Near Future Teaching Workshop #1: Divergent Thinking

On April 30th at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI),  the first of two workshops was conducted for the Near Future Teaching project.

This first workshop was largely driven by the data and the subsequent outputs from the first phase of the project: vox pop interviews with a large range of faculty, staff, and students; events and focus groups; and the thematic videos emerging as a result. The workshop was attended by the Task Group of the project as well as students from across the university. Our task was to discuss, appraise, and collaboratively build speculative future worlds that higher education will inhabit over the coming decades.

The workshop was designed and executed by Santini and Zoe of Andthen, a consultancy which marries Design Research and Futures Thinking to help companies with early-stage innovation. They will be drafting a post soon on the design methodology behind this series of workshops and we will provide subsequent posts once we have had a chance to review the data generated as a result.

Briefly though, this first workshop was largely about exploring divergent thinking. We started with discussions around values which emerged from the Near Future Teaching vox pops, events, and materials generated by the student occupations.

We then each assigned (four groups in all) future worlds we had crafted based largely in the research, four future worlds that moved on one axis between open and closed systems, and human-led and technology-led on another. These four future worlds were outputs distilling a large amount of HE futures research, implicitly a challenge to the misconception that “there is an inevitable future to which we must simply adapt or resist” (Facer & Sandford, 2010).

Each group explored one world and the themes emerging from the video that might serve to underpin it: creative learning approaches, data, lectures, AI and automation, community, humans, and more. We worked through the future worlds and these themes, identified when they aligned and when they diverged.

The second part of the activity was about developing stories that might occupy the homepage of the University of Edinburgh, complete with images, quotes, and headlines. These were at times funny, poignant, largely astute, and ultimately revealing of the values this group would want embedded in such a future world (values that will take some effort to extract!). We presented these news stories to the room and closed for the day. The next workshop scheduled for late May will revolve around how these divergent ideas converge into a possible future for the University of Edinburgh.


Near Future Teaching Focus Group: Medical Students

On one snowy day in April, when we finally were in a room together with 4 University of Edinburgh Medical Students, I felt that we had rounded up unicorns from a magical forest!

That was how hard it was to track down these incredibly busy, mystical creatures. However, we finally managed to do it with the help of Tim Fawns from the NFT Task Group and Lydia Crow, MBChB Manager, to whom we are very grateful.

The session was led by NFT Research Associate Michael Gallagher and in attendance were four female medical students (one 4th year, one 2nd year and two 5th years) and the aforementioned Tim Fawns. It was a rich and intriguing conversation.

Michael began by asking the students about what technology they use in their studies. There was talk of how things were changing in the landscape of national exams and that students took part in PAL – Peer Assisted Learning. Someone mentioned the old adage, ‘see one, do, one, teach one’ and Tim said his opinion leaned more in the direction of, ‘see a million, do a million, teach one.’

CAL – computer assisted learning via videos and LEARN, the University’s online learning environment, were both cited. Apparently no one uses the LEARN discussion boards as there is no search bar, however it was mentioned that a student has invented a chrome extension that you can add to LEARN to make it searchable. Facebook is an active platform, and each year has their own group to which they are added to even before they start their degree. It is used as a notice board, for promoting events, for advice regarding revision and so on. People make friends on Facebook and these groups and networks carry on into professional networks beyond the University degree. It seemed to be useful to have separate channels – the formal LEARN and the social Facebook.

There was some conversation about digital technology and health data. An online medical informatics course had been offered but there was confusion from the start about it as students got the message they were required to take it (so everyone joined) and then that they were not (so most dropped out as they are so busy). It was hard for the students to understand the relevance of learning how to work with this type of information as they were under the impression that someone else would do this for them in future. The course seemed to focus on metadata not relevant to medicine; for instance, the examples given on the course were about finding composers of songs in music data.

One of the students mentioned a non-mandatory Health Ethics course whose relevance did not become clear until later in the programme and the feeling seemed to be that the medical informatics, if designed to be more focussed on the needs of medical students, could be valuable if integrated appropriately into their programme rather than being an optional add on. One of the 5th year students mentioned a project she had been involved in where it would have been helpful for her to know how to code.

The students did admit that data literacy is a skill they are expected to have and that they hoped to see virtual reality being brought into the medical programme, and exploration of gamification so that this work could be social, competitive and engaged. Observing surgery in person can be so crowded that it is difficult to see properly, and you do not get to feel the actual procedures. Being able to explore this online, in detail – especially with haptic VR – could help with this problem.

Michael’s final question had to do with the students’ values around technology. They hoped that everyone would become more open-minded to technology as it leaves no stone in its path unturned. They wished that medical informatics could be integrated in such a way that students could see its value for them in future. One mentioned hackathons and said that this coming together of people from different backgrounds and professions can help students to understand how working with data and designers to build prototypes can be a brilliant way to learn – ‘it would be cool to incorporate this into the curriculum’, one of the students noted. PBL – problem based learning – is seen to be boring, just a reiteration of what is in a text book, whereas a hackathon would be more fun and also feel like real-world experience.

Finally, gamification was mentioned again and the idea of incorporating bots to do some of the work of doctors like taking history from patients, but the students still think that human contact between patients and doctors is vital.

With that, we sent the medical unicorns a.k.a. students back off into the snow with much thanks for their wisdom and the enthusiasm with which they shared their thoughts on these NFT topics.

Jennifer Williams


The student occupation: near future teaching at the real Edinburgh Futures Institute

Students and staff constitute and give meaning to universities—and it is students and staff who should directly and co-operatively control their learning, their teaching, their research, and their contributions to the common good.

At the time of writing, students and staff at the University of Edinburgh are 14 days into an occupation of one of the lecture theatres in the university’s Central area.

