 OK. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Adele Healy. I'm the Head of School of Health and Science in the Dock Institute of Technology, and I'd like to start by introducing the project team. My name is Akin Lluwak, and I'm from IT Sligo. I'm Ronan Brif from the Dock IT Sligo. I'm Dina Brazzel. I'm from IT Cardiff. You've a hard day of working with my team. Why are you worried about it in the project? OK. So, this project is looking at practical assessment in the science and health disciplines, and as you can see from my colleagues here today, this project involves four institutes of technology. Institutes of technology place a major emphasis on practical skills, particularly in the science and health disciplines. I'd just like to say that some of my colleagues can't be here today, again because of exam boards, but I think we have a good representation from the project team, and we're actually going to take a team approach and a part in the pun in that everyone is going to speak very briefly here this morning, OK? So, what is the project about? I suppose really, as I said, the practical element of science and health programmes is very important. The four institutes that are involved, the four schools that are involved, all have a very similar profile in that they provide a range of programmes in both the applied science and in the health discipline. And when we talk about health, we're talking about nursing, mid or free sports science. When we talk about applied science, we're talking about pharmaceutical science, bioscience, environmental science, veterinary nursing. So, a very broad sweep of programmes, but the common link being that they all have a practical component. So, I suppose our first question is, how can practical classes be designed to reduce over-assessment, develop essential knowledge skills and competence, and secondly then, how can we use digital technologies to promote assessment for learning in practical settings? The project is made up of a very multidisciplinary team. Here today we have representatives at head of school level teaching and learning units and lecturers who are involved in the front line delivery within our four schools. We have a number of key stakeholders. We have the project team. We have the academic teams within the four colleges that are going to be involved in the project as it progresses. The senior management team, the heads of school in the four colleges are leading the project. We also have close links with industry partners with our learning and teaching units, with our library and our IT departments, and also very importantly, the students play a key part in this project, and we'll explain that to you to the presentation as to where we listen to the student voice. There's three phases to the project. We essentially commenced the project in January, and I suppose we have nearly completed phase one already, and today we're going to talk about that in some more detail. So essentially the first phase was essentially to look at what are we doing at the moment, what's going on in the literature, what's the best practice out there. So we'll tell you a little bit this afternoon about the literature review, which is giving us information about the international best practice in this field. As I said, the student voice is very important. So our interaction with students and how we've surveyed students will give you some insight into that also. A big part of this is establishing a peer network of academics in the four institutes who are all involved in delivering practical programmes in science and health. So a big part of the initial phase of the project has been to bring all of those staff together, essentially to establish the network. And in the next phase of the project, we will be involving our industry partners in a more significant manner. The next phase of the project that we will enter into starting in semester is to then identify, on the basis of the output from phase one, we'll have identified technologies which we want to evaluate and pilot across the four colleges, and we'll evaluate that and essentially assess their impact. And in the final phase of the project then, we will further disseminate the learnings for the project to the wider community, both nationally and internationally. So what we've done so far is we've established the governance of the project. We set up a project steering committee which is made up of all of the different stakeholders that I mentioned to you there, and we have matched on a regular basis, both using face-to-face meetings and also using virtual means such as Skype. We've established a student advisory committee which is essentially a group of students in each of the four colleges who are going to form the major, I suppose, student voice that will inform the project. We've established a peer network of academics who are going to be the people who are going to be evaluating the technologies in the next phase of the project. We've approximately between six to 10 academics identified across the four institute technology. What's significant about this is that they're from a wide range of disciplines, both the science and the health side, and that's a really important, I think, output from the project. We have identified which employers or industry we want to liaise with, and the next phase of the project will be to speak with them in a more detailed manner. And we've carried out a baseline report looking at what is the practical assessment techniques already ongoing in the four colleges. We've carried out a detailed review of best practices and practical assessment in the science and health disciplines, and my colleague Ronan will talk about that in a few minutes. We've carried out student surveys in two of the four schools, IT Sligo and Dundawg Industry Technology, and Akin will talk about that in a few