 Okay, thanks very much. So I'm here today to just have a brief talk with you about a project that myself and my colleagues in the digitally enabled education team at the University of South Wales worked on. The session is called virtually the same for everyone, and it's a project considering practices to support the decolonisation of the traditional virtual learning environment. I will say now we have not decolonised. This is really typically iceberg stuff so don't get your hopes up. Okay so session outline basically a bit of a definition about what decolonisation is and how it applies to digital education, showcasing what USW already does University of South Wales to support decolonisation and then present some of the findings and the outputs from the project that we've worked on. So really briefly just a little bit of scene setting. I really wanted to this project to kind of challenge some of the implicit Western frameworks that the kind of implicit as part of the modern VLEs. I've listed some things here you know VLEs definitely reflect implicit educational discourse, the icons the graphics the tools the applications that kind of sit within them, often draw from European or American cultural contexts. The VLE functions and activities are very often influenced by Western educational systems, and all of these elements kind of lead into that that idea that somebody's already talked about today of digital shock, the digital shock that are international students experience when they first open up the VLE. And if you want to know more a bit more about international students and kind of digital shock, do read the JISC international student digital experience report which about to write down because I couldn't remember it off my heart. If I find a copy there are apparently I've been told 26 members of JISC here today at this conference so you must, you're going to bump into somebody at some point today so do ask them about that report. But what is decolonisation with the simplest kind of idea I could I could get really was this first one here the process of undoing all the legacies of colonialism that currently kind of sit across, not not not just the VLE but in higher education and everything else. In terms of digital technology, and I've got quite a few long quotes here but I kind of put in bold the bits that are really important I wanted to pick out. Digital technology really is seen as re-arming forms of colonialism and what we wanted to do as part of this project is look at what we can do to start to disarm some of those elements. And this quote comes from somebody called Professor John Traxler who some of you may know. I've been assured that John is going to be online watching so John hi if you're there. John is the UNESCO chair, Professor John Traxler by full title he is a UNESCO chair. The reason John got involved in this project is because we had an initial just kind of off the cuff email really asked him a copy of a presentation he gave was available online. He said it wasn't. Then we had a bit of a chat. We talked about the project we were doing with our team and John said, can I be involved somehow is there something I can do to I'm really really interested. So we got John along to facilitate a discussion on decolonizing learning technology for our team. From that John was really keen for it to be involved going forward to have a chat with us to be kept abreast of what was happening with this project which he called, and I put it bold they're fabulously stimulating and relevant. Thanks for that John. And there's a quote from John here which I think it's really really important in terms of what we're trying to do with this project, you know, we never went into this thinking that we could decolonize hardware and software systems you know we're not that naive. But what we really could do and this comes from the conversation with John is to help make our students colleagues and technical staff, more critically aware about what it means to decolonize the virtual learning environment, and we could do this, excuse me, for example could be talking to UK tech companies that we're involved with as part of a part of our higher educational package and seeing what they're doing to support decolonizing VLE. I want to play this very quick video of john which unfortunately I've discovered doesn't work so has to bounce me out to YouTube to play it. So I'm just going to play it quickly. I'm John Traxler. I'm a professor of digital learning and the UNESCO chair in innovative informal digital learning in disadvantaged and context. In the last two years I've been engaged in a variety of activities and initiatives focused on decolonization in different parts of the education system. So, in very general terms, decolonization is asking ourselves about the ways in which our work, our institutions, our resources, our professions, our values and our thinking are representing and reproducing the dominant urban white European global culture. And in doing so, depriving our students of a wider richer educational experience and disempowering and discriminating against students from outside that mainstream. This work so far has embraced the curriculum, science, education, academic writing, research methods, but understandably most of it has been around digital technologies that people, not just students, people use for any kind of learning. And so I'm delighted to be working with Carl and the USW team, who I think to my knowledge are leading the way in exploring how to decolonize the VLE. I think this work is very important in allowing us to understand the techniques, the criteria, the barriers that might be explored and used across the sector. So I look forward to seeing this work progress and good luck to everyone. I'm sorry, I'm playing again very, very second. There you go. So, yes, there's really kind of words there from John. So kind of really got us enthused about the project, a little bit of information about what we're currently doing USW, we're doing some stuff but not enough I don't think at the moment we do have a community of expertise on decolonizing the curriculum. And we do use Blackboard Ally to try and help students to kind of engage more with their kind of with the technology and give them a bit more of a feeling of empowerment in terms of the technology that's available to them. But that's really again just kind of scratching the surface there's more that we could definitely be doing. So what was our plan, it's a bit small, but don't worry. These are some of the things that we decided we would plan there's lots and lots of things on here. I've highlighted a couple of really important ones I think. We wanted to consult with students to see what tools they're familiar with and what they'd like to see within the Blackboard VLE that we currently that we use. And we also wanted to speak to suppliers of teaching assessment tools regarding how they're addressing decolonization. So we did exactly that. So I approached a couple of tool providers we use Ponocto for our lecture capture and Ponocto said Ponocto aims to bring equity of access to learning for all we contacted Vvox who we use for our polling tools and using Vvox today. They said we've never intentionally thought about decolonization but we intend to actively think about it more going forward which is really positive. We then spoke to Turnitin who gave this really long response but I've just highlighted a couple of bits. They said it's probably important to think about whether there are default ideas and values that are rooted in colonization. And how do we empower the educator who can then apply the lens of decolonization to their decisions. And really that's that kind of spurred on our two part two prong response to this project which was to look at how we could better engage with students to make sure that the VLE worked for them. But also what could we provide to our academic