 a pop-up appearing on the screen now so if you just consent to that you'll stay in the room and without any further ado I'll hand you over to Alicia. Thank you Rob, thank you very much for having us. I'm here on behalf of Student Support and Development in DCU. Anna Bela Stover couldn't be here today she sends her apologies I'm hoping I got the key points here I'm hoping I can communicate them to you and any questions anything that's not clear happy to chat at the end I'm aiming to fly through my slides and then leave plenty of time for the discussion at the end and Rob can hopefully jump in and give me a hand with the techie bits because as he always does for his for this project he's always behind the scene helping us with the techie bits so what I'm going to talk to you today about its DCU's Discover program which as you can see is a hybrid approach to transition so I'm going to very briefly give you some context what do we understand by transition why this approach why this program basically what is the rationale behind it and then I'm going to go through the design the stages it involves and then at the end our concluding thoughts on what are unique selling points are what are we doing differently what innovation have we brought to the transition space and what we have learned from this process and keep applying to to future iterations of this program so to give you the context for this hybrid transitions program we are in student support so by definition we are student centered we want to foster a culture that is student focused student at the heart of everything we do but this is also aligned with DCU's strategic plan goal one which is provide a transformative student experience so we are not working in a silo or in a vacuum it is a goal of DCU to provide a transformative student experience to put the student at the center and we do this through developing multi-dimensional skills encouraging extracurricular engagement and putting a focus in our case on enhanced transitions and supporting the student through the transition in terms of transition that is going to be a keyword throughout my presentation we want to move from orientation as an event to transitions as a process so in the past the way what we would have understood orientation would be maybe if you could picture 500 students sitting in a lecture hall being talked at for two hours or two days and that's done that's you transitioned to university we now understand transitions as a process the students goes through a cycle it can be a year long it can take a couple of years for the student to transition into university and successfully settle into university and our goal with this program is to provide a framework a scaffold to sort of accompany the student along the way and to help them build the skills they need for this transition for successful transition and also build confidence in their skills to transition successfully into university and success with an asterisk there whatever success means to the student that's a very personal concept a big part of this project is also the digital affordances accelerated by the pandemic and we as adding many as many of you probably did we sort of went into a frenzy of moving online when the pandemic hit and when we went into lockdown I have to say we were early adopters in this we already had a lot of digital resources and we sort of used that to build this transitions program out of those skills and out of that context under digital com3 developing the right in re-elaborating digital content so this is the context in which this program is situated in terms of design we wanted to be in all of these spaces basically we wanted to have the best of all worlds we wanted to be in the digital space we also wanted to be in the physical space we wanted to have a good quality asynchronous activities that the students could work through at their own pace to create that independence that self motivated learning that's way to achieve that university and we also wanted synchronous activities where students could join their peers be it online or in person and feel part of a community feel part of a group so in trying to be in all of these spaces at once we had different types of activities as part of this transitions program we had self paced model interactive activities many of them built on h5p which some of you may be familiar with we had live zoom webinars that were accessed through the main model platform where this whole program was housed was located we had self directed campus and outdoors activities and we had scheduled on campus events that students could register for and attend so the model page was at the foundation and was that the house and the framework for everything we offered but still we were not only in model we were also on campus we were also in the students own town in activities that they could do in their local environment so again trying to be in in all of these spaces at once so what's this what did this program looked like as I was saying it is a phased transitions program for three main stages for most students with a stage zero stage for for some students so if you look at the itinerary there stage zero would be a head start for mature students only I'm going to go into each of the stages in a minute stage was a stage one was discover dcu which is what would be the orientation part of the of the program stage two students have already gone through orientation they are settling into university we are offering life skills so an introduction to skills that they will need to succeed at university but also skills that we consider transferable and then stage three again continuing that process of settling into university discover community students who completed all three stages opted to the dcu engage bronze award which is an award that they can apply for for extracurricular engagement if they demonstrate that they are engaging in activities outside their studies so just to go through the stages of the program in more detail stage zero is what we call head start this is a stage that's targeted at mature students specifically and the focus is on academic writing digital confidence and math this is a model course with interactive h5p content several courses built on h5p and there was also this year there was a companion life event where students