 And I'll just take you through. So I'm Debbie Buff. I'm the professional and development manager at ALT. And I'm delighted to welcome you here today to our third CPD webinar. I'm just gonna take you through quickly on our Blackboard Collaborate Holding slides. I'm gonna just point you towards a couple of things just to let you know. There's the OER Domains Conference, which is happening in April. So shout out to that. If you're interested in open education, you should check that out, because that's looking like it's gonna be a fantastic conference. You can find out further information from our website. And also shout out to anybody. If you're not currently an ALT member, please do consider joining us. So with the Blackboard Collaborate Environment, I'm sure everybody knows this by now because you've probably all spent lots of time with various bits and pieces in terms of online delivery. But just to let you know, on the bottom right-hand corner, there is a little purple chevron, which is your access panel, and that will give you access to things like the chat, where you can say hello with other participants, and also give you access to change your volume, your audio settings, and also your notification settings. So if you're finding that there's a lot of pinging and ponging going on when people are joining, you can actually make it go nice and quiet by using the little cog wheel on the right-hand side there. Do say hello in the chat where you're coming from. It's always great to actually see where people are joining us from. So I'm just gonna take you through the rest of these slides because we will be recording, as I say, and we will make it available afterwards. And just a quick reminder, not to share any screenshots that may include personal information, such as names in the chat, but you're welcome to take other screenshots. Okey-dokey, so I'm gonna stop sharing my screen in just a second, and then I'll hand over to Dan, who will give us his introduction. Thank you very much, Debbie. I'm just gonna share my PowerPoint slides. Hopefully everyone can see those PowerPoint slides. Please do let me know if you can't see those lovely blue PowerPoint slides there. So welcome to this session where we're gonna be talking about how we supported academic staff in the move to online teaching. My name's Dan, and I manage the e-learning team at the University of Kent. And with me is my colleague, Dr. Phil Anthony. Do you want to introduce yourself, Phil? Thanks, Dan. Yes, I'm Phil, and I'm a learning technologist at the University of Kent. So hi, everyone. Great, still thanks, Phil. So the purpose of this session is very much for us to share our experiences of how we've supported our academic staff in the rapid shift to online teaching in the last year. We'll describe some of the challenges that we've faced both pre-pandemic and during the pandemic, and how, as a team, we've responded. We'll talk a lot about what we've called our digitally enhanced education course and how we built this and built on its success to then develop the digitally enhanced education webinar series that we now run at the University. And Phil will talk about that a little bit later on. We hope to share some ideas with you and give you some tips that you can take away and apply at your own institutions. I should say that pretty much everything that we've described and we've done has been achieved without any additional funding or additional resource. So without further ado, I shall crack on. So in terms of this session, we'll give you a bit about the context of Kent, how we provided support to our academics pre-pandemic and what tele-usage was like at the University of Kent before the pandemic. We'll then talk more specifically about the issues that we face around the digital capabilities of our academic staff and how we had to rethink our support model in light of the global pandemic. And it was that rethinking of the support model that really led to the inception of the digitally enhanced education course, which we'll spend a bit of time looking at in a few minutes. I'll then pass over to Phil who's gonna talk about how we keep that momentum running, how we build on the digitally enhanced education course, build new communities, create these communities of practice and how we've now created this digitally enhanced education webinar series. And at the end, hopefully at a time, there will be plenty of time for discussion and questions. Okay, so here's a bit of context for Kent. We've got over 500 academic staff and a further 400 or so graduate teaching assistants and hourly paid lecturers. We've got 19 and a half thousand students across our five campuses at Canterbury, Medway, Brussels, Rome, and Paris. And in terms of the learning technologies, the three core systems that we use are Moodle, R-B-L-E, Turnitin for e-submission and for academic integrity and Penocto for lecture recording and multimedia. We also use a range of peripheral learning technologies as well, including audience response technologies such as Ombia and web conferencing tools and the like. But our three core technologies are the ones that you can see listed here. And it's the job of the e-learning team to support staff in the use of these technologies. Now, the e-learning team is actually quite small. There's six of us, including Phil and I. So, me is the team manager and five learning technologists each with their own unique area of responsibility. And being a small team poses a number of challenges. And it certainly posed challenges prior to the pandemic as well. We often found that we were spread very thinly and had huge demands placed on our time. And we had to really think very carefully about how we supported academic staff with such limited resource. But with the pandemic, we were suddenly thrust into the spotlight. All teaching would take place through the tools and technologies that we supported as a team. So the spotlight was right on us. And this posed huge challenges in terms of how we delivered training, provided support and kept our users up to date. So, just a note about how we delivered support prior to the pandemic. Most of our training was delivered in a face-to-face setting. So we would book an IT suite, either one-to-one training or small group. And we would typically run through a series of tasks with academic staff. It was very, very task-focused. We also ran school-based drop-in sessions where perhaps once a month, one of the learning technologists would be more emphatically embedded within a school or department. And on hand to answer questions or have discussions around tell. I always felt that this helped us improve the visibility of the team pre-pandemic. On our website, we have how-to guides, as you would expect, PDF guides and videos, et