Expanding the Pedagogical Space: Co-design and Participation in an Online Postgraduate Course

Abstract

Here, teachers and students of an online, postgraduate course, “Current Issues in Clinical Education” (part of the MSc Clinical Education at the University of Edinburgh), consider co-participation from a postdigital view in which learning is neither fully online nor offline, but spills into and out of formal, digital and physical spaces. The course begins empty, other than a task structure and some resources. This leaves “pedagogical space” for content to emerge through dialogue, and ideas from students’ practice settings. The teacher undertakes the assignment alongside the students, and boundaries are eroded without dissolving. In reflecting on our different experiences of the course, we foreground some power relations and political economics of contemporary, online postgraduate education, and the implications for meaningful participation, co-design, and co-creation.