 Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the session. Thank you for joining us. And this session is called Recreating, Creating Digital Learning Resources Online. Lessons learned from a meta experience. And I'm really delighted to introduce our speaker for the session, Anna Ruff. Anna, I'm delighted that you can join us. And I can see your slides are up. Are you all ready to get started? Yeah, yeah, I'm ready. Brilliant, well, I'll introduce you then. Yes, so hello, I'm Anna. Thank you for joining me on this warm afternoon. I'm a learning designer at the University of Southampton, and I spend quite a lot of time advising colleagues on delivering online learning, but not often doing it myself. So I wanted to share an experience that I've had where I was able to actually deliver something, but also to facilitate students in doing the same. And I'd like to share some of the practical things that I learned from that, but also some insights from students that I think are really interesting. And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna turn my camera off because my concentration phase is the worst, and I also want to conserve bandwidth. So I will go now. So I wanted to start by sharing one of my favorite ever presents. Many years ago, I did a primary school teaching PGCE, and at the end of my final teaching placement, I was given this wonderful book where every student in the class had created their own page, and they did a portrait of themselves and they wrote something about what they really enjoyed while I'd been there. And I really treasure that because it reminds me of being wide-eyed and enthusiastic and of taking that step back from all of the paperwork and the planning and the marking and the stress of teaching and thinking, what's something I can get my students to do that they will really enjoy that will allow them to achieve the learning outcome. And I'm gonna come back to that later. So the module I'm going to talk about is a first-year medicine student selected unit module, and it offers a selection of medical humanities options that students can choose from so they can make a film, they can draw, they can do theater, they can do music, and our option is creating digital learning resources. And my colleague Bobby and I had run that in person for a couple of years. So this was our first year of doing it online. So it's an eight-week module and the first three weeks we asked students to work through the why and the how and the what of their resource. And then they go away and they do some independent work creating that resource. They bring back their draft resource and they get their peers to review it and make some adjustments. So to get some background on this year's delivery, I've got a quick VVox activity for you. So you can either join via a web browser at VVox.app. I think there's a link going into the chat for you where you can join directly or you may already have the VVox app. And the join code is 165-69-2272. And that will remain on screen on the next slide which I'm now going to go to. So I want you to think back to your first year as a student, maybe at university or college and just think about words that somewhat thought it was like for you and then press send. I'm not going to give you very long to do it. So have a think. You can see that we've got four people joined. So write in a few words and press send. Got one out of six. Three out of six, wonderful. Any advance on four out of seven, five out of seven? Wonderful. Right, I'm going to see what those results were. So sometimes this takes a little moment to load but hopefully it will appear in a minute. So we've got fun, exciting, chaotic, confusion, overwhelming, lost. So a bit kind of chaotic but there's quite a buzz about that. I asked some colleagues the same question and we've got some nice big fun, excited, socializing. Again, traumatic apprehensive. So there are some negatives in there. We asked our students on our first year module their first year of online learning had been like their first year of university and this is what they told us. And there are some nice words in there but there's also challenging and exhausting and demotivating and tough and stressing and draining and depressing and isolating and lonely. So we were conscious that this was part of the context. That buzz is not there. That excitement is not there. It's been hard. It's been a struggle. And now they're a little bit of background. My colleague Bobby and I who run this module had also been involved in delivering workshops for staff across the university where we got them to review their lesson plans or curriculum maps and adjust them for online and blended learning. And so we thought, well, having delivered this to all our colleagues, we need to do the same for our module. So we did. We had three hours each week. So we thought, let's do the classic synchronous sandwich where there's that starter that students do asynchronously. We all come together for the main course and then there's the dessert if you like where students do something independently to follow up. And we use teams mostly for both the synchronous and the asynchronous activities. And we did have an especially small group this year because there were more options on offer. So we only had 15 students and I appreciate that's a huge luxury. And some of the things we did, we can only do because of the small cohort but some of them are applicable to larger groups. So we introduced a bit of pre-learning. We've not done that before. Bobby and I recorded a short introductory video to ourselves and to the module. And then we asked students to add examples of online resources that they'd found helpful to compatible. And in our first session, we were able to do a couple of things that we'd not done before in our face-to-face sessions. And one was I was able to record an interview with a third year student who'd taken this option in our first year. So she was on