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Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about something called the new tutor contract. On 22 March 21, I received an email that contained the following words: “we have concluded that we will not be ready to implement the contract changes this October. Migration of ALs to the new Terms & Conditions will therefore be rescheduled”. 

The aim of this long blog is to present a staff tutor’s perspective. It is a perspective that is very nuanced, since we’re in the middle of everything. It has been written with the intention of sharing some important background to a number of different groups of staff: senior leaders, tutors, members of the project, central academics, union members, and anyone else who would like to learn more about what has happened. 

I’ve written a number of blogs about it, I’ve participated in some of the negotiation groups from the inside, and I’ve been to a whole host of briefings and updates. I’ve taken a keen interest in it because I think it is important and right that the university employs its associate lecturer staff on permanent contracts. I’m also interested in how it is going to be implemented, so I can do my best to support tutors and staff tutors.

At the time of writing, the “word on the street” is that the new date for the introduction of the contract might be August 2022. To get there, there is a lot that needs to be done, but there isn’t (yet) a clear vision of how we will get everything achieved by that date.

This blog isn’t a reflection of any negotiated position, and isn’t a reflection of any university policy or plan. Instead, it is intended to share some thoughts and personal opinions about what the next steps might be and highlights some of the clear and obvious challenges that remain. It is also a small chapter of a much longer story.

To make any progress, there needs to be a substantial reset of the project. It needs to be recognised that we’re not just talking about change; we’re talking about institutional reform. It is going to be really important to thoroughly understand the work and role of staff tutors and AL services. Also, the solution is not as “simple” as implementing an IT system since we’re talking creating new human activity systems. A sobering point is that the suggested date of August 22 is already optimistic; we need to get a move on if we stand any chance of making anything work.

For the time pressured, here are a list of ten things that need to be done. Each of these points are expanded in the article below:

1. Let’s go bottom up, not top down
2. Separate negotiation from implementation 
3. Uncover those requirements
4. Embed change agents within schools
5. Be practical, be incremental
6. Make things meaningful
7. Look at planning, piloting and risk
8. Structural simplicity and transparency
9. Don’t be afraid to build
10. Honest communication

Previous articles

In my first blog on this subject, New AL contract: Requirements workshop and C&C discussion, I summarised a very early attempt to “try to figure everything out”. A group of Computing and Communications staff tutors got in a room together in Manchester in January 2019 and asked ourselves: “so, how on earth can we make this thing work?” The truth of the matter is that we didn’t get out of the starting blocks, but we identified some of the key questions that needed answers.

After this first workshop, C&C staff tutors set up some working groups to try to answer some of the questions we had identified. No one told us to do this. We set up the groups because we wanted to be as prepared as we could be when the new tutor contract was introduced, and almost all the staff tutors in the school participated. The groups considered different aspects of the contract and what we thought we needed. It is summarised in the blog Understanding the new tutor contract: C&C working groups, and we presented what we had done to our associate dean.

We’ve always been told that although the terms and conditions for associate lecturers are going to change, the terms and conditions of staff tutors (the line managers of associate lecturers) are not going to change. I’ve always appreciated that some aspects of our job are likely to change. Being a firm believer in the benefit of scenarios, I wrote another blog to try to figure out how the staff tutor might look under the terms of the new tutor contract: A day in the life of a future STEM staff tutor. 

Amidst all this activity, I’ve also found the time to study a couple of modules. One of the modules I studied was a dissertation module, which was about educational leadership and management. In this module, there were some really interesting sections about institutional change. I didn’t have to think too deeply before I could see the link between an academic discussion of change and the ongoing institutional updates from the new tutor contract team. I felt compelled to write a short blog about the theories of institutional change, emphasising the importance of middle leaders in facilitating change: Studying educational leadership and management. I found the papers about institutional change and middle leaders fascinating; almost as fascinating as Computing.

Understanding complexity

It’s important to take a moment to recognise the amount of complexity that exists within the university.

The university employs around 4k part time tutors. Each tutor will have a different work portfolio. Some tutors will teach on a single module. Other tutors, on the other hand, will have a rich portfolio of modules, and will also do a whole range of other activities, such as marking exams through to helping to write assessment materials. There are also practice tutors who work on the degree apprenticeship schemes. This complexity means that there will be as many variations of the new contract as there are tutors.

Since tutors can do many different things, they may also report to different line managers (who are called staff tutors). To make sense of all this, there are two different key roles that staff tutors carry out as part of the management element of their duties. There is the role of a tuition task managers (or TTMs). TTMs look after a tutor who may be teaching on a module (a tuition task). Secondly, there are lead line managers (or LLMs). LLMs oversee everything that a tutor does, carry out their appraisal, and provide references. There is another role, which is called a cluster manager, but I’m not going to go into that here, since that really would be confusing.

On top of all this, there’s another dimension of complexity, which is: staff tutors can do different things. In my school, they work on module teams, do research and outreach, write module materials, they get involved with employability schemes and educational technology infrastructure development, are postgraduate programme managers, and work closely with the student support teams. Also, the number of tutors that a staff tutor looks after can and does vary. In my school, we are expected to look after 54 tutors as a TTM, and we should line manage around 20 as a LLM. At the time of writing, I’m currently supporting around 60 tutor contracts across all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. 

I have the impression that things are different in different schools. In STEM, some of the Science schools are a lot smaller than the Computing school. In the Faculty of Business and Law, staff tutors are not called staff tutors at all. Instead, they have the title of student experience manager.

There’s also complexity within the curriculum. Just because I don’t have enough to do, I’m currently a student in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The introductory level 1 module A111 is very different (in terms of points, and structure) than TM111 in Computing. When you look up the levels, things are also very different too. Some schools have only undergraduate programmes, whereas others have postgraduate programmes and may also run degree apprenticeship schemes. 

It’s is also very clear that different modules apply different assessment strategies. Some use end of module assessments, some require written exams, and others use something called single component assessments and have an end of module tutor marked assessment. For some modules, the assessment marking fee is all bundled in with the salary, but this isn’t the same for other modules.

If you look a little bit further, there’s even more complexities that we need to be mindful of. Some modules may make extensive use of online discussion forums which require proactive and sensitive moderating, whereas other modules might not use very many discussion forums at all. There are also differences in teaching strategies. In non-pandemic times some engineering programmes need tutors to participate in face-to-face summer schools. Similarly, Computing networking modules had a series of compulsory face-to-face day schools that ran at university centres.

An important concept of the new tutor contract is to have a single line manager who has an oversight of all tutor’s work. To begin to move towards this ideal, it is essential to recognise that the reality is complex, messy and very interconnected. It is also important to recognise that everything is currently facilitated by people and personal relationships. To make the change to the new tutor contract, all the stakeholders that are linked to all aspects of a tutor’s workload need to be involved.

In a very early project meeting, I tried to make the point that the introduction of the new tutor contract isn’t just change; it is bigger than that. It is institutional reform. 

