The Office for Digital Learning (ODL), at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, is a team of nine full time members, enhanced every year by a University funded placement student and a purposeful approach to student advocacy.
They have sole responsibility for technology enhanced learning which, at Ulster, encompasses specification, procurement and management of all digital learning systems, academic development, systems administration, application development and Helpdesk support for all 33,000 users.
The multi-disciplinary team, established in 2014, supports four campuses across Northern Ireland, with up to 80 miles between locations. Whilst much of their work is supporting blended learning pedagogy and technology, many of the team established support and services for fully online distance learning programmes at Ulster in 1999 to secure new revenue streams for a geographically remote institution. The experience of establishing digital partnerships, and services, has resulted in the team being embedded in strategic collaborations with geographically remote locations in the UK, cross border in Ireland, and beyond.
As a central team, with broad reach and responsibility, the team has collectively developed strategies to enable effective collaboration within the team, they share knowledge openly, learn from each other, adapt to changing workloads, help each other to develop solutions and create opportunities to share. The team model this behaviour in interactions with all stakeholders and have developed collaborative human-centred strategies to enable transformational change across the organisation. The team are focused on building capacity in others, developing sustained relationships, connecting practice and fostering communities of practice.
The team's combined traits of expertise, innovative approach, empathy and warmth have seen the team become embedded in a large percentage of Ulster's work within and beyond the institution. The pandemic has resulted in the team's work being more visible across the organisation but the team's approach to the emergency teaching response was only possible due to sustained human-centred approaches to collaboration and significant change projects over many years. This foundation allowed the team to adapt and collaborate quickly, building on relationships, trust and experience to rapidly change approaches on demand.