 So welcome everybody to today's CPD webinar and in a moment we'll get underway and I'll hand over to our presenter but before we get started let's just double check that everybody is set up on our interface which is Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. On the bottom right hand corner of your screen for those of you who are new to the interface is the access panel. This is where you'll be able to find both settings and participant list and also the chat. So we've already started chatting and thank you all for your introductions. While I'm chatting do find your clap emoji because in a minute we're going to give Katie a very warm round of applause. If you'd like to upload a picture of yourself to familiarise yourself better with other participants and update your profile do click on the icon in the middle of your screen where you can also set your status and later if you have any questions you can raise your hand in order to ask any questions that you might have. Now in this panel as well you should be able to find the chat without the participants and I can see many of you have already started chatting there and importantly if you can hear lots of little pings then that's also where you'll be able to adjust the settings and be able to stop audio or other notifications so that you can enjoy the session in an uninterrupted manner and I'm very much looking forward to today's webinar. Now in a moment I'm going to hand over to Katie Stripe who is with us to present the session today on creating and embedding personas into digital curriculum to improve diversity and inclusion. So if I could all ask you please to put your hands together to give Katie a very warm welcome and thank you Katie for leading the CPD webinar today. Here we go I can see lots of people clapping so a warm welcome and over to you. Thanks Maron. There's my slides okay so just another little bit of housekeeping from me. I am presenting with Mentimeter today for those of you who haven't used it. If you go to menti.com and use the code at the top of the screen on a second screen or another device you can follow my slides. The little heart at the bottom if I make you laugh, thumbs up if it's interesting, thumbs down if you can't hear me and any questions in the chat please. I have with me today a capable assistant Kate Dallison, I have turned the chat off so it doesn't distract me but I am hoping that she will be able to manage any questions that you have as we go through. We are both from Imperial College. I am a learning designer in the Faculty of Medicine, Katie is a careers consultant and together along with a few other people we have built a programme called Attributes and Aspirations. So today's presentation is about creating and embedding personas into a digital curriculum to improve diversity and inclusion. And we will look at the AA avatars and how we created and deployed them, how you might start developing your own avatars and ideas for how you could deploy them in other situations that are more appropriate for you. And of course how these avatars can increase inclusion and diversity. So first AA, Attributes and Aspirations is the course that we work on. It's a non-credit bearing short course for students in postgraduate medicine. It supports them deciding on and planning for their professional futures. And we are now in year two of delivery. So the first two years were designed specifically for postgraduate medicine. And we are now working on making more bespoke versions for other faculties in Imperial College. Just take a second to think about what inclusion means to you. Scrub it down somewhere, write it on a post-it note. But really I just want you to think about what it means to you personally. Okay, enough with the difficult questions. I just wanted to share a few quotes that I have come across whilst I've been working on these personas and researching this stuff. These are kind of the background to why I think this is important. I have a document, by the way, with all of my references and suggested further reading in which I will share at the end. This first quote, Widening participation in medicine in the UK could be seen as actively recruiting underrepresented students into a system in which they are likely to face discrimination, harassment and systematic educational disadvantage. I read that and nearly cried. But the reason I think it's important is because widening participation is just the start. We have to start thinking about how we include all of our students once they're a part of our community. The second is a quote from Kimberly Crenshaw, the original paper on intersectionality. The intersections of race and gender only highlight the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed. Basically, for me, that's try and reduce the number of boxes you are putting people in and yourself, because we live in a world of interconnected boxes and those boundaries are often blurred, movable. So try and think of students as yourselves as a whole. And my final quote, which I really like, and this is kind of why I'm doing this. Significant benefit is derived from the presence of people who identify as LGBTQ plus not by explicit teaching, but by their inherent challenge to homophobia that their inclusion facilitates. So I mean, really, what this is saying is it doesn't have to be explicit. Just the visibility of minorities helps those minorities feel included without explicitly saying you are included. A bit more context. This is Imperial College London's Council. These are the people that make decisions for Imperial College. These are the people that make decisions for the Faculty of Medicine. A little bit more diverse, perhaps, but... So for those of you who are following on MentMeter, there is a question here. Are we diverse? Yes or no? Tell me what you think. This is the AA team, by the way. This is the people that created our team. No judgment in your answers, by the way. I am being deliberately diverse. Come on, there's more than five people in