Reclaiming the name of the university’s high profile project to refurbish the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, the occupation has re-named the Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre in George Square ‘The Real Edinburgh Futures Institute’. Catalysed by the recent industrial action, the work of the occupation is impressive in lots of ways, but particularly in the thinking it is doing around the future of the university and its teaching.

Those students and staff involved in the occupation have written a declaration which the Near Future Teaching project would like to draw on as it moves forward – in particular the way in which the students have claimed a space to build a vision of education which is ‘free, democratic, and open to all’. Particular directly teaching-related parts of the declaration that can shape the work of the project are these:

  • We resist uncritical education that puts certificates over learning and exploration.
  • We resist assessment systems that force us to compete instead of co-operate.
  • We resist assessment systems that tell us how to teach, learn, and research, and ignore extracurricular learning.
  • We resist hierarchies that defer to credentials before and above the learned experience of teachers, students, and non-academics on the ground.
  • We resist being treated as consumers, and seeing our education treated as a commodity.

Other parts of the declaration cover the structural, governance and finance issues which drive the university, and it ends with this call:

Let us reimagine our curricula together. Let us unite to create the accessible, creative, and democratic universities that we can only achieve together.

The occupation’s web site is here, with some great blog posts, and contact details for those who want to follow up, drop by, or support their work.

Finally, the occupation has also started an open googledoc to which anyone can contribute. The section on Education and Assessment is excellent, and at the time of writing contains the following points:

  • Students involved in designing and updating courses and degree programmes
  • Student participation on defining, diversifying and decolonising syllabi – working with Liberation groups and projects such as Project Myopia
  • Empowering tutors and groups of students to make decisions about accommodations within their courses (eg extensions, alternative assessment)
  • Personalisation of the setting + submission of coursework to fit individual needs
  • Possibility to submit drafts etc
  • Relaxing anonymity rules to do so
  • Attendance and contribution in tutorials removed as a part of course assessment
  • Joint degrees
  • They should focus on overlaps/true joint aspects rather than being two separate single degrees with little communication between them
  • Staff contacts particularly for joint degree courses
  • Community-building (e.g. classes, socials?) for specific joint degree programmes
  • More flexibility within degree structure and information about changing degrees
  • Fewer (no?) requirements for taking courses within certain “subject areas” – too-specific DPRS requirements
  • Creation of an open/flexible degree
  • Smaller tutorial sizes
  • Pedagogical training for lecturers and tutors
  • Minimum hours/rigor TBD – not just a one-day workshop!
  • Diversify education >> not relying solely on massive lecture halls
  • Recording and publishing all lectures
  • Postgraduates should not be required to teach completely outside of their discipline
  • Valuing excellent teaching staff who are not researchers
  • Sanctuary Campus – the university must not be complicit in Home Office regulations (eg re: visas and contact hours) or policies such as Prevent
  • Openly reject such policies
  • Publishing “Contact Points,” or engaging in discussion with students on Tier 4 visas rather than having immigration officers being completely separate from all academic staff and not knowing any of the students
  • Recording and publishing all lectures (asap)
  • Timetables
  • Exam timetables released further in advance
  • Course timetables released further in advance (minimum 1 year?)
  • Exams to be sat in the space (and time?) you take the class
  • Increased transparency on moderation and feedback
  • Focus on quality rather than speed of feedback


Internet of (Campus) Things: summary of a recent Festival of Creative Learning event

As part of the Festival of Creative Learning  and feeding into the Near Future Teaching projectat the University of Edinburgh, Dr Jeremy Knox of the Centre for Research in Digital Educationand I conducted a Near Future Teaching session called Internet of (Campus) Things at the uCreate Studio.

We had done a similar session for staff in November, but this one was squarely focused on students. We had groups of students physically in the room and a few participating remotely via Collaborate (not without some hiccups there, but getting distance students involved in on-campus events is something to which we are committed).

The purpose was to stimulate thinking around how IoT technology can be used to proactively build community or improve teaching or research practices using configurations of data being generated by the university itself. The richness and intensity of campus life is often taken for granted. Yet physical co-location, visible in the bustle between lectures or the queues for coffee, create a peripheral awareness of the university community, and a crucially important ‘sense’ of the diverse yet shared pursuit of learning that ties the university together. This workshop sought to develop ways of including ‘distance’ students – whether studying ‘at’ Edinburgh from another country, or simply based in another part of the campus – in this shared, yet diverse, University of Edinburgh community.

The workshop itself started with a presentation establishing first the domain of IoT: using sensors to collect data, and using that data drive some kind of technology, and to develop some kind of activity. We discussed how we are a distributed university already: 30,000 on campus students scattered in various campuses around the city, 2600 distance students scattered globally, 2.2 million participating in MOOCs and in some way a part of this larger community. But this wasn’t so much about scale as developing some sort of intimacy between students and their academic communities, to give a ‘feel’ to the distance experience.

Jeremy then discussed his Pulse project, which served as the inspiration for both these IoT events (and another we are doing next week with teachers for a digital centre of excellence school in the region). The Pulse project was designed to “develop wearable technologies that will enhance our awareness of student communities in an era of increasing online provision, where students ‘attend’ the university but not necessarily the campus itself.”

This project therefore seeks to develop new and innovative ways of creating an ‘ambient awareness’ of the broader global space of the university community, connecting distant online students and those located at the campus, and in these ways explore global citizenship in the student population. This was the backdrop for the workshop.

From there, we discussed some bespoke IoT projects that have provided some inspiration for how we explore this with IoT. The first, Light Reminders, explores social interaction and home lighting: each light representing a person in the designer’s life, and each light’s power level is determined by how long it’s been since the designer has seen that person. The more they see their friends, the brighter the home. Another, AirPlay: Smog Music translates air quality data over a three year period in Beijing into music based on how it approaches and often exceeds hazardous levels. Listen to Wikipedia is just that: an attempt to transform edits or additions to Wikipedia to musical form. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots.

