 Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar for Week 5 of Octel. Hopefully you can hear me. If you can give me a green tick, you can do that via the participation box. Excellent, I can see a number of green ticks, which hopefully means I'm coming through loud and clear. If you do have any issues with audio, then please feel free to put them in the chat box and we'll try and assist you. Okay, so the theme of this week is about leadership management and keeping on track with reference to technology-enhanced learning projects. A key part of any project is identifying and engaging with your stakeholders. So today we're very pleased to have presentations which will look at how we can engage with students and also the role of leadership in any learning project. So for those of you new to collaborate, as I mentioned, please use the chat window if you have got any issues with audio or any other issues with Collaborate itself. If you can put any questions you want to ask the presenters into the chat window and we'll have time at the end of each presentation to hopefully respond to these questions. You can also use the green ticks or crosses if you are asked anything through the presentations or the smiley face options and they're all at the top of the participants box. So if you're ready to start, you can just give me a green tick. So our first presentation is on student engagement and I'm delighted to introduce Ellie Russell who is Projects Officer for the Student Engagement Partnership. So over to you, Ellie. Okay, hi everyone. It's great to be with you today. If you could give me a green tick to let me know that you can hear me, that would be great. Okay, that's good. So I'm going to start off by talking about some of the student engagement literature that exists. A literature review that was conducted by the Higher Education Academy in 2010 summarized the research into student engagement practices and their effects on outcomes. Much of the literature and engagement comes from American Australia where surveys such as the NACI have made comparisons between, for example, hours committed to study and eventual degree outcomes. And it's easier to compare that than in the UK where we don't standardly survey these things. The review group that I just mentioned turned to three themes that you can see on the slide. So by far the most evidence was available to support the nation that students' engagement with their own learning and active participation and so on. Some was available around student identity, so how students see themselves, their backgrounds and the effect these things have on how likely they are to engage with their own learning and how much they get out of that engagement. And the final theme is student engagement structures and processes which looks at student representation that primarily is a leadership role, such as a place in the committee rather than as an agent for change. And the literature has a lot less on this and the authors of the report note that specifically students' engagement with curriculum designers and design and change is notably absent. So the research has shown that there are strong correlations between student engagement and a sense of students taking an active role in their own learning and favorable outcomes in areas such as performance, persistence and satisfaction. So that means that students who are more strongly engaged with their course will get better marks, they'll try harder and they're going to be more satisfied with the course. And all of this is excellent evidence that universities are taking on board to try to improve teaching and learning practices, particularly in the US. So for example, there's seven effective practices that are listed on the slide of teaching and undergraduate education, a widest respect to Lacoste America because the evidence based behind them proves that they improve outcomes and that colleges find helpful. So it's not going to surprise anybody listening to this, that these principles lead to better learning, but the evidence based behind them has really given colleges an incentive to drive forward changes in this area. So in terms of student engagement in the UK, there's lots of work carried out on student engagement and learning, particularly by organizations like the Higher Education Academy. But I think in no small part due to the existence of student unions and organizations like NUS, that there is a focus on embedding student voicing processes, structures and decision making. So although the practices around student engagement may be long standing in some cases such as your course structure system or the existence of a student union, student engagement as a policy priority as well as to be recent. And we're now really moving beyond a narrow focus on the validity of various systems of student representation and instead trying to describe the concepts that are linked to student identities and the potential of individuals to influence their environment. So there are lots of concepts that have clustered around this term student engagement. It can be quite vague and appropriated by lots of different interests. So ideas such as co-creators, co-producers, active participants, students as collaborators, students as agents for change. And the concept of partnership is one that's really emerged and gained quite significant currency. So the significant development of this term was kicked off by, you could argue, NUS and HDA's toolkit in 2010 which framed partnership as the end goal of all student engagement activity. And in 2012, QA published the Student Engagement Chapter of the UK Quality Code. And so Chapter B5 sets out the expectation that institutions engage with students as partners both individually and collectively. The Quality Code doesn't define what that means and it really emphasizes the importance of institutions creating their own local definitions of partnership. And then towards the end of 2012, NUS published a Manifesto for Partnership. And that document sets out what partnership could mean and why student unions are so important, we think, in creating and maintaining partnership approaches. And the diagram that you can see on the left of the screen is from this 2010 NUS HDA toolkit showing the stages of engagement and leading to, as you can see at the bottom, this end goal of partnership. So NUS's Manifesto for Partnership suggests that in order to try and make partnership a meaningful choice, we need to examine and reject potentially some of the alternatives. So rejecting and rethinking concepts, concepts of learning and how education is delivered will have an impact, we think, on the way that we talk about higher education to prospective students and the way that we induct NUS students into it. So one of the alternatives that probably unsurprisingly we single out for rejection is the consumerist model. We think consumerism sets up quite a dangerous imbalance because students think they have a very inflated notion of their own power but they're in fact limited on commenting only on what's been sold to them and coming up with quite unimaginative shopping lists. And the role of education, their expertise is also devalued. So this quote that you can see on the screen is from the Manifesto for Partnership and it sums up the reality we think we face in the current policy environment. So regardless of whether students agree with the values and characteristics of the funding model in which they sit, they may adopt behaviors that we associate with consumerism unless we offer a new and compelling way of thinking about learning. And we think that a new way of thinking about this could be students as partners. So this is also about articulating what we stand for rather than just what we stand against. So the Manifesto also looks at the apprenticeship model of learning. So the idea that a student attends university in order to gain mastery in a particular subject and spend time with experts in order to do this. So in our experience, advocates of this approach feel that students should be able to comment on things like the library or car parking, but they're not qualified to comment on the curriculum or course content, for example, because they're not yet an expert. So we don't think we necessarily hold you need to reject this approach, but we do need to reimagine it. And students will be apprentices in the business of student engagement. They're going to need support and coaching from various sources, including the student's union. It doesn't just need to be from other students and staff to engage effectively as partners. So advocates of the apprenticeship approach are often worried the idea of students and partners because it can apply a level of equality, this idea of equal partners. And so we really think that equality is as much about respecting each other's views and approaching discussions in good faith as it is about having similar levels of knowledge. Students aren't subject experts, but they do have knowledge that only they can provide. They provide a very clear sense of what is in the student interests. And to do that, that takes leadership, the ability to assess where the student interests lies and argue for it, and the ability to listen to various constituencies and ensure that their concerns are understood and that they are on forming debate. And that will certainly need support and development for representatives to fully realise that role. This also means that we need to reject the idea of course reps and other student representatives, only creating a massive use and regurgitate from them and being clear that atomised student feedback should never be a substitute for serious student representation. So what is partnership? As I've already said in terms of the QAA Quality Co-Chapter, partnership is going to look different in every institution. It has to be relevant to your community of staff and students and ideally to be reviewed every year. So there's not a one size fits all approach, but we can probably agree that at its heart partnership is about students and staff working together to improve education. And maybe if you agree with that you can give me a tick to see if I'm on the right track. We think partnership is about investing students with the power to co-create not just knowledge and learning, but the institution itself. And students will need to be inducted into this community of practice and as I've already said not expect to be automatically adopting engaged behaviours, particularly given that a status should involve responsibilities. It's not just about the rights and benefits that this will bring to students. And for any of us's perspectives a broader goal is preparing our students for active and engaged citizenship and not just a life of passive consumerism. I just want to say something about student unions. So individual students will probably engage in various forms of their learning, but we really think a whole system of partnership has to flow through the student union. In the student movement we value collectivism, democratic representation. And students that self-organise are powerful. They set the agenda and speak collectively for their own interests. They express what they care about. They're not just commenting on somebody else's agenda or a view of what the student experience is. So student engagement can feel simultaneously exciting and quite difficult. And that's probably because student engagement is inherently political. It's a contested space and there's no right answer. There are different levels of power, different people exerting their influence. And so on the slide, these are some questions that we might ask ourselves in a political environment, all of which are personal if you're thinking about student engagement. So I think there are lots of reasons why technology is an area that's really right for partnership with students. So for example, students' digital know-how needs to be used as a resource by the institution. Students' learning is no longer really under the control of the institution. And students' practices with technology are really varied and challenging and innovative. So I wanted to highlight a couple of examples to you. One about involving students in curriculum design. And one about a technology and arts learning project that was part of the Change in the Learning Landscape programme in its first year. So the idea, this is from Sheffield Hallam. The idea of involving students in curriculum design is often quite controversial, but there are some really great examples of where this is happening successfully and to the benefit of students and staff. So as an example from, this is from H.J. Students with Partners Change programme. And Sheffield Hallam created these course design consultants to be a more meaningful, to bring a more meaningful student voice into curriculum design. They felt that previous involvement of