 Good morning everyone. My name is Tom O'Mara, I am the online learning project manager for University College Cork. So for the next 15 minutes I'm going to talk you through our presentation, our proposal for the transformation of true collaboration of building digital literacy in HEIs. So this is a slightly older presentation, I updated it this morning and I didn't quite get a version of it to you. The partners on this project are University College Cork which is leading it, so that would be myself. And joining me on the left hand side here then we have from I.T. Tralee, we have Dr. Tom Farley, from Cork Institute of Technology we have Dara Coakley, from Institute of Technology in Kerala we have Damien Raftery and from Waterford Institute of Technology we have Laurel Widger. So because we're short in time for 15 minutes I'm just going to do the short straw and I'm up here going to speak through the presentation if that's okay. I may defer it to the guys if you've got particular questions as we've gone, is that okay? Okay, so the presentation that you sent just one slight change on it is Tony Murphy's name was in for I.T. Tralee and in fact it's actually Dr. Tom Farley that's here instead, okay? Okay, so what will the project achieve? So the project is about collaboration to achieve digital literacy, so what we hope to do is we want to continue to work done under phase one of the teaching and learning enhancement funds, so we've done some work on that already, I'll reference it in a few minutes. There's a bunch of us working on projects there, so we want to build on that. Take content and take ideas that have already been developed and then use those in what we're doing. We want to bring together the expertise attained in the Southern Cluster Higher Education Institute, so the institute represented here today at this presentation are a HEEA Southern Cluster around the area of building digital literacy among capacity among staff, but also looking at effective engagement with learners and students by using online tools, so how do we do that? We hope initially to begin increasing the digital literacy of participants and ultimately the project will hopefully provide a sustainable route for the ongoing development of digital literacy in higher education institutes in Ireland, so we don't see this as a one-off project, we see this as being a stepping stone, a launchpad if you like, for building capacity in the future. So I've used the headings that were provided on the guidelines, so how will we achieve it? Well, initially we will identify academic staff in each of the locations, each of the partner locations, and then we will facilitate learning needed to successfully integrate technology into their teaching. The staff that we've identified and supported will then become champions for the improvement of digital literacy skills, thanks Tom, within their academic discipline, but also within their department and ultimately across the Southern Cluster, so we see greater collaboration across the institutes. So as we develop expertise, for example, in IT Carlow, well then we might see those experts consulting and talking to, for example, people in Tralee or people in Waterford or people in UCC, so really it's about developing that community of practice around digital literacy among academic staff. The project, if we're successful, will document the journey that champions take and provide a map for others who wish to follow in their footsteps. The timeline we proposed, and I suppose we were struck a little bit when we looked at the guidelines for the proposal and we spent some time discussing it, it's quite short, and I know one of the feedback questions on the proposal was having the digital week in the middle of February or the end of February is very short and how will you teach people to a sufficient point by that time. We understood we had to have digital week by the end of February so we very much saw the digital week as being a launchpad rather than a culmination. So in November and December, depending on funding, we would look to assess the digital literacy skills of the academic staff that we want to recruit and we would set up a project website. Pretty basic project website we would say. During December, so after exams, when we look at exam boards and we get a little bit more time with the academics, we will identify the champions within each of the institutions and we will have some collaboration. We haven't clearly defined exactly how we're going to define the champions. In UCC for example, we have a waiting list of academics and schools and departments looking to get supported by the instructional design team which I lead in UCC. So if you ask me today I could list five or six academics across UCC that would very basic digital literacy skills who want to work on this project. In January, once we've identified the champions and we've assessed their skillsets, we would design individual learning plans. We were discussing this quite a bit so because we're five different institutes we all have different strategies, we all have IT strategies, we have different needs. So for example, we don't use Adobe Connect that much in UCC but I know it's used in other institutions and they have needs around training for that which we wouldn't need perhaps in UCC. We use Blackboard, other people use Mahara and use Moodle so there would be varying training needs required across the different institutions. So everyone would get a very individualized training plan. We also see for example if you've got, I know for example in UCC if we have academics who want to go on a particular training course, if we want to address particular learning outcomes, well then there's probably a bunch of other people who in that institute would also benefit from doing that as well. Between February, beginning of February and June we would provide training so you can see already we're getting close to digital week and we're only beginning to do the training in February. The training we're looking at doing is to run it across partners, so actually to share training so using tools like online collaboration tools to share so we