 So welcome everyone to the Moodle Academy webinar about ABC Learning Design. I'd like to introduce to you our three presenters today. So we've got with us today Dr Clive Young. And if you'd just like to go to the next slide Clive. So Clive Young is from UCL along with his colleague Natasha Perovich. And they will, they're actually the people who created ABC Learning Design. So they're joined today by Claire Gormley, who will be giving another perspective on using ABC Learning Design. She's been using it for many years alongside Clive and Natasha and has worked on many projects with them as well. So next slide please Clive. And today we're going to be going to be covering an introduction to ABC Learning Design. So if you haven't heard about it or you're not familiar with exactly what it is, we'll be doing an overview. And then DCU will talk about how, we'll talk about how DCU is using ABC Learning Design. Then we're going to move on to discussing how it can be run online. So that I know some of you asked those questions in the discussion boards earlier and we'll be covering that and then we'll be taking any questions. But you're also very welcome to ask questions in the chat as we go through. So I'll hand it over now to our guests. And I believe Clive Young has started starting. So we'll get started. Thank you very much, Jess. And thank you for inviting us today. It's a great pleasure to be here. So we will be talking about the ABC Learning Design method that myself and Natasha developed around about five years ago at UCL. It's a rapid design method and really mostly used for a new program design and the review of programs. Now we've had a long connection with Moodle. We've been a Moodle shop for as long as I can remember. And it's one of the largest Moodle installations in the UK. We've got 48,000 students and the pretty impressive statistics here. So our role really in UCL is to try to enhance the student experience through pedagogy design, thinking about presentation, activities and so on, but also optimizing the use of the technology under line nine, which is, as I say, mostly Moodle. So if you think about ABC that will be shown you over there, I'll be introducing over the next 10 minutes or so. It's something we do with program and module teams at UCL and think of it as a way of engaging with academics. You know, it's a design method itself. There's also an engagement method. And it was designed for itself, for academics, for teachers who are busy and may have a little, very little experience in formal design methods and maybe little enthusiasm for them either. So that's where ABC came from. And it was designed, it was built around a kind of workshop. I've got a short workshop we do with academics. And it is built to be quick. So we know that academics would not have a lot of time. So bring them in quickly and do something really useful with them and focus on the idea that this is a student-centred method based on the things that students will be doing throughout the course of their courses or modules and programs. And the main part of this is to encourage this type of conversation and discussion, pedagogical conversation and discussion and come out as a consensus with the team about how this particular program or module should be designed and develop a storyboard of the students designed through it and at the end of the day, an action list. So if the thing has to be changed, then how is it going to be changed, who's going to do it? We've run it for many years. It works across lots of different disciplines. And we've run it inside UCL, outside UCL. Other universities like DC have picked it up and really run with it. We, it was based on a face-to-face method, but as you'll see, we do online stuff in it as well. So the route that came out that was to do with blended learning or trying to look at changing the kind of blend that if that's the modes that people were using with students and again, trying to get new programs as it came out post-validation to think in this kind of way. Also for short courses and MOOCs, they do the same type of validation, but the kind of quality and presentation is actually important. But actually Natasha found, you know, her and myself, we found a lot of program reviews. So a few programs have been running for a few years. They brought us in to kind of review and pick up stuff about student feedback and so on. And on that process, look at maybe specific topics, things like employability or professional body requirements. As I say, again, student feedback assessment, things like that. So there's a few things you can do with these workshops. They, I'm just trying to say that, you know, there are many other ways of designing programs and this is just your one way of it. And I think Jess will either distribute this slide, you'll see it later on. You can follow any of these. There's many other ways of doing it. We all kind of learn from each other. It's a really interesting area of program design, but that's us down at the bottom there. And of course, we think ours is the best, but you know, we would, wouldn't we? So we built it on, myself and Natasha, built it from what's called a conversational framework. So there's a kind of a theory behind that from Professor Diana Launlard who's one of the UCL Institute of Education Professives. And she's had a theory around for a long time called the conversational framework, which sees the adult learning as this kind of big discussion between teachers and students and learners and the peers and the environment and practice and so on. And it's quite really relatively complicated, but we took a part of that and she sort of identifies six learning types and types of learning that goes on within this rich conversation. And we operationalized it, that's what she said. So we developed these sort of six cards, each one representing one of these types of learning. And that's the card that originally in this sort of paper format. And this is a way you can build the students' journey through these cards. Now you might think when you first look at it, it's kind of a bit simple or even simplistic, but think about these as Lego blocks. These are something you can use, the types of colors of Lego blocks to create really very complicated structures. And we found that it never fails us. People can build a student experience through this, but actually just going through that process is often quite useful for people to think about, well where are we, what part of this course is acquisition, where the students get a chance to collaborate and discuss. Are they getting a chance to investigate this in the subject more deeply? Where can they practice the skills and ideas, the learning and production is often to do with the assessment. So it gets people to think in that kind of way. Real benefit of this is that as we know in Moodle and all the elites have this kind of reputation as being content repository platforms. You know you put your blocks and stuff in there. But this model kind of pulls back out of that and says there's many, many more things you can do with the VLE, as many more things to do with digital education. Content is only part of it. All of this kind of six types, only one is to do with content and that's to do with acquisition. And that really works. So it helps us to think about the learning platform in a new way. We also have on the paper cards we had in the back of them, or we have in the back of them, sort of serving suggestions, things you can do. So things you can do kind of face to face, things you can do online. And it just helps our academic colleagues to just think a little bit, kind of a little bit outside the box a little bit. And we have often a discussion about how could you use this in my particular course and so on. But as I said, these are service, serving suggestions. We don't sort of say you must do this or you must do that. They workshop itself and you'll see an online version of it in just a few minutes as Natasha goes through it. It's quite structured. We ask people to think about what's the unique aspects of that particular module. What is the kind of shape of the module in terms of these different learning types? What kind of blend do you want? Is it going to be more offline and more offline, that sort of thing? But the main part of the workshop is actually creating this storyboard as you'll see