Reform takes time since there is a cultural dimension to it.

Recognising the inversion

Given all this complexity, it is useful to ask the simple question of: “how do things work at the moment?”

The answer to this is pretty straightforward: a tutor manages their own time and workload. 

If a tutor has capacity, and they see an interesting module, they might apply. They then might be shortlisted, interviewed, and then potentially be considered to be appointable, and then later offered a contract. Also, if they want to get involved in forum moderation, for example, they may respond to an expression of interest.

With the new tutor contract, everything is inverted. Rather than the tutor managing their own time and workload, the staff tutor becomes responsible for ensuring that the tutor’s time is used as effectively as possible by allocating them bits of work. This means that all the complexity that was previously described needs to be somehow understood and taken account of. That complexity also needs to be shared between fellow staff tutors within a school since they need to work together to solve common problems, such as tutor illness, marking appeals and student support issues. To make thing work, we need to create some form of “system” to collaborate and work with each other to make sense of all that complexity.

When I use the term “system”, I don’t mean a computer system. Instead, I mean a human activity system, of which there would be an information technology component. The humans we would interact with would include curriculum managers, colleagues from AL services, people services, and anyone else within the complex picture that was described above. What we have is a difficult problem to solve because it involves a lot of people, and a lot of information.

When considering the new tutor contract, it’s important to recognise an important inversion. Time management will shift from the tutor to the staff tutor, and this represents a fundamental cultural shift.

Imagining the next steps

At the time of writing, the work on the implementation of the new contract had paused since there was a recognition that the university would not be ready to make things work in October.

Another question I have been asking myself is: “if someone in the VCE asked me for my view about what they should do, how might I respond?”

As a starting point, and to facilitate further discussions, here are my suggestions:

1. Let’s go bottom up, not top down

One thing that I’ve realised is that top down change doesn’t really work when there are two factors at play: loads of complexity, and working with a rich community of colleagues who are free thinkers who really want to be involved. 

Staff tutors are smart people. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge. That experience and knowledge exists “on the ground” within the schools. They will be doing the work at the end of the day, so it is important to reach down to those grass roots.

2. Separate negotiation from implementation

The project team tried to negotiate their way to an implementation. It is right and proper that unions are involved in the negotiation of contract terms and condition, but the implementation of operational processes and system is substantially different. There isn’t any reason why the union need to be substantially involved (and I choose my words carefully here) in the gathering of detailed requirements. 

I’ve heard the argument “we couldn’t start the implementation because we were still negotiating” a number of times. This view doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The broad aims and principles of the contract are understood and published. All the time on the project has been used up for negotiation, and not implementation.  There is no reason why everything needs to be completely defined before the work that is needed to implement the contract could begin.

3. Uncover those requirements

In the January 2019 workshop which I referenced earlier, I spoke about using tools such as personas, scenarios and use cases as potential ways to start to uncover user requirements. Before even considering system requirements, it’s important to ask a simpler question: “what, exactly, is the work that staff tutors do?” It’s important to capture scenarios, to evaluate them, to write new ones, and to test them thoroughly because different staff tutor communities might understand similar things in slightly different ways.

A whole host of issues were uncovered during the February 2020 staff tutor new tutor contract, but these issues were not clearly shared, understood and resolved in a way that was clear or understandable. All this gives the sense “the project team” don’t really understand what staff tutors need to be doing to make the new tutor contract a reality. 

4. Embed change agents within schools

I hate the term “change agents” but at the moment I can’t come up with anything better. 

The existing project had a role that was called a “faculty rep”. The faculty rep had the unenviable job of being an interface between the faculty and the project team.  Our STEM faculty rep has done a very good job in helping a lot of staff tutors understand some of the fundamental challenges that need to be resolved. Structurally, however, four faculty reps isn’t enough people to facilitate complex strategic change when there are at least four hundred centrally employed university staff who are directly affected by those changes (I include AL services colleagues as well as staff tutors within this rough estimate of staffing numbers).

A proposal is to have someone within every school (or a part of a person within smaller schools) who help with activities such as gathering requirements, testing requirements, and sharing updates about how systems and tools will work. 

In response to queries about the lack of engagement by the project team, I’ve heard members of the project and colleagues from the union say: “we have had staff tutors in all the negotiating groups”. That certainly is the case, but there is a fundamental difference between participating in a collective bargaining and negotiating structure, and having the need to actively uncover requirements, enact culture changes and help colleagues to understand new ways of working. 

The only way to effectively make bottom up change work, is to find a way to empower those communities that will be affected by those changes. A school rep (rather than a faculty rep), along with other stakeholder reps, may be the only way to do this.

5. Be practical, be incremental

Tutors and staff tutors will be making decisions, in partnership with each other, about what bits of work need to be done. These ‘bits’ might be module tutoring, exam marking, or a broad range of additional Tuition Related Activities (TRAs), as they are called. Effective decision making can only be facilitated by the provision of effective and accurate information. 

The idea is that every tutor will have a full time equivalent percentage, which relates to their salary. A bit of a tutor's FTE relates to TRA activities. The thing is, we currently have no way of knowing what that bit of time relates to. Subsequently, we have no idea about how to manage it.

The TRA bit of the FTE has been calculated by calculating an average of salary data over a period of three years. An average presents a summary; it doesn’t present the detail. What we need to make everything work is the detail of who has been doing what and when.

A practical suggestion is to separate out module FTE from TRA FTE, and find a mechanism to increase a tutor’s FTE over a period of time when substantial pieces of work are needed to be carried out. Rather than guessing what work people do (which is never a good thing to do), we should rely on real data. In the transition period, which could take a few years, tutors should be paid roughly the same for the same amount of work.

This approach gives us something else that is important: equity (in terms of making sure that work is fairly allocated between tutors), and transparency. 

6. Make things meaningful

One of my grumbles was about the first skills audit pilot. Tutors were essentially asked whether they would like to carry on doing the work that they were doing. The skills audit pilot that we were presented with wasn’t the systematic discussion about the skills, capabilities, and aspirations that I had expected. In January 2019, a question was posed that still seems to be unanswered: “will tutors be able to see their skills audit summary through TutorHome?” I still don’t know whether this is the intention of the project team. 

During the course of last 18 months, a project group was set up to develop training procedures to help staff tutors to understand how to make the new tutor contract work. This is an important piece of work, and this is something that certainly needs to be looked at. The problem was that the project group were trying to define training for procedures which hadn’t yet been defined, since staff tutor work practices had not yet been defined, since requirements had not been uncovered and analysed. We couldn’t be trained in systems that had not been defined.

Some parts of the project have been baffling. The workload planning group wasn’t really about workload. Instead, it was about FTE. There was a “support solutions group” that was, actually, a group about tools and systems. 

Substantial bits of work should always have meaning, and should make sense. It is important that any overseeing board takes the time to question the activities that have been set up and are taking place. 

