 Well, it's so nice to see you and to have some activities after the vacation and this difficult situation we are living all around the world. But we will try to do our best to give some insight to all academics and practitioners in the world of distance and e-learning. So we have still people joining. Welcome all and good afternoon or good morning or good evening because we have people mainly from Europe but also from other places. I will share my screen so we can start with the introduction. Well, welcome all of you and first of all, happy new year and thank you for all the speakers for accepting our invitation for this first webinar, ADIMNAP webinar in 2021. We will start the series of ADIMNAP monthly webinars with this one and the focus will be about social presence and interaction in e-learning. And we decided to choose this topic because it's despite the model, the framework that Terry Anderson will introduce has some years now, more than 20 years. This pandemic situation has put it into place again or more than before because many interactions now are happening online also in traditional universities. So we wanted to raise this issue and present some framework and some studies and some practices related to social presence and interaction in e-learning. And we have four presenters and here you can see the overview of the topics we will talk about. We will have the first brief introduction about ADIMNAP, the organizer of the webinar, then the four presentations and some questions and answers and please use the chat for your comments and your questions. And we will continue afterwards in the Twitter with ADIMNAP chat as in other times. And the network of academics and professionals is a part of ADIMN, of the European Distance and e-learning network. And it is conceived as a networking space for promoting collaboration between individual ADIMN members and to share knowledge and practices. And one of the main activities is this webinar. This is an activity that has been taking place for some years. And last year the ADIMNAP steering committee was renewed but we have clear that we will continue with this activity because it's very, very welcome. The ADIMNAP and the ADIMN chat. Here you have the current steering committee members and this webinar is co-organized by Francesca Amenduni and me, Ines Jaurena and we will be moderating. So let's go directly to the first presentation. And we have Terry Anderson, who is a very well-known academic in the distance education field. And he's also a member of Eden, Eden Senior Fellow. And he has been working at Tabasca University in Canada and also related to different initiatives such as the Ayurvedic Journal. And Terry, when you want, it's a pleasure to have you here. Great, well, thank you Ines for this opportunity and thank you so many people. I'm really quite thrilled. Now, if I can just find my PowerPoint slides here, where there we go. So hopefully you can see this opening screen, Introduction to the Community of Inquiry Model. I'm really glad to be able to talk about the COI model although I must confess right off the bat that as I've gotten more into mass distance education, I've seen some limitations on the Community of Inquiry Model. So I will introduce it and then I will just briefly end by talking about what I think some of the challenges are with the COI model. So let me go to the next slide. And first of all, the Community of Inquiry is a model and you've all seen drawings and illustrations of models and the value of them isn't that they explain everything but they make it so it's intuitive so that a person can get, oh yeah, here's the various elements that are interacting in a complex situation. And I think that's one of the strengths of the COI model is it isn't that sometimes these research studies come out with models with arrows going left, right and center and then getting so confused that even researchers can't make much use of much less practicing teacher. So a model leads to exploration, explication and its application in a teaching and learning environment. So you've probably seen, if you've been in the field for very long, these three, the Venn diagram of the social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence. And this was developed by Randy Garrison myself oh in 1998, 1999 and we published a number of articles on it, on each one of these separately and all together. It's really quite amazing to me how popular that model has become. It's really, it is the most cited model of online learning in this century anyways. It's used by researchers and you can look there's thousands of research articles that have used it as a basis. But I think more importantly, it's used for professional development by faculty developers who say to a situation well online learning is different. It still has many of the same quality indicators that you have in a face-to-face environment but the context has changed quite radically. And if you look and take care of the social presence of the cognitive presence and the teaching presence you will have a better course. And what we were trying to do was to have empirical ways to verify this and I'll get into those in a minute. We needed to show that online learning can be a social experience. You got to go back 20 years ago before we had even much video conferencing much less social media where the distance education was perceived then as being basically a transmission model where you would have perfectly designed texts and maybe videos but there would be very little social interaction if any. And we wanted to show that you didn't have to be in a classroom sitting in front in real time in a common location. And we needed to be able to distinguish between good and poor courses and we needed a mental model for developing that quality teaching. So why community? Even the term community inquiry, we didn't invent that. It was just taken from a face to face studies. But there is lots of evidence about the value of community. It generates commitment and belonging. It's a building block for future friendships, social capital sorts of things. And it leads to persistence and motivation. One of the big problems we have in online education was even worse in the earlier days of distance