Category: People, Place and Work

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.

Scottish Tech Workers Union

Scottish Tech Workers Charter
Scottish Tech Workers Charter

A few years ago i did a talk at ALT-C #altc about unions:  Sessions 18-47, 18-108 – ALT Annual Conference 2018 – YouTube and the relationships between learning technologists, academics and employers.

One of the questions from the audience was about the emergence of new, tech workers unions. This week I attended an event which I thought was about the launch of such a thing in Scotland.  It turned out that it wasn’t so much about that as being about encouraging tech workers to join a union ( in this case Prospect), which is fine.  The event was the launch of the Tech Workers Charter, which covers most of the stuff you would expect, and would probably get/expect from a larger employer.

The discussion was interesting. Several people talking about working in smaller tech organisations feeling that they could not request part-time working. It is interesting to see how interest in working part time is shifting from being something women traditionally want, to something everyone might have.

I also learned a bit about IP restrictions ( your employer could assert a right to the work you do in your spare time) and non-compete clauses which could restrict you from speaking to former colleagues or working in a similar place doing much the same stuff.  I don’t think that would work in universities.

The next night I spent a fun evening with old friends from union days. We mused on whether it was better not to be in the same union as your staff. Since I am often at odds with UCU ideologically, I might consider Prospect if they are reaching out to tech workers.

International Womens Day 2023

ribbon cutting action shot

IWD2023 is shaping up well for me so far.

We will be be naming a lecture theatre after an inspirational but overlooked woman of science- Charlotte Murchison

The book ‘Dangerous Women’ will be published in the USA

My article has been published in the JPAAP special edition Vol. 11 No. 1 (2023): Special Issue on Breaking the Gender Bias in Academia and Academic Practice https://jpaap.ac.uk/JPAAP/issue/view/34

I am also giving a talk for edtech company Instructure (the people who have sold us our new badging system) about:

“Empowerment through Education: Discussing the importance of education in empowering women and girls.”

so I’d better get some thinking about that.

IWD began in 1908, when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay and the right to vote. A year later, the Socialist Party of America declared the first National Woman’s Day.

It is lovely to see so many activities across ISG to celebrate International Women’s Day this year as every year. It has been a real team effort to raise awareness, thank you.

International Women’s Day has become a date to celebrate how far women have come in society, in politics and in economics, while we are in the  middle of a sustained period of industrial action in this university  strikes and protests  and events are organised on campus to raise awareness of continued inequality. Striking ( collective bargaining by Beatrice Webb economist , founder of LSE)

The first theme adopted by the UN (in 1996) was “Celebrating the Past, Planning for the Future”.The UN’s theme for 2023 is “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”. This theme aims to recognise and celebrate the contribution women and girls are making to technology and online education.

Some of you may have heard me before going on about the pay gap  ( big) and the pensions gap ( twice as big) . There is also a digital  gap  and the UN estimates that women’s lack of access to the online world will cause a $1.5 trillion loss to gross domestic product of low and middle-income countries by 2025 if action isn’t taken.

Advancements in digital technology offer immense opportunities to address development and humanitarian challenges, and to achieve the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals. Unfortunately, the opportunities of the digital revolution also present a risk of perpetuating existing patterns of gender inequality. Growing inequalities are becoming increasingly evident in the context of digital skills and access to technologies, with women being left behind as the result of this digital gender divide. The need for inclusive and transformative technology and digital education is therefore crucial for a sustainable future.

Digital literacy has become almost as important as traditional literacy.

Over 90% of jobs worldwide already have a digital component* and most jobs will soon require sophisticated digital skills. If we equip girls with digital skills through prioritising education in IT subjects,  girls will thrive in places  where digital skills are prized. This is already true.

We can strive to highlight the ways in which the work we do goes someway to addressing inequality and achieving the UNSDGs. Technology and digital education can increase the awareness of women and girls regarding their rights and civic engagement as well as offering careers for those with a range of digital skills.

In Scotland there is still a significant gap in IT education in schools. The recent report from the British Computing Society “Landscape Review: Computing Qualifications in the UK” found that in all UK nations, computer science subjects are the least popular amongst the sciences and male-female balance in class is often six to one.

  • girls are outnumbered six to one by boys in computer science classes across the UK.
  • women  who do choose computing,  outperform their male counterparts on average.

