The infographic below is part of a scholarship project where colleagues produce research-informed-teaching infographics to bridge the researcher-practitioner divide. Here Sarah Watson has synthesised an article that focuses on assessment for learning.
Patricia Couturas, Lecturer in French and COIL Facilitator for the School of Media, Arts and Humanities.
A collaborative online international learning (COIL) programme is a form of virtual exchange or online learning that connects students and educators from different countries or cultures. COIL programs typically involve a partnership between two or more educational institutions and even NGOs with the goal of promoting cross-cultural understanding, intercultural competence, and global citizenship.
COIL programmes can take many different forms but they generally involve some combination of online communication, collaborative projects, and virtual meetings or exchanges. For example, students from different countries might work together on a joint research project, create a video or podcast, or participate in a virtual debate or discussion.
COIL programs can be structured in many different ways depending on the goals, the learning objectives of the program and the preferences of the participants. Some programs are fully integrated into the curriculum or the module, while others are optional extracurricular activities. Some programs involve synchronous (real-time) communication, while others are asynchronous (self-paced). They can also involve both.
Overall, they offer students, educators, academics a unique opportunity to learn from and with others from different cultures, to gain new perspectives and insights, more knowledge and develop the skills needed to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world.
COIL programmes in the Department of Language Studies are already well established and are now of interest to Internationalisation at Home (IaH) in the context of the internationalisation of the curriculum and the students’ intercultural skills development.
Last year I set up an 8-week COIL programme with my peer, Dr Girodet, from the University of Reims, France. The feedback from the students through their reflection on their intercultural experience showed a better knowledge of themselves and the socio-cultural mechanisms that lead to the construction of preconceptions and points of view, and a better distinction between interpersonal and cultural differences. You can hear me talking about the project here https://www.sussex.ac.uk/schools/media-arts-humanities/internal/staff/education/cpdbites (scroll down to episode 6).
Our current COIL programme is with the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce et d’Informatique de Gestion Business School (ESCO-IGES) in Burkino Faso. In collaboration with my peer, Salifou Dabo, from ESCO-IGES in Ouagadougou we have designed and are teaching an 11-week COIL programme which has been embedded into the University of Sussex French for Professional Purposes module, and into the ESCO-IGES University English language module.
The Sussex and ESCO-IGES shared-learning objectives of this COIL programme are to:
To meet the teaching and learning objectives we have co-designed two problem- solving-based scenarios which require students from both universities to find solutions via analysing, assessing, negotiating and making group decisions. Their group work involves weekly collaboration via synchronous, recorded group discussions on the scenarios via Zoom, and asynchronous collaboration via Google.doc, Whatsapp and Padlet in the two target languages (English and French). At the end of the COIL programme students produce a reflective report on their collaborative work experience in a multilingual and multicultural learning environment.
In a webinar on 28 March 2023 Francesca Helm, Associate Professor of English in the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padova in Italy and Marianne Grace Araneta, Learning Designer in the Office of Digital Learning and Multimedia, University of Padua facilitate a conversation about Virtual Exchange through the lens of dialogue, interculturality, and sustainability. They discuss the Virtual Exchange programme they have developed with students and other institutions (Universities and NGOs) to facilitate an international dialogue on sustainability and climate change. You are warmly invited to join the webinar. Information and registration here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/connecting-minds-bridging-borders-tickets-580447793977. You are also invited to ask questions or answers questions on COIL on this Padlet before the webinar https://padlet.com/p_couturas/5la0kcmnr60b8ohx
Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:
Areas of activity
Core knowledge
Professional values
The infographic below is part of a scholarship project where colleagues produce research-informed-teaching infographics to bridge the researcher-practitioner divide. Here Sue Robbins has synthesised an article that focuses on the provision of actionable feedback to allow students to develop the knowledge and skills we value.
The infographic below is part of a scholarship project where colleagues produce research-informed-teaching infographics to bridge the researcher-practitioner divide. Here Julia Jiang has synthesised a study that applies Dual Coding Theory to the teaching of Chinese vocabulary.
The infographic below is part of a scholarship project where colleagues produce research-informed-teaching infographics to bridge the researcher-practitioner divide. Here Matt Walpole has synthesised a meta-analysis on the suitability of TED talks for teaching academic listening.
The infographic below is part of a scholarship project where colleagues produce research-informed-teaching infographics to bridge the researcher-practitioner divide. Here Patricia Couturas has synthesised a meta-analysis relating to Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).
