The seminar will be broken into separate yet interrelated themes:

• Past experience at UDSM with digital education, investments and capacity building in ICT, and relevant projects such as Halostudy, a project aimed at improved subject content knowledge of teachers in secondary schools in Tanzania, all of which were drawn on in response to Covid
• How that past experience informed the Covid present, particularly around:
  • What it revealed about digital divides within and outwith the UDSM community
  • public private engagements with mobile telecoms to potentially alleviate some of these divides through zero-rated access to UDSM digital education
• Future directions for UDSM and for Tanzanian higher education overall based on these experiences.

One of the happiest parts of all of these changes has been assuming the role of Programme Director of the MSc in Digital Education and chatting with so many incredible students over the last year from our programme on a programme podcast. A really diverse, insightful group here all reflecting on digital education in their contexts and in many cases what the current pandemic has changed about all of this for them.

Of course there is the other podcast as well, M&M podcast, which Myles and I will be resurrecting in 2021. Both of us just sort of needed to plow through the semester and breathe a bit but we are eager to get back to it.

There are other passion projects as well including some early efforts to populate this. Early stages of course.

There have been papers and projects as well. We just launched the Foundations for All programme with two cohorts of twenty each in Kiryandongo and Kampala, Uganda. I am happily working with colleagues at the University of Dar es Salaam and the State University of Zanzibar on projects, as well as one with colleagues at Makerere University on refugee education. So staying busy. Here is hoping 2021 is treating you well, all things considered. Stay well all.

Hope everyone is keeping well. I haven’t posted in a long time as I have been a wee bit busy. It has been fairly full on since mid-March for me so it is good to come up for a breath every so often before taking the next plunge.

I suspect like most of us in HE, we at the University of Edinburgh are spending the summer preparing for the uncertainty of the next academic year and doing what we can to make that all a little less uncertain. Granted, there are larger uncertainties surrounding all of this (employment being one), but we are keen to move forward at least with teaching and learning. So sharing a few bits in this post that hopefully might prove useful to some (and help me organise my own thinking). I will organise this around design and dialogue as that is really the focus of most of my activity.

Design

This is where I am truly fortunate to have some of the best colleagues in the world both centrally, across the university, and in my own school Moray House School of Education and Sport (MHSES). I would name them all here but that would take half the post. Either way, I have never been around so many people of such capacity and cheer. They meet every challenge as an opportunity and I am emboldened by them.

We are approaching this in roughly two ways: through ABC course design sessions and micropatterns.

Course Design

We use ABC (as I am sure many many HE institutions do). ABC (Arena, Blended, Connected) curriculum design, adapted from the work of Professor Diana Laurillard and created by UCL Digital Education, is a hands-on 90-minute workshop where academic teams work together to create a visual ‘storyboard’ outlining the type and sequence of learning activities (both online and offline) required to meet the course’s learning outcomes.

ABC is a card-based method for course design based on the concept of learning types derived from the Conversational Framework model. A learning type is defined on one side of a card, and on the other side conventional and digital learning activities (the practice) are detailed. As the workshop progresses these are sequenced into a large storyboard sheet representing the student journey. We have used this throughout the University of Edinburgh for years. Very accessible and very participatory. Most of this work at the University of Edinburgh has been done very well by Jon Jack, Tracey Madden, and others.

To move it online, we use MS Teams. In MHSES, we are creating a Teams group for each programme and then populating the courses as individual channels within that Teams group. The point here being that the entire programme can see the storyboards for each course allowing for capacity building and some programme level fine tuning (if needed). We use Planner for the storyboards. The cards are dropped into weekly columns over a course of 90 minutes. We have done many of these in MHSES and are scheduling many many more.

