Picture taken by me in the street in Glasgow. No rights reserved by me.
You may be interested to know what the LTW teams have been doing to support you in the last 6 months.
To support the development of digital skills since January 2016, the Digital Skills Programme has delivered 136 face-to-face courses, to c.1400 attendees, across all Colleges and Support Groups, using 40 tutors from across ISG.
To support capacity building for online learning 25 staff across the University have signed up for the recently launched CMALT programme for learning technologists.
To support online learning at scale we have delivered 8 pilot Learning Design workshops with 21 programmes interested in holding workshops in the future.
To support sharing and use of video MediaHopper now holds more than 5,000 video items uploaded by staff and students. Around 10% using a creative commons license (OER). 200 people have been trained to use the new media tools.
To ensure that users can understand and engage with our University we have published 51,000 published pages on Edweb.
To ensure that our students can gain work experience alongside their studies we’ve employed more than 20 student interns.
To make you more comfortable we’ve upgraded 300 open access PCs and refurbished 52 rooms and spaces.
To make the world a safer place we have launched MyLungsMyLife and Self-Help for Stroke web projects at the Scottish Parliament.
And that’s all on top of maintaining, running, patching and upgrading all the major systems and services you use for teaching and learning every day.
Happy news: OER16 Open Culture Conference was awarded Wikimedia UK Partnership of the Year. The conference was co-chaired by Lorna and me. In a letter of thanks Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive and Michael Maggs, Wikimedia UK Chair wrote:
We are delighted to award Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year to the University of Edinburgh, for the Open Educational Resources Conference in 2016. The strong presence of Wikimedia UK at OER16 was only made possible by your support as conference co-chairs. It gave a high level of visibility to the charity within a prestigious international conference, which will have an ongoing benefit for us as we develop our work within education. On a separate note, we are also delighted that the University of Edinburgh is hosting the first Wikimedian-in-Residence in the higher education sector in Scotland.
Lorna has also been appointed as a Wikimedia trustee.
Issue 26 p. 1 front cover Illustration of hanging a sheet on a washing line Usage terms: We have been unable to locate the copyright holder for Hanging a sheet on a washing line. Please contact copyright@bl.uk with any information you have regarding this item. – See more at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/spare-rib-magazine-issue-026#sthash.qZnKW0Db.dpuf
As part of the PlayFair Steps equality and diversity initiative in ISG we have been looking at our staff demographics and considering our recruitment practices.
There is many a cliche to be heard around how difficult it is to recruit women into tech jobs. Some of it is true, some of it is lack of imagination. As a large tech employer in this city we compete for the best talent against other tech employers in the city. The competition for new graduates, skilled software engineers, designers, excellent IT managers and creative thinkers is hot*.
As an organisation we recognise that we need to improve the diversity in our teams to improve our insights and creativity, to draw upon a diverse set of ideas and experiences and to model for our own students the world in which they might want to work.
One of the things we’ve done is to start employing student interns. Dozens of ’em. It’s been really invigorating. All the teams in LTW have benefitted and I am personally very much enjoying having the most up-to-date thinking and input from the interns in my office. Dominique works with me on my gender equality plans and Polina works with me on digital marketing and recruitment. These two projects are linked. If we want to get more women into our organisation- particularly at senior levels- we need them to apply for our jobs in the first place.
I am not certain that as a tech employer we are very well served by our recruitment strategy currently. We have no specific graduate careers track in ISG, no ‘return to work after a career break’ initiatives and we tend only to advertise in ‘university places’ such as our own HR pages and jobs.ac.uk**. I’ve never seen a twitter feed or anything similar pushing out our jobs (other than mine).
HR sites, and even jobs.ac.uk rely on the premise that a person wants to work in a university first and that they’ll be looking for a job and your ad will happen to be there at that moment. I’m not sure that is the market we most need to be in. I think we need to be digitally transforming our recruitment approach and reaching passive talent*** while they happen to be browsing.
