 Hi, everybody. Thanks very much for coming along to our session today. I'm a learning technologist from DCU, and I'm here with my colleague Suzanne as well, also from DCU. And we're going to kind of treat this as one whole session, if that's okay. So we will speak at the beginning about our EDTL project, and then in the latter half we're going to be looking for your input and assistance with a particular task. I might turn off my video now to save my bandwidth, and we'll just get kicking off. So I hope you can all see our slides now on the screen. The slides can be accessed at the bit.ly link there afterwards if you want to take a look back over it. But let's kick off. So what we hope to do in this session is give you a bit of a background to our EDTL project, which stands for Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning. Speak about the structure, speak about the community that's built up around it, talk about how we piloted this project in our own university, and how we focused on the topic of technology enhanced assessment. And then we'll also share with you some of the preliminary findings of our evaluation, and then some refinements and adaptations that we are making going forward. So just to give you a bit of a background, and I won't labour this point, but I suppose there's been a general shift or consensus or conversation happening at various levels in the last few years around the need to equip our graduates with the necessary digital skills and competencies so that they can succeed in the workforce. And this is spoken about in the new school for Europe, where they talk about making sure European citizens are adequately skilled for the ever changing economy. We have our EU digital education action plan, which many of you will be familiar with, which I suppose aligns very much with the skills agenda and puts forward a number of concrete and distinct actions to enable digital education. Here at a national level in Ireland, we have our own national skills strategy, which again is very much aligned to the European skills agenda and really calls on higher education institutions to make sure that our graduates coming out of our Irish institutions are suitably equipped for the ever working world. We have a national strategy for higher education, which calls on institutions to adopt greater levels of e-learning in their provision of programs. At a sectoral level, the seven public universities in Ireland are part of an organisation called the Irish University Association, or IUA, which is a representative body. And that body, the IUA, launched a charter in 2018, which seeks to make sure that the Irish University system is as good as it can be and that it can offer a very robust digital learning experience for all of our students. And then of course, like many other institutions, we have strategic plan in DCU with many, many ambitions in it, one of which is to increase the number of digital learning experiences that we offer our students. What we can see is really at various different levels, a number of policies, a number of strategies really coming together to provide opportunity for something to be done about this whole area of improving the digital experience of students, improving the digital skills and competencies of them. So the IUA applied for some funding from the Higher Education Authority in Ireland to develop what they initially proposed as a digital learning programme. So a programme where academic staff in the universities could upscale around their own digital skills and competencies with the view to improving their courses and their modules so that students own digital learning experiences could be improved. So thus was born the Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning Project, or EDTL, so it's a three-year project and the aims are of course to enhance the digital attributes and digital experiences of the Irish University students and more specifically to roll out a staff development programme to enhance the digital confidence skills and competencies of all those who teach in Irish universities. So we're not targeting just professors or lecturers or just full-time teaching staff, but we have a very broad conception of people who teach and people who support teaching in our universities. And the approach is to mainstream digital in teaching and learning. We're all very familiar over the years with the concept of champions. We've all had champions in our departments in universities who are great at digital teaching and learning, and they're the go-to people, but this project aims to kind of mainstream that and get away from this idea of the champion and the pedestal, but rather lift up the skills of everyone who's involved in teaching. These are the kind of four pillars that underpin the project. We recognise that each of the seven universities have a lot of professional development opportunities already, so this project doesn't seek to undermine existing CPD approaches, but really build on them. We focus very much on pedagogy first, not technology first, so we speak a lot in our development with academic staff. We talk a lot about what it is they want to achieve and what learning outcomes they want their students to achieve, and then they explore ways in which technology can embed that. We treat things on a discipline level, so we work with teams in programmes or teams in schools and departments rather than working with individuals or rather than working with the mishmash of academics from different disciplines in the university. We also value quite a lot. We have a number of student interns involved in the project, interns who lend to all of our activities. There's the structure. We have, as I mentioned, a project manager in the Irish University Association. We have different project leads in the seven universities, and myself and Suzanne are the leads in DCU. We have student interns and we have a steering group made up of senior management from the different institutions, and that senior management buy-in we found is