 Yeah, I will start us off shortly. All right, I'm going to just get our rules up. I have been mentioned a few times, but please note everyone who is now coming into the webinar that as a setting we have turned your microphone off and we want you to leave it off. Also your video cams have been turned off simply to preserve bandwidth so that everyone can get a seamless experience. Normally in smaller groups we would advocate that you keep the video cams on. We think it's very important that as a presenter you can see all your participants, but today is special because it's a very large group and therefore we've asked you to keep them off. However, we do want to hear from you. So if you have a question during the webinar, please can you put it into the chat facility? Can you spend a few moments now just checking that you know where the chat facility is? We have two people dedicated to trying to go through as many of your questions as possible and they will try and answer you in the chat. And some of them they will pass on to me on the facilitator today and I will then try and answer them in front of everyone so everyone can benefit from the insights. All right, it is now 12 o'clock and we are going to kick off. I am going to ask our host today, Domo Giannini from AAU to give us a welcome and let us know how this fits into their vision. Okay, good afternoon or good morning everyone. I'm bringing you greetings from Accra Ghana from the Association of African Universities, particularly the Secretary General, Professor Etienne Ehile. We are very excited to be hosting this very important webinar as one of our responses to supporting academic staff in Africa to be able to cope in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a number of initiatives that we have as an association to support the universities and I invite you to look at our website, aau.org and particularly visit the page called COVID-19 within the Association of African Universities website. We are excited obviously that we got a very good response in terms of registrations and we invite you not to forget the other follow-up webinars that are coming after this one. There's a follow-up webinar on the 30th of April, another one on the 4th of May and another one on the 8th of May, still on the same subject, supporting academic staff to do their business during the lockdowns. So you're all welcome and I hope we will all have a successful session of learning. Thank you, Andrew. I hand over to you. Thank you very much for that. That's great. All right. Today's team, we've got a number of people trying to support you. This is obviously an AAU initiative and we're very thankful for them to getting this thing going. My name is Andrew Moore. I am representing OER Africa today and I've been very fortunate in the past to be involved very much with online learning and therefore I'm hoping that some of the expertise that I have come across and assimilated myself can be imparted to you. Also working as part of the team, we've got Neil Butcher. Neil Butcher is also representing OER Africa today. He is a co-project director at OER Africa and he's going to be doing a very valuable job of the back channel manager today because the group is so large. We need some hands to help us process all your queries and so on. So Neil will be looking after that and supporting him is Kathy. Kathy is also representing OER Africa today. And yes, one of those two will be responding to you in the chat facility. So once again, please notice that we have muted your mics. We wanted to stay that way. We have turned your cams off and we would like you to ask your questions through the chat facility. So that's going to be our protocol for today. So if you want to be heard, please raise your questions in the chat. All right. So what are we here for? So the design of this webinar series is really an attempt to provide you with quick and cheap solutions to suddenly now having to teach online. And we call that ERT, Emergency Remote Teaching. And if you go on the internet and have a look around, you'll see there's quite a distinction between ERT and what others are calling online learning. Obviously they're related, but they are slightly different in the sense that ERT has to be picked up quickly and we need to provide quick, simple solutions to having to engage your students in a completely different way to what we're normally used to. All right. So to do that, we've got four webinars. The first one is more of an overview. We're going to show you some ways to teach effectively. In fact, we're going to keep it really simple because in the end ERT is not a magic thing. It is really straightforward, simple, and any of you can pick it up and implement it in an effective way with a little bit of briefing, a little bit of creativity, and a bit of experience. And this is the time to try it out. So today's one is more of an overview. We're going to show you some of the principles. And we're also going to spend a bit of time in PowerPoints just showing you how you can sexy up your PowerPoints so that they are more engaging, that they respond to an ERT environment rather than perhaps as lecture notes. And yeah, so there's going to be some principles, but there's also going to be some hands on new technical skills there. If you find that this takes, if you enjoy this, then on Thursday, we've got another one, and it's much more about the process. So watch to teach during campus closure. There's no doubting that some of the materials that we try to teach in ERT are better suited to online or the online environment, and we'll show you how to go through your curriculum and actually pick out the pieces which will most likely be successful. And for those more difficult ones, we can give you some ideas about how you might do it. The third one, and next Monday, is knowing if learning is happening during campus closure. Normally, when we're in front of our lectures, we're lecturing and we're in front of the students, then we get a lot of non-verbal communication as to how well this is going down and whether the students are actually picking it up, especially with tutorials and later on with practical sessions. But of course, that's gone now. So how do you know that learning is happening when students are learning remotely and we'll show you some tricks to do that? And the fourth one will be a week on Friday. Communicate effectively during campus closure. We're going to show you the tips and tricks. How do you make sure that you are still engaged with your students, that they know you're there, that you care and that you want them to do the best they can under these trying circumstances? So that's the fourth one. All right. So let's have a look at today's agenda very quickly. We're just going to pick out four principles which we think if you can implement these, you are away, up and away. And luckily, none of these are brain surgery. It's really easy. But just a little bit of thought, a little bit of creativity and you can do that. So we're going to talk about quickly what materials should you select and what are the principles in selecting these materials? Then we're going to ask you to think about how you can contextualize the study so that it becomes more meaningful, more relevant, more engaging for the students. We want you to also think, what must the students do with your materials that would allow them to be more than just passive learners? And then we're going to ask you to provide feedback and support. We'll give you some tips and tricks about how you can do that very easily as you're going along. Then we're also going to have a little section called the tips and tricks section. We're going to look at PowerPoints and we're going to show you four things. Some of them are very easy like how do you insert graphics? How can you use open educational resources, images and photos, et cetera, online in your PowerPoint? We're also going to have a look at YouTube videos. How can you insert YouTube videos into your materials? How can you put your own voice in so you can actually have a voice over where you can talk to the points in your PowerPoint? And if you want to, you can even put a screen capture video into your PowerPoint. PowerPoint has the ability for you to capture things on your screen and put them in. So we're going to look at that too. All right. Oh, yes. Before you really get started, the webinar one