Reconceptulising the Role of the Visiting Lecturer:

The national lockdown during semester one of 2020 meant the Manukau Institute of Technology Early Childhood teams needed to revisit the existing requirements of their programmes in terms of practicum. In response, the teams developed ‘virtual’ meetings to replace the usual observation visit by a visiting lecturer. By using communication software (Microsoft Teams with cell phone back up) the student and Visiting Lecturer engaged in weekly critically reflective conversations that mentored the student in thinking about their practice, setting goals to work on and articulating their learning. By using the software in this way, the Visiting Lecturers changed their role from merely assessor of practice to firstly, mentor and guide. In the online triadic meetings (also using Microsoft Teams and cell phone back-up) it became clear that the traditional model of the student being told how the assessor felt they had met the practicum criteria was replaced with one where the student was able to articulate for themselves. At the end of the semester, students and lecturers were invited to give feedback via a survey. The responses focused on the deep learning experienced, ownership of learning, and the confidence the students felt at the on-line triadic. Much more unexpected was the correlation between survey responses and much of the literature. Drawing on these findings, this presentation poses some possibilities for what both the practicum and a reconceptualised relationship between visiting lecturer, associate teacher and students could look like in the ‘new normal’.

Heutagogy: The pedagogy of agency

Even before Covid-19, higher education was facing a perfect storm of challenges: increased costs, reduced funding, and rising industry demand for more skilled graduates. Educators were also challenged with finding ways to better prepare students for an uncertain future where lifelong learning skills are essential. The current pandemic has only served to intensify the storm, and educational institutions have rushed to technology in order to survive. In response to the new — or next — normal, institutional leaders are attempting to adapt traditional curriculum and systems so that they can transition rapidly to remote teaching and learning. Online, hybrid, and hyflex learning have become the beguiling buzzword solutions of today. How to survive this perfect storm and the storms to come? This presentation will propose that it is not technology that will best address these challenges; instead, a fundamental rethinking of how we teach and learn is necessary. By adopting heutagogy — or a pedagogy of agency, where the learner takes control of learning — will we be able to agilely transition and pivot across delivery methods, while also equipping our students with the lifelong learning skills and competencies required for the future.

Creative Forest: an emergent learning environment

Creative Forest is an educational space that connects, facilitates and empowers learners in education, enterprise and local community. Using an ecosystem methodology that resembles a forest metaphor, learner’s co-construct networks, interact, collaborate, and seek out and share expertise as a way of transforming social and cognitive relationships and values that craft a future of learning that is distinctly different and unconstrained. Learners are integral to the operation and success of the learning community as a way of designing, managing and promoting individual or group/community design projects for either self-discovery and knowledge creation or creative and entrepreneurial endeavour. The essence of the ecosystem relies on a permeable structure that allows participants to reveal tactics to reinvent, subvert, and recontextualise the folds and refolding of the learning space for meeting the needs and understanding of encounters of everyday practice. Learners are central to the ecosystem. “Learning is usually a progressive change in what we know or can do” (Nuthall, 2001). For Creative Forest, learners is a term that applies to everyone, everyone is a learner, everyone is a teacher, and learning to do by doing. Creative Forest is a reorientation in educational thinking that has challenged traditional, didactic education for its implied assumption of a separation between knowing and doing, where knowledge is treated as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used. This assumption is in conflict with the social knowledge that emerges from learners’ interaction with each other and the Internet, which they use as a tool to reach out, interact, mentor and share experiences and knowledge. Given this situation, learning organisations are sometimes challenged to shift from their traditional role, perceived as the transfer of abstract, decontextualised formal concepts rather than personalised interconnecting socially constructed experiences (that promote critical learning and citizenship). Building a system that encourages students to co-construct, interact and collaborate on individually orientated projects shaped the foundation structure and supportive mechanisms for the development of Creative Forest. This paper presentation will discuss a journey into building Creative Forest as an emergent innovative learning environment and talk through its application in education, business and community contexts. References Nuthall, G, A. (2001) Student experience and learning process: Developing an evidence based theory of classroom learning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle.

