Back in the early days of blogging, content was largely an annotated record of the sites someone had been visiting and wanted to share, a web log. A couple of months ago, I started a weekly ed tech column in this tradition in Campus Morning Mail, an Australian tertiary education focused daily email newsletter run by the former Higher Ed reporter for The Australian, Stephen Matchett. It gets a few thousand views a day and I get to write what I like and people have been teasing me for being famous so it seems like a win.
Anyway, I thought I might as well share my work here too.
Martin Weller is one of the more interesting practitioners in the ed tech space and this thoughtful post breaks down recent discussion in the UK (but, arguably everywhere) about where we need to go with technology enhanced learning when we (eventually) emerge from the pandemic.
What is an Education Technologist? What do they do, what do they know, how do they help educators to navigate the digital age of learning and teaching? This article from Sonnenberg et al. outlines recent work to describe their practices and proposes some useful ways forward for edtech teams in transforming “the academic experience for learners and teaching faculty”. While the focus is on the Canadian experience, the ideas translate very well to Australia.
Twitter can be a goldmine for ideas for educators and this recent tweet from Kevin Gannon (@TheTattooedProf) and the subsequent replies offers some invaluable practical suggestions for new lecturers (faculty). Among them, capture students’ attention early with a wicked problem that the unit will equip them with the skills to solve in time.
The Melbourne EdTech Summit is a free four-day education technology and innovation showcase beginning on Tuesday 17th August. The first two days are K-12 focused and the Thursday/Friday relate more to Higher Education, VET and Industry. It offers an opportunity to explore new technologies from Australian EdTech vendors and engage in broader discussions about the emerging future of learning and teaching. EduGrowth is an umbrella body of education institutions, industry and edtech entrepreneurs. Speaker highlights include Martin Dougiamas (Moodle) on the Wednesday, Liz Johnston (Deakin) and Chris Campbell (Griffith/ASCILITE) on Thursday, and Belinda Tynan (ACU) and CMM’s own Claire Field on the Friday.
Branching scenarios and decision tree type activities are becoming increasingly popular in learning and teaching due to the ease of creation via user-friendly tools such as H5P and Twine. Some of us got our first taste for these through the popular Choose Your Own Adventure book series in the 80s and 90s. This article from Sarah Laskow describes some of the ways these branching stories are mapped, offering insights for our own work in designing them.
Given my job and my interests, I probably spend more time than most people thinking about how educational institutions implement educational technologies. This is not something that gets much coverage at all in research literature about technology enhanced learning or ed tech, most likely because it is big and messy and complex. Most things I have seen about ed tech relate to specific interventions to see what impact a tool has on learning and teaching – which is, you know, pretty important. Alternatively another major strand seems to consist of feelings about ed tech – either at scale or individual wailing about the (sometimes legitimate) failings and ethical/moral problems of certain tools and approaches. Again, these can be important discussions to have.
I was excited to see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education crop up in my Twitter feed today though from Dr Jenae Cohn, the director of academic technology at California State University at Sacramento. These are certainly questions and concerns that I’ve heard before but it was nice to see them articulated so clearly and evenhandedly.
Recognising that there are, of course, cultural/operational/organisational differences between HE institutions in the US and Australia and definitely different terminology, hopefully I read and understood it as intended. My biggest response was – where are your educational technologists? These challenges sound a lot like what we work to address every day (with varying degrees of success, sure). There is a reference to ed tech professionals at the end but I do wonder what differences there are in how we work and what we do.
Anyway, from here, this is largely going to be my direct responses to some of the key points. Apologies if I’m overdoing the quotes.
“Decisions about educational technology can appear opaque to academics. On the flip side, the IT staff in charge of acquiring the technology may find faculty preferences in the classroom to be similarly hazy and ill-defined.” – This is literally why we have educational technologists (and also do reasonable business analysis), to be the bridge between educators and IT.
