 Okay, people can hear me, obviously in the room and online, so welcome for this final session of the third day of the Association for Learning Technologies 30th Anniversary Conference. We have a presentation this afternoon with Dominic Pates and Miranda Melcher from City University of London, learning technologists within the Department for Learning Enhancement and Development and they'll be discussing the new buildings on solid foundations. Our city program was redesigned for a fully online delivery, so over to you both. Thank you very much, Simpson. So assuming I'm audible here, do we have a camera in the room? Do I need to look at something up there? Okay, so let's move this out of the way a little bit. You can see the slides there. Now I'm introducing this bit, so there are a few things that we're going to talk about in this. We're going to talk about the context. So thank you, first of all, for coming to the graveyard slot of the conference. We love the fact that we have an audience and that we can therefore continue with the presentation as intended and a nod to the online as well, there you go. For those of you watching online at home, we're going to talk about the context. We're going to talk a little bit about the design process and we'll cover a little bit about student and faculty feedback on the project, which took two years to run and was only eight modules. So it kind of, I look at some of the other discussions we've had of 150 modules in six months or something and I go, wow, I'm also going to talk a little bit about our new digital learning design service at City. So that's me next as well, isn't it? What was the module like before? The module, the program is called MSC in Temporary Works and Construction Method Engineering. So it's something that the construction industry asked for. A postgraduate professional development master's degree program in the 1970s. They've been asking for it that long for construction engineers, get them off site and development further. And to be clear, the bit of engineering we're talking about, because I did not realise this when I became project manager, is a really specialised bit of engineering. It's the scaffolding. It's the temporary, let's dam a river for two years while we build something and then take the dam away. It's how do we safely demolish buildings and clear the ground so that we can then build something else? So it's not any engineering. It's a really sort of high stakes bit of engineering for the moment to build really. Exactly. And it's for, as it says, temporary works, right? They mean things like scaffolding. They're only there for a certain amount of time. But obviously, while those structures are there, they have to do rather a lot. So that was kind of an extra level of context that became really important in redeveloping this for an online context. And the difficulty that the programme had is if your students are mainly career professionals who work on building sites, it's very hard for them to get any time off site and to come down to London to do some study. So the programme has struggled with students over the years and before COVID, they came to us with this idea and said, do you think we could take this online? And we said to them, yes, but if you want to do it well, if you want to do a good job, you can't just, you can't just scrap it. So we looked to what did they want to change? So then obviously COVID happened and everybody chucked stuff online anyway for the sake of doing it in a rush. Then they came back to us again and said, well, we still want to do it properly. Can we really do that? You can see on the screen some of the things that were important questions for us to address. How do we provide for maximum flexibility for students? How do we create consistency across given the, how many visiting lecturers do we have on the modules? So almost every module had 12 sessions to live sessions. And one or two were from our academics and the entire rest of them were visiting lecturers and not other academics. They were people who actually worked in the particular companies that oversee these building projects, which is obviously incredibly helpful, but it means that they don't use Moodle on a daily basis. They don't teach on a daily basis. They're not used to thinking about and explaining their experience in that particular context. So they had incredibly helpful information, but kind of the logistics of being involved in a module and a program was really strange for a lot of them, and there were many of them. So you get you get an afternoon off from building Crossrail to go and teach. Exactly. It was interesting. So, you know, the student experience, the consistency, that kind of stuff. These were all big drivers for us as well. And one other thing that I'll add as well before we talk about the steps for here as well was that various other programs in the institution, which is a campus-based university, is quite used to doing stuff on campus. A lot of other, you know, quite a few programs have come to us over in the past, and we'd like to go online. What do you think? They ended up working with third party providers of elsewhere in the sector or building building brand new teams and raising a variety of different challenges. And we said, come to us and we can do it. Yeah, but resource us to do that. So I think this is for mine. So how did we actually do this? It was involved a lot of different steps. And the key was that we did it ourselves, but we did it as a coherent team. So I was the actual project manager that was resourced time. And we had a whole bunch of time with the academic, so the program director, but also the module leaders for all of the modules. There were what, five total, I think, four or five academics. Something like that. And we got like a whole bunch of time with all of them together, which is miraculous, given that these are also active engineers. And we started off with storyboarding workshops. So this is using the ABC method and really getting right back to basic. So it wasn't and this was, again, their request. It wasn't, can we just take what we do and what's the fastest way to get it online? It was like, actually, hang on, let's think about what we're doing and why, which absolutely to their credit. And they had never