QAA Focus On Building Learning Communities at a Distance Event

I attended this event to present 'Student Representation for Reps at a Distance: Support, Community and Inclusion' with University colleagues Erin Jackson and Gillian Mackintosh. It was fantastic to share our work with the Online Distance Learning Student Representation Task Group, including the key successes of collating information for students and staff about support for including ODL students in local student representation, as well as our new online training for all Reps which has seen an increase of 169% in engagement with Class Rep training. While we have had great successes, it was also important to the challenges we've encountered in the task group, mainly communicating new processes to staff and creating an online community of Reps across campuses. 

It was really helpful to hear that all universities in Scotland are also struggling with these questions, and it was great seeing examples of things other institutions have tried in order to implement effective student representation for ODL students and those at transnational campuses. Both Heriot-Watt and the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) highlighted the importance of having strong local student representation with Class Reps and Reps for each of their different campuses, and they're working on improving links to Sabbatical Officers working centrally with university management. Both UHI and Robert Gordon University (RGU) have Student Partnership Agreements and have found these very beneficial for making tangible impact on their campuses. It would be good if EUSA also considers creating a Student Partnership Agreement, and if we consider drawing on RGU's great practices of having a monthly ODL-specific newsletter and regular communication via an ODL Facebook group. Furthermore, RGU has found it extremely beneficial having ODL faculty Reps, and at EUSA I think it would be helpful to see if we can include an ODL Section Group Rep in our new democratic structures. This event has provided lots of food for thought about ODL student engagement and student representation, and it will be great to see how developments in the sector evolve. 

Digital Day of Ideas

At the Digital Day of Ideas, it was fantastic to meet many colleagues working in digital humanities or information services. I attended a workshop on using Google Sheets and Google Analytics to analyse discussion data. While I expected that this would be discussion data from virtual learning environments, this ended up being a very techy session but I was able to use the code provided to extract the 253 tweets on #studentengagement in the last seven days and map the location of the tweets. While this was not particularly relevant to my work, it was interesting to think more broadly about how Twitter data and other digital data is used more widely. 

This theme was explored more deeply in Karen Gregory's keynote 'Conceptualising Digital Sociology as Critical, Interdisciplinary Practice'. For me, this keynote highlighted how individuals are becoming co-producers of their own digital data (via social media, FitBits, biometric data, data from wearable technology, etc). I took from this the need to engage students in discussions about  how their data is being used, how to evaluate trustworthy sources, and how to engage critically with the  digital world which is evolving around us. 

For much more on the Digital Day of Ideas, visit http://www.digital.hss.ed.ac.uk/.