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Why university lecturers enhancetheir teaching through the use oftechnology: a systematic reviewLynne Jump aa School of Health and Social Care , University of Greenwich ,London, UKPublished online: 24 Mar 2011.
To cite this article: Lynne Jump (2011) Why university lecturers enhance their teaching throughthe use of technology: a systematic review, Learning, Media and Technology, 36:1, 55-68, DOI:10.1080/17439884.2010.521509
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Learning, Media and TechnologyVol. 36, No. 1, March 2011, 55–68
ISSN 1743-9884 print/ISSN 1743-9892 online© 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17439884.2010.521509http://www.informaworld.com
Why university lecturers enhance their teaching through the use of technology: a systematic review
Lynne Jump*
School of Health and Social Care, University of Greenwich, London, UKTaylor and FrancisCJEM_A_521509.sgm(Received 5 April 2010; accepted 14 August 2010)10.1080/17439884.2010.521509Learning, Media and Technology1743-9884 (print)/1743-9892 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis0000000002010Mrs [email protected]
The purpose of this systematic review is to add to current understanding oftechnology-enhanced teaching through a process of synthesis and analysisof a collection of contemporary case studies set within university contexts.The justification to review case studies comes from Pinch and Bijker’sconcept of the ‘social construction of technology’ as a way to structure therelationships between technological artefacts used in teaching and thosesocial groups that shape their use. Basil Bernstein’s sociological theory ofpedagogy provided the framework for the analysis of the case studies. Hisconcepts of ‘classification’ which examines power relations betweencategories, such as agencies, agents, discourses and practices, and‘framing’ which examines the control of instruction in relation to theselection, sequence, pacing and evaluation of learning and determines therelationship between teachers and students, were used as instruments forthe analysis of the systematically chosen case studies.
Keywords: case study; university; teaching; SCOT; Basil Bernstein
Introduction
The aim of this review is to explore the use of digital technology as a way ofenhancing teaching within universities. As a study, it sets out to explore therelationships between university lecturers and technological artefacts, such ascomputers, the internet and other forms of hardware and software that are usedin the day-to-day management of their teaching. The study does not set out toexplore those relationships within a context of purely distance (off-campus)education, but in situations when technology is blended into traditional, on-campus delivery as a way of enhancing teaching and learning.
One of the key methods of documenting how technology is successfullybeing used in university teaching is through published case studies, whenuniversity lecturers describe how they have used technology and evaluated theimpact that it has had upon their students. These are often small-scale, context-dependent studies and whilst case studies make an important contribution to
*Email: [email protected]
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the literature it is difficult to extract the generic themes that emerge from them.The purpose of this systematic review is to add to current understanding oftechnology-enhanced teaching through a process of synthesis and analysis ofa collection of contemporary case studies set within university teaching andlearning.
The reason for the importance placed on these small context-dependentcase studies is best explained through the concept of the ‘social constructionof technology’ (SCOT). In 1984, Pinch and Bijker (reviewed by Bijker 2010)argued that a social constructivist view of technology would provide a usefulstarting point for an analysis of the relationships between technological arte-facts and those social groups that shape their use. Pinch and Bijker (1984)describe the development of technological artefacts using the evolutionaryterms of ‘variation’ and ‘selection’, which results in multidirectional model ofdevelopment, as opposed to a linear model. The essence of their argument isthat such a multidirectional view is essential to a social constructivist analysisof technology, as the successful stages in the development trajectory of anytechnology are not the only ones.
Pinch and Bijker’s (1984) paper offers a structure which includes four stagesto the study of technology development, the first being interpretative flexibility.The authors suggest that there is flexibility in how people think and interpretthe use of technological artefacts and how they use them in an everydaycontext. The second stage relates to defining and describing the relevant socialgroup, i.e., those who share expectations, needs and definitions and in turncome to a consensus that the artefact works. Artefacts are in turn ‘selected’ forfurther use, not because of empirical, objective indicators but because it worksfor that particular group. The third stage is ‘closure and stabilisation’ which isthe point when the relevant social group decide that there are no further prob-lems and that no further modifications to the design are necessary.
