dara cassidy is head of online education in the royal college of surgeons and previously director of online learning in hibernia college um uh dr cassidy has done a lot of a lot of work in in areas to do with online presence and online community and makes use of these in kind of suggesting ways that we can better plan and implement remote teaching and learning um i know dara a while now from our work together with a colleague from ul dr angelica risquez we all work together on a national forum project to um develop an online course for lecturing staff in the area of online teaching and learning and i think dara that that course was by any measure of great success in terms of its its popularity and its its positive reception and and and its impact on the sector so all of that really down to you dara in terms of leading and directing and coordinating that project and and the pleasure indeed on working with you on it so today dara is going to talk to us about the kind of issues we've all been facing as we try to to teach and support students at a distance uh when a lot i suppose of what is familiar has been removed you know in terms of invisible cues and supports and furniture indeed that we consciously and unconsciously and rely on in the in the on campus or the the uh face-to-face environment so from there dara is going to talk to us about her work and her research and her thoughts into those issues of online presence and online community and give us i think some some take away lessons for us in terms of planning uh effective remote teaching and learning so i'm going to go quiet here dara but i'll i'll be here and i would encourage um people to use the q a feature along the bottom to ask any questions uh as we go and also perhaps to use the chat feature now just to say hi introduce themselves say who they are we're up to 45 participants at the moment i see over to you anyway dara thanks so much okay thanks very much girl for the introduction and the and the the nice things that you said um you're welcome everybody thanks for coming along on this um uh winter's lunchtime i know uh it's uh there's a lot of calls on our time and maybe sitting in front of another webinar on another screen is not the most attractive but hopefully uh it'll be interesting enough for you um i'm going to just start you thinking really uh my aim is about this whole thing about presence in in online teaching and learning so it's it's not like there's any kind of earth-shattering formula i think or any kind of new thing that you're going to hear that that's going to um maybe transform the way i shouldn't be saying this at the start of the of the talk um but but i think often people feel that there's something out there something vastly different than what they're doing that's going to change dramatically or will have a dramatic impact on on what they're doing on on how they teach online um and really a lot of it is is quite um it's little things it's little and and maybe obvious things if if we just think about them but i think the problem is that we often don't think about them we think about other other things um so that's my my goal here today is to maybe to start you you thinking about a different way of approaching uh how you teach people when you're teaching people online and like the road said i ha i'm head of online education in rcsi and prior to that i was um director online learning in hibernia college so i've been in the kind of online blended education sphere for a long time almost 20 years at this stage um and uh i it's something that i'm particularly interested in i think when i started in in the area i was like many people who came from an industry background originally an e-learning background i was very focused interested in the content and content production and good practice in in in content and structure and trying to have cool content and nice multimedia and videos and make things interesting from that point of view which is very important and great if if you can do that but like as the longer i've been involved in the in the sector the more i've come to focus on the kind of the relationship side of teaching and learning and the emotion side and how we feel about things and so when we are in the online environment things don't work exactly as they would as as we're used to uh when we're teaching in the face to face on campus so that's the kind of things that i'm going to be looking at and hopefully start you thinking about um one of the things that i was threatening to do was put you into breakout groups at various stages but garrote informed me that you're off the hook because the platform doesn't support it the way it's set up today so i will hopefully uh be getting you to engage um in a more in a less threatening way through um word clouds and things like that so uh hopefully uh you will if you have your phones ready there'll be few opportunities to do that and and it would be very useful to get some some feedback back from you about different things so that's a rather long-winded start um trying to advance the slide now i'm sorry about that there you go um yeah so just to start you thinking about this i have my first word cloud of the day and what i'm interested in is think about your students not your students now um in in cobra times but your students as they were before uh on campus whether that's in uh cork as you have here or or in uh truly and and think about what kind of supports are available to them so don't you know don't don't be too concerned about having a perfect answer so just um any kind of supports that you ca that are available to your students that supports their their learning so you're you've got a whole um learning ecosystem as it were associated with a university or a college um and if you could just take a minute there to go to this url it's answergarden.ch forward slash 173498 or if you have a mobile phone with a queue or a reader if you just pointed out the screen there that should take you to the uh correct place and um we just get i'll take just a minute or two to get some feedback from you on that so what kind of supports are available to your students so you type it in and click submit if you're doing it on a phone it's not very responsive so you have to kind of scroll over to get to the submit button um just gonna minimize this hair okay great so we take another minute or two just if anyone else wants to put put in some more feel free okay that's great i'm going to refresh now and we get the up-to-date so what we have here then you've got zoom and canvas sorry on canvas which are obviously um platforms that we're using now at the moment and and and very important for kind of to provide a structure in terms of canvas for uh studies for students we've also got the