There are many more to choose from but we were looking to explore projects that had with them a sense of presence, of place, and of some emotional or aesthetic connection.

As for data, Jeremy explained that there are rivers of data flowing through the university already: environmental data (air and sound quality, etc.), university events (graduations, matriculations, seminars, and more), online activity (logins, discussion board posts), bodies (footfalls on campus, ID entries into the library), and more. To frame the discussion a bit, we then presented personas, or students we were designing for, some distance and some in Edinburgh, all with different takes on the university experience. Personas move the discussion away from the abstraction a bit.

Jeremy and I explained that the personas could be about teaching, research, or community based improvements: distance to distance, distance to campus, campus to distance, all of the above. Groups discussed the personas, discussed data points to use and configurations to explore.

Groups discussed, designed and then presented their IoT configurations. Everyone then participated in an anonymous vote for the winning group and prizes were awarded (an IoT starter kit). The ideas generated were remarkable.

One group had a discussion around a human Uber, or a surrogate for meetings, events; as well as collaborative video watching. Another had devised a globe distributed to all students on induction which lights in particular areas when particular activity is performed. Another suggested a mood lamp of activity from the students worldwide, a soft presence. Another group discussed an app showing activity on different campuses. Another had an interface showing locations (anonymously) of all students in one color, a color which shifts if the student indicates their willingness to chat. Ambient awareness of the larger community abounded in all these works.

All of these configurations were about strengthening connections and community and doing so in an emotive way, providing an aesthetic vision of presence which is often hard to see in which for an increasingly distributed university is critical to ensure that all are involved are the community.


Near Future Teaching Think Tank: Vets

On 18 January 2018, we were delighted to welcome 17 students at various stages in their training to the Institute for Academic Development.

The students were primarily from the University of Edinburgh Veterinary Programme at The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. They came along to attend a Near Future Teaching Thank Tank event.

The format for the event was three short talks or ‘provocations’ detailing possible developments in the future university, which would be followed by a group challenge being set. The group would then be split into teams which would respond to the challenge.

The first talk was by Dr Catriona Bell, and was called ‘No More Lectures – more time to think’. Catriona noted that lectures are traditionally ‘didactic and linear’ and that it could be difficult for students to remain engaged throughout. By the time the typical 50 minute lecture is combined with making notes and revising, the total time cost is usually 3-3.5 hours, and she asked whether this was the most efficient use of student time.

Her provocation was that in future we eliminate lectures completely, increasing flexibility and using other approaches such as the flipped classroom to enhance and develop a more personalised learning experience.

Next up was ‘Competition, analytics and student league tables’, by Dr Jeremy Knox. Jeremy spoke about the ‘datafication’ of society and asked – if we have all this big educational data, what can be done with it, or more importantly, what SHOULD we do with it. He promted us to consider ‘openness’, ‘prediction’ and ‘attention’ and described some of the benefits of data sharing in these areas, however he also pointed out that there may be a tendency for data to be used to control and reduce. His provocative questions touched on the following:

  • Openness: Is your data really you? Who owns student data? Who should see it?
  • Prediction: Is a future without failure a good future? What is the educational value of mistakes?
  • Attention: Should students in classes be scanned for attentiveness? What if students were punished for not paying attention?

Finally we had Erin Williams on: ‘Getting rid of the bodies – cadaver-free anatomy teaching’. Erin asked if we can use technologies such as 3-D printing and virtual reality to replace the need to cut up cadavers in the lab when learning veterinary skills. She talked about how these technologies have been used in the commercial world, such as in gaming, with great success and asked if this could be a way forward to a more animal-friendly, economical, healthy and flexible way of teaching in future.

Professor Susan Rhind then set our challenge for the workshop which was: ‘What is your fantasy veterinary curriculum and how will assessment work in your fantasy future vet school?’ The students split into 3 groups and had 30 minutes to debate and consider. They came up with rich and sometimes surprising ideas and responses to the provocations.

Group 1

In response to the first provocation to end lectures, Group 1 suggested a move towards structured small group teaching sessions but did say there was some value in live tutor contact via lectures. One student said she had skipped a number of lectures and still passed her exams, so in her mind that meant that lectures were not of particular value. They argued that the time spent overall on lectures was inefficient, but also made the point that they will be entering busy 9-5 jobs and that the preparation and rigour involved in attending lectures could be good training for full time employment.

They had a strong response to the second provocation regarding data and analytics and argued that they had been tested and pitted against their peers all their lives to get into the University of Edinburgh and that they felt they had ‘been through enough competition already!’ They felt there had been negative emotional consequences for many from the intense competition in schooling and said that now they are here, they should be taught without having to prove their worth all the time. They felt that assessment technology should be used by lecturers to find out what THEY are doing well or not well, rather than targeted at struggling students. They argued that academic knowledge is not the be all and end all of being a good vet and that academic performance does not necessarily reflect the ability to be a good clinician. The ‘at risk’ model of identifying struggling students could be useful to help these students, but should be kept private and used to provide support rather than being public and exposing which they felt would be degrading.

Finally, on the topic of cadavers, the students said that the technology on offer at the moment was not good enough to replace operating on cadavers, and the 3-D/VR technology on offer now is not good enough to support learning properly. They felt the public would not trust a vet who had not operated on a cadaver and that they already did not have enough contact with live animals during their study, let alone dead animals. One devil’s advocate in the room did mention that pilots are often trained in simulators and then fly with real people! They said that while some technologies could help with resources, they would not be a total replacement. 3-D printed skulls would mean that more students could spend more time examining the skull, but it might be more difficult to reflect the natural and important variation of nature. They asked how we would stimulate that spontaneous natural variation.

