 Hello, hi everyone. My name is Matt Lingard and I am chairing this session. Welcome to those of you I can see joining now and also a shout out to those watching this at some time in the future, who knows when. The title is on the screen now and hopefully you're in the right spot. The session is 25 minutes in total and our speaker, Marlise will be talking for about 20 and then there'll be an opportunity for you to ask questions. So please take advantage of the comments, post your comments, say hello and line up any questions you have and I won't waste any more of that 20 minutes. I'll hand over to Marlise now. Thank you. So welcome everybody to the session on from digital ethnography to exhibition exploring the entanglement of learning online work and life. My name is Marlise Gratian and this presentation is co created with Paula Shaw. She's unable to be with us today, but I've added her email into the PowerPoint as well and you will receive the PowerPoint after the session. So if there are any questions based on the presentation, feel free to reach out to us as well. So what did we do in terms of the research project that we undertook it's underpinned by the advanced he flexible framework. And we observed six higher education modules within the University of Derby over a 12 week period from February to May 2021. And these modules included different disciplines and levels of study, including to fully online modules to apprenticeships and to practical modules that transitioned to off campus blended learning due to the covert restrictions. The multidisciplinary research team of academics, students, media learning technologists and learning designers engaged with six module leaders and over 20 students in a series of in module vlog reflection reflections and captured module level learning analytics. Just a point to note and I think it's one of my the core messages of the presentation is around why would you use an ethnography as a method. I don't know if everybody's familiar with an ethnography so let me just go into that a little bit further. So ethnography literally means to write or represent a culture. This includes participant observation where the researcher participates in the society or culture being studied yet retains an analytical or observational position if you will. So that through reflection and analysis the ethnographer can describe and interpret the place, the people and its activities. An ethnographer looks for patterns describes relationships and picks meanings and ethnography is both spatial and temporal occurs in physical location or movement between physical locations and occurs over a period of time. The complexity of digital ethnography is so just to just step back a little bit so if you think about digital ethnography you're almost talking about being in a studying a place within a place because a student or a lecturer in a digital online learning community is within that digital space but they're also within their own space or within within the university space. And so digital ethnography is also spatial and temporal yet these spaces and time periods are complicated by the digital medium. Participants may access the virtual learning environment the VLE from a single location on a fixed computer or laptop via Wi-Fi or fixed ethernet connection. And participants may access the VLE from several locations on different fixed computers and or laptops. So either at work or via their mobile phone as well or at home and participants can access the VLE from their mobile phone moving between locations as well. Depending on the VLE participants can access the same space at the same time from different locations across the globe giving rise to unique contexts. Digital spaces at any one time participants will access a single VLE site plus they may have other digital spaces open to such as other browser tabs and apps. These digital spaces may access a combination of study work and personal spaces all at the same time. So when we're doing this ethnography and when we're trying to embed ourselves within that digital learning community there are spaces that will be open to a student or a lecturer that we as observers or researchers might not see or have access to as well. Time in digital space works differently as well in comparison to physical space. Once text images and videos etc are submitted to those spaces they become decentralized conversations, persistently retrievable and unless edited or deleted they remain in that same condition as they were first posted. This makes it easy to feel asynchronous conversations that happened in the past as events in the present time. So where in a physical space something would happen at one moment in time and that moment in time will not be repeated. Or you have to physically repeat it again within a digital space. These events have a longer temporal stamp if you will. So that gives a little bit of background on what ethnography is and specifically also how ethnography in that digital space can be quite complex. I'll go to the next slide. So the research focus for us was to when we observed these six modules to look at the entanglement of participants studies work and home life in relation to credit hours. And credit hours can then be divided up between on the one hand synchronous and asynchronous contact time and on the other hand independent private independent learning as well. In terms of the dissemination of the research. So there are we've the first phase of the research has now been disseminated and this presentation is part of that dissemination. But we've also launched a MOOC, a massive open online course, as well as a virtual exhibition. And I will go into the virtual exhibition in a moment. But just to mention that so Paula Shaw is the head researcher of this project and she's coordinated all the different teams with that have participated