jurnal internasional new

Australasian Journal of

Educational Technology

2012, 28(Special issue, 6), 965-982

Enhancing teachers’ ICT capacity for the 21st

century learning environment: Three cases

of teacher education in Korea

Hyeonjin Kim

Korea National University of Education

Hyungshin Choi

Chuncheon National University of Education

Jeonghye Han

Cheongju National University of Education

Hyo-Jeong So

Nanyang Technological University

Korean teachers are generally considered well trained to integrate ICT into their

teaching since the inception of the first IT Master Plan of Korea in 1996. However, the

emergence and adoption of cutting-edge technologies create demands for evolving

roles and competencies of teachers in the new knowledge society. Given this changing

landscape of teacher education, the purpose of this paper is to explore new

educational approaches to enhance teachers’ ICT capabilities in the 21st century

learning environment in Korea. The literature indicates that the new roles of teachers

include new media literacy skills and adaptive expertise with efficiency and

innovation. From this perspective, we examined three cases: (1) learning Scratch for

computational and creative thinking, (2) learning robotics as emerging technology for

convergent and divergent thinking, and (3) learning by design with ICT for systems

thinking. The new approaches, such as focusing on thinking skills rather than

technical skills, and providing various contexts different from ordinary classroom

lessons, help teachers to develop adaptive expertise. On the other hand, participants in

all three cases indicated difficulties in integrating new ideas, dealing with various

course activities, and understanding unfamiliar design contexts in their

comprehensive projects. For further studies, it is necessary to investigate learning

processes and outcomes of teachers’ learning with more depth and a larger number of

cases and multiple sources of data to verify the potentials and challenges of these

approaches more rigorously.

Introduction

ICT for education in Korea has shown progressive development and has matured over

time since the inception of the first IT Master Plan for Korea in 1996 (Hwang, Yang &

Kim, 2010). While Korean teachers, in general, are considered to be well-equipped with

ICT skills and knowledge for their current practices, their evolving roles and

competencies in the rapidly changing society, coupled with the emergence and

adoption of new technologies, have become a legitimate area of concern. That is, it is

966 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

unclear how well teachers have been equipped to face the challenges and complexities

of the teaching and learning in 21st century; and what directions should be taken to

better prepare the new generation of teachers.

Given this changing landscape of teacher education, the purpose of this paper is to

explore new educational approaches to enhance teachers’ ICT capabilities in the 21st

century learning environment, taking into account a critical examination of the current

status of ICT education for teachers in Korea. Toward this end, three cases of teacher

education in Korea are introduced and examined as to how the design and enactment

of those courses contributed to enhancing teachers’ ICT capacity for the changing

needs of 21st century learning environments.

Teacher ICT capacity for the 21st Century learning

The nature of technologies for teaching and learning has become increasingly social,

collective, and multi-modal since the emergence and rapid adoption of Web 2.0 and

cloud technologies. Programs that are largely ICT skill-based are unlikely to prepare

pre-service teachers to learn how to deal with the problem of complexity-making

intimate connections amongst content, pedagogy, and technology (So & Kim, 2009).

This may suggest an immediate need to revisit assumptions underlying what we mean

by necessary ICT competencies for teachers, and further, to redesign ICT-related

modules in teacher education programs to provide pre-service teachers with

opportunities for experiencing and developing new media literacy skills.

Based on the preceding discussion, we argue for the critical need to reframe teachers’

ICT capacities from adaptive expertise perspectives. Since the seminal article on Two

Courses of Expertise by Hatano and Inagaki (1986) and the conception of Preparation for

Future Learning (PFL) by Bransford and Schwartz (1999), adaptive expertise has been

used to explain the differences between novice and expert learners and further the

importance of developing transferable knowledge and skills. Hammerness, Darling-

Hammond and Bransford (2005) suggest that the development of adaptive expertise

involves two dimensions of expertise, efficiency dimension and innovation dimension:

The efficiency dimension means greater abilities to perform particular tasks without

having to devote too many attentional resources to achieve them (p.361).

The innovation dimension involves moving beyond existing routines and often

requires people to rethink key ideas, practices, and even values in order to change

what they are doing (p.361).

They argue that the two dimensions are complementary, but can be antagonistic when

they create conflicts. For instance, in the initial stage of learning innovative strategies

and knowledge, teachers may experience their practices being less efficient than

previous approaches. To be adaptive experts, however, they need to develop

dispositions to perceive such initial experiences, not as a failure but as a valuable and

productive process of learning.

