The Power of Automation

Today's blog will also be a "how to" video if this idea works, so keep your eyes peeled for new uploads to my YouTube channel (which you can also peruse in the video section of this website).

A not insignificant amount of an #academic's time is spent dealing with urgent queries and problems. I say urgent, but urgent is one of those "in the eye of the beholder" things when you think about it. From my four year old's point of view, his doing the wee-wee dance for five minutes in no way indicates to him that he should rather urgently go to the toilet (that urgency will be of his choosing, and will largely coincide with finishing his snack or the episode of whatever he's watching coming to an end). But to my mind, being more experienced in having a full bladder and better equipped in judging relative distance to the nearest toilet, when you have to start hopping about try to try and keep your external urethral sphincter from being overridden by the internal one (apologies - anatomist, remember), we're into the lands of urgency and you need to get moving my boy. The same thing goes for urgent matters of staff and students.

For instance, a #student e-mailing you on a Friday afternoon asking to change classes for the following Monday morning because they had an appointment booked in for weeks but only now felt they should probably address the impact that will have on their ability to attend is urgent to them, but possibly just an example of poor planning from the perspective of the person they are e-mailing. Yes they need to get something sorted quickly for them personally. But the fact that they knew their timetable and their circumstances for a considerable period before it dawning on them that other people might also need to be aware for things to run smoothly should not mean that the academic receiving the e-mail should necessarily drop everything to resolve their issue - and certainly not if that e-mail is received over the weekend. Yes you need help, but I'm not even going to read your e-mail until Monday morning because I maintain appropriate working hours and practices so that I don't start to drop the ball in being a husband and father by letting work creep into my home life.

Same kind of thing with staff urgency of course. A colleague having only just gotten around to something that others are relying on or waiting for, then coming to you/your team at the 11th hour apologising but could we all get "x" to them asap is not grounds for me to go out of my way to counter for your poor time management and inefficiency.

Some things on the other hand, are urgent and warrant intervention and support almost immediately (and often are simply to solve, take no time at all to sort, and can be done by putting aside what you were doing for five minutes and dealing with). Systems that are not working that are out of a student's control and have a time factor involved in them being able to access them for example. It might not be a system I created or have access to. But I can likely (and I hate to play the "if you're good at your job" card, but being an academic is more than teaching and marking, and research - you also have to, and should have to, know a lot about how the place works inside the machinery) figure it out myself, know who can, or signpost to the appropriate service or person who has responsibility for it.

Some urgent matters can be dealt with through a quick chat. Others might need a bit more detective work. Some are super simple to sort out, but through the ways in which we are used to working (and of setting expectations) just... take... an age... And that detracts from the time we hoped we could carve out of our busy days to enhance something, build something, fix something. That headspace we need to be able to reflect on what needs doing, what we'd like to do, and to prioritise properly. Or even just to deal with the urgent stuff that can't be handled by other means than us and our wits.

So we need to start automating the aspects of our job that might need doing, that might be beneficial doing, or that are just a pain in the behind to do but keep cropping up. A low-level example of this we're all familiar with, would be optical readers for MCQs - boy I bet those of you who were around when they came in didn't know what to do with all that free time (for about a week until someone decided that free time was wasted time and gave you a whole heap of new things to do). For years now I've been using a completely digital approach to my large first year module assessments by having what I call Varied Online Questions (VOQs) that are marked and reported back to the VLE automatically by the software (Blackboard Test would be an easy example of this kind of functionality) but that ask questions and expect input in a far wider ranging way than just the old MCQ. Matching pairs, spot questions, word banks, numeric, sequential and the rest. It means pretty much the entirety of my first year assessment is done and dusted from my point of view before they even arrive due my setting it up at the start of term. All I have to do then is field the occasional technical issue a student might be having.

It works because at that level of study I actually do need them to demonstrate basic knowledge and understanding. The higher level skills of critical evaluation and all the rest will come as their learning develops. And what this does is (if we were to think of time as purely transactional) buy me more time to giving greater quality and quality feedback on assessments at higher levels. Not that I spend additional time marking those higher level assessments just because I have the time; I just do that marking differently to ensure I am giving more feedback and in more detail than maybe others can by their more manual methods (basically I do live audio comments, in-line, as I read through the work to provide context and conversational tone).

Attendance is another aspect of the job that I have begun to automate (and that feeds into the point of today's blog, which I promise we're edging towards) is attendance monitoring. Not for a punitive or assessment related reason, but for student wellbeing. Obviously I'm concerned about large scale absence in teaching sessions (when I say "concerned" really I mean p***ed, just like every other academic showing up to a half empty room while Kenneth the space resources clipboard guy judges you silently through the window in the door at the back for "wasting" valuable space), but it's a sector-wide issue that will require meaningful change in how we operate to have any real impact on. But when a student is absent a lot, it can sometimes mean that something is preventing them from coming in. Could be something minor, could be something more serious. But either way it puts them at risk of non-progression, non-completion, and of going unheard and unhelped if we don't know for sure that they're missing (some people, no matter how much we generalise students in a positive light, simply don't want to come to class and don't care about their learning - we can try to help them change that mindset, but they do exist). So before my institution instigated a centralised means of gathering attendance data (that needs work and doesn't work quite as well as my own method, but has the right idea and is modifying all the time as it runs - the people involved are doing a damn good job of it), I used a simple #Microsoft Forms method of collecting attendance in any teaching session.

Here's how it worked. I made a Microsoft Form with three questions.

1. Which of the following courses are you on (an MCQ)?

2. What module are you in right now?

3. What is the word of the day?

I then modified the settings of the form to only allow access to those within the organisation (i.e. have a Microsoft based e-mail account within the university tenancy, which all our students now do) so that it could automatically capture their name and e-mail. And finally to give them access, I shared it via the downloadable QR code option that Forms provides, and put it up on the screen in one of the breaks of the lecture (or the end of a practical in the lab). Then I would just call out whatever random word popped into my head (and invariably spell it for them, no matter how simple it was). The login access prevented them signing in their absent mates from their own phone, the QR code prevented links being sent around social media chats (quick photos of and sending round notwithstanding), the word of the day ensured they had to be there at the time to hear it, and the timestamps ensured I knew who had done it at the time I actually gave it. I made one for each level of study, sent the QR codes round to my teaching team (25 academics, give or take) and asked they give out the relevant code in every class they taught or facilitated. The data automatically collated in Excel (and live I may add, using the new "add Forms to Excel" functionality), which I could then filter based on any number of criteria from module to date to name to email to word of the day. It was simple, consistent, only required something they all possessed anyway (a smartphone and a university login), and allowed me to monitor programme wide attendance across the year at any point in the year.

Then came a centralised method of collecting this information. Though they looked at my method to adopt university-wide, another centralised system could not handle Excel data feeds and thus could not be scaled up. It only allows the member of staff timetabled to capture attendance, has about seven different ways it can be cheated, cannot handle there being repeats of things and a student having to come to one other than the one they were timetabled to, and the only person that can see the data is again the person who was timetabled to teach. No module and no programme overviews possible by academics. Still, I was fortunate enough to be given "back door access" to the data for my faculty and thus began manually downloading and collating weekly attendance data for around 30 modules (way more of a slow pain in the backside than my way, but access nonetheless). This data I used some Excel formulas to tally up the number of sessions any one student had been to on any one module to give me a total presence (you can watch my How To video on that here). And that was useful. It gave me an idea of troublespots and success. But more importantly it gave me a list of names of students who were very absent. That in combination with classlists (for the e-mail addresses that I used to be able to get automatically but now had to ask module leaders to get and send me) gave me a means to send an e-mail to everyone with a high degree of absence, let them know I had noticed, and ask them to fill in a Form that formed the backbone of a supportive process to help them.

Now that was nice. It gave me an automatic way of collecting reasons for absences so I could begin to look for how we could turn that around and increase attendance. But the overwhelming response to the question on the absence support form, "Can you give some detail as to why you have been absent so often?" was related to #mentalhealth. I won't go into the importance of that, as anyone working at any university knows full well the increase in cases of poor or struggling student mental health and the impact it has on student success. But what could I do to help? How could I try to make sure that those students who were filling in my absence form and declaring (quite bravely) that they were suffering from stress, anxiety, depression, and that that was what was preventing them from making the most of the opportunity university offers, got to the help they might need, or the information they might find helpful? The form included a link to some support at my university, but a couple of them had already gotten in touch several weeks after completing the form to say (paraphrasing) "I filled in your form but you haven't helped me with my problem". It hadn't occurred to me that they might have thought I was offering some kind of mental health aid or counselling. Even I, with arguably a lot more free time than mast of my colleagues thanks to my digital approaches and creativity, was not going to be e-mailing a student everytime they completed my form to have a chat about their mental wellbeing. I'm afraid e-mail trafficking and service signposting is not what I got into teaching for, and does fall into the category of "not my job". You don't want to step on the toes of those services and of people who genuinely can help with mental health issues (I'm more of a bulldoze my way through something, solve the problem, don't let things get to you kind of guy - I'm great at listening, and I can empathise, but I'd want to help fix things and that's not always what people struggling with their mental health are looking for).

So this morning I came up with a solution (see, fixing things). Let's automate this puppy! Now I've never used it, but I wondered if another tool in the Microsoft arsenal that staff and students at my university have access to, Power Automate might have something I could use. And lo and behold, it did! A quick Google search and by following these instructions from Microsoft, if a student selects "yes" to the question "would you say that the primary reason for your absence is related to mental health" on the absence support from, Power Automate automatically sends them an e-mail with a supportive message, links to the wellbeing service information we provide, and to the ability to contact that service to make an appointment. It's simple, it's scalable, it's in line with the ethos and supportive message we're trying to get across when it comes to student support for mental health (feel like I've said those two words too many times now), and it's automated. I'm helping (I hope), but I'm helping without having to divert time away from what my job and my passion actually is - it's a win-win!

Here's the thing though - that's just one application of a massively adaptable feature within a simple(ish) to use application that isn't bespoke or unsupported or additional cost to anyone. It just isn't being utilised very much. By using this feature or others very similar, you could simplify student registration, signpost more efficiently based on selecting answers to questions users ask - a decision tree of support and information, if you will. Imagine making a form, a survey, where the questions you put to students help them find information themselves! Or indeed holding staff to greater account for getting those things done that some of us spend so much time waiting on others to get done before we can do our bit by automatically assigning tasks to a project planner using Power Automate - a document going up that automatically updates the task progress to "done" and unlocks something else for the next person, or e-mails or messages them a confirmation without the first person having to do it themselves ("Hi Charlie, just letting you know I've done that." sheesh...). Okay I might have to tinker a bit more with Power Automate before I get that fancy with it. I'm just a beginner.

But that's the thing - I'm a beginner with this, and with only a little tinkering and having a want to help further but a need not to add to my own workload (I'm want to help but I'm not looking to be busier) I simplified something that can actually provide real benefit to staff and students. If we start to throw in a little AI, a little bit of chat bot (but without removing the personalisation - universities are people places after all and no tech should ever take that away from them but should instead take away the burden of the non-people interaction based work) who knows what we can do to make university a learning experience again, and not so much of an administrative one.