 Hello everyone and welcome to Outsie 2022. I am really happy to introduce today, Brendan Masterson and Matt Jones from Middlesex. They are here to talk to us about the Middlesex iPad Project, a case study in digital pedagogy, transformation for inclusive maths education in the face of digital poverty. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Brendan and Matt. There will be a short question and answer session at the end of this. So please pop any questions you have in the chat and we will come back to them at the end. Over to you, Brendan and Matt. Good luck. Thank you very much. And it's good to see so many people here today. So thank you. We're going to talk about the Middlesex University iPad Project. So I'm Matthew Jones. My colleague here is Brendan Masterson. He'll take the second half of the presentation today. So the iPad Project is really... There are a number of kind of ways to describe this. And so what we're going to do is just going to go through a journey of how we use this to solve a number of issues. So next slide, Brendan. So just to give you some background, Middlesex University is a university in North London. It has kind of a broad range of students in particular as it takes a number of students that are predominantly from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, nearly three and five students come from backgrounds where the index of multiple... The multiple deprivation is in the lower two quintiles. Or another way as well, we have the second highest proportion of students who were eligible for free school meals while they were at school. So there's a lot of students who come to Middlesex from poorer backgrounds. Next slide, next bit please. So there are a number of policies that Middlesex has that help this kind of thing. So for example, they offer a laptop loan scheme for 24 hours. They offer free printing for students. And this has been going on for about 10 years or so. Next bit, please. And then during lockdown, which we will talk about quite a bit, that was extended to loan laptops for much longer period of time. And these were couriered to students. So next one, please. So why is that important? Well, it's important in this context in particular because students from poorer families have a number of disadvantages, not just their socioeconomic background, but the way they relate to digital education. So students, they're much... findings from, for example, the 2018 Ipsos Things survey found that students were much more likely to be online from poorer families, but the time they spent online was less quality time, I guess. So less time learning, more time on TikTok. TikTok are not learning. So they come to university with a lower kind of expectation, I guess, or lower skill set. Next slide, please. Now, given that, okay, in 2017, something like that, Middlesex introduced a standard TEL threshold for all modules and modules were expected to produce videos before and after learning sessions, they were little snippets who helped to give students a chance to get something to consume. Yeah, so I'm recruiting the chat half-way. So that caused problems for the maths team in particular because, of course, it's quite difficult if you know anything about developing maths for web consumption, then it's quite difficult to do that. I mean, there are ways around it, but it's consuming and awkward. So we introduced... we phased in the use of iPads at the department, used iPads, gave iPads to staff throughout 2018 in order to help with this. Next slide, please. And what we were using them for was we were using them for creating slides, we were creating videos, we were using them in class to record lectures. So the kind of things that we were doing were pre-pre-pre-preparing PDFs and recording kind of annotation on these PDFs using various apps and providing students with a video and full audio of these things after class to work on. And this was hugely popular. This was hugely popular because... and I think it didn't have the effect we were worried about. So we didn't see any drop in attendance, the fact that we were recording these lectures. And in fact, what we found was that students were attending class and were attending classes, but then also viewing the recordings of these same classes on average three times. So it was really being used back then. So next slide, please. We were using... because what it allowed us to do is it allowed us to then kind of make use of some of the apps that are available for iPads. So for example, using the graphical calculator apps. This is Desmos that you see here. But what we... which is kind of standard, you know, is kind of straightforward the use of something like this. And it's the kind of thing that you could have done before anyway. But if you go to the next slide, then you can see that what we were finding was that actually we were able to use interesting and exciting ways of engaging students such as augmented reality using the iPads as well. And because if you move on, Brendan, because the university has a subscription to Microsoft 365, we could use the facilities of OneDrive and so on to really, really streamline the feedback that students were getting. So we were producing shared OneDrive folders for students. They were then able to get formative feedback on their work almost instantaneously. And importantly, this kind of thing made it easier for staff as well. So it wasn't this extra layer of difficulty that staff had to cope with. It became this more efficient way of doing this. And it dealt with the kind of difficulties of mathematical notation because you could just write on these things. And so we carried on extending what we could do if you go to the next slide. We were in a department or maths in a department that includes engineers and product designers and so on. And product designers were using the iPads in a slightly different way because what they do a lot of the time is they do kind of these workshops where they're being all creative and stuff. And they do