It’s time to kick off the Taylor Institute Learning Technologies (TILT) podcast series. I was fortunate to be invited to chat with Brian Lamb and Royal Roads University’s LRNT 525 class, nominally to talk about institutional change management and decision making, but it turned into a wide-ranging discussion of innovation and the tension between creativity and enterprise-scale.

Direct link to audio file

ps. I’ll be moving these podcasts onto UCalgary media servers, once that’s a thing. For now, self-hosting to get things started…

pps. Some of the links mentioned in the webcast:

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello, I’m D’Arcy, and welcome to TILT, a Taylor Institute Learning Technologies podcast. This is the beginning of what will become a series of informal chats with people doing innovative things with learning technologies. In this first episode, I’m talking with Brian Lamb, Director of Innovation at Thompson Rivers University, and the LRNT525 class at Royal Roads University. It turned into a wide-ranging discussion of how we’ve explored innovation at our institutions and how to balance that with the need for sustainability and running at enterprise scale. So Darcy, actually we once had you out to TRU to talk about the process behind this report you’re looking at because we, to an extent, tried to emulate it at TRU. We didn’t do it anywhere near the same amount of rigor that you did. But maybe just before we get into what the actual stuff is about, But could you just give a little background on what this framework was meant to do? Yeah, absolutely. I can maybe go ahead and just leave it just a few steps before that. So you threw the picture of us from 2004. That’s back when we were actually doing, I think, really cool, innovative stuff. And it was, this may sound bad, but without having to worry about the rigor and the formality, but we just got to play and do cool stuff. And what happened is we stuck around and eventually the institution started dropping expectations and we sort of now you have to you know dress a little better and you have to write reports and that kind of thing. So you started off kind of playing and having fun and then all of a sudden you get dropped into these other things. 

The strategic framework for learning technologies was actually something that was started by our our provost, Vice President Academic, and she was trying to say we’ve got all these kind of uncoordinated, that’s not her words, but all these sort of initiatives going on and get them all kind of pointing in the same direction. And so she struck a working group. I was one member. There was about 25 people in it. Some were associate deans from various faculties. There was a dean of one faculty. There were students in the room, both undergraduate and graduates. And there were staff members from key units across campus. And we were like, what kinds of things are we doing for implementing and supporting learning technologies? And what should we be doing? How do we get there? and that’s kind of how this got going, but it started from a very, you know, a whiteboard. Let’s start with a whiteboard and flesh out ideas and brainstorm. And then it turned into the institutional rigor, which you might be seeing in the document. So that was a learning experience for me. But one thing we found is having it come from the top down with the provost saying, this is important. That is a different message than Darcy playing off in the corner of campus where nobody actually cares what happens, and if cool things happen, it might or might not affect other things. So this was a large institutional working group. And when they collaborated on writing this thing, it went through many revisions, there was a writing subcommittee of it. So it was very formal with roles and responsibilities and terms of reference and all that super fun stuff. We use this in my role. 

So at the time, I was, the role was called an IT partner, which is a strategic position that reports to the CIO and to a dean and a faculty or director of a unit. And so that was my role there. I’ve since moved on to a role where I am managing our learning technologies group and our Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. In my new role, I’m using this strategic framework basically as my marching orders. These are the things we need to do and I’ve got the kind of institutional mandate to do it. 

So using the this big report as kind of ammo to describe what you’re going to do and it gives you a reason to do it and kind of get away with doing stuff without having to ask so much permission because the university has agreed this is important. 

So it’s kind of some of the background on the framework and sort of my job description is actually written largely from what came into this report. 

So when you started having these conversations Darcy, so it ended up being this really, really wide range of viewpoints. Did you have any surprises come out of that? Well, not really surprising. I mean, in hindsight, it’s totally obvious. We thought it was going to be, well, let’s list the technologies we need to buy or build or whatever. And it turned out, yeah, that’s important. But what’s more important is how are you going to support it? How are you going to teach people to use it? How are you going to help people teach themselves to do it? The other conversation that came out of it was how do you use it for academic promotion, credit and promotion? So if a prof is gonna spend a ton of time building a tool or integrating in technology into the course, redesigning the course, so what? Is it just for the fun of doing it or is it something to actually get credit for? We’re a research university, so before we went through a rather significant change at the university, we were focused almost entirely on research as what they used for promotion. How many research dollars did you get, how many publications, you know, the usual. And so people who spent their time wasting it on teaching were basically hamstringing their academic careers. And that came out in this report. This stuff is fun, but so what, it’s a waste of time for my career, why would I do this? And so this led to a major change where we’re actually changing the academic promotion system at the University of Calgary to include innovation and learning technologies and pedagogical approaches and all that kind of thing, sharing with the community. 

So finding how… You identified a problem and then there was follow-up. 

Was there steps of how you elevated that to the decision makers? Like, how did that come about? Because I’ve heard, I mean, I’ve been in tons of meetings where people say, oh yeah, you know, spending time on this is just, you know, you got to change, change your review, and everyone just kind of nods gravely. Okay, we’ll do that. Well, no, more like, no, that’ll never change. And then everyone just kind of shakes their heads and then we move on. Well, this is the part where it sounds like I’m kind of gloating, but the, the leadership of the university of Calgary right now is absolutely fantastic from the president to the vice provost to the vice provost teaching and learning to my director, they’re all absolutely fantastic and they are actively engaged in this stuff and they’ve come from the teaching ranks. So they get what the issues are. They get what’s it like to be an instructor designing a course for 600 students? How do you do all of that? So the leadership is absolutely fantastic. We’ve also thankfully got resources available. So we have funds, we have staff, we have units. We actually, as part of this strategic framework, it was done at the same time as designing our Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, which started as a virtual organization because we didn’t have a home. Designing what groups do we need to be together to support this. 