cetera. And most of our support was delivered by the telephone, so email support and telephone support. Largely standard for a learning technology team. In terms of pre-pandemic tell usage at the university, we felt that we were neither ahead of the curve nor behind the curve. I suspect we're actually in a similar position to many institutions of our size. So as of 2019, 63% of our lectures were recorded, and that equates to about 14,000 hours per academic year. And students viewed 168,000 hours of lecture recordings. So it's pretty high. All of our modules were active in Moodle. And what that means is every single taught module at the university would have a Moodle presence of some form. And what that presence looked like can vary wildly from really advanced uses of Moodle to more disseminatory style modules. So there's a whole spectrum there of what things look like. And 85% of modules utilize e-submission in some form, so whether that's the use of turn it in or Moodle assignments. But the challenge that we faced was around the digital capabilities of our academic staff. And this brought into a much sharper focus with the onset of the pandemic and the move to online teaching. If I were to place Kent on this continuum, you can see here between beginner and expert, I'd actually say that we were somewhere in the middle. It'd be very difficult to put us at either side of this continuum. So we would have on the right-hand side, the power users, the experts, those that would use technology to enhance the learning experience, what we would call e-learning champions, those that would actively engage with us as a team and explore the use of technology for things like collaboration or engagement and deeper learning. Then at the other end of the continuum, we have those that we would be considered to be beginners using technology for dissemination and perhaps just using Moodle for sharing resources or perhaps engaging less with things like lecture recording, for example. And in the rapid shift to online teaching, the challenges we faced as a team was how do we provide a sufficient level of support for all users on this continuum? How do you harness the enthusiasm of those expert users without alienating the beginners? And how do you provide a level of support for the beginners without the expert users feeling that what you're providing is beneath them? So that was the challenge. So the crucial question that we asked ourselves as a team in early 2020 was how do you provide a platform and the skills and the confidence to your academic staff to deliver a high quality online learning experience? And this is the question that we grapple with in the spring of 2020. So we asked ourselves this question, what do our academic staff need? What is it they actually need to transition their teaching online? And we quickly identified that whatever we offer that it would need to be something that was consistent, it was accessible and applicable to all. It would have to be a high quality product. So the first thing we identified is technical proficiency. Now we've already got as a team, we've built up technical guidance over many years. So we've already got that, but we needed to look at how this could be put into a more digestible form and something that was more accessible to our staff. And then academic staff also need confidence not necessarily technical confidence, although that is important. It was more a reaffirmation that just because we've moved online, they don't suddenly become bad teachers overnight. They're experts, they're experts in their field. It's just the medium that's changed. And we wanted to instill that and give people the confidence to embrace that. And then we started to think about the appropriate use of technology. So show academic staff that this kitchen sink approach is not a good approach overusing technology. I always find that technology and teaching is best used when it's appropriate and it's used in the right measure. Trying to spell this myth that online teaching necessitates just this technology overload. And crucially, the final point is give academic staff a benchmark. How many of our academic colleagues have actually experienced online education from the point of view of a learner? I would argue not many. We were about to ask 500 academic staff to transfer their teaching online with the vast majority of them having never seen or experienced what a good online learning experience is actually like. So let's show them. That's our job as learning technologists. And it's this final point about benchmarking and experiencing the informed how we as a team then responded. We needed to bring these four elements together and the output of this thought process was what they name our digitally enhanced education course. And we became a little obsessed with this term eating your own dog food, or at least I did and I'm not short-filled it, but I certainly did. A term used to describe using your own product. Our idea was to create a self-contained dedicated course that taught our staff how to use and apply particular learning technologies to online teaching. So crucially, the course would be created following the principles of online learning. We wanted to create a high quality course, a high quality resource that it both imparted the principles of online teaching whilst simultaneously demonstrating the power and the flexibility and use of Kent's existing learning technologies. So as we started to storyboard the digital enhanced education course, we identified four elements that underpinned this philosophy and this development. As a team, we've always had more success when we've drawn in the expertise of academic staff to help promote particular practices. So we chose to adopt a similar strategy. So when we were pulling together the resources, we involved numerous academic colleagues and their contributions, including those already engaged with distance learning at the university. Let's use them to our advantage. And we involved senior managers from the outset as well and we asked them to contribute to the course and to help promote it. And to further underpin this notion of eating your own dog food, we wanted the course to be punctuated with things like discussion forums and formative assessments and other activities. And we felt that things like discussion forums would be a particularly useful way of keeping our participants, our academic staff, engaged with that learning. And also to tie in with our work meeting the public sector bodies accessibility regulations, we aim to ensure that the digital accessibility was interwoven throughout all of the materials that we produced so that the course itself, when it was put together and when it was made available, that it was fully accessible. So it was sort of leading