 Thank you, my name is Lyn Ramsey. I'm from Lyrr imagination Institute of Technology and I'm a Head of Teaching and Learning there, I'm also Program Manager for the west-north-west cluster. This proposal is from the west-north-west cluster, we worked together collaboratively already on a number of projects but specifically projects looking at professional development so we can talk to some of those. I suppose for a personal level we're delighted to be bringing a programme at this forward. I know I was formerly head department and had that same sort of panic as head department as I had as a new lecturer thinking I'm in this job and I have no qualifications at all in this space and I suppose in part this is a reaction to that sort of experience. So we'll take you through a sort of roadmap for the day who, what and why is the TLC took a little bit about the engagement and particularly what that means in terms of our region. There's particular perspectives that we think are relevant in terms of how we engage with our target groups. Touch briefly maybe on the alignment with the professional development framework. I think our sense is that the project aligns very well with the professional development framework. Talk a little bit about the implementation plan and in particular the impact on students and then the value for money and legacy aspects. So in terms of the team here I might just hand them over to themselves to introduce them. My name is Maria Gallo and I am the development manager in the office of the president at San Angelo's College Sligo which is a college of MUI Galway. Hopefully to be merged with MUI Galway next year. Hi, I'm Isabelle Cunninghamma from LWIT. I lecture in management and leadership. I'm Korean again. I'm from GMI T and I work in teaching and learning terms and I'm Jennifer Billigan and I'm an instruction and designer in LWIT. So we talked about the region. This is a nice picture of Mockish taken by one of our graduates from LWIT, Rita Wilson. So I think our project is quite a simple project and I say it's based on the relationship we already have across the cluster. The cluster is of five institutions across the west, northwest so LWIT, IT, Sligo, GMIT, MUI Galway and San Angelo's as Maria mentioned seem to be merged with MUI Galway and within the cluster we've already quite a bit of collaboration but in essence this project has two two elements. One to develop an online and blended community of practice bringing together academic and non-academic managers to share experiences of teaching and learning to engage with the digital roadmap and to engage with the professional development framework. We think our project aligns quite nicely with one of the proposals you'll see tomorrow which is the Atlas project and one of the main motivations in having a blended approach is to have the opportunity for first managers from the academic and non-academic areas across the four institutions to network and to share experiences that will help them when they move to the online stage since they'll already have built some whatever relationship. We're going to work with three external partners from Florida, Rohan Joala, from Loughborough University and also from the University of Derby where Isabel has a lot of experience and Derby in particular is an interesting partner because they have a lot of experience of an online community of practice. So that's in essence the first element of the project. The second element of the project is to take the the learning that we've had from this online forum and to help develop a bespoke module for leadership for mentoring for teaching leadership in teaching and learning. The module would be a sort of module in a box essentially a series of digital resources with an accredited level nine module and they would draw on best practice. In preparation for this, Maria and I did a piece of research over the summer where we worked with some of our staff in each of the cluster institutions who are undertaking level 10 studies. From letter Kenny alone we have 32 staff undertaking PhDs and we were very interested to see what the experience of our own staff who were students was. So we know I think quite well the experience of our undergraduate staff and the experience of our own staff who are PhD students we knew less of and the research was very telling and in particular one of the things that struck us most was how isolated some of the staff felt and how they felt that managers and in particular senior managers didn't know what their experience was, didn't know what it meant in terms of time commitment, didn't know the impact it had on their personal and family lives and crucially I think in terms of professional development weren't sure where the research would take them in the future. How was it to be supported by their institutions? So that was part of our motivation to have an evidence-based perspective and we'd hope to similarly extract the evidence of managers through the community of practice in terms of what their experience trying to lead in these areas are. I know in the time that I've been academic manager there's been no PMDS at all, professional development, no professional development but not a lot of mentoring, not a lot of necessarily engagement in a formal way at management or senior management level so we feel there's a gap there. So in terms of target groups, in terms of engaging the managers, we would hope to target at least five or probably up to eight managers, academic and from the functional areas, we're particularly interested in the non-academic managers, I don't believe I'm really comfortable calling that with the managers from the functional areas, the HR managers, the IT managers, the librarians, who's role is crucial in terms of providing a supportive environment for students. We think the registrars will be key in terms of our recruitment. Our operations group within the cluster at the moment is comprised of the registrars, they're very bought into this process and it aligns very well with the strategic plans with each of the institutions and I say each of the institutions is very committed to professional development of their staff, we all have a number of staff undertaking accredited CPD at the moment particularly at the PhD level. So we imagine that the registrars will act as recruiters for us. The regional perspective I think is important here, we're small institutions, we know each other very well across the cluster, we know each other very well so we will champion this programme. Our experience in the cluster has been working with NUI all the way in terms of bringing our own staff onto the structure of PhD, there's been very positive but it works at a very granular level. So when Lucy burned the VP for graduate studies got involved in that project, she came to visit each of the institutions to promote the project, the PhD project and explain what the commitment would be for staff and we think that's the key, it's a personal relationship that we can bring to bear in terms of recruitment. In terms of student engagement so we developed a system where students would be part of the steering and operational group, the issue rep from the BMW region was very keen to