Last week I attended the Digifest 2024. It’s nice to see some old peers and meet new people in person, and mostly support my colleagues (Dr David Pike and Alina Bajgrowicz) to present “Engaging students and staff with generative AI ethical dilemmas”.
Here I jot down some key takeaways. A few key speakers call themselves as Futurists. There were highlights on ‘community‘, ‘environment‘ and ‘immersion‘. For example, the 17 goals released by the United Nations, which well linked to our recent Academy for Learning and Teaching Excellence talk event about climate change and the use of En-ROADS Simulator. What can we do as an individual about our space environment, where 50k objects (4k satellites) in the space that can affect us? Dr Moriba Jah raised the issues of space leftover objects, and cleaning them is very costy. But I wonder why did human being generated these objects initially. Shouldn’t the ones who generated them take the responsibility for cleaning their leftover objects?
A few important but not new things are below that I should remind myself of more often:
In life/work, we should try not taking ‘assumptions’. This is quite hard as it connects to our prior knowledge and experience. I think it’s a challenge to our cognition ability, from awareness to consciously making changes.
Nowadays with online communications and mobile phones, persisting distraction is unavoidable. Don’t forget to use the Eisenhower Matrix.
Many things/ideas we already know. How we interpreting what we already know into future matters.
A few noticable changes are:
“Data analytics” is maturing, therefore enabler roles such as data engineers and data managers are required more for data governance and data interpretation.
By 2025 many new jobs need to be reskilled. More people will choose to work for themselves as entrepreneurs. “Adaptive to changes” and resilience are curcial in employability skills.
Four areas matter in workforce in future: Is it your interest, Are you good at it, Is it well paid and Does what you do make you feel adding value to the world.
Comparing to my Digifest experience in 2018, this time new technology (products) seems not so highligted/addressed. It has become a part of our work/life. There were hardly robots, big touch screen, and VR equipment.
Seems people didn’t tweet as much as before (the Covid time). I wonder if people have started to use LinkedIn more or have they moved to use other social media tools?
Recently I read the JISC Digital Transformation materials and unintentionally started to recap when and what components were noticed by me. What their maturity levels are at present in my practice. Hence I make a snapshot of my thoughts. The maturity levels are offerred as three levels from the Famework for digital transoformation in higher education:
Emerging to established
Established to enhanced, and
Enhanced to mature.
These components are my personal takens and they can be from the key themes of Technology, Teaching and Learning development, Digital and physical infrastructure, Organisational culture, and Operation and execution. A sense of their maturity levels at present is highly related to my work environment and my cognition.
Year
Attention-grabbing components in my field
Maturity Levels at present (2024)
2024
Digital transformation Employability Education 4.0
Digital transformation – Emerging to established Employability – Established to enhanced Education 4.0 – Emerging to established
2023
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Digital leadership Learning Analytics to improve retention
AI – Emerging to established Digital leadership – Emerging to established Learning Analytics – Established to enhanced
2022
Reducing Digital Shock Multi-factor authentication (MFA) Cyber security
Digital shock – Emerging to established MFA – Enhanced to mature Cyber security – Established to enhanced
2021
Closing Digital Poverty & Digital Divide (DP&DD) Hybrid Working Hybrid Learning
DP&DD – Established to enhanced Hybrid Working – Enhanced to enhanced Hybrid Learning – Established to enhanced
2020
Digital Wellbeing Gamification Microlearning
Digital Wellbeing – Established to enhanced Gamification – Established to enhanced Microlearning – Established to enhanced
2019
Digital Citizenship & Digital Etiqutte (DC&DE) Student Voice & Students as Partners (SV&SaP) Software as a service & Cloud services (SaaS&CS)
DC&DE – Established to enhanced SV&SaP – Established to enhanced SaaS&CS – Enhanced to mature
2018
Digital Capability Big Data Blockchain Collaboration & Collabrotive Learning
Digital Capability – Established to enhanced Big Data – Established to enhanced Blockchain – Established to enhanced Collaboration & Collabrotive Learning – Established to enhanced
2017
Digital Accessbility Digital learning spaces & Inclusive environment Blended Learning Business Intelligence & Data Analytics (BI&DI) Universal design & Inclusive Design (UX&ID)
Digital Accessibility – Established to enhanced Digital learning spaces – Established to enhanced Blended Learning – Established to mature BI&DI – Established to enhanced UX&ID – Established to enhanced
2016
Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
EDI – Established to enhanced GDPR – Enhanced to mature
2015
E-learning benchmarking Digital Security
E-learning banchmarking – Established to enhanced Digital Security – Established to enhanced
2014
Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality (VR&AR)Â e-Assessment Bring your own device (BYOD) Personalised Learning Agile methologogy & change management Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
VR&AR – Established to enhanced e-Assessment – Established to mature BYOD – Established to mature Personalised Learning – Established to enhanced Agile – Established to enhanced MOOCs – Established to mature
2013
Open Education Resources (OER) Flipped Learning Virtual Classroom 3D printing
OER – Enhanced to mature Flipped Learning – Enhanced to mature Virtual Classroom – Enhanced to mature 3D printing – Enhanced to mature
2012
Creative Commons (CC)
CC – Enhanced to mature
2011
Mobile Learning (M-Learning) Digital Literacy Digital Natives
M-Learning – Enhanced to mature Digital Literacy – Established to enhanced
2010
QR Code Various content creation tools Web 3.0 / Semantic Web
QR Code – Enhanced to mature Content creation tools – Enhanced to mature Web 3.0 – Established to enhanced
2009
Social Networking
Social Networking – Enhanced to mature
2008
Learning management system (LMS)/ E-learning system / Virtual learning environment (VLE) Community of Practice (CoP)
VLE – Enhanced to mature CoP – Enhanced to mature
2007
Information Storage and Retrieval (IS&R) Information Literacy
IS&R – Enhanced to mature Information Literacy – Enhanced to mature
2006
Web 2.0 Open Source Content Management Systems (CRM)
Web 2.0 – Enhanced to mature Open Source – Enhanced to mature CRM – Established to mature
2005
Social Media Social Learning
Social Media – Enhanced to mature Social Learning – Enhanced to mature
I haven’t written blogs for a while due to my job and personal conditions have been changing.
