Advice on the many functions of a university that fall outside academia or teaching such as HR, finance, communications, department and laboratory management, libraries and student services. Find out how professional services teams in higher education can best ensure the smooth running of an institution, supporting teaching, research and student success – and work effectively with their academic colleagues.

Professional services in higher education

For women, the “leaky pipeline” – the loss of female academics from STEM fields – has been known about for decades. The demands of caring for young children are at odds with the increasing demands of academia, resulting in poor work-life balance and decreasing well-being of parents. This can lead to parents being lost from academia.In the UK, the loss of female academics was one of the main driving forces behind the Athena Swan Charter to support gender equality.So it is perhaps surprising that progress to alleviate the stresses and challenges associated with return from parental leave continues to be variable. Support also needs to go beyond mothers. If we enable fathers to be more equal parents, we take the burden from mothers. This requires a cultural change in how family leave is viewed. Growing, giving birth to and raising the next generation is not a holiday, and no&nbsp;one chooses to have a baby to get out of doing work.Since the birth of a baby is rarely completely unexpected, this provides the opportunity for both employee and workplace to plan for the stages of family leave and to factor in support before, during and after return.Four ways to achieve a better work-life balance in academiaIs working from home going to solve your work-life balance problems?Gender equality is more than a box-ticking exercise – let’s champion itHuman resources and line management documentation should include guidelines supporting parental leave. Following a challenging return from my second maternity leave, in 2022 (after a lockdown pregnancy), I&nbsp;used funding from my faculty at the University of Southampton to run a project focused on support for returners. Originally, we planned to survey returners, but it proved difficult to get people together – perhaps unsurprisingly, because we were trying to engage an already overloaded community. We did find a huge appetite, however, when an event was run, including a workshop for parents and career coaching.The result was a framework of guidelines for departments to consider when a member of staff is planning to take family leave.Before family leaveConsider the workload of the person going on family leave and identify which tasks they perform that should take place during their planned parental leave. Then find out whether existing staff have workload capacity and expertise to take on these essential tasks or whether additional cover staff are required. Remember that on return, the person will likely be sleep deprived and will have been out of the workplace for several months. The following dos and don’ts may help in these decisions.Don’t:Don’t assume that you can allocate the work of the person going on leave to other staff members; you are increasing their workload, potentially beyond capacity.Don’t ask the person going on family leave to suggest which members of staff take on each task. They do not know the workloads of colleagues; they are not their managers.Don’t move tasks to a later or earlier date, so that the person going on family leave has more work before or after going on leave.Don’t front-load all the work required, hoping that the person going on leave will do as much as possible beforehand.Don’t expect them to simply pick up where they left off when they return.Do:Arrange cover for that person.Have a handover period of at least a month, in case family leave has to begin earlier than expected.Normalise that it might not be possible to cover absolutely everything that a person does (this is also useful to consider when academic staff are unavailable for other reasons, such as long-term sickness or sabbatical). For example, if someone is the main member of staff on a module and there is not appropriate cover, it might not be possible to run the module that year.Sit down with the person going on leave to make a plan for their final trimester and for the year after return. It is likely that the person will tell you about their pregnancy at the start of their second trimester, and they will be