resources, everything you see in this tutorial. In fact, because we're representing OER Africa, all the resources are openly licensed and you can take them and use them and adapt them. And not just what, not just this presentation, but the other resources that we have identified, you can access all of them in our webinar classroom. So we've built a Google classroom and there's the link on the screen at the moment. It's very simple, classroom.google.com. When you go in, it'll ask you for the code. So please can you have a look at that code there? Make a note. And I'll show you again at the end so that you can access all of the resources and there's lots. And at the classroom, we'll use it not just for today's webinar or for webinar, all the resources will be in the classroom so you can get hold of them. All right. So that's the prep. And now let's begin our webinar in all seriousness. Again, any questions, please use the chat facility to raise your concerns or have some queries answered. So what are the essential elements of emergency remote teaching? And we would argue that one of the things you really need to be careful about is what is it that you give to the students in terms of their materials and activities during this time. Traditionally, we've often thought that oh, oh, oh, we'll give them this reading. Oh, oh, this is a new reading. We'll add that onto the list. And as higher education institutions, it's important that our students are exposed to the full gamut of academic debates within our areas. But for emergency remote teaching, it's a bit different. The students are isolated. They are probably on a not great connection to the materials. They are feeling vulnerable and therefore we don't want to overwhelm them. We really want them to see only the really important materials, the key materials, the core stuff. And therefore, my first point today is that when you are making your selections of your materials and your activities, there must all be essential content only. This is not a case to show them the bibliography of your whole course. This is where you need to handpick carefully what is key, what is core, what is essential. This is an instance where less is more. So when you start putting together your ERT program, keep that in mind. Keep things really down to the bare bones. The second item I would say then is the materials shouldn't be too long. So yes, they must be core, but we should also think, is it possible to edit them down to their key messages? So we often say that in instructional design, we often mention the ability to chunk information. And this is based on cognitive science findings where short-term memory is kind of limited and therefore we can only process so much information at a relatively short time. So we would argue then that your materials should be concise and that if possible, you should chunk them into small segments. One of the things I've noticed is that some lecturers are putting up videos of their lecture and they put the whole two-hour lecture up. I mean, that's kind of a killer for online remote learning. I would say you should chop your video of your lecture or any other video that you create into small chunks, around about 10, 15 minutes max. I mean, if you think of these TED talks, for example, they try and keep them between 8 and 15 minutes. So the idea then is, whether it's video or whether it's text or whatever, try and keep it down to small manageable chunks. And then we would also argue while you're selecting your materials, try and go for a variety of different types of formats. So as lecturers, we often bemoan that our students just don't read anymore, that this generation aren't great readers and yet a skill for their profession that they will need in the future is to be able to process lots of readings and articles and journal research and so on. And yes, I would say normally this is something we should champion, but during ERT, I would say it's now important to start thinking about other ways to present the information if possible or just give them a mix of different formats. So yes, give them some text, but then also try and think about can we use video? Can we use audio? Are there some simulations? Is there perhaps a podcast or an audio file that we could use to break up the different types of formats? And this is backed by research as well. So if you think of gardeners, multiple intelligences, whether you like that theory or not, basically it does say that many of us have different preferences in terms of how we learn in terms of the formats. So yes, that's kind of backed up by research too. Sorry, I'm just checking my notes. My back channel is talking to me. No, not yet. All right. And then the fourth item is ideally we don't want to fall into any copyright problems also. So maybe it's a good idea. In fact, it is a good idea to make sure that we use as many open educational resources as possible. Now, obviously we are OER Africa. That's our mandate is to encourage African academics to start using OER, but also to release their own materials as OER. And so you're going to see throughout the presentation I'm going to be offering you other people's OER to back up what I'm saying. But your materials too, for your students, we would strongly encourage you to think about giving them resources where there are no copyright restrictions or problems. So material should have no barriers to access. Okay. So that was a ramble. But I would say that ideally you should look at these resources. Ideally you should download the PowerPoint at the end of the presentation and go through. There's all these links here. These are some open educational resources to do with what I'm talking about. So there you'll notice the first one there is a little tutorial how to find open content. And you can click on the little access button and it'll take you directly there. And you can go through a tutorial about how to do OER. The second one is more about how to chunk your materials. So I was talking about chunking earlier. So there's a little YouTube video which will take you through the process of chunking your material. And I also mentioned Gardner. So do you want to know a little bit more about him? If you do, here's an article that explains his multiple intelligence theory and his advice that we should offer multiple different ways to deliver the information. You can see the little CC licenses at the bottom. All of these are OERs. They all allow you to take and use them for free. You don't have to ask for permission. And all of them allow you to adapt them and reuse them in different ways if you want. Thank you to the open community for some resources there. All right. Now that we've had started, I wouldn't mind hearing a little bit about some of your perspectives from what I've said. Here is a question to consider. We would like some of you to respond in the Zoom and let us know what your answers are. But this is the query. What ways do you need to adjust the materials you have used previously? So from what I've mentioned earlier, are you in a position whereby you can now release these in this new format? Or are you kind of stuck with handwritten lecture notes? In your minds, have a think about that. You can respond in the Zoom. But for those of you who have already accessed the classroom, then I have also put in a discussion forum in there so you could also provide your answers to that query in the discussion forum in the classroom. I am going to pause just briefly while you have an opportunity to think about that question and also to post your response in the chat or the classroom discussion forum. Andrew, unfortunately, the chat facility has been somewhat compromised. So we've been Zoom bombed, which I've read about and was hoping wouldn't happen to us. That means that I've had to switch the chat off because we're getting some really, very abusive messages coming through the chat. I'm very sorry everybody about that. I thought that switching it off is probably the best solution under the circumstances. I hope you'll all understand. And I'm not sure if we can possibly, we'll try and think of a different way to add questions I will share via email my Skype address and so if you have questions, you can post them to Skype. Or alternatively, we could use the chat facility in the Google classroom, which we will monitor as well. So I'm very sorry about that, but so, yeah. So if you have a question