I aim to promote an inclusive culture in my organisation. I have a focus on promoting cross-generational working. We welcome student interns as staff, and while not all students are young, they do tend to lower the average age about the place.
I am delighted to have such a great group of interns who work with us in Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW) all year, across all of our teams and projects.
Currently we host around 40 interns. In the summer we will add around 20 more.
I am pleased to see we will have new interns looking at AI in L&D, Green Web Estate, VLE Excellence, Web Migration, Accessibility, Training and Events and Communications.
All our internships are paid. We aim to support students at times of rising living costs by providing high quality work experience opportunities which will offer them a head start into digital jobs in the future.
FLORA (Feedback, Learning, Online Rubrics and Assessment)
Ensuring staff and students have an appropriate platform for Exams / Digital Exams
Digital tools to support assessment done under exam conditions (with an open question about what ‘exam conditions’ mean in digital contexts … could be in-person computer lab, online, take-home … and involve different types of restrictions to support academic integrity: locked browser, in-person invigilated, online invigilated, open book, various levels of time restriction).
The reliability and security of digital exam platforms is essential for delivery of high stakes elements of students’ experience at the University of Edinburgh. The current situation and digital estate add complexity, stress, burden, and confusion to the workload for both staff and students. It is not sustainable and carries several risks to university business of marking and assessment.
Analysis work done in the Autumn of 2023 looked deeper into exams, taking testimony from Teaching Office staff across all schools, to build a clearer understanding of what exam provision looks like across the institution. This included what role technology plays in exams, marking and exam boards. Gaining insight into what changes are anticipated in the use of technology to support exams, marking and exam boards. Plus looking to identify barriers to the wider adoption of online exams.
The analysis has shown that as an institution we do not fully understand how many ‘digital exams’ take place as there is no central collation of this data, but we do know that many different types of exams involve a digital element in their workflow e.g. scanning and marking.
This project through its various work packages will look to better ensure staff and students have access to appropriate platforms for Exams / Digital Exams. This will include the aim that exams are not taking place on the main virtual learning environment (Learn), but are on separate, robust platform(s) designed to support assessment done under exam conditions. The project will also examine the reasons behind institutional exam data being disjointed and present options for change.
Why now?
The reliability of assessment platforms is essential for delivery of high stakes elements of students’ experience at the university of Edinburgh. The current situation and digital estate add complexity, stress, burden and confusion to the workload for both staff and students. It is not sustainable and carries a number of risks to university business of marking and assessment.
A previous procurement failed, but we must try again, 5 years on, with better knowledge and more support from the digital estate strategy governance processes. The market (after covid) has changed and we think suppliers are more attuned to UK HE needs.
The ISG teams who will lead this work have successfully delivered the VLE upgrade and are ready to revisit this area now. We want to provide good assessment platforms to the University in line with business needs.
The project will have three elements. Institutional gap analysis to fully understand the current picture for assessment and exam workflows at the university. Once requirements have been established the procurement of an exam system can commence if necessary. Additionally, the project will examine, and if appropriate procure a tool to support the marking process on digital, or digitised paper exams.
The impact we expect on people is:
improving the staff and student experience: Staff will find the new services easier and quicker to use giving them back more time to do other things. Also, there should be opportunities to do more innovative assessment types where needed.
For students their assessment experience will be better – with more consistency over platform usage, giving them the chance to become familiar with them. They should be easier to use and more reliable, reducing student stress.
Closer working relationships between ISG LTW with Exams Office and Timetabling unit timetabling information about exams/types of exams to allow support requirements to be pinned down in advance of diet. At the moment, it’s hard to do this, so this would be better.
Mitigate risks around poor experience, poor support, high stakes data on random platforms.
Easing the strain on availability of physical spaces for exams/during exam periods.
The project team wanted the name of the project to be reflective of the work, memorable and to ensure ease of recognition when there are other large initiatives across the institution that may overlap with teams across the campus.
FLORA was suggested for the pioneering history of the person Flora Stevenson (Flora Stevenson Wikipedia) and also that it could fit much of the scope of the work we are looking to take forward.
Thank you to everyone working on starting our sister projects, LOUISA and FLORA for our focus on how our systems are used to support assessment. If you would like to know more about some inspirational women Louisa Stevenson – Wikipedia and Flora Stevenson – Wikipedia
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
I am gutted to lose my current Data and Equality Officer, she’s been excellent and has rightly moved to greater things. But I’m recruiting for a new one.
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)
I aim to promote an inclusive culture in my organisation. I have a focus on promoting cross-generational working. We welcome student interns as staff, and while not all students are young, they do tend to lower the average age about the place.
