 Hello everybody and welcome to today's launch of the Seven Seas for Abedding Student Success, a toolkit for higher education institutions. This resource has been developed in partnership with the HEA and in consultation with the sector. A little bit of housekeeping before we start. The launch will be recorded, you'll have seen the recording button and we'll make a recording available on the National Forum website later. Please use the chat, we'd encourage you to use the chat to share your comments or insights as we go along. You will have an opportunity to talk, to answer questions, to share your insights and your comments on the toolkit later on in the session. When that happens, you'll be able to turn on your mic. I would ask that you keep your mics on mute until you're actually speaking. We've closed captions available and this can be switched on for the menu at the bottom of your window, of the bottom of your window if anybody wants to switch that on. So I'm delighted that Minister Harris agreed to launch this toolkit for us. Unfortunately he wasn't able to be with us today but he pre-recorded this message for us. Hi there, it's a great pleasure for me to be with you here today for the launch of the Student Success Toolkit. Across our education system are teachers, lecturers, career guidance counselors and everyone in the education sector is doing their very best to ensure all our students succeed and grow each day on their educational journey. Success takes many forms and we all grow when we have that sense of belonging, where our individual goals and our aspirations are supported. As we support our students to reach their full potential day and their learning must be central to our consideration. This particular toolkit being launched today will guide everybody in our higher education institutions. In those key planning moments we must stop and ask ourselves are we doing the right thing for our students? Are we reaching all the diverse needs of our student body? Student success is everyone's business, including our students, with the help of the work being undertaken by the National Forum who through their great credit continue the national conversation with all key stakeholders. Our institutions are now much more focused on developing a more inclusive environment within our higher education setting. Student success is about giving students the opportunity to recognize and realize their potential. Partnership is the only universal aspect of student success. Our focus must be on working together to optimize the learning environment for all our students. This year it's more important than ever, especially to those who become first years and those who are second years but have not yet had the first year they expected. We must pay particular attention to ensure that sense of belonging as we continue to navigate the impact of COVID-19 on all of our lives. As we now move to finalize our new national access plan for 22 to 26 before the end of this year we hope to have a more student centered plan that drives our strategic goal of inclusion which is a cornerstone of my departments. I want to finish today by congratulating the National Forum for Teaching and Learning led by Dr Terry McGuire and the HEA on this work and with a final remember to all of us including myself that student success is everybody's business. I wish the sector every success as you continue to develop and implement these student success strategies. Most importantly my wish today is that our students and our future students reap the full range of rewards from the time they spend in higher education. Good morning. Thank you minister. You know it's been a long journey and you know as a sector we've worked together we've developed a national understanding of student success and if you think over the last number of years the changes that have happened we've we stopped talking about non-completion. We now talk about student success. We don't talk about retention. We focus on engagement. We've moved from entertainment to learning and we recognize the need to empower our students to achieve their own potential and we know that we can help them by identifying and removing obstacles that hinder them and hinder what what they want and their own view of student success. We know student success is in binary and we can't be encapsulated in metrics such as their retention or progression rates and we know that it requires whole of institution approaches. It's been a long journey and I certainly have been working on this for now nearly seven years but for those of you that aren't familiar with some of of those big milestones let's have a look at the short video to bring you up to speed on how we came to today. I think one of the it's it's amazing when you put it all together like that in the very short video and it's the all the work and the hard work that has gone in to getting to where you are. I'm not sure that captures it as much as you would like but it's it's definitely I think tells the journey and we've traveled with student success and one of the things that we learned fairly early on and listening to our students and working with our students is that student success is very individualized and one of the reasons we went with a national understanding and not a definition of student success was so that we enabled all of those understandings of student success to be considered and I think in preparation for today we spoke with some of the students and there's our student representatives and we asked them what student success means to them and I think you'll agree with me the different views of student success are trying through. Student success for me personally is the pathway to a better future for both myself and my son and the higher likelihood that my son will end up in a higher educational institute it's so important to embed student success into the institutions as it means that we are encouraging inclusivity and that nobody no matter what the skill background or demographic is left behind. For me student success is about finding yourself it's about being ambitious and taking the opportunities that are open for you it's also about finding the courage and the confidence and push yourself to do the things that you want to do I feel I can succeed as a student when I'm given access to a broad range of educational opportunities when I also have help available to remove any barriers that may prevent me from achieving my full potential in higher education and finally when I feel heard fulfilled and supported in my higher educational institution. I felt like having no degree is holding me back from getting a job in the top management so for me student success means doing well in the classroom leaving with a first-class degree and finding employment afterwards also because of the MBA I'm interacting with different students and lecturers from different backgrounds which is improving my communications and business skills. Student success for me is realising that I that I needed an extra year after I completed my leaving cert to do a PLC and