 body should get a little notification. I think we're recording. So Mark, in your own time, over to you. OK, can you see my screen? OK. Give us a thumbs up if you can, please. Yes, all good. Perfect. Thank you very much. Thanks, Rob, for that introduction. I do know the way you had 20 minutes in the speech, but you told me 15. I'm not sure what that says about me more than anything else, but we'll try to keep it as brief as possible and leave time for Q&A afterwards. So my name is Mark Linn. The Twitter handle is up there. And indeed, if you want to contact us via email, it's mark.glinn.dcu.ie. What I want to do is talk about gamification and how we've used it to engage our students in a variety of different means. But I think first off, it's important to explain to people what gamification is and indeed what gamification isn't. And for me, the definition, best definition I've come across is the fact that it uses game thinking or approaches or mechanics within games in a non-game context. All right, and I will give examples now in a second. What it's not, which is very important, is it's important to know that there's a continuum. There is gamification, there is game-based learning and serious games. Game-based learning, the best example I can give is where you're trying to teach accounting through Monopoly, for example. The game that was built and you build a teaching activity around that game. Serious games typically tend to be limited to big money courses like medicine and so on where they do simulations, computer-based simulations, but they're built specifically with education in mind. In this case, gamification, we're talking about using leaderboards. We're talking about giving students choice. We're talking about setting levels, rewards, all sorts of different things. Principles of games or elements of games to try and motivate people into learning. So the ones I want to talk about, and I've divided it up into three, the presentation is three, I wanna talk about just gamifying one activity, gamifying a module, or indeed, gamifying an entire program. And you can pick and choose which one suits you best in your context. Remember, you are the king or the queen of your program, so you make those decisions. It's not up to me to dictate to you what you should use. What progress levels could be after they have achieved a certain score, they move up to level two or they get more content. Freedom to fail allows them to do stuff as many times as they like, and there's no repercussions of failing, but they can try and try and try again until they learn. And that's a real, a great mechanism for assessment for learning as well as assessment of learning is a good example. Learning pathways, allowing people either different choices within the module, or indeed different ways to get to the same end goal at the end. You're not going to dictate to them how they should travel once they get to that destination at the end. And then conditional access and indeed rewards are other mechanisms in which you can offer them stuff. Like for example, you can't get to topic two until you've completed something in topic one. So it's a condition that you must fulfill in order to get access. And rewards can be anything, can be a certificate, can be a badge, can be a prize, a 10 euro voucher, whatever it is. Again, your module, you decide your program, you decide what it is. So the first case study I want to go through is the module that we had and a particular activity in nursing where they wanted to develop quizzes and wanted to see where the students actually engaging in the quizzes and where they worked well for the lecture. Then, and worked well for the lecture to actually take the time to create them. The solution was we created a mixture of formative and summative assessments. And then we did a quantitative analysis at the end, quantitative and so far as we looked at what their stores were of the students at the end for those that participated in these formative gamified quizzes where they could fail it as often as they like. And indeed, then we looked at the results of those that didn't engage with the formative and just went straight to the summative side of things. So that was the setup and just to go through the logistics and this particular topic, we had eight topics in this module. Each topic we had set aside 25 questions and students could do them as often as they like whenever they liked and there was no rip question. So that freedom to fail element for us. The final exam, four questions from each topic was taken. It was 32 questions was the final exam. They were only allowed one attempt and they could only do it in a particular time period. So those that engaged with the formative and the gamification elements of things and those that didn't, both sets of students had to do the final quiz which was at 32 questions. And here's what we ended up getting. So this particular quiz was on drug calculations and we had all the students, 215 students with an average market, 93%. But what was more important to us was the 71 students who'd never attempted a quiz, about 88%, 88.45% which is a fairly decent score and hats off to the lecturer involved for teaching this particular topic very well. However, when you look at the students, the last row in the column, students who had attempted the quiz at least once ended up scoring and this was a significantly importance or a significant difference between the two scores. 96.88%. So nearly a difference of 9%, 8.5% between those that had never done the quiz versus those that had engaged with the gamified elements. We wanted to look, was this just a coincidence? Was this just linked to the particular topic itself? And we looked at those during infection control. Again, another topic to be analyzed. Those that completed the quiz, what score did it get in those particular questions? So 85%, 85.41% for those that had never attempted a quiz but it shot up to 94% for those that did engage. So the conclusion that we had from it was the students that engaged with these quizzes that were given this freedom to fail, it was only one activity, remember, wasn't anything else within that module, but we gamified that activity, wanting them to be able to understand infection control and drug calculations. And we got more engagement from the students and we got better attainment at the end of the day. So that was the first case study that I wanted to use gamification for. And the second one was our colleagues in psychology where they had a particular area of