 And I want to introduce our presenter today who is Dr. Julie Voss from the Department of Digital Education, Learning Enhancement and Development in the University of London. And she is going to be talking about how you structure your TEL support. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Julie. Thank you very much. Thanks Emma. I will just get my slides shared. Okay, hopefully you can see them and hopefully everyone can hear me okay. I have got a second window with the chat. So if I look down, I'm looking at the chat. Hopefully I'll remember to look up all the time. So welcome to January 2020. For those of you who saw the advert on Twitter, we've travelled back in time today. We're pre-pandemic. I hope you're all doing all right. But actually I think we'll switch forward. So you may not have known. I am actually a time traveller. So this is me. And I will now fast forward us to January 25th, 2020. So I'm Julie Voss. I'm Head of Digital Education at Sydney University of London. I'm also a senior lecturer in educational development. I've mentioned in the chat if you are tweeting today. If you could use the hash tell models and hash ultsy hashtags. And if you want to follow me, I'm at Julie Voss. So I'm a former student of the Lancaster University PhD programme in e-research and technology enhanced learning. And today I'm going to talk to you about my research into organisational support structures for TEL in UK higher education. Please do introduce yourselves in the chat. It would be great to see who's here today. So I'm going to be using poll everywhere as well. I have shared a link for that in the chat. Hopefully you've seen that one. Okay, so what I'm going to do is just give you a brief overview of my research and then I'm going to focus on three areas of the research. So we're looking at TEL support structures, location of the TEL team within the institution and then TEL governance. It's going to be fairly interactive. I'm going to give you some tasks to do and we will be using some quiet time where you'll be able to work on the tasks and then we'll be discussing it, what you put into the padlock. So the aim of the research was to investigate TEL support models within UK higher education institutions and it focused on these three key areas. So one is the types of TEL support model and how those TEL support models have evolved over time. Then it was looking at how a particular model will help or hinder the successful adoption of TEL within the institution and then looking at whether TEL adoption was influenced by organizational culture. So the research took a three-stage exploratory design approach and the results from the first stage informed the design of the second stage and stage one was an online survey that was sent to the Heads of E-Learning Forum. 33 institutions responded to that and then interviews were carried out with five Heads of E-Learning which probed further into the themes that had merged during the survey stage. Now the research took place between sort of 2015-2016 so it's going back quite a bit but it'd be useful today for me to see how things might have changed since then especially as a result of the pandemic. So following the data analysis there were several key findings that emerged and I presented these at one of the old winter conferences as part of a tweet chat and that focused on similar topics to the ones we're looking at today. And then I also did a directed content analysis of the USISA Technology Enhanced Learning case study so these accompany the USISA TEL survey which runs every two years and I used these themes to identify similarities and differences between my findings and the case studies. So in terms of the key findings so support for TEL within UK HGI typically evolved organically primarily by increasing the number of staff supporting TEL but there were concerns that existing teams were being overloaded as more technologies were taken on and so typically teams started off as a VLE team and then as things like lecture capture plagiarism detection tools came along they were expected to take on those tools but maybe with limited additional resource. What we started to see was institutions were then taking a bit more of a rational and strategic approach so thinking about the technologies that they're supporting and how they can best support that. And a lot of that came as part of a wider review or to have a particular focus on TEL. Larger teams started to evolve I'm talking about maybe teams with 15 or more staff and they started to specialise in particular areas so this meant you might have a team who focus more on the support side of TEL you might have others that focus more on some of the project side but some of the challenges around focusing in these specialist areas mean there's less variety for staff and I think one of the people fed back that sometimes their support staff just felt like sort of ticket monkeys just constantly responding to support but not having that opportunity to look at other areas and explore projects. Local support is something that has either come about because either the what we would call the sort of the central or the primary technology and arts learning team were at capacity or in terms of like the support they could provide or it was a result of increased demand for specific support so it could be for a particular initiative like putting a fully online program. So local support is an interesting one and it's looking at how the central teams might work with local support. And this has parallels with this model from Nichols and Anderson which is this core and custom model. So you would have the core activities so supporting technologies for the whole institution would be done more centrally but where you have more bespoke or custom activities such as developing a particular masters program specialist learning design skills they might be done more at a local level. The issue arises though where there's this overlap between the central and the local teams and what I looked at was how you try and overcome that through things like good working relationships through good governance of tell. So most institutions in the survey identified themselves as what we've termed centralised which means that there's like a single central unit combining a number of different support functions for tell. But when I explored this in the interviews those institutions who felt they were centralised typically had what was called a primary tell team but they worked in partnership with other departments so they might work with IT or they might work with educational development and there might also be some form of local tell support that wasn't coordinated by the centre which could be the teams or individual members of staff so they weren't actually just one central unit they were a mixture of units all working together. There were some devolved structures when I did the research and I don't know if they still exist so Manchester University had a very devolved structure where it was all based in the faculties and where I used to work at Imperial we had very strong faculty teams and I worked in a central e-learning team within IT so mainly devolved what we had good connections between the centre and the faculties. And since I did the research we've also seen the rise of separate distance learning units with very large numbers of staff which support the development of fully online programmes so King's Online, the team at Coventry are good examples of that and the USISA tell survey, the 2020 data showed that 21% of institutions had a separate distance learning unit. So this is a sort of mock-up of what this support model might look like so this is an example so this could be where the primary tell team is based within an IT department and they have good links with an educational development department but they might also have some individual learning technologists who they don't really know much about and then they might have a strong local team within their medical school that again they have a good connection to. Another way of looking at it might be you've got a primary tell team who are based in an educational development department they have good links to IT and then there's a local team within their business school and this is fairly similar to the model that we've got at Citi where we have a digital learning unit within our business school who focus primarily on the fully online programmes for the business school. And this is just another way of looking at it you could be based in a combined service at Library and IT again with a couple of local learning technologists that you don't really have much to do with. Okay so if you haven't already opened up Poll everywhere then if you could go to pollyv.com. I'm going to do a poll just to find out how well this sort of tell support structure describes that of your own institution. So we're thinking about this primary tell team so mainly a tell team maybe who works in conjunction with other units and there might be some local tell support. Okay so your options there are does it describe it perfectly is it very similar, is it fairly similar or is it not at all similar? So it's great to see some results coming in. Okay so we've got quite a few results we've got two say it describes it perfectly the majority say it's fairly similar. So what we're going to do in a minute is just look at your own structures and share those and then we can have a chat about how similar it might be to the model. Okay so for those where you did say it was different perhaps you could just write in what the differences are between the structures that I proposed and that of your own institution. Okay so some interesting comments coming in so no local faculty teams at all that's interesting no local teams there's only two of us yes it's amazing how the size of teams vary across the sector there are some which are very small and then there are some which we have over 50 staff a lot of them are the ones that do more on the learning design side. Okay so thanks for that feedback what we're going to look at next is asking you to map out your own tell support structure so you can do this on paper or you can do it electronically the idea is to pop it into Padlet if you don't want to draw it then feel free to just write it down I've got an example here of cities one that I've tried to draw out so we're based in the digital education team and I've actually split that into three different areas so we have a school liaison some people talked about having people who are sort of contacts in the central team that work with the schools so that's what we have there we have an operations team who do a lot of our support and training and core support for the central technologies and then we have a projects team who focus on some of our more larger scale strategic projects like things like learning analytics, digital accessibility and then we have links with other areas so we have a link with IT because they provide all the services that we support we have a link with our digital learning team in the business school and then we've got a new stem digital academy at City in our School of Maths, Computer Science and Engineering so we're working with them on some learning design stuff. So the idea is map it out, draw it on paper or just write it down into Padlet and I'll share the Padlet link in a minute so that'll be the first five minutes and then after that what I'd like you to do is to there's a document in Padlet I'd like you to have a look at it and again try and map this out think about the relationships that you have with those other units now if you've only got yourself then there's probably not much to think about but yeah think about how you might work with those other units and what is the level of interaction you currently have with them so do you see them a lot, is it more infrequent and what influence do you have over them so are you in the same sort of organisational structure do you have a lot of influence because you both report into the same line manager or do you have sort of very little influence over them so this is a really interesting way of thinking about the working relationships that you might have with those other teams and how you might look at strengthening them because you might identify well actually we don't interact with these people and we don't have any influence over them but actually if they're really important in supporting tell what is it you need to do to try and increase either one of those so I'll share the Padlet link in the chat and I'll give you about 10 minutes to look at that I've got two laptops here so just trying to share that across so take your time I've got some