in the research. I was an observer in one of the modules and there and what the module that I observed was a dance module. And it was very interesting to on the one hand sit into a classroom space and observe the students and their tutor in how how they use these different spaces. So on the one hand, especially in dance, the physical space, you know, did they have enough room in their in their dorm or at home to perform the dance in some of the classes they went outside. But on the other hand, the digital spaces as well. So you could clearly see that some students were on their mobile phones, whereas other students used a laptop or desktop. You could see that in terms of interaction with certain media that made it easier or harder for them to to interact with the rest of the group. And so what we've done with the students is we've created a virtual exhibition and this is what I will be showing you today. And they've chosen from their video diaries, they've chosen elements that they want to highlight to you as a visitor to that virtual exhibition. So I'm going to talk through some of those but just to give you a sense of the space that that virtual exhibition is in. What you see now on screen is our atrium at the University of Derby. So this is a space where where basically is the the central hub of the university. All the classrooms and lecture halls are connected to the central space. And there are rooms for each of the modules. So we've got the operating department practice room. We have a room on senior leadership. We have a room on sports therapy, which was one of the other applied modules that we looked at. And there's the dance room. I'm just going to show one of the rooms just to give a little bit of a sense of what the exhibition then looks like. So in each of the rooms, there are artifacts and the artifacts are color coded. There is an amber color, which is what the researchers have observed. A green color is what the tutors of the module have observed. And then there's the red color, which are student observations. And if you go into those, there is either text or in some cases it's an image that you can then explore. And I welcome everybody to enter this virtual exhibition after the talk. Like I said, you will be able to find the link to the virtual exhibition in the PowerPoint. And I can at the end also copy the link over so that you have it in the chat as well. In the presentation, I will highlight a couple of artifacts for you. And I'll do that using the initial questions that we've asked in the research. And these initial questions come from the QA document that is referenced here and that you can access as well. The four questions are, is there a strong pedagogic rationale for whether sessions will be synchronous or asynchronous? How have learner analytics been used to enhance program session design? How learning analytics and are there opportunities for students to personalize their learning experience working at their own pace, accessing and revisiting bite-size asynchronous materials? So those are the four questions I will sort of illustrate with some of the artifacts from the exhibition. So the first question, was there a strong pedagogic rationale for whether sessions will be synchronous or asynchronous? What we noticed from a student point of view is that they had a physical or temporal reason why they would attend asynchronously or synchronously. One of the students highlighted that they were studying whilst at work as well. This was from one of the apprenticeships. And they were based in Egypt, so they also had a time zone difference to take into consideration. For them, it was really difficult to go to the tutorials and the synchronous sessions. And therefore for them, there was definitely a reason for the asynchronous materials. They were very useful. Other students really used it to manage their own time. So this student mentions, I found that waking up an hour earlier than I usually do, I'm really focusing on my studies before anything else has happened in the day is a great way for me to work. And this shows sort of how asynchronous can help as well with creating that flexibility. We'll go into flexibility a little bit more later as well. This was one of the tutor observations. So it is not necessarily a pedagogic reason for using asynchronous or synchronous, but it is a very practical one because they're saying that they, the students are telling me about their experiences within the clinical work placement. Lots of reflective pieces are being written. I'm going through and I've been commenting on upon some of them. Obviously this takes a huge amount of time, but I'm responding to at least one learner with one of their particular entries. It's really, really hard to run a module when there's so many other things to do within my work role. So what we see here is that the tutors as well have those two spaces, that work space that is digital and their physical temporal space. And they're struggling with that. Again, for us it was interesting with this question that to go back to the question, is there a pedagogic reason for using asynchronous or synchronous? Actually, from our observations and from the artifacts that we've collected, what we see is that it's more about time management and it's more about how do you manage those different spaces. The next question, how have learner analytics been used to enhance the program or session design? The same student that we looked at before when they were looking at studying whilst doing work. It's interesting how you plan, for example, your tutor sessions or your synchronous sessions. Because this is from our Blackboard system, we could see when students logged in and when most students were online. Using data like this to identify the best time to meet is definitely advisable. And it's something this lecture has done to