ENGAGING ACADEM ICS I N
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOP M ENT FOR
TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED LEARNING
A synthesis project for the UK's Higher Education Academy
Dr Mira Vogel
Learning Technologist
Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit
Goldsmiths, University of London
January 2010
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Executive summary ................................. 3
Background ............................................. 4
Change in the higher education sector . 4
Students ............................................... 4
Professional development for academic
teachers ............................................... 5
Technologies ........................................ 6
What is engagement and why give it
attention? ............................................. 7
Methodology.......................................... 10
Technology-centred – pedagogy-centred
.............................................................. 12
Technocentricity and techno-negativity
........................................................... 12
Technical knowledge and academics . 12
Technical mastery .............................. 13
Beyond technical mastery .................. 14
Learner-centred - institution-centred ...... 16
Post-colonial views of development.... 16
Academics at the centre ..................... 17
Learners ............................................. 17
Centralised - local.................................. 18
The importance of culture ................... 18
Managerialism and autonomy ............ 19
Rejection ............................................ 19
'Capability building' rather than
'development' ..................................... 20
Balance and equilibrium ..................... 21
Extrinsic - intrinsic motivation ................ 22
Learners needs .................................. 22
Self-actualisation ................................ 22
Perceived relevance of TEL ............... 22
Remuneration and funding ................. 22
Coercion............................................. 23
Time and professional identity ............ 23
Situated - generic .................................. 26
One to one ......................................... 26
Grouping academics .......................... 26
Situating in practice ............................ 27
Situated learning as excluding
technologies ...................................... 27
Broadening out from situated practice 28
Support - development .......................... 29
Support rather than development ....... 29
Uniting support and development ...... 29
Negotiable - non-negotiable .................. 31
Institutional orientation to management
.......................................................... 31
Enthusiasm ........................................ 32
Reflective practice ............................. 32
Communities of practice .................... 33
Freedom within well-defined projects . 34
Accounting for informal development . 34
Institutional - third party software .......... 35
Recognising potential ........................ 35
Obstacles to going outside ................. 35
The needs of experimental academic
teachers ............................................. 36
Approaches with new tools ................ 37
Conditional success factors .................. 39
Taking advantage of being central ..... 39
M25 responses ............................... 40
Not imposing practice ........................ 40
Gaining attention................................ 41
'Capability-building' rather than
'development' ..................................... 41
M25 responses ............................... 41
Addressing cynicism about change .... 41
M25 responses ............................... 42
Addressing the 'practice gap' ............. 42
Maintaining motivation ....................... 42
M25 responses ............................... 42
Building confidence with technologies 43
M25 responses ............................... 43
Limitations and unanswered questions . 44
Limitations ......................................... 44
Unanswered questions ...................... 44
References ........................................... 46
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This literature review and synthesis seeks a better understanding of the successes and
informative failures experienced by academic developers in their work to kindle in academic
teachers an appreciation of the potential of technologies, and to support practice with
technologies which expresses educational principles.
Change is endemic in the higher education sector, and necessitates far-reaching innovation
based on educational principles and technological understanding. Technologies have
preoccupied institutional policy-makers in recent years, leading to the emergence of
technology-enhanced learning as a distinct concern. Alongside this, as a result of both
educational, recruitment and retention concerns, determination to understand and meet the
expectations and needs of students has gained the foreground.
It is frequently observed that e-learning practice has been technologically, rather than
pedagogically, driven. Although there is widespread recognition of the importance of
engaging academic teachers, there is little discussion about what this means for the design
of academic development encounters. This synthesis understands academics' engagement
as individual motivation – that is, an enthusiasm and commitment over and beyond mere
participation and, as such, a primary concern for academic developers.
The lack of literature dedicated to this subject necessitated wider reading to discover findings
about engagement within answers to different research questions.
After Land's (2001) map of the domain of academic development, findings have been
organised as a series of continuums:
 Technology-centred - pedagogy-centred
 Learner-centred - teacher-centred
 Centralised - local
 Extrinsic - intrinsic motivation
 Individualised - generalised
 Support - development ethos
 Negotiable – non-negotiable
 Institutional - third party software environments.
Given circumstances of endemic change within a plurality of contexts, there can be no
unified theory of engaging academics in professional development for e-learning. However, a
number of practices emerged as helpful for academic developers, and the policy-makers on
whom they depend, to adopt. These are discussed as conditional success factors, namely:
 Taking advantage of being central
 Not imposing practice
 Gaining attention
 ‘Capability-building’ rather than ‘development’
 Addressing cynicism about change
 Addressing the ‘practice gap’
 Maintaining motivation
 Building confidence with technologies.
Limitations of the work concern the lack of a body of literature dedicated to engaging
academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning. This seems an
omission; given the settled belief that academics are, and should be, autonomous, it then
ultimately falls to academics to grasp change and transform it purposefully into innovation.
Further unanswered questions about engagement are raised.
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
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BACKGROUND
CHANGE IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR
University education structures are famously resilient and enduring - sometimes called inert
and conservative by those who are interested in changing them (Hannan and Silver, 2000,
p78). Nevertheless the change which has characterised recent decades in the sector has
given rise to a stretched and difficult climate which can be summarised in terms of
massification, diversification of students, centralisation accompanied by more directions,
falling retention rates, falling ratio of teachers to learners, falling contact time, funding
shortfalls, technification, the information explosion, increased funding of educational projects,
marketisation and the commodification of learning, the introduction of fees for many students,
and the consequent recasting of students as customers with entitlements.
Endemic change has given rise to a far-reaching innovation agenda (innovation being a
conscious and intentional kind of, and response to, change). 1997 saw the publication of the
Dearing Report, a policy milestone which required every higher education institution (HEI) to
offer some form of professional development for new teaching staff. Dearing
counterweighted the dominating influence of the Research Assessment Exercise with the
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) as auditor of teaching quality in the sector; the QAA
undertook this in ways which divided academic opinion (Hannan, 2005; McNamee, 2004)
and has since brought in refinements. In 2000 the Higher Education Funding Council for
England introduced a requirement, lubricated by Teaching Quality Enhancement Funding
(TQEF), that institutions strategised learning and teaching.
An intensification of interest and investment in academic staff development ensued, and at
the time of writing it is rare for an HEI of size not to have some kind of central academic
development centre or unit. In this piece of work, the term ‘academic developer' is used in a
broad sense to include learning technologists. In the literature and the different vocabularies
across the sector, the terms 'academic development', 'professional development' and
'educational development' tend to be used interchangeably, although a good case could be
made for distinguishing between them in other contexts.
STUDENTS
In their landmark report for JISC and the British Library, Rowlands and colleagues (2008)
identified superficial use of information by younger people related to a deficit in knowledge
about how the web works, as well as a lack of understanding about how to synthesise new
ideas from information found on the web. Ipsos MORI's earlier Great Expectations study
(2008) concluded that student expectations about technologies were being met but noted
that these expectations were currently vague and unambitious. They explain:
"Thinking differently about information is going to be crucial as Web 2.0 takes off, for
both teachers and learners. To tell a story orally demands a certain set of skills, but to
write a good report, the information must be deployed in a different way. A television
journalist, weaving pictures and sound together to tell the story, needs a whole
different set of skills, manipulating the information in a new way; which academics
have called “secondary orality”. In the era of networking and emergent information
systems, a whole new range of skills is necessary in our academic culture; the skills
required to create online frameworks for collaborative, learner-led work."
The Great Expectations study also discovered a dislocation between the ways students used
online software in their social and learning lives. There is little demand for technologyenhanced learning from this quarter, and the evidence of a demand for the kinds of uses of
technologies conceived by TEL theorists was similarly absent from the interim report of a
British Library study of doctoral researchers (Education for Change Ltd, 2009).
Davidson and Goldberg (2009) take a different perspective, locating academia in the wider
world and urging innovation for ethical reasons:
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
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"Our charge was to accept the challenge of an Information Age and acknowledge, at
the conceptual as well as at the methodological level, the responsibilities of learning
at an epistemic moment when learning itself is the most dramatic medium of that
change. Technology, we insist, is not what constitutes the revolutionary nature of this
exciting moment. It is, rather, the potential for shared and interactive learning that Tim
Berners-Lee and other pioneers of the Internet built into its structure, its organization,
its model of governance and sustainability."
It is inconceivable that academia would deliberately persist in remaining aloof from a wider
world in which civil society is increasingly located in online interactions, and indeed none of
the authors discovered in the course of this review, even those who are sceptical about the
value of technologies, attempts to argue for this. However, the case for TEL is not currently
being made by students themselves, but on their behalf.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR ACADEMIC
TEACHERS
Strong educational principles, understanding and skills are the inner resources upon which
academic teachers and their collectivities, institutions, draw to navigate change with purpose
and judgement at a time when, as Bryson and Hand observe (2007) with reference to
Fromm, "education as a 'becoming' process has become subservient to the 'having' aspects.
Accordingly, in 2005 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) invested
£315 million in funding 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) to
elevate the importance of learning and teaching activities until 2010 (by which time it was
assumed that this would have been achieved). In 2009 HEFCE reorientated its 2005 strategy
"to reflect a more general, problem-based approach to institutional change as opposed to a
technologically determined approach" and a reassertion of the importance of staff
development:
"Strong pedagogic skills will enable staff to make good use of ICT and other
resources to support student learning, and to be better placed to revise approaches
as technologies change."
This took the form of a number of framework recommendations:
"All staff have opportunities to develop and practise skills for enhancing learning
through the use of technology"
"Staff skills for technology-enhanced learning are recognised in their roles and
responsibilities and in reward structures"
"Staff engage actively with the scholarship of teaching and are involved in innovation
in using technology for learning and teaching".
Thus, academic professional development for e-learning has become externalised, a
corporate concern with the aim of deploying staff strategically. Where it is both compulsory
and understood to serve an agenda which academics do not share, this can provoke
disaffection and consequent Machiavellian responses. One conscientious objector to
development is Erica McWilliam (2002), whose following observation is relevant beyond the
health and safety agenda it references:
"Many academics can and do resist this sort of colonisation of their time and
activities; others are more Machiavellian, choosing instead to enter the discursive
domain of health-and-safety by framing their particular research and teaching needs
as health-and-safety issues. ‘If you really need funding’, I was recently told by a
leading scholar, ‘see if you can mount a health-and-safety argument’. These are the
sorts of language games that consume heads of university departments when the
logic is to ‘do more with less’. In paying attention to these games, academics must
necessarily spend significantly less time engaging with knowledge that produces new
scholarship."
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Another conscientious objector is Tara Brabazon who, in her assertive and polemical 2007
book 'The university of Google' (2007), marshals many arguments against institutional
managers' interpretations of technological innovation. She argues (p120) that "...by
continually stressing the new and the innovative, the intellectual capital that staff have built
through the years of experience is discredited". Appalled by the quality of one recorded
lecture, she generalises her condemnation (p125):
"Instead of teaching staff developing - with time, precision and consideration materials that utilize the specific attributes of the web such as hypertext links, the ilecture is a cheap, inappropriate and low quality application for education. It confirms
that the education revolution never arrived. The only managerial option was to upload
already existing - analogue - lectures, ignoring intellectual property rights, and hope
that nobody would notice. ... With the prototype i-lecture stream being garbled,
inadequate and incomplete, it remains a metaphor for the state of technology policy in
educational settings."
Insisting that "education is not convenient" (p128) and free with references to students'
laziness, she talks of academics' feelings of powerlessness confronted with misplaced
student priorities and expectations, alongside managers' cost-cutting initiatives.
Institutionally located in this tense space between management, students and academics,
academic developers attempt to make their contribution. Ray Land (2008) summarises the
discomfort of academic developers as they seek to warrant the attention of their academic
colleagues, to make the case for the robustness of the evidence-base of their practice, to fit
in around disciplinary understandings, and all this without insinuating professional
incompetence:
"Academic development knowledge is often 'alien' or 'troublesome' knowledge ... If
the warrant is developers' own professional experience and expertise within the
teaching and learning domain, then this too is open to challenge in terms of its
disciplinary specificity, inappropriateness or degree of currency. There is an issue
here of academic developers still feeling the need to earn a right to be heard in higher
education, to find an effective voice within the sector, let alone a critical voice."
However, as the Higher Education Academy's Pathfinder projects found (HEA 2008), many
academic developers do negotiate mutually influential partnerships with academic
colleagues.
TECHNOLOGIES
Teaching and learning activities and student expectations (problematised by Brabazon,
2007) have been the main forces behind the strategic uptake of technologies by HEIs
(UCISA, 2008). However, although much infrastructure and equipment is in place, its
incorporation has stalled. In 2000 Surry and Land noted "sporadic successes and isolated
pockets of innovation". In their work for The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education,
Becker and Jokivirta (2007) found that although over three quarters of Commonwealth
institutions had implemented an institution-wide online learning platform, less than one
quarter had integrated them into learning and teaching activities to a significant degree. The
HEA (2008) observes that "at senior level in institutions there is sometimes compliance with
the rhetoric of e-learning and technology-enhanced learning and teaching, with no clear
evidence that this is truly understood".
Perhaps the most looming challenge here is the fast pace and plurality of technological
change which has imbued new technologies, and the practices they make possible, with an
ephemeral quality Clegg and colleagues (2000) refer to as "the shortening life of knowledge
and skills". In this respect, change has become endemic to higher education; it is no longer
possible to think of it as having an endpoint or even a goal. Opportunity, willingness and
ability of academic teachers "to capitalize on the unique attributes of a particular technology
for use in existing designs, while generating new designs rooted in emerging theory"
(Hannafin and Land, 1997) is not currently a sine qua non of academic teaching practice, but
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
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many commentators predict that these qualities will be important or crucial to the ongoing
survival of universities as teaching institutions, and by implication to the survival of academic
teachers as we know them.
WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT A ND WHY GIVE IT ATTENTION?
Unsurprisingly - because imagination depends on prior knowledge - there is little evidence of
demand for the kinds of technological uses conceived by educational technology theorists.
