Category Archives: wildcard

A student voice in the DEO: What have the Student Digital Champions found so far?

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Since the 2019 Digital Experience Insight Survey, which revealed so much about students’ experiences of the digital learning environment at Bristol even before the pandemic, the DEO have been keen to channel student voices straight into our work. With 2020 turning out the way that it did, it was even more crucial to make that a reality, and so we worked with Bristol SU to recruit 12 Student Digital Champions (SDCs) from across all faculties in the University. They don’t have a lot of time each week with us, but they’ve definitely been making the most of that time so far!  

You can get to know them a little better by viewing this introduction video, also found on the DEO Student Digital Champion project page. 

What have they been up to? 

Since joining the DEO team, the SDCs have been actively getting out into their faculties, going to course rep meetings and faculty meetings, and talking to staff Digital Champions and other key staff. They’re reporting that even just being in meetings with their ‘digital champion’ hat on has been sparking interesting conversations with course reps and students about the student experience of digital learning in 2020 so far. 

They’ve already actively worked with us on two new DEO guides, which have been instigated from student feedback in the Pulse surveys. These are the guides on Interactivity in large sessions, and Breakout rooms. They’ve also worked to co–create and give feedback on the Assessment Checklist and Troubleshooting guide, and other areas of the new Digitally Ready online space on assessment, which launched on 5th January to support students during this assessment period.  

What have they found?

The remit of the SDCs is to look for patterns emerging in the student experience across faculties and schools, and work together on the key themes of student engagement in learning and community building. They’ve been tasked with getting students to talk about solutions to their problems too: we want to hear ideas for what could be done differently, or what is working really well and how that could be expanded.

So far they’ve noticed…

Some of the common themes which seem to be merging across the student experience include:

The cohort conundrum  

Students are feeling disconnected, are lacking a sense of belonging and a sense of a shared experience. Many are reporting that this is partly due to other students not being active and engaged in online sessions, particularly in not turning on their videos. On the other hand, students also said they feel anxious themselves about being in online sessions, particularly breakout sessions, and in turning on their own mics and video. In the Engineering faculty, students actually felt there was an increase in engagement between students when using the general discussion forum to ask questions. Students seem to be asking more questions and sharing information with each other.  

‘I don’t wanna be just a guy on the screen. I want us to be more like a cohort.’  [Year 1 Student, Centre for Innovation] 

Clarity and simplicity make good online course spaces 

Echoing student feedback in previous years, students are now more than ever keen on things being concise, clear, and easy to navigate. Videos around 20-30 minutes seem to be the maximum that students feel they can engage with, with most preferring 10-15 minutes. Our SDCs are also reporting that a messy Blackboard course space can be pretty discouraging, especially to first year students! 

Group work online is brilliant/impossible (delete as appropriate)  

We’re hearing loud and clear that the tools of online learning – shared documents, MS Teams, BB Collaborate and BB journals – are potentially great in making group work easier to manage, and coordinate. Students are getting to grips with what these systems can offer, and love the flexibility of it (when the technology allows – internet connection problems are frequently mentioned too!). But they would like more guidance on these tools, and how to use them effectively. At the same time, the lack of group identity, and the fact that they may not have actually met their peers in person, is making things difficult.  

‘Only few people are tuning up. How can I trust someone to do their work when we’ve never met?’ [Year 1 Student, Arts] 

And they’ve suggested…

There are already several projects in the pipeline, ideas for what might be possible, and pilots in progress. A snapshot of these include: 

A Breakout Room toolkit – A toolkit for staff, made by students, on how to plan and delivery the best breakout room experience. This is broken down by year, recognising that first years have different needs and situations than returning students. It includes ideas for group sizes and permanence (3-5 week rotations for groups seems popular), and establishing group identity, as well as how to encourage students to actively participate. More on this soon… 

‘Online mingle’ pilot – In partnership with the Centre for Innovation, creating a template for how to run ‘speed dating’ type welcome sessions for students, where they can get to know each other and practice speaking online in a safe and fun environment.  

Motivation Panels – Here, more experienced students are there to support first years involved in team/group work, and spark a sense of what their degree is about, and feel motivated by the subject. Led by course reps and students, this is a way to feel part of something bigger than your own unit or programme.  

Shared spaces – using tools like MS Teams to explore ways for students to meet regularly and informally. This could include news and inspiration, notices of events, a ‘Help me out’ forum, and introductions to different people within their programme or school. 

Groupwork toolkits – Deliverables to help students choose the best tools to use, and how to use them, for group work, as well as how to maximise group work as a way to meet people, and gain the sense of social interaction often missing online.  

