Higher Education Research in Scotland: Report of a Survey Undertaken by Universities Scotland Educational Development Sub-Committee

The aim of this study was to gain an insight into a range of higher educational research taking place across Scotland with a particular focus on the nature, expertise, support and dissemination of this research. For the purposes of this study, we used the term ‘research into higher education’ to refer to a range of higher educational research activity that included: research into higher education policies and practice, pedagogical research, research into learning and teaching taking place in higher education and research about transition from further education or school into higher education. The findings point to the underground nature of pedagogic research taking place in Scotland. Many researchers are based within disciplines and their pedagogic research is disseminated in a variety of settings that do not always make it easily accessible within generic higher education research discourse. Pedagogic research is also apparently undervalued, with many academic staff experiencing pressure to prioritise publishing within their main discipline over and above pedagogic research. In addition there appears to be a lack of capacity within Scottish institutions to maximise the profile of higher educational research in the forthcoming UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise

A Systematic Analysis of Accessibility Education Within Computing Disciplines

Accessible technologies improve the usability for all users, including 1 billion people in the world who have a disability. Although there is a demand for accessible technologies, there is currently no requirement for universities to integrate this content within the computing curriculum. A systematic comparison of teaching efficacy is important to effectively prepare future computing professionals with the skills to create accessible technologies. This dissertation contains a mixed-methods cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of undergraduate Software Engineering and Information Technology students’ learning of accessibility. Four teaching conditions were assessed at Rochester Institute of Technology: content lectures, projects, exposure to stakeholders with a disability, and collaboration with a team member who had a disability. Evidence of student learning was obtained through questionnaires, project reports, and interview data. Student learning was quantified by a knowledge of programming techniques, awareness of accessible technologies, and attitudes towards individuals with a disability. The cross-sectional analysis spanned three years (spring 2016-2019), fourteen courses, and seven distinct professors. We found that students in all conditions gained an increased knowledge of implementation methods. Students who were exposed to a stakeholder with a disability obtained significantly higher scores in their prosocial sympathetic attitudes, awareness of accessible technologies, and knowledge of programming techniques following the course. Students in the other conditions obtained significant changes in only a subset of these measures. While students in all conditions obtained significantly higher knowledge scores in the short term, only students who had a project or a team member with a disability sustained significantly higher knowledge scores two years after exposure. In interviews, senior-level students revealed that there were multiple factors outside the classroom that dissuaded them from furthering their learning of accessibility. Students mentioned a lack of person-centered topics in major software development processes (e.g., agile, waterfall) and workplace tasks. Without direct reinforcement, students focused on functional software requirements and expressed that accessibility would only be necessary in select front-end development career paths or domains. While current work in computer accessibility education evaluates learning during, or immediately following, one course, this dissertation provides a systematic comparison of student learning throughout multiple courses and instructors. The findings within this dissertation may be used to inform future curriculum plans and educational initiatives

The UX of things: exploring UX principles to inform security and privacy design in the smart home

Smart homes are under attack. Threats can harm both the security of these homes and the privacy of their inhabitants. As a result, in addition to delivering pleasant and aesthetic experiences, smart devices need to protect households from vulnerabilities and attacks. Further, the need for user-centered security and privacy design is particularly important for such an environment, given that inhabitants are demographically-diverse (e.g., age, gender, educational level) and have different skills and (dis)abilities. Prior work has explored different usable security and privacy solutions for smart homes; however, the applicability of user eXperience (UX) principles to security and privacy design is under-explored. This research project aims to address the on-going challenge of security and privacy in the smart home through the lens of UX design. The objective of this thesis is two-fold. First, to investigate how UX factors and principles affect the security and privacy of smart home users. Secondly, to inform product design through the development of an empirically-tested framework for UX design of security and privacy in smart home products. In the first step, we explored the relationship between UX, security, and privacy in smart homes from user and designer perspectives: through (i) conducting a qualitative interview study with smart home users (n=13) and (ii) analyzing an ethnomethodologically informed study of six UK households living in smart homes (n=6); and, we then explored the role of UX in the design of security, privacy and data protection in smart homes through qualitative semi-structured interviews with smart home users, designers and business leaders through two rounds of interviews (n=20, n=20). In the second step, using conceptual framework analysis, we systematically analyzed our previously collected data and the literature to construct a framework of design heuristics for consent and permission in smart homes. We applied these heuristics in four participatory co-design workshops and reported on their use. We further analyzed the use of the heuristics through thematic analysis highlighting how the heuristics were used, their purpose, and their effectiveness. By bringing UX design to the smart home security and privacy table, we believe that this research project will have a significant impact on academia, industry, and government organizations. Our thesis will improve design practices for security and privacy in domestic smart devices while addressing wider challenges, opportunities, and future work

