Being a 2023 OE Awards Finalist

I am honoured to have been nominated in the educator category of the 2023 @OpenEdGlobal Open Education Awards, and then astounded that I am one of two finalists alongside the great Dr Maha Bali from the American University in Cairo (AUC).

To be a finalist in this award round with Maha Bali, and others in the leadership category, like Catherine Cronin and Martin Weller, that I have known and respected for many years is an experience both energising and humbling.

The Open Education community has been a source of support and inspiration for me since I began working on off-campus/online, Open Education programmes in Dublin City University (DCU) in 2010. It was a conference symposium on open pedagogical assessment at the OE Global conference in Delft in 2018 that gave me the push to start implementing some ‘non-disposable assessments’ in the OE Psychology undergraduate programme I chair. It was talking to some amazing librarians about their efforts to encourage engagement in Open Practices at the conference in Milan in 2019 that helped inspire the creation of a beginner’s guide to open educational practices for DCU. It is listening to inspirational colleague’s like Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz speak on hopeful ways to envision teaching and learning futures (#HE4Good) that reminds me of the importance of continuing to promote and ‘do’ Open Education, even when (especially when?) that feels like perpetually swimming against the current.

I think my shortlisting belongs as much to the groups I am and have been involved in so a big shout out and thank you to: my colleagues from the former Open Education Unit in DCU, in the DCU library, and in DCU’s Teaching Enhancement Unit; my colleagues in the Psychology Major team who are currently gearing up to ‘do’ Open Education week in week out in the 23/24 year; and all those involved in the OpenGame Project, the BUKA Project, and the Encore+ project.

#OEAwards #OEAwards23

The Pivot to Leading a Remote Academic Team

The great-advice-on-moving-online-due-to-Covid-19 market is pretty saturated by now with great contributions on Twitter from the likes of @tonybates @slamteacher @eam0 @karencosta @Jessifer @jonbecker @ProfSallyBrown @neilmosley5 @tjoosten @LTHEchat and many, many more. I am particularly proud of the contribution coming from @DCU’s @NIDL_DCU (National Institute for Digital Learning) and our ‘Keep Teaching‘ and ‘Keep Learning‘ web pages, which I think set the right tone. It is also a good time to have a project running on how to teach online, as the Openteach project (led by @orna_farrell) gets into full swing with lots of useful resources. As the Irish Government is shutting all schools and HE Institutions from tomorrow (13-03-20) some of us here with online learning experience are helping colleagues to gear up to teach and support their students without their usual on-campus setup. But anway, I’m not here to add more to that conversation. I thought I would write about something I haven’t seen discussed already, and give some advice about how to pivot to leading remote academic teams.

Since 2010 I have led a (fantastic) remote academic team in my role as a Chair of open education, online programmes (this T&L model is described in Brunton et al. 2018). Having previously led on-campus academic programme teams I can say that these require different approaches but there are lots of transferable skills from one to the other. For all those Progrmme Chair/Directors who are about to pivot to leading an academic team whose members are now remote and distributed, my advice would be (note – I am going to talk about the technology we have here in DCU, you will have to translate to what is available in your institution):

Be gentle with the team as they transition to working remotely: as new remote workers some will be dealing with a sense of disconnection while others are dealing with the chaos of a house where they don’t have a preexisting area to work and children kicked out of school are swinging from the ceiling. It will take time for team members to find their feet in this new mode of working (remote working is a whole thing in its own right).
Provide some infrastructure to pull the team together: having a shared folder or set of folders with shared documents e.g. agenda for team meetings or shared spreadsheets used as tracking files can help give the team have a single point of focus.
You can use tools that allow for real-time, synchronous meetings, for example Zoom, to allow for team meetings or one to one meetings. Try to make sure your team have working mics and headsets so they can participate well.
You can also use asynchronous means of working with your team. I have held asynchronous team meetings where team members added comments to a Google Doc (we have Google Apps for Education) that had a detailed Agenda+brief over a specified day or two.
Be creative in how you use the tools available to you. For example, in a recent meeting where a sub-group was working on a curriculum redesign project we had a workshop detailed in a shared Google Doc and then we worked on that together (with me taking notes in the Doc) while that document was shared through Zoom.