minutes. We got ethical approval to carry out those surveys and the surveys will be carried out in the other two partners in the autumn. We have scoped out the industry survey and we plan to have a project workshop next Monday, which is something that we haven't envisaged, but it's, we think, a very good output of the project that has developed as we've evaluated our progress over the last few months. So I'm going to hand over to Akin who will talk about the student survey now. Okay, thanks. As Idel has already said, student voice is extremely important in this project. So we got ethical approver in two of the IOTs in Dundawg and IT Sligo, and the survey is a combination of TIC and open-handed questions. What we did was to pilot, was first of all to pilot the survey with the student representative before implementation. Sligo, IT and Dundawg, IT, we have already done ours, the other colleges we do theirs in September. We decided to go for the paper survey so that we can get a very good success rate in student feeling it. We went into their classes to do all of these things, and we had 55% success rate. The next thing that we want to do is just to go ahead and do it in the other ITs. Yeah, I'm going to hand you over to Rene and to you. Thanks, Akin. So, as Idel mentioned, we really wanted to engage with the literature to see what was there, try to identify best practice that would have an evidence-based solution moving forward. As we did, we really focused on assessment, but what we also found was that the format and the design of these practical sessions are critically important. We need to create a powerful learning environment, essentially, in that practical sessions, and try and migrate from an expository style, which is quite uniform in many practical settings, to a more inquiry-based one. I really like this quote from Gunston and Champagne. It's nearly 30 years old, but mine's on as well as hands-on with regards to the design of these strategies. With regards to assessment and feedback, we tried to look at exploring alternatives to the kind of uniform ways that are in place. We wanted to try and, even with feedback, introduce feedback, review time slots and dialogue, create dialogue as Elizabeth Carnell has highly recommended. So, the small boxes in the middle and the bottom row are just some areas we've identified. For example, pre-practical preparation, getting people prepared for these practical sessions, putting them in context, making sure they're aware why a practical session is occurring and why it's being performed in such a particular way. Creating that in combination with quizzes and so on, we could do those to get them prepared coming in rather than just reading text. Video was one thing we really wanted to incorporate, and the literature backs that up. That customized videos before, during, and even after the laboratory or clinical skills session can be very beneficial for students. The literature does recommend putting in virtual labs, but really it's complementing the system. And our student engagement systems back that up, or sessions, back that up, the students don't really want virtual labs on their own. They really see them as a complementary resource to the real thing. The literature highlights practical reporting that we need to reduce over assessment and change the way that practical reports are written. Instead of the normal headings that we ask questions in the headings, what can you claim? What evidence do you have to support this that makes the students think about what they have to process in the report rather than introduction method results, discussion, so on? The literature would highlight self-peer, exemplar assessment activities to try and develop metacognitive development, the use of electronic reporting, so e-portfolios and ELN or electronic lab notebooks instead of the normal paper-based systems. And finally, one other element we came across quite often is this introduction of digital badges to recognize practical skills both in science laboratories, but also in clinical skills settings that would recognize the competencies that have gained. So I really like that quote that a lot of the displays use earn, issue and display. So I tried to just get some thematic areas to show you that from quizzes, video, engagement and collaboration, practical clinical skills and electronic reporting and feedback, from the student engagement sessions we've had and from the literature, we've been able to identify quite a lot of technology tools that we can implement to try and support those thematic areas there. So I'd just like to pass over to Dina, my colleague. Good afternoon. Rhona, myself and Akim, we're representing the academics in this programme, so it's wonderful to have management supporting us. So because Idel is management, she actually, I persuaded her, the team we persuaded her to present at edtech, which was held last week. And for Akim, Rhona and I, we have a very high teaching load and we can have, some of the ALs would have 18 hours contact, so we would have about 16 because we're a bit more senior. However, we don't have opportunities to meet other colleagues and often in our own institutions, we may not know what's going on. So this was a fantastic opportunity to see what was happening and to see what the edtech people were talking about. And we had to submit an abstract and particular talks were chosen, so it wasn't a given that we would be allowed to represent our project. So Idel was able to explain to the gathered group what exactly we were trying to do and we got fantastic feedback from other people and we just had made informal linkages. So we are able to now link in with other projects that are available. The digital champions, for example, we know exactly who the people are, we're on first name terms with them and I think it's only been absolutely inspiring