 Good afternoon and welcome to the afternoon session of day two of the alt annual conference 2021. I am delighted to welcome our speaker today, Kathy Chandler, who is going to be talking to us about the other side of the story, students experiences of online tutorials. We'll have time for a bit of interaction throughout, but I'm going to hand over to Kathy now. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. My name is Kathy and I'm an associate lecturer in health and social care and an eddy student at the university. And I'm going to share some of the findings of my doctoral research with you today. I've been researching students experiences of synchronous online tuition in health and social care. I've set up a few questions in WooClap. It's the first time I've ever used this, but I'm hoping that there can be some interaction during the presentation, which you can access using the QR code or the URL on the screen. So you might like to connect with that now. And I think that URL is going in the chat as well. So my research is about students experiences in online rooms. And just to give you an idea of what an online room is like in my context and how it differs from the online room that we're in at the moment. This next slide is a screenshot from the tutor perspective. So the platform that we use for tutorials at the OU is Adobe Connect. It's a platform with lots of inbuilt functionality and persistent content so that tutors can set up our activities, including polls, breakout rooms. We can do that in advance with lots of different ways of interacting, as you can see on the screen. We wouldn't use all of these features simultaneously, however, and webcams are rarely enabled because they take up so much bandwidth. A lot of research has been done about online tuition previously, especially in the areas of language learning and STEM. We've got lots of quantitative data about students preferences, but we still know very little detail about what happens in online rooms from a student perspective. We don't really know about their lived experience and we don't know the reasons behind the preferences they have, particularly in the area of health and social care, which is my discipline. So when I started, these were my research questions. So firstly, how do the narratives of students' experiences of synchronous online tutorials in a health and social care module vary and what factors account for this variation? What can we learn about the needs which drive the preferences students express about synchronous online tuition in health and social care? And then later in my study, I added a third question. How does hearing about students' experience of synchronous online tuition impact on tutors' reports of their thinking and practice? And I'm going to focus on my first two questions when I'm talking to you in this presentation. I'm going to say a little bit about my methodology in a moment, but first I want to share an experience with you that influenced my choice of approach. Before I started my EDD, a researcher asked if I would take part in their research project and be interviewed about a specific aspect of my experience of education. And I can't remember now what it was about, but I said yes. And then during the interview, I kept thinking that something didn't feel quite right. The researcher was asking the wrong questions to find out what they wanted to know. I didn't get the opportunity to say what seemed to be important from my perspective, and that felt really frustrating. And we're going to have a look on the WUCLAP questions now, if I can get those started. So the question I would like to know the answer to is, have you ever participated in a research study and thought that the survey or interviewer was asking the wrong questions? So I can see a few people participating there. It looks like we've got a fairly even split, probably more yeses than noes actually, which is interesting. But it's encouraging to me to know that it's not just me that's had that experience, that it is an issue for other people. Yeah, so we've actually got far more yeses than noes now, 61% yes, 39% no. So thank you for that. So my methodology, because of that experience, the approach that I was keen to take was very much a relational one. So seeing research participants as the experts or what Hesbibba and Levy have called the privileged noes. And the methodology that I chose was an experience centred narrative approach, which generates rich and insightful data, and it's appropriate for gaining in-depth understandings of students' experiences. So 10 students kept diaries and were interviewed about their experiences of 21 tutorials. And there are advantages and limitations to taking this approach to research. Within the narrative research process, Kathy Reesman explains that there are five points at which meaning can shift. They can shift in the attending to the story. They can shift in the telling of the story, the transcribing, the analysing and the reading. So as such, participants' narratives, researchers' interpretations and the reader's understandings are all unique to them as individuals and to particular times and contexts. So my study couldn't be replicated even with the same participants' researcher and readers. So narrative research is we're aiming for not reliability but dependability, making robust records of the decisions that we've taken around data collection and analysis, and ensuring that the methods of analysis are consistent with accepted standards. And in a similar way, we can't claim generalisability. Instead, we're aiming for transferability, having responsibility to share participants' narratives in a way that makes