Quantity vs quality

In the last couple of days I've had a meeting with our newly appointed Digital Learning leads. A great discussion - we talked about where technology enhanced learning is going, what the coverage is like across our different departments, what barriers there are in adopting TEL, and what the future looks like. We also touched on what makes a Learning Technologist - how are they different from an IT technician. It's very clear to us, but not so clear in departments, where IT support staff are being rebranded as learning technologists, when they have no experience in learning, just the technology. It's important that LTs understand the pedagogy - it's how technology can be used to enhance learning which is important, not just the technology itself.

I also met the Vice-Chancellor for a regular catch up where we discussed a Digital Strategy for the University.

Following that I went to our UEB/HoDS forum where our Executive Board and heads of department meet to discuss different topics. This time we were looking at student recruitment. In particular, what was more important, quantity or quality. Should we take more students, no matter what grades they have, or take only the higher graded students to keep our tarif score up. After a couple of presentations we had a lively discussion on the tables - I'm not sure we came to a conclusive answer though!

Finally today I had a meeting with an IT Director from another Institution. Newly appointed she was keen to catch up with what's happening in the sector, and it was a very useful exchange of ideas.

TEL, SAP, Value and TechQual

I posted the other day about TELFest which has been hugely successful - congrats to the whole team. The team have also just launched a new website - the TELHub - a website which provides information about technologies available to all staff to enhance their teaching as well as case studies showcasing the innovative use and effective practice of learning technology from colleagues across the University. Another great resource.

Other stuff happening this week - our Corporate System team completed an upgrade of our eRecruitment System delivering some real enhancements to the service, and they completed it ahead of schedule. Congrats all round.

I went to the first meeting of a new University committee to look at Public Value. I'm really quite excited about this group. It will look at how the University creates Public Value by looking at questions including  - what is the value of what we do, what are we for, who do we serve? It is intended to demonstrate that our activities make a difference and ensure that our stakeholders can engage with us. It will also look at difficult issues - where we might have different views from some of our stakeholders - and encourage an open debate. Some issues we discussed yesterday included whether we should disinvest from fossil fuels and how we might help asylum seekers in Sheffield.

The other interesting discussion this week was a first look at the results of a recent survey we've done of our services to staff using TechQual. This doesn't just measure satisfaction with our services, but it measures our customers expectations. Not surprisingly these have rocketed in the last year or two, and we are struggling to meet them.

OK, off on leave now for a week. See you soon.

TELFest

While I was off, we successfully moved our VLE (MOLE) to a hosted service.  I missed the fun and games, but by all accounts it went very well - so congrats to all of the team. The only noticeable difference to our users should be that content creation is faster - everything else should be just the same, despite the fact is is now not running here, but on servers in a different country. It was a very aggressive timescale we worked to to get everything migrated in plenty of time for the beginning of the academic year, and I'm really pleased it was so successful.

Technology Enhanced Learning is an important part of our strategy, and this year we are running a

week long TEL festival in September and I'm pleased to see that arrangements for this have really come on in the past few weeks.  TELFest-2014 is designed to give help, guidance and support to anyone develop their skills in this area, no matter how much experience they have. There's workshops, drop in sessions, panel discussions and much more - the agenda looks really interesting, and we hope it will be a well attended event.

MOLE is moving.....

This week has mainly been about catch ups with senior colleagues in CiCS and in our Professional Services Executive, and Liaison meetings. We're in our second round of meetings with the Faculties where we discuss our plans for the year, and look at their strategic challenges and how we might help.

One of our key priorities for the coming year is to improve the availability and performance of our VLE, (called MOLE). Hopefully we will have achieved that very soon, as we are moving it next weekend to a managed hosted service. We only took the decision a few weeks ago to move, and the team here have worked really hard to get  it migrated by the end of this month so it will be ready for the start of the next academic year. We've done a few test migrations, and next weekend we take the service down, migrate all of the content over to a datacentre in Amsterdam, test it and hopefully go back live again. Our staff and students shouldn't see any difference, except in performance, responsiveness and speed at which any faults get fixed. We hope then that our Learning Technologies team will be able to focus their efforts on supporting MOLE and helping staff and students to use its features to produce innovative and engaging online content to provide our students with the best learning experience possible.

