 This session is going to be a 10 minute presentation where myself and my colleague Kerry are here on behalf of our colleague Fiona, who isn't able to join us today, to tell you about some really exciting new C-mold developments. And then we have a couple of our colleagues who've been doing all the hard work in this pilot group over the last six months joining us on stage to share their perspective and also to have an open Q&A with us. So I hope that we'll have, Julie, will you join us as well for the panel, if you like? Yeah, at the end, perfect. So we'll go through it now and we're going to talk about the in-house accreditation pilot and I'll explain what that is in a moment. And then I'm going to hand over to my colleague Kerry to give you also a taste of the exciting developments that are the C-mold course, which is also on the horizon. So next year is definitely going to be a C-mold year. And first of all, just to explain the in-house accreditation. So particularly I can see many people around the room who are very familiar with C-mold. There's many established holders in the room. But our challenge really, given that C-mold is a peer-based scheme, is that we need to meet an increased demand in a way that works within institutions and within their cycles of CPD and assessment. Now, we currently have over 40 different institutional cohorts that Alt is supporting. And scaling up 40 different cohorts and counting daily is just not a viable process. And so we want to learn from a lot of the organizations that have successfully done that in order to help find ways for institutions to deliver C-mold in-house to meet their own demand, but also to gain that professional recognition across the sector. We have been focusing on C-mold as a main pathway because currently 75% or more of all applications into the system are for C-mold. But we are hoping to broaden that out into associate C-mold and also senior C-mold in the long term. Now, we issued an open call for member organizations who had existing cohorts thinking that they would have the biggest chance of piloting this, given that they had a good number of C-mold holders already in their institutions. And we had a fantastic response. So first of all, I want to give a big shout out to all the institutions who have taken part in our pilot since January, working so hard, coming to the monthly meetings, filling in surveys, giving us their time, expertise and energy in trying to make this happen. And that's why we thought it was so important to bring four of them representing different institutions here today to be able to share their views on what the opportunities are, but also what some of the challenges are. And I think for me, this has been really inspiring, particularly in the first phase of the work, which we've been doing, where we mapped out the pilot process and thought about all the different elements of it. We identified a lot of questions and concerns, but also we asked members of the pilot group to share experiences of successful schemes. Now, those of you who've been involved in the C-mold developments for quite a while will know that one of our challenges is its scale. C-mold is a much, much, much, much smaller scheme than something like the Advanced HE Fellowship. You know, even with the increasing number of professionals in learning technology with different job titles who would like to get C-mold, it is still on a much smaller scale than more established larger fellowship scheme like the Advanced HE One. So we've been looking at where we can learn from schemes of a similar scale as well as finding inspiration in best practice. We identified three different parts of the work that we really need to get to grips with, starting with the initial accreditation, where we thought about how would an institution, initially a university, but hopefully in the long run, all types of providers go and become accredited? What would be the cost of that? What would they need to be able to put in place? How can we quality assure that they start off on the right foot? Then we thought about the internal assessment process, and this is probably the part that we as a pilot group spend most time thinking about. We thought about how could it be scaled up? How could the workload be managed? What would the workload be like? If you get 10 C-mold holders or maybe 12 or even 15, how much work would that be for the assessors? Those of us who are senior C-mold assessors in particular know that the workload generated by a purely peer-based scheme can quickly become heavy. So this is one of the things we thought about a lot. And we also thought about the support and resources that Alt needs to put in place in order to support the institutions. We had some exciting conversations about how members could help each other, do peer learning, and how critical friends could play a role as well. And then we thought about it in the long term, how can we quality assure that process? How can we make sure that the recognition that C-mold has established over the last 10 plus years remains very strong? How can we help internal biases? How can we help balance out what might be very acceptable in one institution versus what is totally unacceptable in another? This was some of the questions that we asked ourselves. And I want to share some of those results with you shortly, but also to say that in the second phase we built on that consultation, again through monthly meetings, and we looked at how can we use our new C-mold course to help provide a lot of that training initially for candidates, and hopefully in the long term for assessors as well. And this second strand of the work is really important, and Kerry, in a moment, will come up on stage and tell you more about that. But we also looked at how we can put all of the input that we received into practice, because there was a lot of rich input that we had, and it's been very challenging actually to think about what we need to put in place before we can even do the initial pilot. So given that we have quite a small staff team, there's always a question of where do the resources come from before something even becomes operational. And I know that our new CEO, Billy, shares my passion for C-mold and its importance, and I think we're going to really try our very best to make the work that's gone into this pilot become an operational reality as soon as we can. So I want to share, before I hand over to Kerry, the report and the recommendations that have come out. Now, this report is quite long and very detailed, and what we wanted to do is not edit the voices of our members. So we've really put all the feedback that we had, every single comment, into the report. So when you have a look at that QR code and scan that and have a look, you can really get a flavor of the discussion that we've had since January. But just to summarize, in the interest of today's session, here are the recommendations that we feel come out of this report, and I think we've had really positive feedback from the working group so far. First of all, to develop existing guidance and criteria and resources, including really importantly the C-mold documentation and guidance for assessors and candidates, because we're really mindful that we need to ensure that there is a transparent, consistent and fair assessment process. Secondly, we need to consider how we can provide a very clear point of contact for institutions, particularly the new institutional leads that are going to be running these pilots and hopefully the scheme long term, and set out very clearly from the beginning what support Alt can provide for in-house accreditation, as well as giving an estimate of institutional overheads. For most institutions that we're looking at at the moment in our cohorts, we're seeing C-mold holders in single numbers going through the scheme within a sort of six to nine month period. So at the moment for most institutions, this is quite a small scheme, but it could potentially grow. And the scheme that we're putting in place has to work as these scale up. That brings me to the fee structure. So obviously we need to find a fair way of in-house accreditation being paid for, and we've had some really helpful input there and learning from organizations for example like CEDA, who've got an offering there we can learn from in terms of how institutional membership includes some of the in-house accreditation at a different levels, and we discussed whether it should be limited by type or by numbers, how can we make it easiest for members while keeping it financially sustainable for all. And finally, and I think this is a really interesting development, how could member groups and member organizations collaborate maybe via this network of critical friends and others to help bring that baseline of practice across institutions that sort of crown jewel of what C-mold is all about into a reality in this new scheme. So we are going to in a moment hand over to our pilot group participants to share some of their experiences and then we'll have a longer Q&A session, but just for a couple of minutes I'm going to hand over to our CEO Kerry now who leads the C-mold course. Thank you, Maron. It's a pleasure to speak to you all today. If any of you haven't got a C-mold badge or a C-mold holder and you don't have a badge, do come and see me at the end to make sure you get your badge if you weren't with us earlier on today. What we're going to be putting together and certainly has been highlighted by the pilot group and has been highlighted also by the feedback from people who have participated in C-mold is we're planning to create an online course and that course will enable the participants to go through a course that will take them through the whole process of putting their portfolio together, but also give them some of the skills, the reflective skills, some of those models and that framework and support that they might need to complete that portfolio. And that can be something that candidates will be able to jump in on to different parts that might be interesting to them. Perhaps they just want to focus on a particular section of their portfolio or if they want to, they can also spend a couple of hours a week following the course and actually by the end of it they should then be able to have a portfolio ready to go and submit at the end. So that's the plan and you can see on the slides above here what the sort of aims of our project are and also some of our guiding principles. So of course we want it to be inclusive. We want to make sure that it's accessible for everybody. We want it to be asynchronous as well so that people can take part in it and they can pick parts out at any time without having to need to dedicate any specific time to it during their working week. But it's also going to be un-facilitated so that people can just take part and there'll be lots of activities that people can take part in at any time, but it's not something that means they have to be there at nine o'clock for an hour to do a specific activity. And of course everything we think about is about making it as easy for members to consume, but also easy for us to use support and also be reusable for those who want to run in-house accreditation in the future to actually take the course, reuse parts of it, but also use it as a resource to support their own cohorts. So that's the plan. And we've convened a working group of people. I can see some of them here. I can see Julie at the back there. Thank you, Julie. One of the volunteers who have come together to help us put this together and one of the things I will say is always such a joy about is that whenever we ask our members for help, there's always a queue of people ready to help us put these things together to benefit their peers and for our other members. We're also really pleased to have received an offer, a very generous offer from King's College London. Michael Kay, who we are working with there, has offered the full support of King's College online and we're really delighted to have their help. So they are going to help us with the learning design, do all of the workshops for us, as well as then actually pulling together the collective expertise of all of King's College online to actually put the course together. So we're very lucky and very grateful to King's for their offer. We were delighted to receive it. And I should say as well, Sam at the front here in the red T-shirt, do you want to give us a wave, Sam? Sam is a very much a staunch supporter of SEMOL anyway and has long been supporting it and a very strong supporter of the portfolio as well. Sam also works for Catalyst IT, who are out in the exhibition if you haven't met them already with Richard. And they are very generously going to also give us the platform on which this course will be sitting. So we're very lucky to have essentially been given a free platform, free hosting, free support from Catalyst. And we're extremely grateful for them. And of course we'll also be able to call on the experience of Sam as well in helping us put this course together. So we've been very lucky as always from our members to have such support for this course. And we also have Kieran as well as Julie and Jen who have also, Jen McPartland who have also volunteered to help us and be part of the working group as well. And once we have something that members can look at we'll be putting things out and offering people the opportunities to go and have a look at it and feed back to us so that we can make improvements before we release the full final version. So that is the plan and we're really looking forward to it and we really hope it's going to be a real support not only to people who want to undertake SEMOL individually but also for those who want to take part in the pilot perhaps run their own cohorts within their institutions as well. So that's the plan. Do get involved when we start to you know put things out and feed back to us. We'll be delighted to have your feedback and we hope it will be extremely useful to all of you. So thank you for listening. Thank you so much Kieran you know we're so excited to see what's happening there. Before we go on to Q&A I just wanted to sneak in one more mention of the other exciting SEMOL development which is you know the new pathway to associate SEMOL via the first digital learning design apprenticeship that Billy launched yesterday here at the conference and I think particularly if you're looking at scaling up SEMOL I'd really like to encourage you as well to learn more about this particular initiative because it will give you another pathway into associate SEMOL particularly for new staff particularly for those who are retraining who are getting into becoming a learning technology professional for the very first time and I think it's really a testament to all's hard work in the last decade but is the most future looking part of what we're doing is how much we're changing the way and scaling up the way professionals can get that professional accreditation. So we have 15 minutes left I believe or just under but I want to now move on to our panel discussion and I would like to invite all of our four panelists to come on to this rather warm stage and take a seat here and take a mic because we're now going to go over to the Q&A. So if we could bring up the Reevox Q&A we are going to take your questions and comments in just a moment. To begin with I'm just going to ask everybody on the panel to just introduce themselves and maybe share one thing about the consultation so far that they maybe jumps out at them or that it's really important to share your thoughts and maybe Kieran if you don't mind kicking us off, Mike should be live and if we just go around and we'll do the introductions that way. Thank you. Hi I'm Kieran Govley, work as a Learning Design Manager in the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Imperial College. One thing that stands out to me was that it was very easy to come to this working group for voting things I agreed with I think the whole process just stands out as very collaborative. Hi I'm Tamzin Smith, I'm a Learning Designer at the University of Southampton and I think one of the things that stands out for me is the fact that when we've talked about initiatives that we're trying in our institutions the number of people who are already doing something with sort of peer support around CMOL. Hi I'm Julie Vos, I'm Head of Digital Education University of London and I've been leading the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange CMOL cohort this year whilst Sarah Sherman's been on maternity leave. For me I think one of the most important parts of this is ensuring that fair and transparent process when it comes to marking so I think it would be good to see that improvement in the guidance that there is for assessors. I've been assessing CMOL for several years now and I think it's always a challenge just trying to come to agreement on what bits mean and making sure that there's a fair and transparent approach to people who are submitting their portfolios especially on the senior CMOL I think there's some challenges there that can definitely be improved. Hi my name is Farmi Geng, I'm from University of Oxford and I've been a CMOL member since 2005 and one thing I learned from this game really is like I think it's a fantastic scheme and I was worried when I was an assessor how it would work but now we launched this kind of scheme and I'm very happy to see that. Thank you very much for introducing yourselves. We are now open for comments and questions from the floor. Please do post any comments and questions but I think I'm going to keep an eye out what comes in but I also wanted to give you all an opportunity to just highlight something that we found maybe challenging or something where you see a lot of opportunities and I wonder whether we could start and Julie I'm sorry if I'm putting you on the spot but I think one of the things I'd love to I think people would love to hear more about is the idea of sort of member groups or potentially critical friends which is something I think we talked about a lot so I wonder whether we could kick off the discussion with that if that's okay with you. So I think one of the challenges we talked about was are we going to have enough time to do all the marking and actually if you're running a cohort with 10 people suddenly you've got 10 portfolios that you have to mark and that's quite a lot of work and at the moment that goes off to a host of volunteers across the UK but when it's just like two or three of you are in your institution and some of the challenges are if it's my team while I'm their line manager is that appropriate for me to be marking their work. Now I'm part of the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange which is a selection of institutions in my scope in terms of number of people but I think we'd still face the similar challenges in terms of recruiting those people. I chaired the M25 Learning Technology Group and suggested that maybe that's a way to get the member groups involved and to share practice because I think one of the challenges you'll get when you accredit your own CMOL is very insular one of the benefits of CMOL at the moment as an assessor is seeing that range of portfolios and seeing good practice in other institutions and going oh that sounds interesting too maybe we could explore that and I think by involving the member groups and looking to others to help with the external examining and helping with the marking as like a second marker I think that will bring that benefit and collaboration within your local area. Thank you we have a couple of questions coming in the first one is around institutional buy-in so the question is how did you gain institutional buy-in to gather a CMOL group and put multiple staff through accreditation so I wonder Kieran are you happy to maybe start with that question and then we go on to Tamsin and then maybe we'll swap around for the next question sorry any more thinking Ty yeah okay Tamsin do you want to jump in yeah I think for us it was quite easy we've got a range of different initiatives at the University of Southampton for people to gather accreditation for whatever area they're working in and this is really the only accreditation that people in our area wanted most people have already got associate fellowship of advanced HE or fellowship and so senior staff were very supportive and they could see the benefits and we've been able to use it as part of people's appraisals to look at are there gaps in their experience what kinds of projects might they need to do to develop themselves so we've not found it difficult to get any institutional buy-in. Thank you. We'll come to you in a moment Kieran. Fave I was wondering I know that the University of Oxford has a large cohort at the moment can you tell us anything about this perspective on how did you gain institutional buy-in? Actually I found like I did a presentation yesterday talking about C-mode support scheme at Oxford. What I found actually during the pandemic everyone felt so isolated that's why we try to collaborate with different members in different department through running this sort of support scheme what I found already that people felt benefits by working together and sharing the difficulties concerns and the great idea how to support each other there's already a lot of benefit so in that sense I think we can sort of like share the narrative like clearly and creatively and talk to the senior managers and I think shouldn't be a big challenge to get a buy-in. Thank you. Kieran did you want to add something? Yeah it's very similar to your experience I mean we always encouraged I think there was still a gap so you encouraged the H.E.A. fellowship but not necessarily C-mode and I think that's what we as we mentioned that when we went to some other kind of training and I think we were lucky in that sense there was senior management that I recognised that there was nothing specifically in college, in house already in place so yeah I think it stems from that that there's a push to do accreditation and this is one of them that's not supported well enough. Thank you. I know we have a couple of questions around C-mode in relation to other frameworks and C-mode is mapped to the UK PSF although now that the UK PSF has been updated we're obviously going to have to work to update the mapping as well but it's also mapped to a range of other qualifications so I just wanted to pick that up as a quick point because at the moment you do need to hold C-mode in order to be a lead assessor for C-mode and in order to be able to institutionally assess as well but I wonder whether there's a couple of questions around the value of C-mode like what would institutions gain, what would groups gain or cohorts, what would individuals gain from getting C-mode accreditation there's been a couple of questions around that so I think I would like to invite the whole panel to answer because I'm sure you each have different perspectives and maybe Fave we might start with you this time and