Ten years, ten highlights

Yesterday marked a full decade since I started working at this university. The Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD) department was officially launched on my second day in the job, at an on-campus event with LEaD cupcakes, leaderships speeches and aspirations of where things had come from and what we were to become. The annual Learning at City conference was held, off site at The Hatton, on my third day. During my first week in a new job then, I had the highlight of the professional year as well as the birth of the department I’d just joined. Auspicious beginnings!

On a site tour at an interview for the job, I remember walking around a place that is situated in the same location but which in many ways looks very different now and thinking that this was an institution with a lot of promise and that I hoped I could play a part in fulfilling some of that promise. The place was known then as City University London (hereafter City). It became City, University Of London in 2016 when it joined the wider federation that it had long sought sanctuary and identity within. It will change its name again to City St Georges, University of London later this summer, when we merge with another London higher education institution (HEI) and become the third largest university in London, at least in terms of student numbers.

In many ways, if there has been one constant since I joined City, it has been change. Working in educational technology, that would often mean being at the forefront of some of that change too. I have held two main roles in the decade since I joined the institution. I started as an Educational Technologist in LEaD’s Educational Technology Team, with a focus on school support at the then-School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering (SMCSE) and within the cross-LEaD team that worked on learning spaces. I am now a Senior Educational Technologist in LEaD Digital Education, managing the relationship between central support services and Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), The City Law School (CLS) and the School of Science and Technology (SST, formerly SMCSE). For the first time in my career, I had an ‘ist’ at the end of my job title, which felt like a professionalisation of sorts.

With a decade at the same place under my belt, City is now far and away my longest employer. I thought I’d therefore use the occasion of a decade here to look back on some of the highlights. Ten years, ten highlights. Seems about right.

1. The (now award-winning) team

Some of the people who were members of LEaD when I joined still are. There are also a whole variety of others who have come and gone, or who joined subsequently over the years. Within that, as a manager I’ve also had the privilege of being able to build a brilliant team within the wider department. Establishing a new team, whether a smaller group within something bigger, doing so off the back of one that already exists or building a completely new one, is never easy and it’s been a long road to get to this point. However, that journey has now led to us all being part of a team that is nationally recognised as an award-winning one.

LEaD’s Digital Education team won Team of the Year at the Association for Learning Technology’s (ALT) 2023 conference in Warwick, as voted for by sectoral peers. We also picked up an award for Supporting Learning, Teaching and Research at the 2024 UCISA Leadership conference. I accompanied my boss to the ALT conference to pick up the 2023 award on behalf of the whole team. It was the first time I’d been associated with winning anything since a secondary school prize in my Sixth Form and made for a real highlight of my time in this role.

2. Learning spaces

When I joined LEaD’s Learning Spaces team, I’d spent several prior years teaching in a variety of classrooms of varying shapes and sizes, with their furniture, their layouts and their equipment. I’d not, however, spent much time thinking about physical space as a tool for supporting and enabling teaching and learning. The department I’d joined had a track record of about five years of working with various stakeholders from across the university to explore, iterate and innovate on the rooms available within the physical estate to better enable active learning. It had even prepared a manifesto for what new learning spaces should look like. Early on, I wandered around the Drysdale basement when it was little more than a building site and pondered on the rooms that were to be built there.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of new learning spaces being developed or old ones enhanced, and have been able to play a part in how they look and work. This has included spaces like B200, where my suggestion for the room layout was adopted by the architects, and the layout of some of the PC labs in the Drysdale Building, which I drew on my prior experience as an IT teacher for inspiration. I’ve collaborated on a short film highlighting what could be done in some of these spaces and written a case study of City’s learning spaces that was cited by the Norwegian government, among others. I’ve also been able to experiment with putting theory into practice for facilitating early explorations into hybrid teaching.

I’ve learned a lot from others too, in particular colleague James Rutherford, with whom I co-designed the Robin Milner Lab for teaching a new MSc in Artificial Intelligence in, ran a series of workshops across the sector titled ‘The Pedagogy of Space’, and co-hosted a podcast on hybrid teaching titled ‘Teaching Here And There’.

Developing, studying and promoting learning spaces has been one of the really enriching (and challenging) areas I’ve worked on since joining City.

