UCL, Chandler House, London

The AUA are in a partnership with UCL and JISC looking into the impact of technology on the role of the ‘teaching administrator’ under the guise of the JISC Digital Literacy Programme and its sister Professional Association Strand of projects and activities.

The project team have provided a mapping of the skills required of a teaching administrator, the AUA Professional Behaviours and the JISC Digital Literacy themes.

I’ve been invited along to UCL to discuss opportunities to support teaching administrators via a CPD Programme utilising various resources including input from JISC with;

Brenda Dakers (Programme manager PG Cert, AUA)
Jenny Evans (Head of business strategy, QAA)
Stefanie Anyadi (Project Manager and Teaching Administrator Manager, UCL)
Carole Baume (Consultant to the Programme)
Lorraine Dardis (project manager, UCL)
Jan Shine (Lead consultant on CPD Framework, and UCL Project, AUA and UCL)
Catherine Lille (Professional Development Manager, AUA)

This is the initial map describing a generic CPD framework;

This, the same as linear flow

Here we have the AUA Professional behaviours:

Next the linear flow mapped to AUA Professional behaviours

Finally here is the final diagram comprising;

o JISC digital literacies (green inner circle)
o Tasks of UCL teaching administrator roles (blue middle circle)
o The UCL Digital Department accreditation process (red outer area)

The AUA PG Cert (accredited by the OU) might be able to expand the range of specialisms offered from 2012 and is interested in airing what future content might be helpful.

UCL aim to develop an accreditation framework for teaching administrators. It should be flexible enough to extend to other groups within HEIs.

To that end UCL have piloted a cohort of staff using CMALT and are developing a knowledge base. The intention is to expand this to encompass the AUA CPD Framework, but not to the extent of the PG Cert (which is a significant commitment).

QAA have a significant training programmes and identified with a number of opportunities;
1. Reviewers within QAA may lay fallow for several years and so QAA need to refresh those skills.
2. Accreditation as a choice is something QAA wish to pursue
3. People in HEIs might want to take part. Overseas market for accreditation has not yet been offered and access to a QAA course might prove attractive

QAA want to know whether the 3 can be delivered together, possibly in partnership with AUA

Emm Johnstone (representing the Association of Heads of University Administration, AHUA) noted that there are a good deal of opportunities for those administrators who are well underway in their career CPD but identified an opportunity for learning sets across multiple HEIs to support new Administrators. Over 600 applications from 9 HEIs were received for a programme of graduate trainees beginning in September 2012 via Nottingham University.

For my part I aired the JISC mappings we’ve done from Leadership Foundation in Higher Education and their Future Leaders Programme to JISC content, expertise and capacity as well as a similar exercise undertaken by myself and Patrick Bellis of JISC Infonet for AUA 2012 Conference delegates. The group felt that the JISC approach of using Google Docs to build such a mapping would be beneficial and I offered to share such a document once JISC had made an attempt to populate it with our own resources. I also described the breadth of offer we have in our InfoKits and it was felt that these could be very helpful in terms of content.

I also aired the JISC Emerging Practices Initiative that I’m developing with JISC Advance colleagues as a range of delivery methods including tools to highlight to senior managers areas for improvement (JISC SICT Toolkit) and it’s questionnaire resources how to address these (the SICT Enablers) and how these are supported by the Emerging Practices Initiative as PDF briefings, webinars, social networks, action learning sets, face to face events with peers and expert led opportunities, allowing people to transition up the JISC ‘Road to Value‘.

We felt that a profile of SICT with Digital Literacy as an Enabler and referencing / input to and from the initiatives represented around the table would be of interest.

The group identified ePortfolio as a significant issue and welcomed JISC assistance via our expert in the field Lisa Gray.

The group felt that with JISC input they had access to a great deal of content and would be keen to produce joint webinars and other delivery opportunities as part of the Digital Literacy Programme.

UPDATE: JISC Colleagues have mapped JISC Resources to UCL Teaching Administrator Roles ready for AUA to take forward and this can be viewed here http://bit.ly/jisc-auamodulemapping drop me a note if you want edit rights.