 Hei, Colleen. Thank you. Hi, good morning everyone and welcome to my presentation. Now, what I'm going to be looking at, the basis of this is my experiences of using Collaborate Ultra as primarily a lecture substitute as part of my teaching, but I've also extended the remit of my abstract a little bit to throw in some other ways that I've been using this particular technology that might be of interest or a benefit for your own practice. OK, so I say I'm Polly Monroe and I'm a lecturer in HRM in the Glasgow School for Business and Society, which is part of Glasgow Caledonian University. So this is basically what I'm going to be looking at in my presentation. What is Collaborate Ultra? What can I use it for? Some staff reflection, student reaction and lessons going forward. So first of all, not everybody's familiar with these types of tools and it's a tool that's embedded within our VLE. So what we know as our GCU Learn system. So it's, I describe it as Skype-like because it allows you to communicate with students or anybody else in a sort of Skype format where you could have video, almost like video calling where you can have audio and it has a chat feature as well in it. So it's quite a multifunctional tool that is similar, you know, in a lot of ways to Skype. And the additional benefit of it is that you can upload lecture slides. For example, today includes screen sharing where you can actually show the window in your own PC to your audience. You know, for example, I found that quite useful if you want to show a diagram for students. Students actually find this really, you know, very functional because it means they can still make an opinion, they can still answer a question, they can still make a comment, you know, without feeling that, oh, I'm in this big lecture hall and you know, I don't want to speak in front of everybody. So say chat messaging and polling as well. It also has a function that you can use for little opinion polls. And what I've been using mostly is recorded sessions. You can save them and make them available through your VLE. Okay. So I'll sort of talk a wee bit more about how I've been using these functions in what I've been doing in my own teaching practice. Well, primarily what I've been doing is live lecture sessions. Now, this has comprised of me sort of delivering my lecture live through this tool. Now, this is a lot of benefits for staff. For example, time management. I might only have, let's say, one lecture that day. Now, this tool allows me to deliver that from home so that I can maybe be productive during the day, get other things done. And an interesting side effect of it is you're much more relaxed. You know, you can maybe lie on the couch, your cup of tea. You know, your little plate of biscuits. But you have to remember your headset to mute it when you're drinking your tea. That's what, you know, sort of several weeks of practice sort of told me. So doing that, you can also pre-record your lectures without an audience. So you're uploading your slides, you're doing your narration. Now, a lot of people use Camtasia for these types of processes. But I found that using the actual tool within your VLE is so much simpler than a more complicated Camtasia. Summer revision sessions has been an absolute real find for me because when you have students doing resets, for example, they might be international students. They might, you know, they might say, well, why should I come over in the summer for a session for it's maybe going to last an hour? I have a lot of part-time students as well and they can't always attend, you know, during the day if they have work commitments. So arranging live sessions, and I have done for some of my part-time students in the evening, means that they don't miss out in any sort of important information. And what I've found is a student is far more likely to tune into the session from home or anywhere else that's suitable than actually physically come into the classroom during the summer holidays. You could also use it for guest speakers. You could, you know, you send the link and the guest speaker can use, you know, the system as well but the only problem that you can have is their IT system might not allow them to do it. I've had sort of conflict software conflicts in the past. You know, I've tried to set up, for example, a Q&A with an industry expert for the students, you know, things like that. So it's kind of, that can be a wee bit trial and error. Dissertation meetings, it's great for dissertation meetings because you can record the session. There's no ambiguity as to your feedback. If the student, and it means that the student instead of maybe constantly emailing you for clarification for this or that, they have a record of what was said. And what I do is I put feedback on their chapter, for example, turn it into a PDF, upload it and we discuss it. They can see all the feedback and the document on their screen and I see it online and we have a chat about it. And it means that, for example, their time's not being wasted in neither's mind because they might only be able to do one hour in that day, I might only have their meeting in that day. So it means that you can manage their time more effectively. And of course it was good to see, they all see Organising Committee we're using collaborate as a very effective tool in order to organise the activities and processes for the conference. So you see how it has a lots of different dimensions. It's quite a multifunctional tool once you really start to explore what it can do. So this is what I call Collaborate Ultra in Action. Now this is based in my student experience, my teaching practice. Now in my sort of timetable, I have a fourth year semester B undergrad module. Now what happens is by week five, week six, they start to disappear because as soon as you say the word dissertation, it's like, ah! I need to be working on my dissertation, I need to be working on it. So lecture attendance drops off a cliff because they're prioritising the dissertation and they're missing out in a lot of valuable lectures as part of their module. So what I decided to do was do live sessions in their lecture slot that were also recorded. So they had the option to appear, to come to the session virtually live or they could listen to the recorded version. And my third year undergrad module was mainly direct entry students. I recorded all the lecture material for them so that they had something to go back to. My postgrad module, I want to use, you know, for more recording of the sort of the theoretical aspects so that I can use more class time to develop more practical based activities so that we're less death by PowerPoint and more sort of learning by doing. So say I've already used it to streamline dissertation meetings and it's also a very effective reflective tool for myself because when you listen back to your own recordings you have to think about am I actually explaining things properly? Am I, what tone am I using? And the unfortunate thing for some of us in the west of Scotland, you know, what gratuitous