 Hello and welcome everybody to this last parallel session of the conference. I would love to introduce you to Tariq Zubir and Gabby Bishop, who come from Imperial College Business School. And they will be presenting their session this afternoon on distance makes the heart grow fonder. I don't want to take up any of your time, so speakers, it's over to you. Thank you so much for the introduction, Claire. So as you can see, we're going to be looking at distance makes the heart grow fonder. Now, since the pandemic, we have seen a focus on online education. Overnight teachers from varying backgrounds had to gain skills on how to translate their in-person teaching online. In the midst of the scurry to become prepared, I saw teachers attain free online training last year that could help accelerate their capabilities in the online classroom. And this got us thinking, does distance make the heart grow fonder? From a teaching, delivery and student perspective. So we're going to look at two examples in this session that were developed during the pandemic. And hopefully this will shed a bit of light on this subject. So as the ATAC Lab at Imperial College Business School, we're one of the largest departmental ATAC teams in Europe. And we consist of specialists in online learning design. So Gabby and myself are both senior online learning designers. We've got research functions, software development, film production and program administration. So all of these roles are really key to delivering around about 180 online modules per year. This includes our global online MBA, our executive MBA, business analytics and strategic marketing programs. We deliver these using the Incendi platform, which was developed at the ATAC Lab and acquired by a study group. It's also used by many other like-minded business schools internationally who we collaborate with. So in the endeavor to find out more about this fondness, we began to look at a number of different things. Firstly, we looked at how can we convince traditional teachers that online learning is effective? Then we looked at how can we try not to simply put on campus online and then risk Zoom fatigue? Thirdly, we looked at will our on-campus students feel that they are engaged and how can we ensure that they'll get that social learning element that they would normally get in person? And finally, we looked at what is the role of faculty and what is the role of the instructional designer, especially in transforming on-campus modules online. It's very important to note that this on-campus remote learning was the starting point that inspired this discussion on fondness, but our job is very much focused on online learning. So this discussion will be looking at what we learned from the pandemic and how we can transfer this into online modules as well. But before we get moving with this presentation, we've got to look at a few terms that we'll be speaking about. Okay, so in our view and kind of as the QAA highlighted in their report, terms really do have a role to play. So we feel that fondness is impacted by the very perceptions of what it means to learn digitally, especially given the constant technological evolution and the terms used to describe digital practices versus actual experience. So I know pre-pandemic blended learning has been used for a long time, but in many institutions that's meant having slides online. And that just doesn't sit anymore. So in this presentation, we're going to focus our discussion on campus remote or hybrid if you like and distance education, which is completely online. So the hybrid, I'm using a definition from Sue Beckingham. We recently shared a very handy infographic via Twitter and the definition Sue offered for hybrid was students have some learning online and also attend in-person synchronous classes, online learning maybe synchronous or asynchronous and it can be called remote learning or extended campus. And that's sort of what we found with the on-campus experience moving online. At the business school, I have to say we are set up for high flex, so in-person and online groups learning together because we've invested in multimodal classrooms. So we have students dialing in into lecture theaters and students present in the room at the same time. This was certainly the experience earlier this week in our induction. The other thing we're focusing on is distance learning in this presentation. So again from Sue, student learning is physically removed from campus, usually online but can include physical resources. Learning can be synchronous or asynchronous. I want to add two points of reflection that will surface in our discussion today. The first one is on screen there, social or physical distancing. We're not talking about the pandemic, we're talking about learning. So it's not social distancing, it's physical distancing. And also do students and faculty distinguish between all the variations and modes of online learning? So do they see a difference and how does that impact their fondness of online learning? So historically we've used the OSCA framework to aid in the transformation of face-to-face modules, so moving face-to-face modules online. So the organized phase involves creating a module outline that speaks to the programme specification. The structure is a session by session focus, so our modules that we look at today have 10 sessions. Compose is when we storyboard and assign tasks to the faculty. Audit is when as learning designers we kind of really review the blend of activities, the workload balance and the timings. And review and renew is when the final checks are signed off. So some of those final checks would be internally from our senior management team but also we have student testing. So all our courses before, all our online courses at least, not the pandemic ones that were converted at a rapid pace. They have student testing