Hammerness and colleagues (2005) suggest that helping teachers become adaptive

experts needs three aspects of preparation. First, teacher educators need to help

teachers to see teaching and learning in fundamentally different ways from what they

might have learned from the “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975) as school

students. One of the important goals for teacher education is to help pre-service

Kim, Choi, Han and So 967

teachers view teaching as more than simply applying routine practices. In certain

cases, this means that pre-service teachers need to reconstruct their established

perceptions of teaching and learning in order to learn and adopt new ideas. Second,

helping pre-service teachers teach more effectively means not only thinking like a

teacher but also knowing for both understanding and enactment. Pre-service teachers

often face problems of enactment. Effective enactment goes beyond the ability to apply

routine practices. Instead, pre-service teachers need to be engaged in reflective

practices where they have opportunities to practice and reflect on their own enactment

in various contexts (Schön, 1983; Kim & Hannafin, 2008). Problem-based learning,

case-based learning or micro-teaching are examples of pedagogical approaches that

help pre-service teachers become better prepared for effective enactment. The last

aspect involves what they term “the problem of complexity”, where teaching is viewed

as process of developing habits of mind and practice to enact and reflect in an

integrated and iterative way.

Adopting the efficiency and innovation dimensions of adaptive expertise, we argue

that the prevalent models of teacher’s ICT competencies may have more emphasis on

the efficiency aspect than creating a room for innovative ideas to grow and mature. As

mentioned earlier, typical ICT competency-stage models are of little use to the

development of adaptive expertise, while such models may hold certain values for

efficient teaching and diagnostic purposes. The new direction of ICT education for

teachers lies primarily in the development of a set of adaptive and transferable

knowledge and skills, so that teachers are better able to adapt to the challenging and

complex nature of future learning environments. Therefore, the epistemic and

pedagogical assumptions underlying the design of ICT courses for pre-service teachers

have to be revisited a) to focus on doing with understanding where pre-service

teachers are continuously exposed to better understand the complexities of teaching

and learning with technology, and b) to develop systematic and creative thinking skills

to grow innovative ideas.

Sociocultural context: ICT and teacher education in Korea

ICT has been integrated into educational contexts since the announcement of the first

IT Master Plan for Korea in 1996 that promoted the use of e-portal (e.g., EDUNET), elearning

(e.g., Cyber Home Learning System), and u-learning (e.g., Digital Textbooks).

Recently, the Korean government (MEST, 2011) has announced the educational policy

on smart learning for the new knowledge society. In tandem with the government’s

strategic movement toward smart learning, pre-service and in-service teacher training

need to reflect the new paradigm of learning in their curriculum in terms of technology

and pedagogy.

In-service teacher training in Korea has been conducted to support national policies on

ICT for education since the late 1980s (Hwang et al., 2010). However, the Korean

government has not formulated any centralised policy specific to ICT in education for

pre-service teacher education. Instead, more agency and control were given to

individual teacher education institutions (TEIs) and colleges of education in

universities. Therefore, it can be said that the nature of ICT-in-education programs in

Korea varies from institution to institution.

In Korea, national teaching certificates can be gained from several different types of

institutions, including TEIs, universities, and graduate schools of education. Most

968 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

TEIs, commonly named as a National University of Education, offer compulsory and

elective courses about ICT-related topics (Park, Jun & Kim, 2011). The compulsory

course aims to enhance students’ computer literacy through hands-on experiences

with computers. Elective courses are designed to help pre-service teachers to be

“digitally fluent”, and to develop their ability to adapt and adopt new media in fast

changing environments.

In this paper, we introduce and discuss three cases on ICT teacher training. The three

cases were purposively selected to unpack how new approaches to building teachers’

ICT capacities are formulated. All three cases are from the context of TEIs, where the

authors are affiliated. The three authors in this paper participated in each case as an

instructor.

Case 1: Learning Scratch for computational and creative thinking

The first case is a course is offered by Chuncheon National University of Education

(CcNUE), which was founded in 1939 for elementary school teacher education. The

course “Computer Practice” is designed to help pre-service teachers to be “digitally

fluent” by managing information and creating teaching materials. The course is

required for all third-year students at CcNUE. Previously, this course focused on

teaching computer programming knowledge and skills based on traditional

programming languages. The rationale for selecting computer programming is that

computer programming supports the development of higher-order thinking skills such

as computational thinking and problem-solving skills (Papert, 1980; Resnick et al.,

2009; Wing, 2006). In addition, computer programming provides pre-service teachers

with opportunities to reflect on their own thinking process. Consequently, pre-service

teachers are expected to become more media-fluent by designing, creating, and

expressing themselves with digital technologies.

Learning goal

Despite the benefits underlying computer programming, pre-service teachers often

find it too difficult to master the syntax of programming languages. In 2008, the

instructors for this course redesigned it using Scratch in order to overcome this issue.

Scratch is an educational programming environment developed by the MIT Media Lab

(2012). Scratch provides visual blocks, such as motion, looks, sound, pen, control,

sensing, operators, and variables. Instead of writing program codes, Scratch users

compose programs by dragging and stacking these building blocks. Scratch enables

users to easily create media-rich content by incorporating graphics, sound, and

animation.