So my group, the learning technologies group, we have an instructional design group, we have educational development consultants, we have curriculum people, we have scholarship of teaching and learning, and we have all of the support units above it in our that one institute, which is fantastic, as well as collaborating with information technologies and libraries and cultural resources and other groups. 

So having that, I don’t know, that’s that momentum of we need to do this and having an institute set up to help supported, we’re absolutely, we’re blessed to have this. 

But it’s not it wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate by the leadership. 

And it was deliberate by feedback from instructors and students saying this is something that’s important. And this is where institutional resources need to be spent. I’m just gonna jump in Darcy before Brian asked you because there’s some questions. 

So Lori asked, did you centralize things or did you assign certain things like a simulation, certain fields so that’s maybe something you were talking about earlier and then John was asking about how did the wider faculty react to the change I think for and I’m guessing that’s around innovative technology like the actually promotion and tenure piece. Yeah sure so I guess I’ll start with Laurie so did you did we centralize or did we do decentralized kind of both so we realized we needed centralized resources for things like support for things like supporting key innovation. 

supporting key innovation. So where does an instructor go to learn how to redesign their course? Well, do we want each faculty have 13 faculties? Do they want to reinvent that 13 times? 

times? So we decentralized some of that stuff around that. We also realized that there are signature pedagogies. 

So each faculty teaches things in different ways for a reason, not because they like doing something differently, because it’s the best way to do things. So our faculty of veterinary medicine is deeply using simulations, both software based, they’ve also got a lot of fiberglass models of cows that you get to do things with and it’s they’re very deep on simulations. They’re also very deep on distributed learning through video conferencing because they are spread all around Alberta. They might be at a farm, they might be at the zoo, they might be at all these different places. So technologies are unique to each faculty but supported centrally. 

Our faculty of nursing does an insane amount of simulations. 

They’ve got a multi-million dollar simulation center where you get to play with mock patients. 

We can’t do that centrally because, you know, But where it makes sense, we do centralize, so things like the learning management system is centrally managed and administered. Things like video conferencing, we’re working on getting that set up. Web conferencing, online classes, those things are centralized because things can be used across all 13 faculties. But supporting discipline specific things that are distributed around the university. How do the wider faculty react to that? Yeah, that’s kind of a weird one. So I think in general people were yes, we need to be supporting, you know, academic promotion and all that But there’s also a lot of distrust because they’ve heard this before They’ve heard that yes, things are going to change and hallelujah. 

We’ve got it figured out and nothing happens so there’s a lot of hesitation a lot of distrust and what happened is things actually started to change and Slowly and it hasn’t happened to all the instructors yet all the faculty members But they start to they start to buy in they see the change One of the really cool things we did is we started a university-wide teaching awards program. And so there are awards for, you know, sessional instructors and TAs and full-time professors and adjuncts. And you name it, there’s categories for all kinds of stuff. And giving recognition for interesting things. And that shows that the university is actually giving value to what they’re doing, that then they can use on their CV. They can use it for APR and all these other things. So actually showing that it’s being valued is super important. We also have a very large grants program. So if an instructor wants to redesign a course or, you know, do a functional MRI of something while they’re evaluating learning, there’s actually funds to buy them time on an MRI to do that and evaluate it and share it. So showing that we’re supporting interesting research on this stuff, the university is stepping up and doing that. That’s key. You can’t just talk about the stuff. You actually have to do it. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but it doesn’t always happen. After the pilot, and I’ve certainly been in this situation, I mean, the way funding tends to work, not just at institutions, but a lot of times from organizations that support either innovation or development, certainly open education stuff, is that you get this kind of one-time burst of money to make something happen, or maybe you just come up with a good idea and you’re able to start it you know on a small scale for a few people and you support it on a more or less personal level and then you sometimes it just doesn’t work and then nobody cares and then the con and the thing just dies and you delete the web pages and you try to move on and hopefully you’re not too starred by the experience but then sometimes through those experiences where it gets just enough uptake that people start to depend on this stuff and really want to keep it and maintain it and then of course and if it isn’t like a massive huge success that you know where you’re guaranteed the follow-up resources to come along or now you’re expected to come over the business plan or sustainability model to use a word you hear a lot about an OAR. 