before going live and we'll talk to that. One of the things we noticed about trying to implement this framework as part of a pandemic response was it was difficult to follow this kind of rigorously because there's less commitment to online learning and different conceptions of what that is. So for example just delivering a class online. And so it resulted in perhaps less desirable outcomes but actually very realistic outcomes which were that lectures were moved online. So coming back to student fondness, let's just take a look at the on-campus learner journey experience. Now I can imagine a lot of you have been to an office before or maybe you studied on campus and there is a level of enjoyment in meeting new people and having in-person discussions that are informal. So those are the kind of fondness that we look at from a faculty and delivery and student perspective. So there's synchronous learning, as you can see there's a lecture every week and this kind of illustrates almost like a 13-week on-campus experience. There's social learning. So those informal in-person discussions after a lecture or in between a lecture or even with faculty and then all of this is supported by theory. So you can see there's a lot of interaction and engagement and this is obviously what students are fond of. Now keeping this graphic in mind, let's just look at what would happen if we went to a remote learner journey purely taking what's on campus and putting it online. Now you can instantly see that there is no informal discussion. That social learning has really been stripped away and the lectures are now just Zoom lectures, which obviously we know a lot of people suffered from Zoom fatigue. Now The Financial Times released an article quite recently speaking directly to students' experience of this and it said a lot of participants say that when you do online education, the tuition fee should be lower because of the problems with social bonding and network. It simply disappears if it isn't done correctly. Now thinking about this, in terms of learning design, what did you struggle with when pivoting to an online teaching? Now Tarek's going to pop a mentee link in if you can't use this QR code, otherwise you can use the scan this QR code and we'll just look for some of your answers, unless everyone is too shy to share. So if you are too shy we can come to this at the end, but really we wanted to just understand from your perspective. I think so it's an example would be for us that that social element was really difficult to recreate and we were wondering if there were any aspects within that. So for example informal discussions, pastoral support, maybe we'll come back to the end and just really talk. Okay so moving on, we're going to start to look at two case studies and these case studies are from our MSc Strategic Marketing Online Module which is a part-time module. Okay so what we're hoping these case studies will do is kind of push back on that these online courses don't have social bonding or networking and their second rate and they should be kind of lower tuition fees. So hopefully the examples we show you will speak against that. You can see our MSc Strategic Marketing Online Program there and a bit of information about our student body, a really varied student body with mixed prior experience. And as designers this means keeping an eye and making sure that there's a range of content and exercises to meet all these different learner needs. So an example being supplementary readings from different industries. Also something to point out our online courses have primers, non-credit primers that students can take. So for example a primer in accounting, data analysis, marketing fundamentals and these are also online and act as a way of inducting them into the online space. So we'll just go straight into the examples now I think. So Tarik's going to first address crisis management. Okay so very briefly I want to speak to three challenges. So the first one is related to conceptions of online learning. So the module leader I was working on had that live class delivery experience what was completely new to distance education outside of his comfort zone up to a point and he was also based in the States. So the entire time we worked together we developed a design and developed a modular distance and you can see him there in a video that he recorded in his house in Washington. One of the enablers for kind of overcoming this challenge were weekly meetings. So right at the beginning we shared weekly meetings. We shared examples of existing outlines and courses that the module leader could look through in their own time. We were also realistic with what we expected. So early on it was a blank piece of paper put your ideas down before steering those ideas and constructing them more and more with our in-house templates and then talking around that new structure. The second is to do with project management management and program oversight. So before I actually show you the module I'm just going to talk to these three points and then I will show you the module. The second is to do with project management and oversight. So we meet weekly as an internal team. We design these modules while the program is live so it's really important that we meet weekly and make sure that we're designing in a similar way and we're meeting program level objectives. We don't lose sight of that. So we have internal meetings as well as faculty meetings. And the third one is to do with remote teaching communication during delivery and we use a dedicated project management software called ASANA. We assign tasks, we receive weekly tutor reports which really make sure the experience is smooth for students and we pick up on those reports and intervene when needed. So if I now just share my screen I'll show you the course. So our courses are made up of 10 sessions