 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the session today. I'm Caroline Orts, Events Manager, and here's a handover to Keith in a minute to introduce the session. But it's just to say that if you're not used to using Blackboard, there's a range of smiley faces, there's a tick and a cross feature as well, which are all underneath the participant's heading on the left side of the screen. So if you want to use those throughout the session, if Pamela says there's any questions, you can be, at the moment your audio, your microphones are turned off. If you have questions, please, could you post them in the chat window as we go, and we'll try and pick them up. And we'll also have pauses along the way to answer questions. So as I say, if you have any problems with your sound, if you check Tools, Audio Setup Wizard first, and then please post in the chat and I'll try and help if you're still having problems. Great. Enjoy the session. Thanks, Caroline. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the week two webinar on the focus of our learning design for student-directed learning. We're extremely pleased to have Dr. Panos Lajopoulos from Macquarie University in Sydney joining us, and thanks to Panos for joining us so late. Half past nine, I think, is in Sydney at the moment in the evening. Panos is a very experienced practitioner and researcher in learning design, online learning and teaching, has particular interests in moderation and activity design. And we'll be talking to us today about some of the theoretical ideas that have shaped his thinking. But we'll also take us through some of his current research into learning design for student-directed online learning, and there'll be plenty of opportunity for questions as we go and at the end. So please do make good use of the chat area. We'll pick up questions in there and we'll have a number of pauses for our discussion and exchange with Panos. So without any further ado, Panos, on to you. Okay. Thanks a lot, Keith. I thank everyone for joining for this session. Yeah, it is actually 9.30 in Australia at the moment, so it's a bit late. I'm the only person actually left here in my building. So what I thought I'd do today with you guys is actually talk to you through some of my own experiences of being a teacher, an online teacher, and also an online designer of experiences of learners in different contexts, blended learning and online learning. But primarily what I want to do is also to engage with a dialogue about the importance or not of thinking about student-directed learning nowadays. Very quickly, I just wanted to tell you that literally a few hours ago, the federal government here in Australia announced the new budget for Australia Higher Education, which actually includes a cut of 80 billion dollars, that's approximately 50 billion pounds, in terms of health and education, including a lot of cuts you can imagine in university funding, which involves the freedom now of universities to start charging more and more in terms of their degrees. Practically, each university will be able to charge as they please for the degrees they offer. So you can imagine now, take this as part of an introductory comment, imagine an environment where universities, they start competing with each other in terms of their authors, in terms of the quality, in terms of their product, in terms of their degrees they offer, in the same time ourselves, as the teachers and the designers, having to work with students, they come from different backgrounds and trying to make sense of it. So it's a very interesting moment actually to be in education, it's a very fascinating time to think how we can get it right for the students we are having in universities and they actually want to learn and some of them they pay a lot of money in order to learn. So take this as a very quick, very quick point. Quickly, that's my details here, so I'm very happy for you to get in touch with me at any point after the presentation, if you have any questions, if you want to discuss ideas, please do so. I'm based at Macquarie University. Macquarie University is in the north, north in Sydney. Beautiful campus, I put just here a few photos just to make sure about how we are here. Beautiful weather still, nice environment, nice buildings and the university actually claims to be one of the universities they take into account the student experience, more perhaps another university. In what way? We call the university as the non-traditional university, hoping to give students different experiences outside if you want just a classroom experience and that's a very fascinating place to be. The university is a size of around 38, 39,000, so it's a lot and has a good area of specialization. Plus a lot of interesting things happens now with new technologies, you have new investments in technology, we try out interesting things including 3D design, we have our own real assistance or all the good things that we know about technology and the investments that many universities have, they do exist here in our own university. Now there's three parts in the presentation and I would like to stop in particular parts and ask you to step in and give me your comments. The first part will be a bit more theoretical, practically to try to put in context what I think literature and different theories mean when we talk about student directed learning. The second part will be my own piece of research, which is the moment I'm in the process of writing on student directed learning that involves online courses here at Baklore University, either for what we call CRE compressed accelerated curriculum, but also for normal sessions. And the third part will be pretty much the lessons learned and some examples that I would like to discuss with you. If for any reason, you know, you have the questions typed in the chat, if you want me to slow down, do things, please use the emoticons. At some points, I will ask you to give me happy smile faces to make sure that you know you all follow, particularly follow and understand my my accent, my Mediterranean accent and Greek biology. And if you have any questions, at some point, I will actually pose and take them as well. So can I take this opportunity just to double check everybody's okay with my introduction, give me a happy smiley face. And I will continue with the main parts. Okay, quite a few. Thank you. I will start with