 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this session of the alt-conference. I'm really pleased to welcome Tirumani Nadan and Jim Turner and I'm really looking forward to this talk. Skip your sleep. It's one minute to midnight. I had a moment like that myself last night. I'm sure most of you are in the same position as we're preparing for semester one. So if I'm hoping for some hints and tips of when you get to that midnight stage. I will hand over now to Tirumani and Jim. Thank you very much and I'll share the screen. Thank you Emma for the intro. So welcome everyone. I've just posted in the chat. I'm not sure if people are I think on the waiting. Just waiting for it to start or oh we have 13 people watching. It would be great to know who is there, who's watching, where you're joining us, your institution because this is going to be an interactive presentation. So I've got my co-presenter Jim with me today and we're just going to make it a start. Can I have the next slide please Emma? Hi Alex. So today briefly we're going so a quick overview of the presentation. We've gone only 30 minutes with question 20 roughly 25 minutes. It's a deep topic but we'll try to kind of get into bits and pieces, kind of just kind of foot for thought to take away from today's presentation. So what we're going to talk about is your input. There'll be a lot of you input in this as part of this presentation today and we're going to talk about why this piece of work, why skip your sleep, it's 2359. And what is intersectionality? Current literature around deadlines, assessment, and cultural understanding. We're also going to briefly touch upon literature that tells us about deadlines and students and then intersectionality consideration for assessment before we then provide a question that is going more as a takeaway for you. Can I have the next slide please Emma? So there is a link that Emma is going to put in the chat. I can also do that actually. Whoever we've got today with us, sorry, can I have the slide before? So we've got a Google jock which is open, you can all have access and I would welcome you all to kind of fill this in for the moment. This will be the first activity of the presentation and the questions that it asks, it basically asks about your institution, your name, role, department and assessment deadlines, what type of deadlines you've got in your institution. I've got an anonymous call more rent, I didn't even know that was an animal, I've got a camel, I've got a kangaroo, so people out there are looking at the document. If you could please fill that in with pros of those deadlines that you've got in the institution, completely your thoughts, not what your senior management thinks the advantages and disadvantages are and then the cons and then you as learning tech designer, consultant, however you call yourself, the role that you call yourself, what are the challenges for you when you're designing the module online, putting it on VLE management, how you deal with having to put students into group, I'm seeing some slides being filled. Now, can I have the next slide please Emma? Now one thing I didn't tell yet is you've got just two minutes to complete this and there's going to be a reward for the first one to complete the role. I've been very generous, I've just told you the two minutes now only, it's deadline. We've got Ida, sorry if I've mispronounced your name, we've got someone from UU Academic, okay, we've got someone 7 p.m. on Mondays, 259, by the way my stopwatch is running, you can't see it but it's running and we've got someone who 12, I guess that's noon, 1 p.m. okay, UAL, I'm not too sure who's joined us from UAL, if you add your name that will be great. Cons rigid, user focus, I'm going to check the timer, okay, you're still good, not yet, I mean by the time I started it, so we've got somebody who said generally 4 p.m., senior learning, LSE, University of Worldwick, so we've got Cheetahs, Rhinos, Hamsters, Camels, I've got a bat, I've got a beaver, okay I've got loads of, I still don't know what a Cormorant is, I need to google that somewhere in time, Camelone I'm familiar with, Hedgehog, Otter, Hamster, Aunt Eater, yeah, let me look, okay you're still doing good in terms of timing, very generous with this stopwatch seriously, oh somebody sent me Cormorant Facts, oh the seabird, I feel like just looking at it, oh it's pretty, so we've got someone who said generally 4 p.m. and some 20 through 59, okay, yay, hooray, so time is up, now next slide please, so by the way the reward for the first one to have completed it is a big thank you from me, thank you for submitting it, for completing it on time and within time and for having done the whole rule, thank you so much, that's very much what we often say to our students and that's why I'm saying that as well, thank you, submission received, leave the bird emblem of Liverpool, oh I'm learning a lot about Cormorant today, so yeah thanks Emma for moving to the next slide, now what's intersectionality, you know I could have put a lot of definition around intersectionality, there are so many out there and Google provides a wealth of information on this, this presentation is not about teaching every aspect of intersectionality, so I will not go deep into this, however briefly to mention as you can see on this picture it's around race, gender, class, history, language, you have a religion, culture, sexuality, sexuality, sorry, education, economic background which is not quite on this particular picture and of course one thing that is often very very often missed is that all these elements also corresponding to your immediate family member affect your position in society, we often tend to say okay it's just my gender, it's just my class, it's just my ethnicity which is true but also it depends on the ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and all of your immediate surrounding as well and this helps in your understanding and if I could have the next slide please Emma. So this is my definition, you can quote it as long as you say too many say that, so understanding intersectionality for me being born in Moorish was not challenging at this time because I was exposed to ethnicities and classes and genders that are present sexuality, orientation and all that were present at that time in Moorish, however I think I learned more about it when I came to Europe and got exposed to other cultures and things like this and to me in a natural understanding and intersectionality is understanding what I am and what I am not, if I don't understand for example I'm a female, yes I will not understand everything, I