Did you know?

shift_happens_web-poster

“Shift Happens” or “Did you know” is a PowerPoint presentation that first surfaced in 2006 in a US high school. It soon went viral, and various other versions created. I came across it when visiting open evenings at secondary schools.

A 2013 version is available on Vimeo, and well worth 6 minutes of anyone’s time, if nothing else to reflect on why do we teach what we do, how do we address globalisation and what will we do with rapidly changing technology.

I will be shamelessly using a couple of the ideas in my presentation next week at our Partnerships Conference at Staffordshire University.

Blackboard Education Leadership Forum 2013

Strategies to improve student recruitment engagement and retention

This one day event was an opportunity for both Blackboard and users of its software to showcase their ideas and experiences. These notes summarise what I took away from the day, the full set of slides will be sent to participants later, and I will share with colleagues as necessary.

Some of the most interesting comments were from Rick van Sant at the end of this piece  – for example how to drive technology adoption in an institution and the impact of requiring all marks to be in grade book.

The other idea I particularly like is the use of students to provide technical support, at least to other students, if not to staff.

MOOCs inevitably make an appearance, but the hype seems to have gone, and people are trying to identify the reasons for doing them.

 Jay Bhatt, (CEO, Blackboard)

Jay suggested we are approaching a perfect storm in education and need to ask the questions:

What is the value proposition?

Is the education interaction available the right one?

He felt that BB has opportunity to influence perfect storm.

Compared to other markets, there appears to be a lateness in globalisation of education, but this is now happening in areas of population growth

He cited the lack of universities and HE places in China, suggesting that they will turn to western brands and online education.

Considering the US, where 76 % of high school students have a mobile device, why do educators still use textbooks?

Looking ahead to Education 2020, we need to understand where education is going. This will involve:

  • Truly global – By 2020 40% of all college grads will come from  India and China
  •  Non-traditional learners – In US 85% of learners are non-traditional
  •  Consumer preferences – current course constructs are antiquated
  • Learner centric education
  •  Big data in mainstream – even BB isn’t doing enough on this   Data should support retention. How can we use analytics to support this?
  •  Online mobile everywhere – online enrolments has grown 10x growth rate of traditional enrolments

Jay recognised that BB has to improve- products not well integrated with each other. They could be better at innovation and needed to be a better citizen to the education industry

The BB plan for the future is : Accelerate, integrate, innovate

On MOOCs, he suggested that the key thing is that they bring attention to online large scale education .

On Citizenship- BB need to be contributing back to industry and used  BB Connect and push technology for reporting bullying through use of a  mobile device. BB have decided not to monetise this, and pushed it out free to US school districts

Blackboard Labs will deliver some innovations into public area for beta testing, for example the development of an online polls system, instead of voting clickers

 Sue Rigby, University of Edinburgh

This presentation was on how Edinburgh we using BB for recruiting and positioning. As a research focused institution, they want to recruit international elite who can afford the fees and by 2020 want 15000 postgraduates with  50% of these off campus.

They intend to achieve this via online delivery and aggressive marketing with an increased digital presence for marketing .

They intend to place courses and programmes online, in particular part time vocational masters, with  10 new awards per year.

They don’t  think MOOCs will transform education for Edinburgh, despite the fact they have run them through Coursera. They are now exploring if MOOC can be shared with U21 network. However a large number of students were exposed to Edinburgh through MOOCs and this was cheaper than any other form of marketing.

Edinburgh also ran an online open day which attracted 400 unique visitors from 60 countries. This included the use of academics in chat rooms. This meant huge training requirements and although moderately effective was not sustainable.

Edinburgh now use static video to showcase masters awards.

There were incidental benefits though- more digital awareness, more trained academics, , more focus on marketing as a valid activity, more preparedness to try new things

It was noted that lots of academics are neither digital natives nor even digital converts, and still rely on papers and books.

Esther Jubb , University of Derby Online

Now running 23 online programmes with 65% of students from UK. In 2009 there were 1100 students with £1m turnover – that is now 2400 students and £4.4m turnover. In the University, part time students contribute is 44% of income and 29% of student numbers.

The key message was –  It’s hard!!!!

The Derby online model is to use a dedicated separate business unit.