then go around the panel just to see what do you see as the value either for yourself or your cohort in gaining C-mode accreditation I found like being a C-mode member you sort of get into this kind of like a pool of like wise ideas and very interesting conversations even on C-mode mailing group for example you pay attention to what's going on and also make me to be aware what's going on and the trend of the development in terms of pedagogy and data education so that is very valuable for a group I think it's like again as I said I think creating opportunity within the institution to have a conversation first and share the challenges I mean I think everyone agrees even within university different departments they don't talk to each other sometimes so I do think this is sort of like another vehicle to work together do more collaboration so that's already very beneficial Does anybody else want to jump in? Yeah I think for me and for some of my colleagues who have gone through C-mode one of the main value is about that reflective nature of it the portfolio is structured so you reflect on a range of different areas and it's really helpful if you're thinking where am I in my career what's my next step tech or ahead of digital thinking about just taking stock looking at what you do what you like doing what you would like to do more of and maybe it highlights some of the areas that you're not doing much of so when I did my original C-mode I was working in an IT department in a sort of e-learning technical role and I was like I don't do a great deal on teaching and learning there were elements of it but it was not as direct as I would like it to be I think that's the value of just reflecting taking stock and actually you're building a really good portfolio so that when you go to interviews and things you've already got all those examples nicely written out for you and that can help you Thank you I think it would just be echoing what Julie said really about that opportunity for reflection especially because I think a lot of us have projects that move so quickly that you might have some instant reflection but then you're straight on to the next project so I think having that opportunity to come back to it a few months later a year later and to really think about what went well in that project and what changes you've made to how you work how you run projects is really beneficial Kieran? Yeah, I'll second what's already been said but also it gives you an opportunity to kind of ensure that you're doing quality work yes you know but it is just to see what other good practices they are especially if you're an assessor or if you're even sharing with other tech colleagues around the college so yeah I think the Seamult becomes a very good kind of conversation starter so there are things that you even don't put in your portfolio but you still learn from but turning up to like a Seamult discussion session Thank you, I just checked the time and I'm sorry to our chair we are actually one minute over but we did start a few minutes late there are a couple of questions on the screen about the Seamult course and Kerry I don't mind making yourself available at the end of the session just to pick those questions up please do come and find Kerry here at the front with the Seamult course but I just want to give everybody on the panel an opportunity just for any final remarks maybe something you're particularly looking forward to in terms of the in-house process the in-house accreditation process before we conclude so any final remarks or any observations sort of hopes for Seamult futures I guess I just wanted to say that when you have a cohort and someone achieves Seamult that that experience is also really really empowering obviously you find joy in someone also achieving the accreditation Thank you, anybody else wants to join Faber Yeah I don't want to say like I will have more opportunity to work with other institutions through this game and also I believe running Seamult within Oxford will provide recognition my colleagues deserved Tamsen, Julie, any final words? I think it's given us an opportunity with colleagues we've explored anybody who sees learning technology as part of their role but not specifically academic staff to identify themselves and we've managed to gather a group of 50 staff now who've expressed an interest in being involved in September and I don't think we'd realised we had that many people who saw it as being a key part of their role Fantastic, Julie I think for me the Seamult course is going to be really transformational in helping people achieve Seamult as an assessor you see so many portfolios and you think if only they'd had a mentor or spoken to someone there's a lot who do submit it without support or a great deal of support and I think that will really help with improving the quality of the Seamult portfolios that come in to begin with Thank you so much I'm aware of time and temperature so we are going to draw the session to a close but I just wanted to give a big thank you to the members that are here today on stage but also every member of the working group a lot of the things that make Alt happen is all the work that goes on month in month out between these wonderful conferences that we run where some of it then surfaces just for about these half an hour chunks of time I just want to acknowledge all the time and effort that our industry partners and working group members put into this so please put your hands together big round of applause for our panelists this session it is no other session in the main hall for the next half an hour so if you do want to go straight into another session please do make your way to another room or maybe some refreshments a little bit of cooling down before the final session of the day