PDLT Webinars


PDLT Webinars

Signing Up For and Joining Our Webinars

  1. Sign up for the webinar by completing our Sign Up Google Form
  2. Joining instructions for our webinars are emailed out the morning before the session to everyone that’s signed up
  3. For guidance on joining the session please refer to our one page guide: Collaborate Guidance for Attendees.

Upcoming webinars:

Date and time

Theme
Various – See date/time details in column to right.

Numerous topics relating to moving content online during COVID-19 are being repeated throughout Summer 2020.

Current Overarching Theme: “Preparing your module for 2020-21“.

 Details of all our upcoming webinars are available to view and sign up for via our sign up form for summer webinars. Running between 1 to 2 hour in duration, this series of webinars provides practical and pedagogical support for you as you move to online delivery. If you cannot attend these sessions, they are also being recorded – See our Webinar Archive page for details. Our new “Preparing for Dual Delivery (2020-21)” self-study VLE site is also now available to all staff.

 

Tuesday 30th June 2- 3pm: Planning your module

In the first planning webinar, we looked at some of the overarching principles for blended learning online, including the need for a clear structure and ‘flow’, the need to focus on communication and engagement/community building and the need to consider equity and accessibility.This webinar focuses in more detail on designing your module for active learning and suggests models for online learning to support your designs. We will offer a design approach and planning tool, supported by examples and a checklist to help you to reconceptualise your module design and identify the tasks, interactions, resources and tools that will be applied.

 

Wednesday 1st July 10-11am: From passive to active learning design: Delivering content

Following on from the focus on planning and design, this webinar is the first of two which focus on ‘delivery’ of content within your module. By providing resources that can be accessed flexibly by your students and which can be integrated within a series of tasks, the emphasis shifts toward active learning. This webinar focuses on a possible model for the use of recorded ‘mini-lectures’ interspaced with facilitated student activities.

 

Thursday 2nd July 2-3pm: Creating content, using existing content, student-created content

This webinar continues the theme of active learning by considering the opportunities available to integrate ‘content’ within learning activities. It provides a brief overview of the range of different approaches available for creating engaging content which can be embedded within your VLE site to support facilitated student activities. It includes options for supplementing the recording of ‘mini-lectures’ and includes a focus on activities encouraging students to create and share their own content. There are many options available and this webinar aims to provide a brief introduction with links to further resources. This aims to support you in selecting one or two suitable options that might give you the most benefit through your module.

 

Friday 3rd July 10-11am: VLE Site design: A clear roadmap for your module

Your VLE site is likely to take a core role in your module design as the main point of reference through the module activities. This webinar will provide a practical focus on designing your VLE site to provide a clear structure and to make it easy for your students to navigate through your module. We will explore options for organising the menu structure, organising content via folders or ‘learning modules’, and using adaptive release to support students’ ‘journey’ through your module.

 

Monday 6th July 2-3pm: Hands-on Panopto

If you have been inspired by the options for using video recordings for ‘mini-lectures’ and to provide stimulus for student activity, this webinar will provide you with the practical guidance you need to create, edit and deploy your own accessible recordings in your VLE site.

 

Thursday 9th July 11.30pm – 12.30pm: PDLT Show and Tell: A showcase of approaches to transferring f2f to online.

A chance to learn from other academic colleagues how they have approached transferring face to face sessions online. Each session aims to showcase the work of colleagues from a range of Departments and disciplines with insight and reflection on the process of development/delivery and how this is informing plans for 2020-21.

 

Friday 10th July 10am-12pm: Creating accessible documents

An online workshop demonstrating how ‘universal design’ can help everyone, not just those with an accessibility need. Practise creating accessible documents using your own documents or using sample documents. A Blackboard Collaborate webinar link will be sent to those who sign up on the HR LMS (https://bit.ly/eaccess-training) or sign up for those who cannot access the HR LMS (https://bit.ly/eaccess-training2).

 

Friday 10th July 2-3pm: Making collaborative online activities work

As part of active learning design, regular opportunities for students to engage with group tasks are important in promoting engagement, dialogue and feedback. In this session we’ll explore the design and delivery of asynchronous online collaborative activities utilising tools such as discussion boards and Padlets. We’ll look at the types of activities that can be used and key areas of design such as the nature of tasks and their instructions. We’ll then explore dimensions of delivery, such as how to facilitate student engagement with your activities (and each other) and how to guide their learning.

 

Monday 13th July 10-11am: Identity Practices: student interaction, community, and engagement

Regular interaction among students has been shown to have positive effects on engagement, attainment, and satisfaction: student-to-student interaction is a key part of any university experience, and student engagement in learning, online or face-to-face, is particularly influenced by a sense of ‘belonging’, to a programme, to a department, to a college, to a community of other learners. But what do we want that interaction, that sense of belonging, to look like and in what ways can we develop, maintain and manage it within our teaching? Group dynamics are often challenging whether conducted face-to-face or online; online interaction has potential benefits in terms of providing a more inclusive space for voices which might be lost in person (for all sorts of reasons) but also poses additional questions around public/private divides, online identities, boundaries and behaviours, and the teaching of sensitive topics. In this webinar, we will consider a variety of issues involved in building interaction and student community and in helping students positively voice their identity within that community.

