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Senior CMALT Renewal 2026
Summary of recent work / practiceI continue to be in the same role and structure as I was when I submitted my original SCMALT portfolio: I’m coming up for six years of leading in digital education for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at UCL. Of particular note this year is that, as a result of an ongoing piece of institutional restructuring, my job title has changed, from Faculty Learning Technology Lead, to Faculty Digital Education Manager. This job title change was of specific interest to me, as there was much discussion around what this cross-institutional role should be “updated” to: I was, informed by my own research and experience, firmly in the camp of ‘Faculty Digital Education Manager’ over the main alternative, ‘Senior Learning Technologist’, as I feel that the former best represents the strategic nature of my role. Making the case for this, with the support of my Faculty and manager, has been a significant personal achievement in the past couple of years, and this was supported both by the work I did in my MA (see: CPD: 1), and my experience, in particular, with the ALT community and its events. I remain a firm advocate of the CMALT portfolio and its associated process, and have regularly supported the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange community who facilitate the collective pursuit of CMALT for a collective of London universities. I have continued as a CMALT/SCMALT assessor, sat on the committee for the review of the CMALT process, and am now on the committee for the ALT conference to be held in Cardiff this year. Participating through various levels of the ALT community has given me real insight into the impact it has, as well as the work it takes to sustain and develop such community in education and technology. It has also allowed me to extend my own leadership and impact. My UCL remit continues to be the strategic use of teaching, learning and assessment technology across the Faculty, both in terms of designing and deploying platforms and policy across the Faculty, and feeding into the central institutional design and development of platforms and processes. The institution introduced Panopto as a replacement for our existing lecture and learning capture provider in 2025/26, and preparing for this, as well as testing, and supporting the central team during the deployment, has taken a substantial amount of work, not least in ensuring effective communication with all colleagues, as there was the potential for historic content to be lost. Fortunately, I was able to successfully manage this deployment for Arts & Humanities, utilising my previous experience in the deployment of new technologies, as well as by capitalising on my existing relational trust with academic and PS colleagues, and the overall experience has been very smooth. UCL is currently undergoing a process to align and standardise professional services support across the institution, known as EASE, and this has presented me with the opportunity to further align our Faculty use of assessment platforms and processes. I spent much of 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 moving all ten of A & H’s departments towards the consistent use of Moodle Assignment for written and media assessment, which involved a lot of exploration and research into the experience of the available workflows for different roles and disciplines, from having to click through long, slow-resolving documents for academics marking essays, to the vast amount of possible combinations of drop-down box settings administrative teams needed to wrangle to achieve the desired workflow. Thrillingly, this move has been further complicated by UCL’s introduction, in January 2026, of the Coursework plugin for Moodle, an assessment tool with excellent provision for double marking, and various additional second marking methods. I used Coursework extensively in my previous institution with positive outcomes, and am pleased to see it arrive at UCL. This term I have, therefore, been preparing to facilitate departments to further decide between Moodle Assignment, and Coursework, depending on their various requirements. Communicating the constraints and benefits of different platforms for different preferences and workflows to facilitate appropriate pedagogical choice remains a core part of my role, which I particularly enjoy. This process has also allowed me to make some strategic recommendations around digital transformation, which have supported peers in my role in other Faculties who are beginning to transition assessment from Turnitin into these platforms. I have also been able to feed into institutional Moodle and Coursework platform design and adaptation, representing academic requirements and feedback to our Digital Learning Environment team, thus supporting the development of the tools for the benefit of the institution as a whole. Finally, in May this year, I achieved my Universal Design for Learning badge, after working through the “Universal Design Beyond the Classroom” digital badge course from University College Dublin. A further current UCL initiative, the Programme Excellence Project (PEP), looks to ensure all UCL programmes are thoroughly underpinned by UDL principles, and as such, I was pleased to be given the opportunity to develop and formalise my expertise in this area. As evidenced by my consideration of work on Digital Accessibility in A & H in recent years, I have been particularly concerned with finding ways to ensure that our content and programmes are designed in such a way as to be as inclusive and intentional as possible, thereby avoiding additional academic workload to accommodate students’ Reasonable Academic Accommodations where possible, and ensuring that students have the freedom to study in the ways that are most beneficial to, and appropriate for, them. Overview of CPD activities over the past 3 yearsProfessional Accreditations & Awards:
