Purpose: Demonstrate awareness of and engagement with wider issues that inform my practice.

Description and Reflection

My engagement with legislation, policy and standards is across two key areas, one focused on compliance and the other on national curriculum.

Compliance

I am obliged to meet the requirements of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) in the delivery of the postgraduate programme that I direct. This requires regular reporting cycles, including participating in an institutional review with our partner institution, Unitec Institute of Technology. To meet these requirements I have to ensure that all internal and external moderation and monitoring processes have taken place, also to gather and analyse regular student feedback and review data on issues such as student retention and completion, relative success of minority groups and catering for the bicultural nature of New Zealand Society by acknowledging the role of the Treaty of Waitangi as a living document. Fortunately I have some understanding of internal NZQA processes from the other side, having in the past acted as a panel member of an NZQA degree validating panel.

In the closing section of the most recent external monitor's report on the programme that I manage the moderator noted that ”There are no serious concerns to be raised with NZQA. There was no evidence of serious non-compliance, a lack of quality that is likely to seriously disadvantage learners, or systematic failure.”

I am also required to ensure that all of my staff who teach on the postgraduate programme are research active within NZQA regulations. This means that in any two year period, staff must have published at least two quality assured research outputs. This was a target that I achieved within two years of taking up my current role, from an initial position of severe non-compliance. The strategy I used was simply to strongly encourage collaborative publication, first by leading the authorship of articles and inviting others to contribute, and then by mentoring staff into their own small research groups to work on specific projects, with publication targets in mind. Our weekly online research hangouts have become a core part of this research community and all staff are not only engaged in research because they need to be, but because they want to be. As one of the staff pointed out to me recently, in the early days of these hangouts, no-one had much to say, but now we often run over time, there is so much to share and discuss. One indicator of success is that for the 2017 National Tertiary Learning and Teaching conference we have three peer-reviewed papers accepted with a total of ten contributing authors.

Curriculum policy

In a broader context I have been engaged for several years now in issues of policy from a curriculum perspective. My policy-based research in technology enhanced learning has focused on two areas. The first is a series of analyses of the relevance and applicability of the UNESCO guidelines on mobile learning policy (UNESCO, 2013) in the New Zealand context. The second area I have studied is policy as it pertains to the digital curriculum. New Zealand has a national curriculum which continually evolves and is an essential component of the course that we deliver. There are components of this curriculum that relate to digital fluency as well as specific digital technology skills.

I have been engaged with the development of digital aspects of the curriculum for several years. In 2012 I gave evidence to the government inquiry into 21st century learning environments and digital literacy (Education and Science Committee, 2012). In 2016 I was present at the initial announcement of the new Digital Technologies curriculum and as a result presented some reflections on the material that was available at that time. More recently, a new digital curriculum proposal (MoE, 2017) has been released and I have recently published a reflective blog discussing digital technologies in the New Zealand curriculum. However it is also my responsibility to gather feedback from my staff for the collective response to the government from my institution. This has also been very illuminating for me, since it gives me an opportunity to get a broader view of the different perspectives of all our educators.

Examples

I have published several articles around issues of policy as it pertains to technology enhanced learning. The first of these was published in 2014, and was based on a series of interviews with educational policy stakeholders in New Zealand.

Parsons, D. (2014). Pathways to a Better World: Assessing Mobile Learning Policy against UNESCO Guidelines in a New Zealand Case Study. In M. Kalz, Y. Bayyurt & M. Specht (Eds.), Mobile as Mainstream – Towards Future Challenges in Mobile Learning (pp. 182-196). Proceedings of 13th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning. Communications in Computer and Information Science 479, Springer.

Subsequently my work focused more on policy as it applied to the provision of broadband internet for schools, since this was clearly a fundamental enabler for technology enhanced learning from a BYOD perspective.

Parsons, D. (2016). The Social Surplus of Broadband Initiatives in Compulsory Education. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 20.

Another broader view of policy was explored in an invited publication for the International Telecommunications Union. This article included consideration of cultural perspectives such as indigenous language, local community and philanthropy in driving policy.

Parsons, D. (2017). Stakeholder, Corporate and Policy Perspectives, in J. Traxler (Ed.), Capacity Building in a Changing ICT Environment (pp. 81-90). Geneva, Switzerland: International Telecommunication Union. Retrieved from https://academy.itu.int/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=edit&id=178&lang=en

The following chapter revisited and expanded some of the evidence and themes in my original 2014 paper, but in a much more comprehensive and wide ranging way.

Parsons, D. (2017). Mobile Learning Policy Formulation and Enactment in New Zealand. In A. Murphy, H. Farley, L. Dyson, H. Jones (Eds.). Mobile Learning in Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific Region. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 40. Springer, Singapore.

As indicated above, I have a particular interest in policy relating to curricula around technology enhanced learning. My most recent publication in this area of research, co-authored with Dr Kathryn MacCallum of the Eastern Institute of Technology, directly addresses this issue in a book chapter that takes a broad look at the relationship between international digital curricula and mobile learning.

Parsons, D. & MacCallum. K. (in press). Mobile Learning Curricula: Policy and Potential.  In D. Herro, S. Arafeh, R. Ling & C. Holden (Eds.), Mobile learning: Perspectives on practice and policy. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

References

Education and Science Committee. (2012). Inquiry into 21st century learning environments and digital literacy. New Zealand Parliament. Retrieved from https://www.parliament.nz/resource/0000243164

MoE. (2017). Digital Technologies Hangarau Matihiko. New Zealand Ministry of Education. Retrieved from https://education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Ministry/consultations/DT-consultation/DTCP1701-Digital-Technologies-Hangarau-Matihiko-ENG.pdf

UNESCO. (2013). Policy guidelines for mobile learning. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002196/219641e.pdf