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Research has shown that critical data literacies development for educators is seldom a core component of most campus conversations about datafication, even as extractive, datafied systems become pervasive throughout the higher education sector. This article outlines findings from an international, qualitative, Comparative Case Study (CCS) of university professionals teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic. It overviews beliefs and barriers shaping educators’ responses to datafication and focuses specifically on their perceptions of faculty development opportunities related to digital classroom tools and to datafication more broadly. The article presents insights into how faculty understands higher education’s contemporary datafied infrastructure and highlights participants’ voices about faculty professional development and critical data literacies. Based on our findings, we recommend formal faculty development and broader professional learning conversations as a means of enhancing faculty awareness and agency within the higher education sector.

Abstract In recent decades, higher education institutions around the world have come to depend on complex digital infrastructures. In addition to registration, financial, and other operations platforms, digital classroom tools with built-in learning analytics capacities underpin many course delivery options. Taken together, these intersecting digital systems collect vast amounts of data from students, staff, and faculty. Educators’ work environments—and knowledge about their work environments—have been shifted by this rise in pervasive datafication. In this paper, we overview the ways faculty in a variety of institutional status positions and geographic locales understand this shift and make sense of the datafied infrastructures of their institutions. We present findings from a comparative case study (CCS) of university educators in six countries, examining participants’ knowledge, practices, experiences, and perspectives in relation to datafication, while tracing patterns across contexts. We draw on individual, systemic, and historical axes of comparison to demonstrate that in spite of structural barriers to educator data literacy, professionals teaching in higher education do have strong and informed ethical and pedagogical perspectives on datafication that warrant greater attention. Our study suggests a distinction between the understandings educators have of data processes, or technical specifics of datafication on campuses, and their understanding of big picture data paradigms and ethical implications. Educators were found to be far more knowledgeable and comfortable in paradigm discussions than they were in process ones, partly due to structural barriers that limit their involvement at the process level. Graphical Abstract

With the precipitous changes of the platform formerly known as Twitter, brought on by the change of ownership in late 2022, many networked educators sought, and continue to seek, new digital spaces to continue fostering and developing their digital practice. The authors of this article had all been actively networked on Twitter, and wanted to explore these changes in their professional worlds. As we sought out these spaces we critically began to interrogate our own practices on this platform to gain a deeper understanding of our practice going forward. We’ve approached this exploration through three vectors: an examination of the terms we use to describe movement from platform to platform, digital identity formation and disruption, and building human connection in digital spaces. The findings from our exploration yielded the following conclusions: (1) With regard to metaphors of movement (i.e., “migration”) we leave space open as to which metaphor to use as no metaphor is a perfect fit to explain the complexity of this phenomenon. (2) Digital identity/ies are multifaceted and sometimes place-specific, but some networked affordances seemed to encourage an ever-evolving digital identity more than other spaces. (3) Finally, digital spaces afford us the ability to carve out our own communities from the wider academic community, in the process developing a more owned and voiced identity. However as social media platforms are fleeting, those connections – and identities – are in danger of getting co-opted or deleted as platforms rise and fall.

This paper outlines and critically analyzes the process, expectations, and outputs of a ChatGPT search on what educators need to know about GenAI. The paper includes two versions of a prompted position paper generated by the free OpenAI tool ChatGPT 3.5. The prompt and the resulting paper(s) are identified as parallel, in content, to an educational video script on AI itself, whose creation the author has recently supervised. However, the content of the generated position paper(s) – while somewhat surface – turns out to be less problematic than the format, in spite of direct format-oriented prompting. This outcome and the implications of both content and format issues for the field of higher education are discussed in the reflection. The overall conclusion is that GenAI should be a site of critical literacy development, while broader concerns about the impacts of these tools on knowledge and society must also be foregrounded. (This abstract was written by the human author.)

Why is Openness in Education important, and why is it critically needed at this moment? As manifested in our guiding question, the significance of Openness in Education and its immediate necessity form the heart of this collaborative editorial piece. This rather straightforward, yet nuanced query has sparked this collective endeavour by using individual testimonies, which may also be taken as living narratives, to reveal the value of Openness in Education as a praxis. Such testimonies serve as rich, personal narratives, critical introspections, and experience-based accounts that function as sources of data. The data gleaned from these narratives points to the understanding of Openness in Education as a complex, multilayered concept intricately woven into an array of values. These range from aspects such as sharing, access, flexibility, affordability, enlightenment, barrier-removal, empowerment, care, individual agency, trust, innovation, sustainability, collaboration, co-creation, social justice, equity, transparency, inclusivity, decolonization, democratisation, participation, liberty, and respect for diversity. This editorial, as a product of collective endeavour, invites its readers to independently engage with individual narratives, fostering the creation of unique interpretations. This call stems from the distinctive character of each narrative as they voice individual researchers’ perspectives from around the globe, articulating their insights within their unique situational contexts.

This paper overviews an Open Educational Resource (OER) project aimed at developing digital literacies and open educational practice within a Faculty of Education. The project, titled (redacted), modelled and enacted three core digital learning principles – produsage, presence, and authentic audiences – for a broad audience of faculty and educators through the creation of videos and podcasts about educational technology tools. Designed to enable Bachelor of Education students to work towards authentic assignments and open practice, while leading professional development for faculty and practicing teachers, (redacted) also developed student literacies in assessing and evaluating educational technology platforms. The project’s video and podcast outputs, showcased on a sub-page of the official Faculty of Education website, reflect intensive student research into the classroom uses, data implications, and differentiated learning possibilities of digital classroom tools. The paper will introduce readers to the principles and pedagogy that shaped the design of (redacted), and examine its efforts to create a common conversation about digital learning between educators at all levels.

Research into emergent forms of scholarship focuses on academics’ use of technology for learning, teaching, and research. Very little attention has been paid in the literature to scholars’ uses of social media to disclose challenging personal and professional issues. This article addresses the identified gap in the literature and presents a qualitative investigation into the types of disclosures that 16 scholars made online and their reasons for doing so. Results identify wide-ranging personal and professional disclosures. Participants disclosed not only about academia-related issues but also about challenges pertaining to family, mental health, physical health, identity, and relationships. Some scholars disclosed as a way to grapple with challenges they faced; others disclosed tactically, sharing information for political rather than personal reasons. Yet others disclosed as a way to welcome care in their lives. In all instances, though, disclosures were selective, intentional, and approached with foresight.

Over recent decades, higher education infrastructures have become increasingly digitized and datafied. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated adoption of online learning platforms, trading the walls of the classroom for digital systems. Yet the surveillance, privacy, and discrimination issues that such systems raise are minimally understood by those who teach and learn within them. This paper overviews a 2020 pilot survey and 2021-2022 qualitative study of higher education instructors on a global scale. These projects explored the ways in which instructors from various locales and academic status positions understand data and classroom tools using proxy questions surrounding knowledge, practices, experiences, and perspectives. This paper draws on those studies to frame concerns about datafication amplifying issues in higher education. Its premises are twofold: first, if higher education instructors, as knowledge workers, are not knowledgeable about the contexts within which they teach and conduct scholarship, then the construct of shared governance within higher education is inevitably undermined. Secondly, if faculty and academic decision-makers are not intentional about equitable and ethical use of digital platforms within higher education, students' privacy and data is at risk. In this conceptual paper, we outline findings that frame datafication as a critical change within higher education culture.