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TEL Sonya Posts

Online Learning and Teaching for Neurodiverse Students

Published 10th June 2021

My Brain has too Many Tabs Open
If I could only Command+Q my brain sometimes. Photo by That’s Her Business on Unsplash

‘Exploring the Experience of Online Learning and Teaching for Neurodiverse Students’ was an excellent session hosted by ALT East England shining a light on some of the issues with online learning and teaching which particularly affect neurodiverse students. I’m going to do this backwards and talk about the second part of the session first, because it was the first part which was more impactful for me, and that’s what I want to focus on.

The second part was a talk by members of Anglia Ruskin University’s Disability and Dyslexia Service, who discussed the challenges of supporting hardware and software platforms they weren’t necessarily familiar with, and the benefits of online working which offered opportunities for engaging with students at times which better suited them, freed from on-campus, 9-5 hours, and for rapport building by sharing intimacies of home environments. I have personally loved pet-bombing during meetings and nosing at people’s book shelves, though I want to insert a note of caution here that many students are living and studying in far from ideal environments; having a suitable home working / studying environment is a privilege that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Returning now to the first part of the session, this was a student-led discussion on some of the issues they have faced with online learning, and their thoughts on what we can do as developers and teachers to make things better for all students.

So for example, some students with anxiety or ADHD reported that they had found the structural changes difficult and, in the case of the many changes we’ve had to lockdown restrictions, frustrating. One student commented that all of their activities – studying, eating, leisure – were all now being done in the same small environment, shared with another student, and that was causing a lot of stress. Another student found online lectures harder as they felt more conspicuous asking questions, though on the flip side they also noted that lectures tended to have more availability at other times.

There was an interesting discussion on the use of cameras during online lectures, whether students should have them on or off. This is something I’ve struggled with when teaching, as there is no feedback for me to gauge students’ engagement and comprehension. One student on the panel commented that they have been in online lectures with up to 500 students, and cameras being on was very distracting for them. Another student commented that they preferred cameras on to get some social interaction with their peers, while another who was hard of hearing said that they benefitted from cameras being on for lip-reading.

On assessment, there was general appreciation for the ‘no detriment’ policy they had last academic year when the pandemic began, but this has been removed in the current academic year in favour of universal extensions granted upon request, which one student said was far worse because it extended the time available for them in which to be anxious about their assessments. There was no love for online proctoring software, with some students saying they had difficulty with suitable space for these, and even having to buy their own webcams.

I got a lot out of listening to students like this, but I found myself wondering about how to draw conclusions. On webcams for example, on or off? That, I think, is a decision that needs to be made with each student cohort individually, and in consultation with them – and with their consent! Far easier with cohorts of 30 rather than 300 of course. One good suggestion from the student group was to build in social time to online teaching sessions, either at the beginning or end of sessions where cameras can be on so that students can see each other and say ‘hi’, and then turned off during the taught component to reduce distractions, unless specifically required.

There are institutional things that could change to help students. Proctoring software is a vile product category that is just needs to get the sea. The whole lot of them. In the Sea. There was maybe an argument to be made at the start of lockdown, but people have had over a year to redesign assessments now, so there’s no excuse. And policies around mitigating circumstances and reasonable adjustments need to be made actually reasonable, and not applied across the board as though they were written on stole tablets. There’s core values stuff here. Should we be looking for reasons to fail students, or doing everything possible to help them to pass? I know how I want to spend my time.

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OERxDomains21 (Almost) Live Blog

Published 21st April 2021

Rather than typing notes and taking screenshots throughout the conference and typing up something polished over the next few days (possibly weeks…), I’m going to try live blogging it! This is a very last minute thought I’ve had and it may be terrible. And / or deleted.

Welcome and Orientation

Love the conference programme being styled as a TV guide. Are there going to be people at this conference who don’t get this reference?

Opening Plenary: Joy and Care in Open Education in Times of Pandemic

What has brought me joy over the past year? I have better connections with my team. We have a morning catch-up call at 9:30 to plan the day ahead, and a more informal ‘banter’ meeting at 4 to have all of the office chat that we would be missing out on throughout the day. This culture is going to have to be something we work to keep when we return to campus.

Catherine Stihler taking an early lead in my ‘home office of the conference’ award.

“Technical issues have an emotional impact on people” – Nicholas

Discussing the pros / cons of synchronous and asynchronous teaching – Tutalenui made some great points about how the ability to work asynchronously is a privilege. That there are some people for whom home working / learning has thrust upon them unexpected caring responsibilities. I’m very conscious of this on our student body. With regards to previous comments I’ve made about my team, I recognise the privilege that most of us have in that we don’t have young children / caring responsibilities, which is part of the reason why it has worked well for us.

That there are academics who want to do live Zoom sessions for 3 hours is indeed a problem. It is “adapting” teaching for the pandemic in the worst possible way. My vote is strongly for asynchronous, but it does take time to adapt teaching materials for the new approach. My own sessions have – and I hope my students would agree with this! – considerably improved since the beginning of the pandemic.

