 Hello everybody, my name is Kira O'Farrell. I'm from Trinity College Dublin. I'm here with my colleagues from Trinity, Timothy Savage and Theresa Logan-Feelin, and our partners for this project who are Marianne O'Connell from IADT and Alison Egon from Renew Institute of Education, MIE. So today we want to present to you our idea for aligning an existing five ECTS credit module that Trinity operates for our graduate teaching assistants. The idea is to align it to the national framework, but at the same time to create it in an online version, a blended learning version. It's currently a face-to-face module. To do this we propose that we repurpose and we reuse existing material both from our five ECTS credit module and from other content that we use to support postgraduate teaching assistants in Trinity and also beyond. We'll make it into a blended or an online module. One of the things that we really want to achieve with this is greater scope and greater sustainability. The idea is that it will be as flexible as possible. It will be a single pathway if you want to take it as a five ECTS module or it can be taken as five discrete units, possibly through badges for students who don't want to take a five ECTS module at one time or who want to do it gradually. Hopefully it's something which can be of use to people across the sector, not just for Trinity. We want to release it and have it usable for institutions within the national forum and beyond. So this is our existing module that I'm talking about. It probably looks very familiar to many of you in the room. I know that there are modules across our institutions. Ours is called Teaching and Supporting Learning. I won't go through the learning outcomes, but you can see from our module that it's very strongly focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning. It's a theory into practice module. We pull together our teaching assistants to work and learn from each other and to begin to think about their journeys as scholars, as teachers, as scholars. They come in very much as students. It's a very much a transitionary phase, I think, for graduate teaching assistants. They have to begin to not only move into tutorials and work as demonstrators, but to really begin to think of what it is that they want to achieve as a teacher going forward at the very start of their career. So it's a module which is very much based on critical reflection and on the scholarship of learning and teaching and on working on learning through conversation with each other as a group of peers. We've had this module since 2009. The feedback has been consistently positive about it. I think that you can see that they talk about this paradigm shift and they talk about the experiences they get from working in a group and learning from each other and reflecting on their practice. The downside of the current module is that we can only have a certain number of students doing this module at a particular time because of the emphasis that we pace on the scholarship of learning on them presenting and reflecting with each other as a group. It grew for a stage. At one stage we had 32 hours of supported face-to-face teaching and it just wasn't sustainable at that level. So we had to reduce it. There was one year where we quite honestly didn't have the capacity to run it at all. It's back up and running now. It's positive, but we can only take about 15, maximum 20 students out of go on it. If you think in Trinity we have at least 700 graduate teaching assistants in Trinity at any given time. We also do what we call just in time support for our students for our graduate teaching assistants. So at the beginning of the academic year we hold some workshops for them. This year we held two workshops. We had about 60 places on the workshops. We made it fairly big. We had 120 for each workshop so we had 60 on a waiting list for each workshop. But what we really want to do is something that's more than just in time teaching. It's not enough just to have one workshop and then go in and become a tutor and that's it. We want this to be about their professional development. We want them to be on the start of a journey. So we really feel that the module has great potential but we're limited by the scope of it at the moment. NYG also have a model which is fairly similar in learning outcomes to ours. There's it done through Epidium so we can't have access to that. Michelle has very kindly shared the assessments that they're doing with it but they get about 80 to 100 graduates a year. So that would be hopefully what we would be looking to do if we were to put this online and create the tools for it to become a blended learning experience. OK, so how is it going to align with the PDF? What strategies for consultation are we using and what's the student perspective? Well, we're hopefully going to align with the development framework across all the phases. We have quite a tight time frame. We're hoping that we will have this developed in time for the next cohort of students coming into our universities in October. So we're very much focusing it on this year from January to June when it would be ready to go to be developed by our online company. So initially it's very much about gathering the existing content, the materials, not only from our module but from elsewhere, analysing it, seeing if there are any gaps available. We do know from feedback that there has been a bit of a gap in terms of the audience. We want it to be obviously a very inclusive module and at the moment the focus tends to be on tutors rather than demonstrators. So it's a little bit, we'd like to make it a little bit more stem focused or useful for that audience if we can. We