realising that there is no shame in taking an extra year or two or however long you may need to make sure that this path is right for you. So I think it's a really difficult question because it really depends on the person it can depend on the time of year it can depend on the content they're even studying but I think it's really it's feeling comfortable and confident with the skills and knowledge from whatever you're studying whether that's a discipline whether that's something more practical. Student success means to me leading by example and being passionate about delivering upon your goals so in my case I did a PLC and then a three-year law degree and I'm now the Vice President for Education for the Student Union in I.T. Carlo. I plan after this going on to Black Hawk Place in Dublin to study for my FE1 exams to be a solicitor. Student success to me is having the opportunity the support and the information needed so that I can complete my degree to the best of my ability. To me student success is overcoming obstacles to find my passion in education. It is the immense personal growth from a distracted underachieving undergrad to a highly successful and empowered master student striving to make education a more accessible and inclusive place. I was extremely lucky to be enveloped by encouragement and backing from my university community in a time of need something I hope all students can experience within their institution. Student success to me is all about having those connections, clear communication portals and building those relationships with yourself in your lecture to build your portfolio and get the references so you can progress in your education and postgrad. When I think of student success I don't think of the grade that's on the paper or on your degree. I actually think about more your personal experiences and like how you look back and you think I've actually grown so much or I've learnt so much. For me student success is getting to learn something new every day and going to a college course that I really really enjoy. And I'd like to thank all of the students that made a contribution to the video. The resource that we're launching today has been developed in partnership with HGA and it now gives me great pleasure to invite Katrina Ryan, the Head of Access Policy in the HGA to say a few words. Katrina? Thank you Teri and good morning everyone. I'm absolutely delighted to be here. The HGA has been working on partnership with the National Forum for a very long time. As Teri you said it's been a long journey but I think I know it's been a really productive journey and it's great to be at this point and to reach this milestone where we're actually launching the 70s student toolkit, student success toolkit. This I suppose just to give a little bit of history though I think a lot of the videos did that for us. The current National Access Plan which commenced implementation in 2016 one of the things, the objectives it asked the sector to look at was the issue of non-completion and to look at retention levels particularly among the target groups for the National Access Plan. So I suppose we were thinking about how do we address this objective and we started the process of talking to the forum. They were the obvious stakeholder to speak to given their role in the teaching and learning space and it became really really clear from the start that this wasn't going to be a quick job, this wasn't something that we could rush and that we really started by looking at the language and saying the language was all wrong. Words like non-completion, retention, they create completely the wrong image and don't really shape what we want to do as a higher education system and that we needed to frame the conversation much much differently and from that the whole concept of student success and that terminology emerged and I think just listening to the students in the video prior to this just hearing the vast array of definitions and what success means to different people it just reinforces that it is the right way to speak about student success and that progression retention, their words but they don't really capture the essence of what is the system we're trying to achieve and I think this is very much picked up in the in the system performance framework because it embraced that principle of student success and the idea that every institution should have a student success strategy in place so going way back to back to 2016-17 when we started this journey we started off by talking to some students and learned just like we learned today that success can mean very different things to to different people and it very much depends the particular point you are at in your studies and your career in your life decisions and it's really important that we capture this in any approach to student success. I think what we really learned as well was that for every student regardless of background or or forever and back stories or whatever circumstances that they have in their lives that every student struggles at some point during the higher education journey it's not an easy journey and whether they be financial struggles or whatever they might be or other personal struggles everyone struggles at some point and that it's important that when we think about student success that we normalize these struggles and say yes it's it's fine it's okay to struggle but there are supports and these supports can be individual individually tailored and to help to help and support students and I suppose what we learned is there are certain tipping points or certain things can happen that might seem quite small can make a huge difference on the student success journey whether it be you know if the student who might not have logged into whatever teaching platforms just even getting an email saying we see you haven't logged in in a while are you okay can we talk to you you know was there anything you need that those kind of things can help and I suppose we'd interact very close with the access officers and we know from the those involved in managing say the student assistance fund that yes of course its financial support is important but also part of the process of getting student assistance fund is maybe a conversation with some of the access office and that that conversation can be really really important in that that interaction and that that that applies to other admin and other services every part of a higher education institution really any interaction that that the institution has with students can be important in in helping the student get over that that struggle that that we're now trying to normalize and understand that every student will struggle and that it's the supports that are in place that are that are so important so from that those early interactions with students we moved on to the extensive consultation process some of them were illustrated in the video there we had a three-day event involving all of the stakeholders we had a student consultation event and we I remember the last in-person event we had before the pandemic we