Education:
Academic Conference Presentations:
Publications
Example 1 – MA Education: Leading Innovation and Change:DescriptionThe largest part of my personal CPD, since undertaking my initial SCMALT portfolio, is my MA Education: Leading Change and Innovation, from St. Mary’s University, achieved with Distinction. I undertook this course part-time whilst continuing to work full time in my current role as Faculty Digital Education Manager for Arts & Humanities at UCL, and, as the course was heavily practice-focused, took the opportunity to dive deeply into the UK Higher Education Digital Education sector, and reflect extensively on my own role, roles like mine, the ways in which they are integrated into institutional structures, and how best we can facilitate positive change as specialist distributed leadership. Modules included Pedagogical Issues in Practice, which enabled me to develop a paper on Understanding Academic Reticence to Digital Change, and Change Agency, which exposed me to a breadth of change theory, and encouraged me to reflect on the most useful theories around change and leadership during change for my own practice. Of these theories, I became particularly enamoured with the concept of systems thinking, which I find especially useful in the conceptualising of digital education specialists. Finally, I produced my thesis, and accompanying presentation, “Exploring the Professional Identity of Digital Education Specialists in UK Higher Education in 2021/22”. I surveyed over 40 digital education specialists and leaders in the sector, and interviewed 18 peers in a variety of digital education specialist roles in UK HE for this, which was an incredible opportunity to delve into the practices, structures and pressures of others in the field, from a variety of HE institutions across the country. One of my core findings was that having undertaken a peer-reviewed portfolio, such as CMALT, was heavily correlated with a clarity of professional identity, and the specialist’s perception of their ability to enact positive change in their institutions. A concluding recommendation was, for individuals, to undertake CMALT or an appropriate pathway thereof, and for institutions, to facilitate access to, and community surrounding, such development. ReflectionThe experience of returning to university to study was extraordinarily complex for me: having completed my undergraduate degree over twenty years’ ago, in a very different world, as someone first-in-family to university with little idea of how to study, never mind how to attend university, I discovered I had a great deal of leftover issues around inadequacy, imposter syndrome, and my own learning behaviours to confront. The fact that I have worked in Higher Education myself for nearly a decade had, in fact, done nothing to assuage these issues, and, whilst I have always hoped I work in a compassionate way with students, the fact that I found myself, someone whose role includes, for example, supporting tutors to actively encourage students to book tutorials with them, quailing at the idea of booking my own tutorial was enormously revealing. Further I – someone who has taught thousands of students, and tutors, how to submit to Turnitin – managed to make a hash of my own submission at one point, so stressed was I about the work. The whole experience was extremely humbling, and a great reminder that one can be as digitally competent as you please, with the clearest instructions possible in front of you, but that there are a number of factors at play when it comes to interacting with educational technology, and we can never take anything for granted about our students. In terms of supporting my impact and leadership in the sector, undertaking this MA was extraordinarily helpful. My thesis findings have fed into my committee work with ALT, my work with the BLE CMALT group, and my ability to communicate between teams and senior leadership regarding the work done by digital education specialists in UK HE. This work also informed a number of the research projects I undertook, as well as the capacity to, as a specialist, use my own research as evidence and leverage for digital change. I was also delighted, recently, to continue to iterate on this research by hosting an #LTHEchat amongst the wider community, which sparked excellent conversation and fostered closer bonds and understanding between participants. Overall, undertaking my MA a wonderful opportunity to rigorously develop my own institutional role, research the history, theory, and recurrent barriers to change for digital education specialists in universities, and to explore in more detail the tangible benefits of endeavours such as CMALT. It has given me significant findings which continue to allow me to participate meaningfully at all levels of sector discussion. I also had the pleasure and privilege of significantly extending my personal network in the sector, and remain grateful to so many for taking the time to participate in my research, and to support my personal development in the field. Evidence 1: Degree certificate