I have asked Polina to investigate LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has company pages, where employers can gather followers and networks and get their news and jobs in front of people who already have jobs and are busy networking in their professional field. Looking at Linkedin I note that as well as the University news pages, our business school is already using linkedin for their recruitment. Polina is a business school student so she knows her stuff. My hope is that we will figure out how best to use Linkedin in ISG to get our adverts to new eyes using linked people, friends, friends of friends, networks, news, alumni, students and interested tech followers to show them what a great place this is to work.
I’ll let you know how we get on. If you would like to follow our nascent company page, please do.
**it turns out that 15% of working professionals are scanning their network at any given time, and 45% are totally open to considering a new opportunity when approached by a recruiter. I know this. It happens to me a lot. In addition to the 25% who say they are actively looking for a new job, 85% of the global workforce are your oyster.
*** I’m also having trouble finding anyone who has any stats about how many views or shares our ads get. What I am finding is some anxiety amongst our HR professionals that I may be about to disrupt the status quo (again).
Lynda.com brand logo. Fully copyrighted and trademarked. Many rights reserved by them.
We are soft-launching the Lynda.com service this week, providing the University with access to an extensive library of high quality video courses in technology, creative and business skills.
This exciting and versatile new resource can be used in many ways to develop staff and student skills, support curricular teaching, assist in software and systems rollouts and enable our training providers to expand their subject range and online provision. It supports the strategic plans of the University and Information Services, and will make a key contribution to digital transformation by increasing our capacity for digital skills development, helping to develop a digital culture and supporting staff and students to improve their skills for work, study and life.
Today’s soft launch provides access for staff and students on a largely self-service basis and will allow early adopters to immediately start using Lynda.com and begin to explore the possibilities it affords. The full launch in September will offer access to visitors, integration with Learn, engagement events and more comprehensive support resources. Care has been, and is being taken to consider where your data goes and how it is used, but if you do have questions, do ask.
Sea Elephant (c) Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh https://www.flickr.com/photos/crcedinburgh/17180464078/
Last week, as part of our PlayFair Steps equality and diversity intiative in ISG, we invited Dr Rowena Arshad to talk to ISG staff about ‘Race Matters at Work’. The presentation was excellent and thought provoking. Attendance was low though, in comparison to an earlier talk in the same series about age. I wonder whether colleagues hear ‘age’ and think ‘that’s me‘, they hear ‘race’ and they think ‘that’s someone else‘.
Rowena’s presentation helped us to ask ourselves questions about how we see people as ‘other’, and provided valuable insights into real, recent examples at University of Edinburgh.
As well as being one of the ISG change themes through which we are looking at our organisation and changing it to be fit for the future, equality and diversity is part of a larger consideration of digital transformation going on in the university, being championed by our CIO.
Our CIO challenges us to think about the ‘internet of me’, where each of us is at the centre of a web of services tailored to what the internet knows about us and what it anticipates our wants and desires to be as a result. Examples given of Uber, Airbnb etc certainly seem to make life easier for some.
I’d suggest that we cannot think about digital transformation without considering privilege and bias. For some people, their experience of the internet is not as positive as it may seem to be for white, wealthy, north american or british men. For some it is toxic, biased and perpetuates unhelpful stereotypes. It is up to us as tech professionals to consider all our users and ensure that we create an internet for all. It is up to us not only to consider our unconscious bias but also to check and recheck that the services we build are inclusive.
The best way we can do that it to have diverse teams working on every project and provide safe working environments for colleagues to share their experiences which can inform our thinking. The risk if we don’t is that the more our services become personalised, the less we are able to empathise with the experience of others.
Rowena encouraged us never to be a bystander. Following a reported rise in racist incidents in the wake of #brexit, this is also a useful resource on social abjection.
Cover image of Spare Rib Issue 171. Check http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib for copyright details.
My trip to Sweden was enjoyable and informative, despite being very brief. What I learned though, was that the Scandinavians would rather the UK didn’t leave the EU. We also considered the challenges of figuring out how MOOCs fit in a higher education system which is already free and open to all and already offers online courses.
Once again, I continued my good work of pointing out to AV tech guys that not all keynote presenters wear pockets or a waistband, or wish to have a headset put into their hair. Universal design does not seem to include women 🙂
This week I’ll mostly be in Budapest for EDEN16. The conference is called ‘Re-imagining Learning Environments’. It’s my first time to EDEN, and I’ll be keynoting in the theme: ‘Opening up education’. I’ll be talking about the initiatives , projects, examples of good practice and the new business models we are championing at University of Edinburgh.
EU referendum MOOC https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/eu-referendum/1
What’s your favourite digital learning university doing in the face of the EU referendum? Another one of our just in time MOOCs, of course!
The EU can often be confusing and the UK’s relationship with the EU over the years has been complicated. This three-week course breaks down the key facts and guides you through the referendum.
We look at how the UK ended up having a referendum on EU membership. We then consider the campaign issues, public opinion and alternatives to being in the EU. After the vote, we reflect on what the result means for the UK and for the rest of Europe.
Cover image of BITS magazine. BITS Issue 14, Spring 2016 http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/about/edinburgh-bits
I am impressed that ALT have found my CMALT portfolio in their archives. I will share it as an example with colleagues engaging with our new CMALT programme.
When I wrote my initial CMALT application in 2008 I was just about to leave University of Leeds to embark on a new adventure in a new role as Head of Learning Technologies at University of Oxford. At that time there were so few CMALT persons in each university that the status of ‘University with the largest number of CMALT’ shifted from Leeds to Oxford when I moved. I stayed in that role at Oxford for 6 years, becoming Director of Academic IT as I expanded the teams, projects, scope and services.
Looking back at my portfolio submission from the time I am reminded of my commitment even then to blogging, learning design, VLEs, OER and my specialist subject: learning technology leadership.
In order to renew my CMALT portflio I am asked to reflect on how my career has developed over the past 3 years and how this relates to my work with learning technology.
I’ve been at Edinburgh for 2 years now. I know this because I’ve just attended my third elearning@ed forum. It’s been a vertiginous learning curve, and I’ve had to make some serious changes in the leadership of the Division. Grace Hopper said ‘ the most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’. I think that is *especially* dangerous for anyone in an industry like learning technology which requires, demands innovation.
As a woman who arrives from somewhere else to take over the management of a department, I hear it a lot.
The investment of time and effort is paying off though, Senior Vice Principal Charlie Jeffrey described us as ‘gripped in the throws of innovation’. Which is good, I think. I’ve also just been appointed Assistant Principal for Online Learning.
Having an Assistant Principal as part of the senior management team in ISG will ensure that we can align even more closely the activities of ISG to the mission of the University. This will contribute to the success of our service excellence and digital transformation programmes as well as planning for learning and teaching technology. My new role will bring added complexity for me as I manage the challenge of keeping my teams on track with these innovations while also giving a renewed focus myself to online and distance learning. Exciting times.
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic – http://www.aliceboreasphotography.com/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48410918
If you are working in a learning technology role the University of Edinburgh is committed to supporting your professional development. I am delighted to announce a new university wide scheme supporting CPD for staff working with learning technology. Our aim is to support colleagues working in schools, colleges and ISG to become CMALT accredited.
CMALT is Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology – you submit a portfolio describing and reflecting on your work and linking to relevant evidence. The training and support you can access via the CMALT programme will ensure that you stay up to date with best practice and maintain strong links for career progression.
If you join our scheme now you will be supported to complete CMALT by:
* discounted fees
* regular meetings of the CMALT applicants group
* mentoring and support as you put together your portfolio
* access to organised writing retreats
For more information contact Susan Greig in LTW now.
I completed my CMALT portfolio a number of years ago. I’m hoping my co-chairing OER16, judging the Learning Technologist of the Year competition and supporting the roll out this scheme at University of Edinburgh will help me to maintain my good standing.
