 over to Killian. So thank you very much. Okay, that's great. Thanks very much, Rob. So as Rob mentioned, my name is Killian Murphy, the less famous, but none less, famous in DCU. I work in DCU in our Student Support and Development Unit, and I'm here today to talk about Discover DCU, which is our online transition and study skills program for all incoming first years coming through to the university. What I'm going to cover today is, firstly, I want to give you guys a background to the Discover project, why it is that we came up with this, and why it is that we think it's important, and why it might be relevant to some of you now and in this space, at this moment in time, trying to figure out how to do maybe some aspect of online orientation in September due to COVID. Then I'm going to look at a project timeline, how long it took us to put together what we now have as a package, which may be, again, useful in terms of anybody considering doing something similar. I want to then put the focus towards H5P, in particular, which is the software that we use to build Discover DCU, and its housing within Moodle and how that all works, and then finally look towards student usage and the feedback that we receive from students to date on the initiatives. I'm looking forward to getting some thoughts and comments from you guys at the end of the presentation. No doubt if you have kind of thoughts as we go, pop them into the chat bar and I'll let Rob kind of maybe collate that and pop questions to me at the end. So to kick off the background, so what is Discover DCU? Very simply, it's a series of short interactive courses designed to help students settle in and introduce them to the tools and skills needed to succeed at university. So basically it's an online transition and study skills course for students coming into DCU. So it's combining those two functions, both the transition function but also then a lasting study skills resource. So we get a lot of use from first year students in particular, that's who it's pitched at, but actually we get a lot of continuing students also using the resource, second, third, fourth year undergrads and actually quite a lot of master students also and quite popular with our international cohort. And it's a cross-university collaboration. I think this is one of the unique things about Discover DCU. It's not just something that we work on in student support. We also have to, by necessity, work in it with Rob's team and the teaching enhancement units for their online expertise. We've worked a lot with our open education units, so DCU has a long tradition in providing distance degrees. So we worked with our open education units who have that experience to try to put together this package. We work consistently with the library on it, ISS registry, DCU healthy, DCU sustainable. If you can think of any DCU something, it's probably involved in some way in this particular project. So that's the team that kind of is behind this. Why did we decide then to come up with a Discover DCU course? Why was it necessary? And I kind of was thinking about this when I was prepping the slides and I feel there's three key reasons why we decided to develop this online transition and study skills course. The first is incorporation. So DCU was involved in a major incorporation process a couple years ago, as many people would be aware, where we went from a relatively kind of contained small university of about 10,000 students up to about 17-18,000 now where we incorporated three teaching training colleges. So we now went from one campus location with relatively kind of manageable number of students to a much larger student body spread across three primary campuses. So just by necessity, we had to think differently about how we were doing the whole orientation process and that was a catalyst in getting this project going. The second was the obvious move towards online learning that's been happening in the sector, even pre-COVID and trying to use those type of resources to do things like orientation just better and to get students also engaged in our online learning platform as soon as possible to orientate them into that space. And then the final, probably the biggest but the very simplest reason was we were, it was a very simple choice for us to buy it or build it. So previous to developing this particular series of courses DCU would have invested in bought-in packages by the likes of Skills for Study Campus or Epigium where you were paying maybe a license fee, a 10,000 euro a year and then you would get a kind of generic content for kind of study skills for university purposes and there's various other ones out there in the field. But this is expensive and like it or not we're moved push towards let's say developing our own but actually I think that turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. So we decided to build our own package and we kind of think that there's a couple of unique benefits to having our own spoke DCU transition and study skills package. The first is and foremost is that students have access to this course at their offer stage. So as soon as they receive an offer letter from DCU no matter whether that's a mature student on round A or round zero or whatever or incoming regular secondary students who gets their offer in August or an international student who receives an offer otherwise they get access to this course as soon as they get that offer letter with their login details to Moodle. So they don't even have to be on campus to begin the orientation process. Therefore orientation actually begins several weeks before term starts before the student is physically on the campus itself. And we think that it's a key unique selling point to this program. The material is obviously online 24 seven it's interactive it's accessible