Project summary

New lockdown measures and social distancing requirements resulting from COVID 19 sparked huge structural changes in education such as shifting in-person teaching into an online or blended space. With the rules sometimes changing by the hour - from a last-minute lockdown to finding out one needs to self-isolate - both life and education are constantly evolving. The Innovation Programs required a fast pivot to Blended Learning that would allow for seamless delivery in this unpredictable environment.

As the Undergraduate Program Director, I worked to develop and implement an educational strategy to support the program through the 2020/21 year and beyond. This required aligning people, processes and educational delivery. The approach was unique in that it was:

• Design-led
  The work put into practice what the Innovation Programs teach by applying an agile, adaptable human-centred design process. A simple process of Listen, Test and Learn helped in implementing rapid changes.

• Collaborative and Agile
  Changes were made collaboratively with colleagues and students; agile leadership principles helped to balance clear direction with autonomy.

• Programme focused
  Zooming out with a focus on the overall program and student experience increased sharing and collaboration across the program, allowing for new narratives to emerge.

As a result of this work, the Innovation Programs were able to not only pivot to blended learning, they also made rapid progress on program targets around assessment and feedback strategy, program-level design initiatives, and team culture and collaboration.

Programme Development Strategy

The strategy was built on a program-level approach to streamline the workload for both staff and students. Key features included:

Year clusters for staff - teaching staff formed working clusters by year group to share experiences across the units, collaborate on curriculum and set coordinated assessments.

Program-level project teams for students - students shared the same project and team across units in a year group to maximise teamwork, engage with a single project from a variety of perspectives, and maintain a smaller social bubble.

Supporting elements of the strategy included:

• Creation of working groups operating at various levels (see image to right)

• Development of shared definitions of teaching activities across the program

• Adoption of templates for Blackboard site setup, unit handbooks and assessment briefs

• Development of a course assessment strategy to simplify assessments and align with program-level assessment principles

• Development of an assessment and feedback framework to respond to the needs of blended learning as well as National Student Survey (NSS) feedback

Educational Delivery

The strategy was built from a series of online workshops early on with the teaching team using virtual collaboration tools. Workshops covered topics such as lessons learned from online teaching and scenario planning for blended/hybrid learning.

This level of open collaboration is a core Centre principle and a key part of the transdisciplinary nature of the programs. It served to involve the teaching team in changes, empower new ideas and value existing work and expertise. My work aimed to:

Translate Faculty and University guidance into a model of delivery that worked in the context of the Innovation programs.

Recognise and celebrate good practise by focusing on what's working and balancing critical feedback.

Learn from one another to identify new (or possibly already tested) interventions that could provide a benefit across units or year groups.

Bring the work full circle by returning good practice from the program back into the Faculty / University planning by sitting on the University Digital Champions and Faculty Blended Learning Delivery working groups.

Examples of work supporting the teaching team include:

• Facilitation of a series of team workshops covering topics such as lessons learned from online teaching and scenario planning for online/hybrid teaching

• Development of and training on program delivery principles

• Roll out of a teaching checklist to support the alignment of principles and key tasks

• Delivery of technical support for course development

Student engagement

To understand the ongoing evolution of the student experience, I began holding Listening Sessions with students from across year groups to provide an informal space to talk about their experience and, where relevant, get feedback on concepts or interventions. The Listening Sessions work together with the more formal Student Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC) where student representatives elected by the Student Union represent the experience of their cohort as a whole.

Listening Sessions allowed for quick identification of possible interventions (Listen), followed by a period of implementing the ideas (Test) and evaluating their effectiveness (Learn). The results of which were brought to the formal SSLC for discussion. In this way, we were able to get farther faster with feedback representative of the full cohort based on a number of iterations.

Examples of interventions as a result of these Listening Sessions include:

• Sharing of key student experience insights with staff including “Try this…” quick tips for making small but meaningful improvements

• The shift to MS Teams across the program as a collaborative team space

• Testing new ideas for year 1 student experience and engagement

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