 I'm John Wilson. I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally, we prefer to work with what we feel is ethical industries. Obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare. We feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating. They're obviously cultivating collaborations of their active learning community somewhere else. So I think given time that our other two presenters are here, we'll get going. Welcome to this session. Again, I've said if you are at the back and you feel like moving forward, that's totally acceptable. But yes, stay at the back, whatever. So without further ado, I'm going to let our first speaker, Anders Crohn, give us his presentation on designing for participation. Over to you. Thank you so much. Can everyone hear me? Hello, I'm Anders. I'm co-founder of the London-based education startup called Aula. So what we do at Aula is we enable educators and institutions to actively engage students. We use everything the world has learned about conversational technologies from things such as Facebook Messenger, Slack and WeChat, as well as everything we've learned about pedagogy and design science to basically change the way we think about co-infrastructure in education. So what we build is a communication platform for education. I'll get to that in just a bit. But the focus of my talk is going to be on how can we learn from the way we design buildings how to design better software. So I'll walk you through a bit of sort of high-level architectural theory, and then we'll move into software design. And so if we start with the buildings, if my clicker works, there you go. So this quote I really like, this is from an architect called Peter Suntor, and basically what he says is, architectures focus is on the dialogue with the issues of our time. So basically one would assume that if you look at a building, you can infer from that building what the issues that building is trying to resolve are. And so what I've done is I've brought with me two images from two of our partner institutions. One is from Coventry University and one is from Ravensworn University. And if we start with Coventry University, so it's a bit hard to see from this image, but this is basically a sort of seminar room slash lecture theatre. It is a circle, so the academic will be in here in the middle. And what you'll probably know from this image is that it's actually quite radically changing the way that people perceive the act of sort of giving a lecture or the act of teaching, because from an architectural perspective, the students are much closer to the educator. Given the fact that the academic can sort of turn around and draw in students from around the room, it's much easier for the academic to engage the students in debates, in discussions, and it significantly changes the way that academics think about their teaching, as well as the way the students think about engaging with each other. So that's one example of architectural intent. Then if we go to Ravensworn, so this is an image from Ravensworn. Ravensworn is an open plan building in London. And every time I walk around Ravensworn, I think it's quite sort of daunting how much thought has been put into what this building means for learning. It's collaborative, it's open planned. You can be in one corner of the building and do sound design, and then you can sort of see people doing architecture in the other corner of the building. Another thing that's pretty clear about this building is that students are meant to engage with each other. And the spaces are specifically designed for specific subjects, in this case fashion, which again changes the way that people perceive that learning space. And really puts forward one of Ravensworn's values, which is to be industry focused. So these are two great examples of this thing I mentioned before, which is that from these buildings we should be able to infer what is it that the architect and the institutions have tried to solve. What is the issue that the buildings are addressing? And for me it's pretty clear that the problems that the architects have tried to solve on engagements around bringing the students closer to the academic. Actually when I started travelling around the UK quite a bit over the last year visiting different universities and the UK universities have spent three billion pounds on physical learning estates in 2017. So we should be able to pretty clearly understand what is the issue that UK universities are trying to solve is if we believe Peter Suntor is right that you can actually infer from buildings the issues of our time. So let's try to think about what would these three billion pounds have been put into. For me the answer is increasingly clear and I think we can find it in the UK Engagement Survey from 2017 from the AGA. But if you ask students about their learning experiences the things that consistently they are dissatisfied with or the reasons that they drop out or the reasons that they don't engage they relate to learning with other staff-student partnerships interacting with staff. And universities know this and universities put that into their building budgets and in many cases that's several hundreds of millions of pounds that goes into solving these problems. But the thing is that it's actually this isn't quite stark contrast to the average higher education learners digital student experience. So I really like this blog post from Sean Michael Morris who's at Middlebury University in the US which is called Being Bags in the LMS. And basically what he's saying is that the LMS is not a place you want to hang out. It's not a place you want to spend time. It's not a place you want to interact with others. It is not built for bringing students closer to each other nor built for bringing students closer to the academic. And so if you think about that for a minute, if you think about the trends that are happening in education more commuter students, more online learners, more hybrid teaching, more blended learning it's quite interesting that the universities have put three billion pounds into well not necessarily three billion pounds but a large proportion of three billion pounds into making their physical states more interactive when the digital learning experience of students for most of the universities I visit is basically a file repository. It's not uncommon for me to meet a Vice Chancellor who says yes we've invested 300 million pounds in getting rid of lecture theaters or in group work or in industry focused teaching or in collaboration and then we teach 18,000 students from PowerPoint slides that are uploaded in like a dot box with 2,000 buttons. And so this is a conclusion from the Edgycalls and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation report on next generation