Tag Archives: reflection

Research update #59: I’m back – what did I miss?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

I took a little time off – as it appears many of my fellow candidates are – due to the plague and the impact it is having on, well, everything. Work in the online education space has been frantic and it seemed like a good time not to try to do too much.

One thing that I’m very conscious of now is the fact that the role and value (at least hopefully perceptions of value) of edvisors has changed now. I know this will impact what I’m looking at but it’s not really clear yet how. Academics are absolutely far more aware that we exist and largely seem to be appreciative of this fact. What does this mean for my main research question?

What strategies are used in HE to promote understanding of the roles and demonstrate the value of edvisors among academic staff and more broadly within the institution?

To be honest, I’ve been thinking for a while now that this isn’t the right question anyway. It doesn’t explain why I’m doing this research (the problem) and it moves straight into looking for a narrow set of solutions for an assumed problem. This problem being that academics and management don’t know what edvisors do or what they contribute. It also assumes that edvisors and edvisor units have the time, energy, skill or political capital to develop and implement formal strategies to address this.

The heart of the issue is really, to put it plainly, why don’t people respect our skills, experience and knowledge and take our advice seriously? Which seems possibly a bit pointed or needy as a research question but that’s not hard to tweak. So this is something that I’m thinking seriously about at the moment.

Something else is the fact that I’ve never been entirely happy with my methodology. Unfortunately, as someone who hasn’t done a lot of research before – at least at this scale – I’m dealing with a lot of unknown unknowns. How much data do you need for a good thesis? People have said to me recently that the best PhD is a done one, so maybe the question is just how much data do you need for a thesis – but I feel like if I’m putting in the time, it needs to be good.

Generally my approach when faced with a big project is to gather up everything that seems to have some value and throw it at the wall to see what sticks. Then it is just a gradual process of filtering and refining. The problem is that the scope of “everything” has expanded to cover edvisors across three roles, academics and leaders in potentially 40+ universities around Australia, as well as policy documents, job ads and position descriptions, organisational structures and whatever else crops up along the way. Given my ties to the TELedvisors community, I’d hope that this group will also play a substantial part of what I’m doing.

But maybe this can be done more cleverly.

Could there be enough material just in the edvisor community? Even in the TELedvisor community? (486 members and counting). I’d long felt that case studies were an interesting way to tell a story but lack something authoritative. But I’ve been reading Five misunderstandings about case study research by Flyvbjerg (2006) and I’m starting to see the possibilities. (I think I’ll do a separate post about this)

If the world’s going to change, I might as well join in.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363

Research update #56: Tying theory to methodology

While I’m waiting for faculty approval to submit to university ethics, I have time to consider some of my bigger questions sitting in the ‘later pile’. A big one relates to how (if?) my theoretical framework relates to my methodology in a meaningful way. There are a couple of theories that I’m drawing on for this research, though to be honest I’m not sure how officially ‘theoretical’ they are.

There’s work by Whitchurch and others about the Third Space as it relates to Higher Education, the liminal space between admin and academic that edvisors occupy. And there’s work relating to Social Practice theory by Shove and others that I feel may be helpful in defining the different kinds of edvisors by the work edvisors they do. It may also reveal something about how we/they work with academics and management in terms of the ways practices are disseminated and evolve. This seems to crossover into the realms of change management, which I seem to be hearing a lot about recently in this space and which perhaps seems like a useful angle to take, strategically. (Truth be told though, I think that too much weight is probably given to change and not enough to maintenance and sustainability of existing good learning and teaching practices, so who knows where I’ll land on that)

There are a couple of concerns that I have – are the theories that I’m looking at robust enough to inform the research that I’m doing? Are they even really theories, as such? Shouldn’t they be providing me with some ideas about how I should be designing my research data collection? To date, I’ve been largely assuming that they will come to the fore when I eventually get onto data analysis and trying to make some meaning from the things I’ve collected.

