Suzan Koseoglu, T. Ozturk, Hasan Ucar, E. Karahan, Aras Bozkurt
{"title":"30 Years of Gender Inequality and Implications on Curriculum Design in Open and Distance Learning","authors":"Suzan Koseoglu, T. Ozturk, Hasan Ucar, E. Karahan, Aras Bozkurt","doi":"10.5334/jime.553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.553","url":null,"abstract":"Gender inequality is a pressing issue on a global scale, yet studies on this important issue have stayed on the margins of open and distance learning (ODL) literature. In this study, we critically analyse a batch of ODL literature that is focused on gender inequality in post-secondary and higher education contexts. We use Therborn’s social justice framework to inform and guide the study. This is a comprehensive social justice lens that sees inequality as “a life and death issue,” approaching empowerment as a central area of concern. Qualitative content analysis of 30 years of peer-reviewed literature reveals patriarchy and androcentrism as significant mechanisms that continue to produce gender inequality, in particular in women’s access to educational resources and formal learning opportunities. We highlight three themes that emerged in the content analysis: (1) ODL and equal opportunity; (2) Feminism and gender-sensitive curriculum design; and (3) Culturally relevant curriculum design. We critique views of access to technology-enabled education as an instrument for social justice, and provide a pedagogical model for an ODL curriculum centred on empowerment and agency, two concepts closely linked to existential inequality. We argue that such a curriculum is public service and requires a model of education that is based on participation and co-construction, and lies at the intersection of critical, feminist, and culturally relevant pedagogical practices.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48431517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Open Textbooks and Social Justice: Open Educational Practices to Address Economic, Cultural and Political Injustice at the University of Cape Town","authors":"Glenda Cox, B. Masuku, M. Willmers","doi":"10.5334/jime.556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.556","url":null,"abstract":"There is currently a clarion call to address social injustice in South African higher education (HE) in order to achieve greater equity in access. Within this context, current social injustices pertain to financial exclusion as well as epistemic marginalisation and are embodied in the predominance of expensive textbooks which are authored in the Global North, meaning that they are unaffordable for many students and do not represent local realities. This paper provides evidence from the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project at the University of Cape Town (UCT), on the potential of open textbooks to address social injustice in South African HE and the practices utilised by UCT staff to address these challenges. The paper uses Nancy Fraser’s (2005) trivalent lens to examine inequality, specifically as relates to the following dimensions: economic (maldistribution of resources); cultural (misrecognition of culture and identities); and political (misrepresentation or exclusion of voice). This enables the authors to critically analyse the UCT context and the extent to which open textbook production as well as open education practices within the classroom promote social justice through “parity of participation”. The findings presented demonstrate that open textbooks have the potential to disrupt histories of exclusion in South African HE institutions by addressing issues of cost and marginalisation through the creation of affordable, contextually-relevant learning resources. In addition to this, they provide affordances which enable lecturers to change the way they teach, include student voices and create innovative pedagogical strategies.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49439367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between Social Justice and Decolonisation: Exploring South African MOOC Designers’ Conceptualisations and Approaches to Addressing Injustices","authors":"Tas Adam","doi":"10.5334/jime.557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.557","url":null,"abstract":"As social justice and decolonisation discussions fill the physical and virtual corridors of universities in South Africa, educators, and in this case, MOOC designers, are inevitably influenced by them. They are prompted to reflect on such topics, whether in agreement or with scepticism. Provoked by one interviewee’s comment that ‘you could decolonise and still have an enormous amount of injustice’, this paper investigates how South African MOOC designers conceptualise (in)justice, and how they attempt to address these injustices in and through their MOOCs. As notions such as ‘social justice’ and ‘decolonisation’ have multiple meanings and connotations, a framework was created to unpack the ‘Dimensions of Human Injustice’ namely, material, cultural-epistemic, and political/geopolitical injustices. These dimensions of injustice were used to analyse semi-structured interviews with 27 South African MOOC designers. MOOC designers who stressed cultural-epistemic injustices, focused on relevance, inclusive processes and the geopolitics of knowledge production. Those who stressed material injustices, focused on socio-economic disparities, infrastructural inequalities and the need to tackle these systemic problems at a societal level. Through illustrating that MOOC designers attempt to address injustices based on their different conceptualisations of (in)justice, this study argues that a multi-pronged approach to tackling the various dimensions of injustice perpetuated in and through MOOCs can lead to more holistic justice-oriented MOOCs that better enable learners. Additionally, justice-oriented efforts by South African MOOC designers, highlighted in this paper, can be seen as a guide for the MOOC space in general to take greater strides in creating MOOCs in more justice-oriented ways.