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My fantasy end of year wrap up – the best learning environment ever?

So this is the time when a lot of people are making predictions, sharing their views on developments and trends over the past year. When ever I read these posts, I tend to get a sense of plus ça change plus ça la meme chose. So I’m not going to critique any of these reviews instead I’m going to share with you, dear reader,  what I can remember of a dream I had last night about what my end of year post would be.

I don’t know if you have ever listened to Tenacious D (stay with me on this) on one of their albums they have a song called The Best Song Ever. It’s a cautionary tale of a rendezvous with the Devil, writing “the best song ever” or words to that effect, forgetting almost all of it the next morning but having the frustration and knowledge that they had indeed written the best song ever – if only they could remember the killer riff and the words. This post may be a bit like that . . .

image of calendar

(image: CC0  http://pixabay.com/p-316814/?no_redirect)

What a year it’s been. I think we’ve finally cracked it. As you’re aware over the last couple of years we’ve made some pretty radical changes not only to our physical campus but also to the structure of our academic year. After our digital participation conversation – open to staff, students, alumni, our (local and international) community, we decided that our third trimester would be one where no formal teaching takes place. Instead this now is a time where all our staff and students really focus on developing a range of approaches to building, creating and maintaining our approach to “the common weal”. All our students are either on placement in industry, within the 3rd sector, or in the university itself. If students are in the university they are working with staff on a range of different projects. From reviewing and redesigning all our programmes, reviewing our learning and teaching spaces, our technological infrastructure to reviewing and extending our data sources and ethical use of data policy. No-one has classes to go, school/uni committee meetings are suspended until the last two weeks of the trimester when there are round of review, publish, and where next meetings. So everyone is able to turn up for projects meetings and get “stuff done”.

After a couple of iterations we think we’ve cracked the module evaluation, course redesign, OER resources creation and research cycle. Our staff are rotated during this trimester so they are focusing on one aspect. This seems to be working well now and we are seeing much more informed feedback from students as they understand what is involved in module design, have actively been part of the process and understand what kind of feedback is needed and is useful.

Staff get time to develop and/or repurpose (open) learning and teaching resources. We also run a series of one event based open programmes where our students not only get the change to co-design the events but they also are offered opportunities to be online teaching assistants. Our research outputs are on the increase and our new digital scholarship recognition scheme which offers staff a dedicated sabbatical during trimester C for either creating learning and teaching resources, research activity or any type of digital scholarship is being extended to accommodate additional staff numbers.

Our open data policy and open data stack allows students to create their own GCU homepage with the feeds that they find most useful to them. Each year our student mentors help our new students (face to face and online) design their own. Our most popular feed is still from the cafeteria, students still really want to know what’s for lunch.

This year our wearable technology working group as well as coming up with some really sensible guidelines for the use of wearable tech in the classroom, also have come up with some great ideas which they are taking to the City Council about why retailers should not be able to allow access to certain retail spaces based on financial data assumptions via loyalty app points. Glasgow city centre is for all the people of Glasgow – not just those who can afford designer handbags. A draft paper on our website site has attracted considerable interest internationally and the group have submitted several conference paper submissions. A video summary of their recommendations has had 250,000 hits on Youtube.

Our more traditional research also benefits during this trimester as we now host our social innovation research sprint. Over a week a number of key local (and increasingly international) businesses work with our staff and students to develop ideas and pitches for short real world research projects. At the end of the week teams of researchers are selected to work on the best of these projects. The businesses provide varying levels of support for the research teams depending on the nature of their business and the research being carried out.

Stress from exam marking has gone down (and all our systems are fully integrated so any mark on any system automagically gets fed into our student record system). Students are more engaged, have more real world and ideas for projects to work on for their final year dissertations. Our results on all levels are steadily increasing.

As well as changing our traditional trimesters we also have become a much more flexible working environment. Gone is the 9-5 replaced by a number of flexible working patterns the allow the physical campus to be open for classes from 10 am – 9pm. Despite initial concerns from Unions, staff are finding the flexibility this provides really useful, particularly for those staff with child care responsibilities. No one is on a zero hours contract. This more flexible approach, combined with our greater online provision has also proved attractive for students and we are seeing our numbers steadily increasing. Our outreach activities are growing with pop-up learning cafes on particular areas, as well as maker spaces open to everyone a regular part of campus life. The campus really is providing a central space for the community.

We have developed our own agile approach to creating achievable and measurable results. Our senior management are actively involved in at least one learning and teaching or research project and some of them are actually teaching again, our staff numbers are going up. OK, things get a bit fuzzy around here, but for a while there last night it really was the best year ever . . .

