 I'm...so...good morning. Now good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming along to this session. I'm Elaine Huber, I also work at the University of Sydney with Peter and I'm going to take you on a bit of a journey through a self-reflective journey of mine. I've worked as an educational developer for around 16 years Ac o enwedig o'i gynhyrchu'r projektyn hyn yn hynny, ond y gallwn gweld rwy'n gwybod y ddau am ymlaen nhw'n gwybod. Rwy'n gwybod ymlaen nhw'n gwybod y ddau, ond rwy'n gwybod atiau'r dweud, ond rwy'n gwybod ydweud rwy'n gwybod ar y llwydd, ac rwy'n gwybod i'n gweld ymlaen nhw'n gwybod ar y proses. Dwi'n gwybod i'n ei wneud i gweithio a chael chi o'r gwybod trunsfymus. I'm sure you've all been there and you've tried it, you've been part of it. We all know about the chaos that erupted with COVID and the complexities that that's brought into our transformation journeys. But what I just wanted to touch on briefly is that this word transformation and transformation can be quite small and quite simple and can be very personal or it can be huge and large scale and obviously that example that Peter was sharing there is definitely the latter category. I'm going to share three of the bigger categories but I have obviously and I'm sure you all have too worked with a lot of people on that smaller scale transformation because really we're all on this innovation curve and it depends where you are on that curve as to the size of the transformation, the size of the change. So I also will use a reflexive lens if you like. I'm sure we're all familiar and we all know about the importance of reflection particularly with our students but I particularly like this quote, I mean obviously reflection's been around for quite some time. Marina Harvey wrote this one, Marina's a mentor of mine and she's done a lot of work in reflection but it's really about learning from what you do. And I'm going to use a 1990s because this is the 30th anniversary of ALT paper to structure my reflections so Driscoll did work in the nursing field actually and just use these questions of well you know what happened in the situation, so what you know understanding the context and then perhaps now what thinking forward about what we've learned from that. So I'm going to talk about three projects, they're all at universities in Sydney where I've worked and the first one I'll go into more detail in a moment about each of them but they're pretty much university wide or in the third case at the business school it's a faculty wide transformation project but as Peter mentioned our faculty is like a small university, it's rather large. So I think one of the important things before I go into the detail of each of those projects is to think about what success looks like and yesterday there was a great presentation by some colleagues from Liverpool University, I don't know if they're here, but they were talking about how they'd garnered perceptions from staff and students about what a successful VLE might look like and I think it's really important before you start any transformations to think about how do we know it's something's been transformed if you like and lots of these different projects that I've worked on have used different criteria but I do think it's important to measure them and I'm sure you could probably add to that list and I invite you to if you're online, if you're at home and you want to share other ideas in the Discord chat please do but these are some of the ones that I've come across in my journeys. So before I go into the detail of the three projects one last thing, challenges. We all know there are a multitude of challenges when we're working in this transformation space in this change management space but for me these are two of the biggest challenges that I've come across and still do and we know that change takes time and that it's time consuming to take part in a transformation project of any size but how do we get buy-in from our academic colleagues who are already pretty time poor, they've got lots of things going on they're teaching, they're researching, they're doing their community outreach how do we get them to add on to that to change their practice and to think about innovation in different ways and then the second thing to me is not just our academic colleagues but how do we bring other stakeholders on this journey with us how do we ensure the success of the project and this comes through from my, I did a PhD in evaluation of innovative projects so you know for me it's really important to get that stakeholder buy-in so that anything that you evaluate could then be implemented in a much better way so you know talking about, talking about students, about industry colleagues at the library, the IT departments all of these people who have a stake in the success of a transformation project so a little bit on to each of the three projects the first one was at Macquarie Uni and it was a very standard move between learning management systems we call them LMS but you call them VLE I think and we moved from Blackboard to Moodle and our new Moodle incident was called I Learn so we hired a big team of iMovers because they were doing the lift and shift of the administrative side but it was a big team that was led from the central learning and teaching unit we tried a self-determination theory approach where we really were aiming to, a bit of a Trojan horse we're trying to lift the digital capacity and capability of our staff through this move between VLEs we utilise faculty champions we developed bespoke resources we decided not to go with the standard Moodle resources but we developed our own we offered drop-in sessions to try and speak to people's time availability so they could drop in whenever was suitable for them and the result of that project where we had 18 months to get ready and on day zero we switched over to Moodle and it was quite a seamless transition it had been hard work for the 18 months to get everything ready but it was pretty good so what did I learn through that project? that was back in 2011 we started and for me I led a big section of the team in that project and that value of teamwork and getting the right members on the team was critically important just this regularity of meetings and everyone groans when you hear another meeting but just really about updating people on progress we had traffic light system about how particular units of work were coming along and developing the resources for the different levels on that innovation curve so there was a lot of people in the middle who just needed to know how to use Moodle and what the basics were but then we also had the people who were at the top of the innovation curve who were the forward thinkers who already knew all the basics and wanted to try something new so we developed resources at three different levels for the different approaches and we developed a suite of exemplars which really worked well because that expression that you can't be it if you can't see it well this is very true in edtech if you can show people what something looks like it helps them visualise it and come along on that journey and obviously communication we had a faculty liaison role like one person's role in the team was to be that touch point and keep answering all of their specific questions and making sure the communication channels were open so fast forward a few more years and I moved to the University of Technology in Sydney and I was part of a very large transformation project there the diagram is a little bit detailed but basically each of those five arrows were sort of stages in the development or the transformation process so it was about ensuring that students were able to quantify their learning goals or make sure our learning outcomes were aligned and well written in our courses, in our curriculum ensuring that students had good access to content and knowledge and our content delivery methods were accessible it was about creating those authentic learning experience being interactive and immersive obviously feedback was critical making sure everybody was giving lots of opportunities for students to get feedback in the process of their learning and giving them an opportunity to reflect so we called this sort of approach if you like university wide approach learning dot futures the dot was very important but really this was again led from the centre of the university from central learning and teaching unit but we really sort of offered staff lots of opportunities to understand these five pillars if you like or five ways of teaching and learning and we spent a lot of time socialising we didn't expect everybody to do everything all at once and in terms of measures of success for this university it was very important to get this student feedback those quilt levels of satisfaction that Peter mentioned that's a national measure they score very high on those and international awards were very important for that particular university and they did win a few so what did I learn through that process well for me it was very important to realise well the importance of context so whilst we had that general approach we allowed each of the faculties to apply that in their own specific ways so I actually worked with the faculty of science at that time and helped them develop processes that worked with their ways of working and they felt spoken to because as scientists they felt they were very different to other parts of the university and they are in terms of what they needed to change I found the faculty of science through some money at it which really helped the importance of working closely with ICT to have them on board with us to move things forward celebration of people doing good work and examples again was another success factor for me or important for me and I also learnt about bringing students on the journey through this project so it really was an approach to flipped learning and students didn't like it they didn't like that back in 2014 we started this they didn't like that they had to watch stuff and do stuff before they came to class they didn't understand the value and our teachers didn't really get it either so they weren't telling them how important it was the idea of doing it in this way was so yeah really important to bring students along and help them understand why you're making a change so third and final project was the connected learning at scale project which you've heard a lot about from Peter so it won't go into too much detail has he mentioned these three pretty basic underpinning pillars if you like that really you can then apply and adapt to different contexts so we do have a dedicated team leading this project forward whilst we started this in 2019 we were obviously disrupted by the pandemic but we found that it helped it actually helped people start to think about changing and to start to think about new ways particularly around principle one about delivering content and how to interact more with the students and we took a strategic approach so we started with all of our core units our foundation units and our capstones that everybody had to do so we changed those first and then we worked and we worked with them over 18 months which we called a deep touch approach we then during the pandemic we trialled a light touch which was just changing one or two things for a lot of units and now we've settled into a sort of a medium touch where we work with staff over six months so it won't go into any more detail on the project but what did I learn from that evaluation is really important getting human ethics for capturing data so that you've got this evidence to show people that you've collected it rigorously and that this is what people are saying co-design is the top thing for me getting all of those different voices it takes longer but you do get a lot more from it again context matters it's been throughout all of these three projects you need some basic foundations like our principles but you need to be able to apply them to different contexts and give people the opportunities to see them in different ways and to do that we developed a website called the classdesignpatterns.com class with 1s because it's connected learning at scale and in that we've collected this huge amount of data and we have been able to distill the top I think we've got the top nine problems of teaching at scale on our website and then you can go into each of the problems and then you can look at different patterns so different solutions to that problem and then within each solution you can look at how it's been applied in different disciplines in marketing or in finance and see how you might be able to then adapt a pattern to your own context rather than saying this is what you need to do to fix your problem there are lots of ways to do that so they were some of the things that I've learned through that and just to finish off I would like to tell you about I came across this just recently and in terms of my reflective journey about what makes up a good team and I've said this all the way through the team is what makes a good project and a good transformation and you might be familiar with this actually there's a QR code if you want to read up more about it it's about different roles that people play within a team and I feel that I've actually played all of these roles throughout my career I started off very much in that bottom right hand quadrant as a systems thinker I was an engineer I started out as an electrical engineer so I'm really able to see a bigger picture but also drill down into the micro as well and sort of work across silos and that's been really important and you need someone who's able to do that on your team I think the next thing for me would be the designer and maker I was an educational developer for a really long time and a learning designer so you need people on the team who kind of understands the power of design and the ability of what tools can do for us and who's able to sort of make those things happen and then I guess I feel I'm also a connector and a convener I think you need somebody who's got good relationships and is able to sort of bring people into spaces and bring the right people together at the right time from different backgrounds and perhaps join the dots to make a bigger movement and then finally that you definitely need a leader and a storyteller and I think you've met our leader and storyteller this morning in our project Peter is definitely the big ideas person who comes along with let's try this, let's try that and I'm learning about that and it's about not just telling a great story but explaining why it's important and bringing people from different levels and also having the tenacity to see the work through to the end so my final slide is just a few final thoughts again this goes back to that Driscoll paper that I mentioned at the beginning three important things around reflection so reflection isn't always about changing you might reflect that what you're doing is really good and I think coming to conferences like this you can see what other people are doing you can benchmark yourselves there's always good things that are happening and we try to tell in our transformation projects that we're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater we're just going to pick the good things that work well and build on them think about your own practice and your own innovation doesn't always and don't make too many changes at once because that can be very disrupted so yeah that's it from me, thank you Do we have a mic for the audience or do we need to repeat the question? Yeah let's get a mic for the audience so we've got some time for questions so if there are questions from the audience I'm happy to run around talk show host style and yeah we've got questions okay it could be for me Elpita because you wouldn't want me going on the stairs okay how are we doing? do you three want to collaborate on your question? or thanks very much those are very interesting talks as always the question I have is this is very progressive especially within the context of the UK so what would you say to those how do we upward manage because some of this may take good move from the top but sometimes it needs good move from the bottom as well so I'm not really clear what your question is so you need buying from the top and from the bottom no if I can interpret I think he's asking how do you get leadership to recognize this is necessary and then give you the resources to actually do the thing but also sometimes the leaders in question may not have all the knowledge so that if they don't feel they have all the knowledge they can't do this and they might need to push from the bottom if they make sense upward management is what it's called I think in management speaking I think that there's two parts to this the leadership part is having the right rhetoric and narrative to talk to leaders about we were very lucky we walked into an environment where we generate an enormous amount of revenue for the university and that revenue potentially was at risk so to talk to the leaders in that terms we want you to invest x amount of money to protect x amount of money and that kind of worked but the more important part was how do we convince not just the leadership and convincing the dean wasn't too hard but convincing the university was harder but how do we convince our academics to get involved and I think that's one of the biggest challenges so that's the bottom up bit because if you take innovation normally you can say look I can get 25% of my people doing stuff without a problem and those 25% of people will keep innovating every time, every time, every time give them more stuff, they'll do more and more and more and we're going to get 25% at the top that will never innovate I'm not going to move them no matter how much money how much support, how much bribery we give them they won't move the real group of people we need to work with is the 50% of people in the middle so a lot of those people in the middle are not going to innovate or not going to want to be transformed because they're scared because there's risk there's precarity in higher education we all know those things and student feedback is one of the only measures that universities use to measure the quality of teaching and at the heart of that part of what Elaine's team does is make those people feel comfortable to do that and it's because they're not on their own they're working in a team of co-designers they've got ed developers they've got learning designers they've got media people they've got students all in that group with them and what the school reassures them so I'll call myself one of the leaders what the leaders reassure them is you know what, it's going to take 18 months and we know that your student satisfaction scores are not going to bounce up 6 months later it might take 6, 12, 18 months your fail rates aren't going to come down immediately but we give people the confidence to get involved in that and know that punishment is not the outcome of change that actually support to change is far more important we could probably do one more and Marie, do you want to... I'll monopolise the microphone then you can find Peter later I was really struck by the phrase transitional space Peter was really resonated in terms of we don't own students they pass through our institutions and we forget this an awful lot we believe, because we're stuck there all the time we're static in time and they're not and so I really appreciated the way you are building a way of learning that isn't what we do I suppose and really respect that transitional space that they pass through and they leave traces behind themselves in the form of those videos so I just wondered whether that kind of thinking about it's a life transition as much as anything else as much as a learning transition had fed into any of the thinking Without a doubt the brief story I'll tell is our Vice Chancellor is relatively new, he's been there about 2 years he always talked about when we're in various buildings in the university that he remembers when he was studying at the university in 1986 sitting in these rooms doing exams and how important that was to him and it's almost like he'd never left the university he didn't transition and he was trying to find ways of associating himself and it just wasn't landing it was landing with staff but wasn't landing with the students and so earlier this year I bumped into him at a leadership retreat and I actually just said to him okay can you imagine, his name's Mark Scott can you imagine Mark if the 18 year old Mark Scott sitting in that lecture theatre in 1986 can you imagine if someone like you, the Vice Chancellor had walked up to you and said thanks for being here at the University of Sydney I hope you're going to enjoy the education that we've designed for you it's going to be based in 1954 and he looked and he thought about that for a second and went oh that, I get that now he said what and I think what he was trying to what he finally worked with him worked through because he'd never been a Vice Chancellor before or worked in the university or this is his first job in a university as Vice Chancellor and what he started thinking was what is the bit that he needed to take with him from his university experience it wasn't sitting in McLaren Hall it wasn't an exam and then he started realising like he's doing a redesign of the library and the whole plan changed he took away what he thought students wanted and went and asked them so that notion of transition is not just about the fact they passed through our space but it's that bit that you said what bit do they leave not just what they leave at the institution but what do they take with them and then how that then becomes part of their life journey and defines their life journey and I find it interesting how people think through that but the Vice Chancellor which I think is not common there's a yes or no question here so did you create a dedicated strand in the project to address the cultural change I assume them in the last project but no is the short answer but yes in terms of so our team, our change team is made up of educational developers and learning technologists and learning designers but our edg developers do pedagogical research so their academics as well and they really did a lot of work around understanding the context and bringing together sort of the things that would help and help move people forward so it's kind of in their remit and they act a bit like project managers they bring all the people there's connectors in that quadrant diagram so we didn't identified as change management we probably couldn't because we're in a business school and there would be people who say that's our area but we did it surreptitiously through our edg developers I would say thank you both so much thank you all for coming that's it