Social Geographies of Educational Leadership

Educational leaders across the globe are facing a growing set of challenges that include concerns around academic performance, but go well beyond to include the pandemic, equity, climate, and poverty. This is a defining time for leaders to attend to the needs of students in the face of ongoing and developing challenges. Better understanding how educational leaders engage with one another in developing community and accessing timely and context connected information is an important line of investigation during these challenging times. One of most widely used and simplest strategies is engaging communities through communication and collaboration in online spaces which involves accessing just in time information (e.g., news, ideas, approaches) and the exchange of information, knowledge, and strategies. Social media platforms provide multiple opportunities for these exchanges and yet we know very little about how educational leaders are engaging with these platforms. The rise of social media has led to a panoply of online communication spaces or sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, wherein individuals can engage into the informal learning with others. Furthermore, a growing number of studies have shown that educational professionals use social media, such as Twitter, to access and share information that helps them and others to face their everyday challenges. Being embedded in their immediate (work) environments, media constitute social opportunity spaces enabling individuals to engage discussions with a wide variety of others and stimulate a process of critical reflection. Consequently, educational leaders can benefit from participating in social media to help them (and their colleagues) in their efforts to engage in high quality practice. However, traditional views of leader activity have constrained work in the space. Leadership is one of the most examined concepts in the education literature, and while the study of online social networks is also gaining interest, the intersection between leadership and online social networks has received limited attention. The key notion underlying most traditional leadership research is that the behaviors or attributes of a leader, typically a person in a formal position, matter for a variety of outcomes. While offering valuable insights, this dominant view of leadership behavior and attributes underestimates the impact of (informal) social networks particularly those in online spaces. Scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of social processes involved in leading. Leadership in its broadest sense has often been conceptualized as a process of influence toward an outcome. Social relationships through networks may provide leaders with the necessary infrastructure to access resources in achieving outcomes. A social network perspective brings to the fore the dependencies of actors within a social system. This perspective shifts the focus away from individual attributes toward an examination of the ties between individuals, thereby placing leadership directly in the role of a social undertaking. Leadership from a network perspective emphasizes the interdependence of action that are reflected by a network of ties, which may ultimately moderate, influence, or determine the activity and movement of resources such as practices and knowledge.

In search of the margin spaces

Virtual and Distance Learning are certainly not disruptive technologies, but rather a trend in contemporary education. However, the potential of new mobile technologies, and the openness to new pedagogies associated with them, is enabling teaching professionals to design learning instances that could truly disrupt traditional schooling (Agarwal, 2013). Societal changes such as the rise of the knowledge society and disintermediation of education (Prince, 2014) demand a learning ecosystem where learners can create their own opportunities to develop life-skills and problem solve (Hannon, Patton & Temperley, 2011). This means that learners should be given the opportunity to be their own agents of learning and build collaborative networks with both instructors and peers. However, secondary school education is still organised around students’ attainment and standardised testing, where curriculum normalisation demands supersede student-centeredness (Leadbeater, 2005). This paradigm-clash together with some limitations on teachers’ digital capabilities or/and the organizational constraints on the adoption of technology challenges the full implementation of ICT as a neural network that could enable full-personalisation and, therefore, a deep learning ecosystem. Digital technologies can no longer be considered a simple tool to access, organise and communicate information. At its lowest denomination, technology becomes a constitutive structure “which partly constitutes the things to which is applied” (Van der Hoven, 2006, p68), and acts as a medium that both impacts on the way we explore reality and mediates its understanding (Carr, 2011; Cardinali et. al; 2009; Doidge, 2007; Kurtweil, 2005, quoted by White, 2011). At its highest denomination, technology can be understood from the perspective of sociomateriality, where material means are “constitutive of both activities and identities” (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008, p 455). From the perspective of the Extended Mind Theory (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) humans and tools can work together as a functional organ, blurring the boundaries between human and technology (Hannon, 2018). Technologies are not the only medium capable of enabling deep learning, since “learning is not only the development of the fundamental competencies [but] also developing the personal, interpersonal and cognitive capabilities that allow one to diagnose what is going on in the complex, constantly shifting human and technical context of real-world practice and then match an appropriate response.” (Fullan & Scott, 2014, p4.). However, it would be naive to disregard the impact that emerging technologies are having not only on pedagogy, but also, on the economic and political pressures being transferred into secondary schools (Bolstad et al.,2012. p1). The aim of my research is to inquire into the tools that high-achieving senior secondary school learners are using to interact with digital texts in order to (a) structure their learning [organising]; (b) articulating the "external mind" [signposting] and (c) representing mental processes [synthesising] and its intersection with Biesta’s (2010) notion of the dimensions of Education from the perspective of Complexity and ANT (actor-network) theory.