and you have access to the Google classroom, please post it there. Some people have indicated also that they're struggling with the code. Back out. Yeah, but people are saying they've struggled with it. All right. I'll also have a look in the classroom now. I've got this on another computer. But anyway, I think you should continue going in the meantime, Andrew. All right. I can do that. Okay. Right. So let me get back to where we were. All right. So I went through that quite quickly. So what happens if you want to know more detail or you actually want to get the skills to do that? So this is a plug for our second webinar on Thursday. Hopefully we'll have sorted out some of our communication tools. But the content of the webinar two will be how to, we will investigate how to select specific parts of the curriculum that are suited to ERT. And then we will discuss how to identify resources and choose digital tools to support remote teaching. So we'll go into a lot more detail today. I was at a very high level. I just gave you four principles that you should think about. But you will go and unpack that so that you might feel ready to engage. All right. So we looked at careful selection of materials. But now we would argue that your next principle or your next essential element is to provide a context for learn. In fact, this would be good in normal teaching anyway, but is especially important for ERT. And what we're saying here is that learning happens when students understand new information in relation to what they already know or how it relates to prior experience. Again, this comes from educational research. It's very clear now that students very rarely, in fact, almost never learn something purely in isolation. It's quite rare. What they're normally doing is trying to understand what you're teaching them in terms of their prior knowledge or their past experiences. And therefore, we should help them to do this, which will make the materials and the course content much more engaging for them. They will see why this is significant, what you're trying to teach them is significant. It's interesting. This is especially true for males. Males, unless they can understand why something is important, the chances of them engaging at a deep level is pretty low. Women are slightly different. Women will hold judgment for a little while before they'll say, okay, I don't really understand why this is important or significant. So keeping that in mind then, the first thing is an easy way to do this is to actually set some questions so that when they're engaging with your material, they're not doing it passively. So say, for example, you gave them a reading or a video, and then you said, okay, read the reading or watch the video, then the problem is it has no context. There's no reason for them to feel engaged. So a quick, easy way is to ask them a question first about something that will appear in the video or the reading and then allow them to read the article, watch the video with a lens to try to answer that question. So that's an easy way to do it, but it can be superficial if it's not done well. So you can go a bit deeper and we would say provide a context whereby you are trying to understand real-world problems that are framed or that can be framed by the theory that you're trying to teach them. So for example, what's nice about this webinar series is that the real-world problem is very obvious. I mean, it's very rare you get it this strong. We are obviously trying to help you get up and running with ERT, obviously because of all the lockdowns throughout the world. But does your content lend itself to something similar? Is it an engineering problem? Is it a health issue? Is it something to do with another aspect of a world problem, like poverty or if you're doing economics, for example? So try and think about how you might do that. Also, educational research tends to suggest that when you start something, a lesson or a program, there should be some type of a hook and some type of a way to engage the students, some way to frame what they're about to do. And sometimes it could be an open-ended question, because it can be a community problem, which the materials might support, and so on. So again, find a real-world problem, see if you can set some questions in front of any resource that you offer. Try and be provocative or find a way to engage the students right up front. And then, if you're really good, then the trick is, can you find an opportunity for the students to transfer what they've learnt as theory and apply it to a specific new context? Okay, so that last one would be like first prize if you can get there. How can you set your little ERT lesson so that it builds towards the students then transferring that knowledge to solve something that's a community issue? All right, so want to know more about these things? So again, we've put together a little package of OERs for you to have a look at in your own time. So the first one is understanding what an open-ended question is. How do you set these questions that I'm talking about? Then there are, there are some principles which will allow you to set good open-ended question. And then there's a little YouTube video which has, it looks at the critical role of curiosity and engagement for today's youth in connected learning. And then there's another one about the hook. I was trying to mention, find something engaging or provocative. So starting a lesson with an initial stimulus material could be your hook. So there's a little article that you can read there as well. All of them again, open educational resources. Which brings us to our third student activity, which is to create, which is to create, sorry, brings us to our third essential element, which is to create student activities. All right, what do we mean by this? One of the big problems with education at the moment is that we probably don't set enough opportunities for the students to be active learners. Our tradition for teaching and learning has been a very passive model. We provide them with the content and we kind of fit for that's enough. So during ERT, what we would encourage you to do is to set some type of an activity which forces the students to do something with the material, not just simple recall or comprehension. Ideally it should be higher order thinking skills where they're being critical or they're having to evaluate or they're having to create something would be ideal. So what might these activities be in order to get them to engage with your materials? And an easy one for online is whereas previously we had a tutorial, now we could offer them an online debate or a discussion. Again, your role or your tutor's role would be to facilitate that discussion without actually answering them but guiding them through the discussion. So Google Classroom has a little online discussion forum but I'm sure if your institution has a learner management system then they too have normally some type of a forum or a discussion facility. However, it doesn't have to be in an LMS. You could be using social media like a WhatsApp group, something like that where you can collect your group together, your class together. If it's not too big, you can use WhatsApp groups. All right, the second type of activity that we would encourage is short focused assignments. If it's something that the materials that you've provided are building blocks to something that's much more complex and they need to go through this. You don't want to give them a big project but you could give them something short in shop perhaps to create a little PowerPoint presentation or to put together a little word assignment, a word processor document or perhaps it is to create a poster or perhaps in a graphics package. So the idea then something short and focused which they can do relatively easily online using common productivity tools in order to create evidence that they have engaged with your materials and understand them and can do something with them and ideally transfer that knowledge to something new. All right, you could also do project work that covers multiple lessons. Sometimes it gets a bit much all these short shop assignments and you think, no, rather let them build something that's more substantial by putting together all my ERT lessons. And we're going to show you that later in Webinar 2 how to actually sequence your ERT lessons so that you can