 That's not really got much to do with my presentation. But it links to a theme of the findings that came out, which we'll talk about in a minute, but I just like this one. I'm Rosman, I'm an e-learning manager at Manchester Met. I'm going to talk a little bit about some research that I carried out for the Faculty of Health, Psychology and Social Care on one of the online programmes at Devon. Yn ymddych chi'n gweithio yn bwysig y bwysig gyda'r bwysig a'r gwahau'r ystod yn ddod o'r lleswn ymlaen. Yn ymddych chi'n gweithio, mae'r program eitha'r MSC, yw'r program eitha'r psychologi, i'r program 12-month, a'n ddweud i'r program eitha'r psychologi. Yn ymddych chi'n gweithio, mae'r gweithio'r busg wedi bod yn ysgolwyd gan ysgolwyd, maen nhw'r gwirionedd, yn fwy ffordd yn bryd, a'r pwysig o'r ffrind i'r bwysig a chyfodol, i'r amlwg am ymddiannau, a'r cyfathlu er mwyn ffwrdd yn ymgyrchol ar y ffwrdd y dyfodol wedi'n gwyfun ar y bwysig sy'n bwysig yw'r progran. Felly, dwi'n cael ei gwirionedd o'r pwysig iawn, sy'n fod yn ymdill ystod i'r ffacolau i'r pwysig iawn, ond ond yr ysgol yn dweud o'r progran o'r pwylliant. A gynnyddio hynny, roedd y ffyrdd gynhyrch o'r program yn 2015, a'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r 13, oherwydd yn y piler, o'r rhan o'r 100 o'r studen. A'r hynny'n gwybod yn ddod i'r eu hunain yn ymddangosol o'r hyn o'r ddiwedd, o'r hyn o'r hunain. Mae'n ymddangosol o'r hyn o'r thysgu, o'r hyn o'r stryd, Rwyf wedi'n gweld y cyfans, y cwm, gwybod y byd. Rwyf wedi'n gweld ddyn nhw, rwyf wedi'n gweld ddyn nhw'n credu o'r ddylamu waith ar y pryd. Rwyf wedi'n gweld ddyn nhw, mae'r prydau'n greidd. Nid ym mwyn hwnnw i'r rau'r rhaid, ddiddordeb ar y ddioghusol. Mae'n ddiddordeb ar gyffredin nhw'n ddiddordeb ar y ddiddordeb mewn hamlion. Mae'r adolau iddo ar y tro, ddim yn ychydig honno ar gyfer y dyfodol, ac mae'n gweithio gweithio gweithio'n cyffredinol, nag rwy'n lle rhoi bod gyntaf eich gweithio'n ei wneud yn y gyflawnu'r language o arnyntio yang fydd y gallur o'r gwneud gweld. Nid yw gweithio'n digwyddion cyfgareddau wrth gael mae'n gwneud cyflawnu ar 300 ydal. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, a'r gweithio arall arall ar y prywodau. Mae'r adeg y gallwn 350 eu cyfraeg yn eich prifesu. Mae'r rblwysgrwy Arun 40%. Rwy'n deall yn fawr o'r theores. Fe ddim yn amlwg i'w pryd o'r drafod dda'r rydyn ni, efallai yn ni'w cofio'r ddeugel ym spices. Ond, fydd y fath nhw'n meddwl i'r ddwynt gynnig ar hyn. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i ddweud gweld ein fath ym mhwyl iawn. Dwi fydd iawn o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r griffurau ondi. A wedyn dweud i'r sgwpeth i'r sgwpethói'n gweithio ddim yn y program. Ac mae'r ddaeth amser ac mae'n gwreiddoch yn ôl. Rydyn ni'n ddweud yne? Fyddai'r ddweud ar y ddechydd ym Mhwyllydd? Fyddai cael ei ch carb y Gymraeg? Mae'r talog i'r ddechrau sy'n dweud a'r ddweud chi'n gyfnodol Meidai Llywodraeth, ond drwy ddweud ym Gweithio Ielodau yn dweud o'i ddweud o'r dweudio i'r ddechrau i'r ddweud. How can we look at this and build on the commonalities where they are and if there's disparities, look at what the causes are behind this, why are staff thinking about certain aspects different to our students thinking about. Before I do go into the themes of what came out, the overall themes, I thought it would be interesting just to break up the session a bit and ask for what you think might have been important on this. Obviously there's going to be a lot of people with the experience of either being a student or teaching online programmes and blended programmes. But I thought rather than asking questions at this point, just on the me too thing, just ask maybe put a few comments on things that you think might have been important. Maybe then we can just have a look and maybe compare and contrast with what I thought, what we found on the study. If I just give you a couple of minutes just to do that and I think hopefully that will... So if you can just put up on the screens the comments, that would be really good. If you maybe if you just talk to the person next to you or just put up some comments. Again just from what you think from a student perspective of what was important, what things are important to consider or from a staff perspective what are important aspects to taking into account. And also if you see a comment that's particularly pertinent, give it a like and then hopefully we can get those ranked and the ones that are most popular will show up on the screen. So there's quite a few comments around community which I think always comes up, this is always an important part. Time obviously, I think time both from staff and student perspective that's something that always comes out. I think some of the comments are coming through the generic comments that you would assume for a student, any student but they're amplified for online students. So things about not being able to submit online or not being able to submit at all. I think those kind of things, those anxieties really are amplified when you're online because you don't have anybody to talk to of a physical space to be able to kind of drop something in. I'll just put that up there. Now these are the things that students said that was important for them and a lot of them have been covered here. But I think one of the interesting