Kuan-Chou Chen
Purdue University Northwest, USA

Professor Kuan-Chou Chen is Thomas M. McDermott Sr. Endowed Chair Professor in Economic Development, Professor of Management Information Systems. He was the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, the Associate Dean for Faculty and Students Research, the Director of the White Lodging School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (2018-2019), Department Head of Information Systems, Finance, and Business Analytics (2005-2016), as well as Interim Department Head of Department of Graduate Studies in Education (2013-2014) at Purdue University Northwest. He was awarded with the “Outstanding Administrative Leadership award” for the year 2019-2020 at the University level. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University and his MBA from National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan. He specialized in business intelligence, system simulation, project management, decision support systems, data mining, system analysis and design, e-business strategy and application, supply chain management, network design and security, knowledge management, and information economy. Professor Chen has more than 100 scholarly publications, most in peer-reviewed journals. He is an active participant in several professional journals and serves on three paper reviewer boards. Currently he is an Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning. His productivity and scholarship have been recognized by his colleagues, being nominated three years in a row for an “Outstanding Scholar Award.” He also the recipient of Teacher of the Year Award (Purdue University Northwest, 2005.

 

Keith Morrison
University of Saint Joseph, Macau, China

Professor Keith Morrison has worked in higher education for over 40 years, in the UK and South-East Asia, and, since 2000, in Macau, where he is currently Vice-rector for research at the University of Saint Joseph. He is the author/co-author of 20 academic books, including 8 editions of Research Methods in Education, and he has been the Co editor of the international peer reviewed journal Educational Research and Evaluation. He is in the top 20 of the world’s most cited authors in education, in Google Scholar. He has conducted consultancies for governments, companies, organizations and institutions in countries across the world. His most recent jointly authored book (2023) is Student Engagement, Higher Education, and Social Justice (with Corinna Bramley).

 

Abstract: This keynote locates educational technology and its impact within current trends in higher education, raising questions for the partner of education technology, which is student engagement. However, ‘student engagement’ is a slippery term, asking ‘engagement in what, for what, and for whom?’. The keynote introduces implications of these questions for educational technology. In doing so, it provides a typology of studies in student engagement, drawing on the early work of Jürgen Habermas. This typology is then matched to how educational technology serves different interests in student engagement, moving beyond technicist and instrumentalist views of engagement, to engaging students in understanding, to a transformational, emancipatory role in which students take existential control of their own lives, agendas, and futures within a free, open, egalitarian society. From this, challenges are identified for educational technology in engaging students’ different interests, agendas and values, and the talk identifies key questions in meeting these challenges.