On the subject of lectures, the students argued that they would like to spend more time learning in hospitals and that effort and tenacity should get more weight than numerical assessment. In their ideal future university, people would graduate with ungraded degrees, teaching hours would be cut and there would be more time spent in teaching hospitals and supervisors would assess technique.

Group 2

Group 2 said that there was a difference between learning the fundamentals of anatomy versus surgical anatomy and that it is very different operating on live animals. They felt that there could be less or no use of cadavers when learning the fundamentals in pre-clinical work – skeletons and muscles could be learned on plastic cadavers and 3-D models, however they still would require cadavers  for the clinical training. This group felt strongly that they did not want data tracking and agreed with Group 1 that they had already faced their fair share of comparison and competition. They stressed that praise is important and does not need to be data/numbers-based (for instance, it could be a response to good client communication). They said that the Vet School does not say ‘Well Done!’ enough and that this type of praise can mean so much more than a distinction.

They argued for more smaller, ‘bite-size’ exams and felt that data could be used to flag up failing students and get help for them, but not to punish them. This group had already experienced flipped classrooms and stated that they are a huge improvement over lectures. Overall though they did acknowledge that it is impossible to cater for everyone and that the Vet School does a great job at balancing priorities.

Group 3

This group had some mixed opinions. As regards data, some felt this could be used usefully to improve the performance of lecturers, and that in the business world data will inevitably be used to track performance and help meet targets, thus it is important to get accustomed to working with it and in response to it. Others argued that we are already self-critical and compare too much and that data can be dangerous, that it is a way of a seeing a reduced version of a person on paper rather than conveying other vital skills such as good interpersonal skills. It could be a way to weed out people who might deserve a job but do not look like that on paper. One student mentioned that in some countries interview scores are released to the public by companies and that this can improve overall performance rates, but asked if we are prioritising outcome behaviour or welfare. She said that if you look at China, they are able to make technological advances because they can control performance via data, however if we make data public and get rid of anonymity, are we in danger of changing the way we look at failure and destroying our ability to make mistakes and learn from them?

On the subject of lectures, there were some mixed views as well. Some felt that lectures should be replaced with group sessions whereas some thought lectures should never be completely eliminated because some things can only be learned in a lecture format. That student said that contact with a lecturer is good and that you can ask questions of them in person. She had also learned a lot from working through cases at home and presenting them in small groups. They agreed with Group 2 that more little assessments along the way would be of use and make one value what one is learning more, and that after each lecturer’s series of lectures, the students should be able to give immediate anonymous feedback.

They agreed that cadavers were still needed but said that post-mortems could be used more within early years teaching to incorporate histology. One student said that she always remembers what ISN’T normal – those instances have more impact. Also with post-mortems, specimens are fresher and not full of chemicals. They did feel that a virtual system would be very useful before surgery in order to revise.

So overall it was a dynamic, fascinating and extremely provocative session. The teachers came away from the event inspired to rethink how they are teaching NOW, and the students could not stop chatting as they walked out into the night… into the future!

Jennifer Williams
Projects & Engagement Coordinator
Institute for Academic Development


Internet of (Teaching) Things

Dr Jeremy Knox of the Centre for Research in Digital Education and I conducted a Near Future Teaching session called Internet of (Teaching) Things. The purpose was to stimulate thinking around how IoT technology can be used to proactively build community or improve teaching or research practices using configurations of data being generated by the university itself.

Most IoT technology that we might know is of the commercial and domestic variety: fridges that can automatically order fresh milk when you run out, or toothbrushes that can count how many times children brush their teeth). We wanted to look beyond those a bit and explore how these types of data and technology configurations can be used to attend to university work. This connected world of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) has potential to shape future teaching in creative ways by drawing on the potential for increased communication, not just between people but between the objects and spaces that surround our educational activities.

The event was held in Kings Buildings and attendees were staff ranging from Geosciences, Social and Political Science, Global Health, and more. Some had teaching duties, some were instructional designers, and some researchers. The workshop itself started with a presentation establishing first the domain of IoT: how it is about a sensor collecting data and using the data to port into some technology to do some activity. We discussed how we are a distributed university already: 30,000 on campus students scattered in various campuses around the city, 2600 distance students scattered globally, 2.2 million participating in MOOCs and in some way a part of this larger community.

From there, we discussed some bespoke IoT projects that have provided some inspiration for how we explore this with IoT. The first, Light Reminders, explores social interaction and home lighting: each light representing a person in the designer’s life, and each light’s power level is determined by how long it’s been since the designer has seen that person. The more they see their friends, the brighter the home. Another, AirPlay: Smog Music translates air quality data over a three year period in Beijing into music based on how it approaches and often exceeds hazardous levels. Living Light in Seoul is a building facade that displays air quality (drawing on open data) and public interest (defined by online activity) in the environment to brighten or dim lights. eCloud is a dynamic sculpture inspired by the volume and behavior of an idealized cloud at San Jose Airport; made from unique polycarbonate tiles that can fade between transparent and opaque states, its patterns are transformed periodically by real time weather from around the world. Listen to Wikipedia is just that: an attempt to transform edits or additions to Wikipedia to musical form. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots.

You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell. You can welcome him or her by clicking the blue banner and adding a note on their talk page. There are many more to choose from but we were looking to explore projects that had with them a sense of presence, of place, and of some emotional or aesthetic connection. Jeremy then discussed the Pulse project, This project will develop wearable technologies that will enhance our awareness of student communities in an era of increasing online provision, where students ‘attend’ the university but not necessarily the campus itself.

PULSE
This project will develop wearable technologies that will enhance our awareness of student communities in an era of increasing online provision, where students ‘attend’ the university but not necessarily the campus itself.

