 Hello, my name is Sean. I'm the English for academic purposes coordinator here at the RCA. So I run the in-sational and pre-sational communication and academic skills courses. I'm really sorry to have missed the earlier talks, but I think there's some connections with what I've just heard so far, so hopefully I'll try and connect some of them. I'm presenting with Julie, who I've had the pleasure of working with, so I'm really pleased that we can share what we've done. So I'm going to tell you about our pre-sational course, so the summer course. We have an eight-week course and a four-week course, I think that's quite common, sometimes longer. We run them in July and August. This year we had about 150 students in total, all online for the last three years. And we are focusing on academic communication skills for postgraduate art and design students. So I'm just going to, I just threw this one in because it connects with what you're talking about or Ian was talking about a culturative change. So the students are coming in in the summer and they're coming to a new educational environment. They need to learn new communicative skills and they are communicating in a different language in a different context. So all of these together are what we look at. And my background is in linguistics and communication. So this is where we're coming at it from, but we focus here on this one. The culturative process of change is about how all of these elements are involved in the process of change. So students, how do they process? How do they change in a new environment? What kind of skills do they need? And how do they communicate in this when they move towards this new environment? So we look here at behavioral changes. There are different learning strategies, different behavioral skills and different ways of communicating within these. I am talking here about students changing, but the a culturative process of change, if you wanted to read any more about it, maybe you've heard about it. Barry writes about it a lot in cross-cultural communication and it's a two-way process to be ideally effective. So it's not just students changing, but the institution should change as well, but that's for another day. So the course that we're going to talk about today is the summer pre-session or the four-week and eight-week courses. I think you're timing me. So we've just had it accredited by our national organisation, Barley, the British Association of Lectures and EAP. And particularly the change that led to us being accredited was a process-led course. So when we are talking about the communicative skills that students need, well, I'm not looking at how do you communicate in a presentation? How do you communicate through a piece of writing? Those are the outcomes. We're looking at the processes. What do students need to do in communicating in order to be able to give a presentation or in order to be able to talk about a research project? What steps do they need to go through? That's what students have found very difficult. So it's the process that we're looking at rather than the outcome. So what do they need to go through? In an art and design education, they need to be able to use skills of dialogic communication. So they need to have lots of dialogue with their tutors, with in-group work, with their peers. So it's all about the communication and the conversations that they have. It's also about collaborative work, especially now we've just moved to short courses. There's an awful lot of collaborative projects. So it's about the dialogue within the collaboration and the outcomes of those projects. It's about reflective learning. So they need to reflect on their learning. It's not just reviewing their reading, thinking about it, but it's also reflecting on their conversations. So they might, or their observations. So they might go out and observe, continually inquiring, observe, read, have conversations, but they need to reflect on this. They need to think, how do I respond to what I've seen? How do I respond to what I've read? And how do I respond to the conversations I've heard in the group or with my peers? So it's not enough just to have the conversations. They need to do continually processing these forms of inquiry. They're learning is very experimental. So they're expected to push the boundaries. They're expected to try, have conversations about what went in their reflective conversations, what worked, what didn't work, why it's all about the dialogue and the pushing yourself forward to experiment more. So I think next was experimentation and experiential. Okay, so experimentation through reflective discussions and finally experiential learning. So it's not just about reading and writing, but it's about they're making practice, they're taking themselves through the process. It's about their conversations. So it's all of these things that we try that we needed to think about in communicating and in moving to an online environment. So these are the communicative acts that we needed to transfer into an online environment. And then I was fortunate to meet up with Julie and we moved to the online environment. So here we are. So as part of a conversation that I'd started with Sean back in 2019, when I first joined the RCA was about how we were using RVLE and our tools to kind of expand on how EAP delivers their offer in the summer. So we started having conversation about how we could use blended options for that summer activity. And then obviously March 2020 happened and instead of it being nice and blended and kind of a nice lead into those kinds of tools it was okay everything is moving online we have to create a contingency for that. So we obviously moved online and there were moments of clarity I'm sure between staff but providing them with the tools and the training so that we could move online and that experience would be reasonable for the students that were taking part. So since then we've learned from all of the things that happened during that initial stage and kind of develop those into using tools more effectively getting feedback from students quite significant amounts of feedback from students and from the staff using those tools to deliver the same kind of offer. So every year we have kind of changed what that really looks like. This is our four week version of pre-session. And what we actually had a look at was what tools that we could have a kind of use that would be useful for students and focus on kind of those principles and values that that Sean was just talking about. How do we create that conversation how do we create a collaborative environment for students to actually engage where they can't normally, whereas where EAP was always in person, you had quite a lot of in person conversation and activities going on. So how can we not exactly replicate that but how can we, you know, facilitate that kind of level of engagement and so what we ended up doing was using Zoom, Padlet and TALIS in different ways to try and create that kind of conversation. So students were using Padlet within Zoom sessions so that they could kind of underpin what they were talking about and the readings they were doing and the activities they were taking part in. So we kind of trying to do that as well asynchronously outside of that. So using TALIS was something that we decided to try and use. I think it was hypothesis before the first time that we did it during 2020, but we found TALIS was far