 Hello, thank you for joining us this morning. I'm here with Claire Killen and Sarah Knight and today they'll be discussing learning from the enforced move to mass online learning from the teaching staff perspective. So thank you very much and I'm going to pass you back over to them. Thank you very much. I'm Sarah Knight, I'm head of Learning and Teaching Transformation at JISC and joined today as my co-presenter with Claire Killen who is a senior consultant in the data analytics direction for the digital experience inside surveys. So we're delighted to be with you today and we're going to be sharing you some of the highlights from our recent surveys that were published around how teaching staff have been experiencing the online learning environment. We will be sharing some of the highlights of office research and hopefully encouraging you to think about how this relates to your own experiences, all that of your teaching staff and also starting to reflect on some of the takeaway messages that you might want to feed into your own practice within your college or within your university. So for those of you that don't know, our digital experience inside surveys have been running since 2016 and has enabled us to gather a large amount of data across a range of different stakeholder groups within organizations from students, teaching staff, professional services staff and researchers and really ensuring that we are able to gather experiences and expectation of how staff and students are using the digital environment. So this year was no exception and I don't think ever before we have had the number of responses that we received to our surveys, both from students and from staff. You may be aware that we published our students surveys recently in September and they provide some really interesting insights into how students are experiencing their online learning and also some very key recommendations on how we can improve the experiences of all our learners. Our 2021-22 surveys are now open and of course we'll be gathering the data from this year's students and staff and analyzing that in due course. So very briefly we have obviously two reports that were published last week that bring together the findings from nearly 3,000 teaching staff in further education and nearly 4,000 teaching staff in higher education and these reports go into a lot more detail and also have some very useful guidance and recommendations for you to look at post this session. But we are going to just touch briefly on some of the key themes and some of the highlights that are coming through from this research and at this point I'm going to hand over to Claire who's going to talk us through the first theme from the survey. Thank you Sarah always good to remember to unmute before you speak. That was me not you. So we have four themes the first one looks about looks at their current situation. So firstly we looked at how and where teachers were teaching and the majority of further education teachers were teaching from home although there were quite a few online. Some on-site teaching for further education was still taking place. For higher education 94 percent of teaching staff were teaching from home and very few were physically on-site. If you could move on for me please Sarah. This is an interesting one and remember that there were more questions than this we're just picking out the highlights to share with you today the reports are freely available online. So one of the questions we asked were what problems staff encountered when they were teaching online and you can see that the highest one for both is poor Wi-Fi connection over half of teaching staff experienced problems with Wi-Fi and what was also a surprise was that overall 60 percent of FE teaching staff and 64 percent of HE teaching staff said they had encountered one or more of the problems that we asked them about and this this was a surprise I think compared to information we've gathered in previous surveys. The survey was a little bit different because it focused specifically on online provision during the pandemic but it's quite alarming and also if you look at the report for students you'll see high numbers there too. These present significant barriers if online delivery was the dominant mode. Okay if you'd like to move on I think I'm handing back to Sarah now thank you. Thank you Claire and I think what's interesting to remember about the survey and the timelines is the data that we gathered was running from October through to July so during that time staff were experiencing a range of different tiered restrictions, lockdowns and of course in some cases a return back into campus so there was quite a range of different environments that teaching staff were working in. Theme two was looking at the digital platforms and services that teaching staff were experiencing and this gave some very interesting findings you'll see there that there are some similarities there between the results from further and higher education as well as perhaps some sort of lower percentages coming through in some of those areas. I think overall staff very much felt that they felt safe and secure by being able to work remotely and using the online platform but there were certainly some areas there which actually mirrored I think the responses that we have back from our students a lot of the questions that we had across our surveys very much were to align with the students and staff so that we could look at that holistic picture of what staff and students were saying about the online environment to really help inform planning both in a technical sense but also in a pedagogical sense as well. Some of the percentages there that I think were perhaps lower than expected was in relation to their teaching environment being well designed and easy to navigate and actually interestingly those percentages were fairly similar to what our students were saying in response to that question too. Looking at this slide which goes into about more detail around how students feel about the platforms and services you'll see there that there was quite a low number of staff that felt that they were