Dr Ruth Stirton, Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Law and Chair of the Social Sciences and Arts Cross Schools Research Ethics Committee.
Social media research comes under the umbrella term ‘internet-mediated research’ (IMR) which is defined by the British Psychological Society as:
“…any research involving the remote acquisition of data from or about human participants using the Internet and its associated technologies.”
(Ethics guidelines for internet-mediated research, BPS, 2021)
Social media users are human participants in research terms and the overarching principles of ethical research with human participants apply. Social media research should – like any research – aim to:
Any research project involving social media users/their data will require University ethics review[1] and data collection must not start until the appropriate ethics approval and permissions are in place.
Social media research involves the processing of personal data and is subject to the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
Personal data is anything that enables a living person to be identified. It is information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual; that is, a person who:
Examples of personal data include: name, address, date of birth, research participant number, number, pseudonym, occupation, e-mail, CV, location data, Internet Protocol (IP) address, phone number, a user-name, ID post or Tweet.
The University must always have a lawful basis for processing[3] personal data and, in the context of research activities, our lawful basis is carrying out a task “in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller”, known as ‘public task’ (Article 6(1)(e) of the UK GDPR.) Under our Royal Charter, the purpose of the University is to “advance learning and knowledge by teaching and research to the benefit of the wider community,” meaning research activities are part of our ‘public task’.
Although there are some limited exemptions for research activities, researchers will need to comply with most of the requirements of data protection legislation. The key principles are:
Under data protection legislation the following types of personal data are called ‘special categories of personal data’.[5]
Special category data should only be processed for a limited range of purposes and only where necessary. Under the UK GDPR researchers may process special category data for scientific and historical research purposes provided:
Social media research projects collecting special category data to meet the research objective must meet the above conditions. If the research will involve the processing of special category or criminal offence data on a large scale* then a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) will normally be required (see https://www.sussex.ac.uk/ogs/policies/information/dpa/dpia.)
*For the purpose of this guidance, a large data set is defined as that which contains more than 1,000 individuals/data subjects. Large scale processing or ‘mass data’ research is discussed in Section 3 below.
The processing of criminal offence data (which includes personal information about criminal allegations, convictions, and proceedings) is also subject to specific conditions and limitations (see https://www.sussex.ac.uk/ogs/policies/information/dpa/sc-crim-convictions.)
Informed consent is one of the core principles of research ethics. Legally, consent is not required to process personal data for research purposes where the lawful basis for processing personal data is the University’s public task [see 1.2 above]. However, to ensure that research is ethical – and that respect for the autonomy, privacy and dignity of individuals and communities[6] is upheld – researchers should usually seek informed consent from participants by giving information about the research that allows them to make a meaningful choice about whether or not to take part.
In social media research, however, this is not always possible and “In many cases, a social media user’s data is accessed and analysed without informed consent having first been sought.” Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics (Townsend & Wallace, 2016.) This does not mean that the principle of informed consent does not apply to social media research; rather, that it is context-specific and will depend on the extent to which the social media user’s data can be said to be in the public domain, the terms of service of the platform the user posted on and the nature of the data itself.
In some instances, such as accessing data via an on-line forum or group, it may be possible to seek informed consent from individuals or from a moderator/administrator. In other cases, such as projects involving as automated mass data-scraping, it will not (realistically) be possible to do so and researchers will need to think about whether consent can be deemed to be ‘implied.’
When applying this test, it is important to remember that:
It is simply not possible to provide a prescriptive list of scenarios where informed consent is required, and those where consent may be implied, as each case will be context-specific. A general rule of thumb is that the use of direct quotes would typically require consent but there may be exceptions to this, such as quotes taken from official or public-authority web-sites or from the content of a published newspaper article; or those made by public figures acting in their public capacity.
Thinking about participants’ privacy, confidentiality and anonymity will help researchers work through some of the issues around consent.
Researchers should always seek to protect participants’ privacy and confidentiality. Typically, this is achieved through the de-identification of individuals in research outputs so that quotes/data etc cannot be linked to the research participant. In social media research this is difficult to achieve: a quick search of a quote via Google or another search engine may not only identify the individual but their location, and the time and context in which they originally posted and so anonymity cannot be assured.
A helpful way of thinking about the nature of social media users’ data and its representation in your research is to think of it as “private data on public display” (Nicolas Gold)[9]. In other words, a person’s data may be technically accessible or publicly available but it still contains private information about them that they may not expect to be ‘studied’ or included in another medium.