education was low completion rates. And one of the things we do know is that when people become adapted to and start leaning on and benefiting from the community then their motivation, their persistence increases. Finally, we're starting to hear lots more these days about the need to have diverse viewpoints and to talk about, we're sharing one globe and we have to learn to listen to each other, talk to each other and question each other. And I think a community is a safe place to do that in or some communities anyways. And yes, and then of course in COVID times there's a lot of people who are socially isolated. You look around, we're all in our own individual houses even in these pictures that you see in front of you. And I think that that sense of community has been denied to many of us in COVID times. So how does the model work? There's the big three, social presence, cognitive teaching presence and then we developed what we call design elements or sort of the major features of it. And then we finally got to as you'll see in the next slide for each one of them we developed indicators. And this is just an example, this is social presence. And we talked about three kind of larger groupings cohesiveness where we're talking about a group as a group, so we talk about us and we and we use fattics and salutations, high class members, that sort of thing. And then we looked for interactive behaviors where they were picking up on a thread from somebody else or quoting their somebody else's messages. Again, these were originally developed for a computer conference async and x-based environment. And they have been updated for more real-time interaction as well as for use in classrooms and face-to-face classrooms as well. And then affective behaviors, expressing emotion, humor, self-closure. So we went through for each of the three social cognitive and teaching presence and do note that we always talk from the beginning about teaching presence, not teacher presence because we felt like the community members start to teach each other as well and that sometimes they're formally requested to do so and sometimes they just do it informally. One of the challenges we had was trying to measure this with the naive assumption that all the interaction was now laid out there in text through the interactions and in a threaded discussion, which was the medium that we were using when we developed this medium. I say naive because really we know that learning doesn't only happen in what you punch into the computer conferencing. It happens when you're studying for a test, when you're talking informally, when you're on Facebook and other social media, of course nobody was in those days. So it made it simpler. But we had a challenge because it's really hard to, something like one of the indicators of social presence is use of humor. And trying to find a joke that everyone thinks is funny is really challenging. And when we were after replication and being able to get it so that we had consistent marking was really challenging. And so it was helped a lot by scholars who developed a student response so that they had to use a Likert scale survey to look at each of these elements and give a one to four rate whether the instructor clearly communicated important course topics, et cetera, et cetera. So that gave us an instrument that was certainly much easier to use to assess the community of inquiry can be used by teachers or by researchers. This is, what am I in? But the big problem, one of my biggest problem with the community of inquiry model is it is a constructivist learning model. And we haven't been able to scale them much above 30 or 40 people. I know some courses have gone up to around 50 but I think the quality starts to suffer. So one of the big problems is it focuses on student-student-student teacher and a little bit of student-content interaction. But in order to scale, we have to bump up the student-content interaction. And that was done through MOOCs where a teacher would often record on video. And then what used to be student-teacher interaction became student-content interaction where the content was the recorded voice of the teacher. And there's other ways. This was from an article at Randy Garrison and I wrote where we talked about the need for teacher-content interaction and content interacting with other content. We see that happening now more with the semantic web and artificial intelligence where content is updating other pieces of content. And I think we've got to start looking more because what I got more interested in ways to reduce the cost of higher education. And the community of inquiry model for all of its power in taking a small classroom and making it work at a distance, it doesn't scale to the hundreds of thousands of students that are necessary for some areas in the world. There's been many people who have written, factors, whole articles on additions to the COI model. People saying, oh, teaching social presence, it's just not enough. We got to have emotional presence, technical presence, communication presence, and a whole bunch of others. And none of them have really carried, really had a lot of traction. I think Randy Garrison once said that he made his whole career on Venn diagrams and Venn diagram by definition can only have three components. But the one that I like is introduced by Peter Shea called learner presence. And because no matter how good we get those other three, if the learners are not there, if they're not attentive, if they're not motivated, we're not likely to get much learning happen. So I think when you add learning, then you come to maybe a learning model rather than the COI is currently mostly a teaching model on how to teach effectively. So just to end, this is the COI site. There's many of the papers there. There's the copies of the tools. Sort of it's a central hub for the COI model and I encourage you to go there. And it's all open access stuff from Athabasca. So to conclude, it's very widely quoted heuristic and research theory. It's a simple model, but it's helping to guide but not restrain. It's based on constructivist educational pedagogy and just leave you with a couple of questions to think about. Does it speak to learning in your course contents