 Fel yw'r ydych chi'n gweld o'r edrych o'r UCL. Felly, mae'r UCL yn 2000, ac mae'n nid i 16 yma. Felly, mae'n ddweud y byddai 5 yma, mae'n rhaid i'r gweithio. Mae'n fwy o'r gweithio'r ymddangos. Mae'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gennym, mae'n gofyn i'r tyn nhw, y dyfodill yn ymddangos yn Moodl ym UCL. Felly, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Felly fel ymddangos, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio'n gweithio, a mae'r ffocwsau yn ymddangos y strategiaeth i'r gweithio'r cymdeithasol yn ymddangos E-learning. Mae'r ffordd o'r clywed o'r cymdeithasol. Fi ar hyn yn fwy o ddau, mae'n meddwl â'r Llywodraeth Cymru. Mae'n meddwl i'r cymdeithasol, yn gallu y cymdeithasol ac yn gweithio'r cymdeithasol, rydw i Llywyddau hefyd, ac rydyn ni'n meddwl yma. Mae'r eich cymdeithasol yn fan hyn a'i ymddangos i ddweud i'r ffordd o'r clywed o'r cymdeithasol. Felly nesaf i'n gweithio i gweithio'r 27, ac yna yma yma yng ngyllgrifenni yw ddefnodol, ac yn y gwbl y gallwn ni'n gwiyntio i gyd yn y brineidio. Ond byddwn ni'n gwelwch y teulu, ESL. Mae'n gudio'r byddiw arall, mae wasg y masg i'n gweldio, ond gan gudio'r byddiw arall, mae'n gudio'r byddiw yn gudio arall a'r byddiwch. Mae'n byddwn ni'n gweldio gyd yn unig. Mae'nンベu ar wneud, ac mae'n gydig Fanidglun yn dynol. usulig y ddarnfa sydd oedd yn gallu unig mewn byddai. Ond that is beginning to shift in a very positive way, where campus-based in that if you can call a sort of scattering of buildings of varying ages across Bloomsbury and Hampstead and Highgate, and also stretching down to Surrey at campus. By campus-based, I mean that we are mainly a face-to-face institution. Mae'r unrhyw unrhyw sy'n gwybod ein anelydd yn ychydig yn ymdarthynol, ond sefydlu'r rhai o cas yma ac ymddangos ar y afrathionol. Wrth gofyn, mae'n gofyni'n gwneud fathach o'r adroddau'r agyfiadau. A hynny'n heddiw'r cymdeithasledd meddwl, geirfer y pân edrych yn y gallan mwy blithol. A wneud wrth gofyn i'r awrth o argy rowsfod o'r adroddau抗au'r UCL. A rydych chi'n ddechrau defnyddwch chi i'r gwelliadau a'r ddych, We blended learning as good as it gets, and there's very little fully online learning. I wanted to add in these slides last night, which is partly why I didn't come to the dinner. I just thought it was worth drawing a timeline. First of all, of the way that the team that I work in has evolved. This is just a mugshot of some of them who are here. There were nine of us here yesterday, which was probably a record for Moodle Mood, and indeed for us to send any people to a conference. So that's some of them in the hall yesterday. The team started in 2012, sorry, 2002, when we were given responsibility for WebCT. We called ourselves the Learning Technology Support Service, and it started off with me as a caretaker manager and two learning technologists. It grew up until about 2008 to eight staff. 2012, we had a big reorganisation, and amazingly, money was given to our area. So we were able to grow the team, so we pretty much doubled to 15 staff, and we rebranded as e-learning environments. At that point, we took on responsibility not just for e-learning, but also for learning spaces. And this year, we rebranded again to digital education. I've managed to resist the technology-enhanced learning in the title. I hate that. But e-learning began to sound a bit dated. We felt digital education sounded a little bit more current, although I'm told it's actually digital is past, you know. The other timeline I wanted to touch on was our strategic timeline. And certainly when I started in 2000 and began to be involved in e-learning in 2002, there was nothing like an e-learning strategy. In 2005, I was invited to develop a thing called an e-learning strategic statement. This was an annex onto our education strategy, but it wasn't really a strategy. Then, 2012, I was asked to produce an e-learning strategy, and I will talk about the development process there and what we did and what we achieved and what we didn't. And now, we've got our new education strategy. It's just been released, and e-learning is properly embedded into it. Now, when Martin was talking yesterday about roles, it made me reflect on my own roles in this area. So I've now got my personal timeline. And certainly in 2002, when I was kind of given WebCT, without particularly asking for it, I was a rookie learning technologist. And I was also running an IT training team at the same time. So I was not terribly hands-on. 2008, I had been on maternity leave. I came back, and most of the team disappeared. I'm not sure if it was something to do with me coming back. But at that point, I had to really become Mrs Moodle because I had virtually nobody left and I had to do the whole thing, end-to-end support for Moodle. So I certainly became deeply immersed in Moodle. By 2012, when we were developing that strategy, I'd say I was moving from a management role and more into a leadership role, which is what I wanted to try and aspire to, in my gather. And when we were invited to choose our tables for dinner, I was looking at the different categories. I was thinking, where should I go? I thought, oh, probably decision maker. So this is just prompted by Martin's talk yesterday. Anyway, on to the meat of the presentation. The first part of our journey to total Moodle. And in case you're wondering why I've got a picture of an eclipse, when you have a full solar eclipse, it's called totality. Back in 2007, we were a WebCT institution. And we were having a fairly rocky time with WebCT. Their supports seemed to be getting worse and worse, their prices were going up, and they were going to land us with Vista, which was the next version, and it would have required every course to have been redone. So this really prompted us to stop and think, well, you know, actually it's the right platform for us. So we did a VLE review. And we asked staff and students what they wanted. And actually, of course, I think somebody mentioned said this yesterday, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And if you haven't done it in a VLE, then you probably don't know that it's possible. And so students and staff alike were pretty much telling us that they wanted the same functionality that WebCT had. There didn't seem to be much vision. We weren't getting much of a steer. We did the beauty contest. So we looked at, and then the condenders really, were Blackboard, Moodle and WebCT Vista. And it was really hard to... None of them seemed to come out particularly in front of the others, which was difficult, but actually gave us the opportunity to stick our necks out and say, well, actually, we think, based on what we know about Moodle, that this is the way forward. And we didn't have that many courses to migrate. So there were, I don't know, a few hundred courses. It wasn't a big job to change direction. And