research methods and it was core for them throughout the four years. It took the four years off the undergraduate degree and they realized that first year in particular but research methods throughout the four years was a problem module for a lot of students and led to retention difficulties. So what we decided to do was to introduce gamification elements, several gamification elements into this module. We did have quizzes just like in the last example, but we also had different levels for them to get through. We gave them different scenarios and they could choose which scenario to follow. And indeed, there are different answers depended. The answers they gave in particular quizzes and scenarios led them on to other learning activities and results. So we gave them individual pathways and we'd also enabled conditional access. Now, all of these are core Moodle features and indeed the analysis of the quiz features were core Moodle features that we took advantage of. But what we did in this case is we wanted to survey the students. So the last time we did a quantitative analysis of the quiz results, in this case we surveyed the students to try and see what our insights were from doing this and overwhelmingly the students responded very positive to the gamified features, to the quizzes, the endotopic quizzes, to the progress bars that we would put in and we had labels that we had introduced into the course that were conditional access that showed students where they were in the course as well as having the progress bars. The students most certainly preferred to learn remotely, to learning the scenarios, to they gave very positive feedback where they could actually engage with the scenario-based learning themselves in the comfort of their own home, but also in the safety of their own company that if they made mistakes, there was no repercussions afterwards. And what they provided real positive feedback on was when we had used real-world applications to the particular topic. So making the learning authentic but integrating gamified gamification into it. So one of our key learnings was we should use more of this within our teaching. We should try and engage and indeed the lectures involved did end up integrating into other modules that they were teaching and not just research methods. One of the other elements was around control. A positive was students felt in control of their own learning, of their own exploration of the topics and again, the freedom to fail without negative consequences. Going back to what I was saying on the previous slide about having the comfort of their own company and security of their own company when it came to making mistakes. However, the negative side of this is lectures were a little bit uncomfortable because they felt they gave too much control over to the students and felt that students that weren't motivated didn't have that intrinsic motivation to engage with the material that they may have fallen off the radar for us. So it's important to have that balance and to make sure you're accommodating all level of students and all levels of students in terms of their motivation, not just their educational attainment. So it is about getting that balance right, a balance that you as a lecturer is comfortable with but also something that will support all types of students. The last module and hopefully I'm still on time Rob, the last module I wanna talk about actually is a program in itself it was our transitions program, transition into the university. And we wanted to see where students engaging and monitor their online engagements in the orientation and we decided to gamify the entire process and we brought in all the levels of before so the progress bars, the labels, freedom to fail, personal directions, conditional access. On this case, we added in badges, we added in rewards. And this diagram I appreciate it's quite busy but if you just look at the top corner diagram there where it has this roadway, each one of those badges along the way, each one of those icons represents a badge or an activity. So the first two were badges, they had to do orientation, a general welcome, engaging with content on that then they had study skills courses. So they got badges there, the next one was a scavenger hunt that we created which was a mixture of online and in person scavenger hunts. Then the fourth icon there, the badge, the red star badge, that was a MOOC they had to do on FutureLearn. And then the last or second last one was a giveaway when they had scored a certain amount of points they were put into a draw. And then we had the personalized program list that was given to them based on what program they were given, it's sifted them off to give them the relevant information. And the bottom stream there is to signify a plugin that we had used. And the plugin is a gamification plugin which I'll mention in the next slide but each activity had points associated with it. And when they completed the activities they went up the ladder essentially going from ready to launch with zero points to up to being a newbie to being an explorer. And indeed when you'd engage with all the activities you scored 600 points and you were awarded the discoverer badge at the end of it all. Just to put into perspective we 3,800 first years come along this year over 1,600 students had got the discoverer badge which had engaged fully with that entire module. So 1,600 students fully engaged we were absolutely thrilled. And the 1,500 students had engaged and completed the MOOC. And again, that's important that the MOOC was completed it wasn't just started. The gamification plugin that I mentioned is called Level Up. It's an excellent plugin, I would highly recommend this. I see that your webcam coming on there Rob so I'll shut up now soon. But there's various different features that allows you to pick various conditions allow you to see whether they've matched them or not and whether they've matched them in combination with other activities. And on that basis, award points. It is a very short second so I leave questions indeed for after this session or indeed at a later stage if you wanna contact me offline and we can go through demos of that level of plugin. I'll wrap up with the conclusions and the conclusions that did the students engage with the content to their entainment and their engagement go up based on gamification? Absolutely did. Did it suit everybody? No, not really, but it suited the vast majority of students and staff and it is a learning process. And the second one is