 Thank you very much, Terri, and welcome everybody. This is the vital week's first scholarship hour. There'll be one every week, sorry, every day this week at 12.30 for one hour. It remains for me to welcome Geraldine O'Neill from UCD, who's one of the National Forums Teaching and Learning Research Fellows. Geraldine is going to talk about her work. And then under the Gosta Master'ship of Tom Farrelly, and for those who haven't yet encountered Tom, beware, but look forward to it. It's going to be great fun. Hang on to your seats and join in and have fun. We're going to have Gosta presentations from Ulrich Höker in GMIT, Denise Lyons in IT Carlo, Mark Noon in Maynooth University, Lucia Walsh in TU Dublin, and Dara Coakley in MTU, Monster Technological University. We're already running a little bit behind time, so Geraldine and I are going to pass straight over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lewis. I'm very happy to present my National Forum Fellowship Research. I'll just share my screen here. So those that know me, as I often start with, will know that I'm an associate professor in University College Dublin in UCD Teaching and Learning. So I'm an academic member of staff and an educational developer. And when I got this opportunity to do some research, assessment was something I'm always very interested in. So I thought, well, I'll continue this research, an opportunity to do this research, but also work-based learning is something that I very much was interested in. The other thing I wanted to do, given my general approach to teaching and learning, I wanted to do something useful from this research. Yes, so it's evidence-based, as mentioned already, but also something that was useful. So I felt I wanted to do some solutions to this area. And I also wanted to do something that was current, so maybe an emerging assessment challenge in this area. So what I did, I started looking at the literature and trends. An authentic assessment is something that's coming through a lot in the literature around assessment. And this, even as I mentioned already, is for things like engagement and student learning. So assessments and feedback should be meaningful and valued. That's something that's really coming through in all the kind of policies and literature at the moment. Also student ownership and assessment, which is a part of authentic assessment, is coming through. Students being able to have their assessments related to their identity, their discipline, and the idea that practitioners, and I use this term in relation to those who are out in industry, health care workers, employers, teachers, those that are working in sort of practice, but they are somewhere involved in the design implementation of assessment and feedback. So this is authenticity, it was coming through a lot in the literature and it's coming through in trends in assessment practices. However, when I was involved with the National Forum and with Quality QQI in a series of webinars in 2020, when we put this to the sector, which was the emerging challenge, they were saying, yes, they agreed authenticity is really important, but you know something, consistency is something we're concerned about. So this was things like consistency across graders, consistency across placements, criteria being consistent, good procedures to ensure there's fairness for students, and grading skills to support consistency. So this was coming through. So I thought, well, to know something, maybe it's about looking at the balance between authenticity and consistency, because sometimes, although they're not quite a binary balance, hence the picture here, but there is a challenge in getting both of these. So what I did was, with the research opportunity for the research fellowship, my revised question was to looking at assessing work integrated learning, what are some solutions, so some useful stuff for the sector, to the challenges of both authenticity and consistency. So this became the revised question. And the methodology that I wanted to use, again with the idea of doing something useful and listening to the sector, listening to all voices, I used a methodology called participatory research and action, some references there at the bottom, if anybody's interested in it. And what I did was I interviewed seven key researchers in this area, so people who conceptually had looked at it were on top of the literature from across the world. I then had an opportunity to look very strongly at the student voice through the national survey data, so that's the studentsurvey.ie data, that and I had access to five years of this data, so nearly 93,000 comments, open-ended comments is what I was particularly looking at. But a core part of the research was working with nine disciplinary groups, to explore solutions to their context, what they felt were the challenges. So if you look at the graphic here on the right, working through, by discussions with them, interstakeholder dialogue, being the key approach, working through their individual challenges, what they thought were group challenges, key challenges, and then working through some solutions and actions. So these were three and a half workshops in these three disciplines, and each workshop had equal number of students, educators, and practitioners. So there was a great, very good interstakeholder dialogue in each of the workshops. All on Zoom, which was part of the COVID approach, but it worked out quite well. And the disciplines that I used, or I should say volunteers to be part of it, were civil engineering and diagnostic radiography, which were on-campus work-based learning stuff, project-based learning and problem-based learning case study types of on-campus types of work integrated learning, come back to that. But also on placement, but primarily educator assessed, primarily educator assessed, were groups like hospitality, survey and construction management, teacher education, which was physical education aspect, and business information systems, and those then on placement, disciplines that had placements that were primarily practitioner assessed. So these were disciplines for occupational therapy, veterinary nursing and physiotherapy. So thanks very much to those people who gave the time, the students, practitioners and educators. And finally, I will be coming back to look at a focus group of expert authors, coming back to them to share the results and discuss that with them. Some initial data, just a bit of a brief feel of the data. In the nine workshops, there were 27 key challenges, 308 solutions, 129 actions, some initial data teams coming through, this is all initial, early stage of data analysis, clarifying expectations was coming through, interstakeholder dialogue between those stakeholders was coming through that was really needed, powering students, manageable competencies. In the student survey data, nearly 33% of the comments in the opening questions were related to work or real or practical, those kind of comments, so big push from that side. And consistency, the graph in the middle here, the blue in the graph shows that consistency was coming higher than authenticity, which is in the red, when you looked across those three different contexts that I mentioned. So consistency is a real concern. However, when you talk to the researchers, they say, oh, well, it's more important that it's authentic and the consistency should be something that comes in behind. So there's lots going on in the data. But I was particularly asked by Terry and the team, rather than getting into all of the results, is to actually put to you what are the key