silo working Archives - eLearning Stuff

I wrote a blog post, So does your institution have a silo mentality? I wrote it after reading this article on the WonkHE about higher education silos, Institutional silos are making it harder to build learning environments for student success.

Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.

Though talking about silos, the article is more about integrating digital into learning and teaching.

Though as anyone knows breaking down silos is hard. We often think of grain silos, metal cylinders that are close together, they should be easy to break, shouldn’t they? I always now think of higher education silos as missile silos, embedded into reinforced concrete and dispersed across a wide area.

Breaking down silo working, isn’t just about saying, we need to break down the silos but is so much more about thinking strategically about what your organisation is trying to achieve.

After working from home at the start of the week, I went off to London. I was attending the BLE 20th anniversary event at Senate House.

The Bloomsbury Learning Exchange (BLE) brings together expertise to share good practice and enable collaboration in digital education and technology enhanced learning projects. We are a partnership comprising six Higher Education Institutions in Bloomsbury, central London. Essentially, the BLE is the community, and the BLE Executive Team facilitates the exchange as well as offering specific services to the partner institutions.

They have grown over the years and expanded their collaboration. It is a really good example of collaboration that doesn’t mean you have to create complex pseudo-organisations to manage a shared service. The core of the BLE is the memorandum of understanding.

I ran a similar collaboration back in 2000, called the Western Colleges Consortium, where the FE colleges in Avon shared a VLE. There are lots of lessons from that experience and the BLE that higher education probably should take on board for future collaborations, especially in the learning technology space. One of the key lessons is about keeping it simple, constant adaptation and tinkering, may in the short term resolve problems, but it is harder to then collaborate whern faced with a future challenging scenario.

I have done quite a few things with the BLE over the last twenty years, including a few things while I have been at Jisc. It was nice to see and hear about their success.

At the event I had a couple of interesting conversations. One was with a manager, who spoke about the challenges in joining collaborative ventures, and needing more support from senior management. We know that collaboration often needs to come from the top, but there is also the need to delegate that downwards, to enable collaboration at different levels in the organisation as well.

In another conversation someone provided feedback on the report, which he stated he “had read thoroughly” and even quoted lines from the report. He said it was an excellent report and much needed. This was nice to hear.

Did some more work on the UUK project, did some stuff with the KPMG report next steps, and created a template for the position papers for the E in NREN activity.

I had various meetings this week and spent time in our Bristol office, as well as working from home.

I wondered if silo working is another word for non-strategic working? People often complain about silo working and the resulting challenges that can arise. I think part of the reason why there are problems with duplication, conflict, and lack of communication, across silo working, is teams are working to their own objectives and aren’t necessarily working towards common objectives.

The NSA in the US talks of silo working as cylinders of excellence. You can have outstanding or excellent teams, but not necessarily have an excellent organisation. See this blog post I wrote about that. I think I might expand on this on a future blog post.

stove espresso maker — Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

I attended the Adobe and Wonkhe Education Espresso event on supporting pedagogical development and innovation.

I had a meeting on licensing development and links to intelligent campus and student experience.

I had a meeting with organisers of on possible speaking opportunity and possible session ideas for EDUtech Europe 2024.

I had an Intelligent Campus meeting with the Honeywell PoC team at Jisc.

I also had a meeting for planning a workshop on building a smart or an intelligent campus.

Had an informal discussion with colleagues in Jisc on learning spaces. I have been looking at how Jisc can support universities in the learning spaces space. What help and support do universities need, and what help and support do we want from Jisc. We also discussed the compromise that is a flexible learning space. Often, we see universities building flexibility into their learning spaces, as that is often seen as easier than building flexibility into curriculum design and timetabling.

Continued my work on a concept for supporting institutions in the smart campus space. This included reviewing the Higher Education Reference Model with an intelligent campus lens.

I recorded some content for an internal podcast. I used my Snowball microphone using Quicktime. I did a test recording, which sounded fine, and then did the actual recording. After sending it off I got some feedback that the audio recording was noisy. I checked my recording and there was a lot of interference. I had written a script for the recording, so it was quite easy to re-record the piece. This time though I used Garageband to record the podcast clip, and then checked that it sounded okay before sending it off.