 My name is Nonzaria and I'm Matt from disability services at Monash Uni. We're here to present a recommending alternative arrangements for assessment information using Moodle. So we'd like to talk about the terminology we'll be using first. So at Monash courses, when we talk about courses, we're talking about the degree that the students are studying in. So we've changed it to units, which when we talk about in Moodle. In Monash Moodle, we talk in units when we'll be using a lot of AAA has the acronym, which is for alternative arrangements for assessment. Assessment can be anything from online quizzes to class tests to an assignment. So at Monash University, we have about 70,000 students enrolled. 1,500 of those students are registered with disability support services. 888 students that are registered with that out of the 1,500 requires AAA in Moodle. And there are about 1,255 units with AAA data in Moodle. Can I just add? Yeah, sorry. I'll just add there too that of those 1,255 units, they involved the staff who could access those units were about 4,000 teaching staff. Okay, so why do we need this? The difficulties for the disability services is with such a large organisation, a large number of units, different forms of organisation in the faculties who's responsible for arranging which kinds of alternative assessments. Our problem has been, the challenge for us has been to be able to attract our students' enrolments to determine who are the relevant staff associated with those units that they're enrolled in, determine when internal assessments are being run in each of those units so that we can then deliver the timely advice on the alternative arrangements that need to be put in place for those assessments. So the way we've been doing that really is when the student registers with us, we provide them with a support letter which basically outlines their alternative arrangements and it's their responsibility to pass that letter on to the relevant academic staff or administrative staff who have to put those things in place for them. So we have another, in some faculties we provide ad hoc lists of students where the AAAs are administered centrally. But to give you an example of how it works at the moment, say Kim is a student who registers in week two of semester, Matt is, that's me to draft a letter which confirms that Kim's registered and generally supported for flexible deadlines, extra time in written assessments and especially exams. Kim must distribute the letter in advance on a case-by-case basis to faculty staff as required. There's a wait list for support letters, Kim is nervous about approaching faculty staff and hopes not to need any extra time in class tests. So eventually Kim uses that letter, oh thanks not, eventually, so Kim's hesitant to use the letter. She eventually uses the letter to make a late request or he to a teacher for class tests but because the request's late the test needs to be delayed to allow time for those AAAs to be put in place. The teacher then contacts me later on to ask why they were not advised earlier that they had a student in their class that was registered and needed alternative arrangements. The registration is due to expire at the end of the semester and a new letter will be required if Kim is to re-register. So the aims of developing this project was to address some of the problems with that process. The urgency was an issue in that if we could get instant AAA advice direct to the target that's going to avoid those delays. The capacity, if staff are getting the information early then their capacity to manage it in a timely manner is improved. The efficiency is improved by eliminating redundancies in our processes whereby we're taking information and repeating it in other formats or other systems. In a letter, for example. The responsibility is currently in the old system on the student so with a new way of doing it in Myrtle we could perhaps lift the responsibility from students to additional burden on them to distribute information. I mean they've come to us, they've told us their information why should they then have to go throughout the university repeating themselves. Simplification, the advice to students can be a lot simpler the process in all the faculties is the same. And there's also potential, we're hoping that the information being in faculty automatically enables the faculty to use it for other purposes potentially for example students who are involved in academic progress proceedings. It's important for the committee to know whether or not they're registered. The big issue with getting this up and running was I guess the most complex issue was the privacy issues. This is just an example of a risk management plan for probably the last privacy hurdle that we looked at which was basically about, we were talking about 4,000 staff potentially accessing this information and some of them don't need it. But we have a number of protective factors in place and basically the ultimate one of course is that students are able to elect to go with the old method if they had their own privacy concerns. Alright, so how does the system work? So the students still have to register with disability support services and once they've confirmed and registered disability support services then puts it in our in the Monash student database called Calista. We also have another system called Monash Reporting System and the central examinations unit where the Calista view of the information goes to those two departments if you like and we also put it in Moodle. So there is a 24-hour link every day to update between the Calista and Moodle. And we also like to acknowledge that the code, the development of the code behind this was through our third party provider Blackboard. So what does the alternative assessment info report looks like in Moodle? When you go to your administration to your unit and you go to the administration blog there is in the reports there is an alternative assessment info. You click on that and this view comes up. We have grayed out the names of the students due to privacy reasons. So some of the things that are in the columns that you see I know it's a bit too small so I'll just quickly tell you. You have student ID, you have the name, the email address, the