Wherever possible researchers should paraphrase quotes or present outputs in aggregate form to avoid the identification of individuals. Where the use of direct quotes is necessary for the research output, it may be appropriate to contact the participant to seek their consent, or possible to demonstrate that the individual was aware that they were contributing to a public debate (public settings on Twitter, for example, and use of # hashtags to indicate contribution to a wider, open debate.) There will be instances however, where the risks clearly outweigh the research benefits – such as exposing participants to the disclosure of illegal activity or compromising an individual/others – and direct quotes cannot therefore be used. Researchers should consider and mitigate any risks associated with the research output and explain these clearly in their ethics review application.
Even where the research output will not identify individuals, the data collected for the analysis constitutes personal data and must be stored securely on University systems in order to assure confidentiality.
It is essential that researchers read and follow the terms of service of the social media platform they are collecting data from. As explained above [1.4] terms of service are never a proxy for informed consent, but understanding the nature of the user’s contract with the platform will be helpful when negotiating issues around privacy and confidentiality and considering whether an individual’s data can be said to be ‘on public display.’
Researchers must also be very clear as to the terms under which they may collect the data. For example, some social media platforms prohibit the automated collection of data (known as ‘data-scraping’) unless researchers do so via a specific developer agreement that grants them access to software developed/managed by the platform. Twitter for example, mandates that researchers must collect data via the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API). This places limits on the rate of data collection and also enables Twitter to notify researchers when a user has requested the deletion of a Tweet (which should it turn be removed from the research data set.) Automated data collection is discussed further below in Section 3: Mass Data Research.
It is not possible to explore the various platforms’ terms of service within the scope of this guidance, and it is the researchers’ responsibility to read and comply with any terms and conditions.
[1] http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/research/governance/checklist
[2] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/key-definitions/what-is-personal-data/#2
[3] ‘Processing’ personal data means any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction.
[4] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/ogs/policies/information/dpa/research-and-gdpr
[5] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/ogs/policies/information/dpa/sc-crim-convictions
[6] Ethics guidelines for internet-mediated research British Psychological Society, 2021
[7] Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics Townsend & Wallace, 2016
[8] Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics Townsend & Wallace, 2016
[9] Using Twitter Data in Research Guidance for Researchers and Ethics Reviewers, Dr Nicolas Gold Department of Computer Science, UCL, 2020
By Jo Lindsay Walton, Research Fellow in Arts, Climate and Technology in the Sussex Humanities Lab
The MAH Sustainability Educator Toolkit is a resource to enrich teaching with themes such as planetary and social boundaries, the Sustainable Development Goals, climate justice, ecocentrism (especially in law and policy), Indigenous knowledges, and degrowth. As described in the Ethical Educators plan, a pillar of Sussex’s sustainability strategy:
“Universities are uniquely placed to help shape – and be shaped by – the thinking of younger generations, organisational cultures and even geopolitical ideologies. For this reason, fully embedding the principles of sustainability within our curriculum is a practical way of helping to create a better future.”
We pulled together the Toolkit mostly in the summer of 2022. The Toolkit is filled with reading lists and signposts, quotations to discuss in class or to build into teaching materials, some explainers of key topics, some teaching ideas we’ve framed as ‘Activity Seeds’, and a handful of case studies. It focuses on environmental sustainability, although sustainability has other dimensions too. If you’d like to contribute to the Toolkit, or if you have feedback on it, we’d love to hear from you.
Following early conversations with colleagues, we were keen to make something quickly. In addressing climate crises and biodiversity loss in the early-to-mid 2020s, every year, every month counts. Environmental emergency isn’t something for ‘the next generation’; it is unfolding all around us. But the rhythms of academic life, from grant writing to curriculum development, aren’t always best suited to acting fast. So we hoped to create something that was good enough for now, and might spark ideas and enthusiasm for even bigger and better things soon. The HE sector is rising to meet environmental emergency with a range of ambitious timelines: fulfilling these promises means embracing improvisation and experiment.
Sustainability and interdisciplinarity go hand-in-hand. Quite early on, we also realised we wanted to focus on embedding sustainability within existing media, arts and humanities curricula. Our scoping research (led by Adaora) revealed many great introductory resources about sustainability. So what was the gap we identified? There seemed to be few resources that were designed to be combined with existing methods, texts, lessons plans, learning outcomes. We imagined ourselves thinking, “OK, I am teaching such-and-such next week, and I want to include sustainability angles. How do I do that?” We looked for resonances between sustainability science and policy and areas like the environmental humanities, ecopoetics, new materialism, and postcolonial and postdevelopment studies. As Alisa Lebow (Film Studies) points out in her case study, “We often explore films in which the environment is very prominent. But we can also read any film (or novel, or photograph, or object) in an ecocritical manner.”
We were also interested in activities and formats. Many teaching resources we discovered were either very content-focused, or contained activities more suitable for primary or secondary schools. To be honest, compared to our early aspirations, we have drifted a lot toward content, and away from activities and formats. The dream of perfectly customisable “activities I can drop into my 9am seminar tomorrow” hasn’t materialised. But hopefully the Activities Seeds and case studies are steps in the right direction.
Similar to decolonising the curriculum, ‘sustainabilising’ the curriculum may also mean going against the grain of subtle systemic power. Educators are under all kinds of pressures, and sometimes sustainability can feel like a box-ticking exercise, disconnected from transformative action or radical system change. The synergy between theory and action can be elusive. Especially when words like ‘sustainable’ are proudly plastered across the websites of the worst polluters and perpetrators of economic and ecological injustice. Maybe the next big iteration of the Toolkit should include a chapter on ‘Greenwashing’? Maybe you’d like to help to create it? There are so many different things to think about when you’re planning teaching, and one thing that is easy to let slide is the ecological foundation of all the others. We see embedding sustainability as potentially hard work, but of a creative and illuminating kind: something generative, a source of inspiration and even energy.
MAH Sustainability Educator Toolkit
Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:
Areas of activity
• A1 Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
• A2 Teach and/or support learning
• A3 Assess and give feedback to learners
• A4 Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance
• A5 Engage in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices
Core knowledge
• K1 The subject material
• K2 Appropriate methods for teaching, learning and assessing in the subject area and at the level of the academic programme
• K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/ disciplinary area(s)
• K4 The use and value of appropriate learning technologies
• K5 Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching
• K6 The implications of quality assurance and quality enhancement for academic and professional practice with a particular focus on teaching
Professional values
• V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
• V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners
• V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
• V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice
By Emma Newport, Senior Lecturer in English Literature
In 2017, I launched a new creative writing initiative, Sussex Writes, which was developed in conjunction with Mark Fairbanks and piloted at Beacon Academy. We wanted to connect our students at university with young people in local schools to ignite, or reignite, a love of creative writing. Since then, we have expanded into a global writing initiative, working in related areas of student wellbeing, youth opportunities, and post-Covid recovery, through the Arts and Humanities.
Context
We identified that:
The impact of this kind of assessed creative writing has resulted in an emphasis on standardised and quantifiable outputs, resulting in “inflated and unconvincing” stories being rewarded most highly and teachers necessarily seeking a formula to help their students produce writing in the limited time of the exam (Barrs, 2019).
Added to this, Covid has further widened the gap in attainment in schools, with large gaps in students’ teaching, with an increased burden on covering content and little time dedicated to developing skills such as essay and creative writing. Teachers signing up to Sussex Writes have reported that there has been a decline in student confidence, self-direction and autonomy in their learning.
One of the consequences of learning via a screen has been a – largely accidental – rise in passive learning: watching video recordings, completing closed tasks, following a PowerPoint. Passive learning is associated with decreased enjoyment in learning and thus impacts engagement in education (Gorard & Huat See, 2010). In homes with limited computer or internet, access to all the interactive functionality of Zoom (video, breakout rooms) is not always possible, and digital inequality increased the attainment gap. Digital inequalities are most often related to socioeconomic status, gender and ethnicity; as a result, this indicates that any effort to increase digital equality among young people must struggle against well-established structural divides (Samuelsson & Olsson, 2014).
Partner schools have reported three key performance areas have been affected:
The primary aim of Sussex Writes is to focus on closing the attainment gap that has widened due to the pandemic, although Sussex Writes also works with a host of projects beyond formal education, including charities and organisations like Girl Guides and AllSorts. The programme is underpinned by ideas of social justice: creating opportunities for students who may not have had many to develop their employability skills, while supporting people in the community who may also have had limited opportunities and whose education has been disrupted by the pandemic.
