Global Education

Accelerate and Humanise Skills-Based Learning with Video Feedback and Assessment

A roundtable discussion featuring a global panel of instructional experts

A global panel of instructional experts discuss the role of video assessment and feedback in remote and face-to-face courses.

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Alistair Lawrence:

Hello, everyone. And welcome to Accelerating Humanized Skills based learning with video feedback and assessment, a webinar brought to you in partnership between Times Higher education and GoReact. My name’s [Alistair Lawrence 00:00:18] I’m the special project editor at GHE and I’m delighted today to be joined by an international panel of experts from higher education industry who are [Joel Bergstrom 00:00:25], university lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University, Josh Beutler Vice President Business Development at GoReact, Dara Murray, assistant professor in the Division of Nursing at the University of West Alabama Dot Powell, Director of Teaching and Learning Enhancement at Warwick Business School, and [inaudible 00:00:44] Senior Director Department of the Translation Studies at the University of Vienna.

Alistair Lawrence:

University’s mass migration online during the past year has both accelerated and introduced new ways of teaching and learning, among these is video feedback and assessment, a flexible tool that can be integrated into a wide variety of disciplines, several of which our panel will speak about today. Before we start the main discuss, I’d like to hand over to Josh [inaudible 00:01:08], who’s going to tell us how GoReact partners with universities around the world to help them increase and diversify their online teaching and learning provision. Josh?

Josh Beutler:

Thank you, Alastair. Thank you everybody for joining and thank you for being here. There are so many things happening in the world, whether it’s personal and professional, and all other is that we’re so glad to have you join this session, and we hope that you feel a lot of value, and see the value of what we’re doing and what these speakers will speak about. As Alistair mentioned, I run all of the partnership work, all of our scaled up integrations, and all the work that we do when it comes to using GoReact across so many different disciplines. And maybe to give you a little bit of background that should be just concise enough to provide a foundation for the conversation.

Josh Beutler:

We have been doing this for quite a while, and we’ve seen so much happen even in the last year or two that have accelerated what we do. But if we really value or we really understand what the here and now is. The times have changed in education expectations have changed for people to be able to engage, and to use the right tools and the right learning experiences to really drive home real skills based learning. And if you look back at anything that we’ve done in the past, you look back at GoReact’s history, we’ve been doing this since the inception of GoReact at 2000 in 2009. And today we are working across the globe, and particularly in over 650 colleges and universities, to make sure that anywhere students should demonstrate learning anywhere, they should actually be able to engage, and know that they can do what they’re actually learning in the real world, and that they should get great feedback in perfect context, to be able to actually improve as well, that’s where you focus, and that’s where we focus and GoReact when it comes to skills based learning.

Josh Beutler:

We realize also that learning has changed so quickly, so rapidly, and the ways that students and learners have to be able to engage their course materials and their courses can be any number of things. And so, if you think about GoReact as a category, as something that is a specific thick moment where students need to be able to, in this case, use video and capture anything they need to demonstrate, receive feedback or be assessed, that’s what we do, and that’s where our efforts are all around making that as simple as possible. All around making that something that the learner, and the instructor, and peer reviewing and all these other different parties need to be involved in a way that is seamless. It should be right inside the learning experience, and our hope is that the learner, or the instructor whoever’s using GoReact, they may not even know that it’s GoReact in their learning process; it’s just that simple.

Josh Beutler:

I’ll show you a visual here in just a minute; we’ve some resources, something that you can actually go and add additional, or learn additional information about GoReact if you haven’t seen what we do already. But there are a couple things that we should probably touch on. When we look at GoReact from a, what do we do and what we don’t do, that’s just as important as anything. We are not considering ourselves a platform, we’re not trying to be a learning management system or a enterprise video management system. It is very much this video based assessment, wherever students demonstrate that skill, and there’s this saying that I think about a lot in the way that we classify ourselves; there’s no more personalized learning experience than the learners seeing themselves on video, and getting great feedback in perfect context so that they can move forward and they can learn faster. We are all the time from instructors saying, “Wow, I’m just connecting at a different level with my students. I see them improving and applying some of the things that they should do, and learn faster because they’re getting that connection with me.” And there’s so many instructors and students out there who are at a distance who are online now, and there are moments where they say, “You know, I really wish I could just connect around my own skill, or see what something looks like and have it applied directly to me.”