implications for my findings at this point for practice and policy. So you get a chance to see more of the articles and things as they come out in reports. But these were the seven key messages, I suppose, that I would say are implications for higher education assessment and feedback policies and practices, some that lean towards authenticity and some that lean a little bit to consistency. So let me briefly go through them, starting with the middle one, which is that stakeholder dialogue between key stakeholders. And Frank mentioned this in his talk. It's really important we get the stakeholders together in the room to discuss this complex area of assessing workplace learning. And we need clarity in relation to, I'll probably move on to this later, and we need clarity in relation to the expectations. So this is central to the key message that was coming through a lot, clarity of expectations. We need to know what the different stakeholders are expecting when we're assessing in this opportunity. And we really need strong dialogue between these different stakeholders and institutions and policymakers need to establish opportunities to promote this dialogue, to really keep coming through and that's also coming through in the literature. So that's the first thing we need to do to develop opportunities for these people to get together in a room. And often they don't. They often come in in it sequentially but not at the same time. The next thing that is coming through that students do want real life experiences. The student survey data and the students said we want to be employable. It's coming through in the national forums, even student success report that employability is something the students are really looking for. They want real world, they're using this language we want practical. And even though it's not all about the immediate skills, as was mentioned already, but if students are really looking to be employable, they really want real world practices really coming through strongly for them. So higher education policies and practice need to support those working with practice and industry. And even in particular those even promotional thing in the literature again comes through with this, the promotional things need to really value people who are working in this in higher education sector as well. That it's valued that this link with industry and this link with work is important. And curriculum designers need to look at mapping both their on campus and off campus curriculum to identify where we can do opportunities to enhance students employability. So it should be a much broader remit of all those involved at curriculum design, not just of the few who might be involved in the traditional work experience opportunity. Terminology matters. Language matters. How we describe things really matters. And there was two that came through here. First is the term work integrated learning. And even myself in my time in the fellowship, I've changed my own language on this. The term work integrated learning with integrated underlying is a term that is used a lot internationally, but less so in Irish higher education. We could talk about it in different ways. There's often a false binary between those involved on campus and those off campus. And by not having language that talks about this as a more holistic experience, we're putting this binary, we're feeding into this binary. So in in policies and practice, we really need to emphasize the term like work integrated learning, because it talks about it being integrated and not sort of this either or and by using a term like work integrated learning, we are also including all those rich experiences that happen on campus like project based learning, case based learning, and we're valuing them as an option or alternative. Nothing doesn't all have to be out on placement. We're seeing the spectrum. So that language is really important. The other language that really important is that when we talk about assessment, we should be really looking at the national forums definition of assessment in when we're looking at this wider work integrated learning area, because that definition also includes not just the grader piece in green, but the feedback piece, which is giving students feedback, the purple and the blue, which is valuing students self monitoring and judging the realm work. So even using that language, and that sort of definition in this area could really help. The next is competencies should be manageable. Many of the participants in the workshops talked about we've too many too much competencies, they need to be less but broader. And one of the reasons for this is that sometimes students were having to race through lots of competencies on a placement and they weren't getting the unique experience that suited them. So policy makers, professional bodies are key in this. Curriculum designers need to consider the number and specificity of competencies that support an authentic experience for the students across diverse work placements context. So less is more. So it's really, really, really key point. And looking at our grading approaches, many different approaches were used around the measuring sort of work integrated learning from percentages through to narrators with competent, not yet competent pass fail, probably the most popular. However, policymakers and program teams need to explore this further. This is even an international thing I think that really needs looking at because if we value work placements, many people feel that we need to use percentages. So it gets into our grade board averages. And we it's feeding into an inconsistency in work placement types of opportunities. So we really need to look at other ways in the grading schemes and institutions that value work integrated learning. So other evidence, use of narrators, other ways of being creative about how we how institutional grading scales value work integrated learning. We could talk further on that piece on its own. And sixth point is that we need to support practitioners in their professional development and the recognition practitioners that broad term that I'm talking about are key for authenticity. However, consistency was a particular concern for students when when practitioners were involved. So they need much more support professional development, much more support in taking students and assessing students. And key things might be how to assess standards, giving constructive feedback, use of assessment, rubric criteria. And again, they need to be recognized and supported, given their importance in authenticity and consistency of assessment. And last but not least is the empowerment of students and assessment and feedback. And again, this came through a lot in the workshops from the students themselves and from others, that we need to support students in developing their unique personal and disciplinary competencies. We needed to make sure that they have some level of control in and what's valuable for them. Curriculum designers and policy makers need to facilitate empowerment, such as the use of learning contracts or negotiated learning plans on placements and on campus types of projects. In, for example, encourage students to request specific feedback. So that again, that they have some control in the feedback. And finally, with links to the sort of terminology of assessment, really strongly supporting students to self monitor and evaluate their own performance, really helping them with this skill, so that when they leave the institution, they have that skill, a very powerful skill to have. So to summarize, stakeholder clarity and