Edinburgh Napier University

  Ecosystems balance in a delicate dynamic of motion and change. When hit with a disturbance, an ecosystem's resilience is tested and any vacuum quickly filled by those well-suited to the new conditions. The ecologies wherein teaching occurs in higher education were hit by such a disturbance in 2020 and behaviours and systems had to reconfigure for digitally-mediated teaching.

Using data from a larger research project at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, this short presentation will explore the signs for future digital education ecologies and how practitioners may be supported in finding a balance between newly acquired threshold concepts and renewal of familiar pedagogies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with academic and professional services staff, exploring conceptions of digital teaching. What emerged were hybrid models of old and new behaviours and support systems. For some of these educators, their experiences, forged within a hybrid digital ecology, meant that there would never be a return to what had been before; both they, and their digital education ecosystem, had irreversibly changed.

This presentation will offer perspectives from a Scottish institution and invite participants to reflect on their own digital education ecosystems, and how these different contexts can learn from one another.