really heard some really impactful student stories and I think they really have drove the process forward and our understanding of what it is to be a student what success means and how it can be supported in in all its in all in whatever success is it can be supported in in various different approaches and methodologies and I suppose what what also comes through is the individual nature of it and that while supports can be general and broad and are there to meet everyone's needs when when they're actually being interact when you're actually interacting with students they need things need to be tailored to an individual level and I suppose that's what that this toolkit is all about is it's supporting students at an individual level so that they can achieve their individual student success objective and so I suppose and I'd just like to say the forum has done amazing work in in in the consultation process and in bringing that the toolkit and the framework and to this what I think is it is will be a fantastic resource for institutions and policymakers in understanding student success and in developing student success strategies and what what to me I was I'm delighted to see the student success strategies in the system performance framework but I think we all know some strategies get published and but then sit in the shelf so I think what this toolkit allows a student success strategy to be is a real living working document that will be practical and and and used and and not just a strategy for the sake of the strategy and I think the process of consultation and the work that's gone into the framework enabled it to be this I think lots of us could have written strategies five years ago but it's meaningful strategies is what we want and strategies that will work and I think this toolkit is is is really important in helping to deliver that the timing of today I think is very is very appropriate as well because we're working with the Department of Further and Higher Education in developing the next access plan we're at a very advanced stage at this point and and earlier on this year we've engaged in a very extensive consultation process and I and having been someone who's involved in the previous plans consultation process I really saw a big shift in emphasis and in what's coming through the consultation and I think what everyone was saying to us stakeholders and students is that student success needs to be at the heart of the next plan and I think this captured on one of the slides there it things need to go beyond access it's access and and and student success and that that's really important and I suppose this this what we're hearing is that we need approaches in teaching learning and throughout institutions that recognize that there is diversity in the student population and if this diversity is what gives higher education a richness and and and is so positive for higher education but that this toolkit and what institutions need to do I suppose is look at the structures the supports the services the teaching learning everything that is delivered to ensure that it it drives student success and allows for that individual and and tailored approach to to enable each individual students to meet their own individual goals and I think that it will be really important and really valuable and I'm sure and as everything the form does it'll be a living and active document that as as it's used it'll be reviewed and evaluated and changed over time and I think that it's important that it is a living document and that that's that's essential so I suppose I'll conclude by just thanking everyone especially the forum for for all of their work but I think there's a huge amount of people and stakeholders a huge amount of students all the people who are consulted along the journey and gave their time and their contributions it's all been really important in getting in getting to today so again congratulations to the forum and I just like to wish everyone the very best in using the forum in using the toolkit and implementing it on an active daily basis so thanks thanks for your time thank you very much Katrina and now as you know the national forum and all its work works in partnership with students and in particular we really value our partnership with the U.S.I. and the other students union so I'm delighted now to welcome Megan O'Connor vice president for academic affairs for the U.S.I. to say a few words thank you so much Terry and it is a pleasure to be with you all today for for the launch of the 70s student success toolkit which as everyone has said now but I'll have to reiterate I think it's going to be an incredible resource for everyone across the sector staff and students alike in facilitating that sustainable enhancement as the living document as Katrina talked about in ensuring that students do reach their full potential. This project was spearheaded by the student representative many years ago and it was something that at the time might have been seen as a priority within the sector but they persisted and ensured that conversation continued and looking back on the story so far earlier was really incredible to be able to see that timeline so succinctly from that national scoping group back in 2017 that was four years ago if you look at how far we've come since the work that was done then everyone that was involved in every project report workshop all of have contributed to what we have today and I think certainly I feel very privileged to have somewhat inherited that incredible resource as something that we can we can use on the ground each day in practice and to see student success is one of the key strategic priorities of something like the national forum with the dedicated team that are doing incredible work day in day out. It was already touched on what we really are in changing the language that we use and that language is impacting our practice it's impacting how students perceive the sector that they that they enter and a huge amount of work was done as part of the national access fund and considering Arden's ever-growing diversity within HEIs and we must ensure their focus going forward isn't just on progression or access or take the box exercise in student engagement but that we continue these really meaningful conversations and facilitation of such projects to ensure the measurement of the student experience. As the minister touched on before student success really is everyone's business and I think we're coming to a place where we can say that that is what we're doing partnerships between students and student organizations such as the USI with the National Forum, the HEA, HEIs across the country is invaluable and it is something that has gone from strength to strength over the years and I think it's currently in a space where it can always be improved but I think it's something that we can be very proud of with resources such as the Seven Seasons Toolkit we can take further strides in ensuring that this partnership isn't just existing amongst us who are having this conversation here but are mirrored