The formal “research” part of my pre-research – the literature review essentially – has gone off the rails a little in the last couple of months. I’ve been collecting things to read here and there but not reading them and clearly not digesting and blogging about them.
Nonetheless, I still feel as though my ideas are coming along. This has mostly been as a result of attending a couple of major Higher Education events – the ACODE Benchmarking summit and the HERDSA 2016 conference. (Australasian Council of Online & Distance Education and the Higher Education Research & Development Society of Australasia)
One of my initial goals with this research was to generate some helpful resources for people in my field/trade/craft – Education Designers/Developers/Technologists. The more I look into the issues around supporting TEL in Higher Ed., the more I realise that this is the area of the most interest to me. I had thought for a while that focussing on the work of professional (non-academic) staff in this space could be a great way to explore larger questions of university culture and the impact that this has but speaking to a number of colleagues at these events, I’ve realised that there is a combination of academics and professional staff providing educational support and that this sector – which I’m going to call Education Support People (ESPs) for now because writing Education Designers/Developers/Technologists is tiresome and clunky.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t multiple factors – that I think may require varying research methodologies to properly explore – that affect the uptake of TELT practices in Higher Ed. but given the central position of ESPs in the organisation, there is a better than even chance that I’ll be able to hang most things on this hub. (To mangle a metaphor)
I’m also starting to think about the dichotomy of rational and emotional reasons for using/avoiding TEL practices. The literature offers many solid, evidence based reasons to use TEL but actual uptake often seems tied to the attitudes of the key players. They might further muddy the waters by raising a (legitimate) rational barrier to TEL practices – we don’t have the time/resources to do this – but the next words in the sentence take us closer to the heart of the emotional response to the issue. They could be … ‘so how can we get around that and do it anyway?’ or ‘… so you can’t make me do it’ when they simply don’t want to.
Finding these core gut responses I think will be interesting and challenging.
The project plan that I showed here a few posts ago has blown out a little, so I’ve tweaked some of the timeframes. I moved University as Organisation to begin after ESPs a few weeks ago but this is my current interest (and I’m not altogether sure what I mean by University as organisation – beyond something to do with the complexity of the educational ecosystem) and I’ve now extended my time to read up on ESPs and pushed back the Uni section a couple of weeks. I was hoping to neatly tie everything to months but there is no compelling practical reason for this, just neatness.
I also spoke to several people at HERDSA – who really were all great, thoughtful and generous people – about interest in creating a Special Interest Group for ESPs (not necessarily that name) and will pursue this in the near future. Big wraps for HERDSA – I have to say that I think it has been one of my all time favourite edu conferences. There wasn’t a single slot that didn’t have at least one presentation that I was interested to see.
The conference also helped me to discover the work of Carroll Graham at UTS, who recently finished a PhD on the impact of professional staff on student learning outcomes. Her website – Higher Education Professionals – I think will be a rich resource