will not be able to walk in the shoes of a male right now but at least at some point I need to know that yes this is what I don't know and this is what I'm not and try to understand it, not obviously I will not have a live experience of that. Can I have the next slide please, yeah I'm trying to jiggle. So now a quick question I've seen in the Google documents some people are associate professors, we've got academics, we've got learning tech, educational developer, we've got Matt, I'm not sure which role you are and we've got senior learning tech, I believe we don't have any students at the moment with us. This slide I'm just going to ask you if you could put in the chat on YouTube where you're joining what do deadlines mean to you in your role as professor, senior, LTE, simply LTE academic, we'll have bread if we had somebody who's doing their PhD or post-grad or something like that at the same time during a part-time degree or something but we don't, if you could just write in the chat what do deadlines mean to you, to you personally again not to your institution, you don't have a deadline for that by the way but we'll still have to go with the flow because it's a 30 minutes presentation, sorry I don't seem to see the comments so I'm just going to come back to that. Can I have the next, okay Elena Dawn says place one wish to begin backward timing to set up workflow okay do we have some more comments around what do deadlines mean to you and if you are doing some part-time courses or even if you're doing online training where you know sometimes you've got these courses two three weeks that you've got to do for work if you can just write about that as a trainee or student on that course so I guess it's Emma who said for me deadlines are both a motivator and a pressure, Rich said deadlines are something many of our students have no respect for okay I'll do I'll leave the comments coming and I'm going to move to the next slide quickly can I have the next one please yeah so I'll now leave the floor to Jim who's going to take you through culture of deadlines and what they mean and what current literature says yeah this work that we're discussing today really comes out of a lot of meetings that the three of us have been doing where we're trying to find you know particular answers in the literature or plan a research project about trying to focus on one aspect of education and see how we can design a research project to try and understand it in a deeper way and we were talking about assessments generally and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to very quickly go through some of the things we've been discussing in terms of the literature in trying to understand this particular aspect so next slide please so just give like sort of macro overview and this might sort of link with you in terms of how we think about deadlines in our daily work rather than just in terms of how it affects students so I was looking more in the gray literature here with you know looking at the things like business insider and Forbes magazine and these sorts of things where this is where I could only find references to cultures around approaches to working across different cultures using deadlines and the impacts of that but one thing I don't mind Emma could you share that thing that I just dropped in the private chat there this is a link to a rather interesting little review where in business insider they're talking about the different cultural understandings of time so this is somebody who's worked an American who's worked across very you know different time zones for different groups of people globally and starts to discuss what are the different time understandings of that there's a really nice one I don't know whether it's apocryphal because I couldn't find the actual example of this but they talk about in western views we view time as we're facing the future and we walk forward into the future and in this review that I've just put forward there they talk about the Madagascan point of view where you walk backwards their whole linguistics is around the idea that they're moving backwards into the future always facing the past and these are quite you know quite interesting different ideas about how we think about time and how culture builds our vision of time and how we might use time to plan it but sometimes I think reflecting on some of this literature I've noticed as well this has changed my viewpoint on how I think about internal cultures within organizations about how I start talking to other groups and their understandings of the flexibilities within deadlines so there's a whole other range of literature which talks about how we set deadlines and where does that come from and the different ways in which deadlines are managed in different cultures so one of the interesting ones that comes out is this idea that the most important thing about a deadline is not hitting it but what remains after it so the one of the important things that comes from this cultural understanding is that the most important part is that the relationships remain strong and respectful so you have the importance there is that what you're doing is you're not pushing to get the job done you're trying to build up that relationship and I've noticed that just reflecting on that in my own institution of how you know you set a deadline you go why aren't these guys hitting it and then you go and sit with them and chat about it and lo and behold by the end of it they've gone oh yeah there you go that just finished it for you so there's a lot of like negotiation around these sorts of things another one that comes out quite strongly in this grey literature is this idea of hitting the deadline in terms of and they describe it using the bus analogy okay so again I don't know whether this is apocryphal or not but they talk about well in swiss time for instance the bus leaves always on time but in some other cultures the bus leaves when it's full and they use this to sort of highlight the significance of quality over this temporality of getting the job done this all links together as well with a wider discussion about the impact on creativity how you want to actually get quality out of this process but by setting this deadline the closer you get to it the the less quality that you can produce because you're squashing this creative creativity in a shorter space of time and I'm worried about my time load now next next slide please so um what I wanted to talk about here as well is just focus on two of these aspects here a lot of the literature now if we think about the impact on students is procrastination so there's a