UCISA Women in Technology in Liverpool WiT25 – UCISA
Pink WiT
At WiT Katie and I spoke about what works in our efforts to establish career paths for women into some of the areas of technology where they are currently under-represented. We presented a number of case studies from the last 10 years of LTW internships and trailed the research work which will be going on this summer to track the career paths and destinations of so many intern alumni over time. We were un-phased by the fact that the conference organisers had failed to upload our slides sent in advance and so we had to just wing it for while.
At Echo I enjoyed a very glamorous evening of castle, caves, culture and canards about sagittarians and luddites before proving that I would say boo to a goose.
The book is designed to support new lecturers who are joining HE from a background in a professional area or career rather than a career in academia. These new teachers draw on different background knowledge and I think it has been a gap in professional development in universities to recognise that they need specific help to get up to speed in our cultures and languages alongside the expertise they are bringing in their area of practice. Too often academic colleagues try to exclude professional people by using academic jargon or referencing arcane local processes.
My contributions to the guide are about the IT support, learning technology, VLEs etc which new colleagues can find for their teaching. Please do buy a copy and ask your library to buy it for colleagues.
another lovely slide theme created for me by the LTW Graphic Design team.
I was delighted to be invited as to National College of Ireland to speak as part of their ‘Assuring Quality in Fully Online Programme Delivery’ event last week. A lovely excuse to visit Dublin again.
I chose a gardening theme which enabled me to talk about the time it takes to grow online learning and the investments we make in ensuring that there are good growing conditions and that native plants can thrive.
To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow
-Audrey Hepburn
It was my pleasure to sit on a panel of women leaders talking about our careers in tech. We had a friendly audience and the event was very well organised by Ellen, Fiona and Katie. One of the questions from the floor was about women who have inspired us, and we all chose women who we knew or had worked with, not necessarily in tech, but who embody the character and behaviors that we aspire to.
I mentioned a colleague from University of Leeds who was my mentor briefly, before she went on to bigger things, Miriam Zukas. Miriam was/is a professor of adult and lifelong learning, and she didn’t have a Wikipedia page. But now she does. Miriam Zukas – Wikipedia . Wikipedia pages are not really the place to celebrate the way people do their work and the impact they have on people because it is hard to cite, but this oration from Birkbeck’s master sounds a lot like the woman I knew. Miriam Zukas — Birkbeck, University of London .
Another question from the floor was about specific things we each do, every day, to optimise our resilience and success at work. I said blogging, obviously.
Using the right platform for your learning activity
We’ve created an infographic which we hope helps explain the collection of platforms available for University of Edinburgh colleagues to use, the strategy for each and which should be used for different learning/teaching activities. The graphic talks through the benefits of using each platform. Each platform is designed with a particular use in mind, providing features to suit the specific use-case/audience. We hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions, please contact us via the IS Helpline.
Now it is time to wave goodbye to University of Oxford’s WebLearn. There is a celebratory event this week to remember our time working with WebLearn and all the support and innovations we shared in running and using the system.
The Leeds and Oxford teams met in Oxford in 2005 to discuss development of Bodington in collaboration with Sakai. When Leeds University opted in 2006 to select a proprietary system (Blackboard) for their next VLE, Oxford was left as the sole large-scale developer of Bodington and this situation was untenable. It was at this point that Oxford decided to seek an alternative platform (with a bigger and better community) and chose Sakai Learning Management System, deploying it as WebLearn in 2008.
WebLearn Sakai was first installed at University of Oxford in March 2007 and I joined from University of Leeds in 2008, when it was just a baby.
Working with really talented open source development teams. Adam, Mathew, Colin, Roger and Colin taught me most of what I learned about open source and the potential for using technologies in unusual ways. I attended several Sakai conferences with them over the years and there always seemed to be people who really cared about the systems they built and the community involved in developing the product. The nice thing for me about WebLearn was that it was flexible enough to not be built on the same assumption as the large proprietary systems. Oxford at the time was not driven by a module catalogue which rolled over and refreshed every term. It was based around the teaching which was done by colleagues over many years and with different students groups. The starting place- that one goes to Oxford to ‘study with’ -puts the academic colleague at the centre of the teaching and builds the online spaces around them. Some colleagues at Oxford chose to have a place in the VLE for all their teaching, with resources for first years, third years, post graduates etc grouped within that. I was pleased that we were able to build that for them. It was nice that we were not in a ‘technology says no’ conversation’.
The Sakai Community was for me, a place to meet some very interesting colleagues and researchers, some of whom I still count amongst my friends (looking at you Nynke, Michael and Alannah). It was also a place with some big personalities, Fun evenings with Michael, Ian, Nathan and Dr Chuck.
I was also pleased in LTG and OUCS to have talented researchers who worked closely with as the WebLearn team to think about what we could discover about how VLEs and OER could support student learning. Liz, Joanna and Jill really were ahead of their time in bringing a bit of academic rigour to what we were doing.
The WebLearn training and support teams made sure our VLE met users needs and Fawei continued to promote and celebrate each use in departments and colleges. Adam has been continuously blogging it since 2009 2009 September | WebLearn Blog and projects using WebLearn regularly featured in the OxTALENT awards.
In recent years, after I left in 2014 to join University of Edinburgh, Oxford changed VLE again and opted for Canvas. People sometimes forget that when we move to a new VLE the learning technology teams still have to run the old one for several years to enable course to be taught-out and keep access to any materials which staff and students might need for archives, assessment or appeals.
After several years of running in parallel with the University’s new virtual learning environment (Canvas), WebLearn was finally closed in 2022 and decommissioned in mid-November 2024. At its peak WebLearn at Oxford had 47,000 users and hosted 101,000 separate sites.
Ursula Le Guin once said ‘We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do‘.
Last year more than 5000 people at University of Edinburgh showed up to learn new digital skills. 5210 to be exact. We ran more workshop events than ever before: 604, and we reduced our ‘no show’ rate by nearly 15%.
‘No Shows’ at free training events are a challenge for all training providers I expect. We are using new techniques to structure our programmes and get them as close to ‘at need’ as possible.
Having just launched a programme of AI training which is ‘sold out’ for months ahead, I think we might do even better this year at meeting demand in our organisation.
As you know, in December each year we do a round up of achievements over the last six months. Here’s a summary of the LTW achievements and initiatives from winter 2024, condensed into ten ‘lively’ bullet points by ELM AI:
Edtech Ecosystem Expansion: Launched a new short courses platform, successfully integrating it into our existing edtech ecosystem, attracting over 2500 learners across 200 courses, with a whopping 1 million page views!
Web Migration Marvels: Smoothly transitioned 161 websites to a new platform, involving the migration of 80,000 pages, 90,000 images, and training 800 colleagues, despite the hair-raising complexities of the ISG website debacle.
AI Adventures: Rolled out the SADIE project to explore ethical AI integration in educational technologies, sparking lively discussions and critical thinking across the board.
Digital Skills Dynamo: Delivered 305 sessions in our Digital Skills Programme, elevating 2593 learners to digital prowess and cyber savvy status.
Green Web Warriors: Launched a comprehensive initiative to promote sustainability in our digital estate, culminating in a report hefty enough to rival a master’s dissertation and recruiting three eco-conscious interns.
Caption Craze: Wholeheartedly embraced our captioning service, making automatic captions the new normal for Media Hopper Create videos, ensuring accessibility isn’t just an afterthought.
Migration Maestros: Completed a gargantuan migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, a logistical feat involving years of planning and a cocktail of technical and copyright debt.
Festival Frenzy and Windows Win: Navigated the summer festival season with flair while deploying Windows 11 across all teaching rooms—a double triumph in operational excellence and timing.
Induction Innovation: Refined our induction and onboarding processes for staff based on fresh feedback, fostering a quicker sense of belonging and smoother integration into our LTW family.
Community and Recognition Revelries: Celebrated the extraordinary efforts of LTW staff with numerous awards and recognitions, including Reward Vouchers and Staff Recognition Awards, proving every day is rewarding work in LTW!
LTW’s tapestry of teamwork weaved these achievements into an impressive display of collaboration and innovation, proving that when it comes to pushing the boundaries of educational technology and services, we definitely know how to put on quite the show!
Cool graphic designed by our cool LTW graphic design service
The University Web Strategy (https://edin.ac/web-strategy-2018) identified a programme of activities, including the development of new web publishing tools or web publishing platform.
“There is a fragmentation of technology, working methods and standards, whichleads to uneven and, in some cases, broken user journeys.” – University Web Strategy
The strategy stated that “it is important to recognise that technology is not a solution but an enabler. Whether delivered centrally or locally, there is a clear need to empower our staff by providing them with the intelligence, tools, standards and resources to attract and engage users.”
