ESCAPE @ IBLC 10

Dominic and I recently presented our work at the International Blended Learning Conference. The room was full – which was just great. We were joined too by Sarah knight and Marianne Sheppard from the JISC and so it was just great that they could pick up another update of our work and hear delegates thoughts of our work from delegates.

Essentially ..
1. We outlined the context for our project
2. We gave a run through of main features of the ESCAPE toolkit

• Themes and questions (Diagnostic)
• Features and consequences
• Ideas (including our three minute assessment Tips, Themes in Practice, see earlier blog post)

3. We demonstrated an example of change in action

It was really good to see some of the concrete things emerging from the work. It was particularly rewarding too to look back at some of our Partner modules and just see how far we have taken them; both in terms of their thinking about assessment and feedback practice and also in their use of technology. .

We took a couple of questions at the end of the session. Perhaps the most encouraging was a question asking if access to our ESCAPE toolkit was possible – It is! Such interest validates our thinking and also shows how projects run by one institution can also help and influence practice elsewhere too.
I was really pleased that Sarah and Marianne were able to join us and see the fruits of their programme being shared with others.

JISC Conference 13th April 2010

Last week Mark Russell and I presented at the JISC Annual Conference, which this year was held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. The opening keynote speaker was Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor of the Open University. One of his Keynote themes was that students are often well able to find information - there certainly is enough of it out there, but are less adept at assessing the veracity of the information they do find. He spoke about teaching students to not only discover, but also to teach them to "triangulate" the information. He then went on to challenge the audience - always a good thing(" I'm an Australian - you can't offend me!" was one of Martin's opening gambits). He spoke of the different perspectives between British and Australian textbooks in dealing with the Galliploi campaign of the first world war. This is still clearly an emotive topic after over 90 years and brings into sharp focus the concept of triangulating knowledge - and the need for students to develop their own understanding and perspective.

All in all a really challenging and informative keynote address

JISC Experts Group

On Wednesday 17th March I presented a workshop on the ESCAPE Project at a meeting of the JISC experts group in Birmingham. The workshop gave an overview of the Appreciative Inquiry(AI) approach that we took with module teams. We then explored the emerging findings from two of the modules that we are working with. In particular we looked at how educational technologies (online submission, wikis, and online groups for example) provided a medium for achieving the pedagogical aims of the project (for example: a more consistent engagement with the curriculum, increased opportunities for students to engage with feedback and the facilitation of more personalised leaning opportunities). The day provided a good opportunity for getting feedback on the project and there were many questions on the use of AI.

It is indicative of the stage that we are at in the project that we are now starting to present the emerging results of the project on a national stage .This was always was part of our dissemination plan and its nice to be in a position to start to see all the hard work done by the module teams starting to bear fruit.

Sustainability – thoughts from the Experts.

The JISC operate a Pedagogic Experts Group which I have been fortunate to have been a member for a little while. At a recent event a cluster from the Curriculum Design programme were invited to engage the experts as were a cluster from the Curriculum Delivery programme. We (ESCAPE) were part of the Curriculum Delivery cluster invited to talk to the Experts. I jumped at the chance and suggested that our session be about sustainability.

I am keen that our project does not wither on the vine when the funding runs out, nor do I want our leaning to stay confined to us at UH. And so I was keen that we didn’t just engage in a traditional show-and-tell routine but use the Experts Group to help shape and / or validate our thinking on sustaining our projects.


After a brief into from Malcolm Ryan – the critical friend of the cluster, Gunter Saunders outlined some of the work from Westminster’s project. I followed and briefly introduced ESCAPE. We then moved to ask the group …

* What would you do to ensure that the projects are not sustained ! (reversing the question is just great to get the ideas flowing ) and

* What one thing would you suggest the projects consider / do to ensure the sustainability of the projects.

Some great ideas flowed

Working with Dominic we I will go through the list and use the thoughts / ideas to challenge our own work.

I always like the buzz that seems to be present at the JISC Experts Group and I was particularly (selfishly?) pleased that some of the buzz and thinking will flow into our ESCAPE project.

Curriculum Design Toolkit

Although I am the ESCAPE Project Director I only (officially) get to work on the project for 0.2 of my time The other 0.8 is dedicated to my role as the Deputy of the Blended Learning Unit (BLU). In the 0.8 capacity part of my remit is to lead a team of seconded staff in the area of Curriculum Design and Innovation (CDI)

Some of the CDI team are currently working on developing a Curriculum Design Toolkit. The toolkit has three components and is intend to help individuals, module teams and programme teams reflect on, and where appropriate re-engineer, their curricula. The primary components of the toolkit are

A Diagnostic tool – used to establish where the problems in the curricula might lay
A Features and Consequences map – used to show what the ‘features and consequences’ of the diagnosed curricula are likely to be.
A Suggestions for Improvement resource bank – used to provide staff with different forms of advice should they wish to tackle any diagnosed problems

Wednesday and Thursday of this week I drew the team together to review progress and accelerate the development. The team are only seconded the BLU on a fractional basis and so they too have many varied demands placed on them.

The two days was full of energy and enthusiasm for the development.
After I outlined the vision for the toolkit and fed back initial thoughts from users of a pilot Diagnostic tool day one was set aside for the team to show where they are at.

Marija Cubric outlined the Technology-to-Principles Matrix. Given that UH is wedded to the notion of Blended Learning there is a need for us to help staff make appropriate decisions about the use of the varied technologies available. For us it is never ‘the answer is a wiki, now what was the question?’

Following Marija’s presentation / discussion we spent the rest of the day exploring the progress of the various CD strands.

Currently the strands under development are ‘Curriculum Design Toolkits for…

* Core values (Here we use the Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education offered by Chickering and Gamson)

* Employability – this development is being led by Amanda (Mandi) Relph and Sarah Flynn

* Research Informed Teaching – this development is being led by Phil Porter

* Assessment for Learning – this development is being led by Maria Banks and Myself

Other strands to be developed include

* Internationalisation
* Entrepreneurship


The Diagnostic tool offers a set of research informed principles to the user. The Principles are different for each strand.

Each of the Principles are accessed separately by five questions. The Diagnostic tool rates the responses to the questions and shows, graphically, if there is good, or other, alignment with each of the Principles. We spent the whole of Wednesday looking at the Principles and the ‘accessing questions’.


Wednesday was really productive and we moved on our developments and thinking significantly. Wednesday also included a trip out to a local Indian Restaurant. It was great to continue the discussions as well spend some time socialising with colleagues.

Thursday was due to be a testing day. We were hoping (somewhat ambitiously) to get other members of the BLU / LTI to test the toolkits under different scenarios. Alas we were just too ambitious and so we stood the ‘testers’ down.

We continued with our work from Wednesday and also spent part of the day engaging with students. This was to incorporate their voice into the Features and Consequences Map. We thought getting the students involved would be a valuable contribution. I’m not sure any of us knew just how valuable that activity was going to be. We took input from Lauren Anderson and Elizabeth Terry (placement students in the BLU), Yoeri Goosens – BLU Student Consultant, Ruth Hyde – BLU research assistant recently engaged in the JISC funded STROLL project and Dawn Hamlet. Dawn is our link with the UH student Union. We have worked with this group before and they are always dedicated and committed. Thank you!

Each of the strand leaders met separately with the students to get the student view. It was really interesting to see how the strand leaders engaged the students differently. I suspect the different facilitation techniques kept the students alert too. That is they were not overwhelmed by the same technique.


Gaining the voice of the student was followed by a super-efficient and dialogic facilitation technique (Marija Cubric) to get us to vote on the likely ability of the various technologies to meet the needs of the various Principles.

We came a long way in those two days and although we are left with some on-going activity I doubt we would have so far if we had stayed in our offices and worked on the toolkits on an ad-hoc basis.

Oh, why am I writing this here? Mainly because of the Assessment-for-Learning strand that is being developed. It will be just great to get this and the Technology-to-Principles matrix fed into ESCAPE.

Watch this space…

Great job team!

Final Version of Project Plan to JISC

We have just submitted our " final version" as opposed to "draft version" of our project plan. the plan was revised in the light of comments received from our colleagues at JISC and from the steering group. The Plan is now quite a hefty document - including the work packages it runs to 48 pages. We have revised some of our time lines. In particular we have allowed much longer for the design and development of the assessments for learning phase. The modules we are working with are a mix of one and two semesters long. The single semester modules will run between October 2009 and February 2010 - which means in March we will have an idea of how well our redesign has worked.

This week we are starting to apply our appreciative inquiry methods to the school of Life Sciences. We are conducting interviews with members of the module teams. This will allow us to get to know each other and start the inquire phase of the Appreciative Inquiry method. We will be asking them about good learning experiences they have encountered. We will be exploring what was it that made it a good experience. with questions such as:

• what happened?
• who was involved?
• what was your part in the experience?
• what was it that made it possible?

