No size fits all: Design considerations for networked professional development in higher education
- Authors: Pallitt, Nicola , Gachago, Daniela , Bali, Maha
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/453520 , vital:75260 , ISBN 978-3-030-85241-2 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85241-2_4
- Description: This chapter develops a framework for design considerations that can be used to analyze, contrast, and design networked professional development (NPD) in higher education (HE) contexts. The framework was developed after reflecting on three professional development (PD) courses, each with facilitators who are academic developers across the African continent. Using a Collaborative Autoethnographic methodology, the three authors reflect on design considerations for different forms of blended and online PD courses, based on their experiences of designing and/or facilitating these interventions and with PD more broadly. We argue that course designs can be positioned along a range of dimensions, namely open/closed, structured/unstructured, facilitated/unfacilitated, certified/uncertified, with/without date commitments, homogenous versus autonomous learning path, content vs. process centric, serious vs. playful, and individual vs. collaborative. We discuss relationships between dimensions and learning theories (the more open dimensions speak to connectivist, while more structured courses follow social constructivist approaches). We also identify various tensions that arise in the design of NPD, such as between academic developers’ pedagogical advocacy vs. usefulness, need to maintain volunteerism without exploitation of affective labour, and struggle to create spaces for agency within institutional constraints.
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- Date Issued: 2021
A wake-up call: Equity, inequality and Covid-19 emergency remote teaching and learning
- Authors: Czerniewicz, Laura , Agherdien, Najma , Badenhorst, Johan , Belluigi, Dina , Chambers, Tracey , Chili, Muntuwenkosi , De Villiers, Magriet , Felix, Alan , Gachago, Daniela , Gokhale, Craig , Ivala, Eunice , Kramm, Neil , Madiba, Matete , Mistri, Gitanjali , Mgqwashu, Emmanuel , Pallitt, Nicola , Prinsloo, Paul , Solomon, Kelly , Strydom, Sonja , Swanepoel, Mike , Waghid, Faiq , Wissing, Gerrit
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/439449 , vital:73598 , https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00187-4
- Description: Produced from experiences at the outset of the intense times when Covid-19 lockdown restrictions began in March 2020, this collaborative paper offers the collective reflections and analysis of a group of teaching and learning and Higher Education (HE) scholars from a diverse 15 of the 26 South African public universities. In the form of a theorised narrative insistent on foregrounding personal voices, it presents a snapshot of the pandemic addressing the following question: what does the ‘pivot online’to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL), forced into urgent existence by the Covid-19 pandemic, mean for equity considerations in teaching and learning in HE? Drawing on the work of Therborn (2009: 20–32; 2012: 579–589; 2013; 2020) the reflections consider the forms of inequality-vital, resource and existential-exposed in higher education. Drawing on the work of Tronto (1993; 2015; White and Tronto 2004) the paper shows the networks of care which were formed as a counter to the systemic failures of the sector at the onset of the pandemic.
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- Date Issued: 2020