hear a lot about an OAR. I don’t know what to do with that but I mean that must be a dynamic you’ve seen a lot. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the perfect example of that is, um, I mean, you mentioned that I, I, I recently turned off Wiki.com at RCA, um, a copy of media Wiki that I installed. I kind of snuck it onto a server 13 years ago and it had a lot of activity. It was awesome for many years and then it kind of petered out and there was kind of like the long tail and it got to a point where maintaining it, updating the code and PHP became more of a burden. And if nobody’s edited in many months, it’s time to turn it off. That was one that hadn’t quite reached the critical mass. The other one that I snuck onto a server about two months after that, so it’s almost 13 years old, rather, is UCalgary Blogs, which is a WordPress multi-user installation that is almost 13 years old now, holy smokes. It has reached critical mass. It’s the one where if I was to try to turn it off, it would cause huge problems across the university. It sounds like this should be a big institutional initiative. There should be big money behind it. It’s still supported entirely by me. It’s run on an IT managed virtual server, but they know nothing about PHP. They know nothing about MySQL or WordPress. So IT can’t be expected to support this stuff. So how do you go from something that you sneak onto a server because you think it’s cool and interesting when you’re in a small role that doesn’t, you know, you get to experiment and play and 13 years later, you’re in a role where you really don’t have, I don’t know, the latitude or the freedom to do that kind of thing without balancing. How do you do sustainability? These things that you didn’t have to worry about 13 years ago. But now it’s this thing. There are thousands of users. There’s thousands of sites on it. If it disappeared, it would break many courses. It would break. Our entire Taylor Institute has many of its initiatives published on UCalgary Blogs collaborative publishing. So if it disappeared, it would cause huge problems. It’s still, the budget for it, I think, is $600 a year, which is what it costs for our WordPress developer license for some of the plugins that we use. There’s a commercial system, WPMU dev license for that. That’s the only cost, which is kind of crazy. How do we transition from that? And that’s something I’m still coming to grips with. I don’t think anybody really knows how to do that. Things wither and they get replaced by a big enterprise system. I want to avoid that if I can, but that’s kind of what we’re out there. So before we go back to some of the questions, I can see a couple more maybe coming in and maybe Michelle will do that, but beforehand that, just to sum up, if you try something ambitious, maybe it just won’t work and people won’t care and won’t want to do anything with that and it’ll just die or what’s even worse is people might actually like it and start using it and building it in and I guess I mean I I’ve always thought that that more organic kind of you know do a skunk work see what happens makes more sense than you know trying to get a lot of upfront money and a lot of structures and to pre-plan everything because those tend to be the to me the most disastrous things I’ve been involved with. But even those small organic ones have their own perils as well. And of course, there’s a personal dimension to that. I don’t know if it’s the same with you, Darcy, but usually the people, like the first few people to try WordPress, for example, when you work with them, and you can give them a lot of attention, and you kind of ease them along, and they come to depend on you, and then they find it this very satisfying kind of human scale existence. And then, of course, when things grow, that’s harder to maintain. And then suddenly you gotta kind of transition it into some kind of service. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s exactly what happened with this. I mean, it started off with literally there was maybe five users the first semester. And it was used for an English Lit course, I think it was, and a couple other little things in my little test blog. And then over the years, it just blew up and it was crazy amount of activity on there. We had our environmental design faculty decided to do e-portfolios on UCalgar blogs before e-portfolios were a cool thing. With gigabytes of files, they do large PDFs of sketches and stuff. And how do we do that? And now all of a sudden, oh my God, the server’s falling over and smoke’s pouring out because it’s being used so heavily. I can’t afford a new server, what do I do? So that, I think if it had started with, let’s do an RFP for a campus blogging platform, it would have died. It would have not, who’s interested in that? 

have not, who’s interested in that? My god, that’s, by starting organically, I think this was the right way to go. We start organically, we grow, it gets to a point where it’s interesting and useful and embedded, and it’s a good problem to have now to figure out how do we shift into a sustainable model. 

13 years later, that’s, some would say, sustainable already, but right now, because it is is entirely me running it if I win the lottery, what happens? So I don’t buy lottery tickets anymore. No, that’s good for all of us in that type of person. The Yukonaga Blog is actually by a deliberate decision. I didn’t integrate that with campus authentication. So it is a completely standalone thing. It doesn’t talk to anything, except it’s a web thing. So it does web things. You can link to it. You can do iframes. So all that kind of stuff is there. But the integration with legacy systems, because they started as sort of Skunkworks projects, you don’t care about legacy systems. So you’re starting fresh, and now maybe they become the legacy system. So new stuff, are they done as plug-ins for WordPress, so they’re available in UCAG or blogs, or do we do it in D2L as an alternative because everybody else is in that? But yeah, I don’t think when these start, these sort of Skunkworks things, legacy stuff wasn’t a consideration for me. Maybe it should have been. I don’t know. I think that might have sucked the fun out of it. 

That’s kind of maybe the unspoken thing about edtech. A lot of the innovation happens when it’s fun and interesting and it’s a pet project as opposed to an institutional mandate, thou shalt build national repository of learning objects, which dies after a couple of years and several hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars, I think it was. 

We didn’t see that. You think that the Skunk Work Model is workable in smaller organizations? We have a lot of students in the class that aren’t even in post-secondary, per se. So we’re looking at smaller companies. And I’m just wondering if the Skunk Work Model, you know, that you’re funded to play, it’s not maybe something that would be possible in a lot of smaller groups. I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s possible anywhere. I mean, if you’re looking at is technology the constraint, I still do a lot of my skunk work stuff on my own server that I rent for $15 a month, not on a university server, because I have more control over it than the university is willing to provide me. But the time, how much time in a day can I devote to these other projects? That comes, I guess, down to the leadership thing. As a manager now, I basically, I expect my team to spend a bunch of their time just playing and being creative and come back and share with the rest of the group what they’re discovering and making and what cool stuff. 

