 and welcome everybody to this session today in our leadership track at the Alt-Annual Conference 2021. I'm really thrilled to be introducing to you a really stellar panel of speakers. And in a moment, I'm going to hand over to Simon Horrocks to kick us off. But I particularly wanted to welcome Caroline and Hannah, who are joining us here today. I think it's fantastic that we have yet another session and on leadership as well that includes student voices. So a very warm welcome to you both. Thank you so much for joining us. I think we're distributed all across the UK in this panel today, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, all joining in together to make the session happen. So Simon, over to you for the full introductions. Welcome from us. Diolch yn fawr, Maren, and Burda Pau. Very great pleasure for me to open this presentation on behalf of Cardiff University, don't worry. I think that's probably the last wealth we're going to use, although Dowie may use the odd word as we go through. It's important to say at the beginning that although this is very much about leadership, we wanted to present to you multiple perspectives of the changes that Cardiff University has experienced during the pandemic and how we're kind of looking forward to our kind of future development of digital education. And therefore, we have kind of several contributors to this presentation, which we'll introduce to you in a short while. Listening to Lou Mikroft's keynote earlier, it was really interesting that she talked about this idea of collaborative leadership, so I hope that in some small way we can kind of emulate that. And also it's worth noting that we were hoping originally to have an additional voice here today in our Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Students, Claire Morgan, but unfortunately she's been drawn out to something else, and therefore it's just the four of us. So I think we're going to put up our slides. And the first is really just for me to introduce to you the context of our presentation, where Cardiff University was and is in relation to digital education transformation. And the first thing to say is that we are a research intensive institution, but we're also highly distributed as an organization. We have about 30,000 students, but we're structured in a way where we have three colleges, we have 24 schools. And those different elements of the university have different levels of autonomy in some cases as to how they kind of structure their work in education. And at the beginning of the pandemic, it's also worth noting that we had very differential experience of digital education across the university. So in terms of online, pure online programs, although we have 24 schools, most of our programs were focused on one of those 24. We had been foundational partners of future Linn, but we hadn't developed that many courses, perhaps in comparison to some of our UK institutions. And therefore, there was a very uneven experience as the pandemic hit. And alongside the actual disruption of the pandemic, we had a number of other factors, I think, that kind of came into play. The first was that we did actually have some new formal leadership within the institution in the sense that Claire, as PVC, had only just literally taken the reins as the pandemic came along. So what a time to begin your job as provost chancellor for education and students. And also my role as academic lead for digital education strategy didn't even exist before the pandemic. It was actually created partly in response to the disruption, but also, I think, to recognise immediately that there was a need to implement something which was more strategic in terms of the university's development of digital education. And there was a revision of the strategy alongside the planning that we put in place for the pandemic, which included, for the first time, actually an acknowledgement of the importance of online education in the headline university strategy the way forward, which you can find online. But I think, most importantly, by way of context, we introduced what I think for Cardiff, what a fairly unprecedented approach to how we address the challenges of the pandemic. And this was under the auspices of what was called the Digital Education Program. And the Digital Education Program, very similar to some of the things we've heard from other universities during this conference, contained a number of different work streams. But I think, most importantly, contained a number of people who wouldn't normally necessarily be involved in the actual direction of the university's approach to digital education. We had over 200 people in the Digital Education Program. And they were spread right across the university in different kind of roles, but also from different perspectives, academics, professional services staff, very importantly, the Students Union. We also had students from our Students and Champions Program kind of contributing to that. And that, I think, kind of sets the context for our presentation today, because we wanted to give you a flavour in some ways of the multiple kind of experiences and perspectives within that programme. And so these are the sort of four perspectives that you're going to get today. I think just before we actually kind of go into the detail, it's kind of just worth asking the question, both for this kind of reflection period, but also going forward, who ultimately tells the story in terms of the institutional approach to development of education and digital education in particular. And I think from our point of view, it is genuinely really vital that we understand that there are multiple perspectives and all of them are equally important in ultimately shaping how the institution approaches its work in this area. But we're going to go through these now in order for you and we're going to start off with the learning technologies perspective and that's over to you, Dowie. Hello, so my name is Dowie