supported to use their own digital devices if they needed to for their work purposes. There were relatively good access to online systems and services from from where teaching staff were but then you will start to see some of those differences coming through I think particularly between FE and HE when how the platform was used to communicate effectively online and also then looking at the environment providing a good environment for collaboration. That's really interesting and I think it again will relate back to perhaps the different platforms that staff are being asked to use. We know that there were a range of different platforms that staff were using in relation to all this to their their virtual learning environment. They would also perhaps be using a Teams environment they could be using Google Classroom, Zoom, a plethora of platforms and of course we know that similarly with students that the ability to be able to communicate effectively down to collaborate effectively online some of those working practices needed to perhaps be more embedded before staff work was thrown into and what wasn't happening in many cases this plethora of online environments. Now interestingly we always say that last percentage there always seems low. Claire reminded me that was an increase in previous years but a recognition that the surveys aren't just the only means for students for staff or students to be engaged in decisions about online teaching and digital environment and very much seeing the surveys as a way then to actually continue dialogue to look at areas where for staff and for students there are improvements and enhancements that could be made. So I'm going to come back to Claire now to talk through theme three. Thank you. This is why we look specifically at the technology that was used in their teaching. So we looked at the range of teaching activities that staff said they were engaged in what had carried out. Interesting to point out that we asked them specifically this last year to focus on what they had done in the last two weeks prior to taking the survey. So here are the further education statistics so there was quite a lot of producing and uploading course materials feeding back to their students use of live lecture sessions and and recently high percentages supported students to learn online although the teacher at me wants to point out that that's you know two-thirds I'd be worried about the other third. But when you look down this picks up a point that Sarah made earlier that the number of collaborative activities they were far less and this is an area of work that we feel quite strongly about because it's very common in the modern workplace. So you know that I think attention needs to be given to those activities that feature lower down in the list. But also important to remember that overall teaching staff were positive about the quality of online and digital learning their courses provided and then further education 78% of teachers rated the teaching that they were providing as best imaginable, excellent or good. That's quite a surprise because they're normally an audience that is quite hard on themselves. If we could have a look at the HE stats please. Thank you so again it's a similar picture there's quite well very high in some cases numbers reporting they've been involved in the live lectures for feeding back producing and uploading coursework. Quite a decent number holding online drop-in sessions and we know from the student report that that's something that they really valued. An interesting point for me was that 40% found and shared course materials made by others. When we looked a bit deeper in the stats we found those staff that had had training all were confident in copyright and all the issues around sharing materials there was a correlation those who had had the training were more likely to have done so. But again at the lower end of the scale we've got the collaborative activities so I know it was difficult it's just an area that I think we could put some more focus on as we go further forward it's not a judgment that we're saying they're lower down it's just identifying an area where perhaps more research and support is needed. If you could move on please Sarah. This was a new question we haven't asked before particularly pertinent to the situation we were in. We asked staff whether they felt online learning had created technical challenges added significant new stress or changed their role as a teacher and as you can see the percentages are pretty similar they are quite high and when we look at the free text responses I'll be able to provide a little more information on that but those are quite high so the impact of delivering online learning was apparent. The technical challenges were not just their own technical challenges but those of the learners and many staff not surprisingly found it stressful to try and manage a live teaching situation and manage technical challenges their own and their students. For higher education high numbers agreed that it had an impact on their role and so that this added stress to their workload. If we could move on and I'll hand it back to you Sarah. Thank you Claire and theme four was particularly relevant because it was looking at exploring the digital development and the support staff had had for taking their their teaching online and this section I think always provides some really interesting results and we've run many of these questions over the years and unfortunately not seeing a great shift in some of these percentages here. I think that you know there are some positives there in terms of support for teaching staff and the support they had for teaching online for campus and I think that comes through as well in some of the qualitative comments that we'll share with you. There was certainly a slightly more positive percentages there about staff that agreed they had guidance around the digital skills needed in your teaching role still obviously a large number of staff that felt that they didn't receive that guidance. Very few HG staff had an assessment of their digital skills and training needs slightly higher percentage