I realised the “Dunning Kruger effect” on me here as I thought I will keep writing and maintaining my blogs as usual. This over-positivity and self-ability estimation made me understand myself even better. I had draften a couple of posts in my spare time over the year, but haven’t completed them. Let’s not slip this one again.
With two previous attendance experience of ALT conferences, I know it’s often compact and full of interesting sessions (see the programme details). I favour the ALT community not only because the variety of professionals who openly share their practices, experiences, lessons, expertise and visions, but also due to its reflective approach to CMALT (It’s not a life certificate but an ongoing reflective practice). Despite my institution didn’t/does not support my SCMALT membership, I continuously encourage my colleagues to achieve one. “Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time.” (Clear, 2018, p.250).
It’s the 30th anniversary of ALT. There are also many changes about ALT. I am pleased to get the opportunity for attending the ALT conference online, which I unfortunately could not gain the benifits of meeting and interacting with old and new peers in person, however, it did allow me to be away from my work emails/Teams messages to some extent. It indeed allows me to gain insights, learn from peers, and check my practices.
Things I very appreciated are (only list a few here):
I can play the livestream sessions from the start if I was late to join (It’s like traveling through time, isn’t it?) or if I want to switch and join in a different session during a presentation. On the spot, it would be discouraged to leave one session room and go to another room in the middle of sessions because it’s impolite as well as can end up missing both session parts. The technology brings such flexibility well.
The platform strcuture is clear and easy to navigate.
The support guide sources are very useful.
It covers wide range of rich timely topics.
A few inconvenient things are:
The vevox.app seems not connecting to different sessions and I couldn’t check back a session’s questions page easily (I might not get how to use it in a right way.).
The slides related to each session are unvailable from the session box, which I haven’t worked out how to get them yet.
The online view of the presentation screens in some rooms was small and blurry. It’s difficult to see the content clearly.
In a couple of sessions, the sound was not recorded, and I didn’t know how to tell them.
I started to think more of leadership not only because of my position/team/institution but also because of the situations and culture that I wasn’t facing before.
Anne-Marie Scott‘s keynote speech covers her perspectives on leadership and her experiences and tips on leadership. There are not many new points but how these points are put into practice does matter a lot. These include taking a step at a time, planning for multiple scenarios, leading by developing others, qualifying your time, taking time for refill and refocus, and building trust. I learned that we need to accept the complexity and uncertainty in our work. To me, trying to simplify and change it is like fighting back against the pull of entropy.
From Tim Neumann, Rich Osborne, and Abbi Shaw’s session “Distributed Leadership in Digital Learning: Agile Adjustments, Brisk Breakthroughs and Controlled Chaos”, I learned an Agile project management approach. I quite like the reflective way of viewing how they have led digital learning strategy and practice changes.
“Digital shock’” was a new term to me even though its explanation wasn’t new to me. It’s like a buzzword in the conference, which made me think of the “digital natives”. I guess this term was from the JISC International students’ digital experiencereport. The session “Equity, diversity and inclusion: understanding international students’ ‘digital shock’” delivered by Elizabeth Newall, Tabetha Newman and Diana Catana and the Day 2 Keynote Student Panel presented many examples of “Digital shock”. Linking to my own expereince, after moving from a Russell Group university to a young culturally diverse university, I have been facing enormous requirements for improving digital learning services for “digital shock” students: 25% of the student population are international, 70% are mature returners to eduation, and 15% of the student are part-time. Many of them don’t have a laptop, need a lot of extra support for academic writing and understanding computer applications, or don’t know how to seek help. Recalling my own experiences as a mature interenational student 20 years ago, I had a good laptop, had a small cellphone without using wifi, had enough support of academic writing (not by using technologies like Turnitin, ChatGPT, Grammarly or Studiosity but from staff), and had a personal tutor. The big differences between that time and now perhaps are the mobile devices, VLE, social media, AI, and rapidly increasing requirements for good Internet and Wi-fi connections and digital literacy support.
From Coline Loughlin and Ben Parker’s session “Investigating the Relationship Between Virtual Learning Environment Engagement and Academic Outcomes Using Learning Analytics“, I learned that students spend 60 hours on average on viewing content, with a range of 12 hours to 75 hours. It’s interesting to see a pattern that they are trying to find. To the current stage, they noticed that over the point of 45 hours, the positive correlation between students’ spending time on learning content and their assessment results does not continue. It becomes inversion correlation. I’d like to follow their next stage research.