 

Tuesday 14th July 10-11am: Synchronous online activities

This webinar focuses on the potential benefits of incorporating synchronous sessions within your active learning designs to support student learning and community building. We will cover: Active learning within synchronous sessions and using synchronous sessions in combination with asynchronous activities, e.g. to draw a ‘block’ of activity to a close and introduce the next block/provide a trigger for the next asynchronous activity.This brings potential to add dynamism and personalisation for those unable to physically attend face-to-face sessions (ensuring all key points captured and shared with anyone unable to attend an online session).

 

Tuesday 14th July 2-3pm: Teaching in a socially distanced environment

There are many unknowns going into the 2020/21 academic year; while we do not know to what extent guidance regarding physical (social) distancing in face-to-face teaching will remain in place, it nevertheless seems likely that we will be teaching, and that students will be learning, under some constraint of this nature. Social distancing has forced all higher education institutions to plan for delivering teaching differently for this upcoming year, and not only in regards to estate infrastructure and space capacity, but in terms of restrictions on how those spaces can be used. In this webinar, we will consider ways in which teaching activities may be adapted so that they can be delivered effectively within a socially distanced environment, while surfacing issues and ideas towards good practice. It is also the case that a key principle of the University of York’s guidance on teaching delivery in the 2020-21 academic year is that small-group teaching should be designed to support both physical face-to-face gatherings of groups on campus and gatherings of remote groups online. We therefore need to think additionally carefully about how we calibrate and manage our delivery in order to support student learning across these environments.

 

Wednesday 15th July 10-11am: Setting up and using asynchronous communication tools

If you plan to incorporate asynchronous collaborative tasks as part of your module design, this webinar will provide the practical support to set up and work with asynchronous tools. We will focus on the discussion board tool and Padlet as options for structured task-focused discussion and consider set up options to make it easy to create and facilitate time-bound, focused discussions. We will also focus on the blog and journal tools as options for sharing work in progress or reflections for comment and feedback.

 

Thursday 16th July 2-3pm: Setting up groups in your VLE module

If you have large cohorts for modules and need a way to manage the seminar groups through the VLE, you can set up Groups in the VLE using just two spreadsheets to automate the process. These Groups can have access to their own Collaborate room, Discussion Board, Blogs, Journals, Wikis and so on. This approach can help to manage synchronous seminars and asynchronous seminar activity. This session will also offer some further ideas and templates for structuring online seminars.

 

Friday 17th July 10-11am: Setting up and using synchronous communication tools (collaborate)

This webinar focuses on the use of Blackboard Collaborate. We will consider how to set up a collaborate session and how to make the most of the different options for interactivity. This aims to introduce you to the key concepts for running synchronous activities in such a way that learners remain active AND you have time to ‘breathe’ between activities.

 

Monday 20th July 10-11am: Breakout rooms in Collaborate

If you are likely to use breakout rooms in Collaborate, this session introduces you to the experience and talks you through what you need to do to run breakout sessions. Spaces are limited to allow you time to practise, depending on sign ups, we may need to run further sessions at a different time.

 

Tuesday 21st July 10-11am: Assessment and feedback

Assessment and feedback are often perceived to be drivers for student learning. This webinar will focus upon key principles and good practices in assessment and feedback in higher education, and the ways in which the current context we face have required us to think differently about some of these practices (while maintaining the principles). As with other elements of our curricula, we have faced challenges in assessment, whether in terms of thinking about open exams and others formats which may be different from departmental or disciplinary norms, questions around authenticity of assessment practice, maintaining academic integrity, or (perhaps more prosaically but no less importantly) issues in marking load and volume. But there are opportunities here too, in terms of designing assessment and feedback that is manageable for students and staff, authentic and purposeful, and which sustains students’ engagement in the material: getting assessment right is key to ensuring student learning is as effective as it can be.

 

Wednesday 22nd July 2-3pm: Online feedback approaches

An active online learning approach involves regular participation within tasks and regular opportunities for interaction and the creation of task outputs. Feedback on the outcomes of these tasks is central to the approach and may be particularly important in driving asynchronous activities online. This webinar will focus on online feedback tools and techniques. We will focus on the need to design for efficiency of feedback and to maximise the benefits in supporting students towards assessment. This will include a focus on opportunities to connect feedback to assessment criteria and to support students’ ability to take action as a result of feedback.

 

Thursday 23rd July 10-11am: Evaluating online learning

This webinar focuses on evaluation strategies for online learning and includes guidance on how you can use the learning analytics available within the VLE and related tools to monitor learner activity and to support students who may not be making ‘visible’ contributions online. We will focus on evaluation at the end of a module to inform future design and also ‘formative’ evaluation to guide approaches as the module progresses.

 

Friday 24th July 2-3pm: Looking after yourself and others

Staff and students have had to make enormous changes to the way they work in a very short period of time. Simultaneously we are all being challenged on many fronts, from caring for children and vulnerable relatives to concerns around job security. While some (staff and students) may have adjusted to these changes relatively easily, others will have found it much more challenging. Things may not always go to plan, technology may fail us, and some days we may feel overwhelmed with competing demands. In this session, we will think about mental health and wellbeing ‘in the round’, in terms of both student support and guidance and in how we look after ourselves and those around us.

How can I see your past webinars?

  • Our webinars are usually recorded, with the recordings shared within 48hrs on our Webinar Archive page.
  • Older recordings (2016 and earlier) can be accessed on our YouTube channel.