 Hello and welcome. I hope you're all enjoying the conference so far today, and welcome to this next session we've got, which is on supporting academic staff in the move to online teaching, so I'll pass you over to the presenters for this session, Dan and Phil over to you. Hi everyone, my name's Dan, thank you for the introduction there. I'm joined by my colleague Phil and we both work in the e-learning team at the University of Kent. So we're going to be talking to you about how we supported staff in the move to online teaching over the past 18 months. So this session is largely split into two parts. I'll begin by describing the pre-pandemic landscape at Kent, the challenges that we faced and how by rethinking our support model we created something called the digitally enhanced education course. I'll then hand over to Phil, who's going to describe in more detail how we built on the work that we've done and formed a community both inside and outside of Kent that we use for sharing practice and ideas in response to the pandemic. So the picture at Kent, we're quite similar to many mid-sized higher education providers, and we have around 700 academic staff and close to 20,000 students. And the e-learning team is actually quite small, there's only six of us, Phil and I included. And we look after the support and use and promotion of those five core learning technologies listed across the bottom of your screen there. Prior to the pandemic, our support model was fairly standard in that we created high quality PDF guides that sat on our website to support our various technologies. We delivered face-to-face training sessions. We ran school-based drop-in sessions where a learning technologist would be situated within an academic school for a day and working with the academics in situ. And we also used to deliver online forums, online e-learning forums, where academics were invited along to share their practice, so all fairly standard stuff. But like others, we had our challenges. We had a number of challenges pre-pandemic. Digital literacy levels at the university varied greatly from absolute beginners to power users, and some of our staff were exceptionally confident users of technology, whereas others were not. We also had issues of engagement, so some academic colleagues didn't engage with the team and probably didn't know that we existed. And we were also very concerned as a team about consistency of user experience. We'd actually often see mule modules that were either very engaging and beautifully crafted compared to some that were effectively just a repository of poorly named PDF files. And we often struggled to benchmark what we could detail as good e-learning, like Sonia mentioned earlier, what does good look like? And we were very much grappling with these challenges pre-pandemic. So when the pandemic hit, all these challenges just sort of merged into one, and how do you respond to these challenges in a global pandemic? We could create more PDF guides, we could run some online sessions, and we could create case studies, but I felt that we were at risk of just replicating the issues that we already have. So to solve this problem, we ate our own dog food, which I think is a term used in programming for effectively using your own software. Our philosophy was that if it's good enough for them, then it's good enough for us. We felt that the best way to show academic staff what a high quality online learning experience was like was actually by giving them a high quality online learning experience. So we effectively treated our academic colleagues as our own students, and we wanted our academic colleagues to be treated as we would expect them to treat their own students. So we were very, very much following that philosophy. And this thought process led us to the creation of the digitally enhanced education course, which is a self-contained course that both imparted the principles of online teaching, while simultaneously demonstrating the power, flexibility and use of Kent's existing learning technologies. So we were very much eating our own dog food here. So the underlying principle of the D course was that it needed to be achievable. It needed to be meaningful. It needed to be relatable and high quality. And that the underlying principle was that less is more. We didn't want it to be crowded with noise. We wanted to be very direct and to the point. So the course that we created that sits within RVLE is broken down into sections that cover around 10 different topics, such as delivering online lectures, structuring modules within the VLE, using resources, digital accessibility and copyright, et cetera. And we instilled a consistent format throughout the module, throughout the course. So there's an activity as you can see here. And then it followed with further resources and then an applied task. And we thought this really important as it would help teach our academic staff about the importance of structure and about consistency. And what was really important about this structure is that it catered for all needs and all ability levels. The activities themselves were the entry level, the core knowledge that everybody needed to know. The additional resources gave more advanced features and gave people the opportunity, the power users the opportunity to learn something new themselves. And then the applied tasks enabled users to apply what they'd learnt to their own teaching. So this was really, really important. Everything in the course is meaningful in that it had a purpose. It wasn't technodeterministic by any means. So it had to be applied, it had to be tangible. So as we built the course, we would consistently ask ourselves, what is the value of the elements that we're adding here? So our academics were very concerned about things like loss of engagement with their students. And so in the pivot online, we demonstrated features that were already at their fingertips within Moodle that they perhaps