library we've got the disabilities office um ebooks vle peers mentorship chat before class coffee hangout um tell departments the lecturer what's up with accessibility uh accessible hood hood i don't have my glasses on at the moment i can't i can't read that um but that's great so you can see that this within the the ecosystem of the the university or the college there's a lot of things happening that supports your students um and you can divide them into kind of uh infrastructure so you've got the dedicated space that the learning takes place uh the various facilities you have the equipment you've got a canteen you've got a library new sports facilities and then you've got the kind of social support so you've got your classmates you've typically if you're going into uh a campus every day you've got uh teacher contact your teachers in the same room as you you've got the clubs in society i.t services events student welfare services so these are the things that we typically associate with being in being on campus as a as a learner um and that's just to kind of illustrate some of them there so it's it's the it's the the the things that are related to teaching and learning services is the the items related to that displaces the equipment but it's also very much it's the social aspect it's a place to meet friends meet new people expand your horizons get involved in sporting activities and cultural activities you have the library so within that we have a a a structure that supports our students to learn and and it's one that we don't necessarily even think about all the time um and the two kind of the biggies there i think are dedicated time and dedicated space so if you are uh going into campus every day nobody expects you to be at home um you know homeschooling your kids or washing the dishes or um the range of other things that impact on your time when you're when you're at home and similarly you've got spaces that are set up for learning so you've got lecture theaters and you've got seminar rooms and you've got labs and you've got all those things that are configured to support your learning and if if you look at learning from a a a socio-cultural perspective these places these learning places and dedicated spaces have associated with them ways of behaving so they have what you could nearly call scripts for behavior and those scripts are very familiar to us all so particularly as as lecturers or teachers we know that in a lecture theater we give lectures students take notes in a seminar room we have we facilitate smaller group discussion in a laboratory we work with equipment or whatever and we also have the experience as teachers and the students of of going to school from the age of four or five and going to a physical building and being in a class with people the same age as us having a teacher and and that whole support system that we take for granted as part of our education so as a lecturer or somebody who's thinking about developing a course when we're on campus we don't really have to think about a lot of these elements they're all in the background and they're happening and they're supporting our students learning they're affecting our students but it's not something that we necessarily have to give much attention to we need to just focus on what what's my role in this what what modules do i have to deliver which are lectures which are lab sessions what do i have to do and everything else is just it it's taken care of when you move that into the online environment everything disappears always it doesn't have to but automatically those things that that were there are suddenly gone and all that's left is you but now as the teacher and your students as the uh as the participants in your course not obviously they still have some access to library and they still have uh your vle that you mentioned and your platforms but a lot of those wider ecosystems of support are not there and and as a teacher this means that you have to start thinking about how it is that i can not make up you can't make up for for for everything else that happens but but but you need to think about how you design what it is you're doing with your students in a way that um that supports them in this environment that does not have the same level of support that they would have however that they would expect on a on on a campus um now obviously that doesn't mean that you have to become an i.t expert and be there to to answer any questions they have about every question that they have about their uh you know how their laptop works or anything like that but you do have to think about the fact that you have a group of people who uh are are learning together in in a in in a particular house but they may not know each other and they may not know you when particularly for students who are starting online but this isn't uh it's not a situation that we have at the moment that a group of students um we're on campus on our are now working remotely but they may know each other so that is implications for how we go about structuring uh our courses and on what it is we do and where we put our focus so a lot of the things that are um in places so the things that we don't think very much about uh are things that become much more central when we're thinking about planning for for online delivery and so it's difficult for us to know what exactly it is we should be doing like what's important how how is it that we um that we develop this kind of support system or this feeling of of a community uh that can support learners to you to to um to to develop to develop a class spirit a class um a sense of collaboration a sense of working together and working uh and learning from each other so one of the um an article that was written about two years ago it was uh mark brown and uh from dcu and ranked uh sorry lorraine delaney um it was called to walk invisible just distance students experience in a dual mode university and it was a very interesting article um because it included the experiences of students who had engaged in distance learning programs and and what it felt like for them to be students in those programs and just i'll pick out a few quotes that i thought were were interesting in the research um one person there said that the least enjoyable part was the feeling of being alone with assignments um somebody else i i didn't attend my conference party because there was a good chance that i might not know any of the students there on the day and the third one i never felt part of the university so you can see what's coming across there is this feeling of kind of dislocation and not being part of anything and and this is the the key um requirement for lecturers and teachers and people tutors people who are operating in an online environment this is something they need to really think about how do i get my students how do i help my students to feel connected uh and and one of the the tools that we have for for doing this is this framework um which is quite an old framework at this stage um developed by uh garrison anderson archer in 2001 called the community of inquiry and garza manson and archer were operating in a totally asynchronous context so this came out of um distance learning that was totally asynchronous and it was basically based largely on interaction through discussion forums uh but it it stands up uh very well even through to today to cover teaching uh where we have a lot more to synchronous tools at our disposal so we have these um zooms and blackboard collaborator and ms teams and all these tools that allow us to to to engage synchronously uh with people so um but it's still one of the most researched and robust frameworks um to support this idea of of learning and teaching in an online environment and it focuses very much on this idea of presence and it pulls out three types of presence and so social presence cognitive presence and teaching presence so social presence is the kind of obvious one so it's the ability of the participants to project their personal characteristics into a group and represent themselves as real people um and that's very important if you think about um how you how how people get to know each other and and and get to trust each other and and create a an environment where people can trust each other enough to maybe discuss things that are difficult or um to be vulnerable in terms of uh learning situations where people feel they're not very confident that they don't know um you know they want they don't don't come across as as stupid or not very um you know as if they're missing the mark so this kind of social presence uh is very important to try and develop this so this sense that um we are a real person you know i'm a real person i'm there i'm part of this group and that you over time me as a teacher you get to know me and similarly that the other people in the group are also people that become real to you and and you get to know them and unless and feel them as real people you get a sense of who they are the cognitive presence is um the extent to which you are engaging your students cognitively so basically how engaged are they in what's going on in their learning and it's not something that you can do but it's something that you can facilitate through the design of your your teaching approach and that's where the teaching presence comes in so that's really like the instructional design so it's the decisions that you make about uh how you're going to teach a course and if you're if you're coming from us you know from your traditional um of campus-based teaching you may be very focused on um the activities so the labs the the content the things people do and the idea of how they interact around that may not be something that you you would have foregrounded uh in the past whereas when you're planning for delivering in the online that's the thing that you're really thinking about you're thinking about what kind of tasks what kind of activities what kind of structures can i put in place that are going to encourage these people who don't know each other to to build up trust in each other to get to know each other and to work together so that they can learn from each other so in an online environment there's typically three kind of learning sources there's the instructor and so the students in structure relate instructor relationships the student content relationship and then there's the student student the peer relationship and all those three aspects are are a core part of the um development of um of of of of community and and under the learning process now if we're just focused on the the content piece um where it's like one one um leg one leg on the still so you're missing that that relationship piece that is really important uh when in any kind of um educational interaction but particularly needs to be intentional when we're designing for the for the online context and so the community inquiry as i said is um a really helpful way of thinking about um the the things that we need to attend to so we need to attend to this idea of social presence being there being being seen to be there being visible being available how we're going to the types of activities that we're going to ask that that are going to encourage people to actually really engage um cognitively so really think about what what it is you're asking them um i'm not just kind of maybe facile um for example to say using discussion forums you can use a discussion forum to develop this social presence and you know people um introducing themselves and talking a little bit about them but to get to the cognitive presence bit you need to use those discussion forums much more intentionally so you need to pose you know very kind of specific questions that will allow people to um dig deep into a particular area you need to be able to give them feedback on their responses you need to engage with them and and move them along um in their knowledge so it's about that engagement piece um and you do that through teaching presence so this sense of of someone being there and it is just this idea that when a person when a student thinks about their class that they they think of a network so they they think of the fact that there's a teacher there that they have a sense of who the teacher is they know the teacher and they know the people in their class so just to as i said it's a very well researched framework um and robust framework and has been shown to um play a big part in um this idea of presence in in persistence and success in online education so where um instructors manage to develop this sense of presence people are much much more likely not to drop out they're much more likely to stay to the end and to attain their attention their level of attainment has been shown to be higher and in terms of presence just to break it down on a very kind of simple level it's it's just about being these things that's on the screen positive friendly knowledgeable empathetic and consistent so if you can um [Music] as a teacher give that sense of of somebody who is you know positive friendly open uh approachable then it's it's breaking down that that transactional distance that distance between yourself and and the people who are out there who are your students so i'm just going to get you to go again to um an answer garden and it's a different um code at the end uh but again you have a qr code if you want to to access it that way and just if you can fire up a few thoughts yourselves about how you can go about developing presence um in the online environment