 Good morning, everyone. For those of you who couldn't hear any audio until now, the reason is because we hadn't started the teleconference or the webinar, but we are about to get going. We've still got a lot of people flying in, so we'll keep letting people in as we go. For those of you who are new to the session, welcome, and I'm sure lots of other people will be coming in soon. But please, can you just note the following observations because of all the challenges around Zoom? We've introduced the waiting room, which is why we're still letting people in as we go. In addition to that, we request that you turn your video facilities off. That enables me to monitor whether anyone with bad motives comes into the room by mistake, in which case I can get rid of them very quickly. As you can all see, the chat room is open at the moment, and we do encourage you to introduce yourselves and to chat. We've found the chat facility particularly in the last session very helpful because participants were able to interact with each other and answer questions. You will have seen that we actually shared the chat log with you in the resources afterwards, and we'll hopefully do the same again if we get good conversation. Obviously, because of the risk of being Zoom-bombed, I will be monitoring the chat very closely, and if there are any problems, I will turn the chat facility off and let you know that I've done that. But the last two webinars have all been fine, so I'm hoping that we'll have another clear run because our securities are much better on the webinar in the last two rounds. So I'm going to hand over to my colleague, Naduma Glamini from the Association of African Universities, who will introduce yourselves, welcome you all, and we'll be on our way. For those of you whose sound is breaking up, as far as I can tell, generally the sound is okay, so I suspect that might unfortunately just be a problem with the connectivity on your side, but I will keep monitoring from you. So welcome, Naduma. Thank you very much, Neil. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, those that are already in their afternoon. We welcome you again to the last webinar, where we will be talking about how you can effectively communicate as you teach your students. My name is Naduma. I work for the Association of African Universities, and I'm representing my boss, Professor Etienne Ehile, and I'm here to just thank you for taking time to participate in these webinars, especially those that have participated in all the four webinars, who are eager to hear your feedback as we plan other capacity-building initiatives. So please enjoy this webinar, and we look forward to hearing from you in terms of how we can improve the future webinars and in what areas you require additional capacity-building. Thank you very much. I would now like to hand over to my colleague Andrew, who is our facilitator today. Thank you. All right. Welcome, everyone. Today's team. We've already had an introduction from Naduma. Thank you very much. This is obviously AAU's initiative, and we're very happy as part of OER Africa to co-host here today. In the back room, making things happen. We've got Neil again. For those of you who have already interacted with him, you know, he's a very efficient gatekeeper, trying to keep things flowing very nicely. We've also got Kathy again. She's back and is making things happen behind the scenes, and Tony is helping us out as well today. There's Tony up in the top left right-hand corner, also from OER Africa just to make sure that it all runs very smoothly. My name is Andrew Moore. I am representing OER Africa today, and I have introduced myself four times, or this is the fourth time. If you'd like to know more about me, there's all the social media links that you can download this PowerPoint and have a look if you're interested. Yes, but my particular interest is obviously in open educational resources, and we're going to be offering you a whole load of them based on today's presentation. Obviously, technology is one of my loves. The marriage of good pedagogy and the technology together is where I like to sit. All right, so today's one is on communicating effectively during campus closure, and it really is the fourth piece of our puzzle. We've already had a look at a very general introduction to ERT in webinar one. If you are new on this occasion, then we would strongly recommend you go back and have a look at the recordings of the webinars for one, two, and three. The second one was on what to teach, how to sift through your curriculum carefully to find things that lend themselves to ERT, and last Monday's one was on various activities and assessments and diagnostic tools to kind of work out if learning is actually happening. So that was number three. So this is the fourth piece, and we're going to talk today about how do you keep your students engaged, interested, interacting using communication tools. So that will be the focus today. Just for those who are new, ERT, we're going to use that term a lot, Emergency Remote Teaching, and we differentiated from online learning, for example, because in this particular instance, we're looking at quick ways that we can get people who have previously no experience or very little experience with online learning up and running and engaging with their students and making sure that learning continues during this time of crisis. And yeah, so we're going to use ERT in that sense. All right. So what is our agenda for today? So I've divided up into four. The one of them is on how do you devise a communication strategy. So if you really want to be organized, you should think through how am I going to engage in terms of communication to who, with what, and what am I going to talk about, and so on. So I'm going to talk very briefly about developing a little strategy for your communication. Then we're going to have a look at effective communication practice so that when you are engaging in terms of writing messages or engaging with people in various platforms, what is good practice? We're going to very briefly look at some digital communication tools. I think you guys are getting up to speak quite quickly with these things, but I'll identify the usual suspects and the ones where there's lots of support. And then right at the end, we are going to encourage you to start thinking about how do you facilitate synchronous meetings, like a Zoom meeting or like Skype meeting and so on. So what role should you take and how should you mediate these type of synchronous meetings? So we're going to have also look at that as well. So that's our agenda for today. Time permitting. We'll have a very quick look at how to get some technology up and running to support your communication strategy. Obvious things that we could do that will have a big impact is create a WhatsApp group for your class or for your course, and also to create a Facebook page for your course so that you can use these tools to distribute information and communicate. If you are interested in this presentation and or the recordings, both this webinar four or the previous ones, one, two, three and four, they are available in our Google Classroom. So you can go and have a look at our classroom. We did talk about Google Classroom in webinar two and we're trying to emulate how to use Google Classroom. There's the code. You would simply go to that URL and then plug in that code. Some people have been saying that they couldn't get in and we have subsequently found out that Google likes some domains and it does not trust some domains. So there is actually a filter on who it lets in. What we have discovered is that if you use your Gmail account, then you can just walk straight in and there are places still in the classroom. So if you'd like to go in there and when we have a discussion during the course of today, you can actually use the discussion forums in the classroom if you want, otherwise you use the Zoom chat. However, if you can't get into the classroom, do not panic. All the materials are available on the OER Africa website and there's the link there. We will upload today's resources as we get them after the webinar. Webinars one, two and three are already in place and you can go in and get them. All right. So that's the admin for today. So let's begin in earnest. Right. We're talking about communication and effective communication and if you want to be really organized and we would encourage that you be so, then you should actually sit down and spend a bit of time thinking and planning about how what communication strategy would work for your context, for your students and for your subject. And so there are a couple of questions which you need to ask yourselves and here are just a couple of ideas to kind of mix up your strategy. I'm going to talk in a minute