 So, first of all, before introducing the speakers, let me just give you a bit of information on how this will work. So, first of all, we're going to hear from the speakers some 15 minutes each, and then we're going to stop to pick up some questions for them. If you have specific questions during the presentations, please use the Q&A, the question and answer facility down there, the option in the Zoom, and or please use the chat if you have comments or doubts or ideas connected to what you are hearing in the presentations, and please use also the chat starting from now to introduce yourself, to say who you are and from where, which institution you are calling from. Welcome, Joyce. We have now also our third speaker, so we are complete. And so, basically, I don't want to take a lot of time, just we all know the context of this webinar. We have an unprecedented amount of educators trying to understand how to do things right for their learners when things are happening online, and this deals with any kind of issue from technology to pedagogy to evaluation, assessment to engagement, any issue that people have been doing offline, now it's mostly online. So, we need actually experts advice, and Eden is actually doing fantastic work in trying to get the best minds of the planet in giving us their advice on this. So, I would like now to very briefly introduce the three speakers. We're going to start with, I don't know, Joyce, if you are able to share your presentation already. Okay, and we can hear you, I think. I think you can. Can you? Perfect. Yes, awesome. Great. Great. Well, thanks Fabio for that. I wasn't expecting to be the first one up, but that's perfectly fine. And probably just as well, because it's 1 a.m. where I am. I'm in Melbourne. So, hello from the middle of the night, everyone. So, if you want to share your screen and your presentation, and well, so we have also a rather international panel today, even if two panelists are based in London, they all have a very broad range of experiences. So, just last point, please keep on introducing yourselves in the chat. And Joyce, you have the floor for some 10 to 15 minutes. And then after that, you will have time to pick up some questions, both from YouTube, from the YouTube cohort, and from the Zoom participants for you. Florio. Okay, great. Fabio, can everyone see that? Can you tell me if you can see that? Yes. Yes, great. So, what I wanted to share with you is some of the work that I've done over the last few years. And thank you so much for inviting me. So, for those who don't know me, my name is Joyce Seitzinger. I work on the other side of the world in Australia, in Melbourne, as a director of learning design for a fully online company as part of RMIT University. And RMIT University is one of the larger universities in Australia. And we look at RMIT online. We look after the fully online education portfolio. And one of the things that I've been working on over the last few years has been really exciting. And it's something that has actually stood us in good stead and I think is something that is very helpful to other people who now all of a sudden find themselves in a position where you have to scale how you do learning design across an entire organization. And so, the lessons that I've learned over the last four years, working in a fully online education arm of a big university, I find actually start to spread to those of you who suddenly find yourself in charge of moving an entire university to a blended or online learning mode. So, basically what I'm talking about is the idea of setting up your own learning design system during a pandemic and why you might need to do that. To give you a little bit of context about why I've been able to do this and why I've needed to do this together with our team at RMIT Online because we have a huge variety of types of courses that we build for. And so if you want to apply this to your own context, it's a little bit similar to finding yourself in charge of having to move several different schools, several different faculties that have to go fully online or suddenly find themselves teaching in a more blended mode. For us, we work across both fully accredited degrees, as well as we have a range of courses which are more like short courses, professional development courses, which we call our future skills courses and which are very much at like this kind of future of work area. And so what we find is that the way that we have to work together is that we work within a very complex partner ecosystem. Now when you're working to actually support a university and going fully online or fully hybrid blended learning mode, you may or may not be working with partners. I think one of the most interesting things that I found in this pandemic and one of the most interesting ways of thinking is the work that Phil Hill has been sharing about these different phases that we will all find each other in in terms of moving online, which is phase one being the more emergent, the emergency teaching, then phase two being this phase where we find ourselves where students will be expecting us to be more formalized. That's probably the area that we're all working towards at the moment, which is this area where we're no longer in the semester where we had to subtly change things, but we were in the next semester and students will be expecting a little bit more of us. And then stage three being the place where, you know, we're going into some type of, you know, normal for now and then stage four being the place where we're actually going to be re-entering and what does re-entry into campus look like. So I think like we're all going to find each other, like as we go into this phase two into a place where we may be working with new types of partners, we may be working with new people that we bring into our own partner systems and how do we actually work together with other people that we need to bring in place in order to develop more sophisticated and more complex types of courses. And to give you an idea for us, it means we've actually got like four different types of portfolios. You don't need to worry about this too much. I'm just trying to give you a little bit of background about why we've moved in this but you might start to recognize yourself in this way and where you are trying to support several different faculties or several different types of schools, maybe a science school versus a business school that you are working with in order to, you know, develop different types of course formats and different types of learning experience for your students. For us, it's been very much a matter of, you know, how do we scale up? How do we actually start to do learning design at a really large scale? We used to work with like three build partners across four different portfolios across 50 different industry partners. And now what we find is that we have an increasing amount of discipline partners that we work in. We have an increasing amount of different build partners that we work with as we're trying to scale up and we also have a different amount of different types of learning experience in the different portfolios that we work with. And so the problem with working with more and more people and this is where you will find yourself as well as you try to onboard more colleagues into designing for a fully remote learning experience is the problem that we all have to share is how do you actually design a chair? So if you think about learning design and about educational design, everyone has different ideas about what it means to do good learning design and learning designers, you know, it's only in really like the last 10 years that we've seen a lot of, you know, like I did my own masters in education technology but that we see a lot of formal training into the area of education technology into the area of learning design. And so what you find is that when all of a sudden you're trying to design lots of different courses with lots of different little learning design squads to produce those courses is that everyone has their own aspect what the best way is of arranging elements for students to actually have a learning experience. And so what we found is that what we needed to create is actually one learning design system within which all of those educators, subject matter experts, education technologists, learning designers all needed to work within this one shared system of thinking about learning design and thinking about how you actually build course experiences. And, you know, this will be nothing new to most of you. There's long been calls for formalizing how we design for learning. I personally really love the work that Peter Goodyear has been doing in this area in terms of advocating for all of us to start thinking about a science of learning to start thinking about how we actually design for learning and how we might be able to formalize that. And so for myself what I started to do is I started to look at different at different design disciplines and what we