 But thanks everyone for sticking around for this. My name's Owen. I'm a digital learning manager at Cardiff University. I'm joined by Laura and Matt, my colleagues. We're going to talk about... We've seen a lot of really big external initiatives that are fantastic today, just like the one we've heard about as well. They've got so much scope for really, really impressive change, but we're going to talk about some things a little bit more internal and a small but really important change that we made within our digital education team. I'm going to give a little bit of background about the team and about what this was. Laura's going to talk about what we did and some staff feedback, and then Matt is going to talk about the success factors and our next steps. A little bit of information about us. We're now a central team. Before the pandemic, we were distributed in different academic schools across the university, and there's around 35 of us ranging from learning technology support assistants, learning designers, digital learning managers, learning technology. Anything you can think of that has gone on job description that kind of fits within this sort of team, we've got one of them at least. Laura and Matt and I have previously worked in clinical schools. Before the pandemic, I was a liaison for our biomedical life sciences college, which covers all the clinical schools together. In these roles, we had been exposed to quite a lot of medical content that, to be honest, without any warning at all. My first job at the university was to go out and buy a nice video camera, so that's quite exciting because I turned up a few days later. I was really excited to get to use it. I got sent to the operating theatre with it to film people having surgery, which was somewhat unexpected and somewhat grim, and definitely not something that I had been told about when I was going through the application process for the job. That's fine. This happens when we get jobs. Not everything is in the job description, and that's fine. But in this case, we're not 100% on whether that's okay. Laura and Matt have worked in optometry, so you can imagine the sort of stuff that they've seen, and Laura's most recent role in biosciences includes work on modules about human anatomy and dissection, and again, not really in the job description. Our big central team is also in the process of replacing our VLE, and we have got loads of people to be delivering training sessions and workshops and things like that in disciplines that they're not familiar with. Someone from Music Social Science is now working in medicine or engineering rather than having every single person do one of every single workshop and things. Another big part of our role involves coordinating our support hub, which is an email-based help desk, really, made up of junior members of the team who don't have a lot of experience working in closely with learning content. That's not really part of their role. They're on the edge of the technical education tech side of things. We realised there's quite a good chance of someone who's quite happy working with content in their discipline or sort of generic content is going to end up actually working on something they've not experienced before, and it might be something that makes them quite uncomfortable and that they wouldn't be expecting to work on. Then we realised, actually, that's not just our support team. That's everyone in our 35-person team, and I'm convinced that it's more wide across the university as well. What I mean by content that makes people uncomfortable is it's really easy to imagine in medicine. But the more we reflect on our experience, we realise, actually, it's probably more of an individual thing than a kind of conceptual thing or a disciplined thing. I've given some examples here that are, because it's quite hard to explain them without saying about things that are quite distressing. I've given some examples that you might hear about in the news. You can just extrapolate those if you want to or not. Maybe you're asked to help edit a podcast on end-of-life care or palliative care. That's 99% of the time, that's probably okay. But what if that comes in the week of an anniversary of someone that you know that's passed away? Maybe that's not something you want to be working on then. If we go outside of medicine, what about engineering, working on content that explains what happens to a car when it's in the car crash? Same thing. Looking at journalism, discussing the ethics of printing photos of what happens when small boats capsise. Real example from a university. Law, creating e-learning content for criminal cases that discuss things that maybe you don't want to think about, maybe you don't want to read about. I think that gives examples enough to show that this is a bit more wider than maybe we think. It took us a long time to think of these examples only when some of them actually came up that we realised how widespread this might be. But actually, is this actually important? I think it is. We think it is. But when we asked our team about this to find out what they thought. So you can read the actual information specifically on the slides, but anything in red or pink is something that I consider is something we didn't want to happen. So most of our team, almost all of our responses, indicated they'd encountered content that made them uncomfortable at least once with most of them saying more than once in their careers as digital education professionals either at Cardiff or elsewhere. Almost everyone said they encountered it as part of their role rather than by accident because we didn't want to include things like if somebody walked into a lecture theatre and there's something going on, that's not the same thing. And again, most