digital learning environments which basically says the LMS has been highly successful in enabling the administration of learning but less so in enabling learning itself. And I think it's for the audience at the sort of conference that's here today that might be sort of quite obvious but it's definitely not obvious in the way that universities allocate funds to the issues that their buildings are trying to resolve. So the question we ask ourselves at Algarh is can we design online learning spaces for engagement? And in order to do that I think the first place to go is the places online where people engage the most. So how many people are familiar with Slack? Just a quick reference. Quite a good proportion. How many people are familiar with Facebook Messenger? Decent proportion. So basically Slack is a team communication platform for companies and Facebook Messenger is sort of a social chat-based application for the world. And so Slack has about 8 million users. It was released in 2013 which is quite, it's probably one of the fastest growing enterprise companies in history. Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion daily users. But that's not really what's interesting about these chat-based applications. What's interesting is the lines that are below that. These 8 million daily users on Slack, they spend an average of 320 minutes per day, which is absolutely insane for enterprise software. It's like the world has never really seen anything like that before. 200,000 developers are building applications for Slack. And you see sort of the same thing with Facebook Messenger. 17 billion photos shared per month. It's just like these numbers are absolutely mind-boggling. It's basically changing the interface by which students engage, sorry, not students, humans engage with technology. It's more than 10 photos per user on Facebook Messenger per month. And it's a significant proportion of the humans on planet Earth. It just sounds like a bit crazy. And there are 300,000 bots that have already been developed for Facebook Messenger. So we are starting to know how to engage people online. And so why can we not use these sort of lessons in technologies in education? Why can we not use Slack or Facebook Messenger? And I think there's been a few examples at this conference that you can actually do that, and some people have done that quite successfully. But similar to how the learning management system was not really designed for engaging people online, these chat-based applications like Slack were not really sort of designed for education. You can get a few academics to teach their students with great results on Slack, which is fantastic, and I think we should get a lot more of that. But just imagine you're running a university with 20,000 students, the summer is coming close, and you have to roll over 5,000 courses with content pinned to channels. It just doesn't really make sense at institutional scale. So what we've done at ALLA is trying to say, what can we learn from Slack, what can we learn from Facebook Messenger, what can we learn from WeChat, and how can we apply that to help educational institutions solve the problems that they also tried to solve with their buildings? And so I'm not going into too much detail about these sort of interfaces. It's quite simple. ALLA consists of spaces, which is for a module or for a program. In that space you have a feed, which is where it's sort of the beating heart of the class. Educators can make announcements, students can have discussions, a bit similar to what you would know from Facebook group or Slack team. There's material, which is where the academic would set up the content of the class. And then there's direct messages, which is for real-time private communication. So from our pilot we see close to 100% reduction in email communication between students and academics. And we see a significant sort of take-off in the organic student engagement inside of these spaces. And the same thing on mobile, as you would sort of expect. You swipe right, you have feed, you have material, you can scroll in your feed. So basically to see like has there been an announcement, has there been a discussion. And people will use these as online learning communities for students. You swipe left, you have your direct messages for group work, instead of sending emails to your academics or for the academics to be able to easily get in touch with students. So it's very hard for people to understand a product just from seeing it on a screen like this. But if there's one thing to remember from what I just showed you is this law. It's one of my favorite laws. It's from a person named Mada. He used to be a professor at MIT. And this is his 10th law of simplicity, where she says it's a law that encompasses all other laws of simplicity. And what it says is simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. So what does that mean? Well, one great example of this is this thing called the iPhone. It's pretty obvious one would think that phones need keyboards. Because you need to be able to type in letters and numbers and other things. But now we know that that's not really what makes phones meaningful. Because it's the interactions between human beings that makes this thing called the iPhone meaningful. So that's a great example of understanding how to make something extremely simple in order to make the product more meaningful. And that's essentially what we've tried to do with Aula. That's what Slack has tried to do with chat-based communication in the workplace. That's what WeChat is done for China. That's what Facebook Messenger has done for people all across the world. And that's the power of these conversational technologies. And you'll see that that actually leads to quite radical implications. If you remove all the obvious things from a learning management system, you build integrations to add things on top and you just focus on the meaningful things, which for us is the conversations. Then you actually end up with something that seems quite radically different. It also has similar to the rooms I showed you from Ravensbourne and Coventry. It has radical implications for the way that people perceive teaching and learning. So if we go back to Ravensbourne, what you will see is that actually the way that Aula has designed is not that different from the intent of the architects at Coventry and Ravensbourne. It's an open plan. You can get in touch with all the students. You never more than one click away from another student. It's built for collaboration. It's built for actively engaging students. And that changes the way that the institution operates. So Ravensbourne is rolling out Aula to older students now. They have about 2,500 students. So these are the results from the pilot that ran this year. And I think particularly the staff in the internal survey in the top left corner is quite telling, which is that 80% of students say that Aula makes them feel part of a community of staff and students. So these are residential students, community students in London, who actually think that the institution has enabled them to create communities online, which we know from research has quite significant implications for student retention and satisfaction. And the other side of that is the course leaders, so that Aula has made it easier for them to connect with students and to encourage them to engage with the content of the course. Which is absolutely essential for the institution in order to create a more distributed digital campus, if you will. And so these are obviously the survey stats, so to make things a bit more legit, I just took a screenshot from the analytics engine this morning. So Ravensbourne has 2,500 students. 