 Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupiter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupiter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupiter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Okay, everyone, welcome to this pre-lunch session. We'll have six speakers for the price of three. So that's something to get to keep you here. We'll start off with Martin and Louise. The floor is yours. Good afternoon. I'm sure people are looking forward to lunch and by way of incentive and to keep you focused, there is a small edible prize for those that are able to concentrate and work the hardest for the first part of this activity. That's the title of our presentation. As you can see, there's a mini instruction there, which is to get laptops ready if you have them, or mobiles as a second preference. I'm Martin Compton from University of Greenwich. I'm Louise Drum. I'm from Edinburgh Napier University, formerly of the University of Greenwich. Which is why we're working together on this. Okay, so without further ado, we're going to try and illustrate through exemplification, give you something to do, and that task is for you to work in groups. Obviously in a room like this, which is magnificent, but not clearly designed for group working activities. So around the room, you will see green pieces of paper that determine which group you're in. So we've kind of got one group over there, one over there, one over there, one over there, and then we've got four spaces in the middle. So if you look right towards, if you will, the pieces of paper as being indicated by Louise at the moment, then... Got one right down here. Yeah, there's one over there. That's good. With your mobile devices or laptops. Everyone in this area, please come here. Follow the instructions. If you're joining us online, welcome. I don't know where the camera is. I'm going to wave sort of generally like that. There is also an option for you to have a crack at this as well. But those here in the hall, ignore this. Use your piece of paper, please. So it's not a prize for everyone, but we would hope that everyone will complete this task as swiftly as possible, but the winning team will be furnished with some minimal nourishment. Okay, can we turn over now? Yeah, get going. Turn over. You'll find a QR code and duplications of that QR code or a URL on that page. Pass the white pages around to your friends so they can scan it or log in. Please don't use the people in the room. Please don't use the one on the screen. That's for people who are watching the live stream. So please use the URL or the QR code on the pages that you've got in your group. Too complicated for you. So not everyone needs to be logged on. You can collaborate, work in a way that's best for you. The task should be evident though. So you'll find the task is in Google Slides. You want to make sure you're in edit mode of Google Slides. The second slide has movable words. Drag and drop them. I don't want to worry you all, but the online group seem to have finished already. So if you're with us online, can you click the like button in the VVocs so we know how many people are participating? That would be great as well. Just a code to enter for those working online. Nobody's rushing to me yet with the piece of paper. I hope we should be close. It's the green paper is the one you want to fill in. Oh look, here comes someone. So close. Oh no. So close. We have a winner. We have consolation prizes as well, so keep going for a minute. If you're close, bring it up. Your green sheet. Online group, you've got one letter missing. But yeah, do keep bringing those pieces of paper. We want to check. Excellent, well done. Yes, so we have a runner up there as well. Congratulations. Let's see. So close. Two letters runway round. OK, as much as I'm sure you want to carry on with this until it's complete, we do only have a limited amount of time. So if you give Louise your pieces of paper as we continue with this, these are the answers for the different groups. You'll notice that they are actual words, but not words that are actually that easy to guess. So you have to get the things in the right order. What we'd like you to do is hold on to that experience. Think about how you felt doing that and relate it to the context, the problem that we had, and the solution that we came up with, which is slightly different given that the context here is different. The online experience for those people who are watching online was a little bit closer to ours, but they didn't have audio. They were relying on text comments to interact with one another, but they seem to be able to do it a little bit faster for some reason. Maybe you have an explanation for that. So I'm not going to take any comments now, but we can save those for the end. So the context that we were working on, online, distance, PG CERT HE program, along with Ross who's sitting over there as well, with both UK and international participants, we have as part of our scheme weekly webinars using the Zoom webinar tool. And we were using a lot of the kind of chat, Mentimeter in the background, breakout groups, turning mics on, turning mics off. We heard earlier in the earlier session about some of the issues we've collaborated in these sorts of contexts. But we weren't particularly happy with the amount of participation. And I think any of you that have ever taught online or perhaps even just participated in online webinars will be familiar with this. When we talk to students online, we tend, I feel, and a lot of the evidence shows that we're doing this as well, that we're going back towards more transmissive modes of teaching the pedagogy is much, much more transmissive. And the media, the mechanisms that we use, the tools that we're using can exacerbate that. So the skills and strategies that we use to encourage dialogue in classes aren't necessarily the same ones that we can draw on in an online environment. So we're finding new ways of trying to get people involved. So there are a couple of real issues with the way that we're asking people to interact. So they feel more visible. They perhaps feel more vulnerable, more subject to the surveillance of the tutors and their peers. So a number of these things are causing