Reflections on HECU8

Higher Education Close Up (HECU) #8 was a wonderful conference that examined the theme of social justice in depth and from multiple angles and perspectives. Bringing together higher education researchers from the UK, South Africa, Australia, the U.S., and beyond, this conference wrestled with difficult questions about the purpose of the university. We discussed the extent to which we are researching how to develop higher education institutions that are socially just and/or whether higher education can lead to the development of a more socially just world. This conference raised so many deep and important questions about social justice and higher education that will take us all quite some time to think through, but below I have attempted to summarise some of my reflections from the past few days.

Jenni Case set the scene with her keynote asking whether we are asking the right, forward-thinking, impactful education questions to fully understand the current context that is rapidly changing. She highlighted how 'close up' research is undervalued, and how academics need to not just write opinion nieces, blog posts, and social media posts that are short-term and focused on the moment at hand; we need to not lose sight of the long-term aims and conduct forward-thinking research about social justice in higher education. Similarly, Monica McLean suggested that higher education is of diminishing importance for disadvantaged groups, and students from lower socioeconomic status are more likely to enroll in lower-ranked and lower prestige universities. She highlighted the need to understand in a nuanced way what epistemic injustice looks like, and also what justice and spaces for hope look like in within higher education.

During the three days of the conference there was a range of presentations about inequalities in higher education, as well as hope by seeing some very positive projects. For example, Kirsty Finn highlighted that some student mobility focuses on maintaining or reproducing class, power, and privilege. She showed that this is seen especially within discourses of cosmopolitanism about students who have the ability to move within the country or around the world to pursue educational opportunities. However, she used the capabilities approach to try to shift the debate about student mobility and show the advantages for student commuters who can see their long commutes as opportunities to create physical and symbolic distance between their home and university which allows them to reflect on ideas during their time commuting. Other talks looking at inequalities in higher education included Kelly Coat who is researching gendered inequalities of prestige for mid-career female academics, Samuel Dent who is researching support for and recognition of students who care for children, and Joanne Doyle who is exploring the challenges of bringing higher education learning initiatives to incarcerated students in Australia and the benefits when they have fewer instances of being re-incarcerated. In addition, research from Kingston university showed attainment gaps for white and black students although there is hope because they have introduced successful ways of developing students' social capital which appear to have improved attainment rates for all students.

Paul Ashwin and Rachel Sweetman's talk on the stability of higher education ranking systems that reproduce prestige was also fascinating, and they suggested more socially just measures of teaching quality. They highlighted the importance of looking at students' perceptions of their learning experiences and their reports of whether transformative learning takes place in their classrooms. They also highlighted the public perception of precision in ranking systems, but they showed that this is not the case in reality so it is more advantageous to use blunt measures of teaching quality so that the public can more easily recognise the obvious benefits and limitations of university ranking systems.

Another theme of the conference was the importance of developing strong student-teacher relationships in socially just higher education that minimizes inequalities. Her her keynote, Jan McArthur highlighted that self-realisation and social inclusion are interconnected, encouraging both students and teachers to give and receive in learning and teaching. She emphasised three aspects of mutual recognition in higher education: love, rights, and merit. This included emotional support to develop self-confidence, equal treatment including cognitive respect and moral responsibility that encourages self-respect, and social solidarity that develops self-esteem by contributing to society. She questioned, 'if assessment is so important, why can't it be more socially just?' And highlighted lack of trust and honest in assessment from the plagiarism industry's effect on assessment to inappropriate emphasis on knowledge that priviledges economic value (such as employability). Jan stated that, to promote social justice in higher education, we need to have assessment that promotes self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. Furthermore, Jan called for social justice work in higher education that to be in conversation with the world as it is currently, and as it might be if it is indeed socially just.

(photo from my presentation is with thanks to Vicki Trowler)

In alignment with this, I did clearly see a case for hope. I presented on how I see co-creation of the curriculum as an opportunity to promote a social justice purpose of higher education: 

• by creating inclusive and safe spaces for students and academics to work in partnership, 
• by increasing student and staff engagement with learning and teaching, and 
• by modeling democratic engagement and social justice in the classroom with the hope that what is learnt can be taken forward to tackle complex global problems and inequalities.

