 and she has excellent great stuff. Welcome. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first parallel session of today's Alt C Summit, online summer summit. Really, really happy to see you all here. I'm Debbie Baff. I'm the membership and professional development manager for Alt and joining me is also my colleague Fiona who you will be very familiar with if you email us in with any of your queries because she is the helpful person at the end of the phone and at the end of the email she's saying hello there. Really, really great to see everybody. We've got two sessions today within this session so they're half hour sessions and that also includes a little bit of time for questions. What I will do to start off with is just take you through some of these initial slides that we have because obviously we do have some session sponsors for the first time. So I'm going to take you through our welcome slides and then we will kick off with our first speaker. So I'm assuming that everybody is okay with Blackboard Collaborate. You probably all are with everything that's happened over the last few months but we may have the odd person that may not actually be familiar with Blackboard Collaborate so we've put in a couple of these slides just to help people. So if you are looking about where to find the chat button you will find in the bottom right hand corner there's a little purple chevron and if you click that it will take you to lots of exciting buttons where you can access participant lists and also leave us a message in the chat. We should have enable chat for everybody by now. As you can see from there you can also raise your hand ask a question and you can also set your status or give feedback. So I'm going to do that for the moment if I could just ask everybody to go through your my status settings if you can see that and if you click your little button you could put a happy face that's great lovely and you can also um please put a happy face in the chat so that we can check that that is all working okay excellent great to see all these happy smiley faces we should get prizes excellent like in that one Joe brilliant well done everybody um obviously if you did need to double check your um your audio your video settings you can do that with the cog wheel on the side and you can check your audio and video sessions there. Quite fun okay um and also you may need to change your notification settings as if you were listening to the plenary just now um obviously Marin would have mentioned that um you may find all these annoying binging and bogging going on and you can change your notification settings to stop the annoying things okay there we go um and a big thank you to our session sponsor uh Vvox because obviously without you this session would not be possible so I'd like to give you a kind of round of applause a round of applause thank you very much for uh for being our lovely session sponsor and um if you wanted to know more about Vvox there's um oh and I pressed the wrong button too quick go back um I had one job I had one job somebody's playing with mislides there we go thank you very much um so uh please do have a little look at that and you can see how you can vote on live polls and things like that um very very exciting okay okay right we are nearly there and I'm hoping that our presenters are getting themselves ready to present um if you do get stuck at all we do obviously have some how-to guides um on our web pages and we do have a virtual help desk which we are all trying to man at the same time whilst running these sessions okay so without further ado I'm going to um just close these slides down for us and it's not cancelled and we are going to move on to our first session which I believe we have Wendy Garnham and Matt East and I'm glad to see Wendy yay there we go I've uploaded your slides and hi Matt welcome welcome I'm just going to share your slides for you and then I will disappear and stop talking here we go great stuff okay over to you Wendy okay so um the story that we're going to tell today is based on a project that we've been working on across the previous academic year so right through COVID as well um which involves our foundation year students at University of Sussex um and it's a project where we've tried to get students to move away from becoming just shoe experts more of that to come um to being students who are sort of really actively collaborating and willingly participating in active learning in the seminar so um just to give some sort of context to the story um the students that we've been working with are all studying on a foundation year um some of them are doing psychology in fact the vast majority but there are students from business and management arts and humanities and social science foundation programs so we have over 200 students on each of the modules that we've been using this project with um the majority of our students are coming to us straight from post 16 study and particularly in the current environment um that's going to be even more important for us to acknowledge because obviously they would have been out of education but at least face-to-face education for some time um so this is basically the problem that we started with is that in our seminars we would expect our students to have completed some essential reading before they came along with the view that in the seminar we would then be able to in our enthusiasm to build on that reading that they're done and engage the students in lots of active learning and in reality it was something quite different because it would quite often start with students coming along but having not read the paper and or sometimes students would have started to read the paper stumbled a little bit in terms of understanding it and just given up so essentially what would happen is that we would have a room of shoe experts so students who would be reluctant to engage or participate and instead would spend a long time examining their footwear particularly if you were to throw a question um to those students they would quite often look down at their shoes rather than make eye contact with a view to actually participating um for me in particular I found that the seminars were increasingly turning into mini lectures um with the result that it didn't really give us room to do lots of interactive learning interactive activities so we wanted to do something that would sort of help us to really sort of turn things around so I started exploring um what sort of possibilities were out there and interestingly I discovered in the process that we were not alone in this