quite big issues that we're preventing them from engaging in dialogue. So what we wanted to come up with was something that kind of mirrored what you were looking at here or doing here as a strategy for engaging them. Okay, so what we did is we put together a series of Google slides that the students online could collaborate on, which is you were collaborating today. I'm only bearing in mind that they're all at a distance. It's a synchronous discussion. It's a synchronous Zoom webinar that we are running. And we use the breakout rooms facility within the webinar to siphon people off into small groups of three or four where they would then engage in this problem-solving activity. And the thing that was most interesting about this that actually this became a private space in the way that a main webinar room cannot be. So just as you were huddling in groups together, they were virtually huddling in groups. Some of them were using their mics to chat and some of them were using the chat facility as well. So what we did is we had these instructions for the escape room where they went through the slides, would probably progress to the next slide, and they had a drag and drop activity, which in Google slides people can do at the same time. So they were dynamically moving around these words into this left and right for them to experience. Kind of collaborative problem-solving online. And then afterwards we would discuss what was the approaches that they were taking in doing that. And then they had an escape room code much in the same way that we asked you to fill out your code on the page as well. So the student feedback that we had, people had quite a strong reaction to it. Obviously they said they felt more comfortable talking to each other because there wasn't somebody in the room, it was okay to make mistakes. Again, that idea of playing and failure coming to the fore there. And some people indeed feeling this kind of panic. We didn't set a timer on them, indeed we didn't set a timer today either, but actually there was this sense of urgency that they had to get on it and do something and complete a task. And then other people talking about, well they just had a conversation about what was happening. And I suppose most striking of all, bearing in mind the name of this talk, somebody said actually I had to put down my cup of tea and sit up and start doing things in the opposite way that sometimes we think about online webinars, this is a passive thing, I can just sit down and do something. We passed over some responsibility and agency to them. So I think we'll finish up there, but we've got to hand out our prizes first of all. So if people have comments, any feedback? Obviously there was some technical stuff happening there because people couldn't get into edit mode of Google Slides if they didn't already have it downloaded on a mobile. But if you have any comments or anything like that at all, who is our winner? Sewerage one. Sewerage one, and that was this one here, so that is, there's group 3A, who'd you like to come with us? Congratulations. And left. Well done. Sewage, who came down first? Sewerage. So while the grand prize giving is underway, are there any comments or questions about it? I think it was quite ambitious asking you to do this in such a short space of time, but hopefully you get a sense of that experience, which is what we were going for. Who were our runners up? Oh, the second one was, no, oh, it's here. It's this one. Oh, yes, Fishways. 4B, 4B. 4B. Oh, something, yes, what's your story there? So obviously we're going to post the wrappers to the online people because, you know. I told them they can take something from their fridge. Yeah. Yes. And obviously those Google slides will be there in perpetuity for people to have a look at. We've shared the links there as well, for people who want to have a look and make your own copies and adapt it for your own purposes. Any questions? Comments? Hi, Stephanie Campbell from Southeastern Regional College. Oh, there we go. Stephanie Campbell from Southeastern Regional College. So just a tiny question about digital confidence and capabilities with the learners and the students, were there challenges to overcome with? Some people have a real fear factor, especially online. And how did you overcome those challenges? I think one of the things that's central to the way we designed the program is that, you know, we're all coming to this online distance program with different levels of expertise and confidence. So built into the program is a sort of, you know, you might be on this rung, you might be on this rung. Let's move up a few rungs wherever you are. And everything that we do is about challenging people to move on. So there's that sort of backdrop that reassurance. And indeed, we had somebody who was there, whose entire job was to support that improving digital confidence amongst the cohorts as well. But, you know, we were lucky, it was a PG CERT AG. So everything we do, it's experience it. These are the kinds of things that students are exposed to. So we had the perfect kind of narrative to frame that, actually. Maybe you can answer the bottom question there. I was going to address the cheese comment, actually. But no, OK. So some of the tasks that we set the students. I mean, the illustration that we have on there is a classic one. But I think that the opportunities afforded by live presentation, drag and drop functionality, synchronous use of things like Google Docs, there's so many things that you can do, completing tables, labeling diagrams, those kinds of things, all lend themselves in a similar way to the kinds of tasks that you had as well. Anything to add to that? No, I think just the next question in relation to people who didn't like the activity. The only one was people felt a little bit of panic. And maybe it might be a little bit related to the digital, not just their own capabilities, but actually the devices. And we were working with people in different countries. So in terms of access to the internet and stuff like that, people found that they had to turn off their video in order to carry on with it, or they had to use a second device in order to actually access the activity. So there were things like that that created a sense