I recently joined colleagues for the first LSE Admin Forum, organised by Michael Etheridge, Nicole Garnier and colleagues and facilitated by Chris Watt, Head of Organisational Learning at LSE. They were keen for someone from the UCL Teaching Administrator Network to come along and talk about our experience. Their first meeting was really successfully with lots of colleagues coming along even though it was a very busy time of year.

It reminded me of when we got started at UCL about six years ago – the relief of realising that you’re not the only one struggling with some of the issues was exactly the same! It was also a reminder of what a fantastic bunch of people teaching administrators really are – extremely committed to supporting “their” students and academic staff and usually able to bear most of the difficulties thrown at them with a sense of humour. And a realisation that we need to work together within our institutions to ensure the impact on departmental processes and workloads (and ultimately students and academic staff) are considered when decisions are made centrally, and to work together within and beyond our institutions to share best practice. The wordle below, put together by Nicole and Michael, reflects the discussion:

Last week, I went along to the JISC workshop looking at Electronic Management of Assessment. Great to meet up with Mira Vogel, and to meet colleagues from Birkbeck, King’s College London and elsewhere.  You can find out more about the project at http://ema.jiscinvolve.org.

The workshop was about involving end users, establish requirements and preferences, and then prioritising next steps. I voted for better interoperability between Student Information System and VLE Integration, better reliability of submission and greater creativity in specifying assessment. Have a look below – what are your priorities? You can feed into the project via http://ema.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2014/11/27/end-user-perspectives-on-the-challenges/

JISC Electronic Marking of Assessment – Top Challenges, by Gill Ferrell

The first cohort of UCL teaching administrators and learning technologists has graduated from the workshop programme supporting accreditation as certified members of the Association for Learning Technology designed by the Digital Department project team. For further information see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/news/cmalt

Have a look at some questions and answers regarding improving digital literacy in the latest JISC Inform: http://tinyurl.com/cojy54s

Keynote for ICA Network Educating the Net Generation in the Life Sciences, 21 June 2012, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Some of the results of the UCL Staff Survey carried out in autumn 2011 have recently been made available.

The results do have important implications for the Digital Department project, especially as some of the outcomes are envisaged to serve as a key resource for the induction of new colleagues in teaching administration. So we should, for example, make sure we help new colleagues understand the context of their work within the wider UCL environment and to support working across departments. The survey also indicates an interest in skills development, which connects to the aims of our project.

We’ve this week had the second workshop for teaching administrators working towards completing the CMALT portfolio. Our first cohort consists of 20+ teaching administrators and other support staff, divided into four mentor groups. We’re running workshops to give some structure to the completion of the portfolio and to facilitate group working and mutual support, and have already seen a lot of sharing of good practice. The first workshop, about a month ago, looked at operational issues.

At this week’s workshop, Rosalind Duhs from UCL CALT gave an interesting presentation on E-learning/distance learning: Using moodle to extend student learning. The material from the presentation and subsequent discussion will be useful for the part of the portfolio on Teaching, learning and/or assessment processes. A further four workshops have been scheduled.

CMALT is an important component of the project in a number of ways: it provides a supported certification option for teaching administrators while encouraging reflective practice; the workshops provide a forum to share ideas and identify and spread good practice; it is envisaged that the CMALT qualification can be accredited as part of an AUA qualification, which the Digital Department and the AUA aim to establish. The material produced will (where permission is given) contribute towards a UCL Teaching Administrator handbook, a collection of reference material which will be another important output of the project.

We gave a presentation at a workshop of the Learning and Development Network of the UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences on 20 March. The event was attended by 40+ colleagues from across UCL and beyond. Some helpful comments afterwards about sharing our approach beyond teaching administrators and about integrating relevant central services.

See below for the slides:

Interesting to see the University of Aberystwyth Social Media guidelines for staff at http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/social-media/onlinesafety/, and to compare them with UCL guidelines at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-media/guidelines. Two quite different approaches!

Joined the AUA CPD Implementation Project Networking Event on Thursday, a follow-up to an earlier meeting which Clive attended (see his post of 20 October). It was great to meet colleagues from universities across the UK and find out about their projects, including some who are working on building the AUA professional behaviours into staff development strategies, and learn more about the challenges they are facing and possible solutions. Like us, some have encountered difficulties applying the AUA framework directly to the staff roles they are working with, and one solution was to slightly adapt the framework to local needs. Most of those who attended will also join the AUA conference in Manchester at the beginning of April, and it will be great to find out then how everyone is getting on with their projects.