Five pillars of the Edinburgh Futures Institute
In June and July 2023, the Teaching Matters series, 'Showcasing the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI)', was developed with the aim of highlighting EFI’s forward-thinking and innovative approaches to post-graduate learning and teaching. It offers critical reflections on the Institute’s first year, by exploring some hard-won lessons and inspiring surprises. The series is divided into two parts. The first part offers insights into the lessons learnt from EFI’s Academic Development Workshops, while the second reflects on the innovative approaches to teaching and learning at EFI.
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Five pillars of the Edinburgh Futures Institute
Pillar 1: Challenge-led approach
One of the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s foundational pillars is its focus on a challenge-led approach to teaching and learning. In the introductory post of this series, Mike Bruce, Education Development Manager in EFI, highlights one of the biggest challenges associated with courses that have a Fusion (hybrid) model in their design and delivery - providing a positive student learning experience for both on campus and online students equally. He shares some of the key strategies EFI uses to mitigate this challenge:
“…our Course Organisers design and deliver their courses with this in mind. Supported by a Teaching Assistant (TA), they strive to ensure that student voices are heard, and are included within the classes by responding to online chats, questions raised in class, and group work, which can include a mix of on campus and online students in our Fusion teaching rooms”.
On a similar note, in his blog post, Dr James Lamb highlights the practical challenges in connecting with two audiences (online and in-person students) and in ensuring that these audiences are connecting with each other. He invites us to think beyond the dichotomy of online/in-person students by designing courses with a ‘fusion’ mindset from the start. James proposes this model as a way to ensure that we continue to attract students whose personal circumstances might not enable them to attend in person but who will enrich the very discussions of the course through their unique life experiences.
In this way, fusion-teaching reflects a commitment to expand the very definition of ‘student’ to people from various backgrounds and profiles. In their blog post on experiential learning, Vlada Kravtsova and Sarah Harvey discuss how a challenge-led approach can help address real world problems. They discuss how this is reflected in elective courses such as the Students as Change Agents elective (SACHA).
“SACHA allows undergraduate students to work in groups alongside partner organisations to actively engage in real-world scenarios, issues and challenges. Indeed, through such examples of experiential learning, students are responding first-hand to UN Sustainable Development Goals”.
Pillar 2: Interdisciplinarity
A second key and innovative pillar of EFI is its approach to teaching through interdisciplinarity.
Interdisciplinary teaching is the “integration of the contributions of several disciplines to a problem or issue” which “brings interdependent parts of knowledge into harmonious relationships” (Stember, 1991).
In her post, Kate Orton-Johnson, Director of Education in EFI, highlights EFI's commitment to interdisciplinary education. By offering a diverse range of Postgraduate Taught (PGT) programs such as Creative Industries, Data Inequality and Society, Education Futures, Future Governance, Narrative Futures, and Service Management and Design, EFI fosters an environment where students can experience the intersection of various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach not only creates a vibrant intellectual atmosphere but also encourages students to think critically, adapt flexibly, and engage with complex, real-world challenges.
In their blog post, Jane McKie and Lynda Clark from EFI highlight how interdisciplinary courses equip students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to work together in envisaging collaborative solutions to global challenges. This integration is reflected, for example, in one of their courses ‘Interdisciplinary Futures and Text Remix’. Here, students are asked to explicitly think about what has fomented their intellectual autobiography:
“For example, individually, students create their ‘intellectual autobiography’: a visualisation of the ways in which different kinds of disciplinary and non-academic knowledge have contributed to their current way of working. This reflection helps them develop a greater sense of self-awareness, so that when they come together with students from other disciplines to tackle a group task (imagining a potential solution to a real-world issue such as climate change or sustainability), they are better equipped to identify blind spots and assumptions in their own and other disciplines.”
Centring interdisciplinarity at the heart of the course design invites students to break free of the boundaries imposed by distinctive disciplinary framings.
Pillar 3: Fusion teaching
A third crucial pillar of EFI rests on the delivery of fusion teaching. This is teaching that isn’t just hybrid or asynchronous but that considers the needs and requirements of both the face-to-face and online students equally, from all phases of the course design. In this sense, fusion teaching is about considering the language we use when talking about the types of students we have. As James Lambs contends in his blog post:
“If we use “face-to-face”, “in class” and “being present” to describe those students physically situated with us in a teaching studio, we run the risk of othering those engaging online. Instead, we need to think about how the above terms, as well as ‘arrival’ and ‘eye contact’ work differently, but also positively, for students attending online and perhaps mediated via screen.”
