Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation argues that scholarship on ethos in first-year writing courses overlooks important articulations in the relationship between teacher and student and between peer students. I apply a theory heretofore little known in the American writing studies conversation called critical friendship. In short, critical friendship is the medium in a pendulum between total friend and total critic. I apply this theory in the context of the philosophical tropes from Emanuel Levinas, whose theorizing begins in the Levitical notion: Love your neighbor as yourself. He calls for responsibility to the other in the form of a continuous response to the ongoing call of the other. Chapter 1 defines critical friendship and offers a rationale for using such a theory. This chapter also defines and explains my use of ethos, which has layers of complexity and competing histories. The chapter concludes with an introduction to my understanding and use of Levinasian theory as a matter of critical friendship. Chapter 2 examines how teachers respond to student writing. I argue against a historical preference for agonistic practices, suggesting instead that teachers should be reflexive about their understanding and application of critical distance by offering in equal measures thoughtful critique and friendly mentoring. After Chapter 2 asks, "how should teachers respond to student writing?" Chapter 3 asks the question, what should students write? Here I turn to Michel de Montaigne to mitigate the contemporary discussion in writing studies about personal writing and academic writing, often identified in opposition to one another. I propose Montaigne's practice of essaying as an example for first-year writing students as a useful way of looking and observing in order to experiment with thinking, reading and writing the world. Like Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 examines proximity, but this time in relation to technology. Here I argue that students can benefit from an historical perspective on what counts as technology in order to understand their own performance of ethos in highly mediated environments

Refining Open Educational Resources For Both Learner And Institution

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement over the past ten years has described many benefits of releasing learning for free, including business remunerations to institutions as well as a means to altruistically reach underserved groups. By examining learner behaviour and motivation, the papers collated for this PhD by Published Work bring a critical analysis to the experience of delivering OER addressing the broad research question “How can the refinement of OER benefit both learner and institution?”. A range of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and associated website analytics are used to investigate the challenges of repurposing OER together with how the motivations of those wishing to take advantage of OER usage can be better supported. During the five-year time line of these papers, formal students and informal learners, predominantly UK-based, were surveyed by the author generating several thousand responses. These surveys focussed mainly on a large institutional endeavour to deliver OER at The Open University, key findings from which show the business impact of open educational practice where literature had provided only theoretical assumptions. The data also exposes the many and varied motivations of learners using OER where literature has focused largely on the experience and attitudes of educators. The thesis reveals learners’ problems with OER usability more generally, and critically, the desire for certification of OER study against the prohibitive costs of studying in higher education. It describes the development by the author and associated impact of the application of digital badges (or ‘micro-credentials’) to reward users of OER as recognition for informal learning achievements. The thesis includes recommendations that extend beyond one institution’s OER policy, regarding the design and curation of OER globally to better serve the needs of learners, particularly those who cannot afford formal study. It also highlights the need to bring together OER and micro-credentials more cohesively to explore the potential of a framework of core work-related skills needed for a digital economy. It is concluded that there is an economy of scale to the delivery of OER, but that the key to successful impact is through robust open educational practice, instructional design and tangible recognition to learners of their achievements

A CASE STUDY OF PEER ASSESSMENT IN A MOOC-BASED COMPOSITION COURSE: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS, PEERS’ GRADING SCORES VERSUS INSTRUCTORS’ GRADING SCORES, AND PEERS’ COMMENTARY VERSUS INSTRUCTORS’ COMMENTARY