Building a New Platform
Our Web Publishing Platform (now named EdWeb 2) project’s aim was to create a web publishing platform for our publishing community within a strong web governance framework. Therefore, this project should not be viewed solely in isolation but within the wider context of the web strategy. The goal was to create a platform that could be continually improved, meet the immediate needs of our existing editorial base but also meet the needs of Schools and business units that had never used the central service for web publishing before.
The web strategy identified the following common approaches:
Improve the quality of our web estate and online channels through the adoption of an inclusive and supportive governance model
Enhance the accessibility and security of our web estate by establishing and evolving University-wide standards
Enhance solution and content quality by improving the digital skills of web publishers and practitioners; establishing a common understanding of web roles and capabilities; and delivering web publishing and management tools
“The strategy does not set out to answer the exclusive needs of a business area or address a single specific University activity. As a pan-institutional strategy, it establishes a framework for the use of web technologies, both centrally and locally, to achieve business goals.” – University Web Strategy
To address these common approaches the web publishing platform aimed to deliver a product that was flexible and geared for iterative improvement to support ongoing business and user demands.
The delivered solution needed to support central and local innovation, allowing website teams in schools to make use of and extend the product appropriately, aligned with agreed University standards and guidelines.
This project has delivered the platform and associated processes to create the web publishing services that will support this strategy.
This includes a high-quality, future-proof and long-term sustainable University web publishing platform, aligned web publishing services, training and a support model, all backed up by a team with the requisite knowledge and skills.
Successes
Planning
Platform training programme with the planning, development and roll out in very close collaboration with our Digital Skills team was very successful, and receiving excellent feedback (Phase 2 – Deliverable 1.3)
Major achievement to deliver a fit-for-purpose, web platform, fulfilling the targets set regarding flexibility, migrating over 60 sites live despite some of the complex issues faced by the project. (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.3)
Early and ongoing engagement with the service users, and the wider web publishing community, was essential to ensure the web platform developed in a meaningful way to address their external audience engagement needs. (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.2, 7.1)
The project has delivered a solution in line with the original University Web Strategy in terms of the flexibility offered and that the offering should appeal to Schools and business units that have never used the central service at all for their web publishing. For example the School of Chemistry now has a live site on EdWeb 2. (Phase 2 – Objective 4, Deliverable 4.1)
Developing for our Wider Community
The University of Edinburgh is a highly devolved organisation in terms of physical locations, organisational structure, decision-making and budgets, purposes, goals and audiences.
Aside from the central team, our community extends across the organisation, from system administrators and developers to UX and user-centred design practitioners, content creators and marketers, each operating with significant autonomy and responsibility for their own sites. We had to take this into consideration as early as possible in any decision-making process, and to emphasise the importance of user centred design, backed up by user research, and using the experience and expertise of staff around the University.
The new platform had to work for existing users of our CMS but also support the needs of our devolved community of developers and administrators who are responsible for building, developing and managing our wider web estate, from colleges and schools to individual research projects.
We chose to continue using Drupal as this platform and surrounding processes support highly distributed development, allowing code contribution back to a managed common modular code base.
Project Approach
The project was approached in two main phases, with the ultimate goal to have introduced the new web publishing platform and having all relevant EdWeb content and sites migrated to the new platform by November 2022 (the initial deadline for Drupal 7 end-of-life).
The deadline of completing the migration needed to be moved due to the extremely complex nature of the websites built in EdWeb, and the differences between the two platforms, as well as ongoing resourcing issues and is currently set for November 2024.
The project involved the application of Agile methodologies using the Scrum framework and has tried to use a user-centred approach to service design wherever possible.
“User-centered design is based on the understanding of a user, their demands, priorities and experiences and when used, is known to lead to an increased product usefulness and usability as it delivers satisfaction to the user. “ – Wikipedia User-centered design
Hoarding and storage of old stuff indefinitely is a challenging user behaviour for several of our platforms. Cloud storage costs the university money. Users may be unaware of the need to align with data protection rules and to reduce our impact on the environment, every little bit helps and we have a huge amount of cloud storage being used. Our first batch of deletions resulted in the total number of courses in Learn being reduced from 91k to 65k courses.
Our media platfrom has 69,000 items on it which have never been played.
Understanding digital sustainability is a key knowledge set for the future.