300 students have already started their course. And so over the last week, I think the things that are noteworthy are, one is that we continue to see the high adoption of messages, so about 200 messages were sent, primarily between students and educators, meaning no emails. There were 128 posts that across the students, 80 new comments and quite a few reactions. So actually, for an institution that is moving away from an LMS that was primarily used for content, this is a radically different experience for those students who are having their first week at university. And on top of all these engagement comes the engagements with YouTube, with tablet and other integrations that are used on the platform. Similarly, if you look at the bottom graph, what you'll see is that the top one is mobile adoption or mobile unique sessions, the bottom one is web sessions. Yesterday, close to 100% of students at Ravensbourne used a mobile app. Half of them used desktop applications. And I think these are some of the differences that we're starting to see when people start to focus their infrastructure on conversations rather than on content. So can we design online learning spaces for engagement? We think yes. Do we have the complete answer? Probably not, but we are almost 100% sure that the answer is to be found somewhere in between conversational technology and everything we know about pedagogy. I think we have a few questions. You've got some questions coming in. I can read it loud if that. What are the main differences between this and Microsoft Teams? They appear to look quite similar. What additional features are there? Good question. So the biggest difference between Aula and Microsoft Teams, I would say it's around the idea that Aula actually replaces the learning management system. So when we work with an institution, we do it in multiple phases and the LMS will actually be phased out. So when we set out to build Aula, we thought, okay, we can maybe integrate this in cameras, a detail of a blackboard, but we saw a significant difference in engagement spots between those spaces where the educator had moved the LMS to the background and the ones where we tried to integrate Aula inside the LMS. So the biggest difference between Aula and Microsoft Teams is that we focused on replacing the LMS. Could Microsoft do the same thing? Potentially. But I think the thing with Microsoft Teams is that it was primarily built for team communications. So it has a lot of the same problems that something like Slack has when it gets to institutional scale. It's not built for learning analytics. It's not that Microsoft thought, okay, we need to make our turn it in integration very, very good when we do this thing. We need to make our lecture recording integration very, very good when we do this thing. And maybe they will get there, but that's definitely not the case right now. I think another thing that we've realized is this is what we do. We focused just on this. So when you work with Aula, there's a product and there's a plan. We are rolling this out, we have an implementation team and that implementation team is focused on enabling institutions to roll Aula out at full scale. And that's not really how it works with the sort of Microsoft Teams. So I think from what we can see, and I sort of hope we get Microsoft Teams as a sort of bigger competitor because that sort of tells the world that we are more, it's more than move away from the LMS that we are sort of focusing on, at least from the conversations we have with universities currently. Any other questions? Just following, can I just check? Just make one last check. Do we have Chris, Nick or Valerie here? Yeah, you are here. Okay, right, okay, I just wasn't sure if you were here or not. So thank you very much, Anders. Thank you. Rich Goodman, and he's going to talk about it's a marathon, not a sprint, and moving to opt out in lecture capture. Okay, thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone, stragglers, still staying on. Good to see you all. So I'm Rich Goodman, learning technology team manager at Loughborough University, and I'm going to tell you about our lecture capture journey and kind of go through the history of lecture capture at Loughborough, tell you where we came from, where we got to, and where we are today a few bits and pieces of graphs and statistics thrown in just for good measure, because we will have a few graphs. So it's a marathon, not a sprint, till somebody's taken that out of PC, so I'll use that instead, except for the bit when you're asked to run the last 385 yards when you've already run 26 miles. So this will basically be the theme of this talk. So I'll tell you about our journey of lecture capture and how we've done loads of really good stuff, and then last summer in three months we unload more stuff, and I'll tell you all about that as we go along. So a little bit about the Loughborough way, we have a mix of homegrown stuff, open source systems, commercial off the shelf systems, we have a kind of horses for courses approach, so we'll do various different things in different ways. We had our first VLE in 1998, that's where I come in. I was employed on an 18 month contract to come in, deliver a VLE and then go away again. Obviously that didn't quite work out, because I'm still here. We moved to Moodle in 2007-08, that was quite a brave decision I think at the time, because not many people were going in that direction, there was still a lot of web CT and blackboard traffic around at the time, and when we announced this decision then it raised a few eyebrows, but we did that successful transition, and then we keep rolling with Moodle every year, so you can see our upgrade path there, we've just gone to Moodle 3.4 this summer, we have an annual upgrade project where we move things along. So lecture capture, back in summer 2009, just before I came