I hope these help!

The Sweet Summer Heartache of Leading an Online Learning Programme

This post marks my return to the blogosphere after being in a preparing-for-the-new-academic-year-of-an-online-learning-programme fugue state since early August. Some of my colleagues and I have taken to referring to that August-September period as the #timeofgreatsorrow as we knuckle-down to try and get as much of the online learning materials (completing edits, updates, and design/development of new materials), assessments, VLE/LMS infrastructure updates, etc. etc. ready for the start of the year. Our philosophy is, where possible, to provide students with access to all learning materials and assessments on the first day of the academic year. Although I have been gradually working on the flow of work during the whole year, trying to move elements of work to other times of the year, I have yet to find a way around the sweet summer heartache of having to drop all research, writing and service work to focus 100% on this teaching and learning work for at least two months. It is rewarding work, but it is exhausting.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Much of what causes the #timeofgreatsorrow is the way in which our DCU Connected programmes run by my Unit (Open Education Unit) use a teaching and learning model created specifically for online, off-campus study where small teams of full-time academic staff work with larger teams of part-time, off-campus, adjunct faculty who fulfil specific teaching and learning roles (described in Brunton et al. 2018). This provides many benefits in terms of the oversight that I have over the programme and the consistency that results in terms of learning materials, assessments, student experience etc. It also allows my unit to be a lean, efficient one that can exist in an education system that does not provide the same supports to off-campus, online students that it does for their on-campus, full-time counterparts. But, during times of intensity I can become a bottle-neck for the progress as almost everything comes through me for quality checks and final sign-off. During the summer the only way to stay out of bottle-neck city and get everything done is to focus on T&L work and pull extra hours in a calculated game of chicken with both the start of the academic year and burnout.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

But, I am out from under the start of the year (in week four…), the programme looks great after the work that was done, and the students are happy (the biggest numbers we have had so far on this open access/education, online, UG psychology programme), and I am ready to figure out where I left all that research and writing work and get back into things like writing blog posts.

Onward!

Video-based Career Supports for Psychology Students

One of the many great presentations I saw at the second annual conference of the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Division of Academics, Researchers, and Teacher (DART-P) (@BPS_DARTP) related to The Talking Jobs video series/careers podcasts for psychology on YouTube, produced by Dr Rachel Bromnick from the University of Lincoln (@unilincoln).

This is a great example of technology being used to aid psychology students in better understanding the different possible career possibilities, as well as practical advice on getting ready to pursue career opportunities. It is also a great example of an academic going way above and beyond to innovate to the benefit of students.

I provide students on my programme with periodic careers webinars focusing on different sub-disciplines of psychology, along with one to one advice when sought, but this kind of innovative practice is on another level.

Productivity, Wellbeing & Academic Workload

I recently attended a very useful CPD event organised by the Division of Work and Organisational Psychology in the Psychological Society of Ireland on Productivity. The event was given by Dr. Richard MacKinnon a workplace psychologist and managing director of WorkLifePsych (@dr_mackinnon), who has a straightforward and effective approach to how we can reflect on, and improve how we work in order to positively impact our overall wellbeing in a holistic way by looking at a number of pillars of productivity. You can find out about this (psychological) evidence-based approach to thinking about your productivity in a podcast co-hosted by Dr. MacKinnon, My Pocket Psych, specifically starting at episode 32. The show notes relating to the different episodes contain a number of very useful resources.

Image of woman working at a desk with a planner, laptop, notebook, and phone. She has one hand to her head as if a little overwhelmed. — Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com

Tools that can help those working in higher education to manage their workloads and improve wellbeing in a holistic way are to be welcomed, especially in academic roles with the open ended nature of that work and the expectation of continually maintaining excellence across a number of areas. The pressures of academic roles have been brought into sharp relief recently in three reports from the UK, with two research reports on wellbeing in universities, from the charity Education Support Partnership (reported on in an article in The Guardian,
‘It’s cut-throat’: half of UK academics stressed and 40% thinking of leaving) and a report from the UK Higher Education Policy Institute (Pressure Vessels: The epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff).

Take care of yourselves everyone!