The fourth stage is ‘the wider context’, i.e., the socio-cultural and politicalcontext in which the technology development is taking place. According toKlein and Kleinman (2002), this stage is underdeveloped in Pinch and Bijker’soriginal paper. They argue that in order to understand the relationship betweentechnology and the social group, it is also necessary to understand the groupin terms of relations to each other, the rules ordering their interaction andfactors contributing to differences in power. A theoretical framework is neces-sary, therefore, that will allow for lecturer and student relations to be analysedin response to the use of technology within traditional pedagogy. For thepurpose of this study, Basil Bernstein’s sociological theory of pedagogy(1996) provided the framework for the analysis of the case studies.
Bernstein’s sociological theory of pedagogy
Bernstein’s model (1996) aims to describe the organisational, discursive andtransmission practices in all pedagogic agencies and show the process whereby
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selective acquisition takes place. He is most often remembered for his researchinto the effects of language use within education and the relationship between‘elaborate and restricted codes’, social class and learning. However, it is hisconcept of ‘recontextualisation’ that is most pertinent to this study. Bernsteindescribed pedagogy as one discourse which embeds two discourses; these areinstructional discourse, which is the specialist knowledge and skills of thesubject being taught, and regulative discourse which determines the socialorder, relations and identity within a learning space. These two discourses arebrought together for the purpose of transmission by the teacher and acquisitionby the student. Bernstein described teachers as ‘agents with a recontextualisingfunction’, who select, relocate and refocus subject matter for transmission. LikePinch and Bijker, he felt that the development of pedagogy, in terms of theselection of learning materials, the relationship to other disciplines and thesequence and pacing of learning are socially determined.
Bernstein developed two concepts as instruments to analyse the recontex-ualising rules of pedagogy: ‘classification’ which examines power relationsbetween categories, such as agencies, agents, discourses and practices, and‘framing’ which examines the control of instruction in relation to the selection,sequence, pacing and evaluation of learning and determines the relationshipbetween teachers and students. When there are clear boundaries between whatis to be learned, there is strong classification, whereas weak classificationinvolves a blurring of the boundaries. Likewise when the instructional meth-ods are centred on the lecturer there is strong framing and weak framing whenmethods are student centred.
Recontexualising rules offer a way of extending current understanding ofthe use of technology in universities by adding the means to describe the rela-tions between teachers, their students and technological artefacts used forteaching, and in turn, add to the underdeveloped fourth stage of SCOT (Bijker2010; Pinch and Bijker 1984).
Methodology
The aim of the review was to synthesise and analyse small context-specific casestudies of the practice of using digital technologies by lecturers in their every-day, on-campus, teaching in higher education institutions. As the case studiescollected for this study are from a very short time frame (2007–2010), thepresent study also aims to capture an evolutionary ‘snapshot’ of contemporaryapproaches to pedagogy within the context of technology and universities.
For the purpose of the review, the term digital technology will refer tocomputers and the internet plus a variety of hardware and web-based soft-ware that are designed to support person-to-person or person-to-informationinteraction. A case study was defined as a published example of real peoplein real situations, and through the analysis of that specific example a moregeneral principle could be extracted (Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2007).
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Establishing rigour by critical appraisal of each case study is difficult as theconventional tools available for other research methods were inappropriate;therefore, the study is guided by the strengths and weaknesses of case studiesidentified by Cohen, Manion, and Morrison (2007). In particular, these arethe need for rich description of the events relevant to the case, analysis of theevents, perspectives of the teacher and rigour in the collection of studentexperiences. This latter point is key to understanding the social constructionof the technological artefact, and in offering insight into the dynamics of allthose involved.