And that we actually did a project last year and every an hour every single day I think it was two to three in the afternoon I blocked a meeting in their calendars and it was creative time. Whatever you’re doing you have one hour that you know nobody can grab you’re not going to be in meetings you’re not going to be doing whatever. So from two to three I expect you go play go do something creative read a journal article build some software make a video whatever and then at the end of the week we come back and share what cool stuff did you do and it was inspiring it was amazing having that freedom to be creative yeah it cost productivity but really the job we’re doing isn’t measured in you know ticket resolution we’re we’re meant to support innovation as opposed to that transactional how many people did you talk to today oh you need to increase that tomorrow you didn’t issue quota we’re not like that and I think it’s important not to be like that so you have the freedom to do this and amazingly creative things came out of that and we actually built as a result of that an entire series of workshops based on the tools and even just the concepts that were discovered during that creative time. 

So I think that’s extremely important and sorry Laurie was asking do people relate the creative time back to work? Some did, some did completely weird things. 

So Kevin our EdTech developer built a basically a snapshot clone that put spiders on your head using a webcam as a website, not directly related to educational technology, but he learned some new tools that are directly related to educational technologies. For him to play without having to worry about, am I gonna break this campus tool? No, go play something cool, learn and come back. 

One of the problems with that was people, when they get busy, this was one of the first things to go when we get swamped before our conference season. So this right now we’re in conference adjudication, grant adjudication, award adjudication. So all the staff in our unit are in that. And this is our busy season. This creative stuff was the first thing to go because it doesn’t feel productive. And I struggle with that. How do you make it feel productive? Because this, I think, is more important than reviewing a PDF for a conference submission. Seeing the observation come up, you know, talking about how, you know, Skunk works in enterprise, can they happily coexist? And, and I, and Clint suggests, you know, both need to coexist. I’m just going to try to share a really short anecdote, but it kind of, partly, hopefully we’ll explain why I was so laudatory and genuinely grateful to Darcy about the early days. Because so when we were doing this learning objects project, which, you know, on the one hand, it, it didn’t achieve its goals. I mean, the site, you can go back on the Wayback Machine and you can see it was going to be this nationwide network of open sharing resources within the British or within the Canadian context. 

And there were all these quite bold claims and it garnered this quite significant amount of federal funding. It was kind of the last big federally kind of guided learning technology program that I can remember. 

I think shortly shortly after this program, there was a federal review of Canary, and I think they were kind of remandated to kind of just focus on pipes and not worry so much about community applications. And I think organizations like BC Net and BC Campus, at least in British Columbia, were expected to kind of step into those kind of application gaps. Anyway, so, you know, Darcy has this repository called Kerrio and it was a nice tool and Darcy did some really nice design work on it and it worked really well and I’m here at UBC and I’ve got it installed and Darcy’s doing my tech support. The only problem is we barely get anyone to use it and nobody would willingly put their resources in this thing and partly because the whole model of how how we what we expected users to do and then the benefit that they would ultimate get were completely disconnected they were expected we were expecting individuals who had no stake in the project itself to put in all this extra work change completely how they think about and work and then with the idea that if everything went right in two or three years we would kind of Metadata wonders. But interestingly enough, though, I don’t know if it was as big a waste as it is, I mean, weirdly enough, I mean, that, that, that, it’s interesting, I see someone joining. The whole generation of us actually had our jobs funded from that inadvertently. 

I don’t know, Darcy, I assume your job there was funded out of that project? Absolutely, and my job, for several years after that, was funded by an offshoot of that. at that time at UBC my job was self-funded I had actually write grant proposals but there was matching funds from that fund like there was money sloshing around and someone who just dumped it jumped in Les Nesman I know who that is I happen to know that that fellow his early jobs in ed tech were funded from this stuff so it actually and you know the work that happened there I I remember this day really well. We were sitting there, kind of bemoaning on instant message chat, the fact that nobody was really using this quite nice system that we’d installed, and I was realizing I was on a self-funded temporary contract that was not going to get renewed on any sort of its own merits, and I actually remember Darcy going, well, nobody’s using this beautiful server you bought, you want me to throw movable type and a wiki on there for you? Maybe you can at least use it for that. And I went, yeah, sure. And movable type was kind of the WordPress of its day. WordPress at that time didn’t exist. And so I started using this blogging platform and the wiki platform for my workshops and stuff. and I remember very quickly going into workshops and going hey look you know there’s this thing called learning objects and you should do this and this and this and that would be just faculty would be looking bed-eyed and then at the end of the session I’d go oh by the way this page I put together it’s a thing called a wiki and you can go in you create a page yourself and any of you can edit it right now you want to try and people go well I don’t care about the learning objects but that tool you used is pretty cool. Can I use it for this? Can I use it for this? And it ended up having this really organic growth. And of course, I started to realize that through our blogs, you know, myself and Darcy and this guy out in Levine and Scott and other people on this call, kind of the early generation, we were thinking, well, what’s learning objects supposed to do? It’s supposed to provide platforms that allow us to share resources, communicate with one another, and maybe provide some of the technical framework to support sharing and maybe something like an emerging community of practice. That was the objection or the objective. And I think it was about a year into it that we realized, holy cow, we can do this without money. Like these tools allow us to share resources. We’re using our each other’s stuff. We can collaborate, we can communicate in real time. We actually don’t need a network of federally funded learning object repositories to at least meet these initial goals. And that actually was, that initial thing I showed was how we started working together because we just started sharing that fairly obvious bit of learning. So I guess that’s just, I don’t know what the lesson of that is other than, you know, unimagined consequences. But I think it does speak to the one specific question where I think people have been saying, well, can you do this at smaller institutions? And I would, yes, I see, by the way, Scott’s making reference to one of the classic posts in the field called Stop Playing to Share. He wrote a post called Planning to Share versus Just Sharing. And if I wasn’t in the middle of a rant, I would link to it right this minute, which kind of just sums up that whole dynamic I just described. If you’re at a small institution and you don’t have an IT department that’s ready to work with you, I can say that there are ways around it. 

