 I'm just conscious that they will pass the front to the camera for their live streaming. Here they come. We'll give them a second. They're just coming in. So welcome back everybody. And I'm delighted to now ask the team who's leading Cork with their project, Disciplines Inquiring Into Societal Challenges. Okay, good morning everybody. Thanks very much for the invitation to present today. Our project is called Disciplines Inquiring Into Societal Challenges, or DISCs for short, and the subtitle is Enhancing Teaching and Learning for Active Citizenship. So the project team, as you can see here, consists of myself, my teaching and learning colleagues, Dr. Morgan Maynroll and Dr. Audrey Brine, who are here with me presenting. And I'm also Dr. Bernie Grommel from Minutes University. And along with the teaching and learning partners, we have partners from each Student Union who are VPs for Academic Affairs or Education Officers in terms of the respective titles. So we have Aaron Freil, Calla and Commons, and Katie Deegan from each of the Student Unions in each institution as part of our project team. Now, this team is multidisciplinary in terms of our backgrounds, and that's important to understanding the project itself. We have people who have our disciplinary knowledge of social sciences, diversity pedagogy, education technology, biology, economics, mathematics, et cetera. So quite a diverse team. And I suppose the reason why we want to put this project in place is because there's been a lot of advances in terms of diversifying the medium of teaching and learning in this country and across the world. What we want to bring to this, along with diversifying the medium, is diversifying the message of teaching and learning so that our students and our staff, all staff who teach, are capable of engaging with societal challenges and with sensitive topics towards building active citizens in our universities. So there are three, I suppose, elements to what we want to contribute through this project. The first is to select, profile, and develop 15 discs champions. What those champions will be doing is benchmarking themselves against a publicly available online tool in terms of their self-assessment. They will be providing proof of concept in terms of our pilot values, competencies, methods, and outcomes model. They'd also be acting as advocates for the discs project across the country and internationally as well, we hope, while also creating narratives online of their professional development journey. The second aspect of the project is modeling engagement of student learning, student experiences, and student ideas through activities like interdisciplinary online student assemblies, student focus groups, empirical research, that empirical research with students, the advice of our student union partners, and also developing participatory assessment methods with students during the project. And finally, the key goal of the project is to develop a roadmap that would support our institutions in Ireland, across the country, across the island, in terms of developing a strategy and an implementation plan for teaching for societal challenges across disciplines. So what will the disc project deliver in more concrete terms? Well, I suppose ethical and value laden issues are no discipline or classroom is exempt from looking at ethical or value laden issues, even if they think they are sometimes. And what our project will deliver, I suppose, is to enhance the national professional development framework in terms of the different aspects of professional knowledge and skills, personal identity development, professional values, and also digital competencies, et cetera, and communication and dialogue competencies as well. What we'll be doing is focusing on three national strategic priorities for our country in terms of teaching and learning, and that's an intercultural focus, a gender-conscious focus, and a community-oriented focus. And I suppose, in order to cohere that, what we'll be doing is developing a series of tools, guidelines, exemplars, and literature review, which will, I suppose, put a focus to those three strategic priorities. So in concrete terms, the deliverables for this project are, first of all, as I've mentioned, an international literature review, and that literature review will build understanding of the key values, competencies, methods, and learning outcomes that all those staff who teach need to develop in order to become, I suppose, what we're calling discs engaged. So that will be available on the project website at the end of quarter one, and also we'd like to disseminate that in the Bilbao Euro-Suttle Conference in June. The second piece of the puzzle, I suppose, and a really key part of it is the Spiky Profile Online Tool. Some of you may be aware of this tool. We're currently using it in UCC, and UCC will provide a platform for it to be available publicly, or will support that platform. So essentially what the Spiky Profile Tool is an online tool that will become publicly available over the course of the project for staff in any institution, any staff who teach, to self-assess themselves in relation to what we are calling discs, values, competencies, methods, and outcomes. And to give you some concrete examples of what that would look like, staff would be completing a questionnaire at various points in their professional development trajectory. Looking at, I suppose, values, for example, like student backgrounds that differ from mine must be engaged as appropriate in my teaching, and whether they actually agree with that or not. It is important to equally engage students of different genders in teaching and learning because of the issues around, say, males versus females and the different levels of public engagement that can happen in a classroom or online or on campus. So in terms of methods, for example, in terms of a community-based learning method, I can support students to create shared digital artifacts such as, for example, hypertext to collaboratively write with a community group. Or I can moderate online or on-campus discussions about sensitive issues using a brave space methodology, so having ground rules for how we conduct conversations face-to-face and online. So there's just some examples, and what would happen through that tool is that, I suppose, a spiky graph would be developed where we can identify places where the person is doing well, but also gaps that they need to fill or that they could fill, I suppose, in the context of their professional development journey. And this tool itself will then provide automatically generated recommendations for places to go in order to further develop your competencies in those areas. So getting back to the other deliverables, I suppose, during the lifetime of the project, we will be developing a strategy and implementation plan, which is a key aspect of the strand one proposals. So there's a couple of elements to that, which some of which will be disseminated during the life of the project and obviously then launched at the very end of the project in terms of the strategy and implementation plan. So the first piece is that ongoing creation of a narrative publicly on our website for individual champions regarding their professional development journey. Clearly, we'll need to work with the individual champions in order to create those narratives. They'll also be sharing things like module activities students will be inviting students to put up blogs and blogs, as well as staff, as part of that journey, as part of creating that professional development narrative and exemplifying, I suppose, to publicly what we're doing. And we'd also like to, given that the International Sottle Conference in Atlanta in October 2019 is focused on subtle without borders and looking at social change, I think it's a really good opportunity for us as a team to exemplify what we're doing, given as well, I suppose, the challenges that are there for universities across Europe and internationally in dealing with sensitive topics and societal challenges, conflicts of values, et cetera. The final few pieces in terms of deliverables for the project include the strategy and the implementation document itself, which I said will integrate the National Professional Development Framework. The project website will be a living implementation site. And finally, the disc champions themselves will be trained up to the level of leaders and advocates for their own particular domains and for the disc's project itself. So I'll hand over next to Morag. So my name is Morag Munro, and I'm going to take you through the implementation plan for the proposed disc project. So it's our intention to kick off the project in January, 2019, and the first two phases of 2019, the first two quarters, consist of two overlapping work packages. The first one is our project initiation and recruitment phase. And during that phase, we will, first of all, come together as a project team to focus in on agreeing our project objectives. We'll also begin work on developing the spiky profiling tool that Carl mentioned earlier. Also in terms of recruitment at that stage, we will be looking to recruit a project officer to support us in the implementation of the project. We'll also be recruiting our disc's champions, and we'll do that by using the spiky profile tool to profile those members of staff who have expressed an interest in becoming disc's champions. And our aim will be to come up with 15 disc's champions who represent a diverse range of disciplines and backgrounds. Our phase 1B is going to be focused on the development of our values, competencies, methods, and outcomes model. And as Carl said, that will be based on an international literature review of policy and research in relation to teaching for societal issues. Also in phase 1B, we will make the disc's spiky profile toolkit available publicly online. Phase 2 of the project will begin in July 2019. And that's going to be focused on the professional development planning for our disc's champions. So we'll work with each of the disc's champions to develop a personal development plan for each of them. And that plan will be aligned with the disc's values, competencies, methods, and outcomes model, and also with the National Forum's professional development framework. In doing that, when we're identifying professional development opportunities, we will, as far as is possible, look to leverage existing resources. So for example, the AHEAD digital badge for supporting universal design that's been developed through the National Forum, and also the LEAD program, which was developed through the Irish University's Association Equality Network. Phase 3 of the project will be the rollout of professional development, and also the rollout of the implementation of disc's principles in our disc's champions teaching. And so that will begin around September 2019. And again, we'll work with the disc's champions to support them to implement disc's principles into their learning and teaching. Also in that phase, we'll begin to support our participants, both students and staff, to begin to disseminate and share their experiences, as Carl said. So for example, through video logs and so on. The fourth phase of the project will commence around January 2020. That first of all is going to be focused in looking at how we will evaluate the project and planning for the evaluation. We'll also be focused in on working, beginning work on our disc's strategy and implementation plan, a key part of the project. Then finally in phase 5, we will evaluate the project with our disc's champions and with students. We'll also be very much working with the disc's champions to support them in developing their leadership capacities to ensure the continued roll out of the approach across other departments and across further institutions. And then finally in that phase, we will hold a national event to launch the disc's strategy and implementation plan. So I'm going to hand over to Audrey now, who's going to talk about the sustainability of the project. Thanks, Morag. Audrey Brine, School of Human Development, DCU. So just very briefly then, in terms of impact, well, we will work in partnership with students and student representatives through the online and student assemblies and focus groups to create dialogue among students in terms of what really matters to them in terms of methods and content. We will, as Carla and Morag have mentioned, the Spiky Profile, we will disseminate online tools, including the Spiky Profile, which will have reach beyond our three academic institutions and beyond Ireland's borders. And the Spiky Profile will provide statistics on usage as well as a clear message on impact. And the champions will act as advocates for strategy and implementation plan, both online and through local, bite-sized and national presentations to staff and students. Thirdly, we will disseminate findings from the project during the life cycle of the project itself. So the next International SOTL conference is actually titled SOTL Without Borders, Engaged Practices for Social Change. So that just demonstrates the relevance of our project. Fourthly, we're going to leverage our complementary implementation of national priorities of intercultural, gender-conscious and community-based teaching and learning in strategy and planning documentations to propose that the disc strategy and implementation plan becomes a higher education authority-approved model of best practice. And then finally, the positioning of Carl as the chair of the Irish University's Equality Network will support the integration of discs into future institutional strategic plans for teaching and learning and for broader third-level strategic planning in general. Thank you very much.