上面. Thank you." So my name's Sarah Sherman, I work for consortium of universities in the London area. Our six partners are Birkbeck, the London School of Hygiene stock vault medicine, the Royal veterinary college, SOAS, UCL's Institute of Education and the University of London. Together we do all sorts of things. We share software licenses, deals I've negotiated with providers, some of whom are here today. We do joint training we provide joint materials training guides I run lots of events and we do stuff together because between us all were quite small institutions and as one combined effort. ..ingly, we still are not the size of a normal sized university. So the hole is greater than the size of its parts is very much our motto. So activity is based around an enhancement theme which we pick every two or three years. In 2014 we were looking at assessment and feedback practices. We collated lots of good examples across our partners and shared that with the community. The next enhancement theme, which we started in 2016, was digital capabilities, which is obviously what's brought us all here today. So we've done a lot of different activities as part of this theme. We have designed a MOOC, an award-winning MOOC. I have to add that in for teachers, any teachers who teach online whether it's fully blended or completely distance learning. It teaches and trains them to make their online courses engaging and interactive. It's on course here, it's three weeks long, it's free, and that's the URL. Also, as part of this theme, we have run the JISC Student Digital Tracker Survey, and we've also trialled the staff discovery tool. So the topic that I'm going to be talking to you about today is our pre-enrolment course, which has come out of this same programme. It's a course to look at students before they start university. We're well aware of all the brilliant stuff that's out there, particularly a lot developed by JISC, on ensuring that students are equipped for entering the workplace to make sure they're digitally skilled and ready to get earning the bucks. But actually, we were worried and bloomed to if we were maybe doing a disservice to our students. We're equipping them with the technologies that they need for their learning, and in a way to get them before they even start. So it's still a work in progress, but I wanted to talk about the process and where we've got to right now. So we did some research across our six partners, we consulted with a number of colleagues, and we ran a couple of surveys with staff and students. So in terms of the consultation, I report to a steering group which is made up of a couple of senior representatives of each of the six partner institutions. So I talked to my advisory board, kind of my line managers, to make sure they were happy with what we were planning. I also have a sort of a dispersed team of learning technologists, we call them the BLEE tell team. They knew what we were up to, some of them were involved more heavily in the project. I have a digital capability advisory board, which again is representatives from all the institutions, but from different stakeholder groups. So we have librarians, staff, development, a real life student. We have a number of different people on our board progressing through all of these different activities, some of which I've already mentioned. But for this specific project, the pre-enrolment course, I have a working group. They don't have big muscles, but some of them like to think maybe they do the peck working group. So to kick off, we ran a couple of surveys last year, one for staff. It was possibly the shortest survey we've ever sent out to staff and they were quite pleased that we did so. It just has two questions, one of which is, what digital skills do you expect your students to have when they arrive and start your programme? And the second question is, on what digital skills do they seem to routinely lack? And that was it, and if they wanted to provide their name, that was great, it wasn't obligatory. And we targeted a number of staff, so we had 17 colleagues give us responses back, which doesn't sound loads, but actually that was kind of more than enough because we were coming back with very similar results. Then we did a student survey, we opened it up to first years across the consortium. We asked them four questions. What digital skills did you have when you arrived at university? What did you need that you didn't have, that you realised you didn't have? How did you acquire these skills? What did you do to get them? And what advice would you give any first years coming in based on what you've found out? So we had 63 students respond to that. Again, loads, not significantly remarkable, but plenty for us to get working on. So we collated all of the results that we've got from all of our students, and based on the data we started to identify the areas of this pre-enrolment course that we knew that we would need to cover. So this is like the spreadsheet taken from collating all our data. So we started realising that all of the teaching staff, for example 11 teaching staff said they needed something on Microsoft Word, working in documents like that, that cloud storage didn't come up at all. We thought it would. We grade it out because only one person thought it would be significantly important. Not to say we didn't include it, but this really got us going, start thinking about how to design and shape the course. At the same time as collecting our data and finding out what our stakeholders wanted, we scoped out what resources already existed internally. So we looked at all of our six institutional partners, VLEs. We got access to the sort of digital skills courses that they already offered, making sure that obviously the resources there were openly available. And then we went external, so we asked local friends if they had anything in the open that we would be able to use in this course. Now it's important at this stage to realise that our course was an overview of the kind of digital things that a student would come across once they started their academic career programmes. We weren't going to be learning