 Efallai i wneud o'r 130 oes hynny. Mae'n gwybod i'n gwybod i'r ystod. Mae'n Susanne Hardy ac mae'n gweithio gyda Gysgr, ac mae hynny'n gwneud i gael gyda'r sesiwn i'r ysgol. Mae'n yr hynny'n ddod o'r prydau oedd yn cyflawnio i'r grannu ar gyfer y Llyfrgell ac oedd yn cyflawnio i'r swydd digidol o'r ffansio cyflawnio mewn cyflawnio. Mae'r 1st oed yn ysgrifennu ac yna'r ffrind oed. We just welcome Tim Neumann, Rich Osborne and Abby Shaw and Tim's going to start over here and then move over there. Just a couple of things to say first, if anybody's taken photographs, please can you make sure that you turn the flash off. And if you've got any questions for either of the sets of presenters, if you can send them via Vvox and join in instructions at either side of the stage there. We've got screens at the front so we can see the questions as they come in and we'll do Q&A that way. So enjoy the talks and I'll hand over to Tim. Thanks very much and hello everybody. I am Tim and over there are Abby and Rich. We do proper introductions later in the show that is part of the dramatic curve of this presentation. So we're talking about this distributed leadership and digital learning and there are a few alliterations on that screen because I like them. And I used to be registered as a professional slogan writer 20 years ago anyway. The link to the presentation is up there but it comes up on the last slide as well so no need to panic. We don't have a lot of time because all of us three like to talk a lot and it's really difficult to stop us so we'll crack on. The main part of the presentation is actually organised as a panel discussion. That's why they are sitting over there and I'll join them in a while but I'll first start by setting the scene. So that's a prequel so to speak before we get into the subjects that were in the title. So we are all at University College London and we all occupy the same role to which we come later. Just to give you a bit of context we are looking at what happened over the past 15 years at University College London. And over the past 50 years short timeline just to give you a bit of context UCL effectively doubled in size in terms of student numbers and there were a few internal and external events that affected the development where we had to change, we had to lead on the digital front and change things around. And in order to help us with our reflection we are using a paper, we are basing our reflections on a paper by Garrison and Kanoka from 2004 and the slide says it's a reflective framework. No it isn't. I don't want to use the term framework because we will hear about the proper framework in about 27 minutes. So there's another slide that says it's a framework but honestly it's more of a screening tool. So this paper by Garrison and Kanoka introduced success factors for blended learning. Blended learning, okay we can call it digital learning now nobody knows what it is anyway. And the purpose is to keep track of digital learning initiatives. So the question is what actually have we done to make digital learning stick over all these years? And to help us reflect on that there's this screening tool, well it's not really a tool, it's 10 ideas. Originally it was only 9, we added a 10th one, the community thing. But these 10 areas are effectively what every institution should do in order to make digital learning stick. And as a screening tool it works very well because you can just read through it and then reflect. And within 30 minutes you have a rough overview of what you're doing in each area. If you compare this to the digital transformation framework that you'll hear in 25 minutes it's 80 pages long. So by the time you have finished reading that framework in detail you have listed all of the initiatives that you are doing. So I'm not suggesting that these 10 areas are replacing this digital transformation framework. No, if you hear about the framework you'll be amazed if this is the first time you hear about it. No, these 10 areas are a tool that helps you reflect on what you're doing to identify gaps to see what needs filling and to improve your offering. So details are in the links on the slides. So at the end you'll get a link to the presentation and then you can click through to learn more. So in 2018 I've been in an old sea conference with Jess Gramp who's now leading the Moodle Academy. And we reflected on 10 years of initiatives at UCL and you see them listed here. Then in 2021 at a virtual presentation at old sea Clive Young, Leo Hefman who's currently presenting in another room and myself we updated these initiatives and they look completely different. And now we are in 2023 we are reflecting again using the same 10 areas and again they look very different. So just without reading the detail but if you look at what is listed under current activities in these three snapshots from three different years it's completely different. That is an indicator that UCL has changed and this is actually a value of these 10 areas because you can just quickly reflect and then if you do it multiple times over time you actually see what you have lost over time. And maybe at some point in the future you recognize oh five years ago we did this thing that was really good. Let's do it again and let's bring