Great to have good news to share on a Friday! A new article is now out in @A_L_T‘s Open Access Research in Learning Technology Journal – Research in Learning Technology: making friends and influencing people. The article examines some of the most downloaded/cited papers in RLT, to identify areas of current interest, influence, practice, etc. This is part of our marking of 30 years of the Journal, as its first papers were published in 1993.
(Keynote recording is available on YouTube [42 min 2 sec])
(Presentation slidedeck is available in Google Slides)
It was a pleasure to give the opening keynote at the ‘Go Wild to Stay Well: Digital Learner Wellbeing in an AI age’ Hackathon in DCU on the 10th Nov. The Hackathon (profiled here) is part of the Digital Education Hackathon (DigiEduHack – @DigiEduHack), which involved students in institutions across Europe engaging in Hackathons to tackle different identified challenges relating to digital transformation in education.
My keynote, Rewilding digital ‘learning to be’: Techo-deterministic dystopia versus open and hopeful futures set the scene for the student who had come to think through the challenges of ensuring digital learner wellbeing in an age of digital transformation and identify solutions to those challenges.
My aim in giving this talk was to combine the very practical with the need to link practical, short-term solutions that can facilitate learner well-being with utopian visions of what the future of education can look like. The practical side of the presentation drew on the existing literature on student success, student wellbeing, and also toolkits for professional self-care such as Burns, O’Mahony, and ’s (2018) SPARK self-care toolkit designed for social workers. As well as highlighting some practical aspects of managing wellbeing, for example, feeling like you belong, managing workload within one’s studies as well one’s overall lifeload, etc., I was keen to highlight the importance of linking short-term practical actions, such as those designed to improve digital learner wellbeing, to longer term ‘real utopian’ visions (drawing on the work of Dr Rikke Toft Nørgård – see her keynote at the EDEN conference hosted by DCU in June 2023, starting at 41.25)
When highlighting aspects of the broader context for the students engaged in this hackathon, I first wanted to highlight that wellness in higher education can be viewed as being an ecosystem that needs to be ‘rewilded’, and that in that context certain potential solutions that may seem sensible will look damaging in that light. For example, it could be argued that one way to facilitate digital learner wellbeing would be to layer on more supports from staff in the institution. Coming from a student-as-consumer perspective, this may seem to make sense, but using the ecosystem metaphor it can be seen that this solution may just shift pressure on wellbeing from one part of the institution to the other, given the documented issues with higher education staff mental health and wellbeing. I encouraged the hackathon attendees to focus on ideas that would help everyone in higher education to flourish and be well.
To further broaden out the context, I drew on Prof. Sian Bayne’s 20203 article, ‘Digital education utopia’ in order to highlight those voices that call out for a change in how we think about digital education. These voices highlight how, over several decades, digital education has largely changed from being seen as a strong emancipatory force to a view of digital education as a driver for human capital development, with “the neoliberal subject for whom lifelong learning has become both ‘a duty’ (Biesta 2022) and an internalised project of self-reinvention (Lee, 2022)” (Bayne, 2023, p. 8). I drew the hackathon participants’ attention to authors such as Neil Selwyn and Felicitas Macgilchrist and related ideas on: a planetary health imperative to cut back on use of digital technology, digital degrowth, sustainable computing, and the rewilding of digital education.
Finally, I left the attendees with a call to engage in their hackathon with what Dr Rikke Toft Nørgård calls a hopepunk imagination, where we can work towards more hopeful digital eduction futures with an insistence on hope, humanity and virtuousness, even in the face of bleak present realities or grim visions of the future.
#DigiEduHack
Bayne, S. (2023) Digital education utopia. Learning, Media and Technology. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2023.2262382
Brunton, J. (2023) Rewilding digital ‘learning to be’: Techo-deterministic dystopia versus open and hopeful futures. Keynote presentation, ‘Go Wild to Stay Well: Digital Learner Wellbeing in an AI age’ Hackathon in DCU, 10th Nov 2023. Digital Education Hackathon (DigiEduHack – @DigiEduHack).
Burns, K., O’Mahony, C. and O’Callagan, E. (2018) SPARK: A self-care tool for professionals. IDEA Project, University College Cork. Available online: https://ideachildrights.ucc.ie/resources/tools/SPARK-Tool-Final-UCC.pdf
Nørgård, R. T., (2022) What comes after the ruin? Designing for the arrival of preferable futures for the university. In Bengtsen, S. S. E. & Gildersleeve, R. E. (eds.), Transformation of the University: Hopeful Futures for Higher Education. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 156-174.