colloquialisms am I using that an international student will say? What? You know, and it helps you to reflect in your own practice that you can go back and see, you know, what where you need to improve and are you actually producing the most effective learning experience for your students? See, what I found though, as someone who likes to bounce off the audience, not literally, but likes to the rapport and the, you know, sort of being in contact with the audience I found that quite difficult to adapt at times to online because as I say, I'm lying maybe on the couch of my wee cup of tea and I'm talking to nothing. See, because I like the audience effect where you can say a little bit of rapport, a little anecdote here and there and when I listened back to the recordings I thought you're awfully serious, you know, and it didn't sound like me. You know, apparently I'd put the speed to 1.5 so it didn't sound too nasally, apparently. But there we go, my elocution for me. So, you know, that I found that was quite difficult so it's not something I would like to do all the time if felt it fitted this module and the particular students because we also have a very diverse student group now. We have more mature students who maybe have childcare or other caring responsibilities as maybe our other students. We have students that maybe say I'm coming from, let's say, Ayrshire and it's expensive to travel. So if more of my materials online then that will save me some money and I'm really pleased about that. Our international students, you know, say, well, what we like is we can go back and back to what you were saying so we can pick it up better. So say, and especially as I mentioned earlier there's no ambiguity regarding dissertation feedback. There's no, I'll bet you said, I'll bet you this, that it's all there as a record. So say, as I've said, you know, it makes you more aware of yourself as an educator. And that's why it's an interesting concept. If we, you know, is this how it's going to go? You know, we're going to actually move away from more face-to-face. Are we going to do more online? Does that mean that the lecturer becomes, you know, a sort of a narrower part of the whole education process? Now, student views, as I said, this is a sort of summary of what they said. They thought it was great for their time management, re-access. They could be interactive with the chat bubble because what I did was I switched off their audio. You know, so they couldn't speak because what happens is that you hear them all breathing in your headphones. And if you've got maybe 30, 40 people, it's not a good idea. So, you know, they did that. So they asked questions through the chat messaging. Some didn't like it. Now, you're always going to get that. You can't please all of the people all of the time. And they found it harder to engage. They thought, well, it's online. I'll look at it next week. Or I'll look at it next week after. And they never look at it. You can't, that's inevitable. You can't, there's no sort of magic bullet that's going to suit everybody. I mean, here it's just some of the feedback examples. We are not going to read them out word by word, but you can see, you know, that one of the key themes was being able to re-access the material because sometimes in a lecture hall you can't retain what's being said, especially if there's distractions and all the rest of it. So they find that really useful. But of course, you know, to give it a sort of a balance, there's some would like face-to-face and recorded as well, which is resource implications, you know. You know, and some people say, well, maybe a 50-50 split would maybe be a better way to do it. Now, just to kind of sort of finish up, what I found was one of the biggest barriers was staff who maybe felt they don't have the confidence to use these things. There's the thought of, if it goes wrong, I don't, I need to be seen to know what I'm doing and if it doesn't work, I'm going to look stupid. And if the students don't like it, it's going to impact on our metrics. So, you know, sometimes institutions can become a wee bit risk averse and make sure it's for the correct student group. Don't just blanket apply it to every student that you've got. Some students you just would not work for and recognise that you're not going to please everybody. There's always going to be somebody that won't like it and it's not an easy option. It's actually, it can take you longer and more thought to do. But I would say, do I have any regrets about doing it? Absolutely none. And it's something that I hope to develop in the future, you know, to try and enhance the student experience where needed. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for that polling. So just an opportunity now if you've got any questions or comments in the room with this. I'll use her over. We do have some that have come in, come in through Vivox. So one was about using the platform for a lecture capture but I think you've addressed that just as that question came in. Do you use a flipped approach? So not reducing the face-to-face time but using that time for more application of knowledge? Well, I think it also depends on the actual module on the student group. For postgraduate level they like, you know, more of a kind of a practical focus because HR is a very practical discipline. So if they've already primed with the theory beforehand then that gives them something to think about and then to focus more on the sort of practical activities. But for maybe other undergrads, you know, that I would say that, you know, it's good as a reference point for them and you maybe wouldn't do as much sort of flipped classroom activities but it does mean that you can maybe go a wee bit lighter in the heavy theoretical aspects, less powerpoint. We have another question there. Do you have any evidence that, oh, that non-attenders access the recordings or did they actually join live? Yeah, well, how we do it is our dashboard on our VLE allows me to look at the statistics for each individual student, you know, to see how many times they've accessed each particular item. So I have a full sort of statistical sort of breakdown of those that are looking at it. Maybe not join in the live session but are actually viewing recordings. So yeah, I have those. We're able to access that yet. There's a question there about Office 365 and the use of Microsoft Teams. I guess maybe that's why Collaborate Alter and not one of the other tools. I've actually never used the M365 so I wouldn't be able to comment on that. But I mean certainly if it was a tool worth exploring then yeah, something I would certainly look into. So I think we may be of time for one more if there are any more questions in the room. No. Yeah, some people commenting just a really useful tool for professional services staff, two to save time and travel. I think we've all been there in the car and are ready to another meeting. And yeah, thank you very much. So just a round of applause please for polling. Thank you. And I'll ask the next speakers to come up.