 Thank you. Hi everyone, good afternoon and welcome to this session. My name is Matt Lingard and I'm chairing today and I'm joined by Nathan and Richard who are the presenters for this session, so just check you're in the right place before we get started. This is building a community through Slack. And the format of the session, if you've not been to one so far, is it's 25 minutes in length. So about 20 minutes for Nathan and Richard to present and then we'll take save a few minutes, hopefully five minutes for questions at the end. So please use the comments in the chat on the right of your screen to post any questions you've got. If you'd line them up, I'll keep an eye out for them but also feel free to use the chat for comments and just to say hello to each other and so on. But I won't waste any more of Richard and Nathan's time and I will step back and hand over to them. Thank you very much Matt and welcome everyone to this session where Nathan and I are going to share some of the progress that we've been making at the University of York in developing a community space for our students, if we can move on to the next slide. Pre-COVID really, we have done quite a lot of scoping work at the university with our student associations thinking about a revitalised digital strategy for the university and one of the key learning points in collaborating with our student associations was the importance of community building as a focus for knowledge sharing and collaboration in learning activities. So that was pretty clear to us pre-COVID and it also was a finding that's been shared in other work, particularly Edinburgh University with their re-envisioning of digital learning. So we've known about the importance of digital communities in supporting that knowledge sharing for a while now and it's also reinforced by the literature, Gerriton and Anderson and their views on social presence in online teaching are well established and well known and this was all pertinent to University of York when in 2018 we launched a new portfolio of fully online programs and those are run on a carousel delivery approach which means that students can jump on and off a carousel with six opportunities entry points during an academic year when they can do that and that presents challenges in terms of giving students a sense of programme and belonging, a cohort that they belong to as they are jumping on and off different module sites and can mix with a whole range of different students. And obviously as we know with the pandemic right across the sector, one of the big learning points from that was the isolation that some learners have felt working remotely, dialing in to sort of study online and that's been hugely disruptive to traditional patterns of education and that's something that we've reported on previously in our own reflections on the pandemic if we can move on. What do we know about the literature on digital communities? Well quite a lot, Leven Wenger is probably the most cited reference on communities of practice in terms of informing how we can learn together through common interests and DeVilda has also recently published on the scope for informal learning networks and Haytham Wade and Bane and Gallagher have also spoken about the potential for interdisciplinary learning and networking and this is something that's very much interested us at York as well in terms of looking at the synergies between different programmes, different departments and different modes of learning. We've had too much in the past of a siloed learning experience with fully online learners simply interacting with themselves and not with those that are campus based or engaging with other modes of learning practice so these are all sort of pertinent sort of steers to our thinking on digital community and also intuitively we know that through face to face that socialisation spaces such as sort of cafes or water cooler opportunities are really important in terms of giving students a sense of effective belonging and the motivational benefits which sort of are the glue which bring together a learning community. Next slide please, Nathan. So with all of that in mind what we've tried to do at York is address this issue of community for our fully online postgraduate learners and we've done that by using Slack. Now Slack is one of the new generation of team-based environments which draws on the strengths of social media with file sharing capabilities as well and it's a system that has already been rolled out successfully across the university for staff which we used extensively over the pandemic period for home working and cross team collaborations but we've also used it prior to the pandemic for teaching and I've reported on that at a previous outset in terms of how we use that for project-based learning for our students so there are precedents for that as well and the affordances of a team-based environment for community I think are quite compelling in terms of the scope to enable students to take control set up their own distinct sort of channels for their own purposes for those dynamics of collaboration dynamic sharing of information and that's enabled through push notifications and which provides opportunities for instant problem solving and sharing of information. There's also through the file sharing capabilities the scope for observational learning where you can search for and drop in on conversations from from other students and learn that way as well flexibly in your own time so there are a lot of strengths in terms of the environment which attracted us and we were led in using Slack by Arizona State University which we had a number of conversations with in terms of how they had used Slack as a community tool in rolling out their fully online programs so that was if you like a guide for the community