1. Sustaining innovation in curriculum delivery
Gus Cameron, Marion Manton & Phil George, facilitated by Simon Walker
Welcome to the first of the Theme 2 afternoon session that concerns the sustainability of innovation in curriculum delivery. My name is Simon walker, and I’m head of the educational development unit at the university of Greenwich and co-organiser of the annual e-learning conference that I know many of you have graced with your presence. This session is very close to my heart as we have recently introduced a new institutional vision for learning and teaching as part of a graduate attribute initiative, about to introduce a new VLE and new processes that support programme teams in regenerating their curricula. .
So this session which is part of theme 2 realising the value, isn’t about sustaining project work. Its much greater and more complex than running a project. It is, however, a natural progression from successful project work. Embedding change in ways that deeply impact upon the work of the institution and all its stakeholders involves both bottom up and top down approaches. So the questions that I think would usefully frame this session are:
How do institutions successfully promote and adopt innovative practice to achieve transformational and long-term change?
How can we sustain innovation in curriculum delivery in a climate of economic restraint?
What types of organisational cultures and habits should we develop that will help to lower the barriers that prevent curriculum innovation and change
Joint Information Systems Committee
Supporting education and research

2. How do institutions successfully promote,
How do institutions successfully promote, and adopt, innovative practice to achieve transformational and long-term change?
How can we sustain innovation in curriculum delivery in a climate of economic restraint?
What types of organisational cultures and habits help in lowering the barriers that prevent curriculum innovation and change?
Joint Information Systems Committee

3. eLearning and blended learning practice.
Presenters
Gus Cameron is a Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol.
Marion Manton is eLearning Research Project Manager at Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford.
Phil George is eLearning manager for Kingston College with responsibility for teacher’s professional development and training in
eLearning and blended learning practice.
To help us find our way through these questions we have 3 superb presenters Gus Cameron , Marion Manton and Phil George who I have had the pleasure of working with in the lead up to this conference.
Facilitator
Simon Walker is Head of the Educational Development Unit at the University of Greenwich
Joint Information Systems Committee

4. Session practice Text-chatting Elluminate layout Audio Whiteboard
Technical problems
Use the text-chat to engage with other delegates, presenter and moderators.
You can send private text-chat messages e.g. to moderators or to individuals.
You can change your Elluminate layout to “Wide layout” to make it easier to follow the text-chat (select “View … Layouts…Wide layout”).
If you are distracted by the text-chat, you can “unlock” the Elluminate layout to enable you to adjust the size and position of the text-chat sub-window (uncheck “View…Layouts …Layout locked”)
It is best to run the Audio Set-up Wizard to test your audio set-up each time you enter an Elluminate room (select “Tools…Audio… Audio setup wizard).
You must use a headset/microphone if you want to ask a question in audio.
Only use your microphone when guided by a moderator – click on the mic icon (bottom-left of screen) to turn it on and click on it again to turn it off.
Only draw on the whiteboard if guided by a moderator.
Send a private text-chat message to “moderators” and they will try to help.
A number of delegates have already responded to a forum discussion regarding their own enablers and barriers (thank you) and these will be responded to in this session as well as in the summary. Hope you will feel able to contribute live to this session as well. You can view the different ways of engaging in this session through text chat or audio but please note that if you are trying to follow the chat it might be better to change the layout of your elluminate screen. If you wish to ask a question, can you hold up your hand so we can queue people.
Joint Information Systems Committee

5. Session format Resources http://tinyurl.com/jiscsustaiinov PART 1
Asynchronous discussions
PART 1
Project Presentations
PART 2
Barriers and Enablers
Intro
Simon Walker
Project presentations
Gus Cameron
Marion Manton
Phil George
Discussions
Intro
Simon Walker
Project challenges & how they were dealt with
Gus Cameron
Marion Manton
Phil George
Discussions
Wrap-up
Simon Walker
Text-chat
Text-chat
This is the intended structure of the hour long session. It is like a glorious tasty sandwich – the scrumptious filling is the presentations and discussion with you and the bread is formed by the asynchrouns discussin before and after. So the first part will be short 5 min presentations by Gus, Marion and Phil followed by a 10 min discussion. We then move into part 2 to consider challenges and would like to hear any questions or comments from you that our presenters will try to respond to. You will have read the bios, so i wont spend valuable time introducing them..over to you Gus for the next 5 mins.
Asynchronous discussions
Resources

6. PART 1 – Project Presentations
Gus Cameron
Joint Information Systems Committee

7. Gus Cameron

8. How do we maximise the value of the resources and effort?
Context
Bristol Biosciences Laboratory Teaching
1000+ mainly “traditional” students.
pieces of coursework.
100000’s of student contact hours.
1000’s of staff hours.
£100000’s spent in space, equipment and consumables.
Dr Mark Downs, Society of Biology CEO comments on fees increase 4th Nov ’10
“We must ensure that the option for universities to charge potentially large differential fees does not force universities to offer less hands-on practical experience in the field or laboratory.”
How do we maximise the value of the resources and effort?
We believe the key is 1) better student preparation and 2) better feedback.

9. Where we were. Opportunities. Challenges.
Students can be expected to have broadband and be able to use the standard web technologies.
Web content-creation tools no longer require high-level expertise.
Most staff familiar with VLEs.
Reducing time spent marking allows more in-lab time for staff.
Existing provision was poor and had not been changed in many years.
Very time-consuming to assess individual student achievement.
Consequently relatively few summative marks were assigned to laboratory work.
Which, combined with students being increasing mark-focussed,
leads to relatively low engagement with laboratory classes from both staff and students.
In summary, there were few incentives for students to prepare for laboratory classes.

