Digital resilience in higher education

Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution’s ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada’s Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing

Donning Coase‐coloured glasses: a property rights view of natural resource economics

Economic analysis of natural resource and environmental issues inappropriately places too much emphasis on Pigouvian externalities and too little on Coasean property rights and transaction costs. The crucial questions are who has what property rights and what are the transaction costs associated with these property rights. Asserting an externality implicitly assumes a set of property rights and hence a distribution of the social costs, but it is precisely a lack of property rights that allows decision makers to ignore social costs. By viewing natural resource and environmental problems through a Coasean lens, we better focus our attention on how property rights evolve, how they influence transaction costs, and how those transaction costs affect the potential for bargaining to minimise social costs.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Teaching In An Online Learning Context

This chapter focuses on the role of the teacher or tutor in an online learning context. It uses the theoretical model developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) that views the creation of an effective online educational community as involving three critica

Telelearning Research and the TeleLearning-Network of Centres of Excellence

This article provides a personal perspective on funding and organizational issues related to e-learning, distance education, and other distributed forms of educational technology research. It examines the largest single investment made in this area by the Canadian federal funding councils: the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence (TL•NCE). The article presents an overview of the rationale and need for expanded TeleLearning research at both basic and applied levels. It discusses (and critiques) other funding sources and ends with a call for a renewed and expanded commitment to the multidisciplinary research area that encompasses e-learning and online teaching

Interactions Affording Distance Science Education

Book chapter from 2010 D. Kennepohl & L. Shaw (Eds.), Accessible Elements: Teaching Science Online and at a Distance (pp. 1-18). Edmonton: Athabasca University Pres