2018 – Week 5

Monday

  • Working on the ISG plan.

Tuesday

  • Lecture Recording Academic User Group.
  • Lunch with Lisa.
  • Section Heads meeting.
  • Review Lecture Recording scheduling.

Wednesday

  • Lecture Recording Programme Board.
  • First Cookie Jar meeting.

Thursday

  • DT3 meeting – decide on projects to put in the plan.
  • Lunch with Michael McTernan – good chat about Voxsio and chat interfaces.
  • GDPR and blogging with Rena.
  • eScript migration project board.

Friday

  • A hard day. Wrote a blog post about it.
  • Worked on EdX data and setting up access.
  • Wrote reference for Pat.

2018 – Week 4

Monday

  • Catch up with Fraser – Xerte pilot plans and <something else>
  • Starting to pull together our input to the ISG plan.
  • Meeting with Donna in IAD – how does lecture recording fit with the study skills materials that students that IAD produce.
  • Review Digital Transformation ideas.

Tuesday

  • Meet Jeremy and Yu-Chen to discuss their PTAS project.
  • Make arrangements for lecture recording of new Principal
  • Noteable meeting with James et al.

Wednesday

  • On leave in the morning.
  • School reps meeting
  • Lecture recording steering group.

Thursday

  • MVM Timetabling project board
  • CSPC
  • Organising AI event

Friday

  • Work on ISG plan
  • Catch up with Dave and Colan to discuss recent call with Deakin
  • Update on blogging project with Sonali
  • Conference call with LH and TA
  • Pull together info on H-West usage

2018 – Week 3

Monday

  • Submit proposal to QAA Enhancement Themes conference – joint proposal with a student colleague.
  • Meeting with our CIO and programme team members to look at some aspects of distance learning tech.
  • Exec meeting – planning.
  • Catch up with Ewan on Wikimedia activities.
  • Learning Technologies Advisory Group meeting – reviewed papers going to LTC including eExams and MOOC Strategy.

Tuesday

  • Annual Leadership Away Day

Wednesday

  • Learn quarterly service review
  • Blogging project kick off
  • Review Timetabling integration / lecture recording scheduling workflow with Colin and Alan and Marc.

Thursday

  • Aurora mentoring meeting with a colleague.
  • Meeting with Cathy Bovill with Euan  and Annie to discuss mainstreaming lecture recording into IAD help and guidance resources.
  • Sort out lots of staff development requests.
  • Finalise PRAF paperwork.
  • College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science RAG reports.

Friday

  • GDPR documents for Student Systems colleagues.
  • Prep with Ross and Myles for their meeting with Academic Services – use of Learn to support class rep comms to students.
  • Comms catch up with Lorraine.

2018 – Week 2

Monday

  • Meet with Institute for Academic Development colleagues to check plans, process and money for PTAS project calls.
  • Work on job descriptions for 2 team manager posts and re-draft a job ad for a senior service manager / learning technologist role.
  • Discuss a ‘state of the art’ workshop with to introduce colleagues to some thinking around key technologies and current capabilities.
  • Review comms plans for our lecture recording programme.

Tuesday

  • Exec meeting and catch up with Kevin. Lots of recruitment to get going with.
  • Catch up with Stephen and catch up with Mark. Review the resource planning spreadsheet.
  • Submit proposals to Digital Transformation call for ideas.

Wednesday

  • Plan an all ISG staff event to share all the AI projects ongoing at the moment.
  • Business processes update for lecture recording / timetabling integration – feedback from the PM on the recent workshops.
  • Work on HR paperwork stuff.

Thursday

  • Specify reporting requirements for lecture recording with the team and our PM.
  • Reviewed the draft of our institutional learning analytics policy.
  • Catch up with Colan on GDPR prep activities.
  • Catch up with the team on the Eesysoft pilot.

Friday

  • Working from home – writing up TEL031 final project report and making notes for blogging kick off meeting.

2018 – Week 1

Wednesday

  • Cleared the decks and sorted my diary for the next few months ahead – blocking out all of March for travel.
  • Bit of work on my CMALT portfolio.
  • Reviewed 2 LAK Hackathon proposals.

Thursday

  • Did some HR stuff.
  • Struggled through half the day then went home feeling grim.

Friday

  • Continued to feel grim.

