 Good afternoon and welcome to this live online session on the third day of ELSI 2022. Thank you for joining us and we hope you've had a great conference so far whether online or in person. So for the next 30 minutes we've got Simon Corbett who's joining us to present his session which is titled Transforming Towel, a strategic approach to offering a customer-centric technology enhanced learning service within a UK university. So let's give a really warm welcome to Simon Corbett. Thank you very much Fiona and good afternoon everyone. I wanted to give this short presentation today to tell you about some of the work that we've done over the last 18 months at Northumbery University and really taking a good look at our towel service and transforming it with some real strategic direction. Like all I guess big strategic projects we started off really thinking about how we would anchor this back to our university strategy. Our university strategy has some real key items in it about digital fluency and around technical innovation embedded in the curriculum and from that university strategy we then have an IT strategy that sits below that and again our IT strategy has some golden threads back to the university strategy around our technology enhanced learning service. Things like staff and students can constantly use technology and digital services that support our future learning and student support. So we've started with some real core values and some real core threads back to the strategic elements that we actually run and align our university's direction and from that then we've built a tail strategy and our tail strategy sits on two focuses, a team focus and some customer focus. We've really tried to have a look at the team so the people that sit in our tail stream really have to look at how they operate, how they're structured, what our operating model looks like, where we really add value to the university. So actually how can we actually analyze that value? How can we answer the so what question for everyone? And within that we've tried to grow the people we've entailed by some coaching and mentoring and I'll come on to some of that throughout the presentation. The other focus we've given as part of our tail service is really around our customers. So we've actually come up with a tail marketing plan that sits behind everything we do to try and promote ourselves across the university. We've done some real work and again I'll go into the details of some of these things around digital fluency and induction. Time to bring some things together with tail central and our information hubs and our next generation of research. I'm going to go into some of the details around this as I walk through the presentation but I thought it'd be useful to start the whole of this talk knowing that we've grounded this and I think it's an important part of really making sure that the tail transformation has worked. We're grounded back to the university strategy. We've built it on some solid foundations and we've given some real key focus to what we're trying to do. So what is our tail service then? We've built our tail service on four key areas. The first one is around training and the training support give. We've done some work around content development about helping academics, some work around our online delivery capabilities and some work around our direct support. I'm going to go into the detail, a little bit of detail on each of these now. So for our training we've created quite a lot of training material all available to all the academics across Northumbria. We've created a lot of help guides, a lot of help and support and they go through our core technologies that our academics use for their teaching and learning across Northumbria University. And we've taken real care in doing help guides and videos and some of the key things we've done is we've used what is quite innovative I guess for Northumbria is we've used a lot of placement students. So these are students who might be studying a media course at Northumbria and they want to take a year out between their second and third year of their studies. And we've taken some of those media students and then we brought them into the tail team and actually they've generated some of the videos for us on this training element and it's really worked. We've got a real new insight into what would have traditionally been an IT person maybe producing to video to someone who's actually studying and actually understands the technology that's been used and the technology that's been shown to them and understands that more media savvy approach to things and marketing things. So it's been a huge success to us to actually use our students and try to produce some of the material that we're using to train our academics that are using to train our students in their teaching and learnings. So it's quite a nice circular event that's occurred there. As part of our training as well we've got a fully online book yourself training sessions. Academics can go and put book training sessions we run throughout the year. They're regular events obviously some of the technologies have more events than others but we run a variety of courses across all the main things. At Northumbria we use Blackboard as our main teaching and learning platform so we have a lot of courses around Blackboard but also around technology like Penocto and Turnitin and some more of a traditional training around office products. We do quite a lot of work with academics who really want to expand their role into the office products and the office offerings to help with what their work they're doing. So that's the core training piece. We also have an arm of tales I said around content development. So this is a group of colleagues within the tale team who will actually help academics produce their material. This can be a number of things. So the first one there is module makeovers. So our academics may have a module that might be a traditional set of PowerPoint slides and our content development team will actually sit with the academics and with their PowerPoint slides to try and make them a little bit more engaging and we've had a lot of success with this just in order to improve the learning. A great deal of this I guess has come over the last two years with the onset of the pandemic and a lot of distant learning for our students during that and it's been a quite a big success over that time in order to make material more engaging as we're trying to engage with our students who might not actually be sat in the classroom in front of it. Of course that's also helped with some of the distant learning work we do. We do a lot of distance learning here at Northumbria and quite a lot of blended stuff over the last year where we may have some students in the classroom and some students remote and an academic colleague who's trying to engage both sets of students at the same time. Again we've done quite a lot of video content and video animations and again we've used our placement students in this area so we've again taken students who may be on animation courses here at Northumbria and they've helped us produce some of the video material for academics who may be on different courses to make their work more engaging. We've done quite a lot of work on tasks and interactive tasks to try and do some of the gamification to improve learning and try to really another big thing that we've pushed here is around accessibility and usability. So we've worked with quite a lot of academics to take their material that might be in power points and really have a look at that to see does it conform to the accessibility standards, does it conform to some usability standards to make sure that we've got material available for all students depending on what their what their needs are. We've done quite a lot of work around then graphics and banners to enhance it just to make it more visually aesthetically appealing for both students and academics. And one of the big things is the penultimate point there is around work-based complex work-based assessment. So we spend quite a lot of time with certain academics who've got really complex work who really want to try and get difficult messages across in their learning and try and work out actually other ways to present that information. So it's quite an exciting team. They do a lot of varied work. We offer a service across the university to our academics and any academic can engage with the team and go on short sharp little projects to try and improve stuff. I have a couple of brief slides here just to show you about some of the things that we're doing. So again these screen grabs are taken from Blackboard and it's a kind of drag-and-drop type of material here and they're obviously just some simple examples that I'm showing you here but you know the student would pick up some of the information here and drag it to where it is and it gives a short questions and answers type thing to just get some engagement from the students as they go through their learning within Blackboard. And you see this is a course that's been set up that takes the student through and as they go through the learning and go through the reading material there are short sharp exercises in there to make it more entertaining. Similar sort of things of drag-and-drop things about making sure that you're going to make it more interactive. And then some of the gamifications that we've put in as well. So here's an example of some of the animation that some of our students have created and then it flows through into some actual animation and the learner here would actually click like this isn't a live example but the learner here would actually click on some of the graphics within this thing and actually it becomes more of a game to show where the flow is and to show where you're teaching and learning fits into all of this. Bringing this all together for our online learning we have what we call Tel Central. At the moment this is a web base but it's a single place for all our Tel support. We put all our guides and material on here all our online learning you can book courses you can put one-to-one consultation as well and you know you can book your content development as well. Our key technologies are called out in there and it really becomes a one-shop stop for all our academics to visit. We try and route everyone through our Tel Central website it becomes a quite a central place and actually some of the guides and support materials we've worked really hard on. We've kind of had this philosophy within our Tel team at the moment to make it simple and easy so we've worked really hard on the messaging behind that to make it simple and easy for our academics who we know are busy who we know don't have the time some time to go into the real detail of things but we want to make it simple easy for them to use that brings out the best in the technology tools that we have available here in Northumbria for them to use on a day-to-day basis and sitting alongside Tel Central which is our core website we have a physical presence as well so we've graded the IT place here at Northumbria and our IT place sits centrally within our main hub of student activity so in our library at Northumbria which is centering the main heart of the campus we have our core ask for help where students can go and ask for for central help and right next to that we have our IT place it's a drop-in center there's no appointments necessary the two colleagues there in the photo deal with hundreds of hundreds of queries from both staff and students every week anyone can can drop in we have students calling in with their own devices with university devices with queries about how to submit things but we have tel support there alongside it as well not showing that photo we have a couple of booths where lecturers can go and record lectures or try out the new technology we have tel support staff on hand to help them and guide them and it's been a great facility actually that we're really quite proud of about and really having that first-hand support not bookable just you staff can just turn up and get support that they need for the technologies that they have alongside another big part of what we've tried to do at Northumbria is really lean on digital induction and digital fluency if you remember on the first slide that I showed you it was part of the university strategy here at Northumbria to make sure that staff and students have an opportunity to become digitally fluent if they want to and we've really concentrated on this the first part of this is on our student digital fluency and really we've created a free step process for our students around digital induction and digital fluency the first one is around pre-enrollment so as our students enroll and just before enrollment we have a certain amount of information available for them and there's a screenshot there about some of the things that we have available so we have some guides simple guides for our students about some of the technologies that they can expect to see when they visit Northumbria so things like your email account how do you how do you set up your email account how do you set up your email accounts on your phone how do you access your emails we have a remote desktop system here where all our lab PCs are available remotely and so we have quite a lot of guides around that that will really help you know when you start as a student and you might be in a lab in the afternoon doing some work and actually you want to go back to that lab in the evening and repractice what you've done we have in a system here called my access that allows you to go and do that and so we have guides around that and we found what all it's meant is many of our students understand the types of technology they might use and might see before they arrive at Northumbria once they arrive at Northumbria every single program slide has a digital fluency module within it so as a student when I log on to my program which again of course is in in Blackboard here at Northumbria they have a module there that gives them all of the digital induction work and guides and guidance that they might need across all of the technology here at Northumbria so there might be guides around how to submit work how to use turn it in where they're going to find information across Blackboard how they contact the service desk and again this has really helped with our students with their digital fluency across Northumbria it's the same information for all students irrespective of what the program they're on and some of the ideas that we're looking at in the future is to really start tailoring this per program and that'll be a future step as we make this service more mature and then the last phase is our student professionals so we introduced that earlier this year in 2022 and this is a concept that we've called our digital suitcase so as our students prepare for graduation as they finish their finals we have some content that's downloadable that is basically the digital their digital suitcase that they can take away as they leave Northumbria and we've made this digital suitcase about information that they probably didn't need when they were studying but might need when they go and start their professional careers so it's more about some of the things that you might need so having gone through your course you may have done some work around meetings and projects but if you really understood how you really use Outlook and really get the most out of Outlook of when you start work which might be slightly differently to how you've used Outlook as a student have you really thought about how you promote yourself and how you use some of the digital material available to you and this has been a great success we've created the digital suitcase this year at Northumbria we've made it available to all our students on graduation it's a downloadable piece of material that they can take away they can refer to when they need to and I think there's been a big step forward for us in making a differentiating thing for our students as they graduate on the flip side of that we've also kicked off a big program here at Northumbria around our staff digital induction our staff digital induction obviously has been linked to the JISC digital capabilities framework and I'm happy to share that offline if people haven't come across that the JISC framework has provided the basis for us and we've kind of tailored that then for a Northumbria solution this actually is quite an exciting initiative as well across Northumbria so what we do is every new member of staff that joined us here is assigned a mentor from the tail team and the tail team then will go out and work with that new colleague around their digital induction and in order to start them off on that journey we've created a digital skills scan and that digital skills scan will guide the colleague through to check some sort of high-level understanding of where they are and their digital capabilities so we ask them a number of questions as we go through the staff digital induction and those questions I said are based on the JISC framework and as you go through those questions and we go through those questions with the tail mentor and we try and get colleagues to answer them as honestly as possible we come up with again a spider map to give some indication of where you sit within your digital fluency we've got some models then that sit behind this to say for your role where would you like to sit and what do you need to learn and then this then guides what we then offer staff as part of their digital fluency and maturity and work that we can do with them to help them with the technologies they might need for their job at Northumbria and their role at Northumbria and throughout that journey we keep the tail mentor with them so the tail mentor is there throughout their time at Northumbria they can lean on them as much or as little as they want and we've found some great success on this we've seen colleagues have joined us who you know have come with a high degree of digital fluency but have still occasionally used their tail mentor when they've got some specific questions about some specific technology you know and a task they might want to do to those colleagues who are pretty new into the profession and haven't come across some of the tail technologies that are available to them and have leaned heavily on their tail technical mentor that's really helping to get up to speed quickly and really help them move forward and then do what they're here at the University to do which is really help with their teaching learning and research so it's been quite it's a very successful program for this we have a huge amount of material available for staff all of it available again obviously in our you know virtual learning environment and our tail technical mentor helps them go through some of this technology and some of the learning that we have and what we've been really keen to do is to say this isn't mandatory you don't have to do this when you when you start and also we don't expect you to look through all of this when you start but going through the digital skill scan that we've created working with your technical mentor actually this enables you to really pick up on the pieces of information you need and really get focused in on what's really going to help you and I'm quite excited about that I think it's been quite a quite a big move I hope most of the colleagues at Northumbria who've been through this have really benefited from it supporting this what we've also done is pushed all our tail liaison officers through a coaching training course so all my tail staff now who go out and help academic colleagues have been through a coaching program so they really understand actually what's it like to coach what's it really like to encourage people and that's been a bit of a game changer for us as well that's really changed the focus and rather than just someone in a typical IT support actually they're there to help actually they're there to coach actually they're there to get the best out of the what we have on offer here I'd like to just conclude actually in the last couple of minutes about what we're working on now and whilst the graphic there shows some students with some VR headsets on actually we have done some work on that recently we have a lab now at Northumbria that's been kitted out with 60 seater lab all for VR headsets and we've done some really cool work on that about people now using some of the medical virtual reality software that enables some of our students to actually walk through body parts and see there as part of their learning what we're also looking at in parallel to that is the classroom of the future now at Northumbria we're going back to