 on and welcome to this first nine o'clock session for OER 2022, an open approach to developing educators digital capacity, lessons learned from the cross institutional development and delivery of an open course. I'm really delighted to welcome Sharon Flynn, Kate Malloy and Rob Lowney here with us today. And I'm going to hand over to Sharon now who's going to present their session. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Caroline. So I'll just introduce myself a little bit and my two colleagues here. So for anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Sharon Flynn. I work with the Irish University's Association on a project called Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning and you can see the little logo of the top right there. I'm joined today by just two of my team members. So we have Rob Lowney who's with us from DCU and Kate Malloy who's with us from the National University of Ireland, Galway. And I understand that within a couple of weeks time that will actually be the University of Galway according to yesterday's announcements. So that's definitely easier to say, unlike the project itself. So if we could pop onto the next slide, Kate, thanks. Can I do it? Yeah, brilliant. Thank you. So just a little bit of background about the Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning project. It started in January of 2019, which you'll note is well before the pandemic and well before we were all thrown back into our homes to carry on teaching and learning. It's funded through the Irish Higher Education Authority, Innovation and Transformation programme and originally it was a three-year project. So it should have finished last December but actually we have an extension until the September 2022 which is fast approaching and I'm a little bit concerned about that. And I'm the project manager but I work with individuals and groups across seven of the Irish universities. You'll see all the logos there I'll go through them all and I work with Rob in DCU and with Kate in NUIG. And the project overall, it has a couple of aims including we talk about the digital skills of our students, the digital learning environment of our students but also about the digital capabilities of our staff. And when we set out with the project initially we were very, very focused on staff development. So development of all staff who teach or support teaching and learning because we want to be really inclusive around that. And broadly speaking our main aim was to try and mainstream digital in teaching and learning. Of course we had no idea that the pandemic was on its way but that has in some ways helped and in some ways hindered the project to a certain extent. So in the first it took a while to get all the team together and so really we began our work with staff probably around the September say of 2019. And the approach we took was that each university sort of defined their own plan, their own work plan and defined their own pilot projects within the first academic year of the project. So if we could move on to the next slide. So the types of university activities depended very much on the local setup, the local context, the skills that were available locally in each university and also the strategic goals of the university. So the work plan for each university was decided in conjunction with senior management within the universities and also looking at what was needed and what the capacity was like already. So we have a couple of examples up here. We had a certain amount around digital content, certainly around video creation, podcasting, a number of people were interested in looking at H5P. Some of the universities focused specifically on the student digital skills. In DCU in particular they took up the whole assessment piece and the digitally enhanced assessment. And I know Rob's going to be talking a little bit more about that later on. It's been quite a drive right across our universities around academic integrity. And then there was the teaching online. Obviously that was spurred on and encouraged by the pandemic when it happened. But certainly the remote teaching, formation of digital communities, social bookmarking was one thing that Kate was looking at originally. Hybrid teaching, flipped learning, etc. Open resources. Our project has always been very open in terms of its approach and practices. And UDL was something that also came up in a number of the different partner universities. So essentially each university defined its own activities that it was working on. But because I was central and trying to pull it all together, we needed a unifying framework. So we were using the DigComp edu work. We are using the DigComp edu framework, which is the European framework for the digital competency of educators to try and hang all of the different activities of this to map to it, but also to use it to identify where there were gaps in our approaches. Another framework which we were very conscious of and wanted to ensure that we linked into was the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Ireland. That's another mouthful. I'll just call it the forum in the future. But they a number of years ago had developed a professional development framework, which identifies a number of areas for educators to map their skills, to identify gaps, to improve, to reflect, etc. One of those areas is around personal and professional digital capacity. And so we were trying to align what we were doing very much with that part of the professional development framework. And so what we decided to do very early on, the National Forum has a system of digital badges and open courses, but we decided that we wanted to create a digital badge, which would align with the framework, and which we could then award to staff, to academic staff and to other staff who support teaching and learning, who had engaged fully with our pilot activities. And in order to do that, we needed to create a set of criteria, which would be common across the seven universities, but that each of our team members could use to recognise the efforts that staff had put into their teaching. So the four criteria are to reflect on their current use of technology and identify areas where digital technologies could be used to enhance the teaching, to acquire and demonstrate a digital skill to support teaching practice, to plan a new or enhanced teaching activity, and the planning there we felt was extremely important, and then plan how to evaluate the success of the new activity. So it's not just about learning a new skill, but rather thinking about how you're going to use it in context, how you're going to evaluate it. So thinking about it a little bit more critically. So