I am honoured to have been nominated in the educator category of the 2023 @OpenEdGlobal Open Education Awards, and then astounded that I am one of two finalists alongside the great Dr Maha Bali from the American University in Cairo (AUC).
To be a finalist in this award round with Maha Bali, and others in the leadership category, like Catherine Cronin and Martin Weller, that I have known and respected for many years is an experience both energising and humbling.
The Open Education community has been a source of support and inspiration for me since I began working on off-campus/online, Open Education programmes in Dublin City University (DCU) in 2010. It was a conference symposium on open pedagogical assessment at the OE Global conference in Delft in 2018 that gave me the push to start implementing some ‘non-disposable assessments’ in the OE Psychology undergraduate programme I chair. It was talking to some amazing librarians about their efforts to encourage engagement in Open Practices at the conference in Milan in 2019 that helped inspire the creation of a beginner’s guide to open educational practices for DCU. It is listening to inspirational colleague’s like Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz speak on hopeful ways to envision teaching and learning futures (#HE4Good) that reminds me of the importance of continuing to promote and ‘do’ Open Education, even when (especially when?) that feels like perpetually swimming against the current.
I think my shortlisting belongs as much to the groups I am and have been involved in so a big shout out and thank you to: my colleagues from the former Open Education Unit in DCU, in the DCU library, and in DCU’s Teaching Enhancement Unit; my colleagues in the Psychology Major team who are currently gearing up to ‘do’ Open Education week in week out in the 23/24 year; and all those involved in the OpenGame Project, the BUKA Project, and the Encore+ project.
#OEAwards #OEAwards23
Are you interested in learning how to tackle teaching and learning issues in innovative ways?
The Erasmus+ funded OpenGame project (Promoting Open Education through Gamification) aims to contribute to the uptake of Open Education Practices among staff in Higher Education through the development of a gamified and situated learning experience. The project has already released two outputs: a Handbook of Successful Open Teaching Practices; and an OpenGame Course Curriculum and Content.
The OpenGame project team is now seeking Irish higher education staff to engage in early testing of an online game designed to encourage the use of useful open educational practices. This will involve exploring the current version of the online game and filling out a short survey on your experience.
If you wish to take part, here is the link to the online game (https://opengame-project.eu/play/), where you can register and explore version 0.2 of the game, and here is the link to the associated online survey (https://bit.ly/opengame-gametest).
I had an article come out over the weekend in Studies in Higher Education: Brunton, J. & Buckley, F. (2020) ‘You’re thrown in the deep end’: adult learner identity formation in higher education. Studies in Higher Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1767049
This is a paper that is very close to my heart as I have been working on it for a long time and it contains results that I have very much wanted to get out there into the world.
The paper is based on a study that examined the discourse of thirty-four full-time, undergraduate adult learners in two Irish HEIs at the start and end of their first year. Many of these learners felt that starting their HE course was like being thrown in the deep end and mostly left to sink or swim.
Our key finding was that participants engaged in two interrelated forms of identity work: 1. constructing an identity formation narrative, about becoming adult learners; and 2. ongoing, day-to-day identity management. First, participants were identifiably engaged in the macro-level formation, development, maintenance, and augmentation of their new learner identity and changing identity portfolio, developing a story about how they were becoming adult learners and what that meant for their overall sense of themselves. Second, they were continually engaged in ongoing micro-level processes of day-to-day identity management as they changed between different context-specific-identities. These forms of identity work were shown to be interrelated. The findings demonstrate how participants’ identity formation narratives influenced how they engaged in day-to-day identity management, for example, the type of learner they saw themselves as shaped how they choose to interact with other learners. In turn, findings show how participants’ identity formation narratives were influenced by ongoing day-to-day identity management, for example during conflict between context-specific-identities. Day-to-day events in a participant’s life had to be incorporated into their identity formation narrative in order to maintain a consistent and coherent sense of themselves.
The study also illustrates how adult learners experienced varying degrees of identity struggle. Struggle could be within a context, e.g. “who am I as a learner?”, or in the clashing of their different life-parts and associated identities.