Micropatterns

Jon Jack and fellow learning technologists throughout the university have come up with a series of micropatterns, which are worked through seqeuences of common teaching types (lecture, seminar, etc.). At MHSES, we provide these before the ABC course design workshop as a means of demonstrating what worked through examples look like. For some, this is enough as they can use the micropatterns as they are, or they can tweak them (which we encourage). Essentially the micropatterns work out to a week of activity online (roughly).

A further advantage to the micropatterns is that they map to Learn, the university’s official LMS. Which makes sense as my programme uses Moodle. So Jon and team created weekly folders in Learn that mapped to these templates. If the micropattern worked for them, the tutors could copy them over into their own Learn instance. The weekly folders are just shells that need to be filled in but the sequences are taken care of.

This approach, due to the time constraints we are under, requires a bit of homework on the part of the course organisers. They need to familiarise themselves with the cards and the micropatterns before the session (which is not how you would normally run an ABC). So Herve Lacroix, an exceptionally resourceful learning technologist at MHSES, created a resource for everyone to review ahead of the session. The resource has proven really useful in framing the discussion with course organisers.

Dialogue

We are talking to everyone willing to talk to us, sharing across the university and across universities, and truly relying on our network to see us through to something less a reaction and more a renewal of sorts (at least that is how I see this process). A lot of this is coming through the podcast.

We recorded a few recently on hybrid (Episodes 15 and 16) that might be useful for some, and the two most recent ones below are worth a listen.

Episode 17: I mentioned Jon Jack several times on this post and we were lucky enough to have him on the podcast talking about the very design that I describe above.

Episode 18: We are learning from our networks constantly here and so we were lucky enough to have Dr Maryam Ismail and Said Yunus from the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) on the podcast talking their response to Covid and how that response was largely built on past projects to build capacity at the university for digital. Lovely people and a lovely chat.

That is enough for now, I reckon. Sending all my best to you all, wherever you might be. Stay well, stay safe.

We are all preparing (in UK HE at least) for that emerging reality that we will likely be teaching online for some part of the academic year 2020/2021. The work we must do over the summer to account for this reality is significant, certainly at a much greater level than our remote teaching transition in March. The shift is now around not only remote provision but a sustained and coherent online experience, one with an indefinite timeline. This involves UG and PG programmes, it involves access and bridging programmes, it involves everything we do as universities. For many, the work is underway as it is at the University of Edinburgh. For those managing this with care responsibilities, my best to you. That is herculean work. For those working with faculty unfamiliar with this new environment and doing so with humility, encouragement, and care, my best to you. For those legions of instructional designers and learning technologists out there, my best to you and your important work. For those doing all of this without access to resources and support, I am duly impressed. Hang in there, all of you.

What I learned/am learning from my research networks

I can only speak to my little part of this migration and only through the lens of the University of Edinburgh and the several universities I work with in sub-Saharan Africa, all of which are managing this transition. To begin, I am taking lessons from these SSA universities directly into my Edinburgh response. When technology ownership and internet access are not givens (and in some cases, not the norm by any stretch of the imagination), one needs to think imaginatively, assertively, and with some core principles.

Interesting to note that many of the same principles that we emphasised in the Edinburgh remote teaching transition in March are emerging with these universities as well: continuity, contact, and care. Meaningful educational exchanges on Moodle, on WhatsApp, on basic SMS; peer groupings, reflective practice, audio only mini-lectures, asynchronous activity, and more. This is coupled with technological activity, such as negotiating with the mobile telecoms to provide free access to particular IP ranges (ie, the university’s Moodle portal), offline content, remote work stations, and more. Technology ownership is a thornier matter but access is in some cases accounted for. I am enriched by my discussions with these universities. My thanks to them.

How that reflects in the work we do at the University of Edinburgh is similar. Moving from this remote teaching emphasis into something a bit more hybrid: if and when we are able to access the physical campus, not all of us will be there. Travel restrictions will persist for many; financial restrictions will further limit that mobility (it doesn’t make much financial sense to relocate to the physical campus if we only have access to it from April, for example). There will likely be periods of opening and closings of the campus. Even when on-campus, restrictions from social distancing will change the nature of the classroom experience in terms of how many can congregate there. All these permutations on the continuum between online and on-campus abound.

We will need a model that allows for these movements without making any of them impossible. We need a model that is embedded with what we know works and what values we hold dear as an institution. We need a model that has sustained and enriching educational experiences, whatever the disruption. No easy feat but no significant transformation, crisis response or not, ever is. What we learn here will stay with us for decades.

What are we doing (at least the parts that I am involved in)

I was trying to think of a clever way to phrase this, but alas I only came up with teaching online teaching, mapping, and mentoring. Note that there are layers of activity taking place here simultaneously and considerable work being undertaken to make sure the layers speak to each other. Professor Sian Bayne is guiding most of this work at the highest level (and we are all so incredibly thankful for her guidance here; none of this works without her, in my opinion). I am most definitely on the more operational level. On the surface this might sound obvious, but it is important these levels join up for coherency’s sake. Particularly if and when campuses open and close.

1: Teaching online teaching: this is in the form a training programme that colleagues and I from the Learning, Teaching, and the Web team (all-stars all of them) created last year, have run a few times, and now heavily adapted to the current context. It isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We are calling this programme an Edinburgh Model for Teaching Online. This is not because we are advancing some radically innovative pedagogical approach here; in fact, most of what we are advancing is readily available in the literature (and certainly present in other online teaching programmes as well). Rather we call it that because it is a position of teaching online that emerges specifically from the digital research and teaching projects at the University and the values surfaced within them. Engaged teaching, engaged learning communities, and meaningful feedback and assessment surfaced in a tour of core university supported technologies experienced as a student might. High touch teaching from myself and the course tutors (a wonderful cross-section of the university from the Centre for Research in Digital Education, Learning, Teaching, and the Web (LTW), and the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine). We are running this course starting tomorrow for 200 faculty, and immediately upon the completion of this run, we will start another in June for at least 400 faculty (and presumably another after that, if the appetite is there). At least I know what I am doing this summer.

2: Training packages and drop-ins: in addition we will be running further training on core technologies all week for every week leading up to the beginning of the new academic year. These are being run by the Learning, Teaching, and the Web team and more information can be found here. I along with Stuart Nicol and Jon Jack of LTW run the drop-in sessions which are basically just open sessions. I do a quick 10 minute presentation on what one should try to emphasise in their teaching online and then we open it up to questions from anyone who has them. Even if your university or school doesn’t have access to a great deal of technological resources, consider this approach. It is easy to implement, provides you a quick diagnostic of the most pressing issues, and gives you an opportunity to draft an informed response. People are given a voice to surface concerns and they have access to a learning technologist and a faculty member who teaches online. We will have at least one a week and advertise as part of the larger training programme. If synchronous sessions are problematic, consider a Teams channel or equivalent dedicated just for support like this.

3: Mapping: the mapping bit is largely a design effort, however condensed. It involves again the noble work of learning technologists and instructional designers the university over working with programme directors and course organisers to map face to face activity onto a hybrid model of online and on-campus. We will be using established design models adapted for abbreviated circumstances. This is critical work (a bit of an understatement) and will likely be complemented with design templates (ie, designing towards a template of a: a large lecture style UG programme b: a postgraduate taught course in subject X, c: a lab-based course and on and on). Again, the trick here is not design something so fixed in any one mode (online or on-campus) that it excludes some element of that continuum of cohorts I mentioned earlier.

4: Mentoring/matching: this is capacity we are fortunate enough to have a bit of, but at least in some schools the idea is to pair those with online teaching experience with those that don’t. An open channel akin to the drop-in sessions mentioned above but more a sustained space for these discussions to settle into normalcy and not just as a one-off. Our ideal model if resources allow (which they really don’t but we will try to make it work) is 1 online teacher + 1 learning technologist/instructional designer to 1 programme director or course organiser. Sheer numbers dictate that learning technologists and online teachers will be paired with many programmes and courses. But it is a channel that gives further sinews to an overall support structure. Not sure if it will work, but we will try.