Digital Education

As for data, Jeremy explained that there are rivers of data flowing through the university already: environmental data (air and sound quality, etc.), university events (graduations, matriculations, seminars, and more), online activity (logins, discussion board posts), bodies (footfalls on campus, ID entries into the library), and more. To frame the discussion a bit, we then presented personas, or students we were designing for, some distance and some in Edinburgh, all with different takes on the university experience. Personas move the discussion away from the abstraction a bit: how unlimited choices of data and things might lead to some decontextualization of the event so we wanted to frame it this way. Jeremy and I explained that the personas could be about teaching, research, or community based improvements: distance to distance, distance to campus, campus to distance, all of the above. Groups discussed the personas, discussed data points to use and configurations to explore. Groups presented their IoT configurations.

Configuration #1

A configuration taking data from three distinct yet entirely representative aspects of university life: administration (EUCLID data), social (coffee data), and more. ODL students would get wearable devices that change colour depending on what is the dominant mode of activity on campus. Colour spectrum would be from red (intense learning activity) to green (leisure activity) and data would be drawn to represent each. For the reverse, there would be physical maps on campus representing the ODL campus: a live feed from ODL students’ activity globally with detail if interested. For example, Rebecca from Australia is drinking coffee (leisure) as am I in Edinburgh. A good use of non-scholarly data to support community and connections.

Configuration #2

The second group presented an emotional dashboard which was about making human connections. Within the course page, students use colours to describe their mood over the course. It useful for students to know I am not alone or what their peers feel in general. It is useful for staff to know when students are struggling and how they might help. They emphasised that such an approach could be layered so can just use colour to suggest mood or can expand on that by adding an image or some other media to make a connection. Discussion boards could feed off this dashboard.

Configuration #3

Full disclaimer: this was Jeremy Knox, Lucy Kendra’s and my (Michael Gallagher) group. We designed for one of the personas (Gossy) who struggled to explain the university in meaningful ways to his family home in Nigeria. We explicitly saw this family and these extended connections as part of the larger university community. Our configuration involved Gossy collecting his social data (physical proximity with others, social media, and more) and using that to brighten or dim a lamp in his mother’s house. A simple connection. Another one was to take both Gossy and his mother, map their daily movements through Edinburgh and Lagos, respectively. To collect data along those walks and curate postcards at intervals through an application.

All of these configurations were about strengthening connections and community which for an increasingly distributed university is critical to ensure that all are involved are the community.


Learning Analytics: What has data ever done for me?

Friday saw a Future Teacher event at the Moray House School of Education on the subject of learning analytics and its role in the future of the university. Much promise, much potential, and lots of messy, but promising developments.

The event was organised by Anne-Marie Scott of Learning, Teaching and Web Services, and the speakers were Dragan GasevicYi-Shan Tsai, and Jeremy Knox. There were approximately 20 attendees, a mix of mostly staff and some students, representing a range of fields on the campus: education, psychology, geosciences, law, biology, and more.

Dragan and Yi-Shan first provided context, polling the attendees as to their level of familiarity with learning analytics and their understanding of its definition. Answers varied considerably, suggesting a field that is still emerging in its scope and application. Most of us were, by any definition, novices in the field of learning analytics.

Dragan discussed the history of learning analytics and how it finds itself shifting from its original position as a deficit model (retention) towards something more proactive and formative (strengthening feedback loops, primarily). Some of the earliest work was discussed, particularly Signals at Purdue University and how it was an important, if ultimately critiqued, project.

Many of these earlier projects used dashboard models and a relatively small set of indicators to achieve some sort of impact: for Signals, 5000 students were identified as a sample and grouped according to three categories of high, medium, and low risk for failing a particular course. These three groups were translated into traffic lights, providing an easy way for teachers to recognise those in danger and presumably offer more or a different form of feedback. There was some success with this approach, but the feedback itself needed bolstering: the stoplight didn’t give enough feedback to change teaching practices.

There is a new emphasis in more recent projects on 21st century data skills, some sort of data literacy, data and privacy protection, and more. The principles are shifting as well: data is never complete, analytics can perpetuate bias, the necessity for humans always being in the loop, how and if projects should be scaled up, and more. Learning purposes vary dramatically as well in terms of quality, equity, personalized feedback, student experience, skills, and efficiency. A very complex tailoring of data to purpose and principle. This was where most of the discussion in the groups sat, this idea of tailoring and having a very specific feedback and guidance system in place, the need for bespoking this all to disciplinary or domain specific needs, a good understanding on how feedback can bolster or undermine student engagement and resiliency. Much to work through here.

Dragan and Yi-Shan transitioned to three applications, more or less in their infancy, and asked us to give them a try.
Loop, On Task, and LARC.

Loop is a learning analytics application that provides access to pageviews, access to course content, forums, and assignments, presumably plugging in via API to an LMS like Moodle or Learn. It tracks to some degree a student’s engagement record, scores for assessments, and more. Dragan referred to Moore’s transactional distance as we were toying with the application, and how some research suggests that depending on the context, increased faculty interaction may or may not lead to positive outcomes. Clusters, bar charts, and more, Loop felt both complex with Dragan emphasising that data can be interpreted in many ways, if done poorly can have a negative impact on effort and outcomes. Dragan pointed to research (Khan & Pardo, 2016) suggesting that student dashboards were mostly ineffective. Ultimately, these applications need to provide capacity for task specific language and appropriate levels of guidance: it can’t be merely summative feedback.

On Task took a different approach, dividing large cohorts of students into quartiles (or whatever cut was deemed appropriate), and drafting text feedback snippets for categories of feedback (particular answers, passages, outcomes, etc.). Categories are translated to set texts for feedback. Feedback is then given based on the quartile. Some degree of granularity while still being general enough to reach some level of scale. The feedback itself is devoid of numbers; it is just guidance. On Task seemed to have some merit for large course (MOOCs or other scaled course structures).

