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Online Instructional Activities Index - ION Professional eLearning Programs - UIS

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Art Projects Article Critiques Audio Recordings (Includes Podcasting) Blogging Brainstorming Case Briefs Case Studies & Case-Based Instruction Concept Mapping Debate Discussion Question Activities Document Analysis Drill and Practice Essays Fieldwork...

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Fostering online discussion in higher education

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Articulates a set of principles for fostering online discussion in higher education, based on theory, the literature and evidence from postgraduate and undergraduate flexibly delivered courses.

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Hi there! Welcome to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Threshold Concepts Special Interest Group!

We aim to build up a multidisciplinary community of scholars who are exploring Threshold Concepts in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

What does that mean? This special interest groups seeks to bring together scholars for different backgrounds and perspectives that are interested in Threshold Concepts and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The desire for this group emerged out of a need for ongoing and interdisciplinary conversations about the connections between Threshold Concepts and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. And if we can do that through witty repartee, even better!

We hope that you will join us in conversation about research projects, professional development, and innovative curriculum and pedagogies.

Follow us on Twitter @RedBlanketTC, with the hastag #SoTLTC, or through the Threshold Concepts Facebook page.

Andrea Webb, University of British Columbia
Anne Tierney, Edinburgh Napier University

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Threshold Concepts in the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

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Hi there! Welcome to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Threshold Concepts Special Interest Group! We aim to build up a multidisciplinary community of scholars who are exploring Threshold Concepts in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. What does that mean?

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This scholarly practice guide is designed for educators who are interested in supporting reflective practice for their students' learning and for their own
learning and career development, with a range of activities to stimulate deep and creative reflection.

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Reflection for learning: a scholarly practice guide for educators

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This scholarly practice guide is designed for educators who are interested in supporting reflective practice for their students' learning and for their own learning and career development, with a range of activities to stimulate deep and creative reflection.

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Critique of the culture of calculative assessment 

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Critique of the culture of calculative assessment 

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Ryan C. McIlhenny, Geneva College (Shanghai)

Culture is formed through a network of habits, many of which come to us subconsciously from external forces, including the social contexts that shape our identities, dispositions, and deepest interests. These cultural habits serve as the framework for our understanding of the world. However they may be incorporated into our meaning-filled lives, some practices, especially bad ones, often contribute to a skewed vision of reality, which quickly turns into a kind of self-incurred tutelage that Enlightenment intellectuals warned against. Regular exercise, for instance, is good for the body, but habitual fast-food consumption is not. The same is true in reference to beliefs. Affirming climate change is not only good but critical for current and future generations; denial, on the other hand, is a seriously bad habit of mind. The challenge comes when we try to break our routines and thereby alter culture. Physical and ideological habits die hard. In his 1842 essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "a foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of little minds."[1] This great Transcendentalist intellectual, the father of American literature, was referring to habits that we've tacitly accepted without critical reflection on either the meaning from which they come or the power by which they seem to enchant us. Members of society rarely realize that they are stuck in cultural customs shaped by peer-driven group-think, what Friedrich Nietzsche, in a similar frame of mind as Emerson, would later refer to as herd-driven individuality.[2] Such habits arrest the development of our own self-reliance, the core, I would argue, of our physical and spiritual being and becoming.

Another way of understanding the notion of a "foolish consistency," one that may move us away from Emerson and toward thinkers like Michel Foucault, is how erstwhile good habits can inadvertently turn into negative cultural practices from which it may become equally difficult to break free. One well-worn adage may come to mind: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." A CEO of a multinational corporation may have very good physical and moral customs, but not so the company which may be complicit in destroying the environment or the lives of workers employed by the company. The "foolish consistency," in this case, is the belief that the good personal habits of a CEO trickle down to the habits of the corporation in general. But the parts do not always reflect the whole, despite what marketing departments may say to the contrary. Culture, though inextricably tied to our everyday customs, defines us in ways that are beyond what we may anticipate. We may have a reason to employ certain practices for the purpose of achieving an appropriate end, but the moment we act, both direction and meaning slip away from us. Cultural habits move us toward meaningfulness, but "meaning," immediately engaged and altered by those who interact with it, cannot be contained. We deceive ourselves if we think that we can control every fragment of meaning that comes by the routines inherited from our social group. And we become fools when we refuse to recognize when individual intention becomes disconnected from the wider system, the assemblage of multiple intentions. We celebrate the benevolent individual who helps the poor in providing a meal, shelter, clothing, and other essential needs, yet that individual becomes foolish when refusing to go beyond these surface level activities in dealing with the roots of poverty. We celebrate the philanthropy of the wealthiest among us, but that celebration as well as the philanthropy are often ways of distracting us from dealing with root issues. Indeed, the wealthy need social, economic, and political crises to demonstrate their benevolence. As Emerson suggests in the same essay, the little charity that we give to various social causes-slavery, in Emerson's case-function not only to assuage our conscience but also to excuse us from going any further, which in turn produces a shallow culture that we think rests on powerful principles.

The practice of educational assessment, comprising the various ways of measuring student learning, is a defining habit of higher education and is thus central to its culture. Most professors are required to articulate on their course syllabi the learning outcomes and the methods used to measure summativestudent learning. Tests, quizzes, written assignments-these are means to measure student learning. There are also the numerous formative methods that use an array of rubrics drafted by assessment teams to examine sample course work. The goal is to see whether student performance matches up to the institution's larger outcomes.[3] From specific courses, to the department, to the institution as whole, outcomes-based evidential learning seems commendably organized and thoroughly logical. Demonstrating the quality of the curriculum is vital for an institution's sustainability, including its long-term financial health. But such an effort requires a considerable amount of dexterity, coordinating the various players-as well as interests-of an institution.

Having been actively involved in collecting data for the purposes of bettering not only student learning but my own efforts at effective teaching, I've noticed that assessment in some cases has fallen into a situation that, ironically, threatens the learning process itself. Many institutions have created a culture that restricts learning to what can be measured. If something cannot be measured, then it is tossed into the dustbin of uselessness. This hegemony of measurability shares a striking resemblance to what leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, borrowing heavily from Max Weber, called "instrumental reasoning"-namely, the reduction of life to numerical quantification.[4] Such constricted rationalism, according to David Held, "implies that whatever cannot be reduced to numbers is illusion or metaphysics."[5] The culture of assessment, a derivative of the obsession with shallow quantifications and hurried interpretations, tends to present learning as a closed system. The obsession with measuring ignores the reality of cognitive development, which includes appreciating the unknown as an essential part of the learning process. Assessment has not only arrested the development of the mind, it has devalued the place of mystery in learning. The "ballooning assessment industry," Molly Whorten warns, "is a symptom of higher education's crisis, not its solution."[6] The present essay considers how to reshape the culture of assessment, how to soften its rigidity by appreciating and accommodating the openness of learning.

As I have claimed above, assessment has fallen into a particular "situation." I'm suggesting that the current culture of assessment should be abandoned, not assessment itself. In short, I want to challenge the way in which assessment has been "encultured." At root, the corporatization of higher education has reconstituted our attitude toward evidence-based student learning. Colleges and universities have evolved into top-down authoritarian enterprises, mimicking the organizational structure of the modern corporation where students are viewed as consumers, faculty as disposable labor, and administrators as managers. What accounts for this transmogrification of higher education? The 2008 Recession, the nadir of nearly five decades of economic stagnation, has certainly accelerated this cultural shift. Whenever a financial downturn impacts an economy, each member of an economy works to preserve his or her own interests. But in a vertical structure, those situated at the highest level of authority-in this case management-have greater power over those below. A weak economy has created a sense of urgency, which in turn has demanded tighter managerial oversight over the finances of an institution. Educational leaders, increasingly concerned with an institution's financial future, have reacted to financial strains by tightening budgets, raising tuition, and implementing austerity measures.[7] They can do so because, like other managers, they are in a stronger position relative to those at the bottom. And the strategy of enforcing financial realignments functions to augment the power of those making such realignments.[8] Those who control the purse have the lion's share of power. This has resulted in the weakening of shared governance.

In Fall of the Faculty, Benjamin Ginsberg has examined the reasons behind the rise of what has become the all-administrative university: the decline in state funding for public institutions, a trend that began in the early 1970s; the growth in the number of students and programs that have augmented management; compliance with the growing number of mandates imposed by the federal government; and the fact that faculty members are increasingly less involved than they once were in administrative tasks.[9] We should also note that the growth in administrative authority is reflected in the rising number of non-research degrees, including professional doctorates.[10] And institutions are seeing an increasing number of holders of non-Ph.D. doctorates (e.g., Ed.D.s) filling administrative slots. Most Ed.D. programs, for instance, writes Dewitt Scott, "focus specially on preparing students to assume formal administrative leadership positions in education institutions."[11] Further, many individuals with such a degree who then take an administrative position do so with very little experience in administration itself and thus, as if to jump on to a highspeed train, inherit the pressures of demonstrating the successfulness of their institution. Professional doctorates, unlike traditional Ph.D.s, are focused more on deepening the practices within a given field, tending toward an urgency not only to produce innovative practices, while often relegating theory, but also to produce immediate results.

At the same time, holding an administrative position places one in a key decision-making position at an institution. Administrators have an opportunity to shield themselves from plans that would negatively impact their own status. For instance, those at the top of the administrative ladder, especially at smaller institutions, have an intimate knowledge of the finances of a college or university, as well as very close connections with leadership further up, especially at the level of the Board of Directors. When finances are tough, administrators will carefully craft the narrative to Board Directors-often withholding information or flat-out lying.[12] Decisions are made that will, for the most part, preserve administrative authority. It is either simplistic or evasive to say that administrative growth has come as a result of addressing "real" needs, for it fails to consider, Ginsberg argues, the variations in administrative numbers among institutions-why one institution has three times as many administrators per student as opposed to another with similar economic conditions.[13] It also fails to address the steady increase in administrative power at institutions that are more financially stable.[14] The stress of the post-2008 economy certainly presented financial challenges, but the economy also intensified habits and, thus, a shared culture despite the fact that the material circumstances have not impacted institutions equally. Many college leaders have either been innocently caught up in the momentum that has fueled administrative bloat, or they have taken advantage of such bloat to strengthen their own power and create more bloat. When certain conditions develop without creating significant ripples or generating opposition, such conditions become status quo.[15] This, of course, does not mean that every administrator has a penchant for becoming a tyrant. Again, administrators may have the most upstanding intentions, but they are stuck in a systemic cycle, and it is difficult to decelerate the momentum. The Recession has helped to normalize the "foolish consistency" of assessment obsession.

A final reason for the growth in administrative power, related more toward strengthening such power, has come as a result of the overwhelming silence of the faculty. It is not uncommon for the oppressed, for whatever reason, to be complicit in their own oppression. Perhaps challenging power directly is too dangerous. Faculty members are afraid of being subject to retaliation, from sanctions to losing their jobs, if they raise issues regarding the health of an institution. Some will choose to use more creative ways to challenge managerial power. I suspect, however, that without direct confrontation the oppressed will unwittingly support that power. When taking for granted the decisions made by certain individuals regarding the financial future of a school, members of an institution, especially students and faculty, tacitly legitimize the authority of those making such decisions. (This should remind readers of Antonio Gramsci's notion of "hegemony."[16]) This is not to say that faculty members have willingly come to accept the 3-to-1 administrative-faculty ratio. Again, human agency is often disconnected from cultural habits. Some may think that faculty members may no longer come from a position of power to do anything substantial about the growth of the administrative institution, despite the call to do otherwise.

Faculty members need to harness the power that they have as a body to strike down the conditions that have secured such a trend. One way to do so is by getting directly involved in hiring faculty members. But who has the strongest influence when it comes to faculty hires? It is not the faculty. Some will argue that it is a Board of Trustees or Board of Regents with such authority. Technically, this is true. But remember that the vast amount of information that Board Members receive comes from administrators. Some will disagree, saying that faculty members play a very important role in governance. If that's true, then why would faculty members choose to reduce the number of long-term or tenured faculty members, to let their wages stagnate, and increase the number (and salaries) of administrators over the last decade? Seventy-five percent of all college- and university-level teaching is done by contingency faculty. Instructors have no choice but to accept a precarious situation whereby they work at the pleasure of the administration.[17] The reality is that board members and administrators constitute the power bloc that makes decisions for colleges and universities. Faculty members have become, for the most part, ineffective advisers, which is no more than a euphemism for an increasingly powerless cohort within higher education. Taking comments "under advisement" very often means to ignore.

In the meantime, however, faculty members will face increasing pressure to comply with the dictates of management. The vertical authoritative structure of the corporate world, which in academia has created administrative bloat and bloated administrative authority, instills, Jerry Muller argues in The Tyranny of Metrics, the "irresistible pressure to measure performance, to publicize it, and to reward it, often in the face of evidence that this just doesn't work very well."[18] This "metric fixation," as Muller calls it, has deepened the urgency to comply with managerial dictatorship, creating "tension between the managers who seek to measure and reward performance, and the ethos of the professionals (doctors, nurses, policemen, teachers, professors, etc.)." In a modern capitalist economic, workers, those who perform the main laboring task of an institution (as opposed to those who simply monitor labor), live in a culture of increased production, legitimizing an overbearing bureaucratic machine that disciplines workers in a variety of ways while directly strengthening management. Increasing production is one way to secure the longevity of a business, and one way to increase production is to employ cost-effective (and very often exploitative) forms of labor, which has always intensified, as the history of capitalism shows, tension between management and labor.[19] With management's control over intellectual labor, administrators can more effectively call the shots, demanding that faculty-both adjunct and tenured-comply with production output.[20]

The urgency to increase output by contingent labor has the potential of endangering the quality of instruction.[21] Submitting without question to the tyranny of metrics, allowing the hob-goblin of a bad habit to plant itself deep into our psyche, turns learning into a matter of control and domination. When the financial situation of a college or university is tenuous, instructors shift into survival mode. They feel the pressure to show learning success in the classroom, knowing all too well that administrators will cut their courses, their programs, or even their employment if they fail to show immediate results.[22] Non-tenured faculty members, who ultimately serve at the pleasure of administrators, provide easier courses to please an institution's desire to maintain tuition-paying consumers, retention, on-time completion, and graduation rates. Such a culture discourages the taking of riskier and more creative leaps in our educational journey, because such risks may not yield immediate results. Education becomes reduced to dictation and recitation, and creatively engaging challenging issues becomes less of a priority. Imagine the number of college graduates who may be able to satisfy the instructions in a manual but have little skill in solving more complex issues. Much of human experience cannot be reduced to pat answers taken from a textbook. Life is much more complicated than that. And students are becoming increasingly aware of the declining rigor of their courses. A slim majority of students, according to a 2015 study by the National Survey of Student Engagement, have said that their classes lack significant rigor, as evidenced by minimum class requirements and easier assignments, including a considerable drop in the number of prep hours for class as well as the number of assignments.[23] Further, there has been no major reversal of this trend. Indeed, to entice consumers, the college experience has been presented less as an opportunity for learning and more of a visceral 'happening' filled with non-academic activities organized by non-academic staff members. College becomes a consumer trap, distracting prospective and matriculated students from the central task of education.

The corporate turn in higher education is undergirded by a very powerful ideology. In their own separate way, authors Ellen Schrecker, Henry Giroux, and Jennifer Washburn have argued that the contemporary university has been shaped by neoliberalism-an ideology that imposes discipline from the top to guarantee fiscal success not so much for the well-being of the community but for those at the top, which in turn redoubles their power.[24] The corporation has come to consume much-if not all-of human life. Herbert Marcuse predicted such a state more than fifty years ago. The contemporary world, he once wrote,

tends toward both the total administration and total dependence on administration by ruling public and private managements, strengthening the pre-established harmony between the interest of the big public and private corporations and that of their customers and servants.[25]

Academic work by any faculty member is, Marcuse argued in another essay, "motivated, guided, and measured by standards external to [the faculty member], standards pertaining to predetermined tasks and functions."[26] Neoliberalism has indeed produced its own cultural habit-that of discipline-produced in part as a result of paranoia over an imagined enemy.[27] As the history of capitalism has consistently shown, the enemy that requires discipline is always the main producers of wealth-namely, labor. Labor has considerable power in production. It doesn't matter how many managers a company has at the top-no labor, no product. One would think that labor would be conscious of its powerful position; sadly, this is not the case. Management has strengthened its power not only in the sheer use of force but also by the way in which labor has come to recognize its own subservience. Despite the fact that labor organizing has been at an historic low recently, such organizing is always assumed to be the enemy that seeks to subvert management (management doesn't like to share power), hence the reason why the latter needs to control (i.e., discipline) the former. Faculty members are often portrayed as the chief obstacle to student learning. Neoliberal administrators justify their disciplinary practices by painting a negative picture of the faculty as obstacles in the way of student learning and institutional stability.[28]

Within this cultural setting, assessment has become an obstacle to the life of the mind. The student debt crisis has contributed to the decline of academic rigor. College graduates hold an average debt of $30,000 ($1.3 trillion nationally). They also make up a high percentage of underemployment. In Paying the Price, Sara Goldrick-Rab writes that learning is hampered when administrators place further stress on students' financial security, not just by way of tuition hikes but also loan schemes that only deepen their financial enslavement. Stress over the affordability of college forces many students to skip meals or reduce the hours needed to sleep for the purposes of acquiring yet another job. This has an adverse effect on learning, as hungry and sleep-deprived students have difficulty focusing on their course assignments. Ultimately, the intellectual development of students-students burdened with debt, who continue to attend larger and less-than-rigorous courses-is arrested.

Likewise, professors, including adjuncts working at more than one institution, who barely make ends meet, face similar challenges: a lack of job security, minimal to no employee benefits, forced retirement, and often no long-term guarantees of stable employment. What is more, faculty members have less time for research, which negatively impacts knowledge production. Yet all the while faculty are pressured to work harder and produce more, often compelled by administrators to implement the latest pedagogical trend. Professors are required to include outcomes in their syllabi that may not serve an immediate purpose in their courses, aid in their pedagogy, or advance the developments within their field. Rather than benefiting "from serious conversations about what is and is not working in their classes," Whorten laments, professors (and students) "end up preoccupied with feeding the bureaucratic beast."[29] The double burden for intellectuals is to make advances in knowledge while complying with the dictates of administrative management. What is offered to assessment bureaucrats may only be a portion of the overall exploration that needs to be done in classroom discussion and experimentation. As Mark Salisbury writes:

When institutions narrow their educational vision to a discrete set of skills and dispositions that can be presented, performed or produced at the end of an undergraduate assembly line, they often do so at the expense of their own broader vision that would cultivate in students a self-sustaining approach to learning.[30]

Learning is a process that is, Salisbury continues, "cumulative, iterative, multidimensional and, most importantly, self-sustaining long beyond graduation." In contrast, assessment today has the tendency of sealing off learning from the rest of life.

The assessment culture dominating colleges and universities ignores the dynamic openness of learning. The higher or deeper one moves in an area of study the more the learner is confronted with greater challenges, obfuscations, ironies, and even paradoxes. Learning is a matter of overcoming the openings (an admitted euphemism for "ignorance") in our perspective on reality. Indeed, there is no learning without admitting that sometimes reality cannot be packaged in tightly managed metric units. Openness also relates to a readiness to be surprised with new developments in the course of study. In both cases, the learner must be patient. We can never predict a moment of insight, and it often takes time to articulate just what exactly such an insight means. In this regard, new ideas, arguments, or solutions to problems cannot be forced; they come at different times for different people. A scientist (or science student), for example, cannot force a conclusion from an experiment just to satisfy the bureaucratic beast.

Of course, assessment has its place. It is most certainly helpful in terms of learning outcomes in introductory, mid-level, or skills-oriented courses (e.g., logic, communication, writing). In my lower division history class, for instance, I write out the learning outcomes on my syllabus and go over each of them at the very beginning of the course. Accordingly, students are told that while taking my class they will identify and be able to articulate names, places, and dates in a particular historical period. They will also identify and be able to articulate important historical arguments. Students will also learn how to formulate their own historical arguments-arguments that mirror those made among professionals. But at an advanced level, these positivistic requirements can be stultifying. Upper-division and certainly graduate-level courses often engage challenging questions or developments within a particular discipline, making it difficult to offer a closed and measurable list of knowledge bits for students. The higher a professor and his students move within a discipline the more difficult it is to meet time-restricted deadlines and delineate clear boundaries of what is known and what needs to be explored in greater depth. The learning process-and there is never learning without constant process-cannot always be presented in a neatly packaged manner, "as a closed loop." We cannot reduce deep learning to the length of a social media status update or a TED talk. Many courses will spend an entire semester grappling with a handful of problems, often without a satisfactory resolution. But the benefit of such a class is that the questions remain with students long after a course is completed. In many ways, questions should be considered as having greater value than answers because they tend to stay with us much longer. How does an instructor provide learning outcomes for a class that grapples with a problem of historical interpretation? Can an instructor provide a satisfactory learning outcome in a part of his or her discipline that is in development, where the contours of what is to be studied are admittedly blurry? A response to the problems of assessment in advanced studies might be that a disciplinary problem or question can be easily presented as a measurable learning outcome in itself, that a professor can articulate in his or her syllabus that students will be able to recognize and articulate such challenges, leaving out the issue of answerability. This is perfectly fine; many professors do just that. But more pervasively (and perhaps more perniciously), assessment has cultivated a different habit. Administrators want tangible results-outcomes that are not only quantifiable but also marketable. Leaving the world open-ended does not satisfy consumer demand.

Socrates spent his life asking questions. He not only resisted but directly challenged simplistic answers to serious questions of life. Socrates-along with many other great thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition-would have been an unreliable candidate in providing assessment, yet he remains regarded as one of the wisest thinkers in history. For millennia, true knowledge was never divorced from wisdom. Indeed, the two were one and the same. Wisdom goes beyond isolated knowledge units and towards an interconnected and transcendent moment of superior insight. The expulsion of wisdom from the Western intellectual garden began in earnest around the time of the nineteenth century. Many thinkers have reacted against such developments. Nineteenth-century Transcendentalists sought to regain a sense of wisdom by attempting to bridge the divide between Understanding and Reason, the former focusing on the basic stuff of knowledge and the latter going beyond static bits of data (like words, logic, or personhood) to a higher plain, one focused on the whole mind, the whole person-body and soul. Understanding is abstract; Reason is experientially embedded. Understanding can be closed, but Reason remains open. Unfortunately, institutions nowadays have confused measurable knowledge parts (Understanding) as definite knowledge (Reason).

The beauty of wisdom is that it can hold out aspects of knowledge without restricting the openness of a greater knowledge experience. One way to understand this paradox is to think of the raw data of knowledge, the composition of Understanding, as having meaning only by way of relating with other aspects of reality, moving us into the transcendental realm of Reason. The various modes of being that structure reality-biological, emotional, rational, economic, aesthetic, religious, etc.-congeal into a meaningful language that we call "culture." An economic mode of being, for instance, is given its meaning by how it relates to other modes-aesthetic, logical, biological, psychological, emotional, and so forth. The wise person pursues an integrated life and mind, putting together the pieces of reality to form a rich-and richly transcendent-mosaic. To do this, however, learning must be allowed to remain open. Assessment obsession is stuck in the world of "Understanding"-the surface level of knowledge that can be measured, the isolated points on a spreadsheet or the ephemeral flashiness of a PowerPoint presentation. Wisdom dictates that a more complete epistemology, accepting the relational aspects that make up reality, as more than just "Understanding" but also transcendent "Reason."

What is missing from a transcendentalist epistemology is the social embeddedness of knowing, which also speaks to the openness of learning. In contrast to mere intelligence, which is "fixed, impersonal, and, in an odd sense, nonsocial," wisdom, according to author Steven Hall, is "profoundly social, deeply personal, adaptive, and intuitive."[31] Wisdom acknowledges abstract concepts and social contexts that contribute to meanings. Indeed, it is the dynamic of the social that gives meaning to our ideas. The philosophy of pragmatism, for example, a school of thought that has done quite a bit to shape the methodology of modern American scholarship, has sought to regain wisdom by reminding us that meaning must remain open and that truth emerges from within the dialectics of the social context.Pragmatists accept contingency, patiently waiting for useful and applicable results-results that are not always immediate.[32] Yet pragmatism allows the social context to direct the development of truth. It is, if you will, an epistemology that is bottom up, not top down. Knowledge production must rely on a social context (i.e., peer evaluation); it cannot be dictated, predicted with absolute certainty, or fit into the time constraints of administrative-driven assessment.

Pragmatism also appreciates the application of a diversity of perspectives in the pursuit of more clearly realizing and sharpening "workable truths." The greater diversity, in terms of the number of individuals involved in the learning process, the richer the outcome. A one-size-fits-all imposition ignores the cognitive range among learners-cognitive ranges situated and delimited by specific social, economic, and culture contexts.The culture of assessment undermines social, economic, and intellectual diversity. Measurability creates a kind of sameness, a homogeneity that resists difference. Multiple perspectives have the potential of yielding a richer understanding of reality. Institutions nonetheless force assimilation through content assessment (distinct from skill-measuring assessment), which seems to conflict with the drive toward greater diversity on the college campus. Are institutions truly committed to diversity if only in the social but not the cognitive sense? Transcendentalist "reason" and the importance of the social in American pragmatism, which recognizes the openness of learning, protect knowledge from ossification and in this way preserves wisdom.

