 Good afternoon, you strong few who have remained in this heat to join us for some of the last sessions of the day. It's fabulous to have you all here and welcome to those of you who may be watching online. My name is Cary Pinney. I'm Alts Chief Operations Officer, but I'm also one of the people that you may meet if you come along to any of our sort of Seamalt sessions. If you get involved in the Seamalt course that we're doing and various other activities, Seamalt related, you will either meet myself or my colleague Fiona who unfortunately couldn't be here today, but Fiona also supports the Seamalt scheme too. What I'm going to do today is a bit of a whistle stop tour of Seamalt. So normally I do these sessions sort of for about an hour and we go into lots of detail about all of the different sections and things, but there's no time for that today and I want to make sure you've got an opportunity to ask any questions. So I'll give you really a sort of whistle stop tour of what Seamalt is, what you have to do to get Seamalt, why you might want to get Seamalt, what the value is and also how the actual process itself works. So this session is really for anybody who is interested in doing Seamalt independently, rather than say the session we did yesterday, which if you want to watch that back is more about if you want to do a cohort of people within your institution, for example, and a credit in-house. So that was yesterday. We had a session on that if that's of interest. So yeah, no, entirely the wrong laptop. That's probably why that didn't work. Okay, so welcome. Thank you for coming. Come on in. Hi Tim Ruminie. Come on in. So what I'm going to do today, I'm just going to sort of talk you through some of the basics around Seamalt, talk you through where to find things, you know, the different types of portfolio you might do, how the submission and assessment process works, what you might do after Seamalt if you decide to undertake Seamalt. And then I'm hoping we'll have plenty of time for questions and anything else that you'd like to ask. And I'm joined by Lynn, who is my colleague from Amplify Fee, but also a recent senior Seamalt holder. You got your accreditation a few weeks ago. For those online, Lynn was just saying that the ink is still wet on her certificate. She got it, but a few weeks ago her senior Seamalt certificate. So thank you, Lynn. I may turn to you to share some of your thoughts. So a brief overview of Seamalt and the scheme. So first of all, our definition within ALT around learning technology is not simply that everything that we do is for people who have the job title, learning technologies. We have a very broad definition of what learning technology is, whether you're an academic, a researcher, a student, you know, we all interact with learning technologies, you know, throughout our lives and our careers. And so we have a very broad definition. And so therefore Seamalt is open to a very wide range of people. It's not simply here for learning technologists and those people with that strict name. And we know that, you know, learning technology isn't just about the technology, there's all sorts of things that go into it, sort of the wider context of policy, of theory, of research, and the history of learning technologies as a whole. So Seamalt is for professionals who are actively involved in learning technology. And as I say, that's not just people who are learning technologists specifically, but also people who use it as part of their teaching, part of their research as part of their, you know, their working lives as students and a very wide and broad range of people. And we have three different pathways. So associate Seamalt and senior Seamalt. Associate level is really for those who are perhaps early career, maybe have only been working with learning technologies for say around three years. Seamalt tends to be people who are perhaps mid-career for want of a better phrase, who have been working with learning technologies for some time. And senior Seamalt tends to be, you know, it's more likely to be those who are leading learning technologies in whatever context they're in, whether that be research, whether that be within the own institution or more broadly perhaps from a research or perhaps you have a peer network that you run or something like that. And the senior Seamalt end is very much about leadership and the impact of your work. So that tends to be people who have perhaps had a very long or longer career in learning technology and they can really demonstrate that impact of their work more broadly. We have various ways that we assess and we have a huge pool of assessors. And as we've said many times during the conference, everything that Alt does is with the support of our members. So the people who assess your portfolios are members themselves. They are your peers and they are people that work within learning technology. We've got documentation and documentation and guidance and I'll point you towards that at the end. We have two independent reviewers when it comes to the assessment process. Two people look at it blindly and then they come together and come up with their final outcome. They give joint feedback. So whenever you submit your portfolio and you receive your result, if you get a referral, which I did and it's okay and we get a high number of referrals, they will give you helpful feedback to help you rework your portfolio and then resubmit it. Then we'll reassess it if you do have to resubmit. Many people pass first time without needing any sort of resubmission or feedback at all. And as I said, we have this community of assessors who not only actually do the assessments and follow the assessment process, but they also contribute to our schemes development. So the session that was on yesterday around the in-house accreditation scheme