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Higher education institutions have collected and analysed student data for years, with their focus largely on reporting and management needs. A range of institutional policies exist which broadly set out the purposes for which data will be used and how data will be protected. The growing advent of learning analytics has seen the uses to which student data is put expanding rapidly. Generally though the policies setting out institutional use of student data have not kept pace with this change. Institutional policy frameworks should provide not only an enabling environment for the optimal and ethical harvesting and use of data, but also clarify: who benefits and under what conditions, establish conditions for consent and the de-identification of data, and address issues of vulnerability and harm. A directed content analysis of the policy frameworks of two large distance education institutions shows that current policy frameworks do not facilitate the provision of an enabling environment for learning analytics to fulfil its promise.

Despite all the research on student retention and success since the first conceptual mappings of student success e.g. Spady, there have not been equal impacts on the rates of both student success and retention. To realise the potential of learning analytics to impact on student retention and success, mega open distance learning (ODL) institutions face a number of challenges, paradoxes and opportunities. For the purpose of this paper we critique a ‘closed’ view of learning analytics as focusing only on data produced by students’ interactions with institutions of higher learning. Students are not the only actors in their learning journeys and it would seem crucial that learning analytics also includes the impacts of all stakeholders on students’ learning journeys in order to increase the success of students’ learning. As such the notion of ‘Thirdspace’ as used by cultural, postmodern and identity theorists provide a useful heuristic to map the challenges and opportunities, but also the paradoxes of learning analytics and its potential impact on student success and retention. This paper explores some of these challenges, paradoxes and opportunities with reference to two mega ODL institutions namely the Open University in the UK (OU) and the University of South Africa (Unisa). Although these two institutions share a number of characteristics, there are also some major and important differences between them. We explore some of the shared challenges, paradoxes and opportunities learning analytics offer in the context of these two institutions.

Business schools have been accused of being the ‘academy of the apocalypse’, serving and perpetuating greed and ‘rapacious capitalism’. There are increasing calls for business schools to redefine the purpose of business and to empower students to serve broader society whilst being profitable. Social justice is not considered to be high on the agenda of the curricula of many business schools, on the contrary. While the debate rages on regarding the complicity of business schools in pursuing a capitalist path, an important question is whether students and (potential) employers care about social justice as an essential element of the MBA curriculum? This paper shares the findings of a study undertaken to establish the expectations of various stakeholders including students, faculty and employers on the curriculum and pedagogy of the MBA curriculum in an open and distance learning institution. The study indicates that social justice issues are very low on the ‘wish list’ of students and employers, while representatives from the faculty had differing views regarding the value of including social justice issues in the MBA curriculum.

As higher education becomes increasingly borderless, with technological innovations and globalisation allowing higher education institutions to reach beyond their own geopolitical boundaries, different stakeholder groups have a range of expectations regarding the meaning of an ‘international’ curriculum. These expectations may differ starkly from the hype and rhetoric of the discourses of the internationalisation of higher education. Often these expectations and assumptions result in specific claims regarding curriculum design, development and delivery. Students are registering to study with overseas institutions which offer programmes often developed within considerably different cultures and contexts than the students’ own. Institutions offering ‘international’ qualifications are in danger of (and often accused of) prescribing Anglophone epistemologies as universally true and applicable. Such curricula may result in cultures losing their distinctive features or becoming syncretistic mixtures of cultural practices dislocated from their original locations. This paper shares the findings of a research project in the context of a large distance learning Business School in which 500 students, faculty, tutors and employers were surveyed regarding their expectations of an MBA with a stated claim of providing students with an ‘international’ learning experience. The findings reveal that the different stakeholder groups have very different views of what they expect from both an international business curriculum and an international mix of students. While all stakeholders stated several advantages of being exposed to diverse contexts (local and global, private and public) and different cultures; students and sponsors considered the ‘international’ nature of the curriculum to be less important than tutors and faculty. The findings will be of interest to faculty, curriculum and instructional designers, tutors, employers and higher education management.

