Be warned. This is a blog post about strategy… which is not the most exciting of topics (usually). I was trying to find a good title for this post and all the ideas I had sounded awful:
What a difference good governance makes…
The privilege of being a CEO
The power of really listening
Making stuff happen…
Anyway. If you are still reading this then I am grateful asI really want to share some work I have been involved in over the past 9 months that has inspired me and reminded me that when you put your mind to it, you can really make a lot happen.
I am writing this during a week when much is already going on in the world, in the UK, in education and in Learning Technology. Come Thursday, when ALT launches its new strategy to its membership, there will be something else to add to the list. And this one matters much to me, and to the Members we work for and represent, as it will set the direction for the next five years.
There are a few things that I used to be doubtful about when it came to strategies such as: does anyone ever read them?! Does anyone, including staff or Trustees, know what they say?? Does anyone care? How does a suggestion made actually shape the things that appear in the final, committee approved version? Most of the time, the answers to these questions are not encouraging. But I am not feeling cynical today and I want to share some of the things that I feel set ALT’s next strategy apart from many I have come across previously and also what makes the process of arriving at the strategy so valuable and effective.
Strategic Conversation captured by Bryan Mathers
What’s involved in making our strategy? 9 months of listening.
Phase 2:external consultation (July – January) This phase included:
Strategy suggestion box
Quarterly updates to Members
Assembly meetings every month
Online Winter Conference with dedicated strategy sessions
Annual Survey – data from which is published openly each year
Phase 3: Board of Trustees strategy work(July – January) This phase included:
Fortnightly progress updates
Board of Trustees meetings
Visual Thinkery sessions
Strategy progress and impact report
Consultation plan & outline
Draft strategy & planning
Phase 4:Staff Team strategy work (July – February) This phase included:
Staff Team meetings every month
Individual input from each member of the team
Strategy thinking session for senior staff
Review Priorities year 1-5 based in input from Members
What shapes our strategic priorities? Members having their say!
One of the things we look at in the final phase of writing the strategy is where input for specific aims has come from, which this year includes: several suggestions received throughout a 6 month period through an online suggestion box, which are directly included in this year’s strategic priorities. Also, we get feedback through events, which included a strategy session at the Annual Conference in September and the Online Winter Conference in December as well as monthly meetings of the Members Assembly. In addition, some of the priorities we identified during strategy days, the formal consultation and the Annual Survey as well as a specific consultation around ALT’s CMALT framework.
Whilst most of the input comes from Members already involved in ALT, much of the consultation process is open to everyone with an interest in Learning Technology and it’s been really valuable for me personally to think along with people who don’t know much about ALT, who don’t know what we have already done, where we have come from since 1993. Having worked for the same organisation for over 10 years, it’s useful to have the opportunity to look at what we do, how we talk about it and what we could do better through fresh eyes. One of the ways in which we do that is through Visual Thinkery.
Strategy… by Bryan Mathers
Conversational leadership: one way of reminding myself of what I don’t know…
Creating this strategy is a collaborative process and many people have input, many voices shape the thinking that goes into it. Yet in my position as CEO there is a certain amount of leadership that I need to bring to the process for everyone involved from Trustees to Members to staff, a kind of overall vision that frames the work that is going on. I used to be more rigid in my approach to providing that kind of leadership, but over the years I have come to find that it results in a poorer output, a less ambitious, less relevant strategy. So how do you lead a conversation without knowing what you don’t know? I found working with Bryan Mathers one way of achieving that, my favourite way to having a genuine conversation, an authentic consultation that gives everyone, myself included, permission to really think.
And the result?! Well, you will have to keep your eyes peeled at the end of this week to find out what the future holds in store #altc (and it may NOT all be green).
I, for one, am deeply grateful that nine months of work, that so many have contributed their time, energy and effort to, have resulted in a shared vision and shared values that I believe in, that inspire me and that will make a positive difference to Learning Technology professionals in the UK and further afield. Thank you for making this the best strategy I have been part of (yet).