dialogue is really important. Terminology matters. We need manageable competencies. We need to look at our enhancing our grading approaches. The practitioner professional development needs to be really explored, empowering students and students are really looking for real life word experience. So in looking at these seven key things, which I say some lean towards authenticity, although it's a spectrum, another is lean a bit to consistency. I think that will really help us get the balance right between authentic, real and valuable assessments and consistent assessments that are consistent and consistent across placements and assessors. So I'll leave it at that. And I'm very happy to take any questions for the recording. I'll just go through the references as well. So people have it for the recording. Geraldine, thank you so much. That's really interesting and delighted to get a sneak peek of the researcher doing this part of your National Forum Fellowship. Thank you. It's interesting for me to realize that your research has already identified that Ireland is out of step with some of our international colleagues around how we approach this topic and particularly around the integration bit. And that was a new insight for me. There's a number of questions coming through and some of them link onto that. So what steps do we need to take to agree a common language? Well, I think I suppose the National Forum probably has a bit of a role in this and QQI and other stakeholders. But what I would say is I suppose we need to start the conversation. And I suppose this is the start of a conversation, the research to be shared. And I'm sure Terry might even like to come in here. But certainly the dialogue needs to happen around this language. So QQI, I know, have been very involved with this research along with the webinar. So I think if the conversation has started, certainly from the National Forum and QQI's point of view, they have been involved in hearing this. So I think that the national stakeholders need to get together. The national policymakers need to get together. That would be my first suggestion. But I think at institutional level, people in the room like educational developers, careers officers, policymakers in the room here, I think there are different formats heads of schools, presidents, registrar groups. I think these are the groups that need to... And it's not just people involved in careers. And I think this is where it's often packaged into sort of particular areas. So I think all these groups need to hear about this research, start the dialogue. That would be... But I'm sure there's people in the room here who are involved in those policies that would also have ideas about it. But yeah, starting the dialogue. Yeah. Thanks, Geraldine. Yeah, certainly it's underway, but I think we've erode to travel yet. And maybe we could learn from our colleagues in further education and training who may have had a different historical approach to this and certainly would have experienced they can pass on to us. There's a question coming through from Claire Gormley. And so currently, how are Irish educators describing the work integrated learning piece? What terminology are they using, even if it isn't very well-defined? There's... I started off myself talking about work-based assessment. And actually, that's a term that's used a lot, I think, in medicine things. But the difficulty with that word is it often is only kind of applied to placement types. It doesn't include the on campus. And that's one of the challenges. But I think the challenge with this is that you have people using words like internships, assessing internships, clinical assessment, because there are so many different stakeholders, teachers, healthcare workers, social workers. So they all have their own language on this a little bit. Sometimes, as I say, it's clinical assessments. Sometimes it's assessing internships. Sometimes it's work-based assessment. And sometimes it seems like, you know, down to even smaller things like, you know, uskies and sort of even the tools that are being used, which is often ones that are used in medicine. So I think that is one of the challenges. There's a lot of commonality across all these groups, but given the historical nature of where these groups have come from, they're using different language. Yeah. Work-based assessment is the one that I started with. And actually, I've changed my own language on that even since. So I hope that answers that, Claire. That makes sense. And that would help us move away from the dichotomy of, you know, the placement type issue, but also then all the on-campus experiences, whether those are projects, work or whatever it is. Exactly. That would be a helpful step. There's an interesting comment coming through from Eleanor Roanen, who's the National Forum Student Associate, I think, in UCD, I think. Yeah. And he's highlighting the importance of assessment of for and as learning for the students who look to feedback as much if not more than they're looking for the feedback as much as if not more than to grades. Yeah. Any comments on additional comments on that? Absolutely. Interesting feedback came up a lot, both from the students and actually interesting from the staff. And a lot of the practitioners, again, calling that broad term, talked about challenges in giving constructive feedback when you're working so closely with somebody. And I think this was a real challenge. And practitioners need help with that. And students need help with getting constructive feedback. And it's quite different in that context than on campus because they're working so closely beside the students. So it's hard to give constructive feedback and walk away positively. So there's a lot of help needed from both students' role in this and practitioners' role in this when on placement. And students developing their skills of self-monitoring, they need support in how to do that. So yes, it's a huge area. Laura, was it? Yeah, it was a huge area for development. Yeah. And I came through a lot of the workshops that other students talked about. Yeah. So that's an area that needs huge support. And pass, fail or competent not competent grading helps in that regard because the stakes don't feel quite so high. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Geraldine, one last question if I may before we move on to the to the gasta session. And Tom, I hope you're getting your knife sharp on there. Coming through from Brian Gormley, Geraldine, wonder whether students face the same value on campus-based work-integrated learning as a work placement? And any thoughts on that particular? Well, it's interesting. Yeah, absolutely. That came through a lot. It's interesting the work placements that were assessed back in the ranch. So in other words, like the workplace, more internship stuff that maybe had to do a report. Some students talked about having quite a poor experience there, not necessarily having a quality work experience. Whereas actually what came through that sometimes the on campus really good project work where they maybe had to go out, meet industry, come back and was supported can actually be really, really authentic. So it wasn't like that work placement was always better than on campus. And this surprised me actually that it wasn't this kind of binary that the more authentic is being on placement and the least is on campus. It actually was those really rich, authentic project based types of experience with, you know, maybe links with industry that were really valuable and there were some work placements that were really poor. So I think we need to look it's not this kind of a binary or there's not this sort of a direct line or sort of a positive correlation, which I actually thought it might be. So if that answers the question, Brian, so there can be really valuable on campus experiences that students really found very valuable. Thanks, Geraldine. We're getting great value out of your early research findings. Looking forward to more in due course. Thank you. We're going to move on now to the next part of our scholarship hour today. Dr. Tom Farrelly from Monster Technological University is going to take over as our Gaster Master. Tom is a lecturer in social science in MTU and an educational developer. And I will pass over to Tom straight away. Lewis, thank you very, very much. You're going easy on me because I was talking about my November and this horrible thing underneath my nose and I was expecting some sort of witty repertoire. The week is but young and I just want to talk about MTU, just like to acknowledge that we had our flag raising ceremony today as our new university status. So I just wanted to to acknowledge that. Anyway, we have a number of victims of the presenters who after doing the presentation will move from that very, very important thing that we've talked with term and terminology. They will no longer be presenters. They will be Gaster Tears. They will have ran through the guns that that is Tom Farrelly there like that. I'm looking at Brian Garmley Chucks in the way. I'm going to get you on a Gaster one day, Brian Garmley, by the way. Tom, I can't see anything under your nose. That's what I was laughing about. But anyway, sorry. Yeah, now the child though, I feel like when it was 14 I used to get like sort of boot polish to try and make myself look older but that's another day's work. Anyway, unfortunately, as I said, so we have we have a couple of people today. So just while I'm prattling on our first presenter if they're if they're just going to get ready there now. And so for anybody who hasn't seen a Gaster Tears or Gaster before, we'll be doing online. Colin will be giving you all the license to speak up there. So we'll be counting. I don't want the presenter sort of jumping in and thinking you're going to squeeze out a few seconds because now I am very strict. And I have last year, you know, because of the pandemic, I was probably a little bit soft at times. Well, that's over. That's over. And in fairness, Terry McGuire told me, actually, if anything, maybe cut the rug from them and not give the five minutes. But I said, no, Terry, I'm not that evil. Nearly, but not. But joking aside, as I said, what will happen is when we show Gaster your clock will the time will start. I will time you here. When you have 10 seconds ago, I'll just put the camera back on and say 10 seconds. And when the five minutes is up, it's up. I mean, we're talking here about teaching and learning. The amount of people who are professional educators and can't stick to a time, they have to tell this big, long, long, for those stories. Well, that's gone. Those days are over. Five minutes means five minutes. Now, as I said, and genuinely, this is also a serious thing. It's the one and only thing I'd be serious about. The thing about Gaster is a chance to give a shout out. Based on the old premise, dear mommy, I'm sorry for writing such a long letter. I didn't have the time to write a short one. So it's about getting in there, getting your message. Please reach out and contact me. The chat room was full there. If someone says something that wants to excite you or interest you, please reach out to the Gaster tears. That's really, really important. This is just a chance to shout out and also to wake everybody up because you've been sitting there and you're going to go, Geraldine was brilliant. But now, we're now the fun and games begins. So who we got up for. So I should be all organized, but of course, I'm not the least bit organized. I'm just winging it as I often go along and just rely on my animal magnetism to try and overcome the debacle that is about to come across today. Just a quick shout here down. I see Ken McCarty down in Waterford there, my old nemesis, my old mate there like that. I'll be nice to him today, but you will see that the week goes on for the old Ken will get it in the neck, but you know, probably deserves that anyway. Anyway, I still looking up here for our forest Ulrich Hooker. Excellent. I hope I pronounce that okay, Ulrich. I see you there. Right. So are we all ready? Now, when we just start off and I'll be also doing the counting with the fingers as well. We show Gasta and then the clock begins. Are we all sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Are we all ready? Put your mics on. Denise Lyons, come on. Get it up there. Come on. Are we all ready? Yep. Thank you. Who jumped? There's only one Gasta master here. Okay, are we all ready? Now we're ready. Okay, here we go. Hey, man. Okay, thank you very much for allowing me to present our research here today. I carried out my research with Arno Leary, who is also a lecturer in culinary arts and a very good colleague of mine. We look at reflective practice in the context of culinary education and our research would suggest that it is worth our consideration for embedding it in the curriculum. It's going to be a very quick tour looking at reflection and its history. COVID as the catalyst to reevaluate our approach to reflection and culinary education, the pilot study and possible impacts and learnings we took from that study. Based on my research so far, you could categorize reflection into three different levels. Very basic reflection, then a little bit more advanced reflective practice, and then very formal critical reflection. And the people that are closely associated with those three levels are John Gewee, who first described the concept of reflection. Donald Schoen, who developed the idea of reflecting on experience to gain professional knowledge and reflective practice, and Stephen Brookfield, whom is one person associated with developing the process of critical reflection. However, when we look at reflection in a culinary context, research has lately started to question the pedagogical model of culinary education where students often learn to demonstration and replication with very little room for reflection. However, COVID was the catalyst to reevaluate the process of reflection in my approach to culinary education. The technologies clearly exist that allows us to disallows us the fusion of digital teaching and learning strategies with the more traditional on campus mode of delivery. And while COVID presented many challenges, it also offered an opportunity to review and assess the way of our delivery. There are many digital tools that enable us to create structures for new learning activities that support an online and blended mode of delivery. And the tool that one of the tools that showed a lot of potential in the promotion of reflective practice was Padlet, which is an intuitive and user-friendly digital notice board. And my fourth slide will show some examples. However, we realized that it is important to scaffold student learning through a rubric and a concise brief in addition to tuition and examples in order to give a clear structure to the students on how to engage with the process of reflective practice. And following on from our pilot, we are now in the process of sharing our experience with other culinary lecturers to raise awareness of the importance of reflective practice. Feedback from the students in relation to Padlet would suggest that it has great potential as a digital tool that