keen to gain assurances from you.Put in place a staggered work plan for the person’s return that considers cognitive overload. Annual leave is accrued during parental leave and can be used to gradually ease the return. It is also beneficial for the baby’s settling into their new routine with their childcare provider.Agree a communication plan during parental leave (for example, that email will be checked once a week). Any communications should consider this time plan. Some people may prefer a phone call or other forms of communication.Many universities have mentoring programmes that are topic-specific and that will include mentees with lived experience of parental leave, who can be valuable sources of information.During family leaveBefore the new parent returns from family leave, most university HR departments will ask their line manager to confirm whether the person will be returning on their expected date. This often happens eight weeks before return, which makes sense for the university but is too early for parents! My experience was that my line manager forwarded that email to me, but I&nbsp;was on maternity leave, not sitting at my desk reading emails. I fed back that people on leave should not be reading emails, and the process at the University of Southampton has changed; staff are now sent a letter.Don’t:Don’t expect people on leave to be constantly on email.Don’t expect new parents to have a crystal-clear idea of their work capacity. Babies have good and bad weeks, and what a parent can do will vary from week to week. It is less frustrating all round to have no expectations.Do:Respect the agreed communication plan.Ensure that line managers receive training in order to be able to support returners from family leave.After family leaveReturn to work is difficult for parents. They have been through something life-changing, and now have a small person’s needs and life to juggle everything else around. They may be leaving their baby for the first time on their first day back at work. There are likely to be tears, from both baby and parent.Don’t:Don’t expect the returner to start exactly where they left off, perhaps a year before.Don’t just leave them to it, with no acknowledgement.Don’t fill their first few days back with meetings and training.Do:Use a return-to-work induction checklist; we worked with Clara Wilcox at The Balance Collective to develop ours:Role-specific updates What is the status of the work covered while they were off? Ideally, this would be a meeting with their manager and job cover. A handover document is a great tool to use as a template for updates on progress and decisions made.Strategy What, if any, changes have been made to the strategy of the organisation, and how does that impact the team and the role itself?Staffing What key staffing changes have occurred? How does this impact their role?Funding/grants/income What, if anything has changed, and how would this impact their role, budgets, resources or timescales?Policies/processes Have there been changes to how things run? This can include operational (such as IT/approvals) as well as higher-level HR elements within the organisation.Training and opportunities This may be driven by earlier elements, such as changes in processes or staffing. Or it could be down to changes within the organisation or department. What training and opportunities are available? Over the initial return, it is useful to ask the individual what they want for their personal and professional development.Work-life balance What do they need to support their well-being?I have experienced two returns from maternity leave to the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton. I&nbsp;found maternity leave a strange time, losing my own identity and the huge lifestyle change that comes with becoming a parent for the first time. With my second child, it was more difficult because I&nbsp;was juggling another person. It has been far from easy; my mental health has suffered. Two years from my return after my second child, I&nbsp;am still struggling but recognise that I&nbsp;am coping better. It has made me motivated to try to change the culture in academia (industry is ahead of us in supporting all parents), and to improve the experience of parental leave returners.Judith Lock is principal teaching fellow in ecology and evolution within biological sciences at the University of Southampton.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.

