1.c Supporting the deployment of learning technologies

Evidence

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Supporting Design for deploying in the digital teaching environment

Course Design

Systems Design

Design is really a way of thinking about the world. How to see a problem and think of a solution. One of my proudest projects was a self starting one. I noticed that we tended to not share the output of our considerable investment in eLearning investment. We worked in silos and had no mechanism to encourage sharing.

I designed and manged the production of a method of doing this in the new intranet rolled out at the University in the calendar year 2015 – ?(I don’t think it has finished yet) . The product was called ourUWE and is a referatory for published RLOs and the assets needed to recreate them in the future.

A referatory is a catalogue of resources stored elsewhere. A learning object referatory is a catalogue of stand alone e-learning resources developed here at the the University of the West of England. The learning objects themselves may be stored on a Blackboard content collection or a less well known mechanism but in this interface they are catalogued together for staff to browse, try and then use within their teaching. It is supporting deployment through sustainable practices.

Here are some images of the referatory.

Supporting onboarding staff

I give departmental, programme level and individual tutorials for new staff to help get their head around the UWE digital learning products. We are very reliant on folk memory currently to navigate the existing support structures so I give a one and a half hour discursive session. Not everyone can make these sessions and as they are so discursive there is little value in recording these via event capture. The slides in themselves do not convey much in the way of information. So I do a different and compressed presentation for those who cannot attend. You can view this presentation.

Supporting Design for deploying in the phygital teaching environment

Learning Space Design

I have been involved in a £5.5 million project to revive an old NHS laundry space into a flexible and innovative teaching space. My part in this has been:

• Consultation with SME’s and programme leaders over the affordances needed in this space.
• The co-authoring of the tender under lot 3 for the design.
• Tender design judging.
• The AV design installation consultation.
• The product selection from the tender winner.
• Controller programming design.
• Material design for the space.
• Early adopter training.

The overall design optimizes the value of multiple investments made by the university but also services anticipated needs for the university above and beyond the imagination scope of the current leaders within the Faculty.

Phase 1 has covered the more traditional AV of screen location, sound re-enforcement and the interplay of teaching across the fluid space.

The above design shows the screen locations but not the fluidity of the space of the around the sound and screen sharing design. These are designed to allow for any iteration of space around ‘Teaching Skills 2’  with content sharing across sound and screen. Including sharing from mobile devices.

Phase 2 will cover the installation of an IP camera system that will cover the flat and areas of the wider space and be viewable from within the space and through online platforms. This will require a data protection impact assessment.

The space will have repeater screens around Teaching Skills 1 and 2 which will allow for multiple modes of action. These screens will move up and down within a range of motion of 70 cm and are interactive with touch screen to a computer behind them. They screen can be adjusted down for use by students to engage in self directed and in the future un-facilitated clinical learning. The modes of action are as follows:

	Active / passive	Enables	Status	Software
A	Active	Click through activities (Elsevier / narrative virtual patients / Skills demonstrations) Enquiry based activities Independent student lead learning Kiosk style / electronic poster presentation conferences	Ready Ready Future Future / ready	Web based Web based Web based TBC / Office
B	Active	Student lead recording (simulations / roleplays / skills demonstration) Kiosk style / electronic poster presentation conferences Staff lead recording	Ready Future / ready Ready	Kaltura TBC Kaltura / Panopto
C	Active	Student lead recording (simulations / roleplays / skills demonstration) Kiosk style / electronic poster presentation conferences Staff lead recording Simulation display	Ready Future / ready Ready Ready	Kaltura TBC / Office Kaltura / Panopto Web based
D	Passive	Repeater screen	Ready	Lectern

The benefits of this flexibility will be fully understood in praxis. To combat regressive practice I facilitated three early adopters groups to explain the space to academic / clinical teachers going forward. They were well received but if I am honest the need for flat bed teaching spaces has outstripped the need for innovation in the short term.

