 Hi, welcome back. I'm very pleased to be joined today by Ian Nicol and my name is Emma Proctorleg. I'm going to be chairing today's session. Let me formally introduce the session title for you. So it's equid education in the time of COVID-19 implementation of digital learning environment. I'm going to hand over to Ian to take it from here. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us for this this talk. I'm Ian Nicol. I'm the learning designer at the Donkey Sanctuary and we're going to talk about how Donkey Sanctuary implemented the digital learning environment, the new digital learning environment during COVID. So things are going to run through with you today is a little bit about Donkey Sanctuary, some information about the project team, how that was set up, the outline plan, what the journey actually was, some of the challenges and some recommendations at the end. Donkey Sanctuary is a UK charity but it has a global reach. It has a lot of skills, experience and expertise and there's a lot of research and a key thing to think about in the difference and what makes it different is it does have education at the heart of what it does but it's not like a further education or higher education institution. So this was a totally new thing for it. It didn't have any established learning environment principles or processes and it was recognised that there was a level of expertise within that area that it needed. I think probably what I'm going to say is not necessarily going to be new to some people, it's meant to be helpful for small organisations who have seen as many have the benefits of online learning which we've seen during COVID and it's something new and something that they might be implementing and some guidance about what the key thing was that sort of tripped us up because of COVID. Historically there has been training done by the donkeys actually but most of it has been face to face so hands on with the donkeys and the idea of the learning environment was to improve and enhance the reach of the flexibility and the quality of the teaching so that you can increase the drawing portfolio and promote the health and well-being of donkeys worldwide. So just some examples here the picture on the left that's a donkey with their owner in a brick kiln in Nepal. The centre image is a donkey with their owner in Africa and on the right that's a donkey in one of our UK sanctuaries getting some dental treatment from one of our UK based staff. To give the idea of the breadth of knowledge and skills experience the categories that we're looking at in terms of the courses we've been together together are behaviour, biosecurity, care and welfare, clinical, donkey assisted therapy, dentistry, ferrary, harmless health and welfare assessment tools, nutrition, safeguarding and working equid and a lot of that is driven from the research that we do as well and a very important question I'm going to come to next so that question is whose turn is it with the welly the wellington boot it's something for enriching the experience of donkeys in the sanctuary it's something that they play with so the way that the teams were set up to run this project from nothing to a learning environment was there was a leader team which had senior management overseeing and living after the general management of it an academic lead and subject matter expert lead so the head of the vet team and that type of thing there was a wider project team which had the organizational expertise such as IT communications customer relationship management so not directly involved with with the learning environment but crucial to that being integrated that team included the learning designer which is myself so a lot of this is from a from my perspective and the other thing is subject experts these the people on the ground that are knowledgeable and that work with donkeys again such as the vet team or the dentists so the plan outline was fairly straightforward the project started in May 2019 with a consultation and then that's choosing the VLE then the idea was it would be set up so provided we set it up get the learning designer in post create the courses subject matter experts and then launch it's a great plan the tender and procurement was mid to end of 2019 and the VLE was then bought and it was going to be being set up and it was recognized that the organization needed the skill set and expertise of learning designer type role and later on it was recognized that COVID was quite a big risk to the project because it overlapped so best laid plans how that ended up was that most of the leadership team were pulled into crisis management at the donkey sanctuary and the related sanctuaries because there were a lot of donkeys they still need care they can't just be put on hold so it needed to be that will need to be worked out how that was going to work with safety for the staff move same as everybody else moving people to working from home so that pulled a lot of them away from it it also affected the time and availability of some of the subject matter experts especially donkey facing such as the the vet team the project continued but it was a slower pace so dearly was chosen it was set up but the learning designer wasn't in post at that point so it looked more like this the education lead was guiding on pedagogy and in basic introduction to the learning environment and that was continued on and people were then working on courses and I joined in January 2021 so it was a small team at that point and what that meant was that the subject matter experts they are very skilled in what they do and the ones who have done training before it was face-to-face training but they also needed some additional training on how to translate that face-to-face training into online learning or blended learning and that bit was missing because of the delay in moving in post because of covid so there are the sort of issues that we've come up against so I'd like to reassure you though that if there's a problem there were always be somebody around who can look at a problem for a different angle and try some solutions that might make things better an excellent solution I think so what I'm focusing on here is I'm learning designer but it's this type of role so learning technologists education technologists education advisor all have the same sort of skill set so that's the sort of things that I'm focusing on and these are the things that we had to sort of put in retrospectively some of them so they fall into a couple of categories with quite a lot of overlap in the middle there were technically technical issues so people have been introduced to the learning environment