people said there was no expectation that they made clear to them before they took the role that they would encounter this sort of content and that it wasn't implied either. So when they did encounter it, we asked them if they were able to step away or if they were able to carry on. And most of them, unfortunately, said that they were expected to carry on. There's some quotes on here. Lots of people were saying, oh, we just had to grin and bear it and deal with it just like I had to. And finally, we asked if they'd seen content that they would make other people uncomfortable even if they were okay with it. And as you can see, the majority of people said, yes, at least occasionally, if not more than once. So I'm going to pass over to Laura now to talk about what we did and give you this control and try and clip this. Okay. So I'm going to talk about more about what we actually did to get this project started. So the initial focus for the project, it was around empowering individuals. We wanted people to come away from this feeling empowered and that they felt they could step away from something that they felt uncomfortable with even if it was an anticipatory situation. Now, this isn't a research project. This is about people, but we still had a measure of success and our measure of success was that if one person used this resource in a positive way and it meant that they could step away, then we considered that to be a success. So how do we actually provide this information? So we created a resource and we just wanted it to be direct, compact, simplistic, very practically focused. So we put in steps that people could take to avoid the content and then what to do if that situation arises. And we incorporated accessibility and inclusivity principles and our design as well. So in terms of dissemination, we made this in a Zootie, just an online package. People could access through a browser and bookmark, very quick access and we made it available on our SharePoint pages as well. So people knew where to find it if they needed it. So we've got one of the pages on here just as an example as you can see. It's just text-based, straightforward, bullet points, straight to the points that people could get for the information that they needed. So all staff had information around preventative measures, you know, prevention is better than cure. So what we wanted to do in the first instance is encourage people to say before they go into something, what might I see in this module that could potentially cause me distress, discomfort and make me feel uncomfortable? So that might be based on the name of the module and what school it's come from. It's not always obvious, but take that moment to reflect. But then most critically, it's you can step back from this. You can say, no, step away, tell somebody, tell somebody I do not want to work on this. You don't need to give a reason. There's no need for a disclosure in this. You want to disclose that's completely up to the individual, but they can step away and then if they get to the point where something's made them uncomfortable, this is where you get support for your wellbeing. We also included content on how to ask staff in schools when you're working on projects. If there's something in here that I might see that might cause distress or cause somebody else distress because the closer you are to something in terms of your subject matter, the less you see these things. So sometimes people say, oh, actually, I haven't thought of it like that before. And then they say, actually, yes, there might be something in here. This is what they might find. And then finally, there's guidance for people who've been disclosed to where somebody says, I've been upset and there's just our university resources where wellbeing, where to get help. So it was the actual feedback and the impact. So we focus very much around the usefulness of this and the majority of the team surveyed said that for them on a personal level that they found it useful. So there were a few people who said they didn't find it useful, but this is purely subjective. So there might be people who maybe can look at absolutely anything. There's never going to be an issue. And that's totally fine. That does happen. But what was really positive reassuring is that they all said they thought it was important that we needed to have this even if they felt that it might be important for somebody else. So that level of empathy that somebody else might find this useful. We've got a really nice quote here from one of the team that's saying that you don't always know there's an issue until this is too late. And this is one of the reasons why this is really important. And lastly, we asked if they've made use of the resource and actually six out of the 11 people responded to this question and said, yes. Now coming back to our measure of success, our measure of success was one person. So for us, this is a massively positive outcome that they've known it was there and they've come back and they've used it. So looking on then to more deep diving on impact and say coming back to this confidence and feeling empowered. This is moving towards more of a cultural shift and that's going to talk a bit more later about the team in itself in that respect. So we wanted staff to give us an indication of how confident does this resource make you feel in being able to deal with content and uncomfortable content in the future? And for the most part, most people said yes, it made them feel confident. But then does the existence of the resource make you feel more confident about asking to stop working on something? And the absolute majority again said yes, which is what we wanted to see. We wanted people to come away and say yes, I feel be able to say I do not want to work on