Josh Beutler:

And so as you look at this, and as we shared this URL and this video and this web resource, this landing page, the hope is that as we discuss these use cases, if you think about the possibilities of using video for skills based assessment, we already work in all these universities across the world, but the disciplines are really endless. We have a strong focus in communication and public speaking, obviously nursing, nursing education healthcare, behavioral sciences, the notion that student teaching, or teaching in general, to be able to use video and capture real world practice and provide coaching and feedback, world languages, obviously sign language and interpreting very, very broad possibilities. And we’ve just expanded and continued to expand this possibility into more technical disciplines. IT, user experience design, any combination of video and feedback is where GoReact lives, and that’s where we hope to be able to do really great things over time, and impact the way learners learn, and teachers or instructors teach as well.

Josh Beutler:

So, that’s a very kind of broad statement. And I’m excited to hear from everybody else on the panel today, to be able to understand the specific ways that they’ve used and see GoReact as a core component of what they do in different disciplines for a quick peek at this URL. And this, this website, I will share my screen for a moment here, but this is available to you right now is at goreact.com/global. And here’s a quick peek at what you have in front of you. This is our resource page that you can go to get quick information, references, obviously connect and provide your information to get more contact with GoReact, particularly with our, our folks who lead the academic efforts overseas or across the world. So as you look here, again, 650 universities or academic institutions, very clear, concise visuals of what we do and how we do it. And so, these details are available for you right now. And again, what we really want to do is to be able to work with you, and understand what you need to do and show you how GoReact can align to any use case when it comes to skills or competency based learning.

Josh Beutler:

And there’s this notion as you see some of these things, even around assessment and learning faster, or using rubrics inside of a video, to be able to assess with that common language, or the standards that are necessary, the whole world is in this video moment. Everyone like we are right now has to be on video, and we may in the future continue in some measure of that requirement. There’s a real key point here; for years now, we’ve known that even an online or face to face, video has always been this great tool for learning the best way to provide learning, because it’s something that people can reference repeatedly. What GoReact is doing is also shifting and broadening that possibility into GoReact being the best way to use video. As evidence of learning the student, the learner should be able to say, “I know how to do this. I know what this means. I know what these skills or these core competencies and these key practices look like in my discipline, and now I have visit video evidence of it.”

Josh Beutler:

And the evidence is what means the most when it comes to anything from outcomes, skills based assessment that is more focused on a micro credential, or a badge or something that can be portable. And that’s where you see GoReact is something that is very powerful for the learner, rather than just have it be a passive watching or video experience. So, that’s my quick intro. I’m kind of scrolling through this, but these are your resources you can click on and get additional information. The web address again, is goreact.com/global. And we’d love to enjoy the conversation with you. Back to you, Alistair.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you very much, Josh. So I’d like to begin the discussion by talking about the, Josh touched on this, there’s a very many different ways that video is now being utilized by universities. And I think it’d be very interesting for the rest of the panel and also the audience to hear how each of you university representatives are using video in your jobs. Because I think one of the unique things about this panel that have today is that you work in a wide variety of disciplines. So perhaps dot can we, can we start with you and you can tell us a little about your role at work at business school and the key competencies and the applications for video that you are using there, please?

Dot Powell:

Yes, thanks. So I’m Dot Powell, I’m the Director of Teaching and Learning Enhancement at Warwick Business School. And our main interest in using GoReact is about developing presentation skills. So business students at all levels need to present, and we have large undergraduate cohort up to sort of 700 students per year, and equally large postgraduate and MBA cohorts. Each of those needing to develop their presentation skills, because we know from research that businesses need the soft skills, as well as the knowledge and understanding that we develop. So, I sort of latched on to GoReact probably three or four years ago before even thinking about things like the pandemic and the fact that what students need is to be able to see themselves present. And that gives such a great sort of teachable moment, because if you can provide feedback at the point that they say something, or make a gesture, or look at the floor, then that’s the moment that you can really catch them. And we found that with students to be a really effective thing.

Dot Powell:

So we generally use it with group work, with group presentations, some small individual presentations as well. And we use the facility for the tutor to make comments on the video, which appear time stamped on the recording of the presentation, so the students can go back and see the comments on exactly the place that the tutor whatever feature they wanted to comment on.

Alistair Lawrence:

How has it changed the collaboration between both staff, and students, and perhaps peer groups of students as well are using video tools?

