 Okay. So, hello everyone. My name is Thomas Maloy. I'm from the UNSW Law School. I'm an instructional designer there and so I'm doing my masters at the moment in a New Zealand university and my focus is on peer-to-peer interaction. My master's finishes in three weeks, which is probably why I'm going to read this presentation rather than do it freestyle because I've been pretty busy the last few weeks. So I just want to have a look at or share some of my findings around peer-to-peer interaction online. I'm really interested in the idea of what successful peer interaction looks like as I've seen some really great online peer interaction. I've seen some really woeful or peer interaction that results in absolutely no learning whatsoever. So I'm sure you've all heard the refrain from students that, you know, they thought they were being forced to do an activity online. It had no benefit for them. It was just extra work. So this is kind of something we're trying to avoid. So for this presentation, I'm drawing on the literature. My experience as an online student for the last year, as I said in New Zealand University, and my experience as an educational designer trying to make peer learning online meaningful. So what is peer-to-peer learning in an online course and what makes it successful? The model I want to look at is this model we're implementing at the law school at the top there. This is using a classroom approach where the students first engage with course content over there. This is Bloom's understanding section at the bottom of his pyramid. The area of interactive content is rapidly changing at the moment. We're now chunking up in law, chunking up the cases and the readings and providing a variety of multimedia with interactivity around key concepts. So we're using H5P at the moment. Has anyone used H5P in Moodle? Okay, so for you, those of you that have an H5P is an amazing plug-in that now allows you to upload videos to YouTube and download them into H5P and put questions within the video. So it adds interactivity around the activity. So we're also using some software at the moment called Smart Spur, which also integrates into Moodle. And this is a University of New Wales company that's now worldwide. And it's also a content management system. And this allows us to put a variety of content in one place and provide interactivity. In a course we've just run using Smart Spur as putting all the videos and graphics and text with interactivity quizzes immediately after chunks of information. We surveyed the students and the students absolutely love it. I've never seen feedback from students like this before in my life, so that really works. So that coupled with the collaboration phase in the middle, which is more knowledge building and analyzing and evaluating the information that they've got in the first section, it allows the students to construct knowledge and meaning from the content and from each other. We're also finding that chunking up the informational content in the first section allows us the option of chunking it up a little bit more in the second section where we can put the students into smaller groups around that smaller and chunked up information. And finally then they enter the classroom and this is the key. They enter the classroom to apply that knowledge in a very active way. For us this is the merging of online learning and face to face learning or blended learning. The key to having this as a successful learning model is that each step is very dependent on the others. In the past we've had a kind of bolt on model with eLearning where the eLearning element is over there somewhere and the face to face experience kind of remained unchanged. I'm sure you've had that experience. In the bolt on system there was always the cry from academics that only half the student cohort came to class prepared. Having these three sections interconnected will mean that students have a responsibility to themselves and their peers to go through the material, collaborate around the material and then be able to apply information and knowledge in class. So online collaborative activities that require peer interaction could be forums, wikis, blogs, peer assessment and project work. That's not exhaustive but that's what I came up with for this. So I think we all agree, what is it? I think we all agree that social engagement enhances the learning experience. Social constructivist ideas have the students connecting with content and then engaging with others around the content to construct meaning. The social aspect of this brings, looking around the core there, variation in the level of prior knowledge so you can get students mentoring each other and forming a pool of experience within the class in which to make meaning from the content or online in the online context. This can and really does work well in an online context especially if you have a skilled facilitator who is a subject expert. Peer learning has been shown to be highly effective in terms of boosting focus, depth of understanding and of course motivation which is the next one. So any discussion of peer interactions must touch on the issue of motivation. What motivates us, what motivates a student to engage with others online? In my experience learners will do what they need in the online learning environment, no less and no more. This is the reply to at least two posts scenario where they have to go in there and collaborate with their peers. It might not be connected to the coursework that much. So this scenario where students will do this as a task but only do it because they have to do it. So I did an interview for my masters the other day with a student and the student showed me a Facebook group where her class was discussing a law issue. The debate was robust to say the least. It was amazing. There were two clear differing opinions around the issue and people were really pulling the issue apart. A student had initiated the conversation based on interest and the conversation posts got up to about 140 posts, people posting, which I thought was amazing. I've never seen that in an online educational sense. I thought that was fantastic as there was great soft skill learning going on of critical thinking, communication and interpersonal skills and they also were really analyzing the topic which is what we want them to do. I asked the student later in the interview why this kind of discussion never happens in her course and she told me that her course is a formal learning space where she has to behave in a certain way to get through the course. She has limited time and so will do what she needs to get through. And I think this attitude is really common. The other interviewees also expressed this. Even I'm doing this in my course. So this made me think about Ryan and Desi's self-determination theory which is where they show that a lack of student autonomy will result in lowered learning outcomes. Students in the Facebook group were totally autonomous. They had intrinsic motivation to continue the conversation. It was still loosely within the confines of the course material and there was really dynamic peer interaction around an issue. Whereas in the course they were being instructed to discuss an issue and reply it to other posts. In this situation the students were not very autonomous and so minimal interaction was happening in that sense. So there was more extrinsic motivation of the pressures to fill the requirements of the course and little intrinsic motivation to interact with each other. Does that all make sense? Yeah. So what's the problem and what can we do about it? At the moment in the model I showed you before we're in the transition phase of this and implementing the new model of learning. The problem here is that in the structure of academic teaching the academics don't have time to deal with online interaction. The teacher or facilitator though is critical to foster a community of learners bringing expert direction to a thread and giving students a sense that the teacher is there with them. At some stage we're going to have to change the structure in which the academics are working to allow for teaching to be done online and that's the critical thing. So as I said before there's been this idea that e-learning is kind of over there, students will do the readings online and then perhaps discuss the topics. When they come to class the academic teaches them virtually in the same way as before. This for us is the key to making online peer interaction meaningful and effective. It is connected in a seamless way with the face-to-face class. So if it's connected in a seamless way to the face-to-face class then the students will be much more active in both spaces. So for example if I was a student and my class was on Friday and it required me to stand up with my group and summarise, compare and contrast with other groups, present your understandings, debate an issue, etc. Then I think I will consider the online portion of my class as an extension of my face-to-face class. And usually there is a certain amount of accountability in a face-to-face class that motivates students to participate in a class. With close interaction between the online and the face-to-face hopefully this accountability will go through into the online portion of the class. So the key to the motivational puzzle is to have strong teacher presence in a course. Allow for autonomy in a classroom. Allow for students to collaborate around content. Have relatedness in the form of a strong learning community. And relatedness to their learning goals in the sense that students want to show confidence among their peers. And have challenging activities to push the students outside of their comfort zone. Interest in a task is critical and there can be two kinds of interest. There is individual interest and situational interest. Situational interest for me is when the students are connecting the learning through the three stages that I mentioned before, where they know there will be an outcome at the end of the process. So in the class there is an outcome so they have to go through those three stages to get to that end point. So the situational interest may be in the process itself rather than the content. So if we can get this balance right we can increase the levels of intrinsic motivation to collaborate online, I think. So isolation is another problem. This is brought about by low teacher presence and I say that again. The time delay in responses, lack of interest in an activity or a badly designed activity that doesn't take into account the interplay between the content, the collaboration online and then the face-to-face experience. So we're trying to set quite strict timings on the online interactions. The students function much better in a structured schedule, particularly if it's connected to a class. So again, going back to that Friday idea, if they've got a week to do the online interactions then we say Monday, Wednesday, Thursday in preparation for the Friday class, it's got to be structured. So we'll also be focusing on effective teacher presence and how that works, not just in the course, but also in the structure of how academics interact online. And that's the structure coming from faculty or even from the university where we allow the teachers to teach online, not just have it as a bolt-on. So just quickly, as far as designing peer interactions, I found parts of Keller's ARCS model of design to be really useful. This is more of a general learning framework, but it applies nicely to online interactions and learning too. So the attention part for online interactions for me is in grabbing the students' attention, we need to stimulate inquiry around a topic or a problem. So this is best done with very open questions or questions to play the devil's advocate. Then the students can debate or express opinions, particularly in law, this is important, to tease out the subject matter. It is crucial that the teacher monitors this kind of interaction and I think that's about the fifth time I've said that it's important that the teachers in the online space. It's important, the next one, relevance, it's important to establish relevance to set interactions that draw on students' experiences or prior knowledge. The students must see the line between the learning activity, the content and the assessment and the online face-to-face class. And we must allow autonomy in this type of online interaction, but be clear about the goals. So set the structure but allow autonomy within the online interactions. So it may be in their class, when they come into class and they have to do a presentation, we allow them to organize their own groups and work with their own groups to have that outcome in the class. And confidence. We should structure the interactions to allow each learner to see the value in the interaction and that will lead to learning success. And allow for incremental learning, giving the students more and more confidence by guiding and supporting the peer interactions. And the last one, satisfaction. We have to create a strong community of learners by giving timely encouragement and feedback. That's the teacher again being involved in the online interaction. And so in summary, so I think effective peer interactions are where the teacher has presents. Did I mention that? I think I did, yeah. So this is a critical part of it. And we must, the last one as well, we must structure this now so that this actually happens and going following on from Martin's talk this morning to make Moodle really fantastic. The teachers now have to come across and be really involved in it, not having it as a plug-in. And the next one, there's strong integration with the face-to-face class. This is absolutely the key to us where the students are having a seamless experience between their online interactions and their face-to-face interactions. And in both areas, the teacher is very, very involved. The students are challenged, of course, and the students have a responsibility and accountability to peers going back to the idea that this flows through into the face-to-face class and the accountability in the class has an influence on the accountability in the face-to-face, in the online interactions. And the subject matter, of course, we need questions that have a clear answer. So, I think that's it for me in the spirit of collaboration. Any comments? Experiences? Questions? Right. Here it's so clearly reinforced that no, the teacher has to be largely present in this space. It's just really, really refreshing and we can take it back. Fantastic, that's fantastic. But when introducing that to teachers who are not coming on board with the idea, if you just do it slowly and incrementally and maybe start with a little bit of the bolt-on idea, get them used to it, and then it's about changing the way they behave in their classroom in relation to what's happening online. That's got to change. And then the online situation will become really successful, I think. Any other? In terms of changing the structure of teaching, which you mentioned, you need time limits, very specific time limits, the teacher needs to be involved in the online space. Do you have a centralized team at UNSW or is it sort of like for learning design I mean, or is it each school pushing their own agenda? And if so, in either context, I guess what are you thinking about in terms of rolling out that structure of change? Both. UNSW is going through a big change at the moment. We're in a 10-year strategy that a major part is digital uplift, which means moving to these kinds of models. Different faculties are doing it at different paces, but there is a centralized idea of pushing in this direction. And have you looked at any models in particular to push that agenda? To introduce to teachers, you mean? Or to... Yeah, I guess at my institution we use a five-stage model, which does address a lot of those things, but I was just wondering if you had a different model that you were using that we could also look into just out of interest? Not formal model, but yeah. Cool, thank you. Norris, anyone else? Yeah. Yes, so the question was some tips around encouraging teacher presence or making that teacher presence successful. It's a tricky one because the literature says there are many things that you can't do online, you can't jump in, you can't control the conversation that's going on if it's a forum, for example. I think the idea of autonomy is very important, giving the students a lot of autonomy in their own learning pathway in the online, but at the same time having it structured and having the teacher presence, the teacher in there communicating when they need to communicate. I think with any kind of teaching you gravitate towards you're in a relationship with people so you gravitate towards what is successful anyway and it's a matter of trying to find out what is successful and what's not. I think the main tip is structure it so that there's learning going on, the teacher is flitting around monitoring it and making sure it's going in the right direction and actually learning is happening within that system. Does that kind of answer the question? Okay. Anyone else? Okay, thanks.