 Welcome to this morning's presentation. I hope you've all enjoyed the keynote that we had this morning. I am Alex Chapman. I'm the Head of Technology Enhanced Learning at Middlesex University, and I'll also be presenting with my colleague Phil Miller from Moodle Rooms, who'll be jumping in at the end of my presentation. So the title of the presentation is Increasing VLE adoption at Middlesex University, but actually when I started to look at that title and sort of put my talk together, I realised it wasn't necessarily around increasing just adoption of the VLE, but actually more about enhancing the way that we currently use our VLE. So that's what I've tried to focus the talk on, and I'm going to look at that in kind of three strands. The first of those is looking at the sort of strategies and the structures that we've put in place to support our academic colleagues within the schools in using technology-enhanced learning, support learning and teaching. Also how we've tried to leverage institutional-wide projects and external drivers to sort of drive the use of technology-enhanced learning. And then thirdly, along with Phil, we'll talk a bit about sort of the future and the role that data and data analytics might play in shaping how we can make better use of technology-enhanced learning to support the curriculum. Just to give you a bit of background about Middlesex University as an institution, we just stopped the road in London at the end of the Northern Line. We have about 40,000 students, and the majority of those are based at our campus here in London, but we also have campuses in Dubai, Mauritius and Malta, which I know sounds a bit more like a holiday brochure than it does in a university campus brochure. But these are the places that we have campuses. We also have six schools at Middlesex, ranging from media and performing arts, to art and design, law school, business school, science and technology and health and education. So it's a very sort of wide breadth of subjects that we support. So that gives us a very diverse student body, but also a very diverse academic body as well, both in terms of their makeup but also in their digital skills and their digital literacies that they come with. Middlesex as a whole has had quite a long history of using technology-enhanced learning to support learning and teaching and curriculum within the institution. For those of you who remember WebCT Vista, we started with that back in 2003 and obviously moved through those cycles of upgrades to WebCT Vista. And it wasn't until 2013 that we actually moved across to Moodle. So we're quite recent converts to Moodle ourselves and that was a two-year transition and we worked with Moodle Rooms as a Moodle hosting partner to make that transition. But we feel it was a platform that was going to put us in the best position to be able to move forward with what we were trying to do with supporting learning and teaching as an institution. So Moodle is our core environment and some of you may be familiar with this kind of diagram but it's really there to show our academic colleagues within the schools how we support and what different tools and technologies that we support as part of that environment. So Moodle will always be the core of that environment where say things like our summative and formative assessments take place. And there's obviously a series of other plug-ins that we have as part of that whether that's our e-portfolio system, whether it's turn it in for assessments, Adobe Connect for online classrooms and these kinds of things. And then we have that recognised and recommended layer as well which may be tools that sit outside of the institution that we would fully encourage our academic colleagues to engage with the news as part of their delivery but that we may not be able to fully support in terms of creating accounts for and managing those systems. So it's more about supporting staff and how they can embed those within the curriculum. And again often the recognised and recommended layers, the tools will move in and out of those and form part of that wider tool set. So I work within a central service which is the Centre for Academic Practice Enhancement. So we work centrally across all six of those schools and all the campuses that we support and we're there to support not only technology enhanced learning but also the development of learning and teaching across the institution. So we very much work in what's called a sort of hub and spoke model. We're a mixture of academic developers and educational technologists and we align an academic developer and an educational technologist to each of those schools to support those schools. And that's an important partnership because it allows those individuals to get a real understanding of the cultures and the disciplines and the subject specificities of those particular schools that they support and feel like they're part of that school and that they're also part of what we do as an institution. So it gives us that institutional overview but also the ability to be able to sort of drill down into what's happening within those schools. But what we realised was that we weren't the only team within Middlesex that also provided this kind of level of support to the academic community. There's a much wider support network that exists out there to support academics in delivering their curriculum. So what we wanted to do was to create what were sort of terming sort of virtual teams and this really came out of our move to Moodle and that two year phased project. And it's the idea of pulling together these different teams that provide academic to support both colleagues and students within the schools. So they're led by ourselves in the Centre for Academic Practice Enhancement but we also have our liaison librarians who deal with our online reading lists and our e-book projects. We have our student achievement officers who are there to provide support around retention and progression agendas within the schools. We have our employability service and also our learning enhancement team who are obviously there to provide academic support to students within their modules and programmes. What we wanted to do was pull together this wider sort of team to support our academic colleagues in their endeavours of introducing technology and also wider learning and teaching agendas within the institution. So I've actually borrowed this diagram to consume a life cycle for purchasing but actually I think it explains really well how we work as these virtual teams within the schools. It's very much about having that influencing role and that overarching institutional view of what's going on to be able to deliver both internal projects or to support external agendas and I'll talk a bit more about that later. So that's very much how we see our role as influencing and a big part of that is raising awareness with our colleagues within the schools. What we often hear is from academics that they don't know what they don't know. They're not sure about what's possible, the potentials of the technologies that we have that we support. So a big part of what we do in these virtual teams is to make staff aware through sort of good practice sessions, staff development sessions, what is actually possible with what we're doing. But