might learn from different design disciplines in how we actually apply that into our own expertise of learning design. And one of the, there's a tremendous amount of work in this. I've done a lot of work in terms of reading up on service design and the service design discipline also on the user experience design discipline. And what I found is that there is a lot that we can actually borrow from those disciplines and particularly around how they go about doing design at scale. And so one of the things that I want to call out to and there's there's tremendous amount of resources about this all around the world is this handbook called the Design Systems Handbook which was supported by the design system called InVision. And basically what they talk about is this idea that if you have a design system it enables teams to build better products faster by making design reusable. You're not doing it in a bespoke manner every single time that you pick up a design project because everyone who is working on one of your design projects actually work together within the same shared understanding, within the same elements within the same system. They all understand what they need to do. And so that's something that we've been focusing on and that is something that I would say that if you are working in an area where you're going to have to spin up a lot of people to do a tremendous amount of design projects across your entire campus is to start focusing on that shared language and building up that shared design system so that everyone can be working in the same way and you can reform those design squads as you're going to have to going forward as we go into phase two, as we go into phase three, as we go into phase four. So design systems are basically an idea that we build design systems that work for us as users. So if you're thinking about your design system, the users for your learning design system would be your learning designers, your education technologists, your subject matter experts, your course coordinators, basically your graphic designers, your videographers. Basically anyone who's going to be working on your design projects is going to be a user of your design system. If you want to look for some examples of design systems, very popular ones. What's really nice about design systems is that most of them are very openly available and so I can show you through a few examples of them. One of them is Atlassian. They've made their entire design system fully online and fully open. I think one of the ones that's probably closest to what we need as universities is the BBC's design system. Also sometimes called the global experience layer or gel. Sometimes also referred to as global experience languages. And the reason that I think that the BBC is a really good analogy for us as universities is because they are very much about commissioning projects that no matter which television producer creates them, they still have to feel like they're part of the BBC. And I think that's what we do when we work as universities with the design system is we actually want somebody else because there's no way that we can scale up, particularly in this pandemic, really quickly to do this work ourselves. So if we're going to outsource things to other providers, if we're going to work together with other providers in order to start to create courses for us, then what we're doing is we're commissioning content but we still want our students to have that flavor of the course experience that is very much our flavor. And so that's where I think that we can learn a lot from the way that organizations, design organizations like a BBC or like other types of commissioning producers actually work is that we can set up similar design systems with similar standards and guidelines so that people who produce for us still support that absolute, you know, excellent student experience that we want to create. So just aware of the time. One of the absolute frontiers in this, or I would say frontier breakers in this, it has been Ala Colmatova and the entire team at FutureLearn who have been doing a fantastic job in terms of actually building that course learning design system that they have built for FutureLearn, something that most of you will probably be familiar with and the fact that they have set up this way for people across any number of universities to actually be building courses that despite the fact that they've been built by different courses and despite the fact that they've been built, sorry, different course design teams and despite the fact that they've been built in different locations still all feel a similar way when people engage with those courses. You get a similar type of course experience and so I can really recommend if you're starting to get interested in building a design system in order to help you get started in this, then I can't recommend a better book than this book that she's written. So just to give you a few tips about how we've gone about it, we have called our design system ABLE. It stands for activity-based learning experiences. So everyone talks about ABLE within our organization. We talk about, you know, ableifying courses, etc. And really what we've tried to do is we've tried to distill really solid learning experience, really solid learning experience principles such as activity-based learning basically making those at the heart of our learning design system. So each course is basically a sequence of learning activities. Each learning activity is a combination of learning tasks and students should have an indication of their progress through that. We have a set of learning design principles and again, this comes back to that how do you design a good chair? So rather than having that debate during every single course build project that you do, set out a set of learning design principles and work together with leaders within your university in order to agree on those principles and then put those at the heart of your learning design system. For us, we've decided that learning activities are basically our pedagogical building blocks. It's how we start to put the courses together and by formulating that and saying we always design by learning activity, it means you also get a shared language with everyone that you're working at. So now every single build project actually gets measured in a very similar way and you start to have a way of actually discussing with your learning designers and discussing with your course coordinators how you build the course. You can start to measure together how the course is progressing and how complete the course actually is. I'll just quickly run through some of the elements that you might want to include in your learning design system. For us, it's been elements like this. So we have guidelines about learning experience, about assessment, about writing, about visual design. We have templates such as course maps, assessments, storyboards, learning activities, and visual design, very important as processes because there's one thing about setting out principles and elements that you want but the next bit about your learning design system is that you actually have to track that they're being implemented. So it's not enough to set out exemplary behavior. You actually have to somehow quality control that those design principles are actually being executed. And then the next bit is around having examples for people, courses, course maps, storyboards, assessments that you can be sharing, and then also to provide training. And so for us, in terms of implementing that, what we do is we actually make sure that we have several different quality control points. One is at the course map stage, one is at the prototype stage, one is at the mid course check-in, and one is at the final QA. And if you find yourself in a place where you all of a sudden have to control up to hundreds of course build projects across your entire organization, then this is definitely what you want to be doing is you want to be setting up some quality control points so that you actually know how things are progressing across your entire campus. With that, I know that I am running out of time. We're already at 60 minutes. So Fabio, I'm happy to share a little bit more, but I might give it over to Gerald and to Gilly, and then wait for the Q&A later on. Is that all right? Yeah, that's perfect. Thank you very much. Keeping something for the for later is always a good thing. Keep some suspense. So thank you very much for that. Okay, no worries. And thank you everybody also for introducing yourself. I've seen some questions popping up being answered already through the different means. I have just a first quick question on myself about your work. Actually, I love the idea of this collaborative design and starting with partners and with the people who you will design with, not by the process or the principles, it's lovely. Just a quick question because I know some people are listening to us maybe don't have the time or the capacity to, let's say, embark