The English Indices of Deprivation 2019

The Indices of deprivation (IoD) is a collection of seven measures of deprivation used to relatively rank areas of England. The aim is to order the 32,844 small areas, with an average population of 1,500 or 650 households, from the least deprived to the least, and monitor changes in these ranks over time. The indices were introduced in the 1970s by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government to measure local deprivation across England. These neighbourhoods are officially called Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs).

Poverty is a lack of financial resources, whereas deprivation includes multiple aspects of individuals living conditions to measure a lack of resources. There are 39 indicators organised into seven domains combined using weightings that value income and employment more heavily than other forms of deprivation such as health or risk of crime. As a relative measure, there is no threshold where an area is considered deprived, but rather it is used to measure the relative deprivation between local areas.

The seven measures that make up the IoD are:

Income (22.5%)*: Measures the proportion of the population experiencing deprivation relating to low income
Employment (22.5): Measures the proportion of the working-age population in an area involuntarily excluded from the labour market
Education (13.5%): Measures the lack of attainment and skills in the local population
Health (13.5%): Measures the risk of premature death and the impairment of quality of life through poor physical or mental health
Crime (9.3%): Measures the risk of personal and material victimisation at local level
Barriers to housing and services (9.3%): Measures the physical and financial accessibility of housing and local services
Living environment (9.3%): Measures the quality of both the ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ local environment

*Percentages represent weighting used when combining the domains

The latest data was collected in 2015 and 2019. Deprivation is distributed across England, with 61% of local authorities having at least one of the highest deprivation areas. The most deprived areas of the country tend to be concentrated in cities, particularly those that used to have heavy industry, including Birmingham, Nottingham, and Hartlepool, coastal towns, and parts of east London. Blackpool is considered the most deprived area of England, with eight of the ten most deprived neighbourhoods in the indices.

The indices can be used to compare neighbourhoods across England, identify the most deprived small areas, and compare larger regions based on the relative deprivation within the LSOAs, such as the number of areas in the bottom 20% of the indices. The data can also be used to explore individual domains such as levels of education, health, or crime in particular areas. Movements in the relative rank of a given area can be used as evidence of the effectiveness of development programmes or targeted interventions.

The Indices of Deprivation is becoming more critical for Universities. The Office for Students puts pressure on higher education institutions to narrow gaps in access, progression, attainment, and outcomes between different groups of students. Gaps in the four areas existing between those that come from regions ranking lower than those that rank higher. Universities must make sure they are narrowing the gaps by seeking to recruit students from areas of high deprivation, putting in place interventions to help these students stay at university and achieve a good degree, and support them to find a graduate-level job once they leave.

Being aware of the indices is essential, first to understand that deprivation is not just about income, and secondly that you can use it over time to measure the impact of your work. You can read the complete reports and access the data on the UK Government website.

Creative Arts funding: What is really going on.

My Twitter feed over the last week has been full of comments like ‘disgusting’, ‘an absolute disgrace’, ‘shortsighted’, and ‘damaging’. The words have been attached to articles with titles including: ‘Plans for 50% funding cuts to arts subjects at universities catastrophic‘ from the Guardian, ‘Arts figures criticise plan to cut university funding for creative subjects‘ by the BBC, and ‘Office For Students consults on 49% cuts to HE arts courses‘ by the Cultural Learning Alliance.

As a Music Production graduate who spent much of my career teaching in or managing Creative Arts departments, these headlines come as quite shocking. The creative industries are a vital area of the UK economy and one in which we are world-leading. The subjects that feed the sector with talented graduates are expensive to deliver, requiring specialist equipment, and provide a route for students that are less academic and primarily from lower-income backgrounds.

These articles and comments have come in response to a consultation the Office for students and the Department of Education have been carrying out into redirecting a particular type of Higher Education funding. To understand what is going on, you first have to look at how university courses are funded.