build sophisticated knowledge sets and master specific skill sets. So that's another option but if you can't think of anything else then at least give them a short little quiz and again we've got tools to do this. So if you are in Google Classroom which we will investigate in more detail in the next Webinar or your institutional LMS or perhaps an online free multiple choice tool in fact we're going to look at that in the third Webinar one such tool. Okay, my back channel is talking to me they're telling me I'm getting a bit excited I got to slow down I get very excited you can see I'm getting very animated and obviously close to my heart. So four options then about element number three what can you do to make sure that your materials aren't received passively there needs to be the students need to be active learners so again get them to discuss amongst themselves you can facilitate set short, sharp assignments per article or per lesson or sequence them into a project that covers multiple of your EOT lessons or give them a test give them a short test keep in mind that you want the machine to mark it you don't want to do that so make sure that it's machine markable alright so that is element three and again we've identified some resources for you to go deeper our first resource is how to facilitate these online discussions as you can see from today that just the vast number of people in the group has given us a headache in terms of keeping our communication in our discussion going so we're going to have to think about that carefully for our next one but there are also principles about how you should facilitate a online discussion so we've got a little OER for you there and how to make online discussions work in your teaching five tips we have another one which is managing an online course discussion forums this one's a little video so if you don't want to read an article you can go through a short video on YouTube and the last one is actually an open access journal article so if you're finding this all a little bit insubstantial then you can read deeper you guys are academics you love your research based articles so please there's a couple of these research articles which go in a much deeper level promoting deep learning through project based learning a design problem so I'll also there on pecs some of the issues involved again these are all OERs there's buttons to access them online and you can see the creative commons licenses again all of them allow you to access them and just check and change them if necessary alright you might say oh but that's kind of very high level and it was it is an introduction and we're trying to give you some ideas so that you can go forward if you want to know more about these activities and how to actually build them properly and create them using these online tools and strongly advise you sign up for Webinar 3 okay know if learning is happening we're going to investigate how to set activities assignments and tests and use them to track down student growth and learning so yeah we'll get a lot more practical we'll show you some of the common pitfalls and help you become more of a practitioner an online and ERT practitioner in terms of setting activities and doing assessment which brings us to our fourth point let me just check my back room let me help you with things okay yeah alright so which brings us to the fourth point which is the essential elements of ERT number four provide feedback and support okay and again we would say that you got to appreciate the context which learning is now taking place remember that your students used to get most of the information about the course and the materials and so on from their peers the whole network, a peer network a peer network is an important part of how students cope with their academic program and now suddenly that's been taken away from them so they really are reliant now on this tenuous connection that you are setting up with your ERT and the problem often many people mention that online learning is kind of this sexy thing but it's actually a very difficult environment for the learner they often feel isolated there are many technical barriers to success and it only really works well if there is some type of support mechanism for them or the students are very much independent learners and we know not all students are so in fact I would say a small percentage are independent feel comfortable doing independent study so having said that then the link with faculty is essential and here is where you're going to provide them some feedback you're going to give them some support and let them feel that you are following them that you are supporting them that they are not in isolation but they are still part of a big learning community so still checking my back channel they are still saying carry on how would you do that so how do you make sure that faculty is supporting them that you are supporting them so one of the easy ways is to rather put up notices for the whole class so instead of engaging them one by one which can be quite trying rather put up what I have called an office hours video normally when we are doing some type of online study we say that our office is open between say four in the afternoon and six in the evening with my type of learning communities they tend to be adults and they are learning off but they are studying after work so we normally have a daily office hours open in the evening but limited and then people can post questions all day but there is an understanding that faculty will only answer during the two hours office hours so we always make sure someone is on duty in the evening however after a week of engaging with all these queries during your office hours it is a good idea to address the whole class again and this way I would encourage you guys to use your phones and to put up a little video of you discussing some of the common issues that kept repeating themselves over and over again during the course of the week and it doesn't have to be long maybe eight minutes ten minutes but one thing that they do like is to see you that you are still there and that you are engaging with them and that you are thinking about them and so on so I would say if you can use your phone and put together it doesn't have to be super professional half the fun is that they can see that it is you in your house you are also all rugged up in your lockdown situation and therefore they can appreciate that you are going through a similar experience and then during the video you obviously unpack that week's problems however the responsibility does lie with faculty and you must put together some type of a support mechanism but it makes sense to try and recreate the peer network that is now missing and some of the students would do this themselves but if not then you need to encourage them to do such a network and the obvious place to do this is in the social media platforms so again a whatsapp group in my experience has been very useful and therefore by the time I get to answer a query someone in the class has already done it for me so that is usually quite nice so I would say try and put these together so a whatsapp group a facebook page or a facebook group the issue with a facebook group of course is that it is very public so you can't really air your laundry in public and although there are these days facilities to keep it as closed as possible it is a very public environment so just keep that in mind a slightly different approach when you are using facebook and then there are numerous other channels if you are using your institutional lms for example then there is like a group mail system that you can use or a chat facility within the platform that you are using that the peer can talk to each other so see if you can start thinking about how you might set up this peer network so that they can support each other another item that is quite useful is a frequently answered questions page or resource and again the trick is not to feel that you have to do everything here so your team could put together the first couple of questions and make sure that there is a suitable approved answer but then you can get the students to actually do this for you as well and answer each other's questions and to do that you would probably want some type of a collaborative document whereby everyone has rights to edit and this can be done if you are using an institutional