The obstacles to innovation are such that, by way of an example, the HEA observed (2008)
even the Institute of Education's internationally respected e-pedagogy research had made
little impact on its own learning and teaching.
A quietist response here might note that since students are satisfied and academics perceive
little need to adopt technologies, the dark predictions of precipitous change seem to recede.
However, horizon scanners doubt this state of affairs can endure. In his 2009 report, Melville
refers to current students "managing a disjuncture" and predicts "the next generation is
unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary". Canadian
government advisor Stephen Downes (2009) predicts the future reminiscences of the HE
community: “[i]n the years to come, we will say that it was a quiet decade, with the existing
system having remained largely unchanged, almost unsuspecting, even, of the major
changes that were to follow”.
Part of the problem with a strategic, centralised approach to professional development for
TEL is that it is frequently undertaken superficially. Whether out of deference to the
independence of individual institutions or for some other reason, the matter of how
academics might be motivated, and why they might not be, has been left largely
undiscussed.
Academic developers have always had to work hard to establish their credibility and
entitlement to make recommendations to academic staff. Since Dearing, the majority of
academic development units have come under the direct remit of senior management
(Gosling, 2009) and, with exceptions, these have an increasingly strategic role in achieving
institutional ends. For academic developers, their new relevance can be a mixed blessing
involving an element of managerialism and interior conflict. As one of Gosling's respondents,
an e-learning lead, comments:
"Regrettably, achieving that [a stronger strategic role] has meant many compromises
which have made us more “main stream”, which at [X university] means “centralised”.
In that sense, we are further from practical academic acceptance than we were
before. (Respondent, pre-1992 university)"
This threat to credibility has come about in parallel with a new bluntness about using findings
about student needs to "push through change" (Bell and Bell, 2005; BIS, 2009). In the
current straitened times there is a sense that institutional policy-makers view the task of
convincing academics of the intrinsic worth of proposed changes as a lost cause (Corbyn,
2009).
Kandbinger's (2003) survey of Australian online academic development exposed an almost
wholly informational approach to technology use, which was assumed to have worked unless
a problem was reported. In the institution where Connelly and Rourke (2007) undertook their
evaluation of continuing professional development (CPD) for e-learning, they found that
success was measured in technology use and volume of material accessed. There is little
sign that younger academics are approaching technologies in substantially different ways;
Education for Change Ltd (2009) found that on the whole the 5408 doctoral students they
surveyed for the major 'Researchers of Tomorrow' project do not use emergent or advanced
technologies – such as Web 2.0 tools, virtual research environments and e-portfolios ‐ in
their research work but show the same patterns as other age groups in this respect. Surry
and Land (2000) observe that change depends not only on opportunity but on the recognition
of that opportunity along with the motivation to act. They propose four categories of
motivation: awareness; relevance; confidence; and satisfaction (together, ARCS) in
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
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response. Drawing on ARCS for her paper on strategy-making and implementation of online
teaching at the level of a small department, Roberts (2006) notes many individual barriers to
engagement which she summarises in terms of "belief", "comfort", "fear", "threat" and
"demands". Engagement, then, is very much a personal, as well as structural, matter.
The Higher Education Academy / JISC E-Learning Benchmarking and Pathfinder
Programme (2008) was explicit in its endorsement of approaches aimed at "transforming
people rather than technology innovation":
"... a majority of the projects can be characterised as aimed at building relationships,
rather than at technology development. Within institutions we can view the
Pathfinders as situated within a long process of awareness raising and persuasion."
For these reasons, engagement here is conceived as motivation - enthusiasm, interest and
ongoing commitment - on the part of an academic teacher to explore the potential of
technologies in their practice. This view of engagement suggests certain orientations to
academic development which are centred on the academic teacher as an autonomous
individual rather than as an actor to be domesticated within a system. In his study of different
staff development orientations, Land (2001) summarised these kinds of person-oriented
approach as:
 romantic (ecological humanist): concerned with personal development, growth and wellbeing of individual academics within the organisation
 interpretive-hermeneutic: working towards new shared insights and practice through a
dialectic approach of intelligent conversation
 reflective practitioner: fostering a culture of self- or mutually critical reflection on the part
of colleagues in order to achieve continuous improvement
 Cognitive science
 New learning;
technologies
SYSTEMS ORIENTATION
Institutional
managers
Employers, government
agencies
Entrepreneur
Funding bodies / quality
agencies / ILT
Activistmodeller
 Tips and hints on
practice
Vigilant opportunist
POLICY
DOMESTICATING
Professional compete
resource
Students
Enterprise
Work-based learning
Partnerships
Change management
Internal consultant
Human
management




INSTITUTION
Political
strategist
Educational
developers
Reflective
practitioner
Discipline
specific
Students,
individual
Romantic
academic
staff
PERSON ORIENTATION
 Phenomenographic
approaches
INDIVIDUAL
Figure 1: A model of academic development (after Land, 2001)
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
LIBERATING
CRITIQUE
Org behaviour
Management of change
Learning organisation
Accreditation
Lifelong learning etc
Quality Assurance
Educational researcher






Interpretivehermeneutic
 Critical theory
 Postmodernism
 Humanistic psychology
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These orientations are primarily concerned with changing attitudes and individual practices
rather than systems, and as such they seek the engagement and active, enthusiastic
participation of individuals. Land (see Figure 1) intersects his continuum of systemic and
individualistic approaches with a second continuum of liberation and domestication.
Domesticating approaches promote pre-defined ideas about best practice, whereas liberating
ones embody an ethos of critique.
This synthesis does not rule out engagement in any of Land's quadrants, acknowledging that
engagement under compulsory or "necessary" circumstances is possible in theory (Ferman,
2002; McNamee, 2004) though it is likely to happen despite rather than because of the
approach (Hanrahan et al, 2001; Land, 2007; McWilliam, 2002; Smyth, 2003).
There are many other reasons to give engagement attention, briefly touched on as follows.
They are many and varied, but they all point to engagement of individual academics in
development activities as a critical factor in institutional well-being. Good practice in elearning is context-specific and impossible to define, therefore the strong forces of corporate
and strategic professional development demand interpretation in the light of a diversity of
academic and disciplinary principles. Higher education remains a sector whose essential
structures are extraordinarily enduring and in which, on the whole, the freedom, autonomy
and professional judgement of academics are valued and fiercely defended. In a sector
which values reconceptualisation as one of the highest forms of learning it would be
incongruous for approaches to teaching to be either habitual or managed; only academic
teachers can bring appropriate principles and judgement into the use technologies for
learning and teaching in their subject area. If, as Engestrom argues (1999) it is the creative
act, rather than the product of that act, which is key to an individual's development, then
there is a clear need to offer formative opportunities to individual academic teachers. UCISA
found (2008) that the presence of a committed champion - a role with the explicit aim of
engaging colleagues - was key to the rate at which technology-enhanced learning was
adopted in institutions. It is well recognised, too, that adoption is not tantamount to good
practice; although theorising the relationship between learning and teaching is problematic,
there is evidence that teachers' approaches affect those of learners (Hattie, 2003; Kember,
1997; Rea, 2007) and that a deep approach to teaching is therefore desirable. This
recognition does not necessarily translate into practice, however. There is an incongruity
between what Argyris and Schon (1974, p174-180) term teachers' "espoused theories"
(beliefs) and their "theories-in-use" (practice). They make the person-oriented assertion that:
"Educating students under the conditions that we are suggesting requires competent
teachers at the forefront of their field - teachers who are secure enough to recognize
and not be threatened by the lack of consensus about competent practice."
In addition, individuals should be aware of these incongruities and inconsistencies of
institutional rhetoric and practice, and respond with theories of their own. Relatedly, Wenger
(2000) sets up a duality of reification and participation which sheds light on the difference
between institutional visions for technologies, and participation in these (de Freitas and
Oliver, 2005; Shephard, 2004).
Less consideration has been given to the optimal circumstances for person-orientated
interventions in the field of staff development for technology-enhanced learning than to
systems-oriented interventions. In acknowledgement of the autonomy and professional
judgement of individual academics, this review seeks to address that.
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010
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METHODOLOGY
The following terms were used to search the peer-reviewed literature on Web of Knowledge,
ERIC, IngentaConnect, Google Scholar, the HEA and JISC:
 Academic / educational / staff development
 Online learning / e-learning / educational technology / learning technology
 Higher Education, academic, university
 Pedagogy / andragogy / theory
 Recruiting / Engaging
 Compulsory / Coercive
 Recognition / Reward / Incentive / Compensation
The literature included in this review was:
 Peer-reviewed literature, from an academic developer perspective
 Grey literature – reports from JISC, the HEA, the Quality Assurance Agency, the Staff
Development Agency and their international equivalents, as well as e-texts e.g. Scribd
 Informal literature such as blog posts and discussion forum contributions • Solicited
contributions from the disciplines which may be unpublished
 Other materials identified by HEA, ALT, members of JISC discussion groups, and the
M25 Learning Technologists Group.
It sought insights into:
 Engagement in, or responses to, professional development – formal or informal – for
TEL.
 Evidence of ‘viral’ or serendipitous spread of TEL among academics, without the
mediations of academic developers
 The impact of academic engagement in TEL on student learning
It quickly became clear that the literature dedicated to this particular topic was almost nonexistent, and that findings about engagement are often subsumed into research strands
which approach online learning as a systemic question of innovating or implementing. For
this reason the criteria for inclusion were adjusted to take in research on engagement which
was not based in e-learning, or research into professional development for e-learning which
was not explicitly concerned with engagement. The literature was read and digested into a
Google Spreadsheet which was opened to public view. The amount of potentially relevant
work identified exceeded the amount read.
Professional networks were contacted, requesting unpublished findings from within
institutions; some published material was forthcoming but no internal documents.
Prospective respondents were encouraged to arrange telephone or skype conversations to
discuss unpublished work; consequently there were conversations with three academic
developers (one of whom was also employed as an academic) and one academic. These
conversations helped to frame the reviewer’s responses to the literature.
A skeleton or framework for the sections of the synthesis was designed, the digests were reread and revisited paper by paper, integrating findings into the sections. Once a draft had
been written, we circulated the link to our networks and appealed for input.
Drawing on the work of Land (2001) in mapping the terrain of academic development, the
framework presenting the findings according to the following continuums:
 Technology-centred - pedagogy-centred
 Learner-centred - institution-centred
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 Centralised - local
 Extrinsic - intrinsic motivation
 Formal - informal
 Situated - generalised
 Support - development ethos
 Voluntary - compulsory
 Institutional - third party environments
The synthesis was drafted in CommentPress, a Wordpress blogging environment theme
created by the Institute for the Future of the Book, which allows for collaborative authoring
and paragraph-by-paragraph comments threads. The reviewer encouraged members of the
M25 Learning Technology Group to comment, but did not structure their engagement by
asking particular questions or designing activities to stimulate their thinking. A very small
number of comments were forthcoming. The opportunity to run a 30-minute activity to collect
direct feedback on some of the findings arose at the M25 Learning Technology Group
meeting, Friday 20th October, at the University of East London's Stratford Campus. At this
stage the report was incomplete but substantial and well-structured and including draft
conclusions in the form of success factors.
Over the course of a half-hour session, approximately 37 participants broke into five groups.
Each group received an A4 sheet with a different summary finding in the form of a title
followed by 3-5 brief bullet points. Groups were requested to delegate a scribe and a
presenter and discuss their finding for 10 minutes with respect to the question "How do these
findings relate to your own practice, and to what goes on in your institution?" Each scribe
recorded the discussion on the sheet, which each presenter used to give a two-minute
summary to the plenary group and then submitted to the author. There followed a brief
discussion. The activity went well and participation was animated, although it was felt that the
discussion was too brief and there were insufficient numbers of hand-out sheets. The
responses to the five findings discussed are integrated into the Success Factors section.
Continuum by continuum, the following sections discuss the different aspects of engagement
of academic teachers in professional engagement for technology-enhanced learning.
Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning
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TECHNOLOGY-CENTRED – PEDAGOGY-CENTRED
"The challenge for providers of courses is to give users sufficient technological
understanding to allow them to be confident in rejecting the technological
reductionism ... which shapes the debate about globalization and ICTs."
(Clegg et al, 2000)
This section considers technology-centred and pedagogy-centred approaches to academic
development.
TECHNOCENTRICITY AND TECHNO-NEGATIVITY
Surry and Land (1999) observe that access to technologies does not on its own lead to high
or insightful take-up. MacDonald and colleagues (2009) point to a failing in the sector where
technology is too often deterministically used to drive change. Poorly-conceptualised roll-outs
can tarnish academics' attitudes to future ones, entrenching negativity about technology.
However, in the light of Hussein's work (2008), this negativity and resistance can look selfconfident and assertive. Finding that interviewees in Ugandan institutions assumed bought-in
technological solutions to be inherently superior to local initiatives, Hussein attributes this to
Freirian internalisation of oppression and low self-esteem.
Academic developers in the area of TEL have been charged (e.g. Brabazon, 2007) with the
failing of technocentricity - here, the tendency to premise development activity on one or
other piece of technology to the detriment of learning and of relationships between and
among teachers and learners. Kandbinger and colleagues (2003) discovered a belief among
Australian academic developers who were using online environments but were not also elearning developers, that technologies were inadequate for representing pedagogical aspects
of collaboration and curriculum design to academics; consequently they used them in a
supplementary, information-centred way calculated to reduce costs. However, Kandbinger
and colleagues caution against the assumption that "information dissemination is always
inconsistent with inquiry-based values". Where a virtual learning environment is observed to
be fragmented, informational and even designless, in fact it may be functioning as valid part
of a dispersed gestalt fully apprehended by the tutor and their learners (Masterman and
Vogel, 2006. p55).
Technocentricity can also be a strategy adopted by academics to meet institutional demands.
The inclusion of pedagogy is particularly difficult in political contexts in which academics
attend development sessions in the hope and expectation of "immediate returns" (Clegg et
al, 2000), namely enabling them to evidence that they are using technologies to policymakers who themselves sometimes comply with the rhetoric of technology-enhanced
learning without demonstrating deep understanding (HEA, 2008).
TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND ACADEMICS
The Higher Education Academy's Pathfinder projects, many of which had focused on building
relationships rather than technological innovations, confirmed the realisation that the
availability of technologies is necessary but not sufficient to their use (HEA, 2008). During
their JISC-funded national Work With IT project exploring the impact of information
technologies on working practices in academic institutions (McDonald and colleagues, 2009)
explored ways of working and their implications for staff development, and found a lack of
provision for baselining the existing skills of academic staff and responding to their needs.
One way of addressing this is through distributed cognition across TEL development teams
or partnerships, where some partners are not burdened with the requirement of technical
knowledge. One example is Davis and Fill (2007) tactfully overlooking the uninitiated
language of the academics they worked with, and instead prioritising eliciting academics'
needs. They:
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"...have found that a good approach has been to allow the academics to specify their
needs, then to show them technological solutions that might meet those
requirements, rather than start with the technology. Thus, when the idea of a ‘nugget’
emerged from the early meetings that sought to establish common ground, the
learning technologists did not initially rush to replace it with the term ‘learning object’,
nor to expose the academics to emerging interoperability standards and metadata
theories."
Some have referred in common-sense terms to the need to protect academics from the
complexities of technologies. This may be a pragmatic approach welcomed by all, but others
argue that lack of understanding of the tools may restrict vision of how they could be used,
binding academic teachers to technologists for the longer term. However, a number of
Bluteau's and Krumin's (2008) participants demonstrated great relief when offered a division
of labour whereby academics were responsible for pedagogy and technologists, for
actualising the ideas with technologies. This enabled ideas to develop into entities, with an
according sense of fulfilment and self-appreciation. Adopting a similar division of labour in
their project to "build capability" at Leicester, Salmon and colleagues (2008) opted to use
only stable, "tried and tested" technologies hosted institutionally, a signal that academics
were anticipated to receive institutional help with them.
Westerman and Graham-Matheson (2008), by comparison, were conscious about the
implications of Web 2.0 technologies for the sustainability of TEL, and identified digital
literacy as key. They undertook a piece of action research in Canterbury Christchurch's
Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (LTEU) to build digital literacy among academics.
25 volunteer participants selected six digital tools from a suite of institutional and Web 2.0
tools assembled by the LTEU (including Google Reader, Wikipedia, Flickr and PowerPoint)
and devised their own personal development plans for the coming year. The LTEU provided
group workshops or demonstrations, with homework and a follow-up session. All but the
most experienced self-reported significant gains in digital literacy, and many reported easily
applying what they learnt to their practice. The participants also welcomed a continuing role
of supporting colleagues. However, it is not yet clear whether this model will be limited to a
small number of self-selected staff who "felt the digital world was burgeoning and they
needed to be more aware, more confident, more adaptable", and who were prepared to
undertake extra work for its own sake.
In the course of the Work With IT Project, McDonald and colleagues (2009) came to
recognise that "technology-driven change" is problematic and leads to "winners and losers"
within departments, dichotomous reactions which cannot entirely be accounted for by
personal outlook. They observe unnerving role slippage as technologies free individual users
from the requirement for a skilled mediator, and at the same time redistribute unwelcome
administrative tasks onto academics. However, they also note the fruitful collaborations
which can occur in the research arena in the absence of the coercion which often dogs
learning and teaching practice.
TECHNICAL MASTERY
Clegg and colleagues (2000) found that mastery of basic skills with the technologies under
consideration was an important and frequently overlooked precursor to engagement with the
learning and teaching potential of those technologies. Academics without this prior
knowledge expressed a "clear desire for a more instructional hands-on mode". Westerman
and Graham-Matheson (2008) also found that raising awareness of Web 2.0 tools in the
absence of training with them was inadequate. The short shelf-life of technology skills led
Clegg and colleagues to consider rejecting the reflective practice model in favour of
rehabilitating a training model with a task-based approach until academics - re-conceived as
users - had mastered the basic skills. Surry and Land (1997) included opportunities to master
various types of technology in their model of motivation. Shephard (2004) included familiarity
with technologies, some of which require a significant investment of time, as a discrete
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concern in a long list of prerequisites to "embarking on a significant e-learning venture".
McDonald and colleagues (2009) recommended that staff be empowered to become
sufficiently IT-literate to interact with technical people on their own behalf, rather than being
insulated and mediated between.
This discrete need challenges the prevailing espoused theory that the technicalities should
be subordinated to educational concerns, exemplified by the very popular summer school run
by Donelly and O'Rourke (2007) which, to avoid a division of e-learning into technologycentred or pedagogy-centred, focussed on the learners' interaction with the subject matter,
and delayed uploading materials until the final hour of the introductory day. Despite the pains
they took to avoid technocentrism, among the perceived threats mentioned by Donelly and
Rourke were concerns about deprofessionalisation, erosion of academic freedom and
agency, commercialisation, technocentric models eroding campus culture, erosion of facetime, increased pedagogical and technological uniformity. Surry and Land (1999) point out
that these academic perspectives are often at odds with those of "university administrators".
Favouring an integrated approach, the successes shared by participants in the Collaborative
Approaches to the Management of E-Learning (CAMEL) project (Higher Education Funding
Council for England and JISC InfoNet, 2006) rejected European Computer Driving Licencetype training in favour of "small chunks that relate to something they are actually doing", and
suggested that requests for technical support should be taken as "new opportunities to
disseminate new ideas, give pointers and engage staff further every time you interact with
them". The technical needs here are viewed as an opportunity to start a conversation about
pedagogy. However, to smuggle pedagogy into what are ostensibly responses to requests
for support with the technologies may be a pragmatic response to non-engagement at the
pedagogical level but, as Shephard (2004) points out, unless this is accounted for, it will not
be resourced by institutions.
BEYOND TECHNICAL MASTERY
As well as observing that "basic 'hard' IT skills such as proficiency with desktop applications
are increasingly viewed as essential", the Work With IT project (McDonald et al, 2009)
identified a number of non-technical, "social and relationship" skills required "to adapt to fully
exploit new business processes and capabilities" and "to perform the new technologyenhanced working practices effectively". These relate to use of information and
communication technologies, including the ability to define boundaries, and bonding in and
motivating teams online. For online work they also refer to appropriate attitudes of
adaptability and flexibility, and habits of mind such as reflection, critical thinking and
creativity. They point out that these skills and attitudes are the same ones which academics
are working to promote in their students.
McDonald and colleagues caution against confusing competency with good practice. As
technical innovation sweeps through academic institutions along with (although not
necessarily coordinated with) the employability agenda, there is a possibility that everything
which is not designated a technical skill or 'life' skill becomes invisible. It is salutory here to
keep in mind the experiences of Tara Brabazon (2007, p217) applauded by her students:
"By the standards of e-university marketing consultants, I had done everything wrong
throughout the semester. I had conducted all the lectures and tutorials, working way
over workload because I was not prepared for ill-qualified staff to baffle students with
generic competences rather than specific knowledge. There was no website attached
to the course, and I did not record my lectures in any form. I did not even use
PowerPoint. If students missed a session, there was no way for them to 'catch up'. I
was inflexible, disciplined and demanding ... I transgressed all the dogmatic rules for
flexibility established by educational managers. Yet the students stood and cheered
at the end."
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Tara Brabazon mistrusts the agenda to technologise higher education institutions. She
suspects that words like 'flexibility' and 'diversity' are fig leaves covering the same neoliberal
agenda which is marketising universities to their detriment. Her experiences of inept
technical renderings of established teaching methods only entrench these views. She
demands time for academics to familiarise themselves with and consider the potential of
technologies. Insisting that it fall to academics to decide how to exploit the technologies, she
denies that generalised competencies can stand in place of specific subject knowledge, and
provides sufficient evidence of her successes - even as she firmly refuses to meet the
expectations of her students - to demonstrate that student expectations are insufficient
reason to adopt technologies.
There is a majority view in this literature that pedagogy should be maintained as a key
concern in any development of IT skills in academics. There is also consensus that
inexperience with the technologies they are required to use, or wish to exploit, is a potentially
severe handicap for the individuals concerned. Institutions have responded in different ways,
including those which require academics to acquire skills, and those which relieve academics
of this expectation by resourcing a division of labour. Although there is a consensus that the
availability of technologies is insufficient, though necessary, to guaranteeing their confident
and pedagogically-informed use, there are no authoritative recommendations about
promoting familiarity and confidence in academics who are not particularly keen to use
technologies.
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LEARNER-CENTRED - INSTITUTION-CENTRED
"After all, if we lecturers are expected to provide an individualised learning experience
for our students, one would hope that we deserve the same consideration."
Bertolo, 2008
This section considers academic development which maintains the academics, as learners,
as a central concern, and academic development which serves institutional workplace
priorities.
POST-COLONIAL VIEWS OF DEVELOPMENT
The phenomenon of students being invoked to drive through change, e.g. Bell and Bell
(2005), becomes divisive where academics cite professional and academic reasons for their
reluctance to undertake that change. Worrying that "clicking replaces thinking" (p16) and "the
sweaty beauty of teaching" (p9) Tara Brabazon (2007) makes a sharp distinction between
responding to students as consumers, and responding to their needs as learners. Her
learners are required to disrupt the commonplace, interrogate multiple viewpoints, focus on
sociopolitical issues and pursue social justice. With this redemptive view of education, she
unites academics' and learners' needs by positioning them in opposition to a neo-liberal
agenda she perceives on the part of institutional managers. Having relegated the roles of
these policy-makers to the margins, she asserts that academics are better-placed to identify
students learning needs than students themselves, in their disorientation and inclination
towards laziness. However, or perhaps consequently, it is hard to grasp her views of
students' learning needs in this book. Their frequent presence in the book is as
"undergraduates who have no idea why they are at university" (p27), helpless desensitised
victims of neo-liberalism who require the protection of enlightened and principled academics.
Brabazon seeks to reposition academics at the centre of universities' learning and teaching
activities.
Earlier in the decade, in similar vein, but with almost no reference to learners in this particular
paper, Erica McWilliam (2002) asserts academics' independence from institutional
development agendas:
"The new imperative to teach by means of flexible delivery is a case in point,
predicated as it is on the assumption that academics are deficient as teachers, and
that, by and large, it is knowledge about new information and communication
technologies that can remediate that deficiency. In the same way that subsistence
mixed cropping has been declared to be a form of ignorance and mono-cropping for
the market a form of knowing in the Third World ... so too local academic enactments
of pedagogical work can come to be framed as a form of ignorance, to be overcome
with the application of new techniques."
With personal examples she demonstrates that professional development can be facile and
inappropriate to the point of insult.
McWilliams and Brabazon push back questions and assert their interests. In contrast,
applying post-colonialist theories of dehumanisation to his research into staff development
for e-learning, Abdullah Hussein (2008) found that although there was little evidence that the
African Virtual University - an imported, off-the-shelf 'solution' - was solving problems in
Ugandan institutions, academic developers and managers were forcing academics to
participate in monotype training for it. While the developers warned academics that their
students would "suffer" if academics refused to participate, no similar concern was shown for
academics' wellbeing. With reference to the work of Freire, Hussein points out the
dehumanisation of academics by institutional managers and their enforcers, the academic
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developers, and notes the tendency of oppressors to regard dehumanised people as
adaptable and manageable beings. In turn, oppressed people tend to internalise the
oppressors view of themselves. One senior academic interviewed by Hussein exemplifies
this internalisation of oppression when, positioning himself as an outsider, he pronounces
local knowledge to be inadequate. Academics were not invited to influence the provision, and
nor were learners, nor did they claim this as their right. On the contrary, all the interviewees
felt that importing tried-and-tested programmes and localising them was a good idea, a "deep
admiration”, “over excitement” and “copying” which Freire attributes to internalisation. Freire's
"banking style" of education, based on a view of learners as receptacles for facts, procedures
and figures consonant with an existing system, was strongly present in these approaches to
academic development for e-learning.
Such approaches can only be sustained with the kinds of institutional rules and requirements
which diminish the importance of autonomy and motivation, and therefore academics' scope
to innovate. As such they can only have a limited place in a sector which purports to value
independent, critical and creative thinking in its scholars, particularly in times of change.
ACADEMICS AT THE CENTRE
Alternatives to this managerial and monotypical model of academic development may be
situated, individualised or localised, and are discussed at more length in those sections.
While Ferman (2002), Bertolo (2008) and others continue to call for individualised support for
pedagogic development with technologies, one-to-one work is felt to be unresourcable.
Consequently, development which seeks to value academics' judgements and sense of
autonomy takes two broad approaches. One approach (Bluteau and Krumins, 2008; Cook et
al, 2008; Davis and Fill, 2007; Salmon et al, 2008) encourages academics to contribute
according to their strengths, rather than burdening them with the acquisition of technical
skills. Another approach is to co-opt enthusastic academics as Fellows or champions,
demonstrating to and supporting their colleagues in directions they choose (Hanrahan et al,
2001; Westerman and Graham-Matheson, 2008) allowing the institution to collect
descriptions and exemplars and build structures to support local practice which is felt to be
successful, rather than prescribing or proscribing practice.
LEARNERS
This literature review has focused on academics, rather than students, as learners.
Consequently, and with some exceptions (for example the e-Mentor scheme designed by
MacFarlan and Everett (2009) and the activities designed by Fitzgibbon and Jones (2004) in
which academics assumed the roles their learners would later take) the focus of the work
reviewed has tended to be on academic developers discovering ways to form optimal
relationships with academics. Notwithstanding the post-colonial views outlined above,
'optimal' here has usually been conceived as sustainable, respectful, trustworthy, convenient,
and facilitative. Given these concerns, students' presence has been backgrounded,
occasionally raised as a pretext in some institutional quality agenda (MacNamee, 2004),
change agenda (Bell and Bell, 2005) or other conundrum. Perhaps, in the current phase of
universities' experiments with TEL, the developers (who predominate as authors of this
literature) have after all preferred to defer to academics' pedagogical expertise rather than
acting as the enforcers of a putatively revenue-preoccupied management.
