It’s been a really busy couple of weeks here at blended learning HQ at GCU.  My colleagues are in the middle of preparing our annual blended learning report. There’s not a huge amount I can add this year, but it is a great opportunity to find out more about what is happening, so data and analytics have been high on the agenda. For the past couple of years there’s been an encouraging increase in the use and access to our VLE, which we call GCU Learn.  This year the web accesses are down but the mobile accesses have increased exponentially with Apple devices far and away the most popular. Tuesdays also seem to be a popular day . . .  We’re also seeing a significant uptake in use of turnitin and trademark.  E-assessment and feedback is definitely something staff and students want and are using. Last Friday we met with Blackboard about and they took us through their analytics platform.  I was in that strange position of being quoted back to myself, as they were referencing the Cetis Analytics Series quite heavily. Still a great piece of work, and if you haven’t had a look, and are interested in analytics I would throughly recommend it.  We are probably not at the stage to start working with their system yet. There are some key questions that need some really serious discussion, not least around benchmarking. But I am now taking a leaf out of my own book and really considering the who, what, where, why and how of data here. Although I’m not exactly a newbie anymore, I am still finding my way around and getting to know what  people are doing in terms of blended learning.  Our Engineering and Built Environment School had a lunchtime "technology taster" session yesterday which gave me the opportunity to see some of the practice in that school. There was a really good mix of activities including the use of WebPA, screen capture and various student response systems packed into an hour. We’re developing case studies of practice just now so a few more names were added to my list of people to speak to.  Library colleagues also gave a demo of BoB  our national broadcasting recording service. You can easily create playlists of clips and or whole tv/radio programmes which can be embedded into webpages and most VLEs. The slight downside for us is that we don’t have complete single sign on and BoB uses Athens authentication so if we embed in our VLE students will have to login with their Athens details to view   . . . but hopefully that will change relatively soon. There is a lot of activity around new IT infrastructure as well as overarching discussions and consultations around a new institutional strategy to take us to 2020. I’m really pleased that I have the opportunity to take forward the work I’ve been doing with Bill Johnston and Keith Smyth on exploring the concept of the digital university as a possible way to link up a number of "things" that  seem to have some kind of digital dependency. Sharing and exploring practice is pretty much at the forefront of everything I’m doing just now.  Although I consider myself an open practitioner, and an advocate for open educational practices, I am aware that my own practices, my networks and connections are changing in response to my new position.  As you’ll be aware, dear reader, it’s Open Education week next week. David Walker has organised a brilliant week of events at Sussex.  I’m delighted to have been given the opportunity to run a webinar with Catherine Cronin about the challenges of being open. The title of our session is "Open and online: connections, community and reality"  and I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts and experiences along with Catherine’s  research on openness, identities and online spaces. I’ll also be blogging more about this next week and using the responses to my twitter question Tweeps do you think I am an open practitioner? Your response will help me with a couple of things for open education week — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) March 5, 2014 In the meantime tho, my good friend and former Cetis colleague David Sherlock has written a really thought provoking post  in response to my tweet, which takes a different angle on sharing, data and who really benefits. Random picture of a bit of welcome sunshine earlier this week. Morning Sunshine Tagged: #open #practice #learninganalytics, blended learning, openeducationwk, opportunity

Open Education Week 2014 As you are probably aware, this week is open education week, and there is lots happening, so I just wanted to highlight a couple of things to look out for. Firstly something very close to my heart.  A draft version of The Open Scotland Declaration is now online and available for comment (on a paragraph by paragraph basis). Everyone in the Open Scotland Working Group would appreciate as many comments as possible on this document. The University of Sussex has a great line up of events throughout this week. On Friday I’m taking part in a webinar with Catherine Cronin  called Open and online: connections, community and reality.  The webinar will be recorded and made available if you can’t make the time slot on Friday. There are a number of  other UK webinars on this week including Exploring the Battle for Open from the OER Research Hub and  A Pedagogical Look at MOOCs from the University of Leicester. Also later this week I’ll be one of the guest bloggers on the UK Web Focus site . Everyday this week Brian Kelly has invited a guest blogger to share a range of views on open education. If you only do one thing this week, then reading these guest posts is a great option.     Tagged: openeducationwk

Originally posted on UK Web Focus: The third annual Open Education Week (#openeducationwk) takes place from 10-15 March 2014. As described on the Open Education Week web site "its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide ". Myself and my Cetis colleagues are supporting Open Education Week by publishing a series of blog posts about open education activities. The Cetis blog provides a series of posts from Cetis staff which describe Cetis activities concerned with a range of open education activities. These posts are complemented by a series of guest posts on the UK Web Focus blog from people I have worked with who are working in open education. The fourth guest post in the series published on the UK Web Focus blog is written by by Sheila MacNeill. In this post Sheila gives her reasons "Why the Opposite of Open isn’t Necessarily Broken". Why the Opposite… View original 1,245 more words

It’s not been the best week for women in IT. Early In the week we learned that Julie Ann Horvath quit Github due to allegations of harassment. Any story like this saddens me. I have generally had positive  experiences of working in IT, but I have been in many situations where I am one of a few women in a sea of men. I also have had that feeling that I have been judged and my capabilities underestimated due to the colour of my hair. Equally I have, and continue, to work with some fantastically supportive male colleagues. And I am I now working somewhere with a very high proportion of female senior staff which shouldn’t be something I feel need to comment on, it should be normal. But sadly it isn’t. Over the past two years former Australian PM Julia Gillard was subjected to what I can only describe as horrific misogyny. However as many of you know she did make a quite wonderful speech in Parliament in 2012. Today I spotted via BoingBoing that this has now been set to music.  I’m not sure if it is as powerful as the original speech, which still gets me standing up and cheering "go Julia" whenever I see/hear it, but I found the overview from the composer of the piece Rob Davidson very thoughtful. "The resulting choral piece, in which the singers echo and support the Prime Minister’s speech melodies, is initially quite humorous, as we are confronted with the melody that perhaps was not evident to us before. As the music goes on, it passes into something more serious, and (it is hoped) we hear the Prime Minister as a woman experiencing very real emotions." Enjoy - and I am humming, "not now, not ever" as I type

