Dr Dominic Mahon

Educational disparities, particularly in remote and rural areas of Southeast Asia remain a critical challenge, especially regarding access to equitable and inclusive quality education. In response, four universities from the UK, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia came together in the ACES project - A Community-Centred Educational Model for Developing Social Resilience, funded by the UKRI-ESRC under the Global Challenges Research Fund. By leveraging playful and frugal educational design methods within a community-engaged framework, ACES sought to address how university partnership with community stakeholders across local, regional, national, and international contexts could target and collaboratively address educational challenges in a culturally relevant and sustainable manner. This paper discusses the methodological insights of how Community-Engaged Scholarship (CES) and Community-Engaged Research (CER) were combined and integrated through the lens of the ACES project. CES and CER have each been discussed as approaches useful for leveraging and strengthening community research relations with higher education. Collectively referred to as Community-Engaged Research Scholarship (CERS) in this paper, we critique how a collaborative CERS study design was applied to bridge the gap between academic research and community needs by fostering equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships. ACES strategies have focused on how CERS values have been consciously integrated to create impactful educational interventions. Adopting a Case Study approach, the paper analyses initiatives from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, mapping the ACES’s core principles—community engagement, playfulness, frugality, and co-creation—to the participatory and community-engaged values of CERS. The findings reveal how ACES served to bridge the urban-rural educational divide, empowering educators and communities to co-create culturally relevant and sustainable learning experiences integrating playful and frugal methods. The CERS design underscores the importance of agile and co-creative pedagogical approaches, especially in the context of crises like the COVID-19 pandemic to enhance the resilience and effectiveness of community-engaged educational initiatives.

This study investigates how playful and frugal values can be integrated to support inclusive and sustainable STEM learning in resource-constrained and culturally diverse contexts. Drawing on educator-designed educational materials from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam participating in the ACES (A Community-Centred Educational Model for Developing Social Resilience) cross-national design challenge, the research explores how educators embedded value-based design in learning activities that were contextually relevant and culturally responsive. The submitted designs demonstrated diverse, localised approaches using everyday materials, cultural knowledge, and creative pedagogical strategies. The study analysed 25 design submissions to the ACES Challenge from educators (aged 18+) in Indonesia (n = 10), Malaysia (n = 9), and Vietnam (n = 6). Only educators contributed as research participants via activity designs and reflections; any learner involvement occurred independently within schools and was beyond the study's scope. The analysis focused on educators' design rationales and value-led reflections, alongside experts' assessments of playfulness, frugality, and perceived learning potential, referring to the anticipated educational value of each activity, ensuring alignment with the approved ethical framework. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analysed how playful and frugal values were embedded in these submissions. Quantitative analysis examined correlations between the two value dimensions across educator-designed activities using a framework-informed rubric. In parallel, qualitative thematic analysis of reflective narratives and submitted materials explored how values were interpreted and applied in practice. This trian-gulation enabled a deeper understanding of value-led design processes across culturally and materially diverse contexts. Findings suggest that playful and frugal values are conceptually compatible and can be operationalised to foster student engagement, creativity, and accessibility. Educators leveraged local assets and co-created learning experiences perceived as engaging and sustainable. However, challenges emerged in applying these values consistently across contexts, particularly in balancing playfulness with curricular demands and material constraints. Variation in expert evaluations also highlighted the difficulty of assessing pedagogies that resist standardisation and emphasise exploratory or affective outcomes. These insights underscore the need for more nuanced evaluation frameworks, clearer design guidance, and sustained professional and institutional support. While student learning outcomes were not directly measured, the study offers a novel replicable framework for value-led playful and frugal educational design. It contributes to global discussions on inclusive and sustainable pedagogy by demonstrating how playful and frugal design logics can inform ethical, adaptive, and creative learning, especially in communities where resources are limited but ingenuity and resilience are abundant.

This chapter explores the concept of resilience in the context of higher education. It discusses the significance of resilience for university students, arguing that although the term is commonly used and understood, there remain questions about the nature of resilience, its measurement and its desirability as a characteristic of student development. The lack of equity in student experience and the need for some students to be more resilient than others is also explored. The discussion subsequently questions the conventional emphasis on developing student resilience and it raises the possibility that universities demonstrate resilience by shifting the responsibility to be resilient away from themselves and onto individual students and minority groups. The chapter also offers an unconventional path for equitable support by proposing a resilience equation. Overall, the key idea emerging from the conversion is that a significant re-evaluation of the concept of resilience in higher education is required.

This chapter explores the concept of resilience in the context of higher education. It discusses the significance of resilience for university students, arguing that although the term is commonly used and understood, there remain questions about the nature of resilience, its measurement and its desirability as a characteristic of student development. The lack of equity in student experience and the need for some students to be more resilient than others is also explored. The discussion subsequently questions the conventional emphasis on developing student resilience and it raises the possibility that universities demonstrate resilience by shifting the responsibility to be resilient away from themselves and onto individual students and minority groups. The chapter also offers an unconventional path for equitable support by proposing a resilience equation. Overall, the key idea emerging from the conversion is that a significant re-evaluation of the concept of resilience in higher education is required. 

This chapter focuses on the role of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in the context of higher education from the perspective of GAI. The following discussion involves a human researcher and two versions of GAI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Topics covered include the importance of GAI in higher education, personalised learning, academic integrity and whether GAI might replace teachers in the future. A major theme emerging from the chapter is the need for universities to address the situation with GAI and the importance of a coordinated approach to policy development across all education sectors.  

"As societies continue to respond to the grand challenges of our time, so too must Higher Education. This book explores what innovation and change could look like within Higher Education, and what could be done to facilitate it. Inspire: Learning for Teaching in Higher Education considers the grand pedagogic challenges facing the Higher Education sector, captured through a series of detailed dialogues and debates between disciplinary colleagues. Reflecting on forward-looking frameworks and exploring how they may be facilitated, each co-authored chapter platforms insights from educational experts. The focus of this book is on action, seeking to inspire those teaching, facilitating, and leading in Higher Education to bring conceptual understanding to actuality"--

There are multiple terms to describe the set of skills that are relevant across different contexts, including transferable skills, graduate attributes, transversal skills and soft skills. These terms, while overlapping in definition, are not exactly synonymous. Typically, higher education is viewed as one context where these skills are developed and it is the challenges surrounding the integration and understanding of these skills that is the focus of this chapter. Taking the form of a discussion between three academics, the chapter explores the nature of skills development across diverse academic disciplines. The key themes covered include the impact of disciplinary culture and epistemology on the teaching and development of soft skills, the stubborn gap between employer expectations and the skills graduates bring to the workplace, and the need for a nuanced approach to assessment that values creativity. The ideas that assessments of skills development should involve an element of creativity and that cross disciplinary skills assessments are unlikely to be successful or fair emerge as important takeaways. Finally the creation of a database of how these skills manifest in different disciplinary contexts is suggested as a first step in moving towards a better understanding of how skills development and assessment can be addressed in higher education contexts.  

The paper draws from the development of playful approaches in education in the ACES project (http://aces.gchangers.org), which aims to underpin a playful approach as an empathic, agentic, and frugal means for engaging young people within a creative inquiry process to enhance social resilience. Play is considered an enabling instrument for equipping young people with the relevant skills to manage the realities of tomorrow, where play is the freedom for them to engage with, develop curiosity about, and learn from the world and people that surround them in positive ways. Acknowledging that there is a link between play and the development of a range of competences young people will need to flourish, this paper proposes a mapping framework towards articulating the relationships between the aspects of play, the competencies that playful learning may afford, and the types of resilience that these competencies may develop. Such a mapping approach can be used to analyse and form considerations for the design of playful educational activities. The mapping is co-created with the ACES partners in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and the approach takes inspirations from Arnab et al. (2015)'s Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics (LMGM) mapping model which has been extended to consider motivational theory (Proulx et al., 2017). The paper will present the mapping framework of the aforementioned aspects and provide a mapping example using the "STEMBucket" programme in Malaysia, which is designed to engage teachers and learners in playful STEM activities towards social innovation and resilience development.

Data collected in Malaysia over the duration of the project. This includes quantitative and qualitative data from surveys, interviews and focus groups collected online and face to face.

Data collected in Indonesia over the duration of the project. This includes quantitative and qualitative data from surveys, interviews and focus groups collected online and face to face.

Social resilience can be defined as the individual’s willingness to mobilise for the communal good, combined with the ability of societal institutions to both resist and adapt to changing conditions. Social resilience has become increasingly important as we respond to the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic poses to education. As individuals, we are expected to act for the communal good by wearing masks, following social distancing and allowing contact tracing. At the institutional level, education providers have responded to the current situation to a great extent by rapidly moving education online. However, online education provision has connotations which threaten the quality of education provision for minorities (ethnic, religious, and others). This paper looks at potential scenarios of online education disadvantaging minorities and suggests principles which can guide socially resilient education transformation in response to crises like the global COVID-19 pandemic.