placements. We just caught up on teams one evening and she talked about her experiences on the module and how it had helped her and what her advice was for the students starting this option. We were also able to catch up with one of our very busy clinicians live in the session about how he used online resources and found them helpful. So that was really exciting and a really nice addition and something I think we'd take forward in future. We then sent our students off into groups as we normally would to talk about what makes a successful digital learning resource. And we got them to look at the examples they put on the paddlet wall. And there were some challenges with that, particularly reporting back was a bit painful. And then the final hour of the session we set aside for an independent task and that was to update their learning journals. And this is something we've always done in the module. So we get students to reflect on their learning each week and write about it in a Blackboard journal. And we can see in Blackboard when new posts have been added. And at the end of the hour, there were exactly no posts in the journals. So it felt like that hour didn't quite work as we wanted it to. They did all get the entries in just in time for the following session. But I think one of the things we took from that was that maximizing the time we had with the students and what they could bring to each other was important. At this point, we and the students were the resource and we needed to make more use of that. We also decided we would use a shared slide deck and breakout rooms and I'll talk more about that in a bit. And when you're teaching primary school you sign post a lot. You say, this is what we're going to do. This is how it's going to work. This is why we're doing it. This is what we've just done. And I found in online teaching it helped making that sign posting quite explicit again. So our second session is the how, what tool are the students going to use to create their resource? And we've traditionally done this. We've got colleagues from the team each to set up a station focusing on a particular tool and our students rotate around these stations a little bit like speed dating to learn about each tool. We thought that's not going to really work online. And so originally our plan was we'll find resources from previous years that students have created in different tools. And in that independent hour at the end we've get students to work through these to explore the different tools. But it felt like that maybe wouldn't happen or it wouldn't happen as meaningfully as we'd like it to. So thinking back to the students are the resource we thought what we'll do instead is we'll set up different channels in teams for each tool. We'll put the example for each tool from previous years students into that channel and we'll assign students to groups to the different channels. And their job as a group was to work through some questions and then report back in our whole group sessions. So they demonstrated the tool and shared what was possible in that tool. And it worked really well. So that was something we took away that getting students to deliver to each other was a really good way of engaging them but also to scaffold that activity. And again, that's something that I take from primary school teaching. Something else that I would do a lot in teaching is modeling. So demonstrating what students and what you want the students to do. And week three is our what when students work on the content for their resource and my colleague, Bobby, modeled what she wanted them to do. So she made a video where she demonstrated mind mapping and then mapping out and outline per resource and reviewing the balance of content in that resource and making adjustments. So in that asynchronous hour the students watched the video. They played along and then we came together and they gave feedback on each other's plans and that worked really well. It's actually the session that we used as the model for our staff workshop. So we'd had quite a lot of practice at making that work online. So in the next couple of weeks, the students went off and they had that experience of being on the other side of the like creating the resource for themselves. And this is where those learning journals really came into their own. We'd always used them in the past but suddenly it was such a great way to get to know students that we hadn't had a chance to meet in person to track how things were going, to view their plans and their drafts, the resources. So when we actually met with them we had all of that information ready. And where is face-to-face? We'd met for 20 minutes and a good 10 minutes of that was the student arriving, unpacking, getting the laptop, loading it up. Suddenly it was just so much easier for them to share their resource and just to have a really focused discussion. And so we only needed 10 minutes each. And I think we would take forward that way of doing it. It just was so much more efficient and easy and productive as a way of doing that. So that was really helpful. And the students really liked getting stuck into it. They liked thinking about the user's perspective and kind of having a different view on that. And they liked using the learning journals. They found that really helpful. In our final sessions we had to look at things like making the resources more accessible for all learners, making their resources more interactive and then they had that opportunity to get feedback from their peers about their resource as well as clarifying anything they needed to about the assessment. So I think one of the students one of the things that students had experienced quite a lot this year was quite a passive version of online learning. A lot of long recorded lectures that they'd watched. And we wanted them to think about how do you get your learner to actively engage with your content? So again, this is kind of a modelled example. We talked