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Digital education, now common in higher education, is particularly evident in the expansion of blended and fully online offerings at universities. Central to this expansion are educational developers, staff who support teaching and learning improvement in courses they do not themselves teach. Working closely with staff, students, and the curriculum, educational developers see first-hand how the digital learning agenda is both implemented and experienced. This article reports on findings from a national study of three educational development groups: academic developers, academic language and learning developers, and online educational designers, from 14 Australian universities. Although their institutional settings, roles, and work practices varied considerably, a central theme was the tension arising from a perceived shift in institutional priorities from 'people development' to 'product development': that is, from building human (educator) capacity towards curriculum resource development, particularly for the online environment. Participants reported a decline in autonomy, with institutional strategy and targeted projects increasingly directing both the work that gets done, and the skill sets required to do it. Their observations have implications for how universities conceptualise the development and support of the educational process. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Higher education learning is increasingly enacted in digital environments and doctoral education is no exception. Scholars–supervisors and PhD candidates–actively create their own digital profiles, and their research is often disseminated via social media in tandem with the traditional publication of journals and books. Online learning behaviours, social media and doctoral education are complex, and, when considered together, present distinct challenges. This paper explores the work and practices of digital academics using social media through a case study of an academic blog, Doctoral Writing. We use statistical data from the blog to map evolving pedagogic practices and forms of doctoral writing support and engagement. This analysis reveals horizontalised networks of co-creating consumers and producers who interact on social media platforms in ways that signal new transnational networks of learning and teaching. This paper contributes to our understanding of academic engagement with social media in contemporary doctoral education, particularly doctoral writing Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This book on doctoral writing offers a refreshingly new approach to help Ph.D. students and their supervisors overcome the host of writing challenges that can make—or break—the dissertation process. The book’s unique contribution to the field of doctoral writing is its style of reflection on ongoing, lived practice; this is more readable than a simple how-to book, making it a welcome resource to support doctoral writing. The experiences and practices of research writing are explored through bite-sized vignettes, stories, and actionable ‘teachable’ accounts. Doctoral Writing: Practices, Processes and Pleasures has its origins in a highly successful academic blog with an international following. Inspired by the popularity of the blog (which had more than 14, 800 followers as of October 2019) and a desire to make our six years’ worth of posts more accessible, this book has been authored, reworked, and curated by the three editors of the blog and reconceived as a conveniently structured book

A ‘knowledge society’ relies on a workforce with high-level skills in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Continuing development of ICT will arise partly from research undertaken by doctoral graduates. However, compared to other cognate disciplines, ICT has relatively few students taking up doctoral studies. This article explores some of the perceived barriers to undertaking doctoral studies in ICT in three Australian universities. Current students were surveyed regarding their post-course intentions relating to employment and further study, and the resulting data was analysed in terms of type of university attended, gender, nationality and first-in-family status. Overall, the perceived barriers to doing a research degree were related to the financial implications of such study and a limited understanding of what research in ICT involves. The following recommendations are made to universities and higher education policy-makers: that universities ensure that students have accurate information about the financial costs of doctoral studies; that students be provided with authentic undergraduate research experiences; and that pathways be developed to facilitate a smooth return to research degrees after periods of working in industry. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

As practices and expectations around doctoral writing continue to change, so too do the demands on academic developers and learning advisors. Social media is increasingly playing a role in doctoral education, just as it is in higher education more generally. This paper explores a blog initiated in 2012 to inform and support doctoral writing; since its inception, it has grown to include diverse and overlapping communities of academic developers, language and literacy specialists, supervisors, and students with shared interests in doctoral writing. This case study reflects on our experiences of entering the online environment through the lens of connectivist learning, noting the practices and communities that have been established, and the blog’s positioning in relation to our formal roles within universities. We consider how blogging relates to our work as academic developers. Details of our experiences, with our analysis and reflection of them, can inform other academic developers seeking to engage in social media networks as part of their working lives. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This chapter discusses a ‘writing movement’, which is currently occurring in various parts of Australia through the support of social media. A concept emerging from the café scene in San Francisco, ‘Shut Up and Write!’ is a meetup group that brings writers together at a specific time and place to write side by side, thus making writing practice, social. This concept has been applied to the academic environment and our case-study explores the positive outcomes in two locations: RMIT University and Queensland University of Technology. This informal learning practice can be implemented to assist research students in developing academic skills.