3 ways higher education can become more hopeful in the post-pandemic, post-AI era

Below is a republished version of an article that Shandell Houlden and I published in The Conversation last week, summarizing some of the themes that arose in our Speculative Learning Futures podcast.

3 ways higher education can become more hopeful in the post-pandemic, post-AI era

The future of education is about more than technology.
(Pexels/Emily Ranquist)

Shandell Houlden, Royal Roads University and George Veletsianos, Royal Roads University

We live at a time when universities and colleges are facing multiplying crises, pressures and changes.

From the COVID-19 pandemic and budgetary pressures to generative artificial intelligence (AI) and climate catastrophe, the future of higher education seems murky and fragmented — even gloomy.

Student mental health is in crisis. University faculty in our own research from the early days of the pandemic told us that they were “juggling with a blindfold on.” Since that time, we’ve also heard many echo the sentiment of feeling they’re “constantly drowning,” something recounted by researchers writing about a sense of precarity in universities in New Zealand, Australia and the western world.

In this context, one outcome of the pandemic has been a rise in discourses about specific, quite narrowly imagined futures of higher education. Technology companies, consultants and investors, for example, push visions of the future of education as being saved by new technologies. They suggest more technology is always a good thing and that technology will necessarily make teaching and learning faster, cheaper and better. That’s their utopian vision.

Some education scholars have been less optimistic, often highlighting the failures of utopian thinking. In many cases, their speculation about the future of education, especially where education technology is concerned, often looks bleak. In these examples, technology often reinforces prejudices and is used to control educators and learners alike.

A picture of a collage showing a Facebook-jammed image that says 'You've been Zucked'
Amid accelerating technology, what kind of future do we imagine for higher education?
Annie Spratt/Unsplash

In contrast to both utopian and grim futures, for a recent study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we sought to imagine more hopeful and desirable higher education futures. These are futures emerging out of justice, equity and even joy. In this spirit, we interviewed higher education experts for a podcast entitled Speculative Learning Futures.

When asked to imagine more hopeful futures, what do experts propose as alternatives? What themes emerge in their work? Here are three key ideas.

It’s about more than technology

First, these experts reiterated that the future of education is about more than technology. When we think about the future of education we can sometimes imagine it as being tied entirely to the internet, computers and other digital tools. Or we believe AI in education is inevitable — or that all learning will be done through screens, maybe with robot teachers!

But as Jen Ross, senior lecturer in digital education observes, technology doesn’t solve all our problems. When we think about education futures, technology alone does not automatically help us create better education or healthier societies. Social or community concerns like social inequities will continue to affect who can access education, our education systems’ values and how we are shaped by technologies.

As many researchers have argued, including us, the pandemic highlighted how differences in access to the internet and computers can reinforce inequities for students.

AI can also reinforce inequities. Depending on the nature of data AI is trained with, the use of AI can perpetuate harmful biases in classrooms.

Ross notes in her recent book that social or community concerns shape how our societies could imagine education.
Researchers involved with Indigenous-led AI are tackling questions around how Indigenous knowledge systems could push AI to be more inclusive.

Policymakers and educators should consider technology as one part of a toolkit of responses for making informed decisions about what technologies align with more equitable and just education futures.

Emphasizing connection and diversity

In line with thinking about more than technology, the second theme is a reminder that the future of education is about healthy social connection and social justice. Researchers emphasize fostering diversity and celebrating diverse expressions of strengths and needs.

Experts envision and call for education that is more sustainable for everyone, not just a privileged few. Kathrin Otrel-Cass, professor at University of Graz, and Mark Brown, Ireland’s first chair in digital learning and director of the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University, suggest this means teaching and learning should be at a slower pace for students and faculty alike.

In this vision, policymakers must support education systems that regard the whole learner as an individual with specific physical, mental, emotional and intellectual needs, and as a member of multiple communities.

Acknowledge the goodness of the present

There’s lots to be gained by noting and supporting all the great things related to education that are happening in the present, since possible futures emerge from what now exists.

As two podcast guests, Eamon Costello, professor at Dublin City University and collaborator Lily (Prajakta) Girme, noted, we need to acknowledge the good work of educators and learners in the small wins that happen every day.

In 2019, researchers Justin Reich and José Ruipérez-Valiente wrote: “new education technologies are rarely disruptive but instead are domesticated by existing cultures and systems. Dramatic expansion of educational opportunities to under-served populations will require political movements that change the focus, funding and purpose of higher education; they will not be achieved through new technologies alone.”

These are words worth repeating.

 

 

Shandell Houlden, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Education and Technology, Royal Roads University and George Veletsianos, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Special issue CFP: Decolonizing Digital Learning: Equity Through Intentional Course Design

Below is a call for proposals for a special issue of Distance Education on the topic of Decolonizing Digital Learning: Equity Through Intentional Course Design. If you’re interesting in this area, you may also be interested in the special issue on Higher Education Futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology my colleagues and I are co-editing (submissions due by the end of October).