It helps if you have friends at other institutions, like I don’t know if this was strictly proper, but Darcy effectively was my IT department, even though he was at University of Calgary and I was at UBC for about two years. And we’re supposed to be competing. Well, this is the thing I’ve always found about edtech. I’ve never found that people who actually do the job really compete with me. I’ve always felt like we’re all in it together. And then I guess if you were to start now and you don’t have a friend like Darcy, there is kind of an emergent community out there of people and it’s quite remarkable actually what you could run with a with a shared hosting budget of a couple hundred dollars a year and there’s a certain vendor that’s essentially made this their business model and I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of ed tech departments that are running their innovation pilots and skunkworks off of a shared platform that’s actually you know shared hosting that’s geared to education departments. 

So anyway, I think I’m just gonna jump in. 

So if you’re not at a institution, but a small organization that might be doing, you know, trying to do e-learning, do you think that’s an option if you’re more in the business sector? I personally think having a reasonably robust, even just instance of WordPress multi-site and knowing how to provision sites and manage a certain number of accounts does just gives you so many options. 

And so I do think it’s viable. I know there’s a learning curve there. And I don’t want to overstate the ease of it. 

Hard lessons I’ve learned that makes sure your backups are rock solid. 

But I think I absolutely I mean, to me, that’s one of the cores. 

I you want to do anything outside of your learning management system I think that the most kind of obvious and viable way of kind of providing alternative kind of more flexible and especially open web options would be something like a WordPress multisite I don’t know if anyone else has recommendations for that I was absolutely say WordPress multisite because you can add plugins and names you can make it basically do whatever you want which is a cool starting point there was a question I have been lurking on Twitter I’m not active, but I did learn there’s a question about So what how do you balance enterprise versus this skunk work stuff? I think it’s important to note that enterprise doesn’t necessarily mean PeopleSoft or Oracle or you know, the big vendors I view enterprise as campus-wide things. 

So you Cogger blogs by now is an enterprise thing It’s used by people in all 13 faculties. 

It’s used by thousands of people. So that is enterprise by almost any definition But we also build tools because we’re a central a service unit at the Taylor Institute. We actually build tools for various things. And what we’re actually able to do is tie them together. So we build tools for curriculum mapping. We’re actually building a brand new tool that is streamlined based on what we’ve learned over the last several years on mapping curricula in various faculty departments. So we’re building that tool. We’ve got a tool for ePortfolio, which is WordPress. We’ve got a tool for what we call a teaching challenge, which is a website where people can actually go, instructors can go, or our students. And it gives you a challenge, you know, try making a video, flip your course, you know, whatever it is. And you get points, you share what you did, and you reflect on what you did, and you get points for completing things. And there’s a leaderboard. You can take what you do there and put it in your portfolio. And then you can tie it in. We’ve got a badges platform that we built that ties into all kinds of various things. But by connecting all of these things, you have a way for instructors to learn a new thing to test it out and get feedback and reflect, to build a portfolio of their learning over time and to get credit for it, and then to tie it into institutional curricula, which is absolutely amazing. 

They are separate tools. They’re not connected by hard lines. 

They’re loosely joined, as we talked about earlier, but they’re absolutely enterprise. 

Not from PeopleSoft, not from Oracle, not from a large LMS vendor, we built it and we get to do that. 

We’re lucky that we have amazing developers within my team who are doing this. 

And so if you don’t have developers, obviously, that’s difficult. 

obviously, that’s difficult. The other risk we’re seeing is once these tools hit critical masks, same thing that happened with Uglogger blogs, how do we scale it up? How do we make it sustainable? 

it sustainable? I don’t want my developer to be supporting all of these tools that he builds over the year, I wanted to be focusing on building the next thing. And so we have to figure out how do we transition these things from the Skunkworks to an enterprise launch, to a full support, and how do we do that? And we’re still figuring that out. So the nice thing about, you know, a lot of the open ed tech that’s out there with tools like this is you don’t necessarily have to know how to design and structure and program all the functionalities that you see out there. If you look at someone like Alan Levine, you know, he develops a template for a simplified blogging tool where people don’t need accounts or logins to learn how to author it and they don’t have to learn how to use WordPress. They essentially fill in a form, put your title here, put your text there, hit post. 

It’s a little harder than that, but not a lot. And someone like Alan, you know, if you go to splot.ca, he posts all the templates. You can just install it like a WordPress theme. And, you know, if you go into Alan Levine’s blog, not only does he share the code for all these things, but he goes into incredible detail about why he did it, what he’s learned as he’s implied at what’s not quite working as well as he wished. I don’t know, to me, that’s still the most fun way to work. And to be honest, certainly for effort to pay off ratio, the most effective. So yes, Darcy, Alan is absolutely inspiring on the way he does it. Like Alan, like you said, he narrates everything that he does and he shares everything. 

