 Hi everybody. I'm Jill Lyle. I'm an educational developer from ANU Online at the Australian National University, one of a team of people who work with academics in the different faculty or we call them colleges to develop their courses. We were approached by the ANU Medical School to review their Moodle site, their course sites to see what improvements we could help them make. The project involved a team of people with ANU Online and the Medical School and the people who assisted me and sort of reviewed my presentation mentioned up there. So just thanks to those people, they couldn't make it so I'm here representing them. So the ANU Online Medical School approached us because they perceived that their course sites were functional but not very nice to look at and a little bit pretty hard to navigate. So when we had a look at it, that was the first impression we had. It was like some kind of old curious bookshop full of all sorts of intriguing and useful information but displayed and set up in a chaotic way so that it's very, very almost impossible to navigate. And that was the feedback they were getting from both admin staff and students. So they thought it's time to have a look and see if we can do something to improve the situation. So we were asked to have a look. So that's what this presentation is about the journey of the educational developer designer in working with academics and other professionals in a college or at campus to improve their courses. I just wanted to find out how many people here are in an educational designer development role and or tech support for people who are the academics. Okay, quite a few people. How many people are academics? Their primary role? Only one? A couple of people. How many people are regard themselves as both academics and designers? Quite a few people. Okay, so we did have a few people involved in the project from the medical school who are academics but they're very keen and very interested in course design. So our role was to work with those people and help them come up with a way forward. So first of all, when we had a look at the site, as I said, it looked a little bit like an old messy bookshop. It was something that had grown organically from a website that was designed specifically, customized specifically originally for the medical school to organize their student rosters. Medical schools have particular needs. So they had this website to organize their student rosters for practicums, their timetables and their content. But that admin side took precedence over the sort of teaching and learning side. The person who developed that left and it wasn't sustainable so they had to switch to the enterprise LMS, which was Moodle, and they had to start from scratch. And basically what they tried to do was get help to replicate what they had on their original website, mid online. So they were trying to put the administration coordination and all the complex things that are involved in running a medical school on to an LMS. And it grew organically from that into something of a monster. So that's why we were brought in, or asked to have a look at it. Because it had grown into something that was getting hard for everybody to deal with, was highly valued by the students, but it was very difficult to navigate and find specific resources and the students were starting to form this kind of community around helping each other navigate the sites, and often working outside Moodle on other sites to communicate with each other because it was so difficult. And even the academic and professional staff were having issues and the site welcome page was a little bit like this. The guy from Black Books, very difficult to negotiate with, very difficult to get any information out of. There wasn't any particular individual who was like that, but that's what the site looked like, somebody that wasn't very friendly. But the good thing was the initiative came from within the medical school itself and senior professional and academic staff perceived that there needs to be a change. And so that's a really good, if you are educational designers and developers, you'll know that that's a really good way to start. So our job is to actually keep that sentiment going and not put anyone off the side, as you probably know. So the drivers were that they recognized the student need. Then the students needed a much more user-friendly, navigable site to be able to access course materials, get some more interactivity in there. And also they recognized that the history of the site was not coming from a pedagogical model. And so they wanted to perhaps go back and have another look at that as well. So there was a strong desire for improvement and it was key people who were well informed with insight who were involved. So that was a good start. But it was time for a makeover. We had a monster. We had to do something with it, try to keep it under control. So our role was as a relatively new centralized team in the university that has been put together to work around the university in different centers as needed. We're still finding our way, really. And so we're still working on what our role is. There was a need identified. There was great potential. We were very excited, potential for a different vision, opportunity to get our teeth into some redevelopment and starting from scratch with a whole lot of course sites. So it reminded me of a midwife role in that we had to try to rebirth this monster into something much more easy to work with. And we were able to use our knowledge of education and technology to assist the people involved. And the people involved also had some of them had high levels of technology knowledge and also had done a lot of high level training in education. So it wasn't as if we were the only ones who had that expertise. We had to work with them as a team. So, you know, we could work as trusted advisors or there was, there is some change involved in that people, not just the ones who, who came to us and who was steering the process, but the people