by example. So if we now jump in to our digitally enhanced education course, you'll get an idea of what the finished product looks like. We launched the digitally enhanced education course in the summer of 2020. So hopefully you can still see this on screen. Okay, I'm just gonna jump into here. Okay, hopefully everyone can see that. Please do let me know if you can't see the course on screen. We can see that then. Great, thank you. So the digitally enhanced education course is obviously built in Moodle, as you can see here. And it's broken down by theme or topic with each section introducing a particular area. And we start off with an introductory section which introduces online learning. And we got one of our current academics who are involved in distance learning to introduce the whole notion of how distance learning and blended learning differs from face to face. That was a really key thing, outlining what these differences are. And then as we progress through the module, we then start to introduce students into the mix, reminding our academic staff that it's a new experience for our students too. Let's not forget that. And with each section, there's an estimated time required. So we manage people's expectations as to how much time they can expect to spend on the taking a particular section. Then as we progress through, we move into what I would call the nuts and bolts. So section three, section four, for example, moving into the nuts and bolts around things like core structure and navigation and reminding our staff that structure is absolutely vital when your VLE is effectively the primary point of contact for this for learning now. So if I jump into the individual sections, you'll get an idea of what it looks like. So this is the introductory section. And you can see that it's split by activities and then additional resources and taking it further. So every section within the module, within the course is arranged in exactly the same way, sort of level one, level two, level three. The activities, the things here in blue, are the core aspect of the learning. Let me know, tell me what I need to know. That's what the activities are there for. That's the absolute core things. The additional resources are enable people to find out a bit more if they're interested. So they can take things a little bit further and find out a little bit more. And then the taking it further, the level three, caters for those experts that I referred to before, those that perhaps want to do even more, perhaps they already know about the merits of good core structure, but what they actually want to see is what the sort of pedagogic approach behind that is. And so we structured it so that it caters for different ability levels. So level one, level two, level three and so on. And we applied this consistent style across all of the sections. You can see we're going to section three, core structure navigation activity one, activity two and three, and then additional resources taking it further. And we did the same thing throughout. So we've applied a consistent style and a consistent interface where the structure is very clear. We're trying to instill and impart this consistent user experience onto our staff. So as they're actually experiencing this as learners, they're looking at it thinking, perhaps this is something I can actually apply to my students in my Moodle modules as well. Now the discussion forum that we introduced was particularly useful as it provided a safe space where people could air their concerns and discuss issues and share practice. And that was the whole idea of it where people could effectively say, these are the things I'm worried about when I'm approaching teaching online. These are my issues. And our Vice Chancellor actually actively contributed to this forum and it was wonderful to see senior people really setting an example and getting stuck into it and engaging in discussions around what people's concerns were. And the course itself is punctuated using formative assessments and provides plenty of opportunities for people to test their knowledge and understanding. So they can actually apply their knowledge as well, which is always really useful. So generally, the way we structured this is that it can be taken in any sequence at all. So whilst we have a general set structure, section one, section two and so forth, covering things like accessibility, using the digital library, copyright and online teaching, tracking student engagement, they can be generally taken in any sequence and it's not time constrained. So people can dip in and out of this as much as they want. We thought that was really important as well so that if people don't have enough time to spend going through the entire course, they can do section one and then leave it a couple of days and then come back to section two and progress through that way. And people found that really, really useful. It wasn't sort of, you know, shut down their throats. It was very much, it was very subtle and they can engage however they wanted to. And the other thing that we did is we used a range of different media to get our message across. So ranging from written to rich media to discussion forums, to activities and so forth. And the idea behind that was that it again shows the power of what Moodle is capable of doing and what the current existing tools that the university can do. We wanted to remind people, you don't have to buy in specialist tools or specialist software to do this. We've already got the expertise to support this and we've already got the tools in-house at Kent. So we kept the module up to date as well. We provided updates for the spring term including Gavin Essler's tips for virtual lectures. He's our chancellor by the way. And additional videos that we created in response to feedback from our students union as to how the first term had gone. So we kept it live and up to date. Jump back into my PowerPoint. Hopefully you can see that again. So we have over 1,755 staff enrolled including all academic staff, professional services colleagues and a range of staff from around the university. And that's why this figure is a little bit higher. And from the 19 short videos included in the course over 16,000 minutes of video have actually been viewed by our participants on there. We enabled mobile completion tracking on the module and we can see that the completion rate is around 70% of the teaching staff. So around 70% of the required activities have been completed. And we've also, as I mentioned, continuing to engage with the module throughout the academic year. So we didn't just create it and just release it. We've kept it up to date. And so we've kept it live by contributing to the discussion forums and by posting updates ahead of the spring term including