 We're just about ready to start. Yeah, no problem. So, hello everyone. Welcome to this one, one 30 session. Well done for making it past lunch. On the final day. I'm John Brindle. I'm going to be a chair for these, these two 15 minute talks. We won't delay any further and I'd like to introduce Dan Walker who's wakefield. Sorry, wakefield Walker. You did walk them, so that's what I can take to my new talk on on artwork, which sounds really fascinating. So, ddwy'n gweithio. Ddwy'n gweithio. Hello, everybody. I will try my best project as best as I can. Hopefully, you're not all sleepy after lunch, so we'll do what we can to keep you entertained and keep things going. It's a very brief presentation, so I can't go through all the detail in 15 minutes, but there are details at the end if you want to sort of look into this a bit more. So I'm here to talk to you about preparing students and their employability skills to try and get them embedded inside the curriculum. We know this is a common challenge we are all trying to face at the I'm not saying I've got the perfect solution, but we've started on that journey to try and get there. So one of the things which we look at is this comes directly from the AUGRA report. We currently live in a country with 9 million adults with those poor basic skills, even more lacking strong digital literacy. Skills gaps are widening, particularly in those intermediate skills, and employers are struggling to recruit in many roles. Now I can't remember which report it came from, but there was also the idea that in the next 10 years there's going to be 50,000 new job titles that don't currently exist. There's going to be a big gap coming up, which we need to try and fill as best we can with looking at industry and various other partners to try and support with that. So we had a challenge, we had several, as I'm sure most universities do at this particular point. We need to raise that awareness and employability. We need to focus on that idea of implementing as much industry-based experience as possible, and in some courses that fits a lot nicer than it does in certain other ones. We need to look at the idea of developing curriculum and skills, but that's across multiple disciplines and doing that cross-disciplinary approach if possible. We need to make sure, if we're going to put the system in place, it works with the wider systems, we've already got our University of Lincoln. So we need to make sure our policies align and everything else goes with it as well. We need to make sure the course leaders, the experts in that area, have those wider opportunities to design curricula, which suits the needs of those students and how it all functions. And we need to have a little bit of a go as best we can to try and develop the knowledge which students have about their own transferrable skills. One of the things I speak to students quite often about is the idea of you have all these skills you're developing, but that's actually not very clear on what those are as they go through their course. And when they get to the end of their course, they're not very sure how they can transfer those skills over to new careers or new career trajectories if they want to. So I'm going to ask you a question. It's only a very quick 30-second think-pair share to the rest of you. Who should be involved in employability-slash-curriculum design? I'm going to give you 30 seconds and we might ask for some people to give some feedback to give you a better warning off you go. Hi, yes. Come on in, no problem. It's nice to see. There's some chairs over here if you need them. As I say, for people online, if you want to just have a bit of a reflective exercise at the same time, feel free to. Feel free to, no problem. So I'm going to draw us all back together. I was going to do my typical primary school claps and repeats, but I'm not going to go for that because that's probably a little bit too young for this audience. However, does anybody have any ideas about who should be involved in employability and curriculum design? Who's got some things they'd like to just call out? There are no wrong answers, I assure you. Careers, absolutely brilliant. They are experts on campus. Why would we not utilise them? Students and columns. Yes, absolutely. Alumni and students are vital to this because they're already out in industry getting all their expertise while we don't want to use them bringing back in. Employers, absolutely. You've got to work with the industry connections that we've got, and especially with working careers. We've got so many wide-varying connections. PSRB, yes, you're absolutely right. My brain's stuck for a second yet. Our professional statutory regulatory bodies, we've got to work with them to make sure we get to the right points. Anybody else? Library, yes. I'm going to be honest. Pretty much the entire university should be working together towards these goals. It is one of those things that is a cross-disciplinary and cross-professional boundaries type of collection which we need to come together. That is what I targeted to try and do at the University of Lincoln. Easy task, right? No problem, sorted in two minutes. Not quite, it took a little bit longer than that, but we're working on it as we go. So our solution was Arc, and that stands for assessments related to careers. Now this is tied in with assessments, particularly because obviously those are our end points. We're looking at our learning outcomes and what skills students need. We look at that assessment endpoint and work out how they need to get there. So the idea is by designing good assessment points at the end which are authentic, have those industrial skills based inside of them. As we build up towards that, we can clearly see a pathway for skills development and knowledge development as well as getting those industry-related ideas into there as well as best we can. So Arc, if you haven't heard of it, which I imagine most of you probably haven't, that's absolutely fine. I will be waiting for my photographs of fame later. But realistically, we've based it around P21 framework, which some of you may know, some of you may not. P21 framework is essentially this diagram here which focuses on various different skills that students will need to get from the very beginning of their concept of literally learning in nursery all the way up to when they're an adult and they are going out into the real world. We've got to look at things like life and career skills. You've got those learning and innovation skills to look at critical thinking. We do a lot of that university, but it's in which we're trying to embed younger and younger as we go. Look at those communication skills, collaboration, creativity, trying to embed those as much as possible. Coming from a digital education background, you'd obviously expect me to have this in here somewhere, but it is the way which the future is going, so we need to make sure we've got those skills embedded as best we can. And all of this is underlined by core educational principles. Standards and assessment, curriculum instruction, professional development and learning environments as well. The idea should be that by using this as a basic framework, we can then start building towards generating the right skills and knowledge for these students. So here's what Arc is. There's a general process which goes with it. Just to let you know, we also do the ABC curriculum design. If you've heard of that one as well, we partner them together. And I tend to say Arc will go first. If we can look at the end point assessment, because as we know, we're generally outcomes-based planning people. We tend to look at the end point first and walk our way towards it. So we have a pre-meat with the academic. Pre-meat with the academic is fairly basic as soon as it goes back. Now I'm just going to do it on here. There we go. There we go. The pre-meat with the academic is vital but very basic. We gather loads of materials from careers. We gather materials from LinkedIn Learning because we've got access to a jobs careers area which tells us what employers are currently looking for and what skills they're looking for. We look at various websites which tell us current skills that are needed for that particular trajectory, of course. We bring all that data together and have that conversation with the industry professionals who are on that course. We can then talk to them about what their requirements are, what their needs are. If they've got PSRBs, how we're going to utilise those, and how we're going to put all of that information together. What we also do as well is we bring in careers themselves. Careers actually do a sister workshop which looks wider at the programme and getting invitation for industry speakers to come in all various of the bits as well. So we try and look at as many optional possibilities as we can going through. Now that pre-meat is also a really good chance as well for the programme leaders to set their own barriers and their own requirements. So if they suddenly say, you know what, this is the best course last year, this was a particular key problem, we can then make sure when we're designing all of these we're focusing on that as well as the employability factor. Then we have our three stages of arc. The art workshop lasts about 50 minutes to an hour depending on how you want to go about it, and it focuses not only on core, good assessment design and the principles that go with that, but it then focuses on widening that out and looking at the idea of authentic assessment. Now at the start of the workshop we talk about what authenticity means, have that open discussion with them, talk about industry-related ideas, and then we pull it all back together and get them to start designing from there. So you might not be able to see it very well, and this is clearly not where I'm going to stay over here. So I'm not going to run you through all of this, but the idea is it comes through three core stages. Initiation, now it says about assessment design type. Remember in P21 that framework which I showed you? They had those four Cs, and we've broken down core skills based around those four requirements, so it fits into that P21 framework. And then we've got a very basic list which self-generates based on which area you choose about the different types of assessment design you have. Now that works directly with our policies, our Office of Standards in Quality Partnerships. They have a big document about the types of assessments we can run at the university. I've aligned all of those to P21, so when they choose them they get a drop-down list just to get them to start in an idea of what that could be, because all of this is about innovation and change. The second part, that innovation part, we do have some of the statutory requirements which we expect. So we have a very strict policy in our university that a certain amount of credits you have to have a certain amount of assessments maximum. You can't do more than that. So I've always got that information just over here, so if there's 15 credits they can do one or two assessment elements, for example. That's there as a reminder, so I don't have to go scanning through all the documentation of the university regulations that we've got. We've got a little bit of a detail about the activity which we've had that open discussion with during the session as well, and then we start looking at that idea of how is it going to relate to careers and employability. Now authentic assessment is something which does not have a definite definition. It's constantly fluid, it's changing. The way in which I tend to try and explain it and please feel free to tell me if you've got different definitions so I'm always looking to add to it as we go, is the idea it's either replicating or replicating the skills and knowledge you'd use in the real world. As long as it links, that will be enough. So we talked to them about how they're going to make sure this assessment is authentic as possible and given those skills and knowledge. I don't know about anybody else, but when I do curriculum design I find quite often formative assessment can easily fall out the window if we're not careful and it's something that actually a lot of people don't fully understand and grasp the reason why we do it. So I've literally broken formative assessment because we don't need that because quite often we don't have that link between the formative and the summative so therefore they're not getting that knowledge development and that feedforward opportunity which you're looking for. Yet again, talking about that feedforward opportunity we've got the question. How does your formative assessment support the overall summative assessment? Really hammering home, this is how you make sure everything links. Now we also have, if you need it as well, learning objectives you can put over there on our ABC job which we've got and that will all pull through as well. But for this next part, this is where all the employability skills comes in. So we have here a list which has been generated from Weth, from Jisk and various other sources are basically about the top 100 skills that most employers are looking for and we use real-time data so I try and update this if I can every six months or so just to see what's fresh and generally you've got core skills and you've got technology skills. So if I go through that particular element and think for my assessment what do those students need to have as a basic transferable skill to get to the end? Now I'm also on a bit of a mission at my university which if you want to join and put flags behind it, go for it. What I'm looking for is trying to make transferable skills as transparent to the students as possible. So I'd love the fact that if you came through here and worked out what skills they were going to need for that assessment, you put that inside and it's not saying they're going to develop them completely but it gives them the opportunity to develop those. And then the rest of it is all really basic stuff. You know what resources do you need what technology can help you with this are there any trainings that you need and of course we've got the idea about accessibility and inclusion, how are we going to make sure that this is supported for everybody. So all of those go through and then at the end, once everybody's done theirs we can generally do multiple modules at once which is always really useful. We then have the sharing session where most people do with ABC where you come back and talk about your curriculum maps we talk about our assessment design and this is where actually most of the magic happens because people start talking to each other making those connections and where possible we try and get as many disciplines together as possible see if there's cross disciplinary connections. Doesn't always work, we try our best to get that sorted. So once they've done all that process the idea should be that they've then got a really solid assessment which will fit our requirements as a university and we'll start thinking about that employability journey. So we've already talked a little bit about the fact that we are collaborative cross-departmental working. Here are just some of the ones which we tend to work with and it can be a two-way direction or one it can be one-way depending on what we're doing. We've got careers, they've got things like the Lincoln Award which is how students get a sorted award based on employability skills again as they go. We look at graduate outcomes data, industry connections we've got things like LinkedIn learning so when we have at the University of Lincoln we look at a list of skills. We look at the colleges and talk to our employability leads employability working groups and get those industry opportunities in there because they're the experts. Obviously we've got to talk to our quality department to make sure it fits the requirements of the courses. Obviously this education team which is where I'm from we are a big driver in this and making sure that it's pedagogically and technologically sound as best as it can be and it fits with our IBC and then we often look for external sources like JISC and WEF to try and pull all that information together but by combining the workforce and getting out and getting the experts to bring that knowledge together we end up getting a more I suppose condensed but easier to understand and grasp medium for the students to go through. So we had our challenges here's how we're trying to meet them. Raising awareness of employability and those wider technology skills we're working with multiple departments and looking at co-promotion of those key skills and services and we're looking at those key frameworks and wider datasets trying to inform our planning as we go. Implementing industry based experience working with those career teams and looking at data yet again to understand looking at development of curriculum and skills we're looking at that design package with varied accessible frameworks and trying to where possible cause collation between different subject experts. Integrating with current systems obviously we just created it to fit with our own policies and regulations on our own current guidance which we've got ensuring the experts have got those wider opportunities so actually yet again working in collaboration with those different departments working with those students as co-collaborators it's quite often useful as well and then trying to develop student knowledge making those skills as transparent as possible so they have the knowledge they need to then develop. That is the end of my presentation so any questions anybody? Ah there we go well luckily I have a lovely email address for you there if you want to you're very welcome to go is that this one? Sorry we don't have time for questions of course because they're 15 minute talks but I'm sure Dan will take any questions so thank you so much for that it was really insightful.