Jennifer Roberts

About time: a metacognitive view of time and workload created by technological advancements in an ODL environment

Management of time and workload is influenced by the quality of awareness of impacting factors. Faculty has to attend to many responsibilities, with technology in teaching a recent but game-changing impacting factor. This article is a case study which explores the metacognitive awareness of the impact of technology on teaching, learning and research by a senior professor at a distance education institution. Current research often focuses on institutional policy, with less attention being paid to how staff consciously reflect on it. Although policy creates necessary frameworks, a healthy and comprehensive awareness of relevant issues is required for making informed decisions about time and workload. Many academics are so accustomed to being overworked that they seem to become unaware of the rising heat, much like the proverbial “frog in a pot of slowly heated water.” What is suggested is that faculty should be skilled in metacognitive awareness strategies, in order to better manage their time and workload.

Technology, Work Roles and Competencies of Educators Facilitating Fully or Partially Via a Distance

ABSTRACT The education sector as a whole is being transformed by changes in funding, fierce competition, the increased use of technology and an increased emphasis on learner-centred education. As a result, the clear divide between learning via a distance and a traditional blackboard context is rapidly disappearing, mainly due to the increased use of technology within and outside of classrooms. The use of tablets in classrooms, the popularity of social media, learner management systems and other emerging technologies have permanently changed the education landscape. Within this highly complex context, educators have to fulfil various work roles, one being a technology expert. This paper considers the various roles of distance educators and the place of being a technology expert within the broader conceptualisation of the roles and competencies required by educators, fully or partially facilitating over a distance. A review of existing literature on the roles and competencies required by distance educators, including both a quantitative content analysis, as well as a qualitative content analysis component is offered, where amongst others the results indicate the importance of the role of educators as technology experts. The information offered through this study may be used to form the basis of a framework for the professional development for educators facilitating fully or partly via a distance.

Expanding Horizons in Open and Distance Learning

This issue of the journal is devoted to a selection of papers to the ODLAA conference held in Melbourne, Australia in Febraury 2017. In order to analyse the content of the presentations at the conference, we have decided to make use of the Leximancer text analysis tool. Leximancer presents visually, a concept map of the text data being analysed and has been used in various other studies (Roberts, 2016; Zawacki-Richter & Naidu, 2016) The titles and abstracts of all the papers that were presented at the conference were collated and analysed and the results of this analysis are discussed in this editorial. Taking into account the overall vision for the conference which was ‘Expanding horizons in Open Distance Learning: Open education, community and innovation’, we will discuss the relevance of each of the articles in this edition to the themes that have been identified in Leximancer (Figure 1). From Figure 2 it can be seen that several key concepts were presented at the conference. At the heart of any ODL institution should be the students and their learning, and this is reflected in the analysis of the abstracts. In Figure 2, similar concepts were grouped together i.e., learner and student, as well as opennes and Open Educational Practices (OEP). As expected, MOOCs made a familiar appearance as well as online learning. Other significant concepts presented at the conference included, the development nature of ODL, course design and staff development. The articles constitute a clear narrative in line with contemporary issues in the area of distance education. The article by Daniel Burgos and one by Laura Marquez-Ramos examine learning, students and teaching. Burgos looks at transgenic learning for Science, Technology and Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) subjects. The article provides a practical view of transgenic learning. It focuses on the limits of the delivery of open and enriched learning content corresponding to university level students. In an environment where advances in the use of technology to enhance teaching has taken a lead role, the article presents ideas that have been tested in the classroom and found to work. Students and staff will find ideas presented here useful. Laura MarquezRamos’s article examines ways in which technology has taken over numerous aspects of our lives. The author provides several examples to illustrate her point. For instance she points at the emergence of services provided by the Uber transportation system and Uber Eats representing a system for ordering food online. Further the article explores Airbnb, an online network addressing homestay for travellers. The author makes the point that while people live their physical lives, they still increasingly connect on multiple dimensions through social networking sites. Modern society faces the challenge of being innovative, creative or entrepreneurial. While one part of the society has gone highly digital, there is another part of the world struggling with the new affordances. This is largely so in the developing countries where direct access to the internet still remains a challenge. Their fate is captured by studies whose focus is on bridging the gap between the digital world and the world trying to catch up with technology. The articles by Mathew Hillier and Richard Musita and colleagues, Betty Obura and Dorine Lugendo, address the challenge of connectivity in distance education. While internet connectivity may remain a challenge in the developing countries, it is also a challenge in some parts of the developed world. In his article, Hillier points to parts of Australia as a case in point. As long as internet connectivity remains an issue, elearning will remain a challenge to all concerned. Richard Musita and colleagues point to ways in which secondary school dropouts from the third world countries

Future and changing roles of staff in distance education: a study to identify training and professional development needs

Abstract The roles of distance education teaching staff are changing, necessitating role clarity and the development of appropriate competency frameworks. This article investigates the perceptions of the teaching and research staff at the University of South Africa, regarding the current and future roles of distance educators, their own competencies in each role and training that they require in order to address competencies required in these future roles. This research forms part of a larger project that focuses on capacity and continuous professional development processes that are necessary to train staff to be prepared for these changing roles. A quantitative web-based survey was sent to all academic (teaching and research) staff at the University of South Africa. Key results indicate that competencies in the roles of technology and instructional design have emerged as crucial for distance educators, and that future training programmes need to be developed to support these areas.

Distance education and time

In The pleasures of life Lubbock (1894) includes a chapter on education where he suggests that education is about learning to appreciate. For this appreciation to take roots we must spend time: “It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes it so precious” says the fox to the little prince (St. Exupery, 1943, cited in Christiansen, 1997, p. 175). This is at the heart of the educational journey: to become aware of so many things and to learn to appreciate them. The opposite, more dour perspective is captured in the above Marx (1976) quotation which links time to profit (p. 492). While it seems rather farfetched to relate the quote to education, the education system is increasingly being restructured along the lines of industry and, more recently, business (Olsen, 2014; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), to the extent that we must ask how much time is left in a profit-accelerated undertaking for learning to appreciate. Technology (and we may re-define distance education as, pace Peters (1983), “the most technology-mediated form of education”) does not help. The question why technology does not free time we can use for learning to appreciate would receive the answer Marx (1976) gave to J.S. Mill who mused “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being” (p. 492). Marx (1976) gave short thrift to such thoughts: “That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism” (p. 492). Neither is it the aim of technology in education to free time for “learning to appreciate”. Education itself is (increasingly) locked in the rhythm and relentless pace of accumulation. The story preferred by distance educators is that we (the distance educators) are the proverbial “white knights” and at the forefront of providing access to the hitherto excluded masses. The argument runs that education is good; the more of it the better; and that, the traditional system being unable to cope with the rising tide of demand, distance education has to come to succor. That is the Daniel story which tells us: distance education breaks the iron triangle, that is, the lockstep relation between cost, quality and access (Daniel, Kanwar, & Uvalic-Trumbic, 2009). How can distance educators achieve this? The keyword here is efficiency. Efficiencies are achieved through various combinations of substitutions, most importantly capital-for-labour and labour-for-labour substitutions. Capital-for-labour substitution basically means creating learning objects students can interact with (e.g. by reading a study guide, working on in-text questions, doing in-text activities; or interacting with