building that we engaged in but just sort of finishing off here it's important to acknowledge that we're not advocating this presentation that Slack is the only means of doing this obviously MS Teams is far more established in the UK actually sector now and could do a similar job and we've learned only recently at the Kent conference last week I believe that Discord has been used as well as another type of platform to support this type of learning and as well as the more traditional really discussion boards which I think have limitations anyway I'll hand over now to Nathan to talk about the research we've done on our experience rolling out Slack to postgraduate fully online students. Okay thanks Richard and hi everyone so talking about the pilot what we actually did was give Slack to about 30 students in May these were management school students so the York management school have online programs as Richard said we have a carousel model which means eight week terms and six possible starts per year so the intake in May of this year was about 30 and they went into their own Slack channel in addition to the module they were all studying at the time so we did that to kind of do a kind of soft launch effectively just to kind of proof of concept about having students using Slack for this purpose at the end of that eight weeks we extended it out to all the management online students at that time which is about 400 so we up the numbers considerably and they had eight weeks using Slack in that way apart from the main channel we also made one channel per module with the idea they could kind of socialize would have informal learning on their specific modules as well as a program level in the main channel. In terms of implementation apart from the setup that I've just explained I mean it was quite light touch essentially we just emailed them to invite them to the to the workspace we did consult with student reps to sort of get some feedback on our process we offered usage guides for Slack as a tool we had kind of positive messaging around community building and there was some kind of rules of engagement in there as well although that wasn't kind of foregrounded so really you know there wasn't really any sort of hosting or facilitation it was literally kind of giving them the tool and seeing what would happen and we evaluated that by you know checking the usage data how often was it used and for what purposes and then we ran a questionnaire of which there were 16 responses in a focus group of four so quite you know small sample size so we have to be cautious about how we interpret the results however it was useful to get feedback on on their experience in terms of that usage I mean it was quite low to be honest there were 104 uses of Slack across that time period which is is rather low of which there were 27 threads so that shows you there were some actual conversations and interactions going on not just individual posts however there were only 25 distinct users which mean you know that that bears out the idea of quite low usage here only about 6% of what was possible as you'd expect the type of stuff going on there were questions back and forth about the actual learning the content the assessments and so on some general social interaction and at one point interestingly some students arranged to start a study group in WhatsApp so that happened within Slack in terms of the quantitative data from the questionnaire when we asked the students whether they thought the university should provide a digital community space 94% said yes 6% said not sure so yes a very small sample size but but this was encouraging in terms of the students that did respond saying that they did want such a community space in terms of whether they wanted it to be Slack 50% said yes go with Slack the other 50% either weren't sure or wanted different platforms so that's somewhat ambivalent you know there wasn't kind of overwhelming support for Slack however 50% said they did want to keep using it this is the first of three slides where I kind of draw out themes from both the questionnaire and the focus groups so in terms of whether they found it useful or not yes there were positive comments around being able to create connections across the program however comments around the fact that it would be useful but there wasn't enough activity and interaction going on there um this slide shows barriers to engagement that were highlighted so this is what students either said you know these were reasons why they themselves didn't engage very much or they thought the cohort wasn't engaged very much first of all a reluctance to use the new tool I mean that could be because of the need to manage new notifications an actual dislike of going out to different systems rather than having everything in one place and one student raised data protection concerns they weren't sure about whether Slack was safe in that way there was a general sense that some members of this cohort are quite goal orientated because they're pressed for time so their adult learners most of them are working and they have caring commitments as well so there was a sense that you know perhaps this cohort in particular a lot of them wouldn't use such a platform anyway also the ones that did want to use a community platform one of the possible limitations there was that there were already existing student creator channels on WhatsApp and Discord that are quite popular which you know may have reduced traffic in the pilot channel and lastly you know they said that because there wasn't any hosting or facilitation you know that could have led to the lack of engagement so this next slide these are ways that the students said um might increase engagement or foster a successful community first of all that active promotion and facilitation by the students or staff