 Hello. I'm thrilled to be back for the last afternoon of the OLD conference. For this session we have Ruth Payne and Sarah Copeland, and they're going to be talking to you about using ePortfolio to support student belonging and wellbeing in the post-COVID HEI context. Over to you ladies. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. We're very excited to be able to be here today to talk about this project. I've been pretty much all I've done for the last year. So I'm Ruth Payne and I work at the University of Leeds, and in this context I'm the academic lead for the roll out of pebble pad at Leeds. And I feel the need to say straight at the very start of this that I don't regard myself as a tech at all. And I hope that that's quite telling. So I'm thinking more in terms of how we can use this and how we can strategically support our students with this product. Sarah Copeland on the other hand is a learning consultant at Pebble Pad and knows more than I can only dream of. So that's the dynamic here. Pebble Pad arrived in Leeds in autumn of 2020. Now autumn of 2020 for all of us is going to be sort of etched on our minds as a key point in HEI. The issue though to remember is that the procurement process and the discussions with Pebble Pad started long before that. They started in 2018 and the whole process was going on until we got to 2020. When it then arrived in the strange COVID context, there was a lot to think about colleagues were understandably exhausted. Nobody really wanted to think about a new platform. Nobody wanted to think about having to learn anything new that already being the rush to learn new platforms of teaching. And then there have been some changes where we started off using Zoom. No, we won't. Yes, we will. No, we won't. We'll use Teams. No, we won't. We'll use Zoom. We'll use something else. And so there was a lot of that going on. People really didn't have the appetite or the energy for anything more. People were homeschooling. We were going in and out of lockdown. And I think that as we move along that particular process, we have to remind ourselves what it was like in autumn of 2020. Lots of unknowns for both students and staff. And as I keep having to remind myself, we had no real sniff of even a vaccination program at that stage. So we genuinely didn't know what was going to be coming around the corner. So the existing lead strategy that we had within which we had started to discuss the procurement of an e-corpfolio at Leeds focuses on community and collaboration. This is really important. This was already what Leeds were about. This is not to do with the pandemic, but obviously that this became a key thing. So very much focusing on embracing diversity, welcoming and including everyone, creating a sense of belonging. Belonging is a huge topic at the moment in higher education and reflecting the community that we want to serve through true inclusivity. So actually creating and shaping the community, contributing to the future, but also shaping the community and serving it as it really is, not in some idealised sort of state. So that becomes really important. And again, this idea of student belonging, which comes up a lot in this sort of reflective practice that we ended up with in Pebble Pad, as you'll see. So the plans for the new e-corpfolio were very much to support and enhance these main streams of work, these main ideas that we have at Leeds and these standards that we have at Leeds. So the student experience and well-being were already on the map and front and centre. And I'm not going to read the list, but provision for professional regulatory bodies, so accreditation and so on. Being able to do a thorough reassuring, supportive job for every single individual student, being able to tailor information so that we can get it to students in a timely way. Helping students to reflect on their own skillsets, on their own development needs and being able to seamlessly move into a blended learning and hybrid teaching environment. And these were the things that were there in 2018 when we started those discussions. So these were not new. What happened when we got to COVID-19, though, is we ended up with a sort of refocus. And so out of that initial list, we started to really sort of zone in on student experience and well-being, community building and inclusivity and the blended learning hybrid teaching scenario. So the original aims remain in the background in terms of them being part of the Leeds strategy. But the way that we were then going to have to focus them and prioritise them was going to uniquely in these circumstances was going to be pushed in a different direction. The reflective practice is particularly important at Leeds. The majority of our programs actually include some sort of experience that isn't at the university. The school that I work in, languages, cultures and societies, most of our students go away for a year abroad, maybe a term abroad and some for a term and a year abroad. And they're a year in industry programs as well. So that context is also very important. So we started to look at how we were going to use Pebblepad to support our personal tutoring at Leeds and actually to be the place where we housed it and where we delivered our personal tutoring. The existing provision of personal tutoring had actually produced quite a varied experience for our students. And there was some strange inconsistent engagement with staff as well, some unusual pockets where personal tutoring didn't seem to quite sort of take off. And given that we were now looking at the ePortfolio and we were looking at this huge support role that we had to play with students in the post-COVID era during COVID, that we knew that we had to do something about personal tutoring and it became a real focus for us. This was always the idea in the direction, even in the discussions in 2018 and 2019 during the procurement process. So it wasn't that personal tutoring suddenly came onto the map, but suddenly it became very, very urgent. One of the things that we used to have in the system that we were using was sort of series of tick boxes where students were asked things like, have you engaged with the academic integrity information that the university provides? And students