 to share with us on how Nanyang Technological University, NTU, uses WordPress in classrooms. So Philippi is an assistant professor in the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in NTU, while Joan is a senior librarian at the library. She collaborates closely with the faculty and other users to design blogs, provides consultation and training on applying appropriate social media tools and strategies in their work. So let's welcome the both of them. OK, thank you, everyone. I'm here physically. Philippi will be here virtually. He will appear later. Sorry, because he got to be in Surangkana. OK, so hi, my name is Joan. I'm a librarian with NTU, Nanyang Technological University. And I came in touch with WordPress maybe four years back because of my job in NTU. Because the library supports the university blogging platform, which is on WordPress. So how it all started is, OK, this is a typical day in the life of a professor accent, NTU. So NTU now actually moves towards this pedagogy called the Flick Classroom. So you will see that means the students actually has to study first about the subject. And when they come to the classroom, the professor only facilitates. So the professor have two options. How do I do a Flick Classroom? I can use a BBIs Blackboard, which is a learning management system, or it could be WordPress. So our working relationship is designing the request. The library actually supports together with the IT department. And then when we receive the request, we work with the faculty closely to create the content. Maybe you ask why the library is doing this instead of the IT department. The library is in this role because we see the content differently. We are the specialists and the professionals in looking at information structure. And later I will share with you the case study and you will understand why the library is involved in this. OK, by the way, this is Philippe. And he's going to talk. Because he was away, so he especially got the IT to do this video for the talk. Mr. Microphone? Just play. Sorry. I said, can you play the flute? Sorry. Sorry, sorry, give you guys a flood. Can you just play first? I can't do your volume. Oh, maybe we need to control. Control. If I got there, and I teach chemistry at NTU, the problem I see with teaching hard for sciences, such as chemistry, is that there is a disconnection between the concept and the real life. The concepts that people can understand, all the advances to come from, let's say, new mathematical compounds, drugs, it's very easy to understand, or it's a new drug, that they don't understand that there is a lot of chemistry behind it, for example, or chemistry behind the materials. It's very difficult for students to understand, translate from what they study to the actual real life. So this is why we decided to go with these blocks. And the block will help them produce the video. The block is used as an script. What did they need to do? They need to find out the chemical concept they want to talk about, explain it, see how it is applied to society. And also, the block will be a catalyst for accounting everything they do at the week, their meetings, and all the activities. Because after all, one of the big differences is that rather than going from individual work as traditional courses, they do have to work in groups. So the task is to map as a group. They need to be able to develop software skills. So nowadays, most international companies, they are assigning, the assignments are nine teams. So they need to learn how to cope interacting with other people to finalize a task successfully. This is why we decided to do the blocks, which was a small task. And why did we decided to do the blocks in WordPress? Because WordPress is, the work pages in the world are done by WordPress. So it will bring them some skills that they will really be able to utilize outside the course. Okay, he's actually a longer video, so I have to cut him off. Okay, just to share the case scenario, how he come about his chemistry course is actually with, for the case study, I'm going to share this with 306 students in 51 groups. So there will be a weekly exercises with four questions, and he wants them to have a final script, each group, and two video submissions on a assigned topic on chemistry. And then he also wants for peer evaluation. So usually, when the professor comes to us, he will just give us this kind of vague requirements from the instructors, but we need to kind of transcribe the requirements into something that works on WordPress. So, as an example, we look like there's a group, so maybe they should have individual blocks for the each group. Then we need to have structural content of so-called the required final script. So we work with him, like he needs them to come out with what is the method, what is the concept of the assigned topic, which is chemistry, I don't really understand. Then how do they upload the videos onto the main blocks, and how do the group tracks their progress on the block that he could read it on the course block, the main block. So based on that scenario, we actually come out with the structure together with him. So every student, we will share with them, like they need to talk about introduction, about the team, chemical concept, implications to society, minutes and assignment. Actually, before I need to do this presentation, I didn't know how the students felt, but when the students shared with us that forcing them to structure that essay this way in a group actually helps them to really think through how to write it so clearly that everybody who reads their course block, their group sites will understand the concept easily. Instead of you write