really done sort of something like a storyboarding workshop. And so we walked them through really from the beginning. You know, what is this? How do we think about these things? How do we think about alignment? And we've got some fabulous feedback. We've got a video to show you later on where the academics kind of talk about their experience of it. But they really found it incredibly helpful and actually were in some ways almost more eager than we expected. We were kind of like, well, here's how much you need to poke at what you've done before. And they're like, great, can we do that and more, please? We really want to kind of think about this. So that's kind of where we started is mapping out all the different modules and not just individually, but also together to create that program consistency. They were really invested, for example, in making sure that assessments were staggered so they didn't all end up at the same time, which obviously we really appreciate and isn't always something that academics initially are on board with, but they really were. And then we wanted to make sure that consistency and investment that they were showing in the workshops showed up to students as well. And so the key thing here was the creation of a standardized moodle template so that each module, even though it was led by someone else, even though it had different visiting lectures and loads of them, looked the same to students and they could understand this is a coherent program that I'm part of. And I'm moving from module to module, especially because so many of the students were part-time. So we knew that they'd be in this environment for years. To make sure that it was consistent for them. So we created a standardized moodle template. We're going to show you a picture in a moment because it's actually really nice looking. One element of this was that because there were so many VLs, we knew that kind of, yeah, OK, we could put the name of the person and like what company they're from. Obviously, we should tell students that, but they're only going to meet this person maybe once. So anything we can do to kind of help students understand who this person is before that live session would be beneficial. So we worked with the visiting lectures for them to each record about a minute of an introductory video before the session that then went live on moodle. And we even made it so that the entire all of the introductory videos for the whole module were live at the beginning of the module. The number of spreadsheets required to make this happen. So all of the students could know who all the lecturers were. They got a little introduction. Again, it was all sort of a standardized experience. We did the live sessions on teams because that's enabled the chat to be saved so that students could kind of log back in and see what had happened last time, etc. It was easier for a consistency point of view. But we also linked it up with Echo so that it was all the recordings were automatically put on to moodle. So if a student, for example, had to miss a session because they were on an oil rig in Aberdeen, they could catch up with the next session. And all of this was done because we had project management from lead. So again, the spreadsheets, the emails, the weekly meetings, all of that to get all these pieces together. So in a storyboarding workshop, we looked at range of activity types. Again, this is something that they hadn't necessarily thought very much about before, but we're really invested in exploring what the different opportunities were. They very much got the idea of alignment and were like, oh, yeah, that would really help with this consistent program experience and built in support, especially for the blended and hybrid part of this. So this was there were a lot of discussions about kind of how to use teams effectively, what to put up on moodle for students to engage with in advance of sessions, how to make sure that moodle was not just kind of a requisite thing, but actually part of the overall student engagement. These were all things that were very much discussed and engaged with during the storyboarding workshop from the beginning. So these were what we ended up using. Well, it's got a very long story short. This is a variation of what we use for them in terms of the different kinds of learning activities, formative and summative assessment, ensuring that support and guidance is built into the storyboarding. So this is things like the introductory video, the clarity of instructions for students about before each session. We want you to do X, Y and Z, and here's why. So these were the sorts of things that we were all discussing in the workshops. And so we would have workshops or storyboards. Like this began as a traditional ABC. You can download from the website and it looks like this. And we evolved it into looking like this. Yeah. And it would obviously change, right? So this one has kind of a lot of pre work online. It would depend entirely on the content of it. And that was something we worked with fields to sort out in advance. And again, the goal was that when each module went, when each module started, all the material would be available on moodle for students. And this was considered a key part of making the provision flexible, given how many other commitments our students had. They were literally on oil rigs and Aberdeen. So the idea that they could see ahead what this module is going to be and make sure that they could plan for engagement with it was something we knew for this cohort of students was going to be especially important. And again, I think the the versions that we see here are the sort of final polished products. These went through quite a few issues. There's a lot more complexity to try to condense down into something more digestible. Yeah. So here's another example. So you can see the pink stuff. So the model welcome, the overview of the assessment. So we made a lovely infographic that was right up at the top of the moodle page. They explained how assessment was going to work. This was pretty good for reducing questions from students, which the academics really, really valued. They didn't get kind of the questions. I think a lot of us are used to like, wait, how much is the assessment worth again? All that