things there about a community that it did come up in the findings but it wasn't a distinct theme in itself. It was always in relation to possibly things like interaction or wanting to feel that social presence. But the community itself, I think because these guys were working full-time and loads of them had families and busy lives. I think some of that took a back seat and the thing that really focused their attention was I need to get my assessments in on time. I think sometimes a community thing didn't play as big a part as you might do for an undergraduate course where you really need to feel that sense of a community study. The time one is something that we're going to come back to in a few minutes. But yeah, I think particularly from a staff perspective that was something that really came out that staff didn't have enough time and that needs to be acknowledged of the amount of time that goes into developing an online programme. But what I thought I'd do now is just go through a few kind of mini case studies of some of the findings. Obviously it wouldn't be possible to go through all of them but these are the overall kind of findings of what the students found important. Again, I think a lot of them are covered here, things like support, academic support, pastoral support. That covers things like timeliness of communications, which I think was one of the comments here as well. Interaction of learning. Again, the interaction with peers and students. I think with a room like this some of these things might seem obvious in common sense but I'm in an institution where some of these things aren't very obvious to certain people. So I think part of this conversation needs to be that the right kinds of people need to hear this information, I guess. And that's something I'll talk about in a minute. So the first thing I wanted to talk about was the individual unit areas. So students talked about the fact that they were getting inconsistent units within each one of their learning spaces. They were having inconsistent information, it was labelled differently. Sometimes assessments were located in different spaces. And because these guys were time poor we all know that you don't have enough time to be able to get your assignments in on time. Never mind, search for contact details or kind of find the weekly activities that week. And that often meant that important information was sometimes missed. But from a staff perspective they kind of countered that by saying well there was a lot of information that staff had to give to students. Things around exceptional factors or the elective units or all that kind of information had to be given to students. And because they were in online and they were in that week they had to kind of give all that information in one go. Another interesting thing was about some of the cheaters talking about the fact that they felt constrained by having to have this consistency with other units. They weren't able to teach in a fluid manner as they might be able to in a face to face environment. So some of them relied on this kind of almost serendipity of when you're teaching some of the things just kind of the penny drops. But you weren't able to kind of build that into an online session some of the cheaters felt and having to kind of front load all your resources at the beginning of term really made that difficult. Now from my perspective trying to take a neutral role in this it was really obvious that all of the staff comments were relating to their own unit areas. And that thing that that's kind of carried over from the way that it's taught in a face to face environment. But in Moodle each unit area has each his own unit leader who has ownership of that unit. But they take care of their own unit but they don't necessarily think about the whole programmer as a whole. And we all know students see a single program not individual unit areas. So my role was to kind of think about that whole program level thinking. And I did that by kind of incorporating Moodle template to try to bring in that consistency across the different unit spaces. But also leaving them flexible enough for different tutors to be able to kind of build on their own kind of style of teaching into it and make it easy enough for their own subject matter to be incorporated into those templates. This idea of just enough information and just enough time to stagger the information to say OK well you don't need to know about assessments on your first day or Harvard referencing or whatever it might be. And we picked points in the term where we thought this would be more pertinent for the students to be able to access that information. And obviously make it available and signpost to it but not to bombard them with all of that information at the outset. Now these kinds of things that have happened here, their ongoing issues, inserting a template is not a quick fix. You can't just say everything's done now. Templates can be broken. They can be ignored. You can imply a consistent template inconsistently. I think it's an ongoing thing of being able to kind of work with the tutors to say well this is what's working here. That's not what's working there and that more iterative approach. And similarly with that idea of just enough information, just enough time, just coming different things to different tutors. So