 Thank you very much. I'll explain a little bit why it's me rather than Michelle is presenting this project. Basically, this project, the original title is a collaborative knowledge exchange for learning impact, which is not exactly catchy. We came up with a different title. One of our team members is particularly gifted in that area. Thank you, Helena. She came up with the name Cranoog, which we're using and it doesn't stand for anything, but it sounds nice when we can explain the rationale for why it's used later on if you want. Anyway, it's a partnership between the institutions that are listed there. Our colleagues from MedEi are not quite here yet, but never mind, we'll continue. I suppose the main aim of this project is to directly address a really crucial set of people in higher education, and that's those who are heads of school or heads of department. They really are key agents of change, or in some cases, potentially key blockers of change. They're really, really important. With lots of examples of people innovating as individuals, individual lecturers and tutors, but if you want some sort of more systemic change, you need a collective endeavour really. At the school level, that's a really key unit of change. We think that crucial, we know they're crucial, they shape disciplinary cultures as well, and they contribute also to the culture of the broader institution in various ways. The exact structures of institutions varies, and the amount of devolved power varies from institution to institution, but all heads of school and department, to some extent, are making strategic decisions, at least at the local level, and many of them have invaluable experience of teaching as well. So they're a key group, and we want to work with this group, and we want to try and provide them with support and help, in a sense, raise their awareness and also benefit from their experience in the enhancement of teaching and learning, thinking also about the educationly effective use of technologies, because, as I say, we're trying to nurture a culture of inquiry with regards to teaching and learning. So that's the intention of the project. So the kinds of actions that we mentioned were going to undertake as part of the project, obviously it's about trying to fine tune our understanding of that group of people's needs, so that involves a lot of liaison and communication, and building partnership is really important, because those people are very busy people, and that's one of the key aspects we've mentioned as well in our project proposal. We recognise that people are very, very time-cure, under lots of pressure, so we want to make sure that we're seen as a help rather than a hindrance, and so it's really important to build that sense of partnership and build that sense of trust. What we're trying to do, though, in a sense, is really translate some of the research, the scholarship and the outcomes of many, many previous projects and ongoing projects supported by the National Forum itself, the Higher Education Academy, the Leadership Foundation, just all these different bodies. There's lots of really, really useful materials, resources, strategies, research and evaluation studies that we think could help people who are in that role as head of school. But the difficulty is that these materials are scattered, they're not necessarily written for that with that audience in mind, and so part of our project is really taking these resources and writing bespoke, targeted versions that harvest the learnings from these diverse sources and put it into terms and a framework that the heads of school will appreciate. So what we're doing is we've picked a number of key themes or topics, and we'll see these in a couple of minutes, and we're sourcing, customising, adapting and offering where required materials and pressing those specific themes, where as part of that development, identifying scope for student engagement and participation, that will vary depending on the topic, but it's going to be crucial that in each topic we look for the opportunities that are there. We'll be planning and coordinating local workshops and networked events where we're bringing in appropriate invited experts as needed, and we're also going to be producing podcasts, recordings, and embedding an evaluation into each of the topics of the themes. So the idea is to produce materials, yes, but it's more about repurposing, harvesting and trying to see if we can design those materials and resources for that target audience. So it's really crucial to get feedback from. Now, of course, many of the people here have already explained that there are difficulties sometimes in many Irish educational institutions when it comes to projects that involve employing people to work on the project. It might seem bizarre that if you're provided with funding and you're enabled to actually employ someone to do the work, there then come a series of hurdles that prevent you from actually doing that or delay the start. So our project is not different to most of those which have spoken thus far in that we had also a delay to our project. Sadly, though, at times we did feel that it was beginning to become particularly surreal. As I say, we discovered bureaucratic hurdles we never knew existed. All sorts of strange new approaches to simply setting up a temporary contract with the clamp down on contract work. So at times that's the response. See the colours aren't quite worked out there, but maybe actually the colours are even better on that screen. That's really how we felt at times in the early phase of the project. But the good news is that we've actually taken the opportunity to the delays in employing someone to think in a little bit more detail about what exactly is it we're doing. The speed dating session that was arranged for all these projects in April was actually a brilliant opportunity for us to touch base with one another, and it was a great opportunity for us and this project team as well to review what it is that we're planning to do and how we're going to do it. So we took stock of the situation, whilst one committee, two committee, three committee, four committees were crumbling in the background just simply to allow us to get a job add out, we took that time to plan out things a bit more pragmatically, I think. We began some of our work as well by having initial meetings in each of the institutions with representatives of the target groups, the heads of school and others. We harvested information from those meetings as well, which has also obviously helped to shape our plans. The good thing about it is actually that what's been common to all of those meetings is a genuine willingness to engage. As I said, these people are busy people, they've got lots of priorities, but the feedback has been that they really are looking forward to having this kind of support to be able to discuss collectively, I guess to some extent, issues around teaching and learning and see what kind of supports we can provide. So that's certainly very reassuring. What we've done is we've revised our project plans on what to cope for that delay. Initially, our initial project proposal was for an 18-month project, so the fact that we've had this delay isn't much of a problem in the sense that it's a delayed start rather than a delayed scope. Also what we've done is instead of employing a project worker to do this work on our behalf, we managed to persuade a colleague of ours that her expertise, that her