you know that was felt really to be needed a fuller introduction to Slack and the benefits of using it I mean clearly because it was a pilot we could only do that in a fairly light touch way whereas with a greater rollout there'd be opportunities to do it in a more thorough way integrating with other systems would obviously be ideal if things could be in one place integrating with campus communities I mean obviously there's the actual physical other students being around them but however in a department there's a community as well so kind of information about events and so on so it's not just the physical campus community it's what's going on within departments and you know perhaps the colleges and the other sort of informal networks around the university there was a suggestion that it should be implemented as part of a wider strategy and in fact we do have a wider strategy to try and increase the sense of community our university so it would fit with that there should be a kind of attention paid to the ongoing benefits such as alumni links professional networking and possibly incorporating alumni talks to kind of enhance the value of the space and there's the possibility that if wider university support services were run in Slack that would increase traffic on the platform now interestingly point six and seven we do no happen at Arizona State University for their on campus and online programs so those are two things that we're already thinking about so I'm going to hand back to Richard now for our sort of conclusion slide okay so what have we learned from this initial pilot well I think I think the first point is probably unsurprising but build it and they won't necessarily come what we've learned is that you can provide additional tools but unless there's a sort of a clear driver for students to engage then you can assume nothing and I'm sort of drawn to the work of Sanchez at how they in their review of academic use of Facebook where they've highlighted the importance of social influence and actually getting social influences to drive adoption of a particular tool in the case of Sanchez study it was it was Facebook groups and the use of for academic adoption but clearly this is all pointing us to the need for a wider engagement strategy to get students on board and to developers of a thriving community and the challenge here particularly for the use case that we have been describing here full-time well professional workers who are engaged in flexible learning and master's program they are sort of time poor and the capacity for peer interaction wouldn't necessarily be sort of extensive so and the added complication are these multiple sort of start so this lack of coherence with a cohort so these are all barriers which potentially could be obstacles to student engagement in a thriving community so what we need to think about moving forward and our plan is to roll out this slack environment to all our postgraduate taught students and this is work that's in progress now is to work in partnership with our student associations and actually get them to take an active role in the in the modeling and the socialization of students and that might be by putting on sort of initial activities which get people into the system and then they can start to see the potential for it to to to develop those the synergies across programs and I'm quite drawn by the the thinking of steam virgins and rajat kapal who talked about this sort of concept of a third space so the you've got the formal learning environment which is university controlled environment managed by staff you've got informal which are the the spaces off off-site which are controlled by students and then there's this third space where we're working with students empowering them to actually manage it and and and use that as a bridge for community building and that's how we see the future of slack moving forward so so that's our vision and over the next academic year we'll be rolling this out and and hopefully driving sort of greater adoption of this space for our fully online and our our traditional postgraduate students and what we hope to see is a synergy between these different communities as they they share practice and share common research interest and we've got a particular drive towards interdisciplinary collaborations and it'll be exciting to see how that plays out so that concludes the presentation I don't know if Nathan you want to just sort of click on and just show the the links to the references but we'll make this presentation available on slideshare for you and tweet back but Matt I don't know if there are any sort of questions we'd like to pick up yeah yeah thank you guys thanks very much and we'll make sure the slides are shared for sure so we've had a couple of questions come in although Perion wasn't sure whether hers was a question but it certainly turned into a question partway through her typing so and I'll let you guys read that and then you can come back okay we'll start from the bottom up slack and discourse type platforms can look very overwhelming at first probably needs care for introduction and community building so I think that's a very fair comment to start with and I think that sort of plays into the whole engagement strategy and modelling of behaviour there's also with any new platform I think a sense of exposure to start with and and fear which you have to sort of get over and that's by having social influences if you like who can sort of take the lead and and encourage students I think that's a way forward but but in terms of a training side of things through my own research with final year biology students that the focus groups that are around with them that the key message was how intuitive it was and how active they were with social media of different types anyway prior to