 And now we get to listen to Dr. Sharon Flynn. I'm assuming Sean is not joining us today. Talking to us about the Intutor project, you're going to do fine all by yourself. So thank you, Sharon. Thank you very much. It's been a fantastic conference. I have really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for turning up here today. We've got a small group, but I have been talking to various people about the Intutor project over the last couple of days. Thank you for being here. I'm going to preface this presentation with a personal note, because I learned from the first keynote this morning. 13 days ago, I tested positive for COVID. I didn't think I would actually make it here. I've been pacing myself, but that's just to explain that I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I'm inarticulate. So it's just a forgive me sort of a notice. On top of that, because I have asthma, I've spent the last four days on steroids. So despite being exhausted, I haven't slept, and I'm slightly hyper. So again, forgive me. The last thing I want to mention, and I really thought about, am I going to say this or not? It's my birthday. So here I am on my birthday presenting to you lovely people. Fantastic. Sean's not here. He wanted to be here. He may well be watching. I don't know. But I do have some lovely colleagues here from MTU who are sitting up the back, and they'll also be able to answer questions that I can't. OK, so let me tell you a bit about the NTU project. So we're in the middle of the project. So this is a really very kind of factual, what is it, more than anything else. And maybe next year, I'll come back and talk about lessons learned, because I am certainly learning plenty and plenty of lessons. So the specific details. So it's a project within Ireland, within the Republic of Ireland, and the last line of the slide there. It's a collaboration between seven higher education institutions in the technological sector. It's funded from European money under the next generation EU scheme, the Resilience and Recovery Fund. And the Irish government chose to invest almost 40 million euro in a two-year project. And to put that money into the technological sector, which is absolutely fantastic. One thing that you may not be aware of within Ireland is that that sector has been in a phase of transition, huge transition, over the last couple of years. So this is sort of change upon change. A number of years ago, we would have had 13 or 14, depending on how you count them, Institutes of Technology. We now have got five technological universities, which have been formed by amalgamating former IOTs together. And then we still have two IOTs that haven't amalgamated. So our seven partners are ATU, Atlantic Technology University. We have Dundalk IT, which is still an Institute of Technology. We've got Daenerys Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. We have MTU, Monster Technological University. Colleagues up back. We have the Southeastern Technological University. We've got to you, Dublin. And we have the Technological University of the Shannon. So those are our seven partners. The program, the program as a whole, has been designed. And I use that word very loosely, designed. Apologies, Geroad, to transform learning, teaching, and assessment in that sector. And I'll come on to the streams in a moment. But there are three broad streams to it. So number one, the stream one is focusing on students and empowering students. Number two is developing staff capabilities and also looking at curricular development. And stream three is around the digital ecosystem. And Geroad, who's going to be the host of OER in March next year, is actually one of our stream three leads. So if you want to talk about that developing ecosystem, he's the man to talk to. Is that everything I wanted to say there? Let's just move on and I'll catch up with myself. OK. Yes, the design of the program. The design of the program is based around six core themes. And you recognize all of these from the current narrative around teaching and learning and education. So the six core themes are academic integrity, big issue at the moment, and lots of talk particularly at this conference around AI and how it is impacting on academic integrity. Universal design for learning, and there are some quite big projects that are happening in Ireland in parallel to the Intutor Project, which we are leaning into and learning from. EDI, quality diversity inclusion, is a big one, employability, which is really within the student stream. Education for sustainability, and digital transformation in teaching and learning. And as you can see, all of those, they overlap. They're not separate themes. They're all interlinked and interwoven. And it's a nice space. It's a nice palette to work with, thank you, Donna. So it's quite good. But the reason that I'm talking about this loose design is when I started in this role, which was in November. And I should just say that the project, the program, started, the clock started ticking in April last year. So April of 2022. I started as a national coordinator in November. So there had been already quite a bit of time, had lapsed. Not a lot had happened at that stage beyond talking and discussing. But the number of people I met in the first week who said to me, Sharon, you really need to understand how all of this came