#edenRW9 editors and the publishing process #papers

Question and answer session with editors, really great questions!

Question: Interesting question from Airina Volungeviciene whether the published research can be tagged in some way (like with xAPI or similar but than connected to bridge theory to practical) in order to see how applicable the research is, whether it is implemented and how. Some indicators to see the impact of science.  

No clear answer to that  from the editors (Dianne Conrad, Jill Buban, Josep Duart, Som Naidu) (yet). I would like to see this happen, also  in other areas. Aaron Silvers, what do you think would this be possible.

Question from Marti Cleveland-Innes: increasing fear for reviewing articles, editing journals… how can this become more possible given the increased time shortage. And can you give a notion of who reviews your articles, how do you choose reviewers.

Answer: (Diane Conrad) you hit the nail on the head, it is a major fallacy of peer-review. We rate reviewers and than evaluate whether they can stay on as reviewer. We assign 4 reviewers to every article (in the hope 2 will respond).

(Som Naidu): we are editors for our academic responsibility. And universities do not reward people for doing reviews! Academics might be given awards for that type of work. There is a process for each reviewer, and if reviewers do not respond than they come out. A full professor is the busiest, and they almost do not respond. So we choose reviewers who are early in their academic career.

(Josep Duart). We collect as much information as possible in terms of their expertise, so we have a good profile of them as academics in their field.

Question: George Veletsianos: could you give feedback to the authors on how to respond to ‘minor or major’ revisions.

Answer: (Diane Conrad) it is upon the reviewer to make sensible comments that support the review suggestion. The feedback needs to provide support for the decision made by the reviewer.

(Som Naidu) I look at the reports and filter them if they are too different before sending them to the author. And than provide the author with the option of what the author can do, making it possible to the author to enter into a constructive conversation.

Question: how can we get published

(Diane Conrad) Most common reasons for rejection:

Turn it in is used, and its reports.

We look at the scope of the research for the journal

Issue of the research with little importance, specifically to our readership

There is always something out there on any topic… never think there is not.  (we prescreen articles before sending them to reviewers)

Make an article understandable right from the abstracts. Abstracts should be written after the article, and be VERY precise, including the conclusions!

If the research is old, probably not accepted, use up to date research.

Use up to date literature

Do not republish, we have seen it before makes it unpublishable.

Question: how do you handle contradictory reviews

There always are more opinions, and it can be depressing to see how different equal experts give different reviews and decisions.

Each review is different, so as an editor I choose what goes out and what does not go out.

I consider the quality of the reviews, and the quality of the reviewer. I might send it to another reviewer, or take a personal decision as an expert myself (Diane)

If one decline is suggested by reviewers, I do not publish it.

Some reviews are not up to snuff, so I do look over the reviewer comments.

There are a lot of subjective components in the editorship. 

editors get not paid

#edenRW9 Community of Inquiry Framework: new directions and research opportunities

The slides can be found here : tinyurl.com/edenone

Great session focusing on Teacher presence (by MartiCleveland-Innes) and great idea of shared metacognition (by Randy Garrison).

Related to the Community of Inquiry model.

Marti Cleveland-Innes speaks on Community of Inquiry which can be used as a model for different educational settings, both digital and physical.

Interesting idea of moving from teaching to teacher presence, where each one of us can be the teacher in a community.

Context is changing, this means roles are changing. This is more about teaching and learning, making a transition like this can make a significant contribution to the higher educational reform.

Student demographics will change, and with different characteristics. The employment factory demands different graduates (or with other skills).

Pressure on higher ed is not about technology, it is a matrix and technology has an effect on the whole society. The pressure on higher ed is higher than at any other given moment in time.

We are teaching students that are no longer living under the same conditions as when the educational institutes were set up.

CoI is all about creating an educational experience, which can help us with some of the contemporary conditions and pressures.

Drivers for higher education change: the ed institutes need to morph into the current challenges. We shall all be engaging and learning with others collaboratively.

Teaching presence: the design and organisation , facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes to realize personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes. The opportunities for students to participate in each of these components of teaching presence. We can empower the learners and engage them in a way that are meaningful to them.

The best way to measure whether these elements were present or not. There are 4 design and organisation factors: communicating important course topics, clearly communicate important course goals, provide clear instructions on how to participant in course learning activities, communicate… (see slide)

Facilitation is key… identifying areas of agreement and disagreement, guiding the class towards understanding, keep course participants engaged and participating in constructive dialogue, explor new concepts, reinforced the development of a sense of community.

Direct instruction: focus discussion on relevant issues, help to understand strengths and weaknesses, provide feedback in a timely fashion.