between institutions and their students at a local level. So as I'm sure you've heard every USI representative say through the years mean the answer for an HEA that there is no strength without unity. So I would like to extend my sincere thanks to those who have spent the last few months and years in preparation of today to commend the Toolkit as a resource and I have to say I'm really looking forward to continuing working alongside students across the country in promoting this resource, working alongside our partners in the National Forum and across the sector with the many months and years to come. Thank you very much Megan and now I think the time is right to to show you the Toolkit and to demonstrate our online interface and I have a version of it here but I will what I'll do is I'll just share my screen for a moment and I'll just take you through the different parts of the Toolkit in the first instance. So the Toolkit, so first of all the aim of this Toolkit is to support institutions to take a whole of institution approach to embedding a process for the continuing enhancement of student success. Right so it's not a tick box, it's nothing, this is about building that sustainable approach to embedding student success within institutions and the Toolkit as you can see it's available as a printed pack and we thought that people would like to have an actual pack to be able to use now that we were able to have more face-to-face events for workshops within institutions and it's also available on an online interface and I'll actually demonstrate that later on. So the Toolkit has a user guide and it has a number of associated components and the pack itself has got quite a lot of bits as you can see. So what the Toolkit does is it actually builds on the framework. We identify 12 enablers under three pillars in our guiding framework and what the Toolkit does is it actually extends and shows institutions and helps institutions to interpret what each one of those enablers means in practice. But underpinning the whole Toolkit is the seven Cs. Commit, get institutions to commit, collaborate, build a community, build consensus, communicate with each other, connect and continue the process as we go through it. So one of the things that we have outlined as part of the Toolkit is to say somebody in an institution needs to be identified to actually lead this process within the institution and that person has got to be supported by partners across the whole range of function, all the function areas within the institutions. What we talked about then is that we need these to collaborate, to build their own shared vision, to understand the national understanding, to understand the framework and the enablers and to build their own vision for what student success means in their local context. And then rather than make the decisions at that level we've provided tools that allow all stakeholders, students, staff across the whole institution to be able to contribute to the process and to ask them what's working well, what needs development and we have our interface allows all that to be collected and collated and looked at by institutions. And once they've got all this data back we ask institutions then to actually build a consensus. What are the key things we're going to work on in this next period? What are the key things we're going to work on together? And from that we're going to develop an implementation plan, an institutional implementation plan which is then connected back into the functional areas. So those high-level targets set in the institution are going to be interpreted within functional areas so that they can identify within the functional area what does that target mean for us? What do we need to do? And we're encouraging a process of continuous evaluation based on feedback continued conversation to ensure that the process keeps going and is repeated. To help institutions, for each enabler we've developed statements. So each enabler has a series of statements that actually if you were I describe it and my team are going to laugh now is the Valhalla. You've got to travel through the 70s to get the Valhalla. The statements is why institutions should be looking for a naming too. But the other thing about these statements is what we hope they do is we hope they're going to be used to initiate discussions and to disrupt and challenge context-based thinking and to promote positive enhancement. For each of the statements we've developed rubrics and the rubrics are helping the aim of the rubrics is to help to find a starting point to help you to take stock of where you're at. And we have developed the online tool which I'll demo in a moment and from that tool individuals will be able to input where they think students' success is at and those leaders and partners within the institutions will be able to collate information across cohorts so staff or students offer the institution and get a clear picture of what's working and what needs development. We know that our staff and students are not homogenous. So part of the toolkit is to prompt those while you're working within the institutions is to prompt you to think about the whole very variety of students and staff that you have. And we've come up with them I think quite an interesting way of doing this. We call it the flippy books. So within the flippy books we have a staff persona generator and a student persona generator and what you do is you can turn different pages and you get different profiles of students. So the idea is when you're thinking about policies thinking about practices thinking about any decision making you say well does it work with this kind of student? Does it work with that kind of student? Does it work with this kind of staff? Does it work with that kind of staff? And the main thing is is to recognize that staff and students are very diverse and this is to prompt the groups working in the institution to acknowledge that diversity and to plan for it. We've also included templates for a rubic scoring that could be used face-to-face and action-based templates for implementation that can be used. The PAC will be sent to all institutions hopefully in the next few well I promise by the end of the year and hopefully sooner if we can do that. We just have to get into the Royal Irish Academy to get all PACs back out again and things like that but certainly in the next few weeks we'll get the PACs out to everybody but in the interim we have developed a dedicated web space which I'm actually going to show you now. So I'm just going to stop sharing for a moment and I'm just to share my screen again to the web space. So this is our web space and you can see it's it's introducing the toolkit. We've got the video story so far that that we played earlier on and this this you'll be under the stories student success the story so far you can see and we've captured all the milestones as we've traveled this journey together. We've included our guiding framework because it's upon this framework that the the toolkit's actually built. We have the seven C's