Abstracts - Earli

An evaluation of accredited teacher training programmes in UK higher educationAndria Hanbury, The Higher Education Academy, United KingdomMichael Prosser, The Higher Education Academy, United KingdomIn the UK, government policy requires that, from the current academic year, all new academics inhigher education should complete an appropriate teacher training programme. These programmesare accredited by the Higher Education Academy and aim, in part, to develop more student-centredor focussed teaching. A common theoretical underpinning of such programmes is derived from theresearch on the presage-process-product model of student learning, with associations foundbetween teachers’ adopting a student-centred approach to teaching and their students adopting adeep approach to learning, and with students adopting a deep approach and achieving betterlearning outcomes. The aim of this research was to compare academics’ conceptions of teachingbefore and after attending an accredited programme, and to explore their evaluations of the qualityof the programmes. Academics from 32 UK institutions who had recently completed a programmewere surveyed, with a response rate of 46 percent [N=388]. The academics rated themselves assignificantly more student-centred and significantly less teacher-centred after attending aprogramme. Overall, those who experienced the highest increase towards a student-centredapproach also evaluated the programmes most highly. Participants from post 1992 institutions, andfrom health sciences disciplines, reported the biggest increase towards a student-centred approachand evaluated the programmes most positively. Participants were most dissatisfied with the workload and the balance between generic and discipline specific support provided by the programmes.The findings suggest that the programmes can be successful in helping participants become morestudent-focussed and improve the quality of their teaching. The findings also highlight areas forfuture development of the programmes, including exploring the balance of generic versusdiscipline specific aspects of the programmes, and the demands the programmes place upon newacademic staff.Hindrances for a virtual teacher community to become a learning communityAnastasios Matos, University of Thessaly, GreeceVassileios Kollias, University of Thessaly, GreeceThis paper describes and analyses the forty months life of a web environment, constructed by theCentre of the Greek Language (C.G.L.), in order to support a CoP comprised by teachers of Greek,in Universities around the world. It was expected that conditions under which this group wasfunctioning (generic virtual environment with affordances to communication and cooperation,isolated teachers without colleagues’ help by them, having to cope with special curricular issues),would be conductive to the emergence of a learning community culture, and could possibly have abroader impact in changing teachers’ attitudes to jointly constructing knowledge. Analysis of thewritten exchanges in the asynchronous data base shows that the first year of their operation wascharacterized by a separation of the participating members in two groups (a "core" of highparticipation and a periphery of much less active members). Many of the participants exchangeindividually made activities, without any joint creation of common activities. The sparse efforts tostart joint teaching material creation or to discus about pedagogical issues faltered. Efforts by themediators of the community to "raise the standards", by explicitly calling the members toparticipate in "Electronic Workshops" under the guidance of experts, met a lot of resistance, overtor covert from the members themselves, and finally faltered too. Analysis of the data basecontents, denotes three main issues that are relevant to the lack of a disruptive change: a)participants did not lead their team towards the adequate discussion of some important issues (inaccordance to their familiar work norms) b) a lack of orientation towards inquiry learning in the– 113 –