 Welcome to this webinar. I'm Richard Beggs. I'm a lecturer in higher education practice within Ulster University. I'm just going to go through the approach that we've undertaken to try and encourage active learning that's gone on for the last four or five years. It's been a long thought process. I'm also chair of the active learning special underscript. Okay, so just to get started, from an Ulster context, Tina's coming, we're moving one of our campuses to the center of Belfast. We have four campuses and I'll show you images of them shortly. One in Jordanstown, which is mostly moving to Belfast. This is the artist impression of what it looks like there. It's the center of Belfast. Then we've got one in McGee, which is in Derry, London Derry, and one in Colerain, which is up the north coast. So this change, to a large extent, around active learning is being driven by this change to the learning spaces that we're having access to. We also have had investment in our learning spaces in McGee, which is up in Derry, London Derry, and again in Colerain with new teaching blocks, with new more active learning focused ways of teaching and layouts. But also in our Jordanstown campus, which is transitioning Belfast, there's kind of hybrid things happen there to get students and staff to explore the more informal areas that we can use in our teaching as well. But this plan I'm talking about now was kicked off by our visiting professor back in 2017, Joss Boyce, and she did a research project and looked at where we were in regards to learning and teaching and our aspirations. And she identified seven areas for opportunity, getting the basics right, improving institutions' own learning. So we learn from one another and don't work in silos, which tends to happen a lot and probably similar in your institutions. And the good aims and approaches we're working together more fluidly, supporting and engaging staff, supporting and engaging students, and expanding and embedding active learning throughout our practices and also developing some learning landscape activities, so activities that encourage our staff and our students to embrace new things and try new things. But there's three key themes come out of that. Institutional culture across the board, across all of our campuses, and our campuses are spread across a great distance, 90 miles away or so. Our staff teaching and learning practices, just trying to identify what they are and what the expectations around that are. And the last one was identified as staff perceptions of student learning experiences. I've truncated that to student learning experiences. I think that's more important rather than staff's perceptions, what are the student learning experiences and how can we learn from that. So whenever I took over this role, back four years ago, I started working in CHIRP. And one of my key projects was to take on the learning environment plan. And this is the learning environment plan I'm going to go through now. It was a plan to get us ready for moving to the new campus, which is meant to be now, September. Part of it is open, but the rest is going to open in January, slightly delayed because of COVID and Brexit. But it doesn't matter, we're ready for that anyway. So when I was thinking about Joss's report, and I'm thinking about, well, how can we implement that? Obviously, you hear this all the time, it's all about hearts and minds, but it is about hearts and minds, that's true. So we needed to think about the heart of the matter, which is the learning experience. And think about active learning pedagogies and learning design. So how can we encourage active learning to happen? And how can we facilitate our staff to design, to some extent, co-design with students' solutions? But then again, we want our students and staff confident on board and partners engaged. So there's more of a less hierarchical and more of an equal plan field, and we're learning from one another and working in partnership and collaborative partnership. And as I said, with new learning spaces, on the different campuses we have, but also the transition. So if we look at the three themes individually here, theme one is institutional culture. So we need a lot of flex or flexibility within that around timetabling, room-breaking, IT support, employability, internships, and working with the students' union. And a lot of those things have happened over the last few years. We've had a new timetable incident, room-breaking facilities have been looked at, and there's more of a joint up approach. I think whenever I started this, I started opening up conversations with the different departments, started talking to them. And it's amazing once you start talking to people what doors have been. And I definitely encourage anybody who's thinking like this, just get the pick up the phone, start talking to people, and doors will start opening and things will start happening. Because silo activity is something that our institution is renowned for, but it's starting to move away from that now, which is good. So the next theme is learning and teaching practice. So theme two, and that's all about the academic excellence aspects of it, the program design. Looking at the validation, revalidation, review process, staff induction. So new staff at start go through a number of different training courses, orientation courses, whether it's with ourselves or in the office for digital learning. Our learning and teaching strategies pushing things through our curriculum design principles. And all that's feeding up through the learning landscape starting future into the next theme, which is the learning and teaching experience, which is the belonging aspect as well. That's the kind of front end of it, the cool face of it. And you can see here, yeah, either side, 17 to 20 is when we were meant to move in, but I said it was slightly delayed. But that's irrelevant. You come up through the middle, learning landscape features at bottom, and active pedagogies and learning design is at the heart. Then you're going into the learning environment. And obviously the learning environment is split in two, and don't we know it from the last year? It's been mostly swayed one way, but hopefully getting back to the two again. The digital and physical aspects, but then again, they're split down into formal and informal aspects. So we've got the digital, the formal aspects, the VLE, the apps that we have, Office 365, Blackboard, OneDrive systems, time tabling banner, all those things. But then the student's own personal learning environment. What do they have? What are they using? And it's wide and varied, social media, Google Dropbox, and