in a moment, using these cards to build a kind of story. And then hard baked into this as we look at assessment and feedback as well as part of that process. But we can add other things as well. And at the end of that, we review. So we've done this design. What changes do you want to make? If you want to make any changes and come up with an action list that the teachers then take away or the team takes away and hopefully kind of actions them. So this is how it looks like in kind of practice, groups come in and work on tables with these large sheets in which the cards are placed in order to create a representative if you like the students journey. We tend to go into, if we can, we go into departments. We don't want it in the central area. We'd like to move around. Keep the session short as we can. 90, 120 minutes. Maybe, yeah, 120, 20 minutes, two hours is about the maximum on that. Just to get people in the room inside. And the important thing is to get people in the room, folks. And then you can work with them. And often we try to do a number of modules at a time and ideally a whole program at a time. So you have all the tables all working away, each table representing a module with the teams that are working who are the strategic teams for the module with a module lead leading the discussion. And the whole idea of this is to have this kind of discussion, it's a pedagogic discussion. But as we go through that, we can look at outcomes and assessment policies and so on and come out with these plans. They're very lively sessions and there's often quite a lot of buzz in the room as we're doing this. If we do this at a program level, we then get people to present back the whole room. And so each table represents a module and what you get there is a snapshot, if you like, of the students joining across the whole program. And this is something that's very, very difficult to do in other methods. You know, how cohesive is the student experience across the whole program? And does the assessment all kind of join up? Are there any kind of through lines, conceptual through lines, practical through lines, assessment through lines that they can join these various modules together to make the whole program? This is something that's very, very difficult to do. But when we do this, this kind of gives a kind of snapshot or an insight of what can happen. As you can see, people get very lively in that and people then query what's going on in a particular module because they've all done through this, all done through the same exercise. They know what the terminology is and say, well, why is there so much acquisition? What is assumed in terms of the practice in this other module? That type of thing. It's clear it's an interesting discussion with academic colleagues. You get to a fairly good level of, maybe I call granularity. People can decide on specific types of activities they want to do. We don't, in these particular version of the cards, we don't specify kind of moodle activities. These are more kind of pedagogical activities, but we have other versions of the cards which, and other people use different versions of the cards which are more aligned to the VLE and the tools inside it. And this is the sort of thing you get. So these are very visual representation. Those little blue dots there on this particular one, well, the stars represent assessment points. Some of the different forms of assessment. Little blue dots on those, if you can see them are, I don't remember what that one is, but they can represent things like learning outcomes, professional skills points for professional skills are represented within design and so on. Or maybe it could be digital skills that students might need to acquire, that type of thing. It's a very visual way of looking at a module. It doesn't have to be linear. Some of our folk, our teachers are incredibly creative and they come up with all sorts of designs, circular designs and so on. We don't limit that in any way. Just whatever means something to them, that's what they run with. But on the specific components, I think it's quite an interesting thing. As I say, assessment and feedback is pretty hard-baked then. We like people to look at the module and program outcomes. You sometimes do that before they come into the workshop, but it's certainly always part in there. People often bring the laptop with the program and module outcomes on it. Institutional strategies, competencies, somebody's mentioned in the chat there. That sort of thing can do. Professional body requirements, often something we have to align with. We can bring students in. If it's a program review, we can bring students in who have been working and have been through this process and they can ground the discussion. You know, they say, well, I did this module. It didn't really work or I really liked this, but it was really difficult for my colleagues. That sort of thing is really helpful for the discussion. And because it's a kind of a democratic environment, there's not really hierarchy there that students can participate in. We've had students design whole things with ABC. So it's quite a flexible system there. We're quite good at analytics and evaluation of these, so you can pick up points where, if you're making changes, well, how could you show that change is happening within, for example, noodle stats or feedback in other types of ways. Online and offline, that's what it's designed for. Through the kind of pandemic, we've been talking a lot about more synchronous and asynchronous and that kind of balance within a module, group and individual work. Again, this sort of online component can either help that or hinder that in terms of the way you design it. So as it goes through, and people, other people using ABC focus on different elements of it, depending on what's really important for your institution. It's not just the workshop itself. We have our supporting materials. That big circle thing is called the, I think called the app wheel or tool wheel, sometimes you call it. And that maps the learning types onto the tools that are available within the environment of the university. With the ones in the center, they're sort of like the ones which are most, let's say, reliable, low risk. They're often inside Moodle or supported tools. But we have a map in there. You see, I can't read this too small, but the idea is that you can map the various tools within Moodle against these pedagogical types. And we also have other sheets, if you like, where you can go in, do a deeper dive and say, well, okay, how do I actually use hot questions in this particular way? And you'll take it through to a mini guide in which to give you some technical and maybe some pedagogical tips as well. So these things are continually developing. This is a version from last year, but we continually develop them and try to make them more helpful for people. And that's a tool wheel. This is a quite nice way, actually, a nice way of representing to teachers what's available to them in environment in terms of the different types of pedagogy they might want to use, but also how things are supported. As I say, the internal ones tend to be this little M in the center. That tends to be their Moodle core tools in there. Once you go now, there are things which are maybe more social media or tools individuals use, but not supported by the university. I'm going to jump over this one a little bit just for time. So you might say to be client, well, that's all wonderful, but what can we do with all this? Well, we did a workshop in, sorry, a project with Erasmus finished last year. The whole of the universities across Europe, including lovely DCU who will be speaking in a minute, very important partner with us. And they looked at ABC and see how they could localize it to their own institutions, to their own education culture and so on. And that was really, really interesting. And there's often not just one way to do that. People come up with great ideas in there. And from that project, we have a toolkit. So a set of toolkits, there's just a link there and again, that'll be circulated later. And there's got various aspects, sort of things I'm talking about, various aspects of ABC, including how to localize it locally, if that makes sense. And we've got some evaluation work in there, I'll explain that in a second. A little bit about the online