in ANU medical school in general are going to have to change from seeing the sites for their course as some, as something that's purely for administrative and content management to something that is teaching and learning because after all, that's what Moodle's for. It's a constructive learning environment. So it needs to be used the way it was designed for. So our process is a fairly standard process for instructional or educational design in that it started out with being approached, lots of consultations setting up a little committee of interested parties and the senior Ed designer in our team steered and coordinated the initial consultations. We then did an electronic survey of approximately 200 students from years one to four. And we got responses from 120 which shows you the students were keen to be involved. So it's quite a good participation. We then did interviews from interviews and focus groups from those students surveyed who expressed an interest in being further involved and we did some also with other students that hadn't been involved yet. We also did focus groups of clinical staff, clinical teaching staff, academic teaching staff and casual tutors. So this was all to get feedback on what was good, what was worth saving and what needed to change. We then did an analysis, wrote a report and makes some recommendations. So that's a fairly typical cycle and then of course it's iterative. So once that report goes through, they decide what they want to do. We do more consultation. We start implementing some of the recommendations they've accepted. There's more review and so on. So as we all know, most of us who work in educational design know that it goes around in cycles. So what we found was the current use of the Moodle LMS at Australian National University Medical School was as a content repository which wasn't working too well because that's not what it's designed for. An administration site because there's just so much administration needs with rotating rosters for medical practicums, timetabling for lecturing. It's just like very complex and admin environment but it wasn't really working trying to do that on Moodle. And also lots of links to third party resources. There's so much like there's such a vast medical library out there that the medical students need to know about. They need to have current contemporary knowledge because after all they're out there in a very practical way having an impact on people's health and lives. They need to know what the labest is and they get referred to lots of different resources by their lecturers so that there's a need for those resources. But teaching and learning was not highlighted because there's very little interactivity and so on. So that's all due to the nature of medical training. There is a tendency to just want to use a space to organise everybody rather than do the and the teaching and learning is done more face to face in lectures but they do have rural remote students so it's important to sort of get it right. So we did from our survey we did some infographics or one of our team did some infographics and the most interesting thing about this infographic apart from don't look too much about the feedback about the site in general. We're hoping that will change very quickly soon. But looking at other online spaces as where the students go to communicate and organise themselves. They don't use Moodle. They use the places they use are Google Docs, Facebook, Wikipedia, Dropbox, Office 365 are some of the examples of this online spaces the students organise themselves in order to get through the course and only one descent totally use Waddle as their site and yet they all say that they they have to use Waddle every day. So another infographic story seems to be going ahead there. The other infographic is what devices are they using? We found that there's a huge demand for mobile devices. So 85% are using their mobile phones to try to get their information from what we're calling Waddle which is web access to teaching and learning environment which is ANU's iteration of Moodle. Sorry if I've mentioned Waddle already that's our acronym but we mean Moodle. So they use mobile phones a lot to access what they need on their Moodle site but not always successfully they're not happy with it they're not happy with the way it responds. So 95% do use laptops probably because they're very mobile and 85% you can imagine an intern busy intern in a hospital has to like look at his mobile phone his or her mobile phone to see what when their next lecture is you know their next where they go next for whatever activity they're doing next in between like seeing patients following doctors around and so on they just look at their mobile phones it's the most convenient thing but they're not happy with the responsiveness of it. 53% use campus computers 50% use tablets but there is a was a very loud clear call from mobile friendly for them to be able to access on their mobile so that was interesting feedback and fairly predictable I guess. So some quotes from the students really says it all I've never thought of it as an educational tool it's a place you go to get lectures and information which then used to do your education and another telling quote was I hadn't even considered Waddle which is Moodle as a learning tool I think of it as an administrative tool it helps me organize what I need to do for the day or the week get the notes I need to get see where I need to be and when I need to be there I don't think of it as a learning tool but that would be interesting so they were there and they all wanted interactive quizzes and things to help them learn so not all of them but a good deal of them in the feedback that we got so the challenges I won't read them all out because I know we don't have a lot of time but basically a medical education requires a four year integrated course because the students need resources from year one right through to year four they need to access all the resources across all the years and so there needs