Dr Irina Rets is a Doctoral Researcher in educational technology, based at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), the Open University (OU), UK. She also holds a doctorate in applied linguistics from Volgograd State University (Russia). Irina's research interests lie at the intersection of education, technology-enhanced learning, and applied linguistics.
As part of her PhD, she investigated the accessibility of online education to English learners. Irina has used a variety of methods to explore this topic, as well as the topics of other research projects she has provided research consultancy for: eye-tracking, online measures of learner behaviour; statistical modelling, advanced qualitative analysis of the data from over 40 interviews she has conducted to date; cluster analyses; analysis of longitudinal reflective learner diaries; analysis of surveys; participatory research.
Irina is a Fellow of Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Before her PhD at the OU, Irina taught a variety of academic university courses to undergraduate and graduate students in English-medium settings. She was involved in all stages of the teaching of these courses: from course design to course delivery and assessment.
human-computer interaction, technology-enhanced learning, accessibility of education, computer-supported collaborative learning, literacy
TESOL, applied linguistics, academic skills, technology-enhanced learning, blended learning, research methods in social sciences (qualitative and mixed methods)
To date, Irina has obtained two grants as a PI.
2020 - pres. 'Exploring engagement of OU students with learning analytics dashboards', funded by OpenTEL, the Open University (UK);
2018 - 2019 'Investigating cognitive processing of test task completion with eye-tracking', funded by Praxis-WELS, the Open University (UK);
2018 Irina was awarded the WELS ‘research degree student prize for research excellence’ .
Irina is a member of Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) organising committee. She assisted CALRG in organising cross-faculty weekly research and training events, as well as an internatinal academic research conference.
Irina helped organise over 60 faculty-wide weekly training workshops for the IET PhD students.
Irina has extensive experience of doing research collaboratively. In the course of her PhD, Irina has provided research consultancy for a number of other funded projects:
2019 – 2020 an international project 'Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education' (externally funded by Erasmus+ Key Action 3);
2018 a university project 'Unpacking UK experts’ perspectives of the impact of OU learning analytics' (externally funded by Jisc, UK);
2017 – 2018 a cross-faculty project 'One model, three scenarios: integrating PDP into three OU modules' (internally funded by Praxis-WELS)