and there's quite a lot of literature out there suggesting this is a really common problem so in a study back in 2004 Klump reported that 27 percent of assigned readings are completed before a class and this is really sort of just reinforcing this idea that actually reading the essential material is actually an issue and shepherds also looking at a completely different cohort looking at math students found that even when the reading is completed it's just not effective and so students are not really engaging with that initial step and for me this really highlighted a big problem because I think you'll agree that you know in previous um years we sort of really emphasised a lot the importance of group work for students both in terms of what they're doing in the seminar in terms of you know trying to get them to sort of talk to each other to support each other but it's almost as though we sort of neglected that initial step which is the reading because we still allocate students reading to do and we just let them go off and do it on their own sort of in isolation and so what we really wanted to do was find some way of trying to address that issue and avoid the sort of the necessary falling down the rabbit hole experience because I think we all agreed that if you don't if you get students who are not doing the reading quite often that means that they will not attend because they fear then that they're going to be made to look silly in the session if they haven't done the reading or it's going to be really obvious that they haven't done what they should have done and that consequent anxiety stops them from attending and that sort of initiates a whole sort of series of fairly negative consequences so if they're not attending they're not engaging in discussion if they're not doing that that leads to increased stress and anxiety and sort of further down the line and stress and anxiety leads to a decline in performance and that can lead to withdrawal ultimately so what we wanted to do was find a solution which would put an end to our shoe experts and instead replace them with sort of confident participators in the seminar activities and to do that we wanted something that would nail that initial part of the story it would enable students to actually collaborate with the reading itself and so this was the tool that we used we chose to trial this with our two modules with the foundation near students and Talys Elevate is a tool that enables students to collaborate in real time so they can hold conversations with each other on the reading as they see it so they'll have the text on the left hand side of their screen and on the right hand side of their screen they can be posting their comments questions and discussion points and I'll show you some examples of that shortly and the second thing that's really important about this is that they can do this across different sorts of content and it gives me as the tutor some analysis of how much the resources are being used how often the students are engaging with it the extent to which they're posting comments or making personal notes and so on and that has a huge impact in terms of my ability to sort of foster and support their learning so just to show you what this looks like this is a screenshot taken from one of the readings that we asked the students to do so you can see that on the left hand side of the screen here this is the text on the right hand side there is a column where the students are posting discussion points their opinions their experiences questions and asking for clarity and so on and the way it works is they can highlight the piece of text and on the left that opens up box on the right and the students can then just jot down what it is they want to say to their peers there and what it enabled were students were actually engaging in really lively debate and questioning they were commenting in real time so they could see straight away what it was that was being referred to they didn't have to go back and scan through documents but also this enabled them to do other things as well such as make their own private notes so if students didn't want to see the whole sort of series of class comments they could literally click a button at the top of the screen and it would enable them to do exactly the same sort of thing but for their own private use so they could highlight pieces of the text and make their own notes on the right hand side and it would save those for them to revisit in revision time so the other sort of factor that I think was really important in this tool is it enabled students to post anonymously and in doing so it sort of strips away the anxiety that students were reporting they often felt about contributing so they didn't want to be made to look silly or they didn't want to ask a question that seemed really obvious it strips away that because now they can just post as an anonymous contributor I can still see on my analytics that that student have actually engaged but in terms of their actual comment that is posted as anonymous so that was really what the tool looked like we used it primarily with reading but what we are going to look at now going forward is using other resources like videos and podcasts and so on where students can literally stop the video post a comment and it will show where most of those comments occur during the video and it will initiate the same sort of discussions there so that's really what the tool is to give you some examples of how the students used it this was probably the most common way that students used it to support each other and that was for a sort of a basic level of interaction so clarity questioning just trying to sort of make it clear what certain aspects meant the student was asking what the particular concept meant and that one of their peers said I think it means it's a good method of teaching a subject the first student then responded yes thank you I got it now is it a way of teaching such as a larger audience in the lecture and so on so they're really having conversations to help each other really understand the basic points of the paper and underneath that we've got another example where a student says I just don't really understand this bit they've highlighted in green and this idea about IGL inquiry guided learning and as discursive insurrection so I just don't get that and another student has then gone on as an anonymous contributor and explained it in their own words so again that student is really supporting their peer in terms of just clarity and so that was one example and that's really what I expected from the tool