 Good afternoon. I'm sure people are looking forward to lunch and by way of incentive to keep you focused. There is a small edible prize for those that are able to concentrate and work the hardest for the first part of this activity. That's the title of our presentation, you can see there's a mini instruction there to get laptops ready, if you have them. Or mobiles as a second preference. I'm Martin Compton from the University of Greenwich. I'm Louise Drum. I'm from Edinburgh Napier University, formerly of the University of Greenwich. Which is why we're working together on this. Okay, so let's, without further ado, we're going to try and illustrate through exemplification, give you something to do, and that task is for you to work in groups. Obviously in a room like this, which is magnificent, but not clearly designed for group working activities. So around the room, you will see green pieces of paper that determine which group you're in. So we've kind of got one group over there, one over there, one over there, one over there, and then we've got four spaces in the middle. Gravitate towards, if you will, the pieces of paper as being indicated by Louise at the moment. Got one right down here? Yeah, there's one over there, that's good. With your mobile devices or laptops. Everyone in this area, please come here. Follow the instructions. If you're joining us online, welcome. I don't know where the camera is. I'm going to wave sort of generally like that. There is also an option for you to have a crack at this as well. But those here in the hall, ignore this. Use your piece of paper, please. So it's not a prize for everyone, but we would hope that everyone will complete this task as swiftly as possible. But the winning team will be furnished with some minimal nourishment. Okay, can we turn over now? Yeah, get going, turn over. You'll find a QR code and duplications of that QR code or a URL on that page. Pass the white pages around to your friends so they can scan it or log in. Please don't use the people in the room. Please don't use the one on the screen. That's for people who are watching the live stream. So please use the URL or the QR code on the pages that you've got in your group. Too complicated for you. So not everyone needs to be logged on. You can collaborate, work in a way that's best for you. The task should be evident though. So you'll find the task is in Google Slides. You want to make sure you're in edit mode of Google Slides. The second slide has movable words. Drag and drop them. I don't want to worry you all, but the online groups seem to have finished already. Oh, okay. So if you're with us online, can you click the like button in the VVoc so we know how many people are participating. That would be great as well. Just a code to enter for those working online. Nobody's rushing to me yet with the piece of paper. I hope we should be close. It's the green paper is the one you want to fill in. Oh, look, here comes someone. So close. So close. We have a winner. We have consolation prizes as well, so keep going for a minute. If you're close, bring it up, your green sheet. Online group, you've got one letter missing. But yeah, do keep bringing those pieces of paper. We want to check. Excellent, well done, yes. So we have a runner up there as well. Congratulations. Let's see. So close. Two letters runway round. OK, as much as I'm sure you want to carry on with this until it's complete, we do only have a limited amount of time. So if you give Louise your pieces of paper as we continue with this, these are the answers for the different groups. You'll notice that they are actual words, but not words that are actually that easy to guess. So you have to get the things in the right order. What we'd like you to do is hold on to that experience. Think about how you felt doing that and relate it to the context, the problem that we had and the solution that we came up with, which is slightly different given that the context here is different. The online experience for those people who are watching online was a little bit closer to ours, but they didn't have audio. They were relying on text comments to interact with one another, but they seemed to be able to do it a little bit faster for some reason. Maybe you have an explanation for that. So I'm not going to take any comments now, but we can save those for the end. So the context that we were working on, online distance PG CERT HE program, along with Ros, who's sitting over there as well, with both UK and international participants, we have as part of our scheme weekly webinars for Zoom webinar tool, and we were using a lot of the kind of chat, Mentimeter in the background, breakout groups, turning mics on, turning mics off. We heard earlier in the earlier session about some of the issues we've collaborated in these sorts of contexts, but we weren't particularly happy with the amount of participation. And I think any of you that have ever taught online, or perhaps even just participated in online webinars, will be familiar with this. When we talk to students online, we tend, I feel, and a lot of the evidence shows that we're doing this as well, that we're going back towards more transmissive modes of teaching. The pedagogy is much, much more transmissive. And the media, the mechanisms that we use, the tools that we're using can exacerbate that. So the skills and strategies that we use to encourage dialogue in classes aren't necessarily the same ones that we can draw on in an online environment. So we're finding new ways of trying to get people involved. So there are a couple of real issues with the way that we're asking people to interact. So they feel more visible, they perhaps feel more vulnerable, more subject to the surveillance of the tutors and their peers. So a number of these things are causing quite big issues that we're preventing them from engaging in dialogue. So what we wanted to come up with was something that kind of mirrored what you were looking at here, or doing here, as a strategy for engaging them. OK, so what we did is we put together a series of Google slides that the students online could collaborate on, which is what you were collaborating today. Only bearing in mind that they're all at a distance. It's a synchronous discussion. It's a synchronous Zoom webinar that we are running. And we use the breakout rooms facility within the webinar to siphon people off into small groups of three or four where they would then engage in this problem-solving activity. And the thing that was most interesting about this, that actually this became a private space in the way that a main webinar room cannot be. So just as you were huddling in groups together, they were virtually huddling in groups. Some of them were using their mics to chat, and some of them were using the chat facility as well. So what we did is we had these instructions for the escape room where they went through the slides. We probably progressed to the next slide. And they had a drag-and-drop activity, which in Google slides people can do at the same time. So they were dynamically moving around these words into this left and right for them to experience the