Tara Brabazon (2007) vindicates this deference by setting out to construct a scaffold for
emancipatory learning in an information age. Identifying the "seamless passage/confusion
between discovering and using information" as the major threat the Web poses to meaningmaking, and wary of literacy conceived as a cultural practice of reproduction, she explains
her approach (p29-30):
"The aim of this process is to give students - and citizens - the ability to move text into
diverse contexts, and observe how meanings change. Explicitness in method is
required to establish an 'enacted curriculum' rather than constructing (another) list of
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assessment criteria unread by students … Critical literacy remains an intervention,
signaling more than a decoding of text or a compliant reading of an ideologue’s
rantings. The aim is to create cycles of reflection. Operational literacy – encoding and
decoding – is a cultural practice of reproduction. Critical literacy requires the
production of argument, interpretation, critique and analysis.”
The origins of her scaffolding lie in her "intellectual allegiance and inheritance" (p215) within
the subject area, as well as her observations about her learners. Understanding how such
approaches are reached is presumably of great interest to academic developers. However
this review of engagement for TEL did not uncover any research which explicitly studied
academics' changing conceptions of online learning over time. This is an important gap.
CENTRALISED - LOCAL
"While there will always be tensions between an inside-out and an outside-in
orientation, both are needed. Central programs can challenge the taken-forgrantedness of local ways of operating, and local work can ensure that new initiatives
are embedded in changing work patterns of departments."
(Boud, 1999)
This section considers development activities which have been organised and run centrally
and those which have been devolved to, or occurred at, a local level. The main issue here is
the need to reconcile national and institutional agendas with the needs of academic teachers
as autonomous professionals within in their own contexts, as well as the needs of students.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE
Typologies about organisational cultures abound. Land (2001) reviews these. To pick out
four: cosmopolitan national and international reference points may lead academic
researchers to keep their institutions at arm's length; collegial cultures confer authority from
below; hierarchical, command-and-control cultures confer it from above; in politicised
cultures, power relations bring allegiances to bear on ethos. Accordingly, there is a plurality
of orientations to academic development practice, as academic developers attempt to
influence the practice of their constituents. De Freitas and Oliver (2005) broadly locate these
within accounts of change in organisations, alternatively Fordist, evolutionary, ecological,
community of practice and discourse-oriented, pointing out that these narratives make
different sense of the same policies to the point of incompatibility:
“For example, under the Fordist account the role of the champion is to use their
authority to ensure a new approach is accepted; within the discourse‐oriented
analysis, the same role is re‐cast as educative rather than coercive. The models are
thus inconsistent in their explanation of the use of power within processes of change.”
In her substantial study of institutional culture and attainment of strategic objectives - 38
interviews with staff across roles in six institutions - White (2007) found that managers
referenced external strategies (e.g. HEFCE, JISC) and institutional strategies (motivated by
HEFCE and JISC) but non-managers didn't. For White this illustrates that the strategies
weren't focused within institutions and functioned as drivers, rather than stimuli or inspiration,
for change. Therefore, she observes, strategies would require facilitation which might be
mixed with performance-oriented measures depending on whether the culture of the
institution tended towards the managerial or collegial (approaches which White observes to
reflect the professional identities within teaching-intensive and research-intensive institutions
respectively). She found that pockets of innovation in autonomous settings had less
likelihood of broadening out than those which occurred in managed circumstances (typically
teaching-intensive universities) where stretched resources often necessitated innovation and
close financial control, and e-learning was proposed and mainstreamed as "solutions".
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Thinking about promoting TEL within the other kind - the ‘disaggregated’ institutions where
collegiality rather than management is emphasised - Lisewski (2004) calls for less idealised
and more realistic characterisations of institutions by policy-makers, and a more “disfigured”
view of policy implementation processes:
“Learning technologies cannot be unproblematically applied to improve learning and
teaching practice. It is not just a question of putting in place the right ‘success factors’
but rather the need to have clear rationales which are effectively communicated
throughout all levels of the organization in conjunction with strategies which correctly
configure the cultural landscape and localized teaching and learning practice of the
HE organization”.
MANAGERIALISM AND AUTONOMY
McNamee (2004) reports his evaluation of an institution-wide teaching development
intervention at the University of Gloucester which, though centrally coordinated and
compulsory, was designed to respect autonomy and context. Staff came together in small
cognate groups which negotiated their own agenda according to individual and institutional
needs, and structured and conducted their own peer observations. McNamee describes
initial enthusiasm. Teaching staff appreciated the flagging and dissemination of new
evidence by the Centre for Teaching and Learning, and the opportunity to discuss new
evidence with colleagues in autonomous meetings. However, this enthusiasm quickly
dissipated when the institutional agendas of Quality Assurance and appraisal were perceived
to have intruded.
In comparison, the Teaching Research and Collaboration (TRAC) groups described by
Hanrahan and colleagues (2001) were "very successful" until institutional support was
withdrawn (the nature of the support is not explained) and they were replaced with a
workshop and seminar series. Hanrahan’s and colleagues' reading of Boud leads them to
speculate that the TRAC groups may have faltered because the formal support for risktaking, which had until then sheltered each risk-taker from the criticism of peers, had been
terminated.
In contrast to both of these cases, an unusual case of bottom-up, peer-initiated and selfreliant development in conditions of institutional neutrality, Roberts (2006) writes about the
experience of a small Organizational Leadership department staffed by new academics
which, after linking dips in retention with a lack of online provision, came to a collective
decision to address this lack. They determined that nine online courses would be developed
over three years, one per term, one academic leading on each, relying on each other's
expertise and auditing (a word which had disciplinary resonance and with which they were
comfortable) each other as "a learning function" which they connected to professional
development and scholarly activity. The desired outcome - increased recruitment and
retention - was achieved, finally attracting the senior management recognition and support
they had done without until then.
It is frequently pointed out that much, if not most, development is informal (Ferman, 2002;
Roberts, 2008). It is therefore important to recognise the work of the hardy and independent
contingent of academics in the sector who view continuous development as part of their
academic identity and set out to identify opportunities which they can purposefully, and as
individuals, integrate into their professional lives. Heigh (2005) took a serendipitous approach
in everyday conversations, to which he brought a repertoire of conversational "moves" to
promote reflection. However, while reflectiveness is indispensable to consciousness raising,
it is limited in terms of introducing new knowledge or getting to grips with new tools.
REJECTION
Land (2001) notes that power-coercive approaches tend to be the chosen approaches of
practitioners who are politically orientated. However, these can cause resistance, resentment
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and superficial, behavioural engagement. Hussein (2008) argues that such approaches bear
the hallmarks of colonialism, treating academics as deficient and obliging them to conform to
practices which they would not choose to undertake. Under these circumstances, academics'
self-confidence is liable to give way to an internalisation of power-holders' views of their
inferiority.
McWilliam (2000) conditionally rejects all professional development as anathema to
academic life, contaminated with domesticating, performative concepts of quality and crass
commercial values. On TEL:
"...local academic enactments of pedagogical work can come to be framed as a form
of ignorance, to be overcome with the application of new techniques. These new
techniques include mechanisms for ‘on-line’ teaching, the use of Powerpoint, email
and CD-Roms, multi-media and computer-assisted learning, and so on. The difficulty
here is not that any one is these techniques not worth knowing. It is rather that
‘flexible delivery’ threatens to collapse the complexity of pedagogical processes into a
‘technology will deliver’ quick fix, a version of monocropping to meet the student
market. Two myths are kept in place here. Not only does the myth that ‘technology
will deliver’ get maintained, but so too does the myth that students’ preference is for
virtual pedagogies over campus-based ones."
She argues that professional development it is resisted or met with more subversive
Machiavellian responses - for example, complied with to obtain funding from a dedicated pot.
Finally:
"To the extent that professional development is part of the modern populist form of
adult education called life-long learning, it must be suspect for its ‘headlong pursuit of
relevance as defined by the Market’ (p.1), and its complicity in the production of the
‘malleable-but-disciplined’ individual that is so necessary to enterprising culture."
McWilliam's appropriate demands for evidence about the need for academic development for
TEL have to some extent been responded to, and in the years since she wrote those words
parts of civil society have willingly migrated online, healing the perceived split between online
and offline worlds noted by Oliver and Trigwell (2005) – in social and economic existence, if
not in formal learning. However, where it exists, this suspicion of the centre and resistance to
its agenda as probably-unfavourable can be addressed through transparency, partnership
between academics and academic developers in agenda-setting, and resistance on the part
of developers to becoming enforcers of an agenda which the targetted academics do not
share.
'CAPABILITY BUILDING' RATHER THAN 'DEVEL OPMENT'
Engestrom argues (1999) that it is the creative act, rather than the product of that act, which
is key to an individual's development - and this belief is key to valuing informative failures
(McPherson, 2005). However, if development is understood as a process primarily of benefit
to an individual, then the product of that process, or the relevance of the process to the
institution, may be undervalued. The experiences of Davis and Fill (2007) tells them that
pockets of innovation may greatly enrich the teaching lives of the individuals involved, but
that they cannot broaden without the active support of senior management. They also note
that, while necessary, this support may not be sufficient if the innovation - in their case,
sharing reusable learning objects - is felt to be inappropriate.
On the other hand, Salmon and colleagues (2008) used the prospect of the 'product of the
act' to incentivise participation. They felt that success would depend on distancing their short
intensive approach to e-learning "capability building" from "routine staff development", and
succeeded in forming a fruitful "design partnership" with course teams of academic teachers:
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"Previously, many academics had worked largely alone on developing their courses:
very few had experienced the benefits of working with learning technologists and
subject librarians in a structured way. Interviews confirmed that bringing the team
together to begin planning pedagogy and course development was a valued change
in their practice. The process provided opportunities to ‘thrash out team differences
and come together to a team consensus’ ... and ‘real enjoyment and enthusiasm
[was] experienced by course teams’."
Faced with an 'implementation dip' in newly-purchased technologies which they attributed to
a combination of low skills and culture, MacFarlan and Everett (2009) developed a means of
building capability with academic staff and students working one-to-one in situated contexts.
Their pioneering e-mentoring scheme created partnerships between a lecturer who was
inexperienced with technologies and a learner who was confident with them. The institution
offered training sessions with the technologies to both partners (there were 75 partnerships
in 2009, with interest spreading by repute) and the two would take an as-and-when, on-thejob approach to working technologies into designs for learning. Lecturers reported feeling
more relaxed about using technologies in the classroom and were not reluctant to ask for
help. There was a suggestion that students were primarily required to provide technical
support, and that any educational focus was on their own initiative. Their sense of
involvement in their learning was a predictor of their continuing involvement in the scheme.
BALANCE AND EQUILIBRIUM
The significant challenge is to balance the advantages of a centralised provision and support
for innovation with a respectful view of academic teachers as necessarily autonomous
individuals whose learning needs are situated in their own practice.
Land (2001) gives some consideration to the cybernetic model of decision-making whereby
institutional goals are themselves shaped by "multitudinous individual decisions at the point
of activity", indicating that a bottom-up approach is necessary, even while also working to
influence top-down.
"As Birnbaum points out, universities seem to have enjoyed a remarkably stable
institutional history over many centuries without resort to tightly coupled management
structures. Elton (1998, p. 2) points out that such stability depends on ‘constant
adjustments and responses through cybernetic controls’ and on ‘self-correcting
mechanisms at a micro level based on negative feedback’ with information flowing
freely in all directions throughout the organization."
One example: in designing modules centrally at Plymouth University, Helen Beetham (2000)
and her colleagues built in transparency as an antidote to domestication and feelings of
resentment, "allowing opportunities to critique the underlying agendas from an informed
perspective".
Alternatively, for some authors there is a will to create or exploit dynamic imbalance.
McWilliams intimates that if the Machiavellian game of dodging staff development were more
interesting she, inspired by Lyotard, would be prepared to undertake it as part of her own
self-directed academic development. Land (2001) cites Berg's and Östergren's, (1972, p.
264-5) notion of cracks - inconsistencies, anomalies and conflicts which are intrinsic to any
human system - and which, to opportunists, represent a precondition of change. This
approach is, at least, a challenge to the inertia for which institutions are famous.
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EXTRINSIC - INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
"The course team introduced the idea of quality assurance. I grew impatient. Apart
from hating the technical rational language used in this form of policy speak I couldn’t
see what on earth it had to do with why I was there. My diary records extreme
frustration. However a few sessions later I was able to translate the purpose of the
session into a different context when I realized that – yes, I would as a course leader
steer the new ODL mode though our quality systems. I was really intrigued that as a
learner I had done what I see my own students doing all the time; lagging behind not
seeing the relevance until after the event . . . I was struck by how as an experienced
member of staff I still needed time to reframe the problem and could miss what was
astonishingly obvious."
(Clegg et al, 2000)
This section considers the different reasons academics undertake professional development
and what is known about how these affect engagement and later practice.
LEARNERS NEEDS
Judgements about learners' needs underpin most academic decision-making about using
technologies for the purposes of education (rather than content). In the literature reviewed,
the virtue of TEL has often been taken as a given unless it is perceived to be problematic.
Eynon's (2008) interviewees pointed out the potential reduction in contact if technologies
were used, arguing that students were demanding more contact rather than less, and that
contact was an important aspect of their motivation to learn. Brabazon (2008) also raises this
strongly (see the sub-section Learners).
SELF-ACTUALISATION
Bluteau and Krumins (2008) refer to Maslow (1987) in accounting for their participants'
motivations, arguing that reasons for engaging in this or that voluntary activity are always
intrinsic. They mention a number of different intrinsic motivations, including interest in elearning, the idea of carrying out some applied research, or learning a new skill. Similarly,
Eynon's (2008) respondents derived personal satisfaction from developing a new learning
approach, others from pursuing their interest in a new technology. It remains that many of the
academics studied in the work reviewed here were self-selected enthusiasts.