plan on having surveys, focus groups. We did a very large scoping project for this module in 2009. We still have a lot of the data from that which I looked at. It's still quite topical. So I think that the scoping exercise will need to be, we don't have to go back to the very beginning but we do want to speak with existing students, with graduates of our programme, with some undergraduate students, with staff members and all the partners will be able to enable this. Some of us have many teaching assistants, other of us have very few and other of us have teaching assistants where they're not actually graduate teaching assistants but they're working as teaching assistants so they've done their PhD or they're not doing their PhD. So we need to tap into all these people who are potential audiences for our module. Okay, once we have gone through the development phase, the scoping phase where we pull together all the material, then we'll begin to design the learning activities and the supports for reusing and repurposing and hopefully enhancing the existing material that we have. The idea is that we would align it to the framework and when I looked at the framework and the domains, the five domains that the framework had, I thought that aligns very nicely with our module. So what we're hoping to do is to create five discrete units. We have a special purpose certificate and academic practice which we can take as a whole. Our academics can take in pieces, in short modules, whenever they want and according to their professional development interests and it actually works really, really well. So what we thought was that this could be a single pathway, a five ECTS module, a blended learning experience or it could be done in discrete units, possibly as badges. And one of the reasons why NUIG have joined us is that they have a lot of experience in this area in the older board project. The idea that each unit would align directly with the current domain, so the self, professional identity, professional knowledge and skills etc. And what we have already fits in very neatly with these units. Then we would also design templates for each unit so that if this has been rolled out across other institutions, they will be able to use the template to see what are the learning outcomes, what learning resources are in there, how the learning will support the curriculum, how it's going to be inclusive. So that you will have the actual online experience, but you will also have a tool kit to accompany that. Again, that's the domains that we're moving to. This is the development phase. So the academic developer who's working on this will have the materials ready to go to our online learning team hopefully in June. And then this would be how it is developed. So each unit would have an introductory video, a short introductory video which would have the learning outcomes. It would consist of some multimedia presentations, some resources, online activities. And we would be very keen to keep the scholarship of learning and teaching and to keep the peer element of the module. So that would be done through online discussion boards and the ideas that we don't want to lose the heart of that. And then the face-to-face tutorial, the assessments and the rest of it can be done within the other institutions. So we'll have everything ready to go to the other institutions, how you assess it or how it aligns with your way of doing it. It may have to go through your own assessment boards. So this is a strategy for consultation. We, as I said, we're going to consult with our students, with our graduates across the program. One of the things that, one of the feedback that we received was that the consultation from students could be more thought through. And we began to think about how we could use our students as more than just consultants in this or consultants in the design of the project. How could we bring the student perspective in? So we began to think about the co-creation of this product. And I think this could be very exciting in what we're planning on doing. And we haven't got very far with this because it would be part of the project itself. But in our current module, we have a cohort who are just finishing. We have another cohort who will be starting in January. And we would like to involve the graduate teaching assistants who are part of that module to actually be involved in the co-design of this module. It may be that they're involved in some of the design of the resources, in the curriculum design, in the design of the assessments. We're not sure yet we need to think about that. But they would be actively involved in this. And then NUIG, who also have an assessment to do with course design, have said that their students on their graduate program can be involved in the evaluation of it as part of the assessment of their program. So that's the plan is to actually get students as co-creators of this. And I think that's a very good opportunity for some scholarships and publications which can be co-developed between the students and ourselves as a result of this. So impact to finish off, I think some of the impact will be, the KPIs will be developed when we begin the project. I think the main thing is going to be reach and sustainability. We want to broaden the scope of this project. We have many teaching assistants who aren't getting this opportunity at the moment because we don't have the scope. So the evaluation will be very much to do with scope and sustainability. But also hopefully we'll learn things from collaboration with other institutions. We'll be able to align it to our own strategic priorities and hopefully it's something where we can grow from there. Thank you.