“Yet decisions surrounding digital tools — and the professional development necessary to use them effectively — seem to have no clear catalyzing origin for either faculty or staff members.”Agreed there is definitely a need for better communication, but at the same time, I’ve tried to explain the complexities of these processes only to see people’s eyes glaze over.
“Staff members and administrators often do not know why or how instructors intend to use certain ed-tech tools. The staff and administrative role is just to facilitate their purchasing and support.”So this is possibly a US/Australia thing – by administrators do you mean institutional managers/leaders (many of which are academics) or IT dept leaders? Here at least, IT dept leaders seldom make these kinds of calls without direction from the senior academic leaders in the institution. And, again, this is why we have educational technologists.
“Meanwhile, faculty members seem to think that some amorphous administrative body just decides to buy random ed tech purely for the sake of buying the latest fancy technology. Sometimes that perception aligns with reality; sometimes it doesn’t.”Again, these top end decisions here are frequently driven by senior academic leaders but the point about an amorphous admin body is well taken and sometimes decisions can even surprise the ed tech units too.
“Poor channels of communication. Because the faculty and the staff operate in separate spheres on most campuses, whether communication about teaching technology is clear and consistent often depends on where, and how, the ed-tech staff members are housed in an institution. On a single campus, you might find some ed-tech staff members in an IT department. Others are in campus teaching centres. Still others may be housed in an academic-affairs office or as part of a distinct online-learning division.”Certainly a challenge – in Australia at least, most ed tech units with the power to roll out ed tech uni wide sit in a central Learning and Teaching division and work with uni IT. There are often local ed techs in discipline based teaching centres (which we call faculties or colleges). There can also be a cultural component in HE institutions where academics tend not to talk that much to professional staff about these kinds of issues.
“Lack of representation. While faculty perspectives often shape campus technology choices, the mechanisms for collecting those perspectives may not always be representative. Some institutions have designated faculty-senate groups to discuss the choice and implementation of educational technology. But those committees may not be representative of the full range of faculty and staff voices and needs. In addition, those governance committees may not always consistently communicate with the staff members who are directly responsible for getting the technology up and running.”Any decent tech implementation project should first examine the business (learning and teaching) needs – which necessarily involves understanding what educators need (and want). An education technology will usually also need to address other institutional needs however (technical, security, financial, policy, etc), so educator input can’t be the only consideration. The question of how representative these representative groups is a fair one, with the potential for more senior educators who teach less to fill their ranks. One thing I’ve seen in Australia is that we will often seek out known ‘power-users’ or innovators in a faculty to inform decision making – which may still offer a skewed understanding of the needs of ‘average’ educators.
“Instructors going rogue. Faculty members may opt to use online teaching tools without the explicit support or licensing of their institution — turning the ed-tech environment on any campus into an idiosyncratic jumble that differs from one course to the next.”Certainly presents some challenges – ed technologists and central units actually don’t want to discourage innovative teaching practices and frequently do whatever they can to support localised implementations. Where value is demonstrated, with potential to be used more widely, they will even work to embed these new tools in the enterprise/institutional ed tech ecosystem. BUT there can be problems with integrating with existing systems (the LMS, student management etc), problems with support, accessibility, security and privacy and often problems when the person who was a big driver of using a tool moves on, leaving their colleagues abandoned.
Two suggestions:
“1) Give faculty members with expertise in college teaching a joint appointment in administrative units where they can directly influence campus decision-making about teaching — especially around purchases of educational technology.“
Decision making in this space rarely happens quickly so there would likely be long periods where this person/people may have little to do. Developing stronger models for input (which many ed tech units are at least mindful of) might be more valuable. Also revisiting the weighting of priorities in the evaluation and procurement of new tools, while recognising that learning and teaching aren’t the only factors at play. Also, how would such people be found and, more pragmatically, how would we deal with institutional politics of it all? Would STEM academics accept someone from the humanities? How many would we need then?Some kind of embedding sounds useful but…
“2) Rethink the role of educational-technology professionals on campus and allow them to engage in a mix of scholarship, teaching, and administration. That way new research on college teaching directly influences technology procurement, testing, and implementation”.
