Technology Enhanced Learning

The day starts with calm but it’s not long before our youngest starts screaming. The noise finally subsides as the children are ushered in front of the iPad for 30 minutes of Cosmic Yoga, buying time for the morning meeting. As people are joining the Zoom call, I print off reams of colouring-in mixed with maths worksheets. Later, I take a few minutes to set up some paints then rush back to the computer to answer another email. Afternoon arrives and I wonder if the webinar attendees can hear the Mary Poppins Returns karaoke taking place downstairs. As the webinar continues, some curly blond hair sidles into the corner of the screen to pick up yet more colouring sheets and deliver a biscuit on the way. 

Like many other people, the last three months of lockdown have seen my wife and I juggling childcare with our respective jobs. We have two children aged 6 and 4 and both work a kind of ‘covid’ full-time, fitting in the hours where we can.

We’ve opted to split the days in half. In the morning, one of us will take the ‘office’, anywhere the kids aren’t, while the other will sit or work with the kids. We swap in the afternoon or for important meetings. While it’s not ideal, we’ve managed to get by with this approach.

I take some comfort knowing I’m not alone in this experience. I often see a colleague pause a meeting to talk to their child or see the slightly frazzled face of another colleague after an afternoon with their two year-old.

While lockdown is beginning to ease and I start to entertain the thought that things may eventually get back to some kind of normal, I recognise that this may remain the experience for many of our distance and some of our campus students. 

With this in mind, some of the things I’ve most appreciated during this time are:

• The importance of having a space away from distraction.
• The ability to turn my camera off and mute the mic from time to time.
• Captions on videos so I don’t have to have the sound on (a magnet for my children).
• Patience of others in meetings when there are unexpected interruptions.
• Asynchronous means of communication. For all its frustrations I’ve really appreciated chat through MS Teams.

These things will be much more present in my mind in the future.

If you have any questions about how you can make the best use of technologies for the autumn semester do contact tel@sussex.ac.uk and we’ll do our best to support you. 

Since March we have all been working at home. Having only recently got used to being all together in an open-plan office in the library we were suddenly spread across Sussex. So how are the Technology Enhanced Learning team working together while apart?

Focusing on the team

We believe it’s really important to work at maintaining and building our sense of community while we can’t see each other face-to-face. So we are using Zoom to hold a brief check-in every morning. Not too early, to allow for those with children to look after, we get together to check how we are all doing. Sometimes we talk about work briefly, but we have other team meetings for that. The daily check-in is mainly to say ‘how are you doing?’

At the end of the week we have a fun get-together and to give us a focus we have a weekly quiz. This is homemade and involves identifying team members from various photos that have been submitted. Topics so far have included baby photos, the view from a window, an unusual object, a book and a work of art. We never do very well with scores – I rarely get more than 2 right, which considering 1 of them is mine is pretty bad, but we always have a good laugh!

Team working in Teams

When it comes to the work, we are using Microsoft Teams. We were fortunate that we had been using Teams for some time before the move to remote working, so it is a comfortable online space for us.

Teams allows us to have separate ‘channels’ for different projects we are working on as well as a ‘Random’ channel for those water-cooler chats. With tools for chatting to individuals and small groups within the bigger team as well as sharing documents, making calls and holding video meetings, it has been invaluable.

If you want to know more about using Teams for staff at Sussex have a look at the ITS website http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/services/software/teams

Managing tasks with Trello

Another tool we have been using for a while is Trello. This allows us to create cards for specific tasks, assign them to individuals and keep track of progress. Here is the Trello board we use to manage the TEL blog, with a card for each post that moves across the board from ‘draft awaited’ to ‘published, tweeted and posted on LinkedIn’ via reviewing, editing and posting in WordPress stages. Each card shows who is assigned to it and due dates. There are also drafts and images attached to the cards.

What have we been working on?

Since March we have been very busy supporting staff in the move to teaching and assessing online. The most visible outputs are the Teaching Online, Learning Anywhere site in Canvas which contains a wide range of guides and videos on teaching and assessment online at Sussex (staff can self-enrol to see the resources) and the Maximise Your Learning Online site which has been created for students in collaboration with colleagues in the Library and Careers and Employability Centre. 

We have also been running lots of webinars on topics such as Keeping students engaged online, Panopto basics, Teaching online with Zoom, Canvas tips, tricks and shortcuts, Canvas Quizzes and Engaging students with video. There are more sessions to come and recordings of past sessions on the Teaching Online, Learning Anywhere site. 

And of course we are still here for staff queries and advice. We are asking staff to use our team email address tel@sussex.ac.uk so that we can make sure that even if individuals are unavailable there is always someone to respond.

With the sudden move to working from home we all had to quickly adapt to working in new spaces, both online and physical. We thought we would share how someone in Technology Enhanced Learning has set up their home working space. 

As I only have access to a laptop at home, when the move to working from home was first announced, the first thing I did was race out to buy a wireless mouse and keyboard. Working on a laptop is notoriously bad for your neck and upper back, so with a wireless keyboard I am able to place my screen at eye height (albeit precariously balanced on an old Amazon delivery box!) and have my keyboard lower down at a comfortable height.

I don’t have a dedicated office space so have had to set up camp at our dining table, meaning that I have to pack away everything at the end of each day. However, I do think this helps manage work/life balance when work and life are now temporarily in the same location. Our table is a bar table so it is quite high. I thought that this would be inconvenient and uncomfortable however I have realised that the table is actually the perfect height for a standing desk meaning I can quickly switch between standing and sitting throughout the day.

The only thing I’m longing for now is a comfortable office chair! 

Wherever the TEL team are sitting or standing, we are still here to support University of Sussex staff with the move to online teaching,learning and assessment. There are lots of resources available in the Teaching Online Learning Anywhere site in Canvas and you can email us at tel@sussex.ac.uk