The followings are the aspects of Scratch that meet the needs of this course. First of all,

Scratch eliminates syntax errors by using graphical building-block programming. In

addition, using Scratch moves the focus of the course from mastering programming

languages to higher-order skills like problem-solving, creative thinking, logical

reasoning, etc. Furthermore, programming with Scratch promotes learning by doing

with understanding for the development of pre-service teachers’ adaptive ability. In

this rapidly changing environment, “knowledge alone is not enough” (Resnick, 2007;

p.18), and therefore, pre-service teachers must be prepared to adjust themselves in

response to the complexities in a fast-changing world. Lastly, Scratch stimulates

students to come up with creative solutions by allowing playful experiments with

Kim, Choi, Han and So 969

program fragments. Scratch scaffolds for powerful ideas by making concepts more

visible. Scratch has been incorporated into the computer practice course since the

spring semester in 2009.

Structure and method

The computer practice course consists of nine modules followed by the orientation

sessions. In the orientation module, pre-service teachers are introduced to what they

can do with Scratch and become familiar with the Scratch user interface, the types of

building blocks, and their basic functions. Each module focuses on a category of blocks

and provides a small Scratch project, so that the participants can experiment with

different types of coding blocks for the completion of the project. The modules guide

the pre-service teachers to create animations, scrap books, games, quizzes, visual arts,

music, dances, etc. In the last module, the students learn how to incorporate a Picoboard

to capture the information outside of the computer. The Picoboard is a small hardware

item that can be connected to a computer via a cable. Using the sensors on the board,

the participants are able to implement the behaviours of the objects in the Scratch

projects. The modules are designed for pre-service teachers to create various types of

teaching and learning content that they can utilise in their future teaching contexts.

Figure 1: Screen shot of a pre-service teachers’ final project (5th grade science)

970 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

Upon the completion of nine modules, the participants design and implement their

own project in groups of two. The pre-service teachers choose any topic in the

elementary subjects, develop a lesson plan, and create learning content that can be

used in the context of their lesson plan. At the end of the semester, each group presents

their own project to the class, focusing on how the designed content helps their

students achieve the learning goals, and how the group coducted the project with

Scratch, including their planning and developing processes. For each presentation, two

designated peers and the instructor provided feedback on what the best feature was

and how they could improve their projects. Figures 1 and 2 show two examples of final

projects developed by pre-service teachers.

Figure 2: Screen shot of a pre-service teachers’ final project (5th grade science)

Evaluation

In order to find out participants’ perceptions toward the Scratch programming course,

a survey was administered to the third-year pre-service teachers who took the

computer practice course during the fall semester in 2010. In total, 133 pre-service

teachers (100 female, 33 male) participated in the survey. The survey included two

sections: learning skills and prospective use in future teaching. The learning skills

Kim, Choi, Han and So 971

section had five Likert scale items: Scratch programming helped me to improve (a)

information and media literacy skills, (b) communication skills, (c) creative thinking

skills, (d) problem solving skills, and (e) self-directed skills. The prospective use in

future teaching section has two items: (a) I would like to use Scratch in my future

teaching practices and (b) I believe that teaching Scratch programming to elementary

students would help them to improve their learning skills. The Cronbach’s alpha for the

survey was .88.

Participants’ perception of acquiring learning skills through Scratch programming was

overall positive (Mean=3.81, SD=.73). Among the five items, participants perceived

that Scratch programming helped to improve creative thinking skills (Mean =4.03,

SD=.91), followed by problem solving skills (Mean=3.87, SD=.95), communication

skills (Mean=3.79, SD=.94), self-directed skills (Mean=3.71, SD=.93), and information

and media literacy skills (Mean=3.65, SD=.88). They also responded that they would

use Scratch to develop teaching materials in their future teaching practices (Mean=3.97,

SD=.96). The participants believed that teaching Scratch programming to elementary

students would help them to improve learning skills (Mean=3.68, SD=.95).

In addition, the project artifacts were evaluated with five criteria: pedagogical design,

technological design, creativity (originality), presentation skills, and promptness. Preservice

teachers’ creativity was evidenced in various manners. One team created a

project to explain a mathematical concept (e.g., pi) in a simulation that participants

could easily understand. Another team implemented music content that pre-service

teachers could compose music by placing music notes. Lastly, another team presented

famous paintings and had participants discover a hidden story in each painting. Also,

pre-service teachers’ adaptive expertise was indicated in several aspects. First, they

brought authentic materials (e.g., news) into the content and these materials were

connected with the subject of teaching. Second, pre-service teachers recorded their own

voices and used these as voices of characters or sound effects of the content. Lastly,

they incorporated different genres (i.e., music, movie clips, arts, stories, and games)

into subject matters and showed their critical selection of different media.

Lessons learned: Possibilities and challenges

Unlike the traditional computer programming languages, Scratch helped pre-service

teachers focus on what they could do with programming languages. Acquiring

programming concepts has become implicit rather than explicit. Participants were

delighted to have their own agency in the programming environment as they would

not need to worry about debugging syntactic errors, and were able to create tangible

products from the initial stage of the course. The variety of the projects pre-service

teachers created showed how innovative and creative their approaches can be. In the

course of learning with Scratch, they learned from each other about how to adapt the

skills for prospective teaching, evidenced by the following qualitative comments given

by students:

I used the skills I learned in this course in my practicum teaching. The students in my

class loved it. I was thankful that I learned this new tool.

