Siân Bayne

Higher education as a visual practice: seeing through the virtual learning environment

As certain areas of practice in higher education shift online, the work of learners and teachers increasingly takes place within the domain of the image. The ‘digital turn’ we are experiencing, both in higher education and in the wider culture, accompanies an ‘iconic turn’ in which the logic of the image as it emerges on our screens has a growing influence over our working, thinking and learning practices. Visuality gains a new urgency as we move further into the digital age. This paper considers and critiques the form of visuality which increasingly mediates between pedagogy in higher education and digital space – the interface of the virtual learning environment or VLE. If the spatial organisation and visuality of the screen both represents and creates a value system and an ontology, what social and pedagogical practices does the VLE interface reflect, inform and inscribe? What meanings does it produce? What version of pedagogy does it ‘make visible’, and what alternatives does it blind us to?

Moving Through MOOCS: Pedagogy, Learning Design and Patterns of Engagement

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are part of the lifelong learning experience of people worldwide. Many of these learners participate fully. However, the high levels of dropout on most of these courses are a cause for concern. Previous studies have suggested that there are patterns of engagement within MOOCs that vary according to the pedagogy employed. The current paper builds on this work and examines MOOCs from different providers that have been offered on the FutureLearn platform. A cluster analysis of these MOOCs shows that engagement patterns are related to pedagogy and course duration. Learners did not work through a three-week MOOC in the same ways that learners work through the first three weeks of an eight-week MOOC.

‘Digital Native’ and ‘Digital Immigrant’ Discourses

This paper takes a critical approach to a discourse still commonly applied in our discussions and understandings of the relationship between practitioners in higher education and the new digital technologies – that of the distinction between the socalled ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. We critique this over-simplistic binary from a range of perspectives, highlighting its tendency to de-privilege the role of the teacher, its implicit alignment with an understanding of higher education as market-driven and commodified, and its reliance on a series of highly problematic and dangerously deterministic metaphors. We end the paper with a call for a more carefully critical and nuanced understanding of the effects of new technologies on the practices and subject positions of learners and teachers in higher education.

Open education: the need for a critical approach

This special issue is concerned with developing critical approaches to open education: about delving deeper into what we mean when we use this term, how it is recognised and understood, and how the particular claims of open education influence policy and manifest in practice. We hope the work collected here will contribute to the continued development and embedding of this area of educational practice. ‘Openness’ has become a highly charged and politicised term, a movement operating in many areas outside of education (for example, open knowledge, open government, open access, open data, open source, and open culture). In the process, it has acquired a sheen of naturalised common sense and legitimacy, and formed what seems to be a post-political space of apparent consensus. Invitations to question openness are quite rare, particularly within a field like education that is above all motivated by a desire to exchange knowledge, to make it accessible, and to positively affect the lives of individuals. However, it is precisely this view of openness – as a virtue of natural worth – that is problematic, not only because it masks alternative perspectives, but also because it does so with an apparent moral authority that renders the critic at best a technophobe and a cynic, and at worst an elitist and a champion of the status quo. Indeed, we think that in this moment when it is perhaps least fashionable to question open education that critical perspectives are most urgently needed. Open education is gaining increasing traction, perhaps most noticeably through relatively recent high-profile online initiatives such as the open educational resources (OER) movement and massive open online courses (MOOCs), but also many other moves which attempt to widen access to education or challenge the perceived dominance of established institutional provision. Prominent conferences are devoted to the subject, such as the Open Education Conference. In 2015 it was entitled Mainstreaming Open Education, and in 2016 it is set to be Open Culture, signalling not only a growing confidence in open education as a field in itself, but also the sense