THE ENTANGLEMENT OF INFLUENTIAL TECHNOLOGY CHANNELS IN PRACTICE AND DESIGN

Design for academic practice is an important phenomenon in Higher Education. This is the practice through which informal, non-professional designers operating in a variety of roles in academic institutions carry out the design of systems, resources, activities and processes that are intended to enhance academic practice. Despite its importance, the area has not received sufficient attention in studies of academic practice, quality enhancement and digital transformation. This thesis argues that the absence of insight into how designers for academic practice engage with digital technology in their design practice contributes to the mismatch between the ambitions for digital transformation in higher education and the reality of how digital technology is used in higher education. This research has developed an approach to address this issue and enhance how designers for academic practice engage with the digital technologies that are enacted in the practices of lecturers in an academic institution. This approach adopts a novel theoretical lens developed for this research, termed Influential Technology Channels, that produces a model of technology use in everyday practice and provides access, through the existing use of technology, to the enactment of academic practice. This model is used alongside another contribution from this research, practice-based personas – a modelling method that represents the diverse collections of technology use that constitute academic practice, and thus enables designers for academic practice to navigate and engage with the diversity of practice in the population of lecturers in the academic institution. Using this approach to design for academic practice, the form of design characterised and investigated in this research, informal designers are supported to achieve a greater understanding of the audience for which they are designing and explore designs that build upon existing, diverse, situated practice in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Through the implementation of an instrumental case study, this research demonstrates how these methods provide the meaningful connections between design and practice that can support digital enhancement and digital transformation initiatives on a broad scale, enabling designers to better engage with diverse people, practices and uses of digital technology as they seek to enhance academic practice

A systemic study of learners' knowledge sharing and collaborative skills development : a case study in a British business school

Knowledge management, as Leistner (2010) argues, is a “misnomer”. Knowledge cannot be managed since it relates to prior experience and is present merely in the mind of individuals (p. 4). We can manage knowledge flow, but not the knowledge itself. Leistner states that ‘‘you can enable a flow by creating an environment that people find safe, attractive, and efficient, and that motivates them to share their knowledge. This could be either face-to-face or by recording relevant information that can be used by others to re-create knowledge in their own frame of reference’’ (p. 10). Therefore, managing the flow is “as much about creating conditions that will make sharing more likely as it is about trying to have a direct influence on people’’ (pp. 17-18).In the arena of creating such conditions, operational research (OR) is assumed to offer special capacities to lead the advancements in knowledge management and knowledge sharing research. However, the role of OR is not clear in knowledge management. There is also very little account of OR studies concerning knowledge management in combination with social network analysis. This situation has not changed over past years. In addition, although soft-OR tools promote specific solutions with which to tackle complexity management in organisations, there are very few studies concerning the use of action research and soft-OR tools such as the Viable System Model, which are designed specifically for knowledge sharing projects and simulating social networks.This research intends to design, develop and implement a soft canonical operational research (SCOR) methodological framework for the processes of knowledge sharing. The researcher combines Davison et al.’s (2012) canonical action research and Checkland’s (1985) F-M-A soft account of action research. The framework has, in itself, an embedded solution for skill development and performance improvement through collaborative knowledge sharing and experiential learning/practising. In this research, a combinative perspective of VSM and SNA is considered.Adopting a pragmatic philosophy with an interpretivist ontology and relativist epistemology, the researcher inductively conducted two cycles of action research and analysed the outcomes. Four types of transformations occurred in (1) individuals’ skill level, (2) performance, (3) knowledge network and (4) gradual development of strategies across levels. This research elucidates said transformations and explains the key mechanisms for facilitating collective knowledge sharing in order to develop skills and to improve performance. It also brings to light the evidence regarding two unplanned phenomena that occurred in both cycles: leadership development and autopoiesis.Reflection is provided on the design of the soft-OR multi-methodology and on how this design has been useful and effective in the present research. In addition, the study’s contributions to knowledge and practice are also explained. This research suggests that guided self-organisation is a more effective approach for skill development than traditional methods and that it can create an effective context in which a knowledge network is able to reproduce itself. Finally, the limitations of the research and implications for future studies are clarified

Transitional Space in Active Learning: Perspectives from an Undergraduate STEM Education Context

There is increasing evidence, particularly in STEMM higher education, that traditional didactic transmission lecturing is less effective than more active, student-centred learning. This has resulted in ongoing curriculum review and pedagogic transformation at the research-intensive institution studied and elsewhere across a changing sector. However, the examination of active learning was generally confined to instructional contexts and has assumed that undergraduate students successfully transition between timetabled and non-timetabled learning. The expectation for greater self-directed learning associated with the sector-wide shift to blended learning presents an argument for better understanding student engagement with and perception of transition. This study took a phenomenological approach to using naturalistic ethnographic observation (60 observations) and field interviews (50 interviews), in combination with automated occupancy monitoring data, to capture student transitions in two different departmental settings: Chemical Engineering and Physics. Studying physical, temporal, cognitive and social transitions in to and out of timetabled face-to-face lectures led to the definition of on-ramp, medial and off-ramp transitional spaces. These findings informed an institutional redesign of a raked lecture theatre and adjacent foyer space, which provided an opportunity to implement and test the operational impact of these research ideas with educators, architects and other practitioners. A subsequent phase of data collection included in-depth interviews with 4 students and 3 lecturers which reported transitions in behaviour, perception and expectation to actively learn in the refurbished and other learning spaces. Bioecological theory formed a framework for better understanding student transition in relation to strategy and physical/conceptual infrastructure as nested systems of influence. Transitional learning spaces within and at the fringe of classrooms are of increasing importance and might be imagined as ecotones to better understand and support blended learning in an increasingly complex post-COVID HE ecosystem.Open Acces

Self-Directed Learning Development in PBL

Lifelong learning is an emphasized graduate outcome for engineering professionals at the international level by the Washington Accord and at the United States national level by ABET. When a new engineer enters the profession, she will be expected to acquire new technical knowledge in order to solve a problem or create a design. Unlike her experience in college, there will not be a professor to guide this learning. The planning, execution, monitoring, and control of this learning will now fall to the new engineer. The level of the ability to succeed in this self-directed learning modality will be a function of the extent to which the lifelong learning outcome has been met. This paper studies the importance of this graduate outcome and the development of self-directed learning as the way in which the outcome is achieved. Quantitative measures are taken using the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale. Quantitative results show a statistically significant difference between the developments of self-regulated abilities by students in a two-year PBL curriculum as compared to students who did not undergo the PBL treatment