How courses are funded

In England, university students pay up to £9,250 per year in tuition fees. The money is usually paid by student loans directly to the university. It is also common for individual courses to require students to pay materials fees or compulsory field trips at enrolment. If a course recruits thirty students per year, the course would then have £277,500 (30 x £9,250) per year to run that course.

In a typical university, up to 70% of the student fee would go to staff costs, leaving £83,250 to pay for facilities and resources for our example course. This might sound a lot, but once you have factored in the buildings and heating, security, marketing and recruitment, student union extracurricular activities, and general running costs, it does not leave much to buy the specialist equipment required to prepare students for world-leading industries.

Universities have got around this shortfall in two ways; the first is scale, the second is a government top-up called the Higher Education Teaching Grant (T-Grant). Most universities are large organisations with many thousands of students and take advantage of economies of scale by pooling fees for the non-staff costs like computers and buildings. Many courses can be run for under £9,250 per year, and so institutions charge the top rate to all students and then take a top-slice from all courses, creating a fund that can be bid for when subject areas require specialist facilities or resources.

To support the HE sector in resource-heavy subjects, The Department of Education has the T-Grant fund that provides high-cost subject funding allocated to these areas based on the higher costs. The new ‘Allocation of the Higher Education teaching grant funding in the 2021-22 Financial Year‘ consultation looks at how this fund might be used differently.

High-cost subject funding — supporting strategically important subjects. High-cost subject funding is currently allocated simply based on higher costs of provision, with little strategic prioritisation. The OfS should reprioritise funding towards providing high-cost, high-value subjects that support the NHS and wider healthcare policy, high-cost STEM subjects and/or specific labour market needs.
Gavin Williamson CBE MP

The proposal suggests 50% of the T-Grant for subjects including performing arts, creative arts, and media studies are removed for the 21/22 academic year and reallocated to high need areas such as those supporting the NHS, STEM subjects, and other areas with skills shortages. This proposal is in part a response to the Auger report but also part of the Government’s broader strategy to address the skills mismatch. It is worth noting that the DfS has identified eleven smaller specialist institutions that will retain the full T-Grant for these subjects.

The proposed courses eligible for the high-cost funding are:

Clinical Medicine
Clinical Dentistry/Dental Hygiene and Therapy
Veterinary science
Nursing and allied health professions (pre-registration courses)
Anatomy and Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology
Sciences (Agriculture, Forestry and Food Science; Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Chemistry; Physics)
Engineering subjects
Information Technology

Impact

There are three primary reasons I can see why this is a problem for the sector and students. First is the timing; even if you ignore the impact of the pandemic, these changes are proposed for the next academic year, starting in four months. If approved, it will not leave long for the universities to react, finding funding that may already have been allocated for infrastructure projects or recruiting students to courses incentivised by the T-Grant.

Second, most universities work on overall budgets, so although the funding is being reallocated rather than removed, it will benefit some universities but significantly hurt others. Some universities that already teach both the high-cost subjects and the new strategically important subjects will offset the cuts in the creative arts with the increase in funding in other areas. Other smaller institutions that do not teach the new strategically important subjects will not offset the cuts, which means significant reductions to budgets that will most likely lead to redundancies.

Finally, and most importantly, the subjects facing 50% reductions in the T-Grant are the types of subjects that tend to attract students with lower grades and from disadvantaged backgrounds. My teaching career is full of stories of kids coming from deprived backgrounds that have found a passion for creative arts, studied hard, and then gone on to prosperous careers. If we are disincentivising universities away from delivering these courses by removing the needed additional funding for the required resources, will these kids instead choose to study engineering?

The Government has been clear, with 50% of people in the UK getting a degree by the age of thirty but with 8% of employers not able to recruit to positions due to a lack of skills and 13% having internal issues with skills, something needs to be done to address the mismatch. The Apprenticeships levy was the first grand step, and Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQ) is the next big move. Degree Apprenticeships and HTQs moving forward should help provide funding to give students the skills they need for work.