Sadly, however, the contemporary world has turned its back on wisdom. Perhaps this is because wisdom, which grows by way of experience and is defined in part as an acceptance of the unknown, cannot be easily measured. According to Hall, wisdom converges

on recurrent and common elements: humility, patience, and a clear-eyed, dispassionate view of human nature and the human predicament, as well as emotional resilience, an ability to cope with adversity, and an almost philosophical acknowledgement of ambiguity and the limitations of knowledge.[33]

One part of this definition seems to stand out: the idea that wisdom is emotional steadiness in the face of the unknown: "Real life," Hall continues, "is not confined to a board; it is not symmetrical and neat; it does not always reward boldness and aggression; it does not forbid a new piece from flying in out of left field."[34] Indeed, real life cannot be quantified in any final sense, because new experiences force us to adjust to new circumstances. Wisdom relates to a "higher level of understanding, almost intuition, of knowing when experience should guide decisions and when you have to throw out the experiential playbook and literally do a rethink."[35] Wise people do not panic when an answer is not readily available. They are grounded but clear-minded enough to deal with contingency: "Knowledge offers comfort; wisdom feels comfortable with uncertainty."[36]

Working through the unknown, the openness of reality, requires patience and humility. "Patience," a mark of wisdom, Hall writes, "is the battle ground for now versus later, immediate reward versus delayed gratification, impulsivity versus prudence."[37] He suggests that the corporate mind is the furthest thing from what we would consider as wise. "Narcissistic CEOs," he writes,

[tend] to make more "extreme choices," and, in essence, [are] the corporate equivalent of drama queens, typically pursuing abrupt shifts in business...big wins, big losses.... Executive narcissists bring a lot of drama into the boardroom, but that drama does not produce systematically better corporate performance.[38]

Foolish leadership, Hall continues, "often boils down to a failure of character, a personal estrangement from the virtues we associate with wisdom: a sense of fairness, humility, emotional regulation, deliberation."[39] Colleges and universities are increasingly being run in this manner: managed by leaders who lack not only fairness, humility, and emotional regulation but also an open mind. A considerable dose of humility is necessary when acknowledging ontological contingency and epistemic limitations. Yet in a world that is fixated on quantifying the smallest units of production, there is very little room for such a quality. In the realm of higher education, it is hard to admit ignorance in an assessment report or a program review. Exposing the weaknesses or shortcomings of administrators gets in the way of showing the viability of a school, hence the reason why some schools have either withheld vital information about their program or have straight out lied.[40] What keeps an institution moving is not action based on data but on the bullying will of narcissistic leaders. It takes humility to work through challenging issues. But in a context dominated by ephemeral blips of information, we have very little patience for individuals or groups who take time to work through a problem and admit of the limitations in their knowledge or methodology. We have even less patience for those who respect such limitations as an essential part of the knowledge process. Author John Meacham tells us that "to be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness."[41]

Contemporary assessment has ignored the unpredictable, boundless, and even messy ways in which knowledge evolves. Assessment-and assessment-obsessed administrators-will never be able to corner an evolutionary moment in a field of study. Professionals in my own field of history are regularly confronted with new data, ideas, arguments, or paradigms that change the way we do history. But such changes-some minor, some major-cannot be predetermined or packaged for students to simplistically point to and regurgitate for assessment officers. This kind of thinking is restricted to the textbook. According to Robert Dickerson, the current state of accreditation, which incorporates assessment, has "outlived its usefulness."[42] Higher education should invite students to grapple courageously with mystery, irony, and contingency, to revel in the mysterious, to study the great works in the humanities, sciences, social science, and the arts to forge innovative ideas that bridge the gaps in our knowledge.

So how might we break the obsessive habit of assessment and return to a posture of openness and patience integral to the production of knowledge? One strategy would be to confront the neoliberal ideology that has perverted higher education. Institutional leaders need to gain the courage to break the "foolish consistency"-the metric fixation exacerbated by a consumer culture-that has come to dominate the life of the mind. I'm not sure how to accomplish such a task without some sort of clamorous but unified barrage of criticism. A second more practical solution-one that will return us to a healthier approach to assessment-would be for faculty members to return to the teaching and scholarly outcomes articulated by their own disciplines.[43] Faculty members regularly visit such outcomes as they develop those for their courses and departments. Institutional and department outcomes should be directed from the outcomes specific to an academic discipline. Outcomes should be generated from the bottom, from departments, up. Faculty members must take the lead in articulating institutional outcomes through the use of the outcomes in their respective disciplines.[44 ]In an ideal situation, faculty bodies should have sovereignty over curriculum development, which should include assessment and program review. The sad reality is, however, that administrations have relegated faculty members to advisory positions, which is tantamount to taking away their responsibilities as primary judges of student learning.[45]

Finally, the defeat of the current hobgoblin demands a shift in the power structure of higher education-namely, a return to a truly shared governance model. There is a lot of talk about the importance of shared governance, but very little movement in trying to regain it.For the majority of institutions, governance is concentrated in the hands of administrators.Faculty members need to hold their own and create a unified front against overgrown administrative authority. They need to find ways beyond tenure-because tenure is no longer a guarantee of job security-to protect their interests from the directives of corporatized management. Perhaps they should tighten their association with not only their professional organizations but also organizations like the American Association of University Professors. What is more, such association must form the basis for a united front among faculty bodies, forging alliances from within their own institutions but with other institutions as well. Assessment, within limits, is invaluable. But obsession with assessment can be, to borrow from Max Weber, disenchanting. Faculty members should be at the forefront of the campaign to breach the restrictive walls of contemporary assessment-only then will institutions move closer to regaining the transcendent mysteries of learning.

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," In Essays: First and Second Series(New York: Library of America, 1990), 35.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bernard Williams, ed., trans. Josephine Naukoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 352.

[3] Program Review, both internal and external, is likewise an important aspect of assessment, though related particularly to accreditation.

[4] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 228.

[5] David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 68.

[6] Molly Whorten, "The misguided drive to measure 'learning outcomes'" New York Times Opinion (February 23, 2018): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/opinion/sunday/colleges-measure-learning-outcomes.html

[7] Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier, Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

[8] Paul Campos, "The real reason college tuition costs so much" New York Times. Opinion. (April 4, 2015)https://www.nytimes.com/2015/ 04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html

[9] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty and the Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters (NY: Oxford, 2011), 30. "During the same time period," Ginsberg continues, "the number of administrators employed by private colleges and universities grew by 135 percent" (30). See also Richard Vedder, "'Kill the Administrators' (Not Really)" Forbes (May 10, 2018): https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/ 2018/05/10/kill-all-the-administrators-not-really/#34880e716210

[10] Douglas Archbald, "The Emergence of the Nontraditional Doctorate: A Historical Overview" New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 120 (Spring 2011): http://www8.esc.edu/esconline/cdlrev2.nsf/ 7ee05c19c4623d128525767800520634/26fea5d0ec3c9330852578a4004d0adf/$FILE/C.2.4.pdf

[11] DeWitt Scott, "Ph.D. v. Ed.D." Inside Higher Education (October 24, 2016): https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/phd-vs-edd. See also https://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2015/01/16/5-career-trajectories-graduates-earn-doctoral-degrees-education/

[12] Scott Jaschik, "Lies, Damn Lies and Rankings" Inside Higher Education (July 19, 2018): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/ 07/10/temple-ousts-business-dean-after-report-finds-online-mba-program-years-submitted

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ben Cosman, "Universities are Cutting Tenured Faculty While They Load Up on 'Non-Academic' Administrators" The Atlantic (February 7, 2014): https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/universities-are-cutting-tenured-faculty-while-they-load-non-academic-administrators/357858/

[15] Jenny Rogers, "3 to 1: That's the Best Ratio of Tenure-Track Faculty to Administrators, A Study Concludes" Chronicle of Higher Education (November 1, 2012) https://www.chronicle.com/article/Administrative-Bloat-How-Much/135500; The Office of the President of the University of California alone has over 2,000 non-teaching administrators. https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/05/10/kill-alll-the-administrators-not-really/#34880e716210; Jon Marcus, "New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom in Higher Ed Administrators" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html;https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administrators-ate-my-tuition/

[16] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (NY: International Publishers, 1971), 10. See also Valeriano Ramos, Jr., "The Concepts of Ideology, Hegemony, and Organic Intellectuals in Gramsci's Marxism," Theoretical Review 27 (March-April, 1982).

[17] Dan Edmonds, "More than Half College Faculty are Adjuncts: Should You Care?" (May 28, 2015): https://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/

2015/05/28/more-than-half-of-college-faculty-are-adjuncts-should-you-care/#265bba531600.

[18] Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 6.

[19] The same is true in the UK. Paul Jump, "Academics in the minority at more than two-thirds of UK universities" Times Higher Education (September 3, 2015): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academics-minority-more-two-thirds-uk-universities

[20] Hank Reichman, "Current Hurdles to Academic Freedom and Shared Governance" (April 13, 2015) https://academeblog.org/2015/04/13/current-hurdles-to-academic-freedom-and-shared-governance/; https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/05/10/kill-alll-the-administrators-not-really/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/

[21] Kim Clark, "The Great Recession's Toll on Higher Education" U.S. News and World Reports (September 10, 2010) https://www.usnews.com/ education/articles/2010/09/10/the-great-recessions-toll-on-higher-education;https://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ihe/article/viewFile/8486/7620

[22] Peter Brown, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[23] Dan Berrett, "For Students, Expectations of Academic Rigor Are Far From Universal" Chronicle of Higher Education (November 19, 2015) https://www.chronicle.com/article/For-Students-Expectations/234269

[24] Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (NY: New Press, 2010); Henry Giroux, Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014); Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (NY: Basic Books, 2008);

[25] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 35

[26] Held, Critical Theory, 417.

[27] Henry A. Giroux, "The Disimagination Machine and the Pathologies of Power" symploke21, no. 1-2 (2013): 257-269.

[28] Jeffrey Alan Johnson, "On Assessing Student Learning, Faculty are Not the Enemy" Inside Higher Ed (November 7, 2014): https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/11/07/administrators-should-work-faculty-assess-learning-right-way-essay

[29] Whorten, "Misguided Drive."

[30] Mark Salisbury, "Future-Focused Assessment" Inside Higher Ed (December 5, 2013) https://www.insidehighered.com/views/ 2013/12/05/risks-assessing-only-what-students-know-and-can-do-essay

[31] Stephen Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience (NY: Knopf, 2010), 43.

[32] Whereas the historical roots of American pragmatism are perhaps most acutely present in the lectures of William James, a more contemporary application of the pragmatic principles of a dialectical pursuit of meaning may be found, for example, in Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, Solidarity.

[33] Hall, Wisdom, 11.

[34] Ibid., 193.

[35] Ibid., 194.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 168.

[38 ]Ibid., 140.

[39] Ibid., 258.

[40] Scott Jaschik, "Temple Rankings Scandal: From Bad to Worse" (July 26, 2018) https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/07/ 26/temple-admits-it-provided-false-rankings-data-six-more-programs

[41] Meacham quote in Hall, Wisdom, 144.

[42] Robert C. Dickerson, "The need for accreditation reform" https://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/dickeson.pdf See also Valerie Strauss, "11 problems created by the standardized test obsession" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/ 2014/04/22/11-problems-created-by-the-standardized-testing-obsession/ ?utm_term=.bdba1ff4a8f6

[43] The American Historical Association, for instance, has its own resources, including outcomes, for teaching and learning: https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning

[44] Jeffrey Alan Johnson, "On assessing student learning: faculty are not the enemy" Inside Higher Ed (November 7, 2014) https://www.insidehighered. com/views/2014/11/07/administrators-should-work-faculty-assess-learning-right-way-essay

[45] James Derounian "University administration should enable, not disable" The Guardian (July 31, 2012) https://www.theguardian.com/ higher-education-network/blog/2012/ jul/31/the-role-of-university-administrators

Copyright © 2019 by Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture is formed through a network of habits, many of which come to us subconsciously from external forces, including the social contexts that shape our identities, dispositions, and deepest interests. These cultural habits serve as the framework for our understanding of the world.

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Going gradeless is possible in any school environment, and doesn't mean that one never gives a grade. Instead, this process is about lessening the impact of grades (with the end goal of eliminating them with the system altogether.)

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Going gradeless is possible in any school environment, and doesn't mean that one never gives a grade. Instead, this process is about lessening the impact of grades (with the end goal of eliminating them with the system altogether.)

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Passionate teaching guru :-)

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Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept being graded, and none of us spend enough time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades.

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Feedback for Learning: Closing the Assessment Loop

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Feedback for Learning: Closing the Assessment Loop

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A multi-university collaboration providing guidance about the most effective feedback practises.

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Assessment feedback for learning is the lynchpin to students' effective decision making, and the basis of improved learning outcomes. However, feedback is under-utilised and often misunderstood by both students and educators and there is no single feedback strategy or model that has been shown to work across all contexts. The Australian Higher Education sector is in need of a useful and useable approach for improving feedback for learning.

We have a surfeit of models, frameworks, principles and strategies in the considerable expanse of literature exploring feedback for learning, yet we have little guidance on how to choose amongst them. As such, our project aims to enhance student learning and experience by improving institutional, educator, and student capacity to stimulate and leverage assessment feedback.

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Assessment feedback for learning is the lynchpin to students' effective decision making, and the basis of improved learning outcomes. However, feedback is under-utilised and often misunderstood by both students and educators and there is no single feedback strategy or model that has been shown to work across all contexts.

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Issues and priorities arising around academic development, teaching and learning in Higher Education. filtered by 2018

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This article is a stub. You can help the UBC Community by expanding it.

Signature pedagogy refers to the forms or styles of teaching and instruction that are common to specific disciplines, areas of study, or professions. Often cutting across individual courses and institutions, signature pedagogies help students build a "habit of minds" that allows them to think and act in the same manner as the experts in the field.

Signature pedagogies are important because they "implicitly define what counts as knowledge in a field and how things become known. They define how knowledge is analyzed, criticized, accepted or discarded. They define the functions of expertise in a field, the locus of authority, and the privileges of rank and standing". (Shulman, 2005). Understanding the how your teaching methods are guided by the discipline in which you are situated can help you understand and formulate learning outcomes suitable to your field and assessment strategies. Examining the signature pedagogy of your discipline can help you to better understand the means by which learning takes place in your program, and how well you are preparing your students to be the next generation of experts in their field.

Shulman (2005) has identified three dimensions of signature pedagogy:

Surface Structure

Concrete operational acts of teaching and learning

What the learning looks like

What actually goes on in the classroom

Deep Structure

Assumptions about how best to impart knowledge and know-how

Decisions about how the material will be taught or presented

The advantage of choosing certain methods and practices over others

implicit Structure

The "hidden curriculum" that includes moral dimensions

Beliefs about professional attitudes, values and dispositions

The limit and bounds of learning and application

Chick, N. L., Haynie, A., Gurung, R. A. R., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2012). Exploring more signature pedagogies: Approaches to teaching disciplinary habits of mind. Sterling, Va: Stylus Pub.

Gurung, R. A. R., Chick, N. L., & Haynie, A. (2009). Exploring signature pedagogies: Approaches to teaching disciplinary habits of mind. Sterling, Va: Stylus.

Jenkins, D. M. (2012). Exploring signature pedagogies in undergraduate leadership education. Journal of Leadership Education, 11(1), 1.

Robinson, J. M. (2010). Exploring signature pedagogies: Approaches to teaching disciplinary habits of mind - edited by regan A. R. gurung, nancy L. chick, and aeron haynie: Reviews. Teaching Theology & Religion, 13(3), 286-287. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9647.2010.00631.x

Shulman, L. S. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52-59. doi:10.1162/0011526054622015

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This article is a stub. You can help the UBC Community by expanding it. Signature pedagogy refers to the forms or styles of teaching and instruction that are common to specific disciplines, areas of study, or professions.

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The value and impact of the partnership approach

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AQF levels | Australian Qualifications Framework

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AQF levels and the AQF levels criteria are an indication of the relative complexity and/or depth of achievement and the autonomy required to demonstrate that achievement. AQF level 1 has the lowest complexity and AQF level 10 has the highest complexity. The AQF level summaries are statements of the…

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ABSTRACT
'Transparency' is frequently invoked when describing assessment criteria in higher education. However, there are limitations to the metaphor: 'transparent' representations give the illusion that everything can (and should) be explicated, and that students are 'seeing through' to the educators' expectations. Drawing from sociomaterial perspectives on standards, an argument is made for a different way of conceptualising assessment criteria. 'Invitational' enactments offer an alternative metaphor, one which intentionally promotes student learning. Three propositions frame potential use of this metaphor: (1) assessment criteria promote learning when they invite students into a 'productive space'; (2) assessment criteria coordinate sustained learning by inviting multiple enactments across tasks; (3) assessment criteria develop sophisticated ways of knowing by inviting student reflection. Drawing from both metaphors, teachers can design assessment materials - particularly rubrics, task descriptions and exemplars - which convey their intentions while also prompting students to develop their own ways of working and learning.

Introduction

Assessment criteria are so frequently considered transparent representations of institutional expectations that we forget there may be alternative ways of thinking. Originally, transparency denoted the move from the 'secret business' of university assessment to an open and defensible approach (Boud 2014. "Shifting Views of Assessment: From Secret Teachers' Business to Sustaining Learning." In 2014 Advances and Innovations in University Assessment and Feedback, edited by Carolin Kreber, Charles Anderson, Noel Entwhistle, and Jan McArthur, 13-31. : University of Edinburgh. ). Thus transparent assessment criteria improve perceptions of fairness and consistency of marking. More recently, transparency also connotes explicit assessment criteria that enhance learning and the student experience (Jonsson ). From this perspective, students 'see through' to institutional expectations; they then grasp what they need to do to complete the task, including the basis for judging the quality of work (Jonsson ). At face value this seems reasonable and, when asked, students value transparency (Reddy and Andrade ; Bamber ). However transparent assessment criteria are surprisingly problematic.

Being completely explicit is not as easy as it sounds; indeed it may be impossible (Bearman and Ajjawi ). Attempts to be transparent therefore can lead to lists of mechanistic instructions, which hinder deep and holistic understanding (Torrance ). This is not ideal. From a learning perspective, assessment criteria should promote sophisticated ways of knowing, including coming to understand what constitutes quality of work (Tai et al. , Rola Ajjawi, , Phillip Dawson, and Ernesto Panadero. 2018. "Developing Evaluative Judgement: Enabling Students to Make Decisions About the Quality of Work." 2018 Higher Education 76 (3): 467-481. doi: 10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3. ).

This paper seeks to present a different way of thinking and talking about assessment criteria in order to meet these aspirations. Our focus here is on how assessment can promote learning. We commence by providing some definitions to guide us through the somewhat contestable landscape. We then review the challenges facing transparent assessment criteria, particularly with respect to student learning. Next, we draw from the sociomaterial literature to develop a case for assessment criteria as enacted rather than represented. We invoke an alternative metaphor for this new way of thinking - the invitation. Finally, we explore the implications for assessment materials, particularly rubrics, and provide three propositions to guide practice.

Definitions

Transparency is rarely defined in the higher education literature and this oversight may be because, at heart, it is a metaphor. In this instance, the metaphor of transparency suggests those on the outside can 'see through' to previously hidden processes. Metaphors are powerful (Lakoff and Johnson ) but nonetheless figures of speech, not literal references. For example, while transparency is associated with audit, it is by no mean the same thing (Strathern ). Therefore, we do not define transparency tightly. Jonsson (, 840) describes transparency with respect to assessment in higher education as: '[s]tudent awareness of the purpose of the assessment and the assessment criteria'; Strathern () uses the term 'visibility'. Similarly, we consider transparency a form of 'seeing through': a metaphor associated with explicating mechanisms, usually through documentation, so people know 'what's going on'.

Assessment criteria are less challenging to define. We are focussed on learning, not on grading, therefore this paper is not concerned with notions of criterion-referencing. To this end, we define assessment criteria to be those artefacts that outline expectations for student work, especially characteristics that denote attainment of standards or describe aspirational quality. Generally, this function is associated with rubrics but by this definition can include aspects of task descriptions, learning objective exemplars and so on. It is through these generally written representations that academics, administrators and students jointly understand what constitutes achievement. We will frequently refer to rubrics during this paper, but they are by no means the only form of assessment criteria, however they are most often associated with 'transparency'.

The challenge of transparent assessment criteria: views from the tertiary education literature

In seeking different ways of thinking about assessment criteria, it is worth reviewing the problems with transparency, which have been extensively explored over the last fifteen years (O'Donovan, Price, and Rust ). Textual explanations such as use of rubrics may clarify expectations, reduce anxiety, improve self-efficacy, and self-regulation (Panadero and Jonsson ). However, there is general agreement regarding the problematic nature of over-specification and associated reductionist approaches in higher education (O'Donovan, Price, and Rust ; Sadler ; Torrance ; Boud 2017. "Standards-Based Assessment for an Era of Increasing Transparency." In 2017 Scaling Up Assessment for Learning in Higher Education, edited by David Carless, Susan M. Bridges, Cecilia Ka Yuk Chan and Rick Glofcheski, 19-31. : Springer Singapore. ). As Sadler (, 390) notes, in his critique of post-compulsory education in the UK: 'The assessment criteria have been reduced to pea-sized bits to be swallowed one at a time - and for each bit, once only.' Studies of university student perspectives support these concerns. Some students view transparency of assessment primarily as a means to get better marks and therefore explicit instructions lead to 'gaming' or instrumentalism rather than attainment (Norton ; Bamber ). Bell, Mladenovic, and Price () found that half of their student sample thought of assessment materials as a 'recipe' book for achieving lecturer expectations.

Issues with transparency appear to be most bothersome with the complex, authentic pieces of assessment (Norton ; Sadler ; Jonsson ), which require deep rather than mechanistic thinking. In these instances, students often find it difficult to understand expectations and teachers find it impossible to articulate what these expectations are (O'Donovan, Price, and Rust ). As Jonsson (, 841) notes: 'even if transparency may be considered desirable in order to promote student learning, it does not seem to be easily attained'. If researchers struggle with how assessment materials provide meaningful transparency, these difficulties are further compounded within the day-to-day situations of teaching and learning. Torrance () describes teachers overspecifying and thereby limiting learning through finely explicated criteria. Dawson () notes the multiple and confusing use of rubrics in higher education.

One solution is to 'do transparency better'. This is most prominent in the rubric literature: where authors seek to identify features of effective rubrics (Jonsson ) or identifying associated factors which improve their effects (Panadero and Jonsson ). Authors also suggest additional processes and tasks that surround the written criteria. These include: tasks that build an understanding of the purpose and criteria of the assessment (Norton ; O'Donovan, Price, and Rust ); self and peer assessment (Panadero and Jonsson ; Jonsson ); and teacher explanations (Jonsson ). While useful, these seem to somewhat stretch the notion of transparent assessment criteria to something else again. Additionally, transparency itself has been problematised as a socially constructed device which serves other agendas (Strathern ; Orr ; Jankowski and Provezis ) and this is also true for assessment criteria (O'Donovan, Price, and Rust ; Bearman and Ajjawi ).

In order to move past this conundrum of being transparent but never being transparent enough, we would like to challenge the assumption that artefacts such as rubrics are a straightforward form of communication of expectations. The assessment criteria do not simply and only represent expectations, like some kind of photocopy of the teacher's mind (Bearman and Ajjawi , ; Ajjawi and Bearman Ajjawi, Rola , and Margaret Bearman. 2018. "Problematising Standards: Representation or Performance." In 2018 Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work, edited by , Rola Ajjawi, Phillip Dawson, and , 57-66. : Routledge. ). Consider a leading international expert who is asked to fulfil a student project brief and is given an associated rubric outlining expectations. If the expert heeded the rubric, they might produce very different work from their own professional practice. In other words, the rubric doesn't just depend on a person's frame of reference; a person's frame of reference (also) depends on the rubric. The assessment criteria shape students' notions of what (for example) an assignment looks like and therefore students align their work to its dictates. This is more than transparency; the rubric is prompting students to 'think', 'do' and 'make', not just 'understand' expectations. In other words, assessment criteria do more than explicate, they promote (and constrain) activity.

Two views of assessment criteria: representation and enactment

In her sociomaterial study of teachers' professional standards, Mulcahy () articulates two ways for thinking about and studying standards and we draw from this work to describe two views of assessment criteria. The first perspective is that assessment criteria 2003. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter Comes to Matter." represent the intentions of those who created them. This representative view is so dominant that it is taken for granted. It seems self-evident that students come to know the task requirements as explained by the written materials. Here, the metaphor of transparency makes most sense, as the purpose of the assessment criteria is to 'communicate the expectations to the students' (Jonsson , 840). However, this view also comes with all the critiques outlined previously. The second view forms an essential point of this paper: that assessment criteria can be thought of as be thought of as performative. This contention is informed by a sociomaterial perspective (Barad 2003 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801-831. ; Mulcahy ). From this perspective, the assessment criteria are enacted and the meaning that they have at any given time is emergent and so dependent on who (and what) is present in the doing. As we noted earlier, a rubric can prompt students to 'read', 'think', 'do' and 'make' - it becomes 'an activity in which people might participate' (Mulcahy ). In this way, the rubric is significant at the point of enactment: how the students and materials work together to co-produce the assignment. The unique situation of the student and their context is integrated into the task at hand.

But what about consistency and equity across students? One concern about considering a rubric as a locally produced enactment might be around meeting global requirements. What if the student does something entirely different to what we intend? We look to again to the standards literature (Timmermans and Berg Timmermans, S. , and . 2003. 2003 The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care. Temple University Press. Philadelphia: ; Mulcahy ; Tummons ); these suggest that professional standards are always enacted. For example, when any nurse takes your blood pressure, they are following a strict protocol but at the same time making adjustments for your particular circumstance such as your current state of health, restrictive clothing and recent physical activity. In other words, the nurse is 'working with' the protocol rather than 'following it'. In the same way, rubrics act as coordinating devices, for both students and markers. This coordination is not static, it is made of dynamic and ephemeral enactments that necessarily vary from one student to another and from one marker to another. This is why we can have diverse responses to any project-based assignment - different topics of investigation, different methods and different writing styles - but the assignments generally come to the same point. The assessment criteria, task descriptions and exemplars are not fixed expressions of quality but constitute quality in a slightly different way at any given time or place. The assessment is constantly being remade: similar but different.

