 Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable our Jupiter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable our Jupiter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. So welcome everybody to the first parallel session for day three of the ALT conference. I'm going to be chairing this session and there are three presentations about 20 minutes for each one including Q&A. So I'd invite you to use the VVox apps if you've got comments or questions and we'll refer to them at the end of each presentation. So three presentations, online learning during university shutdowns, implementing collaborate ultra as a lecture substitute, and enhancing student learning with rich media feedback. So for our first speaker I'd like to introduce Laura Turner-Witch. He'll be speaking first. Enjoy the session. Good morning everyone. I feel like I should sing, it's this room, but I'm not going to sing. I'm going to be talking about blended learning and student protests. And I'm just going to start with two quotes. One of which is that the student protests were described as a meeting of new emerging antagonisms with old resolved ones. These are the student protests in South Africa and Donna Haraway reminding us that technology is not neutral. And I'm going to be talking about how academics in one research intensive university made sense of the role of blended learning during campus shutdowns in 2015 to 2017. In a little bit of context, the South African student enrollments have doubled. Until 2016 the demographics have changed, the student bodies become much more heterogeneous, but participation and success rates are highly skewed and black students still do much more badly in throughputs in South African higher education. So exclusion takes multiple forms partly through funding and student debt and the reduction of state funding, but also through the cultures of the universities, especially the traditional research intensive universities. It's impossible to describe the protests in South Africa between 2015 and 2017 in one slide. This was my hardest slide to put together. Any South African who's watching me is going to disagree with my summary. But briefly there had been protests before 2015 and there are still protests today, but during the road must fall and fees must fall era, the entire system had protests with universities shut down for days and weeks. They were exam disruptions, delays and postponements and the logic came to an end when the president of the time announced free education for the poor. There was a huge amount of damage, physical damage to the system up to about 45 million euros and the protests were about fees falling, outsourcing and transforming the culture of the university. There have been some commentators trying to talk about this. Even the commentators in the books that are being written are highly contested, so let me just clarify that this is an extremely controversial, highly contested era and one that's very difficult to make sense of, but I'm going to give you a little bit of an account from some of the academics. What happened at the University of Cape Town is that at the end of 2016, which was the second year of the protests at the university, there was an announcement that teaching and learning would resume because the university had been closed through a variety of approaches including blended learning. This was the first time that academics had heard about it and it was the first time that the Centre for Teaching and Learning had heard about it when it was announced on the vice chancellor's announcement. So we did a study with four universities who were involved in student protests in different ways and at the University of Cape Town we interviewed 16 academics and they were people who had come to departmental sessions that were run during that protest shutdown period about if you're thinking of using blended learning during the shutdowns, are you interested? So that's how we managed to get those people. It was really difficult because people were very busy and under pressure and we've actually written about this, drawing on a range of literatures, critical pedagogy, digital colonialism, a little bit about protests and social media and then some literature on blended learning and challenging circumstances which is less useful because it tends to be about earthquakes or floods where there's much more agreement about the need for blended learning. We used activity theory to map out the account of using blended learning because as I was explaining it's a really messy and conflicted space and activity theory gave us a way of mapping the story as told to us by academics which we found very helpful and I'm sure many of you are familiar with activity theory. It's really about the subject which in this case were the academics and the object which in this case was blended learning towards an outcome which in this case was completing the curriculum for the year and writing exams which had been under threat because of the shutdowns and the tools that we used were that we found in these cases were both the protests and political actions and learning technological tools. These were also mediated by the rules of the game, the community this was all happening in and the division of labour and that is a very detailed summary of what we found that I'm going to run through and which I'll come back to. So in terms of the subjects as I mentioned these are the academics and all academics were implicated in this decision. So everyone was basically told encouraged suggested to that they should use blended learning as a way of continuing teaching but not all of them agreed with this. So whether they agreed took it on or didn't take it on everyone was implicated and for some people this was nothing new so some people said well it's already a blended institution this isn't a big deal and some of them said one of them said my course is sufficiently blended so moving online is not a big deal. So if you think of a residential university that's in the process of becoming more blended like so many traditional face-to-face universities that those people are more likely to be at the front end of trying new technologies but for all of them it was very emotional and emotive and some of them were angry they would say blended learning is a bit of a band-aid being stuck over a much more serious problem in the second and third year they would say well we tried it last year and really there's no appetite for it this year because we had three years of closures and by the third year people were actually planning their interventions and then some people said I was just so exhausted we'd be so determined there'd be no sacrifice it's tough when you're in the middle of a residential thing and you suddenly have to do everything online so there was a lot of anxiety and emotion attached to it and then of course some people were quite angry about this where they said look blended learning is a deliberate activity and it's not what we're doing it's got nothing to do with panic throwing things online it's got nothing to do with what happened at the end of the year it's a complete disservice to anyone who actually is engaged in blended learning it's an abomination okay to suggest that what we did was blended learning so that was on the other side of the spectrum as I mentioned the mediating tools was was the technology itself and people use technology in a whole range of ways one of the things that people who are already involved in lecture recording did is they carried on lecturing to empty lecture theaters and put the lecture recorded lecture up online for their students the most common thing really was using the learning management system to put up notes and PowerPoint presentations and so on but people also used a WhatsApp chat groups some voice notes a number of them made short clips themselves using their phones and some made screencasts so there was a whole range of users and some people who'd never used technology before came up with with various solutions but while this was happening all of this wasn't being mediated by the the protests and the students who made teaching impossible in a range of ways and bearing in mind the student body is not a homogenous group so you might have student protests you might have students not protesting very very mixed but the protests you ask how is it possible to close down a university well in the one case as you can see on the image there if you block the entrance roads that's a drone image of the blocked entrance road you can't get onto campus and in the other ways through disrupting lectures as in this case where protesters would simply make it impossible for lectures to continue and then also fire alarms going off continually which makes it impossible to teach the other thing that was a mediating factor was that there was security on campus and that was extremely controversial most people were very unhappy about security being on on campus so that kind of management intervention had also led to the final exams in the third year being held in a central marquee on the rugby field under a great surveillance which also made things very tense so in terms of the rules what happened is that the primary formal pedagogical rule is for educators to teach face to face and this new rule that was introduced very suddenly was greeted with resentment and ambivalence and people said things like it was like a gun against your head or I just felt it was forced on us there were a number of stakeholders involved every single stakeholder within the university community really and we saw a division of labour between academics who were producing online content the students who were either receiving or producing it because they also put their own contact up contact context content online the tutors who played a very important role and the professional staff so in some cases the tutors had a pens down campaign they refused to participate they said it was undermining the protest action and the centre of teaching and learning found itself in a very tricky situation where as a unit that provides teaching and learning support to the university however people felt about it they were actually producing guides on how to do this and academics said without those professional staff they would have been lost and people also tried to take into account issues of access and divides so the the central contradiction from an activity theory point of view was that the student protesters were demanding that the academics stop teaching but the institutional imperative was for the curriculum to be finished and exams to be written and there was enormous ambivalence about it people were saying well you have to do what you feel comfortable doing and at the same time this is not a normal situation there was a great concern about divides and exclusion some people said this is about an exclusionary culture anyway and the use of blended learning is making things more exclusionary and others were really concerned about access and cost and the cost of data for example and the final thing that people spoke about and which has continued to this day is that blended learning has now developed really negative connotations so any kind of online and blended learning project there is a danger that in academics minds it's associated with this kind of rough and ready introduction during student protests so to go back to the image you can see that this was an extremely complex rapidly changing very volatile and fragmented set of activities during which the blended learning was introduced and it really leaves us with the last questions which is what do academics do when they caught in this moral web of choices compromises strategies and imperatives about the use of technology was the use of technology a betrayal of the fight for free decolonised education which many academics supported what was the responsibility of the university to the vast student majority who wanted to finish the curriculum in fact had to finish the curriculum was the use of blended learning an appropriate response and was the use of technology a blended as blended learning even blended learning at all so i'm throwing these questions out i wonder what you would have done in the same circumstances given your roles in these kinds of fields as learning technologists and education developers that's the situation that teachers and learning professionals found themselves in during this era thank you thank you