 Ynw'n gweithio, yw'n gweithio ac rwy'n gweithio gwaith gweithio digital a'r fuddwysig ar y cyfnodion eich bod yn dechrau. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n Gweithio'n Gweithio Llywodraeth a Llywodraeth Fyaf, ac mae'n fyddechrau'n ddweud bod yn cael y dyfodol gweithio digital, ond rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, Cymru'n gweithio'n gweithio wedi'i gweithio'n gweithio, ac i'n ddiddordeb llun o'r ddweud, I website email a you will understand that has come together with you and then I'll joined you back at the end to help you through the Q&A. So over to you. Thanks very much Emma Jane. Hi everyone, it's really good to be with you today. It's been a really interesting day so far and I feel that there's been a common theme in terms of reflection a'r hyn o gyfnodd rhan o'r inform thereoedd digyfrans. Yn deall ag y byddai nhw'n amser rydym yn cael eu canfodol ac yn ei neud yn ymdeg gael chi'n ein storiol a'r blaen f synthadol wrth gofyn. So byddwn i'r ysgrifennu, ac os rydw i'r meddwl, gyda'r chath a ddiwethaf y cwm yn ddigonul ar gyfer y dyfodol ar y ddeithaswyd. Er oedau bod y cyfnod o'r prysgwyr yn ymgyrchu'r ysgrifennu. Rwyf yw'r caelwch gyda'r cyfnod. Yn ymgyrchu'r ysgrifennu a'r adael. Yn ymgyrchu'r cyfnod, ond mae oherwydd Sjuhawnd. On the left, an use of temporary versus permanent, so yes, efficiency versus cumbersome, thank you. The long route and the short route, so yeah, the quick fix, which I think we perhaps were all in at the last term between March and July in 2020. And then thinking about how we might, as cats, as commented, want to include accessibility inclusivity as part of our universal and long term design. So at Birkbeck, we obviously had the same challenge as everyone else, moving our teaching online very quickly and also the challenge again, like everyone else, with the new accessibility legislation. And we thought we'd take the opportunity to bring those things together and build those into our learning design and in our learning environment. So we're going to be using Mentimeter a little bit during this presentation to collect some of your thoughts. Emma Jane is going to pop a link into the chat, but you can also go to menti.com. Emma Jane has popped that in the chat for us. You can just follow that link and begin giving us your thoughts about how did or would you approach consistent module redesign with the particular focus on making your courses as inclusive as possible. To give you some background on where we found ourselves, we were a very, very new digital education team. So we had very little progress in terms of walking the path towards digital accessibility when the pandemic hit and we needed to move everything online very, very quickly. Early on in the pandemic, the university made the decision to promise our students that they would always be able to take an online route through their course, no matter whether we were going to be in person or online. As it turned out, we were online the whole way through. And as part of that promise, we committed to redesigning all of our modules to be dedicated to online learning and to make the most of these things. I'll give you a little moment to say how you would approach consistent module redesign. And then I'll share with you some of the methods we used to tackle this beast. Five of you on the board so far. So integrate feedback continuously with concise objectives around inclusivity is a really great suggestion. Make templates. That's a little bit of a forum for what we'll see in a little while. Create or use checklists is another fantastic methodology. Consult with stakeholders during polls templated on them without asking. It's very important to do that. But what I would say is we didn't necessarily consult as much as we normally would. Like this project would have taken several years in normal circumstances. Everything had to be rather more accelerated than we otherwise would have. But again, consulting is really, really important in order to get that sort of buy in and giving detailed supported guidance. Absolutely couldn't agree more color scheme. This is important and something we took approach of. This is a really something we thought was really key actually standardised approach across departments and school and faculty. When you universalise key elements and allow teachers to be creative within that template, you can actually ensure a lot of inclusive elements. In the interests, accessible templates in the interest of time, I'm going to move on to our next slide. So this was our approach. First, we built in some baseline standards that all modules needed to adhere to. We also put on a mandatory digital pedagogy training course for staff. So 900 teaching staff attended that over a very short period of time. And it was quite an intensive course where we took them through all the various different elements of teaching online and took a really, really strong approach on accessibility. We also built a new course design and timetabling software that teachers could use to develop their courses from the ground up. We rolled out a template using this course design software across all of the courses within our virtual learning environment. And we provided dedicated consultation support with all of the digital transformers so they could have a constant beeline to the learning technologist within their department. And to talk about their ideas with us at any time. And as far as tools training was concerned, we effectively ran just consistently rolling tools based training that anyone could attend every single week there was training on all of the tools that we had available. So the next question I have in this Mentimeter discussion is, do you have a set of agreed module standards? So cast your votes now. I'll flip back to that in the interests of time to see what you've