 So I'm delighted to be here today. My name is Dr Gwen Moore and I'm Director of Teaching and Learning at Merriamaculate College. I'm delighted to be welcomed by my army of colleagues here who joined me traveling all the way from Limerick which is fantastic. From Merriamaculate College we've Dr. Emma O'Brien and Ann Ryan who are academic developers. Also Jean Reel who's educational technologist and is also a PhD student I'm in the field of academic practice. Dr. Michael Ryan from LIT and Dr. Brendan Murphy who is head of quality teaching and learning at LIT and Dr. Ido Hosellivan who's senior educational developer and program coordinator of the Graduate Diploma in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship. So today we wish to share with you our vision for a flexible pathways approach to practice-based professional development for all staff who teach in higher education. We are responding to the National Forum's strategic planning goals under one professional development, three digital capacity enhancement and four enhancing student success. So a word first about our partners and I understand yesterday we also had a presentation from the Shining Consortium. So we have three partner institutions from very different areas of the sector. University, an Institute of Technology and a college which focuses primarily on teacher education but also on the liberal arts and early childhood. We have 20,000 students across all three institutions and we have over two and a half thousand staff. So we are well placed in the Midwest region and quite strong. As mentioned yesterday the Shining Consortium has been singled out as a key exemplar of collaboration by the Higher Education Authority. We've been together for over 10 years and we've enjoyed much success in terms of shared policies, memorandums of understanding, procurement, shared services and of course all of the shared teaching and learning initiatives that you see here today and the National Forum funded projects that we've been involved in. Last year we celebrated with a 10 year symposium which saw 41 papers delivered in the scholarship of teaching and learning across the Shannen region. So you're punching way above our weight. So when we saw the call from the National Forum for extensions to a previously funding project it was music to our ears. During the course of the previous project which I'll allude to shortly a number of HE key drivers came to our attention. At European level we know from the 2018 trends report that there is a 79% increased demand for flexible degree programs and enhancement in teaching and learning is often more voluntary than compulsory. The report found also that in general there's a lack of recognition of teaching and professional development in terms of career progression. If we come back out of Europe and into Ireland at national level we've witnessed new policy developments in terms of teaching and learning. For example the new HEA system performance framework has mandated that all HEIs must implement the PD framework by 2019. Under the Technological Universities Act which we've heard about earlier on, institutes of technology must bring their number of staff who as we know and we've heard our predominantly teaching staff to PhD level from a baseline of 15% to 40%. And as we build on our previous project and bring it to a national level we see the need for recognition of prior learning and also prior experiential learning for staff and for students who teach and wish to attain teaching qualifications. So we have a blue sky's vision and we have a window of opportunity here today. And we have two overarching goals as part of this project. The first to extend professional development and the recognition of prior experiential learning through the design of a unique flexible pathways approach to embed the PD framework in Irish university, institutes of technology and college contexts. And to situate in practice flexible learning pathways for all teaching staff that will have applicability, portability and transferability at national level. So who are we talking about? Who is it for? And this is extremely important in terms of those we're meeting the needs for. So in the first instance it's for all staff who teach and I'll allude to that shortly, who are situated learners and teachers but also very importantly they are students and they are meeting students on a daily basis. So in a sense this Venn diagram indicates the overlap and I guess the meaningful situatedness of that. We've learning technologists, librarians, graduate assistants, full time faculty, HODs, heads of department obviously and the elephant in the room I feel is the army as some researchers have spoken about this that universities and colleges could not operate without their army of casual staff members. So how do we meet the needs of those who are seasonal? More critically studies have found that a lack of development for part time staff can also have a negative impact on the quality of teaching and learning. So let's look briefly at what our previous project achieved and bearing in mind that some of you are familiar with it and some are not. So in a nutshell, we collaborated on the design, delivery and assessment within a University of Limerick face to face graduate diploma in teaching learning and scholarship. We developed or PL guidelines for the program based on extensive examination of other exemplars and we aligned the program to the PD framework bearing in mind the domains and the values. We collectively designed and delivered a summer school twice over the course of the project with students as partners in the design whereby and I'll explain this shortly they selected the topics for the module and worked in groups to present key issues that for their moment in time were really critical. So you can see here the students selected themes that were really interesting, engaging with student expectations and managing issues around retention, teaching for inclusion, accessibility and diversity in higher education and academic identity. So this idea of balancing the roles between their identities as researcher, as teacher and also as student. So students were very positive about this approach. They welcomed the partnership approach and the co-construction of knowledge around the topics, which my dad were reflective of the students roles and responsibilities in that cohort and thus it's situated within their practice. However, they mentioned the time involved in the overall program and the challenges of this. So we conducted six focus groups across the course of the project with various different stakeholders, including current and prospective students, heads of department, PhD students and graduate assistants and those who had primary or secondary teaching qualifications and three main themes arose. The first was flexibility. They wanted the program to be flexible to their needs and also their current position rather than a fixed, if you like, predefined program. They wanted more than one pathway, such as achieving a teaching or scholarship accreditation process. And they wanted that the previous experience and qualifications that they had, be they informal or formal teaching learning experience would provide exemptions as appropriate. Of course, so I could just go back to that. That's not