Bobi Archer is the Vice President Education at the Students’ Association, with a background in mathematics. Technology has the ability to enhance relationships between teachers and students; to create an increase in interaction, engagement and thus enthusiasm in a positive and relevant learning environment. This is crucial for the growth of our students’ intellectual ability and their experience within the institution.

Pushpi Bagchi is a visual communication designer and a PhD Design student at Edinburgh College of Art. She aims to use design as a tool to facilitate cultural dialogue to catalyse social change. Previously, she worked as faculty in the Academy of Design in Sri Lanka, adapting UK transnational design education (TNE) curriculum for students in South Asia. Pushpi’s PhD research aims to critically appraise TNE systems through a postcolonial lens, exploring the role of cultural context in learning, motivation, and pedagogy. Her objective is to impact Design higher education by offering research-based, contextually aware insights to further develop transnational education partnerships which facilitate networked international communities of practice.

Sian Bayne is Assistant Principal for Digital Education and is based in the School of Education. She feels it is often assumed that technology will drive and disrupt educational change in particular ways that are either good or bad, depending on our personal perspectives and philosophies. But it is quite rare that students and staff have a forum to discuss what that change might look like, or to pro-actively design what we might want that change to look like. This project is a chance to do that and to try to make sure that the ways in which we teach and learn are based in a set of values and visions we can ascribe to as an academic community.

Luke Campbell is an Associate Lecturer in Community Education for the University of the West of Scotland; an Associate Tutor in Adult Education at the University of Glasgow; and in September 2018 commenced his Phd Social Work at the University of Edinburgh. As a practitioner he has worked predominantly in anti-racism initiatives, social inclusion, youth homelessness, and as an English language educator to speakers of other languages. He currently serves on the Edinburgh, Scotland, and UK & Ireland Unite the Union committees for the non-for-profit sector.

Sarah Cunningham-Burley is Professor of Medical and Family Sociology and Dean, Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences: Edinburgh Medical School and Assistant Principal, Research-led learning. Looking to the future of learning and teaching in the digital age, she is excited about the opportunities for immediate feedback and assessment of learning throughout a course and the platform that digital education can provide for peer interaction as well as between students and their academic teachers. Challenges include ensuring that the diverse range of research and other additional materials relevant to a course are well curated, accessible and with interpretative support.

Tim Fawns is an Academic Coordinator on the MSc in Clinical Education. His vision of the future of digital education at Edinburgh centres around creative uses of both the material and virtual worlds to complement and extend prehistoric processes of learning and thinking. Students, staff and others collectively searching for ideas through a critical yet inclusive mixing and re-mixing of old and new, slow and fast, individual and social, with neither continuity nor change ruling over the other.

Dr Michael Gallagher

Michael Gallagher is a Lecturer in Digital Education based in the Centre for Research in Digital Education at Moray House. He believes in technological use that is generative of viability: the student has the opportunity develop capacity for serving themselves, their community, their families, their relationships. Use that is mobility inducing: How is it contributing to the capacity to enact the change they want to see? How does that contribute to their betterment? Use that augments creativity: how does it provide capacity for creativity in self-development, to addressing community challenges, in identifying creative takes in application, in pedagogy, in research, and engagement?

Judy Hardy is Professor of Physics Education and Director of Teaching in the School of Physics & Astronomy. Technology has the potential to change the way we teach and the way we learn.  So it is important that we ask ourselves: What should we change and why? What can technology offer and how does this meet our needs? And how can we understand the impact of these changes on our teaching and learning?

Sarah Henderson is the Programme Director for the MSc in the Clinical Management of Pain and the Deputy PGT Director at the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Sarah’s background in psychology grounds her interest in engaging diverse groups of healthcare professionals to embrace technology in order to enhance their interdisciplinary working and clinical practice. By using technology to enhance learning, develop educational experience and promote flexibility in learning, we have a unique opportunity to affect healthcare education and delivery.

Melissa Highton is Assistant Principal and Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW)  at the University of Edinburgh.

Melissa leads services and projects in support of the University’s strategic priorities for digital and distance learning on global platforms, blended learning, virtual learning environments, technology enhanced learning spaces, the digital student experience and use of the web for outreach and engagement. She has particular interests in digital skills, wikimedia participation, 21st century curricula, open educational resources, research led teaching and online media.

