Lara has been working in online education for the last six years, supporting universities and academics in their transition to blended and online learning.
Some of the notable projects she has worked on include:
- The development and presentation of the University of Cape Town’s first accredited blended postgraduate diploma.
- The creation of an online tutor training course for GetSmarter’s academic staff.
- A blended learning collaboration between the University of Namibia and the University of Cape Town to transform the current MSc in Civil Engineering to a blended format.
- The development and presentation of GetSmarter’s first international short course with Goldsmiths, University of London.
Lara completed her Masters in Higher Education at the University of Cape Town in 2019. In her doctoral study she plans to explore the affordances and limitations of online education with regard to different subject matter.
Her areas of interest are online education, higher education, pedagogy, digital literacy, and digital inequalities.
McQueen Sum is a Clarendon Scholar and is currently reading for a DPhil in Education at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include higher education, academic work, and sociomaterial theories of practice. Her doctoral research is fully funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and New College Scholarship.
McQueen is a member of the Centre for Global Higher Education. Her research interests are influenced by her experiences of working as an academic tutor at the University of Hong Kong and a researcher for Khan Academy and HarvardX (edX).
Prior to coming to Oxford, McQueen completed her master’s degree with a specialisation in media and learning technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University in the City of New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and business management at the University of Hong Kong with a full merit-based scholarship.
Supervisors
Professor Alis Oancea and Professor Velda Elliott
Publications
Xie, Y., & Sum, M. (2024). Higher education leadership challenges and responses to COVID-19 in China and the UK: A need for ethical, collaborative, and compassionate leadership. In M. Drinkwater & P. Deane (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Context and Transformative Leadership in Higher Education . London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Sum, M., & Oancea, A. (2022). The use of technology in higher education teaching by academics during the COVID-19 emergency remote teaching period: a systematic review. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 19(1), 59. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-022-00364-4
Sum, M., & Oancea, A. (2021). Higher education teachers’ perspectives on technology use in emergency remote teaching during the global pandemic: A systematic literature review. In Proceedings of the Yidan Prize Doctoral Conference (pp. 103-124). Department of Education, University of Oxford. https://yidanprize.org/knowledge-hub/publication/2021-yidan-prize-doctoral-conference-proceedings
Runke received her bachelor’s degree from Beijing Normal University (BNU) and master’s from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) with distinction. Both of the fields were Early Childhood Education.
After graduation from HKU, she became a kindergarten teacher in China. As a teacher, she was fully conscious that the quality of teachers’ pedagogical practice is really important for children’s learning and well-being. Therefore, her current research is to explore the quality of kindergarten teachers’ pedagogical practice and its association with teachers’ leadership.
Publications
- Huang, R., Yang, W., & Li, H. (2019). On the road to participatory pedagogy: A mixed-methods study of pedagogical interaction in Chinese kindergartens. Teaching and Teacher Education, 85, 81-91.
- Huang, R., Yang, W., & Li, H. (2019). From transmissive to participatory pedagogies: A mixed- methods investigation of pedagogical interaction in Shenzhen kindergartens. 2019 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). Symposium.
- Yang, W., Su, Y., Huang, R., Zhu, J., Hsieh, W-Y., & Li, H. (2019). Coaching, teacher instruction, and early childhood development: Synthesizing the conceptual rationales and empirical effects. 2019 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). Poster.