This year has started with two very different keynotes: the first in January I wrote for an event on scaling up Learning Technology which was chaired by Dr Michael Flavin, and the second, a joint keynote with my colleague Martin Hawksey, was written for a one day workshop organised for the Data Human Interaction Plus network.
If you’d like to have a look at the slides and references for the two talks, you can access them here:
From empowered professional practice to empowerment in the age of surveillance: opportunities for human data interaction – joint keynote with Martin Hawksey for the Human-Data Interaction Network Plus
Some common themes emerged for me from contributing to these two events:
More tech-critical voices This year I feel I am hearing more voices that are critical towards use of technology in education and more broadly our relationship to technology as a society and as individuals. More people are questioning where the boundaries of technology and the tech industry should be, who should enforce them and how. I hear suggestions of limiting our use of technology or at least to stop proceeding unquestioningly with scaling up what we do. There are more questions being asked about ethics, policies and equality – questions that are becoming more specific and informed, not simply articulating a general, vague concern.
More wholesale digital adoption At the sometime there is a growing number of institutions who are ‘doing digital’ across the board. The examples I come across most often are focused on systems or platforms more administrative in nature or common software packages and productivity tools. But the transformation can still be powerful and there is often a drive to up-skill and develop the workforce and the learner population at the same time. This is very much about digital skills and literacy not often about the more expert design, implementation or support of Learning Technology more specifically but this often gets conflated in the way the process is described. Whilst on the whole a very positive move, there are two challenges that I often see come up next: first, as the tools change iteratively the process of training users has to continue and fostering a culture which normalises that is hard to do. Hence there is a lot of messiness in how people use technology long term, little patches, work arounds, small idiosyncrasies which accumulate over time. Everyone has legacy systems, spreadsheets, databases and so on they don’t know what to do with. The other challenge is to find enough resources (of every kind) to continue to do Learning Technology beyond the core systems you have scaled up and to invest in the expertise you need to do that in the long run rather than to outsource innovation to private sector companies and loose that capacity.
Negativity, pace and productivity Whilst I still meet with a lot of genuine enthusiasm for technology a lot of narratives I have come across during the start of the year are driven by negativity, primarily about the wider context. Political, social and economic factors shape our perception of technology. The pace of innovation continues to be a factor also: should we try to keep pace, and why? Will technological change keep accelerating and how does this impact upon the world we live in? Meanwhile I feel productivity has snuck into our ways of thinking about research and practice. Playful approaches, mindfulness, even time specifically set aside for ‘moon shoots’ is really all about doing ever more with less. Always contactable and on the go whilst in reality there are too many meetings in which nothing happens at all.
Resistance and hope, articulated Against this rather bleak backdrop however, power is rising. Expertise is multiplying, action being taken and there is a drive to resist surveillance capitalism and to find alternatives that can provide hope whilst still offering functioning business models are cropping up more and more frequently. It’s always a privilege to be invited to contribute to events as a speaker and if the first two talks of 2020 are anything to go by the resulting discussions will be extremely interesting this year.
This post is re-posted from the #ALTC Blog. You can find the original post here.
Dear Members
Since we updated you in October, work on the next strategy for ALT has continued apace. We are now in the final weeks of the consultation process and here are the key points for you to be aware of.
Make your voice heard
If you haven’t already done so, we invite you to complete this year’s Annual Survey https://go.alt.ac.uk/ALTSurvey2019. We will use the results of this survey to inform the work of ALT for the coming strategy period, what we prioritise and how we put our shared values into practice. We strongly encourage you to complete the survey in your own right, even if you work for a member organisation. Representatives of member organisations are welcome to complete the survey once on an individual basis and also on behalf of their organisation. While this Annual Survey is primarily aimed at ALT Members it is open to anyone to complete.