7. Look at planning, piloting and risk

Towards the end of the first staff tutor conference about the new tutor contract that took place in Leeds, I asked a really simple question: “what are the next steps?”

There needs to be a clear project plan that has a set of interim deliverables, and that plan needs to be published widely. That plan isn’t expected to be perfect, since change is difficult, but it needs to offer more detail than has been offered by the previous plans that have been published by the project team. 

Piloting is important, and I think this is partly recognised. I have heard rumours of a second “skills audit pilot” that had been taking place in the Faculty of Business and Law, but I have no idea what it is all about. One thing I am certain about is that the curriculum in FBL is likely to be very different from the curriculum in other schools and faculties. Piloting ideas and concepts is obviously important, since they smoke out issues, and develop understanding within the community of staff that are involved within a pilot. Pilots should be embedded within a complex change programme to ensure that stakeholders are involved.

One of the obvious criticisms that can be levelled at the current project team is the lack of clear risk planning. With every risk, there should be a mitigation. Although it seems like it, August 22 isn’t a long way away when we’re dealing with complex change. 

An important question that needs to be asked early on should be: “how are we going to run everything if we don’t have access to the information systems that we need?” This “plan B”, whatever it might be, should be understood, designed and then piloted.

8. Structural simplicity and transparency

When I was on the union side of a negotiating group, I wasn’t quite sure about what I could say to whom about what. There was a high level group called AL NT, another group called ST NT, another group about FTE calculation, and another couple of groups which I don’t really know anything about. There were also two sides, a union side, and a management side. Meetings took place every two weeks, and there were always no less than ten people per group. 

Within those groups, I found myself repeating the words “engagement” and “requirements” many times. There is a fundamental issue at play here: the more complicated a structure, the more difficult it can be to actually get things done, and to get your voice heard. 

Communications between parts of the project need to be better for anything to work, and the whole project structure need to be simpler. When requirements are gathered, these should be made available for scrutiny. Transparency should be a principle that is adopted for the whole of the project. 

9. Don’t be afraid to build

The OU is a unique institution amongst higher education institutions. The new tutor contract is also likely to be unique amongst contracts that are used in the higher education sector. In one of the groups I was involved with, there was a general trend towards looking at “off the shelf” solutions to keep track of who does what and when.

Given the uniqueness and the complexity of everything, it is entirely plausible that an ideal off the shelf solution might not exist. Subsequently, it’s really important that the decision makers don’t rule out the need to develop a bespoke set of tools to help AL services and staff tutors if that is needed. The university has a bespoke version of a VLE and a bespoke student management system.

As suggested earlier, when considering systems, the project leaders should always remember that when the term “system” is used, it isn’t only used to refer to “information system” or “computer system”. The system needed to make the new tutor contract work is what is called a human activity system, of which IT will play an important part.

It’s also not only true that an IT system needs to be built, the project team need to take time to build understandings amongst all the different stakeholders, and build ways of working too. Drawing on my experience of tutoring on a third level Interaction Design module, it may also be a good idea to build prototypes too. 

10. Honest communication

Finally, a call for honest communication. 

A lot of the updates coming from the project team can be described as unrelentingly positive. Some of the messages that were being conveyed were substantially at odds with my own understanding of how everything was going. Some of the communications summarised work done rather than achievements gained and conveyed a false impression of success. Also, some of the email updates appeared to suggest (in my eyes) a lack of understanding of many of the complexities that were sketched out at the start of this blog. 

If there is going to be progress, communications from everyone who has a vested interest in the new tutor contract needs to be considered and measured. There also needs to be a degree of honest directness. It is also important to listen to those who may have something to contribute, and to thoroughly consider the perspectives of others.

Final thoughts

Given how important tutors are to the success of the university, there is something very wrong if the institution isn’t able to give tutor colleagues permanent ongoing contracts which recognises their commitment and dedication. 

I have been concerned about the state of the project for some time. I think I have been concerned by some of the very important misunderstandings, or differences of opinion, that appear to exist. The first of these is the concept of: “we can’t implement whilst we’re still negotiating”, which doesn’t make sense given the extent of the change that is necessary. The second is a misunderstanding of the conception of “engagement”. Engagement within a negotiation structure isn’t the same as engaging with those who are at the sharp end of any change. Engagement and involvement must be substantial and continuous. Staff tutors sit within a confluence of complex relationships: with tutors, AL services, module teams, people services, and other stakeholders. All these groups need to be involved.

It’ll put it another way: there needs to be a substantial “reset” in the way that the project is run for it to have any chance of success in August 2022. As suggested earlier, in the complex world of IT system procurement or development, this isn’t much time at all. Also, we need more than an IT system to make everything work. Meanwhile, systemic institutional reform that needs to take place. We have, after all, a profound inversion of working practices to figure out.

A significant concern is that staff tutors don’t yet have an understanding of how they will be able to practically manage module teaching under the terms of the new contract. Given that we don’t have a thorough or detailed understanding of how to make things work for modules, the idea of managing tuition related activities with incomplete information, having no real understanding about how to deal with that incomplete information, fills me with fear. There needs to be systematic uncovering of requirements, and the topic of the TRAs need to be thought through very carefully.

I want to support tutors (and students) by allocating work in a way that is traceable, transparent and fair. By working with AL services, I also want to ensure institutional and organisation efficiency by ensuring that that public money and student fees are used and spent in a way that is appropriate and justifiable. 

I don’t want to be in a situation in 2022, where I again receive the words “we have concluded that we will not be ready to implement the contract changes”. There’s a lot of work to be done, and a lot of hard decisions to be made before we get anywhere close to a workable solution. 

As an institution, we need to get a move on.

Acknowledgements

Many of the concepts that have been expressed in this blog are not my own, but have emerged through a process of extensive collective discussion of these issues of a period of many months. I would like to personally thank staff tutor colleagues within two groups, the cross faculty M-21 group, and the C&C staff tutor community. A personal thank you to colleagues who took time out of their busy day to proofread this very long article.

Updates

This blog was updated on 27 July 21, to simply some of the wording used to express the management of TRAs (or HTRAs, as they are sometimes known). Also updated 8 September 21, where the point about an alternative way of working and the importance of piloting was clarified.

In the October 2018 edition of the associate lecturer newsletter, Snowball, I wrote the following paragraph: “When I got to the beginning of October, I sat down after a hard day of emailing and suddenly thought: “Is this what burnout feels like?” I had caught myself looking at my Outlook inbox and couldn’t find the mental energy to open up and process another email.”

In 2015, I wrote the following in a blog post that reflected on the closure of the university’s regional centres: “I’m a pretty young guy. I can deal with stuff. I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for stress, but I’m beginning to suffer from change fatigue. I’m beginning to get tired and have started to think ‘what have I got to do now?’ and ‘when will thing settle down to a steady state?’  The issue of change fatigue was something that was mentioned by another colleague.  I’m feeling the strain, and I’m getting tired.”