in this instance part time 10 weeks. Within each of these are a number of activity pages and within the activity pages are a number of exercise pages, right? I know that was very fast but I'm going to show you some specific examples just now. So the first example I want to show you is how we built in really early that social experience. So early on in the course the module leader takes some time to introduce themselves and who they are which you might expect in face-to-face course as well. And the students also geotag where they are in the world and a little bit about themselves and really in a risk-free way share something about themselves and encourage others to share. So that's just kind of a soft introduction. Then if I go from the beginning to the end if you like we look at the assessment. As part of our assessment approach we've got participation grades. So in this particular module we designed it so that week on week students would have to complete a participation exercise. And some of these exercises are actually interlinked as part of kind of our scaffolding. So you can see that one is in 1.4 is individual then it's a paired exercise that builds on that individual exercise and then it's a group exercise. Very quickly I'll show you the paired exercise in 3.8. The students get a bit of content from the module leader. There's a guest speaker from the public health industry and then the students get to practice on camera reading their media statement. So that's kind of the active learning and social learning that components built in. One very last example from me before handing back to Gabby is we have guest speakers embedded throughout the module and you'll see here at the end of the course we collated that. So the kind of the teaching presence if you like is really extended by bringing in a range of experts into the course. And we'd argue students to get a heck of a lot of value in these courses. I'm just going to hand back to Gabby. Right so the next case study we're going to look at is emerging technologies. Now I'm going to look at three things. So what made the faculty fund of this? What made the students fund and what made the delivery fund? All the people enjoy the delivery. So just for a bit of context my module was an on campus module that we put online and so originally students were really really fascinated by the tools that they were being exposed to and they really enjoyed that and we wanted to pull that through into the online module as well without just trying to mirror the on campus to online. And so some of the things was making sure that our faculty were supported that my module leader felt that there was rapport between us and that she could feel comfortable and obviously she was really incredibly busy so one of the things was we had to prioritize project management. So making sure that at the beginning of the week there was an email that was sent out that she could understand exactly what she needed to reach at the end of the week and that was one of the things that she really enjoyed and then another thing was obviously I don't know if the video played now but if she was felt that she didn't feel comfortable in a recording studio so she wanted to be in the classroom and so we filmed her in the classroom and and that really encouraged her to to really teach incredibly well and she loved the experience and that created fondness. And the second fondness is our student fondness they really wanted to be exposed to a number of engaging tools they wanted to be able to apply what they learned in those tools to exercises and they wanted to reflect on what they learned in real-world examples. And finally a delivery fondness so we made sure that the tutor was available for open office hours so students could pop into zoom and ask questions and engage with some of the things that they were kind of finding tricky so they felt supported and our module leader then would would post some videos just also giving a bit more guidance. So I'm going to just pop on to the hub now to show you so the one thing was tools so Google Universal Analytics is one that I'm showing you and we broke it down into chunks because it's just easier to understand but also to follow you don't want a very long video and students really enjoyed engaging in this so we first showed them the structure then the insights and then the reports and once they had gone through these videos they basically were able to create a product and we gave them a scenario real-world scenario to make it an authentic experience and they were able then to upload and share their their product that they created and see how other students compared to what they created so that was one instance another was the reflecting so we created a journal activity at the end of every week where we'd give them a real-world scenario so something that would happen happen in the marketing environment and they could then apply what they learned so obviously Google Analytics to the scenario and then they could type in how they would respond and that would then collect and end up at the end. Finally other things that we did is we always wanted to make sure that they had industry application examples so we provided a multitude of different industries and how emerging technologies were being used. We also gave them opportunities to create chat bots in live classes and that was one way that they they could really see how it was relevant to their immediate surroundings or immediate roles rather. So now looking at that I just wanted to show you a graphic representation of how a typical online experience would look and you can see that there is a mixture of asynchronous synchronous and synchronous work which encourage social learning as well as flexibility and this is what we want to kind of tap into. So keeping all these graphics in mind we're going to just first touch