 Good morning, thank you for joining us. Today we're doing a session on our journal articles, so welcome to research highlights where we'll be sharing a three-minute articles from the research journal from ALT. Joining me this morning is Michael Flavin, Tunday Varga Atkins and Richard Walker, so I'm going to pass over to them for the presentation. Thank you. Good morning everybody, I hope you're enjoying conference thus far. In this presentation we have an opportunity to focus on the research journal that's published by the Association for Learning Technology and that journal is Research in Learning Technology. My name is Michael and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of the journal and with me is Tunday who is on the editorial board of the journal and although my name features at the top of the slide it really should be Tunday's because she's done the vast bulk of the work for this presentation. What we're going to do within this presentation is look at three papers that have been published recently. We're very privileged to have one of the authors with us as part of the presentation and the other two have offered us video files which will play technology allowing within the body of this presentation. One they'll give you the sense of what the journal is like and what it's publishing and we hope that some of you who are in attendance are yourselves thinking about how you can become more active members of the learning technology community by undertaking and publishing your own research and we'll see what we can do in this presentation and beyond to facilitate those ambitions because I think it's really important that we get that sense of community going. As we move through the presentation essentially we'll be handing back and forth between myself and Tunday so we very sincerely like you to think of us as academic chuckle brothers for the next half hour or so. If we can move on to the next slide please to you to me. So I think one of the things to think about is where we are, where our own research journey is, where we're going to. I think I'll let Tunday talk to this particular slide before I come back to give some background info on the journal itself. Yes so I think that this is very much the spirit of this session is what we wanted to achieve so that just to you know many of us we read papers and we'll engage with written texts but really research is about having discussions with people and by inviting authors we wanted to develop this conversation so we have an experience of actually talking to some of the authors and really encouraging you to through your research plans if you have any to do the same. So that's the spirit of this session and on the chat we would love to hear from you. So if if we using this visual metaphors to describe your research journey at the moment where would you be you know would you be in the right hand side in a safe harbor when you've navigated through the you know the difficulties and know how to do the process you know how to anchor your boat or is it perhaps that you've already I don't know bought or designed your boat but overcoming difficulties and in your publication journey so you would love to just hear pointing perhaps some of these metaphors as well you're up to in your research journey and while you're doing that in the chat I will hand back over to Michael to talk a bit about the journal. Thank you a bit of background information about the journal and some salient points to stress one is that research and learning technology is an open access journal. Increasingly academic journals are only available to you if your university or other employer subscribes to that journal's contents and this inevitably limits dissemination but if your work appears in research and learning technology it's completely open access. Another feature of open access journals is that authors are asked to make a financial contribution towards that open access status but that doesn't apply with us this is a journal in which it's free to publish so if you meet the quality standards more of which later then there's nothing further that's required of you and you have an article published in a reputable journal with potentially very wide dissemination. If we can move to the next slide please just to evidence the credibility of the journal we're listed in numerous databases and moreover we have a rising impact factor impact factors possibly the single most important metric in academic journals whereby indicates how articles published in research and learning technology then go on to be cited by other researchers so if you publish with us you get widespread dissemination you get credibility of a reputable academic journal and every possibility that your work then can enter a wider scholarly debate that pushes the discipline forward we could move to the next slide please so here's what we're doing we think in RLT and without the current editorial board we're here to open a gated community quite often in academia research is a slightly demarcated and often privileged space and you meet expert practitioners who somehow think well that space for doing my own research and seeing that work published that's not really for me I think we don't accept that precept we challenge it and I think all members of the research and learning technology community can make a contribution to the advancement and the development of learning technology we all started out we're all beginners and yes there's a learning curve but I think in research and learning technology we're here to facilitate that learning curve and in a presentation like this just show what you can do and show some of the excellent work that's come out of our journal recently so if we can move on to the next slide please Tunde and I have selected three papers for you they relate well to the conference theme we talk about care and collaboration in these spaces I think they're also interesting because there are highlight different methodologies different ways of going about your research and I think they're also interesting because of their diversity they look at different educational sectors and they come from different countries because we are an international journal so hopefully these this subsection within the presentation will give you a sense of the journal and will excite you as to its contents and may give you ideas too as to how your practice and your research can feed into these wider discussions so we're very lucky to have with us Richard Walker who's the first author on the first paper we're looking at within this presentation facilitating peer-led group research through virtual collaboration spaces an exploratory research study over to you Richard thanks very much for introduction Michael and for the opportunity to share practice here so yes this was a collaboration my role is providing the e-learning and sort of educational design insights but work very closely with Satari Chung and James Chung in our department of biology who are the subject matter experts and we work collaboratively over a couple of years actually on before we submitted for publication if we move on to the next slide our interest was in how we could replicate the the dynamics that take place in our labs between our final year undergraduate project students at the University of York and their facilitators graduate students who are there to provide just-in-time support how could we match that peer-led learning to support research projects remotely and we did this pre-pandemic looking at how we could move to a blended model where the majority of students research work actually could take place remotely with the campus-based time with instructors sort of focus more on sort of summary of results so the the role of near peers graduate facilitators was really important in this in terms of our research design and from a technology perspective we look to make use of a team-based environment slack in order to facilitate this and this is what the paper is about can we in terms of the first research question sort of replicate the the the near-peer dynamics online and and how successful is slack as a platform in supporting that and slack has certain affordances in terms of communication tools as well as search tools and and prompt alerts as well which we're very interested in seeing how they would work in in complementing problem solving and troubleshooting activities that our students would be engaging in okay if we go on to the next slide so what we did is a multi-year study almost sort of an action research one where we ran a pilot study with our initial cohort 27-2018 and drawing lessons from that in terms of how to get better interaction between groups of students and their near peers we made some adjustments and then ran it again 2018-2019 okay if we move on to the next slide so you will have noticed that the the cohort's very small sort of under 10 for each year but what we did do is go for a mixed methods approach of rich picture of what those students were doing and we did that through surveys entry exit surveys and activity logs we got students to reflect at various milestones about their learning experience what they were doing and how impactful that was and then we ran a focus group at the end in order to get a sort of a really detailed sort of insights from them in their own words in terms of their learning experience how they'd navigated the the online slack experience and then we used the all the the entries that they made within the slack environment and obviously with ethical permission for that we ran a content analysis looking at the different levels of interactions in order to determine the type of learning that was taking place okay on to the next slide and our findings certainly based on what we we saw with the adjusted design for the 2018-2019 cohort showed that we moved successfully the students away from instructed at learning giving them a greater sense of ownership of the that online learning and slack was complementary in that that respect in terms of through its alerts supporting agile problem solving but also it helped the less confident project students to achieve positive outcomes and that was through the search facilities the ability to engage in observational learning so we believe that there's there's plenty of scope for this as a team-based tool to support peer-led learning moving forward but there are lessons learned and these are shared in the paper particularly the need to socialize our students to learning methods provide clear communication about instructional roles but also to provide training to our near peers and the focus on responsiveness is absolutely key to this learning approach so that's it in a nutshell hopefully I've covered it in my three minutes yeah thanks Richard and I think I mean we have put in some thought questions or prompts for any for you listening so if if anything that resonates with your practice or anything that you might want to ask Richard about the research process or of the other two papers coming up please put that in the comment box but just while we're waiting if people did want to ask some questions or even observations and comments about you know is it resonating with your own practice that I really like Richard in your research that you had a really strong underpinning you mentioned peer learning and you really based your research designs so not necessarily I mean obviously it's very the very interesting in terms of what you're looking at the the content and the you know the outcomes of the research but if I also zoom in on the process and how you've conducted it I think that's a really strong aspect of it that you as you said you brought in the literature around peer learning, peer-led learning and also the framework that you use around cognitive thinking to analyze the interactions