of urgency. But out of all the things we did, I think, as the webinars, and we had been doing webinars for a full term at that point, that they did respond very positively to this, in that they had something to do. They were given something to do. But it wasn't with the whole group. And more importantly, it wasn't in the big webinar, which was usually being recorded as well. So actually it was genuinely a private space for them. A desirable anxiety, I would call it. Yeah. OK. Any more questions? Hello, I'm Stephen Bruce from Edmund Napier University. I'm just interested in the challenges of transferring something like that into the asynchronous environment. I think that's a really good question. Actually, these sorts of activities came out of asynchronous activities. So for example, our induction activity is an icebreaker about icebreakers using Google Slides documents. So introducing all of our participants to the concept of multiple authorship on a single document, add your own slide, share an icebreaker with your colleagues or your future colleagues on this program, and then comment on those using the comment function. So introducing people to this idea that you can operate in an asynchronous way using a single document and do some quite interesting and creative things. And they're all academics, teaching academics. They go off and do it in much more interesting and creative ways, sometimes without Lego. I suppose the one thing to bear in mind about this one is that there's no traceability about who moves what around. So if it's asynchronous, we don't know who's done that. And it's debatable whether that's something you need to know or not. But whereas within a Google doc, where people logged in and you can actually trace the history of who's done what. But yeah. Great. OK. Maybe the final question. How long would you give students to complete the task? And what happened when groups finished earlier than expected? We had an extension task built in. So the content of the example that we showed you there was about what was it about? It was problem-based learning. That's it. So there was an opportunity to discuss some of the features that might be surprising, I think it was, wasn't it? About counter-intuitive ideas. Counter-intuitive things about problem-based learning. OK. Thanks for the cheese. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks very much. Well done, everyone. Thanks. Three of presenters. Lorna, Charlie, and Stuart, the floor is yours. Hi, everyone. Are you good? So my name's Lorna Campbell. I work at Information Services here in the university. I'm in here with two of my colleagues. Like to introduce yourselves. Hi, I am Stephanie Charley-Falley. I go by Charley. And I work in Open Educational Resources. Hi, I'm Stuart Krummer, and I manage a small interactive content team within Information Services. We haven't got any prizes. However, we do have something that hopefully all of you will be able to take away either in a physical or a digital form. So everyone's a winner in our session. So hopefully you've been enjoying yourself here at the University of Edinburgh over the last three days. And as you can see, Edinburgh is a very ancient and a very grand university. But it's also a very playful university. And I think if any of you were at the Cayley last night, you'll have experienced that. And what we're going to do in this short session is look at how we support playful and creative engagement here at the university. Through Open Education. So the mission of the University of Edinburgh is to deliver impact for society, to discover, develop, and share knowledge. And we firmly believe that one way we can do that is through engaging with open education. And we have a vision for open education and for open education resources here at the university. And this vision is very much the brainchild of Melissa Highton, who you've already met, as one of the co-chairs of this conference. And this vision is founded on the history of the Edinburgh settlement, our excellent education and research collections, and traditions of the Scottish Enlightenment and the university's civic mission. We have a policy to support this vision. And this OER policy was approved by our Learning and Teaching Committee in 2016. And that's important because it situates open education and OER very squarely in the domain of teaching and learning. This policy is permissive and informative. It doesn't tell staff what they must do. It encourages them, both staff and students, to use, create, and publish open education resources to enhance the quality of the student experience. And it helps colleagues to make informed decisions about creating and using open education resources. But policy is nothing without practice. And in order to support this policy, we have an open education resources service. And you're actually looking at the entirety of the open education resources service here. It's myself and Charlie. But we cover a lot of ground in the university. We're a centrally funded service, based in Learning and Teaching and Web Services, which is the Directorate of Information Services, but we work right across the university. And we focus very squarely on developing digital skills. And we also provide strategic support for big initiatives. We run a lot of workshops and digital skills events around open education resources and open education. We provide a lot of advice and guidance about copyright and open licensing. And we inform strategic initiatives. So for example, one of our big strategic initiatives at the moment is developing online masters at scale. And that initiative is very much informed and underpinned by our principles of open education and our OER policy. And we also support information services groups, playful engagement strategy. And I'm going to pass over to my colleague Charlie now, who'll be able to tell you a bit more about that. So my involvement with this actually began when I have a very playful approach towards the way that I teach and share information. And one of the things that I was doing as part of our open education service was running OER board game jams. So this is where groups are led through openly licensed materials in order to create and license their own game. And it was really