In 2025/26, I took a leading role in the LOUISA Early Adopter Programme (EAP) across the two Schools I support: the Centre for Open Learning (COL) and Moray House School of Education and Sport (MHSES). LOUISA is a three-year university-wide project focused on improving the student experience of assessment and feedback in Learn by developing recommended workflows for common assessment types. The EAP was the mechanism through which courses across the university would test these workflows before recommendations were finalised.
Building on the trust and credibility I had established with course organisers and administrators during the Turnitin Deep Integration Pilot (see Section 1a) and the Learn Ultra rollout (see Section 1c), I was able to have open conversations with colleagues about the benefits and risks of participating. I presented the EAP to the Senior Leadership Teams in COL and MHSES and to the MHSES Programme Directors Forum, before following up individually with Course Organisers across both Schools. I designed a web form to collect Notes of Interest and coordinated the subsequent responses. Fifteen courses across COL and MHSES joined the EAP, with a further 7 agreeing to pilot the workflows outside the formal programme, accounting for around 40% of the 44 courses participating university-wide across 9 Schools and 3 Colleges. This high uptake also ensured that two of the less commonly tested workflows (media and group assignments) were well represented in the programme.
I became the primary point of contact for around 25 colleagues in my two Schools throughout the pilot, proactively supporting them to implement three new assessment workflows across their courses. I advocated for two COL courses - British Sign Language 1 and 2 (see Specialist Area 2) - to be included as a project case study, showcasing an innovative design that combined the media and group workflows. This approach enabled students learning BSL to work in pairs to submit recorded video dialogues to Learn, and for their instructors to leave both group and individual feedback using a rubric and video feedback. Coordinating this required skilled communication with the teachers, course administrators, and LOUISA project team to design and pilot these workflows and gather feedback from colleagues who are themselves BSL users. The resulting case study was created as an example of good practice, demonstrating how the revised workflows could improve accessibility, enhance the student and marker experience, and reduce administrative workload.
A key part of my role was gathering, synthesising, and channelling feedback from our Schools to the project team. Early in the pilot, the project had planned a series of drop-in sessions for staff, but these were not well attended. Drawing on my understanding of colleagues' working patterns, I was able to clarify that they would benefit more from 'just-in-time' support at strategic points in the semester: when assignments are being set up, when marking is about to begin, and when marks are being released. I also coordinated and facilitated engagement sessions where colleagues could share feedback directly on their experience with the new workflows. These insights helped reshape the project's support model.
Through discussion with colleagues in other Schools and Colleges, I identified that delegated marking - the need for markers to assign themselves to specific marking groups for marking and moderation - was a core requirement for large cohorts across the university, not only in my Schools. While this was possible within the new workflow, it presented significant usability challenges. I evaluated both the current and proposed approaches, finding that a task requiring 2 clicks in the existing system required 10 in the new workflow, among other issues, and shared extensive detail with the project team. I also identified a specific technical issue related to how delegated marking interacts with the Turnitin integration in Learn and raised this with our central Information Services Learning Technology Services Manager, who escalated it to Blackboard for resolution.
In Semester 1, it became apparent that the media workflow was susceptible to students pasting inaccessible links to their videos rather than embedding them using the recommended LTI tool. To address this, I revised the student-facing guidance for our Semester 2 courses to include a pre-submission checklist in the dropbox, reminding students of submission requirements. This led to a 97% success rate in our Semester 2 pilot courses, up from 82% in Semester 1. Using skills developed on a recent CPD course, 'Developing Your Data Skills', I created a Sankey chart to illustrate these findings for the project team. I later developed this research into a report and interactive dashboard. As a result, the guidance I created and recommendation to include a pre-submission checklist was shared with colleagues across the university and incorporated into our Schools’ template guidance for media submissions.
Interactive dashboard exploring effect of revised guidance on media submission success rates in Learn
As the volume of feedback from our Schools grew, I became concerned that a key finding from the pilot - that one of the recommended workflows would present serious challenges for larger courses with multiple markers - might be lost among the broader feedback. Given current budget constraints and the additional workload pressure on teaching offices, I recognised that mandating this workflow could create significant issues. I raised this directly with the LOUISA project leads to ensure it was addressed in the final recommendations.
Towards the end of Semester 2, I delivered updates to both COL (Academic Practice Share) and MHSES (Programme Directors Forum), outlining the EAP outcomes and the recommendations. This allowed me to reassure colleagues who relied on their current workflows for managing marking in large cohorts that they would not be required to change their approach for the new academic year, while highlighting the opportunity for colleagues who wished to adopt the new workflows. I also contributed to the LOUISA blog series, authoring several posts that shared emerging insights from the EAP and showcased how user group contributions were shaping project outputs. Additionally, I supported the project's UX workstream by helping recruit students and staff for usability testing, drawing on my networks across the university to secure 23 expressions of interest from students across five Schools.
This experience has significantly shaped my understanding of how communication can influence institutional decision-making in learning technology. My earlier career in community education gave me a foundation in building trust and working with diverse groups, but the LOUISA EAP required me to operate at a more strategic level by translating local insights into recommendations that affected university-wide policy.
The Amoeba of Social Change and different types of actors within a stakeholder group (Source: AtKisson, 1999).
I found the Amoeba of Social Change model (AtKisson, 1999) helpful in understanding my role as a Change Agent: someone who connects broader innovation with local contexts by communicating benefits clearly and helping others adopt new approaches. In this case, the trust I had built through the Turnitin pilot and Learn Ultra rollout meant that colleagues were willing to engage with the EAP, share candid feedback, and act on my guidance. Without those established relationships, we would not have achieved the level of participation or the quality of feedback that we did.
The most important lesson I have taken from this work is knowing when to escalate. Gathering feedback is necessary but not sufficient, and leadership involves recognising which signals are critical and being willing to raise them, even when they might raise uncomfortable questions. Raising the issues around delegated marking directly with the project team and board took me out of my comfort zone, but doing so helped ensure the recommendations reflected the realities of assessment delivery for large cohorts, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. The role of my feedback in this project has given me greater confidence in my ability to influence decisions beyond my immediate context.
This experience also reinforced the importance of presenting evidence effectively and concisely. Creating the Sankey chart to illustrate the pre-submission checklist impact made the findings immediately legible to the project team and contributed to the guidance being adopted more widely.