
Katy JordanLancaster University | LU · Department of Educational Research
Katy Jordan
MA (Oxon) MPhil (Cantab) PhD.
About
87
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - present
July 2017 - August 2019
May 2005 - August 2005
Publications
Publications (87)
The use of Short Messaging Service (SMS) for education has grown in recent years, drawing particular attention to supporting school-level learners, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This renewed interest has prompted questions about how this form of educational technology could be used in the longer term. However, despite being used in many Covid-19 re...
The use of SMS messaging for education has grown in recent years, with particular attention recently during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Mobile phones often have high levels of ownership in low‐income contexts compared to computers, and lower connectivity requirements, which arguably make this a more equitable medium than data‐heavy online instruction, f...
The use of mobile phones has been identified as a potential way to bring the benefits of educational technology to a wider audience, including in low-connectivity settings. This is a topic that has received renewed interest recently as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. While a number of recent studies have demonstrated good pot...
Higher levels of device ownership and lower connectivity requirements are key reasons why mobile learning may have potential to support education at scale in low-income contexts. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, interest in the use of mobile learning-particularly through the use of SMS or messaging apps-has been renewed recently, and the evide...
The academic literature has arguably never been more accessible. Through the internet, academics - and the wider public - are presented with an increasing array of platforms which offer sources of academic literature and information sources. Large-scale platforms – such as Google Scholar – often utilise algorithms in order to manage how search quer...
he GO-GN EDI project has had two phases to date. The first phase (2018-19) focused on EDI practices in open education (OE) in Africa. Nine interviews with key OE experts and practitioners from Africa were conducted. This phase also included a two-day face-to-face workshop in Nairobi, and several dissemination events. Findings from phase 1 informed...
In a New York Times article, Pappano (2012) declared 2012 as ‘the year of the MOOC’. It was a year which saw a surge in interest in this new, open form of online higher education. While the initial hype around Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) subsided and their form has changed significantly from the first large-scale courses, more learners than...
The pursuit of greater research ‘impact’ has become embedded within Higher Education, through links to perceived value for money, and reified through institutional auditing processes. Academics are frequently encouraged to use social media to facilitate public engagement and enhance research impact, as it offers the potential to connect with more d...
In this paper, we argue that digital platforms play an important role within higher education, not least of all when Covid-19 has made remote working the norm. An increasingly rich field of theoretical and empirical work has helped us understand platforms as socio-technical infrastructures which shape the activity of their users. Their insertion in...
Motivation:
This article discusses the use of educational technology (EdTech) in girls' education at PEAS (Promoting Education in African Schools) schools in rural Uganda during the Covid-19-related school closures.
Purpose:
This article addresses a research gap surrounding the potential use of EdTech to support girls' education, focusing on the...
Jusoor's Refugee Education Program helps Syrian refugee children living in Lebanon integrate back into formal schooling. When schools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee program adapted to distance learning by developing Azima, a novel program that used WhatsApp to enable children to keep learning. Azima had to respond immediately to t...
Le Programme d'Éducation pour les Réfugiés de Jusoor aide les enfants réfugiés syriens vivant au Liban à réintégrer le système scolaire formel. Lorsque les écoles ont fermé à cause de la pandémie de Covid-19, le programme pour les réfugiés a été adapté à l'apprentissage à distance à travers le développement d'Azima, un programme novateur utilisant...
يساعد برنامج تعليم اللاجئين الذي يقدمه مركز جسور اللاجئين السوريين الذين يعيشون في لبنان على الاندماج مرة أخرى في التعليم الرسمي. عندما أُغلِقَت المدارس بسبب جائحة كوفيد-19، تم تكييف برنامج اللاجئين بحيث يلائم التعليم عن بُعد عن طريق تطوير برنامج "عزيمة"، وهو برنامج جديد يستخدم تطبيق WhatsApp في تمكين الأطفال من مواصلة التعليم، وكان لا بد له من الا...
This eBook is an edited collection comprising eight Rapid Evidence Reviews undertaken by the EdTech Hub in response to the educational disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this collection, after almost a year of the Covid-19 pandemic, authors reflect on its impact on higher education, world-wide; including, amongst other topics, challenges for staff and students; new approaches to teaching; accessibility and the support provided by communities.
