 Good morning and thank you on behalf of our project partners for having us here today. My name is Lisa Donaldson and I'm the project manager on the What Works and Why project. There are many national and international reports that look at the challenges facing us in higher education, but also the potential for technology enhanced learning. Staff development is seen as the key to this. We wanted to provide opportunities for continuing professional development so that our teachers can work together, they can work smarter, they can work more collaboratively and most importantly they can make better use of technology enhanced learning approaches. So our project team here of DCU, AIT, Dundalk and Minuth University. What we look to do is to build digital literacy and engagement for both students and teachers by looking at the question what works and why from a discipline specific context. So what we were really seeking to do was to change mindsets as well as to augment skill sets. So to give you a brief overview of the project there were really three main strands to what works and why. Firstly that was the development of continuing professional development through workshops, seminars and drop-in clinics and these started very early in January and in fact are still continuing. We have a reschedule one next week but also were focused on our TEL week which was, excuse me, March 7th to 11th. The second string to the what works and why project was the supporting of TEL innovation projects. So we funded a number of projects across the participating institutions. And the third element of the project was to support teaching groups which are essentially peer mentoring circles. We're very pleased with what we've managed to achieve within a relatively short space of time. We've in fact over delivered on what our original proposal was which was to have 20 development events and eight peer mentoring circles and 10 TEL innovation projects. So that's quite the significant achievement over the six month period. What I want to do is share with you briefly the student voice and we thought it was important to capture the student voice at the beginning of the project to help inform our thinking as regards development. I'm just going to play you a small part of this. The students were asked a question here as regards their use of technologies and what technologies they see being used in the classroom. PowerPoint. I'm French and business so we use a lot of like translating software and prezzies, presentations, PowerPoint and just kind of YouTube as well for videos. By lectures it's mainly PowerPoint slides that I've seen amusing and some of them use a John pad kind of things where John that's it. In the classrooms mainly PowerPoint to be honest that's not all I can remember and so basically we don't even have that. PowerPoints at the odd time is smart technology so smart boards for using in private schools so we get reaped on that quite a lot how to use the smart boards. Generally it's just PowerPoint presentations. I think I'll pause there. I think can you see a general team coming through? Right so obviously for us then it was important that we supported more innovative use of technology enhanced learning tools to better support our students who are using more than PowerPoint in their day-to-day lives. As a result of that we developed a number of workshops which are as I said still ongoing. We asked our lecturers to come to us to attend the workshops. We went to them with drop-in clinics. We developed tabletop cards which were placed in communal areas supporting some highlighting the features of some of the tools that we were highlighting in the workshops so we went to them and they came to us and that's an initiative that's ongoing but just speaking of students we also developed these tabletop cards for students as well highlighting some of the tools that were particularly relevant to them and some of those were coming out of the projects the tele-innovation projects that we were actually funding. So just briefly to speak about the projects we had a number of different projects some very exciting results coming out of them that unfortunately we don't have time to go through today but we had projects and you can see that they're very focused on discipline specific areas. We've had screencasts and quizzes being developed within computing use of different tools like web works and engineering upgrading of digital media skills in the library but as you can see there's a wealth of other projects that we have supported all of them very focused on discipline specific areas and looking at technology enhanced learning use within those disciplines. A full list of all of the projects and in fact all of the outputs from the What Works and Why project is available on whatworksandwhy.ie. The second strand I mentioned was teaching groups which are effectively peer mentoring circles so these were by the teachers and for the teachers and they were large scale as well as small scale events. So this is an example of a teaching group taking place within computing where they use some very exciting new tools for helping programming robotics to Lego mind storms. Very interesting materials coming out of there. We've looked at there's a number of teaching groups that we've supported within the education field looking at portfolios and MOOCs. We have looked at supporting the teaching group within the School of Business which are looking at live polling and other ways to interact with students besides PowerPoint within the classrooms. But as you can see again there's a wealth of other teaching groups that we have supported as well as inter institutional groups where a number of our institutions have come together to share expertise and that's the goal behind it is to share expertise. So the Heinrichs 2013 research on the role of peer mentoring groups on scaffolding pedagogical change was really behind this. So I mentioned the last strand the tell week workshops. Again this is just a small snapshot of some of the workshops and seminars that we put on across the participating institutions. So in looking at those workshops we've had over 160 to date and there's still some numbers to add to that attend those workshops and events and we've started the evaluation of those workshops based on the impact evaluation framework by Colbert and Hinton and that looks at reach impact and practice impact and learners and impact on the project teams themselves. So at the moment as I say we're at the early stages of collecting information it's very much qualitative data that we have at the moment but as you can see on screen it's coming back as really really positive that it's had a big impact on the practice of those that got involved with the events and this is particularly important to us when we're looking at the sustainability and going forward of what we have started here with the what works and why project do you intend to investigate further something that you've learned as part of the project and over 90% of those who responded to date have said yes. So I think that's key to what we're trying to do here. To look at the impact of the projects themselves we've produced a lot of the groups have produced a lot of shareable outputs and they're very shareable across our partner institutions as well as in the broader context. So they