With digital technologies woven into the fabric of our everyday and educational surroundings, every student spends time learning in online environments. He says one way to think about such fusion is to consider,
‘Every student is an online student’.
In their blog post, Alex Penland reflects on the ways that fusion teaching is an effective tool for adaptability, which becomes more and more relevant in an ever-changing world.
Drawing from their experience as both a student and PhD Teaching Assistant at EFI, they provide a compelling example on how they used the technology to enable online students to feel physically present during an out-of-class activity at Dynamic Earth, concluding that:
“If I take away no other lesson from the Fusion classroom, I want to take away this one: think outside the box”
In a different light, Jen Ross argues that fusion teaching, with its asynchronous component, enables more inclusive classrooms, and provides opportunities for non-traditional students to participate:
“EFI takes fusion learning seriously as a form of pedagogy that works with different spaces and synchronicities (Pates, Sikora and Rutherford, 2023), and values the varied places, times, experiences and insights that students bring with them in asynchronous engagements”.
It encourages crossovers and interactions between students, both during and after their time as students, and provides opportunities for constructive and purposeful engagement that is slower-paced than the fast pace of university life. To this avail, fusion teaching very much embodies EFI’s ethos of creating learning spaces that permit students from various backgrounds and specificities to share the learning experience in creative and adaptable ways.
Pillar 4: Intensive model of course delivery
This inclusive ethos to student participation is also reflected in EFI’s fourth pillar: its intensive model of course delivery. Again, this was developed to adapt to the various profile of students, allowing to deviate from the archetypal representation of a ‘student’, as a twenty-something individual who is available to commit to taking classes full-time during a set academic year.
The intensive model runs over a five-week period with pre-intensive asynchronous activities, a 2-day intensive teaching block, and a post-intensive asynchronous follow up. This model enables learners’ flexibility to navigate their own learning pathways. In her blog post, Kate Orton-Johnson reflects on the past year:
“It has been a challenging and demanding year for colleagues and students in EFI and I have found myself repeatedly invoking the phrase “steep learning curve” as we engage in interdisciplinary ways of working, fusion modes of delivery and intensive models of teaching. This triple whammy of innovation has placed considerable demands on academic staff, students, and professional service colleagues as we try to bridge gaps and make connections between various fields of study in a complex web of university structures and processes”.
Aiming for such an inclusive and intensive future-facing model, EFI courses also demonstrate integration with AI technologies. In their blog post, Jane McKie, Stuart King and Lynda Clark, offer an example outlining the possibilities, challenges and considerations related to text generation using AI:
“During the last year we have been using both ChatGPT and its pre-cursors …… in our EFI course Text Remix and in workshops on creative writing. Focussing on using this technology in a playful way, opens up the possibilities for co-creation through writing games involving interacting with the AI, making new prompts, and combining cut-up and randomisation of texts to make new prompts. Students have found these tasks particularly interesting, noticing both the ways in which AI can become a creativity amplifier, but also easily identifying the shortcomings of the current set of AI tools”.
Pillar 5: Reflexivity
Finally, the big take-away from the EFI series in general is that educators who have contributed to the design and delivery of EFI’s first year of courses are still firmly in the experimentation stage of the programmes. This is reflected in the tone of the blog posts, where the authors admit to blind spots and certain shortcomings. For instance, Kate Otron-Johnson reflects:
“In delivery, we also experienced challenges with interdisciplinary cohorts requiring more scaffolding before/after and during course delivery as students come with more diverse needs than in fields where there is a shared understanding of a discipline”.
There is a strong reflexive tone that comes out of this, and that we argue constitutes EFI’s fifth pillar. As a completely innovative and integrated institute, reflexivity seems to be there to stay, as a guiding principle for continuing to adapt the teaching and learning practices in ways that best reflect an ideal of inclusivity and real-life challenges. As Kate Otron-Johnson summarises:
“The learning curve has been steep but the journey of EFI has just begun. As we navigate the ever-changing educational landscape, we remain focused on issues of sustainability, social justice, and ethical practice, collaboratively seeking solutions to the wicked problems humanity faces↗️. We remain committed to working towards interdisciplinary excellence and innovation to create a space in which students can be prepared for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.”