In this course, I created and presented content that I could use in an actual classroom. I

was glad that through this project, I had an opportunity to recall what I had learned

and utilised it. I learned from other teams’ presentations.

972 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

Programming was not easy, but I have gained some confidence that I can do. And I

think I will use Scratch often in my prospective teaching.

I was very impressed by the creative approaches that other peer students took that I

have never thought of. I learned a lot from watching other students’ presentations.

In terms of expert adaptability, during this course pre-service teachers have

experienced the integration and remixing of various media to represent new ideas.

Scratch was used for pre-service teachers to create a room for innovative ideas. Yet, one

of the challenges in this course is how to scaffold pre-service teachers’ thinking

processes since they need to pursue increasingly complex projects with the integration

of new ideas. In addition, pre-service teachers need to consider how to use Scratch for

creating educational content in pedagogically meaningful ways. This implies that

instructors need to help pre-service teachers consider pedagogical impacts as well as

design aspects.

Case 2: Learning robotics as emerging technology for convergent

and divergent thinking

Cheongju National University of Education (CjNUE), founded in 1941, has built a

reputation for ICT in teacher education as an award-winning institution in the contest

for software development for teachers hosted by the Korea Education and Research

Information Service in 2006-2009. The four courses on ICT in education are provided to

enhance pre-service teacher's computer literacy through hands-on experiences with

computers, and administrative ability with computer-based management systems. The

topics range from the traditional ICT technologies to cutting-edge technologies, such as

robotics for education.

There are mainly two kinds of educational robots: educational service robots and

hands-on robots (Han, 2010). In particular, learning to teach with robotics is

considered to be important to teachers in the 21st century because learning robotics in

schools can facilitate students’ knowledge building through active inquiry and

constructive activities (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000). Learning to teach robotics

can also help teachers to understand core concepts of computing (Klassner &

Anderson, 2003). In Korea, there has been increasing interest in robotics in elementary

schools. About 43% of elementary schools in Korea were expected to offer robotics

courses in their extra curriculum in 2010 (Hur, Choi & Han, 2009). The Korean

government also has formulated the nation-wide plan to expand robot-based learning

through the “R-learning” program.

Among the four required courses on ICT in CjNUE, three courses focus on general

computer literacy, while the other one is about Web-based Courseware Development and

Programming, which is the focus of this case study. This particular course is designed to

facilitate the development of convergent and divergent thinking. Furthermore, the

course aims to help pre-service teachers learn by doing ‘with understanding’ to

facilitate the development of adaptive expertise.

Learning goal

The learning goals of this course are to improve pre-service teachers’ abilities for

thinking and doing with creativity, by designing and programming web-based

courseware, and to facilitate better understanding of the thinking process in authentic

Kim, Choi, Han and So 973

teaching practices. To achieve these goals, the pre-service teachers need to work on

web-courseware projects from school students’ perspectives. For the development of

creative thinking, pre-service teachers are given opportunities to engage in divergent

thinking processes through digital storytelling and interface/interaction design.

Finally, pre-service teachers can develop convergent thinking in the process of

choosing logical solutions to design problems.

Structure and method

This two-credit course consists of five modules: overview, literacy, design,

implementation and discussion. The overview module includes the review and

critique session during which pre-service teachers view and discuss various projects

awarded in previous contests for software development. This module helps them start

to plan their future projects in the semester. In the literacy module, the user interfaces

for Flash and Actionscript are introduced for two weeks. Then participants move to

design and develop their courseware individually and collaboratively for nine weeks.

When pre-service teachers complete the prototype of their courseware, they conduct

usability testing with their peers. In the last module, pre-service teachers learn about

the concept of a robotic-based courseware, based on the IROBIQ as an educational

service robot with a demonstration. Figure 3 shows a robotic demonstration designed

for 5th grade elementary science, ‘the change of volumes according to heat levels’. In

this session, pre-service teachers are expected to actively engage in the class

discussions.

Figure 3: Screen shots of sample courseware (left) and the IROBIQ robot (right)

Evaluation and lesson

The official course evaluation of the university included 347 pre-service teachers who

took this course in 2008 and 2009. The result indicated positive perceptions toward this

course with mean values between 4.10 and 4.28. Participants perceived that this course

was suitable to meet learner’s needs for learning and thinking (Mean=4.1, SD=.94),

unique contents compared to other course (Mean=4.28, SD=.88), improvement of

knowledge and technical skills about ICT (Mean=4.25, SD=.87), and satisfaction with

promoting self-development (Mean=4.14, SD=.93).

