Category: People, Place and Work

improving accessibility

Every year we take a snapshot of accessibility in our VLE. Over the summer 3,508 documents across 1,441 courses from across the University were reviewed against a defined selection of accessibility criteria by our excellent team of interns. The results were encouraging:

87.6% of documents reviewed were named appropriately (i.e. so that users can anticipate the contents in advance of opening the files)
Within the documents checked, 74.4% used a more accessible font (sans serif)
80.7% of documents were justified/aligned in a way that supports more users (i.e. not centre or fully justified)
Italics text is harder for some people to read in blocks, and 89.4% of documents contained no blocks of italics. The same counts for blocks of capital letters, and a whopping 97.9% of documents contained no blocks of capital letters.

Well done to all at University of Edinburgh who are changing their practice to be more inclusive.

The promise of video

I’ll be speaking at

Kaltura Connect Education Track 2023 – EMEA | Kaltura 28th November, London

I will speak about ‘The Promise of Video’

What do we expect from our media platforms? What do our students and users expect? How can we ensure that the promise of a generation of video is realised?

During academic year 22/23, we saw the highest rate of lecture recording ever seen at the University of Edinburgh.  Between Media Hopper Replay (lecture recording) and Media Hopper Create (media streaming and management) we saw more than 2000 days of media created last academic year, that’s nearly 5 ½ years of media.

I will look back at the last 10 years of my experience championing  media asset management in very ancient higher education institutions. Reflecting on the things which didn’t work the way we expected; the things which did work and spread like wildfire, and the things which continue to delight and surprise me for the future.

I chose my title because I was thinking about an incident at the start of term this year. Every year I have my fingers crossed that the start of term will go well, without any major incidents or business continuity challenges.

But it never does. This year it was RAAC

Suddenly we lost 6 of our biggest lecture theatres and teaching had to be relocated, fast.

To get venues with large enough rooms for this kind of teaching we were going to have to go off campus into city theatres and conference centres.   And even though we didn’t own, manage or run those venues, they all had to have lecture recording in place, for all lectures, because the students had been promised video.

The promise of video at University of Edinburgh is a key part of our offer- of our student experience. More than 450 lecture theatres are kitted out and more than 98% of all undergraduate lectures are recorded, turned around within 24 hours and available for students in the VLE.

Video has gone from being a WOW factor to being  a hygiene factor in only a few years.

Ada Lovelace Day 2023

 

Thank you to everyone who came to our Ada Lovelace Day celebrations -to listen to talks, make badges, edit Wikipedia, and generally celebrate women in STEM. Thank you as well to those who walked the Women in STEM trail and took their pictures with the inspiring women featured.

 

Special thanks to our guest speakers Prof Ruth King, Prof Frauke Zeller, and Bhargavi Ganesh, who engaged the room with their fascinating stories of space elephants, hitchhiking robots, tree rings, and steam boats. We were all inspired by their unique career paths and the curiosity they showed about the world around us. Their research demonstrated the importance of combining humanities with technology and data to innovate, and how women are vital to this innovation, just as Ada was vital to the founding of computer programming.

Unfortunately the day was tinged with sadness at the tragic loss of a colleague, but that served to remind me how important it is to gather and be together.

menopause at work

I was delighted to be invited out to our beautiful Easter Bush Campus at Roslin this week to deliver a session on the hot topic of menopause. We talked about feeling the rage and laughed about losing your nouns. Thank you to everyone who came along.

If you would like to organise a session like this for your dept, here’s the blurb:

Please join us at this workshop to discuss why menopause is a workplace issue.  One in ten women in the UK who worked during the menopause say they have left a job due to their symptoms. Are we at risk of losing some of our best staff at a time when they have the most wisdom and organisational knowledge? How can we adapt to ensure that all our colleagues have the support they need? Is this another leak in the pipeline for women in STEM?  At this workshop we will look at best practice guidance from professional bodies and trade unions and think about how University of Edinburgh can respond.  Your input and ideas are invaluable. Melissa Highton is a senior manager in Information Services Group (ISG) , she works with her leadership teams to ensure that workplaces are inclusive, and together we can tackle this ‘last taboo’. She will join us to discuss well-being, plans, policies and implications of hybrid working. By the end of the workshop we hope to have some actionable suggestions to take forward.

Feedback from the organisers:

“thanks for taking the time to come out to Easter Bush and share this information directly with us, in such an informative and engaging way…I think the participant numbers we got were an early indication to us that the topic was of deep interest to the staff on campus – but more significantly the discussion in the groups, and the enthusiasm that there should be follow up activities, is a further indication of how important this topic is to so many people.”  

to see ourselves as others see us

Lilinaz Rouhani
Lilinaz Rouhani

Does everyone at the University experience our services and the workplace in similar ways?

(guest post by Lilinaz Rouhani, Data and Equality Officer)

“When I first started in this role, this was my guiding question. I read reports and papers, joined staff networks, and started drafting my own surveys to find an answer to this question. I was hoping to find that the answer is yes. People more or less experience the University in similar ways, and where this is not the case, it will be clear why. So there will be a straightforward action point for me to report back. As with most other things in life and research, the picture was more complicated than this.

