‘We were ready - we had the tools up our sleeve’: How the University of Northampton is pushing digital education forward
From implementing new ideas quickly in response to the Covid pandemic to collaborating with organisations in the county on innovative projects, the University of Northampton has been at the forefront of change at a crucial time for digital learning.
We spoke to Helen Caldwell, Rob Howe and Emma Whewell from the University’s Centre for Active Digital Education to find out more.
What is the Centre for Active Digital Education and where did the idea come from?
Helen: The idea for the Centre arose from the concept of active blended learning. For several years now we've thought that learning should be active and take place across different environments.
We've obviously had a resurgence of digital education over the past couple of years because so much had to happen online.
Rob: We became a centre in the early part of 2022. We wanted to look at new ways of learning and teaching, new ways of using tools and technologies, and networking.
Talking to external stakeholders, people didn't know who to contact at the university about different digital developments. We wanted to provide a centre to co-ordinate all the brilliant stuff that's happening in academic areas. We didn't necessarily want to control that activity – more to work out what it is and who else could benefit, both in and outside of the university.
Helen: We wanted to recognise that the digital environment has many, many positives. A lot of lessons we learned during our phase of online learning are things we want to keep and take forward. For example, a digital environment makes it easy to collaborate with other people, it's easy to capture learning and make interesting digital artefacts together, to come back to them and pick up where you left off.
The digital environment doesn't just mean sitting in front of a computer. It can involve getting out and about in the world and engaging with people in different ways. You can follow your learning journey using digital tools and capture and share that. It's opening up lots of possibilities for active and collaborative learning.
We want the Centre to bring together the diverse and interesting uses of technologies across the university under one umbrella. To do that, we need input from people in different faculties. We've put together a set of special interest groups around different aspects of technology use. There are 4 groups - GGBL, which is gamification and games-based learning; Artificial Intelligence; XR, or extended realities; Distance Learning. There's a lot of interesting work going on under all these banners.
Rob: Through Digital Northants, there's an opportunity to go out locally to businesses in the area.
Merged Futures is a great way to find out what's happening in Northamptonshire. I've learned a huge amount from going to those events.
We became a centre in the early part of 2022.
We've been getting leads coming through, partly through Digital Northants. We've got work through Merged Futures and got involved in the North Northants Tresham Techspo.
That provided an opportunity for us to talk about the work taking place at the university to a group of people we've never spoken to before.
How does digital learning open up opportunities for people?
Rob: We're supporting the Bridging the Digital Divide event, which has been really interesting for us. We're looking at it from an accessibility point of view. When people are interacting with technology, we need to think about different people's personal situations and how technology can help. We're putting that front and centre - everything we do needs to be accessible and personalised to people's environments where possible.
We're looking at how we can engage people in an outdoor environment, inspire people and open up new ways of learning and teaching.
In the AI space, we're looking at things like AI marking and teaching, chatbots. For Merged Futures, we brought in the National Centre for AI, and local businesses and organisations were really interested in how chatbots could add efficiency to their work.
Helen: We strongly believe in the idea of universal design for learning. Learners should be offered different ways of accessing learning, different ways of representing their learning and different ways of engaging with learning. The digital environment offers possibilities so people can express themselves using technology.
How did you find the challenge of responding to the need for digital education at the start of the pandemic?
Emma: When we were asked to convert mainly to online, we were ready. We had the tools up our sleeve and our students were ready too.
In other institutions it surprised people - there was a lot of learning that had to happen very quickly.
Thankfully, our students were used to using collaborative digital tools.
For some students it was still horrible of course – that wasn’t to do with technology, but because they were isolated and unsure of what was happening.
But technology still helped some students in that situation. They would usually come to our door for help.
Technology enabled us to have one-to-one online tutorials instead. It means our communication with our students has changed, and they're much more comfortable doing dissertation supervision online now.
We use a platform called Blackboard, which allows us to use polls and breakout rooms. We'd give students a task to do on a digital tool like Padlet, so students were co-creating. For some of our students who struggled with answering direct questions one-to-one, they were able to take time to think and write their answer down. It facilitated thinking time and space, and a different way of learning.
At university there's a range of different ways we assess. The classic form is an essay but we also pride ourselves on portfolios, websites and presentations, all facilitated by technology.
We had to quickly make some emergency changes to our assessments. For practical assessments, technology facilitated video assessments so we could still see practical skills for things like rehabilitation and nursing, so we could see them doing interventions - and we could feed back straight away.
What are some specific examples of the Centre’s work?
Emma: I'm a big rugby fan and so is my son, and we like to go to watch Northampton Saints.
I knew the manager of the Northampton Saints Foundation from the gym and we put our heads together to see what we could do.
Part of the University's agenda is to make big strides in social equality in the local area so we’ve started using Padlet in non-mainstream education, at a pupil referral unit.
We've tried to digitise the students’ lives to allow them to represent their thinking and their journey slightly differently. Previously that kind of work meant using pen and paper and they didn't want to engage.
Helen: We're working with the Chester House Estate at the moment. We have students from the games design team and education working together to create digital resources to engage visitors on the site - things like an app where you hold your phone up to a QR code and archaeological artefacts appear on your phone in the place where they were found.
We're digitising the visitor experience and researching the impact of what we're doing, so we can come back to the university, share with our colleagues and show how we can embed authentic experiences in our courses using AR and VR.
A PhD student of mine is designing a digital space called an Early Years Virtual Environment (EYVE). Teachers and students can populate the room with different things to suit different learners and it’s a great example of adjusting teaching to particular needs.
Rob: We want to encourage relationships between the university and the digital businesses and social enterprises in the county, so both sides can benefit from working together.
We recently took some tutors over to Sean Toru at Toru Digital – they’re practically on our doorstep at Delapre Abbey, to open up the avenues for cross-promotion.
He was interested in our graduates’ personalities and their soft skills rather than their specific technical skills. Our students can get hung up on being able to use the latest technology. It was helpful for them to see it was more important to convey how passionate they were about their work. It also emphasised the importance of a portfolio of work.
How do you see yourselves and the Centre operating in five or ten years’ time?
Emma: I might have bionic eyeballs by then!
My main hope would be that the work we're doing has informed practice and left a legacy that has moved with the times.
We would hope that means it’s continued to transform the learning attitude in classrooms.
We don't know what the tech will look like in ten years' time.
We have to teach the skills to learn, so teachers and students have had experiences that will enhance their learning here. It almost makes us unique in this region. Not many other universities are talking about this kind of thing.
Rob: While we set up the four SIGs separately, there's already a crossover between some of them. AI is cutting across different areas to the point where it's difficult to do anything without some element of AI cropping up.
Things will be created in an XR environment that never previously existed. The AI will create them on the fly, then you'll be applying a games-based mentality to delivering that to students that could be in a distance learning environment, so something can touch on all four groups.
We didn't anticipate when we set them up just how much they'd be crossing over already and that will grow even more.
Helen: I’d want the Centre to continue to become a beacon of excellence. We've already pulled together a lot of people within the university and we're starting to do the same with external stakeholders. We're starting to be able to present the best of what goes on within the university to the outside world.
In five years' time we'd want to be known for being the digital face of the University of Northampton.
Upcoming event
Bridging the Digital Divide takes place on Wednesday 23 November from 10am to 1.30pm at the University of Northampton.
Tickets are free.