The identification of studies meeting the inclusion criteria began by search-ing bibliographic databases and registers of published educational research.Relevant articles that are included in the education database ERIC weresearched and articles that met the inclusion criteria were found as full text arti-cles using the database Swetswise. The following key words were used: tech-nology, higher education, teaching, learning, enhanced teaching, enhancedlearning and university. Study titles and abstracts were reviewed before thearticle was included in the initial list. The articles that resulted from the initialsearches were then screened using the inclusion and exclusion criteria beforebeing included in the final list (see Table 1).
A total of 16 articles were finally accepted for the purposes of the review.A detailed thematic synthesis of the findings of the case studies was thenconducted following principles for the analysis of qualitative data. Studyfindings were coded according to the theoretical framework described byBernstein (1996) and then organised and documented as answers to the follow-ing questions:
Table 1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Inclusion criteria Exclusion criteria
Studies that include: (1) Any kind of digital technology that
lecturers included to enhance existing, on campus, teaching methods
(2) Evidence of practitioner-based enquiry
(3) Methods of evaluation to study the benefit to students, such as: ● Outcome evaluations including
pre/post test results, interviews, focus groups and surveys.
● Process evaluations including narrative analysis, observations, surveys and in-depth interviews.
(4) A publication date between 2007 and 2010
Studies that are not: (1) A specific description of events
set within a clearly detailed context
(2) Focused on digital technology(3) Campus linked, that is the study
excludes all case studies that document distance learning only
Also: (1) Do not document the benefits to
students(2) Older than 2007(3) Not written in the English
language
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● Why did the lecturers think that introducing digital technology would beuseful?
● What did they aim for by introducing digital technology?● What was the impact of using digital technology on the students?
Results
Why did the lecturers think that introducing digital technology would be useful?
The themes that emerged from the analysis of the included studies suggestedthat there are reasons as to why a lecturer will choose to use technology intheir teaching.
Weaken classification: a desire to remove or change the boundaries of power
This was highlighted in three studies which set out to transfer some of thepower inherent within teaching and learning, held traditionally by lecturers,to their students. The studies identified within the context of this theme aimedto empower students by focusing the use of technology on the way that itcould support their learning needs as well as delivering discipline specificcontent. The central feature of these studies was to break down conventionalboundaries between students and academics in relation to communication andteaching practices as a way of determining the structuring of the learningspace, which was quite specifically designed to improve the skills of thestudent.
For example, Lenne et al. (2008) used an online learning environmentthat adapted to the emotive, cognitive and behavioural needs of the learnersas a way of promoting self-regulated learning. They set out to transferpower to the student in order to learn by increasing their involvement andresponsibility during the learning process. NgAmbi and Brown (2009)removed boundaries related to teacher and student roles, by designing anonline environment in which students could anonymously post questionsabout course content and receive responses from both the lecturer and otherstudents at any time. Allowing all students to contribute, including thosewho may find it difficult to ask questions and speak out in face-to-face situ-ations, was a particularly important consideration within the design of theenvironment.
In each of these studies, there was a blurring of the boundaries between theeveryday experience of the students and their university experiences. Thisinvolves a weakening of classification resulting in a pedagogic discourse thatplaces an emphasis on realising the competences that students already have, orare thought to have (Bernstein 1996). However, expertise in terms of subject-specific knowledge remained under the control of the lecturer.
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Strong framing: keeping control of the content and pace of learning
Lenne et al. (2008) state that ‘the course was designed based on the experienceand evaluation methods provided by traditional teaching’ (172), and that self-regulation and motivation determined the level to which students could exploitthe resources made available to them. For NgAmbi and Brown (2009) theinitiative arose over a difficulty in providing support and attention to a largeclass of over 600 students. Questions about exam preparation were verypopular in comparison with questions relating to career options and how tostudy. In another study (Demetriadis et al. 2008), which focused on case-basedlearning in what the authors called an ‘ill structured domain’, scaffoldingprompts in the form of questions generated by the lecturers were used to guidethe learning process. They were used to direct the students and to engage themin deeper processing of information presented in their case-based coursematerials.
