Towards Technology-Enhanced Transformative Learning Environments

Abstract

The world currently grapples with ambiguity and uncertainty, facing ongoing challenges that span various aspects of life, from economic fluctuations and political instability to environmental crises and technological advancements. Confronting such ambiguity and uncertainty highlights the critical importance of equipping learners with transformative competences. Such competencies empower individuals to navigate challenges, foster innovation, reconcile conflicting demands, shoulder responsibility collaboratively, and contribute to a more promising future. Learners need to cultivate these competences to help shape a world where well-being and sustainability, for themselves, others, and the planet, can be realized. Creating such a transformative learning ecosystem requires educational institutions to constantly look for embedding competences in their curriculum to provide rich learning settings for their learners to become capable professionals to manage today’s complex issues. This, of course, demands for a shift from teaching and learning in the traditional classrooms into learning and collaboration with Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) environments to make learning processes more effective, efficient, and engaging and ultimately to enhance learners’ transformative competences. This theoretical paper argues for a deep exploration of the indispensable need for a paradigm shift in educational practices. It first sets the stage by elucidating the foundational rationale for such transformation within the educational landscape. Subsequently, it delves into a nuanced exposition of the key constituents comprising this transformative competences. Next, it discusses the need for a shift from providing first-order scaffolding (tools for living) towards providing them with second-order scaffolding (tools for learning) to meet the needs of the society. Subsequently, it discusses the role of TEL environments for second-order scaffolding to nurture learners’ transformative competences. Finally, it provides a framework that delineates the multifaceted dimensions of TEL environments for the cultivation and refinement of learners' transformative competences.