Operational Management of a Digital Education Service: Challenges and Opportunities

Rolling Out Blackboard Ultra Courses

Background

  • The Digital Learning Environment Review Project and Roll-out of Blackboard Ultra Courses

Key Stages of Ultra Rollout

  • Sep 2021: Ultra Navigation
  • 2021/22: Semester 2 Early Pilot (9 modules across 7 schools)
  • 2022/23: Targeted rollout of Ultra Courses (250 modules across 7 Schools)
  • Sep 2023: University-wide roll-out

The Challenges

  • School consultation and engagement
  • Staff training, resources and support
  • Internal staff development
  • Technical challenges
  • *Students support*

🎓 Key Activities

  • Roll-out planning, including timelines, resources, and engagement strategy
  • Engagement with academics and Professional services staff
  • Offer 'getting started' meeting to all module convenors
  • Drop-in and 121 in depth conversation

💪 Challenges

  • Establish key contacts with the relevant authority within school
  • Key messages not delivered across leading to some staff resistance
  • Ultra contacts lack of understanding of how school operate
  • The timescales, and timings, involved were an issue in terms of engagement

Engagement

🎓 Key Activities

  • Designed and delivered a range of training sessions for staff
  • Creation and distribution of several asynchronous resources for staff
  • Ultra support embedded in standard support Hub route
  • Drop-in and 121 in depth conversation

Getting Staff Ready

🎓 Challenges

  • ​​Despite organising the training programme quickly, we weren’t able to offer training as early as we would have liked
  • Engagement levels very inconsistent, with numbers over the summer particularly low
  • Significant numbers of staff either did not use the Ultra essentials resource or were not aware of it

🎓 Key Stakeholders

  • Ultra rollout team
  • School partners
  • Hub support
  • Training Team
  • Resources Team
  • IT and Anthology partnership

💪 Challenges

  • Communication, collaboration and streamlined processes within the team​​
  • Keeping up to date with Ultra knowledge
  • Working more closely between strands
  • Formalise processes and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
  • Effective workflow on reporting issues/features

Internal Staff Development

University

To work in partnership with people across the University, building strong relationships and a reputation for collaboration

Development of a deeper, strategic relationship with our external partner Anthology, the developers of Blackboard

School

To work seamlessly with schools, and integrate our specialist staff with school teams to drive change in educational practice.

Staff

Develop approach for co-designing updated module presentation and delivery through Blackboard Ultra Courses

Students

To embed students as partners through the process, driving a culture of engagement and inclusion.

The DigEd Team

The development of the required skills and knowledge of Ultra Courses

Strengthened our relationship

Built confidence in ourselves as experts in our field

Opportunities

Made with Slides.com