 Now of course I need to get back to where I was. There we go. I'm hoping that it's going to go and share any minute. Please share. Yep the sharing. Excellent. Right let me just switch on my camera so that you can I can actually say a proper hello to everybody. Hello, so I'm Joan Fitzgerald. I'm a lecturer in health informatics and evidence-based practice at the University of Central Lancashire. My big passion now, and it has been for a long time I suppose, is digital teaching, how we do it and why we do it. And I am one of those people. I've used computers in all their forms since 1982. I was very blessed to get a job working with a company that were very very forward thinking and all those years back. So I've used so many different types of software over the years. But I've never had any formal training in any of them. So I have picked bits up and I've learned bits here and there and whilst that stood me in good stead, there have been times when I've gone I'm probably using 10% of what this software can do and I need to be learning more about it. And I think over the last year what's happened is that I've looked far more in-depth at the software that we use and started to use far more of it than I have probably ever used before. So that's where I'm coming from. I'm going to stop my camera now so that I can go through my presentation and not... yeah call to everybody to be looking at my flapping hands and things just a moment. So I've described who I am. Part of my role at UCLan is I'm a digital and champion and most of you I hope by now would have heard of the digital sector but I'm also a digital coach so I spend a part of my role at the university actually helping others to learn about all those other bits of the software that they don't already use. I'm a Microsoft innovative educator expert and I'm just about to apply for my third year and I'm also a Microsoft certified educator and that's one of those things where you think but what it has done for me both of those things is to make me look at what I'm learning and what I'm doing with it and why I'm doing that. So that's where I am at right now. So when we moved okay I think it's reformatted things slightly as we copied them over to Blackboard so my apologies if the formatting isn't perfect. We really have had over the last year two different cohorts of students so the first cohort when we all went into lockdown last March I don't know about everybody else but we got basically a week's notice that this was going to happen. Fortunately for us we've had the did you learn program within the university anyway so lots of people had at least got some basics of Microsoft Teams and and how to use at least some of what that could do to start teaching students remotely. I don't like to say online I like to say remotely because all of my work with the students is face to face but through a screen so that's remote so it's not necessarily online and today I'm not going to particularly talk about asynchronous or synchronous. I'm talking about the stuff that I do with my students face to face through a screen every day. So the first set of students that were just thrown from having you know been in the classroom to suddenly it being online so they've had some teaching in the classroom they were largely already in established groups we all know what it's like the students come in and they sit and they get used to each other and they sit together forever after unless you mix things up a bit which the students hate but it's sometimes a good idea. Most of them were fairly confident with some of the technology that we've been using so I had already been using for example Teams and the class notebook with them I'd already used Vvox with them so that was a bit easier for them but that's very different using it in the classroom with somebody telling them I'm making what to do and making sure that they were doing the right thing to being on their own the other side of the screen and not necessarily being able to follow everything easily and then that absolute assumption that they were going to be losing out because they weren't in the classroom they were going to be losing out and then we moved to the second group of students in September and they'd had no classroom teaching at all they'd never met each other or that they'd only met perhaps one or other two other people so there was no or very minimal peer support available to them they were largely terrified at the technology they had they haven't got a clue and a lot of my students tend to be a bit older shall we say so they are they are master students or they're returning to studying after a gap so they they didn't really understand the technology and I think it's a really interesting thing we all assume that our millennials know lots about technology or if they don't at least they're not scared of it and that has absolutely not been my experience so they might know how you know what to do with Facebook book or Twitter or all those other apps that they use they might know how their video games work World of Warcraft whatever that they're well into all of those perfectly comfortable but give them something that is more formal shall we say and they they are as flummoxed as everybody else so and I think that's a really interesting thing and something that I know at UCLan and I'm sure you are all doing the same thing we're working really hard at trying to upskill those students now and one of the things which has been really really lovely for us is we use Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams is being rolled out across the NHS so my students who tend to be healthcare related they are all they they leave us knowing more about teams than anybody in their NHS trust is ever going to be able to teach them so that that's great but also they're coming to us and having no idea what to expect so you know they arrive at the first teaching session and they think that it's either just going to be a recorded PowerPoint or I'm just going to be sitting there talking at them and then when you say right or what you do activity now and they are completely panicked so we have those different groups click the one button there we go so with Powerwall 1 my original aim was just really to create as something as close as possible to the classroom experience so I wanted them to feel as if everything