quite popular. And so moving on from that, I went and I did some research with a colleague here at the University of Edinburgh. We ran focus interview groups on people who had been attending the sessions. And through this, we actually found that there was quite a desire for more information on how to be playful in learning and engagement here at the University. And a real appreciation for services provided from us within information services use this playful and creative approach. A lot of this comes back to a lot of discussion that is occurring and playful engagement and learning at the moment, which is in the magic circle, which is where we're looking at creating a space of safety where the rules of the real world don't apply directly and where different norms and codes of practice emerge. So there's space to imagine and create. So where we were talking this morning about creating curious and playful people. And so this is something that we've really been trying to take on board within information services here at the University of Edinburgh. And we're now actually applying this as a strategy in how we are providing our services, our information and the way that we are engaging, both internally amongst ourselves and then broader out across the university community. So we have our playful engagement strategy. This has been put up and is being implemented right across information services. We've got some wonderful little gifts here that have been created by Stuart and the information team. And this goes across our commitment in a number of areas. So our commitment to reflection, development and innovation. And this is seen in our services including our academic blogging services. We have a UCreate makerspace and we have a large number of student internships as well. Our libraries, museums, galleries and collections. So we are looking at different playful and engaging ways that we can engage with those. And Stuart will talk about that a little bit more in a moment. Digital technologies, looking and seeing here my favorite of these is actually the catch box which is just a throwable microphone that you can throw around and it breaks up that divide. So the technologies don't need to be huge but just thinking about how we can use them to engage creatively. So this is also seen in our flexible IT spaces. The 23 things for digital knowledge course which I was talking about just yesterday and our digital skills services and teams. We're also building communities of practice and this can include, we have open educational groups and communities. We have Wikipedia, editathons and game sessions and we also have the fabulous Ada Lovelace Day which is now becoming quite important to us and a regular feature of our calendar. And on that I'm going to hand over to Stuart to talk a bit more about our practices then. Thanks Charlie. Okay, I first got involved in Ada Lovelace Day back in 2015. I don't know how many of you participate in it but it's quite a common and popular activity in a number of universities around the world. It's really just a celebration of women in STEM and sort of encouraging young professionals and up and coming students to explore a variety of different subjects. So I'm just going to showcase some of the activities we do. So typically we start off in the morning with some guest speakers and we now have quite a large commitment from the student body. So we had talks on sort of women in particular in high performance computing. We had representation from student societies sort of mental well-being and the women in STEM society and we had an intern from the library talk to us about things she'd uncovered in the university's collection to do with gender and equality. And we also had a really sort of cool presentation for Madeline about how she hacked her net machine to create portraits of sort of famous women in STEM. We kind of sort of loosened things up a bit when we do some group activities. So some of them are very sort of academic and focused. There's the HPC carpentry course, the university runs which sort of covers supercomputers, what it is, what they can get out of it. But it is a particular focus on women for that particular course. One we'd done last year that was created by the students themselves was STEM Stories where they sort of collectively wrote down and discussed their own personal experience and shared it with each other and online. Some of my colleagues ran the DIY film school activity for mobile journalism. And without fail we always managed to do Wikipedia sort of editing. This is just some of the fun activities we've got cupcakes decorating. A lot of sort of coloring in. We have sort of visible illustrations we've commissioned. Evening events are sort of networking, sort of career discussions. The, sorry, I'm erasing through these. Second project we're going to talk about is the coloring book, which is a sort of culmination of all these different focuses within the university. So this sort of started as a series of workshops back in February. And we invited students to come and look at the university's collection. There's sort of 40,000 images online. Most of them are open licensed. And we sort of shortlisted some of them here. And we gave them the sort of digital skills to go through, transforming the photographs or paintings into a black and white outline with the sole focus of that creating this sort of collaborative book for publication later in the year. And these are just some of my particular favorites the students created. And this one I'm sort of overhead garden designs, I think it's really unique. What was nice was one of the outputs was we took these publications and used them during exam times. So we had drop in sessions for the students wellbeing. And we also ran a series of similar events during mental health awareness week. And that was for staff and students throughout the university. I'm happy to say we've got some copies of the book with us today. Come and grab us, but we'll leave some out at the poster downstairs as well. All of it's available online. There's a Flickr album and there's PDF downloads for the book and for running the workshop yourself. And there's links to Charlie and Lorna's efforts as well for you to look at. I'm going to wrap up