 I'm very much delighted to introduce to you Mark Stubbs from across the road, otherwise known as Manchester Metropolitan University. And he'll be talking to us about transforming the curriculum, mainstreaming learning technology and improving the student experience. Quite a lot to get through in 20 minutes, I think. We'll have time for questions in the end, and I'll hand over to Mark now. Thank you. Thank you very much. Testing Vogue 1, 2, 3. Thank you. Well, a very good morning, everyone. Well done. Nine o'clock Thursday morning after the night before. My name's Mark Stubbs. I'm Professor and Head of Learning Research Technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University. A couple of bits of background about me. I used to work as a management consultant. I've been principal lecturer in business information technology at the university some time ago. And I guess I'm a bit of an optimist. I have solar panels on my roof in Manchester. So that might give you a bit of background of where I'm coming from. Manchester Metropolitan University is an interesting place to work. We're going through quite an ambitious change programme at the moment. Some of you may have seen some of the exciting new buildings going up. We're large, popular. But we've got a single-minded focus at the moment on improving the student experience. And that puts in context some of the other work we're doing, particularly the new curriculum, the new learning technologies that we brought in. I'm conscious of this audience. I don't really need to sort of go into detail about the student experience because it's a phrase I have some problems with. For me, I guess any individual student's experience is a bit of a cure its egg. Some of it is good in parts. Others you'd like to improve. When you think about a large organisation like Manchester Met, we're talking 36,000-plus students, 1,000 courses, 1,500 tutors across multiple sites. That's a quite diverse thing. When you actually start talking to the students, their expectations vary. Their perception of technology varies. For some of them, it's a playground. They want to do all sorts of exciting things with technology. For others, it's just a tool. They just want to get the job done with it. And sometimes dealing with that variety within the same group can be hard. The tolerance that students have for imperfect technology can vary. Some of them, this might be a real turn-off if it doesn't work first time. Others, well, hey, we use lots of this stuff all the time. Some of it works, some of it's broken. We just shift around it and get on to the next thing. We know that the motivation for studying varies. For some students, their willingness to blur the line between their social identity and their university or work identity varies. Dealing with that variety can be quite challenging. I think if I carry on my eggs metaphor for a moment, some of you might be familiar with a very popular physics game that does the rounds on mobiles, which involves some stolen eggs. Some questions have been asked about why is our student experience sort of flatlining. Lots of people are making improvements. And in the NSS tables, if you're flatlining, you're going backwards if other people are making improvements. So I guess our confrontation with reality was a really strong need to do something about improving the student experience. Now we did some quite detailed listening, focus groups, we looked in detail at our NSS, we used statistical techniques to identify of all the things in there, what was most strongly correlated with overall satisfaction, and we started to see a pattern coming through. There were a series of hygiene factors, things like, what's my real deadline? I hear lots of rumours, when's it really due in? Where am I meant to be from one minute to the next? Is that really the right timetable or has something changed? So we did some surveys with students about what they wanted from their mobile devices, and we were hoping we might hear all sorts of exciting things about augmented reality, and what we actually heard was, can I get my deadlines and my timetable and my reading lists? And if those things change, can you let me know? So we got this very strong message back that actually there's a series of hygiene factors that we need to attend to before we can really get on to the stimulating pedagogy stuff. Now, we also then had lots of focus groups with staff. Why can't we do anything about this? We know there's a problem. And the message that came back is, well, we can't change anything because we'd have to change everything. Everything depends on everything else in the university. It's the student record system, or it's the timetable, or it's the quality system. Really, if you sort of unpick all of this, you see lots of buts, reasons why we can't do things. And I guess a lot of them come back to the fact that we're a large, diverse, risk-averse institution. What sort of happened that was very important for us is we had one of those very important things happen. We had what's termed a Deputy Vice Chancellor out of Patience Era at Line 1. This notion of we can't do it because we'd have to change everything, built up and up and up. So we ended up with, well, if we can't do it because we'd have to change everything and that's what you're saying to me, let's change everything. Now, that's really exciting because that's the kind of top-level commitment to change that you really, really need. The challenge is that's probably necessary, but is it sufficient to knock all over these barriers while learning, teaching, doing the business of the university? We felt we needed to structure that enthusiasm somewhat. So we put together a very strong project and programme team led by all the sort of key people across the university. We've got the head of quality, the head of the sort of student systems to drive that stream. And we thought about all the things that would need to change to make a step change improvement. We decided that we wanted to refresh the undergraduate