to Algin Manchester in summer 2009, we were tasked with trialling a lecture capture solution with a new history degree program, history of history at Loughborough in 1991, which was the year before I started as a student, we closed down our history department, and then in 2009 we brought it back again. As with all these things, they go in waves and cycles. So what we were asked to do is to look at a couple of things, a system called Opencast Matterhorn as part of the Steeple BR project, which was a national project, and we were also asked to look at a commercial lecture capture product. And so we selected one and began our trial. We had a few scheduled lectures captured every week, with two members of academic staff who were working on the new history program, one capture appliance put in one room on the campus, and all the sessions were automatically scheduled. Now this was nearly 10 years ago now when we made this decision, but that served us well. That's something we've used ever since. So essentially as a member of staff delivering lectures on campus, all you have to do is walk into the lecture room, deliver the lecture, go away again, and everything happens automatically in the background. And I'll come back to that again in a moment. We also have lots of ad hoc sessions captured in this first year, so people are very interested in trying out this technology. And as word spread, various things were happening, and the staff were getting involved. So there's a screenshot there of one of the first sessions we ever captured with Marcus, our history academic. And even after only a few weeks, he went for a flipped classroom approach. So he came in with various changes of clothes and pre-recorded a whole series of lectures. So he could use those times for seminars and tutorials and something much more interactive with the students. So the demand grew as the word was spreading about this project. We got a second capture appliance added in semester two, so we now had two rooms with this technology in. And the word's portable capture system sound very grandiose for basically what was a laptop in a bag. But at that time we had a MacBook Pro which we could travel around campus and capture sessions in other rooms. And this proved to be very popular. So we had a grand total of 74 sessions captured in that very first year. And we captured more of that in our first hour of the last academic year. So the next season, next year, we saw increased use from academic staff. So we've gone up to 435 sessions and we start to see the first non-academic use cases. And this has been another thing about building the system at Loughborough. It's not just for captures of lectures or teaching events. It's been for captures of lots of other things and actually more examples in a moment. Those of you who remember the 2010 World Cup might remember the slightly disastrous Adidas Jabbalani ball which was partly developed at Loughborough. So we were very proud of it before the tournament started but after the tournament it was not so good. But anyway, we had a public lecture on that and that was one of our most popular sessions during that year. The service was branded as review and you can see our little logo on the bottom left hand side. And that was a decision that we made in case we ever decided to change our mind on what we were using. And staff could opt in to have sessions recorded. So they could tick a little box on the timetable and this would generate an email to one of our teams who could then go and schedule the sessions on the system. And this works up to a point until you get so far. And we had also the use of WolfVision desktop visualisers just like the one you can see up on the stage here. So for example our materials engineering department essentially used it as a kind of on stage microscope so you could examine and look at things under that. So whatever is presented on the screen either the visualiser or the PC was being captured and they found that really useful in their courses. We've on another year and we've now got seven capture appliances so seven rooms and still our portable devices going around. And again, further non-academic use cases the capture of sessions for prospective students pre-arrival students and the things they can expect from Loughborough little bits of video touring around the campus so they get a feel about our largest state and how they can find their way around and get from the station and all these kind of things how to navigate around to get from various places. Very useful and the students found that really helpful. We also started to see the capture of student presentations for marking and also for the students to reflect on their own performance in presentations. And again a few more sessions captured so we're up to 629. We've on another year we renewed our license for the system with seven hours to spare for the end of the year that was a very hair-raising day that one but we eventually managed to convince enough people that this was worth doing and at this stage we've now got around 2,000 captures around 4,000 hours of content available and a quote here which comes from one of our distance learning courses and Cheryl's in the room here quotes from her students video tutorials are excellent they allow distance learning students to be in the classroom from afar and we found this with all of our things that on-campus students don't really worry about having video of a presenter but the distance learning students really love seeing the person that's teaching because they're never going to get to meet them but they feel a bit more connected by actually seeing them up on the screen. And we find here that students are now using lecture capture as a criterion when they're choosing their modules so like most places we have optional modules that you can choose in later years and we find that students are actually using this as an option back in 2012-13 and here's another example of things being captured by the visualiser so this is some engineering mathematics one of our professors Carol was using this in her lecture and again this is really popular this is one way of capturing things that you don't easily get on computers. We'd captured almost a thousand sessions this year and had our first lecture conference at Loughborough one or two of you may have been at that one and we move on again and usage of the system is doubling the take-up has been very much driven by the student voice so we've got the students experiencing this system on some modules and really wanting to have it on more and more modules so they're the ones that are driving the demand. We had to have additional processing power to ensure the sessions were turning round in a decent amount of time and we created our first lecture capture working group