there and open the floor to questions, if that's okay. The audience, there's no online questions so far. We have some copies of the coloring book that you can take away, but as Spirit said, you can also download them. And all the outputs that you've seen today are completely open licensed, so you can take them away and use them at your own institution, even including like the Ada Lovedless Day posters. The playful engagement strategy. The gifts that you saw in the presentation and even though we are policy is open licensed. So everything that you've seen here today is there for you to take away and use. Okay. I think it's that time of before lunch. People are getting hungry. Colt, my attention was that thing you said about sort of in creating the real life don't apply. I mean, it's a shame that real life rules aren't those that are in that space. And I'm just wondering sort of in these, through these practices, do you find that creating these spaces sort of makes it such that those rules become real life rules, the openness and the interaction? So the movement towards playfulness has been happening for quite a number of years within our information services group. So we've had a number of people who have been practicing just independently like myself and Stuart just doing playful things in the way that we engage and teach and share information. Now that we've applied that as actually a strategy as a way that as a group we're moving forward and embedding, it is actually signaling to a lot of other people all across the organization that they can be playful, that they can participate in all of these. We provide a number of playful materials. Throughout our buildings and our spaces for anybody to use and incorporate in their activities, whether they're just having a team meeting and trying to figure something out. We've got craft boxes that they can go in and pull that out. And it is actually leading to more people thinking about, okay, how can we present this information in more informative, engaging and creative ways? And it is actually leading to an uptake in our own practices, but also in people attending a lot of the services that we're providing. Any other questions? I have a question. How is the uptake of the colleagues and the teachers changed in culture there? In terms of open education or playful engagement, or both? Playfulness. Playfulness? Yes. So when I was running the Board Game Jams, I was doing it because I wanted to reach a different audience to those who would normally come along to information sessions about copyright and licensing. And the research that I did actually show that exactly what was happening, the people who were coming to the sessions were coming because they wanted to learn about playfulness and then apply it. And from those sessions, we've actually had people go and create their own games. They've applied and openly licensed and shared and taken out to their own students. That we've had some featured at conferences. And there was one that was quite prominently featured at a geoscience conference the other year. And we're seeing a lot of interest in playful engagement across the university. And because of course, Laura and I are involved in open education, it's also being tied in with the way that these new resources are being created and shared, which again is encouraging that to be taken up elsewhere. Yeah. Hi. It's not really a question, it's just a comment. I think it's a brilliant strategy. I love the focus on mental health and wellbeing as well, which is such a key issue for students and coming more and more into the conversations. I just love that it overlaps. Teaching and learning and wellbeing aren't necessarily mutually exclusive events. So thank you for sharing. Thank you. If there's no further questions, then I want to thank this person. Thank you very much. Thank you. And then I give the floor to Stephanie, who goes by Stephanie. So, hello. I'm aware that I'm standing between you and your lunch. So, I'll try and keep this in good. So just to introduce myself, my name is Stephanie Campbell, or Steph, and I'm part of the Learning Academy, which is a small team within Southeastern Regional College. We are one of six colleges in Northern Ireland that deliver mostly FE, but also HA as well. And all the details there, if you want to find out more or to reach out and get in touch with us. So the first thing I would like to do is ask you a question. The British cycling team have a philosophy that you should ask yourself, why are you on the bike? When you're starting off on your day and you get onto that bike and you've got a big challenge ahead of you, why are you there? What is motivating you to be there? And that's something that we should keep at the forefront. Why are we on the bike, especially those more challenging days? So once we're on our bike, where do we want to go? What is our destination? And there's been so many amazing discussions as part of this conference about what our destination is and learning technology and data analytics in health and wellbeing as well. So what is our destination? Where do we want to end up? As that question used to hear at interviews, where do you see yourself in five years time? If you remember that one. So we're on our bike, where do we want to go? For us, it was about challenge. Not that long ago, we had a lot of challenges in terms of our makeup. So Northern Ireland went through a bit of a reform a few years ago where they merged multiple colleges into six super colleges, as they were called, and at the time we were merging three main colleges into one. And each of those little colleges had their own organisational culture, they had their own systems, they had their own processes, their own people. So how do we get those three different, completely different cultures to work together in a way that is productive and effective and is working for the students at the heart of it? And we wanted to plan for where we wanted to be. We were on our bike, we knew why we were there, but we needed our destination. So we thought about, well, what happens when we do have lovely facilities? At the time, our facilities weren't great. So what do we do when we do have our great facilities that we really want to get? What do we do when