 Hello to everyone joining us online again for ALT-C22. I'm delighted to be joined by Lewisyn Nelson, who is here to talk to us today about how she has used a personal tutor toolkit to support personal tutors in their role. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Lewisyn for help. I don't know what to do, providing digital support for personal tutors. Thank you very much and hi and welcome everybody. I am Lewisyn Nelson and unfortunately Sonya won't be joining us today, but I'll be here to talk to you about our role in supporting personal tutors and how we've helped that through the creation of a digital tool. So just to provide a little bit of background, I'm actually an academic, I'm a senior lecturer in anatomy, but I also hold this additional role of being a senior personal tutor together with Sonya Lopez de Quinto at Cardiff University in the School of Biosciences. So it would be great to know who's here and who's joining us today and where you're from. So if you'd like to sort of say hi in the chat, so we know who you are sort of, and if you have any roles that are similar to senior personal tutoring or yeah, just what the background is, that would be great to know. So moving forwards, I wanted to provide a bit of a background to how we can ended up doing what we were doing. So have you ever been in this situation where you're a new member of staff but you don't know about how things work? How do you, you're supposed to be a personal tutor? How are you supposed to do it? Or another example is, I can't remember when I'm supposed to be meeting my two T's. I'm supposed to meet with my two T's, but I don't know what to say. They have the situation where personal tutors are just expected to know everything. Where do I find a question from a student? Might be where do I find information on applying for extenuating circumstances? A student wants to chat about mental health but I don't feel like I know what to say or how to approach them. My personal two T wants to ask about placement year but I don't know anything about it. So I've ever been in this situation where you feel like you're bombarded with questions from all directions. And then meanwhile on the flip side, this is a student's mind. So in the student's mind, they come to you, they have a question and I need to ask my personal tutor about and it could be anything. Personal tutors get questions from their two T's about absolutely anything. And often personal two T's see the tutors as this font of all knowledge. So then we have this situation where personal tutors don't feel particularly confident and two T's expect them to know everything. And then we also get this time factor where two T's say I need to know the answer now for my five o'clock deadline or in an hour or it's quite urgent, I need your help now. So this was the background and then we had the lovely situation where COVID hit and then personal tutors had all of this again by some factor, whereas multiplied. I put 30, it could have been 100, I didn't want to over-exaggerate the demands on personal tutors were definitely increased throughout the pandemic. So moving forward, so the School of Bioscience, we're a large department. We have roughly 90 academic members of staff who act as personal tutors and approximately 1,500 undergraduate students give or take because we have extra students that come and go. We have the dental of students, for example, and we have intercalating students. Anyway, roughly 1,500 students, that's quite a large task of providing help and uniformity to the students across the board. So some of the challenges that we faced as personal tutors, as senior personal tutors, we wanted to provide students a uniformed experience as much as possible where they would say that they got good support from their personal tutors. And as a senior personal tutor, it was our role to provide our personal tutors with a good platform to help them be as good a personal tutor as they could. So the challenges we faced was that tutors had varying levels of experience and training. So for example, some personal tutors might have been quite experienced, but not particularly engaged. So they just did their own thing or we had new members of staff who'd never been personal tutors before and just didn't know what to say. So that was an issue. There was also a lack in support and resources available to tutors. So again, they were just expected to know things, but weren't necessarily given all the help and training that was required of them to be able to deal with the student questions. What we also found was there was inconsistent support delivered to the students. So some tutors were very, very active. Some tutors weren't particularly active. And so what we found is the students would speak to each other and say, well, I got this help from my tutor and the other one will say, well, I didn't. And then they would find there was this disparity in support across the students. So we wanted to try and iron that out. In addition to that, we would experience a lack of interest or engagement with the personal tutor system. And that came from both sides, not only the tutors, but also the tutors. So some tutors just didn't reach out or contact their tutors. Some on the flip side, some tutors would contact their students but wouldn't get a reply, wouldn't ever have at them come to a meeting. So there was this issue of lack of engagement. Sometimes tutors would say, for example, that they would go to their tutor, but their tutor didn't ever know any of the answers to their questions. There was no point. So on top of all of this, we also wanted to ensure that the student expectations were managed. They would understand what a personal tutor could help with and also the plethora of support around them, not just using the personal tutor system to help them if they had any reason for needing help. So that they weren't always falling back on expecting the personal tutor to know everything. So in addition to those challenges that we faced then through COVID, we had additional challenges that we faced. And