Dot Powell:

What’s been really interesting has been the response from the students to the comments. So it’s a feature that we weren’t really pushing. We weren’t really making it particularly noticeable to the students that when they receive a comment from their tutor, they can then respond back to the tutor, they can react to what the tutor has said. And we did get students saying, “Yes, you are absolutely right. I did make that mistake. I did look at the floor. I won’t do that again.” And almost sort of setting up a dialogue with the tutor, which we found was really interesting. And also, as Josh was mentioning, sort of evidence of learning, evidence that you people have really cottoned onto something that they need to change.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you very much. Dara can I come to you next, please? Just tell me you come from a very different discipline; you work in nursing, and so, I imagine the application for video is slightly different in terms of the curriculum that you offer. Can you give us a little bit of an overview about that? And then perhaps also, if you could tell us how it’s changing collaboration in your field as well I think it’d be interesting to see that contrast.

Dara Murray:

Sure, absolutely. And of course we are different ,just because we’re nursing and we’re focused on, on healthcare and safety and student competencies is more so the primary way that we use GoReact in our program is through the evaluation of skills. There are certain psychomotor skills that nursing students are expected to be competent in performing before they go into a clinical setting and perform them on actual real life patients. So, that’s our primary use; we teach the skills and then the students use GoReact to go into our labor setting. And they record themselves. They watch their video. They use a student rubric in GoReact to evaluate theirselves. So they do a self evaluation before they submit, and that gives them an opportunity to grade themselves and identify mistakes that they’re making, and then they submit to us and we grade. We use it for physical assessment, and a few examples of the skills that we grade; physical assessment, IV catheter insertion, urinary catheter insertions.

Dara Murray:

That timestamp feedback, Dot mentioned the feedback, that’s been huge for us when you’re. When you’re evaluating a skill in person face to face. And we did it that way for a long time, you don’t interrupt the student when they make a mistake; you let them finish the skill, and then you try to go back, and you try to talk about it after the fact and give them feedback. But to be able to pause that video at the moment that the error occurred, and then be able to go back with that student, most of the time they see it themselves, they see that mistake, and they realize what they did, and they’re able to go back and fix it on their own. But if they still don’t understand that video gives me an opportunity as an instructor to pull it up, and go over it with the student and say, “See right here, that’s where you contaminated your sterile field, that’s where you made a mistake and let’s learn how to fix that.”

Dara Murray:

And then aside from critical skills, we’ve also used the product for assignments. Our pharmacology instructor is actually using it right now. She has created an assignment for her students in that course, they’re creating Pharmac drug commercials. They pick a pharmaceutical, and they are creating a commercial, and they’re posting it in GoReact, and they have to respond to at least two other classmates’ videos. And so that was a fun learning activity that she was able to use it for, to just kind of make sure that they’re learning those medications in a fun and sort of way. But those are just a couple of examples. I hope that’s what you were absolutely hoping to-

Alistair Lawrence:

Absolutely. Yeah, no, it’s really interesting to see the breadth of application that it has across what you’re doing. One other thing I wanted to ask, because you are a STEM subject. I wondered how much have you been impacted by the lockdown measures because when I’ve interviewed university leaders over the past year or so, it tends to be people from STEM who still have some limited capacity to teach students on campus?

Dara Murray:

Yes, we did. And GoReact helped us, it saved us a little bit when we were in complete quarantine, and we were unable to come to campus, we were able to, especially physical assessment things that they just need their stethoscope, and they need someone in their home. We did assignments where they were able to complete them from wherever they were. We were able to still interact. Some of our product vendors, as far as equipment have created some little small things that they can home and actually do injections. We prepared kits with syringes and IV catheters that they were able to take home, and we were still able to teach and evaluate in that remote learning environment. I think that I hope that we’re back on campus, but if not, it definitely provided us an avenue to continue to those skills that we needed to teach and evaluate them as well.

Alistair Lawrence:

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Joel. I’d like to come to you next, if possible, please. Your background’s in sign language teaching, and we’re also joined today by a couple of interpreters for Joel, Jonas and Dan, so thank you for your help today, guys. Joel, if you could perhaps tell us what the applications have been in your field and how it’s been impacted in the past 12 months?

Joel Bergstrom:

Yes, we have worked with this GoReact for a long time. We start doing 2013. So for the past eight years, we have worked with GoReact and we can see that we are sign language users, and we are used to language, and we used to write notes, and also look at the individuals, and analyze their work and try to improve their skills using GoReact. So we have used GoReact a lot, actually. And we also use different tools where we can sort of interject in the video exactly at that time they do something we can give them feedback, like the others said about timestamps. Yeah.