The VLE review seems a common institution task over the last 5 years, especially during the pandemic time, people have seen its importance and constraints. As I am involved in our institution’s VLE review, I was pleased to learn other institutions’ experiences, approaches, and lessons no matter what platform they changed to. Will Moindrot and Ben McGrae’s session “Diamond ranking and kaleidoscope eyes: engaging stakeholders to tune-in to our VLE review” caught my attention. I made a brief comparison as follows.
University of Liverpool
My institution
Moved from Blackboard to Canvas
Not decided yet
To engage student feedback, they provided £50 Amazon voucher for students.
Some of us felt £25 Amazon voucher was enough, but a colleague who undertakes many student studies suggested £50.
They provided Tier 1 24/7 support.
We discussed about 24/7 support and found in fact, it’s difficult for us. I learned that our libraries actually hardly have out-of-hour staff.
Different tools: buddycheck, H5P, Canvas Studio
Studiosity, Mentimeter, MyProgress
Innovative approaches: student partnership; p2p community of practice
Similar to them, we used surveys and focus groups.
Findings: 54% of students use their Canvas mobile app Students did not immediately see the VLE as a space for peer-to-peer engagement.
Emerging results: mobile learning, more VLE training
Their findings of student opinion on VLE
I agree the view that VLE review is not about platform itself. It’s about how you use the platform. People could use the same platform for different purposes and ways. We should focus more on the student experience. When we review a VLE, we should ask what our insitution defines our VLE role and what’s its identity. This is from the session “Digital Platforms – Mind the Gap” by Zac Gribble. I also enjoyed learning from the Day 3 Keynote speech from Satwinder Samra: “Keynote Collaborative Practice: Designing, Communicating and Diversifying Architecture”. His drawing of user experience illustrates what we are doing in our VLE review which is reviewing technologies use and supporting needs in the student journey.
In relation to digital transformation strategies and approaches, I got insights from Elaine Huber’s session “Leading transformational change in higher education: A critically reflective lens” (Note: they moved from Blackboard to Moodle). The Systemic Design Framework is new to me and I’m keen on learning from the Characteristics of Changemakers Series.
AI is another inevitable topic. In the session “Providing guidance and support to academic staff about the challenges and opportunities of generative AIs/LLMs”, Paul Finley and Matthew Wood shared three lessons in their practices of supporting AI uses.
Keep it simple.
Prepare for hooks, delivery, and materials. (I think their initial approach to encouraging staff to give AI tools a go is the same to what we are doing. However, I think we all need more designed activities for supporting students and engaging students as partners to explore AI uses.)
Planning for the long term.
The pre-recorded session “Corpus of student uses of AI foundation models to improve their assignment reports” from Eric Atwell and Noorhan Abbas presented how they designed assessments that studied Computing students’ experiences and opinions in exploring AI technologies to complete their assignments. The studies show the benefits and limits of using ChatGPT vs. BARD, Grammarly vs. Microsoft Word, and ChatGPT vs. Google Scholar, which is useful for us as we are studying our students’ experiences and views on using ChatGPT, Studiosity, and Grammarly.
I was thankful to hear student voices from the Day 2 Keynote Student Panel (the three students are from Russel goup universities). There are many valuable feedback and I joted down the ones that made me ponder further.
There needs more studies on understanding how online and viewing videos impact on student learning.
The need of more staff quick interactions.
The need of multiple ways of notifications about learning content updates.
The need of pre-support for digital skills before starting their university life.
Clarify course resources and requirements for technologies that are needed in study.
Not enough encouragement from staff to allow students speak up and ask for help.
Online and physical spaces for students to ask questions. (I know my previous insitituion has provided an online community plaform for all students and staff. I hope my current institution will reduce email uses for such purposes and provide a community platform too.)
It’s difficult to avoid using AI. The gap between students who have the knowledge of using AI well and who do not have knowlege of using it will become bigger and bigger.
Celia Popovic presented her study on staff’s opinions of turning on camera in online learning (see the session “Selfie Generation: but not in class”). I quoted the information from her abstract as follows. I’d agree that “… camera use is treated by instructors as a proxy for student engagement“. To be honest, I think there are more complicated elements behind the scene. For example, when with some specific people in the online session, poor Internet connections or solw computer devices, how much interaction it requires, encouragement to students, consistent guide to online etiquette across all online sessions, the insititution culture and so on. Based on my own experience of online meetings, people did not turn on camera each time. If it’s a webinar or one presenter leads a talk, most people will turn off the camera tacitly and when they speak, many of them will turn on their camera. If it’s a small group discussion, the people who don’t turn on the camera the first time tend to never turn on their camera. I presume in an online meeting that requires attendees’ interaction and input, turning off the camera would bring unnecessary challenges to attendees who have a hearing impairment. With my personal bias, turning off camera in a meeting with someone at the first time and not explaining why is unprofessional behaviour and disengagement attitude.
Reasons cited by students for turning off their cameras include (Castelli and Sarvary, 2021, Hariharan and Merkel, 2021): • Concern with appearance • Privacy, such as family or living arrangements visible • Discomfort with being looked at constantly • Doing the same as everyone else • Being judged for their behaviour (eg non-course related activities)
We use ‘EdTech‘, ‘digital technology’ and ‘learning technology’ interchangeably. We continuously face the tasks of procuring, selecting, evaluating, and developing technologies for supporting education needs. Anne-Marie Scott’s session “5 Things You Need to Know Before You Buy Edtech” was another wonderful presentation that shared tips of supporting EdTech and made me ponder our practice more.
