 Welcome back to this last Oatsey session. So it's great to be here. My name is Emma Proctor-Leg, and I'm the chair for this session, and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Tim, and he's talking on a topic that I'm really interested to hear all about. So the session title is, cameras on or off, different perspectives of the same live lesson experience in FE during the COVID-19 emergency. So the session is 25 minutes in total, with approximately 20 minutes for the presentation and five minutes for questions. Please do use the chat to post questions and comments, and I will now hand you over to Tim. Okay, well, thanks Emma. And well, good afternoon, and thank you for attending this presentation on the cameras on or off dilemma. And this is something that's stimulated a lot of debate in virtual staff rooms and on social media during the emergency. And about an hour ago, the topic was covered by Cate Bezela and Pete Meller from the University of Sheffield. And they asked the person a question, should we see students' cameras when we teach online synchronous sessions? And it's a good question because normally teachers have been used to seeing the eager faces of their students, peering at them in expectations, expectation during lessons. But during the past 18 months, that experience has has changed fundamentally. So I'm going to have a little bit of a practice with you, I'm sorry, that you, Roo Clap. And there is a QR code there, and there's a link to Roo Clap.com ought to see 2021. And the question is, why don't students turn their cameras on during synchronous online lessons? And if you can keep your responses fairly short, one word, answers would be great. And we'll have a look at that later to see what people think about that. Okay, so what I plan to do is talk about the research I've been undertaking at Plumpton College and at the two other colleges that were part of our consortium. And discuss the change to teacher-student dynamic we experienced during the emergency taker, and look at the findings of the research, and make some recommendations. So last year, as employed by Plumpton College to investigate what was happening in online lessons, they'd noticed that student experience was too variable and had formed a College Collaboration Fund partnership with Basingstoke College and with East Kent. That's Basingstoke Technical College and with East Kent College Group. And the aim was to find out how to improve digital confidence and competence of our lecturers and the learning experience of our students. So at Plumpton, we teach a range of land-based topics from wine production, equine science, veterinary nursing, blacksmithing, forestry, animal management, and our partnership colleges teach all the courses you'd expect at the general FE and tertiary college. Teachers had used online learning methods previously, mainly using Moodle or Google Classrooms, but only a support for physical face-to-face settings. They're not taught online in synchronous lessons. And as we know, research in this field is predominantly focused on situations where students and teachers have elected to join an online course and not much where online learning is mandatory. So I initiated a mix method research program last December, and this involved rapid literature review, an initial set of benchmarking surveys with staff and students, plus follow-up surveys in March, 21 interviews with teaching staff, three focus groups with a total of 12 students from each of the three colleges. And there were two surveys, one at the start and one at the end of the project, 250 members of staff who taught online, over 1,400 students responded to the first survey, over 160 online teachers and over 1,000 students to the second. And the demographics of respondents to both students surveys were fairly similar, with around 80% of them studying at levels two or three and 70% in year one. So yes, I kind of started out with my first research interview with a lecturer. And I was a little bit surprised by the level of irritation and annoyance I heard in that. So this is a quote from that interview. Students won't turn their cameras on, I suspect that a lot of students just turn the camera off and use it as an excuse to duck. And other lecturers I spoke with agreed that non-user cameras was a real problem for them, being able to judge students' attention. So here's a quote here. I don't know if someone's being quite, because they're anxious, I don't know if someone's being quite because they're just studios and they're making notes, I don't know if they're being quite because they're not there or because they're intimidated by the content. I just can't judge that. There's no way of judging that because they won't put their cameras on. And I just, I don't want to give you too many quotes here, but there's one more. We've all been trying to get people to turn their cameras on and microphones on to give them a better experience, but it's just not been possible for us. Lecturers I talked to say they feel like they're teaching, just teaching to a brick wall. So this is a big disconnect between staff expectations and student behavior. Our lecturers continue to focus on maintaining the quality of their teaching as they adapted to teaching in this new environment. The means of communication profoundly affected their practice, especially