 Yna, arweud. Glein yn fawr, Glein. Mae'n fawr. Mae'n fawr. Mae'n fawr, Glein. Gwyddi'n gwneud. Glein yn fawr. Fawr. Gwyddi'n gwneud, Glein, ac mae'n iawn o'n gweinio, Rydym ni'n fawr iawn. Gweinio. Mae'n fawr, Glein. ac mae'r newid yn fawr i'r teimlo wedi'u llunydd. Gallwn i'n ddigon nhw'r gwybod y ddweud o hyd yw'r sgol yw'r gweithio. Wrth gwrs, mae'n arfer o'r rhan o'r teimlo yn fawr. Roedd bod fe'n ddweud o'r tîm wrthio'n dweud yn fawr, mae'n ddweud o'r tîm, ddweud o'r teimlo i'r tîm, a'r ddweud o'r tîm, dwi'n ddweud o'r tîm a'n ddweud o'r teimlo i'r tîm, is part of a central cross-faculty service called learning and teaching development services and our team's role is usually to work with a school or program team to help enhance learning and teaching, often, but not always with these digital tools. During the pandemic our team worked really on just one project which was essentially helping everyone to deliver teaching remotely, but we're this year just getting back to what our team was intended to do. So I'm working with the School of Modern gyda'r hanfod o ymwyfodol i'r ddisgondol, ac mae'r peryfynodau yng Nghymru yn ysgol. Mae'r holl fydd yn cyffredig fel hyn o'r holl o'r holl o gael. Ond, yn y pand REMC, ac oherwydd mae'n llu'n trefiau, mae'n ddweud o'r holl o'r hwnnw yng nghymru ar y Llywodraeth. Terry Fert longer than me, who's in post 10 or 11 months, I think, before I moved to Newcastle last February and joined the project when it was already in full screen. So before we look specifically at the labs, which is the main focus of this webinar, Terry's just going to set the scene, but give us some context about what this project was. That's great. Thanks very much, Glen. Good afternoon, everybody. I'll leave Glen to keep an eye on the chat for me, if that's all right. Glen, just in case there's any questions, just feel free to pop them in there. As we go, that'll be great. So yes, see if we can move this slide on. Excellent. So the School of Engineering's flexible Stage 1. I've noticed Martin, Edny, who was also part of the sort of wider project has appeared in the chat. Hello, Martin. Nice to see you. So before I go into detail on the blended labs themselves, I thought I'd just take two minutes to kind of quickly set the scene, as Glen said, and touch on the rationale and the context behind our work. Why it was we were redesigning our labs on switch a large scale is the name suggests the engineering flexible Stage 1 is a common Stage 1 engineering programme designed to give every first year engineering student a broad introduction to the subject. So whether that be civil engineering students, mechanical engineering students, electrical marine, they all do the same first year and in doing so get a flavor for all disciplines. Before needing to commit to one of those disciplines at Stage 2 and beyond. This gives students the flexibility to and time to explore the many different specialisms available to them, different career paths available as an engineer before needing to commit to any one of them for the remainder of their degree and possibly for the rest of their life. So it was a pretty big project and as we will show you today, Glen and I, who, as Glen said, are essentially cross faculty learning designers and tele-advisors, we were kindly invited to join the engineering team and why were we invited? Well, development of this new programme required a complete curriculum redesign, as well as a shift towards collaborative module design and team teaching. Project leaders also wanted to modernise their taught content and lab experiences and make better use of digital technologies in their delivery. First, this was to build upon the university's strategic commitment to provide an educational experience supported and enhanced by technology. But more than that, it was also to try and demonstrate digital innovation and position a school as a forward looking ambitious leader in engineering education. And that's where Glen and I come in. So we came and we added to the discipline specific subject knowledge and pedagogic knowledge that was already present in the engineering team with a deeper technical knowledge, so knowledge of university systems, effective digital practice and content development know-how. In this partnership model helped create a sustainable culture of working together, where each member of the design team was kind of valued for what they were able to bring to the project. And where the real value from that relationship happened at the intersection points, you know, where the technology, the pedagogy and the subject knowledge all came together. I do like a nice PowerPoint animation. After that, we ran a number of learning design workshops at the outset of the project to try and work out exactly how we were going to achieve. Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself. We started off with a number of vision workshops with the engineering staff to get all stakeholders in a room together and then collectively trying to determine what it was that everybody wanted to get out of this project. And then after that, we ran a number of learning design workshops to try and work out exactly how we were going to achieve that vision and how we could help establish an infrastructure in the school to help support staff in the development of their new modules and their new labs. And moreover, how a blended approach could be used to improve the student learning experience and combine the best of face-to-face teaching and lab activities with the best of online learning. Now, I should say, aside from the pedagogic advantages of a blended approach shown on the screen here, things like flexibility, interactivity, availability, accessibility, reusability, all the illities, there was also some unavoidable