Author Archives: opendistanceteachingandlearning

About opendistanceteachingandlearning

Research professor in Open Distance and E-Learning (ODeL) at the University of South Africa (Unisa). Interested in teaching and learning in networked and open distance and e-learning environments. I blog in my personal capacity and the views expressed in the blog does not reflect or represent the views of my employer, the University of South Africa (Unisa).

An African Network for Learning Analytics Research

Posted on August 10, 2022 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Background As African higher education becomes increasingly digitised and datafied, higher education institutions will have access to not only more student data, but also  a greater variety and granularity of data, creating opportunities to utilise the data for a greater … Continue reading →

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Rethinking student vulnerability and risk: Researching student success and retention in open education contexts

Posted on August 12, 2020 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

This blog contains text and some of the images used for the invited seminar, UNESCO Chair on Open Distance Learning, University of South Africa (UNISA), Wednesday 12 August 2020 This reflection flows from an editorial I wrote for a Special … Continue reading →

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Special issue: call for papers

Posted on May 7, 2020 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Originally posted on TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION:
Possibilities and complexities of decolonising higher education: critical perspectives on praxis (co-editors: Kathy Luckett, Aneta Hayes and Sharon Stein) Photo by ICSA on Pexels.com There is wide acknowledgement of the need to ‘decolonise’…

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Learning analytics in open, distance and distributed learning: Potential, practice and challenges

Posted on May 28, 2019 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

As part of the series, Springer Briefs in Open and Distance Education, we invite expressions of interest for a book that will critically explore and map the potential and challenges of learning analytics in the specific context of open, distance … Continue reading →

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Fear is a broken compass

Posted on April 4, 2019 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Fear is a broken compass. Fear is medication that does not work anymore. Fear is convulsions at night. Fear is not-knowing and to continue walking I used to know the rules, the landscape, and what was expected of me as … Continue reading →

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Faculty as quantified, measured and tired: The lure of the red shoes

Posted on June 4, 2018 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

[This is the text of my keynote on 31 May 2018 at the First Annual NWU Teaching and Learning Conference at the North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa.] I would like to take the opportunity to thank the conference organisers for … Continue reading →

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What I heard, what I did not hear and what I wish I had heard… Reflections on the World Conference on Online Learning, Toronto, 2017

Posted on November 21, 2017 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Recently I’ve had the privilege of attending the World Conference on Online Learning in Toronto, organized and hosted by Contact North I Contact Nord. What a conference it was! At times, it resembled a medieval marketplace or bazaar with a … Continue reading →

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Open(ing) Education

Posted on June 21, 2017 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Image credit:I’ve used two sources for the above collated image. The image of the head was sourced from https://pixabay.com/en/art-sculpture-scrap-sculpture-human-1699977/ while the image of the network was sourced from https://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Egoi_network.png  Call for Proposals We are excited to invite you to submit … Continue reading →

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Decolonising the collection, analyses and use of student data: A tentative exploration/proposal

Posted on November 14, 2016 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Voices from the Global South* (*I know the term is contentious) increasingly demand to not only be recognised in the extremely uneven and skewed terrain of knowledge production and dissemination, but to actively take part and contest and reshape knowledge … Continue reading →

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Failing our students: not noticing the traces they leave behind

Posted on November 7, 2016 by opendistanceteachingandlearning

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/p-366446/?no_redirect Last week on 1 November, Jesse Stommel hosted a panel discussion on Ethical online learning  – which stayed with me and haunted me since I’ve watched it. Somehow this morning as I was writing this blog, some … Continue reading →

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