 Okay, hello everyone. Can you hear me? Okay, through the mic. I'm sure you can hear me anyway, but is it coming through on the mic? That's the main thing. So others who are joining us remotely can hear. So thanks for coming to today's session. Only this session between you and drinks. So nice of you to come, particularly with the weather as it is. So this is a session around leading people in a time of complexity. And we've got two talks in this session later on we'll be hearing about utilizing learning technologies to enhance conference organization and facilitation from Joseph Spink and Jamie Morris. We're going to kick off with a talk called should we be doing that it's enhancing digital education support through marginal gains. And here to talk about that is Leanne Fitton and Stephen Williams from Manchester Metropolitan University. So thanks everyone and over to you. Wonderful. Thank you very much Tom. We've already gone through the title there so I'll read it again myself and Leanne are both senior digital education specialists. And we are part of the digital education team at Manchester Met, which is also part of the learning. I've forgotten the name of the wider team already learning enhancement educational development. We're a new team. Now what you can see on the screen there we do focus on leading on the pedagogical impact of technology and teaching learning and assessment. We've got some of our main themes and topics we cover within our sessions and our one to ones, many that I'm sure you'll all be familiar with. But you can see where we're a large scale university. We've got just under 40,000 students and 2,300 staff, and we've got eight faculty specialists to in each of our faculties that support staff. We spread out our support through a variety of different areas. So we have our one to one sessions, we have our bespoke sessions, our faculty based sessions, but we do also have our tickets, which hopefully will provide a little bit of context for today's session. So when we was discussing the type of support that was given, we was really interested in why people were accessing different types of support. So we did a bit of analysis on that. And we looked at 1400 individuals almost and looked at whether they access tickets so whether they sent tickets in, whether they did one to one so they booked appointments with us, or whether they attended training. So we looked at that we found that the people who attended training and log tickets, only six and a half percent of all of those people use both of those mechanisms of support. So most people were either doing training but they're not logging tickets or they were logging tickets but not really come into training. And when we discussed that we tried to think of why that might be. The thing to be that the tickets, which is quite a large proportion of what we do is the kind of first aid support someone somewhere has got a real issue, they're having a problem, their students are having an impact, something's gone wrong and they want someone to help them sort it out. The point of work is really to try and understand what's happening there to see whether we can prevent any of those first aid type of queries, whether we can build the skills before that happens so that they're not having that stressful situation later down the line. So with all the tickets that we've received over the past few years, it mainly started around March 2020 when we had a significant increase in the amount of queries we were receiving from those around the university. And I'm not going to point out why that might have been an increase at that time. But one of the things that we had with our previous system which wasn't really a system was everyone just got individual emails is very personal. You had a named contact. However, when using the ticketing system, it made it very transparent for us as a team, maybe easy for us to be reactive to what was coming through. And that did appear quite impersonal to the academic staff we were engaging with. The one main thing that really helped us and helped us with today's presentation is that it gave us that visibility of all those queries we were receiving that were previously just in people's email inboxes. So we started playing around with what we could do with that data. So we was looking at how many queries came from each of the different departments and things like that to start with and that helps us to have more informed and farm decisions. But we really wanted to get to the root of what was happening, what could we improve because it felt a bit like we was coming together and we were saying, oh well this has happened and this has happened and we've got such a wide ranging kind of portfolio of systems of processes that we support just to give you a number on that we've currently got 158 codes and that's been refined. So that's 150 158 things that people have come to us and asked us about. And so it really is very varied. So it's quite difficult and complex to get to the the knob of what actually is happening. So what we did was started kind of coding each of the queries that came in and we developed this coding system. And what it meant was that we could really think about what we was getting queries about and when and then from that we could come up with interventions to deal with them. So sometimes it might be an issue that's a technical issue, something's broken, something's not working, we'll see a sudden spike in queries around that. We have process issues where people are just not quite sure which teams should be going to or what's happening there. It could just be an awareness issue. And then the approach that we take to deal with that what kind of intervention we put in place it might be that we request some kind of technical development and having the data. How many people have asked this question how many people have had this issue has been so valuable for making those business cases for those communications. It's not just what we're communicating but when we're communicating how we're communicating we can really track well we did that communication and it worked. So that kind of thing is what we've been doing. And then we have an intervention. And this is an marginal gains approach so we're just making tiny tweaks, but then monitoring the impact but then overall is really helping to continually develop our service. So this is a bit overwhelming so don't get too too worried but this is a big picture of what all of our kind of tickets are about we've got seven main broad categories you'll see that Moodle admin is our kind of most popular ticket query. Remember these are the first aid kind of supports the pedagogy supports they're going to drop and they're speaking to them in faculty specialist so they're happening elsewhere. These staff access queries we need to make that better so they're not having to have that issue at the start of year and go through that. And then we've also got assessment we've got questions about training questions about video how to use Moodle and then other kind of technologies was after another section don't you somewhere. So yeah as lians had on the previous side 42% of all the tickets we received were about Moodle admin really access staff wanting to get access to a particular area or they wanted to add someone to the area similar for students they should be enrolled into an area automatically. But above the screen there only nine over 99% of enrollments were successful. It's actually pretty much 99.9%. However, because there's so many enrollments going through the system. When we actually look at the queries getting still getting about 1700 queries come into our team asking us just an admin question of I need access to and taking us away from that real work of the pedagogical value of technology and embedding that in teaching learning and assessment. So just on the side of the screen here is part of the complex process that staff are getting stuck in trying to find what they need to know to get someone into an area or get themselves added to that particular area. So after we analyze this, we took an approach to try and improve the processes. So we had a look at our guidance and took a look at the tickets the frequently asked questions that we were receiving and started to build that into something that was more concise for staff and easier for them to approach. So we've got our self help tool really quick and simple just branching scenario stuff can go online through the internet, click through the process, some simple questions, they ever get pointed towards a team that they might need to contact if a unit lead needs to be changed, or they actually get taken to a video guide takes them through to a two minute process of what they can do to resolve that query. The other element was the system itself, the previous system was 12 years old it was developed for only to be used for six months, but it did your job pretty well so it was used for 12 years. Now it's being redeveloped should be more intuitive for staff and hopefully will help remove some of those queries again. And to hopefully inform that these queries are going down the past two years worth of data we can see that there is a drop we do have the usual peaks at the start of year start of semesters as we would expect a little bit around the recent market assessment boycott, but we can see those areas dropping down and hopefully with the other initiatives we can see them drop down further. But we took a similar approach with lecture capture as well so having the being able to do the little thing and then see whether that works, we was able to track the change over time and this is the lecture capture link so we found that we had a bit of confusion with some of the terminology that was using around opting out and opting in so people were getting a little bit confused, and we was able to really do comms that were targeted at the right time. So we had a little bit of confusion over teams that was the title of our presentation is should we be doing that will some of these things isn't technically us but we can fix it for people so having that knowledge and go into that team and saying, we've got this issue people are a little bit confused about this can we send comms at the point of the change being made in their data. So just some reflections, this was quite an investment in time to do this I do think it's paid off because it's probably saved a lot of time overall for people where problems have just gone away that they hadn't even thought about this because we've identified and fixed it. We do need to be flexible because of those other teams and also we're trying to automate as much of this as possible it is quite long winded but we are trying to automate it. Focus on the winds as well, this is great for identifying issues but it's also great to say to know that great training session that you did, look at what's happened because we've had less queries on that kind of topic afterwards. And then using the data to refine the process can be quite helpful here and this is a mistaken email that got sent out and then a load of auto replies triggered the ticketing system and then we have to close them all down that was a really fun day so. A couple of hours work at the end of the day of me and me and removing tickets that we'd created ourselves so we didn't need the system to tell us that but if it wasn't us that caused it. We would have noticed something went significantly wrong in July and we could have reacted to it and maybe put some comms in place for July next year because we know we'd give a demand for it. And so that's our very whistle stop tour of the work that we've been doing to try and improve the service that we offer and and thank you for joining us at the long at the end of a long day on a hot day as well, but any questions. Thank you. Instructions to make sure that even the question is a mic that say. He wouldn't mind. Do you sometimes find that when you run the training course there is a spike in tickets relating to that specific topic area afterwards as people try and use it and get to a point where they've they've go right I'm not going down my capabilities I can't remember what the training course told me on this. Yeah, and yeah it works both ways so sometimes and queries go away because we've we've kind of trained and then they know what to do so they don't need to do that. Sometimes we do get a spike in queries particularly around a new technology that people might not be using and we do have some tools that actually don't need. We don't really talk about them when we have these action planning meetings because they're just so easy to use and things like that the apps, the box pad let that kind of stuff. We've always been like oh why are you we're not talking about that and it's because they're using the other support mechanisms and they're just so easy to use that they don't create a lot of work I think. Moodle the kind of things that we've spoken about today they've built up in complexity over time and with these these other apps so we don't have that same level of complexity I don't think it's anything. I just think on the the app side of things where we've got that reduced number of tickets we did have a slide on it but we removed it because it was getting a little long. But a lot of that I think comes from that element of choice staff are taking that responsibility with choosing something as part of their practice, whereas Moodle the VLE. You've got to engage with what you've got to provide that detail to students, whereas with the apps that they're able to go I'm going to engage with that I'm going to look into using that myself. And I think it just provides a little bit more flexibility for staff. Just just to quickly add one last point and just going back to your question. It's not that we want to remove tickets we don't we don't want to remove them completely we just want to shift to doing things that are going to build people's skills rather than firefighting after something's gone wrong for them. Okay I think we've got time for one more question if there is one. Hi, I was vaguely involved in something relatively similar in a previous institution one of the big issues they had was getting staff to stop sending emails to people they know and use the ticketing system. How did you handle that. I think we will still have that issue. So when we first introduced the more kind of formal version of the ticketing system. Everyone had auto replies on their emails to say, you're contacting me over this, you need to go through this system and we were pretty strict on it just because of the amount that was coming through. I think that has stepped back a little bit. But by looking at the tickets we're still getting similar numbers coming through. But hopefully they're improving in the types of things that were being asked, but I don't think we'll ever get rid of that we do have other spaces like the teams spaces. So we've got teaching and learning community and teams with about 1100 academic staffing, but that's a peer to peer network so they kind of resolve each of the query sometimes as well. I think it's just about being consistent and continually reinforcing the message as well both with the team and with the academic colleagues who are requesting support. So if they do email you obviously reply nicely to them and they obviously still have a question that they want. But then by the way, did you know that if you email this email address, it'll go through the whole team and then if I'm off then you'll be able to get the support quickly. And just reminding them of the benefits of having that central communication point rather than the teams where if I'm offered two weeks and someone's emailed me directly they're not going to get a reply for two weeks and then they're going to go around and just making sure that we're. We're consistent with it because if you if you if you go outside the box once then they'll come back to you and just they'll be upset if you don't do the same thing again. And sometimes we just log the tickets for them and just say I've logged it for you next time if you could do do this but yeah it's just really tricky balancing. Giving good service and also managing how we keep all of these things in check.