supports blended learning and it has many benefits for being reflective and beyond. It supports visual learners. It enhances engagement with reflection. It is also a great collaborative tool which forces peer-assisted learning and in the process develops a type of team spirit. However, in the context of reflective practice in culinary education, we realized that a lot of work is needed and much can be learned from nursing education where both reflective practice and critical reflection are embedded in the curriculum. I think that reflective practice needs our consideration as it is a life skill that will help our students to achieve, maintain, and continuously improve professional competencies throughout their life. Lastly, we have some examples here of the Padlets generated by the students shown reflective practice in action and the pictures of their dishes that they created. I hope that everyone is going to have a nice lunch break after this and that the pictures made you somewhat hungry. I'd like to thank you very much for listening and hopefully I was able to provide some food for thought in relation to reflective practice in the culinary context. Thank you very much. You are perfectly timed. That takes away the whole form, but I have to say I'm sitting here looking absolutely starving and you have certainly provided us with food for thought. So round of applause from everybody, virtual round of applause, well done. Not easy to go forth to the fourth, which I do think it's, you know, here we are trying to start off a marathon and here you are showing food down as well. Luckily I've been on such a good diet for the last week, so well done. The presentations are absolutely fabulous and as I said earlier, please reach out to people there if they've done anything. I particularly like Padlet myself. I think it's a really, really good tool and it's interesting to see how you've done it there. Okay, our next one up is Denise Lyons. Denise, all ready to go. Now Denise, are you going to be doing a two-handed one here with the two of you or just yourself? It's the two of us. Hi Tom, Noel Riley as well. Well done. Well, I tell you, I'm always very impressed. Now you would think with two people you might get 10 minutes, sadly no. That doesn't work that well and then it's said like, you know, and just because I know is no, you're not going to get anything nicer here. This is a really nice one here. So and hopefully you'll run over time so we can have the phone of stopping you, but no. Okay, we already know this time I was very nice, so I want we're going to start off on the left on the toe on the right. I want everybody can get the hands up here. Come on. Are we all ready? Hey. Hi everybody. I hope you can hear us okay. Well, welcome to I.T. Carla where we're sitting today and thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you about our skip model. We just want to start to say where the skip model came from. So and over the last two years, myself and a colleague from Munster University, Dr. Theresa Brown, we worked on a free resource for social care students because we're our profession is one of the 12 professions who are going towards statutory registration. And we as I'm just thinking of Geraldine O'Neill's comment there in your presentation, Geraldine, when you were saying about competencies and how many they are, and we should have less. Well, our students have to demonstrate their proficient in 80. So as you can imagine, that caused a huge issue for the profession ourselves to not alone go, oh my God, 80 such amount, but to interpret all of those 80 statements, what they meant within the five domains that they were categorized under. So what we did was we got a big collaborative project. We got we went into the field of practice and we said like myself and Noel are social care workers in education. So we said we'd love to talk to social care workers and practice team leaders, managers from all the different settings. And they came together 75 of us and we made five books. Each one of them is in the domain. So they're all available. We'd love for you to see them and we'll share the link as well into the research forum. So today we're just talking about one, which is one chapter of the 80 chapters that Noel and I worked on together, chapter 67. And in that proficiency, we were asked to talk about the evidence of social care. So that students should have an understanding of where does our evidence come from and to demonstrate the interrelatedness of what students learn. So the knowledge that they gain within the education setting, their formal education setting, and then the knowledge that they gain when they go out on placement to try and get students to understand the interrelatedness of that. Noel and I developed this model, which we called the SKIP model. So it's brand new, it's social care knowledge informing practice. So we're just going to talk to you briefly about that today. So the first area I suppose that we considered was that social care is an interrelated profession. So the piece of equipment people bring to work with in this is a personality. And that's the relationship is the tool. So we had to start off with looking at the service user, the service user world. That's the top of our model, which tells us, tells the students where to start in terms of looking at knowledge. And then they go on placement. We have them, they go on placement and the situated knowledge reflects that relationship development with the service user and the mentoring they get from the practice educator, the social care worker in the field. And they learn how to do social care work there. But one of the key things that we need to learn about is the self. So as much as forgiving them education about the service users, their world, they're learning the skills of how to do it in the setting, which might include manual handling, but it could be a homeless needs assessment depending on where you work. But the first stage is learning about yourself before you engage in a relationship with another person. So when they develop that knowledge of themselves and obviously that's an ongoing process that happens throughout life, they then begin to develop an insight into what exactly social care is. In the chapters in the book, there are 80 different definitions of what social care is defined by each of the chapter writers. So there's so many different perspectives because we include everything from intellectual disabilities, homeless services, addiction, residential, right across the whole gamut of human life, I suppose. And when we talk about what social care is, we recognize that professional education and knowledge from a social care perspective is something that goes on for an entire life. It's looking at, you know, the practice with some people accumulate over time. And currently in a lot of the published research for our social care world, a lot of that is not captured yet, that practice wisdom piece is not recorded because it's stuff that happens on the ground and we're a new profession. And so that's captured in the third element of our model. And then finally, in the heart is just to remind everybody that the relationship is the center of everything that we do, the relationship with our service users. So I'm hoping that you get from this that we feel this model, the skip model is vital for the students to be able to understand the interrelatedness of education. And if you're interested in it to check out chapter 67 in the e-books that are free. So then we see this model also been useful across all the life cycle of a social care worker right up to the end of