 I'm here on behalf of the Teaching and Learning Champions project with my colleagues Maria Gallo and Isabel Cunningham. We're part of the team working on this project on behalf of the West Northwest Regional Cluster. So in terms of project presentation today I'll run through who we are and what we're doing and why we're doing it and I'll also discuss how we've looked at engagement with the tyre groups particularly from a regional perspective and then Maria will deal with the remaining three sections. How we're aligning the work with the professional development framework both globally in terms of the project and then specifically in terms of this first review, the implementation plan and where we are with that and then looking forward in terms of impact and longer term sustainability of the project. So this project was an application on behalf of the West Northwest Higher Education Cluster and that involves institutions, higher education institutions in the north and west of Ireland. So we are LIIT, IT Sligo, GMIT and St. Andrews College which is almost part of NUI Gallo. So last time we met we gave you a lovely wintery scene from the wild Atlantic way and here's some summery scenes, we're nearly at summer now so we're in a very gall way there and Sligo, Ben Balben Sligo and I think that's Port Salon in Donegal. And I think the cluster has been a very useful springboard for the projects. We're piggybacking on the architectural structures and governance structures of the cluster so we work with the registrars who form part of the steering groups and our meetings fall on the back of that. And we have already quite developed relationships at some level, at senior management level in particular and working down towards the manager's level within the cluster and some projects already in the ground. We have an existing relationship but what we're up against in terms of our area is the geography and the ability for our managers, senior managers to access training without having to travel. So this in part is a way of addressing some of those issues. And suppose the other unique focus of our project is that we're not just looking at the academic managers, we're also looking at the professional services, functional services managers. So there's two main focuses of the projects in terms of big outputs. The first one is working towards the establishment of a teaching and learning forum for managers. The forum will be blended both face to face. We'll have two institutional days, two forum days. One of these is already earmarked for the 7th of, 2nd of November, keep seeing the 7th. The 2nd of November, that's the day that we know traditionally managers particularly in the IoT sector is a week that we would have normally had free and there's less teaching that time. So we discussed and we know that's the day that people are available. So in addition to the two forum days, there will also be this online forum looking towards establishing a community of practice. Maybe we'll talk about that in a bit more detail. The other main output would be a module on mentorship for teaching and learning leadership. As we're working through the project, we're aligning a number of digital badges that deal with elements of the work that we're doing. One is a parallel process that's working alongside this, so the first badge is almost complete and that's for mentoring, introduction to mentoring for teaching and learning. There'll be one on digital leadership for teaching and learning and then the final one would be more at a mastery level around teaching and learning and that's allied to the action learning approach that we'll have to the community of practice. And as many of the presenters have said today, we'll be drawing on existing resources to support some of the work in the online community of practice and looking at lessons from elsewhere. And I suppose at the heart of our project is our belief that teaching and learning is a business of all managers within our higher education institutions that human resources didn't start apart from the head of library, nor head of finance, nor estates and no more than in the last group's discussion so we've been having lots of very, very interesting discussions around that broader theme of teaching and learning being the business of every manager and Maria might talk about that in a little more detail in some of the interesting discussions we've been having certainly with our benchmarking survey going live and some manager saying, why does this apply to me? So that's a nice starting point to have the discussion. We're aligning the benchmarking survey and indeed the whole project with the professional development framework that's really our focus and the digital roadmap. The ability of these managers to lead on professional development personally in terms of teaching and learning and also leadership in terms of their own staff for the teaching and learning. So in terms of engaging with the target groups, our target at the outset was for five to eight senior to middle managers from each of the institutions and as I mentioned covering the academic area and the functional services area. Our steering group is comprised of the registrars of the four institutions. Two of the registrars have already identified themselves as participants, which is great. So not only are they championing and recruiting and promoting the survey, they themselves are committed to walk the walk in terms of engagement so we're delighted about that. And we're also getting good buy in with different functional services managers, particularly estate areas are very interested, library are very interested and to a lesser extent in some institutions and a great extent in others human resources, which is interesting. As I said, the registrars are on our steering group. We had a launch day there recently and there are recruiting champions. There are key influencers, there are ambassadors on the project. We also have a working group in each of the institutions. They each have different work packages, but they're also working as influencers and recruiting and sitting down having the cups of coffee with the managers and saying this is what this project will look like and this is crucially how it would benefit you in the short term and in the longer term. So our initial piece of work is the benchmarking survey. We've worked with the professional development framework and the digital roadmap to try and see where managers are at in terms of their own professional development and also how interested they are in developing their skills in that area. Those are the two levels of analysis. We're sharing that roadmap survey also with the D-Step project. I'm meeting with the head of fear, the deputy chair of the shortly now to look at using that across the sector and we are having discussions with the IUA. So it'll be an interesting initial benchmark and then longitudinally at the end of the project to see how our participants feeling having gone through the project. So there's around 100 managers that we've targeted with that and it's running from last week to the end of June, more or less, at the end of June. And part of what we're doing with that survey is it's a first step for some of the managers to engage at all with the professional development framework. So one of the questions we have asked early on is how familiar are you with the professional development framework which is going to be interesting. And I think it's a way into the types of areas that we're going to be looking at. Hopefully it's starting some of those conversations. And the big goal is looking at changing culture ultimately and what we all know in higher education at the moment is that landscape is changing very rapidly. So indeed one of the partner institutions is going through a process of marriage at the moment. So that impacts on the potential group of participants but we're working with the four original institutions at the moment but we're also open to extending it. And the other target group for us is student engagement. It's been part and parcel of the project really from the design stage and at all stages. So our students are key members of both the steering group and the working group and they've fed into the feedback and the design of the survey and the review of our logo there. Different stages, they'll be involved in the focus group analysis on the forum days. So they're part and parcel of every stage of the project. Our staff are students in this project which is interesting, a