Well, as an education technologist, clearly, I think this is ingenious. I have actually been advocating for this for a while but breaking down some of these perceived barriers between academics and professional staff and giving ed techs this richer experience of an academic’s work and needs can only help everyone.
This article is timely for another reason in that I’ve recently been looking at revising a Twine branching scenario game that I built with some colleagues (Wendy Taleo, Stephanie Luo and Kate Mitchell) in 2019 about choosing and implementing ed technologies. Bear in mind that it is a work in progress but enough is done to play through the process in around 20 mins. bit.ly/EdTechGame
I have a reason for not having posted for a little while, for a change. I’ve been swimming in the data from my first survey, learning about statistics and stats tools and generally working to get my head around what the survey tells me about the edvisor landscape, how our work is perceived and valued and what activities/knowledge might be connected more to one of the three roles than others.
I’m in the process of putting together a document capturing the many facets of this data – some points stand out more than others – and it is currently around 192 pages. This includes a LOT of bar charts and I’m still pulling everything together to be able to go through and try my hand at analysing things down to a few pithy pages for the thesis.
Meanwhile, I had a slot in the most recent TELedvisors webinar, among some people that I’d like to consider peers also conducting research in this space – Evonne Irwin (Uni of Newcastle), Natalia Veles (James Cook University) and Karin Barac (Griffith Uni). (To be honest though, their presentations all meshed together theory and practice so cleverly that peer feels slightly aspirational)
I think that because I have spent so much time in recent months with this data, and so little time discussing it with anyone, I got a bit caught up and turned my 10 mins into something of a data dump. The information was there but not so much the discussion about why it mattered. Something to consider more next time.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s what I had to say.
I carried on a bit about how great Uibelhoer’s thesis was recently in covering some much neglected ground and offering some new ways to think about the research I’m doing in my own one. This thesis is one that I’ve had on the pile for a while but I did note that it was also well referenced in Uibelhoer’s. I’ve just finished pulling together some 7000+ words of notes and quotes and ideas from it, so this will not be a post at the same scale but I’ll mention some key reasons why this one is also great.
I’m not sure why I avoided the American literature for so long – I guess because my focus was on the work of edvisors in the Australian HE context. But really, there are so many common issues between the two sectors and I’ve found so much stuff (some written well after I started looking, to be fair) that speaks to things that I had thought to be major gaps in the literature that I am lightly kicking myself.
In a nutshell, Drysdale explores the question of what kind of organisational structures in HE institutions enable edvisors to have the most impact in the work they do supporting (in this case) online learning. I think that it is because many of the researchers that I’ve been reading lately are also Instructional Designer/Edvisor practitioners (rather than interested academics) that I’ve been finding a deeper understanding of some of the nuance in these situations. In particular, ask any edvisor and they will tell you that there are centralised teams and there are faculty based (using the Australian meaning relating to colleges/discipline areas, not faculty=teachers) teams and frequently never the twain shall meet. On top of this, some edvisors as classed as academics and report to academics and others are professional staff with other reporting lines. (To my knowledge, for the most part in Australia, few edvisor units report to IT or other administrative units but this is something that I do need to pursue)
Drysdale does three case studies of ID/edvisor teams supporting and/or leading online learning initiatives in 3 different unis with different structures:
“a centralized dedicated instructional design team with academic reporting lines and distributed curricular authority,
a centralized dedicated instructional design team with administrative reporting lines and distributed curricular authority,
a decentralized or blended-structure instructional design team, with either academic or administrative reporting lines, and distributed curricular authority.”
Drysdale, 2020 P.54
Spoiler alert, he found that overall, IDs/edvisors working in a centralised structure, with academic reporting lines (I assume they also held academic roles) were the most effective and encountered the fewest barriers in leading online learning initiatives.
Obviously this is a relatively small study, interviewing an ID, an academic and a leader in each of the institutions and there could well be more at play (institutional culture for instance) but Drysdale does a decent job in allowing for this as much as possible in the work.
