The role of a Learning Technologist

I've been chatting about the The Really Useful Ed Tech Book with some learning technologists today. This is a great all round read for those working in TEL, those who want to understand what impacts on TEL and those who want to understand the role of a learning technologist and it's available to download for free! I thought I'd post my thoughts on the parts of the book that stuck out to me. I really liked Wayne Barry’s chapter "…And What Do You Do?" Can We Explain The Unexplainable? 

The prologue made me chuckle, we’ve all had those awkward moments when we get asked what we do haven’t we? My personal response tends to vary depending on the role of the person who has asked me the dreaded question 'soooooo, what is a Learning Technologist?'. My personal best (or worst) would have to be my graduation day. It was 2013 when I graduated with my MSc in Technology Enhanced Learning, Innovation & Change. I watched hundreds of students walk on stage to be greeted and presented with their award by Lord Robert Winston. I was up next! Now we all wonder if we’re going to be that student that gets asked a question mid hand shake, well that day I was that lucky student. And what should Lord Robert Winston ask me? That dreaded question…. “so what do you do?” Panic! Now anyone who knows me knows that I am not one of these learning technologists that shy away when posed with this question, never shall I brush my job role under the IT carpet or place it under the ‘e-learning’ catch all.

I had found myself up on stage at Sheffield City Hall with hundreds of people starring at me whilst I desperately tried to think of the quickest and clearest response to get me off that stage. I couldn’t do it, “I’m a Learning Technologist” I said proudly to Lord Bob, “Oh, what’s that?” he replied. I used my standard opening response in this situation as a first attempt “I work with academic staff to embed learning technology into the curriculum to enhance learning and teaching". Lord Bob gave me the nod and probed a little further. Luckily I managed to wrap the conversation up in what felt like hours but was actually minutes and merrily trotted off the stage without falling over. Phew!

So I wonder how other people view our roles? I think most of us learning technologists can certainly answer that question in our own contexts but why is it so difficult for others to understand? Is it because we all do so many different things?  Peter Reed refers to this variety of roles in his chapter The Structure And Roles Of Learning Technologists Within Higher Education Institutions. He talks about the variation of job role on a spectrum, spanning from IT Systems Architect right through to Educational Developer. He also looks at the factors that can influence the diversity of the role including the impact of organisational structure. I myself form part of a team of learning technologists within a faculty, but I'm the only faculty post whilst the others focus on departmental demands. In my previous post I highlighted some of the work I do as part of that role. Our faculty has a number of departmental learning technologists and technology professionals that sit at various stages of the spectrum Pete’s referring to. I'd place myself closer to the end of educational developer but in my time working in the field have moved along at different points starting from more of a content development role and quite often I find myself sliding up and down this spectrum depending on the project I'm working on. What I like about Pete's chapter is that it sets out the variety of aspects to the role and the influences and business demands that might go towards shaping the kind of learning technologist that you are.

In their chapter, Learning Technologist as a Digital Pedagogue Dr David Walker & Shelia MacNeill highlight that we might be in danger of compartmentalizing ourselves if we do tightly define our roles. I would tend to agree with this and there have been many times where I've seen quite specific job remits and responsibilities even right down to the specific software and technology that's required to be supported. This always baffles me (although I do understand the need for this in the case of certain posts) as we're dealing with technology that's constantly changing and a big part of what we do is to look beyond what we already have in place and look ahead to what's on the horizon, but more importantly we look to the teaching approach and learner needs that guide the technological solution. Equally, compartmentalising our roles too much could be detrimental to the professional development of the learning technologist as well as detrimental to the support, knowledge and guidance that can be gained from the learning technologist.

What defines each individual learning technologist seems to be their own personal interest and background. We all bring something different to the table and we all have our strengths and weaknesses.

I think the authors of this chapter sum things up quite nicely with this closing paragraph:

"...the ‘new professionals’ of 2015 are an emerging tribe of digital pedagogues with focus on learning enhancement and advocacy of innovative practices underpinned by research and scholarly activities. Among this overlapping community of professionals, we would argue that Learning Technologists - operating across academic disciplines, support services and more senior management positions - with their ability to engage in discussions with colleagues from multiple disciplines beyond simply the use of technology identifies them as our most rounded pedagogues..." (Walker & MacNeill pg 103)

So back to my question, how do others view our roles? Well when I first started here at the university I was keen to find out how academic colleagues in my faculty perceived our roles. So at different stages last year I took the opportunity to gather some comments from the academic staff for my own interest.  