it back and so on. The longitudinal view or having a longitudinal view of how your institution has changed can be really helpful in optimizing your initiatives to help make digital learning stick. So back in 2021 we ended the presentation which was about this tribute leadership with some conclusions and here are two of them. The 10-area screening tool more framework helps identify gaps and the gap analysis helps identify areas for distributed leaderships where people like us can intervene. And how they intervene well to find out that let's interview our distributed leaders and we actually had done this in 2021 but we are now giving you insights into the views from this particular group. From this particular role we are all faculty learning technology leads so each of us looks after a different faculty in UCL and we steer the adoption of digital learning within a faculty. We all do our jobs differently and the only thing that we share is that we have high levels of autonomy and flexibility so more or less we can do not quite but almost what we want. The rest of the presentation is a panel discussion to give you some insights of how differently we think about things or what things we are picking out are necessary in order to make digital learning stick. So introductions. I am at the faculty which used to be called UCL Institute of Education now we are IE, UCL's Faculty of Education Society. Not a big branding move but well. I am the only academic who works as a faculty learning technology lead and I'm in the faculty education leadership team and my team consists of myself and half a learning technologist. And we wanted to start the statement with a question how do what does autonomy mean to us. In my case at the current time autonomy is great because you can define your own approaches. But the problem with that is I am currently running at the risk of making myself obsolete so in the past I trained our staff to help themselves and I was probably a bit too successful because now they are helping themselves. So I need to reassert my presence there in order to not make myself obsolete. That's the drawback of autonomy and we'll move along the other two now so Abby. Am I? I am the faculty learning technology lead for the faculty of arts and humanities and I would say we have a substantially lower rate of adoption of digital technologies in the majority of our courses compared with for example the IOE. I've had total autonomy which for me largely means that nobody really knows what I'm here for and what I might be able to do. This is a marvellous luxury which means I can do what I like. It's dangerous and it's tempting to run away with the things in which I'm most interested. But largely for me it means researching, identifying, understanding my faculty and gaining their trust as a local point of contact for all matters digital education of any shape, size or issue. So I'm a mathematical and physical scientist but we both joined AB9 in 2020 so we relatively knew I was at UCX for many years. But I'm also a physics teacher so I have a background which suits my faculty and my faculty had no learning technology for it. I know official learning technology is a tool so when it's a big faculty we've got 5,000 plus students, 1,000 plus staff and I'm the only one. Autonomy is pretty much you are in charge of all that lot to deal with it. Thanks. So we are now going to offer our reflections as a case study effectively on these three themes of the presentation and we'll start with agile adjustments. Agile in our context is pretty meaningful because our information services division recently moved completely to the agile project management format. And if you are aware of what that means, they talk like they want to go for the Heineken Cup final, they talk in rugby terms throughout. So their department is now suddenly, it has a culture which is completely different to the rest of the institution. They are doing great work because they are delivering very, very rapidly. But there's a different culture in that department that needs to be managed, the interfacing needs to be managed. So who manages the interface between agile parts of the organization? The faculty learning technology leads obviously. So here on this slide are some suggestions of what needs to be managed, how it can be managed. And I'll give Abby first tips in terms of providing an answer. My faculty is largely unaware that our central operations might work in any particular framework of any kind. And if I said it was an agile framework, I don't think they'd be very interested in what that might be. Technically it's of no consequence to them. I translate between the agile speak and the needs of my faculty. Prior to working in universities, I had the joy of working in IT and understanding agile frameworks and such things. And I think that's really helped me know what I can ask for when I'm making sort of central representations about our faculty needs, departmental requirements. Also understanding that sometimes there are urgent issues which cannot be carried out within the agile timeline. So negotiating with the different stakeholders a realistic timeframe for solving those and to some extent solving those myself where I can. So being that kind of point between all the