 very welcome. I have a little bit of a broadband, what would I say, issue. So I may switch off my video once I've said hello to you, but thanks everybody for joining us today. What we're going to speak to you about is our experience of translating universal design for learning policy into practice and the way that we've approached that is it through the development of a toolkit for Moodle, which draws on the UDL principles and offers practical advice and tools for academics at DCU to translate those principles into practice. And whoops, okay, there we go. Just to give you an overview of our presentation, Karen is going to introduce you to universal design for learning very briefly. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the universal design for learning principles, but just to frame the discussion around the toolkit. Then I'm going to link the work of the UDL toolkit to the DigComp edu framework and also make reference to some of the findings from the index survey that was published last week. We're going to give you an overview of the components of the toolkit and then back to Karen, she's going to speak to you about the development process of the toolkit and a little bit about feedback from our pilot users and then we'll just wrap up by outlining our next steps, which includes the sharing of the toolkit through Creative Commons structures soon enough, probably in June or going well. So with that, I'm going to pass you over to Karen. Thanks, Suzanne. So I suppose to briefly provide a quick overview about universal design for learning. It's a framework essentially to improve and to optimize teaching learning and assessment by removing barriers in the environment, both physical and virtual. So we think that small considered changes to practice can make the curriculum accessible for everyone. And essentially it ensures that a high quality of education for students can still happen and certainly provides for full and very active participation for learners. So this practice improves student engagement and retention while positively enhancing the learning experience for everyone. UDL promotes the use of multiple approaches in teaching learning and assessment and it's encompassed by three main principles. So they are the multiple means of representation, multiple means of student engagement and multiple means of action or expression. So UDL is considered best practice for inclusion by suggesting flexible instructional materials, techniques and strategies that can empower educators to meet the varied needs of learners. So the three principles of UDL can help us refine how we approach who we teach, what we teach and also how we teach. And as we all know, technology enables the quick modification of learning materials to meet the specific needs of our students. But it also means that virtual learning environments such as Moodle are really well placed to address the goal of universal design for learning. So it's the responsibility of institutions and developers who maintain these environments to plan for inclusive practice. In DCU we recognize that learning is a partnership between learners and teachers and we hope to employ student centred learning design where the student voice is heard and that informs the design and implementation of the learning experiences. So in order to enhance this inclusivity of the learning experience, what we intend to do is to promote the principles of UDL in the design and delivery of all of our programs. And I suppose now more than ever we're required to design our programs to allow more flexible delivery online and also using the technology that is available to us. So to fulfill the commitment that's outlined in the DCU strategic plan and the constituent teaching and learning strategies, we've tried to draw on expertise and best practice across DCU and beyond to implement a UDL pedagogic framework to underpin our institutional approach to teaching, learning and assessment. So maybe Suzanne will discuss the European framework for digital competencies. And really I suppose what we're looking at here is number five empowering learners. Thanks Karen and apologies if I got the timing on moving the slides a little bit wrong there. Not at all, perfect. Okay so the work of the UDL toolkit speaks to the dimension number five in the DHCAMPA edu framework which is called empowering learners. And this dimension is broken down into three parts. The first relates to accessibility and inclusion which obviously speaks to developing learning resources and activities that are accessible to all learners but it also speaks to considering learners' expectations and their digital abilities or capacities. The next part of this dimension, differentiation and personalization explores offering choice to learners so perhaps allowing learners to advance at their own pace through a piece of learning or to develop the development of individual learning pathways. And then the final part or aspect of the dimension is the active engagement of learners both in terms of engaging with the content and then engaging with the creative expression of their learning. Okay so you can see how those three aspects of dimension five connect quite easily with the universal design for learning principles. The first one accessibility and inclusion connects to multiple means of representation, differentiation and personalization then connects to multiple means of engagement and then the active engagement of learners speaks to two of the principles, multiple means of engagement and multiple means of action or expression. And just we wanted because the index survey is hot up the press we just wanted to mention two findings from that report very briefly but are relevant to the UDL toolkit. Students have called in the in the survey for consistency around the use of the VLE and we feel that the UDL toolkit offers some opportunities and tools for staff to create consistency in their use of the VLE. And the other finding that stood out to us when we