huge amount of literature and if you share this particular one Emma for me as well that I just dropped into the chat this one's quite an interesting overview just recently done it and what it highlights is our viewpoint of procrastination is very much a sociological point of view no sorry a psychological point of view rather than a sociological point of view there's very little literature that talks about the context of the deadline rather than just what's happening inside the individual as as they start to reach that that crucial deadline so there's something really missing about that and an opportunity to explore this with students I think there's also a massive connection between well-being and procrastination so the emotional side of this is not really explored very well in the literature it's more um the psychological effects are more about personality traits you know the usual kind of surveys and these sorts of things to highlight particular personality traits rather than these emotional reactions so there's a huge opportunity as well of exploring anxiety and its effects but also causes of procrastination that it's cyclical that it's it's not you know as as you approach that deadline it could be what's happening as you lead up to it as much as the cause of it so there's also this multiple deadlines as well and you'll see this a lot in the literature and I think I've forgotten to put this one together I'll send this one out in a minute the link to this but there's a really nice piece of research that's been done by Jones 2020 in the development of this student minds mental health charter the university health charter they did a really nice sort of development process interviewing staff and students and assessment bunching becomes really begins to highlight in that literature and its impact on mental health and the last little thing here this liminality and becoming links back to procrastination as well and through the topic of mental health because what you'll see in there is whether we talk about during this this lead up to the deadline itself the journey that the student is taking towards that and whether we actually building greater support where we discuss the emotional impact of coming towards your first deadline and how to deal with some of these things just get them out on the table and actually begin to share them and discuss them and then possibly an opportunity so last next slide please Emma here's the link now for that Jones article I'll just drop in the chat um so it's this uh there is different possible solutions here UDL universal design for learning I don't know whether you're familiar with that but that there's a there's a real richness in the connection of that theory with um neurological studies and these sorts of things is grown through neurological studies but it doesn't focus so much on procrastination and deadlines it's much more focused on assessment uh flexibility in the type of assessment that you offer that the format that it that you give the student there's some literature around continuous assessment as well although there is some evidence in there that it this continuous assessment is almost like over assessing the the students and they become like overly tired by this performative process all the time there's some interest in studies about flexible assignments um there's not too many studies although I you know I haven't done a massive literature review on this but what does seem to come across there is that the studies that are it's not truly flexible what they're talking about is offering three or four deadlines that the students can pick from and what they tend to find is that the students are really bad at choosing the optimal deadline for them so basically what they're saying is they always go for the final deadline out of the four um and they still haven't planned well enough to to hit that deadline and also that they talk about the fact that well we in order to offer this flexible flexibility we need to help students to become flexible learners which seems to be like you know giving even more weight to the to the problem one of the um interesting couple of examples though around the identification of bunching some some really interesting things coming from the tel community around building systems to make the academics aware and and to use some kind of systems to identify those deadlines and put them into some kind of order so that the student the staff is aware of how many deadlines are all happening at the end of the month but I got really interested in the block delivery okay so I'm going to share a couple of really I think really key little bits of literature here that maybe you'll get your time to have a look at these I don't know whether you offer block delivery um in there but the the first one I've shared here is a review by an Australian University Victoria University in Australia and they've gone big with it they basically over the past four years everything is block delivery all all modules are taught in that way and they present a really interesting I wonder if you move the slide just one step forward yeah so this some graph is from that study and shows you the effects over the three years as they shifted to block delivery and there's a lot of really interesting things where they look at intersectionality and how block delivery has really supported those learners so I think there's something in block delivery but the second one that I've offered up which is Nixon and Gorman from 2020 looks at the problem from the lecturer's point of view of handling block delivery and there there are some good points about this but there are some complications for instance this you get a faster sense of accomplishment and insight about what's happening to the students but you're you're you're there's a little margin for error because you're only delivering in such a short space of time if you're not sorted and you you miss that deadline yourself as a lecturer it's too late I've finished my little bit sorry to you Rumani if I've gone too far but no that's that's all right um I wanted you to cover um in a puzzle so that the audience can understand why we are doing this piece of work can I have the next slide please Emma uh no next one so quick questions around intersectionality considerations it's quite a packed slide with text are we bothered about intersectionality are we bothered about students with care responsibilities are we bothered about international students there is in the google doc a timeline which was around I think 4 p.m roughly let's say if I'm a mom and I've got care duties I've got my kids in care center daycare