together. From my understanding, and Grode can confirm or otherwise, basically, a group of people from across the sector were all brought into a room early on. And that they may have been added to at different times, people coming in and out. But essentially, this program was designed over the course of a month by seven partners. All wanting to include their own things, their own priorities, what they wanted to do. So I'm not going to say that we have got a coordinated program of work. But we are working towards that. And what is exciting is the, I suppose, the willingness of all of the partners to work together and the recognition that they do want to work together. And they do want to collaborate and share their experiences and learn from each other and move forward together, rather than operating at seven separate institutions. So that gives me a lot of hope and a lot of confidence. And I have to say that I am really enjoying the experience because I am new into this sector myself. And as I say, I'm just learning so much. Let me tell you a little bit about the governance and management. So this is an EU project. So you can imagine the amount of governance that's going on. I sit within what's called the Technological Higher Education Association. There is a huge amount of politics involved in that, which I'm just not going to go into, because it would take me about an hour to explain it. But essentially, that's where I am. So I'm in the program management office, which you'll see is the kind of green circle up there. I've got a small team around me, so I've got a finance guy. Thanks be to God. I have got a project coordinator who does a lot of the heavy lifting with me. I've gotten an admin assistant for the first time ever. That is so exciting. I'm not really quite sure what to do with her, but she's fantastic. And we also have got a communications manager, which was absolutely essential to have within the project. It hadn't been planned, but had to have her there. So that's our program management office. And we also depend on some of the resources within the Technological Higher Education Association as well. Then if I was to go from left to right, and we go into the institutions, within each institution then there's a sort of a program management team. So each institution has got an institutional lead who's been recruited into, this is a full-time role, an institutional lead for their institution. And they actually form part of the steering board, which is the pink circle up there. And we meet once a month. We meet physically once a month. We have these mammoth steering committee meetings, which last at least six and a half hours. And they're difficult. And even at that, I mean, I wrote how to chair one recently, and it's a challenge. Right, there's a lot of talking. And everybody wants to be heard. But within their institution then, they have got teams. So other people have been employed. Because we've got a huge amount of money, to be honest with you. So within each institution, there are people who have been employed, intervals working specifically on different streams within the Intutia project. So they're responsible for making sure that the activities happen within the institutions themselves. But then we also, because we want to really enforce that sort of collaborative effort and to make sure that we are all moving forward together, we then also have these cross-institution working groups which pick up on different elements of the work plan and bring the appropriate people together to actually work and share, figure out what everybody else is doing, and make sure that we're all sort of moving vaguely in the same direction. So that's sort of how things are working operationally. If I go up the way then, I have the Intutia steering board, as I said, we meet once a month, mammoth meetings. The steering board is made up of our seven institutional leads, plus a representative from TIA, and that's Sean, who is meant to be here today. Plus there were a number of people who were involved in the design of the project from very early on. And I think of them as being, well, I used to call them the memory of the project or the elders of the project, but some people didn't like that. I don't think a road liked that. So now I'm just thinking, they're the visionaries. You're a visionary. I thought Senators was. Senators, yeah. Yeah. There you go. Thank you. But then we get into the reporting bit, and oh, boy. That's a whole other area. So I interface directly with both our higher education authority through whom the money is channeled, and they are monitoring. I mean, I meet with the HGA. I have a regular meeting every two weeks, and other meetings that come up in between, and they're the ones who send me the reporting templates, the reporting schedule. They come back and say, actually, that report's not good enough. We want a better report. You have to do more in this. We want the reports on that. Here's a new report we want you to work on, and it's just constant reporting demands, which is only right. It's a lot of money. We have to be able to show what we're doing with it. And then I also have to report in the Presidents Group, because this is the President's project. So I'm talking about the presidents of the institutions, and they have the final say, basically, on everything that happens. So that group is convened by the HGA, and I report into it, and they meet four times a year. And they have to do all of the approval, et cetera. So it's complicated. OK, I'm just going to talk you through our three work streams so you get a sense of the type of activities that are going on. I have to say, I do have a master plan. It's all documented in lots of Excel sheets. It hurts my brain to think about it as a whole. It's a very, very complicated work plan. There's a whole lot happening. So we've got three streams. I mentioned them already. And in each stream, we've got three work packages. So in stream one, which is around learner empowerment, I'm not going to go into the work packages. I'm going to tell you about some of the things that we've been doing. We launched a collection of staff student fellowship projects. Basically, we put out a call back in, I think, January this year for collaborative projects, which were to enhance staff student collaboration. And we announced those projects, 131 of them across the sector. And those are ongoing at the moment. We have recruited 100 student champions across our sector under the different themes. And they are working with the teams, with the end-user teams, within institutions, on different projects, which will be local projects, locals, the institution. We have a green paper on micro-credentials in the TU sector about to come out quite soon within the next couple of weeks, I hope. We have got a sectoral digital backpack, which is about to be launched, which will offer a number of shared opportunities for digital badges, which might be co-curricular or extracurricular for all students, but we're going to focus specifically on first-year students for the next semester for reasons which will become very obvious in a few minutes. And we're also working on student competency or graduate attributes framework for the sector. Thank you. Second stream is around staff capabilities. The type of things we've been doing is a community of practice, which is a gathering of people who are engaged in developing staff capabilities within their institutions. We've launched a series of masterclasses. Those are open. They're webinar-based. Anybody can attend those and sign up to those. There's a curriculum framework under development, an associated toolkit for staff, and also each institution is doing training needs analysis within their own institution, and hopefully will be able to compare outcomes across that. And then under the digital ecosystems space, the first part of that is around the provision or enhancement of systems to support assessment and academic integrity. And that also includes quite a large piece around the training and development for staff and students around academic integrity, and now with a specific focus on artificial intelligence. We're looking at improved infrastructure within our classrooms for hybrid learning. Thank you. Digital media production, open badges, digital badges, video, enhanced access to digital library resources, which is something that this sector in particular has been sadly lacking, and the introduction of a series of pilots across the sector. Very quickly, before I finish up, by the end of April 2024, which is less than a year away, what do we have to achieve? We have to demonstrate that we have engaged 4,000 staff members in activities related to end tutor. And that's quite a task. At the moment, we're just over 2,000, but you'll know yourselves that it would be the first 2,000 that are easier to engage. It's the next 2,000, which would be more challenging. And we have to demonstrate that we have engaged 9,600 students in activities related to end tutor, which is about 12% of the student population across the sector. And that's why we're focusing on first-year students. And I would just like to thank my steering board and Geroad, who's on the steering board. Nice picture of them. This is from our fellowships launch. They're all listed on the slides. Thank you. Yeah, I didn't smack you or anything. Nice work. OK, so now we have time for questions. What time is it now? It's 2. We've got 15 minutes for questions. Thank you, Sharon, for keeping time. We can do the V-Vox thing if people want to engage with it there, or I can run up and hand a mic to somebody in the room who might want to ask a question. So we have questions from any of the... Well, I might take advantage of my position here as chair. Oh, OK, there's the output is great. Mockups to show options. OK, so this is for this team. What time frame do you allow for the design, development, and I think this is a theme that goes across, right? This notion that we've got time scales and the work required to do the thing. So you want to come up and speak to what you allow for design and things? I don't know which one of us is going to take this. OK. So I suppose, linked to time frame, we tend to take a three-month development of a course plus a month for QA. Sometimes that leads through, but that's a sort of average number, or what we aim for at least. What's probably more important is the fact that we don't have a set amount of media pieces per course. So it is something that varies depending on the needs or wants of the academic and of the course itself. But yeah, I'll chuck over to you, Lucy. Yeah, just before I read that question, I thought they're going to ask about time frames. I knew