And not just the code, but he narrates the thought process and the trials and what works and what didn’t work. So everything is in there. It’s absolutely amazing the way he does it. 

Yeah, I follow everything he does. I don’t necessarily use it all, but it’s very cool the way he works. and I think more people if more people work that way. The cool thing about Allen is he’s always worked that way since the day we met online and then in that cringe relief photo. 

He’s been like that all along he shares everything and you can see the train of thought you can see how he’s connecting disparate ideas and that I think is an amazing way to work as an educational technologist you’re not looking you know at vendor acquisition and product placement and all that kind of gross stuff that is kind of part of EdTech but it’s not it’s not the interesting part of EdTech. And Alan really kind of lives the hey let’s just play and have fun and let’s do some cool stuff and be interesting and connect it to other people and it’s yeah it’s amazing he’s inspiring. So just to look to bring that back to Laurie’s question because I’m looking at the teaching challenge site did you actually use one of Alan’s themes for the teaching challenge or did you just No. 

So that was something that was absolutely inspired by the DS106 Daily Create. 

But it was because we wanted to integrate different ways. And actually, frankly, my developer wanted to build js. 

a tool in Node. So he actually built it from scratch to do that. 

It could have just as easily been done as a WordPress thing. But we decided, well, let’s try this. Here’s a sandbox environment. you can you can you can build this app absolutely based on the DS 106 daily create which is the same thing it gives you a challenge not on necessarily teaching specific stuff but you know go take a photograph of something that’s square go draw a picture of you know whatever and so we just extrapolated that well what if that was specific to things that are related to teaching and learning you know make a video for your class get feedback from a student on something and so that’s sort of where that came from it was inspired by Alan’s amazing work and sharing and creativity. And we just took it and ran with it in our context. And I think that’s the interesting thing. We’re not trying to say everybody has to use the same things. Take the idea, localize it for your context and see where that goes. Laurie’s got a very good followup. So yes, once you got it built and you know it’s a good idea, how do you promote it? How do you launch it? What are the challenges that come up there? Yeah, so if you start and say like the big announcement to all staff at University of Calgary, the email list, here’s this new thing, go use it, nothing’s gonna happen. 

So we decided to do kind of a soft launch with it. And basically what we did is we baked it into all of our workshops and programs at the Taylor Institute. So if you come and do anything with us, likely you’re going to wind up building any portfolio or you’re going to be earning a badge or you’re going to be doing a teaching challenge as part of it. 

We just baked it into what we do. 

And it’s kind of a soft sell. And people are like, hey, this is cool. And they see them show up on a leaderboard on the teaching challenge oh no I want to get more points I want to beat the other guy in my department or whatever so that’s yeah the soft launch and kind of letting it grow organically but baking it into what you do we actually we do the challenges ourselves I was the top on the leaderboard for a while I’ve kind of fallen off the wagon I need to get back in there I just now linked to Scott Leslie’s post and I’m glad he reminded me of it I think if you want to kind of look at the I mean it’s it’s a very it’s definitely taking a strong position it’s Not trying to find a middle ground, but I think if you kind of wanted to try out what are the lines between front loaded planning and kind of the more emergent, like just get on with it and prove as you go. That post is a classic of the genre. Which sort of ties into Carrie’s question about the project management model. If you start with, well, we must follow ITIL and we have to get a project charter and we have to get a sponsor and let’s do a racey to see who’s responsible and accountable. If you start with that, it just sucks the life out of it. Sometimes it needs to be done, but don’t start with that for the love of God. Start with being interesting and creative and play. Have fun with something. When it gets to a point where you have to worry about sustainability, that’s when you start the project management and the Gantt charts and all that, maybe even avoid that. They just they suck the soul out of everything The fun thing I have is working with people on the other side, so I’m not in in IT anymore I’m in our Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning We work very closely with people in IT and in a previous leadership in IT. 

They were very much about ITIL specifications, and is this you know certified? Are you a certified project manager, and are you not using the right protocol and the huge culture clash? Thankfully, we’ve had a change in leadership there and they are completely on board. Let’s do this. This is important for teaching and learning, for innovation. We need to play and we’ll figure this stuff out. And again, it comes down to leadership. Having the leadership being supportive of this stuff changes everything. But then there is a bit of a transition path and I think that’s where enterprise stuff can be handy. I have to say, just to give a shout out to our IT department here at Thomson Rivers University. 

I mean for a while I was essentially running blogs and kind of standalone what I would think of as innovation projects off of WordPress multi-site install that I to be honest I was paying for out of my own pocket out of that unnamed from that unnamed vendor I described earlier for the first year or two that’s not sustainable not just because of the finances of it but when my boss found out that that that I owned the domain and that it was I was actually paying for it out of my own pocket. It was not pleased to hear that. 

And it urged me to move this thing in house. 

But the nice thing is, is when you have 25 or 30 interesting viable projects you can point to, I was able to take that to our IT department here in our CIO. 

And that led them to allow us to move to what a very worthy initiative in British Columbia called EduCloud, which is essentially trying to provide a lot of the cloud-based hosting services that services like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services provide, but doing it in British Columbia and being compliant with our privacy laws. 

Just a quick note too, Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean both now have Canadian and based hosting, we won’t get into the legality of whether how much safer that makes it, but it does seem to tick a box on privacy policies. 

So it’s actually a nice, so I’m, this is where I sound like a heretic. I’m thankful to have the enterprise tool. I’m glad we have an LMS because all of this enterprise privacy grades, personal identifiable information, that can go in there and we don’t because there’s a place for all that sensitive data to go. So I’m thankful that we have, in our case, it’s D2L. Put that stuff in D2L, let the vendor worry about it. Great, awesome. Now go play in the cool stuff because you’re free to do that. So I’m thankful that we have a place for the sensitive stuff to go and a place for the sort of more fun innovation stuff to go. And they can connect. And Darcy, I’ve abused you over the years for saying things like that. So allow me with a certain amount of shame and regret to acknowledge, now that I’m actually theoretically responsible responsible for supporting campus users institution. I feel somewhat the same way about Moodle. I still don’t get excited about Moodle and I still don’t really like answering grade book questions when they come my way. And there’s lots of things that frustrate me and I wish more instructors would take the risk and step outside the managed walled garden of the learning management system because it just, I think, does, but some things it does very well. And if all that instructor wants is a private space to share a document or a place to transmit grades or manage class lists, let’s remember what that name is. 

It’s a learning management system. 

So if you need a system to manage tasks associated with classroom management, it does those things very well. 

it does those things very well. And I’m grateful for it too, because if we were trying to do those types of functions in a kind of wide open environment like WordPress, we would just be and creating headaches for ourselves everywhere. Hey, while you’re at it, Darcy, on the subject, and I hope this is important to other people, but you have something you call the iron law of online learning. Do you wanna talk about that? The iron law? Oh, Darcy’s law of in tech. Yeah, so this kind of embarrassingly has turned into the most cited blog post I’ve got. And it basically, to sum it up, is any tool that you use, you could start with the most open, awesome, free tool ever. By the time you use it a few semesters, by the time you get a bunch of other people using it and having their use cases embedded into it, it basically turns into an LMS. So the short version is any technology with enough use cases becomes an LMS. So you can take WordPress after people use it eventually, well, this should have a grade book. Oh, awesome, let’s add that in there. Oh, it should have attended, did you? and boom, you know, you eventually slowly rebuilt an LMS. So this is why I’m thankful to have an LMS, so there’s no pressure to build that stuff into all these other cool tools that we do. It’s a great post, and I think it actually reminds me a lot of in those early days, being in a focus group session for some people that were developing a learning system that was designed to share. And if you sit down before you go to design and you get a room with 20 people together and you say, what do you want this to do, you end up with such a long list of features and requirements. And so to get back to the idea of the splots is, you know, the splot, to take Les’s point, splots don’t pretend to manage, they don’t pretend to have a gradebook, they don’t do anything other than, in the case of the writing tool, it’s a way to contribute writing and read it, or it’s a way to submit images, or it’s a way to share sound files, it does one thing very clearly, very simply, and then when people in the community will use that, and they’ll go, oh this is great, I love it, but could it do this? 

I love it, but could it do this? We just say no. 

You know, at that point, no, this tool doesn’t meet your needs anymore. 

And that’s That’s why I think we are trying to diverge from your law. I see somebody put this learning technology platform, Jay pickup. That was me. So that was about 2014 when we were going through this LMS transition. I started listing what tools are used across faculties and what level of support and that kind of thing. So these are all the crazy things that people use in summer enterprise, summer individually. So some prof licenses, a pen opto server, all that kind of stuff. So this is what we’re talking about. And if all of these things need to have grade books and all these other things that make LMS, no, we don’t want that. Can we have LMS that does that so these other tools can focus on being the best thing, whatever the thing they do, the video hosting thing focuses on that and not activity tracking and whatever. 

Yeah, 278 requirements are LMS requirements for the RFP. 

We started with committee. We asked faculty members and students and everybody, hey, so what should we have in this? And we wound up with this ungodly list of 278 things. It was ridiculous. And then how do you score it? And then the vendors respond on that and they had to build responses to this. How does their product do on each of these 278 things? And then we had to make sense of their responses. And basically when you have that many items at that level of detail, the responses become meaningless. They all sort of regress towards the mean and what are you gonna do with that? But don’t do that. Don’t have 278 requirements. has picked the few things that are important to you for anything. Pick what’s the job that thing has to do. I just shared a link from Anne-Marie Scott, who I forget her exact title, but she’s essentially the one of the lead people on the technical side of learning technology, University of Edinburgh, and she was putting some thoughts forward about this, this thing you’ll hear about called next generation digital learning environments, which I think claims to kind of slide past this conflict. because it’s like well you don’t have to choose one tool you can just kind of have your LMS and then you just link things in you just kind of hook them up in this and it’s kind of an interesting thing because it seems to almost want to say you can do you can have both you know you can have all that you can use be as flexible as you want but you can still have this seamless integrated environment so the NG DLE next generation digital learning environment I can’t That’s loosely coupled, right? I sometimes think that this idea of seamless experience and seamless integration is problematic because I think it’s an unreasonable expectation and it’s not how the web works. And if we think about what we typically do in our day-to-day lives to complete an online task, it’s very rare we start with one tool and finish with one tool without ever going anywhere else. We, you know, even if we’re just writing a Word document, chances are we pop over to our browser and then we go to however many sites and we use sometimes we’re looking at a video and then you know I mean we do this stuff all the time and we move from one environment to the other one platform to another and we don’t expect them to be you know integrated you know super tightly in the seamless way like they’re all just one thing but one thing why I think that post is really great is I mean Anne-Marie’s actually implemented a lot of the NG DLE type principles and use this specification called the Learning Technology Interoperability Specification, which is very promising. And we want to do more of it here. She makes some really good points as somebody who’s actually done it. And one thing she points out is if you do this stuff too much you end up with a real nightmare of maintenance over time. Because anytime one component changes you’re essentially creating ripple effects through all the interconnected systems. So integration is one of those things that isn’t just a motherhood statement I would suggest. 

It’s something, again, you got to make a decision, how important is this to your needs? I think this one from Lori is important. 

How do you deal with change management? There’s all these changes here and they’re fine when they’re skunk work things and nobody cares and most people don’t even see them. But once you get out to, you know, the masses, we have over 40,000 people using our learning management system at UCalgary. So any change there, even if you think it’s trivial, affects some people severely. 

There’s new interface about to be released for D2L and literally it’s a style sheet change that makes it whiter and the changes the font and they move the position of one of the buttons and I came back from their conference I think it was almost two years ago saying great we’re going to click the checkbox and be done with it and I was talked out of it by our IT department said do you realize the support load that’s going to get we can’t just do it right now we have to time it right okay so pause we’ll wait until after then the next break was actually almost a year later and then we looked at it and realized, well, there’s all a support documentation and people have built screenshots and videos and all these kinds of things showing people how to use stuff and they’re now invalid because they’re based on the old design and oh, I have to be rebuilt. And so it turned into a multi-year project, probably tens of thousands of dollars, hopefully not more than that, my God, in people’s time to document what resources need to be rebuilt and who uses what and how’s the for literally what looks like a style sheet change. Um, so I, in my previous life as a tech developer, I would have just hit the button, boom, we’re live, deal with it. Now that I get the, I rate emails from people, oh, you broke my thing because the button is four pixels to the left and I have no idea what to do with that. It makes you pause and you think, well, do we really want to do that? And part of me kind of hates that there is that sort of hesitation to make a change for something, because it’s going to annoy somebody enough that they’re going to write an email to the provost to complain about their pixel there, the button is now four pixels over and it’s a different shade of blue and they have to retire now because they can’t deal with that change. Literally, we had somebody threaten that I have to retire because of this. 

Crazy, but it’s stuff you have to deal with at, at scale of these these tools. 

That was an eye opener. 

So yeah, that having to pause and hesitate about this stuff was something I would have never predicted in my, my early days of let’s just build something, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. And now it’s, oh, who’s who’s going to be affected by this. 

And so there is instant institutional change management plan, there’s communication strategies, there university newsletter articles about it, there’s meetings, there’s presentations for a style sheet change. 

And that’s, that’s what life is now. Well, I think, Darcy, it’s good that you talk about all those, like the communication strategy. How do you overcome that idea of the resistance? And you talked about it earlier about, you know, the teaching, you know, getting people to adopt things early. It’s like you workshop it and then you continue to build all that documentation around everything. So I guess that would be one thing, like, in your experience, and Brian, jump in. how do you get, you know, over that resistance piece? No. 

I’m still figuring that one out. It comes down to trust. I mean, people are irate about stuff because they don’t trust the university. They don’t trust the process. They’ve been burned before. So they think, oh, here comes another change. It’s being forced on me. Here we go again. This is going to suck. And there’s that hesitation and distrust. And when you come from the place of distrust, any change is a major, is a big deal. So the big thing is building a sense of trust, having a community, having people brought sort of into the fold and yes, we’re in this together and we’re not doing this to you, we’re doing this with you. And it’s just software, it’s not gonna kill anybody. And you’re gonna be okay after the style sheet changes. So that’s that sense of trust and engagement and that’s the big part. And we do it just we go out to each faculty and we work with instructors and they tell their friends and so on and so on um, that’s the big thing getting out of that that that place of distrust and it’s hard because As academics work for many years they they learn And they’ve got a memory And if they remember the last time something went off the rails and they got screwed because this didn’t work And they looked like an idiot in front of the class Um, and that’s not going to happen again And so yeah, trust is absolutely key I think no matter how many focus groups and prototypes and evaluations, you can spend a year doing that. There’s still somebody who is missed, and they are going to be irate by whatever change you make. And you have to be okay with that. How do you deal with that? How do you reach out with that? And make them feel loved, and they’re part of the community, and it’s okay. That’s the key, not fixing it so that there are changes in there, and they can use the old-fashioned. At least I got an email the other day, they wanted somebody, they wanted us to go back to Blackboard because they liked it better. We’re not doing that, but let’s go have coffee and talk and what are the actual issues and how can we do that differently in whatever tool or maybe it’s not even about technology, there’s a tirade about something, they don’t feel valued. So I’ll go and have coffee, I’ll sit and talk with them and then they’re okay and they’re still not loving the tool, it’s not about the tool, it’s about being involved and everything comes out of that.