what I consider or I found over the years to be quite wise quotation or quote for us as academics as designers, reading and trying to make sense of educational research and educational leadership. If you've if you read or if you've seen Alice in Wonderland, there is a good character there called the Hamni Dhamti. And there's a question there about meaning. So when Hamni Dhamti says I use a word, it always means the thing that I chose it to me. That's a very interesting quote to keep in mind. That's something actually that I keep in my myself when I ever read about different things in technology enhanced learning education. I'm sure you'll agree with me that when you read the paper, when you read the book, when you attend the presentation, like today's people, including the presenters, the authors, the authority voice, they use definitions, they use terminologies, they use notions, they use concepts that make sense. But they are not exactly the way that you associate with them. So they're not 100%. You know, you're not 100% sure how this has been used in different contexts. So even what I present here, what I would like you to do is to think and see how else how differently this idea could be used in your own context, because I will present something that comes obviously now from a different context from the Australian context, but also from a very small sample of students around my own students. So what I'm saying here is what I choose to present to you and I hope that you'll make sense of yourself. Getting a bit more serious now, if you think about the idea of student directed learning, you will see in the literature a different variety and different interpretation of this terminology. Early in publications, you know, at the early stages, we are using the term student focus, or in contrast, teacher focus, who are using the term student centered and teacher centered. We are using the term student directed or teacher directed, but also gain more and more attention to the idea of self directed. So we have a plethora, a variation of different interpretations of this thing that students actually can take control of their own learning. And depending on the, you know, the approach that the author state, this is a different meaning. Here are four books that over the years, I read and I'm using now in terms of my own advice. And all of them they come from a different perspective. For example, one of the very first books that you possibly read, or I advise you to read, in order to understand the idea of student directedness is, comes from Carl Rogers and one of the seminal books, Freedom to Learn. Well, Carl Rogers was a psychotherapist himself. She wrote a lot about human connection, how people actually connect with each other. And she places a strong emphasis on the role of the teacher as a fellow learner. In other words, Rogers will say that as long as the teacher can put himself or herself in the place of the learner, they can think like them, then they allow all this freedom for learning to happen with their learners. It's a very difficult thing to do. It's a very interesting thing to do if you try it. But at the same time, Rogers has been quoted only a few times in literature around student directed learning. And I come back to her. Next to it, I have a book by Professor John Cohen. He's also a good colleague of mine, a good friend of mine, who wrote the book on becoming an innovative university teacher. Now, John, she will talk about student directed learning from the approach of reflective practice. In other words, this idea of student directed learning is open for discovery and is open for negotiation through, if you want, an internal process of thinking what is better at a particular point. Now, the very bottom we have some more interesting interpretation of student directed learning. One comes from Stephen Brookfield, who will see student directed learning almost as a responsibility of a modern democracy, of a modern society. In other words, she will claim that it is the aim of the university to create student directed learners because the idea is that learners should be able to learn how to exercise control over their own abilities to choose things in life. And that's a very powerful thing to do in terms of learning design. Having your learners to choose how they will be assessed, to choose what they want to study, to choose why they are in the university and actually think critically about it. And then perhaps in the most close to our own discipline, by Anna Loylat with a seminal book, a very interesting book. I really advise that people actually get a copy and read it, pitching as a design science. So we come and tell us that, wait a minute, we are talking about formal education here, we are talking about people being part of the system, part of the university, and what we have to do as designers, as teachers, is actually to think and plan for people to become student directed learners. So it's a quite interesting, if you want, like spectrum of how do we see this, and I think your own philosophy, your own chosen philosophy of what does student directed learning means will influence also the approach it will take as a teacher or as a designer. However, if you're going to summarize a few things from this kind of seminal authors, another one, Dave Bout, she will say that the overall thing about student directed learning many times appears to be a power game, is actually how much can we afford to allow students to take control of their learning, and at the end of the day can we actually allow them the freedom to recognize this, and actually students are ready to do this. Brookfield in 2005, she will say that the most important thing is that students should be able and should be empowered to take control of their learning, and then Diana Lollilaxi will say that the learning design is a key thing, just a quick summary of the things themselves. However, that's another thing which I would like us to pose and consider. So far so good, but education in particular, primary, secondary, higher education, not so much in the life of the learning approach, but in this kind of education, is when someone or some system sets out to arrange for learning, and we may do that for arranging for particular interactions to take place. In other words, education is a very political action. It carries particular expectations, it has particular interpretations in