 Well, good morning to the first parallel session of day three of ALT-C 2021. Good morning to the European contingent and for those on the other side of the world. Good evening to Peter and Danielle. I'm delighted to invite Peter, Brian and Danielle Eden, who are going to be presenting and discussion on promoting connectedness, particularly peer mentors and inter-curricular online learning environment. Danielle, over to you. I'm going to start, Roger. That's right. My name is Peter, Brian. I'm the Associate Dean of Education at the University of Sydney Business School and I'm also a trustee of ALT. So it's lovely to be here to introduce Danielle Eden, who will be doing the primary presentation on a particular project that we've been working on now for just over a year called Leading in a Post COVID World in 2020 and what became Leading in a Post Crisis World in 2021. Before I start, it's a bit of a tradition that we do, starting Australian presentations to acknowledge the indigenous lands that we are on. I am on the land of the Bejigal people of the Eora Nation and it's particularly important for the University of Sydney as Australia's oldest university is built at the intersection of three roads where three different mobs of indigenous people came together to learn on the hill where the university is built and our university has been a centre of learning for nearly 60,000 years. So it's important for us to pay respects to the elders past, present and emerging of the indigenous people of this country. So Leading in a Post Crisis World was a particularly important programme for a university as we are. Our borders have been closed here in Australia since January 2020 to China and then since March 2020 to the rest of the world. And with the majority of our students overseas from my business school, which is around about 83% of our students are international and in 2020, nearly 72% of them were overseas, there were critical problems around feeling a part of our institution, critical problems about belonging to the campus and critical problems around social isolation and connectedness. And that manifested itself as students wanting to defer their studies, students wanting to cut back the amount they were studying, which impacted on their progression and completion. And actually, it's significantly impacted on their learning and how they engaged in their in their programs. And for us, we're just about to graduate our very first group of masters students. We have a very large masters programme, masters commerce has about nine and a half thousand students in it's the largest masters programme in the Southern Hemisphere. And that masters is about to graduate its first group of students who have never been on campus in a face to face designed programme. And that creates some really interesting challenges around that sense of community and belonging. And this programme is designed specifically to address those issues. So I'll hand over Danielle to sort of take you through what we did and some of the interesting aspects of it. Thanks, Peter. So this presentation reports on an intracurricular pilot study that we ran fully online in semester two, twenty twenty in the business school. The programme had around eighteen hundred students participating across the different sections of the programme. The entire programme was online and students from multiple countries and locations were able to participate. And we did it online, of course, due to the lockdown. So today, I'm actually going to talk about our research project, but I'm just going to give you a little bit of introduction around the actual initiative and then talk about a specific part of which we had peer mentors involved. So for the leading in a post COVID world, it consisted in a modular four modules of learning and they were led by four master classes of influential and impactful voices. And we had a psychologist, economist, a futurist and a challenger. The first part of the initiative consisted of the asynchronous engagement with the video of the master class. And then the second section of the module, which I was sort of looking at for the research project, was around four purposefully purposefully designed immersive workshops that engaged in small group problems, solving and challenging activities and provocations. We ran over a hundred of these workshops across the initiative. And we utilised a team of twenty four academic facilitators, including eight peer mentors who were doctoral students, four doctoral students and four masters of business administration students. And as I said, we ran the program fully online utilising MS teams. MS teams was really useful because we could also while we were running the workshops, we could also post and answer questions and make it feel more inclusive. So the initiative consists of a range of sections. There's other sections that I won't I'll just sort of touch on briefly today. So future makers, which was part of the immersive crowdsourcing program. This is where students had the opportunity to post and share their ideas for personal, local and global challenges. And this is where we got some of the information for the business, not as usual forum. The students were then able to post these as challenges to share with other students to become involved in. So to complete the program, they worked through various sections of the program. We have research connections, which is a series of engaging webinars. And the students could participate in an interactive forum using Slido with researchers to learn more about the latest research trends. The topics were raised by the students, so they wanted to know more about the future of work. So we invited four guest researchers to talk about their work from the business school in terms of that sort of area and what the future of work might look like, including the future of work for women. And that became one of the challenges that was voted to include for the business, not as usual forum that you can see there on the screen. At the end of the program, the students were able to apply for and a badge to represent their participation at the various levels in the program. This initiative is underpinned by connected learning at scale class and has the three main principles of information engagement, connected participation and active learning, relevant and authentic assessment of feeding forward. The interesting thing around to analyze as a researcher was the inclusivity of design. So the design of the program by Peter included the various aspects to promote belonging and inclusivity and connections. So students as partners underpinned by class community of inquiry approach. We utilize the master classes, so a combination of asynchronous content and synchronous live workshops and crowdsource challenges. So this brings me up to the actual research project. So what we did was we conducted a mixed methods project where we looked at quantitative data from the student completion survey and qualitative data from a