 So everyone, thank you for joining us this afternoon. I am so sorry, we're a little bit late at the moment, but everyone is now here and we are ready to go with this next session. I'm really happy to be joined by Narun Nahar and Thomas Storey for joining us on the University of Bolton. And this session is gonna be a treat for anyone who is interested in co-creation and game-based learning because that's what this is about. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Narun and Thomas to talk about co-creating student engagement through EDL using a games-based learning approach. So please show your appreciation in the chat and add any questions that you may have for us to cover in the Q&A at the end. Thank you very much, Caroline. Hello, everyone. I hope you can see my slides there. Thank you very much for attending our session. So I'm Narun Nahar, an assistant professor with the University of Bolton and I'm joined by Thomas Storey, who is a research intern as well as an application developer. So we're going to talk about how we have worked on enhancing student engagement through co-creation and it was through EDL using a game-based learning approach. So our main intention was to provide an in-house learning platform with the intention to improve student engagement in the class as well as when we are delivering sessions online and also to see how students would benefit from it for their summative assessments and related coursework. So the primary objective of our project was to develop a web-based application to support students to reach their model-specific learning goals and track progress as well as to improve engagement at module level and to support them with knowledge retention, prepare them for their summative assessments because EDL uses pre-designed and planned formative assessment tasks in order to support which are aligned with summative assessments in order to support students prepare better for their summative coursework and it's also to ensure that they have got an overall positive learning experience in a blended learning context. We began this project last year in August 2021 and have only recently finished the first phase of the project and we are carrying on with the project in phase two but we'll be providing more information about this towards the end of the presentation. Tom? Yeah. So we're gonna introduce student engagement for starters. So Trowler here explains that time-effort resources invested by students and institutions intend to optimise experiences, enhance learning outcomes and performance including studies whereas the UKS are slightly different, I explained that they believe that time-effort invested in studies and engagement are heavily intertwined with academic achievement and that disengaged students have a disparity in performance. So if you adjoin both of those, you can see that positive engagement is likely to increase student success in academic achievement and we have some examples on the right from Trowler as well of positive and negative engagement. Next slide. Game-based learning, so it is a principle of extracting principles in actual game design and applying it to other mediums to engage people. The psychology involved allows students to engage with materials dynamically, more dynamically than standard classroom content and it's a big part to introduce activities incrementally as you would in a classroom. That same principle applies to online and gamifying learning and some aspects of game-based learning involve competition points, incentives and feedback loops. And our project is underpinned by the theory of game-based learning and the theory of connectivism which is explained by Arith there as nodes and connections to define learning through gamification. Next slide, please. So we have used staff-student partnership as an approach in this co-creation process and recently, Rachel is increasingly showing that staff-student partnership has got multiple benefits for students as well as for staff. It is used as a process rather than a measure to achieve predetermined outcomes and it can also be used as an enabler of student engagement. Some of the benefits of staff-student partnership include developmental benefits for both staff and students and it can lead to potential for enhanced skills to improve motivation, to support creativity and staff-student communication improvements as well as to develop self-efficacy. So in this project, we have implemented staff-student partnership in the design process of ADAL using Healey's four stages of engaging students in partnership framework which uses consultation, involvement, participation and engagement as a process to initiate staff-student partnership co-creation in any form of engagement. So the methodology that we have applied is a qualitative approach and we have used student focus groups to understand what the impact was of ADAL on students engagement as well as overall learning experience. We have conducted the focus group with some trainee teachers at postgraduate level and with some business management students who were studying at their final, who were studying at HE6 level a final year of their business degree. And we obtained ethical approval for the, before the data collection and for the purpose of participation, we did make sure that the participation was voluntary. The purpose of selecting student focus groups as well as a qualitative approach is to see if we could get in-depth overview of the student's overall learning experience using ADAL and how or if there is any opportunities for us to work on further improvement so that the user experience with ADAL can be improved or we could look into whether the games that we have designed within ADAL were actually benefiting students to retain learning as well as to understand various concepts within curriculum delivery. Some of the limitations we have had in this project is that it was over a strict deadline because it was funded. And so we needed to make sure that we stick to the deadline for designing or for developing ADAL as well as for piloting it. And we had limited respondents compared to what we anticipated when we invite the students to participate in the focus group. And the other limitation was the budget. So because we had limited budget so we could not invest in some of the additional features that we wanted to include within ADAL. However, we have received further funding now in order to work on these developments and features that Tom will talk to you about towards the end of the presentation. Over to you, Tom. Yeah, so, sorry, one sec. So we've used a paradigm for the programming and design aspects called agile programming. It focuses on revisioning software. Over time, I'm sure a lot of you are aware of it. It's also, as it's described there, creating a system that undergoes substantial change to follow requirements. And we have applied this in the form of feedback-driven development. So we change the system as the feedback from the users comes through over time. And we do this to ensure features and content and updates stay relevant to what students and tutors included perceive as useful within studying and how they use the platform. And next slide. So the functional design. Here we have an example of one of the designs of functional aspects of the platform acts. So this is the quiz, for example. How the staff student partnership applied in this was Noren discussed the desire for having a quiz. I laid out the logical requirements for it to work programmatically. And then I then developed the software based on this diagram and went and got feedback from Noren based on this design. As it says there, this was made with universal modeling language, which is pretty industry standard. And then it was used to create pseudo code and from pseudo code it was then turned into actual programming and what worked and what didn't work well. It's hard to sometimes get all of the requirements down on the