may be I'm just picking a couple of examples can be quizzes and screencasts. I know there's videos in teaching that's available in sorry videos of nursing teaching that's going to be available shortly but also what each project and teaching group have produced is a briefing guide and that they're available and more are going to be posted to the what works on my website and what they're simply doing is providing an overview of what they've done their approach and the recommendations should anybody else be looking to introduce something similar. So there's a great wealth of knowledge there to be shared and speaking to sustainability the teaching groups that are now embedded in the faculties and the technology evangelists that we're see coming out of there. We expect that to continue that the continue on going and enhance the sustainability of the project beyond the six months. Thanks Lisa. So just addressing some of the feedback that we got from the panel the first time around you asked us you we specifically chose a discipline based approach rather than a thematic approach to do this and you warned us of the pitfalls quite rightfully. So what we had done was we've made sure that we had specific discipline specific supports there. We had regular reporting going on regular conversations going on between the various teaching groups and we also made sure the teaching groups were talking to one another. The student voice was very very important to us Lisa alluded to a video earlier on but also what we were able to do was in a lot of the teaching innovation projects students directly participated and imported into them. So the local and national impact so we're dividing it into two particular two particular areas. The local impact. Let's just talk about within the institutions this money this project created a huge buzz within their institutions at a local level what we don't because we went with the discipline based approach. We got people thinking and talking about teaching. We got them thinking not as individuals and not talking as individuals but talking within groups within their own disciplines and that had a huge knock on effect. Now there's no doubt time was an issue absolutely the time restrictions and everybody's mentioned it but trying to twist that positive or that negative into a positive. The optimist for me says we've laid the foundations we've sown a seed for what works and why to that's simply the way we see it because rather than trying to see all the negatives that we could have done this we could run that as Lisa said we over delivered as a section as a project as a whole but we could have done so much more we want to do so much more as a national impact just looking at the social media side of things we set up a Twitter group of Twitter hashtag to follow with over 200 tweets and nearly 400 followers now at this stage we've got a significant following that will continue beyond the project. The website has had over 2000 views to it and this is the hope that shares all of these shareable outputs examples to which you have in front of you. From conference presentations Ed Tech was mentioned earlier on not only did we have several presentations from across to partners presenting at the conference we had loads of people involved in the projects that just came to attend that hadn't tended before and that to me was a key output of the project. We had specific discipline ones in that loan there's a science education one. We've been accepted to present at the alt conference which is a very highly respected one in the UK and again taking examples my policies I think it's alone again have put in a submission for a decedent conference so it's beyond the Irish community is where we're having impact and these are peer reviewed so it's not Mickey Mouse stuff that we're presenting by any stretch of the imagination. The key thing for us is that integration the literature tells us this integration of talent pedagogically sound ways and that's that's the key thing we're not leading with the technology we're leading with pedagogy has to be embedded in course design and a tight time frame of this project made that hard to measure the impact but again I go back to the saying they're on turning on on that side we've sown the seed we've sown the seed with these projects and we're going to see this integrated in with all the teaching and learning projects we're going to see this impact next semester and a semester afterwards because all the videos we created at the screencast for mentioned earlier on in other ones all quizzes all the interactive teaching techniques our teaching groups have learned will be implemented next semester we touch all the disciplines to four corners as I say we have examples from all of the partners touching science and business and computing and nursing but what happens now is the business guys can talk to the science guys and the computing guys and so on and so I'm very confident that we will with this seed that will grow into so much more what we found is that this project has given a lot of people to to have critical reflection and have that stimuli to do so much more and that if nothing else it's brilliant what we have done here we have came together as a consortium of institutions through the form with this common goal getting the timing here now so upon reflection I have three things really to put out what we said we deliver versus what we actually delivered Lisa touched on it earlier on we said we would have 20 events we had 34 we said we would have eight teaching groups we had 15 we said we would have 10 innovative projects we had 26 now I still believe we were ambitious in the targets we set considering all the factors against us but we over delivered because of the staff in each one of the institutions the evaluation data is very very positive coming back and and for me that's that says it all as Lisa said over 90% of the the respondents so far said yes we will do something else we use a framework we didn't just lash out the happy sheets we use the cool bear framework measuring the impact on the the teacher the impact on the student the impact on the team and and that's how we we structured our evaluations looking forward greater flexibility of time we've all said this right looking forward what I see coming out of this is now the projects that started in that lawn can be spread to Dundalk can be spread to DCU can be spread to Manus right already we have in the academic writing is is one that's already an institutional program that's are sorry an inter institutional collaboration that's doing very well but I see the individual projects the nursing skills that can easily go from Dundalk out to the three partners and three other partners the maths ones that can easily go and spread so so looking forward we've only seen the seed I genuinely believe that it will be a super project for us I I stood before you here's whatever seven months ago and I said we wanted to change a mindset not just a skill set and I firmly believed that we've started to do this with this project and it couldn't have happened without the partners we were for individual islands but brought together as a common goal I see the next stage to what works and why to is where more into to insert institutional collaboration happens but as I say the seed seed has been so thank you