3. Building relationships with and within the schools

In my role as Senior Educational Technologist, I operate as a relationship lead. This tends to mean acting as a bridge between the central Digital Education team and the three schools in my remit. In practice, this means a lot of things – treading diplomatic tightropes between diverging challenges, having to advocate in both directions for a particular idea, building cases for change within a school or centrally (depending on the driver), as well as really getting to know both motivations and intended directions of travel at senior levels.

It’s not an easy role to get right and leaves me with a lot to have to juggle, but it can be an enormous privilege to be able to get deep into a school’s disciplinary and educational wants and needs in the digital age and get to play a part in their journey.

4. The ability to explore big questions

In my ‘er’ jobs (bookseller, teacher, trainer), I got to help people in various different ways and generally contribute to others’ learning. In my ‘ist’ jobs (technologist), I’ve been lucky enough to be able to explore some – to me – big questions that have emerged in the course of doing my role.

At the LEaD cupcake launch in 2014, I was introduced to an academic who asked if I could help with being able to wirelessly share an iPad image to a projector screen in an Engineering lab. This led me down multiple different investigatory paths, including identifying what I called the ‘mobile learning paradox’ (essentially that mobile learning is largely a personalised experience whereas learning in general is both personal and social). The iPad screen share attempts and the work into the mobile learning paradox culminated in my first visit to the United States in almost 25 years when I got to present on the journey into wireless collaboration at a conference on mobile learning in Chicago.

Another SMCSE engineer asked me if I could help with bringing a remote speaker based in Auckland in to one of his seminars. This allowed me to apply some of the frameworks and theory I’d picked up in my learning spaces work and develop a design approach for planning and running what we ended up calling blended synchronous learning and which we now call hybrid teaching. Bringing a remote speaker into a seminar was one of the early challenges that was posed to me, leading me to wonder how one could do that but remove all the perceived barriers to engagement that come with clunky and experimental technologies. I concluded that the best way to do this would be if the guest speaker could be brought in to an in-person class holographically rather than via Skype or some other suboptimal video conferencing option. This didn’t seem technologically possible when I had the idea, but the ‘holographic academic’ stayed in the back of my mind.

At the mobile learning conference in Chicago, I found myself in a conversation that led to an opportunity to write my first book chapter. The resulting chapter was titled ‘Interrogating the Holographic Academic’, where I investigated the technological possibilities and implications of this idea. I also turned the chapter into a speculative design workshop, where I introduced the idea to others and asked participants to imagine a scenario where the holographic academic was possible. The hologram work was some of the most fascinating that I’ve been involved in, and seemed to be a pretty wide open space as far as the rest of the sector was concerned.

Figuring out how to bring business and engineering disciplines together with a bunch of drones for a couple of classes in the CitySport gym (and actually doing it) was quite a highlight too.

5. The development opportunities

One of the factors that I’ve really appreciated at City has been the development opportunities that staff have access to. I have certainly had access to far more chances to grow in my role and perform it more effectively than with most other employers for whom I’ve worked.

In 2015, the Educational Technology Team had a workshop titled ‘Managing Upwards and Sideways’, introducing me to the helpful notion of ‘matrix management’. I took a really useful internal course in 2016 called ‘Practical Skills for Managers’, which helped me to explore the nature and challenges of management before I took on an actual management role. As the shock of the Covid lockdowns started wearing off in 2021, I took another course titled ‘Stepping Into Leadership’, which helped me to differentiate between management and leadership.

I’ve taken part in a handful of shorter development opportunities too, from learning about conducting appraisals or running interview panels to workshops on areas such as ‘Inclusive Leadership’ and ‘Motivating Hybrid Teams’. Many of these are well established and effectively designed internal development opportunities available to all staff, but also catered to different levels.

On top of this, I’ve been supported by my department as I have strived to gain professional qualifications like SCMALT and SFHEA. Little chance of standing still in this role. Big shout out too to the Organisational Development team for putting on the developmental opportunities for City staff.