students in curriculum was very ad hoc. It was overly reliant on module evaluation surveys. And those surveys were too late really to have a tangible impact. So they worked very closely with the students' union to create this role of course design consultants. They were recruited on a Part 10 basis, paid and line managed by the university through a student placement post. And these CDCs were given training on things like quality enhancement, student engagement and curriculum design process by institutional quality assurance and engagement enhancement staff. They went into disciplines other than their own to facilitate solutions-based workshops with students and with course representatives. And then their findings were written up into a report and they were shared with course planners, departmental staff and student course representatives. And they were there to provide a dialogue throughout the course design process and not just at the start or at the end but throughout this entire process. And the case study is available on the H.J. website but there are a few key messages I think from the case study to pull out. So seeking and communicating how an initiative is a win-win for all involved specifically for students and course design teams. It's really important that it's relevant to both of those audiences. Tries to capitalise on existing work-based learning initiatives and co-curricular activities within the institution to seek student involvement. Marry up initiatives to existing institutional strategies. So Sheffield Holland CDC initiative was tied to the implementation of the institutions learning and teaching assessment strategy and academic quality frameworks. It's a very long title. And things like established and initiative governance across the institution in partnership with the Student Union. And so for example members of the Student Boys Committee provided a really valuable insight and direction into this initiative. So they looked at opportunities for input across the entire institution and with committees and with instructors that already existed. So another example is from University of York. So this is the example that I mentioned about it that came from the change in the learning landscape in its first year. So academic integrity. It aims to assist students in the proper citation of their work and to prevent plagiarism through ICT use. It's multi-platform so in addition to a main site, there are versions that are provided on Facebook and Twitter as well as a personal blog. The University had ownership of the project and they identified the perceived problems that would be addressed but the University was really proactive and directly engaged students and the Student Union. So following recommendations from the Student Reps sensitive, there was a dedicated website for students that was launched and it was going to include a student monitored blog. A set of referencing booklets on all styles were also made available and the program itself was run by engaging students from the commencement of their degrees right until the end. The Student Union was really enthusiastic about the project which definitely helped. They organized a campaign alongside the website launch which was run in conjunction with academic support staff. So again, you can see that partnership working well and actively. So a couple of learning points. The project did involve student consultation from the beginning so they didn't necessarily need to tweak the solutions later but the consultation itself was actually quite top-down with the institution defining the problems in the scope and it didn't allow for practice suggestions from students on altering the structure in the first place. Certain features that students in the consultations noted were absent from the initial consideration. So I suppose the lesson here is that potentially involving students in designing the scope of the project, not just necessarily involving them from the start once you've identified the problems or the scope of the project can be really helpful. And the students would assign really specific roles and goals which ensured that there was some sustainability and the involvement of the Student Union meant that there were lots of different access points to the service and it reached a much broader spectrum of students through this campaign that they organized alongside what the university were doing to advertise the service. So, let me change the slide. Some examples from the Just Design Studio I really encourage you to visit the link below and I've just highlighted some examples that you can put in the search box there and I've looked for institutional case studies on things like students with digital pioneers, working in partnership between staff and students and students acting as change agents. Very detailed case studies and the Just Design Studio in general is just an excellent resource. And finally, some more information. I've included a link here to many of us as a manifesto for partnership. Some details about the Student Engagement Partnership which is a team that I work for were housed by NUS but were funded by the Higher Education Funding Council and were undertaking various projects and supporting institutions with their approaches to student engagement and partnership. And I'm very happy beyond this session to speak to any of you individually if you're trying to get schemes, processes off the ground. And also a link here to just enhancing curriculum design with a technology that might also be of interest. And the Change Agents Network, I'd encourage you to visit their website, follow them on Twitter. It's groups of students and staff from across institutions that have tried to introduce student change agent projects. And they're doing great work sharing the practice and connecting the staff and students that are interested in this across the country. So I'll finish there and hand back over to Julie to see if there's any questions. Thank you, Annie. That was a really interesting presentation and there's been lots of agreement with you in the chat room about the importance of engaging students and agreeing with the issue slides up. We all face with only consulting sort of the nominated student reps. I know when I go to meetings, you sort of see the same faces and you wonder how and whether they really are representing the views of all the students. So it's important to get as many people involved in the process as