 We have to be there. Okay. I was gonna move around. Good afternoon. We appreciate you Coming back after lunch on the last day of alt. I know three-day conferences are challenging for me They're probably challenging for lots of people. So I'm Donna I'm Laurie Phipps. I'm from JISC. I'm an anthropologist and So we're gonna talk to you today about Yes, that's why I wanted to move around Mike Oh This I can do this awesome We're gonna talk to you about a project that we've been working on for the last year. So we started doing this research in 20 What year is it? 2017 we started doing this work and this is the first time that we have been able to talk publicly about it. So we're very excited Yeah, so What we've done is we've been working with the sector what we did originally is we had the co-design process And a lot of people in this room will have been involved in that where we talked about the next generation digital learning environment Thank you. Me too for putting that on the bingo back of the bingo card We we looked at What the next generation of digital learning environments might might be and we asked some questions We asked what would an environment do for staff and students We asked what kind of learning experience Would an environment provide and we asked what learning and teaching practices aren't currently supported within the current crop of learning environments now we went through Several months of consultations with the sector. We talked to an awful lot of people I think we had something like seven thousand Twitter engagements and over a hundred blog posts were written about the next generation Digital learning environments during that period and not just from the UK. We had engagements from the US from Australia From Europe, especially Finland and Sweden I'm not sure why But we actually then started to pull all of this together into a retrospective of that particular aspect of next generation Digital learning environments and we started to sort of draw out some of the themes Current good practice was one of them because there's an awful lot of good practice that people are already doing People know how to use the environments. They've got right We started to see the emergence of large enterprise approaches lots of people were talking about the fact that Microsoft and Google and even Facebook had started to get involved in the learning environment space We started to look at the rise of the individual in terms of their practices Seeing lots of people like academics setting up their own for example slack channels For small cohorts of students and things like that We saw of course analytics writ large across the whole thing, but we saw analytics in lots of different guys We saw it in terms of what's going on in institutions and that reporting But lots of people were seeing the the benefits of analytics and how analytics can help support Some aspects of learning as well And there are various other emergent models that we'd started to pick up on So we started looking at that and I say we have lots of work around that These are some of the key things that came out of the report the emphasis on the administration of learning and teaching innovation in learning Technology we found tended to happen outside of the virtual learning environment according to what we were doing We also started looking at the changing behaviors of academics and the changing behaviors of students And that's where this report emerged from as a result of this consultation. We started looking at well What are the teaching behaviors of academics? I just want to emphasize something that we didn't do the previous slide this is Amplifying and advocating rather than discovery. So this is a piece of research And we're going to tell you the things that we think are going on But we're under no illusions that this is something that has never been said before So what we're trying to do is boost the voices That are coming through in our research not pretend that we've discovered this for the first time So I'm so bad at titles and my apologies to Becky for having to like read the title. This is the working title of the report And This is all the stuff we're trying to do we wanted to move away from a sense of Talking very specifically starting off with digital and we wanted to ground it in the behaviors of people who were teaching in the sector And the pitch that I made for the project was you can't talk about any sort of learning environment Until you've talked to people about what teaching is and what teaching practices are and what teaching means to them So this is what we did so over the course of the year We conducted 11 interviews. It's across the range of disciplines So we tried to get as wide a range as possible within quite frankly our convenient sample We put out a call to people to see who would talk to us And we we were really pleased with the the amount of diversity that we got with people who were senior in their institutions people who are very new in their institutions and it was he and Effie and Post-92 and Russell group and red brick. We tried to do all the things as best we could within our sample of 11 We took the interviews that we did and we processed them so that each Individual thing that a person said became a standalone statement and when all of those were printed out It was about 1500 things that people said about teaching For those of you who are in love with numbers And the analysis was not just done by myself and Laurie, but also in conjunction with a group Partners who we brought in to help us think through what we were getting a handle on here and so You will have access to the slide deck at some point But these these are the interview questions that we did and so what a contextual inquiry is that it's basically a very Specific way of dealing with structured and semi-structured interviews and the idea is that you interview people within their context So that you can learn in depth about what they're doing and why so that you can be there in their space Talking to them about their practice so that when they say well I tend to do this thing or I learned about it in this context You can point to the surroundings if that helps you you have this photo. What does this mean? I see you've got these books arranged on the shelf in a particular way What is that doing? So it is in context and so ethnographic ethnographic in that sense, but not sort of long Slow deep ethnography like a classic anthropologist would do and you can see it's very sort of wide-ranging questions about what is teaching Where do you teach? How did you learn how to teach? How do you talk about teaching with whom do you communicate about teaching in your practices? What's the role of research in the role that you have? How does that inform your teaching? What sort of support do you get for teaching? You will notice but nowhere in these questions. Do we say what kind of technology do you use when you teach? We never ask people direct questions about tech We started