were preparing for this session was that students are calling for improved navigation and signposting in the use of the VLE which we also feel that the toolkit can offer some guidance and support around. So the toolkit itself comprises of three different parts. The first is an introduction or overview of UDL which is available in both text and video format in line with Universal Design for Learning Principles. The second piece is a Moodle template which I'm going to show to you shortly which seeks to address the issues raised in the index survey around creating some consistency in the use of VLE. And then we've got a series of UDL checklists which we hope will also support engagement with UDL principles for staff. So just bear with me because I want to share the template with you so I need to get another screen up if anybody can sing while I'm just doing this. And there we go. Apologies. Okay so you can see that the template is is very very simple it's not a very complicated toolkit. You will see over here on the right we've got a little section for the course outline or the contact details of the lecture and also a placeholder an image placeholder where we're encouraging people to pop a picture of themselves up just to orient the students and their office hours is the last kind of suggestion that we have in that section. We've gone in the introductory section of the page we've got automatically an announcement or course news forum. We've also added an ask a question forum the DCU academic integrity and plagiarism policy and then we've popped in a template for a Moodle handbook where we're hoping that people will populate with material related to their own specific module. And then very importantly over on the left we've got by default the accessibility toolbar available within the template. Karen is going to speak to more about the development of the toolkit but one of the surprises that we had when we began developing the toolkit was how few people were actually aware of this toolbar or block within Moodle and how well received it was when they became aware of the accessibility block. So that's here by default in our template as part of the toolkit. Okay stop sharing back to the slides bear with me a moment. Okay here we go. So then we've got our UDL guideline checklist and the idea here is that we've provided a range of checklist types for staff. Originally what we what we thought was that we would present these options to to staff and that they would select their preferred type of checklist but actually the feedback to us was that they'd like to have all of the checklist types available in the toolkit and that they would choose the appropriate toolkit checklist for their particular context at any particular time. So you'll see the first one here is a tick box kind of checklist which goes through each of the UDL principles and then breaks it down into checkpoints around the guidelines. So people just have a look at the suggestions there and they tick the box if they've met all of the requirements. The next one is the educator checklist which was developed by CAST and this again breaks down each of the UDL principles and then the soapheadings but here they offer kind of ideas or examples around how you might address each of those checkpoints on the UDL principle list and it also offers some space for your own ideas or notes over here to the right. So it's a little step up from the last one and then our final checklist type is is a progression rubric adapted from a rubric designed by Melissa Toland. We have the reference in these slides which will be shared later and what we did was we took Melissa's design and we incorporated the dimensions of the three framework developed by Napier University to support the engagement of staff with technology enhanced learning. So we we took those three dimensions and we mapped them on to Melissa's design. So you'll see here on the left you've got your your checkpoint relating to principle one and then at each dimension of the framework there are some examples and definitions offered within the breakdown of the checkpoint. So you'll see here use a Melissa's language if you're at a level of emerging practice in UDL you've got your choices here at checkpoint one, checkpoint two, checkpoint three then you can move on to proficient and finally to expert level and we've mapped those on using the language of the three framework enhanced extend and empower. Okay so I'm going to pass back to Karen who's going to speak to you a little bit about how we actually developed. Thanks Suzanne. I suppose taken from our experience as learning technologists and academic developers we really thought about designing and developing the process of the toolkit really to be in consultation and partnership with our colleagues and we can all agree and we all know that we're all busy and I suppose we didn't want to just start designing the toolkit without consultation. We wanted to really try to empower educators and empower those who teach across the university and to really make this toolkit useful and beneficial for them and their practice. So what we wanted to do was to try and sketch an outline of exactly what would be useful I guess what would be a kind of a starting point perhaps for for our colleagues and really this started with a focus group. So what we wanted to do was to engage those who teach we wanted to pilot with two faculties who had different experiences I guess and engagement with Moodle and we wanted them to kind of tell us what exactly they need we wanted this to be something that enhances their practice but not so burdensome or not so cumbersome that would stop them in their tracks to implement a UDL template just like this. So that consultation or that initial focus groups were really really informative for us in designing and outlining some of the resources that Suzanne has just shared with you as well. So in piloting our toolkit, oh thanks Suzanne, in piloting our toolkit really what we wanted to