curriculum. We knew we wanted to do that on a timeframe that would actually have a return on investment very quickly. Our quality systems have been typically geared up to five-year review cycles. We needed something different to cope with change on this scale. Reviewing a thousand modules simultaneously needs a different style of quality approval and enhancement. We knew that we were hearing messages about our administrative systems needed to be more flexible, needed to be more student-oriented. So we knew we needed to make change there. We also knew if we didn't make the change in the sort of things that students use to interact, the learning technologies, we wouldn't see the benefits from the students, the key people we were hoping to help. So we put together a programme board with these four strands of work. It was a bit Mission Impossible, bringing together all the key people from across the university on a fierce timeframe, kicking off in the first quarter of 2010, running right through to actually saying, September 2011, we want an entire new first year live. Now that's a fierce pace, really fierce pace. And we had to innovate some things along the way to achieve that pace. We had to get a new set of rules for a new curriculum approved. We decided we'd change the credit rating from 20 to 30 credits in order to give staff a sort of clear steer on what a new curriculum would look like. We took to academic board rules about how many learning outcomes there should be, rather than writing thousands of less good ones, be very clear, very specific about the ones that are important. And there was a lot of kind of Pareto 80-20 thinking behind a lot of the stuff we did. We looked at assessment, we'd heard messages about over-assessment, so again we focused on doing a small number of things well. One of the things that we had to do was find a way to capture this new curriculum that we were asking staff to write while delivering a year's experience for students. We knew this was a big ask. Just while you're teaching, can you rewrite next year's module? That's quite a big thing to ask, and the first draft of the unit specification form that came out was eight pages long. And people went, I can't feel that in. Doesn't make sense. We also realised that we'd need a new style of thinking. In the past, people had written a Word document, it had been to a committee, it had perhaps been knocked back, it had then got approved, someone would pick up that Word document, retype it into a student record system, retype it into timetabling, set up the VLE, etc. On that sort of timeframe that you've just seen, that's impossible. So we had to innovate not just our learning technology, but our admin technology. So where we had a policy that said, I'll cut it down here, but five learning outcomes maximum and two pieces of assessment, we designed forms that supported that. There were only five boxes for learning outcomes. There were only two boxes for assessment, but you couldn't submit the form until you were actually clear how the assessment covered the learning outcomes. We wanted to capture graduate outcomes and employability skills that students might get, so it was a requirement that assessment was tagged with the graduate outcomes that students might get from engaging with that piece of assessment. Basically, we tried to be smart with the way that we captured the curriculum so we could use it for other purposes. That's the sort of XCRI thinking, exchange in course related information that went behind a lot of this work. We also had strong support in terms of input from our learning and teaching colleagues about what makes a good learning outcome. So next to all these boxes, there were little pop-ups with good examples and guidance that people could go to. Just back to the story for a minute and the eggs, we were conscious that our student experience was really being governed by the learning environment in which it took place and the admin systems on which that rested. We'd heard these strong calls for consistency, we'd identified this set of hygiene factors, so we wanted to deploy these new systems, processes and particularly a new virtual learning environment we were moving to, to address those things. So our new virtual learning environment that we built was really a swanky new egg cup. Something which wasn't the whole student experience, but it was something in which that student experience could take place that hopefully would be a step forward and would address those concerns that students had expressed to us. And what we really, really wanted was to make it personal to our students, 37,000 students or so, each receiving a personalised egg cup. To make that possible, we had to be extremely consistent with the way we identified curriculum and we needed web services to pull things together from around the institution and assemble it around the learner. When, with technology, it's both an enabler and a constrainer. What we wanted to do was play to the strengths of each. We'd heard from our student community that they wanted consistency, so in terms of introducing technology, we wanted there to be a consistent front door to all the things that the institution had. So we came up with this notion of a core plus, verily, in which students stepped through a consistent front door in which things like their timetable, hand-in-dates, reading lists, all the things they'd asked for were there. But we were conscious that wasn't the end of the story. And academic colleagues might well want to innovate and bring in a whole range of new technologies that were appropriate for theirs. Now, some of those technologies we could enable centrally. We could set up, turn it in. We could perhaps arrange live at edgy for all students and people might well be able to use that. But other things we were conscious that staff might want to set up for themselves. And in that case, our role centrally would be to support the integration of that so it appeared to be a seamless experience for our students. And