 Okay, guys, hopefully you can see those slides OK. Very quick introduction.I'm Rod Colin, I'm co-presenting today with my colleagues, Stephen and Janet, who've been integrable to the work that we've been with the last two or three years. I'd just quickly introduce yourself and say what you do within the institution. Rwy'n gwneud, so I'm Stephen Williams, I'm one of the senior technology enhanced learning advisors at ManMet, and I work with Rod in the technology enhanced learning team. Thanks Stephen, and I'm Janet Lord, I'm the director of education in the Faculty of Health and Education, but probably more relevant in this context I'm the strategic lead for what we call Delta, which is our digitally enhanced learning teaching and assessment strategy, which has just gone live, basically. I'm really delighted to be here with you today. Thanks everyone. So we're going to talk about kind of a long term piece of work that we started before Covid, but then kind of gained momentum during the pandemic, and has kind of paved the way for stuff that we're doing now around that digital education strategy. So it's kind of a long story really, but there's a lot of things that we know resonate with other colleagues. We've presented a little bit on this previously, we've had a lot of sort of contact from other institutions asking us about practical aspects of the way that we've managed to implement this particular toolkit, so we just wanted to kind of share that. So a quick sort of starter for 10 in the discussions with our colleagues at the OATSIG, what we agree was to do an initial blog post to kind of set the scene, the background to our project and the approach that we'd adopted to select a set of tools that we might make available to the OLE institution, which is our learning activities framework. In the second part, which is the webinar, we're going to talk about how we selected the apps, how it went about procurement, how we rolled it out, our approach around accessibility and basically how things have gone. Part three of this will be a follow-up blog post where we'll kind of basically write up the stuff that we're covering in the webinar and we'll approach any issues that might arise as part of the discussions that we enter into today. And so, very, very quick poll, I'm going to see if I can launch this poll, collaborate a tiny little bit quirky so it doesn't always allow you to do these things very quickly. I'm just interested to know who's actually read the poll. So if I, hopefully, you should be able to see that now. Yeah, it's working fine. Brilliant. Okay, so I can see that as well. So you can just kind of pop your response in there. I'm not kind of, I do not have to name and shame anybody, it just kind of gives me an idea of how much detail to go into in terms of the background. And so we've got quite a few people, some people read it, some have skimmed it, we've got a few that haven't read it. So apologies to those who've read it. There's a little bit of revision at the beginning here, but hopefully everybody will get the kind of the gist of where we started with this. And so we do a lot of kind of engagement with our students, we do a lot of talking and engagement with our academic staff as well, just close that poll down. And for a long time, our students through our internal student survey, which we analysed in quite a lot of depth, were telling us quite clearly that they wanted to be much more involved in their live face-to-face teaching sessions rather than being passive recipients of information. So they're particularly critical of depth by PowerPoint experiences and common sort of comment is, you know, I can read slides for a self, I don't have to come in and sit for two hours just listening to somebody regurgitate in their notes. I want to be more involved. Features of the kind of feedback of the things that they really like were quizzes and polls, discussion and debate activities, tools like many meter padlet and code featured very heavily in that kind of feedback where it was being used. And a feature that was being able to make contributions in what they considered to be a safe way through anonymity that's offered by a few of these tools. At the same time, our teaching staff was saying, yeah, we get that. We're, you know, we really aspire to meet in that particular challenge. We want to use more technology to provide interactive teaching, but the university doesn't provide me with any tools and using the free tools that are available out there makes it really difficult and makes it risky. So lots of them wanted to use more than now, but a lot of colleagues were telling us, I'm not confident enough to use those free tools myself. It takes me ages to set things up. I'm worried about GDPR because sometimes I have to sign students up or give my own details where I've got problems with paying for licences and stuff like that. I get the free licences as limited functionality and then I just get used to using something and the terms and conditions change and it's no longer free. And so there was a lot of it was a clear barrier to some colleagues using these tools was that notion of having to find the tools for themselves that were free and then things that were changing. And so initially that that was our kind of our starting point. But to summarise that kind of just as a kind of a pause to thought Ian said that they you know from the blog post those aspirations kind of resonated with him or those experiences. So if you could just pop on the chat yes or no or you know we have a different experience be interested here whether those aspirations and challenges reflect the experience in your institution. So if you could just do that in the chat I'd appreciate it or if you want to kind of pop your hand up and say something equally we would we would be valued here what you have to say. Hi I just wanted to say just from Northampton's point of view we've just completed the JISC digital insight survey and there's a question there on the degree to which students like interactive sessions or feel that their material is actually engaging and whilst it's increasing there's definitely room for improvement there and it just reflects some of the stuff I think that that you've got on the screen. Yeah I think I mean I think that's you know our experiences it kind of we were analysing we don't we don't use the JISC survey we've got our own internal student survey which we've run annually since 2010 and it's just a it was a reoccurring theme. Where it was happening students were really positive about it where it wasn't happening they were comparing the experience the good experiences and using that as a benchmark to say why can't we have more of this on these other units? So thanks for that yeah and it seems absolutely kind of you know from the comments that we're getting very very similar experiences from the student perspective and in terms of the staff experience of these things as well so thank you for that. So um then we kind of hear a tricky