Although the use of peer assessment in MOOCs is common, there has been little empirical research about peer assessment in MOOCs, especially composition MOOCs. This study aimed to address issues in peer assessment in a MOOC-based composition course, in particular student perceptions, peer-grading scores versus instructor-grading scores, and peer commentary versus instructor commentary. The findings provided evidence that peer assessment was well received by the majority of student participants from their perspective as both peer evaluators of other students’ papers and as students being evaluated by their peers. However, many student participants also expressed negative feelings about certain aspects of peer assessment, for example peers’ lack of qualifications, peers’ negative and critical comments, and unfairness of peer grading. Statistical analysis of grades given by student peers and instructors revealed a consistency among grades given by peers but a low consistency between grades given by peers and those given by instructors, with the peer grades tending to be higher than those assigned by instructors. In addition, analysis of peer and instructor commentary revealed that peers’ commentary differed from instructors’ on specific categories of writing issues (idea development, organization, or sentence-level). For instance, on average peers focused a greater percentage of their comments (70%) on sentence-level issues than did instructors (64.7%), though both groups devoted more comments to sentence-level issues than to the two other issue categories. Peers’ commentary also differed from instructors’ in the approaches their comments took to communicating the writing issue (through explanation, question, or correction). For example, in commenting on sentence-level errors, on average 85% of peers’ comments included a correction as compared to 96% of instructors’ comments including that approach. In every comment category (idea development, organization, sentence-level), peers used a lower percentage of explanation—at least 10% lower—than did instructors. Overall, findings and conclusions of the study have limitations due to (1) the small size of composition MOOC studied and small sample size of graded papers used for the analysis, (2) the lack of research and scarcity of document archives on issues the study discussed, (3) the lack of examination of factors (i.e. level of education, cultural background, and English language proficiency) that might affect student participants’ perception of peer assessment, and (4) the lack of analysis of head notes, end notes, and length of comments. However, the study has made certain contributions to the existing literature, especially student perception of peer assessment in the composition MOOC in this study. Analysis of the grades given by peers and instructors in the study provides evidence-based information about whether online peer assessment should be used in MOOCs, especially composition MOOCs and what factors might affect the applicability and consistency of peer grading in MOOCs. In addition, analysis of the data provides insights into types of comments students in a composition MOOC made as compared to those instructors made. The findings of the study as a whole can inform the design of future research on peer assessment in composition MOOCs and indicate questions designers of peer assessment training and practice in such MOOCs could find helpful to consider

Papers from the Education Doctoral Research Conference Saturday 26 November 2016. School of Education

Various abstracts and paper

Kertarajasa Buddhist College Inter-religious Learning from the Perspective of Self-Study of Teaching Practice

Using the self-study of teaching practice (S-STP), this research examines the process of inter-religious learning at Kertarajasa Buddhist College. The S-STP applied to this study is a potential alternative to answer many teaching challenges that were left out by other educational research approaches. Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the courses of inter-religious learning were offered online. These courses were designed and taught by the first author who is a non-Buddhist teacher-educator works in a Buddhist teaching institution.  The courses were delivered using various online learning tools, assisted with scaffold learning, and included guest lectures. In the learning process, students were given opportunity to interact with the instructor and guest lectures. The guest lectures are liyan (the others) and subject-matter experts. The interactions mean to develop students’ awareness of other religious communities and the room for them to experience the religious moderation. This study reveals that the S-STP provides scientific method for the instructor to study own teaching practices. The S-STP as a research approach enables the course instructor to reflect on opportunities and challenges on teaching.  The research approach also enables the instructor to self-assess the professional development as a teacher-educator. Moreover, feedback from the critical friend unveiled strengths and weaknesses of the teaching that were possible unseen by the instructor

The strategic role of MOOCs in education and its effects on the competitive recovery of Portugal