School assembles – Regular school-wide live sessions, to give a sense of belonging and motivation across a school, rather than just within a unit or programme. These are already been run in the School of Psychological Science, and the SDCs are working to find out what it is about them which are so engaging, and how that might be replicated across the university.  

 

Exploring Curriculum Design Approaches

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Recently at the University of Bristol, we’ve all been thinking a lot about learning design, developing curriculum and ways of assessment. BILT’s focus on TESTA for transforming assessment is one way you can see this in action. In higher education, learning design can quickly get complicated – for example redesigning a whole programme – and is increasingly new and exciting – with online or blended aspects, new assessment methods or innovative pedagogies. A method of working when approaching curriculum, programme or learning design can speed up the process and make it much more enjoyable for everyone involved. Helpfully, there are several working methods based on story-boarding which provide a way to navigate this process, and which focus on a team approach to designing learning.

The Digital Education Office have mainly used an approach based on UCL’s ABC: you can read more about our use of this method from a series of blog posts by Suzi Wells and I on a previous ABC conference held at UCL. 

Such curriculum design approaches all facilitate discussion and evaluation of current and future learning designs by bringing together relevant stakeholders, learning design specialists and support staff. In the Sway presentation embedded here, we’ll have a quick look at a few, in order to get a taste of what these approaches involve, and how they’ve been used by others. Follow this link to open the Sway in a new tab or window.

What can an ed techie learn from the US civil service?

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I recently read Getting things done in large organisations by Thomas Kalil (profession: “expert” according to Google). Kalil worked for the Clinton and Obama administrations on science and technology policy. This is his attempt to share what worked for him. I was interested because 12 – nearly 13 – years in at Bristol and I’m still learning how to get things done. From what I understand of their structure and rate-of-change, civil service and universities are at least in some ways similar.

The paper is aimed at “policy entrepreneurs”: people who generate or spot new ideas, then evaluate and (if appropriate) help make them happen. I grew up in the 80’s and the word entrepreneur brings to mind Rodney from Only Fools and Horses … I can’t imagine wanting to apply the term to myself. But the principle certainly applies within my role, and indeed many professional roles.

Kalil starts by giving a bit of a career history, which is probably only relevant if you would like to become a policy advisor. This is the first 6 pages. The remaining 10 pages are pretty solidly filled with good advice. Here are some of the things most directly applicable to my role in digital education….

“Influence without authority as a job description” – this resonates, working in an organisation that is still often operating on goodwill and people’s desire to cooperate

Thought experiment: What if you had 15 minutes with the president (in my case the VC), and if he liked your idea he would be willing to call anyone to make it happen. Kalil developed this as a way of making people think seriously about what they would change, and who would be in a position to do it. Follow up questions:

  • Would the people called be willing & able to do it?
  • Is there anything we could change (for them or about the proposal) to make them more willing or more able?
  • What existing forums / mechanisms are there that could carry this forward? (This also relates to the paper from a previous reading group on evidence and the question: would the initiative continue if we walked away?)

There’s something empowering about having an answer to this prepared. I don’t, but I will.

How does your remit fit into the bigger picture? Related to the thought experiment above is the importance of keeping aware of – and actively looking for – areas where digital education can further the broader aims of the university.

Partnership working (working collaboratively) works best when you have good relationships. Both sides need to:

  • Understand each other’s priorities
  • Trust each other to follow-through
  • Feel able to disagree and raise concerns

Relationships need to be a two-way street, not just one side dictating. It’s also important to understand the internal politics and personalities you are working with. Clearly the bulk of this is good advice for all relationships, professional and personal.

Have an agenda. In my experience teams do tend to do this but, for personal job satisfaction at the very least, having a personal agenda makes some sense. Kalil has some good questions to ask on this (go read them) but key for me is: why do I believe this is the right thing to do and that it will work? Also, recognise that you won’t know the answers without listening to (and asking interesting questions of) other people.

Make it easy for other people to help you. The example Kalil gives is: if you want someone to send an email, write it for them. Closely related to this is his advice for making follow-up more likely to happen: ask people if they think they can complete their assignment; document and follow up commitments; have deadlines, even if they’re artificial; if someone isn’t following up, try to find out why.

Understand what tools are available to you. What are the things you / your team / the organisation can do to affect change?

Be open to ideas from a range of sources. Engage with people from outside of your own contexts. Adapt and imitate what works elsewhere.

Plan for a change in administration (surprisingly applicable in universities, this one).

