Dr Vily Papageorgiou

Higher education has witnessed continuous growth in online learning, further catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving forward, it is important to transition from remote teaching to sustainable, high-quality and mature online learning practices for impactful student learning. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative multiple case study research that investigated the pedagogical decisions and rationales of educators and digital learning professionals in deliberately designed online learning contexts. Data were collected through 31 interviews, observations and documents from seven interdisciplinary design teams across six UK universities over an extended period. Three themes were constructed to convey key research insights including: (1) embracing a multi-level view of student learning journeys, (2) embedding multiple and diverse ‘voices’ and (3) creating a complex web of social learning opportunities and ‘spaces’. The findings from this study offer a revitalised understanding of pedagogies suggesting holistic and multivoiced approaches to online learning. Findings pointed to the need for narrative-based approaches to online learning design, attention to purposeful hybrid learning spaces and an expansive view of educators’ role. The insights presented in this paper can be enlightening for educators, teaching teams, digital learning teams, academic developers, researchers and university leadership, opening up dialogue and new directions for online learning practices and research.

Higher education has experienced an increase in the design and provision of blended, hybrid and online programmes as a move towards flexible education. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated universities, educators and students’ engagement with digitally mediated learning practices. It underscored the necessity for all university actors to develop digital capabilities to enact their roles skilfully. This chapter takes the form of a conversation among five academics from the United Kingdom and Australia who explore how digital capabilities can be conceptualised for responsive higher education futures and how to facilitate their development across the university ecosystem. This discussion highlights the need to reframe digital capabilities by considering their deeply relational and fluid nature, to transcend existing frameworks that primarily focus on individuals’ resourcefulness and skills. It proposes a shift towards collective and holistic development of digital capabilities, challenging established power dynamics between educators and students. Key dimensions discussed include cultivating a digital epistemology, encouraging critical and ethical decision-making and promoting social inclusion. Finally, by recognising the interconnectedness between digital capabilities and other educational priorities such as inclusive education, sustainability and employability, this chapter offers useful insights on harmonising their integration into learning and teaching. 

Integration of sustainability in institution-wide curricula is widely advocated to help address global sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities. However, studies demonstrate a mixed picture concerning educators and key actors’ understanding, openness and readiness to meaningfully embed sustainability into their teaching contexts. Successfully integrating sustainability into learning, teaching and assessment is highly demanding, requiring interdisciplinary teamwork and resources in navigating the challenges associated with achieving large-scale implementation across entire universities. This chapter takes the form of a conversation between four academics from the United Kingdom and South America who examine ways in which universities can empower teaching staff in their journey towards enriching curricula with sustainability. This conversation emphasises the importance of nuanced sustainability definitions that are context-sensitive, time-relevant and holistic. It highlights the need to integrate sustainability transversally across disciplines to transcend siloed teaching approaches. Proposing a multi-level approach to supporting teaching staff, this chapter underscores that top-down efforts should be complemented by interdisciplinary community engagement and students acting as co-creators and active contributors for transformative practices. This chapter’s insights are particularly valuable for university leadership, teaching staff, academic developers, researchers and other stakeholders involved in education for sustainable development activities. 

Education for sustainable development, when thoughtfully implemented, becomes a powerful mechanism for developing well-equipped graduates and university staff to address interconnected global socio-environmental challenges, paving the way for more sustainable and equitable futures. This chapter delves into the perspectives of university educators, exploring their conceptions, experiences and aspirations regarding the meaningful integration of sustainability into teaching practices. The central theme emerging is the importance of embracing a values-infused approach to sustainability in learning and teaching. The discourse highlights the need for epistemological pluralism, by encouraging the consideration of diverse perspectives and partnerships to tackle complex global issues. This chapter argues that a vital condition for enabling education for sustainable development is ensuring sustainability of people. Therefore, the second part of the discussion employs sustainability as a lens, redirecting the conversation towards sustainable pedagogies and practices. Practice-based examples for nurturing students’ learning fitness and flourishing are provided, urging deeper reflection for the creation of healthier university learning environments. The chapter concludes with a compelling advocacy for a genuine, whole-university commitment to sustainability integration in Higher Education. This commitment should involve a fair distribution of responsibility and customised support for teaching teams, aligning with their unique contexts, needs and aspirations. 

