"Education uses student data to make decisions, but maybe it is forgetting other sources of information"

Laia Blasco, a researcher in the Design, Art, Technology and Society (DARTS) group, member of the Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications and director of the Bachelor of Arts Degree at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), wrote her doctoral thesis, Visualizing study plans to see competencies, creating visualizations to generate questions, on the university's doctoral programme in Network and Information Technologies. She recently received the 2024 UOC-Santander Award for best interdisciplinary thesis for her work. Now a doctoral degree holder, she tells us about the content, methodology and conclusions of her award-winning thesis, as well as her experience on this veritable odyssey, which has taken her ten years to complete.

First of all, what does it mean to you to receive the 2024 UOC-Santander Award for the best interdisciplinary thesis?

The truth is that I was really pleased to receive this recognition, which is also about a way of doing things, about interdisciplinarity, which I am currently working on and which I am particularly interested in.

Tell us about your experience with your doctoral thesis project at the UOC.

My path in writing my thesis was a bit unusual, because it was a very long journey. I'm a lecturer at the UOC, and the thesis has coexisted with this reality, it has been a travelling companion for a long time. Doing my doctoral thesis at the UOC has allowed me to modulate it in a way that is probably easier than if I had done it elsewhere, because a lot of things happened during the time I was doing my thesis that were not actually related to the thesis. This allowed me to manage it, pause it if necessary, or approach it more or less intensely, depending on the moment. This meant I have been able to balance it with everything else over the almost ten years it has taken me.

Your thesis is titled Visualizing study plans to see competencies, creating visualizations to generate questions. What prompted you to become interested in this topic? And what was the main objective of your research?

The initial motivation was a bit vague, but over time I have realized that it made sense and that it actually says a lot about me. I joined the UOC in 2010 as a faculty member, when we were in the middle of implementing the European Higher Education Area. The programmes were being adapted to this new European framework. At the time a new concept was beginning to emerge that would end up being very important: competencies. Everyone was talking about them and it seemed like they should be the focal point of education and that they would shape our programmes.

Then, in 2013, I took a course on visualization with a tool that allowed me to visualize data and present it as a set of networks, seeing the relationships between the different nodes. So, out of curiosity, it occurred to me to try to visualize programmes as networks. This curiosity was the seed that germinated and grew into something bigger.

What I did then was to start developing a prototype that visualized the different courses in a programme, associating them with each other based on the competencies they shared. This allowed me to visualize the programmes of study taking into account these competencies that everyone was talking about, but which until then were nothing more than a list of elements that the student had to acquire, elements that were disconnected from the courses themselves.

I started testing and fine-tuning the prototype, and talking to colleagues and faculty members to see if they made sense of it, and I began to see that through this visualization, we could begin to talk about these programmes and the competencies, and even to question them. Somehow this intuition, which was initially very innocent, that perhaps I was not understanding this issue of competencies, turned out to be pretty much the crux of the matter, bringing to the forefront a much broader and more general problem.

So why do you think there is a lack of visibility of competencies in university programmes of study?

Competencies in the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) are something that must be articulated in the programmes of study. However, although I found some research that attempted to visualize programmes of study and competencies as milestones, I couldn't find any proposals that associated courses with competencies. Based on this initial intuition and the lack of work in this field, I began a process of experimentation and construction of a prototype that questions this lack of visibility.

The first sub-question your thesis raises is how to make these competencies visible

Yes, this practical question is what drives the construction of the prototype. Both the construction process of the prototype and the prototype itself attempt to answer this question.

And the second sub-question is what the implications are in visualizing the acquisition of competencies using student data

This second question is a bit more speculative. What if we monitored the student's progress throughout the programme of study, their acquisition of competencies, and more? In the thesis there is a visual speculation, because there is a prototype outline that speculates in this regard, but what triggers this question is a series of issues. What happens if we do that? What are the implications? Does it make sense to reduce the student and their acquisition of competencies to mere data? This exercise in speculation raises a series of reflections that are pertinent in the context of the data-driven education model that we are part of.

What methodology have you used in your work? Could you explain the five phases you followed – Listening, Experimenting, Building, Testing and Reflecting – and what they consist of?

Just as the thesis is multidisciplinary, the methodology is also multifaceted and takes bits from different methodologies used in the different fields with which the work is associated. There is an action-research part, another part involving critical research, another part dealing with design processes… and then there is a more general overarching part, which is practice-based research and artistic research, which, through the construction of artefacts, seeks to generate questions that take us a little further, that make us think and that are even a little uncomfortable.

The process is planned in phases. In the first phase, Listening, I observe what happens to people who are involved in the programme of study, and I talk to them. It is a first contact that allows us to understand the needs, interests and shortcomings. Closely linked to it is the second phase, Experimentation, in which I try to start developing a visualization and ask the people what they see, what they don't see, how they see the artefact, etc. This phase has different iterations: I experiment, I ask questions, I make changes, I have a new version, etc.

Once I have all this information, I start to Build the functional prototype that I can then use, this being a phase in which there are also different iterations. Then what I do is Test the prototype, which I use to analyse data from all of the university's bachelor degree programmes. Although the last phase, Reflecting, comes at the end, in reality it is present in all of the other phases too, because each of the different phases has produced a series of conclusions that have fed the prototype, although some have deviated from it and have been seeds for slightly broader reflections on competencies, the university system, data-driven education and the meaning of visualization.

And what would those uncomfortable conclusions of your research be?

These are conclusions where, on the one hand, there is evidence that the notion of competencies is problematic, and on the other, the notion of learning outcomes, which is the one we are now being pushed to use, is even more problematic. This is a conclusion that may be uncomfortable, because it means that for ten years we have all been designing programmes of study based on important contradictions.

Likewise, the conclusions also call into question our current reliance on data and algorithms, which govern and structure teaching today, whether online or in person. Generally speaking, education is taking data as a fundamental source for decision-making, but it may be forgetting other sources of knowledge – this may also be uncomfortable to hear.

In short, my thesis plays with what we see and what we don't. A visualization shows us things, but whenever something is shown, something else is hidden. In any visualization, including the one I created, there is always a bias that is generated, among other things, by the cultural context – disciplinary, intentional, ideological, contextual, etc. – of the person creating the visualization. We should be able to read the manifestations of the data and visualizations we interact with on a daily basis in a more critical way, but we must also be able to create visualizations that serve to question the reality that surrounds us. Perhaps one way to contribute to this is to carry out our research in a way that integrates different and diverse points of view and perspectives, something that the interdisciplinary approaches we mentioned at the beginning can provide.

Related thesis

Blasco-Soplon, Laia. Visualizar planes de estudios para ver competencias, crear visualizaciones para generar preguntas [Tesi doctoral]. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2023. http://hdl.handle.net/10609/149360

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