It’s surely not enough to cover everything I learned from the 3-day conference in a blog post. I appreciate peers took the time to share their practices, projects, tips and insights. I appreciate ALT organised people in the EdTech area together, which allowed me to see the trend/changes, challenges, solutions, and possibilities and to reflect on my own practices. Congradulations to the ALT awards winners, who are excellent exemplars in improving edcuation.
Accessibility is not new. I keep an eye on the Ally usage data and try to understand how course accessibility has been improved. I noticed that the use of Alternative Format downloads increased a lot from 2020 to 2021 (55.15% -> 67.06%). However, the use rate of Instructor Feedback and Fixes through the Instructor Feedback increased much slower from 2020 to 2021 (13.97% -> 14.38%). Obviously this does not provide convincing evidence, but roughly shows that course content accessibility has been progressed slowly, not as quick as we’d expected.
I’d like to improve this, but I cannot complain anyone. Even myself I need to keep building the accessibility awareness and habits, and constantly remind people whenever I notice a potential accessibility issue. After a quarter of 2022, I thought to revisit what I had learnt about accessibility this year.
Second, we all become digital content creators to some extent. Even though we may know people who will receive our information are not disabled/impaired, do we bear in mind to avoid accessibility issues in our generated information (e.g., SMS, emails, blogs, documents, images)? We could generate accessibility barriers for someone. For example, my blog is using the default colours from the chosen theme. The posts have contrast issues that I haven’t improved. I like the SCULPT guidance and the THRIVES guidance. Both provide a checklist for us to use when creating accessibility content.
Third, taking some training courses/webinars (or catching up recordings) is a good way of reviewing and revisiting my knowledge and practice. I highly recommend two resources:
AHEAD provides ARK (Accessibility Resources and Know-How). The 3 free accessibility courses (Whole Institution Approach to Accessibility, Develop an Accessibility Statement and Digital Accessibility for Educators) are very useful. Even though it’s relating to Irish regulations, most information is valuable for people who work in the UK HE too.
On 8th I felt full of the joys of spring just a moment because I received my SFHEAcertificate. I haven’t had this kind of fleeting delight since I achieved a SCMALT. It’s a good time for me to write down why I did it and how I did it.
From March 2020, I started to work from home due to the effect of COVID-19. I realised that I had to cope with all kinds of emerging feelings like frustrated, lonely, homesick and anxious. The NHS mental wellbeing guide and the Cardiff University wellbeing support are helpful. However, it’s highly related to time-management and how much time in control. Without being able to travel long distances easily and often as before, I felt that setting a short objective and working towards it using my spare time has helped me to redirect my thoughts/emotions and stay positive and energetic.
Apart from my personal reason during the coronavirus pandemic, I also wanted to give SFHEA a go for a long time. I’d like to understand the area I work in more depth and see how my work quality is. However due to a set of changing priorities, I postponed writing an application year by year. Until May 2021 I achieved a Senior CMALT as an update of my CMALT portfolio, I decided to put the SFHEA application on the agenda.
The Fellowship Category Tool is a clear and useful self-analysis tool that helped me to map my work activities out with required categories. I had used it in February 2020 and May 2021. The two results were quite different. This could be my views of my practices have changed because over the past two years, things have changed so fast and I needed to be more responsive and accountable.
First, I appreciate the Cardiff University Education Fellowship Programme funded my application and provided options for me to apply for SFHEA either through the route of the Advance HE application or by the University new internal accreditation route. I joined one of the University cohorts starting in August and planned to submit it within three months by the Advance HE route. The tip here is to set a realistic goal according to personal circumstances, keep working on it but do not burn yourself out.
Second, I appreciate the support from Dr Jo Smedley who answered my questions at the beginning, provided helpful suggestions and recommended an awesome mentor Professor Derek Lang to me. The key tips I learned at the beginning include:
Jot down as many work activities that I had done as possible no matter I think it links to the required category directly or indirectly. (I will add more on this point later.)
Match each activity with required categories. (Although I have created an activity diagram when wrote my SCMALT portfolio, I found it’s not very helpful when I tried to reuse it. The activity cases were useful, but required categories in a SFHEA application is very different and its writing style is very different too (neither like a journal article nor a project report). It’s better to create an activity-category map from scratch.)
Select activities that represent my professional practice which have impacted on student learning the most. This will compose the first draft.
It’s about reflecting on why I did what I did.
The application needs to show I am very proud of my work as it has positive impact on student learning. (I wasn’t very confident as I felt my work was far from outstanding. It’s like boast myself.)