And some don’ts:

  • Don’t try to do too many things at once
  • Don’t act of the urgent and forget the important
  • Don’t spend too much time on reports
  • Don’t let things drag on indefinitely
  • Don’t surprise people, they don’t like it

Nothing earth-shattering perhaps but good solid advice, much of which it’s worth being reminded of. I’d recommend it.

Digital Literacy – An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief

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A new Horizon Project Report from NMC focuses on how classroom instruction/education can create digitally literate students (and by default staff).

NMC Releases Horizon Project Strategic Brief on Digital Literacy

“While institutions have become more adept at integrating emerging technologies, our survey data revealed that there is still a lot of work to be done around improving digital literacy for students and faculty,”

#EDCMooc – the view from the other side

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By Hilary Griffiths

Now the dust has settled I thought it might be useful to post some thoughts on our EDCMOOC experience. Once a week educational technologists, students and academics had the opportunity to meet for a coffee, and to reflect on their experience of participating in a MOOC – these are some of the thoughts expressed during those meetings.

Only two or three of the group had participated in a MOOC before so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the most common reason for participation cited in the first meeting was curiosity – what exactly is it like to be a student on a MOOC?

The general impression after week 1 was one of feeling overwhelmed – both by the range of tools participants were directed to use, the percieved lack of explicit direction or course structure, and the amount of “noise” in the environment. Some participants struggled initially to make sense of how they were expected to use the tools (which were things like Facebook, Google +, and Twitter as well as in MOOC discussion fora.) One participant cited the fact that they didn’t want to have to sign up to Facebook or Twitter but through the ensuing discussion it became clear that given the number of participants you didn’t need to use all of the suggested tools, but could pick a couple you were most comfortable with and still get a good experience of the course.

It was interesting that the participants cited noise as adding to their feeling of being swamped by the MOOC – the sheer amount of information being uploaded, commented on, communicated, microblogged and hyperlinked to was overwhelming, especially if you arrived in a discussion or activity area some time after it had started.  Given the participants use a range of ways to filter and organise the information they receive in their life outside the MOOC, it telling that at least initially they did not seem to apply the same strategies within the MOOC.  Generally better ways to filter and surface activities was seen as key – along with some way of allowing late arrivals to jump in to activities  without having to wade through masses of information, for example a daily digest of key discussion board conversations to allow later arrivals to contribute to the current conversation more easily.

A concern from a current undergraduate student was the perceived lack of validation of her learning. Was she learning what she should be? Was her understanding correct? In the absence of feedback from the MOOC academics the student was relying on a validation by peer consensus in a course where a lack of academic rigour characterised many of the contributions.

My perception was that those who had the most enjoyable and engaged experience of the  MOOC engaged early and managed to form small, self supporting groups which helped reduce information overload and the lack of a present academic by filtering information, alerting group members  to things they may have missed and also offering feedback on their learning. Groups offered a way to move beyond the experience of the central discussion boards,  often characterised by a lot of posts but not a great deal of dialogue,  into an area where participants could start to develop a sense of the experience and expertise of the people they were communicating with. One benefit of the MOOC use of external social media like blogs and twitter are that these conversations can continue after the course has finished.  A final suggestion was that perhaps we should lobby for some kind of advisory service for students to consult before they sign up for a MOOC – MOOCAS anyone ?

Applying the Mumford method to report-writing

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Philosopher Stephen Mumford has developed a process for writing academic papers, known as the Mumford method. It involves producing a summary of your argument in a very particular format, using this summary when speaking (both as notes for yourself and as a hand-out for the audience), refining it after feedback each time you present, and eventually writing up. It’s been used by professors through to a-level students and always sounded like a convincing idea.

I decided to try it out when working on a recent internal report on Open Education at Bristol, in collaboration with my colleague Jane Williams, and it worked well. We initially produced a handout, roughly in the format Mumford describes. After several iterations of this handout we used it as our plan for the final briefing paper.

Although we started with the Mumford method instructions, I made some small refinements for the slightly different circumstances. My summary was:

  • single-sided
  • landscape with 4 columns of 10pt text (as the points being made tended to be relatively brief)
  • sub-divided into section headings (these did not neatly fit with the 4 columns but that was fine)
  • produced in Google Drive to allow collaboration (this involved using a table for the columns – a little fiddly but workable)

We used this handout both for meetings with individuals and when presenting the paper at larger meetings for consultation, and it was very effective as an aid to discussion.

I was tasked with writing up and found I could relatively quickly write up the report based on the outline (which I had talked through many times by this point). Each of the four columns produced almost exactly one A4 page of relatively spare prose, more than I had anticipated. But the argument remained very clear and it was extremely easy to produce a summary of the key points, drawing almost directly from the handout. It’s definitely something I’ll use again.