From echoes of the ocean to portable homes, seashells hold great importance for (non)humans after their original creators have moved on (Scales 2015). Conversely, the afterlives of digital learning objects — like course shells found within the virtual learning environment (VLE) — have been routinely overlooked. While postdigital scholarship has extensively researched the design and facilitation of digital education, there remains a notable gap regarding the materiality of a course after it ends. This contribution argues that a course shell, which refers to the space for a single course within a VLE and the materials and activity contained within it, embarks on as messy and complex a journey as teachers and learners themselves after course end (Bissell et al. 2025).

Accordingly, this contribution maps the processes, policies, and actors surrounding a course shell’s afterlife through a qualitative analysis of 40 university policy documents and interviews with six VLE administrators. By ‘following the actors,’ it identifies three environments and seven stages through which course shells pass on their afterlife journeys (Adams & Thompson 2016). It discusses the intermediary actors that influence decisions related to course retention and how current practices intersect with students’ and teachers’ learning journeys. It finds that intermediary interests, which prioritize the collection and storage of student data over continuity and community, complicate efforts to innovate within these platforms (Weller 2020).

Drawing inspiration from hermit crabs (Scales 2015) and rusted robots (Okorafor 2025), this contribution explores possibilities to reimagine the afterlife of digital course shells beyond informatics engineering (Macgilchrist 2023). To view course shells as ‘miniature, mobile ecosystems’ may shed light on alternatives that support learning communities in developing belonging and nurturing their own educational narratives (Gravett & Ajjawi 2022; Han 2024). The study concludes that the material end of a course is a worthwhile starting place for reconceptualizing how we design and orchestrate digital learning experiences in the VLE.

References

Adams, C., & Thompson, T.L. (2016). Researching a Posthuman World: Interviews with Digital Objects. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bissell, L., Lamb, J., & Overend, D. (2025). Postdigital Learning Journeys. Postdigital Science and Education 7, 327–335. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00539-y.

Gravett, K., & Ajjawi, R. (2022). Belonging as Situated Practice. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), 1386-1396. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1894118.

Han, B.-C. (2024). The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H., Cerratto Pargman, T. et al. (2023). Designing Postdigital Futures: Which Designs? Whose Futures?. Postdigital Science and Education 6, 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00389-y

Okorafor, N. (2025). Death of the Author: A Novel. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Scales, H. (2015). Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells. Bloomsbury Sigma.

Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of Ed Tech. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press.

The adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), in educational contexts presents several risks. While humans remain responsible for meaning-making in interactions with these systems, LLMs are not neutral technologies. Trained on vast datasets, LLMs reproduce and amplify imaginaries, narratives, values and biases embedded in their training data or instilled in fine-tuning processes (Bajohr 2024; Buttrick 2024). This inherent non-neutrality could potentially shape human perceptions, beliefs, and actions. Therefore, we argue that integrating LLMs into educational settings requires a critical perspective that goes beyond viewing them as neutral instruments to support teaching and learning processes. Educators and learners need to cultivate a critical awareness that leads them to question whose visions and imaginaries these models reproduce (Warr and Heath 2025). This requires developing competencies beyond effective prompting skills, such as proficiency in discourse analysis. In addition, educators and learners need to become aware of their own needs and visions for the future to strengthen their human agency over technology (Zuber and Gogoll 2024; Holmes and Miao 2023; Miao and Shiohira 2024). This can be facilitated by engaging learners and educators in activities that promote agency and subjectification processes, such as future workshops (Simon et al. 2025; Suoranta and Teräs 2023). To promote the integration of such activities and methods into educational practices and curricula, awareness must be raised of the inherent non-neutrality of LLMs and the narrative and imaginaries they reproduce, which may not align with the values and future visions of school stakeholders.

To illustrate the necessity of these methods, this contribution offers a comparative analysis of imaginaries generated by ChatGPT and visions articulated by teachers in two future workshops conducted in France. The analysis focused on technology- and education-related narratives and values. In particular, we analyzed which domains of educational purpose were emphasized (Biesta, 2015), as well as the presence of techno-solutionist narratives. Our findings reveal a striking divergence between the narratives and imaginaries produced by ChatGPT and the visions of the future articulated by teachers. We conclude by discussing implications for future-oriented educational practice.

References

Bajohr, H. (2024). Whoever controls language models controls politics. In I. Arms (Ed.). Training the archive (pp. 189–195). Walther König.

Biesta, G. (2015). What Is Education For? On Good Education, Teacher Judgement, and Educational Professionalism. European Journal of Education. 50 (1). 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12109.

Buttrick, N. (2024). Studying Large Language Models as Compression Algorithms for Human Culture. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 28 (3). 187–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.01.001.

Holmes, W., & Fengchun, M. (2023). Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research. UNESCO Publishing.

Fengchun, M. & Shiohira, K. (2024). AI Competency Framework for Students. UNESCO Publishing.

Simon, S., Vassaux, C., Guigon, G., Čarapina, M., Consoli, T. (2025). The Postdigital Classroom: A Guide Toward the Imaginary. Postdigital science and education. 7(3). 916-938. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00565-w.

Suoranta, J., & Teräs, M. (2023). Future workshops as postdigital research method. In Constructing postdigital research: Method and emancipation (pp. 317-331). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35411-3_16.

Warr, M., & Heath, M. K. (2025). Uncovering the hidden curriculum in generative AI: A reflective technology audit for teacher educators. Journal of Teacher Education, 76(3), 245-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871251325073.

Zuber, N., & Gogoll, J. (2024). Vox populi, vox ChatGPT: large language models, education and democracy. Philosophies, 9(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9010013.

This presentation reports on our qualitative study of how higher education academic staff talk about their experience of online education. The study examines how three academic staff in an Irish University, who were engaged in online education in three distinct ways, discursively construct both themselves as actors in online educational spaces, along with how they constructed their efforts as desirable and worthwhile. A key motivation for this research was our concern that too much existing research fails to capture loses, in a real and tangible way, the way in which online education matters to those who create, teach, or administer modules and programmes. This study recognises that higher education academic staff are vibrant, dynamic beings and not variables that we can adjust in order to achieve a particular output, such as high quality online education. We used a discursive psychology analytic approach to examine the discourse and discursive practices of the three participants as they discussed their experiences with online education in semi-structured interviews. Our findings consist of two overarching participant discourses: Involvement in their work existentially matters to staff, and staff and their work exist in a reciprocal relationship with each other. We further divide these into five sub-discourses: their work gave staff a sense of purpose, their work reflected staffs’ senses of identity, staff coped with challenges that their work raised, staff confronted work realities by investing themselves, and staff navigated tensions between being the shepherds or originators of work concepts. We will conclude this presentation by discussing some implications of our findings, which have implications for how we can and should frame staff attitudes towards online education, and critiquing in particular the trend to fit staff into our theoretical notions of what online education practice should look like rather than view staff as dynamic beings. We will call on researchers and practitioners to be inspired by exemplary practitioners, rather than using them as tools that are useful to the extent they allow us to champion our educational interests.