 I'm John Wilson. I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally, we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries. Obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare. We feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms, easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilise. What we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas. By investing in broadband in these local areas, we can attract more talent, we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions, within Scotland. I hope you've all enjoyed your lunch and are ready to carry on. So this afternoon we're going to start off with a session with John Kerr and Vicky Dale and they are looking at how MOOC effectively facilitated student transitions to an online distance learning programme. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. So I'm John Kerr, the MOOC manager and learning innovation officer at the University of Glasgow. I'm Vicky Dale. I'm a senior academic and digital development adviser within the Learning Enhancement and Academic Development Service. Phew. Oh, my foot. So we're going to just briefly go through some of the research that we've carried out about the student transition from a free MOOC to a fee-paying postgraduate certificate. Just to give you an overview of the MOOCs seen at Glasgow, we partnered with Future Learn five years ago, so we've been with them for quite a long time now. We've actually produced more than 25 courses since we put the slides together. We're probably closer to 30. That's about four or five in production. 300,000 plus learners enrolled into MOOCs. I know these numbers don't mean a lot, but we're still attracting large numbers onto a lot of our courses. The main things that we actually try and achieve is promotion for our MSc programmes, the distance ones in particular, research output. We also use MOOCs as part of our blended on-campus provision where we allow learners in class to take six weeks and take a MOOC online, and then they'll come back and do caps on assignments and so on and so forth within class. It's sort of like a teaching approach, but it's like the different pedagogy behind it. Partnership collaborations, so we've started partnering with other institutions. Deakin University, for example, where we're going to co-collaborate a MOOC together in a specialist area of healthcare management. We've also done other work with other partners such as the BBC and historic royal palaces. Future Learn becomes that platform that both partners can use and we're not relying on someone else's piece of technology, like Moodle or something that another institution may use. We also have the generalist courses, and these are just special interests that we feel that Glasgow has expertise in, and we will push that out for the public to take. So a lot about the project. The course is Postgraduate Certificate in Arkeying. It was a course leader with Dr Donate Yates. She actually won a Best Online Learn Student Experience Award at the University of Glasgow, and the MOOC served as a precursor to the course. So it ran twice before our course, our PG set went live in September. And the course that we specifically looked at attracted almost 11,000 learners. You can see the sort of completion rates there. The standard Postgraduate Certificate, 60 credits, three courses, and then rolled 30 learners on to that. And it can actually lead on to a face-to-face master's, which is within this School of Arts. The MOOC is now on its ninth run, and it still does actually really well as a standalone course. A sort of learner experience study, and Vicky's going to talk more about that in a second. And we really focused on how the MOOC supported that transition from a free course to the fee paying course, and Vicky will go on more about the sort of themes that we looked at. So a typical screenshot of Futureland, which I'm pretty sure everyone is absolutely familiar with, and what we used. The screenshot on the right is from the course that Academic used, used that presentation software for course delivery. And she used Slack Chat, an awful lot we found learners, sorry, Donna found learners that Slack Chat was a great way of learners communicating rather than using middle forums. The notifications, almost like a sort of WhatsApp style communication channel. And that's something that's been adopted throughout. So I'll go and pass it on to Vicky. Thanks. So just before we go on to the learner experience research methodology, if you haven't seen the introductory video for this particular MOOC, it's your opportunity to see John and his acting debut as an antiquity speaker, so that's quite interesting. Please don't watch the video. Vicky, so we wanted to do learner experience research because we're really keen to know what about the student experience, and we wanted to know particularly the experiences of the MOOC and how that transitioned into the PG cert. We were interested, and this was informed by the literature, how they prepared for the PG cert in terms of their foundation knowledge, which was quite varied. Their study skills, which again was quite variable, although a lot of the students were actual graduates, so they did already come in with a number of skills. But digital literacies, because obviously that's critical when you're engaging with students in the online space and the readiness for self-directed learning. Because online distance learners, there's that issue of the loneliness, perhaps not knowing how to manage their time online, so it's really important that they are self-directed and that they're engaged and supported in that. And we also wanted to find out what else we could have done to support students as a team. And what we did was we had semi-structured interviews planned and of the nine participants, seven of them were actually recorded, audio-recorded, face-to-face interviews. Two of them were filled out as interview performers in a written format, and that's because we had some international student participants and they felt more comfortable engaging in the study in that way. So we combined that data, and obviously we got ethical approval to gather the data from our learners at the start. So we used thematic analysis to be able to analyse the data, identify the themes, the sort of commonly occurring patterns and what the students were telling us. So Eva Kubinkova and myself hand-coded