Immersive professional learning to foster technology- enabled peer-review

Abstract

This paper reports on a professional learning exercise designed to help academic staff gain pedagogical and technological confidence to successfully integrate peer-review practices and a feedback tool into their teaching practice. The study focuses on an immersive professional learning experience in higher education, embedded as a formative assessment task within a unit in the university’s Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Education (GCTE), a nationally recognised qualification. Taking a descriptive case-study approach, we report on academic participants’ professional learning experience as they undertook the unit, specifically the potentials of FeedbackFruits from a learner perspective, and how participants gained pedagogical and technological confidence through engagement in the task. The findings highlight how professional learning can be embedded for successful outcomes and the importance of providing professional learning in a safe environment allowing participants to consider both pedagogical practices and relevant learning technologies in context so that technology adoption occurs purposefully and with confidence.