on lessons that we learned and then finally what do we think that learners really want. So Tarek will be speaking about what faculty found and what they learned and I will be speaking about what students learned out of this experience. Okay so in feedback from the module leader it was about workload and setting expectations really early on so because he was completely new to online learning and there was some distance to travel between face-to-face experience to this he felt that could have been this expectation could have been better set earlier on. Also I was a bit surprised to learn that in a feedback discussion the module leader described the experience as sometimes slightly anonymized now this didn't come across in the student feedback because they were always thanking him by name and he was present in the narrative text and in all the videos but essentially the module leader wanted more live interaction with the students we have three live classes and he really he said he would benefit more from increased live interaction. From the tutor's perspective more weekly participation deadlines we had those for the first half of the course and then we left it pretty open in the second half but there was encouragement to do it throughout the entire course weekly participation and that's I think that's all I've got to say on that Gabby. Yeah and then from the student's perspective they really enjoyed I think they had a love hate relationship with group work but they said that it did mirror what would happen in a real world scenario so being able to collaborate with others effectively so they enjoyed that they wished that they'd had more live classes instead of live tutorials because then they could have more contact time with their module leaders time was always of the essence they are very busy people and so just being able to manage their time a bit better would be more helpful and then finally having really good up-to-date scenarios and case studies they really wanted that and I think Tariq and my module did tap into that quite well because both our module leaders are very much keeping up with the latest case studies in the industry. So taking those learnings into consideration I'm going to just show you the final illustration of this is typically what students would and faculty would be fond of. Now first look it's very overpowering we can see that this could create a lot of issues especially because with all these synchronous things like student online socials and tutorials and live classes and things like that that would mean that would lose a lot of flexibility but we also think that small group discussions and more touch points like that would help students feel encouraged and engaged like they would on campus. So there's a lot to say about this and there's a lot to give and take but it is something that that we found at the end. So finally we want to pose a question to you what would you focus on to increase fondness and once again Tariq is going to pop the link in the chat and you can use a QR code and this is just really for us to kind of understand a bit more about what you're thinking about and and what we've spoken about today. So do feel free to add things after the session and I'm not sure how time's going but we can also move to questions. Hi Tariq and Gabby that was really really interesting thank you so much for sharing that with us. As you can see there's a question on the screen now from Sarah who obviously knows you Tariq and she asks how big the team is that work on this and other courses and if you could talk a bit about the structure. So our actual etec lab team we're about 20 people right but when we work on on the two modules that Gabby and I have shown it's essentially one senior online learning designer an assistant learning designer and an attached media person. Obviously there's all the wrap around in terms of program admin and other things you expect in new university settings but the core of the kind of session design and development happens through a senior designer with the faculty member and assistant and somebody in media. So I'd say there's about you know four or five people in the core team but the wraparound services are obviously essential. The structure I'm not sure I quite understand in terms of if that's about the team or the modules themselves. Well Sarah also asks if your model was scalable Gabby what do you reckon? I would say it is scalable I've been working with a number of teams that try and scale how we work on products and I do think that it depends on the faculty as well and if the content so for example Tarek's module was only 40 how many hours was the Tarek that had and so new content had to be developed so that would obviously take longer and that's how I'd answer it. Yeah I would say they are scalable and we use we have processes in place that mean they can be replicated you need the staff I don't think obviously there's only so much you can do so we tend to work on one one development at a time as a senior designer as well as looking after a number of modules that have been carried forward but I would say it's scalable with the project management software in place and the processes, weekly meetings that we have to track progress and things like that. Okay great thank you unfortunately we're running out of time now and so I would just like to say thank you so much for this really interesting and informative session that you've given us and really really appreciate you sharing your time and expertise with us especially as you have got the last slot of the conference so I'm sure that wasn't easy waiting for three days. If anybody has any further comments or questions please add them in the chat of the YouTube link and I believe now it's time for the conference close and for us to say goodbye so thank you Tarik and Gabby very much for your time. Thank you.