in more detail, but you need to plan and strategize and I've put a little table of guys there because ideally you should really plan and strategize with your department or with your college or your school or even your university and try and get consensus on how things should work and who is playing what role and so on. One of the things that are very important though is that you come up with very clear contact and availability information. So one of the things we're picking up is that during ERT the faculty often feels overwhelmed. Students are panicky. They're not used to this type of teaching and learning and they bombard faculty with a whole host of needs and requirements and concerns and woes and so on and they can be a bit overwhelming for faculty as well. So you might be experiencing the expectation by the students that you should be on call 24-7. So we would argue then that your communication strategy one of the things it should identify is very clearly who should be contacted for what and when that contact will be responded to. So not just the time but also what's the time delay within how quickly will they respond to various requests. So with encouraging you guys in your plan to think very clearly about contact and availability information and then because of ERT there are so many tools and we'll have a look at them in a minute but it'd be good to have a mix of different types of opportunities and we'll explain why later on but we've already in previous webinars mentioned that synchronous meetings that is live or immediate meetings are very engaging. People find that students find that they can see you, that they know what's going on, they feel you're on top of things, they feel on top of things so synchronous is very very nice but it takes a bit of setting up for example even this webinar there was quite a lot of setting up before it for it to happen. Asynchronous meaning not live meaning can be done within certain parameters at any time so asynchronous opportunities should also be in your plan. So what's synchronous and what's asynchronous and which tools are you using and so on all right and then my fourth item I thought try and not be too predictable. If you find that you keep sending out the same type of message every week then people start to ignore it it becomes mundane and oh yeah it's one of those and so on. So ideally your plan should have a whole load of ideas about how you can be creative and how you can shake them up a little bit perhaps be provocative and come up with some creative announcements to keep people interested and engaged don't become too predictable in your communication strategy. All right so if you are building a strategy document then what should be in it and I was going to I found this this morning I actually thought oh this is quite cool it's not an OER you know in the previous webinars I've been trying to give you a whole host of free opening licensed materials and I've there's a whole load in here as well but this one is fully copyrighted but it is free to use for individuals and to share so I thought oh well we'll stick this thing because it is actually quite good. So here's like the structure of what your plan might have so first of all is according to our author comms 2.0 he would say first of all you need to understand what is it that you're trying to do so what is your context what is your specific aim of the strategy and what you want to achieve what are your objectives so he said get that out the way first make sure it's very clear about what the purpose of this document is supposed to do then he would say all right now have a think how are you going to do so what is your strategy so what's the scope what do you and and then who exactly is involved and who is also the audience and then another section would be on where and when and there's some ideas in there what's your channels what's your timeline what type of message content are you there's things in the realm and get rid of this what's your message content and so on and yes okay and then towards the end what are the resources that you're going to use so the more detailed it is the easier it is to run your communication strategy but it does require a bit of thought and as a process and then ideally of course we should evaluate to what extent it achieved its objectives after it's been running for a while and maybe revise it in light of what we discovery all right so have a look at that there's a link there and you can download that if you feel this would be useful in devising such a document we said in previous webinars we've mentioned that there should be rather than feeling that you should be on call 24 7 rather set some office hours and obviously people can ask questions and send emails and log queries and so on 24 7 but the faculty only commits to responding at certain times and that just gives you some space in order to to get rid of these things that gives you some space to be able to work effectively so I've just called up an example here so you can see how other organizations have done this this is from Matthew Gniewer school of leadership and governance they're here in Hauteung in South Africa they run a little online courses and these are examples of their communication strategy for their courses so you can see they're very clear about which components of work will be done when so you can see that each of those cells is a different unit of study and then we can see when during the time that has been allocated for example it says 21 to 27 august then it says well during that week who is the facilitator on duty between five and six o'clock in the evening they made the decision that their office hours would be nightly every night and and it would run from five to seven for two hours in the evening but they would have two different facilitators on call and you can see they provided the email addresses of the facilitators the the students who are actually teachers in this instance also had access to telephone so they could they would those phone calls would be taken during those times if they got the right person all right so there's an example of them thinking through the the when in terms of communication and support this is another African course which where they built their communication strategy around their course here this is the more the who in the strategy so this one is from a Kenyan ICT CFT competency framework for teachers it's a ICT integration course for teachers and they had an orientation right up front and then they shared who do you talk to so they wanted to make very clear who handles what type of issues so if there were any academic assistance required then those three people at the top there were the the people you could go to emails supplied if they needed technical assistance it was a blended learning course so there was moodle and devices and things involved people were forgetting their passwords etc so then there was a link to a person who provided technical assistance and then they had little specialist groups tutors for want of a better word but these were online tutors and they would obviously be more down at the level of the actual content in the units of study that was going on so they made it very clear in their communication strategy as to the who should be approached all right so how would you make your own little communication strategy I've given you a chart or a poster which can help you guide you in terms of structure but here's some interesting little OERs and the first one is very nice it's kind of breaks it down into steps about how to create your own communication plan that would incorporate social media it's by a blogger called Sue Beckingham she does lovely stuff so have a look at that one and then the second one is a bit weird it is a little YouTube video it's really about church communication and how does a church communicate with its its congregation but the principles are perfect for us so instead of saying church you can say class and they come up with four good little steps about how to do your your planning so I thought that transfers across very nicely it is a openly licensed YouTube video and then there's a book on effectively on humanizing online teaching and learning and there's a special chapter just on the whole communication and devising a strategy so it's a little bit long-winded but good stuff but nice stuff all right sure that was a run by me so I think it's this now I get to hear you guys and for those of you who are experienced in this field we would like to know what communication strategy advice you've got and for those people who are new to this field we would like to know what are your faculty's experiences of this first part of the national lockdowns and the campus closures and do you feel that you are being overwhelmed do you feel there needs to be