Open Reading with Your Eyes Shut: Demystifying Foo-Foo the Snoo

In total and complete honestly, I have chosen this strand because that title haunts me. From Mark Brown at DCU, asking the question of how we keep current with research in our fields. Identifies a problem of ‘drowning in open resources and journals’. Publishes a top 10 list of articles as ranked by his team. Strong focus on open access journals, but commented about the problem of many articles still being behind closed-doors / paywalls. Some authors are responding by publishing their pre-published drafts in open journals. Cautioned wariness of sticking with known / favourite resources as this could result in missing good things.

Contemporary Art and Open Learning

Neil Mulholland discussing the problem of teaching contemporary arts during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic there were very few distance / online learning communities for artists – the field was over-reliant on the studio as a means of socialisation. Responded by creating a new OER collating relevant peer reviewed resources.

Update: Nope!

It is just about 12 noon and I’m calling it on the ‘live blog’ thing! Great idea Sonya, but too much work. Instead of concentrating on the content of the sessions, I’m worrying about formatting issues on this post. Will revert to my classic frantic scribbling of notes which I’ll turn into a couple of posts over the following few days.

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Nominal Group Technique for Student Feedback: Preview

Published 8th April 2021


And it only took three takes to be acceptable by my standards

On the 22nd of April I will be "presenting" a short presentation at the OERxDomains conference on adapting nominal group technique for online learning, which I had to do with a cohort of students on my Digital Learning module last year as a result of the pandemic.

"Presenting" in quotation marks because with the conference being online, it was actually pre-recorded this afternoon. The version posted here was the dry run I did myself in the morning to rehearse. I did not think Panopto would pick up the ‘present’ mode of PowerPoint, that’s very amusing, so you can see all my notes and the bits I edited out and changed on the fly. This is fine, because for the live recording, the Streamyard tool they used did exactly the same thing!

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Moodle Munch: Feb. 2021

Published 16th February 2021


The February Moodle Munch recording. How do they get these up so fast!?

This month’s Moodle Munch had sessions on Universal Design for Learning and use of Office 365 within Moodle.

First up, Suzanne Stone and Ann Marie Farrell from DCU discussed how they went about creating a toolkit for creating Moodle course sites that were built with UDL considerations in mind. They were joined by an academic colleague who shared their reflections on using the toolkit. They had gone from using Moodle as a file store designed to meet their needs as a teacher, to one which put students’ needs first. This included, for example, redesigning content that previously would have been a PowerPoint upload, to an online interactive learning activity using the ‘Book’ tool in Moodle. That ‘using Moodle as a file store’ comment is a very familiar problem!

As an aside, and I’m not quite sure where this came from, someone posted a link in the chat to LibreTexts, an online resource for open source textbooks. It’s very American, but that’s understandable when the US has a huge problem with massively expensive textbooks students are expected to purchase on top of their already huge university fees. I’ve had a wee quick nose through their philosophy section and it seems pretty good. Bookmarked and shared.

Back on topic, the second session today was from Edel Gavan of MSLETB who talked about their Office 365 Moodle integration. Their Teams integration looks better than ours, as it can create a Team for each Moodle course which means that students get Teams meetings added to their Outlook calendars automatically, and they can easily create recurring appointments for, for example, weekly classes. To be fair, I think our systems could do that, but there are features we don’t have enabled by our IT. Edel also showed a ‘Block’ of Microsoft tools in Moodle which has been made available via a plugin to add those. One technical point of note regarding those was that each Microsoft service needs to be configured separately.

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Teaching, Learning and Assessment in a Digital World

Published 3rd February 2021

100 years of learning theories showing the learner as the active agent
The learner must be the active agent in the learning process

This was Bob Harrison’s inaugural lecture as a Visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton. Bob has been in education for over 50 years, and I have known his name in Ed Tech circles for a long time.

His talk was on the dangers of over-emphasising the power of technology as a solution to the problem of online and distance education, and the need to continually relearn the lessons that successful learning, no matter whatever physical distances may be involved, needs to be driven by the learner as the active agent in the learning process, supported by well-designed content delivered by caring and competent teachers. And if I’ve mangled Bob’s thesis in this summary, you can read it more eloquently in his own words in this article, Why there is nothing remote about online learning, published last year. And for an example of how you can’t magically improve online learning just by throwing money and technology at the issue, Wired’s article on the ‘LA iPad debacle’ is a good read.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bob’s lecture, and his dismantling of technological solutionism, neoliberalism in education, and his barely checked scorn for the Department for Education and their fixation on remote teaching.

The screenshot which I grabbed to illustrate this post shows a continuation of the theme of learners as the active agents of learning in the most influential learning theories spanning the past century.

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CELT Team Away Day and Insights

Published 2nd February 2021

Insights into CELT
Insights Into CELT: Shocker, we’re all introverts

Has there ever been such a phrase as to warm and inspire the hearts of man* as ‘virtual team away day’? Thanks Covid, the gift that keeps on giving.