really, really very important. We utilise the, your use this framework to engage with the academics and have them explore what's their current level. Do they want to explore? So that is quite a that is useful framework. I'm seeing some messages about my internet connection, so I do apologise. What I might do is, Suzanne, if you can hear me, can you take over from here? Yeah, sure. Rob, I was just texting you there. Apologies for that, guys. So, as Rob said, one pilot with seven different flavours. I guess, can you just make sure that you can hear me, okay, so that we don't have continuing issues with audio? Brilliant, excellent. One pilot, seven different flavours. You'll see a little bit of information on the slides. I popped the bitly into the chat box a couple of minutes ago. Obviously, we're more, we're going to speak more about the experience at DCU today, just to give you an idea of, of the experience at DCU. Brilliant. But before I do that, I just want to highlight one of the successes at national level of the project, self-proclaimed success, but it has been very successful, particularly after the pivot to online learning, because people were reaching out and looking for a kind of a learning community to engage in. And that's our community, our learning community, which we kind of, we facilitate through a webinar series, which allows practitioners to come together, share their experience. We do kind of have a semi-formal structure in that. We have one or two very short presentations at the start. And the idea is to focus on the session afterwards. And we'd like to invite you along to join that community. More information on the blog. You can see the information, the blog URL here. There is a session happening today, as we speak. It's clashing with our session. Please don't leave us and go to that one. But you might check out that session afterwards. The recording will be available on our Vimeo channel and also from the EDTL blog. There is one that you may, some of you who are working or supporting people who work in lab-based subjects, does an upcoming webinar. Thank you Fiona for popping that in. That's brilliant. Coming up on the 7th of September with some guest speakers, Andrew Gard and Michael Seary. So we'd invite you to engage with that learning community. It has been very active and very lively. Some of you may have attended already, but we'd love you to see some of you at one or more of those events in the future. At DCU, then, our focus is on technology enhanced assessment. And why did we choose assessment as our focus? Well, assessment, as we know from the literature, influences all teaching and learning or all aspects of teaching and learning, which is why we decided to take that approach. We have four distinct but interconnected work packages which centres around a staff development program, but also involves the development and maintenance or revision of online resources. We've also committed to ongoing technical enhancements for our VALE, which is Moodle. That's obviously in discussion with participants and the broader university community, and then our communications and dissemination package. The staff professional learning program is based around a suite of 10 workshops which drew on established professional learning opportunities and staff expertise within the teaching and enhancement team and beyond the team. So as Rob outlined earlier, one of the pillars is that you're not starting from scratch with this project that we're building on work that's already been done in the past. The pilot phase, the development of the project worked a little bit like this. So we developed the suite of assessment workshops. We discussed those workshops with our potential participants from the Faculty of Education and a School of Psychology. We customised those workshops based on discipline-specific needs. We developed pre-work workshop learning activities, more about those later, not so successful, unfortunately. We delivered three pedagogy-focused workshops to participants, followed that up with individual and group consultation to support the planning of their technology enhanced assessments. We offered ongoing support in the implementation of those assessments and then we reviewed and refined that pilot phase and what we learned from that pilot phase. Essentially, we applied in phase two of the project which happened from February to April this year in the middle of all the madness. But I guess the first learning for us that, and we'll be discussing this later on in part two of this session, is the need for staff to conceptualise digital assessments. A lot of the staff or the participants that we were working with had a little difficulty imagining alternative assessments. I know that things have slightly changed and people have been pushed to imagine alternative assessments with the COVID crisis, but we're talking about September to December last year. The idea came about to develop a set of exemplars of digital assessments. We found that while a lot of people in our immediate circle had some excellent examples of digital assessment, we wanted to build on that and those grew the idea to develop an open education resource and to crowdsource exemplars through a broader community. We're going to ask for your help with that in part two of this session. Another learning from the pilot was that flexibility was needed for delivering the professional development. That's an old lesson, but even before COVID, we had already begun to deliver some of the sessions online. A very interesting finding was that originally we had structured the workshops so that we would incorporate a piece of practical work, and the idea was that we felt if participants left the workshops having discussed the why of digital assessment and a little bit of the how to and had something tangible to leave the sessions with, we felt that would be a great achievement, but actually we found as we delivered the workshops that the discussion around the pedagogy, the why to of introducing