all the transcripts. John looked at a sample of these, and then we had conversations. I think we had a couple of conversations just to tease out what we all agreed were the main themes and patterns. And the main themes were as follows on the slides, that the MOOC, as you would expect, stimulated enrollment onto the PG cert, enhanced the preparation for this online distance learning credit bearing course. One of the things that came out that was critical, and I think that's a point for discussion that we really welcome later, is the importance of the lecturer. And also there were challenges and suggestions for improvement because the MOOC can help in some ways to support the learners into this credit bearing course, but there are still issues that we couldn't anticipate. So what we're going to show you is a series of quotes, so we're not going to read them out to you, but there are on the slides, and they will be available online in slides here afterwards. I might just pick out some key themes, key points for it to highlight that. So in terms of how the MOOC stimulated enrollment for the PG cert, it raised the students' awareness. It confirms their motivation and interest in the topic. So one of the issues of our online courses is they may start it, and then once they've already started, they've paid their fees, they find out this isn't really what they thought they were buying into, and so that leads to dropout. This is a good way to alleviate that issue. Self-efficacy, so being able to study online. Students felt more comfortable and more confident about that too. And then finally, recognising the value of online learning. The student had had previously very bad experiences of online learning, and it was actually quite cathartic for them to realise, and powering for them to realise that online learning could be a good thing. It could be inclusive, it could engage the learner. Okay, is that enough time to read them? Just, kind of. Okay. And then in terms of how the MOOC enhanced their preparedness with the PG cert, we talked about foundation knowledge. So there were people on this course, we were art historians, we were archaeologists, there were people from the police force, and from international backgrounds as well. So the students all come in with various, almost like jigsaw pieces, combining their knowledge together, which was a good thing, but it did mean that the MOOC provided the opportunity to align everybody, calibrate their foundation knowledge. So that was good. Digital literacies obviously prepared them for engaging in the online learning space. And then study skills. It didn't give them new study skills as such. Maybe some advanced study skills, as we mentioned later on, but generally it just kind of reinforced what they'd already developed. We did have some really incredible people on this course. I think we am using the Royal Weed Honours course, of course. There was writers of fiction. There was a whole range of different people. An incredible bunch. Yeah, definitely. And then readiness for self-directed learning. I'll just give you a second to have a wee look at that. Yeah, it's a bit scary. If you don't keep up, you're going to have to pay a price for it. So obviously they'll learn through the MOOC that they had to manage their time effectively. And then the importance of the lecturer. So enthusiasm. Donna lives and breathes her subject. She is the best digital scholar I've ever seen online on Twitter. She has an incredible number of followers, doesn't she? She's got about three Twitter accounts. She's in the tens and tens of thousands now. Yeah, as she lives and breathes her discipline, and I think that comes across so clearly to her students, which is a wonderful learning experience. You can't put a price on that. And then very much the idea of teacher presence. So Donna was there. Even though it was an online course, the MOOC was obviously online, and the PG is certainly leading into it was online. Donna was there. She answered questions. And the comment about support, the level of helpfulness that she brought to it. So it wasn't just that she was fielding academic questions. She was also dealing with technical issues as well. We had students who were struggling to get into the library to rent out books or get ebooks, that sort of thing. And Donna was keen to engage with that. She went over and above. I don't know the number of students. I don't know how sustainable that is in the long term as your student numbers grow. But she was just an incredible support to the students. And the learning design as well. And we'll see a wee bit about that shortly. Basically, the way that it was designed just made it so that students wanted to do this course. Just to give you a bit of a background. So Donna was involved in discussion forums throughout the MOOC. But we also had two GTA students who would also facilitate discussions. And anything that they couldn't answer was passed to Donna. So Donna would dip in. But she was there at a high level and at a more personal level with us in some of these. I couldn't give you an estimate of how much time she spent on the MOOC. But I would imagine it was maybe about an hour a day. That's probably where she'd have been at probably more. However, there were challenges, as we noted. So in terms of the challenges, as I said, this was an incredible bunch of students. And so we had one saying that they wanted to engage with the course material beforehand. So they would have liked more academically challenging content. You would talk a lot about assessment and feedback. One student or a couple of students felt that academic writing, it would have been good to have some more formative experiences within the MOOC to prepare them for what was happening in the PG cert. But you've got to balance that with the fact that the MOOC has designed it quite a low level for ever's generalist levels. And then advanced study skills. So being more challenging, scrutinising scores sources a little bit more carefully came up. In terms of other challenges with some technical issues, not technical issues, but challenges in terms of students engaging the Glasgow platform. Did you want to say a few words? Just the alignment between future learning is quite radical because of the tools that Moodle offers and Blackboard offers compared to future learning. So learners actually really just do that very simplistic linear