problem I'm sure you're all aware of this but there's a daff for pretty much everything there's hundreds of them even in our kind of initial kind of review of what what what colleagues we're doing you know we were finding the colleagues we're using all sorts of things within the institution at that time so this is going back pre pre pandemic we didn't provide any institutionally licensed apps for colleagues we had a couple of small scale things going on in different departments and stuff like that which kind of added to the confusion because some colleagues did have access to things and other colleagues didn't and there was like oh why have they got it why have we not got it but it poses the tricky problem which apps do you include you know what what should our toolkit comprise of so that was our sort of main starting point and so what we did was we we we entered I'm not going to go through this in a massive amount you did because it's covered in the in the blog post but essentially what we did was we engaged with our faculty based technology and learning advisors and got them to work with their academic colleagues to create these simple scenarios and case studies that were almost kind of agnostic of the tool that was being used to describe the kinds of activities that they were they were delivering in their in their classroom teaching situations and we used those 25 case studies in a literature review we categorised the the baseline things that they would do they would do it so we kind of reduced it to kind of the the the lowest common denominator if you like and we came up with this active learning framework which describes kind of five main types of activity that colleagues with were engaging their students in with a series of different subtypes so these are the five activities here so personal learning and what we mean by that were in the class session students were being encouraged to do basic stuff like taking notes and managing those notes and maybe using tools like OneNote or Evernote and things like that and or some kind of resource collation or management so that was mainly kind of links and resources and often using the kind of the built-in tools in in web browsers to bookmark things and there was a lot of kind of stuff around presentation delivery so the traditional kind of thing like I'm using now like like PowerPoint both being used by staff and by students and then there was a little kind of pocket of use of using tools that delivered presentation in a slightly different way so rather than having a screen at the front of the classroom the presentation was delivered on the students own devices and the students in some instances could work through the materials at their own pace rather than being led through materials by a tutor so that was that was an interesting observation there was lots of stuff around the tutors asking questions of classes or groups of students or whole groups of students and we've sort of broken that down into several kind of subcategories so just using technology to deliver simple objective tests like MCQs more complex objective type questions and so that might be kind of matching questions that might be where you're allowed to kind of annotate hotspots and put things on the diagrams and stuff like that but still objective questions nevertheless there was a lot of use of questioning in a gamified way so splitting the classroom into small groups and doing like a pub quiz type thing and getting students talking to each other before making single responses that were then fed back to the whole class lots of these tools also employed some kind of free text question response and that was dealt handled slightly separately from the MCQ type responses and then kind of surveying and opinion seeking tools maybe the same tools but being used in a slightly different way. Lot of stuff around collaborative tasks so where students are doing kind of group work where they're being asked to create ideas to draw things to share ideas to work together as a group to collaborate and collate resources in a single place using kind of whiteboard type tools. Lots of examples of students being asked to plan an activity to do project management type stuff using simple digital tools. Lots of examples of students working on shared documents so probably one of the best examples of that is using a shared spreadsheet to collect data and to use the whole class to collect lots of data so that you've got enough data to analyse a statistically significant level or significant at a viable level if you like. Small amount of colleagues using kind of peer review peer assessment type tools and then the final type of activity was student questioning where it kind of flipped round where the students were pushing questions almost as a back channel to staff during their live teaching sessions and so when it kind of did you know all of the different kinds of activities that we found at different levels whether it'd be kind of badged up as active learning or problem-based learning or place-based learning when it boiled down to it these five main activity types with these subtypes were at the core of it and so we thought maybe we can use this framework as a way of helping us to select a relatively small number of tools that meet the needs of the maximum number of people recognizing that we're probably never going to nail it for absolutely everybody. So I'm just going to pop a link uh should just bear with me a second into uh into the chat. So I've got a link to a little padlet here and what we're interested in here is just getting an idea for the categories that I've just described the categories rather than the subtypes what kind of tools are you using in your institution and whether or not you're centrally licensing at the moment so all right you're aware of staff using them as free versions do you encourage staff to use them as free versions or have you kind of taken some steps towards licensing those tools. So when the personal learning presentation delivery tutor questioning collaborative tasks and student question just pop your ideas and they just click on the plus underneath their respective columns and also are there any activity types that you think we've missed is there anything that you know that you think is obviously glaring a mission uh from in the context of in-class teaching. Rod, I think that's the oh thank you Stephen it's all right it's it's in the wrong link oh yeah sorry all right thanks Stephen I'm just going to pop the the padlet on the screen and we can see as things come through so so Office 365 featuring um in terms of personal learning to give you so kind of interested to know if I'm guessing Office 365 is centrally licensed but you can just kind of pop a little bit of an addition under there as to whether or not you're centrally licensing centrally licensing them or using the free tools that would be that would be interesting to know that's an interesting point about those kind of authentic practical learning experiences like