that was the digital badge that we created. We awarded it over a number of dates in the first couple of years. So you can see in September 2020 was the first set of recipients. And then we awarded it sort of incrementally over the course of two years, really. And so I know that Rob would have awarded some, for example, for people who had been doing a lot in the area of digital assessment, and Kate had also awarded it in a number of cases at NUIG. And I'm going to stop talking there. I don't know if either of you would like to say anything about the digital badge or if I'll just hand over to Kate for the next part of the talk. I suppose I think we're handing over to Rob at this stage, but from my end, I was working with Digital Resources and the cohort and the pilot group I was working with actually, ironically, before the pandemic, really looking at creating interactive multimedia resources and resources for asynchronous and blended learning, which became far more important in March 2020. But we had a nice small cohort of staff kind of working on podcasting and video and interactive multimedia and working informally at that stage. So they obviously did receive the digital badge for the sheer amount of effort and work they did around learning design and all of the work put into creating resources, which was fantastic. But it's nice to get some structure to it, which we'll be talking about in a second. I think I'm going to hand back to Rob. Thanks, Kate. And just from the DC point of view, myself and my colleagues, Suzanne Stone, ran a short professional learning program, a series of workshops and consultations for staff around digital assessment. And for those that participated in the workshops and for those who implemented an enhancement to their practice, we issued the digital badges to them. But if you want to move on, Kate, I suppose we can talk about the next phase of the digital badge, really. I suppose we were invited by the forum to develop an open course so that others could earn the digital badge, not just those who are participating in our specific university activities. So we began development of this open course in March 2021, with a subgroup of the overall EDTL project team, although there were members from all of the seven universities involved. And we used the ABC learning design approach, which I presume for Irish and UK higher education audience members, they might be familiar with it. I know it's quite popular for anyone else. You may or may not have heard of this approach, but it's based on Diana Laurelard's conversational framework, and it was a learning design framework developed out of UCL by Clive Young and Natasha Peridich. And I suppose it's a framework and an approach for rapid development of a module. And you can see the coloured cards on the screen there. So based on the work of Laurelard, it presents learning as categorized by six different types, acquisition, collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice and production. And so learning through acquisition might involve a learner reading something or watching a video, learning through discussion might involve participating in a discussion forum activity on the VLE or what have you. Production might involve creating some sort of output or artifact or something like that. So a lot of us from the team are familiar with ABC learning design. So it was a natural fit to use it to design the course. And for those who weren't familiar with it, it's very, very easy for an office to pick up and to use. And I suppose it's aimed at rapid development and it's aimed at encouraging people to use and mix all of these different learning types in their course design. So we met weekly as a team to kind of storyboard the course, deciding on the different learning types and deciding on the order and making sure everything was constructively aligned to the outcomes that Sharon showed earlier. Even though ABC is a rapid, I'm smiling to myself when I say rapid development process, because we actually took a very long time to develop our course much, much longer than we expected. I think definitely at least two months, if not more. We met weekly on MS teams to discuss and to storyboard. We did that all synchronously. I mean, we could have obviously designed it asynchronously, but I think the conversations, the weekly conversations were so rich because we all came from different perspectives and had different ideas. I think thrashing those out again and again really helped us to refine the course. We would sort of decide something and then the next week we would undecide it and we kept kind of coming back to decisions. But I think that was all good in the end because it made sure we really interrogated the course and that we were satisfied that we had designed it to a very, very high standard. I was sharing Kate and Sharon and I were just joking yesterday about how many discussions we had around the color scheme for the course, our greens and our purples, and bringing in the different colors of the project brand and so on. But once the course was storyboarded, different team members kind of took it on themselves to go off and curate content, a new digital skill to Moodle. And one example of some of the materials we developed and we got these professionally developed where our participant guide and our facilitator guide. So there was a guide for those who were taking the course and then there were those for there was a guide for those who were doing what we called the facilitator add-on. So where they themselves might like to facilitate this course in future, although we as the team were facilitating it the first time around. And these materials kind of gave the participant sort of a roadmap from the outset as to what to expect. And we were very keen to set the expectations, especially because it is a very reflective self-exploratory course. You know, we didn't want people to think they'd be coming in and there'd be a ton of material for them to work through. And then suddenly they'd be digital experts according to the DigCom PDU framework. So we really wanted to kind of, you know, give clarity to what was expected. So the guides explained everything what was involved for the course as a whole. We were keen to use sort of iconography and icons and verbs and colour coding etc to break down the different types of activities that people would need to do in each particular unit. And then as just a nice little extra we kind of printed the guides and posted them out around the country to all the people who are participating, which was just something kind of nice for them to have a hard copy, something tangible. If you want to move on there, Kate, and then kind of just