view of their learning, whether within Moodle everything branches off to somewhere else. So I think the struggle for us internally is how we can actually aesthetically make Moodle not locally future learn, but take some of those principles that learners are telling us and think about it and then use it within our own course design. Yep, and the trade-off with that is having the extra functionality in Moodle, of course. So it's, yeah, definitely. English is a second language, so we had international students on this course. And one student loved the chat sessions, but they participated in a different way. So they commented, but they didn't want to talk, contribute to the audio feed because they were still building up their vocabulary and their confidence in learning in English. But they still felt fully involved. And then other people commented that in terms of online study, maybe more signposting, more explicit signposting about what they were expected to do in the timeframe for that would have helped. And that's some feedback we've taken on board that we advise academics about. So we've got a paper accompanying this, and we used Garrison's community of inquiry model as a lens in which to present the results because we really felt that in terms of Donna's contribution, the teaching presence was very much highlighted. The cognitive presence was very much highlighted in the learning design, and the social presence was very much highlighted by the fact that we had this course that was underpinned by a constructivist pedagogy as well. So this is Donna. She's at an ABC Learning Design workshop. That was before we got the glossy cards, so it was a bit rough and ready back in the day. But she was one of our first adopters at the ABC Learning Design Method that came out of UCL. And as you can see, she looks quite happy to be using that to design, of course. And I'll let you read this out. So Donna gave us permission to share her experiences with you. And I think that's what's really empowering is the fact that when students do engage with us in terms of online learning, the MOOC and the PGSEAR, it doesn't just inform the practice as an online educator, which John mentioned she won an award for, but actually informs all their learning and teaching. So that's really, really empowering. And if you want to hear more about Donna's experiences, if you haven't read about her in the papers already or follow her on Twitter, there's a talk there as well. That was our bold showcase event, blended online learning development project showcase, and Sheila did the keynote for that as well. So there's some really interesting stuff in that. Back to John. So I'm just going to recap with some of the future developments that we see at Glasgow. The next step for us is definitely a MOOC strategy whether that is a wider open educational strategy or we just go quite narrow and focus specifically on MOOCs is still to be determined. But we definitely have to set out markers of where we want to go with this in the next three to five years. It's become such an essential part of what we do at Glasgow now. It really is going to start to be embedded more mainstream into our day-to-day learning and teaching rather as a separate entity. We want to increase our output to be in line with our online degrees. So if we offer a master's or a postgraduate certificate, then a MOOC should definitely proceed that for all the benefits and highlights that we've just mentioned. Within future learning, we're short-term focused just now on the credit bearing programmes where we can offer sort of short pieces of credit for learners if they take a sequence of MOOCs for someone in the region of maybe 10 to 15 credits or something along that line. Again, we see that as a natural progression from a MOOC to a full postgraduate certificate or master's, and it gives them that middle ground that maybe brings some of the challenges that the learners were talking about, and it might actually help us with that going forward. We need to look at the demand internally. Growing, we get requests weekly for new MOOCs. We need to be aligned to sort of different strategic goals, and we need to put people in place to support this. You know, academic developers like Vicky, the media production development team, and so on and so forth, and the future direction MDMF. So MDMF is a framework that has been created at Glasgow. Again, we have a paper on that as well, and effectively this builds on the UCLABC approach that actually takes it online and is for MOOC curriculum development. So at the left-hand side you have a linear structure that is expected to find on future learning. You just see everything on the one page. You've got timings per activity, which the students picked up on, and then we've got some of the more common activities within our MOOCs or videos, articles. They get mapped out, and then at the end it all gets mapped on to the learning types, and we have a look, and as a non-subject specialist, it allows learning technologists to have that conversation with academics, look at the original course ILOs and aims, and then we can have that discussion of, well, should we have more production in this course? That was the original aim, but we've went a lot by two. Video heavy, which is often the case. Let's start adjusting some of these activities, and how that looks once you've had that conversation. It looks like this. It's a free tool called Real Time Board, and it allows multiple collaborators. The good thing about this is, as it's an enhancement and an extension to the ABC approach, what they've been online, is that once you've had an initial meeting with an academic about their MOOC curriculum, this is online, and anyone can go back in and start re-jigging things, and everyone sees the most up-to-date version. With the ABC approach, at the end of that session, you sort of take a picture, and then you're working off of that sort of medium, and it's not ideal going forward, so I've enhanced it, and we've created this framework, and this is Creative Commons licensed, and you can actually go online and get all that. If you just search for MDMF Glasgow, take it and use it, and there's all the instruction, guidelines and everything else. As Vicki alluded to earlier, we have a paper on the transition work accepted by Alk Journal. We've just got the email about proofreading the final copy, so that should be done in