 Can I get everyone who's got a mobile device or a laptop to go to the website menti.com? We might have a little bit of interactivity that afternoon. And then when you're there on that site, type in the numbers 61, 42, 30. And there's a question that will appear on your screens, be it a mobile or a laptop. Just a kind of focuser this afternoon. Menti.com. And this is the live poll results coming up. So just trying to gauge where we are as an audience. We're a bit sleepy after lunch. It was a delicious lunch. Oh, but fired up, ready to go. It's slowly coming from behind. Oh, sleepy days. Oh, I could watch that all day. So it's great to have everyone here. It's great to talk to you today. When you answered your screens, you'll see a question on the answer page that says ask a question. If at any time you have a question that occurs to you, you don't have to shout out. And I often find I have a question about five minutes into a presentation and 25 minutes later, I can't remember it. So you can just type it in to that thing. And at the end of the presentation, we'll go through the questions as they submitted them. So feel free to ask as many questions as you like as we go along and they won't be forgotten. Thank you very much. And we'll see you at the end. Okay. So I am David Balfour from the Australian Film, Television, Radio School. I'm the head of teaching and learning. I'm Julia Avenall and I'm the e-learning consultant at the school also. So we're here today to talk to you about our school and our unique use of Moodle, which is an evolved use over the last four years, which allows us to support the creative education of industry focused courses. We teach film, television and radio. It's kind of in the title. And we are a unique school in many ways. Our purpose is to find support and develop the next generation of Australian storytellers in screen and broadcast. And we are a national agency. We are in the Department of Communications, but we are also a self-accredited higher education provider through Texas. So we are award our own degrees. And so we are kind of sitting in this world between government and education. And of course we have lots of compliance to do because of that. But I want to tell us a little bit about the school and because we're filmmakers, I think I do it in the form of a video. Above all, we do need a real elite of producers, of directors, of scriptwriters, of people who can show how this can be done. And the best way that I know to do this is to set up a proper film and television school. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure to come to this gallery, to this school to declare it open. But there is no question that for the rest of the lives of us all, Australia will be able to participate. Australians will be able to contribute better because of this school. It's an all week activity. The film school is a mixture of dreams and nightmares. And even the nightmares you look back on and you think, oh, how awesome, because you learned so much. I've always felt it was one of those lucky things in life. The privilege is so unique in the world. I can't tell you how lucky we are to have it. So without the film school, I wouldn't be here. I have a career only because of the film school. It's been excellent. That's a bit of our history. We were set up in 1973 because the 10 previous years saw no Australian film production, not a single film. And the government believed at that time that it was important that Australians have a voice on their own in their cinemas. And this school, along with a number of other initiatives, saw the creation of a whole generation of filmmakers, which has been, you've seen some of the graduates there afterwards. And so our role in finding, developing and supporting film students is to help create and sustain an industry. So we are deeply embedded in an industry. Our students come from all states and territories of Australia and sometimes New Zealand. And they come from diverse backgrounds. They are not all high school leavers or graduate students. They often come, having left school at the age of 16, or never gone to university. So our education to help these students has to be accommodating to a variety of educational experiences. And they all share a passion to tell the Australian stories that have motivated and moved their lives. And that passion is part of the merit selection process. And we'll get on to more, a bit about this in a minute. But our philosophy of teaching is that we deliver industry-relevant education through an experiential learning model. And we approach our craft through a conceptual approach. We believe that concepts are the key way to develop students of the future. And I'll say more about that in a minute. A pillar of our education is collaborative practice, where students have to work in complex situations to create powerful pieces of work, be it in radio or in film. And that reflection is the driver of the transformation in the students across their education experience. This is our conceptual model. We don't teach directing straight up. We don't teach screenwriting straight up. We teach character and performance and story. These are the skills. If we teach a student how to use this computer or that camera back there, in five years' time those skills will be redundant, as that camera is redundant, as technology has overtaken it. So we teach the concepts around these technologies that inform our storytelling. And that is our approach to education. And that's how we have driven our Moodle site. Our experiential learning model, as all experiential models starts with action. From day one, students are doing things in a highly structured environment that over time becomes more and more student-enabled. After doing action, they reflect, and then they do abstract conceptualization in partnership with their mentors, and then they do planning and further research to do more action again. And I'll tell you how this works. This is one semester. This is the first semester of the BA program. It's a 16-week semester, and it's intensive. Unfortunately, we don't have any part-time option. And students experience our course as one single entity. You'll see that in one week they do screen business, and the next they do story. In each week, there's a cycle of complete learning cycle. They do something, they reflect on it, they get more resources, they do it again. And that happens over the first 12 weeks, leading up to, in the last four weeks, a large, complex production. So over the course of a whole semester, students make lots of different work. And students experience our course as one course, though, like your schools and your universities, perhaps they do individual subjects. So