Using educational technology as an institutional teaching and learning improvement strategy?
Increasingly, educational technology is identified as crucial to addressing many scale issues around higher education learning and teaching. However, such projects are often run with the technical project goals achieved but the educational goals unrealised. Further, in an age of austerity, all investments must be closely scrutinised as to their efficacy in meeting their intended goals. To what extent can educational technology be used as a management tool to enable and promote institution-level change in learning and teaching as a strategic goal? This paper reports on use of the Resources, Activity, Support and Evaluation (RASE) model at an Australian university in its move from an incumbent to a new ‘learning management system’ coupled with judicious use of inflection points introduced to drive educational change across a whole institution and to model and report on that change.
Reconstructing Identities in Higher Education: The rise of 'Third Space' professionals
Reconstructing Identities in Higher Education: The Rise of Third Space Professionals draws on studies conducted in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to explore the roles and identities of a growing number of staff associated with broadly based institutional projects such as student life and welfare, widening participation, learning support, community partnership, research and business partnership, and institutional research. Thus, at the same time as professional staff are acquiring academic credentials, some academic staff are moving in a more project-oriented direction. This has effectively created a Third Space between professional and academic spheres in which lateral interactions, involving teams and networks, occur in parallel with formal institutional structures and processes, and give rise to new forms of management and leadership. Yet such developments have tended to occur ‘under the radar’, and have not been fully articulated. The concept of Third Space is offered as a way of exploring the knowledges, relationships, legitimacies and languages that characterise those who work in less boundaried roles, and the implications of these developments for both individuals and institutions. The ability to problematise and accommodate a series of paradoxes and tensions, for instance between formal and more open-ended structures and relationships, would appear to be at the heart of working in Third Space. Individuals also grapple with the fact that Third Space can, at one and the same time, be a safe haven for experimentation and creativity, and also a risky space in which there is likely to be contestation and uncertainty. The text is addressed to professional and academic staff who, by design or default, for long or short periods, find themselves working in Third Space environments; to those to whom such staff may be responsible, including senior management teams; and also to researchers interested in changing identities in higher education.
Content strategy in LibGuides: An exploratory study
Abstract Since its inception in 2007, Springshare's LibGuides has become a popular content management system (CMS) with academic libraries. The challenges of managing LibGuides content through a cohesive content strategy have not been well documented. The researchers conducted a survey of academic libraries that were using the LibGuides platform in Fall 2019 to determine how institutions are managing content challenges. Of 120 respondents, only 53% of the respondents indicated that their institutions had content guidelines that LibGuides authors were expected to follow. The top three most observed elements of these content guidelines were page design (80%), content reuse policies (77%), naming conventions (73%), and navigation (3%). 15% of respondents' institutions did not review guides once they were published. Of those that reviewed guides post-publication, authors (84%) most frequently reviewed their own guides. These findings imply that LibGuides are largely cared for on an honour system. Guidelines tend towards quantifiable elements and omit more abstract concepts.