 I'll be chairing this session today. I'm John Brindle from Edge Hill University. We have Megan Buchanan and a faraway gang with you today. So we're going to start with Megan, who's going to do her presentation platform nine and three quarters. Are we virtually there yet? I can see one of my colleagues is here who's a big Harry Potter fan, so I can see it. Hi everyone. So I'm Megan Buchanan. I'm an e-learning adviser and I work in the e-learning team in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Aberdeen. Thank you for coming to my session. I'm going to be speaking about dual mode teaching delivery at the University of Aberdeen. So since the pandemic, there has been a greater push at the University of Aberdeen to deliver dual mode teaching. By this I mean teaching that is delivered synchronously in person and online, with the aim of making learning more accessible to all. I would be really interested just now if any of you in the room could just put up your hand if you have ever delivered dual mode teaching or if at your institution you know that that type of delivery has happened. Okay, so there's quite a few of you. I'd say that's maybe just under half of you, so that's good to know. So there was some hesitancy among staff in terms of this transition, and the challenges that they were facing were mainly due to knowing how to use the technology in the room to set up their session, knowing how to deliver in an accessible and inclusive way, and also how to engage the students and encourage participation and interaction during their session. So within the e-learning team we led staff through this period of complexity and transition by providing guidance and training on how to use dual mode classrooms to deliver teaching and how to use technology to encourage interaction during sessions. So in this session I'm going to cover how we led staff through this transition to address these challenges and it's going to be focusing on the two main points of how have we supported staff using the technology to deliver dual mode and how have we supported staff to encourage student engagement and interaction during dual mode sessions. So many staff reported to us, as I said, that their understanding of how to use the technology in the room and their lack of confidence with that was a real barrier to them to start their teaching and actually delivering their session. So prior to the start of teaching in around, this was August and September 2021, we provided staff with opportunities to book one hour sessions to try out our dual mode teaching classrooms and gain familiarity with the technology in the room. Staff reported to us that this was really helpful for them to get more comfortable with the technology in the room and to gain a practical understanding of the steps they would need to take to set up their session and then to begin delivering it as well. It was also a great opportunity for staff to plan what types of learning activities they wanted to have in their session using the technology and to gain an understanding of the challenges that they might face using this technology as well. They reported to us that being able to use these rooms before the start of teaching really did help put them at ease and it made them feel a lot more comfortable with beginning their teaching. We also developed an online toolkit area and this focused on digitally enhanced teaching spaces. This included a video that we filmed within eLearning giving an overview of one of our dual mode classrooms and we kind of provided an overview of the technology that would be in the rooms as well as how to use it. We also provided written guides on using MS teams and class collaborate to deliver dual mode teaching and our guidance placed emphasis on how to deliver in an inclusive way. So for example we emphasised to staff about looking at both the in-person participants and online students when you're delivering a session and this would help to kind of avoid online participants feeling like spectators during a session. We also encouraged them to leave time for reviewing the chat during their session so that they wouldn't miss any questions coming in from online participants and if there was any kind of activity going on in the chat that they would be encouraged to repeat that for the in-person participants and vice versa if there was any conversation going on in the room they would make sure to repeat that near the microphone so that the online participants would be able to hear. In terms of how we have supported staff to encourage student engagement and interaction so we provided a lot more bespoke support for this type of challenge so generally we would meet with staff one-on-one or in small groups to provide training and guidance on specific learning scenarios in dual mode format such as planning opportunities for active learning and helping to foster learning communities which are both really important aspects of dual mode delivery. So for example the types of learning scenarios would be using groups so we would encourage staff to when you're delivering dual mode to keep the groups separate so this was mainly in terms of making the classroom management easier so having the in-person students in one group or in a few different groups and then using the breakout room function in teams or a class collaborate to have the online students in groups. One of the other scenarios we would help staff with was using polling and one of the things we encouraged here was to ensure that students wouldn't be excluded from using polling for example if they needed more than