case study with the peer mentors. So I just wanted to talk very briefly about the role of the peer mentors in the program because this was part of the research question that we were exploring, the impact and the role of the actual peer mentor team. So the peer mentor team were part of the academic facilitation team in the actual workshops and then they ran these separate peer support sessions which were drop-in sessions for students to attend as an option to gain more feedback and more information about their action plans that they were preparing for the business not as usual challenge. Now what was really interesting, multiple areas of interest here was the inclusivity approach from the students that were involved in these sessions both from the participants in the program but in particular from the peer mentors who were really engaging and positive and supportive about these pitch presentations. They were three minutes long so many of the doctoral students had experience of writing for you know pitching for a three-minute thesis and the MBA students had experience of pitching throughout their course. Many of these peer mentors were at the end of their programs so they were able to reflect on the whole process and really help students who were undergraduate and postgraduate some new to their journey at university to feel more included. So the peer mentor rubric that was used for the verbal feedback in the actual drop-in sessions was designed by or co-designed with the peer mentors and they gave feedback around the rubric. It was structured as a verbal feedback structure because it was easier for a drop-in session on MS teams to be able to hear the pitches and then to be able to share some verbal feedback but having that guide so that they felt scaffolded in that process as well. The rubric aligned to the criteria for the business not as usual forum. On the call as well was an experienced facilitator who was available to support but not in a visual way more by sharing posts on MS teams. So it was a really interesting platform to use because you could add information through posts and students who maybe didn't feel confident to turn on the camera and speak could ask questions by posting so having the combination was really useful. These sessions were led and run by the peer mentor team in groups of three. So they were always scaffolded. They were scaffolded by being in a group of three so that they felt able to help give feedback and then also be able to reflect on feedback while one of the other peer mentors maybe was speaking. So the interesting thing about using this rubric was that you could reflect in action or you could actually reflect on action after the pitch and then share some more feedback through teams. So we looked at these mixed methods from a community of inquiry framework because it's a very interesting social constructivist framework that promotes connections and connectedness and we've been mapping using a community of inquiry framework to look at the various aspects that the peer mentors were involved in and noting things like that the social part, the social presence. We had welcome activities where the students posted a book cover and shared about their journey or their experiences at the beginning of the program and the peer mentors as well as the rest of the academic facilitators and also the wider university could share their thoughts on those types of posts and share. And it was very inclusive and reflective. It was interesting to see that sort of approach and that lovely collaboration. The teaching part of the teaching presence, we had students as partners in learning and the peer mentor sessions. The cognitive parts were really interesting to look at the way the design of the masterclass is the fireside chats. And it was really interesting to note that at the beginning of the modules the the peer mentors started in being scaffolded by observing experienced academics in facilitation but by the the second and third and fourth modules they were confident to lead those workshops including the actual modules as well as the peer mentor support sessions. So for this project for the research we looked at the student completion survey. We found that 82 percent of the responses agreed with the statement that the workshop panellists were really engaging and helpful during the sessions. And we found that 83 percent of responses agreed with the statement I felt supported in the program. Through the case study with the peer mentors we had some really insightful comments around the workshops and how awesome they were. Students were really engaged talking about that the skills were things like leadership, open-mindedness, forward thinking helped to be a peer mentor and I like this quote in particular I appreciated helping people to think deeper so I felt like I was making a difference academically and professionally. So some of the challenges we asked what were the challenges as well so things like I guess people were fatigued with doing things virtually and the idea of moving to a new platform so we were experienced with Zoom but we were less experienced with MS teams so having support and technical expertise to train up the facilitators and the peer mentors on MS teams was really helpful at the beginning as with everything it takes time to get used to it and the other comment was around fatigue with online engagement and it I have to say that at the moment we're still in lockdown in Sydney and so this feeling of fatigue is familiar again. So we then looked at how this linked to the literature and so we're noting things like Matthews talking about the five propositions for genuine students as partners in practice so that the sort of guidelines to look at for good practice we tried to keep these in mind particularly for the peer mentor sessions so to foster inclusive partnerships to nurture a power sharing relationship through dialogue and reflection and this team were very generous in terms of sharing their reflections and their thoughts with the students and also with the other academic facilitators and we had separate teams chats that we could share those sorts of reflections on and students could also share their reflections their personal their group reflections and their society reflections on the challenges in the MS teams and also in channels within MS teams so then I've also looked at here a finished study called by Lea Temeke it's a really interesting study because it looks at how to promote around global connectedness and I particularly liked this diagram this sense of belonging shared motivations for improvement and around interconnectedness of self and others and the recognition of shared challenges all of these things resonated while we were looking at the qualitative data and the student survey data this particular study is not in an online space so overall what sort of findings did we find so overall the positives of the program included things like the the feedback was around quality and insightful and