to develop our institutional strategy and we start to see it used for elite athletes one thing you may know about Loughborough is that we're known quite a lot for sport we've been winning the box championships since almost the day I was born so it's something that somebody always knows but obviously we have a lot of elite athletes go off away on training camps and away from the university for extended periods of time and lecture capture is obviously a great way for them to catch up with things that they're missing either live streaming while they're away if they've got time or later on that day or that week or when they get back so they don't have to fall too far behind with their studies We commissioned a lecture capture study and this was actually cited in a presentation I was at the other day and had a second lecture capture conference at Loughborough looking all around the evidence for lecture capture that hashtag there if you search for that on Twitter you'll find some of the things captured on that day I'm going to go on up to 3,000 sessions and launch our very first lecture capture policy which was reasonably nicely worded strongly encourages the use of recording of lectures with review in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching for the benefit of campus-based students and distance learners will not be used by the university to replace student contact time for campus-based students so a clear position set out and strongly encouraged staff to do this and again we're rolling out some new rooms on campus and we get some additional bits and pieces in and a classic lecture of theatre view so what does a sleepy midlands market town do launch a university in London of course you do Loughborough University in London was launched in 2015 so we're based on the Olympic Park in the old broadcast centre for those of you who have been around the Olympic Park now this is a completely new school so nothing has existed so there's no preconceptions, no other ideas and they had their idea that all lectures and associated teaching sessions were appropriate would be captured electronically using a review so they were the first school to basically say right we're having an opt-out policy we're going to capture everything unless there's a valid reason why you wouldn't want to do that we also opened our own branch of IKEA or the West Park Teaching Hub as it's properly known so we've now got 40 capture devices in rooms another 75 classroom capture installations so covering probably around 90% of the main teaching rooms across campus at this stage and then we move on to another year we migrated the system we were using we captured nearly 7,000 sessions in that year and this is where the game changes so we launched a new digital strategy for teaching and learning with various themes themes for students to provide outstanding learning opportunities supported appropriately through the use of technology and personal support to give staff a good understanding of that technology the thing that underpins and supports the student experience to have this exceptional accessible and dynamic learning environment to inspire outstanding participation and innovation so lots of nice words there but what does that actually mean on the ground I'll break there and just have a look so here's our first graph so this was how we were dwindling along nicely growing year on year student voice was driving this take up so this was purely on an opt-in basis so this is to the end of summer 2017 and then this digital strategy loaches and one of the first projects was a review of our requirements for teaching event capture so again changing the language around this we've heard a lot of talk about this at the conference around not trying to use the word lecture capture as much and then I'm going to use it in the next sentence where we selected a new lecture capture platform after this review of the requirements and the idea of this project which we did across three months last summer which is why I looked absolutely knackered this time last year at Alt we equipped all of our rooms across campus with identical lecture capture devices we launched our new teaching event capture policy and if you google that phrase you'll find that freely available on the web so you can have a look at it and see the wording and things that we've used so that allows for the automated recording of audio and material presented on screens so is that PowerPoint presentation or output from the visualizer or whatever else you like with the option to opt out so we're not recording video by default but you can opt in to have that recorded in a room where that's available so we didn't roll out additional video cameras across the rooms around campus as that was felt to be a barrier for people to take it up so that's an opt in system if you want video of you recorded and it's all automated through our timetabling system so if you go to the timetabling system you can opt out of publishing some of the lectures or you can opt out of recording some of the lectures and recording can be paused in the room and we've got these visual lights on all of the lecterns so you can see that recording is happening and if you give that a tap you can then pause and then tap it again and you can start up again and that's one of the things that really got staff encouraged by this that you had this visual thing that's actually going on you can see something's definitely happening and they were really happy about this so all of this is automated so again you walk in, do your job walk out again and it all happens automatically on to the VLE 24 hours after the end of the teaching event so if you finish teaching at 4 o'clock today at 4 o'clock tomorrow it will be automatically published and again you can change that so it's republished at the end of the teaching session so the end of the first semester in December for example or you can change the delay slightly if it's on a Friday then you get 72 hours so you get the corresponding time on a Monday if you want to go in and make any changes in edits and the vast majority of staff don't do that but they have that option if they want to so we launched our new system on the first day of term of the last academic year the last installation of these systems was completed the previous night we had all these devices online and then we made more recordings in the first month than in all of the previous year after our first term we had recorded the most sessions session hours of all the customers of the platform that we're using and we've delivered over 220,000 hours of recorded material to students and the student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive students love it and all the evidence that you've seen and the presentations you've seen this week say the