In each of these studies, the lecturer was the expert and had knowledge andadvice to impart to the student. Pedagogy, in this sense, was highly visible.The boundaries of power between the lecturer and the student have becomeweakened, in terms of supporting learning, whereas control of interaction interms of the specialised knowledge, or what is to be learned and evaluated,remained firmly with the lecturer, i.e., weak classification and strong framing(Bernstein 1996).
Strong classification and framing: lecturer centred teaching
In another group of the studies, both power and control remained with thelecturer. A desire to improve student learning resulted in the lecturer enhanc-ing their teaching by offering more teaching. This meant making teachingmore intensive, more efficient, providing more resources or to increase thelecturer input through the addition of technology to their traditional teaching.
This included, e.g., enhancing in-class lectures with weblogs (Shim andGuo 2009) or adding a ‘blended’ component to traditional teaching in the formof a website (Delialioglu and Yildirim 2008) which included a number ofcognitive tools. In other studies, a ‘Virtual Learning Environment’ (VLE;Shah and Cunningham 2009) was introduced into an orthodontic trainingprogramme and to a ‘Nurse Education’ programme (Mitchell et al. 2007) inaddition to other traditional teaching methods. Improving the efficiency oftraditional teaching through the use of technology was the intention of anumber of studies. They included, e.g., improving the efficiency of the tradi-tional lecture through the use of video formatted lectures (Dey, Burn, andGerdes 2009) and offering a mix of PowerPoint and podcasts instead oflectures (Griffin, Mitchell, and Thompson 2009).
The work of Ferenchick, Fetters and Carse (2008) was to design a web-based authoring tool for hand-held computers (Personal Digital Assistants,PDAs). This resulted in additional learning resources in the form of software,
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in order to support specific competencies for medical students (centred aroundspecific problem areas, e.g., diabetes, substance abuse, etc.). The software wasalso intended to help the student to convert their learning from the PDA intosafe patient care; in turn the software then tracked, documented and stored thestudent–patient interactions. The students used the device when on clinicalplacements in geographically remote places. Nagy-Shadman and Desrochers(2008) aimed to enhance student learning by increasing understanding, partic-ipation, alertness and interactions with fellow students, through the use ofStudent Response Systems in the context of multiple-choice questions inscience classes.
In all of these studies there is a clear distinction between the role of thelecturer and the role of the student, and there is very little in the way of weak-ening of the boundaries between the everyday knowledge of the student anddisciplinary knowledge of their university course. In each case, the content tobe delivered by technology and how it is to be evaluated is very clear tostudents and lecturers – a visible pedagogy (Bernstein 1996). The only bound-ary change is between home and university, with a view to facilitating studyoutside of a confined timetable.
Weak classification and framing: an integrated approach
Two other studies were designed to help students to integrate the knowledgegained at a lower level and move their understanding vertically and across awider range of different phenomena (Bernstein 1996). Kraemer (2008)designed a course that emphasised student centred, engaging and active learn-ing, and assisted the student to work towards enhanced proficiency of Germanlanguage (language and reading) within a context of fairy tales that alsoincreased the students’ knowledge of broad sociological themes. Anotherstudy used technology as a way of enabling reflection, engaging with thecreative processes and as a creative tool in dance education (Doughty et al.2008). An integrated approach aims to personalise the learning environmentso that competence is explored in an individual and often therapeutic way. Inpedagogies with strong framing, control is explicit and overt, as in the formerstudies, whereas for this style of pedagogy, the control is implicit and hidden.Bernstein captures this distinction within his description of visible andinvisible pedagogies. In the case of invisible pedagogies, students appear tohave considerable control over the selection, sequence and pace of instruc-tional discourse, and the boundaries between the roles and the power oflecturer and student are blurred.
What did they aim for by introducing digital technology?
This section of the review will explore just what the studies described aboveaimed to achieve through the introduction of digital technology into teaching.