was continuing as normal they were just in an individual space instead of a class space it need to be seamless because these were students who weren't used to moving around between different pieces of technology so it needed to be seamless so that everything was contained within one space and we weren't making them go to lots of other places and it needed to be interesting you know I'm one of those people if you could see me now my hands are going and I'm moving around and I wanted it to be as interesting for them as if they were in the classroom so that they didn't feel as if they were losing out then we have cohort 2 and they were in fact exactly the same I wanted to be as close to the classroom experience as possible it needed to be seamless and it needs to be interesting and there's nothing worse we've all been in meetings where we just sit there and go shoot me now or this is two hours of my life that I'm never going to get back so it's got to be interesting to hold them because we can't see students might be logging in and then disappearing off the minute they get bored or they might be on their phones and I find it really interesting with the students with who've got their webcams on they forget the webcams on and I've seen a student you know actually watching an event from bed and then just disappearing off to obviously go going to get dressed and come back so you know they do they do all sorts of things when they're not they obviously don't realize that we're watching but I think with cohort 2 and my first word for this was simple and I thought no actually that's not the right word it needs to be straight forward it needs to be something that we can explain to the students in words of one syllable so that they can understand it and I think that we sometimes forget that what we know really well and I was I was trying to to do something today that I was going to get you guys to do some activities and I realized that I was just not going to get it working the way I wanted it to and be able to explain to you what it was I wanted you to do so I sort of backed off of that but it was a sumptuary lesson I have to say so it needs to be we need to be able to explain it and they need to be able to follow exactly what we're doing and what I have found is it doesn't matter if you've done a fabulous video in advance of the module say watch this so that you know that this is what this is how we're going to be doing things because students don't or if they do they don't remember it because when it comes to actually doing things live you know I've just had our lovely host here having to explain to me in words of one syllable which buttons to press because I'm going I can't see it I can't see it where is this button because things are not necessarily in the same place depending on on the different setups that people have so that was my those those are my main things and so those are my drivers if you like for the way that I have developed things so the first thing I say we use Microsoft Teams and my apologies to those of you who are really really up to speed with with Teams not everybody uses it and I but I think what I'm trying to do now is say you know you might not use Teams or you might use Teams exclusively but this is my take on it and this is why I do these things so the very first thing I've done with with the students is to set up private groups so these channels here have the the students in them the other students cannot even see that those groups exist so group A can't see BCDEF and so on so that's their their little private space that's just for them now within those groups they can meet they can they can just post messages to each other if that's what they want to do they can meet in exactly the same way as we are so they can webcam they can talk and I get them to use that function when they're doing activities so they will leave me they will go off to these groups and they will work within those groups exclusively now all of these platforms have breakout rooms which are fine depending on what it is that you're doing I wanted something more permanent I wanted something where the students wouldn't have to go off and find the relevant meeting to look at the relevant chat I wanted everything to be in one place where they could easily find it so that's why I use the private channels rather than breakout rooms and I was saying before everybody joins that I was going to do an activity and get you all to go off into breakout rooms and I thought but I don't use breakout rooms and I have a really I think a really good reason as to why I don't use them and so I decided not to do that so I'm afraid you are going to be sitting large and just listening to me talk so we have those now those students stay in those groups for the duration of the module and that means over time we start to they start to build up those networks and that real peer support and I was quite chuffed recently to have a student contact me to say I've been put in a different ground not with the same people on another module is there anything you can do about it and of course there wasn't anything I could do about it but I have now talked to the other module leader and in fact we've talked together as a course team now and what we're going to do is we're going to keep those students in the same groups throughout the course so for the whole year they will be in the same group so those peer support net with that will get stronger and stronger and stronger over time you know I know that pedagogically but perhaps we should do some mixing up but as I could say before the students hate it and I think the mixing up of those groups is is manageable in the classroom it gets much much more difficult and much messier when you're trying to manage that whole process online now setting these channels up does take a little bit of time you need to decide how many groups you need and I work everything that I do all the activities that I do I do in sixes now oh here we go how did you allocate the groups at the start of the year yes so I first of all work out how many activities I have and I break those down into sixes so I need six groups for each activity if I've got cazillions of students then I might have to have two groups because I think a group of six or eight is is probably optimal I think any larger than that and people start