next year or so, and that'll be published in the Alk Journal in the coming weeks. Some references if you want to have a read, but that is us. Thank you for listening. OK, we still have time for questions. Anyone want to ask before I go on to me, too, to look at some of them? OK, while you're thinking about it, let's just go on to me, too, then. So I've got three questions here. The first one, how more engaged were the students when using Slack compared to FutureLearn, and was it used for text-based comments or interactive engagements? That's a very good question. It's a very good question. It's actually going to be quite hard to answer that, but the quality of the comments is quite difficult. I couldn't tell you that sort of standing here, but for the 30 students that take the Postgraduate Certificate, they use Slack throughout the three courses, and Donna only reported positive highlights from it. It's the immediacy of the comments and the way they're threaded. Mudo is different. It's the 30 minutes of post. It's not synchronous in that respect. There is all these delays and restrictions, whereas the Slack gives you much more of a WhatsApp-style mobile chat. So it's hard to actually answer that wonderfully. Sorry, I hope that's helped. The next question is all about Donna. How does she manage her time to support the MOOC, for example, does she have advertised online office hours or is it more ad hoc? There was no official rules of engagement. Effectively, we would ask academics to just give as much time as they can, and we would normally say somewhere in the region of maybe about half hour a day, but that's fronted by two GTAs who would help guide and facilitate discussions, and then the academic would come on for that half hour, look at the main themes and topics, and then answer them or further guide those discussions. Donna being Donna just couldn't tear herself away from it, so she probably spent hours on it, and then she told me before she'd been up to it, all hours at night, two in the morning, reading through comments, because it's so personal as she's built that course. It's hard, maybe, so it's difficult for you to detach, but we don't advocate that an academic spends that amount of time on that MOOC. But I think just to pick up on that, Donna was, I think the fact that it was online the course, she could be completely flexible, so as you can imagine, somebody who's just a scholar like that, she's got so many travel commitments, cos she's still doing all sorts of archaeological research and things as well. So I think it being online gave her that flexibility to engage with her students, and she never missed a class, and she had Google Live sessions and things as well, didn't she? Yeah, Google, YouTube Live sessions there, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One more question. I find that engaging with students online can be very time intensive, but do students expect timely responses? Or, again, was it more office hours? So it's more of the expectation, a way that they just expect it to just get on with it, and answer my question. I think probably Donna was successful at establishing a really good rapport with her students and engaging with them before the course leading up to it and through that whole transition period. So I think she'd already established a rapport and a kind of protocol for what was appropriate in terms of communication. But I think that's what you said there is really important. I think setting clear expectations for what you can do as an educator, because you can't be there 24 hours a day. You've got their own well-being is important as well. You don't want an academic to answer a question as soon as it's asked either, because you put out the flame before it starts to burn, and you want other students to charge the collaborate or to put forward their interpretation of the direction of the answer. So usually I dare to, unless this is broken, I can't fix it. But if it's a general question, somebody's good to let that discussion happen organically before someone comes in. Any more questions? No? Great. I think we'll call it that then. Thank you very much. Thank you. Right, we'll move on with our next session then. Can I just ask that you speak a bit closer to the mic? I guess you're not mic'd up. No, no, we're just relying on the podium mic. That's fine. Right. Okay, our next session we've got Fiona Hadleif, and she'll be talking about students as partners in technology initiatives. Sorry, we've started a bit early, so we might have a bit more time at the end for questions. Thank you very much. Does that sound okay? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I think it's probably because two people before were standing a bit further back, but if I lean in, then probably you'll be able to hear me. Okay, so I'm Fiona Hadleif from the Centre for Learning and Teaching at the University of Brighton, and I'm here to talk about some research that I've been doing into students as partners in technology initiatives. So to really have a kind of think about what the aspects of partnership and the aspects of technology within those. So I'm going to have a quick overview of the research that I've been doing. Have a look at some of the characteristics of the partnerships in those projects. Look at the role of technology, and then think about a bit more about this in terms of practices as learning technologists. So I guess the bigger picture, the background to this, is students as partners work, and the development of these series of practices and activities and what you might call discourses around students as partners that has developed in the UK in the last 10 years, and probably at conferences like this, at a venture and by JISC, and in other, and things like the change agent network conferences, and other growing organisations such as RAIS, where students as partners has become a thing, has become something that has surfaced on university agendas, and what I'm particularly interested in is the tight relationship, the development of this idea of students as partners has had, particularly in the UK, with technology. So that's the kind of background of my interest in this, and in particular, we come back to that idea, why is this important? Things to do with students as partners are reaching out, getting more and more attention, because of this idea here that the students as partners work can do some of