For now, I might just highlight some of the most valuable ideas that I found in the thesis. Lots of great new literature resources for one – again, I don’t know why I didn’t look beyond Australia for the most part in my earlier scans. That said, it’s interesting that in all the US theses that I’ve read recently, nobody seems to be aware of Whitchurch’s work on Third Space workers in Higher Ed. So maybe we can all be a little insular at times.
I have a few new theoretical frameworks to explore – Systems theory (Patton, 2015) which explores how organisational systems work. There are also a few takes on leadership – Transformational Leadership, Authentic Leadership and Shared Leadership. The idea that leadership practices are influenced by organisational structures makes a lot of sense but is something I haven’t considered in depth until now. (Sometimes I do really wonder how much my thesis is actually about education at all compared to sociology and organisations and power)
There’s a lot to think about as well in terms of where control of curriculum and course content sits and what impact this has on institution level learning and teaching initiatives. Building on that, something that I don’t think anyone has really explored but which I do hear regularly as an argument for faculty/decentralised edvisor units is how disciplinary needs and focuses do necessitate discipline specific learning designer (etc) approaches. I can appreciate that there are truths to this but unpacking that from the need to feel special is a job of work. (One that absolutely needs to be done though)
Role clarity – more accurately the lack of it – absolutely came up. Holding academic positions with parity to “standard” academics in these cases did certainly seem to minimise that though. I have many conflicting positions about academic vs professional roles. I’ve always held a professional role and believe that the skills and knowledge of the edvisor should be recognised regardless, but at the same time, I understand that people in organisations can live in any number of tribes that are important to them.
A few other things came to mind that I haven’t yet seen covered but which are absolutely emerging in the sector – where do edvisors/IDs from external (often corporate) providers sit in this picture?
Questions about what it actually is that IDs do are perennial and there is some nice work in here exploring what the literature has to say and some of the practitioners. This is absolutely something that I am also focussing on. An interesting stat to emerge was that most IDs spend <50% of their time actually doing instructional design. Much of the rest of administration, training and tech support. (I’ll leave the bigger question of whether those things are also design in essence to another time). The kinds of training that IDs/edvisors provide is touched on, referring to work by Meyer and Murrell (2014) showing that it is a mix of tech and pedagogy training, with the tech side valued less but perhaps done more.
It’s been fantastic looking at the recent work being done in this space – I can still see that mine is adjacent but aligned, so I’m not concerned about not bringing something new to the party. Many of the issues that we as edvisors face do appear to be fairly global and it’s great to be a part of the conversation surrounding it.
I really struggled with this thesis at first because it is written in a very conversational, narrative style. I realised that this was a significant part of the point of the research – the first research question is actually:
How does the format of this dissertation address the accessibility of knowledge created for instructional design and curriculum development practitioners?
Wilder, 2020
So it is clearly a very deliberate and mindful approach that is being taken, with the aim of questioning the dissertation/thesis model and its accessibility to “average” readers. There is some worthwhile discussion of this throughout the thesis and also in a related conference paper in the appendix. Wilder uses a Narrative based approach drawing on Invitational Rhetoric (Fass & Griffin, 1995) and Invitational Learning Theory (Purkey & Novak, 2015). Questions about scholarly writing conventions are valid and I think there is much to think about overall, so I may well come back to this at a later time. My first impression, perhaps as someone that has learnt to parse academic writing, is that it was hard to take the work as seriously as it deserves.
So I’ll focus on the things that I was able to take away of particular relevance to my own work. The perspective of an Instructional Designer is always welcome to me and particularly descriptions of how they are working in their contexts.
