Conrado Silva de Farias
Conrado is a sound-designer and filmmaker. After graduating, Conrado worked as a lead sound-designer on a variety of short and feature films and animation. This was followed by a position at BBC Global News where he worked for many years as a Producer. The work involved producing, filming, and editing news and educational videos and sound pieces. In his current position, he produces audio and video for Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh campus. Conrado has a BA in Music from EMBAP (School of Music and Fine Arts – Curitiba, Brazil) and a MSc in Sound Design from the University of Edinburgh. He is a keen sailor.
Psychology meets digital media meets pedagogy
The growth of online learning is spectacular and increasingly disruptive. It predates Covid and continues to gather pace. Registered online learners number hundreds of millions, and the sector attracts tens of billions of dollars of annual investment (World Economy Forum, 2022; McKinsey, 2022). And it is evolving. New generations of online learning design no longer seek to mimic traditional text-based and face-to-face configurations. They are, instead, redefining relationships between academic content producers, media and students; generating new psychological challenges that traditional pedagogies will need to accommodate if they want to keep up with the times.
In line with these advances, a new generation of online courses is being offered at Heriot-Watt University. One of the pioneering degrees in Business and Organisational Psychology is the product of an across-the-globe collaboration between the academic and media teams. This production process has afforded valuable psychological insights into teaching and learning in a digital world. Firstly, a reconsideration of the social identities of both academics and media professionals: academics have a traditional attachment to the printed word, and media professionals a traditional detachment from the nuances of content. Psychological adjustments are negotiated on both sides as they make the transition to the category of “third space professionals” in the intersection of two traditional domains (Whitchurch, 2008). Secondly, the psychological design of an asynchronous online environment to support mentored dialogic inquiry: in essence, a virtual intellectual Escape Room which deploys digital media to motivate and entice students to engage in knowledge-creating dialogues with others. “Others” who are real, imagined, or somewhere in between. There is discussion of the graduated ways in which the enticements, or “bread crumbs” of cues and prompts, might be distributed effectively. The key rôle of engendering a “feeling-of-knowing” (Keil, 2006) ahead of understanding and application is examined and illustrated in detail. Finally, although the relationship between Academic and Student in an asynchronous online setting is an indirect one (literally mediated), the human relationship can be asserted in several ways, which are discussed; and the online setting facilitates, with suitable guidance, the student’s engagement with still wider communities of learning (Wegerif, 2019).
The world is changing, and academics must appreciate that video is not an inferior form of teaching, and keeping up does not mean dumbing down.
Keil F. C. (2006). Explanation and understanding. Annual review of psychology, 57, 227–254. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190100
McKinsey Insights (2022). Demand for online education is growing. Are providers ready? Online article, July 20, 2022. Accessed 6/7/23 Check out this useful article:
Demand for online education is growing. Are providers ready?
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/demand-for-online-education-is-growing-are-providers-ready?cid=eml-web
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In
(Mercer, N., Wegerif, R. and Major, L. eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. Routledge.
Whitchurch, C. (2008). "Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: The Emergence of Third Space Professionals in UK Higher Education". Higher Education Quarterly 62(4): 377-396.
World Economic Forum (2022) Three charts show the global growth in online learning. Online article, Jan 27, 2022. Accessed 6/7/23.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/online-learning-courses-reskill-skills-gap/