there of FB teacher staff agreed but I think those last two percentages are the ones I think have most concern although we say this and constantly say this that unfortunately staff are not necessarily always having the time to innovate to explore the new tools and approaches and I think that's come through even more so in the past two years with pandemic. That last percentage relating to reward and recognition I think is the one that's most concerning and very much you know recognizing that digital practices need to be recognized as part of the professional development part of these sort of appraisal goals that staff might be having and very much need to be sort of more embedded into the whole sort of support framework around that staff are working towards. So those are areas in particular that you constantly stress that we do need to be working more closely with human resources with CPD with sort of educational development to ensure that that staff are supported and are unable to get that sort of recognition and reward for the digital skills that they are developing. This question I think is also interesting I think it ties in with the question Claire that you were just talking through in relation to how staff felt and you can see there that I think it very much ties in with that sort of higher workload that we were seeing in this of the previous slides looking at the expectations on them that had been reasonable only a low percentage of staff agreed to that and not all staff could access all the organizational support services they needed online and you know that that also relates to sort of services around sort of well-being and support outside of the digital that staff were having to rely on in terms of the online access and you know again so those fairly low percentages there in relation to staff feeling that the concerns that were being heard and that opportunity of sharing their concerns. So that ties in with the complete quantitative data that we're going to share with you and I'm going to hand over now to Claire who's going to talk through some of the really fascinating qualitative findings and this really I think brings the data to life in terms of what we will share in relation to the quote that we had for our teachers. So over to you Claire. Thank you Sarah. So we have four qualitative questions in the survey but for the purpose of this slide two questions are fairly similar they ask how we could improve so I've distilled it down to three so there were many positive aspects of online teaching and I'll talk you through some of the positives for FE and HE leaving you with those quotes to look at. So for further education staff cited things like having the chance to learn new skills being able to try out creative approaches to teaching so quizzes having guest lecturers recorded lessons and this they felt led to an increase in student engagement they found that sharing live documents facilitated one-to-one discussions break out rooms with small groups were also helpful particularly in helping learners work together and collaborate. The ability to deliver a greater variety of assessments was also cited and staff felt it was efficient use of their time they had easy access to resources they felt it increased inclusion and examples there would be for learners who perhaps were less likely normally to contribute in class but found it easier to do so and they felt they had greater communication with learners the sort of flexibility and efficient use of time were things like not having to travel having more time to plan more time to give to students but they appreciated the flexibility and felt safe for higher education there were some similar themes it was new and flexible ways of teaching being able to record live sessions and to use those sessions to build up flexible resource banks for the future they found it was positive in that it improved student access to learning and it supported them to revisit content go at their own pace fit learning around other commitments and this was the thing that came out very strongly in the student rapport they also some of them also cited increased student engagement and more options to support students improved options for formative assessment was an interesting one and again they cited convenience and improved productivity so those were some of the positives if we look at the the reverse side of the coin the negative and you know it's very much a marmite situation what some people like others don't and of course everybody had unique experiences just because it worked well for someone didn't mean it suited everybody so for further education the most negative aspects were technical difficulties as we talked about earlier both their own and those of students not having access to appropriate equipment and software which was one of the problems we looked at in in theme one and particularly when you think that not all of them felt they were supported to use their own devices that was an issue that could have helped mitigate some of those problems slow or insufficient broadband finding it hard to deliver practical sessions um difficulty in judging when learners needed support and I think this relates to something that came up on um came up in the comments you have to design your delivery in a different way and if somebody is expecting to judge engagement by seeing people's faces that's that's an issue some staff felt the camera should be on all the time but we know that that's not good practice for other reasons that's just not um that's just not correct particularly if you've got other people in your workspace area um staff are overwhelmed and felt overloaded with work and they missed the rapport and the physical interaction and um contrary to what people said they liked some staff said that they noticed a decline in student engagement and interaction for higher education the most negative aspects were reduced student interaction and engagement managing group work with large groups and as I referred to earlier small group work definitely worked better for most teaching staff um they were concerned about the impact of online learning on students and watching them struggle and absorbing some of their well-being issues technical and access issues similar to FE increased workload and interest in some of the universities are possibly some of the colleges as well doubled up on staff to support the sessions as a response to trying to help out with the technical issues but that meant that their workload increased so perhaps we need to be looking for a different model of support for online learning trying to resolve those difficulties feeling thrown in at the deep end and a decline in mental and physical well-being so some said that they were spending all day sat in a chair not for moving about for campus like they normally would um so if we could move on please so we asked them how how they could improve and this is where I'll hark back to the reason why one of the reasons why we need to include student staff and all stakeholders in the design of online learning because that come up with some great suggestions so for further education they wanted um access to equipment systems and support to be improved they wanted the quality of digital resources to be addressed they wanted them to be consistent and designed specifically for digital use they wanted a review of staff working practices and they wanted training to be more flexible and more personalized so for higher education their suggestions were recognize and support teachers to address the challenges in moving so swiftly to online that along with the government and other stakeholders we need to do more to explore and address digital poverty and to improve the infrastructure improve platforms and information management encourage online collaboration between peers and it was interesting that many staff in responses to issues of well-being said that they felt isolated from their colleagues and so the usual peer support mechanisms didn't necessarily translate quickly to online although we know that there's a lot that can be done there also they too wanted more training and they wanted recognition and support for staff well-being if we could move on please so just to sum up the key challenges were you know that infrastructure and access to the right technology is vital but more support is needed to teach and assess online um one of the interesting things is that almost all staff had to engage in online learning so in some ways that's a gift to those who've been promoting this for many years we know it's not a new concept um but there is now a need to look at that again and the well-being you know changing practices technical challenges physical well-being isolation these were all major concerns for themselves but also what was really interesting is when you ask students what concerned them when you ask teaching staff what concerned them the majority first said they have concerns for their students so um those are the that's a quick summary if I hand back to Sarah now well I think Christina maybe maybe taking this over thank you can I think yes it's it's as I said there was a lot in there and I would be really interested to hear how those findings reflected on your own experiences and that of your staff do feel free to add some comments to the chat which we will be responding to anything that struck you that was surprising but also thinking about how you are engaging your teaching staff in in taking their practice forward what have you learned from the experiences over the past two years of that you know that that pivot to online teaching and how is that then starting to shape and inform the ways in which the curriculum is being designed going forward to have that blend or to be better prepared if we do need to make that shift back to to purely online learning in the next next few months so I'm going to to pause there and open it up to questions and comments anything coming through in the chat yeah so um Dave White is wondering whether we're seeing greater scrutiny of online than we would have had in on campus or in building teaching in terms of engagement I can see that several people have asked for the slides yes of course we'll make those available we had a question Claire from the TEL team asking is are you putting external pressure on universities to start recognising the need to identify digital skills competencies as part of staff development including such skills on job advertisement? Well some universities are already doing this and some colleges to some are building the digital capabilities that we reference in the building digital capabilities framework they're already doing that as far as applying pressure we're sharing good practice and our reports are picked up by the Office for Students and others and the communications team just have regular meetings with government so they are fed back that way I don't know if that sufficiently answers the question it was it was a long question have I have I tackled that one Christina? I think so yes you have right the cameras on just not doable yes I agree and the best yes students too were wanting cameras on some of them just having a look somebody was asking about the talks are there any plans for talks between Jessica and universities and unions to raise awareness of future skills development? What's really interesting here is that all the universities and colleges that to a part have their own data set and many of them already have discussions with the student union or guild or involve them in the strategy and development processes so I would say that's perhaps a useful way forward that they use their own data set so when a college or university signs up to the service they get access to their own data just then has the opportunity to anonymize that data and use it to give a national picture but all of those participating have their own data set which will be really really helpful in informing their strategy that was great as thanks both have you here and we've just gone past our end of the system time so it'll be great if you could share the slides over on discord and continue the conversation there because quite a few comments and questions coming through lovely thank you perfect thanks for joining us thanks everyone