that's all within the context of having an understanding of the beliefs and values of those individual schools so it's coming back to that idea of a hub and spoke model with those individuals working very closely with programme teams. So they're able to contextualise sort of institutional-wide initiatives but also external projects that may come from changes in government policy for example for the school and work in partnership with them to then obviously come up with some sort of solution and deliver the outcomes that the institution and the schools are looking for. So what these virtual teams are really aimed at doing is kind of breaking down the silos that often exist within institutions, kind of creating a network of school-facing staff who can support academics in using technology-enhanced learning but also delivering curriculum change and curriculum development. It's about building that knowledge across the institution of the different roles and expertise that exist within these different teams and being able to develop sort of examples of good practice and share that not only across schools but also within the individual schools themselves. And it allows us to give a sort of more holistic approach to our staff development activities within the institution. A sort of good example of this is some of the drivers for enhancement that we're now beginning to see that come externally from the institution. So I'm sure a lot of you are aware of the changes to the disability students allowance. We've also got the upcoming teaching enhancement framework and obviously student retention and progression is a big issue for most institutions. So we're looking at how we can leverage these kinds of projects, big institutional-wide projects to really drive the enhancement and use of our online learning environment and technology-enhanced learning. And one of the areas that we've identified that is kind of similar across all these areas is this idea of developing an inclusive curriculum. And obviously the online element to that plays an important part in delivering that inclusive curriculum. So these virtual teams are now starting to look at how we can work with academic colleagues within programmes to start developing resources such as video, key concept videos that deal with certain aspects of a particular curriculum and related powerpoints that we're then delivering through the virtual learning environment. It's about making these resources available to our students before they actually turn up to a session so they're able to get some of their thinking formalised before they come along and make the most of those face-to-face sessions with their academics. And then it's about putting pre- and post-activities, things like online discussions, before and after these face-to-face sessions to then again try and formalise some of that learning that's taken place. And it's moving towards things seeing students as creators. So making use of tools such as wikis and blogs or things like video assignments and digital stories to allow students to play a part in their own learning and actually create resources that can then be used within that course for future students. So this is what sort of one of our course spaces looks like to one of our students. It's kind of broken down weekly with the resources in there. But I think the important thing here is to highlight the different teams that are involved in pulling that together. We're up-fronting that to our students but also to our academics, that sort of wider support network that's available to them through our online environment and through the staff development activities that we have. So we have a link through here to our student achievement officer and also the liaison librarian for that particular school. And this is replicated from sort of course level down through each of the courses within that school area. So another part of what we've begun to look at is using data analytics to kind of predict what students might be doing and the kind of support that they might need within our virtual learning environment. And it's something that's very early days for us. And it's something that necessarily Moodle isn't particularly good at. It gives you a lot of very detailed course level information but if you want to look at a student across a programme of study it's something that's actually more difficult to do to get that kind of picture. So we're using a data visualisation software called Tableau and it allows us to pull in different sources of data from different platforms across the institution. Moodle plays a big part in that. But we also have stuff from our attendance monitoring, the swipe cards that students use to access libraries and these kinds of things. So these are just some of the sort of dashboards that we've created. And our sort of next steps is to see how we can then drill down into Moodle to pull a lot of that sort of course level information out where the students are missing assignment deadlines and these kinds of things to predict if they're going to be struggling and then put support mechanisms in place to support those. I'm now going to hand over to Phil just to round off the presentation to talk a bit more about what Moodle rooms offer with regards to data analytics. Thanks, Alex. So my name is Phil Miller, I'm with Moodle rooms and I want to just share briefly one of the things we've been working with Middlesex for a long time and analytics is a key driver. One of the messages that Alex brought forward is how do you leverage other institutional initiatives to drive adoption of technology? And so we as the largest Moodle provider in the world we've got thousands of clients and we're hearing more and more analytics are important for us. What can we do for analytics? So we are actively looking for institutions to partner with on building better analytics solutions. We bought a technology a year ago called X-ray Learning Analytics which came with six data scientists and we've now added to that. So we've got data scientists around the world that are looking across all of our clients. What are the trends? What are the drivers within the LMS that we can use to help institutions make better decisions? And I think the important thing right now that we're seeing across our institutions including Middlesex is trying to leverage analytics is such a hot topic right now. It's important that those of us that are in charge of or that are using the LMS or are involved in Moodle every day that we leverage those initiatives that are happening across the institution to become part of that research, to become part of those initiatives so that we can make sure that we're getting the right data to the right people at the right time. If you're interested in talking about your analytics projects whether or not Blackboard and Moodle rooms can support you in that, happy to have that conversation. We're downstairs. Happy to have you talk with Alex and other ones of our clients that we're partnering with. So I know that we're on very strict timetables and I think we are exactly on time right now. So that's it for us. So thank you to Alex for sharing his time and his expertise. We're happy to be here and support as well and we'll pass it back over to whoever's next. Was that perfect timing?