2017 – Week 51

Tuesday

  • Meeting with Rena for an update on Data Protection stuff – specifically learning analytics focussed. This is also the third time recently a discussion about support for being abused online in the course of your job has come up. Revisited the MozFest / iHeartMob resources I collected and i think that the step around supporting / helping someone document abuse is a really practical one that shouldn’t be very controversial.
  • Exec meeting
  • Catch up with Stephen about recruitment plans for online learning tech support.
  • Skype with Eoghan about student support for IT at Easter Bush campus.
  • Introductory meeting with Jill MacKay on her evaluation work for lecture recording programme. Focus will be on qualitative research. Should hopefully feed ideas for PTAS projects and future areas of research.
  • Meet with Colin and Alan on the requirements documents for the projects for the next phase of lecture recording programme. Spent quite a bit of time on the timetabling integration requirements.
  • Finished off the job descriptions for student interns for the summer: 1 to support academic blogging service and 1 to support lecture recording programme.

Wednesday

  • Meeting with Sian et al. about tutoring stuff and also web conference call.
  • Catch up with Lisa on FOI stuff.

Thursday

  • Meet with LTW SMT colleagues – sharing approaches and information about writing visions and strategies; where to start; ow to socialise; mapping to the bigger picture.
  • Programme meeting with Colin Watt including the 3 year annual planning review.
  • Lunch with Claire Knowles – identified some potential overlap with her thinking about an Omeka service and our blogging project. DOOO offers potential in both areas especially.
  • Lecture Recording Implementation Steering Group – reviewed training plan for next phase.

Friday

  • Writing job descriptions for new team manager roles.
  • Last-day Christmas lunch with a bunch of colleagues from across LTW.
  • 1-1 with Pat – resourcing plans for next year.

2017 – Week 50

Monday

  • Prepare my slides for IT Futures talk.
  • Catch up with Fraser – lecture recording; barriers to online learning.
  • Online learning steering group meeting.

Tuesday

  • Noteable project meeting – first one with James in post.
  • Exec meeting
  • eScript Migration Board – signed off prototype and plans
  • Meet with Simon from York
  • Meet with Jon from IAD – how to integrate lecture recording with their support resources. Agreed on focus on study skills development and large class teaching. Following up with Cathy Bovill and Donna.

Wednesday

  • IT Futures conference today. Gave a talk on our lecture recording project. Covered the amazing work that Euan Murray has done on recording chalkboards. In reality he’s produced a solution for recording writing surfaces, and it doesn’t require super-fancy tech. It’s based on good graphic/ui design for the room control touch panels, some thought about feedback for the lecturer (to check what’s being recorded at any point) and clever programming of the room control systems. Also emphasised that this project was very much about learning from other institutions, but still has a strong evaluation component built in. Since most of the talk was backwards looking, I also asked for ideas for creative uses of lecture recording technology. Suggestions included:
    • Using live streaming to join our disparate campus together
    • Using live streaming to do joint activities with on-campus and online students
    • Doing more to work with recordings once made – critical analysis via annotation by students for example
  • 3 hour hands-on workshop learning how to use OnTask. Comments from academic colleagues in the room were about the extent to which data integration needs to be automated and how they thought it was good, but it’s “yet another system”. Reminded me again that the fundamental premise of the NGDLE is built upon a model of digital skills and academic workload model that is totally removed from reality. Although the workshop facilitators encouraged interaction during the practical doing bits of the session it was also deathly quiet – this stuff takes more concentration and is a bit harder perhaps than anticipated?

Thursday

  • Another good blog post from Tony Hirst on Jupyter and Binderhub turns into an email discussion about our Notebooks project and including something explicit around sharing notebooks as OER in the pilot project criteria.
  • Meeting about the JISC Digital Experience Tracker survey – reviewed questions and finalised our institutional questions.
  • Meeting about the QAA Enhancement Themes and our institutional plan. Need to submit an abstract to the Enhancement Themes conference by 12 January 2018 on our lecture recording project.

Friday

  • Meet with online learning services provider.
  • Another great presentation from Abelardo on feedback in large flipped classrooms with OnTask. Great points in general about the kinds of feedback students need (coaching mentality, not judge) and what can be done to support students in a flipped classroom scenario. Need to watch for the video recording going up. Also caught up with Hamish.
  • Popped over to ECA at 16:30 to see Lindy’s embroidery project exhibition before it closes.

