 pop-up there folks if you just want to click on the pop-up and then without any further ado Mary I'll hand over to you. Good afternoon everyone I'm delighted to participate in this afternoon's Moodle Munch session. Thank you to Suzanne and Rob for the invitation. My name is Mary Larkin I am Operations Manager with DC Alumni Office here at Dumstead University. I'm going to share how the DCU Graduate Student Mentorship Programme uses Moodle the loop database to support a mentorship programme involving internal and external users drawing on flexible of the database activity. I'd like to start with an introduction to the DCU Graduate Student Mentorship Programme. Formally known as the DCU Structured Mentorship Programme it is one and a prestigious IIDT National Training Award for excellence and in coaching and mentoring in 2018 and was shortlisted as a finalist in 2020 and 2021. It is a joint initiative co-organised by the career service and the alumni office here in DCU. The programme runs for six months between November and December sorry November and April and pairs second year students with alumni mentors for the purpose of career and personal development. Alumni and students are matched based on their areas of expertise professional expertise DCU course and their areas of interest for mentorship. This is supported by the application of the loop database um by the DCU loop platform Moodle sorry the Moodle database via DCU loop platform. The mentoring programme assists the university in providing a transformative experience student experience by pursuing active engagement with our alumni community to volunteer as mentors for our DCU students. Mentorship is mutually beneficial relationship with mentors passing on professional insights and expertise that can come from real world experiences and challenges. It has enormous impact on students employability skills and self-confidence when applying for future work placements aside of by the DCU career service. At the centre of the programme is a collaboration between alumni mentors and students that include monthly one-to-one meetings, skill session and a work shadow day in the mentors organisation. The programme has grown since its foundation in 2003 with the implementation of video conferencing such as Zoom. We receive alumni mentor applications from our international alumni community and alumni in various career industries. The role of our model the role of our mentors is transformative student experience here at DCU by assisting the development of a DCU student. Our graduates give back and volunteer to the Dublin City University to their time experience and expertise and the programme provides a range of benefits that can be captured on the mentor CV. This is evident in the shared testimony by our recent 2020 mentor of the year Tom Feeney with his second year of mentoring on the programme highlights the benefit of the virtual environment and also the experience of the programme as a previous mentee. From mentors our colleagues in the career service dedicate their time assisting programme mentees as a mentee on the programme you learn to complete a reflective journal on your mentorship experience and complete learning agreements. In addition mentees complete information sessions CV interview and a career action plan where feasible mentors provide a work shadow day and the mentors sign the mentor sign off on this. Our mentor of the mentee of the year last year and Sophia also explains and highlights the guidance from mentors when looking for your first job and applying for that first job. Our mentorship programme starts with a connection a matching connection that is supported by our use of the Moodle DCU loop database. The slide briefly outlines how and why we use DCU loop to connect mentor and mentee matches. At the start our application process in October on receipt of our mentorship applications from both mentors and mentees we request the creation of a DCU loop course with the assistance from our colleagues in the EU here in DCU. Within the loop course mentee details are imported to the database with fields such as name course application questions and area of interest for future mentorship. An individual record is created with every mentee within the course applications are then received from mentors both internal and external to DCU with both DCU email address student email address or an alternative preferred external email address. Mentors are then enrolled on the course as a non-editing editor role restricting functions such as download and report. Mentor email addresses decide their their entry route to the DCU platform with DCU emails providing users to opt for the DCU student and staff option with their own preferred login with their own login and password set. For non-DCU external users they are enrolled in the program and provide are provided with login assistance. Mentors then log into the loop into loop to select their program mentee and to confirm mentor are enabled to access the program to view the mentees to aid the selection process. So we use DCU loop to aid our matching process within the mentorship program. Before I go for any further I'd like to just display how that happens. So I'm going to just skip one slide. So on entering DCU loop the mentors are greeted with a course that they've enrolled on. So in this instance it's the DCU graduate student mentorship program. Options are then available to select their mentee within this program and they filter it through to select. I'm going to show you an outline of an application. To assist mentors selecting their mentee we've applied filters also so they can look at their course name their title their reason they want to pick the very ventures on this example like marketing and finance so they can filter on that. On successful selection and decision mentor then selects the cog wheel here and on entering that they're able to enter their credentials so their name will be able to appear and in this instance I have Vaughan McLaughlin as my mentor. Alumni staff are then enrolled as teachers and we can download and within the alumni office and the careers office that we can download a CSV file with the mentee's name and corresponding mentor. It's deemed a successful match and the program proceeds to introductory link communication sharing contact details for the partnership to begin their first meeting. To revert back slightly I'd like to acknowledge that the training and resource troubleshooting and support is also within this process and is very important within this process as it gives us first instance to clarify any questions or queries with regard to their login whether they've selected the correct mentee and we we could double check that. So using loop to assist our mentorship matching again I just want to reiterate that we have both external and internal users of the program so with that we would have we have seen that mentors have limited exposure to loop those that are recent graduates adopt faster to the system because there's familiarity with it but there's also knowledge growth within those for returning. What we also have done for the options of to filter we can filter with regard to our courses unmatched is also a possibility so we can actually filter out those mentees that have been selected already to to provide convenience to the mentors that have not selected the mentee within the second tranche. Also within GDPR we don't share personal contact details on loop that is share or try it when the match has made on loop and then the introductory emails are sent from the alumni office to introduce the mentee and mentor. Our lessons and shared learning our lessons and shared knowledge availability and our resource schedule zoom calls increased mentorship training so what we have noticed is in the years since 2018 we've applied different techniques to increase adoption with our mentors ranging from we've created a resource video we've created troubleshooting with help and support from TEU and we've also had an option where when we are launching the mentorship matching process that they have the option to have a zoom call immediately after that means that if anyone has instant difficulties logging in that they have the resource to contact the alumni office and dial into that zoom call to resolve any issues. We have noticed higher engagement through our mentors and self-selection particularly on the day of when we release and our mentees are available for selection 45 to 50 percent of mentors enrolled on the program will go to loop and select their mentee so this has a knock-on effect as you can imagine that reduces resource of manual matching within the office. In 2022 we had 83 percent of mentorship pairing matches completed via loop which was a substantial amount I think there was very little things for manual matching so completely reduced the staff resource with with the regard to this. Also we have had feedback that the mentors solely use loop to select their mentee as part of the product add-on we wanted to ask about the forum and to share different updates about the program and we were asked not to that they particularly use loop as a selection tool they don't use it as a communication tool it's their selection tool and that's their preferred option. In 2023 we had an addition of a second database which was quite interesting in that when the first database of mentees were second year students we also had a calling for postgraduate students and final year students that wanted to participate in the program and through our colleagues we developed a system where they may have been entered in the course initially for the mentorship but the second tranche of mentors that hadn't been matched were then filtered into a second course so that allowed them to participate in a second mentoring. So again I just want to reiterate thank you Rob for the opportunity to present and to thanks the career service the alumni office and TU for implementing this loop function for successful matching in our mentorship programs and it's over to you Giga. Thank you thank you Rob good afternoon actually good evening from from the country where I'm from I'm currently from I'm doing this course from Georgia where I live I represent Ilia State University and this is one of the state biggest state university in Georgia and the topic which I would like to highlight today is the peer review with through bricks in Moodle assignment and this is a task that was created under the Erasmus Plus project which actually Ilia State University is participating with Dublin City University and the idea was brought from this side and I would like to first I will briefly describe the idea behind this activity and then I would like to demonstrate that how it looks like into into the Moodle platform that we are using so as for the project the project was funded by the Erasmus Plus and it's titled like this assessment in health care education goes digital and the main aim or the objective of the project is to enhance the digital assessment in the field of health care education together with Ilia State University and Dublin City University two more higher education institutions are involved in in this project which all together makes four institutions so there are several work packages and activities in this project I'm not going to tell you that much information but what is the most important is that the project idea was brought so the people gathered around the field of health care education and they thought that now is the time when we have to think about the transformation into the assessment teaching learning and assessment and this transformation was meant basically transforming the traditional way of teaching and assessment into a digital one and this project was was funded during the COVID so this pandemic also had kind of influence on that because at some point people start thinking that perhaps now is the time when we have to draw digital competencies into the medical field as well I'm not sure how it is in island or UK but in Georgia we are still having quite conservative people in the field of medicine and I think it has its reasons but for me I don't have any any education in the field of health care or medicine I'm working at the university as a deputy director of the library but at the same time I'm responsible for the learning infrastructure of the university I by myself is responsible for the Moodle web page that we're having at the university and all of the e-tools that are used in the teaching and learning process in order to enhance the quality of teaching so the so I was asked that now we have we are participating in this kind of project and perhaps you can you can also be involved here and we can all together make make this happen so the the the necessity from from the side of the faculty members was that there was certain activities there were certain activities in the in the medical field basically those activities are from the clinical skills that young students have to pass and the idea was that making these activities in a digital way but in addition to this the faculty members also wanted to include the peer assessment because as we all know the peer assessment is used to quite a lot so the history of using the peer assessment is quite a long and the effectiveness of peer working is also actually there a lot of research that says that it's quite effective when it comes when students actually have to assess each other now but in addition to this so first I was or we were given these tasks that first of all it should be digital then it should be peer assessment so there won't be a teacher who will assess the students but there will be the classmates of of of that students who will assess each other and the third criteria was that it should be assessed by rubrics which was created by the faculty members but the students have to first read or see the the the tasks that their classmates submitted and then they have to use rubrics in order to assess the work they have done but in addition to this there was also a demand or request that the rubrics should have a textual kind of textbook where the student the reviewers can write something additional comment or textual feedback so when it comes to peer review assignment and you are a model person the number one activity that comes into your mind is the workshop the workshop that is used quite a lot in at our university when it comes to to peer assessment when students have to submit the text but now it was a bit difficult for us because the also the workshop has a functionality to be added to be graded by the rubrics but you cannot really have the textual comments in those rubrics and you cannot change the grades of that rubric so it basically the grades should be only one number like you have certain criterias but all those criterias should be for example three points or four points you cannot really navigate that much so this was the challenge at first time so and then we had the selected skills as I've mentioned these those three skills were selected from but by the faculty members the hand washings the right glove application and then puncture so the whole idea of this is that the students at some point could make these activities at home for example the hand washing activity they should capture it by their smartphones because it's easy to to make that kind of videos and it only takes one minute or even less to to make it and then they have to submit those files into the model platform and after that the the peers have to make the peer review of that submitted videos by the rubrics that were defined by the teachers so it was a complex task for us so what we did we divided this into steps and first the rubrics were created by the faculty members I was not involved in this part because as I've mentioned I have I don't have education in the field of health care or medicine so the faculty members created the rubrics the assessment basically those are the assessment criterias and peer reviewers should have to just double check whether this criteria was met or not or to what extent it was met the second step was that the grades of the criterias differ according to the content for example if the first few steps in the few steps students can get one point but the number five or it might be the tenth step in that case in that case the grade might be not one but ten because there's special demands for example you can you might wash your hands correctly but on the seventh step if you touch anything everything is lost so for this reason the grades of the criterias are different and I will show you in shortly how it looks like then we thought that the the best way to do this peer review assignment is not choosing the workshop activity because we have rubrics and that grading is just to create an assignment just a simple assignment that is given into the Moodle we created that and we defined the rubrics so actually what we did was just we put we take we took the rubrics that the faculty members created and embedded it into the assignment next step was that we asked students to capture their hand washing which they did and they submitted those video files into the Moodle assignment actually we asked them to upload the videos on their youtube channels because all of the students are getting the gmail account from the university so they have this europe channel as well they and they can easily submit the videos here and what they did was they had to embed those videos into the text box which was given under the assignment so they submitted their assignment after that the teachers defined the reviewers I mean the students who should review the videos that were submitted and in order to grade those papers in order to have access to this assignment so students were given the teacher's role specifically for this assignment not for the course but for the assignment in order to navigate into the assignment and having a possibility to grade it and yeah so also the process was like that and first and let me just show how it looks like into the Moodle platform not just showing you the theory so this is how our platform looks like and this is actually the course as standardized model course as you can see we have here the instruction for the reviewers and then these are the simple assignments so what students do is the ones that made the videos they just simply come here and submit their assignments here but the reviewers what they are doing first the teacher gave them the teacher's role and after that they go here they come to the course they watch this video this is kind of instruction just in order to make them prepared what they should assess then they go to the assignment and they view submission and they see who submitted this from the student side and they click grade and then they see the video that the student made oh sorry for that it's only one minute maximum or one minute and seven seconds and then this is the rubric that was defined by the teachers as you can see the rubric is quite complex because we have several criterias here as I've mentioned it it varies also the points also vary here so in this case in your student can get maximum 0.5 but then this summary comes and in which they can get 10 points or nothing but so this is also a text box so in addition to the points the student the reviewer can also write here something for the students so this was a crucial part for from according to our faculty members because they wanted to in addition to that grade they wanted us to create the solution where the reviewers can actually write something they can explain why they graded this so it's a certain easy for the reviewer they just read the criteria first they watch the video then I hope that you you hear me because that was a notification yeah I think you okay perfect yeah they they see they watch the video then they scroll down they see the criterias here choose the point they wish to and give them the feedback if they wish so they just choose the point they scroll down this is the rubric and after after they have finished it then they can give the overall feedback as well in addition to the feedbacks and the criterias and then they save it once they save it the grade is automatically I mean they're the summed so each student when they go there the students who submitted the videos they see the grade that they got here in this assignment and also the feedback they get from the reviewer so this was but this is something that we kind of made under the project this is still a trial kind of it is not like we are still in the very first phase so what we are thinking that we do have some challenges here because we need we need to explain how it works first to our teachers because those teachers might not have that might or might they might they might not they do not have that knowledge that deep knowledge in how the model is functioning so we we think that perhaps we need to create the user guide how to use or how to make this activity we also need to explain it to to the reviewers but I would say that for the students we we made a pilot study for this and we had quite big number 20 30 students who graded and who participated and they find found it very easy to navigate through there and but but there's there is another another big issue how objective the students how objective the students assessment is so it the biggest fear here is that when I assess my classmate I might might not be that strict so the grades that the students are giving to their classmate might not be the ones that the teacher will be but this is another story this doesn't have anything with the model activity but yeah I think that that was all what I wanted to mention here let me just double check it into my presentation yeah that was all that I wanted to mention here this was the solution that we came to I mean I'm not saying that this is the only one and true solution but this is what we did and yeah if you have any other questions and any thoughts I'm here to yeah to listen thank you