timeline of events for the JISC Curriculum Design and Deliver programme from the support site
Created by sheilmcn on Oct 17, 2008
Last updated: 05/17/12 at 01:26 AM
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The Circle Events calendar is no longer in use.
Use the Google 'Programme Calendar' in the left frame on the Circle home page for forthcoming programme and external events.
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1846
RT @sheilmcn: In preparation for next week's final programme meeting, timeline of pictures and videos tagged with #jisccdd http://t.co/M3RrnEAZ
http://twitter.com/sarahknight/statuses/203035018283581442
RT @thestubbs: uploaded 10min movie-themed narrated slides on #MMUEQAL curriculum transformation for next week's #jisccdd meet http://t.co/FHNIFnyl
http://twitter.com/brucelevitan/statuses/203033795438444544
RT @sheilmcn: In preparation for next week's final programme meeting, timeline of pictures and videos tagged with #jisccdd http://t.co/M3RrnEAZ
http://twitter.com/gillferrell/statuses/203027235324694528
RT @sheilmcn: In preparation for next week's final programme meeting, timeline of pictures and videos tagged with #jisccdd http://t.co/M3RrnEAZ
http://twitter.com/CosmoCat/statuses/203026289395892224
In preparation for next week's final programme meeting, timeline of pictures and videos tagged with #jisccdd http://t.co/M3RrnEAZ
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/203025842127904769
uploaded 10min movie-themed narrated slides on #MMUEQAL curriculum transformation for next week's #jisccdd meet http://t.co/FHNIFnyl
http://twitter.com/thestubbs/statuses/202848120684552192
mini conference on coaching in HE, 31 May, Leeds Met, more info @ : http://t.co/ptrZ4gGc register http://t.co/aOegoVeT #jisccdd
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/202745725573005313
Coaching ambassadors from PC3 project - great example of students as change agents #jisccdd #jiscdiglit
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/202744335962341376
RT @sheilmcn: MT @marianneshepp: Role of coaching in enhancing the student experience #jisccdd webinar starting at 1pm. Join in http://t.co/LuRO1too””
http://twitter.com/stuartboon/statuses/202743025435283457
RT @sheilmcn: Overview of coaching from PC3 project http://t.co/KosloCB6 #jisccdd
http://twitter.com/sarahknight/statuses/202733675660587008
Overview of coaching from PC3 project http://t.co/KosloCB6 #jisccdd
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/202730652200730625
MT @marianneshepp: Role of coaching in enhancing the student experience #jisccdd webinar starting at 1pm. Join in http://t.co/LuRO1too””
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/202729753399136256
“@marianneshepp: Role of coaching in enhancing the student experience #jisccdd webinar starting at 1pm. Register at http://t.co/OgUFeI0Q”
http://twitter.com/sarahknight/statuses/202729528508940288
The role of coaching in enhancing the student experience webinar just about to start #jisccdd
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/202728942766014466
“@jisccetis: Managing large scale institutional change webinar now available online http://t.co/7QLmRpUG” #jisccdd
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/202696418983550976
Everyone attending last week’s
http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/03/19/telling-the-story-webinar/
The title ‘Tracks in the snow’ was designed to fit with the ALT-C 2011 conference theme (Thriving in a colder more challenging climate)
The kinds of evaluation we often do to show the impact of our work has a lot of parallels with following tracks in the snow. We are trying to identify a specific footprint relating to our activity and looking back at the impression it has made. A very focused evaluation plan might serve us very well for small-scale interventions, however …
… in a long-term project aimed at achieving major institutional change, things become a lot more complicated because other people start trampling their wellies all over the same space!
This paper stems from work with a range of institutions including some JISC activities (particularly the four year Curriculum Design projects) and also a review of Enhancing Learning Through Technology in Wales. Almost without exception, the people who were working to enhance or transform learning were doing so against a backdrop of significant structural change that makes it all the more difficult to know which factors are having the most impact.
Despite the external pressures, our institutions still have a core mission and are working towards a vision for where they want to be. The extent to which this vision is as dependent on external stimuli as you might think is something we’ll come back to later.
I would argue that in this kind of situation it is fairly pointless to try to separate out all of the tracks on this journey. What we are really interested in is whether the institution as a whole has moved closer to its goals. We often talk about significant enhancement projects as change projects and we need to think about what it is we are actually trying to change.
I think what we are trying to change is institutional culture and I define culture as ‘the way things are done around here.’
What this post tries to do is:
•Look at a few models that have influenced the way I think about these issues
•Look at the experiences of some major change projects in the light of these models and
•Make some suggestions for things we could be trying to capture and measure that may bring us a little closer to understanding whether we are actually changing culture.