I had another moment like this a couple of weeks ago, but it had a slightly different character. Rather than feeling unable to open up yet another email, I realised that I was becoming increasingly grumpy. There was another aspect to my grumpiness: I also felt a little ‘flat’ emotionally. 

I then realised that I had spent three very busy and very full days at the OU campus (I’m a home worker, so it’s always a bit of an ordeal to get to the head office), plus I had worked a whole Saturday on a quite demanding TM356 Interaction Design teaching event, that also took place on campus. In between all those days, I was working at home, on my own; just me and my laptop. I suddenly realised that my “very busy week” might have had influenced my grumpiness.

I then realised that I was in need of a holiday.

Staff tutor session

On 26 February, I went to the usual STEM staff tutor meeting. The first part of the meeting was all about general university updates: new colleagues, updates about the new tutor contract, clarification about the university strategic objectives, and something about the new IT systems replacement. The second bit was different; it was all about mental health.

The second part of the meeting was facilitated by Stephen Haynes who is from a charity called Mates in Mind which has its origins in the construction industry. 

Stephen presented what was described as a ‘whistlestop well-being tour’. He began by asking us some questions: “how are you doing?”, “why don’t we talk about mental health?” and “what do we mean by mental health?” 

A simple point was made that: we all have mental health, and it’s important to think of things in terms of ‘mental fitness’. A point I noted down was: one can have a diagnosed mental health condition but can have good mental health (which was a theme that came out of another session I attended in London, which I'll mention later on).

I made some notes about something called a ‘stress response curve’, which illustrated the difference between stretch (which is a good thing), and strain (which is a bad thing). If there’s a lot of strain over a period of time, then there’s a risk of burning out.

Stephen gave us some facts: suicide in the education profession is higher than the national average, 300k jobs are lost every year due to mental health issues and 44% of all work related illnesses are due to mental health issues (unfortunately I don’t have the reference for this, but it might well have been in Stephen’s presentation). Also, 1 in 5 of us are anxious most of the time.

I noted down 5 ways (or actions) that can contribute to positive well-being. These were: connect with people, be active, give, keep learning, and take notice (ironically, I didn’t note down what ‘take notice’ means, but I assume it means to take the time to be aware of ones surroundings).

I was also interested to hear that one of the biggest drivers of employee well-being is having a good line manager. This point made me stop for a moment: I’m a line manager.

As well as being a line manager, I’m also a home worker. I made a note of a set of potentially useful tips: consider your posture and work environment (my posture needs to be better), don’t multi-task (I try not to, but there are always distractions; I need to put my mobile phone in the other room when I really need to get on with some ‘thinking work’), use a web cam when you participate in remote calls (this way I’m forced to not work in my pyjamas and be scruffy), take the time to check in with others (I miss my colleague Sue, who has recently retired), look out for each other, look out for yourself, and take the time to listen. 

Like many institutions, the university has something called an employee assistance programme or scheme; telephone support that any employee can access at any time. I have to confess that I’ve never used it. Apparently, counsellors that support these programmes can readily say: “if only I had spoken to him or her sooner”. I never used that service since “I never thought I was that bad”, but looking back, I certainly feel that there was a point in my life where I could have benefited.

One of the biggest take away from that whole session was that phrase: “if only I had spoken to him or her sooner”.  The assistance service is there to be used, and there is no reason that I shouldn’t use it if I feel stressed or upset, or down, or anxious, or emotionally “flat”. Not even a misplaced sense of ‘masculine pride’ or sense of ‘coping’ should prevent me from chatting to someone. This, I felt, was a very helpful take away point.

Resources

After the session, I remembered that I had seen a couple of resources on the OpenLearn website. One is called Work and mental health, and another has the title: Exercise and mental health. 

A few years back, a Mental health awareness day (OU blog) event was held in the London regional centre. During this event, the theme of mental well-being was discussed. I also remember being shown a video called I had a black dog, his name was depression (YouTube, World Health Organisation), which also featured in our Staff Tutor session. I remember the biggest take away point from that day was the importance of choosing to do things, or to participate in events that are positive for mental well-being.

This takes me onto the final resource, a blog summary about a Home working workshop, that was organised by HR (OU blog). One of the main messages I took away from this event was pretty stark (I’m not going to tell you what that message was, but I’ll mention that it is in the section that is about setting and management of boundaries). 

The second take away message was simple, pragmatic and helpful. It was: ‘make sure that you plan your own down time’. Thinking back to my opening paragraphs, I think this is something that I need to get better at doing.

This post is a personal summary of a two day staff tutor conference that took place at Horwood House, Little Horwood between 5 and 6 December 2017. I’m blogging it for three reasons (1) so I can remember what CPD I’ve done when I have to do my appraisal, (2) it will help me to remember some of the important discussions that took place, and (3) it might be randomly helpful to someone!

Introduction

The conference began with a session by the outgoing associate dean of regions and nations, Steve Walker, a fellow staff tutor from the School of Computing and Communications. Steve presented a sobering description of some of the challenges that had to be addressed over the previous three years: the closure of the university regional centres, the introduction of a new tuition approach called the group tuition strategy (GTP), and the merger of faculties to create a new set of schools. A further change on the horizon is, of course, the potential introduction of a new associate lecturer contract.

Since the last staff tutor conference, I am now a home worker, there is a new student support team (SST) which is based in Manchester, and there is a venue management team that is based in Wales, and a system called the Learning Event Management system (LEM) which is (I understand) less than ideal. Also, AL development has been reconfigured (or, should I say, centralised) to create an entirely new way of working. 

Looking back to when I started in this role back in 2010, geography isn’t as important as it used to be. Support for students is instead organised in terms of curriculum teams as opposed to regional support teams. This means that the connections within schools have been strengthened and that there are more opportunities for activities such as associate lecturer development.

A number of important external drivers were emphasised:  the part time student market is receding due to government policy and fees, the student demographic is changing (they are getting younger), there are new entrants into the HE market and this means increased competition, the government has introduced the degree apprenticeship and the apprenticeship levy. There is also the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and even talk about something called the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF). There has been a lot going on!

Student’s first transformation

During this period the university has defined a ‘student’s first strategy’ and has realised that it needs to address a potential income deficit due to the fall in part time numbers. In response, the ‘student’s first transformation’ programme has been set up. The programme aims to achieve a number of things: increase student retention, increase student progression and increase student satisfaction scores, whilst at the same time saving 100 million pounds (a figure that has been chosen by senior management).

To make these changes faculties have been asked to review their curriculum and other divisions of the university will be asked to review their working practices. These practices will be defined in something called a new ‘university operating model’ and the university will create a new ‘teaching framework’. Members of the university will be asked to participate in project groups and teams. Change, of course, has its own costs.

