More delight
I heard on Friday (as did all ALs at the Assembly pre-meeting), that the AL representative structure is to get a very visible and central presence on the Walton Hall campus, in the form of its own offices, meeting rooms and hotdesking area for visiting AL reps.
This puts us - and ALs generally - at the heart of the OU, and no one should have an excuse in future not to know how to find us.
Sounds as though this will all be up and running by the autumn.
Absolutely delighted to hear today that the university has found extra money and ALs serving on region/nation committees will now be paid an attendance allowance.
Many thanks to the Vice Chancellor and the Director Students for reviewing this issue.
This should allow us to attract lots of interest from high calibre ALs - and should also remove some of the barriers to close collaboration between region/nation committees and the new AL Assembly.
Great news.
I'm thinking aloud here, trying to sort out my understanding of the current consultation on CDSA (Career Development and Staff Appraisal) and the AL Illustrated Role at http://www.open.ac.uk/tutors/employment-info/pages/salary-and-benefits/assimilation-communication.htm
Individual ALs are invited to comment and there are structured forms to help us do so.
It's very important that we, as ALs, do comment, for it is on the basis of these documents that I think our actual pay and conditions under the new contract are likely to be worked out.
The AL role has already been agreed, and it is on that basis that AL positions have been put on a grade 7 scale, ie. the AL role has been used to decide that our job is worth £120 per day rather than, say, £60 per day.
The AL illustrated role which we are invited to comment on, shows how the AL role might be implemented, and ultimately what the workload might be. It's the document that will inform a decision about whether an AL job takes 30 days a year or only 10 days a year.
The CDSA process is important for two reasons. It might, ultimately, enable progression onto discretionary points on the salary scale and any other bonuses. It is also, importantly, the pre-requisite the university said it needed in order to be able to abolish the retirement age. On the latter, the ALC Officers were very encouraged to hear the Vice Chancellor say that he is absolutely committed to abolition, and that we are still on track to do so in 2011 during a meeting we had with him on Wednesday.
After a hectic couple of weeks with the "Talk to the candidates" forum open - more hectic for Clare than for me - I'm extremely grateful to Clare for all the work she did moderating the forum, she deserves a medal - voting has opened and things have gone ominously quiet.
Does this mean no-one received their voting email? We're aware of several who did not, and are investigating. Any AL who did not receive an email invitation to vote on 31 March should contact cs-elections@open.ac.uk
Or does it just mean that people are enjoying an Easter holiday (and some fine weather at last). After several days snowed in in Braemar just before Easter, I can sympathise.
Or does it mean that everything is going so smoothly that no one needs to say anything?
We've got a great lot of candidates for the AL Assembly elections - so that's my first worry over.
Next major challenge is to get people to vote. It's really important we have a good turnout in the elections, otherwise we won't have credibility with the university.
We've got a forum going where people can ask questions of the candidates and find out about them, so they can decide who to vote for - but at present it's largely full of candidates talking to each other, with few disinterested ALs in there.
Anything people can do to encourage others to vote - or ideas for things we can do - greatly appreciated.
Controversy is raging over the pros, cons, ethics, impact on the student experience, of recording elluminate tutorials.
By coincidence, in my day job, my attention has just been drawn to a paper on the value of students watching recordings of tutorials.
It's a limited study of physics, in a non-OU context, so needs further research. But, if it proved to be applicable it would imply that:
1). Students gain little simply from viewing recordings of elluminate tutorials
2). Students who do not wish to be recorded and hence are debarred from asking questions and participating actively in elluminate tutorials gain little from the tutorial
3). A more effective use of elluminate would be to use it to enable two students collaboratively and actively to watch a video of a good f2f tutorial undertaken with consenting students. To be effective this would, I think, have to be built into the tuition model at course production stage.
Be interesting to see whether this gets picked up and followed up by the OU.
Hooray! got my paper submitted - only 3 weeks late. A great relief.
Now for something more fun - a Peebles case study for A825 day school, based on work my PhD student did a few years ago.
After a frantic day on Friday, ironing out glitches with the new AL representation website as it went live, things have quietened down, and all is going smoothly - fingers crossed.
Nominations for the Assembly open today. I've spent my spare time in the last several days drafting nomination forms, clear (I hope) guides to the election process, encouraging letters, etc, etc, as well as working through the implications for region/nation committees and what they do now.
In between I've been for a gruelling walk along the Fife coast (lots of cormorants, eider ducks, oyster catchers), to clear my head, and frantically trying to write an overdue paper on learning design that I've promised for a journal - oh yes, and planning A825 day school activities.
ALC approved the changes to the AL Representative Structure by a very narrow majority last Saturday - a huge relief as I think without the change the structure would have withered away fairly soon.
But what was I letting myself in for? Huge amounts of work getting the new structure off the ground.
Watch this space.
The AL representative structure has, I think, operated for too long as an almost secret society. You couldn't find out easily how it worked until you were in it - and then it operated on an apprenticeship model that worked better in some regions/nations than in others.
We're trying to rectify this now in a number of ways. One immediate step is to trial an induction afternoon for new reps on the Friday afternoon at the start of the AL national conference and I've just been thinking about what would be the most useful things to include here. We're doing a campus tour, among other things, so what would people most like to see on the campus?
On a much more ambitious scale, we are trying to review and revise the entire representative structure, so it is much easier to get into it, so we can make much better use of all the AL expertise that is out there, and so that we discuss with ALs much more widely what their views and experiences are. This will be discussed at AL national conference and then publicised more widely among all ALs, before AL Committee makes the final decision about whether to go for it or not, in February.
More later
I've just been setting up a blog, twitter, etc for the AL National Conference that is coming up 20-22 Nov. Unfortunately the title is a misnomer since the conference itself is open only the the 130-odd members of the region/nation AL panels. But this year we are making an effort to feed as much as possible of what we do out to the wider AL community, enabling them to take part.
So, there's a conference blog and a twitter stream and we are asking any conference participants who blog, twitter, upload photos, etc elsewhere to tag their items with #alnc09 so that we can retrieve and pull them together easily, and so that everyone can see them.
Like everyone else, just testing the system now we've got it. Having to know the url for others blogs is a real pain, but hopefully blogroll will soon start disseminating the links.
Thanks a lot to Hilary for all the chasing she's done to work out what is going on - and what needs putting right.
I contribute bits to blogs all over the place. Never felt the need for one of my own though, so don't know how much I'll keep this up.
Check out the ALC blog though for infrequent updates of what ALC has been doing - infrequent because we do as much as we can cope with as volunteers.
See also Caledonian Academy blog for my day job (not all by me)
What I want to know is whether rss feeds for blogs visible only within the OU get out past SAMS. If so it'll be a first. This is the excuse I've been given when I've suggested putting rss feeds on tutorhome pages, and rss doesn't work on ALC blog.
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