lms you can use the wiki facility I know in Moodle they call it wiki but most lms have some type of a collaborative tool but if you don't have that then think of google docs the idea then is set up a document make sure that there is access for the class and you can start off by from your experience putting in the types of questions that are frequently asked and a response and then ask students to set questions and find answers amongst themselves but the whole trick of course is to use a document which allows multiple people to edit and then my fourth item here is it's like they the students want to know that you are watching what they're doing and if you are distant then the students feel that you don't care and that you're not really engaged so one easy way to make sure that they know that you're watching what they're doing is to try and summarize readings and respond to what students have said so maybe set a reading but then a week later go back to it and say class let's summarize what are the main messages what are the main points and allow them to identify what they think are the main points or if it isn't forthcoming then you identify what those main points are just to make sure that they are aware that you are tracking their progress and understanding of the materials that they're going through alright so those are four simple little ways to provide feedback during the ERT sessions there are multiple materials that you can use tools that you can use and again we've put together a little basket of open educational resources which you can access and read the first one is about how to make your own little videos and you've got to get out of your mind now that you need a studio and lights and sound and all that type of thing that's very old school now most of us lecturers need to become guerrilla filmmakers so we're able to use our cell phones to put together an informative, engaging little video which we can then share with our students either through the LMS or through some type of social media group and there's a little video there for you to a little tutorial for you to read through and take away pardon me the second little resource we've got for you there is how to use social media effectively and I quite like this video this video is not all how wonderful it is it's quite a lot in there which kind of alerts you to potential problems and issues so again another little good resource about how to start accessing social media and using it if you can and then again I've got another open access article for you to read obviously social media is of a lot of interest to researchers at the moment and how that intersects with education so I've got a little one open access article which you might find of interest at this point we had planned for you guys to have a little discussion amongst yourselves and with the back channel but because we were overwhelmed by the numbers think about this in your mind okay so Andrew's just gone on a long tirade about all these items about YouTube and Facebook all these things but have a think are there any communication tools that you could deploy immediately have a think is there something that you already use maybe with your family maybe use it in a non-educational context which could now be harnessed to support your your class again keep in mind that not all students have access to great connectivity so are there any like low tech ways that you might communicate and support students don't discount email for example email is very right down there in terms of most people can access some type of static email with low on pictures but with essential text so could you use like an email group to communicate I've got a query coming in a second on this way to see what it is got through alright here we go the query is from Heidi she says I'm using Twitter and the university's LMS I think that I have a good grasp on how to engage with my students and how to keep them engaged my problem is however that I don't think much learning has taken place students have performed quite poorly in my online quizzes although I'm only assessing theory to prepare them for the more formal assessments how to how do I ensure better learning many things alright and I think this is a very common problem with ERT in fact online learning generally is we often feel that our students lose rigor when they are now left alone and to some extent this is true alright students think oh no this is hard I therefore don't have to push as hard to get through I'm finding it's a little bit overwhelming therefore I'm not going to do much and I would say that this is something we need to counter as faculty alright so we need to impose on our students our expectation that it's business as usual that they need to become tenacious if there are problems and there will be problems they need to find creative ways around the problems Heidi obviously found a creative way to get around the closed chat room for example and but at the same time students are not going to be as involved if they don't feel engaged so it goes back to what I said earlier we need to design ERT lessons which are interesting that are engaging that seem to impact on the students experiences past experiences so I'm afraid there isn't a simple answer it really needs we need better designs in terms of how our ERT lessons are put together and if you think of your lectures in the past you kind of knew when the students were engaged and when they were totally distracted alright and you've got to remember that these are young people there are many things in their lives they've got a peer network which is probably more fun than you are but we've got to find a way now to kind of package what we're teaching but in an engaging way so we can compete with these other distractions for a bit of a better word and so therefore even with our lectures we should be thinking about how do we make them more engaging if we feel that many of our students are not fully engaged during those times so it's more of an education rather than an ERT question what is nice about Heidi's comment is that she is trying to track them she is using quizzes and she's a bit put out by how poor they are so then the results are how poor the results are so again maybe we need to make it so that there is some there is some tension that there is something that they need to accomplish in order to proceed so maybe even put don't just make them all formative assessments maybe put in some two marks some summative assessments hurdles along the way so to kind of gather their thoughts so that they're focused on the next thing and again sadly this works better for males than it does for females men kind of raise their game when they see there is a barrier that needs to be overcome whereas women tend to work very nicely throughout those are generalizations but I would say yes try and provide some tension along the way it mustn't all just be totally relaxed and a holiday alright I don't know if that answered your question Heidi it's a good one and it's interesting that this is not unique Heidi's concern is not unique to the developing world a lot of developed nations mention that online learning often has the same problem that they don't feel students are totally engaged in it so yes try and make your lessons more engaged based on what I mentioned okay do you need more detail or more skill on how to communicate effectively alright before we go on let me go back to my question page right Ishmael Isaiah says what is the difference between open access and open book alright because I'm wearing my OBR Africa hat so please they are very different okay in your minds I want you to think of open as really what is open education and the general principles are we want as many people as possible to access and be successful in their studies in their education we want it to be as flexible as possible we want it to no barriers to entry and so on so when we look at all the opens and for example I've mentioned if you're ready today open access is normally used in terms of journal articles so we talk of open access journals so thinking then is these are journals which you don't need to subscribe or your institution needs to subscribe to they are freely available on the internet and can be accessed and read without any cost to the reader okay and OBR Africa has just put together an online tutorial about what is open access and how much you publish your research articles as open access so you'll put a link up in the next webinar so you can access that so open access then is more for journals and research publishing open book if it is an open textbook okay then that means it is a textbook which can be accessed without any cost that is distributed freely that many of the open textbooks allow you to adapt them and to change them as you see best and the nice thing about it is you don't have to you nor the students nor your institution has to pay lots of money for texts books many textbooks these days are astronomically expensive and so this is a one way of allowing open education access to for more students if you mean open book as an exam strategy then obviously is completely different it means the question that has been set allows you to look at the textbook during the exam time the question obviously isn't a direct comprehension question it's obviously a much more open-ended question and you might just need a couple of references and terms in your answer so that would be another interpretation of the term open book okay I hope I answered that question is there any more alright my back channel seems alright so I'm going to push on okay if you feel you need more detail and all the skill to actually develop these communication tools and support tools then here's a punt for webinar four a week on Friday where we will actually go into some more detail how to make those decisions and how to actually do it we will look at whatsapp and facebook specifically in the technical section alright okay so any more questions let me have a look at my mail maybe people are sending it that way let me have a quick look at my mail and then we will look at the technical section of today's program mail mail mail see the chat alright I'm just going for the one at the bottom because it's handy how do you know the assignments or classwork and homework are not being done by students alright and if you are it's a good question and this is one of the big concerns about online learning and especially online assessment and the answer is you would need your one of the ways you can do it is by making sure that you are using the learner management system and LMS which wants the students to be accredited into the system alright so that means there are some passwords and user names to get in if they are having someone sit next to them then and actually doing the assignment then there is no way you can tell alright if you are using an online environment like a Google classroom there are a lot more ways to hack into the system all according how important the assignment is if it's a summative assessment some type of a summative assessment then it's very important and then you need to rethink carefully about what is the assignment and how can we make sure that everyone's answer would be unique and that our students can be identified by what they do in the LMS I'm used to I use Moodle a lot then there's a facility whereby you can put the student's picture up on the screen so if you are doing your summative assessment but there are some type of invigilation going on then the invigilator can check that the photograph on the screen is the same person that's sitting in front of the machine but a purely online summative assessment means there's a lot more going on so for example if you go on Coursera for example they want you to accredit who you are and so before you can even start they want you to type up a little paragraph in as a almost like a fingerprint they want to know how do you type and so with Coursera some of their courses which are offered for accreditation then they match the typing done by the student during the exam with the little typing profile that they have for that student so there are other biometric ways you can do it for example some of them now want your fingerprint a bit like the new smartphones which are using fingerprint to access and even a few of them now are using face recognition so these are problems which have not been resolved nicely yet but I can see in the medium term that assessment will become a lot more secure online but for ERT I'm afraid you're going to have to just set questions which will allow you to recognise by the response from the student that that is most likely from the student sorry that's a long way of answering that question we've got another one here this is from I use WhatsApp groups of 10 unfortunately I don't get to see what they talk about but each WhatsApp group has a group leader I only speak to group leaders okay and I think that's an interesting practice I quite like the idea of making them more private students are more likely to be honest and speak what's on their mind in small groups but I'm a bit of a busy body I like to know what's going on so I tend to be in these groups and I'm in hundreds of WhatsApp groups and it does get a bit trying sometimes I have to turn it off just so I can have a respite but I do like that strategy I think it puts a lot of agency onto the students themselves and obviously if there's a leader the leader can raise issues to you if there's problems with the group Dr. Annette Bossoff asks get them involved by adding badges through Edmodo which is a free portal and I see Telegram becomes popular one of my students suggest that alright and again in one of the later webinars we're going to investigate a whole load of these different tools and how you might use them the idea of badges that Dr. Bossoff has mentioned is an interesting one most LMSs now allow you to offer badges so we were talking about how do we keep our students engaged that was one of the earlier questions and maybe you want to use badges so if they collect a full set of badges these are electronic badges which are awarded on completion of various tasks then there might be some type of a reward or an incentive or perhaps it's even a requirement for the course so badges is something we could investigate to keep people engaged alright okay are there any more let me just go up a little bit see if I can find one or two more alright no we'll leave it looks fine okay cool let me go back to the notes alright so we're in the last 25 minutes now and we've talked at a very high level some of those questions were really good they're more operational question which means okay I accept what you're saying in principle but how do I do that which is great so this is more of the doing section we didn't really know who you were so we had to kind of come up with some ideas for the demonstration and if you've got specific interests then let me know and then we can always work them into one of these subsequent webinars but today we are going to look at how to make your PowerPoint a bit more sexy alright we mentioned that lots of text is a bit of a turn off for some learners and what's more reading on the screen is never ideal it's always more difficult to read the screen than it is to read a book or a paper and therefore we've got to kind of think of ways to reduce the amount of text but still get our main message across so we're going to look at PowerPoint a lot of you use PowerPoint for your lecture notes so how can we make it even more engaging than perhaps it is already okay so what are we going to do we're going to look at putting graphics in a lot of us do that already but we've got to cover it so we'll look at that and I'll show you three different ways how do you put video into your PowerPoint we'll show you that quite nice because we were talking earlier about how do you make offer support we said have an online presence let people know that you're around so therefore inserting your own voice into your PowerPoint is quite nice and what's more we often say that you shouldn't put too much text in so maybe you want to expand or expound one of your points so therefore you could use the audio for that and then some of you might find that what you do is a piece of software perhaps maybe you're an economist and you're interested in the statistical packages and you want to capture what you're doing on the screen then you can use a screen capture PowerPoint allows you to do that as well okay here we go the first one is inserting graphics let's see if I can get this to go a quick and easy way to make your notes more appealing is to insert some graphics some visual elements into your notes and for most of us who use PowerPoint this is a basic step but I'll go over it again quickly in the text box you'll notice there are some little prompts directly in the middle click the first icon on the second row and this automatically opens up access to any resources that are on your laptop navigate to have an appropriate graphic and click on insert the box disappears but is replaced by the graphical image I'm going to reverse a little bit I'm going to push control z to go back to where we were and now consider a second probably more interesting way to add to your notes if you look at the second icon in the second row this one says insert online graphics this window appears and it already gives you access to Microsoft free image library and you can choose a category I'll look at money for example and it'll then provide you with any options that it has in terms of money most of this money looks American but let's just go with one of these items we will choose this one notice however that in the top left hand corner there is a filter mechanism and you can now say that you're only interested in creative commons or open licensed materials this is a good way to escape any fuss or problems to copyright issues so I normally make sure that that tick is in place and then click insert and voila we have now got the image embedded in our notes the challenge with the power point library is that it is all very stock looking and we might be needing something more specific say for example you're an economist and you might need a chart which is just not covered by the library so the easiest way to find more specific images is to use images.google.com which is Google's image search navigate to images.google.com and then type in what you're looking for so say for example we're looking for a supply and demand chart we go supply and demand curve would work and we've now got the power of Google search engine looking for specific images the problem though with the results that you get originally is that this includes everything that Google can find and some of it could be copyrighted so there is a filter to help us find materials that we can reuse without asking for permission click on tools and under usage rights you have some options which are pointing specifically at open licensed materials so I'm going to say labeled for use with modification this is nice and broad it gives me a lot of options of what I can do and now I can see what's available and the one that I'm looking for is more to do with very simple or classic supply and demand so I'm going to go for this item here and I can right click this image and go save picture as I will save it to my laptop and then return to my power point alright so now I want to insert a graphic there is no text box to use this time so I must do it using the menu so go insert a picture from this device I'm interested in this image here select it and say insert and now I have it in my notes okay right let me have a look at the chat is there what's going on in there in a second I'll give it up alright are there any about power points okay not specifically about power point but these are good questions so before we push on with the power point I'll just engage with some of these I am using Moodle as my LMS with my students I have implemented most of the strategies mentioned by Andrew to enable interaction and active participation however students do not participate most complaints are with network connections assist with other strategies it is really frustrating if they do not participate alright so William yes I'm afraid this is something we need to make very clear to our students that the fact that it is online does not mean that it's in any way inferior to what we would expect when they were face-to-face if they are are shirking then we need to shake them up however if their concerns are real if they really are struggling with connectivity then our strategies needs to be very low bandwidth and very simple so earlier I mentioned email maybe all these other nice things that have been demonstrated today the video and the audio and some relations and so on aren't going to cut it because if your community is very low bandwidth and we need to respond in a way that allows them to still access materials so email or offering text documents is not very sexy but it does get the information across and then I also mentioned earlier that maybe we need to have some hurdles they need to jump through being isolated means a lot of them just slack off so then we need to say no it's an online activity but it's for mocks or it is for part of your term mocks so I would say we've got to change their expectations but we need to be real so we need to provide them with materials and activities that can be done within the context in which they live and have to study alright we've got a question here from Bonadventure what can we do in teaching practical sessions or laboratory testing alright now we're going to cover this in the next one in more detail practicals and lab sessions are extremely difficult to do effectively online they can be done but you need to be really organized and prepared so maybe under ERT conditions you might decide no I rather do as much theory now and then we will do the ERTs where we can get back into class and that's something that we will discuss in the next webinar is which sections of your curriculum lend themselves to ERT and which ones are difficult however if you have to do lab work and practical sessions then we're going to have to introduce a video somehow alright so we can't even the real experience and therefore we're going to have to simulate what the experience would be like video is the easiest way to do it we record what normally happens in the lab and we get in real close so they can all see in detail the problem though is even a simulate no matter how good a simulation is it is not as good as a student doing it for themselves alright so during the electricians course recently in South Africa for department of higher education and training we tried to provide them with little kits of equipment that they could then use remotely when they were going through the video so we would show them in the video what to do and then expect them to actually do the practical session using the materials in the kit but again you need to be organized and you need a little bit of a budget if you're going to make sure that everyone has access to your little kit so it can be done but it's not as good as the real thing and if you are going to do it you need to be prepared and organized so yeah no quick and easy answer for that one and finally I think it's better to sample the student's opinion or what technology they feel comfortable with to deploy email are the students used to the environment and this is a big problem for ERT is that many of our students just as you're not ready they're not ready either and so I think this is a very good suggestion is look for things that people are familiar with and build up slowly from there so if they are only used to social media or only used to email they can start there and then slowly build up introducing new little tools as you discover them and find them useful alright what else we got let's push on a little bit with our presentation the next one is on video I'm going to play the video because we are already slowly running out of time in fact not so slowly but the first part would be to provide some of the information using video there are two ways to put video into your PowerPoint slides the first one would be to click the item in the second row with the little video screen and go and locate the video somewhere on your laptop but it's more likely that you want to use a YouTube video that exists out there on the internet and it is possible to embed those videos into your notes to do this you need to open your browser you need to navigate to www.youtube.com and then do a search for the video that you are interested in if I am a maths teacher for example I might be looking for some information about calculus so we will do a calculus search and YouTube provides us with a whole load of videos that are available on their platform however we want to keep copyright problems to a minimum so we are going to use the filter facility and click on creative commons and now it sifts through all the results and provides only those ones which have a creative commons license I am going to go for the first item and let's say for example that we decide that this