What we did
The Sussex Writes programme connects undergraduates and postgraduates in MAH with the local and global community via student-led creative writing workshops and literacy programmes. We don’t just limit ourselves to working with schools: our team runs events with charities, youth programmes, and vulnerable groups in Brighton and around the world. The success of the programme derives from the full partnership that we share between faculty and students, with students have responsibility for the following:
Sussex Writes members also become involved in generating leads for new opportunities with partner organisations including schools, youth groups and other outreach organisations, and in running peer-to-peer workshops where Sussex Writes team members exchange tools and strategies for best practice, based on their experiences.
There is enormous value in students co-creating programmes with faculty that is not just focused on academic outputs and contributing to the final degree award, as it changes the students’ relationship with learning: they enhance and deploy their knowledge and skills for their intrinsic and social value, rather than perceiving their value as a grade to be banked towards their degree (Freire, 1968; 1974).
Where it has led
Sussex Writes has now developed into a multiplatform, multifaceted programme, with its own website , blog, Facebook page, and social media. Our student team has worked with hundreds of young people in twenty-two different countries. Four of our student team have gone onto PhDs and lectureships. The research for Lockdown Live resulted in a grant with the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, in partnership with The Youth Café, a pan-African youth advocacy organisation.
The future of Sussex Writes lies in building on the ways in which we centre social justice and social responsibility in the university and beyond. I see the programme as a model for a scholarship pathway that can offer equivalent opportunities to the Junior Research Award and identify, fund and grow excellence amongst our students at Sussex in partnership with faculty.
Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:
Areas of activity
Core knowledge
Professional values
By Victoria Grace Walden, Senior Lecturer, Director of Learning Enhancement
So often online learning is discussed as a ‘deficit’ model (Darabi et al 2010, 216). It is compared to in-person, campus teaching, which it can never be identical too, therefore it is perceived as lesser. Critical digital pedagogues, Maha Bali and Bard Meier (2014), however, argue that presumptions that online learning should look like in-person learning are informed by three (incorrect) assumptions:
They celebrate asynchronous learning for the ways it promotes ‘deeper reflection’, during which powerful learning is happening; it is just learning that the instructor cannot see or monitor.
In August 2021, I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Pedagogy Lab , founded by Sean Michael Morris with threads by a variety of contributors, including Bali. Morris, Bali and colleagues run the Hybrid Pedagogy open journal, which focuses on Critical Digital Pedagogy – heavily influenced by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux. Essentially, the work of the journal emphasises the humanness at the centre of (digital) learning.
Media Education Theorist, Julian McDougall, argues ‘that online learning spaces can be productive “third spaces” if they are charged with creative, productive possibilities, combined with an ethnographic turn in curriculum design’ (2021, 2). He argues against the idea of online learning spaces providing ‘supplementary’ materials to the physical classroom (2021, 3). Instead, following thinkers like Bali, he suggests a need to think about how students’ personal learning journeys might take shape across, through, and combining different spaces.
Another influence on McDougall’s work is that of Arndt et al. (2020), who argue that online higher education, just as with offline, needs to be understood as relational, which emphasises the ethics embedded in learning design. In this sense, notions of student ‘engagement’ and ‘presence’ refer to how their ‘relational energy’ is generated through their personal learning journey (McDougall 2021, 25).
As we transitioned back to on-campus teaching as the dominant form of engagement with students, I wanted to think about what I could take form my experiences of remote, online teaching during the pandemic to inform an inclusive, blended approach going forward. I was conscious that not all of our students would be able to be on campus for the entire term – how could I created a learning experience that was as accessible as possible to all students?
What I did
Design your own blended learning journey
Acknowledging that each student will create their own personal journey through the module, I decided to design each week with a ‘menu’ of learning options (some online and collaborative; some online and solo; some offline and solo; some on campus together). Each week was divided into five sections:
Challenge Yourself to Learn Something New
Check your Learning
Practice
Engage with your Learning Community
Reflect on your Learning
In structuring support for students’ personal learning journey, I wanted to ensure that tasks were not divided into in-person or offline tasks, and online learning. I also wanted to avoid the idea that online learning is supplementary to offline. The use of headings designed to encourage challenge, assessment, practice, community, and reflection were the driving forces under which a range of online and offline activities were included.
Using the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) to ensure good practice and excellent student experience. This teaching practice outlined in this blog post is informed by the highlighted areas:
Areas of activity
Core knowledge
Professional values
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