practical reasons why we were doing what we were doing. By combining all of the discipline-specific programmes into one common programme, student numbers were expected to increase substantially. We were projecting 400 or so for the first run of the new programme, with higher numbers going forward. And that's pretty much what we've got. I think it was just shy of 400 last year with 450 or so this year, so big numbers. And as you can imagine, everyone was very much aware from the outside that this would place a large strain on not only teaching capacity, but also estates and lab space, not to mention the costs associated with those labs, materials, staffing and such. And so a blended approach and its promise to streamline delivery and reduce teaching overheads presented a very attractive proposition. Just for completeness, before I move on, I should say that a blended programme, as you probably very well know, in the pre-pandemic sense of the term, generally requires something between 20% and 80% of content to be delivered online. Using resources created specifically for that purpose. Amount to vary in that definition, but a 20% minimum was what we were working towards at Newcastle. And I'll pass you over to Glen. Yeah, so we fast forward to October 2020, so just over a year ago now, the School of Engineering launches this new flexible stage one programme. And while the project was still sort of in pre-pandemic times there was a hope of a sort of a vague game that about 30% online was sort of an imagined number. And that was already seen as quite a challenge. It meant a lot of change for the school who become very accustomed to doing things in person. But as it turned out, it ended up delivering 100% of it online, as I'm sure everyone in the webinar will remember that spring and summer last year, where that adjustment was made. Because obviously the pandemic hit and everything changed. But as the work we've done so far in moving some of this delivery online was already in place, it had put us in quite a good position to pull that off. And we were able to get out of the block straight away and start reimagining how those in person elements could move online to join the rest of the programme. And a key feature of the on-dime delivery that we already had was the work that we've been doing on the digital labs. Thanks, Glen. Yeah. So yes, although we took a holistic approach to blending all aspects of the programmes taught delivery for the rest of this session, we're really just going to focus on how we help to blend and embed more digital learning opportunities. In the all first year engineering labs starting with our digital lab gates. Right. Let me test my streaming capabilities here. Don't worry if this video is a bit jumpy on your end. It's just yet to illustrate the lab. This was a video recording we made to demonstrate our work a little bit back. I'm not going to share this sound. I want to turn that off because it will just drone me out. And my colleague presents this video, but the sounds off. So just pretend she's not there. So what are digital lab gates? Well, we created these in Canvas, Canvas being our VLE, to blend the labs and flip specific aspects of the experience. The idea was to try and extend our traditional lab activities beyond the confines of the physical timetable sessions. Firstly, this was to allow students to get a feel for a lab beforehand before they arrived on site in person. Just so they felt a little less overwhelmed by being in the lab itself. This is engineering and also our labs tend to be quite cavernous spaces full of heavy machinery that could be quite daunting for new students. And also pre-work was used to complete any lab introductions or lab orientations, including any important health and safety checks that needed to do. So for some labs, we had videos they needed to watch and forms they needed to complete and agree to before attending the lab in person. And then when they did arrive, they could jump straight in, follow instructions and collect data on their devices and really get the best out of their time in the lab. And that's what was really driving a lot of what we did here, trying to get the best out of valuable lab time. Afterwards, after the lab, students could go off and finish the experience by completing post lab work. And that was often things like writing reflective lab reports or completing knowledge checks, that kind of thing. Automated assessments were also built into these digital labs, which meant students got marks for the assessed part of the lab instantly, which was it was good for them, but more so it was good for us because it went academic staff and demonstrators didn't have to mark 400 weekly lab reports manually. I think we've all been there. It's something we were trying to avoid. I should say students in engineering were all issued with tablet computers to do this work, but those tablets were by no means required. If they forgot them or anything, they could just use their mobile phones, they could use a laptop computer. They could even just take notes on paper and enter the results later after the lab. Our approach and technology choices were always designed to enhance and increase opportunity, never to reduce it, so nobody was ever at a disadvantage. Now, this is the approach we are taking this year and we would have took this approach last year had it not been for the pandemic. But because of our blended approach, when we went into lockdown, we were able to pivot really quickly and shift our engineering labs to full online delivery. All we needed to do was just swap out the onsite bit, the experimental elements and replace them with something like a recording or sometimes a third party simulation, which we were able to buy in. And once or twice as well, we