Hybrid Teaching Update #2: Early progress

I am off on leave for 2 weeks but I wanted to get a quick post out before I’m dragged away from the computer by my children. By popular demand you’ll find the list of 50 rooms that have been earmarked for hybrid listed below. I’ve also added a little bit about the service design approach we’re using as well as a few highlights from our to do list.

The big fifty

As detailed in our previous message, there are 50 core teaching rooms being upgraded to support some level of hybrid teaching, first as Capture & Stream then as Dual-Mode, depending on how fast we can get the hardware delivered and installed.

Dalhousie  1LG02	Dalhousie  1F18 Env 4	Dalhousie  2G14	Dalhousie  2S11	Matthew 5017
Dalhousie  1LG03	Dalhousie  1S05	Dalhousie  2F02	Dalhousie  2S12	Scrymgeour 1.08
Dalhousie  1LG04	Dalhousie  1S06	Dalhousie  2F03	Dalhousie  2S13	Scrymgeour 2.08
Dalhousie  1LG13	Dalhousie  1S08 Music 2	Dalhousie  2F10	Dalhousie  2S14	Scrymgeour 2.12
Dalhousie  1G05	Dalhousie  1S10 Music 1	Dalhousie  2F11	Fulton J18	Scrymgeour 3.08
Dalhousie  1G06	Dalhousie  1S18 Clay	Dalhousie  2F13	Fulton J19	Tower Geography Jun Lab
Dalhousie  1G10	Dalhousie  1S19	Dalhousie  2F14	Fulton H2	Fife Campus Classroom 1
Dalhousie  1G15	Dalhousie  2G03	Dalhousie  2F15	Fulton F20	Fife Campus Classroom 2
Dalhousie  1F01 Env 1	Dalhousie  2G12	Dalhousie  2S02	Harris LT	Fife Campus Classroom 3
Dalhousie  1F06 Env 2	Dalhousie  2G13	Dalhousie  2S03	Matthew 5016	Fife Campus Classroom 4

These rooms have been selected for their suitability to support the small to medium size teaching that will make up the majority of in-person teaching next year, while large lecture style teaching is recommended either online or via asynchronous content. There may be some changes to this list along the way as we progress though the actual installations and if requirements change.

Note that We’re in discussion with the School of Medicine to discuss their requirements separately and will communicate the outcome of that work directly with the school.

Service Design approach

I mentioned previously that we’re taking a Service Design approach to this project, but what does that mean? A quick google will give you a multitude of different explanations but I really like the below video’s simple way of putting it:

The key elements of service design as applied to this project:

1. Customer centric

Our ‘customers’ are the students, academics, and support staff who will use this service, with each group coming with different requirements:

• Students want easy access to a quality learning experience, whether they are on campus or online.
• Academics want a service that allows flexibility for their teaching without significantly increasing their workload or disadvantaging any of their students.
• Support staff want to be able to administer and support the entire process easily without fiddling with spreadsheets or contorting their work practice to accommodate bad design.

So, we will be engaging with each of these groups to ensure our design fits their needs as much as possible rather than trying to fit them around it.

2. Co-Creation

Wherever possible we will try to involve our stakeholders in the design process. We’ve already started with the Dalhousie pilot room and there will be more to come as we get more rooms online, including the conversion of the Eduzone into an innovation space. Similarly, the lab and studio rooms are being co-created with the schools to ensure the facilities they have are suited to the teaching they need to do.

3. Holistic

This project is not about simply installing some hardware in 50 rooms and walking away. Although there is only so much we can fit in for September, our long-term goal is to look at the full journey that each user group makes for any learning session, from timetabling to how session recordings are managed. A student doesn’t care about which department in the university is responsible for which element of their experience, they only care that it all works. In this project we want to look at the entire process and design it from that student’s holistic perspective.

Service Design resources:

• Service Design Academy – Great expertise only a few miles away at Dundee and Angus College
• This is Service Design Doing – Great books on the subject
• Service Design Tools – online resource for service design tools.
• Service Design Show – YouTube channel and podcast

To-Do list

In the next couple of weeks (while i’m on holiday🤔) there will be a lot going on. Here are some of the key activities:

User Research

Jane and Kim will be getting started on the user research that will help guide our design efforts. They’ll looking back into the staff and student pulse surveys and the NSS data to build some context of where we’re coming from in terms of the staff and student experience over the last year. They’ll also be making a start with some user interviews so we can start to build some persona profiles to help us steer our design process in the right direction.

Design

Jonathan and Ed have already started getting their heads around the interfaces and workflows based on ten initial user testing in the Dalhousie demo room. Our challenge is to figure out how a lecturer can enter one of these hybrid rooms control their teaching environment without getting overloaded by settings, controls, and things going wrong. Similarly we need to figure out how online students can access the teaching easily, reliably and without feeling in any way excluded.

Infrastructure

Stuart, Douglas, Jonathan, and our AV partners at Streamtech continue to deal with the huge challenge of sourcing and installing 50 rooms worth of kit on top of the bespoke requirements of the studios and labs.Website

Website

Finally, we’re working hard to get this very website up and running for all our digital education service, including a resource area specifically for the Hybrid project.

See you in two weeks

Apologies for the brief catchup this week – there will be plenty more info in the future. Note that Blair and Natalie will be giving an update about this and other aspects of our L&T preparations for the new academic year during Wednesday’s Townhall meeting, so make sure you come along at 3pm via the Teams Live link.

Have a good two weeks and i’ll see you after the 16th.

Hamish