Through this course, pre-service teachers were able to gain opportunities for creative

thinking during design, logical thinking during development and programming, and

divergent and convergent thinking during sharing ideas and discussions. Some preservice

teachers perceived advantages in the course because of its emphasis on new

types of thinking with technology and problem solving processes which are facilitating

974 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

adaptive expertise. One pre-service teacher mentioned the following in the course

evaluation:

This course seems to go beyond the scope of computer literacy and focuses on

designing instructional materials based on pedagogical knowledge and creative

thinking. I designed the project with deeper thinking through discussion. And I had to

consider the robotic devices as future media for content delivery.

I was interested in robotics when I saw the robot in demonstration. I had a meaningful

time and experienced the fun world of computer and robotics, even though it was not

easy to work very hard with my project. I guess this course can hit two birds.

On the other hand, there were some challenges as well. Due to the range of activities in

the course, the pre-service teachers found it hard to follow all the course activities that

included storyboarding, computer graphic handling, interaction design and

programming, and the introduction of the robotic courseware during the 15-week

semester. Additional challenges included the instructor’s efforts for integrating

cutting-edge technologies into the university course and securing budgets for

purchasing robotic equipments.

Case 3: Learning by design for systems thinking

The last case focuses on teacher education for enhancing teachers’ capacity of creating

new learning environments with technologies. Literature on teacher learning shows

that exemplary teachers who use ICT in meaningful ways generally adopt studentcentered

learning, which requires revision or redesign of traditional lessons (Kim &

Hannafin, 2008). In this regards, this case explores the efforts of the Korea National

University of Education (KNUE) toward preparing teachers for future technology-rich

learning environments.

There are several courses in KNUE related to ICT in education. Particularly, Theory and

Practice for Instructional Material Development and Educational Methods and Educational

Technology are focusing more on ICT integration into teaching by designing and

developing ICT-applied instructional materials (for details, see Kim, 2011). In

continuation with these courses, the current course, Instructional Design, is offered to

graduate students in both the educational technology program and in the teacher

preparation program.

Learning goal

The purpose of this three-credit course is to help participants gain systematic thinking

and adaptive expertise through learning by design with a system approach. Beginning

teachers often gain teaching expertise through iterative teaching experiences, and their

teaching practices become routines. While such routine practices tend to increase

efficiency, they can hinder innovations which are required in 21st century teaching and

learning (Hammerness et al., 2005; Kim & Hannafin, 2008). Accordingly, providing preservice

teachers with opportunities to think innovatively is important for enhancing

their adaptive expertise. For this purpose, this course provides teachers with the

opportunity to develop their systematic thinking by coordinating various components

for creating new learning environments for 21st century, including curriculum,

content, students, teaching and assessment methods, and technology. Designing a

lesson with a system approach is essential in that future schools are likely to adopt

Kim, Choi, Han and So 975

flexible curriculum contents, cutting-edge technologies, and interactive activities (Kim,

Park & Koh, 2009).

Structure and method

The course activities consist of two sections: instructional systems design (ISD) and

design of technology-rich learning environments. The first section focuses on

instructional systems design based on behaviourism; while the second section is

focusing on designing technology-rich, student-centred learning environments based

on constructivism. Although the two sections are based on the different paradigms of

epistemology, they share some common characteristics: a system approach for design.

That is, ISD includes the systemic components and procedures for instructional

development such as analysis for task, learner, and environment, design for learning

objectives and instructional strategies, development for media and materials, and

evaluation and revision. Sociocultural theories such as activity theory and distributed

cognition also focus on a system, as a unit of analysis (Bell & Winn, 2000), including

agent, tool, activity, community, objective and their interactions.

The instructional methods of the course include lectures, topical seminars, hands-on,

and project-based learning to bridge theories and practices. After the instructor’s

introduction and demonstration, each participant selects and leads each topical

seminar. The instructor scaffolds each topical seminar leader through discussion and

resources prepared for the seminar. The role of topical seminar leaders is to enable

participants to deeply understand the particular theories and designed cases. The

topical seminars are followed by the design projects to help students understand the

complexity of the design concepts.

The first section consists of seven modules, including an introduction to ISD, systemoriented

models, classroom-oriented models and product-oriented models, need

analysis, task analysis, competency-based curriculum, and practice. Although systemoriented

ISD is more used for military or corporate training programs to develop entire

courses or curriculum than classroom lessons (Gustafson & Branch, 2002), the systems

approach of ISD is useful to understand the complexity of teaching and learning

environments even in school contexts. In particular, the main idea of this section is that

the instructor introduces a variety of ISD models based on different purposes and

contexts, so that teachers can view ISD as a design tool, and select, adapt, and recreate

appropriate ISD tools for own contexts of learning environments. Accordingly,

participants are asked to design the instructional program in a non-classroom context

for their design report (i.e., instructional design for the teacher training program). The

participants in groups of three collaborate to complete the authentic design project

based on ISD components and procedures. The modules in the first section are

designed to help participants develop an epistemic view on instructional design with a

system approach in terms of understanding the complexity of instructional design

components and procedures. Based on such fundamental understanding, participants

move on to design technology-rich learning environments; they are based on

constructivist theories and contexts.