we have our brilliant technologies in every classroom? We're a few years down the line and we do have those buildings. The difference was when we got to those buildings, our people already knew how to use them. They already had the confidence and the digital capabilities to embrace the changes and to embrace the technology to make it work really effectively. We've got these great facilities now and a lot of people will say, oh, it's okay for you, you've got lovely facilities, but we didn't always. I taught in mobiles where the toilets froze over in winter time and the students had to come in and walk for miles to get to them. And now we have these great facilities, so what do we do with it? And part of that strategy was about integration, about taking the systems that we had, the people, the data and the technology and making it work together as a whole college, as one unit. So how did we do that? So this is our science bit, a little bit. This gives you sort of overview of how we integrated those systems together. So at the bottom would be our learner management systems using G and EBS, we have Moodle as our VLE and on top of that we built our systems using cloud services and also within our own quality processes as well. Then on top of that again, we developed the people agenda a little bit. So we looked at staff development, we created a learning engine where people could do their mandatory training online in a flipped learning environment and also developed enterprise entrepreneurship and employment as part of that strategy. So we took all those little bits, smushed it together to make a whole strategy so everything works and everything talks. And one of the key themes of this conference is about dialogue and that's not just human-human dialogue but how do we communicate with our systems and how do they communicate with us as well. But at the heart of this are our lecturers, our teachers and we really firmly believe that teachers are the agents of change. They are the people that our students see every day, every night if they're night classes and they are at the forefront of creating a change strategy. So how do we empower those teachers? How do we give them agency to be able to change the agenda within their own classrooms and for their students? We live in a world very complex digital landscape and the questions and the conversations that have been happening in this conference or testament to that, we're not quite sure where things are going and where it's going to end up. So in that landscape we have students that we need to prepare for a future and we have teachers that we need to prepare to teach those students to prepare for the future. So how do we do that? When teachers see an iPad or a piece of technology do they think teaching or do they think gimmick? Do they think a tool that I can use? An appliance as was mentioned yesterday in the keynote. Do they think about teaching and engaging their students? How do we address that gap? People see that there is a value in technology and teaching but do they have the confidence and the skills to be able to utilize that really effectively and make a real change? One of the things we looked at was that you can train somebody up brilliantly, you can give them lots of technology but unless their mindset is in the zone of change they're not going to. They need to have the right mindset and how do we cultivate that mindset change? And one way is to show them what good looks like. Let's see what the really good things are. So with that in mind we started to think about how do we help people to unlearn some maybe habits or changes that they've done in the past and relearn some new ideas in teaching and learning? How do we remove those barriers and there are always barriers and there always will be and to me that's just a challenge. I'm like yeah, what's next? So a barrier can often spark innovation and creativity. So one of the ways that we did this with the 3R peer mentoring process and you can see here coming up here in a lot of ways it's a very simple process but built into that are some very key elements. One of the key elements is the pre-mentoring assessment where we sit down with the mentee, this is all taking place on a one to one basis and to follow with the themes of cups of tea we usually do this over a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and have a conversation, an open dialogue. And one of the questions we ask is tell us about your most challenging class and if I could wave a magic wand, sprinkle some fairy dust, what would you change? And from there we start to address, okay, what teaching and learning strategies, what digital tools, what appliances can we use to help address that challenge? We then have our mentors and we have a dedicated team at the moment of around nine and they go into the classroom and teach that mentee's class, we teach their subject with their students in their classroom with what they have in that room and that is a real light bulb moment. That's a real chance for that mentee to sit back and think, oh my goodness, I can use this. Let's take a look at how do my students engage with this strategy or this approach and really reflect on how it might shape their learning. So we show them what good looks like, we show them, we demonstrate that technology and that's such a win. It also gives a lot of kudos to the mentor. So I've been a mentor for around seven years now and I've got to teach plumbing, animal care, hairdressing, a bit of beauty therapy. So I can tell you how your toilet works and also how to do a skin test for hair color and we get a brilliant opportunity to go in and see these classrooms as well. The whole approach is entirely confidential. It's not about reporting on anybody, it's about support and it's about showing that mentee different methods and coaching them in a very safe way. They get to try something new with somebody alongside who can help them and if it all goes wrong, it's fine. We remove that fear of failure. We take away that risk. The students feedback into this as well at the end of each classroom session, they give us feedback on the learning and teaching, not the tutor. So how did you learn today? What did you learn today? Did you like it? Did you not like it? What would