staff to give them a sheet of quick tips and ideas that they could use to begin to just think about decolonizing their VLE pages. But we really wanted to make sure we incorporated the student voice in everything that we did and that was really, really key to us. A little bit of background and aims I've covered some of these already. There's very limited research out there on decolonizing the VLE anything you do find will lead back to John Fraxler trust me, if you look it will. We've met with John which was great, but we wanted to kind of make sure we move beyond this traditional Western European technology that we all probably use. But for me and for the rest of the team is really, really important that this phrase nothing about us without us was kind of implicit across everything that we did we wouldn't want to run any sessions we didn't want to have any discussions. Unless the users we were talking about were in the room with us. So every time we had these discussions we ran these sessions we wanted to make sure that our international student body representation were there. Our home student DME representation were there. We wanted to make sure that we had the people in the room that we were trying to support. And we wanted to create resources that would help our staff and students understand what decolonizing technology actually was. So we created some co creation workshops, these were ethically approved 60 minute events, collaborative activities were set to kind of guide the discussions that took place. We had two groups student and a staff group, but they both addressed similar themes. Now, I want to play this video, but I've just realized playing the last one that although the video the audio played the video didn't actually play. So I'm not sure if anybody's, oh fair with this we can know how I can play the video because it's kind of there's no audio on it it's just a video. It didn't actually play so I'm just going to. Oh, that's fine. That's exactly what I wanted to do. There we go. I'll play it for you. There's activities really important because every student has different set of priorities they want to show up and show. And also with the blackboard, it's, it should be more personalizable rather than being as it is. And they were quite, they wanted our creative takes on how blackboard should be formed it was quite fun. Blackboard is it always a lot of potential, and I really liked using it it's just as everything it does have room for improvement. And so we have some of the students that we that we worked with, and we worked really closely with them to make sure as I say that their input was was key to everything that we did as part of this as part of this project. You can see here, some of the sort of word clouds that we created just in terms of what students and staff expect to see on the homepage. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly it's eventually look at it. They're very, very similar. There's lots of words there that you can see across both the kind of modules assessment links key things that we expect to see there but yeah lots of parity between what staff and students want to see across our virtual learning environment pages. So what changes that we made based upon the workshops we've done the conversations that we've had well we've got a new homepage with representation representation across our student body and what that means is, we've not tried to use stock photos we've tried to use photos of our student body wherever possible, but we know there's a tension here in regards to screen scraping it's just not good enough to just go, we'll put some pictures up of kind of multicultural students having a chat and whatever and that's fine. They're still concerned there and that's something we're still working towards. Fantastic. Thank you. We're using more inclusive language in our module templates where our module is much more mobile responsive. We're very heavily making use of the pronouns and pronunciation features that are built into the VLE. And we're doing a greater promotional push of Blackboard Ally so these are changes that we've made to the VLE itself and these are just early stage changes this project is going to continue. We've also created a decolonising the digital learning environment tips for inclusive education document for our staff. This QR code is on the last slide as well so don't worry if you don't manage to get it now I'll put it on at the end. But this was presented at our USW learning and teaching conference for the first time about a month ago so our staff are now aware of this and we've already had staff approaches asking to be involved with the project going forward. So some reflections and if you didn't get that don't worry as I said it'll be on the end so so where do we go next where we're conscious we're only scratching the surface is a long way to go. And there's no quick fix to this we know that there's no quick fix it's something that we need to embed in our working practices all the time going forward. We're working with staff and students to support them on the journey decolonising their own VLE areas. And we've got ongoing scholarships such as coming here today to be invited to present at the conference. And we've already got evidence of this inclusive education flyer being utilized at other institutions it is created commons license so you can take it with you and do we want to make sure people do something with it. So we've already had conversations conversations with colleagues and other Welsh institutions have already picked up and are working with it. So that's a really quick update just a few references there and I just want to finish really say thank you very much there's a QR code again I'll leave it on the screen if you want to scan that and go and have a look at the document. I've also got some hard copies flyers here if you want to pick one up and take one away with you. But thank you very much. Thank you. Hey, thank you, Carl, and to Celia as well for these two sessions. Any quick questions before the drinks reception which is starting at 15 past. Yes, Dustin. I work at Glasgow University I'm a co lead of the decolonize and the curriculum community practice there. Can I suggest that you look beyond John Draxler. He's a newcomer to this field. He, you're actually engaging in a form of neocolonialism by giving him a voice. There are others who've done work on this. Maxine Adam is one example and there are tons more. He may be UNESCO chair but he got that. Why, because he's an old white guy. Are those are those specifically rated to decolonizing the virtual environments specifically and even looking for this gap of the VLE like you need to look beyond just the tool. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's education, it's knowledge production so on and so forth. And I studied this as well. So I'm not talking out my behind. But there are others that you can look up. We have a reading list. I can send it to you. Yeah, great. But Taskine Adam is one who's done a lot, especially in the context of MOOCs, but it would still apply to this. He's a newcomer. He's taking others' knowledges and reporting on it. So I think you need to go back to the roots. Yeah, no, and I appreciate that. Absolutely. I mean, we're new to this. This is an entirely new area for us to be looking into. No, no, no, absolutely not. And it's appreciated if there is anything that you can send to me. You can see my email on the screen. It'd be very much appreciated. So yeah, absolutely. That'd be fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Justin. And good point there. There's lots of educational developers in this space like Mahab Bali at Cairo University, for example, is another person is doing that kind of work as well. Any other questions from people obviously do contact Carl or Celia if you've got any questions afterwards grab them at the drinks reception.