a final point for me, Sharon has already mentioned our National Forum here in Ireland, which is our body for the enhancement of teaching and learning. And they do an awful lot of wonderful work, strategic projects, they supply funding, they provide guidance insight. Sharon has already shown you the professional development framework that they have developed and this wonderful platform, which I think for about five years now they've been running these open courses, although someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is I think is a wonderful example of collaborative professional development for those who teach and those who support teaching in higher education. And it's available to everyone nationally in higher education, and actually a lot of our further education colleagues actually participate in these open courses as well. So what usually happens is the forum would approach some people in different institutions in a very collaborative way and ask would you like to put together a course in very much the same way they approach us, and then people go off together working collaboratively, developing their course, and it's hosted on the platform here, which is a Moodle-based platform. Lots of different courses and topics are available, there's ours are one obviously on digital capacity, there's one on reflective writing, program focused assessment, loads of fantastic topics to be explored and they run at certain intervals throughout the year and they attract a great amount of numbers and are just wonderful. I've taken several myself and they're just wonderful examples of collaborative open professional development for all. So that's my spiel done. I think Kate now shall I hand over to you to go into some of the details of our iteration of the course. Yeah perfect thanks Rob and thanks folks for your contribution. Yes I suppose it's left to me to discuss some of the logistics around the course. So as Rob pointed out we did take our time and you know had some really useful conversations throughout the development of the course and really labored over our decision-making, so when we felt we were ready to deliver a six-week course, a six-unit course, wasn't until around November of this year so we definitely did you know carefully kind of plan that that roll out out. We'll just give it some context that the course is broken up into six units. In this case we did it across six weeks it's approximately 25 learner hours so it would be one ECTS in terms of our system here so it's kind of a light touch approach we often discuss and as we often refer to with these open courses so as Rob kind of alluded to already you know it's quite a reflective course it was mostly self-paced. We did have some live webinars for signposting you know those were recorded that folks could opt in or opt out depending on availability because it's a national rollout obviously it's you know quite difficult to really suit everyone's schedule and with folks coming from further and higher ed obviously you know that you have a wide range of people coming but essentially the six units equipped our learners to do some self-reflection based on that ditch comp edgy framework that Sharon was exploring earlier giving time in the earlier units to explore and demonstrate their new skill to so too in particular teaching need for it and and really demonstrating and getting to grips with with whatever tool or technology they were using and then planning a digital enhancement so some enhancement to their teaching and finally claiming their badge within the peer group that they worked in so part of the format for these courses is often based on what we call a peer triad or a peer group so that the group is working together to share the evidence of that digital enhancement and ultimately verifying that they've met the criteria to receive the digital badge that we issue through open badge factory with the national forum so there's an additional piece that I often like to be involved in with these with these courses and that's equipping participants to complete an additional five hours so that they can earn a facilitator badge so that they can facilitate this course themselves in their local institution or with us nationally some folks will be looking into doing that with us in our next rollout that we'll talk about soon but as Sharon alluded to you know this doesn't provide technical training this imparts a structure for professional development to encourage that exploration and development skills in your own time and hopefully equipping our participants with those skills going forward so just to give it a bit of context we did start in early November so obviously it is a busy time of the semester I think pretty anywhere and we ran from six weeks into the 18th of December we did award 46 badges as Rob said the module itself wasn't really content heavy or resource heavy that we we shared 34 resources those resources will be available openly soon when they are refined and ready to go with our next iteration and the feedback was largely positive not entirely surprising but 68% of folks said there was a challenge in actually completing the course at a busy time of the semester that's probably consistent with some of the work we do you know locally and nationally but what was nice and consistent was that 68% said that learning from their peer triad was the favorite part of their course because again with this open course model that often does tend to be the perfectly our participants favorite part that there is engagement with peers and time and space that that folks don't often have to reflect and actually sit down and have a coffee and talk with their peers about teaching and learning so that is really heartening to see there is an element of sustainability and I suppose from my kind of personal end that's why I like being involved with the facilitator badge is that we see participants coming from 20 different you know higher and further ed institutions that seven universities six education and training boards so we're seeing a wide variety of people interested and again sharing that expertise with us and within their peer groups and hopefully you know bringing bringing what they've learned back to their their institutions or their schools or their centers so 12 participants actually completed that facilitator badge that I had been talking about so they can actually facilitate the course in their own institution if they decide to take the materials with them when those materials are available they can use them on their own virtual learning environment or if they use teams and some of the further ed institutions those materials are available you know to to anyone that does