the society, and trying to bring education and student directly learning, perhaps these are two things that they might not go necessarily together or not easy together. So where does this leave then us, ourselves, as designers and as teachers? So I will take the opportunity to pose here and open up a quick discussion about do we feel as teachers or learning designers or as learners, in the case of some of us as learners, there is enough, okay, I can see there is a question, I don't know how Keith is going to open the microphone. So I've got the mic, he should be able to speak now. Perfect, I don't think we have sound though. So I wonder if we can ask you to type your question to chat area for now. We seem to have a bit of trouble with your mic, your audio. Okay, maybe we'll just wait a bit. I've seen an interesting comment on the chat as we wait for the comment, which is about if there is a scope for informal learning and that's a very good point. And the big question is whether ourselves as designers of the learning experience, we should be, if you weren't worrying about creating the informal space for students to learn, in other ways we want to be able to design for their own independent study, their own informal study or to go a bit too much by doing that. And that's a question I'm going to come back in a while after presenting some of my findings. That's a very important point. If we, as educators, we are expecting nowadays to start thinking beyond the formality, beyond what is supposed to be the curriculum. Absolutely and the one that also found us, Gordon McLeod had a question in terms of the continuum you presented from teachers of controls all the way through to student control. Gordon was wondering where do you think student generated falls into that continuum? Well I would say the student generated, especially in the idea that students contribute if you want new knowledge back to the system, back to the learners, it falls mostly into the idea of the student directed as opposed to the student centers. Because the student centered as a definition of the way I read it and the papers they are using it, it's pretty much that someone else, the teacher themselves, they just design with the student in mind. The student generated approach is actually that the teacher trusts the students to design for them, to generate for them and the rest of the group. So I can, I can, I can see actually two different things there. Okay thanks very much and also if we just go back to Sly. Sly's got his comment in the chat area now and he was saying that you agreed with the comment you made around self-directed learning needing to fit into a well-designed structure. Sly, you should be able to use the mic if you want to click on the talk button, if you want to add to that. Okay, I think Sly might be having maybe a little difficulty but we've got his comment there in the chat area as well, so thanks for that Sly. Perfect, I think it's a few points. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just reading a few more of the comments which is about the learning design and the idea that we need to have learning objectives. It's a very important theoretical point there. Learning objectives, the way at least I see them unless they allow some sort of negotiation with the learners themselves, somehow they divert us from this idea of student-directed learning. So people like John Cowan and Steven Brookfield, they will say that if we are to be serious about creating a space for learners to learn on, you know, take control of them, we should allow an element of negotiation at least of a few of the learning outcomes. When John Cowan would used to say that at the end of the list of the learning outcomes, we should allow a bullet point or something to say and any other learning outcome that would be personally meaningful to the learners themselves, just as a comment. If you are okay guys, I will continue, can you give me a happy smiley face or do you have another question raise your hand before we go to the second part and we'll come back for discussions anyway. Okay, I can see quite a few happy smiley faces. Now, just a quick thing before I move to the research. Everything in the literacy that I've read or a lot of the things that there is what I read, they take into account the fact that the learners and the student populations, you know, they exist and they are coming to the university carrying particular characteristics and particular expectations. However, with the use of technology, with the fact that we're expanding more and more into the, if you want, the global dimension of education and we might see more and more informality in education, we might see more and more learners arriving from different countries. It's always an interesting thing to start considering ourselves how much do we know in advance in order to design for learning and where does this leave us in terms of, you know, getting an understanding of our own learners. What I put here is just a few images. That was a very interesting publication from the Guardian Weekend Magazine on the 15th of September 2012. It might be online, that's just a scan of it, but I was fascinated at that particular time. I primarily empowered from the educational systems to have a voice. They're all male students and if you want, the expectation of these particular students are that they will arrive in the university and there's going to be opportunities for them to perform well. Failing is not actually an option for many. The one in the set according to the article again, it comes from Germany and it is a group of students that kind of feel that they have full control of their own classroom. Actually it claims the article that students feel ownership of their own classroom, but perhaps you can see it a bit in the way that they address how flexible they are and what they have around them. Then if you go bottom left, you have a group of population from Nigeria in a massive class trying to co-op with some basics in education. And then on the bottom right, a group from Taiwan where students are sleeping in the middle of the class after they had their lunch, it might be familiar in which sometimes I get students from a particular background that they are actually switching off during my class. And you're kind of wondering how on earth I'm going to actually try to satisfy this population of students, this blend of students