Online Learning as Embodied, Socially Meaningful Experience

Fawns, Tim; Aitken, Gill; Jones, Derek

doi:10.1007/s42438-019-00048-9

Cited by 63 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The criticism of online learning as inherently impoverished in terms of the relations and interactions that occur there has previously been challenged (Fawns et al 2019) suggesting that meaningful interactions can, and do occur online, but require creative pedagogical design and sufficient academic time to support community building. These results reinforce this view and consider how curricular design can encourage academic interactions that have direct benefits in the clinical workplace by allowing time and space for discussion and reflection.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While this can be seen to have clear educational benefits, it does take time and effort both from the student and the staff supporting them and cannot be seen as a seamless process. A factor often overlooked requiring wider acknowledgement within higher education institutions when considering the resource implications of online learning (Fawns et al 2019). The current ascendency of the neoliberal agenda in higher education means the income generated by postgraduate programmes and their growth potential can result in institutional pressure to expand.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Postdigital Exploration of Online Postgraduate Learning in Healthcare Professionals: A Horizontal Conception

Aitken

2020

Postdigit Sci Educ

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Holistic evaluation of educational quality necessitates considering novel and theorized measures of quality as well as more instrumental metrics. Online learning is increasingly valued by working professionals as a means of gaining a postgraduate qualification while employed, but this area of education is undertheorized and investigated. Online learning is often discussed in instrumental terms, as if abstracted from the social and material settings in which learning and work take place, but my own conversations with student and graduates about the impact of their studies contrast strongly with such views and motivated this work. Adopting a postdigital perspective, I present an activity theory analysis of interviews with students and staff about the value and perceived impact of online postgraduate programmes in healthcare professions. Four themes are identified that describe how students learning moves horizontally within and across academic and clinical settings: crossing boundaries, ripple effect, eroding structures and hierarchies and expansion. Teaching is delivered online, but learning occurs as the students move through the various contexts they inhabit. The pedagogical approaches required to realize the potential value of these programmes should not be based on the online delivery or the technologies used, but the particular needs of the student group.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Postdigital Exploration of Online Postgraduate Learning in Healthcare Professionals: A Horizontal Conception

Aitken

2020

Postdigit Sci Educ

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“…It adds to the literature on how relationality is constituted through advice sequences (Shaw 2013) but critically examines this topic in a postdigital context. Knox (2016) and Fawns, Aitken and Jones (2020a) remind us that in our postdigital age, in which students and staff are multiply connected, not all face-to-face interactions help build meaningful relationships. Chris Park's (2007) description of doctoral supervision as 'a secret garden' can be equally applied to undergraduate supervision; despite the prevalence of shared offices and overheard meetings, supervision remains a largely hidden encounter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘I’m Not Going to Tell You Cos You Need to Think About This’: a Conversation Analysis Study of Managing Advice Resistance and Supporting Autonomy in Undergraduate Supervision

West

2020

Postdigit Sci Educ

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This article, firstly, critically analyses a face-to-face supervision meeting between an undergraduate and a supervisor, exploring how the supervisor handles the twin strategies of fostering autonomy while managing resistance to advice. Conversation analysis is used as both a theory and a method, with a focus on the use of accounts to support or resist advice. The main contribution is the demonstration of how both the supervisor and the student are jointly responsible for the negotiation of advice, which is recycled and calibrated in response to the student's resistance. The supervisor defuses complaints by normalising them, and moving his student on to practical solutions, often with humour. He lists his student's achievements as the foundation on which she can assert agency and build the actions he recommends. Supervisor-student relationships are investigated through the lens of the affective dimensions of learning, to explore how caring or empathy may serve to reduce resistance and make advice more palatable. By juxtaposing physically present supervision with digitally mediated encounters, while acknowledging their mutual entanglement, the postdigital debate is furthered. In the context of Covid-19, and rapid decisions by universities to bring in digital platforms to capture student-teacher interactions, the analysis presented is in itself an act of resistance against the technical control systems of the academy and algorithmic capitalism.

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“…Yet learning that was designed to be experienced face to face takes time, skills and academic experience to translate to platforms where a teacher is not physically present (Fawns, Aitken, and Jones 2019 ). It is not a simple ‘pivot’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

et al. 2020

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After several months of personal journey towards accepting that the coronavirus pandemic is real (see Jandrić 2020a, b), in early March, it dawned on me that the pandemic does not need only so-called essential workers. Self-quarantined after returning from abroad weeks before the Croatian government locked down the country, I immediately wrote an editorial for Postdigital Science and Education and argued that 'While doctors, nurses, politicians, food suppliers, and many other brave people self-sacrifice to support our daily survival, this editorial argues that academics have a unique opportunity, and a moral duty, to immediately start conducting in-depth studies of current events.' (Jandrić 2020c: 234) I had no idea how to even approach these studies, yet I had a strong feeling that something needed to be done urgently. So, I just did what I know best and issued calls for 3 different types of Covid-19-related material to be published in Postdigital Science and Education: short testimonies, longer commentary articles, and full-length original articles. I had no idea how much material I would receive, what this material would look like, and what I would do with this material. I just had a deep gut feeling that we are witnessing a unique time in human history, a once-in-a-lifetime event, that needs to be recorded as it unfolds. For better or for worse, I decided to follow that feeling. This general vision, without a clear idea of what I was doing, paved a bumpy road for the development of this collection. On 17 March 2020, I shared the Call for Testimonies on Postdigital Science and Education social network sites and I emailed it to the journal's mailing list. Based on my previous experience with similar calls, I expected to receive 10 to 15 contributions and produce a standard-length collective article aiming at postdigital dialogue (Jandrić et al. 2019) about the pandemic. Yet my call went 'viral', at least for academic standards, and a couple of weeks later, I had more than 50,000 words written by more than 80 authors. So how do I make sense of all that material? My dear friend and Associate Editor of Postdigital Science and Education, Sarah Hayes, came to my rescue. We first tried to make sense of the contributions using critical discourse

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Online Learning as Embodied, Socially Meaningful Experience

Cited by 63 publications

References 18 publications

A Postdigital Exploration of Online Postgraduate Learning in Healthcare Professionals: A Horizontal Conception

A Postdigital Exploration of Online Postgraduate Learning in Healthcare Professionals: A Horizontal Conception

‘I’m Not Going to Tell You Cos You Need to Think About This’: a Conversation Analysis Study of Managing Advice Resistance and Supporting Autonomy in Undergraduate Supervision

Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

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