 and you should all see a little pop up there asking you to consent to the recording so just click that and continue and then without any further ado I'll hand over to Stephen and Janice from Maneuth to tell us all about stack. Hi, my name is Janice and I'm here with my colleague Stephen Nolte and Tony Waldron. We work as support staff in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in Maneuth University and we're just going to share a little bit of our experiences of using the stack question type in Moodle. So just to give a little bit of context pre-pandemic we had very limited use of automated quizzes in Moodle. We use them in a proficiency course and as part of the mathematical computing segments of some more second and third year modules and at that time the question types that we were using were predominantly closed and some MCQs. When the pandemic hit like everyone else there was a massive switch online and part of that meant that we started using quizzes in much more modules and in much broader way for both continuous assessments and for our final exams and that initial switch we had to just cope as best we could with what was available but then in the summer we were given the opportunity by our local Moodle support to test out alternative question types because we had realised that what was available wasn't really sufficient for what we were trying to do. So during the summer of 2020 we tested a number of different types and additional question types were added to Moodle for the start of the academic year 2021 and one of those was stack. At the moment now we're returning in person so there has been a switch back to paper-based exams and but we are still continuing to use quizzes as part of our continuous assessments and during the pandemic we very much focused on summative quizzes and now kind of split into using more formative and summative quizzes in these modules so there's a lot of work going on in the background. The last year my colleague Stephen has been spending a lot of time working on adding JSX graph-based questions to our question bank and just to flag that generally all of our work is done in conjunction with our lecturing staff to come up with these questions. So just to say why we ended up kind of going with stack I suppose the main reason is the flexibility it offered us. So Stephen will go through more detail but just to give a rough idea of what we're looking at. Stack allows you to have multiple input types and the algebraic expressions is particularly useful because you can check for algebraic equivalents but they also have matrices numerical multi-choice etc and there's a full list of possibilities given there. It also allows users to check the validity of their input so you can give them feedback on what it interprets their input to be. It allows for randomization, it allows for complicated marking schemes well Stephen will go into that in more detail and as I said it has JSX graph support so I'm going to hand over to Stephen and he's going to go through more specific examples of what's available. Thanks Janice. So like Janice said I'm just going to try and go through some examples of the different features of stack and I'm going to try and show some examples in the kind of context of questions that we've been using over the last couple of years. So the first thing that was mentioned was that stack supports a number of different input types so the first one I want to present is just a simple numerical input type so this is going to support decimal answers, fractional answers and then other types of numerical answers like expressions involving square roots or mathematical constants and then for expressions that involve variables there's an algebraic input so this could be things like polynomials or trigonometric logarithmic exponential functions some combinations of these and this will be available then to be graded with the algebraic input type. So that obviously allows for a number of different types of questions but in particular in linear algebra it's very useful to have for instance matrix input types so stack supports two different types of matrix inputs. The first is a fixed sized matrix so stack will present the students with an array of boxes that's specified by the solution, the correct answer so when the students see this they can type in their answer into the boxes and then it'll be graded as a single matrix by stack and then the second option is a variable sized matrix so rather the students are given an empty box and they can choose what size matrix to input and they do this by using spaces and new lines for the rows and columns so this is particularly useful then for instance if the thing you're trying to assess is actually partly the size of the matrix like in matrix multiplication for instance so stack also supports a number of multiple choice input types so the first one just on the left is to show just an example of a drop-down question type so this is just this is in the context of the question about convergence of series so you can see it's just it's part of it's it's part of another question a longer question but so this is about the root test for series but you know this is particularly useful when there's a single correct answer and specifically for kind of text-based answers like whether the series converges or doesn't converge or the test is inconclusive it's particularly handy to be able to fit this in line for instance so then there's also a radio button option again this is particularly useful when there's a single correct answer and it's quite nice that stack also supports the use of latex then in in these radio button options so for instance in this question here in the middle there's a question about finding the Taylor series of a function and then the student can choose the correct series representation and then the last one that we found very useful is the option for a checkbox input type so this is this is particularly useful then if you have multiple correct and incorrect answers and you'd like to do some kind of partial grading based on that so as mentioned one other very useful feature of stack is the fact that it provides input validation to the students so as the students are typing they will see their answer shown back to them in a nice kind of latex format and it also provides some