(image: http://www.desktop-nature-wallpaper.com/birds/swan.html) About a year ago I wrote a post called Preparing for the Second Wave after attending and presenting at an internal staff development event at Newcastle University.  At that time Newcastle hadn’t committed to MOOCs and was grappling with issues of being part of the second wave of MOOC activity. After the event I commented: "I suspect that for a number of the UK institutions in the first wave of MOOC activity, the reputational benefits are the key driver. Many of them can afford to underwrite the costs of developing and running the courses in the short term without having to think too much about the longer term benefits/costs . . .Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing for those institutions not involved with MOOCS just now, to take a step back to consider the most beneficial aspect of MOOCs for their aims and objectives before trying to become part of the second wave." A year later and Newcastle is firmly part of that second wave along with a number of other UK institutions as part of FutureLearn. Now I now all the ed tech hipsters are "so-o over MOOCs" but the questions around the long term costs and benefits MOOCs have still to be answered. For an institution like mine who hasn’t been part of the first, second or third wave of MOOC activity, we are still very interested to see what we can learn from others to help us develop our own strategies which may or may not involve an element of MOOC-yness. Yesterday the Jisc RSC Scotland and the University of Strathclyde hosted an event on MOOCs in Scottish Education. Teams from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde shared their experiences to-date with FutureLearn. And the team who just keep giving from the University of Edinburgh shared their experiences from their ever increasing experience and research of MOOCs on a variety of platforms including FutureLearn. If you want anyone to convince you of the positive benefits of MOOCs, then look no further than Professor Niamh NicDaeid, University of Strathclyde. Hearing her speak about the the murder mystery themed introduction to forensic science course almost made even my MOOC weary self consider signing up if they run it again.  What a joy to hear someone continually emphasise the importance of fun in learning. Niamh also talked about the experience of actually running the MOOC and the amount of work behind the scenes to keep its swan like appearance for the learners.  As anyone who has done any kind of online delivery will know once something is live and running there is a huge amount of world that needs to be done behind the scenes. With discussion boards getting around over 6000 posts a week the effect is multiplied beyond most peoples experience. Staff time for both development of courses and running MOOCs is crucial.  We heard yesterday that Glasgow is committing £2.5 million to developing online learning, we know Edinburgh has a pot double that size, and although Strathclyde didn’t quote any figures it has obviously made a substantial commitment. Again for institutions like mine who maybe haven’t got such deep pockets, there are some fundamental investment questions that need to be addressed about where, what and how to invest and future developments. We aren’t in the MOOC club, unlike Glasgow we weren’t invited to the FutureLearn party, unlike Strathclyde we weren’t gallus enough to "chap on the door" and ask to be let in. And now do we even want to be in the club?  Maybe we are better off doing something in a different way. FutureLearn (like many MOOCs, and courses) is pretty content driven, and there was lots in the presentations from both the Glasgow and Strathclyde teams about the development process. My colleague Linda Creanor and I did notice get a bit of a "them and us" division creeping in between academic staff and the learning technologists who seemed to be just doing the ‘techie’ stuff. I hope that this is just an impression and not the truth. Certainly the strengths of the skills of all members of teams was emphasised but there was just a bit of a niggle of LTs being put to the bottom of the pile.   I raise this issue in the hope that I will be shot down with evidence to the contrary. In terms of institutional drivers and evaluation it still seems to be reputation,  staff development and wider engagement with online learning for campus based activities that are key. Presentations from the day will be made available via the RSC website, and I just want to thank everyone involved for providing a very informative session. Tagged: #moocscoted

This week I’m going to try and keep up with the twitter back channel from #lak14 in Indianapolis, already it looks like some really interesting and innovative work is being presented. However, back in my world our learning analytics journey is really just beginning.  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to do some basic investigation, introductions and explorations of learning analytics initially with colleagues from IT and the Library.  We are very much a the who, where, why, when and how stage.  So it’s been really useful to look back at the Cetis Analytics Series and also at the presentations from the UK Solar Flare events.  As ever the generosity of the community in sharing experiences is invaluable.  This presentation from Mark Stubbs at MMU helped to clarify a few things for our IT department in terms of data sources we need along side data from the VLE.  This slide was particularly useful.  BTW we need another one of those SoLar events  soon . . .  However we do have access to some data, particularly from our VLE, GCU Learn.  Every year we produce a Blended Learning report which gives a snapshot overview of activity in GCU Learn across the University.  Getting and cleansing the data is always a bit of a chore and we are aware that the we can only provide a superficial view of activity. I won’t go into the ins and outs of our data access and data gate-keeping issues but I suspect that you, dear reader will understand so of our "challenges".   In broad visual terms we have broken our blended learning activity into four main areas (click on the image to see in more detail, btw the tools/activities are just samples not a definite list for each area.) We can get data at school level (we have three large academic schools) but not at department or module level. Given the dates of our semesters, annual stats are not much use either as they include weeks when there is no teaching so again that can skew the data.  This year we decided to take one month, November 2013, and base the report on that.  So although what we have is a very high level overview there are some clear trends coming through. To quote the Cetis definition of analytics, these trends are indeed giving us some ‘actionable insights’ not only in terms of blended learning activity but also in terms of our wider IT  and support provision.  So get ready here are our headline figures: •        18% decrease in average student accesses to GCULearn via the web •        420% increase in average student accesses to GCULearn via mobile app •        25% increase in number of GCULearn Communities •        82% increase in use of CampusPack blogs •        134% increase in use of wikis •        232% increase in use of journals •        222% increase in online feedback via Grademark in Nov 13 compared to Nov 12 •        167% increase in online Graded papers in Nov 13 compared to Nov 12 We don’t have a mobile or byod strategy and looks like we might not need one.  It’s happening, our users are talking with their mobile devices, and 80% of those devices are iOS.  What we need to ensure is that our content is web enabled and ensure that students can interact fully with activities via mobile devices.  A "switch on" policy and, probably more importantly, culture for learning and teaching is something we need to work with staff and students to develop. Ubiquitous and stable wifi across the institution is key to this. Improvements to Bb’s mobile app would help too and we can’t wait for the roll out of their new web enabled design to be in place.   Staff and students are using the more interactive and student centred functionality of the VLE such as wikis and journals. And the use of assessment and feedback functionality is increasing dramatically.  We estimate that 41% of our modules are making active use of GCU Learn as opposed to just having a course shell and some powerpoint slides. Now we need to drill down into that school level data to get more module level detail on the types of assignments/activities being used, and in tandem develop staff confidence in using, developing and sharing assessment rubrics and their overarching learning designs.  We are only starting to scratch the surface of learning analytics in our context, but the data we are getting is leading us to ask more detailed questions and demand more nuanced data collection and sense making. We are starting to bring people together to have data driven conversations, and share just exactly where our data is, who has access to it, when they have access to it, what format it is in, and how they access it. We have had initial discussion with Bb about their analytics package, however we need to have more internal discussions about what we can and want to do internally before making any decisions about that.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to share the next part of our journey very soon. Tagged: #lak14

