Digital education is one of a number of terms (including e-learning, technologyenhanced learning, online learning, blended learning) that have seen increasing use in educational discourse and in the branding of educational programmes. A lack of conceptual clarity around such terms makes it easier for different groups to appropriate them in the service of conflicting agendas. In this paper, I discuss the pros and cons of the tendency to distinguish between digital and non-digital, arguing that while concepts like Bdigital education^can be useful insofar as they encourage people to look closer at the design and practice of teaching and learning, they become problematic when used to close down ideas or attribute essential properties to technology. Considering the implications for understanding institutional initiatives, student practices, and the interplay between teaching design and orchestration, I argue for a postdigital perspective in which all education-even that which is considered to lie outside of digital educationtakes account of the digital and non-digital, material and social, both in terms of the design of educational activities and in the practices that unfold in the doing of those activities.

Abstract‘Pedagogy first’ has become a mantra for educators, supported by the metaphor of the ‘pedagogical horse’ driving the ‘technological cart’. Yet putting technology first or last separates it from pedagogy, making us susceptible to technological or pedagogical determinism (i.e. where technology is seen either as the driving force of change or as a set of neutral tools). In this paper, I present a model of entangled pedagogy that encapsulates the mutual shaping of technology, teaching methods, purposes, values and context. Entangled pedagogy is collective, and agency is negotiated between teachers, students and other stakeholders. Outcomes are contingent on complex relations and cannot be determined in advance. I then outline an aspirational view of how teachers, students and others can collaborate whilst embracing uncertainty, imperfection, openness and honesty, and developing pedagogical knowledge that is collective, responsive and ethical. Finally, I discuss implications for evaluation and research, arguing that we must look beyond isolated ideas of technologies or teaching methods, to the situated, entangled combinations of diverse elements involved in educational activity.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. COVID-19 is forcing many Universities to close for some time and programmes for medical, allied health, and nursing students are moving online. Based on our extensive collective experience teaching a variety of health professionals in clinical and academic settings, and of online learning, we want to question assumptions that seem apparent to us in some of the discourse around "moving teaching online". We write from the perspective of a team delivering a postgraduate programme for professionals working full time (in most cases) from around the world and different professions; however, we believe the issues raised are applicable to online education in general. There is a practical purpose to confronting these assumptions. It is our aim to help those delivering health professions education avoid some pitfalls that we think would result in poor quality experiences for all concerned. We do not believe that online education is inherently poorer nor, indeed, fundamentally distinct from on-campus education. However, there are certainly important considerations for learning to teach online, and we attempt to highlight some of these. We also provide some advice to those new to teaching online based on our experience, research, and the literature.

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Current evaluation of higher education programmes is driven primarily by economic concerns, with a resulting imbalance towards the summative assessment of teaching and away from faculty development. These agendas are advanced through datafication, in which the transformation of social and material activity into digital data is producing a narrow, instrumental view of education. Taking a postdigital perspective on contemporary practices of evaluation outlined in higher education literature, we argue for an ecological view, in which evaluation must take account of those aspects of teaching, learning, and educational context, missing from digital data. We position quality as distributed across teacher, student, institution and context, arguing for the crossfertilization of diverse kinds of data and non-datafied understandings, along with greater involvement of teachers and students in ways that enhance their agency, and develop their evaluative judgement of the quality of educational practices. We conclude that datafied practices can complement expert judgement when situated within a trusting, formative environment, and informed by an understanding of both pedagogy and technology, and clarity of educational purpose.