 Good morning everybody, and thanks very much for calling us here for this presentation. We've been enjoying being involved in the process so far. So my name is Anne Devitt. I'm from the School of Education in Trinity College. This is Kieran Sims from the School of Engineering, Trinity College. And this is Brenda McGurk from Learnovate, a research centre also from Trinity College. And I'll just raise it now. Our colleagues from UCC and NYU were unable to attend for various, for a set of reasons, but we have them listed here. You can see them up above, but I'll come to that in a moment. So first of all to unpack our titles. So we're looking at STEM identity. So the identity of STEM students within their programmes as they develop to graduates. And we're looking at STEM as a unified discipline. So science, technology, engineering and maths. We're looking in particular at the common entry courses, so where many students coming in first year and then distributing out at around third year into their specific disciplines. The key point here is that we're looking at integrating learning with socialisation for the students. So it's not only about the academic content, but also about the kind of interpersonal and interactive part of the course. And our proposed solution, although we haven't expanded on this here because it's in fact a process that we're defining through this project, is some form of online system. So digital supports for collaboration, peer-to-peer learning. And in order to build community, those are the things that we are interested in and want to achieve. So our team come from the three institutions, NUIG, UCC and Trinity, and from a range of STEM disciplines. So we have engineers, Annette Hart from NUIG and Kearon Sims from Trinity. And we have immunologists. We have Kleene O'Farley from Trinity. We have computer scientists, Mary Sharp from Trinity. We have Botanus, Betty Higgs from UCC, and so on. We also have academics from the field of education. So from the School of Education in Trinity, there's myself and my colleague who works in STEM education, Collette Murphy. And also we have educational technologists. And here we have Brenda from Learnovate. We also have her colleagues in Learnovate and Tom O'Hara from UCC. So a number of people involved in putting this project together with a range of expertise. So this expertise is disciplinary, it's educational, and it's educational technology. And also what's important in here is we bring expertise through Trinity, the School of Education, and through UCC, their work on funded T&L projects. We bring expertise on professional development for educators, and in particular in higher education. Because this is a key point for all of us, I think, is we might develop excellent projects, but to get that to roll out into a university context is certainly not seamless. And we also have expertise on peer-assisted learning protocols coming from NUIG who do excellent work on face-to-face peer learning scenarios with their engineering students. So the problem space for us is the STEM Common Entry programs. And the issue in here is that the students report a lack of identity with their discipline until they engage with their specific discipline. So that's already three years, usually, into their program. So this lack of identity can lead to, among other things, low engagement, and that can be realized as poor attendance. It can lead to poor outcomes for students, and certainly it leads to high attrition rates. So all of these things are negative outcomes, not all stemming from issues with identity, but certainly drawing from that issue in that students don't identify with the work that they are doing yet. It's too disparate. So our envisaged solution is, in fact, a process. So this project sets out a process to engage students and the other stakeholders in the institutions to design the solution to this problem space, if you like. So we've taken, I guess, an engineering design model the CDIO design process, which I'll come to in a moment. And most importantly, I think, we're taking on the student voice methodology as a means of engaging our students in the process to give them ownership of this project and hopefully to allow them to engage them with the rollout of the potential pilot. And we'll be looking to pilot the solution across three institutions. So the CDIO design cycle, so it's a user-centered design process. The initial, the C of the CDIO is to conceive, it's that kind of user-centered part where you're trying to do needs analysis followed by design, implementation, and operate. So in our case, I can read it better up here than down here, but I'm sorry, it's very tiny. In our case, the conceive part of the design cycle is about engaging the students, the academics, the technologists, and everyone who will be involved with the modules in exploring the problem space and also potential solutions. So we're not delivering a solution here, we're looking for all of the people involved, in particular the students, to come together to look at what solutions might offer. So this would allow us to identify specific needs and also to make sure that we're not redesigning existing technology and that we're using technology that aligns with what the students do and believe in their own learning and in their own personal lives. So the design phase then is where we take the outputs of that conceive phase and we specify the technical and academic requirements for the module that we're going to implement. So we are going to look to implement a solution in one use case module in three different institutions. So this design phase is about the technology but also about the academic content of that module and aligning those two and ensuring that it's well specified. The users again come into that phase as a focus group, as an advisory group to make sure that the design is actually meeting the needs of students and other stakeholders. The implementation phase is about prototyping the solution. So within the work plan we have a number of prototype phases. So again, coming back and around to the users to make sure that what we do prototype and design is meeting specified needs and also at that point we'll be designing the professional development strategy for to ensure that the solution can roll out within the universities with the staff involved. The final operate phase is to trial within the three institutions. So in UCC, NUIG and Trinity to trial this pilot module, so an online collaborative peer learning system embedded within an academic module and to evaluate the outcomes for students. So at the first we'll be looking to compare outcomes for students in the pilot phase with students who are currently going through their first year now. So we would run an evaluation at the end of this academic year which we could then compare with outcomes at the end of the next academic year again in the three institutions. So the student voice methodology just to give you a little taste of what that's about. Essentially the motto if you like of that is nothing about us without us. So it's about a sense of democracy and ownership within not only higher education but primary, secondary and so on, but within education where those individuals who are most important in the education system which is those who are learning and it's a methodology to allow them to take ownership for where their education system might go to engage in leading that process. And one of the key elements here is that those involved in the project have to display authentic listening. So it's not the fact that we bring in user groups, we sit them down, we record them and we listen to what they say and we bring that into the design. The authentic part of that is that that rolls back out to the students so that they're aware of how we're responding to what they have raised in the sessions with them. So there's a constant feedback loop from the students and other stakeholders back to them to ensure that that ownership which is based on respect shows that we are listening and we are responding to what is coming up from those voices. So the project structures and across all of these projects there are a number of collaborators and certainly the management structure for that has to be, is key to success. So our project management structure is aligned around LERNAVATE, the Educational Technology Research Centre in Trinity, taking the project management piece of that and engaging all of the other partners to draw on the expertise from the other partners and they'll also take the educational technology lead having a long history of expertise in this field. We'll have a steering group to advise on the pedagogical, academic and the technical direction of the project. So within that we have this range of expertise that is disciplinary, educational and educational technology and all of those will be brought to bear through the steering group which will work with LERNAVATE with the project management structure of LERNAVATE. The advisory panel which will begin at the conceived phase is essentially the stakeholders. Within that I keep saying students and stakeholders because the students are essentially the key members of this. So we want the advisory panel of students and staff members who will be involved to continue their engagement throughout the process. So very much of the conceived phase but coming back at key points throughout the project in order to feedback our responses to their issues but also to feedback around the evaluation process and around the potential success of the project. The final set of structures if you like or the final people involved are those academic staff who'll be involved in the pilot and so they're going to work to embed the project into an academic module across three institutions. So we're going to have to work very closely with them in order for this to be embedded and this is not a one-soft workshop professional development model which the research would show does not work. This is again around community building with our academics to see how we can move how we can embed this new process because it would be a big change and changes that involve changes to belief and so on are very difficult to embed and this is something that we're going to be working very hard to do within the project. In terms of deliverables for this project the first deliverable if you like is the environment a collaborative peer learning environment which is supported digitally and intended to support student learning and community building. So it will be embedded within an academic module but also very much focused on building relationships between students. The second deliverable rather is the professional development strategy and the workshops with academic staff. So I say strategy because it's not just about a single workshop it's a process that we see staff engaging with through the following academic year through the pilot process. The third deliverable is essentially the methodology around which we're going to engage our students. So there's work on this in higher education in particular Alison Cook-Sather and one of my colleagues in the School of Education Paula Flynn. So this methodology is something that we see as being potentially transformational within higher education. It's a way of bringing students in and allowing them to lead change. So this is a deliverable how to design and lead change with students in a student voice approach is one of the deliverables for this project. The fourth is guidelines for adoption of this environment. So the environment of course there are very strict guidelines around the open source or proprietary nature of anything that's developed within these projects. And so the environment itself has to be available to other institutions to use. And in order for it to be usable there have to be very clear and specific guidelines about how to deliver that in combination with the professional development strategy. And the final piece then is around the evaluation instruments that we wish to use. So we're looking to reuse existing instruments to measure student engagement and transferable skills and so on. But again we'll be engaging the students in working through these instruments to ensure that they are in fact assessing and delivering the kind of information that we need in order to assess the outcomes of the project. In terms of the outcomes so rather than deliverables the non-tangibles what we're looking to achieve with this project is improved student engagement within this trial module. And a quality of evaluation of students' sense of identity and well-being within their discipline so this is not something that's very easily measured. Am I okay for time? No, one minute, okay. Stakeholder ownership of the STEM Identities Project so building in, drawing in the students into the, students and stakeholders into the project and the staff development piece which is very important around change. If we look to ensure that change is lasting the staff development piece is essential. In terms of national impact we're looking at one scalable solution that could deliver for all STEM students. So all of our universities have STEM common entry courses all of our universities have these same problems and this project embeds a solution within the academic content so it's not separate from it, it's embedded within it. And why should this have national impact? Well, let me Google it for you. Why does Ireland need STEM graduates? I mean we've all been talking about it here but STEM workers are driving innovation and so on it's very important for our economy and this isn't just coming from the Google sources but from national strategies and so on. That STEM is key, STEM graduates are key and the demands for STEM graduates is only going to increase in coming years growing by up to 8% up to 2025. So what we hope to deliver for national impact is lower attrition rates for STEM graduates graduates with better disciplinary knowledge graduates with better enabling skills or better 21st century skills through the collaborative part. And the final piece is around our institutions themselves too much text here but essentially we want to embed these changes embed changes to practice within our institutions and this can only deliver more competitive and more successful institutions. So thank you from our team and I hope I maybe met the time. You have and thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.