One phrase I regularly hear that is connected to the transformation programme is ‘digital by design’. A personal view is that I’m not quite sure exactly what this means; I know that students study in different ways using different technologies. Whilst I’m technologist, I’m a great believer in the usefulness of printed materials. On the point of ‘being digital’, the JISC Building digital capability project was mentioned (JISC).

During this part of the conference another point that I noted down was the term ‘sustainable academic communities’. Again, I’m not quite sure exactly what this refers to, but I did make a note of the principle that perhaps associate lecturers should be more involved and connected to schools. This discussion about associate lecturers takes us to the next part of the conference, which was about debating the purpose of tutorials.

Purpose of tutorials

Three staff tutors were asked to present perspectives about tutorials. The perspectives were: face to face tutorials, online tutorials, the use of pre-recorded tutorials and peer tutorials. I began by talking about face to face tutorials.

Face to face tutorials

Face to face classes, in my opinion, are the best and most effective way to teach. Here are some reasons why:

1. What really matters in education is, of course, people. Face to face tuition is all about putting student’s first for the simple reason that technology doesn’t get in the way.
   
2. Face to face means that learning is personalised to individual students or the group of students who are attending a tutorial.
   
3. Tutors can ‘see’ the effect of their actions; they can see the learning that takes place. To assess the effectiveness of their learning tutors can quickly ask questions, and this allows them to correct and develop understandings.
   
4. In adult learning, students can themselves become teachers. Students can arrive at class with significant and relevant real-world experience that can be discussed within the class. In some ways, students are their own resources. A skilled tutor can help to make connections between different students and topics.
   
5. Face to face gives tutors and teachers opportunities to innovate and to try new things out since they can more directly and readily understand what students feel comfortable with. Tutors can more easily facilitate role play events, facilitate discussions and create tasks that make use of the physical space of a tutorial room.
   
6. In a face to face session, a tutor can easily see if something is wrong; they can pick up on blank expressions and uncomfortable body language.
   
7. Face to face tutorials benefit all students, irrespective of whether students attend the sessions. The reason for this is simple: a tutor or teacher has to have a good command of their material. 
   
8. Following on from the above point, students will more readily question or challenge tutors during face to face sessions, helping themselves to understand how the teaching materials can be understood from different perspectives.
   
9. Face to face tutorials are real in a way that other methods are not; tutors can offer direct and personal encouragement to students.
   

I understand that there are some debates within the university about the cost of certain types of face to face tutorials, since they represent a significant proportion of the tuition budget. During this session I argued that, from an educational perspective, the university can’t afford not to provide face to face tuition.

Online tutorials

The second presentation about tuition events was by Diane Butler from the School of Health, Life and Chemical Sciences. Diane said that online tutorials, like face to face sessions, help students to understand module materials, allow students to interact socially with tutors and other students and to develop skills. Online sessions allow tutors to provide tailored support and, when travelling is difficult, help to alleviate a sense of isolation.

Diane also highlighted some of the challenges: online sessions can very lend themselves to be centred upon PowerPoint presentations, and given the complexity of driving online sessions, tutors can easily rely on the simplest tools. A common issue (and one that I regularly hear of when speaking to tutors) is that students are very reluctant to use microphones. It is a rare session that tutors present a series of activities; it can also be difficult to fully appreciate the learning needs of students.

An important point was that online tutorials don’t easily lend themselves to constructivist learning. During Diane’s presentation, I made the note: ‘we put our tutors in an environment where it makes it difficult’, and ‘[there may not be] much benefit to watching the recordings versus attending live’. A point was that perhaps the module team ought to spend more time creating recordings.

Another point was: ‘we place an unrealistic burden on our tutors to facilitate group work’, and that ‘we need to take online teaching to the next level’.

Pre-recorded tutorials

Hayley Ryder from the School of Mathematics and Statistics shared her experience of creating pre-recorded tutorials for a whole module cohort. An interesting point that Hayley made was ‘students like me to make mistakes’; this can share something about what really happens when people ‘do mathematics’. By exposing the challenges that accompanying studying maths, and demonstrating things that are ‘actually hard’ may encourage students to adopt a growth mindset: if the lecturers make mistakes, then it’s okay that I make them too!

My understanding was that the module team might have prepared a set of recordings once and then rolled them out for different presentations, but this wasn’t happens: new recordings are made every presentation; different people and different cohorts get stuck on different things. 

Hayley’s videos were fun and personable; her presentation got me thinking.

Peer tutorials

The final presentation was by Katherine Leys who is from the School of Life Health and Chemical Sciences. Peer tuition and peer support is mentioned in the new teaching framework. Peer tutorials is all about having students teach each other. Examples of these might be a group of students working together to plan an experiment in an online room or a forum. To facilitate these discussions, students might adopt roles, such as leader, deputy leader and so on, but tutors do need to mediate and some students will not be able to take part, perhaps due to the need to make reasonable adjustments to take account of disabilities or impairments.

Supporting staff tutor practice

Staff tutors offer support to associate lecturers, module teams and students. An interesting question to ask is: what can we do to help to support ourselves and fellow staff tutors? Maggie King, Staff Tutor in the School of Engineering and Innovation began this session by saying that the ‘changes to our jobs have been monumental’. In some respects, our job has changed from being a job that was primarily about people (and our academic discipline), to a job that is increasingly about administration.

We were asked a question: what could we do to make things better? Some suggestions included: the need for further staff tutor staff development, and opportunities for further sharing of practice, perhaps on a monthly basis or at different ‘regions’ or ‘regional areas’ (which could be, potentially, booked and organised through the venue management system). A personal reflection is that constant and effective communication between each other is the only way that we can continue to work well and understand the changes that are emerging through the university.

External Engagement

The title of this session was: ‘it’s good to get out’. It was facilitated by Matt Walkley, Staff Tutor from the School of Computing and Communications. Matt posed three questions that guided group discussions: what external engagement have you done? What external engagement should we be doing or be doing more of? And, what actions can we commit to?

A personal reflection was that I have always struggled to understand what was meant by the term ‘external engagement’; I was always under the impression that it had a more formal definition than it had. I was imagining external engagement as sets of targeted and strategic activities that can be used to help gain insights that could feed into module production, or to make contacts with individuals within organisations that could explicitly benefit from learning can be presented through OU programmes or modules. Although all these things do fall under the topic of external engagement, they are more directly aligned to the more formal concept of ‘knowledge exchange’.

External engagement can, as I understand it, broadly mean ‘getting out there’ to make contact with people to help us learn more about our subject and also to raise the profile of ourselves and the university. In some respects, being an external examiner and visiting the occasional British Computer Society event both represent different types of external engagement.

I learnt that external engagement is an official part of our contract. This means that we can allocate between 3 and 5 days into our work plan for external engagement activities (although there was some debate about exactly how many days we might have available). A point was if we can align our own personal and professional interests to that of our School and Faculty, then so much the better.

Another point I learnt was that each school has its own external engagement officer. I had to ask who the officer for my school was. This, in turn, made me realise that since staff tutors are scattered across the UK, the staff tutor body is at an advantage when it comes to engaging with national initiatives. A thought is that it is up to schools to develop and apply an interesting external engagement strategy; staff tutors are a resource that can be used, and used effectively (when we have the time, of course, and we’re generally pretty busy).

Improving retention and progression

The subtitle for this session that was held on the second day was: what can staff tutors do? Different staff tutors summarised different aspects of their experience. What follows is a very brief summary of each presentation.

U116 Environment: journeys through a changing world

Christine Pearson spoke about U116 and its ethos: the module assumes that students don’t know anything (that they are entirely new to the subject). I made a note that the students are changing, and also have a broad range of digital literacy skills. An interesting point was that some students were invited to take place in a focus group; a key point were that there was a need for induction or some kind of ‘fresher’s week’. Subsequently, a ‘getting started’ video was made, and students were sent a postcard to help them to get online. Another ‘bit’ was a numeracy podcast. An important point was that more and more students are doing concurrent study, which might be a side effect of the loan scheme.

Impact of presentation patterns

Bernie Clarke spoke about the impact of 22-week presentation patterns, where two modules are taught back to back (which is going to be the case for the new Computing modules TM111 and TM112). Using this presentation pattern, students gain credit at an earlier point in their studies. Another change is that in the engineering curriculum the teaching of mathematics is now done within the context of the subject, rather than students being asked to study a maths module that has been written by colleagues in a different school.

M140 early start initiative

Alison Bromley spoke about the effect of enabling students to start earlier on a module (another colleague, Carol Calvert gave a presentation about this same subject at a HEA Conference in April 2017). Over two hundred students accepted the opportunity to start M140 early. Those that started apparently really appreciated the opportunity for early tutor contact. I didn’t note down the detail of the impact, but I did note down that there was a difference between students who were studying for the very first time and students who had gained further experience through study.

Learning analytics and interventions

Nicolette Hapgood, chair of S111, reported that S111 applied an assessment approach that is known as ‘single component assessment’ (which is also going to be applied on TM111 and TM112), which means that the result is based on completing only assignments and not an end of module exam or assessment. Nicolette also described the availability of a data analytics tool that is now available to all module teams; this tool enables module teams to see differences in retention between different module presentations.

An important question to ask is: what is the main role of staff tutors when it comes to improving student retention and progression? An answer I’ve noted down is: our role is to support the associate lecturers who are closest to the students. We also represent an important link between the tutors and the module teams. Some other discussion points related to the knowledge management system that is used by the SST (which is used to offer study advice), the importance of reminding tutors about study support resources (there is an earlier blog about study skills resources), the importance of induction (which remains a mystery to me), and helping module teams to write and develop module materials. 

What will the REF mean to staff tutors?

I’ve forgotten who presented this final section of the conference, which was about the Research Excellence Framework.

There are some differences between the 2014 REF and the 2021 REF. One of the key differences lies in a statement that all staff who have significant time and resources to carry out research are to be submitted into the REF. There is a clear contractual difference between different categories of university staff: central academics are required to do research as a part of their contract, whereas staff tutors are ‘encouraged’. Subsequently, there is an ambiguity as to whether staff tutors will be included into the REF submission.

The reason why staff tutors are only ‘encouraged’ to do research is simple: workload. Time that we could have spent on research is spent supporting and developing associate lecturers and dealing with a whole host of administrative issues. Over the last year, it has more or less been a full time job keeping up with institutional changes, never mind doing institutional research.

My view is that there are two things that could be done to help to tick the research box: rather than doing discipline specific research, one possibility is to do scholarship and research into teaching and learning (since this fits closely with the role of a staff tutor), and secondly, if disciplinary research is important, another approach is to team up with central academic researchers. 

Reflections

This is the second or third staff tutor conference that I’ve attended. Typing everything up helped me to look back and to put a lot into perspective; a lot has changed. As mentioned at the start, the majority of the regional centres in England have closed and the way that tutorials are organised is now very different to how it was before. 

Put another way, I’m now doing a different job to what I was doing six years ago. I’m not going to pretend that homeworking is easy: it isn’t. 

This said, putting difficulties aside, there are some good things about this new way of working that many of us have had to embrace. A final thought is: it was really useful to spend time with so many colleagues; they are a pretty fabulous group of people to work with.

This blog post echoes a blog post I made in June 2015. The earlier blog was designed to accompany a presentation that I gave to the Computing and IT student support team, who were then based in Birmingham. Since I gave that talk, things have changed: the Birmingham office is just about to close and the functions have relocated to the Open University Manchester Student Recruitment and Support centre.

This post has a similar aim: to accompany a presentation that I gave to my student support colleagues to given them a feel for what Computing and IT staff tutors do. An important point is that every staff tutor has, of course, slightly different roles and responsibilities. Our exact mix of duties and responsibilities depends on our own expertise and interests. 

Another point is that every day can be very different. Here’s what I wrote last time: ‘the below narrative is a collage of aspects from different days. I’ve written it this way so give a sense of the diversity of things that we do. It’s not representative, since every day is different, but it does give a taste of what kind of things a staff tutor gets involved with’

Blitz the inbox

I wake up at any time between 7.00 and 8.00am; I often watch the travel reports whilst I eat breakfast. Now that I’m a home worker, I do find the travel reports strangely satisfying; I take a life affirming moment to reflect that I’m not in the middle of one of those huge snarl-ups on the north or south circular roads.

One of the first things I do is triage my inbox to decide what is important. The exciting thing about being a staff tutor is that anything could happen. I look after approximately sixty associate lecturer contracts (or tutor groups) across three different levels of study. To give an impression of scale, a tutor might (of course) have anything between 18 and 20 students. 

My key objective is to get to the messages that are important. So, glance through announcements about conferences and drainage issues. I delete messages that offer reminders about events in Milton Keynes, even though I’m not working in Milton Keynes. I shift-delete emails about fire alarms and electrical testing, and start to read messages, dropping updates about new procedures into folders (I don’t read things in depth if I don’t need to).

TM356 tutor telephone call

The first scheduled event was a chat with a TM356 tutor. Our tutor has been raising some really good points about the design of some online sessions; he’s also very experienced too. We shared views about how things are going on the module, and I make a note about some things that I need to bring to the module teams attention.

After our chat, I receive a delivery: it’s my new desk. To make things easier at home I’ve been reconfiguring my study area, and this has meant trying to find a bigger work area. I haul a big new desk into my lounge and start to puzzle about what the next step needs to be: my desk needs varnishing. I make a mental note.

It is a busy morning: I email a tutor about organising an additional support session, and then send off another email, this time to AL services in Manchester about transferring TMAs from one tutor to another due to a tutor being away on sick leave; a few days earlier I had found a tutor who was willing to cover.