about here's how you might tell someone something but actually what if you get your learner to think for themselves and come up with what the answers might be or even better, what if you show instead of tell? What if you demonstrate something? What if you have a scenario and then get your learner to reflect on what are the learning points from that scenario? So having modelled this example, this is where our shared slide deck comes in. We set them off in groups to do a similar activity. So they were given some information about type two diabetes and in their breakout groups, each group had a slide allocated in a shared slide deck that we'd set up in teams. On the left hand side, they had the information that they had to rewrite in a way that made it much more active for their learner. And the lovely thing about your shared slide deck is that you can see how the groups are doing while they're out in their breakout groups. You can see which groups might need help. You can see when the groups have finished and need to be brought back. And when they are brought back, it's very easy for each group to report back because you've got everything you need right in front of you. So that was a nice activity that we did. Now I'm going back to V-Box. So if you're still logged into V-Box, brilliant. If not, you can join again, same code, same link in the chat. So something else we've always found is that our students struggle a bit to write good multiple choice questions. And I think, have we not been running this online? I don't think it would have occurred to me to do this activity, but we were able to use V-Box to make this into an interactive activity. So again, as I said, if you want to play along, there's the joining code. And which is something outside of medicine. So this is very loosely based on one of our university's MOOCs on benefit ecology. We've got a few multiple choice questions for you. So pick an answer. Which of the following is an important component of biodiversity? Number of individuals, number of species, how individuals interact with themselves in their environment or all of the above? Just gonna hang on a minute. So actually there might be a few people finding their way to respond. Right, I'm going to move on there. Sorry, we didn't quite get time to interact. So that's very interesting. So with my medicine students, nearly all of them went with all of the above. And we talked to them about why they went with that. And they said, well, if all of the above is in there, then that is often the right answer, which I find it often is. But that's really interesting. So there you go, these things don't always work as you anticipate. Right, where is biodiversity greatest? Again, I might just close that. So I'm sorry if you haven't had quite a time to respond. So yeah, the majority saying nearly equated outside test is maybe true. And so we again asked our students, why did you know that? And it's because the distractors aren't likely to be true. And I think that's a common trap that we had seen previously in students' questions that they included in their resources. So last question, there were a few others that we use. This is just an example of some of them. So pick an answer. I will, I'm going to have to hurry you along a bit or hurry myself along anymore. Any advance on seven, I'm going to stop it there because this is just a little example. Yeah, it's always the one that looks different. So again, we talked to the students about, you know, the fact that try and make your answers look similar. So I think that's an activity that worked really well. They wrote fantastic multiple choice questions for us this year. So I would definitely take that forward when we go back into in-person teaching. But as I said, I don't think I'd have thought of doing it. It was the fact that we were online that made me do that. Something else that I would take forward into online teaching is we used in teams the OneNote class notebook. So it was a way of collating information and resources, but we also used it for collaborative activities. So we got students to make a checklist together for things to look out for in their resource. I'm sorry, that slide seemed to get stuck there. And I think also next year we might do the journals themselves in the OneNote notebook because I think it's a bit more in line with what we want. So for the assessment, students are asked to write a reflection on their experiences on the module, as well as assessing the thing that they make. They have this reflection. So again, kind of modeling, we got them to do a reflective activity in our final session. And we asked them whether their experience of creating a digital learning resource had changed their thoughts about online learning at all. And the vast majority felt that it had to an extent. We asked them how, and this is a selection of comments. There were a lot of different comments, but you can see a lot more respect for staff developing and delivering it harder than I thought. A lot of time and effort. I appreciate the effort more. It's not as easy as I imagined. So actually I found it really interesting how that experience of creating something for themselves had maybe changed their opinion about some of the online learning they'd experienced during the year, or at least given them a different view on it. We asked them what they'd like more of. We didn't have any face-to-face sessions. Some of them felt that would be nice. And something we did a lot was we put them in quite small discussion groups online because we felt that would be easier online. And we tended to stick with the same breakout groups so that they could pick up where they left off, but they wanted bigger groups and more variety. I think they found it a bit awkward and samey in small groups. Some of these comments are interesting. I like the first one. I really enjoyed the experience being on the other side. And the second one, if I'm really interesting, I think I had