 Ilein Hogan, my name is Ilein Hogan and I am a lecturer in social policy in the school of applied social studies in UCC. I'm going to be presenting part of these slides in relation to our proposed project. Tom O'Mar, I hear my UCC colleague from the Office of the Vice-President for Teaching and Learning in UCC will be presenting some items as well. Various colleagues are here representing some of our proposed partner institutions. Unfortunately, not everyone could be here because of various teaching commitments, but you'll have an opportunity to speak with those later as well. Okay, so just to present the partners then, the project builds on existing networks. So one of the pre-existing projects that was funded through the National Forum is the social commons, which is ongoing and is a social policy discipline project which is looking at assessment as of and for learning. We're also partnering with others who've been previously involved in the Transformation through Collaboration project, which is another national forum project that focuses on digital skills development. So this project proposes to bring together all of those through seven partner institutions in total. So this is just briefly the national forum feedback on our project. What we're going to focus on specifically in this are some of the, well to respond to some of the criticisms. So one of those was looking at a perception that it was perhaps an overly instrumentalist approach. So we'll talk through some of that to clarify about the nature of resources and finally to speak in further detail about the impact of the project. So just to give a brief overview of the project, here we have the, well we heard about excited librarians and excited strategists. So this is the excited though somewhat bewildered social policy educator. So we found that while many of us are digital enthusiasts, we're not sure exactly how to proceed and are looking for guidance in how to develop our digital skills capacities. So this project proposes to bring together social policy educators and instructional designers and learning technologists and to look at how learning technologists can facilitate social policy educators in their journey towards becoming digital champions and to document that process and to evaluate the process. So these are the various project phases, some of which are overlapping. We've identified five key phases, one on identifying social policy educators' digital literacy needs, secondly responding to digital literacy needs, thirdly developing and practicing digital skills, fourthly recognising and rewarding technology enhanced teaching and learning practice and finally evaluating the project outcomes. And I'm going to invite Tom to speak now to each of those. Thank you very much. So I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes just talking about one or two aspects of how we identify digital needs. So in a previous life I worked for the National Out of Literacy Agency for nine years and I developed a number of different tools. And one of the tools we developed was to begin looking at diagnostic assessment for literacy learners. So one of the challenges in Ireland was that literacy learners rock up to a local literacy centre and they present and they're stuck into a class. And really there's no opportunity in many cases for individualised learning. So we developed a tool and write on.ai whereby we asked a whole series of 33 reflective questions and people answered yes, no. And depending on how they answered we then gave them a recommendation. So we identified a thing called a spiky profile for every learner. So this is not an alif right, this is coined by a lady called Helen Casey in the NRDC in the UK and the University of London. And the idea really was that every single learner exhibits a different spiky profile in terms of their own learning needs. So I thought well the same thing must apply to university lecturers and academics as well, we're not immune. So we're on and on training classes that one size fits all. What we decided we'd do is develop a tool, very simple and we'd ask people a series of questions. At the end of it everyone gets an individualised learning plan that identifies what their spiky profiles are. I think this probably goes to the idea of the instrumentalist question or query that came up with the feedback. Because very much what we're looking to do is put the learning in its own individual context. So not even a discipline context, yes there'll be a discipline context, but everyone have their own specific needs. So whether you're a lecturer, whether you're an admin person working within the discipline, you'll have your own particular needs. And equally then you're working across different institutions. So the idea first of all was to identify everyone's spiky profiles and give them a plan that they can take with them and learn with. And then respond to that by using existing resources. So I suppose the one thing we're being quite good at, we've worked on about three or four, actually nine national forum projects over the last number of years. So worked a lot of many of the colleagues here in the room today. So we're very keen to use a lot of existing resources. So tellu.me, for example, we developed in collaboration with CIT on a project I led last year. We're aware of allaboard.org. But we also use lynda.com, we use disk, disk, we use alt. We'd like to see all of those resources being used. And the most recent project was a project called Transformation Through Collaboration, which ran from January to June of this year. Many of the panel would be familiar with that one. So we have a lot of resources up there. So the idea is that we're going to actually build on that and use those same resources. We don't want to reinvent the wheel. And we want to just guide people I suppose towards the learning that's appropriate for them. Most of it will be non-accredited. A lot of it will be collaborative and unstructured. It's all about networking. It's all about people talking to each other. It's all about learning from each other. But for example, in UCC, we have an ECDL syllabus that's freely available to staff. So if that is a particular need, then we point them towards that and let them use that. We also run a post-graduate certification diploma and master's in teaching and learning on higher education. I think in the context of social studies, it's 90-70% of the academic staff in that department already have a post-graduate qualification in teaching and learning. So we're very keen to use those things. So what in UCD and Trinity and CIT and Waterflyty, they will have their own resources as well. So we'll try and build on those things and not have to reinvent the wheel. So I was just speaking to the pointer about Ola board, I suppose, as well. The idea as well, if you look at tellyou.me or if you look at instructional design at UCC.ie, if you look at digitalchampions.ie, what you'll see is you'll see a lot of case studies. So it's all about putting learning in context and saying to people, we can teach it a technical and mechanical skills of how to do something and how to blog, for example. But really what's more important is actually understanding why you would blog, or how you would blog, or how you'd build it into what you're trying to do with your students. Or not even with your students, you know, in your professional life outside of education. So really that's it in a nutshell, if I can