Core Area 3:  The Wider Context

3a) Understanding and engaging with legislation 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

H5P will store data about your users’ interactions on your host system. Being that our setup was "self-hosted" (as we opted out from a "SAS" setup) and as the Global Director for Digital Education at Prime Press ltd, I made this transparent by depicting this clause on our data privacy policy, providing the legal grounds for keeping and using this data as demanded by Art. 6 GDPR.

More specifically, we alerted all end users that to everyone's best interest, our company proceeded in storing and processing some or all data to learn something about our users, with the final goal of improving our delviery methods and the subsequent learning outcomes. As such, for each interaction that a user had completed, H5P stored the user’s account identifier of your host system, the start time, the finish time, the score that was achieved and the maximum score possible.

Articulate Rise is one of the tools offered within the Articulate 360 suite of applications, which is one of the leading platforms that are used by industry professionals for elearning content development. Articulate 360 includes several award-winning authoring tools, a new responsive-authoring app, screencasting apps, an ever-growing library of course assets, an online tool for review and collaboration, and exclusive training webinars by industry experts. At the time of writing this reflection, the annual subscription rate for one licence that would permit one user to use this platform to create elearning content is USD999. Articulate software is available via electronic (download) delivery only and its services are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Due to the fact that educators can use this software to create and deploy formative and summative quizzes and exams, Articulate secures data on their servers and network traffic with the most advanced encryption technology publicly available. More specifically, it uses 256-bit TLS/SSL encryption and 2048-bit RSA public keys making  all exams fully GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant.

Reflection

It is generally true that GDPR has really shaped the way we are now treating student data. Even though, in the past 5 years, I have found myself pushing this agenda by undertaking senior roles in various institutions, I do recognize that this is a very dynamic field that needs constant attention and increased vigilance to avoid any eventuality of having to deal with an eye-watering fine that would most likely also end my career. The thing that really scares me sometimes, is that both in academia and in the private sector, I do frequently find myself doing things "the quick and dirty" way! Keeping an eye to existing and new legislation is one thing, but trying to match new emerging technology that comes in the form of new tools with an existing legislative framework is hard work and requires careful thinking and planning. Deadlines and due diligence do not exactly go hand in hand and are oftentimes in direct conflict with direct re-precautions in the quality of the outcome. 

One thing that I definitely need to work on is to figure out ways to delegate some of the work that pertains to GDPR issues to colleagues, but this is something that requires trust and team-building exercises are some decisions can have a huge impact on the outcome of a project and cannot be taken lightheartedly.

3b) Understanding and engaging with policies and standards 

During my 15 year career as a learning technologist I had the opportunity to work for many universities that used Moodle as their VLE. One of these universities was UCL London which had introduced a baseline for courses created in Moodle that had been re-branded during Covid-19 and relaunched as the "Connected Learning Baseline". Even though, I worked as a Learning Designer at UCL, that had a primary focus to develop short courses for FutureLearn, I had the opportunity to access and develop some of their Moodle courses that were primarily linked to the FutureLearn MOOCs that I was in charge of developing.  

Using this invaluable experience I gained during my time at UCL, I was able to design and create all of the support materials on Prime Press's Moodle site based on the "Connected Learning Baseline" and also set out the minimum expectations for all of our new courses! More specifically, I created some guidance on how to structure course content using collapsed topics

Another area that I focused was the introduction of the idea of accessibility. All images that were used in Moodle had "Alt text" and all of the Interactive Video Quizzes contained closed captions and a video player that allowed students to re-watch specific parts of each video. 

Last but not least, during the stages of providing feedback to my team members that were tasked with populating our Moodle Platform with content, I made sure to explain the importance of structure and ease of navigation (UX/UI design). Due to the fact that most - if not all - of our Moodle courses, were targeting young ESL learners that had English as a second language, I instructed all team members to avoid having lengthy titles and avoid any unecessary jargon.

Reflection

The complexities of working and coordinating 2 teams remotely both had a negative and a positive impact on the creative process. On the one hand - and it terms of understanding and engaging with policies - I was forced to introduce more meetings were corrective action was needed. These meetings at time, seem to have a negative impact on the group dynamics and the whole process of creating new content. On the positive side of things, even though at times it seemed that creativity was stifled by the introduction of manuals, agreed processes and technical meetings, staff reported increased capacity building and felt that they could do more work autonomously going forward.