Review what we have achieved
We have now published ALT’s Impact Report 2017-20. Access the full report as a PDF or Google doc and visit the report homepage. Introducing the report, Sheila MacNeill, Chair of ALT, said:
“As you will see, the Association has grown in size and influence, serving our Members in all parts of the UK. Close my heart is our commitment to being an open organisation which reaches from our governance and leadership to marketing and communications. Our commitment to openness reflects the need for greater criticality and transparency when it comes to using technology for learning, teaching and assessment. Our Membership includes practitioners, researchers and policy makers from all sectors and together with my fellow Trustees I want to thank everyone involved for helping take ALT from strength to strength.”
Sketchnotes created by Bryan Mathers.
Highlights from the strategy consultation
Since the start of the consultation period in June, we have heard from Members via the Strategy Suggestion Box (which continues to be open for contributions until 12 January 2020), in early September the formal consultation with Members and the wider community was launched at the ALT Assembly meeting at the Annual Conference and the Annual General Meeting. Since then, the monthly meetings of the ALT Assembly have continued the consultation process, and staff as well as the Board of Trustees had productive strategy days in November. In December, at this year’s Online Winter Conference, Members took part in a strategy discussion around the Ethics in Learning Technology, facilitated by ALT’s chief executive Maren Deepwell and Professor John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton. The questions we discussed included:
Why do professional bodies have ethical codes or frameworks? What are the benefits?
What are typical examples illustrating the breadth of formality, detail and principles?
What is so specific about learning, technology and learning technology?
Is it just about research ethics?
Members strongly supported establishing a broad ethical framework for Learning Technology professionals and suggested ideas of how this could be put into practice. You can view a recording of the webinar.
The shape of things to come
Thanks to the many contributions we have received, it seems clear that ALT’s current aims and values continue to be in line with Members needs. In recognition of this we are looking to refine and strengthen our vision to reflect the challenges ahead and the changing context we work in. Whilst the strategic objectives will only be finalised once we have analysed the results of the survey, we want to share a taste of what is to come with this update to ALT’s definition of Learning Technology:
How we define Learning Technology
We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that are used to support learning, teaching and assessment. We recognise the wider context of Learning Technology policy, theory and history as fundamental to its ethical, equitable and fair use.
For now, thank you to everyone who has already provided input, participated in the consultation events and sent us suggestions.
We encourage you to take part in the final phase of the consultation until 12 January 2020 and make your voice heard! The new strategy will launch in February 2020.
Authors: Sheila MacNeill (Chair) and Maren Deepwell (Chief Executive)
Now, an ‘I love me’ wall is something Jim Groom introduced me to, ‘basically a space dedicated to all the stuff you’ve done..’. And I’ve come to embrace that concept wholeheartedly in my work space at home. Home working has never looked so stimulating and that’s a major plus on days when the heating is broken, the cat has been sick on the carpet and the doorbell rings with yet another delivery for next door.
In that spirit, this is the ‘I love me wall’ of the past year, celebrating the stuff I’ve done, been part of, am proud of and am inspired by…
Photo by Sandra Huskinson (@FieryRed1)
One of the absolute highlights of my year was giving a keynote at the Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference in January, which led to conversations and collaborations that last for the whole year including this excellent webinar Academic online identity and social media .
I really enjoyed working on this ‘keynote in three hashtags’… it was a great way to start the year, thinking about how social media often comes with a general sense of the superficial, showing just the best side of myself, trying not to avoid being vulnerable for social media can be a toxic space for many, particularly for women, for people of colour, for anyone whom the trolls choose to single out. The talk focuses on three questions:
How is social media changing professional practice?
How does social media support openness in education?
A completely different kind of conversation started a month later, when I took part in a panel discussion at the Royal Society in London on Human Transformation Remembering and Learning alongside Diana Laurillard and Diana made a point that really resonated with me: Diana reminded us of the enormous scale of the demand for education (at all levels) worldwide. Diana reflected on how many hundreds of thousands of teachers will be needed to provide education and training as more and more learners in the global South in particular gain access to education and come online.