more flexible. And staff have really taken that on board using it for the summer course. So that worked out really really well. The feedback we got from students was that, you know, having that ability to flip between using Padlet in person but also asynchronously but also facilitate that and TALIS worked really well for them. So here's some of the work that the students and the staff kind of all did together kind of building everything. And how students had a look at, I think they created like ongoing blogs so that they're able to kind of communicate together but also provide information to their tutor. So where we can't do those things in person we could do them online in an engaging way. So staff were able to create content that they gave to their students and focus on areas that they wanted to look at. So this is their reflective blog. So they had to write every week they had to write something in their reflective blog and they had to, it could be anything it could be as as time goes on the knowledge that we learn is more and more difficult. My heart in my heart I know they are connected but my mind is messy sometimes it could be anything they wanted and it could be just about what they've been looking at, or it could be about their learning and we encourage them to be more reflective. They're deeper in their reflection about their learning later on, but we use we asked them to write this, just a little bit every week and then they took this they brought this to their zoom one to one tutorial which was very short. And then the tutors had a discussion about this so when it became more about their learning, they could have the conversation about their learning, but the tutor it was only shared between one student and their tutor. The tutors feedback on this was fantastic because they said that they learned more about the students here than they'd ever done in face to face tutorials so this and the students had time to think about what they were writing, and to write it very personally in the privacy of their own home but knowing that they were going to share it. So they could edit it if they wanted to beforehand but it was really, really insightful for the tutors to think about their learning and their progress. So, just to finish off, yeah, this is very dry, but it's just to think about what we were trying to do and what I think the benefits were because I think there were many, many benefits to having it online. We, we could focus on the process we itemize the process so that we looked more carefully at it, maybe that was a planning issue but but it made us stage our activities more carefully. It made us be explicit about the learning outcomes and what they were trying to achieve so the, the asynchronous and synchronous learning was really helpful here, because we wanted students to have cognitive processing time so that they could. They could think about what they wanted to say they could think about their reflections to something, even an image they could think more carefully, so they could prepare beforehand. They could share with each other in a different kind of space so not just communicating verbally so the communication was very diverse, it didn't have to be spontaneous conversation it didn't have to be a conversation it could be written communication it's about getting the same message and the same community interaction across but in many different ways. So, I think it was definitely beneficial and some of the students did too. So, these are some of our feedback comments it was clear and explicit open dynamic friendly variety of formats methods they many people commented on the variety of formats they liked the padlet and the tal and talus and being able to share and go between these planning explicit tools and stages good moodle padlet and tell us we're useful for sharing studying materials easily so that was about outside of the online outside of the zoom session they could they had a record. They could keep their record keep this their fellow students records as well. I love the way everything was structured visual interactive bits and pieces not huge chunks so we took this away as well. We've now gone on to do much more manageable pieces of learning so we've taken a lot of this away. Variety formats tools, etc. physical record obsessions again, they like to have the different evidence and recording obsessions not not recording but just notes on the on the padlet. Tell us some padlet are great to communicate and share ideas so again the communication that wasn't verbal and wasn't spontaneous, totally approachable. It could be reacted to different media use multi for my mind works like that so that was padlet a lot to do and tell us moving around between the text. So, there we go. I'm really happy and we're going to definitely keep elements of that as we go forward. So, thank you very much. Before we wrap up for the day. And I think that you're alive. He struck by using padlet as a blogging tool which wouldn't have necessarily occurred to me I love it because the, you know, the posts were quite sort of short but I guess that was what was, what was wanted and it's nice to get students connected so well to that as a as a platform. What made you think of doing the blogging padlet. Just they need to be reflective and many of them had not had any practice with being reflective and especially about their learning so we wanted them to prepare for the tutorial, much better so that they had already thought about it. I mean, why do we you just was just wondering whether that you looked at other platforms but you thought that was the best one. I think one of the things that we did part of padlet was it wasn't part of emergency teaching but it was something we'd already been using kind of underlying. But I think that what we've done is whenever we provide any kind of tool like this we try and look at different ways that you can use it for to fill different holes. And that's where that's that's come from it means that students are interacting on that within class and it becomes something they're quite familiar with. And so interactive they don't have to learn another system we don't we're not using a moodle, you know, blog instead, which is far more comprehensive and not as modern looking I suppose. So I think it's one of those things is, it's just, I think feel but also, because it just means that it's easy for them to consume and use. I have colleagues to use it now we use it a lot, even though we're in person now so we asked them students now need to have a lot more practice about communicating verbally so we asked them to record you can record a little bit on it, either with a video or not. And so we asked them to put that to talk every day just to themselves, if necessary, so that they put it on padlet and they were and I, I think they're fantastically flexible. You can have the background you can talk about the background, and you can put images and, and they like the ability to spread out and be and use it as they want, but also multimedia institutional subscription to it. We have we've got back back or what used to be back back but now it's not it's for you. Is there any assessment for this? There is, but they don't have to have it but the assessment is a comment. They have to do a reflective writing and a presentation so and they can use all the tools to do that. Well, they had no they had to do that they had to. Yeah. I think it was 400 words a week. Yeah.