See my conference paper Co-Creation of the Curriculum and Social Justice: Changing the Nature of Student-Teacher Relationships in Higher Education. While on the surface there seem to be differences between each of our different contexts, I also saw strong similarities and that we can learn from each other as individuals are working in South Africa is to de-colonize the curriculum, in Australia to embed cultural competence in the curriculum, and in the UK and the U.S.to diversify and internationalise the curriculum (instigated by the 'why is my curriculum white?' campaign in the UK and Black Lives Matter in the U.S.). As Paul Ashwin reflected at the end of the conference, the curriculum is not natural since there are many choices and clear power dynamics at play within it, so it's important to be transparent about those choices and their impact. There is lots more to do and more 'close up' research needed, but it's important to understand fully the challenges and risks so that we can to try to reduce inequalities and create a more socially just world. I left this conference with many more questions than answers, but that is extremely positive since it was such a valuable experience to be part of this conference and emerging discussions about social justice and higher education.

Tips for Creating Open Badges

After I first heard about Open Badges two summers ago, I was keen to adopt them into my work in academic engagement at Edinburgh University Students’ Association and over this time the project has been extremely successful. Open Badges are flexible, free, digital forms of accreditation that are full of information (metadata) about what individuals have done to earn them. They are open source and hundreds of organisations and companies around the world use them. The Open Badge scheme I set up at Edinburgh University Students’ Association was the first Scottish higher education scheme, but now increasing numbers of universities across the UK and around the world are adopting them – the more Open Badges are used, the more widely recognised and valuable they will become.

This past year I have tried to share my experiences of setting up an Open Badge scheme with as many people as possible within the higher education community. I have published a case study about my experiences of setting up and piloting Open Badges, led workshops at conferences to help others learn how to incorporate Open Badges into their own work, and responded to many enquiries from individuals across the country.

I now want to consolidate all of my tips in one place, so keep reading to see my advice!

Clarify Your Aims: How Will Open Badges Benefit Students and How Will they Benefit Staff?
I have found that Open Badges have a large number of benefits, but it’s important to be clear about how they benefit students (i.e., why they should bother earning them) and how they benefit staff at your organisation (i.e., why it’s worth the effort to develop them). Below are examples of benefits relating to the support I give to Class Reps at the Students’ Association.

Benefits for Students:

• Better understanding all aspects of the role, and serving as stepping stones to the Edinburgh award for representing students
• Reflecting on and documenting their work
• Sharing best practices with Reps in other schools who may be working on similar issues
• Sharing their work & successes with the students they represent (see examples of anonymised blog posts on our Schools pages in the ‘news’ tab for each)
• Earning open badges and adding them to their LinkedIn profiles

Benefits for the Students’ Association:

• Fewer questions about the Class Rep role and, in particular, what activities are part of the Edinburgh Award for Reps
• Learning more about the local work of Reps in their School (there are over 2,000 Reps at Edinburgh University who work locally within subject areas and Schools)
• Learning more about the impact of the student Rep role on students’ personal and professional development
• Having access to fantastic blog posts that we can include on our Schools webpages
• Providing a new form of recognition for our Reps who are volunteers (see more in the sparqs accreditation report – my example of Open Badges is on pages 10- 12)

Think About the Bigger Picture: Develop Clear Criteria and a Framework for Your Badges
While you can create a one-off Open Badge, it’s best to think about the bigger picture: will your Open Badges be part of a framework for your activity, or within a bigger framework with your organisation? You should have a think about what activities you want to incentivise students to take part in and make sure this fits in with the benefits you aim to have for your scheme. If others within your organisation also offer Open Badges, how will your scheme fit in (separately or together?) and will it be the same level of difficulty to earn badges offered by different areas of your organisation?