PERCEIVED RELEVANCE OF TEL
Relatedly, in their survey of technology-enhanced learning in British higher education,
Browne and colleagues (2008) found that where there was "less extensive use of
technology-enhanced learning tools than [the] institutional norm", the most-cited reason was
a perceived irrelevance of TEL to the learning and teaching approach. However, where use
was more extensive than the norm, this was primarily attributed to the presence of a
champion, somebody who represents the potential of TEL to colleagues.
Both Eynon (2008) and Kandbinger (2003) found that technologies were perceived as
providing learners with facts and information, but not for critical engagement with these.
Browne and colleagues (2008) asked (Question 3.3) "How is the development of technology
enhanced learning tools enabled within your institution?" They found that time for academic
development necessary to consider relevance was significantly less enabled than funding
TEL as a service and funding projects.
REMUNERATION AND FUNDING
Discussing project-based professional development, Boud (1999) noted that:
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"...without the impetus of a funded project, the expectations of a wider group of
colleagues and the presence of some expertise in the facilitation of learning within the
group, it is unlikely that the initiative would have been successful. The desire to
improve teaching and learning in collaboration with colleagues alone would not have
been sufficient in the current highly demanding context of university departments."
Fielden and colleagues (2007) were more equivocal in a statement of institutional good
practice that “Appropriate recognition and rewards are available to incentivise staff; but
emphasis is also given to the fact that e-learning brings its own intrinsic benefit”. Clouder
and colleagues (2008) found that the optimal amount was a modest enough sum not to
require too much institutional or funder attention, but large enough to 'count' in individual
departments, confer status, be recorded as 'applied research activity', and justify recognition
by colleagues. However, along with Eynon (2008), they observe that money does not sustain
motivation. Hanrahan and colleagues (2001) and Bluteau and Krumins (2008) found that
while money was important to managers considering whether to release a member of staff
for project work, in fact it did not release time because organising for the release of time itself
expended too much time. They speculate that the project coordinators could helpfully take a
more active role in negotiating secondments with the secondee's manager.
MacFarlan and Everett (2009) rewarded their student e-mentors with vouchers, USB sticks
and the promise of a reference for prospective employers. They explicitly linked their scheme
with the kinds of skills and practices which students would require in the workplace.
However, there would probably be little opportunity to pursue this approach with staff, since
only 27% of institutions surveyed by Browne and colleagues (2008) indicated that TEL
activities provided scope for career enhancement.
COERCION
As White (2007) found, targets - institutional requirements which can leave room for creativity
in achieving them - are common-place in teaching-oriented institutions. It is crucial to protect
agency and professional judgment; as Land (2001) observes when he quotes Berg and
Östergren, (1972, p262):
"… to produce new knowledge or transmit it to students is itself a creative activity at
the heart of the system and closely depending on its main properties. Such
innovations cannot be inserted from outside: they have to be created anew within the
system, by those who are members of it."
He then wonders, given the cybernetic propensities of academic institutions to stabilise
themselves, how systemic changes can occur, returning to Berg's and Östergren's, (1972, p.
264-5) notion of cracks - inconsistencies, anomalies and conflicts which are intrinsic to any
human system.
TIME AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
The demands of TEL on time have been recognised for many years (Conole and Oliver,
1998). Hardly any literature omits time as a major consideration. The concerns of Emilia
Bertolo, an academic writing for the HEA's Biosciences subject centre (2008), are
characteristic:
"Lecturers’ attitudes towards Web 2.0 tools are mixed. The pedagogic benefits seem
clear, but the increasing use of technology in our practice has added to our workload.
Considerable time and effort are needed to apply these innovations in a meaningful
way; this issue must be acknowledged at an institutional level. Unless sufficient
support and encouragement is provided by HE institutions, we risk a repeat of the
rapid but superficial spread of VLEs. If institutional support is limited to providing the
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technical infrastructure, the use of Web 2.0 in a pedagogically-rich environment will
become another unfulfilled promise."
For those who are motivated to embark on a project to exploit technologies, time can be
consumed by lack of skills (see for example MacFarlan and Everett, 2009; Westerman and
Graham-Matheson, 2008; White, 2007), lack of interoperability between institutional systems,
and also by the increased interaction required in, say, online discussion, particularly when
used as a supplementary activity (Eynon, 2008). Fitzgibbon and Jones (2004) observed that
moderating online activity took double the time allocated, and consequently some
moderators said that participation would be dependent on remission. They point out a loselose situation in which the more participation there is, the more work there is for the
moderator:
"The pace of learning and waves of student activity and inactivity also contributed to
the roller-coaster time and task management experiences of the e-moderators.
Students worked through the tasks at differing speeds and at any point in time some
students were ahead but some were well behind schedule. The student controlled the
pace of the learning but this added to the work of the e-moderator, for example in
attempting to provide summaries and archiving responses"
One of Fielden's and colleagues' (2007) statements of good practice was that faculties and
central departments should consider the individual workload of embedding e-learning.
However, it is hard to come to conclusions about the relationship between time and
engagement. Eynon (2008) cautions:
"...care must be taken that lack of use is not simply interpreted as a series of practical
factors that can be solved through investment and policy change. Since academics
do use other technologies where they perceive them to be appropriate, though they
remain pressured, it is unwise to conclude that non-use is simply down to such
issues, as there may be other good reasons."
One such good reason, explains Peter Taylor (2008, p37), concerns professional identity:
"... the reliance by academics on their role in developing disciplinary knowledge as a
basis for their identity claims. This reliance is reflected in the almost universal
reference to a loss of time - to think, to read, to write - in the literature on academic
work. Whereas there is a sense here that 'the good academic life' ought to involve
such opportunities, the reason given for these opportunities invariably centres on
these as opportunities for research, that is, creating personally and professionally and
morally significant knowledge".
So time, like other institutional support, is necessary but not sufficient for engagement in a
given activity considered desirable by TEL developers.
Salmon and colleagues (2008) attempted to address both necessity and sufficiency at the
University of Leicester in the form of "capability building". At the same time as strategising elearning as "pedagogic innovation", the Beyond Distance Research Alliance (BDRA) was set
up with a brief:
"... to develop capability in e-learning design that would engage Leicester’s
academics. BDRA had to enthuse them to build on good practice, adapting their own
practice to new modes of learning and forms of learning technologies. BDRA wanted
to ‘beguile’ and entice the academics, persuading them to engage with student
learning activities on the VLE, work together and work with others who could help
them."
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The approach they adopted, called CARPE DIEM, offered quick creation and realisation of
ideas for an online learning activity. Course teams made a short, intensive investment of time
in the form of a two-day facilitated workshop of six progressive collaborative tasks, namely
blueprinting, story-boarding, and (only on day 2) prototyping, reality checking, making
adjustments, and finally reviewing, approving and planning.
Anticipating a number of professional identity barriers to participation, the project was careful
to distance itself from routine staff development and was therefore able to form partnerships
for design - "get your course online - together". In this way Salmon and colleagues were able
to explicitly support prevailing cultures and give academic teaching staff control. Concerns
about time did not go away, however; as Salmon and colleagues point out, participative
learning activities imply an allocation of tutor attention. The difference is that the problem of
time had been simplified into that of resourcing the task of e-moderation and facilitation.
In the case of the co-opted academic School Online Teaching Advisors, related by Hanrahan
and colleagues (2001), their relationship with the institution involved the institution asking
them questions rather than instructing them, and it was this which allowed them to fit their
development activities into their day-to-day work; only one used their remuneration to buy out
their time.
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SITUATED - GENERIC
"Grounding academic development in academic work now means that the nature of
such work and relationships between colleagues must also be questioned."
(Boud, 2009)
"...formalised approaches to academic development are also usefully conceptualised
as being located primarily in sites of academic practice: the department, the
laboratory or library, in supervisory relationships and in professional networks. The
rationale for this is that it is in these sites that academic identity is formed and is most
powerfully influenced. Organised development activities may productively occur
elsewhere, but when they do, they must take careful account of these other
influences, especially the influence of learning among peers. An illustration of what
happens when this is not taken into account is given by Martin and Ramsden (1994)
in their follow up of teaching and learning courses, the good effects of which were
contradicted when staff return to their departments."
(Boud, 1999)
From different perspectives, this section considers situated and more generic development
for academic staff.
ONE TO ONE
Academics favour individualised assistance and support (e.g. Bertolo, 2008; Ferman, 2002)
but there is a widespread understanding that this is unsustainable (Land, 2001; Shephard,
2004) barring exceptional cases.
GROUPING ACADEMICS
Centrally-provided workshops, seminars and courses are relatively cheap (a major reason
they endure) but are frequently said to be non-ideal forms of professional development
(Boud, 1999; Butler, 1996; Cannon and Hoare, 1997; Hanrahan et al, 2001; Slater, 1991).
There's a widespread belief that they are insufficiently situated to achieve more than
cosmetic refinements. Boud (1999) summarises this thinking:
"There is often little opportunity to practice new skills or ways of working, the
colleagues who can support or undermine initiatives are rarely involved in such
programs and new practices are often insufficiently contextualised to work in what
might appear to be an alien environment. It is not sufficient however, for universitywide activities to be simply replaced by local ones."
However, in her small-scale study of the types of staff development lecturers consider
valuable, Ferman (2002) made the "surprise finding" that inexperienced lecturers in particular
valued these forms of professional development. Perhaps this follows from the high value
placed on collegial and collaborative forms of professional development; another possible
reason is that inexperienced lecturers perceive a need to understand their institutions.
Fitzgibbon and Jones (2004) and Westerman and Graham-Matheson (2008) also noted a
preference, regardless of colleagues' disciplines, for collaborative work or face-to-face
contact with colleagues for some forms of learning.
Ferman (2002) also found that (particularly) experienced lecturers valued the opportunity to
work closely with what she terms an 'educational designer' to actualise their worked-out
concepts. In conclusion she references Boud to argue for supporting academic teachers in
their professional development aspirations, whatever form these take, and for a holistic
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approach which includes and supports diverse activities. Funding shortages militate against
this and channel institutional policy-makers towards economies of scale.
Poor attendance at centralised workshops led Hanrahan and colleagues (2001) to design
their Professional Engagement Group (PEG) model as a community-based alternative in a
school within their institution's Faculty of Education. Small groups convening, sometimes only
briefly, round a given problem, were facilitated by academics who had taken on the
remunerated role of school online teaching advisors (SOTAs). It could be argued here that
the academics were already engaged - either they knew what they wanted to achieve online
or they wanted to support a colleague who did - and what they required was a liaison role
who could organise them into mutually supportive self-help groups and so preserve their
impetus.
Salmon and colleagues (2008), whose design and actualisation workshops are discussed
below, recruited course teams to undertake a short intensive period of work with learning
technologists and technical developers to devise and produce a new TEL design for their
course. This approach was valued by participants.
SITUATING IN PRACTIC E
Westerman and Graham-Matheson (2008) prepared a suite of digital tools which they
presented to academic staff, asking them to select six based on personal or professional
interest, and devise their own personal development plan for the year. The development unit
then ran workshops and demonstrations, with homework and a follow-up session. They
continually asked participants to consider how they could use the tools in their practice and,
as well as offering support, encouraged them to support each other. While the academics
applied the tools to their own contexts, the authors observed a strong preference for
collaborative learning in groups and a dislike for solitary work with manuals. This suggests
that observations about the individualistic nature of academic work which are made from time
to time in this literature cannot be extrapolated to learning about technologies.
Fitzgibbon and Jones (2004) ran a pilot course on e-moderating in which their academic
learners participated as e-learners. They too noted a strong desire on the part of colleagues
across their institution to gather together. In response to feedback, they adapted the course
to include three face-to-face sessions where there previously had been none. The insights
these academics have acquired over the course of the distance learning course persuaded
them of the value of the face-to-face dimension, and presumably this would in turn inhibit any
plans to move existing face-to-face learning online. Here, a situated approach afforded
academics critical insights and the opportunity to shape the course. However, the time
required to take this course grew. 60 hours of online participation had to be spread over 16
weeks, excluding the three extra face-to-face sessions. The satisfaction of the authors with
the outcome may reside in the institutional backing given to this course, including its
development as a postgraduate credit-rated module.
SITUATED LEARNING AS EXCLUDING TECHNOLOGIES
By contrast, in her socio-technical research into online (distance and blended) academic
development in 31 sites across Australia, Kandbinger (2003) found that technologies were
being used in ways which were inadequate for representing pedagogical values to staff, and
were supplementary:
"These uses of on-line technologies describe an information-centred approach to online learning where staff development is considered to take place as long as quality
information is available to academic staff. As a transmission model of communication,
success is simply assumed unless there has been a technical impediment to the
delivery of this information."
Like Fitzgibbon and Jones (2004), she questions whether learning is best undertaken in an
authentic environment, and points out the implication that "only in the special case of using
flexible learning to teach about flexible learning is the on-line environment seen to be a
suitable means for academic development". This highlights that it is not obviously apparent
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how a situated approach - in the 'participative' sense of Lave and Wenger (1991) rather than
in the 'authentic problem' sense of Savery and Duffy (1996) and Hanrahan's crossdisciplinary groups (2001) - might be deployed in learning about a radical innovation particularly at a distance, where it is harder to defamiliarise the familiar. Writing in advance of
Web 2.0, Kandbinger also notes an individualistic culture in academia and doubts that
collaborative modes of working suggested by the Web will attract many academics in the
near future.
One of the most positive reports of an intervention we encountered in the course of this
review was the intensive design and actualisation workshops Salmon and colleagues (2008)
organised for course teams:
"In summary, academic course teams acknowledged the benefits arising from the
team approach to course design that CARPE DIEM offered. They worked collegially
and finished the workshop with an increased understanding of pedagogy relevant to
their disciplines. They learned to make more effective use of VLE features in context
and increased their understanding via purposeful, learner-centred and peer-reviewed
e-tivities. Teams were willing to try out the new designs in their teaching and felt
confident about their ability to generate and integrate more e-tivities into their
courses. Each of these aspects contributed to their capability building."
