 Hello, everyone. My name just adjusts my glasses as I start. My name is Matt Lingard and I'm chairing this morning's session and I've just got a couple of announcements before I introduce the speakers for this session. So just bear with me. Just a reminder of all the help information if you're needing any help or to join us on discord or on Twitter. There's the hashtag. I'm sure you all know about this already. This session this morning has a sponsor and the sponsors are so important to all in being able to run conferences and events like this. So we really do appreciate their involvement and this session is sponsored by open LMS who regularly work with alt and you can find out about more about. Let me try again. You can find out more about what open LMS do at the web address on the screen on the screen. So many thanks to open LMS for sponsoring this session session itself doesn't relate to open LMS. And the last notice is just about recordings and reminder of netiquette. And that's all I need to say. So let's move on now to the session itself. I can see all the speakers have joined me. Hopefully everybody listening is in the right place. I'm going to hand over in a moment and our speakers will talk for about 20 minutes and there'll be five minutes for questions at the end. So please do use the comments field to post your questions, but you can start using it now just to say hello and share comments throughout the talk. So we're joined by four speakers. I'm going to hand over to James first and let them get underway. Okay, great. Thank you very much. So hello everyone and thank you for attending our presentation today altogether now changing the structure of an EdTech team where we will be looking at the changing requirements of EdTech provision in our faculty and how and what structural changes were made in our team to meet those requirements. We encourage you while listening to think about your own ways of working and the wider purpose of the EdTech function and we hope that you will contribute to our continuing reflection on our team model by adding your input and feedback in the comments. So to introduce ourselves first we are minus one the functional area leads of the EdTech lab and the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London. And now you may have picked up on the term functional area there and that's an important term that we'll be looking at later in the presentation. But for now just to quickly introduce ourselves. My name is James Dunbar and I'm the tools and systems manager and I'll hand to Kiran who I can see. Hi, I'm Kiran Gubbley. I'm a learning design manager. Over to Helen. Hi, I'm Helen Moorkey. I'm the education insight and evaluation analyst. And I'm more resource field and I'm the director of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, which we call forms EdTech lab at Imperial. Okay, so we go to the next slide Moira. Okay, so yes, our aim as I say is to encourage attendees to think about their own ways of working and the wider purpose of EdTech function. So the next slide Moira, thank you. So our presentation will cover the period from September 2018 until now, a period which presented our team with significant shifts in approaches to teaching and assessment in the faculty, some planned and one obvious case not planned at all. And from the beginning to the end of this period we saw our structure and ways of working as a team shift from quite a standard model. So we can see on the left there to one involving a more clearly defined and separated what we call functional areas that has come out of the aforementioned shifts, as well as from the lessons we've learned as a team as we've looked back on those shifts and also ahead to the new requirements that we've been facing. So next slide please. I can get the next slide. Sorry Moira. Wonderful. Thank you. So for some context quickly, the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College is composed of five departments as listed on the slide, who between them offer 100 programs with around 700 members of staff and 4000 students. And in 2018, we had three members of our team supporting all of those departments, programs staff and students. And what this meant then was that the support that we provided for departments was very much centered around the day to day support of learning technology. So things like lecture recordings, setting up and supporting online assessments with some innovation happening on particular models. But as you can clearly see today, there's more than three of us. So what happened next to present this, I'll now hand over to Helen. Thanks James. And next slide please Moira. So the first change in our team structure was to meet the challenge of supporting a pedagogic transformation of teaching, learning and assessment. And this was driven by the introduction of a new learning and teaching strategy at the university with the objectives outlined on this slide. So we successfully secured around four million pounds in a joint bid with the Faculty of Engineering to spend over five years, which allowed us to expand the team. And over an eight month period, we recruited another six members to expand to a total of nine. And we organized ourselves into three separate subteams to help fulfill our function. So to meet the objectives of the pedagogic transformation and the new learning and teaching strategy, we had the transformation team. The review and maintenance team was to support business as usual. And the insight and evaluation subteam was to enhance our practice of reviewing and evaluating everything that we do and the things that we support academics to do. Next slide please. So we've gathered feedback from staff within our team and had conversations within our senior management team and also interviewed people who've left on the effectiveness of this structure. So this is really an internal team perspective on the structure. And the the pluses were that within the subteams we had tightly defined areas of responsibility. There were very established and effective ways of working in the review and maintenance team. A real sense of belonging in subteams where there was more than one people, more than one person. But the downsides were that the subteams worked separately in the main. Also that not everyone was able to gain experience with the core tools we use, particularly the transformation team who weren't supporting that daily business as usual. And that the bespoke solutions created by the transformation team in the main were not always easy to roll out further. So roll out more widely. And we didn't gather any formal feedback from the academics that we support during this phase. But anecdotally they were generally happy with our service. And I pass back to James. Hi. Yes, so the next major shift in the approach to teaching assessment in the faculty came with the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision in the college to shift the remaining teaching and the summer exams. And in fact all traditionally face to face assessments online with a decision coming not longer after this that the model would continue for the foreseeable future and which has been in place until the present. And there was an initial whirlwind of activity just before this decision to make plans at a faculty level for how online delivery of content assessment would work. And what became clear in that initial period were the larger roles of the ed tech team. So the larger role the ed tech team had to play across the faculty and how our team needed a new way of working to meet that role. So the activities we were looking at in this period were developing new teaching learning and assessment techniques. Initially the major one being remote timed assessments or even timed remote assessments as we call them sorry. And later VLE course templates and alongside that preparing online support materials and documentation to support a self service model for common teaching and assessment activities. Sharing and showcasing activity, those activities and approaches around the faculty to the different departments and also with other faculties in the college and providing training and dropping sessions to help induct academics into things like the new VLE course templates. And then also looking at where there were gaps and what other support was needed. So in this period the team was very all hands on deck and the partitions between the two teams were brought down so that all team members were working on largely the same activities together in pairs across the areas of review maintenance and transformation to cover all departments in what we termed action teams. So to the highlights, positive feedback from staff about working with the action teams, team members liked taking a project and working on it from start to finish. It helped people gain an understanding of the general context that we were all working in. But there were still issues around uncertainty, you know, about the arrangements and also complexity in communication for academics, you know, which team did they need to get in touch with. So for the next section I will hand to Kieran. No, no, more sorry. Yeah, so, yeah, the next stage that we came to really towards. And I suppose once we got everything established in the COVID period, we started to think how we would now try to transform the team structure so that we could build on what we discovered and look at how we could work moving forwards. And we also had to take on some additional responsibilities, which were delivering support for online programs, and also clearly the continuing online and blended provision for the on campus programs. And so one of the things that we did was to evaluate where we were and we used lots of paddlets in this talking about different aspects of the team, the sub teams, how they viewed themselves, how they viewed and working together during the COVID period or the emergency COVID period. And looking at the benefits and the drawbacks of the previous structure. And we also consulted literature and sought advice internally within the college from faculty management from our HR department and from the learning and development team. And so we've had lots of input which has been invaluable as we've been them considering how to restructure the team for the future. So, oh, I've lost a slide. So there should be a slide, which is Watson in 2007, who talked about the, the four different aspects of, of work, which were, gosh, I hope I can remember all of this, and which were use evaluation, probably design and implementation. And we realized that we had three of those elements, but we didn't have the fourth one, which is implementation, which was really how you do things. And that's really where we made the new role of tools and systems manager, which James now undertakes. So we're now having three senior three aspects within within the team, or three sub teams to having four areas of activity for functional and activity areas, which were learning design, which is design and implementation, which is thinking about how we implement things in a bigger sense, not just thinking about the tools, but also the processes and so on as well. Use, which is actually delivering, and then evaluation, which is really key and important. Sorry, this is a bit difficult doing that blind bit. And then the other, the other aspect that we looked at, and was from the literature was good year in Dimitriatus, which is a really helpful paper, which was looking at designing and designing not just for for the current situation but designing also for the future. And this was something that we've always talked about roll out ability as something that was kind of a key aspect of our work. And, and, and good year in Dimitriatus have a theoretical paper which is suggesting this forward looking design with the four elements designed for configuration design for orchestration design for reflection and design for redesign. They exemplify that within a companion paper Dimitriatus in good year. And we will also come back to this with an example later, which I hope will make make things clear of how we're implementing this. So the key structural change that we proposed was, first of all, we would have the fourth functional areas rather than than three sub teams, and that staff would work across the functional areas, rather than being restricted to a single sub team. And also that we would really try to implement within our team this holistic forward looking approach to design and as put forward by good year in Dimitriatus. And now I'm going to hand over to Kim who'll tell you about what we did and how it went so far. So thank you, Mara. As mentioned already, so you see the functional areas and that's a particular term that we started using with tech tools and system looking at the computational teaching assessments development of new tech products, automation, streamlining of existing processes, learning design, looking at, you know, the development that was needed for online programs, transformation innovation in existing modules and prediction of media assets and tech delivery, which would support the ongoing delivery of existing programs, updating of online programs and staff training and support. And you can see, we have deliberately put evaluation and insights bang in the middle, just because it became an important factor that we, you know, considered from kicking off a project all the way through when we're finishing something or requests. So we wanted to really make it center stage. So evaluation insights led by Helen, as mentioned earlier. Next slide please. And what we then decided was that members of staff could choose arcs of activity. So looking at their specialisms and the interest that they may have using our one to ones, allowing them to maybe follow a project, you know, from, you know, discovering things into the system to designing and going and supporting the delivery of it and evaluating it throughout the process. So just really capturing what members of staff had told us they're really appreciative of working in action teams and earlier during working as a one team earlier during the COVID period. So we wanted to build upon that