same kind of thing we love it, I love it for a vision it allows me to go through the lectures at my own pace I can repeat things as often as I like it's brilliant staff feedback has also been good students who are absent for legitimate reasons can have a way of catching up and I know which parts of the lecture the students found hard to understand and were in need to improve things next time that's quite a nice piece of feedback and it's even better when it comes to your vice chancellor who happens to teach on some modules and sends that round to all staff as a way of promoting the system so there's our graph again and now we add in the next year where we move to our new system and it absolutely smashes everything else to pieces so yeah we've recorded huge numbers of sessions this year and the vast majority of pings have been kept on the system so there's only a very small percentage of things that have opted out for various reasons and there's our usage graph which I mentioned earlier on can anybody spot with the exam settings on these pretty obvious so just before just after Christmas and over the new year period and then just in the last few weeks of May and June or again that gives a pretty obvious direction of the way that students are using the system and how much they benefit so even it doesn't look like much is happening for a little while but then as soon as it comes to the period where they really need it then they really, really are using it so there we go a marathon and a sprint all at the same time Thanks for your insights The opt-out rate is around 5% I think of all sessions so yeah very few number of people have opted out there's a few kind of things where you've got a guest lecturer coming in and they haven't got permission to share whatever it is so it's a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and they haven't got permission to share whatever it is they're sharing with the class so they're opting out for that and there's one or two people who are still not convinced of the benefits of the system so they've also opted out but when you're asked to opt out you're asked to give a reason and that reason is recorded and we haven't had a chance to analyse all of that yet to see all the various reasons that people have opted out but yeah that's one of the main things and there's other things Just wanted to ask, did you have a little resistance to putting in how did you get it through? Yes and no we got it we got it done really by negotiating and getting everybody involved and as I think Melissa was mentioning on Tuesday afternoon getting everyone around the table including the unions getting people to buy into that and to find out what it's all about why we're doing it what the usage is going to be like and those kind of things so yeah it was about getting conversation getting everybody around the table and getting consensus on what we were doing and why we were doing it and the reasons we were doing it and again the students really wanting that system in place Thank you very much and we'll move on to our final presentation for the day cultivating collaboration developing an active learner community in nursing and we'll just give our speakers a couple of seconds to set up those slides I know this is the last presentation of the conference in this room as well so let's try and keep the energy up in fact I'm trying to be Tom now let's all sway or maybe not Okay so my name is Chris Melia and I'm a learning technologist at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and I'm joined by my colleague Nick if you want to introduce yourself Nick Bohannon, it's nice to meet you all I'm a senior lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Central Lancashire Okay and we're here today to share our experiences really developing online communities within the School of Nursing so the first thing that we really did when we sat down and looked for a way forward for Nick's pre-reg cohort was to really look at some of the considerations that you need to look at when developing an online community and the immediate ones that jumped out was really understanding learners' needs and putting that first how do they engage with the learning what works for them and also developing personal connections as well not just the students and the peers but working with the academic team and how everybody can support each other and you'll see other things on there as well identifying community leaders sub-communities that branch out from that initial one and generally at UCLan most online communities fell into one of two categories so we'd either be using our VLE or social media now each of those came with their own sort of drawbacks the challenge really was finding a feature within the VLE that would allow us to create an interactive environment that students could access through mobile devices and really met their needs in terms of an interactive platform the social media challenge really was the fact that there were a number of Facebook groups set up across the courses at different levels modular level or course level and nobody quite knew who had access to them who was administering them what was being shared on there so it was really an unknown entity in that respect so it's clear that we needed another way forward something that could help us provider private and safe environment for the students to actually collaborate with them and the solution came in the form of Microsoft Teams which is very it's a good point on the last presentation obviously the one before the last one we had the guy from the VLE alternative company and the questions about Microsoft Teams the solution was was Microsoft Teams we adopted Office 365 and launched probably about four or five years ago and we'd already explored the use of OneDrive for cloud storage and Microsoft Teams was still something that was in its infancy as far as we were concerned we didn't know that it was really being used in higher education at all because we were talking about a year ago just over a year ago now and looking initially there was a number of features which drew us to it namely the fact that it really presented a social media feel so it was something that resembled a lot of what the different social media platforms had that the students were already using so whether it was Facebook or Twitter there was something about that feel also the app integration so a lot of the other apps within Office 365 the OneDrive capabilities OneNote, Classno, Booking, Portfolio system all of that could be integrated within Teams which was something that was core additionally the fact that you could actually core off the documents and collaborate with other environments was really really good moving on to the next case study now So this is a case study based around what we do