Reflections from Digifest: Jisc online CPD service for FE & skills

By Matt Ewens March 11, 2016
FE and Skills
CPD, digifest, digital capability

On 2 and 3 March, Jisc held yet another highly innovative and engaging Digifest event. I felt a great buzz and hive of activity throughout the two days, encapsulated by enriching presentations and content, but not forgetting the robots!

My role this year was to be on-hand to provide social media coverage for sessions throughout the event.

One of the highlights was the session improving digital technology skills in FE: The CPD service, held at the advice and practical assistance stand, which took place at 11:15am on the first day. The session highlighted the students’ expectations regarding digital technology and some of the barriers that teaching staff face. Sarah Dunne, senior so-design manager, Jisc talked about FELTAG and some of the challenges moving to a blended learning model. This led into some audience feedback and their experiences and challenges related to CPD and developing digital capabilities and the kind of questions raised below:

How can trainers and teachers gain the confidence and skills needed to use digital technology effectively?

What were the most troubling aspects that came back regularly?

Sarah then introduced the Jisc online CPD service for FE and skills, a project that once published will enable staff to build their skills and make them more confident and proficient in using digital technology, directly mapped to the needs of the FELTAG agenda.

“The JIsc CPD online service will provide ease of access to curated content through orchestrated activities to help staff use them in their own teaching”

The tool has been designed with a simple interface that will lead the user along pathways to ‘learn, find and reuse and build’ – the CPD service will tie in to a diagnostic ‘Discovery’ tool, which is linked to Jisc’s six elements of digital capability. Feedback and suggested steps and actions are provided during the course of the user experience and also self-review.

In addition the tool will offer searching of curated resources, community reviews and digital capability themes. There is also potential for development of an online course builder in the future.

For further information about this exciting project, please contact Sarah Dunne (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/staff/sarah-dunne)
sarah.dunne@jisc.ac.uk

Clare Killen, who is a consultant for the CPD project demonstrated many scenarios related to the kind of challenges that teachers may face and how the Jisc CPD online tool will help in the future. Peter Chatterton, also a consultant for the project led the discussion activities the workshop, the outcomes of which have been gathered to inform future development.

(Clare Killen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/clarejk)
(Peter Chatterton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/balham)

The Jisc online CPD service aims to launch this September.

Feedback from delegates during the session

“Will be a great support to those of us in training. Identifying needs means we can target specifics and plan suitable training opportunities.” – Teresa Woolf, Learning Technology Developer, Swindon College

Presentation slides from the session

Further reading

Jisc guide: Supporting professional development: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/curriculum-design-and-support-for-online-learning/professional-development
Flipping continuing professional development: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/flipping-continuing-professional-development-20-aug-2015
Implementing the FELTAG agenda: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/implementing-the-feltag-agenda

Throughout the rest of Digifest I was busy tweeting from sessions and contributing to the conversations on the app, which I found to be a great engaging tool. One of the benefits of the app was its ability to sync to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to extend the messages without having to separately visit other social media websites.

Digilab

A NAO robot entertaining delegates with impersonations

Digilab was very immersive and featured some very cool robots and digital technology.

Delegates could try out virtual reality headsets and use their smart device to control a replica toy BB-8 droid from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie.

Other interesting things to see included: thermal imaging, 3D printing, lecture capture, 3D photos and Google Translate.

Watch how Google translates text on-screen

To have a look at these technologies in more details visit the Digilab webpages. (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/jisc-digital-festival-02-mar-2016/digilab)

But what did the delegates think about Digifest? Why not listen to some of the reflections from speakers and delegates captured for Jisc’s YouTube channel. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbKeiLya4JyAqU7ZEGfvy5PAcAqXy3DKB)

Jisc and LOOP: The future of student feedback and the role of digital technology

By Sarah Dunne March 1, 2016
Learner feedback
Jisc event, Learner expectations, learner views, LOOP event

(published on behalf of Alev Zahir)

On Thursday 21^st of January Jisc and LOOP collaborated on a unique event which explored: “The future of student feedback and the role of technology”. At the heart of the debate was how technology can support student feedback to improve quality in colleges and learning providers.