Evidence 2: #LTHEchat blog postExample 2 – Conference Presentations on Iterative Faculty ResearchDescriptionI am delighted to say that I have been able to continue the work outlined in Specialist Option 1: Developing Iterative Faculty-Level Research, with my Arena (UCL Academic Development) colleague and research partner. We have continued to, funded by UCL’s Changemakers student-staff partnership fund, and the Centre for Humanities Education, work with Arts & Humanities student researchers to explore:
These projects have allowed us to present extensively to our Faculty, and to relevant central teams (for example, Digital Education; HEDS (careers and academic development) on our students’ experiences, and to ensure that the work we do in curriculum and assessment design and review is underpinned by our students’ actual experiences. In all projects I have taken a leading role, co-ordinating research meetings and timelines, co-creating research questionnaires with our student researchers, and writing up our own experience of the project, alongside our own interpretation of the data, and the students’ interpretation of the data, to draw up recommendations for practice accordingly. My research partner and I split the original writing of our findings papers – I usually take the introduction, literature, and half the findings, and he works on the method and half the findings – and then we work over the draft in turns until it reaches its final form. I usually create a shortened 2-page paper of findings for wider distribution, and the full report is shared with core Faculty and institutional stakeholders (although it is available to all Faculty colleagues). As an example of the impact these projects continue to have on my work, UCL have undertaken an extensive review of all taught programmes during 2025/26, and the work I did on student experiences of assessment and feedback was also paired with an extensive report on staff experiences of assessment and feedback. The enormous amount of survey data gathered during these projects allowed me to approach the Faculty’s programme review efforts in a highly informed way, and to suggest strategic ways of developing programme assessment patterns and priorities in such a way as to enhance both staff and student experience: diversifying assessment, lowering academic workload, ensuring timely opportunities for feedback, and more. The Faculty’s familiarity with, and involvement in, our research process led to appreciative reception, and in most cases, smooth integration of these suggestions: as we continue to review at, now, a modular level, it will be interesting to see the extent to which these improvements change staff and student experiences in future. At the Change Agents’ Network conference in Plymouth, and at UCL’s own celebration of its Changemakers funding stream, we were able to present an evaluative look at our research over the previous five years, considering its effectiveness as a method for leveraging change. I worked particularly on developing our understanding of leverage in this context, whereby it was important to me to communicate to the wider sector the value of this level of work, and the extent to which it really can develop relational trust between both third space supporting roles and academic colleagues, as well as between Faculty and students. Arts & Humanities have also introduced a Student Voice Committee, and being able to demonstrate to student reps in this context the ways in which my work is continually orientated by student experience, and how I continue to be invested in ways to gather their perceptions and experiences has genuinely supported their understanding that digital education is not something that just “happens” – it is managed, iterative and designed by people like myself. I was proud to be nominated for, and to receive, in 2025, the Faculty Education Award for this work, and to subsequently receive Highly Commended for the UCL Provost Award for Impactful Partnerships. ReflectionBeing recognised by my institution, as well as my Faculty, was a first for me, and I am delighted that it was for this research work, which has defined my approach and values throughout my time at UCL thus far. Funding is increasingly difficult to secure in a competitive research environment, and arguing for the importance of this work in relation to my own has been challenging at times. I truly find, in particular, the student-staff partnership elements of this work extremely rewarding, not least because my role is not particularly student-facing, so it is fantastic to have the opportunity to collaborate with, and to hear from, at scale, those who are, after all, the reason we have a university at all. The fact that it was the impact the work has had on both the staff and student experience that led to this recognition was particularly welcome. Continuing to present this work has also given me a fresh appreciation for the capacity for conferences to support third space roles in terms of development, community, practice-sharing and change. By presenting in these spaces, Jesper and I have been able to share our tips and process with others, and have met up with colleagues from multiple institutions afterwards to offer support