very much from experience I would say don't try gamify everything at once. It's one step at a time. That last program that I just took you through that wasn't developed overnight. We built on that over several semesters and indeed two years of experience in doing this online orientation. So if you are doing it one step at a time and you will start to see the progress. So Rob, that's me done. So we're back recording now. So it's over to you Nick. Thank you Rob and good afternoon all. So I am Nick Earl and I work as the Strategic Academic Project Manager at University of Gloucestershire based on our academic development units as well as managing projects for so many services and a number of teams including our learning technology team. And myself and my colleague Catherine who works as one of the academic development units learning technologists are gonna talk to you today about a project we've been involved with to enhance the electronic management of assessment. So I'm gonna talk to you first a little bit about the project focusing on its rationale, its approach and particularly how we went about the change of management. Catherine will then give you a bit of a flavor of how our solution, technical solution works in practice and then she'll hand over back over to me to talk about some of our key benefits. And I should probably declare at this stage actually this is an absolutely mammoth project. And this is there's a bit of a bit of disruption there I wonder would you turn off your video for a second if that's okay, your internet just seems to be a bit, yeah, thanks a million. Okay, okay, we can go. Right, so let me start with a little bit of background. So going back to 2017, we at the University of Gloucestershire we'd actually already moved wholesale to the electronic management of assessment. We'd already rolled out a policy that anything that can be submitted online should be and that's all Mark has needed to prepare feedback within pre-working weeks. And that was all facilitated by the spoke development of our student record system six. And very briefly what that enabled was Mark has become in these files and then make a system or they could upload files themselves and then all of that feedback and the visual grades will release to students automatically in three weeks. Now, students were generally really satisfied with this approach. That's not a surprise because that solution was developed based upon feedback they've been missing in the previous years. They really wanted to avoid traveling to Canada standing along to use the hand in assignments, paying for printing. And they also wanted a bit more consistency when feedback arrived because in some cases they were waiting months. However, we've received an awful lot of feedback that Mark has were perhaps less satisfied with the system. They found it slow to use and inflexible. And this was leading to lots of requests for additional functions. We also observed that there was been some creative way to do something about this. So we said about scoping a new piece of work and we really started out actually looking for way to find markers with much better tools. Now, we had a whole load of requests for markers. So we put together an academic working group to help us prioritize those requirements. So they wanted things like support for group work. They wanted to be able to edit feedback up into the solution of these. But down low, they wanted to annotate scripts directly in browsers. They didn't have to fiddle around, get them out and mark them up, put them back in. And due to the requirements, we didn't have technical options. And quite quickly we realized that we probably hit the ceiling really with what we could do with developing the six. And we also had some staff changes that we all meant. We had some new developers skills, which meant that we were now able to see if we consider moving submission and marking to Moodle and developing a bespoke integration with our student working system. And as we started looking at this and started realizing actually that submission would actually offer us a number of other benefits such as integration with other types of assessment tools and some various management information reports. So I'll show you this quickly. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but this was the technology environment as we began to imagine it. And in fact, as it is now, more or less. So you can see here we have Moodle and anything orange boxer tools that already integrated. So by moving over to Moodle, we thought we could provide students with their assessment briefs. They could submit their assignments as files, but they could also use tools such as the quizzes, group assignments, blog wikis, blog files. It was already integrated with our tech matching tool, which we used to turn it in. Also media platform as well, we'll be able to upload videos straight into the system, straight into our streaming platform. But of course, we didn't want to lose sight of student records because that was always going to be the place that all the system rather that owned student data and assessment data, due dates, final grades, and it dealt with processes such as, you know, extensions. So we set out on a project to migrate setting of assessment, submission of marking over to Moodle. We were aiming to develop that software bridge, build those management reports. And very importantly here, we aim to provide academics and professional staff with the communication training and support they needed to successfully make that transition to the new system. And this point here, number four, is actually really important because the first EMA project, we thought would be fairly simple actually in terms of practice. But what we found is many academic colleagues still at very low levels of digital literacy and they were some of them really struggled just to use a system to mark online and upload a feedback files, which really wasn't that different because we're attaching something to an email. So they struggled with that. Now with this project, we were completely redesigning the way technology supported a whole range of assessment processes like second marking, initial moderation, flagging suspected breaches, et cetera. So we really knew we had to pay constant attention for going to Moodle. So I'd just like to talk a little bit here about some of the key features of that change management approach. So firstly, we were very careful to identify stakeholders early on and get some good dialogue going on with them right from the business case stage. This is what we're intending to do. What's the impact on you? Get their feedback, get their endorsement before we continued. And that dialogue continued through the proper project when everything needed to explain some new solutions would go back out. I think very important here is the project governance and very briefly, that looked like a project board. It was quite lean boards that represented the business supplier user interests. But that was mainly senior staff who would steer the project to provide high level support and a project team which really was at the operational level, very much people who will be taking this forward as a service later. And it was really myself as a project manager that connected those two groups, demonstrations of our plan solutions to academic communities and various academic forums. That was very important. We got lots of good ideas, came out of those. Pilots, we did pilots in every subject community. Actual fact, within this example, the pilots were as much if not more about getting our subject communities aware this was coming, giving them some upfront experience of the system and giving them a voice as much as it was about actually testing the technology. We also did some mandatory training for all academics. Now, this was a first. We actually held training for every academic subject group and insisted that academic subject leads get their start to those meetings. Took a bit of effort, but it really paid dividends. So much so actually that we now do mandatory training for academics every summer to deal with other developments, other projects. As you might expect, we also developed a lot of online guidance for colleagues. We also ensured a really, we did a lot of skinning of the network because as I'm sure you will appreciate assessment requires a whole range of different teams support. So we made sure we train people up so they could deal with inquiries as effectively as possible. And we're also ready to respond very quickly to any teething issues and use of feedback, particularly in that first year of going live. Okay. At this point, I'm gonna hand over it to Catherine who's going to just give you a bit of a sense for how this works in practice. Thanks, Nick. So yeah, I'm gonna talk about how our electronic management of assessment works in practice. If you can go to the next slide. What we have is a simplified diagram here about how assessment works within our university. And what's quite nice about the diagram is it kind of splits up into different stages throughout the assessment process. It starts off really nicely into two parts. The all module tutors, all people within the course and all involvement within that particular assessment all go through. And it starts off with a standardized module guide that is automatically created on every single module course that we have within the university, which brings in validated details from our student record system. And also it brings in the assessment brief once it's been agreed at our assessment scrutiny process. It also then brings in in the second part that actual assignment brief. And this is where within the CMA project what it's involving now is this draft brief that tutors are setting up to bring along to our assessment scrutiny process. So everything is done within our Moodle. So within that brief they have a template which is standardized across the entire university. So all our summative briefs are identical in regards to their structure. So it makes it really clear for the students to be able to identify the instructions and the information they need for that particular assessment. And then what they can also do now within Moodle and having the features that Moodle offers within the assignment activity. We also have the option where they can submit things like Mahara portfolios but also video submissions files but different types of files. So we're not just restricting it to Word and PDFs. So it could be a Photoshop file if it's a graphic students for example that wants to come in. But we also have the option to record offline assessments. So if it's a physical artifact that needs to be handed to the tutor for example that can be scanned in to say that that's been accepted. So that all except that all happens within Moodle that goes into a draft point. And then what happens then is we go into an assessment scrutiny process that's held at course level. And at that point there's something then we have something called a SITS link code. And what that means is it's a little code that goes and connects our Moodle system to our student record system. And it's at that point the data then transfers between the systems. So the date goes from Moodle into our student records system and within there things like extension dates but also our feedback release dates also gets generated but also other automated processes like our turn it in. So we have the turn it in plugin within the assignment. So all the settings that they need for summative assessments is there for them but also things like grading scales. So everything gets set up and connected between the systems within that link code. At that point then if I'm on step seven, I'm on step seven the students hope you're gonna be viewing that assessment brief and then submitting their assessments. Then in regards to sort of step eight this is where Moodle has been really fantastic where it gives the marker a fantastic sort of flexibility in regards to marking tools. So we use a lot of academics are using the annotated script and being able to add comments onto the actual script itself. And then also they've been able to now be sort of find new ways of sort of giving feedback such as do a video or audio feedback as well on top of the scripts and being able to attach that back into the students to see but also other comments that students might want to see just general ones around the feedback. So it gives them a good sort of wide range and that flexibility that they can provide within Moodle. That gets released back to the students. They can see their provisional grades and on our sort of 20 working days that then goes across into our student record system for it to be agreed and confirmed at an exam board. We do have a few screenshots so you can actually see what it looks like within our system. Nick, if you can go to the next slide for me. Fantastic. So this is our online module guide going back to step one. So all our module course pages as you can see on the right hand side as a little tile for their module guide if you can go to the next slide, Nick. Fantastic. So this is our module guide. It has all the different aspects. They all have exactly the same sort of blocks and then in regards to our assignments our assessment briefs are located within that module assessment section. So you can click on to the module assessment if you can click for me, Nick. I think it brings up an example of our assessment brief. Here you go. And what's really good about this because as it's standard it has all our up to date sort of rules regulations and policies. So module guides aren't then becoming old or out to date. The students always have the up to date accurate information. If you can go to the next slide for me, Nick. Brilliant. So this is the assessment brief in process. So what we do have, we have a link to the side where the tutor is able to then go and copy and insert the brief template and then they're able to then infill the elements that is required for that particular assessment and type in what it is, who the tutor is, what the arrangements are, requirements, criteria, et cetera for that piece of submission. Can you go next slide please, Nick? Next slide, Nick. Brilliant. And this is just showing our variety that we can able to choose now within here within sort of Moodle. Again, having video files, Mahara and also offline assessments as well. Now coming into Moodle. You can go into next slide, sorry, Nick. Cool. So this is one of the most sort of key processes that this is the connection. So what they have within that settings and when they're setting up the brief, once it's been agreed within that assessment scrutiny process, they have a link code to connect it through and that's when all our automated processes start to happen. Next slide, Nick. This is just an image of our student declaration because everything's online, our declaration for students as well when they submit through is electronic and they can then go and click through to submit their assessments. And next slide, sorry, Nick. Brilliant. So this is our sort of grading table. So they have the option, like Nick was saying, we have the way that we can put our assessment flags in. So if it's a suspected breach, we also have our initial moderation and second marking that all happens within Moodle. Again, that can happen again within our sort of grading table view and a place where we could put feedback comments and also annotate PDFs. They can also access Turnitin reports here as well. We just use the Turnitin just to see the reports. We do all our feedback and everything within Moodle itself. If you can go to the next slide, Nick. You'll see just the key points and then this is the annotation tool that many of our markers are using so it can give that flexibility to add comments, to highlight and line what they require and use different colors, et cetera, as they need to. And then next slide, I think it's back to Nick. Back to you, Nick. Thank you, Catherine. Okay, so I'm just gonna wrap up by highlighting some of the key benefits. In fact, there have been many benefits as a very successful project. We're going through the key ones. Firstly, for academic colleagues, well, they now have assessment tools that are significantly more flexible. And some have even reported that it's five times faster to input grades and feedback, which is absolutely fantastic and, well, theoretically gives a little bit more time to actually produce feedback. Although we were very much focused in academics with these developments, there are some benefits to students as well. Students have told us that they really like that. All the learning and assessment activity is in one place. They don't have to move between systems. They also like things such as seeing their due dates come up in the mood or timeline and generally find that system clearer and easier to use than the old gone insits. And for some subject communities who are keen to use them, you know, they've been able to have come back to using annotated scripts. Now, there are also some benefits for professional services teams as well, that we haven't necessarily anticipated. But two particular ones here. Firstly, they find that the use of the Moodle user logs really helpful when investigating incidents. And the classic is a student saying, well, I've submitted late, but I logged in half an hour before and Moodle was just playing up. You know, we can now go into the system and have a look and often and may well find, actually you didn't log into, you know, five minutes past the deadline. I think students have kind of got used to that one now. I'm not sure we're here quite a certain many instances first year around. Something that's been very interesting we weren't expecting with this, but it's great. And that is actually the profile of the learning technology team has been substantially raised. I think part because they now also deal with assessments, which is obviously very important, but they're also very visible with these mandatory training each year and the support they give to all the other professional teams. So that's a really great outcome. Just a few other things to mention. For many subject communities, it depends how they are operating beforehand, but for many, the process of setting assessments has been streamlined for others, it's about the same. I think because we bought our assessment and learning systems together, we've noticed a massive increase in the use of Moodle. That was before the COVID situation, everyone moved online. We've seen improvements in NSS results as well. And just one example there, I think I'll work within EMA. Something that's done for us is we're now 31% ahead of the sector average for timely feedback. And the last one here, which is absolutely fantastic is that we now have management reports which show the status of setting assessment, student submission and timeliness of feedback at any level. So you can go in as a head of school or a subject leader or course leader, and you can have a look at the status of where assessment, set or not, it does this by looking at, is that six link code in place? We can have a look at themes of where students are typically submitting late or where feedback's been returned late. And this isn't something we heavily believe, but it's something that might give us some clues or some clues as to areas where we might just want to go and have a look and just to see what's happening in there. So again, that's been a very, very powerful outcome for us. And I will stop there and hand over for questions.