 And then we can get underway. Excellent. Great. We'll welcome everybody to another of our power of the day at the Old City Summit. I'm just going to go through our set of guidelines that we have here. And obviously give a big thank you to Pebblepad, I should say there, who are our sponsors for today's session. And without Pebblepad, today's session would probably not happen. So big thank you to them. I was going to just double check. We were having a quick conversation in the chat about notifications and things. So they can be found in the access panel in the bottom right hand corner. There is a little purple chevron. If you click that, it will give you access to chat and also access to the settings cog that you can see there on the screen. In towards the bottom right hand corner. And then if you click on that, that will allow you to go in and play with the settings so that you can take off all the things and bongs that happen and might start to annoy you. And also we are in the large settings of Blackboard Collaborate so that you only got your chat facility, not the microphone at the moment. But we may have time for questions later on and we can give you the microphone if you need it. You can also raise your hand as Martin says on that slide there. Okie-tokie. So I'm hoping that by now you will all be fully of a with Blackboard Collaborate and you're able to use the chat. But if you do have any problems, then please do let us know. We also have a help desk function which you can email. And I shall just pop that on the slide for you. Thanks again to Pebblepad. There we go. Oh, and there we go. I didn't expect that then, that surprised me. More added bonus for you there from Pebblepad. Great. Ok, I'm going to hand over very shortly to our speakers today. And we have David up first with Debbie and then we hand over to Leo and Verena. So I'm just going to close my slides down now, Debbie, and hand over to you and David. Thank you. Just double-check in case there's anything else sneaking on here that I've said. There we go. I guess that's the help. Great. Ok, I'll close that one down and I'll hand over to you. Thanks then. Lovely. Just load up a little more. Welcome everybody to our session this afternoon. And in the way of a slow gentle introduction, my name is David. And I'm joined this afternoon with Debbie. And there's a third colleague, Andrew, who's not with us today. But today we're going to be talking about academic advising. And this all comes from our search for the meaningful use of data to help student learning. So it's part of our broader learning analytics work. And in this presentation, we're looking wholly about our efforts to take academic advising online to help student learning. So that's where we come from in terms of this presentation. So in terms of setting the scene, so we think of academic advising as a staff student process, which has the aim of helping students with their academic development and achievement, but also their pastoral support as well. And it's tend to be viewed very positively by students and staff in recent surveys. There's one by Chan here. But the results are variable, for example, based on the astute of the advisor. I don't know if it's the same in your institution, I know where I work. So academic staff have various views of academic advising, which has an impact on how effective their sessions are. We'll come back to that in a moment. It's just really very heavily outside my window at the moment. The background noise might be coming from. So we've got some questions for you today. We've got six questions for you. And what we'd like to do is ask the question and then for you to put the answers as you go through in the chat if you would like to. And so my first question is a quick question is what factors influence academic advising at your institution? So what sort of things affect academic advising where you work? That's our first question. Interestingly, at our institution, when it was a bit more informal, it seemed to work better than when we had a huge central very formal policy. That's just an interesting thing just to kick in there. If anybody else has got any, you know, do you have academic advising policies people? We've got some greeting going on at the moment. Okay. Well, in which case, let's move on quickly. And if you have a thought about that, please do add little messages in the chat and we can revisit them. So let's move on. Okay. Some of the factors which we normally see reported when we look at influencing factors are the frequency of the interaction between staff and students. So how many times a semester might you normally get together? But crucially for students is the influence they perceive in these sessions on their own development with the view that if students perceive more benefit, they're more likely to be engaged. And the relevance of information, this is how beneficial against students see the information they're getting back from their staff members in terms of the questions that they raise. That's linked obviously to the advisor knowledge. And we've talked briefly before about the advice attitude that they bring to the whole session and therefore the quality of the relationship between the two parties. Going to the right hand side, we've got clarity about what the academic advising process is actually there to do. Some see perhaps a lack of clarity from a student perspective in terms of what the process is there to do. Is it academic only? What things can they raise? What about confidentiality? Very personal questions. Are those permissible? So clarity of process is important. And that affects the advisee's perspective on the whole process and therefore that links to their participation. The size of