I don’t claim to have the answers but I hope the suggestions may lead to some interesting discussions on this blog or perhaps form the basis for an online session.
These notes represent a lightning run through models I find interesting to do with people and change and there is a list of references at the end of the post.
The image isn’t really to do with people or change at all but Chaos Theory makes a nice backdrop for the other models. The underlying premise here is of course that even in systems where you might expect quite deterministic cause and effect relationships, small variations in initial conditions can cause quite major fluctuations in outcomes. As human behaviour is the ultimate in non-linear systems, let’s not start out with any hope that patterns of change are going to be readily predictable.
The first group are models that concern the adoption of innovation.
The work of Malcolm Gladwell is very well known: the idea that once an innovation reaches a ‘Tipping Point’ continued adoption is self-sustaining. I’ve also been influenced a lot by the work of Albert Angehrn from INSEAD (and also Conner and Patterson’s eight stage model of the adoption of innovation). Angehrn has created an excellent simulation tool which is used in the JISC infoNet change management training courses and without giving too much away for those who may be interested in trying it, you very quickly learn that you need to understand both the formal and informal networks that exist in the organization in order to successfully influence enough people to get a change embedded (to reach that Tipping Point).
The second set of influences is work on social networks. By this I don’t mean Facebook and Twitter but rather how social ties in general operate. Some interesting work on the subject by Christakis and Fowler explains all sorts of social phenomena in terms of how social networks operate – one example is clusters of obesity affecting people who are at some social distance from one another. They suggest there is no simple cause and effect but it is to do with people adopting behaviours that spread to others and individuals making changes that affect other people’s perception of what is the norm.
The final influence is some work, by Gerry Johnson of Manchester University, on how institutions evolve their strategic direction. His diagram of the cultural web is used a lot but is often separated from its original context which looked at the ways in which strategy, often perceived to be a very logical planning process taking account of external factors, is actually much more heavily influenced by the institutional paradigm.
The paradigm is a generalized set of beliefs about the way the organization is and how it operates and it encompasses the politics, the rituals and the myths that make up organizational culture. External facts that don’t fit the paradigms can often be ignored in quite a surprising fashion. Johnson found strategy development was best understood by undertaking cognitive maps of key stakeholder’s views and triangulating these against events. He based his work in the retail industry but it is interesting to reflect on the extent to which views about a university’s core market and strengths and its response to the current climate are based on the institutional paradigm rather than the facts.
The common thread in a lot of these models is that it is the connections between people and the shared beliefs and behaviours that are particularly important. A critical mass of connections can create traits in networks that persist over time whilst individuals come and go. This for me is institutional culture.
Which brings me back to how we undertake change projects using technology. The traditional way used to be: bid for some funding from JISC, think of an acronym for your project (the sillier the better) and get out there and evangelise about what you were doing.
A lot of recent projects have approached change quite differently:
Many of the JISC curriculum design projects have deliberately not branded and marketed their activities, instead they have concentrated very hard on showing how what they are doing aligns with broader institutional goals.
Welsh universities, when they reviewed their progress with technology enhanced learning, felt that ‘branded’ projects simply created new silos within the organization and that real change was effected by plugging into existing networks.
A number of projects in the JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme adopted what they termed a ‘guerilla’ approach to change and
A very successful JISC Curriculum Delivery project at Exeter University, that is already having considerable impact in terms of its work on Students as agents of Change, realised that ‘change happens one conversation at a time’.
It might seem as if operating within the paradigm rather than explicitly setting out to challenge it is achieving considerable success in terms of stakeholder engagement but making it even more difficult for these projects to demonstrate their impact on institutional culture because they are so embedded. However, by looking at the bigger picture and by focusing on the glue rather than the building blocks, they seem to be coming up with a mixture of qualitative and quantitative ways of achieving this.
Finally, a run through some of the techniques that have been effective and highlight tips for measuring transformational and cultural change.
The first tip is to start from a baseline. You can’t measure the distance travelled unless you have some idea where you started. It was a requirement of funding that the curriculum design projects had to do this and many of them were initially very sceptical about the value of trying to take a snapshot of such a moving target. They took various approaches to determining the baseline and these are summed up in a report by Helen Beetham (see references)
Suffice it to say that the process mattered more than the specific techniques and within a very short space of time the project teams were convinced of the value of this work.
Some projects undertook quantitative analysis. The OU created a set of profiles looking at its courses from a range of perspectives including financial and pedagogic perspectives. Bolton did some basic but powerful analytics after finding that many discussions relating to course approval and validation were based on assumptions rather than facts.
Producing statistics about learning outcomes and assessment types helped show where some modules appeared to be over assessed or where the same learning outcome was assessed multiple times. Quite simply it changed the conversation. Snapshots of these types of analytics will show changes in practice in particular disciplines over time.
