 So, good morning and thank you very much for having us here today. My name is Tom O'Mara. I'm going to present with my colleague, Dara Coakley, from CIT, the Transformation True Collaboration Project. So, the partners in the project, I'm just going to quickly fly through this, is IT Tralee, Cork Institute Technology, UCC, Institute of Technology, Carlo and Waterford IT. Now, unfortunately, our colleagues in Waterford IT, Laura Widger and Damien Raftari from Carlo and also Michael Connell from Tralee, can't be with us today just because they're tied up in other events. So, hopefully, they're watching the live stream. We're just going to say hello to them. They're here with us in spirit. They'll probably be texting me questions and suggestions as we go on. So, that's just a list of the people involved. What I did was I just, I literally just cut and paste the information from the teachingandlearning.ie website. So, this is the overview of the project. So, what we were trying to do was we had done some work under phase one and a couple of projects, most notably with CIT and a project called Tell Tools. So, we wanted to continue to build on that work. We wanted to bring together expertise in a southern cluster, HGI's, around the area of building digital literacy among staff. So, I'm conscious of some people here who are talking about students. We're really focused on staff and staff development on this particular project. So, the idea was we would increase the digital literacy skills of participants and provide a sustainable route for the ongoing development. I think we've done that. The plan was we would identify academic staff in each location and facilitate learning. And then these staff would become champions, digital champions. We gave them all a nice pen last Tuesday, we're a digital champion on it. And the project then would document the journey that these champions took. So, hopefully it's a little bit like, I'm going to use the Irish reference here, operation transformation. If you haven't seen that TV program, the idea was we find these champions and we watched them over a period of time. As they grow and develop. And hopefully you find someone that you can identify with. So, the various phases in the project that we set out, starting in phase one, right the way up to phase seven, which is completion on the 30th of June this year. So, I'll go back to these phases again in a minute. So, what we actually did, so that was the plan. So, in December 2015, we advertised for digital champions across each of the five institutions. We then set up a website called digitalchampions.ie and I'll put that up in a minute so you can have a look at that. That was phase one. We selected our digital champions in January. I think that ran into February a little bit during, in some cases. In UCC, we had six digital champions. We wanted four and we had 13 people shortlisted and we selected six because we just felt we just liked the cut of the jib of the other two people involved in the project. CIT had 14. IT Tralee had nine. Waterford IT had seven and IT Carlo had 10. So, we set out with very small numbers. I think we said four initially, but then as we actually started to interview and talk to the champions and look at their needs, we felt, well, we really do need to be supporting these people. Now, I should say in addition to the six, for example, in UCC, we had 13 applicants. We have subsequently supported all seven, all other seven applicants in other ways outside of this project and we see there's a great opportunity to engage with those champions. So, in total, we had 46 digital champions across the five institutions. We developed training plans for each of those champions individually and we started training with them in January, really. And each of those champions, certainly in the case of UCC, had never engaged with us before, so they were completely new. We had very little interaction with them before this project. That was phase four. And then what we did was a, sorry, December week is a typo. That should say, it was a digital week, sorry. Digital week, we ran from February the 24th to the 25th across the five institutions. And you can have a look in your own time at the blob. But what you'll see is that on each of the days, we ran a different session around a different theme in each of the institutions and we recorded it. And we recorded it and put them up online and streamed them. So I'm just going to click on this just very quickly. I'm not going to play much of this, but we use a tool called Panopto to record what we did in UCC. It's an extra capturing system. One of the interesting things about this project was, so I'll just jump in to just going to show you what happened. What was interesting about this was some people use Blackboard Collaborate, some people use Adobe Connect, we use Panopto, someone else use video. It's actually very interesting just looking at the way people use different technologies to actually share the various events that are happening. So in this case, what we did was we ran a session for about three hours. We had the Vice President of Teaching and Learning in UCC, John O'Halloran, Professor John O'Halloran introduce it. And then we had each of the champions come up on stage and just talk a little bit about what they wanted to achieve from the project. And we had a very diverse group of people. I'm not going to play this. You can, as I say, look at it in your own time. And each of the institutions then did something very similar. So we would have seen each of the champions and each of the institutions. And we would have had an input as well. So there was some training on the day. So in the case of UCC, a lot of our champions were focused around the area of video. So we did a couple of introduction sessions on video. So we had people talking about video production, presenting the camera, and we ran follow-up sessions afterwards as well. Back here. So that was phase five of the project. Now around for five days. We provide a training and support. And there's a link there. I'm not going to link out, but that goes to the digital champions site as well. And you'll see some training resources in there. What we tried to do was we didn't want to develop any new stuff, as Sarah says. What we did was we decided to use existing materials. So we use the tell you.me website, which is the tell tools project, which is funded under phase one of the fund. And we also used instructional design at UCC.ie, which is our own website in UCC with learning content on it. CIT would have used their own. Carlo, Waterford and Tralee would have used their own training materials as well. And we shared them with people. That training is ongoing. So with that training started in January, with the digital champions, and we'll continue with the digital champions, really into the foreseeable future. We'll continue working with those champions after this project completes. One of the requirements was for someone to become a champion. They had to engage with us. They had to present a digital week. They had to participate in an assessment. They had to agree to a training plan. They had to engage with us in terms of their training. But they also had to add blog posts to digitalchampions.org. So we want them to document their journey. And we've got that. We've, to varying degrees of success, I would say that some people have produced some really nice blogs and really nice introductions to what they've done. Others were still chasing. We'll be chasing them until the end of June. But we hope someone will continue to add to the blog afterwards. All of this culminated then in a digital champions day a couple of days ago. And I was a little bit remiss in getting budgets back to the national forum because we were a bit preoccupied with running our digital champions day on Tuesday. So what we did was, and just play a short video if this works. It's only one minute long. But they give you a sense of what we did on the day. Of course I can't remember my password for this. Can I? Oh good, set the video. Okay, brilliant. Thanks, Kevin. The online learning project manager here in UCC and I'm the coordinator of the transformation through collaboration project. So today's event was about bringing the digital champions from our five institutions together for the first time in the same room. It was a celebration of the work that they've done over the last six months. It was a chance for them to share experiences, to interact with each other, to network with each other, to learn from each other and hopefully to share their experiences and figure out ways of collaborating into the future. This event is, in a way, a celebration or a marking of the fact that many people here have been on personal journeys. Dr Irene McCormick and I'm a lecturer in media studies in IT Carlo. Shane Cronin from the Cork Institute of Technology. My name is Kate Madden. I'm a nursing lecturer in the Department of Nursing and Healthcare at Waterford Institute of Technology. My name is Thomas Broderick. I work in CIT in the Department of Sport and Leisure and Childhood Studies. My name is Mary Brosson. I'm at Frontier Institute of Technology in Trilly and I work in the Nursing Department. My name is Eimear Thompson. I work as a nurse lecturer in the Institute of Technology in Trilly. My name is Timo Sullivan. I'm a lecturer in the School of Pharmacy and I also teach in the Department of Chemistry. Okay, so what we're doing, I just asked the editor just to put together that one minute clip just to give you an idea of what we were trying to achieve. We ran the day on Tuesday. As I said, we had 27 of our digital champions attend that event of the 46th. We were quite happy with that. We gave, we had Professor John Nocten from Cambridge University over doing a keynote speech for us. John is an alumnus of UCC so we're quite friendly with John. We got each of the digital champions, each of the institutions on stage presenting their works so they all got about 20 minutes, I think it was, to present the work that they had done. We then had breakout sessions where we had themed discussions and at the end we had a presentation where we gave each of them a token really which is a, UCC is one of Ireland's first green campus. We gave them a bamboo pen with digital champion inscribed on it. We only got, we got 50 of these made with 46 champions so we forced spare so we're trying to encourage other people to be taken. This is the carrot that will get people engaged in technology. We also gave them a USB key which is quite nice. And we gave them a digital badge which really generated quite a bit of interest. So it was the first time that UCC is engaged and worked on digital badges. So it was really nice to work with the other institutions and actually come up with this badge ourselves. And we spent quite a bit of time actually talking to the guys from all aboard before we actually put the badge together. So that was an interesting thing to do. We are putting together the final video and it'll be finished by the end of June. We have the entire event videoed. We have all these nice sound bites with the various different champions outside talking about the impact that technologies had on their learning what they hope to do for the future. Key message, what message would they get they give somebody starting out on a journey. We're going to use all those video clips. We're going to circulate them between the institutions so they can use them in different ways across the institutions as well over the coming months. And finally by the end of June we will have updated digitalchampions.ie with all of that content with the videos with the blogs and with any other additional information we can get from the champions as well. So I think Dara, that kind of summary is writing us. I suppose maybe just an additional element was in the institutions are internal events as well which involved kind of let's say within CIT. CIT digitalchampions presented to the rest of CIT staff and WATL somewhere as the UCC in addition to the digitalchampions they saw those were streamed live and the recordings are also available they'll be added to the blog as well all of the presentations which the digitalchampions gave so there's a huge amount of content there I think the remainder of the project really will just be trying to structure the blog in a way that best benefits making this content available and accessible and relevant to the general public and to other educators. So I think it's interesting that we've taken ownership of the blog outside of this project and there's no significant cost to it so it's really about how do we use that content into the future. Okay so we were asked to talk about the local and national impact so I suppose initially what the project did was it initially helped us to develop internal networks of digitalchampions so in each institutions we now have these people who are called digitalchampions who work with each other who talk to each other who share experiences but also within the Southern cluster we've now got people talking across institutions so it was a fantastic lady for example for my teacher Lee who came along and talked about the impact that it had on her teaching in the field of nursing and we had colleagues from UCC in the School of Nursing going God I never didn't know that lady and they went up and made a connection and there was lots of that happening last Tuesday and we see this as a vehicle for lots of that collaboration to happen into the future. Nationally we hope that digitalchampions.ie will continue to be updated and hopefully it'll be an inspiration to other would-be champions so again I'll go back to the operation transformation concept. We were very keen that we would use existing resources that are already out there so we have referenced tellyou.me instruction design website and UCC all of the other institutions websites but we've also referenced all aboard HE as well and various other websites so we're not really about reinventing the wheel here about using that content and providing individualized support to individual academics to develop their own specific skill sets. We think there's great scope to do some follow-up projects we'll be talking to the various institutions we've talked to ourselves and see what we can do together but it'd be great to talk to the National Forum as well about a perhaps a follow-up to this as well and see what can we do how can we build on it. So evaluation okay so just this is my last slide I suppose the project did what it said on the tin which is a great phrase if you're not familiar with run seal in Ireland you know I feel that we actually we did everything we said we would do along the way however we felt the timelines are very short and we did say this when we put the application back in October last year that six months was very very short for us to achieve what we wanted to achieve it meant that organizing events was very difficult and very challenging for us the selection of candidates was very pressured and one thing we've talked about was we had this idea and I think somebody just talked about it this morning but developing an assessment to it so we could actually compare skill sets across institutions we just didn't have the time to do that so we selected academics in each individual institution and the training was very compressed but it will continue in a way it gave us a focus working towards June the 7th but at the same time it put everyone under a lot of pressure I just wanted to make a final point to see the administration of this project was very significant for us so I think if we were looking at in future we would have to have a full-time administrator working on the project especially across institutions just dealing with budgets organizing events that type of stuff