that they arrive and am I the one who have to worry about getting students to take control of their own learning. It's not part of my research to deal with multiculturalism, although I'm very interesting, but I wanted to have it in our mind just as a reminder. It was a very powerful article actually to read. Now I have two works in definitions of my own work as a researcher in that particular area of student directed learning. Two things here. One comes from Benjamin and she's recent work on digital habitats where practice you will say that if a community of learners is to be formed and exist, then learners should take ownership of their own learning and this should be from their own intrinsic motivation. In other words, there is no real point of us trying to if you want design for this kind of things where we have to put our own effort is to make sure that there is enough materials enough information for them to be motivated and these people should be able to form their own activities. My own definition of student directed learning as I place it here talks about a period of time where learners at least even for a day or for a week or how much we allow within a university system they actually have absolute freedom to make some decisions about how they will go about activity, design and assessment. So these are two working definitions that actually play and I hypothesize in my own sense. Where I am now I have at the moment 29 fully online postgraduate students that are working in a virtual learning environment and also in a live classroom exactly the same that we are using today to do our webinar. I use a framework which I've developed as part of my own research roughly six years ago now and I have done some modifications to this and two types of activities in order to find out how my learners they move from being more if you want teacher focused or teacher directed to be more independent and I'm doing the idea of guided and discovery in terms of my own activities and I'm going to quickly present to you the findings of a quite intensive research I run over a period of one semester. Now the learning design framework I kind of apply is the idea of a place is the idea of a ring fence in order if you want to allow this kind of emotional separation of what is expected of learners in the university as part of the curriculum and where actually they have time to negotiate element of this curriculum. In the center of this design if you can see it guys now online is the idea of a significant learning event that takes place in the classroom the online of the face to face and is enough to allow students to start thinking about this. The idea of the ring fence actually is that the universities the students arrive in the university where the program aims are pretty much pre-decided where the majority of the tasks and the criteria of the task are pretty much pre-decided where the assessment the majority of the time is pre-decided the design the roles including perhaps the role of being a student-directed learner is pre-decided and important to them and also the resource and the principle of how this thing will work is pre-decided. So the question is what sort of student-directed learning can we have with all these things already imposed to us as teachers and as learners. So what I'm trying to discuss here is there any way at least to think at an activity level where we can create and protect allow me to say as students from the complexity of education and give them a choice at least to do something the way that they would be prepared to do it. It's a bit I mean just putting it very very very quickly and very naively here but almost I try when I design to put a pen and draw a line and say well these things I cannot mess because quality assurance and a number of things in the university will be very upset with me if I put it to my students but if I am to design to student-directed learning what can I afford to allow for negotiation and if you are struggling with this idea I would actually advise you to go back to your designs and try this and try to ring fence what actually this thing is truly student-directed learning and you will be surprised how little actually we do and how little we allow students. Now what I did I gave my students opportunities to play with different activities all to be consistent allowing involving students reading materials or watching videos and then I gave them what we say like the online discussions I gave them the opportunity to take part in an online discussion some of them they were guided meaning I was there with a decision about what to be discussed and the students they had even the freedom to interact for a period of time and bring their own interpretation or I gave them the opportunity to actually show us exactly the type of discussion we want to do whether to be a debate whether to be an analysis and so on in a way discover themselves how they want to tackle that and I did that for both synchronous and not synchronous so using the online discussion forum but also using a type of tool the one that we are using now for a sequence interaction I collected all the transcripts from the online discussions and the recordings from the online presentations clearance with ethics so no major issues there and then I had in my mind to do two types of analysis I was very interested to find out how students they interacted in this kind of settings and if there is a particular way that students they feel more empowered to discuss and communicate in one setting or another and secondly I was very interested to find out applying a bit of very basic social network analysis to find out whether there are particular people in this kind of interactions that they are even more empowered than others and what is my role in this kind of design so what I did I analyzed my online messages following the classification system that I find myself quite useful I separate messages as being proactive and reactive proactive means the learners they go there and they initiate something for themselves without being asked to do it reactive means that actually they go and they always follow up someone another learner or the tutor group means that the learners they have at least temporarily in their minds the group when they do some sort of an action when they initiate a discussion by trying to take perspective of the learners an individual means that actually they only interact either one to one or with their own tutor and I try to do kind of content analysis based on that and for the social network analysis I was interested in three main things one is for people you're not familiar with the methodology it's a good methodology to look at there is something called the in degree and there is something called the out degree the in degree is how much actually of this kind of messages are sent to you there are degrees how many you sent back to them and you should be able to find numerically who has the more dominant figures and then I did a post-activity anonymous questionnaire where I asked my learners how they felt on a number of items that I gave them or being if you want more student directed throughout the process so far so good guys can you give me a happy smiley face or if you have a quick question raise your hand before I present some of the results about the methodology okay I can see a few happy smiley faces some people they might be a bit confused but hopefully we can come back to it now the guided discussion the guided discussion keep in mind I asked my learners to read articles I gave them the questions and I told them I told them that you have 10 days to come back with a reply sounds familiar it's very familiar to me at least as a teacher but also when I was a learner and it's very familiar to the designs I've seen here at Macquarie you know we want to have control about what we will discuss and how they will discuss us after they analyzed us I found out that in this type of interaction of activity of design if you want to call it like that the most frequent type of postings were actually the individual proactive and the individual reactive not surprisingly for me because actually the task was almost prompt them to go and reply to myself to the activity to the person who has the authority to decide what is to happen the same time the social network analysis shows a quite strong kind of core a strong group of people talking together but the direction of that was mostly to me so a lot of people they will try to play the game satisfy the system become if you want directed by my own discussions and come back to me to take the books that they contributed okay and this is one of the most typical type of activities that you have strategic actually now Peter wrote that is exactly to link it back to what you are starting this week this is the learner who is not really interested in deep learning to initiate things but knows how to play the game in the discovery of the discussion the highest number of contributions appear to be the group practice followed perhaps by an equal numbers of group reagents I didn't bother if you hear guys with numbers and stuff because it's not a research seminar but at least give you the flavor because I'm happy to share a piece of paper I wrote around this now the interesting thing about the discovery was that a lot of the time and a lot of the interaction that happened was about getting a sense of community getting to know how they will do it so if you ask me as a designer as a teacher if I was satisfied with what was happening I will tell you that it took a lot of time to warm up it took a lot of time to start discussing but once they went there everybody was more passionate and they had actually more to say more to contribute than in the previous one so at the beginning the activity appeared to be almost a disaster because they couldn't even find their way around but for those they did found their way around it was a liberating activity they could actually bring their own examples the social network analysis brought some interesting things and that was that actually the messages that they will divert it to me were pretty much well it was pretty much balanced so I was getting exactly I was getting the same amount of things but the messages that I had to feel to send out the out-degree of mine they were actually pretty much lower in that kind of case and also the messages sent were more in relation to the content of the actual activity another interesting thing from the social network analysis was the fact that there were more smaller groups of people so the big network that I have in my mind everybody around me discussing become groups or cliques as we call them in networks of people three or four creating their own discussions personally I like that when I've seen this being that actually my learners they managed to find partner partners with them and discuss it was something that I thought was much healthier and much wealthier than trying simply to to discuss as one and a common group now that's very interesting it's a very quick if you won't like representation of what my learners said about the number of things I asked them in terms of the four different types of activities I just asked you for a second to look at this diagram and follow the red line the red line is about us synchronous guided discussion so online discussions I was there and they were guided throughout the process I asked them for example to tell me if they seen a particular value and you can see here on the top of this kind of diagram let me just take the point that here if I can I can use it so over here I have the task value internally okay so I asked them how much do you feel that being part of this activity was a worthwhile experience for you in terms of learning what you thought you would learn and I got on average a 4.25 or something like that out of five for the external value it was just over 1.75 that's from zero from from one to five how much and how little yeah when I asked them about able to set learning orientated goals again it was quite high and the ability to evaluate was quite high now follow for a second the same type of pattern on the asynchronous discovery task which in this case it will be the totally outside one the purple one you will see that the highest one of the internal value is that the highest of the feedback was over there and also the higher of the orientated goals the lower for this type of activity was of them setting performance goals so in other words the asynchronous discovery task according to their own perception was the one that made them somehow think that there is some value that they can understand and they felt less stressed in terms of having to perform well so there's a very good for me it was very high opening about where I introduced a particular