some effective methods put in place to protect faculty from this barrage of requests so let's can you use the chat facility let us either know you'll let us know your experiences and there is also the classroom there's a place there's a discussion forum in the classroom so if you have access to the classroom can you please do that and if you're really struggling there's a email link which you can use as well we had it up at the beginning for Neil so can you use one of those mechanisms to get your views across okay Andrew so I've got a couple of raised hands are you ready to take a couple of inputs Joel okay so first I have Alice I have your hand but unfortunately you don't seem to have audio so I'm not sure how to connect you so next is Jay Fatakun so I'm going to unmute you to talk you are unmuted if you'd like to talk thank you very much it's been a wonderful experience the lockdown has actually given us a challenge and that has helped us to think about investing also online teaching with our students in Alcoa University Lagos however there are some issues general issues anyways of students putting gates along very well because of the network connection and the major issue really now is using the go classroom because I am thinking how can we domesticate the kahu to assess our students is there any help you can give in this direction when we did the demonstration I registered as a student to be able to participate in the questions now how do I come in to set my questions and register as a faculty member it's one of the issues I want you to address for us here in Alcoa University secondly the go classroom yes if you go to meet the video aspect of it there is attendance there but the attendance there is a continuous one I'm still thinking anytime you do presentation is that the attendance all over again maybe you want to move from presentation mode to the chalkboard and the whiteboard mode the attendance will start all over again is there any help in generating the attendance list exclusively so that everybody can be covered within the period either one hour lecture or two hours lecture thank you sure okay um I hope I heard that correctly the first part on assessment and we did yes it's just been a request if you could because also other people struggle a bit to hear if you could just repeat the question as you understood it I don't think there's point in in unmuting again because the line wasn't great but if you can just repeat the question as you're understanding it and then give you a reply all right and the first question was about assessment and how can we still have rigor and be able to track students progress and so on and what tools are available so we did cover this in webinar three so I would say if you want to it's the answer in detail or have a look at that recording um but the quick answer is that if you want to be rigorous in terms of tracking student progress and making sure that they are developing then ideally you should get your assessment within a closed environment like a learner management system where we know who those students are they have to log in they have usernames and therefore the and then after that the platform will track what they do and what they say and you can even grade them and so on you can then use also develop term marks so I'd say if you if you want your assessments to be rigorous then you're going to have to put them into a platform whereby it can track what they're doing so these fun things like cahoots and quizzes that we did last time are really only any good for formative assessment where it's kind of a learning aid rather than a reviewing of proficiency tool and then your second question was ah I've forgotten okay was I'm going to move on to Rinaldo in the meantime and then hopefully you'll remember it otherwise maybe uh Jay Fratikun you can just type it back in the chat and Andrew one other question that someone is asking which I think is relevant at this point is uh just how to manage in terms of being overwhelmed I says we're working more than 15 hours a day and I wonder if you might be able also to address that once Rinal has spoken because I think a lot of the problem there comes with the channels of communication getting too open and students having too much access to to to academics and educators in this context but before we go on to hearing from you about that maybe that's something you can address I'm opening up for you Rinal you should be unmuted now thank you Neil morning everyone Rinal Evans University of Pretoria South Africa um I just would like to respond to the topic of the day the communication and how we deal with that I agree with being overwhelmed students are needing some form of contact and I think just typing a little question quickly to hear that the lecturers out there might also be the case I'm responsible for a module that has 987 students that means just under a thousand and we are three lecturers who deal with them what we have done is um we've taken the many emails and WhatsApp messages and we've created an FAQ sheet frequently asked sheet where um there's a question with an answer and another question and an answer and that seems to have alleviated the many emails and um barrage of WhatsApp or SMS's coming through and um we've also created at the moment four times a week which I personally think might be um too many sessions we might be grading down to two sessions but we've created virtual consultation hours where we we've indicated what time we available and we are live online all three of us and um we are then trying to respond to questions that session is being recorded the platform that the university uses is Blackboard Collaborate Ultra cool very nice and we mentioned frequently asked questions last time um that in webinar two um and here you can hear an example of where it's actually helping to to um limit repeat requests for information so the idea then of a frequently asked question page or a document is that those questions that keep coming up um the you'd say to a student have you checked the FAQ if you if it's not in there then can you express the concern again and that's why you don't have to keep repeating yourself over and over and over again if one person's got that issue probably a number have as well it's very rare that it would just be a one-off type thing so the idea then is that's a good one and I do like the virtual consultation hours as well it's when um the lectures are available and people can come in and ask and um the that also sounds good the uh you might also remember we mentioned um another way of doing frequently asked questions is to have like a summary at the end of the week where you say these issues kept coming up in terms of communications and then you can um publish what those are sometimes it's done as a video because then they can see you as well and sometimes it doesn't have to be it could be a digest in the email and so on so yes uh we've got to find ways then to kind of support these people that are feeling vulnerable they they're also been pushed into an environment that they're not but totally familiar and comfortable with so we do need to provide the support but at the same time we've got to protect ourselves we we mustn't become totally overwhelmed and therefore that's why your communication strategy is important you've got to put in place what are these mechanisms like Pretoria has in terms of these two approaches so nice are there any other questions not at this stage so I think go ahead all right there's lots of questions coming through on the chat but uh others are also answering so let's keep moving and then Tanya will sift out a couple of our questions for you as we go along okay and there's another example what Neil has just told me is that you guys are helping each other and we should be doing something similar we mentioned in the last webinar or again was it number two uh that we should try and put together peer networks where they can help each other and we mentioned previously that these peer networks have always existed previously admittedly face-to-face and that's where most students get used to get their course information and now suddenly that's disappeared so try and think of ways that you can put these peer networks back together again so it could be a WhatsApp group or perhaps a Facebook page or something whereby they can help each other as well and that's another way to stop the faculty from being overwhelmed by all these requests for support all right so assuming that you've got your little communication strategy in place and you know who's doing what and when you're publishing what and so on then it's an idea how do you structure these communications I mean the actual communicate how do you write it or video it or in such a way that it really is effective so the here are four