to be a way they can access a vast amount of resources from year one through to year four in addition to that they need specific course places where they can go for their current year but within that year they need they belong to different groups and they need to be able to communicate within their group and to get specific information from their choosers and lecturers in that group plus access to resources related to their lectures and so on so it's like layers um which need a probably a meta site and some learning spaces within that the other feedback we got was that tutors felt a bit they felt very alienated from the moodle site they didn't have their own spaces they just it was all done by admin people they didn't feel any relationship with any sites but they would they would like their own teaching and learning space that they currently don't have so that was the other interesting thing so they don't have any educational design or development staff within the ANU medical school um so they have no one leading that whole thing so they're relying on this central team now to help them see the way ahead it is a small and relatively new school so they're still finding their way as well so the recommendations um that's I won't sorry I won't go through all those points but it's it's on the um it's on the moodle uh site moodle moot site for anyone that wants to look at it but the picture there describes our image our vision is to have a lovely like the equivalent instead of that messy bookshop a lovely modern uh resource place like a live a modern library with places to relax places to socialize places to learn and an easy navigation through the resources so that's what we're thinking that we need to aim at so um and it needs to be sustainable so we're hoping that we can work as much as possible within existing resources we don't think that the full potential of moodle is being realised um so it's it's this is where our role comes in so how do we work with people to build this vision and to get them to realise the potential of moodle so it's not only about real them enabling the the academics and those people involved to realise their vision it's actually helping to get a vision in the first place so this will be a difficult birth because not everyone's willing and not everyone's you know uh we've got a few key people that are but this is going to be interesting and we really don't know where we're going from here um and what our role will be but it will be a cyclical action research approach um and hoping to use the tools that are already there as much as possible or we we do know we need a content management system and that's something that's been happening at universal university level so we have to wait for the outcome of that but they definitely need a content management system they can't use moodle to contain the vast amount of resources that they need to have access to although we may be able to utilise the library but all that needs to be looked at so out of that we're hoping to add to educational design theory and write articles that are published but that's just by the by and so I guess uh we've only got three minutes but uh there's some of the things I thought you might like to uh ask or share how do you relate to this experience have you had similar experiences can you take any lessons from our experience do you have any suggestions for strategies and ideas and do you have any questions so go for it uh great does anyone have any questions on that or any suggestions experiences I'll come over there to you thank you uh Jill you mentioned that a majority of those users 95 had laptops yeah I think it was 95 yeah it's quite a high it is high is that something you experience across the whole student body at ANU uh without doing a survey like we did for the ANU I don't know but the medical school is particularly mobile in a sense they've got to be in a lot of different places and we do have quite a contingent of rural students off campus yeah and they've got to like work from maybe a hospital a medical centre and so on so I think that's the reason why for the high level of use of laptops and mobiles yeah fair enough um and I thought of a suggestion depending on what the students got access to why don't you split your organisational section of the school into one site and the learning into another site because the students already have access to it it's not another system they have to log into yeah and also some of the organisational aspects are really don't belong in a learning management system at all they belong with HR or sorry somewhere else so yeah I I take that aboard that's a really good thought this is another question that will you thanks Jill um yeah I'm an educational designer that's had to work with academics on a redesign of a four year course yep um but we didn't have time to do any formal research yep it was agile development and picking out exemplar subjects and building on those as we did the first year and now we're into second year going into third so we're building and now we're doing some research on what the students think of the approach but I've always been interested in curriculum design as well as the behind it so is there any sort of curriculum transformation alongside of your educational design um in terms of assessment across four years and that's all of those other structures that sort of yep that's a very timely question because yeah they're looking at curriculum redesign as we speak so the two things might come together that's why now we've done our review it's kind of up in the air now we're waiting to see how the cards are going to fall because yeah they're looking at curriculum redesign so it could be a bigger project than we thought yeah sorry is that a question um okay yes yeah that's right are there any other questions quickly uh we probably have time for one more before lunch okay well thank you very much Joe um I hope we can uh help you with that and it's great to see that uh combination of research leaks thank you uh we do have