 The sun has set. It is dark outside. Thank you to the panel, obviously this day, and to colleagues at the back who stayed. Thank you for seeing that. We're here to talk to you about our proposal, a Type 3 proposal, which is not very sampling entitled, I would have to say, enhancing the digital teaching capabilities of experienced online instructors and the digital learning capabilities of their students. I've listened to some of the other project teams that have their gorgeous acronyms, A-I-T-E-A, and I wish we had come up with something snappier. But this is coming from, I suppose, our experience of delivering a wholly online course. So, Trace and I have been involved in an online programme at Trinity, the postgraduate diploma in social policy and practice, which is delivered wholly online. It's a one-year postgraduate programme delivered, I suppose, really quite intensively over a year with six modules. We take two classes a year. This is one of those classes graduating. And I think that experience, which is part of Trinity's strategy to go online, part of the 2014 strategy to go online, has developed, I suppose, among our staff, a very intensive acquisition of knowledge and skill. Very much focused on, how do I get my materials online? How do I facilitate my students' engagement? And I think what we now have would be quite a technically skilled group of instructors who are also, I think, actually quite good at the design and development elements of the curriculum. We've been through that experience. We also have a very good set of established supports, I would say, in no small part to Trace, supporting students. This is part of a centralised support unit, where all of our students have access to that technical support. And that, I suppose, has been really where our focus has been, in getting online, going online, and requiring those technical skills. But I think it's fair to say that that's really only one part of the picture. And if I'm to look at the all aboard map of the digital skills, mapping those in our higher education, I'd have to say I think we've probably been quite focused on some of the tracks in this lovely map. Probably very focused on things like tools and technologies, certainly focused on creating and innovating. But one of the things I suppose now our experience of running that programme has brought us to is to realise that for us, and for our students, it's certainly a lot more than simply the technology. It's not just about design and development. And good design and development of digital resources does not make necessarily for a good, rich, vibrant, digital learning experience. And that's where we are now. We're realising, as opposed to this point in our experience, we have four cohorts of students graduating. We're now in our fifth year. But actually, really for us, there's a growing need, I think, for students and instructors to focus more on the, I suppose, the interaction within the classroom. What is going on within the classroom that is, I suppose, important. So that live part of the online course is something we're beginning to reflect on now. And we're reflecting on that, I suppose, guided by, despite how obvious it might seem, I think for a while we probably thought that online learning was simply replicating what you might do in a face-to-face environment. And the truth is, of course, that it's not, that it requires new ways of teaching and new ways of learning. And it's taken us a while, I suppose, to get to the point where we're beginning to ask, okay, well, what is it we need to be doing in the classroom that will stimulate that debate, that will get students to engage with each other? Now, I think that's probably of particular importance to us because of the program. The program is a program of social policy and practice. We have a lot of people coming to us from the world of social services, people who run services and manage them. We have people coming to us from the community and the voluntary sector who are advocating for social change, and who want an understanding of the bigger social policy picture to make that change happen. We also, actually, some years of people coming from the corporate sector who want to learn a little bit more about social things to fulfill their corporate social responsibility. What that means is that we have a melting pot of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. Some of our students are operating with English, certainly not as their first language. And yet, in order for them to achieve learning outcomes at level nine on a social policy program, they need to be able to discuss and debate with each other in a very robust way. So, how do we make that happen? How do we make sure that when the course goes live that the discussion forum, certainly, is live, interactive, vibrant? And how do we make sure that the tutorials we use? We have synchronous tutorials once a week. On a Thursday evening, the students would come together, enhanced with webcam and microphone, and we talk as a class with each other. We debate and we engage. So, in that environment, I suppose one of our experiences, and this is a very local project, arises from very local need, one of the things that we can see can happen is that when the classroom isn't vibrant, it is, I suppose, a natural instinct for instructors perhaps to move into didactic mode and start teaching and filling the space where maybe they're wanting discussion to happen. The same can happen, I suppose, in the reverse talking earlier with colleagues from DCU that sometimes in the synchronous tutorial, if a student does speak up and they start to dominate the discussion, you're almost so delighted that they're talking, you leave them at it, perhaps for longer than you should. So, trying to figure out, I suppose, what's the right balance? How to promote that engagement? How to make it safe for students to share with each other and often in social policy to argue with each other about what social policy might be the correct response to a social problem? We think we need some new ways of teaching and learning on this programme. We think we need to be spending a little more time thinking about the roles that teachers and learners play in the classroom. A little more time thinking about the behaviours, the teaching and learning behaviours. So, not just thinking about the material, not just thinking about the stuff, but thinking about how once you've made that available, how do you signal to people, how do you build the right kinds of behaviours, the right actions and the right attitudes in the class? So, what you're building is, I suppose, the competence but also the comfort and the confidence for that classroom to be vibrant. So, this is what we reckon our need is and we have an opportunity now because we've been running this course since 2014. We have four graduated cohorts of students and one currently in line actually having classes, synchronous tutorials this evening. And one of the things we'd like to do is we'd like to go and find out what those students thought about the experience they had online. We'd like to find out from their perspective what were the digital learning behaviours that they thought were good for them, that were good practice from them, what were the digital teaching practices that they liked. So, we've done variants of this in very small scale surveys before. So, we know for example that students really like it at the digital classroom when the instructor calls on somebody to contribute, but they don't like it when it's them that's called. So, we know therefore that there's something that works when you pull somebody out of the group, but there's some barrier, some attitude, resistance perhaps from the individual's perspective. We also know from having conducted, we've tried