We are not suggesting that representation or enactment present a better perspective than the other (although the representative view can and should be critiqued due to its taken-for-granted status). We suggest that both views - assessment criteria as Mulcahy, Dianne. 1999. "(Actor-net) Working Bodies and Representations: Tales From a Training Field." representations and as enactments - have value and that teachers constantly engage in 'strategic juggling of representational ambiguity' (Mulcahy 1999 Science, Technology and Human Values 24 (1): 80-104. , 97). This juggling is made easier if we remember that transparency is only a metaphor, one which strongly aligns with assessment criteria as representative. Therefore, we suggest that finding a new metaphor will better support the notion of assessment criteria being enactments. In this way, we can move between two metaphors, depending on the value we require at the particular time.

Invitation: a second metaphor for assessment criteria

Metaphors exert significant power over how we think. Sfard (, 5) notes: '[b]ecause metaphors bring with them certain well-defined expectations as to the possible features of target concepts, the choice of a metaphor is a highly consequential decision'. As already outlined, transparency as a metaphor is well accepted and has many benefits. We have also described its many limitations, including trying to explicate the inexplicable and students who become overly focussed on recipes for success or 'gaming the system'. We suggest that a partner metaphor could usefully emphasise enactments and provide a means for teachers to counter these challenges.

We propose a new metaphor - assessment criteria as invitations. This avoids the pitfalls of transparency as 'seeing through' to institutional intentions by focussing on prompting students to 'work with' assessment criteria (Bearman and Ajjawi ). Invitational assessment criteria can provide valuable opportunities for students to make meaning, in particular with respect to holistic, dynamic and highly tacit concepts which are poorly captured in writing. Teachers can therefore consider how their assessment artefacts promote learning activities - such as thinking, studying, regulating, writing, devising, and interacting. This highlights the value of the pedagogies associated with assessment criteria (Norton ; O'Donovan, Price, and Rust ; Panadero, Alonso-Tapia, and Reche ), which promote dynamic opportunities for students to 'work with' assessment materials.

Of course invitation as a metaphor has limitations. In the same way that transparency is not the same as explicitness, invitations are not literally made and students may not have an understanding of what enacting criteria means. The key argument of this paper is that teachers (and students) can use both metaphors as and when they are useful. In the same way that Sfard () suggests learning can be both acquisition and participation, it is possible that assessment criteria texts such as rubrics can be both transparent and invitational. Thinking with both metaphors allows teachers to interrogate their own materials more critically and design them more carefully by attuning to what the student does.

Invitation as a metaphor: implications for assessment practice

The literature suggests that we know how to make rubrics and other assessment materials representative (Reddy and Andrade ). So, if we don't need to explain more or clarify further, what else should our assessment criteria be doing? With the enactment metaphor, criteria must necessarily work in concert with the task design and the particular circumstances of the student, as students enact the criteria through doing the task. We offer three propositions to frame how to design assessment criteria as invitational enactments. We illustrate our points using rubrics as these provide practical and concise examples, however these propositions apply across all assessment criteria artefacts.

Proposition 1: assessment criteria promote learning when they invite students into a 'productive space'

Our alternative metaphor suggests assessment criteria such as rubrics should invite rich student learning. However this leads to the question: how should we phrase our invitations? Highly directive formats (e.g. rubrics with items like 'has provided three references with correct format') leave little room for meaningful enactments although they certainly prompt the students to complete a task. On the other hand, criteria that are associated with tasks that are too abstract or criteria which cannot be grasped by students (e.g. instructions like 'write a coherent essay') are equally uninviting.

In order to promote meaningful enactments of criteria, we propose that materials should: (1) set appropriate boundaries for the assessment activity, taking account of the particular context of the student (such as their level, the course, a particular teacher and other associated social and material circumstances); and (2) within these boundaries, invite liberal opportunities for students to contribute their own thinking and doing to the development of quality work. These invitations for student contribution define the 'productive space' of the assessment. In other words, the student's context, the task and the criteria all work together and cannot be considered in isolation.

There are three major implications for assessment criteria. Firstly, generic rubrics or similar, which are used repeatedly across tasks, by themselves do not take account of student context and therefore cannot set boundaries for the productive space. Therefore, generic rubrics may not provide useful invitations, unless care is taken with the other elements of the assessment such as task descriptions, exemplars and teacher explanation. Secondly, descriptions of quality should contain salient details that can inform the students' actions. This will avoid some of the flaws described by Popham () of rubrics being overly precise or too broad and, with some thought, these descriptors can also allow for student work that exceeds the educators' imaginings (De Vos and Belluigi ) within the bounds of the task. Finally, the criteria must be explicit or transparent 'enough' for the student to understand the invitation. In this way, the criteria can invite rather than dictate and allow for the variation to emerge between students and across markers.

What does this look like in practice? For example, in a science lab report, we might have a generic criterion, such as the one provided on a University of Michigan website: ' University of Michigan, n.d. "Sample laboratory report rubrics." Centre for Research on Learning and Teaching, Accessed June 5, 2019. Graphs, charts, tables ...: Are all relevant figures included? Are figures and axes labelled appropriately? Do they only ever contain appropriate information? Are the tables redundant with the figures?' (University of Michigan, n.d. http://www.crlt.umich.edu/print/220. ). There are very much aligned with the transparency metaphor and while the question format appears invitational, the student can only respond 'yes' or 'no' and cannot generate their own responses. This is a statement that represents desired achievements and while there are markers of quality, they tend to be captured in words like 'appropriate' and 'relevant', which are difficult for students to understand if they don't already know what they mean. We suggest the following criterion may represent an invitational version, one that prompts enactments: ' Visual representations of lab report data: The charts, graphs and tables align with the conventions of lab report labelling and formatting with the data accurately represented in an easily readable format.' In this way the criterion invites the student to seek the appropriate conventions and enact concepts such as accuracy and readability. However, in order to make sense of this, the students must look for, or be provided with, examples of the conventions, including accurate representation and readability. Additionally, the task itself must generate data which can be appropriately visualised. And all this takes place within particular social and material circumstances: how a teacher explains the work to the students; how a distance student might work on a lab simulation; how the lab group works together in an embodied manner with the 'stuff' of science; and how particular conventions of science privilege some forms of information and disendorse others.

Switching metaphors shifts the teacher's purpose from being O'Donovan, Berry , Margaret Price, and . 2004. "Know What I Mean? Enhancing Student Understanding of Assessment Standards and Criteria." Handley, Karen , and Lindsay Williams. 2011. "From Copying to Learning: Using Exemplars to Engage Students with Assessment Criteria and Feedback." Carless, David , and Kennedy Kam Ho Chan. 2017. "Managing Dialogic Use of Exemplars." Bearman, Margaret , and Rola Ajjawi. 2018. "From 'Seeing Through' to 'Seeing With': Assessment Criteria and the Myths of Transparency." explicit to inviting enactments. While this suggests many of the same educational approaches suggested by the transparency literature, such as alignment with assessment (Jonsson ), exemplars (O'Donovan, Price, and Rust 2004 2011 2017 2018 Frontiers in Education 3: 96. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2018.00096. ). Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 42 (6): 930-941. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2016.1211246. , 931) consequently suggest exemplars should always be used dialogically to promote 'student understanding of goals and standards'. However, this metaphor takes exemplar use one step beyond understanding: our alternative framing asks teachers to consider exemplars as an invitation to a productive space. Teachers can then consider how students 'work with' the exemplars rather than 'see through' them (Bearman and Ajjawi Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 36 (1): 95-108. doi: 10.1080/02602930903201669. ); Carless and Chan ( Teaching in Higher Education 9 (3): 325-335. doi: 10.1080/1356251042000216642. ) and teacher explanation (Jonsson ), it allows a focus on learning rather than clarification. For example, the perpetual fear with exemplars is that students will use them as 'model answers' (Handley and Williams

Developing rubrics, tasks and exemplars that invite students into activity presents a different challenge to making an assessment 'transparent'. A 'productive space' necessarily requires formats that discourage 'gaming the system' but at the same time emphasises that meaning-making can be generated within clear boundaries. In seeking to design materials and write rubrics, teachers can ask: What can students contribute that will help them come to enact the criteria? How can the assessment criteria be written in a way that invites them to do so?

This concept of maximising the 'productive space' assists with how educators may apply the metaphor of the invitation. It is not an opaque version of assessment, where the students have to guess what the lecturer is thinking, but also avoids the trap of pure transparency, with its aspirations of being explicit and knowable. In short, an invitation to the 'productive space' provides an opportunity for students to make meaning through enacting the criteria in a holistic way. However, there is no recipe; promoting student learning is dependent on the level of the student, the purpose of the assessment and criteria. This aligns with the sociomaterial foundations of this metaphor: enactments always emerge in a particular place and time.

Proposition 2: assessment criteria coordinate sustained learning by inviting multiple enactments across tasks

The previous proposition focussed on a singular piece of assessment. However, from a sociomaterial perspective, it might be worth asking: what work does an assessment criterion do - and where and when? When viewed in this way, it can be seen that criteria can coordinate activity across time and space - this could be across a semester, over the course of a year, or indeed over the course of a career. For example, a medical student who comes to know the characteristics of good communication with patients draws on this understanding both within their degree and many years later as a senior doctor. Indeed, Boud () argues assessment should both promote learning for the present and be sustainable, that is, sustain future practice.

Assessment criteria have a key role to play in making assessment sustainable through building a students' capacity to make evaluative judgements about their own work, after formal education has finished (Boud , Tai et al. , Rola Ajjawi, , Phillip Dawson, and Ernesto Panadero. 2018. "Developing Evaluative Judgement: Enabling Students to Make Decisions About the Quality of Work." and Molloy. 2013. "Rethinking models of feedback for learning: the challenge of design." 2018 2013 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 38 (6): 698-712. doi:10.1080/02602938.2012.691462. ) suggest that assessment promotes and sustains learning when students have multiple opportunities to make meaning of holistic and dynamic indicators of quality, through drawing on feedback information from teachers and peers. We suggest that assessment criteria such as rubrics can usefully invite multiple enactments Higher Education 76 (3): 467-481. doi: 10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3. ). A singular assessment task, however well designed and appropriately supported, may not be sufficient. Boud and Molloy ( across a range of tasks with similar criteria. These repeated invitations to produce similar work may assist students to understand the gaps and contextual challenges of producing 'good' quality of work in different circumstances. Among other benefits, this illustrates to students that characteristics of quality are relevant to multiple occasions and beyond the confines of a specific task.

We illustrate this with another selection of a criterion published on the internet. The Eberley Centre at Carnegie Mellon provide an exemplar rubric for a philosophy paper, which suggests that for a student to receive an 'excellent' regarding the 'premises' of their assignment, their paper should meet the following conditions:

We can see that this fulfils the 'transparency' agenda by outlining the characteristics of what is expected. But what does it invite? As with the previous example of the lab report, we can see the disciplinary influence within the wording of criteria (Bearman Bearman, Margaret. 2018. "Prefigurement, Identities and Agency: The Disciplinary Nature of Evaluative Judgement." In 2018 Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work, edited by , Rola Ajjawi, Phillip Dawson, and , 147-155. : Routledge. ): this is a criterion for a philosophy paper and invites the student to present an argument like a philosopher. Therefore, this assessment criteria is relevant beyond the particular task, and can be used by students when completing different but similar tasks. By focussing on the invitation metaphor, teachers can use criteria to deliberately coordinate work across a unit or a course.

We suggest one pedagogic strategy for doing this coordination is to varying the assessment task in non-traditional ways. The time-honoured means of learning a criterion like the one suggested above is to repeat the same assessment, such as an essay, multiple times. This aligns with the transparency metaphor: through this activity the students will come to 'see' the criteria. We suggest, drawing on Proposition 1 above, that if we think of this criterion as an invitation into the productive space, then we should think about how multiple enactments of the criterion take place within different boundaries. For example, when students first commence in philosophy, they may have short tasks that purely focus on outlining the premises of an argument using the criterion above. These need not be written: they could be for example, within a class debate. Alternatively, later, they may be asked to write work that highlights 'controversial' premises. In this way, these multiple enactments allow students to grapple with complex, tacit notions of quality even as they are (re)constructing them in various forms. These multiple invitations present an alternative way to think about how students learn complex concepts, where, as argued previously, transparency always is most problematic (Norton ; Sadler ; Jonsson ). In particular, it allows students to develop a deeper understanding of what quality is, not only through making evaluative judgements about quality but through the enactment of the criteria in multiple contexts.

Proposition 3: assessment criteria develop sophisticated ways of knowing by inviting student reflection

One of the most exciting possibilities for the invitational metaphor may lie in students themselves using it with respect to assessment criteria. For example, teachers can ask students: what do you think this rubric is inviting you to do? This can then lead to a discussion about the breadth of variation rather than a single path to 'meet the criteria'. Equally, teachers can outline how the criteria invite responses, drawing from exemplars or through class discussion. This highlights the important notion that academic standards are living, dynamic concepts, which develop and change over time.

The most significant value of this final proposition can be found in self-assessment, where students can interrogate their own responses to the assessment criteria 'invitations'. By explicating how they have responded to the criteria, students focus on the nature of their contribution, not the 'right answer'. We already have effective and productive self-assessment task designs - where students articulate why and how their work has met the criteria and how this relates to professional practice broadly (Barton et al. Barton, Karen L. , Susie J. Schofield, Sean McAleer, and Rola Ajjawi. 2016. "Translating Evidence-Based Guidelines to Improve Feedback Practices: The interACT Case Study." Ajjawi, Rola , and . 2018. "Examining the Nature and Effects of Feedback Dialogue." , Romy Lawson, and Darrall G. Thompson. 2015. "The Calibration of Student Judgement Through Self-Assessment: Disruptive Effects of Assessment Patterns." 2016 2018 2015 Higher Education Research & Development 34 (1): 45-59. ). However, these approaches provide the student with limited opportunities to generate further understandings of the criteria themselves. Asking students to explore assessment materials as invitational, can productively build on these approaches by asking how and why the student enacted the criteria. Sample questions are: Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 43 (7): 1106-1119. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2018.1434128. ) or articulate why and how their judgements differ from expert judgements (Boud, Lawson, and Thompson BMC Medical Education 16 (1): 53. ; Ajjawi and Boud Which assessment materials inform my work and how? What did I draw from the various exemplars and why? In what ways did I rely on the rubric to influence my thinking? What other possibilities might have fulfilled the brief? What criteria were most difficult to fulfil and why? How do various exemplars diverge from my approach?

We illustrate this with a holistic rubric assessing critical thinking in engineering from the University of Louisville. The aspirational criterion reads in part: ' ... Accurate, complete information that is supported by relevant evidence. Complete, fair presentation of all relevant assumptions and points of view. Clearly articulates significant, logical implications and consequences based on relevant evidence.' (University of Louisville, University of Louisville, n.d. "Holistic Critical Thinking Rubric." JB Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville, Accessed June 5, 2019. n.d. louisville.edu/ideastoaction/-/files/evaluation/engineering.doc. ). This is an extract from a rubric designed to assess written tasks with respect to critical thinking. Asking students to self-assess by reflecting and commenting upon how they have responded to the invitation presented by this criterion adds an additional and valuable element to any associated assignment. In this way, students can discuss how their work is accurate and how this links to the evidence; they can surface any assumptions; and they can consider what 'significant' and 'logical' mean with respect to their work. This is a very different task to 'grading' their own work; this type of self-assessment is intended to promote deep learning.

Asking students to describe the relationship of their work to the assessment criteria performs a number of very useful functions. Firstly, it may build the tacit, holistic understandings of quality around specific criteria (Tai et al. , Rola Ajjawi, , Phillip Dawson, and Ernesto Panadero. 2018. "Developing Evaluative Judgement: Enabling Students to Make Decisions About the Quality of Work." O'Donovan, Berry , Margaret Price, and . 2004. "Know What I Mean? Enhancing Student Understanding of Assessment Standards and Criteria." Bloxham, Sue , Birgit den-Outer, Jane Hudson, and Margaret Price. 2016. "Let's Stop the Pretence of Consistent Marking: Exploring the Multiple Limitations of Assessment Criteria." Price, Margaret , Jude Carroll, Berry O'Donovan, and . 2011. "If I was Going There I Wouldn't Start from Here: a Critical Commentary on Current Assessment Practice." Perry, William G. 1968. Hofer, Barbara K. 2001. "Personal Epistemology Research: Implications for Learning and Teaching." 2018 2004 2016 2011 1968 2001 Educational Psychology Review 13 (4): 353-383. ). Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. : Holt, Rinehart & Winston. ; Hofer Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 36 (4): 479-492. ). Finally, and most significantly, this design approach helps students move beyond black and white thinking and thereby developing more sophisticated ways of knowing (Perry Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 41 (3): 466-481. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2015.1024607. ); coming to this understanding helps develop students' assessment literacy (Price et al. Teaching in Higher Education 9 (3): 325-335. doi: 10.1080/1356251042000216642. ). Moreover, it suggests that markers too must have variation and that sometimes consistency is neither possible or desirable (Bloxham et al. Higher Education 76 (3): 467-481. doi: 10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3. ) as well as developing the types of self-assessment skills that we all use as unsupervised workers (Boud ; Boud and Soler 2016). Secondly this design approach promotes students' repeated engagement with the necessarily imperfect rubrics, treating them as learning opportunities. This avoids the need to be absolutely transparent and acknowledges the necessary limitations of our assessment texts (O'Donovan, Price, and Rust

Conclusions

In this conceptual paper, we have interrogated the notion of transparent assessment criteria. Assessment materials are habitually considered to be representative of expert knowledge. Thinking about them as enactments may provide different insights. We provide invitation as an alternate metaphor, which allows us to conceptualise assessment criteria as dynamic enactments. We suggest designing assessment materials with both metaphors in order to promote holistic tacit understandings of criteria and also to avoid 'secret assessment business'. We provide three propositions to guide design of invitational criteria. Firstly, assessment criteria should optimise the productive space; that is, they should allow for the student usefully contributing to the assessment in concert with other materials and the student context. Secondly, assessment materials should support multiple enactments of similar criteria, coordinating students' learning across units and courses. Finally, asking students to reflect on how they respond to assessment 'invitations' can be used to prompt student learning about the specific criteria as well as the overall nature of criteria. Seeing criteria as an invitation shifts the focus from explaining the tacit criteria to providing opportunities to enact tacit criteria. By drawing from both metaphors, and not privileging one, teachers can design assessment materials which convey their intentions while also prompting students to develop their own ways of working and learning.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Professor David Boud for his helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

References

Ajjawi, Rola , and Margaret Bearman. 2018. "Problematising Standards: Representation or Performance." In Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work, edited by , Rola Ajjawi, Phillip Dawson, and , 57-66. : Routledge.

Ajjawi, Rola , and . 2018. "Examining the Nature and Effects of Feedback Dialogue." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 43 (7): 1106-1119. doi:10.1080/02602938.2018.1434128.

2003. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801-831.

Barton, Karen L. , Susie J. Schofield, Sean McAleer, and Rola Ajjawi. 2016. "Translating Evidence-Based Guidelines to Improve Feedback Practices: The interACT Case Study." BMC Medical Education 16 (1): 53.

Bearman, Margaret. 2018. "Prefigurement, Identities and Agency: The Disciplinary Nature of Evaluative Judgement." In Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work, edited by , Rola Ajjawi, Phillip Dawson, and , 147-155. : Routledge.

Bearman, Margaret , and Rola Ajjawi. 2018. "From 'Seeing Through' to 'Seeing With': Assessment Criteria and the Myths of Transparency." Frontiers in Education 3: 96. doi:10.3389/feduc.2018.00096.

, Rosina Mladenovic, and Margaret Price. 2013. "Students' Perceptions of the Usefulness of Marking Guides, Grade Descriptors and Annotated Exemplars." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 38 (7): 769-788. doi:10.1080/02602938.2012.714738.

Bloxham, Sue , Birgit den-Outer, Jane Hudson, and Margaret Price. 2016. "Let's Stop the Pretence of Consistent Marking: Exploring the Multiple Limitations of Assessment Criteria." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 41 (3): 466-481. doi:10.1080/02602938.2015.1024607.

2014. "Shifting Views of Assessment: From Secret Teachers' Business to Sustaining Learning." In Advances and Innovations in University Assessment and Feedback, edited by Carolin Kreber, Charles Anderson, Noel Entwhistle, and Jan McArthur, 13-31. : University of Edinburgh.

2017. "Standards-Based Assessment for an Era of Increasing Transparency." In Scaling Up Assessment for Learning in Higher Education, edited by David Carless, Susan M. Bridges, Cecilia Ka Yuk Chan and Rick Glofcheski, 19-31. : Springer Singapore.

, Romy Lawson, and Darrall G. Thompson. 2015. "The Calibration of Student Judgement Through Self-Assessment: Disruptive Effects of Assessment Patterns." Higher Education Research & Development 34 (1): 45-59.

and Molloy. 2013. "Rethinking models of feedback for learning: the challenge of design." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 38 (6): 698-712. doi:10.1080/02602938.2012.691462.

Carnegie Mellon University, n.d. "Grading and Performance Rubrics." Eberly Center, Carnegie Mellon University. Accessed June 5, 2019. https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/rubrics.html.

Dawson, Phillip. 2015. "Assessment Rubrics: Towards Clearer and More Replicable Design, Research and Practice." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 42 (3): 347-360. doi:10.1080/02602938.2015.1111294.

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Mulcahy, Dianne. 1999. "(Actor-net) Working Bodies and Representations: Tales From a Training Field." Science, Technology and Human Values 24 (1): 80-104.

O'Donovan, Berry , Margaret Price, and . 2004. "Know What I Mean? Enhancing Student Understanding of Assessment Standards and Criteria." Teaching in Higher Education 9 (3): 325-335. doi:10.1080/1356251042000216642.

Panadero, Ernesto , Jesús Alonso-Tapia, and Eloísa Reche. 2013. "Rubrics vs. Self-Assessment Scripts Effect on Self-Regulation, Performance and Self-Efficacy in pre-Service Teachers." Studies in Educational Evaluation 39 (3): 125-132. doi:10.1016/j.stueduc.2013.04.001.

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, Rola Ajjawi, , Phillip Dawson, and Ernesto Panadero. 2018. "Developing Evaluative Judgement: Enabling Students to Make Decisions About the Quality of Work." Higher Education 76 (3): 467-481. doi:10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3.

Timmermans, S. , and . 2003. The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care. Temple University Press. Philadelphia:

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can a rubric do more than be transparent? Invitation as a new metaphor for assessment criteria

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ABSTRACT 'Transparency' is frequently invoked when describing assessment criteria in higher education. However, there are limitations to the metaphor: 'transparent' representations give the illusion that everything can (and should) be explicated, and that students are 'seeing through' to the educators' expectations. Drawing from sociomaterial perspectives on standards, an argument is made for a different way of conceptualising assessment criteria.

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The Higher Education Learning Framework (HELF) is an evidence-informed model for university learning.

The HELF is based on the seven main themes emerging from a rigorous study into higher education learning undertaken by researchers in the Science of Learning Research Centre.

An overview of the HELF is provided in the HELF matrix. Each of the 7 principles is further described in the HELF handbook which provides (i) an explanation (ii) implications for teachers, students and assessment and (iii) a discussion of current literature relating to the principles.
HELF matrix HELF handbook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Higher Education Learning Framework - Science of Learning Research Centre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Higher Education Learning Framework (HELF) is an evidence-informed model for university learning. The HELF is based on the seven main themes emerging from a rigorous study into higher education learning undertaken by researchers in the Science of Learning Research Centre. An overview of the HELF is provided in the HELF matrix.

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Threshold Concepts: Undergraduate Teaching, Postgraduate Training, Professional Development and School Education

A Short Introduction and a Bibliography fom 2003 to 2018

The Meyer and Land Threshold Concept

" The idea of threshold concepts emerged from a UK national research project into the possible characteristics of strong teaching and learning environments in the disciplines for undergraduate education (Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses). In pursuing this research in the field of economics, it became clear toErik Meyer and Ray Land [1-7], that certain concepts were held by economists to be central to the mastery of their subject. These concepts, Meyer and Land argued, could be described as 'threshold' ones because they have certain features in common. "

Glynis Cousin, An introduction to threshold concepts

Over the past decade this concept has been embraced by many disciplines outside economics; indeed the above quote is from Glynis Cousin's excellent short introduction to the concept written for earth scientists. The threshold concept has been seen as a valuable tool, not only in facilitating students' understanding of their subject, but in aiding the rational development of curricula in rapidly expanding arenas where there is a strong tendency to overload the curriculum (Cousin, [ 2008, 2006]). This web page will describe, briefly, the characteristics of a threshold concept and list selected references to the work of those examining its value in a broad range of disciplines.
Features of a Threshold Concept

'Threshold Concepts' may
be considered to be "akin
to passing through a portal"
or "conceptual gateway"
that opens up "previously
inaccessible way[s] of
thinking about something"
(Meyer and Land [ 1]).

Troublesome: Threshold concepts are likely to be troublesome for the student. Perkins [ 1999, 2006] has suggested that knowledge can be troublesome e.g. when it is counter-intuitive, alien or seemingly incoherent. > More ...

Discursive: Meyer and Land [ 2] suggest that the crossing of a threshold will incorporate an enhanced and extended use of language. > More ...

Reconstitutive: " Understanding a threshold concept may entail a shift in learner subjectivity, which is implied through the transformative and discursive aspects already noted. Such reconstitution is, perhaps, more likely to be recognised initially by others, and also to take place over time ( Smith)". > More ...