that challenging of the hierarchy within education systems between students and teachers, and do some of the subverting of that hierarchical relationship. So in students as partners work, in the discourse around it, there's lots of positive emphasis on the potential of this work to be really transformative, to create transform learning communities that we're part of. The downside of that is that we're also getting caught up in the minute, at the moment really, with some critiques of students as partners, that these initiatives have been too closely aligned to what we might call neoliberal discourses about the role of students in universities today, and it's pitched as a counter to the role of students as consumers, that you can develop new, close relationships with staff through this idea of students as partners. So what's happening is there's been a real focus, a bit of an energising of research into this area, and I just wanted to highlight this one paper by Mercer and Mapstone et al, who've done a really big piece of work looking at students as partners across lots of different countries, bringing together lots of different information. They're not focusing on technology, but what they were saying is basically the key things are around dialogue and negotiation. They want to make sure that when we're reporting on these projects, we're looking at the positive and the negative sides of the projects, and also that we begin to explore the broadness of those projects, in particular to think about other partnerships, and this is, I guess, where my bit of work, my interests sits. So I'm not just interested in the lecturer- student relationship, but the other people, the learning technologists, the librarians, the academic developers who are involved in these partnerships. I'm never destabilising element, I suppose, in this relationship, which calls on that, the things to do with technology. It's the fact that when people learn about technology, they do so outside of any kind of formal curriculum. So already technology has the potential there for subverting some of those roles, because there's no kind of hierarchical approach to staff, lecturer and a student. So there's less of a power relationship there when we're talking about learning about technology. So when we bring all of this together, we can see that there is some potential within these partnership workings focusing on technology to destabilise this arena of learning. So my world then has been caught up in researching the DigiChamps, the iChamps, the partners, the ambassadors, the change agents, familiar terminology that you might have come quite used to over the last few years. So I'm looking at those kind of projects, but I'm also looking at the smaller projects that don't have the big headline names, but kind of attach onto these discussions. They too attach themselves, they kind of hook onto these students as partners, umbrella. And I'm interested in seeing how they all create this the way that we talk and the things that we do in these initiatives and how they're generating change as we go forward. So my research project really has got two main parts to it. So the underlying background research is looking at students as technology partners looking at 69 case studies that I've drawn from conference abstracts and papers that have been presented in the UK and that have been drawn from 51 higher education providers, so 51 universities. So I'm kind of contrasting that really with the some more detailed case studies that I've done through semi-structured interviews with participants in those schemes. So the way to kind of conceptualise that in a way is once the big picture this is the official story of what's going on, on the other side we've got the smaller detail case studies which really reveal I guess the unspoken and the unofficial narratives of what's been going on in this area. So the desk based research as I said I've identified 65 projects 69 projects 51 higher education providers and out of those 69 projects 106 pieces of dissemination so that could be conference abstracts that could be papers and I've been analysing those to look for things like who's involved, who are the partners what kind of technologies they're using what can we say about the partnerships in those projects. Now as that would suggest what you can see is that what you might have is one university is producing several different case studies will be generating several different points of dissemination so it's quite a big and complex task and the important thing to remember here is that these are self expressed by the participants in these projects this is how they view their partnership working so that's quite a key thing to remember and in contrast the six case studies these were chosen and represented schemes that you're probably familiar with that have existed over a long period of time that are that are also and also include some newer schemes and I chose them because they offered some opportunities where I could see that students were taking on new roles that might challenge these hierarchical things so basically kind of into teaching roles so there were semi structured interviews with participants several of the partners were interviewed so let's have a look really first of all at that kind of who question who are the partners so we're looking at the desk base research here so from presenting at conferences quite like this one in fact alt conferences from 2014 to 2017 were part of this study we can see that most of the kind of lead partners in these projects presenting at these kind of conferences were lecturers actually which surprised me somewhat followed by learning technologists so people like people like you with the rest of the of that pie chart then really highlighting the range of different people who are involved in these projects so people from employability in careers people like me, academic developers a kind of range of different students including students with kind of more coordinating official roles librarians or people who work in libraries and then other staff perhaps people who are specifically titled student as working student engagement what was also interesting and this project really I guess starts to explore is the partnerships that go beyond just a member of staff and a student to connect across perhaps different services so what I was particularly interested in perhaps is obviously