Paul Prinsloo

University of South Africa | unisa · Department of Business Management

Amid the many claims surrounding the operationalisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, is the claim that AI can democratise education - referring to, inter alia, increasing access to equitable, high-quality lifelong learning opportunities for all. There is, however, also the claim that education should play an integral role in democr...

This is the editorial of the inaugural issue of a new journal with an exclusive focus on macro and meso level research on open, distance, and digital education. https://ojs.uni-oldenburg.de/journals/ojs2/ojs/index.php/jodde/

Augmented Reality (AR) has garnered significant attention in the field of education over the last two decades, with data indicating that it improves the effectiveness of teaching and learning in a variety of academic environments. There is, however, the absence of a framework that can guide the institution-wide adoption of AR in distance education....

Students' physical and digital lives are increasingly entangled. It is difficult to separate students' digital well‐being from their offline well‐being given that artificial intelligence increasingly shapes both. Within the context of education's fiduciary and moral duty to ensure safe, appropriate and effective digital learning spaces for students...

This article investigates policy-as-discourse and policy-as-technology with specific focus on how the deployment of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education is positioned as a redemptive force in the case of Botswana. Therborn's theory of inequalities was adopted to catalogue ways in which supranational organisations and the nati...

After decades of turbulence and acute crises in recent years, how can we build a better future for Higher Education? Thoughtfully edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, this rich and diverse collection by academics and professionals from across 17 countries and many disciplines offers a variety of answers to this question. It addresses t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and establish the contours of trust in learning analytics and to establish steps that institutions might take to address the “trust deficit” in learning analytics. Design/methodology/approach “Trust” has always been part and parcel of learning analytics research and practice, but concerns around priv...

Over the past decade or so, learning analytics (LA) has matured as a research field and as operational practice within many educational institutions, mostly in the Global North. Learning analytics is commonly defined as the measurement, collection, analysis and use of students’ data to improve students’ learning. Until recently, the main sources of...

Since the emergence of learning analytics (LA) in 2011 as a distinct field of research and practice, multimodal learning analytics (MMLA), shares an interdisciplinary approach to research and practice with LA in its use of technology (eg, low cost sensors, wearable technologies), the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), an...

This collection of reflective essays is a treasure trove of advice, reflection and hard-won experience from experts in the field of open and distance education. Each chapter offers tried-and-tested advice for nascent academic writers, delivered with personal, rich, and wonderful stories of the authors’ careers, their process, their research and the...

How institutions and researchers understand, explain, and predict student success and attrition, and design interventions to support students, flows from, inter alia, their understanding and assumptions regarding education, and more specifically, of success or attrition in the nexus of teaching and learning. Research is also shaped by how instituti...

Learning analytics (LA), as research and practice, has been committed to contributing to understanding students' learning and the contexts in which their learning occurs since its emergence in 2011. Core to learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and use of student data. As higher education becomes increasingly digitised and dat...

To cite the final article: J. E. Maritz & P. Prinsloo (2021) Narrating the (dis)comfort and multiplicities of becoming faculty, Gender and Education, 33:6, 692-706, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2020.1860198 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1860198

In the broader context of higher education, queer and gay faculty are increasingly visible, yet they are also relatively quiet regarding the assemblages of their identity on the processes of becoming faculty. In authoring our assemblages of coming to be Afrikaner and white and queer and gay as well as faculty, we attempt to narrate our multipliciti...

Higher education institutions are moving to design and implement teacher-facing learning analytics (LA) dashboards with the hope that instructors can extract deep insights about student learning and make informed decisions to improve their teaching. While much attention has been paid to developing teacher-facing dashboards, less is known about how...

This article maps considerations of inclusiveness and support for students with disabilities by reviewing articles within the field of learning analytics. The study involved a PRISMA-informed systematic review of two popular digital libraries, namely Clarivate’s Web of Science, and Elsevier’s Scopus for peer-reviewed journal articles and conference...

Learning analytics has the capacity to provide potential benefit to a wide range of stakeholders within a range of educational contexts. It can provide prompt support to students, facilitate effective teaching, highlight aspects of course content that might be adapted, and predict a range of possible outcomes, such as students registering for more...

Central to the institutionalization of learning analytics is the need to understand and improve student learning. Frameworks guiding the implementation of learning analytics flow from and perpetuate specific understandings of learning. Crucially, they also provide insights into how learning analytics acknowledges and positions itself as entangled i...

Data, and specifically student data, has always been an integral part of good teaching as well as providing evidence for strategic and operational planning, resource allocation, pedagogy, and student support. As Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE) become increasingly datafied, institutions have access to greater volumes, variety, and granu...

Distance education celebrates its humanitarian mission of providing opportunities for disadvantaged and marginalized individuals who do not have access to traditional campus-based higher education. Large enrolments of students necessitate an industrialized approach in planning, design, and delivery informed by a norma-tive assumption of ableism. In...

Since its inception in 2011, Learning Analytics has matured and expanded in terms of reach (e.g., primary and K-12 education) and in having access to a greater variety, volume and velocity of data (e.g. collecting and analyzing multimodal data). Its roots in multiple disciplines yield a range and richness of theoretical influences resulting in an i...

This article seeks to explore different combinations of human and Artificial Intelligence (AI) decision-making in the context of distributed learning. Distributed learning institutions face specific challenges such as high levels of student attrition and ensuring quality, cost-effective student support at scale using a range of technologies, such a...

"This collection, titled ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19—The New Normal’, is a collection of short testimonies and workspace photographs submitted in the first half of 2022. In numbers, the collection consists of 67 textual testimonies and 65 workspace photographs submitted by 69 authors from 19 countries: USA (13), New Zealand (8), India (7), Swe...

The Center for Open Education Research (COER) is an international research consortium, that was established in 2018 in order to increase international collaborative research projects, furthering innovation and understanding in open education, educational technology, lifelong learning, and international education. This book provides a cross-country...

Data, and specifically student data, has always been an integral part of good teaching as well as providing evidence for strategic and operational planning, resource allocation, pedagogy, and student support. As Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE) become increasingly datafied, institutions have access to greater volumes, variety, and granu...

In the past two decades, Augmented Reality (AR) has been increasingly receiving attention within the field of education, providing evidence of the positive impact of AR on the effectiveness of teaching and learning in several disciplinary contexts. Despite the evidence, there is a paucity of large-scale adoption of AR in higher education and no evi...

Since the emergence of learning analytics, much of the research has emerged from traditional campus-based institutions in the Global North (Prinsloo, 2018, 2020). While learning analytics is not a panacea for all of the challenges faced within distance education with regard to, for example, student retention and throughput, there is evidence that i...

Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education cannot be put into practice without considering institutional contexts, which differ not only globally but also within the same country. Each institutional context provides educators with opportunities or limitations where Open Educational Practices (OEP) and OER for teaching and learning are inv...

Learning analytics offer centralization of a particular understanding of learning, teaching, and student support alongside data-informed insight and foresight. As such, student-related data in higher education can be imagined and enacted as a ‘data frontier’ in which the data gaze is expanding, intensifying, and performing new meanings and practice...

The effect of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic on the education sector forces us to consider the impossibility of education without technology. Meanwhile, technology (in one form or another) has always been an integral part of education and increasingly assumed to be as available as the air that we breathe and the water that we drink. On the o...

Background The Covid‐19 pandemic disrupted higher education in many ways, such as the move to Emergency Remote Online Teaching and Learning (EROTL), often including a move to online assessments and examinations. With evidence of increased academic dishonesty in unproctored online assessment, institutions sought ways to ensure academic and instituti...

While learning analytics (LA) has been highlighted as a field aiming to address systemic equity and quality issues within educational systems between and within regions, to date, its adoption is predominantly in the Global North. Since the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) aspires to be international in reach and relevance, and to inc...

This book explores and further expands on the rich history of theoretical and empirical research in open and distributed learning, and addresses the impact of the “data revolution” and the emergence of learning analytics on this increasingly diverse form of educational delivery. Following an introductory chapter that maps the book’s conceptual rati...

It is with a sense of irony that we offer a conclusion to this book. As we acknowledged in the introductory chapter, when we invited authors to submit proposals for a book on exploring the potential and challenges of learning analytics for open, distance and distributed learning institutions and forms of delivery, no one would have imagined how the...

As part of the series, Springer Briefs in Open and Distance Education, we invited expressions of interest aiming to critically explore and map the potential and challenges of learning analytics in the specific context of open and distributed learning.

Whilst learning analytics is still nascent in most African higher education institutions, many African higher education institutions use learning platforms and analytic services from providers outside of the African continent. A critical consideration of the protection of data privacy on the African continent and its implications for learning analy...

Evidence shows that appropriate use of technology in education has the potential to increase the effectiveness of, eg, teaching, learning and student support. There is also evidence that technology can introduce new problems and ethical issues, eg, student privacy. This article maps some limitations of technological approaches that ensure student d...

This paper explores faculty’s perspectives and use of open educational resources (OER) and their repositories across diferent countries by conducting a multiple case study to fnd similarities and diferences between academics’ awareness, perceptions and use of OER, as well as examining related aspects of institutional policy and quality that may inf...

While learning analytics frameworks precede the official launch of learning analytics in 2011, there has been a proliferation of learning analytics frameworks since. This systematic review of learning analytics frameworks between 2011 and 2021 in three databases resulted in an initial corpus of 268 articles and conference proceeding papers based on...

This chapter presents a conceptual exploration of the potential of learning analytics to inform teaching and learning during extraordinary contextual events such as the recent and continuing impact of COVID-19. In reflecting on the potential of learning analytics to ameliorate teaching in the dark, we first share some empirical evidence of how lear...

In educational environments, technological adoption in the last 10 years has enabled a data-driven and decisionmaking paradigm in organizations. The integration of cloud services in schools and universities is a positive shift in the field of learning, but it also presents threats to all academic roles that need to be discussed in terms of protecti...

The relationship between research, on the one hand, and policy/practice on the other hand, is complicated and collaboration between scholars in research on higher education (RHE) and institutional research (IR) practitioners is often lacking. This book marks a collaborative effort of a diverse range of South African RHE and IR scholars and asks the...

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted global society in many ways, not least education, with schools and universities moving many teaching and learning practices online. This paper examines the response of educational institutions in employing learning analytics, an approach which includes the collection and analysis of student data to understand a...

https://voicesofpractice.pressbooks.com/chapter/down-the-rabbit-hole-of-race-gender-culture-being-faculty-confessions-distortions-and-extortions/ Whether to testify or confess, that is the question. The difference between ‘to testify’ or ‘to confess’ is guilt. So, when does a testimony about finding oneself in the nexus of race-gender-culture-bein...

"On 17 March 2021 we invited all authors of ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ (Jandrić et al. 2020) to reflect on their pandemic experience 1 year later.3 Mirroring the original article’s format, in ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19—1 Year Later’, we requested short testimonies, biographies, and workspace photographs. In numbers, the 1-year-later co...

The course has been designed and written with the explicit purpose of assisting teachers to understand and use learning analytics ethically and appropriately in their own context. After reading, participants should be able to: 1. Explain learning analytics in the broader evolution of the use of learners’ data in teaching and learning environments....

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted global society in many ways, not least education, with schools and universities moving many teaching and learning practices online. This paper examines the response of educational institutions in employing learning analytics, an approach which includes the collection and analysis of student data to understand a...

In the broader context of higher education, queer and gay faculty are increasingly visible, yet they are also relatively quiet regarding the assemblages of their identity on the processes of becoming faculty. In authoring our assemblages of coming to be Afrikaner and white and queer and gay as well as faculty, we attempt to narrate our multipliciti...

Produced from experiences at the outset of the intense times when Covid-19 lockdown restrictions began in March 2020, this collaborative paper offers the collective reflections and analysis of a group of teaching and learning and Higher Education (HE) scholars from a diverse 15 of the 26 South African public universities. In the form of a theorised...

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project "Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures-EduArc", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed...

This is a verbatim transcript of the Call for Testimonies sent out on 17 March 2020 to thePostdigital Science and Educationmailing list and posted on social networking sites.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) across the globe have turned to online technologies in a bid to address the unprecedented disruption to their educational function, created by physical restrictions implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators, learning professionals, administrators, managers - all have had to muster the courage and deter...

This essay explores questions pertaining to who has had and has the power to define who is human and what it means to be human, and the way higher education is but one of the role-players that define humanity and what it means to be human. It also examines the potential of decoloniality as an alternative and critical onto-epistemology which is esse...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the fourth industrial revolution have rapidly become the latest buzzwords in the education industry. Learning analytics and student data have become a central focal point in understanding and evaluating students in an attempt to improve upon the learning environment and experience. This paper explores the history an...

Higher education institutions have access to higher volumes and a greater variety and granularity of student data, often in real-time, than ever before. As such, the collection, analysis and use of student data are increasingly crucial in operational and strategic planning, and in delivering appropriate and effective learning experiences to student...

‘Data as technology’ has always been, and continues to be an essential part of the structuring of South African society and education, during and post-colonialism and post-apartheid. In the reconfiguration of South African education post-apartheid, student data constitutes a data frontier as un-mapped, under-utilised and ready for the picking. This...

As institutions of higher education increasingly look to data as evidence to support planning, allocate resources, and inform teaching and pedagogy, ethical considerations regarding learning analytics have evolved from being on the margins to more central in the conversations surrounding institutional uses of student data. After outlining this evol...

10. Belluigi, D, Czerniewicz, l., Khoo, S, Algers, A., Buckley, L.A., Prinsloo, P., Mgqwashu, E.M, Camps, C., Brink, C., Marx, R., Wissing, G., Pallitt, N. (2020). Needs Must”? Critical reflections on the implications of the Covid19 ‘pivot online’ for equity in higher education. Digital Culture and Education (ISSN: 1836-8301).

This article examines developments in the ‘smart classroom’ as a new frontier for the university. It provides a conceptual map of the scope and limitations of smart classrooms, contextualized to smart university initiatives. First, it introduces the notion of ‘smart’ technology in cities, campuses, and classrooms. Next, it examines how the smart cl...

Published in Distance Education in China 4:1-11 摘要：学习分析自从2011年出现以来,不管是作为一个研究重点还是实践领域,它一直在发展,从某种程度上讲已经成熟了。学习分析不但在增进我们对学生坚持学习和顺利完成学业的了解以及提高我们教学策略的效果等方面有巨大潜能,它还能帮助学生在更加知情的情况下做出选择。然而,学习分析在多大程度上影响学生学习?它在什么条件下能够充分发挥其潜能?这些问题引起一些关注。我们在这篇概念性文章中提出从生态系统观的角度理解学习分析,或是把它视为某一个生态系统的一部分,或是把它当成一个生态系统,这个系统由各种人为和非人为因素(行动者)组成,包含一系列相互交叉、常常互相依存且又是彼此一部分的变量。鉴于学习分析有提高学习效果的潜...

This paper outlines some of the material assemblages that are formed in international distance education (DE) in Africa. It offers a first exploratory study of materialities in DE and how they potentially distribute and aggregate to form a network to provide education. Through the use of interviews, students lived experiences are explored to unpack...

In his keynote, Neil Selwyn not only acknowledged his role as ‘outsider’ to the field of learning analytics, but also intentionally assumed the role of “idiot”. In my commentary I assume that Selwyn’s embrace of being an idiot was more than just self-deprecating humour or a disclaimer aimed to prepare the audience for his provocations. In a Medieva...

Assessment and learning analytics both collect, analyse and use student data, albeit different types of data and to some extent, for various purposes. Based on the data collected and analysed, learning analytics allow for decisions to be made not only with regard to evaluating progress in achieving learning outcomes but also evaluative judgments ab...

Student data, whether in the form of engagement data, assignments or examinations, form the foundation for assessment and evaluation in higher education. As higher education institutions progressively move to blended and online environments, we have access to, not only more data than before, but also a greater variety of demographic and behavioural...

Invited presentation, 14 November 2019, University of South Africa, Unisa

Considering that technology has always been part of education and specifically distance education, this should not result in complacency. Recent advances in technology and educational policy offer huge potential for the rethinking of pedagogical strategies. While technology has always formed an essential element in pedagogical approaches at the Ope...

Data—their collection, analysis and use—have always been part of education, used to inform policy, strategy, operations, resource allocation, and, in the past, teaching and learning. Recently, with the emergence of learning analytics, the collection, measurement, analysis and use of student data have become an increasingly important research focus...

Student data privacy as a research focus and practice is relatively under-researched in the context of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Central to researching student data privacy in the context of online service providers are the various user agreements that participants must accept or opt into before they can use a MOOC platform. Such documen...