this makes me feeling comfortable. And then just at the bottom here we've got another quote from a member of the team who said that this was a revelation because they didn't know that they could step away. They didn't know they could say no and that they would prioritise the work over their own well-being. So for them stepping away from this looking at this resource knowing that they could look after themselves and put themselves first was really crucial. And hand over to Matt. Thanks a lot. Cheers. So I'm going to talk to you a bit about let's move on actually about what we think made it possible for this change to be successful. So the success of this policy we think is built on the existing flexibility in workload management that has been practised since we were brought into a central team in 2020. So as Owen said we have around 35 different digital education professionals in various roles in the DJED team meaning there are enough people to step in to support colleagues when needed. And this established way of working has led to a great deal of trust between team members and we've proven over time that a self-directed support environment works for us. So the eight members in the support hub team so these are the people that pick up queries from across the university. They've shown for two years before we implemented this policy that they can be trusted to engage with queries based on their own availability interests and expertise. They deal with around 5000 queries every year and all are answered within 24 hours without the need for management to step in. So and since introducing this policy that's not changed at all. And then within the wider digital education team school partners can and have been relied upon. They rely on each other to support each other and cover each other in sickness and absence for years. So this isn't an issue. We all know each other really well. We've worked collaboratively on many, many projects together. So these exist in strong relationships. I've made it easier for team members to communicate their preferences and feel supported while making decisions. They're best for them whether that's talking with their line manager or anybody else. And team members who support schools they meet every single week online based on what college they're in. The support hub meets every single week online and everybody in the digital education team meets at least once a month in a whole team meeting where we discuss policies in the university and wherever we're working on. So, you know, we can communicate about these issues in those meetings. So everyone in the team, I think we all have the same values, you know, I think the success of this is rooted in those shared values of empathy, respect and collaboration. So it's not just a talk and wellbeing gesture. And I think Laura has demonstrated that they believe that themselves. So they're seniors team members that have worked in the university for 10, 15 years or more in a variety of different schools and different roles. So there's a broad range of experience when dealing with problematic content in a number of different contexts. And, you know, these senior team members see themselves as mentors, you know, they want to support junior team members and they want to share their expertise. So before the pandemic, there was a central team, but it was much, much smaller. So the majority of our learning technologists back then were based in schools and isolated. So they would often go months without talking to any other digital education professionals, potentially just in their own little silos. And this meant that they felt as though they had to deal with content that made them feel uncomfortable. They felt as though they didn't have a choice. As there was no one else to step in. So we think that being in this bigger central team with 35 members is, I think it's been the foundation that's allowed this policy to work. So yeah, what are our next steps? So we want, we want to raise awareness with academic and pro program admin teams by being an open and honest with colleagues when we come across potentially problematic content. Just so that they think twice about what they can do in their own practice to warn colleagues. And we'd like to go bigger and gather experiences from outside Cardiff and do some research with other digital education professionals and look at how we can make this something that is embedded as part of our roles potentially. Which is why we're speaking to you today at this conference. So we encourage anybody interested in working with us from other institutions to reach out to us see if we can do some work together. And finally, we want to look to see if this is something that affects professional service staff and other teams within the university, which means having conversations with people and in other roles and speaking at other events and conferences. So that's what we plan on doing. So are there any questions from anybody? Questions? Questions anyone? Thank you. It's really interesting initiative. Can I just ask about your senior leadership support for this? So if you took this to a really extreme scenario where you've got a module going live tomorrow with 100 people on it and you're having to work on material that you find distressing, would a senior leader back you and saying, OK, then that module can't be ready in time? I think so. Yeah. Well, I mean, as part of our senior management team and the digital team, I would back the team to do that. We shouldn't be at that point if we're at these points. So we did think about what are the extreme situations? What if somebody picks up on something because of a value that we don't share and they don't want to work on a piece of content for a value that I don't consider to be something that is appropriate for the university? What if everyone on the team decides there's something they don't want to work on? But actually, these these scenarios are so extreme, so rare that I'd much rather have implemented something that allows the people that have benefited from it to benefit from it now and when we encounter that situation, we'll deal with it then. I'm feeling fairly confident that we'd be OK in that situation to support that individual, though. Thank you. So how's about your students? So is it an initiative that you are planning to extend to your students? Is it something that you would like to address you're worried about? And do you know if your students perhaps have been in a situation where they have seen something like it? When we were looking into this, actually, there's a lot. There's a lot of support for staff and I work with a lot of staff in the NHS. There's a lot of support for NHS staff who are obviously seeing things on a database that is significantly worse than the sort of things we're talking about here in most cases. Students also have a lot of support networks within their discipline. So you wouldn't expect. I wouldn't expect a medical student. They might they might struggle with something they encounter, but there are support networks in place through the people they work with on their placements through their academic teams and this program support teams and the same in other disciplines. That support is there. Is that the reason that actually that we saw? We kind of saw this as a gap where students have got support. Staff have got support, but there's a whole graph of people in the middle who encounter it so rarely that nobody's ever really thought about their support in that area. Oh, it's great. I'd say do you online, right? OK, so and then do you your team with your piece of work and how you support staff? Do you communicate with the people who support students? So this is really early stages for us. That's one of our next steps is to look at where does this go beyond our team because I think that there's going to be professional services teams that are dealing with if I know there are and so by sciences optometry as well. We all know. So it's kind of how do we get that message across without it sounding like here's another thing for academic people to do when they've got a billion other things that are maybe more important in their minds. But actually when we've mentioned it to people they've got you know, I never even thought that I was sending you a link to this picture of this or sending you that it just it just doesn't hasn't quite been people's minds yet. So we're trying to sort of raise that awareness and then look into where we might be able to make some more interventions to kind of help. I was just going to ask so obviously this is going to work in a central team. I can understand that in a you know, a technical support team that is based in a clinical discipline for example. How might how might that work? Or do you think that there is an argument to put information and to trigger warnings into job descriptions? You know, because it's unavoidable. Yeah, and I think it's not when you say trigger one of these is like that. I know I know we all know what we mean. But if the more externally that's our university is talking about trigger one instead of that again. It's just about making it clear in the job description. Actually, this is a clinical school. This is a you are going to be ex you are potentially going to be seeing this and it's just about being open. We'd be open with our students. We'd be open with with staff in our team that we manage about other things. So why not why not be open about this recruitment is notoriously bad with job descriptions that are just kind of a bit random and person specs just to get people into professional services. And yeah, I think we haven't got any answers for spaces that exist at the moment. But going forward we think getting into the job description getting into the the recruitment process so people know what they're getting into is absolutely key. Because then you won't lose people either if they really if they're really upset by it they're going to go and work somewhere else and you've wasted all your recruitment time and all your money as well. So is that I know I've been asked from the questions but do you want to add anything? Yeah, just one for me for that was really interesting and a really good presentation. I just wanted to kind of understand you know when you say don't want to you're not able to deliver something. What do you look at all the alternatives and different ways of doing things? How do you get round? Yeah, so it's not so much and I think that we might not have been very clear about this in 15 minutes but it's not about not delivering something. It's about an individual. So the power of care thing the end of life care is something that's happened to me. I didn't want to work on this bit of work but we've got other people to come in. So I go to someone say look we've got this piece of work that's coming. It's about this. Is there anyone who is quite as happy to sort of go and work for the team and meet the team on that. So it's it's not so much about not delivering pieces of work. It's about swapping out the individual person that might be doing that piece of work with them or potentially taking them out of maybe the more intense sides of it. So standing behind a camera filming what's going on. You can't not look what you have to know what's going on editing that podcast or whatever. But that doesn't mean you can't build the module. It just it's just about taking the intensity away from the situation. Yeah, that was the last question. Great, great, great question. A big round of applause for Alex, as well as the team.