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41909150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Facilitating Student Engagement Through Educational Technology: Towards a Conceptual Framework","authors":"Melissa Bond, S. Bedenlier","doi":"10.5334/jime.528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.528","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of student engagement has become somewhat of an enigma for educators and researchers, with ongoing discussions about its nature and complexity, and criticism about the depth and breadth of theorising and operationalisation within empirical research. This equally applies to research conducted in the field of educational technology and its application in schools and higher education. Recognising the inherent role that technology now plays in education, and the potential it has to engage students, this paper draws on a range of student engagement literature and conceptualises a provisional bioecological framework of student engagement that explicitly includes technology as one influential factor. This paper first proposes a definition of student engagement and provides an exploration of positive student engagement indicators. It then presents a bioecological framework, and the microsystemic facets of technology, teacher and curriculum are further explored in their relation to fostering student engagement. Based on this framework, implications for further theory-based research into student engagement and its relation to educational technology are discussed and recommendations for educators are given.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44723283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Barriers do Students Perceive to Engagement with Automated Immediate Formative Feedback","authors":"S. Foster","doi":"10.5334/jime.516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.516","url":null,"abstract":"A small preliminary PhD research project used OpenEssayist, a web based automated writing evaluation (AWE) system designed to provide immediate formative feedback to students, to gain insights into how students use such systems. One of the themes which emerged from the data analysis was that most of the students on the module did not make use of OpenEssayist, which raised the question of why? Are there barriers to student use of immediate AWE feedback? The low uptake of use of OpenEssayist reflects the findings of (Attali, 2004), whose research on the Criterion AWE system found that 71% of students did not make use of the redrafting facilities of Criterion and were excluded from his data. All thirty (n = 30) students on the module subject of the preliminary research had the opportunity to use OpenEssayist, regardless of whether they participated in the research, only four students chose to do so. Two students who did not use OpenEssayist were interviewed. The first did not use OpenEssayist for technical reasons, the second did not have enough time to learn about the software. It is not known why the other students did not make use of OpenEssayist. This short paper reports on the preliminary findings of non-use of AWE and outlines how that has led to a research question for a PhD project, which is a work-in-progress. The question is: Are there barriers to student use of immediate AWE feedback?","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48394578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Using Technology-Enabled Learning Networks to Drive Module Improvements in the UK Open University","authors":"Lesley G. Boyd","doi":"10.5334/jime.529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.529","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a work-in-progress action research project to investigate how technology-enabled learning networks may achieve practical organisational improvement outcomes in the author’s own institution, a UK distance learning higher education (HE) context. Collaborative learning technology, typically used for academic learning or professional development, affords the geographically scattered and disparate practitioner stakeholders involved in distance learning module design and delivery the ability to grapple together with a problem area requiring improvement. In this particular context, there is a perennial organisational need to close a feedback loop between remote module tutors and campus based teams, to develop a joint understanding of teaching and learning design challenges, and to put tutors as close as possible to the development of solutions. However, there is insufficient conceptual and practical understanding about the mechanisms by which this unfolding process of technology-enabled organisational learning might happen. Conceptual frameworks in the field of learning networks and networked learning are still developing (Sloep, 2016). The aim of this research is to investigate the active use of learning networks to achieve practical improvement outcomes, and to explore a new conceptual framework covering all stages of the required learning process. The research aims to make an original contribution to the call for actionable knowledge in organisational research, using a collaborative, equitable and rigorous action-oriented and theory-building approach, which also aims to achieve measurable impact.