possible, not just the people who are nominated as a student rep who may well have to sit on multiple committees and say the same thing over and over again. We had a question about the case studies. Are there links available to these case studies? Is that further information? There are. So I can send you the notes from the slides about the examples from New York and I'll find the Sheffield talent example that's available on HTA's website. So I'll search for that and put it in the chat box. Okay, that would be great. Then at the end of the presentation, if you have a look at the GIST design studio, the links at the bottom of that slide. Okay, thank you. So we had a question from Rose. I'll assume it was for the first case study. Were students planning for their successes or for their own learning? That's a good question. I'm not sure I know the answers to that. Is that something that I could contact Sheffields, the people involved, and get back to you on? Yep, I'm sure that would be fine. It's definitely an interesting question. What benefit is there for the students if they're planning for somebody else or for themselves? Yeah, and I think there's definitely some institutions have found that it is very, well, it's very challenging to plan a curriculum with current students as you go along. But sometimes, as you say, there is a difficulty in setting a curriculum for the group of students that aren't going to be going through it. So there was another point from Debbie who said, is there a case of making it simpler for involving students? So sometimes the committee structure proves one too many hurdles. Is that something you've found that committees tend to get in the way? I think they have the potential to. I wouldn't necessarily advocate removing students from committees in order to make the point that committee structures aren't necessarily as active, where you can potentially then mess out on important discussions and decisions. But I think it's important to have different kind of schemes, levels of involvement throughout the different levels of governance, but also potentially remove from that as well. So things like students with change agents projects, course representative structures, they're not necessarily based around committee structures. They're operating outside of it and trying to influence what goes into it or trying to sign the points at which decisions are really made in order to influence them. So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily remove students from that but have things that can complement it operating alongside it. Okay, another point that Brian mentioned. So they are currently appointing a user experience coordinator and he mentioned they've also had a director of student experience. What's been your experience with these sort of posts and is this something we should be looking to do? I think so. I mean, I'd encourage you to be looking at your students' unions in the first instance to see if there's opportunities to invest more in the roles that they have, to see if there's, you know, to avoid duplication of work or to see where in the institution is best placed to have these people who have the most kind of reach and relevance to various audiences. I think it is, I mean, any investment in particularly in kind of staff capacity and resources is fantastic to hear in terms of student engagement and partnership. There are some great examples, Birmingham City, Cardiff, a few other places where they've had roles that are based both in the student union and in the university. So there's a kind of accountability to both of those organisations and they're able to effectively work across both. Okay, thank you very much. So last question I think was from Tracy. So how does the government align students as partners with higher student fees? And at what point would they question the value for money if students are redesigning courses? It's a good question. I'm not sure that they are particularly well-aligning students as partners with value for money. I think the government has a lot of rhetoric on the idea of students' rights. But again, that's quite a kind of consumerist mindset. It doesn't necessarily indicate a level of partnership. I think I'll also circulate a good link to a blog from our Vice President, Howard Cation Rachel Wenson, about how students' rights and partnership can interact with each other without counselling each other out. I think really what we're... this idea that three students as partners are trying to tackle the idea of a kind of consumerist mindset and there's some guidance coming out from a group that have been looking at student charters and how to move them more towards partnership agreements. So that will be coming out quite soon. And I think that will be a really useful tool for institutions to start to think about how they can use the process of creating a charter to come up with kind of expectations and behaviors that might frame a partnership approach and how they can situate it in a kind of a broader spectrum of activity. Okay, but that looks like something we shall be looking out for. So thank you very much, Ellie. That's been a really interesting look at how we can engage students. So perhaps a round of applause for Ellie. There should be an icon for you to do that. Under the highlight boxes. Okay, so I'll hand over to Brian there who will be overseeing the second half of the session. Hello, everybody. I hope you can hear me. Can we just give me a tick if you can? Thank you. Yes, one of the joys of collaborative learning online is to meet people you otherwise might not meet in person. In that respect, I actually haven't met our next presenter, Professor Sean Waring. But hopefully at some point in the future, I might. Looking through Sean's bio, as you probably have already, she's actually worked in many national organizations that we'd be familiar with, including JISC, adult, and CEDA, and the HGA. And in this second session, Sean's going to lead us through the concepts of leadership and how these can be applied effectively in the context of e-learning and higher education. So I'll hand over to Sean. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Brian. Hello, everybody. Can you give me a tick if you can hear me all right? I might be looking in the wrong place for those. Can you give me a little feedback on chat that you can hear me? Oh, great. Okay. My next question is how I move through the slides. Am I doing the wrong thing? How do I bring my slide up? Is that in my... Okay. Can you see my first slide now that's leadership and working in partnership? Again, could you give me a little OK in the chat? Not yet. Okay. What do I need to do for that, then? Can anybody... Brian or Caroline, can you give me a hand here showing up right on my screen? Oh, okay. Lovely. Thank you. Good. And have I got control here of that? If I click, does it go forward? Okay. Well, I'm just going to start talking. Hopefully, I'll sort the slides out as we go. Thank you. Okay. Well, obviously feel free to comment as we go and I'll try and incorporate your responses into what I'm saying. And then to kick off probably slightly at the more abstract sense and some principles that I've deduced from my own... Oh, you can't hear me now. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I'll just keep going. I'm going to move from the more abstract into some examples to illustrate. I'm going to try and give you examples of things which failed as well as succeeded because I know the temptation to give the glossy version but I think generally we probably learn more... thank you, Julie, from failures and successes. I'm going to talk about leadership generally and partnership generally, but in my examples I'm going to be introducing examples from e-learning and students and I think some of what I'm saying will chime strongly with what Ellie's been just talking about and particularly her point about respect. Okay. So here's a little bit about myself. Let me see where my arrows are then. That one. Does that take you into the slide about me? Could I get a little yes? Yes, lovely. Okay. Thank you. This is just a bit of my background. My disciplinary background is initially English literature, language and linguistics, education, and then I've worked a lot with CEDA and more recently, Higher Education Academy. Also worked with Diskin Out and now with the Leadership Foundation. And my background is quite eclectic. I've been a bit of a jill of all trades, which I think is actually really useful to me now which is why I wanted to mention it. I've taught English to friend language. I've coached sport and I've coached students. I've been a study skills tutor, worked in education development as a manager and now I'm a Pro Vice Chancellor learning and teaching here at Pax. Okay. So that's a bit about me and I should also mention probably that I rode competitively for 20 years. And when I think about leadership and partnership, I probably draw quite a lot from that experience. So I just wanted to mention that as well. Okay. So some of my ideas about what leadership is, I'm aware there's a huge literature out there on leadership and I've read a very, very small fraction of that, a tiny fraction of that. But I do draw on a lot of principles which I've found useful day to day. My first example comes from Middlemarch and there's two characters in Middlemarch and they both say this phrase, what can I do? And the first one, Rosamund, says that when she finds her husband, they become bankrupt. And she kind of throws up her hands in horror and says, what can I do? Meaning there's nothing I can do. Sorry about the siren and the background. And the second character, Dorothea, again faced with another character in trouble, says what can I do? Meaning how can I help? How can I change things? And another point I wanted to make about leadership is as my final bullet point on the slide says, it's not about your title, it's not about your rank, it's not about your salary, it's not about the size of your team and it's certainly not about how new and shiny your kit is. It's actually about making a decision that you're going to intervene and change and make things better. And I think people can do that from anywhere in an organization. And I want to talk a bit more about that as I go through my talk. The next example, Efficiency Tourette, was a phrase I found in an article about Cheryl Sandberg, the COO at Facebook. And she said that she was obsessive about making things more efficient and she gave an example of being at a children's party and changing the way the children went up and down the slide in order to make the queue run more smoothly. And then a friend of mine read that article and said, oh, I've got that too. I've got Efficiency Tourette. And I think I have some of that as well. I'm really obsessed with things working, making systems working. And I think that's actually quite a drive, particularly in e-learning projects. And I'll come back to that again as well. My next point is about the idea of slow, that when you're doing anything well and that includes leadership, you lose your ego in the interest of trying to get the thing you're trying to do done. Another colleague says that when he comes into work, he puts his ego in the drawer. And I really like that because I think for many people, it's the opposite of what they think leaders are or do, that it's not about protecting yourself from vulnerability or from being wrong. It's not about being right at all costs. It's not about driving through your solution. It's not about you at all. It's about what you can make happen through the activities of leadership. And I think that's really important. Certain leadership is an idea that I really welcome, which is that you're there for the other people. So I think that's, you know, back to, you're not the person with the most extensive kit or trying out everything that's new. You're the person who's there to bring out the best in other people. And one of the things I'm very conscious of is if I came into work and I personally tried to work more efficiently and I maybe moved my efficiency and my contribution up to the organization up 30%, that would still be a drop in the ocean compared to what can happen if I work with other people in the institution so each of them can give them more. The benefit institutionally to everybody in the institution is to give fully of their own capacity, their creativity, their energy is much, much greater than anything I could personally do except by facilitating and supporting them. The next point is a combination of the previous one around distributed leadership. I really think my job is to help other people make autonomous decisions within the framework of their role and their capacity and the sort that's available to them at a real sense of their own capability so they can use their creativity, their professional