the life span. Okay, that's it. That was absolutely five minutes on the button. Well done Noel. I was about to push the button there, but once again, you ruin the phone. As someone who's taught social care for 20 years, I'm delighted to see this coming out. And as I said with the profession, getting the official recognition it deserves. And it's nice to see something which which can actually articulate it because I suppose, you know, sometimes people, what exactly do we mean by social care? So I think that's a great piece of work. Well done. Even if you did ruin my time, I actually thought I was going to go to Okay, Mark noon. Mark, are you going to ruin my phone? Are you going to be well on time as well? Let's find out. I like a challenge. Yeah, so that's definitely at the interest of me there. Okay, as I said, we started off going to the left, we started off going to the right this time. Now Denise and Noel, there's two years there, so I have to see plenty of movement here. Everybody else lower it down there and you see say, Lewis, are we ready? We're going to start off on the right. Are we ready? Hey. Hey. All right. Hi, everyone. So my name is Mark. I'm from Manooth University. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the computer science center in Manooth University, which is a support service we offer and a redevelopment plan that we took, that we've been undertaking over the last few years as part of the HEA Innovation and Transformation project. So just on the left there, you'll see just a picture of kind of the room that we use currently. So the reason this kind of redevelopment plan came to be is that we've had this support service for years. It used to be called the Programming Support Center. You may or may not have heard of that. We've had, I think about 10 years, we were one of the first universities to kind of open one of these for computer science, particularly. But it wasn't performing as well as it could have. So as part of this project, we looked at creating a redevelopment plan, rebranding, and kind of getting it back to where it should be. For those who aren't that familiar with support centers, they are very common in kind of the mathematics and computer science worlds here in Ireland. Not that common internationally, which is something that we're hoping to kind of push and change as we're learning as well. So anyway, the renaming was kind of the first thing that we did. So we went from the Programming Support Center to the Computer Science Center. One of the reasons for that is that just a lot of students felt like the word support, being in the title, was a stigma. They just weren't showing up because they didn't want to admit that they needed support. So even though we functionally still work the same way and we're still providing support, just the name is a little bit more inviting for some. For others, obviously they didn't mind, but some did. So that was the idea behind the name. The picture on the left there is the current room that we use and a couple of kind of students getting taught by one of our undergraduate tutors who are volunteers. The room was another major thing that we wanted as part of the redevelopment. In the past, we had space that we used, but it wasn't permanent space. So now we have a permanent room that we make use of and that is such an important element of what's needed to have that familiarity, open, welcoming space. So these are just a few of the other aspects then of the redevelopment, and I'm not going to go into all of them. So these are just a handful of the things that we've done over the last couple of years. So increasing the opening hours top left, we used to only run about eight hours a week. We now run 15. Concurrent tutorials is something that we started last year. So basically alongside the lectures for our introduction to programming module, the tutors who run the center deliver a tutorial that talks about the same topic that the students are working on that week, which they find bridges the gap between the lectures and then the labs where they have to put everything into practice. And we developed a lot of cheat sheets. So just additional material to have in the room and other additional questions that the students can kind of practice with. And we put a major, major focus on on bettering our tutor training. So in the past, tutors were trained, but a lot of work has gone into telling these undergraduate students how to best approach teaching students. So most of them are second year. So they've literally just finished the module themselves. So it's a peer learning approach, but obviously they need a little bit of guidance to get to get going. And similarly, then we run a student induction session, which is literally the first years get shown. This is the room. This is what where it is. This is what we do. So instead of just saying, Hey, there's this thing you should use it. We actually bring them show them, show them the room, talk to them about it, get some of the undergraduates to introduce themselves. And again, it just it's another way of kind of calming people down and welcoming them at the start of the year. And then finally, on the top right, we run a few coding competitions and different things. So let's just have a brief handful of some of the additions we made. So before I talk about this graph briefly, let me just mention some of the numbers that these stats are going to be from 2019 because obviously 2020 didn't go as planned for anyone. And this year we're only kind of getting used to everything again. So in 2019, we had 40 undergraduate tutors apply and most of them got errors to work at the center. We had 180 unique students visit the center over 977 visits amongst them. 702 of those were in the first semester. So this was pre the lockdown in March of that year. So we had a very, very heavy kind of participation in the first semester in previous years. The numbers were nowhere near that they were closer to 100 or 200. So briefly a couple of stats on the top figure one there is just some anecdotal evidence from the students as to how they felt about the center that year. So the first point, the CSC is an inviting learning space, mostly strongly agree or agree. The tutors are always friendly and supportive, same again, and that they felt the CSC has helped them advance their knowledge in computer science. And then finally on the bottom, figure two, those students who do attend the CSC at least twice in a semester perform statistically better than those who don't. So the numbers are about 58% versus I think 50%. So it's quite it's a statistically significant increase in their grade. I'm just going to leave this slide up then to finish for for the recording. So if you want to get in touch with me, top there is my email and then there is our social media handle. And there's the paper that this is based on and our poster will also be in the showcase during the week. That's all. Once again, brilliant. I mean, this is, I don't know. I mean, it's the gas to work because people are terrified about the five minutes, but it's certainly working because everybody, but once again, well done, my great, great project. And once again, as I said, if you have those contact details, you want to throw them in the chat as well, there like that. I keep going on about it, but it is, as I said, we like to have a bit of crack, but there is a serious intention to the whole thing, there like that. So it is, it's a great set of slides, a great project there. And a very good point about the sort of almost stigmatization of the word support, I think that was a really good point. You know, so it's certainly something there to do. And our final gas to tear for today is Lucia Walsh from to Dublin. Yeah, I'm here. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Is it Lucia or Lucia? It's Lucia. It is Lucia. Okie doke. So very, very good. I just have to get my timer already again. So, okay, if you want to get yourself sorted out. And this is our last one for today, and I've been leaving you sitting down, haven't I? So I think like, well Lucia. I'm going to present you some sustainable illiteracy through authentic perception. Yes. Excellent. Now, as I said, you're going to air your lunch because Ulrich has got, walked us all up a big appetite. So at this time there, push your chair back a little bit, everybody. Okay. So we're going to go up on the hay and down on the dough. Okay, we are ready. I'm going to go over time just so people can count again at the end. That's what I want to hear. And as I said, I called it 10 seconds. Once the five minutes, we'll do hey, no tree, karku, it's just for me to shout stod. Okay, but I'm, Lucia, I'm sure you'll be perfect. So we're all ready. We're going to go up on the hay. You ready? Hey. Okay. So this has been a very interesting journey that happened thanks to the National Forum Impact Projects funding. Like a snowball, it started small and it gained momentum, not just within our own school, but also across the whole of university. And in the end, in the last academic year, we had over 3,000 students taking part in this in some way. I am Lucia Walsh and today I will be showing you some of the examples of our approach to enhance sustainability literacy through authentic assessment in our practice-based research. I worked with my two W. colleagues, Dr. Olivia Freeman, Aleko McAlpine, Dr. D. Duffy, Dr. Kira Nolan and Dr. Kormak McMahan. So we see that the move towards attending assessment is key to empowering graduates to achieving meaningful impact in the real world. The initiative that I am focusing on today was designed with the aim of enhancing sustainability literacy among business students using innovative digital tools as part of an authentic assessment strategy. The project has been developed by a group of my colleagues that I mentioned who share interests in sustainability education in our school. We piloted SURI test, which is a sustainability literacy test across 16 different modules in college of business with around 1000 students taking this sustainability literacy test in the last academic year. And it was then extended to auto disciplines too. The students varied from undergraduate to postgraduate and executive students in modules such as retail, professional development, international management, supply chain management and strategic marketing. Our approach used three steps. Step one was SURI test. It is a UN supported platform and the students were able to take an MCQ style test that evaluates their knowledge around United Nations sustainable development goals. It also provides students with follow-up resources. For example, when there was a question around forced labor, there was a link to UNICEF report on child labor. This component was not great. Step two was we used a common reflecting framework by both. It was common across all of the modules because it gave us something similar when it came to data analysis and writing up our research. Step three was then the authentic assessment. The students were engaged in making short videos and decision makers, digital posters and even engaged in activism actions. Some of these also involved peer-to-peer learning. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I'm not going to read the quotes because you can read faster than I can talk. But the reflections show that's great insight into students' knowledge and perceptions and what impact their new awareness of sustainability issues had on their college, personal and future professional lives. The most commonly picked topic were around plastic pollution, oceans pollution and rain life, forced labor, renewable energies and circular economy. There was also a lot of emotions and feelings that came through these reflections from shock, anger, disbelief, but we also saw feelings of hope, optimism and recognition of own privilege. This is an example of a video that focused on SDG4 which is quality of education and the technology enabled for the digital workforce of the future. This student related the topic to the relevant concept and also chose to interview primary school children. I have lots of time so I'm going to show you but it's probably not going to play. So you can see the captions there. The sound isn't working but it doesn't matter, I just keep talking. The feedback from students were really positive and as you can see this student got over 1400 views on LinkedIn and lots of comments. The feedback was really positive. The students fulfilled their learning objectives in terms of mastering discipline specific learning outcomes but it also boosted their sustainability literacy knowledge, their digital skills, their reflection practice, their creativity but also the use of professional networking sites and their confidence. This is an example of a digital poster around the fast fashion industry and this is an example of an activism piece in supply chain management. A student in supply chain management contacted their local TV and their question was then put forward and answered by the department for enterprise trade and employment and as you can see this was hugely empowering for the students. So that's it from me. Check out our community of practice called SDG Literacy that we established. We are on social media and if you would like to implement Suri tests within your own modules or programs I'd be happy to talk to you and meet you for a virtual coffee. Thank you. Yeah again round of applause again. Absolutely as I said wonderful wonderful although she nearly made the card and I was saying at one stage you did say plenty of time and I was going challenge accepted. I'm very very mindful that we're five minutes over which I think considering all things considered we've done really well. Just to say don't forget every day this week with the scholarship hour and the gasta there's loads of events around vital week and just to move things on I'm going to quickly hand back to Lewis and I'll see you all tomorrow. Brilliant thank you Tom and thank you everybody all the presenters for their wonderful talks. Thank you and you may have been wondering congratulations to all 65 of us participating. We've just completed the first ever gasta marathon under Tom's. Well done everyone. I think it's a marathon because it's 26 minutes of it so that was that was pretty cool and there'll be more later in the week so well done. I'm going to bring in Laura Keneely now who's a student a student associate with the national forum from UCC. Laura are you ready to come in? I am indeed Lewis. Thanks everybody. Thank you over to you. I won't be as jazzy as Tom I can promise you that and I'll try to keep it as brief as I possibly can but just overall I just want to say thanks for the opportunity to be able to speak today. I'm incredibly honoured to give the student voice on this wonderful gasta marathon and to be the part of the first one. So just to acknowledge Frank's presentation at the start and to say that I found it really interesting to reflect on the economic value of teaching and learning and I think as we all sit here today we are all key stakeholders for policy makers and it's so nice to let that sit with us for the rest of the week. I think that's something that's definitely going to resonate