activity now you follow the same kind of pattern in terms of the synchronous asynchronous for example if you see the ask the synchronous guided discussion as opposed to the asynchronous guided discussion and that will be the blue with the reds in our discipline you will see here for example that in terms of task value terminal tax value the synchronous guided gave me just over one point I think just over two out of five so in other words a lot of them they didn't see the real value of doing this openly with the moderator online I don't know if it makes sense to you but to me it was very very interesting in terms of the design to ask him these kind of questions now what's the key message I can confidently say from what I've done so far with my learners but also from previous research I've done that learning designers tutors who teach in an online or in a fully distanced or in a blended learning course if we carefully consider at the activity level to create opportunities for learners to take control over their own learning in other ways they can free to learn that's something that can happen and it can happen without necessarily the presence of an authority that describes the tutors and that's a very important thing especially when we talk about opening up education about flexibility and including a lot of open educational practices so learners themselves if they see a value for an activity a space we can design a space for them to negotiate an activity negotiate what they want to learn this can flourish and become a very meaningful activity if we bring them back and we prescribe to them the way we want them to be student-directed learning they will be very much strategic they will do it but not necessarily they will get what they want out of it so actually the message to us is encouraging careful design in the outset from our own point of view does not necessarily mean we will have all the learning sequence in advance what you have to do is to have this kind of ring fence areas where we can allow and we can allow the time and the luxury of time for people to negotiate it and doing it and this is what technology plays an important role and this is where we are very privileged to be using technology as opposed to try to replicate this in a face-to-face class because with all these extra tools that we have available including the opportunities for students to keep their own nodes the opportunity to create their own groupings the opportunity to go outside and open up discussions and dialogues are there reach their ring fence pace the big discussion for us is whether the VLEs are the best places ring fence or where we should be actually looking to allow student-directed learning with actual student-directed technology to take place with web to their own personal learning spaces so that's one question for us if we are to do it can we actually make it work in a very strict prescribed environment like a visual learning environment so what is all about to us is not about getting the learning design ready and without a negotiation having a ready design for them to play but developing through the learning design possibilities and abilities for students to take on us allow me to say that you will eject substantial resistance from both the learners themselves and the university because it's risky it's more time consuming most important is unsettling because any discovery and any deep learning is unsettling the other is a strategic one it takes learners and teachers to become facilitators that's almost common sense now it's reported all over the publications and the books about online learning that you should become facilitators but facilitator that does not mean that you will just be there to guide them through a prescribed route but you are there to facilitate them to find their learning position to find what they want to be people they have achieved that often they quote it is a liberated experience and seems to be more personal and significant it stops here I'm open for any kind of comments and questions and I'm happy to go back to any of these slides thank you Panos, thanks very much indeed that was great and it generated a lot of comments on Twitter and in the chat room I think what we'll probably do is invite questions in the chat area but also if anyone wants to raise their hand we can then pass a mic to them so if someone wants to be brave enough to go first that would be much appreciated okay let's see who we got okay Sai, fingers crossed to Sai if you click on the top button you should be fine I can hear it yeah just like so it's very interesting thank you very much and I've got very excited because you took on a pilot maybe learning program for your family that's gone to college and some of the issues that have been raised I think that's a comment actually that you put there Sai I think it is important always to I mean it's good to find out that actually people are the designers ourselves the teachers and the designers we are actually I hopefully see through this kind of presentation that it is a fascinating area to be it's a fascinating area to work I think what we have to really get get right for ourselves is the parameters of student directiveness in other words we should plan realistically for what we want to have in the university and what our learners to be in other words if we try to do everything if we try to try many things if we try to innovate all the time this does not necessarily make the experience more student directed by allowing students sporadically to go around and do things as long as we have carefully selected if you want the spaces and the time and the type of activity that the students are are free to learn that should be a good starting point for us opening up the whole course making the whole thing student standard so it sounds very attractive and some universities actually they might claim they are doing it but at the end of the day it is about education it is about learning outcomes as you have previously these things all exist we don't delete them we appreciate them and we work with them Thanks Panos Panos I wonder could we go back to the your diagram of Ringfang's activities because Emily just posted something she'd like some classification on I think it's the framework yeah excellent so Emily is asking the chat area it appears that different types of forum are relevant for different timings on the course for