Every bit as important as having some kind of quantitative evidence is capturing what Birmingham City University has termed the ‘lived experience’ of curriculum design.
This is similar to Johnson’s work on cognitive mapping. Regardless of what the facts may actually be, it is people’s perceptions and assumptions that affect day-to-day practice.
BCU has made extensive use of video to capture and analyse stakeholder experiences. Greenwich University has used techniques such as Rich Pictures very effectively to identify certain myths that needed to be exploded before the institution could make progress in changing some of its processes.
Finally, what is needed in terms of looking at culture change is finding ways to look at how the individuals who make up the organization (and hence the culture) are connected and communicate. The most significant changes tend to happen when you get linkup and collaboration between parts of the organization that didn’t previously talk to one another.
This idea that it is the connections rather than the entities that really create the structure doesn’t just apply to social networks. You will find that architects looking to innovate also look not so much at the structures as at the linkages, the connections, the spaces between them.
Some of this is actually quite easy to measure in the Web 2.0 connected world. As a very small example this diagram shows the interconnectedness of people who were tweeting using a particular hash tag at a meeting. It would be interesting to look at a series of snapshots like this over time to track how the network expands or contracts and the frequency with which particular tags are used - in other words who is talking to who and what they talking about. In some institutions there may only be a very small percentage of staff who are actually using tools like this at the moment and a growth in this type of communication would represent a significant cultural change.
In other cases it may be appropriate to track the formal networks in the institution i.e. the committees that exist and the parts of the organisation that are represented on the committees.
Many projects are finding that changes in the language used within the organisation reflect changes in perception and understanding of curriculum design and other processes. This language is manifest in policy and procedural documents and guidance used for staff development purposes. Again identifying phrases and descriptions that are key at the baselining stage and mapping how this changes over time can give an important perspective on institutional transformation.
Tips for evaluating Culutre Change
•Start from a Baseline
•Capture the ‘Lived Experience’
•Look at the Connections rather than the silos
•Find out about how others are doing this via the Design Studio
http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/11/09/tracks-in-the-snow-finding-and-making-sense-of-the-evidence-for-institutional-transformation/
**NB this post has been amended from a post on my
http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/10/28/accreditation-a-games-based-approach-to-supporting-curriculum-development/
JISCDesignStudio
This short video gives a tour of the JISC Design Studio, a wiki-based toolkit to support curriculum design and delivery in FE and HE.
From:
jisccdd
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blUY0QVt5aQ&feature=youtube_gdata
Dale_celebrates_success_Oct28_309am.mp4
Curriculum Design and Delivery programme meeting October 2010 - Dale from Exeter talks about the value of the Integrate project and being involved as a student.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82jDJ6DrD9s&feature=youtube_gdata
mark_celebrates_success_Oct28_309am.mp4
Curriculum Design and Delivery programme meeting October 2010 - Mark from Wesminster talks about the excellent work of the Delivery projects and winning lots of chocolate!
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jisccdd
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88s95kPJ6RE&feature=youtube_gdata
Liz_celebrates_success_Oct28_308am.mp4
Curriculum Design and Delivery programme meeting October 2010 - Liz from Exeter talks about the value of the Integrate project and the amount of interest in the project in the Great Exhibition activity.
From:
jisccdd
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U-tAhz8I8c&feature=youtube_gdata
RT MarkPower Introduce technology change alongside curriculum change
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/16216927493
Interesting reflection from ALPS that new tech offered opportunity to rethink learning, teaching + assessment strategy
http://twitter.com/thestubbs/statuses/16216833617
RT heloukee Geology and geography students bringing fieldwork to life through mobile devices www.morse.ac.uk
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/16216287097
RT New blog post from T-SPARC general progress update and info on staff consultation events http://bit.ly/9N8m05
http://twitter.com/sarahknight/statuses/16148430402
RT TSPARC_BCU New blog post from T-SPARC - general progress update and info on staff consultation events http://bit.ly/9N8m05
http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/16141868010
RT @christa_line: Mr Willetts "Universities need to find cheaper,more flexible ways to teach" http://bit.ly/cu3zbI
http://twitter.com/marianneshepp/statuses/15950216901
RT @sarahknight: RT @sarahjaneflynn: International Blended Learning Conference @UniofHerts, 16th/17th June at follow us on
http://twitter.com/SussexTLDU/statuses/15924263782
RT @sarahjaneflynn: International Blended Learning Conference @UniofHerts, 16th/17th June at follow us on
http://twitter.com/sarahknight/statuses/15923397599
@HallyMk1 @timku Raring to go. New student posts hot from the blows to include.