sort of stuff, because it was a very clear infographic that was right at the top of the moodle page and it was the same place and the same style for every single module that they did. Expectations were set. Yes, and clearly communicated. So this is what one, this is what the module overview. So the first bit of moodle would look like for one of the modules. So the module leaders each recorded a welcome video with an overview of the module. Obviously, these were fully captioned transcripts, etc. So there are multiple ways of engaging and the preparation. So this is a good example. So each week there was a clear list of steps of what you need to do each week. There was a teaching schedule infographic. Any of the data things were there. And so pretty much this is a decent example of sort of what each week looked like. And the whole point was to just make it as clear and consistent to students as possible. And that was also why we used then the template across the different modules. What did the students think? Luckily, we had a consistently high attendance in live sessions. And this is something that the program had always struggled with because they were on those oil rigs or they couldn't get the time off or they couldn't get to London usually. And, you know, those kinds of, you know, suddenly there was a scaffold collapse on site somewhere. So it couldn't quite get to campus. So there was also we did a there's a reluctance to ask students in a lot of institutions, they find, you know, survey season comes around. Don't don't busy them because we need to ask these metric based ones. But we did with the permission of the academics ask students quite a lot. How is it? How is it going? Well, in specific things like how are you finding the Moodle layer? How are you finding the infographic look? We actually asked them about a lot of these specific things we had put in because that's not covered in the standard module end of module stuff. And we wanted to know. And although we don't have any data to present here, we can report that there was high satisfaction amongst students, which was gratifying to see. And we can also see it in the other day, right? The few number of questions that academics got, the kinds of questions you normally expect, there just weren't very many of them. Right, we could see that in the fact that students were of their own initiative, logging into the team site the day before a live session and writing a message saying, really, sorry, I can't make it. I've watched the intro video and I'm curious to hear about this. I will be watching the recording afterwards, you know, getting students to do that. And we didn't ask them to like they're doing of their own volition. So in addition to the surveys, kind of directly reported information, there's other indicators as well. Now, somehow have to be able to find a way of getting to play a video here. And I don't quite know how I'm going to do that. So if you press play. No, I go to the next slide. Yeah, that's a that's an image. I mean, copy, paste that. Unfortunately, no. If we go out of that, then copy, paste. How many impacts does it take to play a video? Too many. I'll look at that. That's the URL that will go up to the right point. As well. So do we have a lot of browsers that we've got here to play it on edge? My God, let's bring this up then on. I hope we have audio here. How did you work with lead? I think one of the really valuable things was to have to be introduced to the ABC method, which sort of identified the different learning activities that the students might do. And that was a really good narrative, I think, which was good for us and also good for the visiting lecturers that we had involved. So we ran some little sort of workshops and things like that. We worked through a set of collaborative workshops where we looked and had a reflective exercise on our looking back at our modules, thinking about the different learning activities that the students were only taking. And we used that to then rebalance to look for the activities because we typically found that we've actually been doing things and it was a bit different in the past. The other thing that was really helpful to me personally, I guess, was the fact that in addition to, you know, having the sort of loose storyboarding that we did, we also had quite specific template to fill in to do with how the various modules, module weeks linked together. The other thing that really helped with that was the project management from LEED. And that was something we wanted to have an online program that looked as though it'd been put together as an online program and had that consistency and all the rest of it. And you really need somebody to project manage in order to achieve that, I think. That came back with very feedback from students through the whole exercise and the day benefitted from seeing a consistent approach across all the module. I think the studio has been fantastic. You can record other stuff that you want to record just to do a demo or to show people how things work or how they might manipulate a map or a drawing or something like that. And that's that's amazing, too. What impact did this work have on your program? I think that a really key aspect was developing the Moodle modules and the Moodle modules were much more detailed than any that I've seen before. And they contained lots of infographics and standard layouts, which allowed students to move easily from one to another and realize that it was all part of their course. And we got a lot of feedback from the students saying how easy it was to find what they needed and to be kept well informed. I would say that it's also had a huge amount of impact on my professional practice within producing resources for students and things like that. You sort of think again about what you're doing. Creating opportunities for students in other teaching was really a benefit to me as well because you see how different types of learning, different types of activities can be either taken online or better in a face-to-face type environment. We've had LEED making sure that the slides that they're producing are easily accessible and people can watch them and the information is clear and all the rest of it. And that's not something we would have done