 Hei. Oh wow, this is some room. Right. I'd like to start off by thanking the conference organisers for scheduling me to speak in this room. It's such a wonderful opportunity and it's such a beautiful venue. And it's great to see some friends in the audience as well. Thank you very much for taking the time to come and listen to me today. And thank you all for taking the time to come and listen to this. I will make my slides available after this on my blog. I'll put up the link again at the end and also a short and transcript of what I'm saying today. And there's the recording so it'll be available in different format should you want it. I'm here today to talk about scaffolding online education. I am going to talk quite a bit about my institution, its values, the students that we have. Because that's core to the conversation that I want to have about what may need to change with the way we think about scaffolding at the moment to support students from many different backgrounds and with many different responsibilities. And then I'm going to look at a bit of work in progress that we're doing at my institution in transforming our educational provision and thinking about how we can support and scaffold our students better to be part of an online learning community. OK, so I lead the learning design work at the University College of Estate Management. The institution was set up in 1919. It's our centenary year. We're having lots of celebrations around that. And it was set up to provide free technical education to the sons of men who died, were wounded or impoverished by the Great War. By the time it got to the 1940s, the institution was offering a lot of correspondence courses, including to the military prisoners of war and the women's land army. And in the late 1960s, we became associated with the University of Reading. We built this gorgeous building on Reading's campus. Sorry, I didn't mention this before. Building was our original location in London, but that was bombed during the Second World War. And Reading provided the validation for our degrees. In 2013, we received our own award-bearing powers, so we could award our own degrees. And in 2016, we moved to our new building in the centre of Reading. And this is a lovely sketch done by one of our architectural technologists. We provide 13 programmes of study which cover areas related to the built environment, so that would be real estate, building surveying, quantity surveying, architectural technology. Very vocational degrees, and quite often the endpoint is accreditation through a professional body, so the Chartered Institute of Surveys and so on. One of the core values that we have is sustainability. And I want to mention this, because I think it does provide a nice character for the institution I work at. And it explains why I'm so proud to work at that institution. Stainability is a theme that runs throughout all our programmes of study, and it's in the way that we live and we work in our environment. Our building, I think, was classed as the most sustainable building in higher education in the UK. Our carpets are made from recycled fishing nets. We have solar panels on the roof, we send zero waste to landfill, and we keep bees, which is particularly lovely. Sustainability is a challenge that our students will face when they enter industry, along with other challenges such as housing supply. These are really tricky problems that we have to prepare them for. Housing supply, there are not enough houses, and the houses that are around are too expensive for many people to buy. Health and wellbeing is another important aspect of the built environment. We need to design buildings and we need to design places so that they're good places for people to live and work. We need to think about air quality. We need to think about how we get food to people. We need to think about green space and preserving biodiversity. Health and wellbeing is also particularly important within the construction industry and the built environment industry at an operational level. Mental health illness has been called the silent epidemic of the construction industry. Men who work in the construction industry are three times more likely to commit suicide than the average man in the UK. It's now one of the greatest proportion of illnesses we find in that industry. Against sustainability, we have depleting resources in our planet. We need to think about the materials that we build our buildings with. For example, if we build 200,000 homes a year out of timber, that absorbs about 3.8 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's a lot of issues that our students will need to be facing and think about in terms of urban growth and population growth. In terms of our students, who are they? We only one time teach around 4,000 students. They come from 100 different countries. 20% of our students are on apprenticeship degree programmes. Only about 3% are full-time. The rest are part-time students. With the exception of our apprentice students, we are fully online university. Apprentices have to come and do some workshops, but other than that, all our education is virtual. 90% of our students are over 21 years of age. The average age is 31, so we very much cater for the mature students. 30% of our students are female. 20% have a declared disability. We have 25% of students from BAME. I should mention there that 10% are Chinese and we do have offices in Hong Kong, so the remaining 50% is below what we would be striving for. These figures very much represent the industry. Our students come to us from industry. Our relationship at recruitment is with employers, rather than the student and the parent. There's a problem there in industry that needs to be addressed. There's some great work being done by some of our trustees and some of the professional bodies we're working with to enhance that. Our students have a number of tricky problems that they face in their everyday lives. They have a number of commitments. They may have caring responsibilities. They are often in full-time work. They have to juggle work commitments around what they do. The construction industry is very stressful. It's a higher and far culture. I have highlighted the dysfunctional and sustainable and stressful aspects of the industry that these people are working in. I wonder how many of our students have one of these in their house. I know I certainly have one of these angels in my house. I'm harking back to Virginia Woolf here. She wrote an essay called Killing the Angel in the House. The angel for Virginia Woolf was someone who was always present and telling you, don't do something for your own gains. Don't work on yourself. You have to look after your children. You have to look after your house. You have to put everything else ahead of you because you need to be a good, meek person. Virginia Woolf, she didn't want that. She wants to be a professional writer. She talks about picking up her inkwell and lobbying it across the room and smacking the angel in the head and killing her hard. I had to give my angel a decent amount of concussion to come here this week because ALT is always held on the first week of term that the schools go back in the UK. I've been sending my kids into their new school year, but I had to stand up to my angel and say, actually, this is one thing this year I want to do. This is something our students are facing every day. Full-time employment, caring responsibilities, mature students. They always have someone sat on their shoulder telling them they should be doing something else instead. It has been proposed that scaffolding is a very good way to help students move through their studies and their online environment and to support them to stay within that environment. Now, when I talk about scaffolding in my place of work, people don't think about students and they don't think about education. I think about this type of scaffolding that goes up the side of buildings. But the definition is just as relevant to education as it is to the industry in which I work. Scaffolds are a temporary form of access used to create a safe working platform at height. They have to be the right type of scaffolding for the building. So it has to be the right type of scaffolding for the student. It follows a series of controls. We need to keep checking that scaffolding is appropriate. We need to assess the risks and issue clear instructions to people who are working on scaffolding. It is the responsibility of a team to erect scaffolding. And we can also use ladders when required. So it's not just the structure. We'll move ladders around the scaffolding so we can get up to different levels. In terms of scaffolding online education a meta-analysis found that there were four main types of scaffolding used. Conceptual, this is where we scaffold students and explain to them what they have to choose, what it is they want to learn, what's important to them, what are the important concepts. Procedural, this is very much about getting students familiar with the right tools and resources to be able to achieve the learning. Strategic, which is about scaffolding our students to find alternative ways to solve complex problems. And metacognitive, which is supporting students to reflect on what they have learned. These types of scaffolding, they're all great. They're great for learning activities. And if designed well, they will work really well. But I believe that our students face more problems than actually getting to grips with their learning objectives and how to achieve certain skills and competencies and knowledge. Oh, that's kind of gone off the screen a bit. The top quote is that actually online learners we have much higher rates of attrition for online learners still than we do for face-to-face learners. Despite all the scaffolding and all the research and I know it's early days yet but that level is still very high. And there's other research that shows that whilst online provision gives more access to education and something we do at UCM, there's multiple entry points, students can study as few or as many modules at a time as they wish, we provide incredibly flexible educational moving barriers. But once those learners are enrolled in that space they find that they can actually be more disadvantaged and that achievement gets widened and this could be down to having to have an awful lot of self-management and tackling those other responsibilities in their life. At UCM for about past year or so we have been working hard to transform our educational provision. We're a fully online university that basically took correspondence courses and put them in a digital space. Very reading heavy, not too much interaction, unclear reasons why students were undertaking the assessments they were taking. We've implemented a new learning design model which very much focused on students because we teach students, not content and we call this student outcome-led design. It's nothing new, it's backwards design, we start with the learning objectives and then the assessments and we design all the learning activities to ensure they are relevant to meet those. We've been thinking a lot about how we can be more present for our students online and offering a lot more opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous discussions. So going back to some of the things that Jesse said and Sue said yesterday, it's about being able to have reactivity in the online space. It's not too structured, being able to have a conversation and exchange and learn from each other and understand each other. We're also employing a lot more pedagogies in our teaching. So largely they're participatory and active pedagogies but we need them to be authentic, they need to be aligned to the workplace, they need to be situated so we can ask students to go off and do something in the real world in the physical world, their workplace and bring it back to their online place and do things in the online place and take those into the physical world. We're introducing a lot more problem-solving activities and all these together create a student experience. But again, these lend themselves to the types of scaffolding I just mentioned and what we want to look at is how we put a framework around our educational model and help students support each other in an online space, work with their tutors as well, become part of a community and create a place, create a virtual campus almost because the thing about online education and our online education you can't create an individual scaffolding for each student because it's got to work at scale and some of our modules we have 600 students enrolled we can't spend a significant amount of time with each of those students. So how do we create an environment and an opportunity for students to support each other with help from us whenever they need it and they feel they can ask for that help as well. So our scaffolding is called care and it stands for kindness, awareness, reflective and engaged. Now in my abstracts I think awareness was accessible and engaged, was ethical and this has all changed over the past six months it's still care but we wanted to pull the things out that weren't present in our educational model and put those into the scaffolding and shifted slightly and I apologise that it's slightly different in the abstract. If you want to know more about accessibility I can talk to the ends of the earth about that and W3C standards and universal design for learning and all that but that's a completely different talk. Okay, so it's clear we need to provide scaffolding that provides support for the person not necessarily for the learning for them to be a person in the online environment our scaffolding models kindness to students we start from place of trust we trust that they're going to engage we trust them that they want to be there and we try and develop a sense that they can trust us as well of being open and showing our own vulnerabilities to them. To create cohesion we support