inspiring master classes and fireside chats with senior academics from the university as well as the guest keynote speakers as well as alumni and industry experts having the opportunity to co-design participate in active and collaborative learning opportunities they appreciated the mentoring support they appreciated learning new technology and things like team teaching so being able to work as in groups of three within the workshops was really useful as well because it just meant that you had extra support available for staff and for students needing that extra support having a feeding forward approach to being very helpful in terms of directing feedback that would help complete the challenges so that students could participate in the business not as usual forum and of course the badgings were very popular so the challenges overall things like the rapid pivot to online learning due to the lockdown reduce the time frame to explore and practice on the new platform on the MS teams so as I said from the overall challenges not just from the peer mentors but from the academic sort of facilitation team from their survey as well we saw things like online fatigue learning new technology and digital access so time zones location bandwidth becoming problems that I think we can all relate to overall the lessons learned was things like to have a flexible and adaptable approach was needed because there were times we weren't sure if the bandwidth was going to work I'm on my phone at the moment as a as a hot spot so you know things like that hoping those things would work training and adapting to new technology to support the students as well as the academics was really helpful students as partners in learning was a key theme that emerged from this study for promoting connectedness and for transformative learning opportunities so as an academic facilitator we learned as much as the students so it was a really interesting journey for all that were involved in this and that was the positive feedback that we received authentic experiences underpinned by and informed by transformative teaching and learning frameworks were really helpful to promote connectedness and peer support peer feedback was key to the success of the participants completing so the students who actually came to the peer support workshops ended up going through to complete to present at the business not as usual forum which was an industry forum with a panel of experts giving them feedback on their challenge pitch and so that was really helpful promoting connections through developing a community of inquiry was integral in developing a cohesive group of academic facilitators and peer mentors who could support and facilitate across the program and I think that might be my last slide and to finish with we this is a longitudinal study so we're now looking at new iterations of this program leading in a post-crisis world thank you so much thank you very much Daniel that was fantastic it's very interesting project that you've been carrying out there I've I know there's a few technical problems this morning so I've not seen many questions come up in the in the comments area but please audience do post comments and we can come back to comments in the YouTube chat after the session in the recording they will stay live I've got a couple of questions for you here well people type or anything's in regards to student experience and student engagement did you find that the students were more widely engaged in the rest of their academic life you know was there better retention was there the the rub off as it were and I'm also thinking of the social side of this outside of your scaffolding sessions did you find students were becoming you know making friends or colleagues or whatever outside of this scaffolding and then you know becoming a sort of their own social support network to support themselves so in terms of the students engaging the really interesting thing was that one of the key objectives of the program in 2020 was that we had about just on 25 percent of our students who went on suspension from their program so about just on 4 000 of our 16 000 students went on suspension every single one of them aside from about 200 came back on to studying in semester 2 and a primary reason they came back on was to engage in this program so the actual promise of what this offered to them was really powerful in terms of the social engagement that's a really interesting thing the daniel mentioned the extracurricular part of the program so research connections which is a engagement with some of the critical research being done in the school were really quite popularly engaged with by students even though they really didn't contribute to the program they just felt that was their opportunity to actually interact with other students and we definitely got the feedback from students that one of the things that they found really quite powerful was those kind of incidental engagements that they would normally have if they went to a workshop or they went to a function and there might be a wine and cheese or something at the end of it that by at least having a zoom room where they could comment and engage with each other that at least created replicated some of that not all but some yeah that's I think that's been a challenge we've all had with being online it's that's happenstance meeting in a corridor or what have you it's that serendipity that's you know the digital world makes too formal um daniel just just going back to some of the challenges there you mentioned the fatigue there did you find did you find that fatigue had the opposite effect it you know people stopped engaging or less you know willing to engage because it was too difficult not just the fatigue but maybe the connection and so on um and and access um I think what we found was in in the actual workshops in the in the live workshops we always had a separate technical support person there which was wonderful to have so that really made a difference because then the facilitators could actually facilitate and so if there was were and there were of course there were students who who were struggling with you know connecting or like myself today where I had to use my phone as a hotspot um they actually could have um sort of dedicated technical support and we had up to two learning designers um and technical support people um available as well so with MS teams the beauty of it was you could actually reach out to people and say hey can you can you can you help this student while we're talking to the group around this other area um and having experts in technology to help support was just really critical to to make it a really positive experience great well it's a fantastic project it's it's been great it'd be good to hear the follow-up on this as you as you continue it um we've come to the end of our time um on this session um so thank you very much um for Peter and thank you um Danielle for the presentation today thank you very much thank you I've just