it's not really that they use themselves. We don't really want to restrict that. We want to just be aware of it, that they use their own thing. But when we get to the side of it, we've got our formal teaching rooms, formal seminars, labs, computer labs, library, breakout spaces, and then collaborative spaces. But then we've got informal spaces, such as any hubs that are on the campus. The library again kind of covers both. Any cafes, the corridor, outside those outside spaces. And you can see at the top of this, we've got our staff and students and that kind of the focus of this. But we've got low tech, high tech, and your big list Wi-Fi across the board. And these things are things that we need. Like electricity, this is what's needed in this day and age. So Wi-Fi should be there. Just turn on your device, you have access to it. I'm not saying that you have to use technology in all your teaching, which is you don't. But if you are using it, then you want to be able to get students to input into it as well. And the technology in the room is there if you want to use it. But it's also low tech. There's also white boards and stuff. So it's all about thinking about the pedagogies, learning and teaching, strategies that are happening. And then this plan caters for everything that people want to do. The last piece of the puzzle there was just communication and communicating what we're doing and different things. And the same everyone would have. I think the conference is one was one was hit nail on the head because of COVID, we couldn't do that. But it had all our events, webinars, updates, emails, although emails isn't the best way to communicate, it's still a way to communicate. But then thinking about other methods or ways we can communicate. And we have, with an author, an internal staff, online magazine called Insight, and we use things like that. But also toolkits, and I'll get to them later on, we can share toolkits with people and that's still communicating with them around expectations. So when you see it all together, that's the learning environment plan. So it starts at the bottom, sound foundation about flexibility, communication strategies there, then we're going up through the learning design and aspects that are curriculum design that's fitting in the actual learning environment itself. Okay, so that's what we're aiming towards. But that's well and good having this plan, but how do you get staff and students ready to actually do things? So one thing to mention, and I've got here, it's not about GBD, GBD is the Greater Belfast Development, that's that Belfast Compass has been extended that I'm talking about. But it's not just about that, it's about our other campuses as well. So it's across the institution, it's not just focused on one area. But these new spaces have given us a great opportunity to reflect on what we're doing and take in the advantage of the opportunities that they're they're providing us so we can think about doing things a bit differently. And I think it's helped during this COVID period as well, but thinking about sequencing our learning activities, whether it's week by week in a session, they're using different spaces rather than just a lecture together, but breaking out and then coming back. Planning for out-of-classroom activities, we're not just thinking about class, so you think about the flipped classroom aspects, encouraging on-campus learning, so making the campus sticky is not a term I like, it's making students want to stay and learn on campus, using technology-based self-study as well, and using all the spaces available that we have, formal, informal, physical and digital. So those are the things that we were trying to encourage. We've built toolkits and resources around that and I'll share a link to them later, but there were some print materials, but mostly digital. So staff can access them and they were shared, we created a share point site that's internal to all their staff, where they can get access to all this. Also have them openly available on our public-facing website as well for anybody who wants to have a look at them, but it's focused around the learning spaces and guides what can be done in these spaces. So thinking about practical aspects, the curriculum design, the learning design, and then case studies so they can learn from other people. These cards were just going to go through all the cards, but it's about getting the basics. I think that one of the biggest things came through was the ambiguity around some of the terms and staff's awareness of what they meant around active learning, blended learning, flipped learning, inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, and these are just simple cards that are A5 in size and on one side it breaks down for a student what active learning is and another it breaks down for a teacher what active learning is and what's expected, what type of room you'd be using, what technology you expected to use, and those things in there. That goes down to each one of those blended flipped and that's just about getting the basics. And I think whenever we have buzzword bingo going about staff can get confused, it does put people off things when they're posted out there, but having the somewhere they can refer to for the basics and what's expected from a learning teaching perspective is there. But that's all well and good, all those toolkits are there, we've got our plan. Then really at the end of the day people do these things where we need to get people on board. So we put together a scheme Chirp interns which is turned out to be called learning partners. The students want to call themselves learning partners rather than student champions so that's what they're called now. So we have students who we've got 30 this year on across our campuses who are helping with learning and teaching aspects. They're on campus today, they're on campus this week as part of Welcome Week. And then we have active learning champions here, staff members who are being supported against CMLT and there's one in each school who are pushing forward active learning within their schools. Trying to encourage that to happen across the board. Then there's other spaces, this specifically around Jordanstown, I'll show you photographs in a minute, around the learning lab, a space for staff to come and play and get things wrong before they're in class. And then refurbishment of 20 other rooms across Jordanstown to active collaborative layout so that staff when they get to Belfast or whether indeed if they're going to McGee or Corian to teach that the default layout is active collaborative. So rather than rows, students are putting