that was essentially coming down to the lack of interaction, sort of physical interaction, which led to this feeling of isolation among students but also among staff. Previous, before COVID hit, there would be lots of corridor chats, staff, they could pop out of their office and pop into someone else's office and ask a quick question. And that lack of community was lost through COVID. So there was a lack of support both to staff and students, which helped, I'm sorry, which caused additional stress, let's say, on personal tutors. And in addition to that, there were more demands from the tutors. All of a sudden there were so many more questions coming from tutors and students were really struggling to sort of understand where to go with all of the extra challenges that they were placed on them through COVID. So we developed this one-stop portal, an online personal tutor toolkit for staff. And this was actually in the pipelines before COVID, but it was quite good timing with when it was due to be released because it was released during COVID. And the plan was to provide school specific up-to-date information that was kind of managed and updated regularly so it could contain time-sensitive information. So the plan here was to have information that wasn't necessarily on the university-wide internet, but specifically information that was relevant to School of Bioscience students and the School of Bioscience staff. So we developed this personal tutoring toolkit for staff. And to give a brief overview of what it is, it's a Zerti webpage. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with Zerti, but Zerti is a browser-based tool and I've pinched this quote from the Zerti website, but it's a browser-based tool that allows anyone with a web browser to create an interactive learning material quickly and easily. So using Zerti, you can choose how it is shared. So we've set it so that it requires credentials for access. So only members of the university of Cardiff... Sorry, only members of Cardiff University are able to access our personal tutoring toolkit. So we do require credentials for access, but it is a webpage that's been created by myself and Sonya, and it's us that manage it. So anytime we want information or change information, we don't have to go through a different team. It's us that we can update it as and when we like. So that is a definite bonus. There are some formatting steps that Sonya and I aren't advanced enough to deal with. So we do have some assistance provided to us by the digital education team, which is a central team for the university. But once they've provided us with those formatting, with a formatting setup, it's all very, very simple for us to change and manage and alter an update as and when we choose. So just to provide an overview of the sections that we have got in there, we've got basic information and contacts. We've got signposting links. We've got frequently asked questions section. We've got guidance and support documents for meetings. And we've got a section where we try to summarize and collate information that is provided to students so that personal tutors can be aware of communications students are receiving. And all of this, as I mentioned, is targeted to support tutors. So this is not an interface that the students see. This is a situation. So if a student comes to a tutor and the tutor gets asked a question, they don't know where to find the answer. They can just click on this portal and they can find almost all of the information that they might be asked. So what I'll do now is I'll provide a brief tour of the toolkit and hopefully I'll be able to go now to another page. So hopefully now you can see the toolkit and you'll be able to see that we've got a homepage. We've got information on confidentiality. Got training and resource specific to our personal tutors. And sometimes as you can see here, we might link to other aspects. So there's other pages that we direct them to. So we've got personal tutor training that is university-wide. So we're not recreating training, for example, but we're showing them where they can find it. And we've got our contact page. So all the contacts for different people are here. So for example, we've got links that go directly to the email addresses. We've got a frequently asked question page. So if your tutor asks you what do I need to do if you need to self-isolate if I happen to fail a module. So all of these are here and answers to those questions that personal tutors can see to help address their tutors queries. But what we find has been most successful has been the meeting sections for the different years where we've been able to provide specific meeting to specific meeting information for the scheduled meetings as well as overviews of the different meetings. So for example, we've got the timetabled meetings that the students will see in their schedules. And then if I just show an example of one of the meetings, so for meeting one, we've got instructions and guidance on how the tutors can arrange their meetings, suggest a discussion points of what to chat with their students about during their first meeting. And then you can see here a document that was shared with the year one students. So for every meeting, we've got a set number of documents that the tutors can see in access to help them with that meeting. And as I said, the plan is to help to reduce the workload and kind of stress around being a personal tutor by providing the support and guidance to the personal tutors. As you can see across the top, again, we've got help with extenuating circumstances, links to health and work. You can see this is under construction, links to areas of health and mental wellbeing. So there's lots of different areas that are behind the scenes that we are working on. So the main advantages of this toolkit are that it is a webpage so it can be easily bookmarked on a phone, a tablet, a computer so that they can easily reach and access the page for up-to-date live information. We've been able to provide uniformity of information to the tutors, which then helps to trickle down to the tutees. So students have the potential to have the same information shared with them. Obviously tutors are free to provide any additional support or additional guidance or do something slightly different. This is definitely not a directive of what they have to do, but it's just suggestions in case they're lost for what to do. And it's just a webpage that's simple to use, simple to follow. In terms of evaluation, it's been a really, really huge success. This is just one quote of many that we've received. This one here says, the Zerti resource has been fantastic as a way of helping to support us in the tutor role. I think a lot of credit for the positive feedback to individual staff needs to be reflected back on you guys who are putting this in place. So this is an example of one tutor who's been very thankful. We've also seen a reduction in the requests for change of tutors. So previously, well, all tutors have the option to request a change of personal tutor. And we used to have almost kind of, it was a pattern on which tutors we would see having requests for. So obviously, there are more engaged tutors and less engaged tutors. Well, previously we had less engaged tutors and now those less engaged tutors have actually been really engaged and really thankful for the help. And now they've gone to be as engaged as the others. And so we've had requests for switching now has predominantly been as a result of students switching degree schemes rather than because of a lack of interaction of the tutors themselves. We've also had really positive feedback from staff. So this was a survey that was put out actually during COVID and you can see this staff largely agree or strongly agree that the guidance and suggestions, the guidance and suggestions documents were useful. And similarly through COVID, we had a student survey that was put out and the question on personal tutoring and whether they felt that they had support when needed from the personal tutors, it was actually the question that received the highest positive feedback in the student survey. So that was quite positive for us because we could see that the support that we were providing to the tutors was trickling down to the tutees. We've also seen a shift in positive feedback. So previously in 2020 we received 18 replies from students of which 13 were positive. So 72% positive feedback and of those 13 messages of positive response, they were relating to 12 members of staff. And following the rollout of our toolkit, we've seen a huge increase in the number of replies. And you can see that we had 38 members of staff received positive comments. So bearing in mind, we've got about approximately 90 members of academic staff. You can see that this went from being, the positive feedback went from being acknowledged from a small cohort of staff to nearly half of the members of academic staff received positive feedback from us. So that was a really good jump for us to acknowledge. And so we can see that our support that we've given to staff has helped across the board. So it's not just a dedicated few members of positive, highly engaged personal tutors, but it's now across the board. We're seeing a lot more engaged personal tutors. Limitations are that we've been unable to monitor usage so we can't see which pages have been more popular and which pages or areas of different pages have had more clicks. So that's something that we're trying to work on. See if we can get that. And for more complex tasks in setting up the page, additional help is required. As we mentioned, this is the assistance from the digital educational team. So when we have something more complex or we want to change the formatting, we can go to them to figure out how to do it. So I'm conscious of time, we've got a minute left. So what is next? So off the positive feedback off this, we have been working on a similar toolkit for students. So providing a student interface, a one-stop portal for students, outlining all of the available support to them so that they realize it's not just their personal tutors that they can go to. And the aim of this is to benefit students who have all the information in one place. They'll be able to understand and appreciate the network of support that the personal tutor system lies within so that the plan is that this will reduce the queries directed to the tutors because they might have then a better idea of where else to go for help and support. The other thing is that the resource has generated great interest within the university. So other schools are looking to developing a similar resource. So it's really nice to see our efforts in the School of Biosciences have been recognized beyond the school of the school and we're helping to develop this in other schools as well. So in summary, this toolkit has increased the confidence the personal tutors have in their role. It's helped to reduce the amount of time and effort that tutors need into working with the students in being effective personal tutors. And it's also reduced the fear or the anxiety that tutors face around the role, particularly when they're new. So we've had better engagement from personal tutors overall and we've been able to provide more uniform support to the students. And lastly, it's been a really useful tool that we've used for training new, particularly new staff members when they've joined and also existing staff members like to be able to have kind of refreshing refresher training through the tool as well. And that's it. So I'd welcome any questions if there are any any comments would also be lovely to see. So I'm here if you have anything to ask. Thank you very much for listening and here's my email address. I think you're on mute. Oh, thank you rookie mistake there. Thank you so much for that, Lewis. So it was great to hear about the positive impacts this toolkit has had not only on the staff but the students as well. That's such a fantastic response in the feedback. You must be very pleased with what you've been able to do. Yes, yeah, it's been a great success. Everyone we bump into in the corridor is always thanking us. So it has been a great success. So I'm just gonna share a couple of questions that have come in. First one from Lynn Danzig asking, I'm interested to know how the Zerti webpage shares data, for example, sign on information with the systems like the VLE or Office 365. Yeah, that's really interesting. So this is the kind of behind the scenes stuff that we're currently trying to seek. So at the moment we don't really know. We can have a tab of number of views on a page. But for example, if I click on the page 10 times that 10 times that tally's on to 10. So we haven't been able to get any specific information on sign on information or anything like that yet, but it is something that I've requested. So the digital education team are working behind the scenes to see what the capacity of Zerti has for us to be able to figure that sort of information out. So yeah, I agree. That would be really interesting information to know. But unfortunately at the moment we don't have that. Great, thank you. And another question from Neil McEwen. Each faculty or skill can have different ideas and definitions of what personal academic tutoring involves. Did you have to keep in mind various definitions of the role when creating your guidance? Yes, so the university, Cuddiff University has its personal tutoring policy and that includes the role of the personal tutor for the university as a whole. So in our page, we have two separate sections. So we have the university-wide policy and then we've also made a smaller kind of what school of bioscience expects you to do. So it's not an official university-wide policy, but we've kind of refined the expectations of what we in the school have based on the university-wide policy. As we are a large school and we have got a different system to other schools, we had to acknowledge that. But there was flexibility in the university-wide policy document for that, if that makes sense. And as I said, within our toolkit, we have links to the university-wide information as well. So when we make it clear that this is a university-wide policy and here are the expectations for the school. So we don't try and pretend that we're making a new policy document. We try to clearly outline the two steps, if that makes sense. Yeah, great, thank you. And another question from Lynn. Is it a challenge to keep the information up to date? So as senior personal tutors, we used to provide the information to tutors anyway, but through emails. So we used to send emails with these documents with suggested discussion points. So actually what we found is the work is similar, but instead of sending emails and having replies by email, we just put all the information on that toolkit. So now we have actually had a lot less work in terms of replying to individual comments because tutors now know where to go for that information. So it's meant that we... And now it's got to the point where we don't send emails saying the information will be on the toolkit because tutors know that the information will be there. Sometimes it might be there a week in advance or a day in advance, but they know that on the day, the information that they need to support their students will be there for those individual meetings. The... If I go back to my page, hopefully, can you see my screen? Yeah, the homepage, the personal tutor role, the confidentiality, this stuff is stuff that we don't often need to change. If we find that we get a lot of a particular question, we might add it to the FAQs, but the thing that we change regularly and we update regularly is the year specific pages. Obviously, we haven't yet rolled out the 22, 23 information, but so here, it just means that we add an extra bit in the bottom. If information to students comes in, we can add it here. So it hasn't really added extra workload. If anything, I would say it's almost reduced the workload because we know that we just need to put it there. We're not going to get an influx of information or questions on what should I do? I can't mean my tutor, what do I need to do? So I would say it's reduced our workload, apart from the fact that we need to make sure that Zerti is updated. Thank you very much for that. I'm just sharing your email address in the chat there for anyone that wants to make a note of that. If anyone would like to carry on the conversation about this really interesting resource, have to say, even as an established member of staff, something like that can be incredibly useful. So I'm pleased to see that you have had such a positive response. We do have our Discord channel set up if you want to carry on the conversation, but I've just seen there's one more question come in, so maybe we can finish on this one from Lynn, which is, can tutors share experience and ask questions via the Zerti page? Yes, so tutors, only Sonia and I have access to updating the page ourselves, but one thing that we have tried to put in the page, if I go back to it, is where is it? Academic Tutorial Ideas. So sometimes some personal tutors have really good ideas or they have really good discussion points or they have tutorial ideas that they like, and we would like to share sometimes what other tutors have, so they'll give us the information and we can add it to here. They don't have access to editing the whole page themselves, but we do, so there's a section here on shared practice, we've said we'd welcome any information that we could add on here. So it isn't just us kind of demanding what goes on, we would like to be able to have this as a kind of interactive shared space that we'd be able to help beyond Sonia and ours ideas, other people can have their ideas that they can put on there as well. Yeah. Thank you, a lovely message to end on there about sharing the work, and yeah, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us today. I'm sure we'll agree that was a great session and it's just left for me to say thank you to Louvessa and thank you to everyone for joining us, and we hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.