Interestingly, socialisation/orientation events, e.g. a pre-entry ‘mature student’ summer school in one uni, were identified as being very helpful, stopping some from dropping out before they even began their studies. This highlights the importance of these interventions.
Online, remote, off-campus, flexible learning is so hot right now!
When the need to cease on-campus teaching and learning activities in the face of the Covid-19 crisis became necessary the benefits of off-campus, flexible study became almost instantly and universally recognised. With little hesitation most governments and institutions sought to move to remote or online teaching and learning (I will leave the debate over which term to use to others). This is certainly the case in Ireland where it is safe to say that all higher education students are currently remote, off-campus students.
All those full-time, on-campus students joined the ranks of our existing remote/online, off-campus students who have always studied through that mode. But, these cohorts of students are not treated the same, and that is what has made some of us do a double-take at the sudden exuberant support for off-campus study. In what I am about to cover I will stick mostly to a comparison between different types of ‘first-time’ adult learner in Irish higher education.
First-time, over-23, university students studying flexibly online are treated entirely differently from first-time, over-23, full-time, on-campus students, who are defined as mature students. This is principally because those studying online are defined as part-time learners (this is not the case across the board in Ireland but is in the context where I work). This blocks these online adult learners from accessing any of the funding and access supports available to on-campus, full-time students who are over-23. The imposition of multiple barriers for these students flies in the face of stated national and international goals on bringing more adults into higher education.
To provide a contextual persona for the points made below, I am referring to a 25-year-old student on an open education/access, online, undergraduate programme named Maeve. The open access policy of the programme on which she is studying means that any student over the age of 23 may take up a place if they choose. The student pays a fee per module and may progress at their own pace within the bounds of an eight-year registration limit as this is a continuous, flexible programme. Maeve is married, has one child, and works full-time in a minimum wage job. This is the first time she has studied at higher education level and is from a lower socio-economic background, has a disability registered with the institution, and is from an identified minority group. Meave is defined as a part-time student as she is studying online/off-campus, even if she were to take 60 ECTS credits in an academic year (a full-time credit load).
Facilitator – Student assistance fund
Maeve can apply for the student assistance fund since 2017/2018 this has been made available to part-time students who are lone parents or members of defined access target groups who report that they are in financial distress. It is not clear if this funding for inclusion of part-time students in the fund will continue in the future.
Facilitator – some other minor funds and bursaries
Some other minor bursaries are available for Maeve to apply for, but again, compared to mainstreamed access to these for full-time students the access for part-time, off-campus students is funded year-to-year and may not continue into the future.
Barrier – Exclusion from ‘free-fees’ initiative
Maeve is excluded from the free-fee initiative as this only applies to full-time study and does not recognise any learning defined as part-time.
Barrier – Exclusion from SUSI student grant
As a student on a programme defined as part-time Maeve cannot be approved for a SUSI student grant.
Barrier – Exclusion from the Back to Education Allowance (BTEA)
Maeve is excluded from this allowance, which only applies where a student is taking a full-time course leading to a major award.
Barrier – Inequity in state funding model
Part-time, over-23 students who are off campus receive very limited funding in the core funding model. Springboard courses are the exception to this but this funding is specific, competitive, and limited to a fixed number of courses with the funding not guaranteed into the future.
Barrier – Exclusion from formal access programmes
As a student who is over 23 Maeve is ineligible for the DARE and HEAR access programmes.
Barrier – Inequity in access to services and supports
While institutional services and supports available to the student body are in theory available to online students the services and supports mainly operate to an ‘office-hours, weekdays’ model with full-time, on-campus students being their main users. As an online, off-campus student who is not typically on-campus during office hours, Maeve finds these services and supports largely inaccessible. As a student with a disability this lack of access to facilities etc. ‘out of hours’ clashes with the institution’s responsibility under the Disability Act 2005 and the Equal Status Act (2000-2015).
Barrier – Other support funds
For example, scholarships from Uversity explicitly say they give preference to candidates enrolling on full-time programmes.
Barrier – Student travel card (Leap)
Even the humble student travel card, if you look at the terms and conditions, is only for full-time students.
All of the supports above would be available to Maeve if she joined a programme as a full-time mature student (except entry through a formal access route), but this would not have provided the flexibility she needed to balance study with the other parts of her life.
The current world we find ourselves in, where all students are remote, off-campus students, only brings into sharper relief existing inequities in the Irish higher education system.
