Professional Context

As the child of a teacher and a computer programmer, a career in learning technology seems thoroughly logical, but the route to my current role encompassed: time in the heritage sector, IT support, secretarial work, and 20 years of running online businesses. I eventually began working in higher education in 2017, as a part-time Library Services Advisor in a small outer London university. Within a year I found myself ‘acting up’ as the Head of Technology Enhanced Learning, representing digital education amongst institutional stakeholders, including Senior Leadership, eventually settling into the role of Learning Technologist for the Institute of Education, Business & Law, and Arts & Humanities.

Recognising my career progression was unusually swift for higher education, I worked hard to gain my CMALT (Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology) accreditation in 2020, followed by my FHEA (Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy). These vocational portfolios encouraged me to consider and contextualise the nature and impact of my work, and to appreciate reflective practice as an important element of education, Finding that my professional morals and values were considered integral to my being recognised as a specialist leader to a variety of educational stakeholders gave me a fresh confidence in my work, and in the field as one I wished to pursue.

Institutional Ethos

Since July 2020, I have worked at University College London (UCL). My role, Faculty Learning Technology Lead for Arts & Humanities, was introduced as a layer of specialist distributed leadership in response to the university’s flip to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust & Bond, 2020). Broadly speaking, my Faculty, devoted to creative, critical, interactive face-to-face teaching had had, prior to ERT, significantly lower engagement with centrally-provided digital education than others at the institution, and was facing understandable challenge with the volume of change ERT required.

The Faculty’s pockets of academic digital hesitancy, combined with a range of technological enthusiasms, distrusts, discomforts and frustrations, led me to focus heavily on establishing relational trust (Harris, 2013) in order to lead and shape collective progress. Mayer, Davis & Schoorman’s identification of ‘ability, benevolence and integrity’ (1995) as the antecedents of trust resonates with my approach to gaining and maintaining academic trust.

I have found it vital to work strategically across a broad matrix of considerations: the Action Self Enabling Reflective Tool for Distributed Leadership (ASERT) (Jones, Lefore, Harvey & Ryland, 2012) illustrates these well, emphasising the reflective processes I have found key to maintaining both trust-based relationships, and momentum (Senge & Kleiner, 1999).

Professional Values

My most central ontological value is that online learning is real learning: this can be tough to defend in the context of my Faculty, where I would argue that blended learning is at the habitualisation (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996) stage at best. Online or blended learning is not dilute, nor is it sub-standard, by any kind of intrinsic quality of the modality (Rogers, 2001). Mature and desirable blended learning at an institutional level (Mihai, Questier & Zhu, 2021) requires factors which are not yet present in my current environment.

Moral virtue manifests in my work with regard to students in the form of care (Wilson, 2013), whereby I firmly advocate for accessible pedagogy and design, mindful of all students and relevant to the discipline at hand.

Finally, the development of ‘radical digital citizenship’ (Emejulu & McGregor, 2019) underpins my approach to digital education as a whole. I believe equity, access and an understanding of the ways in which socio-political structures and struggles are as complex and inherent in the digital landscape as in any other must be contextually considered at every point in the construction and practice of blended and digital education.

CMALT to SCMALT: Professional Needs and Aspirations

As my role is new and relatively undefined, it is crucial for me to understand at any point what is possible, what is desirable, and how, specifically, my own approach to leadership can facilitate the outcomes. I need to broaden my experience and awareness of change processes and literature in order to best serve my Faculty in the year ahead: my Faculty is very receptive to the combination of research-based, and evidence-based practice, as illustrated in Specialist Option 1: Iterative Faculty-Level Research into Digital Education.

Whilst I work across a wide variety of disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, I have been particularly drawn to the specificity and curiosity of working with institutional technology with the School of Fine Art, and hence have chosen Specialist Option 2: Teaching, Learning and Assessment Technology for Fine Art. This section allows me to explore the peculiarities and complexities of this area, which I very much hope to continue to explore both within my institution, and, indeed, with fellow digital education specialists working with dedicated Art schools and programmes across UK HE.

In 2021, I began studying for my MA in Leading Change and Innovation in Education, a course which I have already found immensely rewarding for its opportunities to focus on digital education specialists in Higher Education. I have immersed myself in relevant literature in areas from distributed leadership and change mechanisms, to the importance of personal moral value and reflective frameworks in education, and have taken the liberty of expressing my personal context here, at the time of writing, with reference to be papers and frameworks I have found to be particularly resonant and productive in both my day-to-day work, and in the wider context of specialising in digital education in an academic environment. Underpinning my work with a critical appreciation of past, present, and developing theory has made me feel significantly more connected to digital education as a practice, and profession.

Applying for my Senior CMALT accreditation offers me an opportunity to elevate my reflections on my work, as well as to consider the ways in which it has expanded and developed within the context of my current role. It also provides me with an opportunity to look at how I, and my practice, have changed in light of ERT, and to understand how my perception of, and work with, the interplay between teaching, learning, assessment and technology has evolved. Considering my work in the context of the ALT Core Principles and Values for the Advanced Area enabled me to investigate and illustrate the moral backbone of my practice, a process I found to be both revealing, and rewarding.

Whilst many of the examples from my original CMALT portfolio remain relevant, and indeed essential to understanding my current approach to supporting the strategic use of teaching and learning technology, as my role has changed so significantly in terms of leadership and influence, I have ensured that each section has been thoroughly updated to include both examples from my current role, and reflections on the ways in which my approach and practice has developed in the relevant area.

In applying for Senior CMALT, I hope to formalise and contextualise my leadership in learning technology, to again embrace the experience of peer review, and illustrate the ways in which I realise my intentions as a passionate advocate for the judicious, considered, and enthusiastic use of communication, information and related technologies, new and old, to actively enhance teaching, learning and assessment with and for all.

References:

Emejulu, A. and McGregor, C., (2016). Towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), pp.131-147. Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, via AdvanceHE: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/fellowship/fellowship [Accessed 17th December 2021].

Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T. and Bond, A., (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. [online] Educause Review. Available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning [Accessed 17 December 2021].

Jones, S., Lefoe, G., Harvey, M. & Ryland, K. (2012) Distributed leadership: a collaborative framework for academics, executives and professionalsin higher education, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 34:1, 67-78, DOI:10.1080/1360080X.2012.642334

Mihai, A., Questier, F. and Zhu, C., (2021). The institutionalisation of online and blended learning initiatives in politics and international relations at European universities. European Political Science, 20(2), pp.359-377.

Senge, P. and Kleiner, A., (1999). Dance of Change: Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. A fifth discipline resource. New York: Doubleday.

Tolbert, P. & Zucker, L., (1996). The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory. [online] Available at: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/75038 [Accessed 17 December 2021].

Wilson, M., (2013). Critical reflection on authentic leadership and school leader development from a virtue ethical perspective. Educational Review, 66 (4), pp.482-496.