to get a bit lost somewhere in in the ether so I like to creep keep it between six and eight and so I go right back and then it's a class list and unfortunately you have to allocate those students by by hand and there is no other way of doing it at the moment you just have to get on and do that so it takes a bit of time to think about the number of groups that you need and and and and setting those groups up but once it's done it's done so it's it's worthwhile doing that that's one of the things I'll talk about a little bit later on but it is it is a bit labor intensive to start off with but then say what once it's done you you don't have to do that again so that's what we do with those um and that's worked say really well to the point where you know students have wanted to stay in the same groups for the future and it's going to be interesting to see how that dynamic works over the whole year because we're only now just ensuring that in future students are going to be in the same groups so the actual channel activities um I always start at the beginning of the module when they've just gone into their groups and I'll do an icebreaker and it'll be something like um you know find out something that you all have in common that's not to do with your job or the university um so that at least that gets them talking and they're starting to find out a bit about each other and I will run that activity again after about after about four sessions and say right what else have you found out about each other now so so that works quite well um I encourage them to meet and to discuss things um they can either do it in chat or they can do it actually meeting again with with web counts so that they they get to get that rapport they start to understand each other and they start to find a way of working because that's something we can't do remotely we can't make people work in a certain way and one of the nice things now about the the the channels is that if students have a hearing impairment or if they have dyslexia because it's a smaller group it's less of a problem and we we can make sure that though those people get get that support but that the others in the group understand just to clarify is the assignment submitted to the group or for teaching purposes it can be either and I'm going to be talking about assignments a little bit later on because they we we we trialled something this semester for an assignment using the the the private channels which worked really really well not necessarily the way that we thought it would but it nevertheless worked really really well and then the other thing is it's a safe space for asking questions and it doesn't matter or I've found in my experience it doesn't matter how many times the students ask questions and also you tell the student there's no such thing as a stupid question please ask the question because if you don't understand somebody else won't they don't like to do it in such a large public forum because they think they're stupid so that's um that that that's work really really well within those private channels because it's their private safe area so the next thing I do is to set up the class notebook which is the collaborative space so there are three parts to the the class notebook so you've got the content library which is where you can put all the teaching materials and actually I tend not to do that in the content library because I find the files section which is sort of I suppose the SharePoint type of section is actually easier to put everything and all the students know that everything is there as a university we have Blackboard and all of our student materials have to go on Blackboard so I put them there but the actual files that the students use generally will be will be in teams because once again it keeps it all within one space you then get the student notebooks and they are individual notebooks that only the students and I can see or any other instructor can see and that's where they can do work for feedback we'll talk about that a little bit of time they can take class notes and that that that's their space where they can keep all of their work and that work can be saved it can be downloaded afterwards as a PDF or copied to a personal notebook so they have that permanent record and that works particularly well I think for portfolios and then we have the collaboration space and that's the bit that I use all the time with them so that collaboration space what I will do is so I create a collaboration space for each session that I'm doing with them the very first thing I do is in any session space is the attendance register because I routinely forget to download the attendance register I for some reason it's never on my radar don't know why so I get them to fill in an attendance register so that's a that works really well now there are two different ways that I use the class notebook collaboration space which is this bit on the right and I'll show you it's a bit bigger the first time I get them to use this collaborative space I give them a template to complete rather than them working on something freestyle which requires a little bit more lateral thinking on their behalf if you like so I put something in place and you know the the nice thing about class notebooks you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel you can copy from from other pages and from other sections and some other notebooks so that you don't have to carry on doing everything so that's the first type the second type is much more freestyle and as the students are working in it the easiest thing here always is and I have to remind myself to have a post-it note on my screen game remind them to open it in browser if they open it in the browser they get a much much bigger version of it and then it's easy for them to see that they can put anything they like anywhere on that page so this one that you're looking at here they are looking at and actually we turned it into a game so they are looking at different types of evidence so I've given each group different types of research methodology to look at so this is bias somebody else looks at another group looks at credibility and so on so the idea is that they they're going to come back to the session and they are going to say what what bias is and why it's the most important critical issue to look at when you're