My weekly updates have become a bit thin on the ground recently, not because I haven’t been seeing lots of interesting things but mainly because I’ve been seeing and doing lots of "stuff " at work and I haven’t really had the time to blog anything coherent.  My life just seems to be full of "stuff" that needs done.  Most of it is related in someway, but at times there is so much stuff around it’s hard to know where to start. However today is my VIS strategy planning day. But what is VIS? I hear you cry, dear reader.  Well, it’s my new favourite acronym - Very Important Stuff. This morning my colleague Jim and I have been working with SD (stuff done)  methodology to develop our VIS plan.  Most of our most pressing "stuff" relates to our upgrade of VLE (GCULearn)  which will happen in late July.  Early this week we spent a really informative day with colleagues from Blackboard going through the changes in the April 2014 release. I had seen the main highlights at the #bbtlc2014 conference last month, but it was great to get some more time to go through them in more detail.  Some of the new things will be great (particularly the student preview) but we are also now planning to do a few other things like using LTI and integrating some more third party services which we haven’t done before.  We’re looking to trial MyKnowledgeMap with some of our student nurses when they are on placement and possibly WebPA too. Anyway, as I have now have quite a long to do list, I best get back to that. I’ll be blogging more about some of the actions from our VIS plan as and when they happen.   VIS Diary Appointment

Another very successful ALT Scotland SIG meeting was held a the University of Edinburgh yesterday. There was a really good mix of speakers, representing all sectors of the education system, and a range of open activities.  I was a last minute stand in speaker as Natalie Lafferty was unfortunately unwell and couldn’t make the event. Here are my slides. Exploring the digtial_university_alt-scotland_june_2014 from Sheila MacNeill Once again I tried to take some more visual notes of the day, which I hope give a naive overview of the sessions. (Click on the images to see larger versions). Tagged: #alt, #openscot

Early this week I attending the ALT Open Scotland meeting at the University of Edinburgh.  It was a really though provoking day with a great range of speakers from government, FE, HE and the school sectors. As a result not only of the presentations but the wider discussions before, during and after the event, the cost of open practice has been swirling around my brain.  There’s been a lot of war/battle analogies used about open education. I can see why, there is a struggle, and sometimes it does feel like being in some kind of war like situation with ever changing battle lines being drawn/redrawn. However, as I reflected early this year, not everyone actually realises that there has even been a war let alone realise that it has been won. As I am only too well aware,  the wider (non open education specific) battles in our education sector have seen a lot of casualties - not least for some of our boldest soldiers. In that context, I am one of the lucky ones. After Strathclyde University decided not to extend the Cetis contract, I did manage to find a permanent job. However, in terms of analogies in the open education context I’m now actually thinking more around a supermarket one/  The reason is due to one word I heard a being used over the day in a number of  different contexts. That word is "luxury". I used it in my own presentation, when talking about developing open education practice at GCU, and my own experience. I think I said something like "I have had the luxury of being able to develop my open practice and be supported in doing so".  So is open education practice a luxury item or an every day essential? Now it’s only really in hindsight that I can use the luxury word.  I experienced plenty of "struggle", but being part of a nationally funded Innovation Support Centre I felt that developing and being as open a practitioner as I could was almost an unwritten, partly self imposed, part of my raison d’être. I was also fortunate enough to be involved at the start of lots of open education initiatives. But other people and institutions have been/are in quite luxurious positions in relation to developing open practice too.  The University of Edinburgh invested £5million in developing online education which has helped with their MOOC programme and research.  To their credit, they have been very open at sharing their findings and practice. Other universities in the FutureLearn club, which are by and large the Russell Group,  I’m sure have had quite substantial amounts of funding and/or staff time given to developing their involvement.  Other institutions (including my own) don’t have that luxury. In terms of community building, the Open Scotland Initiative is in some ways the antithesis of top down, big money projects. It is very much a bottom up, community driven development. And without Lorna Campbell’s continuing (unfunded) support it wouldn’t have evolved the way it has over the past year.   So I found it rather odd to hear at the meeting that the Scottish Funding Council (SFC)  have given the Open University quite a substantial amount of money (£1.3 million) to look at open and online education in Scotland. Despite the promise of engagement, community building etc, I have very "bad feeling" that this comes about at the same time as I hear that Grainne Hamilton - who has pretty much single handily created  and promoted a very active community around open badges in Scotland, has not had her contract renewed at the SFC/Jisc funded RSC due to funding cuts and is going to work with Blackboard.  Who will carry on that work? The rest of her colleagues are flat out providing the other areas of community engagement and support that is vital in our community. Open eduction, sector capacity building capability - nil  : commercial, open when it suits them companies - 1. Being a bear of very little brain at times, I can’t figure out why is money being given to the OU to carry out community engagement in open and online education and at the same time money is being taken away from people who have been doing exactly that. Now I know that the world of funding councils can be very complicated, and there very well maybe moves afoot to distribute some of this money to organisations like the RSC and Cetis.  But it does seem to me that the SFC have gone straight for the shiny, luxury option.  The OU gets the money, the "ancients", Glasgow, Edinburgha and Strathclyde get a place on the steering group, but what about the rest of us? Do we just wait to pick up the crumbs off their table?  Why not a funding programme that would give those of us who don’t have a spare couple of million to spend on developing MOOCs a bit of support to buy out a bit of space and staff time to explore how open online education could really make a difference to the widening participation agenda here in Scotland? What about relatively tiny bit of funding to continue to co-ordinate and strengthen the OpenScotland Initiative via Lorna and Cetis? They do say that money follows money, and we all know that open doesn’t = free, there is a cost and we all have to pay the bills which means sometimes we just can’t afford to be involved in open education.  I fear that with this type of funding decision the gulf between those who can afford the luxury of open education and those of us who can’t is going to increase.  Whilst I, and my colleagues can do what we can to develop open practice within our institutions, we do need wider support in terms of community engagement too. That’s where the RSC and Cetis come in. I don’t see them as luxuries, they provide a vital role for our community in terms of the development and sharing of practice. They are a the everyday essentials the sector needs. The SFC and other funding bodes strike them off their shopping lists at their peril and to the detriment of the continued growth of the sector. Tagged: #alt #openeducation, #openscot