stuff, but we'll talk a lot more about that in a few minutes. It's widely used. It's something we use, we introduced a lot to research based universities, like UCL, like universities in Europe, and we did a lot of work with them, but since then it's been taken up by many, many other types of universities. And also secondary schools and colleges and training organizations and all sorts of stuff all over the world. So there's lots of enthusiasm there. And if you're interested in that, we have a number of local groups that you can join and chat away with them. And there's a number of translations. These are all crowdsourced. These are people who think, oh, I'm going to do a version in whatever, and this one in German. And we were keen for people to do that. And in fact, there's a more general philosophy of ABC is this is something we release out of the world. We don't make any money out of it or anything. And but we're keen that the community then can share stuff as they go along. So if you come up with any ideas or new materials or something that you think might be worth sharing with others, please do so either through ourselves or through the local groups or something. It really helps us a lot. We've learned this is really crowdsourcing in a very big scale. And I'm just going to finish on this slide before I hand it over to Claire as I say who was involved in this project. I mentioned we did a little bit of evaluation on that. And we've evaluated ABC many times, but this was the most recent one. And what we found is this was kind of across this European project. And we found that these participants were responding and saying, this is really agreed with us. 74% said it facilitates discussion. It was just as well. That's the whole point of it. Does it impact on redesigning? Of course, 53%. And that's people say they really did. The point about that is actually is that we don't say to people, you must redesign your course in this way. That's not what we do. We would ask you to use this method to think about your course, your module, your program. And if from that you want to change something, we can help you to take those ideas a bit further. Sometimes use implement and structure. That's not always what we want to do with design. But it does work for that. But the most important one we'll leave at this point is that 44% participant become more confident teachers. And this is not a staff development exercise. This is a design exercise. But by going through that process, whether you're online or face-to-face, speaking with your colleagues, with your teachers, the people around the group, throwing your ideas around, validating, justifying what you're doing, people come out of that with a great, a stronger idea of themselves as a teacher and the teachers of this part of the curriculum. So that's a very positive. And at that point, I think we'll hand over to Claire. Perhaps just while we move over to Claire, there are a couple of questions in the chat. Catherine was asking, do you have exemplar courses as models in Moodle? Example, oh, that's an interesting one. No, well, of course it's in Moodle, but we haven't really thought about it as an exemplar of ABC. Most of the exemplar courses are based around other things we do within UCL, our baseline presentation of courses, which Jess herself was involved in quite a lot. But in terms of the sort of long-term design, not really. We're just about to put in a launch up a new design team. I'm leaving that with Natasha and the team there. And one of the things we will do is exactly that. It's going to follow through these designs and see what they look like in Moodle and the broader learning environment at the end. Natasha? They are more likely to be patterns of activities rather than the whole module because it's highly unlikely that they would fit one another from different disciplines, etc. But they will be mostly patterns. For example, if you have problem-based learning activity, we could do that and present it in Moodle. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a really interesting, it's a really good question. And it's something that this idea of Natasha says, it's having an exemplar of what this kind of looks like in order to kind of stimulate ideas and that idea. We haven't really done a lot, we haven't really done that really, but it's a great idea. And there was one other question from Guido, are there templates for authoring systems? Oh, Natasha will be talking about that. Not exactly an authoring system per se, but we've got something called Learning Designer, which will contain two to the next step. There are other people interested in using ABC as a precursor to using an authoring system, but the one we use is Learn Designer, and Natasha will introduce that to everyone. I can't know, I'll hand it a bit to Claire. Okay, great. Thanks everyone, and hopefully you can hear me okay. Let's double check. Great, thanks a million. So hello again, and welcome to this part of the session, which I'll be presenting, and which my DCU colleague, Mark Glyn, who's also on the call here today, will be contributing to also. So as has been mentioned already, DCU did have the pleasure of working closely with Natasha and Clive recently as part of the Erasmus Plus-funded ABC to VLE project, where we got a real insight into their vision for the ABC framework, and we learned so much from them, and indeed the 12 other EU partners involved in that. Now a major goal of that project from our DCU perspective was to embed, develop, and adapt the use of ABC at DCU. We weren't really using a specific design framework at that time. We were actually trying out a variety of learning design approaches and models, but we wanted to adopt a framework that was well-founded, was something we could use fairly consistently, and that had a good chance of success with academic teams. So obviously we were very pleased to hear about and to learn about ABC. So over the course of that two-year project, which started back in 2018, we ran multiple ABC workshops with module and program teams at DCU. Throughout that time, we very much learned about facilitating the process, something that in our experience takes time and a good deal of practice, and we explored and evaluated what seemed to work about the approach in our context. So the upshot of all of this work was an adapted toolkit of ABC materials and resources, which we translated, if you like, or localized for the DCU context. Obviously we weren't translating language in our particular case, although several other partners that would have been part of their particular process. However, we did make some adaptations, which I'm going to explain to you now. For example, we adapted the six learning types cards to make them as directly relevant to DCU as possible. And before I go any further, I just add that all of these links are going to be available to you via the slides, and so you can explore them in more depth in your own time. And at various times, we might pop in links as well in the chat also. So to explain what we did specifically with the six learning types cards, which are so integral really to the ABC process, we did, to the course of the project, made a number of changes to those. So just to explain what I mean there, some of the changes we made. Firstly, we actually merged the digital and conventional columns of activities, and this was to avoid presenting the digital options as somehow separate because we found that sometimes making a distinction between modes didn't particularly matter in certain situations. For example, when you're talking about books and papers and electronic resources, and doing so merging those areas freed us up and give us a little bit of space on those cards for other things that were more important to us. Very importantly, on those six learning type cards, we added DCU specific VLE tools. So we added a number of tools that we particularly wanted to highlight at DCU, such as the portfolio and the quiz and the glossary. And we might have even removed some of the tools that were already there if they weren't being particularly used in our context. And just one thing to mention if you're looking at those cards at the moment, you might see the word loop and just to explain that's actually the name of Moodle, the rebranded name of Moodle in our particular context. So thirdly then looking at, and