Abstract

Today the University of Derby is an acknowledged leader in the UK in the integration of technology into teaching and learning and in the development of open and distance learning materials at all levels of post-school education - from outcentres linked to a main campus by videoconferencing, to Masters programmes delivered on CD-ROM supported by computer-mediated communication. Development is ubiquitous, and a key component in creating this ubiquity has been the Academic Development Fund (ADF) which began in 1994 and continues today (and at least to 2001) as the Operational Plan for the Teaching and Learning Strategy. The paper describes the origins and processes of the ADF and how it led to a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches. We also suggest that some of the most significant outcomes of such a major investment in a 'shift from teaching to learning' are the hardest to quantify. Although our strategies were almost unique in 1994, more and more institutions are taking similar measures, and this account of the Derby experience may prove helpful.

Introduction

In 1994 the University of Derby had just been granted university status following a period of rapid expansion from 3,000 to 8,000 full-time equivalent students in the space of just 4 years. (It now has nearly 25,000 students, about 13,000 full-time equivalent.) This growth had partly been achieved by increasing class sizes and reducing student-tutor contact time. It was recognised that such an expansion could not be sustained without further innovation in teaching and learning methods. Ongoing 'efficiency gains' of 3% per annum demanded by the government of the day meant that to achieve institutional goals further expansion was essential.

At the same time the University had developed a policy of a 'shift from teaching to learning' - a shift in emphasis from inputs (teaching effort) to outputs (student achievement). There was a need to stimulate change and innovation in teaching and learning methods which would better facilitate student learning than the more traditional lecture/seminar. Such methods would help develop students as self-directed learners, with the ultimate goal of enabling them to become autonomous learners, with the skills of learning for life. The institution's background was already one of a relatively student-centred nature, which made it more open to new ideas than more traditional universities.

Thus there were both financial and pedagogical pressures towards innovation in teaching and learning which would enable yet higher staff-student ratios at the same time as enhancing the learning, and therefore the achievement, of our students. To some extent this was a scenario facing all higher education institutions in the UK, though many were slower to respond, either because they were able to call on cash reserves and alternative income streams, or because they were research dominated universities. Five years on, few can now avoid these pressures as can be seen in the Higher Education Funding Council for England's recent measures to require institutions to draw up proper learning and teaching strategies and adopt new learning technologies.

Back in 1994 our Directorate realised that substantial action would be needed to stimulate in-depth innovation among academic staff. A small Academic Development Fund (circa £20K pa) had been in existence for several years, but although it had been successful in stimulating some developments, these had remained as 'pockets' led by enthusiasts. The problem was how to bring on board the less-committed staff to new learning methods. The authors argued that the current fund was too small, was distributed ad hoc, and did not release staff from other duties. The response was a sum of £200K rolled over two financial years, with instructions to change the culture quickly.

The Academic Development Fund

The authors favoured a project bidding process similar to that established by the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme in the UK (in which the University had had some success as a bidder), but with greater democracy and transparency. There were some who believed that such an open process would lead to too much disappointment from a potentially large number of failed bids, but we thought that the creative thinking stimulated by competitive bidding would outweigh any such disappointment. Our counsel prevailed, and the new Academic Development Fund (ADF) was launched, inviting bids to cover the costs of development equipment, staff time and technical support.

The ADF had a specific theme: the shift from teaching to learning. The aim was to empower both teaching and support staff to acquire new skills and to develop new resources and approaches for student learning. An ADF committee was formed with Chris O'Hagan as chairman and Jennifer Fry as Directorate representative. The nine university schools were each invited to nominate a committed teaching practitioner rather than a manager. Learning support services also had a representative. The committee drew up criteria and detailed bidding procedures. There was no constraint on bid length as there was no constraint on complexity or overall cost, but a two page proforma summary was required with each bid.

