 Good morning, and welcome to day two of Out Conference 2021. Firstly, a few words from our sponsor and some housekeeping. So if you could put up the slide please, Deb, thank you. Here's the various ways to stay in touch and where to get help. So use the art C21 hashtag, find us on Twitter and Discord. Help is also there if you need help on the help desk. I need to offer thanks to our sponsors for this session who are Adena and notable from Adena Service. Notable from Adena is a cloud-based computational notebook service that provides access to the most commonly used computational notebooks and also comes with auto-grading feature enabling teachers to set assignments for a class of learners with defined rules around automated marking of the code that the learner has written. And Adena is a spin-off out of the University of Edinburgh. So thank you for your sponsorship, notable and Adena. Just to note as well, these sessions are recorded. You can play them back after the event and please be polite and follow our etiquette rules. So without further ado, I just want to introduce today, Nikki Stewart, Melissa Highton and Stuart Nicholl. And they're going to hopefully answer the question, can an ancient institution change its ways? Thank you. Thank you very much, Roger. Yeah, I mean, we love presenting at Alt because this is really important community for us. University of Edinburgh is a leader in online learning. We've been doing it for a very long time. We have lots of online master's courses, lots of MOOCs, and we do have educational technology spin-offs like Adena. And notable is a service that has actually as well as we're advertising it because they're sponsoring this session. It is actually one of the things that we touched on in this project, which was how to provide support for students doing online learning at scale at University of Edinburgh. And what we're going to talk about is whether taking an ancient institution is quite a new area of work, which is microcredentials and thinking about how those different, we already had established master's, we already had established MOOCs, but trying to think about microcredentials, which is quite the hot topic at the moment. And if you are interested in working on microcredentials, we are recruiting and you can work with Nikki and Stuart to do this work with us. Nikki's going to do most of the presenting because she was the project and program manager looking at what we did. And this was a three, four-year piece of work, which we've now finished. Well, we finished the first chunk of the work. And I think the reason we wanted to present is just to talk about what kind of things you have to do, what kind of pace you need to go if you're trying to change an institution to think about something in different ways and just reflecting on what took the time, how we managed to do it, what seems to be successful and it's just an opportunity for us to share our learning with you. So Nikki, I'm going to let you take it away. And I'm sure we'll get questions in the comments. Thanks, yeah. So as Melissa was saying there, University of Edinburgh has been delivering online education for some time. We've had online masters since 2005 and we've been delivering MOOCs for many years as well. But despite successes from these courses and programmes, online education has never been quite seen as main university business. So in 2018, our distance and its scale programme was established to transform the way we deliver online education, increase student numbers, launch new micro credentials and online masters programmes to identify tests and pilot forms of automation, which would assist teachers and learners. And we had three years to do all of that. So it really was quite a challenge for leadership and for the remainder of the presentation, we're going to cover some of the different leadership challenges our programme came across and consider what you might be able to learn from some of our experiences. Sorry, I'm just trying to navigate the different technology here. So the first area we're going to look at is where we provided leadership and change. As a framework for our change programme, we followed a well-known and established process for Cotter's eight-step process for leading change and the graphic on the side of the slide there outlines those eight steps. In order to gain the senior management approval for our investment, our business case established a sense of urgency that immediate action was needed to maintain Edinburgh as a leader in online education and to explore the opportunities for micro-credentials early on. While Edinburgh's existing online tutors shared our goal to improve and the support for online teachers and increase the visibility of the benefits for online courses, some of the early messages from our programme around the need for scale transformation didn't quite fit with everybody. While Edinburgh is delivering online programmes for many years, suddenly everybody at the University wanted to have a say in what we were doing and our guiding coalition ended up quite weighty with our boards, including many vice-principals. Updates had to be shared with various committees along the way and a lot of our early effort was spent drafting committee papers which had to give reassurances that we were operating within existing academic policies. We did require a policy exception for our micro-credential framework and as the first UK institution to produce a MicroMasters with edX, we also had to first design what it would look like outside the US credit system and agree an approach that would balance the impact on student systems and support and the need to admit students at the point of the final