so my final thing pretty much, as I went on maternity leave to have my daughter in 2007, was that my view, my advice to the institution, was that we should go with Moodle. And the final decision was taken pretty much on the day that my daughter was born, at which point I became a mum and not a learning technologist and not remotely interested in what was going on at UCL. And that honeymoon period lasted about nine months. After that, I began to think about coming back to work. I came back a year later. And that coincided with the migration. So we'd made the decision, but we needed to get everything lined up. We needed to get Moodle installed. We needed to recruit staff to run it. And we had a big project, a big Moodle migration project. Now, of course, if we were to change VLE now, it would be a much bigger project, but it seemed big enough to us at the time. We engaged students, the M team, to help us to move content over. And it all seemed to go quite well. But we were really only scratching the surface of the number of modules that existed. In 2005, before I went off, I had been asked to write this e-learning strategic statement. And to be honest, there wasn't very much of great consequence in it. There were some nice words, but it didn't really have any meat. Apart from there was one thing, which was that every course should have an e-learning presence by September 2011. So that was the one sort of solid thing in that strategy. And so, you know, it was a dictat. And UCL is not one, it is not an authoritarian institution. It's actually very democratic and rather lawless in some ways. So we were slightly bothered about this, but we developed a thing called the Moodle baseline or the minimum requirements to try and make it easier for academics to know what they needed to do. And so we had this Moodle baseline and I think that my colleagues, Jess Gramp and Clive Young, have spoken about this at Moodle Mood in the past. It was a short list, a checklist of things that you ought to have in a course, the obvious stuff, your notes, news forum, timetable, links to resources and so on. Strangely, a glossary. I'm not sure why we thought that was so important. And this went out. There was an email, I remember, it went out from the vice provost for education and he said, you know, we need to do this and you've got to do it by September 2011. And if you have any problems, go and talk to the LTSS, the Learning Technology Support Service. So we were braced for a backlash. We actually prepared an email to respond to people to say, well, it's all for the greater good and it'll improve the student learning experience and it'll make your teaching better and it'll help you to organise your resources. And so we had this email ready to go out to all the people who were going to be screaming at us and there was no backlash and we were really surprised. We just couldn't understand why it was just nothing. And I know that Jess and Clive have talked about this so I'll go through this fairly quickly but I think it's interesting to reflect on why we didn't have that backlash. What did we get right? Well, first of all, I think it was having that top-down support from the vice provost for learning and teaching. There was an institutional backing and it was in the strategy. But we supported it. We, you know, kind of learning by doing, thought about, well, what can we do to make life easier? So we knitted some of the key systems together. We have Moodle there but we also connected it with Turnitin with our online reading list service, with timetables, with Echo360 for our electric car service. We provided templates to course teams and we offered to tailor them for departments if they wanted. We had always had courses. We aligned our courses with the baseline so we were able to say to people, well look, if you want to get a course up to baseline standard then come on our three-hour session and you will walk out with a course which is ready to go. We targeted new staff, get them while they're green and enthusiastic. But thinking about the Rogers adoption course, Kurt Curve, which Michael Dyrart was talking about yesterday, we also targeted the later adopters. We wanted to ensure that there were no nasty surprises for them so we prepared the ground. We contacted them, we encouraged them. We emphasised the student experience. We tried to speak their language. We did some homework to find out what motivated people and we just tried to make sure we were as clwd up and able to think from their perspective as possible. But we had also noticed that when we ran training courses, we always aimed them at academics but we often found that administrators came and were thinking, oh, come on, why are you coming? You need your academic colleagues to come. We want to talk to the academics. But then we realised that actually the administrators are tremendously influential. And so we built an alliance with departmental administrators who then helped with the adoption of Moodle in their areas. So the teaching administrators, we ran courses specifically for them rather than saying, oh, you know, you've really come on a course which is for an academic. We tailored the courses for them. And I don't know if you've got them in your institutions but in UCL, most departments have got teaching administrators and I'm not expecting you to read this. This is a list of the tools and services that they need to have expertise or at least good working knowledge of. So there are 40-plus tools and the thing is that the administrators are expected to know all this stuff and it's almost impossible for academics to keep up with this kind of thing. So the administrators are actually points of authority. They're very influential in their departments. And we used them, they were really powerful allies and they helped to oversee the migration of content from websites and from documents and from miscellany of spaces, bringing it into Moodle in a more consistent way. So there was the institutional backing. There was the support that we gave and planned. There was the partnership with the departmental administrators and there was also the student voice. And we had surveyed students about what they liked best and what they liked least in terms of IT. And this is just a wordle of the text comments and you can see that Moodle comes out very positively. So this was wonderful. But there's always a catch and in fact, when you looked at some of the comments and I don't know how well you can see this, but basically this is students telling us they want better consistency. That if they're seeing Moodle being used well by one individual or in one department then they want it to be equally good in other departments and from other staff. So we knew that we hadn't really done enough. We then decided to divvy up the 70-odd teaching departments in the institution amongst the team