 Hello and thank you for being here today. My theme is Encouraging Engagement with Technology and I was talking to my husband about it who's in a similar field to me and he said, I can't believe that you have used that preposition in that title. It's so ambiguous. And given my sociocultural linguistic background, he said, I can't believe it. What are you really talking about? So, thanks darling. This is why I test these things. What I'm really talking about is how we get our learners on board being active participants in their own learning and technology is one of the tools that we can use to do that. So it's an encouraging engagement with technology or through technology or with technology on the side, all of those things. I was getting quite nostalgic listening to Don talk this morning. I thought I'd love to have done that PhD. I was doing a lot of activities that I used to do in the classrooms and so on. Today I'm going to talk to you about the challenges that face large institutions, particularly Monash. Look at examples of what we're doing here at Monash using technology to engage our students in authentic learning. See how that other teachers are doing it with quite sophisticated tools and quite, you know, tools that we can all use and then how we can use Moodle at the end. I'm going to talk a little bit about that, how we can use Moodle to do some of that as well. So the challenges were quite a large institution. We have about 65,000 students. They're spread across five campuses here in Victoria and we have international campuses as well in Malaysia, South Africa and the Prato Center in Italy. And I've put my hand up to go to the Prato Center because I'm sure they need some education design there but I haven't had that gig yet. But that sounds really lovely. We've got a lot of students at Malaysia and often courses that we have here are run here and Malaysia simultaneously. They're quite large classes that we have, business economics, medicine, health science and science can have cohorts of a thousand students per unit which comes with a lot of logistical issues, large lectures and so on and how can we personalize that and make that sort of more meaningful. We have a high percentage of international students so they need individual one-to-one sort of help with their language. All our students go through the IELTS test and there's a certain level of language ability that they have to have when they, or they should have when they enroll but this doesn't give them necessarily a working language so how do we deal with that in the classroom? How do we do that? Our academics are very, very busy as you would all yourselves be. They have teaching loads and research commitments. Malaysia is a research intense university and the research work that our academics do is really important and they are promoted on the basis of their research and we need to maintain high quality of learning and teaching for our students. So as part of the Office of Vice Provost Learning and Teaching I'm involved in what we are calling unit enhancement which is essentially getting teachers involved in looking at how they're delivering, looking at what they're doing online, looking at what they're doing face to face, introducing a blended learning methodology or enhancing a blended learning methodology and helping them personalise that learning for their students. My aim as an education designer is to make it easy for them to do that and I think Moodle has a lot of really good tools that are easy for people to use. You don't need elaborate plug-ins if people have trouble getting their head around sometimes and I'm going to show you at the end of this some of the tools I think that people can do that really make the learning valuable and individual personalised engaging our students. So I'm going to show you three projects that we have here that we're doing. The first one is with business economics. Now, they have built Starlab which is on our core field campus. They also run this in Malaysia so they're aiming at doing it simultaneously. Starlab is a suite of financial simulations. They have lots of programmes and they do market training and they do all sorts of things related to banking international banking and so on. It's as authentic as it can be. Last year they had 2,000 students go through it there's high engagement with the students and it's run from undergraduate and postgraduate. I'm going to let Kevin tell you about it. Starlab stands for simulated teaching and research laboratory and it is aimed at actually involving the students in making the theories come alive. Today's really about consolidating your learning. Today's really about you thinking about the issues. Our initial process was to develop a trading room. It was the first established at a university in Australia. Starlab was started some 25 years ago and it's been an integral part of the curriculum here in banking and finance at Monash University for all those years. The software packages that are used confront students with real life scenarios both in financial markets and in corporate decision making capital budgeting and so forth. So what the Starlab does is it really allows you to take the knowledge and the theory that you've learned throughout your degree and then weave it into a very practical experience. The key skills that the students will get from Starlab will be transactional trading and managing a position. Secondly they would be connecting economic information and aggregates to market outcomes and thirdly teamwork and collaboration. Every semester each team of about three students sometimes maybe four is designated a bank. So it really is like a real life simulation of whatever is happening in the economy. So that's some feedback from the people who have been involved in the building of this program, the teachers, the industry consultation and the students. The key objectives are to help the graduates become ethical and engaged employable global citizens. Now that's quite a big undertaking for a course. The course has been running a long time and they've developed a lot of software to work with this and to help the students get involved in project planning and decision making and ethical. They have ethical dilemmas. The students are engaged at this in a real level. They work in teams, they work individually. They have to produce all their coursework in authentic workplace documents. So Kevin who was featured in that video won't accept essay type responses to assessments if they don't do it in a reporting format, if they don't use business artefacts to produce their reports and their assessments. He takes marks off actually. He really wants to immerse them into this community of practice of banking and