 On to our third pilot study group this morning, our teachers and researchers with Bernie Britten as the expert mentor and again the diversity in this is illustrated by the fact that the 14 participants come from a wide range of institutes of technology and from universities. Bernie Britten and team you're very welcome. Hi everyone I'm Bernie and this is my co-mentor Karen Dunn, so we work in Dundalk Institute of Technology with colleagues and friends. And we work together, we brought the two pilot groups together, we called them teachers and researchers and what we tried to do was to look at the duality of our professional lives where we are working in the classroom but we're also reflecting on that, publishing on that, networking on that and so on. We had a fantastic experience, we had 21 people all together, both people who came every week to our two hour sessions or people who were engaged through the technological space. And what we decided to do was to record a short video for the participants, a few of the participants to tell us a little bit about their experience. So Karen and I would like you to enjoy the video. I'm Bernie Britten and I work in the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Dundalk IT. And I'm Dahi Kearney and I'm a lecturer in music here at Dundalk IT. And I'm Karen Dodden, I'm a lecturer in the nursing here at Dundalk IT. And we've been working with colleagues in the college and outside of the college in Trinity and New City for the last three or four months on the professional development pilot project. We thought we'd take a little bit of time today and tell you about it. One of the things that I thought worked really well was the way in which we were able, as you were saying, to take time to consider our professional development. The acronym is often used as CPD, Continuous Professional Development. But how can it be continuous when you drop it and go back to it maybe once or twice every year when you go to conferences or something like that? So can we talk a little bit about our working process in that respect? So through the National Forum Framework document we have these four typologies of professional development activities. The first one being the collaborative non-accredited. The second one being unstructured non-accredited. The third being structured non-accredited. And of course finally the last one accredited, which is what we have in place for the moment anyway. So just talk a little bit about how we sort of dipped in and out of those typologies and how they had to frame our community. I think it was very much part of the first meeting we had. That kind of realisation that you know what, we do an awful lot more than is recognised and we spend more time than is recognised. I know Karen you talked about trying to kind of capture that time. Yeah, have these casual meetings. And the whole time we're engaging in learning from each other in a collaborative way, in a very unstructured way. And yes, many of us have engaged in the accredited, but I think it was a sense of realisation. Sometimes we forget, we actually spend more time and effort on this development of ourselves than we really does. And perhaps that others measure this. And it's all the things that we do as well, but why do we have these kind of collaborations between ourselves here on campus? Okay, sometimes it's kind of a way of the collaboration to help off-campus in some respects as well. Because we just think of them as conversations with friends or with peers about whether it be research or teaching practice or all of these things. And I think they're equally a valuable source of kind of support on an ongoing kind of network and to help in our work as well. And I kind of always, I know personally I would talk to friends nearly every week about things that I would do in my teaching. And they do the same with me and I think that's very valuable kind of learning experience and stuff. And it's something that we don't ever kind of work through. One of the things I really enjoyed was the way that we were scouting in our UCD and TCD partners in the pilot group. And we were getting the benefits of their expertise, but also their experience. Karen and I, as you know, did one theatre about UCD and we had a smaller meeting up there. But it was really nice to hear, you know, as you mentioned research and teaching, there may be different proportions within the university structure as opposed to the RTI structures. But the pressures and the difficulties and the value systems are actually the same. I found it really hard to learn from that. Yeah, it's really interesting to see that. Even though they have on paper less teaching hours, they still not have any more time to capture those sort of informal collaborations that go on all the time. But even over coffee, we forget we have 50 minutes at 11 o'clock for our official coffee break. But a lot of the time I know from what I see. We talked to our friend, our colleague, about what we're doing. We're sharing the same course. And he looked at us and said, oh, God, it's time to go back. And we have done 50 minutes of collaboration between the two of us at three o'clock. And it's not a credit. And people don't even know about it. It's quite often where you have the discussion about the students who's doing the same topic. They're the same kind of degree pool on these emails. And you're kind of like, are they having an issue with this in your class? And it's all the informal kind of things which you learn so much about. And I think one of the really bad things about our pilot group has been the fact that we've had a portion of time set aside for some of this discussion and for some of this reflection. Because again, one of the challenges we've all spoken about is that trying to find that time to meet with others. And again, even across departments because, again, I'm in a very different building. Actually, everybody here, what has given me a new perspective on what happens elsewhere, even within this institute. And that's been fantastic about it as well.