On why I write and why I’m not writing a book . . . yet

Photo of old books
(image: Timeless books, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timeless_Books.jpg, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Reflecting on my twitter stream recently, it seems like everyone is writing a book, or to be more accurate has just (self) published a book. Well maybe not quite everyone, but three of my favourite ed-tech peeps (Audrey Watters, David Kernohan and Martin Weller) have all recently done that book thang. Download/buy these books – they all deserve to be read.

I’m actually on the periphery of the self publishing activity. I have just co-authored a chapter with David Walker for a book David Hopkins is editing and self publishing (plug #EdTechBook) which is due out in early January. Writing a book “all by myself” isn’t something that I’m thinking of doing anytime soon. That said there is something very appealing to me trying collate some of my blog posts into a more coherent body of work. Audrey, David and Martin have all used their blogs (to a greater and lesser extent – Audrey’s book is based on her presentations over the past year, but they are all published on her blog) as the basis for their books. In his reflection of why he wrote a book Martin says “I don’t know how any academic writer functions without a blog”.

I don’t claim to be an academic writer, I don’t write a lot of proper “academic stuff”. However I do persist with my blogging which at times has a whiff of academese in it. I blog now because it I enjoy the writing process. More importantly it gives me an outlet to record and reflect on what I’m doing and/or what is happening within my community. I still get a buzz when I get comments on something I’ve written, but it is more a personal record or perhaps more accurately my professional memory. If something is important to me I am now in the habit of blogging about it, even if it is a sentence or two in my semi regular “what sheila’s seen this week’ posts. George Couros has recently written an excellent post, 5 reasons your portfolio should be a blog, where he argues that a portfolio should be more than a “digital dump”, it should be about connecting, finding your voice. I whole heartedly agree.

I’m in the process of compiling my application for fellowship of the HEA. Here at GCU we have a portfolio based route for more experienced staff. I can’t begin to explain just how useful my blogging has been in this process. It has acted not only as a memory jolt, but also as evidence and structure for my submission. I am toying with trying to collate the posts I wrote when I was at the height of my MOOC madness into perhaps a booklet, not sure about a book, but “my little MOOC-y book-y” is a tempting title. . .

The HEA are now looking “good standing” measures for Fellows. How better to show engagement and good standing within your discipline/community than through a blog? It can link to presentations, papers, drafts, anything – just like a portfolio. To go back to Martin’s quote I actually don’t know in this day and age how any academic functions without a blog.

Politics, power and location

Like many people I have been following events at Warwick University very closely over the past couple of days.  Whilst not condoning an form of violent protest I always cheer inside (and sometimes on the outside) when I see student protests. Partly this is due to the lack of political engagement in society in general, and the slow demise of student activism. But this isn’t going to be a diatribe about that.

I was struck about the Warwick situation, can be summed up by this tweet.

The students were part of a series of protests across England about tuition fees. At this point I could rant about how angry it makes me that so many of our political leaders (present and recent past) benefited from free higher education, with state funding for living expenses, yet seemed to be more than happy to abolish that system and apart from the Scottish Government haven’t abolished them – but I won’t.

The other thing that struck me was where the protest and “incident” took place – in the university’s “corridors of power” – Senate House.  If my experience is anything to go by, the offices of the VC and senior management of most universities are places where students, and indeed most “everyday” academic and support staff are rarely seen.  In this age of student engagement isn’t it ironic that incidents like this can pave the way for more physical barriers to be put between senior management and students.  After a similar incident in my former institution a security guard is now permanently on duty in the corridor leading to the Principal’s office.

But why does it have to be this way?  We are at the beginning of a major new redevelopment of our campus.  A major part of this is the creation of a new central student experience/ services area.  I know this is a crazy, madcap, Friday afternoon idea,  but wouldn’t it be great if the Senior Executive offices were also there, or near there. Then they would actually see and hear students all the time you never know they might actually engage with them in new, perhaps even innovative ways . . .

What Sheila's seen this week – rebooting CPD, poundland pedagogy, bricolage and more learning analytics

It’s been another busy week here at Blended Learning Towers, so this post is really a whirlwind reminder of where I’ve been this week and some things that have caught my eye.

On Tuesday I attended the ALT Winter conference – Rebooting CPD at the University of Edinburgh. There were a number of really great presentations as well as the opportunity to have a play with google glass, occulus rift and mincecraft. I was particularly taken with the presentation from James Kieft from Reading College about their staff led staff development programme. I’ve still to explore properly the open version of their Pass it on Friday site but I want to take some time to explore the reflective practices encouraged by activities such as “poundland pedagogy” and “open classrooms”.  There seemed to be a genuine (and growing) spirit of collaboration and sharing of practice. I’m sure there is lots we in HE can learn from our FE colleages.

I also enjoyed Nic Whitton’s “proceed with caution: the application of gamification to learning” presentation. As a “proper” gamer and educator Nic’s presentation gave a very entertaining overview of the  where, why, when and how to/not to use gaming in learning and teaching.  She also stretched my visual note taking ability with references to Mary Poppins.  All in all it was a grand day out and great opportunity to catch up with many colleagues. Thanks to all the speakers and all at ALT for organising what will hopefully be a regular calendar feature.  You can see all my visual notes from the day on my (CC licenced) flickr folder.

Visual notes from Nic Whitton presentation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Wednesday I attended the Universities Scotland Learning and Teaching Committee to give a short overview and introduction to Learning Analytics ( you can access my slides here).  Not quite sure what to make of the meeting, there were lots of nodding heads and questions about cost but it just reinforced how early a stage we are at across the UK sector.  Here a GCU we are certainly still in the finding  and sharing our data internally stage in terms of more general analytics. I am ever hopeful that we will be able to start moving again quickly in the new year when we have a new CIO.  I noticed today too that Jisc has released a report on the ethical and legal challenges of learning analytics – something else to add to the reading list.

Yesterday we had another meeting of our Blended Learning Coffee Club and we had a really good discussion about the merits of open badges. So as part of #BYOD4L in January we’re thinking of running an open badge workshop for staff.  We also were discussed the OU Innovating Pedagogy report. We tried to do a very quick mapping of the 10 innovations listed in the report to actual practice here at GCU. There were some immediate examples including GCU Games On with event based learning, SMILE/SMIRK for learning to learn, lots of examples of bring your own device (including response systems such as nearpod, padlet etc). We had a bit of a smile about bricolage – it’s one of those words isn’t it? It makes you smile when you say it, doesn’t it?   Anyway,  we decided that actually bricolage was pretty much what most people did by default – particularly when they were trying to use technology in their teaching.

Hopefully a more thoughtful blog post soon there are lot of things brewing in my mind just now.  And just a wee reminder – why not take a few minutes to fill in the ALT annual survey? You can even get a badge.


Participate in the ALT Annual Survey 2014

Where Sheila's been seen this week – 100th post, open education and movie making for #byod4l

This is my 100th post on this blog. I was going to try and mark this milestone with an in-depth, though provoking piece on the state of education and the role of technology. However, work kind of got in the way this week so it’s really a very quick post sharing a couple of things I’ve been up to this week. I think, dear reader, that’s what you prefer anyway!

On Monday I presented our experiences of our open event GCU Games On at the joint Jisc RSC Scotland and SHED Open Education day.  I’ve written a quick summary of the day, including my slides, on the GCU Blended Learning Team blog.

We’re excited to be one of the institutional partners for the next instantiation of the hugely successful and enjoyable Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) open event in January. All those involved have been asked to create a short intro video, so yesterday Jim, Linda and I spend a few hours, mainly laughing, and making our video. Many thanks to our colleague Martin who saved the day and filmed for us. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to talk, hold and pass an ipad?

Anyway as they say the trailers have the best bits of any movies so I hope you enjoy ours.

http://youtu.be/9OHX-_X5QDE

And here is our intro video- enjoy!

http://youtu.be/WQVy7bmD3Hw

What Sheila's seen this week: innovating pedagogoy, mansplaining, more post digital, analytics awards

If you only read one thing on the interweb this week, then make it this: Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech,and the Refusal to Be Silent by Audrey Watters. Thank you Audrey for a great piece and for introducing me to the term “mansplaining”. I can’t say anymore as my prose is, as they say around here, “mince” compared to Audrey’s so just read it.

My blog has been buzzing with comments (including my first audio comment) on my post about Helen Beetham’s Becoming Post Digital keynote last week. Getting comments (not spam or hate comments see Audrey’s post about that) and seeing an extended conversation unfold is so satisfying for me. It really sustains my motivation for blogging. So thank you to everyone who commented and please feel free to add your thoughts.