in such a complex design exercise. How the question would be the ABLE approach, how applicable it is also to small realities. So think of a small community college or a couple of professors who want to design their course by using this. Is this something applicable also in the micro, at the micro level? Yes, absolutely. And so two things. Yes, I think it is applicable at the micro level. And I would say that you could do this even across an entire discipline across the school or across just the program. So, and sorry, when I say program, I mean something like a degree or a graduate certificate or a graduate diploma. So I think even if you're just supporting one school or supporting one program, I think this is a really great way of going forward because you can rally a group of people around one particular aspect and starting to work together around one thing. I mean, what happens with that is that it means that people actually start to be able to work together on things. They can become more collaborative. They share a language of practice, which just makes it easier for them to start supporting each other as well. At the same time, I also want to say that I think this is a really good way forward. I think when you have too many bespoke design projects where you are supporting just one individual course coordinator, what happens is that doesn't scale. And when that one course coordinator has designed that course so that it matches them and then they move on, you're going to have to make changes. And so I think changing it so that it's like there is a particular way of designing courses for this program or for this school, I think it does two things. One, it makes that design more scalable and more sustainable. And I think it also means that the students actually have a more consistent student experience across that entire program. Fantastic. That's actually where I think not only me, but everybody wanted to hear, so it's usable. Great. Thank you very much. So in the meantime, some more questions will be popping up. I will pop into the chat. Fantastic. So we move now to Gerald from the Open University UK, head of learning design of one of the, I would say, most prestigious open universities on the planet. So Gerald, I guess in this period, well, actually I've seen the OUK has been giving a lot of support to any university around the planet. So I think this is not the first time you're giving tips on how to design courses, but you are very eager to listen to what you have to say. Flor is yours. Okay. Thank you, Fabio. I'll just bring my slides up first. Yeah, and it was great hearing Joyce just now talking about shared language and design systems, very much stuff that I wholeheartedly agree with. So I wanted to focus today on how we, when we're going through the design process, how we go about trying to maintain student focus. So I'm going to talk about how we go about doing activity design at the Open University and how you might be able to go about doing that at your institutions using online tools. Just to say a bit about the Open University in the UK's context, we produce up to 100 new modules a year. They're a mix of some online-only courses and then some which are a blend of print and online. We do have some face-to-face tutorials as well, but increasingly we've been moving those online and of course we've been moving everything online now. In terms of the size of the modules that we run, we can have anything between 20 and 3,000 students on a given module, and we have tutors supporting those students as well. And we produce a wide range of types of learning, so we produce formal learning, but we also do informal learning including micro-credentials and also through OpenLearn, which is a huge repository of OER content. My team, the learning design team, facilitates the learning design process at the Open University, very much working partnership, much as Joyce has described in terms of RMIT. We're a team of 20 and we've got our own complex partnerships with each of the different faculties. We've been using Open University learning design approaches for about the last 10 years, and it's been interesting for us moving online because a lot of what we did before in our design workshops was very much hands-on, using sticky walls and post-its and so on. So initially, today I wanted to share some thoughts from our students, so we surveyed our student panel and we asked them what the pandemic study experience has been like for them. They said to us it's been very different to the normal distance learning experience, so a number of them were reporting struggles with motivation, whereas on the flip side of that, we've got some that are feeling much more motivated and seeing study as a good escape, so some have actually finished their studies earlier due to having extra time to study, so there's a real range of experiences coming back from our students. In terms of how we go about designing with that student focus in mind, we start from a point of view of trying to understand who our students are. So we develop student profiles or personas using the template you can see here, and it covers areas such as study motivation, tuition likes and dislikes, study skills, strengths and weaknesses, and we aim to feed these forward into design later on in the line, but we also then aim to reflect back to this when we're looking at our design, we can see how well is it working or going to work for these types of student profiles. And if we've got information from past courses, we'll feed that into it as well, so we'll use Lunar Analytics to feed into that. So very much if you're at a point in time where you've got a bit of time to start looking at design for a new module, I'd be recommending starting with student profiles and understanding the new students. Moving on from that, when we're running our learning design workshops, really what we're looking at is trying to make sure that everything is aligned, so looking at constructive alignment, trying to make sure that the activities that we're designing link up to the assessment and the learning outcomes. So we treat everything that the student does as an activity, and it will use one of the seven activity types that we use at the university to do that, to define those, trying to make sure that they've got a clear purpose and link both to the assessment and to the learning outcomes. We find that really helps keep the students engaged with the activities as they're going through. So this is an example of what an activity planner would look like for a typical OU module. So as we're going through the design we'd be using this template. So on the left-hand side you've got the week of study, then you've got the learning outcomes and then you've got the activity types across the screen there. So for this one it's a week that's about consumer decision making. You can see there's some similar activity going on there with students thinking about the last time they bought three items. Then in communication they've got to think about what they did in that process and share that with their fellow students and then reflect on the types of buying decisions that they were making there. So we start mapping out for each week what those activities are going to look like. And it's important then if you're going to base everything around to have some knowledge understanding of what makes for a good online activity. So put together some slides in terms of design and activities using the LE tool. So firstly the design of the activity should help the learners develop skills in accordance with the linear assessment. So that reflects back to that constructive alignment principle. As you're going along with design and activities it's a good idea to be asking questions. So if the learners are clear context to develop and practice their skills will they be able to clearly understand why they're engaged in activity and how it feeds into their learning. So there are three component parts that I'd be suggesting as a starting point to consider for online design. So the first is what will the learners be doing. So what's the learning outcome that they're going to be getting from that individual activity and making sure that that links up then to the assessment and overall course of the outcomes. Secondly what are the learners going to create from what's the artifact that's coming from it. And lastly what tool is going to facilitate that sort of online tool are they going to be using to facilitate that activity. And some examples of what that might look like. So if they're sharing a sharing one for instance the students might be choosing a topic to gather some basic research on bringing it back and sharing it with a group. Then here they might need a library research tool. They might need to be Wiki and they might need a discussion tool to be talking with their fellow students. They might be doing some reflection. So the task there is to reflect. They may be reflecting on their current week study and they may need to be using the blog or forum or Wiki or even just an online document where documents be reflecting on what they've been studying that week. But while you're going along and doing that it's really important to be thinking about the considerations for activities using those tools. Each tool that you're bringing in may be new to the students. So maybe you may need to allow additional time if that's the case. There's also the consideration around the skills. The skills may be new to the students. Again allow additional time in that situation. I'd always recommend providing guidance on tools where needed. So that can either be built into the activity at that point in time or you can be building that in over time depending on how big a tool it is and how important that tool is to the course. Looking at the rest of the course and the pathway to ensure students have the skills to undertake the activity. So if you're designing one course that's part of a qualification you need to be thinking about what else is in that qualification. So you might discover that other educators have been using different tools in which case you might want to think carefully about whether the tool that you're looking at there is the right tool to use at that point or whether it's better if you're making use of the same tool that's been used elsewhere. So that communication with other course leaders is really important at that point. And lastly on there about the difficulty of learning the tool versus the importance of the activity. So there are some tools that we know at the OU in our VLE we describe them as heavyweight tools. So we wouldn't be using them for a one-off individual activity. It would be something which would have to reuse across a module. So we've got a really nice tool. It's kind of a portfolio type tool in the studio. It's a great tool but you wouldn't use it for a one-off activity. You'd absolutely have to be using it and bringing students back to it again and again through the course of that module. We aim to test our activities. So we use our curriculum design student panel for this. So that's an online panel and we can call on them to test individual activities. I'd always be encouraging people to be testing activities before they go live if they're innovative ones. There may be different options available at your institution. It may be that you can't get access to students even then. You could perhaps join in colleagues to test out activities there as well but certainly be encouraging to be testing activities where you're pushing boundaries or doing something that's a bit innovative. So the other thing I wanted to touch on then is around student workload. We spend a lot of time focusing on this and we've got tools that we use to map the number of hours that students are going to be studying for each week of their module. It's a very different thing for them to be working online versus face-to-face if the traditional approach has been face-to-face learning. As I've mentioned before, each new tool needs time for learning and maybe itself may need that as well. And you need to bear in mind that certainly at the moment the online activities can be more tiring, especially if students are finding themselves in regular web calls in a way that I'm not certainly experiencing at the moment. And being encouraging people to be planning activities to be done in chunks. So thinking about them to be done in 30 minutes or one hour chunks so that they can break that study down and fit it in during their week. And just at the bottom here I've got a snippet of some of recommendations we have for OU modules. So the curriculum management guide at the OU has this guidance for level 160 credit modules where we aim to have 20 hours a week study but only 13 hours of that are actually formally directed module directed study. And the other 7 hours of that are student directed so that's where students are going off and then taking their own independent research or studentship activity. Lastly just to encourage a balance of activities. So as you saw from that activity planner I showed earlier, what we try to do is try to get a good balance of the activities throughout the module. So communication activities become even more important when it's online only. But also balance that with similar activities such as reading and watching finding and handling information so that might be searching, interpreting, data handling, productive activities such as writing and reflecting, experiential and assessment. And that balance may be different from course to course or discipline to discipline but certainly looking to get a good balance of activities will help with student engagement. And lastly just to point a couple of examples of further reading. So the first article on there about learning design for student retention that introduces the iceberg principles. We use those heavily in our module design for making sure that we're designing for retention. And then the OU Learning Design Team's blog and Twitter feed both have got resources that are available there for everybody and can hopefully find them useful for their context so we've got some resources there around using online rooms, designing collaborative online activities and around student workload. So thank you, that's everything from me. Thank you very much Gerald. I've worked with a club for you, not only for the content but also for keeping the time. Actually that was great. Thank you very much. It's nice to see how actually such complex and well thought things look simple when explained in such a linear way. Thank you very much. We have some questions directly for you. I will give you a read for you a couple of them at the time. So then we have a couple of questions for Joyce also that we can pick up later. So the first one is rather easy are these OU planning templates the ones you presented available to be used for other universities? We're just in the process at the moment of making those available through our website. So if people follow us through the Twitter feed we'll share those after the event. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Then another one has to do about the way you get the student's feeling and preferences. So do the students tell you about their interests or how do you get that information to draw that nice picture with the student persona at the very beginning? How do you get the data? There's a mix of approaches going on there. So in some cases we've got really in-depth information about our students. So that might be from previous iterations of that particular module so we might know quite a lot about the students coming through already in which case we can delve into that from our tutors or from the tutors themselves. In other cases we've done some we've asked students to fill in profiles for us so we've got a nice big database of student profiles where they've sent them through to us. And in other cases it's a lot more informal and down to the people in the workshop themselves to be populating that. They don't necessarily have to be 100% accurate and based around one particular student. What we're looking for is to develop a range of those personas which we can use to then be targeting at how we design that. Yeah, great. One more The human should set a point to be typed and somebody is asking what are very specific questions for you too. I missed some of that. You went into slow motion on me. Can you hear me? I can now. You mentioned seven activities type, seven kinds of activities. Can you elaborate a bit more on these activities? I can try to remember them. We've got the OU Learning Design framework, basically. We have a similar finding and handling information, communicative, productive, experiential, interactive and adaptive and assessment and we categorize everything according to those. In my slides there you'll see that snippet from an activity planner but I can put an additional slide in there after this event to show the full range of those activity types. Fantastic. Let me repeat that the slides as well as the recording are going to be shared so you can find all the links and literature that has been used. Last question I think it's very much depending on the activity but the question is what percentage of activities would be collaborative among students? What is your suggestion? It's a very million dollar question. I'm not sure we have a recommended value for that but we do know that when we see increase in communicative activities we've seen improved retention and performance from students in the past. So to be making sure that there's a degree of communicative activities throughout the module. I'm not going to put a figure on it because I can't necessarily recommend a given figure but I think if you're encouraging students to be communicating each week that would be a positive. Great. Fantastic. So I think we are keeping well with the time also so it's now the turn of one of the superstars of if I can say so of Ilernan Design, Gilles Salmon, now Academic Director at Online Education Services and I know Gilles you're going to present the design problem from a threshold point of view which is actually a very interesting perspective I would say. So the floor is yours Gilles. Hi everyone. I hope you can hear me alright. I'm just about to share my screen. Can you see it? Yeah, perfect now. Is it okay now? Right. Okay. We'll get started everyone. So I've called this through the portal because I'm going to talk briefly about threshold concepts and I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the idea of threshold concepts. Is that still okay at the moment? Yeah. Is it still okay? Yeah. I mean at all levels of learning there are times when an obstruction to move into the next level in the learning process has to be overcome and I'm sure every learning designer, every academic is always aware of that from his or her own discipline and practice and I mean it's called really what we might think of as going through the portal into a new light you know the light bulb moment you might call it and essentially I think that that's what we're all trying to do at the moment across every university and college in the world. It certainly isn't a minor task. So I'm going to borrow from both Gerald and also from Joyce and say just think about some principles and then I will move to some practical tips as well. If I can say there are great talks and I agree with everything everyone has said and all of this does inform my own practice too but back to thresholds a threshold concept essentially is a key disciplinary concept that is in itself inherently troublesome but if you can overcome that troublesome bit it's transformative and integrative and in other words the threshold concepts kind of open a door into a new world a new way of thinking about something and therefore enhance the ability of learners to master their subjects so that's why they're called portals that they lead to this transformative way and the most interesting thing about them is they're generally irreversible because once they're adopted they'll never be forgotten and you look back at the portal and you don't recognize what you've left behind now a lot of this people will know a lot about this within your own teaching and more recent research has started to identify how students cross these thresholds provided measures of the successful acquisition of them because they're generally pretty hard to teach and so where we move in from perhaps a campus based or entirely online you've really got to think about them as you go through not just about the learning outcomes not just about the activity but also how you're going to move people through these thresholds and so I think it is something that you may for yourselves just take as read that you've always done but I think at this moment if we can surface some understanding of what the threshold concepts are of moving from the way we ourselves learnt and the way academics think intuitively normal then we are in a chance of actually moving people forward in this sort of way so I hope that makes some sense to everyone it's just another take on this hugely challenging task that all of us are trying to tackle at the moment so unfortunately taking over my screen sharing it seems to have paused it for me and I'm hoping can I just check that you are still seeing the screen yes we can still see the screen and you can still use it because I cancelled the remote control from myself okay fine so just to check moving on now to my slide 4 is that what you're seeing now yes but you cancelled the slideshow so if you can click back on the slideshow Jola please, sorry for this okay I'll do that again I think we're gonna have to go with this one otherwise it's gonna take me too long is that okay yeah it's probably big enough for most people so I'm gonna suggest to you for threshold concepts for the move to online learning and so here I'm talking about the entirely remote online learning that many of us are attempting or supporting others to attempt you could think of many others and I'm going to give you a chance later to think of those if we have time but one will be the lone wolf generally speaking the academic is in total charge of what he or she wants to offer to the student sure it has to go through university approval sure there'll be other people who have views but ultimately it's been very much my baby holding my baby and then we will generally find that it's driven from academic hours where the lectures are and a lot of the pacing is done that way now you've heard both Gerald and Joyce talk about how they've actually had to think about the difference in that to provide structure and pacing in a holistic way from the student's point of view and that is alien to many people who have always spoken on campus because it's taken as read and a lot of the the scheduling and time in a campus situation is much to do with the availability of a suitable room and the amount of space in the library or how you can get access to a lab or where the placements might come whereas when you move to online all of that is within your grasp as a design task in just the ways you've heard about it and also what you've heard about and I don't think either Gerald or Joyce said it but I'm pretty certain they would agree with me that what you're doing is design once and then delivering this many times and that's where the scalability comes and so and on campus everyone kind of thinks about well I did really well in that particular module because I love the lecturer whereas the lecturer presence is quite different online where you've got the all of the knowledge delivery the pace in the activity built in with perhaps an active what I call moderating tutoring facilitating being considered right from the start that they will have a role so the threshold concepts I think are going very much from this lone wolf to collaborative team design, academic hours to student focus the campus schedules to design once deliver many times and this idea that even when we're delivering there's multiple roles that are deconstructed and put back together again so I also use a very structured design approach it's called Carpe Diem I've put the website up there there's two kinds one is to design programs which uses this concept of threshold to design the storyboard for the whole program so that we are actually leaping through the thresholds so that we end up where we want to be and the second one is I'll just show you what it's like to actively work with a program threshold concept what you see up the top was a rainy day in the University of Liverpool where we were redesigning the Liverpool MBA and we had a visual artist with us who turned the idea of threshold concepts into a rich picture that then formed the mission for the course so it's not time to go through all of it but you can see they represented the student journey being a resolver of all the big problems of the future so the ambition shifted quite a lot from were there students and they've got to do finance and strategy and so on to having this huge vision of a 4.0 future for their students and I think on this one the word collaboration came out and the various pathways along the way so it turned into something quite inspiring which also had the concepts built in and that then went to inform all the modules that went afterwards and then what we would do was do a highly collaborative module also one day like the program with everyone if possible in the room and you can see some examples of that there's six stages for that it's all on the website some of you I know will be familiar with it and others it's fairly easy to follow I've got handbooks up there so you start off really with building yourself a blueprint for the course which includes all the things both Gerald and Joyce have spoken about then the actual storyboard for the alignment of the activities the assessments and so on and then we do in the same day a prototype with whatever software we have usually the VLE or the LMS so that that's done actively by after lunch on that day then there's the reality check so we try and bring in students, alumni, colleagues to try out some of the activities live they have plenty of time for discussions always needed and they leave the Carpathian with an action plan and some commitment to making it happen that won't cut across what either Joyce or Gerald has said but it can be done with either one module or many modules and you can see examples of the storyboard here the little dots that you see they are the study hours so it's exactly as Gerald has said it's driven by student study hours rather than before we went through the threshold portal of academic lecturing time so as I say there's plenty more information about how to do all of that on the website if you'd like to have a go and I hope you will particularly about what I call activities which are Joyce and Gerald's also activity driven you don't need to reinvent this you know there's as you can see there's so much framework so much research has gone in in fact over about 20 years now has gone into this and we are finding people rediscovering this for the first time both this and the five stage model and others some of you I know have been using it for ages and others are just finding it now so it does stand the test of time that's on the website as well so I'm just coming back to my original point about the importance of when you're either thinking about it for an academic course for yourself try and read up a little bit on the threshold concepts what they are and what it means for you and then when you've got the idea of them you can then work out some for your course to make sure that you build them in and I think that's something you could do today tomorrow while you're working out really how to get something you know that's active and high quality for your students in September let alone for the years to come so I put all the references on there so there's no excuses some easy-peasy stuff and I know that you'll be able to access this there's quite a nice one here which was an Australian one 2017 Joyce was at Askelai that did actually look at the threshold concepts for online teaching so somebody is giving you some strong clues there I really like that one what we're going to do now is we're going to give you the chance to actually have a go to vote on what you think the most important threshold concepts are can you see it it should have come up on your screen okay have a go and choose one what would you like to do first and then I'm going to hold you to this you have to start tomorrow okay no it's not true just which one do you think is the most can you all vote now unless you can't vote I'm afraid it's only the participant exactly I was trying but I couldn't what would you like to vote for Fabio well it's not easy I would go for something between tutors only one actually something between so I would go tutors, structures almost all of it okay what about you Joyce you've got your mute on put your mute on I would say provide structure for students that's where the retention and engagement comes from isn't it really absolutely and it can feel really ephemeral if you don't do that and it's so important when everyone is remote that that structure is you know iterated again okay so where can we see the results for these do you know I think they should appear yeah there they are hear that right okay there you go Joyce they all listen carefully to what you said there providing structure for students focusing on study hours trained online tutors and the least design once deliver many times well that's probably important if you're scaling either RMIT nor the OU could possibly design something individual or at least you know for everyone but I think the frameworks are important but providing the structure for students if you have a look on my website there's quite a lot of clues there and I love Gerald's charts of key seven key things in activity types as well that's very helpful so I think we can all do it I think we can all do that so that's the end of my talk I'm happy to answer questions now Fabio and everyone else thank you very much actually you were able to take it to take us through a philosophical different view but from a practical standpoint so thank you very much I think a question was popping out since the very beginning as to do expectedly with students engagement so and actually the three of you were mentioning students as a not always a starting point but as I would say checkpoint through the way of design so how do you see the student engagement through this threshold approach Gilly yeah I think that when you worked out what the key thresholds are you jolly well tell the students about that and what the huge benefits are of it and I think it's quite alien from most academics to do that to start with they're not really sure I mean I agree with the student persona because that helps you design but what you really need is something that truly takes you on this journey so at the philosophical level I think the more purposeful you can be even with some of the students we're working with now through OES and other partners we are actually giving them the chance to see how while they're learning what careers those particular skills and knowledge that they're acquiring will lead them to so at the very highest level we really need to go for enabling them you know to have a vision of the future but most of the engagement is built into activity most of the design of activity most of the design of collaboration always has this engagement as part of it so the activities was one quite simple framework you'll see that there's an invitation with about eight lines in it every one of those lines has been researched to maximize the engagement so it's not something that you can design and then put engagement on the top of you really need to think engagement from the start and learning analytics if you can put it in will help you but it's really taking this stance that it is activity led and the design of the activities and not a substitute for something else they are the main event great thank you very much another question I would like now to call Gerald into the game but the question is not only for you Gerald is for all the panelists has to do with the different approach to be taken whether we are working or designing small courses I mean courses targeted to other small cohort or very large courses I know they are UK you have experience with very large also groups of students so can you tell us something on some give us some tips when designing a course having in mind a large number of students and always having in mind engagement objective let's say okay that's an interesting one I guess one of the things we are always careful about with large courses is trying to avoid anything that's a little bit too kind of hands on for some of our our tutors to work on so we get some great ideas coming through from some teams for instance but then we look at how that might work with a thousand students and you think it's going to be tricky to achieve that so one thing you need to think of when you've got that scale is you know the activity ideas coming through are they actually going to work with the numbers of students that you've got when you get to that level you tend to want things to be a bit more automated in your systems to achieve things so you've got to be careful I think when you're designing activities at that level for that I'm trying to think of other things that we try to look at now yeah I think that's probably the initial one that I can think of I might need to bend some ideas off people to get there I'm just looking at a question that's come on via Twitter and 19 said providing structure for students is such an important aspect of learning but I don't know if he or she find it rather tricky to achieve a balance between spoon food and providing with just the right amount of structure and I think that is true but that's really why we storyboard I mean the structure comes from pacing the activities providing a balance of activities there are definitely no spoons anywhere in my course what about yours Joyce yes now I would agree that it's definitely around the pacing and the right combination of activities I don't think you could say there's a one size fits all for same subjects you're going to be designing a different balance of activities and tasks to doing like a business course etc so it really is like courses for courses I think what becomes interesting about once you actually set up a design system and like Gerald has done where they have different types of activities we've done something similar we call ours learning tasks but you know doesn't matter but what happens is you actually start to be able to detect patterns that work for certain disciplines and I think there's something around being able to track that across your institution and across education overall that starts to become really powerful yeah I mean you do have to pace and time much more and I think that's really what we mean by structure rather than the idea of saying learn this now now learn this now learn that actually one question coming I think from YouTube has to do with learning personalization that is also connected to the structure I mean the space you live to learners I think the question is pretty straightforward is how what do you think about personalization of e-learning so from a design point of view is providing a proper structure enough or do you need to take into account other components do you want me to start off on that Fabi how does that spec will come in yeah right well it is my view here comes another threshold concept that online it is possible to do much more contextualization and personalization that it is on campus for a number of reasons students are in their own settings if you're clever with the design you can use that so they bring forward examples from their own experience and as you gradually get through you can get them to research things and present in that way and I found it much easier both to contextualize in other words for the discipline for the country and also to personalize for the individual or that particular cohort but you do need to be aware that you've got that in mind right from the start what about Joyce and Gerald I'd agree with that I think you've got to be really careful with your design up front if you're going to enable some personalization like that so we do that in some situations where we have what we call user choices so students can take slightly different pathways but where they're doing that at some point they've got to come back together and you've got to think about how the assessment is going to hang together when that happens so you've got to be making some really good decisions at that point the other example we've got actually that's worked pretty well I've found has been in response to particular threshold concepts in STEM topics so there's been a couple of examples we've got where we've tried to target particular problematic areas for students put some resources in there to steer students through it depending on how they're performing on particular questions and that needs a lot of planning in the design so you don't want to be doing that at the moment on every single module maybe we'll get to the point where we can scale that up and do that across the board but not yet I would agree with what you've both shared there and I would say that when we design these courses we're not just designing for the students we're also designing for the facilitators or the teachers of those courses and the more level of personalization you build in the more difficult it becomes or the more time intensive it becomes for a facilitator to actively facilitate that so again it becomes a balance about how you design that course and where personalization might have the most impact and so I loved what Dahlal just shared in the chat around this building activity that they've got of learning gauge, apply and reflect so if you're building your learning activities like that then you might choose one of those tasks you know the engage task or the apply task or the reflect task to be personalized and to be something where you've got your students choice Darrell as you mentioned but you wouldn't do it across all of those tasks because then it just becomes too difficult to have a consistent student experience and to be able to facilitate that consistently Well actually I think you touched upon a focus of a few other questions that these educators for example Dahlal is asking how do you guide your educators towards focusing on reasonable hours and activities and get them to cross the threshold of content heavy sessions I mean at the end of the day as you say I mean students are out at the center obviously and there should be the main concern but they are not the only actor in the picture so if if something doesn't work for the educator or for the facilitator then everything breaks down so how do you actually it's not only a matter I think of training and of building capacity it's a matter of I think mentality you know somehow in terms of perception of workload please Fabio I'm going to jump in because this isn't absolutely in my bonnet like this is something that I feel really strongly about when we talk about how we structure activities etc one of the learning design principles that we have across our design system is that learning activity should not be longer than two and a half hours max and the idea for that is because we know that all of our students are fully online is that what we try to do is we try to design those learning activities so that they fit into one sitting so if I'm a student who is already working full time and I've got other priorities and commitments that I need to participate in what we find and what we found out from when we did a huge piece of user research in 2018 is that students are very targeted and they set aside pockets of study time and so what we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that our design system actually designed for the way that they learn and the way that they set up their study time and so we set up you know a limit of one and a half to two and a half hours for a learning activity so a student can sit down can have one study sitting and then they can walk away knowing that they've accomplished something rather than having to leave in the middle of something that is like a gigantic module so that's how we structure it so that we actually limit it and so that it becomes more achievable for the students can I have a go at that one Fabio do you want to come in first Gerald? Okay I think the question was how I mean I think that's great Joyce but I think the question was more about when you're dealing with what you would call the subject subjects but we would call the academic lead for the program or for the module how do you get them to see to go through the portal if you like in order to be open to these kinds of design approaches in the first place and that's why we start both Carpe diem modules and programs with this vision of the future and we it is a bit disruptive but it's like any design process we try and get them to widen and widen the scope before we start to get them to come back to make choices so I think especially in this situation where we've got very large numbers of people who have been teaching perfectly well throughout their careers without having to really touch the online then I think we have got responsibility to help them to think a bit differently before we move to that and that's why we use some really quite strong creative techniques to encourage them and usually within an hour or two of the workshop whether it's online or face to face because I'm doing both now people will will start to move through that portal and will be very interested in at least some changes to the model of learning that they're used to so have a look I can't remember who asked that but have a look on my website at the gallery of pictures that people have produced in this situation I'll show you one the MBA one in Liverpool because that's stuck in my mind that I started the day with him and said no I can't do that on the MBA nobody will ever allow it I've always taught this way and it was always fine to a massive piece of artwork that they developed together so it can be done but threshold concepts like that are troublesome yeah thank you a couple of more questions one from including in your design and then another one has to do with the link between activities or activities and assessment did you hear me well what was the first one sorry Fabio the first one had to do with constructive alignment how much is or should be constructive alignment included in design processes right for me and certainly for us at the OU that's key to it as you saw from that activity planner we set that up in such a way that when you look at each week you put the link that comes in that the activity should be linked into for each week and you're able to keep that alignment throughout we also try to then make sure that's for the assessment as well so you can see what learning that comes the assessment is supporting and so yeah I think that's a fundamental to having your design process and I think each of the design processes that we've looked at would have that as a fundamental yep and then another point has to do with who wants to take it with the link between activity or activities and assessment so how do you actually design assessment when you are planning and drawing up your activity and thinking of the river in Liverpool for example where does investment come in okay well activities are designed to start with the end in mind so you always start with the end in mind which often is either a way of giving students some fast and effective feedback or some peer assessment or a final assessment as Joyce said the actual activity needs to be fairly small so it won't be the whole assessment but it's always important to be purposeful and to be open that this will help you with this part of the course and that will lead to your assessment why would you not tell them that don't keep it secret so you build the alignment in and and also you will know then what you're designing that for and exactly how it fits and we use quite colourful storyboards either on or offline to make sure we draw lines between them you know so that we're not kidding ourselves that it's not going to happen like that and you will actually find that you get a high level of retention a high level of people submitting if you do that so I've got techniques that do that that are built in and I'm sure the others will have as well I'll confess to having something even more unsexy than drawn lines and sticky notes we actually have an Excel sheet and we have an Excel sheet that we called our Ikea test so people might know this or not but Ikea have certain tests for the producers of their materials and so for instance for a kitchen surface they have a particular test that every single producer of their surfaces has to meet