JISC DDL Cluster meeting November 8th

Institute of Education

What has gone well

What was unexpected

Learning points for other projects• Baseline blogs to be inherited by the new UAL digital programme.

• New projects must complete a basic 'Expression of interest' form, the form will act as a way of realising the main project objectives, needs and benefits. (See next slide)

• The relationship between project leaders’ ‘day jobs’ and their DIAL community project varied.

• There is a need to follow through a process of inquiry: deciding on a question, collecting data, analysing and drawing conclusions from it before going on to collect more data or producing material.

• An area of expertise that some project leaders wished to develop was that of analysing data.

• The second challenge was of being of being close to the data, often operating within the same context as their respondents, and therefore not necessarily problematizing the familiar.

• Finally, there was a growing feeling among project leaders that DIAL’s aim to produce ‘resources’ was worth exploring. Among some there was a transition from seeing resources as handbooks or hand-outs towards seeing them as primarily residing within the new awareness and expertise of their communities, whilst also finding expression in certain online artefacts and practices. This is reminiscent of the last of the common characteristics of the DIAL projects: their aspiration of making use of the differing levels of expertise within their target communities. This remains an area of potential development in the forthcoming year.

• DIAL small project bid (UAL Course Director)• • · A brief overview of what you’d like to do• I want to explore the possibility of filming myself giving messages/information to students on the course – kind of ‘v-mailing’. I send out many important

messages via email and increasingly find students suffering from email overload - not reading them. This can be very damaging to the students and the course. The idea of filming my messages actually came from students at a recent forum.

• In addition and linked to this, I want to explore ways of filming scheduled Personal Tutorials a) because the written form is a hopelessly inadequate record for students and b) to still provide evidence for monitoring processes

• • · Which stakeholders are involved or you’d like to engage? (Specific staff, student cohorts etc.)• 120 current BA PDP students • · What resources you’d develop (Resources can be a handbook, a community of practice, open education resources videos, image text handouts, a case

study or a online unit)• Not sure because I’m aware of the technical implications – which is my I need to run the project. I guess it could be used as a case study for other courses facing

similar communication issues. • • · What you aim to achieve at the end of the project/intervention (How will this benefit others in the future)?• Evidence that students actually get the messages – and so communication issue is improved (see above).• Secondly, feedback that students have access to a better, more appropriate record of their Personal Tutorial, than a completed form – again this could be useful

for other courses.• • · Time frame and basic work plan (how this will fit into current work pattern)• I will be sending messages/holding personal tutorials anyway over the year so the pilot could be tested/feedback gathered by July ‘13. • • · Where you will be reporting, updates and adding resources produced during the development, DIAL would like to encourage use of the in-house tools

including myblog.arts, workflow and process.arts for this.• Not very appropriate for this project • • · What resources and support you will need, general guidance and support in developing digital practice, technical, community building, institutional

support, support networks, funding (piloting digital equipment integration methods and practices, extra paid time support to develop a project, extra support from students paid through arts temps to support you project). Please note DIAL has limited funds and will only be able to offer small funding support to a limited number of projects.

• I will need technical support in setting up any film facility and in how to disseminate the filmed material as appropriate. I might need some remission of teaching time to free up time for meetings/testing – not much – under 10 teaching hours at the most. I will need some equipment (camera…webcam…?) but cannot give estimates at this point as I have not the knowledge.

Challenges for year 2 / questions for the group

• Managing expectations project scope met in year one DIAL had differing success with engagement and managing engagement.

• Issue of structural presentation and communication. There is a tendency to assume a shared understanding of terminology.

• Understanding digital literacies at UAL definitions and competencies.

• There was a problem with projects being able to report project updates, manage online publishing and communication and to edit, develop, design and publish resources and project outputs so to support projects in this area we will employ 2 part time DIAL coordinators.

• Engaging with employers and sector.