groups of 68 so they're facing each other so they can talk to each other. And there's nothing more that discourages active learning than set out in rows. So it's getting people to learn from one another. We all know that learning is a social activity. So this is our learning partners in the Belfast campus that are there and they all have jackets on as learning partners in the back. And their advice was to walk, the first few weeks of term they're floor walking, what's called floor walking. And they're there for first point of support for staff and they work in partnership with our staff. After the first few weeks of term they're going to be working in partnership with them on projects that are focused around learning and teaching and active learning specifically. So then they'll pivot away from the floor walking to actual projects working in partnership. This is to help support the return to campus post COVID, well not that we're post past COVID but post acute COVID probably is the term to use. Yeah so that's them just getting used to the new camps and walking about it and stuff. Then this is a really blurry photograph, I do apologize, of some of the spaces in Jordanstown that were there were changed. This was a room that set an old traditional classroom in Rose Hill, 70 people, it's actually quite long and skinny, still holds capacity of 70 but the furniture and tables now it was changed. The facility active learning, this is the learning lab which has the same technology that is in the Belfast campus, the Merchants of Solstice technology, wireless collaboration technology. And this is for our staff to come along and learning partners to support them in trying out new things and where they connect or where they plan their session before they get to Belfast. There's also going to be these type rooms set up in Belfast for them, the learning partners are going to help support as well. And then this is one of the new rooms in Belfast, it's capacity of 90 and you can see that's what I mean about set out in an active collaborative layout rather than it being rows and rows and rows it's just set out in grips where people can learn from one another and really just learn in a great place. And the whole campus is set out, I guess. There's some instances now where some rooms will be in rows, we have a Harvard style room as well and what's more U-shaped but this mimics what we've got on our Korean campus so yeah it's just a fantastic space for people to learn. When you walk into that room you know that you're going to be doing something rather than just sitting passively. So I think just before I end we've got a couple of slides to go. Context of COVID, learned from last year in a bit and I know it's been challenging, it's been tough for everybody involved but what I have to be careful of is this when we return into campus is managing expectations. A lot of people would talk about the high-flex model and different things, I think we have to be careful around that because the technologies and the kind of the pedagogic ethos of our campus isn't really around isn't really around lecture recording, it is we're taking a flip classroom approach to it. So high-flex comes with so many different technical issues, we technologically wouldn't be set up to deliver that. We have an opto, we have Blackboard Collaborate but what we wouldn't have is any way to capture the audio in the class or even video. So I think for that way we have to manage expectations and do things for the way we want to teach and we don't have to support staff either, that's true on you. So with that in mind it's still about getting the basics right and then preparing for eventualities which might very well be pivoting online if things go per-shipped but who knows at this stage, hopefully that won't happen. Yeah Ian, there's some rooms, that's the only one I've showed you that I bit the rooms, there's other rooms that have multi-projection across the room, different points in different places. There was different rooms identified that we would do, obviously the center point in that room. It's quite difficult to put multi-screens the shape of this build and the shape we have, it's not square rooms, they're kind of different shapes but we can only have in that room specifically a projector at the front but when you're designing stuff anyway for running design you may want the constructions at the front, you could be using the air pods that have devices on the table and they can follow on there as well but that room specifically only has a projector at the front, other rooms I didn't include the photograph of has multiple screens around the room so that is something that that is their idea policy for not including that in my images. Yeah, it depends what you're going to be doing, obviously there is options for having rooms without any projectors in them. Yeah, so that's all good stuff, I think what we want to be able to do is provide flexibility for all our staff to do what they want to do in the room, not saying you have to do this, you have to do another thing and some of our staff would give instructions and then go around the room for students to follow stuff. But anyway I'm not going to hang about on that for a little time. Just to go back to Act different SIG, there's colleagues here on this today that are part of that group. We've pulled together this, it's a blog of such but there's a bit of information in there about who we are, what we do, we're going to have blog postings coming up, we did one last December, we're going to probably follow that with other ones. There's going to be a number of webinars coming up over the next few while. Angelica Rizquez from University of Limerick is doing the next one around ABC, her experiences of using that, learning design and curriculum design aspect. But yeah if you want to chat about this or you can join the Active Learning group itself, there's a mailing list you can sign up to and join that if you haven't already, please do. But yeah just a shameless plug at the end around that is we're trying to build up a community around this so we can all learn from one another and as I said what we've done on our campus is necessarily the right thing for everybody to do across all campuses. We'll all do different things in different ways but it's just about sharing that practice. So do I have any questions? I'll bring up the chat. Yes, Shane go ahead. I have a couple of questions if you'll indulge me. How has UU approached its own learning and changing the culture because I know that that's quite challenging in any institution, especially one the size of Ulster? I think that the Active Learning