Liminality: Meyer and Land [ 4] have likened the crossing of the pedagogic threshold to a 'rite of passage' (drawing on the ethnographical studies of Gennep and of Turner in which a transitional or liminal space has to be traversed; " in short, there is no simple passage in learning from 'easy' to 'difficult'; mastery of a threshold concept often involves messy journeys back, forth and across conceptual terrain. (Cousin [ 2006])". > More ...

Last update: 29 March 2020

Examples of the threshold concept must be transformative and involve a traverse through a liminal space. They are likely to be characterised by many of, but not necessarily all of, the other features listed above.

USING THIS SITE
This site is primarily a bibliography of papers on the Threshold Concept Framework organised by topics and by authors and also includes lists of the key Meyer and Land originating papers, books, overviews, critiques, theses and selected presentations. It additionally includes information on relevant activities, e.g. conferences on threshold concepts, special interest groups, awards, social networks. Links to these different parts of this bibliography and to these relevent activities may be found above in the Contents List on the right hand side of this page or on the larger print version of the Contents List. One such link, New and Recent Additions, provides a list of the most recent references added to the bibliography.

Clicking on an author name in references listed on this web site activates a link to a list of that author's papers on threshold concepts and, where available, a link to that author's home page.

New to the Threshold Concept: Where to start
The Threshold Concept Framework has grown significantly since this web site was first created and this bibliography, though found useful by many lecturers, teachers and researchers familiar with the threshold concept, is now so large as to be less helpful than it originally was for anyone, new to the concept, wishing to incorporate the framework into either their teaching or research. It is far from obvious where such an individual starts. This section will list papers in which the authors have addressed this issue and have suggested a guide to working with the framework:

Hopefully, as the framework is now maturing, more such papers will appear.

Extent of this site's coverage of the Threshold Concept Framework
This bibliography initially reflected the interests of the compiler but, over a decade, has been massively extended to cover most disciplines and topics in which there are published papers on the threshold concept framework. However, the compiler makes no claim to the site being an exhaustive bibliography. Please feel free to e.mail Mick Flanagan [m.flanagan@ucl.ac.uk] with any comments or relevant references.

The Threshold Concept Framework has matured to the extent that the term, threshold concept, is entering common and passing usage in a significant number of pedagogic research papers, i.e. is referred to in passing with no cited reference. Such papers are no longer included in this bibliography unless they also contain a substantial discussion of some aspect of the threshold concept framework.

Key Meyer and Land Papers
The papers cited in this section track the inception and original development of the Threshold Concept framework by Erik Meyer and Ray Land with seminal contributions by Peter Davies and Glynis Cousin.

1.

2.

Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (2005) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning,
Higher Education, 49 (3), 373-388.

3.

Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F. and Davies, P. (2005) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation,
In: C. Rust (ed.), Improving Student Learning - diversity and inclusivity, Proceedings of the 12th Improving Student Learning Conference. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD), pp 53-64.
[ https://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/ISL04-pp53-64-Land-et-al.pdf last accessed 10 August 2009]

4.

Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (2006) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Issues of liminality,
In: Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (eds.), Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, London and New York: Routledge, pp 19-32, [ book details].

5.

Meyer, J.H.F., Land, R. and Davies, P. (2006) Implications of threshold concepts for course design and evaluation,
In: Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (eds.), Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, London and NewYork: Routledge, pp 195-206, [ book details].

6.

Meyer, J.H.F., Land, R. and Davies, P. (2008) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (4): Issues of variation and variability,
in: Land, R., Meyer, J.H.F. and Smith, J., (eds), Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines. Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, pp 59-74, [ book details].

7.

Land, R. and Meyer, J. H. F. (2010) Threshold concepts and troublesome: Dynamics of Assessment,
in: Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning, Land, R., Meyer, J.H.F. and Baillie, C., (eds), Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, pp. 61-79, [ book details].

Books on the Threshold Concept or with a significant emphasis on the Threshold Concept
Books on the threshold concept in general

*

Threshold Concepts in Practice (2016)
Edited by Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer and Michael T Flanagan

Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice, Michael A Peters (Series Editor), volume 68
Sense Publishers, Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei, 2016
ISBN: 978-94-6300-510-4 (paperback), ISBN: 978-94-6300-511-1 (hardback), ISBN: 978-94-6300-512-8 (e-book)

Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework.

The majority of chapters in this book are developments of talks first presented at the Fifth International Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference: Threshold Concepts in Practice, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom, 9-11 July, 2014.

Clickhere for Further Details and Table of Contents.

*

From personal practice to communities of practice (2014)
Edited by Catherine O'Mahony, Avril Buchanan, Mary O'Rourke and Bettie Higgs
NAIRTL, Ireland, January 2014, ISBN: 978-1-906642-59-4
Conference e.book
This is the conference book of talks first presented at the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference: From personal practice to communities of practice, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 27-29 June 2012.

*

Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning (2010)
Edited by Jan H. F. Meyer, Ray Land and Caroline Baillie
Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010
[Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice, Peters, M.A. (Ed), Volume 42]
The majority of chapters in this book are developments of talks first presented at the Threshold Concepts Conference: from theory to practice,
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 18th - 20th June 2008.

*

Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines (2008)
Edited by Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer and Jan Smith
Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008
[Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice, Michael Peters (Ed.), volume 16]
ISBN 978-90-8790-267-4 (paperback), ISBN 978-90-8790-268-1 (hardback).
The majority of chapters in this book are developments of talks first presented at the Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines Symposium, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 30 August-1 September 2006.

*

Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2006)
Edited by Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land
Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, 2006
ISBN10: 0-415-37430-8, ISBN13: 978-0-415-37430-9.

Books on the theshold concept in a specific discipline

*

Threshold Concepts in Problem-based Learning (2018)
Edited by Maggi Savin-Baden and Gemma Tombs
Brill Sense Publishers, 2018, ISBN: 978-90-04-37511-6
Chapter Headings

*

Disciplinary Applications of Information Literacy Threshold Concepts (2017)
Edited by Samantha Godbey, Susan Beth Wainscott and Xan Goodman
Americal Library Association, ACLR Publication ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-8970-8
https://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=12291

*

Townsend, L. and Hanick, S.L. (2016) Transforming Information Literacy Instruction: Threshold Concepts in Theory and Practice
Available December 2016.
Published by Libraries Unlimit, ISBN-10: 1440841675, ISBN-13: 9781440841675.
Cengage Learning

*

Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (2015)
Edited by Adler-Kassner, L. and Wardle, E.
University Press of Colarado (published by the Utah State University Press)
ISBN: 978-0-87421-989-0 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-87421-989-6 (ebook)
http://www.upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/2705-naming-what-we-know (last accessed: 19 July 2015)
Reviews:
Lucas, B. E., Brookins, N., Hodges, R., Long, A., Madonna, A., McKelvy, I., Miller, A., Santore, T. and Whitehead, J. (2017) Book Review of Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Elizabeth Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies,
Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning 22 (Winter 20116-2017), 117-120.
http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1299&context=jaepl (last accessed: 29 August 2017)

Panshula Ganeshan, (2016) Review of Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies,
Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC), 44 (2), 223-225.
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/TETYC/0442-dec2016/TETYC0442Reviews.pdf (last accessed: 25 January 2017)

*

Teaching Information Literacy Threshold Concepts: Lesson Plans for Librarians (2015)
Edited by Patricia Bravender, Hazel McClure and Gayle Schaub
Americal Library Association, ISBN-10: 0838987710, ISBN-13: 978-0838987711
http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=11471

*

Clark, T. (2015) Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept,
Bloomsbury Academic (27 August 2015), Bloomsbury Publishing, London
ISBN-10: 1472505735, ISBN-13: 978-1472505736
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ecocriticism-on-the-edge-9781472506702/ (last accessed: 9 January 2015)
Review:
Corrigan, P. T. (2016) Messy Thresholds, a review of the book: Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept by Timothy Clark ,
The Goose 15 (1), Article 7.
http://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/7 (last accessed: 3 September 2016)

*

Fletcher, J. (2015) Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response,
Stenhouse Publishers, Portland, USA, 2015, ISBN: 978-157110-999-6
http://www.stenhouse.com/html/teaching-arguments.htm (last accessed: 19 February 2015)
See Book Reviews for a review of this book.

Overviews and Critiques of the Threshold Concept

Single Paper Overviews and Critiques

Collection of Papers amounting to an Overview

Single Paper Overviews and Critiques

Davies, P. (2018) The construction of frameworks in learners' thinking: Conceptual change and threshold concepts in economics,
International Review of Economics Education: Available online 30 July 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iree.2018.05.002 (last accessed: 25 August 2018)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1477388018300069#! (last accessed: 25 August 2018)

Barradell, S. and Peseta, T. (2017) Putting threshold concepts to work in health sciences: insights for curriculum design from a qualitative research synthesis,
Teaching in Higher Education 22 (3), 349-372.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2016.1248390 (last accessed: 14 July 2017)
Though the critique is drawn from the healthcare arena this critique has validity across much of the threshold concept framework.

Nicola-Richmond, K., Pépin, G., Larkin, H. and Taylor, C. (2017) Threshold concepts in higher education: a synthesis of the literature relating to measurement of threshold crossing,
Higher Education Research & Development (HERDSA) Available online: 14 Jun 2017
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07294360.2017.1339181?journalCode=cher20 (last accessed: 4 July 2017)

Reeping, D., McNair, L. D., Harrison, S. R., Knapp, R. B., Lester, L. F., Martin, T., Patrick, A. Y. and Wisnioski, M. (2017) How are Threshold Concepts Applied? A Review of the Literature,
2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio, June 25-28, 2017
https://peer.asee.org/board-97-how-are-threshold-concepts-applied-a-review-of-the-literature (last accessed: 1 August 2017)
[An overview across the engineering and computer sciences with relevance across a wider disciplinary spectrum]

Barry, D. S. and Littlewood, K. E. (2017) Threshold Concepts for Anesthesiologists,
Anesthesia & Analgesia 125 (4), 1386-1393.
http://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/toc/2017/10000 (last accessed: 31 December 2017)
[A critique from a medical viewpoint but with wider implications]

Meyer, J. H. F. (2016) Threshold concepts and pedagogic representation,
Education + Training 58 (5), .
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/ET-04-2016-0066 (last accessed: 7 May 2016)

Land, R. (2015) Facilitating the Academy through Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge,
In: On the Facilitation of the Academy, Editors: Elias Westergaard and Joachim S Wiewiura, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015, ISBN 978-94-6209-972-2 (paperback), ISBN 978-94-6209-973-9 (hardback), ISBN 978-94-6209-974-6 (e-book), Chapter 2, pp 17-29
https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/other-books/on-the-facilitation-of-the-academy/ (last accessed: 17 February 2015)

Barradell, S. (2013) The identification of threshold concepts: a review of theoretical complexities and methodological challenges,
Higher Education, 65 (2), 265-276.

Cousin, G. (2008) Threshold Concepts: Old Wine in New Bottles or New Forms of Transactional Inquiry,
in: Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines, Land, R., Meyer, J.H.F. and Smith, J., (eds), Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, pp 261-272, [ book details].
A streamed video of Glynis Cousin's presentation at the Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines Symposium, Glasgow, September, 2006 that led to this paper can be accessed at http://video.strath.ac.uk/06/140-06-04.wvx [last accessed 5/06/09].

Lucas, U. and Mladenovic, R. (2007) The potential of threshold concepts: an emerging framework for educational research and practice,
London Review of Education, Vol. 5, No. 3, November 2007, pp. 237-248

Rowbottom, D. P. (2007) Demystifying Threshold Concepts,
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 41 (2), 263-270

Collection of Papers as Overview

Threshold Concepts in Practice (2016)
Edited by Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer and Michael T Flanagan
Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice, Michael A Peters (Series Editor), volume 68, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei, 2016
ISBN: 978-94-6300-510-4 (paperback), ISBN: 978-94-6300-511-1 (hardback), ISBN: 978-94-6300-512-8 (e-book)

Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework.

The majority of chapters in this book are developments of talks first presented at the Fifth International Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference: Threshold Concepts in Practice, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom, 9-11 July, 2014.

Clickhere for Further Details and Table of Contents

Threshold Concepts and Conceptual Difficulty,
Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PESTLHE), 12, (2), 2017; Special Edition: Threshold Concepts 2017.
Special Edition Editors: Ray Land and Julie Rattray, Durham University, UK.
The great majority of the articles in this special issue were first presented at the 5th International Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts held at Collingwood College in the University of Durham from 9th-11th July 2014.
http://community.dur.ac.uk/pestlhe.learning/index.php/pestlhe/index (last accessed: 10 May 2017)

From personal practice to communities of practice (2014)
Edited by Catherine O'Mahony, Avril Buchanan, Mary O'Rourke and Bettie Higgs
NAIRTL, Ireland, January 2014, ISBN: 978-1-906642-59-4
Conference e.book
This is the conference book of talks first presented at the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference: From personal practice to communities of practice, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 27-29 June 2012.

Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning (2010)
Edited by Jan H. F. Meyer, Ray Land and Caroline Baillie
Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010
[Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice, Peters, M.A. (Ed), Volume 42]
The majority of chapters in this book are developments of talks first presented at the Threshold Concepts Conference: from theory to practice,
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 18th - 20th June 2008.

Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines (2008)
Edited by Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer and Jan Smith
Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008
[Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice, Michael Peters (Ed.), volume 16]
ISBN 978-90-8790-267-4 (paperback), ISBN 978-90-8790-268-1 (hardback).
The majority of chapters in this book are developments of talks first presented at the Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines Symposium, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 30 August-1 September 2006.

Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2006)
Edited by Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land
Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, 2006
ISBN10: 0-415-37430-8, ISBN13: 978-0-415-37430-9.

See alsoOther Threshold Concept Web Pages

Selected Video and Podcast Presentations on the Threshold Concept

Land, R. (2014) A Closer Look at Liminality: incorrigibles and threshold capital
Keynote Presentation, Fourth Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts: From personal practice to communities of practice, Trinity College, Dublin, 28-29 June 2012.
On-line video recording: http://www.nairtl.ie/index.php?pageID=627&PHPSESSID=3977846af865678a7fa99cd4598810be
Full Paper: Land, R. and Rattray, J. A Closer Look at Liminality: incorrigibles and threshold capital
in Threshold Concepts: From Personal Practice to Communities of Practice, Proceedings of the National Academy's Sixth Annual Conference and the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference [e-publication], Editors: Catherine O'Mahony, Avril Buchanan, Mary O'Rourke and Bettie Higgs, January 2014, NAIRTL, Ireland, ISBN: 978-1-906642-59-4, pp 1-12.
http://www.nairtl.ie/documents/EPub_2012Proceedings.pdf#page=11 [last accessed 28 January 2014]

Cousin, G. (2014) Threshold Concepts as an Analytical Tool for Researching Higher Education Pedagogy
Keynote Presentation, Fourth Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts: From personal practice to communities of practice, Trinity College, Dublin, 28-29 June 2012.
On-line video recording: http://www.nairtl.ie/index.php?pageID=627&PHPSESSID=3977846af865678a7fa99cd4598810be
Full Paper in Threshold Concepts: From Personal Practice to Communities of Practice, Proceedings of the National Academy's Sixth Annual Conference and the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference [e-publication], Editors: Catherine O'Mahony, Avril Buchanan, Mary O'Rourke and Bettie Higgs, January 2014, NAIRTL, Ireland, ISBN: 978-1-906642-59-4, pp 22-25.
http://www.nairtl.ie/documents/EPub_2012Proceedings.pdf#page=32 [last accessed 28 January 2014]

Higgs, B. (2014) Threshold Concepts: Navigating the Route
Keynote Presentation, Fourth Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts: From personal practice to communities of practice, Trinity College, Dublin, 28-29 June 2012.
On-line video recording: http://www.nairtl.ie/index.php?pageID=627&PHPSESSID=3977846af865678a7fa99cd4598810be
Full Paper in Threshold Concepts: From Personal Practice to Communities of Practice, Proceedings of the National Academy's Sixth Annual Conference and the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference [e-publication], Editors: Catherine O'Mahony, Avril Buchanan, Mary O'Rourke and Bettie Higgs, January 2014, NAIRTL, Ireland, ISBN: 978-1-906642-59-4, pp 13-21.
http://www.nairtl.ie/documents/EPub_2012Proceedings.pdf#page=23 [last accessed 28 January 2014]

Carmichael, P. (2014) From this Curriculum to That which is to Come: Threshold Concepts, Complexity and Change
Keynote Presentation, Fourth Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts: From personal practice to communities of practice, Trinity College, Dublin, 28-29 June 2012.
On-line video recording: http://www.nairtl.ie/index.php?pageID=627&PHPSESSID=3977846af865678a7fa99cd4598810be
Full Paper in Threshold Concepts: From Personal Practice to Communities of Practice, Proceedings of the National Academy's Sixth Annual Conference and the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference [e-publication], Editors: Catherine O'Mahony, Avril Buchanan, Mary O'Rourke and Bettie Higgs, January 2014, NAIRTL, Ireland, ISBN: 978-1-906642-59-4, pp 26-29.
http://www.nairtl.ie/documents/EPub_2012Proceedings.pdf#page=36 [last accessed 28 January 2014]

Atherton, J. (2010): Introducing Threshold Concepts
Part 1: https://vimeo.com/115832023
Part 2: https://vimeo.com/11600717
Part 3: https://vimeo.com/11601051
Part 4: https://vimeo.com/11601728
Part 5: https://vimeo.com/11602354 last accessed 13 May 2010.

Johnstone, K., Dym, C. and Jacobius, T. (2008) Process, foundation, or skills: Is there a pedagogical difference?,
Presentations and Discussions, (Moderator, Crawley, E.), Project-Centred Learning Symposium 2008, Cambridge-MIT Institute Partnership Programme.

Threshold concepts - Keith Johnstone, University of Cambridge, UK

Design Process - Clive Dym, Harvey Mudd College

Transferable skills - Tom Jacobius, Illinois Institute of Technology

Podcast: http://techtv.mit.edu/tags/741-threshold/videos?view=list last accessed 7 December 2009

Selected Powerpoint Presentations on the Threshold Concept

Specific Topics
Links to the subjects covered by this bibliography are listed below, alphabetically, and ordered into specific disciplines, e.g. economics, and teaching and learning topics, e.g. doctoral research, virtual worlds.
An extended larger print single column version of this specific topics index can be found on Subject Index.

A compilation of all the references in this bibliography arranged under the surnames of the relevant authors may be found onAuthor Index.

Ethnographic Background
Victor Turner, drawing on Arnold van Gennep's work on ritual rites of passage, extended van Gennep's concept of a liminal state. Turner's work has been influential and the concept of a liminal state has migrated from its original anthropological context to wider sociological contexts and is now seen as relevant to pedagogic research.

See Liminality for a brief discussion of the liminal state in the context of threshold concepts.

See Ethnographic Studies for references on ethnonographic studies in the context of threshold concepts.

van Gennep, A. (1909), Les Rites de Passage,
Éditions A. et J. Picard, Paris, 2011 [réimpr. de l'édit. augmentée de 1969], ISBN : 978-2-7084-0900-2
The Rites of Passage, Translation by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, 1960, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961
ISBN: 9780226848495 (paperback), ISBN: 9780226027180 (E-book).

Journal and Book Special Issues
Future Special Issues

Futue special issues will be listed here.

Past Special Issues

Threshold Concepts in Health and Social Care
International Journal of Practice-based Learning in Health and Social Care, 6, (1), 2018): Special Issue: Threshold Concepts in Health and Social Care
A guest-edited special edition, exploring how threshold concepts are being put to use in health and social care education, to foster the capabilities required in professional practice. The editors of this special edition are Linda Martindale, Sarah Barradell, Hilary Neve and Ray Land.
http://e-learning.coventry.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pblh/index (last accessed: 23 August 2018)

Threshold Concepts and Conceptual Difficulty,
Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PESTLHE), 12, (2), 2017; Special Edition: Threshold Concepts 2017.
Special Edition Editors: Ray Land and Julie Rattray, Durham University, UK.
The great majority of the articles in this special issue were first presented at the 5th International Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts held at Collingwood College in the University of Durham from 9th-11th July 2014.
http://community.dur.ac.uk/pestlhe.learning/index.php/pestlhe/index (last accessed: 10 May 2017)

Theological Education and Threshold Concepts,
Journal of Adult Theological Education, 13, (2), 2016; Themed Issue: Theological Education and Threshold Concepts.
Themed Issue Editors: Peter Mudge and Jan H F Meyer.
This themed issue explores the juncture between Theology and Threshold Concepts. It has become increasingly apparent to those involved at the intersection between these two fields that there was a special affinity between the theoretical underpinnings of TCs and the practice and praxis associated with areas such as theology, ethics, biblical studies, practical theology, theology of disability, religious education, and spirituality, among many others (Mudge and Meyer).
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yate20/13/2 (last accessed: 29 October 2016)

Application of Threshold Concepts in Business Education,
Education + Training, 58, (5), 2016; Special Edition: Application of Threshold Concepts in Business Education.
Special Edition Editors: Chris Bajada and Rowan Trayler, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
The focus of the special issue is on embedding threshold concepts in the area of business and management education (from curriculum design through to learning activities).
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/toc/et/58/5 (last accessed: 5 May 2016)

Threshold Concepts in Management Education: Research, Teaching and Learning,
Journal of Management Education, 39 (4), 2015; Special Edition: Threshold Concepts in Management Education: Research, Teaching and Learning.
Special Edition Editors: April L Wright and Paul Hibbert.
http://jme.sagepub.com/content/39/4.toc (last accessed: 20 September 2015)

Emergent learning and threshold concepts in tertiary education,
Waikato Journal of Education (Te Hautaka Mātauranga o Waikato), Special Edition: Emergent learning and threshold concepts in tertiary education 19 (2), 2014.
Special Edition Editors: Ann Harlow, Mira Peter and Anne McKim.
http://www.wje.org.nz/index.php/WJE/article/view/95http://www.wje.org.nz/index.php/WJE/issue/view/15 (last accessed: 12 January 2015)

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 9th issue, Spring 2013
http://teachingandlearningtogether.blogs.brynmawr.edu/archived-issues/ninth-issue-sprin-2013

Threshold Concepts in Educational Development,
The Journal of Faculty Development, Special Issue: Threshold Concepts in Educational Development, 26, (3), 2012.
Special Issue Editors: Catherine King and Peter Felten
http://store.newforums.com/Threshold-Concepts-in-Educational-Development-JFD263.htm

Planet No 17, December 2006.
Special edition of Planet arising from the HEA GEES Subject Centre's residential conference, entitled What on Earth ...? Student Learning in Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, held at the Quality Inn, Plymouth at the end of June 2006. [ http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rhep12/17/1 last accessed 12 January 2015]

Theses and Dissertations
This section lists theses and dissertations that either feature the threshold concept framework as a central theme or contain serious discussion of the threshold concept framework.

Long, C. (2015) Learning Pathways within the Multiplicative Conceptual Field: Insights Reflected through a Rasch Measurement Framework,
Empirische Studien zur Didaktik der Mathematik, Volume 24, Waxman Verlag GmbH, Münster, Germany
Adapted version of Caroline Long's Doctorate in Education Thesis, University of Cape Town, December 2011
https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MkpzCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=xXEvqmAhPN&sig=Fjr70xw7lwgi_TebnNAXl5WwWJs#v=onepage&q&f=false (last accessed: 6 September 2015)

Oskarsson, B. (2014) Towards Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Logistics,
PhD Thesis, Linköping Studies in Science and Technology, Thesis No. 1685, LiU-TEK-LIC 2014:117
Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:758791/FULLTEXT01.pdf (last accessed: 25 November 2014)

Stadig Degerman M. (2012) Att hantera cellmetabolismens komplexitet: Meningsskapande genom visualisering och metaforer,
[Handling complex cell metabolism: Creating meaning through visualisation and metaphor]
Doctoral thesis, Department of Science and Technology, Linköping University
http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:512688 [last accessed: 19 July 2012]
and http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:512688/FULLTEXT01 [last accessed: 19 July 2012]

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Threshold Concepts: Undergraduate Teaching, Postgraduate Training, Professional Development and School Education A Short Introduction and a Bibliography fom 2003 to 2018 " The idea of threshold concepts emerged from a UK national research project into the possible characteristics of strong teaching and learning environments in the disciplines for undergraduate education (Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses).

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Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching

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OPINION: Nicola Parkin
Learning Designer - CILT

It has been interesting, from a design perspective, to engage across multiple different learning management systems (LMSs) at the same time. It is a rare chance to take into consideration some bigger - or perhaps deeper - questions about the nature of the LMS, and how it constructs, constrains and makes possible different forms of educational practice, by its very architecture.
What meanings are configured?
One way to think about the inherent 'designed in' architecture of the technology is to recognise it as a 'meaning-structure', by which I mean both the 'designed in' meanings which are 'given' to the user by the technology itself, as well as the way that the user brings their own kinds of meanings to bear when they use the technology (or: we create as well as encounter meaning). The point is that the technologies configure meanings in their very structures, and it is good to notice them - as much as we are able! - so we choose our way within those constraints and possibilities, rather than being 'subject' to them (remembering that 'constraints' are just opportunities to be more creative, perhaps?).

With this in mind, I set about playing with the different platforms with two eyes open: with one on the practical 'affordances' of the technologies; and with the other, trying to penetrate more phenomenologically their meaning-structures.
From teaching to learning narrative?
The first thing that struck me was how used to our current LMS (Moodle) I had become, and how its architecture had indeed conceptually 'shaped' for me the central concept of the 'teaching narrative' which seems to say 'start at the top, work your way down'. While there are options for the topic site format, in its default mode the platform is set up to arrange a sequential cascade of activities and resources, glued together with text that describes and guides, as if a teacher's voice is captured in the site itself. The teacher has a visual presence too (top right 'welcome block') that overlooks, if you like, the topic.