again that I think are really useful and a strong underpinning of the research design. Is there anything perhaps that you wanted to pick out for people listening or thinking about publishing research that might be useful from your process? I think it's important to think about the contribution that you're making and for us the the peer-led learning that there is an established sort of body of literature on that but very little indeed on actually sort of moving that to an online delivery side of things so I think that's that's something to think about what where's your where's the niche where's where's the actual sort of contribution that you're making to the sort of the body of knowledge how you're taking things forward. And just because we're talking about open access and obviously sustainable and reusable learning resources it's the same with research design as well so you have used the framework to analyze responses I'm guessing anyone who did a similar activity and you mentioned using teams now obviously a lot of people have come on to use teams now so they could run a similar study as you know using those frameworks so I think that's also a nice thing that people don't need to necessarily reinvent everything you can use what's already there. Absolutely the content analysis framework is one I've used in for problem-based learning research in the past it's a very very good one the Fox and Machia one and as you say it captures that sort of range of different levels of cognitive interaction so it's brilliant in terms of giving that rich picture of what health students are contributing in online fora. Okay I mean I could go on asking and discussing this one paper I know we were a bit ambitious to try and cover three so what we will do is Richard you're very welcome to you also respond or pick things up online and you know we do encourage you to make contacts because I think it's always nice as this is what we are trying to achieve here is to get these conversations going so I think you also have Michael now as a connection point so but in the interest so thank you Richard very much for your paper and doing for each people to go and have a read it and we will move on to the next paper which is Michael do you want to introduce this and we will then please. Yeah I will I'd also like just to chuck in a postscript to the paper of Richard and his colleagues with one eye on the fact that attendees may be thinking themselves about undertaking research for publication either with us or with another journal in the field. One thing as a reader I really appreciated about the paper by Richard and his colleagues was its use of mixed methods and it's one I'm using at the moment and just to think about how you can do your own research if you start with a survey or similar instrument it gives you that ground level data probably tell things you don't know about points of emphasis in the data that come through from which you can then develop a qualitative instrument which allows you to elaborate on your early findings and going to greater depth on them so I think as a methodology it's a really interesting way of producing valid and reliable data and interesting papers as Richard showed so for this paper what we'll do first we have a video contribution from two of the three authors so if we have a look at that first I'll provide a brief bit of commentary and of course anyone's welcome then to enter to put comments in thank you Tunde we haven't got volume Tunde. And we're here to present the impact texting and electronic feedback on building relationships and the perception of care published in research and learning technology. As avid users of technology we wanted to determine if this improved communication or impacted student-faculty relationships which led to two research questions first what actions might faculty constitute caring and what role does technology play in students feeling cared for. We used nodding's ethics with care as our theoretical framework and our literature review we focused on why care matters in higher education and technology and relationships. Our participants were eight faculty from varied disciplines teaching 15 courses at a small liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic in the US it included 307 undergraduate students this was a mixed methodology study that incorporated the education school climate survey and personal interviews. After reviewing the research we found several emerging themes for our first research question what actions by faculty constitute caring availability helpfulness approachability personality and reputation effort to know the student and reaching out. The emergent themes for our second question what role does technology play in students feeling cared for included convenience accessibility connectedness and response time. We want to mention several key findings first technology has a positive impact second students identified a variety of different indicators of care and the noted feedback had a limited impact. This study led to a rich discussion including challenging several of our assumptions for example we thought female faculty and humanities faculty would be seen as more caring however there was no data to back these initial assumptions when asked about their feedback preferences students reported 57% preferred technology 23% preferred face-to-face or written feedback and 20% preferred accommodation or had no preference in addition the longer or more times the student interacted with the faculty member regardless of the circumstances the more likely they were to say they felt cared for by them we also noted that although millennials are seen as frequently seen as digital natives several students in our study mentioned not being technology savvy some students also made the assumption that younger faculty were more technology savvy however there was no data to back these claims in courses students