My teaching focuses on postgraduate programmes at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and on the MSc in Digital Education. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
At the Edinburgh Futures Institute I developed and was the co-director of the MSc Education Futures (2019-24), and I teach the Culture, Heritage and Learning Futures course and lead the Knowledge Integration and Project Planning/Project for the programme. On Digital Education, I lead Digital futures for learning and have led or taught on Course Design for Digital Environments, Introduction to digital environments for learning, Research Methods and E-learning and digital cultures. Between 2012-15 I was director of the Digital Education programme.
I was part of the team that created and taught the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), on the Coursera platform (2013-14). This was one of the first six MOOCs to be developed by the University of Edinburgh and in total more than 75,000 people enrolled for the course across three instances. Read more about the early experiences of designing and teaching this MOOC, and about our ‘teacherbot’ pedagogical design experiment in 2014. In 2014 I co-authored the ‘Pedagogy of the MOOC‘ report for the Higher Education Academy. I led consultancy activity with the World Bank in relation to their MOOC developments.
I have served as external examiner for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester and the MA Education in Virtual Worlds, at the University of West of England.
supervision
I supervise MSc and PhD projects on topics relating to online higher education, feedback and assessment, cultural heritage and the arts, information literacy, digital culture, organisations and technology, sustainable education, social media and professional learning. Since 2010 I have supervised more than 35 MSc dissertations. If you are interested in working with me, please read more about the kind of research I am potentially able to supervise.
Completed doctoral projects:
PhD, 2024 – Dr Sharon Boyd
PhD, 2023 – Dr Nada Alsayegh
PhD, 2022 – Dr Sarah Treloar, School of Education. Multiple, dynamic and complex: An Investigation of Investment in English as a Second Language on Facebook
EdD, 2021 – Dr Maureen Finn, School of Education. A socio-material reading of belonging: mobile children and mobile devices in school spaces.
PhD, 2019 – Dr James Lamb, School of Education. Space, Sociomateriality, Sound. The Learning Spaces of Higher Education.
EdD, 2019 – Dr Debbie Schachter, School of Education. Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice: Critical Information Literacy Teaching in Canadian Higher Education.
EdD, 2019 – Dr Murray Craig, School of Education. Understanding the messy realities of teaching with technology in physical education.
PhD, 2015 – Dr Janan Dean, School of Social and Political Sciences. Examining Social Work and Technology: A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Technology Issues in Violence Against Women Shelters in Ontario, Canada.
PhD, 2014 – Dr Jeremy Knox, School of Education. Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: contaminating the Subject of Global Education.
PhD, 2014 – Dr Claire Sowton (Wright), School of Education. Arts evaluation and the transformative power of the arts:A visual ethnography of transformative learning in a collaborative community (arts) film.
I am currently supervising the following doctoral students:
- Stuart Allan (with Siân Bayne)
- Christie Chan, Edinburgh College of Art (with Melissa Terras as lead supervisor)
- John Morrison, Edinburgh College of Art (with Chris Speed as lead supervisor)
- Joe Noteboom, Sociology/Centre for Technomoral Futures (with Karen Gregory as lead supervisor)
- Nicolás Ruiz (with Michael Gallagher as lead supervisor, and Cara Wilson)
- Clare Thomson (with Tim Fawns)
- Yu Wang (with Shari Sabeti)