The other platforms seemed to lack this straightforward teaching narrative. The narrative was there but was more distributed. To get the 'flow' of the topic, it was necessary from a student perspective to switch between tasks, communications, and content. It dawned on me that the 'lack' (or so I first felt it to be) of a clearly joined-up narrative on the page opened another possibility which while obvious had never occurred to me, was to flip the responsibility for the narrative to the student. The possibility for this rests though not in the architecture of the technology itself, but in the educational strategies. Yes, the student must find their way, but could we not ask the student to show the way that they made sense of it all and their developing understanding as a 'learning narrative' (for instance a journal, blog or portfolio)? The 'glue' of the topic is then not so much the teaching voice, but the demonstrated story of the learning, in the voice of the student.
What the layouts make possible
Canvas, Brightspace and Open LMS all seemed to share an architectural logic insofar as their layout was concerned, with the modules stacked on the left side and opening to the right, in the style of electronic book chapters. All well as being arranged like chapters, items were also grouped in the top menu according to type (assessments, for instance), effectively providing an alternative navigation option to the student. The dual navigation, together with calendared items, allows for the student to use the site in the way that makes sense for them. The sense-making, then, falls again to the student as user of the site, rather than the teacher as builder of the site.

It struck me that Learn Ultra had a markedly different layout and structural logic from the other three. In this LMS, the student and their tasks are firmly in the centre, rather the topic, per se. All the topics and other types of cohorts ('organisations') that the student is enrolled interleave into a central spine of tasks, which is organised according to date due, suggesting a workflow based on what is due next. This is a radical departure from the 'container' type topics that we are used to with Moodle. Ultra also allows for 'conversations' - forums - to be associated and dedicated to a particular activity, and adds a 'layer' of discussion that stays with the activity - before, during and after the activity, opening up new temporalities to play with. Interestingly, the activity page allows the student to build their assignments straight into the site, rather than uploading a document created 'elsewhere' (although this is still possible). With this configuration, the activity is a 'space' rather than a tool, a page consisting of activity description and instructions, activity submission point, and activity discussion.

The Canvas set-up also opens up ideas about what a topic can 'be'. In Canvas you are able to choose the 'home page' for your topic, potentially enabling each topic to have their own bespoke meaning-structure. It is possible, even, to build a completely customised webpage and set this as the home page for the topic. Once a page is created, Canvas gives the creator an option to allow students to edit the page; this setting can be applied across the entire topic or restricted to certain pages only. The paradigm-changing net effect is potentially a topic co-created by staff and students. Think of the possibilities!

For these reasons and probably many more that I didn't have time to discover, I encourage you to have your own play in the platforms with an eye on the meaning-structures as well as the practical constraints and affordances.

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The meaning-structure of the LMS - Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching

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OPINION: Nicola Parkin Learning Designer - CILT It has been interesting, from a design perspective, to engage across multiple different learning management systems (LMSs) at the same time. It is a rare chance to take into consideration some bigger - or perhaps deeper - questions about the nature of the LMS, and how it constructs, constrains and makes possible different forms of educational practice, by its very architecture.

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Collection of resources

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Distributed and collaborative: Experiences of local leadership of a first year experience program Student Success Volume 8, Issue 2, July 2017
Local level leadership of the first year experience (FYE) is critical for engaging academic and professional staff in working collaboratively on a whole of institution focus on student transition and success. This paper describes ways in which local informal leadership is experienced at faculty level in an institutional FYE program, based on interviews with faculty coordinators and small grant recipients. Initial analysis using the distributed leadership tenets described by Jones, Hadgraft, Harvey, Lefoe, and Ryland (2014) revealed features that enabled success, such as collaborative communities, as well as faculty differences influenced by the strength of the external mandate for change in the FYE. More fine-grained analysis indicated further themes in engaging others, enabling and enacting the FYE program that fostered internal mandates for change: gaining buy-in; being opportunistic; making use of evidence of success and recognition; along with the need for collegial support for coordinators and self-perceptions of leadership being about making connections, collaboration, trust and expertise.
Building a sense of belonging among tertiary commuter students: The Monash Non-Residential Colleges program A Fernandes, A Ford, G Rayner, & L Pretorius
Student engagement at university is significantly influenced by sense of belonging. In 2013, our university developed a novel extra-curricular program designed to foster a sense of belonging in students who commute to university - the Monash Non-Residential Colleges (NRC) program. This study examines whether participation in the Monash NRC program changed students' perceptions about their university experience and their sense of belonging to the university community. We show that our NRC program appears to be effective in fostering a more positive university experience for students when compared with non-NRC students. Additionally, we demonstrate that our NRC program influenced students' sense of belonging through increased interaction with peers and staff as well as greater reported attendance on campus.
A chronicle of just-in-time information: The secret to building first year university student wellbeing and resilience based on a three year initiative. Donnalee Taylor
Student Success, Volume 8, Issue 1, Early Release, October 2016

To date, little has been published on the provision of student-driven just-in-time information to support first year students.This article provides a dissemination template of what just-in-time curricular and extra-curricular information is required by first year university students. In addition, it outlines how students' need for this information was determined and how information was successfully created and disseminated over these three years to assist the students in their transition to and through university. The intention of this article is to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on student resilience and wellbeing and to provide a guide for anyone interested in supporting their students in a similar manner.
Helping students to persist with and succeed in their first year of higher education. Salah Kutieleh and Ewa Seidel STARS (Student's Transitions Achievements Retention & Success) Conference, July 2015, Melbourne
Attrition, particularly amongst students in their first year of study, has been problematic for universities because of economic and social ramifications. While differences exist in the way universities have approached this issue, the literature shows the need for a holistic strategy that aims to facilitate and enhance student engagement with their institutions. Flinders University has supported the development of a centrally run program to contact first-year students who are likely to drop out. Predictions from machine learning models, built using big data, were utilised to target intervention throughout 2014. Students were contacted by their peers, who welcomed and advised students of the services on campus. Almost two-thirds of the 4100 students in scope were successfully contacted. Preliminary findings showed an effective targeting strategy, with reduced student attrition, improved appreciation and effective utilisation of student support services. These findings continue to shape the ongoing development of the Student Success Program.
Student success: why first year at Uni is a make-or-break experience. Sally Kift
The Conversation - Education, Australian Edition, February 19, 2014

Starting first year at university can be a daunting experience and a big adjustment for new students. Some adjust easily and thrive. As many as one third do not and think about leaving. If first year goes well, it sets students up for successful university study and future careers. But if students struggle or become disengaged they can under-perform or just drop out completely. Universities need, quite intentionally, to make first-year student learning, success and retention their core business.
Transition Pedagogy Handbook: A Good Practice Guide for Policy and Practice in the First Year Experience at QUT. Karen Nelson, Tracy Creagh, Sally Kift and John Clarke Brisbane, 2014, Queensland University of Technology
This Handbook has been specifically designed for academic and professional staff responsible for managing first year students and curriculum and co-curricular programs at QUT. As well as presenting examples of good practice, the handbook provides a brief overview of QUT's First Year Experience Program, a summary of QUT's First Year Experience and Retention Policy and the Transition Pedagogy that frames both curricular and co-curricular activities.
Inspiring Achievement in First Year University Students. Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, 2013
These webpages are designed to support staff who work with students attending university for the first time at a first year level. Some of the material may also be useful for staff working with students who do not fit this explicit category, such as vocational students transferring into upper year level topics and first year research higher degree students.
Partnerships for success: A collaborative support model to enhance the first year student experience. Johanna Einfalt and Janet Turley The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 2013, 4(1), pp 73-84
Recent discourse about engaging first year students calls for more collaboration in terms of adopting a holistic approach to course delivery and support. This paper discusses a collaborative support model operating at a regional Australian university since 2008. In particular, it describes a collaborative support initiative emerging from this model that is based on providing an informal consultative space where students can drop-in and gain assessment support for research, writing and content. A focus group, online surveys and interviews with co-ordinators were conducted to evaluate the impact of this initiative. Findings suggest that this collaborative support model impacts on the first year student experience by: raising awareness about academic skills and the processes for researching and writing; promoting peer learning opportunities; building confidence and providing suitable support for a diverse range of students.
The first year experience of social work students: Developing a "sense of fit" and engagement with the profession. A Practice Report. Jenny Kaighin and Waveney Croft The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 2013, 4(1), pp 117-123
Engagement is believed to be critical to a successful first year experience. This paper examines a range of strategies introduced into a first year Social Work and Human Services unit at Queensland University of Technology. The focus of these strategies was to enhance student engagement through building connections with peers, lecturers and the Social Work and Human Services professions. It is argued in this paper that students are more likely to continue with their studies if they are supported in building an emerging identity as both a university student and as a Social Work or Human Services practitioner. A range of strategies was introduced, including restructuring the unit to include an early intensive teaching block; inviting current practitioners to speak with students about the realities of practice; and embedding an academic skills component into the unit. Feedback from students highlighted the success of these strategies in developing their academic skills, building connections and embedding a sense of fit with the profession.
Enhancing student success: taking the classroom success seriously. Vincent Tinto The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 2012, 3(1), pp 1-8
Professor Vincent Tinto opens this issue of The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education by highlighting the importance of paying attention to students' experiences in the classroom. With the classroom experience of students in the United States college system firmly in mind, Tinto draws attention to what he calls the "attributes of effective classrooms". The classroom attributes he describes, such as clear expectations, timely support, feedback on assessment, engaging pedagogies and enhancing teaching skills, though drawn from the United States experience, are universal and as such are transferrable across national boundaries and applicable to higher education educators, leaders and policy makers globally. You can assess this universality by relating Tinto's criteria to your teaching environment.
What Do Commencing Undergraduate Students Expect From First Year University? Sheila Doreen Scutter, Edward Palmer, Ann Luzeckyj, Karen Burke da Silva and Russell Brinkworth The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 2011, 2(1), pp 8-20
The expectations of students entering their first year of undergraduate study in South Australia were investigated. Responses from 3091 students allowed a comprehensive understanding of students' expectations. Most respondents (70%) were entering university directly from secondary school and most (78%) were studying in their program of first choice. The major factor in program choice was interest in the topic, followed by career prospects. The need to understand the expectations of students commencing university is becoming even more important with many universities aiming to increase participation from previously under-represented groups. Only 30% of students had realistic expectations about the amount of study required to succeed at university. Most students felt that feedback on submitted work, and on drafts of work, would be important for their learning. Having easy and convenient access to teaching staff outside of face-to-face teaching was seen as an important factor in success. 91% of students felt that having friends studying at the same university would provide support, but 25% did not know anyone studying at the same university.
Embedding academic-professional collaborations that build student confidence for essay writing: Student perceptions and quality outcomes. A Practice Report. Juliey Beckman and Gerry Rayner The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 2011 2(2), pp 83-90
Although the ability for effective written communication is an essential graduate attribute, there is misalignment of student perceptions of expected writing styles and levels between secondary and tertiary education. This problem may be compounded by an apparent dearth of hands-on writing and related learning modalities for the vast majority of transiting students. This may be due to a range of interacting factors, including the increased numbers and concomitant diversity of students entering higher education, a reluctance among academics to hand over teaching to professional staff, and a lack of opportunities to establish collaborations between academics and co-curricular professions, namely library and learning skills professionals. This paper reports on the development, implementation and outcomes of a collaboration among these groups on an essay writing intervention for commencing students in a very large enrolment first year science subject.
Daniel Fusch Academic Impressions, 2011
As research on gaps in college preparedness continues to emerge, fueling debates in both academic and public forums, most postsecondary institutions have taken some measures to assist undergraduates in developing a higher degree of information and digital literacy, and to prepare students better for conducting academic research.
Towards a Southern Theory of Higher Education. Trevor Gale 12th Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference 2009, 'Preparing for tomorrow today: the first year experience as foundation' , Townsville, National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education
Crudely, social inclusion in Australian higher education is a numbers game. While the student recruitment departments of universities focus on 'bums on seats', equity advocates draw attention to 'which bums', in 'what proportions', and, more to the point, 'which seats', 'where'. But if the counting of bums is crude, so is the differentiation of seats. Just distinguishing between courses and universities and scrutinizing the distribution of groups, is a limited view of equity. The most prestigious seats of learning give students access primarily to dominant forms of knowledge and ways of thinking. In terms of access, it is to a diminished higher education, for all. Further, undergraduates - particularly in their first year - are rarely credited with having much to contribute. Higher education is the poorer for it. In this paper I propose an expanded conception for social inclusion and an enlarged regard for what is being accessed by students who gain entry to university. Drawing on Connell's conception of 'Southern Theory', I highlight power/knowledge relations in higher education and particularly 'southerners': those under?represented in universities - often located south of ENTER (Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank) cut?offs - and whose cultural capital is similarly marginalised and discounted. While increasing regard for the importance of Indigenous knowledges is beginning to challenge the norms of higher education, we are yet to generalise such reconceptions of epistemology to include knowledges particular to people from regional and rural areas, with disabilities, and from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Nor have we really engaged with different ways of thinking about the physical and social worlds that are particular to these groups. To take account of marginalized forms of knowledge and of thinking will mean thinking differently about what higher education is and how it gets done
Success in first year: the impact of institutional, programmatic and personal interventions on an effective and sustainable first-year student experience. Keithia Wilson Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology, 2009, 19
In this keynote address, the author begins by talking about her practice as a First Year Advisor at Griffith University. First Year Advisors (now in the fifth year of the program) are recruited from the academics teaching in a particular program and are members of staff who understand, and are interested in, first year students, their issues and experiences. The role has been designed to facilitate the successful transition of commencing students to university. First Year Advisors respond to student needs and concerns, providing commencing students with a local, predictable, non-judgmental and accessible point of contact at the most critical and formative phase of their university experience. It is responsible for school-level transition-supportive activities such as developing a degree-level first year experience plan, leading and organising academic orientation and transition and monitoring and advising at-risk students. This innovative strategy is the first of its kind to be implemented systematically at the whole-of-university level in Australian higher education. The author then discusses the measure of effectiveness as evidenced by evaluation data. The overall data for 2007 shows a 13 per cent improvement in student retention even with slightly lower student entry level scores than for 2006. Retention data for 2008 shows that Griffith is in the top 30 per cent of programs nationally. The dual goals of effectiveness and sustainability are equally important. There is an urgent need to interrupt the recurring pattern of short-term innovations which rely on the enthusiasm of champions and which also rapidly decline when their energy is depleted. Data is required from multiple sources to assist decision-making about the cost-benefit ratio of First Year Advisor activities and their return on investment. Useful information comes from multiple formal and informal sources of feedback, with examples of readily available, low-cost and easy to interrogate data including: student feedback; partner feedback (mentors, tutors); staff feedback (convenors, tutors, administration); institutional surveys; course evaluations; student outcomes; and informal, anecdotal and incidental observations and conversations.
Organising First Year Engagement around Learning: Formal and Informal Curriculum Intervention. Sally Kift The Inaugural Pacific Rim - First Year in Higher Education Conference: Dealing with Diversity, 2004 Melbourne
Institutions are extremely sensitive about the imperative to "deal with" student diversity in all of its diversity, whether that presents as student culture, background, preparedness for study, ability or expectations. In the meantime, research confirms our daily classroom experience - that students are working longer hours in paid employment, generally feel less committed to and engaged with their tertiary studies and find it increasingly difficult to motivate themselves. In the first university year, students say their transition is difficult and lonely; while reduced public funding and massification of the sector have exacerbated student disengagement through impersonal large classes and growing rates of academic casualisation. Systemic factors such as increased flexibility in course delivery and diversity in program choice further destabilise the potential for a sense of student belonging in that students no longer "study and play" their way through university together as they once did. This presentation will discuss a "whole-of-course" response to the dynamics of the first year experience. A two-pronged approach will be suggested that embeds the basic skills-set necessary for tertiary success into core curriculum and then supports this in-class learning with a range of out-of-class strategies that emphasise retention and learning engagement. An analysis of student feedback on the transitional strategies will also be presented.

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Flinders has a record of excellence and innovation in teaching, research and community engagement. We aim high to inspire achievement by our students and all staff ? academic and general ? to prepare them to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities of modern life.

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A beautiful thought-piece

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The South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning (TfEL) describes the department's position on teaching and learning practices that lead to improved student engagement and achievement.

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The Changing Nature of the Academic Role in Science

2014 OLT National Teaching Fellowship

Professor Pauline Ross

Fellowship years: 2014 - 2019

Abstract: Higher education and academics are under an onslaught of pressures. To create the student and academic success we desire in a reconfiguring higher education landscape, the academic role needs to differentiate. This fellowship will reconceptualise the academic role and create a framework to evaluate academic teaching in the sciences. The lack of differentiation in the academic role is being felt acutely by the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines (STEM) where the pervasive emphasis has been on research. Declining enrolments and perceived falling standards of STEM graduates, both nationally and internationally, raise concerns about the future pipeline of STEM graduates and a public who are well disposed towards science. This fellowship will with work with leaders in higher education, peak bodies, senior leaders in disciplinary research and teaching and early-mid career academics to reconceptualise the academic role in the sciences and create an evaluation framework to ensure Australia has excellent academic teachers of STEM in the future.

Fellowship discipline: Biological sciences

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The Changing Nature of the Academic Role in Science " Australian Learning & Teaching Fellows

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2014 OLT National Teaching Fellowship Professor Pauline Ross Fellowship years: 2014 - 2019 Abstract: Higher education and academics are under an onslaught of pressures. To create the student and academic success we desire in a reconfiguring higher education landscape, the academic role needs to differentiate.

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By Sally Varnham

What the sector needs now is to work with students for students, inside and outside the classroom in partnership. Student partnership is a way of thinking, not simply an activity. Traditionally, student engagement has meant management-driven feedback and consultation, and token representation on committees and boards. By comparison, authentic student partnership is an institutional commitment to systemically accessing the voice of the 'expert learners' - our students - to understand their evolving needs and expectations. It also contributes to the development of students as critical thinkers, leaders, innovators and citizens in a global society.

Australia has been slow to embrace the benefits of working in partnership with students to enhance the quality of their learning experience, even though a partnership approach to student engagement has been a fixture in higher education internationally for many years (for example, sparqs in Scotland, TSEP in England and NStEP in Ireland). Under one of the last National Senior Teaching Fellowships awarded, UTS's Professor Sally Varnham has worked collaboratively with national student bodies and individual students, staff and managers from Australian institutions to develop a set of Principles ( Students and Tertiary Educators Undertaking Partnership (STEPUP)) to assist the implementation of student partnership initiatives.

In 2019, the Student Voice Australia Pilot Project has been funded by ten institutions to pursue this work at the national level. The Fellowship and Project are leading a shift in thinking and many others are now coming on board. But sector-wide embedding requires the collective support of students, institutions, government and national agencies. And resourcing at a national level, for example, to train student leaders for professional and positive engagement with their institutions. In the perennial struggle to provide a quality experience for all students in the face of competing demands, true student partnership offers a destination worth pursuing.
Professor Sally Varnham
University of Technology Sydney

2016 National Senior Teaching Fellow
Sally.Varnham@uts.edu.au
ALTF 2019 Legacy Report here

to get daily updates on what's happening in the world of Australian Higher Education

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By Sally Varnham What the sector needs now is to work with students for students, inside and outside the classroom in partnership. Student partnership is a way of thinking, not simply an activity. Traditionally, student engagement has meant management-driven feedback and consultation, and token representation on committees and boards.

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Vlog 10 How to write a teaching philosophy

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Through digital, students and staff are more connected and have access to more information than at any other time in history. What does this mean for learning and teaching? How will technology impact our practice? We are looking at technology and academic behaviours to enhance sector understanding of these issues.

Every aspect of university or college is impacted by digital. For teaching staff and for students, the ubiquity of connectivity and access to information brings challenge and opportunity.

Most students in the UK will bring their own device, have access to myriad platforms and tools, and increasingly expect seamless integration with processes associated with learning and teaching.

The rapid uptake of social media and its prevalence in learning and teaching is also impacting on behaviours around technology, and there is a need to engage students in digital citizenship.

What we're doing

Jisc is working with UK universities and colleges to gain a better understanding of the changing behaviours and needs of both staff and students. In the UK, we're uniquely placed to look at the emerging technology trends and offer independent advice and guidance.

Going forward we will work with universities, colleges, vendors and start-ups to develop innovative new services and approaches that use digital to transform learning and teaching.

We are working to:

Develop an in-depth understanding of next generation digital learning

Use that understanding to explore and create prototype new services

Trial new approaches by working in partnership with innovative people from a wide range of backgrounds

Why does this matter?

The presence of technology in educational settings is now taken for granted, to the extent that students - and staff - want the ability to move easily between modes of learning and teaching.

The personal digital devices that students have access to are also having an impact on their expectations of the technology they encounter in teaching and learning contexts.

How this affects you

New digital fluencies are needed around data, media and information production and consumption, and the ability for students and staff to engage with emerging technologies, evaluating them for use in their own practice.

How we use technology in our teaching and learning, how we communicate and collaborate and how we use data must be a model for the digital behaviours that we want to see in our students and graduates.

Universities and colleges need to provide space for students to develop themselves and their practices such that they can live, work, and thrive in a digital world.

Further resources

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Through digital, students and staff are more connected and have access to more information than at any other time in history. What does this mean for learning and teaching? How will technology impact our practice? We are looking at technology and academic behaviours to enhance sector understanding of these issues.

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Randy Bass ([email protected] ) is Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University.

Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page.
A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching.
Our understanding of learning has expanded at a rate that has far outpaced our conceptions of teaching. A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching.

By "disruptive moments," I'm not referring to students on Facebook in classrooms. I mean "disruption" in the way Clayton Christensen uses the term. Christensen coined the phrase disruptive innovation to refer to a process "by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves 'up market,' eventually displacing established competitors." ¹ By using the phrase "disrupting ourselves" in this article's title, I am asserting that one key source of disruption in higher education is coming not from the outside but from our own practices, from the growing body of experiential modes of learning, moving from margin to center, and proving to be critical and powerful in the overall quality and meaning of the undergraduate experience. As a result, at colleges and universities we are running headlong into our own structures, into the way we do business.

We might say that the formal curriculum is being pressured from two sides. On the one side is a growing body of data about the power of experiential learning in the co‑curriculum; and on the other side is the world of informal learning and the participatory culture of the Internet. Both of those pressures are reframing what we think of as the formal curriculum. These pressures are disruptive because to this point we have funded and structured our institutions as if the formal curriculum were the center of learning, whereas we have supported the experiential co-curriculum (and a handful of anomalous courses, such as first-year seminars) largely on the margins, even as they often serve as the poster children for the institutions' sense of mission, values, and brand. All of us in higher education need to ask ourselves: Can we continue to operate on the assumption that the formal curriculum is the center of the undergraduate experience?

This tension between an expansion of learning and the limits of our structures is intrinsic to the learning paradigm. In the 1995 article "From Teaching to Learning," Robert Barr and John Tagg wrote that higher education was in a powerful transition, moving from an instructional paradigm to a learning paradigm-from offering information to designing learning experiences, from thinking about inputs to focusing on outputs, from being an aggregation of separate activities to becoming an integrated design. Barr and Tagg added that it would take decades for higher education to fully make this shift. ²

Now, fifteen-plus years into that shift, our understanding of learning is expanding in ways that are at least partially incompatible with the structures of higher education institutions. In addition, these developments are occurring at the same time that higher education is being asked to become more accountable for what students are learning. Ironically, these pressures for accountability are making us simultaneously more thoughtful and more limited in what we count as learning. The question that campus leaders need to address is how to reinvent a curriculum that lives in this new space.

The Post-Course Era

One of the consequences of the shift from the instructional paradigm to the learning paradigm is that it takes us beyond the centrality of the bounded course, into what I call the "post-course era." The idea of the course has several functions in our institutions: courses are primary tools for managing time, staff, and resources. And they are the building blocks for telling the story of a discipline or a field as it is expressed through the curriculum and translated into majors. Courses in these senses are not going away and will be with us for a long time. What I am referring to here is the imagined meaning that we give to courses-more specifically, the way we talk about courses and the curriculum as the center of the undergraduate experience.

By using the phrase "post-course era," I'm not saying that courses cannot be the site of effective teaching and learning. I will argue later how I think that can indeed be the case. On every campus there are committed and creative faculty whose courses are memorable and have impact for many students. What I am arguing is that we have reached the end of the era of assuming that the formal curriculum-composed of bounded, self-contained courses-is the primary place where the most significant learning takes place.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) previewed this shift almost ten years ago, in the influential report Greater Expectations, which argued: "The shape of the undergraduate curriculum was essentially fixed half a century ago." This shape included the solidification of locally controlled courses as the core of the experience: "Although listed in the catalog as part of a curriculum, individual courses are effectively 'owned' by departments, and most advanced courses by individual professors. Few faculty members teach to collectively owned goals. The student assembles an assortment of courses, each carrying a defined number of credits and assuming a standard time in class. The degree certifies completion of a fixed number of these often disconnected fragments. There is little internal coherence in curricula or programs, and even less a plan for connected learning." ³

Just about all of the broad curricular innovations of the last few decades, from general education to co-op education, have wound around these basic conditions, but have done little to change them.