later on accommodate the time zones. And one of the things we do do within the university as well as engagement checks, we do them at week three and week five. And so this lecture did do an engagement check at the beginning of the week. Three learners were picked up not having access to system for over seven days. And for one of them, it was actually 23 days where they've had to intervene. And so this is the type of data that has been used. We are actually quite surprised how little data is used. So that's definitely a focus for going forward. I will skip these slides on interaction and go to the third question. Are there opportunities for students to personalize their learning? There are two examples here. One is from the dance module and the other one is from the education module, if I'm not mistaken. In the dance module, there was one of the students who couldn't attend one of the dance classes. And normally in a dance class, you would have then missed quite a lot of your studying. But in this case, because all the materials were asynchronously available, she was able to pick that up really quickly. And she was quite pleased with that. And then this is someone who actually was working ahead because they also had their work and another study program that they wanted to get into. And so because of the asynchronous materials, they were able to work ahead. I am going to move at a quicker pace because I know that I'm running out of time. I just want to highlight one more time in terms of next steps what is available to you. So we've got the MOOC as well as the virtual exhibition. This is the beginning of the project. So as you saw on the beginning slide, this is a pilot project and we will continue this research. And one of the things, because you can see that from the examples from the artifacts I've shown, some of this might come across as very anecdotal. But if you do it at a larger scale, you do really start picking up on themes. And those themes are things that we can then use in our design processes as well. So I'm going to just show the next slide. Sorry, I'm struggling. I'm now struggling with the amount of screens I have on. So I want to thank our project sponsors. The project is funded by QAA and SingLink as you have seen has provided the virtual exhibition spaces for us. And that leaves me with a little bit of time for questions. If there are any, please let me know. And like I said, if there are any people who are watching this later on, please do feel free to raise any questions with myself and Paula Shull as well via email. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mali. That's fascinating. I must a personal thank you for the introduction to digital ethnography, which really helped this beginner over here. It's a really great presentation. And we've got a question from Emma, which will come up onto the screen and also request for the links to be shared, which I'm sure we can do as well. I'll let you read that question. So did I get any feedback on why it wasn't used? No, not really. We did have some structured interviews with the module tutors. I think we did notice a difference between the module tutors for the online modules who did use some of that data. But that's because they're more used to, I think, using the data to to see the students, if you will. We often in our learning design team talk about making the student visible through activities that then trigger data points as well. So I think they are a little bit more aware of that. I think in the COVID situation for some of the lecturers, we could really see them struggling with that online space. We could really see, for example, one of the lecturers commented on the use of cameras and microphones in synchronous sessions, for example. So they were trying to get students to get more engaged in that and they weren't really engaging. And I think what we've seen so far is we've observed what happened this iteration. And now, after this pilot study, what we'll be doing is looking at, OK, so do we want to put certain interventions into place? Maybe we want to train module tutors on the use of data and how to interpret that. Because I think, ultimately, that's my gut feeling is they don't necessarily know how that data translates into what you would normally do as a tutor in a physical space. So in a physical space, you don't have that type of data, but you have the faces in front of you and the question marks you can see by facial expressions, whether things landed well or didn't land well. You can, you feel it, you know, confusion in the room, if you will. And I think there's some training. There's a skills gap, I think, that certain module leaders have in that area. Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right there, Mollies. And I think it's one that people would be interested in as well. Certainly talking to some of the staff we work with, they really are keen to get into this stage and understand it. But I think there's a lack of capability to be honest. Thank you so much. I don't think I've got any other questions in the chat for you and we are actually almost bang on time. So I think I will have to stop it there anyway. So thank you so much for your presentation, which was excellent. And, you know, everybody, thanks everybody for coming. But what I really want to say is how much we appreciate the time you'll have taken, I know, to submit this, to write it and to present it today. So it's much appreciated. And I'm sure the big people checking back online to watch it as well. So thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for having me. And I'll post the links. Shall I still post them in the chat? You'd better put them in Discord because as soon as we end here, the comments will go. So if everybody wants to look in Discord afterwards, then they'll be there. Great. Thank you very much everybody.