nursing and physio um I think one of the things that we recognised is that there's always going to be kind of specific and special cases that perhaps is a tool that you're not going to license centrally for a whole institution and we'll come to that a little bit later when we talk about how we're kind of taking this kind of stuff forward yep I'm not surprised to see that padlet and mirror were featuring quite every in the notion of these collaborative tasks um neopod as well um there's a couple of things around presentation delivery that I don't recognise inspiring is a new one on me um it's an interesting point about Mentimeter as well we have seen some colleagues who kind of shifted away from using PowerPoint to using Mentimeter as a presentation tool rather than purely and simply for its um its uh objective testing tools ms teams as well featuring student questioning so for us student question has been kind of facilitated in a few different ways so we've seen colleagues using things like Twitter and one of the tools that we use Vvox as a kind of a separate back channel that that that that can be used as a Q&A mechanism as well coding in mathematical tools I think again that kind of sits under that kind of more specialist area we do have a couple of tools that are used exclusively in faculty of science engineering like MATLAB and a couple of engineering simulation tools that are used as well but they're they're kind of licensed by the faculty rather than by the institution as a whole I think for some of the for some of the bigger things what we're finding is the kind of like when you when you distill it down from the the overarching activity the overarching model within particular things like like scenarios and case studies personal learning presentation questioning collaborative tasks etc they're the kind of the features of those kinds of bigger types of activity and you're not necessarily using one single tool to facilitate those things you're using a combination of different things okay thanks for that everybody that's that's really that's really helpful I'm going to move on first really really useful to to to see those it's a very kind of similar similar set of tools that seem to be kind of featuring it's almost like kind of out of the hole kind of mist and fog of everything that's available a core set is kind of emerging across the sector as well which is which is interesting okay so what we were able to do was to take um this is a gross oversimplification of the process we had lots of discussion with colleagues we engaged with our educational technologies community practice we ran focus groups we had lots of spreadsheets looking at functionality and comparing different tools and stuff like that but when it boiled down to it we kind of focused on what we came down to five main tools I'll say a little bit about why we chose those so we focused primarily on sort of the tutor questioning and collaboration activities because we found that some of the things like the personal learning and presentation delivery were covered by things that we already had in office 365 and so there wasn't a needs to kind of bring in specific apps to address those kinds of things um and so the vvox was is a is a quizzing very very simple objective question tool and it was kind of if you like our kind of starter introductory level thing um because it is integrated into powerpoint really neatly and we felt it provided a little bit of a comfort blanket for some of our colleagues and we wanted to get involved in this it seemed from the conversations that we had for some people extending the functionality of powerpoint was much less of a troubling ask than learning what they perceived to be a completely separate different tool and so we we kind of took that on board and we went with with vvox in order to get a more complex range of object vvox is very simple mcqs uh single answer multiple answer um it does a very very basic rudimentary free text question um and it has a very very simple match and question time that that's about it um a lot of colleagues were already kind of beyond that and so we went with mentumeter as a more sophisticated tool and although mentumeter does have a kind of powerpoint integration we found that it was it was really inadequate it was really slow it just didn't work but it works really well as a standalone tool and gives a lot of flexibility we had a lot of colleagues who were really kind of big on the gamified objective question where they were using it as kind of energiser activities in the classroom getting a little bit of competition going with their students and and cahoot um in terms of the feedback that we got for students was incredibly popular despite the fact that for some of us it's it seems a little childlike students were really really positive about it and about the way that it was being used so we went with cahoot as well we went with neopod because we already had a kind of a user base for this who were using it in a quite a specific way using as a kind of a very kind of but very quite sophisticated active learning where the students were doing a little bit of the session that was tutor led then they were doing a little bit of place a bit of stuff that was asynchronous there was a lot of group work activities there was a lot of stuff in accountancy that was using neopod where they were doing demonstrations of things in excel and students were being led through some instructions in neopod and then going off and doing some practical tasks in in excel and then feeding back through the tools that were built into neopod and then in terms of the collaborative tasks really really simple versatile tool allows you to do lots of things very very adaptive it's the digital equivalent of a flip chart and post-it notes I think padlet just seemed like a bit of a no brainer for us because it was very very popular with academic colleagues very very easy to use and we already had a lot of kind of positive feedback on on on padlet and so that was essentially the decision-making process that we went through and so vvox meant me to cahoot neopod and padlet became our toolkit and at Manchester Met we kind of we have a what we call the core plus model of learning technologies where the we have a moodle in Microsoft teams are at the core the different levels are kind of described based on the level of support that the institution provides for them so at the core we create all the accounts we get everything set up and there's an expectation that all staff will utilise them in the practice in the arrange section we create the accounts and we make sure that students have access sorry staff have access and training and most staff will be using these tools recommended the things that we're aware of and we kind of encourage staff to use them but we might not license and there's no real expectation that everybody will use them and then there's a whole load of stuff in the periphery where we're fairly sure that staff will be experimenting with