music on I'm not going to play any music for you and neither am or are I going to sing so yeah if anything's not clear then just post something in the chat or feel free to ask that's not a problem and don't worry if you don't get a chance to post it in the Padlet the activity can be quite useful just for yourself to reflect on you know who actually supports tell within your institution and how you interact with them I'm very pleased to see a structure appear thank you Queens Belfast reassuring me that someone is out there doing this okay so you might want to start thinking about your interaction and influence grid if you haven't already started on that one yeah I agree Roger I think by our own paper is the quickest one rather than fiddling around in Word or PowerPoint okay just a couple more minutes on this and then we'll have a look at what we've got okay I'm just conscious of time so thank you for sharing the examples of your structures and feel free to continue adding to the Padlet while I'm talking it's good to see different examples here and different levels of influence and interaction I think we've got to where IT a low-ish level of interaction and also low level of influence which to me seems quite worrying given that we rely on IT to provide a lot of that support I just realised my camera's not on I mean for us I think we've got the same issue in that our level of influence over IT is probably quite low but actually our level of interaction is quite high because we do try and make sure we have regular meetings with them so that's something you might want to look at in the influence interaction grid is how you might change that and where your key relationships are and when I ran this activity before somebody what we did was we looked at where it is now and then where you wanted to be and somebody realised that there was a whole relationship that they used to have a very good relationship with a particular team and that had dropped off and actually that was something she was going to go back and see how she could change so we're talking about those working relationships I've got a couple of questions for you to post your answers to in the chat so how do you ensure good working relationships with other tele-support teams and do you have any formal or informal networks for tele-support staff so when I was at the Imperial we used to run as a monthly coffee morning for all the learning technologists and that's because we didn't tend to meet on a regular basis otherwise there would be some of us who would meet through committee meetings but it was a good way of getting together and often people would share ideas and talk about what they're working on so anything in the chat what do you how do you currently develop those relationships so Tommy mentioned bottom-up communities of practice so at City we used to have an educational multimedia group and it was a different way of bringing people together on particular topics monthly forums for learning technologists I think it's tricky when you it's easier when you're all in the same team potentially depending on the size of the team but when you're quite distributed across the organisation I think you do need those networks to bring people together shared teams there that's good good idea yeah so Natalie mentions a monthly coffee catch-up that's what we had at Imperial digital champions meetings great some interesting ideas through there so I'll move on to the next bit okay so the second team was thinking about the location of tail support so this is a location in your institutional structure but it could also be your physical location within the organisation although most of us are now working from home for a lot of it so the literature suggests that the location of tail support can really influence the perception of tail within the institution so specifically whether there's a perceived bias towards pedagogy or technology and that can lead to issues of credibility for tail teams so often there's this desire not to be seen as the IT team or the VLE people so Land talks about many learning technologists finding themselves located in organisational spaces that are not seen to have what he terms educational agency or to be academic and so there's this discussion around third space professionals we were not academic but were not fully professional services we fit in the middle and a lot of institutions used to have a term for academic related staff but that seems to have disappeared a little bit in some and then location within the department with the teaching and learning focus was felt to be a strength because it provides a greater emphasis on pedagogy and it helps to distinguish you a little bit from IT support but then other people felt that actually in IT it was easier to influence some of the technical developments that might be happening and then thinking about how you might develop your professionalization your credibility through things like professionalization so doing something like CMO or Fellowship of the HEA or even going on to do a PhD I think that that can all help strengthen your credibility but sometimes when you go to help with an issue they still see you as the techie person and it can take time to get staff to realise that you do know a bit about pedagogy as well you almost have to sort of present your credentials when you go and talk to them so what I'd like you to do now is respond to the polls this is a poll everywhere again and just say where in the institution your teleteam is located and if it's none of the ones I've listed then please feel free to post it in the chat okay so it's where is your teleteam located so it's IT teaching and learning library if you're a combined service then I guess you could put other or just put either IT or library student services, local support or other so quite a few other people said other at the moment just pick the one that's closest to what yours is I mean teaching and learning might also be called educational development for example so we've got a few in local support a few in IT but the dominant is teaching and learning it seems okay it looks like the numbers have stopped moving so we'll close that one off so dominant is in with a teaching and learning unit which is great because it really does help with that credibility so a different panel at this time I want you to look at the