groups is another factor. Many institutions seem to have some live group sessions. Others have smaller or individual sessions. How that is mediated with its face-to-face or online and then how much time is spent in that process. All factors which seems to influence how students and staff feel about the academic advising institutional process. So let's look at some of the questions. So question number two here then. So this is an easy question to ask you. So on a scale of one, which is low or 10, which is high, how important is academic advising at your institution? So how important is it for a few institutions? Look at Lee's comment there. Lee is saying that one of the problems with standardization is that it takes out some of the soul out of that interaction. That's the personality and the difference that people bring to it is a key thing that you may lose from standardization. So Anne-Marie here says it's a 10. We've got Chris with an 8. Gavin with a 7. I'm dropping down here slowly. So Chris's result is a score of two, but they're for academics. So academics perhaps don't see it as important as perhaps students. And it's an important differentiation to draw. I think quite often it's very high in kind of corporate communications and things like that. And then I think kind of some of these high scores or low scores are really kind of reflecting the nuances on what it's actually like when we're trying to do it. Yes, there's certainly a difference between the policy and the practice sometimes. So thank you that we will move on. One question I'd like to ask you very quickly is about the fair mobility in the process in your institution. Just very quickly, again, from low variability to high variability. How much difference is there between the different schools or faculties or parts of the institution in terms of how academic horizons are done? Again, from my experience in my institution, there's quite a bit of variability. We do have a policy, but then there's some freedom about how individual academics enact that policy. What if it's the same for yourselves? I'll get any views on that. So, Anne-Marie, thank you for talking about N8, so high degree of variability. Different faculties taking their own view. And perhaps, as Lee says, over time, variability might increase, whether it's less central control. Okay, I've got a bunch of time, so I'm going to move on. So when we were looking at this issue at our institution, we wanted to record these interactions between academic advisors and students. I wanted to use our VLE as being a core central repository with all the necessary privacy and security requirements already fulfilled, but which I found that was quite difficult to do in our VLE. So we set about a little case study. A department of 21 academic advisors, about 500, gains in music students. We were looking at interactions twice per semester, with more group sessions for first and second year, and then mostly one-to-one sessions for our family as students. And one thing we did as part of our standardization process was to put in agendas for all sessions, so all staff are encouraged to follow the same process for their sessions. And here's an example of an introduction to one session that we used. So this is for a first year, a level four induction. This is in their induction week, so it's all about access to Unix, do they have log-ins, door codes, all those things. And these are the first four things that we all start to go through. So it's all about introducing themselves, getting students to introduce themselves, clarifying the role of AAs, and then checking class lists in terms of attendance. So that was how we were to structure, and all our sessions for first and second year were structured in a similar way. So fourth question out of six for you then. What do you think of having these agenda for staff for every session that they do to guide them? I think that's a useful thing to do. So Lee's saying, I'll probably actually put some different questions. Actually Chris has raised an important question here about whether subject matter expertise automatically engenders someone to be a good mentor or advisor. I'm sure that there's no direct correlation between the two. Certainly when I work we have development sessions for academic advisors so that they're helped to become good mentors, to know where to go for information when they need it, and who else they can call in to help with their interactions. Good point Anne-Marie, it's the students as well. We're coming on to that. Yeah, we're coming on to the students I don't know. So in terms of recording these interactions, we start stuff by only really recording attendance to the student turn up for it or not. And we started in the last academic year a pilot to try and explore how we could give better information to both staff and students. And so that's what this fun taste about is a pilot and what we learned along the way. So we were faced with the potential for collecting lots of information from students, but some of it's not viable to collect in the time available. So what metrics do you think or information would you think would be useful to capture for staff and students from these types of interactions? So what do you come to capture in your institutions? So Anne-Marie just raised a question. In a mentoring relationship, the expectation is that the mentee is doing a fair bit of work. That's true. I think both sides have a high workload to make these relationships effective for both. So Chris says attendance is a key thing. Totally agree with that. Sarah, academic knowledge gaps. So that would be useful to work out what information students need and how that can be provided. So Lee's point is very valuable about