it. Yeah, so that's one of the reasons why we justified this kind of remote thing rather than flying people over and saying, we've got two weeks with you. Now, it's attractive to do that in reality. I really feel quite strongly that if you, let's get real, the academics don't tend to, that doesn't tend to happen no matter how much you say. Right, so we design stuff in order that we can do it in a kind of more flexible and agile way. But I mean, we work in parallel with the learning design. So we don't, so for example, it's learning designs through media. So it's usually one to two pieces per module in a course. And yeah, three months with one lead media producer and then we have a wider team that will help with that. He'll be leading on another project on another course. But email me if you want more details. I'm happy to have a chat. I wanted to ask my question about, what was the phrase that you used? Uninvested academics. And it's related also to the point that you made, Sharon, about the goal is to engage like 4,000, the first two you're pretty confident about. And I think this is going to what Peter Bryant was talking about in his session yesterday about what you really have to work with is that like 50% in the middle who are kind of neither here nor there. So I wonder if all of you could speak to that, that uninvested, like what are your strategy? What are you doing? Are you just abandoning people who are uninvested or how do you get them to come along? I'll go back in three minutes. I'd like to hear from you, actually. So that's where the specialisms come in, I guess. So it's not about saying you do it this way, it's our way or the highway. It's developing that relationship and working on what's going to suit them. And to experience you, there's a kind of sweet pop spot which is just outside of their comfort zone. And that tends to be what you do. It's very incentivising to see what peers have done. And not show, not blah on. So show the difference because it's actually quite compelling if they can, it doesn't always work, let's face it. But that's what we're trying to do. Sorry, I'm looking at the questions that are coming up. Yeah, look, this is the perennial question. I mean, so I'm not going to tell you how old I am today, but let's just say I've been around for a long time and I've worked in staff development for probably close to 20 years. And this is such a challenge because, and we have these conversations, you run workshops or you organise activities and it's always the same faces, the same people that are there all the time. And we talk about having our digital champions or our champions who are going to share what they've been doing and share the work. And yet there is still this group that is so, so very difficult to reach. And so I suppose, I certainly don't have the answers. What I will tell you is you need to meet them where they're at and meet them where their challenges are. So for example, I mentioned the masterclasses which we've been running, which are online webinars. And the approach that has been taken is each one is on a different theme of our Intutor programme. So it probably doesn't surprise you that the one about artificial intelligence in academic integrity was of most interest and drew in the most people in terms of, you know, sign-ups and people who actually attended. And that's because it's something that matters to people. Now they're struggling with it. So that's what I mean by meeting people and that's one of the reasons why that needs analysis is being done across the sector. It's to find out rather than us deciding what do you need to know, it's tell us where you're struggling, tell us what you need and then we'll work with you on that. And so that's the approach that we've been taking. And that feels like a gateway too because as soon as you're truly useful to somebody then you can pitch the more sort of out there have you ever considered, right? So that's the relationship-building thing, right? If you are people who are useful to them instead of, you know, abstract webinar out there, that's a gateway in. There's questions here about some of the integration and the strategy of Intutor. I like how you said it was, you know, a room full of people and they came out, you know, with a plan after a month. But how was this strategy and the integration of, like, I think you have to be strategic in the integration of learning and technology. So how are you building that in retroactively? Is that what's happening? I wouldn't say that. I mean, I think that it has been, in a sense, built in from the beginning. I mean, I'm being a little bit facetious in terms of how it all happened. But there are obviously, I suppose one of the things that I struggle with currently is in my role as that sort of, you know, sort of trying to keep an eye on what's happening on the ground within the project and in the institutions and making sure that the work plan is happening at the same time I'm trying to report. And the thing is when I'm reporting to the HTA, I have to report things, you know, in their silos. So I have to report, well, this is how we're progressing on all of the activities in WorkPackage 1.2, and this is how we're progressing on everything in WorkPackage 3.1. But that's not how it works on the ground, right? Because they are all integrated and we can see the overlaps between the different elements and that's why it's so important, for example, with the steering group to bring them together and to allow them the space. I mean, I know a six and a half hour meeting sounds horrendous, but it is so important and so valuable to give them the space to have those conversations and now we're trying to build in some extra opportunities where, you know, if you're sitting in a steering meeting like that and you're one of the institutional leads, you're probably focusing on one area of the WorkPackage or one area of the meeting that you're currently dealing with and maybe details about other aspects are just kind of passing you by and then you get a request two weeks later and you're thinking, what the heck is that? I don't know what that's about and it's very difficult for people to have that overall sense of everything that's happening but that I see as part of my role. I have to be there to have that oversight and to see where the connections are and how we can do that. I'm curious about the reporting that you all are doing. Once the work is done and you know it's there, do you have regular showcases? Do you have some way of saying, I mean, I'm assuming you do. This is not yes or no. How do you communicate what's possible based on what's been done before or what people might want to do? You've been nominated, come on. Yeah, we show people. What do we do? We don't have an external facing website and I think that would really make the difference. I was thinking about dashboards for Sharon's thing but some kind of showcase-y if you want to know what we do, almost like a trailer or an advert or something. Yeah, and then we do have lots of, we've been pulling together. What's really lovely and what seems to work really well is we have a piece with those two academics that you heard there talking about the work and then of course we would intersperse it with the content and the priority being, showing people that it's about working out what's the best tool for the job without actually explicitly saying that rather than look, we can do audio or we can do imagery. So we kind of go for that approach and we share examples but we have to be careful because it can become prescriptive because then they go, oh, well I want to have a Lego Formula One, we, you know, you're like, well that's not gonna really work in particle physics or whatever, but yeah, yeah. There is a question here, I dread these questions, about future proofing. I'm happy for you to push back against the notion of future proofing but is that something that is on the radar, is that something that you have discussions about in terms of the digital ecosystem that you all are working within or trying to put together, like what's on your minds around the future proofing piece of it? Yeah, thanks. Reusability and if there's anything, we spend a lot of time sort of justifying our roles rather than sort of thriving if that makes sense. I've just been aware that that's been live streamed but I think that's part of the culture in the UK a little bit at the moment. So rather than talk about the things that are no-brainer to us and really get us sparkly, make content that is accessible and it will be reused for a long time and accessibility is good design, it's user experience, it's all those things and we design for, we aren't an OER university yet but we design as if we are and it justifies the investment. This is to go across all sorts of courses, not just the one it was originally made for. So that's basically, have I answered that? Yeah. I think it doesn't really matter what the ecosystem is. If the VLE dies tomorrow and something else takes its place, what we've created up to this point still lives and it still has a place, it can still live there, it doesn't matter what's built around it. Sure, I suppose with NTutor we're sort of talking about a different scale and that there's a number of challenges, I suppose that spring to mind. First of all, we are trying to move together as a sector but we have to acknowledge that each of our institutions already has an existing ecosystem and it comes to digital and we can't just railroad over that, we have to build on what's already there. So what we are trying to do, for example, is to learn from each other. So if one institution is particularly strong and one area has a lot of experience, we're trying to share that experience. So in that sense, we are trying to future-proof the system as well as that. But the second challenge is the very short timeframe, two years, and then the money's gone, right? And so that notion of future-proofing can be quite difficult because, you know, going from nearly 40 million to zero, obviously we're talking about sustainability and longevity and ongoing licenses and all of that sort of thing. So we do have to think about that and keep that in mind. And the last thing that I will mention is that where we are looking at joint procurement of systems, we are really making an effort, a very strong effort to include all voices, a diversity of stakeholders and to make sure that we are doing it properly and in an ethical way, despite the time challenges. And it is a balance. So we're very conscious of it, but there are many challenges to it. So I'll probably leave it at that. No, that's great. We're out of time. Thank you so much. Thank you to our panel. Please thank them.