Around 50 bids were received totalling over £500K. No rules on adjudication had been established prior to the selection meeting, though members had been asked to rate each bid against the prescribed criteria. At the meeting each member in turn was asked to briefly outline their reasons for favouring or rejecting particular bids. It was then agreed each member should have 8 votes (one per bid) in a secret ballot supervised by the chairman who had no votes. This resulted in a hierarchy of bids which were discussed in turn and finally approved, sometimes with reservations which had to be addressed in the project team's business plan, to be submitted and accepted before any money would be released by the committee. When about £150K had been allocated entirely on the basis of votes cast, the committee decided to look at the balance of projects approved and see if there were any bids which had not scored highly enough but which could be 'promoted' for a particular reason, for example because they helped improve overall participation in the ADF. Sometimes the committee merged bids, requiring two project groups to produce a joint business plan.

We have described all this at length because we believe that process is critical in gaining support for innovation. Inevitably there were suggestions of bias, but they had little fertile ground to root in. Logistical problems, such as delays in getting projects moving because of difficulty in replacing staff or appointing technicians, were more evident. We were better able to predict some of these in the second phase of the ADF which began in 1996.

The ADF in Practice

The first phase funded 15 projects in all, some quite large. But the main successes were in the stimulus the bidding process gave to thinking in new ways about teaching and learning across the institution, to staff development through real projects in the curriculum, and to creating a team of experienced technical support staff. Over half the projects generated significant resource outcomes as well - a bonus, really, at this early stage in shifting the culture.

Before the first phase was complete, the Directorate had agreed to a second phase, also £200K rolled over two financial years, this time with the theme "developing the use of the new Learning Centre and its networks, electronic and human." (A 1200 seat library/learning centre was about to open, with 250 PCs on an ATM network.) Another fourteen projects were supported in this second phase, following a similar process to the first.

Although 'technology' was not a necessary criterion for bidding, most of the bids in both phases involved use of technology. Support services for teaching and learning had recently been brought together under a single Pro Vice Chancellor - Jennifer Fry - who enabled proper discussion and coordination between the Centre for Educational Development and Media, Computing Services and Library Services. It was crucial to the success of many of the projects that these staff and student support services provided coordinated on-demand assistance.

Of course one or two project teams in both phases experienced difficulties in ‘getting going’. The committee was usually able to address the reasons for this and enable progress, but in one notable case in phase one most of the project monies were recalled rather than allow them to be spent towards an uncertain outcome. It had been made clear that funding to schools in phase two would take account of successful management in phase one. In fact, the way ADF funding was monitored and supervised in schools revealed quite a lot about differences in culture between them.

The committee was able to vire unused resources, such as the ‘refund’ described, into providing continuation funding to the more successful projects for further development and diffusion. There is always the question as to what happens when funding stops. The ADF committee had made it quite clear that at some point the individual schools would have to pick up the costs of further development as well as the running costs. If the project was clearly successful, then there should be no difficulty. In practice it was not so clear cut, for reasons of culture, finance, management etc, and the committee had to find alternative ways of preventing a successful innovation from being lost. Sometimes the solution was relatively simple - like bridging the gap in retaining a key technician until the School could pick up the cost in the coming financial year, or finding a place for a key worker either on a new project or in central services. The committee was disappointed when one project, on peer proctoring, was not taken up by schools, but disaster was averted by eventually locating peer proctoring centrally, in the new Learning Centre as one of its many student support services.

Although the committee was essentially composed of academic practitioners, its flexibility of manoeuvre was greatly helped by having a representative of the Directorate and budget managers from central services among its members.

Lessons

We here itemise some of the key principles which emerged during implementation of the ADF.

Those who hold the purse strings in institutions sometimes find it hard to see the full range of benefits that flow from such a large investment. They tend to focus on the specified project outcomes, such as courseware, and it can be difficult for them to believe that good value-for-money has been achieved when measured in hours of learning materials per thousand pounds, for example. The two phases of the ADF did produce some really significant project outcomes - such as the CEBAG assessment engine (now, as TRIADS, probably the best in the world), the University VideoNet service, the Electronic Library, the ATLAS virtual laboratory, and the Fast Track Course in Open and Distance Learning which spawned nine further developments. In fact, most of the projects had useful products even if the full specification was not ultimately achieved, but perhaps the most profound outcomes were less quantifiable and less immediately apparent.

