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Near Future Teaching Workshop #2: a summary
Following on from the first Near Future Teaching workshop last month, we gathered again recently to continue our design of the future of digital education.
Here, our focus was on convergence with the core values the university community would like to see defining our future teaching. The 19 opinion cards that were created from the interviews and insights from staff and students over the last year were summarised into 4 core values:
- Experience over Measurement
- Exchange over Instruction
- Diverse and Inclusive
- Participatory and Transparent
The workshop was again designed and led by Santini and Zoe from Andthen, a studio specialising in futures thinking and design research. We began by reviewing the four future world scenarios we developed through the first workshop. Briefly, these were:
In groups, the workshop began mapping the four core values to each of these worlds, trying to understand how they might be played out in each.
Using a blank jigsaw manufactured by Zoe and Santini, each group built layers around one of these worlds. The first encapsulated how the four values might be manifested, based on group discussion.
The second layer provided speculative examples of what digital education specifically might look like for each of these ‘value’ quartiles. Sian provided a brief brain dump trying to encapsulate something of what we mean when we talk about ‘digital education’:
Finally, we used props to begin to illustrate the speculative examples of digital education devised by each group: using playdoh, toy robots and plastic fruit we attempted to bring these worlds to life. The groups narrated their scenarios to one another and the workshop concluded, taking us another step closer to the co-design of a values-based approach to our digital education futures.

Near Future Teaching: reviews of the key trends
As part of the Near Future Teaching project we have been working on two short reviews which attempt to summarise what we see as the key trends and influences likely to be shaping digital education in universities over the short to medium term.
We have created two of these and want to share them with others who might find them useful:
Future Teaching trends: education and society (4 pages plus references)
Future Teaching trends: science and technology (6 pages plus references)
In writing them, we have focused on aligning the analysis of key trends with the insights coming out of our work with the students and staff who constitute the university (you can see thematic summaries of the things people are discussing here on our video page).
So while there are plenty of megatrend reports, horizon scanning documents, key trends barometers, policy documents and foresight analyses out there which have helped us, we have focused on maintaining a critical edge which looks at what the impact of current technological and educational trends might be on students, staff, communities and the universities in which we work.
If you have any feedback on the reviews, please get in touch.
Near Future Teaching Workshop #1: Divergent Thinking
View this post on InstagramCollage of activity from the Near Future Teaching project at the University of Edinburgh
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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.
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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.
View this post on InstagramFuture worlds discussion as part of the Near Future Teaching project at the University of Edinburgh.
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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.
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Near Future Teaching- methods and a progress report
Now that Near Future Teaching is well underway, it seems like a good time to write a short blog post on our project methodology, how it’s going, and what we hope we will achieve by the time the project finishes toward the end of the year.
The project has the over-arching aim to design the future of digital education at Edinburgh. Our objectives:
- To conduct a participative, institution-wide conversation about digital education and its trajectory at Edinburgh
- To focus on values, curriculum and pedagogy, not only on technological change
- To surface conversations on the open web, foregrounding student voices through high quality media and building awareness of the project across the sector
- To synthesise project findings into an actionable design for the future of digital education, usable by Schools and Colleges
It took us a while to work out how best to build a participative vision in such a large, complex university. At the moment Edinburgh has almost 40,000 thousand students, a staff count of just under 10,000, three Colleges, 20 Schools with many, many sub-units, plus of course our support services. It’s probably fair to say that nothing quite like this project has been attempted before here.

In the end, the process we devised was adapted from the work Keri Facer and colleagues conducted a few years ago as part of a large project looking at long-term sociotechnical futures for education (and published most accessibly in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Our version has five stages:
- Foresight:
- Taking the community pulse
- Mapping in the form of two foresight reviews focusing on factors likely to influence change in education over the coming years:
- scientific and technical trends
- social and educational factors
- Scenario development:
- Scoping plausible future worlds
- Designing educational futures for each
- Testing ideas and designs
- Student panel
- Academic expert panel
- Children’s panel
- Surfacing insights and recommendations
- Translation into policy and action
At this point we have just about reached the end of stage 1., having run and written up a series of events and done short interviews with input from around 300 students and staff. These latter we’ve edited thematically and made available here on the website, with write-ups from each of the events also surfaced here in our blog. We’ll be publishing the reviews here shortly too.
It’s important to the project that we surface as much of our process as possible, trying to show our workings rather than just producing a final report which obscures how it was produced.

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.
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 Gasevic, Yi-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).
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 …