anything per se. We weren't going to be teaching how to create a video, but it was more of a kind of a heads up. This is what you're going to be faced with when you start your programme, whether it was undergraduate, postgraduate, distance learning or what. We wanted to make this as inclusive as possible. Our mantra of the whole course was so that there'd be no surprises when you went through those classroom gates. So, based on all of the research that we collected, we were able to refine and decide on the four main areas of our course. So, sort of topic zero is what is digital skills, what are digital skills, what do we mean by this. Section one is about general technologies. So, working with files, understanding what file types mean. It's important that students understand that they need to save documents into PDF if they're going to be using Turnitin. Office applications, search engines, those kind of things. The learning technology section is around things like the VLE, forums in the VLE, assignments and assessments and the use of video lecture capture. We wanted to tell our students before they got into the classroom that a lot of their stuff would actually be filmed and they can think about how they'll use that recording. For many of our students, we're anticipating that it will be the first time they'll ever have used a VLE, certainly Moodle in an HE setting. So, if nothing else, this course will give them a taste for that. The third option is all around safety, security and access, logging in. Some of our students, I've heard colloquially, come to the help desk because they can't get into Moodle. I've logged on to my laptop and I can't access Moodle. I don't understand why. Well, you have to log in to various different university systems. There are lots of use names and passwords involved when you're at university. The final section is about getting organised, so that's online note-taking, annotating, understanding, referencing, time management. This is another spreadsheet that we designed to start honing in and use this as the course map to structure the course. If the link works, we can go into it more fully. So, it's all there. So, all these different colours refer to a different topic section. In terms of how we managed the project, there was myself and my colleague Nancy, who hopefully is tuning in live at the moment. We used Google Drive to store all of our shared documentation. We worked disparately across six different institutions and our small working group, we wanted to ensure they had access to everything as we went along. We used Blackboards Collaborate quite often. Again, although we're located all in London, Nancy, for example, lives in Dorset, so we needed to make sure we all got together virtually. So, that's just a snippet of a Blackboard Collaborate session we ran as Nancy was starting to start structuring the course to show the working group where she was at. Nancy really is truly the architect and the key designer behind the course. So, let's have a look at the actual course. So, we use Moodle. Our course is a generic course. It sits in our shared version of Moodle. That's the landing page with a bit of information, a very short introduction. That is section zero. What is this course? If we click into the Learning Technologies section, it takes you to that, and there are only about four sections in this course on learning technologies. We don't want to overwhelm these students. Potentially, they might be sitting on a beach in Ibiza. They haven't yet started their courses, so we don't want to stress them out before they even start. But it's just to give them that taste of flavour, a heads up of what's to come. So, you can see in the Learning Technologies section, we've got a bit about an online learning environment, the forums, the assessments and assignments, and the video that you will be using or having access to video recordings. At the end of each section, we've got a quiz. Students are expected to get 100% in this quiz and they can verify very simple questions. They can keep retaking it and retaking it until they get the 100% and then they get a badge at the end. So, it's all kind of subtly demonstrating what it will be like to do an online course. And then that is, if I click into the Assignments and Assetsments section, that is about the size of a page that we have on each topic. There's no scrolling. There might be a video. The University of Derby is brilliant animation and videos about digital capabilities. There might just be a still image, something to make it look nice. And right at the very bottom of this page is a quote which we've pinched. We didn't have to make any quotes up, which was brilliant, we were considering it. But we got enough of those quotes from those students and that fourth question, what advice would you give incoming students? So, right now, literally at this very moment, we're running our pilots. So, out of the six institutions I work for, three institutions are now piloting the course. So, they've taken a copy of the pre-enrolment course from our shared noodle and dropped it into their own. So, that is the role of veterinary colleges, version of the course, that is Birkbecks and that is Soasis. So, you can see it's the same course in different noodles. I'm right now there piloting. So, right at the very end of the course, we've embedded a survey which I haven't looked today, I've already got at least two or three responses from. This is a very quick survey to ask them what do they think of the course. So, I found this course and they've put in a load of different adjectives of them to describe. Too much information, boring, confusing, but we've put in some positives mixed in there as well. We don't want to force anyone one way or the other. We asked them which bits they liked, the best, they can take all of those, how difficult or easy they found their way to navigate through the course and a bit about them so we know which level of study they're in, which institution and their age range and how they were accessing the course. So, as I said, we've already had at least response and one of them says, I am useless with computers so the basic guidance which assumed no knowledge was useful. So, that was good going from our second response to the survey. And then once we have the focus groups, sorry, the survey, has the pilot's progress will collect some focus groups based on students who are happy for us to contact them afterwards. So, what next? We're planning a full rollout 2019, so possible another presentation that we'll see next year. And our plan is to open up the course to everyone, to the world. You couldn't see it earlier but there is a creative commons licence already attached to the course so it will be properly openly available but if anybody would like to take a sneaky peek at it and have a look at it now, I would be very happy to let you in so just grab me at the end or drop me a line. And that's it. So, I think we came up with a really clever metaphor for this presentation which is something about unlocking the stable door. So, I think it's around ensuring our students we might be checking they've got digital capabilities for the workplace especially, let's just unlock the door give them those digital capabilities now and then they're free to leave the stable. Thank you very much, Sarah. So, you've taken my advice and you've asked lots of questions so I don't have to. Oh, God. A little bit. Right, first of all then, is there a difference between digital skills and digital fluency that is investigated in your data? It's a good question. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to answer it fully but I'll do the politician thing. So, I think there is a really fuzzy line between digital skills generally so understanding the software and if we talk about note-taking for example understanding the different Evernote and Google Docs and what there is and I think there's a difference between knowing that and identifying those. So, how to annotate annotations and notes pedagogically for informing learning. That's not what we're doing in this course. It's not so much study skills as technology so these are the tech tools or platforms that you'll be coming across when you're at university. So, thank you. Email me if you want to surf chat more. Yeah, please do talk to Sarah afterwards. Right, second one then quickly. Do you already use Google tools for learning for example Gmail, Drive, Docs? Yeah, so some of our institutions do obviously with six independent separate institutions. Sirass, for example, is fully Googled. They got Google apps for education gosh I don't know, seven years ago whenever it came out. So staff and students at Sirass are using Gmail and Drive for everything. At Birkbeck it's just for Gmail and then other institutions can use it if they want to use it. So there's no hard and fast rule. Brilliant, thank you. Then thirdly what's the level and quality of engagement with the course? Well, I don't know yet. We literally, because it's a pre-enrolment course it's happening right now we've let students loose on it. So the three pilots that we've got running for example at the Royal Veterinary College where I took lots of these photos are probably quite ill horses The RBC is piloting it with one BSE course so it's a full co-horse in the first years. They haven't yet started so the moment the IT sets up their accounts they'll be in. Birkbeck we think we've got a number of courses we've got some academics who are running those and at Sirass we've got some what they call bridging students so they're international students and they come over a couple of weeks before term starts to kind of get orientated do a bit of language stuff and this course will support them so I don't know, ask me again in three months we'll see how we go. Take her email address. Thank you. So do you have a minimum standard for blue muses of staff? Minimum standard of the BLE? BLE Right, minimum standard of staff so students can be sure they will get what they have learned I'm not sure if I understand the question but what I can say is I guess with all the consultation and studying we approached lots of academics I think Liz, you were probably one of the ones who filled in the survey for us we made sure that all the institutions could be covered so what their needs and requirements were so that the course would be met but there isn't anything formal as a minimum standard certainly the institutions don't have minimum standards for the BLE Do you want What are the things to bear in mind that were customised? So the group created the course so the group created the course and when it was handed over we've actually gone in and customised it so the links to all the support materials all the contact details of the post institution so in regards to that if they need additional work or if they need additional work on to that if they need additional support in the resources section they should know where to go so we're signposting as we go along Thank you so much Liz for reminding me and Liz spent about an hour personalising the Birkbeck version of the course so we provided guidance to our piloting and anyone else which bit needed personalising and I think in the actual template course those bits are highlighted in red so people know what they need to change Yes It's kind of a bit of an age-old question we have these ideas at our institution should it be a minimum standard for lecturers for all their lecture captures up there can students expect when they come to the institution I will see all my lecture captures I will see all my PowerPoints I will see a picture of my lecturer and that's kind of what I was trying to ask Got it Yes Sorry Thank you Elizabeth I think you answered that so that each institution will have a different take on it so from my point of view I've done a generic template course and then it's up to the institution how they want to localise that if they want to get rid of that whole section on lecture capture it would be a shame because we work holes in it but you know they can do that Okay thank you Last week for our next presenter you asked students for their age was this relevant? Don't know yeah Probably not but let's find out If you'd like to show your appreciation in the normal way