I didn’t get round to posting about the OU Innovating Pedagogy report last week and in fact its only been this week that I’ve been able to have a look at it. Brian Kelly was quick off the mark with his summary which provides a useful overview. I was particularly pleased to see event-based learning listed in the report. Our online event GCU Games On fits nicely into this category and provides an alternative for institutions, who don’t have links with organisations such as the BBC.

I also spotted yesterday Jisc have just released a new publication “Learning Analytics, the current state of play in UK higher and further education“. I haven’t had time to read it properly yet but it’s always good to get an overview of what’s happening here in the UK. Looks like it’s still very early days as the report says

“Most interviewees are reluctant to claim any significant outcomes from their learning analytics activities to date – again perhaps demonstrating that it is still early days for the technologies and processes”

That gives me hope that we are not too far off the mark here at GCU. Our analytics adventures have been on the back boiler for a bit but I’m hoping to get them back on track again soon.

Finally, it’s awards time again. David Hopkins has been nominated for the Edublogs awards – he’s getting my vote as his blog is just really useful for anyone involved in implementing ed tech. David has also nominated a fab list of UK folks for the awards. I feel very privileged to have been included. So if you have a minute or two, dear reader, then please vote and get some UK ed tech people winning.

And because every blog should have a picture, here are some clouds from my flight to London yesterday for my first ALT Trustees meeting.

picture of blue skies

Becoming Post Digital – #SEDAConf #SEDApostdigital

On Friday I took part in Helen Beetham’s flipped Being Post Digital keynote on the final day of this year’s SEDA conference. I’m still applauding SEDA and Helen on having the courage to try something new at during a conference keynote. If you want to find out more about the structure and pre-keynote activities have a look at Helen’s blog.

Using Collaborate Helen was not only able to allow those of us not attending the conference on Friday to join in, but also to bring in some other voices (George Roberts and yours truly) to add some remote comments to the ongoing discussions along with David Baume (who was in “da room”).  The chat in the online room was pretty lively, as was twitter, as were the discussions in the conference centre itself. From a remote perspective Helen did a fantastic job of dealing with not only some of inevitable technical glitches but also summarising and feeding backwards and forwards from the real room to the online room, and look at the twitter stream.   A sure sign of a (post) digital practitioner!

Dealing with different spaces and places was a central tenant to Helen’s talk.  It is very difficult to be active in three places at once and you could argue that it is probably never necessary.  Speaking for myself I have found being in two places (the “here and not here” Helen referred to in her talk) particularly during conferences, has given me a far richer experience and interaction with the issues being discussed. Twitter acts as my note taking and as a conduit for others not at the conference.  I have been doing it for so long now it is almost second nature.  It is something I become more comfortable with the more I did it. Conferences are still, imho, one of the best places to understand how to use twitter.

Recently I have been experimenting with visual note taking. This forces me to listen and synthesis in a different way. I do miss somethings as I am drawing and I have to store other things until I find the right way to represent them, or not as the case may be. It’s not as interactive a process as tweeting but it does provide me with a different prompt and recall of an event. If other people like the pictures then that’s fine too.

Here’s my sketch note from the session. (Confession I did redo this after the session itself as speaking, being in the online chat, tweeting and drawing is something I need to practice a bit more).

sketch notes from Helen Beetham keynote

During the session there were a number of grumbles about the value of faceless voices (mea culpa – there had been some bandwith problems before I spoke so I went for audio only), how difficult it was to follow the chat and  twitter, a call for a move to slow reading (in the manner of the slow movement).  As the twitter stream was buzzing with “porosity”,  there was also some mention in the conference room itself of feelings of inadequacy in terms of using technology.  Whilst I do sympathise with this view,  Helen is a very skilled, talented and intelligent presenter, I did find it fascinating that a group of educational developers who seem perfectly at home, and excited by theories of threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, weren’t a bit more open to trying technologies that troubled them.  Being online can be scary and confusing, but so is life.

We certainly don’t need to use technology all of the time, but I firmly believe it can be a very powerful enabler for enriching and enhancing learning.  Experimentation in safe places, such as the SEDA conference, is really important too to help us all find, and extend our comfort zones. After all isn’t that what education is all about?

Why we need to talk about digital

This week I’ve attended in person, and remotely, the 19th SEDA conference: Opportunities and challenges for academic development in a post-digital age. It’s the first time I’ve been at a SEDA conference and although I knew a number of the delegates, it’s always refreshing to be interact with other (related) communities.

Keith Smyth, and Bill Johnson and myself ran a session called “Visioning the Digital University – from institutional strategy to academic practice“. The session was based around the work we have been doing in exploring what a digital university actually is and the work Keith and colleagues did for the Napier University’s digital futures project.