As I was settling into this more complex image, the pandemic started.

In an unexpected way, the complex structure I was trying to understand became more simplified when I looked at the pandemic. Of course people don’t experience things in a similar way. I saw how people experienced the pandemic differently: some had caring responsibilities, some had to learn new skills quickly, some had a support network close by, while others lived on their own. So why would we expect people to experience their workplace in similar ways? Surely these different experiences are still there outside of a pandemic.

In the last three years, in my role as the Data and Equality Officer, I have been studying these differences. I have looked at how staff members have experienced home and hybrid working differently, how student workers experience their summer and term-time jobs, if certain groups of staff are more likely to get nominated for contribution awards, as well as looking at the attendance of Digital Skills courses.

The road has been long, sometimes with beautiful views, and sometimes quite hilly and difficult to follow. It was encouraging to see evidence for a historic gender bias in contribution awards disappearing, and it was nice to see increased participation in Digital Skills courses in certain departments and areas of the University. In contrast, it is discouraging to conclude that the ethnic and disability pay gaps are probably wider than the official reports due to the large non-response rates, and that inequality still remains a factor in many aspects of our workplace.

So the answer? Of course people experience things in different ways. Sometimes, unfortunately, the difference is down to inequality. But the fear of facing inequality should not keep us from looking for answers. We should keep asking questions and try and address the problems. The only way to clear the road of the clutter so we can move on smoothly, is to first face that clutter.”

AI and ethics, welcoming our robot colleagues

I am delighted that this summer we have  2 student interns working in LTW to help us understand how Chat GPT and Open AIs can help us in our work.

We have long welcomed our robot colleagues.

We already use AI in our transcriptions and captioning services to add speech to text versions for students, and extensively in our media production services to improve video files, edit out cluttered backgrounds and add ALT text.  We use AI to add BSL translations to our MOOCs and a number of additional languages to promote the reach and accessibility of our learning materials.  We already use Chat GPT to generate code.

With our interns’ help we are exploring how we can scale our use of AI prompts to write web content and improve our support based on considerable technical knowledge-bases of our tools.

But with all the hype around we have also started our list of things we would NOT do.

  • We won’t use art generated by AI because we don’t know where it has come from. #payartists
  • We won’t publish anything as OER which has been AI generated because AI cannot consent.
  • We won’t use AI in recruiting/selecting staff because old data sets are biased and skewed.
  • We won’t use use AI to analyse data about our people.
  • We won’t use ‘human finishing’ or content editor services which pay less than a living wage.
  • We won’t use it to write accessibility statements, DPIAs or EQIAs.
  • We won’t be seduced by AI tools  being anthropomorphised by the use of of words like hallucinating and imagining, however cute they are.

It is striking that at most of the events I am invited to to hear about AI, the speakers are men. It makes one long for some diversity of views.

Here’s a really good article by Lorna https://lornamcampbell.org/higher-education/generative-ai-ethics-all-the-way-down/ highlighting some of the challneges for those of us who publish collections and content openly on the web.

Update 18th August 2023

I am delighted to have received the finished report from my AI Summer interns, Bartlomiej Pohorecki  and Wietske Holwerda 

They have conducted an analysis of the current state of play regarding the use of generative AI technologies in LTW,  and identified opportunities those technologies make possible, how to use them in an ethical way and how to consider privacy concerns. The analysis uncovered that there are concrete use cases of generative AI that would benefit us, however this technology is new and has limitations. Additionally, there are potential pitfalls that could arise when implementing those solutions and there must be a strong focus on ethics and privacy. There is a push to use generative AI from management, however  LTW employees do not have sufficient understanding of how to use it and some fear that they will be replaced by it. This calls for a coherent approach to communicating what is the purpose of introducing those solutions into the workplace.

Bart and Wietske  propose using the term “hybrid intelligence” which aims at denoting that the correct approach is not replacing people with artificial intelligence, but creating a synergy between staff and the generative AI tools. 

They identified concrete use cases and provided me a Possible Implementations Suitability Matrix (PISM). They have offered me courses of action and possible stances in regard to AI.  They have discussed areas of impact of generative AI technologies on Education Technology  and when they conducted interviews with key stakeholders at LTW they identified  commonly held misconceptions regarding generative AI, and explained why they are incorrect.   Best of all, they went beyond the generic literature to identify areas where LTW is already strong, unusual and values-led and took special care to think about the impact of AI on those areas such as OER, MOOCs, Wikimedia, accessibility and recruitment of women into tech.

My next step is to continue and our extend AI internship roles to work with business analysts and service teams in order to be able to navigate the AI market efficiently and make responsible decisions while innovating. There is a need for continuous effort for coherent strategy development and deployment of AI systems and a close eye on ethics all round.  

athena swan insights

Front Cover Issue 9 – Image of woman with household items: iron, thread etc. Usage terms: © Estate of Roger Perry Creative Commons Non-Commercial Licence – See more at: http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/articles/design-and-spare-rib

I am spending some time assessing Athena Swan Applications. It is making me ponder a lot of things. Guidance for giving feedback is to focus on what is included, not what is missing.

