 And welcome everyone to this session, which promises to be a really interesting one. It's advisor, broker, consultant, distributed leadership roles that steer rapid learning technology adoption. And we have four contributors today, but I think most of the presentation is going to be given by Tim Neumann. And he's joined by fellow colleagues from UCL, Leo Havman and Clive Young. And really looking forward to hearing your presentation and your particularly analytic approach to looking at distributed leadership. So over to you, Tim. Well, I hope it's analytic. So welcome everybody. So I will take you through a number of slides that you should see on your screen now. I'll keep the introductions short. Clive is the team leader for digital education advisory at UCL. So that's a small team that advises people really. And Leo is one of the digital education advisors in Clive's team. Myself, I am associated to Clive's team, but I'm actually employed as a lecturer at the UCL Institute of Education, one of the faculties for which I'm also performing the role of a faculty learning technology lead. We had quite a bit to go through. I will affect the construct a story throughout the pandemic and how we evolved and how new roles came into being, but then we'll focus hopefully on four specific role profiles and what we can learn from that, which should be quite interesting. I do have a few takeaways for you to take home after the end of the session. And if technology works, then the slides should have just been tweeted under my account. So you can download them and you'll find more links there. So when the pandemic hit, we were not really starting from scratch. Every university across the country or any other organization, further education, whatnot, had already engaged with learning technology to some degree, I assume. That's no different to us. So we were not starting from scratch. And what you see on the screen now is that we had the digital education department, which comes under the wings of what we call information services division. So it's effectively the techie guys and the digital education team had like four or five sub teams and advisory is a big part of that. So that's where Clive teams were situated. Then not within ISD, we have an academic development team called Arena and they do all the teacher development stuff and so on. But we did coordinate and collaborate as well before the pandemic, but there was a slight barrier between the teams as it normally happens. These are the central teams. Now, the departmental teams might have had their own local learning technologists. Most departments did not actually. We did have an institution-wide e-learning champions network and some other people were collaborating and so on. But there seemed to be a pretty big barrier. We didn't really know centrally what people were doing in their departments and probably also vice versa. But overall UCL has never been a full online institution, very much face-to-face oriented. So that's the starting point. When we all had to pivot to online learning, we had to move fast, obviously. So there were a lot of opportunities to grab there. Firstly, there were some central roles added to the team and these were roles that were long-sought. We added learning designers who were ray, which we didn't have before, but suddenly we found the money because these type of people were needed. But then we also launched a big assessment project and enhanced media and so on. And that was centrally, but locally as well. Faculty's added learning technology leads, departments added connected learning leads and every department had COVID mitigation coordinators and so on. And these three roles were suddenly appearing in every department and that is then really a centralized cascading idea of communication. So we suddenly had people who we could easily identify in each department, in each faculty and the communication has been strengthened to a great deal. I mean, it might have looked very top down also, but thanks to these new structures, we also had a way to feed information bottom up, upwards the chain. So great opportunities to establish new structures. Now then when we hit the winter lockdown, so that was 2020, 2021, so at the turn of the year, we were taking some time to reflect and analyze the current situation. And it was particularly myself who did a bit of analysis, both in my own faculty, the Institute of Education, but also for UCL as a whole. And I had engaged previously in an analysis based on these 10 areas, which I have adapted from Garrison and Kanuka's nine areas that I identified was as crucial for technology adoption. And you can read more on these links on the slide. We presented on this in 2018, so you can now see the differences on how this evolved. And it's actually good to have this kind of analytical framework and reuse it time and time again because then you also have a longitudinal component and can see how things change, which is really interesting because then you do not lose all the good aspects that you did in the past. And I'll come to that at a later point, but really crucially from the technology adoption and from the advice on learning technology perspective were these four role profiles that you currently see on the screen. So in the arena team, the academic developers, they were leading on teaching and teaching approaches. The Digital Education Advisors, Clive's team, was leading on policy implementation issues. It's more than that, but this is a core area which was effectively owned by that team. The Faculty Learning Technology Lead already distributed in the, we have 11 faculties at UCL. They provided leadership in learning technology in their faculties and each faculty has at least one department, sometimes seven, eight, or I don't know how many actually. In the departments we had connected learning leads that were sort of reported or being coordinated by the Faculty Learning Technology Lead to provide the leadership in the departments. And with these four roles, we ran focus groups. We disguised them as panel discussions in order to automatically have them as kind of professional development events, but essentially these were focus groups for us to collect data in order to help us with our analysis. And on the next four slides, I'll tell you a little bit about what we learned from these. So Arena, as mentioned, they are providing teaching practice development and their leadership remit was really to make large-scale changes to the teaching practice at UCL overall. And I think it's best really to distill what came out of the focus groups in the final question that we asked the focus group participants, which was, do you have any tips for your colleagues or for teachers, tutors and so on? What do you want them to do? Or how to help? There was a question on the sharing slides. Go to my Twitter feed, and I'll actually paste the link towards the end of the session as well. So the key tips from the Arena group was trust your students and to lead them because their students can actually take up some of what you're teaching and become partners in learning. And then also connect on a human level. Humanize it, because especially in a panic situation where we did not have the face-to-face interaction, people still need to see the person behind and they will appreciate that. And this is what keeps engagement going and what prevents dropouts, really, and prevents frustration and so on. Now, the digital education advisors, again, the main remit was to advise on pedagogic use of technology, but then also to embed good practice and organizational policies institution-wide. So these were the broad, big advice areas in learning technology for the whole, that were applicable to the whole institution. And the key tips were, do number your course content or your course activities. Provide some structure and put numbers to the individual steps and then specify the expected durations for each activity in order to clarify expectation because that will, in the absence of the immediacy of what we have face-to-face, you need a bit more facilitative structure in order to clarify expectations of what we have face-to-face. You need a bit more facilitative structure, scaffolding, as we call it, and numbering of steps and providing the anticipated learning time helps a great deal. So structure and navigation there. But also be mindful of over-provision. It's easy to overload learners with activities and so on, I have never done online learning before. And we tend to overload the students this way and then they get stressed out and we do not want to do that. Yeah, so the faculty learning technology leads, again, mentioned they were in their faculties and their key tips were, if you don't know, ask. Your job is to be an academic not a technologist but then also simplify. And they observe that tutors often don't need choice or don't want choice because it's too complicated. They want what's appropriate for their context, they're currently finding themselves. And then follow a model or a shared approach if you have one because it also helps with consistency and replicability, scalability. And finally, videos do not need a high production value. Focus on a good structure and focus on what you do well and it does not need to look like a broadcast from the BBC. The connected learning leads, again, they were doing their stuff in their localized departments and their key tips were, find out what students think and strive for consistency in an S-wide group as you can manage, program team or maybe the whole department. Make your path create a learning experience. Don't ignore the past and this is what I mentioned earlier. We have done really great stuff in the past. Don't forget about it, especially when you're onboarding new people, when new tutors come onboard, induct them into what has happened before so that they don't need to reinvent the wheel. But most importantly, find out what works for you and show students that you care. So, and there are good comments coming in in the YouTube channel. I tend to ignore this for now but let's summarize. So the focus group summary, well, if I wanted to summarize this in as few words as possible, then I would like to highlight that all of the groups collect the importance of networking and coordination of working together with each other, finding the right partner who can solve your issues and then brokering the contact between tutors and the person who can help you. So building a network is crucially important for those distributed leadership roles that requires knowing who can do what and then also passing this information on. But the most important thing, even when we talked about technology in the focus groups, the talk always revolved on people. And that, in my view, is a key aspect of being a leader. And when you're starting on your journey as a learning technologist and you're probably focused on a particular project and so on, keep in mind that when you are taking over leadership then it's really about managing people because you need to get people to do some stuff, sometimes things that the people themselves do not want to do. So leadership, I've listed a few aspects on how people deployed their leadership and you can read through them on your own. There are things like expertise information which is kind of stagey bit. I'm the expert and I'm telling you what to do but most, more often than not, it's about trust, empathy, empowering people, leading by example and inspire people. So these kind of soft things. In my own leadership training I was doing my master's, I heard about butterflies. We want people to evolve from caterpillars into the most beautiful butterfly. A fly if you have a moth in the group. Right, so in terms of career opportunities and thanks for the comments in the feed. In terms of career opportunities you can read it for yourself. There are organizations who can help you but the typical digital education advisor of faculty, learning, technology, lead role is really what all looks after. The connected learning leads, they were all established academics so they probably find more meaning in the advanced HE, HEA fellowship scheme and then for the arena type of people, education, development, there are CDAR who also have a fellowship scheme. But I would emphasize that digital education leadership is not an exclusive domain of the learning technology profession. There are people from all sorts of angles coming into that but that is actually just emphasizing the message of old overall. So two slides left, conclusions. The first bit of the conclusion is this analysis activity according to these ten areas there is really useful to identify gaps but also identify areas for this distributed leadership. Where do I need to place the people to lead on the distributed aspects? So this analysis activity is really worthwhile doing. And finally, interview your distributed leaders so these focus group activities they are really great and they give you so much information about leadership development. And finally, leadership or distributed leadership really correlates with aspects that are tackled in the CMOALT scheme, HEA fellowship scheme, CDAR fellowship scheme. So there is lots of correlation going on. And what we found overall this distributed leadership of placing people at different points provides us with a structure that helps us adapt continually because we are totally aware that change won't stop. Even when we get back to some form of normal this normal will be different and evolution will keep going on. And that's the importance of having