flying up where the further support is needed. And we'll address that in just a moment. Debbie's saying boundaries, that's probably in terms of the overall relationship, what can and can't be discussed within these sessions. An action plan. So like your action plan. And that's one thing we wanted to do is to help students to set themselves some goals for the future. And we could, through the ongoing relationship that staff have with students, we had the ability to support students to achieve those goals and also to track how they're doing. So that was a really important thing for us as well, the action plan. And I'll explain that in a moment. So Chris mentioned attendance. So we measure in this pilot student attendance. And then we feed it back to students and to staff how students are doing. So this is a part of a feedback form that a student would receive every three weeks through the VLE showing their attendance. So it shows different labs and lectures, as you see, and then whether they're attended or not, and an overall percentage. And we had some rag rating, red and green, to help students to understand the information. If they weren't attending very well, then perhaps they would have a bed status or a lamp or green, as this one has for high attendance. So we'd give the students this information on a three-weekly basis. We'd also give staff the same information so they could see when they meet with their duties how attendance is being engaged with from the different students. So that's one aspect of the information we fed back. And the second one was about achievement so far. So we know students have access to all their records through their VLEs, but here we summarise it on one piece of paper. So you can see in semester one, this person took three units. There are two assessment parts for each unit. You can see their grades, the unit marks, and their outcomes pass or fail. And it's purely a student focus view here. So not comparing them to their peers. We're saying this is how you did. And the colour coding helps you to quickly visualise this and see how the student is doing. So again, we'd feed this back to students in this format and also give the academic advisor the same information so that when they're talking to the student about their, say, semester one activities, they have a record of their attendance but also their achievement as a basis for their discussion. What we then wanted to do was to capture, as Sue mentioned earlier, the students' goals and aspirations for them to set themselves some academic targets that went beyond just the semester units that they were taking. So we created this form. We couldn't use RVLE for this. We tried and failed. And so in the end, we used the JISC online survey to do it. So you can see here, students are filling out their identification. We need to know who they are so we can record their attendance. We need to know who their academic advisor is so we can feed it back to their academic advisor and the date. And then we ask them to set themselves some smart goals, three goals, which we'd record, we'd feed back to them and then we might come back to them in six months' time to see how well they're doing and how the academic could support them in that. So it's quite a quick form to fill in. We also ask them how they're doing on a scale of one to ten. And then, as someone mentioned before, we ask them, is there anything else that we need to pick up with them? Is there anything else they want to raise or is it a concern? And then at the bottom, there's a section saying, is there any further help needed by other people? So by student services, they're program leader, that's PL, or to the Deputy Head of Department. So this is to further any further action that's needed. So we have somewhere to track it and it's not lost. So it's moving on a bit faster. One of the problems we had with academic advising in this pilot was engagement. Four at the bottom is our first year, five is our second year. And this is a percentage graph. So we can see that about quarter, about first year's engaged and probably half that number, four at level five. So engagement in the process is a key issue, and we'll come back to that in a moment or two. But those that did engage, these are the word frequency of the goals that they set. You can see they're using words like aim, achieve, attend, improve, start, skills, study. So there's some very positive words that they're starting to use when they consider what they're trying to achieve from the academic time at university. These next three examples come from some first year students. So this was probably three months into their university course. I've taken away their name, but you can see their target here, say, for the first one. It's really good that they're saying, I want to make some side projects to improve their skills. Their target two is about establishing a certain style that they want to pursue. And target three is about research, more about my field and opportunities available to me so they can prepare for placement. So really good, positive goals. And by setting them, I think they can hopefully achieve them. And the academic advise being with them can also help them to achieve that. So the AA might have some links that they can put them in touch with to really help them to develop their networking opportunities and help them to achieve a placement in their third year. So those Engage we found has some really good goals that they set that we could then help them to achieve. This is just a quick graph to show information about how much effort people have put into their studies. The graph on the left is level four of the first years. So they had an average of about seven, so a fair bit of effort. We