your own paper and you could really get into all the chemical jargons. So the blocks actually do help them to think through the concept better. And then how to manage like group minutes. For him, this is his view. We have to customize and fix, WordPress allows you to password the page. So we password protect it for him. And then he could look through all the different minutes that is shared by the students who is more prolific meeting, who is not really meeting, who post the meetings, et cetera. He could view it from his own course block, which is, this page is restricted to him. Then of course we also need to talk about the workflow. When we come up with the structure, it's not just a technical thing. We actually need to look at the workflow like he has a weekly exercise with four questions each. And then he needs to be able to self-create questions. You can understand that researchers are very busy and usually maybe on that, if before the class then he can come up with a question. So he needs to be able to be comfortable and text savvy enough to post the questions himself. And then he wants the students to actually, he himself for his questions actually need images because it's chemistry. He needs to have mathematical formulas because again it's chemistry. And the students after they submit the exercise, they need to only see their own submissions and not the others. And then also the students must have an option to submit text or using images. So when he gave us all the requirements, we kind of need to work closely with him, test, do a mock-up and then let him try out whether he's comfortable with the workflow before we roll out to the students because he's a big class and if there's an error it's very hard to call back. This course has run for the third time. So actually there has been iterations even for the third time because every time he's more comfortable with work press, he's more comfortable with technology. We kind of know what's the class requirements better. So he's looking at this participatory teaching methods that he wants the students to really discuss more and do peer-to-peer learning on their own instead of depending on him feeding the information. So the blocks actually help work press actually helps to do that. So first we remind ourselves we think of usage not the design because this is really about teaching. So everything like for the instructor, cost curriculum, we need to look at his curriculum. He's preferred engagement style like does he wants the students, he wants to receive email notification when the student post or he's okay, he's comfortable to just read it off the block and what is his technology comfort level? What is the future integration? When I say this is like this course we have run for the third time. The first round actually we treat it like this is the first test. If it's good, it stays, it's not good. That's it, we are not going to repeat the class. It's a huge class. But then it works. And then after the third class, second class, second month actually we consider how to archive good content from selected students groups. And then of course we need to speak to the instructor, the Alingo. I mean, there's no point that I tell him, okay, you can use this plugin, then we're going to put the code here, then you get this, it pulls here, he doesn't understand. So we have to explain to him in his language. Then we of course also have to think of the student's usage. Like what is the student's comfort level? Different students actually, some students are more tech savvy, some are not comfortable. There is a different access points also, meaning some students use laptops, some use mobile phones, some use tablets. How are they assessing the blocks? Different devices, different access point, like on site, off site, they do it from school campus network, away from school campus network because course block is restricted. So what we did was, this is actually a slide from our IT. We did this one-time login using case. The case service is a ticket-based authentication token. So when the user clicks to login to the block, the user actually get forwarded to the case server login and then via the case client, then the user has to authenticate using the NTU username and password. And actually it will just issue a ticket and then the ticket will pass to our so-called active directory, the database where all the users' information is there. It will check and then if it is okay, it will pass it back and then the user can access the blocks. So this is how we want to make it very easy for the students so they don't have to remember a separate password. Of course, we also looked at, most important, the versatility and flexibility. What I mean is that the whole platform has to be very fluid, is to be very easy to adapt or change along the course timeline. And then it must also have the ability to modify easily, not only by me and my colleagues because we are the people who have been doing the WordPress administrator, but also by the students and the faculty for their own content. So the plugin we use is actually formidable forms plug-in. I'm not sure if anybody is familiar with this plugin or have you used? This is a very powerful plugin. Yeah, but we use it as a class. We don't use it like a real form kind of thing and I will show you what we use it. And we use another plugin called MyClass plugin to do the class management. So for MyClass plugin, what we did was actually, because this plugin allows you to connect multiple sites on your MU environment, multi-site environment onto one another site. So he has his own main site and then he could manage their restriction, whether the students can post, whether they