this kind of thing that you can see here is where you've got a bunch of post-its and I don't know. I don't know what the product designers do. But they do something like this where they're coming up with creative ideas basically. And this was then moved... They were using the iPads in a slightly different way. They were using Miro whiteboards. If you've seen Miro whiteboards, these are these kind of big unbounded whiteboards. And they were using them to mimic what these creative activities were doing. But in a way that allowed you to have a persistent version of the ideas that were being created here. So again, not just using... not just kind of replacing what was being done offline with online but embellishing in it and making it a lot better. So next one, please. And this was used in the maths... on the maths side to kind of do the same kind of thing to get students to think more creatively about what they were doing. You could zoom in on... You could have entire lectures on these big whiteboards. Can you move on as well now? And then... And it led to us to create what we call problem-solving spaces which were just really large, these unbounded whiteboards where students were able to work together in groups and individually. And then COVID happened. So next slide, please. And COVID happened in... The UK went into lockdown in March 2020. We very quickly realized that everything that we'd been doing although we could translate everything that we were doing online it was a problem for students because they... coming back to the background of our students they didn't necessarily have the technology to engage with it. So the department rented and... or bought a kind of subscription from Apple to allow students to have their own iPads and pencils. And so these were all returning and new students in 2020 were given iPads and were allowed to engage. Can you carry on? And again, basically the overall idea was to allow them to engage with what we were doing and really improve how they collaborate. Next one, Brendan. And again, coming back to the makeup of the students at Middlesex, this had a huge impact. So you went from doing what we can do in class and presenting it online making sure students could do it as well. Next slide please. So in March 2020 when we first went into lockdown we went from realising students didn't have even a device to engage with the work to being able to essentially stream live lectures like you can see here use the kind of technology that we had and kind of take notes, for example. This is just one example of how you might use it. Other examples, if you go to the next slide then you can see that using these MIRO boards again there are other things that we used as well but MIRO boards are particularly impressive. You have this online tutorial where students are working live solving problems and kind of collaborating. And on the next slide you can see that students working together the green writing and the black writing are two different students giving each other feedback telling each other well done at the end of it basically. And so using these kinds of ideas using this this kind of new approach allowed us to really improve the teaching. If you carry on then actually I won't say any more about this but essentially just kind of using these boards that are used to collaborate and I'll let you carry on Brendan. Okay, so then in February 2021 when we were coming back to on campus we decided to survey the students and see how useful they found the iPad set they'd been using during the pandemic. And the survey was of all our undergraduate maths programs and our MSc financial maths responses in total and the first thing we asked students was well when you first got the iPad what did you think would help with and what we see here from all of these responses is pretty much that allowed them to collaborate with each other allowed them to access their material and allowed them to interact with their lecture so really just they seem to think that this would really just help them to learn during the pandemic. Then when asked how effective the iPads were at solving these challenges well you can see here everyone Laura said it was very helpful, it was very effective improved how interactive things were there were some issues perhaps around poor internet connections, the university did send out internet dongles for some of these students who really offered due to poor internet connections but the iPads themselves the students found very, very effective. When it came to how good the iPads were at supporting their mathematics you see here some students saying it's game changer, it's shortened their coursework and again it was all about student collaboration and allowing them to engage with the material so that seems to be a repeating thing is that the ability to engage and how has the iPads improved the way in which you learn again it's really here we see that students are saying it's made them more efficient, that it's helped them get feedback quicker allow them to collaborate again and efficiency and really one student up here saying that really took the stress out which was particularly important during the pandemic to really just do anything we could to ease stress for our students and what we decided to do is now that we were coming out of the pandemic although we're still coming out of the pandemic we were going through a revalidation process of our undergraduate maths programs and what we decided is well since staff these iPads are very popular with staff and are clearly very popular with students why not try and design our programs to include these and build our programs around them so that all the work can be completed on the iPad by the students staff can give all their feedback on the iPad and all the reference material the notes, slides what I'll be in an iPad accessible format so the first step of this was to allow the students to work directly on the BLE so by this I mean for each of the module a student received a personalized folder which only they and the module leader had access to the student could simply just upload work there the lecture would get notification when this happened and they can just go in and scribble some notes, scribble some feedback and upload that again for the student and really it just streamlined things student would get notification when they've received feedback and again the important thing to know is that this didn't create any extra work for the staff member if anything, as Matt said it would make it a little bit easier, a little bit quicker and then also convert the material into into a format that would suit an iPad with Leitech this was relatively quick and easy which this being if you're familiar with maths notes most of our lecturers use Leitech anyway so for most people this was relatively painless for the word of PowerPoint that perhaps took a little bit more work to make sure that the layout was correct and cheat sheet so often when we have we prepare notes for our students in past there have been pages and pages of notes and students would have to scroll in here with the iPad we could just create a one page or two page cheat sheet where students could just zoom in on the relevant material they need so when it came to getting the material ready and providing feedback it really wasn't that much work at all to really do it but when it came to assessment is where we were currently working on this and we have been working on this for the past year or so and really we decided to take advantage of the fact that we knew that all students had the same piece of hardware and the same access to all the software so previously when we talked about assessment and trying to include technology can be often difficult because you don't know what students have access to here we know that all students have access to iPads and they all have the same exact same software on these iPads so with that really allowed us to change things and first way in which we did this was to take more what we thought was a more inclusive approach to assessment so what we did here was allow the students to have optional modes of assessment so if a student could be given a report or some sort of thing to could either write a report or we could give them an option to make video commentary or if they were doing a mathematical problem we'd ask them to show their work in a kind of traditional math mathematical way or they could record an audio explanation if they were giving some reading material they could write a critique an article or they could record a commentary and it's just about building that little bit flexibility in so the students can really choose to which mode of assessment really best demonstrate that they had achieved a learning outcome and again this doesn't bias one student against the other because again they all have the access to the same hardware and software and also reduces the need for reasonable assessment reasonable adjustments because the flexibility for reasonable justins already baked in from the beginning okay and then this also further allowed us to be a bit more creative even with our more pure mathematics course works so well this is an example from one of our third year multi barrier calculus course works so if you have ever studied maths you may be aware that this traditionally is quite an abstract and pure module whereas what we decided to do is try and make a bit more authentic bit more real world so traditionally in most multi barrier calculus course works you'd be given some sort of surface and you'd be given some sort of integral associated with that surface and the student would just be asked to evaluate the integrals and various different statements to do with the integral but what we've done here if you look at this surface is this surface is actually pendant where our campus is based the little blue dot denotes where the local tube station is the red dot is where our campus is and you can sort of see the steep walk our students have to make the campus whenever they come to on campus lectures and even that little change straightway makes a bit more real world for the students they now have an appreciation that this sort of topic does have real world application in terms of material like ordinary survey maps and then when you come to the actual material itself you can see that for instance question 5 students are told that all multi barrier polynomials are differentiable at every point in the domain but again they're given the option to either write an explanation draw an illustration record or audio or visual explanation of so to demonstrate why this is true so again it's just about allowing them the option okay so perhaps it's a little unsurprising that this position is perhaps a little bit unpopular with the learned societies associated with maths and statistics they've basically come out with statements saying that they would prefer that we return to on campus in person traditional exams whereas what we believe is that we should be taking the lessons that we learned during the pandemic and really trying to build on those this generation coming through university at the moment are digital natives so we should be teaching them how to use that and really where we can try and base our assessment on through that medium and we did also receive some pushback from our external examiners but we were able to make the case and explain where we were coming from and convinced them that this was the way to go so it took a bit convincing that we got there and just this past year we conducted a survey on students on how they found this approach to assessment okay and the main things that we were concerned about were the students first of all aware of the choices that they had and if they were how did they make their choices that suits towards these different modes of assessment and what obstacles prevented them from choosing a mode of assessment that they may have initially considered okay so when it came to what mode of assessment best shows their ability it's perhaps a little bit unsurprising that no student liked tests either short or long or take home but what we saw was that most students really preferred just traditional mathematics written coursework so the kind of coursework we've been present on math degrees for a very very long time perhaps surprisingly multimedia submissions and portfolios works were very unpopular and this was when we were looking at feedback this was because students felt that multimedia submissions in particular would be time consuming and stressful and a lot more work they felt to get it up to the standard that they would wish in order to submit it so perhaps that's something that we might want to bait and try first and second year really encourage the students there to just get them used to it okay and then when it came to actually completing the work this is feedback we actually had so again it's not surprising that math students here tend to be in general very good at writing line by line mathematical explanations but when they're asked to then put their explanations into words that's where a lot of math students traditionally struggle and it's what we're seeing here with our students that the written English explanation is something they found very difficult but they also had issues with time management and the anxiety of stress when it comes to actually starting coursework but perhaps encouraging they had no problem doing that actually doing the calculations or understanding the question what they maybe struggled with finding the appropriate theory so I guess the idea is once they understand the maths they complete the question they found relatively straightforward but it's noteworthy that most of the responses from this survey were mainly third year students where optional assessment was new in their final year so that goes back to what I said previously but maybe perhaps in the future we should be trying to introduce this a little bit earlier and then some of these opinions might shift okay so in summary we have really taken lessons from these iPads they've proved very popular with staff and students and we've used this technology enhancements to really give students options on how they demonstrate how they've achieved learning outcomes okay and again this really promotes equality of access because we know that each student has access to the same hardware software and everything they need for their studies the iPads have really become a one stop shop for them and from feedback has changed how students approach their coursework because of the iPads but we're also getting feedback from students on the assessment so it really makes them partners in this so primarily results is that technical material students understand well when it comes to actually expressing in English how to approach a maths it's a little bit harder but we're going to try and bake that into level 4 and level 5 and hopefully that will change over time but yeah and that's ish so thank you for listening to us and any questions thank you so much Brendan and Matt that was wonderful I really loved all the interactive videos you put into that presentation to let us actually see how the students use the iPads I've got two questions I'd love to throw at you before we have to wrap up first one is from Peter Hartley who asked how are you going to develop this further yeah I mean this is a good question because I the student numbers on the maths are quite small at that scale it's possible to do this kind of thing but we are looking at how you scale this up so we have some of the big modules that we teach in support as the in the business school and we're looking at how looking at ways in which you can scale that really because that's going to be the difficult thing I think you know it's making sure these things work so there are difficulties with making sure equal types of assessment are marked in the same way but that's actually not too difficult that's more about designing the rubric well but yeah I mean there are issues we are looking at this is a continuous this is a continuous thing that's the thing this is just where we are at the moment really and we are looking to ways of improving these approaches and I'll share one last question from Alistair McNaught perhaps we can carry on the rest of the conversation on this card which says great examples of inclusion in these pedagogies but I wonder if the technologies might create barriers for other disabled students for example poor motor skills who can't use a pen or speed meter users was this a problem you experienced if not has there been a discussion about how it might be handled without losing the benefits of the current approach one of the students who does use this is actually quadriplegic it can only has some movement in one arm but they arrived at the university already having answered many of these questions you know how they were going to deal with it and they were using they were using iPads anyway if you know there are issues and if there are you know going back to what Brendan was saying it needs we will look at how you bake all of this in at the start of at the start of these things I mean it's possible of course we have an example of how it's been done for really a pretty extreme case but you know a lot of the problem with a lot of these things is that you often end up trying to solve the problems when they arise I think there are solutions out there the screen reader we have had experience of that as well working with screen readers with handwritten maths that's difficult but the way we would normally do it is treat it as a case by case kind of approach really all right I'm so sorry to have to cut you guys off it's been a really interesting conversation might I suggest anyone who wants to carry on that conversation head on over to our discord and we can follow up on questions there but it's just left for me to say thank you very much to Brendan and Matt for that presentation and I hope you all enjoy the rest of the conference thank you everyone