they were allowed to practice make some courses work with it see what they could do but there was no overall look and feel and it was felt that we needed that for the benefit of the students so they could see it was donkey sanctuary course and you wouldn't be looking at different things every time you went in and not understanding how things worked liaison with the learning environment supplier on a more detailed level of what things are possible what weren't possible um testing when new things were bought in by the the supplier troubleshooting is it a problem with the learning environment is it a problem with someone's equipment is it a problem with the network people especially when they're new to things they don't know if it's what it looks like is is that something that's a problem or is it my computer so that was a key point I'm looking at customization implementation the knowledge to understand there are the tools out there that we can use so we have now integrated in h5p to give a more engaging experience and that was something that was brought to the table when I joined because I knew I was aware of it and I could see how it would benefit the learning and things like creating reusable objects maybe a little something html css that the subject matter experts can just copy and paste them and use but also the pedagogical side so I've done quite a lot of training in groups and one to one there's general learning environment training a lot of people now have had experience as students in learning environment but actually creating courses is is quite different and then they haven't got that experience even things like using the what you see is what you get editor and then pressing the button that turns it over to the html view and people like what is this I don't know what this is I don't like it and things like course design so we have these skilled people who've done training face-to-face they know their subject matter in detail but we're talking about the translation of a face-to-face to something that's blended or fully online so then there's all the course design principles thinking about how it's going to put together what the learning outcomes are how you're going to reach those how you're going to make sure those are met similarly with things like quiz design and I've seen this in in many places when you first give someone a quiz they have got some great ideas for questions and perhaps you'll get a multiple choice quiz where you've got four answers three answers with a few words long and then there'll be one answer that's very long and I'll say to people well I don't know anything about that and I don't know what the answer is I don't know I'm not a donkey tooth expert but I'll pick the long one because that's where all the detail is so it's just things like that to help get people to understand what good design looks like for quizzes and for courses there's an overlap I think this is probably where the more interesting things are so if you're training people face to face with donkeys understanding the accessibility issues inclusivity isn't necessarily something that you've come across before because you haven't had to do it you're not a teacher in a university and so for example a common thing that I've seen everywhere and I see it I still see it in presentations everywhere is people use red text to emphasize something if you have imperfect color vision like I do if you put something in red I won't notice that you're trying to make it stand out simple answer make it bold as well but until someone tells you that it isn't necessarily obvious if you haven't got that background similarly inclusivity and the digital and physical so that is some of the themes of the conference really and because we are looking to expand the use of learning environment into other areas so for example you might have somebody in a brick kiln who owns a donkey they've got a harness on it and it doesn't fit particularly well they don't understand how the harness doesn't fit well why because that's not the skills that they've got it might be um injuring the donkey so the donkey will not work as well it might be sort of um in pain so it'll it might be sort of dangerous in that sense it some might get ill they might not have the money or access to vets um it might not live so long so how do you get that those people to understand about harness we've done research in harness and we've come up with a design that is cheap and easy to make from local materials different local materials it's specific to donkeys because donkeys do have different body shapes to horses and so how that would work would be either blended or or fully online those people in brick kilns typically they will be using phones if they're using anything at all not computers and they might not have a good signal there so they might need to go to a town or somewhere to get a signal and download the material and maybe have a face-to-face session and then they can take that back to the brick kiln and show other people and teach other people and so this is bridging that physical digital divide and bringing people in making it inclusive other things that are simple that impact on that for instance are best practice with things like images people have lovely images like we've got a nice image let's put it in fantastic except that in terms of computer screen you don't need a high quality image or a large image for it to be visible you do for print but not for computer if you put that in at that full size if someone's got a poor signal and they've gone to a town to just to download the course if you've got huge images in there it's going to take a long time and it make it impossible for them perhaps so simple things like best practice for image optimization how you do it what you need to do how that works and that all feeds into that other things with providing examples for people so that they can just sort of copy and paste almost documentation to file that up and touch ongoing support so those are some of the things that we've had to do retrospectively and it's all fixable it's all you know the opportunity still to to make the course is great and one of the benefits of things like this is they're not fixed in the stone you can go for the continued improvement and learn from feedback and as my when I studied literature a long time ago my literature teacher said a poem is never finished only ever abandoned and it's the same with the course there's always this continual appraisal of how well it works one of the difficulties was people have put a lot of time into their courses before they had the guidance and sometimes it was necessary to go back and say the