I had planned to go to work in the office this week. However in the end I worked from home all week. Pre-pandemic this would have been unusual, of course now this is more normal than not. What I hadn’t checked at the beginning of the week was who was going to be in the office. In the end I assumed that the office would be quite empty, actually in hindsight there were quite a few people in the office over the week. So next week, I might go into the office for at least one day, maybe two.
I found this Observer article on Working from home: how it changed us forever quite interesting. I feel working from home has changed quite radically how I work, who I work with as well as social dynamics. I am unsure how things will change over the next year or so. Catching covid in the autumn, despite being double vaccinated certainly made me wary of in-person interactions. Infection rates with omicron are still high and I am hearing many more stories of infection locally and across colleagues.
Spent much of the week working independently, with colleagues or with the consultant we’ve hired on a review of our team.
I have also been reflecting and reviewing our HE Sector Strategy implementation planning.
My top tweet this week was this one.
The Royal Crescent and The Circus.
Also there is the Jane Austen Centre if you like Jane Austen.
Started work on Monday with Nadhim Zahawi talking in the Daily Mail that “”Students made to pay tuition fees for Zoom lectures should revolt”. This kind of rhetoric makes any (current and future) use of online technologies challenging for universities. Benefits of online will be missed, as students will “revolt” regardless.
Later a more reasoned open letter was published on the Education Department website.
Many of our universities and colleges have been working hard to ensure Covid-secure face-to-face teaching is offered and I know that, for many of you, this face-to-face teaching is a vital part of getting a high-quality student experience. As you know, whilst the country was implementing wide-spread restrictions, the majority of teaching had to be moved online. There are some great examples of effective and innovative online teaching, and universities and colleges have been delivering a high-quality blended approach since before the pandemic. Maintaining the option of online teaching for those who are vulnerable or isolating is to be encouraged. However, face-to-face teaching should remain the norm and the pandemic and must not be used as an opportunity for cost saving or for convenience. I know that students expect and deserve face-to-face teaching and support, and you have my full backing.
But if universities were in any doubt about what they could do and what they should be doing, we had this from the Universities Minister.
Students deserve to have the full face to face teaching experience they would have received before the pandemic – online learning should only be used to supplement this. This week I am personally calling VCs who aren’t delivering this. https://t.co/TuKTexiXaF
No one would dispute that COVID-19 has severely disrupted the education of millions of people. Our polling with Advance HE, for example, shows an unprecedented proportion of undergraduate students think they have received ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ value for money and twice as many as usual feel their experiences have been worse than their prior expectations.
This is not surprising, given full-time students on three-year courses graduating this summer will have had every one of their years at university disrupted. Those leaving school / college this summer have seen both their GCSEs and their school-leaving qualifications (A-Level / BTECs) affected. But it is also true that most of the really big predictions about how COVID would affect education have (fortunately) turned out to be wrong.
It makes for interesting reading. Predictions about fewer students, or higher drop-outs were wrong as it turned out.
Why does this matter, well the article summarises with this comment.
It is worth flagging how poor the predictions about education in a pandemic have turned out to be because it acts as a reminder about how hard it is to predict the future, because it could serve as a useful guide in future crises and because it shows the importance that hard counter-intuitive evidence should play in policymaking.
This is something that we can reflect upon.
One prediction made at the start of the pandemic by many involved in education technology was that the forced working from home would (post-pandemic) be a catalyst for more blended and online learning in higher education. The prediction was that following people being forced to use tools such as the VLE, Teams, Zoom, lecture capture, that this would embed such technologies into future teaching and learning. The reality is that universities are now under pressure from Government and students to focus on and prioritise in-person face to face teaching. So, the prediction that the pandemic restrictions and lockdowns would have a positive impact on the use of online and digital learning technologies across the board, may have been slightly off the mark.
"Face-to-face teaching is a vital part of getting a high-quality student experience": Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi writes to students – The Education Hub https://t.co/RIWkg0tq4z
First thing Monday morning I was on the radio, Radio Bristol, discussing the food and restaurant scene in Weston-super-Mare with the imminent opening of the new bowling alley in Dolphin Square, despite the closure of nearly all the restaurants in the same complex.
Again spent a fair amount of time this week discussing, thinking about and reflecting on digital transformation.
Last week, despite the rising covid infection rates I’ve not had much or seen much discussion about the impact this will have on higher education and students. Then Nadhim Zahawi says there are ‘no excuses’ for online learning at universities.
Well that’s helpful and constructive.