AL CDSA

A Microsoft Outlook reminder popped up on my screen: it told me that there was an AL CDSA (appraisal) was due in fifteen minutes. I started to get everything sorted out: I opened up the tutor’s draft CDSA form that he had sent to me and the tutor’s ALAR report in a different screen (I have a two screen setup; my new desk will allow me to have three screens!) I familiarised myself with the contents of the ALAR report: turnaround times were very good, and the student surveys were very good (but like with so many student surveys, not many students had responded; this is always a problem that isn’t easily solved).

I get everything sorted out for the CDSA and give the tutor a call. He was great to talk to; he was committed and dedicated. I asked him what kinds of things I might be able to do to help him in his job, and told him to contact me if he has any suggestions about what AL staff development events might be useful.

Academic work

After a drop of lunch and a bit of TV it was onto the afternoon stint. Now that the key emergencies had been sorted out, it was time to get onto some academic work. For me, the term ‘academic work’ can mean a whole range of different things.

Over the last year and a half (or so, perhaps a bit longer) I have been a deputy editor for a publication called Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning (Routledge).

The journal has an interesting history: it began as an internal OU publication that shared information about ‘the OU approach to teaching and learning’ amongst its many staff. As time has moved on the journal’s remit has broadened, adopting a more international focus. It is still an Open University institutional publication but it is one that is more outward looking. It does, however, maintain its core focus, publishing research about distance education, technology and educational practice. 

I spend about an hour looking through the status of the submissions. I try to match up newly submitted papers to reviewers. One paper has been reviewed, and there is a positive ‘accept’, which is always good news. I read through the reviewer comments and have another quick read of the paper before making a final decision.

When this is done, I get onto editing a PowerPoint presentation for an online tutorial that is scheduled to take place later on in the day. I send a couple of pictures I have taken from my phone to my laptop, open up the PowerPoint, and then drop them in. I then convert the PowerPoint into the native OU Live format, and upload the new file as an OU Live preload, just to make I’m fully prepared.

I receive an email from an associate lecturer colleague that I’m working with. We’re working on a tutorial observation research project that is funded by something called eSTEeM, which is all about Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics education. My colleague has started work on a literature review and it looks brilliant. I look in my diary and I fix a time to have a chat about how things are going.

One of the things I really enjoy doing is AL development. I enjoy it because it’s great speaking to all the tutors. At the start of the month I ran a TM470 AL development session for purely selfish reasons: I am a tutor on TM470 and I wanted to run some tutorials, but I was also very aware that other TM470 tutors are significantly more experienced than I am. Put simply: I wanted to steal some of their good ideas, and a way to do this is to find a way to get tutors talking to each other. To do this, I ran an online staff development event.

After the event had finished, I had to do a couple of ‘wash up’ tasks. The first one was to send AL services in Manchester a list of associate lecturers who had attended. The second was to write a quick blog post about the key findings, and share that post to all tutors. I spent the next couple of hours going through the recording of the event, making notes, and putting everything into a blog summary of the TM470 AL development event (blog)

Evening

I try not to work evenings (or weekends) but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. It was one of those nights.

At the start of TM356 Interaction Design and the User Experience, some tutors were worried about an event called the ‘Hackathon’. The OU group tuition policy stipulates that each face-to-face event must have an online alternative. The thing is, the TM356 face-to-face Hackathon takes an entire day, and you can’t have an online equivalent of an event that starts at 10.30 and ends at 16.30; it just wouldn’t be humane!

With a blessing from the module team, I made the executive decision to create three ‘parts’ to a longer running online equivalent. After making this suggestion, I realised that I was going to making a substantial contribution to the pedagogic design of these ‘parts’. 

The tutors were asking, quite rightly: ‘how are these sessions going to work?’ 

I made a decision: showing and demonstrating a teaching idea would be significantly easier than writing a document that tutors would then have to try to decode. I had prepped a session, uploaded a session, and I worked with a tutor to deliver a session.

My fellow tutor had some brilliant ideas; we tried a ‘dialogic approach’ to teaching, which means: ‘we asked each other questions’. Listening to two voices is always, in my opinion, more fun than listening to one.

I’ve written this blog post to complement a presentation that I have given (or are just about to give!) at a faculty student support team meeting on 17 June. The aim of the presentation was to share something about what staff tutors do on a day to day basis. Since I thought that other people within the university might find the presentation (and this summary) of interest, I’ve decided to share it more widely.

I’ve written this summary from my own perspective; other staff tutors within the Open University (and in other faculties) are likely to have very different days simply because of how their role might be split between central academic work and regional academic work.  There will be, of course, common themes: working with module teams, working with student support teams and working with tutors (and doing research, when time permits!)  We also, of course, can and do speak with students.

If you’ve accidentally discovered this post, you might not know what a ‘staff tutor’ is.  It’s a job that is half academic, and half management.  The management bit means we manage tutors.  This management bit can and does directly feeds into the academic bit: we represent the interests of the tutors during module team discussions.  A staff tutor is what is known as a ‘regional academic’. We are currently spread across the whole of the UK, and we might do a whole bunch of different things, ranging from outreach, working with local industries (if time and opportunity permits), and playing a role in marketing events.  I’m based in the London region, and work for the MCT faculty (which is the faculty of Mathematics Computing and Technology).

Before I go on and describe ‘a day’, I should perhaps make a quite note on how I wrote this somewhat eclectic summary.  I began by writing what I got up to during an entire day.  I then thought about other important tasks that hadn't cropped up during the day that I sampled.  In fact, the below narrative is a collage of aspects from different days.  I’ve written it this way so give a sense of the diversity of things that we do.  It’s not representative, since every day is different, but it does give a taste of what kind of things a staff tutor gets involved with.

Blitz the inbox

I usually get up between 7 and 8 in the morning, depending on what I’ve got on.  If I’ve got to travel to Milton Keynes (the head office) I usually set my alarm clock for 6.30pm so I can comfortably catch a couple of trains.  Most of the time, however, I tend to work either at home, or in the Camden regional centre. On this day, I was up at around half seven, had some breakfast, and was in my study around three quarters of an hour later after quite a bit of early morning faffing about. 

When I boot up my laptop in the morning I usually have a single objective: to get though as many inbox messages as I can, as quickly as I can; this way I can figure out what is important and what is not.  I delete unnecessary calls for papers and scan through a ‘geek newsletter’ looking at new tech headlines.  I then delete a load of messages from Milton Keynes.  This might be: fire alarm notifications, messages about cakes and something about a pathway diversion. There is some stuff that I just don’t need to know about.

It’s important to keep everyone in the loop about what you’re doing, so one of the first things I did was to email our London faculty assistant to tell him what I’m doing.

