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Discussion
Discussion
My first position at the OU was as a Media Assistant, responsible for taking word document handovers from academic authors and editors, and tagging them in to Structured Content (XML) to publish through our VLE and print production systems. This required a thorough understanding of the XML markup itself, how the various attributes interacted, and the myriad ways it could go wrong.
As a Media Coordinator I progressed to training others in how to tag Structured content, further developed my understanding of the VLE platform it sat atop, and spent a significant amount of my time problem solving and finding ways around limitations within the platform. Alternative Formats (the ePub, Mobi, screen-reader-friendly MSWord and PDF versions of the content automatically produced by the system) were something I particularly focused on, as tiny quirks in the XML or HTML of the source attributes could cause their production to fail – resulting in a painstaking scroll through the error logs to try and identify the root cause.
This understanding of the VLE and production systems has stood me in good stead in the more recent half of my OU career, with it proving invaluable while working on the direct authoring OpenCreate project (RIP) at helping to inform and diagnose quirks in the integration and interaction with our conventional production systems, and writing detailed briefs for the developers around how each XML tag type and attribute should function.
As a Learning Designer, I’ve used my technical knowledge and ability in the use of our production systems to generate and share content and resources through our staff facing VLE sites. This has included examples of best practice and design guides on our TEL in Practice (TiP) site, prototypes of activities for academic authors and other Learning Designers, and hands on production of student facing content for our Curriculum Design Student Panel (CDSP).
Outside of our production systems and VLE, I am continually developing media production skills I can bring in to my practice, and am a fairly dab hand at producing audio content using Reaper, iZotope RX8, and Adobe Audition. I also create and edit videos using OBS and Adobe Premiere Pro, create infographics using Adobe Photoshop and Canva, and recently taught myself to use Adobe Animate in order to produce an animated video poster for the ALT-C 2021 conference. I also maintain a few websites (such as this) for kicks.
Ultimately, this has all come together in two ways:
My production system knowledge has allowed me to advise teams on how to use the tools and technology within the VLE to create engaging and rich student experiences.
My ability with our production systems, coupled with my media production skills has supported my practice, and allowed me to create asynchronous resources to scale and support the design practice of others.
Late addition to the portfolio
Late addition to the portfolio
Got to mention this under technical knowledge and ability in the use of tech. We have a massive challenge with our team knowledge management, with a lot of our supporting evidence, examples of good practice, scholarship and allsorts scattered across a host of different systems. It's a nightmare to navigate, and usually results in people defaulting to the human knowledge management system, of posting a question in Teams.
After a few fruitless months of bothering folk across the university for options for better knowledge management systems, or the possibility of buying some (nope), I decided to have a crack myself. Long story short, I managed to generate a (secure) large language model based on a sample of our practice sharing info, which can in turn be interrogated using the ChatGPT API, without revealing the internal data to the outside world. I am massively, massively excited about this - particularly the ways it can improve how my team navigate our knowledge base, conduct literature reviews, and generally speed up what can often be a headache. The small scale prototype works. Check the evidence section for a screenshot.
I'm currently working towards a larger prototype, and the implications for its use as a learning technology are huge (as well as it being a technology that, well, learns). This prototype will allow us to link pedagogic design choices, within the context of a subject area, to relevant internal evidence and scholarship. This should make sure we avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly, and can lean in to aspects which evidence suggests will work well. Ultimately, this could result in better student experiences, which are more responsive to incoming and historic evidence. Exciting!
'Technical knowledge' generated by Adobe Firefly
'Interacting with technology' generated by Adobe Firefly
REFLECTION
REFLECTION
My technical skills have undoubtedly helped me get to where I am now, and have helped me bridge the gap between technical discussion around tools, and more design related discussion. It's also helped me form relationships with our tech-facing colleagues, geek out with them about the mechanics of it all - and start to learn how it all slots together under the hood.
The extracurricular creative skills I’ve developed have also been a massive help in this, and previous roles – allowing me to support the team and add value in the creation of multimedia assets that otherwise wouldn’t have been made (due to the cost and faff of setting up small project work with our own in-house specialists). Its great to be able to help someone quickly bring an idea to life.
Thinking about where I could improve, I have a tendency to default to these skills and occasionally have to stop myself from jumping to a technical solution when the sensible thing would be to take a step back and approach it from a design perspective.
A recent example would be our faculty team looking in to ways to manage our workload. I whizzed off and prototyped a handful of tools for us to manage our workload – without ever really stopping to analyse what it was we really needed. Several months later we aren’t using any of them, and we’ve each been using our own approaches to manage our workloads (which feels like it’s working better than a one size fits all solution). Saying that, I also recently got my head around using MS Planner and To-do, and they seem to be being picked up in relation to some of our sites work. Swings and roundabouts.
My technical skills do let me occupy a unique niche within the current Learning Design team. The development goal going forwards is to trick myself in to thinking 'design!' before 'tech!'