I asked 14 members of staff to summarise in just a couple of sentences ‘What do you think is involved in the role of a learning technologist?  I've loosely themed the comments and here's what emerged.

With only 14 comments it's clearly not representative of the faculty in anyway but it's interesting to gather the thoughts of colleagues that attend the TEL sessions that I run. As you can see that staff development and support were regarded as the largest part of a learning technologists role. And interestingly, the application of teaching theory or pedagogy was not mentioned as much in comparison.  

This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, typically many people view the role of a learning technologist as quite techie and aren't necessarily aware that in order for us to be the bridge between teaching and technology we do need to have a sound pedagogic understanding and grounding. 


Staff development and support are at the top of the list and rightly so. We all tend to undertake an element of support or staff development be it in the form of formal workshops around TEL or one- to- one support.

Here’s a pick of a few comments: 

"Translating academic intentions into a technology context. Helping to uncover the possibilities of technology and then supporting the implementation. Not content writing."

"To advise and support on the delivery of teaching and learning via technology - any aspects of it i guess!"
 
"Establishing appropriate software for delivery of online distance learning mechanisms for support and feedback. Initiating and maintaining online community feel. Enabling both academic and personal support for students."


I have to say it was quite nice to hear these comments as many of them were pretty spot on which was a great relief! Nobody said fixing the printers... Yay! There were no great misunderstandings of our roles and I guess that's down to the variety of roles we have in the faculty. We have a number of roles within the faculty that support TEL from various angles including filming, content development, VLE management, writing systems right through to staff development, advice and guidance on TEL, project work, curriculum design to educational development. If you ever find yourself new to a faculty I'd recommended taking the opportunity to ask academic colleagues how they view your role as a learning technologist as it makes for an interesting discussion point around the how you can support developments in TEL, allows you to establish your role and other roles working in TEL and also gives you a better understanding of what potential challenges you might face in the future.

References

Barry, W. (2015). "…and what do you do?" Can we explain the unexplainable?. In: Hopkins, D., ed., The Really Useful #EdTechBook, 1st ed. David Hopkins, pp.23-34.

Reed, P. (2015). The structure and roles of Learning Technologists within Higher Education Institutions. In: Hopkins, D., ed., The Really Useful #EdTechBook, 1st ed. David Hopkins, pp.41-51.

Walker, D. and MacNeill, S (2015). Learning Technologist as Digital Pedagogue. In: Hopkins, D., ed., The Really Useful #EdTechBook, 1st ed. David Hopkins, pp.91-105.

Using technology to support achieve more

This last few months many of us have been beavering away working on the Faculty Health Challenge. The Health Challenge is part of the university initiative Achieve More.


I have been working with the academic lead and the rest of the team in the curriculum design process, designing and creating the website 'online workbook' and managing the blog. We've had quite a challenge logistically, as a faculty we simply haven't had the time in the curriculum to allow students to undertake this in a one week period like other faculties have. So we have taken a long and thin approach in delivering weekly content and resources over a 12 week period using Google Sites.

The Approach

Our student groups are working in a multi-disciplinary team to consider the impact cultural and area differences have on the perception of health and delivery of health care, and in doing so developing their own identity as a Global Citizen. They will be working in teams looking at:

1. What affects people’s health in this area? 
2. What can be done about it? 
3. Why hasn’t this been done before?

Why Google Sites?

It's easy to use, it's flexible, we can enrol all our students, facilitators and supervisors easily enough, we can share and restrict our videos via google circles, visually it looks a lot nicer than your typical VLE (well we think so) and it allows an opportunity for all our first year students to interact with Google Sites and Google Docs (should they choose to use docs). Also, our first years will already be using a mix of Blackboard and Minerva so we wanted something easy to navigate around as we don't need the full functionality of a VLE.

We have 40 groups of students, each group has a dedicated facilitator. We created the master site and copied it 40 times and then released it to each student group and their facilitator.

What tools and technology have been used?

The module content delivery comprises of a mixture of content specific weekly online resources such as links to external resources as well as resources created in house by academics, librarians and learning techs. These are in the form of videos, screencasts and presentations.

