 It is great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's session with Jennifer Amfiona, where we are talking about, Welcome to Learning Online, who is the teacher. So I don't want to take any more of your time. This session is 25 minutes, with a five minute Q&A at the end. If you do have any questions or comments, please post them into the chat. We'll invite further ado over to you Jennifer Amfiona. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have a full time section in the end. Thank you, and welcome everyone to our session this afternoon. Jennifer and I are delighted to be here with you today, and we are from the Department of Academic Development and Student Learning in Glasgow, Caledonian University. We'd like to start today by introducing ourselves to you. So I'll start. My name is Fiona Kennedy, and I'm one of the senior lecturers in academic development in student learning. As part of my role, I have responsibilities for supporting the development of staff across the university who are new to teaching and supporting student learning. I'm the programme leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, and I'm the lead for our Graduate Teaching Assistance Learning and Teaching Skills Development Series, which Jennifer and I will be talking to you about today. I'm Jennifer Jackson, IT Learning Facilitator, also within the Department of Academic Development and Student Learning, and my key role and responsibilities are to support the digital skills development of university staff through training. And within our team, we develop and deliver synchronous training events and asynchronous training resources. Great. So let's start with our aims for today then. So our aims today are to provide you with insight into the learning opportunities that bespoke developmental programme of learning offered, offering both the teachers and the learners something to take away. That programme is the Graduate Teaching Assistance Learning and Teaching Skills Development Series, which we will refer to as the GTA Series. To meet our aims today, we are going to describe the GTA Series and then share some of the learning strategies employed on the programme, and indeed we're going to ask you to engage with some of those. We hope that the presentation will illuminate the different perspectives and the shared learning experiences, and also perhaps give you some practical ideas that you can take away and adapt for other learning environments. Before we get started, we'd like to begin by asking you to engage in a brief ice break activity today. Emma James very kindly going to post our Jamboard URL into the chat window or the chat panel, and we'd ask you to click on that URL and the Jamboard should open up on your device. We're going to ask you to do just a very short task, just 10 seconds or so if you just stand up or if you look out the window or door, take a look about you and think about what you can see. We just want you to spend 10 seconds if you want to do that now, and then if you come back and if you want to use the Jamboard, just the T for text tool will let you type on that and you can let us know what you saw in your view. So, while you're doing that Fiona has access to the Jamboard and she'll be able to give me a bit of update on how everyone's doing with that short activity. We'll see if we're getting anything through from that. I can see lots of people joining Jennifer, lots of people already starting to post in fact, and indeed no great surprise. The first thing that's come up is trees, but we've got people walking their dog, we've got dogs, we've got trees. We're getting lots of things to do with gardens, sunshine. Oh, we have someone who's seen the rain and someone who has no windows, which is a shame, school yard. So we've got things coming up about the weather, we've got things coming up about the things that are outside like to do with the gardens, the trees and things like that. So we're getting quite a lot of information in a short space of time. That's great. It's just a very short activity really and we thank you for engaging with that. It was just a short opportunity to show you one of the activities we used within the GTA series. So let us tell you why we used this and what we learned from that. The icebreaker activity enabled us to find out about the environment where our learners were working and we were able to utilise their responses to this activity to generate a discussion. And that discussion was about having empathy for learners when they're working in that online environment. But we also learned about the students' willingness to engage in activities and it set the scene for us to scaffold the rest of their learning experience. Our learners, our students, they learned about how it felt to be asked to engage with an activity and share with others in the cohort. They did like the way they could share simple information in a relatively safe and anonymised way. We actually used a whiteboard within our VLA in the GTA series. The students also learned about how to consider the well-being of their learners, given that they may be seated, watching and listening for periods of time. And the activity demonstrated firsthand how easy it was to factor in even a brief break within a session to allow for a little movement. Thanks, Jennifer. And I can see that the engagement is still continuing with Jamboard, which is lovely. So while you're continuing with that, I'll tell you a little bit about the GTA series. Let me give you an overview of that. So the GTA series is for postgraduate researchers who are new to or have a role in supporting student learning. And the GTA series aims to give the postgraduate researchers an understanding of how to gain skills in effective teaching. The series incorporates learning units on four distinct areas, and those are online teaching, teaching small groups, giving effective feedback and planning and managing classes. And before the global pandemic, we delivered this as four face-to-face workshops. But in response to learning and teaching online, we undertook a redesign process and used a derivative of the ABC curriculum design framework. So we deliberately incorporated a range of different learning types, and we designed learning experiences using a variety of asynchronous and synchronous activities, all designed to give the graduate teaching assistants an authentic student experience, whilst learning about the techniques and the skills associated with teaching. We designed the asynchronous activities to let the GTAs engage with a range of tasks, including things like listening to clips, watching videos, reading short articles, setting them reflective activities, contributing to swear resources and posting on padlet boards, both anonymously and as a named contributor. And we also asked them to read, respond to and summarise padlet posts made over a series of tasks. Our asynchronous activities were all presented with an expected completion time to help learners engage with and manage their learning. And we also flagged up the technology that we used to create the activities, giving learners a pathway to develop their own materials and their activities. So for example, we might say this activity was created using padlet, and then we followed that up with an instruction of how to get a padlet account and where to access training on using padlet. So what about the shared learning then? What did we get from these asynchronous activities? Well, through these asynchronous activities and the contributions made specifically by the GTAs, we as the teachers learned about the students' own experiences and importantly we started to learn about them as individuals. We also learned about the things that they felt would challenge them as part of their own teaching practice. And again, we learned a great deal about the student teachers and their willingness to engage in asynchronous activities, all of which we were able to discuss with them. The students learned about the types of activities that could be used and were able to reflect on their own engagement with these. And they also used their reflections to plan how they might use similar asynchronous activities and technologies with their own learners. We designed the synchronous tutorials to give the GTAs an authentic experience of engaging as a learner. So it was important for them to know how their own students may feel. And so having the GTAs engage as a student provided insight. We brought the students together to give them a sense of community and to provide them with opportunities to meet and connect with their peers. In the tutorials, we explored the tools and functions of the webinar software and we asked them to engage with these. The GTAs engaged with polling, whiteboards, text chat function and raise hand function. And when we engaged them in these activities, we explained how and why they could be used to engage learners and we also signposted them to aspects of best practice. So for example, when we used the raise hand function, we explained why and how inviting participants by name and when at a time could help personalize the learning experience. We also completed small group activities in breakout rooms. One of the activities that we asked the students to do in breakout rooms was to contribute to the creation of a class crossword puzzle and we made this available for them afterwards as an asynchronous activity just in a bid to make the scaffolding of the activities as transparent as possible. We learned from the GTAs in terms of the way they engage with the tools and with the activities we quickly learned about their levels of comfort or indeed reticence using these tools and we were able to talk through how they might manage those situations with their own learners. We also used engagement of the GTAs to reflect on our own delivery and the impact of our teaching styles. Fiona and I made a deliberate choice to come together and reflect on each tutorial after it had concluded. The students learned about giving and receiving feedback in a practical way and this was an area that a lot of the GTAs were keen to learn about because they tended to find this prospect quite challenging. They also learned through their engagement with the webinar platforms and they were able to consider how they could make use of webinar functionality to engage their own students. So what next? The choice is yours. Emma Jane is very kindly going to post the WooClap poll in the chat panel and we'd now like to ask you to engage in a short polling activity and we're going to ask you to make a choice and this will determine the next part of her session. We're going to ask you to collaborate in creating a crossword puzzle but before we do we'd like to give you a choice of the crossword puzzle theme which is coming up in the screen. I'll just go to the next slide because we do have a QR code as well if you would prefer to use the QR code rather than the link in the chat function. Would you like the crossword puzzle to have the theme of qualities of an effective teacher or things teachers can do or use to engage learners? I would encourage at this point either use your device to scan the QR code or click in the link in the chat function to respond to the poll through the WooClap link. So I'll thank you now in advance for casting your votes and we will reveal the results of the poll very shortly. What we learned from polls with the GTAs we learned that polls provided a quick way to give our students choice. We also learned that anonymous polling activities resulted in good engagement from the students. The GTAs experienced the impact of having choice as a learner themselves. They also learned how it felt to engage in a poll and they understood that students are able to express their preferences and this is irrespective of cultural norms and boundaries so it informed the GTAs how they might use polling with their own learners. Thanks for that Jennifer and thanks for starting that poll. I've been watching the results come in and all will be revealed very shortly. But we would like to ask you to collaborate with us to jointly create a crossword puzzle and in our activity in the GTA series we actually asked small groups of learners in breakout rooms to create three or four clues each and answers and they sent those to Jennifer and I and we then created a class crossword puzzle for them incorporating all the clues and answers that the learners had sent us. Today we're going to simplify that and we're going to ask you to give us some crossword answers and we will then produce a crossword, generate the clues and generate a crossword that will be made available to you via an accompanying padlock which we'll tell you about at the end of our session. So this is why we asked you to engage in a poll to decide the theme of our crossword puzzle to give you the choice. So I can now reveal if you'd like to give us a drum roll everyone that the theme that you chose was things teachers can do or use to engage learners. So thank you for that. What I will do is I'll ask you and invite you to post some answers using the comment function. So what I would like you to do is to think about the things teachers can do or use to engage learners and come up with perhaps a word or a short phrase. An example could be technology, something that we teachers can do or use to engage learners could be technology. So if you were to post the word technology, Jennifer and I will gather all those up later, create some clues for that and then create the crossword. And what I'll do is I'll ask you if you