these kinds of things but we advise them a little bit of caution because they're not supported by the institution in effect what we were doing with our projects neopod meant you made a padlet and VWOX we're out in the outer rings and with our projects we were bringing them into the centre into this arrange section where we were taking more responsibility for them as an institution and and developing a toolkit that staff were more expected to use so that's what just going to bring Janet here as well because I wanted to give some information about how we kind of went about kind of presenting this to the institution as a project so would you like to say something about that Janet please? Thanks Rod so we thought it's really important that we did a trial so we set up a steering group and as a relatively senior member of staff I chaired the steering group and the steering group had some clout and so as you can see on the on the slide and we think that's really important we we actually took this forward in the end as a proper project and with me as the sponsor of it and that meant that it had some institutional clout so as you can see what we did in the trial where we did a sort of six month trial it cost us about 30 000 pounds to do some trial licenses and during that time we provided all kinds of support that Rod will talk about but also we monitored this really really carefully and so that was the first thing that we did and we kept a really close eye on it didn't we Rod? Yeah absolutely and but I think that you know the important thing is we had we had seen you buy in it right right the way from the start yeah and so the key aims for our trial though was that we wanted to make it easy to request licenses so there's a there's a comment in there about things being agile we wanted to make it really quick and easy so if somebody wanted one of these apps they could get it really really quickly that they didn't have to have somebody coming out and playing around on their machine so the idea was make a request rapidly create the accounts remotely make them available with manmet their manmet credentials so it was on there at their manmet laptop we wanted to provide effective technological and pedagogic support for using the apps and overall we wanted to perceive this notion of risk and build confidence in using those apps and so Stephen's going to kind of explain a little bit about how we achieved aim one and one and two. Yes so when we first introduced the trial we knew from the outset we wanted to make sure any processors that we were going through or asking staff to go through when they were requesting licenses was something that can be continued afterwards sometimes with these projects and trials it does fall down to the project teams and sometimes then when you go to scale it up it's not appropriate because it's a different process so we made use of the university's current ticketing system and so staff could go to the portal choose the piece of software that they'd like to request fill out the basic form an id number for the case of vvox a asset id for their machine so vvox could be installed for the powerpoint plugin that was then sent through to the helpline team where they would either create account through the through the browser or add them to a group policy all of them were set up for single sign-on so really really quick and easy for staff to get started they weren't having to manage additional passwords and things like that once the account was set up the instructions were sent out via email to staff which included how to get started with the particular app that they chosen as well as some other kind of quick tips instructions on our internet pages and a few other areas of support and the really good good thing for this was that because we already obviously had the account set up and the license is ready to go and the majority of the time it was completed within 24 hours so once staff had made a request it was really quick and simple for them so they could get going with it within a working day really which was really good. I think one of the successes of that is quite often colleagues were going away from the initial contact with the helpline team so if they contacted them on the phone by the time they came off the phone the tool was installed on their device and that was a real big win for us and that's something which has continued since I have to say so that's now kind of ingrained in the way that we handle apps for teaching learning and in terms of our initial evaluation were really really high level of interest right from the off so we had nearly 450, nearly 500 individual requests so that's individual members of staff. The majority were academic teaching staff it was about 30% of our full-time staff actually requested licenses right away from the off. Importantly we had about 44 colleagues from professional services so students facing professional service as well and within the initial trial period over 70% of those expressions of interest became active users and so we ended up just during the trial period colleagues ran over 1200 sessions leading to over 20,000 interactions with our students. Importantly for us in terms of the evaluation nine out of ten colleagues and you very rarely get this with an IT project when nine out of ten colleagues considered the sign-up installation set up to be very easy and straightforward so that again was something that we were really positive about. Do you want to say anything more about that Stephen? No I think one of the real successes of what enabled the future success was that initial trial and the amount of staff that were involved it also kind of really showed that there was a need for all these apps in the future and whereas obviously if we had a smaller number of staff signing up to the apps we might not have been able to put really put the weight down on the cases in the future for expanding further. Okay so just in terms of kind of aim three which was our kind of our support and training materials and things like that. Steve do you want to just kind of give a quick overview of what we did? Yeah sure so as I said on the previous slide with the guidance that was sent out to staff once they set up that included the internet pages written and video guides we did make use of the video guides that the the apps themselves provided as well so that was a massive help. We did include some FAQ pages so things if there was anything around our account logins one of the biggest ones was if staff were previously using a free account themselves before the trial how they could bring that account over easily make sure their content came through and then they could get the additional paid for functionality. We did introduction workshops for all of the apps we did an introduction workshop for the project as a whole but then each individual app had a introduction so staff could get some examples of where you might use that particular application. The dedicated teller droppings were very popular as well so each of the tellers had their own kind of specialist app that they focused on that staff could come along to and ask questions but one of one of the things that was became quite common that staff were going to any of the tellers and providing activity and all which one is going to suit me best, suit my outcomes best for this and having that conversation with that. One of the real real good takeaways from trial and into the future was the MS teams community practice space. It was a fantastic development. Every time someone applied for a license we added them to the area and it worked as that kind of peer support network and we will talk about a little bit more detail of that but that's turned into a really positive space that's really enabled things to move on at a good pace. The interesting question from Jim there about how did we kind of widen it out and we had a big launch about this and also the word of mouth about it there was a real buzz about it from those colleagues who were involved in it so you rarely get such positive feedback from academic colleagues on how easy it is to request and set up things like that. Word of mouth played a big role in it but we did have a big launch. We also had a thread more or less dedicated to it in our educational technologies conference and also active learning is very much on the agenda in our institution. It's kind of built into our new education strategy and so there is a general kind of perception that these tools are really important in that particular context so there's a framework of conversations that are taking place in the institution that these tools sort of tapped into so right place right time is probably a good way of describing it. So in terms of our evaluation of this so seven hour ten colleagues agreed that they received all of the support that they needed during the trial. Now we spent a lot of time talking to colleagues around their experience of this and it's just absolutely clear that some colleagues are really still absolutely terrified of using technology for whatever reason. We've got a small group who require huge amounts of elbow support because they find it really really stressful. It makes them really anxious. They doubt their own skills and their ability to do things and that's one of the things that we think are one-to-one tele support is kind of addressing. It's not perfectly scalable in that respect but we need to kind of recognise that it's not easy for some colleagues and it's not just about them not wanting to adapt. They've got a genuine anxiety about it and need that little bit extra support. Despite that fact these colleagues even though they've found that they still kept on doing it which I think is a positive. So our overall kind of sort of linking back to our aims our strategy basically was that if we address aim one and two make the set up an installation of these things really really easy provide effective support and then an active community of practice that that will lead to a reduced risk and increased confidence. So where we're at for this this is again this is an oversimplification of a complex analysis that we've done but what became apparent is that colleagues perceived the risk of using these technologies differently. So some colleagues just you know they're pretty gungho they'll have a go with anything and they're not really bothered of whether it falls over or not they'll just adapt and they'll work around it and they'll try any tool anywhere any time because that's the that's the kind of person they are. We've got another group of colleagues who they're happy to give things ago but they need to be well prepared and they need to you know they need to understand what's going on and they need to feel supported by the institution. We've got another group of colleagues who perceive the risk has been quite significant unless the institution is supporting them and unless they've got kind of the ability to tap into either other experienced academic colleagues or technical support really really quickly they're finding it stressful and they're anxious about it. However despite the different perceptions of risk nine out of ten of our colleagues strongly agreed that they're more likely to adopt apps that are provided by the institution and supported by the institution and nine out of ten strongly agreed that ongoing provision of those apps encourages them to use and innovate with those tools. That's a really kind of significant thing that that we've taken out of this. So we can't change colleagues kind of perception of risk but in providing the right kind of supportive environment and by showing an institutional commitment to a toolkit we can get colleagues to buy into it in a more significant way. So quick pause for thought before I kind of move on please just turn your microphones on pop anything in the chat. Is there anything that you'd like me to kind of pick up on now? Yeah go for it Rob. So for us H5P is one of our newer ones that we sort of bought on stream and that particularly aggregates I think some of the functionality of some of the other tools that you you mentioned a little bit earlier and so we're we're looking and we're working with the the H5P team to see if we can extend actually some of the the tool sets. One of the I think questions that came up and I popped that in the chat already is people very early on were saying you know if I spend the time to try and learn this and integrate it and it does take a little bit more time than you know just making a simple PowerPoint I think we you know we have to acknowledge that it does you know it is a bit more than just doing the basic really. They're sort of saying okay can you commit to you know longer than one year licence and so on and if you only say oh it's just a year for piloting and stuff they're just like well I can't be bothered you know or I'll worry about it when you've actually got a proper licence and stuff. 100 percent agree with that. I think one of the things that we were as a team we were confident of is that once we got a foot in the door we would be able to make the case for the licences in a longer term in a longer term way and I think we will show you later that we've done that. In terms of H5P we do actually licence H5P institutionally but we kind of see that as something which is more integrated with the virtual learning environment rather than something which is sitting specifically in the context of our in-class teaching. Now that might be a reflection of our limiting ourselves thinking about the way that we might utilise H5P but I recognise there's a lot of potential there with tools like that to bridge the gap between the VLE and what's going on in the classroom. Are there any other questions or queries that people would like us to follow up on? Just to say that that's where we started with H5P and then we've sort of brought it a little bit more out of the VLE now to try and use it in other areas, particularly the voting and sort of rank rules particularly. Also just to say that the tools that you've got at MMU actually just came down to Northampton and they actually used your tool set actually on that and I put the myro board on the padlet so you can see what actually got generated as a result of that. Oh that's great, thank you. That's just really good to know that we have spoken to that. I presented it just last year I think initially talked about this so that's good to hear now. Look forward to having a look at that myro board. We'll say a little bit about myro in a second because that's kind of part of our next fears actually. Okay, so Janet do you just want to say kind of like where we are now because this addresses the you know the issue that Rob has just made about kind of longer term commitment to this? Yeah, so you're absolutely right that once we'd finished the trial we said yeah we want to do this. We then made a business case to the university and we partly we looked at finances and I think I've said in the chat one of the things that we'd found was that there were people not just buying individual licenses to things like Mentimeter and stuff like that but actually they were going and getting their faculty to buy things and when we went to Mentimeter they said oh yeah there's a huge number of people you've already got 600 users all right who were playing for themselves or whatever it was so we did a business case to the university and as I said in the chat one of the things we did was we stopped people using faculty money and using Manchester Met credit cards to buy apps and we then got £250,000 worth of investment which actually I think they've got a pretty good deal out of us investment in six apps for the next three years. Some of those as you can see are unlimited accounts so for example Padlet and Vvox others of them are are less so but we are increasing the number of active users massively and I think one of the things that I can't emphasise enough how a collaboration between academic and professional services and having people both in professional services but also from the academic side working together to make sure that this happened was really really important. I don't think it could have happened if we'd not have this great relationship and so two things there that are worth a mention aren't they Jed we employed our institutional vendor management team to do all of the complex negotiations with with these vendors about the levels of licensing and about the about the financial side of things and they also began the initial discussions and cleared up the things like GDPR and began the initial discussions around accessibility of these tools so having those professional people who really understand the GDPR regulations, who really understand licensing etc etc took an awful lot of pressure off the project team. Absolutely and I think the other thing that we did again I've put in the chat we started a group where people could come to us because as we said sometimes procurement don't act very quickly and we started a group that's on the centre there called the digital experience and software group and what we were finding and somebody's put this in the chat already um that people like their own solutions um and really they didn't they were just used to using a particular app but actually based on the analysis that we had done of the classroom activities that Rod explained to you earlier on they didn't really necessarily need that app because the apps that we had um that Rod had analysed that we already got something that would do that but they were just used to having whatever they had um and hence the importance of support so really people were coming to this group saying oh well you know I need something that will paint everything pink and we were saying well you don't really need something that will paint everything pink we've actually got something that will paint everything any color you want that will do it's just not the tool that you're used to um and so I think that's really really important uh and that group takes as as Rod said request for non-supported apps and we're quite we're quite robust about that we look at new and emerging apps so for example Myro wasn't on our original list of supported apps it was asked for particularly by one faculty um and we decided to go ahead with that now and we're looking at evaluations and they're continuous as well um and again as as we've put on the slide there that's a very senior team um and it's it's a team that there's also enough people in it who are able to take chairs action that if you know when we talked earlier on about oh but I need this particular thing for my particular and I need it now or sometimes in relation to research people felt they wanted something now we could put that through as chairs action and say yep there's enough people here I could vote a couple of people say Rod what do you think yeah that'll do yeah we you're right we haven't got that and then we could put it through very quickly as chairs action so that's been really useful in terms of those requests and review processes absolutely and Jim Jim's point there about bringing new stuff on board with you know with different tools stuff like that you know part of our part of our onboarding with with new colleagues now uh there's opportunities to kind of have kind of one to one inductions with our faculty tellers when we talk about you know which tools we supply which which which tools we provide we give a lot of support to help college transition from one tool into into into another so I'm just going to say I'm going to say a little bit about accessibility because I know that this is this is a contentious issue um so in our initial evaluations everything that we looked at there was a challenge around accessibility and so we know that there are challenges and so we kind of had a you know there's a little bit of a dilemma there do you just kind of reject everything because it currently doesn't take all of the boxes or the decision that we took is we're going to get involved with the app vendors and we're going to work with them and we are going to try and apply appropriate pressure to make things change to get things better to to to have an impact on this stuff and so we as part of our vendor management negotiation we flagged this up with them all right the way right the way from the start that procurement of this is uh in part dependent upon your willingness to enter into conversations about improving the accessibility of these tools um and we had a lot of really robust and we rejected one or two tools because they didn't seem to be prepared to enter into those conversations the tools that we did pick were all prepared to at least start an engagement with and so what we've done is one of our faculty technology enhanced learning advisers is a nominated app expert and they engage regularly with our community of practice they take in there constantly gather from our um from our staff and from our students and we're engaged in originally it was monthly it's