Martin Oliver

University College London | UCL · Institute of Education

This study examines the challenges experienced, and the pedagogy adopted, by university teachers as they transferred their teaching online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thematic analysis of survey and interview data show that teachers engaged regularly in emotional support of students, and a pedagogy of care was discernible in the ways teachers des...

Critics of artificial intelligence have suggested that the principles of fairness, accountability and transparency (FATE) have been used for ‘ethics washing’, in order to appease industrial interests. In this article, we develop this relational and context-dependent analysis, arguing that ethics should not be understood as abstract values or design...

This empirical study examines the experiences of academics and professional service staff in a large UK university during first weeks of the transition to online teaching and working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. The method draws on the work by Gourlay and Oliver (2018) to explore engagement with the digital university in everyday practic...

In March 2020, populations were forced into home quarantine to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Universities moved the majority of their operations to homeworking, with profound implications for students, academics, and professional services staff. This paper analyses interview and visual data collected as part of a study on the impact of ‘movin...

Technology has been an important influence on the development of education. However, very little research in Educational Technology considers this history, and even less questions it. In this paper, we argue that our understanding of educational technology should be informed by the philosophy of technology – a field that has attempted to explore wh...

This paper explores the relationship between social media and political rhetoric. Social media platforms are frequently discussed in relation to ‘post-truth’ politics, but it is less clear exactly what their role is in these developments. Specifically, this paper focuses on Twitter as a case, exploring the kinds of rhetoric encouraged or discourage...

This theoretical paper argues that Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can help advance the emancipatory project in critical Ed Tech research. To support this claim, we deploy Tsing’s concept of ‘scale-making projects’ (2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) to connect ‘global’ nar...

Student Engagement in the Digital University challenges mainstream conceptions and assumptions about students’ engagement with digital resources in Higher Education. While engagement in online learning environments is often reduced to sets of transferable skills or typological categories, the authors propose that these experiences must be understoo...

Sharing teachers’ professional knowledge remains challenging. Teachers’ development often remains ad hoc or local, and attempts to scale this up have proved problematic. To address this, research in areas such as ‘learning design’ has explored the use of formal representations of practice. This proposes that educational practice can be improved by...

Mobile learning has seen a large uptake in use in low- and middle-income countries. This is driven by rhetorics of easy scaling, reaching the hard-to-reach and the potential for generating analytics from the applications used by learners. Healthcare training has seen a proliferation of apps aimed at improving accountability through tracking and mea...

Discussions of ‘big data’ in Higher Education have focused on what the institution can know about its students, and its ability to act on their behalf. These discussions appear learner-centred, but continue to attribute agency to the institution. An alternative way of framing the use of data is offered by the quantified self movement. This focuses...

The aims, discourse and practices of academic development in higher education rest on a series of assumptions about the nature of academic practice and student engagement, assumptions which shape its approaches to enhancement and change. In this chapter, we review and critique these, drawing on sociomaterial theory and evidence from a project that...

This paper reports on the conceptual development of ‘digital literacy’. This is framed in terms of background studies and theory, and then evidence is presented from a study that explores students’ textual practices. The paper concludes by identifying implications of this work for research and practice.

This chapter argues that studying draws in a wide array of technologies, takes place in both institutional and personal settings, and involves the consumption and production of a variety of digital and print texts. Knox exploring educational discourses about openness challenged the negative way in which discussions of technology framed the idea of...

Digital literacies are an important area of contemporary research and practice. However, policy and research on this topic relies almost exclusively on capability or competence models of “digital literacy”. These decontextualised, cognitive accounts ignore the insights of New Literacy Studies (e.g. Lea and Street. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2)...

This chapter outlines the case for an holistic approach to studying e-learning, influenced by ethnography, New Literacy Studies (NLS) and sociomateriality (a tradition of work related to posthumanism and material semiotics). The theo- retical framing for such work is presented and related to developments in ethnog- raphy and digital anthropology. T...

Discussions of technology and education often promise revolution, and freedom from the constraints of campuses and classrooms. There is less discussion of why such infrastructures were needed in the first place, or of the challenges facing learners when these are no longer available. In order to explore such critical alternatives, we can begin to a...

CHWs used WhatsApp with their supervisors to document their work, spurring healthy competition and team building between CHWs in the 2 pilot sites. While there was considerable variation in the number of times each participant posted messages—from 1 message to 270 messages—in total they posted nearly 2,000 messages over 6 months. 88% of messages co...

This paper explores the ways in which information about course pedagogy has been represented to potential students through national descriptors and specifications such as the United Kingdom’s Key Information Set. It examines the extent to which such descriptors provide helpful information about pedagogy, for example innovative uses of technology. T...

Research in learning technology makes many claims about technology's effects, but rarely asks what technology is. This is a dangerous oversight; it leaves people with inadequate accounts of the role of technology, and people risk simply cataloguing a series of outcomes without really understanding what is happening or why. This chapter explores thi...

In this paper we review the literature on teacher inquiry (TI) to explore the possibility that this process can equip teachers to investigate students’ learning as a step towards the process of formative assessment. We draw a distinction between formative assessment and summative forms of assessment [CRELL. (2009). The transition to computer-based...

What does it mean for learners to be involved in the co-creation of knowledge? This paper explores different interpretations of this phrase and identifies implications for research and practice. Firstly, it is contextualised in terms of different theories of learning, leading to a distinction being drawn between pedagogical and political implicatio...

This report forms one strand of work undertaken as background to the Imaginative Curriculum project, commissioned by the Generic Centre of the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN). It covers the initial scoping work undertaken at one of the partner sites: University College London (UCL). The purpose of this work was to provide a foundation...

The importance of evaluation has grown in recent years so that this topic has become the focus of considerable policy and research interest (Oliver, 2000). As new learning technologies emerge there is a need to evaluate how these are used to support an increasingly diverse student population. All staff are now expected to carry out evaluations to a...

This chapter provides a conclusion to and reflection on the book. I summarise the key messages conveyed throughout the book, along with considering the implications of each topic. I critically reflect on the implications of each of the topics and, in particular, what impact the learning design methodology described in this book is likely to have on...

Work on students' study practices posits the digital and material as separate domains, with the ‘digital’ assumed to be disembodied, decontextualised and free-floating, and spaces in the material campus positioned as prototypically ‘traditional’ and analogue. Libraries in particular are often characterised as symbolic of predigital literacy practic...

Background: Community health workers (CHWs) are used increasingly in the world to address shortages of health workers and the lack of a pervasive national health system. However, while their role is often described at a policy level, it is not clear how these ideals are instantiated in practice, how best to support this work, or how the work is in...

This paper explores the idea of open education, focusing specifically on the concept of openness. Previous discussions of open education are reviewed, using Knox's discussion of ‘unfreedoms' as a critical lens. Contrasts are then drawn with the concept of ‘flexibility’, to illustrate ways in which openness could be developed. This leads to consider...

Many changes in teaching practices (such as introduction of e-assessment) are initiated by school management, or by a lead teacher, but have direct impact on the learning designs of others. However, models of teachers as innovators, conducting evidence-based inquiry into their students' learning, view the teacher as initiator of change in their own...

There is growing interest in the impact of digital technologies on meaning-making practices and identity in education, which has been explored via the related concepts of ‘digital scholarship’ and ‘digital literacies’. However, to date, much published work in this area has been descriptive, identifying possibilities or promoting specific kinds of i...

This report outlines work undertaken by the Institute of Education to explore how pre-tertiary experiences of online learning influences students? successful transitions into and through Higher Education. The work was commissioned by Pamoja Education, and the studies that were undertaken focused on the experiences of students and staff taking part...

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) commissioned the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) to conduct research to provide systematic evidence of awareness and use of the United Kingdom Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) at institutional level and, additionally, the impact the framework has had on the attitudes and practices of t...

This paper identifies a significant gap in existing work within the field of educational technology—the failure to explain technology theoretically—and proposes an agenda for addressing this. While there are discussions of theory within educational technology research, these typically focus on learning. Technology itself is seldom considered, being...

Sharpe and Oliver (Chapter 10) begin our journey into the contexts in which design for learning takes place by examining the course or programme of study and specifically the role of the course team in the design process. They reveal the complexity and sensitivity of the course design process in practice, finding that designing for technology rich...

Research into learning technology has developed a reputation for being driven by rhetoric about the revolutionary nature of new developments, for paying scant attention to theories that might be used to frame and inform research, and for producing shallow analyses that do little to inform the practice of education. Although there is theoretically-i...

This paper argues that research on the educational uses of technology frequently overemphasizes the influence of technology. Research in the field is considered a form of critical perspective, and assumptions about technology are questioned. Technological determinism is introduced, and different positions on this concept are identified. These are u...

Full text available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2011.549829

Higher Education Institutions have worked to make equality of access to electronic curriculum resources the 'status quo'. However, there is evidence that simply providing e-learning - no matter how well intentioned - is insufficient to address the problems that students are experiencing. A three stage model has been developed through analysis of st...

The digital divide is believed to intensify existing forms of privilege and exclusion. In spite of decades of governmental investment in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), this problem persists. Arguably, this is because we have not yet understood it well enough. Although ‘access’ is generally thought to be central to the digital divi...

The widening participation agenda was instigated by a government seeking to develop skilled workers in the global economy, yet it has consistently refused to fund the burgeoning student population adequately. Managers and academics within the HE sector have to reconcile requirements for the implementation of policies with an increasing ‘audit’ cult...