was full of people who are CMOT holders, people who are running cohorts within their own institutions, who have given us huge amounts of feedback and input into how we develop the scheme. So we are going to take lots of their ideas forward. So like everything else does, CMOT is very much a member and peer-led activity. So in order to gain CMOT, we have some basic things that you have to meet. So one is to demonstrate reflection. So reflection is a key part of the CMOT process. So thinking about the impact of your work on yourself, on your colleagues, what you've learned, and how you have developed. Across four core areas, which I'll talk about shortly, and some subsections and depending on which pathway, we'll dictate how many core areas and how many subsections you have to do. And then we also have, you know, you have to reflect on a sort of specialism in the CMOT and senior CMOT area. So that might be something that's unique to you. It might be a particular area of like specific expertise that you feel that you have. I always say the specialist area is kind of your time to show off and say, this is what I'm really good at. This is what all my colleagues come to me and ask me about and really show off your practice. We also have core principles and values that underpin CMOT. And what we look for as assessors when we're reading through your portfolio is are you demonstrating those core areas especially? And then the principles on top and the values of CMOT. And I'll talk to you about those in a second. And once you get your CMOT accreditation, you will have a certificate, you will have the post-nominals, you will have a little badge as well. And you'll also be added to our CMOT holders list. And obviously, you can add that to your CV and everything else as well. So these are the sort of core areas. And up in the top right corner, you can see the sort of core principles and values that we hold as part of CMOT. So there are the contextual statement which essentially is for the help of the assessor. So when I come to read someone's portfolio, I need to understand a little bit about you. Where do you work? What's the context of your work? Do you work? So you may not work directly with students. That's helpful for me to know as I'm reading your portfolio about the context of you. So it's not a marked area. You have operational areas, learning, teaching and assessment, the wider context, communication and working with others and future plans. And depending on which pathway you take, there are different core areas and subsections that you need to do. So for Associate, it's just this first box here. For CMOT, the second. And then if you do Senior CMOT, you have this additional advanced area as well. And as we read through your portfolio, we're looking for those four core principles and looking for demonstration of those four core principles throughout. How do you communicate and disseminate your work? Yes, go ahead. No, go ahead, jump in. Yeah, of course. Sure. So for this then, wouldn't you, would you say you pick one area that you're a specialist at or you're an expert in? Yeah. So that would just be in the, so the question was, you pick one specialist, specialism to cover. So that would be in the specialist area. So you would do that in your specialist area section. In each of these sections, what you would do. So for operational areas, for example, take the first one and understanding of the constraints and benefits of different technologies, you would pick an example. So let's say, I don't know, the VLE and you might talk, yeah, yeah, or a project and you might say, well, the VLE has these benefits, but it also has these constraints and this affects me in this way. So what you tend to do and what we see most people do, is they try to pick one or two examples for each of these core areas. And what you're trying to do in your portfolio is you're trying to address each one. So you're demonstrating your knowledge in the areas of learning, teaching and assessment by giving us examples from your practice that demonstrate your understanding of learning, teaching and assessment, the wider context. So that would be about around legislation, so that you could talk about accessibility legislation and how that impacts your work or any other sort of policies and things like that are in that affect your work. So these are essentially the topics that you talk about and you pull from your experience examples to cover those. And most people would tend to pick a different sort of theme for each of those. Yeah, often. It can be quite difficult because sometimes your work could fit in multiple things. So the question there was, do you pick different examples for each section? So sometimes things overlap. So actually something you might talk about here would still be just as relevant here, for example. What we tend to say is try to have a variety of things because what you're trying to show is the expanse of your knowledge and the expanse of your experience. So the more examples you can show, the better. But often, you know, you might talk about in depth something in your specialist area that you've referred to in the learning, teaching and assessment section. The key to it is making sure that you're addressing the core area, the topic. That's the key thing to do. So you could pick then something like body swaps and VR. I'm just thinking off the top and then use that for the first two. Yeah. Yeah. Because you talk about them differently. So you could talk about with VR. So the question was around using VR and other things as an example. So you could talk about VR under a wider context and talk about, say, policy or procedure or how accessibility guidance affects the use of VR. But you could also refer to it in operational areas. And you could talk about, say, if you were talking about supporting