In the morning we planned our plans for world domination, which all went according to plan. After lunch we had a presentation on Insights Discovery which we had all been asked to complete the week before. Last time around it was a Belbin exercise, because the boss didn’t like Insights, but we have a new boss now who doesn’t like Belbin, and who swears by Insights. So we did Insights. I find them all much of a muchness, and don’t put a lot of stock into them. But then I’m a reflective person with a strong internal locus of identity, so I feel like I know myself very well, and there was nothing in my Insights profile that was shocking, or indeed which had changed much since the last time I did one. Other people in the team did get a lot from it though, they found it interesting at least. I guess it was nice to see all the team profiles together, and though I’ve said ‘we’re all introverts’, we do have a new member of the team who came out all fiery red.

* And women. And enbies. I see you, in all your valid glory.

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Digital Equality Awareness and Impact on Practice

Published 19th January 2021

Seven Elements of Digital Literacy
The seven elements of digital literacies, according to Jisc

Maybe it’s the humanities background biasing me here, but all the best training I attend always seems to be deeply interdisciplinary by nature. Sure, the core of this session was about digital equality and things like the different between digital literacy and digital competence, but it really grabbed me when we got into discussion on the nature of poverty, and why and how gender and racial biases get baked into artificial intelligence algorithms.

The ‘Seven Elements of Digital Literacy’ diagram above is taken from Jisc’s Developing Digital Literacies guide, and breaks down digital literacy into media literacy, communications and collaboration, career and identity management, ICT literacy, learning skills, digital scholarship, and information literacy.

Another great resource from this session I am absolutely going to steal for my own work (by which of course I mean appropriate cite), is the Good Things Foundation, Digital Nation UK 2020 infographic which provides research findings in a striking visual format full of data points showing the digital divide.

Finally, some relevant recommended reading. From the session itself, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which I read last year and highly recommend, even if trans and non-binary people are seemingly non-existence, never mind just invisible. And one I threw into the conversation, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.

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Moodle Munch: Jan. 2021

Published 12th January 2021


The January Moodle Munch recording

Welcome to 2021, folks! Let’s hope it’s going to be a better year for all.

Today marked the return of Moodle Munch, with two presentations as always. Mark Glynn from Dublin City University began by discussing some tools and techniques they are using to add some gamification to online modules to improve student engagement. First, the use of formative and summative quizzes, but not just quizzes, the pedagogy around their use, emphasising the opt-in nature of the summative component and giving students the ‘freedom to fail’. Mark presented some interesting research showing both strong positive student feedback and improved pass marks on the formative assessment component with the group of students who had engaged with the summative quizzes. As it should be, but it’s nice to see such strong evidence! Mark then showed us the Level Up Plus plugin for Moodle which can be used to add gamification elements to module spaces, such as progress bars and leaderboards.

The second presentation was from Nic Earle at the University of Gloucestershire who demonstrated the custom electronic marking and assessment system they have developed for managing student assessments, and how it integrates with their Moodle and student records system. They switched over to this system in 2017 wholesale, and again Nic was able to show very positive results demonstrating increased use of the VLE (even before the pandemic), and improved NSS scores.

As always, the presentations were recorded and I have embedded the YouTube above this post.

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Gender Based Violence: Tackling GBV in Strategy

Published 2nd December 2020

A Helping Hand
Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes. Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

I didn’t realise it at the time of booking, but the Gender Based Violence webinar I joined in October was the first of three. I was able to dip into the second session, but only very briefly as it clashed with teaching commitments. This final session focused on how FE and HE institutions can address GBV strategically, with special consideration on what we can do as staff and students are starting to return to campus following the Covid pandemic.

There were good discussions about the different impact on HE and FE institutions, as FE students don’t tend to attend campus as much or live in halls, and therefore don’t have access to the same level of social and institutional support as HE students; that universities and colleges need to realise and fully embrace the fact that they are not bubbles outside of society, but part of society, and that GBV is something that affects our students and staff, on and off campus; and in making the link between GBV and gender inequality, and how so often we place the burden of emotional labour to address problems on the people who are most affected by them and have the least to give. For evidence, one needs look no further than the makeup of the panel of these sessions and of most Athena Swan boards.

With regards to Covid and lockdown, instances of domestic abuse and gender based violence have increased as people are, or can feel trapped in unsafe domestic situations. Making resources and support available online is well and good of course, but the panel noted that these may not be accessible to people under coercive control, who’s internet access and phone use may be monitored covertly or even overtly.

Whew. Writing this, reflecting on this… it’s depressing and I fell powerless. There are some of those online resources here from the University of Strathclyde: GBV Cards, and a suggestion from the panel was to print out a version of this, the ‘Support for You’ page works, and give to staff and put around campus. There is also the complete Equally Safe in HE Toolkit available here: Equally Safe. The focus is on Scottish resources, as this is a project funded by the Scottish Funding Council.

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