additional help as well so for instance here in the algebraic input it's telling the students what variables were interpreted in their answers so that's particularly useful for linear algebra or multivariable calculus and things like this so again in terms of the input validation when the students are filling in matrices the stack will again present the answer back to them before they submit and it will demonstrate the matrix in a latex format and particularly useful as well as the fact that it will tell them if they've missed any boxes so if there's a big 5x5 matrix or bigger it's particularly useful to know if you've skipped anything or there's any other problems with your input before you choose to submit your answer so the numerical input type also provides some specific feedback in terms of validation so in particular if the students have typed anything that contains variables or some kind of equation of variables it'll tell them before they submit that there's a problem with their answer and this input is actually expecting a number rather than a variable or an equation for instance so that's particularly useful when you want to let the students know that the answer like a probability or something is expected to be a number and not in some other format so one key feature down of using stack over some other question types is the fact that it supports randomization so this is particularly useful for instance in both kind of formative and summative assessments so you might find it particularly useful if you want students to get different questions from each other or for instance maybe you want to let students have multiple attempts at a question and you can even give them answers in between and let them retry over and over again just to improve their understanding of the concepts so this is just an example of a question asking for the second derivative of a function and you can have a look at randomizing say exponents or powers of variables or constants and just below is shown a couple of different expressions and their derivatives so stack also supports the option to deploy fixed versions of the question so there might be more versions of the question available than you necessarily show to the students but stack allows you to kind of pre-select a certain number of them and test them before the student sees them so this kind of helps prevent any potential errors or other problems you know problematic questions from reaching the students it gives you a chance to test them and in particular as well when you're looking at larger scale assessments it improves performance basically when you've deployed some number of variants rather than having to randomly generate a bunch of them a bunch of simultaneous or you know a large number of question question variants for a large number of concurrent users for instance this is a significant performance increase there so this is just one other example I'd like to give you a randomization which is that you don't just have to think about randomizing numerical variables you can think of for instance randomizing text within a question so in this particular in this particular question the the different distributions and the multiple choice answers are the same but rather the question text is being randomized so one is asking for distribution for number of heads when you toss a coin five times and another is a number of earthquakes that happen and you know the answer will depend on the text shown to the student so as mentioned as well one other feature that's very useful for assessment is the support of some more complicated marking so one thing we found particularly useful is this kind of idea of follow true marking so you know the students in a multiple part question might might be likely to make some mistakes and if they make one mistake early on that's going to carry true and it's going to you know penalize them or they're likely to get the the following parts incorrect as well but stack allows you to pass answers between parts of questions so for instance if they've gotten part b wrong you might be able to use their answer from part b and and and then use it to grade part c with the kind of expected and the expected in quotes correct answers say to give them either marks or partial marks so this is this is particularly useful then for for for either for feedback or for you know awarding kind of partial marks and quiz and and some of the assessment so as it was mentioned just more recently we've been looking at adding in jsx graph based questions to our question bank so jsx graph is a javascript polling library and it's particularly nice that it supports interactive graphics so I mean this could be useful either for visual aids to help you solve the question or just to demonstrate some concepts visually so stack actually supports jsx graph with this special jsx graph co block that you can include into the into the question text and then it also supports grading certain variables that you can pass from jsx graph to stack and then this will be graded by the cast so you can use this then for for grading the actual graphics themselves or for providing some feedback so uh so I'm just going to give a few examples of this the first is just like it's just some randomized graphics so here the students will see a random number line and this could be an interval or multiple disjoint intervals and then they'll be given a set of multiple choice questions multiple choice options and they'll pick the correct one to match with the with the interval that's been shown to them and and then just as an example of using kind of graphics as an aid to get an answer this is a question to try and find the inverse of a function now the students could do this algebraically but you can also for instance provide them some kind of interactive graphic to help them visualize the inverse so here the students can actually click this change function button and it will cycle through the different plots of the function and then hopefully they'll be able to see which um which which uh graphically which function is the inverse of the given function so uh on the point of interactive visuals um here's another question um where they want to apply a vertical line test to check if a curve that's been shown to them uh is actually a function of a certain form and then this