What might online communities and informal learning practices teach us about virtual world pedagogy? In this chapter we describe a research project in which learning practices in online worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second LifeTM (SL) were investigated. Working within an action research framework, we employed a range of methods to investigat...

This chapter explores developments in e-learning in colleges and universities, providing a context for the work that follows. Pedagogical developments are reviewed, focusing particularly on the UK. Research is then considered, beginning with an orienting discussion of the curriculum as a focus for study. Research concerning the relationship between...

In this paper, we report on survey and focus group data relating to the activities and perceptions of learning with Web 2.0 technologies of students aged between 11 and 16 years in 27 UK secondary schools. The study confirms that these learners had high levels of access to Web 2.0 technologies and that Web 2.0 activities were prolific. However, pat...

Although there is interest in the educational potential of online multiplayer games and virtual worlds, there is still little evidence to explain specifically what and how people learn from these environments. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the experiences of couples that play World of Warcraft together. Learning outcomes were identif...

It has been suggested that there is an ongoing failure to learn from previous research and policy about technology use in Higher Education. This paper explores this claim, critiquing policy and practice around curriculum design and delivery, using ideas about tacit practice and the lived (or performed) curriculum. This reveals a consistent focus on...

In this paper learning and competence in the MMORPG World of Warcraft are explored. In order to facilitate movement between in-game and the real-world contexts of play, data was collected from couples who play the game together while sharing real space. Through the collection and analysis of interview data the authors develop a framework for the ex...

Abstract Boundaries between formal and informal learning settings are shaped by influences beyond learners' control. This can lead to the proscription of some familiar technologies that learners may like to use from some learning settings. This contested demarcation is not well documented. In this paper, we introduce the term ‘digital dissonance’ t...

In this chapter, we look at the implementation perspective from the starting point of the fundamental educational aims that unite the academic community. We argue that interactive and cooperative digital media have an inherent educational value as a new means of intellectual expression. Our primary concern is not the optimisation of knowledge trans...

Although mobile learning is a popular topic in current research, it is not well conceptualized. Many researchers rely on under-theorized conceptions of the topic, and those who have tried to refine the ideas involved have found this to be complex and difficult. In this paper a new interpretation of the concept ‘mobile learning' is offered, drawing...

This article offers insight into the realization of the Higher Education Funding Council for England's vision for Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) as catalysts for change. Two CETLs, the Centre for Interprofessional e‐Learning (CIPeL) and the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE), provi...

This paper explores the use of Activity Theory for the evaluation of user behaviour in immersive virtual environments. Specifically, the study of user behaviour focuses on interactivity, which is argued to be one of the most important processes that take place between a user and the system in virtual reality. The ultimate intention is to study the...

This Special Issue of Reflecting Education arises from the work of the PREEL project (From Pedagogic Research to Embedded e-Learning) at the Institute of Education from 2006-2008. This project was one of nine HEA/JISC (Higher Education Academy and Joint Information Systems Committee) Pilot Pathfinder Projects and followed on from our involvement in...

Training in research methods has always been an important part of postgraduate courses; however, in recent years, what constitutes an "appropriate" kind of training for postgraduate students in Education has been shaped by national policy in addition to disciplinary traditions. Such debates became a live issue during the process of developing an on...

Although mobile learning is a popular topic in current research, it is not well conceptualized. Many researchers rely on under-theorized conceptions of the topic, and those who have tried to refine the ideas involved have found this to be complex and difficult. In this paper a new interpretation of the concept 'mobile learning' is offered, drawing...

L4All is a system that records and shares learning trails through educational offerings with the aim of facilitating progression of lifelong learners from Secondary Education, through to Further Education and on to Higher Education (HE). The focus is on helping those post-16 learners who have traditionally not participated in HE. L4All allows learn...

Abstract The promotion of e-learning in policies internationally has led to questions about how best to employ technology in support of learning. A range of models has since been developed that attempts to relate pedagogy to technology. However, research into the effectiveness of such models in changing teaching practice is sparse, and work that co...

This chapter explores the roles players created, and how these structured their online relationships, in an online massively multi-player role-playing game, Kingdom of Loathing—a low-tech browser-based game with a satirical, humorous style. Existing research has often sought to understand players’ actions by classifying them into “types”, determine...

The articles contained in this issue raise a series of questions that all, to a greater or lesser degree, call in to doubt our ability to communicate with each other. This is a particularly melodramatic way of expressing it, perhaps, but it serves to highlight a fundamental concern: even if we know something, can we share that knowledge with anyone...

Research and practice in the use of electronic voting systems has developed over the last five years. Electronic voting systems, also known as personal response systems, audience response systems or classroom communication systems, use handsets to elicit responses from students as part of structured teaching sessions, typically lectures. The use of...

The editors would like to thank the following reviewers for their contribution to volume 14 of ALT-J: