Cheng-Wen Huang

Generative AI is about to radically transform the way intellectual and creative work is being done. Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the potential impact of generative AI tools on higher education has been intensively debated. ChatGPT can generate well-formulated human-like text passages and conversations that is often, but not always, of a surprisingly high quality. This paper reports on an early experiment to explore ways in which ChatGPT can be used in the higher education context. The experiment involved a written assignment which required postgraduate Information Systems students to formulate a critique of the outputs of ChatGPT to a specific question in Information Systems project management. The paper investigates the level of criticality that the students demonstrated in working with ChatGPT and assessing the quality of its outputs. It further explores the claim that ChatGPT can be used to generate rubrics and assess students’ assignments by asking ChatGPT to produce a rubric for critical thinking and assess the students’ assignments against the rubric produced. The findings indicate that students perceive the ChatGPT produced responses as generally accurate, although they tend to lack depth, with some key information omitted, produced biased responses and have limitations with academic writing conventions. The rubric that ChatGPT produced for assessing critical thinking is lacking in certain areas and the reliability of using it as an assessment tool is questionable given the inconsistency in the results. Overall, the paper concludes that while ChatGPT and other text generative AI can be useful learning and teaching companions for both students and lectures, human expertise and judgement is needed in working with ChatGPT.

Although assessment theorists have long argued that assessment is a contextually located social practice, objectivist and psychometric discourses about assessment persist. The COVID-19 pandemic, in many contexts, unsettled and denaturalised assessment practices, creating a critical disruptive moment. This paper presents a reflection on what this moment might suggest about academics’ assessment beliefs and practices at a research-intensive institution in the Western Cape. Drawing on an institutional survey, we argue that dominant concerns about academic integrity and mark inflation surface discourses of assessment for certification and accountability. Exploring some examples of assessment practices during the emergency remote teaching period at the same institution, we highlight some factors that influence design. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we contemplate the conditions of field and capital that create opportunities for change. We propose that change is contingent on the complex interplay of the capital and habitus of agents, as well as the nature of the field. We reaffirm the case for positioning assessment as a social practice, arguing that this enables the conditions for discussion, negotiation, and scrutiny on the purpose of assessments, what is being valued and not valued, and who is benefiting or being marginalised from particular assessment practices.

There are concerns about mental health in academia globally, which is a direct consequence of an increase of a neoliberal entrepreneurial approach, one heightened during the time of the pandemic. This paper uses Skotnicki and Nielsen's categories of alienation and Fisher's work on capitalist realism to make sense of academic staff's responses to a survey on their experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching, collected in 2021 at a large research-intensive university in South Africa. The responses indicate that participants all experienced some form of alienation, though experienced and expressed differently. We suggest expanding Skotnicki and Nielsen's lens on agency and structure with what we found missing, an element of culture, to ask the question: "How can a university create and rebuild a sense of community and belonging to counter alienation?". We propose a concerted effort to build spaces for collective encounters to rediscover community, which may allow us to re-imagine a future for the academy beyond conflicting imperatives of responding to the need for socioeconomic redress and delivering education as a public good, in times of austerity budgets.

South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has put forward ‘open learning’ as an educational approach to addressing issues of access and success in the post-school education and training sector. This chapter investigates the possibilities and limitations of online assessment to advance DHET’s open learning agenda in the technical and vocational education and training (TVET) sector. Adopting a social justice lens, this chapter explores how online assessment has the potential to encourage as well as constrain ‘parity of participation’ (Fraser,1995) from an economic, cultural and political perspective. A small empirical study involving interviews with four staff members from Tshwane North TVET College’s Open Learning Unit and four students is employed to illuminate the themes of social justice. The findings indicate that online assessment has the potential to aid economic justice by creating the conditions for working individuals to improve their qualifications whilst working, but lack of access to material resources, such as suitable technologies and data, can be a deterrent. Culturally, in relation to pedagogy, the findings illustrate the potential for online assessment to support learning by providing immediate feedback and creating opportunities for self-assessment, although academic integrity surfaces as a major concern. Politically, the findings indicate how a lack of national policy can hinder the successful operationalisation of online assessment at the course and institutional level. The chapter highlights the need to develop policies that correspond with the philosophies and practices of online assessment and open learning. It proposes that principles of open learning, combined with the affordances of online assessment, allows for an opportunity to explore different modes of assessments from the fit-for-purpose perspective.

In its preamble, the Department of Higher Education and Training's (DHET) strategic plan for 2015 to 2020 identified ways to expand access to education and training. However, in South Africa, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges' enrolment growth is inhibited by inadequate physical infrastructure and a shortage of additional and relevant human resources (DHET, 2018). The draft Open Learning Policy Framework for the Post-School Education and Training (2017) recommends that the principle of flexibility be applied to increase student access and support their success. This exploratory case study focuses on possibilities and limitations of flexible learning provision at a selected TVET college in the Free State province. It adopts Nancy Fraser's (1995, 2005) theory of social justice, which emphasizes parity of participation with respect to economic, cultural and political dimensions, to discuss ways in which flexible learning is socially just. COVID-19 lockdowns severely curtailed this study to virtual interviews with two institutional managers only, as students were not readily available. The transcripts were subsequently coded along Fraser's three dimensions of social justice. The study demonstrates that flexible learning provision responded to the economic dimensions of transport poverty by providing access to curriculum content via online platforms, radio broadcasts and hardcopy materials deposited for collection at selected physical destinations. In relation to cultural parity, it reveals that the college provides a pedagogically responsive intervention programme as a second opportunity for students to succeed. Politically, the study indicates that assessment practices at the college are exclusionary due to national assessment policies that constrain flexibility. This chapter contributes towards understanding the practices and policies that influence flexible learning provision as an aspirational form of open learning as well as the complex ways in which social injustices are entangled in the South African PSET sector.

The Commonwealth Digital Education Leadership Training in Action (C-DELTA) is a long-term programme of COL to promote a digital education environment in Commonwealth Member Nations. This concept paper proposes a holistic approach to conceptualising digital education leadership. The C-DELTA programme will provide a framework for fostering digital learning, and will develop skilled citizens for lifelong learning.

This paper conceptualises a holistic approach to digital education leadership, presenting the argument that digital education leadership is grounded in the practice that it seeks to foster (digital literacy practice) and the processes involved in teaching that practice (digital education). In other words, digital education leadership cannot be viewed in isolation, separate from digital literacy or digital education. The foundational dimensions of the digital in this framework are premised on understandings of literacy as social practices. In brief, we understand that literacy involves sets of practices which are tied to domains of practice (e.g. learning). Furthermore, because literacy is about being able to participate in social practices, and because the contemporary world is technology saturated, then in order to create a life for oneself, one needs to be capable of participating (living, learning and working) in this evolving digitally mediated society. The paper presents a new conception of digital literacy, digital education and digital education leadership, and the relationship between them. The conceptual framework presented arises from a collaborative project across eight Commonwealth countries; it will be used as the basis of a curriculum to be implemented to support digital education leadership. The paper will also discuss the challenges faced in terms of conceptualising digital education leadership in the Commonwealth context and the processes used to address these challenges.

This study posits that using a range of modes and genres to construct argument can engender different ways of thinking about argument in the academic context. It investigates the
potentials and constraints of adopting a multimodal approach to constructing academic
argument. The research is situated within a seminar, in a second year Media course. Within this context, the study identifies the semiotic resources that students draw on and examines how they are employed to construct academic argument in three digital domains, namely video, comics and PowerPoint.

Grounded in a theory of multimodal social semiotics, this study posits that argument is a product of design, motivated by the rhetor’s interest in communicating a particular message, in a particular environment, and shaped by the available resources in the given environment. It proposes that argument is a cultural text form for bringing about difference (Kress 1989).
This view of argument recognises that argument occurs in relation to mode, genre, discourse and medium. The study illustrates how each of these social categories shapes argument
through textual analysis.

A framework based on Halliday’s metafunctional principle is proposed to analyse argument in multimodal texts. The framework combines theories from rhetoric and social semiotics. It offers analysis of ideational content, the ways social relations are established, and how organising principles assist in establishing coherence in argument. The analysis of the data (video, comics and PowerPoint presentations) demonstrates that the framework can be applied across genres and media.

The significance of the study is threefold. Theoretically, it contributes towards theorising a theory of argument from a multimodal perspective. Methodologically, it puts forward a
framework for analysing multimodal arguments. Pedagogically, it contributes towards developing and interrogating a pedagogy of academic argument that is relevant to contemporary communication practices.

This chapter presents a conceptual framework, a set of analytical tools, and a metalanguage for teaching sequential visual narratives, focusing particularly on manga (Japanese comics). It will be useful for students - at high school or tertiary level - who are studying sequential narratives as part of a popular culture or media studies curriculum. Grounded in multimodal social semiotic theory, the proposed framework offers a way of understanding and describing how semiotic resources communicate ideas and experiences of the world, convey interpersonal meanings, and how meanings of a text are communicated to the reader as a coherent whole.

This study contributes towards an understanding of the nature of sequential visual narratives, how different semiotic resources may be employed to construct a visual narrative and how sequence of images may be developed. Over the years, extensive research has been undertaken in the area of still images. However, the particularities of meanings made in sequential images remain relatively unexplored. The significance of the study is that it contributes towards an understanding of sequential narratives by proposing a metalanguage for manga.

The term ‘manga’ refers to comics that originate from Japan and it is currently a trend in popular culture worldwide. Certain conventions employed in manga are different from that of Western comics. Using the proposed metalanguage, this study identifies the representational resources used in manga and examines how they are used to construct a visual narrative. The metalanguage is grounded in Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) work produced in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design and Matthiessen’s (2007) concept of rhetorical relations in images.

The theory that underlines the study is multimodal social semiotics which assumes that texts are composed of a combination of representational resources. These resources are always socially situated, produced in a particular cultural, social and historical context. The theory supports the view of comics as a genre and makes it possible to attribute the differences between manga and Western comics to the social and cultural practices of the East and West. This study challenges the tendency in narrative tradition to favour verbal narratives over non-verbal narratives by demonstrating that different representational resources employed in manga have distinct narrative functions and that they contribute to the meaning of the narrative in different ways. Moreover, meaning is derived from an integration of all the representational resources.

The study concludes by looking at the implications of using the metalanguage in interrogating other visual narratives. The New London Group’s (2000) notion of ‘designs of meaning’ proposes that representational resources are like design resources. Individuals employ these resources in particular ways to produce particular texts. A social theory of genre highlights the overlapping nature of genres. Drawing on these concepts, this study argues that a metalanguage which can discuss different forms of meaning can also assist individuals to see the similarities between genres by foregrounding the use of conventions. From this perspective, it is possible to use the metalanguage to interrogate other visual narratives such as storyboarding.