surprising, really, if we think about it, because it really reflects the needs of the wider student cohort. If we think of our undergraduate and postgraduate students who come from a variety of contexts now, be they mature learners, part-time, work-based and so on. So it brings into sharp focus the need for us as a sector to be more cognizant and empathetic to the many demands made on the wider student body. And it's also echoed in this initial implementation of the PD framework, which was conducted with academic staff across the sector and recommended that PD activities should count towards accredited programs that peer support learning communities need to be established and a mentoring system, that it needs to be flexible and include all stakeholders. So what are we proposing today? So we are proposing a flexible pathways for professional development, whereby staff will be enabled to accrue credits for both formal and informal learning and RPL, towards a blended graduate certificate in higher education academic practice, but with scalability to level 10 doctoral qualification by publication. So in this way, we are meeting the needs of the IoT sector having to increase their percentage from 15 to 40%, while at the same time understanding that perhaps their desire might be to publish papers and have recognition for that, while at the same time being reflective in their practice. Across, as partners will entail, shared provision, resources, across systems, virtual learning environments and practices. And it moreover will provide a key opportunity to build a larger network of students, or as we would prefer to call them a community of learners, with diverse learning and teaching experiences. They will self assess their needs with a peer mentor and identify their goals, the plan learning and implemented in practice with the students they are teaching at that moment in time and evidence the outcome. How will we go about doing it? Well, as you can see from the work packages we've outlined in the application proposal, all project partners have a dedicated centre for blended and flexible learning across the partners. As project leads the CTL at MIC and its award-winning blended learning unit is ideally equipped to lead this type of project. We have won an award the Jennifer Burke award for innovation and teaching and learning, and we have one flagship programme in particular that received multiple awards with 900 students. So we feel there's a strong foundation. Embracing the success of our prior collaborations, and you notice here that I've the chrono project all aboard HE, we have multiple resources that we can curate and we can repurpose and use. We need to review international models of flexible learning and conduct a needs analysis. We need to consider cross-sectoral governance. How will this work across the sector, the miniature sector, if you like, at the Shannon consortium level, at our course board having student representation and so on. We then incorporate informal and non-formal learning into either an accredited TNL programme through online blended provision or indeed considering a professional recognition framework. We will have to unbundle the current graduate diploma, which we have worked on, and scale up to level 10, thereby creating flexible pathways. So how will it be sustainable and how will it be mainstreamed? The first thing I would add here is that we'd be meeting the needs of all staff across the sector, be they full-time, part-time, learning technologists, library staff, graduate assistants, through transferability of the flexible pathways to the sector and portability to other contexts. Again, remember, many staff of six-month contracts participate in professional development, but move on, and they need to be acknowledged and catered for. We will align the flexible PD pathways programme to the accredited programme, but also consider fellowships. Some heads of department may not wish to achieve a master's or a PhD perhaps, but they may need and may wish to have some sort of fellowship recognition. Programmatic reviews will ensure that the programme is fit for purpose every two years, and so on. We very much welcome the panel feedback. Thank you for our feedback. We agree that it's a unique response to a strong call for flexibility. Thank you for the suggestion of case study design. We are bearing that in mind, and certainly we'll build a case study library of general and discipline-specific problems for the students that we work with, and also for the sector as a whole. In terms of the suggestion that it was complementary, and yes, we've agreed that it's complementary with the project that you heard about yesterday, so how we differentiate the two is very different. Yesterday's one, and the other project we're involved in, is about a strategy. So it's the what needs to be done. Ours is about the how. So bearing in mind the various demands made on staff, it's about how to make it work in practice. In terms of national impact, as we know from the trends report, it emphasises the importance and value of partnership and collaboration at all levels. So within institutions, between them, across the systems, and beyond. And in this regard, the project can illustrate how the Shannon Consortium can play a role in enabling cooperation and collaboration between the three very different types of institutions, and ultimately transforming them into learning communities at local, regional, national, and we never know, maybe European levels. So the project will be unique in recognising and rewarding the application of learning and addressing the barriers associated with PD. It will create flexible professional development pathways for the professionalisation of those who teach or support teaching in diverse contexts. It will diversify the current module portfolio to include blended online modules at Graduate Certificate Level 9 and create new awards from the module portfolio up to Level 10. For the first time in Ireland, there is no Level 10 in academic practice, so that'll be a first. And it will validate, more importantly, recognise and reward informal learning through the evidencing of non-accredited CPD and conversion to formal credits. We will extend RPL to bear in mind experiential learning and develop a model that can be adapted at national level. In some, the project will illustrate how work-based formal, informal learning can be combined to provide accredited flexible pathways of PD for all staff who teach. And by modelling these programmes, we can demonstrate innovative pedagogical models. I'd like to finish with an image of our colleague Dr. Finula Tainan. So you're all very familiar with the image, the PD framework of the guy in the balloon with his telescope who's looking out over the sector. And in this illustration, Finula is demonstrating for her colleagues, she's actually performing, I should say, the domains of the framework and the ultimate goals and purpose, which, as we can see, is to enable us all to sort in new heights through supportive professional development so that learning can be truly transformative both for staff and for students. So we believe with blue skies thinking and this window of opportunity we see today, we can achieve this not just locally or regionally, but on more importantly on a national level. Thank you.