You can read her blog:  http://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/

or follow her on Twitter: @HoneybHighton

Anouk Lang is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, where her English literature students rise brilliantly to all sorts of digital challenges, from building GIS maps and constructing network diagrams to thinking about interface design and dealing with statistical models of language. She is the academic lead for the College’s Digital Scholarshipinitiative, and is a Fellow of the HEA.

Vanessa Ombura is a University of Edinburgh MasterCard Foundation scholar and Civil Engineering undergraduate student. Growing up in Nairobi, Kenya at a time of an accelerating technological change, most of her extra-curricular activities were centred around using new technologies to implement positive social change in her community. One key opportunity she had was working with the Jamlab community, where she got to learn about design thinking and Open Educational Resources (OERs) which she went on to use to supplement her studies. After graduating from secondary school, she got to facilitate secondary school workshops on design thinking and OERs. This experience greatly influenced her interests in the role of technology in learning due to the opportunity OERs gave her to authentically, creatively as well as collaboratively, gain and share knowledge.​

Susan Rhind is Director of Veterinary Teaching at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. Having specialised as a pathologist, her main interests are now focussed on curriculum design, assessment, feedback, e-learning and student wellbeing.  There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ student but by being creative with our blend of on-line and face-to-face approaches we can build flexible environments and communities for all our students to thrive in.

Charlotte Rixten is a MSc by Research student in Collections and Curating Practices at the Edinburgh College of Art and previously worked in learning and engagement at several museums in the Netherlands. Her research focus is on the potential of online museum collections to engage audiences with art and cultural heritage in new ways. She believes digital has the potential to let us have our cake and eat it too: we can preserve the original and give everyone the opportunity to interact with and transform objects and their context.

Jen Ross is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, and Deputy Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange in the School of Education. She values the pleasures and ambiguities of connection, the richness of insight and imagination, and the complexity of identity and performance of self that digital education can bring. She believes that we have to work to make space for these qualities in a technology context that is often focused on speed, efficiency, surveillance and standardisation. She wants a future for teaching with technology that is adventurous, spacious, critical and creative.

Michael Rovatsos is a Reader in AI at the School of Informatics. His research revolves around how we can make AI more human-friendly and human-centered, and he believes that the use of intelligent technologies in education will only benefit learners and teachers if we put them at the heart of developing the right vision for these technologies.

Michael Seery is a Reader in Chemistry Education at the School of Chemistry. It’s an exciting time for thinking about the possibilities of digital education – how they will shift practice and change how staff and students engage with each other and with learning materials. At the core of any university is a learning community, and we have still a lot to learn about how the possibilities of increasingly blending the online with the real world can enhance our interactions in this community. But the possibilities are very exciting!

Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where he collaborates with a wide variety of partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt, and create products and services for the networked society. He is especially favours trangressive design interventions including cups that only hold coffee when you talk to someone else in the queue, an application for sham marriages using the blockchain, and an SMS platform for shoplifting.

Jon Turner is Director of the Institute for Academic Development, with a background in petroleum geology and postgraduate education. Weaving technology into our educational practices offers significant potential benefits to students and staff, providing opportunities to tailor learning to individual interests and maximise the impact of time spent together in person (online and on-campus).

Jennifer Williams is the Projects & Engagement Coordinator for the Institute for Academic Development and supports a variety of creative and innovative projects across the University including Near Future Teaching. She believes that the future is a dream we are always having, and that we make our present through the activity of this dreaming. This is why she is delighted to be working on this project, which puts the individual and their imagination at the forefront of creating a strategy for what digital education is and is and is and thus will be.

Sanjna Yechareddy is an undergraduate student of International Relations and Quantitative Methods.​

Her previous experience of research related to need assessments of government schools in Bangalore has helped her gain a better understanding of vastly different and unequal learning spaces that digital technology has been introduced into in today’s world. ​

She believes that the full potential of digital education can only be utilised when it is actively used to bridge the gap that exists between learning environments in different countries. She is currently working with Professor Sian Bayne and Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley to research options for designing an online, interdisciplinary course on the city of Edinburgh.