 I'm aware that I'm standing between you and your lunch, so I'll try and keep this thing. So just to introduce myself, my name is Stephanie Campbell or Steph, and I'm part of the Learning Academy, which is a small team within Southeastern Regional College. We are one of six colleges in Northern Ireland that deliver mostly FE, but also HA as well, and all the details there if you want to find out more or to reach out and get in touch with us. So the first thing I would like to do is ask you a question. The British cycling team have a philosophy that you should ask yourself, why are you on the bike when you're starting off on your day and you get onto that bike and you've got a big challenge ahead of you, why are you there? What is motivating you to be there? And that's something that we should keep at the forefront. Why are we on the bike, especially those more challenging days? So once we're on our bike, where do we want to go? What is our destination? And there's been so many amazing discussions as part of this conference about what our destination is and learning technology and data analytics in health and wellbeing as well. So what is our destination? Where do we want to end up? As that question used to hear at interviews, where do you see yourself in five years' time? If you remember that one. So we're on our bike, where do we want to go? For us it was about challenge. Not that long ago we had a lot of challenges in terms of our makeup. So Northern Ireland went through a bit of a reform a few years ago where they merged multiple colleges into six super colleges, as they were called. And at the time we were merging three main colleges into one. And each of those little colleges had their own organisational culture, they had their own systems, they had their own processes, their own people. So how do we get those three different, completely different cultures to work together in a way that is productive and effective and is working for the students at the heart of it? And we wanted to plan for where we wanted to be. We were on our bike, we knew why we were there, but we needed our destination. So we thought about, well, what happens when we do have lovely facilities at the time our facilities weren't great? So what do we do when we do have our great facilities that we really want to get? What do we do when we have our brilliant technologies in every classroom? We're a few years down the line and we do have those buildings. The difference was when we got to those buildings our people already knew how to use them. They already had the confidence and the digital capabilities to embrace the changes and to embrace the technology to make it work really effectively. We've got these great facilities now and a lot of people will say, well, you've got lovely facilities, but we didn't always. I taught in mobiles where the toilets froze over in wintertime and the students had to come in and walk for miles to get to them. And now we have these great facilities, so what do we do with it? And part of that strategy was about integration, about taking the systems that we had, the people, the data and the technology and making it work together as a whole college, as one unit. So how do we do that? So this is our science bit a little bit. This gives you an overview of how we integrated those systems together. So at the bottom would be our learner management systems using G and EBS, we have Moodle as our VLE and on top of that we built our systems using cloud services and also within our own quality processes as well. Then on top of that again, we developed the people agenda a little bit. So we looked at staff development, we created a learning engine where people could do their mandatory training online in a flipped learning environment and also developed enterprise entrepreneurship and employment as part of that strategy. So we took all those little bits, smushed it together to make a whole strategy so everything works and everything talks. And one of the key themes of this conference is about dialogue and that's not just human-human dialogue but how do we communicate with our systems and how do they communicate with us as well? But at the heart of this are our lecturers, our teachers and we really firmly believe that teachers are the agents of change. They are the people that our students see every day, every night if they're night classes and they are at the forefront of creating a change strategy. So how do we empower those teachers? How do we give them agency to be able to change the agenda in their own classrooms and for their students? We live in a world very complex digital landscape and the questions and the conversations that have been happening in this conference or testament to that we're not quite sure where things are going and where it's going to end up. So in that landscape we have students that we need to prepare for a future and we have teachers that we need to prepare to teach those students to prepare for the future. So how do we do that? When teachers see an iPad or a piece of technology do they think teaching or do they think gimmick? Do they think a tool that I can use? An appliance as was mentioned yesterday in the keynote. Do they think about teaching and engaging their students? How do we address that gap? People see that there is a value in technology and teaching but do they have the confidence and the skills to be able to utilise that really effectively and make a real change? One of the things we looked at was that you can train somebody up brilliantly you can give them lots of technology but unless their mindset is in the zone of change they're not going to. They need to have the right mindset and how do we cultivate that mindset change? One way is to show them what good looks like. Let's see what the really good things are. So with that in mind we started to think about how do we help people to unlearn some maybe habits or changes that they've done in the past and relearn some new ideas in teaching and learning? How do we remove those barriers and there are always barriers and there always will be and to me that's just a challenge. I'm like yeah, what's next? So a barrier can often spark innovation and creativity. So one of the ways that we did this with the 3R peer mentoring process and you can see here coming up here in a lot of ways it's a very simple process but built into that are some very key elements. One of the key elements is the pre-mentoring assessment where we sit down with the mentee this is all taking place on a one-to-one basis and to follow with the themes of cups of tea we usually do this over a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and have a conversation, an open dialogue and one of the questions we ask is tell us about your most challenging class and if I could wave a magic wand, sprinkle some fairy dust what would you change? And from there we start to address what teaching and learning strategies, what