 Good afternoon everybody. It's such a pleasure to be in such a wonderful venue this afternoon. I'm going to talk to you with Rich about a project that we've run at Rothberg to help BTEC students actually transform themselves into higher education students at the beginning of the year. So this project was actually developed with a few other universities, Dyna chyffredin, exeter a Universtu Byrmian. Rydyn ni gyd yn fawr i ddadu'r ddeunydd deithasau bethau'r ddod o gyllid yn ddod yn ddod am yr universtu. Rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r ddod, i'r ddod yn gwybod i ddod ar y ddod, i ddod yn gwneud bethau ddod a'r ddod o'r ddod, i ddod i ddod o ffocws, i ddod o'r ddod, ac mae'n gweithio'r ddod i ddod ar gyfer. The drivers were diversity and actually encouraging more BTEC students to actually attend university after they've completed their BTEC. We've identified a gap potentially in study skills for these students and, like I said, the project was aimed at a pre-arrival to university and we looked at the idea of delivering this package online. The research behind this, I don't know whether you all know, but 26% of university applicants are in fact BTEC students. These BTEC students are often academically less successful students than traditional A-level students. They are more likely to drop out in their first year and they actually come from a more social economically disadvantaged background or from an ethnic minority background and live in areas which have low HE participation. So we looked at the student experience in itself, so we did one-to-one interviews to collect data and also focus groups. We spoke to first year HE students and second year FE students to see what their attitudes were to actually attend in HE and what problems they'd encountered in doing this and what the differences were with their A-level colleagues. The majority were BTEC students, but we also spoke to some A-level students and we wanted to actually provide that comparison. So in terms of lecturers and FE tutors also provided some more data on this sort of issue. So we had quite a lot of interesting comments also from our BTEC students. They'd actually come into the university and we looked at them at the end of the first year to see what issues that they actually had. So some had never done exams for a long period of time, so maybe when they were at school they did exams, but in their BTEC they'd not done exams. So they had a whole new learning experience from that. They had problems with maths, they had issues with English and writing in a more academic style. They also had a feeling of disenfranchisism from the actual community itself because the majority of the students are actually A-level students. So in terms of doing this, we looked at the idea of improving retention, making the induction process more inclusive for these particular students and also addressing some of the gaps in study skills. We wanted to improve diversity, we wanted to provide something that was more interactive for these students when they arrived to form a community. We wanted them to feel that they were equal to the A-level students and we wanted to use an online platform to deliver this. I'm actually going to let Keith Pond actually talk to you about our thoughts on this process. Will our initial research with BTEC students in FE colleges and with our own undergraduate students on their first year of entry were that there were certain skills that they felt they needed a lot more practice on a lot more development of? These skills were in writing, academic writing, they were in maths particularly, and the skills, the transition skills, working in a different way, working differently, working in groups, working to a high level with different people from different backgrounds. Will our initial research with... So basically what we've ended up with is a different sort of island to see for people to navigate if you're a BTEC student. So you recognise you've got a skills gap and also you've got transitional issues to do with how you feel and the community that you're involved with. So I'm actually going to stop there and get you to think about the project overall. Now at this point you can see that we've done the research, you can see that we're ready to do some sort of intervention and the other universities involved in this project were all in that position. But we decided actually that we didn't want to do something that was just recycling of induction materials we already had. We wanted to actually do something different with the actual interface itself that we were going to use, which is our VLE. And also within this actual project there wasn't actually much funding to support a big team producing an interface. It was actually only me at the end of the day and I was only given 30 hours. So if you think of it as enter stage right, the learning technologist two months before the actual project was going to be produced. And I was actually only given 30 hours to actually produce this project. So in terms of that we were up against it from the start but we were sure that we wanted to produce something slightly differently. And we also wanted to change the way that we'd normally deliver these materials. So one of the first things I looked at was actually looking at collaborating with the BTEC students we had that were in the first year or finishing the first year. So we asked them to get involved in what we were going to produce. Because we're sporty at Loughborough we decided to call this module warm up. So we got some students involved, we went out and did some video. We looked at the idea of them peer supporting this actual module rather than us. And making the community for these students to enter and improve their study skills. We also looked at having a diagnostic quiz. So that's our current interface as it is there. And I'm going to get rich to come up and actually talk about the way that we change the interface to improve the way that we deliver things. So on this we were going to put a different spin on what we normally do in our VLE just for these students. Thanks Sandra. So this is a screenshot from our VLE which is called learn. It's been called learn for 20 years now. It's gone through many different iterations. And we've been using Moodle for about 12 years now. So this is our interpretation of Moodle. We've got three different themes that we can use plus a different theme that's on the mobile device. And we've kind of put a lot of work into iterating this over the years to kind of get it to how we have it looking. Which is reasonably nice. And it gets reasonably good feedback. But more and more over the last few years we've seen lots of people wanting to just change something slightly. Try and make it a bit less like a VLE. These VLEs that are supposed to be dead again this year as they were 10 years ago. They're still not dead but it's there. It works. People love it. So we get lots of requests and we've been working with lots of colleagues across campus including Sandra and some other people around in different areas. Just to try and make the VLE