Using these reflections we will to start to evaluate the assessment practices of the modules. We will be looking to establish a way of evaluating the assessment against efficiency and effectiveness.

Scottish Journey

Mark and I travelled up to Glasgow last week to meet with Rachel Harris from Inspire Research. We were looking at how using appreciative enquiry techniques could help us in our work with the module teams in the schools. AI looks at growing what works in a organisation to foster change rather than to think of things in terms of something needing fixing.

The day was very productive and we were able to flesh out exactly how we we going to approach things on a module level. In addition we have started to put a detailed timeline together for work we are doing with the schools. We had a chance to knock around quite a few ideas and we were able to develop some ways of looking at things that should really help the sustainability of the project's influence after the project itself finishes. In particular we looked at how many modules you would need to influence in order to bring about an institutional change . Mark compared it to how many people were needed to start a mexican wave in a stadium. Was there a critical mass of modules that you needed? and if so what were the factors that influenced that number. We also looked at things from person centred approach and looked at how we could measure a persons influence within a school as an agent for change. We wanted to encapsulate how many modules a particular person could influence and see if we could express that as a kind of index or quotient. It was good to have Rachel's input and experience to keep us both grounded on what was possible within our time frame.

At the end of last week we also got the feedback on the project plan from JISC - so this week will be concerned with updating the plan in the light of these and the steering groups comments. In addition we will be and arranging meetings with the module teams within the schools to get them to examine their current practice within an AI framework.

From alpha to omega

We had a very valuable meeting with Lisa Gray and her colleagues from JISC. It was a chance for the JISC team to find out what we had been doing over the last month or so and for us to get some feedback on our draft project plan. They also had a chance to meet our stakeholders in the Business School and Life Sciences. The first part of the meeting was with Mark and myself and concentrated on the work we had done to date and looking at some of the issues that the plan had raised.

The round table that followed teased out some really interesting issues within the schools about the need for this kind of project and the kinds of solutions that were being developed - both bu early adopters and having to us technology as the only way to cope with a situation - for example the impracticalities of 650 students all handing in hard copies of coursework at 3.00 on a Friday afternoon. There was a rich conversation on how schools at UH are using of the electronic voting systems and the hidden benefits that emerge once you start to use this kind of technology. Studynet was also discussed in detail and some of us spoke with passion about what we and our have been able to achieve with it.

There was a valuable discussion on the level of detail needed in the work packages - which we took on board. The work packages will need to be more comprehensive when detailing our baseline audit of what is happening in the schools at present - a fair comment. This detail will come in the next couple of weeks as we start to work much more closely with the module teams to dissect the modules and the staff and student experience.

We also discussed the resources and support that will be made available to us over the course of the project. The meeting was held in the Learning Resources Centre where the JISC team were able to see a cross section of the way our students work from informal small study groups that form due to almost chance meetings to more formal student led sessions in dedicated seminars rooms. As I looked around it was clear that technology in the form of laptops, wireless Internet and the web 2.0 technologies was very central to the students learning - the place was a hive of student activity.

All in all a very useful morning, it is good to know that we are heading in the right direction and that we have the support and resources to deliver the next part of the project. I am pleased the way things have gone so far and liken the project to picture of my daughter trapezing - its a delicate balancing act that we are attempting and it will not be easy to get the embedding that we are after - but it is possible and when you get it right it is exhilarating!

Sustaining ESCAPE - Learning from other projects

At the heart of the ESCAPE project is the need to sustain and embed our practice. We are after all about developing sustainable change. Using the standard JISC template for our Project and Evaluation Plans we were required to present some thoughts on Sustainability and Exit. I really like the idea of asking the project to think about these issues at the outset and not at its end. Thumbs up from me!

The University of Bradford are running another JISC funded project - Audio Supported Enhanced Learning (ASEL) - to which we (UH) are partners. The project is nearing completion and today (11 Feb 2009) they ran a UH / Bradford meeting to review how the institutions would sustain the ASEL activity and continue to reap the benefits suggested of audio supported learning.

