 Welcome to this afternoon's session. Thank you for being here. We've got two papers, two 15-minute papers. I'm going to be keeping time. My name is Donna Longclow. And what we're first going to hear from are Lucy, Kendra, Alex Lemson, and Roddy Monroe. And they're going to talk to us about collaboration across continents. So welcome. Thank you so much for coming to listen to us today. And thanks to everyone online as well. As Donna said, we're Roddy, Lucy, and Alex. We're from Heriot-Watt University. We're part of a multidisciplinary team of learning designers and media designers. Our session today is about digital media collaboration. And it's all about building relationships and maintaining standards over distance. So Heriot-Watt prides itself on being a globally connected multi-campus university. So hopefully we'll be able to see you soon on the slide. There we go. So we are based in the Edinburgh campus, which is up on there in yellow. We also have two other UK-based campuses, Gallish Hills and Orkney. We've got two international campuses, one in Dubai and one in Malaysia. Because of this, we strive to keep the Luxby campuses as strong as possible. So there's a real focus on the organization for cross-campus collaboration. So this is made explicit in the strategic goals and values of the organization, some of which are shared on the slide there. So we share this just to show that it's not just a desirable for the teams we work with. It is something that's hard-coded into the strategic values and DNA of the organization. So a bit more about us. We are from the Heriot-Watt online team, the digital education team within Heriot-Watt online, which is a service that works across the schools of university, the design building, deliver fully online courses to a global student base. So we have around 30% of our students are online students, over 9,000 active students in around 158 countries. So we, the digital education team, work with the academic teams to build courses within our delivery model, which is called the anytime-anywhere model. Students can enroll at any time they want. It's very much self-paced, fully asynchronous. No real time limits for students. Students put themselves forward to be assessed when they feel they're ready to do so. So compared to something like a cohort-based course, it's quite a low tutor presence. So the obvious advantage of the students of our model is that for someone who's really, really time-poor and doesn't even have time to commit to something like a cohort-based course, this is a great model for them. It provides challenges for us in design, one of which is creating a sense of identity, providing authentic tutor presence. But that's one of the reasons we value digital media so highly with our courses. It's not just the mechanism of delivery of information for us or a way of breaking down complexity within a subject. It's a means of engaging and motivating students, establishing human presence within the courses, helping students feel connected to the faculty and to the institution, and also to give students a sense of the person or the people who have designed and delivered the courses. So I'm going to pass over to Alex now, and she's going to explore further some of the complexities of our project and look at some of the options we considered along the way. So despite being part of this fantastically global university, our usual way of working in Heriot-Watt online has been perhaps surprisingly local. So we're used to working in these small project teams of an academic, a learning designer, and a media producer. And in terms of collaboration, that's always been done face-to-face on campus in Edinburgh, with the exception of during the pandemic, and obviously that wasn't possible. And it's fair to say that collaboration, that sense has always been fairly straightforward, but we're here to talk within the theme of leading in times of complexity, and so we want to introduce a project that we embarked upon last year to develop a new, fully online MSc in business and organisational psychology. And the complexity we face was that for the first time, the academics we were working with were all based on Heriot-Watt's Dubai campus. So they were in a different time zone, three or four hours ahead, and more importantly, they were in a different physical space. So we weren't able to have that face-to-face collaboration. And this didn't pose so many problems in terms of learning design, but it did present a challenge for digital media production. It meant that we weren't able to be with them in person to get that sense of authentic tutor presence that we wanted into our media. And so we started out considering a number of fairly, perhaps, obvious options, but we quickly realised as we investigated them that they involved obstacles that we couldn't really overcome. So the first travel in either direction between Edinburgh and Dubai obviously would have had a huge cost and also a huge environmental impact, which we want to avoid. And those first two options, the travel or commissioning a local team in Dubai, because they would have to be time-bound and pre-booked essentially, we felt they weren't going to allow us the flexibility we needed to respond to developments in the course design as they arose. And that third option, recording via video conferencing, while we already knew from our experiences during COVID, that it didn't provide reliably good audio quality and nor could we provide as much of that authentic sense of space that we could if we were recording on location. And on top of all of that, none of these options really aligned with that university strategy. And so we want to look more at this second part of the strategy. How could we foster exchange, collaboration and partnership? So instead of finding workarounds to this distance between Edinburgh and Dubai, how could we embrace the distance between our teams? And Lucy, our digital media manager, is going to talk a bit about how we achieved that. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. Well, here are some of the ways. I won't read them all out now, but they increased in complexity as our relationship developed and we got a feel for how far we could push people, that kind of thing. We learned a lot in lockdown in terms of how far we could push the uninvested academic. Luckily and happily this time, they were very invested. And we knew really our best chance of getting that sense of tutor presence and giving us a sense of control was to get content from them and then we could do interesting things with it at our end and we collaborate in the middle, as you can see there. I'm not gonna... If you don't know why audio quality is important, I can talk to anybody later, but we knew for us that it was realistic, because we learned a lot as I say through lockdown, to get academics to record at source, lovely, rich audio, that then we could do something interesting with sound design, all combined with visuals if we felt that was pedagogically useful. So here's the low tech threshold, by the way. So this kind of stuff, but we knew it worked. Next slide. Why isn't Jenny, why is the next slide not going? There we go. Okay, great. One of the things that really helped us was being clear between the three components, what was important about media, what we really wanted all media to do, that sort of our broad brief. So we wanted to, you know, in some way have it intrinsically motivating, right? So either to get complex ideas across fast, you know, media being the best way to do that, or to get people, and or, to get people engaged actively with the stimuli. And that means, of course, happily that audio only content is often the best tool for the job, particularly things like immersive thought experiments, that kind of thing. So here's a little excerpt of one of those examples where you've heard Greg recording at his end. Yes, we monitored remotely. Yes, we did backup recordings through the internet, but we got these rich WAV files from them at their end and did things with that. You, and maybe a dozen survivors, scramble through the narrow tunnel. You're the leader because you're the one in front. It's wide enough for just one. And suddenly you all emerge from the tunnel into a wilderness. You all look around and sense no immediate danger. You look around and see no one you know, a varied mix of suspicious strangers. No one knows what to do. Someone looks to you and says, who are you anyway? So another thing we do with this recorded narration was to add visuals. Here's quite a literal translation of a PowerPoint. Really intentional use of homemade stuff there as well. We used this tabletop technique, which added that level of human presence into stuff. Also, by the way, it gets around a lot of copyright issues as well and a bit of wit and humor, that kind of thing. As I say, this is a fairly straightforward example, but often the interesting thing was working out what was worth making media and how could we make that sophisticated. So this is a kind of fancy advanced tabletop technique. You got control at your end. You could make set pieces as you're going to see here. You could be intentional about representation, gender-ambiguous, race-ambiguous characters through the medium of LEGO, as you'll see here. The car has stopped and the red traffic light is displayed to tell the driver not to move. There must be a green light for the car to move again. The two jacks are placed beneath the front and rear to lift the car. And then, on this occasion, three of the wheels are replaced within a second, but the rear left wheel is stuck and won't come off, probably because of a faulty bolt. This is where things start to go wrong. We did feel, then, we could get academics to be making media with their smartphones, kept the tech very low, fleshed out again. We knew it was going to work for us. Main takeaway here is, as soon as possible, start communicating in the mode you intend for output. So if you're communicating visually, if you're creating video, present a prototype like we've done here, these are my pals on the left. And this is the finished product, really leaning into that kind of smartphone aesthetic. Storyboard software is really handy. Previz Pro is an iOS thing. Interestingly, we didn't tell Greg to wear a black shirt because he had a black shirt on the storyboard and looked great in one. There's Greg in the desert, you know, and smartphones can get places that other things can't. And here's Lucy Bolton saying a bit more about that. Storyboard helps me develop my voice service as well. They give feedback on how it sounds and which bits could be separated up. So you would write a short script and they would help you develop that. Each scene is mapped out for you. Where to have the camera, which way you would be facing, obviously, if you're filming with them, they direct you through all of that. And it makes it more engaging for the students, professional for the students. It brings up personal touch. And then finally, as those relationships developed, we could do sort of creative pieces because we had mutual respect and trust. They had really light touch input from the academics. We were also really familiar with content by that point. So we proposed that we do a series of documentary-inspired pieces on the concept of flow, for example, that needed almost nothing from the academic. We, in fact, devised the questions as well, sourced the people. My name is Donna Wash, head coach of the Heria Flots Scholar So takeaways. I'm going to focus on the last two. You know, if you're going to be playing particularly across continents, but regardless, with, say, spoken word, start doing lo-fi, you know, voice notes, see how that looks, feels to you. You saw some of ideas for sort of visual prototypes, and that was trial and error, but it was really helpful to do that because, of course, these people aren't experts in our disciplines, you know? And then finally, you know, going through a process like this for an academic, it really helps you to get a feel, just like Satvinder was saying about, you know, working on tele, like, where media is best placed to, you know, where it suits you, where it suits your practice, which is really the bedrock of what a media literacy is, you know, and that, of course, can be applied, you know, to all sorts of contexts. And let's face it, it really is all about communication, and if you, you know, there's no point making media unless it's not getting you to the place you want to get to, and, you know, for as it was nurturing a connection, you know, regardless of where you are on the globe. And my colleagues are going to talk about some of the things we just couldn't get round, so thanks. I think we're running out of time a bit, so we'll just whiz through these ones. The first hard truth to balance out those takeaways, I think, was that all those three specialist roles, the media producer, the learning designer, and the academic were essential. We couldn't really bypass any of those roles, and if we tried to, we found that the product was all the poorer for it, and to link into that, we found that sustained collaboration between the three of us was really crucial. Roddy, do you want to take on the next one? One minute. I'll try to be quick, too. So what we found that was that it's not a time saver, you know, it's an iterative process, planning, recording, editing, it all takes time. What it did offer us was new and authentic ways for students to feel connected to us, and for us to really get across how much course leaders cared about the students' learning. And the last one to finish off is that there's no getting away from the necessity for media editing. If this is something you do want to pursue, then that media editing capability is something you really have to build. And that's it. I think there's maybe time for questions at the end, Donna, perhaps we'll do that later, but if you don't want to get in touch with us, our details are up on the slide there. Thank you so much for listening to us today.