 Hello, and welcome to this next session. We've got on from here to anywhere, a digital escape room, an area of personal interest to me. So when I'm definitely looking forward to hearing about today. So I'm going to pass you over to the presenter, Matthew Stranick. Matthew, over to you. Great, thank you. Hello everyone, I'm really glad to be here and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak on this project that I've been involved in primarily from the beginning of the year, that is to say the winter semester, this past March. But there has been a fair amount of development prior to that that went into this project and there's been some sort of ongoing maintenance and care. So I was hoping to speak to that a little bit. Again, really glad to have the opportunity. So yeah, let's just go to it. So I guess just to begin with, I would like to acknowledge that I, where I am currently is in the interior region of British Columbia in Canada, southern interior BC. And I work, I'm associated, I'm a learning technologist with Thompson Rivers University and where I am is located on the traditional lands of the Tecumlick Disequipment here in Kamloops and the Tecumlick, which is the Williams Lake campus associated with our university. And these are both located within Shaquemikulu, which are the traditional and unceded territories of the Shaquemick people. And the region that our university serves also and stands into the territories of the Statenick, Mecklmack, Dethnogen, Nuklack, Deklick and Metis communities within these territories. And teaching and learning has been happening within these territories since time immemorial. And it really is a great honor and it really is a great privilege to be joining you as a guest within these beautiful lands. So I just wanted to start the presentation in a good way. So I guess just to begin with on the topic of escape rooms, some of you may remember this or recognize this image from an indie picture from a few years back that was in some of the theaters, possibly a limited run release. And the whole notion here encapsulated very succinctly by this gift is that the escape room, which you're gonna sort of see how it came together and what it consists of is, on the one hand, it's a bit of an engagement strategy. It's a bit of a, perhaps a ploy, if you will, a bit of a game to try and encourage some learning, but in fact, through its design and through some of the intentional, and in some cases unintentional elements that went into play in setting it up, this is actually something where it serves a pretty wide variety of educational purposes. So I'm not gonna go too far into that metaphor. I don't wanna strain it too much, but hopefully, this will be of interest to you and hopefully we can explore that a little bit together. So I guess just in terms of background, again, to begin with, I think just about everybody who's watching this or who's participating in this conference has had some variety of experience with what, at least on my team and in my area, we're called, we've referred to as the pivot, the pivot to online of 2019 sounds quite heroic, doesn't it? But what it actually did was in our area really caused us to have to adapt and create essentially new approaches for learning, for teaching and learning among a faculty cohort who perhaps weren't necessarily that experienced with it or ready for it. So what this led to, I mean, we all have our own narratives of this, but roughly speaking, the early months of 2020, we're spent kind of scrambling in this way, but by fall of 2020, which is to say one year ago, at least in our institution, things are more or less settled into what the synchronous and asynchronous delivery primarily online of all of our courses and all of our programs that our institution would be looking like for at least the following six months and if not the entire year. So where this led to my involvement with this project was coming into contact with a, for want of another term, non-mainstream cohort of learners, which is to say special needs. That's kind of a term that we don't like to necessarily use. People with a wide spectrum of intellectual, cognitive, and other kinds of various abilities and disabilities, right? Special education at the adult level for students who would not normally be able to attend university through a normal program entry. So I became pretty close colleagues pretty quickly with Christina Cedarloff, who was a longtime tenured instructor in this area that we have in our university, the career preparation for that cohort of students. And we sort of determined that in addition to trying to get their regular programming online, that it would be beneficial for all concerned to develop some digital literacy skills, particularly as the whole university and all of these students' programs and courses were being delivered online for the first time. So to that end, we devised sort of a ePortfolio project, which we worked on with the students throughout the fall term, consisting of WordPress websites. And this really seemed to go quite well. This project, the ePortfolio project lasted with these students for the full academic year, actually. And where we saw a good deal of success and uptake with the students and the folks that these students were had within their support networks, we felt that taking this to a wider audience would be beneficial. So in the later part of the winter term, or the later part of the fall term, excuse me, and then in the winter semester, which is to say January of this year, my colleague, Christina and I met with representatives from BC campus, which is a provincial educational technology group funded by the province of BC. So a publicly funded body devoted to eLearning and eLearning resources and supports within our region. So we developed essentially a pilot for a digital literacy symposium for these special needs students. Again, I'm using that term because I wanna communicate the idea here properly, even though I don't prefer to use that term. And where we ended up with it was coming up with two half days of programming, synchronous and asynchronous, which essentially involved a variety of activities with various speakers. And we had attendance from across the province of BC among the students, upwards of a hundred students. So for a trial project, this is a pretty high enrollment from something like, I believe we were above 10 different institutions and with educators as well in the mix. So sort of a professional development opportunity and networking opportunity. So again, a bit heavy on the background