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45646416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scaffolding Extracurricular Online Events to Support Distance Learning University Students","authors":"K. Foley, L. Marr","doi":"10.5334/jime.525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.525","url":null,"abstract":"Studies about effective practice in Higher Education (HE), student retention, progression and attainment suggest that student engagement is a major factor in success. A sense of belonging to a community of students and academics is seen as key to creating effective engagement. Such studies have identified interventions that have proved successful in traditional HE contexts; however, ideas of belonging and community are considered problematic in distance learning contexts. Preliminary work by the doctoral research author showed that many Open and Distance Learning (ODL) students were successful in their studies without identifying as a student or interacting socially with others, calling into question the extent to which belonging and community are relevant in part-time and distance learning settings. In 2014, The Open University developed a platform, the Student Hub Live (SHL), to facilitate academic community. This research focuses on the value of attending the live online interactive events at the SHL that support part-time distance learning students outside the curriculum, and relating to their studies. Using an ethnographic approach and grounded theory methods, chat logs of events were analysed and the emergent themes informed semi-structured interviews with six participants. The overall findings were that although the curriculum was often a primary focus for students, learning how to apply academic skills more generally and learning from other students is important in ODL. The findings are relevant to other distance and face-to-face HE providers that are keen to engage students in virtual extracurricular spaces to support learning.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47827252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Francisco Iniesto, Garron Hillaire, Jenna Mittelmeier
{"title":"Editorial Special Collection on Doctoral Research: Learning in an Open World","authors":"Francisco Iniesto, Garron Hillaire, Jenna Mittelmeier","doi":"10.5334/jime.544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.544","url":null,"abstract":"This editorial introduces the JIME special collection focused on “Doctoral Research: Learning in an Open World”.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46940663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring Patterns in Student Dialogue While Using a Digital Platform Designed to Support Online Inquiry","authors":"Victoria Murphy, Julie Coiro, Carita Kiili","doi":"10.5334/jime.518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.518","url":null,"abstract":"Online inquiry, or using the Internet to generate questions and then search for, analyse, and synthesise information about these questions, is an essential part of digital literacy. However, processes involved in online inquiry are substantially complex. Prior research suggests that digital platforms can scaffold online inquiry processes. Moreover, the value of scaffolding dialogue in collaborative activities has been shown to enhance critical thinking, an important part of online inquiry. This study investigates whether the use of digital platforms designed to scaffold online inquiry can support productive dialogue when used collaboratively. Data from four pairs of high school students was collected as they worked together using both the digital platform and multiple online sources outside the platform to complete an online inquiry task. Each pair’s interactions were analysed to investigate whether features of the digital platform prompted productive dialogue. In line with research suggesting the use of academic language influences content understanding, each pair’s use of certain academic terms related to the task and digital platform’s interface were also statistically examined. Results suggested that most productive dialogue occurred when using the digital platform. Additionally, two of the four academic terms investigated occurred more often in talk while interacting with the digital platform, compared to talk when on another website. A comparison of timelines associated with these terms offered examples of how initially they were said exclusively while on the tool, and then progressed towards independent use.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70675866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring Self-Regulated Language Learning with MOOCs","authors":"Barbara Conde Gafaro","doi":"10.5334/jime.527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.527","url":null,"abstract":"Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been integrated into face-to-face language modules to enhance the educational experience of students. MOOCs appear to offer language learning opportunities as well as challenging the self-regulated learning (SRL) behaviour of students. This paper presents a work in progress with regards to the literature review of my PhD, which investigates SRL in face-to-face language modules using MOOCs. It discusses SRL as a requirement for engaging with these courses and analyses the way studies have integrated MOOCs into instructional language modules. This paper concludes by highlighting the need for understanding students’ SRL behaviour when engaging with MOOCs as part of their language modules.","PeriodicalId":45406,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Media in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45589864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}