the deployment of learning technologies, you could talk about how you deployed VR. So it's not a case of thinking of it from, you know, you could talk about VR and everything in essence. So you want a bit more variety. As much as you can show. So some of the areas are more, you know, for variety, the question was, you know, a bit more variety. But, you know, the more you can show, so take, for example, you know, technical knowledge and the ability and the use of learning technologies, we would expect to see a range of learning technologies referred to. You know, we would expect to see the breadth and depth of your knowledge. But that doesn't mean to say that if you only talked about one thing in each section, that it would be a fail. It's the detail. It's the richness. And it's the way that you demonstrate the thing that's important more than anything. So you don't have to pick, but we say try to pick one or two examples. And when we come to the planning, what we suggest you do is take all of the subsections that you need to complete and just start putting ideas down. I could talk about this here. I could talk about that here. I could talk about that here. And then you'll start to see, am I just talking about the same thing all the time? Or is there a nice variety in it? But what you're really trying to do with your examples is always make sure it addresses the core area every time. So you will repeat, it's inevitable. You know, we all tend to work on specific things. But as long as it's really clearly addressing the core area, that's the key thing. So just talk briefly about the portfolio. So any format can be used. We get everything from Word documents to people who have done it in Padlet, for example. Lynn, what did you do yours in? So Lynn said that she did Padlet first and then for a second when she applied for senior, she did WordPress. So I did WordPress when I did mine just because it was easy. The main thing to think about with your portfolio is making sure you can still access it when you need to come to update it later. We get all sorts. We get people doing it entirely in videos, for example. Some people just do it entirely in videos. So we get a real variety. Always when you're putting your portfolio together, we have a very vast and varied, and I've just finished what I'm saying and I'll come to you, very varied group of assessors. So we do ask that you take accessibility into account and make sure that what you're giving to the assessors is something they'll be able to work with. So do take that into account as well. Do you have a question? So do you really just ask about the use of video and how you would then show the evidence that you need to give as part of the assessment process? So some people, when they use video, they will just show the screenshots of the thing in the video. So actually having it flashing up on screen, sometimes people do fun animations and show pointing things. Other people just embed the video and then put the evidence as files underneath. So that's absolutely fine. And just to explain, because I haven't talked about evidence yet, so when you do your section, you do your description. So you talk about the thing that you've done. You reflect on that thing. So you make sure you talk about what you've learned, how it's developed you, what you might do differently in the future, what went really well, what didn't. And then you provide evidence. And the evidence is essentially so that we as assessors know that you did the things you said you did. So it could be screenshots. It could be copies of documents. We get personal information redacted, of course, emails where people are giving feedback, for example, could be student feedback that you've received, could be testimonials from colleagues, could be some people even give us full access to learning objects that they've made, for example. So when you do your evidence, just make sure it's easy to access. And that's really what you need to worry about. Yes, go ahead. So Roddy just asked about how academic the portfolio needs to be. Because it's a portfolio and it's about your experience, you can write it in that way. And I would say that that's what I did. Is that what you did, Lynne? It was, yes. Even though it was parallel to my work, the writing style was probably more indicative of a blog. So I think a little bit more formal blog, still blog style, but then with some references at the foot, maybe just to reach each one. So Lynne just said that hers was very blog style and that she did put references in where it was appropriate. And that's what we find. So take, for example, the teaching learning assessment section. You might have some theory that you read, or a teaching or method, or something that you follow, or that you prescribe to, or you feel really influences your practice. That might be somewhere where a reference to a book that you've read or something like that might be appropriate. But it's certainly not a academic essay. It's very much about your experience. And I see plenty with no references at all. And they still pass. So often it really does depend on what people are writing about. So people who tend to be much more academic or researchers tend to share a lot more references to the literature, but you don't have to, because the portfolio is about your experience. But where you feel, you know, this is something that's important to me influences my practice. Here's a book that's changed my life and the way that I do something, you could reference it and just show that that's something that's important to you or that you find useful, but you don't have to at all. As I said earlier as well, there's a lovely checklist so that you make sure you've covered every section before you submit it. We've got lots of guidance, documentation online. And also just think about what you can do with it afterwards. You know, if you make it at your institution, for example, if you then left, would you be able to access it again? So it's worth thinking about that when you come to your portfolio. And as I say, we've got a huge, yes, Tim and me. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Yep, sure. So Tim, we need to start about as an independent person how she can keep, you know, without institutional systems and so on, how she can maintain access to her portfolio. So my suggestion is things like WordPress.com, places like that will give you free accounts where you can make a very even Google site. So you use Google, don't you? You could make it in your personal Google sites area, keep it locked down with the password, you know, if you prefer not to share it more openly. And then you keep hold of it. Whereas like for me, for example, if I made one on when I did it 2016, if I'd made one on my university's Mahara, I'd never have had access to it after I left. And also think about those, you know, things that you can actually keep portable. So say Mahara, just as an example, you can export that and to put that into a Mahara instance somewhere else. But as I say, you could even just do a Word document. You know, it doesn't have to be anything fancy at all. You know, it's the quality of the content, not what it looks like or how it functions. That's important. So just think about what's the easiest thing for you to maintain? What's the easiest thing for you to edit? Because you'll go back and you'll read things, you'll think, oh, I should have put that in there. I'll move that over there. You know, that sort of thing. Think about those sorts of things. But just make sure it's somewhere that you can always get to it. Because after three years, you have to come back and do an update after three years. And you don't want to have lost access and have to start all over again. So things like Google sites, even I think even Sway might be free and Padlet certainly is free. You know, pick one of those things that you know you can keep hold and take ownership of the account. And as I say, you know, it's a narrative. You're talking about your work and you are talking about your life. So again, it's not an academic essay. We want to hear your voice. We want to understand what you do, what's important to you, what influences you, you know, what you've learned and to really see, you know, you show off what you do. So don't feel that you have to stick to that very academic style. I always enjoy the portfolios that feel like I'm hearing the person who's talking to me and I feel like I know them and that always makes them so much more enjoyable to read. As it says here, there isn't a prescribed word count and we have we have had portfolios of like 10,000 words before. So but we tend to suggest about five to 600 words. That should be enough for you to describe succinctly what you've done. Enough room to reflect. How did it go? What could I do better? What would I change? You know, what impact did that have? And then as we say, evidence can just be links to things, you know, if you can embed them in the page, you can embed them in the page. If you've got videos you want to embed or other learning activities you want to embed and so on can just be screenshots, can be testimonials, can be any number of things. We get a real variety. So the first one too far. So the first thing you do is you describe, so as I say, the description for each section. So what I did when I did mine is I laid it out. Here's the the subsection I'm addressing, subtitle it description, reflection, evidence because I knew every time I was writing and doing all of those three key things. So description is just you concisely talking about what you did. So I started a project. It involved these people. This was what we did. And then when you come to your reflection, this is what I learned. This was what went well. This is what didn't go so well. This is the thing I might change next time. If I ever have to do this again, I'll do this differently, or I'll do exactly the same. Here's some feedback, you know, that sort of thing. But what we're interested in, you know, it's quality over quantity, you know, we don't need long, long, long descriptions. But make sure, you know, people when we talk about our institutions, sometimes we have a shorthand for things, don't we? And we, you know, things that we would talk to other people about that work there. But try to always explain enough that if I was a complete, you know, idiot, and I have no idea about learning technology, I could still understand enough about what you're trying to tell me. And you know, this can be a difficult thing, depending on the style of writing that you're used to. But the refractive writing is the absolutely most important bit. So the thing that absolutely, you know, causes resubmission is reflection or the lack thereof. So it's really key. And you can just even just use these titles, if that helps you. What have I learned? I learned that this worked really well, or I learned that this didn't work really well, or I learned that my students really need this. And I gave them this. So next time, I'm going to change that completely. Or I learned that trying to deploy this technology in this way didn't work. And I won't do it again like that if I have to do it again. You know, just use, you can use those or you can use a, you know, a more academic reflective cycle, like Gibbs or something like that, if that's helpful. When I did mine, I just used Gibbs reflective cycle, and I just put the titles of, you know, the, you know, the cycle. I just wrote a small amount, a couple of lines for each bit. And that was my reflection. And that worked really well, because it helped me really focus the reflection. Because one of the things that often