looking at research for evaluation purposes so they can all work in that space at the same time and it's I find it quite remarkable really that you can have all this all this work going on you've got five or six people in different places but they're all coming together on one page so it's as if they're in the classroom but they're not so the other thing that there are lots of other things that you can do if you click on the class notebook icon you can do things like review student work so when you've set it sorry about the black marks but obviously I can't let you see the student names and you can see one right at the bottom so I've set it up so that they've got areas where they can take class notes I've put in all the different assignments and this here is a list of different assignments if I were to click on one of those it would give me a list of students who would want to feedback on their work there's no point in me doing that now because it's all finished but it allows you then to go in and look at the different sections and give feedback on the work that they've done there's another way of doing that and I will be explaining that in a little while so that's where you can start to collaborate between the students and and you so they can ask a question in there I can give them feedback I can ask them questions I can give them suggestions and that's all within their set space so the other thing I can do is I offer students one-to-ones on one of the assignments that I give them over the course of the module and using word or form as you can use either I can I can upload that to here and then the students can simply fill in their names and when I discovered that I could do this at revolutionised my life because it meant I didn't have to go through emails or Teams messages the students simply put in what date and time they want and that becomes an automatic process I am now changing that to a formal booking form in Teams because that will come now come through automatically to my calendar but at least it means I say that I've got a complete list of students and I can see who hasn't made a one-to-one appointment with me and chase them up if necessary so I was talking about feedback before and the assignments tab which is at the top is to me a complete misnomer because assignments here in Teams isn't linked to our grade before I'm so sorry so sorry sorry just throw my phone out I thought it was off um where was I yes so I do wish and if my professor ever listened to this and I have put a request through to allow us to change the the titles of the tabs because assignments is a completeness misnomer and if you don't explain it really carefully to the students they don't understand what this is either so this doesn't link for us to grades per se but I use it for two things I use it for feedback so the students can upload their work and then it's got an actual section of um for my feedback it gives me a list of who's submitted and it also and then I can also see who hasn't and the students can submit more than once if you're happy for them to do it the other thing I do are quizzes just just just to check their knowledge um some students do it some students don't I have some modules where they all religiously do the quizzes and this module as you can see they weren't so happy but almost all of them came to me for feedback um and that's worked that's worked really really well and it sort of made it a more I suppose a more formal process for them than doing it in the class notebook but I think it depends on what you're doing with them um but that's so that there's the two different ways and to be honest they both work really pretty well but I've I've really come to love assignments now I just wish I could call it something else and that's a second happen I don't know why we've got that twice right so one of the things which always worried me about the class notebook was not being able to see who had done what so it wasn't clear whether one student was doing all the work in the group I was aware that there are some students so the platform used for class networks it is it is one note in in in the way that it works it is completely one note but it sits within Microsoft teams and if you are going to use the class notebook and teams it's really really important to set that class notebook up within the teams environment because if you set them up separately you can't put them together afterwards um so that that's a real um yes that's but that's something that that's one of my in summary make sure you do it all in one place so what you if you then go to um open in browser um and you can see it show authors and then which I'm obviously I've had to put black marks but then you can actually see which students have done which piece of work within that class notebook activity so that really that's really helped now we couldn't do that for a long time and that is really I'm feeling much more relaxed now you know there are there are groups of students and I do I do allow them to work the way that they want to work the way that they feel they work best um so there are some students who just want to talk there are some students who are quite happy doing the writing and there are some students who are quite happy just going off and doing the research part of it um so I don't designate what those tasks are I think if I was teaching undergrads more I probably would but certainly for my master students post grads I tend not to do that um and I do think that by giving them that the option of the way in which they want to work makes it a far more accessible tool because everybody can use it the other thing that we have within teams um is what's called insights um and so that that's at the top and that's just a downloadable downloadable app that you can use and this measures the activity of any potential of event potentially any student um within teams so this for example we used for undergrads um this last year we or this last semester as part of their learning outcome we asked them to discuss certain questions in their groups um and one of the very first ways that we could look at the amount of activity that they done within that was to see the number of posts so we've got some people who across the three questions it done 58 or 55 there were other students who done three um now whilst that doesn't