http://twitter.com/petermt/statuses/15917345709
looking forward to this afternoons
http://twitter.com/HallyMk1/statuses/15917072140
Elluminate recording from yesterdays excellent session from @viewpointsuu http://bit.ly/aAmCI8
http://twitter.com/sarahknight/statuses/15839303385
Elluminate recording from yesterdays excellent session from @viewpointsuu http://bit.ly/aAmCI8
http://twitter.com/marianneshepp/statuses/15839074303
Project Sustainability - Dragon's Den Feedback 3
Malcolm Ryan and Andrew Comrie feedback on the Dragons' Den activity where project teams were asked to 'pitch' around the sustainability of their projects - why are their outputs worth sustaining, what evidence do they have to support this, who are the potential beneficiaries.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM7shFQaQQs&feature=youtube_gdata
Project Sustainability - Dragon's Den Feedback 2
Peter Chatterton and Lawrie Phipps feedback on the Dragons' Den activity where project teams were asked to 'pitch' around the sustainability of their projects - why are their outputs worth sustaining, what evidence do they have to support this, who are the potential beneficiaries.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB-tBhEkb2E&feature=youtube_gdata
Project Sustainability - Dragon's Den Feedback 1
Peter Hartley and Gill Ferrell feedback on the Dragons' Den activity where project teams were asked to 'pitch' around the sustainability of their projects - why are their outputs worth sustaining, what evidence do they have to support this, who are the potential beneficiaries.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPKCZyRZKcM&feature=youtube_gdata
The topics of market research and marketing have cropped up often in programme discussions so people may be interested in these 2 lists published by a US agency that advises universities on student recruitment strategies. The first list shows what types of lead have the highest conversion rates and the second shows which generate the highest volume of enquiries per dollar spent. The trick is of course to find the inexpensive methods that equate to high conversion rates.
It seems that personal recommendations are best and that enquiries from advertising are most likely to turn into applications when followed up by a phone call. This maybe suggests we could be doing more to build on the ‘personal recommendation’ abilities of web technologies. It also seems to me that careers advisers could be key stakeholders to be consulted in relation to the development of new courses.
Oh and if you’ve resorted to putting a poster up in the loo you may as well take it down now …
This list shows what type of leads have the best conversion rate:
1. Student/Alumni referral
2. Vocational Counsel/HR Director (employers) referral
3. Traditional media driving to a phone call
4. Website traffic driving to a phone call
5. Trade shows and educational fairs driving to an info session
6. Traditional media driving to a data-post lead
7. Website driving to a data-post lead.
8. Portal directory exclusive lead generation
9. Recharging stale leads
10. Traditional PR Campaigns
11. Portal directory who also resell your leads to your competitors
12. Traditional media top of mind awareness ads (brand building ads)
13. Portal directory co-registration (win a car leads) call center sanitized
14. Portal directory co-registration not sanitized
15. Portal directory e-mail harvesting
16. Urinal Ads, bus shelter ads, etc…
This list shows what type of leads produce the most volume of enquiries in relation to the money spent:
1. Portal directory reselling leads to your competitors.
2. Portal directory co-registration (win a car leads) call center sanitize
3. Recharging stale leads
4. Portal directory exclusive lead gen
5. Website driving to a data-post lead.
6. Traditional media driving to a data-post lead
7. Traditional media driving to a phone call
8. Website driving to a phone call
9. Traditional PR Campaigns
10. Student/Alumni referral
11. Vocational Counselor/HR Director referral
12. Trade shows and educational fairs
13. Traditional media top of mind awareness ads (brand building ads)
14. Portal directory co-registration (win a car leads)
15. Portal directory e-mail harvesting
16. Urinal ads, bus shelter ads, etc…
The lists were published on LinkedIn by Gregg Meiklejohn
http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/04/26/it-pays-to-advertise-or-does-it/
This year the SEDA Conference will explore and debate the issues around communities of learning.
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1543
Details to follow
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1538
For more than 20 years we have been promised that technology will transform living, learning and working practices – has that time arrived? In the first decade of the 21st century has society changed, are we learning differently – do we think differently – where will the journey take us next?
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1623
More details to follow
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1542
Details to follow
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1537
Details to follow
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1536
The 9th ELESIG symposium considers some of the myths that have grown up around learners of the Net Generation led by Dr Chris Jones, Reader in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University.
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1624
Details to follow
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1539
Dr Peter Findlay Assistant Director of the Quality Assurance Agency together with Judith Kuit on behalf of the Academy QA-QE special interest group will talk about quality assurance and enhancement issues in relating to curriculum design and delivery in this Elluminate session.
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1627
Joint programme meeting
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1248
Details to follow
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1537
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