finance. The assessment is what the students care about. Teachers care about content. Teachers care about creating learning opportunities. Students care about assessment. Students are, is this going to be on the test? Am I really going to have to know this? So the Monash graduates, graduate attributes are built into the assessment tasks so that the students are working as finance people. They're working as bankers. They're working in this process all the time they're embedded in that so that when they graduate, they have the qualities and the attributes that will be recognized in the workplace, that will be recognized in interviews and that will make them very successful when they're looking for work and start work immediately. So here's the assessment tasks that are involved in the build all of this up. They have individual assessment. They do project reports. They do business reports and because they work with industry, they have opportunities to network and give presentations and really immerse themselves in this. The students really like things like quizzes because it gives them feedback and they do presentations. As I said, they get feedback all the time on the work that they're doing. Though they have a big cohort or though they have about a thousand students per semester, per unit, the teachers break them into groups. They have lectures but they also have group workers in addition to the Starlab work and they really tease out all the ideas that they need to be working on. So here's some of the feedback that the students have had. I'm well prepared for employment before the Starlab experience and the project work that they did. For example, on average 34.9 after the Starlab, 61.5. And then it's broken down for males and females in some of these as well. Students entered learning. Learning is largely instructor-led. Most students thought that it was but after that they thought, no, actually, I do a lot of the work as well. So it changes. Learning in groups is more effective than learning on our own. I really like this one because traditionally students really don't like group work because it's problematic. They have to negotiate with each other and someone always doesn't do the work and someone always does most of the work and students generally don't like it. We do a lot of work with these groups to help them work in teams and work effectively in teams. So that's part of the built into the learning. But by the end of it, a lot more often think working in teams is a really good thing. So that's a really good workplace attribute. I don't think I've ever applied for a job that hasn't had teamwork as one of the key selection or desirable selections. I love this one. I do not feel anxious about executing million-dollar money market or foreign exchange trades. Can anyone put their hand up and say they don't feel anxious about that? I cannot. Language, I'm not maths. You can hear me stumbling over the words finance. It's not me. Before Starlab, 42% of the male said no, I don't feel anxious about that. 28% of the female said no, I don't feel anxious about that. After that, it changed considerably. They all felt a lot more confident. I don't feel anxious. Actually, that's skewed around that. They actually improved their level of anxiety about that drop and they improved because of the practice that they'd had. And the ethical issues one. At the beginning, this is the last criteria, at the beginning they were all fairly confident that they had their ethics sorted. They knew what was right and wrong. They knew how to make decisions. They weren't so sure after that. I see that as a good thing. I don't think that we should ever think that, yeah, we've got the ethics sorted, that situations require unique responses and I like to think that our students are very reflective about the work that they do and they're building a more mature capability in that. And profit is more important than ethics. Great one, isn't it? Profit's more important. Is it? Is it really? At the first 42% it was at the end 55% of the males said is more important than ethics. They are in banking and finance but the ethical element is still very important. So the star lab here pictures of students working together in the star lab we have 108 students. They often set up two rooms and have them trading against each other and this year as I said we're hoping to do this with Malaysia in real time as well. Here's the website if you want to check it out. But while the students, what happens is the students will come into star lab and they're working away on a planned scenario that the teachers have programmed in and set up for the day and they're working along and everything's going along really nicely and then Kevin, who you can see standing there will go into the control room and there are a couple of students in there whose job it is to add variables to the day's work. So he will go in and say things are looking pretty good out there and they've got the value of the Australian dollar and they change it and then it gets really noisy outside and everyone's ringing and phoning and changing things or why don't you say that Greece has voted no on the referendum and things will change again and all hell breaks loose again and the room becomes all noisy again. So nothing is taken for granted. The students have to respond very quickly to this. This is authentic learning for them and it's very, very effective for our learners. But this is a big program that is programmed and it's not something that ordinary mere mortals like us can do in Moodle, but it's a really good program. The next program I'd like to talk about is a case study that was developed by one of our ed designers here in collaboration with Medicine, Nursing and Health Science and it's called ISAP. It's Integrating Science and Practice and its aim is to provide authentic case studies for the students across all the disciplines to work on and react to and get feedback on. So it's scenario based learning. It's case based learning. It's stories. What's most powerful for our students? What do they really remember and I think it's the stories. So they have scenarios that are from actual scenarios. Names and faces have been changed to protect the innocent but these incidents really happened. So the students have to react to an incident, write the reports and so on as if they were really, really there. The challenges for the faculty of medicine are to bridge the gap between the university life and the theory and the research and what actually happens in practice. So it takes a long time to be a doctor or to be a nurse and there's a lot of theory but when you get out into the clinic how does that translate? I had the same issue when I did teaching