thank you very much Laura um are there any questions or comments in the audience here thanks Laura i don't know if this is a question but there's just so many things running through my head and in many ways i can actually imagine being in that situation so thank you for sharing that i think it's really important to us just in terms of moving forward um i suppose what you've really highlighted is the danger of technology being imposed so how do you think or what are the ways that you know of that staff and students are maybe trying to use technology or blended learning or things now in a more positive kind of positive way or is it now just is there always going to be that kind of battle between this was imposed on us so we're not going to do it i'm just wondering how people are moving forward they're moving forward in lots of positive ways actually um we have a project that's around blended learning and online education we have bits and in the bits we actually say this is not blended learning as it was used during the protest era this is actually intended to improve student learning etc etc and we've got some fabulous projects we've got a project at the moment on decolonizing african science through a blended format um but one has to always deal with that discourse and that set of preconceptions so i don't think it's closed the door but that's the context in which it's it's come to exist and ironically there's been some positive spin-offs that there were some people who had never touched technology who did so during that period and who are now using it which is a really strange silver lining thank you very much and i guess that answers the question there a little bit about what is happening now in terms of blended learning so just another question there Laura how did you deal with equality issues for students who didn't have access to appropriate equipment um i i probably went too fast but we actually developed a guide that looked specifically at issues of inequality and access the university also provided free tablets and laptop computers so that students could actually come and get them if they didn't have any we also gave academics very very short questionnaire so that they could assess the conditions in which they worked we made a list of all the free wi-fi spots in Cape Town which we shared so we developed a whole range of strategies to try and deal with that and we also tried to keep the university laboratories open the full which was not always possible thank you and i think probably our our last question just for this for this section so was the blended learning that did take place successful in terms of the results you know the problem with something like this is you can't assess overall you get little flavors and stories and so in some cases yes i think in some cases having access to those lecture recordings and so on was helpful to students we have also interviewed students as well which we're going to be writing up they they were they were the the the main problem was that the culture in which it happened was so problematic but i think some of those interventions especially things like whatsapp groups and so on where people kept talking to each other was helpful in some cases in some circumstances to some people and that's great and i think we just actually got one more question in there and we just have time for if you don't mind or any lessons for the situation where disruption is caused by staff industrial action that's not something i'm i have experience of but i would imagine that the circumstances might be different although you do have the the tension between the academics and the senior decision makers and so in this case most academics even the ones who supported the intentions of the protests did want the academic year to finish so although they were resentful about being having the decision imposed on them they weren't actually against the intention of the decision i think if it's going to be academics who are disagreeing with senior management it's going to be quite different and there the pressure might come from students and that's great thank you very much laura that was really insightful thank you very much for presenting a bit of applause please for laura can i invite our next speaker up please holly munru and just while she's getting sorted just a little welcome as well to all you viewing online these sessions are all being life-strained as well and there may be people watching later on in the future that may be so i'll just get that hi good morning everyone and welcome to my presentation now what i'm going to be looking at the basis of this is my experiences of using collaborate ultra as primarily a lecture substitute as part of my teaching but i've also extended the remit of my abstract a little bit to throw in some other sort of ways that i've been using this particular technology that might be of interest or a benefit for your own practice okay so they say i'm holly munru and i'm a lecturer in hrm in the glasgow school for business and society which is part of glasgow caledonian university so this is basically what i'm going to be looking at in my presentation what is collaborate ultra what can i use it for some staff reflection student reaction and lessons going forward okay so first of all not everybody's familiar with these types of tools and it's a tool that's embedded within our vle so what we know as our gcu learn system so it's i describe it as skype like because it allows you to communicate with students or anybody else in a sort of skype format where you could have video almost like video calling where you can have audio and it has a chat feature as well in it so it's quite a multifunctional tool that is similar you know in a lot of ways to skype and the additional benefit of it is that you can upload lecture slides for example they include screen sharing you know where you can actually show the window in your own pc to your audience you know for example i found that quite useful if you want to show a diagram for students students actually find this really you know very functional because it means they can still make an opinion they can still answer a question they can still make a comment you know without feeling that oh i'm in this