kind of collaborative problem-solving online. And then afterwards we would discuss what it was and the approaches that they were taking in doing that. And then they had an escape room code, much in the same way that we asked you to fill out your code on the page as well. So the student feedback that we had, people had quite a strong reaction to it. Obviously they said they felt more comfortable talking to each other because there wasn't somebody in the room. It was okay to make mistakes. Again, that idea of playing and failure coming to the fore there. And some people indeed feeling this kind of panic. We didn't set a timer on them. Indeed we didn't set a timer today either. But actually there was this sense of urgency that they had to get on and do something and complete a task. And then other people talking about, well, they just had a conversation about what was happening. And I suppose most striking of all, bearing in mind the name of this talk, somebody said actually I had to put down my cup of tea and sit up and start doing things in the opposite way that people sometimes would think about online webinars. This is a passive thing. I can just sit down and do something. We passed over some responsibility and agency to them. So I think we'll finish up there. But we've got to hand out our prizes first of all. So if people have comments, any feedback? Obviously there was some technical stuff happening there because people couldn't get into edit mode of Google Slides if they didn't already have it downloaded on a mobile. But if you have any comments or anything like that at all, who is our winner? Seweridge won. Seweridge won. And that was this one here. So that is group 3A. Congratulations. Well done. Seweridge, who came down first? Seweridge. So while the grand prize-giving is underway, are there any comments or questions about it? I think it was quite ambitious asking you to do this in such a short space of time. But hopefully you get a sense of that experience which is what we were going for. Were we on ourself? The second one was... Oh, it's here. It's this one. Oh yes, Fishways. 4B. So obviously we're going to post the wrappers to the online people because... I told them they can take something from their fridge. And obviously those Google Slides will be there in perpetuity for people to have a look at. We'll share the links there as well for people to have a look and make your own copies and adapt it for your own purposes. Any questions? Hi, Stephanie Campbell from Southeastern Regional College. Oh, there was Stephanie Campbell from Southeastern Regional College. So just a tiny question about digital confidence and capabilities with the learners and the students where their challenges do overcome with some people have a real fear factor, especially online, and how did you overcome those challenges? I think one of the things that's central to the way we've designed a programme is that we're all coming to this online distance programme with different levels of expertise and confidence. So built into the programme is a sort of... You might be on this rung, you might be on this rung. Let's move up a few rungs wherever you are. And everything that we do is about challenging people to move on. So there's that sort of backdrop that reassurance and indeed we had somebody who was there, and his entire job was to support that improving digital confidence amongst the cohorts as well. But we were lucky, it was a PG cert HE, so everything we do is experience it. These are the kinds of things that students are exposed to, so we had the perfect kind of narrative to frame that actually. Maybe you can answer the bottom question there. I was going to address the cheese comment actually, so some of the tasks that we set the students... I mean, the illustration that we have on there is a classic one, but I think that the opportunities afforded by live presentation, drag and drop functionality, synchronous use of things like Google Docs, there's so many things that you can do, completing tables, labelling diagrams, those kinds of things, all lend themselves in a similar way to the kinds of tasks that you had as well. Anything to add to that? No, I think just the next question in relation to people who didn't like the activity, the only one was people felt a little bit of panic, and maybe it might be a little bit related to the digital, not just their own capabilities, but actually the devices, and we were working with people in different countries, so in terms of access to the internet and stuff like that, people found that they had to turn off their video in order to carry on with it, or they had to use a second device in order to actually access the activity, so there were things like that that created a sense of urgency, but out of all the things we did, I think as the webinars, and we had been doing webinars for a full term at that point, that they did respond very positively to this in that they had something to do, they were given something to do, but it wasn't with the whole group, and more importantly, it wasn't in the big webinar which was usually being recorded as well, so actually it was genuinely a private space for them. A desirable anxiety, I would call it. Any more questions? Hello, I'm Stephen Bruce from Edinburgh University. I'm just interested in the challenges of transferring something like that into the asynchronous environment. I think that's a really good question. Actually, these sorts of activities came out of asynchronous activities, so for example, our induction activity is an icebreaker about icebreakers using Google Slides documents, so introducing all of our participants to the concept of multiple authorship on a single document, add your own slide, share an icebreaker with your colleagues or your future colleagues on this program, and then comment on those using the comment function. So introducing people to this idea that you can operate in an asynchronous way using a single document and do some quite interesting and creative things, and they are all academics, teaching academics, they go off and do it in much more interesting and creative ways, sometimes without lego. I suppose the one thing to bear in mind about this one is that there's no traceability about who moves what around, so if it's asynchronous, you don't know who's done that, and it's debatable whether that's something you need to know or not, but whereas within a Google Doc where people logged in you can actually trace the history of who's done what. But yeah. Okay. Maybe the final question. How long would you give students to complete a task and what happened when groups finished earlier than expected? We had an extension task built in, so the content of the example that we showed you there was about... What was it about? Problem-based learning. It was an opportunity to discuss some of the features that might be surprising, I think it was, wasn't it? Yeah, counterintuitive ideas. Yeah, counterintuitive things about problem-based learning. Okay, thanks for the cheese. Yeah, you're welcome, you're welcome. Thanks very much, well done everyone, thanks. 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