Competitiveness and competition are drivers that guide our society during this Era: competition between countries, competition between firms, competition at work to achieve promotions, competition for vacancies in the best universities, competition for the best partners and even the beginning of life starts with a competition. The main objective of this project is to study if MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses, an innovation in the education field brought us by technology) can help Portugal in its Competitive recovery. To achieve this goal it was important to study in depth the correlation between competitiveness and Education and if the Portuguese Language could have a leverage role. Primary research in form of a survey and in-depth interviews were made, adding to desk-based research of updating Porter’s study of Portuguese competitiveness to the days we live and other assessments such as how can MOOCs work and which business models can be effective. The intended results were to prove that MOOCs could have a strategic role on the economic recovery of the country. The main findings also concluded that the Portuguese language could leverage MOOCs into an exportation strategy of Portuguese educational contents.A Competitividade e a competição são fatores que marcam e guiam a sociedade da nossa Era: competição entre países, competição entre empresas, competição no trabalho para ser promovido, competição para as vagas nas melhores universidades, competição pelos melhores parceiros e até o início da vida tem origem numa competição. O principal objetivo deste projeto é estudar se os MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course, uma inovação no campo da educação proporcionada pela tecnologia) podem ajudar Portugal na sua recuperação ao nível da competitividade. Para atingir este objetivo é importante estudar em profundidade a correlação entre Competitividade e Educação e ainda e se a Língua Portuguesa poderá ter um papel de alavancagem. Um questionário e entrevistas em profundidade foram realizadas de forma a obter insights que pudessem permitir validar estas hipóteses, aos quais se soma a atualização do estudo de Michael Porter sobre a Competitividade Portuguesa para os dias de hoje entre outros estudos como por exemplo o modus operandi correto dos MOOCs em Portugal e que modelos negócios permitiriam a viabilidade destes. Os resultados pretendidos baseiam-se na prova de que os MOOCs podem ter um papel estratégico na recuperação económica do país. Outra conclusão a destacar é a importância que a Língua Portuguesa pode ter a alavancar os MOOCs para os países que falam Português e a abertura que isso pode dar para a exportação de conteúdos educativos em Língua Portuguesa

Structured Approaches for Exploring Interpersonal Relationships in Natural Language Text

Human relationships have long been studied by scientists from domains like sociology, psychology, literature, etc. for understanding people's desires, goals, actions and expected behaviors. In this dissertation we study inter-personal relationships as expressed in natural language text. Modeling inter-personal relationships from text finds application in general natural language understanding, as well as real-world domains such as social networks, discussion forums, intelligent virtual agents, etc. We propose that the study of relationships should incorporate not only linguistic cues in text, but also the contexts in which these cues appear. Our investigations, backed by empirical evaluation, support this thesis, and demonstrate that the task benefits from using structured models that incorporate both types of information. We present such structured models to address the task of modeling the nature of relationships between any two given characters from a narrative. To begin with, we assume that relationships are of two types: cooperative and non-cooperative. We first describe an approach to jointly infer relationships between all characters in the narrative, and demonstrate how the task of characterizing the relationship between two characters can benefit from including information about their relationships with other characters in the narrative. We next formulate the relationship-modeling problem as a sequence prediction task to acknowledge the evolving nature of human relationships, and demonstrate the need to model the history of a relationship in predicting its evolution. Thereafter, we present a data-driven method to automatically discover various types of relationships such as familial, romantic, hostile, etc. Like before, we address the task of modeling evolving relationships but don't restrict ourselves to two types of relationships. We also demonstrate the need to incorporate not only local historical but also global context while solving this problem. Lastly, we demonstrate a practical application of modeling inter-personal relationships in the domain of online educational discussion forums. Such forums offer opportunities for its users to interact and form deeper relationships. With this view, we address the task of identifying initiation of such deeper relationships between a student and the instructor. Specifically, we analyze contents of the forums to automatically suggest threads to the instructors that require their intervention. By highlighting scenarios that need direct instructor-student interactions, we alleviate the need for the instructor to manually peruse all threads of the forum and also assist students who have limited avenues for communicating with instructors. We do this by incorporating the discourse structure of the thread through latent variables that abstractly represent contents of individual posts and model the flow of information in the thread. Such latent structured models that incorporate the linguistic cues without losing their context can be helpful in other related natural language understanding tasks as well. We demonstrate this by using the model for a very different task: identifying if a stated desire has been fulfilled by the end of a story

European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Conference Proceedings

Erasmus+ Programme of the European UnionThe powerful combination of the information age and the consequent disruption caused by these unstable environments provides the impetus to look afresh and identify new models and approaches for education (e.g. OERs, MOOCs, PLEs, Learning Analytics etc.). For learners this has taken a fantastic leap into aggregating, curating and co-curating and co-producing outside the boundaries of formal learning environments – the networked learner is sharing voluntarily and for free, spontaneously with billions of people.Supported by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Unioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio