 Okay, well good morning everyone, it's lovely to be here and it's my first time at one of these events so it's great to see the other projects and I can see opportunities in terms of synergies already. So my name is Blanoff McSherry, I'm a learning technologist who's been working on all aboard since the beginning. You might be wondering why Ian McLaren isn't here, he's the project lead but he's just flown in from New York this morning so he sends his apologies. Just to give people an overview about the project very briefly, you can see the partner institutions are there on screen so the aim of all aboard was really to enable staff and students to flourish in the digital age, so quite a grand aim I guess and I'll just look through maybe the main objectives of the project to start. So firstly what we were aiming to do was develop a national digital skills framework so to identify what are the key digital skills that staff and students require to flourish in the digital age. Secondly we were looking at evaluating, promoting and investigating the use of digital badges to recognise achievement both in terms of digital skills but also in a wider context. Thirdly we want to engage students and staff in collaborative skills development so that's been quite a big focus of the project, getting involved with staff and student partnerships and finally developing and designing learning materials linked to the digital skills framework and so just to kind of situate where we are in terms of project at the moment so the project was due to end at the end of December so we've had some challenges in the last few months just in terms of staffing a project member left and we have just recently replaced project member at the end of September so we're back to our full compliment now but what we've done is request a no-cost extension until March so this is very much an ongoing living breathing project that we're working on at the moment and so what I'm going to do is work through each of each of those objectives and just give you an idea of what have we done since the last review and the types of impact and dissemination routes that we're going down with each of them. So the first one is the digital skills framework so you might be familiar with that metro map so that's our take on what are those those key skills staff and students need. So since the last review we've done quite a bit of work on the digital skills framework so with each of the skills there's about I think just over a hundred skills on our map so we've worked through each of those and we're putting together a set of learning objectives that's associated with each of those skills so that someone can come and look at the map and look at our website and say these are the criteria that are involved in gaining those particular skills that's going to be helpful when people are developing courses when we're developing our own courses. As we've gone along we have refined the stations a little bit you know some have joined together and as we've been developing contact we've seen okay this works well with this or maybe the station there's a lot too which it's best to divide it into two so we've been working on that and we would hope to publish our final map at the end of the project. You can see there on the left we have developed a digital confidence profile tool so what that does that's a little interactive tool that's mapped directly to the framework it takes each of the categories and it asks people a series of questions to give them statements so they can rate where they fall within each of those categories so let's say communication and collaboration do you have a basic knowledge are you confident are you an expert in it so people can kind of see where they're situated and the data is captured anonymously so we are doing some analysis on that as well and the framework is also linked to the professional development framework and we're looking at maybe working badging into that as well and that all aboard would underpin the digital literacy side of that. So in terms of impact we've had loads and loads of interest in the framework we've worked with lots of people nationally and internationally and the framework is being translated into different languages throughout Europe. We have presented at lots of conferences and events so and from different sides as well so let's say you know we've presented at student services conferences during the summer from the ed tech side we've presented at ed tech the project was represented at the European University Association conference various library events as well so it kind of feeds into the different project collaborators and how we have disseminated out through the different the different channels there. We are also presenting at online education in Berlin but I just wanted to focus maybe on one of the conferences in particular it was lucky enough to be invited to the 2016 ministerial meeting the OECD meeting on the digital economy so that was a really high profile event held in Cancun in Mexico and he presented on a panel and you can see there are some of the people who were involved in it so that was a great way of showcasing the project and looking at it from a very strategic high level and to get feedback from other people ministers and government officials on what they thought about the project. The framework as well has also underpinned a number of other funded projects and especially with the tell weeks so projects such as take one step and tell weeks running which run in the other universities during the spring so lots of dissemination lots of impact and lots of lots of interest. So the second area I'm going to talk about are digital badges so again this is another area that we've had lots and lots and lots of interest in and I could have almost spent my whole time just coordinating badges projects and dealing with people and taking inquiries on that. So our badges pilots have continued to spread so throughout all of the partner institutions there are badging pilots in place. I'm based at Anua Galway and we have perhaps maybe 25 or 30 or even more badging pilots in place. There's also interest from new communities in the last number of months so the research community who are looking at potentially using badges to recognize particular scientific skills in Anua Galway as well. We have started working with our HR department to have various skills recognized via badges and also the graduate or graduate attributes will be recognized and will be recognized via digital badges which kind of links in with approaches taken by other universities such as Deakin and Melbourne who have been working with a little bit on this on this front so this is very much ongoing and in terms of impact and dissemination on this side of things because we've had such a large volume of interest and inquiries on badges and what we decided to do was to put together a badge back so that what we're trying to do in the project you know bearing in mind that it is coming to an end is to think about what resources are going to be really useful to people that they can take away after the project has finished and they can reuse and that they can learn from what we've done in our experiences and our successes and challenges so we've put together this badge back which has a set of guidelines and potentially institutional policy and useful links and and case studies all about badges that's available to download from our website and we are also running a national badges workshop event that's going to be at the start of December we're co-sponsoring that with open badge factory so that will be a great opportunity if anyone is interested in learning how they can implement badges looking at case studies and that would be on the 8th of December so we'll be publicizing that in the next few weeks as well and student partnerships so as I mentioned student collaboration and partnership has been a really big focus of all aboard so we have again student partnership programs running in all of our partner institutions so I might talk about two of them and anyway Galway we have the digital champions project so what we have been trying to do is recruit enthusiastic interested students who want to improve their skills but also want to share their knowledge with other students and with with staff members as well so we're now in our second cohort and we've had great interest in in the second core in the second running of the project and we have had over 200 students express their interest we've started running our workshops and we're getting over maybe 50 to 60 students attending the workshops and the UCD digital ambassadors project and it's also running again this semester again that's quite it's been very successful the students there are involved in internships in a range of university services they work with the library to develop videos they work with the access office so really getting involved in different parts of the university we're also getting our students involved in actually developing some of the content that they might have expertise in and also getting them to review some of our learning materials in terms of dissemination and impact we have presented on digital champions and digital ambassadors at various conferences during the summer and again to respond to the interest and what we feel is in need in this area is what we're going to do is develop something like our badge pack except related to the staff and student partnerships so that people can come to a website they can download a pack that says this this is how we run our partnerships and we have a maybe two or three different methods of doing so and give them ideas on how they can run the workshop so this is so this can be rolled out in other institutions so we're working on that at the moment and that will be ready at the end of the project as well and one other element in terms of our student partnership is to we've been trying to get some feedback and data from the students to get an idea of where do they feel they are with their digital skills at the moment and where are they interested in learning more about so we are using the eye test which is kind of a personality type quiz that was developed by the University of Exeter and used in a number of UK institutions so students can come in and answer a number of questions and they can rate their confidence in using technologies and what they get it's not just a survey they get actually feedback straight away on what kind of digital learner they are so it's quite it's quite a nice looking survey so we have started piloting that in a new way all the way we just started running it actually last week we've had three hundred and fifty responses so far and what we're hoping to do is roll it out in the partner institutions and also to promote it as part of digital skills week next year and we also have a master's students a colleague of mine who's working on this so she is hoping to take these these findings and analyse them as part of her research so finally I guess the other major part of all the board is actually the learning materials so this is providing resources interactive lessons a variety of materials that are linked to the various skills in the framework so I guess this is where probably we're going to be focusing most of our work in the next few months and I guess where we have been affected a little bit by our staffing changes in the last few months as well so we are developing a new system which is in beta testing at the moment it's almost there we're going to launch it in November so the aim of this part of the project is to provide resources and interactive lessons that are linked to the skills in the digital skills framework so we want to also have an online system where people can come they can take lessons they can complete whatever assessment or take quizzes and they can earn digital badges associated with those particular lessons so it's really the whole life cycle of the project is built into the system so it's a WordPress website and it's being implemented using LearnDash which is a content management system that plugs into WordPress and also open badge factory so it's quite a bit of development work involved in that and Colin Larry has been helping us with that which has been really great and so it's in beta testing at the moment and it's due to be launched as I mentioned in November and this will also contain all of those other things I've mentioned so to say the eye test survey that the students can take the other tools such as the digital confidence tool that I mentioned as well so they are all going to be available online there in terms of impact and dissemination all the materials will be openly available and downloadable that they're available under Creative Commons license we are also providing all of our interactive lessons as scorn packages we're just trying to think about well how you know how can we make them as as usable as possible within other institutions so any other learning technology units can download those resources and plug them into their own VLE as they see fit and again I think this is probably an area where we could do well in terms of collaborating with some of the other projects take some of their resources share some of our resources and to have them all openly available so you can see here this is just kind of a snapshot of where we are at and what kind of topics we've chosen to focus on and where at with the development of those so again we'll be publishing a lot of these resources in the coming months and we are hoping to kind of feed it into again the national digital skills weeks that will be running next March so that all of our materials will be available by then and we've also I guess spent a bit of time honing our processes on this because all of our developers are based in different institutions you know so we've tied down things like wash tools exactly we use you know how does it work from content through to development through to review and publishing so I think we're in a pretty good place now to start getting these these lessons out and published and so finally the future so I think we have done quite a lot and yeah there it is but we still we still probably have lots to do so in terms of sustainability as well so that's obviously a big focus of the next few months as well so things like our resource packs I think are going to be useful in terms of allowing people who want to use digital badges well here's your pack go ahead it takes through the whole process as you can do it and the same with our staff and student partnership resource pack as well in terms of lessons themselves obviously that is the most difficult thing to continue on once the project has ended but there's certainly a commitment from the lead institution annual way to to maintain the online system and to build it in as much as we can and in other partner institutions to the development of our teaching and learning and technology enhanced learning resources so that we will continue to develop resources and publish them publish them to the website so hopefully we'll be working towards publishing our resources getting our staff and student partnerships rolled out in other institutions and working towards the digital skills we have as many of these resources published as we can so happy to take any questions thank you