we have a kind of challenge. They experience the course as one whole, but we are required, because we're a self-accurating organization, to do subjects and to have a whole series of structures around that. So that's one of our challenges. And Julie's going to take us through some of our solutions to these challenges. Thanks, David. So, to match this unique design of our courses with the needs of our students, we are using basic Moodle tools and themes, but we're deliberately pushing them to improve the online experience for the students within our limited resources. We have made... Our solution is to set up the courses as courses as one. We are using the collapse topic format, and each section of weekly content is released the week before the class unless it's required earlier. The students consume resources at their own pace, and we have completion tracking turned off to prevent any confusion. So what this screenshot here is showing you an example of our BA year one page in semester one, and the architecture of... We use Boost Theme here, and we have a series of icons down the bottom that link to key navigation areas for the student. So they link to things like the semester outline, the Office 365 accounts, their online timetabling system, and their assessments. So some of these links are going externally to other systems, and some of them are linking directly to Moodle objects within the course page itself. Where we are linking to Moodle objects within the course page, we keep these in a hidden content section, which we have at the bottom of the course page, and you can see here the number of items that we have in the average section. So these objects are all hidden using stealth mode. The setup of this section, and in fact actually the whole architecture of the course page itself, is set up by the education staff and by the support staff. This leaves the teaching staff free to just focus on the teaching content. So it ensures that everything is set up in a particular way and a standard way so the student gets a consistent experience throughout the courses. So this next slide is just another overview of that course page, and you can see here all the different collapsed topics that we have. So at the top we have a general, you can't see it very well, but there's a general resources section at the top, some information about orientation, and then we move into a series of sections that correspond directly to the weekly delivery pattern in the order of the subjects. The teaching staff are coming in and they're populating their section ahead of time with any resources, but we don't actually release the content to the students until the week before. Then after the lectures or workshops the teachers will come back and they'll be able to again keep populating those areas with anything that came out of the lectures, such as the audio recordings or the lecture notes or any handouts or maybe even any clips that were mentioned during the workshop. So this screenshot is an example of one of the weeks open, and you can see that some of the teachers have started to use labels to help sign post the student about how the content is divided up. That comes in handy when we do have weeks that are very much content focused rather than production focused. So you can see that our design is very, very simple. The advantage of the design is that we have a lot of staff coming into this as it's a course as one. Many of those staff are transient, they may only be with us for a few lectures, maybe a whole semester, and they all have varying levels of moodle experience. They're also time poor. Having this simple design means that all the teachers can come in, they know exactly where to put their materials and also the students know where to find their materials when it comes time to retrieve them. So this is an example of the attendance. We're taking attendance directly into moodle using the inbuilt tool. All the sessions are set up in advance and we use groups to help the teachers filter their workshops accordingly. The attendance tool is always visible to the students. We encourage them to monitor it and we are also monitoring it and every few weeks we run the inbuilt report to see how they're travelling and we will contact them if they seem to be at risk. That all takes up a lot of time. You can see the sort of reports that we have to go through on a regular basis, we know with 100 students or more and we do really think it's important though because of this unique design that we have in our pattern of delivery if a student misses a workshop if they start struggling in a subject there's no opportunity for them to go back and repeat that workshop or in fact repeat that subject. The grade book. This example I'm going to show you a few examples now actually. So this first one shows you an overview of the grade book and this is actually only six assignments or something from a whole year of assignments. The workflow around our grading process is actually quite structured. The teaching staff marked directly into Moodle. We set up the rubrics in advance and then they'll provide some feedback in the feedback comments or they'll upload a feedback sheet on the grade review panel. At the grade review panel we usually have the head teacher, the course leader and someone from the education team and then only the course leader can release the mark so we never have marks accidentally going out from any of the tutors and that sort of happens pending any decisions that come out of the panel meeting. We always have grading workflow turned on to help manage this process. It needs to be pretty locked down in the system at any one time. So this is showing you just a small snapshot of how some of the subjects are set up and how we weight them, but in fact it could be up to six times this size. And this is just a little snapshot as well of the grade book and the view that the students will see when they come in to look at their grades. So that's a little bit of an overview about how we set up Moodle for our blended courses at AFTERS and David will now talk about how we're using learning plans and a strategic audio visual strategy to further develop creative practice online. That's right. So, thank you, Julia. A lot of what you've seen is supporting around the action and further skills stages of the learning cycle. The two other ones that I want to talk about is reflection and collaboration. Reflection is a process that happens naturally but we help students formulate their reflection through learning contracts and learning plans. In the masses program, we have a standard template that students set out their particular career and personal goals at the beginning of the course. And over the course of the three or two years, they meet with mentors and they break down these larger goals into more discreet activities that they're set by their mentor. And this is an example here and attached to this will be a series of things that the student did or student feedback from the lecturer on their process. And the idea is that they enable the student to take charge of their own learning. This is where I want to go. This is what I want to gain out of this. And this is my dialogue with these experts. One thing we didn't mention is that our lecturers are not traditional lecturers. We work with people who work in industry currently. Most of our teaching staff are current practitioners. And so we're bringing people in constantly to give live, real, industry relevant feedback to students. And that's where this comes in useful because they're getting goals set by practitioners. And so this is a part of our reflective journey. And what's great about it at the end of the two years, the students can look back and see how their learning plans have changed. This wiki page, it's a simple wiki tool that has the ability to see the history. And you can go back and you can check. Well, two years ago I said I was really interested in being a screen reader. Now I'm actually learning I'm a director. I want to make things in a different way. And these are powerful tools that they can have complex, reflective conversations with their mentors. Being the film and television in radio school, we do like to use audio-vision material. And we've had to evolve a strategic approach to how to use this because when I first came here a number of years ago, we were spending three weeks on a single video. We were taking all of our professional practice skills and really making some amazing 10-minute videos. But three weeks for 10 minutes is a terrible waste of time. And also it actually is more about the student as audience as opposed to student as active participant in their learning. So we've done a lot of work over the last couple of weeks on how to use video in the classroom. And actually that's a given our particular lectures a real challenge. So our strategic view involved using source material embedding canopy and Linda and click view materials, uploading and making accessible all of our lectures. Our students are not natural, many of them are not natural readers in the same way that they would be at an undergraduate level, but they are like the audio visual. So providing the materials in that format is actually incredibly important for our students. But then we developed what I call a low-fi and a high-fi video strategy. The low-fi is quick updates in the lecture. I've got my iPhone, I will speak to it and I'll talk to you directly or I'll talk to the cohort after an experience. And it's useful to give direct formative feedback or kind of general status updates. So we've got a lot of information that we've thrown away at the end of each semester. Or used again, it depends. And then of course we also have occasionally highly produced fixed assets that are reused on an ongoing basis. And we collectively work as a team across a course level, what's the right asset that we want to create. So I'll give you a quick snapshot of one of them. So what happens if you get invited you will not be going empty handed. So today in this lecture I'm going to give you some clues, hints and hot tips on how to invent stories, shortcuts to getting those story ideas. Yep, I'm going to teach you how to cheat. It's very rare. So that's Holly Lyons, she's a screenwriting lecturer. She teaches story actually. And she's a screenwriter who worked on Home and Away in many productions around Australia. And she is not a natural presenter, but she is taking to using her phone in a really powerful way to give quick updates to her class. And what we found is, and I'm sure many of you found the same, is that highly informal, personalized, direct conversation drives better engagement than beautifully produced assets. It's really fascinating. That's not what I want to do. So that's our solutions to our problems, but we haven't touched on a number of challenges that still persist for us. So Julie's going to wrap up and talk about those. Okay, so I'll just go through these very quickly. Hopefully you can all come up to us in the foyer afterwards if you have any great ideas about how we can improve on our practice. So these are the three main areas that we're looking for help with at the moment. One of the challenges with having a course as one is that we end up with extremely large grade books. And this can be really scary for some of our teachers. As we mentioned before, they're industry practitioners, they're not teachers. We also have a lot of transient staff, and lots of staff are coming into the grade books at any one time to manage them. Because Moodle thinks everybody's doing the same course, we need to have the notifications turned on about late assignments, but actually everybody's getting the late notifications. And again, some of the practitioners find that overwhelming. The whole workflow process around that and also managing the grade book itself. The other really big challenge for us, and actually probably the biggest challenge is finding the right collaborative tools. As David mentioned earlier, collaboration is the key thing that we really is really important to our students. And Moodle doesn't at the moment have the right enhanced tools for us to use. And I'm looking forward to I think Tate New South Wales are going to speak in the workshop tool and I can't wait to hear what they're doing with that. But also we have a number of assignments that require the students to work collaboratively on documents. And at the moment we're doing a lot of work arounds with Office 365 and Google Docs and non-graded assessments. And of course the last struggle for us, and I'm sure many of you have the same problem, is managing the sheer amount of content on your page and avoiding the scroll of death. The collapse topics and the use of labels does go some way to help us wrangle that content a little bit, but by the end of the semester it can get out of hand. And we're always looking for ways that we can help the lecturers understand and get their materials into smaller packages so that we can get them online for the students. Okay, that's exactly what I was going to do. Before I go to questions, I want to say thank you to the Moodle community, Julie and I have been coming to Moodle for a number of years, and many of the things that we've seen in today's presentation have evolved out of conversations and presentations in the past. So we hope we've stimulated you and your sites, but did any of you have any questions? Thank you.