Keynoting at the RIDE Conference. Image: Sarah Sherman
It was the interplay between learning and technology, how they effect each other to change our understanding and our practice, that is of particular interest. One of the areas of high priority I discussed is measuring learning, an interest in assessment and in a wide range of methods to quantify, track and chart all aspects of the learner experience. There is always a promise that with enough data and dashboards we can gain insights, leverage the power of learning analytics to understand more about how what we do impacts on progress, skills development and learning outcomes. It is up to us to develop our own capabilities in order to be able to understand fully how the more complex systems we use work, what determines when a ‘red flag’ goes up and how we should interpret and act on the information we gain in this manner. One of the last points I mad in this part of the talk picks up on a section of the 2018 Horizon Report, which describes rethinking the role of educators not as a solvable or even a difficult challenge, but a wicked one, as ‘complex to define, much less address’. This is why I think the work that my organisation does is so important, charting the changing role of professionals across sectors. This particular was a really valuable opportunity for me to explore this further with experts in distance education.
April had many highlights and a particularly special moment for me was to be joining #PressEdConf19 for a session that explored a conversational post format can be used to support reflective practice (read more here). The idea for the session came from an ongoing blog project in which Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and I write a monthly series of blog posts to openly share our approach to leadership. You can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts on this blog.
It was a great experience to present at a Twitter only conference. I took part in quite a few virtual conferences this year, as a speaker and a participant and it is extremely useful to have those experiencing when you are have a role in organising events yourself.
May brought both online and in person interaction with the Creative Commons community as I was able to attend the CC Global Summit for the first time and it was a fantastic experience. I have long been involved in the Creative Commons community and various activities but this was my first visit to the event which is at the heart of it all and I was met with real warmth and welcoming acceptance. The creative and joyful atmosphere of the conference, from the handmade designs on the badges to the samba music playing throughout the museum conference venue conveyed a sense of celebration and joy at this meeting of so many in the Commons but also motivated to pull up your sleeves, get stuck in and do plenty of work (and there was A LOT to be done). Here I wrote about my experience in 10 tweets.
Photo: Clint Lalonde
In June I had the pleasure of participating in the ETUG conference in Kamloops, Canada. It was a real privilege for me to be there, to have been invited to contribute a keynote ‘You are more than a data point. Weaving a tapestry of hope and humanity’ to ETUG’s 25th Anniversary Conference, and also to have the honour of taking part in National Indigenous Peoples Day. I learnt a lot from my time in Kamloops and I wrote a couple of posts reflecting on the experience and the keynote I contributed:
“I felt very much at home at the ETUG conference because just like the ALT community it is all about collaboration, reflection and sharing of best practice. After 25 years of working together (celebrated with a great donut birthday cake) this community has come to hold dear very much the same values as I do, recognising the power of sharing practice and research and working together to make change happen for students and staff alike.
And you could tell that this event was very much organised with heart. Little touches everywhere made participants and speakers feel welcome from the start and created a space in which the moving narrative from Elder Mike on National Indigenous Peoples Day found an equally receptive audience as the newest members of the community sharing research findings or #femedtech conversations about equality and women in #edtech.”
This talk was one of the most satisfying pieces of work I did this year and it brought together some different elements of my thinking that I subsequently published as a rewritten article in Educause Review.
#altc staff team portrait
As you may know, we are a virtual team and everyone works from home (even during a heatwave). This way, we can better work with Members throughout the UK. Being a virtual team has many upsides but one downside is that I don’t get to see my colleagues very often. When we do get together, as we did in July, we sometimes create a team portrait (alternatives to photos as we are mostly a bit camera shy) and this is one of my all time favourites. I enjoy planning our team days and I put a lot of effort into the preparations, just like I would for an event. Writing about the Annual Conference Martin Weller called our approach ‘meticulously informal’ and that captures not just the way we run events but also the way we work together precisely.