didn't know about to say, look, there are things within the VLE that can help with its sort of stuff. And so we brought that to the fore and tried to showcase that within the module itself. And we were very, very keen to forge a community that we created. So we deliberately encouraged our academics to share their concerns as we entered lockdown. So, for example, we used the discussion forums and these showed that they were not alone in their concerns and that many of their concerns were shared by their own peers and that they were not alone. So the forums actually later became a space where emergent practice was then showcased and ideas were shared. It was really good to see that develop in that such a way. Crucially, the Digital Enhanced Education course drew from existing expertise. So we invited experienced practitioners at Kent from our distance programmes to contribute their expertise. We involve students. We were very lucky that we got senior leadership buy-in. Both our VC and Deputy VC were fully behind the creation of this course and actually asked that all staff engage with it. And it was really vital for staff to have opportunities to apply what they had learned. And because it's important digital accessibility is interwoven throughout the entirety of the module itself. So just some engagement stats. We've got 1,500 staff enrolled on the course. There's 19 videos on there and I've range in between three to eight minutes in length. And of those videos, 16,000 minutes have been viewed. And from the engagement stats, we can see that people complete around 70% of the module, which is really useful for us because we can then see which aspects of the module are not completing. We look at how we can focus on that perhaps in different ways. And Phil will talk about this in his section, but we were able to build a community out of what we created within the module. So here's some stats on the videos. These are the 19 videos that I mentioned. And this is just comparing the average minutes viewed against the video length itself. And we're very pleased to see that we managed to retain the attention span of our users for pretty much the duration of all those videos, which in turn demonstrated to our academics that those short, punchy, bite-sized videos are a great way of conveying the messages within their modules. And when it's been transferred to academia, our students have commented very positively on this. Finally, some little bits of feedback here. Feedback's been really, really positive on what we developed over 2020 and into 2021, and it's something we will continue to develop and use. But we were very lucky that our Vice Chancellor, Karen, was right behind the module. In fact, she was one of the first people to complete the module. Having her front and centre saying, hey, I'm doing this, I think everyone else should do it was really valuable for us because it really helped everyone feel like we're all in the same situation together. So just a couple of recommendations for anyone that's looking at introducing something similar. Use the expertise that you already have in-house, both within your own teams and your academic community. I tend to find that academics listen to other academics, and that's a great way of spreading the message and getting them to do the bidding for you. Get the balance right by introducing a structure where you cater for both the beginners and for those more advanced users and use tiering of the content to achieve that. But above all, make it a positive experience and be honest to your users as well. Ack knowledge that there are limitations to the technology. Ack knowledge that there are going to be challenges along the way. And out of this module, we were able to then move into a webinar series and Phil's going to talk about how we then built on the success of this module to create a community for people to share practice and ideas. So over to you, Phil. Thanks, Dan. Okay, so why did we need to create a community to share practice and online teaching? Well, many of our academics, they cope to the transition to online teaching fairly easily. And they're confident using the software and familiar with some of the pedagogies of distance learning. I think it's fair to say that others, they found it a bit more difficult. And these gaps were highlighted in a student union survey conducted at Kent. Now, our community provides the perfect opportunity for those who are struggling to learn from those who are already confidently and effectively using the tools. Now, to maximise the sharing potential, we opened up the webinar series to other universities, other public sector organisations and anyone else that was interested in joining. At the University of Kent, we use Microsoft Teams and we use this platform for the community as well, and we found it to be effective. Next slide, please, Dan. So, at the present, we have around 2,900 members and we're really pleased to see that 295 of those are actually from the University of Kent and the rest are from other organisations. I had a look at the sign-up sheet a couple of weeks ago and, at that point, the community had representatives from 80% of the UK universities now and over 150 different institutions abroad, which we are really pleased with. Now, I've included a list or some of the range of guest organisations here just so you can have a look. But you'll see here that we have the London Metropolitan Police on this list and they've given us some really great feedback and they said that at one stage during lockdown, they actually had 30% of their 50,000 strong staff off sick and hundreds of new staff starting every day who all needed access to online training. Now, like us, they had to rapidly move all their content online and they said that the webinar series has really helped them to do that with giving them a range of different ideas from lots of different people. So, that was really nice to see. Next slide, please, Dan. So, we use lightning presentations of around 10 minutes in the webinars. This length has worked really well for us and the feedback has been really positive. And this means that we can have between eight to nine presenters per webinar so we get a really nice range of ideas. And finally, we have time for questions after each talk to provide opportunities for discussion. Next slide, please, Dan. So, here are the webinar themes. We've run nine so far with between 200 to 700 attendees on the day, which we were really pleased with. Now, the pedagogy and practice when teaching online theme is more of a general theme that allows us to include a range of different ideas in that session. And we've run that four times so far. And then we have some more specific themes that you can see listed here, such as using electronic feedback and assessment to engage learners or our most recent one, how best to engage our students in 2021-2022. Next slide, please, Dan. Now, I'm able to include this slide thanks to Dr David Martin from the University of Dundee. So, special thanks to David. And in his session, David demonstrated a new audience response system that he actually created. And he demonstrated it at one of the recent webinars that took place on the 10th of June. And during that session, David asked members to tell us what they were joining from. And we were really pleased to see, as you can see on the map, that we had people from across the world all taking part at the same time. And that was really good because it meant we had such a nice range of kind of experience levels, different perspectives and things like that. So, we were able to put on a really engaging session. Well, I think it was engaging anyway. Next slide, please, Dan. So, we've now had 68 brilliant talks that anyone is able to access. Any of you are able to access these. Now, unfortunately, I don't have time to give everyone here a mention. But just to mention a few of the speakers, we've had talks from Professor Barbara Oakley, the best-selling author and creator of the Corsair course Learning How to Learn, with around 3 million learners enrolled. We've had Professor Sigurru Maiagawa from MIT. We were lucky enough to have Alts' very own Marine Deepwell, gave a fantastic talk. And we've also had some other people such as Professor Diana Laurellard and Director of HEPI, and Nick Hillman. And so many more that I wish I could tell you everyone, but we just don't have time, unfortunately. But we have recorded every webinar and we've broken up the webinar into individual recording links for everyone. And the recordings are being used well. We've had around 55,000 minutes of recordings have been watched so far. And we are planning to move the recordings into a dedicated YouTube channel to try and increase the reach so more people can access these talks and maybe use them going forward. Next slide, please, Dan. So I've only got a few minutes left, but I just wanted to talk about some myths that have been debunked as a result of the webinar series. And this one is around students' lecture-watching habits. And these myths were debunked as a result of one academic at the University of Kent, Laura Bailey. And Laura surveyed 82 of her English and linguistics students regarding their lecture-watching habits. Now, some of the myths addressed were that students, they don't watch the whole video and captions aren't really used by students. Therefore, it's not worth academics investing valuable time in editing the captions. Next slide, please, Dan. So I've placed just a few of the findings here, but you can watch the link in the previous slide, or I can pop a link in the chat after this so you can watch the video with all of them. But interestingly, 50% of the students that Laura surveyed said that they did use the captions, and some even commented on how they really relied on these captions for their learning, which I think was really good to know. The middle stat wasn't really a huge surprise to us given that academics at Kent tend to release recordings on a weekly basis. But it's nice to see that students, they do watch the recordings when they become available, and don't just wait and binge watch them near assessment time. Now, that's not to say they don't do that as well, but at the very least, if they're watching them when they become available, I think that's a great thing to know. And it's also interesting to see that 82% of students said they watched all of the recording in one go rather than skipping to different parts. And I think that's in part thanks to Laura creating kind of short snappy videos of between five to seven minutes. So she's really kind of keeping those students' attention spans. Next slide, please, Dan. So another topic that's attracted quite a lot of interest is the camera on, camera off question. And I'm sure that all of you are very well aware of this with academics saying how frustrating it is when students don't turn their cameras on. Because seeing students face, it helps you give, see natural cues as to whether the student understands the topic or a concept. However, the blog post here, and this is a link, puts forward a number of good reasons why students, they might not wish to turn their cameras on. And it's certainly not a marker of engagement. And I completely agree with that. So I'd encourage you to have a look there. So yeah, please have a look through the link there. Next slide, please, Dan. Now, at a recent webinar, Dr. Sam Lau from Hong Kong gave a really interesting talk on engaging quiet students online and again, this is a link to that talk. And I'd really encourage you to take a look if you haven't already. But I think one thing that I would say is that I think silence is only a bad thing if we perceive it that way. So there are obviously times when we need to to get something back from the students but try not to get hung up on it too much. If you can think back to your time at school or at university and ask yourself, would you do the same thing? Because I think I probably would have. So yeah, I think it's just something to be aware of. Next slide, and I'm nearly at the end now. So I wanted to finish today just telling you about some of the freely available resources that are in this webinar community. It's not just webinar talks. We've also created a range of different videos based upon people's comments in the community, whether people are struggling or they'd like more information. One example here is a video on the right creating engaging videos for teaching that Dan created. I'd really encourage you to take a look at this video. It's only three minutes long, but in three minutes Dan manages to get across some really good points and take home messages that everyone should think about before they try to record a video. So please take a look. They're there for everyone to use. And last slide, please, Dan. And finally, I'd just like to just remind everyone that our webinar community is open to everyone. So if you haven't already, just come and take a look. You may find that there are some things in there that are useful to you, or if maybe not you, some of your colleagues, if you've been speaking to them and they've been struggling on something or would like more ideas. Everyone's really friendly in the community, so please take a look if you haven't. And if you would like to present at a future webinar, if you've been working on something and you think I'd like to share this with everyone, then please, please just click on the link there and complete the form, and we would love to have you at a future webinar. So, yeah, thank you very much. And that's all for me. Thank you very much, Dan and Phil. That was really interesting. I actually really enjoyed that presentation. There's a few, quite a lot of comments coming in the chat. I'm sure you'll get a chance to look at after. I think particularly quite a lot of people will really, really supportive of the sessions that you've run and some fantastic feedback for that, for the others here, too, which is great. In terms of questions, we've got a few already, so I'll come back to the ones from earlier on in the session first. If anyone wants to post any more questions into the chat while we're doing that, please do so. So the first one I was going to come back to was Scott and his few questions there. The last one I think was subsequently answered, so we'll focus on the first three which are linked. It was, did staff have to attend or undertake this course? How did you get them to attend or what did you do about the ones who didn't attend? It's very hard to mandate things at Kent. I think the only thing I've ever seen mandated was GDPR training. So we tried to force their hand a little bit. So what we did is we enrolled all staff onto the module within Moodle. So it's the first thing that they would see and we also undertook a bit of a top-down campaign making sure that senior leaders at the university and senior leaders at a divisional and school level also had experienced the course itself and we'd actually taken the time to talk them through it so they could see the value of why their staff would participate within that module. And from there it was a bit of a top-down policy that it sort of spread a little bit like wildfire it was the case that academic staff were, everyone was talking about it and then it just sort of snowballed from there so we got a bit of a top-down policy enrolled everyone on it and just made sure that any communications it was always linked to what we weren't, we didn't have the ability to to force people to do it because that's just not the approach that the university of Kent takes on the trade. It was a challenge. Okay, thank you. Another one here from Jane and she said we've created a couple of online courses for staff that were tailored for different schools. Did you customize for different disciplines or did you have one course for everyone? It's one course for everyone and we acknowledge that within the course itself that it is effectively, you know, that the information is quite generic but I think what we are then able to do as we built on the course and the reason the webinars started is because we started to say well we need a place to showcase all this excellent practice that's coming out and so that's when we started to see the disciplinary focus coming out within the webinars within the sciences and arts and humanities so whilst the content itself in the course is generic, the message of the webinars is very much a case of, you know, we've got experts in the sciences, experts in social sciences coming out from there. Okay, thank you. And I've got another one just popped in here from Caroline that says, will your course become available outside the University of Kent? I'd like it to. I think it's quite a nice partner for the webinar series. A lot of it's Kent branded but I don't see that as being a problem because as I mentioned it's generic so a lot of it is probably applicable to other HEIs. So yeah, I think it's a good idea. We had talked about it, it was just other stuff took over but maybe it's an opportunity for us to push it outside. Watch this space. Great, thank you very much. Now unfortunately I think we're into our final seconds here. The only thing probably left for me to say Philan, Dan, a couple of people are asking for the links off your slides to go into the chat. I'm not sure if you can easily do that quickly for the people that are here today to be able to open them up. That would be great if you could. Other than that, thank you very much for, as I said, really good sessions being really interesting. I'm sure a lot of people will be going away and exploring some of the resources that you've shared further and look forward to more of them in the future. So thank you very much and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the conference here today. Thanks everyone. Thank you everyone.