do was get a sense of what exactly works for them we wanted to actually try and get into a conversation with meaningful engagement with our colleagues and what we discovered was that UDL was broadly understood by our participants they definitely aligned three principles of UDL to look like good teaching, good learning and fair assessment. So the idea of the toolkit was a nice way to scaffold and to use maybe stepping stones perhaps in applying the principles of UDL in their use of Moodle for teaching, learning and assessment. So in designing the toolkit I suppose on some of the results of the piloting and what we actually discovered in consultation with our colleagues was actually that we needed lots of time and I suppose each of our participants agreed that they wanted plenty of time to be able to practically apply these templates and these resources and any small or significant changes that they were making in their loop pages. The fact that Suzanne and I were present in this focus group or this semi-structured support session was also really important to help us design and to explore what was working well for the faculties who were testing this out. I think some of the real benefits of allowing the time and the space for colleagues to be able to sit with us to be able to take some time out of their day to redesign or to reimagine what their Moodle pages look like really out loud and opened up a conversation for what was important for both the lecturers and their students as well. With regards I suppose to what also I suppose ensures that we're always or we're continuing to design approaches that are efficient and are worthwhile for our student experience was really just about asking our colleagues what were maybe the most frequently asked questions or what were maybe some of the difficulties and what they perceived as barriers to learning for their students and we were really encouraged I suppose looking at the the responses to the pilot group we were really encouraged to see that it provided the use of these kind of templates and these progression checklists provided clarity for the students and allowed our colleagues to be able to organize their loop pages in a way that was able to respond effectively to maybe some of the common barriers or some of the common questions for our students as well and you'll see some of the pilot group responses presented on this slide and some of our participants responded that they've completely changed all of their loop pages which was really encouraging and ultimately that made them maybe much tidier and perhaps more clearer for the students to be able to access information and resources. Also setting up things like tasks in a in a considered way and allowed for the students to maybe engage a little bit deeper in some of the concepts or some of the ideas that were being shared as well. So all in all I suppose and while we're still I suppose I want to roll this out into a institution-wide rollout hopefully in September we think this is a really good opportunity and with all of the the difficulties surrounding the last few months with the shutdown of our institutions we're really seeing that UDL can be an opportunity for our faculty to be able to engage with these principles of inclusion to ensure that as they're redesigning and redeveloping their window pages for next semester that these toolkits and these checklists and these templates can be helpful for them redesigning or reimagining what their loop pages look like. I suppose to move on to maybe the next steps perhaps and what we would like to do is also get your feedback essentially and trying to get a sense of what exactly is working in your institutions and to share what works best. We're going to be further developing the toolkit again trying to have this kind of breadth across the institutions for all faculties and particularly perhaps for those faculties or those staff who aren't familiar with the UDL principles and also offer to deliver this and develop this with staff in a scaffolded process that was something that worked really really well with our colleagues but also we'd like to to share this toolkit with you as Moodle users as well to see how it can be adapted or how it can be implemented in your institutions. So finally I think we would just like to thank you for attending this presentation. We'd love to welcome your feedback as Suzanne mentioned earlier the toolkit is going to be available through Creative Commons in June and we'd love to open up to any questions that you may have. Thanks a lot Rob and thank you everybody for the invitation. I'm Fran McKegney and Justin is our learning technologist. We're going to change gears actually quite a bit here. I'm going to share my screen and let me just share my screen and bump up the presentation. Hopefully you can all see that. So while Karen and Suzanne were doing the presentation which was really which is really impressive I think well we're really going to change gears here. We've had both the interesting opportunity I guess and the challenge of really looking at teaching and learning and the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning from a very fundamental perspective over the past year and when Rob sort of approached us about would we like to participate in these in these webinars and suggested competence three of the European framework teaching and learning we immediately said yes not just because we couldn't say no to Rob but also because this is an area that we have been very guided by and really working on for the past year. So just to sort of you know ground you in this particular part of the framework you can see at the bottom I have this competence refers to designing planning and implementing the use of digital technologies in the different stages of the learning process and you can see some of the bullets in section three which is in blue you know teaching guidance collaborative learning and self-regulated learning. Rob said are you okay to do this and we said yes do you need to make any changes no we don't and the reason was because this is an area that we've been really looking at very closely over the past year so this is going to be a quite a simple presentation just to sort of revisit what we've looked at over the past year and how Moodle fits into our plans going forward I'm going to sort of talk about the overall architecture that we looked at and then I'll hand over to Justin who will talk more specifically about Moodle's piece within that just a little bit on a burning for those who don't know us we're obviously a digital college blended learning is our model for from the perspective of this webinar let's just say it's 50-50 it's not quite but I think it's a good way to think about what we do so 50% is online and then 50% is classroom based or face-to-face and so on our students are spread out around the country and we then organize them into regional groups we have about 23 different regional groups and the regional groups are overseen by a college tutor and members of the of the adjunct faculty the face-to-face elements so the classrooms and so on school placements happen are regionally based as well and obviously in since COVID-19 we've had to move all of those elements online so been 100% online at you know at the moment in addition to that we obviously have because of our teacher training we obviously have all of the sort of school placements and so on and so our architecture has to support this very distributed model and we have to support you know at least 50% at least 50% online now our model up to now our VLE is known as my hands it's Moodle based it's like a big brain and everybody comes into it from their laptops and you know as Rob has said we have used it very extensively in the last six seven years and pushed everything through it what we wanted to do was to step back and revisit our assumptions about about our digital architecture and to sort of have a broader conversation about what we might need going forward over the next five to 10 years so we looked at two fundamental questions and we involved everybody from the executive management team down in the discussion about what this might look like two big questions where what will teaching and learning look like in the next five to 10 years we really took a decade view we separated our conversations that were next week or next month or next six months in terms of immediate needs and said what's going to happen what do we think is going to happen what do we want our teaching and learning to look like over the next five to 10 years and then what digital architecture will we need to put into place to support this and does Moodle have a role does Moodle have a role in our in in our future so very fundamental very fundamental conversation what we did was excuse me what we did was initially we created six workshops we chose different teams for the workshops we gave short presentations and then opened it up to a broader discussion we also used Microsoft teams to create a series of channels around each of the workshops so that we could continue the conversations between the workshops so on six consecutive Monday afternoons we ran a series of workshops we had 40 to 50 people at each at each session and they included everybody from the executive team to department heads to you know functional leaders in their areas on the subject of what what do we do you know what where do we do what do we do going forward so you can see some of the teams here the role of mobile technologies and hibernious future student identity in the student journey using digital technology to strengthen community and learning in the regional groups given our regional structure collaborative learning and research the whole notion of collaboration was key to our to our work over the past year the future of the VLE future of student support use of video and teaching and learning and so on we then issued a report you can see the cover of us there on screen and we then got into a series of more detailed workshops for example we spent half a day looking at collaborative structures to support learning and research what would that what would that look like we moved away from email and and and so on how would we make it how would we make it more collaborative and so on and in parallel with this we were looking at technologies in the marketplace including moodle competitors to see what would be the best fit based on what came out of these what came out of these workshops so a simple functional representation of how we envisage ourselves going forward instead of moodle playing this hugely enormous central role that it does at the moment it would be more a component in a more distributed system and and would interact with those be seamlessly integrated and interact with those components so for example in in terms of video we fortunately made the decision that there would be a lot more use of video in education over the next decade we talked about a virtual video network we got talking to zoom about a year ago we did a series of pilots we deployed before the end of the year we trained up our staff at the beginning of this year so that when the coronavirus hit us in March we were actually quite well geared to to to deal with the sort of educational implications of what was of what was going on there we also want to encourage much greater use of mobile technologies in the future phones ipads and and so on and we're currently building student staff mobile apps which are hibernia college apps which will have quite powerful capability particularly in the area of particularly in the area of collaboration when we deployed zoom we also deployed zoom in every member of staff every student got a full professional license again to encourage not just student student communication but student student communication collaborative research our students are post graduates and so to really put more capability into the hands of both staff and students going forward other elements