Decolonizing Digital Learning: Equity Through Intentional Course Design

Krystle Phirangee, University of Toronto, krystle.phirangee@utoronto.ca;

Lorne Foster, York University, lfoster@yorku.ca

What’s the purpose of lived experience in assessments? How do we even grade lived experience? These were some of the questions asked by faculty during a departmental presentation focusing on assessment and course design in the ChatGPT era. It got us thinking about the digital divide and how much of the literature focuses on unequal access to digital technology and skills. Whereas the divide seems to go beyond access to impact what counts as knowledge and how it is represented and reshaped by power in distance learning modes.

When COVID-19 hit, many educational institutions pivoted to emergency remote teaching (ERT), which allowed learners to learn from anywhere at any time; making open, flexible, and distance learning models even more necessary in the education system. However, ERT amplified the digital divide and inequities among learners during the pandemic. Some governments tried to address this gap within their jurisdictions by giving devices to students who needed them but the lack of access to the appropriate supports (i.e., high-speed internet) and quality use of the technology (i.e., knowing how to navigate the technology) still caused disadvantages for students in completing their online work or attending online classes, thus limiting them from sharing their lived experience. In addition, the digital divide is now prevalent in online exam proctoring software, with the software disproportionately targeting marginalized students. There is also a need for caution when selecting and using online meeting tools, such as Zoom, since personal data from users were sent to Facebook and some classes were hacked by trolls posting offensive and hateful content (Peters et al., 2020). These realities highlight that technologies are not neutral in their development and deployment and as a result could cause unexpected disruptions and inequities in education.

Nevertheless, how these technologies are used in open, flexible, and distance learning in terms of course design and engaging students can make a difference (Dron, 2022), and has proven to be vital in minimizing such inequities. During the pandemic, many educators experimented with instructional strategies and assessments in open, flexible, and distance learning to further support learning, which also helped to inform new learning models. Research has shown that although many like open, flexible, and distance learning due to its convenience of learning from anywhere at any time, the distance between peers and the instructor has contributed to feelings of isolation and disconnection (Chan & Lee, 2010; Rush, 2015; Mbukusa et al., 2017)  In addition, identity incongruence, which refers to when a student’s identity clashes with or does not fit in with the group, has also been shown to be another contributing factor to such feelings among students (Hughes, 2007; Phirangee & Malec, 2017). Whereas identity congruence exists when students have a strong sense of community (SoC) that is a feeling of belonging and being accepted; having a strong SoC motivates students to participate more in their courses and thus lowers feelings of isolation and disconnection. This highlights the importance of using an equity lens in course design to minimize disengagement.

Others have harnessed the digital landscape to revitalize and preserve a culture to teach and pass on to the next generation. Many Indigenous communities have harnessed the digital landscape to revitalize and preserve their ways of knowing, languages, music, and stories through cellphone recordings, websites, an open language archived community and much more since resources to learn Indigenous languages continue to be limited due to the lack of trained teachers and materials that follow external standards and Western pedagogies (Meighan, 2021). There is now digital content created by and for Indigenous peoples, which has contributed to the ongoing decolonization of the digital landscape (Meighan, 2021). Therefore, by “addressing the inequities that may be affecting the learning of students in our classrooms, we can choose to design courses that make learning more accessible and obtainable to all students” (Woodford, 2022, p. 11).

Despite the digital divide needing improvements for both physical and non-physical access and equitable representation in knowledge, it is beginning to narrow, with the decolonizing of the digital landscape (Meighan, 2021). Decolonizing pedagogy requires that we critically wonder about knowledge and how we approach knowledge in ways that reinforce the “monolithic, monocultural, mono-epistemological academic traditions” (Biermann, 2011, p.386). This approach is concerned with what counts as knowledge and how it is represented and reshaped by power. As Kanu (2006) noted, we must decolonize the space of education, but to do this, we must decolonize the mind; in other words, we must be open to negotiating our own biases to develop a shared understanding. Digital learning and its associated pedagogies, “can help to realize higher education as an entry into new spaces and cultures of reasoning and understanding. They call, though, not just for a rare imagination on the part of the teacher but a preparedness to recede into the background and to tolerate a heightened level of pedagogical risk” (Peters et al., 2020, p.14).