big lecture hall and you know i don't want to speak in front of everybody so say chat messaging and polling as well also as a function that you can use for little opinion polls and what i've been using mostly is recorded sessions you can save them and make them available through your vle okay so i'll sort of talk a wee bit more about how i've been using these functions in what i've been doing in my own teaching practice well primarily what i've been doing is live lecture sessions now this has comprised of me sort of delivering my lecture live through this tool now this is a lot of benefits for staff for example time management i might only have let's say one lecture that day now this tool allows me to deliver that from home so that i can maybe be productive during the day get other things done and an interesting side effect of it is you're much more relaxed you know you can maybe lie on the couch your cup of tea you know your little plate of biscuits but you have to remember your headset to mute it when you're drinking your tea that's what you know sort of several weeks of practice sort of told me so doing that you can also pre-record your lectures without an audience so you're uploading your slides you're doing your narration now a lot of people use Camtasia for these types of processes but i found that using the actual tool within your vle is so much simpler than a more complicated sort of Camtasia summer revision sessions has been an absolute real find for me because when you have students doing resets for example they might be international students they might you know they might say well why should i come over in the summer for a session for it's maybe going to last an hour i have a lot of part-time students as well and they can't always attend you know during the day if they have work commitments so arranging live sessions and i have done for some for my part-time students in the evening means that they don't miss out in any sort of important information and what i found is a student is far more likely to tune into the session from home or anywhere else that's suitable than actually physically come into the classroom and during the summer holidays you could also use it for guest speakers you could you know you send the link and the guest speaker can use you know the the system as well but the only problem that you can have is their it system might not allow them to do it i've had sort of conflict software conflicts in the past you know i've tried to set up for example a q and a with an industry expert for the students you know things like that so it's it's kind that can be a wee bit trial and error dissertation meetings it's great for dissertation meetings because you can record the session there's no ambiguity as to your feedback if the student and it means that the student instead of maybe constantly emailing you for clarification for this or that they have a record of what was said and what i do is i put feedback on their chapter for example turn it into a pdf upload it and we discuss it they can see all the feedback and the document on their screen and i see it online and we have a chat about it and it means that for example their time's not being wasted in neither's mind because they might only be able to do one hour in that day i might only have their meeting in that day so it means that you can manage their time more effectively and of course it was good to see they all see organising committee we're using collaborate as a very effective tool in order to organise you know sort of the activities and processes for the conference so you see how it has a lots of different dimensions it's quite a multifunctional tool once you really sort of start to explore what it can do so this is sort of what i call collaborate ultra inaction now this is based on my student experience my teaching practice now in my sort of timetable i have a fourth year seminar semester b undergrad module now what happens is by week five week six they start to disappear because as soon as you see the word dissertation it's like ah i need to be working with dissertation so attend lecture attendance drops off a cliff because they're prioritising the dissertation and they're missing out in a lot of valuable you know lectures as part of their module so what i decided to do was do live sessions in their lecture slot that were also recorded so they had the option to appear you know to come to the session virtually live or they could listen to the recorded version and my third year undergrad module was mainly direct entry students i recorded all the lecture material for them so that they had something to go back to my postgrad module i want to use you know for more recording of the sort of the theoretical aspects so that i can use more class time to so develop more practical based activities so that we're less death by powerpoint and more sort of learning by doing so i've already used it to streamline dissertation meetings and it's also a very effective reflective tool for myself because when you listen back to your own recordings you have to think about am i actually explaining things properly am i what tone am i using and the unfortunate thing for some of us in the west of scotland you know what gratuitous colloquialisms am i using that an international student will say wow you know and it helps you to reflect in your own practice that you can go back and see you know what um what where you need to improve and are you actually producing the most effective um learning experience for your students they say what i found though as someone who likes to bounce off the audience not literally but it likes that to the rapport and the you know sort of being in contact with the audience i found that quite difficult to adapt at times to online because as i say i'm lying maybe on the couch with my cup of tea and i'm talking to nothing see because i like i like the audience effect where you can about say a little bit of rapport a little anecdote here and there and when i listen back to the recordings i thought you're awfully serious you know and that it didn't sound like me you know apparently i had to put the speed to 1.5 so i didn't sound too nasally apparently but say there we go my elocution for me so you know