different areas so think about the area that you're based in but also think about the other areas identify what you would think is a strength or a weakness or an opportunity or a threat so a sort of SWAT analysis of the specific locations and before you post your comment if you could put either strength or S just to indicate so that we know what your comment is about so I'll just post that link in the chat for you so we'll have five minutes on this one so yeah comment on the one that you're based in or maybe think about you know if you were to be based in an IT unit and you're in teaching and learning what might be the strengths of being there what might be the weaknesses of your current area so some really interesting responses coming through here thank you there's definitely the worry about being seen as the techies or people who can fix the printer some strengths around having joined up thinking with other aspects of IT working with colleagues on technical solutions teaching and learning some strengths around some sort of teaching and learning aspects being involved in development programs HA fellowship some weaknesses about being too strongly associated with pedagogy of theory instead of practical tech support some issues about library those in a library being to do hidden away, no visibility for the local support sort of lack of control over systems and deployment to plug holes that the central team should have dealt with that some really strengths about being able to is those working relationships isn't it and understanding what they need locally and that's what some central teams do try to do with sort of the school based staff or school facing staff so where you have those named contacts within a central team who are the liaison between the school and the centre and I think that can help with those feelings of sort of disconnect between a local team and the centre so hopefully you've had a chance to look at what some of the other people have picked and do feel free to keep adding to that I've got another poll for you now so thinking about some of the comments that people have made and thinking about your own area where in an ideal world would you like your tell team to be located would you pick any of these or would you pick some somewhere else quite a few results come in so let's have a look so that's quite a change from the very first question so it looks like a lot of people would move out of IT and probably towards teaching and learning or your own team yeah I mean that's one thing I haven't added in is maybe the option of a standalone sort of digital education team and I think at LSE they used to be quite separate and then they were brought under IT yeah I think there's the challenge of when you're under a teaching and learning you're an IT unit you reflect just that unit whereas actually we're a bit of both and it's really tricky to sort of have your own identity outside of that wider umbrella okay just conscious of time so we'll just move on to the final bit so this is around tell governance so the research identified that linking tell into the main university committee structure was a real enabler for tell developments especially those where policy changes were required because it led to greater visibility of tell amongst senior management all the case study institutions reported having an institutional level committee which governs tell where tell is represented by the head of tell or the equivalent and in addition where such a committee exists tell is typically linked into the university structures are part of a three level structure connecting tell with the top most committee which might be council or senate so this is an example of this sort of three level structure so you might have a lower level committee which would be maybe a tell or an education focus committee then it links into a mid-level one this could be sort of information services or a teaching and learning committee education committee and then you would link up into something and they're all different but you might have an academic board or a senate for example and then in addition to this sort of formal committee structure participants also reported having various user forums project boards virtual learning environment governance groups that would either sit alongside these or underneath this sort of primary governance structure and they were to facilitate some of the more operational discussions but this isn't necessarily representative across the sector now the 2016 you size a tell survey asked about governance and in there only half of the institutions had an institutional committee governing tell so in 2016-20 said they didn't have any tell committees or working groups and that reduced to 11 in the 2018 survey but obviously the number of responses and different institutions respond to the survey but also 70% of those who did say they had something they said it was their teaching and learning committee that governs tell along with the presence of other sort of tell related committees or working groups they might have learning services group or electronic management of assessment group for example so another poll here so how well does this sort of three level governance structure to spot describe that in your own institution so do you have a clear sort of governance structure for tell is it embedded into something just like a teaching and learning committee would you have your own tell committee so again it's does it describe it perfectly is it very similar fairly similar not at all or we don't have a committee governing tell Rachel's made an interesting comment about the committee is that it's sometimes led by academics you don't really have the experience that a learning technologist would have yeah I think you do need to have that representation of the learning technologists on these groups that's key so let's see what people have said okay so fairly similar but actually quite a few of you don't have a committee governing tell that's interesting okay I'm going to stop that one there okay so this is the final padlet so if you could just share the governance structure again if you want to draw it and take a photo or just type it out and if you don't have one maybe just reflect on what you do do in terms of getting new systems approved or policies approved you know who do you report into basically