 which is on the challenges and lessons learned in building a student-led online learning community in the pandemic. So without further ado, I will hand you over to the PAL team from Derby. Good morning everyone. So thank you very much for tuning in to our session. So today, again, we are doing ours on the challenges and benefits of building a student-led online learning community in the pandemic. So I'm now going to introduce you to my fellow co-host. So my name is Jennifer Allen and I'm the peer-assisted learning coordinator for the University of Derby. Hi, I'm Joanna Fenton. I'm the learning technologist who's been supporting the peer-assisted learning scheme here at Derby. Hello, and I'm Tony Longbone. I'm just starting my third year mental health nurse training and I'm also the PAL leader for mental health with the union. I'm Sean. Hi. There's no more presenters after me, but I'm a student, children's nurse and PAL leader in the union. Let's take you to the next slide. So before we go into the PAL scheme here at Derby, we just want to give a quick overview about teaching at Derby during the pandemic. So like all universities, obviously we had to go into an online emergency thing just before the summer holidays and then after the summer holidays we started looking at how teaching would be and we went with three hours on campus face-to-face teaching for all students and then a mix of synchronous online and asynchronous activities for the students to engage with. During the summer staff were offered training and how best to run this for their modules so we offered a best of lens intensive training course for all staff and then students were given a virtual induction through Blackboard to give them an idea about how they would be interacting with their studies over the year. So it was important for us at the PAL scheme then complemented what this face-to-face and online learning was going to look like. Right, okay. So it wouldn't be a learning technologies conference if we didn't first use a little bit of the technology that we've been using as part of the PAL scheme just to find out what it is you think PAL in itself is. So what we'd like you to do is use your handheld devices whether that be your mobile phone, your iPad, anything like that and login to menti.com and then once you've done that if you enter the code that you can see on the screen we're going to share a word cloud which you'll be inputting to and we can see what your thoughts are on that. So in the PAL scheme we use the Mentimeter as just one example of a way to engage with our PAL learners and students in their first year to get an idea about what it is they want out of the sessions how they feel about the session that we're providing at that point and to help us develop the sort of plan of the year and what sort of things we're going to provide for them but also a way to get a feeling and team-building and coaching within that as well. So you can see that this has already started populating and a lot of these are words that we did do within our PAL scheme so we supported students in their gestural capabilities and we signposted them for help we did some teamwork in building the community so a lot of those words are definitely relevant to our PAL scheme so we'll just bring that back. So we've got a little video which kind of gives a bit more information about what the PAL scheme is that was developed within the union So as you've just seen that was our lovely PAL leaders demonstrating what PAL means to them so I'm now going to give you a bit of a debrief of what PAL is at the University of Derby so peer-assisted learning is where a PAL leader like Sean and Tony are in their year two or plus so we have PAL leaders up to PhD support students in their first and foundation years their main aim is to support with helping learners settle into university life explore their academic studies and develop and support with their content as well as improving their digital skills and confidence while studying here So at the University of Derby how our scheme works is that we are fully digital at the moment obviously with the pandemic changing we're hoping to have some more in person as well but we've used the platform of Microsoft Teams to develop 12 sites which are broken down by school and then within the school they have different channels which are private at the moment for the disciplines So as you can see on the right hand side of this slide that these are some of our PAL leaders and that's how like one of the sites that we have Additionally to this is that we have lots of leaders within it so as you can see there's eight leaders from Health Psychology and Social Care so they sort of make it together collaborate and share their best practice and build that positive learning community The PAL leaders themselves are contracted to two hours per week in the academic term so they also get some additional top-up hours if we during academic like study times like January and December and as well they have full support from their academic liaison which is an academic member of staff to support with subject knowledge and content queries as well as that they have professional service staff like myself and Joanna who give them full training collaborative best practice sessions and are just there for any general support So now I'm going to go on to the challenges with Joanna So obviously the challenges that we had at the University are comparable to other universities and that was getting everybody skilled up to be able to study and teach in that online environment We're really lucky that we had such a supportive community here at Derby and you can see from my slide that we had a professional support staff that's supporting academic and PAL leaders the PAL leaders in term were supporting the academic staff as they learnt new tools and then everyone in all was supporting the students So it was important to us that as people were learning hints and tips and things that were working well they shared it with each other and we had lots of different areas in which people were doing that The advantage for me as a learning technologist I was able to work directly with the PAL leaders which is something I wouldn't normally do in my role with direct access to students So they were sharing experiences with me of things that worked well for them whether it was things that had worked in their own online community with their students or things that had worked well when they were in lessons with their own teachers saying this is how they got students to turn on cameras this is how they got us to have interaction this is things that we really enjoyed as part of our teaching So we were able to share that I also used the PAL leaders they would be back to me the skills that they wanted to develop and things that they needed to know So I gave them training on things like Blackboard Collaborate how to make their sessions more interactive the sort of training that I would do for academic staff and they came to me for training on things like Pebblepad or video editing which was stuff that their PAL