a leadership structure that helps respond to this new context. So there are the links where you can find more information and I will stop talking there so that we can have a few moments for discussion. Thank you. Thanks very much, Tim, for a really interesting talk and for keeping to time. So just looking through the comments that have been coming in certainly a question from Peter Bryant early on which I wonder whether we can have up on the screen that was asking about where does agency fit into this structured approach? This is probably a point where I can also bring in my colleagues, Leo and Clive. And that is perhaps a good question for Clive if you want to tackle that. Yeah, Leo made a point in the chat saying a lot of what we have to do is through persuasion onboarding people into some of these discourses and helping them move forward. So in terms of leadership we don't have a direct command and control. So the agency of people is always critical to what we're doing. One of the things that we've found in now is as Tim said, the environment has expanded a lot so that community is now huge. So our role then is to sort of like central people and how do we kind of manage that? How do we organize that community? How can we turn it into a community of practice? What kind of guidance do they need from us? And in some extent they are running ahead of us in many areas and we're sort of kind of catching up. So that is something we are trying to kind of get our heads around. People have learned so much over the last 18 months and it's really to some extent consolidated in that and learning from each other and sharing and so on. It's all kind of normal community practice stuff but in such a distributed community how is that going to work in practice? That's our challenge next I think. Thank you Clive. As seen in the chat there were also lots of echoing of the tips that came out of the focus groups on digital learning. So it was good to see and also appreciation of the leadership skills. There are really nice set of leadership qualities that you showed on the slide as well. Sorry if I can interrupt that because I just spotted a comment in the YouTube chat about other literature. I mean this is probably not terribly new stuff but it does confirm what has been written before and when I started reading about leadership and so on I find myself always going back to a book from 1994 that is How Long 27 Years From Now by Greg Kearsley Education Technology Leadership or however that's called. So this was one of the early learning technology focused leadership books and in 27 years many of these things haven't changed very much. Interesting to know. I think there's a kind of a something that's come out of preparing for this presentation actually is how do we help people develop in these areas. As Tim said there's many, many different people involved with different kind of roles, different job descriptions and so on but how can we help them to kind of move forward professionally in these particular areas. We do quite a lot in CEMO for example but that's really just part of the story of how we do it. And this is something again it's something where I know there's not answers but more questions but how can we help people to see a path forward and recognise the skills that they have acquired over the last 18 months. There's a question related to that from Deborah Arnold which we can perhaps get up on the screen which is to what extent was distributed leadership supported and recognised by the formal institutional leadership. Hello Deborah. I think one of the things that I would note about that is that the new roles that were created were actually referred to as leads. So the faculty learning technology leads and the connected learning leads in the departments. And so it was seen I think really key by the formal institutional leadership that these roles had a kind of a leadership role to play despite not necessarily being managing colleagues. Yeah the naming of these roles is very deliberate. The actual, the way they were appointed though was through the you know through the departmental system so it's you know calls to heads of departments who nominated people and so on so there's a kind of buy-in from the institutional point of view right from the outset. And when the faculty learning technologies came in eventually departments would give some funding to start them off they eventually had to fund those. So again there's a commitment from the from the faculties you know and when people have to pay real money for it then you can see there's a commitment from the faculty level. If I may come in here because I am performing the role of faculty learning technology lead and I had a very similar role before so in some way my role was just renamed but this formal recognition that you had effectively equivalent in other faculties that gave some form of well authority really so people would suddenly listen to what I say and I would not need to go to them begging to listen to me and begging to you know provide advice to help them really but they were coming to me and I actually had to change my own leadership style approach at this point because I did not really want to be seen as this authoritative figure to tell people what to do and that effectively is something that comes through in the words empathy and trust building and so on so it's really trying to be on to portray yourself as being on the side of the academics and really try to make life better for everybody while acknowledging the difficulties and then trying to figure out what to do about them. Thank you, thanks Tim for sharing that. Clive did you have something else to add? I'm just going to say that although all what's said is true we do actually have a slightly kind of guidance role in there as well we have obviously university policies around things like accessibility and the baseline around the virtual learning environment and that's the thesis of areas that we're quite heavily into so as well as trying to get everyone kind of moving on we're trying to try for the students this kind of cohesive experience as well so there's a number of different aspects of it we're guiding people along a particular path but we have a kind of idea of what path often we want people to go down in some areas. Is that right Leo? I think that's fair to say but I think that there's a lot of I think what we're trying to do is provide a structure within which there's quite a lot of flexibility. Thank you we've come to the end of our time here there was another question in the chat which hopefully you can from Matt East you can pick up in discord after the session but I will thank you again for a really interesting presentation lots for us to think about and discuss in discord after the session Thank you Thank you