little ideas number one is these communications need to demonstrate that you're out there we mentioned in webinar one that there must be a presence you must have a presence online you can't just now disappear and put up a front where everything looks like it's controlled by the LMS you need to be there as a person and they need to see you there even though it's all remote so be involved be active and if there's an opportunity for a discussion like a forum or a WhatsApp group or something where there's a discussion taking place be in there I mean don't answer all the questions especially if it's an academic question don't answer it straight off let the discussion evolve and and try and shape it and try and point people in certain ways so the idea then is even in these opportunities for online discussions you need to facilitate the discussion then you need to be in there so that they can see your role another one would be to when you are engaging with people try to be as personal as you can now if you got 950 people in your group that's very difficult okay to effects impossible to be personal to everyone but at least show some interest in the person as an individual rather than as a great big collective the class so try and look for people so that you can show that you are personable and then your feedback should be meaningful so none of this yes no okay type of response you should craft your communications so that they are helpful and useful that they mean something and so on and you should also try and keep interest going and we mentioned also in webinar one that e-learning is a very difficult environment for the learner they often feel alienated and isolated and therefore you need to be engaging and sending out regular little messages about new things that have popped up or and a piece of news which is relevant to what you guys are studying and so on so send regular engaging announcements so that they can see that things are alive and moving along and that they should be moving along too that they're not just been left alone and nothing's happening it's all very easy to think everything's died during ERT nothing's happening and therefore they can now also slack off you've got to keep the momentum and the interest running and show that they are being tracked and listened to and so on all right however these communications or communicates should be as concise and as clear as possible so no waffle yeah remember we mentioned earlier that you in webinar one i was a two it's all beginning to blue that when you're identifying what resources that you should give them you should find only the core resources that you should be giving them only essential data and so your communication should be similar in nature that they should be concise clear and as short as possible actually without being too trite or too distant so yeah so keep your style of writing clear and concise here's CILT again from UCT pardon me and i love the little advice that they gave and i've used this often in my in my little courses and so on and in this book called facilitating online they said that when you are writing don't do these things okay so these are don'ts so for example don't write long emails keep them concise don't give very short answers like yes no or rubbish etc okay don't give very long answers they go on and on and on blah blah blah blah blah blah blah reading online is difficult at the best of times and therefore you need to keep your ideas as tight and organized as possible don't get into waffle don't answer emails and when you do answer be very very critical so if you are going to be critical and let's face it sometimes you need to be that's your role really to kind of guide and make people develop and grow but don't be very critical in the sense that they feel deflated or broken the idea then is keep in constant contact and that if you do need to be critical then be very careful in how you express it so it doesn't become attacking don't provide deadlines for ERT in fact you need to be very organized you've got to tell them when things are ready we've keep mentioning that because these students are now remote they think that because it's all silent and quiet nothing's happening so therefore they need to have clear deadlines about when things are due and what their tasks are and what you are trying to achieve what are the goals of these various activities and so on so you need to be very clear and you need to obviously be flexible for individual needs but you've got to be able to put them out there and if people have specific roles then again they need to be defined so it's very clear so everyone knows what they're doing even though they're not together in a big group so if there's roles that are important then can you define them clearly don't give people very strict long or complicated guidelines so keep it simple for online learning and for ERT we need to make everything as easy accessible as possible so don't over design stuff keep it simple so if there's any guidelines going out again keep it simple and don't promise to do something but then don't deliver all right so if you've said you would do something then you must you must be responsible and get that out there if you say you will do something it must happen and again it's just as easy for us because we're not engaging face-to-face to think oh it's all a bit more lex and a bit more easy oh I'll do it later no it's probably even more important now that when you promise something you deliver and it's on time as you suggested in the first place all right a little basket of sorry and that previous slide you were saying don't provide deadlines um I wonder could you one or two people are asking that they're a little confused by that oh sorry um all right okay I meant I think I've summarized it wrong I was trying to make it concise for the slides uh no it means don't provide deadlines which what what we what they mean here in this document is that um a lecturer keeps everything a bit loose and a bit disorganized but here they're trying to suggest that you must provide clear deadlines all right so that it's what is that strange negative grammar um which is causing the confusion but let's just make it very clear you guys must set deadlines and they must be clear well communicated and everyone must know when certain things are in or when a reading must be finished or when a particular um synchronous meeting will take place uh and that everyone must be involved so you've got to be very clear about when things are due and um and what your expectations of them are so you yes please we want it clear about when these things are due I think there Andrew it will be important just to adjust this slide before you share the slides okay cool can do it um all right let's that is this it has thrown up issues because it's the negatives all right but don't worry okay we will make that very clear because that's the message isn't it that's exactly the message things need to be very clear all right um a little basket of open resources and there's that manual which I've used many for many years there's also you've got another student remote learning resource kits this is very interesting this is um it's been put together by students for lecturers this is what according to Sue Beckingham's blog site um these are the types of things that students are looking for in terms of communication and in terms of how they want to be engaged with and which platforms and so on admittedly that it is American but many of the ideas are are good and coming from students is always nice to have their perspective on things as well and then the third one is um a great article on how to build rapport all the ways that we used to build rapport previously and face-to-face sessions has gone a bit wibbly-wobbly now so how do we do that online how do we create connections between ourselves and our students so there's a nice little article with some good ideas about how you might do it okay again they're all OERs lock yourself out all right should we um ask for questions have anyone people got any observations about how they can craft their communications and um what do for those people who have not really thought about it before you can also think um your normal communications would you say they are clear and concise or do you tend to feel that you want to be as comprehensive as possible when you're right a number of people are clarifying um that previous slide about deadlines and emails etc etc um one of the participants a little earlier and i don't know if you want to cover this now or um refer them elsewhere uh and tombe zadwalinda was asking about how do you evaluate class participation online yes all right and one of the ways you can do this because obviously um the it's it's well known that in the online environment uh we i think