uh horrors this a vertical dotted line can actually be dragged around by the student and it will show the intersections then with the curve so the student's going to apply the vertical line test to tell if the the actual curve they've been given is a function or not and and then just to mention then as I said you can actually use the graph itself as an answer so this in this type of question the students are asked to represent an interval on the number line so what they can do is they can drag the endpoints of the interval around and then they can also click these buttons to change and to change the type of endpoints so whether or not it's a closed or open endpoint uh can be changed and then when the students students uh click submit uh this will be graded then by stack so based on the the endpoints submitted and whether or not they've chosen open or closed and you can pick uh feedback on this and and different grading is up to you uh in the background so and then just one more example of using the graph as an answer uh the students here have been given a particular function and then they've been asked to transform the graph to sketch either some sort of translations or shifted arguments to the function and so here the students actually can grab this uh red point and just drag it around and then they can use this flip function to flip the function um across a horizontal line through the red point and so that should enable them to answer the different uh random versions in this question and again it'll be graded based on the location of the the red point and whether or not they've chosen to flip the curve or not and so I'll just pass back to Janice then to give us summary so um thanks very much Stephen so just I think we've gone faster than we intend but never mind uh so just to summarize um the main reason we went for stack at the time was as I said it's flexibility so it's built on um sorry it uses a computer algebra system in the background that's based on maximum and that provides a very powerful tool and gives us a lot of options when we're creating question types so again summarizing randomization you can randomize numbers list elements and that in itself allows you to randomize text the complex marking so by default um stack has multiple nodes so you can allow for partial marks based on maybe guesses as to where students will go wrong if you want to try and allow for certain obvious mistakes you can give partial marks that way or as Stephen showed you can take an incorrect part of a question use that to give students partial marks later on in the question the validation is very welcome by the students as well the fact that they're shown how their answers are interpreted is is good it kind of prevents some possible errors feeding into the system there are multiple feedback options and which can be really useful in formative quizzes when you're trying to maybe prompt students in the right direction this is something we started looking at but haven't spent as much time on as we expected and Stephen has spent most of the last few months working with JSX Graph and there's just one thing I should note is just that stack to get the maximum use out of stack you really do need to know a bit of well a lot of latex and maxima together to get the most out of it and to really use JSX Graph you'd have to have some knowledge of JavaScript so just just to flag that point so thank you very much for listening and I'll hand back over to Rob. So it's over to you folks. My good start. Good afternoon everyone and thanks Rob for the invite and I really enjoyed that presentation there from our Manuse colleagues so it's some really good practical advice there so my name is Louise O'Gorman and I along with my colleague Ivan today we're delighted to speak with you about the Advanced Centre for Professional Education so I'm the Advanced Centre Manager based in ATU Sligo and I'll give you a brief overview of our background and our aims and objectives Ivan will then share with you in more detail how the Advanced Centre uses Moodle from an Instructional Design perspective so the Advanced Centre it's a human capital initiative pillar 3 funded project it will be similar to other HCI projects in Ireland like the DCU Futures or the UL at Work project from University of Limerick and the overarching aim of all of the HCI pillar 3 projects is to identify and address the future skills needs in our industry and in our case we're focusing on digital transformation in industry. We were founded two two and a half years ago now and our founding members are UCD what was AT Sligo and is now the Atlantic Technological University after our merger last year and colleagues in TU Dublin in the telecampus and what we found was that people working full time can sometimes find it difficult to take on a full award either because of lack of time not sure about the commitment or because they don't want or need all of the learning on offer so our aim is to be more flexible by offering a modular approach to students and the results are a series of accredited digital transformation focused modules and special purpose awards which could ultimately lead to full awards if that's what the learner wants ranging from QQI level six up up to nine and we're also cognisant of the fact that employees as well as companies want to have this more flexible approach to learning and in developing appropriate modules in this area of digital transformation we've been supported in the advanced centre by a group of industry partners some of whose logos you can see on the on the screen there and they've been really supportive in guiding us on pertinent areas to develop and informing us on the trends with respect to new technologies so to make it as easy as possible for the learner to find out what they need we decided to focus on 11 thematic areas which we can see them on the next slide. The three core teams we identified as being the data science, cyber security and software engineering and then the remaining eight teams are of more applied nature so ranging from digital transformation in manufacturing through to health data analytics and financial math there for example and learners can search within a team and then apply for the single module that they want so moving on there please Yvonne. That's the the outward facing element of the advanced centre and then inwardly in parallel we're looking to support our academic colleagues in the teaching and learning area and there's a couple of ways that that we're trying to do that in a lot of our modules we're teaching students about students about the concept of digital transformation so it really behoves us to try and adopt some of these digital transformation tools ourselves and to test them and to see where we can improve our teaching and learning so that's one area and particularly in the ATU Sligo we have a history of offering a wide range of part-time online programs to industry over the last 15 years or so and that's what we'd like to achieve with the advanced centre is to keep improving and enhancing that online offering by engaging with our academic colleagues and our instructional design colleagues and this can then serve the purpose of of say future proofing and colleagues skills there and finally using new technologies we'd like to develop opportunities for colleagues to have more bespoke content and how we use the Moodle platform in particular is is crucial for this so with that in mind I'll hand you over to Yvonne who will speak into this aspect in more detail. Great thanks Louise for that so yeah my name is Yvonne Sarsfield and I'm the instructional designer at the advanced centre and my main focus is on the upskilling of faculty staff in digital transformation technologies at the advanced centre as faculty staff or professionals who are dedicated to teaching it's important that they possess educator specific digital competencies to effectively use digital technologies for teaching and the advanced centre has outlined the following goals research and identify appropriate technologies evaluate the practical and technical environment assessment through running pilots to consider suitability make recommendations for the digital resources and organize and make available the these technologies and resources and also to foster a community of practice so when researching and identifying suitable technologies it's important to ensure that they meet the needs of the faculty staff and the students it's important to research and identify technologies that can enhance the learning experience increase student engagement and provide faculty staff with the necessary tools to create effective and innovative teaching methodologies and by investing time and effort in this initial step the advanced centre will ensure that we're providing faculty staff with the right tools to support student learning increase student success and improve overall teaching effectiveness the next step is to evaluate the platforms and products that have been identified and this is important to ensure that they are reliable they're user-friendly and cost-effective this evaluation includes assessing the quality and reliability of the technology as well as its ability to integrate with the existing ecosystem of the advanced centre and atu the evaluation process also considers the technical support and training required to ensure that the faculty staff can effectively use the technology and it will also consider accessibility privacy and the security of the technology and pilots involve running a trial period of the technology platform for a selected group of faculty staff and our students and that's to identify any potential issues and assess its effectiveness and get feedback from the faculty staff involved and this process enables the identification of any gaps in training or technical support required to ensure the successful implementation of the technology and the feedback from the pilots is also used to refine the recommendations to the med so recommendations are made based on the findings from the previous steps and the advanced centre will develop a comprehensive list of digital resources and these recommendations will be based on the identified gaps effectiveness suitability of the technology the recommendations will also include any necessary training and technical support required to ensure the successful implementation of the technology and providing an advanced centre moodle page faculty staff can access identified or recommend a digital resources and share their experiences with other faculty members the page will serve as a platform to request training to ensure that they're using those technologies effectively and it can also be used to track the progress and efficiency of the digital resources and to continually improve the delivery and effectiveness of them to foster a community of practice among faculty staff the advanced centre project will leverage the features and tools available in moodle and some specific ways this can be achieved include discussing emerging trends and technologies best of sharing best practices and seek advice from colleagues collaborate to create and add documents such as guidelines for the specific use of a specific digital technology organized and facilitate webinars and online workshops where faculty staff can learn from experts in the field and share their own experience and resources can be shared reviewed and rated by other faculty staff promoting the discovery and use of high quality resources so the moodle page will serve as I said as a comprehensive resource help providing access to all of the identified or recommended resources as well as those that are currently being piloted this will include software hardware platforms that are available via the advanced centre along with detailed instructions on how to access them for example in the case of our VR headsets the page will provide information on the number of devices that are available and how they can be borrowed by faculty staff for use in their projects the page will be a repository for other digital resources that may be helpful such as instruction guides ebooks explainer videos 360 video footage 3d assets and virtual tours so the moodle page can be used to set up pilots for testing purposes and here are some of the tools and features course creation so moodle allows you to create courses specifically designed for running pilots and you can create a course with a specific set of objectives learning outcomes and resources related to the technology or platform being piloted group management groups can be created within the course and participants assigned and again this