you can see every student has access to office 365 account and also kind of focusing on student dashboard initially but then moving to dashboards now more in general so in this sort of in this kind of functional architecture then we looked at moodle and had to make some decisions about how we would move forward with it and i'm going to hand you over to justin who kind of take the story from here brilliant you can leave it on that slide for him in the front and thanks everyone for being here this is fantastic for me really enjoying the session so thanks to Rob and just to comment and Rob know we didn't know it was coming and we didn't buy shares in zoom so we missed that boat so i've been pretty much working in building moodle to Tara and many other VLEs for the past 10 years and through all that time we still haven't managed in with hibernia now to actually build or turn moodle into the digital learning unicorn that everyone seems to want okay it's just unattainable we can't do it might be 10 years signed but at the moment definitely not and so as i said we looked at so many other platforms myself i must have went through about 20 25 30 of them weighed them all up and the one platform that kept rising to the top was moodle and just from every point from ease of use a lot of the times it's simplicity so if we just go on to the next slide there Fran oh yep sorry justin is that back on screen for you she's stuck on that one sorry will i stop sharing and reshare yeah please so at the workshop i brought up this slide to show staff moodle isn't just a name there's a reason behind the letters as you see and i don't most of the time as i've been working in moodle and working with it one of the things i've sort of neglected was the first letter there m for modular okay we've slowly been packing moodle with every type of plug-in and every type of integration but realistically moodle is fantastic at delivering learning it's fantastic at enabling students to upload assessments and it's really good at displaying grades and we we've consistently tried to pack it with everything else so we sort of took a step back and say how can we make this a little bit easier for the students to use uh faculty and staff and we sort of focus in on the modular look and aspect of it so we just want to move to the next slide there Fran so we wanted to create in hiberny at the moment um we have a module and inside that module we'd have subjects we're going to have up to four subjects five subjects so you'd have one um module would have english math science and history and the problem we were having was that all assessments were pushed into one particular module for the whole program so we decided to create a module hub based around these subjects where um the assessments were universal between all the subjects um the briefs and it would house a lot of universal documentation that would relate to each one of the subjects so this would make it easier for students to navigate to their assessments uh faculty to navigate around the actual subjects and cells and then staff to um pull reports and requests from us so we've put an awful lot of sort of time and effort into pairing back everything we've put into Moodle and um taking it way back to the basics um as you can see we're leveraging Moodle's underlying architecture it's quite simple um but it's very powerful so we're we're sort of trying to clean house so in order to do this we're after um pushing a new team and a new instance of Moodle and we're moving to version 3.9 in September isn't it friend? In September yeah in September and we're using the azure platform as the portal so anything regarding um sort of reports now will be housed in the portal um so a lot of the staff will not have to actually go into Moodle to pull reports they can actually do it through the portal the dashboard for students will be there so it's a base we're actually taking back control of Moodle of the VLE so we're taking all external items that we would have tried to push into Moodle we've put them into the portal and it's just free and Moodle up to be a learning environment and that's what it's designed to do so um this is the last slide here and as you can see um as Fran detailed all of our external sort of sources and functions will be held in the portal and Moodle will be just left as a learning um platform so one of the one of the interesting sort of integrations that we are faced with say is the integration of Moodle with a larger number of components um in in our architecture so for example the students and staff mobile apps will play a very central role in the life of in the life of the students at launch in September I'm going to say we have a one-way link between but it's really one and a halfway links which is largely from Moodle to to the students to students app notifying them of you know college notices events webinars school placement information and and so on there is a return path it's a little awkward at the beginning um in phase two then that will become a two a completely two-way flow between our own apps and our own collaborative workspaces and Moodle and that was leading leads us to some interesting issues like the integration of our mobile capabilities with say our discussion forums uh with with discussion forums on on Moodle and and so on so um what's been interesting to us is when we looked at competitors out in the marketplace Moodle as Justin said clearly arose to the top in terms of scalability functionality stability and so on but instead of being encompassing our whole world it has moved back to a more component of our overall architecture focused on a number of key things the calendar assessments delivering the the learning progress information and so on that that Justin has has outlined and it will be an interesting journey over the next couple of years as we see how it how it develops from here so just wanted to share share this with you and I'll hand back to Rob and any questions that people might have