with regard to their interaction with students. Staff are used to physical classroom where they're in control of what we might call the gaze, where they're in a position at the front of the class allowing them to monitor all their students as shown in this figure taken from Masiya. Conventional teaching typically consists of teacher A instructing students, BCD, etc. And this setting enables teachers to see all their students identify visual cues that broadly demonstrate the level of comprehension and allows them to adjust their teaching based on these cues. Moving online, change this dynamic and place staff and students in a new environment with a new dynamic where staff and students have the potential to have the same view of each other. The image on the right is taken from a meeting in together mode in Microsoft Teams. And the figure is taken from Moore's paper on his theory of transactional distance and shows the potential for interaction between participants in the distance learning environment. And I'll come back to Moore's theory a little later. The technology appeared to provide an environment that was like a physical classroom, but treating it as such wasn't working for teachers. For those who'd seen the Microsoft marketing and promotion, this is what they may have expected to see, but what they got was more like this. And the challenge involved in moving face-to-face lessons to online had the unintended effect of impeding many of the opportunities teachers normally use to understand their students and adjust their teaching and tended to shift the main focus for many of them towards simply delivering lessons. Staff, where it seems, were trying to replicate their usual practice in this new environment, but students weren't responding in kind. As a student in a physical classroom, you really have no control over how you're seen. But in the online environment, students recognize that they take control of how and when they were seen and use this particular technological affordance to manage their visibility. So why did they do that? So shall we have a look and see what you think? Hopefully, fingers crossed, people have responded to my rule clap. Let's have a look. That's loading up. Oh, look at that. Whoa, that's amazing. Thank you very much, everyone. Privacy is a big one there. Obviously, it jumps out. Anxiety, privacy concerns. Yeah, chaotic home life. It's tiring to be seen. Health and anxiety, caring for children, broadband issues. So there's kind of a technical side. There's a social side there, personal, not being dressed, eating a messy burrito. Yeah. Afraid of screen bombing as well. I think that's another one where, you know, you're very exposed in this environment. Someone could take a screenshot of you in an embarrassing position and then share that. And there's opportunities there for bullying beyond what's normally available to some students. It's tiring to be seen on screen. And I feel this as well. I think there's an opportunity there for the tech companies to address this issue, to think about, you know, if they want to try and replicate the environment. You know, when you're in a classroom, you don't normally see yourself. And that makes you feel, I think, very self-conscious. So, thank you for sharing that. That's really great. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on that. And I'm going to move on because I know we're short of time here. So, if you look at the interviews, what did they, what are the reasons that the lecturers and students gave? Well, some of them were based on personal concerns, as came up in that word cloud. And one lecture I spoke to, brought this home, had this brought home to them very strongly. So, I'll just read this quote, a student in my tutor group, the only student who had 100% attendance messaged me in floods of tears, which is really struggling with anxiety to do with cameras and being online. But for the first time, her attendance dropped because she had to leave the session. So, that's a very big reaction, I think. And I think that teacher really took on board what the issue was going on there. Some students I spoke to thought it was related to feeling of being continually observed. It's definitely those who have a bit of anxiety, maybe struggle a lot more online because they just can't turn the camera on because every, I'm just going to be able to look at them, look at you the entire time. So, we know that anxiety and depression are more prevalent in college students than in the general population. Abraham and Hal estimated around 30% of US college students have some form of depression and a recent study by Jenkins et al in the UK found a similar proportion here. The UK Children's Commissioner report that 20% of children experience persistent stress during lockdown. So, it is a big issue. And it is a contributing factor to my students, tended to turn off cameras, but does it tell the whole story? So, some students reported they didn't have computers that are up to the job and processing audio and video on the web. Here's an example. I'd say the main issue for me is my computer is just very, very slow. It's a very cheap laptop. I just want to turn my microphone on or off. I might have to wait up for up to 20 seconds for that to happen, which is really, really awkward when I put my hand up and the teachers ask me