it's called the 90 percent all 90 percent of people just look and that means they're watching and they're following but they're not actively participating then about nine percent of people um are partially involved they might make a few comments and so on and whatever and then you got one percent who are these terriers these people who love to almost hear their own voice and so they are they are constantly um engaging so it makes it very difficult if you're just watching a discussion or something like that to know whether um everyone is engaged and following and um and getting the most out of it so if you want to measure class participation on a particular activity then you need to organize it so that they're aware that you are tracking them that they are being watched and that there is a minimum requirement as to what their participation should be so for example in a learner management system if you have a discussion forum going you can let people know that in order for the system to mark that they have completed that activity they must post twice and they must reply to a post twice is the bare minimum if they want to get the duly performed for that for that activity so all the lms's have some type of tracking system and i know for i'm i work in Moodle i know Moodle therefore allows you to set the bare minimum of what people must do in order to to be marked by the machine that they have performed the minimum the minimum uh activities and then um you can if you want to even add marks so you can say it's not just posting in a discussion forum for example but it's the quality of your post to what extent you have engaged with the the the question or the um the item and therefore you can mark them and you can say out of how many marks um you want it for and if necessary you can make it part of the term term mark um so there are um ways to track what people are doing make sure that they achieve a minimum participation and then if necessary even quality assure their responses in terms of giving them marks but um yeah that all needs setting up and so you need to know that in advance and as we've already mentioned today your communication um with the students must make that very explicit these are your expectations of what a minimum participation would be so something like that there's a way to do it keep in mind again 90 percent of people just observe nine percent get partially involved and then you normally have one percent two all over the place um and everywhere so yeah you've got a final way of teasing it out so you can see that the others are also following are there any other questions there are several suggestions actually on the on the chat no specific questions right now um just one point is that there are so many good suggestions on the chat that um people will receive a a record of the chat after the meeting and they can they can then go through some of these very helpful suggestions and implement themselves yeah so we're putting the recording and the chat available on the OER Africa website and you can download the chat and have a look thank you because i think some of the the clarifications would be very useful there and so people can do that i think you can continue andrew um andrew before you go on someone has asked you to explain less is more um i've i've pointed out on the chat that you're you're uh the one slide that was exceptionally confusing is a good example of bad communication uh so thank you we've shown people what happens if you don't communicate very clearly and concisely uh online it creates enormous confusion uh so for those of you who weren't clear what andrew was saying is that you should give deadlines in other words do give deadlines but don't be overly long so it's about the the point is about getting the the length of your responses correct so that they're not so short that people don't understand them which is what the mistake that andrew made and not so long that they lose track of what you're saying um so before you go on to explaining also the less is more a little bit more i do have one hand i'm going to unmute uh topic a lifer uh so that you can give a quick input please you're unmuted yes um i just wanted to ask i have a particular situation in my university where we teach um general courses we have uh now i'm wondering what um methods we call you know strategy people put in place to teach er i mean to deploy erc through teaching the students you know while we are not there campus very nice class um uh i think it's kind of what we're trying to cover in the four webinars um maybe i didn't get it all uh you were very fine um uh in terms of an ert strategy if you look at the four webinars together then i think that it does cover quite a lot of ideas about how it can be done um admittedly your context will determine what's possible so we're trying to show you the full gamut of options from environments which are very low tech to those that where it's very um uh very well has good access to connectivity and lots of different devices and software and so on so we're trying to show you everything because you know you're quite a diverse group i would say can you go look through the various webinar recordings and see what specific strategy that you are looking for okay i think we should move on andrew all right so let's keep going and if that is your dog in the background i think you should try and get it up the room quickly um all right so um i this part i'm going to do very quickly because i think this is something everyone else is talking about and the idea then is what tools are available and we have mentioned that uh the idea is you've got to choose the right tools for your community you might remember in webinar two we talked about high immediacy versus low immediacy and high bandwidth versus low bandwidth so you have to find the right um the right tool um the here are a couple that you can think about it became quite clear um that the lms is a really good idea so if your institution has an lms it's time to get involved and get stuck in and get to know it well and start learning how it works and so on and um so i would say that would be your first stop if you want to do your own personal one then the there is an option for there is an option for um google classroom or one of these ones where it's free and you don't need to be part of an institution you don't need a man in a white coat to look after it you can do it yourself so keep that in mind as well let's not throw out the good old phone especially the mobile now where it's very pervasive throughout africa and the good old email and email is free in terms of like a google account or a who account and you can easily say that your students as higher education students must have an email and then you can kind of build your communication strategy around those type of tools um the oh i just have to move this so i can see my own slides okay um the uh social media platforms later on in this webinar we're going to have a quick look at facebook pages which you can develop one for your course keep in mind of course that it's a very uh although you can create closed pages um it tends to be a very public environment so you want to put all your good stuff on your facebook page so that people can see beyond just the class who is doing what and what great work you're doing and what we have found very useful in africa especially is the whatsapp group one way to keep people connected and it's very immediate people are walking around their phones and then they get the message almost immediately so it's not quite synchronous but it's very close um in terms of communication so those work well um twitter of course some people are big on twitter i must confess i've never really got it um um but i think it's just me um and a lot of people say uh the idea of communicating in short little bursts of information uh it is very usable and very friendly um but probably now what's become the big fashionable thing in the last year and especially now with all these lockdowns and things sorry uh lockdown is these synchronous online meeting platforms and um the things like teams and skype and zoom and go-to meeting there's a whole host of them and many of them come with initial free plan and then you can if necessary subscribe for more functionality if you feel it's necessary or your class is enormous and you need more seats so yeah i would say in terms of your tools these are where you're playing but um again you should think what what is appropriate for my context have a think about your students we had a person raise a problem in one of the other webinars where 80 percent of his class were fine they were connecting through all these various resources but as much as 20 percent of his class were uh not able to poor bandwidth in their area and high costs of bandwidth as