look a little bit less like a VLE. Cos you've got all these little things like the navigation block you can see there on the top left. A bit of stuff in the module administration area for students to see activity results. Things like reading lists and the module card. Now these are all applicable to this particular module. This is a standard undergraduate module. But when we start to fit in things like warm up we need to try and adapt the approach and see how things are going to work for those students that have got no idea what all of this stuff would mean to them. So leaving it there would be far too confusing. So we took this approach of making some adaptations just to make it look a little bit less like a VLE even though underneath it's still exactly the same. So now in the top right here you can see the screenshot of this particular module course in other people's parlance but we call the modules for the warm up project. And you'll see the little blocks that we've got dotted here around the screen of the things that we used. So there's nice colourful icons to move students around to the different areas, go to the quiz, look at all the different skills that they need to use, watching the video. So this is all again based on the standard module and the standard module experience but by taking away some of those little blocks in there that make no sense to the students who are going to be on this warm up course because they've not been at the university and don't know what all these things mean it just makes their experience just that little bit nicer to be able to come in and just fiddle around with the page a bit. For our standard undergraduate students and post grads they want a reasonably consistent experience where everything is in the same place. If they go on to the module then the electro capture block is on the top right hand side and there's a reading list block down there and there's a few other things and things move around and you get different module formats like grid and buttons and all these other kind of things. But for this module it was much better to have this much more tailored approach which had a much better experience for those students who are working on this module and then if they come along and transition to be Loughborough students then they'll still see a lot of these elements when they come and take their undergraduate modules but they'll just get a bit more familiarity and experience. Okay. Back to Sarah. Back to technology. Basically we had then a piloting phase for this module. We ran it with students definitely before they came they had to confirm they were coming first and then Rich organised some module access in order for them to go in. Like I said before we had a diagnostic quiz which we produced and that gave them an idea which area of study they wanted to do whether they wanted to look at transitional skills whether they wanted to look at their maths skills it gave them a rating to see where they were wearing those things and gave them a test to be able to do that. So in terms of this it ran successfully with peer support from the students that we recruited there was a forum and various questions were produced in terms of an idea of what students' issues were with that sort of thing. It ran very well over that pilot period but in sort of tandem with this the university then decided to produce their own induction material so we've run it once and then the university's main induction actually has taken over but we've still got the resources from that which fed into that actual process. So I'm going to let Keith have the final word and actually tell you all what we actually learned from this course. Well we learned three key things. We learned that yes there is a gap in the development needs of not only BTech students but also A-level students or students coming to university a development of the skills they will need to succeed in their courses. We also learned there was quite a gap between what the universities were preparing and had available for students to develop those skills and the skills needs that these students had. And one third thing that we learned was that when we do have a project that people believe in that is reasonably well funded it brings in lots of voluntary help lots of different skills and people feel really good about providing a project that has such positive results. Well we learned three key things. We learned that yes there is a gap in the development needs of... For the references for this project we are looking at putting the diagnostic quiz out as an OER free resource so please look out for that because we're now no longer using it in there and thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much indeed that was very well timed and a lot in there for us to think about. This time I'm going to go straight to Vvox for the questions we've received there. I think it might be coming up on the big screen. But first one will any of your course design ideas be adopted by regular undergraduate courses? Yes they are. We've got a project to do with induction at Loughborough which seems to run in parallel with our project which is called Personal West and some of the design ideas we're taking into that particularly the diagnostic quiz to be used by all university students not just these students. Fantastic. Do you want to tackle the top question as well? We're still looking at using and talking with formed relationships with ethic colleges in this actual process our local colleges were very much involved in actually designing our content so we're still continuing to work with those students and also look at how we might be of more help. Thank you. We've got another four minutes for questions so we'll check if there are any in the audience that have been submitted online already. Yes down the front here. We'll just bring the mics here and if you could see who you are as well please when you ask your question. I am Laura Hollinshead from the University of Derby. I was just wondering if you're planning to track the attainment and achievement of those students who perhaps have taken the course. There are no plans as such at the moment. I think the university decided that it would be better to use our actual current personal best stuff to cover a blanket cover of everybody rather than track the individual students so not at this point. Thank you. Any other questions in the audience? Okay we have another on the Vvox. What's the connection with Future Learner? In terms of Future Learner we looked at Future Learner as an inspiration for looking at the way that we would construct the actual course. We've not got the course to show you today but we looked at the way that you navigated through the course and also the way that Future Learn produced the interactivity. So we use that as a basis to design what we've done in the end. Thank you. I'll just final check for any other questions in the audience in which case if we thank Sandra and Richard again please. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable our Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology.