 Welch chi i gael i ddweud y ffordd am y sefydliadau, o ddechrau i'r L-C. Rwy'n ddweud i ddweud Rodg Curran, Kate Soper a Emily Webb i gael i'n ddweud, Felly maen nhw wedi bod yn meddylu'r phoedd yw hyffredig hon nhw. Rydyn ni'n gweithio bod ymlaen. Rydyn ni'n dod yn gyntaf gweithio. Rydyn ni'n meddylu'r gweithio bod roedd hynny, Rodg Curran. Rydyn ni ar y clywedfall yn gweithio, lei, Fy yw'r gweithio. Roeddwn ni'n gyfod y ddech工 i'r awr, a gyrwch yn ddigonodd, yn ddigonodd, yn gyfynodd, ac gydwch yn gweithio. Yn cyflawni'n amlwg, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio, a'r gweithio'n gweithio, a'r gweithio'n gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio fel y dweud resistanceol. Rwy'n tynnu gweithio'n gweithio'n ddweud sut ymlaen o'r projag. Mae'n gweithio'n ddigonodd yn y cyflogion, argynni'n gweithio ar gyfer YouTube, while I do most of the talking this afternoon. So, I think I'd probably better start by giving you a tiny bit of background to our institution, because that's quite important in the context of the stories that we've got to tell. Manchester Met is a large post-92 university, we've got about 38,000 students, we've got a very diverse student cohort. I've got a list of stats there, I'm not going to go through those, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that we've got a lot of students who live locally at home, who come from low participation neighbourhoods, and maybe the first person in their family who are coming to university. So, other than in their university experience, they haven't got a deep network of support for their learning outside of the institution. Before the COVID pandemic happened, I would have described this as a primarily blended learning type of delivery, but the significant focus of our provision is on teaching face-to-face, enhanced somewhat by our virtual learning environment to different degrees across the institution. In response to the pandemic, we perhaps were a little atypical in that we did a massive shift in our curriculum structure, and we moved to a block delivery model. That block delivery model had students studying one 30 credit unit at a time, or two 15 credit units at a time if that was the structure of their course, over a six-week block with an assessment week at the end, before a little break, and then moving on to a second block of teaching. So, they had four individual blocks of teaching over the academic year, but only studying one unit at a time in the majority of cases. The part of our preparation over the summer before the start of the academic year, we rapidly rolled out Microsoft Teams and integrated it into our Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. Part of our support mechanism was an attempt to try and divide up all of the cohorts, regardless of their size, into smaller groups of 15 to 25 students with a specified tutor to basically to guide them through their six weeks of study. That was an aspirational thing. It didn't always happen across the institution. In preparation for the learning design, we encouraged our teaching colleagues to make use of a learning spaces framework to design their online delivery. I won't say too much of that. There's a whole kind of session presentation on that by itself, but in the context of this presentation, we encouraged staff to think about making use of a live teaching space like we're engaging in now, an instructional space for the students, activities in the Moodle area, a collaboration space making use of the channel spaces in Microsoft Teams, and where the COVID rules allowed it to transition into the use of the physical campus space wherever that was possible. That was very difficult for colleagues to predict, unfortunately, as I'm sure most of you are aware. At Manchester Met, we've been undertaking an annual internal student survey, what we refer to as the ISS, every year for the last approximately 15 years. It's a very simple survey with a series of Leica scale questions, with, importantly, a set of paired free text response questions that students can tell us what the best thing about their courses are and what things are most in need of improvement. For the 2021 academic year, we tweaked that survey slightly to include more free text questions about the sorts of things that they were experiencing during that year of study. In December 2020, we had 6,000 students responded to the survey and left about 47,000 free text comments. Our analysis that we're talking about today focused on one pair of free text questions in response to the question, what have you enjoyed or valued most from online activities and what have you found most difficult about online activities? In response to those particular questions, we had a total of just over 3,200 comments split between about 1,300 that were things that students have enjoyed or valued and nearly 2,000 that they had found difficult. This is sort of a 40-60 split in terms of the ratio of those responses. We've really immersed ourselves deeply in the comments that we received from students and we developed a couple of coding frameworks, one for the things that students enjoyed or valued, split into sort of four main categories, five main categories with a finer level of resolution of specific themes when each of those particular categories. That coding framework has allowed us to look at the frequency at which particular comments repeat throughout the student data set that we've explored. We're able to see which things are most important, which things are most prevalent across those students who've responded to the data. We've got one for it enjoyed or valued and one for the difficulties that students have experienced. What that's allowed us to do at the top level looking at the categories is we've been able to look at the frequency of comments that fit into particular categories and we've used these radar diagrams to give us a simple comparison. The top level narrative that we've got from that is that positive experiences of live teaching sessions and self-paced asynchronous activities are what seem to contribute the most to a general positive experience of online learning and experiences of organisational and technical difficulties coupled with a poor experience of live teaching sessions seem to contribute most towards a generally poor online learning experience. That's a really kind of high level narrative and what we've noticed which is different from our previous ISS analysis is where in the past if we looked at one cohort of students their experience seemed to be very very similar i.e. a particular course was a good experience or a particular course was a poor experience. What we're seeing is a lot of differences from individuals or groups of individuals experiencing the same thing and perceiving it very very differently. So we've taken that a stage further we've gone into the categories and we've looked at the specific themes and we're able to look at the frequency of comments around the particular themes as well and where those themes are repeating more or we're seeing more of those themes we're placing a slightly greater emphasis on the narrative that surrounds them. So we've done that for the things that students have enjoyed or valued and we've done that for things that students have found difficult as well. So the size of the pie charts themselves relates to the frequency of comments and obviously the slice of the size of the pie relates to the frequency of comments that have coded in that particular way. We have discovered a really a huge number of narratives from the work that we've done and we're only able to focus on three of those today and we've tried to align them with the themes of the conference so we're going to talk to you a little bit about narratives around the home and remote working spaces, social and interpersonal spaces and live online spaces. If you could just share Debbie the link to the padlet that we've set up. We're really interested in seeing how our experiences and those of our students compare with your experience and those of your students. So we've set up a padlet if you I'll just tab to that, wrong one. It looks a little bit like this if you want to make a contribution to any of the narratives as we go through it just click on the plus and you can add your little story. Once the people have added theirs in you can give it a thumbs up if you agree or thumbs down if you disagree or you can add your own comment on to there as well and we hopefully will be able to come back to that towards the end of the in the Q&A session. So our first narrative is around home stroke remote working spaces and some of our students have told us in the context of that the things that they've enjoyed are valued is that the way that we approached it was just the right thing to do in the context of the pandemic that they felt safe studying remotely from home and that was something which was really important and valuable to them. A lot of these students were also telling us that I've really enjoyed working from the comfort of my own home I've got a really nice working space I've got my bedroom or I've got a work space at home that's allowing me to focus more effectively on my work and keep my concentration for some students there were specific aspects of the online environment which they found advantageous so some one to one student here telling us that they have a hearing problem and that sometimes they struggle with that while they're in a large teaching classroom online they've got their headphones on and they can hear things much better and another student telling us that when they're in class they're often their view of the slides as blocked but being near to the screen improved their overall experience and that's kind of tied in to for some students a preference for their own using their own devices at home and their home set up having a good broadband internet connection for example having access to a second monitor while they're in live teaching sessions or while they're working independently online taking better notes and so those students are clearly in an environment where the workspace that they've got is is advantageous to a positive experience of online learning and we contrast to that with the other group of students who are telling us yeah I feel safe it's the right thing doing everything however there's a but associated with it and that but is that at home I'm really distracted so this student here I live in a shared space the wi-fi only works in the living room but other students are in that space or this other student here who's homeschooling children and that's difficult to kind of to manage in the context of their online independent learning other students tell us that the space that they've got is just not appropriate for working I don't have a desk I've not got the right setup I'm working at the kitchen table that kind of thing not conducive to to effective learning and that kind of coupled with a whole load of issues around I didn't have a laptop that was appropriate at the beginning I've had to buy it I've had to upgrade my broadband I'm at the pay for this I've had to buy a new laptop because my course is particularly demanding in terms of the it that's required and a really difficult experience for some students from a technical point of view contributing to a poor overall experience of online learning our second narrative that's emerged is tied into kind of the social and interpersonal spaces that people find themselves in so some of our students have told us that the online environment has been very connected and empowering and they found it very easy to build relationships with fellow students who they've never met that they've been really comfortable in speaking online and for some of these students it's actually felt like a real campus experience and that's the kind of really interesting to for us to hear tied in with this is a flexible aspect to self-placed provision that allows students to fit in learning around complicated home lives so if you've got homeschooling children being able to do the school run but then to dip in to look at recordings of sessions and online videos or work through self-paced activities and that self-paced nature where it's been made available has been a really positive aspect of these students experience we contrast that some of the comments were very very challenging to read as a lot of evidence of students being feeling very isolated feeling lonely confused by the experience not being able to form proper friendships and at times it was it was it was quite a quite a difficult read in in that respect and that was kind of exacerbated or that those feelings of loneliness exacerbated other problems that the students were experiencing like you know if their timetable was keeping change there nobody to go to speak to no no peers to get support from in that respect not being able to find resources particularly where staff were being you know really pushed to make resources available in a short space of time and just that whole kind of notion of struggling to keep up and being isolated and on their own and this also kind of fits in with something that we noticed around the use of breakout rooms for some students breakout the use of breakout rooms have been absolutely fantastic they've had a great experience they found them participatory and engaging and it's really encouraged them to to to to be involved and helped them to get to know other students for other students breakout rooms have led to a great deal of anxiety and and some students really don't like being put into breakout rooms and find it very stressful and difficult to talk to other students particularly if other students they feel that the other students are not engaged as well and we think to some extent this is down to the way that those breakout room activities have been constructed and have been set up and maybe there's something that we can learn from that. Our final narrative is around the experience of live online spaces again some students have said that they've really embraced these things the flexibility of being able to attend classes from home has allowed them to make better use of their time they're not wasting time commuting they're able to organise things around their complex home lives but also being able to access some of the live sessions on phones laptops or computers gives them a degree of flexibility that's really important. For some students they felt very interactive particularly where colleagues have been using things like padlets and cahoots and Mentimeter in conjunction with during their live teaching spaces they've really felt like they've had a kind of an interactive experience and in that respect it's been very participatory and a lot of them have reported that they feel more likely to contribute due to the semi anonymity that they have in live teaching sessions than they would do in normal face-to-face teaching so that was kind of interesting to see and finally a couple of them said that there are things that we can do online that we don't seem to get in class so for example bringing in guest lecturers from abroad or from industry has been a feature of a lot of our online provision that's been very very well received and for some students they recognise that they're developing communication skills that that'll be really important for them in their future careers. We contrast that with some students who've just found it a really difficult experience that the online lecturers don't count as a replacement for their face-to-face teaching it's not the same kind of experience particularly prevalent in courses where there are practical skills and practical development students kind of feel that they're missing out on important aspects of their learning. For this group of students as well they're reporting that they're experiencing what you're experiencing now which is kind of a death by powerpoint kind of experience somebody talking at them and that isn't engaging to them and this particularly sort of emphasised where other students don't switch on their cameras and so they're feeling kind of well I will if they will and there's an element of not wanting to be the first one to expose yourself if that makes sense and for some students they're saying that you know that they're less likely to contribute in live teaching they find it more exposing to to to be speaking in those online classes so there's a real contrast between these different groups of students and for some it's just an overwhelming experience the slides are moving through too fast there's stuff going on in the chat I'm trying to take notes it's it's all moving on too quickly I've got to you know I've got to be in several places at once particularly if they're having to use multiple devices to engage with a particular session so just to kind of sum up then because we need to leave a little bit of time for questions the sorts of things that we're observing is a split in the experience several divisions are occurring so we've got a digital divide and to return to our nautical theme what we've got are some students who are in a fairly modern boat they've got all of the