help you learn better? And that feedback shapes the rest of the process. So the mentoring process maybe takes, well, it could take any time between six or 12 weeks or longer. It's all completely bespoke to each individual lecture and what they need in their classroom. We've developed this over around 10 years. So we started off in 2008 with a bit of a trial, working with our essential skills team or foundation skills you may know it as. And we've developed it over the last 10 years, tweaking it and making little iterative changes to it. And because of that, we feel like we've learned a lot of lessons. Some of those lessons have been quite tough personally. And we've taken those and used it to continue to work this model and tweak it to make it work for our lectures. So here's the real science bit with numbers and everything. And I teach English, so numbers are not my. So we saw then a roughly 13% increase in achievement rates with 500% increase in Moodle use within that first pilot team. And that's when we thought we're on to something. This could work. Let's see if it'll work on a wider scale. We developed, we're very, very lucky in our college. We have a team of creative developers and software developers. And they created a plugin for Moodle that would allow students to rate activities but like a trip advisor, just like a wee star rating zero to five. And we're able to take that data and see what students like and what they don't like. The numbers here I just pulled on Tuesday nights. So they're quite fresh. So you can see there that students don't really like putting in assignments. That's a bit of a shock. Don't really like submitting assignments, but they do like resources. They do like URL links. So let's see how can we develop that and make that better. So this all feeds into our process. We saw 87,000 roughly Moodle ratings just last academic year, with a rating of about 4.6. So it gives a bit of an overview. And obviously there's a huge amount of drilling to be done into exactly what those numbers mean. We don't just take it as a blanket number. What does that really mean in the classroom? And we're able to work with that. Excuse me. What this meant for us was that we had 6.2 Moodle views, 6.2 million, so not 6.2. That would be a very different number. 6.2 million Moodle views in that year, which was a complete surprise to us. We weren't expecting the mentoring program happening live, face to face, to have such a huge impact on our online blended provision as well. 30% of that access was from outside the college. Again, an unexpected number, but a very lovely one to have. And how do we develop that further? This gives you a little sort of lovely graph of our Moodle data over the last year since the mentoring program first came into play, and it gives you a bit of a picture of the growth and the development of that. What we've seen is large-scale behavioral change in our college. We know that change management is a huge field of research and some trial and error, and sometimes it works. Around 30% roughly they think of change programs succeed. What we found was that mentoring helped to address this slightly by giving that one-to-one bespoke training to people, and it was an opportunity to have a go, test, and learn what was happening. These are some of the key benefits as well. We saw that people are more satisfied in their job role. They feel like they're supported. We haven't just invested in the technology, we've invested in the people that are using it. Collegial relationships. I now have colleagues across every curriculum area in all of our campuses that I've worked with over the last six or seven years, and we've been able to improve practice at large scale as well. This has been demonstrated in external evaluation. ETI, our version of Austead, celebrated this, and most recently, I don't mean to brag, but just yesterday evening, I stood in this very stage and very honoured to accept an award for being highly commended at the ALT award. So thank you very much to ALT. Oh, yay! Bonus applause! So we're really honoured and we're really thrilled, and it wouldn't happen without the team. We found that the student data then, 92%, felt that the teachers were using a range of methods, and that, to us, was a huge win. Students enjoy this, they see, they perceive how teachers are changing their strategy inside the classroom. But it's not just about what we know, it's about what we do with that, and that's what we've found, by taking knowledge, adding some skills, we dash a confidence, nice cup of tea and a biscuit, we get to improve what we do and empower people to embrace change and empower people to try something new and transform how technology is perceived and received with our students. We offer them an opportunity to skim, swim, or dive, so we have little micro-learning through our weekly webinar series that goes out to all staff, corporate and academic. I'm racing through because I'm worried about time. We also have Open Classroom Week, just piloted last year and hoping to do the same this year where lecturers can go and see. Go into your classroom, have a look, see how people do it. Let's have a conversation. We also work heavily in collaboration and about a growth mindset. Where do we go next? We've been able to develop and support mentoring programmes across Europe, UK, Ireland, Slovenia and Italy and also work with, most recently in Uganda, I was there in July, Thailand, Singapore and Japan as well to help implement active learning strategies and technology enhanced learning strategies and that's all come out of this process of collaboration. We work closely with the National College of Ireland, Walsall College and Forth Valley College here in Scotland and we're able to collaborate with them on project-based learning technologies and project-based learning projects as well. We're continuing those relationships into the next academic year, which is really exciting. So last thing is to ask you a question. Where will you go next? What is your next step and why are you on the bike and where is your bike going to end up? So thank you very, very much for coming to speak. It was a bit of a sprint at the end. I know, it was like that. I was on my bike. Peddle on, pedal on, pedal on. To