This special issue aims to identify and examine specific decolonizing instructional strategies and intentional course design approaches used to create a more equitable open, flexible, and distance learning environment to minimize the inequities caused by the digital divide. The themes of the special issue will include, but are not limited to:

  • Uses of technology or its features to enhance learner’s sense of belonging;
  • Instructional strategies to foster identity congruence;
  • Culturally responsive teaching;
  • The role of lived experiences in assessments;
  • Using an equity lens to design online courses;
  • Leveraging universal design for learning principles;
  • Using educational technology platforms within distance learning to decolonize(dis)ability;
  • Indigenous knowledge and reclaiming diverse non-western centric epistemologies in distance learning;
  • Adopting a blended learning approach (i.e., blended, hyflex, and hybrid) to address student disconnection and inequities;

Three ways in which universities are unprepared to support faculty targeted by online harassment

Continuing our research into the technology-facilitated harassment and abuse that faculty members face, colleagues and I recently turned our attention to institutional policies and interviews with academic leaders to understand the ways in which institutions are (un)prepared to deal with faculty harassment. We published our results in Higher Education (which is a journal that I’ve been meaning to publish in for a while), and identified three areas of unpreparedness:

  • first, institutions focus on physical safety over non-contact harms (issue: the harms are numerous and multidimensional);
  • second, they envision perpetrators to be named, local, and part of the campus community (issue: anonymous harassment);
  • third, the reporting process is cumbersome and outpaced by the speed and frequency with which TFVA occurs.

These findings suggest areas for policy improvement and expanding academic leaders’ knowledge around the harassment that their faculty face.

You can find this paper here: Gosse, C., O’Meara, V., Hodson, J., & Veletsianos, G. (in press). Too rigid, too big, too slow: Institutional readiness to protect and support faculty from technology facilitated violence and abuse. Higher Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01043-7  or preprint (pdf).

Traxler’s review of our book: Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education

Johh Traxler wrote a very kind review of Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education, the open access book that Suzan, Chris, and I co-edited. In it, he begins by noting that he is concerned of a growing chasm in digital education, as

there seem to be two parallel universes of learning, of two different sets of ideas about how we learn, what we learn, who we learned it from, and we show we have learnt it: one inside higher education, the other in the world outside. On one side are the closed systems around the dedicated EdTech systems in higher education, and around the different cadres and professions that develop, sell, procure, install, and deploy them to deliver the formal curriculum. On the other side are the ever fluid and informal groups and relationships that exploit social media and Web 2.0 to produce ideas, images, information, identities, and opinions, and to share, store, transform, merge, and discard them.

After reviewing individual chapters, he concludes that each chapter populates the spaces in the chasm and “makes an extraordinary contribution, tackling the chasm from a surprising variety of angles and should be valued and explored accordingly.”

I’m filing this into the “positive words” folder, which is a folder that I refer to when I need reminders that gloomy days are temporary.

So very tired of predictions about AI in education…

By people who aren’t AIEd experts, education technology experts, education experts, and the like.

Case in point: “AI likely to spell end of traditional school classroom, leading [computer science] expert says.”

I appreciate cross disciplinary engagement as much as I love guacamole (which is to say, a lot), but I’d also appreciate that we stop wasting our time on these same unfulfilled prophecies year after year, decade after decade.

Will AI impact education? In some ways it will, and in others it won’t. Will education shape the ways AI comes to be used in classrooms? In some ways it will, and in others it won’t.

Truth be told, this negotiated relationship isn’t as appealing as DISRUPTION, AVALANCHE, MIND-READING ROBO-TUTOR IN THE SKY, etc, which are words that readers of the history of edtech will recognize.

Are cohort-based course platforms “universities of the future?”

The edtech industry includes numerous learning providers and platforms providing tools, technologies, and resources for course creators to create and sell online courses. These platforms are interesting for very many reasons. What roles do they play in the learning and development ecosystem? How do they measure effectiveness and learning outcomes? What kinds of pedagogical and instructional design practices do they support and advocate for? What education-related claims do they make?

two people working on five laptops. They sit at a table littered with other devices, like phones, headset, and ipads. Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

In a paper we published a few months ago, we examined one such platform because it describes itself as building ‘the university of the future’ and has recently received significant attention and funding. This makes it a compelling case study to better understand the potential roles and risks associated with education platforms operating outside of and alongside more traditional higher education institutions.

We highlight specific concerns about cohort-based platforms. These include lack of transparency, risk of surveillance, lack of adequate financial support for learners, and over-reliance on social media networks as signifiers of educator/instructor qualification (this last one is a big one). Suggested benefits include adaptability, suitability to changing skills needs, and responsiveness to changing environmental scenarios.

The published version of the paper is here, but here’s a pre-print pdf: Veletsianos, G., & Houlden, S. (in press). On the “university of the future”: A critical analysis of cohort-based course platform Maven. Learning, Media, & Technology. 

 

A crowdsourced collection of 101 creative ideas to use AI in education

I recently came across a crowdsourced open educational resource which includes 101 ways that AI can be used in education, ranging anywhere from “ask students to read a paper about AI” to engaging in think-pair-share activities, to creating and interviewing learner personas, to exploring gender biases inherent in the data guiding AI tools.

Overall, an expansive and wonderful resource that you can download at https://zenodo.org/record/8072950

Chrissi Nerantzi, Sandra Abbeglen, Marianna Karatsiori, & Antonio Martínez-Arboleda (Eds.). (2023). 101 creative ideas to use AI in education, A crowdsourced collection (2023 1.0) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8072950

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