Lynda Prescott

Reviewing three case-studies of learning analytics interventions at the open university UK

This study provides a conceptual framework how organizations may adopt evidence-based interventions at scale, and how institutions may evaluate the costs and benefits of such interventions. Building on a new conceptual model developed by the Open University UK (OU), we will analyse three case-studies of evidence-based interventions. By working with 90+ large-scale modules for a period of two years across the five faculties and disciplines within the OU, Analytics4Action provides a bottom-up-approach for working together with key stakeholders within their respective contexts. Using principles of embedded case-study approaches by Yin [1], by comparing the learning behavior, satisfaction and performance of 11079 learners the findings indicated that each of the three learning designs led to satisfied students and average to good student retention. In the second part we highlighted that the three module teams made in-presentation interventions based upon real-time analytics, whereby initial user data indicated VLE behaviour in line with expectations. In 2-5 years, we hope that a rich, robust evidence-base will be presented to show how learning analytics can help teachers to make informed, timely and successful interventions that will help learners to achieve their learning outcomes.

Using collaboration to foster academic integrity

Abstract For students new to higher education, the task of developing their academic writing skills, and particularly the principles and practices of source-referencing, can be daunting. Although institutions and teachers can and do provide positive guidance on this score, all too often students veer into inadvertent plagiarism through lack of confidence and confusion. This case study identifies opportunities through collaborative work to help students approach referencing with greater clarity and confidence. A project with first-year Arts students engaged in collaborative writing encouraged them to attend to their recording and writing-up of source references using individual ‘reading and referencing’ logs and then passing on completed references to their group’s designated bibliographer. Checks on later, solo, assignments by these students indicated that they were less likely to stray into inadvertent plagiarism, whilst feedback from the students themselves pointed towards improved confidence in their academic writing skills and development of study habits conducive to effective self-monitoring.

Life writing and life-learning: an analysis of creative writing students’ work

The study described here is based on the work of creative writing students engaged in life writing for a piece of assessment in a distance-learning course. Using the finished assignment pieces themselves, the students’ reflective commentaries on their completed task, and a follow-up questionnaire, the analysis was designed to explore the relationship between the students’ cognitive and affective learning. Although the assessment task clearly generated person-centred outcomes as well as the skills-centred outcomes around which the task was designed, in some instances these overlapped and blended into each other. It thus proved difficult to maintain a clear separation between the cognitive and affective learning domains, even in a context where other factors such as the social dimension of learning had been consigned to the background. The argument presented here supports the idea that, in the field of continuing education especially, we need to recognise the complex interaction between different kinds of learning. The paper also suggests that, in a learning context dominated by the academic requirements of higher education, the value of creativity and imagination, exercised through the development of writing skills, should not be under-estimated.

Encounters with Conrad: self-experience and narrativity

Abstract This article begins by examining a recent essay by the British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson entitled “Against Narrativity,” in which he not only rejects claims about the psychological and ethical necessity of narrative but also distinguishes, en route, between “episodic” and “diachronic” personalities, taking writers as examples. His attempts to label Joseph Conrad within this typology gave rise to subsequent discussion, which is briefly summarized here as a preliminary to a fuller analysis of some of Conrad’s own writing from different genres. My objective is not to endorse or refute Strawson’s schema but to make some cross-disciplinary moves, bringing this particular philosophical debate about self-experience and narrativity back into a framework where well-tested literary approaches can be deployed. Questions are raised about the kind of (written) evidence that can be used in trying discern a person’s self-experience, and about the philosopher’s assumptions of universal and autonomous individuality. I argue that writers are problematic exemplars of Strawson’s categories, having both complex identities (“writing selves”) and specialized skills in the manipulation of narratives that render their expressions of self-experience too opaque for the philosopher’s purposes.