sent them home experiments, which they could do at home. And now this year, all we've done is swap them back again for the real labs. So they do a little bit of work before the lab, come to the lab, do the experiments, go away and do the post lab work. But the online versions from last year are still available for students who missed the lab in person this year. So it's all good, all this material is getting used. Over to you, Glen. So just going to look at a few examples of how these labs worked online. So this lab called Product Disassembly presented three activities to students who needed to complete two of the three. And this was initially, and again, this year is an open choice of two from dissembling a pneumatic ram or a motor or using these things called modal models to explore or they explore how to reinforce structures. And with the switch to remote labs and molar activity became a compulsory one with a series of images and videos showing how these structures with differing reinforcements reacted to pressure and some associated questions that used those same videos to demonstrate how structures held up to pressure. There was also a choice between the motor and pneumatic ram, one of which was included in a kit that was posted out to students at home so they could complete the disassembly remotely. This was just a package that sent out to each one so that they could complete the practical part of the lab at home, including all the tools they'd need, plus either a motor or a bicycle pump, which acting as a pneumatic ram using the same technology. So these were all built into a single canvas module with the molar activity available for everyone who made use of the mastery pass feature in canvas to open up the appropriate disassembly activity for each student, depending on what they had in the kit, it would either be the ram or the motor. And the structure of this lab, you can see the sort of before, during and after parts scrolling around on the screen. That's common for most of the labs on the program where it's sort of clearly laid out that before, during, after pattern. And the idea pre pandemic was students would do everything they need to do to prepare for the lab at home, like Terry's already mentioned. And yeah, including health and safety stuff, things like that. And then come to the lab already prepared understanding what was going to happen to complete the activity. And that part of the canvas module and everything I need for that. And then afterwards they could do some knowledge check questions would often be the case. Also, there's a prompt to write a reflection in their digital logbook, which will come to and also digital badges, which we also come to as well. And now Terry's going to tell us about concrete. That's right concrete. Now in a couple of instances, we went a little further and we augmented our labs with additional custom built simulations. One of which was our virtual concrete mixing lab, which is a lot more exciting than it sounds. I will just press play on that. Now this was developed from the ground up by by us and the learning and teaching development service at Newcastle and pretty much worked the same as a blended lab. The one difference being it allowed students to try out different concrete mixes, different designs without the costs and overheads of doing it in real life. And those costs were not unsubstantial. It was also the problem of how to get rid of all the concrete mixes afterwards, you know which way it turns. So there's lots of practical reasons why we took this approach. So the idea was students would go to the labs in person and experience concrete mixing, but then afterwards they would go off and experiment with different mixes virtually, which they would calculate themselves. They would see videos of specific mixes being created, as you can see on the screen here. Then they'd go through the whole curing process and then eventually the testing process, which would normally take months in real life, but with this app talk, no time at all, it was instant. Here's the testing process happening now. This was always the best bit. This involved putting the concrete samples under huge pressure loads and then watching them explode. Personally, it was the highlight of the whole project for me, recording the 30-odd eventualities that were at the capture to make this app work. It was really good. Importantly, students could do all of this testing instantly, but I would have to wait the months to see the results, as they did with the one single sample that they did actually make. So yeah, it was really good for that. What's important with this was it allowed students to make bad concrete, which as it turns out is just as important as knowing how to make good concrete, but allowed them to experiment and fail in a safe environment. Personally, I always assumed when it came to concrete the harder the better. But no, it turns out that too hard is too unforgiving apparently. And if it fails, it tends to fail with a bang rather than showing signs of fatigue. Fatigue being signs you can spot so you can get out the building before the roof falls on your head. Really interesting. In a really nice little app, students really liked it. The staff used this app to summatively assess the students too, which always helps drive interest in it. So every student got to experience this to some degree. And there's also been interest from other institutions as well to try and take this forward. So as Glenn mentioned at the start, we've now left engineering technically, but we've left them with all these tools and they are developing themselves going forward, which was great. What have we got next? Glenn, another one of yours. So this is another example using an app. This lab is for a module called