This week we hosted the latest in the Jisc Digital Student Consultation events. Nearly 40 colleagues from across the Scottish HE and FE sector came here to GCU LEAD to share and discuss current and future developments around students changing expectations of their digital learning environments.   There are some really useful findings coming through from the consultations so far, which were summarized by Helen Beetham and Sarah Knight over the course of the day. Helen’s recent post gives a very comprehensive overview too.  Being part of the Blended Learning team here at GCU,  I was particularly struck by the use of "branding and blending’ of institutional provided digital services and resources and ones students either bring with them or start using during their studies. The idea of core learning and teaching provision is one I’ve been an advocate of for a long time, like many others I’ve been inspired by the work Mark Stubbs and his team have been doing at MMU around this. We also streamed the talks from the day and the recording is available online if you would like to catch up with the presentations. As well as joining in some thought provoking discussions I took some sketchnotes during the day too. (Click on the image to see larger version)         Tagged: #digitalstudent

#cetis14 was a slightly different experience for me this year, as for the first time I attended as a delegate not one of the organisers, and someone who wanted to find out about what I should be looking towards in terms of innovation and key trends.   As the conference theme was  "Building the digital institution" I was particularly looking forward to insights on that and how it fitted with my thinking on that area. Last week we hosted one of the Jisc Digital Student consultation events, in her summary of findings so far, Helen Beetham highlighted the importance of "space and place" to students at university.  During his opening talk, Paul Hollins showed a video his 12 year old son had made about his vision of a digital institution, and I was struck how important "place" (even if it was virtual) was to him too. His simulation centered on distinct buildings,not that dis-similar to many current university campuses (minus the holo-decks).   However it was a different kind of space that has left me feeling a bit bewildered about innovation and the future developments. Giving a Cetis keynote can be a bit of a challenge. It can be a bit of a "tough crowd", so Phil Richards, CIO, Jisc who gave the first keynote had his work cut out for him.  Jisc has been "evolving" and restructuring for a couple of years now.  Part of that restructuring has seen Cetis evolve too from a fully funded Jisc Innovation Support Centre, to a self funding centre. I was looking forward to hearing what and how Jisc will be working with the sector.  However, I am still a bit confused. I know that the "old" funding mechanisms at Jisc weren’t perfect, but I’m not sure almost 3 years later Jisc still need to be referencing the Wilson report so heavily to justify changes. The million seeds left to flower analogy was used, and again I agree that in the past, some Jisc funded projects were much more successful than others and some, despite lots of funding did wither and die. Now it seems Jisc have been thinning the trees, and are now concentrating on maintaining a more manageable forest. There will be a nursery but just now there will be four large seeds (research, analytics, student information systems, and digital leadership). These have been decided through a process of  co-design with key stakeholders.  Through this process over the next three years Jisc will be developing its Product Catalogue and then we (the sector) can sign up to the new subscription model.  Well I think that’s what he said. . .  I’m still a bit confused about how the co-design process is extended to the sector, or how for example I could tell my PVC of Learning and Teaching how we can become involved in the process. I really like the idea of co-design, the most successful Jisc projects have always had that element in them.  I’m just still unclear how it will actually work in the "new" Jisc context. In terms of innovation, it was useful to revisit the innovation, service, commodity cycle but again I was left feeling that if all services eventually become commodities then what is the value propositions of developing shared services just now if someone else will be able to provide them cheaper than we as a sector can . . .   Again I agree light touch specifications like LTI are really good, but they need to be nurtured too - and someone usually pays for that. This is my visual note of the session (apparently there were unicorns somewhere but I missed them, and they are quite hard to draw) I also went to the Developing Learning Analytics Strategy for HEI session.  Again more head scratching. I suppose I was just hoping someone would tell me what to do ( I know, nothing is that easy!!). Actually trying to map out the steps of developing a strategy was useful. Even if it did just confirm what a huge job that is. Being pragmatic for me I need a quick win, to get Senior Management buy-in and then we can start thinking about strategies. So once again I am thinking about time. Jisc seem to be spending lots of time wandering around their forest, but where are the entry paths/sign posts for the sector? When will they open the gates? What will be in their product catalogue? How much will it cost?  Where do I look to for the fledgling seeds of innovation?  Will I have time to wait for the new seeds in the nursery to flower?  I was sorry to miss day 2 of the conference and Audrey Watter’s keynote, but I’ll catch up on that via twitter now. Thanks to everyone at Cetis for organising the conference and bringing such an interesting and inspiring group of people together.  My final thought - are Cetis conferences now our equivalent of pop-up innovation centres?       Tagged: #cetis14