Virtual Scholarship and Real Academics:

Like many other regional universities in Australia, the authors’ university is well equipped to deal with distance and technology (Chugh, Ledger & Shields, 2017), with staff distributed across more than 10 campuses, and many working from home on a regular basis in a non-COVID year. Yet despite this, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 presented challenges, as staff are not immune from the digital divide issues of bandwidth speed and stability, especially as the whole world moves to a video conferenced meeting solution. This presentation will discuss how our university handled this new triple headed challenge of a renewed focus on Scholarship of Learning & Teaching (SoLT) in relation to Australian government advice (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2020), along with a desire for upskilling in TEL, but simultaneously the limitations of technology in the pandemic, with a view to providing guidance for other institutions looking to mount this challenge. In tackling this issue in 2020, we were fortunate that our university already provided several avenues for staff to engage in and learn about SoLT. Among these, the Scholarship of Tertiary Teaching (SoTT) conference ran over two days via Zoom and offered several virtual concurrent sessions and topics allowing staff to share the results of their systematic evaluations into their teaching practice and student’s learning. Each session is recorded and made available via a YouTube channel, providing opportunity for conference participants to watch sessions they were unable to attend and this year we recognised the work of our presenters, abstract reviewers, and session facilitators with digital badges. Based on this successful model, we realized we had the essential tools already to move our other major training avenue, the Intro to SoLT workshops (previously delivered face-to-face), online. The aim of the workshops is to provide staff with a collegial environment to discuss and develop research ideas. The virtual environment makes this harder to achieve however the SOTT conference showed us that smaller sessions (four hours over four days), along with the use of breakout rooms could provide opportunity for small group discussion and that the value of Zoom Chat as a back channel for discussion was essential and should be encouraged amongst participants to provide an environment where we could maintain consistent support (Soon & Cowling, 2019). Attendance and feedback showed us that this worked. Over 50 staff attended the event over four days, and feedback was universally positive, and this led us to rethink how our L&T events should be offered. Specifically, the success of the changes suggests the development of a hyperflexible model of delivery, asynchronous but with guided support and local contacts (assisting to build campus networks), and the foundation knowledge of how to complete a systematic evaluation turned into an online module/micro-credential as a prerequisite for face-to-face and virtual workshops. The result being a L&T model that leverages the lessons learnt during the pandemic into a new blended model, bringing the best aspects of face-to-face and online delivery into a new academy of best L&T practice.

Supporting STEAM learning through student-developed Mixed Reality (MR) experiences

Mixed reality (MR) provides new opportunities for creative and innovative learning. MR supports the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real-time (MacCallum & Jamieson, 2017). The MR continuum links both virtual and augmented reality, whereby virtual reality (VR) enables learners to be immersed within a completely virtual world, while augmented reality (AR) blend the real and the virtual world. MR embraces the spectrum between the real and the virtual; the mix of the virtual and real worlds may vary depending on the application. The integration of MR into education provides specific affordances which make it specifically unique in supporting learning (Parson & MacCallum, 2020; Bacca, Baldiris, Fabregat, Graf & Kinshuk, 2014). These affordance enable students to support unique opportunities to support learning and develop 21st-century learning capabilities (Schrier, 2006; Bower, Howe, McCredie, Robinson, & Grover, 2014). In general, most integration of MR in the classroom tend to be focused on students being the consumers of these experiences. However by enabling student to create their own experiences enables a wider range of learning outcomes to be incorporated into the learning experience. By enabling student to be creators and designers of their own MR experiences provides a unique opportunity to integrate learning across the curriculum and supports the develop of computational thinking and stronger digital skills. The integration of student-created artefacts has particularly been shown to provide greater engagement and outcomes for all students (Ananiadou & Claro, 2009). In the past, the development of student-created MR experiences has been difficult, especially due to the steep learning curve of technology adoption and the overall expense of acquiring the necessary tools to develop these experiences. The recent development of low-cost mobile and online MR tools and technologies have, however, provided new opportunities to provide a scaffolded approach to the development of student-driven artefacts that do not require significant technical ability (MacCallum & Jamieson, 2017). Due to these advances, students can now create their own MR digital experiences which can drive learning across the curriculum. This presentation explores how teachers at two high schools in NZ have started to explore and integrate MR into their STEAM classes. This presentation draws on the results of a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project, investigating the experiences and reflections of a group of secondary teachers exploring the use and adoption of mixed reality (augmented and virtual reality) for cross-curricular teaching. The presentation will explore how these teachers have started to engage with MR to support the principles of student-created digital experiences integrated into STEAM domains.