it's got a student focus a student content and it's tailored to DCU students. So again I spoke previously about kind of bought in packages a lot of them would have be very UK centric work you know well in this case we've got Irish students DCU students specifically giving video advice to incoming DCU students on how they manage different aspects of the first year journey. So it really begins to feel like you're coming to college hopefully before you're ever actually physically there. And we then think of it encourages the use of technology early so we want students on our BLE on Moodle as quickly as possible and getting used to it and this is part of the transition to that. And then the fact that it's housed in Moodle means that we can monitor the usage we can record it we can review we can look at it across faculties across cohorts in any way that we wish. And then finally we can also feed it into our what we call our DCU engagement award which is a kind of a recognition award for students who are engaged in different aspects of student life at DCU. And we have for the first year component of that award you must complete the eight courses in Discord DCU so it all connects up neatly across the kind of ecosystem that we're trying to build. So in terms of the timeline and basically it took us quite a lot of time to develop something like this. The initial eight courses were developed in 2017 was one of the first of the year we did a lot of heavy storyboarding out for what will go into each course and then every year since we've essentially totally revised the courses based on student feedback and we have a constant feedback loop set up within each course and then we keep building on that. And then we've tried to work as we go year by year to improve things like we now promote the courses much more proactively to students from that offer letter stage onwards. And it's taken a couple years to I suppose embedded into the environment here at DCU and to kind of have faculty buying and whatnot. But it's culminated finally in we won this year the DCU presidents award for innovation for the for the project. I say we should have won it two to three years ago but nonetheless we got there eventually. So we're delighted with that and now we're looking towards the academic year 2021. And I suppose we already now have a location where we can build in more information around orientation which is naturally going to be happening online and philosophy this year. But every single year revision of course is it takes time it takes effort it takes a project team but it keeps the project moving at the same time. So I'm just going to put the focus now a little bit towards why H5P and mood why these are the tools that we engage with in order to build this online course. And I will show you guys at the end of the presentation what it actually looks like in moodle itself. But basically there's we looked at what we were going to use for this and we were interested in using a free and open technology. We didn't want to be paying for anything basically that was the whole point of moving away from a subscription service. So we chose H5P for this purpose and it's mobile friendly it's got plugins for moodle through etc all the various systems that we're already using in the organization. And it has a number of kind of content types that can be utilized. One of these is the presentation mode and that's the content type that we decided to use for the artifacts that we were building within this course. And then naturally why we chose moodle is because that's what we already had. But it syncs up with H5P it facilitates usage of data usage and tracking and stats. It also means that we're getting students into the VLE into moodle ASAP at the very start of the transition process. And it meant that we didn't require students to go anywhere else to access these courses. As you can see from the screen grab there on the screen we auto enroll all first year students in this course. So they just pop onto moodle and it's already there they don't have to be sent off to any other location. It keeps it very simple and seamless. In terms of the design this is what we had kind of been working on for our moodle page for the year gone past. That will be updated this year. A new update coming in moodle which we're really looking forward to. But we kind of try to make it as simple as possible for students. This is what the course they're about. A welcome from the university itself and this is how to use the series of courses that we developed. We then divided up into two stages. So there's eight courses that we use but we try to give the students the information as they need it without overwhelming them. So for that purpose we've divided into stage one which is pre-orientations. That's really our orientation type courses and students have access to that straight away from their offer letter and then we only make the stage two the kind of learning study skills courses available then when semester begins. So it gives us a key structure. So there's our eight courses. The first three with orientation focus are available at the from before the student comes on campus and then when semester begins we make other courses available so as to not overwhelm them with information so they don't necessarily need or understand yet. But of course we have control over what we want to do there and we review that each year and think about how we might change things depending on student feedback. And then as I mentioned it feeds into our engagement award. When students complete all eight courses automatically a certificate pops up at the bottom of the page and then they can just add that to their e-portfolio that we call loop reflect here at DCU. So it's just seamless across our systems and it also means there's minimal