It’s been a busy old week this week with some very contrasting experiences and perspectives on Higher Education.  I’ve already written about #cetis14, and I’m still catching up with other blog posts, tweets etc about it. Marieke Guy has written an excellent post summarizing both days.  I’ve already posted some of my thoughts from the first day.  In between  #cetis14, I attended a couple of school based learning and teaching events here at GCU.  These annual events give an opportunity for colleagues to share some of the new approaches they have been developing.  It was really inspiring and reassuring to see such good practice in blended learning being celebrated, and some of the bigger questions for education generally (such as developing more open, online approaches) being addressed. Some of my highlights included getting up close and personal with the very real mannequins being used in Health and Life Science as part of medical training, hearing real stories about how staff were being told what they had been doing for years was actually this new thing called flipped teaching, and how much student collaboration and reflection is being enabled through various mechanisms including our VLE.  Seeing the various ways our staff are developing new and existing ways to encourage our students to reflect, and share and build their own portfolios of learning openly is exciting but it does bring up a number of wider digital literacy issues. One thing I (and I’m sure many others) have been pondering for a while now is profile management. From an institutional provision point of view, it seems that every system now has a cloud based student profile feature. So which ones, if any,  do we switch on?  From the staff/student point of view, which one(s) is it worth developing? I know from my own experience I have a number of profiles, most of which are half complete. Take note Facebook, I am never going to fill in what school I went to or complete your profile on me (yes I know why you want that info). My network either know or at this stage in my life don’t care. Some of the ones I took time to populate - and these were work related - are no more. RIP Vizify, I did like you but now you are just a snapshot in time.  LinkedIn, well again I did update about a year ago when my employment status was unclear, but I’m a pretty passive user.  About.me I had forgotten about, but after doing my own visitor and resident online mapping remembered. I like it a lot and in many ways I think it is the closest thing I have to an active personal portfolio. So if a reasonably digitally literate and tech savvy person like me is a bit fuzzy about my own use of online profiles, how do we support others, particularly our students? Perhaps this is an area where we really can work on some co-creation with students as we are all really just exploring the really effective use of portfolio/profile tools. I know of at least one new course here which is going to be doing exactly that. I did say this morning that I wasn’t going to write a ranty blog post today, but after a huge twitter uproar (well 4 tweets), I had conceded. So, here comes the mild, ranty bit.  As you’ll know dear reader, I have been experimenting with sketchnoting/visual note taking. I’m enjoying it a lot, it makes me listen and think in a different way. But it is challenging me in terms of visual representation and drawing, and also making me "write" not type on my ipad. Like many people, my handwriting has got increasingly illegible as I tend to type more than write.  @louisegault   pointed me to this report about the use of minecraft in schools and the implication that no-one needs to hand write any more.  Well unless you want people to write like the examples in my notes below, I think we should still be encouraging our children to learn hand write, it is still a skill we need, even if at time it seems we don’t use it that much.   some doodles from this week           Tagged: #blendedlearning #portfolios #profiles

Another week, another workshop on learning analytics. This time hosted by Blackboard, in the University of Salford’s rather fabulously shiny MediaCity building in Manchester. As GCU is a Bb customer we are obvioulsy exploring the Blackboard Analytics solution, however yesterday wasn’t just a sales pitch, a large part of the day was given over to discussion and finding out what "our" priorities are. It isn’t lost on Bb colleagues that many of their case studies are from North America, so although of interest are very skewed the priorities of the educational system there. Retention is of course high on everyone’s list, but I’m more interested in seeing how, and if, learning analytics can help make improvements in the wider student experience.  We seem to be obsessed with the bottom 20% and top 5% (Nb these are just made up numbers) but what about the forgotten middle who make up the majority of our student population? Improving their educational experience is probably more important isn’t it? Aren’t they the ones who are the key to getting all our NSS scores up? Although many people are interested in learning analytics, getting started is quite difficult. Not least because it’s difficult to know where to start. Last week at #cetis14, we were looking at creating an institutional learning analytics policy, and I think everyone there agreed that senior management support was vital. In some ways, yesterday was more about bottom up approaches /needs, but again senior management buy-in was identified as key for any developments.However, it is crucial that everyone, including senior management, do understand the implications of taking a more data driven approach. Developing data literacy has to be part and parcel of any learning analytics work During our discussions, the notion of "academic embarrassment" came up as a possible barrier to adoption. This was said in the context of sometimes work/projects being blocked because someone (perhaps quite senior) doesn’t understand the full implications of that piece of work, and often doesn’t (a) admit that they don’t know what everyone else is talking about , and/or (b) take/ or have the time to find out. This little doodle of mine seem to strike a chord with a few folk on twitter. The Blackboard product does offer a lot, but of course at a price. But any serious work on analytics will have time and cost implications.  Identifying and selling those internally is the tough bit for many of us. The Bb product (and indeed, any analytics product/package) is just part of the overall solution.  However as I’m discovering just starting the conversations with some key stakeholders such as Information Services is a great way of starting new collaborations. Tagged: #BbLearningAnalytics, #learninganalytics

A couple of years ago at a Cetis Conference Professor Patrick McAndrew said that perhaps we needed to concentrate more on the open and online and less on massive and courses. Wise man, that Patrick. That notion has stayed with me and today I am very excited as we are doing exactly that. Over the last month (yes that’s right, 1 month) we have developed an open, online event around the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games called GCU Games On. Let me be very clear, this is not a course and most definitely not a MOOC. Rather it is about bringing people together to in an open online event to celebrate, explore and share experiences during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. Many of our students and staff are (and have been) involved in various aspects of the development of the Games, and will be very active over the Games themselves. Instead of just creating something for our GCU community we thought why not open it out to anyone and everyone who is interested? So we have developed a 3 week event, which will hopefully provide a fun way of bringing people together share their experiences during Glasgow 2014,  enable participants to experience a little bit of online learning. Each week we have a number of simple activities including a digital wishing trees. And because it was just too good an opportunity to miss we’re also doing the badge thang and giving people the opportunity to win bronze, silver and gold digital medals (aka badges). In some ways we have broken every rule in the design book. We have developed (and are still developing) this in a very short timescale, at a time when most of our University colleagues with specialist knowledge have been on leave; we haven’t got a target learner in mind; we’re taking a very broad brush let’s just try and get some participation approach; we’re in the middle of our VLE upgrade; and oh yes, I forgot to mention we’re using Blackboard’s new open education platform which will be officially launched in on July 16th at BbWorld. It has quite possibly been the most exhilarating and scary thing that I and my colleagues Jim and Linda have ever done. But it has also been really good fun. Until last week we really just thought it might be a proof of concept project which would have been really useful in itself. The colleagues we have been working with have reacted really positively and we couldn’t have got to this stage without them.  We’ve also had great support from Blackboard. We couldn’t even have thought about doing this without the knowledge that we had an open platform that we could use. Originally we were planning to use Course Sites. In many ways this is an experiment for us. We aren’t ready to develop one of those "m" things. But this model of very agile, light touch activities, tapping into social media around a major event could possibly be more useful for us.  Our event starts next Wednesday, 16th July but you can enroll here from today. As ever I will be sharing our experiences on the blog, but I would love it, dear reader, if you would sign up and join us for #GCUGamesOn too. Here’s our teaser video (no Professor videos in our event!)   Tagged: #GCUGamesOn, #open, #openeducation, #openlearning