For Class Reps, you can see the image above of the many activities we see as part of the Class Rep role. When students earn three badges in one category, they will earn that category-level badge. When they earn all three category-level badges, they will earn the Class Rep Gold Badge. Based on feedback from students we didn’t create a bronze, silver, and gold scheme since students didn’t like the idea of going from all being equal to suddenly being in a tiered scheme. We wanted to give Class Reps lots of choice and flexibility so we developed these broader categories.

For the criteria, we usually required students to use a blog post to explain: what they did and what the impact was for themselves and/or others. For example, in the Implementing Change badge acknowledges the Class Reps who schedule individual meetings with University staff members to bring their peers’ concerns forward and find potential solutions. Students will have to write up a brief report on their work implementing change, including:                      

• the problems they raised with the staff member                                                   
• the solutions they proposed     
• staff response and action                                                                         
• how the Rep communicated with other students to let them know about the positive changes that were implemented (or the reasons why the idea could not be implemented)

Learn How the Technology will Work for You
Open Badges can be ‘triggered’ by different things. In my understanding, there are three ways to issue an Open Badge:

• Successful completion of an online quiz or online module (automatic badge release upon minimum threshold grade being achieved – we use this for when students earn over 80% on our Class Rep online training quiz and they earn the online training badge)
• Participation in an event, training, conference, etc. (manual grade centre updates to trigger badges – we use this to input attendance into our virtual learning environment to issue the intermediate training badge)
• Graded blog posts (manual grading is needed here and we have student staff members help with this, but we use a grading scheme as simple such as 0 for not meeting badge criteria and 1 for meeting the criteria and issuing the badge)

There is different technology to issue Open Badges, including many virtual learning environments such as Blackboard and Moddle. You can also use Cred.ly and Wordpress’ Cred.ly plugin, although I’m not familiar with how that works. Edinburgh University uses Blackboard where Open Badges are an Achievement (find them in Course Tools -> Achievements area -> Create Achievement). I’d recommend the ‘milestone’ or ‘completion’ options for Open Badges.

Before setting them up, make sure you have:

• a good name for each badge that students and others outside your organisation (such as employers) can understand
• a description including the criteria needed to earn each Open Badge
• a specific grade centre column to link to each badge (badges will be triggered when grade is equal to or greater than 1 in my case)
• an image for your Open Badge

You can choose one of the existing images in Blackboard or using any technology you can upload your own design for your Open Badge, and make sure to publish the badge to Mozilla so that it can be included in the Mozilla Backpack which aggregates badges earnt from organisations around the world. From my experience, it’s important to have attractive-looking badges or students won’t want to earn them if they don’t look nice.

Don’t Forget the Marketing and Support
It is important to get the marketing right for your Open Badges so you promote them to students by selling the benefits to them, explain what your badges are, and clarify how students can earn them. I developed handouts that I made available at various events I ran, and I also included the handouts in our VLE for Reps so they were all aware of the opportunity to earn Open Badges.

Some students I work with have never written a blog post before and were nervous about that, so I worked with colleagues to develop some optional training sessions. We offered Blogging for Reps with tips about how to write effective online content, engage audiences, and be clear about what you want to say. We also offered a peer support session where Reps would have a go at writing a blog post and give feedback to peers on their drafts. This proved really helpful.

Clarify What Success Means for Your Open Badges
In your scheme, does success mean the quantity of badges students earn or the quality of their engagement? As you will see in the infographic, our Open Badges have had strong impact in the quantitative sense with over 1,300 Reps earning at least one badge (for the online training). However, we were just as interested in the quality of engagement of our Reps, and as you will have seen in the Benefits section above the Open Badges helped Reps reflect on their experiences and helped us learn about their work across the University. We learnt about how they developed communications, change management, and leadership skills as well as much more! See my case study in the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership, and Change for a fuller look at what this qualitative impact meant for us.

Need More Support than I Can Offer?
I hope by sharing my experiences and tips this has helped you to think through how to create your own Open Badges. You can find lots of great resources to help you create them at http://openbadges.org/http://openbadges.org/ and http://www.digitalme.co.uk/.

Telling the Story of Your Research

During the end of last week, I was thrilled to participate in the workshop 'Telling the Story of Your Research' at Moray House Graduate School of Education. This was the culmination of five months of working with my PhD student colleagues Carla, Krystallia, and Rebekah to gain funding, plan, and develop this workshop (see my blog post on our journey). On Thursday, fourteen of us PhD students came together for the first time to reflect on our own PhD journeys and share them with each other.

The first morning started with Michael Williams, our storytelling facilitator and guide, telling us that, 'In the end, you need to tell a good story in your thesis and defence'. We discussed the importance of engaging stories that connect with the audience and allow our stories to resonate with them. Our first activity involved using the metaphor of a tree to have us visualise and draw the outline of our stories. We started with the roots to show our diverse backgrounds and motivations for conducting the PhD. Then we moved on to show the root of our work, including the systems and people supporting our journeys. Next we moved to the leaves to show our aims, the fruit showing where we get our energy and passion, and what nourishes us throughout the journey. Finally, we drew the compost bin of things we have already gotten rid of or want to get rid of (such as anxiety or fears of not being good enough to survive this journey).

Next, we went around the circle one by one to share our personal stories and listen to others' stories about their PhD journey. This was a pivotal part of the workshop, since we went to being individual PhD students in the same workshop to developing a sense of community with trust and support in the room. Since I am a part-time student who is not often at Moray House, I knew some of the participants but I didn't know much about their research. For those who I knew better, I had talked with them or had watched their academic presentation of their work but I didn't know their motivations for undertaking the PhD journey. It was wonderful to hear everyone's story, not selecting just a few people to volunteer, because it helped our group come together knowing that everyone would share their story, and everyone would also listen to and give appreciation for others' stories. We were putting ourselves into the story of our research by showing our personal motivations and sharing our motivations and aims.

Through the sharing of our stories and giving appreciation for others' work, it was wonderful to see themes and synergies arise between our research. Many of us are looking at how to tackle inequalities, inclusivity of diversity, and how to tackle complex problems in today's society by using education. Several of us are also looking at creativity and play in different levels of education, and it was wonderful to hear Patrick's definition that 'creativity is the empowerment of people, allowing their voices to be heard. As I discussed in a previous blog post, creativity and play is a theme that I want to look into more and read up on in my own work. Many of us are working to engage students in their own learning, from the nursery level to primary, secondary, and higher education levels too so it was helpful to hear different perspectives on that. It was courageous that many shared their fears of education not being valued by society or that they don't have what it takes to excel in academia, but it was wonderful to see the hope that all of us have that our work can effect positive change in the world around us.

After the first day of the workshop, I think we all felt excited yet exhausted from the mental work of the day searching inside ourselves to tell our story and listen, sometimes emotionally, to others' stories. We returned for the next day of the workshop with anticipation of new workshop activities helping us to tell our story and to pass through the Hero's Quest. This second day began with a fun activity to help us listen to a partner's story, only asking 'why' and helping them delve deeper into their story. Then, we began role playing the PhD Hero's Quest, with one PhD student making the journey and entering several stages of thoughtful questioning by the others. It was an extremely helpful experience to think of what the viva may entail, and it was also extremely supportive.

Participating in the storytelling workshop was a great experience and I was so glad to see it come together. I developed better connections with my PhD peers, personally by connecting to the story of what drew each of them to their research and also academically by finding connections my their work and my own. I also found it an extremely beneficial experience for stepping back and reflecting on my own journey while practising telling my story and learning how to engage audiences better in future presentations and other situations. I think all of us recognised the clear need for other such workshops that help develop our personal skills as well as our professional skills, promote reflection, and allow us to enhance both our pastoral and academic experience as a PhD student. For me, it drew me into our PhD community and was invaluable in helping me to develop strong connections with my PhD colleagues. I hope that others will organise similar workshops in the future! A massive thank you to the EUSA Schools Fund, EUSA Global Fund, and the Moray House Graduate School for providing the funding to make this possible.