might for example run a session in UCC and we would actually stream it and everyone else would participate in an online discussion afterwards any resources we would develop would go up on the project website so we're very much looking to efficiencies of scale between different institutes. From January to June sorry digital week, phase five is digital week which runs from February to 22nd to the 25th so what we have discussed on that is that every day we would, each institute would take a different day and would run a series of events in that institute which would be streamed for everyone else to participate in as well, culminating at the end of the week in some sort of round table collaboration between the institutions online. So for example in UCC we run a digital day every year where we bring together academics across the university to one location and we get them to showcase what they've done and we then begin discussing with people to attend at what they want to do in the next coming six months around their CPD needs. So very much we see the digital week as being a collaborative exercise that we would share expertise over the week. But from January right the way through to June because the project won't complete until June the chapters will be putting learning into practice so we don't see this as a finite training thing, we see this as something we don't, we gradually support people we give them the information they need to get them up and running and then we'll continue to support those people right the way through to June. We want to see them putting the learning into practice with a final summary day sometime towards the end of June that we can agree which will be recorded and documented as the final evaluation. So one of the questions again on the feedback was around how do you propose evaluating this and I'll come to that slide in a minute. Phase 7 then is from December for right the way through the project from beginning until June we would document the learning journey and disseminate through the project website. One of the questions was how do you promote how would you recruit champions so each of the if you look at our proposal you'll see each of the institutes has existing teaching and learning strategies and we have digital learning, digital literacy strategies as well in different places it's what we would do is it's part of our ongoing activities so all of us that are here today representing this proposal were part of ongoing training development within our institutes so we would see this very much as contributing into that. We would use existing structures so existing training structures within UCC for example we have a whole range of different training structures we have a learning technology unit that does some training we have a the Office of Vice President for Teaching and Learning where I work also do some training and we have various other different training functions within the university. We would integrate into training programs and CPD events that UCC are running and the other institutes are running as well. Use newsletters, emails and that type of thing. So evaluation so the question that was asked on the proposal was how would you evaluate this? Well we will have initial assessment results of the champions digital literacy skills and what for IT for example have already developed a tool that we're looking to I suppose adopt for our purposes so we have those baseline results and we'd see what the competencies of the staff are. We would do surveys right away through training we would do surveys across institutions as well to see if we could compare metrics across institutions. We're looking to document using video so in UCC for example we have an audio visual media services team and I'm just beginning to work on that my previous background was I was a TV producer and a new learning developer in commercial so I'm looking to use video a lot more in UCC and we've been discussing that across the institutions about video snippets and hops, recording journeys in that way. We would record all training and digital week events and we would stream them wherever possible and we would also reference various different partner studies and other research I know there's a ton of research being done within UCC for example and talking to the other institutes were also aware of other research that they have conducted. So the two comments that as I said that were mentioned on the proposal were how do we engage the champions and the questions I suppose was about yeah it's all very well dealing with people who already have made the decision and we made this point in our proposal actually it's very easy to deal with people when they've actually decided they want to engage with technology and work with you. Increasingly in UCC we're seeing a lot of pressures being put on from an income generation point of view from people wanting to do more with less within across the departments so there's pressure from the top down and people are being forced to come and talk to us more and more and literally that's growing so at the moment we changed the structure of online support in UCC back in June this year and we're already recruited two new instructional designers and we're under pressure to get more people in so there's a huge demand within UCC and certainly talking to Trillie, Wadaford, Cork, IT and Carlo we know as well that there's an increasing demand for training there. The digital week timing was questioned and again that's down to the proposal really and down to the guidelines we would quite happily be willing to consider moving the digital week back into June or into May if that made more sense but we very much see the digital week not as a culmination of training but really as a launchpad so we really want to put people up there and say well I'm Professor John Smith I'm lecturing in Epidemiology and I've never used technology before but I'm hoping to use Adobe Connect to stream and capture some of my lectures or Panopto or whatever or create a different website. So those were the salient points I'm just looking at the time and that really is Etna Natchel. Thank you very much.