The growth in using ICT to plan more effective learning in higher education necessitates a critical appropriation of the impact of ‘transactional immediacy’ on students’ experiences of online learning and teaching. As institutions attempt to counter the effect of ‘transactional distance’ by exploring opportunities offered by asynchronous and synchronous online learning environments, the ‘immediacy’ of online education is often valorised. ‘Transactional immediacy’ in online learning can result in experiences of disorientation and dissonance. These experiences, though, are not necessarily negative. This paper shares findings from a study of students’ online journals in the Professional Certificate in Management, offered by the OU Business School. The study found ample evidence of a variety of dislocations which students experience, but also a variety of locating strategies employed by students to deal with the multifaceted disequilibrium some experience in learning online. This dislocation can be technological, epistemological and ontological. In their learning journals, students reflect on such experiences, but also document a variety of strategies to self-author. This paper aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the notion of (dis)location in online learning; presents qualitative research findings regarding the (dis)locating experiences of students, and shares ideas for the design of online learning experiences within a hermeneutical framework of (dis)location. The findings have implications for the design, management and administration of online learning, and specifically for the use of online learning journals.

The surprising lack of pressure and speed in the centre of the vortex of a storm are in stark contrast to the force and destruction often experienced at its periphery. Many spectators watching a developing storm will be caught between fear and a desire to escape. The metaphor of a storm has been applied here to the emotions experienced by many students enrolling in online learning courses. Not only do the requirements of studying online collide with personal and professional commitments, the experience of learning online (often in groups) results in many students feeling displaced, scared or out of control. Learning diaries, especially in an online environment, present students with an opportunity to reach the centre of the vortex, though this may not be as quiet and safe as we may have presumed. This paper reports on students’ reflections in their learning diaries as a prescriptive part of the Professional Certificate in Management offered by the Open University. The research focused on the unstructured learning diary entries of 12 students from one tutor group over an 18 day period of a short compulsory online course. This phenomenographic study used grounded theory as methodology to analyse and describe students’ use of their learning diaries. The research found ample evidence that online learning diaries provide students with a safe space to reflect on the vortex around them. Without a quiet and reflective centre, students may be overwhelmed by the wider forces impacting on them. Students’ postings provided rich descriptions of the vortex of studying online and the function of having a centre to which to withdraw. There is, however, also evidence that posting reflections in learning diaries can itself be a dislocating and uncomfortable experience for some learners, while others question its usefulness. The work provides practical and useful information for managers of online learning experiences, instructional designers and curriculum developers

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are almost taken-for-granted concepts in the broader context of open education, and specifically in the context of Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives, projects and practices. GO-GN, a Global OER Graduate Network, set out to investigate and develop its DEI guidelines. This paper reports on the processes and findings of scoping DEI in the context of GO-GN. It also presents some of the project findings and provide the foundations of GO-GN guidelines for DEI. We then suggest some pointers for other OER practices and practitioners in embracing and foregrounding diversity, inclusion and equity.

Despite evidence that learning analytics has become institutionalised within higher education since its emergence in 2011, there remain questions regarding its impact on informing curricula, pedagogy and ultimately, on student success. A variety of factors can impact on the successful implementation of learning analytics. Despite its huge potential, learning analytics may become stuck in the middle of, inter alia, the need to balance operational needs and resource allocation, and different perceptions of learning, agency and loci of control in learning, teaching and macro-societal factors. In this conceptual paper, we propose an institutional cartography of learning analytics and explore the impact of a number of micro, meso and macro institutional factors that may impact and shape the institutionalisation of learning analytics. We utilise a socio-critical model for understanding student success as a conceptual basis for developing this cartography.

In this chapter, we examine the notion of responsible learning analytics. Such an approach requires institutions to take an answerable and response-able approach to using student data. Learning analytics, like all educational technology, is shaped by a range of social, political, economic and cultural agendas. As such, this chapter argues that ethical and responsible learning analytics is central to a consideration of each of the eight dimensions of Khan’s e-learning framework (Khan, 2010). The chapter concludes by suggesting a number of pointers for higher education institutions to ensure the adoption of a responsible and responsive approach to learning analytics.