students or PAL learners were asking them for So we were able to then start sharing that knowledge with them I think one of the key things for me is that the PAL leaders through working with me and Jen were developing some really good skills to be able to support their own learners but in their own right they were then learning skills that supported them within their own studies would you agree with that? Yes, definitely So on to the benefits So we're going to start with the academics because obviously we need lots of academic buy-in for this scheme So one of the positives is that it helped to identify gaps where students needed more support because obviously the PAL learners would come to their leaders and say we would love an extra session on this but the PAL leaders because they were equipped with knowing their boundaries would say I can't help with this but I'm going to support this to the academic team and then the academic team knew what students were struggling with and could recover this within a lesser environment Additionally, because of this positive learning community that we made digitally it sort of encouraged the collaboration students helping other students without the PAL leaders as well as the PAL leaders supporting so it promoted both collaborative and independent learning Another one was that it gave the other option because as we know not everybody feels especially first years and foundation year students when it's their first time at university feel that confident to come and talk to their academics or professional staff and because it was a student safe space with people that have been in their position we found that the connectivity and just all of the feedback was much more positive because they would feel approachable coming to the PAL leaders and then again we had reduction support requests so PAL leaders obviously found out about what sessions and identifying these gaps could develop these sessions and resources so for example I know Tony and Sean with Joanna's support because obviously as we mentioned Joanna upskilled the PAL leaders on purple pad the leaders then did the train the trainer session for the students which was really positive and then this stopped academics actually getting loads of questions about so this was a really positive scheme for like learning and engagement and then again we really really make sure that all of our PAL leaders and our PAL learners know their boundaries and that this is an additional thing to their learning does not replace learning it's just an addition to help cement the project so I'm going to hand over to Tony and Sean for the benefits for their leaders so as a PAL leader Tony and I are currently students ourselves I'm doing children's nursing at Tony's doing mental health as we mentioned so we're still doing our course alongside being a PAL leader and this enabled us to preempt some potential problems so when the pandemic first hit last year we were in our first year we were face to face and overnight we went online like everywhere else so the new students coming into first year in September and March we were then able to use things that we had learnt and discovered problems along the way to help preempt some problems for the new students going into their first year and help them build confidence in overcoming those problems we were able to share remote study tips and experience from ourselves I mentioned and Tony will discuss that in a bit more detail in a moment over the course of the year between the different cohorts we were able to create a safe space for students so none of the academic lecturers were in the team so it was just ourselves the students and members of the union which allowed students to ask questions and ask for help if they needed it and we were then able to sign post them to the relevant places Joanna and other members within the class scheme developed our digital capabilities which then allowed us to coach and teach our learners some of these digital skills to help them with their learnings in a cascading manner which obviously going into the future where more things are going online it will help with our employability I certainly feel that the being a power leader I've definitely upskilled in my presentation skills in my digital capabilities which I can then take into my nursing career later on so go on to the next slide for Tony so what I'd like to talk about is our experiences power leaders we had a lot of experience some really really positive and a few negatives that we learned from as we went along the way and the biggest thing for us that we found from the end of the year was that we created a safe space as we planned for students where they could voice their concerns and talk about their difficulties that they'd had and then discovering student needs we took a lot of different approaches trying to do that we were working through initially start using polls and questionnaires and then we looked at different ways following different engagement levels on those sort of approaches we looked at different ways that we could try and gather some information from the whole student community to find out what they needed from us and what we really found was really beneficial for us who has been able to connect with the student reps from each cohort bring them together in a space together because they got the finger on the pulse with the students they got their own cohort chat so they were hearing what the students' concerns were that they maybe felt they couldn't voice to us directly and through that we were able to work collaboratively with the student reps and with the students themselves to look at the sessions and the information that we were sharing with them we engage with students in all kinds of different ways when we first set up the polls group we looked at setting dropping sessions up for each speciality we as I say we looked at sharing polls we used a lot of gifts just to engage people and what we found really useful was using a mood scale and that's something that we've gone to use on a weekly basis that helps us as poll leaders and the students themselves reflect on how they've been, whether that have been in academic studies, whether that was out on placement and what we found with using the mood scales that we then noticed that students were starting to support each other so we would post a mood scale and we would find that if people were struggling there would be support coming from other students within the cohort and we created what we did over the year we created sessions that were relevant to different stages of the course so we looked at the different modules that we completed and reflected on how we've managed that and what we learned through the complete in those modules we delivered a session on being a student nurse through a pandemic because we identified through the student reps that there was a lot of struggle adjusting to online learning so we thought it would be really helpful to help new students understand what our experience had been and see how technologies had developed over the 12 months and now