engaging with slack so I think once you get over initial hurdle and can actually see the value of slack as a as a place for discourse and for community building then then things flow from there. Great thanks Richard I'll just take you back to a Perion's question oh no actually as Tim's has gone up first Perion's question which is on the screen now and in the comments it's about the fourth from end. Well Tim has asked what specific slack functions did students like dislike I don't know Nathan you'd like to respond to that? Yeah I mean obviously the ability to create their own channels you know that's been perceived to be a good thing however it just didn't really get going there wasn't momentum for people to be doing that and I do wonder when it becomes kind of student owned and it might feel like it's not just people from the centre of the university sort of pushing it out that they might they might start doing that I mean at the moment I just say the general functionality they're commenting is better than you know what they're saying in a VLE discussion board because clearly that if that was done you know you could just put it park it in a module and say this is your community space you would lose you know obviously some of the benefits of slack and similar tools. Perion's raised a question about the danger of a two-tier system some students communicate via traditional platforms only like VLE and some by slack. I think that's sort of the key driver here is that within the VLE and for these fully online students they were using by the way a canvas by the structure the scope for discussion is very much module based and that's a sort of a feature of the as I say this this carousel sort of approach there is in a natural program space for students to come together so where discussion is taking place within the formal learning environment canvas then it's very module content focused and I guess what we need to convey in a more compelling fashion is what slack is for which is opening up vistas for discussion and ideas sharing beyond the module and the immediate sort of priorities of assessments and the challenges of the module and actually sort of looking at you know maybe for the independent sort of studies side of things scope for shared research interests there maybe for more professional employability skills based sharing of practice that's what it's for and it's it's compelling that message and getting that across and I think which is going to be our challenge. All right thank you Richard. There's no more questions in the chat but I was just thinking about one myself actually just in terms of an apologies if I did miss it in the in the talk but are you using slack as with a contract with slack in any way or are students just using the being directed to the free version and signing up with their own accounts and it's the paid version they've been offered yeah and you know we have that for staff and we had spare licenses to try pilot with students but the roll out wider roll out students is the paid version as well and I mean I had one final thought that I might put out there if that's all right there's no more questions I mean from this conference I've other people have talked about community and what I've really picked up on is that okay if you're going to provide a community space you can just build it and see if they come and that's an option we're kind of cautioning against I think there are other things you can do I've seen people entwining it quite a lot with learning and actually almost making it inseparable from the learning and teaching that goes on and I think that's one approach to drive engagement I've also seen the the peer assisted mentoring or thing that that was presented earlier from Derby so doing some other kind of initiative and hooking that into a community space is another way and another way is just trying to kind of drive engagement through active student participation and student groups which is what we're trying and I think that's one of the takeaways I'd recommend people take from this that you probably do need to do something else rather than just build it and see if they come as Richard said but one final comment Tim has asked about the fact that students like back channels Facebook WhatsApp for discussion and I don't see a contradiction here what we did see during our trial was some students using Slack initially to meet form groups and then jump off to go to WhatsApp groups for for private sort of or more niche discussions and that's fine and that that shows the overlap if you like the porous boundaries between if you like a second space a private space and a third space this bridging concept that we're talking about so they can be complementary yeah I don't see that as a problem I think that's just where they wanted to talk at that time hypothetically if they've been a fuller introduction and they'd know they could have made their own channel which they may not have even known maybe they'd have done in Slack however that's just what they wanted to do and in a way the Slack channel might have facilitated that so I actually think that's kind of a benefit yeah yeah and I absolutely agree with that and everybody will be different as well in terms of different individual students and groups of students in how they adapt and manage the combination of these tools so thank you very much gents I think we're coming to where at the end of our time actually so that's bang on so it just remains for me to thank you both both for speaking today and for the time we know that goes into preparing these things and indeed submitting to come to the conference in the first place thank you very much much appreciated thanks for your time and thanks to everybody who took the time to come and engage with the session today good afternoon thank you very much