Jisc list e-mail on online delivery for Library staff

Suzie Williams (Staff) <suzie.williams@SUNDERLAND.AC.UK>Thu 06/08/2020 17:42More actionsTo:

LIS-ARLG@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Hello,

Many thanks to everyone who has replied to my post about hints and tips for delivering live online workshops.

I’ve received lots of replies with great ideas in, all of which are included below:

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For anyone involved in delivering online teaching and student support, I created an online Sway presentation that outlines various options and the advantages and disadvantages of each. This was created for library staff at De Montfort University but we thought it might be helpful for librarians at other institutions who are also making this change.

Please feel free to use it yourself or share it with other colleagues but I ask that you include the attribution to myself [Anna Richards] and DMU Library Learning Services.

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I have run a couple of sessions online during last term. For sessions previously run as practical computer lab sessions, I split them into several parts:

Recorded lecture (appr 20-30 min – no longer) and PDF guides

Small group Q & A Zoom sessions

Brief formative assignment including reflection on what they had learned

Feedback to students via e-mail

My experience so far is that I have a far better understanding what students actually learned and I found students more engaged than during previous sessions. It’s more time consuming (for both sides). I’m thinking of switching the assignment and Zoom sessions around in the future, so I can demonstrate to students what works and what does not.

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During lockdown I’ve delivered live sessions through Teams, and supported this with an asynchronous package within the students’ VLE module including short video created using Panopto, signposting to key resources and links to help and support.

It’s what I’m hoping to do for a number of my dissertation/literature searching workshops, although the other way around, with the asynchronous material provided first and then a live session for questions/clarification/discussion.

Delivering live sessions that would normally be hands-on workshops where you’d go round the class and help students individually (which is what most of my teaching usually is). How are you planning to do such sessions online?

Lots of my dissertation teaching is like this. I’m planning on using Class Notebook from MS365. You have one OneNote notebook for the whole class, with a shared space and tabs for each student. I will ask each student to complete tasks within their tab, which I can then see and provide feedback on. It does require knowing the student numbers of students ahead of time to set up the notebook.

I use non-verbal communication quite a bit (looks of puzzlement; frowns; seeing the ‘lightbulb’ moments when a student goes ‘ah, I get it’!!) to help me assess students’ understanding of what is happening in the session, and adapt session content and delivery accordingly. I’m keen to learn more about how you can gain an equivalent to that in an online environment.

I’d love to hear innovative ways of doing this. So far I’ve relied on asking students if they understand and polls. I think short quizzes and tasks would also give feedback as long as you have time to go over material again if need be.

How to engage students in materials provided in the VLE.

The holy grail, how to ensure students engage with the material we provide! I’m hoping academic staff buy in plus a timetabled online session will help but I know from prior experience lots of students won’t engage with the material. Any suggestions on this most welcome! I’m going to think about how I market the sessions to try and show students that it is valuable for them to have completed the material before the online session.

How to make things as interactive as possible.

One thing I’ve found is that interactive online sessions take longer so you might need to negotiate extra time. Polls/quizzes for knowledge checks, group activities using Class Notebook and breakout rooms if your webinar software allows it, PollEverywhere or similar for submitting anonymous questions.

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We made the decision to make all of our Library teaching in Semester 1 online very early on and we are working on how we do that right now.

We are being driven by the following quote from Jesse Stommel and so we are working to deliver the majority of content in an asynchronous way.

“[At] this moment, we should start by designing for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones with the least access.”

“We have to build for asynchronous, design real points of entry for students who can’t be physically present at a particular time or in specific ways

I know that does not answer your question BUT as part of that async content then we are thinking about how we embed community and learner presence and engagement through different means. If that is providing live Q&A/Drop-ins following some activities online or providing online spaces through our open programme in what we are calling our Together series (which is a bit like SUAW but we are doing sessions for students to come together and read/search).

What we know is that we can provide the same content but we cannot do these things in the same way. So we are taking our lesson plans and looking at the content and reshaping it. We have thought about making editable digital documents to share and using padlet/discussion boards for engagement and narrating slides for more directive content. All of this exists in small chunks of content that we can build together for one course and then repurpose for another with different bridging activities and interactions.