keep it in the Irish atmosphere. Any questions, Fristis? We'll start with questions online. This is about the mentorship process, academics coming to a non-academic looking for a mentor. How did it actually work? So the process of it is that our mentors are academic teaching staff, so they still have a full-time table. They're sort of seconded out for about a day and a half a week. And that day and a half, then those hours are spent with mentees. So they're still teaching and they're still very fresh in their practice. And that gives a bit of credibility to that mentor. And as a mentor myself, it was meant that I tried this with my students on Tuesday and they really liked it. Do you want to try it with yours? So in terms of that, we still have that built in to the whole process. And the second part of the question was what about the culture? How do you get such a culture that people accept you as an outsider to come into the classroom? Yeah, right. Because somebody says, I'm going to come and sit in your class. Nope. Definitely, it took a while and it was about that organisational culture and realising as soon as we said, well, no, we're not going to start off with me observing your class. You're going to observe me. I'm going to take your class first and you can see. And we use the same paperwork. So the feedback that we use, the mentee uses that first on us. So that gives some credibility and it helps them see that this is about an open, safe dialogue. It's not going anywhere else. It's not about pinning somebody down and what are you doing wrong? It's about let's share how we can do things right and let's do it in a really open, dialogic way. So in terms of a culture change, it took a wee while to admit it took a little bit of breaking in and it took some trial and error as I said, but I think because we had that pilot group with the essential skills, the foundation skills, that really helped because the students were feeding back that they loved it, the teachers were feeding back that they loved it. We also asked managers to get involved. So they were one of the first ones to get involved with being mentored. So deputy heads and assistant heads and we also asked those who were in our teachers union if they would be mentored and they did. And obviously that lent a weight to the process and a weight to the openness of it. Most popular question now is some painful lessons. Can you share a couple of those? I think probably speaking from my own experience about times when I went in and tried to mentor somebody in a completely different subject and it all went terribly, terribly wrong at the demo lesson. I remember trying to deliver mechanical engineering at HND and it went very, very wrong. The lesson from that was too that you can never prepare too much but also we put ourselves slightly at risk as mentors in that respect. But the huge benefit of that was that empathy, you know, we're together in this. I'm not saying that I know everything when I walk into your room. I'm saying let's learn together. Let's work through this together. Why did it not go right? We also had some lessons around staff development. So we did the standard staff development of having everybody in a big room, you're going to learn this. And half the people went, oh, really? I don't want to. Another half the people went, oh, okay. I'm here anyway. And that was a painful lesson for us a little bit as well. I have to say over archingly, it has been very, very positive. I feel so honored to be part of the team. Some people used to say, oh no, the mentors are coming. We're now, they're like, oh, can I get you? We have a waiting list of people to be mentored every year that we can't get round them all because there's too many. And people want to come back and back and back. So. Okay. Any questions in the room now? Can I just address one about the IT departments? Yes, sure. Because I think that's an interesting one. We have a very small IT department. We have one of the lowest spends on IT services. And what we do is we invest in the people agenda rather than that. So as they say, we have a small IT services team. We have a small team of creative and software developers. And that's it. So, yeah, that's quite a small team. I'd love to have sex. It'd be brilliant. Yeah, related to that is, do you limit the number of technologies that are being used to keep it sustainable? Yeah, I think it depends. It's super spoke that it just depends on the lecture. Some lectures are like, give me everything. I want to know everything. And you go, okay. And you show them everything. Normally, through each mentoring process, we would focus on one. Let's get one really good, really strong. Let's get you feeling confident and able to progress this even further and even better, tell your colleagues and help them. So we tend to focus on one per mentoring cycle, but we have people who come back every year and ask for it again and again and again because they want to know more. So we do limit the technologies for each individual, but we don't limit our scope. We see our role as kind of horizon scanning to see what's out there. And then we suggest what we think may be useful for other lectures. Okay, final question. Do you involve students in the process and how do you involve students? We involve the students really heavily. So their voice is so, so important. And so often they don't get a chance to really say what they think. And we do that from that first demonstration lesson and we ask them, did you like this? Is it good? Do you think it's gonna help you learn? Did it help you come to grips with these subjects? And they get that voice which feeds forward into the whole process. So from stage one, their voice is being listened to and sometimes lecturers might say, I really want to use Pablet, Pablet's amazing. We try it with the students and students go, no, I don't like it, please make a go away. And we change our whole strategy and we look at something different. So their voice is the most important voice at the heart of that. If students don't like it, they won't use it. Simple as that. So they have a huge voice in the whole process, yeah. Okay, thank you. A round of applause for me. Thank you. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology.