Strategic enhancement programmes
Expression of interest form
Closing Date 21st November 2014
Thank you for expressing interest in participating in the HEA’s strategic enhancement programmes
2014-15. Please complete and submit this form electronically to: SEP2014@heacademy.ac.uk by
noon on Friday 21st November 2014. All submissions will be acknowledged by email within three
working days of receipt.
Please note: there are word limits (stated in brackets) for sections, and we are not able to
consider additional appendices and text.
1. Higher education provider name
University of Warwick
2. Who will lead the pilot within the institution?
The named lead person should be available to liaise with the HEA throughout the programme; the
choice of lead is the decision of the institution.
Name
Institutional role
Direct telephone number
Email address
Address
Robert O’Toole FHEA NTF
Senior Academic Technologist
07876 876960
r.b.o-toole@warwick.ac.uk
IT Services,
University of Warwick,
Coventry CV4 7AL
3. Programme
Please select which programme you wish to apply for (institutions are limited to choosing only one
strand of the programme):
Flexible Learning
Retention and Attainment
X
4. Reasons and interest to participate (up to 300 words)
Please outline the reasons for your institution’s interest in participating in the programme.
Warwick’s institutional strategy includes a commitment to flexibility for students – as both an
extension of curriculum opportunities and as an expansion in the repertoire of practices used for
teaching and learning. Drivers for this include: a more tailored student experience; access to
international opportunities for all; widening participation; the challenges of rapidly scaling a highquality campus experience beyond our physical capacity.
We are developing an approach to these challenges appropriate to large, internationalising,
campus based research-intensive universities like Warwick. We call this approach The
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Extended Classroom. It begins by affirming the teacher-student relationship at the core, but
then carefully extending the relationship over space and time, and across institutional boundaries as
appropriate. First, we understand what is important in inter-personal interactions, then we build
the supporting framework around this, extending the repertoire of informed design choices to
exploit opportunities for flexibility.
However, in such an already “successful” research-intensive university change is not easy. Getting
academics engaged can be a significant challenge. Conventional training and dissemination
approaches are attractive to some but not all academics. More is needed to reach a critical mass.
There is not enough “horizontal diffusion of innovation” amongst academic staff – many of whom
do not even describe themselves as teachers.
In research by members of the team, we identified organisational, ideological and motivational
constraints mitigating against the broad adoption of flexible learning. Our project aims to alleviate
these constraints, using a range of strategies for increasing staff and student engagement and
collaboration, creating a more widespread design dialogue, building a collectively owned and
valued repertoire of Extended Classroom designs, making flexible learning an everyday
reality.
The challenges are still significant. Advice from experts outside of Warwick would be most
welcome. In return, this offers the HE community a chance to explore support models for flexible
learning design.
5. Anticipated impact from participation (up to 300 words)
Please outline what impact you anticipate to gain from participating within the strategic
enhancement programme.
By July 2015 we will have designed and implemented a strategy for institution-wide
engagement with flexible learning through the Extended Classroom. This process of widening
engagement will go rapidly from awareness to understanding, and adoption-adaption for significant
cases in every faculty.
Most importantly, we then need to facilitate collaborations of academic staff, students and support
staff in reflecting upon their experiences and considering further adoption-adaption. We will try a
range of techniques to make this reflective process effective, inclusive, open, critical and positive.
For example, learning designs will be “pitched” and evaluated in peer-support panels (inspired by
the Pixar Braintrust approach). Our aim is to rapidly embed and normalise these reflective practices
as widely as possible.
This first phase of the project will be a success when these early participants become informed
advocates for the Extended Classroom approach, and begin to feed into our institution-level
design process (for example, taking part in the design of new virtual and physical learning spaces).
This design dialogue should produce and circulate worthwhile, well-described, transferable
Extended Classroom learning designs that are sustainably supported by our Extended
Classroom platform (physical and virtual tools). It should be possible for any teacher-student
collaboration at Warwick to choose and implement designs from the repertoire, with as little need
for additional training and support as possible.
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6. Existing work in this area (up to 300 words)
Please outline enhancement activity you have undertaken in your institution in relation to each
programme area in which you have expressed an interest.
Warwick is making substantial investments in physical and virtual learning spaces. This follows on
from the CAPITAL Centre and Reinvention Centre CETLs, and the HEA funded Open-space
Learning in Real-world Contexts project (using teaching space flexibly). We are developing from a
project-oriented basis to a more sustainable service-oriented approach, with the expansion of
support and development teams across the university: the Academic Technology Service
(managing virtual spaces), Audio-Visual Services (managing physical learning spaces) and the
Learning and Development Centre (staff development programmes aligned with the HEA
Fellowship and UKPSF). We are designing physical and virtual spaces for flexibility.
As a result, a large subset of academics and students are already benefiting from a basic set of
Extended Classroom approaches. A smaller subset are adopting flexible pedagogies and curriculum
designs, usually where a more sophisticated pedagogic design capability already exists (through
departmental teaching fellows and support professionals). The HEA Fellowship process is being
used as an opportunity to accelerate the more advanced innovations and their diffusion across the
institution. This is our opportunity for sustainable scaled-up change.
The Extended Classroom project has been designed to build further on these ideas and
innovations from a much broader base. To give just two examples, Cathia Jenainati is developing
pedagogy in the English Department around the concept of “functional and performative spaces”,
and the School of Life Sciences have a number of scaled up learning designs that could be
described as the Flipped Lab. These are potentially useful in other disciplines and teaching
contexts. The Extended Classroom project will present these models in an accessible way that
encourages uptake and adaption at scale.
7. Intended area for development (up to 300 words)
Please outline the aspect of institutional practice that you plan to develop through participation in
the programme.
The project is already informing practice at every level (small group, lectures, modules, course
programmes) and of all forms – although the starting point at Warwick focuses on extending
campus-based learning for flexibility. At an institutional level, across departments and support
services, there are two key themes:
1. Changing the relationships between teachers, students, support professionals and central
services (IT Services, AV, Library, Space Management etc.). The aim is to re-present a disparate
collection of tools and services for teaching and learning as a coherent and inter-compatible
platform, with the academic department being a sub-platform within the wider platform. This
requires a change in the ways in which the many partners interact. We need to think of
everything that we provide (physical and virtual) as maintaining a platform through
which teaching-learning collaborations design and assemble learning, flexibly, as
appropriate to their needs. Although everyone involved agrees this is the right way to work,
making it a reality will involve many small changes in local and institutional practice.
2. Teachers and students need to be more active designers of their own teaching-learning
collaborations – they need to know the platform and its affordances better, and make informed choices
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that reflect their needs, concerns, ambitions, styles. Although they might already use this kind of
flexible design thinking in everyday non-academic activities, it is not always applied so well to
academic work – perhaps due to a lack of coherence in the available choices (not a joined-up well
described platform), over-stretched support services, and sometimes a just-get-by attitude
encouraged by the immediacy of the campus environment (e.g. why use technology when you can
just talk to people f2f?). We need to do everything we can to support people who are hesitant or
simply too busy to engage with and make the most of the new possibilities.
8. Leadership and Institutional Commitment (up to 200 words)
Please outline the institutional support and leadership commitment to this area of work in your
institution.
The University Strategy has a deep commitment to the aims of this project. Strategic Objective:
Explore new models of teaching to enhance the student experience and extend opportunities for
student engagement in the design and delivery of the curriculum.
The forthcoming launch of a new internal structure to support excellence in teaching, combined
with Professional Skills Framework accreditation path and a new Technology Enhanced Learning
Strategy, show our priority.
Flexible, inclusive and accessible learning opportunities are a particular mission for the PVC for
Learning and Teaching, Professor Christina Hughes. Professor Hughes is our senior sponsor for
this project and will act as guide and champion.
9. Student participation (up to 200 words)
Please outline how you anticipate students will be involved in the work you undertake on this
programme.
Student participation is essential for the success of the project. Students are currently reporting an
awareness of technologies, spaces and techniques for flexible learning. However, they tell us that
they do not often understand their purpose. They are not connecting new provisions with use
cases that they value – they are not often experiencing innovative learning designs that make sense
to them. We will change this by actively drawing students into the organisational learning and design
loop in collaboration with academics and learning support professionals (see the diagram at the end
of this document):
Change how teaching and learning is designed (using the platform), with students as equal
participants.
Get people beyond awareness to recognition and understanding.
Facilitate collaborative reflection.
Develop students as informed advocates.
Students actively involved in designing the platform.
Students will, for example, participate on an equal basis in the Braintrust panels. Students will in
these ways be part of the process of creating, reviewing, refining, disseminating and applying
learning designs for flexibility.
Participation should include a large subset of students, every student needs to be part of the
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design dialogue. We will use a range of inclusive methods for engagement – e.g. live events,
debates, polls.
10. Working group
In the table, please include the members of a working group of around five people, who will lead
participation in your institution. This group should include at least one student and/or student
representative and one senior manager. If you are applying for more than one programme, you will
need to identify one group of people per programme.
Institutional role
Students’ Union Sabbatical Officer
PVC for Learning and Teaching
Learning and Development Centre
Advisor
Senior Academic Technologist
(PROJECT LEAD)
Assistant Registrar (Teaching &
Learning)
Name
Andrew Thompson
Professor Christina Hughes
Emma King
Email
postgrads@warwicksu.com
c.l.hughes@warwick.ac.uk
e.l.king@warwick.ac.uk
Robert O'Toole
robert.otoole@warwick.ac.uk
ruth.cooper@warwick.ac.uk
Ruth Cooper
11. Signature
The Higher Education Academy will be storing data on the selected institutions and their working
groups for the duration of the pilot, after which it will be destroyed. The data will also be shared
with other participating institutions. By submitting this application you will be indicating your
agreement to this. The application should be signed and dated by a senior manager (for example a
Pro-Vice Chancellor or Vice Principal) of the institution.
Please indicate your agreement with the following:



I agree that my institution’s participation in the Strategic enhancement programmes can
be publicised by the Higher Education Academy.
I understand that the information I have provided will be stored in an electronic format
by the Higher Education Academy for the duration of the pilot, after which it will be
destroyed.
I understand that the information I have provided will be accessible to, and shared
by, the Higher Education Academy with other participating institutions.
Signature*:
Name:
Teaching)
Professor Christina Hughes
Institution:
University of Warwick
Position: Pro Vice Chancellor (Learning and
Date:
Tuesday 2nd December 2014
* An electronic signature is acceptable.
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