It is hard work and it has challenged my brain slightly as I work on face to face basis primarily. I am so glad that you have asked the question as I think that we need to hear from others.

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I teach Information skills sessions and I have been doing training sessions since the beginning of lockdown in March. I have continued to do so and I am planning in continuing until the end of the year, at least.

For delivering sessions where I usually go to see each students, such as creating an account on Endnote web, I have found it more practical for students to deliver my session with a video that they can re-watch afterwards. Usually I had to go around and help to point at each students what to do but as it is impossible to do so, especially since everybody is accessing their resources via different type of devices, providing students with a resource they can watch at their leisure seemed to be more convenient. However, after doing a first video on Camtasia, I had to do another version, also using Camtasia, after learning a lot more on how best to deliver using a video.

Regarding the lack of physical interaction, I found that students were verbalising their understanding a lot more than I expected. However, I have also found sometimes students who seemed very puzzled and needed a one to one session to be able to clearly understand and where expressing so, either by asking questions, or by non-verbal cues on their faces. Being able to observe students via the webcam can sometimes be a lot more helpful to pick up if they have understood or not what I was explaining. However, not everybody is confident or happy to have a webcam on, so their might be a loss of information. I would recommend offering one to one session to allow people to come back to. I have found that people were more keen to come forward to ask for help which proved to be a good way of following up with students to ensure they can apply what they have learned.

I have not used the VLE very much so I won’t be able to answer your question on this subject.

Regarding interactivity, I have been using Zoom which allows to create breakout rooms for students to have conversations around a question. If I ask a question to a group of students, most of the time only a few people will answer and they will be the same during the whole session, but the use of breakout rooms allowed me to divide the room and have students interact with each other. Even if I don’t check on the group, I have found that people were more keen to participate afterwards, or it gave me an excuse to ask questions to specific people and get them to participate.

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I think this is really hard to do as a group online, would probably need to be done 1:1. I’ve been doing a lot of 1:1s online and as long as your platform allows the student to share their screen then this replicates it.

You can use a platform that allows videos, but not all do and can also cause technical issues. Can also be very distracting for neurodiverse students as a wall of moving faces can make it really hard to concentrate on the presenter speaking and can cause issues with sensory overload and information processing.
I constantly ask if people understand what I’ve just explained/ask if anyone wants me to go over things and also do a lot of quick polls to gauge understanding.

How to engage students in materials provided in the VLE.

Set specific deadlines and clearly explain what the benefit is of completing them/skills students will learn from completing them/links to specific assignments/how doing the thing will make their life easier etc. Link to your synchronous sessions if possible eg. I am setting a task or a video and then part of a live session will be Q&A to ask about the asynchronous content. Start a synchronous session asking if there are sections they want you to recap/go into more detail on/things they didn’t understand.

How to make things as interactive as possible.

Asynchronous – use videos followed up by a quiz. Tools such as Genially which are easy to use and make things interactive.
Synchronous – build in lots of opportunities where you ask questions and ask for input from the students. Think of easy ways to incorporate activities through inbuilt features of your platform or tools like kahoot, socrative, padlet, menti etc.

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–feel overwhelmed, but I think we all are!

I work for 3 universities in my role and have done quite a lot of online teaching with one of them, using Blackboard Collaborate. Other than one-to-one support, I have yet to teach using MS Teams, but will be doing so from August onwards. The other two unis use Teams.

In terms of hands-on workshops, I have had to rethink that from the ground up. Getting students to share their screens one at a time is technically possible, but would be fraught with potential tech issues and would take forever. What I have done is to do 2 short sessions with a gap in between. These could be on the same day (eg if you’re given a 2 hour slot, consider doing 2×30 min sessions, with an hour between), but I have had the luxury of being able to do them on consecutive weeks. In the first session, I introduce the principles and demo the resources. I then set an activity to complete, hosted on the VLE, and then begin the second session by going over the answers from the activity. I make sure students know there will be a “quiz”, but that none of their peers will know how well they do. After the “quiz”, can then discuss issues, reiterate principles, troubleshoot, ask students to share experiences etc.