Collegiate Commentary
with Tim Fawns, Associate Professor at Monash Education Academy, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
While Teaching Matters primarily showcases University of Edinburgh teaching and learning practice, our core values of collegiality and support also extend beyond our institution, inviting a wider, international community to engage in Teaching Matters. In this feature, we ask colleagues from beyond the University to provide a short commentary on ‘Five things↗️...’, and share their own learning and teaching resource or output, which we can learn from.
Tim's Commentary on "Five pillars Edinburgh Futures Institute"
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about some of my former colleagues’ experiences of teaching for the EFI, as described in this series' blog posts. I was part of the EFI educational experiment, designing and running one of the first pilot courses as part of the MSc Education Futures (brilliantly led by Jen Ross and James Lamb). The pilot run of our Postdigital Society course has been one of the highlights of my teaching career. In large part, this was due to an amazing group of students, some of whom are co-authors on a paper with Jen and me about insights drawn from our experience (see Fawns et al., 2023).
With my family, I moved away from Edinburgh at the end of 2022, and started at Monash University in January 2023. The 5 Pillars of EFI, mentioned in this newsletter, resonate in some ways with initiatives here. In particular, Monash’s new Flagship Rich Educational Experiences (FREEs) echo some of the EFI’s experiential and interdisciplinary initiatives. Outlined within Monash’s Impact 2030 strategic plan, the FREEs are part of a focus on experimental and creative solutions to global challenges. The “real world”, challenge-led approach mentioned in Vlada Kravtsova and Sarah Harvey’s post about Students as Change Agents (SACHA) sounds like it has been driven by similar aspirations.
As soon as I arrived at Monash, I became embroiled in our institutional response to widely available generative artificial intelligence technologies (check out this series of 10 minute chats on GenAI that will soon feature The University of Edinburgh’s Sian Bayne). The perceived threat of GenAI to education centres largely around assessment, and each Australian Higher Education institution has been asked by regulator TEQSA to provide a strategic plan that outlines how it will assure the credibility of its qualifications (see the TEQSA assessment reform principles in this Assessment reform for the age of artificial intelligence). Thinking about Jane McKie, Stuart King and Lynda Clark’s experimental yet ethical take on using AI within the remixing of text, in the context of fusion intensive approaches, sent me on a rollercoaster of excitement, anxiety, creative and conceptual overload (no wonder reflexivity is an important pillar of the EFI). This reflexive balance of experimental yet ethical sounds, to me, like a necessary ingredient of future-focused education. This is an ingredient that is not so much “baked in” - since that would imply it no longer requires work and has become invisible - but carefully woven (sorry, I am a careless mixer of metaphors) throughout so much of what is done in the name of the EFI.
At Monash, our Education Plan asks us to consider the whole student and their place in a complex and challenging world. To do this, we need to think beyond tried and tested methods and ideas of education (e.g. focusing all of our energies towards disciplinary learning outcomes) to values and to the generation of new knowledge. If you write on a whiteboard with permanent marker, the best way to clean it off is to first write over the top with a non-permanent marker. Similarly, with entrenched educational practices, new challenges can help us deal with old ones. Covid-19, the emergence of widely-available generative artificial intelligence technologies, and various other challenges, push us to make changes to educational policy and practice that we seemed previously unable to make. However, such change must be done thoughtfully, and a future-facing ethos, mixed with aspirations of openness and honesty, can help with this by proactively promoting important discussions.
One of the challenges in my new role is to try to foster reflexive and outward-looking perspectives on education through academic development initiatives. These initiatives are, often, aimed at teachers new to Monash and, sometimes, new to the profession. They are almost always for educators and education-related staff with heavy workloads and life pressures. I suspect that fostering this outward-looking, future facing thinking cannot be done effectively without motivating the beliefs and energy of teachers to engage in the wider world as it is, and is becoming. If our goal is to help students to creatively and ethically navigate uncertain futures, with hope, kindness, and a strong sense of their own values, then I think we as educators need to cultivate those same aspirations in ourselves.
