Maggie JP

Interview: October 5th 2022

SMT North West HEI

Professor (Dean of Academic Innovation and heads up a Centre) academic role

APP:

Institutional APP 2022 25⁠

⁠

Technologies mentioned:

Studiosity -

brochure⁠

;

website⁠

⁠

Moodle

Office 365

Teams

Notes:

Lots to unpick and will have to go back and listen to it again. I didn’t know her at all but it was fascinating as I thought she would have spoken more academically but she was talking to me like she was in IT. She mentioned the following:

Service Tower

Business owners

Service providers

Customers

Studiosity and First Draft

Digital Transformation

I thought this was unusual as when I speak to those in academic roles their language isn’t framed in that way. I didnt feel that there was a connection between the teaching side and the technology and it was very much that she wanted me to know that they had a plan. I thought again, that she said more in what she didnt say so she mentioned how they had these business owners and that they were offering all sorts of technical solutions but what I wasn’t sure about was how the staff who teach and those who receive the teaching were able to decide on what was best for them. In fact, I mentioned at the beginning about the less confident students and those who didn’t have as much experience or access to the technology and she didn’t really get what I was saying. She told me that they have access and equipment for the students on a 1:1 basis and not a general stock automatically provided for students.

I felt that there it was too strategic and didn’t sound like a university at all. More like a corporation. When she mentioned studiosity as the support for students as well as First Draft (Microsoft) it bemused me completely and I couldn’t quite see how students were involved. When I asked her about the involvement of students she basically told me that they have the opportunity to be involved which was a surprise as the whole point of this is for the students.

She told me that the fact that someone in the Quality Team had suggested the use of FirstDraft rather than any academic member of staff or anyone involved in teaching (staff dev/ed dev) showed how connected they were in that they were always thinking about the students and their needs.

Staff don’t have agency - I was told that they are basically given stuff and the best bit was that she said that she knew what they wanted. Even though she has only been there 6 months.

Learning Information Systems Director (and lots of other new people have been taken on)

Post Pandemic baseline template - sounded good idea

I asked about the systems but she couldnt tell me what lecture capture they had but what she did tell me was that they had a policy of creating a Teams space for every Moodle course (!) It sounded like they created the Teams in IT on behalf of people rather than let them have their own.

My question then is how are students able to access the Team from the year they were in and how long do they have access.

I can’t remember what she said about the students at the begining as I had asked her about them but was so blown away by Digital Transformation and Service Towers I didn’t delve in.

I asked about data and she said they were not making best of use of it but they were cleaning the data which sounded odd to me because the data isnt inputted by someone but generated by a system, a machine.

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