Mandate in Conflict: UNRWA’s Role within Identity, the West Bank, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Created over 67 years ago, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has stood the test of time, but perhaps not in the best of ways. It is one of the largest UN agencies, boasting an annual budget that typically exceeds 1.3 Billion US$ and a staff of over 30,000, but it is not a commonly known entity. UNRWA’s mandate is dedicated to one refugee populace from one ongoing conflict: to carry out direct relief and works programmes for Palestine Refugees, and by default their descendants, fleeing from the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict (Appendix C). With decades of failed peace attempts, and the agency’s mandate continually renewed by the UN General Assembly, UNRWA has continued to serve this population as they have gone from tented refugee camps to urban slums. This agency, built as a humanitarian project, has now become a pseudo-government, with a staff of teachers and doctors. Unlike a government, and contrary to the liberal ideals of the UN, there is little in way of consent or mandate from the population. The research question: how does UNRWA’s structure, culture, and mandate shape its behavior within the reality of its practices with Palestine Refugees, within the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and within its attempts to reconcile its identity conflict through participatory reforms. This began with a study of UNRWA\u27s needs, capacities, and preferences for participatory practices, in agency planning and actions with refugees. Through the use of a Case Study, observations, and interviews, this research intended to appraise the viability of participatory action through the perspectives of several departments representing the strategic level, the programme management level, and the field level of UNRWA’s West Bank Field Office. The research found that there was a solid consensus amongst all interviewed that participatory reforms were essential to the agency’s success, but responsibility for this reform process was not clear. Participatory reforms were seen as a means to reconcile some issues of governance but also to reduce future financial and service burdens on the agency. However, the strategic level interviewees expressed concerns on the long-term existence of UNRWA; refugees are quite dependent on UNRWA for basic services yet there is no exit strategy down the road. Since UNRWA’s international mandate is apparently tied to the resolution of the conflict, the concern is that UNRWA will reach a point of unsustainability before the conflict approaches a resolution. In part, UNRWA is a tool used by both major conflicting groups. Using analysis from literary sources, this paper argues that UNRWA is as much a victim as well as a support structure in the larger conflict – trapped within decade’s worth of constructed identities and norms tied to Palestine Refugees – and that the entire model is unsustainable. On a macro scale, UNRWA is caught in a paradox of development best practices, do-no-harm humanitarian norms, and its international mandate culminating in an ill-fated and inseparable track between itself, the conflict, and the Palestine Refugees

Exploring Strategies in Website Development in Human-Computer Interaction for Older Adults Over 65: A Case Study

Human-computer interaction (HCI) website developers often lack the understanding necessary to build interfaces to meet accessibility requirements for older adults over 65. Adults over 65 often have difficulty using computer technology to access information over the Internet and are slow to adapt because websites are not fully accessible to older adults. Grounded in the technology acceptance model, the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore strategies that HCI website developers use to build interfaces to meet accessibility requirements for older adults over 65. The participants were four HCI website developers from four website development companies in the New York City metropolitan area of the United States. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and organizational documents. Using thematic analysis, the major themes found were ease of readability and accessibility, ease of navigation and simplicity, and the importance of feedback. A key recommendation is for web designers and developers to use best practices and guidelines identified by the World Wide Web Consortium to create accessible websites for adults over 65. The implications for positive social change include the potential to improve the number of websites that are easier to use for older adults, thus providing benefits to older adults by enriching their worlds, allowing their families to use distance communication to interact with them, and affording health providers with an avenue to have more contact with the older adults

MOODs: Building massive open online diaries for researchers, teachers and contributors