and so we were a team of about eight at that time. So we had maybe 10 departments each and we needed to go and look at what modules were still left to bring into Moodle and also where they had just put in courses of the absolute minimum, what we could do to improve them. So we did a departmental push and we offered Moodle makeovers and we did get there. We achieved total Moodle. Now I guess what's difficult to know is the quality that was in those courses and there are thousands of modules now in Moodle and it's very difficult to get a feel for the overall quality. I was very interested in the MMU approach that we heard about yesterday where they have a tool, a sort of audit tool to count the different sorts of activities and things in modules and gives you the traffic light, red and the green sort of quality score. So I think we'll be looking at whether we can start to use that. But what I've just covered is really getting to totality, how we did the blanket bombing of Moodle. The second part of my story is about having to be more strategic and learning the lessons from what had gone before. So back in 2011, we didn't have a very clear education strategy. We did have a thing called the learning and teaching strategy but it was ghastly, it was tremendously long and there was certainly no way you could come up with an elevator pitch from it. It was really difficult to get the gist of it. So to me that felt a bit like a strategy vacuum and I was asked to develop an e-learning strategy to take us forward just three years, 2012 through to 2015. So this was a lovely challenge. I remember the first attempt I made at it and I kind of did something certainly in isolation. I showed it to my director. I was pretty pleased with it and he said, well, it's nice, but really where's the vision and it's not really a strategy. And I said, oh God, you know, spent hours and hours trying to bring it together. So I stopped and thought and did first of all some horizon scanning and went back, looked at what was going on in the literature and what the keynotes, themes and conferences were and what the discussions and things on social media were. We did, as you would always do when you're developing a strategy, look at what your competitors are doing, so a bit of surveillance. I was also a student on a distance learning masters in digital education at the University of Edinburgh and fortuitously there was a module there called e-learning strategy and policy. So I decided that for my assignment for that, I would develop an e-learning strategy as part of that assignment, get guidance from Geoff Hayward at Edinburgh, who was one of the guys who really led the development of MOOCs at Edinburgh. He's a fantastic academic, a very practical and he was my tutor on this module so it really couldn't have been better in terms of mentoring. I had also done a leadership course, a leadership programme run by the leadership foundation and it was a programme over a year and there were different modules and one of the modules we did was on strategy so I had a good library of books on strategic development. One of the nicest ones is the Garrett and Davis one on Herding Cat. It's very short and it's full of pictures and nice quotes about leadership in education institutions. A quote that I really like is that the leaders role is to describe reality and to give hope. One of the other influential people on leadership and strategy is John Cotter. If you have a look at the Harvard Business Review, I think it's from 2006, John Cotter talks about creating a sense of urgency and gathering together a powerful guiding coalition to help you to drive change. We did all this background work but of course we needed to know what staff and students thought. Again, just as we had found back in 2007 when we were doing the VLE review, people tended to want more of the same and we really wanted something a bit more visionary and a bit more inspiring. We invited students to enter a digital story competition and they were told to create a digital story three to four minutes long presenting their vision of education in the future. This is where the technology is probably going to fail me but we'll see how we go because I'm going to show one of the videos now and I'm going to show another one a bit later on. This one is from a pair of physics students, Alex Dutton and Amy, I forgot her name. It's a bit shaky cam at first but it will calm down so if you begin to feel nauseous then don't worry, hopefully the sound will work. Trying to predict the face of higher education in the near future is a difficult task and while it is unlikely that our esteemed geneticists will have found a way to revive Jeremy Bentham finally reuniting UCL's favourite philosopher with his head there are myriad ways in which our university could change in the next ten years. Here we consider some possibilities from simple practicalities to a much greater picture Welcome to the University College London of the future. Central to the learning of many students is access to books, journals, dictionaries, reference catalogs, anthologies, novels etc etc. Imagine then the future of UCL's libraries completely digitised no more searching in vain for that elusive book that someone else has already taken out easy access to all of UCL's written resources on one personal device. In ten years many more students will be bringing their laptops to lectures for clutter free and crumple proof note taking. More laptops means more plugs which means we'll need more plug sockets and while we're at it how about more cluster rooms? Cues for computers are crazy silly at UCL come exam time and it's no secret that when they're queuing students aren't working. In ten years time the traditional lecture might be delivered by means of video conferencing everyone tunes in from the comfort of home the dreaded 9am can now be conducted in bed with a cup of tea not that we're discouraging you from early starts or anything I mean it's just an idea. While such changes to UCL might be convenient and advantageous we'd hate for the future of our great university to be lost in a cold web of technological advancement so let's also consider some more people orientated changes for the future. Firstly we'd like to see an expansion of UCL's public outreach the well established lunch hour lecture is already held twice a week and released online so more of this in ten years time please but increased publicising and advertising to widen our audience imagine hord of the public turning up on campus or tuning in online let's educate everybody. For some it's easy to lose sight of where your studies might take you so for each degree programme what about regular timetabled seminars held by professionals in your field of study increasing contact between students, academics and research staff would not only create a tighter community but also act as a source of continuing inspiration for students. Finally let's consider cross disciplinary interaction greater emphasis on knowledge and skill sharing with a focus on more lectures and workshops for students that are run by students. Our future for UCL is a holistic one an all encompassing education system that utilises technology effectively considers greater interdepartmental exchange and focuses on the relationship between staff and students. Due in part to technological advancements we hope that scope for communication with the public with other establishments and within the university itself will allow this institution to continue inspiring pride in the words UCL, London's global university. I hope that I can go back to my presentation. Now remember this was done in 2011-12 and this was before MOOCs had really hit the headlines but it seems to me that those students were talking about MOOCs they were talking about educating beyond the bounds of the institution educating everyone and they were talking about changing the relationships between students and staff and putting students in touch with researchers and they were talking about cross-disciplinary interactions. So we thought this was powerful stuff and another story that I'll tell you later we'll build on some of this. So this helped to inform our strategic aims so we had this e-learning strategy it was a standalone strategy and it was to me might be a better strategy than the institutional learning and teaching strategy at that time and it had a number of strategic aims and I've slightly combined and remixed them here for this audience but in essence the first one was to raise our profile as an educational leader we were a research leading institution but we really wanted to try and use technology to help to raise our profile to educate beyond the bounds of the institution and to do more and better with technology. The second one was concerned with quality enhancement to do better things and to do more engaging things using technology and in particular to build on the e-learning the Moodle baseline. The third one was to improve the interactions and the connections between our different digital components of our e-learning infrastructure and to make it more seamless we didn't have and we still don't have a portal and a lot of people get very cross about having to log in and log out and shift from one thing to the other and very different interfaces and duplication of information in different places. The fourth was to do with connecting students and academics and ideas and inspired by what was going on here in the digital story. So it's all very well to have your aims you then need to work out what are the things that I'm going to have to have in place to achieve those aims and what are the objectives that are going to take me there we ended up with a list of something like 45 objectives in seven different sections but there were a couple of things which we identified as being critical to success and one of them was something that I came upon when I was doing my research for my master's course and this was to take a participatory approach to rolling out change so Rose Luckin from the Institute of Education and Rona Sharpe had both written on this in the context of e-learning about how if you can give some power to autonomy to departments or to teams they're more likely to engage and it's obvious isn't it if you're involved in making decisions and deciding how to do stuff you're more likely to do it than if somebody tells you to do it it's psychology I guess and so we thought I was trying to think about how we could actually make this participatory approach work and it seemed to me that to have a network of champions was the way forward so we established the UCL e-learning champions network and for every teaching department we had one academic and one administrator and generally I think for this sort of thing you would typically have an academic e-learning champion or teaching and learning champion or coordinator but we felt that we knew that the administrators were so influential and could really make such a difference and could help to move their departments along and pairing them up we would get somewhere and so we wrote to every head of department and we asked them to nominate or to seek volunteers for a pair of people to take on this role and almost every head of department was very happy to do this and to offer people and generally people were happy to do it I only remember one or two people really pushing back and saying we haven't got time for this and everybody is too busy and we can't do it was that they would develop local strategic statements so they would be thinking about what are the needs in their discipline and what are the things they want to prioritise whether it's media based education or the assessments what are the things they really want to focus on that they might be able to share good practice within their departments but also to network with other champions in other departments and ultimately we were hoping to have broad maybe faculty or even school wide networks of champions and maybe special interest groups so that was the first enabler and when I looked at the individual aims and the objectives this seemed to be something that was going to have influence across a whole range of aspects of the strategy the other thing was the structure of our team so until 2012 we had a very regular e-learning support team in which we had a lot of learning technologies all of whom did everything we were all generalists we all covered everything from doing the service desk support and writing courses and delivering courses and doing one to one and working on projects and exploring new technologies and trying to evaluate so we were all doing everything we didn't have anybody facing out to the schools though now UCL had at that time three very large schools made up of three or four faculties each and we were reorganised in 2012 and we had the opportunity to pretty much double the team in size so it's trying to think about what's the best way to make use of this wonderful manner from heaven and it seemed to me that what we needed was to have spokes to have advisers facing out into those schools to act as a focus as liaison points for the champions and also just to work at a more strategic level with departments and faculties so we retained the core services that any e-learning team is going to have so we've got the service desk support and the training and the one to one support and the advice but we have the school facing advisers as well and we also set up a team which we were kind of hoping we might be our kind of skunkworks team the innovation and evaluation team the futures team to do more horizon scanning to look at innovations to look at technical innovations but also pedagogic innovations and then to evaluate them to work on projects and so we had a new structure which we really did feel was going to work well and it's working in partnership and in synergy with the champions so those were the two main enablers for the strategy now it was a strategy to take us from 2012 to 2015 and it was signed off by Education Committee on the 5th December 2012 I remember that date quite well so it was pretty much not really ready for 2012 but never mind how did we do we've got through 2015 now so let's look back and see what we achieved well in terms of raising our profile as an educational leader we have made some progress there one of the main things that we wanted to do and actually sorry one of the things I should have said was that the reason I think this education strategy was palatable to our senior team was because of MOOCs actually for the first time ever I was asked to go to the senior management team and talk to the provost and all the deans about the strategy because they suddenly realised that the big boys on the other side of the Atlantic were doing this MOOC thing and there was this fear of missing out so this was an area that we had some institutional interest in but we decided to take a slightly different approach and what we did was we wanted to set up facing VLE to support non-credit bearing activities whether it's CPD or executive education or sort of lifelong learning type of activities or indeed support for learning communities of other sorts so we wanted a platform for this so a bit like doing the VLE review except this time we didn't try and do it all ourselves we ran a beauty contest and there were many more contestants this time and we engaged the services of Epic who are now Leo to help us to go through all of the possible platforms that we might use and there were 158 oh my god I'm so glad we didn't do this ourselves 158 platforms to look at 23 met some critical criteria 8 made it to our short list and there were 3 finalists the finalists were D2L a platform called Topics which was a kind of social media for learning platform and Moodle now Topics looked quite interesting but it didn't have the financial stability behind it D2L to us didn't look particularly different from Moodle so it was actually pretty clear to us the way that we needed to go was to have a public facing an external facing Moodle we didn't call it Moodle we called it UCL Extend with a big X which I kind of regret now I guess we were a bit influenced by edX but it's our public facing Moodle and it has a slightly different look and feel quite often people would look at it oh it's really nice I wish Moodle was like this well actually it is Moodle what it's got on top of what the main Moodle has is the shopping cart and the ability to browse and search for courses and to self register and to pay online using a credit card and to do all this without having to have a UCL user ID so we've got the course discovery side of it the registration and payment and the underlying learning environment so we use a system called course merchant for the registration and payment thing although that hasn't been without pain but the underlying system is Moodle it's hosted by Leo they've been great people to work with and it's gone very well it's got or has had 118 courses over the three years since it went live 17,000 learners which is quite good when we had the vision for this of course we were thinking very much in terms of revenue generation this is a way to bring in money for CPD and of course we were completely kicked into the long grass by the emergence of MOOCs because then the world realised that you could do really good online learning without having to pay anything so why would you pay UCL to do it if you can get it from Harvard for free so it hasn't been the earner that we thought it might be but then I guess that's just the way that the sector has gone what we are finding is it's been a good place to disseminate research we've also signed up with FutureLearn this is another area that we did it actually over for two years and it was really only through the merger with the Institute of Education and having Dana Laurellard there who was really very keen to do MOOCs and to work with FutureLearn I think she could see its educational potential that she managed to persuade the senior team that this was the platform and the partner for us so we've got three FutureLearn MOOCs either in action or just about to go live one of them has been very big and very successful already it's the anthropology of social media I think it's in week four at the moment it's a very interesting course one of them is on dementia and the other one is on making babies in the 21st century and the interesting thing about those is that they are led very much by researchers people who identify themselves as researchers rather than as teachers and they are using it to disseminate their research impact although there are many different reasons for MOOC in fact UCL seems to be working well as a mechanism to show off our research so that's where we've got to I'd say it's gone quite well in terms of our outreach-related e-learning activity the quality enhancement side the building on the baseline well this has been good as well and I think thanks very largely to the efforts of Clive Young who runs our spoke team the advisory team and Jess Grant who's going to be speaking later on this morning and Tim Neumann from the Institute of Education we've worked in partnership with the champions to review the baseline and to build on it so now we have got a baseline and a baseline plus the baseline has got much more detail and much more guidance on what you need to think about when you're trying to put together high quality materials online there's a bitly there if you want to take a look at it or you can just Google UCL e-learning baseline it's in our wiki at the moment we're going to do a nice PDF printable version of it and the IOE had something similar and we had to cut and shunt the two together and that's come out with something which I think is better than the sum of the parts we've got two baselines one of them is for face-to-face programmes and the other one is for fully online programmes where you need to provide much more in terms of orientation and support to students How did we get on with the seamless digital infrastructure? Yeah, well, okay, this is quite tricky and don't ask me any details I'm not a technical person I may have been Mrs Moodle in the past but I'm definitely not anymore what I can say is that we probably have interfaces between systems rather than any kind of deep integration we do have a digital master plan taking us forward over the next five years and in that there will be a portal which will surface just the information that people need for the context that they're working in and hopefully that will help to build links between