Electric and Magnetic Systems. And it required some sort of specialist heavy equipment that was on site and wouldn't be available to students completing the lab remotely. After some consideration, which included scaling down the lab for a home kit, testing for which kept stripping the fuses in one lecturer's home, I remember. So I've been that off, but the team decided to use a simulator to conduct the lab, which allowed the students to build the same circuit digitally. And there's a desktop version of this software called Multisin, which is on a lot of the computers on campus, but it was found that it didn't run very well on the remote desktop software. So it decided to just use this sort of browser based version of it instead, where the students would be able to complete everything they needed to do for the lab for free, so they wouldn't need to subscribe to it. This lab also made use of an online tool called Numbers, which is this one we can see here. This was developed at Newcastle by the School of Maths and Physics. It sees a lot of use in engineering programmes, so the students were already quite familiar with it and would become quite familiar with it through the year. And this contained all the instructions they needed to build their circuits, notes on what screenshots to take as part of their submission, a voltage calculation at the end here, which is based on the circuit they'd built and then automatically marked within Numbers. There's this template document for them to insert their screenshots and a place to then upload it as a submission for that lab. And it's just an example of they had to do quite a lot of thinking around called us to get that one delivered remotely, but yeah, what wouldn't have been possible to do otherwise, they were able to just use that online tool to still meet the learning objectives, which was the essential thing in the end. Yeah, great. Right. So that was the blended lab guides. Now, running alongside that complimenting all of those was something called the digital logbook. Now this was built in one note using a VLE integration called one note class notebooks. And what that is is essentially it's just an interface that allows you to automatically provision a one note notebook to every student instantly via the VLE. Now what this was for was it was designed to replace traditional bound logbooks so physical logbooks that students used there that used to be issued with. So engineers normally use logbooks to take notes of work on site. So this is a traditional and often legal requirement. So they use it to scribble down thoughts, reflections diagrams lab results meeting minutes, you know you name it. And this represents a formal journal of their work and decision making process as the go. And now the digital logbook that offered them a way to do this. Well, digitally using their tablets on the surface. Just to make you solve the tablets. But really panthe scenes. We took this approach as it had many benefits over the physical logbooks. It was accessible. It was always backed up. It couldn't get wet and turn to mush on site. And it couldn't be lost or eaten by the dog or anything. It was also tightly integrated with the blended blended lab guides that we just showed you before there. So it was very easy for staff to access who are marking the logbooks. And that was one of the critical parts of this that staff could just access every single students logbook automatically very easily through the VLE through canvas because there were more in this summatively. And of course, because of the pandemic, we had an instant solution here to the problem of physical logbooks. Had we have given every student a physical book, we would have been in big trouble when it came to the pandemic. But fortunately, we set this up on one note and it worked lovely. Yes, we've never been able to issue and mark the physical logbook. So this was a definite advantage. It is just one note at the end of the day. It worked really well on the tablet, especially when students are taking notes in labs. Works great for that. And here you can see some of the notes that were being written by a student. I've just pulled some out at random. This was on the stresses and strains of a trus frame, I believe. As Glenn said, we're not engineers, but we tried our best. In these notes, like I said, we're taking it in lab with the calculations entered into the blended lab guide afterwards using numbers. So yeah, it worked really well. Now digital stickers, yes, so this is a bit of fun really. We created these to try and encourage students to interact with the labs a little bit more. So in the past, there were certain problems with students not coming to them, not seeing the value. So what we did is we created these, which are, this is a small subset of a larger collection of digital stickers. We didn't call them digital badges because I didn't want it to clash with the kind of well known digital badges. These were just little images that got awarded for participating in completion of the labs. The idea was just to try and encourage a little bit more engagement. I haven't totally evaluated their success or anything, but at the end of last year, it was great to see students horribly running around trying to collect these and swapping them like penini stickers and being annoyed when they were missing some and asking if we'd run labs again so that they could collect them. So it was designed as a bit of fun, as I say, based on an idea I had from watching my nephew playing games and collecting Xbox achievements. But it certainly did help whip up interest in the labs. So yeah, it's on my list to try and give this a little bit more thought and try and explore them a little bit more formally. It was a nice little thing, so you complete a lab, the digital part, the post-work part, and afterwards you would get one of these badges and all you needed to do was just copy them and then paste them into your digital logbook. So yeah, nice and simple, nothing really complicated, but it worked really well. Last but not least, as part of all of this work with the labs, we also developed a lot of new digital content for the blended parts of the labs, the online parts. These included simple PowerPoint stacks, but really went all the way through to very high quality videos and interactive quiz content. We always tried to get colleagues to do this themselves wherever possible and supported them in their endeavours, but wherever something a little bit more special, a little bit more bling, as we tend to call it, was required, we were there and happy to help. I'll show you a couple of examples, see if these play. Yes, so this is a video describing how metal bends under load, I believe. Again, this was used for pre-work as part of a blended lab on experimental loads. Yeah, it looks quite nice, this is one of my colleagues bending a ruler. Well, it looks really nice, I think the quality of the content we made for this project was really good, really awesome. See how that goes on like this for a couple of minutes, so we made quite a lot of videos like this one. It's great watching all the stuff flex. These are things that students would take from this and then go into the lab and then experimentally try and come back and reflect in the digital logbook and write up the notes. Looks really nice. Move on, here is another one. What's this one going to be? It is the Carno Cycle. Yes, so this is an engine cycle video. I'll just fast forward this to something a little bit more exciting. This is like how an engine works, like a car engine, so it's simple things like fuel intake, combustion, exhaust, that kind of thing. So this was used in course material too, but was intended to be used before an engine disassembly lab. So students would kind of see how the engine worked and then go to the lab and tear an engine apart and see how it kind of worked and how all these bits happened. It was all a little bit beyond me, but yeah. The students really kind of reacted very well to all this content. I thought we'll put it again and look nice. Really worked. We used lots of different systems to do this. This was created in the Adobe software suite, so it's a slightly more complex level of content creation than you can normally create in things like Camtasia, but Camtasia I'll get you about 99% of the way there. This was just the same as that, but just that little sprinkling of extra, extra jazz on top, a little bit of extra bling. What have we got next? So yeah, that was the content. So I mean, we made a lot of videos like that. Some not quite as complex, but I think we've made over 50 of them at the last count. So a lot of effort went into making them. If I was to say that we got a little bit stressed out maybe towards the end as we had all these videos to create and were taking so much longer than we thought it would do. So if we can learn a lesson going forward, it's that video content takes a lot more time than you think it's going to take. So here's a few lines of feedback from our first year students, pretty much on track. I think the plan was to do 30 minutes of talking in this presentation. So what we did is towards the end of last year, we did a review with the students. We got them all online in a room together on Zoom with the academic staff. And we just asked them about how the module went, what I thought of the digital content we were creating, the digital blended labs and also all the talk content that we're getting. And I would say 100% of the feedback to little anecdotal at this stage was entirely good. It was really, really promising. The engineering team are doing more thorough analytics and assessment this year because it's running as intended. Last year's fully online approach was largely can seen as a one off. But yeah, we're a bit early for meaningful stats at the minute, but I would say so far so good. Students really did like them, especially the digital labs. The idea that they could do a little bit before the turned up. So when they arrived at the lab, they kind of had a bit of an idea what was going off. So yeah, really good. It was a good year. Like I said, I got a bit stressful towards the end creating all these online videos, but yeah. And that's kind of it really. So yeah, any last reflections from the project Glenn? Yes, I think we've mentioned that once or twice already. By being at that starting point of having blended delivery already planned before the pandemic hit. With loads of online activities, heavy use of the VLE, this particular programme is in a much better position to pivot quickly to remote learning. Doing colleagues elsewhere in the school was a much bigger struggle for people in sort of the later years because this was just the first year of the course, which is now being talked through to be the main programme. But aside from that, the pandemic really had a big impact on how this programme is delivered and how it continues to be delivered this year as well. I alluded earlier to some initial reluctance from the school to embrace blended learning, sort of the concept, but they, because they've got highly value in person lectures. So these are the key part of their programmes, which is like very understandable. One of the key practical reasons for delivering this programme blended was the space considerations for lectures. And instead of converting those lectures to online learning activities, there are plans across the programmes or timetable, the same lecture two or three times a week. Depending on available space. And I still remember, sort