Third, I can’t thank Professor Lang enough for all that he had helped me in this journey. Writing is never an easy task for me as I often spend a lot of time on choosing proper words, thinking of the grammar and organising my thoughts. Apart from reflective writing itself, a more important thing was to clearly know – “Why I did what I did“. Thus having a brilliant mentor is crucial. His critical comments, supportive advice and answers to my questions really hit the bullseye. We emailed back and forth over 4 months until the 5th version, he agreed that I could submit. It took me about seven months from starting to prepare the writing to the submission. I guess most applicants didn’t spend so long. (I remember it said that SFHEA applicants spend 5-8 days on writing for their applications.) The key tips I gained include:
I have read some useful support resources and examples from other SFHEA members before started my first draft (I listed them at the end). I noted down some points that I hadn’t thought of and put them in my draft to remind myself. Although they are not in the same context, it’s worthy of learning from other members. If we were working in office, I might have had an opportunity to read some submissions from Cardiff University. But it’s impossible at the time. Hence, if you are preparing for your application, do remember to ask your institution if you could read some of the previous submissions from your institution.
“I work in Professional Services. My practice is in IT support, am I suitable for applying?” – We have this question is because we see the FHEA as a CPD route for academic staff. Considering our daily activities, we felt our impact is indirect. I said ‘we’, as I know many people work in a similar role to me would think CMALT is a closer CPD route for us. What I am trying to say is it is not a problem for professional services staff to apply for SFHEA even though you have not achieved FHEA certificate already. Reflect on the work that you have put a lot of effort on and you believe it’s beneficial for students. I revisited the Senior Fellowship Applicant guidance notes and the UKPSF Dimensions of the Framework – staff in learning support roles a lot. Very useful guides for non-academic staff. Remember it is to assess our impact and influence rather than assess what we did because we are in a senior position or an academic position. It does require us to prove leadership (e.g., strategic thinking, effective decisions).
It is all about student learning (experience). As I was not teaching students or leading an educational programme, it’s easy to diverge and wrote about our system/services enhancement. Remember any chosen activity in your application should be a story of how you have enabled, empowered and enhanced student learning.
I spent a lot of time on thinking, questioning my activity examples, and rewriting each example. Remember a well-structured application helps readers/assessors to see your practice (why you did what you did) clearly. I had a battle in my mind regarding a decision of the structure (see my example). My mentor said I was overthinking a bit. One paragraph for one activity is fine. I hope you do not have this problem.
It’s time consuming to search old emails and my support tickets in order to collect strong evidence (e.g., how I communicated, what others’ feedback or comments about my approach, any changes on students, my insights, etc.). It’s also time consuming to generate accurate stats in order to evaluate/measure my impact (and consequences) in terms of one of my activities. Thus, if you are preparing for your application, collect all this kind of information (both qualitative and quantitative) while you see them and put them together for later use.
Linking to the point 1 above, once you have an activity example in mind, it’s better to quickly write a brief summary for the activity using a 5-sentence structure: one sentence about what it is; one sentence about why you did it; one sentence about what approach/skills you used; one sentence about how students have been affected from it; and one sentence about what data show the impact. In this way, you can easily see if it’s a good example; you can then either abandon it or expand on it.
It’s important to write concisely and clearly. Although it doesn’t sound many of the limit of 300 words Context statement, 3000 words RAP, 3000 words Case studies and 500 words Citations, when English is not your first language or you do not write articles often, you can easily go over the word count. At the beginning, don’t worry too much about the word count, rather make sure it’s reflective and not too descriptive. At the later stage, simplify. I asked a friend (who knew little of my work) to help me cut out sentences and paragraphs which might not add more meaning into the whole application. In addition, here is a very beneficial advice from my mentor: “Try to cut out some of the connecting words and sentences. Does a sentence actually say something, or is it just there as a filler? Be brutal!“
I had questions such as “Do I have to cover all UKPSF aspects in the RAP” and “Do I need to mention Case Study one and two in the RAP”. The suggestion was as long as all covered across the whole document, it’s not necessary. Here is my matching map, you can see that I did not mention all categories (D3.I to D3.VII) in my RAP.
When you plan, do include possible unavailability such as annual leave, busy exam/assessing time and/or unforeseen things beyond your control.
Last but not least, I’m very grateful to my referees. I faced a difficulty of choosing a referee because most people who I closely worked with are professional staff who may not know SFHEA much. Although I have supported many academic staff and students, I didn’t have long experience of working with them, especially the curriculum development type of activities. I worried that academic staff was unwilling to comment on my record of effectiveness in supporting teaching and learning. The tip here is asking anyway. Provide enough details to them so that they know what the requirements are and how they can support you. People genuinely like to help others.
Embrace both compliments and criticism in the journey. Accept the emotions it brings. If I can achieve it, you can too.
Useful resources (Many thanks to the creators and sharers, highly recommend them):
One of the benefits we have since pandemic last year is many conferences/events that were used to be fewer chances for us to attend due to budget have become free for attending online. #BbWorld21 is one of them. I want to express my gratefulness and appreciation for these organisers. They have made a lot of effort on supporting wide communities, and provided opportunities for us to carry on knowing the latest research, new development, use cases, challenges, solutions, trend, and take time to rethink our own practice. Indeed great thanks to the presenters too.
BbWorld 2021 was taken on 13-15 and 20-22 July. Because of different time-zones, most sessions were at afternoons and in evenings in BST. I realised that I have already accumulated a list of need-to-watch-later recordings from different resources, so I attended a few sessions that I thought would be the most useful for and relevant to my work in hand, and gave up most sessions that were of my interest. This is one of tips I learned and made changes of – to use my time more efficient and live a mindset of not feeling that I have missed important information. As I know that selected sessions and content will be available in the event platform in the next 30 days, and later will be available in the Blackboard Community site.