The Recentered Curriculum

So, what's disrupting courses and the formal curriculum? If they are no longer the essential center of the undergraduate experience, what is? In 2008, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) published a now-familiar list of what is referred to as "high‑impact practices." ⁴ These are the college experiences that highly correlate to the most powerful learning outcomes. Students' participation in one or more of these practices had the greatest impact on success, on retention, on graduation, on transfer, and on other measures of learning:

First-year seminars and experiences

Common intellectual experiences

Learning communities

Writing-intensive courses

Collaborative assignments and projects

Undergraduate research

Diversity / global learning (study abroad)

Service learning, community-based learning

Internships

Capstone courses and projects

These are called "high-impact practices" because participation in them correlates with high retention and persistence rates. These practices also have high impact because they induce, according to George Kuh, student behaviors that lead to meaningful learning gains. The important student behaviors include the following:

Investing time and effort

Interacting with faculty and peers about substantive matters

Experiencing diversity

Responding to more frequent feedback

Reflecting and integrating learning

Discovering relevance of learning through real-world application⁵

Where are the high-impact practices located? Many of these practices are not part of the formal curriculum but are in the co-curriculum, or what we used to call the extra-curriculum (e.g., undergraduate research). The rest are special or exceptional curricular experiences (e.g., first‑year seminars and capstones). From the perspective of the impact on learning, this intersection of the most learning-intensive experiences in the co-curriculum and in the few exceptional, often experientially focused courses in the formal curriculum forms the new center-the recentered core-of undergraduate learning. Indeed, in my experience of holding focus groups and informal conversations with students, if you ask them where they think their deepest learning has taken place, they will sometimes point to one or two courses that had meaningful impact for them. But they almost always point enthusiastically to the co-curricular experiences in which they invested their time and energy.

What, if anything, should we make of this? If most of the formal curriculum is not where the high‑impact experiences are located, what are our possible responses? One essential response is to design more high-impact courses. That is, we need to ask what gives these practices high impact, and then we need to look at ways to integrate those kinds of strategies into course design and classroom pedagogy. On every campus, there are hard-working faculty-and their colleagues in the center for teaching and learning and the educational technology department-whose main focus is exactly that: to make courses more closely resemble high‑impact practices, with similar results.

Technologies can play a key role here as new digital, learning, and analytics tools now make it possible to replicate some features of high‑impact activity inside classrooms, whether through the design of inquiry-based learning or through the ability to access and manipulate data, mount simulations, leverage "the crowd" for collaboration and social learning, or redesign when and how students can engage course content. Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of today's technologies is that many of the high‑impact features that used to be possible only in small classes can now be experienced not only at a larger scale but, in some cases, to better effect at larger scale.

A second response to the location problem of high-impact practices is to design for greater fluidity and connection between the formal curriculum and the experiential co-curriculum. An example is the use of e-portfolios, which allow students to organize learning around the learner rather than around courses or the curriculum. Once intended for assessment or employment presentation, e-portfolios are being reinvented as integrative spaces across the undergraduate experience. They are being used in learning communities and first‑year experiences, sometimes spanning from general education to internships and capstones. As Bret Eynon puts it: "Drawing on the power of multimedia and personal narrative, recursive use of ePortfolio prompts students to expand their focus from individual courses to a broader educational process." ⁶ The continued growth of e-portfolios across higher education reveals a restless search for ways to find coherence that transcends courses and the formal curriculum.

I am naming here those approaches particularly relevant to instructional technology. There are, of course, myriad other approaches, both established and emerging (e.g., civic engagement and community-based learning), that bridge the classroom with experiential learning. I think it is also possible to work with faculty to create course designs with a "post-course" consciousness, paying attention to such elements as prior learning and prior conceptions, experiential knowledge, program-wide learning goals, and the long view of expert practice. There are also many ways to create assignments (and reflections to go with assignments) that gesture beyond the course itself-to life experience, to other courses, or to larger communities of practice, for example. These kinds of post-course consciousness strategies not only acknowledge the role that any course can play in building certain kinds of foundational knowledge and skills but also recognize the fluid boundaries of the course within a larger context of learning experiences.

Participatory Culture

A second pressure on the formal curriculum is the participatory culture of the web and the informal learning that it cultivates. Several years ago, Henry Jenkins and his colleagues published the report "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture." ⁷ They looked at a range of web cultures, or participatory cultures, including Wikipedia, gaming environments, and grassroots organizations. They compiled a list of what they considered to be the shared and salient features of these powerful web-based communities:

Low barriers to entry

Strong support for sharing one's contributions

Informal mentorship, from experienced to novice

A sense of connection to each other

A sense of ownership in what is being created

A strong collective sense that something is at stake

I don't know that every college course needs to function like this, but it is worth asking the question: How many college classrooms or course experiences include this set of features? In how many courses do students feel a sense of community, a sense of mentorship, a sense of collective investment, a sense that what is being created matters? It is no coincidence that these features of web-based communities have much in common with the traits that make high-impact practices so effective.

Some might question whether most courses in the formal curriculum need to be designed for this kind of learning and intellectual community. Clearly, students learn foundational and essential knowledge and skills in courses, and then they put that knowledge and those skills to use in high-quality life experiences or learning experiences outside the classroom. Maybe that's the intended role of the formal curriculum: to prepare students to have integrative experiences elsewhere. But if we actually followed the logic of that position, we would be making many different decisions about our core practices, especially as we acquire more and more data about the power and significance of those experiences. Those choices might include more significant shifts from inputs to outcomes, reinvestments moving more resources to the recentered core, redefinitions of what we mean by "faculty load," changes in how we count departmental productivity, and an expanded repertoire of ways for documenting learning achievement. And it would also follow that our course management systems would be organized differently. After all, the post-course era would need a post-course management system.

Reversing the Flow

When John Seely Brown talks about what he calls "reversing the flow," ⁸ he claims that the typical school curriculum is built from content ("learning about") leading to practice ("learning to be"), where the vast majority of useful knowledge is to be found. In a typical formal curriculum, students are first packed with knowledge, and if they stick with something long enough (i.e., major in a discipline), they eventually get to the point of engaging in practice. Brown argues that people instead learn best by "practicing the content." That is, we start in practice, and practice drives us to content. Or, more likely, the optimal way to learn is reciprocally or spirally between practice and content. Brown's formulation echoes the growing body of inductive and inquiry-based learning research that has convincingly demonstrated increased learning gains, in certain well-designed conditions, when students are first "presented with a challenge and then learn what they need to know to address the challenge." ⁹

So, how do we reverse the flow, or flip the curriculum, to ensure that practice is emphasized at least as early in the curriculum as content? How can students "learn to be," through both the formal and the experiential curriculum?

In the model of novice learning under the old "instructional paradigm" (before the learning paradigm), experts performed their thinking for students and then asked the novice learners to do "mini versions" of their work. The experts then graded the students accordingly and hoped that something would happen, that some students might "get it." The less-suited students would then disappear into another major, and the most-suited would continue. But three or four decades of research has taught us that a lot of meaningful activity-struggling, processing, sense-making-is going on in the intermediate space between novice and expert. In the learning paradigm, we are focusing not on the expert's products but, rather, on the expert's practice. That new "endpoint" changes what we should be attending to in the intermediate processes. It changes the role of instructional and emerging technologies, for example, which allow us to see, capture, harvest, and design for the intermediate learning processes.

Finally, this focus on practice changes what it means to teach, for both the faculty and an institution. How can an institution provide an instructional environment that makes this kind of learning possible and most effective, including (but not limited to) enabling the critical expert roles that faculty play?

A Position of Authority

The entangled nature of practice and content is often expressed in the words of faculty who talk thoughtfully about their students' learning, revealing how much higher-order knowledge is rooted in social and experiential learning. I recently ran a workshop called "The Bottlenecks and Thresholds Initiative," in which we help faculty analyze their teaching by slowing down and thinking about what it is that a student needs to do well in order to be successful with complex tasks. ¹⁰ We were looking at a student's general-education history paper, and I asked the faculty to say what the student needed to be doing well. After I pressed the group members, who wanted to focus on what the student seemed not to be doing well, one faculty member succinctly critiqued the paper's weak introduction by stating that the student needed "to speak from a position of authority."

Which department is responsible for teaching students how to speak from a position of authority? Where do we find evidence of someone learning to speak from a position of authority? Which assessment rubric do we use for that? Critical thinking? Oral and written communication? Integrative learning? Lifelong learning? Of course, when faculty speak of "authority," they mean not just volume, but the confidence that comes from critical thought and depth. Learning to "speak from a position of authority" is an idea rooted in expert practice. It is no more a "soft skill" than are the other dimensions of learning that we are coming to value explicitly and systematically as outcomes of higher education-dimensions such as making discerning judgments based on practical reasoning, acting reflectively, taking risks, engaging in civil if difficult discourse, and proceeding with confidence in the face of uncertainty.

Designing backward from those kinds of outcomes, we are compelled to imagine ways to ask students, early and often, to engage in the practice of thinking in a given domain, often in the context of messy problems. This is perhaps one way to rethink the role of technologies and social media tools-often the cause of that other type of teaching disruption-and reimagine the ways that discussion boards, wikis, blogs, Twitter, and collaborative writing tools and spaces might facilitate activities that help students learn to speak from a position of authority.

Derek Bruff, the Assistant Director at the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, writes a blog, Agile Learning, about educational technology, visual thinking, student motivation, faculty development, social pedagogies, and many other interesting pedagogical tactics. For one post, "Backchannel in Education: Nine Uses," he talked about Cliff Atkinson's book The Backchannel and adapted it to higher education. He listed nine ways that a faculty member could use Twitter in the classroom: notetaking, sharing resources, commenting, amplifying, asking questions, helping one another, offering suggestions, building community, and opening the classroom. ¹¹

These are simple activities, but what do they look like if they're part of the continuous flow of teaching someone how to move from novice to expert, tuned to disciplinary thinking or professional discourse? When we put Bruff's excellent list into the intermediate space, what can we discover about how these means of engaging are serving as a bridge from novice process to expert practice? What is the relationship between the intermediate activity and the stages of intellectual development or the constituent skills and dispositions of a discipline? What if the activities enabled by social media tools are key to helping students learn how to speak with authority?

Expanding Our Conception of Teaching

If our concept of learning has outstripped our notion of teaching, how can we expand our notion of teaching-particularly from the perspective of instructional support and innovation?

Team-Based Design

One approach to expanding our conception of teaching is through what we might call "team-based design." One version of this approach was successfully implemented by Patricia Iannuzzi, the dean of libraries at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (previously at the University of California, Berkeley). She had long observed that the traditional "hub and spoke" model of course innovation was fundamentally broken. In the traditional model of course design, a well-meaning instructor seeking to make a change in a course talks separately with the teaching center staff, with the technology staff, with the librarians, and with the writing center folks. Then, when the course is implemented, the instructor alone deals with the students in the course-except that the students are often going back for help with assignments to the technology staff, to the librarians, and to the writing center folks (although usually different people who know nothing of the instructor's original intent). So they are completing the cycle, but in a completely disconnected way. Iannuzzi's team‑based design thinks about all of these players from the beginning. One of the first changes in this model is that the instructor is no longer at the center. Instead, the course and student learning are at the center, surrounded by all of these other players at the table. ¹²

The team-based model asks not only how all of these instructional experts might collaborate with faculty on a new design but also how some of them (e.g., embedded librarians) might play a role in the delivery of the course so that not all of the burden of the expanded instructional model falls on the instructor.

In a related example, Dan Bernstein, the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas, adapted Iannuzzi's model for a funded project to test the efficacy of team‐designed courses, organized around a cognitive apprenticeship model, in improving undergraduate students' skills, with the larger goal of maximizing the effectiveness of each course for the wide range of students attending a state university. For example, library instruction and writing center colleagues worked with a psychology professor on designing staged research and writing assignments to scaffold a complex assignment involving intellectual synthesis and writing in a nonacademic genre. In this large-enrollment class, high achievement on the final product went from 1 percent to nearly 50 percent of the class through iterative team design over four offerings of the course. The study concluded: "Our assessments of student learning as well as participating faculty members' reflections suggest that the team-design approach can be an effective and efficient way of supporting the development of undergraduate students' critical thinking and writing skills, even in very large courses." ¹³

A key aspect of the team-based design is the move beyond individualistic approaches to course innovation. In higher education, we have long invested in the notion that the way to innovate is by converting faculty. This move represents a shift in strategy: instead of trying to change faculty so that they might change their courses, this model focuses on changing course structures so that faculty will be empowered and supported in an expanded approach to teaching as a result of teaching these courses.

E-Portfolios and Systems Thinking

This holistic approach to rethinking strategic courses has a more macro counterpart in

e-portfolios. As described above, e-portfolios can be powerful environments that facilitate or intensify the effect of high-impact practices. As tools of integration, they also help students make connections and think about how to present themselves, their work, and their learning to an audience.

The Connect to Learning (C2L) project ( http://connections-community.org/c2l), a network of twenty-three colleges and universities for which I serve as a senior researcher, is studying e‑portfolios and trying to formulate a research-based "national developmental model" for e‑portfolios. One of our hypotheses is that for an e-portfolio initiative to thrive on a campus, it needs to address four levels: institutional needs and support (at the base level); programmatic connections (departmental and cross-campus, such as the first-year experience); faculty and staff; and, of course, student learning and student success. In addition, e-portfolios on these four levels should be examined from four angles or sides: as a technology; as a means for outcome assessment; as an integrative social pedagogy; and through evaluation and strategic planning.

All four vectors are operative at all four levels, resulting in myriad combinations of what is required to run a successful e-portfolio project. E-portfolios, or Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), or whatever they are named-as something that enables students to weave these connections back and forth across the formal and experiential curricula-will be an essential element of our response to this disruptive moment. For any large-scale version of e-portfolios to be successful, they will require at the program and institutional level what Iannuzzi's model requires at the course level: a goals-driven, systems-thinking approach that requires multiple players to execute successfully. All levels speak to the need to think beyond individual faculty and beyond individual courses and thus can succeed only through cooperation across boundaries.

Connecting Ourselves

As we move forward on our campuses, several strategies can help our notion of teaching keep pace with our expanding understanding of learning.

First, we need to acknowledge that the center of significant learning has shifted to a new, recentered core and that, from the perspective of deep learning and impact, most of the formal curriculum now must move from margin to center.

Second, we need to move beyond our old assumptions that it is primarily the students' responsibility to integrate all the disparate parts of an undergraduate education. We must fully grasp that students will learn to integrate deeply and meaningfully only insofar as we design a curriculum that cultivates that; and designing such a curriculum requires that we similarly plan, strategize and execute integratively across the boundaries within our institutions.

Third, we need to think more about how to move beyond the individualistic faculty change model. We need to get involved in team-design and implementation models on our campuses, and we need to consider that doing so could fundamentally change the ways that the burdens of innovation are often placed solely on the shoulders of faculty (whose lives are largely already overdetermined) as well as how certain academic support staff (e.g., IT organizations, student affairs, librarians) think of their professional identities and their engagement with the "curriculum."

Finally, we need to take the problem of learning in the post-course era very seriously. The learning we are coming to value most is not always where we are putting our greatest interest and effort in assessment, including the emerging discussions about "learning analytics." To be sure, we should work very hard and carefully to align, document, and capture our current assessments of student learning; at the same time, we should be attentive and ambitious in figuring out how we want to cultivate and evaluate learning in this expansive environment.

The New Nexus

Steven Johnson, the author of the book Where Good Ideas Come From, closes his TED Talk of the same title with the tagline: "Chance favors the connected mind." ¹⁴ By "connected," Johnson means two things, both of which bear on the problem of learning in higher education today. First, he means connected in the sense of being integrative, of making connections between things that seem dissimilar. And second, he means connected in the sense of being socially networked.

If we are beginning to see that the greatest impact on learning is in these boundary-crossing, integrative, and socially networked experiences, then we need to re-create dimensions of these experiences in the learning designs that bridge the classroom with life outside of it. The connection between integrative thinking, or experiential learning, and the social network, or participatory culture, is no longer peripheral to our enterprise but is the nexus that should guide and reshape our curricula in the current disruptive moment in higher education learning.

I want to thank the following colleagues for valuable feedback on drafts of this article: Heidi Elmendorf, Daniel Bernstein, Bret Eynon, and my colleagues in the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, especially Matthias Oppermann and Janet Russell.

1. See "Key Concepts: Disruptive Innovation," on Clayton Christensen's website: < http://www.claytonchristensen.com/disruptive_innovation.html>.

2. Robert B. Barr and John Tagg, "From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," Change, November/December 1995.

3. Association of American Colleges and Universities, National Panel Report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 2002), p. 16, < http://greaterexpectations.org/>.

4. George D. Kuh, High Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 2008).

5. George Kuh, "High-Impact Practices: Retrospective and Prospective," foreword to Jayne E. Brownell and Lynn E. Swaner, Five High Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality (Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 2010). The list also closely parallels that of Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson: "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," AAHE Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 7 (March 1987), pp. 3-7.

6. Bret Eynon, "'It Helped Me See a New Me': ePortfolio, Learning, and Change at La Guardia Community College," Academic Commons, January 7, 2009, < http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/eportfolio-learning-and-change>.

7. Henry Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," occasional paper, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006, < http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf>.

8. John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, "Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0," EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008), pp. 16-32, < http://www.educause.edu/library/ERM0811>.

9. Michael Prince and Richard Felder, "The Many Faces of Inductive Teaching and Learning," Journal of College Science Teaching, vol. 36, no. 5 (March/April 2007), < http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=53403>.

10. This initiative ( http://cndls.georgetown.edu/bottlenecks-and-thresholds/) builds on the work of David Pace and others on "instructional bottlenecks" and on Jan Meyer and Ray Land's work on threshold concepts.

11. Derek Bruff, "Backchannel in Education: Nine Uses," Agile Learning, January 21, 2010, < http://derekbruff.org/?p=472>.

12. See "UNLV Faculty Institute on Research-Based Learning for High Impact Classes," < http://www.library.unlv.edu/faculty/institute/>.

13. Dan Bernstein and Andrea Greenhoot, "Final Narrative Report on Spencer/Teagle Foundations Project," < http://assessment.aas.duke.edu/documents/KansasFinalNarrativeReportonSpencerTeaglefnl.pdf>. See also Andrea Greenhoot and Dan Bernstein, "Using VALUE Rubrics to Evaluate Collaborative Course Design," Peer Review, Fall 2011/Winter 2012, < http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-fa11wi12/UsingVALUE.cfm>.

14. Steven Johnson, "Where Good Ideas Come From," TED Talk, July 2010, < http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html>.

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 47, no. 2 (March/April 2012)

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disrupting ourselves: the problem of learning in higher education

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Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education

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Randy Bass (bassr@georgetown.edu) is Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown

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2018 Key Issues in Teaching and Learning

Each year, ELI surveys the higher education community to determine key issues and opportunities in post-secondary teaching and learning. These key issues serve as the framework, or focal points, for our discussions and programming throughout the coming year. More than 900 community members voted on the following key issues for 2018.

Download the infographic below and share with colleagues, or explore each of the issues more deeply with the resources below the infographic.

1. Academic Transformation

2. Accessibility and UDL

3. Faculty Development

4. Privacy and Security

5. Digital and Information Literacies

6. Integrated Planning and Advising Systems for Student Success (iPASS)

7. Instructional Design

8. Online and Blended Learning

9. Evaluating Technology-based Instructional Innovations

10. Open Education

11. Learning Analytics

12. Adaptive Teaching and Learning

13. Working with Emerging Technology

14. Learning Space Designs

15. NGDLE and LMS Services

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Each year, ELI surveys the higher education community to determine key issues and opportunities in post-secondary teaching and learning. These key issues serve as the framework, or focal points, for our discussions and programming throughout the coming year. More than 900 community members voted on the following key issues for 2018.

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Rubrics are marking tools which are developed hand-in-hand with assessment tasks; they reflect the intention and purpose of the assessment, and, through the assessment, the learning outcomes of the course. They aim to separate out the standards of student work, and communicate those standards to students and other staff - that is, they bring clarity and transparency to the assessment.

In teaching and learning, rubrics are far more important and powerful tools than generally assumed.

It could be argued that the development of the rubric is more important than the development of the detailed assessment task, because the rubric is critical in ascertaining whether or not the students have achieved the learning outcomes of the course. At its worst, a poor rubric can result in students passing the assessment, and even the course, even though they haven't achieved the outcome that you are looking for.

Rubrics communicate to students (and to other markers) your expectations in the assessment, and what you consider important. The rubric tells students much about the assessment, so you need to make sure that it is telling them what you want them to hear. You should be able to give a well-written rubric to students INSTEAD of the assessment, and they should be able to identify what the assessment is and what is important - in fact, in some cases, it may be possible for the students to negotiate the assessment task with you based on the rubric.

You can also use good rubrics as teaching resources, to give students a clear indication of any critical gaps or weaknesses in their performance, what they need to do to improve, and where to focus their efforts (feed-forward rather than feedback). Good rubrics can also go a long way in eliminating awkward conversations on questions such as, 'Why did I get this mark', 'This mark is not fair', etc.

In order to create a really powerful rubric, there are some important steps to consider, which we have outlined below.

However, one other point before you start - try not to start out by using a template. There are literally hundreds of them out there - some good, some terrible - but it is important that your rubric is absolutely aligned to your course outcomes and your assessment outcomes, and using a provided template can skew the process. You need to consider the unique aspects of your assessment and outcomes independently of pre-formatted templates. If you definitely want to use a template, first work through the rubric development process, and then find a template which fits your requirements.

1. Stand back. The first step must ALWAYS be to take a good, hard, holistic look at the very foundation of your assessment task - what is the purpose of this assessment?

Always, always, always start by considering the Big Idea of the assessment. What is the one main essential purpose of this assessment - what it is that students MUST do to pass? What learning objectives do you intend the assessment to further or to demonstrate?

Ideally, there should only be one Big Idea for every assessment (which might focus on more than one course objective). Take all the time that you need to think about this, because if it is not reflected as the basis of your rubric, the rubric is not only not effective as a marking tool, but could actually be causing harm.

2. Next ... where does your assessment fit with the program and with the course?

Your assessment must fit with the program objectives and with the course objectives. If it doesn't, you may need to change the assessment, or even consider changing the course objectives. It may be that the Big Idea for your assessment is actually a re-statement of one of the course objectives ... nothing wrong with that. You need to consider the program dimension to make sure that the assessment and rubric reflect the appropriate stage in the student's progress.

As the assessment aligns to the program and course, so too should the rubric. If the assessment is aimed at demonstrating achievement of higher order, more complex learning outcomes such as critical thinking and analysis, the rubric must be able to quantify that.

3. The big question ... holistic or analytical?

A holistic rubric judges an assessment product as a whole, without judging the various component of the assessment separately. An analytic rubric judges separate elements, components or aspects of the assessment product..

There are strengths and weaknesses with both types of rubric, depending on your situation. For example, a holistic rubric is more valuable in judging whether or not students have achieved the Big Idea - but requires extensive discussion to ensure that multiple markers are all on the same page.

Holistic rubrics are often useful at the more complex levels of learning, especially in creative or hard-to-quantify disciplines. They are also useful for judging achievement in the affective domain - for example, valuing, responding, or being receptive to ideas or material.

Our advice is that if the assessment 'whole' is bigger than the parts, then use a holistic rubric (an essay is a good example of this). If each of the components or aspects are all important, then use an analytical rubric.

However, in developing an analytical rubric, be careful not to over-simplify or over-segregate the assessment elements or components, because this can lead to trivialising and loss of the Big Idea. A fine example of this is dividing up an essay or report task based on the various sections of the document - introduction, body, conclusion, language use, referencing, etc. You may end up with a rubric which comfortably passes students who have no real idea of the Big Idea, and have not actually solved the problem posed in the assessment.

4. The line in the sand ... what is a pass?

The most critical element of the rubric, and the one on which you should spend the most thought, is what we call the Minimum Acceptable Level of Performance. The whole purpose of this is to accurately separate out competent students from incompetent students - the passes from the fails. The rubric MUST be set up so that no student can pass without achieving this minimum level in the critical assessment outcomes, especially higher order and hidden outcomes.

To find this, think about what is the minimum point at which you would be happy with a student's performance in the Big Idea, taking into considering the complexity of the task, the student level and experience, and the outcomes which you are assessing.

Have a very clear picture in your head of what the Minimum Acceptable Level of Performance looks like, for students at this level, in this type of activity, according to these course objectives. This minimum level of performance will become your 'P1 pass point': the defining point for the student to pass the assessment. Receiving a P1 for an assessment should indicate to both student and teaching staff that the student has achieved an acceptable professional level of performance in these assessment outcomes relative to their time in the program. Higher levels of performance will be encouraged and rewarded, but are not essential for professional effectiveness.

You can see an animation of different Minimum Acceptable Levels of Performance ( MALOPs) below - just move the arrow on the slider backwards and forwards.

5. Good, better, best ... bad. How do you establish other levels of performance?

Using the minimum level of performance as a pivot, decide on the other levels of performance, especially the levels of pass. You can do this by establishing in your mind what you think would classify as an outstanding student response to the task, completely fulfilling all of the assessment outcomes - this becomes your HD. You can then work up from a pass to a HD, deciding on your levels of performance.

Forming a picture of a failure is much harder, because it's virtually impossible to anticipate all the possible ways in which students might not achieve the assessment outcome. You may need to keep this section of the rubric quite general, but make up for this by providing very specific, detailed feedback to the failing students. Some teachers populate the fail sections of the rubric by outlining the 'typical critical errors' which commonly prevent students from achieving the Big Idea.

If you have chosen to develop an analytical rubric, you can now draw out performance criteria which encompass the various assessed aspects of the task. Only create as many as you need to accurately assess the student. You should give each performance criteria a weighting which will the assessment outcomes - again, adjust the weightings to make sure that a student can't pass without having achieved the critical outcome (even if they did brilliantly in all the other outcomes!).

Finally, before you present the rubric to your students and staff, give it the acid test ... go back and test it to see whether it is possible for a student to pass without achieving the Big Idea.