often felt technology pushes from their benefit instead of faculty members our findings demonstrate that implementing technology can help build caring relationships furthermore they indicate that faculty to take the extra time to exhibit care for students have a positive impact we invite you to take a moment to pause this video scan our QR code to read our article thank you so much thank you if we can move on to the next slide please yep okay so I'm aware that we are running out of time Michael so one might need to be brief yes okay well the questions there we can take into offline conversations I suppose what interested me there was a reader was what students rated highly in care was the actual fact of availability rather than a more explicitly pastoral quality and the way that technology was seen as a means to support and enhance availability so it avoided thinking of technology as panacea and looked at it as a means of supporting and enhancing practice I'm mindful of time delays so I suppose we'll move on to the third video so we can ensure we incorporate that hello everyone my hypothesis one was partly supported apologies I will be presenting this study which is about student engagement and disengagement in technology enhanced learning and more precisely has a focus on gamers gender and non-native students my name is nena bagel and I'm a researcher at the department of education in manma sweden and I'm affiliated with the department of computer and system sciences at stockham university so we distribute the questionnaire to 410 students across a level up in secondary schools in sweden to survey how they perceive their engagement and disengagement from learning with digital technologies and we raised several questions but in this particular study we raised three hypotheses that academic engagement and disengagement would differ between high and low frequency gaming students or what we can refer to here as gamers and non-gamers we found that most variables were similar for high and low frequency gaming students but that certain variables specifically in the cognitive dimension showed significant differences that meant that the hypothesis one was partly supported hypothesis two was fully supported it surveyed the differences between female and male students and found significant differences across all engagement dimensions of both engagement and disengagement finally we looked at the difference between native and non-native speakers we found that non-native and native speaking students engage similarly but we had also seen that some students engage in non-authorized activities with their digital devices and that non-native students in the cohort that we explored were significantly underrepresented when we talk about disengagement conclusively while gamers did not view their digital devices as resources that support learning they also were less sensitive to notifications and information overflow female students displayed significantly higher levels of pro-learning engagement variables than male students but male students on the other hand were more satisfied with teacher social presence online and then we found that non-native speakers were framed from unauthorized users to a higher extent than native speakers so gaming and nuanced understanding of student engagement and disengagement for particular subgroups is important when we want to design learning activities to redeem engage disengagement and increase engagement if you have further inquiries then hesitate to get in touch yeah so i think that was a really interesting paper from the school sector but these are the students that will be coming to university so i think that would be really relevant and very topical discussion given the current global context around the worries for student gaming for instance that was some really interesting conclusions and the observation in this paper i'm just aware that we are running out of time and we wanted to close with some tips from from on getting published michael do you want to yeah i'd say look and we were assuming that some of the attendees here this morning are interested in writing for us or writing for academic journals more generally so we would say look read some of our articles read the three articles in this presentation read our author guidelines we revise those earlier this year so they're up to date make sure your work adheres to them we have word limits we have paper structures when you submit your work first comes to a member of the editorial board tunde or myself or one of the other members and we make a decision about whether it goes out to peer review and i'm afraid if you haven't adhered to our guidelines that's very very unlikely so please do take time to study the journal write for us specifically adhere to the guidelines and if we do send your work out and it gets peer reviewed you'll get constructive criticism back stress constructive rather than criticism it's there to be worked with to enhance your work so you can bring it to publication you have the immense satisfaction of that and then you enter part of that wider scholarly and research community and we'd love to facilitate you on that journey to you tunde yeah definitely i think um if if you wanted to comment anything in the chat of where you're up to but really just wanted to close with the picture that you know we're very welcoming in this bay and harbour and and would love to engage with more research and for you to engage and contact others i think it's lovely to get connected with researchers who are like-minded and do the same thing thank you so much for coming and it's a goodbye from us thank you everyone for joining us that was a really interesting session it'd be great to carry on the discussion on discord i've shared the link to the the free papers in their resources chat so feel free to carry on the conversation there so yeah thank you thanks christina bye everyone