My first focus was the Roadmap sessions as they provided the latest updates from the supplier. It’s vital for us to learn if any expected functionalities will be delivered and we can feed them into our own action plan. I like the plan of development was presented by time ranges: current available, 1-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6 months above. However, I have to check back roadmap recordings later if I want to find some specific development information. I was thinking if Blackboard could provide an online active Roadmap version (something like this), it might be even better for all customers to have an overview and find a plan of a specific functionality when they want to. I’m sure internally Blackboard has such methods of developing products.
I attended three sessions in this topic of Accessibility and Ally, from Michael Shaw (University of Lincoln), Fiona MacNeill (University of Brighton) and a group of Accessibility Champions (Adam Elce, Claire Gardener, Kristen McCartney-Bulmer and Ben Watson) who shared their views/experiences.
The University of Lincoln developed an Accessibility Toolkit, which is for supporting digital content accessibilities. I have seen some universities have provided such support resources. I think in my institution, I developed a guide as a tech guide to Ally which is for VLE content, rather than for wider digital content. Our web team developed some guide to accessibility for web content. What my institution needs to improve is to combine materials created by different support teams together, redesign and make them as an institutional accessibility support source.
Seems many universities have provide Accessibility mandatory training as a staff CPD course. This is a good way to make staff be aware of why and how to improve accessibility quickly. I think there are some well-developed Accessibility training courses that universities can adopt or introduce to their staff if they haven’t had developed their own Accessibility training courses.
UX design is not new, however it seems that people have talked about it increasingly since last year. I first learned it from one of my courses – Interaction Design in 2003, which made me realised cognitive and social issues. In the Ally European User Group meeting of March 2021, Fiona MacNeill presented her experience of supporting Blackboard Ally adoption in the University of Brighton. She shared more in the #BbWorld21 too. I have learned from her presentations:
Project planning template and interactive whiteboard tool – Mural template.
Engaging activities – using escape rooms to bring learners into the accessibility learning journey.
If you are interested in UX design and interaction design, the UDL Guidelines and IDEO may be helpful as a start.
Other popular topics include Application integration, Data Analytics and Blackboard Ultra courses.
I haven’t used the Developer Documentation site yet, it is definitely very useful for people who support integration between systems and understand how to use Blackboard data and reports. Blackboard provides regular training webinars, and supporting courses via the Blackboard Academy for people to learn the Ultra course. They are good resources if your institution does not provide training. I do recommend people register Blackboard Community and the #BbWorld21 to check any topics that are of interest to you.
At the beginning, I was thinking to use “online education” in the post title rather than “education”. However nowadays in HE, how many courses/programmes without online activities? Do I need to specifically say “online”? Cardiff University CESI colleagues have put great effort on making the Teaching and Learning Conference 2021 happen online. A big thumb up to them. I have managed to attend some sessions today. Here to jot down my takeaways.
To discuss the online education, two hours were not enough. Considering the wonderful keynote talk from Dr Tim Fawns, I’d like to reflect on three things particularly.
Self-directed learning
Self-directed learning (also self-regulated learning) is one of the theories I like to use in my practice, especially when I generate support materials. Tim mentioned it in the teaching context. Although I don’t teach, I embed this idea into my design and often explain to people why I designed it in such way. I expect learning materials that learners visit are latest, accessible, easy to follow, and mostly relevant to their context. This may not be related to their specific discipline/study, but absolutely about the feature/functionality that they use, for instance, it helps them to learn what could happen if they do not click the “Submit” button after uploading their Turnitin assessment. Tim pointed out that we should not leave the teaching materials for students to self learn, rather we need to tell students what it is, what they could do and how they may go through the materials in line with the topics. I nodded indeed. I often provide feedback channel with support materials and track the usage data regularly to see how users have interacted with the materials. However, unlike teaching and learning, the challenge for us is that most users are unwilling to spend time on telling us the details of their experience and what exactly are the barriers for their use. Apart from I take the ownership of this process and make it as a research project, then I could go to collect such data from users. Otherwise there is little opportunity for us to really look into the outcome of self-directed learning in our practice. This is also an ongoing challenge for IT – how much research we would have time to do when evaluating our delivery design in supporting teaching and learning.
Technology & pedagogy
Over the years, people criticise that technology drives pedagogy. Although I work in IT, I never felt so. With working experience in software development, we always take users’ requirements the first. So from my bias view of supporting users, the software is formed by users. Therefore systems we support are largely shaped and improved by what users wanted it to be. On another hand, I do see the impact of technology on people (education), such as who don’t need mobile phone and the Internet over last year? Technology impacts our methods. I see them interplay. I guess the view of “Tech drives pedagogy” was related to how much control/administration that users have and who have the ownership of evaluating, purchasing and supporting technology. I like Tim’s model of technology and pedagogy (see below tweet).
I have been guilty myself of simplifying things by saying ‘pedagogy before technology’ but really like @timbocop’s ‘entangled’ model #LTCU2021pic.twitter.com/G0pssvMaMP
I agree Tim’s viewpoint of honesty. I think no matter it’s teaching or supporting teaching, honesty is a necessary rule if we really want to engage the learners. I mean the teacher and the student are both human. Honesty is the invaluable trait in building human relationships. The purpose of education is to gain knowledge, to learn skills, to grow, and to explore unknown. When I was a child, I had a mindset that a teacher is not for questing how much they know, a professor knows everything of the subject; a doctor knows everything of their field. Questioning a teacher in classroom is strange. I think I started to learn critical thinking and understand why professors encouraged us to inquire when I took my Masters programme. I wish I had been led to see honesty of whom a teacher is in an early age.