design and some new stuff pops up as you're actually programming it. So that did needed to be accounted for. And what could have been improved to future foresight, I guess. And maybe a bit more time, as Noren said, we will restrict on time requirements. Next slide, please. So the UI and UX. Again, the staff student partnership aspects incorporated in Noren given me some requirements and me trying to find a seamless and functional user interface and user experience design which would be clear for users and not frustrating to use. Here on the left, you can see here's an example of the design process. So it was made a very base design at first, just a drone in paint because it was quicker doing it that way. And then the next iteration of the design it is all of the elements set up. However, the contents that are going to be in those elements are then a bit more refined but it's still done in paint. And then the next revision will hopefully have all of those aspects completed. So the aims, as I said earlier, the aims are to make it clear for users. That's the minimum standard. And then the next standard is accessibility which we are gonna tell you about later. And the challenges included in our, I'd say inexperience but I'm getting better at it as it goes along. And in reflection, this wasn't the original dashboard as shown, the other dashboard did work well. However, it wasn't very clear to new users. So that's something we're trying to improve on. Next slide please. Here is a video now demonstrating the version one of Edo and its features. However, we'll talk more about version two later. So I'll take you through the findings. When we have conducted the focus group with the students, mostly we have received very good positive feedback with regards to the engagement, with regards to the fun aspect of engaging with et al as well as the fact that it has helped them to understand concepts better. So a lot of students said that they have found the feedback feature quite useful because it helped them to understand where they have gone wrong, to reflect on their answers and also to find out where they can improve and how they can actually improve their understanding so that they can do better in their summative assessments. And it also helped them to brainstorm and concentrate. And some of them actually found it quite useful and efficient way to learn and remember concepts and with et al because they could play either individually or in a group while in a class. They were able to quickly learn financial terms and also the definition by using games such as math to definition. And the reason why we conducted the focus group was to find out what actually went well and what didn't. So amongst what didn't go well were some of the features within et al. So they thought that perhaps we could improve on the interface design as well as include more games. So they simply just didn't want to use the existing games over and over. They wanted to, they loved et al but at the same time they wanted to see if they could have more games and more activities designed as games in order to support game based learning within their curriculum. So the feedback has actually directed some changes and developments in et al. We immediately took the feedback on a positive note to work on our user interface design as well as to bring in some visual changes to the color and the display. And we have also been working on fixing some technical issues within the current version of the app. And Tom has been working on new games and additional game that we could include in version two of et al, which will be released later next year. And at the same time, we have also worked on some changes in the format of how feedback is provided in addition to giving opportunity to the students to see or for the tutors to see which activity went well with the students and which didn't. So they could actually after they have attempted an activity complete a small questionnaire in order for the tutors to understand if the activity they have attempted has supported them with their learning. And it also helped us to reflect on the whole co-creation process while we were working on designing et al and using it for improving student engagement. So it helped us to think about in what other ways perhaps we could improve our engagement in the co-creation process and how we could improve our communication and discussions while we are working on designing et al for enhancing student engagement and user experience. So Tom will talk to you about some of the prospects and upcoming features of et al in addition to updates with where we are with et al. Over to you Tom. Yeah, we've got lots of things coming over the next year. We are implementing modules. So modules weren't segmented in version one because it was a small pilot and didn't require it. However, it's gonna be a big change implementing that the way the app structures. But we're gonna try our best. There's going to be QR code integration for third party websites to link to any aspect of the application that isn't restricted. As you saw, there is the new dashboard and admin dashboard respectively for moderating content. We're implementing more badges and statistics as shown earlier on the user profile as well as graph integration for data modeling and a big point there is the overhauled feedback system. So we're giving students the opportunity to give different forms of feedback dynamically on whether it be anything specifically like the activity they've just completed or of the general feedback that the tutor wants from students. So I hope that goes well. And as for the updates, those were the key features, by the way. As for the updates, we are gonna have full ownership and hosting of content. So if people want to adopt the software, it's very easy to adopt and we're also overhauling the installation guide and deployment guide. So it's as easy as possible for people to adopt it, although some technical knowledge will still be required. And most importantly, it will be a open educational resource. So it's free for people to adopt in the future. And as you see there, the timeline is just under a year. So hopefully we get all of this done. Thank you very much. That was our presentation, Tom. Yeah, this is our LinkedIn profiles and our email addresses. If anybody wants to get in contact about this PowerPoint or potential adoption in future. Thank you. Thank you both very much for that. I'll leave your slides up on the screen for a moment so people can have a look at the references there. And we've got just about enough time to do a couple of questions. So I can see one that's come up in the chat from Lynn Danzig. Let me just pop that up on the screen for you. When you get beyond Sudo code, what are you programming in? So there is two languages that I am currently programming in. The first one on the back end is Java, which is using a Spring Boot as a server. And there's a lot of plugins in that also being used, but I won't go into that. And then on the front end, it is using React as a framework which uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript and then the React commands too. I hope that answers your question. Thank you, Thomas. That was a great answer there. The next one isn't a question, just a comment, which I think sums up how a lot of us are feeling about this great work, really encouraging that it will be an OER. That was really nice to hear. So I'll echo Vicki and our other watchers' comments to say thank you so much for sharing your work with us today, it's been really great to hear about it. And if anyone has any further questions or follow-ups, please do check out the Discord channel, the resources for this session will be shared there. So please enjoy the rest of your afternoon and thank you once again to Neroen and Thomas for that session. Thank you very much and thank you for the comments. Yeah, thank you as well. I hope you all have a nice day.