hand back to you. A further element of that, would you like to speak to the digital badges? Sorry, yes. Skip the last slide. Sorry about that. So yes, go back to the idea of accreditation, non-accreditation. So we're aware that many people won't want to go back and do a postgraduate certificate or a diploma. So what we've done in UCC in the last six months, and the transformation project, was the first time we did this, was we gave out digital badges to digital champions across, 45 digital champions actually across seven institutions. And since then we've taken it on in UCC and we're actually rolling out digital badges to a number of different academic disciplines. So we very much see digital badges run an open badge factory or something very similar as being the way in which we would recognise much of the learning that happens outside of any formal structure. The next slide as well. Sorry, I should have actually read this. Okay. So the idea here was that... So someone asked a question that you wrote at a previous presentation about how do you involve the students in this? We're very much all about the students. So everything we do in terms of... If you look back and look at the transformation through a collaboration project, what you'll see there is that the students are the ones really that inform what the lecturers need to do. So in the last year in UCC we run an international... a student experience survey. And the student experience survey then informed the types of technology and house learning training that we've rolled out this year. So we've identified that in academics and said, listen, the students have come back and said, for example, inconsistent use of a VLE of a virtual learning environment is a huge problem within UCC. So we're now tackling that strategically over the next three years as we look to go to tender on a new VLE and build training into that to make sure that any academic, for example, who decides to use a VLE is actually being properly trained in using it. The Student Union and UCC are big supporters of this project. So we sit on numerous different committees with the Education Officer and the President of the Student Union. And they would regularly tell us the types of training that's required for staff. I think I actually am finishing on that one. I wouldn't mind what we designed it together. OK, so very briefly somewhere where time is flying by. I just want to speak to some of the alignment with the institutional and disciplinary strategies. So I suppose there's to a degree a kind of common language in speaking to the various respective institutions, the strategic plans, the teaching and learning strategies, and the emphasis on continuing professional development and drawing on the national forums, PDF or professional development framework in that. So I suppose again briefly there's some overlap with the principles within the PDF of collaboration, student centredness, authenticity, scholarship, and I'm forgetting one. I will remember it when I sit down. So I'll speak just a little bit around the discipline-specific ambitions then. So I suppose we're kind of cognisant that we have some strong links in terms of institutional partnerships at a research level, but far less so in terms of teaching and learning practice, and perhaps even generally within teaching and learning practices within social policy, although we do now have quite a number of staff members who have completed accredited training in teaching and learning in terms of scholarship, which is the one I was looking for. In terms of scholarship we have kind of a, there's a lot of work to do in terms of publishing teaching and learning related research within the discipline or related to the discipline of social policy. Another key issue is supporting integrative interdisciplinary learning within the discipline. So many of our students take social policy as a subject within an interdisciplinary programme and that would cover social care, social work, youth work, community development. They're the kind of the core social science, they're the core programmes, but also students take it as nursing students, dentistry, public health, government, occupational therapy. So social policy is a subject within a wide variety of programmes. So what are the challenges that students have in making connections between or about kind of the meaningfulness of social policy as a subject within their programme. So we hope that being able to articulate the disciplinary objectives through student involvement in digital learning and our own digital skills development that we can maximise that. Also a key issue is expanding the impact of the discipline. So I suppose if the success of Trump has taught us anything it's that we really need to up our game in terms of articulating the kind of the social justice mandate of social policy both within various digital platforms. So although we're well intentioned we need to develop our skills in that sphere. And that's connected to our own digital capacities as students, as educators, as professionals, but also as global citizens. Two minutes left. Okay great. Just to speak briefly to some of the short term impacts we envision in relation to the project. I've spoken a little bit about this already in terms of dissemination. We would have participation with very large staff cohort. We'd probably be looking at about 45 to 50 social policy educators across the seven participating institutions. We'd be using pre-existing resources but applying those to the discipline. So in that sense we'd be looking at developing discipline specific resources. We hope to contribute to international conferences and journals so those would be both e-learning or technology enhanced learning related but also disciplinary and again that's quite an underdeveloped sphere within the disciplinary conferences that teaching and learning activity. In terms of dissemination we also envision that these would be open access resources. Dialogue is a really important one. Again I suppose we can sometimes operate within silos and that's a negative impact on the discipline and the potential impact of the discipline. So this kind of project will support and will find impact in greater inter-institutional collaboration. We will have project presentations both in face-to-face and online contexts enhance student participation in terms of assessing and evaluating and informing teaching enhanced learning. I'm watching your approach. I think I've covered many of the issues in teaching and learning anyhow. Improve teaching approaches, improve confidence which goes back to our enthusiastic and excited but bewildered social policy educator. Some of the long-term impacts is on learning and learners I suppose because it is a very applied discipline we have perhaps been slow in embracing e-learning, blended learning more flexible learning opportunities so that's something that we're conscious of developing. The most significant thing and I'll finish on this point is that it does encourage us to introduce a culture change so it is about changing ways of thinking. We're as social policy educators reflective practice is something that's probably embedded within a lot of our teaching and practice but people have been somewhat reluctant or lacking in confidence when it comes to digital skills development. So it's about taking a cross institutional approach to promoting that sort of attitude and change and I'll leave it there. Thank you.