More
In addition, I have enjoyed a lot of Allan Theophanides‘ “Pecha Kucha” presentation of A-Z of LT. May be because the topic is so close to my daily work. I like the little timer on each page and the simplicity of how he explained the technologies.
At today’s lunch time, there were two interesting sessions that I equally wanted to participate. However, time! time! One became a catch-up recording later, and one was live experience.
@BlackboardEUREuropean User Group meeting which includes the latest news of Blackboard Collaborate and Teams/Office integration in Blackboard Learn, and UX content design.
I attended the second one as I realised the growing requests about accessibility comes. It’s important to keep my knowledge up-to-date. I think the webinar recording will be available on the AbilityNet website. Susi Miller‘s presentation slide is available already, which I do recommend for checking up.
My takeaways are below.
Susi shared advices of making elearning content accessibility based on her experience of supporting accessibility. I quickly recalled what I know and checked the information of improving accessibility that I have provided in our institution during her presentation.
The eLearning accessibility dos
Among the six dos, I haven’t “made sure all interactions and media players are keyboard accessible” with the content I created. I relied on the applications that I used. This is an aspect that I need to learn how to apply it in my practice.
The eLearning accessibility don’ts
I found an ongoing challenge of “Don’t create inaccessible links” is the content provider/creator needs to keep checking any broken links as links to resources can be changed often. Ensuring links can be automatically redirected is essential but this is not always provided.
“Don’t use time limits unless learners can control them” is a very helpful suggestion! I once supported an academic quiz creation, which the staff member was very keen on providing a timer on each question page where they wanted to limit the students’ respond time. I was wondered this design. Now, I can see the potential accessibility issues it can bring to students who use screen readers.
It’s very useful for us to see the students’ feedback about the accessibility issues.
Susi’s book «Designing Accessible Learning Content». I will explore the design framework which I was thinking could be used for us to communicate with end users.
Learned there is a tool called “NoCoffee Vision Simulator” (a free extension), which can help us to understand issues faced by people with vision problems.
Since last year, there have been rapid increasing opportunities for us to participate in online conferences and activities in relation to eLearning. This kind of free availability never happened before the Pandemic outbreak. The good is that I have many upcoming options of learning opportunities, such as to learn the latest good research results, practice cases, recent issues/trend/concerns/discussions. I take them as CPD opportunities. The bad is to hugely challenge efficiency and productivity regarding my time and workload. Considering my time, energy and wellbeing, I have given up some. I was off twitter for about 7 months although I use Twitter as a rich learning resource. I had to tell myself it’s ok to miss some resources from there.
Looked back my calendar, and noticed that I have attended at least one conference/event that has included the topic of accessibility monthly since January. There are more forthcoming.
January – Cardiff University IT Staff Conference 2021
The Kent Digital Accessibility Conference 2020 was like yesterday, and I took some time to attend the Kent Digital Accessibility Conference 2021 (You can get all session details from this website). I have to admit that I have learned a lot from the University of Kent Digital Enhanced Education webinars and the Digital Accessibility annual conferences.
Accessibility is in my daily practice and over a year I have made changes as follows.
Remind colleagues to check and improve accessibility of their documents if I notice a problem.
Suggest people to be aware of the accessibility issues and improve content accessibility if I assist their online courses.
Keep my knowledge updated and keep learning from communities and accessibility experts.
Share resources in our internal community.
#KentDigitalAccessibility2021 was a super accessibility event. I’m grateful of the organiser and presenters’ effort and time. I was able to attend all sessions in the morning and one session at afternoon. Here I recap what I learned from the event.
First, there are many support that we can get to help our institutions to improve (digital) accessibility. Although I don’t work in a role of accessibility support particularly, accessibility is with everyone for everyone. This is not new from this event, but I found the Accessibility maturity framework developed by Alistair McNaught Consultancy and AbilityNet is a very supportive tool that helps institution leaders to define what need to change. I learned more from talks from Dan Clark, Michael Vermeersch, George Rhodes and Richard Morton.
From Michael Vermeersch’s talk, I know that I have recognised Microsoft accessibility features and are using them. I recently encountered an issue of “Check Reading Order” warning in a file, which I found it’s time consuming to fix if it’s a complex diagram in PowerPoint with many animations on the diagram items. I was glad to see Michael demonstrated these features. Furthermore, I learned the Microsoft developed support materials. A diagram of how to enable accessibility would be useful for us to check how we have done so far.
From George Rhodes’ talk, I learned findings of how Accessibility Statement prepared in FE. Again it addressed the “lack of initial individual engagement”.
AllAble finding VLE in FE
AllAble research finding mystery shopper
AllAble research actions so far
From Richard Morton’s talk, I learned the mobile apps exceptions complying with WCAS 2.1 level A and level AA. It is an app or not an app. How to test mobile apps. What happens about non-compliant apps and sites, and CDDO resources.