languages and all the worlds. Yeah, I'm just really done for that. I mean in my faculty I wanted to give an example of how this has been happening in practice, in anger. We are part of the COVID, we adopted the YSW platform for the majority of our assessments, which works well for SA. So they're out on the stage, that's brilliant. PDF in, PDF out. That's not how maths works. Mathematics, if you don't have mathematics assessments, they're quite different. You need to, it's usually section based marking, it's usually a bunch of markers, usually PhD students or whatever, maybe not even that experience. And the reason you need this is because maths can be questions, can be very hard, especially the later ones. And sometimes you need to adjust your marking group, so it's complicated. And I get that because I talk to the maths people and I understand what they need and I've got to be responsive. So we actually did a comparison, we've got crowd marking. We have a crowd mark developed by a maths professor from Toronto to assess maths, works really well for maths. And we did a quick comparison study, I was able to be agile to adjust rapidly. And now we use crowd mark all in the maths department and not using YSW. So a really good response of action. To give you context, YSW is the assessment platform that the whole UCL adopted during lockdown. So there was an institutional approach to an assessment platform, yet richest faculty took the autonomous decision to take a different route. And that effectively shows that how we deal with digital learning can and has to be discipline specific. And that is a reason why actually you do need some leaders on location in these different subject specific faculties. You can't ignore that. Not everything can be solved by a central approach. Let's move on. Brisk breakthroughs is the second theme. What that effectively means, we are working in a very, very dynamic environment. It seems that lockdowns and then AI have accelerated the speed of change significantly. Things that happen and we need to react to them. So during the pandemic, we at UCL had significant investment. Now after the lockdowns, we are seeing severe cuts in investment. So we need to really look at where we are spending the money. Then at UCL and at some faculties with completely new senior leaders who change the whole institution completely. So we have major policy and strategy overhauls and then AI came along. So the question here is who aligns the local practice in a timely manner in the context of flexibly moving goalposts. When we are facing so many simultaneous changes, who wants to tackle that question first? Shall I have a go? Again, this is about what we mentioned already about discipline specific about reacting to projects. We are deeply embedded with our departments and academic colleagues. We have a network of CLLs connected learning needs we work with to surface issues and problems. For me, it was things like listening to those voices in Covid, it was engagement. It was about screens off. What did we do about that? So we did a lot of research and I created little workshops for all my departments to help them deal with that issue. Then it was about back to face to face. How can we get what we used to do when we were supporting things like clickers in rooms like this? How can we get back to that? Can I remember how we used to do that? Then we came to the AI stuff again. We are tailing local sessions. We are working with individual academics to say what does it mean in my context? What does it mean if AI is used in my physics assessment or my chemistry assessment? So it is about tailoring and listening to the voices and listening to our community. I think my faculty has certain specific requirements in some areas. Small group teaching, really discipline specific. My departments include the Slade School of Fine Art, the Centre for European Language and Culture. So when something like AI becomes a pressure point, the ways in which it affects different departments are so varied, yet there is often very specific expertise in those departments. If I look at the way my academic colleagues in language have managed dealing with things like Google Translate, they have a lot to offer which I can then represent to colleagues in other departments in a way that is relevant to their disciplines, but also to the nature of their smaller group teaching and perhaps the central policy might generally cover. Again, what comes out is the subject specific nature of some of these challenges, how we need to address them and again emphasising the point that we do need local leaders who are expert enough in the organisational policy in the learning technology arena and also in the people field on how to bring everybody on board. To address the final thing, and by the way I just wanted to mention Rich, you said clickers, not everything we did in the past is worth salvaging. Related to that, Vvox is active so if you want to pose some questions in the Q&A, Vvox with this code there. Controlled chaos, what does that mean? Not only are we changing, but we are changing in a way that is even more dynamic than this ultra-dynamicness on the previous slide because the origins of change, where change comes from, that changes and that adapts and