In positioning, structuring and promoting the workshops, Salmon and colleagues paid
considerable attention to "disciplinary cultures". A judicious mixture of rhetoric about
"innovative pedagogy" along with pragmatism about offering only stable technologies helped
to manage expectations. Along with the promise of an online activity that the team could use
by the end of the workshop, these things were felt to be a compelling factor in the model's
success. Here only a situated approach could have enabled this virtuous circle of collegiality
and productivity. The situated approach did not exclude technologies, but clearly signalled
that academics were to be relieved of the burden of grappling with unfamiliar technologies.
BROADENING OUT FROM SITUATED PRACTICE
There is a preoccupation in the literature about broadening out from "pockets of innovation"
(a frequently-used phrase). Surveying the literature on change, White (2007) cautions
against project frameworks which bind initiatives to early adopters, and therefore lose
initiative after funding ends and fail to mainstream. She attempts to find out more about
individualised (to the level of the "culture") and generalised approaches with the questions:
"Are there aspects of the academic process in the UK, specific to the culture of
individual institutions, which identify the best routes to the change and innovation?
Does the organisational structure of a university in itself effectively select an
academics propensity to adopt and integrate new technologies into their teaching?"
Her findings suggest that managed institutions are more amenable to broadening out
innovation than collegial ones. Awareness of these different contexts leads her to recognise
national initiatives such as those advanced by JISC, HEFCE and the HEA as drivers, rather
than enablers of change or inspirations for change.
Considering enablement, the HEA's Pathfinder project (HEA, 2008) indicated that "faculties
pay more attention to people who speak their language". Consequently, the HEA seeks to
retain the involvement of "the generic learning and teaching community" while making
funding available through its Subject Centres, "with the aim of tapping into discipline-based
development communities".
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SUPPORT - DEVELOPMENT
"Helping staff to help themselves (a fundamental underpinning to professional
development) is generally expected to involve more work for these teachers, than
doing it for them (a basis for direct support). Never the less, most teachers, in most
institutions, do draw on a wide range of direct or indirect support for these activities
and it is necessary to address, in some detail ... the roles of professional
development services and academic support services in developing the use of ICTbased learning resources and skills to support student learning."
(Shephard, 2004)
This section considers the nature of the activities undertaken, the circumstances under which
these activities might be reconceived from the espoused development - 'working with'
academics - to support - 'working for' them.
SUPPORT RATHER THAN DEVELOPMENT
Shephard (2004) explicitly sets out to examine the role of academic developers along a
support / development continuum, and concludes that it is difficult to unpick one from the
other.
"Many activities do not fit neatly into either directly supporting staff or professional
development. Repairing a faulty computer is clearly a direct-support activity, and
running a workshop to develop staff skills in on-line communication is clearly support
for professional development. But where does helping a teacher to design his or her
first computer-assisted assessment fit, or helping to evaluate the effectiveness of an
ICT intervention?"
Some participants in Bluteau's and Krumins' (2008) project sought to avoid developing new
skills and actualising their own objects, preferring a division of labour where they could to rely
on technologist or technical support to actualise their ideas. Such conceptions of an
academic developer as subordinate (in a support role) rather than counterpart may not be
consonant with their remit to bring about change, particularly if they are working in what Land
(2001) refers to as a "normative re-educative" framework within which "romantic" developers
undertake their work as change agents.
UNITING SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT
Hanrahan and colleagues (2001) fused a support and development ethos by building
capability within a sub-discipline with a co-opted academic lead who convened small,
autonomous 'Professional Engagement Groups' to mutually support each other to meet local
online teaching needs and carry out local projects identified by their members. The school
promoted reflection within the groups by requesting that they create exemplars of their work.
An explicit aim of the work Westerman and Graham-Matheson (2008) undertook was to
design situated staff development which promoted digital literacy. Participants selected from
a suite of supported tools and devised their own personal development plan which used
them. Learning and teaching developers ran demonstration sessions and workshops
throughout the year. The most motivating format was felt to be a group session in which
homework was set, closely followed by a second session in which academics could view and
discuss each others' work and experiences. The personalisation of this second session was
felt to be particularly helpful. Academics who had undertaken this development activity were
reported to embrace a support and development role for colleagues in partnership with the
central unit.
Supportive of risk-taking, McPherson (2005) highlights the importance of incorporating
learning from failures into new guidelines and practices, rather than allowing them to fade
from institutional memory.
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MacDonald and colleagues (2009) identify organisation of support and points of contact as
key to academics' willingness to experiment with technologies. Being referred from one
member of stupport staff to another is demotivating as well as damaging to relationships.
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NEGOTIABLE - NON-NEGOTIABLE
"...most institutions now have the necessary technological infrastructure to support
the use of ICT institution-wide. However, the researchers also highlight that this
infrastructure is often not used as part of a rich pedagogical environment. Worryingly,
they noted that lecturers tended to be less enthusiastic about the benefits of ICT use
than decision-makers and technical support staff."
(Bertolo, 2008)
"One interviewee pointed to a conversation they had had with a Pro Vice Chancellor
at another institution. Both had made use of TQEF funds to address some aspects on
the e-learning agenda. The other institution had taken a strongly managerial
approach, defined a timetable of objectives, targets and measured outputs. The
interviewee’s institution had taken a less formal approach, but had provided
infrastructure and rewarded and recognised good practice. “But when we compared
progress we were just about at the same place forward”."
(White, 2007)
As Bertolo observes (2008), many academics perceive ICT use as part of a gradually
growing workload with no reward. This section considers freedom of academics to decide
whether or not to undertake staff development for TEL.
INSTITUTIONAL ORIENTATION TO MANAGEMENT
White's (2007) work institutional cultures found that only managers tended to refer to external
and institutional strategies and concluded that they functioned as drivers, rather than stimuli,
for change. During their work on the HEA's E-Learning Benchmarking project, Fielden and
colleagues (2007) discovered that awareness of strategic objectives for TEL was low across
institutions and an opt-in model of participation prevailed, including for e-learning
development.
White found a difference of approach along teaching-intensive and research-intensive lines,
with more and less managerialism respectively. Having identified that vertical alignment of
organisational policies throughout its hierarchies is necessary for innovations to broaden into
institutional practices, she points out that managerial institutions - often teaching-intensive
institutions with tight budgets - are more likely to make it their business to know about and
mainstream appropriate innovations than collegial institutions. Engagement here may be
sidelined as a concern in favour of managed participation. The approach undertaken in the
institutions Bell and Bell (2005) studied is a good example of this. In keeping with the topdown management style, most of their recommendations are aimed at managers; the
recommendations for academic developers were that, for credibility, they should themselves
be practitioners, and should ensure "effective customer care". Here, engagement is
subsumed into managed, "road-mapped", routine participation both following and
simultaneously bringing about poorly defined change which more resembles a set of new
practices than a cultural evolution.
McNamee (2004) documents the establishment of Teaching Development Groups at the
University of Gloucestershire which attempted a light touch. The approach took the form of
small cognate group meetings, one per semester, in which participants negotiated their own
agenda and organised mutual peer observations. Although participation was both
compulsory and explicitly linked to the Quality Assurance agenda, the initiative was wellreceived at the beginning. However, early optimism faded when the peer observations
became associated with appraisal and the formalities and performativity set in. The
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overarching structure came to be perceived as restrictive, and insufficient time was allocated
to digest the negotiated activities and translate them into practice.
Compulsory participation does not necessarily mean that the sessions will be regarded as
useless (for example, Salmon and colleagues (2008) did not report ill effects), but the need
for sensitivity cannot be overstated, and the likelihood of resentment and minimal
engagement is strong (Hanrahan et al, 2001).
ENTHUSIASM
Enthusiasm is not the opposite to coercion, but the two are rarely observed to co-exist. Surry
and Land (2000) outlined a model of engagement which they mapped to Roger's theory of
innovation to yield attention gaining, relevance, confidence building and satisfaction (ARCS)
strategies for academics at different stages of technology adoption. Roberts (2008) explains:
"This framework, based on motivational theory, suggests increasing awareness by
offering showcases, demonstrating relevance through retention, promotion, and
tenure decisions, building confidence through support and mentoring activities, and
increasing satisfaction via rewards and incentives. Possible incentives can include
release time, stipends, mini-grants, teaching with technology awards, upgrades to
current hardware or software, travel to conferences to present work, or support for
publications that showcase technology adoption. Changes within the promotion and
tenure process that recognize innovation in teaching or adoption of technology will
also serve to communicate the importance of technology as well as commitment to its
adoption."
She drew on ARCS in her course team's mutually-initiated project to create nine online
courses, a successful instance which is discussed in more detail in the section on formal informal approaches.
The Teaching Research and Collaboration (TRAC) groups described by Hanrahan and
colleagues (2001) were cross-disciplinary, voluntary, highly autonomous groupings around a
given teaching approach, such as supervision or large group teaching. They collaborated on
joint activities they chose themselves, including feeding into institutional policy and supported
centrally. However, the enthusiasm for working as a community of inquiry evident during their
period of central support was not sufficient to sustain the groups or their shared projects after
this support was withdrawn.
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
Reflection is the ultimately individualised form of development, as demonstrated by Heigh
(2005) who structured his own reflective practice during conversations. It is helpful, though,
to think of it as giving consideration to how an activity might be better carried out, along with
a commitment to re-examining the premises of the activity, in case a change of circumstance
or knowledge has given cause for refining it. The distinction between "reflection on" and
"reflection in" action set out by Schon (1983) is criticised by Eraut (1994, pp142-9) for
vagueness.
Where reflection is brought into service of an institutional agenda and where a prior
'common-sense' outcome has been identified, the danger, articulated by Land (2001), is that
academics who fail to draw the same conclusions from their ruminations are marked as
degenerate.
"[Developers] such as Webb (1996), put emphasis on the role of dialectic and
contestation. One could employ a Foucauldian perspective of surveillance, perhaps,
and interpret the development of reflective practice entirely differently, as a regime of
self-regulation, intermediated by the educational developer ‘therapists’ (Foucault,
1979)."
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Wenger (2003, p79) notes that reflection can both distract from active participation and also
activate the imagination and counteract narrowness of participation. Clearly, however,
without reflection, change cannot occur unless it is reduced to a set of behaviours.
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
Etienne Wenger (1998) emphasises knowing and meaning in organisations as negotiated,
often - but not exclusively - with other humans. De Freitas and Oliver (2005) point out that
the policy documents produced by senior managers “can be interpreted as the production of
reification of practice”, but that such policies “cannot just be ‘implemented’; first they must be
interpreted in relation to practice”. Meaning resides in the way individuals and communities
interpret the policy documents in the light of their existing practice, and practices can diverge
as well as align.
For Wenger, (2003, p79) engagement involves aligning; it is a "mode of belonging" which
"requires opportunities for joint practice, [and] is different from imagination, which often
requires opportunities for taking some distance from our situation". Interactions and practices
are thus negotiated by the community and may include events, activities such as problem
solving meetings, formal or informal sessions, and guest speakers. They are dependent on
sensitive leadership which gives due consideration to the rhythm of events and the
responsibilities of members, as well as exploring knowledge, identifying gaps, and defining
projects to close the gaps. Communities reify their practices as rules or strategies (1998,
pp58-60), "tools of process" upon which members focus to negotiate meaning.
Wenger cautions (2003, p80) against romanticising communities of practice, pointing out that
they included witch hunts, and that they can learn not to learn. He also raises the problem of
multi-membership (1998, p159) and the work that individuals often need to undertake to
reconcile the different forms of membership. He emphasises (1998, p165) that nonparticipation is, no less than participation, an expression of identity. He also points to nonparticipation as (1998, p170):
"...a source of freedom and privacy - a cherished sphere of selfhood. They can feel
profoundly bored and depressed, but the fact that they can leave their job behind as
soon as they walk out of the office is an aspect of their relation to their work that they
value."
The spirit of communities of practice, then, can seem unattractively consuming. Wenger's
work helps to make sense of the rejection of professional development described in
McWilliam (2000) in terms of the importance of "social reconfiguration: its own internally as
well as its position within broader configurations" (1998, p220). Importantly and worth quoting
at length (Wenger, 1998, pp220-221):
"…looking at a very technical article full of indecipherable formulas can confirm in a
very stark fashion our lack of negotiability. Access to information without negotiability
serves only to intensify the alienating effects of non-participation.
What makes information knowledge - what makes it empowering - is the way in which
it can be integrated within an identity of participation. When information does not build
up to an identity of participation, it remains alien, literal, fragmented, unnegotiable. It
is not just that it is disconnected from other pieces of relevant information, but that it
fails to translate into a way of being in the world coherent enough to be enacted in
practice. Therefore to know in practice is to have a certain identity so that information
gains the coherence of a form of participation. In making information more widely
available, what the technological advances of a so-called information society really do
is create wider, more complex, and more diversified economies of meaning and
communities, With respect to the potential for learning communities, issues of
identification and negotiability are then heightened, not transcended."
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FREEDOM WITHIN WELL -DEFINED PROJECTS
In comparison, Cook and colleagues (2007), working in the CETL for Reusable Learning
Objects, aimed for an enabling balance by resourcing small pockets of innovation "free from
centralised control". They succeeded both in safeguarding this freedom and in achieving
senior management support. Perhaps the nature of the RLO projects, which had clearlydefined endpoints in the form of a product, helped to resolve the tensions between
speculative open-endedness and performativity which affected other CETLs.
This supports Clouder's and colleagues' (2008) observation that constraints can be enabling.
Similarly, having specified that the output would be a learning object, Bluteau and Krumins
(2008) were able to leave decisions about creating it to the discretion of the individual
academic. However, one participant (Cook and colleagues, 2007) found it difficult to
negotiate remission with their head of department for this informal activity.
ACCOUNTING FOR INFOR MAL DEVELOPMENT
Highly negotiable staff development activities can be so informal that they are at risk of
disappearing. On the one hand, if a development activity is resourced and accounted for, the
consequent performative demands can interfere with creativity. On the other, if it is not
accounted for it is often not resourced.