Micro-credentials

Micro-credentials (MCs) are emerging as a viable form of non-degree qualification as they can offer flexible, inexpensive contents which closely match learners’ needs. The opportunities to gain MCs are increasing and academics involved in online learning are particularly situated to help make, assess and validate MC courses. However, the lack of agreed definitions as to what MCs are can undermine their value and uptake. This presentation attempts to fill this gap by summarizing common features and challenges of MCs. In practice, MCs tend to be offered online (Gallagher, 2018) and are often seen as short courses for learners to reskill or upskill for work (Kato, Galán-Muros & Weko, 2020). Among a large range of courses leading to MCs, the most common are MOOCs. The top five providers in 2019 were Coursera, EdX, Udacity (all US); Future Learn (UK) and SWAYAM (India) (Shah, 2019). Such courses range from general skills (language learning) to more specific ones (coding). The top three courses from the most popular MOOC provider (Coursera) in 2019 were Machine Learning; Learning How to Learn; and the Science of Well-Being. Overall, the most popular courses are business and IT-related (Shah, 2019). The majority of learners who have been awarded MCs via MOOCs “tend to be relatively well-educated, male, and within the core-working age group (25-54)” (Kato, Galán-Muros & Weko, 2020, p. 23). Not enough data is yet available as to what degree these learners have found MCs are beneficial, either professionally or personally. A further question to be asked is to what extent MCs can reach out to non-traditional learners who can take advantage of these types of lifelong, alternative learning opportunities. One key challenge is that there are few validating frameworks that MCs fit in to. This can cause problems for both learners and potential employers as it is difficult to demonstrate what exact values MCs offer and to answer the crucial question: “Are MCs going to be useful?” This is further complicated as MCs also vary widely in terms of duration, modes of assessment, and whether they can lead to further qualifications or not. In order to overcome these challenges governments are establishing criteria for MCs. Perhaps the leading agency in this area is New Zealand’s Qualifications Authority; and Australia, the EU and the US have also all created various MC models. The OECD has also produced a working paper (Kato, Galán-Muros & Weko, 2020) to guide policy makers as to what MCs are. This paper uses the term “alternative credentials” and includes certificates, digital badges and MCs within that term. It defines alternative credentials as ones “that are not recognised as standalone formal educational qualifications by relevant national education authorities”. In sum, the term MCs is a contested one and there is an ongoing debate as to how they could develop in the future. What is not contested is that the number of online courses leading to MCs will continue to grow and so academics working in online education can influence their content, quality and form.

Rapid transformation of work integrated learning from the farm to virtual reality

All veterinary schools in Australasia require students in the first half of their course to complete work integrated learning (WIL) during vacation time on a range of animal enterprises. This allows students to gain an understanding of how the enterprises function on a day to day basis and compare to the theoretical training that students receive on-campus. The time on-property required is equivalent to 60 days of work with a requirement to visit several enterprises (AVBC, 2016). COVID-19 required immediate cessation of all on-property placements. Given the limited number of holiday weeks available for WIL we developed an on-line experiential program to support student learning. The backbone of the online WIL experience relied on previously developed or developing virtual reality (VR) farm resources; the 4DVirtual Farm and DookieVR (Barber etal, 2016). These resources allow students to visit properties via multiple 360 images through time on a property, allowing virtual travel through time and place to see what happens on an enterprise throughout a year. They also integrate environmental variables and both 360 and standard video to provide access to further information. They are viewable using mobile phones, laptop and desktop systems as well as VR viewers. The basic VR resource allows students to take their own tour around the property however the week of experiential learning was planned to reinforce the students’ ability to see what happens on the individual property throughout the year. This compares to an individual property visit where a student gains more “hands-on” insight for a much more limited timespan of the year, usually 1-2 weeks. The week of synchronous, experiential learning used Zoom as the primary tool to allow communication between staff and students with content managed on the learning management system, Canvas. The standard format for each day involved an initial entire class group session, mostly in didactic information transfer from staff to students and then a mixture of small group, full class or individual tasks. Assessment of content understanding was evaluated on a regular basis using multiple choice questions or word responses using PollEverywhere. The large class group of 100-250 students broke into small virtual rooms of 6 to 8 students. Each day this small student group had a task to complete and submit via Feedback Fruits, which then allocated individual students to provide written feedback on the group report by the next day. Time was allocated for students to review these reports both individually and then to discuss the multiple reports that group members were assessing and submit feedback. In addition, each small group reported on a relevant name to the veterinary industry, either from current or historical times. A short video detailing the link of this name to the veterinary industry was posted to Flipgrid for both staff and other students to review. Student understanding of the week was measured at the commencement and completion of the week using an online multiple choice quiz as well as receiving student feedback by an online survey. This presentation will cover the background, development and design of the week and associated material. References AVBC (2016), Standard 9.3 Extra Mural Studies (EMS or Workplace Learning), page 32, Australasian Veterinary Boards Council, https://avbc.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/documents/public/AVBCStandardsAug2016.pdf Barber S, Hallein E, Shallcross D, Weston J, Jacobson C, Bramley E, Celi P, McGowan M (2016), Final report: Development of 4D farms to improve student learning and safety, Office of Learning and Teaching https://ltr.edu.au/resources/ID12_2365_Barber_Report_2016.pdf

‘Unfreezing’ traditional teaching

Teaching online is not an unfamiliar phenomenon for university lecturers evidenced by the rapid rise in the number of those who “want to teach online”, “have been told to teach online” and “are training and encouraging others to teach online” (Ko & Rossen, 2017:xx). Never-the-less, the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 caught many teachers from elementary to tertiary level unprepared and in some cases led to the collapse of educational systems in countries around the world (Mishra, Gupta & Shree, 2020). Moving lessons online, creating virtual classrooms, accessing appropriate software and online tools, as well as being competent in the use of them within a very short time period not only required “adjustment” but also had a “mental health impact” on both the educators and the students (Etchells et al, 2020). Attempts have been made to assess the success with which lecturers have been able to transition their classes to online. A survey of students in the United States (USC Center for the Digital Future, 2020), for example, asked about their remote learning experience during the pandemic and found that only around one-third enjoyed it better than in-class instruction. In addition, almost one half of them felt they learned less online than in person, and only around half of the students believed that their teachers were good at adapting their courses for online construction. This raises the question of whether educational institutions and their staff were up to speed enough with online learning to make this sudden transition. For those running practical teaching programmes that require face-to-face contact, the thrust into the isolation of Covid-19 lock-down was most challenging. This presentation documents our learning experiences as two Auckland University of Technology lecturers whose respective programmes involving journalism practice and student collaborative movie-making were caught midway by lockdown when the government commanded us to “Stay Home, Save Lives”. Viewing our teaching experiences through the lens of change management theory (Lewin, 1958) that divides the process of change into the three stages of unfreezing – changing– refreezing, we discuss how the unfreezing of our standard methods of instruction forced us into change where we had no other choice but to learn to adapt our courses and teach online. We provide insights in this presentation as to how well the new methods of the virtual classroom worked for us based on the resources we were given, and whether they are now refrozen and maintained in our classes for the future, or will we simply change back to our original methods. We also offer feedback from the students and their experiences of our lessons in lockdown.