that that i found that was quite difficult so it's not something i would like to do all the time i felt it fitted this module and the particular students because we also have a very diverse student group now we have more mature students who maybe have child care or other caring responsibilities as maybe our other students we have students that maybe say i'm coming from let's say ayrshire and it's expensive to travel so if more of my materials online then that'll save me some money and i'm really pleased about that our international students you know say well what we like is we can go back and back to what you were saying so we can pick it up better so see and especially as i mentioned earlier there's no ambiguity regarding dissertation feedback there's no i'll bet you said i'll bet you this that it's all there as a record so see as i've said you know it makes you more aware of yourself as an educator and that's how it's an interesting concept if we you know are we going to is this how it's going to go you know we're going to actually move away from more face to face are we going to do more online does that mean that the the lecturer becomes you know a sort of a a narrower part of the whole education process now student views as i said this is a sort of summary of what they said they thought it was great for their time management reaccess they could be interactive with the chat bubble because what i did was i switched off their audio you know so they couldn't speak because what happens is is that you hear them all breathing in your headphones and if you've got maybe 30 40 people it's not a good idea so you know they did that so they ask questions through the chat messaging some didn't like it now you're always going to get that you can't please all the people all of the time and they found it harder to engage they thought well it's online i'll look at it next week or i'll look at it next week after and they never look at it you can't that's inevitable you can't there's no sort of magic bullet that's going to suit everybody i mean here it's just some of the feedback examples we are not going to read them out word by word but you can see you know that one of the key themes was being able to reaccess the material because sometimes in a lecture hall you can't retain what's being said especially if there's distractions and all the rest of it so they find that really useful um but of course you know to give it a sort of a balance there's some would like face to face and recorded as well which is resource implications you know um you know and some people say well maybe a 50-50 split would maybe be a better way to do it now just to kind of sort of finish up what i found was one of the biggest barriers was staff who maybe felt they don't have the confidence to use these things there's the thought of if it goes wrong i don't i need to be seen to know what i'm doing and if it doesn't work i'm going to look stupid and if the students don't like it it's going to impact on our metrics so you know sometimes institutions can become a wee bit risk averse and make sure it's for the correct student group don't just blank it apply it to every student that you've got some students you just would not work for and recognize that you're not going to please everybody there's always going to be somebody that that won't like it and it's not an easy option it's actually it can take you longer and more thought to do but i would say do i have any regrets about doing absolutely not none and it's something that i hope to develop in the future you know to try and enhance the student experience where needed okay thank you thank you very much for that um pulling so just um an opportunity now if you've got any questions or comments um in the room with this i'll use her over we do have some that have come in come in through from the V-box so one was about using the platform for a lecture capture but i i think you've you've addressed that just as that question came in um do you use a flipped approach so not reducing the face to face time but using that time for more application of knowledge well i think it also depends on the actual module on the student group for postgraduate level they like you know more of a kind of a practical focus because HR is a very practical discipline so if they've already primed with the theory beforehand then that gives them something to think about and then to focus more on the sort of practical activities but for maybe other undergrads you know that i would say that you know it's it's good as a reference point for them you maybe wouldn't do as much sort of flipped classroom activities but it does mean that you can maybe go a wee bit lighter in the heavy theoretical aspects less powerpoint um we have another question there do you have any evidence that oh that non-attenders access the recordings or did they actually join live yeah well how we do it is our dashboard on our VLE allows me to look at the statistics for each individual student um you know to see how many times they've accessed each particular item so i have a full sort of statistical um sort of breakdown of those that are looking at it maybe not join in the live session but are actually viewing recordings so yeah i have those we're able to access that yeah um there's a question there about office 365 and the use of microsoft times um i guess maybe that's why collaborate altar i'm not one of the other tools i've actually never used the um 365 so i wouldn't be able to comment on that but i mean certainly if it was a tool worth exploring then yeah something i would certainly look into so i think we maybe have time for one more if there are any more questions in the room no um yeah some people commenting just a really useful tool for professional services to to to save time and travel i think we've all been there in the corner right here another meeting um and yeah thank you very much so just a round of applause please for polling thank you and i'll ask the next speakers to come up so our next speakers are talking about enhancing student learning with rich media feedback and i'll ask you just to welcome them to the stage thank you thank you very much i'll just get on to the uh browser so good morning everyone i hope you're