Introducing Personal Teaching Environment for Nontraditional Teaching Methods

Abstract

Students use technology in various ways to learn. The differences in their learning goals and needs make it challenging for teachers to be more engaged in designing educational tasks, assisting, and coping with their students learning. This paper introduces a novel structure of a concept for teaching called Personal Teaching Environment (PTE). This contribution aims to provide teachers with PTE components (tools, connections and activities, and data sources) that can facilitate the fulfillment of their educational tasks for them. The main goal of this study is to define the concept of PTE and its components, as well as to investigate the most popular nontraditional teaching methods and to relate PTEs to these methods with application examples. Therefore, this paper addresses the following questions: (a) What is the structure of PTE, and how does it work? (b) What are nontraditional teaching methods’ advantages, frameworks, and successful implementation stories? and (c) How would you categorize the tool types of nontraditional teaching methods to serve PTE applications? A review was conducted to achieve these goals, and a total of 93 peer-reviewed articles pertaining to the most frequently studied nontraditional teaching methods were comprehensively studied and analyzed. The analysis resulted in practical guidelines, including the benefits and tool types of the five studied nontraditional teaching methods (flipped classroom, problem-based learning, gamification, case study, and social media-centered). Based on the results, the authors established significant examples for teachers who aim to use one or more of those nontraditional teaching methods through the adoption and utilization of the PTE applications.