that makes everything actually quite complex. We are under pressure from external challenges, but then also self-inflicted challenges when we change an institution and so on. The problem with such chaotic developments is that practice at local level can vary a lot. Even within our faculties, students may have vastly different experiences. How do we manage that? Who are the people who bring the people together across context and coordinate the expectations of various stakeholders? It's faculty learning technology leads in our case and I'll turn to Rich for this one. To run example, I did how I responded to some of these challenges. It ties into the way the students were talking this morning actually as well and it's about consistency and about scale. I mean I have 10 departments in my faculty and they're all like to do things slightly differently. We're really struggling over Coby with the students coming back saying that the approach is so different. I don't know where to get the assessment, I don't know where to get all my stuff. I said, how can I address this? We have Changemakers projects at UCL so we can get students involved. I ran a Changemakers, I reviewed every single currently running module in my faculty. So well over 400, almost 450 modules. Working with students, understanding what they wanted to see and the students did the reviews and they did every single module. Only Light Touch using the baseline that was ready in some earlier slides. UCL has a baseline on how we do this. And it gave me a really strong foundation to come back to faculty and say, look there are four, just four key recommendations students won here about assessment, about bunching, about a consistent design and now we're rolling that out and we're pushing that forward across all the different departments and I've got this strong student voice to help me back that up. I've taken a similar research based approach looking across the faculty. So, as Rich mentioned, we joined in July 2020 and to get a rapid sense of my faculty and its departments, I and a colleague in the teaching and learning area ran a survey of student online experience which was followed by a survey of academic online teaching experience followed by a survey of the student experience of the VLE followed by a student experience of giving feedback into modules and that's taken place over the three years I've been there and the number one finding in everything has been it is inconsistent. It's inconsistent for academics. The experience is inconsistent for students. A very good way to appeal to your stakeholders is to acknowledge their core concerns and offer sensitive ways of solving those with the least work possible. I think also recognizing the fact that people are quite time poor in education knowing what an actual academic workload, a student workload looks like is something where I can be strategic about the must, could, should change that we need to bring in, what are the minimum things we need to do and what would be nice. Which leads us with a final question. So we are the faculty learning technology leads as you've now heard multiple times and we act as distributed leaders to take over the local implementations of the organizational strategies but also addressing the local strategies. So if I, with a request for a really brief answer because we are almost out of time, what do you think why do we need this role? We have some responses that we reflected on earlier but I want to hear in probably one sentence why do we need our role? We are the only people whose job it is to be the expert in digital education for our faculties and departments and that works reflecting centrally and also locally. I think for me it's at this specific level. As an ex-sciences as well I get what it means to try and teach your subjects at your level and I can then align the right technologies with the right pedagogies. And I would say we are the people who pluck the gaps in these ten areas. Thanks. For the people online. I'm hoping that we've got some questions coming up on Vvox and I'll leave you to decide which ones you want to take first. Let's start at the top, shall we? You talk about independence and autonomy. How much and how closely do you also work together to deliver institution priorities? Oh, that's a good question. We love working together. Yes, very much. We are perhaps one of the only roles that has a representative with the same role in every faculty at UCL. We meet every two weeks to discuss our approaches to initiatives, current practice, challenges. It makes us a great resource for each other. I think we tend to be project-focused too. I might start a project with my God engineering colleague who's not here today and we did some stuff on mathematics stack quizzes and questions because it suits both our faculty. We do on a project basis. We come together with things specific that we think we can solve together. We have regular meetings with the central teams. With autonomy comes responsibility. It's not enough to say we're autonomous, we can do whatever we like. No, we have the responsibilities to seek out other people, to find out to be the experts in the institutional strategy, in how learning technology works, how the culture in your local department is. Therefore, we