the room. I deliberately didn't put don't know. I want you to make a snap judgment. There's our lovely faces again. Okay. I admit that that was a slightly mean question. Here we are again. My point behind asking the question is that, on the surface, yes, we are all white women and that doesn't strike you as extremely diverse, necessarily. However, we are all from different countries. We'll have different hobbies, different lifestyle approaches. A couple of us have kids. We've nearly all lived in different countries. So you can start to see how I'm kind of digging through diversity as something that isn't always necessarily visible. However, our college leadership, our faculty leadership, our own team, none of this is anything that we can change. Most of us are at a teaching level or course development level. We have limited ability to affect structural systemic change, but we can change our outlook in the content that we develop. So we are very aware that we are a bunch of middle-class, well-educated white females. There is nothing we can do to change that, but we can say, okay, we know this and we bring in students to test. We have feedback from a range of different people, job roles, et cetera. And that's what I think this is about, is that kind of acknowledgement that we can't individually make high-level changes. We can start to think about the content that we deliver and from a small level, as with the earlier quote, from a small level, those small differences will start to make a difference overall. Okay, so these are our avatars. These are the students that we have created to go through our course. We will discuss how they were created and how they've been embedded a bit later, but first of all, I want you to share on the screen what you think makes them diverse. What kind of diversity do you think is in this group of students? Okay, what about the stuff that you can't see? Yeah, so you're coming up with a lot of what we have built into these avatars already. We also look at employment at the family backgrounds, obviously gender, sexuality, age, country, race, that is all there. And that's kind of where we're going with developing these characters, these avatars. A bit more background from Imperial. Our total student body is 40% female, but postgraduate medicine were 64% female. Nationality-wise, 34% UK student, 16% Chinese, 50% UK and postgraduate, 87 countries represented. You may think this is a kind of slightly random data set. It is absolutely random data set, but this is the only information on our student diversity that I could find by publicly available sources. So if we're thinking about our student diversity and working on building content that addresses any issues that may be there, my question for you, is that enough? All the data I can get from Imperial is on gender and nationality. Is that enough for us to make decisions? That's an easier question, isn't it? So I tend to agree that I don't think it is enough, but you ask for more data, you start getting into different kinds of issues. So one of the things we've looked at with this data or with our avatars is that effectively you have two choices. You can take your student data, whatever student data you have and match these avatars, these personas that you're creating to your student cohort so that the avatars that you're building into your content matches quite well your demographics of your cohort, which is very much what our postgraduate meds and avatars do. They're very representative of the cohort that we have. The other option that you have is to look at your winding participation agenda or your cohort and say, well, actually, I would like my cohort to look different and you can use your avatars to mirror that and to say, okay, actually, I've got 64% male, I would like that to be 50-50. And these are the kind of decisions that you can start to make when you start playing around with the content that you make. So what is a persona or an avatar? They're very common in user interface design for websites and things. They are based on existing users and an understanding of the people that you have in your cohort, in your user-based field website. But they're very, very context-specific. My set of avatars that we've created for postgraduate medicine will not be appropriate for anybody else's cohort. Our engineering avatars are different to the postgraduate ones. But the idea of personas originally is to kind of look at what your users are going to be, what their motivations are and so on, which is how we started. We had a kind of typical user interface persona design template and we did this in the days before COVID, we did this in a room on flip chart paper with pens. And we started to map out our potential users I am going to ask Kate Dallison over how we did this because she is the brains behind this because she is the one that knows our students the best. So, Katey. I'm here. Thank you. Thank you. So I think it's fair to say that when we started out making these avatars, really we were making them for very selfish reasons, I would suspect, in that we wanted to create content that was going to hit home. That's a non-credit bearing course. So we needed these students to see themselves in the content and to help them to understand that this was the right sort of content for them. So I've worked with postgraduate medicine students along with every other student just about in Imperial. I've been a careers consultant for about 15 years. So when we sat down, we didn't necessarily focus so much on this idea of inclusion and diversity. What I was focusing on was, okay, what are these people want to get out of this course? What are they going to find most frustrating? What do they want to do? How are they entering into and how are they going to interact with the content that we are creating? So I started by using my knowledge of working with these postgraduate medical students, but then we did go to a certain amount of data. So as a career service, we have an interface where our