there, but I felt it was important to emphasize this cohort of students in as much as as we were devising the program and as we were devising what the activities would look like, we were mindful and indeed intentionally moving towards some implementation of universal design for learning, which many of you are likely familiar with. I won't go into any great detail or pretend to be particularly an expert on UDL, but hopefully it renders well enough on the screen here, just sort of as a summary wherein you can see that we were mindful in this presentation, in this online format of synchronous and asynchronous activities for these students to really wanna make sure that it worked as well for everybody as possible. And I guess in front and center of my mind as somebody sort of responsible for the WordPress element, the website, the asynchronous elements and the escape room was providing multiple means of engagement for students. That was the primary thought that I was trying to represent here through UDL. And again, if there's more questions later on about what that could, what that looked like and what my thinking was there, I'd be happy to speak to that. So as I mentioned, a key aspect of what we were doing was making a publicly accessible website through WordPress at TRU. The team that I work on supports a local, a local installation of WordPress, which we refer to as TRUBOX. And that's the newly updated from the summer landing page, just trubox.ca, if you want to visit that handsome website. And for this project, we felt on the open web was important. So WordPress was definitely the way to go. And it was sort of an opportunity as well to kind of represent the project, not just as a learning activity, but as an open educational resource to be used and adapted by other educators. So everything that you would see within the project is intended in that spirit, with the Creative Commons 4.0 license associated with it. Now WordPress was sort of the platform for the asynchronous elements. You've heard me mention H5P and I'm sort of taking it for granted that everybody knows what H5P is, but that may not be the case. So here are just a couple of screen grabs from H5P.org. It's essentially a, ask a learning technologist how to describe what a technology is, and you'll get a very long-winded answer. It's a very, I would say it's a bit of a paradigm shift if I'm not putting too much emphasis on it. It's user-friendly learning technology. And it's a format wherein learning activities can be created easily by users and shared via a specific format file. And it's all now piped into, all H5P is baked into the core of the Moodle learning management system, which we use at our institution and in other areas. And it exists as a plug-in into WordPress, which we have in our WordPress installation. And those files can then be moved from one location to another and adapted. So for the purposes of using it as an open educational resource, that was important. Being able to create dynamic, enriched media experiences for these students vis-a-vis an escape room, it just made sense to use H5P because it exists as something which integrates very well into our WordPress setup and then permits transfer, download and sharing among other educators or others who wanted to use it. That was essentially the thinking there. I'm regretful that at 4.30 in the morning in my local time here in BC, I can't give you a better overview of what H5P actually is. But if you visit the website for sure, you can see some excellent examples if you haven't experimented with it already. So I guess now moving into the actual escape room component, right? This is also the digital citizenship website that sort of was mounted. And as I say, we had these two half day synchronous sessions that were delivered through Zoom. But what we had prior to the sessions going forward was this WordPress site setup such that folks would be able to check out people who weren't at the session necessarily or people who had been at the session and wanted to review the session slides were presented there. And we had some other resources, including links to things that the students and educators might find of interest, a survey for feedback. But again, the main feature of this was to mount the escape room in that it could be used by folks who did not attend the session. But the session was the second day of programming actually did focus on a 30-minute culminating activity wherein the students were asked to apply what they had learned over the two days through the escape room platform. So to that end, this is a bit of an open-ended project. So what Lawrence Fishbird is sort of referring to here on our behalf is that it was really meant to be something wherein we had the opportunity to provide something that existed not just in the moment, but for a longer life cycle outside the scope of the initial offering. So in terms of what that consisted of, essentially it consisted of one single H5P activity which was the book activity with a number of different questions. So each of which had a supporting media element, whether a video elements or whether a photograph to kind of anchor the viewer, gather attention. And then some very, I guess it started out, it was sort of envisioned through the gamified learning aspect as being three distinct levels of learning, of testing the learning over the course of the room. So the challenges were meant to go from lower order questions and then by the end of the question cycle reaching out to higher order, self-expression, self-knowledge kind of questions with two distinct checkpoints a series of five questions, pardon me, a series of five questions, a pause, moving on to the next level and then five more questions, a pause, moving on to the final level as it were. Again, attempt to make a sort of a gamified interface here. Now where this was being mindful of our special needs learners and folks, we didn't want to end their educators and others. We didn't want to necessarily make this something where they felt like they couldn't move around that will. So we had a collapsible menu wherein you could jump from question to question at your will, essentially. We wanted this to be a safe experience. We didn't want to force any kind of, I guess, single pathway through the escape room. We wanted this to be a safe and meaningful experience. So the collapsible menu provided the opportunity to jump from spot to spot and people could complete this kind of at will. The graphics were sort of supportive of an escape room scenario and all of the graphics were openly