 Hello everyone, it's nice to be here. We're presenting in our project Transforming Personal and Professional Digital Capacities in teaching a learning context, a collaboration between social policy educators and students of learning technologists. My first task was to absorb the name for teaching out of speeds which turn to the social policy education and have some different skills. I was just beginning to kind of launch our project identity to develop that and to develop our visual assets and your goals etc. But speeds from now on are great. So just very briefly to introduce, you can see that everyone's representing the second participating institution, so the UCC is the leading institution and we also have a social policy education and learning technologist representing IT Cardinal, CIT, IT Trevee, Waterloo IT, Trinity College of London and University College of London. And I'd like to add the very cool thing here who's represented CIT and treat me with a feeling that he's here from TCG Scotland and tell me more about the instructions as I learn using C. Other apartments could be important to be on the view of examples and trying to be like that but hello to them they are tuning into the live feed. So just very briefly to explain the genesis and the aim of the project so we're kind of starting here. This figure is representing the social policy education and he's kind of keen to develop digital learning but very unsure of what direction to go in. So the aim of the project then is to bring together social policy education and the structure and design of the learning technologist within each participating institution. With a view to developing the social policy education into the digital champions and tracing their journeys along those pathways so that others might learn from the process. We are developing that. One of the objectives initially is to engage in an assessment of social policy age's current digital skills and as part of that we're developing a new tool called the spiky profiling tool which Tom Omara is going to present about and Tom is going to give a little update on where we are at with that. Thank you Eileen. I suppose the working title of what we're doing is we're developing a spiky profile tool and that concept was explained in our application process stems from literacy. So my own background before I joined UCC was I ran the distance learning service for the national audit literacy agency in Ireland and the concept of a spiky profile was developed by the National Research Development Centre in the UK and the concept is that every single person has a different profile. Some people are very good at some things and very weak at other things. So we thought we'd apply that model to what we do in higher education as well. So I run the instruction and design team in UCC and part of what we do as we do two things really we support the development and the application technology to learning by developing content with academics but we also then do a lot of training with academics as well. So the picture up here in the top left this is taken from our presentation back in November I think. That's the write on to spiky profile tool if you go to write on that or if you want to see more of that you can see that. So this is what we said we would do. So the idea is that we would have every single individual that takes part in this project would have a personalised literacy profile digital literacy profile and a development plan. So if you see here for example the different bar charts or different bars explain where a person's skills might sit this is obviously literacy at level two and the national framework qualifications I imagine that will now be something different which I'll show you in a minute but as well as having identified people's gaps and strengths what we also do is we point people towards where they can actually get support around those things. We also have developed in the lifetime of the project information on what is an ideal literacy profile of someone working in the area of social policy. So how are we doing that? We're using I suppose four different I'm going to call them broadly frameworks right because they're all slightly different. We spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of months just looking at different contexts so what are we going to reference here? So we could come up with our own curriculum and we could develop our own series of learning outcomes and say these are the things we're going to reference but obviously we have due regard to these four things so the first one is the professional development framework by the National Forum for Enhancement Teaching and Learning particularly domain four. So these are the areas that we're looking at. We also have then of course the all aboard and I know that the guys from all aboard are here today as well. So looking at all of these things and we were very lucky we were involved in a U19 seminar with all aboard back in April so we actually got to talk to the guys a little bit more and find out what's actually behind this lovely tube map of literacy in higher education. We also then referenced the I suppose they've just developed a stations map as part of the all aboard framework as well so we're actually looking at the learning outcomes and the content that's up there. We also will be referencing the EU digital companies as framework 2.0 particularly I suppose items I think they're called Dimensions, Dimensions 1, 2 and 3 and we're also going to reference sorry it's not in there actually the ECDL framework so ECDL now have three different particular awards around information literacy struggling to remember the other ones at the moment but there's three of them. So essentially what we've done for the last couple of months is taking all of the content from here all of the learning outcomes and grouping them together and seeing how would we address each of these areas to see can we find some commonality and we've been quite successful in the sense we've begun grouping them into themes. We're now in the process of once we have all the learning outcomes together of probably the most difficult part of the project over the next two months is coming up with statements that people can answer yes or no to. So part of a spiky profile to it isn't we don't ask people a whole series of questions what we do is we make a series of statements and then they will agree or disagree with those statements and say yes, no. So it's quite a bit of work in terms of designing that and sharing that with our colleagues and coming to a common understanding. And the last part of that process then of course is figuring out well if someone does say that they have any for example around communication with students where would they then go to get support around that. So we're looking to leverage as much as possible what's already out there. So we have reference to the tellyou.me website which is developed by CIT last year as a national forum project. There's a huge amount of content up there. We have all the board content. We have a lot of content in UCC. All of our partners have a lot of content as well. So we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We're developing new content here so we'll be using existing content and sharing with our colleagues. The process and timeline is slightly revised on what was in the project plan. So we have already listed reference points. That's those four different frameworks. We're grouping the learning outcomes together. So that's more or less complete at the moment. We're now during July going to be writing the statements that come from those learning outcomes. And I was the one who wrote all the outcomes for right answer. I have some experience in doing this. We're going to build a prototype. We're going to build a prototype using something like Google Forms or even just using Excel. Just for people to use. There's a data protection issue here of course because we want everyone to take this content and actually own the data themselves in their own institution. So we want them to use that. Roll it out as a pilot from September onwards with their own colleagues and then give us feedback on the tool itself online. The tool is probably going to be something like a DHTML or a HTML5 form with a MySQL database underneath it and some sort of exclusive admin rights then for each of the institutions to be able to access their own profiles. So that's it in a nutshell. If that's okay. Thanks, Tom. So I suppose what we've really been focusing on or developing in the first phase of