Computer mediated simulation and its impact on initial teacher education

Abstract

Teacher education increasingly seeks to broaden its horizons to successful national and international educational realities. To this end, academic and student mobility programmes as well as telematic collaboration respond to the call for internationalisation in higher education and vocational education and training in the report of the European Council and the European Commission (2015) entitled "New Priorities for European Cooperation in Education and Training". The present proposal collects the perceptions of university teacher education students during a large-scale web-based simulation course. The study is carried out with participants from five universities in the following countries: Tunisia, Romania, Turkey, the United States and Spain. The aim is to find out how web-based simulation correlates with students' acquisition of a deeper understanding of current educational problems. Through a correlation analysis we determined the significant relationships between the variables and then modelled with a linear regression, through which we concluded that simulation can be predicted to be a methodology for improving teaching and learning based on the problems collected in the scenario, the time dedicated to asynchronous interaction added to the face-to-face time in the synchronous sessions, and the perceived difficulty in carrying out the simulations with respect to other educational activities. After analysing the data, the results suggest that although the telematic simulation allows participants to perceive the progress of their learning in a significant way, it can also serve as an indicator of aspects that need to be improved