Introduction: Futures for English Studies

English Studies, the term we use to cover English language, literature and creative writing, is a capacious subject that, over the years, has meant a variety of different things to different people, depending on cultural tradition and geographical context. Although generally perceived as a modern subject that only entered in the academy in the late nineteenth century (or even the early twentieth century, depending on how ‘arrival’ is judged), claims are sometimes made for ancient lineage through the links with rhetoric, links that are not merely of historical importance for, as we shall see at several points throughout this book, rhetoric continues to be a potent concept in discussions of current and future directions for the discipline. Meanwhile, in today’s globalised world, as social and academic landscapes undergo rapid changes, the fundamental position of the English language in the daily existence of millions of people around the world is effecting large-scale shifts in what is meant by ‘English Studies’ worldwide. At the time of writing, the British Council has just launched the world’s largest (so far) massive open online course, or MOOC, on ‘Techniques for English Language Tests’, with close on 400,000 students in over 150 countries.1 This is just one, highly specialised example of changing facets of English Studies as a discipline in the modern higher education sector.

Greene, Waugh, and the Lure of Travel

Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene were contemporaries, born in 1903 and 1904 respectively in what would later be labelled the ‘Metroland’ northwest of London, who became friends in their mid-30s. They were both Catholic converts, and although their political inclinations diverged, their names are often yoked together, not only as Catholic novelists but also as writers who were to a large extent formed by the experiences and atmosphere of the 1930s and the Second World War. As well as establishing considerable reputations as novelists, however, each of them travelled widely and produced a number of non-fiction books and articles based on their travels, especially in the early stages of their careers.

The Indian Connection in J.G.Farrell's 'Troubles'

In the winter of 1966–67, J. G. Farrell, author of three now largely forgotten novels of contemporary life, was living in New York on a Harkness Fellowship and casting around for a subject for his next book. He had told the Harkness selection committee that he was ‘deeply interested in trying to write universal, as opposed to regional, novels; the sort of books in which people trying to adjust themselves to abrupt changes in their civilisation, whether it be in Ireland or in Japan, may be able to recognise themselves’ [1]. In fact he found his global theme in the decline of empire and worked it through in three great historical novels, Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Although collectively referred to as the ‘Empire trilogy’, Farrell commented in an interview in 1978 that he preferred to describe these novels as ‘a triptych rather than a trilogy with each panel presenting a picture of the Empire at a different historical watershed and by their association shedding, I hope, some light on each other. I can’t promise that I won’t add other Imperial panels and turn it into a polyptych’ [2]. This possibility was, of course, cut short by Farrell’s untimely death in August 1979. When he died, Farrell was in the middle of a second novel set in India; the unfinished manuscript of The Hill Station was published posthumously in 1981. In it, Farrell re-introduces readers to Dr McNab, one of the mid-Victorian characters from The Siege of Krishnapur, translated to a different part of India at a later date, just as the central character of Troubles, Major Brendan Archer, last seen contemplating the charred ruins of the Majestic Hotel, Co. Wexford, in 1921, had re-appeared in The Singapore Grip set two decades later in Singapore. These intratextual links represent just one kind of ‘association’ established among Farrell’s Empire novels, implying, at a fairly literal level, realistic connections across time and place. The interlocking effects of Farrell’s imaginative transposings are not always so visible, however, and may pull against the facts of history and geography. For example, the real-life original of the gargantuan Majestic Hotel was situated not on the coast of Wexford but on the other side of the Atlantic, on an island off the coast of New England, south of Providence. Farrell happened upon the ruins of the once-famous Ocean View Hotel on Block Island in 1967, a year after the dilapidated building had burned down, and realised that it would make a suitable home for the fictional Irish family slowly emerging from the tangle of story-drafts in his notebooks [3]. Similarly, the names of several of Farrell’s friends appear in the guest list for the Majestic’s last and disastrous ball [4], a fictional event supposedly happening years before any of these people were born. These ‘real-life’ links contribute to the novel’s concreteness, but unlike, say, mention of the General Post Office in Dublin or Lord French of Ypres, they do not tether the fictional narrative to the real world in any literal way.