Digital is not the future - Hacking the institution from the inside

Round 2 - Vote, Comment.

The story so far...

Our overall aim of this project/community is to produce a short proposal around the five scenario areas which sets out clear teaching and learning focused objectives at an institutional level. We are keen to advocate for the digital being more than just a set of ‘services’ (while acknowledging the importance of providing robust services). The key principle throughout being that our audience is the VC or a board of senior managers within the institution.

So far we have had some constructive discussion in Loomio and run an intense face-to-face event to ‘hack’ responses to the scenario areas following the hack rules (see below). We gathered around 25 people together for the face-to-face hack representing 10 universities in the UK and organisations such as Jisc, UCISA and UUK. We also had international input from Donna Lanclos and Dave Cormier. There was a healthy mix of roles within this: learning technologists, educational researchers, project managers, edtech experts, a CIO, an associate dean, an NUS representative, a couple of heads of elearning and more.

During the hack five groups produced short (circa 100 word) responses to each of the scenario areas. These groups were reformulated each scenario-round to keep thinking fresh. To gain an overview of the themes that emerged we recommend reading these two great blogs posts by Colin Simpson (http://bit.ly/1NClheZ and http://bit.ly/1VUeWyG) who has done a sterling job of capturing the emerging lines of thought. Interestingly, many of the responses to the scenarios don’t lead with the digital but respond to the influence and impact of the digital.

Next step - voting
We have gathered the hack group’s responses to the scenarios together, unlinking them from the profile of whoever happened to write them in Loomio for each group (hence why every proposal is appears to be from Peter). They are now set as five proposals within threads under each scenario, representing the thoughts of each group. (see the links below)

We’d like you to vote for the proposal in each scenario which you think will be most effective as part of the final pitch. Feel free to make any of the other debates within the scenarios into proposals as well. Please add a comment to your chosen response if you feel you can add to the line of thought but please only add one key thought/idea per scenario. All comments should be made within the rules of the hack (see below).

You have an opportunity to comment on each proposal, and then vote. You are encouraged to either vote a proposal up or down (agree or disagree), or you can choose to block the proposal, or abstain if you can't decide.

If you’d like to read all of the proposals in one place before voting we have gathered them into this Google doc http://bit.ly/1NFaEIv - it’s only about 2000 words in total.

Links through to voting in Loomio:
(If you haven’t requested group membership you will be able to read the proposals but not vote - it’s a very lightweight sign-up process)

Scenario 1 Strategic review of the institution and budget planning for 2020 http://bit.ly/1SMh1bW
Scenario 2 Institutional restructure because of a new VC
http://bit.ly/1Tyb9TZ
Scenario 3 Undertaking of an institution wide pedagogical redesign
http://bit.ly/1rBA3cA
Scenario 4 Responding to and implementing TEF
http://bit.ly/1qX8Yzz
Scenario 5 Institutional response to poor NSS/student experience results
http://bit.ly/1N2hjwg

Rules of the hack

Rule 1: We are teaching and learning focused and institutionally committed
Rule 2: What we talk about here is institutionally/nationally agnostic
Rule 3: You are in the room with the decision makers. What we decide is critical to the future of our institutions. You are the institution
Rule 4: Despite the chatter, all the tech ‘works’ - the digital is here, we are digital institutions. Digital is not the innovation
Rule 5: We are here to build not smash (hence only one positive change to any proposal)
Rule 6: You moan (rehearse systemic reasons why you can’t effect change - see Rule 3), you get no beer (wine, juice, love, peace, etc.)

Round 3
We will leave voting and commenting open for a couple of weeks then David White and Peter Bryant will gather the ‘winning’ responses into a pitch, incorporating comments where possible. Our hope is this will be a short document which can be used in any of our organisations to influence high level strategy around the digital and teaching and learning.