with me and I hope that it resonates with other people about our value you know especially for in terms of policy makers and with the decisions that they make which are Leen's presentation I have a little bit more notes to to to incorporate but I'll try to be as quick as I can. I really love the presentation I think it's great this research is solution based and it's you know it looks at current assessment challenges and it also does that fantastic things that also students are still trying to master which is looking at literature versus practice and amalgamating those two concepts and the balance obviously there being between authenticity and consistency and I love the fact that we've discussed you know the inter-stakeholder dialogue and the fact that you know this is a bidirectional relationship that we need to be having and I love that the methodology for the research was participatory research and action so in terms of the different aspects of the research and the seven key insights for the policy and practices I just want to say in relation to the central point which is the stakeholder dialogue and clarity that I'm really you know I suppose I'm really delighted to see that students and educators and practitioners all have a collaborative role and because that speaks to students usually like when we're involved in everything and when we're included in our own education and the purpose of our own education so I feel you know delighted that that was a key central insight and students want to be employable ultimately you know we want practical skills and we want to be supported and I think when promotional efforts are made towards this it can only benefit everybody and my main reflective point from Geraldine's talk was just to look at them was just to look at those that maybe that what we do to support those who can't engage in placement or work integrated learning components within the remit of their course for example myself and who may not get to experience you know that work integrated learning and I just wonder how that we how do we then go about bridging the gap of knowledge for the students who may feel that they're a little bit disconnected from their final roles within the university and kind of encouraging that institutional bridging between the importance of on and off campus learning I think Brian touched on this earlier as well like how what do we value more do we value it more when we are more competent as students on campus or do we value it more when we're integrated into you know the work practice and how we work with emplacement so for me personally in my own institution I know there is the UCC works award there's also the mentorship program which is launched this year and they also do a work placement module that you can take and I think this is something that's crucial and needs to be highlighted to students going forward and as a means of bolstering that kind of relationship between on and off campus learning in terms of the gas to presentations that will be super super quick and Ulrich's presentation amazing love the concept of reflective practice and I love that there's the the tree levels of reflection I would think that like defining these for students will be incredibly helpful Paddle is a great tool because it's pure assisted learning but it does now also need to be monitored and I do think that looking at COVID as a positive catalyst is something that's really refreshing versus the way we've all sat and looked at it for the last 20 or months and to Denise and Noel again fantastic the emphasis being on the interstakeholder dialogue importance the supporting students to achieve the competence that they need for work like this is such a key message through all of the presentations today and you can see that obviously as educators I mean it gives me hope as a student that this is such a central team running through to everybody's talks and the frameworks and models can be really beneficial in steering as well self reflection which touches on Ulrich's earlier presentation and again it's just the need for the assessment this is literacy clarity so what's expected of students being really clear with the language that we use with them and Mark's presentation interesting point as students seeking support can feel like it's a weakness I know that for me myself when I have to reach out or if I have to sort of seek a learning opportunity it can feel like weakness you know I can feel like oh my god I have to lean on another but it's it's definitely worth involving students in conversations around this and how to frame it and I think Tom you touched us on this as well and to not see support as such a negative word we all we all need support at some point or another and I think you know highlighting that to students as a positive rather as a negative would be great and finally you see our first sustainability again meaningful impact in the real world like this really sits with me and it's the key message for most students we just want to be able to you know do that transition out you know we've transitioned in we transitioned through and we want to be able to transition out as well and how we do that is super important so it incorporates the themes I think from the other talks today that bridge the gap between what assessment is for who does it serve what types of assessment are needed to really benefit students and the importance of assessment literacy so I hope I've covered everything I know I've been really really quick but I was aware that we were running over time and I wanted to hit it all so thank you so so much and again for the opportunity to speak to you all brilliant thank you Laura that's great to get your your concluding remarks as well and and your summary of the main points it's it's very important you know the national forum values the student the student voice and and that's a great exhibition of that thank you so much Eleanor Ronan in UCD has also been making a few comments in the chat and underlined the importance of sustainability and higher education and the importance of building that concept into assessment and into learning and teaching more generally thank thank you Eleanor and I it's my duty now to bring this session to a close thank you everybody and congratulations for participating today and there will be just a reminder more sessions every day this week and a scholarship hour every lunchtime from 12 30 as well as tons and tons and tons of campus based and and virtual activities so please look at hashtag hashtag is it hashtag vital as hashtag he vital and and you'll you'll find everything there and my own two takeaways and I think I echo a little bit what Laura was saying here hashtag nash nf vital thank you there you are you have the the correct link and apologies for giving you the wrong hashtag and two two takeaways for me the importance of of using covid as a positive catalyst and Laura highlighted this too and we were on a point of no return we knew we had to do things differently and covid has really helped us identify ways of doing that and sustainably as well so let's try and do that and the second one underlined yet again today by the brilliant talks that we've we've all participated in and enjoyed the importance of research underpinning developments learning and teaching in Irish higher education and internationally so thank you to everybody for for those and I'm going to ask you to check out the vital calendar reminder remind you again of the scholarship hours every day this week look at the website the links are all there in the chat follow the hashtag nf vital and over we go thank you