admin for us in students board having to go back and check workshop attendance and all that type of thing. It just goes seamlessly across. The H5P design itself as you can see here on screen this is kind of what we've developed with our commas and marketing team. So again the advantage is here is that it's all within the DCU branding so it begins to feel like the DCU campus and environments straight away and from this course onwards. And as you can see using the presentation mode we are provided with a navigation pane on the left hand side so students can just click to whatever part of a course that they're interested in working through. They don't have to work through the whole thing if they don't wish to. It enables us then to embed videos, graphics images, etc. And we developed a couple of dozen videos at this point and very sure kind of won too many clips that we pop up on YouTube with current DCU students explaining how they did different things or how they made friends starting off or how they managed their first assignment so it's got that strong student voice. We have an activity after every section that enables a kind of interactive element and also enables data tracking and then finally we gather feedback on every single course. We have a feedback link and loop set up. And what we particularly like about this all you know the use of H5P is that we can embed our own videos into it and we try to have a really strong student voice and at that a diverse student voice so we try to find representatives of our different student cohorts and make sure their voice is represented within the courses. So it's DCU students telling incoming DCU students how to manage life at university and finally it also gives us an ability to start actually working through a staff voice. So we have for example tips from different lecturers on how to do your first presentation, how to manage group work, how to become a critical thinker and various other things like that. So and they're all in DCU environment and classrooms and lecture halls so again it begins to feel like university. In terms of our usage and feedback then for the year gone past we had just over 1500 students engaged with the courses and they completed between them over 5000 discrete courses and really what we've seen here is it's been a slow build to be honest initially getting going with so many things that are launched at students in first year and we felt that it took us a while to kind of find our space there but just in the last year we've really seen a huge build in enthusiasm for the project both among kind of students and staff and so hence the jump in engagement between say this time last year and this time this year 2000 students or 2000 courses completed in May 19, gone up to 5,007 in May 20. So that just gives an idea of the interest in the courses and we think that's probably due to rise as well in the years to come in particular in the current COVID situation. What's interesting about that also when we looked at again we have the ability to of course track data and starts across faculties and cohorts of students and I didn't pull everything for the purpose of this presentation but I did just have a look at the different faculties that we have within DCU and what we see is that we have a significant overrepresentation of our distance students so open education as you can see here on the graph that's essentially our students who are studying degrees and at a distance and they're basically extremely interested in this course a lot of them complete not just one course so don't just engage in one course but actually complete all eight and I think that's they're encouraged to do so by the lecturers but I also think it provides a function for them to feel part of the DCU environment and community and you know if they can't make the traditional student support workshop on XY or Z that normally happens at kind of lunchtime on a Tuesday it's no issue because this resource is there for them 24-7 at a time that suits them to engage with so I think that is also as well as interesting terms of what we're looking at all of us for the year ahead where you know practice every student is becoming somewhat of a distance student and this type of facility of course may be particularly interesting to them so I'm going to be interested to see what that brings over the months ahead and then in terms of feedback, just a two-minute warning there Killian, that's great Rob just last slide actually and a quick show of the resource then take some questions so in terms of feedback and we have this loop set up in every single course and we got hundreds of feedback comments from students on it and vast majority of students find the course is you know extremely useful and the comments and again overwhelmingly positive and what I try to do here is just pick out a couple that show how it speaks to hopefully different types of students and I like the type of comment that although I will now be starting my studies online I now feel part of the community that's really what we're trying to do with this resource make people feel part of DCU even if they're not physically there but it also speaks to secondary school students I highly recommend everyone to do this as I'm sure it would make the transition from secondary school to DCU that little bit more easy and then those type of comments very helpful love the videos and interviews with students the student voice is what people want to hear about this okay so I'm open the floor to questions in one before I do so I might just actually share my screen one final time with the course as it looks in and the VLE just for you guys to get a sense that before take some questions I hope that's okay Rob your end yeah of course go ahead Killian great so I'm going to stop this year