experience and her particular skills would actually help this project considerably. So we've managed to change the staffing to effectively second Michelle Tuher who is sitting here to run the project as the main project worker and she has a lot of experience of working with these types of people and in education and development. So we think actually that's a benefit of the fact that the project was somewhat late in starting, that we feel a lot more confident now in being able to deliver a really effective training and support. OK, so as I say, we have this kind of revised work plan and we have an event happening next week which links into a conference that's taking place anyway and we're going to run a session at that conference, particularly for heads of school and heads of department and we have an external experience facilitator who's coming in to support that, someone who's done a lot of work for the leadership foundation in higher education and also for the Aegee Academy, Steve Utscham who's going to be talking about leadership issues in teaching and learning and actually have a kind of open discussion with the members of our target group. As I say, we've got the project manager and lead developer and that's the ground title we're calling you Michelle. And she has a lot of expertise and experience which we'll exploit to the maximum. So what we do now is that Michelle is available this month on a half-time basis and then gradually we'll step up as time goes on. We're now beginning to look at sequencing the themes and the topics that we're going to deliver content and resources on and facility workshops and discussions on. I also want to mention just there at the bottom that when we've been looking over this and revising the plan we saw that there was a great opportunity actually as one outcome of this project to develop the resources to provide a module in pedagogic leadership that could be used beyond the project life cycle. One of the things I think is important to remember is that this project is a combination between educational development units and HR units and in some ways that's pretty rare that kind of liaison and that's what I think is actually quite interesting quite an interesting aspect about it because many of the heads of school and his department spoke to us said that they were provided with some training for their role but it tends to be from HR and it tends to focus on management issues and budgets and staffing as opposed to front loading the teaching and learning in the curriculum. So this does a clear niche for this kind of work. That's just a diagram that we've seen before that's just some of the topics that we were looking at covering in this programme, this project. They're based on resources that we know already exist and projects are already taking place through the National Forum and elsewhere so they're not just plucked out of thin air. What we've done is start to survey our groups and talk to people and see if any of these in particular appeal to them and try and work out what an appropriate sequence might be based on events that we know are happening over the next year or so. We can see that some of these things are beginning to bunch together into a smaller number of topics because we're only talking about a relatively small number of events and topics given the nature of these people's work. So we've got this kind of five broader categories that these different topics kind of bunch into and so that looks like the kind of structure and we're now talking about the sort of sequencing of these which materials we've produced, which events will be scheduled and so forth and that's part of this ongoing conversation. As we outlined in the original project proposal we do make sure that we align with the professional development framework and there's a really complicated slide by the thing you've got a printout of it that shows the specific items in that PD framework that this project is attempting to address. I think it's also important and we know this from our own experience of many years of working in this kind of areas is that in practice there's an awful lot of work that goes on behind the scenes that's one way of interpreting this picture but the other way of interpreting it too is that whilst we will have a relatively small number of workshops or events happening over the duration of the project actually a lot of the work involved in trying to affect this culture shift or building the confidence of the heads of school and so forth is the stuff that's going on behind the surface. That's why it's really important for us to have an experienced project worker who's going to do a lot of liaison with the target group because they are people who are busy it's very difficult to actually schedule times to bring them all together we know that from experience so rather than simply bludgeon ahead with fixed dates and fixed events we recognise that a lot of the work is going to be about contacting these individuals directly and in groups visiting them trying to get their feedback at every stage of the project so there's an awful lot of that kind of submerged work but it's absolutely crucial that that's done it's not just about producing some packs and running some workshops it's actually about engaging with these people and in as deep a way as we can and so far as they are willing as well of course so just to conclude in terms of the outcomes, the outputs and also thinking about the longer term sustainability obviously what we're hoping that we can get a richer understanding of the profession development needs for those in this role as head of school, head of department, vice dean, there's a few different names different structures and different institutions but we also would like to help them where they feel that it's appropriate to be more aware of the developments and the opportunities that they might have both within their discipline and more broadly in enhancing teaching and learning because as I say they're busy people there's lots of resources, lots of information out there it's difficult for them necessarily all of them to keep up the speed and so we want to try and fulfill that role as much as we can so we will be developing a rich set of high quality resources on these key themes it's about customising and adapting materials it's about writing them in a style that's appropriate and that will in itself lead to content but we're also designing a framework for a future CPD module on pedagogic leadership which will be of course mapped onto the national framework and of course highly likely to be badged that seems to come up for some reason the other aspect of it that's maybe a little bit subtler but is really important in the conversations we've had with head of school is this notion of making sure that teaching and learning aspects are embedded in future management training and development that that division between the perceived remit of HR in terms of leadership and management training and the education of development units in terms of teaching and learning that that division needs to be kind of bridged I suppose and we hope that this is one way of doing it certainly it has been really interesting in terms of the project team who are mixed in terms of the backgrounds to see those links being formed at least on that basis so we're quite hopeful that in the future there'll be a greater understanding of the broader training needs of head of school and head of department okay so I don't know