10. What we did. The eBiolabs site. The students said
Created a new site dedicated to laboratory teaching,
and populated it with very high quality resources.
We encouraged the students to engage with it (marks!),
which meant they got more out of the lab sessions.
We automated the marking, which freed-up staff to work in the lab.
Which improved feedback and confidence in assessment.

11. Where we are going.
Two years in and now supporting ten bioscience courses (800+ students).
Leveraging economies of scale and reusing resources.
Provided the impetus to develop a full electronic “marks, feedback and attendance” system.
Moving across Faculties / disciplines.
Licensed to another university.

12. Gus Cameron Gus Cameron School of Biochemistry. University of Bristol.
Gus Cameron

13. Marion Manton

14. CASCADE
Developing new models to transform the delivery and support of learning for continuing and professional learners at the University of Oxford
Bridget Lewis & Marion Manton
Cascade project
Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford
Cascade – developing new models to transform the delivery and support of learning for continuing and professional learners at the University of Oxford

15. Context/Drivers
Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford
Diverse body of 15,000 part-time students each year
Courses at all levels from open access to PhD
Subjects from Nanotechnology to Philosophy
Courses available for study online, f2f, blended learning
Challenge: Help offset the loss of funding resulting from the Government’s ELQ policy by using technology to:
Improve the efficiency of the Department’s activities
Develop new or repurpose existing activities
Improve levels of service for staff and students
5 focus areas
Online assignment handling
VLE support for courses
Generic content
Course design
Online payment and enrolment
The Cascade project was implemented to face the challenge that the ELQ policy (which withdrew government funding for students studying equivalent or lower qualifications to those they already held) posed to the Department. The project aimed to enable the Department to:
Undertake its activities more efficiently so that resources are focused on value-adding activities, such as delivering improvements to the student experience and the creation of tools that support best practice;
Develop new, or repurpose existing, activities to support the delivery of its new vision and provide additional revenue streams;
Support its ability to deliver academically superb courses to students of the highest calibre through the use of new tools and functionality to augment the services currently offered to students.
And had the following objectives to:
Identify interventions that achieve our aims, focussing on the areas of course design, online access to the department and e-administration.
Implement those interventions that best meet the criteria of impact, achievability, desirability to stakeholders and add value to the Department.
Develop models, toolkits, and dissemination techniques that maximise uptake and ensure that the interventions are embedded and sustained.
Establish approaches to track and report on project activities and measure their success.
Share the outputs of the project with the wider University and beyond.

16. Challenges/Questions
Open ended problem - managing scope
Very diverse department
students
staff
courses
Focus on operational services
everything affects everything and everybody else
some things cannot be changed
Changing culture from "could/should we use to technology" to "how will we use technology"

17. Where we are now
New online assignment handling system built into Moodle
Streamlined system for providing VLE support for courses
Student-facing information across the Department reviewed and streamlined across platforms – web, VLE, databases
More shared content developed, centrally managed and, where possible, released as OER
Moodle course with best practice examples of the use of technology for teaching and learning from Department
Updated documentation to encourage consideration of technology in new course design
Online payment and enrolment available across the majority of our programmes
Infrastructure extended to support student access to their information in Departmental systems online

18. Future vision
Staff confident in using technology to perform their role
Technology-supported aspects of curriculum delivery embedded in Departmental practice
All programmes using technology appropriately to maximize efficiency, service and reach without sacrificing quality
All award-bearing courses supported by a VLE
Developed from a template or existing provision
Including relevant generic content
Allowing online assignment submission, if required
Online enrolment and payment available for all courses.

19. Thank you

20. Phil George
Joint Information Systems Committee

21. Kingston Uplift for Business Education.
KUBE
Kingston Uplift for Business Education.

22. Why and How?
Significant challenges identified on the Higher Education Business programs running at Kingston College. (BABM BA in Business Management. HND Business Management. Foundation Degree in Business)
To attempt to address issues of learner attendance, engagement and achievement.
To examine changing the delivery of the programmes to fit with changing patterns of the students behaviour and lifestyle.
To explore models of blended learning solutions which best exploit the available technology and permit re-purposing of existing resources.
To build a repository of well designed editable blended learning objects.
To enhance best practice and collaboration amongst teaching practitioners.
Kube used a variety of tools and techniques to address the core elements of the project.
Seek to create engaging blended learning activities using a variety of tools and techniques.
Attempt to address some of the issues identified by learners using technology supported solutions.

23. What we did
Deployment of a wide selection of blended learning resources.

24. Where are we going? How will we get there......? Drivers? Challenges?
The Learner Voice:
“All the online resources have helped me with my learning.”
“Podcasts help me to refresh my learning”.
“I listened to a podcast just before my Business Accounting test and I remembered everything!”
“The online material helps me to prepare for lectures.  I get an idea of the main points before I turn up.”
“I like to test my knowledge, and I like doing something interactive so you are engaging a bit more.”
“I think the podcasts and ‘drag and drop’ activities etc are essential.  They help you to find the gaps in your knowledge which you can’t do just listening to lectures.”
Challenges?
Organisational and Human
Resources.
Uncertainty.
Confidence issues
Fear of change
Organisational buy-in
Work patterns
Measurement and
Evaluation
Infrastructure
Attitudes and behaviour
How will we get there......?

25. Kingston Uplift for Business Education.
Thank you.
Phil George
Head of eLearning
Kingston College
KUBE project resource site.
Username jiscguest
Password welcome2KC
KUBE
Kingston Uplift for Business Education.

26. Discussions

27. PART 2 – Barriers and Enablers
Gus Cameron
Marion
Phil George
Simon Walker
Joint Information Systems Committee

29. Wrap-up