process itself that's our national understanding minding you where it came from and then the process itself and we're very clear about who should be involved. Institutions do need to identify leaders they need to identify partners and all stakeholders within the institution need to participate. We've given you guidance on how to use the resources. We have a digital we have the taking stock digital tool I'm going to come back to that one. We have an online persona generator it's interesting some of the persona that it it comes up with but you just generate a persona or you can develop student persona and these are used the main point of these is to actually get you to think about and the different types of staff and students that are available or sorry that are within your institution and then on our on our as in our downloadable resources you can download all of the resources you can download individual components or if you can download resources by each pillar so enabling institutional capabilities culture our practices. So I'm going to go back to the taking stock digital tool and I'm going to show you how this works now in the next few weeks we're going to write out to all of the registrars within the institutions and we're going to ask them to identify the student success lead person for their institution that person will be allocated a login to a unique account for their institution that will give them access to this taking stock digital tool. We have a demo version of it available on the on the website now once the student lead has access to it they're able to create accounts for the partners in the different functional areas across the institution and so I have an account set up here I'll just go in it just now so if I'm a partner within an institution I can actually set up accounts for I can set up links to the taking stock tool for staff or for technical staff or senior managers or all staff all students or different cohorts of students it's very simple to do just create a cohort link a cohort description you can make this as when you create your cohort so your cohort then comes up here now as a as a as a partner so within your functional area you can see all the entries from different cohorts these are the enablers and I'll explain what these mean in in a moment you can and you're able to download all of the data from all from individual or all your cohorts and you're able to download that data and into excel so you can play around with the different data so let's let's see what happens when I actually get a link to the taking stock digital tool so as a partner you set up the link I'll just take go to the tool now and I go in to demo the tool so what you're asked this is this is what the link that you've created we give people access here so I'm a staff member I go next this is the we asked people to read the rubric and based on that rubric to decide where they think they're where they think their functional area institution is positioned we also asked them to think about what they do well and to capture it here are any areas of development that they they might identify for each of the enablers for each of the enablers there's a rubric so the the respondent has got to fill in for the 12 rubrics and I'll just move my screen so at the end once you've filled in all the rubrics you can then generate your report and each participant gets a report that positions against each enabler the development stage they think student success is at you can see the different you can see here the different pillars capabilities culture and practices the report also captures everything that individuals have actually captured that they think is done well and the areas for development and we've also included what does the different stage actually mean so if I'm a student success partner I can actually collate all of this information and gather up everything in one report everything that everyone has said about what we do well and what needs to be developed and the different stages that we're actually at we're really hopeful that the tool will be will be used by institutions as part of that consultation process in terms of taking stock and where they are so I'm going to stop the share for a moment and I'm interested in that's that's what we've developed I'm interested in what you think about it and and how you think it will work is anybody going to comment please we can turn on your mic if you just put your reaction you put your hand up if you'd like to say anything and we'll we'll do it now it's not it's we're going to continue to work with this we put a comments box on the website so any ideas you have for improvement but the other thing just to let you know that one of the things we have it's mobile friendly but not as good as we would like so it'll be mobile friendly and over the next few weeks when we actually just get that and to get that done and Jill you'd like to come in sorry um great and I'm just absolutely amazing and resource I'm just wondering will there be support for people to implement its use um within the institution so I know you were saying there a moment to go and Terry about the you know registrar will be contacted and then they'll nominate a person in house so I work with T.U. Dublin and Heidi Kelly Hogan is is looks at student retention and success so she might be sort of an obvious person but there might be somebody else that that he has in mind and I'm just wondering it's a brilliant toolkit and there's lots of sort of nooks and crannies in it and will there be a little bit of a sort of hand holding in terms of of how it's it's rolled out so that it gets uh it's it's I suppose best use uh absolutely absolutely the student success team uh will support institutions in its implementation and uh when we go out to our registrar as we're asked in the registrar's to identify up to three leads up to three people that will have access to the interface and I know as required once the leads are identified the forum will run you know support webinars and that but you won't be left to your own don't worry and Marcus would you like to come in? Hi Dane I'm Margaret Finch just from MTU Kerry campus um I just want to say first of all I just it's fantastic it's amazing and it's the energy of everybody who spoke today um and I think that's you know you even looking in the chat the reaction to the toolkit is just how stimulating and innovative and creative it looks visually and how you describe it so it that will be the feel and I don't think we could have had better time post-covid in the return and the hybrid the whole sense of new and energy that isn't people um and again it just brings people the whole COVID experience for students a lot of the feedback I think it's just brought them into what do I really want you know and really what is success to them so it's an amazing time to be able to be part of changing on every level not just one micro piece of the whole experience you know student engagement, assessment, teaching, learning and it's it's just fantastic and it's a it's a really exciting thing to be