 to Kay Lindsay, and are you ready if you'd like to take it away? Okay, hi everyone. How do I turn off the pingy noise that's the notifications again? If you go to the call in the chat bar, and then drop down the notification settings, there's under someone posted chat message, and audio notification is the middle one that should be fun ticked. Okay, I think that's done. Yeah, okay, right. Okay, I hope that works, I won't be distracted. Okay, hi everyone, and I'm not sure how many of you have are down to present today, and if any of you are as unprepared as I am, it's highly likely that my children and my cat may make an appearance in this presentation. But thank you very much for everyone joining today. I'm going to talk first of all a little bit about where I come from, institutions that I'm at, and a little bit about the students that we have. I come from an institution called the University College of Estate Management. Okay, this week we are celebrating our centenary year while we're just finished actually. We are an institution that focuses purely on delivering degrees in the built environment sector. So that's things like building, surveying, and quantity surveying, and construction management. Our building was originally cited in a place called Lincoln Field in London, and the institution initially provided free technical education in real estate and related areas for the sons of those who had been killed, disabled, or perished in World War I, and they called for improved living standards and living conditions, including for city sums slumped to be replaced with better housing. By the 1940s we were providing largely correspondence courses, including during the Second World War two prisoners of war and the women's land army. And in the late 1960s we became associated with the University of Reading who awarded our degrees for us. We built this wonderful building that you see in the centre here, great brutal thing on campus, and our students were studying onsite and via correspondence. In 2013 we received our own degree awarding powers, and in 2015 we left the Reading Campus and with the exception of our apprenticeship programmes where students come into the building to undertake workshops or actually at the moment virtually, we are now fully on university and we offer 13 programmes of study right from further education up to master's level. Okay so a little bit about our students. We have 4000 students enrolled with us at any one time. Our students are from around 100 countries, about 20% of our students are apprentices and we're expecting that to arrive in the next few years to be at least of our students. And only 3% of our students study full time. The rest of our students are already employed by the industry or are looking for a career change either working full time or part time. 9% of our students are over 21 years of age and the average age of our students are 34. Reflecting the statistics in the industry, only 30% of our students are female and that's something that will work very hard to address in our institution. 10% of our students have declared disability and 15% of our students are from the BAME background and again that reflects the industry statistics there. It is worth noting that that does not include quite a high proportion of Chinese students that we have and we actually have officers in Hong Kong as well. Okay, our students have very complex lives. They're unable to dedicate the time they would like or the motivation that they would like to into our studies. For the very reasons I just outlined, most of them are part time. They have other responsibilities. They have caring responsibilities. They have work responsibilities. They find it hard to focus and have motivation. They may suffer from poor internet connection, feelings of isolation and also mental well-being which is a big factor in the construction industry and men are much more likely to actually commit to this industry than all other industry sectors in the UK. But this is not just an issue. These challenges don't just affect our learners. These challenges are symptomatic of many online learning experiences and I think at the moment many students in education and the staff themselves are familiar with some of these challenges listed here. It would be really easy for me to flip this talk into something that examines the role of caring and online education to focus on the current situation that the world is in at the moment. It's a time when we're all exploring how we can be there for our students and how we can be there for each other whether that be through our teaching practices, teamwork, as a manager, as a peer. But the truth is for us as one of only a couple of fully online universities in the UK we are established in doing this. It's not been a huge amount of work for us at the moment in terms of looking at our educational model. We are largely running out of this at the moment with a few exceptions such as removing archvounds and replacing those with assignments and we're going to continue doing that in the future anyway. We have had to take a lot of our working practices online so all of our meetings, our design collaborations, our committees and whilst part of these are all virtually as well we always have people zooming in. It is a change to our working practices and the real opportunity that this brings us is that we now can really start to understand our students' experiences better and that is a good thing. So I am going to talk about what originally proposed about how we can provide a framework that puts the psychology of our students at the heart of online education and not just making it add-ons but also the fundamental part of our learning design that annexes the curriculum to have a presence scaffolding which builds community and human connection. But what I am going to change slightly actually is the participation and input from anyone listening to this talk right now because I'm really keen to learn from you and what you are doing in your institutions at this time to demonstrate care to students as you may be pivoting online. I