Clouder and colleagues (2008) tackle this subject in their examination of the CETLs. They
observe the tension between creating the imaginative, experimental, risk-friendly
circumstances necessary for the actualisation of creativity within the constraints of a funded
programme and all this implies about performativity (accountability and deliverables, for
example). They found that grants were important, and that these should be small enough to
matter to departments without attracting too much institutional or funder attention - however
grants weren't found to sustain motivation. Clouder and colleagues also found that some
kinds of performative constraints - for example deadlines or the requirement to articulate
aims - could be motivating and helpful where they provided structure without restricting vision
or practice.
However, it is only relatively recently that professional development has become
externalised; the larger proportion remains informal and serendipitous. Hanrahan's and
colleagues' (2001) review of the literature cautioned against co-opting informal workplace
learning into institutional agendas, so instead they endeavoured to capture, in the form of
exemplars, informal workplace learning about online teaching and feed these findings into
departmental policy-making. They point out that outcomes are unspecified and hard to
measure, and that this may have deterred some departments from participating in their
model of professional development. In order to justify their model's ongoing existence and
resourcing, they were obliged to make the exemplars highly visible. Success was identified in
the increasing sophistication of the online materials academics produced.
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INSTITUTIONAL - THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE
Web 2.0 is a platform in which consumers can also be contributors, sometimes called the
'read/write web'. Its arrival has brought about an explosion in authorship, strong movements
for individualisation, openness, gratis resources, and difficulties negotiating boundaries
between institutional online environments and the wider Web.
Web 2.0 is sometimes seen to compete with institutional software provision, as illustrated by
the much-anticipated 'The VLE is dead' debate, begun in advance of the Association of
Learning Technologists 2009 conference, and currently touring. Respondents to the UCISA
survey of technology-enhanced learning use in British universities (Browne et al, 2008)
reported significant incidence of non-centrally-supported technology use by students,
including blogs, wikis, podcasting and social bookmarking. The perception is that teachers
and learners will avail themselves of the many alternatives to university services as they feel
appropriate - that availability will lead to pedagogical development. Bertolo (2008) queries
this with reference to the same time and workload obstacles which have impeded the uptake
of institutional software.
RECOGNISING POTENTIAL
'Web 2.0' may be a sufficiently impenetrable moniker to have discouraged all but the most
intrepid academics from mining its potential. However, incentives include opportunities for
public academia and wider impact, sharing of and access to information, collaboration at
different times and locations, and institutional and individual public relations. OECD-CERI
note (2009) that universities have made impressive progress in all of these areas, but not in
teaching and learning where possibilities for Web 2.0, and indeed information and
communication technologies in general, are not well recognised. Although many
commentators (Davidson and Goldberg, 2008; Downes, 2009; Franklin and van Harmelen,
2007; Melville, 2009; Purushotma et al, 2009) have identified the need for new pedagogies,
OECD-CERI note that where Web 2.0 tools are used, this tends to be in support of
established pedagogies. OECD-CERI view the most crucial issue in academics' uptake of
technologies to be that of "incentives". Bertolo (2008) thinks that it is more a matter of
resourcing the thinking and experimenting time to develop activities.
OBSTACLES TO GOING OUTSIDE
Academics who do venture into Web 2.0 face a number of obstacles, comprehensively set
out by Franklin and van Harmelen (2007) and the University of Edinburgh Information
Services (2008). There are seemingly-irresolvable difficulties with allowing institutional open
access computer-users to personalise their browser's toolbars and widgets so that they can
design collaborative activities in, say, social bookmarking environments. Another concern is
the uncertain nature of third party hosts which are often unaccountable commercial
enterprises. This latter is one of several reasons to keep quiet about using Web 2.0 for
teaching. The well-documented trepidation of university IT Services to facilitating academic
and student use of Web 2.0 is another. Many Web 2.0 environments have vague privacy
statements, vague statements about intellectual property, and no guarantees to safeguard
the work on their servers - this is hard to reconcile with institutional statutory requirements
such as Data Protection and Freedom of Information. Facebook's infamous investigations
into business models which exploit its users' content and data about them for peer marketing
and behavioural profiling are merely the best-known of similar forays by many other online
service providers. Intellectual property and the allocation of credit in collaborative projects
(Franklin and van Harmelen, 2007) is a further area of uncertainty.
New models of authorship and knowledge creation can be perceived as challenges to
established models of authority, provoking the following passionate response from Davidson
and Goldberg (2009):
“To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative,
knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct, and
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collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education. To miss how
much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the foundations of
learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self-destructive.”
THE NEEDS OF EXPERIMENTAL ACADEMIC TEACHERS
These are some of many reasons academic teachers might view the Web as unchartered
territory in learning and teaching and as such best left to pioneers. Perhaps the most
celebrated such pioneer is Michael Wesch, recipient of National Geographic's Emerging
Explorer award (National Geographic, undated) whose short constructively-aligned film 'The
Machine is us/ing us' (Wesch, 2007) deployed Web 2.0 to explain Web 2.0, and excited great
interest among academic developers in his skills as a talented 'explainer' (Association of
Learning Technologists, 2009). However, Wesch is primarily academically interested in
online participation, and (peerless communication skills notwithstanding) somewhat less so
in the challenges which confront teachers in academic institutions.
This focus of interest, where developers’ concerns about academic staff are expressed as
concerns about their knowledge, their output, their learners, or changing practice, but not
their academic well-being, is quite strong. There are many (e.g. Bradwell, 2009; Conole et al,
2009; Davidson and Goldberg, 2009; Melville et al, 2009) publications concerned with the
possibilities for Web 2.0 in higher education. On the whole these have helpfully
problematised and explored the potential of Web 2.0 and set out the provision that learning
institutions might make for learners to induct them into a new world of participation. However,
although a role for teachers is implicit, their needs and how these might best be met are
rarely made explicit. A report for DEMOS (Bradwell, 2009) includes a brief section on barriers
to technology use and incentivising innovative teaching practices. Selwyn (2008) alludes to
"re-configuring" the teacher role. According to Purushotma and colleagues (2009) the
"challenge of participatory culture" is principally concerned with engaging learners in critical
dialogues, but they give virtually no attention to building critical media literacies in teachers.
Without academics there can be no institutions - perhaps teachers are implied in references
to 'institutions' and 'universities'. If so, you might be forgiven the impression that teachers are
unaffected by the digital confusion that threatens their learners, and all that is required for
their mobilisation is an act of will. You might also be forgiven for wondering if some Web 2.0
advocates expect learners to replace teachers at some future stage.
At the same time, authors on Web 2.0 look to academic teachers for cues. Franklin and van
Harmelen (2007) flag the need for "new pedagogic models" with Web 2.0 and note that:
"While some examples of specific pedagogic approaches are mentioned above, our
consultative work revealed strong feeling that educationalists do not as yet know how
the increased use of Web 2.0 technology will interrelate with learning and teaching,
and in turn demand new pedagogies and new assessment methods."
There is currently still little cross-over between authors on academic development and
authors on Web 2.0. This may be because academics are free to use Web 2.0 without the
mediation, or even awareness, of a learning technologist or other academic developer. It
may be because academics have been deliberately discreet about their Web 2.0 activities for
fear of having them proscribed by their institution.
Consequently there is a growing body of exemplars of Web 2.0 in higher education but most
of the peer-reviewed published work stops short of addressing the gap between
dissemination and practice. Not only does this this gap suggest that access to Web 2.0 tools
is assumed to be sufficient for their discriminating uptake, but it fails to acknowledge that
academic use of Web 2.0 environments is experimental, and as such inhibited by those
forces within contemporary academia identified by Clouder and colleagues (2008) which
militate against experimenting. They observe:
"Accountability and performativity are not usually conducive to risk taking or creative
problem solving (Gleeson & Husband, 2001), because they are frequently associated
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with a 'blame culture' (Avis, 2005). In fact, Avis argues that performativity stifles
innovation, encouraging deeply conservative practices. Such 'culturisation' inhibits
consideration of anything outside of the confines of cultural acceptances (Pearce,
1974, p. 49). Similarly, Winter et al. (2000, p. 292) blame 'stifled learning and
creativity' on managerialism, which they associate with low levels of commitment
among academics."
Accordingly, there is little support from the top; although learning and teaching strategies are
key influences (Browne et al, 2008) in technology adoption. Franklin and van Harmelen
(2007) identified only one university which responded with a Web 2.0 learning and teaching
strategy (although others, including the University of Strathclyde and Xavier University, have
developed strategies for marketing and service delivery with Web 2.0).
APPROACHES WITH NEW TOOLS
At the London School of Economics, Chatzigavriil and Leach, in an informal presentation to
the M25 Learning Technology Group (2009), reported notable interest shown by academics
in their 'Teachers' Show-and-Tells' in which teachers demonstrate and report their work to
colleagues, and answer questions. This was felt to be due to the interest and appreciation
which emanated from these two learning technologists, as organisers.
Heaney and Odell, Learning Technology Advisers at the University of East London, have
worked to bridge the gap between being informed and adopting practice. They designed a
structured, rapid and iterative problem-based group activity to introduce academics in
departments to Web 2.0 technologies as follows:

Preliminary stage: a needs-analysis questionnaire to help narrow down the
technologies to be introduced

Stage 1: in a ten minute presentation, a technology is briefly “passed in front of the
eyes” of academics

Stage 2: in groups they then brainstorm how these might used it in their own
contexts, write succinct ideas on post-it notes and stick them onto the wall. The
process is repeated with a number of technologies.

Stage 3: academics look at each others' posted ideas, and use stickers to prioritise
them.

Stage 4: there and then if possible, the Learning Technology Adviser summarises the
priorities, proposes an action plan to bring them about, and encourages the group to
nominate a contact for each project.
At the University of Canterbury, Westerman and Graham Matheson (2008) did not seem
troubled by the aforementioned Web 2.0 / institutional software split when they devised an
intervention to improve the online literacies of academic teaching staff. They incorporated
Web 2.0 and institutional tools into "a suite of 23 digital experiences" from which they invited
academic participants to select and undertake six over the course of the year, feeding back
on their experiences. The success of this deliberately situated, contextualised, holistic
approach was also attributed to the explicit brief that academics should try to embed their
activities into day-to-day practice along with the follow-up in which they had the opportunity
to share their practice. It remains to be seen whether this model, which attracted 25
academics without the promise of a reward, can become a larger-scale institutional practice.
Web 2.0 is a participatory medium which challenges established notions of authority and
offers unprecedented opportunities to design learning activities which incorporate current
theories of active learning, including constructionism, situated learning and social
constructivism. However, research for this section uncovered little coordinated academic
development in this direction; there is still an impression that Web 2.0 in higher education
has been regarded from every perspective except teaching. In their 2009 report for the
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Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience, Melville and colleagues raised
the alarm about inertia:
“The world [students] encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly
different set of norms. … Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the
situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however,
unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so
accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary.”
Engagement of academic teachers in considering the potential of the read/write web has not
been the subject of coordinated efforts in British higher education, and in their absence a
combination of legalities, managerialism, quality concerns and institutional strategies which
lag behind the rapidly emerging possibilities, have presented TEL to academics as practice
best undertaken with the software available in the institution. Few commentators feel that this
will be sustainable in the long term. Academic teachers require time to explore possibilities
and determine ways of working together to distribute knowledge within departments and
other communities of practice.
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CONDITIONAL SUCCESS FACTORS
There is a consensus that the role of academic teacher is changing, that the shrewd and
purposeful adaptations required cannot happen without some kind of institutional facilitation
and that, if they do not happen, academics and institutions will be vulnerable to these
changes.
This literature synthesis originated in the needs of the author to create the circumstances for
engaging academic staff, on a voluntary, negotiable basis, in academic development for TEL.
For this reason it seems appropriate to end by picking out success factors noted in the work
reviewed and relate these to the roles whose remit it is to initiate, facilitate and sustain these
changes - the academic developers and managers. These roles are the focus of the
following sections, to the extent that they can exert influence on the wider circumstances of
government agendas, student expectations, and academics' judgements about what is and is
not appropriate for teaching their subject areas.
However, it is impossible, based on the summary of success factors below, to confidently
assert what works because the evidence does not claim to be generalisable. The literature
reviewed above confirms what is already widely realised: in circumstances of endemic
change affecting varied cultures and contexts, best practice in academic staff development
for TEL cannot be subsumed into a unified concept. No single approach is appropriate for all.
This is the reason for titling this section 'Conditional Success Factors'.
As outlined in the Methodology section, responses from the M25 Learning Technology Group
feedback activity (which was felt to be too brief) are integrated below.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF BEING CENTRAL
Academic developers, including learning technologists, are often the only university staff in a
position both to engage with the scholarship of technology-enhanced learning and teaching
and to understand what is happening on the ground across different academic departments.
Positioned at the centre of institutions, or with good links to it, they can fulfil a valuable role
for academic staff if they manage to negotiate a path between the radically transformative
ideologies to which they are exposed and the aspirations, needs, fears and regrets of their
academic colleagues. This involves maintaining a sceptical view of technical-rational
approaches to TEL, and working to set up exploratory partnerships instead.
Academic developers can work as an institution's memory by recording and disseminating
successful endeavours and informative failures. One advantage here is that if individual
innovators leave or change roles, there remain documentation and a group of people who
can articulate, and if necessary defend, any hard-won approach to new colleagues. Another
advantage is that they can ensure that local projects - including those which fail or founder can contribute to institutional directions.
They are in a position to broker and help to sustain mutually supportive connections between
academics - for example, those who share an interest in a teaching issue but who would
otherwise be unlikely to encounter each other, and who may provide each other with different
theoretical frameworks and critical dimensions.
Academic developers can also encourage, legitimise and sustain academics who experiment
and, through liaison with institutional managers, can advocate for structures which enable
and reward those practices and projects which advance the institution's understanding of
technology-enhanced learning, including the aforementioned informative failures. This
recognition includes maintaining managers' awareness about the different categories of work
being undertaken, so that these can be funded and otherwise resourced. Developers can
also fulfil an important dissemination role which addresses the unsustainability of each
department attempting to grasp the implications new legislation, such as the Special
Educational Needs and Disability Act, and new agendas such as Broadening Participation.
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Centrally-located developers are well placed to recognise the contributions of colleagues to
their own development and to institutional knowledge, to ensure that these are recognised in
turn by the institution, to design ways of working with academic colleagues which do not
make unfeasible demands on them, and to advocate for remission, remuneration or
recognition as appropriate.
A further opportunity for academic developers is to give particular attention to course teams
and departments to sustain and champion the pioneering successes of their early adopters in
a way which is attentive to the (often) more pragmatic and risk-averse needs of the
mainstream.
Senior managers can ensure they understand the experiences of their academics and do
their best to contribute these to national policy frameworks. They can interpret national
frameworks as informed and visionary strategies which set objectives and articulate
institutional or departmental ambitions; where needed, academic developers can then
facilitate the interpretation of the strategies at the level of individual or course team practice,
while safeguarding the autonomy of individual academics. Senior managers can allow for
speculative, open-ended projects, encourage risk-taking and value informative failures.
M25 responses
The breakout group discussing this finding felt that it was easier to make connections across
an institution when centrally based and with access to a greater pool of resources. On the
other hand it was more difficult to develop close working relationships with those in faculties
and moreover, forcing academics to approach a central service to "get things done" could be
disempowering. In short, both central and faculty-based approaches are helpful, with the
advantages of the centre dependent on the institutional ethos and each developer's
individual approach.
NOT IMPOSING PRACTICE
Academics stand to lose if practice is standardised. Losses include professional identity,
initiative, a sense of autonomy, and discretion to teach contingently. The ensuing sense of
personal loss, anxiety and unfulfilment is a risk to academia.
Academia also stands to lose. Intention is crucial to navigating change, but beyond planning
changes to practice, the influence of intention is limited; the process of change is complex
and contingent on multifarious unanticipated factors which are best negotiated at the level of
the individuals directly affected. Individuals, departments and course teams fall back on their
disciplinary and individual principles, and these are due respect. At the same time, many
academics are wary of the inert common-sense of habitual practice. They are hungry for
news of national and local developments, for an understanding of new technologies, and for
new skills which enable them to harness these. For these reasons, a design partnership,
rather than a power-coercive or normative-re-educative relationship, is more promising here,
with the emphasis on building capability.
Developers can begin conversations about principles, sustain them with their interest and
advocate to give them institutional weight. They can disseminate research and project
findings relating to TEL from the learning and teaching research and from elsewhere within
the institution. They can also communicate national and institutional strategies - and
importantly, their background - in a reflective way, anticipating that academics will need to
respond to them, interpret them according to their own personal and disciplinary principles
and ultimately incorporate them appropriately into their particular practice. This knowledge, in
combination with academics’ knowledge about their subject area, discipline and students’
understanding, can form a realistic, mutually understood characterisation of the culture of a
course, department or institution. These things, rather than disembodied success factors,
constitute a rationale for innovation.
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GAINING ATTENTION
Practices which are perceived to be relevant spread by repute. However, the rationale for
much software use is opaque. This is a matter of awareness and exposure: academic staff
need to encounter the practices, understand their rationale and evaluate evidence of their
potential. This in turn requires the backing of institutional policy-makers and communicators,
as well as creative, enthusiastic promotion on the part of central development staff. As well
as marshalling – or creating - case studies and evaluation data, arguing a rationale entails
developers problematising an existing situation. This risks implying a deficit, and so requires
a grasp of the specific context along with great tact.
'CAPABILITY-BUILDING' RATHER THAN 'DEVELOPMENT'
Academic developers can aim to form or forge design relationships with academics which
are free of any stereotypical development agenda, and which may instead be regarded as
capability-building. This implies an inquiry- or task-based approach.
Short, focussed retreats for course teams are conducive to the actualisation of learning
activities. Longer projects - particularly those aiming to create objects, whether learning
objects, grant applications, case studies and exemplars – afford autonomy to academics.
Constraints, particularly the expectation of some or other outcome, are helpful here.
Indicators of success can be negotiated with academics and learners, and may be perceived
in the sophistication of TEL designs over time, and the uptake of TEL practices by
colleagues.
Cross-disciplinary groups can be formed around a shared teaching interest, for example
small group work, public response systems, problem-based learning, working together on a
briefing for institutional policy-makers, or on a publication.
M25 responses
Nobody in the discussion group knew of an away-day dedicated to design or capabilitybuilding for TEL at their institution. Half of the group worked in institutions which offered
central funding for TEL projects, and where this happened it was clearly flagged as a
development opportunity. One such initiative had recently ended for financial reasons. Crossdisciplinary working groups were formed, but not in a task-based way. Publications and
briefings were used for awareness-raising, but not necessarily among working group
members. There were briefing groups, but they were not viewed as capability-building.
ADDRESSING CYNICISM ABOUT CHANGE
Change – adaptation and innovation - is inherent to survival, but without the engagement of
academic teachers it is impossible to make sense of change in terms of teaching innovation.
There is a vocabulary associated with innovation which academic developers would be welladvised to avoid, including terms like 'non-explorers', 'non-transferers', and 'laggards'. There
is also an unfavourable tendency to use students’ feedback, instead of educational
arguments, to pressurise academics to change their practice.
Professional identity, which for academics largely resides in intellectual allegiances, is an
overriding concern which is under simultaneous attack from different directions. Sensitivity to
professional and disciplinary identities is of great importance when making arguments about
the transformative potential of different technologies. Any transformative inclinations need to
be balanced with a commitment to continuity, a view of academics as the custodians of their
disciplinary knowledge, inculcators of its ethos with their own intellectual allegiances. This
implies engagement on the part of the academic developer rather than the academics, and
an open-minded approach which encourages and welcomes a diversity of innovations.
There is value in academic developers designing and enthusiastically supporting activities
which facilitate academics in defamiliarising their own practices and negotiating their own
understandings of new tools in relation to this fresh perspective.
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M25 responses
Many academics are eager to please students and amenable to students' needs. With
regards to professional identity, one favourable model might be to assign learning
technologists to a faculty so that they can become sensitised to the needs and concerns of
that faculty. It was felt that examples of good practice would be helpful to have to hand, but
that these were difficult to collect, partly because of academics' worries about putting
colleagues under pressure to change their practice or to conform. Another significant
obstacle to exemplars was the need to maintain student anonymity, or obtain permission to
disclose their identities within a working or archived example.
ADDRESSING THE 'PRAC TICE GAP'
“Pockets of innovation” which do not broaden into institutional practice are widespread and
associated with the kind of collegial, as opposed to managed, institutional ethos which is
valued and vigorously defended by those who work within it. However, the broadening out of
practice is achievable if it is facilitated by a top-down managed initiative which resources,
supports, and rewards it.
It is important to balance the academic need to make sense of technologies in the context of
disciplinary practices with the need for interdisciplinary exposure. Taking a keen interest in
academics' practice, facilitating interactions between colleagues, and collecting case studies,
exemplars and responses, rather than prescribing practice, are helpful to understanding the
potential and limits of the new practice. Judiciously-chosen constraints such as project
deadlines and limited funding can help focus. Paradoxically, while one-to-one individual
support is thought to be unsustainable, it would often be the most situated approach for a
sector in which much academic work is individual, even as it is socially-orientated.
Resources allowing, individualised approaches are valued; failing that, constructivist, situated
approaches work best, with measures to promote interdisciplinary interest and engagement.
MAINTAINING MOTIVATION
Maintaining motivation could entail ensuring that work on TEL yielded meaningful
opportunities for academic teachers, including publishing their work, understanding its impact
on their students' learning, or influencing institutional policy.
Innovative practice requires that practitioner to confront the possibility of failure and prepare
themselves to justify their decisions in the event of scrutiny. An additional risk to
experimenting academics who depart from established practice is exposure to criticism from
colleagues. Institutions could help here by articulating recognition of and support for
innovative risk-takers.
Extrinsic barriers such as skills, access to equipment and software were also implicated in
motivation, as well as extrinsic incentives such as reward, recognition, time, equipment,
reward, recognition and support. Attempts to motivate academic teachers benefit from taking
self-actualisation and personal satisfaction into account, as well as understanding the
relationship between different professional identities and what academics choose to do with
their time. There can be no single approach to motivation within institutions.
M25 responses
It was noted that motivation has been assumed to take the form of financial incentives, but
that individual differences in motivation between academic teachers suggested that this link
may not be very strong, since the buying out of time led to some academics contributing
more time than others, presumably depending on their interest. Money was also necessary
to organise events and to provide training with technologies, both of which were necessary
for maintaining motivation. In the subsequent general discussion, one participant related her
attempt to persuade an academic to talk about his practice in a centrally-organised event. He
refused, saying that he preferred to spend his time doing the thing rather than talking about
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Page 43 of 50
it. A further comment on the subject of showcase events, one participant pointed out that it
was not sufficient to hold the event; it was also necessary to follow up afterwards.
BUILDING CONFIDENCE WITH TECHNOLOGIES
Every suggestion in this section is premised on the assumption that the technologies are
painless and straightforward to use. Institutions need technologies which work well and
seamlessly, allow for mobile working, and integrate with each other. In any case, these
qualities are lucrative because they have an impact on recruitment, retention, productivity,
and widening participation.
It emerged particularly strongly that policy-makers should invest in building academics'
familiarity, skills and confidence with technologies. The reasons for this are both normative
and transformative. As parts of civil society migrate online, the ability to avail oneself of
technologies in one's working life is important for social inclusion and, by implication, the
'social good' part of a university's mission. In their capacity as role model and, separately,
facilitator and critic of their students’ methods of learning and communicating, it is desirable
for academics to be able to use and appreciate the tools for learning and scholarship their
students use (or are predicted to use in the future).
Rather than being procedurally or functionally based in individual technologies, appropriate
skills endow individuals with principles which allow them to adapt to the inevitable changes to
come. However, adaptation in the sense of compliance is a threat to academic work; in order
to harness technical change as innovation, independently, creatively and in keeping with
disciplinary allegiances and individual principles, confidence with technologies is of vital
importance. The literature suggests that academics prefer and benefit from coming together
for activity-based, discursive learning about how to use technologies, rather than learning
alone from manuals.
M25 responses
There was discussion, unresolved, about how technologies should be defined. There was
broad agreement with the principle that building confidence with technologies was important and necessary if there were expectations of independence on the part of academic teachers.
Considering the relationship between creativity and familiarity, it was pointed out that some
academic teachers do have creative ideas although they are not confident with technologies.
Here, in the absence of resources it is the inability to implement, rather than a lack of vision,
which poses the obstacle, and a learning technologist or technical developer may usefully
take on actualising the idea. The need to showcase good practice was identified as a way of
introducing academics to the potential of technologies.
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LIMITATIONS AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
This final section discusses limitations of the work and raises further questions.
LIMITATIONS
That there is no body of literature dedicated to engagement of academics in professional
development for e-learning is testament to an enduring confidence that the appeal of
technologies is self-evident, assumptions about the inevitability of change, and assumptions
that institutions would guarantee participation in technology-enhanced learning. This made
identifying appropriate literature difficult and introduced some haphazards into the body of
work reviewed related to the volume of literature and the backgrounding of engagement
within work on change, academic and disciplinary cultures, motivation academic
development and TEL. Consequently, and also because of time constraints, work is known to
have been omitted. Additionally, to allow for new ideas to emerge, each paper was digested
as a summary rather than according to the framework eventually adopted. In the event, each
paper needed to be re-read through the perspective of the framework, which meant that the
digest, though a very helpful – even necessary - first pass, was a luxury that a project under
these constraints could ill afford.
Although individual publications brought flashes of insight, some characteristics of the work
reviewed compromise it as evidence and demand caution when attempting to generalise
from it. Generally projects have been small-scale, of short duration and conceptualise
effectiveness as participation, completion or satisfaction of academic staff, but rarely as
impact on students’ learning. Findings from projects which work with enthusiasts cannot be
assumed to be representative, whereas projects which roll out policy at an institutional level
do not tend to focus on engagement since participation is already guaranteed. Academic
developers write most of the literature and despite their commitment to disinterested
accounting, it is reasonable to suppose that this perspective is distinctive.
Despite considerable efforts in local awareness-raising, critical participation in providing and
reviewing the literature and drafting this report was hard to achieve. Organising an activity
within an existing face-to-face event (the M25 Learning Technology Group) proved the most
effective approach. The reason for this is difficult to identify but worth understanding,
because Grainnie Conole and colleagues (2009) attracted more participation in their review
of the use of Web 2.0 in Higher Education, conducted for the HEA publicly on the Open
University’s Cloudworks academic networking environment. It may be related to circles of
trust and influence of the author, the publicity, the software environment, or perceived
relevance of the project.
As mentioned above, the M25 Group involvement could have been better scaffolded from the
beginning, and the activity in which they enthusiastically contributed their responses was felt
to be too brief.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
This synthesis has left open the following questions, among others, which would best be
addressed to the sector:
 Where academics changed their mind about TEL, what were the critical incidents?
 How do academics themselves conceive of critical engagement with TEL? How do these
conceptions vary between disciplines? In other words, what do academics feel they
would need to know or feel in order to engage critically with TEL? This may include
evidence of the success of TEL, skills, cases, a belief in their students’ ability to
participate, a feeling that the technologies in question were consonant with their own
professional identity.
 What institutional factors enable or impede engagement? In particular, the idea of time
needs to be probed. Does time refer to time solving technical problems or preparing
contingencies? If so, this is a matter of better technologies, skills and support.
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
Alternatively, does time mean prioritisation of TEL over something else, in which case it is
a matter of better aligning TEL activities to professional identity, or of relieving academics
of bureaucratic activities?
Given the absence of findings which can be generalised, what do academic developers
need to know about their institutions, their academic colleagues, and themselves in order
to choose wisely from the various approaches open to them?
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