present in the process of it happening so thanks to everybody really thank you very much for Margaret. Jennifer I'll just ask Jennifer and then we moved to our our speakers Jennifer. Thanks very much Anna again I just I came in a little bit late and I was coming from our accent and I cancelled it but I had to attend but I'm it's really impressive and the the whole student success concept I think is brilliant and I think having a tool like this to support and help us and I'd really commend it and I think in in relation to comments about you know going to the register I think it's great to get that senior management and from the top down support on this so that we can make sure everybody gets involved and I think that's something we'll certainly work hard with the registrar you know we may have one person managing the two but I would definitely think the intention is to have as many people as possible involved in this I think it's it's really important that that the whole university gets involved in staff academic and non-academic across the board so and I think the tool really helps that so I commend that and I and that's what the whole idea that the student lead has act it creates the accounts for everybody that they want to be involved in the institution and we're saying that should be representatives from across every functional area there's no limit to the number of partners you can develop within the institution because remember student success is everybody's business exactly okay so what I'm going to do is I would now like to just move on we have a couple of inputs so in 2020 the strategic alignment fund was focused on transforming teaching learning for student success and it was a five million euro fund it funded 74 initiatives across the sector and it involves over 300 staff and students and what we thought we'd do today is to actually showcase some of the initiatives that are happening within the institutions that are actually embedding student success and so I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Jim O'Mahony who also is one of our student success is on our student success advisory group from Monster Technological University and Jim will talk about the local enhancement project in MTU. I'm also delighted to welcome Dr. Agila Reske from UL who will share their STELLA initiative student evaluation and learning analytics and I'm particularly delighted to welcome Dr. Dylan Scanlon from DCU. Dylan was actually one of our student associate members of the National Forum so he's well acquainted with the National Forum last year the from UL and he's moved to DCU having got his PhD so well done Dylan and thank you for your support today so I'll hand over to Jim O'Mahony now Jim if you'd like to speak first. Sure thanks Teri. Is it okay to share my screen? I passed that slide yesterday but I can share it okay let's see if I can do it from here so might just let me know if you can if you can see that. That's perfect. Okay let's go to presentation mode so good afternoon everyone it's a great opportunity just to be able to present some of the outputs of the MTU local enhancement projects so I'm just going to present really quickly I was told this is a lightning talk so this shouldn't go more than more than three minutes if things go according to plan and anything that we do in MTU across teaching and learning is done as part of a team and one of the great things of working in a team is that different people step forward to take part in different initiatives and I think it's really important to list the whole team here but in particular it's really important to acknowledge the invaluable help and support that Will Carey has been in terms of working on the ground day-to-day with all those who are successfully awarded LEP projects in in MTU and also to Maurice Birmingham who is our head of TLU and student engagement and drives really everything very positively around teaching and learning and student engagement so when we came to this SATLE project we were already in a pretty strong position in that we had started to support teaching and learning projects right across the what was Cork Institute of Technology at the time and we had already supported over a hundred teaching and learning projects and in the last while we started to introduce a learning community culture in the last two or three years we now have 30 plus learning communities right across different disciplines and programs in in MTU so I just thought it might be helpful to give a very quick overview of how we managed the funding and support from the national forum I know different universities worked in different ways but we set up a collaborative team this is one of the first initiatives that we undertook as a university we were originally Cork Institute of Technology and Institute of Technology truly so collectively between the registrar's offices and the teaching and learning teams we we assembled a working group including a Bank of External Educational Reviewers and of the money that was given to us we ring fenced 190,000 to use for these LEP projects and we just solicited applications from right across every discipline students staff support staff across the university of which we received 44 applications and through that screening process we were then able to support 20 of them and the projects that we had were were wide ranging some of them were discipline specific some focused on programs and some focused on on institutional aspects of teaching and learning so I'm just going to very quickly run through four lightning examples of the type of work that we we supported and the national forum helped us to support so the first one here was led out by Jessica Carson from the Crawford College of Art and Design Jessica heads up a teaching program there on creativity and change and because of the pandemic it was difficult to undertake this this project under normal circumstances and they literally moved all the learning that they had subscribed to this program outdoors which was which was a really interesting and innovative way of showing that not even a pandemic can can limit good teaching and and good learning and this next one is one we're really proud of this was spearheaded by biology department Dr. Bridget Lucy and Dr. Leslie Cotter and what's unique about this is that it's it's an international undergraduate of of health sciences which could stand shoulder to shoulder with any peer reviewed publication in terms of its professionalism and how it's presented but what really makes it unique is that it's it's it's mainly run by students for students so the editor-in-chief is a student and those who review the the submissions are students those who write the articles are students and ably supported as I said by Bridget and and Leslie and also by members of our of our library team in in MTU so we're really proud of of that and as I said stands head and shoulders above many of the the peer reviewed journals that that are currently out there and another one just to very quickly talk about is as a project that was coordinated by