the relevance of the stories obvious and enables readers to make judgments about whether the study's findings are transferable to their own contexts. So the narratives may be useful to you, they may be useful to others, but it's up to readers to decide this for themselves. And I used voice-centred relational method to analyse the data, and that could be a presentation all on its own. So I'm not going to focus on that today, but do come back to me and ask me about voice-centred relational method if that's something that is interesting for you. So narrative research generates this huge amount of rich data, and I needed to find a way of easily sharing students' experiences with educators who are interested in them. So for each student, I've put together a vignette of their narrative, which can be found on my research website and there's a link to it on the screen. Each student that took part in the study has chosen their own pseudonym, and you'll probably notice that they've all chosen female names. Although we don't have many male students in health and social care, 6% of the sample of students I was able to approach to take part in the study was male. But despite my best efforts, all of the volunteers who took part were female. In other ways, including age, ethnic background, employment, previous level of qualifications and disability, they were a much more diverse group. One of the most striking things about the students' narratives of their tutorials was just how much was happening around them during the tutorial sessions, and how many other tasks the students were trying to juggle at the same time. And before I go on to share some of these things with you, I wonder what other things you've been trying to do at the same time as participating in this conference. So I'm just going to bring up another WooClap question now. And just going to ask you to type in some of the other things that you've been doing while you've been participating in the Alt Conference today and yesterday, maybe even during the session already. I can see some responses appearing, thank you. So we've got booking a holiday, emails and work, more emails, lots of work going on, laundry, loads of things, back stretches, messaging, making a coffee, a dig walk. I wonder what a dig walk is. Thank you very much, texting, eating, booking a train, cooking even, lots of stuff going on. I think the time that I did this that I had the most unusual answer was putting out a fire in the garden, accidental fire, looking after children, playing the drums. Wow, social media, but you get the drift. There's lots of things going on. Thank you for all your responses there. So for the students in my study, a lot of them were fitting tutorials around their caring responsibilities. And whilst Vicki, a single parent who you can see top left on the screen, she'd been able to arrange for childcare for her son. But many of the other students had family members around them. Amy and Deborah both had children watching television. Tilly was collecting her daughter from her club at the beginning of one tutorial. And she often had her family cooking or eating around her during sessions. Even Karen at the bottom in the middle there, her son was older and he was able to look after himself. Her partner had recently been discharged from hospital, so she was worried about him. She was a bit distracted. So it would be fair to say that there were plenty of invisible others present for the tutorial. The tutor couldn't see them, the other students couldn't see them, but they were all around. And students also had distractions in their online environment, much like some of you. And I've chosen a bit of Joanne's narrative to share with you here. So you can see that she was distracted by a news website and she lost her focus on one of her sessions. Something else that was very apparent from the narratives was that students had lots of preferences around how to communicate in the online room. Nobody will be surprised to hear, I don't think, that everyone expressed a strong preference for typing rather than using the microphone. And other studies have found the same thing. Even students listening to tutorial recordings describe online verbal communication as stilted and unnatural compared to face-to-face. But what surprised me were just how many different reasons students had for this preference. They talked about having family members in the background, not being able to see anyone, having English as a second language, being behind on the reading and feeling shy or anxious about saying the wrong thing. And even Karen, who you see top middle here, and she works as a lecturer in an FE college, and I interviewed her during, at the beginning of the pandemic. So she was becoming very used to facilitating sessions herself in online rooms. But as a student, she didn't use the microphone and she wasn't sure why. Another aspect of communication that students talked about was the way in which online rooms allow multiple conversations in a way that can't happen in the physical environment. So most of the tutorials students attended were co-presented by more than one tutor. And as Joanne describes here, and I've tried to illustrate on the right hand side, one tutor can be saying one thing using the microphone and the slides. And another tutor can be simultaneously responding to students' questions via the chat box, so you can actually have two conversations going on at the same time. There was one student in the study who actually quite liked this because she said it sped things up. But the other students were worried about missing things. And you can see from Joanne's narrative here that that was the