our systems and services The last aspect of the strategy connecting students, academics and ideas Yeah, this is even more difficult than connecting systems together I like this quote from Goethe thinking is easy, acting is difficult and to put one's thought into action is a difficult thing in the world but also Jason Norton, my colleague and friend I like his email signature the smallest of deeds always succeeds the grandest of intentions so we kind of had a grand ambition there but we haven't realised it yet which is not to say that we won't early days which brings me on to part three which is our move towards a more connected learning environment bringing us right up to the present so it is 2016 and in the last couple of years we've had a change of guard at UCL we've got a new provost well he's I guess not so new now he's been there for a couple of years Michael Arthur, he came from Leeds Vice provost Anthony Smith, he's a vice provost for education he came from the School of Pharmacy and Dilly Fung who was an exeter before and she's our head of educational development and the three of them are just so strongly committed to education and they are tremendous leaders and they have developed a vision a strategy, an institutional strategy which really has education at the core and Michael Arthur, his mantra is that education should have parity of esteem with research it is equivalent in importance to the institution Dilly, Dilly Fung her vision which she came this happened last night when I ran through it it's maybe telling me I'm going on too long it is this slide, I'm not going to show that slide again because that's the one I had problems with which crashed my other Mac last night so here we go ok, the connected curriculum Dilly's brain child and what she presented when she came to interview at its core and I hope you can read that learning through research and inquiry every student will be doing this right the way through their programme so students will connect with staff and with the world leading research of staff in the institution within every programme for every student it will be a through line of research activity and that will start week one, day one and run all the way through till they graduate students will be expected to make connections across subjects and out into the wider world so the interdisciplinary side and they will be connecting their academic learning with workplace learning and they will be required to produce outputs directed at an external audience not just essays for the tutor or exams for the marker and they will connect with each other across phases which means between year one, year two, year three, year four and with alumni which is lovely and it's really hard to argue with that so in our strategy there's a sort of one page infographic and the elevated pitch to do with the connected curriculum is that all students will be learning through research connecting with each other with people, places and subjects beyond their courses in UCL so it's all to do with connections and there is then a requirement it's written in the strategy that we will develop a distinctive digital infrastructure to connect students with each other with staff and with the outside world to support networked research based on interdisciplinary education and I wrote that, so now I've got to deliver it and so what this means is that we are going to be augmenting the existing VLE by a set of communication, collaboration and productivity tools to make a thing called the connected learning environment so we've got this what do we need to do to support it in terms of this digital infrastructure well we need an infrastructure that will enable connections beyond modules we need to allow networks to evolve and develop and grow and be supported we need to allow recommendations whether it's recommended content or recommended groups or recommended people to follow so social media sort of feel we need it to be open beyond the institution we need students to be able to showcase their work producing external facing outputs and we need to give some control to students and of course that's very difficult in a traditional VLE which tends to be very much controlled by staff so the connected learning environment this is what it looks like in my mind you've got the VLE at the core and then wrapping around that we've got a new thing called UCL Together which is a working title and then wrapping around that again we've got the student showcase space student sites core VLE I'm quite comfortable that we stay with Moodle for now and it was interesting listening to Jenny yesterday talking about maybe you need to do a review every couple of years oh my goodness I feel so locked in to Moodle the idea of shifting the institution there's a sure way to cause panic in the ranks then it's to talk about changing the VLE and as far as I can see there are some interesting alternatives Canvas looks really interesting but you know I'm not sure they offer that much that it's worth the pain of a migration I think the VLE does the job that a VLE needs to do what we need is something else around it so we're developing a vision for a thing called UCL Together and the term was coined by Vincent Tong who's in Dilly's team and he's the academic coordinator for the connected curriculum so here we go another quick video at times our education seems like it's solely based on receiving information from our elders this information sometimes feels like it's being dumped into our head as if we were empty shells however as we all know academics do not constitute the entire body of our knowledge and one of the other major components is expression which comes from within UCL is here to provide us with the necessary tools to allow us to express ourselves and identify our goals but Bill, why is it so important for UCL to provide us with the place to express ourselves? Well Hannah, expression is the first step to finding our interests and passions not only through speech and writing but also other forms such as art and music we are a student body built of unique individuals and the convergence of all our ideas is the basis of innovation just as UCL has been doing lectures provide us with incredible academic resources we have the privilege of being taught by brilliant professors who can be considered pioneers in their respective fields To complement lectures tutorials offer us the opportunity to develop our view on topics through dialogue with exchange and itself a form of expression allows us to make connections between our personal experiences and the subject we consider this opportunity to be so valuable that we suggest tutorials should be extended to one and a half hours the tutor should act as a chairman for student discussion and debate to facilitate the formulation and sharing of ideas tutorials act as a bridge between the vast land of