having a great um conference so far i've been really enjoying it uh fantastic keynotes olly said he approved my duck so i feel pretty validated there with a capital v so that's great so my name is grand macalini and this is my colleague matt robson from the university of sheffield and we're going to talk a little bit about some work we've been doing um bringing rich media feedback into the uh assessment process at sheffield so we'll give a bit of context um and then we're going to dive in with a case study that matt's been doing from his own practice which is great um so i'm going to try and go fairly quickly through these in fact so much so i'm going to set a timer on my phone isn't that uh isn't that something so um i realize this is um context that a lot of people are aware of but just in case people aren't let's just set the agenda so this is the classic quote that comes from um i saw Lisa earlier on from your document really saying that you know assessment is so important but yet still it represents a major source of stress and dissatisfaction from our students um and you know there's a real sense that we haven't quite got this right yet uh we have very high aims about wanting to use assessment as a really good tool for learning rather than just the certification but maybe we're not there yet and perhaps students anxiety may have even become a bit more increased since we've introduced fees and then the challenges that we face when trying to actually change this is that whilst our institutions may have may have very strong and noble um the policies that they want us to out here too we still find that there's a huge resistance uh to change practice uh i sometimes say to people that you know if you want to talk to academics about changing assessment practice you might as well uh offer to kidnap their children and it's the kind of same kind of response you're going to get and we have other questions about you know what we're really doing with assessment are we over assessing um people will say well you know we put up something to feedback the students don't use it so there's still that kind of tension between uh various uh people various stakeholders i guess so electronic management of assessment has um offered to uh and and i believe does actually deliver on a lot of this has really helped out in you know not just the logistics of submission and the sustainability of not printing out reams of paper um every semester we used to have 24 hour print accused in our in our information commons at at the end of term um but really we we know that the the tools um or some of the things the affordances the technology mean that we can enhance the quality of feedback that students are getting so those can be um in in terms of written feedback using tools like grade mark it's not the only one of course but also to provide rich media feedback by which we define as audio uh screencast or video um and again this this is not um this is not new i know in in melzig for example those of you who are familiar with the work of melzig we've been trying to promote rich media feedback for a decade and there's been some really sort of foundational projects like the sounds good project that bob rotherham did in about 2007 um and there's quite a lot consensus that students really do engage well with um technology enhance feedback or rich media feedback the kinds of things that we get back from student evaluation is that um students really love the fact that there's a personal dimension to it um practitioners um and we'll probably hear about a bit more about this in a moment um it's actually logistically possible to give a higher quantity and quality of feedback uh people feel they can understand um the comments a little bit more and for specific kinds of assessment and we'll look at this in a bit in a bit more detail in a moment it can actually be more suited to the very assessment type that we're doing and i think that's a really important point so it's a great old thing but it's also probably fair to say that certainly um at places like sheffield as a concept it's or as a practice it's not exactly um flown off for shells can we say so what are the barriers in the absence of an integrated system that enables you to do it typically case studies I've come across they tend to represent really kind of complicated and fiddly workflows people having to do things like record some audio with an audio recorder save it out as an mp3 implement some kind of file in the magnitude system which enables you to map the piece of work against the student what if it's anonymous one of its anonymous submission that's a problem isn't it how do we then get it back to the students in a safe and secure way and all of this adds up to something that isn't really in any way a properly scalable solution or indeed sustainable so in sheffields um we uh made some inroads into this start in a couple of years ago by uh implementing the calchura family of products which are um uh there's many fantastic products of calchura one of which is the way that it's integrated within the blackboard virtual learning environment and that's really kind of made a huge difference and so what we did when we first implemented calchura before we rolled it out we started a number of pilots with a number of departments they had different aims but four of our pilots really engaged with the fact that they could use the tools presented to them now to do and provide rich media feedback so and what I'm going to do now is hand over to Matt who's going to talk a little bit more about what you've been doing thank you Graham um so yeah I'm Matt Robson I'm a university teacher at the department of journalism studies in Sheffield um specifically um I teach the very practical parts of tv filming editing um producing tv news items so for me the assessments that I do it's really helpful to have this kind of rich media feedback available in the bad old days when I was doing written feedback um I might say something to a student I might write them a comment that would say in your interview you don't seem to remember the rule of thirds the headroom on your shot isn't is not um particularly brilliant so maybe you don't maybe you understand those terminologies that jargon but