Editorial

Abstract

It is well over a year since the first lockdowns on campus and the need to rethink our teaching and learning. Analysing our performance in this regard will take time, but many of the ideas coming through can add extra weight to our efforts to meet the needs of our students under the present constraints. The obvious approach is to move to online teaching, but this is increasingly being met by student resistance – usually in the form of complaints that they are not getting their money’s worth. Some of the articles in this issue look at the application of technology, in particular contexts, but the initial clutch of articles is primarily concerned with learning in groups. Some of the articles deal with the facilitating technology but others predate the current concerns and reflect the wider approach to teaching and learning. This is a very international selection of papers, which hold the prospect of translating ideas from other parts of the world. The first article by Christopher Lange, Jamie Costley and Mik Fanguy is based on work in South Korea and looks at cognitive load. One of the key results was that better participation in group work led to better exam performance, at least in postgraduate students in STEM subjects. Implications also suggest the need for synchronous collaborative writing as a way of sharing ideas and knowledge to produce higher levels of individual understanding and quality writing. Following this is an article from Sara Arena and Julian Davies from the United States that, similarly, found a correlation between co-operative learning and student achievement. This study is based on first year Mechanical Engineering, but the results suggest that the benefits are not concept specific. The third paper, from Limerick in Ireland, looks at student perceptions of problembased learning. The context here is Masters-level study in Business. The suggestion is that the adoption of PBL goes beyond issues of teaching and learning to the development of professional attributes that could aid future advancement. An article from Iran by Fatemeh Keshmiri and colleagues, looks at inter-professional education, an area often identified with PBL but here using a case-study approach. The context is in professional education in the field of health: often a leader in collaborative learning and also an area where inter-professional collaboration is necessary in the workplace. Moving more towards the technology of collaboration is a paper from London-based Zeller Pimlott and Tricia Tikasingh, looking at the use of wikis. Results suggested that a wiki-based collaborative knowledge repository was valued by students above knowledge gained elsewhere online. A group of two articles examines issues around doctoral supervision. First, a paper from Magdalena Jara, from Coventry explores peer learning and case studies as elements in the professional development of supervisors, in the context of an evaluation of a programme for supervisors. Following this, West London-based Isabel Huet and Diogo Casanova look INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION AND TEACHING INTERNATIONAL 2021, VOL. 58, NO. 4, 375–376 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2021.1942362