happens is people get back into description, rather than reflection. And that's that can often be the case. And then your evidence, as I say, you know, we tend to say, you know, try and stick to recent practice as much as possible. But if you need to refer back to say something you've done 10, 20 years ago, that's absolutely fine. But what we want to see there is you showing how that relates to your practice today. So we want to see, you know, maybe that project you did 20 years ago still influences you today. And that's still relevant. And, you know, you can use any type of evidence that you can get, as I say, it's just to show us that you did what you said you did. So if you can't access something, say, you know, say you want to talk about something, and you, you can't share it more publicly, for example, maybe it's private and you can't share it, or you can't access it anymore, could just be that you get a testimonial from a former colleague that says, yes, Roddy did that piece of work. This is how it is, you know, this was how it went down tick, we know that you did it, you said what you, you know, you said you did. So those are the three key areas, description, evidence and reflection and each of those core areas in every subsection needs to see that description, reflection and evidence. And like I say, the easiest thing to do, lay it all out if you know, start with a Word document or a Padley or a Kanban board, whatever works for you, with all the subsections and just start putting ideas down, thinking through what you're going to put in each one, and then starting to fill them out and you can easily move things around if you need to, but every subsection and core area needs to have these three elements. So I'm not going to go into each of these, because we could talk about each of these all day long, and I could talk to you for another, you know, I do a whole day on this, so we won't go into that now, it's too hot for that. But these are the sort of the core areas, as I said earlier, and each one, what we do is, you know, core area one, for example, depending on which pathway you take, you may have two or three subsections to write about, and each one has slightly different requirements, so you can see there's a handy table on the website that shows you which core areas and then the subsections and which you have to do depending on which pathway you're doing. So for each and every one of these, so you know, for 3A description reflection evidence, 3B description reflection evidence every time. Just to say a little bit about the submission process, so there's a checklist in the documents as well, just so that you can, before you submit it, just go back through and tick tick tick tick, yes, I got that right. So use that if you do decide to go for CML. You get two, essentially you get two attempts the first time. So if you submit worst case scenario, you get referral major revisions. What that means is there's something significant about the portfolio, either every section needs work or something like that, or you've forgotten evidence from every section, something like that. If it's a referral major, that's basically, there's really, there's a lot that needs working on. The majority are referral minor. That's usually because there might be one or two sections that need some additional work, so the assessors will tell you what they want to see. So when I write my feedback, I always say in section 2A, you know, you haven't reflected enough, you know, there's only two sentences about your reflection. So can you expand on that reflection, tell me more about what you learned, what you did, how you felt about it, what you learned and so on. Ideally, first time we pass, I didn't. I will tell you that I left mine two weeks before the absolute final deadline that I could hand it in. You get two years from when you register to hand it in, and I left it till the two weeks before. So I got a referral, but thankfully I got very, very good feedback, which helped me. And then the next time I passed, if it's a really exceptional portfolio, they will also award pass with distinction, which is for a really exceptional portfolio. And we give those portfolios a distinction. So let's say you get referral minor or referral major, you'll get all of your feedback, and then you can act on that, and then you can resubmit. And this is the final chance, essentially, pretty much the majority, at least pass. But we do actually get some people that really want to get pass with distinction, and they do lots of work to get pass with distinction. The absolute worst case scenario is on the second attempt, you fail. And at that point, you have to reregister and start again. What I always say to people is, even if you're not 100% about your portfolio, but you're not sure where to go, you get two chances. So submit it, you'll get useful feedback from the assessors, they will help you to develop it, and then you can resubmit it the next time. You know, I think I can, you know, sometimes we can get sort of paralyzed by perfection. If it's got all the elements in there, but you're not quite sure, submit it anyway, and you will get useful feedback. But you may also find you pass because we can be our own worst critics, can't we? We have three submission windows. So our next submission window is the 30th of September this year. But we also have January and May as well. And as I say, you get two years to submit from when you register. So, you know, plenty of time to have a go if you want to. I won't go into life after Seymour because it's, I'll just say very briefly, after three years, once you've been accredited, you have to do an update. So it's a minor update that just looks back on the previous three years. What have you been doing? How have you been keeping your practice up? And so on. And it's also something that we, it's an annual renewal. So each year you can, you can renew for like three years if you want to, but each year you renew. And then after three years, you have to do an explicit update on your portfolio. We also share portfolios as well. So if you're open to it and you're willing to share your portfolio, we keep it locked to members only, but we share example portfolios. So there's a whole register and list, if you're a member of portfolios, if you want to go and have a look and see what other people have done. And once you've, what your Seymour accreditation, that's the point at which you can also become an assessor. So all the people who assess myself, I'm an assessor, there's lots of assessors here at the conference. We have Seymour and when we got Seymour, we also then became assessors ourselves. So you can also do the same if you choose to, but it's not mandatory obviously after you get accreditation. There we go. I will share these slides in the discord, so you can click on all the links to the help stuff, otherwise it's just just a load of links. So I will share that. I think we are, yeah, just one minute after time. So if you do have another session that you want to go to, please feel free to, but otherwise I'm very happy just to stay here for a few minutes and answer any questions that you have. Oh, I do, I should do a plug while I'm here. So on the 18th of October, if you can bear to spend an hour with me, then I'm doing another getting started with Seymour session, which is a slightly longer version of this, where I go into a bit more detail about the sections and the different content requirements. And if you really want a sort of a real boost to your portfolio writing, I also do a full day, about 930-4 accelerator workshop, where we essentially, I will go through all of the sections in great detail. You'll have an opportunity to actually be an assessor and learn how to assess so that when you come to writing your own portfolio, you will have that mindset when you come to write your portfolio. And there's also opportunities as well to actually get started with writing your portfolio. So they're all on our website, if that's of interest to you, we have lots of Seymour events. But otherwise, I hope that was useful. I have some handouts for you here. If you want to take those away, let's talk about the key benefits. Oh, you've got one. Well, you're very good. Let's talk about sort of the key benefits and why you might want to get Seymour. But one of the things, certainly one of the trends I've seen more recently is lots more job descriptions are starting to look for Seymour as a, either as a essential, but very often as a desirable. And so it's certainly becoming a lot more prevalent as part of the assessment, the recruitment process. Yeah. Yeah. So those online, Lin was just saying that, you know, putting the portfolio together can actually then become a portfolio that you can use for showing new employers and things like that. So I think that's really great advice, Lin. And I always find that doing a reflective portfolio like this really makes you stop and think about all the things that you have achieved because you trawl back through your back catalogue of things that you have done over the years and you suddenly realise just how much you've achieved over all that time. And it's an opportunity to stop and really properly reflect on your career where, you know, be asking your future plans, where do you want to go next? Where do you want to learn? You know, what do you want to develop? And I think it's always a really good opportunity to just stop and think about what you want and, you know, what you enjoy about your role. So if you do decide to sign up for CML, we'd be very delighted and we have, you know, help available to you if you do decide to go down that route. And if you have any questions after this, if something pops in your mind, do feel free just to get in contact with us. We'd be more than happy to help. Quite often. Yeah. So mine was the institution I was at the time. Mine was funded by them. Yeah. Yeah. So it does depend. But I think there's a lot more, a bit like, what do they call now? Advanced HE, but it used to be called HEA in the HA accreditation. I think it's starting to become something that institutions are seeing as a value add to help develop their staff. So quite often they will, you know, and if you can, obviously, if you can, you know, demonstrate the benefits to them and to yourself, then they may be more, you know, more willing to do so. But we do get a lot more, you know, institutional cohorts now. We have huge, Oxford has a huge group, for example, of course, there is Oxford. So, you know, you know, they can afford it. But we actually have quite a lot of large cohorts coming in who work together within their institutions to do CMO and work together to develop their portfolios and support one another, which is really, really nice. But we also have, you know, once you've registered, you get access to our sort of CMO email list as well. And, you know, you have a whole, you know, if you tweet or, you know, on social media and you ask a question about CMO, there's always a good, you know, hundreds of CMO holders that will come and help you. So there's quite a wide network. And we also map CMO to other, so we have mapped CMO to the UK PSF, which has obviously changed now. So we need to update our mapping. But we map it also to any other comparable accreditation schemes to demonstrate how the, you know, the principles and the values that we talk about and the core areas that we talk about map to those things as well. And I certainly found taking my HEA accreditation application and reworking it for CMO helped me do my CMO portfolio because you talk about a lot of the same things across those, you know, accreditation schemes.