Emergency situations that cause damage to educational buildings or require the closure of schools due to unsafe health, environmental, or political conditions can be an unwelcomed interruption to education. Indeed, the recent COVID‐19 pandemic created the largest disruption of education in history, affecting 94% of the world's student population. I...
Emergencies can cause disruption to education. This study is unique in providing the first empirical systematic review on teacher support for Emergency Remote Education (ERE) from 2010 to 2020. A total of 57 studies emerged from the PRISMA search. This mixed-method study used deductive and inductive iterative methods to examine the data. The data r...
La pandemia de Covid-19 ha marcado el comienzo de un período de interrupción educativa a una escala sin precedentes. Durante este tiempo de crisis, la educación no funcionará como de costumbre y EdTech por sí sola no puede cerrar la brecha de aprendizaje. Serán maestros dedicados y educadores resilientes quienes se asegurarán de que el aprendizaje...
The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in school closures at an unprecedented scale and prompted educational systems to find alternative teaching models at short notice. The role for educational technology in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has recently become the focus of much discussion. While prompted by the pandemic, the discussions surface lat...
This paper was written to provide background information to assist in drafting the Save Our Future
white paper Averting an Education Catastrophe for the World’s Children. It has been edited for clarity
and to maintain consistent style and branding in line with the Save Our Future campaign. The views and
opinions expressed in this paper are those of...
It is now five years since the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted by all UN member states. While education is arguably a key part of unlocking progress towards all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SDG4 places education squarely on the agenda. There is a wealth of indicator data available to track progress towards SDG4. How...
'Critical questions for open educational practices' is a special issue of the journal Distance Education (41/2, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cdie20/41/2).
On 16 June 2020 an 'issue launch webinar' was hosted by ODLAA featuring the special issue editors and authors. The recording is available here: https://youtu.be/32O9eTRfRW4
The slides...
There has been little research into the impact of textbook costs on higher education in the United Kingdom. To better understand textbook use patterns and the issues faced by UK students and educators the UK Open Textbooks Project (2017–2018, http://ukopentextbooks.org/)) conducted quantitative survey research with United Kingdom educators in Septe...
Key points:
Technology can help mitigate the effects of the educational crisis and closures of schools, but ed-tech is not a silver bullet and governments need to have realistic expectations about what it can achieve
The digital divide means that internet and mobile network access varies greatly in middle- and low-income countries
Governments can...
The need to demonstrate the impact of research has become an important issue in the Higher Education sector in the UK. This has been taken care of through the introduction of ‘impact case studies’ as part of the research excellence framework (REF). The aim of the study presented in this paper was to understand the role that educational technology (...
The rise of social media and its permeation into all aspects of social life has in turn led to its adoption and use by academics in their professional lives. Social media, and social networking sites in particular, require profiles and cultivation of an online identity. An individual may use a range of online platforms, and existing models of onlin...
Open Textbooks are openly licensed academic textbooks, where the digital version is available freely, and the print version at highly reduced cost. They are a form of Open Educational Resource (OER) that has seen significant impact and success in the USA and Canada. The UK Open Textbook project was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation...
Academics are increasingly encouraged to use social media in their professional lives. Social networking sites are one type of tool within this; the ability to connect with others through this medium may offer benefits in terms of reaching novel audiences, enhancing research impact, discovering collaborators, and drawing on a wider network of exper...
Social network sites enable people to easily connect to and communicate with others. Following the success of generic platforms such as Facebook, a variety of online services launched during the mid 2000s in order to bring the benefits of online social networking to an academic audience. However, it is not clear whether these academic social networ...
Academic social networking sites seek to bring the benefits of online networking to an academic audience. The ability to make connections to others is a defining characteristic of the sites, but what types of networks are formed, and what are the implications of the structures? This study addressed that question through mixed methods social network...
Academics are increasingly encouraged to use social media in their professional lives. Social networking sites are one type of tool within this; the ability to connect with others through this medium may offer benefits in terms of reaching novel audiences, enhancing research impact, discovering collaborators, and drawing on a wider network of exper...
Validity and reliability are long established as central tenets of ensuring good quality research. However, safeguarding validity and reliability can be challenging within the context of multi-platform social media research, as considerations such as access to data or self-selection place caveats upon the generalizability of any study and are exace...