to say something. And staff reported that network or processing issues on the rare occasions that everyone shared their cameras. With team specifically, it can be a little bit slow and laggy when you've got all students on. So, we've got a group size of 13. It can be really, really slow if everyone's got cameras on and can't click on their class notebooks to do anything because it just freezes everything. Okay. So, technical and social issues here. What did the surveys tell us? So, we asked a number of questions in the survey and we're looking here at the comparison between survey one and survey two. Very little difference here. Most students said they were confident in using online learning technologies. About 65%. But only a quarter found online learning as interesting as face-to-face lessons. Significantly, around 60% agreed that technical issues disrupted online lessons. And around 15% said they did not have access to reliable network connection. So, those last two may very well be connected for some students. What about teachers? Well, they were equally confident in their use of online learning technologies. But this changed in the later survey three months later. Confidence in the use of online learning technology improved from 66% to 75% saying that they had confidence. Similarly, we saw a change here with teachers reporting their ability to motivate students improving from 49% to 64%. And also, there's a big drop in the teachers having reporting technical issues disrupting their lessons from 64% to 42%. That's quite a difference between the teachers experience here and the students. And what can we attribute this to? So, I think it comes in three letters, really, CPD. Speaking to some teaching staff at the end of the project, it seems that they were responding positively to the intensive focus of CPD sessions in the February half term. So, whereas students did not have the same experience and the students I spoke to complained about the lack of provision they had. There was some training provided, but it wasn't enough. So, the picture that emerges is that while it may have been uncomfortable for lecturers not to see most of their class, it may have been too much for students faced with anxiety over being watched or watching themselves, a slow computer, or an unreliable network connection. And the affordances of the interface which allowed students for the first time to take control over their visibility and lessons. So, what could be done about this issue? Some lecturers I interviewed suggested the introduction of sanctions for not turning on cameras. And I'm not sure how enforceable this would be, to be honest. And how you'd manage that. You don't manage those who had logistical reasons for not complying. I'd be interested to know if anyone actually agrees with this. I spoke, some of the lecturers I spoke with had noticed that building rapport with students was important. So, I'll just read this quote here. A lot of students, they wouldn't put their cameras on. When you're talking to them, you're getting a rapport with them. They're answering or they're typing the answer in. They know what's happening. And that to me is the key thing. Teachers recognise that cameras were a bigger issue than they thought and began to de-emphasise their use. So, I've got quite a long quote here, but I think it's worth repeating here. Where we were pushing so much to get the cameras on, actually we were just bugging the students, making them more anxious about it. Then suddenly, their microphones are off as well. Whereas, what we found is that if we let the cameras go, I found, and most of my colleagues have found, that the engagement with the microphones and the chat massively went up. So, what I'm doing instead is encouraging them to answer short quizzes, or many assessments throughout the lessons, and saying to them, this is how I'm going to do the register. So, I see if you're answering these questions, I'll mark you as attending. If you're not, I'm not going to mark you as attending. And that worked for this staff member. So, although I'm happy we're not seeing the faces of many students, many staff participants reported success with alternative approaches to assessing student attention and engagement. And other teachers and students talked about how they saw more camera use in breakout rooms as well. So, I promised a little talk here about Moore's transactional distance theory. And this interaction is between the learner and instructors at the core of this theory. The big idea is that in distance education, transactional distance is not just a matter of being geographically apart, but it's also a pedagogical phenomenon. He discusses what to consider when designing distance courses and focuses on teaching behaviors that are defined in his terms by dialogue and structure. The interplay of these two functions define the transaction distance between learner and teacher. The more dialogue, the less distance, which leads to better learning experience and positive learning outcomes. Rigid structure tends to reduce dialogue and teachers should aim to promote dialogue by a variety of means in the low-structured environment. So, with apologies to Moore, I'm going to do this. Despite criticism, the theory does provide, I'll go back again, provide a useful framework on which to hang discussion on this