 Gweithio am ychydig, yn gofio ar y gweithio. Yn ydych chi'n gweld i'r pryd a'u'r prosiect o Llyfr Eiland yn Arland. A bwrdd hwnnw i'r ysgolion fydd ymgylched ymlaen... ..u ei chael ei fod yn ysgrifennidau yr ydych chi, ymlaen i'r system ymlaen. Ieithan y gallwch chi'n gael ei fod yn wych ymlaen i'r ysgrifennidau. Felly mae'r ysgolion ymlaen i'r system ymlaen i'r ysgrifennidau. It was important that we clarify and make sure that the students actually know what they're getting into and know our academic style in particular. So, the focus therefore of the project is on to enhance the learning experience of the students when they actually arrive in Ireland. To do this we wanted to develop resources for both the students and the academic administration staff that are going to deal with the students when they arrive in Ireland so that everybody is familiar with what the students actually need and how we can help them and how we can incorporate them into the class and ensure that they feel part of the institute that they join when they arrive in Ireland. In order to do that, we decided that we needed to do a very rigorous and extensive literature review on what's out there and what's already been accomplished and what other people are actually doing. So that we identify the gaps in what's there so that we could develop resources that would actually help the students themselves to learn before they actually come to Ireland about what to expect when they actually get here. That's where we decided to focus because that's where we found that the biggest gap was. To do this, we wanted to ensure that the relevance to the students and make sure that this was student informed. So the student at all times is key and central to what we're doing. We want to make sure that they feel at home with the actual units that we developed and to make sure that they learn from those units. In order to do that again, we decided to survey the students at the beginning to see exactly where they found the gaps. So students that have arrived, what didn't they know, what would they have liked to know and how would they like to interact with us. So we actually surveyed over 500 students to begin with. After developing the pilot we went back and resurveyed people and we've over 500. So altogether we've over a thousand student surveys conducted on this study. Once we've done that then we decided to, we have disseminating both the objects and the research. And my colleagues will talk more about that when we get later on in the actual project. But what we've, again, looking at the pedagogical and social differences and the background of the students when they come to Ireland, that's what we wanted to inform the staff units with. Because as we know, the students are coming from very diverse areas. Some people are very much led by critical thinking and some are led by road learning. So we wanted to ensure that everybody knows that before they get here and which student type they're actually dealing with. So our staff units were very much informed by the students and what they actually came to us with. So what do we actually do? We developed there for four units for the students, two of which are based on their academic needs. How do we teach in Ireland? How are you supposed to learn in Ireland? What are the pedagogies that we employ? And how can you get used to them before you actually arrive? So the academic units, both the two academic units focus on that. And then we found that there was a big need for social and practical experience and social and practical information for the students when they actually arrive here so that they can feel at home in Ireland if you like. So that they have some experience of how we think. For example, you know, ask your man. Ask your man to somebody who's not from Ireland is who? What? Where's the man? What's he doing? What do we want? You know? They want to find this person that they don't know. So it's to get them used to how we actually speak and how we interact with people. So that was the aim of the social side of the actual unit. So we have one unit based on that and how we talk and particularly how we engage with each other. So for example, they can listen to radio stations here in Ireland before they actually get here so that they can improve their English that way. Now looking at the practical side then of course is where's the bus? Some countries bus come automatically every minute. We know that doesn't happen here so therefore we have to inform people of that. From an academic point of view, as I said, we were looking at the pedagogy that the students are used to before they actually arrive here. And as we know, we are very different. We deliver differently. We think differently. So we wanted to get the students used to that as they arrived. In order to do that, we have a very successful cross functional multidisciplinary team with representatives from the five institutions in the southern cluster. And today our Cork colleagues unfortunately could not be here, but we have Tom Farley here from it truly. And we also have Louise Nagel from it truly. Ken McCarthy, who is going to follow me here from WIT and myself, Yvonne Kavanaugh from it Carlo. So we have developed this team together and so we're looking at it from different areas. We're not just concentrating on one particular experience. We want to ensure that we gather all the information so that the students come to a home rather than to just a country. And I'll hand over to my colleague, Ken, here to continue. Thank you. Thanks Yvonne. I probably should say that even though I work and live in waterfront, I'm a corkman, so maybe I can fly the cork flag. And interesting enough, one of the things that when we were trying to give examples of the kind of content we wanted to include and explain to international students was if you're in cork and somebody says I will, yeah, that doesn't mean they're going to do something for you. It actually means the opposite. So how did we achieve what it is we wanted to do? We had lots of meetings. Our previous project coordinator who now works with Terry was a good man for meetings. We had lots of weekly teleconferences and we had face-to-face meetings in each of the five institutions as well. So we took it in turn to host those and they actually informed a lot of the work that we did. We also had a shared workspace online that gave us a place to store all of the information that we gathered and keep minutes and resources and all that sort of stuff. In going through how we approached that, the literature review was commissioned first and completed in IT truly and that sort of informed the questions that we wanted to ask in the academic interviews that we conducted and in the student surveys that we carried out. There was over 570 responses to our initial survey which was a very rich data set to get in terms of what students would like to have known before they got here. The interviews with academic and support staff gave us the perspective of what were the kind of things that students were coming to them with as problems on an ongoing basis. We then created a pilot unit over the summer and we tested that last September, September 2015 and then revised based on that and created additional units. So at this stage, all of the student units are complete, all four of them, and they all live on the liveandlearnandireland.ie website. They were created in an articulate storyline, I think it is, so even though they live on that website, they don't have to be there, they can be put on any other website as well. The liveandlearnand website is like many of the other projects here you're on. It's a WordPress website and we also have the.ie.net.com and .org domain name, so it's very easy to get to. The site itself is responsive, so if you look at it on a tablet or a phone, it should work. There can be an issue with this storyline or the articulate modules in that you have to download an additional plugin to use those. What we're at at the moment is we're finalising the content of the staff units. They'll be ready I think next month. The website is completed and operational and we've done quite a bit of dissemination at conferences. That's the landing page that people get to when they arrive on the website. When they click on that, it branches out into the various different areas, but as I said, the website isn't the project, it's the units that are on there is really what the project is. So what's the impact been so far? It has been used, I know, fairly extensively by UCC for pre-departure informing students before they come here. One of the big, I suppose, unintended consequences or additional benefits of the project was it was a realisation of the concept of the blended professionals of the third space as articulated by Wichurch because it was an unusual project in that I'm not any learning professional, I'm not even a learning professional. I'm a car salesman actually in a previous life. Tom Farley defyde's explanation as to what he is. Yvonne is the lecturer. Tony and later Lee Louise are on the IT side of it and then our colleagues from CIT and UCC were in the international space. So, you know, if it was the international officers from five colleges joined together, we'd probably have a completely different outcome. Given that we had different people bringing different things and different perspectives. But it worked really, really well. So much so that we just don't want it to end, I don't think. It's actually quite timely that a project like this has been developed at this time because just last week Minister Bruton announced that he wants to increase the number of international students coming to Ireland and having a resource like this that explains what they can expect when they get here and how things work. We believe that it's a resource that absolutely needs to be there. And with that I'll hand over to our project coordinator Louise who will take it through the rest of it. So, I'm going to cover dissemination and sustainability and elements that have already been covered by my colleague Ken when he mentioned our website and the survey responses that we've had to date. Earlier on I know that Professor Sarah Moore mentioned the importance of establishing strong network of vested interests in a project. And I believe that's exactly what we have done. Here on the slide in front of you you can see some of the universities, the international universities who have given us positive feedback on the resources that have been developed by the project. The feedback here is from international officers, from the staff, but also from the students that they have disseminated the resources to. We also have feedback from academics. There's a number of seminars that the partners have attended and as I've mentioned the feedback has come from Australia, the US, Europe and obviously the UK as well. It demonstrates the level of community and that we have established an emergent community best practice that can be leveraged. This is going to make dissemination and sustainability a lot easier in the long term. So in terms of conferences our colleagues here, my colleagues here have presented at EdTech which was a Dublin based conference in Limerick, in Boston, in Liverpool and an international audience was reached. And this audience I believe will be extended by the paper that has been submitted to the Journal of International Students by members of the group here today. And it will also give weighting to the needs analysis and the research that was undertaken as part of the project as well. The resources have been promoted via the website and on social media and also through the international offices of the HCI throughout the country. So they've all been contacted and roller stands have been put up outside the international offices and the partners are very active and they've given us very positive feedback. They're distributing the resources among students actively and also within their own associations and networks. Also in terms of the website it is up on various web links ICAS, we have contacted, we're going to present to them, actually as a group in the next few months, the IUA and institutes such as DKIT and IT Sligo have also put up the web link. We hosted a soft launch in March 2016 down in IT Tralee and we propose to hold a hard launch now in the next few months quite possibly in December, we're planning that at the moment. And we're going to target the external organisations that I mentioned earlier, ICAS, Thea, the IUA Educator in Ireland and the Teaching and Learning Forum. Also just to mention that there was a webinar initially at the beginning of this project back in 2014 and it was a great way to disseminate the information around the project and we also had a streaming of the soft launch in March 2016 as well, which reached a larger audience. So I'm going to move on to sustainability. So as I mentioned, given that we have a strong network we're going to leverage all the contacts that we have. We're firstly going to put in an application for funding to the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, the call is out at the moment. So we're going to take the resources that we have developed and we're going to further extend them into a CPD module for HEI staff. So we see that there is a need for this, for CPD for the staff who are dealing with international students and supporting them in the transition here to Ireland. We also propose developing a consortium. So this would incorporate associations and educators and partners who have a vested interest in the resources. The resources make their jobs easier and it is in their own interest to keep them up to date. We've costed the sustainability at under 4,000 euro a year in annual fees to maintain it and to update it. So if it is distributed among the associations and educators who work with international students we believe there won't be a very large burden to them. And finally there is also potential to develop an Erasmus Plus project. So we are beginning work in the next few weeks on putting in an application because we believe that the resources could be adapted and translated and could be used by universities throughout Europe and so there is a great opportunity for that there as well. So it's a non-commercial resource but we do believe that there is plenty of potential to harvest contributions towards the maintenance of it into the future. So I would just like to have the opportunity to thank the teaching and learning forum for the support that they've given the project and to my colleagues who have worked very hard on the project and we look forward to working together in the future and putting in future proposals as well. So thank you.