students log all their interactions. So we have this information around what sort of ages our students are and roughly what sort of backgrounds. And we took that, mixed it up with this idea of goals and started to think about what are these people going to be really annoyed about and how can we make our content work with them? So it was, I guess it was quite an organic process when we first started and we sat around and I gave some information about what I'd seen and Katie would bounce back some ideas around, okay, what about this? And Dallas, who's the other one of our team at that point would also join in. So it was very much a co-creation of these mock people with very different backgrounds. Thanks, Katie. So that's how we started. And it was purely just a kind of developmental to help us guide the content that we were going to write. But then they sort of developed a bit. So we kind of made them out, we built them up and we gave them pictures and we put them on different degree programs and we kind of filled out their goals and motivations and stuff. And then there were these four of them. But actually after the original brainstorming session, there were only really three, Chris and Chris, the two on the end were one person. We never gendered them in our brainstorming sessions, but then came this idea of actually we can use these to narrate our course. We can put these students into the course so they can become part of the program. And then we actively made the decision to make Chris into two people to give that gender balance. And now we have five, shortly to be a sixth one for our faculty of engineering. You know, we're still using the same process, but we are being a lot more conscious in the way we approach the diversity of these students across the board diversity, you know, their backgrounds, their histories, their family. And of course we are being a little bit reactive to certain external situations such as Brexit. You know, previously we may have had a higher percentage of international, of EU students, but you know, maybe that's not so realistic anymore. You know, we're also consciously trying to keep these avatars as real as we can so that our students do generally identify with them. Okay, so now you will notice in the attendees panel that we have set up some breakout rooms for you. I would like you to pop into those breakout rooms and discuss what you think should be included in your own context if you're thinking about making some kind of avatar. So, you know, your students could be other staff, you could be staff training, they could be students, they could be, you know, you are going to build your own at some point today. So in the breakout rooms I would like you to just start discussing with the other people what kind of diversity is important in your context because it may not be the most obvious. So, for anybody familiar with Blackboard Collaborate, the breakout rooms are in the attendees panel. So we are aiming for four or five people in each breakout room. So if we go down the list from the participants, so Caroline, Christina, Jorge, Julia, into room one, the next four into room two, the next four into room three, et cetera. Brilliant, people are going. I will stay here for questions. If you need me, hi, I can see a couple of people have just joined us. There are currently people in breakout rooms doing a little activity, but we are about just about to go and get them back. So hang in where you are. We are currently looking at different types of inclusion, the different types of diversity that is important for people's cohorts that they're working with. Hi, it looks like most of us are back. Katie, can you go and, oh no, they're coming. Cool, so these are really great answers, and I hope that's given you something to think about, and in your own context about what's important to your students, it's great to see so many as well, and it really does highlight, I think, how important it is for this to be anything like this to be done specific to your own context. I think the only thing that I have written on my list that I don't think has come up is a family background and first and family students and community students, which I think is going to be more important as the way we work and the way we study changes. Okay, I'm gonna move on, I'm slightly mindful of time. I have created a form, so you can start to create your own personas, but I am mindful of time, so I will share this at the end if we have time, and I'm just gonna skip on a bit. So just a little theory stock for you now. I'm sure some of you, most of you will be familiar with the theory of universal design. It comes from architecture, a building that is designed for wheelchairs that will have benefits for many other people, people with young children, visually impaired, and simply clumsy people. And this is something that is easily put into the educational context as well. Something that you do to support visually impaired students so they can listen to content will equally help students that like to listen to their paper as well on the bus. So quote from some work that Kate Lister's done at the U.K. University, 52% of students said studying helped with their sense of confidence and identity. Now that's just studying, that is just the very nature of being a student. Imagine how confidence and identity would be boosted if a deliberate part of your curriculum was creating something that allowed students to be comfortable in their own identity and gave them the confidence to be who they were. It's accepted that from this studying is good for a student and it's good for confidence and wellbeing, but there is so much more that we can do. I can't not mention decolonization. It's inevitably important when you're looking at changing your content, making it more inclusive, more diverse, but there are infinitely better people to talk about this than me. But I do think it needs to be considered as part of a bigger piece of work. However, we can't change history. There is nothing