digital tools, what appliances can we use to help address that challenge? We then have our mentors and we have a dedicated team at the moment of around nine and they go into the classroom and teach that mentee's class we teach their subject with their students in their classroom with what they have in that room and that is a real light bulb moment that's a real chance for that mentee to sit back and think oh my goodness I can use this let's take a look at how do my students engage with this strategy or this approach and really reflect on how it might shape their learning so we show them what good looks like we show them we demonstrate that technology and that's such a win it also gives a lot of kudos to the mentor so I've been a mentor for around seven, eight years now and I've got to teach plumbing, animal care hair dressing, a bit of beauty therapy so I can tell you how your toilet works and also how to do a skin test for hair colour and we get a brilliant opportunity to go in and see these classrooms as well the whole approach is entirely confidential it's not about reporting on anybody it's about support and it's about showing that mentee different methods and coaching them in a very safe way they get to try something new with somebody alongside who can help them and if it all goes wrong it's fine we remove that fear of failure we take away that risk the students feedback into this as well at the end of each classroom session they give us feedback on the learning and teaching not the tutor so how did you learn today what did you learn today did you like it did you not like it what would help you learn better and that feedback shapes the rest of the process so the mentoring process maybe takes well it could take any time between six or twelve weeks or longer it's all completely bespoke to each individual lecturer and what they need in their classroom we've developed this over around ten years so we started off in 2008 with a bit of a trial working with our essential skills team or foundation skills you may know it as and we've developed it over the last ten years tweaking it and making little iterative changes to it and because of that we feel like we've learned a lot of lessons some of those lessons have been quite tough personally and we've taken those and used it to continue to work this model and tweak it to make it work for our lecturers so here's the real science bit with numbers and everything and I teach English so numbers are not my so we saw then a roughly 13% increase in achievement rates with 500% increase in Moodle use within that first pilot team and that's when we thought we're on to something this could work let's see if it'll work on a wider scale we developed we're very very lucky in our college we have a team of creative developers and software developers and they created a plugin for Moodle that would allow students to rate activities but like a trip advisor just like a wee star wearing zero to five and we're able to take that data and see what students like and what they don't like the numbers here I just pulled on Tuesday night so they're quite fresh so you can see there that students don't really like putting in assignments that's a bit of a shock don't really like submitting assignments but they do like resources they do like URL links so let's see how can we develop that and make that better so this all feeds into our process we saw 87,000 roughly Moodle ratings just last academic year with a rating of about 4.6 so it gives a bit of an overview and obviously there's a huge amount of drilling to be done into exactly what those numbers mean we don't just take it as a blanket number what does that really mean in the classroom and we're able to work with that excuse me what this meant for us was that we had 6.2 Moodle views 6.2 million so not 6.2 that would be a very different number 6.2 million Moodle views in that year which was a complete surprise to us we weren't expecting the mentoring programme happening live face to face to have such a huge impact on our online blended provision as well 30% of that access was from outside the college again an unexpected number but a very lovely one to have and how do we develop that further this gives you a little sort of lovely graph of our Moodle dad over the last year since the mentoring programme first came into play and it gives you a bit of a picture of the growth and the development of that what we've seen is large scale behavioural change in our college we know that change management is a huge field of research and some trial and error and sometimes it works around 30% roughly they think of change programmes succeed what we found was that mentoring helped to address this slightly by giving that one to one bespoke training to people and it was an opportunity to have a go test and learn what was happening there's some of the key benefits as well we saw that people are more satisfied in their job role they feel like they're supported we haven't just invested in the technology we've invested in the people that are using it collegial relationships I now have colleagues across every curriculum area in all of our campuses that I've worked with over the last six or seven years and we've been able to improve practice at large scale as well this has been demonstrated in external evaluation ETI our version of OSTED celebrated this and most recently I don't mean to brag but just yesterday evening I stood in this very stage and very honoured to accept an award for being highly commended at the ALT award so thank you very much to ALT bonus applause so we're really honoured and we're really thrilled and it wouldn't happen without the team we found that the student data then 92% felt that the teachers were using a range of methods and that day us was a huge win students enjoy this but they see they perceive how teachers are changing their strategy inside the classroom but it's not just about what we know it's about what we do with that and that's what we've found by taking knowledge adding some skills we dash confidence nice cup of tea and a biscuit we get to improve what we do and empower people to embrace change and empower people to try something new and transform how technology is perceived and received with our students we offer them an opportunity to skin swim or dive so we have little micro learning through our weekly webinar series that goes out to all staff corporate and academic I'm racing through because I'm worried about time we also have open classroom week just piloted last year and hoping to do the same this year where lecturers can go and see go into the classroom have a look see how people do it let's have a conversation we also work heavily in collaboration and about a growth mindset where do we go next we've been able to develop and support mentoring programs across Europe, UK, Ireland, Slovenia and Italy and also work with most recently in Uganda I was there in July