We're expecting our students to upload items to their own site as well as use the threaded comment feature on Google Sites if they want to have a discussion online around a particular week.

What about communication? Social Media? Twitter? Facebook?

What about it? We have no hashtag or Facebook group, I'll say no more on this. What I will say is that we have a fantastic resource created by our SALTS (Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching) which is called 'Hashtags & Healthcare'. If you'd like anymore info then let me know i'll share it with you. But essentially it's an online guide for students created by students looking at the potential of social media as well as the pitfalls for those in a healthcare profession.

We're leaving it up to our students to decide how they want to communicate with each other and work as a team, we've given them the opportunity to be able to have online discussion but if they'd rather meet or email or use another online space then they are welcome to do so.

We are using a private Google+ community for our facilitators to touch base with one another as the weeks continue. They can use this private space to share issues and ideas or just keep each other up to date on week to week progress.

We do however have a Health Challenge blog, this is a Wordpress site that run alongside the week by week delivery of the programme. The purpose of this is to feed in useful tips, blog posts from subject specialists, footage of the opening event and all the 'fun' stuff along side their week to week learning. This blog also feeds into each groups site but can also be viewed as a stand alone blog.



We're only into week 3 of the module and our students are getting ready to head out to their allocated neighbourhood next week. The next few weeks will start to get really interesting as the students start exploring their neighbourhoods (observation only) and hearing from our patients as educators!

e-Assessment

I attended and presented at this years e-Assessment Scotland conference. I came back with lots of inspiration and ideas ready for the start of term so i thought I'd blog about what I took away from the day and how I'll be putting my thoughts into action. So here goes...

The keynote was my an old colleague and friend of mine Mr Peter Reed. You can view his slides and thoughts of the day on his blog. Pete delivered a really interesting keynote focusing around Brookfield's reflective lenses which encourages reflection through 4 lenses. These are self-reflection, students, literature and peers. In particular looking at assessment through the lenses of others and giving consideration to a host of factors when planning assessment. I found this really interesting and thought provoking when thinking about my own working context. So what am i going next? Well during the course of the next year I'm already planning a few events around e-Assessment and e-Feedback BUT I'm going to pop that on the back burner just for a very short while whilst I take on board Reedy's fantastic keynote. I'm going to re think my original sessions and target audience and I've been in touch with a few different members of staff within the faculty including programme administrators and unfair means officers. What I now want to do is involve some of our key stakeholders to ensure I'm understanding their perspectives when it comes to e-Assessment and involving them in informing some of these events and vice versa. I've also been thinking a lot more about the assessment lifecycle, assessment loading, high and low stakes assessment and how the planning of assessment in general can impact on the success of the assessment as a whole which again is something to consider when working with the various staff roles when planning new assessments.


I presented on emerging e-assessment practices, trends, techniques and tensions. I took a thematic approach as opposed to the usual case study approach and focused on three key areas in A-assessment. These were Collaborative e-Assessment, Portfolio based e-Assessment and e-Submission, e-Marking and e-Feedback. The presentation highlighted some of the emerging e-assessment practices being adopted within the faculty to address some of the challenges, this included the use of PebblePad for e-portfolio assessment, online submission and marking through Turnitin and Grademark and the use of Google apps for collaborative assessment and group work.


The other presentations on the day were varied and interesting and I met some new folk! Networking at a conference is always a big reason for me attending but it was nice to meet colleagues that were local to Scotland that I have never had the opportunity to meet before and have kept in touch about a few things since the conference! Also, although quite often we don't take advantage of a lot of the sponsor's stalls at these things, I really did and got some useful information from some of them in relation to developments within my faculty.

And finally, I got to visit Dundee! I stayed next to this lovely boat (pay no attention to the danger sign, i didn't!)






This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

MELSIG MMU "Smart Devices for Learning'

Last week I attended MELSIG which was held at Manchester Metropolitan University. I just wanted to highlight some of the key things I took away from the day. The event focus was around 'smart devices for learning', topic that's been growing in interest and use for some time now. What I quite like about MELSIG is that you tend to get a good mix of speakers that are currently undertaking projects directly with students and also you tend to pick up some useful app ideas.

