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ENGAGING ACADEMICS IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED LEARNING

A synthesis project for the UK's Higher Education Academy

Dr Mira VogelLearning TechnologistGoldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit Goldsmiths, University of London

January 2010

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Executive summary..................................3Background...............................................4

Change in the higher education sector..4Students................................................4Professional development for academic teachers 5Technologies.........................................6What is engagement and why give it attention? 7

Methodology...........................................10Technology-centred – pedagogy-centred12

Technocentricity and techno-negativity12Technical knowledge and academics..12Technical mastery...............................13Beyond technical mastery...................14

Learner-centred - institution-centred......16Post-colonial views of development....16Academics at the centre......................17Learners..............................................17

Centralised - local...................................18The importance of culture....................18Managerialism and autonomy.............19Rejection.............................................19'Capability building' rather than 'development' 20Balance and equilibrium......................21

Extrinsic - intrinsic motivation.................22Learners needs...................................22Self-actualisation.................................22Perceived relevance of TEL................22Remuneration and funding..................22Coercion..............................................23Time and professional identity.............23

Situated - generic...................................26One to one...........................................26Grouping academics...........................26Situating in practice.............................27Situated learning as excluding technologies 27Broadening out from situated practice.28

Support - development...........................29Support rather than development........29Uniting support and development........29

Negotiable - non-negotiable...................31Institutional orientation to management31Enthusiasm..........................................32Reflective practice...............................32Communities of practice......................33

Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths, University of London, 19th January 2010

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Freedom within well-defined projects. .34Accounting for informal development. .34

Institutional - third party software............35Recognising potential..........................35Obstacles to going outside..................35The needs of experimental academic teachers 36Approaches with new tools..................37

Conditional success factors....................39Taking advantage of being central......39

M25 responses................................40Not imposing practice..........................40Gaining attention.................................41'Capability-building' rather than 'development' 41

M25 responses................................41Addressing cynicism about change.....41

M25 responses................................42Addressing the 'practice gap'..............42Maintaining motivation.........................42

M25 responses................................42Building confidence with technologies.43

M25 responses................................43Limitations and unanswered questions. .44

Limitations...........................................44Unanswered questions........................44

References.............................................46


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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.


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BACKGROUNDCHANGE IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTORUniversity 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.

STUDENTSIn 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 technology-enhanced 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:


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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 TEACHERSStrong 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."

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


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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 i-lecture 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.

TECHNOLOGIESTeaching 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 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.


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WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT AND 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 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.


Discipline specific

Org behaviourManagement of changeLearning organisationAccreditationLifelong learning etcQuality Assurance

EnterpriseWork-based learningPartnershipsChange management

Cognitive scienceNew learning; technologies INSTITUTION

Institutional managersEmployers, government agencies

Educational developers

Funding bodies / quality agencies / ILT

SYSTEMS ORIENTATION

PERSON ORIENTATION

PO

LICY

CR

ITIQU

E

DOMESTICATING LIBERATING

INDIVIDUAL

Students

Tips and hints on practicePhenomenographic approaches

Critical theoryPostmodernismHumanistic psychology

Human resource management

Internal consultant

Political strategist

Reflective practitioner

Entrepreneur

Interpretive-hermeneutic

Romantic

Students, individual academic staff

Activist-modeller

Professional com

pete

Vigilant opportunist

Educational researcher

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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 well-

being 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

Figure 1: A model of academic development (after Land, 2001)

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.


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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 e-learning 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.


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METHODOLOGYThe 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 learningIt quickly became clear that the literature dedicated to this particular topic was almost non-existent, 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 re-read 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 Centralised - local


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Extrinsic - intrinsic motivation Formal - informal Situated - generalised Support - development ethos Voluntary - compulsory Institutional - third party environmentsThe 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.


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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-NEGATIVITYSurry 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 self-confident 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 e-learning 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 policy-makers who themselves sometimes comply with the rhetoric of technology-enhanced learning without demonstrating deep understanding (HEA, 2008).

TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND ACADEMICSThe 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 MASTERYClegg 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 concern in a long list of prerequisites to "embarking on a significant e-learning venture".


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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 technology-centred 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 face-time, 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 Licence-type 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 MASTERYAs 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 technology-enhanced 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."

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


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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 DEVELOPMENTThe 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 CENTREAlternatives 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.

LEARNERSThis 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 meaning-making, 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 assessment criteria unread by students … Critical literacy remains an intervention,


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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-for-grantedness 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 CULTURETypologies 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 AUTONOMYMcNamee (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 risk-taking, 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 self-reliant 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.

REJECTIONLand (2001) notes that power-coercive approaches tend to be the chosen approaches of practitioners who are politically orientated. However, these can cause resistance, resentment and superficial, behavioural engagement. Hussein (2008) argues that such approaches bear


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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.

'CAPABIL ITY BUILDING' RATHER THAN 'DEVELOPMENT'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-the-job 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 EQUILIBRIUMThe 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 NEEDSJudgements 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-ACTUALISATIONBluteau 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 e-learning, 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 TELRelatedly, 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.

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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.

COERCIONAs 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 IDENTITYThe 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 technical infrastructure, the use of Web 2.0 in a pedagogically-rich environment will become another unfulfilled promise."


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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 lose-lose 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 thepace 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 e-learning 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."

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


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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 ONEAcademics 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 ACADEMICSCentrally-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 university-wide 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 approach which includes and supports diverse activities. Funding shortages militate against this and channel institutional policy-makers towards economies of scale.


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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 PRACTICEWesterman 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 TECHNOLOGIESBy 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 on-line 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 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 cross-


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disciplinary 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 PRACTICEThere 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 ICT-based 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 DEVELOPMENTShephard (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 DEVELOPMENTHanrahan 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 MANAGEMENTWhite'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 top-down 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 well-received 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).

ENTHUSIASMEnthusiasm 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 PRACTICEReflection 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 PRACTICEEtienne 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 non-participation is, no less than participation, an expression of identity. He also points to non-participation 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 PROJECTSIn 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 clearly-defined 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 INFORMAL DEVELOPMENTHighly 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 SOFTWAREWeb 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.

RECOGNIS ING 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 OUTSIDEAcademics 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 TEACHERSThese 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 TOOLSAt 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 FACTORSThere 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 CENTRALAcademic 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 responsesThe 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 PRACTICEAcademics 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 ATTENTIONPractices 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.

'CAPABIL ITY-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 responsesNobody in the discussion group knew of an away-day dedicated to design or capability-building 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. Cross-disciplinary 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 CHANGEChange – 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 well-advised 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 responsesMany 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 'PRACTICE 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 MOTIVATIONMaintaining 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 responsesIt 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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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 TECHNOLOGIESEvery 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 responsesThere 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 QUESTIONSThis final section discusses limitations of the work and raises further questions.

LIMITATIONSThat 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 QUESTIONSThis 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. Alternatively, does time mean prioritisation of TEL over something else, in which case it is


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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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