Will Cary by Kleana Hattano and by Sinead Hoskinson and this was around building assessment literacy and it was committing to partnership between staff and students which which was really important and I know something very close to the National Forum's heart under a number of different themes including providing effective feedback and and feed forward with large groups and also looking at different ways in which we can provide effective feedback to to to students and this last one was spearheaded by Michael Costello of our library staff in MTU who created a wonderful bank of open educational resources and built them into the canvas learning management system that we have in MTU meaning that students can self enroll and that they can undertake a whole series of different modules including in this case understanding plagiarism looking at effective search strategies and and so on so that's kind of three to four minutes hopefully I didn't take too much time it just gives you a very quick overview of how we use that funding and it's it's great to have the opportunity to acknowledge the support of the National Forum and to thank them for for assisting us in making sure we keep teaching and learning center stage in MTU so I'll stop sharing and hand it back to you Teri. Thank you Melinda. Thank you I'll just hand over to Angelica now. Thank you Teri and thank you again for the invitation to the to provide a latin intolerance at all because well on our project is a privilege to be here today and seeing so many known people in the audience so the project that I will present on it's called Still Alive Implementing Learning Analytics for Student Success and I'm leading this project together with my colleague Sarah Gibbons who is currently being seconded out during her leave by our new colleague Claire Happen who I believe is also here today so it's important to mention that this project is a direct follow-up from the previous Sattel funders project which was led by the soon-to-be Dr. Sinead O'Sullivan in our who is the director of our quality office and one of the it was a very multifaceted project but one of its outcomes has been the formal day wide consultation process throughout campus in order to arrive to a new policy on the use of data to enhance teaching learning assessment or known as short as the new learning analytics policy so obviously this provides us with a framework and an umbrella under which to to be able to start making progress and we would like to walk and run but before that we have to really learn to crawl if you like and we have to start with Thrust Principles approach to how we're going to extract data and how we're going to transform that data into information that is going to be used on the way forward sorry Antela could you want to share your screen your screen isn't shared just now oh my apologies sorry for that well that would have been much better for everyone to be able to see what I was talking about the apologies for that so basically what I was saying just here is that we want to start with this approach to data and to information and in order to do that what we are aiming to achieve through STELA life as we came to call the follow-up from the previous STELA project was first to scope and resource with relevant to stakeholders namely academic registry or data protection officer business intelligence quality office registrar as well to explore the potential for access and extraction of the student success data the student data mainly as well held on the student information services but also data relating to VLE usage different learning platforms and so on and define a data management plan that we can use around this also the second objective has to do with the baseline analysis of the variables that best can predict a student success for specific selected cohorts and triangulate data to find those predictors and finally that will that will lead us to design in a protocol for intervention to improve academic student experience in particular cohorts that it's timely personalized and actionable and is most importantly informed from the perspective of teachers students and relevant support mechanisms as well so that's why we want to do when we start considering data obviously there is a wealth of data that can be considered and we found it very useful to refer back to the or like data conceptual model by the National Forum in order to provide guidance as to what data we kind of start looking at and say what that looks like in our particular context and in doing all this we really want to bring forward learnings of the wide consultation process that is taking place in UL for the last two years and what the students told us so we know that students want to know how and why their data is collected so keeping consent very much at the core and information at the core of what we're going to the next and students we know that students especially undergraduate students welcome intervention to avoid failure but to promote as a student success in positive and proactive ways as we've been discussing today and to make a difference to improve learning practices as a result we know that interventions should be positive and constructive and based on several points of data so we are being wary of not making mistakes in the direction of being led by by particular sources of data only and being careful as well on the tools and the mechanisms to provide a student feedback we know of the potential detrimental effect of the student dashboards when they are not used properly we know of the potential detrimental effect of invasive feedback provision mechanisms for example so we just want to inform the whole the whole project in this light and just to finish with in terms of the impact and sustainability of the project we hope that by the end of it we have a data management plan and approval for access data that we can escalate across different cohorts across the institution we can establish mechanisms for extraction of data in collaboration with business intelligence units and academic registry and other relevant stakeholders we can pilot protocol that protocol for intervention in the in several cohorts on the years to come and as we do so we create a community of practice we as people are involved in the project and and and we can therefore share both internally and externally the results of it so we have more information there in this website and so thanks so much for your attention Any thanks Angelica and I'll hand over to Dylan just now Perfect thanks Terri and as Terri said oh hi everyone as Terri said my name is Dylan Scanlon a postdoc researcher at the Teaching Enhancement Unit at Dublin City University so today I'm going to talk to you about briefly talk to you about a few projects that we are conducting at the TU which all have the similar overarching goal of enhancing the student experience through assessment the pivot to the remote and online learning assessment has shed light on our very much needed redesigning of assessment the changing modes of assessment across modules has brought a renewed