must proactively seek out opportunities to talk to the relevant people and to work together. Working together is effectively part of our job description, I would say. I hope that answers the question. The next one was fascinating to hear about different practice in each area. How do you share new best practice with such diversity? Have we addressed this? Sort of. I mean I guess it's interesting when I talk about my Moodle service example and you talk about your work, have you? This was built on each other. I built some of my stuff on the work of colleagues and vice versa. We share it with each other and then they get shared back to the connected learning leads and again get shared back to digital education and the education conferences for them. I present to the both education conferences that you see I've been to. We have our own education conference once a year. For me, the students are all students and they do have things in common and particularly my faculty students take modules from across multiple departments. Actually remembering that is quite helpful for many of my colleagues. I think we'll get to the next question because there are actually quite a lot. This one is good. You can read it yourself. The relationship with students, how do our roles and teams engage with them or is it a faculty focus? I should probably start by saying we do have staff, students, consultative committees in every department even. That is built into our organizational structure. I hope you have the same at your institution. It's a good idea to set this up. But this is actually a forum where staff and mostly student reps get together. Anything beyond that would be initial initiatives, either by the student reps or by staff to set up focus groups, questionnaires, engagement opportunities, whatever. We don't have, well at least I don't have a specific student facing aspect of my role. How do you interpret yours? I introduced myself at some point student reps and make myself available. Student reps also participate in faculty forums. If they mention anything pertinent to teaching and learning technology, obviously that's something. I also mentioned research projects we've undertaken with students. I do try to gather a wide section of student voice because they are the end, the net result, if you like, of what we think we're doing. We're actually doing, by talking to our students to a certain extent, so I try to really build that in somehow. It's interesting why I mean, say faculty doesn't really have, students don't really fill a part of a faculty, often do they? They fill a part of their department. But we have a student experience officer who I liais, we're very closely and achieves the one who helps me get to talk to the right students at the right time. I serve in the SSCC, I've got to use an acronym haven't you? The Staff Student Consultative Committee as well. So we're plugged in at the right point is the plan. I should mention, I do have contact to students. It's just that the management of this contact is organised. At IUE, at my faculty, we have a quality team who organise that and they just ask me to attend, which is quite comfortable. So do we manage to get through all the questions? Conflict? Ah, yeah. So the third question that we see on the screen, do you encounter much conflict in your roles? And how do you overcome this? Yes. Oh yes. And I like to call it resistance often. And I think that it's about, again, it's about being strategic, being understanding and having an overview of the full picture. So when people announce a new digital platform, a new initiative and new method of communicating with our students, knowing we're learning how to do that simply just doesn't fit into the available time. So again, I try to overcome things by saying if we must do it, we must do it, and we're just going to get through it. It's going to take you X time. I will work with you to find that time, but you must do it. And if you have sufficient trust in roles like ours, then people will say, OK, please support me through this. And I let people complain as well. I think we're all entitled to complain about technology if we'd like to. I think we're all entitled to be enthusiastic too. In that front, I see it as part of my role to take some complaints forward to the right people. Therefore, I need to know who to put these conflict points to. And that is effectively the leadership aspect, which requires me to have a good understanding of how the whole organization works, not just my faculty, but what certain conflicts can be solved by talking to the correct people. And if you understand your faculty well enough, you can see it coming as well. Sometimes I don't necessarily need to ask everybody because I can see a central policy and say, we need to change that wording just a little, and it will make my life much easier. Yeah, on that note, we did have a good feed-up policy. It's worked very well in Covid certainly. Some senior leaders just listened to us very closely because they realised we were more connected to the ground than what was happening on the ground. The voices work quite clearly. Are we at the end? Or do we have...? Yeah, okay. So you can just join me in thanking our first speakers. That was a really fascinating talk.