got. There we go, neck and neck. OK, so it's interesting that largely evening out. But quite a lot of us don't and quite a lot of us do based on what I'm getting a sense of here. Again, at the start of the pandemic, given that we just started as a digital education team, we had no set of module standards that were agreed. And so we built up a set of module standards that went for consultation with the academic community. And this is what we came up with. This is the core baseline standards, the main pillars that we had of our baseline. The first, what I want to highlight on some of these is some of the ways that this enhanced accessibility, even though the sixth point is accessible to all students. And the core idea behind this is that we focus a lot when we talk about accessibility on specific tools based elements. Videos have to have captions, images have to have alt text. Make sure you use the right fonts, make sure the backgrounds are changeable. And that's all incredibly important, which is why it still makes it in with the accessible standards. But there's, I think, incredibly broad, soft element for accessibility, which is about cognitive load when encountering things, which is about how easy it is to navigate within a virtual learning environment and how easy it is to absorb information. So our very first standard is consistency, clarity and transparency of key information that allows all students, no matter what background they come from or what the various individual challenges they're facing, to understand what the information about the module that relates to them is and easy to find it. Clear navigation was our second thing. There should be a clear learner journey. Activities needed to be signposted. And this is important for people with mobility difficulties, as well as people who have cognitive challenges, dyslexia, any number of different things. Clear navigation helps. We made assessment information. We said that we had to have transparent assessment and feedback information so that students would know from the outset how they'd be assessed, what those marking schemes would be and what planning they'd need to do over the course in order to be ready for that assessment. We required effective communication opportunities so that there was good communication between teaching staff and between students and that those methods of communication were clearly signposted right from the beginning of the course so that no one was confused about how to get in touch. We also required that there were engaging activities, including a blend of activities, including a range of different learning types. This is specifically alluding to the conversational framework which we used as the underpinning to our digital pedagogy training course and at least one interactive learning activity for each week of study. And then finally, accessible to all students to really enshrine that as one of the core elements of our baseline. Then in here, I'm going to move to our next Menti-Lita. Whenever you go through a process like this, you encounter a number of different types of reaction within your academic community. This is a small spectrum of some of the different types we encountered and so if you go to the Menti-Link you should be able to vote on the different types that you've encountered in your format. Yes, fonts, colours and contrast are essential Matthew. I'll talk a little bit about how we built that into our VLE. So we had early adopters, hesitant was, I see that's got the first response and vocally opposed, we had those in droves. Then there's always the early adopters no matter what approach you take and terrified in technophobes are a similar sort of group. There was a lot of fear that we encountered both in ourselves but also in the learning community about how scared they were about going online. Yes, you can collect more than one. Technophobes were an interesting group that would often fall into their hesitant and vocally opposed but if you provide the right training you can get them to move slightly over into the reluctant but willing to try category or the early adopters. We had a very similar sort of spread that this indicates. Lots of hesitancy and over the course of the journey we had people. Yes, Jezzering, we've counted all of them. We've brought some of them along and changed some of those minds. So I think we get a fairly good sense of what's going on there. This is not what I wanted to move on to. Let me just move. Yep, there we go. So here are some of the things that we put in place both to support accessibility and to support the redesign process. So the first thing is we had a standardised template built into our module design tools. So whatever academics built their courses and pushed them into our virtual learning environment that would stamp our pre-built template, which you'll see a little glimpse of in a moment. By having this standardised template it meant we had a clear and easy to navigate virtual learning environment and once students have become familiar with one course they automatically know where to find all of the key elements within their key course. We also made a number of... Yes, we did Neil, good point. We did construct exemplars based on the design principles and we built a transformation kit as well so that people could get a sense of those linked into the exemplars. Then we built in some core improvements within the VLE. So the timetable build events were shown in line with the learning activities. So we had students able to see where their timetable session would be but also what they needed to do to prepare. We also automatically populated teaching groups within the environment so that the academics could show and hide content based on what place within the learning that students were at and also allow different timetabling. We played a huge emphasis