Teaching teaching presence: faculty needs to learn, and be given the opportunity to understand the learning. Learning how to teach is through teacher presence, by teaching. The CoI model serves as course design and delivery. Pedagogy involves observing and modelling the online teaching practices of expert distance educators. A high-tech, high-touch approach provides the most effective means of assuring quality student learning and satisfaction.

Translation into practice: critical to impact on higher ed reform is that students will be enabled to play a more active role (purposeful) and faculty realise this. Make students participate in teacher presence, in teaching. Sharing teaching is the most important part of the Community of Inquiry, as well as being emotionally present.

Shared metacognition (Randy Garrison talking)

Thinking and learning collaboratively. Metacognition is central to Inquiry.

Regulating learning (between cognitive and teaching presence) is the situated area for metacognition.

Goal of CoI is constructing another level of awareness.

Explicitly recognizing co-regulating of metacognition, and individual as well as shared learning processes.

Self- and co-regulated functions, each of which include monitoring and managing cognitive and teaching responsibilities. (Inge note: I realllly like this!!!). Shared metacognition.

They did a construct validation pilot study, data from 167 participants, from a 54 item questionnaire. In the final questionnaire the elements were reduced from 54 to 26 items.

Two factor solution analysis was used (looking it up), followed by a four factor analysis conducted to extract monitoring and management subcomponents. Big challenge to separate monitoring from management. Look up references from Garrison and Akyol (2011, 2013, 2015).

Randy promotes shared metacognition as an interesting future research topic.

The questionnaire was built coming from the CoI model. Now, I want to connect to Randy (remark from myself).

#edenRW9 A scholarly life online @veletsianos

Finally, I got to meet George Veletsianos (http://www.veletsianos.com/) and the pleasure of hearing his keynote liveblog from EDENRW9. 

open/social/digital scholarship: how does that influence each of our professional practice?

But we as academics are not only online for professional reasons, we are also humans with lives... online. 

Digital residents (individuals that consider the web of part of their live), digital visitors (those who use the web to engage in a particular activity, more practical, less part of life). 

So different people use the web for different purposes in different ways. 

What: share information, collaborative authoring, post draft papers, author open textbooks, open teaching, public P&T materials, crowdsourcing... not always rewarded by the institutes for putting or working online, but the mindset is changing. Online participation is becoming more encouraged by institutes (opportunity). 

Institutions and academics are still looking at social media in different ways.  Social media activities are rife with tensions, dilemmas, and conundrums. 

acceptable identity fragments (Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2016) https://royalroads.academia.edu/GeorgeVeletsianos 

Academics filter their posts to cater to specific groups.... (inge remark: this also means less overlap is happening, so less potential stepping stones). 

Disclosures might be tactical: political, encouraging reflection (Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016). 

When institutions view social media with a functional perspective.. they become part of an audit culture, and a complex data assemblage that confronts the individual academic (burrows, 2012). 

So what does it mean to look at academic impact through social media (see paper on twitter).

A scholarly life online from George Veletsianos

#edenRW9 Studying learning expeditions in cross action spaces with digital didactical designs

Isa Jahnke (http://www.isa-jahnke.com/ ) is an inspiring academic, and one who knows how to network.

Liveblogging from Oldenburg, Germany.

@isaja

Who is using a device with internet access? That is cross action spaces… when you tweet content is used to link to other people in other spaces, to learn from.

Human interaction is crossaction… multiple spaces. Conversations go from network to network to network. Humans connect across locations/spaces virtual or physical.

This crossaction can also be done in classrooms. About 20 years ago, school was the place to learn. Now with these crossaction spaces learning is opened up from classrooms only.

Learners apply classroom themes into the material world, in which they are living. So the outside comes into classroom and from classroom to other spaces.

What is learning:

Reflective doing of multiple crossactions

Reflective performance of crossactions

Reflective communication

Theoretical lens:

Learning is embedded in a bigger organisational framework.

It is not only about teacher student, it is about learning goals, institutional strategies, curricula, academic staff development...

Digital didactical design has 5 components to study about 80% of what is happening in the classroom:

learning activities,

assessment

learning outcomes

social relations

web-enabled technologies

She investigated 64 classes to see where these classes were in the 5 layered framework. This position in the framework, enabled to identify where problems arose. 

The patterns provided meaningful interpretations into the inner/outer classroom actions. 

The university of the future is made of those crossaction spaces, in which teaching is organised in project teacher teams across existing disciplines

teacher teams from different departments work together and design a learning expedition and the students develop learning expeditions, learning by topic and not by the subject. 

Have a look at her book!

