all right well welcome everyone thank you for coming to see uh debbie baff and um listen to her discuss the cmalt program debbie is the professional development and membership manager for the association for learning technology alt uh in the uk and i will let debbie do uh further introductions of herself thank you for being here that's great thanks ever so much jenn um hello everybody it's great to be here um and um i'm delighted to talk to you today about our cmalt accreditation framework so as um i was just explaining to jenn before we got going uh my wifi decided to fall over yesterday so um i'm going to switch my camera off just to kind of preserve a bit of bandwidth and then uh i'll crack on but um please if you've got any questions just pop it in the chat and i put my email in there and i put my twitter handle on there and i'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have um but otherwise we'll um we'll crack on i'll make the slides available for you because i think we've got about 20 minutes or there thereabouts so bear with me a second while i just press some buttons there we go lovely so i'm hoping you um you can see my slides so as jenn said i'm debbie baff and i work for the association for learning technology in wales in the uk we're um we're a distributed organization so we all work from home um we're quite a small team there's six of us and uh we're kind of based all the way across the uk so i'm based in wales i'm based about 20 miles north of cardiff so right at the bottom of wales and surprisingly it's really sunny today so um i'm really happy to be here with you so i'm just going to tell you a little bit about alt in case you don't know about us and i'll give you a whistle stop tour of the cmalt framework i'll tell you a little bit about the benefits and the different pathways that we offer mention briefly about the various aspects of support and how we go about assessing the portfolios and then um let you know how to register so i'm not quite sure um where you're joining from today and i'm not quite sure of your backgrounds and whether you may even have cmalt or whether you're interested in doing it but um please do pop in the chat um the reason you've come along today it would be really nice to know um and then perhaps we can get to that for a couple of minutes at the end and just to um to see where we are okay so bear with me a second okey dokey so alt um we are the leading professional body for learning technology in the uk and the way it works is we um offer organizational membership and anyone that's a an organizational member their staff can join for free and then we also offer um different sort of memberships individual memberships and um and the cmalt membership that i'm going to talk to you about today so we were established in 1993 i think it was and we've got over three and a half thousand members now so in terms of um who we are really this slide i think is really useful because this summarizes our main values okay and then each of these values um i know obviously being at this conference today these are gonna um you know ring a lot of bells with you so um you know with these particular values we try to empower our members to kind of collaborate and communicate and really coordinate their practice um we have sort of members groups all over the uk um and then we uh our our values really are inspired by our commitment to support our members so it's a kind of nice um feedback cycle that we have so i mentioned obviously that we have these different levels of membership i've just put the details up there for you in case um you are interested of joining as well um and you can find all of this stuff out on the website but um in terms of some of the information that we have about cmalt there's an awful lot of it on the website for you but there's more access to certain things if you are a member so i've put that in there in case you're interested of doing that okay so getting to the actual cmalt overview i'm just having a quick look at the um the chat now to see where people are joining from oh right you've heard about it from a colleague desiree great oh university of cape town wow that's really good excellent oh well i i hope i'm doing it justice for you um so that's a slide that you can see there brilliant uh skill set and how certified people collaborate great so i can tell you all about that karen later so that slide that you can see um in front of you the people that are on that slide this was taking at one of our annual conferences and all those people are successful cmalt holders from um one of the three different pathways that we've got um and a lot of these people on there are very very active members within our community generally really so cmalt itself um it stands for certified member of alt so if you think of it along those lines and then we have these different pathways to kind of describe the three different pathways of cmalt so when we're talking about learning technology we've got a really broad definition that we use so the kind of the the way we think about it is you don't have to be a learning technologist to be a learning technologist so if you see what i mean so um it's you know we've got people that um that are involved in learning technology with lots of different roles and responsibilities so we've got a really really broad range of it and obviously once you achieve certified membership that gives you the recognition really that you've got from your peers as a current practitioner in the area of learning technology however you are defining that within your own role so in terms of how we approach it obviously you can see the connection on this screen here with our values that i talked about about being open and valuing learning from colleagues and things like that so these slides so i should say as well these i've got some really great images on them from um a chap called brian mathes and he does these for us to kind of illustrate how we approach things in alt and i love to use these slides whenever i'm talking to people about them because i think it's my favorite one is the one with the cakes at the bottom um but um but really um what i should say is obviously we we kind of embed these core principles really a professional practice within the whole of the framework so as people are providing evidence we're asking them to think about these things all the way through so that they can really demonstrate their commitment to all of these individual values so in terms of the framework itself this screen really gives you a really good overview of the various different pathways that we've got and it also highlights the core principles and the key areas of competency so in terms of the kind of level that you're thinking of when you're looking at this you are the best person to decide whether or not you feel that you should go for either an associate or a cmalt or a senior cmalt because it's individual to you okay so in terms of the assessment of it it's a portfolio approach so people sign up to do a cmalt um pathway and then they get two years to actually pull their portfolio together within each of the years there are three points of the year that they can submit so in january may and september some people come in and they think right i'm just gonna get this done within two to three months or something like that other people think actually it's going to take me longer to be able to really evidence what um what i do in my everyday role so this is why we offer three different points throughout the year and then when these portfolios come in we give them to two peer assessors they both look at the portfolios independently and then they come together to agree on a joint outcome and as you can see on there there's there's three different outcomes really you can either pass it you can pass it with distinction or if it's not quite there on the first go then it goes into referral so basically that's just saying that minor or major revisions are going to be needed and then you can resubmit and then on resubmitting then um you know the majority of time people get such good feedback from the assessors they will then pass at their second go okay so um once you become a certified holder um then you pay an annual membership fee which um entitles you then to to continue calling yourself a certified member of alt now the good thing about it as well is that once you become a certified member you automatically become eligible to become a peer reviewer yourself so it's a really good way of sort of closing the loop in terms of feedback and also continuing your own professional development so um what we find is a lot of our assessors actually say that they find it really useful to assess other people's portfolios and that helps them keep up with their own professional development and it also um maintains their um their up-to-date knowledge of different technologies that are happening because as we know it happens so fast things really really change quickly in this environment so i really like the way that that's um that's set up you also need to um review your portfolio every three years so because we ask people to pay an annual certified fee that money then covers your renewal process so there's no fee to actually revise your portfolio every three years as long as you're paying your annual membership fee but that is something that you will need to do to remain in good standing so um let me see benefits okay so with the cmalt um with the cmaltprogram itself i mean there are many benefits and they're all going to be individual to the person that's actually doing it but these are the key ones that i think might be useful it really allows you to um to evidence your own learning technology skills and experience that you have and i think with the um with a lot of the work that goes on in this area it's very invisible and i think it's really important to be able to recognize the work that people do behind the scenes a lot of this stuff doesn't happen by magic so you know it's really really good to be able to give some stronger recognition for that obviously it demonstrates your commitment as well to the importance of the interplay with learning technology and it allows because of the um the work that you do in pulling your portfolio together it's a really good way of developing those transferable skills we encourage reflective writing as well within the portfolio so it allows you to reflect critically on what you've done and what you've achieved but also maybe things that you um you might do differently if you were if you had chance to do it again and i'm sure you all know you know over the last kind of 18 months with them with the impact of covid there's lots of things that have happened really quickly that perhaps people might do differently and all of that experience is really really valuable when you're pulling this portfolio together obviously you're getting a good feedback as well from your own peers and then once you've become certified you will have the post nominal letters after your name and that's really useful either for appraisal or for um for recruitment purposes my computer is pinging at me now i'm not sure why it's pinging at me but i'll just carry on um please do um pop any questions that you've got in there thank you so there's three different pathways that i mentioned then just to cover briefly these our original pathway that we started with is the cmalt pathway and that's been running for over 10 years now and then in the last 18 months two years we've introduced a sort of top and tail pathway so we have the associate cmalt pathway and then the senior cmalt pathway and as you can see there on the screen with we've tried to give a guide so that you can think about where it might where you might put yourself within each of these individual pathways but it it's really comes down to you you are the best person to be able to judge whether or not you feel that you can meet the various evidence and the criteria that we're asking for but as a guide we're talking about less than three years experience perhaps people who might be on the periphery of learning technology so they may not do it in a day-to-day role and those people would go for the associates cmalt people who are doing it day in day out learning technologists who've been in the business for more than three years um would be doing the cmalt and then if you are a senior practitioner and you've got maybe management leadership or maybe research uh responsibilities anything like that then you can can consider going for the senior cmalt so the three pathways themselves all have a common approach in that we ask people to set out a contextual statement and to sort of give a bit of background really of where where you're coming from and the sort of role that you that you were undertaking and what your story is up until this point so everybody is required to do this contextual statement and then we also ask people to indicate their future plans as well and that's a really useful thing when people are coming back to review their portfolio because they can go back to it and see exactly what they said they were going to do and whether or not they they met those goals that they stated on there and we also asked people to embed those principles that i mentioned so on that slide where we had the cakes and we've got the kind of communication and dissemination and learning from colleagues and exploring and understanding and keeping up to date we ask people to embed those principles as they're going through with their examples that they're demonstrating of meeting the various criteria and then there are four sets of competencies across each of the pathways so the main areas there as you can see on the screen operational issues learning teaching and assessment the wider context and then communication and working with others has a separate section but each of these individual areas depending on which pathway you're looking at will depend on whether or not um you need to meet every single one of those sub-sections or whether you may just need to meet one or two of them so for example with the associate cmalt for the operational issues section for that one we would expect people to be talking about the constraints and benefits of using different technologies and also talking about the kind of technical knowledge and and sort of how they use learning technology on a day-to-day basis but we wouldn't necessarily ask them to evidence how they actually support the deployment of it um and then when it comes to things like um understanding of your target learners within area two so that learning teaching and assessment area we would only be expecting cmalt candidates to pick up both of those particular areas so the understanding of the teaching learning and assessment processes would be a core thing that every pathway would need to do but when it comes to cmalt we'd also expect them to have an understanding of the target learners as well and maybe you know why you would um use particular technologies for particular um groups of learners um when it comes to the wider context we would still um expect people to engage with legislation so the associates cmalt the cmalt and the senior cmalt we would expect you to have some kind of idea about engaging with legislation but we would expect more depth when it comes to the cmalt and of course the senior cmalt one as well but you can find out more information about this it goes into a lot of detail on this on our website okay um i should say as well that with the cmalt one we also cmalt and senior cmalt actually we we ask people to provide a specialist area so you need two specialist areas for the senior cmalt and one specialist area for the cmalt and then in addition to that then if you are going for the senior cmalt we're also expecting an advanced area of practice so this is where um you you really kind of demonstrate your management or leadership skills and there's they're not set in stone you know these if there's some examples on the screen there of different advanced areas of practice that people have have used um and because this pathway is relatively new we're coming across different ones of these all the time um but i thought it was quite helpful just to give you an idea of the range really so um you know it's it's up to you to demonstrate um what your advanced area of practice is really and it it's more about um demonstrating the impact that your role has on other people so that's where the management and the leadership stuff comes in okay are we doing for time we're okay for a little bit i think um i mentioned earlier as well that we have some really detailed guidance notes on the website and this um slide here is an extract from the um the guidance notes and i like this one because it's it's a really clear way of showing each of the sub-sections and what you need for each particular section so as i mentioned earlier there you know you wouldn't necessarily need to be able to know about supporting the deployment of learning technologies for the associate cmalt um pathway but you would do for the cmalt and the senior so it's a really nice way of just displaying that visually really um and this is the other bit of that slide as well that shows you the different specialist areas and the advanced areas that um that you will need for the senior as well okay so i mentioned as well about um the fact that we expect people to write with a reflective approach so these three elements really are core across each of the um pathways so we expect people to tell us what they've done provide the evidence of what they've done and then really um reflect on what went well you know how it would go differently next time you know and what sort of difference that it's made um to learners or the organization and i would say as well that when people are referred on their first attempt for example that is one of the key reasons is because people find it really difficult to write reflectively and i'm one of those peoples well i i you know i do find it quite difficult to put the i into things i tend to naturally fall into the we did this and we did that and obviously because it's a personal portfolio and it's specific to you you have to really put yourself into the center of it so um it's um it's a really uh good idea to maybe run it past somebody else as well because often people are able to um to kind of value your skill sets sometimes a bit bit higher than we value our own skill set so um but as long as you you make sure that you are reflecting and you've provided enough evidence then um you know you'll be able to use that approach all the way through really okay so i mentioned about support as well um we've got detailed guidance documentation for each of the the pathways and they literally take you through bit by bit exactly what you're needed to provide for each of these individual sections we run regular support webinars as well both for candidates who are thinking about doing cmult and also those that are already on the pathway and maybe want a bit more guidance and recently we've started running some optional um paid for accelerator workshops but these are really designed for what we find is some people sign up for this um and then it takes ages for them to actually get going on it and they start to run out of their two-year time frame and what we found is where we're offering these one-day online um workshops it helps them um gives them a bit of a motivation really to get going on their portfolio but it also works for people who just want to get it done really really quickly so these are new um workshops that that we've designed really to help people hit the ground running so the idea with those as well is obviously you can almost form a little community of practice as well with other people that are in the same position as yourselves now i mentioned as well about the open portfolio register now this is when people become certified we ask them if they're prepared to share their portfolios on our website so if you're a member you can log in and you can see a lot of these successful portfolios which is a really helpful thing because it it makes it more tangible for people once you see how somebody else has approached it now as i said you do need to be a member to actually see those but there are also an awful lot of people that are part of our membership that are open practitioners and they do share their portfolios online um on their own blogs blogs and websites and things like that um this is a just a screenshot of our guidance documentation for you now when it comes to the portfolio itself it can be in any digital format that you that you like really as long as it's something that we can receive online and we can then share with the um with the individual assessors some people use a wordpress site some people do a google site some people put it together in just a doc you know a google doc or a word doc it's really up to the individual and it's it's a reflection of your own personality really on your own um way of approaching things um i thought as well i mentioned about the open practitioners i've put an example on there for you lorna campbell is one of our um certified holders she's also one of our trustees and she's very involved in the um the open world and she does um she has a blog which relates a lot to open scotland she works for university of edinburgh and she's shared her cmalt portfolio as you can see on there i think lorna's used a wordpress um format but i thought it would be quite useful if you wanted to have a little look at that that might give you a flavor and an idea of the way that it can be used in an open environment as well um open education is very close to my heart so i do like lorna's vlog on there okay so we're nearly there in terms of cmalt registration if you do want to register as a cmalt candidate um there are three different registration fees depending on which pathway you're thinking of as i said they you get two years so you sign up and then you get two years to pull your portfolio together so um i've got the three different fees on there for you and it's all online so you can you can go on to the link and then you can um either pay you know with paypal or credit card or you can ask for your employer to be invoiced as well so um that's relatively easy to um to actually sign up i should say as well that when you submit your portfolio you also submit that online and we have a whole suite of pages in relation to the support and what have you which is the link that i put on originally before we started our talk um i've put a slide on there for you with just some links to some further information in case you do want to know anything else um including um the one at the bottom there which is mappings to various other frameworks so we map to things like um in the uk to the jisc digital capabilities framework um and also to the um advanced he the uk professional standards framework as well so um if you're interested in having a look at that you can look at that page and that will show you all the various different mappings that we've got okey doke um i think we are nearly done that's i'm just gonna that's our website on there um and when you have a look on the cmalt drop down menu to the side here you can see all these individual um links which will take you to the cmalt support pages that i talked about earlier okay so i'm going to stop sharing that and um and perhaps ask if there's any more queries okay there we go well if there are no questions and i'm not seeing any at the moment i wanted to say thank you so much debbie this was um very informative and i'm sure that those that were here got a lot of information and as you know we're recording and so we'll get this out and so those that weren't able to attend will be able to see it later as well um currently we are up at a 15 minute break don't get excited don't run away it's only 15 minutes and then next up we have a plenary with uh one of debbie's co-workers we have the alt and apereo screen side chat coming up ethics and learning technology perspectives from the pandemic i think it's going to be a really interesting session so i hope you will all join us you'll find the link uh on the conference platform in the trysakai thank you everyone thank you yes the slides will be available i'll then i'll send them all i'll do whatever you need me to do for that i can put them on the site can't i jenn i think he said yeah okay i'll do that for you thank you so much for coming everyone i hope you found it useful take care take care bye now bye-bye
2021-06-30