education. There's a lot of theory and everything which is wonderful and underpins what you do but you get into the classroom in 35 in those days. Young children are looking up at you and it's like well Piages you're at this level and it doesn't work like that and it doesn't work in the clinic as well. So it really needs to be something that's going to help students work through actual things before they can get out there and do some damage. So what we have built is a learning object in effect that's web based and it has cases and you can see this is the front page of one of the first case and it's a radiography case study and someone is handed the work for that worksheet. This is what you need to do. It's your first day, it's a busy night and someone has presented and the doctor sent through the instructions I want these x-rays done. This is what happens. So the top screen is the next page of the scenario and what happens the radiographer starts to do the x-rays and the patient is an elderly male and he's a bit uncomfortable so that he does the first two x-rays that were ordered by the doctor and you can see them there. But he doesn't do the third x-ray that the doctor ordered because the patient gets really anxious and starts to throw up and it's all over the place. So the radiographer is there on his eye and the patient is covered in vomit and everything is covered in vomit. So he asks a nurse to help him clean it up and the nurse says oh we're going to get back to emergency. You deal with it. So the radiographer cleans up the patient and makes a decision. What am I going to do? The doctor wants me to do the third x-ray but we can't. So he cleans up the patient, takes them back to the ward or somewhere. Then the doctor comes in and says well what about that x-ray? I told you to do this you didn't do this why? All along the time there are reports that the radiographer has to fill in and say what's happened and why it's happened because really if the doctor tells you to do something you don't you've got to have a pretty good reason. So I'm going to show you a video of some of the participants and the teachers in Marilyn Baird Professor Marilyn Baird talking about this project and why it's really really useful. ISAP is integrating science and practice and the real goal is that we help students see the value of scientific knowledge in informing their clinical decisions so that patients receive expert care. There are several elements to the design of ISAP. You start off with the scenario or the case it's written fairly shortly, succinctly, it can be a letter form it can be an image it can be whatever but what it must do is give the student an idea of what they need to do with that case. The second element is a student is told essentially the professional issues in the case. They are then provided with resources to go away and create a clinical action plan or CAP. Once they create the action plan in response to the issues raised within the case they upload it on uploading they get a copy of the expert report or action plan. The learning doesn't stop there, the student or students must then compare their action plan with the action plan or suggested response by the expert and upload a comparative report. The comparative report is for me the element of the entire process that the educator can gain some insights into the critical thinking the reflective abilities of the student because until we actually get the students to commit to paper what that case really taught them we can't be sure of anything we don't even not even sure if they actually read or made sense of what the expert suggested should be their approach in the particular situation described within the case. So that's what it's about. It's about that authenticity but then producing the documentation to show that they understand what's really been going on. They download the documents from this case study as you can see and then they get video feedback or a video insight from an expert to say how they should have reacted. So this woman tells them about the appropriate action that radiographers should have taken with the ill patient to continue with the x-rays. So I'm just going to show you briefly what the students think about this because their voice is powerful. Students are actually being facilitated to reflect on the situation that they've been given so with that expert report they can reflect on how the expert did it and reflect back on what they've done so they can do it differently or do it better than before. ISAP gave me the opportunity to self reflect back on to my practice and it gives me the opportunity to also introspectively look at what I've done and how I could further improve my practice. So that's really an essential part of it that the students develop the language and they're able to think like a practitioner. They're being enculturated into this community of practitioners so they develop the language they don't say well I've got to continue with this that they have the patient at the centre and this is really important for our students to learn before we send them out into the clinic because if that old man was your father and you just had someone who said well I've got to get this done that's really inappropriate and you'd be very upset. I'm going to touch briefly on this because I see we're getting close to running out of time but this is higher ed degree students Honours students and PhD students who are part of the robotics laboratory in the swarm have developed swarm technology. What I liked about this project was that it and they do lots of projects but it's a collaboration of a lot of different disciplines so is that on yet? This is the little single unit, little simple unit that makes up part of the swarm here and the swarm little robots are programmed to act as a group to collaborate and make decisions as a group from directions and obviously a mathematical algorithm from the central computer. This project brings together students of mathematics, biological sciences mechanical and electrical engineers IT people all of whom contribute to make this a really valuable experience. Each of them knows something that the others don't. So this, I really loved this obviously robots are really cool and glamorous and so on but it's the project work, it's the group work and it's the this is really authentic work these students are sitting at the grown-ups table in the real world with real people they are involved in cutting edge research and technology and that's really validating for them as well so that's a really wonderful project it's not something that I could do so I need to mention that aside, I need to now look at social media because social media is a big part of education, we've got twitter streams going on and so on, I just want to show you a couple of class units that use social media I'm going to look at Facebook and Yammer Twitter's brilliant, I love it if you've, you know, I'm on twitter but it's very public and so Yammer is a preferred platform for our students for some of our students because of the nature of its privacy so this is Facebook, this is science communication and practice and it's student controlled, as you can see what's the clue here that it's student controlled clue is John Snow the teacher did not put up that photo of John Snow, does anyone watch Game of Thrones hands up, show of hands, anyone recognize this, you know sad looking person this is John Snow, there was a question on the exam about John Snow this post came up after the exam after saving London, despite saving London from the cholera epidemic John Snow still knew nothing which is a theme, a meme that's going around at the moment you know nothing John Snow I won't tell you the cholera story, it's pretty fascinating it signified a real shift in science and germ theory the way John Snow worked out where the cholera was and how he worked that out, it's pretty fascinating but mostly this Facebook page is used by the students to ask questions about the exam questions about what they have to do they use it more than they use the Moodle forums, it's accessible the teachers love it any claims of pseudoscience falsifiable does anyone know what Flair is I think is one of these questions somewhere these are things that are on the exam that students are asking about in the weeks leading up to the exam they use it as their own form of communication the teacher likes it because the students use Facebook that's a no brainer but not everyone does and this comment I hear this a lot where's my thing, teacher has less control this is a problem that teachers have if we give control of the learning to the students they might learn the wrong thing and a lot of teachers are worried about that students the teachers do go into Facebook and correct any misunderstandings to trust our students more to find their way to the right answer and then there's social media Yammer this is a psychology and psychiatry group and they use Yammer because of its very closed nature and they use it to ask questions about the course who's doing the reading, what reading should I be doing and so on students care about assessment there are lots of questions in these and I think that as practitioners we should really rethink how we assess try and make our assessment more authentic essays are fine they're a great way of teasing out what students know, what they don't know and the theory underpinning it but there are lots of ways that our students can demonstrate their understanding they could make videos of what they're doing they could collate a whole lot of different things into something like Moodle Wiki or we use Google tools for education so they could use Google sites or WordPress and draw a whole lot of things there's more than one way to represent what we know and I think we should really give our students the opportunity at least in at least one assessment task to do that the ed designers are working with the teachers to help rethink their assessment practice, think about the weightings and should you have an 80% exam so what can we do in Moodle so the ISAP case the ISAP case could be built really beautifully in Moodle with a Moodle lesson you can link to documents that students download you can add videos, you can add pictures you can make it more like a decision I love Moodle for decision making it's a really powerful tool I always get teachers to start with big bits of butcher paper so they can draw the tree, the decision tree and have post-it notes so they can move things around before they actually build it it's quite, once you start building it it can become a bit overwhelming we're doing a lot of work also with peer assessment so that our students are reviewing each other's work okay, two more minutes students can assess each other's work research has shown that when students have to look at someone else's work if they're going to be reviewing someone else's work and have their work looked at by someone else they work harder if they're doing something just for the teacher they do what the teacher wants but if their peers are going to be looking at it they are more careful about what they do and we use the Moodle workshop for that and I've run a workshop in building a Moodle workshop and teased out all those ideas of control and so on I will flip through these quite quickly because I am out of time but I want to emphasise that Moodle should be used as a learning it is teacher controlled and should be used to develop learning and build learning design in and contextualise all the learning we do use authentic activities I'm a big fan of choice if you saw my presentation yesterday you'll know I'm a big fan of choice it gives students information before the lecture before they come they're thinking about the topic it gives them something controversial they have to vote when they get to the lecture you mention it they think oh I thought that it pre-activates their thinking about a topic and I'm encouraging the use of this as a pre-learning activity because really students don't often do the reading we would like them to do sort your content and activities, contextualise the learning and so on using pages Moodle pages I think are possibly underused they can be used to contextualise any activity that you do the ISAP case study could also be built in a series of linked pages you could make your own link from page to page again you can download documents and insert videos they're really powerful this science and communication unit is using it to sort the learning for that topic so here's what you need to know for this topic here is what you're going to do here are the links to the assessment tasks and the lecture slides that you really want all in the one place for the student to find so for our advanced learners not a problem they can sort it out but for our students who have English as a second language or students who don't have good learning strategies this is really powerful for helping them develop the cognitive skills that they need to manage their learning this is thinking about what the learner needs not just putting our documents up in Moodle because that's not helpful to our students I'll get through those feedback what are the future directions I have no answers to these questions but this is your homework to think about do we need lectures, how can we redesign our learning environments and how do we keep our learner at the centre of what we're doing we'll stop now thank you very much