 

2017 – Week 49

Monday

  • Talk about Digital Transformation APIs project; review roadmap with John, talked about comms, skills building, support. Some work to be done to tie into overall information architecture standards. Also reviewed change process and agreed how we handle situations where an existing inter-operability standard exists.
  • Chat to Jen about AI agents and where they fit in our respective projects. Agreed to bring together some contacts and research we both have.
  • Circulated paper on learning analytics and proposal for using to support feedback. Needs more follow up to support integration with our learning design process, and ensuring it’s properly evaluated.
  • Scoping stakeholders for Lecture Recording evaluation activities. Who needs to be in the loop – are they contributing to, or actioning outputs? How do we ensure the research and evaluation we are funding is disseminated and finds it’s way back into practice. Following up our chat with a meeting with the Director of our Institute for Academic Development.
  • Quick catch up with Muriel about CMVM projects in the learning and teaching space.
  • Planning meeting with Ewan and others for our Women in Medicine editathon for Festival of Creative Learning week next February. We need to expand our list of biographies that need writing. Identified the BMJ Obituaries section as a source of more info.

Tuesday

  • Normal Tuesday management meeting, plus a good catch up with Colan on Web
  • Governance as I’m going to miss the last workshop on Wednesday.
  • Quick update with Stephen on tech plans including learning analytics paper for the board next week and how we gather requirements for other areas of activity.
  • All LTW staff meeting in the PM. Long list of stuff we’ve achieved in the last 6 months – very impressive! Also hands-on activities. Charley had us helping to crowd-source ideas for her playful learning strategy and Ewan led a session on Wikipedia Games to introduce the division to the work he does.

Wednesday

  • Went to that there London to do a talk at the London School of Economics with Yi-Shan Tsai on Research-Informed Institutional Analytics. We covered an intro to learning analytics, the activities and research of the Sheila project and Edinburgh’s institutional activities (and I hope it was clear that we have learned from much of the research).

Thursday

  • Playing catch-up after Wednesday, plus a meeting with Jimmy A from Edina about his multimedia text generator innovation project. Decided on a do-able scope for the project.
  • Christmas lunch and socialising.

Friday

  • On leave!

2017 – Week 48

Monday

  • Submit proposal to OER18 based on Open to All blog post.
  • Talk to colleagues about a Festival of Creative Learning Week vox-pop session.
  • Discuss API access to our media servers for search indexing videos as part of a new University search engine project. Can we have a Creative Commons filter on the search please? Need data protocol permission forms filled out.
  • Review the beginnings of a video and graphic design style guide for new online content.
  • Review Web Governance vision and objectives with Colan ahead of workshop later in the week.
  • Discuss whether we should extent the coaching / feedback report we built for QMP into something that all users can have access to. Following up with potential users and guage interest.

Tuesday

  • Meet with project team for Notifications project – API access to Learn for Announcements data and permission to use data protocol to be taken forward.
  • Go to IAD and review PTAS applications as part of the adjudication panel. 2 lecture recording related projects approved.
  • Meet with colleagues on Service Excellence projects to share experiences of procurement processes, and some ideas around building buy-in for their direction of travel.
  • Catch up with the team on their impressions of the Wiseflow product demo on Tuesday PM.

Wednesday

  • Web Governance workshops with Colan et al. Really starting to pull things together. Can see where DOOO and blogging fit within the bigger digital strategy. This is good stuff and we are getting quite excited about it. We talked a lot in my group about content design and development; the extent to which content needs to be highly design in some areas of our web estate, and the extent to which a wide variety of user generated content might be curated in other areas.
  • Met with the Surgical Sciences teams to check progress and plans on their VLE migration projects. Everyone is really very positive about the opportunities they see in coming off their bespoke platforms.
  • Implementation Steering Group for Lecture Recording Programme. Signed off briefs and scope of this stage; update on comms plan; update on rooms for the next phase from Euan. Still a lot to do and aspects like timetabling integration will be technically challenging.
  • Marc was at Sheffield Echo360 User Group – learning all about their opt-in project and timetabling integration.

Thursday

  • Met Chris Cheong from RMIT for an overview of his learning analytics work. Described the Task, Test, Monitor system and how it supports student self-reflection. Some really interesting observations from this project. In terms of how students use TTM – starts as a testing system, but flips into being a diagnostic system around mid-semester as assessments kick in.
  • Whole afternoon workshop with Shane and Aaron from Pebble Learning, looking at what we want from ATLAS assessment tools for the future.

Friday

  • Working on paper for DLAS and learning analytics recommendations.
  • Met with Ewan to plan Wikipedia Games session at our all staff meeting, plus potential visit to Stockholm and visit from Alice to support Festival of Creative Learning week events in February next year.
  • Agreed next lecture recording programme newsletter with Lorraine. Strong focus on training to support Semester 2 prep.
  • Off to Moray House to work with Yi-Shan on finalising our presentation at LSE next week.