assessment which would allow us to award credit to those students. It took about a year but we eventually got approval to proceed and to test our new micro-credential framework. So three years on from starting our programme, the urgency of change has shifted slightly and our guiding coalition has new members and we've managed to be able to recruit the principal who's now also keen to lead conversations about micro-credentials and digital badges. Our strategic vision might not have been delivered within the initial three years but it has given us a clear idea of what the strengths and opportunities to Edinburgh are and these will really help us continue to move forward. I'm going to hand over to Stuart now who's going to talk about a couple of other areas of leadership. Sure, thanks Nicky. I'm just going to talk quickly about leadership and technology. Do we have that slide? It's on my screen. There it is. Cool, thanks. Another step in caught is change processes once that sense of urgency has been achieved is to enable action by removing barriers. One of the things we did here to remove barriers from a technology point of view is that we moved from quite distributed model with our online masters programmes where teams that were creating those courses were distributed into schools to have a central team of experts to produce these new at-scale courses. It was kind of modelled on what we did with MOOCs before which is a central team that was much more of a small innovation group. By building this team it provided the benefit of streamlining processes rather than lots of different people coming up with the same answers differently and getting that guidance and expertise into more streamlining format. Then we could then share that knowledge back with the local teams where we're helpful. We built up this team of instructional designers, media producers, project managers and course administrators that Nicky led. We spent time refocusing what the innovation was. With MOOCs we'd kind of got to the point where media seemed to be the innovation and we refocused that so that learning design and the course itself was the innovation and it allowed the central team to pilot new technologies and to meaningfully design those technologies into the fabric of these new courses that we were building. What we did find is that although we removed some barriers by providing this, by creating a central team and a central service there were other barriers that we bumped into around things like university governance and existing experience and success in the areas of MOOCs and online masters and those are barriers that we found really hard to in some cases it didn't manage to remove. In the area of technology we were able to kind of experiment with a few different learning technologies like learning analytics adaptive learning computational notebooks. Learning analytics was quite an interesting one and there were some barriers that we really bumped up against there and some perceptions within the university. I guess there's I guess a bit of a reticence or suspicion about learning analytics maybe I kind of thought that in the context of Edinburgh it's not the idea of retention and flagging at risk students isn't necessarily something that is seen as a big issue so it led to our choice of tool which was a on-task which is a coaching tool and then once we tried to get that implemented we bumped up against the very robust ethics approval processes that the university has put in place so I think that really limited some of the successes we were able to achieve through the use of that new technology. It's also worth noting I guess that we did see real benefits of building this central team when the pandemic hit last year we were really quickly able to redirect that central team to create online courses to support students in the transition to hybrid teaching and also we created nine pop-up studios across the university very very quickly which Nikki led again which we wouldn't have been able to do before. Some of the short-term innovations that we gained we launched the university's first admissions chatbot which was a big achievement we worked with a research center in digital education to research attitudes into automation and AI we trialled that coaching tool on tasks so we got really good insights into how that works and also we piloted computational notebooks which was something that was very very successful and is provided by Adina that notable service and the also grading for Python assessments proved really really useful within the context of the predictive analytics courses that we've been using. We move on to the next slide, Nikki. Cool and then just to talk a little bit about leadership and teaching so we developed the digital pedagogy this had strong academics before it was developed in partnership with the center for digital research and digital education. I guess I addressed the suspicion about the role of technology in achieving scale and what we mean by scale and it retained the importance of the teacher and the teacher function but that's not to say that that messaging around scale has been a real challenge in this project. The course that we created the Edinburgh model for online teaching has had great feedback and we've repurposed it a number of times we delivered it first in edX at the beginning of the last year but we repurposed it into learn and actually it was very very successful last summer in training teachers or the development of teachers over the summer in preparation for hybrid teaching during the pandemic and we had over 700 people that went through that. We evidence that partnering with edX could produce high quality courses I would say the