we're going to move on to the next slide which I think is the poll leader for the future so next steps for the poll I want to talk just briefly is about what we'd like to see poll in the future for me as a nursing poll leader it's recognition about the work that we've done as poll leaders within the course and tying that into our academic modules and some of our learning so that we can reflect that in our leadership module and that kind of thing for me obviously we've been all online this past year and we are still currently online moving forward however we want to make it a bit more blended and I would love to have a lecture full of first year students and engaging face to face for a better engagement for just an alternative to being online for me with my learning technology hat on I'd really like to see the poll leaders doing some proactive skills training so they're already proactive within their own discipline areas and we'd like to see them pushing it across the whole university and some of the things that they've learned and some of their reflections and going forth and doing training in the first few weeks to skill up incoming students but also to go forward and carry that on into the year so we've got peers supporting other disciplines and other people across the university and then what I would love to see is obviously poll is done at a discipline level this year and we're obviously developing our strategic plan to hope we have a poll bigger and better but what I would love to see is that how having it at every single program level instead of a discipline level across all of the courses we know this is very ambitious but we can't see, we can go for it and dream big thank you so much for listening to our presentations I really appreciate you tuning in and now I would hand back to Shona if we've got any questions we've also just been asked to share back to the mentor that you all completed for us so here's some of the other words that people have been dropping in so have a look at those while we're doing questions thank you very much that's been a really interesting presentation, a great scheme and particularly good to think to hear from some of your students there as well that's been really nice so we're open for questions and answers if anyone wants to pop them up into the chat and while people are having a chance to think about that I'll ask one of my own I think it's really interesting scheme and I guess I just wondered a little bit more about the process you went through for identifying and getting the students involved and as the PAL leaders and I guess particularly what happens next for them if they continue in that role in their university or progress up that role in the university as they go through their stages or if you want new students coming in each year so that they gain from it as well yep I can take that question so we're currently in our recruitment phase where we've done some digital interviews using shortlist me as a platform and then we're having some training which again we're utilising my knowledge and supporting the PAL leaders but also we're utilising Joana to upskill and use other learning technology that she physically can and then again we have our PAL leaders where they're going to be doing a session to train the trainer so we're really proud of our PAL leaders that Tony and Shana are continuing next year because obviously they started in their second year they're now moving into their third year and then they're going to be doing it this way so again once the PAL scheme comes into the cultural change I'm sure we'll have more PAL leaders joining in last year we unfortunately had a lot of third year students so they've gone on and graduated but Shana and Tony are some of our second years that have been fabulous and we're still so so proud of them and they're going to be leading the way for PAL this year great stuff I've got another question coming in here in the chat from Alison Christy who's asking do you currently provide digital badges for PAL I think Joanna's best to take this question we do have a digital badge system here at the university but it's not something we've investigated but I think that might be something we can add onto our list of things that we'd like to do in the future and I'd like to get feedback from Shana and Tony to see how they feel about the different skills that they develop and maybe have a super PAL badge and then have kind of like the different things that they've done as PALs but they get the futures award don't they so we have different schemes at the university to actually recognise the role that they've had here at Derby and as well on top of that of course it goes on the higher education achievement report as well so it goes on there here as well to recognise and reward them okay thank you and another question coming in here from Michael do the PAL leaders have the admin access to create and manage groups and teams or does the course leader or someone else deal with that this one so as we mentioned earlier none of the lecturing team have access to this so members in the union like Jen will have access but Tony and I lead the team so yes we have admin access because we are the ones running that Microsoft team so we will accept people coming into the group we have on occasion had rogue people trying to join in who it's not really relevant so we've had to remove people and we basically developed that team however we want it because we've been provided that free reign and then Jen and Joanna will then support us in what we feel is best for our discipline if that makes sense I hope that answers that question yeah and to add to that this is the testament that we want to give is that Joanna and I really want to empower our PAL leaders with their digital learning and their digital experiences to take the lead with that because again by Shard and Tony sort of like navigating this trying all this it's improving their employability at the end of the day and that's something that we really really want to push for them is that they develop their transferable behaviours for employment and it helps with our management and our nursing so when we go qualifying next year we will be managing awards and other members of this team doing all the admin so actually like what Jen has meant it does make us more employable definitely you can't add anything to that to be honest with you thank you I think we've just got a minute or two if there's any last minute questions yeah if not what we can also do is there was a slide but we can type in if need be but Joanna and I are having to provide our emails if I've just popped it on a slide so I don't know if it's sharing or not but there's our email addresses which you're more than welcome to kind of use and drop Joanna and I any questions that you might have about the PAL scheme if anything pops into your head outside of this perfect thank you very much and thank you to all of the PAL team there it's been an excellent session and some good questions thank you and yeah I hope you enjoyed the rest of the conference today thank you thank you