would be expected to tick the box if they had and then speak to their tutors about what they still didn't understand. But there was a real sense that this information went into this sort of long web form of questions. And unless it was drawn out by a very engaged tutor, it could actually sort of just sort of stay there and not go anywhere. The point about Pebblepad was that we were actually going to start this conversation with our students, which was going to move away from this rather flat sort of system that lacked dynamism, if you like, into a much more interactive and lively conversation between the tutor and the tutee. This slightly syndresque feel about tutoring is, I must say, is very, very common in HE institutions. This is not peculiar to Leeds in any way at all. And there have been lots of different ways of trying to address it. And this was very much ours. The personal tutoring system at Leeds is actually embedded in our idea of Leeds for Life. The Leeds for Life vision is to do with individual care and individual support for students. But again, in the personal tutoring that we were giving, we weren't really managing to achieve what our aims were within that. But specifically, they were to do with signposting opportunities, making sure that everybody was aware of the opportunities that were there and that they could actually engage with them, providing individual tailored support. This was very, very important to us and had rather eluded us in the past and also the importance of alumni. Now, that meant that while we were looking at refreshing personal tutoring, we were actually looking at refreshing Leeds for Life. So we were looking at refreshing this huge institutional vision in order to refresh personal tutoring and start to deliver it through an ePortfolio system. And all of this was this project that had come in and was now being co-opted, if you like, by this major piece of institutional work. So the whole thing was starting to really take our life of its own. One of the key things that we were looking at in the refresh of the personal tutoring was that we would have an entirely student-led agenda. So instead of having lists of topics that tutors were being encouraged to talk about at a particular meeting, so it's meeting one of semester two, you must talk to your students about their exam results in semester one, you must talk to them about this, you must talk to them about that, to come away from that kind of approach and say to students, right, here are some topics and here are the things we're going to ask you to reflect on how you feel about these things, how these are impacting on you affecting you, what you need, and then they build their own agenda. So it may be that some students are perfectly happy with their assessment results from the semester one. They don't feel the need to discuss it anymore, but they do want to talk about the potential of going on a year abroad study that isn't part of their program. They want to switch programs in order to achieve that. So that would then go on their student-led agenda. So the whole thing then became far more personalised and this was very much in our vision. So the action plan ended up being, for this particular strand of work, ended up being to reimagine the Leeds for Life vision and then refresh personal tutoring as part of that vision. This meant the introduction of the ePortfolio was supporting this space of reflective practice, which meant that it would become student-led. We are also, and really no time to discuss this today, but we are introducing learning analytics system for the first time in Leeds, which is going to be again embedded in the personal tutoring experience. So the personal tutors talk to students about their learning analytics data. And then the aim, the goal, was to deliver this across the institution in September, sort of like about now really. So what had happened was this idea that we had and the thing that we had procured had become sort of taken on as an institutional tool and truly used. So envisaged then as a way to deliver personal tutoring, which I've already spoken about. Also envisaged as a way to present the institutional welcome induction and transition resource, which actually only went online last year, and that was as a result of the pandemic. So we do have this idea that the whole of this platform, this new platform, this wonderful new thing that we have, has sort of been co-optive and people have swooped in from the institution on high and have swept away with it. And there's these two enormous pieces of work that have now been run through Pebblepad. And at this stage, I think it's worth handing over to Sarah for who's from Pebblepad to actually just talk a little bit more about the importance of that institutional turn. Sarah, and I can't hear you. I'm not sure if that's a problem that other people have got as well. No, that's because I muted myself so I could cough. No, I was being so polite because I can actually see the little microphone with the line. Yes. Okay, I'm so sorry about that. It was going so well up until that point. Anyway, as I was saying. Tell us again. As a learning consultant, I've been in the very privileged position to be able to see how the learning and teaching operates at Leeds. Not least of which, as it happens because I used to work there myself, both as an academic and more recently in the digital education service. That's like the epicenter of some of these movements. But really, I just wanted to emphasize the benefits of taking an institutional approach as Leeds have done with a platform like Pebblepad. But to be honest, this could be platform agnostic. It's the process that the university have gone through to want to make sure that the students and the staff, my camera's gone again, are going to get the best out of this that the whole implementation because it's multifaceted. It offers so many different angles. And as we've already alluded to, it's actually inspired new that the implementation of new programs that have happened as a result of COVID to be able to easily reach every single student in the university through the welcome induction and transition, but already with a view to looking at personal tutoring. And I'd like to start by just stating