Gavin Essel's video as you saw. So overall engagement has been very, very high. And it definitely far exceeds the levels of engagement we would have expected to see through our face-to-face activities in the pre-pandemic world. And we spotted an interesting trend with the video content in the course. So there's the 19 short videos in the Digital Enhanced Education course ranging from one minute all the way up to eight minutes. And we deliberately made the videos short and punchy so that they articulated their messages quite succinctly. What we found was, unlike longer recordings such as recorded lectures, these videos maintain their audience for almost the entire duration. So the return on investment, so to speak, was actually very high. As you can see in the graph on screen, the average minutes used compared to the video length is very, very high across those 19 videos. And so one of our recommendations as a team for colleagues thinking of doing something similar is keep your video content short, keep it snappy and keep it to the point because it keeps people engaged. They don't switch off and we were really delighted to see that these high levels of sustained engagement with these resources. The response to this course was overwhelmingly positive. Many of the comments being posted to the discussion forum itself within the course. Now that discussion forum was incredibly useful because it enabled people to introduce themselves and to share their concerns. And many commented that seeing each other's worries actually helped them to grapple with their own and realize that everyone was in a similar position. But from the team's point of view, when you can see people saying, I'm worried about how to keep my students engaged, I'm worried about technology failing at a critical moment. From a team point of view, we can sort of put that into a list of FAQs. So we can use that to inform future practice as well. Other comments indicated that the balance was just right, which we were really pleased about. And that the course was able to engage those who considered themselves to be beginners, whilst it simultaneously offered enough stimulation to attract those who were already well versed in the use of learning technologies. So using that level one, level two, level three approach. So if those present here are interested in adopting something similar at their own institutions, here's some of the recommendations based on what we've learned over the last year. Draw on existing expertise. So if you've got academic champions and power users involve them, involve them as much as you can. Academics tend to listen to other academics, which is fine, embrace that, use it to your advantage. If you've got people that are already doing something well, get them to put a video, put it in their own words, get them to talk to the other academics. Get this senior management buy-in as soon as you can. Get them behind your initiative, whatever it is. If it's something like this or if you're creating a whole suite of training, get senior management buy-in. Because it adds weight, it adds authority, it adds coolos to what you're trying to do. We benefited so much from having our VC and our deputy VC actively undertaking the course themselves and sharing their own experiences in the discussion forums. It was absolutely crucial to the success of this course. Get the balance right. So go back to that digital capabilities continuum and see where you sit on that as an institution. Make sure you're not pitching it too high or pitching it too low. It has to be just right. Find a structure that encompasses all the ability levels and it is difficult, but our recommendation on this level one, level two, level three is an approach that we think has worked and has been successful. Make it look good. Make it a positive experience. Show your users what can be accomplished with the tools that are there at their disposal. I like to think we create an experience that our academics then want to emulate in their own teaching. But be sympathetic to the challenges that your users face. Timing is a huge constraint at the moment or timing and workload, et cetera. So keep things simple. Make things bite-sized. Allow people to do things in their own time at their own pace. Don't make things more complicated than they need to be. And the final thing to remember is, don't fixate on resources like this, just being a sticking plaster for the pandemic. My view, and I think that the team would agree on this, this module is something that we want to use in future regardless of how we deliver our teaching, whether we're back to face-to-face or whether we have a blended mode of delivery. This isn't wasted effort. It's not a sticking plaster. There's a lot of value in what we've created here and it's something that can be used in the future. So it's all well and good putting something like this together. But the real challenge that you then have is to keep the discussions and engagement going once a resource like the digitally enhanced education course has been created and launched. So what I'm going to do is now hand over to Phil who will talk about how we've engaged our users and been able to build new communities of practice to keep the momentum and keep these conversations going. So over to you, Phil. Thanks, Dan. Okay, I'm just going to share my screen. You're able to share your screen, hopefully. Okay, hopefully you can all see this. Great stuff. Okay, Dan, if you could cover the chat, that would be fantastic. Will do. All right, okay, so yeah, thanks, Dan. I don't need to introduce myself again because we've done that already. So I will move on to the next slide. Okay, so in this session, in this part of the session, I'm going to introduce you to the digitally enhanced education webinar series. That's a bit of a mouthful. I'm going to share some of the most popular topics that we've had so far in our webinars. I'm going to talk about some of the resources and how they've helped to debunk a few myths along the way. And finally, I'm going to talk about some of the freely available resources that you can find in the webinar community. So why did we need a platform to share best practice on online teaching? I think Dan has covered a lot of this already, but universities have obviously had to rapidly move all their teaching online. Now, with the help of the digitally enhanced education module that Dan showed you, some of our academics have actually done this fairly easily and they're confident in using the software and they're familiar with the pedagogy of distance learning, which they've had to kind of upskill on very quickly. However, I think it's fair to say that others have found it a bit more difficult. Now, these gaps in academics, I don't like to say