Participation in computer science in Scotland had been falling steadily over recent years but happily increased in 2021, possibly down to the growing popularity of new digitally focused areas of the curriculum, the higher profile of hybrid working and the good work EDINA have done to embed data science in so many schools. When fewer than 20% of the people working in the tech sector in Scotland are women, we must be vigilant to ensure that the kinds of work we do here in ISG is open to all.

“The Digimap for Schools service enables students to develop fundamental digital and data skills as well as increasing teacher confidence through the provision of valuable resources, lesson plans and ideas. Together with EDINA, we are confident that eligible schools will benefit greatly from free use of Digimap for Schools and the many associated learning resources.”

The Scottish Government has included digital technology as one of the six key sectors in which Scotland has a ‘distinct competitive advantage’. With low numbers of women working and girls studying to be in the sector, this competitive advantage is at risk.

Universities are big employers. University of Edinburgh is one of the largest tech employers in Scotland.

On the upside, in both the HE and IT sectors there are national pressures from policy organisations to increase the numbers of women in senior and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) roles. Highly qualified women are likely to be in high demand, and employers who offer visible support for inclusion will reap rewards in recruitment. You can find us on Women in Tech jobs board.

OfS Review of Blended Learning (2)

In the next couple of months I have a few speaking engagements which have come to me as a result of my being part of the panel who did this review. Our Lead, Prof Susan Orr has also spoken about our findings and I trust you have read the report. I don’t think I would stray far from Susan in describing our findings, or our recommendations. I will be interested to see how it plays out in reality for institutional practice.

The fact that there is no agreed definition of blended learning was a challenge for the panel, but we settled quickly on one which centred the deliberate and thoughtful blending of modes of teaching. A ‘blend’ is different from a ‘mix’. Metaphors can be helpful, particularly domestic ones. Do we aim for a blend which is like tea, or whisky, or a smoothie? is it alchemy, where the carefully selected ingredients are brought together to create a new, high quality desirable experience or is it where all the fresh and over-ripe bits are mushed together and we press extra hard for a few pulses on the liquidizer to ensure we break down the chunks of hard-to-swallow legacy content?

Or is blended learning more like a tossed salad, with each of the elements clearly distinguishable, and the option to have more of the cherry tomatoes if you particulalry like them and avoid entirely the sweetcorn.

How complex is the process of making  a good blend? Is it something anyone can do with some basic kitchen equipment or do you need years of training? Is it a binary task, are we blending just 2 modes or infact many different elements? who are our master blenders and are they our best technicians?

Susan mentions embroidery, I suggest tartan, where the threads and colours are still visible and weave through the piece in familar patterns but each adding an element to the whole.  When I was at school in art class we drew in chalks and used our fingers to blend the colours, to smooth the edges and blur the transitions. Now I expect we would use filters in photoshop or insta.

The context of the report was key. It is a snapshot at a certain time and in a certain regulatory environment. The ‘weaponising’ and demonising of online delivery – particularly ( recorded or not) lectures was palpable. Particularly in the media.  But we what we found was what we have always known, that lecture recordings are of great value to students. They are transformative in terms of accessibility and much in demand.  I suspect that lecture recording will continue to be a contested area in many universities for some time, but for those who have the infrastructure and services in place it is becoming one of the easiest elements of your blend.

‘Infrastructure and services in place’ is key.  I think my most significant contribution to the OfS review was the engagement with the heads of e-learning from each of the providers. We cannot assume all universities have the same or equivalent educational technology and digital services in place. There is diversity on the sector, and that is a good thing.

But if you have good IT staff and good learning technologists your lecture recording system is integrated with your VLE, timetable and in-room AV, it requires no extra time from colleagues to do.

When the panel for the review was announced, a couple of snarks suggested that it would be better done by eminent professors of digital education. I think that missed the point that one should not have to be a professor of pedagogy to understand what  your university’s blended learning offer is.  If you can’t explain it on your website to parents and students ( or regulators)  you can’t be surprised when they have different expectations.

The fact that university websites are full of out of date jargon is not a surprise finding. Neither is the fact that students and staff need good digital skills for the tasks they must do. Nor is the fact that quality of teaching is not dependent on modality. There is poor teaching online, or in blended modes, just as there is on campus. Digital does not fix bad work*.