The OnTask Project aims to provide personalised, timely support actions to large student cohorts. The two-year project started in 2016 and is funded through a Strategic Priority Commissioned Grant by the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) of the Australian Government.

Ontasklearning

Jeremy Knox then spoke of the Learning Analytics Report Card (LARC), a project that asks: ‘How can University teaching teams develop critical and participatory approaches to educational data analysis?’ It seeks to develop ways of involving students as research partners and active participants in their own data collection and analysis, as well as foster critical understanding of the use of computational analysis in education. It captures data from an individual student’s course-related activity, and presents a summary of their academic progress in textual and visual form.

However, there is some customisation available here: to choose what is included or excluded, when the report is generated, and how it might be presented. It attempts to both empower the individual student and surface some of the hidden power structures that increasingly underpin and govern educational decision-making (like algorithms).

The first draft of the Learning Analytics Report Card interface is complete, and is ready for testing with Moodle data and the phase 1 analytics. The interface is behind the EASE login, which will restrict access to the identified pilot …

Larc-project


Future Fictions Texts (2): Works Emerging from a Recent Workshop Imagining the Future of the University

We have received a second batch of works emerging as a result of a recent workshop on Future Fictions for Near Future Teaching.

We are eager to present these here, two works imagining, in their own way, the future of the University of Edinburgh. Many thanks to James and Ana.

I once dreamt I had a surface

Here comes And. Or there goes And, depending where you stand.

Assuming you stand.

My phone will tell me if And has a gender today. And is part of a minority who usually choose to identify as male. Blip. There we go, and his phone will have alerted him to the fact I am simply ‘If’. Like most people I reserve my gender until certain conditions – biological, cultural, environmental– present themselves. Until then, I’m in-potential.

And wears blue overalls. And I hear my voice say, ‘Blue overalls, And’.

‘Thanks’, And says, ‘I want to look like I’m heading to the metal workshop, but really just got out of bed, but actually I’m on my way to a lecture on probability theory.’

I wonder if And had someone in mind when he concocted this description. Whose imagination did he want to pass through his bedroom?

I can’t believe I thought that into the cloud.

My voice just says, ‘Ha, wow.’

I always think that fashion and age work like the rings on a tree, but the other way around. Ask an older person about what they are wearing and you get an answer with relatively few rings. For example, last week my parent was wearing a teal coloured trench coat. When I commented on it they said, ‘it is in the style of 21st century retro kitsch, but really it’s a sign of my solidarity with the coup in Côte d’Ivoire.’

‘Ha, wow.’ I was used to the crashing together of soft-focus aesthetics and global politics. One week, daffodils and labour rights in Chile. The next, polka dots and food hygiene standards in Europe. My childhood education rested on louche apparel.

Ask a teenager what they are wearing and you get an answer like an onion. But this, but that, but the other. One recent trend is to describe what you are wearing in a cyclical way, ending where you started. It’s meant to suggest you are ceaselessly intangible, a Mobius strip of becoming.

Someone else joins me and And on the concourse. So now it is me, And and And.

I know you want me to tell you about the future of digital education and probably expected me to add my thoughts to the cloud from a lecture theatre or tutorial. But the concourse is where the changes are happening. We don’t exist in rooms any more, little static islands of being. On the concourse everyone enters into a kind of Brownian motion, the lines drawn from the nearby buildings disperse to become part of a hazy people-ness.

Everything you hear now in the media is about this motion. Although these theories and slogans go back a long way. There’s a shabby sign outside my dorm that must have been put up by a company ages ago, and then forgotten. ‘Come into being’ it announces into the dismal stairwell. The words match those on contemporary banners, so it isn’t them that seem important to me. It is the fact that through the woe begotten patina they say something else. They carry a history and speak of a faded promise. ‘At last we’ve come to terms with our transient reality,’ their statement hails the world. Then in the failed silence that follows, it has to repeat itself over and over, meaningless, ‘Come into being.’ But the world just is.

One of my reading assignments suggests that the Large Hadron Collider, completed in 2008, should be considered the ancient epistemic symbol of our era. It is built, like our society, upon the principle that particles are spectre that haunt a system of energies. It suggests that me, And and And are just the ripples arising from collisions. And of the millions of particle-people it’s only very few who are accelerated to the point where they become visible.

I looked up the word study so that I might better understand your assignment. It originally meant ‘to strive towards, devote oneself to, to cultivate.’ It speaks of a sense of agency that is utterly foreign. Can a particle of water act against the river of which it is part? Is there ever a ‘oneself’? And in this context to ‘cultivate’ seems to speak of an unforgivable ecological colonialism. Even ‘devotion’ seems uncomfortably anachronistic. As if anyone would make a solemn pledge to anything; in the age when wearing gingham can signal anarchy or a chambray shirt can announce one’s intention to read about the Suez crisis. But, but, but!

I’m distracted by the fact that And just mentioned And’s blue overalls. And looks up and says, ‘I want to look like I’m heading to the metal workshop, but really just got out of my warm bed, but actually I’m on my way to a lecture on probability theory.’

‘Warm bed’. I didn’t get that. I look to see how And receives the information, see if they register anything, see if they are at all enticed. But of course, they won’t yet know whether this description is reiterated throughout the day, the same for everyone. Maybe And just slipped up that time, or the time before when they said it to me and forgot the word, ‘warm’.

There’s nothing more frowned upon than an individual wanting an individual. ‘If’, I have to remind myself.

I looked up the etymology of‘if’ too and ironically its origins are uncertain, though it is thought that it meant ‘doubt’ or ‘hesitation.’ I identify with that. It’s the flip side of our collective consciousness and being. Yet I think there is something in our nature that clings to something that requires individuality. In our culture the question of individuality is polluted by an incessant narcissism. People are always thinking, ‘I’m part of the collective, I’m more part of the collective than anybody else.’ But there is a serious concern here that doesn’t have anything to do with ego. It is about how we as organisms are autonomous systems. We need to recognise this autonomy. But so much has changed. The old world of home ownership, secure employment, retirement funds, long-term relationships have passed. The affordances of a society that once fed individual resolve are gone.