there are lots of partners where staff and students partner together and staff within the same service so two learning technologists and a student partner together but what we find is the most typical cross service partnership is the lecturer learning technologist student partnership now interestingly although the numbers are quite small librarians just partner with themselves while academic partners like me they'll just partner with anybody we work with anyone so in terms then of the dissemination so people coming along to conferences people doing the writing of the journal articles you can see again the range of our participants there speaking to where I have my little little thing here does that work I'm pointing at the wrong bit ok so you can see the range of partners there and obviously given that students were partnering with all of those people they're going to be the largest section here and we can see the types of students most students we don't know whether they were undergraduate or postgraduate but we can probably work out from this that the majority of students being involved in these projects are undergraduate students and so this was the kind of gross totals of all of the partners and then if we look in particular at the 106th dissemination activity so there's points of dissemination so it could be 100 conference perhaps 6 papers 31 so approximately a third involve students in somewhere another which gives you an idea of the kind of the status of students within that partnership and this is some information from the case study the interview data and this really is just here to highlight perhaps the complexity of some of these relationships so these are the people I interviewed and already you can see in this particular case study that there is lots going on in terms of the partnerships that learning technologists were developing these are the people I spoke to as well as they were partnering with other people who I didn't manage to get to speak to think of the students working who are actually working in pairs on this project the other lecturers that they were engaging with you can begin to see that actually there's enormous networks of partnerships going on and if we did something else which would be kind of to connect those projects in terms of the networks of influence between them that would be another kind of three-dimensional aspect to that so the what what kinds of activities relating to technology took place so as I was coding the abstracts and papers I've coded them basically to kind of cover as much of the variety as I could but really they've then been sort of consolidated down into these groupings so there's more information underneath this but I think these groupings here work particularly well so what we can see is that the technologies or the activities around technologies that were most most frequent were the creation of learning resources then the promotion or use of social media and then the promotion or use of verly apps and software while consultation and research so students working as consultants, as researchers finding out about technology was also quite common surprisingly we found that device promotion which is a little yellow slice was actually much lower than I was perhaps expecting while the other segment really covers the projects where students were doing loads of things you couldn't really categorise what they were doing and also kind of more discipline specific activities so just to give you an idea of the things that those those activities would cover the creation of resources would be things like creating animations lots of things to do with assessment and quite a lot of video working video while the research was around creating running focus groups students would be running focus groups doing hack days looking at verly use and also doing things like distributing the GISC student tracker survey and then things like verly's app software is kind of talking about promotion there of lecture capture near pod and also supporting people in the introduction of new verly's social media divided into professional social media things like Twitter and LinkedIn and other social media that we're familiar with particularly the act of blogging is quite an important thing that students get involved in so then I'll try to kind of pick down to that next level and then we start to move to those numbers getting quite small so these are kind of quite broad brush ideas here but what I wanted to do was just pull out some further characteristics that might help some analysis further down the line so what I wanted to kind of highlight really was learning technologies and lecturers typically would work in partnership to create digital learning resources lecturers work in partnerships with students to create learning resources or do things around social media and student led projects create tend to focus again on social media or learning resources library staff tend to do things on social media and then employability staff always do things professional social media or it's something that involves students creating video of themselves or doing something with video what this doesn't highlight so what that also suggests is that research and consultation is something that everybody does and that promotion of apps and VLEs is also something that everybody does so I wanted to start to move towards thinking about you know how can we measure the amount of partnership that's going on and there's increasingly a number of different models that you can use which highlight this so Bowville and Bully particularly I think it's Catherine Bowville is a very respected writer in the field of student engagement so this is one of her models that gets used for this activity so at the top is basically students tutors are in control while at the bottom it's that sift to students being in control of decision making so I did a quick piece so I've just pulled out some highlights here to really contrast perhaps two different two of those different technology activities so the creation of learning resources and the consultation research projects just to kind of contrast slightly the amount of participation in there so you can see at the top of that ladder the more yellow colour this is where students are given a task and they complete it while at the bottom end of that ladder the dark red is where students define the project they complete it themselves