and it is I think they leave like a wet towel for about 48 hours on top of a counter and after that it can't have been damaged at all and so it's like one test you have to pass that test and so as we were thinking about this we thought well what would an Ikea test for one of our courses be and basically it stands for I know each activity Ikea because you know we're nerds and basically what we have is we have an Excel sheet and we actually have the assessments across the top have the activities around it and just make sure that every single one of those activities is clearly aligned to at least one if not more of the assessments in the course so it's very unsexy but it works Fantastic I think I will steal the Ikea idea and it's very practical actually assessment is difficult to be sexy but in this case it's pretty practical I think we're getting close to an end I have two more questions that have been two more words that have been popping out one is was actually targeted to Gerald at the very beginning and has to do with talking about student profiling how does the Open University handle students cultural differences I know it's a big area and another one had to do with how to deal well I'm paraphrasing here a bit how to deal when designing courses with students or groups of students which might have difficulties for example in terms of connectivity or devices or let's say not maybe starting difficulties but how do you take into account that during a course during a learning experience these conditions may vary so there must be some level of flexibility I would say but I don't want to give any answer so first Gerald how do you take into account cultural differences when profiling and when designing when designing for profiling I would say and then how do you question for everybody how do you deal with this with these possible difficulties cultural differences one is a really good one and I'm not sure we have a perfect answer to that yet but it's one we're working really hard on so we do try to build that into the profile activities so if we've got the background information on the students that we have been working on studying the modules in the past then we're able to feed that into our considerations about the student profiles up front but we'll also be trying to design for a typical range of students that we know we will get on our modules more recently what we've introduced is a more self-evaluation steps that we can look at during the design process of questions specifically asking that question around cultural differences around things like decolonising the curriculum and so I want to just try to make sure that we've got a good representative case studies in the module for instance and we're not displaying any unconscious bias in the tone in the modules as well but it's very much something that we're still working on but it's those are the kinds of approaches that we're taking to try to make sure that we're covering all of those cultural differences I think Fabio what Gerald has said is so important because the OU probably has the most diverse population not just country culture but learning culture and disabilities and so on just very briefly the five-stage model that I've mentioned was developed specifically to enable very diverse groups to work together and it was originally developed at the OU in the business school using large groups of students there and that leads you through how to get groups to work together in a beneficial way where you are anticipating that they will be hugely cultural difference in whatever way you define culture so it's another threshold concept but just to give you one tip from it get them sharing who they are early on with each other from known things and build the activity around it so probably one of the most popular of all is sharing what food you would eat for a celebration and that gets people to to be valued but as you go through then you can get them to actually delve into the fact that they're learning experience are cultural too and they do bring a very sort of cultural approach to the whole group's learning and that means everyone benefits from that and once they're established as a group they tend to challenge each other and ask each other questions and learn in that way as well so it's definitely used in that kind of way so it's another cultural threshold concept really that you do need to build the group to be sensitive to it rather than provide just provide all the materials thank you very much so we have a few more minutes and I see that some questions are being answered by other participants so it's perfect it's a sustainable webinar we could go on forever and we could even start taking a drink so my question for all of you as a closing comment is which mistakes people shouldn't do when designing a course maybe for an online course maybe for the first time you are three very experienced designers as you were saying the approaches that you have been proposing and linking us to have been used for many years and fine-tuned for many years and the work of course some work is still in progress but some people also among our our participants today might be in the condition of having to start this so they might be afraid of doing some mistakes or losing some students along the way maybe losing the vision of some teachers maybe the good ones and so on so what is the worst mistake that somebody could make when start designing an online course I'm happy to go first Fabio because at 2.30 am I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be awake but I think definitely one of the mistakes is to design for the user group of one rather than for the student group and by that I mean that as a learning designer you end up working very closely together usually with a course coordinator unit coordinator whatever you want to call it a subject matter expert in order to design the course and they will have very firm beliefs about how this course is to be taught and particularly when the situation where everyone is finding themselves in now is they'll often have an on-campus course which now needs to be redesigned and it can be very tempting to listen to just that one user because that happens to be the one user that you are actually working with and I would say challenge yourself don't get trapped by that but challenge yourself to think about who the actual user group is that you're designing for and that is the 30 50, 250, 1000 students who will actually be experiencing that course very precious and for being 2.30 you are still very awake such an advice, thank you very much Gerald or Gilly Yeah it's a great point, I've just written 4 things down so for me it's trying to make sure that you don't just write everything that you know on a topic make sure that you're thinking about it from an activity based perspective thinking about what your students need to learn so they're coming from a starting point to an end point to think about that journey there there's always time to do an element of design so make sure you take a bit of space and time to do that don't just dive into production and I think the last one is just reflecting on what I was talking about in terms of tools as well don't say to yourself I love this tool I must find a way to squeeze this tool into the course no matter what you've got to be starting from the activity making sure that the tool fits the pedagogy for your module so that's three sorry Oh I like those three that's great I'll just add one to that then because I agree with the design not right that's the commonest thing that happens I'm going to write this course and then I'll let you have it all written down and you can turn it into something amazing no I can't I'd say don't think that all your old lecture capture stuff is going to play out well online 10 minutes please maximum and really if you're used to the material 10 minutes of each time it does not have to be BBC quality and super duper you can be yourself but really talk about what you know and your passion as a lecturer but don't give them all the old stuff please thank you very much fantastic advice actually and very applicable so I think we can close now also to allow the allow Joyce to call it a day at 2.30 in the night and so special thanks to Joyce and thanks to all the speakers for this just please remember that the Eden conference is coming up in June online so stay tuned for that and stay also tuned for the next webinar which will take place next Monday the title is not public yet so a bit of suspense but it's coming up very soon and an evaluation link has been put in the chat so please take three minutes to help us improving this webinar series by evaluating the experience of this webinar thank you very much to all the participants both in zoom and in YouTube superactives and actually self responding to themselves so it has been a dream for me so thank you very much and to everybody stay safe and stay connected and have a nice evening or night for Joyce bye bye thanks everyone, thank you, thanks Fabio