staff, the disability advisor responsible for the student, when the expiry would, the expiration of the registration and things like whether a support letter is available and what are the alternative arrangements for the students. So we also have a link to the privacy policy right at the top in blue and we also have a link to guidelines for academics to teach them how to use this report and the report can also be downloaded to Excel or CSV. So some of the deliverables from the project included, included a guide to how to use the report like I mentioned previously. So these are just screenshots of it. It's about a six page report I think. And we also created a quick video to help academics quickly understand how to use the report. So it's about a two minute video I think. So we also obviously communicated to the staff and students about the AAA information that's available in Moodle. So things like the monash inside the article, which is a weekly newsletter at Monash. We emailed all the staff that had a AAA student. We informed the Moodle administrators, sorry. We informed the Moodle administrators and also informed all the students that are registered with DSS. Okay, so how does the new process work? Now this student comes to register with us and as soon as we put our information into the student database, it's within 24 hours fed straight through to Moodle and the academics staff can access that information. And they could then potentially be contacting those students. So the other way around where we had the student who was responsible for contacting the staff, now there's potential for the staff to have information in advance and potentially contact those students. So look, just give you a quick case study of how that might look. Brinn registers in week two of semester for similar reasons as Kim. Within a few days Kim receives an email from a teacher noting their registration status and encouraging Brinn to contact if they can be of any assistance. For example, by giving earlier notice of essay topics. Later the lecturer blind copies an email list of registered students in the unit requesting that if any of them need adjustments in a forthcoming class test they should reply to confirm by a certain date. Next semester Brinn's registration is renewed and Brinn knows that the relevant faculty staff can confirm the details almost immediately. Brinn is developing confidence about approaching new teachers for assistance. So there's obvious benefits for the students and for the staff for disability services there's... Oops, where is that? Yes, so thank you. For disability services it means we're spending less time writing letters and more time value-adding potentially spending more time liaising directly with either students or staff. Our services are also more visible throughout the university and better incorporated into the mainstream as part of a community development aspect I suppose that the alternative arrangements are seen more as a core part of the university business more than they have been previously. So we did a survey to both staff and students in semester one this year. So 117 students completed the survey. We asked them if they're aware that the academics now have access almost immediate access to triple information middle and more than half said yes. Has this improved their student experience at Monash? More than half said yes. And we also asked how has the student experience improved? So majority of them felt like it's less stressful and have made their life easier which is what we want to hear. And then they also find that it's easier to arrange triple A with their teaching staff or get an extension to their assessments. So we also surveyed the staff and more than half said that they are aware that triple A information is now available in Moodle. And out of the percentage that said yes to the earlier question 71% said that the information is useful and the information has provided some assistance with their teaching. And it's good to know that 71% of them said that they no longer require support letter from DSS which benefits both the staff and DSS rather than continuing communicating requiring the letter. So some of the future improvements we like to see from this we're looking at an optional automatic email notification to teaching staff that there is a change in the triple A information report in Moodle. We also like to put in the contact number for the disability advisor. There has been requests to identify the campus of where the students are currently enrolled in and we also like to be able to give information about the students' conditions and impacts through a support letter to be linked from the report. So thank you for your attention. Do you have any questions? Hi, thank you very much. That was a really illuminating presentation. Are you considering automating those letters one day in the future when the academics consent or would that defeat the purpose of this model of making that human contact? Can you clarify? So when you put up your second process map, you put the information into the spreadsheet, that syncs with Moodle and so on, it then goes to the academics can see that information and contact the student. At any stage in the future do you want that contact to be automated? As soon as the student's information goes in, that letter is sent? I think maybe you're... We're talking about two different types of letter, I think. The letter that this is replacing is one which the disability services drafted and provided gave to the student to give to the academic. So, yeah, that can still happen and will happen for some students where more complex information, if you like, about disability and impacts might actually help in the teaching process. Most of the letters we've been providing haven't needed that info, but where we want to pass that information on, we want to have a link in the report so that the academic can see, oh, there is a letter associated with this student. Let's click on it and have a look at it. Oh, great. Yeah, nice repository. How much of this is code that you've added or had written and is that available? The code is written by Blackboard, so we can talk about whether it's available. It's not a plug-in, it's a code for Monash Moodle. Thank you for your time. Thank you.