can see by second year, they're putting a lot more effort into their studies based on how they report it. So what we aimed in this pilot was to have as much of this information in our VLE as possible to make it as controlled and as seamless as we could. But during the pilot we found that wasn't really possible. What we needed to do was we created a separate set of signing sheets which used an access database to put these sheets off, to scan them back in and then feed that data back into the VLE because we couldn't do that effectively and seamlessly within the VLE. So that was one slight problem we had. And the second one was we had to use the GIST command form as I mentioned which then the data was extracted from there into an R program to manipulate it, reformat it as PDF and then feed that back into the VLE so it could be seen by students and by staff. So a really not very streamlined process to try and achieve our goals. So conclusions. Positive side, we found we had a more consistent approach from staff given our agendas that we gave staff to guide them what they should be covering. So therefore students get a more consistent approach which is not mediated by staff, experience or engagement in the process themselves. By feeding back grades and attendance we would have much better information going back to students in a summarised form. And also for the first time academic staff could see clearly and easily how students were performing and that was a great basis for them and for their discussion. There was the potential we thought to promote reflection. So by setting these goals say in this first session as we saw just now we were planning the second session to get students to reflect on how well those goals are doing how much focus are they making what barriers do they have and what can we do to help overcome that. So the great potential there to help people to reflect more and to therefore gain more from their studies potentially. We did find engaged students engaged well and similarly on the negative side the downside of that was that people who perhaps might benefit from this sort of process were not really engaged and therefore we sort of lost them from the future. Other downsides we found from our pilot was that our VLE couldn't cope with this. A lot of our VLE is focused on units and so this trans unit across three years time process wasn't really well supported which is why we needed to go to third party tools and bespoke work but that meant and this is a key problem for us with this solution was that it was not scalable in any way so it could work for one department with a lot of support but it wasn't scalable across 20 times that number of departments. And we were thinking about engagement and one of the thoughts we had was that we needed to demonstrate the benefits of academic advising to students to increase their engagement to get them into the process because the feeling from staff who we interviewed afterwards was that they felt the process was best they had been in the past but we need to engage students more in that and demonstrate why engagement is a benefit to them to bring them in. So we've got one or two moments. This is my last side of questions for you. So we described our experiences of this pilot at the Boson Commons. So a couple of questions here to finish off before we run out of time. The first one being does academic advising need to be taken online? Do you think there are benefits from recording and reviewing what students have said? And if so, how can this be achieved in an effective way? Parting questions to you. Ada, can you say more about the big blue button and jitsie? Sorry. I was looking for for my my hearings. Well we have a very very good experience using model and integrating big blue button and jitsie. Students are very useful are very accustomed to use these tools. We are we've been using big blue button for I think a couple of years already and now that we integrated also jitsie and the experience we have has been really really cool. They they use it and they I think it's very how can I say it? They are used to these tools I think. Okay. Lots of people in the comments talking about being forced to be online and that's why we will be obviously mediated by Zoom and teams. But what I find many institutions there was no record of those interactions and it's whether we need to record more about those interactions that we can use to help students in the future. It really is thinking about how do we start to look at learner analytics are we measuring what matters? I think that's probably my concluding thoughts there. That's a really good point Karen. How can you make those that are going to engage are going to engage but we all know the ones that are less likely to engage are the ones who aren't logging in and so on and so on. Can you give us a keynote and pull out some of the ideas from there? No, that's true. We think that demonstrating more the benefits and making clear what the academic advising process is Karen may be the way to bring some people in but obviously some students don't want to engage and that's absolutely fine if they don't wish to. And Marie's point about measuring engagement is not always a useful measure. We did have an analysis of outcomes and engagement last year and we did find a moderate positive correlation between at that time it was on-campus engagement and outcomes. If you can see going forward how online engagement and outcomes are linked to it at all. I'm getting the sign so we're running out of time here so let's do a close. Thank you to everybody who had feedback and comments on that. It's been really helpful that we can take forward. That was really, really good. Thanks so much David. Thanks David.