The biggest difference is in how academic staff are used. Discipline leads exist in the unit who line manage associate lecturers who are remote from the university. Derby Online Recruit online specialists to deliver the programmes, thus ensuring that everyone is dedicated to being an online tutor. There has been no problem recruiting Specialist online tutors. May even  be working for other unis! Offer them support and a community of practice

Student recruitment is carried out using a virtual open day using BB collaborate, and is focused on individual programmes and the support services available. There is a 40 to 50% conversion rate at open days!

To support engagement and retention, Online learning advisors, like a client manager, will proactively check students, eg if not engaging with learning materials.

It was noted that students want learning experience to be consistent. Lecturers have to use a common template. There are also content development standards – since learning content is commissioned not just from Derby staff.  Derby Online se “universal design for learning” so don’t need to make further reasonable adjustments.

The following success factors were cited- executive support, evolution after10 years, clear focus on online only, the existence of the perfect storm where technology is here and people are comfortable with it, tough economic climate

There were some issues though – Derby Online don’t use the existing TEL team as they are funded by faculties. There was also an issue of access to library budgets.

 

Peggy Brown Syracuse University

Peggy talked about the impact of MOOCs on recruitment and retention. At Syracuse, all staff are already required to teach online as they are a  well-known and established online provider. However it is different teaching in MOOCs, compared  to credit bearing course.

She cited the need to recognise institutional motivation behind running a MOOC eg for professional development, to provide a certificate of completion or even earn a scholarship

Syracuse therefore used their MOOC as a marketing tool – successful completion meant that studnets had fees waived for part of the course they subsequently enrolled in.

 Angie Clonan and Luke Miller, University of Sheffield

Angie and Luke presented on an internally funded development to develop MOOCs when there was institutional indecision about MOOCs.

They used BB coursesites as the staff were already familiar with the software, which was open and robust

The stats were:

  • 1394 join requests
  • 1048 registered
  • 603 started
  • 136 continued to end and 73 certificates issued.

Not everyone was interested in getting a certificate. Participants were from 61 countries. From evaluation, the reasons for non-completion were time commitment and technical. Incentives to complete would have been more valuable accreditation, access to instructor, reduced time commitment

It was difficult to evaluate or to provide cost benefit analysis howver the cost was about £70k for all 3 MOOCs.

 

Wendy Kilfoil,  University of Pretoria

Wendy spoke about the use of Learning Analytics in a country with 15% HE participation rate. Overall the country has 27% dropout in first year and only 25% complete in 3 years, while at Uni of Pretoria the figures are much better, with  8.1% dropout and 39% completing in 3 years.

Now using analytics for BB Learn. Integrated BB and Oracle Peoplesoft  and,then get lecturers to commit to putting formative marks on BB.

The system enables students to reflect on their progress and allows faculty staff to feedback on course design. The university provides dashboards for a range of different users, eg student, lecturers, award leaders, deans, exec

 

Rick van Sant, (Blackboard)

The final talk of the day was about improving experience through technology adoption

We are probably in late majority in developed world, and early adopters in developing world , so the lifecycle position depends on which market you are in.

There may be a chasm in lifecycle caused by  MOOCs, regulations etc and other disruptions .

Considering a capability maturity curve, Rick felt that 80% of universities were still in phase 1 , or exploratory phase.  Hardly any were in the phase where elearning had become mission critical. This suggested that institutions needed to know where they are, to be able to identify where to go next .

Rick suggested the need for an elearning adoption ecosystem, which cannot be based on a single technology or product. The ecosystem is about building the digital culture. As part of this, Blackboard should be owned by the teaching and learning community and not the IT department

For a successful ecosystem to develop, the following were proposed:

 

  • Dedicated eLearning coordinator or distributed champions
  • Use students for blackboard support!! Even Faculty staff will learn about tech from students
  • Senior academic leadership to drive vision
  • Policy development to facilitate eLearning eg hiring policy, appraisal
  • Level of person and course usage – analytics
  • Clear differentiation between passive and active engagement – is it just a repository for information Digital business processes complementing digital learning- need to create a digital culture, re social media, wifi, mobile etc.
  • What is the university strategy to 21st century education and digital culture.
  • All of these need to be connected.

