The Society for Research in Higher Education Digital University Network was launched in 2012. It is one of several networks supported by the SRHE, and it is currently convened by Katy Jordan, Jeremy Knox and Janja Komljenovic.
The nature of the ‘digital’ is subject to rapid change, so we have created this blog site as a space to reflect upon the meaning of the Digital University network, to both look back at trends in the network over the past decade, and to discuss the current issues for the network to focus on moving forward.
We have taken a look at the archive of SRHE conference papers associated with the Digital University network theme, as a way of exploring trends in topics over time and how the concept of the Digital University is defined. This analysis is available as a short paper, and it is intended to not be an end point but rather to start a conversation with the community about what the Digital University means, what has changed over time and where the network should focus its activities in the future.
We invite you to share your thoughts in response, in particular addressing two key questions:
How would you define the concept of the ‘Digital University’?
What are the critical issues facing the ‘Digital University’ at the moment? (this will help shape planning for future network events)
We would also be interested to hear suggestions for speakers to invite to events. Please feel free to respond by commenting on this post. If you would prefer your responses to not be public, a Google Form is also available.
Please do subscribe to the blog using box at the top right to keep up-to-date with progress and future events!
On 29th April, the Digital University Network will be hosting an event focusing on some of the latest research in relation to social media and higher education. The event will be online and registration is now open via the SRHE website at: https://srhe.ac.uk/civicrm/?civiwp=CiviCRM&q=civicrm/event/info&reset=1&id=700
We are excited to host guest speakers Sue Beckingham, Olivia Kelly, Lenandlar Singh and Alex Wang, and look forward to seeing you online on the 29th!
Session overview
The use of social media in the context of higher education – for learning, teaching, and scholarship – is well established. However, recent changes at Twitter (now known as X) have served to highlight the risks of adopting third-party, commercial technical infrastructure for academic activities and purposes. As a result of the changes at X, engagement with the platform is perceived to be greatly reduced, and a number of new platforms have entered the market. There continues to be a good deal of uncertainty – in relation to the longer term future of X, and which platforms may emerge as a leading alternative – which means that it is too early to understand the implications for the future, and it may be some time before this can be fully gauged. In the face of uncertainty and flux in relation to particular platforms, in this event we turn to current perspectives on how social media is being used in practice.
The session will open with some reflections on the current context of social media in higher education, and introduce the following speakers and themes:
Olivia Kelly, How distance learners establish social presence on X (Twitter) to build online support communities
Alex Wang, Social Media Platform ‘RED’: A liminal space for Chinese international students
Sue Beckingham, Digital Footprints Matter: Encouraging and supporting professionalism and safety on social media
Lenandlar Singh, Early Career Researchers Twitter practices: an identity development perspective
It is ten years since the Society for Research in Higher Education annual conference began hosting the Digital University as one of its themes. During this time, the changing nature of online and digital technologies and platforms has arguably changed dramatically. It is therefore timely to ask, what is the meaning of the Digital University? How might the network focus its activities, looking forwards? In this session, we present an analysis and reflection on the range of contributions which have been presented under this theme at the SRHE annual conferences, in order to look back and reflect on the nature of the ‘digital university’. We will present and discuss themes in the collection of papers, with the intention that it will form a starting point for broader discussions about the concept of the digital university and the future of the network.
Introduction
The inaugural meeting of the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Digital University network was held in 2012 (Atkinson, 2012; SRHE, 2012). From its inception, the network has been intentionally flexible in its definition and scope; “The intention is not to focus on ‘elearning’ as such but to explore a range of issues (both theoretical and practical) that arise through the impact of technological processes on social networks, research methodologies, identity formations, publications and theoretical developments.” (SRHE, 2013). At the 2012 SRHE conference, the Digital University sought to gather suggestions from the community about potential key topics to focus its activities upon. The initial range of topics identified included methodologies for online research; digital literacies; virtuality and education; social networking for learning; staff development needs; e-citizenship; and managing change around technologies (SRHE, 2013).
Since then, the Digital University network has hosted 24 events, and from 2013 the Digital University has been one of the topics which papers could be submitted under to the annual SRHE conference. It is the latter which is the focus of our inquiry. Given that a substantial period of time has elapsed, and the definition of the Digital University and network has been flexible from the outset, what can we learn about the communities’ working definition of the Digital University in practice through the body of conference papers? Has this changed over time, and how can this help inform the future of the network?
Data collection and analysis
Data were collected using the SRHE conference papers archive available online at the SRHE website (SRHE, 2023). All of the conference papers which were categorised as being under the theme of the Digital University were logged in a spreadsheet. From conferences between 2013 to 2022 inclusive, a total of 122 papers were identified. The papers, and direct links to each, are collated in the Appendix. In order to look at trends over time, the following information was recorded for each paper: date; authors; location; research methods; and research topics. As the papers did not already have keywords associated with them, the papers were tagged manually with keywords for the analysis. The keywords were visualised as a co-occurrence network; that is, keywords are represented as nodes in a network, and connected by a line (or ‘edge’) if they are both related to the same paper, with edges weighted to reflect how frequently this is observed.
Findings
The number of conference papers associated with the theme of the Digital University each year is shown in Figure 1, and typically is in the range of approximately ten to fifteen papers per year. Note that the 2020 conference was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Two years stand out as having notably higher numbers of papers. In 2015, 25 papers were associated with the Digital University – a high proportion of which were focused in particular on digital literacies. 2021 also stands out, with 18 papers, which may be due in part to the renewed interest around online and remote learning prompted by the pandemic.
Figure 1: Number of conference papers within the Digital University category in the conference archive, according to year.
A total of 199 unique authors had contributed to the 122 papers in the sample. The authors are represented in the co-authorship network shown in Figure 2. Grey nodes represent papers, and nodes attached to them represent their authors. Blue nodes have authored a single paper, green nodes two papers, teal nodes three papers, purple nodes four papers and pink nodes five papers. Node size is also scaled to reflect the number of papers an author has contributed to, and authors who have contributed to two or more papers are labelled. The network shows that there is a small proportion of multi-paper authors, and that the network is quite fragmented with limited connection between authors across multiple papers. The majority of authors were affiliated to UK-based institutions (85) but a range of countries were also represent across the globe (Figure 3).
Figure 2: Co-authorship network of authors and papers within the sample.
Figure 3: Geographical distribution of authors within the sample.
In terms of the content and focus of the research presented within the sample, papers were categorised in relation to the research methods used and the topic. Figure 4 illustrates the range of methods and approaches used, from participatory research to quasi-experimental research designs as two contrasting examples. However, the approaches used most frequently are common to educational research as a whole (such as surveys, interviews, case studies, or literature-based papers). Methods are often used in combination, with mixed methods being the single largest group in Figure 4. The combinations of methods used within the mixed methods category are illustrated as a network in Figure 5. This also demonstrates that interviews and surveys are frequently used, but both Figure 4 and 5 also point to the use of innovative methods and digital data.
Figure 4: Frequency of research methods used in the papers in the sample.
Figure 5: Co-occurrence network of different combinations of methods used within the category of mixed methods.
Finally, we considered the topics addressed by the papers within the sample, by reviewing the papers and assigning approximately three keywords to each paper. In order to create a map of the topics and look for clusters of keywords, a co-occurrence network is shown in Figure 6. The range of keywords and topics is notable, illustrating that the Digital University network theme is a broad and diverse subject area in terms of conference submissions. Note that the size of each node is scaled to reflect the number of papers which were tagged with each keyword, and the weighting of lines connecting edges reflects how frequently the pair of keywords were used together. Nodes are also colour-coded to indicate six clusters which make up the network. The clusters were largely determined using a community detection algorithm within the social network analysis package Gephi (Blondel et al., 2008), with few borderline cases being manually reassigned on close reading.
Figure 6: Co-occurrence network of topic keywords associated with the papers within the sample. Node size is scaled according to frequency, and nodes are colour-coded according to clusters.
While the identification of clusters is mainly based on the mathematical features of the network structure and are open to interpretation, the communities identified serve to give an overall impression of the themes and trends within the body of papers. The six clusters can be characterised as follows:
EdTech and learning design [purple]
Critical perspectives [green]
Institutional perspectives [maroon]
Literacies and multimodality [yellow]
Online and blended learning [blue]
Social media and identity [pink]
The clusters also raise a question of to what extent they are static, or whether their prevalence has changed over the ten-year period. To address this, the number of papers principally aligned with each cluster is shown visually in Figure 7. The clusters of ‘EdTech and learning design’ and ‘Online and blended learning’ are consistent over time, with the latter perhaps showing an uptick in particular following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Social media and identity’ and ‘literacies and multimodality’ were more prevalent during the first half of the decade, while ‘institutional perspectives’ and ‘critical perspectives’ appear to be receiving increased attention.
Figure 7: Number of papers which were principally aligned with each cluster, per year. Dot size is scaled to indicate the number of papers, with values ranging from one to eight.
Conclusions and next steps for the network As the Digital University did at its first appearance at an SRHE conference (SRHE, 2013), we intend to use this session to invite discussion and suggestions for focal topics moving forwards. This paper is intended to prompt reflection and be a conversation starter for dialogue about the future of the network. As a virtual space for these conversations, we have started a blog for the network. To share your views on the future of the Digital University Network, explore the archive of previous resources and keep up-to-date with news of the latest network events, please visit and subscribe to the network blog site at: https://srhedigitaluniversity.wordpress.com/
We have added links to all the papers included in this analysis to the blog here as a series of blog posts according to year – please do browse the posts, or use the search function, to find out more.
On 9th November 2023, the SRHE Digital University network hosted an online event addressing the political economy of edtech. Speakers and their topics included:
Rebecca Eynon, The cultural political economy of AI and Lifelong Learning
Kathryn Moeller and Klint Kanopka, Following the capital: Using investment networks to understand venture capital’s influence on education
Neil Selwyn, What do we talk about when we talk about ‘Big Tech’?
This Digital University (DU) network event presented findings from the Universities and Unicorns (UU) project (click here to view). The project introduces fundamentally new ways to think about and examine the digitalising of the higher education sector. It investigates new forms of value creation and suggests that value in the sector increasingly lies in the creation of digital assets. Further, the project examines whether and how universities, companies and investors shift from forms of entrepreneurship to forms of rentiership. This has important consequences. Assetisation and rentiership imply a change from creating value via market exchange to capturing value via the ownership and control of assets, such as personal data. Speakers included Janja Komljenovic, Morton Hansen, Sam Sellar and Ben Williamson.
This seminar focused upon the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, in order to examine the ways in which visions of desirable futures shape the relationships between education and technology. Sociotechnical imaginaries call attention to the ways depictions of the future reveal profound insights, not only in relation to the societal norms and values of the present, but also about the structures of power through which technologies, societies, and futures are made. Furthermore, sociotechnical imaginaries are performative, in the sense that they solidify and institutionalise particular kinds of futures over others. Given that the discussion of technology in higher education is habitually accompanied by an array of predictions, forecasts and prophesies about the future of the sector, sociotechnical imaginaries offer a potent means of critically appraising suggestions of the digital university.
Speakers included Dr Lina Rahm (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm), Dr Barbara Hof (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), and Dr Jeremy Knox (University of Edinburgh, UK).
The following papers were tagged with the Digital University network theme at the 2022 SRHE conference:
Drumm, L. Pedagogical and theoretical mobilities in recent scholarship in digital education: a state of the art review in the age of Covid. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0207.pdf
Durrant, I., Hazledene, L., Lehane, M. & Papadopolou, M. Blended learning: next steps, new opportunities. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0238.pdf
Edwards, M. Inclusive university courses for students living with disability: Could universal design for instruction fulfil that promise? https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0033.pdf
Gay, M., Falvo, I. & Lepori, B. Digital transformation in Higher Education institutions: a systematic literature review. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0172.pdf
Jordan, K. & Tsai, S.P. ‘Sort by relevance’: Exploring user assumptions about ranking in online academic literature searches. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0157.pdf
Laufer, M., Schäfer, L.O. & Deacon, B. Resisting digital change: Is it a bad thing?: An exploration into why university staff resist digital teaching. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0048.pdf
Leisyte, L. Digital performance management in higher education: transforming the control of academic work? https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0112.pdf
Matsuoka, Y. & Ida, H. Will Open Educational Resources underpin students’ engagement in EFL class?: Investigating the feasibility of adopting OER in Japanese universities. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0252.pdf
Moschini, E. & Bamford, J. A gamification approach to enhance ‘third space mobility’: building a digital community and fostering engagement amongst culturally diverse students. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0195.pdf
Wood, J. Making comparisons in an open feedback environment: Providing exemplars, modelling uptake strategies, and supporting feedback implementation. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/22/0026.pdf
The following papers were tagged with the Digital University network theme at the 2021 SRHE conference:
Braithwaite, N.J. If shoes could talk …. How a student led research project generated collaboration, peer learning and the co-creation of knowledge. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0545.pdf
Coverdale, A. & Lewthwaite, S. Positioning and sustaining accessibility expertise and teaching in the Computer Sciences and the digital university. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0530.pdf
Detyna, M. & Kadiri, M. Assessing the use of immersive virtual reality in the higher education classroom to enhance learner engagement. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0274.pdf
Drumm, L. & Zike, J. Radically reconfigured or just broken? How emergency online teaching has altered staff and students’ identities, wellbeing and conceptions of learning and teaching. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0218.pdf
Gravett, K. & Ajjawi, R. Belonging to and beyond the digital university: belonging as situated practice. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0096.pdf
Hermansen, H., Lund, A. & Abualrub, I. Beyond “implementation”: Enabling sustainable transformation of digital teaching and learning in Higher Education. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0054.pdf
Ida, H. & Matsuoka, Y. Supporting engagement in English language learning during COVID-19 using paper-based textbooks: A case study of Japanese universities. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0230.pdf
Johnson, M.W., & Hagood, D. Uncertainty, collegial organisation and the collective competencies of digitalization. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0589.pdf
McClure, C. & Zhao, X. Supporting online personal tutoring with gather.town: An innovative approach to foster student belonging. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0157.pdf
O’Reilly, J. & Garcia-Castro, V. Exploring the relationship between foreign language anxiety and students’ online engagement at UK universities during the Covid-19 pandemic. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0289.pdf
Rumyantseva, N., Ballardie, R. & Alahakone, R. Academics in England responding to digital change pre and during the pandemic: The case of lecture capture policies. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0253.pdf
Tamimi, M.H., Muhtaseb, K.A., Hermansen, H.Y., Almasri, M.J., Awawdeh, R. & El Mashharawi, A. A holistic approach to e-learning in the Palestinian higher education sector. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0400.pdf
Wilson, A., Ross, J., Lockley, P., Collier, A. & McKie, J. Assembling an ed-tech imaginary: Telling data stories about higher education after surveillance. https://srhe.ac.uk/arc/21/0301.pdf
SRHE Digital University Network 