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)
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.
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.
As previously teased, I am delighted to say we are launching a 3-year pilot of BadgEd, a new Open Digital Badge service, so that students and staff can earn their stripes and show off their achievements in black and white!
It’s taken me a while to get this in place. I am indebted to Pat Lockley for first introducing me to the idea at Mozfest in 2010.
Open Digital Badges have become a standard way of recognising skills and achievements outside of credit-bearing course work. Within the University of Edinburgh, some departments have already been issuing digital badges for several years, which has highlighted the need for a central service. Our aim is to create consistency, to share best practice among colleagues, to support local issuers, and to provide an opportunity for more colleagues to get involved. Our graphic design teams have been working hard on figuring out how to make branded setts.
The pilot will:
focus on the recognition of extra-curricular skills, achievements, or competencies through the awarding of a digital badge
support the growing interest in and recognition of digital badges
provide guidance on how to maintain the value of digital badges for both earners (students, staff, external learners) and issuers (Schools and Deaneries issuing a badge)
Lovely illustrations for our playful engagement website by the LTW
A year ago we identified a missing component in the University’s Digital Estate.
Each year the University attracts large numbers of Learners (non-matriculated students) to non-credited courses yet there is currently a gap in the University’s learning and teaching platforms to support them. Our review of short course provision in 22/23 estimated that there are upwards of 10,000 learners across hundreds of courses, this is already University business but the digital estate does not accommodate this activity well, as none of the current VLEs are optimised for this type of external business. Our VLE(s) are designed to deliver credit-bearing taught courses and ensure a consistent and positive user experience. There are currently no service(s) that can deliver a University-wide catalogue of non-credit-bearing taught courses to externally facing users or offer a clear and consistent end-user, learning, teaching, or administrative experience for short courses including continuing professional development (CPD) and executive education.
Since nothing is optimized to their needs, learner experiences are mixed and courses can be difficult to find.
This gap for a short courses platform was included in the Digital Estate Strategy and has now been approved. A board has been convened to oversee the procurement and the procurement is now underway to deliver a short course platform that enhances the learners experience across the lifecycle, allowing them to;
access a single university catalogue helping them to browse all non-credit courses with consistent course information.
identify the course(s) that meet their requirements including learning outcomes, course dates and delivery method (face to face, online, hybrid).
register, pay and learn in a way that encourages them to continue their learning journey with the University of Edinburgh.
In addition to improving the overall learner experience the benefits to the University include;
increasing the diversity and widening participation (WP) of our university learning community by enabling staff to create engaging and accessible catalogue and learning content
improved management information for decisions and planning for non-matriculated learners, these learners are mostly missing completely from standard reporting impacting QA and WP reporting, and size and shape planning
encouraging continued learning with the University either on further short courses or on credited programmes through lead generation, and in turn increasing University income.
enabling process and operational efficiencies by replacing end of life systems and enabling the University platform strategy
reducing the risks of non-matriculated learners being granted access to systems which have been licenced based on student FTE numbers
reducing pressure on students services not designed to be accessed by large numbers of non-matriculated learners.
The new platform for short courses will address a lacuna and allow the University to optimize each platform for type of learning and the needs of the audience. The benefits will be seen in the fact that students will learn on a platform designed and tailored for their degree level courses, staff will learn on a platform designed for workplace development, and external and B2B learners will have a platform designed so their interactions with our University are optimized and so courses can meet University business and teaching objectives.
‘I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.’ Ursula le Guin (2004)
Our Learn VLE has been rolled over and all new courses for the whole next academic year have been created in the new template and are now ready to be populated. This has been done more than a month earlier than normal to give people more time to build their courses. Staff should begin to rebuild their courses as soon as possible.
School and deaneries should be encouraging their staff, both academic and professional services, to engage with the changes as early as possible by:
University of Edinburgh has been publishing MOOCs as open educational resources for 10 years. Huge thanks go to all the academic teams who choose this route to share the knowledge they have created with learners all over the world.