In terms of engagement with stuff on the VLE, I really don’t know. Getting academic buy-in helps. Making sure there is some sort of “assessment” (could use Microsoft Forms quiz?) helps, but support from the module team is the main thing.

Main things I have learned:

Keep live sessions short.
Have someone with you if the group is large.
Interact as much as possible.
It’s tiring, so schedule breaks for yourself!

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Perhaps the following resource might be valuable in terms of the hands-on components you noted. It was a community-curated document that was initiated by Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner at Louisiana State University. https://www.clemson.edu/otei/documents/bended/appendix_d_active_learning_while_physically_distancing.pdf

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Not library specific but perhaps an example of different pedagogical techniques and strategies that could be used in any online session. Have you considered a fishbowl? This is a group activity usually delivered in a face to face setting. An inner group discusses a topic with a wider group in attendance. The wider group learn from the ensuing conversation. They can also raise questions to the group and, in some cases, become part of the inner group.

I ran one for our online Festival of Learning Conference with the learning support team …. It involved running a real-time group discussion about a topic of interest to the wider community. Participants in the live session can then interact by raising questions for the inner group. This is done in the chat box or by raising hands and being invited in. To organise this, I liaised with our learning support team to run an online fishbowl focusing on a module I teach online. The online fishbowl does take some organising beforehand. It involves sharing the core content and organising who and how we will work together. We role-played it online beforehand and it all went well.

In our case I designed the session to be about online group work in a module I teach. In a library context, it might be organised around a topic such as search strategies, use of databases, what is meant by a literature review, ‘the online library’ etc.? This approach has numerous possibilities beyond a face to face fishbowl. One of them is the opportunity for everyone to be anywhere including those in the inner group. Another advantage is the potential to archive the session.

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Here are a few things we have used or will use in terms of interactivity in live classes. We use Blackboard collaborate. I am not sure what is transferable to Canvas or Teams:

Kahoot quizzes (I think you can have up to 50 in a quiz if you use the educational license).
Posing a question and asking students to add to a “white board” (this allows it to be anonymous) or add to the chat. E.g. What criteria would you use to evaluate a source?
Using a drawing tool to draw on slides e.g. You could get students to match up terms and definitions, circle things, put things in order
Demo searching but ask students to suggest keywords, make suggestions on how to refine the search
If you set them something asynchronous, ask them to rate it using a poll – could help with finding out why they aren’t engaging?
Break out rooms- I haven’t used them. I know they didn’t go great for a colleague but it is an option

I have also started switching on students’ Microphones even in big groups so students can contribute that way

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My team and I have been working to re-develop all of our workshop plans for online delivery. We’ve had quite a few health cohorts over the summer that we’ve been able to road test them with. We have a “menu” of workshops that we offer academics for their programmes and we then tailor to make it more subject specific.

The librarian picks up to 50 mins worth of activities depending on the needs of the group. We try and keep demonstrations to a minimum and spend the majority of the session doing various short activities. Mentimeter and Padlet have been really valuable for making sessions as activity based as possible.

We use Mentimeter to do a diagnostic quiz to gauge where students are at. We also use it for various scenario based questions, creating word clouds and standard quizzes.

Blackboard Collaborate is our virtual classroom tool and students can quickly use the thumbs up/down, smiley face/frowny face to feedback. It also allows mini-polls in the chat box, so if for example I want to know which database to focus on I can give them three options and they vote.

There is a breakout groups facility on Blackboard that allows us to split the students randomly into small groups – we then give them something to discuss/work through and ask them to feedback either using the whiteboard function on Collaborate or via a Padlet/Google Doc. As a tutor we can then pick up on key ideas, discussion points when back in the main online room. If it’s a longer activity, we can move around the break out groups to speak to groups individually like we would in a real classroom. This is nice in theory, but in practice can feel a bit hurried.