As part of our commitment to Technology Enhanced learning, we are running a week long Technology Enhanced Learning Festival in September with sessions including Using Social Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning, Mobile Learning, Online Assessment and Feedback, Multimedia to enhance learning and teaching, E-portfolios and Flipped Learning. As well as the workshop sessions there'll be panel discussions and drop in sessions. Watch this space for details and programme soon.

The Learning Stack

At the Gartner HE Conference at the moment. Some excellent sessions. This one from Marti Harris, on Building The Learning Stack.

Our institutional relationship with most of our customers will ultimately be in a cloud based ecosystem, particularly with students around learning platforms. The future learning environments will have to balance our assets - applications, platforms and content - to form a collaborative, agile learning stack. The extent an institution adopts a learning stack concept will determine teaching/learning agility and future relevance. It will consist of things we do ourselves, and services including SaaS and other cloud based offerings,

As well as known assets, we have a considerable amount of unknown assets, including software, services and devices being used in our academic environment. Even with known assets such as the LMS there is redundancy and overlapping functionality with other admin systems.

Can build the learning stack on a context platform to include services including, lecture capture, mobile apps, social media, eportfolios, web conferencing etc.


Sandboxes are important to allow experimentation. Can easily remove and add things. Could the context platform be an existing LMS such as Blackboard? Yes, but will be more viable providers in next 5 years who are developing a much more flexible and agile learning environment. Or could be built on Sharepoint, or Google apps, does not have to be a conventional LMS. Different disciplines could have different versions of the stack.

This very flexible agile learning environment will need to be managed flexibly. Cloud will be important, as well as sharing assets and services with other organisations.

Students' expectations set by their consumer experience. They can do everything on-line, so why do they have to stand in line?

More choice now for learners, from getting a degree, obtaining credits, or just learning for knowledge with no credits. Also most courses are delivered through a hybrid on-line and on-campus model. MOOCs could be disruptive to this model. They are on Gartner education hype cycle just over the peak heading towards trough of disillusionment. Gartner view is that it will rise to plateau of productivity fairly quickly, but will have a different name and will have changed to be more integrated with other forms of learning and will have credits that can contribute to a degree. Also, students will be able to take "MOOCs" at other institutions as part of their degree course. Challenge will be to identify the student and ensure that they are learning.

Interesting to see that investment in education technology companies is rising, lots of start up companies and new providers. Will of course be followed by mergers and acquisitions!

Sourcing of marketing, development and delivery is increasing as an option for many institutions, especially with special online courses and programmes. MOOCs good example of this, but may lead to changes in delivery platforms that can be used for more traditional courses.





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MOOCs

This mornings main session at RUGIT was about MOOCs, Massively Open On-Line Courses. We had a presentation from the University of Edinburgh, who launched 6 MOOCs in January of this year. It was a very interesting presentation, and very timely, as we are discussions what Sheffield should do about them next week!

MOOCs are open to everyone, there are no mandatory qualifications and are free to enrol on. The learners who enrol on them aren't really students - they pay no fees to the institution which has no commitment or relationship to them. There is also a huge drop off rate as people enrol at the beginning and then drop out after only completing part of the course.

The courses are fully on line, but there is evidence that people doing them organise physical meets.
They are very lightly tutored and usually supported by teaching assistants, not academics.
They do offer assessment in various forms, and have low study hours per week. The MOOCs currently offered by Edinburgh are short (5 weeks) and have no relation to each other. At the end you get a certificate of completion rather than credits.
They are a completely different business model to traditional HE.

MOOCs come out of many years of technology enhanced learning. For example, on line and on campus eLearning, and online and off campus distance learning. You need to understand how to do teaching and learning on line before starting a MOOC, and apply the same rigorous approval and quality assurance processes to all.

Many companies offer a framework through which courses are offered, providing the hosting and all related administration. Edinburgh joined Coursera. After they launched their 6 courses 300,000 people joined them - that's a lot of admin you don't want to handle yourself, despite the big drop off.

The frameworks have on-line spaces for learners to self support, wikis, discussion forums etc which are moderated. Courses tend to contain a lot of video, but in short clips.

One thing I hadn't realised is that MOOCs have a start time and an end time with timed assessments. Learners can't join anytime and go at their own speed, they have to keep up.

All of the features of MOOCs, for example the automated assessment tools, are open source because of the enormous licensing costs if you use a commercial product. There also deals being done with some publishers to make their materials available for free on line.

Currently there are no credits earned through completing a MOOC, one reason being the difficulty of validating who exactly is doing the assessed work!

Future of MOOCs not certain, the bubble could burst and they could fade away. Or they could expand and diversify and we could see the emergence of specialised MOOCs in unique areas.
One thing is for certain, they are not a money maker!

Some interesting things to consider when we look at whether to go down this route. I think the important question we will need to have a clear answer to, is Why? There will also need to be a clear understanding of the resource implications, they are not a cheap option.



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Photos and processes

As part of our drive to simplify and standardise processes to improve our services, we set up a Process Improvement Unit last year. Yesterday we had a Steering Group meeting, chaired by the VC, where we looked progress so far. Lots of things being worked on, including a number of student related things - change of status forms, fee waivers, UKBA issues and helpdesk referrals in the IC.  There's some quick wins we think we can get by improving the speed and efficiency of processes, which in turn will improve services and free up resources. There's also some big projects we need to work on, and one of the things to come out of many different discussions is the critical nature of course data in our student system. It is used by so many different processes, and has to be right. It's curated and input by a number of different areas, and it isn't always as accurate as it might be. So, historically we have found ways round it, but we can't continue to do so - this is something major that we have to put right. Lots of other exciting things to be worked on, including helping departments across the University to think about and improve their processes. We're hoping for a step change in culture!

Also yesterday we visited our colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health for a Strategic Liaison meeting, where one of the main topics of discussion was eLearning. On-line assessment, distance learning, ePortfolios, learning technology - all important topics for them, and we talked about how we could help. We also touched on MOOCs, but more of that in a couple of weeks.

And if you're wondering about the pictures in this post....

When we moved into our new building we were faced with a lot of blank corridor space, so we asked our staff  to submit photos which could be blown up. printed and displayed, and the first set has just gone up. The quality was excellent - please don't take the quality of these photos as indicative - I've just walked down the corridor with my iPhone :-)  Unfortunately some didn't have a high enough resolution to be blown up to the required size, but we'll be doing it again soon. And to avoid accusations of favouritism, these are just the ones nearest to my office! It's really brightened the place up, well done folks.

Changing models of education

Keynote session now. Blueprint for change in an area of rapid reinvention.
Great opening video about how higher education is critical to economic development, but that one size of education cannot fit all. Different models can serve different needs.
Then video from Student Experience Lab about student experiences. Some key points they've found:
Many students unprepared for University experience.
Drowning in bureaucracy
Pressures of HE can be daunting
Want to work on their own
Learners want more than a piece of paper at the end, they want to achieve something outside of the classroom.

Director of Student Experience Lab talking about new models of education.
Not all students are the same.
Competency based learning. Task based. They are piloting an online system where students perform a series of tasks and demonstrate a set of competencies.
Service based learning. Students need to get credit for some of the work based learning they do.
Put students at heart of the redesign of education. Involve them in the R and D process, that's what the Student Experience Lab is doing.

Now Elliott Maisie. Apparently he invented the phrase eLearning.
We're in the world of personalisation. Look at how TV has developed, most of us watch it on demand, with tablet on knee. Music personalisation was a game changer.
People want to learn in a very personal way. Learn what they want, when they want, how they want, where they want.
Social and collaborative learning important to some people, but not everyone is social.
Need real research and evidence base to design different education models.

Now talking about MOOCs. Most too easy. Everyone passes. No credentials attached to them.
They will develop.

e in eLearning is for experience

Collaboration will be key to developing different models.
We will be operating in a global society. Need to understand how that affects how we operate.

Never been a better time to rethink the rules.


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User Group

CiCS User Group this morning - always a good attendance. About 60 people from departments, a good mix of academics, technical support staff and professional service staff. We use it as a way of disseminating what we're doing to a wier group of staff than our own people. Sometimes if we feel a presentation is on a subject that might not be well know to the wider department we repeat it at a departmental meeting.

Today's meeting had 5 presentations.  First on the eLearning strategy which I mentioned yesterday and is being consulted on at the moment. One of the drivers for this is student demand for technology enhanced learning, they are looking for us to be leaders in the filed. We also have to be aware of the global market for students, and TEL could enhance our competitive edge. The strategy proposes an enhanced eLearning environment,an audit of digital resources, an online environment for public facing materials, a network of eLearning academic champions, more flexible teaching spaces and the provision of appropriate technology.  if you're interested in this area then I can strongly recommend our Learning Technologies blog which is excellent.

The second presentation was on our creative media facilities which I've blogged about before, and I think was new to many people in the room. We also gave them an update on where we are with the managed desktop, and this provoked an interesting discussion about what a staff managed desktop should look like, or even whether we should have one.

Switching to research, we then talked about the new N8 HPC facility which is obviously of interest to many researchers in the University.  Finally we told them about how our ICT support team had been making improvements to their services over the past year. Lots of very good stuff, and they got a well deserved compliment form a member of the group.

No blogging for a couple of weeks now - I'm off somewhere hot! 

The Learning Stack

First session this morning is on the Learning Stack, what's happening in the learning management space, and what's the future of the learning environment.

Currently we have lots of assets that aren't necessarily focused in a LMS, eg desktop and collaboration tools. At the same time, the industry is changing. There have been very few providers of point solutions eg Blackboard. But, new players are emerging. Also, there are "unknown" IT assets, things being used in departments that we in central IT often know nothing about including free, cloud based applications and social media applications.

Email, content management, productivity tools are common admin applications. Often, an LMS will have similar and overlapping functionality. Can we rationalise some of this redundancy?

Need to build a learning stack on a context platform. Underlying this is the student system, identity management etc. But, on top of this are many other applications.






We need to manage these in an agile way. Pieces can be taken out, and others added in. Management needs to be flexible to allow you to make quick decisions.

The big players, Blackboard, Desire to Learn, Moodle, Sakai, will look to be the underlying platform, or as many elements as they can get in the stack. The platform does not need to be one of these, could be Google, Microsoft for example.

Seem Universities have already gone down this route, and not used a traditional LMS, eg the Open University of Catalonia, which I visited last year. They have a very flexible system which uses many tools and can be delivered to all devices.

We must encourage and promote student involvement in the design of our eLearning systems. In most current models, it's a top down decision making process where academic staff decide how and what they use. We need to facilitate student choice. Learning stack environments should allow for student use, even if the academic staff do not set it up.

Learning stack challenges:
No top level view of the emerging education ecosystem
Governance budgets and campus politics
Resistance to change
No awareness of vendor roadmaps and how they match future trends
No assessment of current learning environment redundancies

Interesting session.


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The future's a Mole....

Change is afoot for learning technologies across the university. After over a year of review, planning, consultation, collaboration, piloting, technical know-how and lots of hard work -  our new virtual learning environment, Blackboard Learn 9.1 (or MOLE 2 as we call it), is going live.  From the 12th of September a new link will appear in our portal, MUSE, to connect students and staff to MOLE 2. We've been working with Departments to come up with a timescale for migration which suits them and approximately half will be on the new system this month. The rest will follow in 2012 and will remain supported on MOLE during 2011-12.

A big thanks to all colleagues who've worked hard and brought so much experience and expertise to the project.

This isn't the only change which is happening  - not only are we launching our new VLE but the teams which supports it and other learning technologies - from back-end technical support to day-to-day guidance and development for staff and students - are coming together for the first time within this department. It's an exciting time and a great opportunity for collaboration and partnership for all of us. I'm personally really pleased with the way things are going, and the future's looking good!

There's lots more information about the way we're supporting learning and teaching and MOLE2 here.


And if you're interested in our acronyms:
MUSE - My University of Sheffield Environment
MOLE - My On-line Learning Environment
They trip off most people's tongues without us even thinking about what they stand for - suspect a lot of people don't know they stand for anything.

.uni anyone?

In London at end of last week for UCISA Executive meeting - quite a short meeting, but some interesting discussions. We looked at the implications of a .uni or .university domain name for web sites under the new naming conventions. Would we want to use them? Would it affect our branding if other organisations used them? No answers, but plenty of issues.

John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is carrying out a review of Higher Education, and we looked at some of the papers that have been prepared for him to inform him of the issues. One of the contributions that is particularly relevant to us is the one from Sir Ron Cooke, until recently chairman of the JISC. He was asked to provide a contribution on becoming a world leader in e-learning, but his actual paper is entitled On-Line Innovation in Higher Education. It is worth reading - there is a good executive summary which outlines the three recomendations:

• a new approach to virtual education based on a corpus of open learning content
• revitalised investment into e-infrastructures
• development of institutional information strategies

UCISA will be looking closely at this paper and its recommendations to see how we can help take this agenda forward

The long haul home

The end of another excellent conference. Strange that after traveling several thousand miles, I attended two presentations from Sheffield. There was the one from SHU yesterday, and this morning one given by Martin Lewis and Phil Levy about the Information Commons. It was a very well attended session and the buzz in the room was that it was a very exciting project - lots of interest and people saying how fantastic it looked. And of course they would be right!