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The Edinburgh online learning portfolio currently includes 80 fully online distance-learning Masters courses drawn from all disciplines, and 90 massive online open short courses (MOOCs) and micro credentials across 3 global platforms. University of Edinburgh reaches 4.5 million learners across every country in the world. Each of the 21 academic schools and deaneries have either a Masters or a MOOC online, and many have both. The services online students receive are excellent. E-learning students at Edinburgh currently report higher levels of satisfaction and ‘sense of belonging’ than their peers on campus. In 2023 University of Edinburgh is celebrating 10 years of return on investment in MOOCs.
When we began making massive open online courses (MOOCs) at Edinburgh our strategic position was to experiment with new ways of teaching online, to research the kind of learning and courses which could be achieved, and to have fun. We were never in it for the money. Although it was undeniably expensive at the start, the last ten years of this activity have brought considerable return on that investment in terms of what we have learned, the places we have reached and the impact we have had (inside and outwith our own institution).
As Assistant Principal for Online and Open Learning I have taken care to ensure that our online course portfolio is closely aligned with the university mission, values, civic responsibility and aspirations for the future.
Working with three global platform partners ( Coursera, Edx and Futurelearn) has given us unique insight into the business of scaling short courses online and a rich set of data about our materials and our learners. Each of the platforms has its own strengths and weaknesses and the pedagogical tools offered on each have changed rapidly during the ten years. Their business models have changed too and it has been useful to have an institutional platform strategy to help us target the right content on the right platform, for the right audience. The advice and support available in the platform teams has been useful in understanding what works well. We have been privileged to be so able to rigorously test our courses, to translate our content into multiple languages and to release significant proportions of it as open educational resources.
Making MOOCs has given us the opportunity to bring a wide range of our university community together. The many research groups, cultural organisations and charities who have developed content with us for the Edinburgh MOOCs have ensured that we have gained a diverse set of voices in discussions about how and why a university can and should make courses freely available online. The MOOCs have offered a rapid channel for knowledge translation and dissemination, public engagement with research, global reach, and a place for discussion and debate with an informed citizenry at times of major geo-political change. In ten years we have found 4.5 million people who choose to learn online from University of Edinburgh, an even though many might say the markets are hot for data skills and cyber-security, our consistently most popular course is one in Philosophy.
The value of these experiments in online learning can also be seen in the capacity building and up-skilling of colleagues. In making and delivering these courses more than 200 academic colleagues, media producers, learning designers and learning technologists cut their teeth and honed their skills for online learning. I am sure that this contributed to our ability to deliver in a crisis and develop resources to help others to do so too. Even during the years of the covid pandemic which closed our campus, our online courses and MOOCs continued to grow and some rapid-response effort from a teams across the university produced a short-course about emergency respiratory healthcare which was studied by 50,000 front-line workers the week it was launched.
Top tips for delivering free short online courses
Don’t be afraid to try something new, digital education is an evolving field and you never know where your experiments might lead
Get institutional buy-in by aligning your courses with your university’s strategic goals
If you have more than one learning platform, develop a platform strategy to ensure that you are using the right platform for the right audience.
Work closely with vendor and platform partners to get the most out of your partnership; ensure you can access any data they provide to evidence the reach your platforms deliver.
Pay attention to the licensing of all your course content; sharing it appropriately can make it accessible to many more learners globally
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.
Hybrid innovation is not good for online learning.
‘Hybrid’ teaching seems cool, but actually reduces the amount of flexibility for distance learners. Distance learning was supposed to free us from the tyranny of time and space.
Any time, any place, and pace. Slowly, over many years, flexible to be achieved in balance with their own lives, work and families.
Hybrid is this cool idea that your online learners should be able to join in synchronous sessions with the learners and teachers on campus.
As soon as you include in your fully online programme live sessions which are linked to the activities happening on campus you are requiring the distance learner , wherever they are in the world, to tie themselves to your time. They may be any place, but no longer any time or any pace.
It is teacher-centred, campus-centred and risks ‘othering’ the online students in a way we have fought to avoid.
I think it is a backward step.
I think some colleagues have become intoxicated by Teams.
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.