I’ve been quite busy over the last few weeks, but I did manage to get back to the day job earlier this week and attend the  APT Conference at the University of Greenwich. There was a really great programme and I found every session I went to really informative. Unlike keynote speaker Stephen Downes, I don’t record every presentation I do, and despite his best efforts to convince us all to do so, I’m not going to start anytime soon. However,  I do try and reflect on every conference presentation I make, and every event I go to, and at the very least share my slides openly. The theme of the conference was Connected Learning in an Open World, and Stephen got the day off to a great start with his keynote, where he challenged the traditional role of HE institutions, the cost of education, how current business drivers /models are trying their best to make us pay for open.  This is my sketchnote of the talk. As ever a larger, CC version is available by clicking on the image.   visual notes from Stephen Downes Keynote,                     My colleague Evelyn McElhinney and I presented our work on mapping student’s online residency.  Since my last post we have conducted another workshop and some more issues, particularly around the use of online spaces are emerging.  As we work with students getting them to map their use of online spaces, it is becoming apparent that there is currently a lack of useful utility type services in terms in access to our educational spaces compared with other "real life" utility type services.  This is raising questions for us in terms of thinking about what kinds of services we need to develop. We need to make sure access to what Mark Stubbs calls the "hygiene  factors" i.e. timetables, reading lists and our course material is easy, but that the learning activities themselves are still challenging. I’ll elaborate more on this in another post Space and place was something that came up in the final panel session, which I was roped into. I firmly believe that traditional campus based institutions do have a future. People want to go to University, there is more to the HE experience, and indeed any kind of learning than content and courses.  Successful interactions (and not just educational ones) require confidence and social skills. In an online context these are even more crucial.  As anyone who has been on any kind of online course, never mind a massive one, online education can be a lonely experience. I had to leave the panel a bit early to catch my flight home, and of course it was just as things were starting to get interesting. One particular set of questions from the floor centred on the perceived "best of breed" approach of the Oxbridge tutorial system. We can’t replicate that everywhere, and like many I don’t think we should be. I’m not sure if that type of experience really does much more than continue the power of the old boy network, which given the current state of the world isn’t doing that well unless you are part of that club or rich enough not to need to care.  Along with everyone else who went to the session on Digital Dissidence and CVs (creative visionary spaces), I was really impressed by Anthea, a recent Greenwich graduate, as she showed us via music, video and images how she had been encouraged to express her professional knowledge and herself in a truly multimedia and meaningful way.  Mark Webb’s innovative program exploring cultural diversity in relating to professional development is something I can see working in so many contexts, but I doubt that there would be such richness in an Oxbridge class, and it is more the poorer for that. Thanks to everyone involved in organising the conference and to all the presenters.  I really hope I can get back to Greenwich for next’s years conference. Here are the slides from our presentation. Mapping online residency: getting our bearings to effective online spaces and learning designs from Sheila MacNeill Tagged: #HEAVandR, #uogapt

I have written a short piece for ALT’s online newsletter about my experiences on both sides of their Learning Technologist of the Year award. The full article is available here. And here is a version of it, with a photo that somehow got missed out in the article. One of the highlights of last year for me was winning ALT’s individual Learning Technologist of the Year Award. As a winner I’ve also been part of the judging panel for this year’s awards. In this post I’m going to try and share some of my thoughts from both sides of the competition fence. Martin Weller has recently written a blog post about awards in which he captures how many, myself included, feel about awards:  "I’ve never been one for awards really. My view has been that the people who get them tend to be the people who least deserve them, often because the people who deserve them are too busy doing the actual stuff to bother chasing awards"  But as Martin acknowledges, after winning an award things do change. He then goes on to highlights some of the benefits of winning awards. "1)They act as a shortcut - instead of explaining why something/someone is doing a good job you can just say ‘award-winning’.  2) It helps - we have researchers on the project and this may help get further funding to keep them, or enable them to get other jobs. Being sniffy about awards seems churlish then. 3) It felt nice - it’s not all about the altruism I’ll admit, it felt kinda nice to be given an award, even if I couldn’t be there to collect it." Never having really won anything in my life, I was totally thrilled to win the ALT award. Not least due to the fact that it was recognition from my peers. The timing was almost perfect for me too as it coincided with a major change in my career. It was a really lovely bookend to my time working at Cetis. It also helped when I was starting in my new job as it was something quite impressive to put in my staff bio. I now also have something in the awards section in LinkedIn, which previously I never really understood the point of :-)   Winning is one thing, but as they say, "you’ve go to be in it to win it".  Entering competitions is daunting and time consuming. One of the reasons I really enjoy working in the learning technology community is the lovely people in it. Those I most admire tend to be the most modest about their achievements and contributions. However this is not a good thing when it comes to entering the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Award.  This is where you really need to forget modesty and take the opportunity to share and celebrate your achievements. At this point I should need to confess that I didn’t actually write my own entry. My colleagues Lorna Campbell and Christina Smart conspired, took the time to fill out the form, and then told me when they had sent off the entry form. That gesture in itself meant a huge amount to me too.  Being part of this year’s judging panel has given me another perspective on the awards and the selection process.  After an initial sifting to ensure entries meet all the entry requirements, the completed written entries are judged using a relatively simple but clear marking process. The top scoring entries from that process are then invited to an interview, where they are asked to do a short presentation and then answer some set questions, which are again scored by all the judges. Once all the shortlisted entries have been seen, the decisions are made about the winners.   After a very long but very enjoyable day going through this process recently I have some tips for those of you who maybe think about entering but never get round to it. Don’t just think about it, enter the competition. Do think about entering a colleague(s) (with or without telling them) Don’t leave it till the closing date to write your entry. Don’t assume that judges will understand your context, explain with specific, easily understood examples and evidence what you have done/ are doing. Highlight student /staff engagement and feedback.  Don’t be modest.  If you are selected for an interview you have already proved that you are doing outstanding work, so take the opportunity to celebrate it, yourself and your contribution to the community. Do be incredibly proud of being shortlisted - the competition is tough, particularly this year. You never know, you too could have blue paper signs left in your wake!  Picture of my blue plaque                   See also a recent blog post by ALT President (Claire Donlan): ‘ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards - interviews and judging’ http://donlantechnologies.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/alt-learning-technologist-of-year.html Tagged: #alt, #ltofty