want to reuse them what once once they are live and it's really nice to see that you know sustainability and hopefully some growth so I've been in touch with some uh some of those people that earn the facilitator badge and hopefully they'll join us this summer for our next steps that was very good timing so we are going to offer another version this summer hopefully we will be able to embed the materials and this badge you know into our local cpd as we've done in the pilot groups and as we've done at other times maybe offered a standalone or non-accredited formal cpd again making materials available to the wider audience you know obviously to to anyone here and anyone across the country but our formal plans are really around offering something this summer but making it quite flexible because we know what the time constraints in semester one that things were not only difficult for our participants but frankly you know difficult for all of us because it is busy time of year I think pretty much wherever you're working and higher or further ed so what we've decided to do after that review process is to offer the main content of the course units one through five we'll introduce those within five weeks so that we can spread the workload the actual enhancement that folks are planning the work with their peer groups to allow people to actually complete the course and verify that they've met the criteria that teaching enhancement in September because everyone does need to take some time off and take their annual leave ourselves included so we're doing kind of a front-loading process there which hopefully that flexibility you know should be a nice model even for some of these other open courses maybe to to adopt or maybe from for some of our own local cpd offerings that flexibility has proven key in this the last couple of years I think so just to highlight I think I'm bang on time there is this is our full course development team Rob and I are here Suzanne will be on the next session and we as Sharon said we have representatives from across the institutions that are on the project so we had a wide variety of experience and different values and skill sets brought to the table when developing this course so even though it took a little bit of time and maybe there were a couple of disagreements over color schemes I think we're all really proud of the work we've done so I think we maybe take any questions and thank the team for joining me this morning thank you all for that session that was that was really great we do have a few questions and I know one of your colleagues is in the chat answering some of them but I'll bring those to your attention and you can add anything additional so we have a question from Teresa McKinnon how did the badges add value to the project I can say a little bit about that and Kate and Rob if you want to come in at all they added value in a number of different ways Teresa for the staff members concerned it meant that they were recognized and I probably should have stressed at the time that the badge was developed initially in consultation with the national forum and in collaboration with the forum so the badge is issued by the forum which means that it is nationally recognized and so people can use it as evidence within their portfolios and if they want to try and map it to the professional development framework they can do so so it's a piece of recognition it's a kind of a semi-formal professional development for ourselves it meant that agreeing the criteria of the badge actually took a little bit of time I remember some of the meetings that we had so it meant that we were coming together and collaborating from a very early stage and of course the other thing as project manager that I'm very conscious of is I need to be able to show some sort of evidence of impact and I'm very much against the idea of just you know counting people at a workshop I'd rather be able to say you know x amount of people have been awarded this badge for these criteria and I think that that's a slightly more meaningful measurement Kate do you want to add anything to that well actually just I'm thinking about the last thing you said there you know about the kind of the meaning behind it like so much of the work even in the very small pilot groups that you know maybe I had I don't know even 10 off the top of my head in the first iteration people did so much work you know that there was there was quite a bit of incentive to earn that badge we did everything from kind of virtual field trips and you know really interesting you know development of interactive materials and open materials that have led to other European projects and other funding like it's kind of behind the scenes but I think there was a lot of credence to the badge but it's like I still share and said that it is nationally recognised so there was definitely incentive certain incentive there thank you both and there's one more question that hasn't been answered in the chat yet so pop that one up from Teresa about are the materials cc licensed and yeah Teresa anything that we have pulled together and anything we have created as part of the project we've put a cc by license on it so and they are all open and the only thing is that we haven't quite collected them all together yet for you to be able to to download and access them easily and that's that's part of the work that we need to do over the next couple of months and we as I think Rob mentioned there's very little content in the course so we try to draw on existing resources and in particular when it comes to enhancing the the digital skills component of the course we encourage participants to avail of what's on offer within their own institution because we feel that that's important that they link in with that what's available locally and and also ask them to to to share share with others what might be openly available within their own institution as well yeah yeah even even just to point out that the materials were actually quite low-fi as well as Rob pointed out there pdfs and guides and videos and things that from a learning technologist point of view that if you do want to reuse or easily customisable easily easily remixable and you know there's there's not any faffing around with a scorn content or anything like that it's a it's not yeah they're user friendly and low bandwidth so yeah okay well thank you Sharon and Kate and also Rob who I know has now gone on to the next session it's a very bad schedule today so um yeah it's just left for me to say thank you so much for that really interesting presentation and and please do enjoy the rest of the conference and we'll see you all in the next session thank you thanks so much