Editorial: oSoTL 2(3)

Vicki Dale¹, Matthew Barr¹ and Nathalie Tasler¹

¹University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

We open this issue on a thought-provoking note, with Hall comparing the characteristics of jazz to higher education. He highlights four aspects – improvisations, mistakes, collaboration, and leadership – which are common to both areas of expertise – and argues that lessons learned should be incorporated into academic development programmes if we are to prepare our educators and students for an uncertain world.

Sartania follows with another important area – widening participation in medicine – arguing that admission to medical school is not the endpoint, and that students from disadvantaged backgrounds will continue to experience challenges throughout their medical education, due to factors such as a lack of financial or peer support, potentially leading to imposter syndrome. Again, this is an area that academic and clinical staff can be made more aware of.

Staff experiences of a mandated assessment and feedback policy are the focus for Bikanga Ada. Based on interpretative thematic analysis of interviews with staff at an anonymous university, her research identified specific challenges – the personal and professional challenges of adhering to the policy, and mixed perceptions of the use and value of the feedback to students. The third theme identifies ways that the policy might be successfully implemented.

Reflections on an optional reflexive writing workshop for psychology students is the focus of the next paper. Paltoglou and her students, together with Nerantzi, reflect on the benefits of such an opportunity, noting that it helped students to find their individual voice, foster personal interests, learn through public engagement writing, and it sparked their interest in reflexive writing. It also enabled them to negotiate power structures in academia and form a writing habit.

Cairns’ article follows, which is a reflective work about her multiple identities as a post-graduate research student. An artist-teacher in Adult Community Learning, Cairns reflects on her changing identity through a series of autoethnographic vignettes, complemented by interview data from other artist-teacher participants which reveals the professional role to be multi-faceted. What follows is an interesting visual depiction of Cairns’ identity using Daichendt’s network of enterprises.

Collaborative learning in the online environment is the focus for Evangelista and Thrower; this quantitative study employs a validated Collaborative Learning Experiences Questionnaire to explore characteristics of health education educators in six United States institutions with respect to the extent to which they might predict willingness to incorporate online collaborative learning. A structural equation model revealed only respondent attitude to be a strong predictor for willingness; however, this was more substantial than in the original study.

Mio and Dombi used the revised two-factor Study Process Questionnaire to determine whether increased active learning – through peer assessment and online quizzes – could impact on engineering students’ approaches to learning, anticipating that surface learning scores would decrease and deep learning scores increase. The results were not as expected – the deep approach did not change but the surface score increased – which the authors reflect on, acknowledging that a surface approach might have to be expected in the early stages of higher education.

Kim and colleagues also take a quantitative approach, to investigate whether five quizzes, distributed evening throughout a course, were predictive of students’ performance in the final exam. The results showed that most of these time-points could be reliable predictors of performance, and that similar opportunities should be harnessed to identify students that require additional, targeted support earlier in their course.

Documentary research is the topic of Scholes’ paper; specifically, Scottish school inspection reports. He reflects on how students can be supported to use such sources for their own research dissertations and offers helpful guidance on how to interrogate these sources, which could be applied to school inspection documentation across the UK.

Last but certainly not least, we end with a call to action; Anderson and Tonner reflect on their use of the ‘head, heart, and hands’ model of education in the context of learning for sustainability. The authors reflect on their teaching of heritage, citizenship, and sustainability during the time of COP26, aligned with the aspirations of the United Nations and UNESCO, and encourage us to move beyond Thunberg’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ of lip service to a commitment to sustainability in practice.

We hope you will enjoy this issue as much as we have enjoyed reading it. We would like to thank the authors for trusting us with their valuable work, and thank the reviewers, without whom oSoTL would not exist. The challenge of running an open education journal that relies on many people’s goodwill is far outweighed by the pleasure we all feel to see such knowledge widely disseminated.