The event was attended by FE practitioners, Ofsted, tech entrepreneurs, local council representatives and students, ensuring a variety of views and interesting conversations.

Consultation with LOOP partners in the FE sector suggest that the current methods for gathering student feedback and responding are not always successful.

Institutions have problems getting high response rates and many students and some staff do not take them seriously. Staff leading the survey and students taking part suffer from ‘survey fatigue’ and the results are often not an authentic picture of student experience.

The event addressed the key strategic challenges facing FE leaders in this area, shared examples of good practice and heard directly from students about what motivates them to give authentic and insightful feedback.

Denise Olander HMI gave a very useful presentation around gathering student views during inspection. Some of her key points were:

Learners’ and students’ views are a key source of evidence for inspectors (as are the views of managers, staff, governors, employers and others)
As the recipients of the education or training provided, students can give inspectors valuable insights into the quality of provision
Ofsted use a variety of means to gather student feedback both formal and informal, online and off-line

Guests were able to engage in an informal dialogue with Denise about how best to harness student feedback effectively to support inspections under the new framework.

A panel of experts including Paul Bailey (Jisc), Jayne Morgan (Lewisham and Southwark College) and Uly Lyons (King Edward VI – Nuneaton) gave us their views on the current strategies they use to gather student feedback, the merits of using them and their hopes for the future in this area.

LOOP student board members Abi, Shanice, Nadeem and Ethan spoke passionately and confidently about why effective student feedback is so important to them and gave examples from their own institutions of how the feedback has been used for improvement and recognizing good practice.

“We learnt that there was a consensus that student feedback was very important to all sorts of institutions and organisations. Whether it be principals, Ofsted or the institutions themselves. Student feedback shapes the way an institution presents itself, it can better things for everyone and it’s certainly vital to encourage institutions to gain feedback so that they can realise the potential behind services like LOOP and shape their school, college or university so that it best suits the needs of everyone.” Ethan Gates – Havering Sixth Form College

Expert Panel

Showcases and examples form within the sector of how technology can be used to improve services included:

LOOP – the student-driven review and ratings website for schools and colleges (www.loop.uk.com)

WAMBIZ – private social networks for education (www.wambiz.com)

Unitu – the student voice platform (www.unitu.co.uk)

City Lit – the usage of web postings on progress and online course review systems (www.citylit.ac.uk)

Ofsted Learner Voice – the way for students to give their voice during inspections (www.learnerview.ofsted.gov.uk)

For the final part of the event we asked guests to create their vision for the next 5 years in this area and their hopes are:

To gather greater qualitative and quantitative student feedback data and that more value is given to qualitative feedback
To ensure there’s a measurable impact
That feedback is more transparent to increase trust
To use creative ways to share impact
That there is increased understanding that students are customers
LOOP becomes widespread
That the benefits of high quality feedback are recognised
Student feedback is continuous not just entry and exit

LOOP – the student driven review and ratings website is just one answer in this area.

By partnering with institutions and using a training methodology we give students the skills they need to give insightful and useful reviews. Students become part of the solution by not only focusing on what works well and what needs to be improved but by developing the solutions themselves.

LOOP student reviews can be found at: www.loop.uk.com

For more information about LOOP please contact: alev@loop.uk.com

Building capability across an FE College

By James Clay January 18, 2016
FE and Skills
digital capability, fe colleges, technology, training and development

These are challenging times for FE Colleges. The cuts in funding, Area Based Reviews, FELTAG, competitive pressures, small group sizes, all are areas both for opportunity and problems to be resolved.

Technology offers lots of potential solutions to the problems that are being faced:

Learning platforms and VLEs can provide a mechanism for delivering online learning across multiple sites.
Mobile devices allow flexible learning to happen at a time and place to suit the learner.
Ubiquitous wifi means that BYOD is not only possible but can have a transformational impact on teaching, learning and assessment.
Mobile devices have amazing functionality to change the medium of assessment from written tasks to using video and audio.
The web provides a doorway into an online world of interactive learning, digital resources and amazing videos.