6. Conferences and events

I’ve always found engaging with the rest of the sector via conferences and other such events very useful, from learning about other ways to inform my own practice and sharing it in return with others to being exposed to new ideas and making new contacts through networking. LEaD has tended to be very good at encouraging sectoral participation, whether through local events (the ALT M25 Learning and Teaching Group, the Bett educational technology trade fair), regional, national or even international ones, as well as at our very own Learning at City conference.

Some of the most memorable events I have contributed to in terms of delivering presentations or workshops include:

• Sharing City as a case study for developing learning spaces at my first international conference overseas, in Greece
• Joining a round-table discussion on the implications for academic publishing of adopting CC-BY Creative Commons licences at the University of Cambridge
• Bringing experiences of supporting hybrid teaching to Advance HE in Birmingham
• Running large scale workshops at the ISE trade fair in Amsterdam
• Co-delivering an ‘AI Games Jam’ at MozFest
• Taking the ‘holographic academic’ to Edinburgh via speculative design
• Delivering the closing keynote at a UK Council on Graduate Education event on ways my work had supported postgraduate study
• Stepping out of Covid’s shadow at the Academic Practice and Technology conference, organised by a cluster of London universities
• Online events like a Media and Learning webinar on educational podcasting services and presenting on digital education and the climate crisis for the Centre for Online and Distance Education

There have been many events that I’ve attended just as a participant that have stayed with me too. These have included an Expert Masterclass on the SCALE-UP method at Nottingham Trent University, a NetworkED seminar at the LSE that imagined the impact of London’s HEIs being configured as a networked learning environment, UAL’s Digital Edge event that showcased examples of the adoption of digital practices in arts education, a webinar from Dave White on the nature of presence in online learning environments, and the recent large scale ‘festival of AI’ that was CogX at the O2.

City has also put on some really fascinating events, such as the HCID Open Day conferences run by the Human-Computer Interaction Department and the Immersive Design Sector Forum that was launched this year in support of SST’s new AR/VR Learning Centre.

7. Experiencing (and coming through) a crisis

Nobody wants to have to confront a major crisis in the workplace, never mind a sudden and global one. In February 2020, I was ISE talking about holographic academics when I started picking up on rising concerns about the flu-like disease that was clearly beginning to spread around the world and which was having serious consequences wherever it emerged.

Many of the large Asian technology manufacturers had pulled out of the trade fair and stall holders were starting to offer antiseptic hand gel at their stands. Looking at the wider signals around the world, I anticipated that the campus was likely to need to temporarily close and the university was going to have to move all of its operations online in a hurry. I later suggested to the rest of LEaD that we would benefit from moving our operations quite quickly onto Microsoft Teams so that when City inevitably closed access to campus, we would be ready.

The Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns turned higher education on its head in a way that nothing else in my lifetime had done so. While it’s a long shot to call the crisis a highlight in the decade I’ve just spent in this place, it was certainly a landmark moment in the work that I do. Prior to Covid, when people would ask me what it is that I did for a job, they’d often follow it with ‘What’s one of those?’ Post-pandemic, the role of professionals who support academics and institutions with the digital aspects of teaching and learning seems much more widely understood.

Crises teach you about many things you don’t often get to rigorously put to the test in day-to-day work, such as teamwork, resilience, adaptability, and relentless innovation. The sectoral response to Covid also made the case for digital education far more effectively than those desk side conversations in academic offices ever did. Having found my professional calling in educational technology when I joined City in 2014, I also got to live through and play a part in its coming of age in our institutions in 2020.

8. Designing for learning

I designed and taught my first theory-informed blended learning syllabus back in 2010, as part of a postgraduate teaching qualification I was taking. Since then, I’ve often tended to look at education through the lens of being a design discipline. Of course, learning is so much more complex and dependent on such a range of factors than something like product usage so it’s not really appropriate to put learning design in the same category as something like product design. Nevertheless, if one considers design-based factors like planning ahead or problem solving, I’d argue that it’s possible to consider learning design as sitting within the wider family of design disciplines. Of course, as Laurillard would say, you can’t design learning but you can design for learning. In other words, you can use design-based approaches to create the conditions for learning to happen.

