Online postgraduate education is growing rapidly, as professionals around the world look to build knowledge and skills that contribute to personal and collective development. This has been recognised within higher education as a key area for economic growth, yet it remains undertheorized, and the quality of these programmes often suffers from approaches that have been developed for on-campus and undergraduate education or, alternatively, simplistic models of e-learning where learning is seen as instrumental, relatively independent of educators.

This event will showcase a diverse collection of contributions from an edited volume entitled ‘Online Postgraduate Education in a Postdigital World: Beyond Technology’ (Fawns, Aitken & Jones 2021), part of the PDSE book series. The launch will take the form of a series of panel discussions with authors and invited guests, with plenty of opportunity for questions and comments from the audience. These conversations will explore the ways in which online postgraduate programmes extend beyond digital spaces, and the implications for educational policy and practice. Themes will include:

• Diverse student and teacher experiences of online postgraduate education
• Place-based pedagogy
• Assessment, feedback and learning in a networked world
• Social presence and vulnerability
• Shared responsibility and ecological evaluation of teaching
• Teacher development, expertise and recognition in complex systems
• Institutional approaches to support and decision-making in quality online education
• Curriculum models for complexity and future-thinking.

Contributors include the following:

Editors—Tim Fawns, Gill Aitken and Derek Jones.

Series editor: Petar Jandrić.

Authors— Sharon Boyd, Sonia Bussey, Sarah Hayes, Dai Hounsell, Kyungmee Lee, Christine Sinclair, Cathy Stone.

Guests—Karen Gravett, Thomas Ryberg, Margaret Bearman, Maha Bali.

We will gather questions as we go from the audience for each panel to discuss.