a few approaches for example in the discussion forum. So, one year for example we decided to comment on every single post on the discussion forum. Every single thing that was posted to see what that would do. And not only was that a fairly significant endeavour from a time perspective, we could also see that actually it encouraged a very unilateral conversation between the instructor and the students. And that actually when a course goes live, we need to step out of it a little to allow the students to connect with each other. But some of this learning to be honest is a little ad hoc. Some of it comes from, you know, what we have done of some of our annual evaluations of materials. Some of it comes from discussions between the instructors themselves. What we'd like to do is to really get a good grasp now on the student opinions of digital learning, digital teaching, their experience, what was good and what they think is needed. We'd like to do a survey with the students. We already have a survey planned for this year, a destination survey. We'd like to add in some digital teaching and digital learning questions into it. We'd like the students to respond to that survey to indicate whether they're willing to participate in a focus group. And that's something that we will conduct online using the same methodology, the same technology that we use generally to support the course itself. What we hope we will get out of that, as well as with some interviews with our instructors, we want to develop some additional artefacts, some too new teaching and learning sessions. We already have quite a good suite of resources for our students and for our lecturers, but we think it needs to be enhanced. And we think with some online resources that we can add into the induction sessions that we can support a shared understanding between lecturers and between the students of the kinds of roles that people might be playing in a digital environment and the kinds of behaviours, actions and attitudes that I suppose foster a good rich environment. We think that this will allow for deeper learning experience for our students. And we think it will capture something that's happening on quite an ad hoc basis at the moment. A lot of our instructors, we talk regularly about what's the best way to get a classroom going, perhaps when it has slowed down. We think we could do with formalising some of that and certainly locating it within an evidence base. Now, if we can get the student voice activated one of the potentials of course is for us to use it even more. And this is based on the comments from the panel. We think that there's the opportunity certainly for us in engaging with students in this way to get them to reflect a little on the meta skills of learning digitally. For them to think about how they're learning and not just as many. Most of them are busy people. They all have jobs many of them have families and caring responsibilities to zoom out a little and to think about those meta skills. We also think that this would be a way for us to get some qualitative input into an evaluation of the curriculum going forward. So we evaluate the curriculum at the moment in a fairly standard way using evaluations, survey based. It would be really good if we could get a solid group of students who are willing to give us feedback on our curriculum on an ongoing basis. So if this was to work for this project, it would be something that we could hope on and use for further improvements to what we do. So how do we plan to go about doing this? This is the idea we have in mind. So we'd like to obviously have a look at the evidence base. We know there's some evidence there. We haven't been looking at it in a very concrete way or a very focused way to look at it. Particularly to look at what's out there with regard to the roles that people can play in an online environment. So we can see for example that some of the students very clearly play a supporting role for other students. So very often they'll help students find where resources might be online. That's a role that they're playing. Sometimes they're playing a display role where they're letting you know what they know and their post is very much a performance rather than in any way engaging with anybody else in their class. So we'd like to have a look at the evidence base. Then we'd like to try and capture the student voice through a survey distributed to our five cohorts of students. That's about 200 students since we've started. And then from that to work further with those students in focus groups. We also want to use our instructor group. We're fortunate we have a mainly full time instructor base in Trinity. This program is staffed with full time lecturers. We meet each other regularly as a course committee to use those inputs in group and also in individual formats. And then to develop as I say these two artifacts. An online session in digital learning and one on digital teaching. This is the outline of the project plan. Over the year we really would like to get these materials ready for the next start of the program which would be here in September. So that means we would be starting the secondary research phase there in January and starting primary research towards the middle of February. Now we've already received medical approval for a destination survey so we've a little bit of work done there already. So we would be able I think to go back and look for some revised ethical approval in order to add these additional elements to the project. Then after we have engaged in the survey and the focus groups with students the interviews with lecturers to analyze what's coming out. You know what are people who have been doing this kind of learning in a wholly digital environment. What are they saying are some of the things that work for them. The behaviors and the actions that they associate with a good learning experience. Then we look to develop these materials and I'll talk about the team in a moment to develop those materials for online implementation and then what we'd like to do is to test those materials. We always have a testing phase anyway. We'd like to use our student focus group to give us some feedback on some of the elements of our program. The team basically is a team that works together already quite a bit. The staff and Theresa and our colleagues in Trinity Online Services work together on a weekly basis to deliver online sessions for this program and for others. We would also see a role for research assistant here to assist us with primary collection and also we have a predefined group of students and instructors that we will be able and hope that we would be able to access. I think one of the things that this would do would be it would add to the existing digital skill resources that we certainly have available to us. It would supplement them and complement them. It's something that I think when it's in online format as I think many of the groups that I hear today have said it facilitates that national sharing. Definitely for those of us involved in teaching this supports your professional development I think and it's a way of researching what you're teaching and then teaching what you've researched is that lovely virtuous cycle. Putting the students at the centre of that evaluation of what works. We think for students and also for instructors it will facilitate that meta-analysis and really ultimately though we'll know if it's working. I mean that sustainability in terms of impact will we see in our classrooms more competence in terms of participation in class. Will we see greater confidence and comfort and I think then we'll see whether it has facilitated a vibrant digital classroom. That's our proposal. Thank you very much. I'm going to stop now and take questions from the panel.