While systematic and worthwhile research efforts have been undertaken regarding the conceptualization, development, and assessment of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) within the context of face-to-face learning experiences in higher education and teacher professional development settings, the authors herein posit that the framework of TPCK requires a technological solution, because the limited amount of time that is usually devoted in conventional teacher education courses and one-time only ICT training courses, as well as teachers' different needs, skills, knowledge, expectations, expertise, subject-matter area, and in general readiness, render traditional face-to-face learning experiences inadequate for providing ongoing TPCK development. On the basis of the above rationale, in this paper the authors introduce the design and development surrounding e-TPCK, an adaptive electronic learning environment that teacher educators, teacher trainers, and in-service and pre-service teachers can use to foster ongoing TPCK development.
Introduction data that rest in the system’s database (what tool or difficulty level the teacher has chosen, whether she had declared low or high cognitive load, etc.).
Through the system’s relational database all needed information can be extracted in order to infer the teachers’ interactions with the system. Technically speaking, the inference of the learning path is enabled through the values of two tables (namely, “Property definition” and “Property lookup”) combined with a few simple SQL queries to the database.
The visual analytics are enabled through the visualization of various properties values (stored at the “Property value” database table) that were defined by the designers (definitions are stored at “Property definition” database table) for the scope of learner tracking. These properties constitute a subset of the system properties. All system properties are in the form of IMS-Learning Design properties (http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/) and embedded in a number of IF-THEN-ELSE rules. The system design forms a set of Finite States Machines (FSMs) whose implementation, through the execution of the conditional rules, provides the adaptivity of the system. In figure 3, two properties related to the teachers’ progress were referenced in the corresponding webpage. The values of these properties are shown in bold. In order to implement the e-TPCK system, the corresponding adaptive Learning Design was developed with the use of ReCourse Learning Design editor (http://tencompetence-project.bolton.ac.uk/ldauthor/). In order to access the e-TPCK environment, the Astro Learning Design player (http://tencompetenceproject.bolton.ac.uk/ldruntime/index.html) was configured (by enabling time-related events) and consequently used. 4