 Hello and welcome to our presentation about our project proposal, hashtag openteach, professional development for open online educators. My name is Dr. Orna Farrell. I'd like to introduce my project team. Dr. James Brunton is co-leading the project. Professor Groni Cannell, Dr. Aiman Costello, Samantha Trevazgas, our student team member, and Dr. Enda Donilon. You can see on the slide there he's not here, he's unavailable today. So the project is intra-institutional involving academic staff and students from Open Education and the Institute of Education in Dublin City University. The Open Education unit provides online distance degrees to part-time students through our DCU connected platform. Professor Martin Weller, over to the side there, from the Open University has agreed to act as a critical friend to our project. So why is this project important? The project is important because it addresses the challenge of effectively supporting the professional development of part-time educators involved in online higher education. Specifically, the project aims to develop the digital and pedagogical competencies of the 90 DCU connected online teachers. This will enable our teachers to create a positive and supportive and engaging learning experience for our students. What will we do? Good question. So we're going to start off by conducting an analysis of the professional development needs of our online teachers, followed by a critical synthesis of the relevant literature. Then we will design and create a suite of open access evidence-based digital guides on best practice for open online teaching. We will then use the guides to develop a short online course which will be piloted, evaluated and adapted. The resources will follow an open first philosophical approach and will be creative commons licensed. I'll hand over to Samantha now. So providing a positive engaging and supportive learning experience is one of the key aims of this project. Our philosophy is that learning is a partnership between teachers and learners. This is supported by a student-centered approach to learning design and the student voice will be informed of the project through the involvement of an open education student, myself, Samantha Vazquez, as part of the project team. Students will be actively engaged throughout the project in phase one needs analysis, in the phase three evaluation of course pilot and in the phase four course project evaluation. Hi, my name is Eamon Costello and I'm going to give you a brief overview of the project plan and the key deliverables. And then my colleague James will go into these in some more detail. So we plan to conduct the project in four phases. Firstly, we will conduct needs analysis and critical senses of the literature to help inform our approach. Following this in phase two we will design and develop a set of digital guides for online teachers. In phase three we will pilot an open short open online course using the guides and we will evaluate and adapt the guides at this stage. And then finally in phase four we will concentrate on the dissemination and impact evaluation of the project. So what are the key deliverables that we aim to produce and share with the sector in this project? The first one in quarter one is the establishment of the project web space and the digital media channels to help communicate and share what we're doing as we go along. And the publication of the needs analysis report. In quarter two we will publish the senses of the literature. And then in quarter three we will pilot the open online course and we will update the digital guides. Then in quarter four we will publish the evaluation report of the project and we will publish the digital guides again updated following a cycle of feedback. And we'll make all our publications and other dissemination results for activities available on the project website and through our digital social channels. So to go into a little more detail on those phases. In phase one we will formalize the project team including the recruitment of a learning designer. We will conduct that needs analysis and we will begin the critical synthesis of the literature that will inform our work in later phases of the project. The needs analysis focuses on the professional development requirements of our team of 90 part time open online educators who come from diverse backgrounds in academia and industry and they teach in a variety of subject areas, humanities, management, psychology, information technology. The methodology that we're going to use for that needs analysis is a questionnaire focusing on current teaching practice and then a number of focus groups with our online teachers and students to establish what the needs are. Get a look at what the perceptions are of current support, what people like, what opportunities they see for improvement. The critical literature synthesis will be conducted using a systematic approach targeting literature on effective online teaching practice. In phase two the literature synthesis will complete and that along with the needs analysis data will inform and shape the open teach digital guides to best practice for online teaching. This diagram shows our indicative list of the topic areas that we would focus on in those guides but obviously that will evolve as we do the needs analysis and conduct the literature synthesis. The digital guides will be then combined into a short online course using the seven C's approach to learning design. The project maps onto the national professional development framework as a structured non accredited professional development activity which will support the development of competencies and skills in a number of domains. The table here shows the specific domain elements that the project maps to. For example open online pedagogy maps to the domains of professional knowledge and skills and personal digital capacity. In phase three the first draft of the digital guides will be published on the project web space and a pilot of the short online course will be run involving staff from DCU and from other institutions and also involving students so that we can get their feedback directly on how the course runs and what's in it. The pilot course will reside in our DCU connected online learning platform loop and we estimate it will take approximately 14 hours over two weeks to complete. The course is based around the project guides that we're going to produce. For each section of the course a discussion forum will be made available to enable participants to interact and discuss what they are learning and in addition to that two synchronous sessions will run over the two weeks in order to give a space to the educators to explore ideas and share practice. Based on feedback we get on the course we will then further refine the course and the associated digital guides such that updated digital guides can be disseminated as open educational resources in phase four. So in quarter four we'll conduct a project evaluation. This will be conducted following Patton's utilisation focused approach which is a pragmatic approach which focuses on targeted evaluation questions so those are our two evaluation questions currently. How has the hashtag open teach course affected online teachers perceptions of their practice and how has the hashtag open teach course affected online students perceptions of engagement of online teachers. The data will be collected through focus groups with online teachers and online students then analysed and compiled into a project evaluation report. So an additional you know one of the outputs of quarter four. The dissemination plan for the project you may have noticed the hashtag in the title. So obviously social media play a large role in the dissemination but also in the interactions during the course pilot. So it is anticipated that we'll have this social layer on Twitter using the hashtag in fact I tweeted from the hashtag this morning on the train on the way here. So it'll be a dissemination approach but also it will be a way of interacting getting feedback sharing the resources with the sector. And you know if there's feedback perhaps on the first draft through Twitter we can then use that to update the digital guides as well. In addition we will also use the website to share the resources which as we've mentioned will be open educational resources and anyone can reuse adapt share under the Creative Commons licensing and also we'll disseminate through conferences and publications in order to reach the professional communities in Ireland and further afield. We will also hold two open webinars over the course of the project and the idea of those webinars is to encourage dialogue, discussion maybe even garner feedback on the project resources and they'll be open to everyone so hopefully we'll get a good take up of those. So I'll hand over now to Gronja. Thanks Auna. We expect there will be both short term and long term impact of this project and as Auna has already indicated awareness will be developed through our dissemination plan we're very active on social media we do plan to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc extensively. Sectorial engagement and impact will be measured by the analytics from the project website and interactions with the Twitter hashtag. Dialogue will be fostered through our dissemination activities such as conference presentations and the two open webinars that Auna mentioned. The impact of the project on teachers and learners will be assessed through the project evaluation and we're delighted to have Samantha involved and we planned to involve other students during the course of the project. If funded we think this project can support sectoral development of online teaching best practice and sustainability will be ensured through utilizing the national forums web space and hosting which will be continued after the end of the project and we plan to embed the project resources very much into our own CPD structures. This is very much at the heart of what we want to do there's a real need in terms of supporting and developing our 90-odd part-time tutors and we also will explore the possibility of accrediting the course post the project through DCU. So to finish I think this quote is a very powerful one empower staff to create discover and engage in meaningful personal and professional development and we think this is very much at the heart of what our project is about. Thank you for listening.