Researching the ingewikkeld

Turns out that announcing I am going to be blogging regularly has not made me blog regularly. So, this is an announcement that I am going to blog irregularly. Or continue to blog irregularly. I am still thinking about edtech as coloniality but of course I have been doing Other Things.
One of the Other Things I have been doing is writing an Insider’s Guide to Navigating the Research Bureaucracy at my university. You know, everything that you wished someone had told you? Turns out there is a lot to share about the informal systems as well as the formal ones. But that is not really blog worthy.
Something else I did was write a piece on South Africa for the 2021 Educause Horizon Report. The brief was to describe higher education in South Africa especially in the light of the key trends identified by the Panel this year. That is on page 39 of the Report.
What was striking is that Higher Education in South Africa represents an extreme case of a situation that the pandemic made clear is pretty much a global situation: inequality for students, for academics, for institutions, for national systems, for the sector as a whole.
And how Covid has made everything so much more ingewikkeld - the dictionary says that means vexing and complicated.
And how there is so much that needs to be better understood. Which is why I concluded the piece with a set of suggested research questions:

• What are the risks of collecting and analyzing student data, especially for poor students, students with barriers to learning, and students from the peripheries? In what ways are they more vulnerable to exploitation?
• How can data practices in higher education be carried out in a manner that pays back to communities from which data is extracted?
  
• As data literacies become more complex, how can these be integrated into higher education curricula in culturally appropriate ways?
• Whose interests are being served by new models of teaching and learning provision? Are they, as some claim, simply creating a second—and lesser—tier of education for the less well-off?
  
• How can systems be designed so that stackable credentials serve the public good, rather than only narrowly addressing employers’ needs?
• How can the broader social risks of algorithmic bias be mitigated in universities, given that AI is not yet widespread?
  
• Since OER have such obvious benefits for higher education in terms of adaptability and cost savings, why are they not more widely created and used? What are the enablers and constraints for their uptake?
  
• What is the role of private companies in emergent forms of blended and online learning? Given the speed at which new stakeholders have entered the higher education ecosystem, what have the risks been of these new relationships? How can less-well-resourced universities, in particular, ameliorate such risks?
  

Let's hope that we can find ways to undertake this research and to find answers.