cannot post, whether he can and he can read them directly also. And depending on how we set the restriction, actually the students can also read them and they can comment directly from one page instead of going to every individual pages. So this is very useful for managing multiple sites content. Then we talk about the formidable form plug-in. What we did was actually use it for the weekly form submission. So we have to keep it very simple for him. We don't expect him to go and create, I mean the instructor, Philippe to go and create the form. So what our team did was we create the form, this form A, I should call it form A, for him to submit his questions. And then after he create, submit his question, it will fit to this form B, which the students can view and then they can submit their answers. So it looks like this. And then after the students submitted all the answers, it will appear into this format with the questions and the answers. And the students will get a copy. They can only get their own answers. And then he himself, again under a protective view, will actually get to see all the submission. And because his class is huge. So you know, you cannot expect him to go through like Triana over a student submission. So we also use formidable form to do the filtering. So formidable form actually is very powerful and it allows you to have the filtering entries. So if you set the parameters, you are able to actually the view under the parameters under the view you can actually sort it accordingly, automatically. So it's very convenient for him. Okay. So likewise we use the same thing for the peer evaluation because initially he was like, that's a huge group. There's 51 groups of them and every group have six students and everyone they will be disagreement because they come from different schools coming together for one program. So they want to be able to have a place for them to voice out if they like their teammates or they dislike their teammates. So this is the peer evaluation. So by selecting the group, they will only see their own teammates name then they could make the options. But most important is the bad end thing where he could actually filter again the results by the groups or by the name of the students. So it's very convenient for him. So most important is about interruptions and engagement. You have seen Philippe, so now I'm going to let you see his student. They have very kindly volunteered to be part of this video. I think we just started this project. We faced a lot of difficulties because we were very new in the area of editing blocks or editing videos. However, throughout the project we learned a lot from both our professors and our teammates. So throughout the project they actually learned new skills like video editing, like long game, you know. And this I believe will be very helpful in our jobs or any other projects in future. One wonderful thing about technology is that it saves us a lot of time. Instead of having to submit our weekly assignments physically to our professors pigeonhole, we can now upload our assignment answers onto the block instead. And so that helped us to save a lot of time and be a lot more efficient. I think the principle of technology accessibility is definitely the one that I will go for because blocks and videos, they are online 24-7 while professors are humans themselves who need rest. So with these blocks online, they actually access them anytime on our own convenience to be able to see the videos and actually replay them in case with any issues. Yeah, I guess this is the biggest takeaway of how I leverage technology to actually learn accessibility 24-7. Because it's a very fun and interesting way to learn. There's a difference from the usual lecture tutorial style learning. And like what my professor once famously said, everyone can study. But in order to differentiate yourself from the rest, you've got to have other soft skills such as communication and collaboration skills. We could really see that the students learn more, the grades were slightly higher. And also the material they produce, the blocks and the video, were really professional. I was really surprised to see how much time they put on something that they refuse or they object at the beginning. I really think it was a success in that point. The students were at the end really engaged on their projects and trying to make the most out of it. As well as relatively happy to work in teams because they managed to meet people from different backgrounds or not like the friends. Okay, so actually this course has a story. If you go to, I forgot, it's called some NTU students' Facebook. They are some of the students' projects. When the first time we roll out, the class user enrollment is 300 plus. It drops to 180 because they were like, oh, there's so much work and we have to do this this block thing and video thing. And then the second round, we actually have the enrollment backup because the review was good and he actually got a teaching award. I mean, Philippe last year I actually got a teaching award because of the interaction he got and the feedback from the students. So yeah, with that, I end with the students' nice pictures. There's a huge bunch of them but I just randomly pick a group picture. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Joan. Thank you, Joan. So any of you have a question for Joan regarding this? Anyone? Yes. Hi. I'm a bit of a novice at this so pardon me if my question is too big. For the MyClass plugin that you use, could you use it like if you had a service and you had clients and then you wanted to create portfolios for the clients that only they could access? Could you use it in that way as well? Portfolio for your clients, meaning individuals. If you were a service provider of some sort and you had different clients and you had to show them what you've done that you wanted to put on your website. So could you sort of flip the model so that when they signed in, they could only see the work that you've put up for them and not the work you've put up for your other clients, let's say. Could it work that way? It could, but I wouldn't recommend because I think if you just create the site and restrict and then give them the access might be more convenient rather than going through this plugin thing and then they have to go into the dashboard, they have to click and they have to go to another interface. Because you see the students need to see all the different, their classmates group blocks also. That's why it makes sense. So I'm restructuring myself, Yuni. And I was wondering, I mean that seems a lot of back-end work, a lot of back-end that you need. So you've got, I would have set this up myself. I mean, can you sort of estimate how much time or person hours that you would spend? Are you from NTU? I am, I just, I really email to, I think I email the library to, I'm a guest profiteer from Sweden, but I keep staying in there, so I'm watching. Then it's very fast because you have us. I've been here, I've been back to Sweden and that's why I want to implement this. I have to somehow convince them. I mean, NTU has got loads of money coming to us. Okay. So people keep working the back-end, but I mean how much, if I were to pitch this to try and get it started. I mean, rough estimate of how much work I would have to do in my requisition. Oh, okay. Again, it depends on your class size. So for Philippine's class, it's a huge class, but I think we get it out quite quickly. So maybe give us a big time, but we did all the exercise for him upfront with dummy exercise, so he could just change the questions quickly and publish it. But it meant more that sort of the organization point of view, like how to buy person hours. Oh, no, because NTU, I don't. I'm going to now pitch it back home. I want to say, hey, I want to start something like this. And they say, okay, well, how many hours of person hours do you need to buy? I mean, how much did you guys invest in setting this up, you know what I mean? It's actually manpower because WordPress is kind of open source free. The plugins we use is free, so it's the maintenance, it's the manpower. That's exactly my question. Yeah. How much was that? We could do a training for you. Okay, it's very easy, like building up to numbers, because for me, the four is very powerful. All you do is to go on, get all the drag and drop, and then you can set it up like waiting a couple of minutes. So if anybody will do an illustration of how formidable form can be used, I can do that for them. So I can teach you my business car and the cashier of just a couple of minutes. And I think that's the beauty of WordPress, it's the speed of implementation. So you cut all this parking, and you park it in a very fast. Yeah. Formidable form is just drag and drop, but you need to, depends on what's your requirements. So if you go to the forum, a lot of people also give the script to how to pull the things, depending on how sophisticated you want, what you want to do. So yeah, I could give you the links, and I can also share how to do your own installation. Yeah. Take your team to get all of this up and running. For this single site, because we managed the whole university site. What about the other side? I think about week. Week. Yeah. But then the, it's like not, the whole team is doing this. Yeah, so. Yeah, maybe about two people. The package this and release this as an open source project. Ah, I'm asked, how's my boss? Where is he? I don't know if my boss is here. Is there any particular reason why you chose this package instead of something like one dash, which probably packages every all of this functionality and it has a lot of extensibility. We actually also purchase Lundash. So we actually have two installation. One is supported by campus press. So this example I show you is under campus press. So campus press is hosted solution. So we cannot install our own plugins, but we use Lundash for our own self-hosted one. And we do, yeah, use it for other classes. Because it just seems a little bit too complicated to go through formative forms and then other plugins is to add functionality, which is already pre-packaged in single plugin, right? Makes it so much easier and faster. Yeah. Any more questions? I think the lady at the back. Yeah. I think my question feeds into what Jay-Z has asked. In addition to Lundash, did you try other alternatives such as Moodle, which is, again, open source, learning management system? We are looking. And compared with setting up something like this. Actually, we are looking into it because one of the schools actually use Moodle. And Moodle is very good with mathematics symbols. With a lot of other alternatives such as setting up quizzes and self-learning platforms. In terms of the response you received from the students as well as the teachers, I mean, do you know what's? Yeah, actually, there's a lot of platforms up there. I haven't really explored Moodle, but I saw the demo from the school that used Moodle. So the quiz function is very easy to use also. But for this chemistry case, he only used the weekly submission and he also wants them to do the block thing as a task. So the group block things. That's why we didn't want the students to be going to multiple platforms or go into one. Okay. Thank you, everyone. If you want to ask other questions, you can always look for me. Thank you.