so staff can now work across different activities and you can see this kind of spiral thing going around. Again, highlighting that you don't necessarily have to start in a certain way in the circle. It's circular and probably you start with learning design or tech tools or delivery can start from anywhere. And yeah, members of staff are, yeah, across the board. Next slide please. So by doing this structure, some of the highlights that we now can see is that we do have already some evidence and positive feedback on the widened scope that we have for activities that we're supporting. That includes online exams, the new online programs. We're still collating and are being able to respond to feedback. And that helps us to implement a cycle of continuous improvement with members of staff so you can see the screen grab there, asking staff members questions around the support that we're giving them. We have obviously become a much better at using MS teams and using it as an advantage for teamwork. We're using some of the apps. One of them is the planner boards for workload management and project management in a way that we didn't do before. This view of us being one team is communicated through one mailbox, helps all members of staff have that visibility as well internally on the work and the knowledge that we have. And we are trying to cascade the things we learn in the team through team demos. And again, building upon the idea of that, you know, we need to work across our functional areas. And this is very much an ongoing process. And we're looking at some of the issues which are mainly to do with how do we keep our distinct areas of expertise, but also conveniently and make it a very straightforward experience for the users when they are liaising with us. And we are involving HR consultations in our review and of course using you today to see what you think of our new model and new structure that we're trying to work with. I think Helen is now going to talk us through how this looks like when we're working on an example in action. Over to you Helen. So we wanted to include an example of forward looking design in action. So going back to that model of Goodyear and Demetriatus. And the example we've chosen is that of selecting tools and setting up technical processes for a student e portfolio that they will build up over an academic year by reflecting on assessment feedback. So we've got the four elements of design in Goodyear and Demetriatus' model and how that relates to our functional areas. And the design for configuration is about allowing students to customize or modify what has been designed. And we've done that in this case by having a design that will allow students to add other sections and other pages into their e portfolio, so that they can add in other pieces of feedback that they get or feedback from exams as well as the core pieces of assessed work that will be included for everyone in the portfolio. The design for orchestration is about providing support for the teacher at learn time. And in this case we're supporting tutors to have more informed discussions with their tutors using a summary screen that we have devised, which will summarize marks and key points of feedback and the student actions so they can have better quality discussions together. And thinking about design for reflection, it's about ensuring that actionable data are gathered to inform an evaluation. And in this case we've made sure that the evaluation we have planned can be carried out because we will be able to get the data that we need from the tools that we're using. And design for redesign is about making choices in the initial design that can easily be adapted at a future time point. So we thought hard about making it applicable to wider use, not just the department that's going to roll it out next year, having lots of automated and flexible processes that mean we can adapt it for next academic year. And now we'd like to go on with sort of for our question time if it's alright Matt, we've got a padlet so we'd quite like to do a combination of padlet and questions. So there's a padlet where we would like to invite you to tell us a bit about your teams and your structure. The link is on the slide and in the comments. First time that's happened to me all conference I left my microphone muted. Anyway, many thanks Helen and thanks to all of you. We'll leave people to look at the padlet and start putting things on there now. If you could just get you to respond to one question as well at the same time. It's a question from Kat which I'll let you read and one of you wants to take it. Do you want to take this one? I think as we mentioned earlier as functional leads or you know managers, we are definitely trying to make sure someone is always on top of anything of importance. But yeah, this is still something we're getting better at every day. I think making sure communication is clear between us as managers as well as within the wider team. So this is very much something we're working on, I think. Is that fair? Yeah, I think we also have that are stand up meetings for each of the functional areas where things would be covered. But then in our senior team meetings we look at things that are across areas. So we discuss any projects that have got a lot of work across different areas to make sure that we're not dropping any balls in that. Great, thank you for that. I'm going to be cheeky and put in a question myself if that's all right. So I mean, first of all, I think I don't know if you've seen my comment in the chat. I was just really impressed that you made the space in this year to do such a kind of thoughtful assessment evaluation of the situation and an act on it. One of the things I'm interested in is in that conversation and in the reworking. Has that changed your relationships with the other teams around your institution? And was that part of the discussion? I don't think it's really changed our interaction with the other teams and the other people that we work with closely, such as ICT and so on. I think that the teams, all the faculty teams work separately and independently. And then we also come together to discuss some things that are common. And we also do that in functional areas. So at a college level, we have working groups that are about digital tools, digital assessment and learning analytics and so on. And so I think that that's maybe reflected at the college level as well. Yeah. I think we're quite everyone's self contained. All the faculty teams are quite self contained. Sure. Okay. Thanks, Moira. Listen, I've just spotted the time and I'm going to have to draw us to a close. So we'll make, I think if you make sure the pamphlets also in discord, if it isn't already, and then we can encourage people there to interact with it as well. But for now, can I just thank you all for taking the time out both to prepare the presentation and to give it today. It's really appreciated. And thanks to everybody who's come along and listened as well. But that's all we've got time for now. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.