center I'll probably have to think okay do I go and pick my kids up around four or do I leave them enough to school things like that and there's a whole list of intersectionality consideration that we can understand but there's also one thing that we need to think about what types of assessments are still valid in 21st century especially now post pandemic and things have moved online most all modules have written assignments and exams I recall when I was doing programming I used to have to do assignments with pseudocodes I was like why am I having to write pseudocodes I'm never going to in no job will I be asked to do pseudocodes what is that I mean I've been a software engineer I've never had to do pseudocodes I've never had to even remember codes by heart I knew the abc's of I don't know python uh cc plus plus and all these I knew you had to end with a semicolon when needed and things like this but I've never had to write the code but yet assignments were please write the pseudocode and even in exams and um one of the question I would like everyone to ask is how much are we bothered by the way about assessments about deadlines and about intersectionality and about students whether we are doing things for the students or all the students or whether we are actually looking at just a category so when we say students benefit from it who is benefiting and there will be somebody who's not benefiting from it are we looking for that somebody who's not benefiting from it um one thing also that doesn't work with the current model of uk actually uh assessment is for t&e students now that okay rasmus plus has been you know brexit and all but there's still um t&e courses t&e courses is really horrible like when I was in Greece in Spain yes it gave me one and two hours ahead but it also meant that if I didn't manage my time properly I was still working till one or two and I didn't mind if I didn't manage my time probably it's not because I wanted and I chose you but because when the students move to other countries there are other things that they've got to deal with look for the accommodations I've had visa issues so many times there's always something else that you've got to worry around are we accommodating for these students are we linear enough can I have the next slide please I'm aware we probably will not be able to take questions uh one thing that Jim also mentioned is uh like for example block deadlines and things like this all their alternatives are we having these alternatives are we implementing them are we talking about them in our institution and Jim also mentioned already about uh I've put digital in bracket because not all assignment you need to be working on a computer you probably are already are reading a book students are reading a book and writing it down then typing it on on the word document or something it doesn't mean that everything they are researching on online library and stuff like this so where does well-being stand there in that and sorry I should have asked one slide before now oh yeah sorry this one this very one this is actually sorry the the next one this slide is actually questions that I've already got in the abstract uh that I will share I've shared on Twitter it's basically if we have a 20 for 59 deadline what happens at midnight does the tutor suddenly wake up and starts uh marking the assignment why at midnight why are 20 for 59 could have been 5 am 10 3 5 am is not right as all because the students have got to sleep some of you have written noon which is a really great um deadline because then you also have staff who can help and you're not stressing staff as well there's so many questions that are out there on this slide I'll continue the conversation online as well on Twitter but one exercise for you to take on as it as a takeaway from this presentation is if you had a for Riti and the finance because most of the time I hear that people say I'm not in power I don't have the finance there's this and that issue around offering finance but if you had a for Riti and finance I actually have a public link there if Emma could put that it's a takeaway exercise that you could fill it um in your time if you had a for Riti and finance what will you do differently all the cons that you've added on the google doc how would you then do that differently so that there's no cons and there's no challenges well I I believe there will be some point some model that you'll implement will have some sort of cons maybe you'll have to apply to to employ more people but if you had it all logistically possible what would you do differently and how would you do it so this is more of a takeaway uh kind of exercise for you to and if I could have the next slide which is um oh sorry this this was the one I was talking about and the next one which is about choice we have the choice but are we making the right choice or is money and our line manager preventing her from making the right choice I've got the next few slides which is around references there's also further reading that Jim has shared in the chat I'll be sharing these slides online I'll put it on discord as well if you're on the score I'll um share it on um twitter as well and uh potentially ask uh alt if they could tweet it to reach more people as more members as well and before I finish I'm free when it's already past I'd like to thank uh September call who she hasn't joined us today but she's been a critical friend uh at the early stage of our discussion especially because of our work around intersectionally and what we wanted to look around in intersectionality this is I must mention is a work in progress uh your input around what you've done in the google sheet if you want to kind of fill your row completely that is most welcome so I can have your information and we can defer the work around that uh I don't seem to see question I know we've overrun happy to take questions on twitter Emma I I didn't notice any questions either lots of cormorant facts and other seabirds but um yeah if if you want to share your twitter um with or even on discord um if anybody wants to continue conversation there but it's been a really oh we've lost Jim it's been a really um inspiring conversation and um really interesting and I've been finding myself scribbling down all the references um so I just wanted to say thank you very much Jim and to Romani and um hopefully continue the conversation soon thanks Jim for the uh logistical support that sorry Emma and thanks Jim of course for my being my uh it co-present on this and collaborate on this difficult topic thank you very much and see you at the next session thank you