one device or that you would make it known to students that they would be expected to bring a device to the session to take part in polling or that the online students wouldn't be excluded if they were already using a device and then needed to use another one for the poll so just we would encourage staff to kind of be mindful of that and not kind of excluding anyone. Another thing that we did was practicing what we preach so with any learning we also delivered our own staff development workshops in a dual mode format. This was really useful for us to kind of demonstrate best practice examples for staff as well as to kind of model what to do when things go wrong as they are not able to do, especially with the technology. So for example one of the things that we really tried to do was developing a digital presence so by kind of setting out to students what they can expect in the session as well as how they can engage with you. So to do this at the start of every session we would make sure that we would introduce ourselves to both the online and in person groups, introduce them to each other as well and make it clear to them how they can engage with the session. So whether you would expect them to use the raise hand function or post in the chat or for participants in the room if you're happy for them just to put their hand up and speak or for online participants they're welcome to put on their microphone. We found it was really useful just to kind of set those expectations for people so that they know how to engage with your session. So going forward are we virtually there yet? So as an institution we have mainly moved back to on-campus delivery and where there's a specific reason students will have the option to join online. So for example if there's been some kind of emergency or if they've come straight from work or something and they don't have time to make it to campus then they do have the option to join online but Duomo does not really our default format anymore. Our online offering, our online only offering has also grown hugely since the pandemic. There are cases where Duomo delivery has worked really well so some staff have chosen to continue delivering in that format. For example our Dean for Educational Innovation Professor Kirsty Keesiebrink delivers her cohorts that way. So I would be really interested to hear what others are doing for those of you who have delivered Duomo if you're still doing that, if you've gone back face to face or if you're delivering fully online it would be great to let us know. I've got some further resources here as well and it would be great to hear any comments or questions that anyone has. I have a microphone if anyone's got a question. I might have to run quite far for some of you up there. On Bevox we have a question. Could you give us a bit more information about what you mean by classroom? Are they lecture theatres, workshop spaces or seminar rooms? So kind of all of those. So to support the transition to Duomo delivery following the pandemic a lot of our teaching spaces so these were lecture rooms, workshop spaces and seminar rooms were upgraded to facilitate that. So a dual-mode classroom would have two monitors, two webcams one would be on top of one of the monitors facing the presenter and we also had an audience facing webcam as well and a lecture and microphone. So that's kind of what our sort of standard setup would look like and that was in all of these rooms that you mentioned. I think we started with the more like the lecture theatres and rooms that were used the most as kind of higher priority and then over the course of about a year this was kind of rolled out to more rooms. Oh we've got a question there. You're nice and close so you can ask this one yourself. Thank you. Is there any particular reason why you didn't continue delivering all your courses in dual mode? Because it seems if the professors had hacked it why would you not continue in that way? Just curious. There were a few reasons. It was mainly kind of a sort of institutional level decision partly because although we do have an online offering we are an on-campus university all the buildings are on campus so they were keen to get students back on campus and delivering teaching on campus. There was also the majority of staff really were not the biggest fans of it. They did find that it was quite a big time resource and they did have to allocate more workload into thinking about how to deliver dual mode and kind of all of the training and allocating more time at the start of a session to set up and all of those types of things. Yeah, kind of went into that decision. But as I say, where it did work really well staff have continued to do that. That's kind of been more decided at a school level in very specific cases. Thank you. We do have two more questions on that. I think we've got time for one of those questions which is one that's on the screen now which came through first. Do you facilitate classroom to online breakout discussions? So I take it that means having the classroom and the online participants in the same breakout room. We can do that. We just didn't really encourage staff to do that because a lot of them were already struggling with the technology so it was easier in terms of classroom management and managing the technology to keep that separate. But if staff did want to do that then yes, we would facilitate that for them. Perfect, thank you so much. I hope that answers your question. Perfect, thank you so much, Megan. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Let's show our appreciation.