case for her. Two of the students actually said it was a better experience when the co-tutor was unable to be there because that meant that everyone focused on one thing at a time. And my findings around this were similar to two previous studies, so McBrien et al. 2009, McDaniels et al. 2016. But it seems that as educators, we're still doing this. Even if we know it's good practice not to, we're still having multiple conversations and we need to raise awareness of this issue and encourage tutors to just facilitate one conversation at a time. So I have another question for you now, if I can just move on to the next question. What's the ideal number of students for a tutorial session in your own context or the one that you work or study in most frequently? We know from previous studies that many university students have a preference for smaller group sizes. But what we don't know is why. So I was very interested to see whether the students in my study would raise this as an issue. I didn't ask them about it. I just waited to see if it would come up and it did. So thank you everybody. The most popular choice on there is the 60 to 10 students. But we've got a wide variety of answers. And nobody said that they don't think it matters. So that's really interesting. Thank you. So the students in my groups, their narratives suggested that the tutorial experiences could be improved by considering the numbers of students attending each session, keeping them low enough that there's enough time for tutors to interact with every student. And so that all students' questions can be identified and answered. And Tilly, whose narrative you see on the screen here, she suggests that a group of 15 would be ideal for her. And when it's not feasible to limit the numbers, we need to have strategies that do allow everybody's contributions to be acknowledged. So we can think about using polls or breakout rooms. And this is important because for the students in my study, even though they didn't want to use the mic, they very much wanted tutorials to be active experiences. When the students gave examples of good tutorial activities that they felt had helped them to learn, they were usually activities that built on the module materials and gave them an opportunity to contribute their ideas. A number of the students talked about how much they learned from activities where they watched short video clips together. And I've chosen Lisa's example to share with you here. She describes watching a video clip and then filling in a table on the whiteboard. And Lisa has dyslexia. She's so worried about her spelling that she doesn't write in the chat box at all. She's too worried about somebody seeing her mistakes. And she loves writing on the whiteboard because the contributions there are anonymous. So this activity really engaged her. Another reason that students wanted to attend tutorials was they wanted to connect with other practitioners working with children and young people. The students studying this module, they work with children and young people in a variety of different practice settings, education, youth work, early years, as well as health and social care. And they all have expertise in their own areas which they enjoy sharing. Some students like Deborah in the top comment, they're studying with a view to a career change. So they're keen to learn from others who have some practice experience. And when Deborah talks here about learning to write a report, it's in connection with an assignment where the students have to write from a practitioner's perspective. And one thing that was interesting was that those with fewer opportunities to discuss their learning with friends, colleagues and family outside of the tutorials were those for whom connecting with others during tutorials was particularly important. So it's the tutorials that were active experiences and where students had opportunities to interact, that they described as the most positive and where they described learning most. Or if we look at tutorials using the community of inquiry framework, it was the tutorials with both teaching presence and social presence that could be seen as generating cognitive presence. This framework is not usually used in qualitative studies. So I developed my own descriptions of what these different types of presence might look like in a health and social care tutorial. So for teaching presence, the tutor designs tutorial activities that enable dialogue and help students learn, supports students to sustain focus on the activities, gives direction and provides feedback. And then for social presence, students build relationships with others. They feel comfortable interacting and feel that their point of view is recognized. They share a sense of identity as students. And then where both of these exist, I found cognitive presence, which I defined as students feeling interested and motivated by tutorial activities, finding the discussions helpful in appreciating different perspectives, constructing explanations and understanding concepts. They were able to make links between theory and practice. When I was analyzing the narratives, I was searching for evidence of these different types of presence, and that proved really insightful. And I also chose to look for evidence of emotional presence and learning presence, even though Garrison, who's one of the original authors of the framework, he disagrees with these additions of emotional presence and learning presence. But I found it helpful to look for those two, because doing so enabled me to build a more detailed picture of students' experiences. So I've only been able to give you a glimpse of the narratives here. From the data that I gathered, I came to some conclusions about what educators can do to enable positive experiences. So I'll just share those with you before taking some questions. So firstly, it's really helpful for educators to have an awareness of students' contacts, that they might have caring responsibilities, family members in the background, that they're joining the tutorial from intimate spaces with multiple distractions, they might be feeling guilty about having negotiated some time for themselves. They're often sharing what they learn with friends, colleagues and family. The information doesn't just stay in the tutorial, it goes out and it affects lots of people's practice. Learning is mediated by the technology and the material objects. All of the students were longing for a face-to-face connection, and even those that had never been to a face-to-face event had all their tuition online. They were longing to see faces, which was really interesting. As I've said, they were preferring to be active and hear each other's perspectives, and they wanted to build relationships and feel part of a small community. And as we know, they're not wanting to use the microphone. So tutors can try and meet students' needs in two ways by both being and doing. Firstly, they can be the person that the students need by being friendly. This is really important, understanding the challenges that distance learners are facing, and how hard it is for them to focus on the session. It's important to be encouraging and helpful, acknowledge contributions, working well with co-tutors was also really important. The students noticed whether or not the tutors worked well together, and that really impacted on their experience. And the things that we can do as tutors are to acknowledge differences in power and think about these when setting up the online room. So if the students are using the chat box, then why not make that bigger? It's a good idea to provide slides in advance to all students. Students printed them off and made notes on them. Using a webcam briefly or a tutor picture, this helped students to feel that they could make a connection with their tutor. Designing activities that minimise anxiety, but which allow ideas to emerge and everybody to contribute. So using how questions and why questions, using polls and breakout rooms, especially in larger groups. Responding encouragingly, avoiding multiple simultaneous conversations as we've said. Providing opportunities for students to connect with other students like me. If a student has a conversation with another student who seems similar to themselves, then they start to believe that they must be capable of passing their module capable of studying at this level, if they can identify with somebody else. And finally, we can develop our skill and confidence in using the tools in the online room. And just briefly as well, there are also many things that the university can do. So considering the technology and use and the default settings, how do they mediate power? Do they provide opportunities for students to contribute in a variety of ways, including anonymously? It's important that we remember that technology and pedagogy are not two separate things. They're mutually determined. Providing staff development opportunities so that tutors gain both knowledge and confidence. They can enable social presence as well as teaching presence. And if tutors are expected to team teach or co-tutor, providing training around the pedagogy of that is really important, providing explicit time for shared planning and reflection. It takes a lot longer to plan a tutorial. If there's two of you, then it does if there's just one. Consider the impact of tuition policy, who currently benefits and who's disadvantaged. The OU is reviewing tuition policy at the moment. Also ensuring that students are likely to meet the same people at multiple sessions. When you have a very large university, that can be difficult. But that's very important for building that sense of community. And also the university has the control over the number of students in each session. So it's important to keep that low so that every student can interact with the tutor. I'm just going to the end now. I realized that my references were missing from my abstract. So I've just put those on my screen so that you can see those if you're watching the recording. And I'm just about to submit my thesis. So I'd find it really helpful to receive your comments on what I've shared today. And I'd be happy to take some questions if there's time. And I'm going to just move the the we clap on so that you can put comments in there if you'd like to, which I can see later on or put them in the chat. Thank you very much, Kathy. I'm going to share the link to the we clap again so people can add their comments. I've been keeping an eye on the YouTube comments and I can I've not noticed any specific questions. But but a lot of discussion really interesting discussion about students about people's own practices and their own practice when they're participating as a student or an attendee as well. So I think I think you'll find the conversation really interesting. And can I just thank you for a really, really useful, very insightful presentation, which is so useful at this time of the year as many of us are putting together our resources for courses that we're moving delivering for the new semester. So I just want to thank you for that and remind everyone that they can comment on we clap with the link in the comments there. We can continue the discussion on our Hangout Channel in Discord. And thank you so much, Kathy, for a wonderful presentation. Thank you, Emma.