I have three items: (1) notes on a recent example of the interaction of universities and private educational companies and the increasing commercialisation of higher education; (2) one tweet on effective online teaching and learning design; and (3) one link to JISC’s collection of future scenarios for higher education. Commercialising higher education Coventry University is … Read more
This week has been a lot of ‘heads down’ course designing and building type work. I did find the following of interest: Fostering online learning “research into online learning almost univocally agrees that…well-designed courses with interactive content..continuous educator involvement..timely, and formative feedback are the most promising approaches to fostering learning in online environments” https://t.co/JfHeTd1BsT— Neil … Read more
Three bits of news and content that caught my eye this week: Accreditation and lifelong learning A new post from www.wonkhe.com at on the relations between accreditation, digital education and lifelong learning. The post is mainly concerned with access to education and social mobility in the context of Covid and so makes the case for … Read more
This is a short collection of things that have caught my eye this week. This is an interesting article from Inside Higher Ed on how Covid 19 threatens the diversity of institutions in the higher education system of the USA. It is, as expected, the smaller institutions most at risk of closure. So diversity in … Read more
This is an initial #sketchnote drafted as I re-engage with the conceptualisation of this project. The project aims to develop approaches to enhancing education institutions (rather than individual) resilience in teaching & learning. Like much else, the project stalled as priorities changed to respond to the pandemic. The project draws on concepts of institutional resilience, … Read more
During this period of remote working, I’m reminded of Martin Oliver’s (2015) argument for the importance and value for higher education of the co-location of learners, researchers, teachers, spaces, libraries and so on. These bases of values are now being eroded, problematised and reframed in the pivot to remote teaching. Oliver discusses such value creation … Read more
I was struck by the following quote from the annual Draper Lecture at Queen Mary’s by Nick Hillman on the future of higher education on artificial intelligence in education. The quote highlights key questions on the purpose of the educational endeavour in relation to the individual. Education is not only concerned with learning what or … Read more
Weller’s notion of resilience is proposed as an alternative perspective on change in education systems and institutions that provides a generative alternative to the ‘education is broken’ narrative. For this, he draws on resilience in terms of the stability of ecological systems and the ability of systems to absorb change. Resilience is, therefore, not simply … Read more
Returning to the topic of unbundling universities, this sketchnote is based on some of my notes from the Unbundling Higher Education Coursera course that I discussed here. The analytic approaches undertaken by the research project that underpins this MOOC gives a really useful starting point for studying the unbundling of universities. The study focused on … Read more
Ben Williamson has written a great post here on the concept and realities of a smart, quantified and data driven university. The post outlines the increasingly overt positioning of universities as conduits for data collection, analysis and exploitation. The datafication of universities as the ‘smart university’ or ‘intelligent campus’ provides a clear pathway for the … Read more