be involved in letter county, we have a lot of students who've now been through the the end step the national student engagement project training our own presence part of that so we've got a lot of buy-in from the students reps and I think the question that we got back to the group from the national forum about what other ways are you engaging students was a useful one and paused us to think about the informal and non-formal way we could engage with students, I think it's something that we as an institutional letter can hear very mindful having been involved in the student engagement project that those informal and non-formal spaces are very important so we had a good discussion about how we could engage students and our idea would be to add the TLC days, the teaching and learning champion days to bring student focus groups into both of those days and in that way they could engage in a formal way through focus groups and an informal way through discussions that's one of the things that we've noticed in terms of our engagement with the end step that when we have training days and we've brought managers and senior managers into the informal spaces that work very well till around coffee breaks lunch times it was the start of interesting informal discussions. Crucially the approach here is based on an action learning methodology where the participants would develop different initiatives that they would roll out within their own functional areas or within their own departments and would review with the action learning set. Our idea would be that these initiatives would impact directly on student learning from whatever your area be, either as an academic manager or a non-academic manager. So in terms of alignment with the personal development framework and roadmap, the digital roadmap, our sense is this programme aligns very well with all aspects of the framework in terms of the topology of personal development activities. It runs a range of accredited, non-accredited elements and we've given some examples in that first column in terms of peer networking for collaboration, in terms of self-reflection, in terms of the unstructured non-accredited element, digital badging for participants through the online forum, and Isabella will talk more in detail about how that might work. In terms of structured accredited modules, it was interesting when we talked to some of the senior managers at the design stage about the digital badging, they were saying, I'm not interested in digital badging, I'm a voice scout, was the feedback you got for some, we were interested in the accredited module. Sharing that learning about what digital badging means with senior managers, I think that's a very powerful start of our conversation. Types of learning again, new learning for some, the digital learning will be very new learning for some, first to others not so much, but leadership might be a new aspect of their learning to consolidate where you're at in terms of some of your digital knowledge and move that on. Mentoring is the key element to the communities of practice in those action learning circles and leadership. Very often it's not in the formal roles of your title as manager, you'll know that very often within your own department it's the informal leaders who are key to change, so it's to know as a manager how to walk the walk instead, as also as talk the talk, our managers particularly in the institutes of technology have a three hour teaching requirement, not everyone avails of that opportunity if we call it that, but it is a fantastic opportunity as an academic manager to walk the kind of walk that you want to see. So an investing in your own continued professional development is very powerful in terms of academic leadership and in terms of the five domains we think we cover each of those in terms of the self professional identity professional communication and developing your skills and aligning to the digital world. The implementation plan that we laid out there is very clear, I think there's three quite distinct phases, the first phase in terms of a project development, the second phase in terms of the implementation, key to that would be continual evaluation, I think that would be Maria's role in the project to evaluate the experience of the participants to extract the learning for them to see where there's areas where we need to develop more, to develop specific digital capacity if that's a case, and then the final legacy phase, a number of us in the institutes technology sector would have gone through this, our committee's training was something that the government sponsored maybe seven years ago just at the start where all this change was coming through and what was super about it was the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across the sector, but it ended after the two days in Dublin that was it, there was no legacy and we would be very keen that the online element of the community practice would remain as something which other institutions could adopt and buy into, which something with their own managers could continue to work to, and then crucially that you're managed as a manager, you could bring it to your own academic staff or your non-academic staff who would support teaching and learning, so we think it's important that there's a legacy beyond just the community practice and beyond the life of this project, equally the development of the module with the digital elements would provide an opportunity for colleagues right across the country to share the knowledge from this project. So we have very clear outputs we think, first and foremost we want to create teaching and learning champions right across our region, we'll have the online forum with the bespoke digital resources, crucially it would be based on the experience of our own region, the needs of our own managers, the needs of our own students, this mentoring legacy and the modules and in terms of value for money and it was something that were asked back, I think the impact across the region will be significant, not just in terms of the managers who participated but then for all the staff that they will work with and the students that they will work with, those distributed leadership impacts I think will be significant. In terms of the costs it's both with comparable leadership programmes, I know for example their committees project was tens of thousands really with very little lasting impact and I suppose comparable leadership programmes for us particularly for us in the west north west if we want to send our guys to the HE academy in England we couldn't send a whole team of staff and when we put on training days we get really significant buy-in from across our institutions, Mark was involved in a day that we ran there recently where we had 94 of the staff turned up for a session on assessment for groups, yeah so I think when we have something that's put on locally we get very good buy-in and we've designed this project so that no one has to travel for more than four hours, the bulk of it is online, the two learning days one's in Lerrkinny and one's in IT in GMIT so no staff member has to travel for more than four hours and I think that's very impactful for our sense.