well across their nation and 20 percent is a lot of your class so um yeah you might find that you need a combination of these tools in order to make sure that everyone is getting your communications so yeah um some type of an analysis some needs analysis needs to be done to ascertain what are the optimal tools for your particular context so keep that in mind all right and i think this would be a good time to now ask you to use the chat again and identify what in your context in your different countries and your different institutions uh make sense for low bandwidth learning environments i mean i've just given you a host of stuff what one seemed to be working well for students who have who struggle to connect and to access these type of tools so i have a think and then can you use the chat and give us some ideas what what what is working in your context one of the uh platforms that is being mentioned a couple of times on the chat is google moya messenger um talking about data free uh in south africa and nigeria but um people are saying it does have some limitations and other people are talking if people reading the chat because people are making a lot of very useful suggestions um email and whatsapp are the best for um low bandwidth um voice notes on not not what voice notes on whatsapp as well and powerpoint rather than videos okay again to videos we know high bandwidth um only really work well when people have good access to connectivity yeah so people are coming up with whatsapp instagram google classroom uh twitter people are lamenting that data is never free anywhere which is probably true um somebody's paying somewhere but emails whatsapp whatsapp telegram those are the ones uh that are coming through on the chat most of the time um cool i kakula mentions they only use zoom for postgraduate students um and then again uh finally email and whatsapp so those are the sort of real low bandwidth funds that are being regarded as popular but i would i would recommend people to look at the chat because it'll continue for a little bit um after this anyway cool um all right so which brings us now to these type of meetings these synchronous meetings how should you run your webinar and it's interesting now that we've done it with you guys i would never do like this again all right we've learned so much just from engaging with you on online um that i don't think you should emulate what we're doing um but let's what should you be doing then so let's have a look at some of these tips all right some things we did do which we're quite happy with and then we'll see you later on there are some things we're not so cool on um first of all if you are going to run a synchronous meeting on zoom or skype or teams or whichever platform there is a set of um there's some advice that that we can now start agreeing on team approach to running meetings i would say that if you want to do something like a presentation like i've done it's almost impossible to be able to track what other people are doing in the back channel so you really do need some type of a team approach to running these type of meetings um uh uh some type of a a producer or a manager or someone who can actually control access to the room who can like tony's doing today he's he's scanning the chats and making sure that some of the important things are raised and so on so for me to be able to present and watch the chat is almost impossible so i would say you've got to stop put together a little today we've got four people um uh in various phases doing stuff behind the scenes to make sure that it runs as smoothly as possible all right um but it also means maybe for your faculty maybe not one person should present um you should actually share the presenting so that different members of faculty gets exposed as well so are there sections of the curriculum where there's more than one lecturer working then maybe work in a team so that you can share the presenting as well and then because it's synchronous it is critical that everyone knows exactly when it is going to run and for how long and you therefore need to communicate very clearly and well in advance what the scheduling is going to be so uh you might have remember our webinar one where um we put up 10 o'clock UTC we thought we were very clever well i did and um we suddenly realized that most people were reading it as 10 o'clock in their country and not thinking that there are actually four and maybe five time zones in africa so therefore it all needs to be very clearly um uh communicated about when these things are going to happen and then the next thing is where if you do have a presentation that you want to work through but also just for the whole meeting in general it needs to be quite clearly structured so you got to know what it is you want to achieve if you keep it loose too loose that you don't even have any objectives about what it is that this meeting is supposed to achieve then it becomes kind of mundane and a bit waffly and it doesn't really have any shape and it doesn't really go anywhere people tend to get sidetracked on issues that perhaps aren't critical to what is going on for some people now this has become the social medium this is how they're now engaged with people so therefore a lot of it is chit chat and socializing which is cool but not if you have a specific intention about what it is the webinar is supposed to or the synchronous meeting is supposed to achieve so I would say it does need to be structured you got to know what it is you're trying to achieve but when you read around and you actually see what other people are suggesting in terms of the structure they say that it shouldn't be over designed and if anything mine might be a bit over designed and you might notice I've got a thing for fours there's four webinars each webinar has four focus points and then there was even going to be four OERs for every focus point but I just could I was right out of time so there's only three it's kind of over designed and therefore it should be slightly looser to allow a lot more engagement with the community I feel that we got better as the webinar series went on but not we I think the real value is in the chat rather than me I think that what people are suggesting is is exciting and interesting and contextually very real and so therefore I think yeah be a little bit careful with your design keep it a little loose not too loose but some loose so we can you can have those type of rich interactions and then ideally these synchronous meetings work best when it is a two-way communication at the moment it's predominantly one way I dominate say 80 percent more of the webinar and we are only getting to hear about the chat every now and then so I would say you can't encourage a more two-way backwards and forwards and I've really enjoyed this book and I've been giving access to a whole load of OERs and this is the only non OER but I really think it's good stuff in here so I've put it up here it's fully copyrighted it's a proper textbook and so on if you really want it you can go and investigate there's the name down the bottom so this one's not an OER but it's got some nice stuff in it so let's just see what they say about these synchronous meetings interestingly they say if you if your objectives can be achieved asynchronously don't do synchronous okay so that these authors are saying that really the vast majority of your design for your ERT should be asynchronous but then there are certain things that are so much better if they are synchronous so keep those separate and don't try and mix them do what's best for each of the different types of of engagement and he would say there should be some type of a checking activity now in these webinars we've ranged from between three and four hundred people so the checking activities were almost impossible for that amount and we've heard from a lecturer at the University of Pretoria that her class is nine hundred and so on so a checking activity wouldn't have to be carefully designed so that participants can share their prior experiences and knowledge and feel part of the process so your size will determine the effectiveness of your checking activity but you should still try and allow people to feel part of the process and these authors also encourage a checkout activity as well and you should be you should be structured but not overly designed we've we've talked about that they say your video cam should be on if possible they say especially if it's a smaller group say you're talking about say 10 to 20 people then you should have your cam on and the reason why is then you can actually watch what people you can see if they are bored or they are yawning or whatever and then you can get some non-verbal feedback on how they are engaging and also people tend to be better behaved if they know