Hello all - as part of the Society for Research in Higher Education Newer Researchers Award, I’m currently conducting a research project into the information that academics share on social media, and their perceptions of high impact interactions on the sites.
If you work in Higher Education (including PhD students), please consider taking part in...
The term open education has recently been used to refer to topics such as Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Historically its roots lie in civil approaches to education and open universities, but this research is rarely referenced or acknowledged in current interpretations. In this article the antecedents of...
Since the advent of online social networking sites, much has been written about their potential for transforming academia, as communication and collaboration underpin many scholarly activities. However, the extent to which these benefits are being realised in practice is unclear. As the uptake of tools by academics continues to grow, there is a que...
The web has had a profound effect on the ways people interact, with online social networks arguably playing an important role in changing or augmenting how we connect with others. However, uptake of online social networking by the academic community varies, and needs to be understood. This paper presents an independent, novel analysis of a large-sc...
Postgraduate students involved in delivering undergraduate teaching while working toward a research degree are known as graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). This study focused upon the problems and benefits arising from this dual role as researchers and teachers, as perceived by GTAs at the University of Cambridge. To this end, GTAs at Cambridge we...
This commentary presents an account of a recent project as an example of engaged research. The project focused on collecting and analysing the completion rates of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It began informally, through blogging, and developed into a funded research project
with formal academic outputs. In addition to its formal outputs, t...
Web link mining has been previously used as a way of gaining insight into how the Internet may be replicating or reshaping connections between institutions within the higher education sector. Institutions are increasingly active on social media platforms, and these connections have not been studied. This paper presents an exploratory analysis of th...
Academic genealogy describes the representation of academic mentorship relationships in a manner akin to a family tree (Montoye & Washburn, 1980). It has acquired renewed interest recently through development of novel online platforms to crowdsource data and map relationships at scale (David & Hayden, 2012). This poster will present an ongoing info...
This is a transcript of a keynote presentation given at 'MOOC: Lokala möjligheter till globalt lärande' conference, Campus Skellefteå, Skellefteå, Sweden, 19 May 2016.
Academic social networking sites (SNS), such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, seek to bring the benefits of online social networking to academics' professional lives. Online academic social networking offers the potential to revolutionise academic publishing, foster novel collaborations, and empower academics to develop their professional identiti...
This paper presents a response to the paper ‘A critical look at the ResearchGate score as a measure of scientific reputation’. Following up on arguments presented by the authors, which argue that the ResearchGate score is irreproducible and dependent upon Journal Impact Factors, a small-scale exploratory analysis of ResearchGate scores was undertak...
In the past decade, a number of online social networking sites (SNS) have been introduced. As a result of their popularity, several SNS aimed at the academic community have been launched. This poster focuses upon one affordance of academic SNS: the utility to pose questions to the wider community, by analysing a sample of questions from the Academi...
Social networking sites (SNS) aimed at academics have the potential to enhance academic practice through developing an online academic identity and as a portal to further opportunities for collaboration and communication. This paper explores part of the communicative affordance offered by academic SNS through an analysis of the questions posed by a...
p>This analysis is based upon enrolment and completion data collected for a total of 221 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It extends previously reported work (Jordan, 2014) with an expanded dataset; the original work is extended to include a multiple regression analysis of factors that affect completion rates and analysis of attrition rates dur...
Jordan, K. (2015) Massive open online course completion rates revisited: Assessment, length and attrition. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 16(3), 341-358.
The rapid rise in popularity of online social networking has been followed by a slew of services aimed at an academic audience. This project sought to explore network structure in these sites, and to explore trends in network structure by surveying participants about their use of sites and motivations for making connections. Social network analysis...
Academic online social networking has received increasing focus in recent years with the development of a number of services aimed specifically at academics. There has, however, been little empirical work on the subject. This study seeks to understand the structure and role of academics’ ego-networks on social networking sites in relation to develo...
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allow students to study online courses without requiring previous experience or qualifications. This offers students the freedom to study a wide variety of topics, freed from the curriculum of a degree programme for example; however, it also poses a challenge for students in terms of making connections between in...