Parry. I'm a Learning Technology Manager within the Centre for Education, Support and Innovation here at Cardiff University. So I'm going to make a start with the learning technologies perspective. So the change management challenge that I'm going to discuss is the restructure of the digital education provision here at Cardiff. So pre-COVID, we had a central team of five learning technologists and 20 learning technology-related staff working in pockets across the university, a mixture of expertise, responsibilities and line management structures and very much working autonomously. So COVID happened and we all had to work to get the university over the line for the year. So as a strand of the digital education program, as Simon mentioned, over the summer of 2020, we trialled and then launched a single digital education team structure along with distributed senior team leadership and an academic lead for digital education and Simon, of course, bringing all learning technologists into the Centre for Education, Support and Innovation. So as you can see here, this is the kind of pre-COVID distribution of learning technologies in February 2020, the top diagram. And as you can see, the distribution of learning technologists of February 2021 is down at the bottom. So basically, and you can see the distributed leadership model as well above the line there. So how did we get from this top diagram down to the bottom? We had two additional external positions come in. We had eight additional internal or subcommand positions come in and the majority of these were to the support hub. As you can see, there were quite a few working in the second college, for example. There's an imbalance here. There was six learning technologists working in one school. And as you can see in College C, there was one to a learning technologist in working in a single school. So we wanted to shift from a dispersed learning technologists community to an institutional partnership approach with academic schools. We wanted to address school-based stakeholder needs and identify priorities. We wanted to embed our center into learning teaching conversations within all schools. We want to take a program level approach. So shift from reactive to proactive working with colleagues from across our center as a whole. So the curriculum design team, academic development team, student engagement team, and student champions, along with colleagues in registry, in libraries, project management office, for example, to co-develop new programs, program updates, and work on revalidations and so on. We also needed to take a developer career pathway for learning technologists. It just hadn't existed previously. So the main challenges, academic schools were very wary of losing staff with these particular expertise and local knowledge during this time. So there was a job at work to do around reassuring them that this was not the case, and we wanted to take a partnership approach. Learning technologists might be uncomfortable working in new schools with different priorities, embedding themselves in schools who had not worked with learning technologists before, which is difficult. So difficult issues to navigate through. From the change management point of view, we tend to use ad-cal methodology for change management within the university. So we raise awareness of the changes, communicate a scope, impact, and type of change to stakeholders across the institution. We have active and visible sponsorship. So in addition to the people within this presentation, we have the PVC for education students, Clare Morgan, college deans, directors of learning teaching like Caroline, Digital Education Manager, Tony Lancaster and Center Director, Helen Spickel, who are instrumental in taking these changes forward. So our biggest change really is the shift to an institutional partnership approach with academic schools, addressing their needs of stakeholders whilst driving the transition for an emergency reactive outlook to a focus on strategic development to improve the student experience. So if learning technologists are then working on these different priorities to enable that shift, we develop the Digital Education Support Hub as a casual support best for general queries, managing support processes, and to take the weight away from learning technologists working as school partners. So this summer we reinforced the change, so collecting feedback from fellow team enhancements, identifying low adoption and reach, bringing in data, so NSS, institutional surveys, Student Union, for example, developing business cases for funding and securing contracts for those onto comments and short term contracts. So where we're at currently, we're not yet at full capacity, so you'll see that there are still gaps. And so we have a presence, but not yet fully embedded within all 24 of our academic schools. We are currently reviewing the Centerwide offering, so not just the Digital Education Team, which means processes has yet not been set in stone for our ideal kind of program level approach. Again, something that we're working on at the moment. So why are we doing it this way? We very much see this development of taking a holistic all center approach to working in partnership with schools, aligning to high level strategy, co-developing and supporting, learning and teaching frameworks as the initial bullcrum of institutional change in this area and gives us a strategic footing moving forward in our opinion. So with that in mind, I'm going to pass you over to Dr. Caroline Lynch, who has been working in partnership with us for well over a year and a half now, co-developing and learning and teaching frameworks for an academic perspective on the journey. Thanks, Doi. So as I'm going to present to you from the perspective of the academic lead on the blended learning framework this year, I'm also the director of teaching and learning in a school in the arts and humanities. And I'm an educator myself. I teach on undergraduate programs. As an institution, we were not well placed in terms of infrastructure and experience to pivot to online or blended learning when the pandemic first hit. This is not to say that there was no expertise or instances of best practice within the institution, but these were on the whole independent and isolated pockets of practice rather than anything that was happening in a systemically or in any structured way across the institution. In essence, this meant that the digital education framework team was tasked within essentially a three month period over the summer of 2020 with providing program and module teams with the guidance and support that they needed to design and deliver high quality online and blended learning. The challenges were not insignificant. Perhaps the most pressing of these was the implementation of a framework of principles and guidance with accompanying resources and support that allowed for enough flexibility across the various colleges, schools and disciplines while still retaining a degree of core consistency in terms of the student experience. This was, as Simon alluded to, very much a collective effort at all levels across the institution. And of course, it had to be done in the context of a global pandemic where time pressures and work, home and other commitments experienced by all colleagues were significantly high. As an academic lead, my approach from the beginning was one of supporting and motivating colleagues to come on this journey that involved navigating for many what was essentially entirely new territory. And indeed, one of the guiding principles of both the digital education framework and the revised blended learning framework that we've developed for this year was that it had to cater for colleagues with little or no experience of designing and delivering modules in a blended and online context. To this end, a central component of the framework was the provision of the five key principles that you can see on the slides to underpin how colleagues should approach blended learning. What very quickly became apparent in the development of the framework and in the subsequent delivery of programs was that despite the pressures that we were under, there was a significant desire for positive change around the design and delivery of learning and teaching activities. There were also, and I'm sure there still are, some pockets of resistance. So the main challenge for us when moving from the digital education framework to the revised blended learning framework for 2021-22 was taking advantage of and maintaining the momentum that the pandemic had provided in terms of bringing about institutional change. Our objective at this stage was to take stock of the learned experiences of online and blended learning and feedback from the student experience perspective to ensure that the benefits and best practices of online learning can be blended with the social and interpersonal benefits of on-campus activity to provide a more holistic, well-structured, inclusive and accessible higher education experience. So in terms of what worked and what the challenges were, a significant benefit of the whole experience is that in some respects, the institution has become more agile. We have, over the last 18 months, been able to bring about changes and get things done that standard processes and timelines wouldn't have allowed. A challenge moving forward will be retaining that agility and flexibility and momentum while also being mindful of colleagues' workload as we emerge from emergency response mode. We also have a significant bank of resources in the blended learning framework and as Joey's mentioned, we've moved towards a more distributed system of support partners across the institution. Our challenges moving forward relate to communication and to promotion of these resources and how we can best monitor staff engagement with an application of the resources and the impact that this has in turn on the teaching and learning experience. From a teaching perspective, we've provided clarity and structure in terms of module design and student experience through the standardization of VLE module templates and through the use of module maps. Module maps are weekly module planners that outline the tasks that students should complete each week, providing direct links to resources and linking also the tasks to learning outcomes and to assessments. The use of brief pre-recorded lecture content has enabled live contact time with students to be more interactive and student-centered as it should be. These have been popular with both staff and students and they are just some of the benefits that we will be retaining moving forward. And on that note, I will hand over to Hannah Doe, our Student Union President. Thank you so much, Caroline. I am here to provide you with a Student Union perspective. And last year I took on the role of Vice President Education, working in partnership with the university. But how do we do this? I have been part of the Digital Education Steering Group this year, working closely with the university to put together the frameworks that have been mentioned already. And feedback students' thoughts from a range of sources, such as academic reps, student champions and so on. Students are some of the most difficult critics and getting them on board is super key. So what do they have to say? What are the positive feedbacks that we have received? Well, this past year, as Caroline has mentioned, we have put together module maps and they have been very successful. Students have appreciated a pathway through their modules that clearly lays out what they need to do to succeed. And we have had plenty of feedback on both the accessibility and flexibility of our blended learning approach, highlighting that students have been able to positively engage with their studies from wherever they are. We have created a more inclusive environment, positively impacting those with disabilities. And our