autonomy, their integrity and I think that applies to students as well as staff, as Ellie said. I think we're here to allow other people to be leaders and take control of the environment around them as well. Excuse me, Sam, can I just interrupt a second? Quite a few people are saying that they're finding it difficult to hear you, is it possible for you to increase your microphone volume or sit more closely to it? Is that better? Is that any better? Brilliant, thank you. Oh, good, sorry. Let me try that again, is that better? Can you hear me better now? Good, thank you. Sorry about that. The next point I wanted to make was about, and I put it as seeing the wood more clearly than the trees because obviously it's a police status that you can see, you can't see the wood for the trees. My view of this, and again, particularly learning, is that you need to be aware of the trees and see the trees but always be able to see the wood more clearly. And I think there's pros and cons to that. Obviously you need to be able to see the big picture and not get lost in the detail. But I heard a very interesting program about leadership that looked at the effect of hormones on the brains of people in leadership roles and it said that actually, brain structure changed to become less empathetic because of this requirement so that you took a high level view. You see the wood and not the trees and that makes you actually less sympathetic to individuals and less likely to see an individual's situation in a context where you have to act a higher level. You may have seen research that says there's a very high proportion of people with psychopathic qualities in very senior roles which, due to them thinking other people are there for their disposal or to fulfill their plans and this research was saying, actually there's a reason for that that leaders are having to make decisions at a level that doesn't necessarily consider the needs of individuals but doesn't consider the needs of the collective. And one of the very important things as a result of that is that we have appropriate checks and balances that if we recognize that leaders tend to move in this direction and the longer they're in senior roles the more their brains will tend to do this. It's really important that we surround them with the checks and balances that keep them grounded and keep paying attention to the trees as well as the woods so not exclusively the needs of the collective in a sense of the needs of individuals as well as the collective. Okay. So this is another sort of exploration of what I think leadership is. One of the things that has struck me I suppose in my experience is that there's a balance between maybe one of the things we associate a lot with leadership blue sky thinking, horizon scanning, looking long-term ahead, having very clear goals with being hands-on and keeping things working. And my experience has always been that there are things that I've wanted to achieve in the long-term but there are things that are always on the edge of breaking down and collapsing in the short-term. And the way I've summarized it is in this chart you can see in front of you this diagram that a leader may have to be working towards the left-hand side. You may have to be very hands-on really looking at what's happening to individuals looking at the detail to keep things working. And that's particularly true at times that you're in an unstable or inefficient environment or working with a lot of new people or in times of rapid change. Whereas I think when we all want to be moving in a leadership role you want to be moving across this rectangle towards the right-hand side where you've got things running well, people in post who understand their roles and they've got the expertise and need to do their jobs and you've got some level of stability and at that point the leader can look further ahead and it seems to me that you're always mixing those two and the art of good leadership is knowing where you are in that rectangle and how quickly you're able to move from left to right. I think it's very important that we are on that trajectory leaders serve their communities best when they can look further ahead and think further ahead but that's only possible if you've got, if you've kept the platform that you're working on and I mean that in the widest possible sense, up and running. So sometimes you have to go back to the left-hand side and just get your hands dirty and make sure things aren't going to collapse. In terms of how we do that, and I'm sure I'm absolutely, I'm thinking I'm teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here, I'm sure everybody listening is very conscious of good project management and program management. I must say in my experience of working with senior managers in higher education that always hasn't, that hasn't always been the case but I have found that project management and program management very, very useful and I think the key things that I've learnt from them are around key stakeholder analysis knowing who's got a stake in something, communication strategy making sure you tell people about what's happening and you listen to them, I'll talk more about that in a moment, very clear about deliverables and resources you've got to deliver it, risk analysis and mitigation. What I have found is it's very difficult to stick rigidly to a specific methodology so that's the point at which I'd look to Humpty Dumpty and think well actually it's which is to be mastered so I would use project management to serve my ends rather than me serving the ends of project management. Can I just take a moment now, I'll back through your comments because I find I can't read and talk at the same time so I'll just take a minute and I'll read through what you've said and try and respond that I'm just reading through what you've commented on I do understand that you learning leaders often aren't in control of the rest of the organisation and I guess from that point of view it's really important to know the exact parameters of your influence and authority and also work closely with partners which is what I'll come on to in a moment. So what I'd like to do now is move into some specific examples around change and partnerships and you've got a picture in front of you of my desk this morning which is a recreation of post-its stuck to a computer screen which is to help me illustrate my next example. Again, one of the things that I've my experience with sound often has gone wrong with projects is that we focus too much on the systems and the kit and not enough on the people who need to make the changes and their views of those changes. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Maybe I'll turn it up a bit before I take the picture. In my last role I was involved in a big project to move assessment online I'm going to talk about that in a moment and one stage of that was the distribution of digital assignments or digitized assignments to markers for marking and return digitally and I'm sure many people are doing that right now or have already done it successfully. At the particular time I was working in an institution with a lot of hourly paid staff about half the teaching was done by hourly paid staff and the system of successfully but painfully, yes I can imagine and it was painful for us too but hourly paid staff would come in and collect paper-based assignments from the office and go out with them and the administrators would stick post-its on their screens with the names of the people who needed to collect assignments or had collected assignments and we had photos of these, a photo like the one I've just recreated with the post-its stuck to the computer screens. It seemed a no-brainer to me that we moved to a digitized system where we could download the assignments the system would know who had access to the assignments the marked assignments would then be uploaded again and distributed back to the students. We've totally, totally underestimated how difficult it was to get the system to correctly identify which teachers should have access to which marking whether people had done the marking in a timely way and to send reminders and suddenly it just dawned on me that actually the post-its system could do something very, very sophisticated but it was very difficult to get the computer system to imitate so the administrator could just look at the lecturer and know if they were entitled to take the marking away or not they could look in the box and see who'd collected their marking and who hadn't and they could walk down the corridor and see somebody who hadn't done their marking yet and say please can you do your marking and this very crude, apparently crude system of post-its and people was very, very sophisticated compared to what we had to do with the computer system to get it to do the same thing and of course the downside of the post-its is sometimes the glue stops sticking and the post-its fall to the floor so I haven't got that after picture of my computer without the post-its one but you can imagine it and that was a real watershed moment for me a real critical incident when I realized that I mustn't underestimate the local knowledge that people had and the difficulty of recreating that in a digital system again I'm sure that's teaching my grandmother to suck eggs and I'm sure you all know that but it's my example of it okay so change in my view is more about people than it is about kit or platforms or processes or forms or resources and I know that and I still make mistakes so I'm not claiming to get it right all the time by any means I've given you two examples here one is the JISC project Digital Integration to Arts Learning that I made at my last job in the University of the Arts London and the other is something I've talked about already, assessment online and I wanted to give you to say a bit about the principles behind those and how it fits with what we're talking about today so Digital Integration to Arts Learning was part of the Digital Literacies project and one of the things that, well, my principles in the way we approached this was to take a communities practice approach to recognize that people need to be defining their own goals in terms of digital literacy that development needs to be just in time and not just in case that the resources in communities are shared between the students and the staff and obviously often students have skills in terms of digital literacy that the staff don't yet have but the training has to be purposeful and it has to be personal so in our DIAL project Digital Integration to Arts Learning we used the funding from JISC to set up communities that had specific goals and where the community themselves supported each other and generated resources to help them make the learning in digital literacy they had to make and I felt very strongly that we couldn't have a chart of what people had to learn because it was so different for different roles and it was very hard to explain different levels different levels of digital literacy and it had to be something that was being done locally in communities and it had to be self-sustaining we couldn't afford to bring in enough people to do the training that was needed so our communities needed to become good at learning to learn themselves they needed to have a sense of agency and confidence and they themselves needed to be confident that they could flexibly and dynamically respond to new challenges so that underpinned our digital integration into arts learning and the other project I wanted to say a little bit about was our major assessment project again at University of the Arts London my previous institution if somebody, one of the earlier comments in chat said that you said, let me just go back you said you'd managed to move to online assessment and it was successful but painful this project too was extremely painful it was really against the culture of the organisation we did adopt I think really good partnership principles we took all the goals of the project forward through the committees and then we had a working group and a lot of town hall collective meetings where anybody could come and talk and we tested all the stages of the project on the community we allowed people to vote between different ways of doing things and we had a very public and explicit communication strategy we had a road show we went round to all the different departments and colleges with a published timetable so people knew when they would hear us talking about it and we also created a CD with all the materials on and videos of students talking about their experience of assessment when it had gone online which we sent out to all staff to their home address because as I said we had many hourly paid lecturers who we didn't know we could necessarily communicate with in any other way so we spent probably three quarters of the time in developing this project