We set pre-sessional activities (usually Xerte tutorials) that take approx. 10-20mins to complete. Engagement with these is challenging – we send announcements on the VLE in advance asking for them to be completed prior to the session. We also make sure to build on them during the workshop so those that have completed them feel like they’ve used their time valuably. The health professions are usually pretty good at completing pre-work, as their professional standards mean they have to evidence engagement. I suspect it may be more challenging with other subject areas in September when they haven’t got this same incentive.

I don’t think we’re doing anything radically different to anywhere else, so not sure if info is useful. We have been teaching using active blended methods for some time though due to our teaching/learning strategy and our new campus has meant agile working since 2018. This has been really helpful during Covid, as we had all necessary equipment for good home working.

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When using Zoom or Collaborate I have used the breakout rooms feature, this puts students into smaller groups. Then I have given them a task/discussion point and then moved from group to group to see how they are getting on. Not the same, as it isn’t individual but kind of addresses a similar issue

I have found that they are more likely to ask questions in the chat when they don’t understand, and I have had far more questions in the chat than I get in person, so I try to encourage that. If doing the workshop with a colleague we might take turns to present and look after the chat, which can make this easier

How to engage students in materials provided in the VLE.

Not sure if I am answering this properly, but where I work we have been creating lots of video content on things like plagiarism, referencing, assessing sources etc. So I will be sharing this content at the end of online content where it is relevant

How to make things as interactive as possible.

Open questions asking them to put answers in the chat
Putting links to resources in the chat, asking them to do a search for say an eBook on Summon – and to then put the url to the resource back into the chat, then I’ve gone through some of the resources that came back
Getting them to share their screen and do a search in front of the rest of the group

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I support [Health and Life Sciences] and we’ll be doing much of what you’ve mentioned is happening at Sunderland i.e. delivering via Collaborate Ultra (in our VLE) and MS teams while also providing asynchronous support within module sites on the student VLE including videos, interactive / narrated powerpoint and signposting to key resources and help. For some cohorts we will be including within these packages activities for students to carry out in advance of live Collaborate sessions (so they can informally self-asses their understanding and skills) and the live sessions will operate in more of tutorial / Q&A style. For some courses we will provide a Padlet for students to post questions and feedback as a means for them to interact with one another and for the librarians to collate common questions and issues and address these afterwards in the synchronous sessions. Where possible we will have two librarians available for synchronous sessions – one to deliver and one to manage questions and chat. With regards to the non-verbal communication we’ll also encourage the use of emojis to indicate how they feel as we move through the content (not the same but we’ll work with what we have) and encourage students to write on the whiteboard at certain points throughout the sessions. Hopefully that will provide some of the cues we need to adapt sessions according to understanding.

In terms of getting students to engage with content on the VLE we will be heavily dependent on academic staff to promote engagement and emphasise to students that synchronous sessions are going to be tutorial style to enhance understanding an address common issues and will not repeat or replace the VLE content, also that not completing the activities will impact on their experience during the synchronous sessions. We have made this quite clear in all of our liaison with staff who have requested library support so far and all are very accepting of this – I guess many of the academic staff will have their own similar issues and anxieties to address. To an extent I suppose we are hoping that as most learning across the university will take place online next trimester students will already have an understanding of what will be required of them to get the most of their studies and engaging with flipped content will become more embedded in their everyday learning habits. For the purposes of online learning resources that will provide the content we would usually deliver in person we’re working hard on identifying what we already have, creating new resources where there are gaps and ensuring that content is produced in bite-size pieces that can be put together in packages tailored to the needs of different levels and courses.

Like yourself we want to make all of this as interactive as possible and to guide this we are using an institutional curriculum design template that is also being used across departments for designing module content and has been adapted from UCL’s ABC Learning Design resources available at: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/abc-ld/home/online-abc/learning-types-acquisition/ (resources are CC BY-NC-SA) . [Here] we’re doing this via Padlet

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We use zoom for our online teaching.

Re. your questions:

I have quite a few exercises, where I put participants into break-pout-rooms. Zoom can put participants randomly in break-out-rooms which means the groups will be different next time which I quite like. We had very good feedback on that. The group can ask you for help and as a moderator you can go into the rooms and ask if everything is OK, which equates to the “look over the shoulder”

If I have students doing exercises themselves I have them indicating when they are finished with one of the nonverbal communication tools.