As we can see in the experiences and reflections in these posts, the strength of our aspirations is clearest when we are confronted by challenge. Kate Orton-Johnson and Alex Penland both discuss the practical challenges of fusion teaching in their posts, alongside the potential benefits of having to engage in such challenges. Hybrid education is important at Monash because of our international and distributed campuses. EFI’s fusion approach is, I think, a model that Monash and others can learn from. The EFI fusion model was designed before the Covid-19 pandemic, as a way of generating innovative combinations of online and offline learning activity, and extending the sense of reach of the physical campus.
While still at Edinburgh, based in the amazing clinical education team led by Prof Gill Aitken, we designed and ran some courses aimed at helping our medical education colleagues negotiate their own emergency online and hybrid experiences. As challenging as this was, the benefits of Edinburgh’s historical investment (financially and in terms of the recruitment and development of expertise) in digital education were clear. This includes the work done through the EFI on establishing its intentional and intensive fusion model as more than a “Plan B” for when on campus education is not feasible: it was a strategic and pedagogical move towards new creative possibilities of blending on campus and online practices (Bayne et al., 2020; Fawns et al., 2022).
There are many lessons that can be learned from the intentionality of the EFI’s approach to a hybrid modality. James Lamb’s point that every student is an online student, and, with it, the erosion of a conceptual border between online and offline is crucial to opening up new avenues of design thinking. This ties into postdigital and related scholarship around education (e.g. Bayne et al., 2020; Fawns, 2019; Goodyear et al., 2021; Jandric et al., 2018), in which all learning activity is seen as a complex and emergent combination of entangled elements. As James points out, blurring the borders between online and offline does not remove the planning and practical challenges of good hybrid education, but it gives us a powerful lens with which to approach those challenges.
Here, Jen Ross’s discussion of asynchronous approaches aligns with my own thinking that asynchronous design is a crucial, complementary element to the intensity of synchronous hybrid approaches. Asynchronous design can make the overall learning experiences of students more inclusive by lowering the stakes of what needs to be achieved within a given hybrid session, and by building continuity before and after an intensive hybrid session. This was something I built into the design of the Postdigital Society course, and have incorporated into the guidance I give colleagues at Monash about designing hybrid and, indeed, online and on campus approaches.
As useful as such practical learning from the fusion model is, a greater lesson for me is the value of holding an aspiration to be reflexive and ethical in my work, both responding to immediate needs and trying to shape future education such that it is relevant, effective, and empowering for students who must navigate an increasingly uncertain yet interconnected world.
References
• Bayne, S., Evans, P., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J., Macleod, H., & Sinclair, C. (2020). The manifesto for teaching online. MIT Press.
• Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in design and practice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1, 132–145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8.
• Fawns, T., Ross, J., Carbonel, H., Noteboom, J., Finnegan-Dehn, S., & Raver, M. (2023). Mapping and tracing the postdigital: Approaches and parameters of postdigital research. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00391-y.
• Fawns, T., Markauskaite, L., Carvalho, L., & Goodyear, P. (2022). H2m pedagogy: Designing for hybrid learning in medical education. In E. Gil, Y. Mor, Y. Dimitriadis, & C. Köppe (Eds.), Hybrid Learning Spaces. Berlin: Springer.
• Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2021). Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(2), 445-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09926-7.
• Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000.
About Tim: Tim Fawns is Associate Professor (Education Focused) at the Monash Education Academy, Monash Univeristy, Melbourne. Tim’s research interests are at the intersection between digital, professional (particularly medical and healthcare professions) and higher education, with a particular focus on the relationship between technology and educational practice. Before moving to Australia, Tim was a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Education, Edinburgh Medical School. Recent publications:
• Fawns, T., & Nieminem, J. (2023). The only way is ethics: A dialogue of assessment and social good. In L. Czerniewicz & C. Cronin (Eds.), Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (pp. 533-553). Open Book Publishers: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0363/chapters/10.11647/obp.0363.23.
• Fawns, T., Ross, J., Carbonel, H., Noteboom, J., Finnegan-Dehn, S., & Raver, M. (2023). Mapping and tracing the postdigital: Approaches and parameters of postdigital research. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00391-y.
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