so you're you're now um working online all the time well i presume mostly or maybe limited uh campus-based engagement but what type of practical things can you do and i decided to start they're not always earth chartering things they're just little nudge things but they're things that um can help facilitate this environment it's it's it's creating the supportive environment for people to learn so if you just um have a go there and just throw in some ideas for me i'll open up the uh the other one my toolbar the toolbar is blocking me here i'll just uh try and move it down and i will refresh and see if something come up here great okay so we've got the big one there is camera on and and that is uh that that is a big one in uh in in the original content as i said this was very much an asynchronous environment so we didn't have this opportunity so this is this provides a huge um advance in in what was available to to us in the future in the past was is this idea of people at least been able to see you and while it's not perfect and you do get a better sense of somebody so as a teacher although you mightn't you know you you might be mad about the idea it is really helpful for you to have your camera on and and if you really hate it at least to have your camera on at the start and to say hello to people and welcome them uh and and give them the odd smile to make them feel given a sense of who you are um using quizzes um students using uh i think this is time for me to put on my uh my glasses actually breakout groups a very good one yeah breakout groups are great because um they allow students to meet each other in smaller groups a lot of these tools while we're very familiar with um you know teams and zooms and other things they're hard they can be hard work and and people still feel quite self-conscious and don't particularly like to be um having to um to talk to big groups of people uh particularly if they're unsure of what it is they're talking about if they're being retentive so breakout rooms are a really nice way to break that down to get students working in groups of two or three on specific tasks and then they can at the end of the breakout group they can they can report back to the wider group and that really helps students using webcams again in in breakout groups i think that's really helpful uh in large groups um it's it can be a bit distracting after a while i think it's it's definitely nice to to um to use them at the start of a session or at um at various points you know where you have smaller groups but if it's very big it can be it can be a little bit distracting um online chat forums can be great and again you often hear people say okay i've i have a forum there but nobody ever uses it and so it it perceived that online chat forms are something that people don't want to engage with but again it's largely to do with your your level of engagement as an instructor so if you can create um uh the the kind of the feeling around the chat group that uh people are are you know they're welcome to post that they have specific questions that you'd like them to answer that it doesn't have to be hugely formal and it doesn't have to be perfect so it's a and that you yourself will respond to it it's about um really responding to those students who are brave enough to take the initial steps in posting and getting back to them being very positive and and true things like that you can build uh chat discussions into your weekly activities and they can be very very successful but it is it takes a little bit of work at the start in building up that kind of trust and that um that recognition by the students that these these chats these discussions are important they're important part of what we're doing and and you need to engage with them so a lot of this work um is work that really needs to be front loaded at the start so when you're you first have the students you're you're creating the right expectations you're helping to break down the barriers helping people to feel confident and trying to get a sense yourself of who they are because uh you know it's not just the students it's very difficult for the lecturers and and this these type of uh activities they're they're time consuming as well it takes time um so it's about uh trying to to kind of feel your way around that uh but but trying to be as positive and as as as open to to to your students uh as possible and so student work collaborative wiki breakout groups underground so there's loads of good ideas there so things like um a lot of those are would be kind of icebreaker activities and they can be very helpful people sometimes roll their eyes at icebreaker activities because you can get um they can be quite uh they seem quite forced but i think any type of activity that it can be very related to the the particular subject area or domain and just an easy question is is is often a good icebreaker so it doesn't have to be just you know to talk to your neighbor and find out everything about uh them and report back to the group are things that might make people a bit uncomfortable it's just something that you know that people will definitely be able to answer uh and will have something to say about in in your your um your particular area uh is it can be a good icebreaker so so there's lots of things there about um using video on boarding onboarding is really really important so having some kind of orientation process at the start when your students first join that um introduces them to you to your class to where they can get any kind of help they need with technical issues and the ability to find um little you know help videos and how-to videos and and all those things making all those things easily accessible and available and basically breaking down the barriers so that when you join a class an online class that you feel that this is something that you can participate that it's not that there's not a a lot of barriers putting in your in your way so thanks very much for i'll just refresh it again just in case there's anything else that uh you put okay there's tons of stuff so and so music at the rimfield that's a really nice idea so like there's there's great ideas here from you guys and i assume that a lot of these are things that you're doing already and musical interlude music is a room but that can be a really nice thing to do and and if if you're interested in music it's it's it's it's injecting a bit of your own personality and somebody has your authentic self that's really really important uh presumably with no cut filters absolutely so it is that idea of projecting your authentic self is spot on it's um trying to as much as we can and it can be difficult in the online environment even using things like humor because i i'm and