you know the the three you'd go and you'd go and look you'd pick some at random but so if a student had only done three I'd go and look at those three posts because they might have been three exceptional posts rather than just I I agree and the 58 could be yet tick I like or I I agree so some you have to be a bit careful but it gives you a very reasonable idea and you can customize the range totally so so if you want to look at what a particular student was doing on a particular week which I had to do recently for a student who's doing an apprenticeship I could say this this this was their activity for that week so I could actually prove that they they had actually because I could track a bit into routines they had actually been there they had actually been engaging so that's a takes a bit of getting used to but once you are it works really really well so that that has really helped so the next thing I wanted wanted to talk about really was the the collaboration between the students and us I suppose and one of the ways that I like to do that is through module evaluation um now I do a oh sorry I do a form oh okay for some reason that's in the wrong place let me just go so I do a evaluation rather than it being mid module have that mid module or at the end I do a running um evaluation so I start off right back at the beginning and I encourage the students to come all anonymous to come back on a regular basis and say I like this I didn't like that this work this didn't work and then I can look at that and decide if things immediately have to change because something's not working for for whatever reason um or whether it's something I need to explain so last semester I had students where we did a session on something that they weren't going to be assessed on at the end of the module um and there were several people were well really wasted a whole time and I was going to say but you still need to know about it for the future we might not be assessing it but it's something essential that you need to know about and then they were all fine one note class notebook yes but but they they they work in very very much the same way that the that that one note and then the class notebook um so if if you've used one you can use the other one because the principles are exactly the same so I wanted to go back to there we go there are other apps which work seamlessly and beautifully you can have them in tabs at the top so they're actually embedded within teams I routinely use Vvox and we will create word clouds I will um we I you know I will ask them questions and get them to vote on things um and I will also check their knowledge at the end um and last semester I did a question and answer with them where um I was checking that they knew what it was that the final assignment was actually all about and that that worked quite well flipgrid I do use flipgrid I don't routinely use it because I know that really an awful lot of students really really don't like that the video element of it once they get into it they're fine but it's that initial it's rather like me and sway I have a have a I used to have a big thing about sway because I don't find it intuitive and I have to work really really hard at it once I got to grips with it it was fine um so flipgrid I tend to use flipgrid for my overseas students who are never going to be on campus they are all over the world and they are all having to interact with the materials at different times so I never it's extremely rare that I would ever have them all actually in one place at one time albeit through a screen so I get them to do introductions about themselves so that they can see each other's faces and they know what they're interested in and that's quite nice wakeler is another one um and that's quite nice if students are trying to collect things together especially if they're they're doing portfolios or they want to get a group of resources together and then there's web links I always um put a link back to blackboard so that they don't have to leave teams and go to blackboard they can just click on the link in blackboard I try to avoid using too many things because the students get confused um and I I do think that sometimes we can be really guilty of using some of this digital stuff just for the sake of using it when we really don't need to and what the students need is something that's absolutely stable and that they're confident with how to use it and you have that confidence in how to use it because there is nothing worse than and I know this now from the students who who have finished with me there is nothing worse than them listening to you go oh I'm really sorry that's not working and um we need we need to have we need to be we need to give them that confidence that you know what you're doing as well now some of them don't mind and I think it's easier with the the students who've never had the classroom um experience they're much more forgiving when things don't work um or when you go I'm really sorry I can't make yeah I don't know what I've done here much more forgiving the other students really really really didn't like that so there's all those things but these are embedded in teams and um that means the students have one space they don't have to go off to anywhere else and it it makes them feel much more comfortable much more secure in in that environment so they can get to know it really well so we did the module evaluation ah I'd be interested in how you see blackboard fitting yes well um let before I do the summary yes I think um to me to be perfectly honest the only reason I would now I would use blackboard now is for um the actual assignments and all of our assignments have to go and turn it in so with sort of we have to have something that we can run turn it in now my understanding is that turn it in is going to be available through teams at some point um I think that's actively being worked on once that is done that way then to me as as a module leader and as a student because I've been a student in a year clouds as well it would become an irrelevance because everything everything that my students need so they're the module descriptors the student handbooks the academic procedures everything can be within teams so I'm not I don't know I don't know how much longer it's going to go on having to have blackboard and teams and making the