Classroom by James Clay (CC BY-NC 2.0)

There are case studies in abundance about how technology can be used to inspire, motivate and change how we teach, learn and assess.

However we should remember that these solutions have been around for a while, so why haven’t teaching staff across the FE sector taken up these solutions to solve the problems they face?

Well the reality is that many staff across FE have used technology effectively to enhance and enrich teaching learning and assessment. Unfortunately this may not have happened in a holistic consistent way across an FE College or the FE sector as a whole.

So why is this?

Well there are many reasons for this, from strategy, lack of vision at the top, training, resources, infrastructure, staff development and so on…

One aspect that often can be missed is one of capability, specifically digital capability. Digital capability is not just about having the right digital skills or literacy, but having the capability to make the right and appropriate choices when it comes to digital and understanding when to seek support or the right training.

When an FE College decides to pursue a new digital initiative it often falls at the first fence as staff either don’t engage with the tool, or fail to take advantage of the full functionality available. A good example of this is the VLE, where the end result of staff engaging with the VLE is to focus purely on content and using the VLE as a repository of Word documents and Powerpoint presentations. Missing the added value the VLE can bring in terms of discussion, online quizzes and assessment, wikis, collaborative assessments and so much more.

So why do staff not use the full functionality of the VLE? More often though we talk of time and training, an assumption is made that staff have the necessary digital skills, the capability to take advantage of the functionality of the VLE. That assumption is quite flawed, and staff who have low digital capability may not.

Often an assumption is made that teaching staff in FE are able to understand how, why and where a tool can be used effectively. They know, when showcased a new tool or service how to embed it into their practice. They know, when they see an online video case study, how they will take the lessons and change the way in which they work. We also assume that they have the necessary motivation to do so.

If we assume that they don’t then how do we provide the necessary skills to allow them to do so? What kind of training and development do we need to create to make this paradigm shift?

In a similar manner, when new digital tools are introduced to an organisation, many staff don’t understand why they need to use them, and often choose not to. As described above we assume staff will utilise the full functionality of the digital tools. Organisations invest heavily in technology to support the business processes; we have seen new tools such as CRM, learning analytics, social media engagement, lecture capture, online learning environments. They do this for many reasons, efficiency, engagement, for example, but some of these tools only make sense and only really work if everyone in the organisation who is supposed to use, it does use it.

Learning Space by James Clay (CC BY-NC 2.0)

So what do we do about this?

Understanding your digital capability is key. Knowing what skills you have and which you don’t. It is important that staff are encouraged and motivated to build their digital capability and the appropriate and necessary development time and training is put in place. A change in thinking in how digital tools and services are both introduced and approached needs to happen.

FE Colleges may want to consider how they would ensure digital capability was part of their staff induction programme as well as ensuring the appropriate digital capabilities are included in people specifications and job descriptions.

Similarly understanding the current digital capabilities of their staff will ensure that when new digital initiatives are introduced, the appropriate training across all levels is offered to staff so that full use is made across the college of the new tools and services.

Jisc are building a digital capability service which will allow staff in FE Colleges to discover more about their individual digital capability and useful actions and next steps to build that capability. One key tool for this will be an online FE and Skills CPD service that will provide teaching staff with online resources and training that will develop their capability in digital learning. In addition by analysing the data from the discovery tool, Jisc will be able to provide FE Colleges with an institutional picture of their digital capability and support in building institutional digital capability.

Engaging learners in active dialogue around their digital expectations and experiences

By Sarah Knight December 15, 2015
Digital student
Benchmarking, Best practice, digital experience, Employability, Learner expectations

From the work we have carried out over the past 3 years with Helen Beetham, Dave White, Rhona Sharpe, Liz Browne and Ellen Lessner, under the Digital Student project and the Change agents’ network, the development of the student digital experience is complex and should be informed by learners’ expectations and experiences of technology. Learners should have opportunities to share their ideas about how their digital experience can be improved. Presentations from learners to senior managers and governors can be powerful enablers for driving change. How many colleges have a student representative on their digital strategy working group? Feeding back to learners on how their ideas may or may not be taken forward is also important so their views are valued and you are closing the feedback loop. My recent presentation summarises the key findings from these projects.