The second section, design of technology-rich learning environment, consists of five

modules, including an introduction to constructivist learning environments, design of

constructivist learning environments, activity theory-based design, distributed

cognition-based design, and grounded design. In this section, participants learn about

the nature and application of particular theories such as activity theory and distributed

976 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

cognition that guide the design and the development of technology-rich learning

environments in more comprehensive and systemic ways. At the end of the section,

participants are asked to complete the design report that delineates how to design

technology-rich learning environments based on constructivist approaches. Although

the second section allows participants to work with their familiar subject matter, the

design approach is not familiar to them; participants are supposed to analyse learners,

learning processes, technology, and interaction between them in an in-depth manner.

The final design report should present not only a technology-rich lesson plan, but also

a comprehensive learning environment, including educational problem statement,

theoretical design framework, technology, design procedure, and lesson plan.

Evaluation and lesson

After the first section, the instructor administered the questionnaire to understand the

nine participants’ reactions to the ISD activities. The questions include participants’

perceptions toward instructional design experiences for designing technology-rich

environments during their pre-service teacher training and their experiences of

completing the ISD design report in this course, including both positive and negative

experiences.

Regarding participants’ perceptions for instructional design with a system approach,

all participants indicated their difficulties in completing instructional design for

unfamiliar contexts. On the other hand, through this learning experience, the

participants could develop an epistemic view and attitude toward design perspectives

which include systems thinking and adaptive expertise. For instance, one participant

reported the following regarding his design experience in unfamiliar contexts:

It [instructional design for the teacher training program] is not necessarily to know as

a teacher. However, I was able to develop the competency both as a teacher and an

instructional designer when I participated in projects related to teacher support,

learning environments, and system construction in the comprehensive educational

context (e.g., development of instructional materials, training teachers).

Participants also reported several positive perceptions such as collaborative design

experiences for the first ISD project, the development of new perspectives for

instructional design in non-classroom settings, positive learning experiences about

detailed components and procedures of instructional design, the development of a

sense of design aspects, and hands-on experiences in the authentic project context.

In the second section, the participants’ draft design reports did not represent

comprehensive learning environments well; the technology-rich lesson plans lack

support from in-depth analysis. The instructor gave feedback on the draft and the

participants submitted the revised reports. Participants’ revised reports indicated how

they were using systems thinking by aligning problems, theories, and technology. For

example, one participant identified the educational problem in mathematics education

as mathematical anxiety. To solve this problem, she adopted situated learning and

realistic mathematics education as grounding theory and wiki-based collaboration as

technology and pedagogy. She redesigned existing classroom-based mathematics

lessons into a wiki-based learning environment.

On the other hand, the participants had asked for various design cases to better

understand the complexity of design processes. Building on this learning experience,

Kim, Choi, Han and So 977

the participants may take another advanced course, Emerging Learning Environment

Design II, in the following semester to apply and expand their systems thinking and

adaptive expertise in creating technology-rich learning environments.

Characterising new approaches for enhancing teachers’ ICT

capacity

In this section, we characterise the new approaches to teacher education for 21st

century learning environments by comparing and contrasting the three cases to better

understand some essential features across different contexts of teacher education. Table

1 summarises the characteristics of the three cases as new approaches to teacher

education for enhancing ICT capacity in 21st century learning environments, along

with the general information about the courses such as course titles, target audience,

offering types, credit hours, learning goals, etc.

Table 1: Characterising the new approaches to teacher education with three cases

Component Case 1 Case 2 Case 3

Course title Computer Practice Web-based CourseWare

Development and

Programming

Instructional Design

Target

audience

All students All students Educational technology

students, but not limited to

Type Compulsory Compulsory Elective

Credit 1 credit 2 credits 3 credits

Learning

goal

Computational thinking,

creative thinking

Logical, convergent and

divergent thinking

Instructional design ability,

systems thinking

Topic Creating animations,

games, digital stories, etc.

Programming concepts

Creating web courseware

for elementary school

lessons

Instructional systems

design and technology rich

learning environment

design

Instructional

method

Practice, collaborative and

individual projects

Lecture, practice,

discussion, individual

projects.

Seminar, practice, and

collaborative and

individual project

Success

factor

Focusing on thinking skills

rather than programming

syntax; fostering critical

thinking in integrating

various media for

educational purposes

Thinking as a producer not

a consumer for web

courseware; discussing

and sharing creative

projects

Providing unfamiliar

situations as design topics

and approaches to increase

systems thinking;

providing consistent focus

— systems design across

different epistemological

perspectives

Lessons

learned

Scaffolding strategies are

required to stimulate

learners’ thinking

processes to pursue

increasingly complex

projects

Sharing divergent thinking

via usability and learning

interaction for the best web

courseware are needed

Various design cases are

needed to understand the

complex concepts of

systems design

Learning goals

The learning goals of three cases focus more on enhancing teachers’ thinking skills by

learning both ICT education (i.e., learning about ICT) and ICT in education (i.e.,

learning with ICT). The learning goals also include the development of knowledge and

skills in subjects such as programming or authoring tools and instructional design. For

978 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

example, Cases 1 and 2 emphasise the importance of teachers’ creative thinking during

the process of developing ICT-based materials while Case 3 emphasises the importance

of systems thinking in instructional design and development. Because the course

topics and activities in Cases 1 and 2 focus more on the development of lesson

materials with emerging technologies, it is essential for pre-service teachers to develop

creative, computational and logical thinking. On the other hand, the learning goal in

Case 3 focuses more on developing learning environments based on systems thinking

where teachers view teaching and learning as complex systems.