am going to state an intervention in my own talk to talk a little bit about the place I grew up. I grew up in Sheffield and if you know anyone who is from Sheffield or went to university there it is likely they won't hear a bad word said about the place. It is vibrant, it is green, it is friendly and despite the challenges that is faced over time with the device of the steel industry it continues to feel a very positive city to be in. Something that stands out across the city wherever you lived or wherever you grew up is its sense of community and an example I really love is that when housing stock became so poor after the Second World War dangerous and unfit for habitation a network of high-rise flats were built and entire streets and communities were moved into the estate. Neighbours continued to be neighbours, the same milkman and the postman drove their vehicles along the widely constructed corridors. Streets were moved exactly as they were into the sky and for a long time those communities flourished. They had a sense of purpose, belonging and shared history that went beyond the face that they inhabited and the example you can see here is actually Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. But over time the fabric of these buildings were not maintained. The original residents aged and they passed away. Unemployment rose as a result of layoffs in the steel industry and with it so crime rose, use of drugs, violence rose. Residents became much more diverse with no cohesion programs to integrate new communities. We have moved now what we know into a virtual space. We have moved traditional ways of teaching into the online and whilst for a time this may suffice and it may be good enough over time it becomes clear that the virtual space is not the same as a non-ground university campus and classrooms and the glue that holds it together that community that human contact is the missing factor. Okay so last year I was presenting our work in progress for developing an online educational framework and this work has now progressed to a realization that we need more than a neat learning design model. Learning is really messy. People are really messy and complex and it can't be addressed by a systematic design progress. Stoneman and Morris would say there is an urgency for teachers there's an urgency for human connection and as Bell Hooks has written the requirements for building our knowledge of our students and acknowledgement of their presence is fundamental to a good learning experience. But practically in an online university how do we do this? On the scale of online education can actually be so great that we have hundreds of students in each class and very few students to support them. Okay we need to look at the entire estate may not be pretty but we need to look at the whole thing. We need to look at how to support fully online education and how we can influence the practice of being human at a scale that goes beyond the weekly webinar and the the early forum. At UCM we are starting with the ground floor renovation and whilst our plan is to redesign our entire educational provision over the next five years this September our aim is to reimagine that first year student experience. It's what we would call perhaps a weed out year with between 10 and 20 percent of students failing each module or 10 percent withdrawing or suspending their studies. These modules don't have to do anything to make them difficult. The topics covered by themselves make them difficult. Quantities surveying, law, management, regulatory frameworks. Our student situation and their psychology also make them difficult to deliver and then you bring to students who have a lot of training and a wealth of expertise in their surveying and their construction background but not a lot of training in their teaching and it becomes even more complicated and it's made even more complicated by the vulnerable position that we put them in in the online environment where they're constantly tested on how they communicate. We have a unique opportunity with our ground floor. We have an opportunity to teach students how to be university students, how to become online learners as well as master the foundation of their programs of study and how to establish those caring pedagogies ourselves that build community and online human practice at scale to ensure that our residents are supported and that they are happy. Around our educational framework we have wrapped a set of values that scaffold the online student experience which is open to who our students are and the world that they live in. These make up the accurate enough care and they stand for kindness, awareness, reflection and engagement and overall they aim to build community and establish critical students to student care and incorporate active learning strategies and help students improve their metacognition skills and these are implemented within the module Learning Design itself. They don't sit outside in student support services. Okay I'm just going to move on to this slide and just leave it there for a moment perhaps you could stick that URL in your web browser go to the tablet board and in that board there's four columns, kindness, awareness, reflection and engagement and it would be great as we go through this presentation and maybe as we go through the rest of the day or further into the week if you can note down anything that your institutions are doing to bring caring pedagogies into their online religion, online educational provision at the moment and I'll write a blog post up on those at the end. So we've got a lot more lovely pictures of the Park Hill estate, I feel coming up as I explain what these four elements are and how we implement them. Okay kindness, kindness very much starts from a place of trust. We trust that our students want to actually be there and we trust them to be honest and rigorous in their studies. We focus on their psychology, their motivation and what they need to interact with the content to achieve their outcomes. We're moving student support services into the study space. We have a great well-being team, we have mental health first aiders but when those exist outside of the curriculum in other places in the VLE and when students just want to come in and focus on what they need to learn then we need to move those support services to places where they can really see them so we're starting to signpost things for instance in the lead up to the science are you stressed, are you worried, these people can help you. Similarly we're embedding study skills within the curriculum, they don't just sit out in the study skills area, we're creating activities so students can improve things such as their digital literacy, their critical analysis skills, their metacognition skills. Very importantly we are creating an informal and personal narrative. We address students as you, the institution as we are us and we are not scared to use the word I in our written narrative to our students. We want to help our students to develop self-awareness. The practice of building awareness supports the transition of focusing so much on the academic content to the broader outcomes and those outcomes being very focused on the students that we're serving. It also serves to create cohesion. We create opportunities for students to develop self-awareness of basic needs, how they feel, how they motivate themselves to work towards their goals. We also embed opportunities for students to come aware of each other which enables them to support each other and to practice kindness. We also want them to become more aware of the world around us and people they may not have contact with. The built environment industry has some really big issues facing it around sustainability, around mental health, around caring for our planet and being mindful of diversity. So the more we bring these topics into the curriculum and have those discussions is really valuable for our students. The reflective part of care is very much about and helping students to understand their learning journey as online learners. We're providing end-of-week opportunities for students to evaluate their learning and practice their metacognitive skills and ask questions about where they should be. We provide personal learning checklists so students can monitor their learning and their confidence in mastering the topics and the skills that they need to. There's regular opportunities for students to reflect on applying what they've learned to their own experiences and we embed quite a lot of activities that include things such as creating mindful concept maps so students can start to develop their metacognitive awareness and understanding. And active learning, engaged learning is really a pivotal piece to supporting our students to immerse themselves and start to work with the material so that they can learn with it. We've significantly shifted the focus away from resources to activities, and maybe it's worthy in the student language so there's a really clear and transparent reason why they are being asked to do those activities. Completion of activities do not actually gain our students any marks but they are woven into the fabric of their assessments so to undertake them enables them to move forward in completing their module and gaining those very important outcomes they need to be successful in their work. In terms of practical implementation, we have set up a learning design centre which is a whole host of resources for our tutors to use when designing learning but our tutors design their modules solely on their own. We form a collaborative team that each time we approach a model there is a team of learning designers, quality assurance experts, editorial subject matter experts, tutors, librarians who come together and bring together that wealth of expertise. It is a very unbundled model and all that expertise is really valued and we use the ABC Learning Design Workshop which we have localised for our own more vocational and fully online setting and we have a couple of days of ABC workshops whereby we storyboard the modules and we develop a list of activities and then narrate it throughout the module. We provide templates, we have quality baseline statements and standards to ensure that there is that consistent approach and to also raise the profile of the caring pedagogies that we want to implement within our modules. We do have a website and I was going to make it available to you all today but we are doing a significant overhaul so if you do follow me on Twitter I will be posting the link in the next few weeks and it will show you exactly how we start from the design process, how we develop those learning activities, how we bring in those caring pedagogies and how we move that onto the VLE and what it looks like and I'm really happy to share anything we've learnt around that. So finished off, Park Hill Flap and Sheffield is undergoing a major refurbishment of course it is, a huge gentrification and now those flats are going for you know upwards of 200 thousand pounds, a very very different community is moving into them but I think what we have to remember, part of me is very pleased about that, I'm pleased to see the gentrification but we are losing that element of community again unless we realise and understand the fabric of the buildings and who our students are then it's going to be difficult to bring that human connection and that human nature into fully online education but it's something that we are certainly striving to achieve at UCM and move past but not yet of fully online education and realise what it means to have an excellent online learning experience. Thank you. Thank you so much Kate, such an excellent and informative presentation. I'm afraid that we have actually used our full 20 minutes. There are a couple of questions there are a couple of questions in the chat, one from Mary and then a couple about your contacts as well so maybe if you're able to dive into the chat in a moment and respond to those directly and then any kind of further chats might be able to continue within the social space afterwards if that's okay with you but yeah once again Kate thank you all so much.