One of the great things about working openly is that is leads to all sorts of serendipitous collaborative opportunities. Last week we had a lovely example of that when we were able share a joint creative twitter challenge between our online event #GCUGamesOn and the latest iteration of #BYOD4L. Friday was the final day of #BYOD4L and the focus of the day was on creating.  We thought it would be fun to get participants to share a sporty/keep fit photo and provide a way to be creative and have some Friday fun. As both our online events are very flexible it really only took a quick skype call to add this activity to both. Sue has collated the responses in to this storify. The #BYOD4l & #GCUGamesOn Creative Challenge Storify

Following the special edition of JIME, the whole book, Reusing Open Resources, is now in print and available here.  It includes a chapter on Analytics for Education written by Lorna Campbell, Martin Hawksey and myself. It’s almost a year since we wrote the chapter so its not completely up to date, but I think it is still a very useful overview. The book editors, Chris Pegler and Allison Littlejohn have done a great job putting the book together. It offers a fresh perspective on the reuse of open resources for learning by placing learning and learners (rather than resources) as the central focus and by taking into consideration all forms of open learning, formal, non-formal and informal learning, not only open education. Like them, I hope the (sometimes opposing) views expressed in the book feed into debates across the related fields of education, professional learning and lifelong learning. Tagged: #learninganalytics, #openeducation, oer

GCU Games On Gold Medal Our online event GCU Games On is now in it’s final week. Each week we have been giving participants the chance to win digital medals which are actually badges but as the event is about the Commonwealth Games it was too good an opportunity to use the term medals. Open Education from Blackboard has an integrated badges functionality with Mozilla open badges allowing participants to publish and share badges into their own Mozilla backpack.  So far so straightforward? Well yes and no. Creating and issuing badges with Open Education is pretty straightforward using  gradecentre.  Adding metadata is easy, and unless you knew, you wouldn’t actually realise that’s what you were doing (always a good thing with metadata).  You can customise your badge (remember to use a .png file) or use one of the templates provided in the system.  We have 3 medals/badges (bronze, silver, gold)  but  decided to only make the last (gold) one a "proper" open badge.  Why only one I hear you ask? Why not all of them if it is so easy? Well, there are a couple of reasons. Firstly we developed this "event" pretty quickly and we wanted it to be as easy as possible to get the almost instant gratification of winning a badge - which seems to have worked. Now a silver medal! Could be addictive, this achieving thing. #GCUGamesOn — Wilma Alexander (@Rwamalam) July 24, 2014 It’s really it’s that pesky email authentication thang in Backpack.  You need to use the same email address in both systems to enable your badge to publish into in your backpack. Which is fine up to a point. If you’re like me you probably have at least a couple of email addresses, and you probably use them for specific purposes.  When I set up my Mozilla Backpack I used a now defunct email address. So what’s the problem, just update your email address in your backpack I hear you cry. Well, yes, except finding where you do that isn’t that straightforward, you have do it before you log in and (well certainly when I tried) the option to do that doesn’t always appear, you can’t change settings when you are logged in. . . Our "event" is not a course or one of those M things. It’s about trying to allow people to have a positive and fun online learning experience.  I’m sure just reading this all is a bit time consuming and a bit dull. We didn’t want to have to write extensive guidance about authenticating/creating a back pack. Our participants can just win their medal, and print a certificate (btw we aren’t charging for that like some others!) Then if they choose to, they can select the publish to Mozilla option. I suspect most won’t take this option as we deliberately haven’t given explicit information or guidance on it. However, a couple of people we do know have tried and are having mixed results. There seem to be some issues with using browsers other than Firefox, and quite a time delay. As is the way with these things, there’s not a consistent error and some people are able to do things today that they couldn’t yesterday  . . . However, overall issuing badges through the open platform does work and we have learned a lot about the practicalities of creating and issuing badges within Blackboard. The 2014 update will have the same badge functionality, as does Course Sites.  If you want to see how it all works you can register and see if you can be successfully in our fiendishly tricky gold medal quiz challenge here . If you have any experiences/thoughts/tips about badges then please let me know in the comments. Finally here’s my medal in my backpack (click on the image to go to my backpack page). Tagged: #BlackBoard, #GCUGamesOn, #openbadges

I’ve now been blogging on this site for just over a year, and thought I should mark the occasion with a blog post. There have been some other rather more significant anniversaries this week so I thought today would be a more appropriate day for this post.  I just wanted to stay thank you, dear reader, for taking time out to read my various ramblings over the past year, sharing them and most importantly leaving comments. It’s been quite an eventful year for me and others. When the University of Strathclyde decided not to renew our Cetis contract, I had decided that my future would probably be as a freelance/ed tech gun for hire.  Blogging had been a significant part of my practice at Cetis and it was something I wanted to continue with,  so I set up this blog. Not sure what I would be doing I dallied with weekly updates "what Sheila’s seen this week".  These  have tailed off quite a bit now I have full time employment at GCU, but I do try and keep the theme of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen alive at least once a month.   I’m also trying to blog at least once a week. Since starting at GCU I feel that now more than ever my blog is my professional memory and portfolio. As they say I’m not in it for the numbers - which is probably just as well given my stats :-) Anyway just out of interest these are my top ten posts from the last year. I see some themes emerging . . . but there are all around practice and "doing stuff" which I’m pleased about and I hope continues for the next year. What is a Learning Technologist? Open education practice, luxury item or everyday essential? #openscot After the MOOC has gone - the real collaboration and connectivism begins Some thoughts on the "Students expectations and perceptions of higher education" report Learning Technologist of the Year 2013 Where Sheila’s been this week - digital residency mapping #HEAVandR Research as a service - the researcher as an API #oerrhub Collaborative auto-ethnography - an antidote to big data in MOOCs? GCU Games On - open and online and not an "M" word in sight Developing new forms of online practice