Neil and colleagues will talk a little bit more about some of that work later upon the fourth floor after this. Our vision of that swanky egg cup really was one of wrapping the institution around the learner. We wanted all the good stuff that lay in different pots around the institution to be scooped up and delivered personally to each of our students. We wanted to have a timetable but to make it look like the kind of timetable that students are familiar with from Google, et cetera. We wanted to be able to sync that to their personal devices. So we did some scraping of Scientia. We found ways to bring that in. We wanted to address students' concern about handling dates. So we managed to pull together information about when their handling dates were, whether submissions had been received, whether extensions had been granted, what marks were. And again, we delivered that into the virtual learning environment. One of the benefits of this information was that having delivered it for 36,000 students, we now knew that there were 23,000 submissions the week before Christmas. Now having that heightened state of awareness of about what was going on across the institution meant that we could have the guys with the orange t-shirts from IT ready to make sure the printers were fully stacked and ready to go. This kind of heightened state of awareness about the institution came on the back of being able to deliver personalised information. Our reading lists, we spent a lot of time with students asking them, how would you like to see things structured? We got back a very clear message. When you give us a 200 item reading list, it's really confusing. Where should we start? So we put some effort into identifying clearly those items that were recommended for purchase, those items that were essential starting points and those items that were further reading. We assessed that through Talis Aspire and delivered it back to the student. We had a lot of past examination papers, tagged them with the module code. Again, they were available to all our students. Effectively, what we were using the technology for was reaching out to engage our students, providing some business intelligence on how it was working and automating our processes. What we've seen, I know there's an embargo on the NSS results at the moment so I can't give you the full detail, but what we've seen is an improvement in that area, particularly around course organisation learning resources. So I would say we're in a better position now. When we reached out to students and asked them what did they think, we were overwhelmed by their response. 10,000 students filled in our personalised survey. They left us 58,000 comments. We repeated the survey and took out the final year so we're completing the NSS. 7,000 filled in and left us 33,000 comments. This is a massively rich dataset about the student experience. Our analysis of it shows that we've still got work to do on course organisation, which we have in hand, but something came up in there that we hadn't expected. There was a notion that we need to help students build confidence and I think some of the work we're seeing on digital literacy and all those things is very important in that regard. But we wouldn't have picked that up without having access to some of this data because we wouldn't have seen it across the institution as a whole. What have we learnt? We've learnt that the technology can do some useful stuff, it can personalise the experience, it can reduce the burden of some of the assessment and it can help us prioritise interventions. One of the things we saw, for instance, from the satisfaction survey was that there was a dip from students moving from first year into second year. Focus group, everybody got together and went, well, hang on, we make a big fuss of the first years when they come back, we have induction weeks. We don't do anything like that for our second years. Our two critical success factors, if we join up our thinking, align with our business processes and particularly with academic practice, we can make a difference. We can rewrite the entire undergraduate curriculum, connect it up with technology and roll it out. You need the right partner relationships and colleagues like ULCC, Ombield, Talis Aspire and new signings like Cartera. We're looking to create that ecosystem of partners to deliver that and keep it rolling. There's full details that you might want to follow up later about this, but at that point, I'll leave it and have the floor for questions. Thank you very much, Mark. A fascinating insight into all the things you've achieved. Have you got 10 minutes also for some questions now? If you'd like to raise your hand if you have questions and the roving might welcome to you. So are there any questions from the floor at this point? It's too early in the morning for questions, it seems. There's a question up there. Ruth. Thank you. Good morning, Mark. Thanks very much. Very interesting speech there about quite radical change within a large institution. I'm just interested in how easy was it to engage everybody, the academics and learning technologists, in discussing some of the admin data, especially around course information. Good question. You've also picked up there something that I would really should add as a critical success factor on here, and it's the people sitting in that row over there, the learning technologists. Through this project, we were able to establish learning technologists, we've termed elearning support officers, one in every faculty. Having that point of connection, that bridge between the centre in all its world of codes and curriculum modules and that kind of thing, and the real world on the ground of the academic in the classroom trying to make a difference was vitally important. It's not easy to engage staff in these discussions about how you represent the curriculum. It is easy to get staff to talk about the things that are frustrating them, the fact that perhaps the student record system is geared around an academic