Internet-based research conducted in partnership with paid crowdworkers and volunteer citizen scientists is an increasingly common method for collecting data from large, diverse populations. We wanted to leverage web-based citizen science to gain insights into phenomena that are part of people’s everyday lives. To do this, we developed the concept of a Massive Open Online Diary (MOOD). A MOOD is a tool for capturing, storing and presenting short updates from multiple contributors on a particular topic. These updates are aggregated into public corpora that can be viewed, analysed and shared. MOODs offer a novel method for crowdsourcing diary-like data in a way that provides value for researchers, teachers and contributors. MOODs also come with unique community-building and ethical challenges. We describe the benefits and challenges of MOODs in relation to Errordiary.org, a MOOD we created to aid our exploration of human error

Theorising the design-reality gap in ICTD: matters of care in mobile learning for Kenyan community health workers

This thesis examines the sociomaterial relations of “design practice” in order to advance new perspectives on success and failure in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD). I conduct an ethnographic case study of an academic research intervention and update the widely-cited theory of design-reality gaps (Heeks, 2002). Using methods from classic actor-network theory and post-structural material-semiotic tools, the analysis: 1) disentangles the entwined sociomaterial practices around design, production, and use of technology; and 2) integrates these insights into more elaborate conceptualisations of gaps, sustainability, scalability, and project failure. In doing so, my study answers the research question: What are the sociomaterial relations of “design practice” in a globally-distributed, multi-stakeholder, and technologicallymediated ICTD project for poverty alleviation? My research narrative describes how an array of humans and non-humans participated as designers in a transnational, interdisciplinary Participatory Action Research project to train Kenyan health workers using mobile phones. At least six different patterns of sociomaterial relations operated through a given set of people and things, enacting the material-discursive apparatuses (Barad, 1998) of educational research, healthcare, the market, the state, and the local community. I assert that in this Participatory Action Research project for mobile learning, the design-reality gap was not so much a matter of geographic or socio-cultural divides, but was instead constituted as fluid space (Mol, 2002) separating the educational researchers’ designerly practices from the multiplicity of ways in which health workers, mobile phones, and other actors lived in relation to one another. I conclude that these ontological politics enacted design as an empirical matter of care – an affective and morally-charged sociomaterial practice with an ethico-political commitment to the marginalised (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). I therefore present a conceptual model of success and failure in participatory ICTD projects that explicitly incorporates the affective and material dimensions of care, and conceptualises social justice – not solely in terms of universal claims or global standards – but as embodied, sociomaterial enactments

Dramatic strategies for augmenting nursing student engagement with inter-agency care: a quantitative study

Background: Inter-agency working (IW) is critical to the delivery of safe and effective health care to service users, families, and health-care staff to ensures that high-quality, consistent care is always available for the users. Several studies have advised that pre-registered health students get Inter-professional Education (IPE) to improve their knowledge and attitudes regarding inter-agency collaboration. Students, on the other hand, are unsure of the relevance of these concepts to their careers and demonstrate a lack of interest in studying. Similarly, the optimal approach to learn inter-agency collaboration has yet to be determined. Objectives: The aim of the study is to explore the impact of peer-initiated authentic drama on pre-registered students’ attitudes towards health care team working before and after module implementation with content on health and social care integration/inter-agency working. Methods: In this study, a quantitative (before-and-after) design was chosen. The study included second-year nursing students from Bachelors in Nursing (BN) and Masters in Nursing (MN) programmes who were studying the module 'Effective Interagency Working in Health and Social Care.' A convenience sample of 450 student nurses completed a pre- and post-module questionnaire. For data analysis, descriptive analysis and the Paired Sample T test were used. Results: Overall, there was an increase in the student nurses’ attitudes towards health care team working, understanding of health and social care integration and confidence around working within integrated health and social care landscapes with 80%-90% of participants agreeing or strongly agreeing with the survey questionnaire. With regards to paired sample T test results, these demonstrated that there was no significant difference between the mean pre-module score and mean post-module score ratings (p=.136). Conclusion: Drama-based nursing education is a real-world learning strategy that helps students gain a better understanding of health-care team working. This innovative instructional technique should be employed in the curricula of pre-registration health students in the future