the cam's on and they don't get have seven different devices open and are working on other things and only partially listening to the webinar which I think a lot of you are doing anyway and so that's another argument for making sure that you can see the people and they say we should chunk the programs into five minute segments so they would argue that our segments are way too long before we cut to a discussion or a chat session or something like that so they say attention spans for online are much shorter than during face-to-face engagements so therefore we should try and change the pace every five minutes and yeah so smaller chunks and break the session into interactive engagements so those once we have had a yada yada yada chat chat chat from me we should then find a way to make it more interactive and then finally they they warn you note that the retention is about 50% less than face-to-face engagements so they're saying that this medium is difficult and that at the moment everything I've covered so far only 50% of it has actually sunk in in you guys in the background there so I mean maybe we're trying to cover too much so the idea then is rather choose what is essential what is important and then focus specifically on that probably spend more time so maybe the pacing of this webinar is also a little too quick too long and maybe too quick so keep that in mind when you're designing yours okay so they would say try and create some type of interactivity your environment your online environment should actually try and it should be engaging there should be interesting things in there so I try to make the powerpoint as engaging as possible with pictures and short amounts of text and graphics and so on and so that seems to be on the right track so they're trying to say use images use things to make the environment more interesting when I met these authors at a e-learning Africa conference and they ran a little workshop and they had us doing all these silly things on the screen we were drawing on his slides as he was going through them so things like that to make it interactive to make it engaging and to kind of encourage that's his next point a social aspect to the whole thing all right I think we're a little bit we've got it but it's not very strong in our design provide structure and clarity this has been coming through all our webinars keep it structured make it very clear make it so that people can see what the main messages are without too much waffle and so on I think we're quite good at that apply a virtual etiquette so when you do these synchronous meetings make sure the rules are clear so whatever you want them to be make sure that they have been articulated clearly somewhere and I think we did all right at that keep it short include energy breaks if necessary they do they do say 90 minutes is the the absolute maximum without stopping for an energy break so we just on the cusp in terms of that and then use virtual breakout groups now our zoom didn't allow us to do this but some of these synchronous meeting platforms do allow you to say all right get into smaller groups of a 10 and for five minutes discuss this issue so therefore rather than just post in a in a chat you would have a much more richer engagement with a smaller group of people where you can hear what they're saying they can hear what you're saying if necessary you can come up with some type of a simulation between the ideas and use images over words and provide opportunities for practice so what I try to do is give you some tips and tricks to actually practice some of the tools to achieve what we're doing they would say probably more of that rather than what we've done okay I've been hard on us because I want ours to be even better so the next time around and we we will raise raise the game but now you can come in and learn from from what we have done and again here's a little basket of goodies and one is on how to sync synchronous learning how do you facilitate these sessions another one is very nice it's a it's a free online self-study course and I think it's a moodle it's very nicely organized you can just go in as guests and actually do the little course very nice flow stands for facilitating learning online is what flow stands for and the last one is one of these open access journals go ahead knock yourself out this was how a research paper on teaching mathematics using one of these synchronous setups so how what was the experience cool all right so that's basically the the main content but let's because I've I've talked up the chat here's a final question to what extent oh I think I've answered my own question to what extent did the designers of this webinar series implement the the synchronous commandments synchronous meeting and commandments and all right so we can open it up then and we'll change it slightly what did you like about the webinar in terms of how it responds to those commandments and what do you think were its weaknesses so let's give you a little opportunity to use the chat or the classroom to actually give us some ideas about what would have worked better in terms of this synchronous meeting if anyone would like to also make any additional comments on issues of communication share any thoughts ask any further questions please feel free to put your hands up I will open up chat channel talk channels for audio for people with their hands up we have Noahiri again who also asked a question in the previous webinar so Noahiri I'm going to unmute your channel now so please go ahead and ask a question. Good morning. Okay good morning good afternoon all and thanks Andrew for that wonderful presentation then my contribution is that the communication has been wonderful it's been a very good one even your response to all emails and it was a very quick and precise so that's what I want to say it's been a good one I've learned how to communicate leaving no communication gap thank you very much great thank you thank you very much for that Noahiri that relative confidence at least as Andrew has pointed out this was pulled together very much at the last minute this is a demonstration of emergency remote teaching in action but one of the things that you will have seen from us and that Andrew and I have grappled with is definitely what happens and I think this is coming from from what you're saying on the chats as well the one of the biggest challenges when you're moving to online teaching for people who are and students and teachers who are used to face-to-face teaching is the risk of opening up too many communication channels and becoming overwhelmed with large volumes of communication we've seen that very extensively through the chats and I think it is really important that almost the quickest thing you try and learn is exactly how you can control the chat not let it overwhelm you from the various channels so I'm going to move on to Felix who has his hand up Felix you are unmuted now oh thank you very much Andrew quite appreciate your thoughts through the series I will be concentrating on communication tools bear in mind the different tools we are considering today and those that are available for learning in during this remote time my concern is not just the tool the availability of such tools to meet all the needs would you suggest we down for instance module of google classroom as is being used in my university and con universities and if for sure that alone would not be able to actually help out in all the learning processes from teaching to assessment to grading and to maybe exams so what would you suggest my point is would you say it is necessary for us to adapt of the ready made tool and maybe modify when necessary or in the long run not in this one month of ERC maybe the ERC continues for six months would you suggest building up designing an MMS that would be able to incorporate all the necessary things we've considered or we just settle down for one and find a way around thank you and the in terms of there's a bit of for ERT there's a bit of a catch so the first prize is to have all the students in one place where so you can coordinate very effectively your learning program and your communication strategy and if necessary your assessment and so on so ideally then you would want them in a learner management system because it has already got a whole host of communication tools content delivery tools and online activity tools it's got a grading system and so on so rarely you would want to try and use the institutional LMS for for that however the problem is a lot of students are complaining that they don't have access to sufficient connectivity and devices in order to even engage with the institutional LMS so I would say then for now you have to kind of if 80 percent of your class can get into the LMS cool but then you still got to think