When asking colleges the question – how do you currently gather learners’ expectations and experiences of technology?, there were some excellent examples of practice from short surveys in VLEs at the end of each module, learner voice surveys, focus groups, student rep meetings, digital literacy surveys, SPOC etc. Although when we discussed this in more detail, there is still a lack of emphasis on the digital aspects and also a lack of analysis and bringing together of the data collected to have a ‘digital lens’. A longitudinal view is also rarely available. Hence the work we are carrying out under the Digital Student Data Service.

Asking colleges, how do you engage your learners in the development of the digital environment/digital strategy? is a more difficult question to answer. At course level there are mechanisms and channels to encourage feedback, but less so at a strategic level. The importance of engaging student unions and class reps in these discussions was raised as something we need to do better. Look for opportunities to encourage learner participation in digital working groups for example.

Learners in our Digital student studies saw the digital experience as an opportunity to contribute and get involved. Digital engagement methods such as social media, padlets, twitter walls, vox pops etc are popular and once established can be used for other issues too. Digital students are different – it is important that the experience of different groups is represented. Learners can get involved in different ways e.g. advocate, researcher, representative, intern, change agent, project lead, buddy, mentor, designer. This is an issue which can help change relationships between staff and students.

There are some excellent examples of practice from colleges who are appointing digital leaders, digital ambassadors, digipals as a way of empowering students in discussions and decisions around their digital experience. Blackburn College, Procat, Portsmouth College and Barnet and Southgate College are all seeing the benefits of working in partnership with their learners to drive forward curriculum change with technology. See the presentation from the HE Digital Leaders course on Students as partners.

A reminder of the resources and guidance which is available to colleges and providers to support them with gathering their learners’ expectations and experiences of technology. These include:
– Digital Student card sort and guidance on running learner focus groups
– Digital Student learner profile form
– Digital Students are different posters
– Enhancing the student digital experience postcards
– Jisc – NUS Benchmarking the student digital experience
– Enhancing the student digital experience online guide
– Developing successful student-staff partnerships

Enhancing the student digital experience postcards

I would like to hear your ideas on how you are engaging your learners. Please follow #digitalstudent to keep updated on the developments of the Digital Student project for skills and also around the developments of a possible digital student data service.

Outcomes and Destinations Data for Further Education

By Shri Footring December 10, 2015
Data
Analytics, BIS, Co-design, Destinations data

The BIS Outcome Based Success Measures Consultation sets out detailed proposals for using student outcomes as a key metric for Further Education. The new experimental data set created by BIS to support this activity provides an indication of sustained student outcomes.

An emphasis on destination and the data available changes the way FE is evaluated and will have significant impact on FE providers. This impact is not yet clear but providers will need to engage with the new metrics and data and use it in a range of activities such as strategic planning, monitoring, understanding local needs and reporting.

Jisc is exploring the newly published data and is interested to understand what new information, insights and opportunities it offers for FE providers.

We are taking an agile co-design approach and wish to engage FE providers in the exploration of this data and its potential. We will be developing experiments with the data to make it useful and usable to managers in their future work. This will include asking for feedback on concepts, insight into your concerns and good ideas and validation/challenge of our assumptions.

There is place for Jisc to bring together this destination data set with other information we are working with to make it more valuable to our customers.

We call the stage we are at the “alpha’. This means we will evaluate where we stand in Feb 2016 and decide if there is a place for Jisc to support the sector.