“The designer and their expertise is always secondary to faculty design choices, even when those choices are at odds with best practices”
Wilder, 2020 P.39
“In fact, faculty must become certified to teach online at my university by Spring 2021”
Wilder, 2020 P.39
“On a less cynical note, my department has made significant inroads by establishing relationships with our faculty. We have made conscious efforts to professionalize our online learning department by providing professional development, presenting at regional and national conferences with faculty, and doing research in online learning directly with faculty. I believe our approach has yielded positive results. As the number of online courses has increased over time, faculty have become more informed and experienced in online learning, fundamental design principles, and best practices. The requests for consultation have more frequently become focused on refinements and more advanced topics in learning design, learning activities and assignments, as well as assessment.”
Wilder, 2020 P.39-40
Again, I see that edvisor involvement in research in the U.S. is not seen as the big deal it seems to be in Australia. Raising the profile and prestige of the ID unit also appears to have enhanced the sophistication of the collaborative work they do with academics. (Mandatory certification to be allowed to teach online probably doesn’t hurt though)
The nature of edvisor units has been a common theme in this space but for some reason I’ve never explicitly identified that the size of the unit greatly affects the nature of the work being done. Similarly, changes in organisational structures might mean that professional development work suddenly becomes the responsibility of another team.
“Since we are a smaller group compared to most major research universities, we wear more hats than most”
Wilder, 2020 P.41
One final section really stood out for me, not the least because it let me catch up with the work of someone in this space that I lost contact with a few years back.
A few years back, Carnegie Mellon University invited a researcher to investigate why the professoriate at the university failed to implement its own leading research on how students learn best (Herckis, 2018). Despite having access to the best research in the world, fellow academics at Carnegie Mellon consistently resisted employing that knowledge. The author found faculty were generally enthusiastic when implementing their own ideas but balked at adopting what others tried and tested. Faculty also had personal views of what constituted good teaching that were often the product of their own experience as a student. This example speaks directly how important it is for practitioners to produce knowledge that is contextual and is designed for the audience it is intended to reach. In this case, even academics well versed in the idea of searching literature for new knowledge are resistant to applying theoretical knowledge in their practice.
Wilder, 2020 P. 126-127
There’s much to consider about this on the epistemological side of things – most clearly why some forms of knowledge are valued and others aren’t. I have a whole theory about the hierarchy of knowledge in Higher Ed institutions – discipline > pedagogy > technology in a nutshell. We (edvisors) are often advised to present academics with evidence based research in support of the learning and teaching approaches that we advocate. Personally, I’ve found this to be wildly variable in effectiveness. In some cases it is embraced and in others I have seen people whip up and disseminate terrible and self-serving research of their own to avoid having to make small changes to their preferred practices. Definitely an area for more exploration at least.
Herckis, L. (2018). Passing the Baton: Digital Literacy and Sustained Implementation of eLearning Technologies. Current Issues in Emerging ELearning, 5(1 Special Issue on Leveraging Adaptive Courseware), 17.
Of all the theses that I’ve read recently, this one has been the most valuable – for several reasons. Chiefly, it fills a gap in several areas of the literature around edvisors relating to edvisor perceptions of how they are supported by their institutions (and the support they need), the impact of having faculty/college based and centrally based edvisor units, faculty autonomy/academic freedom, the pedagogical and design frameworks used by edvisors and the ways that organisational structures and reporting lines impact edvisor effectiveness.
Which is a lot.
I’ve had two opposing reactions to this – panic about how I will now find something new to say and appreciation that when I put my ideas out there, I can at least say “well Uibelhoer thinks so too”. (Honestly I’m not that worried and it has been fantastic to see how universal some of the challenges and possible solutions are)
A few other things that I’ve liked – just the clean readability of the thing. Uibelhoer doesn’t tie himself up in linguistic knots trying to sound clever, he simply tells the story in engaging, clear and direct language that moves the ideas forward and progressively builds a compelling case for them.
Personally there were a number of helpful new ideas and theories that I will be able to draw on and use to expand my thinking. I haven’t really given much consideration to faculty autonomy/academic freedom, there’s some nice stuff on collaboration and Collaboration Theory, and there’s also some valuable ideas on the impact of organisational structures, which draws on a thesis from Drysdale (2018) that I also have sitting in my to-read pile.
One other thing that I do need to flag is that there is a stellar overview in the lit review of the various pedagogical approaches in the last century and how they are applied in instructional design. From Behaviorism to Connectivism and beyond, this is something that I will highly recommend to anyone looking for a crash course in educational theory and its practical application.
There are a handful of areas where we have different perspectives – most significantly would be that where I see three distinct (though overlapping) edvisor type roles, the approach in the U.S. seems to be more of instructional designers as kind of a one stop shop for everything these people conventionally do. He does touch on specialisations though and the whole thing has got me wondering whether it is madness trying to foster understanding of 3 separate roles when we have problems doing it with just one.
I’ve glossed over the body of this thesis, which is a case study of development and delivery of pedagogical PD to academics in an institution. As a topic, I suspect this is stronger than my own because it starts from something that seems fairly straightforward but allows for wide exploration of many factors that shape this work and the people that do it. I’ve had an internal resistance to case studies for some reason (which I’ve been rethinking in recent months), possibly because it feels too small for the ideas that I’m trying to bring together. More thinking to do on this I’d say.
One final thought – I do think it would be great to have a global network of the edvisors (and academics) doing research on edvisors. This partially feels like one of those procrastinatory rabbit-hole ideas that I have in place of doing actual work but it’s at the very least something for the backburner.
Reading this thesis was valuable because it showed how stark the difference can be between them. Where Amparo took a very qualitative, narrative driven approach to the research going narrow but deep with 3 people and case studies, Allen goes shallow but broad with this quantitative research into the most valued project management competencies for instructional designers (IDs).
Allen takes a deep dive into a comparatively rich pool of literature relating to the project management skills that best serve IDs, generating a comprehensive literature review that sums up the last decade or so of research in this space very effectively. She builds on it by conducting her own two stage survey of 86 IDs in a range of sectors (Higher Ed, corporate, ID project team leaders) to gather some rich quant data.
Nothing overly surprising emerges in terms of the favoured competencies, with the data largely aligning with the studies that had come before (but at a larger scale) but it did spark a few thoughts for me about my own work. Some of the competencies across the literature I personally found a little nebulous – things like “attention to detail” which are certainly valuable professional attributes but, coming from a competency based education background, I was curious about how that might be meaningfully measured or taught. This brought me back to realising that I need to think carefully about what practices, attributes and competencies mean in the data I am gathering.
The painstaking detail in the writing about the work undertaken, from the lit review to the data collection and analysis offered a useful benchmark for my own future writing.
It was also useful to scan the references and find a few promising leads that I’ve previously missed. These include:
Kenny, J. (2004). A study of educational technology project management in Australian universities. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 20(3), 388–404.
Allen, M. (1996). A profile of instructional designers in Australia. Distance Education 17(1), 7–32.
I don’t think I had thought to search for IDs in the Australian literature.
When I started my PhD, a common piece of advice was to read some other people’s theses to better understand how they work and what might be expected. I glanced at a couple but couldn’t find any that seemed particularly relevant so I moved on to other things. I wish I’d searched a little harder because recently I’ve come across quite a few that have been immensely helpful. In the four that I’ve looked at, I’ve found new theoretical frameworks and ideas and some descriptions of methodology that have helped a few things click into place.
The first of these is from Adonis Amparo, of the University of Southern Florida. While it focuses on a group of people that I’m not covering in my own research (blended librarians), the challenges they face and the work they do aligns nicely with the edvisors that I’m looking at. To paraphrase, Blended Librarians are librarians whose work includes the role of instructional technologists. I take this to equate to educational technologists in the Australian context, based on the description in the dissertation.
Amparo, also a blended librarian, uses a mixture of autoethnography and ethnography in three case studies of himself and two others working in these roles. Additionally, he uses a Narrative Research approach, which makes use of something called “wonderments” instead of conventional research questions to create a little extra space to play.
“Wonderments allow for exploration in research, whereas research questions provide a more limited frame. In narrative research, narrativists design their questions around one or several “wonders” or “wonderments” rather than devise ‘A priori’ research questions (Clandinin, 2016). This allows for “a sense of a search, a ‘re-search’, a searching again,”…”a sense of continual reformulation” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p.124) “
Amparo, 2020
I’m not altogether sure what the difference is or how this works or even if it suits the direction that I’m currently taking but I do like the broad idea of it.
There were a few other ideas that grabbed my attention. Apparently there is this concept of “identity stretch” in Celia Whitchurch’s seminal 2008 work on the Third Space in Higher Ed that I have completely missed until now and Amparo has a nice line when he says
As with any new position, the role must be created from the institutional space provided
Amparo, 2020
Another potentially valuable find was the use of Role Theory. According to Amparo, “Researchers use Role Theory to explain social interactions built on behavioral expectations and social positions defined by these behaviors (Biddle, 1986)” This is a concept dating back to the 1950s in social psychology, meaning that there has been plenty of time for a backlash but Amparo seems to navigate the criticisms of Role Theory well enough to extract some useful insights. Given that my work leans heavily on status and perceptions in institutions that seem tied to roles, I have to wonder whether there is something in here of value to me as well. It may be that my own use of Social Practice theory might knit with some of these ideas. At the very least, it seems to have some potential. The terminology alone, which includes role strain and role ambiguity seems relevant.
The second lens employed by Amparo is Identity and Social Identity Theory, which again is something new to me but which seems to offer some promise in terms of considering how edvisors develop the confidence in their abilities to ‘edvise’ academics.
A final point of interest in this work (spoilers) is that the three Blended Librarians examined all seem to develop or arrive at their professional identities from three relatively different perspectives. One from the objects they create, another from the work relationships they develop and the last from the service they provide to students.
Definitely worth a read if you’re working or researching in this space.
Looking back, it appears that it’s been 6 months since my last confession – um, post.
A few things have happened since then, less tangible progress than I would’ve liked but at the same time I feel that I’ve unraveled a few knots that had been troubling me and I’ve set the stage to get things done in 2021. (Sure, why not tempt fate, what could possibly go wrong with that)
It’s basically impossible at this point to not talk about COVID-19, as much as I’m sick of the sound of that term. It’s had a handful of notable impacts on my research, in that one of my underlying assumptions that people don’t know much about edvisors and what we do has shifted as more academics than ever have been forced to engage with us in the rapid shift to online teaching and learning. This still doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the full or correct understanding of this but overall awareness at least has changed. At the same time, the shift has also had an impact on the way edvisors work with academics at scale, so my ideas about (collaborative) working relationships need to be reframed and reconsidered.
The loss of the international students that underpinned university finances has also had a significant impact on budgets and staffing levels. People in edvisor roles have perhaps been safer than some but I have still a number of friends and colleagues that have borne the brunt of cuts and restructures and there remains a nervous instability in many institutions. Speaking more selfishly, I think this will mean that institutions will likely be less willing to share information about edvisors numbers, roles and unit structures than they might previously have been.
On a more positive note, I was fortunate to add an additional supervisor to my team, Dr Jess Frawley, who also works in an edvisor role and has been invaluable in providing some new insights into this work. One big breakthrough discussion I have had with the whole supervision team has led to me rescoping this project from my initial “boil the ocean” idea of getting insights from edvisors, academics and institutional leaders to the somewhat more manageable and realistic focus just on edvisors. (I can save the latter two for post doc work maybe – but one step at a time).
I also learnt a lot about going through the ethics process last year – doing so another two times for minor changes to my methodology. I suspect that the less detail about the nuts and bolts that is included the better. In my case, I’d initially said that I’d put out a call for survey participants and they would need to contact me before I’d give them a link to the survey. On reflection, I felt sure that this would have significantly reduced engagement so I needed to submit a modification to fix this. Live and learn.