could register to attend three days on campus basically companion workshops to what was on the model page and then also meeting their classmates and meeting support staff and seeing themselves on campus and and starting to live that student life so a big part of head start would be building confidence and starting to build that sense of belonging we are basically trying to tell the students and again these are these are mature students who may be returning to university after a while we're trying to tell them you belong here you can do this the next stage is discover dcu so this is this would be the orientation courses per se students get access to these courses up on acceptance so they don't have to register with dcu as soon as they accept their place here they get access to these courses so they can be before they register working away at home on these online courses you have the modules there discover your dcu university life technology and discover your well-being these are all short courses with lots of interactive gamified activities i'm going to give you a glimpse in a minute there are also companion life events on campus during orientation and this is content that they are given just in time when they need it they are given this content online but they also have an opportunity to revisit it throughout the year it is there it is their transitions to hub on a model throughout the year that they can return to at any time again also very much based on building belonging confidence that sense of community you are welcome here we have some elements that we have in this stage one orientation we have interactive videos and these are very very short i'm not sure if you can see the timestamp there but we only gave our president a minute and a half just straight to the point welcome the students and we used h5p to make these videos interactive so that they could answer questions about them to really capture their attention there's a gamification component where students can level up the more activities they complete the more experience points they earn and then i think there is a sort of hall of fame where the top achievers can earn real world prices and gift cards and things like that so there is that that encouragement to complete your activities and work your way through the resources we we we have made an emphasis on healthy start interactive activities so you can see on the right hand side there right hand side there there is a self assessment wheel that students can answer some questions about where they are before they begin and they can get that self assessment of what their strengths are and this is very much a strengths based approach we don't want to come at least from a deficit based approach of what what you need and what you don't have and and where you don't measure up it's really very much about what are the strengths that you are bringing to university and what are areas where you could maybe develop your strengths a bit more you can see some activities on the left hand side there virtual tours of the campuses and scavenger hunt competition that roll roll walk around challenge 5k which they could do in their own time and just submit some proof and being to win some merit so just stuff to do around well-being and and starting well this first stage of the discover program also linking with the program pages so again orientation even though student support and development plays a big part in orientation it's not something that we do on our own it's also it also connects with program specific orientations and the program pages would be very much part of this program students would be connected with their program pages where all students can develop this discipline identity and this sense of belonging with all the same students who are part of the same program and again information about program orientation online and physical events and again a hub that they can over and over again come back to and revisit those resources and use them when they are useful to them so that was stage two that was the the orientation step stage of discover dcu after orientation during the first week of the semester we would move on to state two which is discover discover life skills we have another self-assessment wheel where students can answer some questions about where they see themselves in terms of self-management digital skills active learning self-reflection mindset and self-efficacy and that is going to tell them which areas they could stand to maybe develop which areas it might be beneficial for them to maybe spend some more time reflecting about and these are also h5p courses that they complete online in their own time but there are also live companion workshops so throughout the semester for example my remit would be the active learning courses we develop those as online courses but we also provide in-person live workshops throughout the semester that students can register for and attend and students who complete all the courses can also receive a digital a digital budget and have that as one of their achievements and finally stage three this what happened at the end of semester one beginning of semester two and this is more about being part of your community and and yes just cementing that belonging and that active involvement and engaging in your engagement in your community so this includes an active consent module bystander intervention training and tilt role play students pick two out of three and again these courses are all housed on model so everything I have mentioned so far everything is housed and built on model we have decided to use that expertise that we have in house and to also use these courses as a tool for students to start to develop their ability to navigate model and their confidence around navigating the virtual learning environment it can be very new to many students some students may struggle with technology some students may not have seen this particular version of a virtual learning environment so they start to feel comfortable in model as one space that they are going to be spending a lot of time in as students so finally just some concluding thoughts and what we think are our unique selling points what we feel that we have achieved with this program basically so as I've said throughout the program the program is inspired by an ethos of welcome belonging and well-being and the idea is to empower the students to create competent and confident students who can manage themselves self-regulate make decisions become independent active learners basically we conceive transitions as pre and post orientation so it is not just a moment in which you have transitions to university it is a it's a longer process and we take into account the students needs and we try to create materials that they can work through at their own pace and then revisit when necessary it's about building affinity with dcu it's about building belonging again you are part of dcu this concept and under section three of our transitions ecology this is a wider space again it's no longer two hours in a lecture hall this is a richer transitions ecology many activities to pick and choose from you can engage in in all of them in some of them more initiative more independence for the students and also for us the potential to measure the impact thanks to technology it's all on model we can go in there see the reports see when they are engaging see how much time they are spending see what they are engaging with and what they aren't and what resonates and what doesn't we also gather a lot of very detailed feedback and we spend a lot of time combing through that feedback seeing what worked what didn't what resonated with the students what did students want to see more of so I think that's all I wanted to say I hope I've done the program justice and I'm sure Rob can come in and if I've missed anything maybe Rob can come in and and add anything else and I'm here if you would like those are our contact details I'm here for any questions you may have and I will hand over to you Lisa you're muted thank you very much Rob lovely to be back and thanks for the invite and even nicer to see so many colleagues from past and present both from DCU from ILTA and across ICGP so my name is Lisa Donaldson I am the academic program manager in ICGP and I'm joined today with by Ben who while Rob was my rock with regards to anything Moodle in DCU Ben is is doing that performing that role here in ICGP so together what we want to share with you today is a little bit about what we've done over the last six months to a year about embedding Moodle as the supposed the main organizing structure around our postgraduate medical training whoops here we go so I'm just going back one a little bit about just to set the scene I'll try to fly through these slides even though much as I would love to spend a long time sharing all this with you so ICGP is the professional body for general practice in Ireland and in December 2020 they assumed responsibility for GP training from the HSE and that GP training consists of a four-year program two years in our hospital based in two years are based in training practices so previous to that it was devolved to schemes themselves nationally 14 of them to organize training and what we did was bring it together into a national training program so from June 2020 when I am moved from DCU to here what we were tasked with was developing a suite of centrally developed learning resources which were accessible to all schemes to I suppose put some standardized learning content out there the as I mentioned the central organizing mechanism was Moodle all of our resources were hosted around Moodle so Moodle as well as the blended learning resources this was a massive change for the schemes so supporting communication around that collaboration co-development of materials that was really my focus over the last number of months so really really briefly what I wanted to share was a couple of the pillars around that so firstly the development of the strategy itself the e-learning strategy I created an e-book which many of you know is one of my very favorite tools to get across what we were trying to achieve with regards to our blended learning approaches in association with that were a series of newsletters with a learning technology focus and as you can see here Moodle was very much at the forefront in every newsletter had a one-minute Moodle segment ably provided by Ben and in conjunction with that on Moodle itself what we designed was an entire support hub which would have resources for anything that schemes would need to do nationally with regards to Moodle and how they could best make the most of it and as part of that we developed a community corner and host monthly events so that schemes can come together they can learn from us but they can also learn from each other and a key element of that is Ben doing a bit of a show and tell and different themes every month so that the schemes are continually learning the the training was not a once-off so we eventually launched the first of our digital resources that went on stream in September of 22 so I briefly want to give you 30 or 40 seconds of what those look like before I hand over to Ben I'm going to switch straight to here and bring you back so Dr Stephen Brennan your specialist topic is the Irish Health Service there are two ways to apply for a medical card name them online and hard copy how many languages the hard copy medical card form come in Irish and English correct so I would just pause that there much as I would love to share more with you that just gives you a flavour of some of the blended learning resources which were developed within articulate and we're hosted as SCORM objects then on our Moodle site so that was a really brief overview to some of the key technologies that that we're using here with Moodle as the virtual hub articulate for development of learning resources but Moodle also then supports the blend which includes discussion forums at and many other materials as well so with that in mind I'm now going to pass over to Ben and he's going to share with you what he has done from to support scheme sites great that's perfect thanks so much Lisa yeah so while Lisa was tasked with the learning resources for trainees it was kind of my job to figure out how can we use Moodle for our schemes and our scheme administrators now that we've taken on all of these 13 training schemes into ICGPs central umbrella and support them to use Moodle with in terms of administrative processes go to the next slide thanks so our objective in GP training was so how can we actually support our scheme directing teams and our administrators that's all right with the rapidly increasing number of trainees that we have so we needed a solution that was scalable and we also wanted to standardize the administrative processes across each of the 13 schemes who were previously each doing all of their administrative tasks completely independent from each other so now that we're bringing them under our umbrella we wanted a standardized tool that was also bringing them into the 21st century some of the schemes previously would have been using hard drives for their documentation collection and or even file collection and so so bringing them into the 21st century with with a tool like Moodle for not just learning resources that Lisa's working on but also in terms of administrative tasks so through the next slide our game plan was that we were going to provide each of the scheme teams with access to their own Moodle course okay and then we would use this Moodle course kind of as a central hub which was like a smart website that each of these separate training schemes around the country would use for administrative purposes when we were doing this we decided to stop using the term course and start using the term scheme site on Moodle and this made it more approachable for the administrative teams and made it sound less academic like this is only where we host scorn packages or online modules but really this is an administrative tool so we created a template for each of these sites and that then the schemes could adapt and these Moodle courses are quite flexible so that they can each be unique to the schemes which are all over the country and then the last part of the game plan was to train up the scheme directing teams so that they were comfortable using Moodle and then finally get our trainees enrolled and go live but we let the the schemes themselves determine when they were ready to go live okay excellent please thanks so how did we actually do this in terms of the implementation plan so ICGP historically a membership organization already had its own Moodle instance set up for our continuous professional development courses that we we delivered to our members so education courses when we took over training we created a new category for GP training and within that we made a subcategory for each of the 13 schemes and within the subcategories we then dropped a scheme site and that's where we granted the the teacher permissions for all of the administrators and scheme directing teams there we use our websites or our website and our database for enrollment and that holds all the training information I'll get in it does create some challenges for us which I'll get into a little bit more detail at the end of the presentation then for all of our scheme sites they use the same template which uses the tiles course format and I was excited to see that Alicia was showing that you guys also use the ski the tiles format in DCU for a lot of your courses which is was exciting I do think it's a gorgeous format that gets rid of the endless scroll of death and especially when we're using things when we're using these courses as like a website it does kind of have that website look and feel where if you click on one of the tiles it then expands to show you everything that's in there so I think it does serve serve that purpose really well so in terms of our training plan we have about 80 individuals across 13 schemes who needed training so initially what I did was I organized training with each scheme one at a time just to cover the the basic Moodle ABCs you know logging in turning your editing on what is Moodle just telling him what it is and just getting them really comfortable so that they understand you know what this what this tool can do and how they can customize it to make it you know fit for purpose for their own individual scheme then we also put a emphasis on group restrictions this was to avoid having to create a separate scheme site for each of the year programs so there are four different training years going on in any any scheme at any time so by putting an emphasis from the beginning on group restrictions that helps them visualize the scheme site as a tool that can really be used as a central hub where if you add a group restriction for any individual activity resource you put up you can be sure that the user is only going to have access to the things that are relevant to them so that was an important thing for us to to to emphasize and also we we did expect that when we first started kicking off this Moodle training program the most useful immediate tool would just be as a document repository where you know trainees can access the important documents that they need and then once we identified some of those on each scheme who were kind of going to take the lead for their scheme on Moodle we went into further training sessions to focus on assignments where they can collect the trainee documentation and this all helps to avoid emails of course and trainee logbooks and it helps organize the documentation going forward so other other things we focused on were using attendance which which they had been doing manually across all the schemes so this is a great way to to improve that for them. Quizzes, discussion boards, communications, all things I'm sure you're familiar with and then also some of the schemes have really loved looking into student folders which I might even be able to show you a little bit at the end. That last thing in terms of training was Rob helped us put together a digital support hub for our staff and admin which is just a great place where they can find any of the information they need on how to run their scheme sites. Perfect, thanks. So this is a work in progress of course as of we started training all of these schemes at the beginning of the summer and by September we had almost all of them live and then in October all 13 schemes were live with trainees actually accessing the sites. At the moment we have six or seven of the schemes who actually have significant regular use of Moodle seam sites and are using them for lots of various tasks administratively besides just repository for documentation. Then we have about four or five of our schemes who do engage but that's really the main purpose they use it for is just that they put documents up there and trainees will go and find it there rather than emailing so they're on track but you know there's much more they can get out of Moodle and then lastly we have one or two schemes who just really haven't been able to manage to get up and running with Moodle yet but we know they'll get there eventually it's just we have a lot on at the moment so you know they've asked if we can you know just push it further into the spring if you want to go on then. So one of our focuses for this year is going to be inter-scheme collaboration and we've already noticed that a lot of the schemes you know when they meet and share ideas with each other is when a lot of the the best ideas are brought forward and they're bouncing ideas off each other it's been really great so far. So what we want to do is give them a great platform to showcase what works and what doesn't on their own scheme and this is when our community corner has really been a great thing for us so at least put together the community corner event which we run every month about and at this event we give them updates on everything they were doing and then allow show and tell and sharing of ideas between those who join who can share everything that they have going on Moodle. We also are trying to encourage schemes to contact each other directly which has never really been done in ICGPs history not so much at least but now all the training happens under our umbrella you know it's great that we can give them the chance to to work together and collaborate more so lastly we're going to give them well we've started discussions about giving the schemes guest access to each other's sites and I do think that will happen but it's going to be on a scheme by scheme basis whether they give permission for that to happen or not okay and then it would be exciting if they start sharing question banks too but I think that's another topic for exams. So some of the key challenges in our case single sign-on has been a blessing and a curse. Our trainees actually don't have ICGP email addresses so they all use their own individual accounts and our solution in order to make sure that our cohort sync enrollment was working properly and always dependable and also to have a single sign-on that avoided multiple you know usernames passwords floating around we have a single sign-on that goes through our website database and then back into Moodle which has really created some challenges for us in terms of communications because there's no actual email address associated with the users when they log into Moodle. So it's been a blessing and a curse. We have managed to use our internet provider to sorry our website provider to help us develop an API that sends it reads the email coming from Moodle and then attaches it to the user on the website and then sends it to their email address but it's really one-dimensional one directional and the view itself of the emails isn't perfect. So that's one of the challenges we'll be working on. Then there are there's significant changes happening in college at the moment. It's one system after another that we've been introducing as a part of this shift over to having the all the training schemes come into college. So as you saw one or two schemes just really haven't been able to get to using Moodle yet which is fine and that's totally acceptable but that'll be one of the things that over time we hope to address and then of course varying levels of comfort and confidence with IT and web tools sometimes in the trainings you know people will have issues even if I say copy the URL from the browser they're not even sure what that means and then you have other people who are just flying. So it's just an array of levels of comfort and competence online. So you always have that when you're training people to get comfortable with this all right. So just going to make sure I speed up so we have time here. So I'll pass that over to Lisa and so I can get you she'll go through some of the feedback while I get ready to show you what our scheme sites look like. Thanks Ben. So as you can see I mean I opened with that it's been a massive change and it has been a massive change but it's been really positive. Certainly all 13 of 13 schemes have engaged relatively meaningfully both with Moodle and and the blended learning resources the centralized resources. So I've just popped up on screen just some of the feedback that we've received from surveying both our schemes a scheme director scheme directing teams our trainees and I'd say it's been overwhelmingly positive. It is a lot of change and it does need a good degree of change management and support but I think overall it's really been quite successful. So at this point I'm going to stop sharing and Ben has about one minute to show you the back end. Yeah well I've gotten permission from one of the schemes to show you at least the front end of the back end. So I'll show you what one of the scheme sites looks like without going into the sections and really you know showing any trainee or scheme information but here's one of the this is our Danygal training scheme and here is the scheme site that they've put together just so you can have a look at some of the ways they're using it. They have their timetables in there either as files or as web pages which are easier for them to update. Then here they have a scheme CKT that's our clinical knowledge test which is our big ICGP examination and they have a practice version of that actually embedded into their scheme site which is great to give their trainees practice. Then another thing is logbooks so they have their CST documents which is all the documentations they need to upload. Typically those would have been collected via email but now they're able to upload them here onto the scheme site which is a great tool and then loads of document repositories, student folders where trainees can share files with each other which has been a great tool that this scheme in particular has really loved you know feedback sections presentations so just to give you a look at everything we've been talking about in terms of these scheme sites or these smart websites that the the schemes have at each of the training schemes. Is that okay? Thanks, thanks a million so we're more than happy to take any questions that you have. I haven't been having a look at the chat so you might direct me.