Digital Didactical Designs, published by Routledge

 https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Didactical-Designs-Teaching-CrossActionSpaces/dp/1138928496 

#EDENRW9 The increasing im-possibilities of justice and care in open distance learning

Paul Prinsloo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-prinsloo-226a8716) was looking particularly good this morning in his light blue jacket and his radiant presence. And what he said hit home! Really great presentation.

Liveblogging what he said here. (@14prinsp ) slides on slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/prinsp/the-increasing-impossibilities-of-justice-and-care-in-open-distance-learning ).

Achieving justice and care was a concern from early on in distance education. Spending time and resources to take down barriers. AT this point in time, the opportunities for justice and care have grown over the years. On the other hand the impossibilities for justice and care have seen new challenges arise.

Intergenerational weight, colonialism, … education is often seen as a key initiative to counter these. Yet, challenges arise against the belief that education and equality is possible. All of societies problems cannot be addressed or erased by education. Students need to be made aware of what education entails from the start to be able to attain access to higher education. Access to education is not enough.

Ethics of care is essential to create equality.

Government subsidies have tumbled while student numbers rose in South Africa.

The amount of funding spend per students are decreasing (see slides).

The problem lies in completion rates of undergraduate degrees, not only on completing individual courses.

In DE there is still this grey area of not knowing where it will take us, what student success entails.

Education is not broken, and technology cannot mend it. Paul believes advances in tech, AI, machine learning can address some of the challenges we face. But what are the conditions. Paul refers to the chatbot, a female chatbot to support students and answer their questions.

AI can get awfully wrong. Can robot replace teachers? It does allow for some light relieve, but it might also endanger jobs. If we consider the role of AI, algorithms to change education, where equity, equality is reached, than what this imply: cost, access, quality and care.

How do we talk about university care with top ranking of universities, the rankings increase marginalisation of knowing. Most of the people are still offline. See most recent report of the Worldbank (http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2016 ).

Can we increase access, maintain quality and address the issue of cost through implementation of these new techs? Student data is the contemporary greatness… our obsession with metrics turn academics/researchers into data drones. Students and surveillance. What could we learn of tracking everyone? How much more student data do we need to move to justice and care? How much is enough data to achieve justice and care?

Will having access to more data answer challenges? Knowing more about our students does not, necessarily, result in understanding. Can we respond in appropriate ways?

We need to realise that our digital lives are more than the clicks. Data does not exist without assumptions, data have contexts, and it impacts on the integraty of data. Knowing what is happening, does not say why things are happening. We do not even have the time to think about why it is happening. Biesta quote (in slides).

Correlation is not causation. 

We need to be careful with accountability and AI. 

HOw can we use algorithms to structure a learning journey, allocation of resources, addressing inter-generational disadvantage? Red-lining?

What are the implications of tech to the justice and care for open distance learning to actually remove barriers and to reach more justice and care. 

People should know who makes algorithms, what it implies, to question conclusions, to have access, to opting out or in, to keep ethical oversight of all these possibilities. 

The increasing (im)possibilities of justice and care in open, distance learning from prinsp

Learning analytics as indicators of online course drop-out a paper by the MobiMOOC research team

Under the lead of the wonderfully driven Apostolos Koutropoulos, Sean Abajian and Michael Sean Gallagher, all of us in the MobiMOOC research team (other members are Nilgün Keskin, Rebecca Hogue and Osvaldo Rodriguez and myself) got a chance to collaboratively write a paper on "emotive vocabulary in MOOCs: context and participation retention". This paper came out of MobiMOOC2011 and it takes a deeper look into the emotive language that is used by MOOC participants and whether this language can be analyzed for words that indicate future drop-out/participation.

Here is the abstract:
Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have been growing in popularity with educational researchers, instructors, and learners in online environments. Online discussions are as important in MOOCs as in other online courses. Online discussions that occur in MOOCs are influenced by additional factors resulting from their volatile and voluntary participation structure. This article aims to examine discussions that took place in MobiMOOC in the spring of 2011, a MOOC structured around mobile learning. This line of inquiry focused on language from the discussions that contained emotive vocabulary in the MobiMOOC discussion forums. Emotive vocabulary is words or phrases that are implicitly emotional (happy, sad, frustrated) or relate to emotional contexts (I wasn’t able to…). This emotive vocabulary, when present, was examined to determine whether it could serve as a mechanism for predicting future and continued participation in the MOOC. In this research, narrative inquiry approach was used in order to shine a light on the possible predictive qualities of emotive text in both participants who withdrew from the course as well as moderately or moderately active participants. The results indicated that emotive vocabulary usage did not significantly predict or impact participation retention in MobiMOOC.

Yes, participating in MOOCs can result in many different outcomes. If you have not signed up for the next MobiMOOC that will run between 8 - 30 September 2012, feel free to register here by becoming a member of the group and you will be kept up to date.