Firstly, as intended, the learning and teaching culture was transformed in the direction of a willingness to adopt new methods and new technologies in particular. Secondly, support services were strengthened, and the Centre for Educational Development and Media grew to be a leading educational technology department in the UK, chosen by the funding councils as one of only nine such university departments to support the other 177 higher-education institutions in integrating technology into teaching and learning. Thirdly, the new Learning Centre was born in a developmental environment which quickly made it a model for the integration of traditional and technology-assisted learning. The £7m cost had been questioned by some academics, but from the start it was rather punished by its success. The 250 computers were in such heavy use that another 100 were soon added, and initial problems with network and server reliability were quickly exposed. These have been resolved, but such difficulties with support infrastructures are occurring in more and more institutions with rapidly increasing use of information and communications technologies. (See Gilbert 1998). As has been noted in a number of research projects (eg. McMahon & Gardner 1995), where there is a staff culture of a readiness to use technology students more readily adapt to it themselves. Our students took to it like ducks to water! Of course, the ADF was not alone responsible for these successes, but it helped create a university-wide synergy, drawing many pockets of expertise into the mainstream.

Nevertheless by the end of the second phase the authors and others were aware of a major difficulty blocking further progress. Although the teaching staff had been significantly up-skilled or had had their awareness of the uses of technology generally raised, many middle and senior managers were either unaware of their staff's new skills or were themselves insufficiently educational technology-literate to build further on that expertise. In a sense we had been too successful in empowering staff, and a kind of glass ceiling had been revealed. Teachers could see that all the strategic signals from the top were for more development, but many were not finding sufficient support from hard-pressed managers within their department or school. Discussions with others from the UK staff development community revealed this as a common and intractable problem in many higher education institutions.

The Vice Chancellor was made aware of the issue, essentially one of ownership and leadership, and discussions in the Directorate resulted in a decision to make phase three a 'top-down' process, persuading managers to engage with staff skills and to build on resources developed in previous phases. This phase became known as the Operational Plan (OP) for implementing the Teaching and Learning Strategy, with £400K funding for the single year 98/99. A further two years are foreseen. The OP is project-based, but this time not competitive. Projects have been selected by a Steering Committee involving Deans and Senior Managers, according to how effectively they address the Strategy in terms of current institutional priorities. Process was again critical in bringing all the School Deans on board with the Plan. The knowledge of the different cultures in schools, learned from their different approaches to the ADF, was very useful to us when developing the Plan in consultation with school managers.

Conclusion

The University of Derby is one of the most innovative in the UK in developing open and distance learning resources and student support. This has been achieved in a short period of time. A key component in this achievement has been the Academic Development Fund 1994-98, though it was not the only component.

We have had a continuous stream of visitors from home and abroad to our new Learning Centre and the Centre for Educational Development and Media. After one such visit by a group from a leading UK university, a spokesman wrote, "I think we learned a great deal from our visit. In terms of services for teaching and learning and, indeed, in terms of staff development in teaching and learning, you are light years ahead of us. I just hope we may be able to persuade the powers that be here to make some moves in the direction of catching up."

Although a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processes is fairly widely acknowledged in industry and commerce as essential to promoting real institutional change, there is always the question of the appropriate processes for achieving this combination. We hope our paper will aid others seeking to develop such processes. We do not believe that we have the only solution, and indeed we are still experiencing problems in reaching full 'take-off'. Nor can we claim omniscient planning in arriving at where we are, but we believe we have overcome most of the major barriers, and are very close to establishing a new model for the distributed university of the next millennium.

References

Gilbert SW (1998), Punished for success, mailings 190, 191, 192, sent to the AAHESGIT discussion list, 4 Dec 1998. Archived at gopher://list.cren.net:70/1m/archives/aahesgit/log9812.

McMahon J & Gardner J (1995), Facilitating and inhibiting factors in student computer usage. In O'Hagan CM (Ed), Empowering Teachers and Learners Through Technology, Birmingham: Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) ISBN 0 946815 14 3.

O'Hagan CM (1998), Staff Development for Teaching and Learning Technology: Ten Keys to Success, Briefing Paper 53, Sheffield: Universities and Colleges Staff Development Agency (UCoSDA).

Addresses

Chris O'Hagan, Dean of Learning Development, Centre for Educational Development and Media,

University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby, England, DE22 1GB

Jennifer Fry, Registrar and Pro Vice Chancellor (Learning Support Services), University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby, England, DE22 1GB