very vocal and involved group of students. So that's an interesting situation for them and for us I think. The students as I said will be involved in these teaching and learning champion days both as participants and as part of the focus groups. And then crucially the project has an action learning methodology so part of what we'll be asking the participants to do is initiate a change or develop some new way of looking at teaching and learning within their own professional practice and sharing it with their colleagues. And crucially then students will be part of the evaluation and the process of that. I might hand you over to Maria now. Thanks Lynn. I guess I just say on the outset too that I am one of these unique managers that maybe inhabits that third space where I would have a background coming from a leadership role that's in the non-academic side and I've kind of made the leaps a little bit on the academic but really just dipped my toe in the water and so I can see the benefit and that also brings a little bit of benefit to be able to have that and being involved in the project. So this is a slide that we would have presented at our original proposal in November and really it's just to show how we wanted to ensure that the project was going to look at all of the five domains of the professional development framework and in particular we want to be looking at it constantly through the lens of that manager and leadership and leader perspective and also looking at the digital roadmap so looking at those two documents and the importance of those and being able to have managers and leaders and also those that may have never been exposed to these types of documents and without this project we would never see these documents we wanted to ensure that we'd be able to have the opportunity for them to really have the exposure and to be able to look at it through their own lens whether they are an academic manager or those maybe that are from an HR perspective or from estates or the director of development or whatever the case may be. So we do have both our key participants in this program are both obviously your senior and middle managers and as Lynn was saying we are uniquely looking at all types of managers and in order to help in the recruitment as Lynn was pointing out is we have them engaged on the steering group and in order to ensure that that's going to happen we are building on the frameworks that exist within the regional cluster and we see them as the TLC key influencers and then they are also the people that helped us as this benchmarking survey has gone live so there are those that are sending it out and encouraging people to participate and we also want to encourage and this is allowing those senior and middle managers to kind of wet their appetite to have an idea of the kinds of areas that we'll be looking at so the survey is designed particularly along all of the domains and all the themes in the professional development framework and also looks at the digital roadmap and the key themes within the digital roadmap and it's allowing people to identify what might be interesting to them as Lynn was saying and also areas that would actually impact on their own personal professional development as managers and senior managers and for students we do have them actively involved in the process and I've had that experience of actually meeting students to talk to them about this and we want to be able to bring them on board so that it's not just a tokenistic process that we're actually involving them in the project and that they can see that there's a meaningful involvement and also just to be able to even raise their awareness on the fact that there is a whole domain and kind of checking their awareness or even raising their awareness on how that's actually there's a section of the professional development framework that talks about student engagement so it's just about raising their awareness and then they can hopefully diffuse that across. We also talk about our own project team engagement with the framework and I must confess that as somebody who would be working as a kind of a professional services type manager I wouldn't have been that familiar with the professional development framework until we started to think about this type of project so it was actually a really good opportunity for me to look at how the framework could actually impact me in my role and other people had that opportunity too so we are in situ the project managers are at time and our researcher time is committed through this project we have set up our governance structures and our administrative structures so we have a steering group, a working group and an operational group and they would have structures on how we would meet and we also have a work plan that's developed a quite detailed work plan and a chart that's developed on how we're going to progress with the project we've also achieved as part of the project we want to be able to have research that is an evidence base that we're learning from the project as an action learning lens throughout the project so we want to be able to have research that informs the project resources and project themes and days that we're going to be having we have already secured our ethical approval so we have single site access through letter Kenny that has given us approval and we have, like I said, the benchmarking survey that's been designed, it's been piloted and it's now gone live and we are delighted that other people see the value of using this benchmarking survey and we're hoping that this benchmarking survey will also be something that we can then take at the end of the project and go back to the same group of senior and middle managers and ask them how much do you now know about the framework how much has this project actually impacted your practice and also, as Lynn was pointing out we're going to be having a development of digital resources and this again goes across the domains of the framework so we for those that know me and my organizational style it would be someone who would be quite organized around having a work plan and so all of our first quarter targets have been met and we're in progress of meeting all of our second quarter targets and it's great that we have everything in place and the structures in place and we also have this logo in place the one that you see throughout our slides so we're delighted to be able to have that and be able to have that to give us an identified brand for the project and we are now at the stage where we have to look at things like recruitment and we figured that in order to start looking at things like freeing participant time we need to look at things like engaging the registrars getting them to become these influencers and that includes walking them through the process in order to get them to buy into becoming the people that are going to send out the survey in their institutions to send out those reminders and so we have those kind of prompts that we have built in so that we can ensure we can maximize the amount of participation so for a survey that's only gone live for only a few days we already have a fair number of participants who participated across all the institutions and we hope that a lot of these kind of cup of coffee discussion we are in a small regional area where we all know each other and we're in smaller institutions so we can actually meet people to tell them about the project and encourage their participation and I think the value of having both academics and those from a non-academic background I can actually then also speak from that non-academic background and say about how this could be valuable to to them to participate especially if they want to want to progress within a higher education environment and then we are looking at the benchmarking survey so just to kind of conclude this is from our launch so don't look happy and see how it is sunny in letter Kenny once in a while so that's our picture from our launch and so these are going to be our kind of impact and our sustainability and so we have we're hoping to have a whole bunch of champions across the whole region we want to have all these bespoke digital resources and we're going to have of course our level 9 CPD module and then we're hoping to get a broader engagement across the higher education sector so that's as Lynn was mentioning Thea and IUA conversations are in progress to actually look at extending some of these ideas across the sector and that's it so thanks for listening