More than a hundred universities including twenty-three out of the twenty-four universities in the Russell group are reportedly online teaching this term. It was reported in the media that Durham University would teach all classes online in the first week of term, Queen’s University Belfast will hold most classes online this month and King’s College London has also moved some classes to online. Across the media and the sector this move has been termed blended learning, online learning and remote learning.
One of things I have noticed is how often much of what was done during the numerous lockdowns was described as online learning, sometimes it was called blended learning, or remote learning.
Can we just agree that what we are seeing is not online learning? I wrote a blog post back in November about this issue.
The reality is though that despite the hard work, there wasn’t the training, the staff development, the research, the preparation undertaken that would have been needed to deliver an outstanding online learning experience. Combined with that, the fact that the academic staff were also in lockdown as well, the actual experiences of students and staff are in fact quite amazing. However it wasn’t online learning.
I caught some of the You and Yours radio programme about student life during the pandemic and as you might expect most callers were phoning in, to complain. Without focussing on the individual complaints, I sometimes think that there was an assumption that universities were ring-fenced from the pandemic. Yes students had, in many ways could be called a terrible experience, however the entire country was suffering during the pandemic, and university staff were in there too. They also had to deal with the lockdown, the restrictions, illness and everything else. It was a difficult time for everyone and we need to remember that.
Have been planning our Thought Leadership on learning and teaching this week. I actually really don’t like the term Thought Leader but it is the term in the Jisc strategy, so internally I will use that term to ensure what I am talking about is aligned with the strategy. It should be noted that many in the sector actually don’t like the term thought leadership. However if you ask universities about the actual content that is produced by Jisc, that we would think of as thought leadership, then there is a different story as they find this useful, inspiring and helps them think. Similarly, universities will often ask for specific people within Jisc who are experts in their field for help and support. Or they will find presentations and articles from individuals inspiring.
These priorities have come from the sector, and we will use articles, blogs, podcasts, interviews, and case studies to bring them to life for universities. We want to create and deliver content that in some cases is longer term in outlook, visionary; transformative yet possible, it should inspire and make people think differently about the area. We also need shorter actionable pieces that should be more practical, replicable and something that could be implemented in a shorter time frame.
Had an interesting discussion during a risk assessment meeting about the importance of strategy and embedding strategy into an organisation. You would think that this is a given, but too often I see strategies developed at a high level, but the actual operational activities are mapped to the strategy, rather than being derived from the strategy. The same can also happen at a personal objective level too. This was something we worked on during the Jisc Digital Leaders Programme about how to expand and develop a (digital) strategy.
We started planning the themes for Connect More 2022 this week.
Got a little too obsessed with Wordle.
Another one I found challenging, mainly as I disagree with the spelling of the correct word. I also had to use pen and paper.
Happy New Year, hope 2022 will be a good year for you.
Working from home this week as our (physical) offices are closed this week. So that makes a nice change from normal…
So went back to work on the 4th January. I had 83 e-mails in my inbox. Most of them though were advertising emails, so didn’t take too long to clear the inbox.
I have had a few meetings this week, mainly about planning for various things going forward.
Spent a fair amount of time discussing, thinking about and reflecting on digital transformation. Part of the challenge is what do we even mean or understand by the term digital transformation?
There is a Jisc definition of digital transformation, that I do think we need to revisit now.
Is the cultural, organisational and operational change of an organisation, industry or ecosystem through a smart integration of digital technologies, processes and competencies across all levels and functions in a staged way
Leverages technologies to create value for stakeholders, and to enable greater agility and resilience in the face of changing circumstances
Is not primarily about technology adoption. It is first and foremost about transforming the mindset and culture of an organisation to ensure that technology can be deployed as a multiplier of impact
There is a diagram on that page that I think is too simplistic and though the accompany surrounding text says different, the diagram implies that transformation is a linear journey.
It isn’t. In many ways what you did with digital before may prepare you for digital transformation, but the reality is that you probably need to throw out what you have done before you can move forward.
The definition continues with a statement which I broadly agree with:
Similarly, digital transformation should not be conflated with prior technological shifts, which focused on digitisation (moving from analogue to digital formats, for example paper forms to webforms) and digitalisation (deploying technology to attain transactional operating efficiencies, or localised benefits).
I know that many confuse digitisation and digitalisation with digital transformation, but transformation is so much more than just merely going digital. I think I might need to expand on this in a future blog post.
Back in the late 1990s when I was teaching business studies and economics, I was a programme lead for a level 2 Intermediate GNVQ programme for 16 and 17 year olds. When I took over the programme we had a long thin course design. Students would undertake different units simultaneously and then we had the challenge of all the assessment being bunched up at the end of the modules. This resulted in stress for students, poor outcomes and shedloads of marking for staff. So what we did was convert the course design into a programme of short fat topics. Students would focus on one thing at one time, but intensely. They would focus on that one thing and there would only be one assessment at any one time. It was challenging for staff, but it was of real benefit to the students.
So when I saw this tweet on block teaching I was reminded
"The pandemic has triggered a fundamental rethink of many academic orthodoxies, but the nature of students’ weekly timetables has largely been ignored." Is block teaching the future of university pedagogy? https://t.co/TCB6EcytRs via @timeshighered
At higher levels, I think the in-depth immersion in a topic would be beneficial and most universities would have the flexibility to deliver this, however it does have implications for staff workloads and timetables as well. Something again I might think about especially as with the iGNVQ programme we did a lot of mapping across the curriculum (and the core skills) so that similar topics were “bundled” together.
We may not go into another lockdown situation, but are universities prepared to pivot again to online delivery and teaching?
We are hearing stories as universities wind up for the end of term that covid infections have been rising in the student population.
Anecdotally Covid seems to have completely exploded on university campuses this week. From tomorrow, if students test positive they won’t make it home for Christmas. And yet a surprising number of universities are teaching on campus until Friday.
This has implications for overall infection rates, but also for what universities will need to do next term.
I finished off a blog post about excellence on my other blog, which may be useful for some educational places.
You can have exceptional staff who are performing beyond expectations and still have an underperforming department or organisation.
My top tweet this week was this one.
"Rude alert! Rude alert! An electrical fire has knocked out my voice recognition unicycle! Many Wurlitzers are missing from my database. Abandon shop! This is not a daffodil. Repeat: This is not a daffodil."
Most of this week I was on leave, returning to the office on Thursday. The Government announced plan B on Wednesday, they asked for people to work from home from Monday. So on Thursday I decided to work from home instead.
I had a fair few meetings on that day, quite exhausting really.
Planning to reboot the elearning stuff podcast in 2022. This will be a weekly podcast on learning, learning technologies, digital leadership, and probably some other stuff I am interested in like the intelligent campus. Will be looking for panellists and experts. The last episode I did was back in 2018, and it was way back in 2013 when I was publishing the podcast regularly.
I have spent some time this week discussing thought leadership, though it is a term I don’t like, the concept of articles and blog posts that inspire transformation is very much part of Jisc’s strategy. For me a coherent and planned approach that engages with our target audience is key, but easier said than done.
I also see having a spectrum of content, media and channels. You will notice that I publish blog posts on this blog (as well as the weeknotes like this one). I see those as part of the spectrum. Recently I published Looking through that digital lens which is based on a session from the digital leaders programme, the strategic work I have done with universities and working with Advance HE on a leadership session back in the summer.
Success in digital teaching and learning is much about understanding about what is required for transformation to take advantage of the affordances and opportunities that digital can offer and not about taking what works in-person and making digital copies of existing practices.
This for me is part of what thought leadership is.
My top tweet this week was this one.
Planning to reboot the elearning stuff podcast in 2022. This will be a weekly podcast on learning, learning technologies, digital leadership, and probably some other stuff I am interested in like the intelligent campus. Will be looking for panellists and experts.
This was a full week back at work and I was in London for most of the week. Over the summer I had enjoyed working in the London office, a change of pace, location and routine compared to the forced working from home we had endured during the pandemic. Having had a fair amount of time off work, sick with covid, it was nice to be back in the office, talking and chatting to colleagues and similarly to the summer having the change of place and routine. The office was much busier than it had been in the summer. It felt quite normal in some respects, a little quieter than it was pre-pandemic.
However it was only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote about the possibilities of in-person teaching now that 90% of university students had had at least one Covid jab. Last week though we saw a new variant of concern of the coronavirus was identified by South African scientists and labelled by the WHO as Omicron.
Hopefully the vaccination rollout and mask wearing will reduce the chance of lockdown, but I would still be preparing for the possibilities of another lockdown regardless.
As we reach the end of the week, there have been some stories on the spread of Omicron, across the world, spreading to Europe, as might be expected with global travel and concerns this variant would have on infection rates (being more transmissible) and the subsequent impact on health resources. There were also some positive stories about the potential of vaccination to reduce the impact of Omicron.
Having said all that I would still be preparing for the possibilities of another lockdown regardless.
