 Hello everybody, thank you. I'm Michelle Carrington, also my first moot, so be kind again. So today I'm going to talk to you about Open Studio and how it can promote collaborative learning and student connection. So I'm just going to go through the background and features really quickly. I'm going to look at some examples of use, how we use it at the Open University. I'm going to look at some research as a general and then focus in on a level one module that we looked at in health and social care and then go through some of the enhancements based on some of the feedback that we've received. So the Open University supports up to 200,000 students at any one time. We know from research that independent online study can leave students feeling lonely and isolated. There can be issues with engagement and motivation which ultimately can lead to some students leaving their course before they finish their qualification. So in 2016 we developed Open Studio which is an online design studio type space where students can upload their multimedia content into an informal sort of shared collaborative area. So we hoped by allowing that sort of space that it might help encourage student connection and that peer learning and collaboration. So just to run over some of the features in Open Studio, students can share their work with other students at either whole course level. They can choose to share with their tutor groups or whichever designated group they have. They can share purely with their tutor or they can decide to build their own private portfolio of work as well. Students can create collections of work, exhibitions through the use of folders and they can upload all their content in multimedia type formats. They can mix with students on a global level, they can provide comments, they can provide feedback and use the social interactions. So there are social media inspired interactions which we hope drive engagement and student connection. And this plugin is mobile responsive so students can upload their work directly from their mobile device if they choose to. So as I said it was originally intended to be a design studio but since then its use has diversified. We have many different subjects using Open Studio now for many different things and over many different levels as well. So in our upcoming October presentations we have over 100 modules using Open Studio and that like I said due to start next month. So there are some examples of use here, these images are taken directly from our modules although I should say this is using the OU sort of styling so it won't look like this if you had the open source version but it still has the same features. So we have modules here using the preset activity type feature where they can upload content to preset slots. Or we have students that also are allowed to just upload to the studio space freely. So this example here is taken from a business module where students are building a learning journal. We have science modules using it where they take photos of the experiments that they've been doing and upload their findings and their presentations. This is an IT based module where students are sharing solutions to problems critiquing each other's work and uploading new solutions based on the feedback that they've received. The originally intended design studio, I don't quite know why there are bananas, I didn't look into the activity but there are. And this one is a STEM conference where students shared posters that they were asked to design. So some other examples we've got is a really visual representation of show me what religion means to you in an arts module. We have visual essays in business modules where students are asked to upload a recorded PowerPoint presentation or embedded YouTube videos. Icebreaker type activities, this example is what does care mean to you. Graduation poster competitions in the careers and employability area and show and tell type activities for prospective students or students between study. So you can see it's really diverse now, not just the design studio. And there's many more examples as well that would take me all day to go through. So there's been lots of academic research carried out on Open Studio since 2016. It shows a link between Open Studio and improved skills and skills development student success. There's some of them listed there, there have been some prior as well but they wouldn't easily fit on the slide. So really most of these showed common findings when it came to the results. So just a really broad overview. So all studies really showed a high level of student engagement. Where there were critiquing or feedback type activities on the whole students reported that their level of skill and work had improved as a result of the feedback that they received from their peers. They really learnt through comparing and contrasting their work, observing different perspectives and in some cases as per that IT module learning what not to do or how to solve problems as well. And it did enable students to connect with other students through the use of the commenting feature and the social interactions as well. The majority of students actually enjoyed this different approach to learning as opposed to the standard study experience that they may well have had in the past. Across the board it showed that it supported transferable skills. So there's some examples there, again varied from subject to subject depending on what the activities were. But receiving feedback and incorporating into their own self development was one that was quite significant. And it also helped students to place complex theories and concepts into everyday context. And some examples they were also able to apply those theories as well to their work. This leads us on to the most recent scholarship that finished last year and this was looking at a level one introduction to health and social care module. I was actively involved in this through data collection and analysis. So this module has a really high number of students so at the time this was done it had over 2,000 students. However they do have two intakes a year so over the year there was about 5,000 students on that module. It's a module that has a high proportion of neurodivergent students or students where English isn't their first language. So some of these students needs more support than other students. A lot of them have had limited prize study. So traditional study methods have proved difficult for students on this sort of level module in the past. The module team wanted a collaborative activity to support retention. One of their strategic aims in this module was to improve retention from start to finish. They had previously tried other collaborative activities in the previous module that had a really low level of student engagement and a really low level of student satisfaction as well. So they wanted to bring open studio in as a sort of a softer way to introduce collaborative learning. So their aim was to engage and encourage development of communication skills for employability and develop foundation steps in peer learning. So again a lot of these findings for this were quite common with all of the other past results but I've just picked out some slight differences which could be attributed to the fact that it's a level one module and the diverse nature of the students as well. So first of all the students felt like they overcame some IT challenges and some barriers. So it was a different type of software that they were used to using in the past and the feedback we had was yes we found it challenging but actually in quite a good way and it really helped me to, I feel like I developed. They also felt they built self confidence so not only by overcoming challenges such as the IT challenges there but they also used sort of the checking and comparing in a way that it was validating their own uploads I suppose. So if they were a bit unsure about what they were supposed to be uploading they'd go on to open studio have a look, see what other students were uploading to make sure that they were on the right track. They did find a global connection and I've just pulled this out again similar to previous but I actually interviewed a Polish student who said that she was able to use open studio to find other Polish students and she connected with them and she really enjoyed that about using the plug-in. They really felt like they had control over their learning so rather than being a really structured and rigid task they were given the freedom to choose their uploads, choose what they wanted to post and they felt they could be a lot more creative. They enjoyed the visual multimodal approach to learning so where these students may have found again the more traditional ways of study more difficult they actually really enjoyed this way, it meant they weren't reading huge chunks of text they weren't writing essays and they were able to view the other students posts. There was a real value identified in passive peer learning from the research team so where students didn't quite feel confident enough to make comments they actually went onto the studio, read other students comments on other posts and they took information from there so there was students here from healthcare settings, childcare settings and social care and they really found it valuable to look at care from all of those different perspectives rather than just having that one blank view of a childcare setting for example. However that did lead to some disappointment from some students where there were students taking a more passive approach and other students didn't receive any comments so there was some demotivation from that respect. However the engagement in this activity was a lot higher than the engagement in the prior collaborative activity which was a real positive. So what have we done? We do listen, we do make improvements based on all of this feedback so the first thing really that we've done since this scholarship is we made it a lot easier for students to add comments and to provide social interaction on posts so some of the people that I interviewed and some of my colleagues interviewed said that actually I was going to comment but it took me more than one click or more than two clicks so I didn't bother so we've made that really easier for students to do so. We've also updated and improved the guidance throughout the studio to improve that retention of students throughout the life of the module and to improve youth throughout the life of the module. Again hopefully reducing frustrations and making it easier to use for students as well. So there was some anxiety identified where students were a bit unsure who they were sharing their work with or if their fellow students would be able to see their work so we've made it a lot clearer for students and actually they have to make an active choice as to who they want to share their work with. And we've also allowed for the ability to filter by specific activity rather than a whole block exercise. So again where students were given a task where they had to sort of comment on a particular activity sometimes they found it difficult to find those posts so in doing this we hope it's a lot easier for students. And again it's worth reiterating this is an open source plug-in so it can be added to any moodle environment via GitHub and you can find Open Studio on GitHub there. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you are using Open Studio it would be great to hear at some point afterwards how you are using it and how you find it. But otherwise thank you very much.