micro masses that we've produced is the most QAid course that we've ever produced there was so much scrutiny on it and although we didn't manage to engage the broad number of programs across the university that we hoped for a really big positive outcome was the business school which is a school that in the past had been a bit reluctant to teaching the online area they've ended up with two micro credentials and they're kind of eager for more they're looking at planning a full online masters. We launched Edinburgh's first micro credential and I think the UK's first micro masters which is edX's trademark micro credential I think where we did have issues was around the governance of how to manage this new type of student the bridges gap between an open learner and a university matriculated student that was a very challenging layer of the project and Cotter talks about this volunteer army it's about the project becoming more of a movement than a project although it's become really strong in the business school where they now have got themselves a point where they're self motivated to move into the online learning area we probably didn't manage to build up that volunteer army across the university more widely and that has maybe impacted by some of the early messaging around the urgency that was created with this at scale teaching message that Nikki talked about earlier Nikki I'll hand back over to you Nikki Thank you I'm just going to pick up on a few things that didn't go so well and that we were thinking maybe you might be able to learn from Stuart already mentioned that there were suspicions around maybe what we were trying to achieve with some of our learning analytics and the ethics around those but what meant that our pilots got held up in multiple committees and the scope of what we were trying to achieve got really restricted our coaching pilot which used learning analytics took over six months to get approval and then when we did get approval its use was so limited that our pilot data meant that we were left unable to really fully understand the benefits to learners and tutors we did learn a lot from developing and supporting our admissions bot but the governance decisions around that again meant that it was only deployed for one program which meant that the overall cost of running the bot kind of way outweighed the savings for the staff time in addition to the admissions bot we had ambitions to develop teacher bots which would help tutors repetitive administrative tasks that could be automated while chatbot technology is fairly well embedded in commercial sectors it was more challenging to identify some of the technology that would support our needs the technology in this area has moved on a lot in the last three years so we do plan to revisit this again at the right time at some point soon so it can take many years to change a universities business model but working with Stern and partners whose aims are to disrupt and transform education can be challenging as they want to move pretty fast edX were still understanding and developing how their platform would support full online masters programs and at the time when we started working with them micro masters were only a few years old and still evolving what this meant was that their business models and priorities changed over the years and at times this also meant that we had to go back and revisit some of our approach to what we were designing and delivering one of Kotter's eight steps is to sustain acceleration but you know it's exhausting to try and keep it up sometimes when you're trying to lead and push for changes and our team really did struggle at times with change fatigue in order to move quickly we had to design the Edinburgh micro credential framework develop the processes and produce the courses all at the same time and this meant that some decisions and conversations had to be revisited sometimes more than once we've already mentioned about there being more scrutiny of our courses than there had been if any other course at the university in terms of QA and just general buzz and talk around it but this meant that some of the change fatigue that set in meant that people just fell back in their role practices rather than kind of pushing for more change and more innovation in the area let me just change the slide but in terms of lead and change we have a few lessons that we wanted to share with you much of what we were trying to do in particular on the technology side was research and development our program was ambitious and in order to learn we needed to try things out first being first also made it challenging we had to convert the US based micro credential to fit with the UK system learn how bots could chat to students and push existing university policies and procedures to adapt to a new world of learning not everything was a success in what we tried but the learning from that trying has still been valuable and we understand much more than we did three years ago about what is achievable the aim to increase student numbers did help us get to get the buy-in for the investment but it wasn't helpful that our success was linked to those the benefits of increasing that student numbers should still come through the changes that we've put in progress but our program was perceived as missing the goals as it didn't deliver all those benefits within your time frame we did change attitudes and investing the time to do so was important and it also allowed us to recently get agreement to continue changes needed to agree a flexible micro credential framework for the university so really our changes is kind of incremental and we do hope to get to the longer term goals eventually I