students to develop awareness now if we think of awareness as in three spheres that kind of fit inside each other the first innermost sphere is really about creating that self-awareness of your own basic needs as a learner and a person in the world without this awareness we can't manage our feelings the way we work our reactions and we can't practice kindness to ourselves which is really important when you're in an environment that is maybe not as human as one you are used to. The second sphere is awareness about those people in our immediate context about those people in our immediate context and that could be our students and our tutors ac facilitators it enables us to support each other and when we link that back to our self-awareness we call that empathy and the third sphere is awareness of the world around us and the people we may not have contacts with everyday and it can include issues as well like caring for our planet, caring for our urban environment our built environment becoming more aware of the impact that our actions may have on a larger context. We are students to reflect on this at regular points throughout their studies and this awareness of each other and the industry they're working in will help them to communicate more with each other and become part of a community and finally engaged we want to encourage students to discuss this and we're implementing some quite innovative ways for our students to engage in our online provision going forwards including virtual studio pedagogy which I know Matt's been talking about I went to an interesting event a few weeks ago on that and we're looking at new ways that our students can collaborate can feedback, can feed up and can act on feedback there's all kinds of stuff happening in that engagement area so I'm just going to give you one example because it's all well and good saying about this framework but I struggle to understand frameworks unless I can actually see them in practice and when I write my blog I'll put a few more examples up there as well so you can kind of see some of the stuff we're doing Down the side here we have the steps of an online learning task it's for our module digital technologies and this is one of the very first tasks called technology and you we begin by asking our students just a brainstorm together everyday technologies that they will use they then move on to do a record of their technology day so over 24 hours they have to record how they engage with and interact with technology what they use, where they encounter it they can use whatever tools they want to do this and we give guidance and support around using things like Instagram or Twitter because of all the privacy issues but we want to make it as accessible as possible they can do it as a word doc but the most important thing is that they will share it with each other at the end of their technology day they'll choose another couple more students' diaries and look at those they look at what's the same, what's different they become aware of how they encounter technology and those students may be in different countries so that could be quite interesting we then ask them to watch a video which provides a model on how how we can think about how we engage with technology and then they ask to create their own digital engagement map and share that and then that all feeds into a online seminar which is more of a workshop where we look at the maps and we explore them in detail so the care in that comes from helping students get started making it about them, making them look at themselves the awareness is self-awareness the awareness is becoming aware of their peers and they're examining, when they reflect they examine why some things are different and some things are the same and there's an opportunity to discuss and apply it to the wider context and this task feeds into future tasks privacy and data security and all kinds of things so it's a good starting point for that and these are some of the other areas that we're looking at where we can implement our care scaffolding online seminars, not webinars we're encouraging activities whereby students collaboratively annotate course syllabi and assessment briefs so they really engage with that from the very start and they understand why it's relevant many more integrated projects and team assignments introducing e-portfolios and tools where they can reflect and they can engage and they can learn about one another so just to finish scaffolding is a temporary structure but scaffolding can actually remain in place for years it may be there for a few weeks and I would say that's the type of scaffolding that we use for online learning activities but we need a more permanent structure to support our online students become part of a community to feel that they're part of a place that can support them and where they can grow as a person it needs to remain in place until our work is done as educators and they leave us to enter the built environment and that connected networked environment thank you very much for one question if there is none in the audience perhaps there was questions in VBOX we can have one Kate may your pick if you have any questions if I could have a copy of these I can answer them in my blog that's probably better do you find there are significant differences in digital literary skills amongst your students and how do you address these that would be really good to know we need to understand that all our students are virtual apart from the apprentices who come into our workshop and we are starting a body of work at the moment with JISC to try and assess what those students digital literacy skills are I said we have a wide cohort and I hate the term natives and immigrants and I'm not going to use it but it's, yeah, there's a wide variety of skills but I think the skills that we also need to be very mindful of aren't so much on how to use a computer they are very much about things like data security, privacy how to be a community online and what the opportunities and the negative aspects of that are but as I said we're working with JISC going forward to do an assessment of our students but also related to that it's really important to look at how our staff digital literacy is as well because our staffs we're very we're an institution where learning designers work on a par with academic staff and that's one of the reasons why I love it there we bring the educational knowledge the staff bring the subject knowledge but many of them come from industry as well may not have any teaching experience or digital teaching experience when they join us so there's a whole heap of literacies that we need to address and that something about transforming our educational provision means that we it's giving us a launch pad to do some of that so thank you very much thank you and Edina's work with learning technologists helps to develop skilled and literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with 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