 Hello and welcome everybody to this latest act of learning special interest group webinar series from Walt and I'm delighted that Deborah Arnold's here today to share her toolkit which is a fantastic resource just as we go through these few slides to get us started if anybody's interested in getting involved with our group please sign up with us join our I'll give you skills in a second of where you can join up and join the group events there's currently this week going on tell fest was a fantastic free event for people to join if you still got two days to sign up and join on things is all the things of obviously the Debra's presentation today and then the active learning network have a global festival learning coming up in April so if anybody's interested wants to submit a proposal there's the link in all there for that yeah so if you want I'll post this in the chat later if you want to get involved with us and join the group I'll post that in the chat so please do and we have other resources and things on our website you can meet the community there's our blog and you can see past recordings of our webinar series so at this point I'm gonna pass over to Deborah who's gonna talk us through the elem for life dynamic toolkit so without less than just more to me gonna pass over Debra okay thank you very much Richard and welcome to everybody thank you for taking time out of your lunch breaks to to join this session I'm actually joining from France so one hour ahead I was able to have my lunch at a normal time but as you could tell from my accent I am of British origin I just left the country about 30 years ago so I work as national and international projects coordinator for O'Neige which is a member association called a digital university for management and economics now we're not a university per se because France doesn't have anything like the open university but we support our members in pedagogical innovation creating open educational resources and we also have a mandate from the French Ministry of Education to represent all the French digital universities from the different disciplinary fields in international projects and this is where the elem for life project comes in so I'm just gonna give you a bit of background because Richard said that this was my toolkit I prefer to use the collective hour toolkit from the from the project elem for life which developed this so let's get this right from before where are we here we go oh no I don't want to do that I want to do that for the screen share and so this is from the elem for life website we can share the links in the chat later so you'll be able to just see here the different partners that were involved so from O'Neige we were the coordinators of this project which finished last year so it was an Erasmus plus project and I know perhaps some of you are sad that UK organisations can no longer participate in Erasmus plus for the reasons that we that we know in this project we had the University of Dundee and I'd particularly like to highlight their contribution in particular Helen Booth who is a learning technologist at University of Dundee and who is herself an alt member because the the toolkit that I'm going to show you Helen was very much involved in in creating that alongside also Magdalena Juzinska from the Warsaw University of Technology who was in charge of the overall design so it really is a collective effort and other things that I'm going to show you have also come from this this wonderful partnership and we go back a long way if you end up on this page on the site you'll see that we go back to 2003 so nearly 20 years history of collaboration this was our sixth project we're taking a little bit of a break right now but looking forward to continuing the collaborations and also to seeing the dynamic toolkit being used Richard that he knows of students who reference it use it and we're hearing feedback all the time from from teachers who find it useful so I hope you will too so you're probably very curious to see what the toolkit looks like so I jumping in here with a live demo it is designed to be extremely simple to use so it shouldn't fail on me and just to go through some of the the principles behind this what we had from a previous project was a framework of soft skills where we had digital skills here we call them here we consider them digital soft skills so they're not the technical digital skills they're all about communicating through the digital technology methodological skills things like learning to learn analytical skills personal skills and then social skills so everything to do with collaboration negotiation and so on so this was a framework developed and validated to a series of focus groups in a previous project and that we now use to classify the different methods in the dynamic toolkit we also classified them by methods or by modalities we know now that these modalities are less clearly distinguished especially with all the practices that came to light during during the pandemic but at the time when we designed this we did separate blended face-to-face and online and we also had outdoor activities as well which is which is very nice for active learning we also found that teachers were very very interested in knowing which particular activities could be done in a very short time slot which were more for a long duration through a month for a semester some of these you actually need to build on them at progressively in different sessions and then group size was an important factor and as many of us know it's very challenging to do active learning in large group sizes so the idea here was to enable filtering of these what we have in the complete list are 30 selected methods all of these were identified through desk were tried and tested with pilot teachers and also integrated other outputs from the LN project which I'll show you at the end but if we just come back to the filter I'll just do a very quick filter on social skills obviously the more we filter the less choices we have but if we filter the the social skills and the example that I want to show you here is is brainstorming because this technique is perhaps one of the the richest the the the most richly documented in the in the dynamic toolkit so we have a short description we have a case study which is a video which is also a standalone video on YouTube and it's also integrated into the LN for life MOOC which I'll mention again at the end we have a list of the different tools that can be used as a pedagogical scenario to help teachers actually implement this there is information here quite simple information about assessment here we're not really considered with assessing this particular method and additional resources either scientific articles and then connection with other methods in the toolkit so that's the main body of the of the entry in the dynamic toolkit on the right we see let me move up to the stop sorry if I'm making people dizzy with the with the scrolling the whole sheet is downloadable as a PDF so you can take it away look at it offline make notes on it there are examples of actual practice from teachers who have who have used it and again this was where we enriched the dynamic toolkit in the second half of the project after we'd produced all the content for the for the MOOC we decided to re-inject some of this into into the method so it was a really circular process of describing the methods testing them in the pilot projects using the results of the pilot projects to create the MOOC using the results of the MOOC to enrich the dynamic toolkit so we can for example see here the the play card as an infographic which summarizes the process to go through the definition of the the topic and so on okay and I'm sorry to see messages in that it's not working okay so coming back to the dynamic toolkit we also have the description of which soft skills from the framework this method mobilizes and helps students to develop the appropriate modalities that can be used although I think inventive teachers could now do brainstorming completely online I'm sure that's possible and I'm sure there are examples of of this group size here it's been classified as individual but with notes no particular cost involved for some of the other methods where you need to use particular tools we mentioned the cost although we were very careful about associating these different methods and techniques with free open access tools and then the different categories that that the method is appropriate for and so that's really what we have times 30 for all the different methods now I'm just looking at the time 12 minutes past past one for you in the in the UK and Ireland we could have a quick run-through from from the the participants if you want to put in the chat a particular method that you're interested in or particular types of activities that you want to look at we can see what else is in the is in the dynamic toolkit so I'll go back to the homepage does anybody want to suggest filters or particular methods the outdoor mode okay let's see what is classified under the outdoor mode this is a leap in the dark for me what do we have okay we have real-world missions this was because this was also a transnational project with people from different languages we had a lot of discussion about what we meant by outdoor and I and I think native English speakers would think that outdoor is learning outdoors in nature but for the majority of the partners outdoors meant outside the institution so this is why we have things like real-world mission within companies and it's interesting that I never managed to convince the rest of the pit that outdoors was really outdoors in in nature so this is why we have these examples here so we have the we have the real-world missions within companies let me go back we have experiential learning okay which is also linked to to the to the mission we have problem-based learning and we have participation of higher education students in associations so these are more external to to what goes on within the within the universities and other higher education institutions so sorry to support you that we didn't have nature-based activities but if anybody does have nature-based activities to contribute this would help make the the dynamic toolkit even more dynamic by bringing in new activities and does anybody have examples of active learning techniques and methods that aren't included in the in the dynamic toolkit such as these things that we could explore to to enrich and bring in further participants can also speak if they wish I suppose voices activated for those who can I want this is not just a one-way presentation I'd also like to have a discussion and question and answer here thank you Richard a challenge I like the idea of it still being called outdoor so villain did that that means that our definition of outdoor is acceptable to you or that we should refine it and really restrict outdoor to outdoors activities in the sense of outside in the wider world we're just to have my tuppence worth in there I yeah originally thought it was outdoor as an outside of the the institution outdoors so I found it confusing I think clarification around that might help for those who are native English speakers but in saying that any of the activities that are in there you could do outside really if you thought about it yeah you can do brainstorming outside you can do yeah I'm gonna see about about tweaking that term so that it relates more closely to to those four methods that are collected under outdoor yeah but I find it it's very useful when you go through this to give you ideas for me it's all about triggering ideas this toolkit and it gets you started if you're a bit stuck or you want to try something you don't know where to go so I do you find it is is a fantastic resource nice shirt with with our staff to get them up and running to think about running okay that's thanks Richard I mean that was exactly the intention I mean we give scenarios but they're not prescriptive scenarios they're examples of what other teachers have done for inspiration rather than being you know recipes that you that you have to follow and and I think the the way many of us teaching in higher education is is really based on that being inspired by examples from from our peers because I also teach myself and beyond being the project coordinator here I also teach on a fully online course and I teach project management and so if I went back to the dynamic toolkit when I talk when I took on this course to see how I could make what was very a very traditional online course when I inherited it how I could make that more active and bring an active learning in a purely online setting with an additional challenge of a very very large cohort of 80 students so I was combining many of those challenges and constraints on my own course and the dynamic toolkit did help me although I still obviously I'm in a process of continuous improvement of that course as well and Ian's asking is the toolkit only in English it is for now we do have plans to produce a French version but we will be hosting those on our own on edge website and we will probably we haven't decided yet if we reproduce the whole dynamic version or if we concentrate on the on the downloadable PDFs but there is a plan for a French version what other language versions would would be useful I was just can you hear me all right yes I can Ian thanks yeah it would be quite useful because I deal quite a lot with Spanish Chinese Spanish Chinese Korean I'm not saying there's about five different languages that we end up dealing with but it sometimes some of the people we deal with they might find it useful to have a sort of toolkit in their own language rather than just in English we're translating quite a lot of our material from English to all the other languages and we're dealing with quite a lot of different institutions around the world about we've got 56 at the moment and these are all educators but some of them might need a little bit of help on these sort of activities because it probably would be useful if you know that's why I said it be quite useful even if there was a PDF version of different languages as you were hinted at rather than so you might have the English but then if you wish to download a PDF of it in your own language here it is that might be useful okay well on that note I should say that all of the results of the LN for Life project are published as open educational resources with a Creative Commons license so anybody is free to take these and to adapt them translate them and I agree that just taking the PDFs and translating them and making them available is perhaps the optimal solution especially because as many projects this one has come to the end of its funding period although as I said before LN as a network an informal network is very solid we don't actually have the time apart from the commitment to maintaining the website for at least five years so if anybody wants to take on the translation and adaptation and perhaps as well this is just a call out to Richard the ALSIG could actually serve as a federating point for us to keep each other up to date on what we've done in terms of translations and then I can see with the team behind this the LN for Life website what we can do as well about making those translations and adaptations visible but as we all know open educational resources take on a life of their own once they're adopted and adapted by the community so that is also part and parcel of the spirit of LN and these Erasmus plus projects in general it's actually a condition of the European Commission we publish everything as open educational resources because it's using community funding they were just eating has her hand up she want to come in yes I didn't either in the chat or speaking every hand up or is it a you were free to grab the microphone if you want to say something or your makes not working okay okay but if you want to pop it in the chat then then I'll pick it up and reply okay thanks very much okay so in the last five minutes I just wanted to show you some of the other what platforms you host these on this is actually a word press website and the LN for life dynamic toolkit was was developed using a word press plug-in get in touch with Helen Booth from University of Dundee for more details on on that and so yes thank you Luke okay so just to wind up what we also have and this is what we did at the end of the project we realized that we had so many useful things that we learned and created during the project that we produced this lessons learnt kit in the form of ten key takeaways so things like a checklist of how to identify of how to implement active learning in higher education there's the evaluation report from the MOOC and I'll show you the MOOC in a moment we collected some good practice examples in well that is the dynamic toolkit so sorry a circular reference again we looked at synergies between higher education and the corporate sector because we were focusing on soft skills for employability we also created again for the corporate sector a ten minute micro course because that was a demand that was coming in from from companies who were very interested in the dynamic toolkit but companies being companies they want is really really quick and short so I invite you to take a look at that as well we can put the link to that in the in the chat sorry and let me do that multitasking okay what else do we have we had a specific report from Poland again from the corporate sector we had an expert discussion blog from the French event that we ran and then we collected a whole series of videos from our final conference which was the LN for life knowledge exchange again hosted by the University of Dundee so you've got all those resources there as well that you can now delve into to see what what the project produced and then finally the MOOC active learning for soft skills development which is a self-paced MOOC but it is a discussion based MOOC so a lot of effort went into the design of this to encourage the sharing of experiences amongst participants and very very professionally produced by the whole partnership but carried by our partners at Polytechnico de Milano and this is the Polytechnico bespoke MOOC platform which is Poc Polymy open knowledge and so here you have the like on any MOOC platform you have the dates this is the current iteration if you ever go to this link and can't find it then just do a search for active learning for soft skills development as soon as the session finishes a new one opens it's completely free and here we've got as I said we've got the the the videos that were produced by teachers who piloted the dynamic toolkit we've got the play cards the stimulus for reflection and discussion and also helping teachers learning designers educational advisors and so on in devising your own plan for your own sessions and courses so it really is a fantastic resource for continuing professional development and that's the last pitch I will do we have one minute left so I will stop sharing my screen but I'll just post this link into the chat as well sorry I'm moving my screens around and like over perhaps to Richard to close for the last minute or 30 seconds of this lunchtime I'll see webinar and I hope you found it interesting next ever was very interesting was good seeing somebody else go through it as well I don't know if is anybody got any questions at this point you can take them in the chat or grab the microphone I'm gonna stop the recording so thank you for that