VIRTUAL EVENT: Academic work and careers online and offline

Programme

'Like having a little conference every day': MOOCs, universities and engaging professional education

Can we grasp higher education’s newfound interest in online learning to create a different model for knowledge exchange with professionals?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are online learning at scale, in many forms from talking-head lectures to vibrant communities of practice where participants exchange knowledge and experience with their professional peers. 

More effective design of MOOCs, foregrounding purposeful discussion, can better support professional learners. A shift towards MOOCs for interactive, social learning could change popular understanding of what MOOCs can do. 

This presentation discusses findings from in-depth interviews with MOOC participants using an adapted repertory grid technique. In online, participant-led interactive sessions, interviewees were asked about their positive and negative experience of social learning and interactivity, comparing a range of MOOCs and other online learning. It will consider the role of educators, the importance of discussion prompts and participants’ experience of learning from peers. 

Challenging career models in higher education: the rise of the ‘concertina career’

How do staff see their opportunities and shape their work in a difficult UK academic labour market?

The ‘concertina’ career is characterised by an expansion and contraction of activity, as well as a stretching and compression of timescales, according to circumstances. Career timelines and promotion criteria assume a unitary direction of travel, but individuals also explore, interpret and stretch the spaces along the given route, and discover new spaces in which they accumulate career credit.

As part of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) inquiry into the future higher education workforce, researchers collected data from the same set of academics in two sets of interviews (2017-18 and 2019-20), and surveyed all academic staff in five of the eight case study institutions in 2018/19.

The survey component of the research sheds more comprehensive light on the origins and potential destinations of academic staff within and outside higher education institutions and focuses especially on how previous experience may influence current career tracks, and whether and why academic staff may leave higher education in future for other sectors.

Speakers

Eileen Kennedy

Eileen Kennedy is a Senior Research Associate with CGHE based at UCL Knowledge Lab, where she is exploring the transformative potential of digital technologies in higher education. Her research focuses on developing learning design tools, scaling up online collaborative learning (e.g. through MOOCs) and researching the experience of learning online.

Diana Laurillard

Diana Laurillard is Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies, UCL Knowledge Lab. Formerly Head of the e-Learning Strategy Unit at Department for Education and Skills (2002-5), and former Pro-Vice Chancellor for learning technologies at the Open University (1995-2002). Her recent book is 'Teaching as a Design Science', Routledge. She is researching MOOCs, learning design, and digital games for dyscalculia.

William Locke

William Locke is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, International Co-Investigator for CGHE (having been its Deputy Director 2015-19) and Joint Editor of 'Policy Reviews in Higher Education'. His research interests include the governance and management of higher education institutes, the changing academic profession, higher education policy and policy-making.

Giulio Marini

Giulio Marini is currently Research Associate at the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) at UCL Institute of Education. Giulio’s research looks at governance of higher education, and careers and working conditions in academia. He has previously worked at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy), CIPES, Porto (Portugal), The National Research Council (Italy) and Sapienza University (Italy), where he got his PhD in Methodology for Social Sciences. 

Celia Whitchurch

Celia Whitchurch is an Associate Professor at UCL Institute of Education and Principal Investigator on CGHE Project 3.2 entitled 'The Future Higher Education Workforce in Locally and Globally Engaged Higher Education Institutions'.

Links

• Centre for Global Higher Education
• Department of Education, Practice and Society

Image: Retha Ferguson via Pexels