As you might expect, I ensured I was wearing my mask on public transport and when entering shops, eating places and as I walked around the office.
We had an HE leadership meeting on Monday and the majority of the meeting was discussing key challenges with our new CEO.
One of the things I reflected on was the success of Learning and Teaching Reimagined (LTR) and what we should do next. In order to build on and support the sector to deliver on the recommendation and work towards the challenges, Jisc working with members produced Higher education strategy 2021-2024: powering UK higher education which outlined how Jisc would support the sector going forward.
However LTR with its focus on teaching and learning leaves the door open to other ideas. There are a range of subjects that Jisc could focus on and undertake a similar range of activities and events as we did with LTR. This, like LTR, could be a sector-wide initiative focused on providing university leaders with inspiration on what the future might hold for higher education and guidance on how to respond and thrive in those environments. We could look at the student experience, leadership, the campus… there are a range of areas in which we could focus on in.
One of things I have noticed is how often much of what was done during the numerous lockdowns was described as online learning. Let’s be clear you can describe what was happening as an emergency response to a crisis, even simplistically a pivot, but what was happening across schools, colleges and universities could in no way be described as online learning.
Some of my meetings were cancelled this week, which though freeing up time, can be frustrating.
This week was the Ascilite Conference. I really enjoyed attending and keynoting the conference back in 2009. Back then the UK was in the midst of an outbreak of swine flu. I didn’t go this year, but I may think about attending next year (pandemic permitting). This year it took place online and in-person at University of New England, Armidale NSW in Australia.
Martin Bean was part of a panel session and one comment (well tweet) I saw about the session mentioned the importance of authentic assessment, which made me think.
Just asking, does anyone make the case for unauthentic assessment?
Does anyone think their current assessment is unauthentic?
While eating dinner on Wednesday evening, I participated in the #LTHEChat Twitterchat, Decolonising Learning Technology led by Professor John Traxler.
I participated and did note that so much educational technology is designed for specific sector and its cultural norms, and then adjusted for other sectors and then other cultures. It was a really interesting debate and I enjoyed the discussion.
As it was December, I started tweeting out my advent calendar posts from a few years back. I really ought to spend some time doing new ones.
At the end of the week we had a HE Team meeting.
My top tweet this week was this one.
With Omicron on the horizon, maybe today is the day you start wearing your mask again and reducing social contact. #JustSaying
I was asked to produce some crisp presentation slides, crisp as in sharp I believe and not ones on a savoury snack.
I have been working on a (revised) implementation plan for the HE sector strategy: Powering UK higher education at Jisc. This is very much about operationalising the strategy, so much so that I started planning a blog post about operationalising strategies based on the content of a session I use to run on the digital leaders programme.
I did write a blog post this week, Looking through that digital lens which is also based on a session from the digital leaders programme, the strategic work I have done with universities and working with Advance HE on a leadership session back in the summer.
The digital lens approach can enable effective and transformational behaviours to emerge by helping staff to understand and develop their capabilities and confidence in the context of their own work.
Looking at strategies through a particular lens isn’t a new thing, but as we move beyond the pandemic, the use of digital has become so embedded into practice and working that the concept of a separate digital strategy is no longer the option it once was for organisations.
I have spoken about transformation a lot over the last year, so it was interesting to read this article talking about the importance of transformation when it comes to embedding technology. Though it does talk about generational generalisations it does talk about transformation.
Faculty roles and the processes of teaching and learning are undergoing rapid change. Most faculty members did not seek careers in the academy because of a strong love of technology or a propensity for adapting to rapid change; yet they now find themselves facing not only the inexorable advance of technology into their personal and professional lives but also the presence in their classrooms of technology-savvy Net Generation students.
Then you find it was published fourteen years ago in 2007….
Wednesday I went to our Bristol office, though my train into Bristol was delayed by half an hour. That was something I haven’t missed during the pandemic.
I booked a meeting room for my calls, so I wouldn’t disturb others in the office. Still nice though to be back in the office now and again.
I had planned to go to the office on Thursday as well, however plans were changed at the last minute. Had some interesting discussions about thought leadership though it is a term I don’t like, the concept of articles and blog posts that inspire transformation is very much part of Jisc’s strategy. For me a coherent and planned approach that engages with our target audience is key, but easier said than done.
I was on leave on Friday.
My top tweet this week was this one.
Have been asked to produce a crisp presentation, have been to Pixabay to get some great images. pic.twitter.com/V0bagEUGOW