otherwise. They pre-recorded those little introductions for what you're going to be hearing in my lecture next week. And the students really liked that. I also think we've done things that we never thought possible like your field trip with Daniel coming to record things so that they could be broadcast to people who weren't there. What advice would you give to colleagues looking to collaborate with LEED? I think that what you've really got to do is you've got to buy into it and you've got to allow them to guide you because however experienced you think you are, they've got an awful lot more to add to what you are able to do yourself. And we absolutely put ourselves in their hands and I can't believe how far we moved in such a short space of time. LEED are the professionals in this area. It's a very rewarding experience for us. Everybody across the sector is working very hard to make things work. And if you wait until you have enough time for yourself to think that you're going to do something, you will never do it. I got the sense that the people you're working with from LEED wanted it to be a collaborative, non-judgmental, supportive process. There was always encouragement and also suggestions for how we might improve things. And, you know, you would have to dig very deep to be able to come up with some of the ideas that we were presented with. Without that management, it would not have happened. And it certainly wouldn't have happened to the extent that it did. We have a course that we are incredibly proud of now and the delivery is very, very smooth. LEED's new Digital Learning Design Service offers consultations, storyboard workshops and project management for the design of learning resources, activities and educational multimedia. There we go, I get the idea. They like us. Thank you. It's important to hear from the academics there, I think. So obviously we did a lot of work with that particular programme. But in a lot of ways, it was a pilot as well for seeing if we could do this for more than just one programme to see if we could do these kinds of learning design things in-house. And as you hopefully saw from the video, it was pretty successful. So based off of that and some work done in other parts of the university, and we have now launched LEED's Digital Learning Design Service. And now we're going to tell you a little bit about it. So we've got a definition of that. And it took us a lot to get to this particular one and even the name itself, Digital Learning Design Service. It's amazing how much you wrangle a few words in a sentence to get to something that everybody can agree with. We are describing this as a collaborative, flexible process for the design, development and delivery of effective blended hybrid and online learning programmes and modules. So it might be a single sentence, but there's an awful lot in that if you unpack it a bit. So we kind of frame it to our staff in some ways based on a few questions that might occur to them. How can I improve student engagement on my programme? How can I design activities that will give them some real life practice might apply their knowledge? How can I make the module more inclusive? How can I have blended learning components or hybrid teaching? To the programme. So this Learning Design Service is available kind of for a bunch of different programmes at different stages, I suppose. So, for example, if a programme is new and is like, hang on, we've got our approval for a programme, we've got a programme spec. How do we translate that? That's something we can help with. Similarly, a programme has gone through a periodic review and wants to make changes and switches modes of delivery. So that's what we've just seen with MSC Temporary Works from fully in-person to fully online and school initiatives and kind of continuous improvement. So the first example, BSE Cyber Security was a module that already existed, was generally run online, but in response to student feedback, the module leader came to us and said, you know, I'm getting some mixed feedback from my students. There's some bits of it that they'd like, there's some bits of it that just really consistently aren't working. And I know my topic really well, but I don't really know how to best respond to this. And so with that lecture, we did a series of workshops and kind of assistance in developing things and then sort of checked in with him as it went and he did further little tweaks and went, OK, that's actually really helpful. It wasn't about changing the whole curriculum for the module, but still a lot of improvements could be made within that. So this sort of is the range that we can work with. So generally, the process is pretty straightforward. So our digital education team within LEED is generally split into covering there's two teams and together we cover the whole university. So Dom is my boss and is in charge of business school, law school and science and technology. And then Peter is Dom's counterpart and looks after all the other bits of the school, the university. And I don't remember all their names. I'll throw out my head because that's not my team. But the idea is that if you are a program leader or a module leader, you go to either Dom or Peter, who you already know anyway. And you say, hey, I would like to work on this. I want to improve student engagement. I want to improve constructive alignment. I want to add something in, et cetera. And we then sit down and have a consultation with our learning design experts. And one of the key things about the service is that it is dependent on what you need from us. So that consultation is not us saying, here is the one template that we will present to you and you must do it this way. Even who's in the meeting depends on what they come to us with. So whether that's people like Jane from the academic team, whether that's more ed techs, people focus on accessibility. The whole point is to make this flexible and collaborative. And then we use a bunch of things that we kind of already have in our department and bring it all together is the idea. So that if you're coming to us for support with learning design, it's not, oh, that just means a Moodle template or, oh, that just means that we're going to improve your accessibility. It's like, no, we're going to look at the whole thing. And we've got experts who can bring in all of those different pieces and put them together. And so if people work with us for learning design, it improves the entire program and the entire module, even sometimes in ways that aren't expected from that initial meeting. So again, going back to the idea of being flexible and collaborative. And to end, we have version one of our, the closest we've got to an online presence for this particular initiative, our digital learning design guide. Make sure you'll see my URL or a QR code on the screen. Thank you for your ears. Thank you. Happy to take any questions if there are any or comments, observations. Yeah. Thank you. Question. Yeah. Yes. You can respond to them. So some of them were involved early on, including in the storyboarding workshops. So if they were people that kind of we knew very early on were going to be involved, then we were able to do that. Obviously, given the number of visiting lectures involved, we didn't know all of them at that far in advance. So essentially what happened is, whenever we were developing the next module in the program, the project manager would work with the module leader to kind of figure out who are the visiting lectures. And sort of what order they're going to go in. And that was going back again to the storyboarding workshops. The lectures then were the ones that usually would reach out and recruit the VLs because they, that was the industry contact, they usually already knew each other. But then that's when the project manager would come in and be like, hi, this is a really interesting program that you've now joined, welcome. We're going to need some things from you. We're going to need you to record a video. We're going to need you to use this template for your slides. And that process was started literally as soon as we had the email address and the name of the VL. It could be months in advance of the module actually starting. And it was the project manager's role to just follow up with them and go, okay, if you're in London, if you want to come to our fancy studio and record your video, please, here's our address. We'd love to support you with that. Come into the studio, we will help you record that video. If you can't do it, here are detailed instructions about how to do it on Teams because you might be in, I mean, I know I keep going back to the Aberdeen oil rig, but that was a real thing. You know, detailed instructions on that. Okay, we need your slides. Here's the template. Here's why we have a template. Can you please send it to us? And they send it to us and we go, great. Turns out your slides don't follow our template. Great, we're going to sit here and do a whole bunch of work to fix that and make it all actually accessible and then send it back to you to make sure that it's all good, et cetera. And so that was a big component of what the project manager would do is that continual communication. So honestly, a lot of the times you're in, you know, weekly contact with VLs for months and they haven't actually taught on the program yet. So kind of a lattice of relationships as well. I mean, we worked closely and had a good connection with the faculty. Yeah, so we had weekly meetings between the project team and the team of academics. And so, and there were massive spreadsheets keeping track of everything. So it would be like, okay, great. We've got this VL coming in. Have you, you know, what have you told them yet? Or do they have any hesitations that maybe they've told you because you know them but they don't want to bring to us? Okay, how can we facilitate that? And because we talked to the academics literally at least once a week, that helped. And they then had the relationship to the VL system. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You didn't present any data. Sorry. The marketing is just for the benefit of obviously the recording as well as in the room. But are there any plans to direct yourself with the kind of monitoring of all the seminae that you've done to the data that you just made? Do you have a plan for that? So we, this was a two year process. Miranda was one of three project managers. It was the final project manager. Final one got to bring this one in. And it was a massive amount of work, but it has to be said as well that the student numbers were quite low. So there's a little bit of looking at the data and going, well, that doesn't tell us anything substantive enough to be able to report on. We know that it worked for them, but can we take it anywhere yet? So we had a dissemination plan that ended here today. Today. We made it. We've told this story in a few other contexts as well. We were shortlisted for Starboard City, we went to M25 for that as well. And it, do we want to write about it as well? We might do. Be ashamed not to read. I do think, I mean, it is on the LibGuide. We've presented other places. One of the reasons we wanted to present it here was, again, it's recorded and things like that. Because I think part of what we want to do is make sure that it's out there at least somewhat. Even if it's not perfect, and we don't have every bit of information maybe we'd want, it's more than nothing. It potentially has to be adopted, but definitely, you know. Well, not so come talk to us. You know, if someone watches this and goes, oh, wait, we've got something similar. Like, great, come talk to us. We'd love to. Yeah, yeah. We figured out how to do this by looking at other people's work and practice and borrowing on it from it and developing it and iterating further. As a learning designer, not a budget manager, I think it's amazing to see the process just summarise that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we are a bunch of things. So that's probably helped. Indeed. Thomas is the learning designer, I suppose, officially. Yeah, exactly. I was an academic and then I'm an EdTech and now I'm a project manager. Also, I'm delighted that you chose to come along to the session and it's really good. Just to go back on the slide, it's fine. I don't know. It means the support. That's something I'm excited to show you or what I can do with it. Feel free to move in closer if you want. If you want. Well, thank you. Very welcome. Shall we draw proceedings to a close? Yes.