Rick also talked about the barriers to adoption by faculty staff:

  • Fear of the unknown- knowing fear is there means we can understand why there’s problem
  •  If it ain’t broke – can we answer why they need to do something different
  • We’re all alone  in this together – divide and rule, ego surrounding what we are as academics
  • Know thyself – don’t know ourselves as teachers, why would you know about science of t&l?

 

He suggested that there are four types of faculty-

  • Entrepreneurs
  • Risk averse
  • Reward seekers
  • Reluctant

which can be plotted as a 2 x 2 matrix of motivation on x axis and skill on y axis.

risk-motivation

The most important factor to success in technology adoption is ease of use, which is why they have been making BB easier to use.

Suggested there should be Faculty wide demos,  Lots and lots of training, creation of champions and mentors,  help centres located where staff are located, newsletters (no more than 1 page)with tips for beginners and pros.

He concluded by saying we need to be creating a new norm driven by top down institutional value change and bottom up student demand. This can be supported by management policies to support digital usage and providing the right technology. Finally he suggested that requiring faculty to enter all grades in grade book would lead to staff getting over the fear of using the system. This could lead to rapid expansion of use of other features by staff, plus students respond to grade book if there is rapid and constant feedback!

Going to University is Good for You!

A new publication from BIS, “The Benefits of Higher Education Participation for Individuals and Society: key findings and reports “The Quadrants”” is reported on in the Higher which shows that  that “People who attend university are less likely to commit crime, drink heavily or smoke, according to a new database of evidence on the social benefits of higher education and are are also more likely to vote, volunteer, have higher levels of tolerance and educate their children better than non-graduates”.

The different benefits are divided into those which help the individual, the market and society, as well as those benefits classified as non-market, with many benefits fulfilling several such functions.

T he report is based on plenty of existing social science research, but provides a useful starting point for those who want a reference to the wider benefits of HE. There are ideas in here that we can be using as part of our marketing, and in particular when explaining the rationale for a university like ours and the diverse programmes that we offer.

It also lays bare the joke I use in one of my lectures – if HE participation  makes you less likely to be obese, less likely to smoke, drink or be divorced, I am clearly a statistical outlier.

The quadrants are reproduced below from the BIS document:

quadrants

Evaluation of Teaching

Just as I am about to convene a group to review how we capture student feedback on modules, and try to find a more uniform way of doing it across faculties, then this interesting article appeared in the Higher, by John Colley of Nottingham University Business School.

Dr Colley considers how universities could improve student satisfaction, recognising that NSS scores have steadily risen over the years.

Firstly he identifies student evaluation of modules, and then discusses the more contentious issue of student evaluation of teaching.

“Unsurprisingly, SET is not universally popular with academics, some of whom yearn for the days when there was no objective way to assess their teaching effectiveness. Some staff are less than cooperative about the process and not all teaching is assessed, but one could argue that SET gives universities access to a tool that could be more fully exploited.”

He also points out that even when poor teaching is identified, then it’s very difficult for universities to do anything about it.

So two anecdotes. Last time I looked at evaluation of teaching, there was uproar that anyone other than the member of staff teaching could see the feedback forms from students. And secondly, I once carried out a peer observation of teaching. I was horrified, so were the students. I reported my findings to the head of subject. The outcome- nothing. For several more years students were given very poor teaching.

In a university that focuses on teaching, I believe that we need to really get to grips with this. If we want to improve student attainment, we need to know how teaching is being received by our students.

Your next VC?

An interesting short article in the Times Higher this week, in which Baroness Bottomley, who is chair of the board of the headhunting firm Odgers Berndtson, states that in future teaching led institutions will look beyond the academy for leaders.

She suggests that large research intensive universities should continue to be run by academics, because an impressive research record is needed to gain respect of faculty staff.

Teaching led institutions on the other hand could be run by someone from outside academia.

So where shall we start? Working in a university that could be described as teaching led, this sounds like so much of the rhetoric we hear about universities from the current establishment. That is, the Russell Group are important, and considered to be “proper” universities, and no one else is.

Believe me, in an institution like ours, we also look up to our senior staff and expect them to be strong academically, in research and teaching. We have had a DVC with no academic background, and he did command respect but he was part of a team and brought very specific skills to the table An exec team still needs to include strong academic leadership.

So this isn’t to say that we can’t learn or benefit from senior staff with broader experiences, rather than having been in a University all their lives, but that successful organisations recognise the full range of skills and experiences needed.

And finally I’m old enough to remember the anagram you get from Virginia Bottomley’s name.

We can be better than this.

A shameless copy of Ed Miliband’s slogan from his conference speech maybe, but this could be a good way for us to look at how we approach what league tables are repeatedly telling us.

I’ve given presentations to two of our faculties on understanding league tables, and what we need to do to improve our position. I always ask people where in a table do they think we should come. The answer lies between 50 and 70, always. Bearing in mind that our position in any of the tables, no matter what the methodology, is not this high the maybe we can take away the following two ideas. Firstly, that there is a will there to work together to change things, and a recognition that improving our position will help with our own feelings of self worth.

The key point of my talk is to explain that league tables are not “something that is done to us”, rather they are just a mirror held up to show us who we are. And if we are uglier than we want to be, then we need to start to do something about it.

Essentially there are two sets of data that go to make up the tables – input and output data. Like all universities, we are now making sure that our input data – staff student ratios, spend per student, entry grades are reflecting us in the best possible light.

The output data is that which can be affected most by faculty staff.

National Student Survey results

Over the years we have invested time and effort in improving our scores in the NSS. This year our scores rose again, but again so did the sector. We have ambitious targets in our university plan, of where we want to get to in terms of student satisfaction, and it’s pleasing to see that this is finally bearing fruit. At the development day for Academic Group Leaders, Peter Jones (Head of school, Psychology, Sport and Exercise) provided an excellent approach that can be used to engage students better with NSS, and demonstrated how he had used this approach to massively improve the scores in his previous institution.

Proportion of good degrees

All league tables use the proportion of good degrees as an output measure, The Guardian uses a factor called “value added”. This is essentially number of 1sts and 2(i)s moderated by entry qualification (it’s worth noting that the university with the highest value added score is Oxford, so value added isn’t quite what we think about when we talk about our commitment to widening participation).

The number of good degrees that we award is low compared with most universities in the sector. This is the one factor where I am challenged the most when I make presentations on the topic. Let me be clear – for us to perform better as a university, we would need to offer more good degrees, but that does not mean lowering our academic standards. It’s a matter of recognising what is happening first of all in the rest of the sector, and in our comparator organisations. Secondly, as a university which has prided itself on being “teaching-led”, then we need to make sure that our focus on teaching and learning does pay real dividends in terms of student attainment. We can be better than we are on this. If other universities take in students with the same entry grades as us, but are able to get them to gain good degrees, then they are adding more value than we do. A key focus for us has to be student attainment, and making sure that as many of our students as possible can get better degrees.

Research scores

Research isn’t measured in the Guardian league table, which is the one we refer to in our university plan. It is however in all the other league tables, and many of our stakeholders don’t just read the Guardian.

Our current research score is poor – the lowest amongst our comparators – and is based on the 2008 RAE.  The forthcoming REF submission has to be designed to gain the maximum score possible for us. Pleasingly we have recently appointed a number of new subject based professors and associate professors, and I would assume that all of them will be submitted into the forthcoming REF, together with our extincting professoriate to make for a strong submission.

More broadly than research though, we are now recording all elements of scholarly output. All teaching staff should be part of a community of scholars, even if they are not currently working at a level of international  publications, but will recognise that a commitment to scholarship and production of outputs has a beneficial impact on learning and teaching. If we want our students to engage in enquiry based learning, and experience research informed teaching, then all of us need to be demonstrating what it means to be both a professional educator and a subject practitioner.

Graduate prospects or employability

This score appears in all the league tables, and students and prospective students are rightly concerned about how taking a particular degree at a particular institution will increase their opportunities to gain a graduate level job. It is clear that employability is strongly related to degree outcome, and most of us have heard stories of employers who won’t look at anyone will less than a 2(i). This brings us back to the issue of good degrees – we need to make sure we can maximise student attainment, to give our graduate the best opportunity of gaining graduate level jobs.

 

Essentially we have to look hard at our individual teaching and assessment practices, to make sure that students have the best opportunity to gain a good degree. after all, would you come to the university where in a subject there is a 40% chance of getting a good degree or the one with a 60% chance?

To support our work on this, then I’ll be talking to all faculties, and sharing detail of our updated portfolio performance review data. This allows anyone to see at a glance how all of of undergraduate awards perform, in terms of recruitment, retention, attainment and student outcomes.

Also the Academic Development Unit will write attainment into all of our plans- we know lots of what we do is better than some of the external data tells us, now we just need to make sure that we all work to understand why the reflection in the mirror appears as it does, and to come together to become better. After all, we, and our students will be the beneficiaries.
 

 

Thank You

This weekend I took part in the British Heart Foundation midnight bike ride from Manchester to Blackpool.
A big thank you to everyone who sponsored me- I raised over £400 plus the gift aid  and donations can still be made here
.
It was a great ride, on relatively quiet main roads and we finished in 3hrs 40mins having decided to forgo any of the rest stops. One thing I learned (and thanks to Peter Jones for the advice) is that caffeine gels are great for for keeping you going. I may replace my morning coffee with these in future.

photo (2)    photo (1)   20130929-191721.jpg

The Times/Sunday Times League Table

The final big UK league table of the year has been published by the Sunday Times and The Times, and rather than being two separate guides from the two newspapers, is now  a single university guide.

Since the data used in this  is the same as that we have already seen in the Complete University Guide and the Guardian University Guide, albeit with different methodology and weighting factors, then we cannot be surprised at the results.

As ever, the top spots are occupied by Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, St Andrews and Imperial. Looking through the table at unis we might compare ourselves to reveals:

sunday times league table

We’ll be doing some further work to look at the details, and certainly some of the tables provided by the Guide, in terms of student population characteristics will be interesting to delve into, particularly considering the “social class” of undergraduate students.

Full details will be provided to Heads of School in the next couple of weeks.

FACT Forum

Last Friday, I gave a presentation to the the Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies Forum.

The presentation was similar to one I have used previously in other faculties and schools, but with more opportunity for discussion.

We focused on university league tables, particularly on generating the understanding that league tables are not something that are done to us, but are just a reflection of our performance.

We looked at: why league tables are important; their flaws; what thy say about us now; how student information can influence them and what we could be doing to improve our position.

On this last point, of improvement, we looked at the work being carried out centrally on data returns, but the key area for development is in student satisfaction and attainment. They key question has to be “why do students here, entering with similar entry qualifications to elsewhere, have a lower chance of gaining a good degree?”

This is always a contentious issue, and inevitably there were comments about threats to academic standards, but also a recognition that if we could recruit better qualified students, so their attainment might improve.

I’m hoping that the discussion on improving attainment will gain traction over this year, in all faculties and schools, as this will be a central focus of Academic Development Unit Activity.

One quick win is to look at final year modules where, for whatever reason, students appear to under-perform, compared with on their other modules. An approach for considering this is offered by Graham Gibbs, as part of the TESTA project. We’ll be looking at this methodology as we look at the results obtained on all modules for the last 3 years.

British MOOCs launched

Yawn.

 

This week FutureLearn leaunched its first MOOCs. FutureLearn is the company set up from the Open University to be a British supplier of MOOCs, working in partnership with a number of Russell Group universities.

The initial offerings are available now for students to enrol on, and include topics such as: Begin programming: build your first mobile game; Discover dentistry; Introduction to forensic science, and The mind is flat: the shocking shallowness of human psychology. I’m just hoping that the dentistry course doesn’t have a practical element.

Speaking about the launch, Prof Martin Bean of the Open University said:

“FutureLearn would be “modularised” and involve “a completely different way of structuring” courses, we’re not going to talk about failures. We’re going to let people set their own targets – god forbid – and measure themselves against their own targets.”

Students would be able to “benchmark” themselves against peers rather than always having to be subject to what he termed “The Man”, “the university saying: ‘You’re a failure because you didn’t do what we said’. I challenge the whole outdated paradigm.”

So, tune in, turn on and drop out  next?

But the key quotation has to be:  “One thing that FutureLearn will never do is to confer university credit. That will always be the domain of the university.”

This is interesting and leads to his final comment about how universities might use MOOCs, to act as a way of granting free access to content, after universities recignise that their future is not about protecting the content that hey own, but by differentiating themselves by their approaches to student experience, pastoral care, teaching and employment opportunities.