kind of a little bit further further apart now but regular meetings with the app vendors where we're feeding feeding back and we've had some significant successes very very quickly Vvox were fantastic when we first got in touch with them they made some really big changes to some of the uh uh the the interface of their of their app based on feedback that we give them um we can't take all credit for a book you know there's we've seen a big change in the in the uh in the approach of padlet towards accessibility they've now got an accessibility statement on their website for the first time we're not claiming responsibility for that but I think our approach and other colleagues across the sector by working with padlet have applied that pressure that's led to that change and a shift in the right direction so it's definitely a work in progress but we think it's the right decision maybe not everybody's favourite but we think it's the right decision to work with them rather than just reject them on the grounds that they're not quite there yet or they're not yet there yet still so that was that that that was our approach to that um happy to kind of follow up on any conversations about that if if colleagues want to but I'm aware that we're running a little bit shorter time so I was going to kind of open that up a little bit more but I'd like to get through some of the other stuff that we want to report back on so our current state of play where are we at at the moment so Stephen's going to say a little bit about our kind of our levels of uptake um so over to you Stephen yes so um obviously that on the the first row there we've got the um license uptake from the the trial itself um really good numbers obviously what you can see there the total of licenses across is 921 where actually staff involved was around 400 and so we knew staff where they were trying things out they were it was it was new a lot of the apps were new to the majority of staff involved they might have used one previously and I thought oh that does something similar or that does potentially will do something better for my activity um so we weren't just seeing one person pick up one thing and we were seeing them trying out a few different things which was great for us in terms of feedback we received and from that we obviously have the licenses that we recorded as of about a month ago and we can see a massive uptake again in terms of the the number of staff it's around um around 1400 staff have at least one um apps for teaching and learning license but you can see there we've got um over 2300 licenses in use across all of those five applications at the moment um so a real boost from the successful trial and then into um now we're I suppose we're in our second um full academic year of the use of um of these five apps that that equates to somewhere between uh 60 and 65 percent of our full-time teaching staff have now got and used in some way shape or form one of our apps for teaching and learning. And then what we've got is is actually the the use of these these applications so we do have the trial numbers as well as the um those since the end of the the trial and it's it's some incredible numbers when we when we first looked at this we were we're really impressed at how much um just to give a little bit of information there the student hits and that's where a student has engaged with that particular application and that activity um so if you've got a session with students um and you've got 10 students in that session um and they've they've at least replied to one poll for instance if it was in one of the um one of the applications that provide that um so things like student hits you know that's almost 175,000 student interactions um since since the end of the trial um and we we also noticed things like like Neapod it's it's not the it's it's not the biggest um license number however there's some really specific use and it's still got a big impact in terms of that student interactions with those sessions uh generally we see maybe Neapod being used in some of the larger teaching sessions uh we know there's a lot in business and law that do use Neapod um and it's it's been really interesting having to look through um some of these some of these numbers um but you can see there the the amount of sessions that have that have ran uh using these applications is um it's been really positive for us. Yeah just just pick up very very quickly on a couple of questions Rob uh has mentioned you know some of their students feeling a little bit paddled it out uh we've seen some instances of that as well um what I think we're seeing is some instances where kind of where paddler has been used sort of as a I need I need to do something with technology and part of the problem with some of the activities is the activities themselves are not that well designed and so one of the things that we want to drive on next year is part of our work around our education strategy and our uh digitally enhanced learning teaching assessment strategy is activity and active learning design and so making sure that the tool is not the driver that design in the activity first and foremost is what they do and that might reduce some of that kind of notion of of you know an overuse of it to just for the sake of it so because I think purposeful use of the technology is really important um question from Chris about analysis down at faculty level we've got all of that data Chris we're we're in the middle of a kind of a really big kind of evaluation we're going to do some follow-up surveys and some follow-up focus groups as well but there is definitely a kind of a range of different users based in um in in the different faculties with different preferences and for different types of tools because because the the faculties are culturally quite different in the way that they approach their learning and teaching and that's reflected in their tool use. Okay just want to say something about the one of the real big success stories is this is around the uh Stephen mentioned it earlier there's a sort of an afterthought when we kind of started enrolling giving people licenses we automatically added them to what we called our tech for teaching and learning community space and team so originally this was just vvox cahoot meant the neopod and padlet channels um and we you know we we just thought it would be a place where they posted questions and got responses from uh from from the telting it evolved very very quickly into something completely different this is a very very self-supporting space so I've now got nearly 900 members of staff enrolled in here over the last three months eight eight hundred and seventy of those have been active in somewhere shape or form within the team space lots of posts lots of replies not from the telting these are academic colleagues talking to each other about the use of these tools um some of the peaks that you see in activity here are related to events and workshops and things that we've run that have kind of