The past two years have seen rapid development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) with the rise of a number of MOOC platforms. The scale of enrolment and participation in the earliest mainstream MOOC courses has garnered a good deal of media attention. However, data about how the enrolment and completion figures have changed since the early cou...
This paper presents an independent analysis of a survey designed and administered by Nature Publishing Group. The full dataset has been made publicly available via Figshare (Nature Publishing Group, 2014). While results related to selected questions and sites were published in a recent article (Van Noorden, 2014), this paper provides a more compreh...
http://ubi-learn.com/the-latest-news/mooc-completion-rates-the-data
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information...
Postgraduate students, typically studying toward a doctorate, who are involved in delivering teaching to undergraduate students, are known as graduate teaching assistants. While graduate teaching assistants are used extensively in other countries, in the UK the role is less formalised and there has been little focus in the literature. This study in...
This paper describes a novel application of semantic web technologies to support undergraduate students’ learning in Plant Sciences. The pedagogical context focuses upon a field trip, seeking to enhance students’ familiarity with plant species they will encounter in the field and making links to over-arching concepts in the wider taught course. Sem...
In this synoptic paper, the authors describe how the transformative potential of semantic web and linked web of data technologies for educational systems has been identified, but highlight the fact that there are few accounts of the pedagogical applications of these same technologies. The papers in this special issue provide accounts of these techn...
This paper draws upon the experience of an interdisciplinary research group in engaging undergraduate university students in the design and development of semantic web technologies. A flexible approach to participatory design challenged conventional distinctions between ‘designer’ and ‘user’ and allowed students to play a role in developing technol...
While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the Ensemble research project, this article examines spatially some of the possibilities and constraints that arise in t...
The Plant Sciences Pedagogy Project conducted research into undergraduate teaching and learning in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge and has translated the research findings into interventions to improve support for student learning. A key research objective for the project was to investigate how teachers within the De...
While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the Ensemble research project, this article examines spatially some of the possibilities and constraints that arise in t...
Activity: We have developed an online, interactive timeline tool to help students studying the topics of Plant Evolution. It allows users to visualise the circumstances and factors contributing to the current diversity of plant life. Student Group: The Timeline Tool is used at Cambridge with First Year Natural Sciences students, and also with Third...
The Plant Sciences Pedagogy Project began in the autumn of 2005 sponsored by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI). The project objectives within the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge were twofold: to conduct research into undergraduate teaching and learning within the Department; and to develop online resources to support stu...
Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 is a pathogen of tomato and Arabidopsis that translocates virulence effector proteins into host cells via a type III secretion system (T3SS). Many effector-encoding hypersensitive response and pathogenicity (Hrp) outer protein (hop) genes have been identified previously in DC3000 using bioinformatic methods ba...
The Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge uses a range of learning and teaching environments including lectures, practical laboratories and small group tutorials'. Under the auspices of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Pedagogy Programme, a two-year research and development project concerned with the development of small-group te...
The Plant Sciences Pedagogy Project began in the autumn of 2005 as part of the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) Education Programme. The project objectives within the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge were twofold: to conduct research into teaching and learning of undergraduates within the department and to develop supportive on-line learning...
Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 is a pathogen of tomato and Arabidopsis that translocates virulence effector proteins into host cells via a type III secretion system (T3SS). Many effector-encoding hypersensitive response and pathogenicity (Hrp) outer protein (hop) genes have been identified previously in DC3000 using bioinformatic methods ba...
At the University of Cambridge, a research and development project concerned with teaching and learning in small-group tutorials has been initiated in Department of Plant Sciences. Known as the Plant Sciences Pedagogy Project, it is part of the Teaching for Learning Network (TfLN), which includes members of the Centre for Applied Research into Educ...
Questions
Question (1)
It would be great if you could spare a few minutes to complete a short online survey about academics’ use of online social networking sites (such as ResearchGate.net). The survey is part of my doctoral research, and will take less than 10 minutes to complete. There is the option to participate in further research activities (network analysis and interviews) in the future, but even if you do not want to participate further your response to the survey would still be useful. It is open to any academics, including doctoral students, from any disciplines. For further information and to complete the survey please go to:
Feel free to forward the link to any colleagues who may be interested. Many thanks!