Nobody seems to be jumping up and down about this though – which has become my default indicator of whether I’m going horribly wrong – so I guess I’ll just keep meandering along. I have reached out to a couple of academics in business faculties now though, with an interest in the way organisations work because I have a strong feeling that this is an important factor in successful edvisor/academic/management collaboration but I have no idea what the language is that I need to describe this or what models or frameworks will best help to understand it. I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like about doing this PhD study is the opportunities that it creates to reach out to people who have done interesting work, who, for the most part seem willing to share their expertise.

It draws into sharp contrast a comment yesterday from one of the academics on my progress review panel. I asked whether my blogging here, as a way of getting my ideas straight, might prove problematic down the road with my thesis – i.e. are there risks of being pinged for self plagiarism or something? I’m pretty sure that my writing style here is far more casual than my academic writing style but we do also have go-to turns of phrase and words that we favour. (I know I really overuse ‘particularly’, ‘however’, ‘interesting’, and a few others but I struggle to find replacements that feel as much like me). Anyway, the academic seemed just as concerned about people stealing my ideas. Which I guess it was nice that someone thinks I might have ideas worth stealing but, given that my entire aim with this research (as far as I know currently) is to improve and change practices and relationships with edvisors, I’m mostly of the opinion that I want my ideas to circulate and evolve. But maybe I’m naive.

Anyway, more things to think about.

#Research Update 54: No more excuses

(Caution – this is very rambly and introspective and I think I largely used this to tease out some ideas that seem quite obvious in hindsight. You can pretty safely skip this post, even if you sometimes find my other ones interesting)

A couple more months have passed since I went through my confirmation and while I’ve been letting ideas percolate and I’ve been developing plans, it feels like there hasn’t been enough pixels put to e-paper

I caught up with Peter, who continues to assure me that I’m not aiming too high, and he said a few times that more than anything else, I need to be taking notes about everything. That was one thing that I was using this blog for and it is the thing that I am returning to.

I actually like writing and I don’t feel like I get to do enough of it in my day-to-day – or at least I should say, I don’t get to do enough satisfying writing. Emails written and instruction/process writing has skyrocketed as I slowly get my head around the challenges of a shared management role in a Higher Education institution. In those cases (other than instructions and processes), a lot of what I’m writing still feels like it is wrong because the landscape is changing so quickly that it is incredibly difficult to have the context and rationale of many of the things I’m responding to. I am quickly – though not quickly enough – learning that I’m not in a position to raise questions about decisions made at an executive level and I need to get on with just implementing them. Which is ironic I guess because I feel as though many of the calls that I have been making are similarly questioned by my team members and I know how frustrating that is. (Because I have the full context perhaps and they don’t? Who knows – that does at least seem to be one thing I can try to do better anyway)

The apparent binary between rational factors and emotional factors in decision making and activities at all levels is definitely something I had never given enough thought to before. Both types of factors are valid and need to be addressed, working with the emotional is a lot harder though. I feel as though I have touched on this a little in the Lit Review as far as teachers/academics goes but have greatly underestimated its impact across the educational ecosystem. I do suspect that this ecosystem is relatively unique in terms of workplaces and that people accustomed to working in “normal” work environments frequently don’t make allowances for it when they try to apply typical change management strategies and tools. It feels as though I have already seen it bewilder and crush the spirits of more than a few sensible and good people. It is probably both a strength and a weakness of Higher Education and I guess I need to find some way to explore and explain it in my research. I keep coming back to the Brew, Boud, Lucas & Crawford article from 2017 about “Responding to university policies and initiatives: the role of reflexivity in the mid-career academic” as something that both shocks and enlightens me about aspects of university culture. This culture seeps through all areas of the institution.