abilities, because that's not fair, but in their kind of their skill set at that time were highlighted in a recent student union survey conducted at the University of Kent. We received a 10 point bullet point feedback sheet. And on that sheet, it was recommended from the students or they kind of wanted to see an area where we had kind of a platform, if you like, where we could share examples where things have gone well for academics. Just to share practice, I guess. Now, we were quite happy when we saw this survey come out because we had literally just set this up. We had set up the first webinar and we were due to go. So the timing for us was pretty good. So we were quite happy with that. Now, our community, which I'm gonna show you in a moment, we think provides the perfect opportunity for those who are struggling with kind of getting their head around what they need to do, what they need to make it look like to learn from those who are already confident and effectively using the tools. Now, to maximize the sharing potential of this community, we decided to open it up to other universities all over the world and other public sector organizations. Now, at the University of Kent, we use Microsoft Teams for pretty much all of our online teaching at the moment. We found this platform to work really well for us. We found it to be effective. We had a few teething problems at the start, but I think most people now have kind of got their head around how to use it and things like that. Now, for the webinars themselves, at the start, we used just a simple Teams meeting to kind of run the webinar itself and we would invite people into the Teams meeting. Now, if they were kind of not at Kent, they would be invited in as a guest. After a while, so after the first couple of webinars, the numbers that were signing up to the series got so high and it kind of led me to have a few sleepless nights, shall we say, about us potentially crashing one of the webinars. So we decided to move over to Teams Live Events. Now, for those of you that don't know, there are some differences between the two. Teams Live Event essentially doesn't have the 300 or 350 kind of hard limit that a normal Teams meeting has. It's open to much wider, I think, over 25,000 people. So it kind of removes that worry of crashing the meeting. And don't get me wrong, that's a nice worry to have. But it does have its limitations and some of those limitations are that the people who are accessing the webinar, they can't turn on their camera and they can't unmute their microphone, which can be a shame because we like to kind of have people ask questions. But the good side is that they can still ask questions in the chat and the team are usually all there and we kind of help out and we ask questions that people put in the chat or we reply in the chat as we're doing here. So that's the way that we like to run it. And so far, fingers crossed, it's been going quite well. So this is as of yesterday, we currently have 1500 members on the community now, which we're really pleased about. 250 of those members are from Kent. And again, we're really pleased about that. Now, not all of those people are academics, some are professional service staff. And that's fine, that's good. We need everyone to kind of be accessing this so they can kind of pass on the message as well. And these people might be helping out academics as well. So it's really important that everyone has access to this. And we also have around 1,250 people from other organizations. Now, I've listed a range of the organizations here and you can see we have universities and we have a large number of the people from universities. We also have colleges, believe it or not, we have a few primary schools that have asked to join and that's great. We have some secondary schools and we've got a few people from, not a few, we've got quite a few now from just who have been joining as well. And there are lots of other people. But you'll also notice on here that we have the NHS and the London Metropolitan Police on there. And that might be a surprise to some. But these people have to train their staff and they have a lot of staff. So they've been really keen to get involved in this. Now, we got some really good feedback from the Met Police and they said to me that at one stage during the pandemic they had 30% of their 50,000 strong staff either off sick or self-isolating, which is crazy, that is a lot of people. And during that time, they were also having hundreds of new staff that were starting every day because of the recruitment drive that's been going on in the Met or across the whole policing sector, I guess. And all of these people need to have access to online training as well. Now, like us, they had to rapidly move all of their training content online. And the feedback they gave me, they said that the feedback, the webinar series, sorry, has really helped them to do that. It's been a really nice community, not necessarily to kind of upskill their staff, but to give their staff examples of lots of different things that they might not have thought about. And they said it's been invaluable and it was really nice to get that feedback. So, yes, I just wanted to kind of put that across as well. Now, regarding the webinar format itself, we decided to use lightning presentations of around 10 minutes during the webinars. We found that this works really well. The feedback from attendees has been really positive. I know we're asking a lot of our presenters to try and fit in the amount of content that they want to get in into 10 minutes. And sometimes we might sneak over that 10 minute cutoff, but in the whole, we're able to keep to that. And I think it's a really good way of doing it. Now, because we keep the presentation time to 10 minutes, it allows us to have eight presenters per webinar. So, and really nice range of ideas and topics that we're able to get across in each of the webinars. And again, we found that this format has been working really well. Now, after each of the presentations, we have question times. So we have a five minute buffer, okay? So sometimes we're gonna have someone that runs over by one or two minutes, but that means that then they only have three or four minutes for questions after that. And then what we'll do is we'll either ask the questions on people's behalf or if the tool that we're using at the time allows it, we'll ask people to unmute and they can ask themselves. And yeah, I think the format has been going really well. We've been getting good positive feedback, nothing negative so far. So yeah, we're really pleased. So just briefly, I want to talk about the webinar themes. So the first one we have is, well, I should say, we've had five webinars, including the one that we've got this Friday. So