Our online event, GCU Games On, drew to a close last Friday, 8th August. We’re giving a couple more days for participants to fill in our evaluation. In the meantime I’ve been playing around experimenting with timelines. As I posted previously, we moved from initial idea to going live on Open Education by Blackboard in a month, so a lot happened in a short space of time and I wanted to try and capture that. I came across a 3-D timeline software package called BeeDocs, which is quite swishy. There is a free version available but it’s only for iOS.  If you upgrade to paid version you get more sharing features including keynote/powepoint export and web hosting. Unfortunately the web version it saves is 2-D which you can see here. So, I’ve just made a screen recording of the 3-D version ( music, sound effects, narration maybe later). I think the timeline will be really useful for presentations about the event. The screenrecording isn’t as sharp as the "real thing" but hopefully you get the idea. I’ve excluded lots of "stuff" but hopefully it gives an overview of the key stages of development. Tagged: #GCUGamesOn, #openeducation, OpenEducationbyBlackboard

This week I’ve managed to avoid that back to work and "omg look at that inbox" feeling for a few days by attending the annual #altc conference.  Last year’s conference was a bit of a personal highlight for me, but this year the team at ALT and all the co-chairs pulled off another great event,including two of the best keynotes I have been to in a long time from Catherine Cronin and Audrey Watters. Both Audrey and Catherine highlighted the need for engagement to ensure the authentic voices, stories and experiences (from all of the education sector, not just ed tech) voices are heard and ensure that new noisy narratives (particularly from certain commercial sectors) don’t become the defacto history and more worryingly, future of education. Audrey wove together an inspiring narrative (including references to Ada Lovelace, Roald Dahl, Luddites, Mary Shelly, Byron, F B Skinner to name but a few) about the creation of monsters, lost histories and control.  She reminded us that we can control the development of technological monsters through our combined efforts to inspire love technology and education. Catherine reminded us of the inherent ethical and political nature of education and how openness, online spaces and new forms of identity can empower us to make our voices heard. However, within this marvellous new open world there are power struggles too. We may laugh at the idea of teaching machines, but in our drive for ever increasing personalised, mobile access to education, content vendors and governments are often (knowingly and/or unwittingly) all too willing to ignore the narrative from educators and buy into a behaviourist, watch video -> click through -> mcq-> (pay for) certificate = learning solution. Helen Beetham made a very good point after Audrey’s talk that in the UK we do have a different narrative - particularly around the student engagement agenda within HE which is different from our North American cousins. But we are not immune, as the FELTAG discussions (particularly around % of online content) and stories illustrated. There were many, many great stories shared over the three days of the conference. John Traxler reminded us of the danger of assuming our  developed, western global ideologies, learning theories and learning designs don’t automagically meet the needs of many emerging cultures (in particular Africa).  David Kernohan provided an entertaining yet mindful tale of how the heady days of open and social collaboration may well be at an end, as big business, governments and employers (included HEIs) start to close down, commercialie and control access and impose censorship. Conferences like ALT are a great way for our community to strengthen and share our own "folklore" and build our collective narrative around the positive impact of technology within learning and teaching. We need to keep sharing our stories openly, and ensure our narrative, folklore, collective knowledge and wisdom is developed and shared as widely as possible.  Roll on ALT-C 2015. Here are my visual notes from all three keynotes (NB if you click on the images you’ll go to full size, CC licences copies on flickr) Visual notes from Jeff Haywood keynote, altc 2014 Visual notes from Catherine Cronin keynote ALTC 2014 Visual notes from Audrey Watters keynote ALTC 2014

Can’t believe it was only a week ago, but . . .  last Monday was quite busy for me at ALT-C all three of my presentations were scheduled for then.  They kind cover a lot of the "stuff" I’ve been involved in over the past year. Below are the slides. Also "click here" to see all my tweets and pics from the conference.

As promised this post shares the summary findings from our recent online event, GCU Games On. As I’ve written about before we developed this very quickly (in a month from idea to online) so we were very aware of some of the pedagogic shortcomings of our overall design. However given the rapid development time during the start of summer holidays when most of our subject experts were on holiday we had to make some very pragmatic design decisions. Overall the feedback was pretty positive and the whole experience is helping to shape our developing strategy to open, online courses. (Nb the text below has been adapted from an internal report). Background GCU Games On was an open online event designed to celebrate, explore and share experiences during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. It ran between 16 July and 8 August 2014. Instigated by the PVC Learning and Student Experience, it was developed in little over a month. Due to the time constraints (one month from idea to being available openly online) a simple design was developed which included: background and contextual information with relevant links, making a wish on our digital wishing trees, at least one twitter based activity and a medal quiz challenge each week. Sharing experiences of Glasgow 2014 via twitter was encouraged each week. Daily email updates were sent to all registered participants. The event was delivered via the new Blackboard Open Education platform. Participation Registrations: 211 Countries: 12 excluding the UK Digital Badges issued: 174 Tweets: 424 Digital wishes: 107 Evaluation Of the 211 registrations, 22 completed the survey giving a 10.4% response rate. In addition, due to the use of social media (and in particular, twitter) a number of informal responses to the event were shared. Summary Findings The majority of respondents to the survey were female, aged between 25 to 65, based in the UK with no connection to GCU. The majority of participants were based in the UK, with 36% based in both Glasgow and Scotland respectively. 18% of respondents were from the rest of the UK, and there were equal numbers (4.5%) of respondents from other Commonwealth countries and non Commonwealth countries. From registration information we know we had registrations from Australia, India, Trinidad & Tobago, Ireland, Israel, Denmark, Canada Italy, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and South Korea. 59% of respondents had no connection with GCU and 45% of respondents cited wanting to experience online learning at GCU as their main reason for participating. The vast majority of respondents had some form of formal educational qualification, 45% up to Masters level.  This correlates to general trends in open online courses, but may also reflect a network effect from the Blended Learning Team’s network and promotion of the event. 95% of respondents found the site easy or partially easy to use.  54% of respondents completed all of the activities. Open feedback was generally positive about the experience. "I really enjoyed this as a bit of fun.  What I got out of it most was seeing new blackboard system in operation and it looks and feels very impressive." "I think looking at the Twitter feed this was spot on for what it was trying to achieve. Much fun was had by all it seems and the course gave a great scaffold to talk about their experiences at the games." "I do know it is hard to pull together a learning experience around an event like this and I guess that was weakness of this approach.  At times I think really perhaps due to lack of substance or clear learning outcomes - the learning design was a bit hit or miss - but I think you did achieve outcome of getting folks to engage with learning platform which was I think what it was about rather than the content"   GCU Games On Gold Medal Tagged: #GCUGamesOn