How to manage parental leave for university staff

Parental leave presents challenges for the parent and the workplace, writes Judith Lock. Here are some dos and don’ts for before, during and after the leave period that aim to smooth the return to work and fix academia’s leaky pipeline

“Lean” as a concept originated within the manufacturing sector, with Toyota an early pioneer, before a continuous improvement culture rippled across the public, health and well-being sectors and higher education.The concept’s name originated from John Krafcik through his work with the MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program from 1986 to 1990. He visited 20 countries and studied 90 manufacturing plants. His influential paper “Triumph of the lean production system” linked performance, corporate parenting and management philosophies. James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos supercharged the concept in their 1991 book, The Machine that Changed the World, which presented the lean philosophies of respect for people, continuous improvement and the eradication of waste.How can universities reduce stress for students during the application processGreener life science labs: the challenge to save energy and reduce wasteBuilding futures: how estates directors can deliver net zeroWe in the iSolutions continuous improvement (CI) team at the University of Southampton have been working hard to embed the core principles of this approach through lean thinking, leadership and toolkits. Projects to date have included improving the reference process for applicants, mobile-phone usage and carbon footprints, and developing awareness of sustainability in human resources and customer experience impact for welcome week and halls.We are a small team within the university’s IT support service, iSolutions, and are part of the professional services community. Our ethos is to build capability for continuous improvement through our people, linking organisational excellence and sustainability and enabling individuals and teams to take a new look at “the way they do things around here” through workshops and projects.How does our continuous improvement process work?As lean practitioners, we follow a process called R-DMAIC.Recognise: First, we recognise the opportunities for improvement in&nbsp;ways of working that&nbsp;no longer serve&nbsp;us.Define: We choose our challenge and define the scope of our intervention.Measures: We work through a series of tools that help us to understand what is working well&nbsp;and is not working, typically through a process map, measures&nbsp;and other tools.Analyse: We analyse the current state to identify what is waste (anything that is not adding value to the end user), where we are&nbsp;overburdened and what we could change to improve the situation.Improve: We create ideas to improve the current state and run experiments to test our solutions.Control: When our experiments are successful, we embed the changes within the university, where we embed the gains through dashboards, reviews&nbsp;and celebrations.Leadership or culture, figureheads or movements?We take a “viral change” approach. That is, we are not implementing a lean programme that has central backing; we are not engaged in rapid improvement events and we are not leveraging budgets to drive transformational change. We also use strategic lean tools such as hoshin kanri (which is also called policy deployment) to link our improvement projects with university and department strategy.We have seen charismatic leaders drive lean programmes through an organisation only to move on and leave their efforts to dissipate under the direction of the next charismatic leader. We don’t undervalue the impact that this approach can bring, but we found ourselves looking to improve on what we’d been a part of previously, pondering the difference between leadership and culture, between figureheads and movements.Our approach was inspired by a lunchtime chat early in 2022 about how Covid had changed the way we delivered improvement workshops, and how MS Teams and Miro had allowed the same capability. Before the end of that week, we had co-opted three other local universities into plans for a “process palooza” conference (four days virtual and one day face-to-face).These two experiences came together, and in July 2022 we started to design a programme of materials, workshops and one-to-one coaching sessions that would: empower people to change the way they did their day jobs and improve their workspaces; and encourage them to give themselves permission to step back and ask if this was what the customer wanted or what the planet needed.Using experiential learning techniques to embed continuous improvementWe developed our approach to building continuous improvement/lean capability using experiential learning techniques. Our lean programme was open to all colleagues at the University of Southampton. We felt this was a good way of building capability and supporting the university.Our one-day lean foundations workshop introduces colleagues to the concepts of lean and sustainability: respect for people, continuous improvement, eradication of waste and understanding the needs of the planet.We show how lean and continuous improvement&nbsp;is applied in higher education, enabling colleagues to experience lean principles through hands-on activities. Workshops illustrate the viewpoints of customer, planet and provider.We developed a Gemba game, where colleagues build five products associated with higher education, such as a final-year project, steps to success, nature and graduation using Lego blocks. This game enables colleagues to apply nested cycles of plan-do-check-act (PDCA) to improve their lead times, quality and teamwork.

  
      
  
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Photo courtesy of the University of Southampton

&nbsp;Our lean foundations workshop is accredited by the Lean Competency System, which is recognised as a global professional qualification. On completion of an online multiple-choice exam, colleagues can participate in the lean practitioner programme, which is a two-day workshop and a 12-week mentored continuous improvement project.Our lean practitioner two-day workshop is based around the R-DMAIC cycle. The workshops have been developed with a clear experiential learning pedagogy in mind. Our colleagues can see what works for them and they can use all their senses in the training so they see it, they hear it and they do it.We use visualisation, storytelling and action-based learning. This is also linked to the Kolb learning cycle, where we introduce the theories and provide opportunities for action and reflection linked to pragmatism. The workshops are designed to deliver deep learning. Approaches such as Lego Serious play allow colleagues to build models that tell the story of how lean is embedded within the university.At the end of the two days, colleagues develop their own ideas for a continuous improvement project. Each colleague is appointed a mentor with whom they work over 10 to 12 weeks to develop a portfolio showing how they have applied this learning in their workplace, which is submitted to the CI team for review. The professional qualification of lean practitioner is then awarded if all learning outcomes have been met.The team was shortlisted for the 2023 Lean Diamond Award linking lean to sustainability. It is wonderful to see how lean thinking and the toolkits are being applied across the university to help us on our mission to inspire excellence, achieve the remarkable and build an inclusive world.Tammi Sinha, Pete Rykowski and Michael Shaw are members of the iSolutions continuous improvement team at the University of Southampton.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Embedding lean practices in higher education

How can university processes be more efficient and sustainable? Here’s how one continuous improvement team took a viral approach to efficiency through lean thinking, lean leadership and lean toolkits