topic. And what my research appears to indicate is that by relaxing structure a little, that is de-emphasizing camera use and increasing the variety of ways of encouraging dialogue, teachers reported increasing levels of interaction. Don't know how dialogic the interaction was or if it led to improved learning outcomes, but teachers noticed that increasing the variety of interactive methods improved their knowledge of what individual students were doing during lessons and enhance their ability to differentiate and assess their progress. So, just to round up here, I discovered that despite expressing confidence in using online learning technology, students had several social and technical barriers to overcome to adopt camera use. They either had anxiety, concerns over privacy, unreliable network connections, or low-quality computing, or varying combinations of these influences. And they exploited the affordances of the technology to control their visibility. On the other hand, teachers were concerned by the lack of visual cues to support their practice, but increased in confidence and decreasing levels of technical disruption to their classes and those who de-emphasized camera use and adopted alternative methods to ascending understanding and progress found that the transaction distance decreased and students tended to encourage, engage more in lessons. I feel as though I'm coming near the end here. I've got a couple more slides. So, my key recommendations were to improve teaching practice with a de-emphasized camera use to reduce anxiety and privacy concerns, encourage and model social behaviors, and record lessons to ensure that those students who experience technical interruptions would have opportunities to revisit lessons when disruptions have passed. So, I've got a little QR code there if anyone would like to give me some feedback. I'm always interested in that, what you thought of my presentation, be interested to see that. There's a, the full report is available by that link and there's, this is the Department for Education report that I've produced. And then there's a bit of information about me there, about my Twitter and such like. Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Thank you, Tim. A brilliant session, really, really fascinating. Thank you. I have to say at the moment there aren't any comments in, oh no, there are some. So, people are surprised that the percentages number with bad broadband, that sort of thing. Sorry. And sanctions for the non-nucid camera, which is a surprising suggestion that I feel. It is, but it's, I've also, I haven't included this here, but I had a look around Twitter and it's noticeable there, but this was mandated at a lot of colleges were mandating the use of cameras. And there's messages on there, so don't forget to have your cameras on. Don't forget to get your parents to sign the consent forms and all this sort of thing. So, there, and I think, you know, I think teachers were really trying to really felt that lack. I mean, that was, it came out to me very strongly. I mean, I just, before I started this research in, up until November, I was teaching online myself to add students in China who I was teaching. And some of them had the cameras on, some of them didn't. And, you know, you just say, oh, you know, I'd love to see your face, you know, and if you can, please do. And then we ended to breakout rooms and suddenly the cameras were on and they were chatting amongst themselves. So, that was quite interesting. There's, you know, there were obviously, there were bandwidth issues in China. And so, yeah, so I was quite taken about with how strongly that message came across. And so I've spent a lot of time trying to focus that and trying to remind teachers that, you know, they know who their students are, they know their social backgrounds, and they know it's difficult for some of them. We've got a question from Pete. He says, do staff warm to the idea of cameras off with awareness of accessibility issues? I think so. You know, I was only able to follow up with a handful of lectures at the end of the project. But all of them I spoke to just said, it really works, you know, using, using quizzes, doing breakout rooms, doing polling, just breaking up the lesson and delivering the stuff in a different way really worked. So, I think there'll always be staff who don't like that. And it is, it can be disconcerting. You know, I mean, I, but then again, you know, I mean, I mean, in this environment, if I had 20 minutes to deliver, I'll just deliver, you know, and then we'll say, okay, guys, what do you, what do you think? And you'll notice those people are responding. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. This scenario really does kind of sum up that experience, doesn't it? But we're getting those interactions from the comments. I'm very aware of time. It has been a really, really interesting session. There are a number of comments I think you'll want to have a look at in the comments area. And some of them are coming up on screen now. But I just want to take this moment just to say thank you again. And we're out of time. Okay. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put the link there. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was really good to do this. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you.