academics and ourselves tourists confronted with this unknown territory but we have identified a problem with this bridge we all have a common fear of being subject to judgment UCL needs a place where judgment does not exist and ideas can be dissociated from the individual but how do we do this? we create a virtual space where everyone is anonymous this virtual space allows ideas to blend freely on a personal level this will allow connections between our passions and academics to become clear and simply make us more certain about what we want on a larger scale this virtual space will increase the chances that ideas will collide and complement to create the perfect example of this process is this project in itself we have created an idea for a website based on the concept that all ideas are shared on common ground and have infinite potential the user logs into the website by using an alias the main page will present the departments offered at UCL which we baptized idea cloud the user method is as follows the user selects the bubbles of his or her choice by clicking and dragging them into the choice board the bottom of the choice board will present a create storm option which will blend the categories and lead to the next page this next page will show all ideas relevant to the blend the user picks and chooses from these ideas creating new idea clouds and repeating the process at his will at any point the user can add his own contribution to that idea cloud he created to keep the user's ideas oriented towards current events a weekly question that everyone can relate to will be at the top of the homepage relevant to a wide range of fields this type of question invites interdisciplinary action how could this not be enriching it can't be this website allows UCL students to expose themselves to the different thought processes, opinions and perspectives of their peers we hope these ideas will open the door to new possibilities at UCL now whether or not we can actually build an idea cloud I'm not so sure and actually trying to distill and understand pin down the functional requirements for this connected, this UCL together thing is quite hard the bubbles are meant to signify the difficulty of pinning it down the best way I can describe it is that it's a sort of academic social network and we've worked on some mock-ups the sorts of things I think it needs to have in it recommendations of content recommendations of people news, a sort of ticker-tape thing with what's going on, what new spaces have been set up new people, people to follow resources which have been added, what's trending needs some audience management so that you can control access to your group if you need to or to your own stuff in there it needs to have a social media feel with all the kind of liking and following and so on we need to be able to tag it it needs to be able to manage information so adding in metadata and so on so those are probably the basics possibly the idea, generation or ideation type of functionality possibly things like leaderboards to show who are the most influential people to vote things up, to give people that kind of kudos to identify roles perhaps for people in a community possibly badges whatever it needs to be more open than our current VLE and it needs to be easy to use fundamentally otherwise people won't use it it needs to be elegant, it needs to be customisable it needs to have an educational feel and people need to want to come to it now the big risk I think is that we set something up and actually nobody comes so what we do need is and it's interesting we've got an Office 365 Office of Suite of Stuff and there are groups in there which I only discovered about last week and it turns out that 800 groups have been set up in this space mainly by students with all sorts of names it's really hard to work out what's going on but clearly there is an appetite for a space where they can set up groups and join up with each other but a lot of these groups are probably unused or there's only one person in them so what we do need is to make sure that we have custodians in every space and that we work and support them so yeah we've got a mock-up but we don't have a clear idea I don't think it exists the sort of thing that we want I don't think it exists off the shelf so we need a platform and we're going to have to go through some kind of a procurement exercise and we'd also be open to working with a partner to try and develop it and whether it's a startup or an established business who knows but we want to create something we see this is a way that we want to create a curriculum with this great emphasis on connecting people in different roles and even beyond the institution Moodle doesn't automatically lend itself to that Moodle still serves a very important purpose for the institution but we feel that we need something to go around it the third component of the connected learning environment beyond the VLE and beyond the UCL together is the student sites side of things and there, again, it's another working title I don't know what we'll end up calling it we've been really inspired by what the University of Mary Washington over in the States have done with the domain of one's own and I've heard a number of institutions talking about this now and I think Jisk are quite interested in this as well where you provide every student with their own web domain and they can call it what they like and they get to take it with them when they go and they have tools and services into it and you can provide them with a very vanilla thing that they can customise themselves with they're very technically competent and confident or you can provide lots of templates and wizards and stuff to help them and it helps students to have a platform to reflect and to showcase their learning and also to develop their digital capabilities now, we've pitched this to the people who control the funds and we didn't get so far and it was quite an expensive project so we're slightly scaling back our aspirations and probably we're going to go with a blog of one's own student blogs at the moment we have an institutional blogging service for departments and for groups but not for individuals certainly not for individual students so we're looking at our options for a blogging service so those are the three components of the connected learning environment as I say we don't really know what it's going to look like but we hope it's going to be beautiful and by the way we are going to be gold members of the Moodle User Association so we're kind of maintaining our commitment to Moodle I hope that's clear we just want to do something additional around the edge I realise I've overrun slightly but I hope that wasn't too much of a problem give you a chance to wake up happy to take questions if we have time okay folks out straight away we've somebody done the