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By exploring how the lecturers involved in the studies determined the successof their actions, it is possible to document their intentions in relation to bene-fiting students and their learning. Details of the findings of the evaluations willbe analysed and discussed in the third section below.
The majority of the studies documented an aim to satisfy students, and toimprove learning or to change student learning behaviour, monitored throughthe use of automatically logged data. The majority of studies also used acombination of methods to assess how successful their initiative had been, asa way of capturing the complexity of those aims. Satisfaction was surveyedeither in relation to the students’ overall experience of learning through the useof technology, or of their perceptions of the effectiveness of the teaching tool.This involved survey tools (mainly Likert style surveys) or interviews (twostudies) in order to establish student views. Four studies aimed to improvelearning and used pre- and/or post-testing to measure the improvement. Threestudies explicitly aimed to change the behaviour of students and analysed thedata collected automatically by the teaching tool in order to observe forchanges. One author undertook a detailed qualitative analysis of student post-ing to document intended and unintended student use of the learning environ-ment, and one author also explored the student’s epistemological beliefs, aswell as a pre- and post-test of student learning, as a way of understandingstudent activity. In summary, therefore, the aim of lecturers when usingtechnology to enhance their teaching is to improve student satisfaction andlearning and to mediate a change in student learning behaviour.
What was the impact of using digital technology on the students?
In this section, the findings from the evaluations used to explore the successof the initiatives will be discussed.
Student satisfaction
All of the studies but one that surveyed student perceptions about the use oftechnology in teaching reported positive findings. Three studies reported asignificant level of support for future use of technology in their learning,including 98% of the students in one study suggesting that using a website tosupport learning should become a permanent resource for the course (Mitchellet al. 2007), and another suggesting that the use of a VLE should be a manda-tory component of their learning (Shah and Cunningham 2009). In anotherstudy, two-thirds of the students reported that technology increased theirenjoyment of learning (Farah and Maybury 2009). This seemed to relate to thestudents’ expectations about the use of technology and the breaking down ofboundaries between on-campus and off-campus teaching and learning. Theone study (Delialioglu and Yildirim 2008) that did not support the others interms of increased satisfaction because of the use of technology found that in
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their controlled experiment (blended versus traditional teaching methods)there was no difference between the groups in that they both reported highlevels of satisfaction, which confirmed the views of the authors that bothmethods of delivery could be used interchangeably without any direct impacton student satisfaction.
Most studies reported that students saw certain components of learningusing technology more positively than others. This included things such ashaving access to helpful and up-to-date information, being able to access toolsthat allow for cognitive development, flexibility of access and the ability touse resources that included multiple representations of concepts and topicsincluding texts, images and sounds. The theme that emerges in these studies,however, that has most effect on student views is the involvement of thelecturer, particularly in relation to feedback. Judgement on their performanceor prompts to direct them to explore new knowledge domains, along with theuse of immediate feedback in the classroom using tools such as studentresponse systems, were the techniques that were received most positively bystudents. In these studies, a combination of weak classification and the shiftingof power to students set alongside strong framing and the lecturers’ control ofwhat is to be learned and how learning is to be evaluated contributed to studentsatisfaction.
There are caveats to these findings which suggest that the factors that affectlearning are complex. Two studies (Shah and Cunningham 2009; Shim andGuo 2009) suggest that socialisation into the use of digital technology issignificant, and the more experience that students have of using technology intheir learning, the more positive about it they become. Some studies recogn-ised that not all their aims could be met, e.g., social learning and the use ofbulletin boards and forums were not recognised by the learners as important totheir learning (Lenne et al. 2008; Shah and Cunningham 2009). Two studies(Demetriadis et al. 2008; Kraemer 2008) reported that whilst the studentsacknowledged the benefits gained from the additional learning activities, theyfound the experience to be tiring and reported negative feelings about the workload involved.
