From Fragmented Support to Strategic Partner: Reimagining Digital Education Enhancement at Leeds

By Phil Vincent, Head of Digital Education Enhancement and Design, University of Leeds

As universities strive to deliver more inclusive, resilient, and pedagogically ambitious curricula, the role of digital education support is under more scrutiny than ever. At the University of Leeds, we have spent the past few years driving a transformation of our learning technologist teams, from siloed, faculty-bound support staff to a unified, strategic partner in curriculum reform and educational enhancement.

I’m excited to be presenting From Fragmented Support to Strategic Partner at ALTC25, where I’ll walk through our journey, lessons learned, and next steps. But for those who can’t be there, I hope this post offers both insight and provocation.

Why reimagine support?

Before 2022, Leeds’ digital education support was highly localised. Each faculty had its own learning technologist function, operating with its own priorities, resources, and constraints. That model served some immediate needs, but it lacked strategic alignment, scalability, and shared identity.

The accelerating shifts brought on by COVID‑19, combined with the launch of our Curriculum Redefined initiative, laid bare the limitations of a fragmented model. We needed a structure that could maintain responsiveness, trust, and discipline-specific nuance, while aligning across the institution to deliver pedagogic coherence, digital equity, and sustainable innovation.

What we did: alignment, capacity, and practice

Our transformation unfolded across three interlocking dimensions:

1. Organisational realignment & recruitment
   We brought all faculty-based learning technologists into a central Digital Education Enhancement (DEE) function within our Digital Education Service (DES). New job families, career pathways, and recruitment built toward greater coherence and shared identity.
2. Embedding new ways of working
   We invested in CPD, communities of practice, specialist interest groups, and shared design methodologies (LXD, design thinking, empathy mapping, group facilitation). This helped the newly unified team develop a mutual language and culture of enhancement.
3. Strategic integration & service design
   We developed a Service Catalogue that made explicit what is core, what is enhancement, and how DEE aligns to institutional priorities (e.g. assessment, accessibility, surfacing skills). We used institutional planning, governance structures, and data signals (e.g. School Action Plans, NSS, programme reviews) to prioritise work.

As a result, DEE is no longer a support function, but a central agent in curriculum transformation, educational enhancement, and professional learning.

What I’ll explore at ALTC25

In my session, I’ll be unpacking:

• The trade-offs of balancing local responsiveness and central coherence
• How we built trust across faculties and made ‘third-space’ professionalism real
• Tactics for surfacing value: the catalogue, metrics, stakeholder narratives
• The evolving role of DEE in supporting Curriculum Redefined, shifting innovative redesign work into sustainable, day-to-day educational enhancement
• What lessons others might adapt, avoid, or reimagine in their own contexts

I’ll also invite discussion on how such models might shift further in response to AI, scaling, hybrid pedagogies, and institutional pressure.

A teaser & a provocation

Here’s a sneak peek: by redefining where ‘the digital team’ sits and how it works, we enabled changes such as:

• Co‑designing modules and programmes from the ground up
• Embedding accessibility into assessments from the start
• Partnering with Schools on embedding the Leeds Curriculum
• Shifting our time from reactive support to proactive, strategic enhancement

And here’s the provocation: in many institutions, digital support continues to be the last thing to get aligned, even though its impact flows across almost all teaching and learning reforms. What might happen if your digital team were embedded, trusted, and forefront of institutional strategy?

If you’re interested in how to reimagine enhancement in your own institution, I hope to see you at ALTC25. And if not, I look forward to connecting here or online afterward.

ALT’s Annual Conference is one of the UK’s largest conferences for learning technology and digital education professionals. The conference provides a valuable and practical forum for practitioners, researchers, managers and policy-makers from education and industry to solve problems, explore, reflect, influence and learn.

ALTC25 will take place in Glasgow on 23 and 24 October 2025.  Register closes 20 October 2025.