on contextualisation rather than just necessarily throwing up content to improve comprehension and accessibility. We also put some core plug-ins into our course of the VLE, sorry. We built in the census access plug-ins which meant that any resources that teachers uploaded into the courses could be converted into other formats so students could take a Word document and convert it into a audiobook or into a braille or translated into different languages or whatever format suited them. We also built in the ReciteMe plug-in that allowed users to customise the VLE interface so they could change all the fonts within the VLE. They could get it translated into different languages. They could use a ruler which showed them exactly where they were reading and they had built-in text-to-speech in all of the areas. Then finally we entered into a partnership with Verbit for captioning to ensure that all of our recorded video complied with our captioning policy. I'm going to show you a quick demonstration of some of the results of the course. This is a course in 2019-20 before the transformation process. As you can see, there was no standard way of displaying information or putting key things up. The teacher with the best possible intentions has thrown up everything. There's an assessment here, there's a syllabus, an announcements folder, they've put in a collaborate event and then they've got just core bits. The teacher can see has actually given a sense of what they're doing in the week and so that was a good start but you'll see how far it went. We've got this sort of dumping of readings without context within reading books which is very much the norm within each week. You can see here, this is the module in its new iteration. We applied a new theme to provide a nice sense of scannability across. We also applied these four key tiles that were in all courses. Key information always contained a welcome video or a welcome message from the teacher. It had the syllabus in a Moodle book to ensure it was readable across devices. You can see here is the census access link that was in all courses to allow students to change their documents into whatever format was accessible and then a communication forum underneath that. They've also gone in and created forums for various different groups. Then in the your studies tile, this always contained the key links to all of the different support avenues that we had available to students and I think behind that was that whenever a student entered into crisis that they didn't have the study support skills they needed or they were concerned about their well-being or they wanted to help with a career or they needed to access the library or they needed technical support. Chances are they would be in a page in the learning environment and so by having these in the same place in every course we had them enshrined within the accessibility of every single course. Students always knew they could find what they needed there at the moment they needed it without having to go browse the website for instance. We're applicable if courses had reading lists. We encourage them to have a comprehensive list within this tile as well as embedding them within the individual weeks and then we contained all the assessment information as well as the submission links all within this same tile again which was standard across all courses. Then within the weeks you can see the amount of rich contextualisation was available to them. You can see that they've got videos where there are pre-recorded lectures embedded in line with all the learning content. There's some learning outcomes and then obviously we had this format in all cases that there was a pre-sessional activities section which teachers were encouraged to detail what the students needed to do in order to be prepared for the live sessions. Then in the live sessions we had embedded links so you can see this year this one has changed over to be a room to be confirmed because we're going to go back to live teaching. You're getting a bunch of debugs because obviously as a CIS admin I'm getting the core information that I need to troubleshoot but this is the core bit that students would have. They'd have just a live session and a link to the live session as well as the timetabling information and that would appear week after week after week. Post session activities would always contain the opportunity for students to reflect on or submit areas where they would be able to work through things. In this particular instance the tutor has provided a forum to talk about creating a character and has also prompted them to add thoughts to their writer's notebooks. Then we've got a little additional resources section where they can put any additional resources so for instance to powerpoint to the presentation. This rolled out across all of our courses so you had a real return to that theme. I'm just going to zip back to our final slide. This is some of the results we had. Obviously it's quite early in the feedback cycle to actually have much hard data on the results so these are just a few little elements that we got in our feedbacks collected. We had student retention up overall which was during a pandemic so in a particularly difficult and challenging situation we actually increased our retention. We did a first term survey, the first term to assess how students were finding our approach to the pandemic response. 80% of students either agreed or strongly agreed that we chosen the appropriate approach. 