students toggle between the two because I don't make them toggle between the two anymore except for submitting that assignment so in summary really you know the the peer support is so essential for them and anything that we can do which helps them to generate that that comfort and that that feeling that they have friends that they can talk to about it all ask those questions say sit there and go I don't understand what I'm doing anything that we can do is is good and and I was thrilled absolutely thrilled in in January to discover that I for whatever reason I got off to the module from last year and um there was a meeting going on I'm like what oh you know oh no they've left it on all this time so I went to it and no they were actually meeting so they were meeting as a group about another module so they kept that group um so that that would work so so well collaboration those templates or the freestyle um you know it gives them that that space and it's a permanent record and from our point of view when they are presenting or discussing what they have found you can actually share that full full screen with all the other students so you know you you and all the other students can see that as well their work can be downloaded as a PDF or it can be transferred to their own notebook so it's always there they're never going to lose it there are all those apps with work within teams so that interaction is completely seamless and then insights allow you to track that individual student interaction it's not perfect but I don't think any system is ever going to be perfect um but and I think a lot of this comes down to you getting to know your students which is more difficult through the screen but not I do I do one-to-ones and and so on I do workshop at assignment assignment workshops that's with so you get you get to know the students but it's just perhaps a warning if if students are not engaging or are appearing not to engage there are you know there are always the lurkers as they're called the people who prefer to just sit back and listen and if they're okay with that then that's not a problem providing other people in the group are not starting to get a bit fed up and feeling as though they're having to do more work and this other person isn't so it's so there are group dynamics but it does work really well and then the main thing so there are two things really I don't know why that one's at the end of that sentence but never mind invest the time in setting it up from the start and giving students time to learn how to use it and that takes far longer than you think it's going to um but it's worth it's worth making that time and then talking the students through face-to-face so not assuming that they're going to watch a video or learn how to use it in advance because they won't or that's that's that's certainly my experience um you know a lot of my students work full-time which is why I don't give them too much to do outside of the sessions so a lot of them work full-time and they just don't have time same with staffsman yes yes it is in telling this a lot of times exactly the same with staff they're not going to look at it in advance and I know as a digital coach well we'll have a look at this have a look and see what you think and they never have done oh I didn't have time so yes it's exactly the same with staff and then the other thing is really to set everything up from within one space and I can't I say this all the time and if Chris Melia was here he would be laughing out loud if you're going to use teams and the class notebook set the class notebook up within the team not separately because you can set it up separately you cannot import a class notebook into a team once it's set up so you know this is this is something that I've worked really hard doing everything I use sits within one space and they much the students much prefer that and you know it's not just my word I have some and these are real real quotes from students um you know it does work well there are days when the software doesn't work and it's no good sometimes it just doesn't I had a real issue with bvox this morning 99 times out 100 it's absolutely fine you need to create the right type of team to get the class notebook hours um because of the way that it's set up we um it's always the right team for for for notebook fortune class notebook fortunately but yes and you're you're absolutely right there are different types of teams that you can set up so you can set up a staff notebook that there are different types of teams but this this is the one for students um and that will always give you the um the ability to set up the class notebook that's not to say that you have to I would recommend teams for everybody anyway and my my email inbox do you know what it's really interesting my email inbox recently has started rucking up again and the teams messages have started going down and I and I I don't know why that is um and I'm sort of starting to think I'm going to put a message on my email to go please message me in teams don't say my email but anyway um so that's um I think out of all of this what I what my biggest pleasure thrill was those students continuing to use that private channel for work from a different module because they didn't have that set up in a different module and that's to me honestly it just said it all I had this sort of warm glow of like that worked um so you know that's that's what I would always say it's worth making the effort because the students do use it and they do appreciate it so that's me um I'm very happy for any of you to contact me if you have any questions about what we're doing with teams um or what I'm doing with teams and also about the digital and sector which is based at UCLan um but it's now a it's becoming quite national um so that's I'm finished with 10 minutes to spare so if anybody has any questions I will be very very happy to answer them. Well an absolutely fantastic presentation and just while we're waiting for maybe people to type out their um questions I'm sure you can all find the clapper emoji um to say a massive well done to Jane for that but if you do have any questions feel free to raise your hand um you do have the mic function enabled there we go Neil. Hi Neil. Hello yeah that's great I'm doing a similar thing uh this year with with the module um I was just