the chance to give this module a proper shot because it was delivered online. So that was quite nice. And I think that first one, what will you take away? Interactive and engaging resources and sessions are very beneficial. We wanted them to take that forward into their own practice, but also hopefully to recognize that that's what they had experienced in the way it had been delivered. And actually some students got in touch with us after the module to share some comments. And I think knowing the year had been a bit of a struggle for them. It's really powerful and encouraging to see a student say it's been one of the best parts of my year. Obviously medicine is quite hard work and this was in a way a bit of light relief, but that was really, really nice to hear. So I thought I'd just share a few examples of things that students have made to finish. So firstly, this is a nice resource that one of our students made to teach COVID-19 to her brownies that she worked with. And there's some lovely activities in here. She's got this nice video where she demonstrates hygiene and germs and how hand washing gets rid of that. So that's quite a nice activity. And she's also got lots of picture quizzes like this. So Walter, Harry and Ben doing wrong in the supermarket. This is obviously pre-changes to the rules. They should be wearing face masks. They should be a bit further apart. So lots of nice things like that in that resource. I'm going to come out of the PowerPoint briefly and show you a couple of others. So this is a resource in H5P, which hopefully you can see. And one of our students did this for stressed health care professionals. So to help them have some moments of mindfulness and looking after their mental wellbeing. And so she's done things like she's created this nice video demonstrating box breathing, which is lovely. And she's also got a guided meditation. Where she again gives them that moment of mindfulness. So that's a nice resource. And something a lot of our students use Sway for their resources. And this is something one of our students created about stroke which was something that had impacted his own family. Lots of bite-size bits of information, some diagrams that he'd drawn himself. And then at the end, a multiple-twist quiz for learners to assess their understanding. So just a couple of nice examples of things that student created. Those are ones that they said it was okay to share. So finally, I said, I'll come back to this. I think I really love doing this module. It was such an important thing for me this year. I love that experience of enabling someone to do the thing that you're doing and learning both from how they're experiencing it but from then how they go on to put it into practice, that kind of very meta experience. Also, it just really reminded me how important it is to take that step back and to focus learning around students rather than content. So that is that for me. What I will do is I will stop sharing. I'll put my camera back on and see if there are any questions. Thanks, Anna. That was really interesting. And I love seeing those resources in action. Please do post comments and questions in the chat. I know we've been using VVox up to now, but this is your opportunity to ask Anna anything further. And I know you've kindly given us a link to your slides as well. Yes, I have, which I forgot to say. I'm gonna put the link into the chat now for you all to have a look. I might jump in with the first questions while people are typing. What do you think is kind of the next iteration? Sort of this year we're kind of, maybe not as much in lockdown, but the pandemic is still with us. Where do you hope to take this work this year? So we have been asked actually if we'll deliver it fully face-to-face next year, but I think we will continue to use Teams and we'll continue to use some of the asynchronous activities. And I think things like I said, the one-to-ones are actually just much more efficient and better online. So I think there's a lot that we use this year that we will take forward into face-to-face. I think there are some things that will be nice to be able to go back and do face-to-face, but I do think quite a lot of the, and just getting the students involved a bit more in delivering to each other, I think that worked really well. So I think it'd be good to take that forward, even if that's face-to-face rather than online. I, earlier, a question came up around sort of equity and access for students. And you mentioned that you've got fairly small groups that you were talking about. Can you tell us a little bit more about what sort of support you put in place to ensure that the students were all able to engage and have access to these activities? Yeah, so we made sure, I mean, all of the videos had subtitles. We made sure that everything was available sufficiently in advance, that students had time to engage with things and that everything was recorded. So if people weren't around, they could catch up. And then the learning journals were a really helpful way of just kind of tracking individuals. And again, that is one of the things that was only possible because of the small number of students who couldn't do it with 400 students. But it did mean that if anyone was struggling a bit, it was quite easy to identify that. And I think that was a lot of the feedback we got was they felt very supported, which is easy when it's a small group. But I think when you're not physically seeing them, you do have to find other ways of doing that. So that was really good to hear. That sounds brilliant. And we're just pitch-perfect at the dot on 25 minutes. So please do put your hands together and give a warm round of applause to Anna, who's been giving us a fantastic presentation. Thanks to everybody again for playing along on VVox. It was great to see a bit of chat and comments coming in through that. So for now, thank you so much for joining us and enjoy the rest of your day with us.