again just working with them really to get that overall cohesiveness to the programme and really thinking about what the online journey should look like for the student. Feedback on formative activities. So students talked about not having enough personalised feedback or wanting to have that kind of validation of their opinions and just making sure that they were understanding the material correctly as they were moving through the programme. As you can imagine staff were concerned about the amount of work that would be required responding individually to 80 or 90 students on a weekly basis. And they also talked about the fact that some of these students were carrying over their experiences of undergraduate studies over to level 7 masters level and where they needed to be a bit more independent in their approach. But I think ultimately what's happened here is that students, well staff were in a situation where they knew a group of students, very intimately 13 students. And then that same pedagogic model was used for a group of 100 students where it was unrealistic for them to be able to know them kind of students very well, being able to engage with them in the same way. And I think that really speaks to the people who are in charge of resourcing the programme. So the scale-up of it really, it was assumed that staff would just do more of the same. The programme had been set up in the first instance, the resources had been created, now we can just let it run. And really when you scale up a programme from 13 to 100, you really need to either increase the staff resource appropriately or you can choose to change the pedagogic model to then fit the resource that you currently have. But mechanisms like discussion forums, if you're using that with a group of 10 or 15 students, that's unrealistic that you're going to be able to use those kinds of same mechanisms on a bigger programme with the same staff resource. So I think that was one of the issues that, so ultimately the approach was taken to kind of modify the way that the programme worked to introduce more automated ways of feeding back. So things like quizzes where you had that personalised feedback for students, but also workbook activities where you had that focused interaction with a piece of reading. But importantly, expectation management, both from students of what it takes to come on a programme, what kind of interaction you can expect for staff as well. So this is what online learning looks like, particularly for those outside of the department who are unfamiliar with this type of teaching. There's sometimes that assumption that, well, you can just put it all online and leave them to it, or that it's a cost-earning exercise. And again, I think one of the big draws of this programme was that you were able to reach students who previously couldn't have come to university full-time and studied on a programme like this. And I think treating it as something where you can say money or time I think is probably not the best way to look at it. So those kinds of messages need to be articulated. And just very finely, webinars, this was part of the overall interaction theme. But things that have come out in some of these comments as well to do with the social aspect of learning, and students talking about the fact that they weren't able to, they felt sometimes isolated from the university. And these webinars were really, really good tools. They loved the fact that they could see other students. They could talk to them in real time and really had that human interaction. But the fact that they didn't go far enough or some of them weren't as interactive as they would have liked. And staff talked about the fact that there were a lot of students, that they weren't able to have those kind of interactions as personalised as they would have liked. Sometimes there were students who would dominate discussions which made it difficult to again have those very interactive kind of discussion type sessions. But ultimately this speaks to the same point in the fact that you scale up the programme and then you need to kind of deal with the fact that interaction needs to change. You can't have the same kinds of interactions based on a previous pedagogy model. And also the fact that the other thing that came out of this was that staff acknowledged that these webinars sometimes weren't as engaging as they should have been. But they didn't have the time to plan, so I mean you need to have a session plan, you need to plan for these kinds of interactions. And if that's not acknowledged by the powers that be of what resources required for delivering this programme, then you can't expect them to plan these sessions in particularly for those who are new to this type of delivery. So staff development sessions were put on and we talked about how we might be able to deliver webinars to larger scale numbers. But again, if staff don't have time to either attend or to implement that, it's questionable whether there's any merit in delivering those staff development sessions. One of the things that we did do was to develop more webinars around assessments. That was to counter the fact that some students felt quite vulnerable online, they weren't able to engage if they felt uncomfortable with the fact that the knowledge of these webinars being recorded and their lack of