Blackboard layout has had a bit of a rebound which has upgraded our student online experience with drop-ins and Q&As in town halls providing more opportunities for students to engage with their schools and feel a part of their learning community. However, it is important to acknowledge that needs vary from school to school and there have been challenges that we have faced. So what challenges did we face? Well, firstly, you may have noticed that breakout rooms were something that also received positive feedback and moving to blended learning approaches. This has provided many students with the confidence to contribute to discussion, raise questions, however, others have found that it has made it much more difficult to engage. But additionally, many staff and students have also had to face the black screens of online lectures. We are putting together at the University of Cardiff lecture con... You know, guidance to using cameras and making students feel much more comfortable to engage with their lectures online. And there's always room for improvement. And with this, at Cardiff, we're continuing to explore approaches and respond to feedback. We want staff to feel prepared and supported, but also we want students to then enjoy the experience so it's getting the balance. And this year with the return to university, we've been working on getting that balance just right, taking both the best experience from our campus and online approaches, finding that perfect balance, allowing us to ensure students have the best time. For instance, if online lectures work best, why not continue them? And going forward, we'll continue to gather that feedback, see what the students and staff think and respond to it. And I shall hand over to Simon to provide you a leadership perspective. Thank you, Hannah. We are running out of time, and that's probably down to my lengthy introduction. So actually I'm just going to concentrate on the last couple of points here on this slide, which is really to ask, you know, the question, which I think is really a burning question for us now, is how do we ensure that we kind of maintain the benefits of this collaborative approach going forward? And just a couple of examples there of things that we're doing. So for one thing, we are actually repositioning what was previously the Centre for Education, Support and Innovation. It's actually been rebranded today, literally today as the Learning and Teaching Academy. And the idea there is to move away from the idea of centre, but also to be a much more inclusive community, which includes all of the different elements that Dari described, but also hopefully just acts as a way of really being at the heart of these different perspectives, you know, from academics and from students and from other key constituents. We're also offering an OU online teaching microcredential to staff across the institution, both academics and professional services staff, with the idea of kind of really building and developing this kind of community practice. Just very conscious, we are literally about to run out of time. We won't have time to address these questions right now, but very happy to carry on in Discord if people would like to kind of take up any of these kind of questions with us. Thanks, Simon, that's fantastic. I think we're just going to carry on for a couple of minutes over time, and as it's been such a fascinating panel. And I'd love to pick up at least one or two of the questions. And I don't know, Simon, but there's a particular one. I was hoping we could pick up Fiona's on how to measure the success of the framework and any thoughts on that, because there's been so much engagement in the chat. We want to at least pick up one or two. Yeah, that's a brilliant question. And I think it relates partly to, you know, this question of how do you deal with something which is both strategic and really kind of responsive and at pace, you know, because we are very keen to, you know, sort of build on what we're doing and not just have it as something that was there for the immediate response to the pandemic. So I think we're still working is the simple answer on the formal sort of evaluation of the framework. But one of the ways in which I guess we did do that was by thinking about how we transition it into this year and sort of again, bring the collective voices in to consider what worked last year with what was called the digital education framework for the pandemic. But as Caroline described, there's now the blended learning framework. So I think it's really, you know, it's not particularly sort of structured or formal, but it is actually maintaining, you know, that opportunity for the multiple perspectives across the university to inform what our evolving approaches. I don't know if Caroline, if you have anything you'd like to add to that or Hannah. No, for me, it's the next phase, I guess, moving forward and it's something that we're conscious of, we're conscious that we want to close the loop as it were or to keep this a cyclical process where we're able to gauge how useful the materials are for colleagues, what impact it has on the teaching and learning experience. And that's the next stage of our process. And if anyone has any suggestions that they want to put forward, we would welcome them too. Well, I think there's been a couple of questions around the role of learning technologists, how they were managing and assigning work, but also around their job specs. So I think there was a couple of questions from Amarie and Pete and Matt in the chat. As Simon said, unfortunately we've run a bit over and we would love to encourage you to keep chatting on Discord and on the YouTube chat. I hope Simon and his panel can hopefully pick up many of those questions. From me and from everyone here, time has flown by and I want to say a really big thank you for a fascinating sharing of perspectives here at the conference. So thank you very much for your session. Thank you. Thanks all.