Conférence Jen Ross

Mercredi 27 avril 2022

Dr Jen Ross, University of Edinburgh

« Contact works in multiple ways: online learning communities in higher education »

Jen Ross parlera de la création de communautés d’apprentissage en ligne dans l’enseignement supérieur.

Dr Jen Ross

Dr Jen Ross is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She developed and directs the new MSc in Education Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and has more than 15 years’ experience as an online teacher and course developer on the MSc in Digital Education. She publishes, teaches and supervises on topics including education and learning futures, speculative methods, museum and gallery learning and engagement, surveillance cultures in education, the impact and pedagogy of MOOCs and open education, and student and teacher experiences of online distance learning. She is co-author of The Manifesto for Teaching Online (MIT Press, 2020), and author of the forthcoming book Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge).

Lecture

The Manifesto for Teaching Online (2020) makes a number of claims about the value and potential of digital education. One of the most important is that « contact works in multiple ways. Face-time is over-valued ». This talk is a deep dive into this claim, exploring current thinking and practice from online higher education contexts, and research into networked learning, virtual communities and post-digital education. It argues that meaningful, engaging and sustainable communities can be at the heart of digital education practice, but such communities do not emerge from attempts to copy ‘what works’ from a face-to-face setting. The nature of time and space, contact and interaction, and knowledge sharing is different in mediated settings, and designing for digital communities requires attention to those differences.

Workshop

We are the campus: the future of online communities

« Campus envy » is the tendency to see the university campus and face-to-face encounters on it as embodying the authentic university experience. This workshop is about what might happen if we don’t succumb to campus envy: instead using speculative and activity-centred methods to envisage distributed, accessible, and sustainable online learning communities, and designing approaches to help operationalise this. You will work collaboratively with colleagues to identify values and principles that can inform relational online teaching.

By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

  • identify specific features of your teaching context that have relevance for building rich online learning communities;
  • consider the gains and losses involved in online community settings;
  • plan for developing a community-centred approach to your online teaching.

Programme 

Matinée – en présence à Brigue ou en ligne

9h30      accueil + café
10h00    conférence et discussion avec la conférencière invitée
12h00     repas de midi
 

Après-midi – réservé aux équipes enseignantes, participation uniquement en présence à Brigue

13h30      workshop avec la participation de la conférencière
16h00      fin de la journée