As societies continue to respond to the grand challenges of our time, so too must Higher Education. This book explores what innovation and change could look like within Higher Education, and what could be done to facilitate it. Inspire: Learning for Teaching in Higher Education considers the grand pedagogic challenges facing the Higher Education sector, captured through a series of detailed dialogues and debates between disciplinary colleagues. Reflecting on forward-looking frameworks and exploring how they may be facilitated, each co-authored chapter platforms insights from educational experts. The focus of this book is on action, seeking to inspire those teaching, facilitating, and leading in Higher Education to bring conceptual understanding to actuality.

There is an increasing number of calls for universities to include sustainability as an integral component in the teaching of every discipline. However, successful institution-wide implementation is highly demanding. One significant challenge is the scale of the task required to empower a large number of non-sustainability specialists to engage with the sustainability agenda through their various disciplines. A second challenge is the need to educate teachers on pedagogical approaches that they may not be familiar with, such as systems thinking, critical reflective thinking, stakeholder engagement, participatory learning, impact solution-oriented approaches and futures thinking. This paper draws on the experience of the University of Surrey, which will have embedded sustainability into all taught programmes by the end of 2023/24. It will present insights into the multilevel support provided to staff, which encompassed resources featuring: dedicated workshops; examples and prompting questions to stimulate teaching staff’s thinking; a self-paced online course; and feedback on preliminary staff ideas from educational developers. The paper offers critical reflections on the approaches employed at the University, incorporating feedback from teaching staff and the ongoing challenges for staff in the process of embedding sustainability within a wide range of disciplines.

The design and provision of online learning by universities has gained traction globally as a strategic move towards flexible education maximising students’ learning opportunities. A promising approach for designing high-quality online learning is collaborative design where educators work with interdisciplinary digital learning professionals. However, to date, studies that have taken a holistic approach to examine the nature and outcomes of the design work between these key university actors in a single project are lacking. This thesis addresses this gap by investigating the decision-making processes of educators and digital learning professionals during online learning design, the factors influencing their decisions, and the rationale behind their pedagogic choices. Cultural-historical activity theory was adopted as the theoretical framework to enable a thorough investigation of educators’ and digital learning professionals’ online learning design work within their broader sociocultural context. A multiple case study was employed as the overarching methodology with data collected from seven design teams (‘cases’) across six UK-based universities involved in ongoing online learning design cycles. One-to-one interviews in two stages (before and after the design of online modules) and non-participant observation of design meetings were conducted to capture participants’ insights. Relevant documents were also analysed as secondary evidence sources. Findings revealed participants’ decisions were made through framing, sharing insider knowledge and expertise, forward-looking, and breadth-first design processes. Their decisions were influenced by four levels of interacting and interdependent factors: individual, team, community and network, and institutional. The pedagogic rationale behind participants’ decisions indicates their practice re-culturation and has been conceptualised in this research as holistic, multivoiced, and connected. Collaborative design also proved to support educators’ professional development in (co-)design, pedagogy, and learning technology. These findings contribute to a multifaceted and contemporary understanding of online learning design and highlight practical implications for educators, digital learning professionals, university leadership, industry partners, and researchers.