Generally my tools depend on the size of the group. If I have a small group I encourage participants to say something via microphone (e.g. I have an introduction round at the beginning)

Another tool I use is surveys e.g. to find out if people use a certain resource already.

I have also tried padlet and miroboard, which function as a white board which you can write on as a moderator and collect (miro) or all participants can use at the same time (padlet).

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We are not planning on doing much live teaching at all. Most of it will be asynchronous on Canvas with short videos, text to read, quizzes to do etc. I imagine that will be same as for our workshops as our lecture replacements. It’s just so time consuming in terms of doing live sessions for us as taking in cohort numbers and different time zones.

We are offering live Q and A if appropriate after they have done the structured learning materials and I have had some requests for some asynchronous talking heads videos about common questions you would normally get in a workshop.

Not sure if that makes sense? It’s still early days in our planning but for us …. the synchronous option is being used by the academics mainly to deliver the key elements of the course, whereas our material works well anyway as asynchronous.

However, we are aware of making sure we don’t lose the person touch and are looking at ways to do this. Introductory videos will be important, but beauty of canvas is that you can send video messages to cohort as well as text, so it’s making use of those features too!

We are also liaising with the individual academics, but we have quite a structured university wide flexible learning plan of how to translate content and timetabled synchronous teaching is limited either on face to face or even canvas so module leaders are using it for more of their essential content.

We haven’t fleshed out the Q and A’s yet, but again it will be down to the course and what academic wants and also numbers. Zoom and Teams has been what we’ve been using so far when we’ve done these things rather than Library Help. Idea is that they see us and can interact and ask questions as if we are in the room. Whether they do ask questions is another matter, which is why some academics want us to do talking heads around certain subjects.

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Finally, the Information Literacy Group are collating case studies of delivery of online information literacy teaching on their website https://infolit.org.uk/category/online-teaching-case-studies/ – if you have any examples of best practice they would love to receive additional contributions!

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Good luck everyone with all your teaching creations this summer!

Best wishes
SuzieReplyForward

From: Information literacy and information skills teaching discussion list <LIS-INFOLITERACY@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> on behalf of Suzie Williams (Staff) <suzie.williams@SUNDERLAND.AC.UK>
Sent: 07 July 2020 11:52
To: LIS-INFOLITERACY@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Teaching online – hints and tips for live workshops

Hello,

Like many of you, I’m exploring ways of delivering library skills workshops and teaching in an online format for next academic year.

Apologies for cross-posting, but I’m keen to spread the net wide for potential responses!

It is likely that my ‘live’ teaching will be delivered via Canvas Conferences (in our VLE) or Microsoft Teams. During lockdown I’ve delivered live sessions through Teams, and supported this with an asynchronous package within the students’ VLE module including short video created using Panopto, signposting to key resources and links to help and support.

I have taken part in a number of excellent webinars during lockdown (many thanks to those who have provided them!) and am using resources/advice available within my own institution. I’m hoping to use techniques/tools such as polls and discussion (where possible in smaller groups – and subject to how well students engage with this).

I’m particularly interested to hear what others are planning to do with regarding to:

Delivering live sessions that would normally be hands-on workshops where you’d go round the class and help students individually (which is what most of my teaching usually is). How are you planning to do such sessions online?
I use non-verbal communication quite a bit (looks of puzzlement; frowns; seeing the ‘lightbulb’ moments when a student goes ‘ah, I get it’!!) to help me assess students’ understanding of what is happening in the session, and adapt session content and delivery accordingly. I’m keen to learn more about how you can gain an equivalent to that in an online environment.
How to engage students in materials provided in the VLE.
How to make things as interactive as possible.

I am happy to summarise for the list.

Thanks in advance to any hints and tips, or ideas that are shared.

Best wishes
Suzie

Suzie Williams (nee Kitchin)

Academic Liaison Librarian (Arts, Design and Performing Arts)

University of Sunderland

BA (Hons), MSc, PGCert, MCLIP, FHEA
ORCID ID orcid.org/0000-0002-0175-8791

suzie.williams@sunderland.ac.uk

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