This literature review considers the role graduate attributes have to play in contemporary higher education (HE). Considering academic literature and reports from government and industry, it argues that there is currently a crisis in HE whereby the financial benefits of having a degree are overwhelmed by the financial burden of obtaining one. This crisis has its roots in the growing trend to perceive the value of HE as the means to the end of employment rather than as an end in itself. Graduate attributes (the skills and competencies students are supposed to acquire over the course of their studies) have the potential to promote HE as an end in itself. However, in their current form they typically do not have strong theoretical foundations and are too heavily subject to the influence of industry. Furthermore, despite explicit claims that graduates display these characteristics, institutions do not normally measure the attainment of graduate attributes. For graduate attributes to become more useful and relevant, these issues need to be resolved.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate and explore the five year partnership between University College London (UCL) and Nazarbayev University (NU) in Astana, Kazakhstan. Now that the partnership has ended, there are many valuable lessons that have been learned. This chapter will report on interviews with key members of staff from both UCL and NU revealing their reflections about what went well, the most important lessons that have been learned. The goal of the study is to explore the expertise and experiences of those involved in the UCL/NU partnership in order to provide a record and contribute to the scholarly body of work on Higher Education partnerships. Critical case sampling (purposeful sampling) was employed to select staff members from UCL and NU who were involved in key roles in the establishment and running of the foundation program. It was necessary to include only those staff who had both a key role, and were involved throughout the entirety of the project. Subsequently a small sample of four participants representing both UCL and NU were involved in semi structured interviews. In order to ensure confidentiality, the initials of these individuals have been changed. The interviews revealed a series of key recommendations when entering into transnational higher education partnerships. These are the importance of cultural understanding, patience and flexibility.

Hybrid learning has become the only solution to ensure the learning process still occurs in place of traditional classroom activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Following this condition, the phenomenon of "Zoom Fatigue" has emerged. Some of the symptoms reported are decreased learning motivation, low attention, and reduced responses. Thus, a refresher process, including the use of new playful and frugal learning media is necessary for varying children's learning activities. A learning intervention was designed to teach anatomy playfully as part of a biology curriculum. The Augmented Reality technology used in this research is a Humanoid 4D+ mobile application with flashcards, developed by Octagon Studio. This media displays information virtually on a smartphone screen when the application uses the camera to scan flashcards containing visual markers. A hybrid learning space is formed as students can see information virtually. But, physically, they are in control because they run applications and choose the type of flashcard they want to scan. The research was undertaken in several learning parks in Solo City, Central Java Province, Indonesia, with a total of 43 volunteer teachers and 132 early primary students participating. Previously, the ACES team (part of a UKRI funded project) had provided online training on the use of this media with teachers. Each teacher would then implement the media for all students in each learning park. The teachers demonstrate the media and each student takes turns running the application to view information virtually, therefore experiencing interactive learning. The qualitative approach was conducted for capturing teachers’ perceptions of Augmented Reality media. A survey using the JISC online platform was distributed to capture participants’ reflections on the activities and media used. Based on findings, the media appears beneficial, effective, and efficient for teaching anatomy concepts. Its virtual features can attract the children’s attention and teachers do not need to bring a lot of physical teaching aids, just one application to explain all organ system concepts. Students can learn playfully on their own and feel new learning experiences. The results indicated that the intervention could create playful and frugal activities which build student engagement as a potential solution to address issues of Zoom Fatigue. The next stage of the project will involve volunteer teachers implementing the technology more widely in their classes.

Regulation of public roadside parking levies with knowledge management can help local governments to increase their productivity, performance, and income so that progress and alignment are created under the Local Government Medium-Term Development Plan. The vision and policy direction taken by the local government aims to increase people's welfare based on religious and cultural values. One implementation of knowledge management is the use of an electronic parking system. E-parking or electronic parking is a condition where parking management is carried out systematically using a parking information system. E-parking systems that can be implemented on the public roadside can also increase efficiency in parking transactions. This research was conducted at several public roadside parking points in Ponorogo, Indonesia. The methods is qualitative which interviews and research team had discussion with the parking attendants and representatives of the Department of Transportation and the Agency for Revenue, Financial Management and Regional Assets of Ponorogo regarding implementing the E-parking system. This system consists of electronic records with Android-based applications synchronized on website-based applications and using handheld-pos. The results showed that this system could improve the weaknesses of conventional systems and increase the productivity of parking service managers as a form of service to customers.