I have a load of folders to manage my email load.  I see one email that corresponds to an on-going issue (a complaint).  I open up a folder that corresponds to the presentation of a module that I’m looking after, and I drag it in, to create a ‘virtual paper trail’ of an issue.

I see a university conference announcement that relates to an eSTEeM project.  This is a university scholarship initiative; I’m becoming increasingly interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning and I received a bit of funding to run my own project.  I read the conference call and wondered: could this conference be useful for dissemination?  Perhaps it might, but I then decided the timing didn’t work: I needed to concentrate on finishing the project which is about understanding the tutor experience of TT284.  I’ve got loads of other ideas; the challenge, of course, is trying to find the time.

One message reminds me that I need to send a message to all TU100 14J students.  One of my roles is to support the level 1 computing undergraduate tutors.  One thing that I’ve been doing is trying to encourage as many students to come along to the face to face tutorial sessions.  To do this I send them neat, concise messages about their day schools – this means they have all the information they need: information about the venue, information about travel information, and information about the room that they need to go to.  I compose a message to our faculty assistant, asking him to send it out later that day.

One email is interesting: can I help out with postgraduate events (because apparently I was some kind of IT curriculum programme lead?)  This was news to me!  I used to be a postgraduate computing student, but I’m certainly not a curriculum lead.  I sent an email to the regional marketing contact (who is always lovely) agreeing to run a ‘demo tutorial’ for any prospective students who might be interested, suggesting that we had a face to face chat when I’m next in the London office.

A colleague sent me a message that demands a response: Could I contribute to an associate lecturer’s CDSA (or, appraisal)?  Yes, I can!  He’s great!  But there isn’t much to say at the moment since he’s currently on a year out, but I’ll happily write a couple of paragraphs that might be useful.

One thing that I do in the region is help out with the associate lecturer development conferences which offer all tutors on-going professional development and training.  These events are very important: they give tutors an opportunity to meet each other, help tutors become familiar with new educational tools and approaches, and help the regional academics to more readily appreciate any of their worries and concerns. I’ve been helping to organise a session where the tutors would work with two actors who are running a session on dealing with difficult telephone calls.  After sending and receiving a couple of messages, it has been decided: the actors are going to invoice the region.

Releasing monitoring reports

It doesn’t seem like there are any really urgent crises to deal with this morning, so I decide to set another objective: to sign off all off on ALL the associate lecturer monitoring reports that have arrived into a faculty inbox over the last week or two. 

I’ve always held the view that signing off on monitoring reports is an important job.  I hold this view for two reasons: firstly, it’s a really useful way to get an understanding of the correspondence tuition that is delivered to students and secondly, as a tutor, I really welcomed the personal comments that used to come from my line manager.  Here’s what I do: I look at the comments of the monitor, and then the PT3, and then the script, and then add some ‘mediation’ comments.  Some monitoring for other staff tutors who are located in another part of the country has ended up in the London inbox, so I emailed it them a colleague who looks after those.

After a couple of hours of work, I decide it’s time for a well-earned cup of tea.

Academic stuff

During my break I idly browsed the BBC technology pages and discovered an article about a new computing initiative that uses something called the ‘Microbit’.  This takes me down the path of looking at (briefly) some of the history about the BBC’s computer literacy project that ran in the 1980s.  I start to read about someone (who is now a fellow of the royal society) who had helped design the ARM chip instruction set.  Since I often help at the London degree ceremonies in the Barbican I started to idly wonder whether this could be someone to put forward for an honorary degree. From my perspective, their contribution to computing is pretty clear.

I decide to park this, since I’ve already said I would recommend someone else to the honorary degree committee, but haven’t (yet) managed to find the time to write a biography of the candidate that I was thinking about.

A few weeks earlier I had attended an event that was run by the Higher Education Academy (HEA website).  The event was all about teaching introductory computing (personal blog), which is an interest of mine.  I also have an awareness that the faculty will soon start to consider how to replace TU100 My Digital Life (which will take a couple of years).  I’ve got this habit of writing ‘blog summaries’ so I can keep notes of interesting events and share these notes with colleagues.  I finally find the time to finish writing my summary, and I upload it to my personal OU blog after a bit of editing.

Dealing with a module issue

I receive a call from a fellow staff tutor about a student who is persistently unhappy with aspects of a module. We swap student ID numbers, and I look up the student record.  We have a chat about the student, and by looking at the student record, we figure out a way forward.  We both manage the tutors who are delivering the module in question, and between each of us we figure out what needs to be done: my colleague agrees to speak with the student to try to offer some further guidance and explanations.

I send my colleague copies of some emails that I had safely filed away.  I remember that after starting as a staff tutor, I soon realised that effective record keeping is really important.

Working with the student support team

The computing and IT student support team is located in Birmingham.  The members of the Birmingham team respond to student’s learner support queries and help students choose their next module on a programme of study.  When it comes to helping students with certain issues, we sometimes ask students to ring the SST, or we create what is known as a ‘service request’, asking the SST to give students a call: there are things that they can do that us staff tutors can’t do.

I receive a call from a colleague in Birmingham about a particular module, TT284 Web Technologies. My colleague has a very precise question about the module, and it’s a question that I can easily answer (since I work with the tutors who deliver that module, and have worked with the module team).  From my own perspective, it’s great to have that contact with someone who is offering advice to the students.  Also, I feel that due to changes in the way that tutors are managed (staff tutors are now managing smaller number of numbers), we’re able to specialise a bit more, and this will help us to more easily respond to detailed academic queries.

Towards the end of the day

As well as being a staff tutor, I’m also a tutor.  In MCT I tutor on M364 Fundamentals of Interaction Design.  In the previous presentation of M364, I ran a module wide revision tutorial.  I didn’t have to do this (this isn’t something that the M364 module team explicitly ask tutors to do), but I thought it would be a good thing to do; plus, it would help me to get more OU Live experience.  I decided to do the same for the current presentation. 

When I announced that I was running a session, another tutor said that she would come along and help out, which was great news. After quite a few email messages, we chose a date and time. There will be two sessions, and we agreed that we would work together on both of them. Our two sessions will tackle the subject of revision in different ways.

After a bit of a delay, the first stage of the Locations Analysis is out. I discover there are a huge number of documents to read through.  I skim through the main document, which seems to be over eighty pages in length. I quickly become tired.

When I get back I check my email again. There an extension request from a fabulous T320 tutor. I’m very happy to accept their judgement, and I appreciated that they asked me about it.  I offered a couple of suggestions about what to say to our student.

It’s the end of the day.  It has been a busy one. I make something to eat, and then caught a train to the middle of London to meet up with some friends.

On the way back, at Charing Cross train station, I noticed that I had missed a call.  There was a voicemail.  It was from a student of mine. I called the student back and we had a chat.  The student was asking for an extension. I agreed to the extension, and highlighted some sections of the assignment so our student could just focus on completing what he needed to do. I also emphasised a really important point: that there are no extensions to the final TMA.