technology into assessment was much more important for them. And also because they were working together in schools or maybe programme teams, that discussion space was really, really valuable for them, particularly because a lot of the time the amount of times or the space that they have to have such discussions can be very limited in a busy schedule. We also found that the pedagogy focused workshops where they were excellent and there was good space for discussion there. They also needed to be followed up by almost separate technology or how to workshops, so we built that into the programme. And in a lot of cases we have actually delivered those online because they lend themselves more to an online space as well. The pre-workshop task as I mentioned in the last slide, two-time consuming people didn't really engage with them so we simply removed them and thought again about our structure. One of our pre-workshop tasks was involved asking participants to engage with the digital comp edu framework so that we would have an idea of their digital competence before engaging with the project and subsequent to engaging with the project. While we found that the framework was very useful and it's quite dense in the way it's laid out and participants needed some scaffolding to engage with that. We attended a really excellent JISC workshop last, I think it was just before Christmas last year in Edinburgh when we were all able to fly and meet each other in person. And there was an excellent presentation or workshop around gamifying engagement with those types of frameworks. Now that one was the JISC framework, digital capabilities framework, but we've adapted that approach to develop a gamified or digital pursuit board game approach to engage in participants with that framework. And now obviously we had tried it out in a face-to-face environment before Covid, worked really well, participants responded really well to it, there was a bit of fun involved and it also, because we were working together in a group, people encouraged each other, they remembered things that their colleagues had engaged in in terms of digital capabilities and that discussion piece was really really useful and well received. We have tried that on an online version of that as well and again works works really well. Last finding then in terms of development, we had kind of focused very much in our work package on the development of online resources that were tech-focused, but we did find that people were looking for non-tech-focused resources as well and one example would be how to facilitate or scaffold group work. So that was interesting as well. There's an evaluation under way as per our pillars, the student voices is key to that. We have conducted focus groups back in April online of course, very very interesting findings. I'm going to speak a little bit about those in a moment and also we've gathered participants' anonymous reflections on the project. We're using Bambur's framework to evaluate impact just to take us beyond quantitative data, you know, figures of participants etc towards an evidence of impact on practice in the longer term and then we're working with the Irish National Forum for Teaching and Learning to develop a badge for participants based on their participation in that in the project. Is there an online version of the game? I see a question coming in there. We have an online version of the game that we're very happy to share with you. Mel will pop that into the chat box towards the end of the session. Okay, so the evaluation, the academic reflections then. Rob, I don't know if you can come in on this and give it a go. I'm not sure how is my internet, is my audio still poor? Perfect, no, it's really good at the moment. I won't keep you long then. So as, as Zan said, we have done an evaluation with academic staff. It is preliminary, we haven't collected all of the all of the anonymous reflections from the staff but from the reflections that we have gotten in so far, there's some nice themes emerging so the academics are placing them in around the same level on the DigCom PDU framework or perhaps one level above us, which is good. You know, we weren't expecting staff to suddenly be revolutionized overnight with their digital competencies. They speak a lot about confidence in using technology, which is here. And there's a really nice quote here about building community as well. So I think that's one of the great benefits of working with colleagues who are focused around a discipline is that they can kind of build this community and they can continue these decisions after they finish our professional learning program. They've made lots of plans for future practice, things like e-portfolios, a formative assessment using technology, adding flexibility to their assessment formats using technology, so maybe offering students a chance to do video assessments instead of text assessments. A lot of the people involved were teacher educators and they had a particularly interesting insight in that they felt it was important for them to model good digital pedagogy for their own student teachers who they're teaching. By no means was it all rosy, they do recognize there are challenges involved in ongoing development of the digital competence and again will be no surprise to the people here in the room, the lack of time for innovation and time for redevelopment, the kind of sense that it's easier to maintain current practice and assessments and of course the ever present danger of technical hiccups as indeed I myself am experiencing now in real time. So I'll hand you back over to Suzanne. Great thanks Rob, it just struck me that you had done that piece of work so I didn't really know what I was talking about for that slide. Okay so the initial analysis of the student focus group data then, we did focus groups with four separate groups, no three separate groups of four in each group and the findings were just really rich, we couldn't, we were really excited by the findings but we're at the early stages