 Good afternoon, colleagues. Welcome to your chosen four o'clock session. I'm Keith Smith, the chair for this session. We have with us Ellen Spender, Sue Evans, Leslie Davies and Tracy Williams, who will be talking about creating a student-led online inclusive community of learning and co-creation of program content using digital technology. So colleagues, over to yourselves and we're looking forward to this session. Hello and welcome to our presentation on creating community of learning and co-creation of content. We are all accounting lecturers in the School of Management at Swansea University. I am Sue Evans and my co-presenters today are Ellen Spender, Tracy Williams and Leslie Davies. The format of the presentation we will all be speaking. The scope of the research project has widened to include two further examples of online activities, which we think delegates will find quite interesting. So Ellen will present first and she will talk about student-led online inclusive community of learning and an individual learning experience within a large cohort group. Leslie will then go on to speak about using virtual reality to create an individual learning experience. I will then talk about how I set up a learning community and I've got students to co-create a module content. We're looking at the context within Swansea University learning and teaching strategy and the GISC digital capabilities framework. And then finally Tracy will talk about the curriculum inclusivity toolkit and what's happening next in 2021-22. And then we will follow on with a question and answer session where you will have an opportunity to ask the presenters questions. So now I'm going to pass over to my colleague Ellen Spender. Hello, thank you Sue. As Sue introduced us, we are all accounting lecturers in Swansea University. And with the swift move to online delivery, we set about researching how we could create a student-led online inclusive community of learning and also an individual learning experience for students within large cohort groups. So we had to consider how to build this sense of community and belonging, particularly with students being isolated and remote. So we conducted some research and based on children and women, we decided to focus on the importance of the university's relationship with our students and the students' relationships with each other, which learning techniques to use and to ensure prompt feedback for our students. So what did we consider? The four of us all teach a variety of levels throughout the university and a number of different cohorts. So we concentrated on those students for which it was their first time at the university and as such had not formed any friendship groups. We looked at first-year undergraduate students, our master's postgraduate students and also our year two level five direct access Chinese students. Because as most of you who deliver will know, there is generally a reluctance for some students to participate in class and a hesitancy to engage. And we found this was even more so with students who had not yet formed a friendship group or had a bed to sit with and to help them speak and give them confidence to speak in classes. We also considered the students access to technology. Did we have unrealistic technological capabilities of our students? After all, technology is a tool, not a teacher. So we came up with all these tools that we could use, but did our students have the capability to use them? And we also wished to enable a sense of social presence where students felt connected to the university, to us as their lecturers and to fellow students. We wanted to build a sense of community and belonging. And in order to do this, there were all types of things we had to consider. So we looked at the asynchronous and synchronous learning and teaching activities. And for both of these types, we had to take into account the digital digital tools on offer for us to encourage online participation of our students. So first we set up a learning path where we felt students could engage with us in their own time and at their own pace. So we did this by recording short videos no more than 20 minutes in length, which meant that students could access these videos in their own time and in fact as many times as they felt necessary. We also thought, well, how can we build a community for students even before they met us that first time in our live Zoom seminars? So we decided to place students into groups and we gave them seminar questions to work on together. And then we wanted them to bring them to our live Zoom seminars. And we also set up Kahoot quizzes in Teams, which I'll discuss later. For our synchronous strategies again, using our digital tools available to us and to our students to encourage engagement and online participation in our in-person live online classes. Those groups we put together, we encourage students to report back to us in the live seminar when we're all together in the group. We also decided, taking into account student preferences, to place students into breakout rooms during our live seminars. And we put them in smaller groups. Why? For chance to meet and socialise, particularly in those groups where we block taught. Because we teach, we also block teach and we had some MSE students who were with us for two weeks in Zoom times in excess of three hours. So we decided to place students in breakout rooms for longer sessions and we encourage them to work on previously unseen seminar questions to give them time to discuss over coffee or even over a lunch hour. Why? To encourage social time and try to encourage our students to form these friendship groups. So what did we learn and how? But in our online, our