 a we have quite a lengthy tidal so apologies for that, we tried to make it a bit snappier, but there is nothing we could do. Good morning everybody and we are delighted to be here representing the Shannon Consortium, to talk about our proposal around the professional and development capacity building in the Shannon Consortium through enhancing teaching and learning through a regional Acredited Programme So to give you a little bit of context, we're working at the Shannon Consortium and it was established 10 years ago, we're delighted to celebrate it this year, We'll have loads of bells and whistles later on in the year to celebrate it. But it's been quite, on the series note, it's been a quite successful cluster that we established ten years ago. So we have the University of Limerick, we have Merriam-Acula College and the University of Limerick Institute of Technology, all coming within the same higher education context but within a different individual context and how they're operating. So interdisciplinary within the University of Limerick, Merriam-Acula College very strong on teacher education and the arts and the Limerick Institute of Technology again, multi-disciplinary but again very practicum and industry focused. So these three contexts have worked really successfully over the last decade on an initial project which was enhancing teaching excellence within the region, the Midwest region of Ireland. And I'm delighted to say that that project has become sustainable over the last number of years and so far as we have regional CPD events, we have conversations in the consortium which are regular conversations in each of the institutions which we all attend. We have regional teaching excellence awards within the three institutions evaluated by an international panel. And then we have three different projects that have been successful within the national forum funding phases. So take one step which some of you might be familiar with. We have the research expertise exchange and we have the most recent one which is the first year transition MOOC project. So we're quite delighted to work together in this collaboration and we see this opportunity, this proposal for funding and as an opportunity to take our collaboration to the next step. To the next step of CPD which is much more structured in a way that all of our staff and our colleagues can benefit through CPD. So let's move on to what we're actually going to do. Can I ask you to stay behind the line? Oh sorry, apologies. I tend to walk, sorry. So the aim of our project then is, as I said, to align and enhance a recently developed graduate diploma masters in teaching, learning and scholarship, which the University of Limerick has recently rolled out to the needs of three partner institutions within the consortium. So what we have is a programme that we have had a level nine postgraduate diploma in the last seven years in the University of Limerick which we have completely revamped and redesigned in light of the higher education context and also in light of the needs of the students within, the students who are obviously our faculty within the university. But this opportunity has arisen where we can really align it really strongly to the PDF framework and also to the needs of the three partner institutions to have a very structured approach to CPD within the Shannon Consortium and within the three institutions. So you've probably been looking at this for the last day and a half so you'll know it has to be better than anybody. But here we have our professional development framework which we have been cognisant of in the initial design of the programme. But at this point what we're hoping to do and what we're aiming to do is take each of these domains to a much deeper level than maybe we have already. So for example professional identity values and development, professional communication and dialogue and the self, they have been very much contained in our initial draft of the programme and redesign of the programme that's running out this year. Needless to say knowledge and skills are part of that as is professional and personal capacity. Yet what we really want to focus on is within the dynamic nature of higher education we want to look at additional themes that can be brought in to the module offerings that are offered already and also we want to look at the professional and personal capacity. And how we plan to do this is through first of all the module offerings we've identified within our dialogue in the institutions, but also through the assessment models that we would use and through the development of e-portfolios, which would bring in all of the values of the CPD framework, all of the types of learners within the CPD framework, but also the domains and it would allow for a very cyclical reflective process of assessment where everything is aligned in this e-portfolio. The RPL guidelines that we talk about is something that we find very complex. It's been very complex for most of us working in higher education and working in projects that are directed for CPD for faculty insofar as you have a programme where there are basic entry requirements to the programme. Yet you have very different levels of academic staff on that programme and that gives rise to a certain amount of complexity around, you might have a professor, we've had a situation where we have a professor with a huge amount of industry experience sitting on a programme with early academics. And how do you harness that and how do you ensure that the RPL that's in the room is harnessed in a way where there is co-creation of knowledge and that you can do that in a much more transparent and standardised way across the programme. We've recently engaged with the RPL network, which had an event there in Limerick in September. A number of us attended that and it was just so gratifying to see that it's not just us struggling with the RPL. It's actually quite a common problem across the context in further and higher education. So that's something that we really want to grapple with more and possibly solve a bit of the mystery and develop guidelines around RPL for entry to the programme, but also in relation to developing the programme further. The innovative and pedagogy and assessment that we talk about, yes, of course, the e-portfolio will be structured to that, but also within that regard, the pedagogy that we want to use and that we want to incorporate is, yes, innovative. We will have interaction. It will be very much workshop-based, where it's discussion-based, rather than a lot of lecturing and scaffolding of material. We look at problem-based learning. We have obviously the technology, enhanced learning and the use of the VLEs within each of the institutions. So, again, trying to align the provision across the three institutions using different VLE systems and provisions is maybe quite a challenge. So, just to clarify exactly what all of that looks like, the University of Limerick programme exists in its first iteration this year. So, we want to make that consortium level programme open to everyone in the consortium and accredited by all. The collaborative planning would take place, as it has done in the last number of years as a consortium, and we would start with the stakeholder needs analysis across and scope out the project. What are we looking at? What do we need to do? What are the needs out there of the faculty, i.e. students that we're going to have on board on the project? And again, taking into account the various contexts that the institutions are operating in. From that then, we would start to engage with the recognised prior learning guidelines. What do we need to really scope out? What has been the previous experience of students on these types of programmes? And we have data from students for the last