using the terms and the boundaries that they themselves have set and what this suggests here is just from you know kind of just highlighting here really some of the key points that probably things where students are involved in doing research and consultation tend to sit towards the top of that ladder so they're told to go off and do a task and they do it, they consult with students but there is a possibility that they can they can make that more of an enriched partnership doing more of the deciding what they want to capture and what what information they need to to be able to make this a valid piece of research so just a flick now to thinking about that was all from the DDSPAS survey to looking at the interview data and seeing if we can find some kind of areas of overlap so I from work interviewing learning technologists, from libraries and from academic developers so the non academic staff we can see that actually their main experience of partnership is a very positive one and the positiveness of it is based on the pleasure of working with students but I think in itself is a really interesting thing because it's something that we don't perhaps express in professional services is we work in education but we don't really have that much to do with students so finding opportunities to work with students is something we quite often quite crave but the main when they talk about that partnership working what they talk about is the insights and experience that students bring our students into that partnership it's about validating information and about bringing that student perspective they also talk quite often about mentoring a model for partnership as well which is interesting from a student perspective all the students are positive and very positive about their experiences of working with different members of staff they see this idea of partnership as being based on equality and about being equal and a successful partnership is one where they feel equal to staff so students say things like we were seen as equals and it was a partnership so all of our ideas were valid and academic developers and other learning technologists talk very much about this this is what we try and instill in students this is about equality they also have relationships with new relationships with the students they're working with so they have a different change in their relationship with their fellow students but perhaps the big step change here there which is obviously really fundamental to what we're aiming for is their changing relationship to academic members of staff so they repeatedly and not necessarily always when talking about technology but they talk about this as being an extension of this confidence that you need to be able to ask a lecturer a question to then be able to engage in a discussion about technology or about just generally and this is how they categorise this idea of partnership and what's really interesting is that this is definitely a threshold that students get across because then they can see they say things like it was quite an odd role for us to be teaching them about technology it obviously became quite normal so once you get over that threshold it becomes obvious this of course I can talk to a lecturer in that particular way so when we talk about dialogue in partnership working this must be I think this is a key area to look into so the work also highlighted what we can say about how this worked in terms of the technologies involved so the most successful partnerships really were where students could either come in with lots of different ideas and take one of them forward or have an idea share, discuss and be able to adapt it but the important thing was how they went about that communication to do the choosing and adapting and that's the those issues to communication probably that's probably key ok so that's the really positive side was the kind of the professional services lecturers for a positive feedback lecturing lecturing staff I think I should probably add that the gatekeepers to all of the projects that I ended up doing the interviews on were all professional services staff rather than lecturers so these perhaps don't represent the lecturers who would have been presenting at places like this so these were perhaps people who had been brought into the project further down the line rather than initiating them but again these are the this is the relationship that we're trying to challenge here the student lecturer relationship or at least one of them so I think it's fair to say that based on the interviews that I did that generally lecturers still see this the partnership working that they've been undertaking is pretty much a transactional arrangement where they've got a problem the problem is I don't know how to use this technology or I need to do something here and there's a student there or somebody anybody who will help them with that if the job gets done and that problem is sorted that's what they consider something as being successful and what I found doing the interviews was that what we found was that sometimes these high profile projects that we're very familiar with when it came down to the ground the lecturing staff involved in them weren't even aware that they were part of these big headline projects that we're so familiar with and one of them said I think the one you're asking me about is that we hired two students to assist us now just to counter that with that students experience of that partnership was completely transformative and yet for that lecturer this was just somebody else another member of their paid staff helping them out so really interesting so they do also share this idea of acknowledging the importance of bringing students in to bring that student perspective in the same way that learning technologists academic developers do and they do have some moments of connection slightly point towards those issues of all those things to do with equality where so one member of academic staff saw that a student in a session that was being run was being quite overwhelmed and said to him we're all in the same boat we've all been there we're all in that face those challenges and there's that kind of sense of it trying to develop that sense of equality but overall perhaps some food for thought there really so within these projects then what I found reported on previously really is that these projects don't really have a