live seminar classes, we had instant feedback. We used polls, we used quizzes, and we used Kahoot. And we, the benefit of Kahoot, and for those who are not sure what Kahoot is, it's a game-based learning platform. It has analytics. So usually in online classes, we all use Kahoot at the end of each class to assess learning, it's a form of engagement, it's fun, it's competitions, it's competition between the students and it's overwhelmingly liked. So it gives immediate personal engagement with us, as well as fellow students, which encourage an inclusive community. And feedback told us that these live classes decreased feelings of isolation and students were able to form friendship groups. However, it's not without its challenges, we had to completely redesign our teaching. It required planning and order. And we found, and you see how highlighted there, communication was vital. It was paramount to a successful lecture-student relationship. But how do we do that? Students often tell us they receive far too many emails, so we decided to use short recorded messages instead, where we told students exactly what was expected of them, so our expectations of our students and what they could expect from us with this move, this new way of learning remotely. And this increased cognitive engagement as students can view the material and all our materials are loaded as often as necessary. So why Kahoot? Kahoot increases engagement, it increases students' motivation and student enjoyment. It allows students to study at their own pace and then by creating a dedicated Kahoot Teams site, as well as using them live, we ensured that we uploaded our Kahoot to the dedicated team site and students could access them at their own pace and in their own time, which also helped oaken video fatigue and to build relationships. And just a selection of student feedback, which was overwhelmingly positive. They particularly liked the different kinds of material that was provided for them to engage with. They, as I said, communication was vital, it was new for us, it was new for our students. So we asked for their opinion regarding breakout rooms, did they like them, the length of time, the size of the groups in the breakout rooms. And during a pandemic is, as we all know, incredibly difficult and different for students who had previously studied at a university, for example, our postgraduate students. And they particularly liked being able to access the information offline. And Kahoot, by being live and on Teams, gave them an opportunity to test their own learning in their own time to interact with one another outside of being physically on campus. Because of course, this was something our students generally had or previously taken for granted within person lectures. And I'd now like to pass you on to my colleague, Leslie, to continue. Thank you, Annan. As mentioned, I'm one of the lecturers at Swan's University. And it was a challenge this year to make sure that students had the same experience that they had in the classroom as they would have had through Zoom being at home. So I use VR, and I use VR to create an individual student-led learning experience, putting the students in charge of their learning and the feedback we get from it. Because being able to visualize an auditing case study, that's what I teach as auditing. Is really important. Auditing students usually experience virtual reality in the case studies in their learning. In a seminar room, of course, we didn't have this. However, due to UK government lockdown, access to the equipment is impossible. So we had to think of something else to do, to make sure that they had that experience. So I created an alternative approach to what we normally did, and this was creating 360 degree videos. And it was a learning tool and a revision tool. Students were able to go back to this tool if that's what they wanted to use, and they worked together. Now, students provided the feedback, which is always important for us on the effectiveness of the video case studies on their learning and their exam preparation. So what did we do? Right, each case study we were looking at, and this case study we were doing T Sport Limited, which was a go-kart centre. And not students had been to go-kart centres and will never look at it the same again. We had approximately five to six separate photographs. Well, and this photograph you can see here is a photograph in the go-kart centre. We had the cafe, we had equipment, we had outside, all which the students were able to access via their phones, their tablets, any platform they had really, and they could move around this go-kart centre. And each picture was annotated with appropriate text, and that was testing the students' knowledge of the business, of the audit issues, and any risks they had. As you can see there, T Sport was selling overalls at a certain price. Some of those were damaged in transit, which then affects obviously the value. The students also had an inventory sheet attached to this because they were being the auditors, they were auditing inventory, and in there you had a list of what was on the inventory sheet, and they had to work out whether that was correct, whether what should have been on there was on there, anything that was missing on there, and then they were able to look at what the inventory figure would have been within the accounts. Now how did we do this? We did this by putting them into seminar groups. It was a student led experience carried out during an online workshop. The students came together on the workshop, then we put them into breakout rooms. Now that breakout room represented what an audit team would be, and they were working together. Now it was important