licensed on splash.com primarily, but there were some other sources as well. And then, I guess, to further the gamified concept and to enter into a problem-based learning concept as well to kind of apply some of the knowledge, we did have what you may recognize as a couple of signs with the Google dinosaur, wherein if you go offline, if you get disconnected from your Wi-Fi on your Android device, you can still play a Google dinosaur game. There's a link here. The students in this course of digital literacy had been advised not to click on sketchy links or unsolicited links from folks that didn't know. So this is sort of a pause to sort of say, well, should I trust this or not? And at which point if they chose to kind of forego what they'd previously learned, they would appear with a video game without any instructions. And thank you, I'm being told there's one minute. I'll try and wrap this up quickly. So there's a publicly hosted version of this jumping dinosaur game without instructions wherein students had the opportunity in the synchronous section and asynchronously to figure out how to use this themselves. This is an example of sort of one of the more higher order questions. So as opposed to the earlier questions which included filling the blanks and drag and drop, this would be something where students would be asked to formulate a written response. And this was not saved, this was not marked, but it did ask that the students come up with something that exercised their critical faculties a little bit more. And of course, they could always check the slides that were available on the website to kind of remind themselves. At the second level of the game, the dinosaur game gets a bit harder. So they have the opportunity to click outside of the website and visit a more complex version of the dinosaur game. And again, this allowed for multiple outcomes and a problem solving approach towards engaging with the game or engaging with the escape room outside of its original parameters. The final slide is this lovely hotspot activity in H5P wherein each of those hotspots reveals a video clip or a photo with a congratulatory message because effective domain is extremely important. I am past my 20 minutes. I hope I can have one more moment here to just indicate that all of the sources of media were open source and that they are documented on the site. The back end of the site in terms of WordPress looks like what you might expect with a WordPress website in the dashboard area. So all of the media that I showed you, all of the media which you can get to by visiting the website, all of it resides within one single interactive book activity. So yeah, and that's what it looks like from the back end when you click on it. So I guess now I'm ready for any questions if there are indeed any questions and it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to present this to you. So thank you. Thank you very much. Matt, that's been a really, really interesting project. Really enjoyed listening to that today. Over to questions and answers. If you've got any questions, please do pop them in the chat just now. We've just got a couple of minutes left. I've got one comment here but I think you maybe answered it is that is the public demo available? Now you've, I think you've said it was maybe afterwards you'd be able to share a link into the chat that'll go alongside the video. Sure, if I plunk in this now, I just put it into the chat which you have access to. I don't know if that can make its way into the YouTube stream or not. Digital citizen, digital hyphen citizen.trubox.ca. That's where all the stuff lives. And it's a fairly self-explanatory learning technologist built WordPress website which means what it lacks in sophistication and makes up for in good intentions, right? In terms of design, so. Perfect, thanks. Hopefully that can make it, we have went into the chat just now. A couple more questions just while we've got time. We've got a couple of similar questions through coming about if you've managed to get feedback from your learners and linked on to that. Have you any plans to make changes or developments based on that? Yeah, absolutely, thank you. The response was overwhelmingly positive. We had a feedback survey, just a survey monkey survey embedded onto the site which is still there. And yeah, overwhelmingly positive. This particular initiative, the Digital Citizenship Symposium was deemed a success. It was a free project involving myself, work in kind essentially within my role. My colleague from a special education at our institution as well as our link, our colleague Helena Prince from BC Campus. We worked off the side of our desks and we've been given a grant to do a larger version of this whether later on this year or early next year. So, yeah, stay tuned. There's definitely more on the way for sure. Perfect, thank you. And that link now, a couple of people asking for that is now in the chat if anyone wants to click on it. So probably got time for one last quick question. We've got a minute left I think. I'll pick up two different questions that are similar. And it's about analytics and sort of what you managed to get out of it. Did you sort of look at the completion from students? Did they go through and complete it all? Or was there any other analytics that you got out of that that was kind of interesting? Yeah, to be honest, thank you. That isn't something we've looked at in any great depth but that's an excellent thing to consider. It's something we definitely have to consider for our second offering. Given our timelines and given the fact that we were off the side of our desks, as I say, we were sort of scrambling just to kind of get it built and piloted in the first place. But for sure, the analytics will be vitally important. If I'm being honest, I probably could dig into the backend of WordPress and dig out some traces and use that for further development. But honestly, through the survey and semantic dodal comments, we believe that we've kind of got what we need for the second iteration. But in the second iteration, analytics will be extremely important. So yeah, that's a great question. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you very much. And that is our time up. So thank you for the comments from everyone. Hopefully you'll imagine access to that and have a good look around it. And we'll look forward to version two, Matt, hopefully in the future for you. But thank you very much, Matt. It's been really, really good and great to listen to today. Appreciate it a lot. Thank you. Take care.