Creating Open Online Courses with Learner Representative Partners to Widen Participation in Higher Education

Abstract

Open online courses could provide stepping stones for audiences that are under-represented in higher education (HE). However, there are concerns that these instead proliferate forms of exclusion and do not address known difficulties for widening participation. We explore how organisations that represent the perspectives of particular underserved audiences for HE can act as ‘Learner Representative Partners’ to support the creation of appropriate courses and to highlight practices that exclude. Six course development processes where a university worked with different partners are analysed using interviews, documentation of resource use, and data on learner behaviour. The analysis utilises previously identified challenges to widening participation and collaborative course creation. Getting partners to directly engage in authoring the course was particularly beneficial but all partners prompted critical thought and greater understanding of the intended audiences. We suggest principles to support such partnerships effectively. These include adapting to a variable capacity of partners to contribute, to encourage reuse or creation of resources by partners, and to facilitate partners to feel confident in expressing their views.

Decision Making in Shifts to Online Teaching: Analysing Reflective Narratives from Staff Working in African Higher Educational Institutions

“…These approaches can create tensions due to the different backgrounds and roles of staff involved and increased formality and workload compared to a solo course convenor model [4]. Different forms of contributions from diverse staff can enhance online courses and teaching, but there is a need for staff across roles to develop confidence so that these contributions can be effectively made [19].…”

“…Using the concepts of Schön's (1983) reflective practitioner [2], substituting online classes for in-person ones could be seen to be attractive because it allowed staff across roles to make use of more of their existing repertoire of practices, such as timetabling, delivering, or observing lectures, rather than moving to more unfamiliar asynchronous models of teaching. As [4,18,19] highlight, producing courses for asynchronous online teaching is a step into the unknown for many staff and usually requires different roles and collaborative relationships to be established. With time, however, the narratives show growing awareness that this synchronous online model heightens the tensions stated above by demanding students to connect at specific times and with substantial use of data.…”