Ultimately, all three cases aim to help pre-service teachers develop adaptive expertise,

which is essential for the next generation of teachers to be prepared in a changing

world. As mentioned earlier, adaptive expertise includes two dimensions — efficiency

and innovation (Hammerness et al., 2005). In all three cases, the efficiency dimension

was increased when pre-service teachers were asked to complete their authentic

projects within a certain time frame. Because authentic projects often involve

complexities and unexpected failures, students can have opportunities to practise time

management with reasonable timeframes, efforts, and cost for productive outcomes.

Through the repeated design experiences in multiple projects, participants increased

their efficiency by managing complexities. The innovation dimension of teachers’

adaptive expertise can be enhanced when they develop new perspectives on

technology and pedagogy during the process of completing their course projects.

Because all three cases involved cutting-edge technologies or innovative pedagogical

ideas for developing lesson plans and lesson materials, participating teachers were

expected to integrate content and technologies in innovative ways.

Topics

The course topics in the three cases focus on design and development of lessons and

instructional materials with technology. The topics in Cases 1 and 2 are related to

computer programming while Case 3 is related to instructional design. Particularly,

because Cases 1 and 2 involve cutting-edge technologies, pre-service teachers could

understand how new technologies make teaching and learning more innovative in the

changing world. Case 3 situated teachers in unfamiliar contexts in terms of content and

design approaches for instructional design so that teachers could understand the

meaning of systems design.

Instructional methods

The instructional methods in the three cases were comprehensive, to bridge the gap

between theory and practice. That is, the courses were designed to provide lectures on

theories and cases, followed by authentic projects that require the integration of theory

and practice. This approach around the nexus of theory and practice is consistent with

the teacher education literature, emphasising the importance of situated learning with

authentic projects in teaching contexts (Kim & Hannafin, 2008).

The instructional methods in Cases 1 and 2 present interesting approaches: Immersing

first, applying later. For example, because the focus of the course was on developing

lesson materials with Scratch which school students will use as a learning tool, preservice

teachers needed to immerse themselves into this learning tool from school

students’ perspectives. After learning Scratch for creative thinking, pre-service teachers

can better understand their future students’ motivation and difficulties and prepare

their lesson materials accordingly.

Kim, Choi, Han and So 979

Case-based learning (e.g., case methods) is useful in teacher education situations

where it is difficult to understand complex and innovative ideas (Kim, 2011).

Accordingly, Case 2 used concrete cases for reviewing project work done by previous

students, and for better understanding of the role of emerging technology such as

robots in education. The pre-service teachers’ critiques on the projects by previous

students made them anticipate and plan their course projects better. Also, it is effective

to use multiple authentic cases for demonstrating and discussing the affordances of

robots (e.g., IROBIQ) in educational contexts, because new concepts and ideas can be

strengthened via concrete cases.

Success factors and lessons learned

All three cases present some extent of trials and errors during implementation of the

courses. However, success factors involve several characteristics of the new approaches

to teacher education. First, focusing on thinking skills rather than technical skills and

theoretical knowledge, and supporting teachers to think differently and relearn new

perspectives beyond their previous experience. Second, providing various contexts,

such as various media in Case 1, and different epistemological perspectives and

practices in Case 3, is useful for enhancing thinking skills, such as critical thinking and

systems thinking, and, more importantly, adaptive expertise. Since the learning goals

toward the development of thinking skills are complex with multiple dimensions, they

are not easily understood from the single perspective and tool (Spiro, Feltovich,

Jacobson & Coulson, 1992). Instead, various media and perspectives in the cases were

used to integrate complex concepts of topics, and further to facilitate the development

of the desired thinking skills. Third, providing new roles to teachers is effective in

making them aware of the challenges and potentials in new environments, and willing

to apply innovative ideas. That is, following routines represents efficiency, but having a

habit of reflection is likely to lead innovation (Hammerness et al, 2005; Kim &

Hannafin, 2008). For instance, the instructor in Case 2 encouraged participants to think

of themselves as producers, not simply consumers (or implementers) of web

courseware. Similarly, the projects in Case 3 enabled participants to take a role as

instructional designers. This presented a different design situation, where the designed

educational programs will be used by other instructors that the instructional designer

may not know. This situation is different from classroom lesson plans that teachers

often design and develop lessons for their own classes, where they view themselves as

implementers rather than designers.