Get Involved

Jisc use a co-design approach for all our developments and would value collaboration with managers and decision makers (deputy principles, MIS managers, vice principles, curriculum managers) in FE colleges.

willing to feedback on our working assumptions and give us insight into your anticipated needs and opportunities
willing to review concepts for how the data could be presented to you in useful ways

Our first request is for your input/feedback on what we think will be the areas where destination data will be used. These are:

strategic planning
How do you feel you will be making decision about sources provided in light of the new data and evaluation framework?
understanding local needs
How might the data be used to help you meet the needs of local populations, businesses etc?
monitoring
How might the data be used in monitoring quality and demand for our courses?
reporting
How might the data available impact on the way you report?
other
Are there other areas where you feel the data will be used, where you have needs or ideas?

Delayed trains, jumping from planes and vehicles for debate at the AoC Conference

By Sue Attewell December 1, 2015
Events
AoC, Co-design, Keynote

Two weeks ago I set off hopefully to attend the the AoC Annual Conference and Exhibition 2015 at The ICC, Birmingham, little realising that if FE thought it was experiencing troubled times then our railways system is so much worse. Monday evening and the Euston to Birmingham railway line was experiencing a perfect storm of vandalism, broken freight trains and a signalling problem which meant a simple 1.5 hour journey turned into a 4.5 endurance trip via Northampton and Stafford finally checking into my hotel just before midnight.

My reason for attending – to listen and learn direct from the sector, finding out first hand their issues and priorities so that we can shape our current service and better plan our future activities to support colleges through this challenging period.

I’m hoping this will be evident in both the support offer that we are currently developing for those colleges undergoing area reviews, see my previous blog and also inform the development of our Co-Design visions that set the parameters for how we innovate over the next 18 months-2 years and will be out for consultation after Christmas – watch this space for more news on how to get involved in this key consultation.

Tuesday morning and the buzz of the conference kicked in and revitalised me. From the opening keynote which included a speech by Professor the Baroness Wolf of Dulwich CBE and Skills Minister Nick Boles who both talked about apprenticeships, although from different perspectives. It is however clear that Apprenticeships are the future growth area with the Minister stating that currently the FE Sector secures 37% of apprenticeship funding with 60% going to private training providers and suggesting FE should be more ambitious and aim to deliver 67% of an increased apprenticeships training budget by 2020.

Lucy Adams, Managing Director of Firehouse and a founding partner of Disruptive HR and Lord Ian Blair QPM MA (the 24th Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 2008) closed day one with two very lively and entertaining presentations on managing change, making this challenging subject interesting and innovative whilst highlighting the very serious issues faced by the sector in responding to these unprecedented levels of change including my favourite quote by Lord Blair: “Leaders are like tea bags you only know how good they are when the they get in hot water”.

In the exhibition hall there was a constant stream of visitors to stands as delegates moved between parallel sessions and the main hall, offering solutions and services for most FE needs. Key amongst these, of course, was the Jisc stand manned by Account Managers and Subject Specialists advising on the spot or arranging call backs for the more in depth queries. And I have to say I managed to find the time to have a caricature done and also experience a virtual reality parachute jump courtesy of The Army – the only way I ever intend to voluntarily leave a plane.

Day two continued in the same vein lots of choice and options over parallel sessions with The Big Debate at lunchtime serving up a serious dilemma over which session to attend having a focus on Apprenticeships and Area Reviews, both areas of interest for me and Jisc. After discussing with my colleagues also attending we divided and conquered managing to attend 4 out of the six options, and all were equally good and informative.

Although I only attended for two days my overall impression was that the conference was a huge success, well organised and a pleasure to attend. I came away having learnt a lot and also having had some seriously good food at the Gala Dinner served by students from Derby College, while learners at Derby College, South Cheshire College and Eastleigh College provided kitchen preparation support for the dinner.

Well done AOC and see you next year.

Summer of Student Innovation 2015 Engagement in FE and Skills

By Paul Bailey November 7, 2015
Data, FE and Skills, Summer of Student Innovation
Analytics, Employability, SOSI

Working with students on the Summer of Student Innovation is one of the best parts of my role at Jisc. It is great to hear the ideas that learners have to improve learning and make their life better in education.