P.s. I was also thinking about titling this post: “If you like you then you should have put some funding on it” but maybe that’s stretching a pop culture reference a bit too much…
I want to share a post I just shared with students on our DCU Connected Humanities programmes, as it may resonate with or be useful to others on either side of the staff-student line:
The current circumstances under which we are all living are unprecedented and we are all having to adjust to a new and often difficult way of being. Even for those of us who are used to studying and/or working in our homes things are now different as, for example, our families are there, all the time, working spaces have to be shared with others, children have ridiculous demands like being fed several times a day and possibly even homeschooled, etc. On top of that, we are anxious about our own safety and that of our other loved ones during a pandemic, especially those in vulnerable categories. I just want to say that, to the greatest extent possible, enage in some self-compassion and take care of yourself during these tough times.
To that end I want to first highlight a webpage put together by DCU Student Support and Development aiming to help you get organised while at home (although I think some of you could teach that class to others!).
Second, I want to direct you to some resources from a Work Psychologist, Dr Richard MacKinnon, whose work I have personally found useful (I use the approach he advocates around productivity and psychological flexibility). He recently gave a webinar about working at home in the current crisis and the recording can be found here in this blog post. He also discussed this topic in a recent podcast, which is here. I benefited from listening to these and so I want to share them with you.
Best,
James
The great-advice-on-moving-online-due-to-Covid-19 market is pretty saturated by now with great contributions on Twitter from the likes of @tonybates @slamteacher @eam0 @karencosta @Jessifer @jonbecker @ProfSallyBrown @neilmosley5 @tjoosten @LTHEchat and many, many more. I am particularly proud of the contribution coming from @DCU’s @NIDL_DCU (National Institute for Digital Learning) and our ‘Keep Teaching‘ and ‘Keep Learning‘ web pages, which I think set the right tone. It is also a good time to have a project running on how to teach online, as the Openteach project (led by @orna_farrell) gets into full swing with lots of useful resources. As the Irish Government is shutting all schools and HE Institutions from tomorrow (13-03-20) some of us here with online learning experience are helping colleagues to gear up to teach and support their students without their usual on-campus setup. But anway, I’m not here to add more to that conversation. I thought I would write about something I haven’t seen discussed already, and give some advice about how to pivot to leading remote academic teams.
Since 2010 I have led a (fantastic) remote academic team in my role as a Chair of open education, online programmes (this T&L model is described in Brunton et al. 2018). Having previously led on-campus academic programme teams I can say that these require different approaches but there are lots of transferable skills from one to the other. For all those Progrmme Chair/Directors who are about to pivot to leading an academic team whose members are now remote and distributed, my advice would be (note – I am going to talk about the technology we have here in DCU, you will have to translate to what is available in your institution):
I hope these help!
The 2019 OEGlobal conference was held in beautiful Milan and hosted by the Politecnico di Milano. The conference provided a great opportunity to reconnect with members of the global open community as well as meet some others I had not met before. Well done to the conference committee and the host institution.
Thank you to everyone who attended the @dublincityuni presentations that @orna_farrell, @lolaDseeu, and I gave, which focused on 1) our Openteach project, which aims to generate new knowledge about effective online teaching practice and to harness this new knowledge to support the professional development of part-time online teachers, and 2) our University of Sanctuary scholars studying online through @DCU_Connected. Part of our research on the higher education experiences of these refugees is discussed in a paper in the issue of Open Praxis associated with the conference.
Cool Librarians
A key takeaway from this conference is how cool librarians are, and to highlight to me and my colleagues that we need to be talking to our own librarians more (and we submitted a joint internal funding application with our librarians last Friday, go team!). There were a number of librarians (is there a word for a collective of librarians?) reporting on interesting initiatives such as: helping faculty understand copyright (Amanda Wakaruk & Julia Guy, University of Alberta); the way increased interest in OEP has changed what a librarian has to help students with (Lindsey Gumb, Roger Williams University); helping students make and share their own OER (Jyldyz Bekbalaeva & Aisuluu Namasbek Kyzy, American University of Central Asia); and partnering with faculty to help students create podcasts discussing political issues surrounding various end-of-the-world scenarios (Lisa Di Valentino & Sarah Hutton, University of Massachusetts Amherst), how cool is that. All hail the librarians!
