 Good morning. Thank you, Bear or not. Please take the stage. Sure. Hello, everyone. So I'm Orna Farrell and along with my colleague James Brunton, we're going to tell you about a project that we've been working on for about the last year and a half. It's called hashtag open teach. And it looks at creating open online professional development for online educators. That's a bit of a mouthful. And you can see the title today is pivot and the pandemic professional learning during the time of COVID-19. I was trying to get as many P's in the title as I could just for the fun. And so here, here is our details if you'd like to contact us after we'd love to hear from you. So you can drop us an email or catch us on Twitter. We're both from DCU. So I work in a newly created unit in DCU called the digital learning design unit, which was created for the pandemic. Before that, I worked with James in DCU connected, which are fully online programs pre code fully online programs. James, do you want to introduce yourself there? I'm James. As Orna said, like I've been working for about 10, 10 years in online open education programs. And in our model, it's a small full time team working with a big network of part time staff who do, you know, they work with the students, they develop the learning materials, they develop the assessments. And that has always come with an additional need for us as academics to also train and provide professional development opportunities for these part time staff who may not be as used to different aspects of online education as they might be. So we've always had this need to figure out what is the best way of helping people to become effective online educators. Yeah, thanks, James. So, so yeah, I mean, that's again, pre covert teaching online was quite unusual. Whereas now I suppose it's kind of moved into the mainstream. And as James said, we always worked with a large group of part time online teachers or educators, whichever word you prefer. And we all always had to provide a certain amount of professional development. But I think the professional development we did provide was a bit patchy and piecemeal, and maybe a bit too focused on the tools that they needed rather than the, you know, the actual pedagogy of teaching online. So that's where this funded project came about. So we got some national funding from the National Forum for Teaching and Learning, which is an Irish organization, which aims to enhance teaching and learning in higher education. So they gave us 50,000 euro. And then we went along and created this project called OpenTeach. So the project had a number of phases. The project is now complete. I'm glad to say. And so in the first phase, we, you know, we created a website, we did a needs analysis. So we did a really good study talking to online teachers and online students about what they thought made for effective teaching and learning online. We got very, very big responses. We did a questionnaire and a series of focus groups. So I think we got about 200 plus responses from the student questionnaire. And I think about 70 or so of the staff, which is pretty good because the pool was only about 100 part time staff. So we did the needs analysis, then we moved on and did a very detailed literature review or synthesis of the literature. And it's called teaching online is different. It's on our website. If you'd like to take a look, it's Open Access Creative Commons, as are all the resources from this project. Then we use those two pieces, the needs analysis and the literature review to help us design and build a fully online course. And also to create some standalone digital resources that could be disseminated separately too. Then following that, we ran the course in March 2020. It was actually pure coincidence, but it coincided with the first couple of weeks of the pandemic. So we had about 100 people signed up, which are largely our own staff and a few interested others. But then the pandemic hit. So we had 450. And we had another 450 or so or 500 on a waiting list. And we had to cap numbers because we just didn't have enough. It was designed to be a very high touch facilitated course. So we just didn't have enough manpower. So we actually ended up running the course again in September 2020. And again to about 500 people. So all the publications and reports, including the evaluation report are on the website openteach.ie. Here are some of the reports. So on the left is the needs analysis. On the right is the literature review. Teaching online is different. So we really, we really did a deep dive in the literature around online teaching about the last 15 years. So if you're looking for something, a good source. And we've done that heavy lifting for you. Some of the things that came out were very interesting. One of the big themes in the literature is online educator roles. So you can see a couple of diagrams from the report on screen. And one thing that kind of staggers me when I look at this diagram is how many things one person is meant to be doing all at the same time. And really, it is impossible for one person to do all the all these jobs. And that's I think why James that you could come in here is why we disaggregated a lot of those roles. Yeah, I mean, I think I think that was the logic of the your traditional distance education kind of role where it was to break these things down and give these jobs to different places so maintain some managerial and administrative stuff centrally, but then pick particular things and say, okay, you do this bit of you do this bit of teaching, you do this bit of content creation, and like kind of parcel those out now. As things evolve, then it's it's always a question as to whether those should be disintegrated or disaggregated in that very structured way or whether you need to have a more holistic approach where, you know, online educators are no enough to do to fulfill all these roles to a good minimum level. Yeah, I still wonder about that being possible. I think the model we're we've developed is a team or team based model. I mean, that seems maybe more possible. So a mix of skills and expertise working together. But again, that's a lot of man power to be putting at a module or a program. Not everyone can afford that. And you'll probably find that a lot of educators are like currently who are teaching online and are struggling with balancing all these different elements, particularly in my new job, which is essentially course design, learning design, and, you know, the technical side is very hard. And also the content because if you haven't designed content before for an online context, it's quite a big different difference, a different mindset as well. I think you're taken over here, James to talk about the learner. I'll take over here. So the way that we actually sat down and designed the course was we use the ABC learning design or curriculum design approach. And we did that as a project team, which included, you know, academics. It was facilitated by someone from the DCU teaching enhancement unit. We had one of our online students in the team. We had an instructional designer. And the ABC approach really helped us to focus on what we were doing and not go in circles and not like have lots of competing ideas. It really helped us sort of capture what are we doing here? What do we want to do? And then really get in and design, you know, the ABC approach gives you different ideas about what kind of different activities, you know, where are they going to acquire knowledge? When are they going to collaborate on something? When are they going to discuss things? When are they going to do something or make something? And it really drove us to a nice, narrow, focused design. And we decided to focus around a couple of key topics and have them be scenario based. So it really helped us to in a relatively short amount of time, very effectively come up with the design of the course. So in turn, we go next slide, please. So here's an example of one of the dilemmas that we came up with. I mean, as part of all the work that that Orna was talking about early on in the project, we had done these and needs analysis, there were interviews, there was focus groups. And out of all that data, you could make these really realistic based on real life personas. And then you could create these scenarios, realistic scenarios around these personas. So you can see email here, like this is based on real people, this is based on people that we work with. And then you could create a scenario. So the scenario for email is around moving to online teaching or, you know, and being anxious about that and not feeling maybe I'm not sure I can do this or how will I interact with the students? And then offering the participants a couple of scenarios, which wouldn't which scenario would you go with? And then letting that play out in the in the in the course through discussion forums or through the production of some kind of artifact that they can share with one another. And orna. Yeah, it was it was that problem or a scenario based learning worked very well because it was very much the here is an interesting problem. Here are some resources to scaffold your response. You know, what do you think? And I think framing it very open like that James actually prompt a huge interaction. Yeah. And do you want to go on to the next slide? Do you want to play the video or not? I don't I don't think we have time. Okay, well, if we have time at the end, we can play it. Yeah. Or else we can put it in the chat and people can have a look. People can enjoy it. It's left. So you are still okay with that, I think. Okay. Okay. Cool. We might put it on at the end. Yeah. So the course was built in Moodle. You can see there we use the the kind of tile format. And we we mostly used Moodle book using a lot of H5P within that to take people through these kind of these narratives. And you know, really at the core having those scenarios and then discussion around those scenarios. And it was mainly async. Well, it was it was an asynchronous, but we had two synchronous sessions really just for social activity. Yeah, just to build community and have a chat and tease out any interesting things that were coming up in the forums. But essentially you could have done the course 100% self directed if you if you wanted. Yeah. And you can see there we we centered these scenarios were centered around key what we thought were key topics, you know, social presence, engaging people in the online classroom and supporting students and engaging them through discussion forums or managing online students when they're doing group work. Like these were the core things that we that we focused on. Because again, we know as well, people who are online educators or all educators or especially people who are maybe doing these roles part time, they have very limited, very limited time. We could have designed a 100 hour course. Who would we have gotten to take a 100 hour course? And so we designed a 10 hour course instead. So and and it was also we well, not only do the topics emerge from the needs analysis, the flexibility of the asynchronous approach came from the needs analysis, but also from the literature. And one of the big points from the literature read professional development for online educators was people need to feel like feel the experience of being an online student themselves. Next slide. Yes, please. So again, I mean, orn is already kind of covered this so I won't spend much time, but the first course, you know, we were we were planning a pilot that would have a reasonable number of people on it and we had interested parties and that was the plan. And then because it was happening in the first few weeks of the pandemic, we ended up with like 450 people. And so, you know, it was very it was very busy, it was very dynamic. It was very engaging though. It was a good experience. And it was just more people than we thought we would have in that first in that first run. Yeah, four facilitators. And also because we were going for that high touch approach, you know, if there was someone making a discussion forum post and no one had replied, we replied, which, you know, which was a lot of work. One thing we did find though that audio or video replies were a lot quicker and people felt really they were a personal touch. So, and there's another persona there, Mihal. Next slide, James, or anything else to say on that? No, I was just replying to Bea in the chat there. I think this is back to you now. Okay, Garand. So, here is some of the evaluation report data. So, we did a questionnaire and a couple of focus groups afterwards. Questionnaire, I think we got 101 responses. So, not bad, out of 450. So, you can see they're very strong response in terms of, do you think your knowledge increased? 98%. Here are some quotes from the qualitative data. One of the big things and one of the big learnings for me was that the best part of the course for a lot of the educators who took it was it helped their confidence. It wasn't so much about the tools and the technology, it was more about feeling like they could do it. So, you can see there that a couple of nice quotes. I had no knowledge of online teaching beforehand and I feel I could teach online with my learners now, or learning about how I might teach online with my learners, something I've never done before, demystifying the concept. So, you know, that was the one of the big outcomes was giving people a bit of confidence, taking away their fear, because in March the fear was very strong. Another couple of quotes here about the, sorry, go back about the kind of new knowledge. So, you can see new knowledge about theories, technology, strategies, valuable advice, tools. They liked the emphasis on pedagogy. So, there was a very strong emphasis on pedagogy rather than technology, even though obviously online learning is facilitated by technology. We were talking more about ideas and less about tools. So, we have a bit of time for questions and I might just stop sharing my screen. I think we have questions yet. You're right about H5P. Yeah, we did have some some some transferability issues, although I think I've actually got a solution to them now, James. Let me know. The other thing we're working on is an open textbook. So, that's still not quite finished, but we are working on an open textbook and you can import the H5P directly into it, James. Exciting. Here is one of the course videos. It's a press book. So, I think it is a press book. There too. Tell me a bit more about that there, the transferability. No, I'm actually kind of going, my mind is going too fast in two different directions. So, no, let's leave it for some other time. Okay, it's good. It's too big a question. No, I'm saying that I didn't want to get the conversation into different platforms. So, you're thinking Moodle, I'm thinking Brightspace. I know. So, it's going to get too messy. So, I was going to say, no, move on to another question. Yeah, fair enough. Well, we were conscious of that and we made a lot of standalone resources too. So, one of them being all our videos are on YouTube. So, we did a couple of different, we've got the scenario videos, but we also have a really nice set of educators talking about their experiences of teaching online. They're on our YouTube channel as well. We've got a lot of kind of open, we call them takeaway resources. So, they're like two page resources about like social presence. You know, here's the idea. Here's a few strategies. Go and read more. And people loved them because they were short and sweet and very user friendly and they loved being able to take them away. They just couldn't believe that we were letting them have things for free. You know, they were even asking, are you sure I could have this? But yeah, so, you know, we were quite conscious of kind of creating standalone material. And I think we did have some issues. We shared the file, the Moodle files with and we can give you a copy of the course if you like as well. We shared the files with other institutions, but if you've hyperlinking within books to H5P, it's just, it's messy. And I'm sure we lived and learned about that. And so that's kind of one of the reasons for the open textbook is, you know, make the whole thing openly available. And then we won't have that file problem as well. So, I don't know, any more questions or comments? James, do you have anything? I think we're out of time. We've got just one. So, you can have like a 30 second reaction to the question from Ingrid. What do you think are the main differences in pedagogy and online teaching compared to face to face? I've only got 30 seconds for that. I think you have to work harder at online teaching and also I think a lot of the preparation for online teaching is upfront. You have to work much harder to create community and rapport and presence online than you do in face to face environment. That's for me, one of the big differences, James. I think when you get down to this, I don't know, is there much, you know, is there much difference in what is good and what is bad, but in online teaching compared to sort of how we think of traditional face to face teaching, a lot of things that are implicit in face to face become explicit in online. And that's just reinforcing what Ornejo said. You end up having to think more about what am I doing synchronously, asynchronously, what can I provide them so that they can study themselves to, you know, so you end up having three legs to that stool rather than thinking about, oh, I'm, you know, I'm just going to go into the class and teach. Yeah. The planning side, I think, is what you're saying. The planning, the design is so important online and spending lots of time on that upfront makes for a much better experience. Thanks. Thank you very much. This was really great. And thank you also for doing all that heavy lifting with that literature review. I think it's something that people here are going to find especially useful nowadays. And I just, just a very final thing from my side. Like I have noticed that the last time you had like a moderated session with this course happening was in September, right? The website that you shared. So if people here would like to actually participate in the next iteration of the course, how would they be able to do that? Are you planning something like that in the near future? Oh, gosh, Igor. Maybe. Watch Twitter. Yeah, Twitter would be the best place to the open teach Twitter handle. I'll share that in the chat now. We don't know about another one. I mean, if it's still very popular, we may go again. But the project is out of cash, is the thing. But if anyone wants to copy the course, and of course, we'll share the open textbook. And if someone wants to reuse, repurpose in their own context, they'd be very welcome. Great. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you both of you for your contributions and the great work that you've been doing. And this concludes this specific presentation. Again, you are all invited to continue these conversations in OEG Connect. There is a specific link that was shared to your session. So thank you very much for that. And now I would like to, so please stop the recording.