Continuing to chart the progress behind Brookes’s new staff developmental programme for TEL. With a structure for mapping the student digital experience in place, from Jisc and the NUS – there are other concerns – the first of which is:

Goal #2: Integrating developments in learning and teaching with staff CPD

One of the things I didn’t want to do for the new programme was set in place a whole new set of courses. There are plenty of effective developmental opportunities already; from online courses that are part of the Postgraduate Certificate for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (which I teach on) to one-off workshops on how to use the various tools needed for TEL. Adding to these would add to the workload for staff, but also, who’s to say what should be on a course? There are over 200 different elements to the student digital experience tool as put together by Jisc and the NUS, we shouldn’t be choosing on behalf of the teacher which is the important one for them to address.

Rather than have a course, therefore, it made sense to me to just add different types of continuous professional development to the DC matrix, alongside the 12 principles of student digital experience that were already there. The intention being that the member of staff would plan to do some sort of TEL intervention and use this intervention as the basis for some CPD activity. This would create a model that could be light-touch, incremental, and adaptable to meet the specific needs of a staff member (and ultimately his or her students) at a particular time. It also follows the practice of not focusing on the staff member’s digital capability as a goal in itself, but as a means to improve student digital experience. It also borrows a bit from the idea of activity-led learning; you’re not learning any skills for their own sake, but to achieve a specific goal.

And this also recognises that people don’t (normally) just do professional development for the sake of it, they are directed towards it for different reasons. I wanted the programme to actually meet the needs of people who had CPD-related task on their plate already, rather than try and generate an additional rationale for engagement. These were the four reasons I thought that people might need the site:

• Having something in their own courses that needed improvement, or a need to be addressed. This could be identified by them, by their line manager in a performance review, or in student feedback.
• Wanting to get into publishing research, and thinking of using a TEL intervention as a good basis for this. Brookes has a lot of internal mechanisms for publication, for those just starting out, and of course there’s the whole range of TEL journals and conferences out there.
• Going for HEA accreditation as a Fellow, Senior Fellow or Associate Fellow and running into the criterion of “using and valuing appropriate learning technologies”.
• Actually having already done something, but wanting to get into dissemination of their practice and not knowing where to start.

The basic structure of the Jisc NUS benchmarking tool (First Steps, Developing, Developed, Outstanding) is helpful in developing ideas, so I adopted that and formed another table similar to the 12 already existing. When integrated into Richard Francis’s site it looks like this:

The idea is that if it sits alongside the other 12, as a “zeroth principle”, then people who come to the site looking for ways to improve the student experience will be drawn into considering how to make something of their TEL development as CPD. Ideally they’d pick a cell from somewhere on principles 1 to 12, and one from the matrix above, and in combination those two elements will form their CPD for that academic year. It’s similar to the numbers round in Countdown – one from the top and one from anywhere else.