On the other hand, the three cases present different lessons learned from the

experiences of designing and enacting new curriculum. First, while all cases adopted

comprehensive, authentic projects with new approaches, such as the development of

materials with cutting-edge technologies and instructional design in unfamiliar

situations, the projects also demanded higher workloads than other typical classes.

Although participants acknowledged the positive effects of the courses in Cases 2 and

3, they also felt it was difficult to complete the projects. Motivating teachers is essential

to make them understand why they learn, and engage them in meaningful course

projects (Kolodner & Guzdial, 2000). Second, providing scaffolding strategies is needed

to facilitate teachers’ thinking processes during complex projects such as Case 1

mentioned above. Similarly, in the other graduate course of Case 3, participants said

that they needed some cases as scaffolds to learn from other experiences. Lastly,

undergraduate courses in Cases 1 and 2 present institutional support; the courses are

compulsory for all pre-service teachers. That leads to larger impacts on broader

audiences from the various departments so that many next generation teachers can

980 Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 2012, 28(Special issue, 6)

learn innovative teaching practices during their preparation programs. This universitylevel

implementation is impossible without institutional support. Also, because

innovative approaches to teacher education often involve hands-on activities,

traditional evaluation methods such as paper and pencil tests and relative evaluation

are difficult in relation to assessing teachers’ learning holistically. Instead,

performance-based evaluation and criterion-referenced evaluation are recommended

as new evaluation methods.

Conclusion

The goal of this paper is to introduce and discuss three cases of teacher education in

Korea as new approaches to 21st century learning environments, and to analyse what

features of the teacher education cases may be characterised as new approaches. In this

paper, Cases 1 and 3 exemplify that ICT is viewed as a mediating tool for teachers to

learn a set of thinking skills and beliefs, such as computational, creative, or systems

thinking, which comprise the fundamental skills that they need to possess in order to

be adaptable in the emerging complexity of current educational landscape. Case 2

shows the possibility of broadening the traditional conception of ICT with the

illustration of teachers developing a capacity to learn cutting-edge technologies like

robotics, for convergent and divergent thinking, and how such preparation helps

teachers better understand both the potential and challenges of teaching and learning

in future environments. All the three cases elucidate our point that building the ICT

capacity for the next generation of teachers requires us to revisit our underlying

assumptions on the role of ICT for education and to reconsider the design of ICT

training modules consistent with our epistemic view.

We conclude by addressing two limitations and then suggest future research

directions. Firstly, the selection of three cases was purposive since we aimed to select

and analyse cases that revealed the research phenomenon, which was to unpack the

making of more innovative approaches to ICT courses in teacher education contexts.

We understood the inherent limitations associated with purposive sampling in terms

of generalisability and credibility. Since the authors were also the instructors in the

three courses discussed in the paper, some cautions should be made in terms of

generalising the findings. However, we believe that the present study surfaced

important issues in teachers’ ICT capacity building and teacher training models, and

such issues could be further sought in-depth in future research studies that involve a

larger number of cases and multiple sources of data. Lastly, this paper is the starting

point to briefly explore new approaches to teacher education for 21st century learning

environments. For further studies, it will be necessary to examine learning processes

and outcomes of pre-service and in-service teachers more in-depth. Also, it is

important to examine closely what theoretical underpinnings support and explain

these approaches to teacher education, so that teacher educators and researchers can

understand and verify new approaches for new environments.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Sunghwan Gu and Wookyung Shim (Figure 1), Sulee Kang and

Yuna Yim (Figure 2), and Minjung Lee (Figure 3) for sharing their projects used in this

paper.

Kim, Choi, Han and So 981

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Authors: Dr Hyeonjin Kim, Assistant Professor

Department of Education

Korea National University of Education

San 7 Darak-ri, Gangnae-myeon, Cheongwon-gun, Chungbuk 363-791, Korea

Email: jinnie@knue.ac.kr Web: http://bbs.knue.ac.kr/~jinnie/

Dr Hyungshin Choi, Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Education

Chuncheon National University of Education

Gonggi Ro 126, Chuncheon 200-703, Gangwon-Do, Korea

Email: hschoi@cnue.ac.kr Web: https://www.cnue.ac.kr/eng/main/main.jsp

Dr Jeonghye Han, Associate Professor

Department of Computer Education

Cheongju National University of Education, Cheongju, Chungbuk 361-712, Korea

Email: hanjh@cje.ac.kr Web: http://comm.cje.ac.kr/~hanjh/

Dr Hyo-Jeong So, Assistant Professor

Learning Sciences and Technologies, National Institute of Education

Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616

Email: hyojeong.so@nie.edu.sg Web: http://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/so-hyo-jeong

Please cite as: Kim, H., Choi, H., Han, J. & So, H.-J. (2012). Enhancing teachers’ ICT

capacity for the 21st century learning environment: Three cases of teacher education in

Korea. In C. P. Lim & C. S. Chai (Eds), Building the ICT capacity of the next generation

of teachers in Asia. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 28(Special issue, 6),

965-982. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet28/kim.html