and I'll do a new share screen with the course itself so you guys can see what this looks like for the student when they come onto the course so they just access it and there's an introduction to the course a welcome from the head of students aboard development Dr. Claire Bowden and then just a video of how to actually use this course over the year ahead we have a divided into two sections stage one and stage two and then basically they'll have to do is click on any of the labels and it takes them directly through to the course of their choice and that they can work throughout their own pace and then if they complete all eight courses their certificate just appears at the very end of the screen here and it's all automated with no admin work from us which is what we like so that's what the course looks and feels like and I'd be delighted now to take any questions or comments or anything else that anyone would like to cover based on that presentation and it's over to you great so we use H5P but not a bit like how they use it in DCU in a completely different way so ours we haven't even looked at sort of the H5P slides which I think is brilliant so I'm already excited about that Killian to use that for the autumn like it'd be just phenomenal so what we've done with H5P is really talk about interactions with students so in terms of self-paced assessment so at the end of a module we give them a lot of quizzes and that's what we're using H5P for primarily in marino so just a brief bit about me I well we just found out Rob and I didn't work together in the Law Society but we were colleagues so Rob and I have kept in contact over the years in terms of Moodle and what's going on in Moodle and my own PhD was on pre-service teachers experiences with technology and ease of use and one of the big findings that came out of it was that a pre-service teacher educators also needed technologies that were easy to use so this is why we're looking at H5P now certainly for the autumn and so I suppose for us H5P is to make things simple for our lecturers to be able to interact with the students in an online environment so like in DCU it's integrated in our Moodle and but we had to ask our Moodle provider to do that they tend not to offer this information because we found they wanted us to go to them for lots of stuff and it's billable days so now that the power is in our hands I'm delighted we don't actually have to go to them for lots of stuff anymore because we can actually create this content ourselves so ever the pragmatists and trying to save money in a small organization and it is about putting the control in the hands of the lecturer so what it stands for is HTML5 package in case you weren't aware out of HTML5 base so it's a multi-platform multi-device compatible and that's really once the iPad came in we had to move to that platform and it's free so that's when I see free I'm always delighted and so we've used it in across a lot of our online courses where we're not seeing our students so in a purity online environment so it's instant feedback for the students and again it's a method of them assessing their own learning on the module whatever the module content is so they know how they're doing so I've three examples here so we had a summer course actually so we provide summer courses for teachers during the summer they start on the 1st of July and they run all summer and teachers get days off if they do these courses and before starting next Wednesday and I have two of them built but hey no pressure so in terms of interactions the students on those courses want to know how they're getting on throughout the course and because there's very little interaction with a lecturer or a facilitator they don't know how they're doing unless they can check their own learning as they go so if you look in the middle of the screen and I've actually dragged a drop out to it and in Moodle I built an interactive map and so what I did was I literally this was a summer course about inclusive education and and I got a map source from the web and then it was it's a drag and drop so we have to match the name of the African country to where it would be on a map and then we can check our learning so it's told me there that those four countries are not the right countries for example and and then so I might retry that and it splits the text box back out and it lets me do the drag and drop activity again now what I made it very simple my biggest problem was I don't know the African landscape at all so when my learning was actually which country was which but once I found that out the drag and drop it's just it was just a case of building the interaction that it was a drag and drop so if we actually look at the the drag and drop activity at the back of that to see how it was built if I go into that I'll just scroll down can everyone see my screen still yeah yeah you're good Allison so if I look at the back end of that h5p content and that's expand at all so as you can see this h5p is embedded in middle and I pulled in an image that's all I did so it's just like grab the image off the internet obviously copyright notwithstanding and then the task was I created these little dialogue boxes and then when you drag them over and you tell them then you give feedback on the position to where it has been dropped so for example are you allowing retry what happens if I drop it on that zone all the sort of interactions that you would expect from a map and then in terms of feedback to the students it tells them whether it's right or wrong so there were lots of interactions in that course I'll give you another example and we use something called flip cards so the flip card was asking them posing questions to the participants so for example this is a mercator map and we wanted them to identify three