Evidence Bases and Business Cases [1702] Home : Annual Conference 2017

Public Group active 9 months, 2 weeks ago

Wed, Sep 6 2017, 1:00pm – 2:20pm
Authors: Amber Thomas, Melissa Highton, Don Passey, Neil Morris, Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, and Sarah Davies
Room: Elizabeth Gidney I (2)
Theme: Moving from the practical to the ‘publishable’
Type: 40-minute session

Description

Evidence Bases and Business Cases: how learning technology decisions get made in universities.

This workshop session explores how to grow learning technology approaches from islands of innovation to the new normal. One of the requirements to scaling up innovations and achieving strategy fit is the ability to influence and make decisions. This is a participatory workshop that explores techniques for influencing decisions on educational technology in an institutional context.

Have you ever needed to: Design a pilot, Run an educational evaluation, Do a literature review, Justify a new site licence for a new piece of software, Try to influence sceptical senior decision makers or Model the total cost of tools and support? Are you expected to understand ITIL (Wikipedia entry “ITIL”) as well as mixed methods (Creswell, 2014)., course design costings as well as the general data protection act? Do you have to present Total Cost of Ownership analysis, explain your change management approach and present your Business Model Canvas (Wikipedia entry “Business Model Canvas”)? Is half of that gobbledegook? Navigating between educational concerns, IT considerations and financial modelling can be challenging. And yet these are all realms/domains of the learning technologist (Anagnostopoulou, 2014).

Learning technologists have to navigate decisions of business strategy, IT strategy, educational strategy, support models and learning design. Understanding and presenting evidence bases and business cases may well be important factors in securing success in this context. Each comes with different considerations, stakeholder-types, vocabularies and decision making structures. Each audience may be persuaded by different kinds of evidence (Moore, 1991).

Understanding and presenting evidence bases and business cases may well be important factors in securing success in this context. Evidence bases can support propositions for change and implementation, but they are not necessarily simple to gather or present, especially if different stakeholders are involved in making decisions, Business Cases, and some institutional case studies.

This session will begin with a 5 minute introduction (Amber Thomas and Dr Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou)

Then there will be 3 x 5 minute inputs from a panel of educationalists and senior managers giving short reflections on how decisions get made in different contexts. (Melissa Highton, University of Edinburgh, Professor Neil Morris, University of Leeds, Professor Don Passey, University of Lancaster)

Followed by discussion.

This will be a session to help learning technologists at different levels and roles understand how to influence decision makers and make good decisions yourselves. You should leave the session with ideas for how to influence decisions at individual and institutional levels.

Anagnostopoulou, Kyriaki (2014) Learning in third space : the nature of non-formal learning opportunities afforded to e-learning leaders in the workplace. EdD thesis, UNSPECIFIED. http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/18424/

Creswell, J. W. (2014). Educational research: Planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th ed.). Harlow, UK: Pearson

Moore, G (1991 revised 2014) Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, New York, US: Collins Business Essentials

Wikipedia entry “Business Model Canvas”. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas [Accessed 05 June 2017]

Wikipedia entry “ITIL”. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL[Accessed 05 June 2017] and Axelos website ITIL section. Available at: https://www.axelos.com/best-practice-solutions/itil [Accessed 05 June 2017]

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