need to review our assessment design and design process and supporting quality assurance policies the design of assessment must reflect the change patterns of engagement with learning by students and represent a development learning journey through the program this brings us on to the research project myself my colleagues Mark Lynn Fiona O'Reilly and Claire Gormie are leading the TESTA project transforming the experiences of students through assessment many of the assessment issues in higher education are underpinned by issues of design of assessment practices at a program level and as such O'Neill points out a lack of program oversight can lead to fragmented assessment and feedback approaches we believe a pro programmatic approach to assessment may assist in aligning assessment philosophies encourage a broader use of assessment allow students to apply knowledge across modules and provide a vision for assessment change as such this project is building on the established TESTA framework to achieve such transformation so where are we at we recognize that the design of assessment varies across disciplines so we're exploring assessment practices in each of the five faculties here at DCU we have secured nine programs across five faculties to be part of this research project while we wait for ethical approval we're in the process of conducting a program assessment audit across the programs we have extracted module information and aligned assessment components from the virtual learning environment to explore what is being done in the name of assessment across the respective programs once we obtain ethical approval we attend to meet with the program team to conduct focus groups on the program assessment audit to gain a deeper understanding of the assessment practices to explore best practices and to identify areas for professional development and learning we believe student voice be central to this research and as such we will administer assessment experience questionnaire to students to gain an understanding of their experience with assessment in individual modules to further explore their assessment experiences on probably a deeper level we will conduct focus group with the students to gain that valuable student voice on assessment practices true extensive data analysis across the tree data assesses and the different voices we intend to construct an assessment framework which is empirically and theoretically informed but accessible to higher education staff and adaptable to their respective contexts what is particularly important is the interconnectedness of the assessment projects occurring in the teaching enhancement unit which can inform and complement each other in enhancing the student experience through assessment so for example here's the test a project funded by satchel 2020 as we work with the program teams we will draw on the iua led edtl project in providing professional development and learning for staff similar when we talk with students their voice and what we collectively do with such voice will be informed by the students as partners in assessment project and when we're designing the assessment framework we will link with the udl project and the academic integrity project in that design process all in all these projects do not operate in isolation but all interconnect and form each other in moving our assessment research and practice forward thank you for listening to a quick stop tour of the assessment projects and happy to answer any questions through my email or twitter thank you and that was just a sample of the 74 initiatives that are actually funded through the the strategic alignment fund 2020 so next steps where we're nearly there next steps we're going to write out to the registrars and the institutions we're going to be asking them to identify the student success leads we're going to send out the packs to all of the institutions so that you can work on them face to face we send out the links and a copy of this recording to everybody that's been here today and the national forum will be delighted to support institutions as they use use the resource and I don't want to have to take a moment to say huge thanks to Brian Gormley Katrina McGrahan, Rhianon Kavana and of course our student intern last year Kohipara who started this work for all the work they're developing in the resource and the work they're now going to be doing in supporting the institutions in the coming months and I also see Leo Fowler there Lee thank you for all the work you've done helping us to get so far and we promise that we work with institutions to capture and share good practice and we will provide networking opportunities to help support collaboration so just to finish up I would like to thank the minister for his support I would like to thank the HTA and the USI I would like to thank our student assembly many of whom are here today and who made contributions to our videos we have I would like to thank our student success advisory group who have provided some of guidance and support with us over the last few months and you can we have some resources and some videos of our student success guidance group that we'll be putting on the website I would also like to thank all the experts the staff and the students who contributed to the consultation and you know some people rarely get get packed but I have to say a special tank to our digital process designer Colin Larry who has designed the interface for you to use who's actually and also designed the whole web space for the seven seas taking stock and I know he gave up his whole weekend to make sure that we could launch it today so a lot of work goes on behind the scenes I don't think that we acknowledge enough and finally I'd like to thank you for all your support the mind you that vital week is on from the 8th to the 12th of November we're expecting loads of submissions from everybody no we need lots more people to do lightning talks to share what they're doing so please contribute and but as we finish our launch we thought it was important just to remind you again to capture some of the aspects of student success from our students and our staff and colleagues so for our finishing piece we asked us our students and some of our colleagues and some staff to give us one word to capture what student success means to them thank you everybody I think the word is commitment it would have to be collaboration equity perseverance understanding for me the word collaboration opportunity achievement career employability developing skills learning about the world doing well learning understanding knowledge doing my best first in my family overcoming obstacles leading by example passing exams exceeding my expectations working hard getting into my post grad course progression resilient developing the word I would choose is universal so I'm going to use an Irish word for this I'm going to use the word sprag because depending on the context it can mean to inspire it can mean to encourage it can mean to motivate which I think good teaching and learning does all of the evolve