 Welcome back after lunch. I hope you manage to perhaps grab an ice cream in this lovely weather. I have the pleasure of introducing Rob and Laura from the University of Derby, who are going to present to us this afternoon. So over to you Rob and Laura. OK, so I'll start just by introducing ourselves. So my name's Laura Hollinshead and I'm a learning technologist in the department for digital learning at the University of Derby. Hi everyone, my name's Rob Higson. I'm also a learning technologist and worked with Laura for perhaps the last six or so years now across all different areas of the university but now I'm mainly focused on the School of College of Business, Law and Social Sciences. So the focus of the presentation today is just to talk a little bit about how we've been using some institutional data about the digital student experience to actually inform teaching and learning practice at our institution. So just to give a little bit of a background about where we started out with this. So we've been using the JISC Students Digital Insights Experience Survey since 2016-17 and so far in terms of that data and the use of that data we've been using that to make some strategic decisions about the investment in sort of the investment in technology and to advise sort of digital approaches that staff can use as well. So for instance we've used it as a business case to get in things like Padlet and Poll Everywhere, so polling tools, but also just investment within the infrastructure, within the institution as well. So that's how the data's been used so far, but what we've found is during the period so since 2016 that the university is becoming a much more data-driven institution so the challenge that has been for us is to ensure that actually we're making the best use of that data and that feedback that we're getting from students through the survey to just support the teaching, learning and assessment practice and improve that student experience so the students are getting the most out of that experiencing that we're really, really using that data. So an example of that is actually at the beginning of the pandemic so in March, oh god so long ago now but March 2020, we actually looked at the data that we've collected in the December 2019 survey so we traditionally run our surveys in December and we actually took that data and then utilised that to help inform the strategic, some of the strategic nature of the way that the university operated during that period of time so within the institution it helped us to understand the challenges that students face during that period and also the types of challenges that staff might face as well so as an example the survey in 2019 gave us some data that said that only 46% of the students who were surveyed had never used, never worked online with other learners before so again that gave us an understanding of the fact that actually a lot of these students don't particularly have experience within that area so that was important to think about and also that it's likely that a lot of academic staff wouldn't have had experience of that either so when we think about this year's survey so just to give some context in terms of obviously there were significant changes in the way that teaching and learning was delivered during 2020-21 as everybody experienced but for the University of Derby we moved to remote delivery but that we had in person teaching for at least three hours per week for our students so they were still getting some on campus contact time alongside that remote provision and as previously the survey and the data that we gathered was gathered during that December 2020 period which was when they were still having that partly on-campus experience and obviously we know that after that point some of that changed and it did become very dominantly remote with very few students having any out on campus time at all so during that transition it was kind of an intense period of trying to upskill staff to use those digital tools to enable them to teach and one of the key things about the survey was that it was giving us data about that student experience of the digital aspects of their course so it was seen as really valuable data during that period of time so within the survey and the students that we surveyed so we surveyed predominantly Derby students who were at Derby campus so we do have online students and we also do have collaborative partners who are also delivering but this survey was just for students who were at Derby campuses and we had around 11% of the student population so that's around 1,922 students who completed the survey so and this was the biggest number of student respondents that we'd had in the survey's history showing that it was quite an emotive topic to give feedback on at that point so I'm just going to hand over to Rob now he's going to talk you through some of the findings from the survey. Thanks Laura so there were lots of findings from the survey and what we've done is we've changed the small selection which had been useful for us when discussing the student digital experience we thought it'd be good to show you how this has filtered down into our kind of data day operations and the kind of discussions that we've been having around the data so one of the first things we looked at were the barriers that students were facing when working online and one of the key things we wanted to do with this data was to communicate this to academic staff in order to influence their teaching and learning as these results are quite closely linked to other questions related to satisfaction so we wanted to help understand why students may or may not be engaging and what considerations do we need to make and how can we mitigate against the these factors that are stopping students from engaging in their studies. So you can see from the results that Wi-Fi issues were top but this didn't just mean student Wi-Fi issues we had quite a few students tell us that one of their barriers was that the connection problems that staff were having was causing issues and we subsequently found out that staff were actually facing a lot of the same barriers that the students were so a lot of work was done on collecting strategies for kind of squeezing the most out of people's connections we had the IT department helping out with pieces of kit like dongles and things and we were having discussions about the practices that could be adopted and this ranged from things like keeping file sizes down we had a lot of people who were doing recorded power points things like that to only using cameras when they were necessary and even to things like making sure that academics kids weren't streaming movies at the same time as they were delivering sessions which probably led to some interesting discussions at home but it did seem to solve a couple of problems and we also had some critical discussions about the types of content that would be created and approaches used we started to think through things like low bandwidth solutions for more asynchronous tasks which was perhaps something we hadn't thought through before and the second area I want to pick upon here was the idea of students having no safe or private area to work in because what became clear was that this was a really new space for students and mostly for staff as well and there was in the sense of knowing what was acceptable in these digital spaces what was going to occur in them it was very new and clearly that was heightened by the pandemic as well for example we had some comments about things like staff pets being a bit distracting for students which you know we we couldn't have ever foreseen that as being something that would be brought up but what this did do what this data did do was it really opened up the discussion about inclusion more so than ever and for us it heightened that importance of ensuring that there's an open dialogue with students about the expectations on them the reasons why things may be done in a certain way and we saw some really good examples from staff of things like staff inductions where those parameters were set in partnership with students and everyone kind of knew what was expected of them and why we were going to run things in a certain way but what the data did here has provided us with an evidence base for us to work with academic staff to kind of start to positively influence their practices and when we could combine the data with some of the best practices that we were drawing on from around the university it provided a really powerful reflective and critical space to actually engage staffing which was really really helpful so another useful question asked the students which of the following options they found most useful to themselves as a learner and data like this was really useful to be able to frame staff development and conversation through the use of bringing that student voice to the forefront because it's obviously student data and one key way we used this data was to consider how this year's results differed from previous years so there was a change in what students found most useful and we tried to highlight that in this graphic and we were able to use that change as a starting point for discussion and unpick at least at a surface level the idea that the most useful items had changed once we were in a mostly remote or online situation and started to think about what does that mean for staff in the future when they're teaching in this space is why have students suddenly found those things a little bit more useful now that we're online where's the value in those activities for both academics and students and interestingly for us in a recent session that we ran before we showed them this data we actually asked staff the same question we don't give them the options but we asked them what they found most useful and a common theme from staff was the use of videos which obviously correlated what we're seeing here and being able to bring this institutional level data into that discussion provides an extra level of depth for us and it's prompted some really critical discussion amongst colleagues about the value of resources such as videos and particularly for those colleagues you might have been a bit a bit skeptical about using some of these things we've now got the fact that they can see anecdotal evidence from their peers and we know that's a major influence in them adopting their technologies and we've got that alongside the student data collected from the students at the institutional level so that was really nice and this was a really interesting question from the survey around students where where students gave a help and one in which actually our data differed from the sector for the top two items so the top two sector answers here were other students were a 65 percent and then second was lecturers and tutors at 60 percent now this emphasised for us that there's been a large load on academic staff in supporting students and also coincided for the area I supported in with a request for strategies to help students become a little bit more independent and really what we were trying to do here was we were looking for opportunities and approaches that reduce obviously where it's appropriate the dependency on individual responses to students and where we can look to apply a more whole kind of cohort focused approach and this fell into a session we've been running on the use of narrative across modules so utilising the tools and channels available to ensure students are clear in the journey that they're taking between things like sessions between modes between activities and thinking about how we can reduce the potential for misinformation create a kind of transparent environment with a consistency of message and that shared whole cohort understanding of what was happening what they needed to do which we had seen anecdotally when people have applied that kind of methodology to their teaching it had really reduced the amount of logistical type questions that staff were getting and there was more of a focus on the more individual academic questions which were more personal to the student and so the final set of findings I want to look at before we move on to the more strategic approaches was to look at the areas students felt there could be improvement in online learning now again this was really useful for discussion and reflection in individual conversations but we also used a lot of quotes from this particular question to frame elements in an all staff course on blended learning which we've been running over the summer so the course kind of sets out expectations of what digital learning should look like and again having that student boys front and centre providing starting point for the activities I think is a really powerful and a really privileged position that we're able to start that conversation from this data is so so useful for those kind of things and to kind of dig into that data a little more we also conducted three focus groups we had around six students in each and similar themes were coming up in those focus groups that Laura ran so that also gave us a little bit of extra insight to back up some of the data that we're seeing and so that was a quick tour through some of the findings and how they filtered down in some of the conversations we're having to try and influence the teaching learning practices I'm going to pass back to Laura now who's going to look at some more of the strategic level uses of the data yeah so what we wanted to do and what we've done previously is obviously use that data at a strategic level so a lot of the data that was coming up was taken to strategic level meetings and in particular a lot of the data that was quite engaging to them to hear about was aspects that linked to the digital divide so some of that problem-based data that we saw earlier on around the challenges that students have faced during that period of time was something that they were very keen to hear about and actually that data itself resulted in more investment within the laptop loans available to students and also trying to make Wi-Fi more available to them in terms of giving out more devices to enable that through perhaps mobile networks instead but it also prompted a bit of a review of the Wi-Fi within halls as well so within the residences linked to university because a lot of the students found that because a lot of them were using it all at the same time that became problematic in terms of you know the Wi-Fi reliability within halls so it prompted perhaps a quicker review of that then maybe would have been planned originally it also helped to develop that some digital learning baselines that we have at the university so we have had those for a while now we had a set developed off the back of the fact that we were moving to remote teaching so that was more focused on remote teaching but the data from this year's survey has actually also influenced this year's digital learning baselines which have slightly expanded in terms of what they covered so in this one it also covers things like the importance of module induction, preparing students for assessments using digital resources and also the opportunities to develop digital skills as well has become a more important part of what we want to provide in terms of the digital experience for our students it's also helped to inform the development of a blended applied learning model which is being used at the institution to help again guide the delivery of courses through this academic year what we also wanted to make sure that we did was to send that information on to the academic staff as well so what we did is we developed a number of infographics to help lead that so we had an institutional infographic that had some of that institutional level data and we looked and focused on those elements which we felt it was most important for them to be aware of and emphasised the things that they should potentially keep doing and try doing what we did in addition though this year was to actually break that data down on a college level so at the university we have four colleges covering the different subject areas so we actually took that data and then divided it into those different colleges and then created reports and infographics which helped to emphasise that data hopefully helping our academic staff to connect with the fact that that was about their students not just about all students because sometimes some people disconnect from that and suggest that that's not representative of their students because their students are different from others so we wanted to try and extend what we've done previously and just bring that in in terms of having that college level data and disseminating that to staff and one of the areas that you know we've wanted to prompt was some of those barrier areas as Rob discussed before so that we could get them to be aware of the facts that a lot of the students were facing these types of barriers as well we also as Rob's mentioned we've used it to inform our course that we've delivered over the summer as well to academic staff helping to emphasise the importance of those digital learning baselines showing examples of really good practice but like Rob said leading with that data to just help move that in and one of the things that amongst the people who have attended those sessions and the online course we also do a live element to that and they have really appreciated that data and it has prompted a lot of really good discussions with academic staff as well so if we just move on to the next slide Rob. So what I wanted to do is just to give a bit of an idea about where we're going next so I'm already in the process of preparing for this year's survey because obviously December is actually not that far away so we are looking to run it again in 2021-22 again looking at doing that in December and we are also looking at doing similar dissemination to that that we've done before in terms of having that institutional and college level information being being sent out as well however one of the things that we found challenging with the last survey was actually the turnaround in data so ideally we wanted to turn that around that data quickly to try and help inform semester's twos learning and teaching so what we want to try and do is to do that in a more timely way to just ensure that we are getting that data out to our academic staff so we do need to also carefully think about how we can get that to the academic staff who are doing the dominant amount of the teaching rather than just getting that information at a strategic level where we're kind of reliant upon other people in order to then get that out to to their academic staff so the other thing that we're also aiming to do which is a bit challenging based on our capacity but we are also looking to try and get some research outputs with this so we've had ethical approval for last year's data and we're looking to do the same for the data that we're looking to collect in December as well so that again we're able to do a bit of a deeper dive into the experience but also get some research published off the back of that data as well so i think we've just got time for some questions and there's our contact details as well it's really insightful and it's good to have that example of how in institutions do you think the just insights are very it's definitely giving me some top tips to take back and i was really impressed with that infographic as well like and there were some of the comments in the chat if you have got a link to it i'm sure many of you would like to have a look at it in a bit more detail but if we go to Jim Turner so he's got a question about um so it's on the screen so i'll let you read it so i don't confuse you by reading over it i think that it's a it's you in combination with a lot of other sources of information so often sector-based things that have come out like gravity assist and also the overall disk report that will come out sorry that's been launched and come out yesterday again a lot of those institutional sorry the sector-based information is often influencing the practice and the direction of the university but obviously big big ones nsrs peters um you know those types of things as well are also influencing the direction that we're going in as well um fantastic thank you and there's another question from scott um asking whether um you'd fed back any of the data with what the data from the vle um so we we haven't necessarily cross-referenced it with data from the vle mainly because i think the data from the vle is doesn't tell you much about what's actually going on because um there's a limit to what sort of those types of analytics can actually tell you about the students experience because you would think that somebody who's been on the platform for longer is getting more use out of it but it could be that they're just really confused and can't find what they need so it doesn't actually tell you about their potential behaviours within the platform itself so i have to admit that's not something that we have done um one of the things that we have done which i'm talking about tomorrow is we have been doing um an audit of the base so we've got baselines we've been doing an audit of that so some some of that has been looked at together in terms of what that experience looks like compared to some of the data that's coming through and there certainly have been some close links between those different things in terms of what we've found um and the things that students are raising yeah i'd echo that actually that that process um we actually interviewed or met with the staff who were delivering particular programmes and talked through the baselines and in a lot of cases we were really able to dig down into some of the practices that they changed and see you know certainly an anecdotal level the the impact that had had on students and their experience and then in certain cases we were also able to see some kind of module and a module questionnaire things like that which backed up the kind of approaches that they'd taken which you know as i say when we were able to link it with the data was it was a really useful um set of tools to have thank you um i think we're out of timing actually so don't we don't have any time for other questions but i think there was another question asking whether the benchmarking was useful but i think you mentioned that you found it useful benchmarking you were great so didn't you record with them what the sector report said um i'd like yeah a big thank you um to both your presentation as i say i found it really insightful and there's been a lot of chat going on as well if anyone's got any questions for Laura and Rob they've provided their contact details i'm sure they're happy to follow up with anything with you and they'll be around on discord and i'm sure on twitter and as Laura said they're presented far as well so thanks again if you use your best emoji to thank them in the comments that'll be great