one is appropriate what you do is you right click the video and you can choose copy video URL then you return to your PowerPoint presentation and this time you go to insert insert of video online and then it asks you to type in the URL well we have copied it so we will paste it in control V is paste and insert and now we can position it and resize it if necessary and it is embedded into the PowerPoint the only catch is for it to play on the students device they will need an internet connection one way to break all right that is the second little tip so video from a YouTube is doable again though like some of those comments that we heard previously if your students live in a low bandwidth environment then YouTube videos might not be the answer because they would obviously have to pay for the bandwidth to view them and they might not even play nicely they might be broken because of the low bandwidth so keep that in mind you will talk about it in more detail in the next webinar but how do you select tools and activities and resources that are appropriate to the environment in which the students live and study are there any more queries before we look at the next one right yes we have a request from Dennis he says please cover how we can assess accounting and tax etc in your session on assessments method marks are so critical in these assessments so the final answer is less important and multiple choice questions cannot help with this any tips will be welcome alright we can do that not specifically accountancy and tax but those type of subjects which require some type of analysis we need to see if they can actually do the doing how would you engage with that online alright so yes we can do that any other queries alright let's go back to your one more I've actually got two but we'll do one I think this one's a great one how to make your PowerPoint more personal by using voice in this next segment we're going to insert your voice into your PowerPoint slide why would you do this well good PowerPoint design means you haven't put too much text on the screen maybe they're bullet points or maybe they are key phrases and therefore they do need to be expanded on and explained in full and an audio would be a good way to do this to do that though it's pretty straightforward look at the top menu select insert the ribbon changes and on the extreme right hand side you'll see there's a section called audio so click on audio there are two options if you've recorded the audio with your phone for example and have now added the file to the PC then the laptop then you can simply upload the file into the document but it's more likely you want to use the mic on the laptop to record your audio so select record audio a little dialogue box appears it asks do you want to give it a name so you can and you'll notice that there are some controls directly below the little red circle is your record button so now you can click it and begin the recording insert your own voice select insert from the top menu select audio from the right hand side when you have completed your recording the other button that is now colored is the stop button so you can push the stop button and you'll notice then that recording has ceased but there is a little play button so you can click on the play button and go back to you so you can hear if you like it once you do like it you can say ok you'll now notice that there is a little grey speaker icon and you can position this anywhere you like on your screen the controls that the student will use are at the bottom here but you now have two further options you can decide that the audio will only play if the student clicks the icon or you can say no I want you to run to do that you right click it you will notice that you have some additional tools now at the top one is style select style and if you want it to play automatically choose play in the background alright ok stopped a little abruptly so that's again it's a nice way of keeping a presence alive online by inserting your voice into your PowerPoint lecture notes and you can also expand on what you've put in point form on the screen we're down to a few minutes now so let me just see if there's any more queries in the chat yes we've got from Jimmy he's all the way from Uganda and he says assessment and evaluation of online learning is a challenge do you have some innovative ways on how this could be conducted how can I be sure that students are answering assignments themselves ok so we have mentioned earlier about how do you know that the real student is behind there and for simple free online tools that's obviously a problem because there is no way to authenticate who is actually sitting at the machine however when we go to summative assessment there are some strategies that we can use we can use invigilation we can even use biometric devices these days on some of the tools assessment and evaluation will be covered in more detail in the third webinar so please make sure Jimmy that you're there and you'll go into a lot more detail about how you might do this alright that's my last one sorry I don't see who's in the thing let's leave it I'm going to have to sum up now because we're down to the last few minutes in the power points there is also how to capture your screen it's a few minutes so if you feel that you are trying to present some a piece of software perhaps it's a piece of software that your students need it's accounting software or statistical software and you want to take them through a procedure a bit like I did now for powerpoint then powerpoint actually has the tools to do that so have a look at that one as well yes okay alright so let's sum up then what we'll be trying to achieve today so we said there were basically four elements that should be in place for effective learning to happen we said you need to be very careful about selecting your materials don't overwhelm them don't give them too much make sure they are core essential readings and then we said ideally even those materials should be chunked or segmented into smaller pieces if possible we said that rather than just handing out resources you should try to find a way to contextualize their study so why are they going through all these materials and we mentioned things like some questions so that they can use it as a lens when they're going through the materials to fully appreciate what the materials are about or set a real world problem or set a hook you might remember we mentioned those and then we said students must not be passive if you just hand out stuff there's no ways that you can expect them to be really knowledgeable about your subject so create activities that run in parallel with all your materials or that are a result of what they've studied in the materials and finally we've mentioned that you should start investigating ways to provide feedback so that they don't become disengaged that they are actually aware that you are following them that you are setting them tasks that they are expected to perform even in these difficult times so those were our four essential elements and we saw a whole load of OERs that I mentioned today related to what we've covered this afternoon so please go into the classroom there's the link and there is the coat and we've laid them all out you can collect them up including this presentation there's also in there so if you want to look at those videos again on PowerPoint or that one that we missed out on inserting screen captures into your PowerPoint it's in there as well you can access it from there alright I'll have one more check of the chat no I haven't got anything else alright alright alright then I think that's been a session that was a marathon for you to sit there for an hour and a half I hope you're still there well some of you and again we're all to come through to the next webinar on Thursday where we are going to look at how to make your selections in terms of the in terms make your selections in terms of materials, activities and tools okay thank you very much and hope to see you again thank you very much Andrew for an excellent presentation thank you to our wonderful participants who will certainly be in touch with you via email if you have any questions or are unable to get access to the resources that we will share please feel free to get back to us thank you for being a wonderful audience enjoy the rest of your day have a good afternoon bye ciao