EJEL
Volume 8 Issue 1
January 2010

Sharing e-Learning Innovation across Disciplines: an Encounter between Engineering and Teacher Education

Nicol Pan, Henry Lau and Winnie Lai
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

One of the major teaching challenges of higher education is helping students to bridge knowledge with real life practice. This is especially important in applied fields including medicine, education and engineering. Traditionally, practicum and internship programs are the only means for students to leave the classroom and connect with the outside world, and a chance to apply what they learn to real life problems. Increasingly, information and communication technology (ICT) is being used to create yet another dimension for authentic learning beyond the boundaries of the classrooms, and in addition afford collaborative and flexible learning mode. This paper details a collaborative effort between the engineering and the education disciplines, in using ICT to support students’ learning in teacher education. An eLearning platform was created for the training of student teachers in developing their professional knowledge in teaching and learning and gaining understanding of the work of a teacher. Through the platform, student teachers gain understanding about the teaching profession from different people of the education sector; and they can reflect and share their teaching practicum experiences with each other using the online communication tools. A program evaluation study later showed that students were satisfied with the quality and the contents of the program. The written feedbacks seem to suggest that an eLearning platform that is rich in multimedia contents about actual teaching experiences may have played a role in the process of knowledge transfer from one generation of teachers to another. However, the findings also suggest that although ICT and new web technologies play an important role in enriching student teachers’ learning experiences, the success of its application still depends on factors that are beyond the technologies or pedagogies. Nevertheless, the project has been a remarkably encouraging experience for inter-disciplinary collaboration in the effort to advance teaching and learning practices.

Keywords: eLearning, teacher education, engineering education, TPCK, Web 2.0, interdisciplinary collaboration

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