those are only two examples of the cards that you're seeing at the moment, but you'll notice that over on the right hand side of those cards, we included some prompts or questions around the topic of universal design for learning. And this was really to raise awareness of UDL practices that are potentially relevant to each learning type. Now, we weren't attempting by any marrow means to incorporate an exhaustive set of UDL prompts, but what we wanted to do was to ensure that while we were having a conversation about learning design that we were bringing UDL into that conversation and highlighting its importance to academic teams. And fourthly then, also on the cards, we included a note about something called the DCU to VLE plus app wheel as a follow-up support for staff. I'll explain a little bit more about this later, but that wheel is intended to provide further videos and additional guidance on how to implement the various technologies that might come up throughout a workshop. Okay, so as part of this project as well, as well as making various adaptations to the materials and resources throughout, we also went through our key policies and strategies at DCU to really explicitly identify how ABC could support and indeed enable various policy decisions. And also as part of that project, we developed a range of pre- and post-ABC workshop supports which I'll be discussing a bit later. So we were pretty happy with ourselves at this point. We now had an in-person workshop which we had tailored to DCU and we had developed various associated supports to allow us to run as many ABC workshops as time and resources allowed. But then COVID struck and of course everything changed as everybody here knows. So nobody could come to the campus anymore for an ABC workshop even though professional development around online learning and teaching was never more sought after. So we knew fairly quickly that we needed to develop an online alternative quickly to support staff in redeveloping their teaching for the online world. And this toolkit, this online ABC toolkit is really available at the URL shown and the version that you'll see there has been the product of several tweaks and iterations as we've run that workshop and adapted it over time. So what we've done pretty much is essentially we've created a paired down version of ABC that has been developed and modified for the online environment. One of the biggest issues we found initially was in trying to get the full ABC experience online within that 90-minute or two-hour time frame. So over time we've made a number of changes to kind of keep it to a two-hour workshop that can be run online using the tools that our staff would have access to in our context. Now I do want to, before I go into that, I'm going to explain what that is now. I do want to though also acknowledge that there are many, many other online versions of ABC out there and we are really just one of many who've been trying to come up with an effective and successful replacement for the in-person ABC workshop that many of us might have been familiar with and had come to know and love over time. So what I'm going to do now is just really explain that I'm going to step you to our one, recognize that there are other ones out there and I think Clive and Natasha might mention where you can find all those a bit later on as well. But for now I'm going to explain the main elements of our particular online ABC toolkit now going through a number of key stages. So starting at the very beginning of the process, when something comes to us looking for a workshop for their team, they're usually the program lead or the program chair is the typical name for the person in Ireland. One of the very first things we asked them to do is to is to ask their team to engage with a pre ABC activity in advance of the workshop. So this particular asynchronous resource and you can see a number of screenshots from us on the slide. This resource includes a set of guidance and questions to help staff think through potential learning outcomes and indeed think about other aspects in preparation for the ABC workshop itself. This is so much to save time at the workshop, but more importantly, it also ensures that those coming to it have thought about and ideally discussed their intended learning outcomes in advance. Indeed, we asked the program chair to work with the team to discuss the learning outcomes and also create a suggested tweet about the proposed course in readiness for the workshop. This particular activity was developed in H5P, which has quite a nice interactive feature of enabling users to write responses to particular questions as they work through it. And by engaging with this type of resource, workshop participants can easily generate a document that can be shared easily and used as a basis for team discussions. So that's happening what's happening with the pre-ABC is usually happening in the week or so running up to the workshop itself and it's usually happening behind the scenes from our perspective anyway. The next step for us is to run a synchronous workshop online where we provide a space for staff to work in teams to collaboratively discuss and work towards designing a specific module or program. Our online workshop sessions are designed to be two hours in duration and are run in Zoom. And I'd also like to mention as well that usually we'd have two if not three co-facilitators on these workshops. I'll be there and also my colleagues Suzanne Stone and Rob Launey who have also worked with us in redeveloping this online approach I should mention as well. So what we do is when we start each workshop we usually run or present an introductory presentation where we do a number of things. So firstly we always explain what ABC Learning Design is where it's come from and explain how it's firmly rooted in the work and the research of Diana Laurin-Arp. So it's therefore positioned as a very well established pedagogically informed framework. We also set certain online workshop expectations including the fact that follow-up conversations are likely to be needed. Now we do also emphasize that an ABC workshop online is quite a bit different from other types of training oriented workshops and we acknowledge that that might even be a little bit challenging for some the level of interactivity that is expected for example. What we do basically is we ask them to run with the process even if some parts seem a little bit odd or peculiar at first. As part of our introductory scene setting piece we also just very quickly show the learning outcomes again for a quick revisit and we talk about the tweet that they've been asked to devise and ideally discuss before the workshop. So next stage then after that once we've kind of if you like set the ground rules and had to get everybody off on some kind of footing on that we can work from the next stage really is where we focus on exploring the six learning types. Now for those of you who are already familiar with ABC and I know some of you are and some of you are not but if you have come across ABC before you may be expecting the six something like the six cards which are like those shown in that graphic in the upper left hand corner. However, our approach has been that in moving this online we have taken a different tack and have actually converted those cards into zoom polls where we explain each of the learning types and this is based on the the standard descriptors on the front of the cards and then we also provide a list or a menu of potential learning activities that somebody can employ to put those learning types into action and these this kind of roughly equates to the activities that are typically shown on the back of the standard learning types cards. Now we've taken the approach of using polls because we really wanted to ensure that participants online get a chance to carefully read each each card or type and consider its potential learning activities. We also felt that the polls might give an opportunity for quieter types of people maybe more introverted types to contribute and finally we also feel like asking the group to specify the most promising learning activities kind of gives us a sense of what the most popular activities are under each of the types and helps to get the the creative juices flowing on the ball rolling in some way in terms of design. For large groups we the next stage of the process is where we move over to breakout rooms and this is really for our storyboarding the storyboarding element of the workshop. So with large program teams we've actually started to use a Google slides storyboard template which as you can see is a little bit more texty than the original version but actually the principle of rapid storyboarding is the same. We've added some additional columns on the right but the rest is pretty familiar to the original poster layout and what's nice we've found about using Google slides is that you can have people work simultaneously on slides in other words on their storyboards in multiple breakout rooms as we would typically allocate one slide to each breakout room and while everybody ever the small teams should be working on their own slide there's also an opportunity to see what's going on in other rooms and maybe steal some of their good ideas. I should add that prior to using Google slides for the breakout sessions we used the whiteboard feature in Zoom to capture and summarize discussions however we found that that approach really seemed to work best for smaller groups. I just briefly mentioned that we do also offer a Google doc template as an alternative to Google slides based on preferences and indeed whatever kind of storyboard template people are using we do feel strongly that having an action plan agreed near the end of the workshop is actually really critical to ensuring that the ideas that come up are put into practice. We try to recommend that the team identified three very obvious clear action items with a clear ownership and timeline. Finally then within hours or perhaps even days of the workshop haven't taken place we make sure to follow up with the team to remind them about kind of a centralized hub of ABC resources that's available to them on Moodle. We point them to curated online supports and guidance so if particular technologies are coming up are seemingly very important for the program or team we don't want to we want to make sure that what we send them is very directly related to the conversation and the ideas that came up you know maybe could be glossaries could be quizzes it could be something like the workshop tool from Moodle for example and we make sure we point them to the most relevant resources on that. We also remind them too that our tool the ABC Divili April is available with additional how-to resources on implementing Moodle tools and indeed other DCU supported and recognized technologies. So after the workshop in the interest of ensuring that designs are put into action we try to keep in touch with the team as much as possible and make ourselves available for questions and we're in the process of developing a bank of case studies which we hope will capture what happened next after workshops and that we hope will inspire others and provide more evidence about what ABC can potentially achieve. So lastly then I just wanted to mention that Mark and I had the interesting experience in recent weeks of facilitating our first in-person workshop after about 20 or so online sessions and we were naturally inclined to draw comparisons and I suppose I'd sum it up by saying that we found that in-person is typically faster and has more of a buzz in the room. The online version introduces potential new tools and models online teaching but in our case we've had to simplify and pair it back to make progress. So there are obviously pros and cons to both approaches and in many cases you know people may not have a choice about what approach they use given the way things are unfolding in the world but this is still very much a work in progress our advice is whatever approach you choose just make sure that conversation remains at the heart of it. So I'll stop now. Thank you very much Claire. Thank you. We have a question from Catherine she was asking whether you would recommend a group wiki rather than the Google Slides. In our case you know we're using probably most are familiar with Google Slides we're really trying to keep the tools as simple as possible and quite a number of the people in our case a wiki would be new to them whereas Google Slides was just just the simplest possible. I suppose we're trying to take a little bit of a cue from the original ABC format where in a sense you don't have to think too much about the tools or technologies you're using physical cards and printed materials and things like that. So that was why it's a good thought though Catherine we you know maybe we'll consider that further on and it's a good point you raise but that's why we did it for now anyway. I guess that kind of brings up the point that each institution is going to implement these ABC workshops in very different ways to whatever makes sense in the context. So Catherine was just explaining explaining that not everyone has Wi-Fi access so when they're running this in internet classes without Wi-Fi access then Google's not a great option. So on the Raspberry Pi I think she means in Moodle then a wiki might be more appropriate in that context. Okay excellent very good point very good point and you're absolutely right. Context is everything here. So we're going to switch back to Natasha now I believe and we're going to look at online running these online workshops. So if you've got any questions for the presenters please write them into the chat. We have another comment from Sandra saying we also had recently face-to-face workshop after about 20 online and the online is more intense working with each participant and being engaged all the time whereas face-to-face is more dynamic, user-friendly and informal. So yeah it's quite a big change going from one to the other and I'll hand over to Natasha now. Yes am I sharing? You are yes. Yes okay so we have seen how people at ECU use online ABC and I will show you what we do at UCL as Jess said various institutions actually do it differently depending on the tools that they are familiar with and on their context. So I will show you what we do now. I will quickly flick through the slides here and then I will share my screen slightly differently. I will show you the tools that we are using. So our online ABC version came last year. I shared a link earlier in the chat but you will get it with this presentation as well. There are about 15 different versions and different tools that people adapted. So what we do now is we replicated every single step that we did in face-to-face environment. We did the same in online. So we use a spreadsheet for the shape. Instead of tweet being shared in the room on the Twitter they are shared in a jumpboard or in the Twitter. Then we for storyboarding part we go to jumpboard where people design their journeys student journey and then instead of flipping cards over which we did in the past and then selecting activities people go into learning designer tool which is also on UCL servers but is available to everybody in the world and they can actually break down these activities in details. So this is what we do now. So tweet shared on the jumpboard same thing with the shape of the module distribution of learning types in the course. Screenshots are shared. Then there's a jumpboard storyboarding and then into the learning designer. I will show you a particularly learning designer for its facility that it can actually export the designs into Moodle and they would look like this for example if one teaching and learning activity highlighted here as one looks like this in a learning designer it can be imported into section one in Moodle. If you've set one of the activities to be discussion it will not set up discussion in Moodle it will just put a placeholder for you to actually do the discussion board there. So and you tie the top and it would look something like this. I will show you the actually real environment in a minute just wanted to give you overview because you will get these slides later. We did say that in a live face-to-face workshop we used to add additional layers like strategic initiatives of various of institution and where in the activities the students do we can actually see the strategy of the university being shown in what students do or pillars of employability for example that we will be working with now. We also at UCL trying to align all these design processes curriculum design from initial ideas about a new program or a module through the validation process and then designing a module going into design support details tools and development. We are in the process of this it's a big process and it takes long time but we are trying to align all these processes where ABC would be one part of it and here are our details and some links to the resources that we share. Okay now I will exit this sharing and I will close this presentation and now I will share my screen again just to show you the tools that we use. Okay oops it's a wrong screen share okay this one here okay okay can you see something like a jump board on your screens this is like overview of the workshop don't get dizzy here I'm going to go through this jump board to show you how we do it so we share the tweets here people work groups we split them in groups whether we're in teams or zoom they work together and each of these tweets represents one team also each of these shapes are the shapes of these tweets that you've seen before and then we ask people to go into the jump board we show them how to build the patterns for their learning activities and then they work in groups each group has one jump board they this is somebody else's jump board and they will end up with something like this so this was one story board this is another and this is another don't get dizzy I'm going back now so if we had for example four or three core modules this would be course three course two course one and if we are in the same program for example my module is one Claire's is two Clive's is three core modules we design in parallel and we can flick and see where what the other modules look like so they are the storyboards and we can explain to each other what they are all about so this jump board will be shared as well so this is what we do in face to face we would now flip the cards select the activities and do the indicate assessment and mark various other things what we now do is go into learning designer which is a new tool I put this course that you are attending today through this tool earlier today so what we do you design you put what your course is all about you put aims learning outcomes and then you start adding teaching and learning activities and you can see here that I hope this is big enough for you to see these are acquisition collaboration discussion investigation practice and production this tool is also built using conversational framework of professor Diana Lorylad so now we can go into the jump board look at these patterns them here while here transferring them I will say this is a video and it will last five minutes is it going to be for all students yes is teacher present I will say yes teacher is present so it's synchronous activity it's a teacher is present is it online yes it is online and I will say also that is synchronous activity and I will save it so you will keep adding how long is activity etc etc and your design here it will show you how much in the learning time and design time it will show you how much you actually designed of that activity of that module or that course once you are happy with your design you can export it into MS word if you want to share with your colleagues and it's exported now you should be able to see it when I drag it to different screen so this is what it would look like if it exported in word it tells you every single activity what happens is teacher present how long is the activity so it's a linear way of presenting it it also shows you distribution of types of learning for this particular course so this is what's happening how much acquisition how much practice it tells you how these activities were conducted where the group work or individual or whole class this one was for the whole class it tells you whether it was face to face or was it online this was 97% online and whether it was synchronous or asynchronous whether teacher was there or not so this is when it's exported into word however it can be exported into Moodle and when you want to export it into Moodle it will ask you in what section of Moodle do you want to export it so you can actually specify you can design one week and say I want this week to go into section 2 of Moodle of your Moodle representation in Moodle I will cancel I will not export it but it is very easy to export I will stop sharing now and so this is what we do now layers can be added as well because you can put a hashtag and actually you can indicate you can attach files as well you can indicate what this activity is is it assessed or not okay I'm stopping to share now and hopefully we can have some time for questions it would be good to get your perspective on this question actually Natasha there's been a bit of discussion in the chat okay okay I couldn't see yeah El Paniqui hopefully I'm saying your name right asked is there a maximum or minimum number of participants for your sessions whether online or in person and have you found that beyond a number of sessions a number of participants it doesn't work well yeah yes per session depending what type of session it is if it's a design exercise if you had the whole team of a program there's no limit there's usually no more than 20 30 people we had trained the trainer workshops where people where we actually go through the method and show how it works and what can be done for more people but if it's a meaningful design exercise we wouldn't go bigger than one program so say eight to ten modules at the same time because by the time they all come to share their designs at the end it would add too much time so there is no limit but it depends really what the purpose of the workshop is what we found is numbers of people per team we found that ideally is two to five people more than five somebody can get disengaged and not express themselves yeah in the live workshops you can have any number and we've run them with you know 40 50 people in a room sort of thing each table there I mean often it's just the size of the space so you can do that I don't know that sort of thing as Natasha says that the kind of ideal thing is the size of a program that's really our that's really our kind of benchmark really which usually means you know maybe six tables seven tables you can in a program sort of our programs we've got many many optional modules in them so you tend to focus on the core programs because they're the ones where the program identity is really being kind of worked out now really just say with Natasha around the table you really have to have more than one so if you got like and that happens sometimes you have one poor soul comes in to redo their their module but you can't really have a conversation with one person they can do it quite quickly but I don't think the discussion is quite so good so we try to just pair them up with with a friend if that happens or say bring a friend or one of us sits at the table with them so really the point there is that they are articulating how they want that particular module to run and through the articulation they're thinking about it if you don't articulate you don't mean to even talk about it then it's they don't get so much out of that I don't think anyway so more than one yeah but beyond that I mean obviously with the online one it's a little bit more tricky because again you can have quite a reasonable number but you can't keep a very close eye on them and because in the face-to-face workshop you've got your in it there's a lot of kind of what you call it group stuff going on you know there's a lot of group pressure of you know get through the workshop and all that sort of stuff online that's not quite so strong so the motivation of really being engaging with it it's okay actually surprisingly okay but I would be hesitant to have two large groups because it might be difficult to do that or you need to have you know more you know facilitators to come in and really sit in with the groups and so on so yeah yeah so in the face-to-face one you know the sky's the limit really but in the online one yeah probably would you say 6, clear 12 yeah something along those lines would be better but again if you want to do it as a program you may have more people and you just have to find some way to accommodate that May I say one to Fatima about corporate settings we have done workshops for union education teams we've done that for health education England we've done the Royal College of Surgeons adapted version of cards so consultants are designing their courses and some of them do not have teaching experience we also have done workshops for planners and architects who designed their courses to teach at UCL and also with students so it did work very well with people they very easily relate to these six types of learning and after the brief introduction they start designing so these are the areas that we worked with so far and it worked equally well as with academic colleagues I just we're stopping as I was going to answer a question then sure yeah I was going to ask another question from Chara so what are the challenges or barriers with that method online beyond what we've already discussed it takes a bit longer but you end up with digital output which we didn't in the face-to-face workshop and it's not such a great fun like when you have loads of people in the room working on the same program and the buzz is missing which was on one brief video that Clive wanted to show but we didn't have time so it will be in your presentations it's really nice atmosphere productive so yeah the point with the face-to-face one is to get the idea that actually learning design is good fun you know it's often when people came into this I said how did you learn design before I said oh it was terrible I just sit with a big glass of wine and kind of work through it it was horrible it was horrible actually this time when they did it they did it with the panels and the discussion things which sometimes I've never discussed before in terms of pedagogy and learning and the students experience and it really is a kind of a for not everybody sort of likes it but for most people it's a kind of a fun experience and it's that that's part of it it's part of to say that this is something you can really get your foot forward and really engage with it's not some dreadful university requirement that's going to cause a lot of pain there's enough of those we're trying to do something a little bit different so the online one is really a bit more functional it does the same kind of task it does get that thing done when you need to do it but it's just not quite has the same kind of as Natasha says the same kind of buzz but we will get back online actually the interesting thing is it's Claire's Claire's on this side on my side and what Claire said was one of the great advantages of the online one is you get this digital output and you know how are we going to do that where we get back and face to face I mean the people love the big sheets with all the stuff they can stick them on the wall and so on I take photographs and that's like but the digital digital output is really good actually and that's something we will try and find some way to incorporate that back in and when I've used the online the face to face big sheets I've always referred back to that photographs with the photographs we take with that afterwards and that's what I use as I build the course so it would be good to see you get people climbing on the tables to take photos worried about health and safety but they do do that it's a nice visual representation actually I think they for all it's false so you know bits of paper and bits of paper falling the floor and so on but it does have a nice visual representation of the discussions that's gone on the students that experience and so on none of the other ones just quite captured the same way but I just see a lot of advantages and we had another question from Ulag to both UCL and DCU I was wondering if you've linked up the resulting learning design with resources so money learning designers multimedia production etc allocated to each course so our experience is often that the ideas and the ambition is really high in the planning process but that the time and money strips down the design quite considerably so I give a quick yeah we have used this what we didn't say I tapped it in the chat we've done this for MOOCs and short courses only not for modules so far and MOOCs and short courses once when they break down into these activities can actually see how much they can spend how many minutes of videos do they want to animations or something else so it can indicate very well the cost for this we do have versions for short courses and for MOOCs we didn't say so far I think or the blended learning I think people are people are actually quite realistic they're quite pragmatic actually and and I think whoever said ask that question is it's correct and the people kind of self limit themselves a little bit and they say what could we possibly do with the resources we have in our department in our team and I think that's that's a good thing because it makes the outcomes fairly realistic but it can be a bad thing in that it maybe limits people's ambition as you say and you see we're putting together and we're just kind of changing point now as myself and Natasha and some of our team are are we're becoming a proper proper program design team and one of the things we'll be doing is working a lot harder on things like action lists to see what's if we can budget them and to see whether within the faculties there are you know funds and so on to help people to you know to realise some of the more ambitious things that people want to do so it could be kind of pragmatic though I mean you know we academics even if they had the money sometimes it would really take time to to do a lot of redesign so it's like what can you do within the kind of spaces they've got available for them and then and then Jane a lot of money in the good job Jane had another question are you aware of any FA colleges using the ABC learning design method I put the link in the chat we had events especially adapted for schools Jane White in the UK she adapted them and Erwin Galen and François Rude they did it in Belgium for European schools and they produced very interesting spreadsheets you can find them they tag us always on Twitter when they share their resources and recording of the session is also linked from that page if anybody is interested and we can also put you in touch with them if you want to we've done stuff with the FA colleges as well Ken works fine the curriculum at the colleges tends to be a bit more a bit tightly controlled I think perhaps maybe I mean one of the nice things about the ABC for higher education environment is that the curriculum are a lot more open so people have more flexibility but but people find it really good in schools and I think that's the stuff that you were saying Natasha found it really just a really good thinking tool to think about what are we actually doing with our with our kids and Guido had another question is learning designer an open source project yes you can anybody can log in it's free to use so anybody can log in and do it there will be more improvements with it done soon there is a work to be done further but it's been improved lately and it is being used from everywhere in the world in our knowledge so yes it's supported by use although it's an open some projects would buy and sell so there is a program of gradually upgrading it and so on so you can have reasonable confidence it'll be there next week and Shara asked another question with the aftermath of COVID-19 how receptive are instructors to adopting this method well all these online versions appeared last year and many before us it's about several I've shared a link I think to the website and you can find there actually all the online versions that were shared with us so people are adopting it and that happened rather quickly I think people I mean clearly you find the same thing people are still pretty interested in this absolutely it's you know COVID if anything accelerated interests in it massively so that's been our experience I see Mark has raised his hand there if you want to say something else on that Mark hey Mark yeah oh just sorry enable everyone to unmute if they like so there you go Mark you should be up to now thanks Jess and thanks Claire for bringing us in yet the response of our staff to them they've been very very enthusiastic towards them now I will admit like all of us we all became a bit zoomed out by the end of of COVID but when they got engaged with the sessions the whole concept of ABC yeah they really embrace it definitely embrace it particularly when they see what's happened at the end when they see the product they really see the value for it I think one of one of the interesting things about ABC how we used to run it anyway is that you you depend a little bit on the experience of people who come in the room you know we don't sort of like we're not pushing a particular technology or even Moodle we just said like think about what you're doing and we'll if you can see some changes we'll help you with that but of course what's happened with COVID and the the response to that with the universities is people have learned a lot more stuff and it'll be interesting when we go back to see whether people have a different kind of viewing things whether they're a bit more you know and they're much more confident for example and using you know online forums and zoom and this and that online you know discussion I just wonder whether that'll kind of feed back in and people will be a little bit more you know ambitious in those areas we don't know yet we haven't run enough yet to do that but it'd be nice it'd be a nice outcome if that was the if that was the case actually just one thing before before I would say is that we actually go now kind of volunteer based and I think you do that DCU as well largely is that people programs or people individuals come along because they want to do this so that's a great help we're probably in UCL going to a point where we're starting to kind of like encourage people to do these sort of workshops with various degrees of obligation and we'll have to be quite careful there because maybe the atmosphere will change a bit we much prefer to have willing volunteers and people who are coming at forced into the room and that doesn't really doesn't make for a good atmosphere but we'll we'll see how we get on and hopefully the people will come in hope that with an anticipation it's going to be an interest in as I was saying a kind of interest in kind of fun activity I should be wrapping up right now but a really interesting question is coming so I'll quickly ask so do you have any evidence that it has improved teaching and learner outcomes or is it simply an easier way for teachers to organise their work that's a big question we did try to well I'll just say from our point of view we did try to do that in earlier evaluation and all that but actually the the chain of events between the workshop when the students experienced the fire is quite a long one and there's a lot of bits of pieces in there so we realise there were being a bit ambitious so so basically the evaluation I've done has been rather around the the teacher you know the teacher experience and whether this helps them think about the pedagogy whether that helps them interact with the students more and as I see we bring students in when we can to kind of validate those points but you know to try and look at the kind of like this is a change made in the program and this is the effect of the students so it's a more long term research exercise maybe if you don't DC maybe you've got some good examples yeah it's just good just going to say certainly we've found you know it's necessary to go back to people six months or even years later in some cases we've been a bit maybe a little bit late going back for some of that later stuff you really do it does take time to see the impact of it and that's sometimes the story of how a modular or program team has developed as a result of ABC the full story needs a bit of time so all that add is yes casters we're certainly the bank of developing our range of case studies around ABC and that's certainly one way of if you like drawing the connection between ABC and the final student learning experience the only caveat I'd add is you need to allow time for that are we going to mention it? yeah I'd add that as well where the more immediate of visual effect on the student experience is seen through the storyboard when it's all laid out completely and what's happened in the past pre-ABC in our case it wasn't it was never really realized how I won't say monotonous but how monotype monolearning type a particular course could be and when you have the very visual representation that Clive and Natasha illustrated earlier on the storyboards it can open the eyes of the lecturers involved in the program so they tend to want to try different learning activity types and that indeed will be a benefit to the students so that's our immediate sort of impact on student learning but everything that Claren and Clive were saying there about longer term work is also needed yeah we could always encourage our participants to use the storyboards to communicate with students we don't really follow that up though I hope they do because often it becomes much clearer for the teachers about what they're doing with the students this sounds really bizarre I mean people are some really great teachers come in but actually either looking at this from a student's point of view it's sometimes that it's a bit of a revelation to them and as Mark says sometimes the the balances needs to be readjusted maybe less acquisition a bit more a bit more activity and just to pick up from what Clare was saying we say to people also these might you know your ideas within the courses might take a couple of years to realise you may have to go and re you know put some new validation documents if you want to change for example assessment or something like that so it's not it's not a quick not necessarily quick fixes a few quick things you can do but things like assessment can take a while to to be you'll be able to do that within your within your modules and programmes I want to very much sorry sorry I know you want to finish but there was one question that we haven't answered which is whether we had groups of people different groups or is it always same programme we had both it works in both cases it depends really very much on who you can get into the room and what the purpose of the design or redesign is we had as academic development sessions people from different modules or we had five unrelated modules saying we want to redesign we would get them in the room they work in parallel they finish probably earlier it is more beneficial for people from the same programme because once they all design they say six seven modules we can do what we call a promenade and we go to Jesse's module and she explains in two minutes everything about her module to us then we come to mine I explain to everybody so everybody who teaches on that programme knows exactly how their module fits with other modules and if there are any gaps or overlaps so that is more beneficial otherwise it works both ways and if there are any other questions that we haven't answered because there's a lot of activity going on in the chat I may have missed some please feel free to post those into the discussion forums we can answer them online I'd like to say a really big thank you to Natasha, Claire and Clive and also Mark for jumping in as well today a fascinating session as always and I learnt something more again just quickly as we're wrapping up I wanted to let everybody know can you see my screen yes about you can come into Moodle Academy and actually earn a badge for ABC Learn Design if you're interested in completing the activities and learning a bit more about it it will actually give you a chance to do some activities where you can try out some of the tools that we've discussed today and we really encourage you to use the forums as well we'll be in there to see the ideas that people are sharing we'd also love you to help spread the word on Moodle Academy we've only launched a few months ago and we'd like your help to get the word out there about our courses the courses are free and we have many other courses that we're building currently as well if you'd like to participate by helping out with actually building courses as well we'd love to hear from you or you can contribute to webinars and suggest topic ideas and also we have a Moodle Educator Certification so once you've got a bit of experience with Moodle as we say about a year at least you might be interested in finding out more about that as a quiz you can do to check if you're ready so yeah please come along to some more of our Moodle activity events we'd love to see you again and thank you so much to the presenters and everyone for participating today it's been a really interesting discussion thank you Thank you Jess Thank you Thanks