6. Getting everyone on board. Discuss the rubric with students and staff.

We can't emphasise enough how important it is to discuss the rubric in detail with students and with other marking staff, to the point that everyone is absolutely on the same page in their understanding of the language it uses, the Big Ideas it is judging, and the guidance it gives. Remember that different words and terms can mean totally different things to different people. You might understand exactly what the rubric means to you, but others may have a quite different picture in their heads.

Take the time to compare and contrast the various levels of achievement and create a shared understanding. This may take quite a lot of time in discussion and negotiation, but if everybody is crystal clear on what the various levels of performance are, it will pay off in the long run.

Rubric scales

The scale will define the various levels of achievement above and below the minimum acceptable level. The most common scale for tertiary assessments is based on grades (distinction through to F2). However, other scales might be useful if you are setting a formative activity, or if your assessment is not suited to the full range of grades. Some options are:

qualitative descriptions (Excellent, Very good, Good, Satisfactory, Poor, Very poor)

marks (either discrete or accumulative)

percentages

Getting students to participate in writing rubrics and marking using rubrics

At the very least, your assessment rubric should be handed out to students prior to the assessment task, to make them aware of all your expectations related to the assessment task, and to help them to evaluate their own progression and readiness.

However, you can take your use of rubrics to another level by involving the students in their creation. This is a very powerful way to help them to build their understanding of what what different levels of understanding actually look like, and what differences there are between powerful and weak work.

Discussions of which performance criteria they think are important, and what the different performance levels actually mean increases the students' engagement in the assessment process.

Another effective strategy is to get the students to use your assessment rubric prior to the formal assessment, as a self-assessment exercise, or to get students to mark each other using the rubric. In this way, they become more cognisant of assessment processes and procedures, and improve their capacity to assess their own work.

Interesting links and resources

Biggs, J & Tang, C 2007, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd edn, McGraw Hill, Maidenhead.

Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation

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Rubrics are marking tools which are developed hand-in-hand with assessment tasks; they reflect the intention and purpose of the assessment, and, through the assessment, the learning outcomes of the course. They aim to separate out the standards of student work, and communicate those standards to students and other staff - that is, they bring clarity and transparency to the assessment.

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The concept of an internationalised or global curriculum is not new. While study tours and exchange programs will continue to remain the peak global experience for a limited number of students, The Belonging Project seeks to scaffold an inclusive, universal 'globalised' experience 'at home' to benefit all students.

In this phase, The Belonging Project seeks to design interventions to help students develop their intercultural skills, knowledge and awareness through a series of phased experiences situated in local contexts.

The project team aims to develop an integrated model for targeted interventions in curriculum design and pedagogy that can:

recognise and celebrate our 'already global' student and staff cohorts

scaffold the further development of global literacies throughout the experience of an RMIT program

provide peak 'global' experiences based from the student's home campus as an alternative or adjunct to overseas exchange and study tours options.

In this phase, The Belonging Project team's focus shifted from key first-year transition experiences to the interdisciplinary student experience, while building on research findings from Phases 1 and 2 (2011-2012). Specifically, the project investigated in greater depth preliminary student focus groups findings that provided valuable insights into the perceived value of and need for interdisciplinary student experiences within an undergraduate context, and where these are best timed.

In 2013, a typology of interdisciplinary student experiences was developed in collaboration with the School's staff and students, as well as colleagues from the RMIT Study and Learning Centre and RMIT Libraries. The project team aim to mobilise this typology into action through the School's undergraduate program renewal project, the MC2015 Review.

The project team aimed to test and refine The Belonging Project Narrative Model of Student Engagement(The Belonging Model) by rolling out a number of pilot initiatives, both formal and informal, across all three years of each undergraduate program in the School of Media and Communication.

The Belonging Model is intended to be flexible and agile, thus a further aim of piloting these activities and interventions was to prove the model's efficacy as having measurable benefit across the School, beyond the School, across the University and across the tertiary sector more generally.

For more information, download the 2012 Report, Phase 2: Focus on the First Year Experience (PDF 1.7 MB).

During this initial six month phase, The Belonging Project team worked to develop The Belonging Project Narrative Model of Student Engagement (The Belonging Model), which proposed a three-tier student experience.

The Belonging Model was progressed from theory to concrete plans for its implementation in the School of Media and Communication by conducting focus groups with students and iterative workshops with staff. This work culminated in a number of recommended pilot activities for an improved first-year experience, which were trialled within the School in 2012.

For more information, download the 2011 Report: Phase 1: Planting the Seeds (PDF 2.8 MB).

Successful grants relating to The Belonging Project

Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Lukas, K. & Araújo, N. (2014). Global at Home: At Home in the Global. A framework for embedding global competencies across the curriculum 'at home'. Learning and Teaching Investment Fund, RMIT University ($100,000).

Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Carlin, D., Lukas, K., & Araújo, N. (2014). The Belonging Project. Phase 4: Focus on the Global Experience. Supported by the Academic Portfolio through the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program, RMIT University ($50,000).

Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Carlin, D., Lukas, K., & Morieson L. (2013). The Belonging Project. Phase 3: Focus on the Interdisciplinary Experience. Supported by the Academic Portfolio through the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program, RMIT University ($160,000).

Clarke B., Wilson R., Carlin D., Lukas K. & Morieson L. (2012). The Belonging Project. Phase 2: Focus on the First Year Experience. Supported by the Academic Portfolio through the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program, RMIT University ($166,000).

Carlin D., Clarke B. & Wilson R. (2011). The Belonging Project. Phase 1: Planting the Seeds. Supported by the Academic Portfolio through the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program, RMIT University ($104,236).

Peer reviewed journal articles about The Belonging project

Morieson, L., Araújo, N., Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Carlin, D., & Lukas, K. (N.D.) 'Belonging in Space: Informal Spaces and the Student Experience'. HERDSA. (Under review).

Araújo, N., Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Morieson, L., Lukas, K., & Wilson, R. (2014). 'Belonging in the first year: a creative discipline cohort case study'. International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 5(3). Retrieved from https://fyhejournal.com/article/view/240.

Morieson, L., Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Lukas, K., & Wilson, R. (2013). 'Belonging in Education: Lessons from the Belonging Project'. International Journal of First Year in Higher Education, 4(2). Retrieved from https://fyhejournal.com/article/view/173.

Conference papers presented as part of The Belonging Project

Araújo, N., Wilson, R., Clarke, B. & Carney, L. (2014, November 22-25). The Global at Home, At Home in the Global. Paper presented at Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Conference, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Araújo, N., Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Lukas, K., Morieson, L. & Wilson R. (2014, July 8-10). Belonging in First Year. Proceedings of the 17th International First Year in Higher Education Conference, Darwin. Retrieved from http://fyhe.com.au/past_papers/papers14/fyhe14_proceedings.pdf

Morieson, L., Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Lukas, K. & Wilson, R. (2013, July 7-10). Belonging in Education: Lessons from the Belonging Project. Proceedings of the 16th International First Year in Higher Education Conference, Wellington, New Zealand. Retrieved from http://fyhe.com.au/past_papers/papers13/fyhe13_proceedings.pdf

Unrefereed conference, symposium and workshop papers produced as part of The Belonging Project

Carlin, D., Clarke, B., & Wilson, R. (2012, May 7-9). Case Study: The Belonging Project. Invited paper presented at 2nd Annual Satisfaction in Higher Education Conference, Sydney.

Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Araújo, N. & Lukas, K. (2013, December 4). The Belonging Project (PDF 3.2 MB). Poster presented at OLT National Senior Teaching Fellowship Symposium, Monash University, Melbourne.

Araújo, N., Clarke, B., Lukas, K. & Wilson, R. (2013, November 21). Approaches to Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching. Presentation at The Interdisciplinary Student Experience Workshop, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Morieson, L., Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Lukas, K. & Wilson, R. (2012, November 20). Thinking About Interdisciplinarity (PDF 237 KB). Presentation of position paper and workshop to School of Media and Communication staff, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Morieson, L., Lukas, K., Carlin, D., Clarke, B. & Wilson R. (2011, November). But what do our students (really) want? (PDF 2.4 MB) Presentation of paper to all staff about student focus group findings and project update, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Conferences and workshops convened by members of The Belonging Project

The Belonging Project. (2015, forthcoming). Focus on the Global Student Experience. Workshop with School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2013, February 5). Inaugural School of Media and Communication Learning and Teaching Forum. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2013, November 21). The Interdisciplinary Student Experience. Workshop with School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project team co-organised and sponsored a staff development opportunity: Ben McCann presented his OLT project findings to staff in the Schools of Architecture and Design as well as Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne (June, 2013). A Collaborative Multi-faceted Approach to Address the Gaps Between Student Expectation and Experience at University. www.olt.gov.au/project-gaps-between-student-expectation-and-experience-adelaide-2009.

Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Moeller, R. & Lukas, K. (2012, Feb). Ice Breakers and Transition Teasers for the First Year Experience. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2012, November 20). Thinking About Interdisciplinarity. Workshop with School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Lukas, K., & Morieson, L. (2011, August). Project Launch and Staff Workshop. Program Directors' Retreat, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Kalorama.

Panels, workshops and presentations by members of The Belonging Project

The Belonging Project. (2014, October 29). Invited co-presented panel discussion at RMIT University DSC L&T Innovators in Conversation 2014, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2014, July). First Things First. Invited co-presented panel discussion at RMIT Learning and Teaching Expo, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2013, March). Interdisciplinary Speed Dating. Presentation at Inaugural School of Media and Communication Learning and Teaching Forum, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2012, December). The Belonging Project: 2012 Update. Presentation on key first year initiatives and findings at RMIT School of Media and Communication All School Meeting, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2012, October). Let's Talk About First Year: Lessons from The Belonging Project. Presentation at Teachers @ Work Staff Development Seminar Series, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2012, August). The Student Cohort Experience Project. Invited co-presented panel discussion at RMIT Learning and Teaching Expo, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2012, August). The Belonging Project: An Overview. Presentation to staff in the College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2011). The Belonging Project. Presentation at RMIT University Business Plan Student Cohort Experience Forum, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project. (2011, November). But what do our students (really) want? Presentation at whole-of-School meeting, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The Belonging Project Citations

National significance

Internal significance

Nomikoudis, M. & Bolt, S. (2012). Pilot Projects to Define the Student Cohort Experience: 2012 Final Report.

Peterson, F. & Hansen, S. (2012). Media and Communication 2015: Program Suite and Delivery for the future. Cited as influencing the School's vision for enhancing the student experience and program retention (p. 3). Consequently, the project team was invited to contribute to the M&C2015 Review project.

RMIT University School of Media and Communication. (2013, March). Learning and Teaching Strategy 2013-2015. Cited as both a key enabler of and reporting partner for the School, and formally acknowledged as a contributing member of the School Learning and Teaching Committee. (pp. 3, 4, 8, 9).

RMIT University College of Design and Social Context. (2012). Program Annual Review (PAR) Report. Indirect acknowledgement: under key activities to prioritise and support, the College highlights the School's plans to enhance the student experience and retention "through improved orientation and transition activities; acting on student feedback and strengthened student engagement".

RMIT University School of Media and Communication. (2013). Strategic Priorities and Profile 2013: Response to University Strategic Plan. Cited as informing the School's strategies for accessing and widening participation through its L&T strategic action plan (p.3).

The Belonging Project invited consultations and contributions to committees, working parties and external projects

National significance

Devlin, M., Kift, S., Nelson, K., Smith, L. & McKay, J. (2012). Effective Teaching and Support of Students from Low Socio Economic Status Backgrounds: Final Report, Office of Learning and Teaching. Acknowledged as contributors to the project's final report and staff resources in relation to design and content (Clarke, B. & Wilson, R.).

Internal significance - University level

Student Services, I Belong Project. (2012-ongoing). Project advisors and key School liaisons. Responsible for recruitment, design and implementation of discipline-specific workshops for visiting disadvantaged secondary school students.

First Year Experience and Transition Project. (2013-ongoing). Invited to participate in the project's Reference Group, Systems Working Group and Transition Principles Working Group.

Inclusive Teaching Practices Project. (2012--ongoing). Advisors to project team and key School liaisons.

Equity and Diversity Committee. (2011-ongoing). Invited participatory membership (Clarke)

Education Abroad Student Mobility Photographic Competition. (2012-ongoing). Advisors to event organisers and key School liaisons.

Property Services, Informal Student Spaces Redevelopment Project. (2012-ongoing). Advisors to project team and key School liaisons.

Office of the DVC (Academic), Student Cohort Experience Project Reference Group. (2011-2012). Invited participatory members.

Student Services, Student to Student Video Competition. (2013). Advisors to competition organisers and key School liaisons.

Internal significance - College level

College of Design and Social Context, Retention and Attrition Project. (2012-onging). Invited contributors (Clarke and Lukas).

College of Design and Social Context, Selection Review Project. (2012-ongoing). Invited contributors (Clarke, Wilson and Lukas).

College of Science, Engineering and Health, First Year Experience Community of Practice Group. (2012-ongoing). Invited participants.

Internal significance - School level

School of Media and Communication, Learning and Teaching Committee. (2011-ongoing). Invited participatory membership.

School of Media and Communication, MC2015 Review Project. (2011-ongoing). Advisors as participatory members of the steering committee and key School liaisons to program teams.

School of Media and Communication, Learning and Teaching Investment Fund Round. (2014). Advise School staff as participatory members of the School's LTIF Community of Practice Group and advise staff in other schools on request.

School of Media and Communication, Transition and Orientation Coordination Team Proposal (DOC 75 KB) (2012 Oct) (staff login needed). Submitted and endorsed by the School Executive and Learning and Teaching Committees. (Lukas, K., Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Carlin, D., & Morieson L.)

The Belonging Project presentations

(2014 Oct). Business Case for Student Atelier Refurbishment. Presentation to Property Services Group, RMIT University, Melbourne.

(2014 Jun). The Belonging Project: Project Update. Presentation at RMIT School of Media and Communication Program Directors Retreat, Kalorama.

(2013 Nov). The Belonging Project: Overview of FYE Initiatives & Findings. Invited presentation to First Year Experience and Transition Project Reference Group, RMIT University, Melbourne.

(2013 Jun). The Belonging Project: Overview of FYE Initiatives & Findings. First Year Experience and Transition Project Reference Group, RMIT University, Melbourne.

(2013, Feb). Creating Lively Informal Student Spaces: Lessons from The Belonging Project. Invited presentation to Property Services Group staff, RMIT University, Melbourne.

(2012, Aug). The Belonging Project: An Overview. Presentation to the College of Science, Engineering and Health, First Year Experience Community of Practice Group, RMIT University, Melbourne.

(2012, Jul). The Belonging Project: Project Overview and Key Student Focus Group Findings. Invited presentation at the RMIT University Communications and Marketing Forum, RMIT University, Melbourne.

(2012, May). Project Update. Presentation at the RMIT School of Media and Communication Program Directors' Retreat, Kalorama.

The Belonging Project committee, working party and external project contributions

National significance

Devlin M., Kift S., Nelson K., Smith L., McKay J. (2012). Effective Teaching and Support of Students from Low Socio Economic Status Backgrounds: Final Report, Office of Learning and Teaching. Acknowledged as contributors to the project's final report and staff resources in relation to design and content (Clarke B. & Wilson R.).

Internal significance - University level

Equity and Diversity Committee (2011-ongoing). Invited participatory membership (Clarke).

Education Abroad Student Mobility Photographic Competition (2012-ongoing). Advisors to event organisers; key School liaisons.

First Year Experience and Transition Project Reference Group (2013-ongoing). Invited participatory members.

Informal Student Spaces Redevelopment Project (2012-ongoing), Property Services. Advisors to project team; key School liaisons.

Student Cohort Experience Project Reference Group (2011-2012), Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic). Invited participatory members.

Student to Student Video Competition (2013), RMIT Student Services. Advisors to competition organisers; key School liaisons.

Internal significance - College level

College of Design and Social Context's Retention and Attrition Project (2012-onging). Invited contributors (Clarke and Lukas).

College of Design and Social Context's Selection Review Project (2012-ongoing). Invited contributors (Clarke, Wilson and Lukas).

College of Science, Engineering and Health's First Year Experience Community of Practice Group (2012-ongoing). Invited participants.

Internal significance - School level

School of Media and Communication's Learning and Teaching Committee (2011-ongoing). Invited participatory membership.

School of Media and Communication's MC2015 Review Project (2012-ongoing). Invited participatory members.

The Belonging Project conference, lecture, round-table and workshop attendances

2013 RMIT University Learning and Teaching Expo. RMIT University, Melbourne, July 2013. Attended university event as delegates.

2013 Inaugural School of Media and Communication Learning and Teaching Forum. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, March 2013. Proposed, organised, managed this event and attended as delegates.

2012 OLT Report Launch for Devlin M., Kift S., Nelson K., Smith L., McKay J. (2012). Effective Teaching and Support of Students from Low Socio Economic Status Backgrounds project, funded by the Office of Learning and Teaching., Melbourne, September 2012. Invited attendance as acknowledged contributors/advisors.

2012 RMIT University Learning and Teaching Expo. RMIT University, Melbourne, August 2012. Invited to co-present a panel discussion on the Student Cohort Experience Project; attended other sessions as delegates.

Public lecture by Karen Nelson on the QUT student Experience Model, RMIT University, June 2012. Invited guests.

2011 RMIT University Learning and Teaching Expo. RMIT University, Melbourne, August 2011. Attended university event as delegates.

The Belonging Project workshops and seminars

Morieson L., Clarke B., Wilson R., Carlin D., (2012), 'Thinking About Interdisciplinarity'. Presentation of position paper and workshop to School of Media and Communication staff, RMIT University, Melbourne, TBC 2012.

Clarke B., Wilson R., Moeller R., Lukas K., (2012), 'Ice Breakers and Transition Teasers'. Developed and implemented workshop for staff involved in the undergraduate First Year Experience in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, February 2012.

Morieson L., Lukas K., Carlin D., Clarke B., Wilson R., (2011), 'But what do our students (really) want?' Presentation to all staff about student focus group findings and project update, School of Media and Communication, November 2011.

Carlin D., Clarke B., Wilson R., Lukas K., Morieson L., (2011). Project launch and staff workshop, Program Directors Retreat, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Kalorama, August 2011.

The Belonging Project Reports

Clarke, B. & Wilson, R. The Ethos of Belonging: A Narrative Model Approach to Student Engagement 2011-2015 (PDF 2.1 MB)

Clarke, B., Wilson, R. & Araújo, N., 2014 Report: The Global At Home: At Home in the Global (PDF 3.2 MB)

Wilson, R., Clarke, B., Carlin, D., Araújo, N., Lukas, K. & Shand, L. 2013 Report: Focus on the Interdisciplinary Experience (PDF 2.3 MB).

Wilson, R., Clarke, B., Carlin, D., Morieson, L. & Lukas, K. 2012 Report: Focus on the First Year Experience (PDF 1.7 MB).

Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Wilson, R., Lukas, K. & Morieson, L. 2011 Report: Planting the Seeds.

The Belonging Project position papers

Araújo, N., Clarke, B., Lukas, K. & Wilson, R. (2013, Nov 21). Approaches to Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching. Presentation at The Interdisciplinary Student Experience Workshop, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Lukas, K., Clarke, B., Wilson, R., & Araújo N. (2013, Sep). Know Your Students First: Unlocking the Potential of Diverse Commencing Student Cohorts Using Existing Systems and Data. Position paper submitted and endorsed by the First Year Experience and Transition Reference Group, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Morieson, L., Carlin, D., Clarke, B., Wilson R., & Lukas K., (2012), Thinking About Interdisciplinarity. Position paper circulated to academic staff within the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Watch on YouTube
After conducting focus group research with staff and students in the School of Media and Communication in 2011, The Belonging Project worked with staff and students in the School to reframe orientation from a one-off event to a series of coordinated, purposeful transition activities supporting students through each program intake over the 2012 academic year.

Specifically, this initiative strove to respond to students who said that during transition to RMIT they needed:

further assistance to make early social connections with their peers

early information, feedback and advice from program peers in second and third years of their home program

orientation sessions that mixed social activities with workshop-style collaborative academic tasks.

This video evaluates the success of this initiative via a series of short interviews with students in the School immediately after the School Welcome Session in February 2012.

Watch on Vimeo
This video was produced by The Belonging Project team to open the School Welcome Session for commencing students in February 2012. The video was designed to:

showcase student work across a variety of professional disciplines

increase student awareness of the range of programs offered by the School

increase student awareness of interdisciplinary connections and opportunities through curricular and extra-curricular projects.

Watch on YouTube
Discussions with students in the School of Media and Communication identified that they required more support to transition both socially and academically. Students suggested that access to more informal spaces, particularly for group work, would help them to establish cross-discipline connections with their peers. On the basis of this feedback, The Belonging Project decided to revamp the School's main student common room, the Student Atelier.

In 2012, an Interior Design graduate was commissioned to work with third-year Communication Design students to refurbish this space through a temporary spatial installation. The brief: turn an empty, white box that nobody visited into a visually dynamic, comforting and fun space that aesthetically reflected the diverse talents and personalities of the School's students. Equally important was ensuring the space catered for a variety of uses.

This video documents student responses to the refurbishment of the Student Atelier space throughout the 2012 academic year.

The Belonging Project team is guided by a group of selected senior executive, academic and professional staff.

The reference group provides support, ideas and critical feedback, as well as guidance on how to turn the project's findings and recommendations into core RMIT University business.

External projects

Devlin, M., Kift, S., Nelson, K., Nagy, J. & Smith, L. (2010-2012). Effective Teaching and Support of Students from Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds: Resources for Australian Higher Education.

Brinkworth, R., McCann, B. & McCann, J. (2009-ongoing). A Collaborative Multi-faceted Approach to Address the Gaps Between Student Expectation and Experience at University.

Internationalisation of the Curriculum in Action

Nelson, K. & Clarke, J. (2010-ongoing). Good Practice for Safeguarding Student Learning Engagement in Higher Education Institutions.

Nelson, K., Joughin, G., Thomas, G., Lodge, J., Clarke, J. & Stoodley, I. (2011-ongoing). Establishing a Framework for Transforming Student Engagement, Success and Retention in Higher Education Institutions.

RMIT projects

Bolt, S. & Nomikoudis, M. (2011-2012). Student Cohort Experience Project. Academic Portfolio.

Clarke, B., Johal, T. & Quinn, S. (2013-ongoing). First Things First: Transition and Transformation of the Student Cohort Experience in the Creative Disciplines. School of Media and Communication.

Crisp, G., Hughes, O. & Pierce, J. (2013-ongoing). First Year Experience Project. Academic Portfolio.

De la Harpe, B. & Terrill, S. (2012-ongoing). Closing the Loop: Strengthening and Supporting PAR action plans on the ground. College of Design and Social Context.

De la Harpe, B., Mayson, S., Mason, T., Blythe, R., Grierson, E. & McPherson, M. (2012-ongoing). Contribute: Peer learning for inclusive practice in Art and Design. College of Design and Social Context.

Fels, M. & Smith, V. (2011-ongoing). The I Belong Project. Equity and Diversity Group, Student Services.

Nomikoudis, M., Harley, J., Gopal, S., Wallace, A. & Porcaro, P. (2012-ongoing). Inclusive Teaching and Assessment Practices Project. Academic Portfolio.

Peterson, F. et al. (2011-ongoing). MC2015 Program Review Project. School of Media and Communication.

Sharp, K., Clarke, A. & Johal, T. (2011-2012). Equal Local: Future-proofing RMIT's global reach by promoting equivalence in onshore and offshore learning. Schools of Art and Media and Communication.

Vivekananda, K. & Brown, A. (2011-ongoing). Student Success Program. Student Wellbeing, Student Services.

Abma, T.A. (2000). Fostering learning-in-organizing through narration: Questioning myths and stimulating multiplicity in two performing art schools, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 9(2), 211-31.

ALTC. (2008). ALTC Dissemination Framework. Sydney: Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Aries, E. & Seider, M. (2005). The interactive relationship between class identity and the college experience: the case of lower income students. Qualitative Sociology, 24(4), 419-43.

Arkoudis, S. (2011). Teaching International Students: strategies to enhance learning. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education.

Aronson, E. (2004). Reducing hostility and building compassion: Lessons from the jigsaw classroom. In A. G. Miller (ed.), The Social psychology of good and evil, New York, NY: Guilford Press, 469-88.

Australian Associated Press Pty Ltd. (2009, Feb 18). Top Universities Slam Bradley Review. AAP General News Wire. Retrieved from search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/docview/448471682?accountid=13552.

Australian Government, Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. (2009). Powering Ideas: An Innovation Agenda for the 21st Century.

Australian Universities Quality Agency. (2008). Education of International Students in Australia Quality Framework of AUQA.

Baird, R. & Boin, K. (2008). Transition in the First Year Curriculum: Supporting transition to university life and study. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Academic Enrichment Services.

Bartunekl, J. M. (1993). Scholarly dialogues and participatory action research. Human Relations, 46(10), 1221-33.

Baumeister, R. F. & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.

Baumeister, R. F., Twenge, J. M. & Nuss, C. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: Anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 817-27.

Bradley, D., Noonan, P., Nugent, H. & Scales, B. (2008). Review of Australian Higher Education Final Report. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Brown, J. & Isaacs, D. (2005). The World Café: Shaping our Futures through Conversations that Matter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Brown, J. S. & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. Educause Review, January/February, 16-32.

Chesterton, P. & Cummings, R. (2007). ALTC Grants Scheme - Evaluating Projects. Developed under contract for Australian Learning and Teaching Council.

Chickering, A. W. & Gamson, Z. F. (1991). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. scholar.vt.edu/access/content/user/adevans/Public/DVDPortfolio/Samples/samples/training/track_d/Introduction/Best%20Practices/Article%20-%207%20Principles%20of%20Good%20Practice%20in%20Undergrad%20Ed.pdf

Coates, H. et al. (2008). Attracting, engaging and retaining: new conversations about learning. Australasian Student Engagement Report: Australasian Survey of Student Engagement. Camberwell, Vic.: Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd.

Colvin, C. & Jaffar, F. (2007). Enhancing the International Student experience: the importance of International Student groups and peer support at Edith Cowan University. Paper presented at the 10th Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference 2007, Brisbane, Australia.

Council of Australian Governments. (2010). International Students Strategy for Australia 2010-2014.

Creagh, T. A., Nelson, K. J., & Clarke, J. A. (2010). The development of a 'Good Practice Guide' for first year curriculum development, revision and evaluation - a moving feast. Paper presented at the 13th Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference: Aspiration, Access, Achievement, Brisbane, Australia.

Devlin, M., Kift, S., Nelson, K., Smith, L. & McKay, J. (2012). Effective Teaching and Support of Students from Low Socioeconomic Status Backgrounds: Resources for Higher Education. Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching.

Eade, D. (1997). Capacity-building: an approach to people-centred development. Oxford: Oxfam UK & Ireland.

Elden, M., & Chisholm, R. F. (1993). Emerging varieties of action research: introduction to the special issue. Human Relations, 46(2), 121-42.

Examples of good practice in assisting international students to integrate with Australian students and the wider community (2009). Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Gleeson, D. (no date). Transition Checklist for Lecturers of First Year Subjects. University of Melbourne Transition Resources.

Gola, G. (2009). Informal learning of social workers: a method of narrative inquiry. Journal of Workplace Learning, 21(4), 334-46.

Greenwood, D. J., Whyte, W. F. & Harkavy, I. (1993). Participatory action research as a process and as a goal. Human Relations, 46(2), 175-92.

Hellsten, M. & Prescott, A. (2004). Learning at university: the international student experience. International Education Journal, 5(3), 344-51.

James, R., Anderson, M., Bexley, E., Devlin, M., Garnett, R., Marginson, S. & Maxwell, L. (2008, March). Participation and equity: A review of the participation in higher education of people from low socioeconomic backgrounds and Indigenous people, Universities Australia, Canberra.

James, R. (2002). Students' changing expectations of higher education and the consequences of mismatches with the reality. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Responding to student expectations, pp. 71-84. Paris:OECD.

Jurasaite-Harbison, E. (2009). Teachers' workplace learning within informal contexts of school cultures in the United States and Lithuania. Journal of Workplace Learning, 21(4), 299-321.

Karpen, I., Hall, C., Katsoulidis, T. and Cam, M. (2011). Co-Creating the Student Experience: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Exploration from an S-D logic perspective. Learning and Teaching Investment Fund (LTIF), RMIT University. Retrieved from www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=xsqunbee4nr6.

Kemmis, S. (2007). Action Research. In M. Hammersley (ed.), Educational Research and Evidence-based Practice, pp. 167-80). Milton Keynes and London: The Open Univeristy and SAGE Publications.

Keppell, M., Souter, K. & Riddle, M. (2011). Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: concepts for the modern learning environment. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Kift, S. (2004). Organising first year engagement around learning: formal and informal curriculum intervention. Paper presented at The 8th Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference: Dealing with Diversity, Melbourne, Australia.

Kift, S. (2008). The next, great first year challenge: sustaining, coordinating and embedding coherent institution-wide approaches to enact the FYE is 'everybody's business'. Paper presented at the 11th International Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference, An Apple for the Learner: Celebrating the First Year Experience, Hobart, Australia. eprints.qut.edu.au/14401/1/14401.pdf

Kift, S. & Nelson, K. (2005). Beyond Curriculum Reform: embedding the transition experience. Paper presented at the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australia Conference 2005: Higher Education in a Changing World, Sydney, Australia.

Kift, S., Nelson, K. & Clarke, J. (2010) 'Transition pedagogy : a third generation approach to FYE : a case study of policy and practice for the higher education sector.' The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 1(1), 1-20.

Kirk, J. (2011). What a School Should Look Like Project: Review of School Governance and Management. Final Report. Melbourne: RMIT University.

Krause, K.-L., Hartley, R., James, R. & McInnis, C. (2005). 'The first year experience in Australian Universities: findings from a decade of national studies.'

Kuhm, G. D., Pace, C. R. & Vesper, N. (1997). The development of process indicators to estimate student gains associated with good practices in undergraduate education. Research in Higher Education, 38(4), 435-54.

Leask, B. (2009). Using formal and informal curricula to improve interactions between home and international students. Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(2), 205-221.

Levine, A. & Nideffer, J. 1996. Beating the odds: how the poor get to college. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.

Levy, S., Yellowley, W. & Farmer, M. (2006). Engaging and Retaining Students through Team Teaching. Paper presented at The 9th Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference: Engaging Students, Gold Coast, Australia.

Li, J., Brake, G., Champion, A., Fuller, T., Gabel, S. & Hatcher-Busch, L. (2009). Workplace learning: the roles of knowledge accessibility and management. Journal of Workplace Learning, 21(4), 347-64.

Macquarie University. (2009). Student Engagement Principles. Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Centre, Sydney.

Markwell, D. (2007). The challenge of student engagement. Paper presented at the University of Western Australia Teaching and Learning Forum, Perth, Australia.

Marsick, V. J. (2009). Toward a unifying framework to support informal learning theory, research and practice. Journal of Workplace Learning, 21(4), 265-75.

Massey, O. T. (2011). A proposed model for the analysis and interpretation of focus groups in evaluation research. Evaluation and Program Planning, 34, 21-28.

McLean, P. & Holden, W. (2004). Investing in cultural capital: a partnership enhancing transition for equity students. Paper presented at The 8th Pacific Rim First Year in Higher Education Conference: Dealing with Diversity, Melbourne, Australia.

McNally, J., Blake, A. & Reid, A. (2009). The informal learning of new teachers in school. Journal of workplace learning, 21(4), 322-33.

Measuring the Socio-Economic Status of Higher Education Students. (2009). Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Meyer, J. (2000). Evaluating action research. Age and Ageing, 29(2), 8-10.

Mitchell, M. & Egudo, M. (2003). A Review of Narrative Methodology. Edinburgh, South Australia: DSTO Systems Sciences Laboratory Retrieved from dspace.dsto.defence.gov.au/dspace/bitstream/1947/3817/1/DSTO-GD-0385 PR.pdf.

Nelson, K., Creagh, T., Kift, S. & Clarke, J. (2010). Transition Pedagogy Handbook: a good practice guide for policy and practice in the first year experience. Brisbane: Queensland Univeristy of Technology.

Nelson, K. J., Smith, J. E. & Clarke, J. A. (2011). Enhancing the transition of commencing students into university: an institution-wide approach. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology. Retrieved from eprints.qut.edu.au/39690/.

Nusche, D. (2008). Assessment of learning outcomes in higher education: a comparative review of selected practices: OECD Education Working Paper No. 15. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/dataoecd/13/25/40256023.pdf.

Palmer, G. (2011). 'Dean of Students Appointment.'

Peterson, F. & Hansen, S. (2012). Media and Communication: Program Suite and Delivery for the Future. MC2015 Report, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Pickford, R. (2009). Designing First-Year Assessment and Feedback: A guide for university staff. Leeds: Assessment, Learning & Teaching, Leeds Metropolitan University.

PricewaterhouseCoopers. (2011). Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2011 - 2015.

Reay, D., Crozier, G. & Clayton, J. (2009). 'Fitting in' or 'standing out': working-class students in UK higher education. British Educational Research Journal, 36(1), 107-24.

RMIT University. (2011). Strategic Plan RMIT 2015: Transforming the Future. Melbourne: RMIT University.

Scott, G. (2008). University student engagement and satisfaction with learning and teaching. Retrieved from www.uws.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/64087/Research_-_Scott_-_pdf.pdf

Smith, L., Bratini, L., Chambers, D.-A., Jensen, R. V. & Romero, L. (2010). Between idealism and reality: meeting the challenges of participatory action research. Action Research, 8(4), 407-25.

Tinto, V. (2005). Reflections on retention and persistence: Institutional actions on behalf of student persistence . Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 2(3), 89-97.

Topsfield, J. (2011, Nov. 14) . National curriculum means lack of state competition. The Age. Retrieved from www.theage.com.au/national/education/national-curriculum-means-lack-of-state-competition-20111113-1nduj.html.

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Valadez, J. (1993). Cultural capital and its impact on the aspirations of nontraditional community college students. Community College Review, 21(3), 30-43.

Varghese, M. & Brett, K. (2011). International Student Barometer Project 2010. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Walton, G. M. & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 82-96.

Walton, G. M., Cohen, G. L., Cwir, D. & Spencer, S. J. (2011). Mere belonging: the power of social connections. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(3), 513-32.

Winkle-Wagner, R. (2010). Cultural capital: the promises and pitfalls in educational research. Hoboken N.J: John Wiley & Sons.

Bronwyn Clarke

In her role within the School of Media and Communication, Bronwyn is researching and reviewing best-practice models of selection and retention of students in line with her study and experience as a Program Director and Selection Officer in the College of Design and Social Context. Bronwyn has also been involved with RMIT's Equity Database Implementation as an advisor and database tester.

Bronwyn's professional background is as a graphic designer, where she sat on the AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association) council as the Communications Manager.

Bronwyn has been involved in offshore teaching for more than 11 years, most currently with the delivery of the Communication Design Program in Singapore, delivered in partnership with the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM). Bronwyn is also an advisor on the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority review of Year 13 programs and assessment models, and how this experience transitions into Higher Education.
Bronwyn's staff profile
Rachel Wilson

Prior to undertaking a role as Program Director, Rachel was the Media program's Selection Officer and Careers Officer. She has also received a number of teaching awards.

Rachel's professional background is as a media practitioner, and she has been teaching within the higher education sector for 18 years, specialising in the Screen Production discipline. She is currently teaching media production and applied research in the School of Media and Communication.

Rachel's current research includes archiving, memory and representations of trauma. She served as the President of the peak discipline body ASPERA (Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association) from 2010 to 2011, and she currently holds the position of National Secretary.
Rachel's staff profile

Dr Natalie Araujo, Research Officer

Natalie was most recently employed in the Institute for Koorie Education at Deakin University and has previously worked as a sessional staff member at La Trobe University, Monash University, University of Manchester (UK) and Mount Holyoke College (USA).

She has completed a PhD in Social Anthropology, Juris Doctor in Law, MA in Latin American Cultural Studies, and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Latin American Studies. Her research interests include: cosmopolitan narratives of belonging; cultural and creative representations of race and ethnicity; gender and embodiment; the cultural construction of childhood; migration and mobility; storytelling; and trauma and memory.

Laetitia Shand, Project Officer (October - December 2014)

Laetitia is a professional manager in communications, arts, design and academia. From a background in commercial product marketing, she has since worked extensively in academic research management. From 2011 to 2013 she was Project Manager for the Circus Oz Living Archive ARC Linkage Project at RMIT University. She has recently co-edited RMIT Design Research Institute's six-year retrospective publication RMIT Design Research Institute Designs on the Future (Melbourne Books 2014).

Associate Professor David Carlin

David was Program Director, Media from 2009 to 2010 and is now a researcher, creative practitioner and teacher working in the fields of creative writing, media and interdisciplinary communication research projects.

David's professional background is as a writer, director and producer in film, theatre and circus.

He currently teaches an undergraduate course in Literary Non-fiction, and a lab in the School of Media and Communication's Honours program.

Dr Lucy Morieson, Consultant Research Officer

Lucy graduated from RMIT's Journalism program before working as a researcher and reporter, most notably at online news publication Crikey. Inspired by her work in the world of online publishing, she returned to RMIT to complete her PhD on the political development of online journalism in Australia. While pursuing her PhD research, she also taught extensively across a range of courses and programs in RMIT's School of Media and Communication.

Her current role provides an opportunity to combine the writing and interviewing experience developed as a journalist and researcher with the insights into the student experience gained through her teaching work.

Karli Lukas, Project Officer

Karli's current role enables her to combine the research, writing, interviewing, project management and video production skills she developed in the film and television industries with her extensive higher education experience.

As both an Academic Services Officer and graduate of the School of Media and Communication, Karli brings unique analytical and holistic perspectives to the project. Her extensive knowledge of RMIT staff networks and processes further enables her to contribute to position papers and represent the project lead team on various working parties.

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The concept of an internationalised or global curriculum is not new. While study tours and exchange programs will continue to remain the peak global experience for a limited number of students, The Belonging Project seeks to scaffold an inclusive, universal 'globalised' experience 'at home' to benefit all students.

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Information Pickup Theory (J.J. Gibson) Information Processing Theory (G.A. Miller) Lateral Thinking (E. DeBono) Levels of Processing (Craik & Lockhart) Mathematical Learning Theory (R.C. Atkinson) Mathematical Problem Solving (A. Schoenfeld) Minimalism (J. M. Carroll) Model Centered Instruction and Design Layering (Andrew Gibbons) Modes of Learning (D. Rumelhart & D.

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We are delighted to present our latest Innovating Pedagogy report, co-authored by academics at the Institute of Educational Technology together with researchers from the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town.

Download the report: Innovating Pedagogy 2023 ( available shortly!)

Suggested citation:
Kukulska-Hulme, A., Bossu, C., Charitonos, K., Coughlan, T., Deacon, A., Deane, N., Ferguson, R., Herodotou, C., Huang, C-W., Mayisela, T., Rets, I., Sargent, J., Scanlon, E., Small, J., Walji, S., Weller, M., & Whitelock, D. (2023). Innovating Pedagogy 2023: Open University Innovation Report 11. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

We are proud to present our 10 th anniversary report in our annual series exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment! The reports are intended for teachers, trainers, policy makers, education consultants, academics, students, researchers, instructional designers, educational software developers and all who are interested in pedagogical innovation and future learning scenarios.

Download the report: Innovating Pedagogy 2022

This tenth report, produced by researchers in the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology in collaboration with colleagues from the Open University of Catalonia, looks back on the past 10 years and proposes another set of promising innovations that have not yet had a significant influence on education but deserve attention.

We welcome your feedback! How are you using our reports? Please add your comments on this blog, or comment on social media using the hashtag #IP2022report

Suggested citation:

Kukulska-Hulme, A., Bossu, C., Charitonos, K., Coughlan, T., Maina, M., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Gaved, M., Guitert, M., Herodotou, C., Prieto-Blázquez, J., Rienties, B., Sangrà, A., Sargent, J., Scanlon, E., Whitelock, D. (2022). Innovating Pedagogy 2022: Open University Innovation Report 10. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Cover photograph by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Read our latest report in our annual series exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment. The reports are intended for teachers, trainers, policy makers, education consultants, academics, students, researchers, instructional designers, educational software developers - and indeed for anyone who is interested in pedagogical innovation and how education is changing.

Download the report: Innovating Pedagogy 2021

This ninth report, produced by researchers in the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology in collaboration with colleagues from the Artificial Intelligence and Human Languages Lab/The Institute of Online Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, proposes ten promising innovations that have not yet had a significant influence on education but deserve attention.

We welcome your feedback. How are you using our reports? Please post your comments on this blog, or comment on social media using the hashtag #IP2021report

Suggested citation:

Kukulska-Hulme, A., Bossu, C., Coughlan, T., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Gaved, M., Herodotou, C., Rienties, B., Sargent, J., Scanlon, E., Tang, J., Wang, Q., Whitelock, D., Zhang, S. (2021). Innovating Pedagogy 2021: Open University Innovation Report 9. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Cover photograph by khoamartin / 123RF

This series of help sheets is designed for people who are trying out distance and online education for the first time, and for teachers who have already taught at a distance and want to try something new.

Each help sheet outlines one approach to learning at a distance and provides guidance on how to put this into practice. All the help sheets are based on approaches covered in past Innovating Pedagogy reports and take into account that students may have only limited access to technology and the Internet.

Innovating Pedagogy 2020
The latest report in our annual series explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation.
Download Innovating Pedagogy 2020

This eighth report, produced in collaboration with the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL), Dublin City University, Ireland, proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education in their current form.

You can see a summary of each innovation using the Current themes menu on the right.

Please add your comments on the report and the innovations on this blog, or comment on social media using the hashtag #IP2020report

Suggested citation:
Kukulska-Hulme, A., Beirne, E., Conole, G., Costello, E., Coughlan, T., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Gaved, M., Herodotou, C., Holmes, W., Mac Lochlainn, C., Nic Giolla Mhichíl, M., Rienties, B., Sargent, J., Scanlon, E., Sharples, M. and Whitelock, D. (2020). Innovating Pedagogy 2020: Open University Innovation Report 8. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Front cover illustration: Photograph by Philip Downs.
Themes covered in previous reports

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We are delighted to present our latest Innovating Pedagogy report, co-authored by academics at the Institute of Educational Technology together with researchers from the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town. Download the report: Innovating Pedagogy 2023 ( available shortly!)

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Assessment Futures

Many students currently graduate without appropriate skills in assessment.

Assessment serves many purposes, including:
* helping students improve their learning, and
* certifying their learning.

This website is about an important additional purpose for assessment.

It is about equipping students for the learning and assessing they will need to do after completing their course and the challenges they will face after graduation.

Broad structure of the website

This site provides information on:
* ideas and strategies to browse and consider, but no prescriptions for what you should do.
* ideas that are potentially applicable across a wide range of disciplinary areas.
* examples of how these ideas and strategies have already been used and tested.
* how to adapt and extend these ideas to suit your own subject matter and local circumstances.

Propositions for assessment reform

To read the ALTC report by David Boud and Associates (2010),Assessment 2020: Seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education, download pdf (4 pages).

For a Spanish translation of this documentEvaluación 2020. Siete propuestas para la reforma de la evaluación en la Educación Superior, download pdf

Who is this Assessment Futures website for?

* Experienced teachers in higher education, who have completed some study in the area. (It is not a basic introduction to teaching and assessment.)

Assessment Futures is supported by theory and empirical evidence. For clarity this information is not foregrounded, but it can be accessed through hyperlinks to the various examples and to the references section of the site. Where evidence is partial or incomplete, the professional judgement of the author has been applied.

Research on assessment practice in Higher Education is limited and is often generated by a local problem or situation. It rarely tracks a major intervention or brings together different studies of the same thing. It tends to be suggestive and ambiguous. Implications are not always easily drawn from it.

If you have evidence that informs the practices described here, please contact us.

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Assessment FuturesMany students currently graduate without appropriate skills in assessment.Assessment serves many purposes, including:* helping students improve their learning, and* certifying their learning.This website is about an important additional purpose for assessment.It is about equipping students for the learning and assessing they will need to do after completing their course and the challenges they will face after graduation.

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Victoria University | Melbourne Australia

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A guide that covers the high level essentials that need to be considered for good assessment practice.

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Developing students (and teachers) as learners instead of knowers

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There is a disturbing phenomena in higher education - and from what I can observe it's present in international and domestic student populations alike.

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Course: Learning Spaces Portal, Topic: Introduction to Learning Spaces

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What do we mean when we talk about "learning spaces"? Definitions range from the literal and specific to vastly inclusive and even deconstructionist.

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With advances in technology and shifts in the demographics of people attending university, the campus experience is changing. We're taking a look at how students have traditionally experienced university across the globe, and how that's evolving in each region.

In the UK: not all living away from home
Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Lancaster University
The dominant image of the UK campus experience is of students in their late teens or early 20s living and socialising on the campus of a long-established university.

However, figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency ( HESA) paint a different picture. In 2013-14, around one-third of full-time students lived at their own or their parents' home and one-third of all students were aged 25 or over. Around 15% of the student population were distance learners, with around one-third of these based wholly overseas.

HESA do not collect figures on the number of students studying in private institutions, but a survey in 2012 suggested there were around 100,000 students at private institutions. This represented around 4% of the 2011-12 student body.

Connaught Hall University/Flickr, CC BY

Part of the reason the dominant image remains unchallenged is that these different kinds of students and experiences tend to be located at different kinds of universities.

The researchers in the Social and Organisational Mediation of University Learning ( SOMUL) project identified three different kinds of student experience based on the levels of student diversity at an institution and the extent to which students' experiences were shared or individualised.

The danger of the dominant image of the young student living away from home, as the SOMUL project recognised, is that higher education experiences that fit with it are often assumed to be higher quality than those that do not. Our research in the quality and inequality of teaching in undergraduate first degrees clearly showed this is not the case.

While technological developments have changed the experiences of students studying at a distance, for other students it seems that it has been integrated into their experiences without changing them fundamentally.

This is similar to what happened with television in the 1970s, which was thought to have signalled the end of the traditional lecture. While it did offer higher education in a new form to students engaging with the programs made by the Open University, the experience of most students did not greatly change.

In the US: the digital age isn't necessarily bringing us closer
Karen Sobel Lojeski, Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society, Stony Brook University
Just outside the main student activity centre, information tables line collegiate quads featuring everything from ceramics classes to geology clubs. However, while on the surface this sociable scene still plays out in one form or another across the country, the campus experience is changing.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2012, approximately 12.5% of the 21 million or so enrolled undergraduates attended online classes exclusively - meaning they missed a "real-life" campus experience altogether.

However, for the 75% or so reportedly attending traditional classes entirely, technological tethers are also impacting campus life on the ground one way or another.

The increased use of web-based lecture technologies like Echo 360, for example, is designed to enhance students' learning experience. Research shows it is perceived to be highly beneficial by those who cannot attend class - providing them with flexibility and multiple learning options when emergencies and other life circumstances prevent them from being there "live".

On the flip side, an unintended consequence is that some students see web-based lecture technologies as a way to justify surfing the web while in class because they can always go back to the "replay". However, while this often leads to a negative impact on grades, it can also change the trajectory of social interactions inside and outside the classroom - fuelling a sense of being " alone together ".

For example studies show that depression and anxiety among college students is rising significantly, creating what the American Psychological Association calls a mental health crisis on campuses across the nation.

On the one hand, social media can benefit student sufferers by keeping them regularly connected to family and friends - easing worries and providing comfort. On the other hand, social media can contribute to the psyche's catastrophic thinking by creating an increased sense of isolation called virtual distance. Whether the student is walking down a crowded campus thoroughfare staring at a screen or curled up in their dorm room looking at Facebook friends' " highlight reels " making them feel more lonely than ever.

The bottom line - technology is impacting campus life on both sides of the ledger in ways that can enrich as well as detract from precious encounters with new knowledge and friends.

The lesson for our youth is that even if you spend a lot of time with your computer companion try to also throw some clay on a wheel, slip down a watery bouncy slide or mine minerals from shoe boxes with like-minded collectors for as Carly Simon sang a long time ago, it is still the case for your generation that "these are the good old days".

In Australia: spending less time on campus
Jason Lodge, Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne
University students in Australia usually stay close to home to go to university. Rural students predominantly stay in rural areas to study and city dwellers tend to stay in cities.

Australian domestic students are less likely to live in dorms or on campus than students in other parts of the world. They instead tend to live with their parents or partners.

While the situation is different for international students studying in Australia, the living arrangements and mobility of Australian domestic students has remained relatively stable. The same may not be said about their actual attendance on campus though.

A recent report from the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education highlights some changing trends. Students appear to be spending around the same amount of time studying overall but are spending less of that time on campus.

Saar/Flickr, CC BY

Students also indicated they were less engaged with their peers than students in the past have been. Instead they appear to spend much more time on the internet or studying alone.

Data in the same report also indicate that students are increasingly using technology to study. However, the notion that these technologies mean they can spend less time on campus was not shared by a third of the sample.

These data challenge the argument that Australian students devalue campus life in favour of online content. The available evidence instead suggests that a complex set of factors drive student decisions about where and when they study.

This is perhaps not surprising given that the student body in Australian higher education is far larger and more diverse than it traditionally has been.

Australian university students also have increasing commitments outside of study including work, family and carer responsibilities. These obligations force them to make strategic decisions about their study habits. This includes deciding whether it is worth making the trip to campus despite whatever value they see in being there.

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The campus experience is changing all over the world

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With advances in technology and shifts in the demographics of people attending university, the campus experience is changing. We're taking a look at how students have traditionally experienced university across the globe, and how that's evolving in each region.

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"Mick is like a human rolodex for active pedagogies. He is an amazing source of the world's great ideas on learning and teaching in higher education." Randy Bass, Georgetown University, Washington DC

"Mick you've done something really, really useful and lots of us are very grateful to you for your assiduousness and stamina. Well done and thank you very much." Sally Brown, Independent

"Thank you for these fantastic resources and being so generous in sharing them!" Rayya Ghul, NTF, Canterbury Christchurch University

" I wanted to thank you for the wonderfully compiled resources and bibliographies, that I am sure are serving many institutions " Joanna Renc-Roe, Central European University

The following bibliographies and case studies have been downloaded 70,000 times in the last seven years.

Bibliographies

The following bibliographies have been regularly updated since 2005:

Case study collections and handouts

UK National Subect Centres archived websites - updated March 2017

"I have found this list incredibly useful, as the Subject Centre websites are a rich resource at many levels. We encourage their use particularly for our PGCert participants and other early career teachers. Many thanks for keeping them alive!" Fran Beaton, University of Kent

Useful websites

Research Instrument

TR Questionnaire3 for publication The student experience of teaching, research and consultancy

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"Mick is like a human rolodex for active pedagogies. He is an amazing source of the world's great ideas on learning and teaching in higher education." Randy Bass, Georgetown University, Washington DC "Mick you've done something really, really useful and lots of us are very grateful to you for your assiduousness and stamina.