During the session there were many questions in the room and on twitter about the use of “digital”. Do we need to use the word? Aren’t we all post digital now? Digital, that’s soo 2010 . . .

We don’t have an answer to the question ‘what is a digital university”, rather we have developed a set of prompts and themes to enable conversations around what it might mean to take place. We hoped, and have seen, that these prompts force people to have meaningful, and contextual conversations about actual and future practice and developments. Our first blog post introducing our thoughts was titled ‘a conversation around what it means to be a digital university‘. Enabling meaningful discussion has always been at the forefront of our thinking.

But why the emphasis on digital, and why do we persist with this? Well, because “digital” is a very powerful word. From the BBC to IBM to the UK and Scottish Governments, digital content and digital solutions are everywhere. They are the future – despite being very similar to pre digital solutions and content! In education, Jisc are now providing “digital solutions for UK education and research”, have programmes of work around the “digital student”, the “digital institution”. Digital is firmly on the agenda for the foreseeable future.

Digital is also key part of most emerging strategies for universities. What it actually means is still open for debate. That’s where providing a tool like our matrix can actually start to unpack some of the more fundamental issues around what it means to be a university in the 21st century. You can get the ear of a PVC using the word “digital”. You can roll your eyes all you like, but that is really important in terms of the future of educational development. Digital is also a really useful way to engage with our colleagues both academic and in support services who perhaps don’t engage at the same level as SEDA delegates with digital and post digital discourse. The Digital Futures work at Napier exemplified this.

So let’s reclaim “the digital”, and use it to help all of us move forward our educational development and educational technology agendas.

image of digital spelt using scrabble tiles

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fbz/187634854/ {{cc-by-2.0}}

What Sheila's seen this week: learning analytics policy for students and lots of open-ness

This week I’ve been doing lots of writing as part of my application for HEA fellowship. I’m doing this via the portfolio route of GCUs AcceleRATE CPD programme. Over the past 6 years, I’ve become increasingly reliant of my blog as my professional memory.  In many ways it is my portfolio and one my main contributions to open practice. As I develop my case studies for my HEA application, it has proved to be an invaluable reference point,  as well as reminding myself that I actually do know a wee bit about a lot of stuff.

Martin Weller wrote a nice post this week on the benefits of an open by default approach. One of the comments highlighted another benefit of being open – that it’s easier to find your own stuff. I have certainly found that this week. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I keep blogging.

I also spotted that there has been an update to the Open Education Handbook from the Linked Up project  – lovely example of open practice creating a resource on open education.

It was also great to see this article on the OU’s policy on the ethical use of student data for learning analytics.  I know Sharon Slade has been working on this for a number of years now. The policy and the FAQ (both available on the OU website) are really useful – not just for students but for anyone who is thinking about or implementing learning analytics. Hopefully it will be available via CC soon too. Another win for open-ness.

#GCblend – blended learning coffee club and blog

Inspired by the work of Fiona Harvey and her iPad coffee club we are launching our own blended learning coffee club here at GCU today.  We’re going to make this a monthly-ish informal meeting where we can share practice and have a bit of a chat over a coffee about what colleagues are/aren’t/would like to do in relation to blended learning. We’re also bribing thanking colleagues for taking time to come along by buying them a cup of coffee.

 

coffee club image

 

Today we’re going to start the ball rolling so to speak by sharing our experiences of our open event GCU Games On which ran in parallel with the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games this summer.

To support this initiative we’ve set up a team blog and  an open (well open but you have to register to access) site using Coursesites where we’re building a collection of case studies and other bits and pieces related to what we are doing. Now before you shout/rant/roll your eyes at me for not just doing all of this in wordpress there are a couple of reasons for using Coursesites.

Firstly, Blackboard is our VLE so this is a good place to encourage our staff to play without interfering with any of their live modules. Secondly, we want to encourage more open-ness here so we have to lead by example. Our primary interest is in our staff and students and we want to encourage them to make the best use of the tech we have. By taking this approach we can have an open sandpit area that is familiar to our staff,  and hopefully encourage them to think more about open educational practice. We can also share what we’re doing with others too – so feel free to have a look around.  We’re also going to be experimenting with badges and we’ll be illustrating different ways earn and create badges. The badging workflow in Bb works pretty well so we are going to use it and again hopefully allow our colleagues to see the potential of badges in their context.

This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, or anything particularly original but I’m hoping that it will evolve in a supportive and open community.

 

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