the project is just developing dialogue amongst the project partners were quite a large group so we have seven participating institutions which means we have 14 participating members representing social policy education and the learning technologist instructional design. And then those people themselves represent a huge staff cohort as well so within our school of applied social studies for example there are about 34 full time academics involved who will all be engaged in the project at varying levels and the same we're seeing that replicated. So we're looking at quite a significant number of participants who are social policy educated and learning designers or learning technologists. So part of that has been briefings we've been engaging briefings with our own academic colleagues within our individual institutions within applied social studies in university college cork because we're the lead institution, we've established an executive committee who are responsible for monitoring and overseeing the roll out and the implementation of the project and that's very important in terms of communicating I suppose the aims and the objectives of the project and encouraging buy in because I think that's going to be the significant thing is that we're trying to promote cultural change quite significantly and I suppose it's no problem engaging with the digital enthusiasts it's those who are a little bit more fearful and reluctant and resistant to involvement that are really going to be our target group. So the executive committee is important in terms of reaching out and the executive committee involves representation of social policy social work, youth and community work we have a postgraduate student representative who's also a tutor and from September where we're recruiting undergraduate students to sit on the executive committee as well and then we've seen your staff level as well so it's kind of to encourage I'm using this term of change agents that those involved in the executive committee will be representatives and ambassadors for other project within the school as well as adopting kind of monitoring role. As you may observe there's been a slight change in my life circumstances as well which wasn't quite anticipated in November but should have been known in November but I am recruiting a project coordinator which was written into the original budget and I hope that that will be achieved in the next couple of weeks so then I'll have like a two or three week handover to bring that person up to speed with not only the kind of the pedagogical aims I suppose of the project but also the administrative systems which is probably a lot more challenging in many respects. So that's at one level we have within academic unit dialogue. At another level then we have dialogue between the academic partners, the units and the the learning technologist or instructional design unit so what we've been doing, what I've been doing today is disseminating a monthly newsletter at the moment it's kind of been led more by me and there's kind of action points within that and that's been important just in developing as I suppose consolidating a new group because we are a very new group we have worked together in various combinations and permutations but we've never actually come together as a whole group before so that's been significant in trying to establish that kind of community of practice just within the project cohort and then expanding that community of practice ideally to the larger social policy education and learning technologist group and we also plan to use base camp to further interaction as well online and then we have interaction between academics and learning technologist and instructional designers within institutions so that's a further level of dialogue and I suppose we're trying to develop a common language to a degree as well I've rarely had the opportunity in the past to work with instructional designers so there's a bit of a getting to know you there as well we have had our first meeting, sorry first project meeting in May the first one was planned for February I think, March and unfortunately coincided with the first day of the transport strike so it had to be postponed very late but it was really good that we met in person in May and that was very productive in terms of establishing a sense of identity as a group as well this is research article or a model article, a scholarship of teaching and learning article that I came across that provides a really useful framework for thinking about how we are each positioned in the project in terms of the aims and the objectives of promoting institutional cultural change so again I'm going back to that idea of being change agents and here I suppose we're members of the project are engaged at this micro level at individual faculty level so we're the ones who are the kind of the initiators, the implementers the cultivators of change within the project and those concepts come from this article it's really interesting one for thinking about cultural change so I'd recommend reading it it's an open access resource as well which is always positive and then the idea is that at a micro level we begin to feed into meso level processes so it's important that we're beginning to interact with middle management within our own institutions but also with meso level organisations outside of the institution as well because the social policy is a very applied discipline so we're thinking not only about the academic context but also how that is linked to community engagement with various professional organisations so for example core who are the accreditation body for social work the same for social care within which social policy is a significant subject we have accreditation bodies relevant to youth and community work we have huge numbers of community based organisations with whom we engage so it's not only within the institution that this project will impact in terms of a cultural change but hopefully it will reach far out into the community also and then at the macro level we're looking at changing institutional policy or impacting or informing institutional policy again both within our own institutions but also within representative institutions of the social policy association for example and even feeding into institutional strategies through the national forum at a broader level so I really like this model and that's something that we'll be looking at in terms of research and dissemination then as I said we've been looking at the project identities and social media activity I have some prototypes of the logos but we're still working on those but they'll be out soon in terms of disciplinary identity that's something that came up as a key question that our partners meeting is interestingly social policy educators saying well what do you mean by social policy education so we've taken quite a holistic approach in that and we're looking at I suppose social policy is about well-being and people's welfare but social policy isn't really taught as an undergraduate degree as such it's more often taught as a subject within a social science degree a nursing degree, occupational therapy, public health promotion, government youth work, community development work so social policy education happens within a huge range of teaching and learning contexts and we're being quite holistic in terms of encouraging participation so hopefully the reach and the impact and the dissemination of our work will impact on huge numbers of students both undergraduate and postgraduate in terms of planning we've identified I've an eye on Terry there in my peripheral vision so we're planning the first digital day and really that's an opportunity for social policy educators to come together and to think about the possibilities of enhancing their digital skills and what's possible to engage in within their teaching within assessment practices so what we're doing is inviting digital champions from previous teaching and learning projects to showcase their work and to hopefully inspire participants to implement changes within their teaching practices over the following year which we will trace in the course of the project and we're going to put together a training calendar again from September 2017 and that's in parallel with the Spiky profiles assessment so we're linking digital skills needs with training resources and making that available as an open access calendar that people can link into just kind of expanding the impact and reach again and that's it thank you for the slightly borrowed time