champions within the school have been influential to the large extent. I think COVID has helped push things forward where people have had to do things differently and put things online which kind of lends itself to the flipped classroom to the extent what we were doing over the last year and probably one positive that's come out of that but I think the cultural change has to come we try from the bottom up but it has to come top down as well and that's where we're getting students involved with the learning partners and it's a slow process. I guess this happened over three to four years and we're not there yet but all we can do is put the things in place and encourage people to come along and then they create a curriculum design framework where we have it also with one of my colleagues Collette designed. That helps that as well because when the revalidation process is going through staff are challenged to think about their delivery methods on what they're doing so it definitely definitely does help push that through but it is slow to go through but we're definitely changing it. Yeah I love the idea of the students acting as learning partners. I think that's great you know it's one thing when a member of staff says this worked for me it's when students are saying I love this approach or technique or way we're doing things in class that has a lot of mileage. How do the students feed that back is beyond just the module surveys? There's learning partners they're being evaluated separately so they'll be asked about each of their experiences is going along. We have a team site set up for them as well for informal feedback as we're going along so they're all in a team's area learning from one each other and sharing what's happening so that's in there as well but there'll be a separate one going ahead before Christmas and one next year to see how they got on anything they could enhance or want to get involved in more. Great it's evolving too. Yeah final question I know that the the active learning plan at UU very much focused on learning spaces which is great you know those new classrooms that were there are coming online just before I left were great really great spaces. How has the pandemic and the shift to digital kind of changed or has it changed you use thinking about active learning learning spaces and has anything that's really worked in the digital side because we all had the shift online now it has been considered as really valuable and useful for blended and both face-to-face and digital learning. Is there any real good takeaways that you've seen over the last year? I think the good takeaway and the push that's coming from our management is around encouraging staff to take the the flipped approach particularly for large lectures but then using the space on campus for more activities so that that is pushing that through and because of COVID all of our staff have recorded lectures they've put videos online so I think that's probably the biggest thing for us that's pushed that through and thinking about our learning spaces in a different way that it's not just about passive dissemination from one lecture and many students we know that doesn't work it's about getting in to do activities problem-based learning whatever it might be in the in the class so that's that's where we've found so far but I think we're still learning and I think this semester we're going to learn an awful lot really to be honest about what has worked and it might have worked online but when we bring it back to this blended approach now will it work just as well we'll just wait and see. Richard thanks Benji. Thanks Shane. Anya did you have your hand up? I did briefly there but it was more to apologize to Angelique it's just been a very long week and the high-flex thing people are trying to do high-flex without the kit that they need and that kind of thing so sorry that was a knee jerk reaction Angelique ignore me and it's not really a question it was just Shane there you know people are just more open to active learning after this last year because as we all know everybody had to jump and it was very painful for everyone involved but I think as Richard was saying about the culture sort of change and I think with the support and one-to-one support that people have had and continue to get I think the culture will continue to change so that's really all. Thanks Anya. Rod? I'm just going to say Richard that we've done quite a detailed analysis of feedback that we've received from our students about their experience of teaching online and one of the things that we've noticed is that the fully online provision really widened a digital divide that we think existed prior to COVID but if you can sort of contrast a you know a student who lives at home with their parents as their own bedroom, broadband internet connection, laptop, two screens has all of the facilities at their fingertips in a private comfortable space to work with a single parent at home, homeschooling two children with a tablet laptop connecting to the internet on a 3G connection on a mobile phone that the reality is that you know that their experience is widely different of exactly the same provision and we feel that in the past pre-COVID our institutional physical spaces so our computer labs and our drop-in spaces and informal spaces have provided a sort of a life jacket for those students who don't have that kit at home and in the absence of that during COVID that gap just got wider and so something that we have to take on board really is that it's not just about the provision of digital spaces within the physical institution to close the digital device we've got to think about how we provision remote learning in those students that come from more disadvantaged backgrounds and have more challenging and more complex homework in lives to work around so it's you know there's a lot of stuff that we've taken from that experience I think. Yeah it's a very good point that and hopefully when we go back on campus to the blended approach once when those students have access back to those other areas on campus a little kind of work in reverse but it's good that that's made that you're aware of that so we can kind of address that now but even investigate it further so that's great Rod, thanks for sharing. Absolutely. Any other questions or queries or nope okay we're two minutes early so that's good thanks thanks for coming and please keep an eye out for the other sessions coming up we're going to have a range of different ones throughout this semester. If anybody's any questions or queries please please come back and I'm happy to answer any questions thank you all for coming.