 Mae'r gwaith ei fod yn ychydig o gweithio gyda'r awddor ar gyfer y sefyllfa mwyro Sarfield ar gyfer yr Eropa Lundin yma, a ddod i'r gweithio ar y gweithio ymddangos, yng Nghymru, ymddangos, yn ysgol. Mae'r gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio gyda'r gweithio gyda'r gweithio, mae'r gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio. Mae'n ddweud gafodd. Mae'n ddweud. Mae'n ddweud ffaisio llaw yn gwybod ar y mod. Mae'n gwybod yn gweinio'r ffordd ymlaen o'r tîm yn ysbytfa yn ymddangos yn ymddangos y bynnag o'r oeddiadau. Rwy'n gweithio i'r unrhyw ymlaen o'r ffordd o'r ymddangos, mae'n gweithio'r ymddangos yn YouTube. Pwyllt i, ddwy'n ddweud. I've also included here my Twitter handle and my email address if anyone wants to contact me at any point in the future. So I'm going to be thinking about the timetable in the big picture. So looking at formal education and looking at the timetable over the course of the year. So the terms and semesters and how we teach across those time periods, not about the day to day timetable. And so I'm going to start with a question to get you all in mood, which is why do schools go back earlier in Scotland than they do in England? So please do type in the chat if any thoughts or ideas about why schools go back earlier in Scotland than they do in England. I think they've already been back for about a month in Scotland, whereas in England where students and the people are just going back to school now. So because you start the holidays earlier, yeah, that's true. And do we know why they would start the holidays earlier and why they would finish the holidays earlier? Yeah, because of the daylight issues and the weather and the climate and all of these things. And where I come from originally is the northeast of Scotland. And here there was always traditionally a two week tattie-hawking holiday, which was the time where the families would be used to harvest the potatoes. So a lot of the early reasons of why the timetables were set as they were were for agricultural reasons or practical reasons. But there is a question about whether that's actually a pedagogically sound reason for having the timetable that way. And I know that there are issues with schoolchildren. They say that sometimes schoolchildren forget a lot of what they've learned over a long summer holiday. So we'll have a look at two different options for timetables. So this could be a term and we're looking at the whole term. And we could have three modules that run concurrently and are long and thin with several teaching sessions per week for the whole term. Or we could have a term where we have three modules that run one after the other. So you do all your studying on one module, you complete that module and then you move on to the next one. These are what we call the long, thin and the short, fat modes of delivery. So three modules per term, they've got the same content more or less, the same credit value, ECTSs, the same number of face-to-face hours into personal study hours. The only thing that really differs is the shape, whether they're taught concurrently or consecutively. And we can call the long, thin ones the traditional method. And the short, fat ones are sometimes called a block or intensive method of delivery. And that's what we're going to be thinking about in this session. So the next thing I'd like you to do is to think about formal learning that you've done and think about how the timetable was arranged. Was it long, thin modules? If so, how many did you have at one time? Or was it short, fat modules? If they were short, fat modules, then how many weeks did you study one subject for? Or was it some other approach? Was it some mixed approach? So hopefully you can tell us that in the chat now, please. How was the term the timetable arranged when you were studying or if you're studying now? Too long ago, oh no. So you can also think about your own current environment and how teaching happens within your current place of work. And again, is that long and thin or short and fat or something mixed mode? So I think we're seeing lots of long and thin, which is what we might expect since that's mostly the traditional way that things have been done. So let's have a little look at the timetable of how things happened. And as I've mentioned already, initially it was often done in terms or semesters. And often it was arranged for practical reasons. And I'm now going to be talking more or less about the education system in the US who originally, I think, took the idea of semesters from Germany. But then we'll talk about some of the developments in the US. In the 1900s, they started to introduce summer sessions in addition to the semesters. And these would be used as a catch-up. So it would be used to catch up from people who had maybe failed to pass a module or missed out on a module that they really wanted to study, which would be important for their major as they were going on. Or it might be to stretch so that they were doing something outside of the normal courses and doing something in a little bit more depth. So these would be shorter summer sessions. And then later, around the 1960s, they started having inter-sessions, which might have been short sessions held at other times of the year. So perhaps in the winter break. And then in the 1990s, certain institutions introduced alternative length sessions as part of the regular timetable. So running alongside the semester long courses or quarter long courses, they would have shorter sessions, which often was added to improve student choice. So this was to allow students to study sessions that were shorter in a block that might run alongside some other activities such as paid work or caring activities and so on. So this was again a practical reason but for student choice. And there have been a great number of reviews and studies on the efficacy of the shorter sessions because they've always been treated with some suspicion. But a lot of the studies have shown that blocked delivery results in the same attainment or better attainment compared with the traditional approach. And once the alternative length sessions came in that were within an institution that was also running longer sessions, then there were some very large studies undertaken there. And these would be the same equivalent modules run over different time periods and with the same student body and very often the same teaching staff. And what was found was that the shorter modules gave better results. Now there are quite a number of methodological issues with these types of studies because usually the students are self-selecting to take the short fat modules. And so they've selected to do those and they've then hopefully been able to do well on those different types of modules. And there are some references here and there is the full reference list in the slide deck. But then there are also some instances where the timetable has been changed for pedagogic reasons. And one of the first places that that happened was in some small liberal arts colleges where they introduced something called a block plan. And I'll let you have a read of the description of the block plan here at Colorado College. So here the idea that was when it was introduced was to enable deep learning and really focusing on a particular topic in depth. So it was introduced for pedagogic reasons. And the institutions where this type of blocked approach is used, they've reviewed it constantly. So they've been reviewing it since they introduced it. And the Colorado College is now 50 years on from when they first introduced it. And so there's quite a lot of information there looking back at the block plan. But they're very happy with it. And they get positive results. They get high levels of satisfaction from their staff and students in general. And again, I suppose to an extent there is a degree of self-selection here where students are choosing these colleges because of the approach that they adopt. And another change that was introduced more recently for pedagogic reasons was at Victoria University in Australia, where in 2020 they introduced across the whole institution blocked delivery. So the top part shows the four units followed by the SWAT fac and then exams. And then they changed it to having four short fact units running one after the other with some developmental activities running alongside, which were mostly study skills and so on. And so the idea of that, the aim of this change was to support students from non-traditional backgrounds. And they really wanted to reduce how complex it was having one thing going on at a time rather than having a very complex timetable with many modules running concurrently. And they thought that this would help with the transition to university study for students from non-traditional backgrounds. So they've now had a chance to analyse that after one year. So they looked at the blocked mode of teaching versus the two previous years of traditional teaching. And it was big numbers, very big numbers within this study. And they saw a really significant increase in marks of over 11% on average. And they found that the largest impact was on the non-traditional students that they were hoping to target. So I think that that was something they were very pleased with. They had a small increase in satisfaction with teaching but a decrease in course satisfaction. And a lot of that was to do with the workload or the difficulty of them focusing on the studies. But that was somewhat mitigated when the assessments had been changed for the blocked modules. And that's something very important because although you want to be covering the same type of material you really can't just teach in the same way. You can't take 40 lectures which are normally spread over 10 weeks and squish them all down into three or four weeks. That's just too much to take in. And so I think that an impact of changing to block teaching is that it requires more active learning, more discussion, more peer review and peer group work and so on. So that's one of the changes that seems to come about when you change from long and thin to short and short. So traditional or blocked, which is better. I think that we can say that really either approach can work and that that is providing that you change your pedagogic approach and have your pedagogic approach aligned with the remote. So there are different strengths and weaknesses. For example, some students are really positive about social aspects of learning and motivation in block mode. And some are concerned about the amount of work that's involved or the amount of time that's involved focusing on this one topic. There are also different requirements for teaching, learning and assessment and I've given a couple of references there to papers that discuss some of those requirements. And I think if there's going to be a change in delivery mode, then it really pays for us as learning technologists to help the academics to think through the benefits and the drawbacks and the design that's required for the different delivery mode. I think it does a rethink and a redesign in terms of teaching approach, the admin processes that surround that modules, the guidance given to students and the type of assessment. So now I want to turn that over to you and to think about this in the Padlet and hopefully someone will post that Padlet in the chat for you. And I'd like you to think it through and put benefits and drawbacks of each of the different delivery modes and also think about it through different points of view from teachers, from staff, from students, from administrative staff and also in different disciplines because different disciplines may have different issues and requirements as well. So, I'd like to hand over to you now to be working on the Padlet and adding in information and I will try and put this up on my screen. There we are. So you've got some there as a starter and please give me the benefits of your experience and your thoughts. I should also mention that if you're logged into Padlet then your posts will come up without any name but if you make a comment then we'll show your name in the comment. So if you don't want to have a name shown which would be also shown in the recording and in the Padlet itself then you should log out from Padlet at this point. Thanks, Moira. Did you want to pick up on any of the comments that have been made in the Padlet before we go to any questions that anyone might have for you? I think that what's great is just to see so many different comments coming into the Padlet from different points of view which is great and looking at it about the resourcing and the admin aspects and the teaching aspects and the student point to you. I think we've also got some comments about different types of subject areas as well which I think can be an issue. I think one of the issues that sometimes people see is with the repeated practice for time which might be quite important for learning in certain subject areas particularly in maths. Then I'm very happy to take questions and have people still contributing to the Padlet if they wish. Thank you. Deb, have you noticed has anyone got any questions that they would like to ask more if you could just put it into the chat. We do have a minute or two left whilst people are thinking about questions where I had a question which was to ask what in your institution which are you adopting now what place are you at with this type of learning? I think it's quite strange I work in the natural sciences faculty and one of our departments uses blocked mode and the other departments more or less use the traditional mode throughout in our maths department they've just moved to having a single block at the beginning of the academic year to use the transition and then they move into the traditional long thin consecutive mode after that. I think one of the reasons why I was quite interested in this is because of the changes that happened I was not going to mention the pandemic let's mention how some places have actually adopted a blocked timetable during the pandemic so that they could just have a focus on certain modules and then with the idea that they might come back to a more traditional way of teaching subsequently. I think it's a real mix in that and online programmes as well might often think of having a blocked mode rather than the consecutive mode just to have that focus. You were asking if I have a preference and I don't think really that it is horses for courses and notice I don't know if it was you Sheila who was saying that you've had things going backwards and forwards from one mode to the other and I think that must be really quite hard to think about swapping them around is probably quite hard. I'm quite surprised with the institutions in the states where they've adopted the same model for 50 years and they are still going strong with it. I think we're at time actually so we don't have any time for any other questions but if everyone could find your best emoji to thank Moira for her presentation Moira is engaging with the discord so if you've got any other questions for her you can follow up in that space on Twitter. Thank you Moira. Thank you all for your comments and everything on the padlet which I hope will grow over time as well. Thank you.