in-person teaching but I think in the back of our minds we do want to keep some sort of high-flex modality in there so we will have scenarios where we have some people in person and some people online but alongside that we're looking about what the classroom can really do how can we make it more immersive how can we make the sound quality and the visual quality across the whole classroom more inclusive for all of our students how can we make sure we record the right things and we have the right cameras set out so that when staff members are writing on boards actually we have the right technology behind that to capture what they're putting on white boards without them stood in front of it so the AI takes them out and they can see what's on the board and I think it's a real interesting thinking going on around this as we come out of the pandemic and really think what our classroom looks like really think what the technology we have looks like and really think about as a tel team how we support our academics and getting the best out of the things that are available today and lastly what I'm going to end on is that we've done a sort of also something different on Northumbria now and we've integrated our client software team into tel now our client software team traditionally would produce the images across our labs and produce the images for our open access areas for the computers that are in there for our students to use and what we've done actually is we've moved that team into tel the thinking behind that being that actually what we really want is we want the tel team to understand what it's like as a student what's it like when they sit in front of a computer what software have they got available and link that to our academics who are asking us for the software on those computers so now the team that produced the images of the particular software in a particular lab are connected to the people that are teaching that lab and connected to the tel team that bring it all together and this is really the first step about bringing the customer at the heart of everything we do and linking our tel team actually with some of our technology teams that get that holistic solution that we want and I hope that's given some sort of overview of where we are at Northumbria some sort of idea of where we are on our strategic direction and what and what we're trying to do as I say and as I started with this all links back to our university strategy about making about bringing our technology into students and their teaching and learning and some of the ideas we've had and I hope that's been useful for you and then please I can answer any questions on this now in the last few minutes. Thank you so much Simon for that presentation that was really interesting and informative we've got quite a few questions in the chat that have come in whilst you've been talking so I'll just share these with you now. So Lynn is asking what format is the downloadable suitcase for students? Yeah that's a good question Lynn at the moment we've done it as a PDF as a readable document with a number of search tags in there it's a difficult one because we wanted to make it more interactive but on the similar vein we didn't want to make it too restrictive so that other students couldn't use it depending on their device so the moment is quite a flat structure but we are looking at the moment to make that a little bit more of an interactive piece of material that students can work with and search with more better so that's where we are at the moment. Thank you Simon and the next question is from Laura who is asking so Laura's commenting that the staff digital induction is really interesting and she's asking did you take the JISC info and create the questions and output or is this an off-the-shelf tool? No we took the JISC framework Laura and we basically used that as a start in place some of the some of the questions in there weren't quite applicable for what we wanted in our firmware so we've altered them slightly but we built it off the basis of that and actually the framework is very good it's a good framework and a good start in place and I would certainly recommend that rather than starting with a blank piece of canvas. Thank you Simon and there's a follow-up question from Lynn who's asking what size is your team and what proportion of the institution budget goes to your digital transformation? Well that's a good question so I have so the tail team that's an easy question so there's 30 people in our tail team now broadly split sort of between the four legs that I showed you on the slide so I'm lucky that I've got quite a large team in some respects if you consider we have three and a half thousand members of staff and 30,000 students here at North Umbria. It's a small team right as to service all those people and does take some organization does take some logistics behind it to do everything around there. The budget supplement I can't obviously can't go into the details on that but we have invested heavily we've invested heavily in the IT place we invest heavily in our people and some of the technologies behind that you know we also have Blackboard Ultra and some of the core technologies that you saw on the side so I think as we've come out of the pandemics certainly I won't be alone in institutions that realize that technology actually is at the heart of teaching and learning now we're not an IT service department here at North Umbria that sits in the corner and just provides a service we really do strive to be a business partner and try and assist where we can with the teaching and learning and research across North Umbria rather than just be a service department so you know we've invested heavily in that mostly in time and resource I would say. Perfect thank you Simon that looks like all the questions for now so thank you very much for your presentation it's been really interesting and very informative and I think you've covered all the questions really well there is someone who's asking if you would mind sharing your slides at the end of the presentation. No I can certainly do that I'm happy if to drop me an email and I can send you the slides across that's not a problem if you didn't grab my email at the start I can probably stick it in the chat can I? That would be great yeah if you just pop a comment in the chat and that will come up for everyone who's watching us now. So let's give a very virtual round of applause for Simon who has just presented for us and for those of you staying with us this afternoon the next session starts at 3.30 so we've got a quick half an hour break now and then this evening don't forget to tune in to our Thursday night show which is our conference after party and that starts from 6 p.m so you can go to the social program on the website and find the link for that there. So thanks very much Simon and thank you for everyone for joining us. Thank you very much, much appreciated.