if you're the student and you've forgotten those things which is why you didn't apply them then what does that feedback actually mean whereas if I can put their interview on the screen I can point to it on the screen I can very much more easily help them to understand what's going on but again I'm trying to describe something with words which is much better watched so hopefully this is going to play no it didn't let's do it click it on there there we go and then when we talk about um running nicola squires we see a shot of nicola so again this is probably the right choice of shot but it does go on for quite a long time and here she doesn't quite leave frame before you cut to the interview so you just needed to let this run on a couple more frames you know two or three more would have done it and she would have cleared the frame and that would be a much less jumpy edit um and I think part of the reason you shoot you can't do that is because here you've got all of your material on the same video and audio track so really you need this to be um up here needs to be up there you need your sound to be one track lower down and then if you need to you can just extend that a little bit but because everything's on the same tracks it's not going to let you do that so that is part of the problem even if you have stuff on the wrong track you can't use the full capabilities of the editing program so there that clips I don't know 30 45 seconds long but I've been given been able to give some really very detailed feedback um and specifically for this student to help them sort of improve what they might be able to do the next time they do some editing so I think that's very clear I don't think there's any way that I could write that down and get across get that across um so I've been doing this for a few years um but as Graham was saying earlier on it was very very fiddly trying to use different apps different ways of doing it it wasn't working particularly well so yeah cultural and that came along and when Graham told me about that I really wanted to get involved um because it has made my life certainly a whole load easier um students can submit their work using this system it's goes straight into the blackboard system on for submission um I've also been using another part of the system to record these bits of screencast feedback and then once I've recorded it I can just slot it straight back into the grade center so that when the student looks for their mark and looks for their feedback it's just there on the screen again they just click on one piece of uh so click on the icon and then they can play that that feedback and and that's been really really helpful for me as a teacher the best thing about it is it's made it quicker um it's made it I'd say at least five minutes per piece of work faster in terms of integrating that workflow getting it all done and five minutes may not sound like much but if you've got 40 or 50 students uh for each assessment then that's as much as half a day that I've got back which always gets filled up with something else of course but there you go um at least I've now got the chance to do those things I'm less likely to be marking well into the night which is always good uh so of course every little uh case study and pilot needs some evaluation so I've been asking my students what they think about this rich media feedback and I've been asking them to compare what's um on a module where they get some written feedback on one assessment and my rich media feedback on another assessment and so these are the results you can you can see the numbers that's nice um so students on the whole found video feedback much easier to understand and you know a big preference for for video um a slightly smaller preference for receiving their feedback in vin video but still a large majority um part of this is to do with accessing um the videos I've made these um screencasts using a big display you've seen it on a big display here students of course are watching it on their mobiles so some of that fine fine detail may be a little bit lost there so something that I've got to think about there and then a big preference for using more video feedback please and then some some comments that I hope back up what we've been talking about um video is a great idea yeah I think it's very good that students actually understand where their grade is coming from because grades are very important as to a lot of students these days and they really understand why everything is coming back to them in the way that it is and then someone wrote something nice about me so forgive my vanity for including that one there um but yeah again again it sort of proves what we've been talking about thanks very much so in conclusion obviously um there's other pilots and we know now that we're very confident that this is being very highly effective and highly valued way of feeding back to our students uh thinking more broadly uh from uh I'm going to sort of take a perspective of from a learning technology management sort of central position and in a way this actually echoes what Melissa was saying on Tuesday morning is that because we've got a process which has been vastly simplified by the tight integration between in this case Calcura and Blackboard what we're actually seeing is a series of marginal gains and we're actually getting the benefit of summation of those marginal gains a little bit like you know the sorts of things that the British Olympic cycling team which all about five years ago and as Matt said these really add up uh they add up to provide whole new opportunities and this is what the people in our other pilot departments who aren't here today have said so so to to paraphrase what Melissa was saying you know here's a big thing which is actually lots of little things and I think that's really valuable I think you know if there's one take home from that from those of us who are in a more learning technology uh management or provision role let's say and then of course perhaps harder to answer right here and now are some of the broader questions so at this moment in time certainly the university Sheffield rich media feedback might be a bit of a novelty it's a new thing um if that was the norm would people still comment on it but of course if it was the norm why would they because it's because that would be the norm of course um and then again we've got the broader questions about you know do we really need to assess as much as we do assess how does all this um broad pattern of assessment fit with for example adopting more of a program level of you program level approach to learning teaching our courses which I think is again a very um contemporary issue for many of us so that's uh pretty much what we had to had to say so thank you very much for listening to us and uh very keen to take any questions you might have thank you very much matt and Graham uh there are any questions here in the live audience yep just something like that there there's a we make coming coming to you there thanks uh martin Compton University of Greenwich question from Matt um like I said um we're trying to say before I really favor this I think it's absolutely brilliant there's multiple ways of of doing it you've showed us one one example but how do you account for the 12 to 20 percent that are less than keen and are you going to do anything to perhaps accommodate them or is it going to be no this is better for you um well I'm not in a position to sort of make anybody do anything um I I can only show people what I've done and say I've found it easier and maybe you want to have a go as well um did you mean your students all right sorry okay not staff okay um so I don't know I don't don't don't know about that I mean I don't think they don't like it but I think they prefer written stuff because obviously we all have different learning preferences um for me I still believe in its value I'm gonna I'm gonna carry on doing it that may be a bit mean of me um but yeah maybe I need to sort of think about that as well in terms of allowing another way of doing it for them but for me it works and hopefully they will all eventually come around to enjoying that as well was there another question from the floor there no um so I've had a few in from Vvox so I'll take the most popular ones first um so why do you think that audio visual feedback is not as prevalent as traditional and more time intensive methods well I wonder whether it's um because whether we've been very fortunate to have access to um the tools that enable us to to be able to roll this out now in a sustainable way as I said before um I think when you read some of the early literature or have you ever been to conferences people talking about this um some of the some of the logistics behind doing this is is quite frankly a little bit uh uh onerous and has probably been a bit of a barrier to people so I do think that is a real issue um and I think you know because of that it hasn't scaled up because of that it hasn't become a normality for people to do and maybe that will will change I think certainly it's been very well received when we promoted it internally in Sheffield colleagues like Matt and and from our other departments as well that's architecture and law and and education sorry economics have been doing it so I just think it's because it's still fairly a new thing to actually be able to do in a reliable way I don't know if that answers the question that's certainly what we've found um so another question there have you tried sharing the students media feedback with other students to give them a wider range of resources to look at and if so how'd it go um no I think it's the it's the simple answer um and I think there's difficulty with sort of anonymity and personal data and all of that I mean if I if I start sharing um some someone's feedback then I'd have to be very careful in terms of anonymizing it and adapting it so um probably simply put that's quite a lot of work which I may not have time for but it's a nice idea yeah and in terms of a way of learning but I think probably I do I do learn things about the common mistakes and maybe can put sort of forward things the next time I see those students about how you know the sort of the the common faults if you want all the common successes certainly the the way the technology is configured that would be an affordance so the beauty of having it tied into um the same ecosystem into which the students are submitting their work it means we've actually got the work and all maths recordings or and or any other rich media feedback doing that could be extracted and repurposed in that kind of way if we felt that was appropriate I suppose one question is would you do that with other written feedback I don't know um so another question here about grade mark um because it has the option for audio feedback so do you think that would be an option to overcome the challenges or why was that not yeah I'm not the words from what I know about grade mark it has up to historically have imposed a certain limits on the amount of um uh audio that you can record and it is only audio I think what maths really clearly demonstrated is when we're doing submissions that may be visual or in the maths case also quite technical visit actually because they were like diving right down into the process of doing some editing audio whilst it's great certainly wouldn't give that degree of resolution would it but but no we would certainly acknowledge the fact that grade mark does provide that but um the limitation I think that some people uh found with with um uh with the limit on audio recording has been a bit of a barrier um the other thing about grade mark is not everyone in our institution for example uses turn it in all the time quite a lot of people use traditional blackboards because we are a blackboard house um use the the out of the box blackboard um submission point as well so again that's another reason but you know grade mark has been a game changer in its own way because grade mark has a an iPad app and in the broader campaign to get colleagues over into electronic management of assessment that's been a really important tool as well so yeah um so folks I think we'll maybe stop there because I know there's only a short break now between this session and the next one so apologies if we didn't get to your question hopefully you can maybe get a chat um with the presenters that are here today to answer any of those queries um so