with the mental health nursing students to provide some context for that the nursing intakes that we have at UCLan are round about 400 450 students at a time now of those only about 80 students would be mental health nursing students but they all start at the same time and they all do their first year together doing generic studies So we had a situation where we had 80 students in a bigger pool of 450 and we desperately wanted to keep their sense of identity you can imagine a situation you come to learn something and you arrive and you find that actually for the first year you're going to spend quite a lot of your time not learning what you thought you wanted to learn learning the basics of a number of other things So we wanted to build this identity in our students we wanted to keep that professional identity there your mental health nursing what you will be and we had I guess an ongoing issue with Facebook in as much as we don't we struggle with some of our students around what they post on Facebook we have to maintain a sense of professional identity what we have is a situation where our students were not so clear about the way that their social media profile impacted on their professional image and their professional profile for want of a better word So an example of that was one of our students went off sick for a couple of weeks and that's a big deal for a nursing programme missing two weeks is a big deal for us but what she did was she posted her holiday snaps while she was away for the two weeks when she was off sick I guess anybody who's been involved in health care you can do get these things happen Now of course it's sitting on Facebook now we didn't look on Facebook but we've got 500 students in this cohort and they're looking on Facebook so they sent it to someone who sent it to someone who sent it to someone who sent it to us so now we've got her holiday snaps but she was off sick and she sent her in and said look what's happening and she said how dare you dig around in my private Facebook and this was the learning point for her and it was the learning point that we could have done with getting to without the pain actually if you stick stuff on Facebook it is no longer private and that's the message that we do struggle with with our students so we hoped that by providing now Microsoft teams arrangement which provided social media functionality provided high levels of connectivity high levels of discussion but it was safe and protected because it wasn't public we hoped we might be able to get to the learning point without the pain that was what we were hoping for also there is something to be said for the flexibility of academics academics need to work in a different way now we know that we have different relationships with students we have different ways of communicating with students and we have to develop different ways of engaging with our technology that can support what goes on so we needed to do that we've got academics who embrace technology we've got academics who resist technology we've got academics who ignore it and they just go away if I open my eyes again it will be gone we've got them on so Microsoft teams as a pilot to negate some of those drivers and that was what we ended up with there's lots of nice things about it we set one up and it was called mental health matters because mental health matters and that was the out-thinking behind it channels we went for because of course in Microsoft teams you can create channels we went for whatever you want a channel on nutrition and mental health we set up a channel on nutrition and mental health you want one on sexuality and mental health, we'll put one in there you want one on law or police and mental health we'll have it so it was like the Moroccan souk approach to channels on teams it was just loads of them and we thought we'd get lots of bars lots of interest, lots of ownership lots of take up and the teams environment which is familiar as Chris has said it's got all of the likes and responses and things like that so, well the benefits that we were hoping for was that, as I say, we'd get this vibrant community we'd get lecturers that were very responsive to student questions and indeed it did happen like that we ended up with a very vibrant community lots and lots of input from students and staff and we did get this safe environment where disagreement and debate could take place online safely and we did set up an editorial panel as well, which was made up of students and Accident and Chris and it went according to our plan but what did we learn well, the Moroccan souk approach to Microsoft teams doesn't work we know that now it was quite interesting to hear someone earlier this morning saying never talk about what didn't work well, we will talk about what didn't work it was channel overload although everybody posted everything and it was vibrant and alive and exciting you couldn't find anything so it was not the best it could be hard to find student wise they got involved very quickly but actually with hindsight we should have started it long before they even started on the programme we should actually have started it so that they could set up friendships relationships, communicate with their lecturers before they started their programme that would be the best time to get this going we got the editorial panel up and running it was vibrant, it was full of posts and then we broke it what we did was we said, you know what we should rationalise all of these channels so we lined them up a typical academic kind of thing lined them up with the modules that they were studying we lined the channels up with the modules because it was tidy and it looked good and the students just dropped it and walked away they just didn't want that their view of this was not that they wanted a study aid what they wanted was a discovery orientated discussion tool that was exciting to use and interesting and stimulating we should not have aligned it to the modules we were able to set tasks and things through teams which was great we got lots of encouragement and lots of participation maybe the best thing was though academics spoke to each other in teams or on teams which meant students started to get the idea about talking to each other we started to pick up on this idea about disagreeing online without becoming a keyboard warrior without flaming each other we started to get this idea that there could be discussion and disagreement but you can do it professionally and next we're going to do a trial from next week with the MSc students that's where we're going next so the second case to the example that I like to share with you is actually a completely different scenario because this was it was actually with Valerie Dineal who can't be with us today for this presentation she's a