that the students led this, they got to know their colleagues, they got to work together, and they had the ability then to discuss what they were finding. So we left them in there for a certain amount of time, and then we brought them back into the discussion room, and we were looking then at what they'd found, what was wrong, obviously the inventory sheet, there were things wrong on there, there were things wrong that were around the video itself, and somebody was preparing that the answers from each team, and they were representing an audit team working together. Then we looked at the audit procedures they had, and the outcomes of what they'd found, and all the groups then discussed whether they wanted to carry on with this. So the student feedback, I really enjoyed the inventory where we used VR, I found it helpful. It made us feel as though we were auditors conducting the audit ourselves, it was different, it was intellectually stimulating, and if you're putting all that together, that's what you want for students to be able to stimulate, be able to think it's different, and to visualise what they're learning in their material is actually what they can see in front of them. So this student-led workshop worked really well, and it's something we carry forward for the masters and the undergraduates, and we'll continue to do so. Right, well now I've got to hand you over to my colleague, Sue, who will take you forward. Thank you Leslie. Take a brief background to my practice. My module is a semester two level five module, and the cohort is a blend of level four cohort progression into level five, some direct entry home and international students enrolling at level five, and international students are mainly made up of students from Chinese universities. In total, the blended group is around 185 students. So what I wanted to try to achieve with this cohort was to try to build a student-led community of learning with the aim to create or co-create module content to foster higher engagement and inclusivity. I had made some assumptions before I started working with students. I did make the assumption that they were digital natives. This was mostly correct in terms of social media, but not in terms of software applications and digital learning platforms. So although some students were very, very highly skilled, others were quite low skilled. The other assumption I made was that the level four progression cohort had already formed friendship groups in their first year of studies. Now this was partly correct, but there was a high proportion of students who didn't know more than one or two students on the program. And the reason I made that assumption is because they'd obviously had one and a half semesters on normal on-campus delivery pre-COVID lockdown. The other assumption I made that direct entry non-native speaking students would find online communication in English very challenging because they would not have the benefit of on-campus interaction with native speakers. So this was about 90% true because some international students did have fluent English skills. So I had to take all this into my practice. So what I thought I'd do is try to introduce students to each other. In the first four seminars of the module, I put the students into microgroups of two to three students. They were randomly allocated to the groups. I gave them icebreaker activities ranging from five to ten minutes at the beginning of each seminar. I was hoping that that would start some communication going on and possibly foster some learning communities. At the end of the fourth week, I looked at the feedback and I decided then in week five it was time to try some co-creation of course content. So I used Padlet for this because I've used Padlet before and it's quite intuitive. It's very easy just to pick up in a couple of minutes. So I thought that was the best vehicle that we could use. The feedback I had was that sort of a high proportion of students stated that they found the icebreakers sessions are very useful for interaction and but after the first session they said could we have longer so I instigated that in late sessions and overall it was an improved sense of belonging with social media learning groups set up. They also fed back that they found it would be more useful to have the same microgroup every week rather than random groups so that they could build some more rapport and confidence. So this is something I'm going to put into my module in the next academic year. Using the digital platform, they were in groups co-creating module content. They loved doing that. They loved using Padlet as you can see from the feedback there. Found it very engaging and the fact that they were creating module content that they may or could be assessed on in the future. However some international students, namely from China, they made little or no contribution in either activity and when I met with them they cited low confidence in linguistic skills so that was a major area that I'm going to take forward for next year. I'm going to talk about that just later in the presentation. Now when we were looking at our practice we were thinking about the university L&T strategy and working within the GISC Digital Capabilities Framework. So in the university strategy we picked on inclusive learning and teaching, technology enhanced learning and then to be able to put that into practice we used the Digital Capabilities Framework in particular digital innovation, collaboration and participation. So this is where the context lies for our work at the university. We also looked at the GISC Student Digital Experience insight survey which again we isolated the one main question which was what could one thing could universities do to improve the quality of digital teaching and learning and one of the top four responses was more interactivity and collaboration and digital learning. So this is you know we have a lot of work to do on this but this is the area that we're focused on. We've only made sort of inroads into it at the moment so it's an area that we are going to develop in the next academic year and in addition to that we are going to be looking at improving inclusivity in our modules by using the curriculum inclusivity toolkit which was developed by a colleague of ours in the university Dr Alice Einan Waller and my colleague Tracy is going to tell you a bit about that now. Thank you Sue for that and as we're over running it's really going to be a short and sweet minute or so for me to tell you about it. What we have at Swansea University is a curriculum inclusivity toolkit and what it does it's basically for ourselves as lecturers a self evaluation questionnaire where it looks at we evaluate ourselves it increases our awareness added values and transforming practice. It's actually based on six domains and you score yourself on these six domains equalizing relationships, empowerment, building community including the individual voice, respecting diversity and challenging teaching and theory. What there are there's loads of questions in this toolkit and it should help you to increase your awareness, change your practice. Here's some examples of questions they're here for example the first one is there explicit information on equality, diversity and inclusion in your learning resources and once you go through this toolkit it really makes you think about what you're doing for inclusivity. Okay so the next slide tells us what we plan to do. We're going to use this toolkit and then we're going to look at microgroups in some seminars by allocating students to the same group each week, every week, increase the use of Padlet, research projects on the discursive engagement with Chinese students to start in October. We're going to use this toolkit I've just been spoken about to put this best practice into place and then we're going to investigate the use of Discord to build a community of learning. So we've got some plans for the future. Okay so there's our contact information I think the next slide is just references so we're on to questions so thank you all for your time today and do you have any questions? Thank you very much indeed colleagues and thanks for bringing me back in Emma-Jane I'm conscious of time we've literally just got a couple of minutes so let's see how far we can get. So the first question that came in was a question and also a bit of a comment. Do you feel that part of making a community online also comes in part from both the staff and students making contributions? The comment being that this colleague often sees these failing as students are really left to their own devices so would anyone want to take that one please? I'm quite happy too. I mean you know from what I understand yes it has been difficult it's been it's been difficult for students it's been difficult for all staff academic and professional services and as I highlighted in my presentation it is all about communication so I found you know our traditional form of communication is either notifications on our campus such as the learning platform our students use or share resources sending emails so instead and the same with colleagues just record a short video message I found students really appreciated that form of communication they thought they could bond with us they could see us we were moving it just wasn't words on the screen. Great thank you. I'm conscious we've got a few questions that maybe partially answered the second one that came in at least to some extent. In terms of practicalities we've got Vicki asking would it be possible to see an example of the 360 degree video anywhere just so there could be a better understanding of how that was put together and Ricardo's also asked what technology software did you use for the VR experience so maybe we could take those two technical questions. Yeah we'll take those yes it's certainly be able to have an example of the students because that's what the students had and it was a software package that we had it was just using the phone basically and then we linked it together I have more information on that if you need to. Great thank you. Anyone else like to come in there? Okay in which case let's have a quick look see we can take one more and then we'll let people get off to the break. So Ricardo again what kind of content was co-created and for what purposes and you mentioned assessments I think Ricardo's interested in this in relation to assessment you're on mute sir I can see you trying to talk. Sorry sorry Baba yeah I had them in groups creating content they had to do some research on short-term and long-term strategies in relation to scarce resources so then they had to in their groups input what they found into Padlet and what I did then was I took all those responses and I drew web documents for them and they then were assessed partly in the final module exam on that content if that answers your question. Great thank you Sue I'm conscious we're a couple of minutes over and also that we're about to go to a break for a short while a 20-minute break for the next session and our colleagues at Alt have just pointed out that within Discord there's a dedicated thread for this session if colleagues want to post further questions in the discussion so sorry there wasn't time for a bit more discussion but we should draw to close there can I ask colleagues to give a virtual round of applause to our presenters please.