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Educational developers contribution to the COVID response#

Summary and rough working for ASCILITE paper

Sources to follow#

  • Emergency covid response - Pevneva & Edmunds, 2020

  • Nature of educational design - Brown et al 2020

  • Watermeyer et al (2020) need to take pulse of people beyond academics

  • Bisset, (2018) navigating between the technical and pedagogical Bisset, D. (2018). Role of Educational Designers in Higher Education Institutions. In C. Bossu, & N. Brown (Eds.), Professional and Support Staff in Higher Education. (pp. 71–89). Springer Nature Singapore Pty Ltd.

Watermeyer, R., Crick, T., Knight, C., & Goodall, J. (2020). COVID-19 and digital disruption in UK universities: Afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration. Higher Education, 1–19.

  • Teaching staff struggling to move online - Houlden & Veletsianos 2019 Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2019). A posthumanist critique of flexible online learning and its “anytime anyplace” claims. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(3), 1005–1018.

  • Key challenges of moving online is lack of knowledge of pedagogical principles: Ching, Hsu & Baldwin, 2018; Rapanta et al, 2020) Ching, Y.-H., Hsu, Y.-C., & Baldwin, S. (2018). Becoming an online teacher: an analysis of prospective online instructors’ reflections. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 29(2), 145–168.

Conole, G. & Wills, S. (2013, Representing learning designs – making design explicit and shareable. Educational Media International, 50(1), 24–38.

Fawns, T., Jones, D., & Aitken, G. (2020). Challenging assumptions about “moving online” in response to COVID-19, and some practical advice. MedEdPublish, 1.

Johnson, N., Veletsianos, G., & Seaman, J. (2020). U.S. faculty and administrators’ experiences and approaches in the early weeks of COVID-19 pandemic. Online Learning, 24(2), 6-21.

Kirk, A. (2020). COVID-19 unfolding in higher education. Journal of Paramedic Practice, 12(6), 219-219

Random ideas#

  • COVID and broad economic, societal and personal impacts...but also L&T
  • Universities had to adjust rapidly to COVID moving the bulk online
  • Universities had to rationalise their offerings, employment etc
  • teaching staff are struggling to move online

Educational design - educational design numbers were growing pre-COVID - educational designers 'navigate between "the technical and pedagogical" (Bisset, 2018, p 71) - educational designers dealing with ill-defined, ambiguous and subject to change (Bisset, 2018) - 2020 Horizon Report (Brown et al, 2020) identify field of educational design as one of the most influential trends shaping higher education - Conole and Wills (2013) "designing for learnign is arguably the key challenge facing education today" (p. 24) - But little is known about how they responded e.g. Bellaby's survey doing a similar job to research on academics. They talk about assessing th eimpact on ed designers. We're looking to move beyond that - But perhaps talk about limitations of this type of survey - COVID "may be offering new opportunities for educational designers" (Bellaby et al, 2020, p. 153)

Bellaby's Findings - ed designers moving from working with small number of units/initiatives and trying to scale up entire faculties - also an increase in working pace and intensity of demand Pointing to the challenge of how to scale AND that existing approaches perhaps aren't intended to help with that change - a lot of the work was on developing instructional resources and guides on how to do something Perhaps pointing to issues with the quality of the assemblages

Bellaby, Sankey and Albert#

With the advent of COVID-19, the majority of universities in Australasia have had to adjust quickly to provide the bulk of their learning and teaching activities online. To a great extent this involved learning/educational designers (and titles similar to this) needing to provide a range of tasks (some new) associated with supporting many teaching staff unfamiliar with teaching online. (Bellaby et al, p. 145)

Question What is it that teaching staff were unfamiliar with and what support was provided? Was it a question of being unfamiliar with the phenomena of teaching in a different media AND the tools available to teach in it. Requiring a shift in practice, but which neither time nor the assemblage of existing technologies was able to support well or quickly enough. The focus here is on the individuals, not the web of technologies in which they were operating which were challenged to this rapid need for radical change

Considering that one of the key challenges for teaching staff, in many cases, is their lack of knowledge of the pedagogical principles needed to design and facilitate online learning (Ching, Hsu, & Baldwin, 2018; Rapanta et al., 2020), (Bellaby et al, p. 145)

Question But what are those principles? Does having those principles actually make it easier to orchestrate/design online learning? Or is it determinism. It's more complex. Yes, the principles need to be included, but do you achieve that by training people

These positions and their corresponding occupational titles vary across institutions but are typically associated with integrating pedagogical theories with emerging technologies through course design (Bissett, 2018) and are now consistently recognised as being “crucial in supporting academics” (Seeto & Herrington, 2006, p. 741). Professionals in educational design are situated in a transdisciplinary field and constantly navigate between “the technical and pedagogical” (Bisset, 2018, p. 71) in collaborative and ambiguous contexts. (Bellaby et al, p. 146)

References#

Bellaby, A., Sankey, M., & Albert, L. (2020). Rising to the occasion: Exploring the changing emphasis on educational design during COVID-19. ASCILITE’s First Virtual Conference. Proceedings ASCILITE 2020 in Armidale, 145–155. https://doi.org/10.14742/ascilite2020.0137