It is unclear how much the pandemic and lockdowns have accelerated this proposal and if it will be rushed through for the September cohorts. It is clear that if they are introduced, they will represent a reduction of the T-Grant of around £17 million for universities delivering creative arts courses. These might not be the same institutions providing the courses that the funding is redirected towards. I do not believe the reporting I have read has been fairly presented and does not consider the governments broader strategy and increased funding for skills. Still, the timing is poor and has the potential to impact those that most need support.

I would love to hear your views in the comments, on Twitter, or on Linkedin.

Mission, vision, and strategy

I am currently working on an updated plan for how the university will move forward with flexible learning. The last fourteen months have dramatically accelerated the plans I drew up in 2019, and so it is time to be more creative and ambitious.

Thankfully we put into place three separate statements to help generate an online learning strategy:

Mission Statement – Who my team are, what we provide, who we serve, the benefits we deliver, and what is important to us.
Vision Statement – A previously ambitious and unique idea of the university we want to create.
Value Statement: Our beliefs about how work should be done, our standards, culture, and aspirations.

The mission statement has remained the same; we exist to move the university to a hyper-flexible delivery model that uses technology to redefine the student experience. The vision statement, however, like most universities strategies, has changed dramatically. The forced move to online learning has moved us past ambitious five-year plans and started creating conversations about what is possible, what is desirable, what works, and what future we want to make.

The external work has moved forward too. Suppliers like Microsoft and the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) vendors have developed the tools available to universities, making them easier to use and adding functions to support emerging practice. The demand for online learning has grown as people have spent more time at home and working and collaborating via a computer screen; their views on learning have changed.

There are three main tasks for the vision statement:

Consolidate the existing flexible delivery.
Build on that good practice to make it better; more interactive, personalised, and accessible.
Think up what game changers might look like in the new university landscape.

Writing a strategy is about creating a plan for how we deliver a mission and a vision. If you have not updated these three documents recently, it might be time to start designing the new normal.

What is an MBA

In the early days of Google, the company got rid of all their managers. They assumed that as they hired the brightest and most driven engineers, they did not need layers of bureaucracy stopping people from doing their job. The Google founders believed if you get intelligent people, you could give them pretty much any problem to solve, and they would work out how to do it. Within a short period, Google brought management roles back and started the ‘re:Work‘ programme to find the best scientific management methods.

Fredrick Taylor introduced scientific management in the 1880s, and the theory’s ideas of economic efficiency and labour productivity formed the basis of the first Master’s of Business Administration at Harvard in 1908. Taylorism was one of the first attempts to apply scientific ideas like analysis, empiricism, and standardisation of best practices to process management and the move from craft, to production, to mass production made famous by Ford and the Model T.

Thankfully, management science quickly evolved to include social ideas like behavioural science and care for employees as people. Still, the basic idea of applying the scientific method to increase productivity forms the basis of management in most fields. The MBA is where people go to learn this science.

It is possible to learn everything you find on an MBA curriculum in books and on the job, particularly if you join a graduate scheme and the places you work have strong internal development programmes. Most companies do not provide a rounded leadership and management training and support offer, so bright-minded individuals either end up not meeting their potential or seeking degree courses.

Peter principle…people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their “level of incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Wikipidia

There are two strong reasons to do an MBA; the first is that if you want to progress to senior positions with a major corporation, it is a requirement, the second is that you want to learn a scientific approach to managing effectively.

An MBA curriculum should teach the fundamentals of management. It will cover the core functional areas, including accounting and finance, human resources, marketing, operations. A good programme will also cover leadership ideas such as strategy, law, and ethics. Most MBA courses will provide optional modules that cover entrepreneurship, digital transformation and global trade.

Many tech entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, have talked down the need for an MBA favouring people gaining technical skills. But good managers are essential, and the skill set is different from just being good at the technical parts of a job. The best MBA courses are highly selective and expect people to have gained technical proficiency in their specialist area and have ample experience in their field before joining.

First, get good at the technical parts of your field, and then, if you choose to move up in an organisation and manage people, get an MBA.

Learning as a habit

I have signed up for an MBA. After a three year break, I am ready to get back to formal study. An executive MBA seemed to be the logical option at 37 and for the current stage in my career. Since graduating, I have enjoyed unstructured learning, reading around my interests and focusing my intellectual energy on work. I have made significant progress on my journey to expertise, and I am building something at work to create disruptive change. To take my output to the next level, I need to learn more.

A part-time Masters degree is a big commitment, and making the most of the opportunity can take up to fifteen hours per week. Formal courses are designing to help students find this time with the accountability of regular deadlines, the curated path through content, and a community of peers for support. However, Fifteen hours is a significant addition on top of working forty to fifty-hour per week, training for at least 10, and spending an hour publishing 500 words per day. Finding those fifteen hours is going to require a conscious effort to make learning a daily habit.

I read an article today from John Coleman on the Harvard Business Review website that suggested five ways in which you can cultivate a learning habit:

Have a clear outcome
Set goals to achieve your outcome
Build a community around your learning
Develop your ability to focus
Use technology to support your learning

I have a clear outcome of improving my performance at work by completing an MBA and applying what I learn to my career. I have a realistic goal of committing fifteen hours per week or around two hours per day to study, writing, and apply what I learn to work. The time commitment is made more accessible while I am not commuting to and from work, and I have built up a habit of writing each day.

The MBA as a format is unique because it is built around community learning, making my role contributing to the pre-made community rather than having to create my own. The skill to focus for two hours per day over eighteen months will be the biggest challenge, but it is something that I have been working on for a while with daily blogging and in elements of my work. Finally, working in EdTech, the use of technology to support my learning should be easy.

I will dedicate a future post to each of these habits but is a formal course something you are interested in doing? Are you able to cultivate your learning habit using Coleman’s five suggestions?

Contact me on Twitter if you want to discuss building a learning habit or starting a new course of formal study.

The four stages of changing a VLE

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) are web-based platforms for the online elements of courses. Over the past year, they have been essential tools in the delivery of learning as most teaching has gone remote, and their role is likely to remain a crucial part of courses in the future. With this dramatic increase in prominence, many universities are likely to evaluate the tools they currently have and begin to assess what is missing and how their platforms can be improved.

The big question is should we invest in our current platform or spend the next two years and considerable resource moving to a different one?

Moving VLE is a two-year project. It can be broken down into two broad areas; year one is completing the tender process to select a new platform, and year two is for implementing that chosen solution. You can further break these two areas down into four six month stages for changing your VLE:

Writing the tender
Selecting a vendor
Technical implementation and pilot
User implementation

Writing a tender

The first stage starts with a review of the current platform’s strengths and weaknesses and a collection of requirements for the future of teaching and learning at the institution. You may choose to bring in selected vendors, including your current provider, to present their software’s latest features and future roadmaps as a soft market test before the decision to stay or move are finally made. The information collected at this stage is documented in the tender paperwork and sent to vendors for a written response. This final step and the next stage are likely to be through a formal procurement process that your finance team will support your through.

Selecting a vendor

The vendors will formally respond in writing to your tender documents, and the university will need to go through each scoring the responses against the requirements. The top-scoring vendors can then be invited in to present how their software will meet the stated needs. Getting as many academics involved in these sessions is crucial to selecting the best fit for the university. Once the successful VLE provider is specified, the contract negotiations and procurement checks start. Do not underestimate how long this process might take – I would suggest leaving a minimum of three months from when you have selected the successful provider for all the contract details to be agreed upon and data protection and legal checks to be processed.

Technical implementation

You now have a new shiny VLE! It needs to be integrated into the Universities systems, the single sign-on, the student record system, and other teaching and learning platforms. The platform will also have to be configured with the options that best suit the way it will be used. The better you have captured the requirements in stage one, the easier this stage will be. Getting the VLE set up and ready to use by the whole university can be challenging. A large scale pilot, moving over a department or school during the technical implementation, can be an effective way to identify and fix any minor oversights or fine-tune settings. Make sure you select courses that are happy to get the new shiny toy in the understanding that it will have bugs.

User implimentation

You have collected requirements in a tender document, you have selected the best provider to meet these requirements with a great deal, and you have integrated it into your systems; you now need to manage the change. The final stage can be the most disruptive; most academics will not have been involved in selecting the tool and will be unforgiving if the move over is not smooth. Communication, automated processes, well-planned training and support, and a much better system will help the user implementation but do not underestimate the resource requirements for this stage; it might cost in time and effort multiples of the contracts first-year costs.

There is some excellent information on the internet on how to manage the four stages introduced here successfully. Most countries have HE specific learning technology networks that can provide a lot of help and guidance. If in doubt, get the VLE vendors in as early as possible to start the conversation and ask many questions, it is a highly competitive market between the top three providers, so the quality of the customer service can be outstanding.

Please feel free to get in touch on Twitter if you are going through the process and have any questions. I am happy to pass on the excellent help I have received during reviews and tenders in the past.

Prototyping in higher education course design

Universities can learn a lot about how to develop courses from product design. In England, a student will spend over £27k on course fees and give up three years of work to take an undergraduate degree, and they put their trust in the course team to make this worthwhile. The combined student tuition fees and education contracts in the 2017-18 academic year were £18.7 billion. At this size, the development of new courses should be a finely tuned process; many institutions have begun to invest heavily in making sure courses this is the case by hiring teams of Learning Designers. Learning Designers adapt many good practices from software and product design to develop offerings that meet the students’ expectations and long-term needs. Prototyping is one such tool helping universities develop great courses.

Prototype: a first or preliminary version of a device or vehicle from which other forms are developed.
Oxford Languages

Prototypes are used to test a solution before the institution invests heavily in the full development of a finished product or service. In higher education, prototyping allows Learning Designers and course teams to test the learning outcomes, course narrative and student journey with prospective students before committing resources to develop it. It enables these teams to create increasingly complete versions of a course over time as an iterative process, reacting to regular feedback and changing trends. Prototyping a course should reduce development time and the need for changes once the course is live. It allows faster identification of the optimal model and avoids the trap of investing heavily in course offerings with significant flaws.

The idea for prototyping comes from evolutionary software development, where a first version is built from a rough specification and presented to users for feedback. Each prospective user experiments with the prototype and makes suggestions for improvements or refinements to the design. The development team then makes improvements based on this feedback and gives it back to users for further testing. The prototype and improvement process is iterative, repeated until the product is where it needs to be for launch.

Iterative prototyping process:

Paper prototype
Proof of concept
Functional prototype
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A paper prototype such as a solution presentation or module map is used as a conversation with students and demonstrate the offering to test whether your offering fits their problem or need. Once the idea is proven to be worth investment, a proof of concept can be created; this is an internal technical test to see if the product can be built with available technology and tools. Once the product or service is approved in principle and proved to be practical to deliver, a working prototype that approximates the final product without being fully finished is created, and further user testing is carried out.

Once the product passes the working model stage, a minimum viable product, the simplest possible customer-ready version, can be built and delivered and sold as a functional product. The product continues to go through developments based on feedback throughout its lifecycle, making sure it remains fit for purpose.

The prototyping process means users get to try the product early. It helps narrow down specifications, and users are more likely to accept the system if they have been involved in developing it. There are some downsides; the first versions a user sees might be of poor quality due to the speed of development, it is not always clear how many iterations the development team should carry out. Prototypes are often built without maintenance in mind making it harder to support long term.

There are two main ways to use prototyping. The first is evolutionary prototyping, where the prototype will become the final system once users satisfied. Significant maintenance work (refactoring) may be needed to keep these products running efficiently, so some people chose to start again once the final design is agreed upon. This second method is called throwaway prototyping, where the initial iterative development is used to determine requirements and then discarded. The product is then built from scratch with quality and maintenance in mind. Throw away prototyping can have a higher upfront cost and slow down the final product launch but should deliver higher quality and a cheaper to maintain end results.

Using prototyping in course design

In the course or module design process, the paper prototype as a module map can be created as the output of a design process such as the UCL’s ABC workshop. A proof of concept represents any technical testing needed to deliver the course vision, and a working prototype could be one hour or so of the course built in the VLE. A working prototype should be tested with at least five potential students in one to one interviews to pick up significant trends in how prospective students feel about the course’s viability.

The Minimum Viable Product is the first run of the course with live students. It is generally accepted that a course needs at least three cohorts to reach maturity, with refinements after each run; Quality Matters (QM) even suggests that a course goes through three complete cycles before a QM review is carried out. Your Course design process should have reviews built-in after each of the iterations to make sure identified changes can be made.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to chat about course development ideas.

Employer involvement in course design

Employability must be a core focus for all higher education. With 8% of employers not able to fill posts due to a lack of applicants with the right skills and 13% of employers having similar issues with a lack of skills in current employees, workplaces need more skilled individuals. The sizeable gaps in the job market represent lost productivity for those companies, lost taxes that could help the poorest in society, and a large number of individuals that could have more profitable and rewarding jobs if they only had the right skills.

These skills gaps come alongside record levels of HE participation, with more than 50% of the population gaining a degree by 30. The Government has labelled this problem the skills mismatch, and it is getting larger. Universities are responsible for addressing the mismatch by ensuring that graduates leave their courses with skills that can get them jobs.

One step towards reducing the skills mismatch involves employers in the design and delivery of university courses. Initiating and developing these relationships can be time intimidating and consuming for academics that have not developed skills in this kind of relationship building. Here I have suggested five steps to building solid collaboration with employers in a gradual phased approach. Any such effort aims to reach step five, at which multiple employers help to design a course to fill their skills needs and are happy to add their brand to marketing materials and employ graduates that the courses produce.

Five steps of employer involvement:

Guest lectures
Student site visits
Employer developed assessments
Student Placements
Co-designed courses

Graduate outcomes; employment and earnings

The UK government released employment and earning statistics over the 2018-19 tax year for graduates yesterday. The figures cover employment and earnings for English universities, FE, and other providers delivering degrees, one, three, and five years after graduation.

The headline figures:

Median graduate earning five years after graduation: £27,400
Graduates in sustained employment, further study, or both five years after graduation: 86.7%
Female median earning lower than male five years after graduation (gender gap in earnings): 13.4%
Median earnings for EU and non-EU graduates from English providers and employed in the UK: £31,000 (EU), and £32,800 (non-EU)

The average earnings for a graduate five years after completing their courses is just £4000 a year less than the national average (£31,,461) for all employees, five years into their 35+ year working life and generally earn close to the national average (£31,100) ten years after graduation. Students studying in England from outside of the UK who stay to work after graduating earn significantly more than those officially domiciled in the UK.

Despite making up 58% of graduates, females earn substantially less than male graduates on average. This gap has grown since 2017/18 (12.5%) and 2014/15 (10.7%); however, females are slightly more likely (2.6% after one year and 0.5% after ten years) to be in sustained employment or further study than males. Graduates from the Indian, Chinese, and White and Asian mixed ethnic groups had the highest earnings one, five, and ten years after graduation.

Graduate earning data is also provided by mode of study. Those who study a Sandwich course, which includes time spent on a business or industry placement and away from the university, were more likely to be in sustained employment or further study and earned more on average than full-time students. Part-time students performed less well in this measure, with only 82.7% in work or study ten years after graduating compared to 85.2% of full-time students and 86.2% of sandwich courses graduates. Graduates of part-time courses earn more initially after graduating than full-time students, but the difference reduces over time, with graduates from full-time programmes making more after ten years. The initial differences in part-time and full-time graduate earnings can in part be explained by part-time students generally being older than students on full-time courses.

The complete data set can be found on the UK Government website. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has produced a report on the returns on degrees, looking at differences between socio-economic group and ethnicity. Interestingly the Lifetime returns on a degree still show a significant drop, with considerable variation, from the Government stated £400,000 used to justify student loans and the 50% participation rate target.

Our analysis shows that over the whole life cycle, university pays off on average for men and women from all socio-economic and ethnic groups. Within all groups, more than two-thirds of university students benefit financially from their degrees. However, there are substantial differences in average returns between groups.

Returns vary relatively little by socio-economic status, with only those who went to independent schools – especially men – getting substantially higher returns from their degrees. Net lifetime returns are also high for those from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds, especially for women. At the other end of the spectrum, returns for state-educated men and women near the 54 top of the socio-economic status distribution are relatively modest
The returns to undergraduate degrees, IFS

How many hours does it take to transform a campus-based university module to online learning?

A recent post on WONKHE, the higher education policy news site stated that it takes 80 hours to convert an existing module into an online or blended one. WONKHE gave no details for where this number came from other than academics had repeatedly mentioned it as the time required.

This comes as no surprise; speaking with hundreds of educators across the sector, we know that, on average, it will take 80 hours to transform a module from face to face delivery with lectures and seminars to high quality online or blended delivery.
WONKHE

I want to do a thought experiment for fun as to where these hours might go. I will make many assumptions, so comment at the bottom to correct me or suggest better hypotheses to use.

My first assumption is that the 80 hours are on top of the existing workload allocation. The module team would use the standard hours for prep and delivery of live (synchronous) learning and facilitation of on-demand (asynchronous) learning.

Assuming the average university module is 20 credits, and one credit is equal to 10 hours of notional learning, students should spend 200 hours on average completing each module.

The term ‘notional learning time’ is used to denote all time expected to be spent by a student in pursuit of a higher education qualification. This includes independent study and reading, preparation for contact hours, coursework, revision and summative assessment. This term is used because the actual time that learners need to achieve designated learning outcomes varies considerably. Notional study time of ten hours per credit is the agreed tariff that higher education providers use in designing their programmes and learning outcomes for higher education qualifications, with 360 credits making up an honours degree.
QAA.ac.uk

Let us assume that a module might be delivered over half an academic year, over 15 weeks, with a one hour lecture and two one hour small group seminars per week as contact time. That would mean that the academic would have 45 hours of teaching time to convert from campus-based to entirely online or a blend of online and campus-based. The other 155 hours would be made up of independent study and working on assessments. This conversion is due to the pandemic, so the independent study and assessment would probably not change too much, even if the assessment is transformed from a three-hour exam to a 24-hour open book exam done remotely.

So, 80 hours to convert 45 hours of teaching to online learning.

Let us further assume that the seminars will stay live (synchronous) through Microsoft Teams or Zoom or, if they are lucky with rooming and social distancing, stay live on campus. That gives us 15 hours of online content and activities to create to replace lectures.

So, 80 hours to convert 15 hours of teaching to online learning. Suppose the academic spends four hours redesigning their module through a workshop activity like ABC, and six hours of training and experimentation to use the software. In that case, this gives our fictional academic 70 hours to create 15 hours of online content and activities for our made-up module.

70 hours of development time to produce 15 hours of video content, text, activities, and self-mark questions mean 4 hours and 40 minutes of development time per hour of online learning.

Let us say that each one hour lecture is 40 minutes of content and then 20 minutes of discussion and answering questions on an audience response tool like Mentimeter. If we allocate 40 minutes of development time to set up a discussion forum and convert the questions to the VLE quiz tool, that leaves four hours to develop four ten minute videos or one hour per ten-minute video.

To sum up, a Module Leader might spend 80 hours converting their existing module to online:

6 hours of training
4 hours of design using the ABC model
70 hours creating content
- 1 hour for each 10-minute video
- 40 minutes for each 20 minute activity time

This is a tough ask for academics that may not have the digital skills or technology at the start of the pandemic to transform their modules in just 80 additional hours. It is important to note that these 80 hours will not have been given to academics within their usual workload but instead done on top of everything else.

Let me know what you think in the comments or via Twitter if you want some discussion.