Coming back to methodology, one of my big concerns as I work out how to do the first round of interviews with Key Informants (approx 12 across edvisor and manager roles – maybe some teacher??) has been how to find a reflective sample of Australia’s Higher Ed landscape. In broad brushstrokes, we have city and regional/rural universities, “elite” research institutions (the Group of Eight), technology oriented universities, younger research focussed ones and a large set of ‘others’ that are often considered by learners as having more of a career-gaining purpose (though quality research is also done in these ones). Some institutions are financially well-off and others struggle for survival – which could both make them more open to innovation and teaching and learning support offered by edvisors as well as less able to pay for it. Culturally, the ‘elite’ universities – and particularly the academics within (to apply a ridiculously broad brush) might have much more restrictive internal hierarchies and cultures that downplay teaching support from ‘non-academics’ – or even teaching over all.

So how to allow for all of these factors (and so many more) in choosing which institutions to focus on in a logistically feasible study. Peter’s feeling – which surprised me but kind of makes sense – was that these distinctions fade away somewhat if I ultimately aim to gather rich data from all the Australian universities. All 40-43 of them (depending on the inclusion of private and international unis with Australian campuses).

In a separate writing practice I like to write ridiculously unfilmable science fiction and horror scripts. I used to write like a producer, only including the things that I thought were actually doable (not that I have the experience to know what that is any more). After a while though, I realised that this seriously stunted the enjoyment that I got from telling crazy stories and I decided that the first drafts needed to have everything and I could leave the problems of actually realising them as someone else’s problem. This feels a little bit like that in some ways and maybe it’s a terrible analogy as none of the scripts have ever been made but at the same time, it seems increasingly like the only way I am going to really learn what it is to be a researcher is to aim too high and then let reality whittle that down into something achievable.

So I guess I’m aiming to explore the relationships between edvisors, academics and management in all Australian Higher Ed institutions, in some way.

The key informant interviews are still as much about working out how to do this substantive piece of research and the different avenues that I might need to follow in order to get access to institutional data. Given that every institution is different, I guess I can only hope to get indicative insights into how this might be done rather than definitive information.

Any way I cut it, I need to actually be doing it to learn about this rather than trying to work out the perfect fully-formed solution in my head before I go and do it. Which will be a challenge but one not unlike my current new work role.

This has been my TED talk, thanks for listening. (It was really just about committing to some ideas I now realise and there is no better way to do this than have to commit them to screen.)

Research update #53: Methodology or Messodology?

I have identified around 17 different types of data that I want to collect for this research. I have been waiting for people who know more about this than I do to say – ‘you’re out of your mind’ – but as yet, nobody has.

It looks a little something like this.

More than a few of these things (edvisor numbers, quals, entry points, unit structures) don’t even necessarily answer my research questions but seem important in the journey towards them. The I.T bit in the corner is more of a stray thought because I’ve been spending a LOT of time in my own edvisor practice lately chatting to them and there is wealth of research to be done on their role in edutech projects that nobody seems to have touched on yet.

Determining how, where and from whom to gather this data is my first stage and will involve working closely with a set of key informants across institutions. I would assume a mix of edvisors, edvisor unit managers (or higher level types – DVCAs maybe?) and I’d imagine teachers but that seems slightly hazier right at the moment. One of the edvisors on the review panel did note that there is a major difference between types of edvisors and while I believe I have acknowledged that, I can probably give it a lot more thought in terms of considering the relationships between edvisors (academic developers, learning designers and learning technologists) and our perceptions of each other. So that’s fun.

For now, the logical thing to do seems to focus on the interviews with key informants, which are intended (amongst other things) to provide some insights into how to go about collecting the rest of this data. I’d like to get a reasonably representative cross-section of people in a range of different types of unis (I considered TAFE and private providers but that’s just too much extra), so I figure I need Group of Eight, Australian Technology Network, Innovative Research and Regional ones. But maybe that’s overdoing it. I do think there is something to be seen in comparing teaching oriented vs research oriented ones and perhaps also (though maybe this is the same thing) well resourced vs less well resourced institutions. Then again I haven’t considered any of these things as factors in my proposal so far, so ??? Anyway, I guess that falls under the research apprenticeship side of this whole endeavour.

But, be honest, this still seems like way too much to be trying to do right?