so that's really helpful to get to get that insight uh first uh to learn from your experience um I'm gonna have about probably 250 students I was just wondering how many students you have on this module um and did you allocate the groups randomly did you get any students who were really like wanted to swap groups or anything like that did you get any was there anything around that which sort of caused you a bit of headache as you were. To be honest no what what I tend to do is I say it's the size of the groups that I think are absolutely critical um I actually normally just allocate them in alphabetical order because it seems as good a way as any um and um yeah I so I tend to just do alphabetical order what I do do however though is if I've got somebody with any sort of impairment or or disability I will contact them to see if there's anybody else they know within within the who's doing the the module at the same time so that I can put them together so that they because that person them can support and understand what the issue is. So I will put somebody with impairment with somebody that they know if there isn't um then I will get permission to contact somebody who's going to be in that group to explain what the position is and just ask them to to make sure that everything's all right within that group but I've not actually so far because we're only really coming towards the end of semester two and this is why we're all learning and it's all it's it is still new um I've not had a student ask to move groups yet so uh that's that's not been a problem so far I do know that a colleague did have that question um because the girl wanted to she'd been used to her particular group and for some reason she'd be moved into another group from a different model and she wanted to move and he he'd had to say no um for for very valid reasons but it's like I said before we're now going to make sure that those groups remain the same throughout I think if there was a real issue with a certain member of a group then we would have to address that as as it came up but I've not had a problem so far you know 250 that's that's quite a lot to manage within within one team space I've managed sort of 100 odd before now um and that's not that's that's been that's been okay it's getting it set up once it's set up it doesn't really matter how many students you've got I don't think it's getting it set up in the first place so obviously you're going to have to sit there and you're going to have to input those 250 names into the various groups manually but at the moment there's no I know that it's something that Microsoft are actually looking at at trying to streamline in some way but there's no there is no other option at the moment yeah you can't even use the CSV file which is really annoying does that help yeah thanks very much that's absolutely great um yeah that's a brilliant thank you really appreciate you anytime I mean if you know Neil if you do want to talk through anything just honestly just ping me a message and I'd be very very happy to talk through you know anything else because you say you're going through setting it up now you know and I know the mistakes that I made first of all um and you know that's what we all learn from isn't it but you don't want to make a comparison with 250 students frankly because I thought setting that up again would be a bit miserable yeah there's another question actually which uh is quite relevant um Susan asks about booking sessions in the diary like as something else I'd like to sort of systemize as much as possible you know so you don't get students just randomly um contact contacting you and yeah if there's any shared questions like if there's any how do you help the students support each other as well like so you mentioned about the groups um sort of help you know they can contact each other and stuff and discuss but just so not everyone's not just asking you everything they can ask each other exactly that's that's what that's what I encourage them to do um and um you know if they're feeling really brave they can ask the question in in in the general channel um if they're not so brave they can ask it within their private channel and what I do periodically is that I'll have a skin through and if there's a question that I think the whole group would benefit from up to me answering then I'll go into the general channel and I'll say oh this question was raised this is the answer um so it's just a case of keeping an eye on it but generally um you know they actually work they actually work most of it out together in their groups but once again are you postgrad or undergrad uh undergrad yeah I think maybe they need a little bit more little bit more support I suppose I think than the post grads who seem to be much much happier to try and agree something between themselves or or decide on a way forward whereas I think the undergrads do tend to um I had quite a large group um earlier on this this year um who you know if I said to them evaluate this paper using this evaluation grid no I couldn't get that um so sometimes I think they need a bit more support a bit more input um but I would I would strongly suggest saying to them you know ask ask ask your peers first don't or don't always come to me and I have in the past said to a student you know have have you asked the others in the group um but you know these we all know that students don't even read half the time um you know the the messages that are already in the general channel you know where do I get this from well I posted that about four posts up go and have a look you know um but I think it's um I tend oh I don't think I'm molly cobble though I think I could probably give them more support because it's not in the classroom and I'm I'm conscious that they are all you know in in different places um alone um so yeah I'd probably give them a bit more support but I try really hard to do that encouragement to to actually do it with with their peers why don't you ask that it's a really great question why don't you ask it in the general channel or why don't you ask it in your own private channel okay you're welcome excellent I think we are coming up to time does anybody have any last questions for Jane not that I can see nobody's raising their hands in that case then Jane what I'm going to do is I'm going to just stop