As I write this I'm sitting at the airport waiting for the long flight home. As usual a very useful few days - most of the sessions I attended were very good (and I made all of the 8am ones....). The networking opportunities are excellent, with colleagues from different countries, different institutions, suppliers and friends. I had a very useful hour with a Vice President of Blackboard about their roadmap and new product -Blackboard 9 - which will help to inform us as we review our elearning systems and agree our future strategy.

I've still got some sessions to write up for this blog, including the last one which was inspirational. I'll do them over the next few days.

Finally, one of the things that makes a conference is the company, and I was fortunate to be with a group of great people - colleagues who have become friends. Especially the cute furry badger - you know who you are!

Oh, and Happy Halloween everyone!

Tuesday continued

I was lucky to have two one-to-one sessions with Gartner analysts during the afternoon. First was to discuss mobile support - particularly how to support the multitude of devices students have, and how to support staff who have to travel abroad and therefore have relatively special needs. The latter is especially a problem in areas where data coverage isn't good or where our carriers don't have agreements with network providers. Lots of good ideas for a strategy which I hadn't thuought of before. The next was to discuss matters relating to higher education, and we spent a lot of time discussing the future of eLearning systems. This was prompted by the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, and the increasing number of institutions looking at open source eLearning products - especially Moodle.

Final couple of sessions of the day were on Unified Communications - bringing together your voice platform with email, IM, video conferencing etc. Again, a lot of importance being placed on context and intelligent notification systems.

It would be difficult to get away with a whole day without a mention of Digital Natives, and I went to a session on how the current generation of students will affect the workforce and how organisations might need to change. It's a commonly held assumption that this generation understand technology more than us - but they don't, they just use it more. They see technology as just stuff - they happily play with it and don't need to read manuals, and will make it work for them, but they don't know how it works, and can't fix it if it breaks. This session was intended to educate people about the sorts of technology in use - social networking Web2.0 type stuff, but in Universities we're fairly familiar with it, and I didn't particularly learn anything.

HE Day continued

Rest of conference blogging will probably be in note form - unless I get much free time - doubtful as I'm in sessions from 9 till 6 everyday, and with some one-to-one sessions with analysts as well! At least the sun has come out today.

Future of eLearning

Lots of Gartner survey data - 50% of courses delivered by elearning in some form – no increase over last year although increases noted in all previous years - has plateau been reached? Top two reasons for using eLearning are meeting student demand and pedagogical advantage – has moved to top. Previously top two were cost savings and generating revenue.

Another trend is OSS – huge increase – up to 35% now – 10% increase from last year.
But commercial software still used to deliver most courses ie lot of institutions trying out open source software - influenced by Blackboard/WebCT merger. Moodle being considered by 53% of institutions in EMEA compared to 23% in North America.

Have to consider changing students – growth in consumer devices, social software, virtual worlds, gaming. In 2000 the producers were in charge – controlled distribution, production, marketing. Not today – consumer are in charge – cheap production tools, multiple channels, new methods of discovery, viral and social networks.

Social networks -Myspace has 65m users with 1% yearly growth. Facebook has 28m users but 77% yearly growth. Can't ignore the gaming experiecce – look at what’s happening in online games. There are 77m World of Warcraft players - more than golf players!

Changing teaching – Is there a place for social software and virtual worlds in teaching?
Should social software/elearing platforms be combined?

Look at Peace Innovation on Facebook, a Stanford University course. You can see documents, videos, share files, and discuss the material. None of it delivered by the central IT service - so how can we add value? University of Mitchigan provides ther library search through Facebook, because that’s where their students are.

Virtual worlds - a demo of teaching applications in Second Life - Chemistry simulations, Genome island, Anatomical models, Clinical simulations.

Changing technology – change in sourcing options. Application overlap – course management systems, student information systems, library systems, CMS and repositories, CRM all have functionality which overlaps.

Notes to self! Must look at Second Life, ( should we buy an Island?), iGoogle (are our students using it?), RSS feeds to get info to students via Facebook etc (eg info from plasma screens, especaily PC availability).