The average UK worker spends only&nbsp;15 minutes (or less) a day reading updates from their organisation, according to the Institute of Internal Communication’s 2023 IC Index. So, how do we engage higher education staff in such a short amount of time? This doesn’t apply only to messages sent out from internal communications; it’s relevant to anyone who wants to communicate clearly and succinctly to their team or to colleagues.I work in internal communications at the University of Southampton. We work closely with teams across the university to understand what matters to our staff and how best to engage with them. We know that staff across the university are incredibly busy and how valuable their time is, so how do we get the most important updates to them?Identify and understand your audiencesUniversities are more complex than most organisations, which means we have many audience groups. Not only that, but they all access and consume information in different ways, so it stands to reason that our approach needs to be as diverse as our staff community. If we only have 15 minutes per day to reach them, then targeting will be key to ensuring we deliver the right message to the right staff at the right time.Universities need to get better at using Instagram – here’s howAuthenticity sells because it mattersNavigating crisis communications in HE: strategies for an effective responseSo, what does that mean for our approach? The first step is understanding who our audiences are and segmenting them to identify distinct personas and how they access information. An academic is going to have different needs compared with someone in professional services.The second step is identifying channels that reach them and developing new channels for those who are unlikely to access our traditional digital channels. The basics can be very effective, such as posters on the back of toilet doors, staff noticeboards and flyers in staff areas.&nbsp;I recently introduced a communications toolkit to the university, which includes background information, the objectives of the campaign, key statistics, sample text and graphics. It means that staff have everything they need in one place, so they can share our campaigns easily in their own environments.&nbsp;Some areas of the university deliver updates in regular staff training or in their own newsletters, so providing them with content to include can be most effective. The key is to be where they are rather than expecting them to come to our dedicated internal communications channels.Bring the subject to lifeSometimes it’s not the what but the how. We can deliver messaging in a straight and logical way or we can approach it from a different angle and bring it to life through engaging campaigns and storytelling.&nbsp;This is an approach we often implement, where we use our staff as examples of lived experience for a particular topic, such as mental health or menopause. This has proved to be incredibly effective in engaging staff. My colleague Denise Badden, professor of sustainable business, recently wrote in Campus about the impact of storytelling, and all the research confirms how powerful this can be.The ‘why should I care’ testWhenever crafting communications for staff, I think about what they would want to hear and why the piece would interest them.&nbsp;For example, if I’m promoting training, I wouldn’t just state what the training is; I would also explain how it will benefit attendees and what they’ll learn from the session. It sounds simple, but so often organisations tell staff what they want to say rather than what staff want to hear, and this reframing can make a big difference.Consider the barriersThink about what the barriers are to communications reaching staff.&nbsp;Common barriers include lack of time, scepticism, no access to a laptop, language barriers and accessibility.&nbsp;At the University of Southampton, we have been developing our communication channels and have established a new inclusive communication working group to understand our blind spots and how we can find best practices to reach as many staff as possible. This will include representation from each of our campuses and different faculties and schools to ensure it’s as diverse as possible.We will then be producing a guide for all communications leads on the best ways to reach more staff through our formats, language and design, so we have a consistent approach.Listen to the data and insightsTechnology is instrumental in reaching as many staff as possible. So many organisations have a wealth of data that they’re not accessing, which is a wasted opportunity.We can use data available from our channels to help us understand which topics staff want to hear about and what content is resonating. We can discover what time of day is most effective for posting, and if there are themes that are consistently popular with staff. We can track data on views against attendance at training or sign-ups for events to get a more complete picture of whether a campaign has been successful.Two-way communication is also important to ensure we are really listening to feedback from our people. We engage with colleague networks to hear the views of staff and use intel from pulse surveys and managers to take on board any feedback, whether negative or positive.Learn from othersWe can learn so much about best practices from other organisations, including from other industries. I recently attended a meet-up of almost 100 internal-communication leads in London, where we discussed the latest trends, staff feedback, new technology and our successes and failures. It’s important that we don’t become complacent and stick to how things have always been done; and we need to keep up to date with new ways to engage our people.Ultimately, getting through to as many staff across the university as possible requires a strategic approach, along with creativity, to yield the best results. Using simple language will be important, as will bringing subjects to life by understanding what matters to your people.If you only have 15 minutes, it’s best you use them wisely.Kelly Hibbs is internal communications manager at the University of Southampton.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

You need to get updates and other messages to faculty and staff, but they don’t have much time for internal communications. Here, Kelly Hibbs offers tips to reach a busy audience in a quick, engaging, accessible way