Here are some:

  • The experiences of professional staff are given very little attention and seem to be poorly understood. particularly in relation to career progression.
  • The professional staff in academic departments are mostly women. I wonder if this is because IT is so centralised.  Bringing all your professional IT and estates staff together in their own large groups makes sense of course in most universities, but it does exacerbate and perpetuate the structural inequalities and gendered assumptions about who does what kinds of work? This is what our students are seeing us modelling.
  • Athena Swan is asking applicants to consider intersectionality, but so many more words are being wrangled into a word salad around gender than are being used to describe the different experiences of diversity and intersectionality of women  in regards to age, ethnicity, race, disability, religion, class, nationality, parental status or  workplace seniority.
  • Its almost like we have only just discovered that career progression is completely different for professional and academic staff. No mention of why the responses to a culture survey might be different in these groups.
  • There is no mention of technology. Flexible working is described, but no mention of anything hybrid or how access to that might vary by job roles.
  • Plenty on maternity, almost nowt on menopause.
  • One action plan discussing the impact of COVID. None mentioning the impact of  ‘digital transformation’ or AI.
  • Interesting to see project management language coming through in the plans  for action logs and data audits, One dept using RAG status for reporting. I haven’t seen any Risk Registers yet.
  • my computer likes to correct my misspellings of maternity to ‘matter not’.
  • No attempt to evaluate the efficacy of training beyond numbers of attendees and satisfaction happy sheets.
  • Only one mention of working to remove marital status titles ‘mr, mrs, miss, ms’ from university systems.
  • Much inclusive language, but also some highly contested and confusing.
  • Almost no mention of technical staff at all ( even in bids at university level)

on your marks

Oliver Byrne. The Elements of Euclid, 1847 (c) University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/0524y8

According to some recent on- the-ground research this is the list of tools being used by schools at University of Edinburgh for summative assessment and marking (below)

Some Schools have tried to standardise their assessment practices as much as possible, making things more consistent for students, markers and teaching office staff. In these Schools, the Learning Technologist, Teaching Office and Course Organisers work together to agree which tools are used and there is a level of central coordination of this work

Other Schools have a more devolved way of working and each course may differ in which tools and processes are used. In some cases, the Teaching Office and Learning Technologist have more limited information about course by course assessment practices.

The full cost of running so many different systems will be our next bit of research.

 

Learn
Turnitin
PebblePad ATLAS
Peermark
Gradescope
Noteable
STACK
WebPA
OMS
TopHat
MS Forms
Peerwise
Media Hopper Create
Blogs.Ed
Coderunner
Learn2Euclid
MS Teams
Practique
Speedwell
Coursemarks
Github
WeTransfer
Thinglink
Collaborate
Final Year Rotation Feedback Tool
Codegrade
McGraw-Hill MCQs
Piazza
LearnSci
Minitab
Cocalc
QMP
Unidesk form
Sign-up tool
MIRO
Moodle
EMS Placement Feedback
SWAY

the change you can see

I asked my excellent Data and Equality Officer to look at our demographics again. I wanted to know if my attempts to diversify the LTW workforce by sex, ethnicity and age were having an impact. She looked at data since 2015. The group has grown about 50%. From 100 in 2015 to 155 in 2022. Proportions of staff in different groups (age, contract type, disability, ethnicity, sex, and nationality) by academic year were requested from HR. Data are only shared in proportion whole numbers.  The data are in a Power BI Dashboard for monitoring and the dashboard is set up so new data can be added every year.

Headlines:

  • In 2021 – 2022, nearly half (45%) of staff in LTW were under 35 years old. This was largely due to the student intern population, as in this year they made up a quarter (25%) of staff in LTW. Taking into account only the “core” LTW population, nearly a third (30%) of staff were under 35 years old.
  • The proportion of staff on fixed-term contracts has remained consistent (about 12%) since 2020. This is a significant drop compared to previous years where the proportion of staff on fixed-term contracts was, on average, about a third (32%) of staff were on fixed-term contracts.
  • The proportion of staff with disabilities has remained relatively consistent (about 6% on average).  The proportion of staff reporting a disability at University level in 20221 – 2022 was 5%.
  • The proportion of staff from BAME backgrounds has remained relatively consistent at about 8% on average. This is consistent with the proportion of professional services staff from BAME backgrounds in 2021 – 2022 at University level.
  • At 47%, the proportion of female staff within LTW has been the highest it has ever been in 2021 – 2022. This seems to be driven by the student intern population, however. the average proportion for female staff in LTW has been about 40%, and has remained at 39% since 2020 – 2021.
  • The proportion of EU staff has increased slightly since 2020 – 2021. The proportion of international staff has slightly dropped since 2019 – 2020.