and feedback on their designs for similar research projects in their own institutions. We have been fortunate to have the time and money to develop our approach, and to be able to support others to progress their own projects more effectively as a result of this is something I’ve really enjoyed, and hope to continue. Finally, understanding how to use such research to leverage real change is something that continues to bear fruit for us, and for our Faculty. This year’s project has been around Careers, and vocational outcomes for students from their degrees, and I look forward to seeing how our findings can support our colleagues to deliver tangible, meaningful improvements to both their curriculum, and to students’ vocational outcomes. Recent conference presentations arising from my Iterative Faculty Research workAcademic conference presentations:
Evidence 1: BETT Conference Programme
Evidence 2: SEDA Article: Effective Learning Environments: The Students’ Perspectivehttps://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179312/ Example 3 – Moving the Needle on Moodle AccessibilityDescriptionA & H has, in comparison with many areas of UCL, overall, comparatively low level blended learning maturity: our digital campus has, speaking generally, fallen behind in terms of accessibility. VLE pages are often full of outdated resources, file types and instructions, all of need to be updated. This has increasingly been highlighted to me by both staff and student error, by student feedback, including in module feedback and student voice meetings, as well as in NSS qualitative feedback. Whilst we have good resource and support for developing accessibility, it is notably a huge area with a lot of work to be done, limited capacity for this, and limited knowledge by those who need to do it. In an attempt to tackle this issue as directly as possible, I recruited suitable support for the initiative. Up until this point, I have had little opportunity to work with other stakeholders in digital accessibility, and the connections between our work have not been sufficiently drawn to be clearly communicated even between ourselves, never mind to our academic staff. With this pilot in mind, I was able to bring together:
This group, along with myself, would work with one module’s tutor and their lead course administrator, in a scaffolded structure and setting, to directly address the specific issues of inaccessibility identified on one large-cohort module. Structuring in this way enabled the optimising of support by aligning language, meaning and purpose relevant to each of us at the start of the sessions, developing contacts between stakeholders with real responsibility in these areas, and the fostering of collaboration and interdependence, whilst also providing a real-time opportunity for action-orientated feedback. Initiating asynchronous communication beforehand by email made space for establishing the academic’s approach and challenges, and allowed for space to discuss these in a personalised, relevant way, in a safe, non-judgemental context at the start of each session, allowing room for both individual and collective reflection around the motivations for the pursuit of the project, and for the work in and of itself. I was able to set clear and meaningful goals for each meeting, for example, tackling the habit of adding resources as untagged, non-OCR’d PDFs (which cannot be parsed by a screenreader). These goals were based on figures generated by the module’s Ally report, which identifies inaccessible resources or elements within a Moodle page, so they were visible to all, and would update in real time as elements were corrected, providing the academic with immediate feedback. Both before and after the session, I was able to signpost relevant guidance and ensure academics and administrators alike had an understanding of the dedicated resources, tools and teams available to support with this work at any time. By taking the time to introduce departmental teams, personally, to key stakeholders from these central teams, and fostering this collaborative, real-time work together, I was able to break down the barriers and narrow the gap between central and local teams. As a large institution, it can be difficult for individual academics or module teams to feel “entitled” to take up the space and time of institutional leadership, such as the Head of Digital Accessibility, so, again, by creating dedicated space in which these stakeholders could spend time working together, it helped to ensure that these colleagues had a true understanding of the nature of each other’s work, and to emphasise that the module at hand was as important as any other aspect of the institution’s work. This “teaming up” aspect also supported the lightening of workload – being able to solidify the understanding that Liaison Librarians can actively facilitate the creation and maintenance of accessible resources took a significant perceived workload away from a number of departmental teams. Whilst the service has always been offered, again, academic teams did not necessarily understand the benefits of this offer, or believe that it would be relevant to their modules: facilitating a direct discussion of the contextual relevance of the service to one module at a time allowed them to truly understand how they, personally, could be helped – and how in turn, their students would benefit. ReflectionThe key impact of this first iteration