for us all. So I'm now going to hand over to our teaching and learning colleagues. So I suppose what's happening next Monday is a project workshop. Ronan and Dina have kind of told you what you've done so far. We've identified, I suppose, what's out there in the literature. We've carried out a survey. We've identified which staff now want to be involved in evaluating the technologies going forward. So we thought it would be very useful to bring everyone together before the summer to see where are we going now so that it would be very much informed decision for the next phase of the project. I should have mentioned earlier that Dr Michael Ciri, XDIT and now the University of Edinburgh has become part of the project in an advisory capacity. So in this project workshop next week we're going to have all of the academics, the peer network are coming together, all of the students from the four colleges are coming together. We're going to have presentations on the literature review that Ronan has just given to you there and the academics who are in the front line who are going to be, I suppose, evaluating these technologies going forward are all going to give a short presentation. We're calling it stories from the front line. Michael is going to give a keynote talk on his area of expertise and we're going to finish up then with a breakout session or a group session which will involve both the academics and the students together talking about what's the learning so far in the project and where is the project going. So that will bring us nicely into phase two. Now I'm going to hand over to Nula. Sorry. Thank you. So I'm just going to look at two elements around national impact and evaluation. In terms of national impact, I suppose really already we're seeing a national impact. We've got four institutes of technology involved in this project that are geographically diverse. They're identifying and sharing best practice, et cetera. We see this as being an opportunity to develop something that is scalable and that can be shared across the other institutes of technology but also across higher education in general. You can see that we have, again, the positive idea of having these cross-disciplinary approaches and as somebody mentioned, reducing that silo effect that can even happen within a school of science because there are so many different areas involved. Listen to the student voice. I think we've shown evidence already. It's not just a token gesture. We have involved students from the very start through engagement sessions, through the survey and also through the groups that we have set up to inform the project. And in terms of framework, we do see this as a very positive approach, having a combination of a discipline area, learning, teaching, industry, et cetera. So we do see it as a potential model for future projects similar to this. In terms of evaluation, we were very strong at the start that we didn't see evaluation as a bolt-on exercise. We see it as, you know, we want to take a developmental approach and there are examples already within the project of where we've adapted in order, because we're meeting the needs that we've been informed about. So, for example, the student survey is one of those. We hadn't intended to do as an extensive survey as has been undertaken. However, we see it being really positive in that the amount of data we will be collecting, particularly about how students use technology currently across the four institutes. The other one is the workshop, which was mentioned. Again, that has become a very much a collaborative approach between students, between all of the partners. In addition, we were delighted to get Dr Michael Sirio, who was published in this area, who was published in terms of the use of technology, and who was published particularly in terms of adapting practical teaching sessions. And finally, of course, we have our literature review, which is informing the process. And very finally, I know time is nearly up, so I will be really racing. Just in terms of how do we sustain it, this has been very important to us from the get-go. We never wanted simply to have little isolated pockets of innovation that didn't really go any further. So the top-down and bottom-up approach led by the head of school, but working very much, taking advantage of activities that were going on in the ground, things lecturers were doing, are key to embedding good practice for us. We have a strong collaborative relationship, and we're collaborating and engaging in continual dialogue with all stakeholders, and that is very important. The fact that we're using a strong evidence base and we're building on existing good practice rather than reinventing the wheel, hopefully will make the project more sustainable. We also have a strong focus and building capacity, both among staff, among those of us who are involved from the non-lecturing sides, but also among students in developing assessment literacy. And within all the institutions involved, we have strong established CPD in the area of learning and teaching, which has already gone a long way to building capacity. We're also involved in other projects, other enhancement projects that are related to this, and there's been huge capacity built from them, which we're harnessing, so we're trying to harness what's there to move forward. As Nula mentioned, the reflection and evaluation is ongoing, and again, hopefully that will help to make this sustainable. And we are going to, at a wider level, we are already beginning to disseminate and to engage more widely with the wider sector. So just to acknowledge the project team and all the institutions, as Adele mentioned, not everyone can be here today, but they're with us in spirit. So we hope that this is the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end, and thanks very much for listening to us.