The criteria do not apply to apps
Second, understanding student needs is key. I don’t normally have opportunities to work with students and see how they use technologies and know barriers that technologies/content bring to them in relation to accessibility. Therefore, talks like what @Paul_GeorgEnder and Wayne Wilsdon have given about their experience and thoughts are very welcome. This caused me to think two things below.
They need to use assistive technologies. In the session I noticed that the camera facing Wayne Wilsdon was not in a good angle. However he wouldn’t know what was the right angle due to blindness apart from someone told him. No one next him could give him a hand neither. So I was thinking – Don’t we have AI technologies such as eye movements, face recognition and video surveillance? If the camera could recognise his position, adjust angle automatically and captured his movements for this presentation purpose, it would improve everyone’s online experience, wouldn’t it?
I would expect in future there is a conference that only students as presenters to show us their accessibility awareness, their experience of the impact by accessibility improvement, their research and stories about accessibility.
Third, as usual, some new resources to read and take some into my practice.
GDS (Government Digital Service) Accessibility videos. “The accessibility monitoring and accessibility capability teams and functions have all moved from GDS to CDDO” quoted from Richard Morton’s presentation. CDDO refers to the Central Digital and Data Office.
Thank Blackboard and the community. This is the second time that I attended the Blackboard TLC Europe online (26-28 May #TLCEUR2021) due to the pandemic impact. Appreciated the opportunity. The advantages of attending it include:
The event was organised as half-days across three days which could leave me another half days to deal with my daily work.
It’s free for anyone who are interested in Blackboard to attend. It helped people who didn’t have opportunities to attend this kind of conference because of funding limitations, far distance, time and so on. All session recordings are available for us to play back (until 24 June 2021).
Gaining ideas about some of the work I am doing. Learning from peers about how they have tackled issues and supported teaching and learning during the lockdown situation. Catching up the recent uses and topics that I don’t have many opportunities to notice. Getting inspired by their work, experience and stories. I saw self-motivation, curiosity, bravery and collaboration from Helen Sharman‘s talk. I saw zest, self-regulation, positive and flourish from Charlie Cannon‘s talk.
I wouldn’t be able to attend all sessions in the conference. Here I highlight those helped me the most.
Assessment
Requirements for supporting eAssessment and online procurement have been ramping up since last year, not only because the teaching and learning move to be online and distant, but also the possibilities of adopting new approaches. We need to redesign assessment, feedback and procuring approaches and review its policies, process and technologies. The discussions about “Assessment FOR learning or Assessment OF learning?” made me think more about why do we assess learning, the tools: Turnitin, Blackboard assessment tools, Xerte LIT/xAPI, Respondus and Möbius, how we have used them together to support different types of assessment, what are the constraints and what are changing. The resources below are added into my following-up reading list.
The MoCo user group is one of my favourite groups in the Blackboard Community. Amy Eyre and Helga Gunnarsdottir have made a lot of effort on leading the group. I have got a lot of support about Collaborate Ultra from the group. Helga’s talk about a UWE’s solution of supporting assessment using Collaborate Ultra showed an innovative example of what we could create based on users’ requirements. The UWE’s own developed Collaborate Assessment Tool bridged the gap that the current Collaborate Ultra cannot do and an inconsistent workflow due to technology limitations between online sessions, assessment and gradebook. The Live Assessment Decision Tree (made by Xerte) is also a showcase of how Xerte technology can be used to assist users to choose a suitable technology support solution.
Data and Analytics
Data is powerful when it’s used for the purpose. Students can use it to learn their own learning progress and be more aware of their learning experience. Educators can use it to identify learning issues and analyse the effectiveness of a course design. Managers can use it to investigate a tool’s adoption and monitor the use of the service. Data-driven approaches became a trend. For me, it is what we often called something “evidence-based”. The key of using data is how we can retrieve data from different relevant systems easily and securely and ethically, and flexibly customise them to be presented as different formats that fit into the users’ demanding. This is an area that I’m interested in exploring sooner.
Dr Charles Knight‘s talk (University of Salford) has shed light on the issues on understanding users’ real requirements when providing Blackboard’s Data and Analytics solutions. Very useful advice.
The pandemic lockdown assisted the rapid changes of online learning. It required vendors to improve the products responsively and quickly. The Blackboard Roadmap session always provides us an idea of what would be delivered and considered so that we could made corresponding decisions and work out solutions according to the institution’s strategy. It’s very clear from Bill Ballhaus‘s talk that SaaS, Blackboard Data, Ultra course experience, personalised learning are their focus. I was delighted to see the improvement of these features below and expect the upcoming release.
System stability when supporting hugely increased uses
Proctoring Framework – Ultra Course View (now)
MS Teams Integration – Ultra Course View (Pilot, now)
Audio/Video Feedback – Peer and Course Announcements (1-3 months)
Gradebook use improvement (1-3 months)
Collaborate Gallery View to students and side by side with content (1-3 months)
Automated Captioning with Collaborate (1-3 months)
Maximum upload file size limit (3-6 months)
Pronouns, Name Pronunciation, Preferred name (3-6 months)
WYSIWYG Instructor Feedback (3-6 months)
Blackboard Learn group integration with breakout groups and Collaborate (3-6 months)
Last but not least, I think people (especially those who use technologies daily) could stay clam when technology failed. Perhaps this is a notable outcome of remote online working since pandemic outbreak.
Web n' Circle 