child nurse in Letra and her situation was she had a quite a small group of students third year pre-reg students and generally I think the group was about 12 in number the idea is she needed a platform to enable group supervision off site so through an online platform and facilitate a community with quite a diverse range of learners to have a space really to share content and share conversation and really develop their group skills and once again the VLE capability really wasn't meeting that need of the group now that module ran for quite a short amount of time I think it was only a few months but the feedback that came from the back end of it was fantastic so generally I think we got 12 responses a single student in that group responded with positive feedback the only negative was that a number of them struggled to enable the notifications when they were following natural channels within the team site so that was something that we could address by having a more well a stronger induction session with them in terms of the feature set that the platform had to offer but generally the positives were around developing that community in the group of students having access to the content outside of the on-site time and again the group supervision which they could do through the video conferencing features so really really positive feedback and you've got the word cloud there as well some things that ring through supervision, support, group really strong messages so we'd like to round the session off really just looking at some of our recommendations of how we can make something and how everybody can make something like this a bit more successful in terms of an active learner community my point out initially is regular interaction it's having that active presence on the community as an academic team and just acknowledging course and just showing that you're there and you're supporting it as much as you can and you need to get the whole academic team involved it was very much around a posting, modelling what we wanted, supporting students liking things and creating debate if you're seen as passive in this then very quickly people just get turned off by it and they don't want to do it and I don't blame them, I wouldn't want to either you have to make it what it is rather than hoping that if you put it there someone will use it okay and even though primarily the platform or something to be used outside of the classroom there is no reason why it couldn't have been brought into the classroom to actually maybe use some group activities on the back of those discussions that have occurred outside of the standard learning environment if you will so that's something that we're going to try and use going forward and you've got to manage learner expectations really well because when you've got something that's on line 24-7 they kind of think that you're on line 24-7 too and actually sometimes we were, some of us go to bed at half past 3-4 o'clock in the morning and other people would get up at 4.30 5 o'clock in the morning and things were covered but you can't go into it with that expectation so we had to sort of manage that quite quite well really but it worked and student feedback was crucial as well as Nick's already mentioned we did set up an editorial panel so we're actually able to shape that experience and make it exactly what the learners wanted into be so that they could actually get the most out of it and then the final point which is what the whole conference is about and what a good thing to do and it starts with the relationship for us it started with the relationship between learning technologist and academic and we worked together and it wasn't about this is a product we can use it was about we want to work together we want to try to make this thing work well what have we got and then we pick teams Absolutely and Nick approached me with the challenge first and then we assessed really what the best solution would be Thank you very much That's all from us If you want to connect with us in any way we've got contact details on screen and open to any questions Thank you It was great and thank you for sharing as much as what didn't work very well So we've got a couple of questions I'll take some from the audience if they are but we have a couple of questions from the app so someone's asking can you elaborate on the types of tasks you set through teams and is it possible to add people external to your organisation to the teams guest speakers, external verifiers Right I will take the external one first so yes absolutely it is we can now add anybody to a Microsoft Teams area regardless of the email address and that's opened up over time over the last 12 months so initially it was only other institutions or partner colleges etc but now any email address can actually be added in as a guest role which you can actually shape exactly within the structure of the teams so that's definitely something you can do In terms of the tasks Some of them were very simple tasks because there's this polling thing that you can do in teams which is a lot of fun, it's called polling and you can just create polls and students can create polls, everybody can so some of it was stuff like that you know check the poll that's going to come out on Friday and answer it and that's enough but it just made people it's a big deal for some people to post something online and I know it sounds kind of weird but it is to the converted it's nothing but to some people it's huge I think some of the other tasks as well in the other case study example in Childness and the Valerie set were around accessing media content and sharing reflections around views on what they've actually watched and I know that in your area as well you were sharing a lot of things that were going on in the media and it was again reflection and discussion around those topics that was occurring on the platform I just want to say how you try the teams in purely online courses I just think that there are a couple of examples and it's something that we're not again we're still pretty much just outside of the pilot phase we've run the pilot for about a year and there are a couple of examples where it has been used in online cases but it's something that we're trying to work out how to embed it and actually bring it in line with our daily and on some kind of integration because we've integrated some of the other applications like one that costs no but for example within our VLE and the teams integration is something we're working on so I think once we've got to that point it's something that we can really offer us as one experience if you will do we have any questions any more questions in the future well I think just once again thank our speakers and that was great thank you thank you . . . . . . . . . . . . . .