we can do about what's gone before and to an extent it makes us who we are. It makes us people in the institutions that we are now, but we can change the content that we use and the way that we deliver it. And this move to digital that was forced by COVID has really given us the opportunity to start making our own content because where we simply lectured or did the same sessions that we've been doing for years, used the same papers, we've now been forced by external factors to start thinking about our content and being given in a lot of cases more time and more resources to make new content. So the next thing we did after we'd developed these avatars, these personas, we started to embed them in our content and I'm not gonna lie, as a careers-based course, that was quite easy for us to do. Each of our avatars has their own CV which makes a really easy way of embedding personal history. And they narrate our content, they turn up throughout to give ideas, to ask questions, to show example our content, a good CV or a good cover letter. Throughout, they're asking our students for help or they're being there implicitly for our students to relate to. But that is, as I've said, for us quite easy in the careers context because we don't have to force the student history. So my question for you now is if you will go back into your break out rooms, sort of carry on the discussion that you've already started about what kind of diversity is important and think about how you can start embedding that in your own curriculums. So are you looking at case studies or are you looking at something like we've done, building your own content, building these people that can actually interact with your students? I don't have the answer to this, but I would like it if you went back to your break out rooms and start to kind of explore how you think this might happen in your own context and then start sharing those ideas with us. Katie and I will pop into the break out rooms this time to share some ideas with you. Great. I think that's everybody back now. Thank you. The group I was in was definitely very interesting, very engaged, and the stuff that's come up on the board is really, really interesting. And I would love to be able to continue these conversations for the rest of the day. However, it is 27 minutes past what. I'm gonna wrap up and then there'll be a minute, maybe two, just some questions. First of all, thank you for participating and sharing and discussing your own students and your own context. It's really interesting and it's really important. So my final conclusions, I guess, are these are just ideas. Every student, every course is different. And what I want to happen from this is for people to take this idea and mold it into their own way to create a good experience for their own students and their own courses. But also, I would be really interested to know how you start to develop these personas and what comes from it. My final thought, if you get to the point that Kate Dallison and I have where you want to go out drinking with your personas, seek help. And with that, I think we have a couple of minutes. If anybody has any questions or anybody has anything that they want to share. So, Katie, we've got a question in the chat already. Oh, okay. You can hear me, yeah. I can hear you, yeah. So we've got on from Tanya. She's, do your students recognise themselves in the avatars or is that a positive thing or does it cause any difficulties or issues? Anecdotally at the moment, there's definitely been no issues. We are just about about to start full evaluation of the program. So definitive answers on that question will come in the next couple of months, I think. But from our initial chance to students, it all seems to be very positive. Even if it's just a kind of, there are other students on this course, even though they're not necessarily real, kind of, I guess makes an isolated student on an online course, feel a little less alone. And I think, yeah, I was telling the other group, group one that I was in that, actually we had a couple of requests from students to find out what some of our avatars did after that completed the course. So they were clearly engaging with them somehow and they were interested to see what their career developed to. So we created a final session and let them know where people ended up to help them with that curiosity. That's really interesting, one of the things that came up in the group I was with was about emotion and how this can be used to keep some kind of emotional connection with online students. Any more questions? Any comments from anyone? It is half past one. I don't know how the bounces are in this establishment if we're all going to get thrown out. Oh, definitely not, but it's been a really fascinating discussion. So unless there's any particular questions, we'd be very happy to send people on their way for lunch. Hang on. It's here waiting for me to share it. My references. If you can't share references on... Mentimeter, there you go. You should have just shared it. And I will share with you, Maren, the download from Mentimeter because it will have everybody's responses in it as well. Katie, you've just got one more question coming through in the comments. Again, Christina, anecdotally, I think, yes. Actually, something I want to do a lot more work on actually is that, I mean, obviously, me and Katie sometimes forget that Alan isn't real and that we might like to go out for a bite with him and, you know, as she said, they are wanting to know if they got that job. So I think they are engaging with them on quite human level, which I would hope will address some kind of loneliness issues. Although, I suppose the other aspect of that is there's probably something better we could be doing to address student loneliness than creating fake friends for them. But that's a different conversation, I suppose. But I hope so. If no one has any other questions or anything else to add, I'll end the recording now. Yep, I'm happy with that.