of, we were quite away into the point where it was going to be apparent with after deliver 100% online. But I still remember a comment in a team's discussion by one lecturer that said, oh, this is great. I'm only going to have to deliver this lecture once. So that's like came to recognise the benefits of blended learning. And that's all reflected in the way that the programme continues to be delivered this year. And even things like where we were in supposed to be supposing the intention that was we'd help them create videos and online content of things. They sort of still saw that a bit as our job. But once they came to having to make videos themselves, we were able to make the step to say, look, this is how we made this. You can do this really simply with PowerPoint and in-house version of Pinotto and just do it. And they all did it and they all learned how to do that. And yeah, and take that on as like a legacy skill from the pandemic. Yeah, and there was a reflection that Terry had that was specific to labs as well, which I think we thought would be a good thing to end on. Just come back for that. Yeah. Just talking to Glenn before this presentation, I was thinking about what it was like when we first started this project and I went along to one of the labs, the physical labs. Well before the pandemic hit. And I was watching how the lab ran. So it was another concrete lab and students turned up. They all stood there. They didn't really have a clue why they were there, what was going off. They watched some things happen in front of them. And they were taking notes as they went. And then afterwards I was watching them and the notes were taking often were wrong because they weren't quite sure what they should be doing. Anyway, they did this to saw something happen in front of them and then the left and that was essentially the end of it. And I thought myself, what a missed opportunity, what a shame, you know, and that's kind of what fed a lot into this blended approach where we were trying. Orient, orient here the students, that's right word to the lab before they arrived so that when they got there, they knew exactly what was happening. And they didn't have to get the grips with being in the lab, the orientation in the lab, being told where all the materials were, having to sit through another health and safety presentation. They could get cracking straight away the second they turned up and get the most out of that one hour of lab, that valuable lab time that I had. And then afterwards go away and have a think about what happened. Reflect in the digital log that we created about what what you saw. And also use some of the knowledge checks that we created to really help reinforce what it was that just happened. And I think now looking at these labs running properly this year for the first year and seeing how better students come prepared to the labs and then leave. Haven't spent a good hour on it and then go off and do the reflective practice afterwards. I think it's excellent. You know, I think it was definitely worth the effort worth the time. And yeah, and I think we've. I would say parts of the project were a little tricky. But I believe that Glen and I we have left the project with a lot of new friends and what has proven to be an enduring professional relationship with the school ever since. So yeah, it was looking back. It was a pleasure as it was to talk to you about it today. So yeah, so thank you very much for taking the time to listen to us. I think I've just went over 30 minutes, but never mind. And I'm happy to answer any questions as is Glen. I've not been able to keep an eye on the chat because I've never used Blackboard collaborate before. So I'm not entirely sure how this thing is working, but I've heard some pingpongs as we've been going. So anything in the chat there Glen. I'm having a couple of things. So someone was asking about the concrete that app. And it has sort of been answered that yeah, that was developed in-house. But just I just in case there's any any more information about that. I don't know if there's anything that someone wants to know. The concrete up. Yeah, so. Yeah, that was developed completely in-house that didn't use any tools. I come from a programming background really. I'm a computer scientist by trade. So I have a lot of programming knowledge. So when I came on the project, we identified that as one of those things where it would having a little bit of something extra would really benefit the project. I would never have normally used it. I would never create a program, which is essentially what it was that would have to be maintained by people who didn't really know how to do it. So what we did was because the team I was working with engineering already had a background in programming. I thought that they could take this forward. They could maintain it. So what we did is we created that from the ground up using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Really easy. And all it is technically behind the scenes. It just brings together a lot of different videos and creates a bit of like one of those old fashioned choose your own adventure books. So at each stage you make a decision and then it branches and you make a decision and then it branches. I think at the end we had something like 64 different eventualities, but a lot of the videos you cannot really tell the difference between one mix or the other. So we were able to cut corners a little bit. But it's a great way for students to get to experience that. If you don't have that programming capacity or development capacity in your departments yourselves, there's probably a million different ways you could do that. You know, you could have just done it using something like H5P. It's a program we use here, or you could do it just using branching scenarios within your VLE. I'm sure. Yeah. At the end of the day, it was just a, like I said, it's a choose your own adventure, a tree structure. If you've got it's a PowerPoint, you could even just do it with action buttons. I'm sure so you could lead students through different slides depending on what decisions to take. Yeah. Worked well. There's no one here about some of your digital resources. It's supposed to be completed before the labs. Students always complete them. Were they incentivised? I think there were some labs, especially ones with health and safety considerations like where they were going to be let loose on power tools and things where they weren't allowed to start the lab until they'd done it. But I don't know about all of them for sure. I think they would probably have had to go and do all those things at the beginning of the lab and lose out on some time, which was probably probably more stick than carrot. But that would be the reason to complete them first. It is, yes. As with all these things, there were a lot of students who didn't do all the labs. But what we did find was that the second to realise that these digital stickers were on the go certainly seemed to drive a lot more interest, especially towards the end when the relays were missing some. Because these labs were online, we were able to run them essentially anytime we wanted. So it was a lot easier for them to go back and try them again and get the batches. Unless it was a mark attached to it in what it's like, students are very strategic in the way they approach these things. If there was no mark, there would be nothing gained from it in terms of assessment. Not everybody come. Not everybody pot it. I think with them being online as well. They're not having to be somewhere physically. I certainly seem to help. What about making videos with specific programmes used? I think most of those ones that looks nicest were made in Adobe Creative Cloud. It's a mixture of Premiere Illustrator and After Effects. That's Ash, a colleague of ours who made those two that we saw. I would say that almost all those videos could create a lot easier just using PowerPoint. That would get you about 90% of the weird there towards a really fancy looking video. It's in that completely within your control as to how nice you make that. There's a learning curve and quite a development overhead in terms of making videos of that quality all the time. I think we took an approach of almost headlining certain modules and labs so we'd have a really nice video, something that really hit the students and they thought, wow. But then below that, there was lower entry stuff, like PowerPoint presentations and things. But we had them at that stage, they were already bored in. I think I always took the approach of using trailers, like film trailers, where they were trying to blow them away with a lot of fancy graphics. Not gratuitously so, but just trying to make them look as best as we could. We had that ability in-house, but afterwards, yeah. We also found out we used a lot of templates as well, so we would create a very basic template. Our academic colleagues would leap on them, and then it would create things like just simple presentations or simple videos using those templates and instantly are so much better because they fit in the hole. I think there's something to be said for templating, without a doubt. It's something we're trying to use more and more across the university and the projects we're doing at the minute. Yeah, Adobe Creative Cloud has certainly got its players, but I don't think I'd recommend it to people other than folk like ourselves who are content developers by and large. It just takes so much time. There's another one. I don't know if there's been much feedback about this, but do you think students still lose something for not having the physical experience of working with materials, mixing, doing the test themselves? I think that's specifically about conquering too. Yeah, absolutely. I would never, in a million years, prioritise doing this stuff digitally and virtually over the physical labs. When it came to the concrete one, the difference there was students could only ever do one thing at a time because it was so busy and the material costs were so high. Like I said once I've created this huge concrete slab, it was really hard to get rid of it as well. So the approach we took was that students would do one of them, so they would mix the concrete, they would see what happens, they would cure it over time, they would come back weeks later, say it's cured, and then come back a couple more weeks later and test it. So it would get that experience, the hands-on experience, but it would never be able to explore different avenues. And students, as we would, they didn't want to fail at that, so they would make the best concrete mix they could. But like I said earlier, that was not always a good thing. It was good to be able to explore creating bad concrete and to see the effect of it. Because like I said, not all bad concrete was actually worse than what you thought. So creating concrete, that had a bit of give, seemed on the surface to be a bad thing and students wouldn't do it. But as it turned out, it was actually a good thing because it provided a bit more flexibility in the concrete mix. I personally learnt a lot about concrete in the last year or so. It's really good. Yeah, I've seen Martin Eddie's comment there, yeah, absolutely. I mean, originally when we designed this whole project, the pandemic was not on the cards. You know, we were expecting to run it last year like we did this year. And students very much wanted the face-to-face experience as they want the hands-on experience in the labs. And at no point we wanted to replace that really. But then when the pandemic hit and we were forced to do this stuff online, we found out we're already so far ahead of the game almost. And we were able to glance at the pivot this stuff. So it still provided a really good experience for the students last year. But I would never replace those face-to-face sessions. And I would never replace the hands-on experiences in the lab in particular. That's the big thing. Because that's where the value is, I think. Especially in programmes like engineering. It's about getting your hands dirty. It's about getting your wellies on, getting out on the site, saying how this stuff works. And imagine as an engineer, that's why you go into engineering. Certainly civil engineering. The same reason you go into electrical engineering is chances are you probably want to make a ham radio or a remote control car, the sort of projects to do there. So being able to physically do that is that's the important thing. And we were hoping that these labs would just enhance that and make those experiences just a little bit better. So that they got the... There's a lot of students and there's not that much lab capacity. So when they do go in the lab, we wanted them to use that time from the second they got there, the second they left wisely. Make the best uses they could. So like I said, I think everything we did here was to enhance the talk content rather than replace it. Is there anything else there, Glen? There's one more about badges. How have the badges been with the students? It's often seems like they get them at the start and they don't bother afterwards when they compulsory. Yes, so at the end of every lab, I think there was... Was there about 10 or so labs, Glen? I can't remember now. It's been pretty much a year since we did this now so it's not completely fresh in my mind. But at the end of every lab, they would do the physical lab bit and then they would go in, they would do some sort of knowledge check or reflective report or something. And the second that did that, they would be given the badge. It was almost like on the VLA, you'd have to complete the quiz there and then the page afterwards, the completion page, they would get this little badge and then they would copy and paste it into the books. I mean, I was very much aware of students gaming, that whole thing, swapping them with the friends and all the rest. And to be fair, we didn't care because it was just meant as a bit of fun. But also it was creating interest in the labs and there was a little bit of hubbub about the labs and students were talking about it. And as far as I was concerned, for these digital stickers and all that digital badges, which were a little more formal, these digital stickers were just there just to try and do that, just to try and increase interaction and interest around the course. But yeah, you only got them at the end once you've done your bit. And then one more about class notebooks about some problems if you can see if you've got the chat open. I haven't, sorry. So we tried the class notebooks on a module. We found student notebooks are not always synchronising at the lecturers' ends. Wonder if you'd face any similar issues or other issues. We did have some other issues, I suppose. Yes, possibly. No, it was the short answer. We set them up and like I said, so last year we had something like 400 students concurrently accessing this one logbook. The only problems we did have were probably more on our side. I think we didn't quite articulate what it was we wanted students to do in these logbooks. You can provision them with a template, which we did do. But students being students a lot went off-piste and they went and did their own things. And then they didn't kind of tell us about that until the very last minute. So on deadline submission day, they kind of suddenly woke up and realised that they've been saving their notes into their own private logbooks somewhere or using a different notebook system completely because they kind of didn't understand what it was we were asking them. But even at that stage, there was a little bit of kind of last minute, whoa, but everyone got them submitted. They copied the content across if they needed to. And that was a tiny percentage. I think out of 400 people, I think it was about five people had bothered like that. But other than that, I think it worked quite well. It's funny we were looking at them yesterday, the current cohort, 450 of them. And because we've got that right, we've got that messaging right this year, the notebooks are filling up lovely. You can see that they're writing the notes and the labs using the tablets as they should be doing. They're copying these digital stickers across. It seems to be working all right. I don't think we've had any problems particularly. I'm trying to think. Certainly at the end of the academic year when the students submitted them, they were all there and they were all pretty good. If you give students kind of carte blanche like we did, they can go off and do all sorts of stuff. And that makes marking them slightly harder because everyone you open, it's slightly different. I think using the templating function is probably the best way to do that. So making it a bit more rigid. I think we've learned that this year. So we've created sections for them, pages within those sections. That makes assessing it a lot easier. I was like Salmon yesterday. I think it did go well. Would you agree, Glenn? I think it was a good project. I think it went great. Good experience. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for coming this afternoon. Really appreciate it. Hi, Terry. If you're happy to end the recording now, I'll go ahead and do so. Please do, Christian. That's great. Thank you very much.