In early August, when the weather was hot and most people were on their summer holiday, I went to our monthly online Members Assembly meeting. Most of these meetings are virtual and the reason why I took a screenshot was that I found it so inspiring that despite the heat, holidays and probably a heavy workload, the room was full of volunteers, engaging, taking action. That’s the secret sauce of building sustainable communities of practice: share power, have a purpose, provide consistent, robust structures and put the time in. Even in August, during a heatwave.
Picture by Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology on Flickr
This community portrait taken at the ALT Annual Conference is the first of it’s kind for us. The moment of that photo means a lot to me. It captures a few hundred participants. I keep it on my desktop to remind me each day that we serve ten times as many Members. It helps illustrate the scale of the core community I represent, it makes something that is largely a virtual network more tangible. Over the past ten years I have probably met more than half of our Members in person or connected with them directly online. Each voice matters. My job is to listen and to make them heard.
This is a photo I took of the Extinction Rebellion Protest in Westminster on a day I had a meeting with senior Edtech policy officials. We sat inside the building discussing essentially how to make change happen whilst outside, on improvised barricades, thousands were singing songs of fear and hope.
From left to right: Christian Friedrich, Maren Deepwell, Lorna Campbell, Laura Czerniewicz, Martin Hawksey, Christina Rupprecht (at the cat wall, Wikimedia Deutschland offices), Source: Tweet
Working in partnership with Wikimedia Germany I was involved in organising an event in late November, an evening of discussion and debate on education, open participation and democracy and critical reflections. It was a very special collaboration and part of our work for the OER20 coming up in April next year.
There is one more big item to add to the ‘wall’ for this year, and that’s ALT’s Impact Report 2017-20 which was published yesterday. Because, of course, the whole ‘wall’ is green… the tapestry through which bright threads of my year are woven spells #altc.
It is a huge privilege to be a CEO and it most definitely is hard work as well. Being in a leadership position brings into focus all elements of who I am and that is reflected in the way I think and work. Borrowing from my ETUG talk to close my reflections on 2019:
…”That brings us back to my own story, my own perspective and professional journey as a Learning Technologist, an Anthropologist, an Artist, Star Trek fan, a carer and a woman. Some of you may be familiar with the OER Conferences that we organise and with the wonderful work of Kate Bowles who gave one of the keynotes at OER19 this year entitled ‘A quilt of stars: time, work and open pedagogy’. Kate and many other speakers and participants created a strong narrative of hope, a thread of open practice that stitches us together, a tapestry, a patchwork, a weaving together. In her blog post about the conference, Kate described her reflections as “a scrap of practice that makes sense through the labour of others who take time to read it, think about it, share it, ask questions of it, extend it” and I feel her words eloquently highlight all the invisible work, the unbilled effort, that is so often crucial to making change happen, from grassroots activism to academic practice.
And this message of hope and kindness very much inspired my year. It reminds me that … we are all more than the data we create and our professional practice is more than can be tracked in time spent, papers marked or support tickets answered. Our practice becomes fully realised when we adopt a more mature and reflective, a more critical perspective that is informed by our stories and recognises the importance of the labour of others. Communities such as ALT are key to us collaborating and communicating in order to create a future for Learning Technology that is more open and equitable for all, to weave that tapestry of hope and humanity.”
If you don’t think gender inequality (in Learning Technology) is an issue that concerns you, this post is especially for you. Welcome!
For those readers who are already interested in this topic, welcome back. It’s been a #femEdTech kind of year 🙂
Maren Deepwell, Laura Czerniewicz, Helen Beetham
For the last few years I have been actively involved as a volunteer in community efforts to promote gender equality in Learning Technology but this year my day job as CEO of the Association for Learning Technology took on a decidedly more #femEdTech flavour.
Now, it’s important to acknowledge that gender inequality is certainly not the only issue we are facing in Learning Technology and that there are other forms of inequality and discrimination that we need to continue to address and challenge.