My closing thoughts (for the University of Edinburgh)

I am struggling to articulate this as I know this crisis has so greatly affected so many. I don’t want to betray or belittle anyone’s experiences, the enormity of their care and professional responsibilities, and its toll on mental health. I feel it sometimes as well, the swell of the charge brewing in front of us. It will eclipse almost everything else for a stretch. I expect to do almost nothing else from now until possibly the end of the year (aside from teach my own online course come September of course on the MSc in Digital Education) and perhaps longer. I am settling into that reality but I still mourn many of the bits I am shedding (and rejoice in some that I am most happy to shed). Research will take a bit of a backseat for now, a few labours of love might have to wait a bit.

My professional duties now are to my people (students and colleagues), my programme, my school, my university, my network, my sector. That is the way I need to see the sequence to remain functional and meaningfully contribute. That is how I keep going. That is my math. It works for me.

That and the waves of support we have been receiving, unsolicited, from across the university. I mentioned the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and their incredibly gracious offer to throw themselves into teaching the training programme with us. Colleagues from the Centre for Research in Digital Education, from LTW, from former students, and colleagues in my network who have all volunteered to take a shift, lend a hand, do what we need to do to make this work. I am emboldened by your generosity. I am comforted by your support. We all thank you.

I want nothing to more to extend that comfort to our faculty at the University of Edinburgh. To say, we will get there together. You will have as much support as we can muster, as much enthusiasm we can provide, all the expertise in our disposal. It won’t be easy but we are committed. Hopefully, take comfort from that. Push back on despair. Practice self-care. Find your math, if you are able. Sending all my best to all of you.

Podcasts

Settling in for what seems to be the long haul here, we have been busy at work recording some podcasts, among other things. In these last few we talk about the transition online that the University of Edinburgh undertook in light of Covid and what we emphasized in the process. We were joined by Karen Howie, Head of Digital Learning Applications and Media, and Stuart Nicol, Head of Educational Design and Engagement. Both were absolutely integral to the university’s online transition and both brought valuable perspectives to the podcast. Worth a listen if you can endure my rambling in between their wisdom.

My students

I teach on the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. In particular I teach a course called Course Design for Digital Environments where we explore the theoretical, critical, and designerly structures of online course design. Students move through the process of designing a course drawing on learning theories, design frameworks, and a large dose of criticality throughout the process. This course always tries to balance the theoretical with the applied but Covid surfaced that quite dramatically. The final assignment is to design a partial course and to provide a written rationale of the context in which design decisions were made, linking it whenever possible to the broader critical context of the programme.

Yet these students are largely performing roles at their respective institutions that made them largely responsible for the ‘pivot’ online; ie they were doing what Stuart, Karen, Myles and myself (and many many others) were doing at the University of Edinburgh. They were bringing their schools, universities, and organisations online in a rapid timeframe, all while juggling care responsibilities and, yes, even attending to my course. I can honestly say I have never been so impressed with my students. Their resolve, their candor, their good cheer despite some truly horrific circumstances was, for lack of a better way to say it, inspiring. It feels necessary to celebrate what we can, when we can.

Also note the intro/outro music care of Garage Band and my iPhone.

We settled on a structure (all drawn out and developed on Monday) that seemed to work fairly well. Individual training on the core tools we are supporting right now: Learn, Collaborate, and Mediahopper and another remote teaching drop-in session with Stuart Nicol, Jon Jack, and myself where faculty or anyone really could ask questions, brainstorm a bit with us, and just generally be heard. We put together resources to support it all.

We emphasized continuity, contact, and care (the slides below develop this a wee bit). Not time for much nuance in these nor did we want to add to the levels of anxiety that many would feel going online.

