Dr Xue Zhou is Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Project Management in the School of Business and Management, Programme Director for BSc Business Management (Year 2) and a Queen Mary Academy Fellow. In this profile, Xue talks about how she is building on her research in digital literacy to develop digital ready future business leaders, communicating her work through blogging, the supportive environment she has found since joining Queen Mary, and her love of theme parks.
I started working at Queen Mary in August 2021; before that I was at Coventry University.
I am working on a project called Digital Ready Future Business Leader. The project aims to explore the digital literacy gap between our graduates' outcomes and the expectations of employers. My first degree was in civil engineering and because of my engineering background, I’m interested in digital adoption, and my research is all about digital technology; I’ve published quite a lot of papers in the area of digital literacy. Digital literacy encompasses the competencies and understanding necessary to utilize digital tools for information retrieval, assessment, analysis, and content creation. Additionally, it entails the capacity to effectively communicate and collaborate within the realm of digital environments.
In this project, I have two sub-projects. One is to look at our current students' confidence in digital skills, and I recruited 22 students to support me with that project. We collected data from students doing the BSc Business Management to explore students' levels of digital literacy. We also asked them how they find the support provided by Queen Mary and whether there is anything they find useful or would like to see more of. We can then use their feedback to enhance our curriculum.
The second sub-project is to interview alumni and employers in different industries. My team has interviewed 45 alumni and employers, and they have identified a need to improve digital literacy, especially equipping students with industry-specific skills. We also found that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly important in the workplace.
AI is very new to higher education. Before ChatGPT was introduced in November last year, a lot of research was purely talking about chatbots, but these were not widely used in the sector. Higher education is now paying more attention to AI but it had not really realised that it has been in use in industry for some years now. So, this is a skill that employers really want to see from students. I expect that skills in AI will become essential to developing digital fluency, which is one of the Queen Mary Graduate Attributes.
I realised that there’s a lot of debate about AI, but there's a missing perspective. How is this going to impact on inclusive education and how can we adopt it in an inclusive and effective way?
A lot of our students from underprivileged social and economic backgrounds are disadvantaged in terms of digital technology. They may not even have a laptop. So I wondered, if a lot of students start to use AI to improve their work efficiency, what about those students from a BTEC background? What about the students from widening participation backgrounds?
I'm a fan of blogs and I have published two or three blogs every year. I do think that we should share our opinions and, while I don't know how much impact we will make from that Wonkhe blog, I wanted higher education senior leaders to see it so they can put more resources into this area and support their students.
Queen Mary students want to know to what extent AI could help them to improve their learning – in my module I encourage the students to use AI, I can see great benefits and the students love it.
I have teaching responsibilities, so during the teaching semester my focus is on teaching, preparation and supporting students. Because of the projects I have been leading, I am engaging with students at the same time. I worked with eight students on Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL), as well as the 22 students I recruited to work on the Digital Ready Future Business Leader project. I had another project funded by the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education, the cross-institutional student-led online Symposium, where I recruited six students from different institutions. I also support a number of PhD students who teach in my programme.
In the summer, I shift my focus to publication projects and conferences. I like to keep busy.
I like the Graduate Centre, especially the top floor with the balcony and a very nice view. It's also very modern compared to the other buildings we work in.
I always tell my friends that since I moved to Queen Mary, I've received great support from my School and the University.
This year they sent me to Aurora leadership training, they sent me to the British Academy of Management’s Becoming an Education-Focused Professor Programme, and they have also given me a lot of funding support; for example, I’m attending the PLTLIS conference in Houston to disseminate the findings of our work in this area, and I will attend the AOM conference in Boston to share our student-led activities.
I have found the Queen Mary Academy Fellowship extremely useful because I can concentrate on my project and the benefits to the students. Since I became a Queen Mary Academy Fellow, I have been given access to the network of Fellows and I find it fascinating to work with them.
I would say to a prospective member of staff, they need to find a supportive environment, and Queen Mary is definitely one of them.
Because there's a lot of stress in my work, when I have my relaxing time, I like to do something very exciting. I like skydiving, and I do diving as well.
When I go to a theme park, I like rides which go faster and higher; so my dream is to go and take all these extreme rides around the world, the top 10 scariest rides.
Read the Wonkhe blog 'Towards an inclusive approach to using AI in learning and teaching'
https://wonkhe.com/blogs/towards-an-inclusive-approach-to-using-ai-in-learning-and-teaching/