of something to do for those 20 how can you now get the notes out or get the activities out in a very low tech environment you're right though in saying that this is an emergency and so you've got to think on your feet and come up with perhaps multiple strategies to be able to cover your students but in time the trick will be to say all right the bare minimum to do my class would be to have a device and to have sufficient connectivity to be able to access the LMS for example so I would say for now that's part of the stress and the the problem is you've got to maybe think of a couple of different ways to deliver EOT but six months down the line I think we could have been mandated that there's kind of like a minimum requirements for my class and the minimum will be based on obviously a needs analysis of your class so you can understand where those students are in terms of their real needs and so on and that's kind of why we've been saying EOT is different from online learning normally for online learning you would have advertised that the the minimum requirements to be able to do the course are x y and z of which some of it would be connectivity and some of it would be access to a specific device so yeah the answer is one I'm afraid you're going to have to kind of be creative and think about different ways to deliver EOT in the short term but then start planning about what would it look like six months down the line once people have had a chance to get on their feet and to be able to equip themselves with the resources they need to do their studies yeah I'm afraid not clean it's a very messy answer thank you Andrew just maybe also a couple of quick observations from my side as the one who coerced Andrew into throwing this all together at the last minute I think there would be a couple of very brief observations I would make from having engaged with looking at how different countries are dealing with emergency remote teaching that are maybe worth adding I think the first thing is that people who particularly educators and academics who are used to face-to-face teaching the the biggest mistake that people are making is that they are tending to overload their students in the emergency remote teaching online courses that they are thinking that they need to keep their students very busy and it's for example I have two children and at the school level the teachers don't seem to be interacting with each other and my sons are complaining that in the first week of work online they're getting as much learning activity to do as they would normally get in a month if they were at school so I think the key message that Andrew's been trying to communicate is to keep things simple and light the students are already struggling and panicking the more you overload them the more you add to their stress levels and the more you create stress for yourself because you generate a lot of additional work that you need to do and so I think if you look at all the tools that Andrew has proposed using the idea is to use the ones that are simplest and that the most students are most likely to have access to unfortunately for universities particularly that are not used to online learning that often means that they don't have those tools accessible so you need to work around with some of the other social media platforms available and again there all I would stress is to keep things as simple and concise as possible and I think that's really been our key message as Andrew's indicated clearly we haven't always got that right ourselves and I think what you've seen in living practice is the challenges of throwing together things at the last minute and but I think what we have also demonstrated I hope is that you can actually very rapidly with the available tools put something together that at least helps people to move forward I've seen quite a lot of queries and chats from people asking about specific questions we need to have a follow-up conversation with our colleagues from AAU about where this process goes forward from here I think I saw H. Schumann particularly asking about if we could follow up on specific requests so I am the person who's in contact with all of you via email what I would suggest is that if you do have some specific additional requests please send them through to me by email if you're asking for individual requests to solve all of the world's problems that you have I think we'll not be able to help with you we won't be able to help you with everything but if you can give us some indication of some some more granular or specific issues where you'd like feedback and input let us look at how we can help with those in the spirit of what Andrew said earlier which is try and keep everything asynchronous where you can and only make it synchronous when you have to or when there's a specific need for it what we may do in the next phase is start introducing some more asynchronous interaction with you all via email and other channels and see how we can help you with any further activities so I think with with that all in mind I've got one more hand raised from Topek Alifa I'm going to give you an opportunity to speak very briefly and then we'll ask Andrew after he's responded to just wrap up and then hand back to the viewer to close up the session Topek you are thank you I just want to see this opportunity so thank everyone who the facilitators and the participants I want to say it has been a very huge privilege for me to learn from you people actually I think I don't have an excuse now not to deploy ERT in my teaching processes and I owe this all to AAU and OEL thank you Andrew thank you Niels thank you the whole team God bless you all thank you very much well Andrew that seems like the perfect note to wind up on I think so too and you'll see now just quickly flicked through the little demonstration the demonstration is available I've lost my whole thing the demonstration is available on the on the actual presentation which we will now put into the OER Africa website and also it will appear what it has it's already in the google classroom so keep an eye on that so here's our little summary for today when you're wanting to communicate effectively there are a number of little things you need to think about number one is try and have an overt plan what is the communication strategy for your ERT session and it doesn't just have to be you it can be your faculty or your department how are you going to coordinate communication with the students and we showed you a whole host of things to think about then we said that when you are communicating with your students what is effective practice and despite the one slide which a lot of people found counted intuitive and the idea is you need to be amenable you need to be approachable you need to be there you need to feel that you're there you need to be concise you need to be friendly the idea then is everything must be clear and all expectations need to be communicated properly then we said in terms of your tools available there is a plethora of stuff and your choice should be shaped by what is the situation for the students and do they have access to good connectivity to a reasonable device and if they do then there are a whole load of tools available and if they don't then you have to kind of think of very simple technologies to be able to keep those communications going and then finally we said should you decide that you want to go for one of these synchronous meetings like a webinar or a presentation online then it itself is its own beast and you need to think very carefully about how to structure it and how to make it engaging and to how to make sure that you can keep contact with your students while it's in place and there we go so that's our little webinar on communicating effectively during campus closure and yeah once again resources are in the google classroom and on OER Africa website I think we can hand over thank you very much Neil for being an excellent facilitator thank you Andrew for leading us through these four webinars and thank you Tony thank you Kathy and thank you everybody that has been part of this webinar certainly we will be in touch with you concerning what are the next steps and please also feel free to give us some suggestions and we will be looking at the chat very carefully so that we understand what you would like us to do in terms of supporting you I wish all of you a wonderful day and please keep on teaching keep on learning and keep engaging your students thank you thank you Naduma and thank you everyone we're glad to see from the chat responses the people seem to have found the chats useful I mean the webinar is useful and through AAU we'll be communicating with you what the next steps are once Naduma and I have had a chance to debrief thanks everyone good luck thank you bye