that would be good to know and then do you think it's effective for enabling tell within your institution is there something that you'd like to improve here for your structure so I'll just put that link into the chat for you so Caroline's noted that the rapid response to online teaching and learning due to COVID has raised the tell profile yeah definitely it was the same for us at City you know suddenly I'm being invited to all these meetings that normally I wouldn't necessarily have been invited to so you know it's great and I think that comes back to what we were talking about in terms of location you know often if you're in a bigger unit it's the director of that unit or the head of that unit and if you've got the director of IT attending do they know exactly everything about digital education likewise the director of a teaching and learning unit so it's about how we get that representation for us as educational technologists learning technologists when you know we're having to rely on people maybe slightly up the hierarchy Rachel makes a good point about the value of a committee if they have no power to influence actual practice I mean you could argue that most university committees probably don't influence actual practice but that's probably another topic of this conversation Simon says after months of asking they've got a digital technology and education working group about to be created that's good I think one of the debates people have had in the past and it's similar to when you have strategies do you have a separate committee and strategy for tell or digital education or do you bundle it up into teaching and learning you know but I think sometimes you get a little lost in teaching and learning because there's so many other aspects you just become a sort of one item on a long list whereas at least when you've got your own committee you can spend that time discussing these issues rather than getting five minutes because that's all they've got alongside all the quality issues and program approval and all these other things that happen in the teaching and learning world okay there's an interesting local perspective around sort of the approval from faculty operational committees but then if you require more having to go through central committees yes going through committees that's a lot of time doesn't it but I think some of the challenges we have in central teams is that things can be approved at a faculty level and therefore they can a lot more quickly than we can centrally and that's where you get that disconnect between the central teams and the local teams and some of that sort of frustration that local teams are able to sort of progress things when centrally you can't you've got a great example there you just ask your boss for something that sounds okay we're almost at time but again please feel free to continue adding to the paddlet so all of this was my PhD research and I wanted something practical after that so I developed what was called a framework for action and some of the activities we've done today are part of that framework so what it does is it takes you through thinking about your tail support structure like we've done today so mapping it out maybe thinking in an ideal world you know where it might be and thinking about how effective that structure is currently for what you're trying to achieve in your institution then again what we've done today is looking at your location within the institution and thinking about how you relate to the other teams that support tail then looking at how you identify and support those local needs so especially if you're in a central team what do you do to understand local needs do you have school facing or school based staff or do you have good connections with local learning do they do a lot of the work do you have committees or working groups that you might use so I think somebody mentioned about digital champions so there's different ways that you can identify and support those local needs but it's thinking about what you do and how effective that is and then thinking about the flexibility of your team so coming back to the beginning I talked about how a lot of teams started off as just VLE support and then you're asked to adapt and adapt and adapt so how easy is it for your team to adapt to some of these changes and we've probably been all incredibly flexible over Covid but thinking moving forward as more and more things move online how flexible is your team and how easy is it to get additional resource without having to go through the five or six committees that were mentioned to get projects or maybe staffing approved and then as we've just done thinking about your tail governance do you need to have a committee for tail is that a blocker at the moment not having something where you can discuss these issues so the framework for change is available for online so please download and have a look I know at least one person in the audience has had a go at that and found it useful but that's it from me I hope it was useful I hope it gave you some pause for thought around how your tail teams are structured and something you might be able to do moving forward in terms of changing it so the framework for action will give you a sort of change in action plan as well that you can develop so that's it so yeah happy to take any questions either by the chat or I don't know if you're allowed to open your microphone up hi can I just say thank you so much Julie you've provided a lot of food for thought for this afternoon I really enjoyed that session I haven't noticed any I haven't noticed any questions just comments in the chat but but if anybody wants to we've got a few minutes before we end if anyone wants to put their hands up and you can unmute or you can ask a question and give it a few moments no it doesn't look like there's any questions at the moment thank you so much Julie thank you and thank you everyone for taking part what I'll do is I'll try and wrap this up into a blog post for all and then I can share the padlets that you all contributed to if you're all happy for that and then yeah feel free to go back to the padlets and add anything more I hope it's been useful and yeah feel free to get in touch with me if you do want to have a chat about tell support structures it's one of my favourite topics thanks everyone thanks everyone