differences and which relate to Africa between the two maps so if I turn the flip card I then let them know what the differences were in that map so it was just that was just again an image with a text box underneath so when the participant flipped they were getting feedback as to what the map the differences were and then the final one which I got very excited about when I found it was multiple choice questioning so I presume you've already used multiple choice and moodle and it's a bit clunky to build so this is really easy to build actually in this case the lecturer actually built this content themselves so if I look at the settings behind this so this quiz it's telling them it's 20 questions and I used the h5p quiz which was the multiple choice quiz and then I clicked on that pulled it in and then I started creating content so again I could add background image did I want people did I need them to know how they're progressing along what was the percentage path rate and then I started pulling in the multiple choice questions so I actually typed these individually so it was either drag and drop multiple choice or true false it was multiple choice I gave the question and then the first quest response was the correct answer so you obviously have to tell us what the correct answer was and then I gave other options and you could also feedback on them you know something like oh no that's the wrong answer for example however my screen like to this day I don't know how to get that screen to scroll across in h5p but I did find out that by using the text button you could actually just star the word beside it instead of doing all that fancy picture stuff so I found this then I would actually drag in a word document that the lecturer had sent me about the quiz I'd ask them to mark the correct answer and then I would just put a star beside the correct answer so I'd say it like it reduced my time building a 20 item multiple choice to like minutes as opposed to hours so being able to pull that text in was great and being able to edit stuff there so if there was a typo or anything I didn't have to go and try and find the question I could just edit it in the text box and so there are just three very simple ways of using it and the students love it because it's immediate feedback and the lecturers love it because they can do it themselves and so what I would suggest to you and I can't tell from the screen how many of you have Moodle and how many of you have this h5p plugin enabled and if you haven't just go to h5p.org and start playing with some of the content on it so there's a very nice flip card activity on the h5p homepage that tells you and you know it just gives you an immediate feedback little trick and tool that you could use right now and you could pull that into Moodle and I suppose in terms of putting it into Moodle how we do it is it is literally just code to code so if I go back into my Moodle instance hold on sorry just sharing my screen again and if I go back into Moodle I embed a lot of our content in the book editor on Moodle so that a participant will know where they're meant to be what page they're meant to be on in their content because they also like to download their content after for a summer course so if I looked at any of the content in that interaction you can actually see it's embedded and on the right hand side that they're navigating around the rest of the content so it is literally just the interaction happens at the end of the module so it's not like I'm sending them off to another website at least it's all contained on the same page for the end user so in module two that's more obvious I just give you a look and so all the content is there and then this is where the drag and drop activity was embedded on the page within the html book editor and h5p doesn't expect you to know the code it provides you the embed code for you so you literally just click on that code and drag and drop it into the html editor page on Moodle and so while I would suggest you and I some of you may have seen this presentation before because I delivered it last year and I suppose we've moved on from just assessment to now using the drag and drop facility to also making sure that all our end users are unable to use it so our plan of action for the autumn given the COVID crisis is that we are training tell me champions so tel for technology enhanced learning mie for marino institute of education so I'm going to train these tell me champions and they tell their colleagues in their departments how to do stuff so it's tell me how to do it that's the idea behind it so we have training sessions over the next two and a half weeks before people go on holidays to get people up to speed because the one to many approach will work in that obviously people in different departments have local requirements for h5p for other tools we're going to be training them on but I think h5p and given what I've seen with kirian I think we've huge potential to use this tool and to let students assess their own learning in the self-paced environment which is the whole point of the online learning which we're hoping to deliver for the autumn and so just I did a couple of screenshots there I'm sure Rob will share them with you in terms of actually how to build an interaction in moodle but like if you don't have the tool in moodle you do need to ask your moodle provider to either create it for you or get them to pull the plug in into your moodle instance but once it's there you're literally just adding it as an adding interactive content but as we've seen in the earlier presentation if it's going to be core in moodle eight or moodle nine three point nine like it'll be right there you don't even need to ask for it so that's kind of good news for everybody that's it I'll stop sharing my screen