Thailand, Singapore and Japan as well to help implement active learning strategies and technology enhanced learning strategies and that's all come out of this process of collaboration we work closely with the National College of Ireland Walsall College and Forth Valley College here in Scotland and we're able to collaborate with them on project based learning technologies and project based learning projects as well we're continuing those relationships into the next academic year which is really exciting so last thing is to ask you a question where will you go next what is your next step and why are you on the bike and where is your bike going to end up so thank you very very much for can you speak there was a bit of a sprint at the end I know it was like that I was on my bike pedal on pedal on pedal on to keep it in the Irish atmosphere any questions for Steve immediately we'll start with questions online this is about the mentorship process academics coming to a non-academic looking for a mentor how did it actually work so the process of it is that our mentors are academic teaching staff so they still have a full-time table they're sort of seconded out for about a day and a half a week and that day and a half then those hours are spent with mentees so they're still teaching and they're still very fresh in their practice and that gives a bit of credibility to that mentor and as a mentor myself it was meant that I tried this with my students on Tuesday and they really liked it do you want to try it with yours so in terms of that we still have that built in to the whole process second part of the question was what about the culture how do you get such a culture that people accept you as an outsider to come into the classroom yeah right because somebody says I'm going to come and sit in your class nope it definitely took a while and it was about that organisational culture and realising as soon as we said well no we're not going to start off with me observing your class you're going to observe me I'm going to take your class first and you can see and we use the same paperwork so the feedback that we use the mentee uses that first on us so that gives some credibility and it helps them see that this is about an open safe dialogue it's not going anywhere else it's not about pinning somebody down and what are you doing wrong it's about let's share how we can do things right and let's do it in a really open dialogic way so in terms of a culture change it took a wee while it took a little bit of breaking in and it took some trial and error as I said but I think because we had that pilot group with the essential skills the foundation skills that really helped because the students were feeding back that they loved it the teachers were feeding back that they loved it we also asked managers to get involved so they were one of the first ones to get involved with being mentored so deputy heads and the assistant heads and we also asked those who were in our teachers union if they would be mentored and they did and obviously that lent a weight to the process and a weight to the openness of it most popular question now is some painful lessons can you share a couple of those I think probably speaking from my own experience about times when I went in and tried to mentor somebody in a completely different subject and it all went terribly terribly wrong at the demo lesson I remember trying to deliver mechanical engineering at HND and it went very very wrong the lesson from that was to that you can never prepare too much but also we put ourselves slightly at risk as mentors in that respect but the huge benefit of that was that empathy you know where together in this I'm not saying that I know everything when I walk into your room I'm saying let's learn together let's work through this together why did it not go right we also had some lessons around staff development so we did the standard staff development we were going to learn this and half the people went oh really I don't want to another half the people went oh okay I'm here anyway and that was a painful lesson for us a little bit as well I have to say over archingly it has been very very positive I feel so honoured to be part of the team some people used to say oh no the mentors are coming we're now they're like oh can I get you we have a waiting list of people to be mentored because there's too many and people want to come back and back and back okay any questions in the room now can I just address one about the IT department because I think it's an interesting one we have a very small IT department we have one of the lowest spends on IT services and what we do is we invest in the people agenda rather than that so as they say we have a small IT services team we have a small team of creative and software developers and that's it so yeah that's quite a small team I'd love to have sex it'd be brilliant yeah related to that is do you limit the number of technologies that are being used to keep it sustainable yeah I think it depends it's super spoke that it just depends on the lecture some lectures are like give me everything I want to know everything and you go okay and you show them everything normally through each mentoring process we would focus on one let's get one really good let's get you feeling confident and able to progress this even further and even better tell your colleagues and help them so we tend to focus on one per mentoring cycle but we have people who come back every year and ask for it again and again and again because they want to know more so we do limit the technologies for each individual but we don't limit our scope we see our role as kind of horizon scanning to see what's out there and then we suggest what we think may be useful for other lecturers okay final question um do you involve students in the process and how do you involve students we involve the students really heavily so their voice is so so important and so often they don't get a chance to really say what they think and we do that from that first demonstration lesson and we ask them did you like this is it good do you think it's going to help you learn did it help you come to grips with these subjects and they get that voice which feeds forward into the whole process so from stage one their voice is being listened to and sometimes lecturers might say I really want to use pablet pablet's amazing we try it with the students and the students go oh no I don't like it please make a go away and we change our whole strategy and we look at something different so their voice is the most important voice at the heart of that if students don't like it they won't use it simple as that so if they have a huge voice in the whole process yeah okay thank you round of applause for the second one thank you Adina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple our Jupiter Notebook service our DigiMap 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