kind of flagged up a little bit of a buzz got a little bit of excitement going um and we've expanded that out now to include other kind of elements of our technology infrastructure so we've got our uh an area specifically around creating and using our video tools and our vle moodle we've got tips for inclusivity and accessibility and just the use of microsoft teams itself this is a really big success story because it because it kind of it it just sort of happened as a surprise we set it up we we we set it off and it's become very very self-sustaining and it's become very active um so just uh you're nothing that we did on purpose but a really brilliant thing that we're trying they trying to keep going in support um as we as we go forward I think one thing to add to that is well in terms of this the shown success of that the first full academic year that we had the apps in place um obviously we've got a ticketing system for raising queries and things like that with it um for us specifically tell there's generally about 1500 tickets a year that we might receive for the first academic year the apps were in place we had 12 12 tickets which is obviously a miniscule amount compared to the the majority of numbers we get and that's down to the success of that that teams network as well as the other resources and things that we've provided um which was a really good test for us to go okay yeah what what we've got in place is supporting it and obviously those those 12 tickets we did get we can inform that in FAQs and other resources we might develop in the future yeah so just to kind of finish us off you know our longer term view of this the provision of what we're called referring to was flexible active learning is a key feature of our new digitally enhanced learning teaching assessment strategy we're thinking of flexible active learning as a learning design concept that engages our students in learning by doing using a framework of formal and informal physical and online learning spaces that provides flexibility to our students in where when and how to learn kind of linked into that core to our strategy um is this notion of a learning spaces framework where we have on campus we have formal learning spaces like lecture theatres and teaching rooms we have informal learning spaces like cafes and student hubs um and and uh sort of drop-in booths we've got a core digital space in our virtual learning environment that kind of provides a gateway into our lecture capture system video streaming and electronic management of assessment tools and then our office 365 and teams environment provide an online collaborative interactive workspace for our students plus a live meeting space that we use now interestingly our apps for teaching and learning tools sit across all of these spaces and so a key part of our strategies is how to utilise tools like padlets to provide students with flexibility in terms of engaging with their learning so this is just very very quickly how that might look so you might set a group task using padlets in a lecture theatre the students can take that with them because it's digital into one of the informal learning spaces and work on it together you can then bring them back into the classroom review their contributions on in that digital space you can debrief on the task you can use the basis of that padlet as a follow-up activity so you can put some instructions in Moodle and the link to the padlet that they've been working on in the classroom within the VLE and then you can point them to a tab in teams where the padlet is also embedded and get them to work in the collaborative workspace they might even arrange a follow-up meeting to discuss this kind of thing whether again they've got that digital tool and then come back into the live teaching session and debrief so what are apps for teaching and learning in capturing capturing the inputs and the outputs of student engagement in live teaching is it facilitates access to those tools beyond the classroom and that's a key aspect of flexible learning provision going forward and so just to kind of finish off Janet these are our key success factors aren't they I mean I would say top of the list there was having a senior project sponsor in Janet who was very hands-on and engaged in the project not only faculty head of education but also the convener of our ed tech cop able to kind of bring all the coalesce those things together um but there are other things as well that you kind of flagged up as well at wouldn't Janet yeah so um yeah I wouldn't want to blow my own trumpet too much but I do think it's important somebody senior who can have the ear of somebody senior as well um we had the brilliant learning activities framework which really helped with the app selection and we had done all that analytic work we had a fantastic project manager um and a great steering group who were really interested and engaged and as we've said in the chat as well really important to get procurement and the vendor management team on board in relation to that um so it that's why we think it's worked and it's continuing to work I have to say I did put in the chat as well I think that uh COVID played into our hands here uh we were very lucky that in a sense that it came along at the right kind of time something we're already thinking of doing and it gave us extra boost which I think has been true of ed tech across across everything I think that's about it for us is it right I think it is kind of we've run over a little bit of apologies for that but um really hope that you found that um a useful insight into what we think is a really big success story our institution um it's it's made a really massive difference uh for a lot of our colleagues and it's really I think it really has had a significant impact upon the amount of active learning that's taken place within the institution um if anybody would like to follow up we've got so much more detail that we could share with you on this it's obviously a kind of a little bit of a a whistle stop tour of some of the things but if anybody wants to follow up um our contact details are there I'll just copy and paste those as well into the into the into the chat um so please please do get you're getting in touch um and if you've got kind of I say any of your own kind of insight and experiences to to to share you know we're really interested to to to hear your thoughts thanks everybody please do keep in touch we really would like to carry on the conversation that'd be great okay thank you I'll just finish it all now you've all had a little chat I know everyone's disappearing but thank you very much Rod and the team that was really interesting because I I see you exactly where you're coming from and I look forward to seeing how it goes in and you will be putting the next blog post together which I will look forward to reading that will be that will be available hopefully by the end of next week lovely thanks very much and thanks everybody thanks very much thanks everyone 19