four really. And then the fifth one is happening on Friday. Two of these have been the pedagogy and practice when teaching online. Now this is more of a general theme, so it can include kind of all pedagogy really. So lots of different themes or projects or examples, things like that. And again, it gives us a nice range during the webinar. So we've had two of those so far. The more specific themes, so the electronic feedback and assessment and technology to develop inclusive learning practices, they've been more specific and we've just tried to target that specifically down that theme. And again, when we've done that, we've found that that's gone down really well. The last one on the list, what can we learn from distance learning? This one is going to be happening in April. So watch this space for that one. And we've got some great speakers for the event this Friday, but also the one in April as well. So please watch this space and join us if you can. We'd love to see you all there. So as I said, we've had two of the pedagogy and practice webinars so far, and we started off with these ones. So the numbers, well, they're still good, I think. We had between 140 to 160 people attendees at those webinars. Now, I've just given two examples here of some of the talks that we had. Now, I would just like to say that we have had 16 talks so far, so I couldn't fit all of these on here. And this is no way in to say that these are better than the others. They're all fantastic, but I just wanted to kind of give you an idea of what we were kind of talking about in those webinars. But if you wanted to look at all of them, then please go to the team and have a look in the previous webinar's channels and you'll find each of the recordings listed in there. For the next one, use electronic feedback and assessment to engage learners. We had 210 days, so the numbers were going up, which was great, this is what we wanted to do. And in this one, we decided to, as well as having six speakers that were gonna be talking about examples in their kind of their field, what they've been doing. We also managed to get two experts in the field as well to come along and give us a talk, not so much about what they've been doing, but more things that you should or not you, but everyone should be thinking about when designing an online module. So again, those were really popular talks and you can find both of those in the previous webinar channel. For this one, the technology to develop inclusive learning practices, this one was really popular and we were really pleased to see this. I think accessibility and inclusive practice is really coming to the forefront now. People are really kind of thinking about, I need to have this, I need to do this. And that's right, that's what we wanted. So yeah, we had over 500 attendees or 501. And again, there were eight different talks here, but I just wanted to just point out these ones. Now we were really lucky in this webinar that we had Microsoft come along and they gave us a live demo on how you can create accessible PowerPoints in live using their tools or using Office 365 tools. That's been a really popular talk. The other two here, we have our kind of our resident expert and general nice guy, Ben Watson. A lot of people know Ben, he's lovely. And he's the guy at Kent who really bangs the drum and he does a great job. And he said some really interesting things in this talk and things to think about. The last one I just wanted to show you were to talk about was Paul George. We had, we were very lucky in that Paul George is a student and he came along and he came and told us about his experiences of trying to learn education right the way through from growing up into higher education. Now Paul George is a blind student and that obviously brings a number of different difficulties. So I think his message there was really, really powerful. And that's a great talk. So please, if you haven't watched it already, I think it's definitely worth having a watch because that will certainly make you think about how you're gonna create your learning resources because I think you need to think about these things before you start creating rather than retrospectively. If you build it into the start then the whole process is much easier. So we have recorded every webinar so far and we've broken up all of the talks into separate links for ease of access. Now believe it or not, this does take quite a lot of time when you're putting kind of intro and outro videos and things like that in there. But I'm happy to do it as the feedback has been great. So yeah, your feedback kind of motivates us to keep going. So if you're watching these and you have seen it then please let us know what you like or what you don't like. But the talks, so the recordings are being used well. So we've had 150 hours of recordings watched so far and given that we've only had four webinars, I don't think that's too bad. We've had 1,363 views on the recordings as well. Now in Panopto or Kent Player as it's also known for us we have the ability to drill down into usage and I thought it's just interesting to say this but the average viewing time for all of these recordings is around seven minutes. And that seven minute marker, that seems to be kind of a golden point to think about when you're creating videos. Okay, that's seven minutes, that really does I think capture that attention span. So yeah, I just wanted to put that in there. So now moving, I'm gonna talk about some of the myths around students lecture-watching habits. Now these myths have been addressed or debunked if you like as a result of one academic's research. Now this academic Laura Bailey and she's from the School of English she teaches in English and linguistics language. Now Laura at off of her own back she surveyed her students. I think she had just over a hundred students and she surveyed them during one of her online sessions with them and she had a really good response rate from the students. She had 82 students who gave feedback on how they watch lecture videos if you like online. Now some of the myths addressed here and these are myths that I think I've heard academics coming to me saying and that is that students they don't watch the whole video and that can be really frustrating for the academics or the people that are making the videos that they're not watching all of it. And another one I think most people will kind of agree with this one is captions at the moment is very much an in thing. And some academics are saying, look I just don't have time to edit these captions. So like I think then students aren't watching them so I'm not gonna invest my time in watching those. Now I'm not gonna get onto whether you should or whether you shouldn't be. That's another day but I think that