Suchergebnisse

AbstractHolistic evaluation of educational quality necessitates considering novel and theorized measures of quality as well as more instrumental metrics. Online learning is increasingly valued by working professionals as a means of gaining a postgraduate qualification while employed, but this area of education is undertheorized and investigated. Online learning is often discussed in instrumental terms, as if abstracted from the social and material settings in which learning and work take place, but my own conversations with student and graduates about the impact of their studies contrast strongly with such views and motivated this work. Adopting a postdigital perspective, I present an activity theory analysis of interviews with students and staff about the value and perceived impact of online postgraduate programmes in healthcare professions. Four themes are identified that describe how students learning moves horizontally within and across academic and clinical settings: crossing boundaries, ripple effect, eroding structures and hierarchies and expansion. Teaching is delivered online, but learning occurs as the students move through the various contexts they inhabit. The pedagogical approaches required to realize the potential value of these programmes should not be based on the online delivery or the technologies used, but the particular needs of the student group.

AbstractCurrent evaluation of higher education programmes is driven primarily by economic concerns, with a resulting imbalance towards the summative assessment of teaching and away from faculty development. These agendas are advanced through datafication, in which the transformation of social and material activity into digital data is producing a narrow, instrumental view of education. Taking a postdigital perspective on contemporary practices of evaluation outlined in higher education literature, we argue for an ecological view, in which evaluation must take account of those aspects of teaching, learning, and educational context, missing from digital data. We position quality as distributed across teacher, student, institution and context, arguing for the cross-fertilization of diverse kinds of data and non-datafied understandings, along with greater involvement of teachers and students in ways that enhance their agency, and develop their evaluative judgement of the quality of educational practices. We conclude that datafied practices can complement expert judgement when situated within a trusting, formative environment, and informed by an understanding of both pedagogy and technology, and clarity of educational purpose.