How effective are Blackboard Community Spaces, established for the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences Schools, for enhancing the professional practice of their academics staff members for Critical Pedagogy?
The purpose of this research is to explore the opportunities available to academics to develop their teaching professional practice in an online environment and assess its affordance for the development of a Critical Pedagogy approach.
This research should be seen in the context of being the second study undertaken as part of a larger ongoing project. The first part of the project, titled “Are lecture capture videos deployed in a science and engineering faculty affording student critical thinking?”, was conducted using the Design Based Research (DBR) methodology, and this current research will also use the DBR methodology. The larger project will continue to explore the attitudes of academics to lecture podcasts in their teaching as well as a collaboration with an academic, or practitioner in DBR terminology, to design a course module that makes use of lecture podcasts, that once deployed will be subject to further intervention, research, evaluation and redesign. It is then hoped that successive iterations of this process will lead to the widespread adoption of good practice for the use of lecture podcasts to afford critical thinking.