Karley Beckman is a researcher and teacher educator in educational technology in the School of Education. Karley’s area of expertise is in digital technologies and education. Her body of research explores children, young people and adult learners’ technology practice and implications for learning. Her doctoral research investigated high school students’ technology practices with particular interest in understanding how young people engage with technologies across their everyday lives and educational contexts. Central to Karley’s body of research is a sociological framing to critically engage with issues of digital inequality, digital literacy and toward developing a theoretically informed understanding of the place of technology in people’s lives.
Her current research, undertaken with colleagues both locally and internationally, involves a number of projects that explore aspects of technology practice in young people’s lives as they transition from high school into a range of post-school contexts; and projects exploring higher education students’ engagement in online learning.
One current focus of Beckman’s research is higher education student’s approaches to learning online. This body of research spans a number of research projects and collaborations with researchers across Australian universities, exploring aspects such as self-regulated learning and approach to engaging in online learning environments, including blended and wholly online.
A shift to online forms of learning has been evidenced across all education sectors including universities world-wide over the past two decades. As a result of the current global pandemic we have seen a rapid move to online forms of teaching and learning, thus making this work highly relevant. While, online learning has been touted as a form of learning that allows for flexibility as it collapses time and space, research findings demonstrate that online forms of learning place more burden on students to manage their learning. As outlined in Beckman’s recent publications (Beckman, et al., 2019, Apps, et al., 2019), student’s varied circumstances and self-regulation skills influence their practices in online learning and ability to manage their learning.
The key drive of this research is to better understand student experiences, which are often invisible to educators in an online learning environment. The aim of this body of research is to better inform online teaching and learning that supports students to manage their learning and is cognisant and responsive to student approaches in online learning environments. Additionally, the research findings have also provided practical implications for students to develop self-awareness of their practices and the development of self-regulation skills.
Other research interests include pre-service teachers and teacher’s digital literacy and learning design with digital technology, particularly the ways teachers can design learning to address digital inequality; the role of self-regulation in online learning environments in higher education; the use of social media in schools for communications with community; and sociology of education and technology.
