Pink Underlay
Community Focused
Aim: digital education with the University community at its heart.
Objectives
- Prioritising human contact and relationships.
- Connecting our community of scholarship in new and diverse ways.
- Committing to technology which makes the University accessible and welcoming.
Short- to medium-term actions
- Put the student and staff experience at the centre of educational technology development, decision-making and procurement.
- Invest in technology futures which help us build and diversify communities of learners in new ways, with a particular focus on social technology horizon scanning, staff development and support.
- Provide easily accessible training to staff
and students focused on social media skills specifically for teaching, and develop support frameworks for those experiencing toxicity, trolling and victimisation online. - Use technology to build relationships between students and staff based on trust, resisting logics of surveillance and unnecessary monitoring.
- Invest in technologies which offer new ways for remote and off-campus students to be part of the community.
- Accompany these with innovative, cross-discipline community building approaches including peer pairing based on shared interests and geographies.
- Continue to support and further build existing networks for digital education staff to share experience and practice.
- Develop and support digital methods and pathways for building greater engagement with the alumni community.
Boundary Challenging
Aim: digital education that is lifelong, open and transdisciplinary.
Objectives
- Building a culture of lifelong learning.
- Supporting teaching which transcends disciplines.
- Committing to openness. Connecting to the city and region.
Short- to medium-term actions
- Promote and support initiatives which open
up our education to broad, diverse groups of learners, in the form of high quality, affordable online accredited programmes, open courses, micro-credentialing and continuing professional learning. - Build capacity for individuals to develop a lifelong relationship with the University regardless of their geographical location or career stage, via open and digital education.
- Make it easy for local people to be part of the university community through informal as well as formal learning.
- Invest to develop transdisciplinary, university-wide courses in key areas, bringing together the best of our online and on-campus teaching.
- Continue to develop codesign methodologies to build student and partner agency in curriculum and learning space design.
- Open all course content to all enrolled students and continue to develop and support existing work in open education.
Assessment Orientated
Aim: digital education with a focus on assessment and feedback.
Objectives
- Diversifying assessment practice.
- Making assessment more engaging for students and academics.
- Supporting new kinds of feedback.
Short- to medium-term actions
- Launch a cross-university, discipline-sensitive programme of work to increase diversity in forms of assessment, including multimodal (video, audio, image, making) and experiential forms (projects, blogs, reflections, reports).
- Build a culture – supported by technology as appropriate – in which students have greater choice over the form of their assessments. Enable risk-taking by, for example, giving students greater choice over which assignments count toward final marks.
- Focus academic development and course design around building exceptional learning experiences, rather than on assessment and performance.
- Promote a culture shift away from exams
where possible. Use appropriate technology, including AI-supported methods, to enable peer assessment, self assessment and timely formative feedback. - Critically evaluate and build capacity for high quality automated assessment and feedback appropriate to disciplines, as a way of augmenting and supporting human assessment.
- Create a platform to open up students’ access to each other’s assessed work after submission for peer learning and feedback.
Playful and Experimental
Aim: enabling creative, academic and student-led R&D for digital education.
Objectives
- Confidently opening our teaching practice to technological change.
Being energetic in designing new, creative ways of teaching digitally. - Using our academic expertise to develop and scale up new forms of digital education.
- Making access to technical development expertise easier for staff and students.
Short- to medium-term actions
Invest to give academics more time to be creative and risk-taking in their use of digital education.
Provide teaching staff and students with central access to programmers and developers for joint prototyping and trialling of new ways of doing digital education. Support associated pedagogic research through the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme and other channels.
Support staff and students to scale up and spin out digital education ideas and applications.
Extend existing media production facilities and makerspaces into new areas such as biohacking.
Fund a cross-institutional programme of work to scope and develop new virtual and augmented realities for teaching.
Near Future Teaching: Our vision in summary
The Near Future Teaching project is nearing its completion, and we have produced our final report.
Over the two years of the project we have worked with over 400 students, staff, and other stakeholders in the co-production the values we want to shape our preferred future for digital education.
In this post, we explain our vision is and give a sense of some of the actions we will collectively take to make it real.
Here is what we did
The Near Future Teaching project employed futures-thinking and design-based methodologies in the coproduction of a vision and a set of values. We built insight by running workshops across the university community and reviewing global trends in digital and higher education. We co-developed a set of community values and preferences for the future of digital education. And finally we developed a broad set of aims for a preferred future, and define a set of actions to help us build this preferred future.
Our community values
The project advocated for the idea that the university community should take stock and actively shape a preferred future for teaching based on shared values, at a time when technological change is accelerating and often assumed to be driving the future of learning. It opened space for reflection and the application of collective agency to the question of the future of teaching and learning at this university. The values distilled from our work acroos the community were that we should emphasise:
1: Experience over Assessment: Learning should not be over-assessed and instrumentalised. Teaching should share a focus on employability and success with an understanding of the value of rich experience, creativity, curiosity and – sometimes – failure.
2: Diversity and Justice: Education should design-in meaningful diversity and real inclusion across all areas of activity. All near future teaching should further social responsibility and global justice.
3: Relationships First: Relationships, dialogues and personal exchanges between students and staff build understanding in a way that is not possible via transmissive forms of teaching. Teaching should be designed to provide the time and space for proper relationships and meaningful human exchange.
4: Participation and Flexibility: The university community should cooperatively shape how – and what – it learns and teaches. Flexibility for individuals, fluency across disciplines and cooperative responsibility for curricula should shape near future teaching.
Our vision for a preferred future
The vision and aims for a preferred future based on these values. We have assigned many actions to these aims, which are viewable in the full report. Here, we just give a few examples.