understanding as it was to be broadcast to the whole group. And so if they were talking about something that was more personal to them and they had more experience around, they'd be able to open up a lot more and facilitate those discussions in a more engaging way. So just very finely, some of the lessons that we took away from delivering this programme, that overall programme level thinking is key I think, and my role in that in putting those templates together, working with academic staff, trying to sell the idea that these templates are a good idea, and also selling them in a way that's beneficial to staff as well, so we are saving staff time. You don't need to populate your moodle areas every single year. I think that's an important aspect of it, trying to win the hearts and minds of people you're working with. As I think Lorian had mentioned as well, it's not about imposing anything on anyone. The scaling up, again, is that option of having either you maintain that staff student ratio and you scale up or you fundamentally change the pedagogy model, and it's unrealistic to be able to scale up without having one of those two options. And the misconceptions, again, the workload is always a concern for staff, but as long as it's understood what online learning is, then that resource can be built into workload models and how we want this online learning programme to work. If it's just going to be a case of putting all the resources online and leaving students to it, then essentially you've got another version of a MOOC, and that's not what I think a lot of people want, and you're going to eventually get the drop-off rates that you might get on a MOOC as well. I think that needs to be articulated for the people who are in charge of resourcing these areas and these programmes to articulate what an online programme looks like and this is the resource that's involved. Hopefully that's been useful, that brings my presentation to a close, and I'm more than happy to take questions. Thank you so much, Osmond. I've spent most of the last 20 years working for the Open University and so much of that was familiar, but I think you've got some really helpfully articulated comments both from staff and students, and it really ties in with what Amber was saying in her keynote about we keep talking about this stuff because the practice is continually evolving. Do we have any questions in the room? I'm looking hard at my former Open University colleagues who must have something to say about this. They're all hiding now. This is an interesting one at the top that resonates with me from my experience. Why did they have to have it already at the start? Was that due to students having to be able to self-pace their studies? Yeah, I guess so. I think part of it was their conception of what online learning was, so it was sold to them in a way where everything has to be ready beforehand. That was carried over from the way that they taught this programme in a face-to-face environment and where they already had all the lectures in place. There's no reason why it had to be ready week on week, but I think that idea of consistency ties in with the fact that things are organised in a certain way. If you had certain weeks that were certain unit areas which did have all their content ready together, then it was assumed that every single other area would have to do the same thing. What changes would you make to the pedagogic model and might students be able to cope with that? As I mentioned, we introduced a lot more automated feedback, but we also made use of the forums where discussion was happening, so they had another personal professional development in which they were split up into their peer learning groups. We directed a lot of discussion there, so although we made some of the communication a bit more didactic in terms of question and answer, some of the other forums that were actually being used, we shifted some of the discussion there, so I think it's dangerous to say, well, we can automate all feedback, because I think that's not going to be possible and we don't want to do a problem like that. I think it's to make use of those areas where discussion was already happening to introduce and say, well, this week's topic was on XYZ. Maybe this week we can have a separate discussion forum within your forum group to just highlight some of the issues or some of the things that we've taken away this week. So I think that's one of the things that we did. The webinars, again, I think people love that real-life interaction, so as much as possible, we had things like having intro videos. Again, it sounds like a small thing, but just having a face and a person saying, hello, welcome to the new unit, this is what we're doing. I think when you're online, I think it helps a lot more bringing a bit more of a human feel to it. So there's another question related to that. Did other synchronous models come up, such as Skype Chat or Google Hangout, to encourage free conversation? So we ran our webinars through Adobe Connect, but the students had their own groups as well, so they would be communicating with each other in social environments, things like Google Hangouts, where they would arrange their own meetings. But apart from the webinars and the kind of formal program committee meetings and things like that with student reps, we didn't have any other kind of synchronous communication. And I think that was probably more characteristic of the student body than anything else because we had people in different time zones, we had people who were different word shifts, so I think it was very difficult to try to get everybody together in a synchronous way. We've got a couple of questions about peer-to-peer engagement. So was peer assessment considered and are online students more resistant to peer feedback? So in the dissertation unit, we introduced an informal peer assessment activity where you could look at each other's proposals. And I went down really well. I think some of the issues where they were probably that probably weren't particularly individual to the online delivery was more to do with the students who were comfortable with the fact that they were giving other people their access to their assignments. They weren't sure about how to assess it. But equally we did get some good feedback about people being more comfortable with the assessment criteria. In terms of their resistance, I don't think they were any more resistant and I would have expected to do this. Okay. I think you mentioned that you were working in a particular discipline. So is there a kind of template you had from that scalable to other areas? Yeah. There are now a few online programmes in that faculty. This was kind of seen as the template in terms of how delivery was worked. So, yeah, I think this, the original model was really heavily based on these weekly formative activities. And I think that was unrealistic given that resource. So it was tweaked, although there was some version of that. It wasn't kind of a direct discussion forum and a webinar every single week. And I was tweaked, but a version of that is now being rolled out and used on other online programmes in that faculty. Okay. So, that was a model of the Jelly Salmons E-tivities model. Was that relevant, helpful, used? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I talked about that staggering of information, that was one of the key drivers of that. So really in that first week, we just focused on getting them online. Whereas previously, in the first run of every kind of looked at, this is all you need to know about assessments, this is all you need to know about everything else. Whereas reflecting on what Jelly Salmons is like, getting them comfortable with engaging with those. We're going to look at how to communicate. This is the emails that you need to know and really make sure they're comfortable online and then moving over to the academic side of things. And I think that's reflected in Jelly Salmons model as well. So it's come up at quite a few sessions over the last three days about getting senior management teams on board. So someone has asked how were your key points received by the leadership? I had a really good relationship with them. I think a lot of people probably have a similar role in terms of being a learning technologist. And I think one of the things that is a good thing to have in your toolbox is that good will that you have with a lot of people. Because you have so many people, so many things, so when you are in a position where you articulate something that might be a bit of a difficult conversation is taken in the right way. And you're not kind of there to add anything, but you're just looking at things in the right perspective. But yeah, I think it's always a working progress, even if people do acknowledge it there's always a port that comes in at some point. But yeah, I think and as I mentioned, the program did increase and that part of that increase was because it was supported and it was kind of acknowledged that the visibility of the workload that staff were putting into this needed to be addressed. So that was acknowledged to some extent. The last question has just come in. I don't know if you have an answer to this. Are online tutors born or made? Well I'll have to say made because I think it's quite a blessing I have to say born. Yeah, I think online tutors are now no different to if you can hold a good teaching session I think it's a very few manner tweaks that need to happen for you to do that in an online space, so a good teacher will be able to facilitate a room and facilitate discussions. When you do that online obviously there's some technical knowledge that needs to go into it but essentially it's the pedagogy which is leading it so I think with the question probably could be are tutors born or are tutors born or made because I think the online side of things is a very small step once you acknowledge and understand what the online space is like. I think that's a perfect place to finish so thank you again for your excellent talk and thanks again to Donna and Laurie so you've now got a half hour refreshment 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 and social collaboration. Externally we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries, obviously education teaching, learning, healthcare we feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms easy to use platforms secure platforms that people can utilise what we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas by investing in broadband local areas, we can attract more talent we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions within Scotland.