year starting in September and doesn't cope too well with January starts. It's very easy to pull out those issues. In the design of that web form, we try to find a sort of more agile way of giving the technology and the admin processes what they needed, but presenting it in a way that made sense for academic colleagues. So, cutting down an eight-page word document into a one-page that for them captured all the things they needed was a very important way of engaging them in that process. As we trimmed things back and ended up with, this is the right things to be on the drop-down list for assessment types, these are the right things to be in the graduate outcomes. We were able to bridge that gap between the world of the academic and the world of data that was needed for that course information to flow, set up the student record system, set up the timetable, set up the VLE, et cetera. And it's flowed further. It's flowed out onto our campus M mobile app, so students not only are having this stuff in Moodle, but because it was a web service, those hand-in-dates, the reading lists that academic colleagues have put in are appearing on students' mobile devices this September. I think there was a question here. Say your name as well. James Clay from Gloucestershire College. Mark, to me this is quite exciting. Somebody at the back said it's radical. But then I kind of took a step back and actually you're doing what we should be doing. You know, to me this isn't radical. This should be normal. And what we're actually doing, most organisations aren't operating in an efficient and effective manner. So that's kind of the first part of my question, but the second, which leads on to, you know, you made it work at MMU. There's quite a few of us who are probably gonna go back and want to do it at our institutions to make them work as they should. How on earth do we do that? I mean, you know, can you got any kind of like suggestions or recommendations to get our, well it won't be in my case, it would be a principle, but DVCs get that kind of like, that lovely quote isn't it, patients are a patient, whatever. I think the top tip would be don't waste a good crisis. The fact that we're where we were with the NSS and that we've been trying lots of things and it just wasn't having the effect meant that we really had to bring everybody together to focus on that problem. And you're right, what we've been doing is moving the institution into a better place. And now we can start the exciting things. Now we can build on this and do the things that we want to do, but we've had to put in place the business as usual that we wanted to see in order to be able to do it. And that, you know, we needed the senior management buy-in. I mean, this had the key members of director at in meetings regularly every couple of weeks understanding, well if one would just have to change the academic process then. You know, when you reach that stage of transformation you've got to have the decision makers who can make those decisions and make it in the room in order to meet these sort of time frames that we work to. So don't waste a good crisis. One more question. Yes, over there. And if you introduce yourself as well, please, thank you. Hi, John Traklar from Wolverhampton University. Sorry, I agree with all that James is saying. Is there a mechanism by which you stop yourself being in this position again in five years' time? Or is there a kind of coping with the change of change? Yeah, that's a really good point. I think what's interesting is to look at some of the legacy stuff from this work. I've already mentioned the e-learning support officers to help take things forward on that regard. One of the things that we really beefed up as part of this project was our business improvement team. We brought them in to understand how this depends on that and you'll have to do that project and, I don't know, we'll need to have it approved and back from the externals by February if we're going to get it into the student record system in March, et cetera. So we had that initial program management process review stuff brought in for the project, but we've now mainstreamed that. The other thing we've mainstreamed is these student experience survey work with the levels of analysis that went behind it. When those students submitted those comments, each one was tagged with the module code and the program code. So the module leader, program leader, got that information back straight away. The challenge for us was looking at it across the institution as a whole and trying to spot patterns that ran across the whole. That was more difficult and that's where we've got some work to do to establish a kind of business intelligence infrastructure. But that's what we're working on at the moment to stop us slipping back on this stuff. Thank you. Do we have any online questions? Yes, there is one. It's from dyslexic IT. That's the name. And the question is, how did you address the change to the tutors and lecturers? I think again, this partly comes back to the role of the e-learning support officers, but also the fact that we had to have champions in every faculty who were behind this initiative carrying colleagues with them. And I think you might want to have a look on the GISC design studio to have a look at an article on there called In the Throws of Change that captures just how difficult this was from a range of different perspectives. And there's some nice insights in there about what it felt like, because it isn't a sort of rosy story from all academics across the institution getting there. As you might imagine, it was challenging, it was hard, it was a big ask for people to do this on top of their day job. But there are a bit of persistence, a bit of we've got to do this. We really do. And by trimming things back, don't expect people to fill in an eight-pager. Ask them for the one page of the things that are needed. Using that kind of approach, we carried people with us. Thank you very much. I'm afraid that's all we've got time for.