it's the digital transformation vision that the senior leaders at the university had really taking it very seriously about how digital can be incorporated into everyday life at the university. And that started way back, you know, Pebblepad's just way down the line of that sort of becoming a reality. But it was embedded into the learning and teaching strategy how digital was going to inform a lot of the teaching going forward. And it put the university in a very good position, of course, to be able to react very quickly when COVID came along. Now, as it happens, we started the implementation, or I should say the sort of the purchasing decisions in 2019. But all of that was going on and then COVID hit. And it's only now that we're just being able to roll everything out because there's a timeline with everything. But the work that's gone on in the last year has been absolutely incredible with different teams around the university. It's been fantastic being able to work with the academic lead. That's Ruth, looking after the vision of how Pebblepad's going to be rolled out on the ground. I've been working very closely also with one of Altsone community members, Patricia Quinn, who was brought into the university to look after the training aspects. So not only is Patricia working tirelessly to make sure that the personal tutors are ready and able to use the platform to be able to sort of work through these meetings with their students, but also for them to be able to train the students, but also to encourage the academic staff to be able to think about how they can leverage the benefits of the platform through their own learning and teaching. So all wrapped into one, I just really wanted to emphasise the fact that whilst we're a platform is very much the human factors that have made this such a success to date. And let's see. I mean, we're at a pivotal point at the moment where it's just been rolled out and the wit stuff has gone out already, but the personal tutoring is just coming online in the next couple of weeks. So let's see how it goes. But I'm very confident that it's going to be a huge success carrying forward based on the successes we've had to date. And if anyone is interested in finding out a bit more about what Pebblepad does as a learning journey platform, then there should be a link getting popped into the chat round about now. So you can have a look for yourself and see a bit more. But yeah, just really thinking about the student centredness of this platform and the benefits that that's bringing to all of these amazing programs that Ruth's talking about. So back over to you, Ruth. Thank you. Thanks very much, Sarah. And I just realised that at the very beginning I had planned to actually nudge people and ask how, if you were asked to do this, how would you do it. And I do remember speaking to another colleague at a different institution when I took over the academic leadership at Leeds. And I said, how would you have done this if you knew then what you know now having gone through this process? And the answer was I probably wouldn't have taken the job, which I thought was actually quite a telling thing. So I don't feel quite the same way, but I do think it's worth reflecting on how it happened. And one of the things I find myself thinking about is how we might have done things differently had it not been to the pandemic. So one of the one of the risks that we have with the project of this scale is that when we if you have a platform taken and used by an enormous institutional project, such as personal tutoring, or the welcome induction transition project, but certainly personal tutoring, which which really affects every single student, because every single student at Leeds has a personal tutor. And there is a real risk that Pebble Pad is going to be regarded as just tutoring. So there's this very sort of top down thing which has been hugely supportive and hugely helpful for the role out of Pebble Pad at Leeds. But it's, it also brings with it this potential risk of Pebble Pad being seen in one light and one light only. And also with the problem with the pandemic, not the only problem with pandemic, right, I hear some trouble, one problem with the pandemic is that the learning a new platform has become, you know, a sort of it is an exhausting task. There is a list. And again, I'm not tech. So I have this list of things nagging me that I know I really ought to know how to use better than I do. And then of course, everybody goes back to the thing that they are most familiar with. So we've got this sort of top down institutional thing going on. But what we didn't have in the last, we're really in the last year was any major creativity coming from the bottom up through smaller projects. But there is about to be a big reveal. And there's going to be a comms plan now that that's very much being beefed up at the moment that's promoting the ease of use of Pebble Pad. And the full training plan that we have been devising in the background. But most importantly, and most interestingly for me, we have a series of showcases and we've called them showcases and we call it showtime. This really has been going on for as long as we've been working on the project to get personal tutoring into Pebble Pad at Leeds. There have been people working tirelessly in creative pockets, creating all sorts of portfolios, all sorts of workbooks, all sorts of student experience. And so we actually do have this, we do now have a bag full of things to release once people have settled into the personal tutoring uses of Pebble Pad, which should give this very, very clear focus on reflective abilities that the encouragement, if you like, the Pebble Pad has, and the interactive functionality that makes it such great teaching tool. So although it's not all going to sort of land at once with everybody going, we're all a Pebble Pad. I think it's going to be sort of the Pebble Pad for personal tutoring has actually been great. Oh, the students have had it for welcome induction and transition. Oh, so the students know all about it. Oh, that's great. What can I do with Pebble Pad in my teaching? Oh, it's actually really easy to do that. Is there an example? Yes, there is, because we've already been working on these things. And it's now just a question of explaining what people need to do next. So that's very much where we are. And as Sarah said, we are literally about to go live on personal tutoring thing next week. So we don't have any, I don't have anything to tell you about how it went. I can just tell you how we're hoping it goes. And I sort of finished with this slide that really just says key notes for anybody who's thinking of doing this institutional support unsurprisingly at the top of that list. The phased implementation that was brought about by COVID, I think actually has helped us enormously. I am not recommending another pandemic. Scalable ambitions that doesn't stall creative work because what can happen is you can have a team of one doing a little bit of creative work, and then somebody else can pick it up and turn it into something you can do for the whole institution or for a whole faculty. So it doesn't actually stall creative work, but always have in mind this needs this could need to be scaled done at scale. Consider who will have what do what with admin rights. This is something that we're still pondering because within each faculty in the school, we're going to have to have people who are able to make changes that that specific school or faculty wants to have that might not be global. And absolutely key is the student involvement in every single one of the build phases and making sure that they are seeing it the way that we are seeing it that they are benefiting from it and that they can give us their own unique perspective on it. And that's the end of our slides. It's me muted. Thank you very, very much Ruth and Sarah so I can see there's lots of questions coming into the chat. I think the first one was from Mark very early on Mark asked were student leaders involved in the early discussions with the pedal pad corporation. Really good question mark. Yeah, the whole of the the whole of the procurement process involves people represent representatives from absolutely everything, including students. And this was, I mean I remember in 2018 being asked would I be long before I there was any idea that I would be a bigger part of the project. Would I come in and represent personal tutoring. And then of course the first thing I do is go and ask some duties. Do they agree with the way that we're doing it are these the things that we think are important that do they agree that these are the things that are important. What would they like to see. So absolutely student voice at every step of the way. Absolutely crucial. And if it's also worth mentioning the the two phased rollouts early rollouts that we had of the personal tutoring workbook grief because we got lots of real student data from both of those phases. Yeah, we did we did close absolutely might say we did close phases of the rollout for the workbook. So we created the content and then we actually involved certain schools as school to volunteer to be involved in two phases one was before Christmas so we literally made and we Sarah and I talk about this now we we pulled this stuff together with the sainted Patricia Quinn and the three of us just just just created this workbook. No, no, no, there's a full stop there get that apostrophe out the way and and we actually got that done sort of November time last year and and just put it straight out to these volunteer schools and their students and said we want all the feedback and by the time we got to the live feedback that we'd planned, we had already understood enough about where we'd gone wrong to have made the changes that they were mentioning so we'd get people saying, oh we think it's really awful. Don't tell us page two we know that needs to change and we've already changed it. So students involved absolutely in that phase, and then a much bigger institutional sort of level project where different faculties were involved, and we have five test schools and their students again in semester two. So in January, February. It was like an excellent approach. So there's two related questions in the chat that I can see. One is about what the student response was like and another one from Pete asking how staff immediately reacted to it to be really interested in both of those. Okay, so the student the student thing is, I'm going to say, universally positive. The students, we, it was a really nice time the early stage was really really nice because I was able to sort of play out my own ideas about what students need when they, when they come to leads and I was looking very much at this, the first experience of tutoring in level one so students coming from largely coming from a level into into level one, and the things that they just didn't understand so I, we put in questions such as such as do you know when to stop reading. Do you know how to choose which bits of a reading list to use. Do you know how to take notes during a lecture. Do you use the notes that you take during a lecture. Have you ever used any of the notes you've taken during a lecture in an assessment. And so we were able to ask these sort of piffy questions, and the students just loved that because they, they said we'd never have thought about it that way. You know, I religiously write down everything the lecturer says, and we're able to sweep in and say of course that's really a waste of every time don't do that. And by the way you don't have to read everything from the reading list so the information that we were able to give at this institute you know through this global sort of thing was was hitting exactly the right spot and we were really happy to find that. And that content has been retained in the big institutional rollout. Now as far as staff are concerned, there is always going to be a sort of how will we ever learn this in time. And what we have and staff have yet to see is really detailed quick start guide which says, if you want to look at one of your duties you do this you click on this you do that, then you do this then you do this, and a real step by step approach, as well as these much much broader more detailed training sessions that Patricia is running at the moment. Thank you Ruth. Thank you server. We're going to need to stop it there, but please head over to discord and carry on the conversations. Thank you.