number of years on the original specialist diploma, where we have looked at what the considerations are in relation to using that knowledge and how to harness it. In so doing then, developing the provision across the three institutions is the main piece of work, is to be able to do both around ensuring that scheduling, the logistics, the curriculum design, and curriculum planning across the project. Never mind the delivery and how that might work. Use of technology-enhanced learning and the alignment of the VLEs across the consortium, and then the e-portfolio development scoping out what type of system we might use there in order to really maximise what we're looking at. The module development, I'm putting up, there are three themes there. They've come very much from strategic plans from national strategic documents and requirements. So that takes us to how we will actually go about it, and we've looked at this as far as we can at this point in relation to the consultation phase, the delivery and design, and the evaluation and sustainability. So to reiterate, our needs analysis would happen at the very outset. The collaboration would be right through the project, and that speaks for itself, but the needs analysis and the scoping provision would initially happen in the first six months to get an initial feel for what's happening and what's required. Again, we would engage with various stakeholder groups within the different institutions. So we're talking about management, staff, students, student unions, and various networks that would be involved there. The development of guidelines for the recognition of prior learning again would happen at that stage, but I think it may happen for a lot longer as well. It may not be the explicit agenda, but I think it's going to come through the whole timeline. Technology-enhanced learning and VLE alignment again will come near the end while there would be scoping initially around that. The development and alignment of the current programme to the national development framework is the key aim of the project to make sure that we are linking in with the values, the types of learners and the domains of the CPD framework, and then the portfolio development, how that might operate in reality alongside the VLEs. The module development and design would go right through from the very beginning to the end of the project, and then evaluation and sustainability is something that we'd be cognizant of and working through from the beginning to the end of the project. Again, in line with how we've worked on projects to date. So the key outcomes of the project then can be looked at from both the very macro level and the more micro institutional level. So we have our main initial aim would be, again, there is a bit of complexity around the students and faculty here can be one and the same person. So just to bear that in mind in case I'm causing confusion. So we have building capacity across Shannon consortium in teaching and learning. We've done a really good job, if I may say so ourselves at this point, around building that capacity and really getting the dialogue started in teaching and learning and class institutional dialogue. But this would be a much more formal identification of that where people would have a very clear idea of where they can go and how they might go about developing themselves through an awareness of a national development framework. And using the labels and the domains of the framework in any advertisement of workshop in the design and development of any workshops across the consortium in addition to that. The economies of scale and shared services, of course, would be a huge issue and a huge benefit to this particular project through the structured nature of the CPD. From the other side of it then we have the shared experience through recognised prior learning and how we will all benefit from that and really try and get through that grappling stage recognised prior learning. How can we engage with the students that are on this programme? How do they want to engage with it? And what kinds of level of experience are we taking on board? At present we have very vague, I don't know that I call it a policy, guidelines around RPL and there is a lot of discretion there. So, you know, how do you map it? So we go with our gut reaction, which is we map it to learning outcomes from previous modules, which isn't necessarily taking an experience at all and that can be a huge problem. And that's something that personally I'm grappling with and I know that I'm dealing with outside who are industry based. New content and approaches because again we have Institute of Technology has a very different culture to Mary Immaculate College, to the University of Lyric and how we can bring all of those different voices to be heard in the different strategies and I think it's a really exciting opportunity for us to do that. We've been lucky so far as we have had engagement with each other and we've co-delivered on an awful lot of workshops and so on and it's a really good opportunity for us as a project team to share that learning. Engagement with the national framework throughout the whole project and again that awareness, increasing the awareness with the faculty on the ground and what is the CPD framework, what can it do for you, how can you benefit and where do you fall at the moment, how can you self-evaluate where you are. And then the overall crux of it then, the inter-institutional collaboration, cross-campus engagement, cross-campus delivery and everything that goes around the logistics of it but also the outcomes and the benefits for the faculty. Perfect. Evaluation of impact then we were looking at Stoffelbeam as our key guideline and model for this and again we can go through that in terms of our considerations. The panel feedback that we received was very much to look at really thinking through the evidence around how we might identify the impact and things through. So we've looked and used Stoffelbeam to kind of think about that and again they're the sources of information that we might use. But initial considerations coming from the document from the forum that we received two weeks ago really impact reaching awareness, dialogue and discourse and learning practices. Again a lot of self-reported improvements here, collaborative presentation at all the networks that we're involved in, we're all involved in RPL network, Eden network, CD network and INU and so on and engaging at that level. But at a deeper level then the idea of access and flexibility for the learners and the learning that happens in the consortium ensuring that there are flexible and accessible pathways for people to engage in CPD, establish effective and efficient institutional structures for curriculum design, for scheduling, for approval of programmes, for planning and again innovation and pedagogy across the Shannon consortium and improving the awareness and sustainability of those. Moving from maybe a very insular practice so an attitudinal change from insular practice to regional wide collaboration so it's not just you're working alone in a bubble on your module or your project but you're actually working across three institutions and developing a contributing to policy in that regard and then ensuring that we have a very collaborative framework which is continuing to grow all of the time and this is an opportunity for us to really pin our colours to the post around CPD and make it a very formal structured way that people can engage with it across the consortium in a way that benefits them in a very authentic way where the assessment is a very critical and a reflective mode of assessment and allows them to align to their daily progression and development and at that point I think my time is up so thank you very much for your time.