In this, the 5th post in my in my series reflecting on my role as Chair of ALT, I am going to focus on strategy development.
ALTs new strategy launched last week. It has been the culmination of nearly 9 months of work, led by our CEO Maren Deepwell, al the ALT staff, the Board and most importantly our members. Maren has written an excellent overview of the process and the CEO perspective but I want to take a couple of minutes to reflect on it from Chair’s point of view.
Strategy can often feel quite removed from the reality of an organisation. I believe that any strategy has to be a relevant, useful, living document. Our last strategy was developed at the point where ALT transitioned into an independent, distributed organisation. At that time the Board were committed to ensuring that the strategy document would reflect the values of our new structure and most importantly the values of our members.
Over the 4 years, it has been a constant touch point for not only the developing work of the organisation but also as a means to evaluate and measure the work and progress that has been made. So when it came round to thinking about the next strategy I didn’t have sleepless nights about the need to change our values or overall direction of our strategic aims. These have proved meaningful and relevant as our Impact Report illustrates. Being able to publish an impact report alongside a new strategy document is another tangible way that ALT is now able to show value and progress to our members and wider community.
As Chair I was relieved that the strategy development was not bound up with major direction changes and the inevitable “politics” that would have involved. Rather, this time we are building and extending from the secure foundation provided by our existing values of open-ness, independence, collaboration and participation. This ensures a continuity of development and progress.
Ensuring strategic continuity and consensus is, I believe, a major part of successful leadership and a key part of my role as Chair to ensure and lead the Board to consensus. But when you have shared, realistic and meaningful values, that task is much easier.
I am particularly pleased that there will be a focus on developing an ethical framework for professional practice in Learning Technology across all sectors. In our current context of increased datafication of education it is vital that the ALT community can take a leading role in the development of ethical practice around the use of data. We need to continue to provide spaces for rich discussion, debate, research and practice, to critique and question the role of data, increased surveillance on students (and staff), and challenge the bias that is inherent in so many systems.
Again, it was heartening to hear from the community that the many webinars and connection opportunities that ALT provide are really valued and what they want to see continue and develop. I have already written about how pleasing it was to see how open-ness has permeated all the work of ALT.
Building from the success of the last document, we have kept our strategy document short, and have used the services of Bryan Mather’s Visual Thinkery to provide a set of open licensed images. These images encapsulate the essence of the strategy and provide a shared visual language for all our members.
The strategy document itself I believe is the embodiment of our values, and was only made possible by a huge amount of open collaboration and participation. Given what was achieved over the last strategic life cycle, I can’ wait to see how much progress the association is going to make over the next five years. Of course I won’t be Chair after September but I do believe that this strategy will provide the new Chair with the continuity that they will need to take the Association to even more success and growth.