was just one point that I wanted to make. So when I go on to the next slide I've included just a few of the findings here but if you watch the recording on the previous video I included a link just there. You'll be able to see all of the results. So interestingly 50% so 41 of the 82 students said that they did use the captions and some even commented in an optional text box at the end of the survey that they relied on these captions for their learning. I think that's really interesting to know. And kind of we've published, we've published sized these findings in our team and some academics have gone, wow, okay maybe I need to rethink where I kind of put my time into this. And I just thought that was a really interesting finding. Now the middle stat was not really a huge surprise given that a lot of academics release recordings on a weekly basis. But I would say I think it is nice to see that students do watch the recordings when they become available and they don't leave them and then binge watch them closer to the assessment. Now we don't know yet if they do also then binge watch them but it's nice to know that they certainly watch them as they're released. I think it was also interesting to see that 82% of students said that they watched all of the recording in one go rather than skipping to different parts. And again, this is something which we've put into the community and we've been promoting this. So I think and some people are thinking, oh, wow, okay. Well, that's good. Now, as you saw earlier, as I mentioned earlier in Penocto, this is something we can check. Okay, so we can check to see if students are watching the whole video. And this is something that we plan to do as I have just got ethical approval to roll this survey out on a larger scale at the university. So I now have four schools or two academic divisions have agreed to survey their stage one students. So we're gonna go for two modules in each school. So I think it's eight different modules with the students. So we're gonna have a really nice large data set on this. So watch this space for the next recording as well. So onto the next one, one of the topics that has attracted quite a lot of interest and I'm guessing that many of you might have seen this one already is the camera on camera off question. Now, there's a link just here to the blog article that I'm gonna be talking about. And again, with this one, academics are often saying to me how frustrating it is when students don't turn their cameras on. Okay, as seeing students faces when they're giving the lecture helps the lecturers see natural cues in the students faces as to whether they understand the topic or the concept. Okay, and you know, I used to teach you a little bit in sports science and I can completely get that. I completely understand when you're talking about something if you can't see anyone's faces and no one's contributing to the chat, you just think, what, do people understand or not? But what I will say is that there are a number of reasons why students might not turn their cameras on and we need to remember that, okay? So, and this blog post puts forward a number of good reasons. So I'd encourage you to have a look at that. So some of those examples, there might be their home environment might not be something that they wish to share with the group. Okay, so they may have children or they may have little brothers or sisters running around that they don't want to be shown online and we have to respect that. Or they may not even have a webcam or the internet might not be strong enough for them to support having the webcam on, okay? So there are reasons. And so I just wanted to show this one. So yeah, just follow the link and you can watch, you can read all of the reasons there. Now, some of the academics who have read this is we've had quite a few people commenting on this one. They've said that they felt more relaxed about this whole issue after reading that blog post. So I think it's definitely worth promoting that and just telling people, look, you're not the only one that this happens to. It does happen to everyone. What I will say is we have had some academics who we have, I've talked about one academic I was speaking to yesterday. He was saying that in his module none of his students turn his camera on. However, recently he's opened up his midterm feedback kind of questionnaire on his Moodle module and he's had a fantastic response rate. So that obviously suggests that the students are actually engaging that they're taking time to give some feedback on their module. Okay, so I think these are all important messages. So not much longer, I promise. So I just want to finish today by telling you about our range of freely available resources. Now we have a number of resources, not just these ones, which you can see here. And one of them you might spot Dan's video. They're creating engaging videos for teaching which was placed in the module that Dan was showing you earlier. Okay, we've also shared this in the team so other people can kind of, they can learn from it as well. Okay, now academics, everyone in the community have been saying how much they appreciate these videos and how useful they're finding them. Some members are even sharing them internally in their institutions or their organizations. And that's absolutely fine. If you wanted to do that, then please do. But what I will say is we've actively been creating these videos after seeing either comments in the webinars that we've been running or comments on the community which we've created. So I think that actually goes a long way in that people see that we are interacting with the community and we're responding to it by trying to create more resources. So it works for our academics but hopefully other people can benefit from that as well. And finally, and this really is finally, what I would just like to say is we have our next webinar. It's gonna be this Friday. Okay, and that's the pedagogy in practice when teaching online theme. So we have a range of different topics in there. As we said, colleagues from outside of the University of Kent are very welcome to join us. So please feel free to circulate the link and if you think your colleagues would as well. You can do that by clicking on the link in the slides just here if you haven't already and then I will add you to the Microsoft team link to the series and you can access all of these resources. Now, if you would like to present at a future event we would love to have you. It'd be really nice to see some people here giving some talks. Please complete the form via the link at the bottom and I will be in touch. That's me. Thank you very much. Thanks, Phil. If I just reshare my screen because I had a couple of final slides as well as our contact details and things, which if everyone's happy for me to share that, I will do that now. I had a, I think we've got a little bit of time for discussion. Again, once again, thank you to everyone who has attended this session. There's been some really good discussion in the meeting chat. So it's nice to see that other institutions are doing similar things. I don't know if anyone wants to chip in with how your own institutions have responded to these challenges around supporting your staff throughout the pandemic. I've heard a number of colleagues at different institutions say that they've done something similar. They've had run modules. They've had mandatory training where anyone wants to chip in. Phil, if you keep an eye on the chat because I can't actually see the chat on my screen. Yeah, no problem. I think whilst, if anyone whilst people are thinking whether they want to pitch in, from our point of view, it's definitely been a learning curve. When we first went into lockdown a year ago now, it seems like such a long time ago. I think it's fair to say that that spotlight has suddenly turned on us as a team. And we went from being, oh, what's a learning technologist? What do you guys do to everyone knowing who we were and exactly what our role was? So in terms of the visibility of the team, it's been great, but it was quite highly pressured in that we've suddenly had to have all the answers. And I don't think we do have all the answers. But what we've found is that by creating these resources for academic colleagues and by running the events that Phil's discussed, we're learning more and more about the best ways to support staff and what the issues are. And so it's an evolving iterative process, which I find particularly useful. Phil, do we have any questions there at all? Or just stunned silence, maybe. We don't have anything at the moment, no. Okay, that's fine. I think I'll pick up on this second question I've got here as well, is just to reiterate, I genuinely think that initiatives like the Digital Enhanced Education course and the Digital Enhanced Education webinars will have a life of their own after the pandemic in the post-pandemic world, whatever that will look like. I don't think we're ever gonna go back to face-to-face teaching because I think what we've demonstrated in the past year is whether we like it or not, the world didn't end when we went online. There is a whole continuum of quality out there and I think students would have a lot of input on this, but I think we've demonstrated that it is possible to change quite rapidly. And that the support that we provide that we've generated over the last year can be reused and re-performed. So I think that's definitely a good thing. Dan, we do have a question from Fiona, if that's okay. Yeah, sure. She's asked, was the DEE course compulsory for faculty staff? That's a very good question. Compulsory is a dirty word at the University of Kent for some reason. There's so many things that we would like to make mandatory but we've been unable to do. So the short answer is no, it wasn't. But what we did have is senior managers who very, very strongly encouraged that people would engage with it. So we got buy-in not just from our Vice-Chancellor and our Deputy Vice-Chancellor but also through our divisional directors of education. So the sort of figureheads for each disciplinary area collectively all said, you need to do this. Can't force you to do it, but we think that this is such a good resource. You should spend an hour, two hours, whatever doing this course, even if you do just the level one stuff. So whilst we weren't able to make it mandatory for all sorts of reasons, we certainly were able to get far more buy-in than any initiative that we've ever run at the university previously. So yeah, I think that probably answers your question. No, it wasn't mandatory, but we had far more buy-in than we've ever had with anything else. We've got one more question from Paul as well, if that's okay. Yeah, sure. So Paul Driver has asked, are you providing training for learning technologists as well? Many don't have teaching experience or deep knowledge of pedagogy, often coming from more tech learning backgrounds. It's a very good question. It goes back to that question of what is a learning technologist? What is the skill set of a learning technologist? It's safe to say within our e-learning team, out of the six of us, we've all got different strengths and we've all got different flavors, so to speak. And we've all got different areas of interest from teaching backgrounds all the way to technical backgrounds. And so I think the mix of our team works to our strengths because we're able to play on that and bring people in to play to their particular strengths. I think there is a gap there in the sector where how do we train our learning technologists? Because often, learning technologists may come in with a technical background but might not have that pedagogic side. I can certainly say, Ken, the broader initiatives are that we try and get our team to do things like SEMOL. We try and get members of our team to do things like fellowship with the Higher Education Academy where they reflect on their experiences in learning and teaching. But as a sector, yeah, I think there's a definite gap there. Again, I don't know if that answers your question, Paul. Sorry. Any other questions, Phil? I think we've got one minute. I don't think so. Let's start the final slide in our contact details. Just to obviously thank Phil for his brilliant contributions to this and to also thank everyone for coming along to this session today and to the broader team at the university for pulling all of this together. It hasn't been easy. I think it's probably been one of the most rewarding experiences from a professional point of view of being involved in this. So yeah, please do get in touch if you have any questions and thanks again to Debbie for hosting us. But you're very welcome. Thank you very much, Dan. Thank you, Phil, for that. That was really, really good. Thank you so much. Really, really grateful for you giving up your time to do these webinars for us. And obviously, thank you to everybody to come along as well. I popped the link into the events page in there for you because we'll be advertising any future CPD webinars that we'll have on there as well. But yeah, that was really great. I didn't know if you want to send me your slides afterwards and I can make those available to people because obviously you were sharing a screen, weren't you? But... Of course, yeah, I will send the slides over. That's great. And we'll also make the recording available as well. But yeah, thank you very much, everyone. And yeah, have a good rest of the week. Thanks, everyone. Take care, everyone. Thank you. Bye.