Overall, the tireless very very proactive work of this team and the opportunity to collaborate with them is something I am particularly proud of. It needed to be done so they dropped everything and did it (even as we ourselves were transitioning to working from home). Truly rose to the occasion and will continue to do so as we weather this storm.

Home

By no means am I diminishing the severity of what has happened over the last few months globally, but my wife and I have been talking a bit about our response to this crisis. We have concluded that the time we lived in Korea helped a wee bit to temper our response today. There was avian flu, SARS, and MERS in somewhat short order. There was the largely existential threat of North Korea nuclear attack (which felt very very real on certain days). In short, there was the relatively consistent puncture of stability, that relatively consistent removal of the veneer of safety.

Yet I took great comfort in being around Koreans who just got on with it. Who banded together and worked it through. Who found some normalcy in all the chaos. Just as they have in this latest crisis. Just as we are and will continue to do here in Scotland. I have seen it across the communities I engage with online, I have seen it in my own institution, I have seen it in my students many of whom are separated from loved ones. It demonstrates to me a certainty: I am not sure when, but we will get there. This will pass.

So I share some bits from all of that and from other times. First, my wife and I isolating as you do. In the sun. With wine. In our first garden ever in our adult lives.

And certainly with music.

And certainly listening to sounds I have recorded over the years which remind me of the calm of days that have passed and the wonder of ones to come. Like this one from Seoul many years ago:

And this one of church bells from London:

and this of children playing and flying kites in Gyeongju:

and the hundred other ones I have recorded here. These all remind me that we will see these days again, and I will hear these sounds again. Until then, hang in there.

I am helping to organise the upcoming BAICE Conference being hosted in Edinburgh this year (feel free to guess which sub-theme below is mine) and encourage anyone in my network to submit and attend. You can learn more here but feel free to reach out directly to me as well if you have any questions.

Partnerships in education: collaboration, co-operation and co-optation

23rd – 25th September, University of Edinburgh

Call for papers

BAICE 2020’s focus is on past, present and future collaborations across a wide range of subthemes to conceptualise joint ventures in comparative and international education more robustly. We are interested in papers that will: help to identify new possibilities for collaborations in education; critique, question and challenge accepted wisdom and practice; and provide inspiration to think about the different ways that stakeholders in education can work together. The conference sub-themes are:

• Global-local nexus of education
• Partnerships beyond formal schooling
• Experiencing education
• Technology: realising educational potential and a new autonomy
• Education partnerships in conflict and protracted crises
• Partnerships around the provision and financing of education

As always, BAICE welcomes papers that discuss comparative and international education, formal and non-formal learning at primary, secondary and tertiary level or adult education, across all global regions including high, middle and low-income countries. If you have an idea for a submission that does not link to a named subtheme, but resonates with the overarching focus of the conference, please mark it as ‘open theme’ on the form.

Participation in the conference can take several forms:

• A full paper presentation (15 minutes with time for questions and discussion)
• A short/quick-fire paper presentation (5 minutes for posing ideas or questions as a stimulus for discussion)
• A panel symposium (a collection of 3-4 related papers)
• A facilitator for a round table in our discussion café where we will be hosting informal open sessions on a particular issue
• A poster presentation

Submission information

For more information about the conference theme and sub-themes, please visit our conference website https://baice.ac.uk/baice-conference-2020/

Abstracts of 300 words (max) must be submitted by 5pm, 30th March 2020. The form for online submission is available here.

Please include full names and affiliations of all presenters. For panel submissions, please submit an abstract for the panel along with abstracts for each of the papers proposed within that panel.

Please note that an author can only make one submission and can only contribute as a co-author on up to 2 papers (with the exception of the discussion café – we welcome expressions of interest in hosting table discussions in addition to formal presentations)

For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us on BAICE2020@ed.ac.uk

You will be informed of the decision by 24th April 2020.