I am really keen to see legacy activity from these type of projects and not just see all the good work fizzle out and dwindle just because the project and funding has formally closed. I was invited as part of the UH team to attend the day to which I seized the opportunity. I want our project, ESCAPE, to learn from ASEL activities and see how we might sustain ourselves long after we have finished. In particular I am interested in what things we might do now to help our project sustain itself and what questions might we ask at the start of the project that would help us at the project close.

Whilst I was happy to support ASEL, want to see UH benefit from a real legacy of the ASEL project, I also wanted, (more selfishly), to see what lessons I could take away from the meeting to benefit ESCAPE.

We had an interesting start to the day where as a group we explored how the project had met its objectives. I think this will be a useful exercise for ESCAPE too i.e. to keep reminding ourselves what we set out to achieve and constantly relate our activity to that.

Bob Rotheram from the Leeds Metropolitan University followed that session with a great presentation about the JISC funded Sounds Good Project - Sounds Good is about giving better feedback and using audio to support the feedback activity.

After Bob outlined his project and the benefits, I was keen to find out how we going to sustain the Sounds Good activity (i.e. in line with the purpose of the meeting and for my selfish needs!)

Bob spoke about the importance of enthusiasm and then I asked, in addition to enthusiasm what three things do you think are important to sustain Sounds Good.?

Bob spoke about the time savings it could bring staff and qualified this with some great examples.
It is quicker (audio feedback) than written feedback if …
• You give a lot of feedback
• You speak faster than you can write

Be a really useful exercise to quantify this and show staff some break information
Bob also said that technology needs to be simple and useable and not be a barrier to uptake. Some great thoughts.

Naturally Bob also\mentioned the positive benefits to students in terms of receiving audio feedback. I really liked the pragmatism about being both student and staff focused. Staff are very busy and they need convincing of a need to change practice and see the benefits for them and their students

Peter Chatterton asked a follow-up question …

If you had a pot of gold what would you use it for to sustain Sounds Good ?
Fortunately Bob said not much was needed, sounded like a ripple effect was kickimg in, but he did say …
• Give staff decent devices
• Run workshops
• Give a chance for staff to come together to share and discuss activity


It struck me also that just as e-learning was a Trojan Horse to pedagogy so too was the use of Audio. The morning session gave a few examples which suggested, for me, it was not developing pedagogy but giving what we already know about learning to be surfaced.


In the afternoon we broke into our Uni teams and discussed how we might sustain ASEL. Asking ourselves …
why bother?
How do we convince an academic not connected with the project to engage?

We collected many ideas - which will `be posted here when they are summarised, but some things for now …

Provide some training packages
Utilising existing support - not develop new systems
Resources might include how do you do it
What do you need to avoid
i.e. a collection of resources related to ‘how to’
as well as a collection of resources relating to ‘why to’

We also mentioned strengthening the student mentor scheme run at UH - and if new / different skills are needed for audio activity then we need to describe what these are and up-skill the mentors accordingly

* Linking it to podcasting campaign
* Tagging resources so that we don’t reinvent stuff
* Networking
* Sustaining communities
* Inter-faculty meetings/
* Cross University inter-faculty meetings
* Link with the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes group?
* Not invent what is already out there

A couple of things ASEL might do now
• Develop crisp selling messages
• Use the right language for different groups
• Tap the why do it into responding to challenges
• Sell to Heads of School
• Share an Executive summary


I was interested in asking the team to map out the audio landscape post ASEL and then establish what is needed to support a vision

i.e. where we will be in
1 week
4 weeks
2 months
6 months
1 year

I would like to do this for ESCAPE - map out what we want UH to look like after ESCAPE and establish what we need to make that vision-landscape a reality.

Per ardua ad alta

We are welcoming Lisa Gray of the JISC e-Learning Programme team, Marianne Sheppard from the Support and Synthesis team, and Sheila MacNeill, a representative from JISC CETIS to the university tomorrow . They are coming to meet the ESCAPE team and to have a round table meeting with us and our key stakeholders in the schools. It prom ices be a really useful day - we are keen to show JISC what we have achieved to date and to get feedback on our draft project plan. It will also be a chance to talk about the arrangements for the management of the project - both strategic with the steering group and advisory group and from an operational perspective. We will also be talking about the communication strategy and reporting mechanisms along with the Project evaluation plan and baseline data gathering exercises that we are nearly ready to start. I will be interested to see what support the meeting feels the project needs.
We are on the launch pad, we have done the preparation with our partner schools and we are ready (almost) to light the blue touch paper and launch the baseline assessment of the current assessment practice.