Exploring dimensions of change: the case of MOOC conceptions

Abstract

During the last 15 years, I have worked as an academic developer. The last ten at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. There, I have encountered many people with a passion for education. They have attended courses and workshops, developed educational projects, conducted the scholarship of teaching and learning, they have written about their work, documented it and have had the very best of intentions on developing their practice. Most often, their work is driven by a desire to improve, and often to explore. At their core, these people are disciplinarians, and not necessarily fully-fledged educators or leaders. My work has been about informing their practice, about driving academic and educational development across campus, and has been about initiating and enabling change in academic, educationally oriented practice. At the same time, higher education in Sweden has witnessed the introduction of the Bologna process. The higher education sector in Sweden has started to charge a tuition fee for some foreign students and the sector is about to enter a new and novel cycle of national, external reviews under the guise of quality assurance. Higher education finds itself in a constant predicament, where things are always in flow and changing, but still tend to stay the same; the same river, but it keeps flowing. This thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of change practice. As an academic developer, I have witnessed many teachers whom, with enthusiasm, wish to change their own practice, only to find that this is easier said than done. This thesis and research project is driven in part by a wish to understand what makes change so difficult but also how people work with the enhancing and changing their practice. Moreover, it is used as an opportunity to reflect on my own, and others' academic development practice, to see how we can better serve the university, and its stakeholders, and to also pursue independent academic research in the context of academic development in higher education. At the same time this thesis and the research work done within, has allowed me an opportunity to take a look at the way a university works when engaging in capacity building and change practice. The title of this thesis is adapted from a collection of short stories, entitled: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. There, the short stories play out in common and ordinary settings. In a similar fashion, the studies in this thesis, and the thesis itself presents a number of snapshots or short stories from the practice of change in a higher education institution.

Educational innovation projects in Dutch higher education: bottom-up contextual coping to deal with organizational challenges

“…This level of unclarity could result in dysfunctional educational crosstalk where these individuals are going in different directions, framing teaching practices based on different ideas (McGrath and Bolander Laksov 2014;McGrath et al 2017). These findings relate to work done by Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016), in which they explain that it is vital to work on the transition that educators go through towards using open online education, especially for awareness and capacity building.…”

Academic developers as brokers of change: insights from a research project on change practice and agency

“…If dialogue was a way of getting unstuck, then lack of dialogue is perhaps best viewed as a way of getting stuck. This is a concern borne out by the findings of Study Three, Change conceptions (McGrath, Stenfors-Hayes, Roxå, & Laksov, 2017), which addresses various stakeholders' conceptions and experiences of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This study focused on the variation of experiences in relation to the many stakeholders that are involved in strategizing, implementing, and running such an initiative at a higher education institution.…”

What’s in a Grade? Teacher Candidates’ Experiences of Grading in Higher Education: A Phenomenographic Study

“…These categories represent qualitatively different ways of experiencing grading in a distinctive and succinct way. The researchers engaged in a form of negotiated consensus, in which the categorisations were compared, discussed and calibrated before arriving at the final set of categories, so-called dialogical reliability control [29,30]. In the analysis, the transcripts were pooled into one data set.…”