Teaching Spaces Update: From Hybrid to Lecture Capture

Having delivered on its key objectives, the Hybrid Teaching Spaces project is drawing to a close and handing on day-to-day support of the new facilities on to UoDIT. However, this isn’t the last you’ll hear from us as we’re shifting our focus to delivering universal lecture capture, so read on for some key information about ongoing support for hybrid and what to expect from the new lecture capture project over the summer.

TLDR:
The Hybrid Teaching Spaces (HTS) project will formally end on Friday 29 July.

Day-to-day support for these facilities will be handed back to End-User-Services, UoDIT, on Wednesday 08 June. ‘Here to Help’ for in-room training will end on this date.

Getting help remains as easy as dialling *1 for live help from inside a teaching room and contacting help4u for all other issues and enquiries.

The focus for the remaining project team will move to developing a universal lecture capture capability ready for academic year 22/23.
The university is working on a new operating model for digital services, which, once complete, should paint a clearer picture of how teaching spaces will be managed and supported in the future. Look out for more information on this over the summer.

Closure of the Hybrid Teaching Spaces Project

Having delivered fifty-two Dual-Mode hybrid teaching spaces, various specialist facilities, and a successful program of training, it’s an appropriate time for this project to close. The resource attached to the project has run dry, so between now and Friday 29 July, the remaining project team will focus on the closure activities, including user-facing guides and documentation, internal service documentation and various other tidy-up jobs.

As Jonathan Walker said in his post about the completion of the Dual-Mode upgrades a few weeks ago, we consider the project to be a huge success both in terms of what was delivered and how it was delivered, and I hope to do a lessons-learned exercise in the summer that I’ll blog about in due course, including all the fabulous people who made the project possible.

This certainly isn’t the end of development for these valuable spaces and once resource is made available again, we will return to continue the work and deliver increasingly advanced and flexible teaching capabilities. We designed the rooms both to provide the immediate hybrid capability needed at the hight of the pandemic, but also as flexible, enhanced rooms, able to be developed with more capabilities in the future. We already have a long list of enhancements requested by the teaching community that we hope to come back to in the future.

Many may not realise but a lot of the support people have received through the project has come from temporary DUTE staff. On Wednesday, Indrani and Aysha will be leaving us, and I wanted to give them both a big shout out for all their help.

Ongoing Support

Closing the project will have an impact on in-room support as much of the support delivered in the last academic year came from the project team itself. Until a long-term teaching spaces service provision is established, day-to-day support for teaching spaces will be returned to End-User-Services (EuS) in UoDIT, as was the case before the project started. Jonathan Walker has been working hard to ensure the facilities we have deployed are fully documented and appropriate guides and training is produced. Dr Jonathan Monk is leading a review of the University’s digital services and I expect that a more substantial teaching spaces service will be established to ensure that staff are trained and supported on the long term.

Support for the software side of the workflow (Collaborate) remains with the Centre for Technology and Innovation in Learning (CTIL) who can also be contacted via Help4u.

What’s Next? Universal Lecture Capture

The next priority for the development of our teaching spaces is Lecture Capture. Remaining resource attached to the hybrid project has now been tasked with developing our universal lecture capture capability so that all appropriate teaching activities can be recorded and delivered via My Dundee. We’re working on a detailed project plan and roadmap, and I’ll communicate those in good time, but for now I can say that there will likely be two phases to the project:

  1. Deploy a minimum viable solution to all centrally bookable teaching spaces for 22/23.
  2. Move toward a fully automated or light-touch recording solution in the proceeding years.

I intend to run this project in a similar vein to Hybrid, communicating clearly and frequently, involving staff and students as we design the workflow and deliver a range of training opportunities in good time before the start of the new academic year.

I will be presenting the project board with a project plan soon and will then communicate more details to you all via Teams and this blog. Until then, i hope your all doing well and enjoying the nice weather.

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