Student engagement, ideological contest and elective affinity:the Zepke thesis reviewed

This paper takes up issues raised in two articles by Nick Zepke and portrayed here as ‘the Zepke thesis’. This thesis argues that the literature on, interest in and practices around student engagement in higher education have an elective affinity with neo-liberal ideology. At one level this paper counters many of the assertions that underpin the Zepke thesis, challenging them as being based on a selective and tendentious interpretation of that literature. It also points out the misuse of the concept of ‘elective affinity’ within the thesis. However, more significantly the paper argues that an understanding of how ideas are taken up and used requires a more sophisticated ontological understanding than the Zepke thesis exhibits. That thesis has strayed into the territory of the sociology of knowledge while ignoring the accounts and debates in that area developed over more than a century

Change theory and changing practices::enhancing student engagement in universities.

This chapter argues that initiatives designed to enhance student engagement in universities need to be underpinned by an explicit and workable theory of change and change management. It sets out a social practice approach to conceptualising the operation of workgroups in higher education and goes on to elaborate the corollaries of this in terms of the management of change. The chapter concludes with a vignette designed to illustrate how these concepts might be elaborated in a departmental situation

'A kind of exchange':learning from art and design teaching

This paper analyses pedagogic practices in four fields in art and design higher education. Its purpose is to identify the characteristics that might be called signature pedagogies in these subjects and to identify their role in student centred learning. In a time of growing economic pressure on higher education and in the face of tendencies for normative practices brought about through mechanisms such as quality assurance procedures the authors seek to articulate and recognise the issues relating to spaces and pedagogies from this discipline that might be made to wider debates about learning in the sector

Students as co-producers in a multidisciplinary software engineering project: addressing cultural distance and cross-cohort handover

This article reports on an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of two years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students’ own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this ‘student as co-producer’ approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a ‘students as co-producers’ approach for software development projects

Understanding the everyday designer in organisations

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment of technology in organisations. The paper describes the experiences of 18 everyday designers in an academic setting using three concepts: everyday designer in an organisation, empathy through design and experiencing an awareness gap. These concepts were constructed through the analysis of in-depth interviews with the participants. The paper concludes with a call for tool support for everyday designers in organisations to enable them to better understand the audience for whom they are designing and the role technology plays in the organisation

Computer-based technology and student engagement: a critical review of the literature

Computer-based technology has infiltrated many aspects of life and industry, yet there is little understanding of how it can be used to promote student engagement, a concept receiving strong attention in higher education due to its association with a number of positive academic outcomes. The purpose of this article is to present a critical review of the literature from the past 5 years related to how web-conferencing software, blogs, wikis, social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter), and digital games influence student engagement. We prefaced the findings with a substantive overview of student engagement definitions and indicators, which revealed three types of engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive) that informed how we classified articles. Our findings suggest that digital games provide the most far-reaching influence across different types of student engagement, followed by web-conferencing and Facebook. Findings regarding wikis, blogs, and Twitter are less conclusive and significantly limited in number of studies conducted within the past 5 years. Overall, the findings provide preliminary support that computer-based technology influences student engagement, however, additional research is needed to confirm and build on these findings. We conclude the article by providing a list of recommendations for practice, with the intent of increasing understanding of how computer-based technology may be purposefully implemented to achieve the greatest gains in student engagement. © 2017, The Author(s)