in consultation and communication and we used students in pilots and we then videoed them talking about the experience of the pilot and we put the videos up on this website it was extraordinarily painful though it was a huge cultural change and I think there's still fallout and repercussions for it but I wanted to talk to that now and this is my final slide in relation to principles of partnership I think in the end that project was successful because we did bring to it respect for people for their experiences and for their knowledge and I understood the we needed to make changes and we knew that we knew we had things going on at exam boards that we couldn't tolerate we were going to have to make changes for the sake of the students for the sake of the institutional reputation personally if somebody changes what I have for breakfast and I have no control over it I'm deeply upset for the rest of the day so I completely recognised the anxiety and discomfort people have during these changes I think we did listen to people and we had frequently asked questions on the website and we tried to respond all the time to the questions people had about the process we also tried to be very clear about roles and expectations and I think back to Ali's point about involving students as partners and the fact that it's not necessarily an equal relationship and that doesn't undermine the partnership I think we have to be very clear when we're consulting people why we're consulting them and how we might listen to them incorporate information from what they told us into the outcome but it's not a democracy we're not voting we're not trying to bring we won't everybody's opinion and view and need won't have equal representation in the solution that we ultimately implement but we will have listened to everybody and I think that's really important and that goes into my next point too I did hear as far as possible everything that was said to me and we did try to share that information backwards and back and close the feedback loop to me timing is terribly important and just back to my earlier slide with the are we at the left-hand side of the rectangle or the right-hand side I think a real art for me does is combining speed and patience sometimes you have to move really quickly to get something done to spare people the agony of the drawn-out consultation and sometimes you just have to wait for people to think through the change absorb it, try it out and talk to each other about it and I think there's an art in understanding which of those and how you balance the two of them and the final thing that I wanted to say and I realize I haven't put it down on this slide as a bullet point is having a really clear sense of purpose and that purpose I think has to be valid, principles, ethical and tie in with the institutional mission because we had such a backlash from some of the activities we were doing with online marking and assessment that it was only the sense that this it really mattered to our mission as an institution to the experience that our students had to our reputation, to the quality to the experience of the staff as well I think if I hadn't had that we wouldn't have kept going and I think finally, really finally now I think it's very important for leaders to judge relative risks and the point that was made earlier in the chat during Ellie's talk about the amount of commitment it needs to really involve students as partners and the extent of the time and the source that we have to allow for that I think one of the things a leader has to do is to judge the risk of failure if we don't build in partnership and we don't take the time to do that versus whether we can afford the time and the cost to do it and I don't think there's always a right answer I think sometimes the answer is we can't afford to build partnerships properly we have to move quicker than that but if we do that there may be a risk of failure because we didn't hear those voices and we had to go back to my post-it slide here it seemed to me that there was a real risk that the introduction of online assessment might have failed if we hadn't really paid attention to the experience of administrators and what they were doing and I think it is also often in very difficult complex change really important to hear all the voices because people at different points in the system in the university know things that the leaders don't know and if you don't hear that you get a complete excuse my French you get a complete fuck up basically so let me just take us forward again slide so I hope that was I hope that was sufficiently relevant not too abstract and you could take from it some things that were relevant to your own experiences as well and thank you very much for listening thank you Shannon very much that was genuinely very refreshing and honest your last slide was on timing and you've timed that perfectly but I think there's some time for questions if there are any amongst the chat room that people would like to retight we can raise and otherwise I have something I'd like to ask but that can always be outside this conference given that we've almost reached the end of time does anybody have any questions as we draw to the close can I quickly ask and this may not be of particular interest to everybody but you mentioned about servant leadership I promise to say to some people that might seem a contradiction of terms is there something you'd like to expand on briefly well I didn't know it was a term actually but it turns out to be I think it was in 1930s theory but I think it's that the leader is there your team aren't there to serve you as a leader you as a leader are there to serve your team and I find that really helpful because I think again very clearly in e-learning people have expertise at the cold face which I don't have I don't have a technical background and I really need to listen to that and I think my job is often to help them do their jobs properly and clear the way or be a champion so does that answer that? Yes it does Do you know? Well I'm thinking given the time unless I need my colleagues Martin or Julie and perhaps have anything to add then perhaps we should leave proceedings and conclude by thanking everybody for taking part so if we can give everybody a clap that would be great Brilliant, thank you I think at that point we shall draw proceedings to a close and thank you everybody very much for taking part Thank you Thank you Bye