was the successful demonstration of the model: bringing together key stakeholders in a dedicated, facilitated real-time space to focus on the single motivation of improving the accessibility of Moodle pages resulted in the clear improvement of Moodle pages, firstly, by Ally metrics, secondly, in reported academic and administrative staff perception and understanding of issues around digital accessibility, and how to approach their Moodle pages from a Universal Design mindset, challenging their own exclusionary behaviour, and thirdly from the central stakeholders involved, who were able to develop their own understanding of disciplinary needs, and gain some much-needed experience with the realities of the module-level workload and needed mythbusting. Having carried out these meetings with five of Arts & Humanities’ largest student cohort modules, we were next able to scale this to the Languages area of one department, with 14 academics present, again, alongside relevant stakeholder specialists, to tackle the specifics of accessible digital resources in languages, and the additional challenges faced (e.g. tools’ compatibility with non-English language content, the use of inbuilt translation tools in platforms and whether or not these are desirable in language teaching). Again, being able to have key central stakeholders in the room to both understand, and advise, in real time was core for relationship-building and knowledge enhancement. This demonstrated to me that it would be possible to scale the model further, with sufficient emphasis on the core UDL principles, and attentiveness to learners’ needs, to potentially support the required reworking of our remaining academic content and resources with the minimum amount of real-time work, and maximum capacity to increase local networks and digital accessibility competencies. I came to appreciate that the groundwork I had laid for this, in having already developed a trust-based relationship with my academic colleagues, and with my experience running workshops in which the work that needs to be done, is done, with as many stakeholders in the room as possible, stood me in good stead when running this project. Without that context and experience, I believe it would be harder to replicate the model, and therefore ensuring that context was communicated when sharing with the wider institution has been important to me. As I start to work on scaling this for this academic year, I do feel this will be achievable, but also note that it does take a level of time and commitment that is important to ensure all participants are aware of ahead of time. Evidence 1: Our Head of Digital Accessibility summed up the impact of this work as follows:What you’ve done so brilliantly is provide an evidence-informed model for how this can be done: who needs to be in the room, what kind of information do they need and how can it be presented effectively. Ben Watson, UCL Head of Digital Accessibility Evidence 2: Agenda item for Faculty Education Committee presentation of Digital Accessibility project and findings.
Updated Future plansI am delighted to have built on my enthusiasm for CMALT with the work I have done with the CMALT committee, and am excited to participate in the organisation of the Cardiff ALT Conference this year. I have always enjoyed academic conferences, and hope to learn more about the work it takes to organise such things, as well as more about how to write a good abstract, and to deliver, as well as to moderate, good conference presentations and panels. I have always found significant value in involving myself “behind-the-scenes” of areas in which I wish to improve, so I can see broader examples of what’s possible, and better involve myself in the work and community. On a similar note, I hope to do more academic writing in the next couple of years, and to develop my own research work, continuing to understand the nature and identity of Digital Education Specialists in UK HE, and the barriers to work they continue to face. The #LTHEchat in June this year gave me plenty of food for thought, and I hope to have the opportunity to explore this further. I am also currently writing several pieces in new areas for me, which I hope to progress towards publication in the near future. In order to improve my skills in this area, I have undertaken reviewing for multiple journals, which I would very much like to continue, and to advance in the coming years. In terms of my role at UCL, I will be leading on development of the Faculty Digital Strategy this year, as well as consolidating several years of extensive digital change across both academic and professional services staff. It’s an exciting time to finally be getting all of the proverbial ducks in a row, and I look forward to having the opportunity to really evaluate our progress and process at the end of 2026/27. I will also be heavily involved in significant academic and curriculum development opportunities as part of an institutional project, and again, look forward to developing my own skills, experience and understanding in this area. Updated Confirmation and dateI declare that, to the best of my knowledge, the statements and evidence included in this submission accurately describe my practice and are drawn from my own work, with the input and support of others duly and clearly recognised. 
Signed: Abigail E. Shaw Date: 20th July 2026 |
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