EVIDENCE
EVIDENCE
Feedback of impact from Gill Macmillan (previous line manager) April 2022
A really lovely bit of feedback, from my previous line manager Gill MacMillain:
'Mike has extensive knowledge of technology to support teaching and learning – this includes a wide range of VLE tools such as OpenStudio, Quizzing tool, Workshop/Peer review tool, Video & audio recording tools, and he is very familiar too with the underlying Structured Content framework which has a wide range of native activities available. He is also adept with 3rd party tools to enhance collaboration and discussion in sessions with Module teams – so he uses collaborative tools such as Padlet and Miro, and all the key facilities within MS Teams and AdobeConnect. When supporting individual module teams in the use of tools, Mike always starts from the pedagogy – he works with the module teams to understand what kind of activities they want the students to do, and for what purpose, and then identifies the relevant tool(s). Mike’s knowledge of learning tools has led to him being asked by Faculty to run School-wide sessions to demonstrate the different ways technology can support teaching and learning. The first one of these sessions was in June 2020 – a mix of pedagogy-led presentation and discussion. Feedback following the workshop (see below), which I received a copy of as his line manager, illustrates how well received the session was, and the potential impact.
“The presentation was really well delivered, lots of energy and enthusiasm for the content and discussions. The chat box had some great conversations going on and everyone seem to be really engaged. I hope this will translate into impact on presentation and the use of tools. Will be great to try and track this somehow and see how we could follow this up further. I would really like to put the recording of the session onto our new digital pedagogy blog once that goes live for others to watch”
Mike also supports module teams in this area by creating short, engaging screencasts – again, extremely well received by faculty colleagues.'
~Gill MacMillain April 2022
Structured Content (XML) Sample
Below is a sample from a Structured Content (XML) document I've put together, part of a template I designed to help other Learning Designers create Tool guides. I've trained dozens of folk in how to tag in XML as a Media Coordinator - and I've revisited it recently to train some new members of the Learning Design team.
Impact: Templates and frameworks like these really speed up the workflow for colleagues new to the production systems, and give them a good starting point - which I've been able to build on with them as their resources develop.
Discovering a Reaper time audio and video time saver
While recording examples for this portfolio, I figured out a way to speed up my screencasting / audio editing workflow. I've demonstrated it In this short video, which I hope you'll agree is very meta. I think it's a good example of some good screencasting, a bit of techspertise (look at that lovely clipped background and clear audio), and of course the trick itself - which is a real winner if you're doing a lot of screencasts!
Impact: I've used this little trick quite a few times since discovering it to speed up my screencast production workflow, and reduce the length of my videos. It saves time for me, it saves time for the people watching - and ultimately that means there's more time to focus on the important stuff - the design itself.
Alt-C mixed media animation
I created this animation for the ALT-C 2021 remote conference. It was the second time I'd used Adobe Animate in earnest, and I absolutely loved it. Mark and I both love drawing, so we produced hand drawn assets in ink for this as a starting point - and worked really carefully to get a nice tight script together.
We then recorded it, with me doing the music mix in Reaper. I then vectorised the ink illustrations in order to get them to play ball with transparency - did some quick and dirty photography and photoshoppery for the background, and then spent a slightly maddening night learning how to marry up a moving camera, tweening, and a bodged page turn animation (which is a bit iffy, but ho hum).
Overall I'm really pleased with it - I think we settled on a unique and engaging way of presenting stories about data (that could otherwise have been a little snooze-tastic). The illustrations also serve to make the narrative a bit more accessible - as the examples we present are pretty complex. It was also a good learning experience - and I've subsequently taken some of those lessons in to other projects.
Impact: The screencasts and animations I've made, including this one, to support and publisize our team evaluation work have been really positively received. The survey below relates to one that introduces our A4A (Analytics for Action) process training, and I'm very chuffed with the yes/somewhat hitrate on a 4 minute animation.
Also don't you just love this logo? I don't think it more than half an hour to animate our team logo - and it's still my favourite bit. It's now my default front and end board to a video if I want it to feel fancy:
TiPBot - Your practice sharing pal (large language model trained chatbot)
Screenshot of my AI model and the interface chatbot in action. This version of the model was looking specifically at the pedagodzilla book draft chapters, and referencing internal information about them. I demoe'd this the following day, and it went down a storm.
Impact: If I can scale this up, and get it working within the mad confines of the OU ecosystem, the possibilities are limitless. It would make it much easier to dynamically tap in to our knowledge base, and to identify top level themes, recurring challenges - in short join a lot of dots that are at the moment, very hard to make much use of. The impact on operational practice would be huge, and it could in turn make some big positive swings on joining up evidence around the student experience.
Principles and values
Principles and values
A commitment to exploring and understanding the interplay between technology and learning & a commitment to keep up to date with new technologies
Continually expands understanding of technology and systems, and how they might be applied in practice
An empathy with and willingness to learn from colleagues from different backgrounds and specialist options
Builds relationships with tech focused colleagues, and learns the mechanical detail of how our technology operates.
A commitment to communicate and disseminate effective practice.
Trains others in the use of technology (particularly production systems)
Looks to bring understanding of tools and technologies back to the wider team, as tools to solve the problems of the day.
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