of analysis so we've just pulled out five findings to date. I thought this was very interesting, a suggestion from the group around digital feedback for exams which seemed to resonate with the rest of the group and to be explored in more detail later but the idea was that you know you often get feedback around continuous assessment but you don't really get it around exams beyond your grade and they were suggesting that maybe that might be of benefit. They were very positive about digital feedback in general and I thought this point was really interesting and it related to the difference between feedback for those who have done well in a piece of work and those who had not done so well so I mean obviously there is a long conversation to be had if people are struggling with a piece of assessment but the point was made that for those who have done actually quite well in their assessment digital feedback is really useful because it can be short and sweet and give guidance around how to make improvements and avoid the long conversation that that may be needed if they had been struggling a little bit more so I thought that was interesting. There was a suggestion to tie alternative assessments or technology enhanced assessments more closely to career needs and one example that was offered was the need to use like basic you know software pieces of software such as Excel and that students feel they don't get enough practice on basic stuff that they are almost definitely required to use in their postgraduate career. We often focus on the via Lee kind of related you know a quiz or indeed the portfolio which they were very positive about as well but the need to kind of expand that a little bit well came through in the focus groups very very positive about the portfolio and would encourage more use of the portfolio again interesting and the last finding that we just wanted to present to you was that students were suggesting more and more collaborative learning assessments so they feel they're really valuable and authentic in terms of assessment. So in terms of the project response to COVID then obviously everything was turned on its head somewhat in March at national level the project refocused to support blended and online delivery obviously for 2020 and into 2021 so the approach that we took was there were an abundance of resources out there to support staff to get online from total novices to those who have been teaching online for years but the approach we took was then to curate the resources and offer a framework for people to engage with those resources rather than reinventing the wheel and those resources are available on the EDTL website which we popped into the chat earlier and we very much looked at okay there was a lot of panic at the start and it's been really really busy and a number of months but we're looking at the crisis as an opportunity and certainly in terms of alternative assessment and the availability of the OERs which we're going to speak about in the second half of the session really supported people to imagine alternative assessments and you know they had to it was something that they had to do last term given the crisis. The impact of the pilot then EDTL participants just I suppose this is outside of the formal evaluation but it's coming through in some of the reflections that EDTL participants felt better prepared for the crisis particularly in respect of designing alternative assessments anecdotal at the moment but it will come through in the reflections as well. Okay so in summary the project driven by you know discipline specific and needs identified at various levels tailored to participants needs scaffolded support and ongoing support is a very important aspect of the project the student voice central to to the project again one of the four pillars and very much informing our skills development for staff moving into the future. Mixture of types of engagement some at surface level some really strongly engaged with every aspect of the project but you know we've just kind of adapted to to suit people's individual needs and the adaptation to resulting from the COVID crisis we're seeing as a real opportunity we're like glass half full people at the moment so guys thanks very much for your attention there we're going to move into the second part of this session but I might just take a pause and see if if you've got any questions at the moment feel free to come on the mic or pop them into the chat box. I think there's one question there Suzanne from Mel asking how much engagement did we get from employers if any from a discipline perspective and that's actually really quite interesting we we didn't engage with employers directly because the the disciplines that we worked with don't necessarily have a very clear cut relationship with a particular industry or or indeed particular employers so we were I suppose more conscious about general digital skills and digital competencies rather than specific skills and competencies related to specific industries however I do know one of our partner universities in the project Manuthi University they have been doing some interesting work with their careers service and trying to in from employers what are the kind of specific skills that they are looking for from graduates and that is something that that that we plan to turn our attention to in DCU as well and does anyone else have any other um questions um I see some of you are are leaving you probably have another another session you you want to get to uh oh thank you so nice comments coming in the chat thank you Natalie and Ute. Thanks very much guys I might just um keep moving then um Rob you jump in when you can and um I'll keep going if that's okay is that okay yeah perfect yeah keep going okay so the next uh the game link uh Don I'm going to pop that into the the slides um so it'll be available on the slides after this session I I just wasn't able to put my hands on it there quickly so um the the game the link to the game or our version of the game um with