As higher education started emerging from pandemic lockdowns and institutions tried gravitating back onto campus as if nothing had happened, as if HEIs hadn’t been prevented from collapse by the existence of a range of technologies that enabled forms of continuity of educational practices via digitised means, I found myself pondering on how universities might ‘build back better’ (to use the now largely forgotten slogan of the crisis period). To me, ‘building back better’ was something that could only really be done ‘by design’ rather than by trying to revert to 2019 (as if HE hadn’t been in a state of crisis before the pandemic). For City, I tried to make the case that LEaD should incorporate a digital learning design function into our services wherever I could.

When I was approached about helping to move a Masters course in our Engineering department fully online in a purposeful and considered way rather than as an emergency response, this provided the ideal vehicle to put these ideas into practice. I provided a steer for a number of initiatives in support of this, including constructing a team within LEaD to make this happen, supporting the build of a dedicated studio within SST for producing high quality video materials, and thinking through some of the implications and requirements of a ‘learning design offer’. Two years in the making, the MSc laid the ground for the launch of LEaD’s Digital Learning Design Service, which was launched in the summer of 2023.

Click here to find out more the service and how it can help with your blended, online or hybrid teaching offers.

9. Inventing conference radio?

A couple of years before I joined City, myself and some friends started an Internet radio station (The Thursday Night Show, or TTNS) as a way of sharing music with each other online. Broadcasting live every Thursday night since 2012, it had been one of those things that I’ve kept going outside the day job but never quite crossing over into it.

We all have non-work sides to our lives that we don’t tend to bring into the office and this was mine. In the first Covid lockdown, however, I found almost all aspects of my life converging into the rectangular screen in my living room. Suddenly, no-one could go out in the evenings and people started to look for ways they could escape the pandemic online. For a few weeks, TTNS became a focal point for a lot of attention as we were already running what we sometimes described as a ‘nightclub in a browser’.

Seeing my work and my hobby brought together in the same space led me to offering a radio component to ALT’s conference, which was also to be held fully online. After that first summer, we had a few more times when TTNS provided an evening’s entertainment for online conference delegates. Fast forward to 2023 and I was asked by the outgoing CEO of ALT if I’d be interested in bringing a more substantive radio component to the 30th anniversary of the conference, due to be held in Warwick. This would be like running a fringe conference in parallel to the main event. I jumped at the chance.

While this wasn’t specifically a LEaD activity, I was able to draw on my work with my colleagues and was supported to bring a radio element to my profession’s main annual gathering. It was a very different way to experience a conference and was hard work, but it was also an awful lot of fun, had quite an impact on the conference itself, and was a very clear professional highlight from my decade at City.

Find out more about how it went at this link or tune in Sept 3-5 to hear the second EdTech venture into conference radio when we’ll be live from Manchester.

10. Bringing climate to the curriculum

The challenges posed by the global climate and nature crises are enormous. For many of us, it can feel overwhelming to know what to do as individuals, given the enormity of the changes to human activity that would be required to bring solutions to these challenges. Being a better recycler or fretting about individual carbon footprints doesn’t feel anywhere near appropriate an action to take to make a contribution to attacking problems with scales like these.

Like many others, the more I’d thought about the issue, the more I came back to the question ‘What can I do?’ The Venn diagram above helped me to answer that question. What work needs doing? Educating the next generation plays a big role in climate solutions. What am I good at? Hopefully, bringing people together around ideas and leveraging my networks in support of that. What brings me joy? As this post has hopefully demonstrated, using creative approaches (particularly in educational contexts) to explore big problems.

When in 2022 City’s Head of Sustainability asked me if I had any thoughts on improving City’s curricular offer on climate and sustainability issues, I thought about it and came up with a suggestion. I proposed an interdisciplinary credit-bearing module on climate and sustainability for undergraduates that would both teach students about some of the issues and empower them to feel like they could take positive action in their personal lives and professional careers.

Since mid-2022, I’ve been working with City’s Sustainability team and a group of interested academics from across the schools on this idea, towards a module that will finally launch in CLS in January 2025. Although it’s a small contribution in terms of the bigger picture and has of course been a very challenging initiative to get off the ground, it has been a real highlight as I look back on my decade at City. Now, the real work begins of building and delivering the module as well as finding a way to scale it beyond CLS and ultimately beyond City. See here and here to find out more about the thinking behind this module.