talked earlier about the many committee papers that we produced at the start of the program but they didn't stop we kept creating them we've kept talking about them and we've made a real effort to keep talking about the breadth of our work and sharing our findings with anyone who will listen to us and finally we made connections between the work that we've been doing and university strategy wherever possible Stuart mentioned that when the university had to respond to the pandemic our team was able to quickly support a range of activities which introduced which included the producing new courses for students and increasing media production capabilities and as the interest in online CPD and executive educations continued we've evidenced the links between what we've delivered and our ongoing and the university's ongoing need for further change so the question we asked at the beginning was whether an ancient institution can change ways and yeah we believe it definitely can but trying to embed real transformation is going to take longer than three years we've been able to raise the conversations on micro-identials and standalone short courses so they're now sitting at the highest levels of the university and we've really learned a lot about the strengths and opportunities for Edinburgh and the strategic direction that we think will work for us and we're going to continue to progress that work and those conversations we haven't talked much about the micro-identials themselves but if you're interested in finding them we've got the links there at the bottom of the slide and you can find them on edX and as Melissa said if you are interested in what we've talked about then we're recruiting at the moment and we've got a couple of jobs advertised at the moment with some to be published soon and then also I just wanted to make you aware of course that we've got running at the moment where we've kind of distilled a lot of the learning that we've in terms of our course production stream side of things and that course is currently running on future learn so have a look that's us thank you very much that's fantastic we've got a couple of minutes for questions from the audience if we can be brief in our answers you mentioned exhausting keeping up the pace of change Simon Parr asked how you would be able to maintain the momentum and the sense of urgency as the pandemic uses I'm not sure who's going to put that one up my doorbell went exactly that moment sorry this Simon's question I think that the thing about the pandemic actually because we started this before the pandemic and after the pandemic the urgency from the institution about we should be doing micro credentials it's suddenly the hottest topic and actually we're able to say we've actually been looking into this for several years luckily we're very well positioned for this so I think that the pandemic has been good in that lots of people have now have much more interest in doing online courses so even though we had many online courses at Edinburgh the demand for everybody to do even more of them is quite important at very much what people are talking about I think that the we did achieve a lot the metrics aren't the only thing as we always know that and if they were the only thing if they were the most important thing more people would be doing books because that's where you can get these huge numbers but I think that what's important about this the course review and the quality assurance was the engagement by so many people in the university insisting on the quality of this thing because it was a new thing a micro masters whereas in fact we've whether those same quality standards are being applied to other bits of online learning so you all will be familiar with this idea that if you try to do something new suddenly there's a lot of focus on it and you have to reassure people that we do actually know how to make online materials to do actually know how to learn and teach online but perhaps as well as the flip side of the exhausting for us and for the team to lead the perception now that it was a lot of work and that a lot of work was done is almost coming back as the problem which why would we continue to do this when it was clearly so much work so trying to get people to think about the work that we've done as essential underpinning infrastructure for now what we might do with micro credentials and badges I think has been very important and that change will really be seen from now on and I think that perhaps Nikki is modest in that she has actually put into place a lot of change within the institution it's just that we haven't quite clarified that the institution knows that yet and I guess the metrics so there's a couple of questions in the chat room about metrics that I'm afraid we're not going to have time to get to so I suggest we possibly move this over to Discord and we can continue the conversation there because there's a few more questions but I guess the metrics is the proof of the pudding isn't it if it's successful then you need to keep doing it it would be the bottom line I'm afraid we've run out of time now so thank you very much again Nikki Melissa and Stuart for your presentation there are more questions in the chat room so the stream yard will be there if you want to make any brief comments or direct people to a Discord thread or Twitter thread where you can continue the conversation so I think there's quite a lot of and in normal times we normal go out to the coffee room and we can continue the conversation there so thank you very much again everybody and thank you for the audience for contributing your questions I'm sorry we couldn't get to all the questions but thank you very much