This year we made a few changes to the competition. First to engaged more learners in FE and Skills by running separate competitions targeted at learners and apprentices, working with AELP to engage learning providers, as well as working with Jisc’s account managers and encouraging college staff to support teams from colleges to submit ideas. Secondly we made it an ideas only competition, so teams were no longer required to have the technical expertise to build their idea, but just to come up with a design. The aim was to engage more females and learners from non-technical backgrounds (but we always had a good subject spread).

We also ensured that marketing materials were more inclusive. The marketing used social media, blogs and podcast, web banners and brochures, institutional contacts and stakeholder bodies.

At a recent meeting with the Learner Engagement working group for the FE and Skills collaboration we shared some numbers around this year’s Summer of Student Innovation that also showed how far we have progressed on achieving these targets of engaging more learners in FE and Skills and a more diverse group of learners.

Summer of Student Innovation 2015 – Engagement in Numbers

This year we had ideas submitted from 80 teams compared with 38 last year. Over 12,600 votes were cast and 43 teams reached their voting target to be considered. In total 25 projects were funded, 9 student ideas, 10 learner ideas in FE, 2 apprentice led and 4 start-up projects.

Ideas submitted by Sector 2015

Ideas by Sector 2015

There were 22 ideas from FE and Skills compared with only two in the 2014 competition which represents an impressive increase in participation. The teams attended the four day design sprints alongside teams from universities; they completed the design tasks and pitched their ideas to a selection panel in August. The FE teams were accompanied by a member of staff from the college. The six ideas selected by the panel in August consisted of four ideas from colleges plus two ideas from apprentices under the apprentice competition.

Some people thought it was not fair to pitch FE teams against HE team and to also have them work together in the design sprints. However I think we can conclude that the teams from FE were more than capable of holding theor own and designing excellent solutions. We had already seen the Lingoflow team from Sussex Downs College deliver a successful product in the 2014 competition, so it was good to see teams with similar flair participating from colleges this year.

Ideas by Gender

Learner ideas by gender 2015

I also looked to see how the submission and success of ideas mapped to gender. As teams varied in size and gender mix (which was a positive) I decided to use the gender of the team lead as an indicator and only looked at ideas (45 in total). In 2014 the ideas submitted by females were 21% (8:30) where as in 2015 it was 33% (15:30). The balance was more even in learners ideas in the FE competition with 47% compared with 22% in the student ideas competition. In 2014 only 4 out of 20 of the winning teams were led by females, however in 2014 this had increased to 8 out of 20.

Attendance at design sprints by gender

Participation in the design sprints show a slightly different picture with 28% females to 72% males (around 100 people). The lead facilitators were females and we had an equal number of male and female mentors. This may be a result of some large all male teams attending the design sprints, but most of the other teams were of mixed gender.
The outcomes are positive. We have shown that good ideas can come from FE and Skills, they can compete with teams from universities and be winners. I was particularly enthused by the teams of apprentices that participated this year. We have always seen teams led by females being successful in the competitions so it is good to see this continuing to be the case and doing what we can to promote equality in the competition.

Ideas by category

Ideas by category 2014 vs 2015

Since that start of the competition we have looked at the number of ideas submitted under various categories.

The balance of ideas across the categories has remained quite constant.Except for the second year we have seen an increase in the number of ideas around career progression and employability. The inclusion of apprentices in the competition may have been part of the reason but we are still seeing a growing need from learners for support around careers and employability i.e. finding a course and getting a job/apprenticeship.

Another observation was the large number of ideas in the student (HE) competition relating to student life. This is a broad category and does end up including all the ideas that are only just in scope. They were also the ideas that were less likely to reach the qualifying number of votes or be winners of the competition.

Next Year
We are currently planning the Summer of Student Competition for 2016 (yes there will be one). The aim is to continue to attract more quality ideas from across all learners. However we have also learned that our efforts are better focussed on support less ideas better. So the competition in 2016 will be looking to attract a lot more ideas from all learners. Expect it to be even more competitive, we want the best ideas, so start thinking about getting teams ready for the Summer of Student Innovation 2016.

Jisc Innovation in Further Education and Skills

Technology innovation for staff, learners / apprentices and employers