1: Community-focused: digital education with the university community at its heart
Objectives: Prioritising human contact and relationships; Connecting our community of scholarship in new and diverse ways; Committing to technology which makes the university accessible and welcoming
Example Action #1: Provide easily accessible training to staff and students focused on social media skills specifically for teaching, and develop support frameworks for those experiencing toxicity, trolling and victimisation online.
Example Action #2: Use technology to build relationships between students and staff based on trust, resisting logics of surveillance and unnecessary monitoring.]
2: Post-digital: education which recognises that technology is now fully embedded within daily life
Objectives: Re-working the concept of ‘contact time’ to reflect contemporary practice; Breaking down the boundaries between on and off campus; Re-thinking what it means to be ‘here’ at Edinburgh; Offering more flexible ways to be part of the university community
Example Action #1: Define and embed a re-worked understanding of ‘contact time’ into workload models and course descriptors, which takes account of student mobility, distance education and flexible patterns of study.
Example Action #2: Plan for the introduction of technological capacity to teach online and on-campus students together in joint cohorts.
3: Data fluent: digital education that understands data, data skills and the data society
Objectives: Taking a research-led approach to education and data; Understanding the possibilities and problems surrounding the datafication of education; Addressing automation with an emphasis on human skills; Engaging creatively and responsibly with learning data
Example Action #1: Create specialist academic development opportunities for staff to fully understand how to analyse and interpret learning and engagement analytics, within an understanding that the datafication of teaching is likely to accelerate and intensify in the coming decades.
Example Action #2: Embed critical understanding of data ethics and algorithmic accountability within academic development and staff training.
4: Playful and experimental: enabling creative academic and student-led R&D for digital education
Objectives: Confidently opening our teaching practice to technological change; Being energetic in designing new, creative ways of teaching digitally; Using our academic expertise to develop and scale up new forms of digital education; Making access to technical development expertise easier for staff and students
Example Action #1: Provide teaching staff and students with central access to programmers and developers for joint prototyping and trialling of new ways of doing digital education. Support associated pedagogic research via Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme and other channels.
Example Action #2: Fund a cross-institutional programme of work to scope and develop new virtual and augmented realities for teaching
5: Assessment-oriented: digital education with a focus on assessment and feedback
Objectives: Diversifying assessment practice; Making the assessment more engaging for students and academics; Supporting new kinds of feedback
Example Action #1
Launch a cross-university, discipline-sensitive programme of work to increase diversity in forms of assessment, including multimodal (video, audio, image, making) and experiential forms (projects, blogs, reflections, reports).
Example Action #2
Build a culture – supported by technology as appropriate – in which students have greater choice over the form of their assessments. Enable risk-taking by, for example, giving students greater choice over which assignments count toward final marks.
6: Boundary-challenging: digital education that is lifelong, open and transdisciplinary
Objectives: Building a culture of lifelong learning; Supporting teaching which transcends disciplines; Committing to openness; Connecting to the city and region
Example Action #1: Build capacity for individuals to develop a lifelong relationship with the university regardless of their geographical location or career stage, via open and digital education. Make it easy for local people to be part of the university community through informal as well as formal learning.
Example Action #2: Invest to develop transdisciplinary, university-wide courses in key areas, bringing together the best of our online and on campus teaching.
Our task now is to put all this into action!
Near Future Teaching: Vision Document Testing Workshops
The Near Future Teaching team have been exploring alternative futures for digital education at the University of Edinburgh.
Already we have engaged staff and students through future-building workshops and discussions. Now that we have some new ideas and possibilities for what digital education might look like in the future, we’re inviting our students back to test them out.
Join us on the 17th of October to help test new concepts and have your say! We’ll be running a series of 90 minute sessions throughout the day. Register your interest here https://tinyurl.com/y8q7nbo8
Explore design and futures thinking, innovative testing models and contribute to the future of digital education at the Unviersity of Edinburgh.
Students who take part will receive a £10 book voucher.@NearFutureTeach, #nearfutureteaching
Please spread the word to University of Edinburgh students far and wide… we would love to work with you on this phase of the project.
Using futures thinking in the Near Future Teaching project
Hi, we have been supporting the Near Future Teaching core team recently on parts of this project. We haven’t yet posted, so here is a short introduction:
We are part of Andthen, a small design strategy consultancy company based in Glasgow, that marries design research with futures thinking to help organisations of all shapes and sizes with early stage innovation. We are working on this project over the next few months to offer some expertise of using a futures-driven approach in strategic planning, and will be posting here about our process and thinking.
— Zoë Prosser and Santini Basra
An intro to futures thinking
While futures thinking is by no means a young practice, it is not particularly defined or established as a discipline; there are few recognised futures thinking degrees, and there is varied understanding of what constitutes a ‘futurist.’ The terms ‘foresight,’ ‘futurism,’ ‘futurology,’ ‘anticipation studies,’ ‘futures thinking,’ and sometimes ‘futures’ for short, are often used interchangeably. While some are slightly varied within their definitions, they all essentially describe the practice of thinking in a structured way about the future, and the methods and approaches that are used to do so. For simplicity, we will just use the term ‘futures thinking’ to describe the practice in this post.
While, as mentioned, futures thinking is a somewhat nebulous discipline, there are characteristics of the practice that are commonly agreed upon:
You can’t know the future
The first and most central tenet of futures thinking is that it is not concerned with prediction; practitioners agree that ‘you can’t know the future.’ Instead, it is about anticipation and exploration. Futures thinking seeks to unpack the question ‘what could happen?’ over attempting to answer ‘what will happen?’
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 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
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.