Open Pedagogy
This conference also gave my works-in-progress on open pedagogy a shot in the arm with an action lab on open pedagogy facilitated by @karencang and @thatpsychprof, seen above giving everyone a heart attack by leaping on the somewhat flimsy tables to draw our attention to the need to move on to the next topic. This action lab was a useful opportunity to discuss open pedagogy initiatives from a number of different perspectives: how we allow for student agency in such work; how we support students with the practicalities of engaging in open pedagogy activities; how we support students in knowing about what is involved in being open with regard to privacy, vulnerability, etc.; how we support staff; and how we design the right open pedagogy activity. I am also grateful to @thatpsychprof for further advice and encouragement relating to finding, and possibly developing and/or remixing, open textbooks in psychology. Thanks Rajiv.
Open Textbooks & Zero Textbook Cost Programmes
Speaking of open textbooks, the last thing I did at the conference before I had to leave for the airport was attend a super action lab led by @JGlapaGrossklag, @unatdaly, and a third person whose name I am now unsure of on open textbooks and the idea of zero textbook cost degrees, ideally where an entire programme is using an open pedagogy approach with no commercial textbooks being used at all. The structure for this action lab was to use the Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices framework of Cheryl Ann Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter. This really widened out the discussions to include macro, meso, and micro examples of economic, cultural, and political injustices in higher education. The discussion highlighted the way in which initiatives such as zero textbook cost intersect with other movements such as work on changing national policy, e.g. in Ireland pushing to make the funding/financial support model more equitable, models for democratisation of/student partnership in higher education, e.g. SPARQS in Scotland, etc. The unfortunate reality was I think we needed a good half day workshop to really work through the actual and potential solutions to the issues identified, and the joke as I was leaving was we will have to work on these over the next two conferences and conclude somewhere in 2023. Here is the handout from the action lab, which contains a number of useful links.
And Finally, Socks…
These are some of my reflections on the conference and I know that there were a lot of other elements of the conference that others enjoyed and took inspiration from. Finally, thank you to @greeneterry for giving me the pair of @eCampusOntario socks at the conference, they are super comfy and don’t look half bad either.
On the last day of the 2019 ICDE World Conference on Online Learning it felt a bit like getting to the end of Christmas Day (or another big event that has been highly anticipated for a long time) where you stop and realise that the big thing you have been preparing for and waiting for has actually happened. I think it has been a big success for DCU and especially for the organisers of the conference (@mbrownz, @1MNGM, and the team they build around them). I want to say a hearty well done to them for a great conference experience.
Over the last few days I have had the privilege of meeting and reconnecting with some great people and saw some great presentations that meaningfully intersected with aspects of our DCU Connected practices, experiences, travails, and research interests.
At the end of the pre-conference event that took place on DCU’s St. Pat’s Campus on the 3rd Nov my colleague @orna_farrell and @mbrownz launched the Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature report (for more details see this blog post and for a related needs analysis report see here). I found that the findings in this report around elements of high quality online teaching especially when performed by part-time online educators were echoed and reinforced at different points in the conference. One example was a presentation from @hodgesc (Georgia Southern University) that highlighted the importance for part-time online educators of timely response/instructor availability and the provision of clear assignment instructions.
A second highlight for me centres around the theme of openness. First I had the opportunity to present with my colleague Dr. Megan Gaffney on an open pedagogy assessment in a psychology module (discussed on the blog before here and here). But more important than this was the opportunity to receive encouragement in our iterating toward increased openness from valued friends like @thatpsychprof and @catherinecronin who were themselves at the conference to highlight open practices and policies. Thank you!
Finally, supporting adult, online learners presents a host of challenges in terms of offering supports tailored for their needs and ensuring that institutional central services work for them, and it was cathartic to hear from many other delegates who face the same or similar issues, and useful to hear how they faced those challenges. In a session where @orna_farrell and I presented on behalf of a research team looking at how we supported refugees to study on our open access, online programmes other researchers presented on: the importance of work and family factors for DE student well-being (Dr. Philippa Waterhouse from @OpenUniversity); a no-cost online learning course for primary caregivers of older adults (Dr. Lorraine Carter from @McMasterU); and on mental health challenges faced by adult learners (Lorna Rourke from @StJeromesUni). Thank you all for sharing your work with adult learners.
There were other noteworthy aspects to the conference, but I think this post is long enough already!
The Third Space 