I’m now reading a bunch of highly relevant theses that all seemed to hit Google Scholar within a few days of each other and trying to fight off the urge to radically upend all my plans for something completely new. Stay tuned for a post or two about what I’ve taken from these soon.
I finally also got around to engaging more with my PhD peers in the lab at my school. COVID-19 has probably been a blessing in that regard as it has meant that there has been much more web based activity to support this group that I’ve been able to participate in. This can be a very lonely endeavour and I really do value the conversations I have both with my TELedvisors friends and study peers.
The latest issue of AJET (Australasian Journal of Educational Technology) opens with an editorial from two people whose work in the space of TEL I’ve found of interest over the years – Kate Thompson (QUT) and Jason Lodge (UQ).
My entry to this editorial was via a local Higher Ed daily newsletter, the Campus Morning Mail. The title of the entry for it was “For on-line to work, ask the ed-tech experts“. Leaving aside the strange hyphenation of online, this headline led me down the page to see exactly who these ‘ed-tech experts’ are. Apparently the only experts are ed tech researchers. (There is a passing reference to education technologists in the abstract but just one).
I tweeted a few first glance responses – looking back I think they were relatively innocuous:
I agree with a significant amount of what is in here but I think there are some key elements relating to meaningful practical implementation that ed tech focused researchers consistently overlook. I feel a blog post coming on https://t.co/Hgma1ImJXz
I would love to see much greater awareness of the big picture when it comes to this kind of research. It seems that so much occurs in essentially abstract lab conditions. Learning designers, ed techs etc should be a much more significant part of the conversation and at the table
This was enough to spark some wide-ranging discussions. I think the main issue ultimately was my suggestion that researchers often don’t take a wide or holistic enough view of ed tech and the ed tech ecosystem in institutions (as far as practical implementation goes) and that much of this research is relatively abstract and lab based. Maybe this is slightly unfair but, as someone whose job it is to stay current on ed tech and TEL, I stand by this overall but recognise that it may lack the nuance that was intended.
So let me explain what my concerns are and what I mean.
I believe that discussions and decisions around technologies with a pedagogical focus need to address practical questions of how it can actually get done in a contemporary institution in a way that has significance and meaningful impact.
This is often (not always but frequently) where the thought about the intervention ends. We end up with conclusions along the lines of ‘within the confines of the theoretical framework and recognising that further research is necessary, it appears that ePortfolios benefit learning because of x, y and z. More institutions should implement ePortfolios in context a, b and c’. This, to me, is abstract because while it is important to have this understanding, it almost never offers a path towards this imagined implementation. There’s a big gap between “should” and will.
The process of making meaningful change happen at scale in a Higher Education institution can be an arduous one, shaped by many valid and real factors, that seem to be waved away as the domain of uninformed “decision-makers”, “policymakers”, “economists”, “self-promoters” and “aspiring international keynoters”. The lack of regard in this editorial for anyone who is not an educational researcher clangs loudly against the repeated question about why education researchers don’t play a larger part of the decision making process.
As an education technologist, I recognise myself as one of these ‘others’. My colleagues in learning (etc) design and academic development areas I would suggest are the same. We possess significant expertise that comes from the varied pathways we took into this field, as well as from the practical work we do day in and day out relating to supporting teaching and learning in practice across many educators, disciplines and situations. We are frequently the bridge between many parts of the organisation – teaching and non-teaching – which gives us rare insights into the bigger picture. As professional staff however, we tend to be excluded from undertaking research and contributing to the literature.
What I’d love to see are three things:
Meaningful, respectful conversations between education researchers and edvisors to foster understanding of each other does and contributes
Genuine research collaborations between education researchers and edvisors
Greater use of relevant, evidence based research in institutional operations.
I bump into the frustrations of people in institutions about the pace of change or progress on implementations on a daily basis. I know how easy it can be to attribute these to personal motives rather than deal with the reality of complex systems – I’ve done it myself in the past, to my embarrassment now. The best way forward in my view is with more mutual understanding and respect.
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