 So good evening ladies and gentlemen It is an exciting moment And I don't think we've ever had a grander hall to celebrate the learning technologists of the year Ever so I hope this is going to be the start of a very special evening And I want to warmly welcome you after one or two pack days of conference programming to the start of what I hope will be a rewarding and warm Occasion there is going to be dancing and might be whiskey and they're certainly going to be dinner So we have a lot to look forward to but first It is all about our winning research projects teams and individuals whom we celebrate for their outstanding contributions Now I first want to give some special thanks and recognition For an individual Who has made these awards this year? And I'm sure you will be seeing them on social media shortly like last year We ran a student competition at Hereford College of Art and Design and the winning entry From the student this year with Lisa McLaughlin and she made these over the past couple of months And so this year like every year from now on the awards are a unique one-off opportunity To showcase the student contribution to our awards and these are won the prize that commissioned her to make this work So if you are one of our lucky winners tonight, and you're receiving this you're taking home a very unique memory Also, I wanted to give a huge round of applause to Francis Bell I'll newest on a very live member now Francis may not seek the limelight tonight But we are very honored to count such a wonderful and exemplary leader Amongst our honorary life members, and I hope that many of you enjoyed seeing Francis receive her accolade at The AGM earlier and also give a well-deserved shout out to Fem Ed Tech, which I'm going to do just the same now So I'm going to also welcome on the stage two people who are going to host the awards and First we're going to hear from Janet Roberts the director of Edina who is supporting this year's awards So please welcome Janet to the stage Thank you very much, and I'm really pleased to be here joining you to welcome everybody to these very special awards for you all And I'd also like to say thank you very much to all of you for making Edina feel so welcome as a Relatively new organization working with this learning technologist community For those of you who may not be aware Edina is part of the University of Edinburgh We're part of information services, which is the IT Department for the University and I work closely alongside Melissa Highton as director of learning teaching and web in the university So we are close to you already What has struck me Over the time that I've been working with Edina and I'm working with Melissa and her team is and particularly over the last two days Is how much Edina has in common with? Alt and its members because we too are an organization that's passionate about Supporting students to learn and enable them to learn through technology Like alt we are also a charity with an enterprise approach Edina has been developing education technology solutions and services for the education sector for over 20 years We are self-funding, but at the same time we have a mission and a vision that's similar to a social enterprises We're very passionate about widening participation and inclusion It's incredibly important to us that the technology we develop is accessible to learners no matter what level of technology They might have so that they learn and they feel confident in that learning and Similarly to make sure that as many students as possible No matter what their background have access to the technology to gain those critical digital and now data skills as well That we all need in every part of our life not just in education Innovation has also been a mainstay and business driver for Edina and that goes hand in hand with our approach to collaboration in terms of developing our services When we were starting out 20 years ago We collaborated with six universities to develop what started out as a geospatial service called Digimap 20 years later. It's our flagship service and we're delivering it to 120 universities and 25 colleges across the UK The most recent innovation in Edina's service portfolio is notable which is a service that enables students and academics to access the computational notebooks of Jupiter notebooks And what has really marked the development of this service, which has been a huge success in the university We've gone from proof of concept two years ago through to a thousand users this semester Has been that from the very outset We've worked with our colleagues the learning technologists to get their additional value add to get their guidance and Expertise in the way that you develop a service and a technology to make sure that it's going to be really really useful to the users So on that note I am absolutely delighted to be here tonight and it gives me great pleasure to recognize that expertise and to support the All-towards and to join you in this celebration of your achievements So a few practical notes then before we introduce the second host of our awards ceremony this evening If you are one of the finalists and awards recipients We invite you please when you're called to come up onto the stage on this side And you'll then be presented by your award with Janet and our co-host and then you can take photos and say a few words We have a special lectern this year for those all important messages and Acknowledgements, so please feel free to say a few words and then we can go on to the next award But now to introduce our co-host for Janet this evening I am very delighted that one of the judges from this year's award and also one of the board members of ALT is Able and come very far to just be here especially to do this this evening. Please welcome Peter Bryan So we're going to start with the research awards and We have first coming up is the highly commended and in this case the judges comments on this were a Very useful and interesting project that will help educators reflect and act upon student evaluation More effectively it will be interesting to see further evaluation of this project and also linking to issues such as gender difference in educator evaluation and The highly commended award goes to the student opinion minor statistical opinion mining to understand student evaluation of teaching. I Didn't expect to be giving a speech So I don't really have anything Exciting prepared apart from the fact that I'm very honored to receive this award and I thank ALT Because this was a very unexpected pleasant surprise. I also thank my team members one one of them is here Lynn you can wave everyone and Geetha and Hasses and Felix who has made this project possible. Thank you very much So of course we've got many awards today and not tonight And if you are a team you can all come up and join your colleagues on stage as well because the more the merrier So I talk about second place now and this the judges comments for this It is a long-running project that has been a valuable resource to the learning to the learning technology community It is impressive how the project has developed a sustainable approach around a community of practice So we'd like to award the second place in our research awards to the size of technology enhanced learning survey and case studies So as I nominated us, I've been nominated the spokesman for today We're really honored to receive this award and it really highlights the work that you size or have been doing and that We've done with you size, but really it's it's the community It's you guys who fill in the survey every two years and it's it's a big survey So thank you very much to you to you all just a reminder that it's coming out again in January 2020 So please do fill it out And we hope to see you back there next year Where we'll be presenting the results from the 2020 survey will let out photographer do their work marvelous Thank you once again a round of applause to the size of team. All right. We are now on to the Winner for the research award and the judges comments on this Was that this project? Was exemplary in a number of aspects. It provides a valuable resource to the higher education community Who are coming to terms with I can barely read these days with a new technology? I'll do it this way. That's much easier for me. It also demonstrates how an approach needs to take account of multiple perspectives and incorporate and Incorporate ethical considerations the methods of open practice and sharing we're also a model for many other projects and The winner is the Sheila projects supporting higher education to integrate learning Yishan nominated me to the US beach, so I'm happy well Thanks very much to the conference organizers to all and this is a really great honor great pleasure It's a really great reward also for an excellent team. We had a pleasure to work with for the course of 33 months Sheila project was basically a joint effort of several European institutions Carlos III in Madrid the Open University Netherlands Talin University. We also had Erasmus student network and European quality assurance in higher education It's been a great honor great work. We also need to thank two more than 100 institutions We worked with collecting data from students from senior managers from Teachers and from different other professional groups members I think as we are finishing the project called Sheila some of the in the audience also have very sentimental Relationship with the name of it. We are now thinking about the next project, which will likely be Bruce. So thanks very much So now we come to the individual award and in fact this year there was only one individual award was made And this is a very special one The judges comments were that the enthusiasm and passion of this particular entrant was apparent Their work demonstrates the importance of betting a learning technologist in other sectors beyond higher education and the winner is Lizzie Seymour Learning technology officer Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and in and Brazil and the Highland Wildlife Park Okay, so I've got a few words First of all, well done on pronouncing that I always struggle saying Royal Zoological Society of Scotland myself And I just want to yeah, thank Oh for this and for having me at the conference and and thank my team for turning up as a surprise And for always having my back Yeah And so now we're on to the team awards and there are a number of highly commended entries here So the first one the judges comments the team have worked Exceedingly hard in a short period to completely revamp their online offering Including creating new courses developing a new platform and engaging in staff development The cultural shift the team have affected in developing an understanding of good online pedagogy is impressive This highly commended award goes to the online learning team Edinburgh Business School Thank you very much and to the judging panel for giving us this award It really means a lot to us the the team have faced a lot of challenges and continue to face a lot of challenges So it really means a lot to get this recognition They are an absolute joy to work with every day and the way they look out for one another and the way that they Work with our academics and so thank you and thank you to this group of people Thanks Moving on to another highly commended and a round of applause for The judges comments for this entry was that this innovative approach to engaging with academic integrity has the potential to make Quite a dry subject more engaging for students The use of students in the creation of the second phase of this project was admirable So without further ado our next highly commended who has come in enormously long way not as far as Australia But enormously long way we'd like to recognize the AIE AR team on behalf of the AIE AR team actually is the trail for integrity and Ethics and from the Hong Kong Baptist University We are honours to have this award and thanks all for all the support And we hope that with this trail we can educate our student integrity and ethics from a more Active way and we also hope that We also invite you if you're interested you can join our project. Thank you So for our next highly commended award the judges comments were That the significance of the student voice in course design is often acknowledged but not always acted upon It can be particularly difficult to capture in online distance education So the approach of this project to incorporate a robust and representative student voice at the design stage Offers a model for others to follow This award goes to the OU learning design team curricular design student panel managers I'd just like to say a really big thank you to the Judging panel for this award and also to acknowledge that this is a real team effort. So I'm here Picking up this award tonight But actually there's a lot of people that have been involved in the success of our student panel it started three years ago with 450 students and we now have something like 2,000 students from across the university who volunteer their time to provide input into curriculum design at an early stage Where it can actually make a difference and bridge the gap between teachers and distance learners So thank you very much. It's a real honor and a delight to be here in this lovely hall. Thank you We are now on to the final of the highly commended in the team awards And the judges comment for this was working across multiple sites in the FE sector This team have developed robust mentoring approach which foregrounds the pedagogical possibility of tell The requests they have received to implement this model elsewhere are testament to its effectiveness The highly commended the final highly commended for the team award is the Cirque tell pedagogy mentoring team Just like to say a big thank you to all this is my first time at all conference So what a lovely evening to have as part of it And I'm representing a much bigger team of our pedagogy mentors who just demonstrated dedication and passion For teaching and learning across multiple curriculum areas. So this is for the team. Thank you So okay, and now we are on to the runner-up and judges comments were The team have developed a range of high quality MOOCs over a short period of time More significantly there have affected a cultural change to the value of online learning Which is having real impact across a broad network of STEM ambassadors Second place goes to online CPD STEM learning Said you gotta do this right so thank you very much alts for for rewarding us for our work. I've lost the 18 months It's been an incredible privilege to be able to work with my colleagues here Karen and Angela And also the whole subject expert team who are based at the National STEM Learning Center at York upscaling our portfolio program could not have happened without Everyone being involved and sharing their expertise and their passion for STEM education in the UK So thank you to everyone at STEM learning as well Helping us achieve this wonderful Process in this wonderful program. Thank you So we are on to the final winner for this and the judges comments were Although lecture captor is an area of interest to many universities What was most impressive about this entry was that it provides an exemplar for the implementation of any learning technology the careful consideration of the perspectives of educators and students coupled with a practical and responsive implementation makes for an effective model The open ethos and sharing approach of the project for the benefit of the wider sector is also excellent practice And I am very proud to announce the winner and a worthy recipient of this award and It might blow the roof off this very newly renovated building, but it is the University of Edinburgh lecture recording team Well the first thing I want to say is thank you to all but not just to the members of all on the podium here with us But to all of you we saw another excellent presentation today on lecture at yesterday Sorry on lecture recording from Durham And it's that sharing of practice that's enabled us to be as effective as we have So we learned a lot of lessons from all of you in the community who've done lecture recording before us So my first vote of thanks is for you Secondly for the team and there are more than this team behind me We drew upon a team of staff from across the institution timetabling our colleagues in schools IT colleagues in schools learning technologists learning spaces and people a really diverse broad team And that's how we've been able to be so successful. I think we named about 40 student helpers on the application as well We had students helping with the rollout And I'd also like to recognize the external expertise that we got particularly Amber Thomas at Warwick and John Cooper Thwaite from echo 360 whose advice and support was invaluable as well And finally, I think I'd like to say thank you to Melissa Highton our director who gave us what I'm gonna call just the right blend of space support and supervision for this project To have the freedom to do what we felt was appropriate but to know that support was always there was invaluable So thank you very much. Well, the team is taking its photo I wanted to say thank you first of all to Janet and also to Peter for being our awards host and Welcome to the stage two of our co-chairs who will be presenting the community choice award So Keith and Louise if you're ready to come up ladies and gentlemen our team winners learning technologists of the year Thank you, Marin Louise myself are absolutely honored to have the delight of presenting this year's Community Choice Award and the people's vote If you like voted on by members of the community This year there were a record number of votes with 596 votes received We have heard from the winners before and heard about the fantastic work We're delighted to welcome back to the stage the online learning team of Edinburgh Business School Again say a few words if you'd like I really don't think it should be me picking up or doing this speech and Because it was Lucy and Kara who made our film for the award and So thank you to them who put in a lot of work to make the film and thank you to everybody who voted for us Again, it really means a lot to us. We're kind of new to the alt community So it really means a lot. So thank you to everybody who voted for us and thank you to all once again, thank you to Keith and Louise for presenting your winner of the Community Choice Award and Very hearty thanks to Peter and particularly to Janet Roberts who hosted our awards evening so graciously and with that The time for applause and time for waiting is over We now invite all of you who are joining us for the gala dinner to cross the square to if you're not familiar with it I've asked how do you describe this locally and they said Hogwarts? So this is where we invite you now to join us in TV at house for dinner and drinks and dancing Enjoy your evening and see you in the morning. Thank you very much