massive impact on the use of technology although they do have a very important role perhaps in raising awareness of technology use amongst the participants did I miss that and one thing I wanted to also highlight was that at the meeting when people talk about technology they quite often still talking about very much students coming into this partnership with a good use of technology they're still coming from the perspective that students possibly are more that digital or native that they should be familiar with technology that they should have loads of brilliant ideas about how to use technology and it's almost always countered by kind of quite often they say well I know I'm not supposed to say that anymore it's like this discourse around that has moved on in a way but actually what we find is that still is the entry point for allowing these schemes to take place and even though they sort of backtrack and actually say well students weren't as good or students didn't do exactly what I was thinking they were going to do this still leaves kind of space for students to become involved in these projects which I think is kind of interesting sort of that we've moved on from that from talking perhaps about that but still there's a kind of ghost in the machine so just to highlight then some quick points so this immigrant native immigrants trope still exists and it still it's still active even though nobody actually talks about it directly because the official narrative of kind of partnership is around equality and it's around dialogue and a bit about this idea of mentoring as being sort of a bit of a role model it's also important to realise that actually where some people are talking about partnership but there are still partners who are not talking about partnership they don't have a narrative around partnership and technology at all and I just want to highlight some preliminary results which would suggest that kind of drawing this together this lecturers and or learning technologists offer working partnership with students offer the greatest potential for partnership working especially if students are able to choose from their own ideas and or adapt them and then to communicate them well and it's perhaps supporting the key issues supporting that element of choice and also those issues to do with communication because it's the communication that supports the dialogue that brings about the flowering of that partnership but really the emphasis is on dramatically different experiences of partnership across these projects even in projects which we will be familiar with a band is successful this isn't something that is experienced by all of those partners and perhaps when we're talking about partnership is to go back to that kind of original idea when we're talking about those transformations transformational shifts in our relationships which will then hopefully go on and change the institutional settings around learning that's what we're going to keep in the backs of our minds so closing thoughts really is for those of you involved in partnership working is to think about communicating the idea of partnership are you when you're thinking about partnership are you thinking about thinking about partnership or you're just thinking about how to deliver a particular service do all participants understand what partnership is what their role in that is and also a point of reflection really in terms of thinking about your desire to engage with students and why you want to get involved in partnership projects is that enough is that transformational enough do we need to rephrase that those desires in something which suggests more of a transformation that will be really begin to kind of change the way that we talk about partnerships and technology and that is it thank you very much any questions I've actually got a question to ask I wasn't too sure was it the whole institution projects you mentioned you interviewed some lecturers you mentioned some papers that you looked at or was it particular schools that were involved in these projects so it would be the particular initiatives within universities so it would be based in one particular service and they'd be running them either as some students might be volunteers or some schemes they might be paid but they'd be organised in that way ok that makes sense I've got a question on me too that asks two part question did you look at students' perceptions on dissemination of findings and experiences if so did you find that they regarded as part of their responsibility towards the partnership or outside of their comfort zone interesting question I didn't touch on this because it's a really really big thing students role in partnership in the dissemination events particularly students coming along to events like this was I would say part of that transformatory experience from their perspective the reason I didn't really talk about it because it's like I haven't worked out yet is that to do with partnership I'm also interested in students as partners work but it's been what's being termed around performance students performing partnership so one of the key areas that people are interested in is doing exactly that bringing students along to conferences and they sit on panels and they talk about their experiences how does that relate to partnership and how does it relate to the other things that we get them to do in these partnership projects like appearing videos well any of these partnerships particularly strong I know you mentioned the ones with students performing technology so academics and things like that I know the academics have a way to go in terms of realising their own transformation but were there ones that were particularly strong in your opinion? I think the strong ones are exactly those where students are able to exercise a lot of control it's difficult to so they exercise control they work over several different projects and so they are able to use their experiences to then feed into the next project so there's also sort of duration because the less successful ones were basically where students were told to come along and do this at this particular session and they'll come along and demonstrate a piece of technology and then move that's fine some people's experiences are positive as is less but in terms of partnership it's quite low down on that ladder so all questions? No, right, thank you very much Thank you