But nonetheless it remains an issue from the gender pay gap to the gender data gap, representation at conferences and on executive boards, in policy making, on social media and so forth.
As I am in a position of relative privilege I can often exert influence over who I work with, who gets invited and who has a voice in what I do. But as soon as I leave my sphere of influence I am back to being the token female speaker on the agenda, the only woman around the table, the woman who gets trolled. Sigh. Sometimes cry. Often shout!
In this post, I am going to share the key pieces of my work on equality in Learning Technology from 2019. I hope they will be useful to you to explore, share, reuse:
My year started at with a talk that brought together the threads of community, openness and equality: Community, Openness, Equality: a keynote in three hashtags #SocMedHE18 (talk, video): Social Media for Learning in Higher Education conference, 9 January 2019.
Promoting equality in a distributed organisation, joint keynote with Martin Hawksey for International Women’s Day, University of the Highlands and Islands, 8 March 2019; this particular talk and the work we presented from the ALT Annual Survey provided a basis for other talks later this year, particular in relation to exploring a gender perspective of the professionalisation in Learning Technology, job roles and changes to this over the past 5 years:
“… the only rule is to make use of your voice, to continue to engage and question, not to become indifferent or disengaged no matter how difficult that can seem at times. …It is, for me, a powerful reminder that we each have agency, and that taking part, contributing something that helps others understand our way of seeing the world, our perspective on open, our world view (as a women, as a feminist, as a contributor in my case) is a meaningful and important act.”
UnCommon Women meet up at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2019
And this certainly isn’t limited to the work we do here in the UK, or even the #femEdTech network, as there are many other communities and projects with similar aims.
The #femEdTech network is made up of activists all of whom ‘represent’ the network in their own contexts. But we, and who that ‘we’ is changes quite often, get regular requests to write about what we do and I volunteered to write this particular post: Building a Network for Curation – the #femedtech movement, blog post for WCET, 22 August 2019; the post gives a short summary of what the network is, what activities members engage in and examples of the types of things we have done in the past.
And there was a lot of talk of #femEdTech also with Terry on the podcast: Gettin’ Air with Terry Greene, 23 August 2019; which I really enjoyed. You can listen to the episode here.
I also want to reflect briefly on how to challenge the status quo and keep going… .
Male only conference, event, panel? No! I no longer accept invitations to male only events or panels and I always ask to see the list of speakers/full agenda. Many organisers I respond to to ask about other female speakers seemingly have not thought about this. Full stop. In many cases the conversation leads to changes to the agenda to be more balanced and I have plenty of lists of speakers I can refer them to if they are looking for speakers on particular topics. This is an old problem, but I figure that I can be one less person to accept it and if more and more people join in then ‘manels’ will soon be a thing of the past.
Women’s issue? No! As you can see from the list above, this year I started to include something about gender equality in pretty much every talk I have given, regardless of context or audience. I reject the idea that gender equality as an issue should be confined to women’s networks or International Women’s Days etc. It’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s fundamental to the work we do in any sector. Eye rolling, sighing and other ‘oh, here she goes again’ reactions are common. Regardless of how many graphs I show or stats I include to provide a dispassionate, well-referenced and balanced argument, the uncomfortable truth is that gender equality requires change and disruption for every single one of us.
Vote = equality? No! I often come across the perception that gender inequality is no longer a thing. That at least in the UK the fact that women have the vote means that the problem has been sorted. Be content already. This is precisely why I include something to address this misconception in every talk. I’d also recommend reading up on the research (Invisible Women – exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado-Perez is a good place to start).
Allies – thank you! I am fortunately not high profile enough on social media to attract a lot of trolling, but keeping up this work year in, year out is hard enough given what I do have to contend with. Luckily I have allies, both men and women and those who identify differently, whom I am grateful for. Every time I hear their voices, see their actions, notice their efforts, I am glad that they are there. Some of them are very visible and others work behind the scenes, but all of them make a difference and they inspire me to do what I can to make change, too. Some moments of this year, like this VConnecting session at the ETUG 25th Anniversary Conference, have stayed with me:
So, gender inequality in Learning Technology, we are coming to get you… from collecting data about pay, promotions and professional practice to calling out harassment, discrimination and ignorance on the web and in the physical world.
We about to embark on the third and final year of ALT’s Strategy 2017-2020. Together we have made strong, strategic progress putting our shared values into practice and meet our aims for Members and for public benefit, too.
We reported to Members and stakeholders from across sectors in ALT’s Annual Report and at the AGM in September about the changes to our organisational and governance structures. The transition to an independent, distributed organisation, has allowed us to make huge leaps in terms of meeting our strategic goals.
Since September, much has happened and so we are are now sharing more of what we have been up to in the year that saw ALT celebrate its 25th anniversary:
Open research
A key area for growth has been the Open Access research published in ALT’s journal. The full back archive reaching back to 1993 is an invaluable resource for Members at a time when reliable research is increasingly important for efficient use of Learning Technology and informed decision making.
Member organisations from industry including Blackboard and Moodle as well as individual experts such as DCU’s Head of the Teaching Enhancement Unit, Mark Glynn, have led a series of webinars on GDPR organised by ALT’s Chief Innovation, Technology and Community Officer, Martin Hawksey. Much of this work has been shared with other sector bodies such as ELESIG Scotland and also fed into ALT’s recent response to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics inquiry into data and technology ethics.
Enhancing professional recognition
We have also completed the pilots for Associate and Senior CMALT. These two new accreditation pathways for Learning Technology professionals will launch later this month. Led by Operations Manager, Susan Greig, working closely with Certified Members and Lead Assessors, both pathways will be supported by a growing body of community-sourced resources and a baseline of example portfolios that set a robust standard for professionals at different stages of their career and across a broader range of roles than before. We invite you warmly to sign up for the launch webinars for Associate and Senior CMALT to find out more.
Postcards celebrating ALT@25 remixed by ALT Members
ALT Assembly
ALT’s Membership has now grown to over 3,500 Members and as a result many of our activities are now scaling up to support the larger community. Alongside increasing our operational capacity, the Board of Trustees led Members in the effort to update ALT’s constitution, bringing it in line with best practice set out by the Charity Commission and also to ensure that in our governance our community is at the heart of everything we do. That is why as part of the updated governance structure the new ALT Assembly committee has been established. The ALT Assembly is the overarching committee advising the Board of Trustees, supported by Tom Palmer, ALT’s Membership Manager, it will be bringing together former operational committees, publication and events related groups and boards as well as Members and Special Interest Groups. We hope that the Assembly will help improve communication for Members actively involved in ALT as well as the impact of the work we do together.
ALT marks one year operating as an independent organisation
In our report above we have focused on the work our Members do and with that in mind it seems only fitting to add a final update on developments that have seen us increase our organisational capacity to support Members across the UK. Today’s date, 1 February, marks the first anniversary since ALT began to operate as an independent, virtual organisation and employer. Whilst major restructuring and transition have been ongoing for most of the last 18 months, disruption to services for Members have been minimal. In keeping with ALT’s commitment to openness, Members have been regularly updated throughout the process and ALT’s senior staff have shared the journey informally in a monthly series of blog posts on open leadership. Having successfully weathered the transition, we now look forward to the benefits the more agile and distributed organisation structure will bring.
Thinking about the year ahead, with the results from ALT’s Annual Survey due to be published soon and a packed calendar of activities already planned, we look forward to increasing the impact of what we do as the leading professional body for Learning Technology in the UK. Members will convene the Assembly (both face to face and online) in the next month to work together and this new development inspires and reminds us that each contribution to the work we do makes a real difference to our growing Membership.
Together, and on behalf of the Trustees and staff, we thank you for helping us making many small steps into one giant leap forward over this past year.