Sometimes it just makes you feel so porous.

You know that I once I dreamt that I had a surface. Like a shell it was at the edge of me. And my thoughts stayed within that cell, moved around within me rather than immediately joining the cloud. There was exchange, osmosis, I was affected by the world. But nevertheless, my membranes remained intact. In this dream my identity was fluid but I wasn’t just ‘If’, I was all possibilities, purposively happening. Pulled from the virtual concourse, a little spark flashing off in that Brownian field I was granted by own body. I came into focus, more real than I’ve ever been.

I like to imagine that dream keeps its surface as it traces itself through your system. It’s like an amoeba, a new simplistic lifeform that’s going to trade substances within itself, without itself. It’s going to grow and multiply and everything will start all over again. Blip.

James Clegg

The loud buzzing sound drilled into his ears and forcefully dragged his brain back into consciousness. Groaning, he pawed at the nightstand next to his bed until his fingers registered the familiar smooth surface of his smartphone.

He grabbed the device and held it over his face in order to read the display and swipe the correct button to make it shut the hell up. The moment he did so, the screen cheerily changed into a blinding white background,with the words “Your sleep summary” written in bright blue letters.

The sudden assault on his retinas triggered a primal flight-or-fight response that, due to his groggy state, turned out to be neither, and he stupidly dropped his phone. It slammed right into his face, eliciting a stream of swear words from the student.

“I’m sorry,” said the phone’s soothing feminine voice. “I couldn’t understand the command. Could you repeat that?”
“I said you can fuck off,” growled the student, rubbing at the sore spot on the forehead where the phone had hit.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t understand the command. Could you repeat that?”

The student manually turned off the voice recognition. His sleeping summary appeared back on the screen, telling him he had managed to sleep a whole three hours, with a total REM time of twenty minutes. He clicked the summary away, and a warning appeared on his screen.

This is the third time this week you’ve gotten less than 8 hours of sleep. Your PT has been notified and a counselling session has been booked.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, not again,” complained the student.Whoever had programmed the stupid Healthy Living app had clearly never heard offinals week. He clicked the message away and got up from bed.

He grabbed an animated t-shirt form the “not yet smelly”clothes pile and connected the small wire to his cellphone. He browsed some of the gifs, decided on a funny meme doing the rounds on social media, and put on the shirt, with blinked at him with cheerful colors.

ping! emanated from the smartwatch on his wrist.
Have you logged in your breakfast?
The student ignored the message. Tired, cranky, he sat down at his desk and began working on the paper due before twelve. Not ten minute slater, he was interrupted by a pop-up on his laptop screen.
Have you logged in your breakfast?
Annoyed, he clicked it away. He still had to write two more pages; there was no time for breakfast.
Ten minutes later, another pop-up.
How about a Lucky®pizza bagel?
“I’ve got pizza bagels?” the student wondered, briefly distracted by the promise of food. He clicked on the app to see the list of food in the fridge, kept in real time by the sensors installed in it.
The list showed a paltry three eggs, a bottle of brown sauce, ketchup, a jar of jam and a bottle of milk with the tag WARNING, SPOILED in menacing red font. At the bottom of the list was the app’s suggestion: Lucky®pizza bagels for only £6.99, with immediate drone delivery.
Annoyed at the advertisement and disappointed at the lack of pizza bagels, he clicked back to his paper. He needed to focus.
Another pop-up:
You have not eaten breakfast in 3 days. Your PT has been informed, and a counselling session has been booked.

“For fuck’s sake!”

Ana Hibert Santana


Future Fictions Texts: Works Emerging from a Recent Workshop Imagining the Future of the University

As a result of a recent workshop on Future Fictions for Near Future Teaching, we have been fortunate enough to receive some of the work emerging from that event by several of the participants.

We present these here, four works imagining, in their own way, the future of the University of Edinburgh. Many thanks to Daphne Loads, JL Williams, David Creighton-Offord, and Anon for contributing their work here.

I’m a Beautician

I’m a beautician.
I studied language beauty for seven years at Edinburgh
I knew as soon as my dissertation sac started to grow
When it was just a little bluish pimple on my forehead, on the left side.
I knew then what I wanted to do.

I suppose I was about 8 when the words started to appear.
Pieces of declensions floating in the blue liquid.
If people came up close they could hear scraps of lamentations.

When I got to that awkward stage, when it was just dangling there,
I kept thinking it was going to burst or drop off.
But if I used a mirror, I could see the strange fragments
Of a bigger picture,
The whole sound.

People always say, it will happen when its’s ready.
But I thought it would never crystallise.

Then three days before I was due to graduate,
It started to change.
It went cloudy, then clear, then as hard as glass
And it came off in my hand.

And then, at graduation
When all the dissertations were piled up,
And they fused together
That sound, the Music of the Spheres
Wow.

