Unfolding Innovation Through the Digitalisation of Institutional Practices

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter introduces Part IV, which presents the understanding of a crisis that is relevant to the chapters in this section. As the chapters report on the dialectics of searching and re-searching for new methods of continuation of academic practices (lecturing and research), the understanding of a crisis embraces a continuous vibrating and pivoting between contradictory meanings, digital and physical spaces and innovations and their uninnovative consequences. Another important perspective on crises and the dialectics of ‘innovating out of it’ discussed in this chapter relates to the different effects of innovations on individuals with different positions in academia. While PhD students received institutional support in the form of access to supervisors’ data and their universities’ networks, allowing them to redefine and continue their research projects, the undergraduate students became invisible black screens, gradually dropping out of the educational programmes, regardless of the teacher educators’ sense of increasing competence for digital teaching and learning.