would continue to keep generating those as we go through the remainder of our time, remainder of our session with you today. So we'll carry on and tell you a little bit more about what we learned just now from creating the crossword activity and let you carry on posting your short words or phrases. So what did we learn from doing that as teachers? Well, we learned about the values and the perspectives of the student teachers through the content of the crossword clues and answers. It was very telling the types of things that they came up with. And we learned also that the student confidence was really increasing and we were able to evidence this through the quality and quantity of their contributions to the activity. The students, they learned about the potential for co-creating activities with their students and they learned how it felt to work in small groups, to work online in small groups, giving them an authentic experience of how their own students might learn. So who is the teacher in conclusion on the selection of our shared learning experiences working with the GTA series? We've highlighted some of the different perspectives that have been gained, perspectives from ourselves as teachers and those of the GTA student teachers as our learners. As we bring our presentation to a close, we'd like to share with you a short video featuring both the student voice and the teacher voice. So who is the teacher? We'll leave that for you to decide. Tell us one thing that you learned starting with other student teachers as part of the GTA series. I learned the importance of working in small groups. This gave us an opportunity to interact, get to know each other by name, to know our individual areas of research. You know, gave us opportunity to air our opinions in small groups and then gave us the provision to work in unity team to come up with unified responses in the situations where tasks were given to us. So that's a good question to start with. I learned about the experiences that the graduate teaching assistants brought with them and also about the challenges they perceived as they moved forward with their learning and teaching. I really gained an appreciation of the commitment and the excitement and the value that the graduate teaching assistants can bring to the classroom. I knew that before, but being able to work hand in hand with the GTAs really brought this to life and the passion for teaching is absolutely fantastic. Tell us about a technology that you plan to use in your teaching as you move forward. During the GTA trainings, we made good use of the Padlet. I think that going forward, in my teaching experience, I will use the Padlet because it gives students the opportunity to add their opinions in writing and also create an avenue for other students to interact using the Padlet. As a result of learning from the needs of the graduate teaching assistants, we've actually incorporated a combination of Microsoft Teams and Blackboard Collaborate Ultra sessions, rather than delivering the series on only one of those particular platforms. That suggestion came from one of the learners so we were really keen to implement this and indeed we've done that and the next forthcoming series will feature both of those pieces of technology. What was your most valuable outcome of the GTA series in the context of a shared learning experience? Prior to the GTA series, I had believed and thought that feedback should be given in the sandwich approach where you make corrections, compliments and corrections again. But I learned very importantly as I interacted with the RISE model during the GTA series that it is best to, as well as give compliments and identify areas of improvement but also to guide the students in the way forward, which is very important. I think for me it's been gaining a variety of perspectives, learning with and about the graduate teaching assistants and gaining their perspectives on learning and teaching, but also learning with and from my colleagues in the teaching team. Being able to share ideas and practice with each other and planning, delivering and reflecting with my peers has meant that the series has been a personally valuable learning experience. Department of Academic Development and Student Learning, Glasgow Caledonian University. Great. Hope you enjoyed hearing the student voice there. We have actually created a follow-up padlet for you with some resources for you to engage with at a later date and we plan to keep the padlet going for one month so please do feel free to visit. There's also an option to post questions or share practice on there as well and importantly we'll be posting the crossword puzzle on that padlet so please do drop by and give it a try. The link forth padlet board is going to be posted into the chat by Emma Jane so thank you Emma Jane in advance for doing that. That brings us at the end of our presentation today and so all that remains for us to do is to extend our appreciation to you for your attention and also importantly for your engagement so on behalf of Jennifer and I can I say a very huge and warm thank you. Thank you. Well I think that we can also offer you both a huge thank you and a round of applause for that very slick presentation highly engaging and highly interactive so thank you ever so much for doing that. If you would have any questions if you'd like to post them into the chat or any comments I can see here that you have got a round of applause already from Anna and you've got another one from Aidan as well. Yes we do. I'm sorry if I missed this during the presentation but how many people did you work with on this project? So I can take that. The GTS tends to differ in the amount of people that come on to the series. So we run the series three times a year in the times that Jennifer and I have been operating that we took our information from for today. We had around about 20 to 22 people engaged in the series. So it's relatively small numbers in the scale of things. I think it still gives a lot of insight though doesn't it and a lot of different perspectives in the way that they've collaborated together and also I think we saw in the video there just one person what they were able to take away from it so it shows the value that it's added. I can see that we've got another thank you here from Kathy saying thank you for such an interesting and interactive session. Well I completely agree with that and I can't see any questions coming up in the chat. So once again I would like to thank you both Jennifer and Fiona for an absolutely amazing session. We hope that you have a wonderful rest of the conference of those that are joining us now and to those that are watching sometime in the future we hope that you have enjoyed this session as well. So thank you everybody take care.