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Ensuring excellence – Weeknote #121 – 25th June 2021

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A rather busy week.

Had a few meetings about Jisc’s HE bespoke consultancy offer and next steps.

On Tuesday I did originally plan to go into the office today, but according to the desk bookings there were very few people in, so in the end I worked from home.

I delivered a presentation to the IHE Heads of Finance Network on LTR, Powering HE and how Jisc can support and help Higher Education with a particular focus on investment in digital.

Wednesday saw myself deliver the second session of an online Digital Leadership programme to a cohort of university staff. Despite the fact I had to do most of the session by myself, it did seem to go well.

On Thursday I did go to the office in Bristol. There was a lot more people in the office than normal, however as I had a fair few online interviews and meetings, I spent most of the day in one of our meeting rooms. However I did enjoy the change in routine and scenery, and I had a few happenstance conversations, which I don’t generally have online.

We had a debrief about the Advance HE/HEDG shareshop we did on transition. We also thought about future ideas, including dual mode delivery and curriculum planning.

Friday saw myself deliver a repeat of the second session of an online Digital Leadership programme to a cohort of university staff. It was a slightly shorter session as I had a conference to present at later that morning.

The conference was a Westminster Higher Education Forum policy conference: Next steps for reforming the TEF and ensuring teaching excellence in HE. My session was entitled Driving up standards and supporting teaching excellence in remote and blended learning.

I talked about definitions, background, the emergency response and the implications of differentiating between translation and transformation. I also discussed the topic of digital poverty.

meeting
Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

In the afternoon I did some analysis of the planning that universities were taking in respect to transition that came out of the shareshop we did on transition.

The main themes that came out of the online padlet discussion were:

  • Building online communities
  • The importance of student (and staff) wellbeing
  • Supporting and developing academic skills
  • Developing inductions and planning welcome weeks
  • Building digital skills
  • Returning to on campus delivery

One of the key themes that came out of the padlet discussion was the value and importance of building online communities. As one delegate pointed out in their planning, they felt it was important in supporting them to socialise and feel part of the community. One university wanted to increase connectedness and a sense of belonging to the university community.

As with academic skills (but slightly less commentary) the disruption to both new students and returning students, many comments were made about supporting and developing the digital skills of students. There was a recognition that many students did not have the (academic) digital skills to successfully engage with online and blended learning. As one participant said there was a need to be supporting the digital skills needed to access the course and related services. Another said we overestimated the students ability to use and engage with online content.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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Challenging – Weeknote #59 – 17th April 2020

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A shorter week this week, as we had Easter Monday, of course with the lockdown I didn’t go anywhere on the long weekend and I am not going off to the office this week… this could result in an easy blurring of home and work. Though I generally am less strict during the working week, I kept the entire weekend free of work to have a decent break away. Though reading the news some relevant stuff does bubble to the surface such as this report from The Guardian on the potential drop in income universities will suffer as foreign students drop out.

Some universities are already expecting to lose more than £100m as foreign students cancel their studies, with warnings that the impact of coronavirus will be “like a tsunami hitting the sector”.

Several organisations are now planning for a 80-100% reduction in their foreign student numbers this year, with prestigious names said to be among those most affected. The sector is already making a plea to the government for a cash injection amounting to billions of pounds to help it through the crisis, as it is hit by a drop in international student numbers, accommodation deals and conference income.

There are also concerns that many domestic students will defer their entry for a year, if the first term in September will be online as it is now. I am wondering how many prospective students will defer their entry for a year as they wouldn’t want to miss the physical aspect of attending university. Similarly will there be first and second year undergraduates who will take a gap year.

We are starting to see the potential impact of this, as some universities are looking at delaying the start of term, whilst others are planning for online delivery.

Durham University is proposing online-only degrees as part of a radical restructuring process, the Palatinate reveals.

Confidential documents seen by Palatinate show that the University is planning “a radical restructure” of the Durham curriculum in order to permanently put online resources at the core of its educational offer, in response to the Covid-19 crisis and other ongoing changes in both national and international Higher Education.

The proposals seek to “invert Durham’s traditional educational model”, which revolves around residential study, replacing it with one that puts “online resources at the core enabling us to provide education at a distance.”

We don’t know for sure when the lockdown will be lifted, or what measures will stay in place, or even if they are lifted, whether they may come back down again, if there is a second or even a third wave of coronavirus infections. So it makes sense for universities to plan for online and remote delivery, something which is not the emergency models they have had to put in place right now.

It looks like the TEF has been indefinitely postponed.

I spent a lot of time this week discussing assessment and the challenges moving to online assessment. Of course assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning, so things you do for assessment need to be incorporated into the teaching and learning.

There are many challenges that the higher education sector faces with regard to assessment, but through my research, interviews and a landscape study, these challenges emerged as key to the sector.

Student engagement – Maintain student engagement through the next few weeks and through the assessment process, as they continue to socially isolate and study remotely.

Translating and transforming to online assessment at scale and at pace – Transform multiple modes of assessment to online versions at scale and at pace. Many universities have experience of designing and delivering online assessment, however they will not have done this at scale or transformed at the pace required.

Ensuring academic standards and quality when moving to online assessment – Maintaining the academic standard and quality as required by internal and external regulations, as they translate and convert existing practice into online modes.

Online assessment dashboards and benchmarking. – What are other universities doing with online assessment? What best practice is out there? Which universities are doing it well? How do universities compare? What do universities know about themselves?

My top tweet this week was this one.

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What is the difference between strong, thorough and exceptional? – Weeknote #37 – 15th November 2019

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BT Tower in Fitzrovia
BT Tower in Fitzrovia by James Clay

One interesting read this week was this blog post

An ‘Edinburgh Model’ for Online Teaching Programme: Notes from a pilot run.

In this post, Dr Michael Gallagher, a Lecturer in the Centre for Research in Digital Education, describes how he and colleagues drew on current expertise and research within The University of Edinburgh to inform and design a new online course…

It was an interesting read, but I find it equally interesting that we are still having difficulty with delivering and teaching online that we still need to run pilots.

There has been substantial amounts of research and practice in this space, this is reinforced by the forthcoming A Manifesto for Teaching Online which, as indicated in the article on the  ‘Edinburgh Model’ was a source for the course, much of what is distilled in the course comes from the outcomes of the Near Future Teaching project and the Manifesto for Teaching Online.

This isn’t though a course which is delivered online, this is a course for teaching people how to teach online and it wasn’t initially delivered online.

This first pilot of the course was run face to face to allow the team to focus on specific areas and get rapid feedback from participants.

In my reading and experience, people really get to understand the challenges and affordances of delivering online if they have first hand experience of being taught online, both bad and good. A similar thing can be said for non-online teaching (or what we sometimes call traditional or face to face teaching. This is something that all teachers will have experience of, being taught in a face to face or traditional manner before they start teaching themselves. Though I wonder can we teach online if we have never been taught online? Should be said though the team are planning to run the course fully online in early 2020.

I suppose there is for me an element of frustration that the concept of online teaching isn’t new, there has been considerable research in this space, but it’s still something that we as a sector struggle with. Hopefully sharing experiences from these pilots will help, but we have been doing pilots for decades now… Continue reading What is the difference between strong, thorough and exceptional? – Weeknote #37 – 15th November 2019 →