Daphne Loads

there was no time and time itself

don’t we always swallow a little more when the breath massages the spine

here in this classroom there is a notion that the nation exists

grasping toward the past it was the future held the coral chalice up to the light (poor coral whitened as the sea waves unto death)

what you will teach is

you broke that notion with your greedful mining time it was always and anyway

that golden classroom when the light pierced the beaker her glass a trembling concatenation of quantum realities as when the first burning torch was raised as now the first equation which makes light possible always always always is

a whole nation’s notion exists the gulf was crystal when we were kids diving to kiss on the banks of this nymph grotto weighted with tyres now floating polystyrene the green bottles blue bottles clear bottles holding my breath

what you will teach is what you believe

waving flinging the keyboard popping the button on your shirt shining desk pounding wet heads with first person second person third person south against north against east against man against woman against computer against robot i want to lift up without needing any tools

what you will teach is a dream no reality a notion no a nation

holding my breath forever is the same as breathing into the endless utopia of space

you will open your hand and (gold wire diamond glass plastic silver laser)

data is water time is light

JL Williams

Examinability

The wikitech access lockdown field clicked in as I strolled into the McEwan-examspace™ for my final exam for the Humanidata Googlebasics Bachelors programme. I started to feel the ‘exam pill’ surge, a burning, brain-swelling, actioning sensation and an opening up of memory – a creativity blast designed to optimise exam performance but also – and this cost me a fortune – to bypass the drug checker scan routinely implemented now at the entrance to the McEwan-examspace™.

At the exam consoles it was notable that many students – or their parents – had forked out on the CTD headwear which the Stangoogle analytics team had uncontestably demonstrated, in a paper published the previous month, were effective in boosting exam performance by 32%. This kit costs thousands. The University Enhancement Tribunal just can’t stay ahead of the advances Stangoogle are making in the enhancement space.

Justice, poetry, philosophy and history personificationsclustered on ceiling of the McEwan-examspace™, interspersed by the Googlebasics Centaur logo, as though we – the examinees – needed to remember and respect the privilege associated with being a member of the elite Centaur group of Googlebasic City-Universities. If I can kill this exam, my future as a Humanidata researcher and academic is pretty much in the bag. I click open the exam console and begin to address the question.

Anon

Empty Halls:

The room echoed, its emptiness expressed as resonance
The lines of chairs caked in dust and soft sibilance
The hiss of the lone mature student sitting down, the rustle of their bag
As they unpack, connect, buffer, and adjust for lag
They slide their glasses on, insert their ear pieces delicately
As the dark lecture hall now fills with ghosts awakened electronically
Connected now, the space is more illusion than reality
The students flicker in and out, avatars without integrity
False identities configured from vanity
Amalgams of fashion, celebrity, monstrosity
As the loading bar spins they watch the lecturer refresh
“Was she ever human?” They gossip. “Has she ever known flesh?”
Information is imparted, man’s input still audio visual
But with API and SQL this became residual
A habit from a time before we became maths, a time of individuals
As our dying bodies were left behind, our children became virtual
Leaving empty lecture halls and one joker’s faded desk inscription
“Transhumanism.
New man is new algorithm.”

David Creighton-Offord


Virtual Reality event at the uCreate Studio: the role of VR in reducing risk and building empathy

A recent event organised by our colleagues at the Institute for Academic Development for the Future Teacher initiative explored the use of virtual reality currently and its potential use for teaching and learning in the future.

It was held at the uCreate Studio, the University of Edinburgh’s Community Makerspace. The event was kicked off by Matt Ramirez of Jisc. Matt is the Futures senior innovation developer at Jisc working on a host of projects including AR-Sci, a 3 year EU funded project aiming to enhance science secondary education and ultimately inspiring students to work with STEM in their future careers.

Participants were from across the university and represented potential for a host of disciplinary and interdisciplinary uses of VR: Social and Political Science; Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences; Design; Health; Engineering; Geosciences; Veterinary Medicine; Law; Social Work; Maths; Informatics; Innovation Studies & Biological Sciences; Digital Skills and Training; Population Health Sciences; and Education. The range alone suggests a technology that is perceived to have significant potential for teaching and research across the university.

Matt walked us through the use of VR and how it has evolved over the years from early 1990s sci-fi to now, highlighting its movement through the Gartner Hype Cycle over the years culminating in its emergence in 2017 out of the trough of disillusionment into the slope of enlightenment. VR didn’t take off initially largely due to a lack of appetite, a lack of portability, and a general lack of content. There were physiological issues: in earlier iterations, everything was in focus leading to difficulty focusing on any one thing in particular; there were cases of nausea and discomfort. Matt pointed out that he rarely goes longer than 20 minutes in a VR session at any one time.

Matt was careful to place VR amidst a larger Mixed Reality (MR) continuum from the physical environment to augmented reality (AR) to augmented virtuality (AV) to virtual reality (VR).

While this event focused on VR, for teaching and learning we can see a range of potential across the larger continuum. 2017 sees VR in a progressive space: use cases are beginning to emerge in museums, in medicine, and beyond; accessible content (Sketchfab, in particular); the use of haptic feedback in simulations, explorations of Tutkanhamen’s tomb with Oculus, and the rise of very low-priced headsets like Google Cardboard, along with some openly and quite visible content like the Guardian’s VR content.

We discussed potential use cases for the university itself. VR as planning tools for the development of learning spaces. Virtual field trips to support disciplinary activity. Virtual apprenticeships where students can use VR to explore potentially hazardous experiences: surgery, disaster response, nuclear hazards, and more.

A study was mentioned that pointed to a study on racial bias with VRand how the results show that adopting a certain virtual race, regardless of the real one, has an effect on certain unconscious behaviours towards virtual people with the same color. Stanford is pursuing a line of research on this racial dimension as I write.

We then cascaded into the UN short VR film Clouds Over Sidra, which follows a twelve-year-old girl named Sidra in the Za’atari camp in Jordan — currently home to 84,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war.

Themes emerged here that could inform both our values driving forward with this technology and potential use cases, and arguably the most tangible were perception and empathy. How does what we see feed into what we believe to know, how that confirms existing bias. How could VR develop empathy, to allow us to critically explore the role of empathy on untangling some of these seemingly intractable issues? Experiencing life as a refugee waiting for asylum, experiencing virtual immersions in autism, perceiving the world as an infant might, all available now in VR. All potentially shaping our shared vision of the future of digital education here at the university. Elaine summed it up nicely.