8% had neither agreed nor disagreed and 8% disagreed obviously. The NSS results around the response to COVID we scored consistently above sector averages. We actually made gains relative to previous years in the NSS feedback surrounding feedback and academic support and among London universities amongst part-time students we ranked highest in the NSS for teaching and overall satisfaction. That's essentially our initial responses but we'll be continuing to monitor the data and try and form assessments in coming years because obviously the approach that we've taken in the pandemic has been rolled forward into previous years so even though we're returning into in-person teaching as much as possible we'll still have these rich resources and the focus on accessibility throughout all of our areas. Thanks, Ed. I think there might be some questions. Yeah, I was just saying thank you so much for that session there. I'm a little bit conscious of time but there are a few that I would really like to pick up. One of them I think was a bit more of a practical question and it was, is the tile format now fully accessible? It used to open as a one-section page. It's a one-section page. It works really nicely for us and we went through some testing with both our disability team and some of our advisers to make sure that it passed their accessibility checks before we implemented it. So it works really nicely for us. Anyone who knows Gavin Hendrick from Moodle Moot will know that he's not a massive fan of it because he doesn't believe it scans well. As a dyslexic myself, I disagree quite strongly with that position. For me, I can scan this text a lot easier although one of the things we focused on with ensuring its accessibility was making sure that titles on any of the individual tiles needed to stay short. The more words you put onto that tile, the less readable it becomes. So you can see we ensured that any of the subtitles which in this instance are quite small but often got quite lengthy. So the political and ethical ramifications of the European shift to this area, that was always put underneath the tiles when you opened them and you had short, easy readable headings. So, our disability team came forward and said, yes, we think that this is fine and we wouldn't have rolled forward if we didn't have that first go ahead on the tiles for that. OK, somebody has just said that it's definitely a Marmite issue. And then we just had a question from Rebecca but it leads on from a question or kind of a statement really from earlier on where the structure that you outlined, some colleagues at some institutions just didn't engage with it or didn't choose to use it and therefore the consistency wasn't there. So how did you manage that? How did you manage to get that consistency across the modules? So obviously there's always a degree of how much people engage and how much people don't. But one of the key successes we had that we believe came out of the templating was that once you gave someone that core structure with here's the tiles, here's the key information you fill in your bits there even the most opposed and most hesitant ended up following that sort of pattern despite themselves. They said I wouldn't possibly ever do that and then you went and looked at their courses and found that actually they have put in some learning objectives, they have given an instruction to their students and they have... We had people's courses because we employed quite a large team of digital education associates so they were supporting us in kind of going through and having a look and consulting with the academics and saying someone mentioned checklists earlier we had a checklist before we went live with courses that things were covered. So yeah. The other sneaky thing that we had with the templating was that we said okay well you need to stamp the template onto your course all your live sessions your teaching links won't get put in there as well because we used the module design tool to actually do the timetabling as well so they got them stamped on their courses automatically in order to have the live sessions and largely I think they found again there was a lot of support and a lot of consultation going on all the time but they found themselves going it's actually easier to follow the template and to tear it all down and start again. Okay. Yeah I can see. I can see how having those things cross-linked together would have ensured that. I am aware that we are a little bit over and I'm just going to do one final question and remember that you can engage with people in our Discord channel to be able to pick up these conversations afterwards. So this comes from Kat and it did any of the templates for any of the modules of course is not really work or was everything pretty much covered or did anything have to be made for spoke? I mean this rough template more or less more or less worked for basically everything just realised some screen still shit but and like it was an open enough format for people to basically build whatever they wanted to have a spoke format. We weren't trying to railroad people into one way of doing things it was just a rough structure in which they could play I guess the analogy I'd like to use is that if you're playing jazz you need to know the notes that work in order to change them and then change them for a reason. By having this rough structure teachers were able to build their more bespoke areas in line. Obviously again a big part of it was we had a little army of digital education associates who we hired to go in and support and assist with things. So when things needed to be changed to suit particular teaching and patterns they were able to help with the changes as needed. I hope that answers your question Kat, that was a great question. I think that brings us to the end of this session so I don't know if you'd like to join me in saying thank you ever so much to Zad and Adele for that. That was absolutely brilliant. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the 2021 annual conference but once again Zad and Adele for so much for delivering this session today. Thank you. Thanks Emma Jane and thanks everyone for joining us today.