How to engage your staff in just 15 minutes 

For some students, university feels like a lonely place. Although typically depicted as a highly social experience, for many students being away from home in a much larger university environment can be incredibly isolating. In the wake of the pandemic, it feels more crucial than ever to make university a friendly, inclusive and supportive space. However, with Ucas projecting up to 30 per cent more UK higher education applicants by 2030, institutions must seriously consider how they can provide a more personalised, supportive experience to a growing number of students.As a former secondary school teacher, on coming to work at university I noticed immediately that the traditional school model of having one member of staff who each student can rely on does not – and cannot – exist as the norm in higher education. I believe this is a contributing factor to the loneliness problem – and part of the solution.Why is that?Cast your mind back to secondary school and I suspect you picture particular teachers, students or non-teaching staff members who really knew you. They asked how your day was going, how your holiday had been, how your sibling was doing. Crucially, they also offered you support and help when needed.As a secondary school teacher, I spoke to my tutees every day, and knew the learning needs of every student I taught, personalising and adapting lessons accordingly. Meanwhile, as a student, my lecturers did not even know my name. This experience is not universal. There are departments and academics who work incredibly hard to ensure every student feels special.Fostering student collaboration rather than competition using peer reviewWhatsApp and campus trails: supporting students in building peer support networksFrom cohort to community: how to support student-led initiativesBut working in professional services, my typical signposting to students might involve three to five staff members who they need to contact for a single problem. These will likely be staff members who the student has never so much as passed in the corridor.It is a big leap from secondary or further education, where you have a network, however small, of people looking out for you, to higher education, where the average staff-to-student ratios are usually much higher. It would be easier to make all students feel included if they all felt seen.This lack of visibility and personalisation risks damaging efforts to improve access and participation. While more mature students are accessing higher education, for example, there are implied social norms that they struggle with, as their age and life situations do not conform to “typical” student characteristics. Often the main encouragement and support these students receive is from generalised mass emails aimed at the “typical” student demographic. Such mass emails tend to overlook the needs of mature students who may need individual learning plans in order to fit exams or coursework around parenting and other responsibilities. If this is their main source of human interaction, can we blame them for thinking they do not belong? &nbsp;So, how can we personalise university amid increasing numbers of students?One way is through peer support programmes. Peer learning has been increasingly shown to generate better confidence among students and support them to become independent learners – two elements crucial in making them feel like they belong at university. At the University of Exeter, we offer two types of peer support programme:Academic (often called peer-assisted learning)Pastoral (often called buddy schemes)Among the latter, our team oversees several cross-faculty, widening participation programmes, including a mature student mentoring scheme. Every year, this scheme recruits current mature students who are matched with first-year undergraduate mature students starting their studies in September. They make contact prior to the mentees arriving so that they can alleviate any doubts and make the incoming students feel welcomed and excited about their higher education journey. The mentors will remain contactable by that student for however long both feel is appropriate.&nbsp;Why do peer support programmes matter?Such initiatives create communities where students know one another, not just by name but by personality, likes and dislikes, and disciplines. With the advice and support of their student mentor, mentees feel more empowered to go out and make themselves known to the staff who can help them – in the way that happens at secondary schools. By becoming independent members of the university community, they can take ownership of their studies, safe in the knowledge that they have a peer who will ask them, “How was your day?” If we cannot make universities smaller, then we must create close-knit pockets within the university, so that everyone has someone who values them and who can help them reach out when needed.A school-type model with class sizes of 30 and a named point of contact for each group is not currently a realistic way forward for universities. However, we must consider what universities are trying to sell to prospective students. We cannot present universities as small, intimate spaces where everyone knows everyone. Instead, we can say that you will not know everyone, but we will make sure you have access to the people you need. If we are going to continue to welcome large cohorts, we need to adopt the policies and initiatives that ensure each individual student is still firmly, personally supported.Emma Norman is academic skills and student engagement officer at the University of Exeter.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

As universities expand, they will need to take more of a personal approach to higher education – despite the huge cohorts – but how? Emma Norman suggests looking to the students themselves