There were a raft of recommendations in the report.  My big take-aways for strategic operational teams supporting blended learning now are:

-Check  your website. Are there still random pages from days in Covid where all and sundry tried to describe blended and online delivery in strangled, stretched and obscure terms?

-Check your digital estate. Technology proliferated and overlapped in the emergency investments and purchases of the last 3 years. You will need to rationalise that and revisit your vendor partnerships.

-Check your campus. Are you developing the physical estate for blended delivery? not all online activity happens from home.

 

What happens next? the next big shift will be when everyone realises that hybrid and blended are not the same thing.

The OfS were concerned with student choice. the students took that to mean that they should have a choice: Choosing whether and when or not to come on to campus, at short notice, on the day or to fit in with your own life. That, the panel felt, was quite a different propostion to knowing which bits of your course are on campus and which are not and being expected to plan accordingly.

 

*purgamentum innit, exit purgamentum.

 

making media accessible for teaching and learning

This is the cover of my book about designing learning.

At University of Edinburgh we centrally support and manage two large media services, Media Hopper Create and Media Hopper Replay.  Both Media Hoppers are named for Grace Hopper.

Media Hopper Create is our media asset management service (for long term storage and streaming of media) and Media Hopper Replay is our lecture recording service.  Both services are integrated into the VLE and core to the University’s teaching and learning.  Media Hopper Create’s usage sky rocketed during COVID and although there has been some reduction since the pandemic ended, usage is still very high compared to pre-pandemic.  Media Hopper Replay was used less during the pandemic but was used more for live streaming and for automatically pushing Zoom recordings. Now teaching is back  on campus, usage has gradually increased to pre-pandemic levels. 

Media Hopper Create is provided by  Kaltura and Media Hopper Replay is provided  Echo360.  These 2 edtech partners have been with us since 2015 and 2017 respectively.  

The scale of use of media in learning and teaching at Edinburgh is significant. In January this year 2,301 new media items were created in Media Hopper Create by 605 staff and students. 3,792 lectures captured in Media Hopper Replay in January, of which 235 were live streamed. This is an increase of approx. 1,000 from January 2022. Even allowing for some duplication as colleagues move content from one platform to another , that still amounts to around 5,000 new items added to our ‘born digital’  media collections. 

As a university, it’s clearly important that we have the tools we need to support teaching and learning.  During the last few years we’ve seen a change in the way teaching and assessment is being done at the University and with the development of the Curriculum Transformation project, the landscape will further change.  Given the advances in technology over the past few years and the developments with the Curriculum Transformation project, we should complete a detailed analysis in order to inform strategy for the future. 

A recent HEPI report highlights that lecture recordings are the most in-demand digital resources for students and that ‘Recordings should be uploaded for the duration of the course and the resource could improve accessibility for part-time students, students with caring responsibilities, and students who are otherwise unable to attend lectures in-person. Videos should be uploaded onto a single, user-friendly platform’.

Our media platforms integrate with our VLE and we have been looking at the accessibility of those materials for students.

During the summer of 2022, 597 pre-selected courses from 19 Schools and Deaneries across the University of Edinburgh were reviewed against a defined selection of accessibility criteria.  From the materials available, the review surveyed a selection of course materials published directly into Learn VLE , along with materials uploaded, URLs, images, and audio files. This review provides an overview of course accessibility by analysing a random selection of materials located within the courses. Over 7600 documents/URLs/audio/image files were reviewed overall.

  • From the audio and video files reviewed, an average of 95% provided a title that gave a reasonable expectation of the content within. 9 Schools and Deaneries had 100% accessibility rates on audio/video naming conventions.
  • An average of 73% showed the duration of the file as part of the description. In 8 Schools and Deaneries, more than 80% of checked files showed the relevant duration.
  • An average of 60% provided subtitles (or if no audio was present, this was made clear). In 13 Schools and Deaneries, at least 50% of checked files provided subtitles or a note that there was no audio.
  • From the files featuring subtitles/captioning, 91% were of reasonable quality.
  • Only about an average of 7% of checked files had made transcripts available to users. Only in 6 Schools and Deaneries did 5% or more of checked files provide transcripts.
  • 1.3x is the most popular playback speed.