Much research in face-to-face contexts outlines the importance of early adjustment on students' higher education experiences. However, few studies have replicated this research in distance learning contexts to unpack the early multifaceted adjustments associated with studying in absence of a physical campus. This is particularly needed from a Globa...

Much of the research on how social media is embedded into the educational practices of higher education students has a Western orientation. In concentrating on a case study of the varied ways in which African International Distance Education (IDE) students actively use social media to shape their learning experiences, we discuss an under-researched...

Evidence suggests that individuals are often willing to exchange personal data for (real or perceived) benefits. Such an exchange may be impacted by their trust in a particular context and their (real or perceived) control over their data. Students remain concerned about the scope and detail of surveillance of their learning behavior, their privacy...

In South Africa, the evolution of correspondence distance education to online education is a fairly recent. Currently distance education (at the most still off-line/correspondence) as a subsystem to higher education in South Africa contributes up to 40% of headcount students and approximately 30% of full-time equivalent students (DHET, 2014b). In o...

In this chapter, we examine the notion of responsible learning analytics. Such an approach requires institutions to take an answerable and response-able approach to using student data. Learning analytics, like all educational technology, is shaped by a range of social, political, economic and cultural agendas. As such, this chapter argues that ethi...

p class="3">While many strategies for protecting personal privacy rely on regulatory frameworks, consent, and anonymizing data, they are not always effective. Terms and Conditions often lag behind advances in technology, software, and user behaviours, and consent to use data for a range of unclear purposes may be provided unwittingly. As the commer...

Few would contest the impact of technology on modern day society. There are, however, wide-ranging opinions and contestations regarding the social and ethical implications of the increasing entanglement of our lives with technology (Introna, 2017; Marx, 2016; Robertson & Travaglia, 2017). Introna (2017) suggests that “At the center of this technolo...

In the context of higher education as social space or field in the Bourdieusian sense, exploring the lived experiences of early career postgraduate supervisors allow us to (re)consider the institutionalised rhythms, procedures and practices that shape graduate supervision. At the intersections of, inter alia, increasing numbers postgraduate student...

While many strategies for protecting personal privacy have relied on regulatory frameworks, consent and anonymizing data, such approaches are not always effective. Frameworks and Terms and Conditions often lag user behaviour and advances in technology and software; consent can be provisional and fragile; and the anonymization of data may impede per...

Despite evidence that learning analytics has become institutionalised within higher education since its emergence in 2011, there remain questions regarding its impact on informing curricula, pedagogy and ultimately, on student success. A variety of factors can impact on the successful implementation of learning analytics. Despite its huge potential...

In this paper we explore the potential role, value and utility of a personal code of ethics (COE) for learning analytics practitioners, and in particular we consider whether such a COE might usefully mediate individual actions and choices in relation to a more abstract institutional COE. While several institutional COEs now exist, little attention...

In the socio-technical imaginary of higher education, algorithmic decision-making offers huge potential, but we also cannot deny the risks and ethical concerns. In fleeing from Frankenstein’s monster, there is a real possibility that we will meet Kafka on our path, and not find our way out of the maze of ethical considerations in the nexus between...

As higher education increasingly moves to online and digital learning spaces, we have access not only to greater volumes of student data, but also to increasingly fine-grained and nuanced data. A significant body of research and existing practice are used to convince key stakeholders within higher education of the potential of the collection, analy...

This brief chapter explores the feasibility of teaching (a code of) ethics against a background which examines our views around data scientists, data analysis, data and, in particular, student data. It touches upon different approaches to ethics and asks whether teaching ethics would make any difference.

As the field of learning analytics matures, and discourses surrounding the scope, definition, challenges, and opportunities of learning analytics become more nuanced, there is benefit both in reviewing how far we have come in considering associated ethical issues and in looking ahead. This chapter provides an overview of how our own thinking has de...

There is no doubt that Big Data in higher education offers huge potential. However, there is a critical need to interrogate the underlying epistemologies and paradigms which inform our understanding of the potential of learning analytics to increase student engagement, retention and success. The harvesting, analyses and application of student data...

Amidst the different claims and counter-claims of disruption, innovation and revolutions facing higher education, the notion of Openness is, on the one hand deeply embedded in the evolution of distance education, and on the other hand, one of the key characteristics of more recent phenomena such as Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open...