bells and whistles all of the navigation tools that help them to steer the boat in the direction that they want to go for others they're in something which is kind of not as enabling that they're they're more at the work mercy of external factors that doesn't allow them to be in control we have a perception that pre-covid for this group of students the physical spaces that we provide in the institution the computer labs the dropping rooms etc actors are sort of a life preserver enabling them to engage in what we perceive to be remote learning whereas in a fact that that some of the our students are at a disadvantage in that they're very reliant on the physical spaces in the institution to do that kind of extracurricular work and activities that's something that we need to think about in terms of the social divide we've got some students who's they're in they're in one boat that their primary focus is that their university work whereas for other students they can feel like they're in lots of little boats and some of those are related to their university experience some of them are related to school in their kids some of them are a carer responsibilities some of were related to part-time work etc and they're being blown in all sorts of different directions and for those students the flexibility that's been offered by online learning is often mitigated some of those challenges and so going forward thinking about how our providing access to physical online and mobile learning spaces is maybe something that we can think of in terms of designing a more flexible curriculum in terms of the students themselves is clearly a preference some students fail like with online learning they're on a kind of cruise liner where they've got access to all of the facilities that they need often kind of exacerbated by the digital divide but they're able to kind of take advantage of all of those facilities whereas some students are perceiving online learning as being very constrained and confined environment more like a submarine where there's there's nowhere for them to go and they've been taken somewhat under the waves at times and I think we've got a little bit of work to do there in respective development students learning skills the final thing is the learning experience there's clearly an element of the design of the learning that we're exposing to and to some experience this relates to the experience of the captain of the ship if we've got a captain who's really comfortable with online learning is delivered online provision before they've been much more comfortable with that kind of delivery and from our research seems to have been much more successful and that relates to ongoing future staff development and training provision on our part so I will stop there I think we've got a few minutes left over thank you thank you for listening I hope you found it insightful we certainly have but we'll hopefully be able to respond to any questions thank you very much rod it's a fantastic presentation there's quite a lot of discussion in the chat room around the block delivery and Carla raised the question was the block delivery response for the whole university why did you decide to go for that and then there's quite a few other comments said you just want to talk around the block delivery is it something the entire university can adopt for everything yeah the block delivery was a strategic decision from our academic senior leadership it was kind of tied into a first of all a perception that we could it would allow us to develop the first block and put a lot of the resource support resources into a relatively small number of small number of courses and then we would be able to transfer that support to block two block three block four going forward and from an academic point of view has also kind of felt that students would it would be easy for students studying one unit at a time we could we could put more support in in in front of them in that respect and also it's sort of tied into hoping that we would be able to get back on campus so we the cohorts were nominally divided into study groups of 25 students and if we were able to come back onto campus we were going to bring them back onto campus in those groups of 20 to 25 students so if one student in that study group became ill we could isolate help that that particular group to self isolate without isolating the whole cohort so there was a sort of a strategy there that was tied into our overall kind of response to the to the pandemic I think with hindsight it was incredibly challenging for for our academic colleagues to completely redesign what had previously been semester long courses and deliver them in six weeks and a real challenge for colleagues there was a feeling that it was really important to cover content and with our learning spaces framework we were trying to encourage people to think more about delivering activities rather than delivering content but it was it's a huge leap to ask people who've never taught before to to really revamp everything that they were doing so it was very difficult some colleagues really thrived in it absolutely loved it want to stick with block delivery for other colleagues it's been a very marmite experience I'm sure your quality service or equivalent enjoyed the revalidating everything as well which I know I know I don't I'm afraid Rod we've run out of time for the session it's really interesting there's further discussion in the in the comments there that Emily and Kate have picked up on it's interesting the surveys as well so in discord we could continue the conversation there and maybe answer some of the questions there but I'm afraid we'll have to draw the question to the clothes man very happy to