Complexity leadership in learning analytics: Drivers,challenges and opportunities

Learning analytics (LA) has demonstrated great potential in improving teaching quality, learning experience and administrative efficiency. However, the adoption of LA in higher education is often beset by challenges in areas such as resources, stakeholder buy-in, ethics and privacy. Addressing these challenges in a complex system requires agile leadership that is responsive to pressures in the environment and capable of managing conflicts. This paper examines LA adoption processes among 21 UK higher education institutions using complexity leadership theory as a framework. The data were collected from 23 interviews with institutional leaders and subsequently analysed using a thematic coding scheme. The results showed a number of prominent challenges associated with LA deployment, which lie in the inherent tensions between innovation and operation. These challenges require a new form of leadership to create and nurture an adaptive space in which innovations are supported and ultimately transformed into the mainstream operation of an institution. This paper argues that a complexity leadership model enables higher education to shift towards more fluid and dynamic approaches for LA adoption, thus ensuring its scalability and sustainability.     

Social Status and the Effects of Legal Concealed Firearms on College Campuses

Research consistently shows that students and faculty are generally against expanding access to firearms on campus, and many stakeholders worry about the effects of campus carry laws on student violence, civility, and feelings of safety. We contribute to this literature by investigating how potential changes to campus carry policies affect students’ reported commitment to campus activities. Theories explaining fear of crime and social commitment led to hypotheses that predict members of socially disadvantaged groups—specifically women and minority students—would report less favorable attitudes toward gun possession on campus, greater feelings of vulnerability to victimization, and less commitment to the college environment when students or staff may possess guns. Hypotheses received support, and add to the growing literature documenting potential issues that legislators, administrators, and faculty might consider when debating the enactment of campus carry policies.     

Dissonance between the digitally created words of school and home

This article considers the potential for dissonance that one 12‐year‐old child (Clare) may experience as a text producer using new technologies, when working across a range of contexts. In this ongoing case study, two types of text are explored: a computer‐generated text produced as a homework task for school, and texts produced using an Internet‐based social network site called ‘Bebo’. Key features of Clare's text production in both contexts are identified and compared in an attempt to establish the dissonance that may be experienced as she switches from one context to another. However, by placing the texts alongside each other, it can be seen that although they look markedly different, the acts of composing the texts bear some significant resemblance. The article concludes by suggesting that experiences of dissonance in relation to text production may in fact be lodged more firmly with the recipient of any text, when it fails to meet their social, cultural and linguistic expectations, than with the child composer.     

It's a Holiday!!

This article studies various holiday distributions, the most interesting one being Easter. Gauss’ Easter algorithm and Microsoft Excel are used to determine that the Easter distribution can be closely approximated by the convolution of two well‐known uniform distributions.     

Book-Sharing for Parenting and Child Development in South Africa: A Randomized Controlled Trial

This study evaluated the impact of a parenting intervention on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development in a group of caregivers and their 21-to-28-month-old children in a low-income South African township. A randomized controlled trial compared an experimental group (n = 70) receiving training in dialogic book-sharing (8 weekly group sessions) with a wait-list control group (n = 70). They were assessed before the intervention, immediately following it, and at a six month follow-up. The intervention had positive effects on child language and attention, but not behavior problems, prosocial behavior, or theory of mind. Intervention caregivers were less verbally and psychologically harsh, showed more sensitivity and reciprocity and more complex cognitive talk. This program benefitted parenting and child development and holds promise for low-income contexts.     

Envisioning the Future: Working toward Sustainability in Fine Art Education

Fine art education provides students with opportunities to acquire knowledge and skills to respond creatively to their experience of society and culture. Fostering creative ways of knowing, thinking and doing requires studio learning conditions that promote the exploration of embodied perceptions, material sensibilities and conceptual ideas that are provisional, socially constructed and ever changing. Traditionally, art schools provided these conditions unchallenged because they were autonomous. Since the 1980s, however, art schools have been integrated into the academy, and face increasing pressure to meet the institutional demands of being in a university. Some argue this changed status means the academy, with its research and pedagogic traditions, is actually straitjacketing creativity. Furthermore, contemporary art practice has changed as artists are increasingly experimenting with interdisciplinary modes of working. This article discusses a two‐year major change initiative, undertaken within an urban Australian art school, designed to respond to this complex set of changed circumstances. It considers ways to address institutional compliance and viability demands while maintaining deeply held values about how to foster creativity in undergraduate students. The outcome is a new organising structure and renewed curriculum for the largest programme offering in the school: the fine art undergraduate degree. Educational renewal is conceptualised as a creative process and the approach to change is thus adapted from creative research methodologies. By treating pedagogy and curriculum design as a creative process, this change initiative, rather than straitjacketing creativity, has re‐envisioned an epistemological framework for undergraduate fine art that will sustain creativity education into the future.