example synchronous and tutor led does help to build a community I wonder if you can just have a look at her comment at the bottom of the chat area and maybe just clarify that for us that's from Moira yeah what was the point that tricked it sorry Panos know the one above Emily's question that came in first okay it appears that different types of forum are relevant different timings synchronous tutor led okay yeah yeah good points here the synchronous tutor led helps to build a community yes I think this is actually the this diagram over here a bit I think if we if we are right yeah the community building you will see it there it was I think 4.75 out of 5 in terms of the of the value and we need this point this is where it's this kind of research help us if you are to introduce let's say a webinar or to introduce an activity where you bring the students together to negotiate a task and so on this this tells to me that perhaps we need to be very careful at one point we will introduce this type of experience for the learners so if community building and synchronicity because this brings this kind of wrongs the face the voice is something we think we need to do at the beginning because traditionally our students they don't want and they will lose time you use this wisdom if you want this knowledge and you start an online activity or you start an online experience with a community building using the synchronicity communication however if what you want to do is to allow first the students to find out their own steps and not being influenced by others from the community before you introduce into the community in a way from a design point of view you step back you allow first a couple of pages in the online F in the online VLE for students to experiment do things for some initial postings and then you use this if you want this hot card that you have this interesting card which calls synchronicity in order to infuse the community building does this make sense give me half a smiley face or a comment possibly okay Emily I think yeah I think I think Emily's confirmed yep that you've addressed that point I wonder if Panos if you want to take just a moment or two to go back to Moira's question and then there's one from Kate underneath and then perhaps we can go back to open the floor up for any other questions Moira question what was the point that took the disaster start in the social media experiment that was are you referring I'm just thinking about the context of it is are you referring to the social to the network analysis Moira yeah Moira is confirmed she is referring to that yeah okay I think yeah that's right okay so the key thing about the the social network analysis was that two things there one is that the learners themselves at the very beginning of the especially at the very beginning of the guided activity but you're all if you want to concentrate it around being so they were all trying to be online they were all trying to put their initial contributions to the online discussion forum and they were all trying to use step-by-step the guide that they gave them including when they have to do it for how long how much they can write and so on and I would say it was a disastrous start perhaps I use this particular terminology that I try to remember now because what did it generate a lot of traffic at the very beginning of the of the discussion in the very couple of the very first days we have something like nine good messages and people who are really serious about thinking and commenting on little ones they almost felt you know like divertive generated a lot of discussion without people thinking about the discussion just they were pressurized to go and do it so from my point of view I would be very careful of my own on my own students if I design an online activity how much instruction I would allow them to have at the very beginning because they would do I have the power because I am the tutor to grab the the strategic learners and generate an outcome out of it so I can play this in a good way if I have students like nine students one hundred students all going to the online discussion and agreeing it is agreeing with the point I made I don't see real value to it so the task value is very small what can I do alternatively is I can ask them for example to put a question in the online discussion hoping that this will then generate a follow-up of the learners so we can avoid this kind of disasters for the well-mixed students in a very student-interquertation directed to learning activity avoiding this kind of traffic and nonsense allow them to say by simply checking carefully what type of instruction what type of student directed approach will allow the beginning or events I don't know if that answers Moira but from a learning design is very important to consider what type of forum what type of activity it will cause what type of interaction and be proactive in that because we can see it many times okay thanks Anos a couple of questions have come in and we still got a big few minutes left so I wonder if we can maybe move to Kate's question which is a straightforward one and Kate would like to know which technology you've been using for your VLEs yes for the VLEs we are using Moodle the latest version of Moodle in the Moodle we have Blackboard well, Aluminator Blackboard Collaborate as it's called now they collaborate as the synchronous one and as part of it we do allow students also to use any kind of blog outside the system so the fixed technology the one if you want that is described to them is the VLE the Moodle the rest of it is up to the learners to come and tell us what sort of blog or what sort of we could call they want to use if you are using actually Moodle if you are using Moodle there is also the a tool called Snap allows you to actually create quick visual diagrams of the interactions and this is very powerful to do if you have to play it back to the students go back to students and say in one week and say this is what we achieve in an online discussion does it look like a healthy interaction model so Moodle has some kind of added bonuses because it has this kind of technologies embedded sorry Keith that was an extra thing No, no problem I was just wondering we're just sort of thinking out loud whether you've just answered your own question there around whether the VLE can be a good space for ring fencing effective online activities and it sounds like potentially it can be but where it's blended with other technologies that the learners will find useful Yes, well what I think Keith is that the VLE in a way is is the dominant space so carries all the power dynamics at the classroom and a setting carries in the university however the fact that it is asynchronous most of it happens over time and allows students a bit the flexibility to explore it in the wrong way makes it a more suitable place where you can actually start creating this kind of spaces to give you a very quick example if you are doing let's say a tutorial in a face-to-face situation you assume that by giving the students a desk five chairs pen and paper and the flip charts they will go there and start taking control of their own learning some of them they might do some of them you have no way actually of looking and supporting individual students most of the times in the online environment you can carefully actually separate the dynamics carefully create the rooms that you need and if necessary if it doesn't work you can open it up to another tool for example a google doc or something else where the learners they can feel perhaps more empowered to go there and learn so you have this kind of possibility you use that the starting point and then you can start expanding it and allowing students to bring their own tools into that okay fantastic thank you Panos I'm just looking through the chat area and just trying to establish whether we've covered most of the questions of things that have emerged over the last 10-15 minutes I think we've got most things apologies to colleagues if I've missed any kind of burning questions in there that haven't been addressed at least partially but I'm conscious we've got maybe just three or four minutes left and I wonder if we might want to open things up again and just see if anyone wants to take the mic for a final question or comment yes happy with that if there is anything burning we may be invite you to raise your hand and then we'll hand the mic over to you and okay excellent so let me scroll down the list and see who we've got Theresa yeah Theresa over to you hi thanks very much it's quite it's quite useful actually that you give me this opportunity to talk because my question was about voice tools certainly in the research I've done I've found that closing psychological distance between learners as a distance is supported by incorporating voice the use of voice within online environments and I wonder whether Panos had any experience of using voice as well yes yes Theresa I mean obviously for the synchronous guided and the synchronous discovery so in a way if it is like the voice in terms of the the tools like illuminator black to collaborate yes and that was very interesting what I found however with the use of voice is that it was the dominant voices that there was always going through the microphone to see what I mean there so again it was it was a very strategic decision and that's why I felt if you see a bit on the diagram I have now when I asked about the synchronous guided meaning the voice but with the powerful voice myself being next to you okay so I was still dominating this kind of space and I asked him a question about if they found an opportunity there to self-evaluate in other ways could they see how they performed I got I think one of the worst scores like 1.25 out of 5 out of these 29 people they told me that they found this opportunity of using their voices and the synchronous communication as an opportunity for them to think and evaluate how they do this so yeah it's a lot of things to say about the the voice when actually we are not there because that's interesting because I think the context of my work has been asynchronous voice use so that's the backboard collaborate voice tools so that just incorporates voice in the asynchronous forums and as a language teacher I found that the students who've been exchanging conversations through the forum once they record their their conversation or they record a little bit of of themselves speaking that's actually helped engagement in the conversation and it's applied and did it out to others I would go with that comment 100% of it is I mean I've used I didn't use the embedded voice tool but what I've done is just using little kind of voice clips for students either to give feedback and so on and I encourage them to do the same they are synchronicity and the fact actually they can record it they can personalize and they post it helps the real one creates in a way more performance stress than it should and although it creates this community feeling the same time makes them trying to perform as opposed to link together yes yes I'd completely understand that yes so having the pressure removed in terms of response so having the chance to record listen to it again and post it when you're happy exactly thank you thanks for that Keith any any other questions or any other comments you think we'll have time I'm just thinking oh sorry I was just about to interject um I forgot to turn my microphone on sorry I was just saying Panos we're bang on 130 so we've come to the end of our hour so just to thank you very much indeed for a really interesting exploration of some really important issues lots of comments online in the chat room and on Twitter lots of things being shared and some of your kind of work as well we'll make sure we try and tie as much of today's webinar discussion into the online forums over the rest of this week as possible and the recording will be available but Panos thanks for joining us so late we'll let you get to your bed shortly and colleagues thanks for joining in and for all your comments and questions if we could just just say a final thank you to Panos um using the round for applause if you can find it or in the chat room and I think that concludes things I don't know if Martin or Caroline need to say anything or if we can just confirm that um that's us finished say that's great thanks thank you Panos bye everyone thanks a lot okay thanks a lot thanks a lot for the opportunity to see one and as I said people they can contact me if they want you know we can actually discuss I'm open actually to exploring more the research and do more things anyway thank you okay we'll make sure the colleagues take you up on that thanks very much indeed okay thanks everyone thank you enjoy the rest of the week bye bye bye