So... My fave presentation was by Simon Thomson Head of eLearning at Leeds Met. I picked up a handy little 'smart device' that they've been using called a 'chatterbox', a fairly old school device used in my youth to direct truth or dare questions. Anyway, Simon has been using them with staff and has stripped them of all truth or dare questions, lucky for them! Instead the chatterbox has been replaced with tools to enhance teaching and learning and ways in which they can be used within teaching. As luck would have it I am in the midst of organising a session for staff around designing online learning activities. I'm definitely going to be using this chatterbox with staff as a conversation starter.

Something else i picked up was a company called Spritz who focus on developing text streaming technology and it's integration into modern technology. So the ability to be able to read moving/ streaming text as opposed to fixed text that you need to scroll through on an app would be quicker, more comfortable and easier. One to look out for i think! (Get it?.... 'Look' out for?!!)


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

The Future of Feedback

Some months ago i presented at The Future of Audio Feedback event at Sheffield Hallam University (in collaboration with the HEA). The event was aimed at those that were quite new to the concept of audio feedback and provided examples of practice and feedback from students who had been utilising audio feedback.

Myself and a colleague Jo Stroud, e-Learning Officer from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine presented the workshop 'Future Feedback... Supported by Technology' (see short abstract below)

Media-enhanced feedback is becoming ever easier to produce, with the growing prominence of affordable and powerful mobile devices reducing our reliance on institutionally-supplied hardware and software. This session will look at some of the free or cheaply available tools and applications accessible to anyone with an interest in creating richer electronic feedback.

The session looked at a mish mash of tools that could be used to deliver feedback to your students using just what you have on your PC/Laptop without having to install or buy anything new, bonus! I re-jigged the session and delivered it to the department of Human Communication Sciences (HCS) a few weeks ago. HCS have been selected to be involved in an institutional wide project on feedback called 'Flexible Formative F3edback' which is aims to gather expectation and experiences of feedback across all faculties. 

There's been some interest from staff in using free tools to enhance and engage students in feedback. There's a lot of widespread use of Turnitin within the faculty at present and many people using Grademark to deliver feedback taking advantage of the ability to annotate online scripts using Quickmark comments, leave detailed free text feedback, audio feedback and also provide a linked marking criteria (rubric). One aspect we (and everyone else no doubt) are struggling to overcome is Grademark's inability to accommodate blind/second marking however this doesn't effect everyones marking practices and is something on the Turnitin/Grademark roadmap to be addressed in the future.

For now i think encouraging using a variety of technology enhanced methods to support feedback is the way forward as it offers more flexibility and freedom. I'm also going to be supporting the use of Grademark within departments, next stop! ScHARR Bitesize on the 7th May 'Online Marking through Turnitin & Grademark'

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

FOTE13

This year i managed to get to the Future of Technology in Education conference held at ULCC, London. The event covered a range of discussions and presentation ranging from BT's Futurologist Nicola Millard talking about Crowds, Clouds and Customers, highlighting the importance of connectivity and how the ability to connect  anywhere is changing our working and learning behaviour, societies evolving behaviours in terms of the way in which we interact and use technology to communicate and collaborate with one another as well as the changes to the physical spaces in which we work.

I guess something that stuck out from the day was the underlying message about the value of social interaction and face to face. Nicola Ward (BT) mentioned the importance of having connectivity to be able to carry out tasks in social spaces, Gwen Noteborn of Maastricht University highlighted the importance of face to face lectures in relation to her research in webcasting. She mentioned how webcasting added value to students learning but couldn't replace the social aspect of coming together in one room for a lecture. Lindsay Jordan Educational Developer at the University of the Arts London also talked about that feeling and sense of remembrance you have when experiencing something in a physical space with a social aspect as opposed to an online space, to demonstrate this she presented wearing a blue spandex 'onsie' and a blue wig. Lindsay has a point,  I don't think some of us will forget that in a hurry! So what does this mean for us as educational developers? How do we create that social experience for our students when it comes to online courses and in particular as Lindsay discussed in relation to the high drop out rates that we find with MOOCs.

The University of Sheffield has just signed up to FutureLearn and the first course to be launched from the university will be Discover Dentistry (shameless plug, go check it out). We'll be looking at using the tools within the FutureLearn platform to add elements of interaction and discussion whilst keeping motivation up. The platform is relatively new so it'll be an interesting experience for all so watch this space!






This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.