No 1, November 2018

Issue editorial

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, higher education faces many challenges and among them it should enable students to succeed. These challenges are particularly acute in the field of French teacher training, since they are entrusted with the responsibility of a class for their internship year. The second-year master's model in force at our university grants thirty hours of training in the didactics of French. In this context, we hypothesized that the flipped classroom offers an interesting perspective, by pushing back the space-time limits of classroom training. More specifically, our problem aims to ask to what extent the flipped classroom is adapted to the specific context of the training of French teachers, and could particularly promote professional development. Answers are provided by the analysis of semi-directive interviews with trainee students, which make it possible to identify and classify a number of obstacles.

When the teaching practicum supervision is done remotely, the collaborative approach of the actors of the university and those of the school necessitates adjustments, or even new ways of doing to help a dialogue favorable to the professional development of the trainees. While this collaboration presents both opportunities and limitations for "presence" in distance learning, our research reveals some characteristics in a particular context. The purpose of this research was initially the feeling of presence of trainees supervised remotely; this article is devoted to the collaboration between supervisors and school stakeholders using information and communication technologies (ICTs) that emerged during the data analysis. According to Henri and Lundgren-Cayrol's (2001) collaborative distance learning framework, we will come up with a support group in which collaboration involves teaching, cognitive and social interactions in an online environment that brings together the trainee, the supervisor, the actors of the school and others.

This paper reports an intercultural telecollaboration project between four pre- and in-service second/foreign language teachers that sought to analyze how knowledge was co-constructed among team members through online social negotiation. Data consisting of transcripts of two conversations using the conferencing platform Skype were analyzed using a taxonomy adapted from Gunawardena, Lowe and Anderson’s (1997) model.  It was found that the highest amount of utterances (62%) fell into Phase I (Sharing/comparing of information) and that few occurrences fell into higher phases of negotiation of meaning (Phases IV and V). These findings raised awareness regarding task’s design, structure and content in order to foster higher levels of negotiation of meaning and to prevent potential lack of involvement.

An exploratory study was conducted using an online questionnaire sent to faculty members and part-time lectures in different universities in the province of Quebec, Canada, in order to brush a portrait of their ICTE use in support of active learning pedagogies offered in class to their students. The descriptive data collected from volunteer participants (n = 119) were analyzed and supplemented with a principal component analysis to refine the relationships that emerged between the selected variables.

This article is the synthesis of a master’s thesis which has three main objectives. The first objective is to develop a methodology for the design of a serious educational game (SEG) specialized in learning to read, for children who have difficulties in reading or have symptoms associated with developmental dyslexia. The second objective is to realize the Alpha prototype of the game, and finally the third objective is to assess the consistency of the scenario as well as, the ergonomic of the game by a user test.

Research from Green and Bavellier (2012) indicates that playing action video games improves attention and learning. While, the results of the research of Franceschini et al. (2013) demonstrate that the use of an action video game improves the concentration and reading speed of dyslexic children.

As part of this research, we believe that adding re-education exercises to a video game of action will improve its effectiveness in learning to read, children with symptoms associated with dyslexia.

The results of the experiment on the coherence of the scenario as well as the ergonomics of the game are promising. However, changes will have to be made, especially in terms of navigation and optimization of game missions.

Although the use of social media is an integral part of our social life, the main function of this tool does not seem to be learning. Taking the particular example of Twitter, however, there are initiatives, still uncommon, to learn differently. This practitioner article has two parts. As a first step, we look at the potential of Twitter from the perspective of professional development (Larsen, 2016, Larsen & Liljedahl, 2017), for both the teacher and the researcher, to learn, network, argue then develop digital skills (essential for the 21st century). In a second step, we share our teaching and research experience to identify the potential and challenges of Twitter to learn math in high school. It will include opportunities to do mathematics differently and push the boundaries of the class, which is of interest to both the teacher and the researcher.

During the early 2010s, MOOCs acquired a considerable notoriety ; hundreds of thousands of their certificates, free at first, flooded the Web. Many believed that the end of the diplomas as we knew them was near. Some started comparing the success of these courses based on the number of certificates that were delivered. More often than not, the increasingly numerous debates over these questions tended to forget the diversity of situations these certificates encompassed. Some indeed validated skills, but most of them were the digital equivalent of an attendance sheet, as suggested by an investigation we carried out into course designers’ motivations. After interpreting this diversity, we focus here on the debates brought about by the renewal of these certificates. They are no longer free, and the private sector has gained momentum, which leads to many questions over the future of this new generation of certificates in academia.

Interview with Daniel Peraya.

Meeting with Brigitte Albero