Improved learning
A number of studies reported improved measures of learning in their studentsas a result of introducing digital technology. Two studies (Dey, Burn, andGerdes 2009; Griffin, Mitchell, and Thompson 2009) reported their use ofalternative methods of delivering lectures and the latter study found that whenstudents watched a video of a lecture their comprehension and recall of thelecture was significantly higher than those students who had attended the samelecture but the live version. The former study found that synchronising apodcast with PowerPoint slides, so that movement from one slide to anotherwas out of the control of the student, worked better in terms of student scores
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for learning than when the student could control the movement of the slides inrelation to the podcast.
In both of these studies, the presence of the lecturer was a significantfeature. In the first study, the authors videoed a live lecture and then playedthis to students with a picture of the lecturer embedded in the presentation andthen for some students presented the same lecture but without the embeddedimage, just the lecture slides and sound. The presence of the lecturer enhancedenjoyment but made no difference to recall or comprehension. It was alsofound that when comparing the live lecture with the videoed version of thesame lecture, the students rated the live lecture as of higher quality andbelieved that the lecturer made more sense, but scored significantly lower interms of recall and comprehension than either of the other two videoedformats. In the podcasting and PowerPoint study, the overall preference by thestudents was for a traditional lecture with a live lecturer.
In a study (Demetriadis et al. 2008) that documented a course that hadpreviously allowed the students a lot of control over their learning in what theauthors called an ‘ill structured’ online environment, it was found that addingscaffolding in the form of elaborate questions activated by the lecturer resultedin significantly higher scores in the post-learning experience test.
Two studies failed to find a significant difference in the learning of theirstudents. In one study (Delialioglu and Yildirim 2008), the authors comparedblended learning as a method of course delivery, designing a very detailedwebsite which included additional resources which the students accessed inde-pendently, with traditional live lectures only as the main method of coursedelivery. In this case, the students did not show any difference in their levelsof achievement. The other study (Farah and Maybury 2009) compared learnerswho accessed a virtual microscope and added resources in a VLE, withstudents who used a traditional light microscope in the university laboratory,and found no difference in post-test knowledge quizzes. Students reported thatit had changed ‘how’ they learned but not necessarily ‘what’ they learned.
In all of these studies, a combination of weakening classification and strongframing have changed the way that students learn but not necessarily whatthey have learned. Bernstein (1996) suggests that this happens when auton-omy, in relation to individual teaching practice and learning by the students, isdetermined by the external regulation of student performance.
Learning behaviour changes
Three studies evaluated their initiatives through qualitative methods. NgAmbiand Brown (2009) analysed the postings made by the students on a websitedesigned to encourage anonymous questions to the course lecturers any time,by text or email. They found that the site had supported the intended aims ofthe project in that students engaged with their learning actively and articulatelybut that there were unintentional findings as well. The site became a place for
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ongoing, formative evaluation of the course. Lecturers received immediatefeedback about their teaching and administrative skills and students tookcontrol of all aspects of feedback both in terms of their questions and in theirfeedback to the course team. However, that feedback did result in someabusive messages about lecturers and other students from a minority ofstudents. This study suggests a weakening of power in relation to the relation-ship between students, and the lecturers created the conditions for students totake control of their learning experience.
Focus groups were used in two other studies. Shah and Cunningham (2009)asked students for their views generally, about the addition of VLEs into theirlearning. The authors report that students acknowledged that they would needto be more responsible for their learning, but it is the collaboration of lecturersand students that will determine the power of the VLE as a learning resource.They also felt that the VLE could not be substituted completely for the teach-ing process. Problems of inequality for some students, relating to the cost ofprinting of learning materials from a VLE and the difficulty of coping withlimited IT skills, were reported in one study (Mitchell et al. 2007) as reasonsfor not engaging with a website explicitly designed to reduce inequalitythrough the use of digital technology.