particularly if you've got students from maybe different a lot of different countries it can be difficult to translate but as much as possible trying to convey a sense of who you are and to give the the students an opportunity for them to do the same to to to convey themselves as real people so great ideas there um i've done i've just put put those kind of things into a table there and it's exactly the type of things that you're talking about but i've divided them then into kind of what you would categorize the social presence what is more um teaching presence and then that cognitive presence of cognitive presence from this presence the strategies are the same whether you're working online or offline it's about kind of posing those thought provoking questions identifying and clarifying misconceptions and a big one is encouraging students to make their thinking explicit so always kind of prompting probing trying to um develop knowledge further and understanding and and and helping people make connections uh encouraging different perspectives on things so all those things um are things that you would be doing regardless of of the environment but i suppose maybe we just need to be more a lot of it is more tech space perhaps in the online environment uh or we need to be more um focused in things like um say resume sessions or blackboard sessions or we may be it may be more um tempting to just kind of have maybe a one-way uh stream of uh um communication from us rather than trying to really tease out um the the the the kind of the learning process for the students and so one other area that i think that that and it gets back to that asynchronous um mode as well is in how we even present ourselves on our on the vle and this is the last thing i say i've been unconscious that i've been kind of wrapping on for a long time and how we present ourselves on our vle so i've just taken a screenshot here of a um i say a week's activity for a course and you can see i've listed the things that i i want people to do they just click into it and and and they can work through it and it's grand it's all there it captures everything so there's there's contents there's um a bit of uh h5p so it's you know some kind of interactive thing there's um something that we want students to do to write the difference between online and facebook and then there's a discussion and then we have all the readings all gathered together so rather gather it together so we have a nice kind of um you know kind of checklist of things to be done but there's no sense looking at that page of of who the teacher is who the class is what's the wider context it's just this is a series of tasks and things to be done so i contrasted with this um a different approach here which i'm going to actually try and share the real life page and again okay so this is um another a web page and it was developed for um digitally engaged learning is something that we did over the the summer uh to help prepare lectures for our um gone back to uh for starting the new term in a kind of an online in a totally online way or not tell people largely online one so we have here this is a session delivered by a weekly session delivered by uh this particular um colleague of mine and it was just to take a look at the structure of what's done here at the start there's a kind of a welcome with a little um uh you know very short thing about this is what we're going to be looking at here is actually just the learning outcome so this is what we're going to do we're going to talk about engagement and then there's a lovely little video here and i just play a few seconds hi everybody my name is jenny and i'm an educationist based at hpec the health professions education center and for this week what i want to do is work with you on tools forums and quizzes so basically the online activities that we can use in our virtual learning environment to support learning okay so the reason i played that video is just to give you um a sense of the tone of it it's very friendly it's very conversational it's short and it's just it's you get the sense that you're being spoken to directly so it it kind of helps to to to bridge that distance which is what we're trying to do all the time when we're we're working in the online environment we're trying to bridge that distance between um for us where we are and our learners were there um and then using just simple things like using um headings here to to kind of direct the students to this is where you start here's a thing there's a little line about what it is it's not just uh reading it tells you the name of it you know what it gives you sense what might be in it and and then discussion and this is a discussion question and included a picture of a dog there was no need for the dog but it just again gives that sense of who the person is this is their dog um a sense of a real person and this was supported then by live workshops that were associated with this content as well so there was a life and opportunity to get a um a live kind of training workshop and then a follow-up workshop where people could come on a drop-in basis if they wanted to follow up so following the workshop they tried something and now they'd like to come back and just tell us how it went or or what um any any challenges they might have encountered so it's that kind of feeling of uh providing support and being supportive and then just follow activities and resources so that's just um just trying again that's totally asynchronous we're not meeting the person um they're they're the like the synchronous events were built into the picture but but it gives that sense of how it is that we can even though we are um mixing asynchronous and asynchronous how we can convey who we are through through the asynchronous as well as through the synchronous um so i think that's me i've been uh talking a lot for a long time uh which is not very good practice so i if there are any questions now girl i can't see them but you can maybe throw them sure yeah absolutely um just was just in case we run out of time in general i'd like to thank you so much for such a wide ranging and talk talk excuse me provoking uh presentation it was great that so many colleagues uh were able to make it we're up to 55 there at one stage i think um i think in the end what we got was really nice balance you know of the theoretical and and the the practical nothing so uh practical as good theory they say and that definitely seems to be the case here and great that you were able to link up those different kinds of you know notions of online presence uh with some practical direction and ideas and great in general that you could join it up with that experience that kind of online remote moment that we're all having at the moment you