 Okay, so we will kick off. It's again a pleasure to introduce a colleague of mine, David Kennedy. David has done some fabulous work that we'll be sharing with you here today. On what's most certainly in my opinion a silver lining to the clouds that was COVID is all of the work that David's after creating and hopefully we'll be bringing forward into non-COVID times. So David, what I'll do is you have 20 minutes. I'll give you a 15-minute slot that will allow five minutes for questions. So I'll give you a two-minute warning if that's okay. Excellent, excellent Mark and thanks very much for having me. Okay, so the floor is yours whenever you're ready to start. Excellent, thanks Mark. I suppose just in brief what I'm aiming to do with you today really is to tell you a story really about the movement from a synchronous face-to-face teaching module to basically a wholly asynchronous module. And the key learnings for me was the importance in which the tools that were made available on Moodle, which is branded as a loop in our university, really helped to accommodate and make this reality possible. So just a bit of general information, I suppose a frame, I suppose background to what I'm about to tell you is that the module in question is from the Bachelor of Education Honours Degree Programme in DCU, which is, folks, it's really it's an initial teacher training program for primary education in Ireland. And the module that I'm going to tell you about is ED201118 Religious Education and the Child. The class size is 405 students and I'm the sole lecturer on the course. It's a five-threaded module and it was with second year and it ran over the course of one semester. Now prior to COVID, the module was run in a very traditional fashion. It was synchronous face-to-face teaching with weekly plenary lectures with the 400 group and then bi-weekly seminars where we broke down that 400 group to about 30 students per seminar session. Traditionally even the assessment method again was very much a traditional academic assignment to 2000 words and all the readings and assessment information was all made available via Moodle. But in a very, I suppose, uncoordinated fashion in the sense that you can see here from the screenshot of the old page, all the material is just kind of listed there. It's kind of dumped there really. Whilst we have the use of the headings, you know, per lecture topics, there's still a very kind of disheveled look to the page for make kind of challenge for students to, I suppose, make their way through it. But that was perfectly fine really and Moodle managed to meet the needs of students really in that totally face-to-face setting because again, this was merely a point of reference as opposed to being the central learning environment for where all the learning took place. So when COVID came along, we had to move the entire module to a completely asynchronous environment and there was this, I suppose you could say there was a sense of hopelessness in one regard when you were there looking at the screen and the panic sets in that it's already challenging enough to try and manage a module with 405 students in a face-to-face synchronous environment, let alone to having to move the module completely to an asynchronous module. Now, the complete move to complete asynchronous module was, I suppose, in part really the main reason why we had to go totally asynchronous was because of timetable changes and all of this trying to meet the needs with COVID in the university. So when I got really started off the journey of thinking how I could recreate this module and how Moodle and Loop could really take effect is that I wanted to take what I was doing really well in a synchronous context and reimagine it in this asynchronous context. So it was really, really important to take what was being done well in that face-to-face setting and try and replicate it in an asynchronous environment and at the heart particularly as well because of the module that it's in religious education and then because of the wider context of COVID and just I suppose the general philosophy of education that we try to embody within the religious education department is that we really sought to ensure that the human person was at the center of the module in a very holistic sense and UDL, the Universal Design for Learning, played a really strong role in making an inclusive relational and dynamic and inviting meaningful experience for students and I suppose the main thing that I wanted to achieve was that I wanted students to learn something and not to merely complete something and that was about finding that balance in that asynchronous environment to try and create a meaningful learning experience. So to assist me and kind of I suppose showing you the tools in which I use to maybe try my best and humbly really try my best to make achieve that goal. We're going to look at the importance of clarity and consistency, so looking at tools like Moodle Books, Communication and just the outline of assessment briefs, etc. The creation of presence and absence so really was in this paradoxical space because it was an asynchronous module that you really wanted to have some teacher presence there and that they didn't feel completely isolated and run their own within that learning environment. And then the big challenge that we had, as I mentioned previously, we had bi-weekly seminars in the face-to-face context and it was in these seminars that the real teaching happened in the sense of that the teachers got to engage with the curriculum and the various programs in a very hands-on way to learn how to teach and how to manage a classroom within the subject area. So we had to try and reimagine this in an asynchronous environment and this is where H5P came in really important and the use of embedded videos and student forums and just a caveat at the end was that the benefit that happened through those seminars was that there was far more usage of discussion forums than I previously experienced. So the clarity and consistency dimension then in terms of communication was really important. So earlier on in this presentation already I flagged the page of how it looked prior to COVID and I very much felt it a bit like a Ron Burgundy moment, hey everyone come and see how good I look when I finished redesigning my loop page in light of the CPD that I had participated in over the summer months and you can see already immediately from the start was that you have already a module handbook for students where they find all their lecture topics, learning outcomes, assessment details, recommended readings and then a clear communication procedure as well as support resources. Their submission boxes for assessment are there very clearly as well and then you can see here that when it comes to lecture topics each lecture topic had its own individual loop book and they had the same structure and content across every lecture in the sense of that in each book you found a pre-recorded lecture, you found readings, a reading list and you found a study task be it a loop quiz or a H5P interactive session. So when it came to the module handbook and as I mentioned this was previously a face-to-face module, we really had to try and I suppose convert students over to an asynchronous learning environment in a very short period of time and this is where the Thomas Aquinas's quote really stood out in my mind of to convert somebody go and take them by the hand and guide them. So the big lesson I learned was straight away from day one you cannot be clear enough and pragmatic enough in terms of communication and layout of the module for the students and what they're going to take up and what they're hoping they will learn and how they can achieve successfully achieve and learn in this module. So this is where the module loop book really became useful. So within that loop book when you clicked in the first thing you had was a description of the course and an embedded video. As you can see there I had Irish language students in the module so all video content had to be interpreted by ISL interpreters. You see very clear assessment brief for the rubric and everything presented but each section had corresponding video input explaining what they had to do so they had a choice of reading or watching. Clear expectations outlined for them again you have the video input and the same again when it comes to the reading list and what was really important within the within this asynchronous environment and the use of loop for me in particular was I wanted the students to have everything at one click away so if it's a reading it had to be one click away if it was for a book it was one click away so their whole reading list as you can see here were all hyperlinked immediately to the documents they didn't have to go and try and find something else somewhere else. So in terms of the lectures then this is where each lecture topic had a loop book you had your lecture inside which are embedded video and then and also a PDF copy of the slides then you had your assigned readings for your for your lecture and then you had your interactive study task or just a study quiz using loop quizzes and this is accessible all via hyperlink but it was very clear and coordinated in how the students were guided by the hand through the module. One of the big things that I learned in my CPT around asynchronous learning as well was the importance of presence and creating this presence and absence and more importantly to not be a walley you need you don't need to be have to be found and sought out by the student you should be very clearly there so when it came to any kind of communication to students be it in an announcement forum I tried my best where possible to give video communication as well. The same then for each lecture topic each lecture topic had an introductory background video of like 30 seconds outline on what they were going to find in the lecture what we're going to look at and the same then again for each lecture topic. So in each part of the module in its layout there was a corresponding visual presence and communication from myself what was kind of funny over the period was it was nearly like a beard growing montage over the course of COVID through to the videos as the module progressed but I suppose the key challenge for us the real challenge within the already team was how do we recreate these very engaged and pragmatic seminars in an asynchronous context so to assist us with this the normal layout of a seminar would have consisted of a very brief presentation PowerPoint presentation and then some activity in some regard so we kept the topics the same but we really reimagined them we came together as a team and had a group conversation around the topic and recorded and then provided ISL interpretation so students watched this video initially and then they participated in an interactive H5P activity which got them to engage with the curricular documents and programs and got them to really I suppose embed and consolidate any learning that they had but not only in the seminar but also throughout the lecture content and the big unexpected finding for us through developing the module in this way and the seminars in this way was that at the end of each seminar they had a task we wanted to hear what the students were were doing where how they were finding things both informally outside of a formative assessment so each seminar session ended with a student task where they had to go away and look at the curriculum or look at the program documents and then feedback to the students of discussion forum and this was really really an active space over the course of the semester students really posted a lot of information and one of the things that they noted in in in a consultation that I've had with students after the module running was that by addressing what they've uploaded in the forums be it by the embedded videos for the seminars or by email or in the forum itself it really also enhanced this sense of presence that was there for the students over the course of the module um but if you're interested in finding more out I suppose in more detail about uh I suppose uh I suppose the other aspects of the course and killing the assessment method we moved from a traditional assessment to loop reflect how did how did that come about um engaged with uh building up the professional community practice by engaging with professionals out there working in the field by having video podcast conversations with uh with teachers at different stages in their career patrons and chairs of boards of management and those so basically those involved in the provision of governance of education in Ireland and those involved at the chalkboard you'll find more information here on a podcast I've done with DCU on the module and on a case study that's available on the teaching enhancement website so on that thanks for listening and uh I hope I can answer any questions that you may have as a bit of a speed run through it but I suppose I said I try and get as much in free as I could