initially that's the sort of thing that I thought would happen what I didn't think would happen is how it supported a deeper level of thinking beyond the paper and so this was a student who on the back of a whole series of discussion comments about the value of lectures and how lectures might be useful this student actually asked their peer group does anyone know the evidence to which this sentence is referring to I'd like to know the theory behind why it's at odds with the kind of conditions needed to engage better student learning in other words this student wanted to go beyond the paper they wanted to explore beyond the basic premise of the paper and and that was something that I just really didn't expect and I won't read through all of these examples here but if you do get a chance just have a look at some of the content of the comments that were posted because they were comments that read meeting as much as the students and the sort of the most sophisticated level of input they really was in some of the discussions where you could really see that students were trying to bring together a whole series of and experiences and thoughts about the content that they were reading to come up with some really in-depth comments this was one based on a paper that they were reading about active learning and and it really for me sort of indicated that this student had thought at such a deep level about some of the claims that the paper was making and and hopefully you can sort of get an idea of how excited I got at this point because this was making me think at a deeper level as well so it really at this stage was really collaboration in the true sense of the word because I was learning as much as the students were learning from the sort of content of the discussion so this was really sort of something that I just didn't expect at the beginning but something that happened with quite consistent regularity this sort of higher level synthesis so that was really some examples and for me it really mattered that this was something that students were able to use to try and nail this problem that we had at the beginning of trying to do the reading in isolation now they weren't doing that they were actually doing it as a group as a peer group and not just questioning but challenging themselves and debating some of the issues and the other sort of aspect of it that I thought was really important that it was student owned and student led there was many a time when as you can imagine reading some of these really good insightful comments that I was just desperate to go in and put my own two pennies worth into the story but I didn't I managed to hold back because I think that would have affected how students saw this resource they saw it as it was their sort of tool to use it it had student ownership and it was very much led by their experience and the anonymity was really important it enabled students to open up conversations where previously they would have been the students looking down at their footwear and and it also created I think more importantly now than ever this sense of community cohesion and these were students who as you can imagine in a cohort of 200 plus students were things that quite often hadn't even met each other but now they were actively supporting each other they were throwing out questions they were throwing out ideas and helping and supporting each other without any request necessarily to do so all they were asked to do was to make sure that they were engaging with the resources and the impact on the seminar was immense basically it meant that we could now start the seminar having seen that the students they had already engaged with that resource had had their questions clarified had really started to open up some really interesting conversations and that then fed into a lot more activity and interactivity in the seminar itself and just some sort of examples of the analytics these are really useful because it showed me that it wasn't just one or two students as with many of these things sometimes it's one or two students that dominate and it has a bit of a novelty effect so at the beginning everybody starts using it and then by week three or four it all sort of drifts and that wasn't the case at all and students did seem to be using this reliably and consistently and so students I could see were spending on average this particular week about 46 minutes on average with this resource and this was a single paper and 116 class comments were made 369 personal notes were made and 79 students were active and that came out as roughly about 78% of students on my module who were active with that resource and so this really gave me an idea of whether the resources were being used engaged with the extent to which students were really finding them interesting so you can see which resources have got more or less sort of notes being made on them and so on and the other thing that's really useful with TALIS is of course it's available to students outside of term time and normally what we find is that once term ends or even you know the last week of term engagement with the resources just drops off and that's it really the opportunity to collaborate just isn't there but what we found was that even though it wasn't term time even in the Christmas break even Christmas week would you believe students were engaging with the resources and they were posting new comments and so for example before we came back in January students were actually engaging with the resources and posting new comments 95 students were active 140 class comments were posted and 104 new personal notes were made and so students were really collaborating even in the absence of any teaching content during those weeks so for us that was really powerful in terms of this being a tool that students were finding useful and just to show that you have analytics that show you across the term and this shows for any particular resource it shows the use across the weeks of term and outside and it also gives you an overview of the overall use of talus elevate across all your resources and but really useful as a tutor you can see here the average number of hours so for example this paper that we started with in term two and since collectively spent 243 hours on that paper which is phenomenal and it's given me a challenge to try and repeat that this year and the last thing really sort of from a tutor's perspective is just how it's transformed my seminars and I don't have any need for lengthy sessions where we're just answering questions about the reading and we now have all this time available in the seminar for building on that reading because they've collaborated supported each other and done a lot of peer learning before they come along and they're also participating with greater confidence now and there could be a number of reasons for that but my impression is it's that community cohesion that they've created online that's really enabled them to sort of do that the grades have gone out significantly but there's a big but there and there could be a number of reasons for that so I'm going to be very cautious I don't know that it is due to talus at all we have to make obviously as everyone did a lot of adjustments and due to covid moving exams online and so on so there could be a number of reasons for that but nonetheless it was a positive outcome and also it enabled me to engage in targeted intervention because I could see from my analytics each week which students hadn't engaged at all and quite often that pointed to a need for support which I was then able to reach out to the students to check with them and provide what was needed but it really did break down barriers and it did create a sort of a norm that collaboration was important I've got my five minutes left so I'm going to quickly go through the student feedback student feedback fell into three main categories this was collected twice during each term and it was very consistent across those two terms in terms of collaborative learning this is what students really pointed to most of all they found it really useful to see what other students were thinking about the paper and they found it really useful to and motivating to sort of have the ability to create conversation around their reading before they came to the seminar and also to sort of see how much reading they were doing compared to their peers so they're able to monitor their own level of engagement and the second sort of big category was around anonymity which is not surprising given that anxiety is really on the increase in our undergraduate populations it really stripped away a lot of that so students were pointing to the fact that they're usually not that confident in asking questions but this enabled them to do that other sort of others pointed to the fact that they could make comments without being afraid that they'll be wrong and then the last sort of category we hadn't even really considered that this came up a lot was the impact on sort of sustainability issues so students were now saying that because they could make their notes in real time and highlight in real time and converse in real time they didn't need to print the papers out anymore and that was a really big plus point given that this is one of our key issues for our institution at the moment so reflections and adjustments reflections the things that were key was really sort of sitting with the students in that first seminar and going through how to use it and making sure that they could actually post before we let them off on their own to take ownership of it and obviously that's something we'll be doing with them back in an online context this year and we promote it to students as both a learning tool but also as a support tool and so they know that we use this to monitor their engagement with the resources and to make sure that they're okay that there aren't any issues that we need to put additional support in place for as we go through the term it's important for them to own the conversation and for me to maintain my sort of monitoring at a distance and not to start posting lots of things in their chat windows because obviously that then takes the ownership back from them and I think that was really key the adjustments we are going to roll it out now across the whole foundation program across all modules and we're going to be exploring use of other media items so using imagery podcast videos and we're also going to increase activity around assessment literacy so we found it really useful to post assessment briefs and students could then just basically comment and ask questions around the assessments again in the same way on Tannis Elevate so that's really where we're at at the moment and I think at that point my five minutes is probably up so at this point I guess it is time for questions. Well then Wendy that was so well to time excellent and whilst you've been talking Matt has been going through the chats and picking up loads of the questions so I'm just trying to see if there's any that he didn't manage to get but I think he got an awful lot of them and in the back there was one was there Matt? Sorry is that you? Santani was there one what happened to those that didn't engage with the readings? So where the students didn't engage obviously that would show up on my analytics report each week so for those students I would reach out to them so I'd usually start with an email just saying look I noticed that you didn't engage with the resources and I just wanted to check that everything was okay so we call it our touching base email so they basically have a chance of then just responding of saying either you know I've got this issue and I need some more support or you know I just had a technical issue this week whatever but it does guide the way that we support them going forward and I think the fact that so many of the students were using it created that sort of norm so it became the normal thing to do to actually engage with it so as time went on because students know that we're monitoring their sort of engagement with it it really sort of empowered us to try and make sure that the support was there where it was needed. That was a really good presentation I really enjoyed that that it looks so such a good way to get people to really engage I mean trying to read journal papers at the best of times is really hard going so I think it looks really really interesting. Thanks ever so much for that I don't think there are any other questions that are in there but if there are that I've missed I don't know Fiona if you've managed to catch any that I've missed there that haven't been answered. No nothing I can see Debbie. No that's been timer going off. It was a question from Maddie did you want to put your question in the chat because as Sheila's reminded me we've got the big sessions enabled so we probably can't give you the mic I don't think but I'm just double checking. Oh the cost I think Tim if you email Matt yeah there you go see he's way ahead of me on that's great well thanks ever so much I really really enjoyed that and we're going to be moving on to our our next session shortly and see do you want to stop and start the recording.