off asking them about teaching and I think that's important And it informs the way that people were willing to talk to us about their practices So just so you can see what it looked like in the analysis phase So what I would do is we would interview them sometimes as a team and sometimes myself alone I would take handwritten notes. So I was synthesizing at the time that I was interviewing them I would then go in and Transcribe my handwritten notes because after about 24 hours. I can't read my own handwriting anymore And then I would end up putting them in a spreadsheet So each as I've said standalone statement would be in the cell of a spreadsheet And then this is the code of the person who we were interviewing and then these thematic codes came later But they ended up in this in the spreadsheet. So this is what one piece of data looks like for this project So what we did is once we got all the data We printed out every single piece of data and then we cut it up into Small pieces of paper and put them in plastic bags. That's our research method We then brought together people in the sector teachers librarians researchers People from Gisk people from other NGOs instructional designers Yeah, and we said let's get together. Let's get in a room And let's look at the themes now We could have used a piece of software could have used something like in vivo to sort of try and elicit the themes And actually have an algorithm do that But what we found is by doing it this way We got people engaged with what was going on and here you can see a few people just sort of going through You can see this is just one wall of four walls of the data being analyzed so the big Post-its are the the large buckets of codes and then we would have smaller Sub-themes emerging and we would move things around we would have these things taped up And then we would sort of visit and revisit them. We'd say well I don't think this piece actually belongs in barriers. I think it belongs over in students We started very early in the morning and we finished very late and but we were very kind we gave them a sandwich lunch But we all of this sort of every piece of data We didn't finish all every piece of data had actually been put into a theme or a sub theme and The themes just kept changing and emerging so that as we sort of progressed through the day Rather than just having a simple output saying oh look all these are the big key words We wanted to have something that was more contextual that actually meant something to the people that were in the room So for you social scientists out there, we were doing grounded analysis We were not starting with a sense of the themes that we wanted to find We looked at all of the things and then saw what emerged from what we had And go through that and sort of pulling there so these are the Now there are a lot of themes you could see on that previous slide there are actually more themes there than I've actually put on this slide What we wanted to do for this report is get the first draft report and a published report out to the sector So we decided to focus on these five themes for this report. We still have masses of data for smaller sub themes as well And we picked these themes specifically to respond to the issues that came out of the NGDLE Community consultation so we felt like these are the ones that resonated best with the things that people were saying in the sector in the Previous piece of work that just so it followed on from the stuff that we were getting about the actual Technology that the actual digital learning environments. So once we focused on were teaching places where people actually do their practice students obviously Change innovation and risk Came through Massively, and I don't think we totally anticipated that I did Hashtag viral Organizational support for teaching and of course technology technology came through almost all of the Technology so, you know, this is very similar to what I say to libraries when they want to know what people think about libraries, right? Don't actually ask them about libraries. Yeah, so we didn't ask them about technology We didn't say tell us about the tech you use. Yeah, they just told us about the tech They used yes in both positive and negative ways, but they just it just came out because it's embedded in their practice, right? So I'll just run you through some of the kinds of things that that are sort of sub themes within these themes that the teaching places Theme had a lot of stuff in the conversations around what they don't have access to right? We don't have enough of the kinds of rooms that I want to be teaching in so they might be in a place where they have a Lot of lecture halls available, but they don't have as many rooms where the students can get up and move around and interact with each other They don't have flexible teaching spaces. And so they're stuck often with spaces like this even though they might want to do group work Access is not just for them, but also for students So not all teaching spaces or classroom spaces if students want to be in an environment where they're teaching each other for instance And can't have access to classrooms and don't have access to less structured learning spaces like lounges or collaborative Learning areas. This is a problem and they were aware that students can't always get into the kind of places that they want to be in To be able to learn Offices showed up as teaching places Offices are places where they interact with students one-on-one where they have confidential meetings and so this wave of Open plan offices and hot desking and academia is having a direct impact on the kind of work That academics can do with their students in safe spaces And so we had people coping with that lack of access to private spaces By scheduling so they might be sharing a space and so some people would say well I'm gonna meet with my students on Tuesday and you can meet with your students on Wednesday, and I'll make myself scarce So they were using calendar to Sort of you know adapt to the fact that they didn't have enough physical spaces other places here is off campus field trips going to Sites for ecology research and things like this So not all teaching places and you guys know this not all teaching places or classrooms I was really important to elicit that the range the landscape of teaching places that are relevant and And then what the implications of digital are for access to for enhancing For making these spaces work for them and especially for hacking spaces Students The notion that trust is a huge part of what they're trying to build when they're in these teaching spaces So the the trust is linked to the spaces because often what they would say is I really value going on field trips with my students I really value going on co-curricular activities with my students are Being in cafes and being in places where I'm not the stage on the stage Because then they'll talk to me about everything Assessment is frequently the tail wagging the dog. So a lot of their practices around teaching are informed by assessment This is important Came through the sense that the the hesitancy and what they put Online what they put into these digital systems might put them at risk if they capture all of my content If they have all of my lectures then maybe they don't need me anymore So the political situation of precarity in higher education is having a direct impact on the extent to which people want to Engage with technology and somebody did actually say to us Ed tech will replace us So this was during the strike as well. So it wasn't some sort of abstract notion. It was a real They actually said it visceral. Yeah, so I won't go through all of these But again, these are the sorts of things that we got Organizational support or lack thereof, right? There's not enough time. How can they build a network? How can they find people that they want to talk to about teaching when it's not built into their contracts? And the barriers they found were generally not technology ones as much as people bitch and moan about VLEs The barriers that people were talking about were other people I Think the other thing is one of the things that we picked up during the interviews Innovation seems now to be writ large in every institutional strategy Just show of hands. How many people have got innovation in teaching in their strategy? Yeah, okay It's important to distinguish that digital and innovation are not the same thing Okay, um, but it seemed to defaults about in some of these cases. We have people talking about really really traditional Things they were doing and we're using the VLE as Content depositories and again, this is familiar to you, right? That's not innovative It's digital But it's not particularly new or excited So the implications of what we've been doing This one very quickly There's a disconnect between what we provide institutionally for teachers to use What they actually want to do and what's possible? What we mean by that is is the institution provides a tool maybe says use this tool They then start using it But then it becomes invisible to them what they could actually do beyond That that thing and it becomes something that stifles the innovation So they're trying so hard to do what they want to do with the stuff that they've been provided that isn't actually a good fit They spend all this time hacking at what they are presented with that they never get to a point where they can actually imagine What's possible so if these circles started to overlap more people would have more access To the possibilities that are currently not visible and the invisibility would disappear. Yeah, and this is This came through very strongly as well And maybe we've heard some of this this week especially during the keynotes, but when you Mandate technology. It's not the same as supporting teaching When you say you will use this tool It's not the same as saying I am helping you in your teaching practice. What did trust you say? I make sure I've got a shell In the learning management system for each of my classes because that's what they told me I need to do But all of her active teaching practices were happening outside of the mandated institutional presence and Mandating technology is also not the same as innovation Yeah This is shot through everything and I think this is one of the most important themes to sit with when we're thinking about Why and how people make the decisions they make around teaching and it's not just about trust between instructor and student Although that was a big deal if the people working in your institution don't trust you And or trust the technology that you are in charge of as an instructional designer as a learning technologist They're not going to engage with you We all know that in it when you start delivering Teaching it's not just the teacher. It's the staff developers. It's the educational developers It's the people that are involved in curriculum design. It's the people that are involved in timetabling It's the learning technologists when you're trying to provide an holistic Experience and what we found people are telling us is that at any point at any point on that circle The trust is broken then things start to go wrong Yeah, if students go into a system that doesn't work They never go back if faculty have that experience with somebody who's supposed to be helping them They never go back if they try to upload a piece of content to a system and it fails They never go back. Yeah, so this needs to be kept in mind all of the time I know it doesn't surprise any of you, but I don't think we talk about it enough That's us. This is us and we have time for questions Just thank you so much for fitting that into 20 minutes. I feel like we could talk about that all day We've got 10 minutes for questions And we're gonna have Becky Do we have the Okay, not any online. So somebody in the room must you can do the me-too thing or we can Or we can We have roving Mike if someone wants to Here we go. It has a question You were talking about spaces They they did they did talk about digital spaces and we didn't have it up on that slide, but people talked about discussion boards People talked about social media as a teaching space And they also talked about digital spaces that they would not go into Because they wanted to make sure that students would interact with each other. So we had one Lecturer who had a space set up in social media where her students knew she was present and she would be there as a teaching presence But then she Encouraged them to set up a separate space that she was never going to go into because then they needed to do different things over there So absolutely digital is a place in these as well, but this yeah So we put physical spaces But even in the language that people were using talking about they were using words that you would describe As a physical space when we throw it to the digital right sometimes when they were talking about spaces You have to check where they are talking about right and but the same things around structured and unstructured spaces Institutionally supported spaces and non institutionally support that's true in physical as well as digital spaces So the themes cross-cut Whether it's digital or physical Thank you. Yeah, I think Catherine had a question and then we've got some coming in online. Oh, wow Okay, so the first one we've got here is you mentioned the main barriers were human not technological What were the main human barriers? Yeah, I mean just so a lot of it is if you if those people are not in your network You're not going to talk to them about your teaching So if they didn't identify anybody on their Institutional network as somebody that they could talk to about teaching They would try to find somebody that they went to a graduate school with or somebody that they would meet at a conference Or they would just sort of resign themselves to the fact that they didn't have a network Or they would sort of wish that they could do that No, it's the other thing about the the question was the barrier for what you It wasn't it was sometimes a physical barrier as well. It was the fact that they couldn't get time with somebody they couldn't I Don't want to place the audience But you know if you're in a university and there's only five learning Technologists, and you want to do something really innovative with learning technology Well, you know come see me at the end of the day when I've done all the jobs I'm supposed to do well and another barrier was quite frankly administrative higher-ups who didn't see the point Of engaging with technology for the sake of education, right? So so there wasn't any space being made by the leadership To to be able to engage in these sorts of things Yes, thank you Kind of alluding to what you said before down about you know You expected that notion about change to come up that thing So I'm not surprised at the names of the themes, but there's a lot of richness in what you're identifying within each Yeah, subtleties that I think are really important. So there are people in institutions who are aware of these and are trying to fight these battles So how do you anticipate this resource being used? That's that's you So I have hopes, but I don't know that's gonna come to pass The purpose for the report From my perspective of just is that we wanted to know how people teach There's lots been written lots been said we wanted to do it in this way to actually hear the voices of the teachers Rather than hearing second-hand voices or you know, we get lots of market research for example from vendors But we get lots of market research telling us we wanted to go into institutions and listen to the voices and You know for just to be able to say this is what teachers are telling us so that when we start looking at Things that we're doing next. We've got work on the intelligent campus We've got analytics writ large at JISC and we've also got some work coming up in the next generation digital learning programs when that works starts to Progress and starts to develop things that can be used in institutions Then we want this report to be able to influence that work. Yeah, but also it's gonna be available It's not gonna just sit in a desk. This is going online It will be available as a resource and the data will be available as a resource for other people to interpret So my one my primary intention actually was to get these voices to JISC's attention and part of the reason We did the initial analysis the way we did it was to get people from that org into the room and Touching the data right at reading the words of the people who teach in the sector so that there couldn't be any What we think they say this or I've heard the people who teach think this but they were confronted with the words of Practitioners and it is my hope that that then will be kind of an antidote to the assumptions that often run through Some of the policy work in the sector So it was a it was a deliberate attempt to ground things in behavior Okay, so we've got about three minutes left and you've seen up there one of the questions is where can we read it? Well Where do we read important fall? So we're writing it up now. We're doing the implication Some of us have done all of the writing Some of us to write some recommendations The recommendations are being written now We are looking at releasing a draft for the community to engage with as well because once we've done this and we have We can now have a draft report at the moment We can now release the draft reports get more feedback from people that are in teaching places and give us more Feedback about what they are seeing and that feeds the richness and it keeps the dates coming But there will also be a full report republished This academic year as well. I did I wrote We've written most it was the first first draft of it was a 40 page report And now I think we've whittled it So we've got a couple of comments and questions about Academics and students sort of related so one is is their research on academics or students not going back if the tech fails I assume that means not going back to the tech and the other one that might relate to it is Was there any disconnect between students and teacher perspectives? So well, it's it's not a student-centered project It's a teacher-centered project So if anybody would like to work with me to get the funding to hire me to do the student learning Contextual inquiry I would be delighted to have a conversation with you about that So that that wasn't the focus of this particular one when it comes to the tech failing. Yes, there is research We've just done it if one person tells us that they went to the BLE and it failed That's research because if it's happened to one person, it's happened to more than one person We keep asking ed techs the same question. Well, have you got research to back this up? Yeah, have you about evidence? How often do we turn around to a lecture who stands in the front of a lecture theater and say Have you got evidence to say that what you're doing is effective? You know, yes, we've just been out and spoke to academics who said it failed. So I never went back It doesn't matter how many said it academics said it fails We didn't go back and how many times does the stuff have to fail before we? Give that message credibility like how many people have to decide that they're not going to engage with technology on campus Because it doesn't serve them or their students Sector to respond to that as an actual need So last one and this is kind of an interesting counter to what you've just said I think did you uncover any scenarios where digital was being used to increase trust? so Yes, yeah, and this I'm thinking about how in the in the sense that it proliferated the number of places where you could communicate with your students There was one practitioner in particular I'm thinking of who was very mindful about his social media presence as a way of breaking down barriers between students and Academics because sometimes it's hard for academics to frame themselves as people right because their teachers their authority figures And so he very deliberately curated of a mode in particular social media accounts To make connections with his students that he couldn't otherwise make in formal structured classroom environment Works really well Then bought fruit when he was doing field. Yes So when he was actually then out interacting with them in social situations in field work That actually was was manifest But he was super mindful about it and he was never into the impression that just because he has a social media account That that got him in good with his students It was about what he did with his presence online that made the difference. It was carefully curated He was aimed students. Yeah I'm afraid we're out of time. That's okay. Donna and Laurie's contact details are up there if you want to chase them up for more information Thank you very much. Thank you