A collaborative approach to online learning design, where Higher Education educators work in partnership with professional staff has become a mechanism for developing high quality online learning environments. Collaborative design has been viewed as an authentic and situated activity that can contribute to educators’ professional development. Although there is a strong theoretical basis for the later position, the empirical base has been limited. This study aimed at filling this gap by employing Engeström’s (1999) 3rd generation Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and McKenney’s et. al. (2015) ecological framework. Interview and observational data were collected from 5 multidisciplinary design teams from 4 UK-based universities in which educators were novices to online learning. Results show that educators 1) cultivated productive design habits of mind and skills, 2) rethought pedagogy for an online learning context, and 3) developed their learning technology awareness and skills. Lessons drawn from this study can contribute to the improvement of collaborative design for online learning.

The aim of this chapter is to report on school teachers’ perceptions and approaches to multimodality using a serious game. STEAM is a game designed for helping school teachers to gain awareness of how multimodality may be enacted in the classroom for enhancing the student learning experience. The game embraces the notion of multimodal teaching and learning, as a way to present multiple representations of content such as text, images, video, audio and pervasive media, by augmenting modes with tools, teaching strategies and locations as means to create ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. A questionnaire was employed to school teachers (n = 54) for understanding how multimodality was experienced through using the serious game as (1) stipulating diversity and increasing knowledge retention, (2) developing senses for attaining deeper understanding of the subject topic, (3) involving students into learning design and (4) supporting student’s autonomy and self-direction. The findings revealed an explicit connection between theory and practice as experienced through the game’s semiotic domain whilst contemplating on attempts to transcend experiences of in-game multimodality to lived classrooms.

The design and delivery of fully online and blended programmes by Higher Education Institutions (HEI) has gained great attention, as it is seen to be a strategic move towards flexible and adaptive learning which enhances the student learning experience. A team-based design approach to online learning, where educators’ work in partnership with professional staff (e.g. learning designers/ technologists, learning analytics experts) and sometimes students, has become a mechanism for supporting educational innovation and for developing quality offerings [1], [2]. The use of evidence to shape pedagogical decisions of such educational innovations and designs has been considered as one of the key components for the provision of high quality learning and teaching [3], [4]. Therefore, there is an expectation for educational decision-makers to adopt an evidence-informed approach to their learning design. This is also reflected on HEIs’ (digital) learning and teaching strategies and mission statements. The use of evidence can facilitate critical thinking and go beyond individuals’ opinions and intuitions on “what works” and/or the adoption of educational myths (e.g. learning styles). Ultimately, evidence-informed educational decision-making aims to make potential solutions visible, and utilises ideas and evidence that emerge from systematic assessment of learning and teaching approaches [5]. Despite the importance and emphasis on evidence for educational decision-making, there is a dearth of studies focusing on this topic, especially in the context of university online learning design teams.

To address the identified gap on the literature, this paper reports on a multiple case study research design exploring the role of evidence in educators and university professional staff decision-making when designing for credit-bearing online learning. Data was collected from three online module teams in different UK university contexts via semi-structured interviews, design team meeting observations and document analysis over a period of one year. Thematic analysis was used to inductively analyse data. Results from this study show that there is a variation as to how, and to what extent, each team and/or individuals’ utilized evidence to inform their decision-making. Four themes were identified; a perceived lack or limited usefulness of evidence, evidence as inspiration and rationale for pedagogical decisions, educational frameworks and theory as foundations for decisions, and the production of research and evaluation to inform future cycles of decisions. Based on these findings, practical implications for educators, university professional and leadership staff and educational researchers are discussed along with recommendations for future research.

The aim of this paper is to report on teachers' experiences of, and approaches to, multimodality in teaching and learning. A small-scale online survey with closed and semi-structured questions has been deployed to school and university teachers (n=68) for eliciting their experiences in multimodal teaching and learning. Thematic analysis has been adopted as the overarching methodology for reporting patterns in the data from the survey. The results from the analysis showed that experiences of multimodality are discerned as: (1) imparting information, (2) enacting collaborative learning and (3) preparing students for exploring concepts. The process of meaning making is exemplified through a developmental progression from more teacher-directed modes through oral, written and visual representations to more student-centered through gestural representations as means of connecting and combining different modes triggered via visual communication, collaboration and exploration.