and can you see or have you used it as a way to develop or to research your learning? So thank you, Ennis and Eden for this opportunity to talk and I will look forward to the other presentations and stop sharing. Thank you very much, Terry, for this overview about the so relevant topics you raised, including the critics or the limitations of the model, which is still a very widely used. We ourselves at UNED, we did a translation into Spanish and validation of the service to use it in our environment. And it's true, there are lately many publications still revising and using and adapting the model. So I think the issues of scalability is very relevant. And relating to that, the next presentation comes from my same university, the Spanish Distance Education University, which is one where scalability is an issue because we are one of the so-called mega universities, one of the bigger universities in distance education universities. And the next presenter is Adriana Kikowski. She's a professor at the Faculty of Philology for Language Studies in the Distance Education University in Spain. And she participates in a teaching innovation group, the same as me. We are colleagues in this. And she will present a recent study we have developed at UNED when you want. Adriana, thank you. Thank you, I would share my, yes, okay. Okay, okay, I will start. Well, firstly, thank you very much to the organizers of this webinar. It is really a pleasure for me to be here this afternoon. And as Ines just said, I'm going to present some of the results of our teaching innovation project that we have carried out last year with the support of our University, UNED, National Distance University in Spain. And the project was called Learning Practices in Open Digital Spaces and their impact on teaching at the UNED. And I want to say that this project is continued in a new project for this academic year. So we are in a project in progress. Okay, we are a group of UNED professors, the majority from the Faculty of Education, but also some professors from other faculties, such as philosophy and phycology, which is precisely my major file of teaching and research. So the main objective of UNED is to analyze the use of social networks and digital applications by students and the relationship with the UNED's distance learning methodology. The aim was to see what dynamics take place outside the UNED's virtual campus and to see how to take advantage of them to improve the quality of our teaching. So the idea was to find out from our students what motivates them to use social networks and instance messaging applications more and more often and to learn about the practices they develop in these spaces. So the methodology we use was a mixed one. So first we really benchmark digital spaces as a basis for designing the tools to be used in the next qualitative and qualitative phase. So as an intercollection instrument, we plan to carry out an online survey that we were going to distribute to the forums of the academic subjects that we teach ourselves. And for the qualitative part, we were going to carry out focus groups with undergraduate and master's students that we planned to do in our regional or local centers. It should be said that the qualitative part was touched due to the fact that the field work had to be carried out in lockdown due to the pandemic. So we decided to do the focus groups online through Teams, which was also an advantage in terms of the confirmation of the rules as it allowed us to bring together people from different geographical areas in an easier way. So I will talk to some of the very important results and from the online survey we have been able to extract some results regarding the frequency of use of social networks as well as the improvement tools of our university. We see that the tool here we can see that the tool most used by students is our learning management system, which is called ALV. Below is WASAP. We refer here to the WASAP groups that students organize themselves for each academic subject. We have Facebook and finally the university's video conference channel. We can say that the use of Twitter is practically non-existent. Regarding the use proposal we can see that with respect to WASAP it is used sorry because I couldn't translate the facts for the graphics but I will translate now at least the most important. We can see with respect to WASAP it is used primarily for consulting with colleagues and to access summaries notes or outlines made by other colleagues. Practically the same for Facebook and in the case of our LMAs it is mainly used to access course materials to contact teachers and to a lesser extent as a communication channel with colleagues. I don't have enough time with the results so I will talk about the qualitative results. The thematic areas of the dimensions that we were interested in analyzing and which we organized the forward group meetings where the learning cognitive and social dimensions and with regard to the results I'm going to give some hints because there is no time to go into detail and because as I have been saying the work is still in progress and I hope to be able to continue with the analysis in further in depth. With respect to all our learning management system and other technological tools belong to the UNED such as the video class channels it is clear that there is an unanimous opinion from all the students who express this agreement with the way it works there is a general opinion that the UNED's platforms are not adequate but it should be taken into account that as I said at the beginning the field work was carried out in the lockdown period and we cannot be unaware to the fact that the digital skills of people in general took an important turn or a turn or a relevant progress because the students now spoke fluently of applications such as teams and they compared them with UNED tools which obviously left the universities technological offerings very poor or in a good situation in fact the university in fact the university had to start using teams this year to overcome the deficiencies of its platform to the increase in online tutorials and tutorial sessions so as I said at the beginning the question of where our students are the concern to see how our students interact less and less between the forums of the official platform was a major focus of our work and why do students use social networks or other non-formal spaces as a learning strategy so when we talk about with the students about our elements the terms that we can find most often in the discourses analysed are for example terms as hierarchy formality, inactivity negative interference so in contrast in the analysis of social networks we find many more nuances and concepts which suggest that there are many more things to say about these here we can find terms such as immediacy, freedom personalisation, reliability socialisation, sharing non-formalisation, closeness more as support to mention just a few of the most frequent ones and in the case of the cognitive and social dimension when we ask how do social media and non-formal neutral spaces facilitate learning students answered things like it's all there sharing resources and materials so they value a closer less formal way of sharing of sharing materials, sharing experiences they talk about also about the study partners, about the immediacy the spaces as I said without hierarchies freedom and friend and so the technological advantage of social media is always an element of contrast with formal institutional spaces for the time the comparison between one and the other the formal and the non-formal so students talk about the formal spaces students talk about also lead an intuitive platform while they have simpler spaces that offer greater possibilities for interaction in another informal places students are always aware of the limitations of the use of social media or also as for example we talk about over saturation and the possibility of incorrect or wrong information and to finish because that's the time to compute from our study I want to signal that to respect to digital infrastructures for example in technological aspects the power university the net learning environment the elements and the rest of the tools is not very adequate as expressed by most of the students who are the users of them and as I said before the technological tools offered by the net are also it compared to the rest of the digital applications that they know and that they have on the internet so in this sense we consider that in an appropriate environment the fact to express users students do not find the information they need in the formal space so they lose their way in the learning process and they do not find the necessary feedback and in respect to the methodological aspects the current digital scene with connectivity, social networks and the abundance of open information on containers is demanding an adaptation of the teaching methods practiced in digital education in our research which as I mentioned earlier is ongoing because we can clear that students find it very effective to seek out learning resources and compliments outside the services offered by the institution sometimes these resources replace institutional ones and sometimes they complement them in this sense it seems clear that the university should adapt its teaching methods to these circumstances and the process of adaptation is one of the points we want to follow in our research so as I said all the time this presentation will be continued so thank you very much Thank you Adriana for sharing this study I'm sorry the audio was not very good sometimes it was going and coming but the slides were very useful for following the discourse in the chat there were many people sharing also their experience in the use of different social networks and the LMS and these different spaces in their own institution so thank you for sharing that and we will move to another case study in this case is Irene Chagbonot from France the University of we have invited her because she presented her master thesis study in Sweden she did the master thesis in Sweden and she presented the results in the last Eden research workshop last October and she deserved the best paper award so we have invited her to share her work which is about social presence in a course thank you Irene Hello can you all hear me well yeah I don't know yes okay great well thank you for inviting me to this webinar maybe I'm going to start by sharing my screen and maybe I can explain a bit clearer is it Stockholm University Nantes University so yeah here we go so I'm Irene Chagbonot so I graduated from Stockholm University recently and now I'm working as a pedagogical designer at the University of Nantes in France and so my presentation will be on social presence in online course so for this presentation so I decided to present my findings from my master's thesis the one that received the best research paper award and I also thought that would be interesting to open a dialogue with two other things first is so my master's thesis was on social presence in an online course that I took as a case study and interestingly the course designers of the online course started Focus Group in which they reflected on the implementation of the course and as I had access to those data and those Focus Group I'm going to try to kind of see how this echo my research as it was with the same online course and then I thought that as given the news now it would be interesting to see how my results we were done I mean during COVID-19 but the course was online before COVID-19 happened so how it echoes the pandemic and now that we have a bit more distance like also I would love to know more about your experience of social presence during COVID-19 so the study I did took as its context the growing concerns about social presence so as we understand highlighted this is something that is not new in research not at all but for sure the new context of COVID-19 as exacerbated this concern so in my research I define social presence very simply as the sense of being there with others in a mediated environment and I think like now that I'm working in the University of Nantes I can see from the like from the testimonies of other teachers how teachers are concerned for example like the way the first year students in bachelors are not able to create interaction with other students etc so I think the concern with social presence is giving is getting more importance and so in my study this slide is not completely finalized so sorry for that so I analyzed an online course that was offered by a network called Unipid Network of Finnish universities to international and national students enrolled in a Finnish higher education so it was offered in spring 2020 and the course focused on global education development from a decolonial perspective that was the course topic and so the aim was to kind of explore the education power structure, structure globally and locally that's about the course I studied and then you can see that my research, you can see this small Stockholm University logo was on social presence and I used the social constructivist lens so you will see that I'm not directly working with the community of Incury so I'm going to bring some new theories in the discussion maybe it can be interesting and so my research was based on observation of the course activities so for example forum discussions or zoom webinars on questionnaires and on interviews with students so yes and so out of the 65 students we were enrolled in the course so it was a middle-sized course, not a massive course, 22 participated in my study and then lastly so I was talking about the course designers who started reflecting on the course implementation so they did three focus group and the aim of this focus group was really to see like so the course topic was on decoloniality but the teachers wanted to also reflect on the extent to which they used as teachers the decolonial pedagogies because it was not only about the course content but also the course form and maybe you're not so familiar with decoloniality so I'm going to give a quick introduction so the idea for the course designers in introducing decoloniality was first to link with the oracentric system of knowledge bringing alternative system of knowledge in higher education in the content that we are teaching to students and secondly they wanted to break down the your keys between students and teachers and finally the third aspect of decoloniality in their practice was to say that the students should reflect on decoloniality not only in a theoretical way abstract way but in relation to their own personal histories and experiences so those elements are going to be interesting when I will kind of put into dialogue their reflection in my work so now I'm going to present some of my findings and bringing in broader discussion so in my findings I so in the course there was an effort to for students to share their identity, their experience to be open to a dialogue at a personal sense more than that for example an institutional sense so that was something that the teachers tried to do and what my results showed is that most of the time students and even teachers when they were introducing themselves to others they tend to focus mostly on like let's say their academic self for example, emphasizing their institutional belonging so they were reluctant at bringing in this personal voice and this individualized voice and also I saw that they were reluctant at sharing personal experiences and even maybe vulnerabilities especially in an online setting and what was so when I worked with the course organizer focus group it was interesting to see that they identified this resistance among students to personal experiences and to take an individual voice and not only they identified this but they explained to me that even themselves as course designers they were reluctant at bringing in their personal voice and they tend to maintain the distance with students saying that compared to their traditional course it was more difficult for them because they didn't necessarily know the student etc and so I think what is interesting here is I mean in general now it was a course on decoloniality but I think in all courses and even in during the pandemic it's interesting to think about how to bring students to share those personal experiences but also how to break down this formality and I think the previous presentation by Adriana Kiskowski I hope I'm not pronouncing it in a bad way but was also about that how to create informal space where students can actually share their vulnerability their personal experience so that was the first point then in my research I compared a class discussion in Zoom webinars and in Moodle forums so I compared students presence and teachers presence and this is very interesting when you think about the aim of the decoloniality which is to break down teacher students binary so we usually think that Zoom is something that will increase social presence because you know you can see the face of the people etc and what the results showed that there's no determining effect of this so in my result I saw that in in fact in Zoom there was less student presence because the presence was inequality distributed and it was distributed based on academic hierarchies so in a sense Zoom tend to reproduce those hierarchies and students participated in the way they engage in the discussion and compared to when we compared to Moodle actually in Moodle forums there was more students presence so in a sense Moodle appeared as a more democratic space but something that is very paradoxical is that Zoom was quite positively perceived by students and actually they tend to make it even more teacher centered whereas they didn't really like Moodle and one of the topic that came out was that Moodle was putting too much workload on them because they had to lead the discussion and be the facilitators so that was about my findings and then when I started to like work with the course designers reflection I saw that they also identify this kind of paradox because let's say they wanted to create student-led discussion for example in forums in Moodle and that was part of the idea of decolonial pedagogies which is to break down the teachers and students binary but actually when they heard about the feedbacks from the student we didn't like forum because it was putting too much workload on them they started to think is it something decolonial practice or is it something that can have bad effect and can be seen more as a neoliberal practice let me explain you so now we are putting like in student-led discussion the emphasis is on student which means that we also expect like it's also a way for teachers to have to engage less and maybe like I mean there's a cost benefit of putting the discussion on student and also we expect student to be like available at any time anywhere but this means that we consider that the university owns the time of the student and they can be and we can see it during COVID-19 where people are expected to do things late at night or receiving information late at night so there's really this issue of the bad aspect of thinking about student-led discussion or flexibility in time the second aspect that was interesting is that the course designer was wondering how to break down the teacher-traditional role by disrupting conventional learning habits because what we can see is that one of the cycle to zoom being something more student-led is the students themselves so how to disrupt students conventional learning habits but at the same time recognizing and acknowledging that students also have a need of stability especially in COVID-19 time and I think that's something that we can really wonder about the COVID-19 now because we want to bring in new practices and take this context as an opportunity to bring in new practices but I think there's also a real need to acknowledge students need of stability in a world now that seems more and more unstable so I wanted to end this presentation by asking you how did you experience social presence during COVID-19 as students as teachers but also in other any kind of other online interactions because I think we all have those experiences that seems weird or that we get used to it then but that can be actually very interesting for me and for research in general and I will also thank you for listening to me and also if you're interested so the focus group that I was mentioning will be used for an article that will be written on the course implementation on which I made my master teaching and I will have the chance to participate in this article so you can follow up. I hope this was clear and I'm really happy to hear about your experiences and questions and everything. Thank you. I want to tell you that your presentation will open up a very critical reflection and discussions so please go into the chat and interact with the other participants. At the end after the Nadia presentation we will try to read the questions and to open up our final discussion about it. I'm very happy to present the last presenter is Nadia Sansona. Nadia is a researcher in Experimental Pedagogy and Technology and Answered Learning at Unitalma Sapienza University of Rome where she is the e-learning responsible and the head of teachers and tutor training so I leave the floor to Nadia and let's listen to her presentation regarding the e-activity. Thank you all. Good evening and thank you for the invitation Francesca. I'm really happy to be here. Let's just tell me if everything is okay with my presentation. I'm going to put the screen on. Please just tell me if you can see it. Okay, thank you. Good evening again everybody. I'm Nadia Sansona from University of Rome. My university is an online university so everything we do is about technology and distance that's why in this COVID-19 we did not get too much difference from before because we are already online but we also felt the difference in the external context about our university. Tonight I will briefly tell you about the very key we use to support social interaction and especially to support a social interaction which aimed towards effective learning. I'm talking about DVDs which in some of the definition are models to promote online active participation and learning. Both considering the individual or the group collaborative learning and this is because they are based on a solid and very strong structure so they are well suited to support and promote interaction and effective interaction. We use activities in our online university to support each curricular subject so we have both online webinar lessons which are registered or in a synchronous way but above all our learning model is based on active learning so students are actively engaged and asked to perform activities and realize concrete products and objects during their learning because we need to give them this kind of concrete goals and activities based on the idea which we knew already from UAE and so on of the effectiveness of active learning, learning by doing so we need especially when each interaction is mediated via a tool or an online environment such as Moodle or Zoom or Google Meet and so on we need to support strong interaction because of the distance and of the literature and the many researches of the sensation of being alone left alone from the screen so we need to support students to feel the presence of others but above all to feel that they have a common goal that they are all asked to reach for this goal which is also to shift from an acquisition metaphor of learning and of knowledge to a participation one that is to build together artifacts which are valuable for their society but for their community and to interact with the peers, with the teachers with the tools and with the overall context so we need first of all to change our perspective about learning and to use this medium not only to perceive social interaction and social presence more than before more than in presence and in face to face interaction but above all to change our view of learning to innovate knowledge and to develop crucial skills that are what we need in the nowadays society also because of the pandemic but we hopefully we will go through and after the pandemic we need to support our students to develop crucial skills such as collaboration such as critical thinking learning to learn and so on that is why because we use activities to support a social interaction activities which we can think about like a recipe made up of many ingredients so first of all the need for clear instructions which we need to give as a learning designer as a teacher to our students instruction about what they are asked to do what they are asked to achieve together so about the tools, timing the evaluation and so on the more an activity is clearly defined from the beginning the more results our students will reach together or individually it depends on the activity then we need to give them interesting and attractive parts which some call the problems the question to begin with and then to continue in their interactions when they are called to produce together a final report a final project a prototype everything that we ask them to build to prepare not just for the examination but to feel part of the same community and to support the interaction and finally we need to give them from the beginning to the end and during the activity effective feedback about their process not just about their learning on the results but about how they are interacting how they are collaborating and how effective is their interaction with the tools and with the peers so the presence of the teacher during the process from the beginning with the instructions and the parts to the end with the feedbacks is very important and it is one thing that should be carefully designed from the beginning and here I want to just show you how we implement the activity in the practical and literature guidelines in the concrete reality of our university so we choose a prototypal cycle of activity online in the Moodle platform and how the interaction are supported in this environment by the many tools not just Moodle but also Zoom or Meet or any other platform to support a real-time interaction from the forums so the asynchronous interaction we begin each small or big activity with a kickoff moment in which through webinar or forums or pre-registered videos or texts we give our students the instructions that they need to go through the activity and to interact with each other so there is a first moment of kickoff followed by supported and guided interactions and group and individual work in which students are clearly demanded to interact with each other in forums or using the same channel like Zoom or any other tools they feel adequate to support their interaction but this interaction should be carefully guided by an inquiry and a problem solved situation a case study everything is good in order to support their interaction as well as they have clear instructions on timing, on roles because we also use the role-taking and on the final goal they have to reach all together or individual which could be a conceptual map to be all together built or a project or a research project because my course is about psychology so they have to know about the methodology and so it depends on the curriculum topic and then there is the final step of the cycle which is based on the students reflection supported by the teacher's assessment but from a formative point of view we use obviously a formative framework of evaluation a sustainable evaluation so students from the beginning to the end are asked to reflect upon their process their results, their group interaction and to provide each other from individual and group point of view with constructive feedback so we scaffold them to learn how to evaluate each other's but via effective communication and social interaction so we have a cycle which support a continuous shift from individual to the group from individual agency to social agency from passive to explicit knowledge from different kind of knowledge in all texts, videos discussions, examples experts coming and giving their point of view to our students and also using conceptual maps, visual maps many kind of knowledge, many kind of experiences in order to combine them and help students develop some crucial competencies which we need from university students and then from a worker which are about effective communication first of all social interaction, teamwork communication and also critical thinking about their process about how they are interacting which is what is a good interaction which is a bad interaction so I'm going to the end of my presentation maybe this kind of structure I presented to you may seem kind of rigid kind of straight but it's not because you should keep in mind just to give students precise instructions about timing about the tools and to support them during the interactions to be present to give them feedback, useful feedback then you can obviously you can adapt the many activities you can imagine you can think about to your curriculum subject to your students their age, their background to the tools you have available to the historical moment pandemic or not pandemic and so on but what you should keep in mind as a teacher, as a learning designer is this final remark about the learning designer, I'm a designer and which is that learning design is an art so you should have passion and motivation but also skills and preparation to be a good designer, you need time you cannot improvise good activity because you need also to imagine possible obstacles and you know difficulties from students about the tools, about the group interaction conflicts and so on so you need to give yourself and your students enough time to all of these obstacles internally resistance and so on about technologies and also you have to prepare good materials good lessons and good instructions for your students and finally you have to think about your role as a teacher and think about if you need a learning designer to help you with the planning and above all if you need and it's obviously like that in an online environment well equipped and skilled and prepared tutors tutors to help you with an activity because it's a complex architecture of an activity which you need to perform online where you don't have to see your students all around the activity there is a social distance that you should face so you need well prepared people in each role of the activity so that's all for my presentation I hope it was clear most of all and interesting for you all and if you have questions I would be glad to answer to you Thank you so much Nadia for your presentation you received a lot of feedback in the chat and also in the question and answer so we are at 6 now our presentation should start but I ask to the secretary that if we can have some minutes to to start to answer some of the questions for the presenters I try to collect all the questions so I select one for each presenter so one for Terry is this one of the best interaction is between students how do you encourage that in synchronous communication for Adriana are students becoming more aware of surveillance and integrity issues for Irene could you please provide some solution regarding the student teacher interaction via the platform moodle and for Nadia which platform is the best for an asynchronous mode of learning in higher education I want to invite you to briefly answer and I also want to invite you to participate in the hidden chat because we keep the conversation also there after we close the webinar okay do you want me to begin sorry the question what is the best interaction how do you encourage them in synchronous communication well I think Nadia answered that question in her presentation it was an interesting question I think the the model of these E activities I really like the fact that it's it focuses on projects group-based learning breaking a synchronous group into group rooms I think is critically important and I think that if you look back in the literature there is you know 20 30 40 years worth of online area in a face-to-face environments but online has some distinct advantages too so I think it's all depends on the learning activity in synchronous and asynchronous but synchronous has of course the power to really allow people to interact in a more sort of a real time in a real way understanding the fact that it opens the door for the teacher domination that Irene talked about that the teachers have to get away from just using it as a lecture model so I'll leave it at that thank you Adriana do you want to answer to your question is your mic okay thank you sorry well I think that people worry about issues of control and surveillance etc but I don't think that that issue is the most important at least for me that because what I want to suggest is that teachers should be aware that there is a huge war beyond the LMS and beyond the resources of our universities and the community activity of the highest importance is taking place in these spaces so the question I think maybe is provoking but I think the question is not about formal or informal or about public or commercial platform it seems to me that the issue is where the training activities takes place in all its extent so I think we need to change our system our restrictive models the classroom has already lost its walls so do not replace the walls of the classroom with the boundaries of our LMS so I think we have to incorporate more social networking activity very in mind that the community of inquiry needs to be expanded by enhancing the cognitive capacities that can stimulate social networks so to bring the study closer to the students practice spaces so I don't have a full receipt but we have to be aware of where the students are and try to approach them thank you thank you Adriana please continue with the question okay great so thank you for your question I'm sorry that I drawn you in theories and I gave not enough solution in my presentation I think the nice thing about this is that I think the other presentation brought a lot of ideas and I think in the chat as well so regarding how to improve student teachers interaction I'm not going to give another solution to the many solution that was given but I'm going to do a bit different answer I would say that I agree with Adriana that you need to plan and you need to make sure you are prepared as a course designer or as a teacher but I would say something that is important if you want to make sure that for example teachers are not taking the whole space or to understand well the social interaction that are happening in your classroom I would say what is also very important is what I would call the pedagogy of the moment which means that you need to plan but you shouldn't think that it's all about planning it's also about being sensitive about what's happening in your classroom and what's happening between students and sometimes we tend to a bit like forget about this when we are doing online education and that would be my take on this thank you Thank you and Nadia if you want you can conclude Yes Right there is no good answer to the question which was directed to me because I don't think we cannot claim there is a unique best platform for synchronous learning what I can tell you is that for my experience since now till now Moodle is certainly a very good platform not just to support a synchronous interaction because to the same we have many many web forums and so on we can just use a common whatever forum but Moodle as you as you well know is a constructive such a constructive platform so it supports a very good way of thinking about learning about formative evaluation about group work so it provides teachers and students with so many tools about collaborative learning and work that I personally I prefer Moodle to other platforms but I do not think it's perfect because it is also a closed system and it's not so social but you know compared for example with Google classroom or many others social platform it has some advantages when you want to engage your students in a long path very well structured and followed by a learning designer and a teacher I would suggest to go for Moodle but it depends as Irene was saying the moment on your students and underneath you are facing in that very moment so there is no right and always valuable answer to this question I like to the pedagogy of the moment and also there is no good tool of the moment we have to follow also our instincts and above all the learning goals and the learning idea in mind so if we need to put the students in the center of the process we need a platform which supports students in doing this but there is no answer to this search for the perfect tool and the perfect environment according to me. Thank you so much Nadia I think that we can close this great presentation with a lot of interaction and I hope to see you on Twitter this Twitter chat will be based on your questions so we will use your question to start the discussion and I want to tell you that you will find the registration of this presentation on YouTube and thank you for the presenters Thank you very much it was really nice your contributions and also the chat it was really nice my insights. Thank you Bye