Analysing the data that are automatically logged by the computer wasanother way of assessing the impact of technology on the learning behaviourof students in the studies. These results show that different students access thewebsite more or less frequently than others, but complex patterns of use ofresources in terms of individual problem-solving are evident for somestudents. However, in a study (Ferenchick, Fetters, and Carse 2008) designedto support medical students out on clinical placement, it was found that thestudents were more influenced by the formative assessment of their knowl-edge than the skills needed to solve clinical problems that they faced withpatients. Again the strongly framed rules of evaluation were powerful deter-minants of student’s behaviour.
Conclusion
The findings of this review suggest that the success of pedagogic practice ismore likely to be agreed between lecturers and students when boundariesbetween them are weakened leading to increased interaction, also when theboundaries between on-campus resources and VLEs too are weakened.However, this is combined with a need for evaluation criteria for assessmenttasks to be explicit and visible. Success for the students involved in the casestudies was more likely to be reported by improved satisfaction through theuse of technology than improved learning, or changes in learning behaviour.However, the success of technology in enhancing teaching within each casestudy was socially determined and the role that members of the significantgroup play in that process became clear through a systematic analysis.
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Lecturers used technology as a way to reduce the naturally occurring powerdifferences between lecturers and students by designing materials that alloweda sharing of knowledge through processes of active interaction, with thelecturer, other students and learning materials, as key components of the peda-gogic discourse. A number of the studies aimed to prove that structuring teach-ing in this way would improve student learning or encourage a greater level ofindependence in learning by the students. Despite the professionalism andcompetence of the lecturers involved, there appears to be an overwhelmingsimilarity in the way that students respond to the use of technology as a partof their learning experiences. Bernstein offers a possible reason for suchphenomena by explaining that alongside instructional discourse, regulativediscourse is always part of the pedagogic discourse and is, in fact, the domi-nant discourse. All learning spaces are therefore a complex mix of instructionand rules, some explicit and some implicit, which determine the conduct andbehaviour of students.
Instructional methods may become more efficient, more intense or moreinteractive; however, whilst students may be able to recognise the variousmeanings that they are to take from their technology-based learning, they stillhave to be able to convert these meanings into pedagogically recognisabletexts, i.e., essays, projects, reports, etc., that make up their assessment tasks(Singh 2002). Bernstein calls this the realisation rules, and explains thatstudents learn the realisation rules through their experiences of the social andmoral order of the institution, and these become the regulative discourse thatdominates the instructional discourse. Despite an expectation that technologywill be incorporated into teaching, students seem be rooted in a regulativeframework that supports a strongly framed view of academic pedagogy andtheir subsequent actions.
SCOT or socio-technology (Bijker 2010; Pinch and Bijker 1984) offers astructure that will enrich the understanding of technology use in universityteaching. It is necessary to understand how the process of transforming learn-ing materials into technology-based pedagogic discourse also recontextualisesthe moral and social order of the institution. A much broader view of the socio-political influences on lecturers, technology and students would providefurther understanding of pedagogic discourse set in a context of technology,through the exploration of the institutional roles played by the university as awhole.
Limitations of this study
Synthesising the findings of the case studies for the purpose of this review hasresulted in some interesting and useful findings that could support the work ofindividual lecturers and policy development. However, the process has alsoresulted in difficulties that prevent the use of empirical rigour normally asso-ciated with systematic reviews, including the meta-analysis of statistical data
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and the synthesis of multiple evaluation methods other than through a narra-tive approach. Readers of the review should take into consideration that anyliterature relating purely to distance education was excluded from this review;therefore, the findings cannot be applied to such contexts. Also, the literaturereporting large quantitative and qualitative studies that contribute to a generalunderstanding of good practice in pedagogy was omitted from the review, andas such the results of this review should also be read accordingly.
Notes on contributorLynne Jump is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health and Social Care at theUniversity of Greenwich. She leads a masters programme for health and social careprofessional practitioners which is delivered flexibly through the use of online media.Her particular research interest is in teaching and learning through the use of digitaltechnology within higher education.
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