can be useful for selecting a specific group of faculty staff and or students to participate in the pilot and the forum feature allows participants to discuss and provide feedback quizzes can be created to test participants knowledge and understanding which can be used to identify any gaps in training or technical support required and the tracking feature provides a valuable valuable insights into the effectiveness of digital resources and allows educators to make data driven decisions to improve their teaching strategies case studies will also be shared on moodle these can be shared with faculty staff students and other stakeholders through the course page or a specific forum dedicated to discussing the case study the case study can be analyzed and results discussed providing valuable feedback on the effectiveness of the resources used identify any gaps in knowledge or skills required to address any problem identified and suggest improvements for future projects the insights and feedback from the case studies can be used to inform future projects and faculty staff can use the information to improve their teaching methods develop new projects and refine existing programs progress and effectiveness of digital resources can be tracked through moodle's reporting and analytics features so here are some essential tools and features to enable training and support for faculty staff the multimedia support such as audio video and image integration this feature can be used to enhance the learning experience and support very various learning styles collaborative learning as mentioned there are features such as forums chats wikis and groups and these features can be used to facilitate group discussions and peer-to-peer learning assessment and feedback such as quizzes assignments and surveys and moodle offers a feature to use to issue badges and certs upon the completion completion of a learning activity which we may also use so moodle can be used to foster community of practice and here are some of the features again that will allow us to do that the forums to create discussion boards where faculty staff can post and respond to messages and questions groups to work together on specific projects share resources and collaborate on ideas messaging allows for private communication between faculty staff enabling them to collaborate and share information in real time wikis to create and collaborate on a shared document or website and this feature can be used to create knowledge bases FAQs and other collaborative resources and blogs and we're hoping that we can create and share a blog post to share a best practice reflect on teaching experiences and discuss emerging trends and technologies so now we will have a look at the advanced center moodle page so just keep in mind that it is still a work in progress and not yet accessible to the faculty but it will demonstrate how we are filling it with content to meet our objectives so I'll just actually share the live site to you now so you can see we've already began to populate it we're in the early to mid stages of the project so we still have a lot more work to do but for example in the virtual reality area here we're putting in some information even something as simple as using a glassware of terms for those who aren't familiar with this new technology we're building that up as a resource you know to to help with that also regarding the matter quest headsets information here on everything from a risk assessment template right down to how to create an avatar and anything that we think would be useful for others I'm going forward in these projects details of projects that we've already had pilots that we've run already and access to the recordings from those and just information we're building up on the moment on some new pilots that were about to run quite soon and we'll also address some of the challenges and barriers that we encountered along the way you know for example difficulties associated with procurement and software screening and data protection and to aid in facilitating the process going forward we'll be adding in supplementary information and guidelines there which will which will be included which I'm sure will be will be very useful to to everybody so just to wrap up there are several potential legacies that can result from the advanced center increased digital competency the faculty staff will have acquired the digital competencies necessary to effectively use digital technologies for teaching allowing them to create engaging and effective learning experiences for their students enhanced teaching and learning the availability of a repository of digital resources and assets and the upskilling of faculty staff in digital competencies can lead to an enhanced teaching and learning experiences for students resulting in improved outcomes sustainable digital culture the project may help to foster a sustainable digital culture within the university where faculty staff are encouraged to continuously develop and utilize digital tech to enhance teaching and learning improve recruitment and retention the project can serve as a selling point for the university demonstrating a commitment to providing faculty staff with the necessary tools and resources to excel in their roles and this can help with recruitment and retention efforts increased collaboration the project can help to promote collaboration among faculty staff and across the atu as we share our best practices and work together to implement digital tech in in our teaching and learning informing future projects the project provides valuable insights and feedback that can be used to develop new programs refine existing ones and improve overall educational outcomes across the atu so overall the legacy of the project can be long-lasting and transformative so if anyone's interested in obtaining additional information or exploring potential ideas please don't hesitate to contact us we're more than willing to help you know to share our knowledge and to collaborate on any projects and I'm very open to any suggestions on how I could use Moodle because I'm not an expert so so anyone who's got any ideas on how I could use it in this project I'd be very grateful for that also so thank you very much excellent thank you very much Yvonne and Louise I'll just pause the recording there now