content's great I you know it's really like I assume you're doing but we need to think about the course designed learning outcomes how that's all going to work I mean so there's been a lot of work time working to that that can be quite difficult for them to then have to go back and redo things so the the key takeaway I think that I'm saying from this is that this type of role needs to be involved early on there was no way around it for the dog sanctuary because it COVID put paid to all the all the good plans personally I would argue that you'd even want that person either in post or from a consultancy to come in at the very beginning when you're choosing the learning environment so for example the needs of the dog sanctuary are different to an hybrid education institution so for example you typically in the HG education establishment you'll have a cohort of people you just enroll on the course we've got different courses aimed at different people we have free open access courses we'll have courses where we're working with universities so we just have that cohort we have courses where we're working with professional organizations so veterinary bodies and that and so there's a difference about how you make those things available to people through the involvement process so I'll just just finish up now that I'm sure there's one question that I need to answer that you've all been thinking about and this is the donkey that was next in line to play with the LinkedIn boot I'm in nickel if we're gonna questions now and if you want anything more detail I'm very happy to answer questions if you're to email me later on I'm very happy to do that so thank you very much hi Ian thank you that was really lovely presentation really enjoyed looking at the donkeys but I can say that I was nodding my way through that going yet that feels very familiar I've been involved in the design and building of courses and and I'm really interested in what you've been saying about that the problems and certainly some of the people in the chat have been saying the same thing that it sounds very familiar to them as well some of those design problems have started coming in part way through the whole design process would you be able to just give us a bit of an idea of how many courses that you've been involved in because obviously you said you were in post from January 2021 so what where have you got to with that and how is it going so we are we've done a soft launch with some some courses and we're hoping to launch in the next couple of months if anyone's interested keep an eye on our social media or the website if you want to touch up the free courses we've got about sort of 30 30 or 35 on the go at the moment and we're probably gonna launch when we launch with about half of those finished so there's been a lot of work going on with a lot of people and it's covering all of those areas that we've I read out earlier on so it's been quite busy yeah it sounds like you've been very very busy and just sort of thinking about if you had the chance to be able to go back and be right at the beginning what one thing do you think you would have done differently I know you sort of addressed that saying that you know you'd ideally have been right there right from the beginning of the outset of the project but is there something that you feel like could have made a difference if they'd have had one piece of information um one thing it difficult one to pick one thing is it the platform or was it um having yeah I think just having the person there who's got the skills it's to ask the questions either to the people who are trying to bid for the to give you the learning environment or for you to ask questions of them when you're thinking about how you want to make the courses run and what courses you've got and how that might best work so I think just having the expertise on hand one way or another I think that backs it really for one thing yeah I mean it sounds like um what you're saying is really if you don't know what you don't know right exactly and that makes it very difficult and tricky to then come in and potentially unpick some of the things that people have done but it sounds like you're doing an amazing job and I'm just going to double check through the comments and see if there's any other questions people are just saying that you know it's wonderful when they've really enjoyed the presentation I think what you've done is just given us such a good story of of your experience that um actually the questions you know that I started off thinking you answered kind of partway through um Kat's just put no questions for me but it's always good to have more people saying we need to be there from the start so yeah you you're highlighting that really importance of learning designers in in this role so and especially when it's an organisation that doesn't have that background because with a university you've got a rolling sort of background and people understand what they're doing and when it's totally new it is exactly what you said you don't know what you don't know you don't know the questions necessary to ask and the things you might need or might it might be an issue so I think that is that is the key and as more people are moving things online train online I think it's important I just want to try and get that message out there that you have someone around to help you yeah yeah absolutely and um one one other question just sprung to mind which is that you sort of said that um you were obviously involved in a lot of training so how how much time did you spend training others versus um kind of putting were you involved sort of in putting some of these courses directly together or was it mainly training others to try and bring them up um so that there was kind of continuity across those courses it's it's been both really and it varies because some people have got um more technical skills anyway that's just the way things are so some people I could do a little bit of training with um or make some examples and they could pick it up and run with it other people I think spend a bit more time with um and because those examples go back so it's probably about 50 50 I think but it varies over over the type of course and the person who's putting it together brilliant thank you um I think we're one minute away from the end of the session so I think um unless any other questions appear in here I can't see anything new so I think we'll wrap it up here so thank you so much for your presentation it was really wonderful to listen to okay thank you and so if anybody does have any other questions later or need some advice or guidance please do get in contact