Few would contest the impact of technology on modern day society. There are, however, wide-ranging opinions and contestations regarding the social and ethical implications of the increasing entanglement of our lives with technology (Introna, 2017; Marx, 2016; Robertson & Travaglia, 2017). Introna (2017) suggests that “At the center of this technology/society interrelationship we find many complex questions about the nature of the human, the technical, agency, autonomy, freedom and much more” (para. 1). Central to our entanglement in this techno-societal complex is the issue of the use of personal data and the scope and limitations of individuals’ agency (a) to make rational, informed choices regarding consent to having their data collected, analyzed, and used (Prinsloo & Slade, 2015); (b) for freely gifting (Kitchin, 2013, p. 263) unrequested data in ways that suggest digital promiscuity (Payne, 2014); and (c) to negotiate terms and conditions around receiving benefits in exchange for personal data, in a phenomenon known as the “privacy calculus” (Knijnenburg, Raybourn, Cherry, Wilkinson, Sivakumar, & Sloan, 2017, para. 1). It is also important to note the increasing automated and directed surveillance of digital users without their knowledge or consent (Kitchin, 2013), which raises “unprecedented challenges to how we currently elicit, secure, and sustain user consent” (Luger, Rodden, Jirotka, & Edwards, 2014, p. 613). The Big Data revolution (Kitchin, 2014) with its accompanying generative mechanisms for extracting data “has become an idea with social and political power in its own right” (Robertson & Travaglia, 2017, para. 1). The reductive quantification of complex social phenomena and the combination of different datasets suggest the need to (re)consider the notion of consent, the scope and limitations of informed consent, in general (Wilson, 2017), and, more specifically, consent in the context of higher education. As the volume, velocity, and variety in data h

Recently a critical turn has emerged in the open education literature. In addition to voices which have critiqued open education as under-theorised (Bayne, Knox & Ross, 2015; Edwards, 2015; Gourlay, 2015; Knox, 2013; Oliver, 2015; Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012), another strand has called upon scholars and practitioners to refocus their attention on open educational practices (OEP). From this perspective, open forms of education (like education in general) are framed as a range of processes undertaken by human beings, rather than consisting specifically in the resources they create or amend. This framing appears to offer the possibility of deeper insights into actual practices, but whereas the forms of openness afforded by OER or MOOCs are well understood, it is less obvious what exactly makes a practice open. However, this inherent ambiguity might be viewed as a strength rather than a weakness of OEP: while much of the literature discussing OEP has framed the concept in relation to OER, there is a more expansive concept of OEP which recognises other forms of openness and ways of opening (Havemann, 2016; Cronin, 2017; Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Roberts et al, 2018). Taking its cue from this line of enquiry, this chapter considers the question of what is open about (or opened by) open education, and how the concept of OEP can potentially aid this investigation. It focuses on a case study of practice at Birkbeck, University of London, which is an institution of higher education that itself grew out of a particular instance of opening almost 200 years ago. The case study will illustrate the senses in which Birkbeck, along with the particular case of practice under study, is characterised by an interplay of openings and closures.

This brief chapter explores the feasibility of teaching (a code of) ethics against a background which examines our views around data scientists, data analysis, data and, in particular, student data. It touches upon different approaches to ethics and asks whether teaching ethics would make any difference.

There are many studies regarding the benefit of incorporating learning diaries into learning experiences in higher education, though very little research documenting what students record when those diaries are unstructured. There are several arguments and counter-arguments for providing students with structure in their completion of learning diaries. Structure is said to limit spontaneity, while unstructured learning diaries are considered to be logs or diaries rather than reflective journals. This study presents evidence that unstructured, private learning diaries can assist students to become more self-aware - and aware of others - while learning together online. This research provides useful pointers for managers and designers of online learning experiences regarding the role that online learning diaries can play in facilitating reflection.

Much research in face-to-face contexts outlines the importance of early adjustment on students’ higher education experiences. However, few studies have replicated this research in distance learning contexts to unpack the early multifaceted adjustments associated with studying in absence of a physical campus. This is particularly needed from a Global South perspective, where countries like South Africa have become regional hubs for distance learners. To explore distance learners’ adjustment experiences, this study analysed results from a Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) with 320 distance learners at the University of South Africa, mixed with qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended questions. The results outlined key factors that impact distance learning experiences for students in South Africa, including demographic variables, class, language, and access to resources. These findings, compared with similar work in face-to-face contexts, suggest areas in need of additional support from distance education providers in South Africa and beyond.