bun and if they're the hard technical questions then I'll pass them on to somebody else okay good morning Robin Wilkinson from the Royal Air Force absolutely love the model we use something similar we use a platform called Jive really interested Jive, I'll happy to show it later really like the integration really like the ideas how are you protecting and risk managing from radicalisation from radicalisation radicalisation um to know of all the questions I've predicted that's not one of them sorry I'm ready to go away and have a think about that um yeah sorry absolutely haven't thought about it that's waking you up first thing in the morning really questions like that anybody else can I have an easier question than that please anything can be easier than that question there we go Steve hello Fiona sorry Steve Bond from the LSE the third part of your e-learning strategy about improving integration between different systems and some of those systems are things like SITS which presumably your team doesn't control how do you go about writing a strategy where you're reliant on other parts of the university to deliver that in conjunction with them or you just write it and then try to push it yeah well we've got this big digital master plan and so there's the education bit which I've looked after there's a research bit, there's an administration bit and there's an infrastructure bit and there's a digital transformation bit and the digital transformation and the admin parts of that digital master plan all kind of overlap with the SITS area the student information and there are three domain leads for education and they might have two equivalents and we do work closely but the point is that all of our projects they're all run within our division and that ensures a certain level of joined upness and okay the business owner for SITS is in the registry but the service owners and the service operations people in ittle terms are in our division and we are in the same building and it does mean that we do know what's going on and we do co-operate and collaborate and talk to each other so it seems not to be too much of a problem but I'm not under any illusions that the move towards the UCL connect the portal and the need to join things up is going to be a very big challenge couple over here go on throw it easy catch I'm going back first of all just thank you for a really rich presentation that has given me an enormous number of ideas but I'm going back to the discussion earlier and in some other sessions relating to I suppose learning analytics and analysing how e-learning environments are being used and I just thought it might interest people that in the FE sector there seems to be I don't know quite a bit of development in that in particular there's a person called Andrew Checkley at Croydon College who believes the Moodle database is an absolute gold mine but he seems to have managed to set up a reporting infrastructure that automates reporting going to whoever needs it academics management etc and also for the online delivery side of things to create an algorithm to track the time actually spent by learners on particular activities which I think is also useful Is he plugged into the GISC learning analytics work because they've been doing a big project Yes I know, I don't know if he is and he's Andrew Checkley Yes at Croydon College Thank you Hello thank you My name is John Warden from the UK Meteorological Office I was very interested in your initial discussion around a blended approach to education and integrating the e-learning into the overall approach in with face to face so I was just wondering how you were tackling that how you were deciding which learning method you were going to use and how you approached it and what you've got at the moment because of the connected curriculum programmes and programme leaders are having to rethink the way that they're doing things and so we've developed a and this is based on some work that was done I think at the Dublin Institute of Technology called Viewpoints and it's a curriculum design workshop we've called it the ABC Arena Blended Connected the arena bit is our staff development for education and anyway we have a workshop approach to work with course teams who are wanting to overhaul a programme or indeed a module and it looks at different learning activities and then looks at how what kind of the balance of different sorts of learning activities that you want to have in a programme or in a module and then at what kind of online things that you can do to support that so and I suspect if you were to Google UCL ABC you'd find out more about it we've got a video about it on our certainly in our digital education blog at UCL you can find out some more so that was led by Clive Young and Natasha Perovich and it's how we're addressing it kind of going forward we have this arena staff development programme and e-learning is getting increasingly sort of integrated into that both to support the learners but also as a kind of formal part of what we teach them but we do rely a lot on the champions and on word of mouth and on peer pressure people are going to always be much more influenced by the professor in the room next door than they are listening to somebody from the centre telling them that they should use technology so in terms of sort of rolling it out and making a difference we're very reliant on people to show the way locally does that answer? ok thank you we have time for one more question and somebody really far away just thinking about the anonymous forum you had for discussion of ideas where you separate the idea from the individual one of the important parts of discussion is obviously debate and a part of that is when someone asserts something they have to follow that up how do you encourage that if you've anonymised everything? the anonymity bit which was in that digital story in fact those are a pair of first-year anthropologists that Hannah and Bea the anonymity bit we're not really planning on putting into our connected learning environment into UCL together we may want to have some ability to do stuff anonymously but that's not a major feature of it for the reasons you suggest although I was heartened to hear yesterday that there is going to be the ability to have anonymous discussions in Moodle because sometimes you do want to ask that stupid question and you really don't want your name attached to it so if you're asserting something and you have to back it up then anonymity isn't the way but there is a place sometimes being able to say something without having your name attached to it ok I know for one I totally enjoyed that presentation and realised that at DCU we've been reinventing a few wheels which I've just noticed are already existing so we'll definitely be in touch but if I can just ask you all to show your appreciation for Fiona and again