Offer students a personal touch through peer support

Higher education finds itself, once again, at a crossroads, faced with rapid technological advancements, evolving student needs and ever-transforming societal shifts. The ante has been upped, with the challenge now stretching beyond academic rigour to crafting engaging, inclusive and personalised environments for a&nbsp;diverse range of learners. At the heart of this transformation is the need for strong cooperation between academics and professional services staff. While their roles differ, the ultimate goal of these highly specialised groups of professionals aligns perfectly: creating quality learning and teaching experiences. Embracing this shared endeavour paves the way for more wholesome and supportive spaces where the voices of academics, professional service staff and learners are heard, valued and impactful.There’s often a stark gap in higher education institutions, with academics and professional service staff operating in separate spheres. Overcoming this disconnect requires us all – from professors to administrators – to be listeners and learners prepared to broaden our horizons, flex our empathetic muscles and enhance our skill sets. More than ever, it calls for open and effective communication, a shared ethos and a shift towards distributed leadership that fosters greater ownership and collective decision-making.Spotlight guide: Connecting the dots between academic and professional services staffInstructional designers: how to work well with teachersRunning a diverse team is harder work – but the rewards are immenseThe rise of commercially available generative AI technologies, such as chatbots, underscores the urgent need for synergetic environments. While AI has already revolutionised learning and teaching, fully realising its potential demands a collaborative effort between academics and professional services to jointly steer revolutionary pedagogies, initiate welcoming learning journeys, and develop a flexible and current infrastructure. Above all, it requires working together towards technological understanding as a perpetual journey, not a one-off training session. That should be translated to an open and honest knowledge exchange encouraging mutual skills enhancement and fostering solidarity amid change. Such an empathetic mindset can be transformative, placing learners’ needs at the forefront, even amid rapid technological advancement.Despite the lack of a one-size-fits-all solution to bridge this enduring gap between staff teams, these are some simple tactics that I&nbsp;have found effective in aiding cooperation:Transform core modules to transform programmes: Nearly every department or school has a series of core modules underpinning the programmes on offer. When redesigning your institution’s programmes, aim first to redesign these key modules jointly and put emphasis on learners’ insights. Change will spread out. First, these core modules have a foundational character and thus their revamp will raise expectations for learners and higher education professionals. Second, their co-taught character allows for cementing new alliances. The shared endeavour allows key and multiple stakeholders to learn about each other’s strengths and abilities and foster mutual respect and understanding.Diversified communication channels: Professional services and academics rarely communicate in low-stress contexts. Quality time can ease combative dynamics often created between the two groups. Creating opportunities for communication, such as joint workshops and shared training sessions or collaboration on low-stakes projects, can create an open, communicative environment that leads to greater empathy and honest teamwork.Job shadowing: Facilitate opportunities for academics and professional services staff to glimpse over each other’s responsibilities, challenges and interests. This could include opportunities for attending live lectures for professional services staff or for observing the daily routine of administrative tasks for academics (in both cases, focus on interactions with learners); research seminars taking place twice or thrice a year and during normal working hours open to professional services staff; and joint discussions on each other’s career paths and sector developments. Such activities can enhance mutual respect and create a sense of shared purpose.Inclusive leadership structures: Develop leadership models that include voices from both academics and professional services staff in decision-making processes. Town hall meetings, themed discussions, decision-making committees with elected representatives and similar can help to build a shared sense of ownership and collective responsibility.Timing: Be mindful of the timing of initiatives to ensure maximum engagement. Avoid periods of high stress, such as exam seasons or the beginning of the academic term, and ensure that initiatives align with the academic calendar.Navigating the path of change, addressing competing priorities and ensuring buy-in can be challenging. These hurdles can be overcome or even mitigated by providing sufficient resources, establishing shared goals and vision (with regular review), ensuring effective communication and offering recognition. The empathetic approach resulting from the process of building a meaningful synergy between individuals and teams will naturally lead to an open mindset and foster a culture where students are viewed as partners in their education.Higher education is a shared journey, a collaborative effort. By fostering cooperation between academics and professional services staff, we can pool our strengths to build resilient institutions capable of facing the future.Foteini Springou is an educational adviser in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of York.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Five strategic tactics for a seamless collaboration between academics and professional staff in pursuit of a learner-centred education

Building bridges between academics and professional services 

Learning designers are the backbone of remote learning, working hard to develop high-quality courses for online education. Yet, despite their critical role in online education and the rapid growth in demand for learning designers, many people, even those working in higher education, don’t fully understand what a learning designer is – if they’ve heard of the role at all.To be honest, I didn’t know what a learning designer was when I was first approached with an offer a year ago. But since then, it’s become a meaningful career where I’ve been able to apply my teaching skills to design curricula that support our online teaching team.What exactly is a learning designer?So, what is a learning designer? Learning designers are the bridge between academics and students. Working alongside programme coordinators (PCs) and lead unit coordinators (LUCs), we translate the large and often overwhelming amounts of information that students must learn into week-by-week phases (or modules) that best help students of all backgrounds learn.Tips for adopting the right technology for blended learningThe demand for online education is still growing, so how can we meet it?Design a student-centred curriculum for dynamic learningSometimes, we get a unit that covers a topic outside our area of expertise and knowledge, but the academics we work with are subject matter experts and the channel of communication is always open. We can ask questions throughout the build to “sense check” to be sure that we have interpreted the content correctly.The way the work is translated into units changes depending on the needs of the students and the subject matter itself, with law units requiring more readings and case studies, while an ICT design unit is more project based and asks students to complete a series of hands-on activities each week to apply their learning. There are daily opportunities to apply creative thinking and be a problem-solver.What qualifications and training do you need to become a learning designer?There are no set qualifications you need to become a learning designer, although most have a bachelor’s or master’s degree, and courses dedicated to learning design are now available.Many learning designers come from a background in academia or teaching and find that working as a learning designer allows them to continue with their passion for education while giving them an opportunity to work more creatively and flexibly than roles in the classroom tend to afford. The pedagogical knowledge and experience that these industries offer is valuable for learning design as well.That being said, a lot of my colleagues come from backgrounds outside education, such as graphic design, editing, architecture and medical sciences.The truth is that many transferable skills complement the learning designer role. Those with an IT or programming background might be familiar with agile workplaces and terminology such as “scrum” and “retro”. Likewise, HTML code was brand new to me. After starting with Online Education Services (OES), I soon learned that understanding code was critical as we switch between the coded end and the plain-text version of a unit while building and editing. I found LinkedIn Learning offered introductory courses and these gave me the basics.Another useful skill is stakeholder management. We deal with internal and external stakeholders across the business and university to bring a unit to life, &nbsp;and we need to manage and maintain these relationships to ensure that the information is provided so we can complete the work as agreed.What does a learning designer do?At OES, the key tasks for a learning designer centre around the planning, development and creation of online units of academic courses, which are tailored to the needs of online students. As part of this process, we liaise with the academic, who is the subject matter expert in the field of study, and seek input on assignments, resources and the general content of the modules.A common misconception is that learning designers “just make it look pretty”. Yes, we do bring a design eye to the way the unit is presented, but there is much more focus on developing the content so that it is relevant and, more importantly, accessible for online students. We pay careful attention to ensuring our images and videos have text alternatives or transcripts for students who may have low vision or hearing, for example.We also apply our pedagogical knowledge to create a balance between new information and hands-on or applied learning to scaffold our students’ understanding and help to support them to achieve the results they are working towards in their final assessments. Sometimes we are involved at a higher level of projects and explore the user (or student) experience and look at ways that we can continuously improve that – from the moment they are interested in a course to graduation – and provide support from the learning designer side of this journey.Some of the challenges that we face working with a third-party provider can involve striking a balance with our academics in terms of their commitments on campus and supporting us with developing unit content. Often the schedule for exams or marking doesn’t correspond with our development period, so there may be times where it is harder to get a response, which can slow the build process. However, we balance this by working on other units, then returning once we have the information – this ensures we are not wasting “scoped time” for a unit and can keep working on others.Hybrid working environments are a great help these days as it’s easy to jump on a call or Teams chat and talk through a query rather than relying on email.My path to becoming a learning designerI studied communications and public relations straight out of high school; when the global financial crisis hit, I returned to study a postgraduate primary education degree. After graduating, I found a love of teaching and educating; however, the demands of the classroom and a feeling that I wanted more led me towards learning design.I had been working in primary education for around seven years when a former colleague reached out to me. Despite not knowing much about learning design, I was open to hearing more. As much as I loved working in education, I’d been feeling creatively stifled and stuck in a rut and, nearing the end of my teaching contract, I was ready for a change.Being a learning designer is a career I never imagined I would enjoy as much as I have, and it’s something that will constantly be in demand as online learning allows students to learn no matter where they are located.Vanessa Jefferson is a learning designer at Online Education Services.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

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