Video of techicians conference in the space taken by the Faculties Dean Marc Griffiths – https://twitter.com/griffiths_marc/status/1149705794742554629

Supporting Hybrid Endeavours During the Pandemic

Whilst at UWE we worked through the COVID panic and supported / lead on the pivot to online learning. The approach to supporting hybrid learning was muddled to say the least. The centre wanted nothing to do with it. Their focus was getting people back to campus as purportedly that’s what students wanted. Empty lecture halls seemed to suggest otherwise but you can see the why they might have thought this. Lecturers were trying to deliver face to face but a large minority were dabbling in hybrid approaches. More out of necessity and over confidence than any great pedagogical reasoning. The digital learning community wanted to increase support for these endeavours but the leadership were worried about supply induced demand. They didn’t want people to do any more of this than they had to. So eventually we compromised on support materials for deploying a hybrid approach. With one big BUT …

As it was now an institutional priority and not without a great deal of institutional scrutiny. We were to be reactive only and our advice had to condensable to a single piece of A4. The thinking being that otherwise no one would read it to the end. In hindsight this all seems quite funny. Do it but don’t do it well was the vibe. The Hybrid Teaching Toolkit of resources is still up from that time to evidence that we managed to do something.

The reason to recount this tale is put a spotlight on the context of deploying learning technologies. Even when everyone is trying to do the same thing politics and a difference of emphasis can exist. You need stakeholders between the leadership and the front line that can find a way to support people that need it without the strictures of message discipline and other priorities. What I grew to realise was I no longer wanted to be the person fudging things and holding things together. I liked doing SMART things well.

Reflection

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Supporting deployment used to mean a lot of the above. Hand holding, meetings, training and all that. During 2019 I had been thinking more in terms of systems and bandwidths. How do I use my position to make a sensible support model within the Faculty with only implicitly drawn outcomes. Our support structure has weathered high staff turnover and I have managed to grow and absorb other none-learning technology roles. It had been hard trying to drive strategy from below. Yet with funding and people you can paper over quite a lot of cracks. I reflected that I had been spending a lot of time doing central work and trying to make other parts of the organisation make sense to our needs. I knew what needed to be fixed and tried to shame the institution into making it happen.

What I started to realize is being somewhere in the middle is incredibly hard. Only powers of influence and a small amount of staff juggling the support needs of a large Faculty. In times of huge change (accessibility and GDPR) and big central projects under delivering support (PebblePad, Kramer, Panopto) this is actually too much. I found the skills I had for supporting individual projects and academics are VERY labour intensive and impossible to scale up to that level. I couldn’t continue burning as hot as I did in 2018. So I decided to change how I approached things.

I tried to scale back my thought processes and ‘scope’ to the Faculty specific. Trying to single handedly stop all problems is counter productive however large scale institutional issues about pervasive stuff stuff as digital skills, digital transformation, accessibility regulations, tier 0 resources etc will counter your productivity anyway. However, the mess outside the Faculty kept on intruding into our work and attempts to deploy an appropriate structure. Whether I was concentrating on wider issues or local issues made no different to my emotional wellbeing. I was ready to walk away.

Then it was March 2020 and everything changed. I went from sulky and parochial on the sidelines to supporting and leading on a lot of responses. Particularly how assessment was to be deployed online.

The Pandemic gave renewed purpose to all services at the University. Gone were the multi-year roll outs of products and festering conflict of interests between those accustomed to the old and those needing the new. We had a shared vision and a shared purpose. We worked miracles at speeds we thought hitherto impossible. This was enabled by the simplicity of the mission. No wooly compromises or ‘watch this spaces’, we had drivers and practitioners who were ready to listen. When we had made it to summer 2021 supporting the deployment of learning technologies became more complicated again. The context had changed. This was a catalyst for my departure from UWE. I had become addicted to working hard and meeting targets. I couldn’t go back. So my reflection is this…

I had become too accustomed to success in deploying learning technologies as being happy academic customers and no noses put out of joint. I had become accustomed too fudging things and smoothing out communications into what was practicable. However, the end product is not a happy academic. The academic is a colleague not customer. The student experience has to be the main focus. This needs more challenge and more alignment of vision. When this was in place I would find it more rewarding. So when this dissipated I moved. The approach to hybrid outlined above was one of the symptoms of this return to business as usual. This is covered more in Specialist Area 2 Supporting online learning for willing and unwilling participants.

What I did differently was move roles.