Joel Bergstrom:

But I also think back before 2013, before we started using GoReact, we would have to use another problem in the computer, and also use cameras to give the visual feedback, and also give the timestamp for that particular comment. And we have to write them down. And if we wanted to comment in a particular moment in the video, we would have to write down the timestamp, and then send an individual video for each comment that we wanted to make. And this is so much more streamlined in GoReact. And we can also analyze these different comments and, yeah, that’s right.

Joel Bäckström:

Just write in a word document. Yeah.

Joel Bergstrom:

So we use it in the bachelor program for sign language in chapters. Yeah.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you. Has it been more of a challenge over the past 12 months with teaching more remotely? Or is it not as big a case in Sweden?

Joel Bergstrom:

Yeah. For us at the Stockholm University, yeah, we do have physical, we do meet onsite and we also have like-

Joel Bäckström:

At the beginning, when you start to teach sign language, you have to be there physically in order to be able to comprehend properly how to do different moments in the education. And then, you have to have the opportunity to go in different groups for a total of maybe eight to be able to perform the different tasks that you have to do. But with this GoReact, and we have done this remotely, we’ve also been able to give feedback, for instance, doing teaching via Zoom. And you can go through the Zoom video relay system to show different items that you want to show through GoReact as well. So we have classes with Zoom and then you have different materials that you have to work with through this GoReact system, and then we can comment on it directly and GoReact and also have Zoom lectures. Go ahead.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you guys.

Joel Bäckström:

And so, most of our education has to be on location, but with remote education, it is more simple when you have GoReact, it’s easier if you use that, but they have to have it on remote as well. Yeah.

Alistair Lawrence:

Okay. Thank you very much. It, seems like there’s a common theme of streamlining processes and hopefully saving time and effort for staff and students along the way. [inaudible 00:22:02] can we come to you next? Can you tell us about your work in translation studies and what that’s looked like? You know, what are the common applications of it and how is it changing the way that you teach?

Dijana Tockner Glova:

Yes, of course, I’m a senior lecturer at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna, and I’m teaching conference interpreting in German and creation. At the moment when we ended up in a lock, it meant that we have to teach online, and that was a quite challenge for all of us, because for teaching conference interpreting, we have well equipped rooms onsite with conference interpreting equipment that we need to use, so students know how it works, what the booth looks like and everything. But when it comes to teaching conference interpreting online, it means that we need to look for tools that allow us to meet the goals from our curriculum. We use different tool, also Zoom or other video conference tools, but we also use GoReact and GoReact is really a helpful tool. We use it for different assignments for students.

Dijana Tockner Glova:

Our main interest in using GoReact is in giving feedback to our students. For us, it is very important to listen to our students [inaudible 00:23:42] to the original speech. So we need original speech, and interpretation of our students to be able to assess their performance. And that’s just something that GoReact give us as an option. We also use it in a combination with virtual conferences, because GoReact has this option of live review, so it means that GoReact is a kind of a mutual conference booth for our students who can interpret, and they know at the same time, there is someone out there listening to them. So it encourages them to give the best performance they can, can do it at that moment, and they know they’re going to get feedback.

Dijana Tockner Glova:

Feedback is very important; on the one side, GoReact give us the option to give very individual feedback to everyone’s student. Time coded means also that the student have the feedback in a context, usually in a regular class, we do interrupt our students when they’re interpreting. So it means we note down all the comments and give the comments and feedback afterwards. Now, every student can get individual comments and feedback time coded. And afterwards, we also meet in video conference for more general comments that, and not for one student, but the comments about interpreting technique or other aspects of conference interpreting that are important for all of them.

Alistair Lawrence:

Okay, thank you very much. We’ve had a few questions from the audience; there’s about 200 people joining us, so thank you very much, everyone for tuning in. But we had a few questions that have been along the same lines, which are about managing the cultural shift to teaching and assessing via video, and the fact that some students may feel self-conscious by observing themselves on video, and that in some cultures, it may just be a case that not turning a camera on is more normal when you are communicating with people online. I wanted to ask a question to the panel in general, if they’ve had any sort of cultural or integration problems where just getting students to adopt this as a mode of teaching and learning has meant they’ve had to overcome some my anxiety. And if so, how they’ve addressed that with their students?

Alistair Lawrence:

Okay. It seems like everyone’s had a fairly smooth integration then so far. Josh, I mean, perhaps I could come to you with that just because obviously you take a kind of top-down view of this and you’re working with universities all around the world; you see what the integration is like in the different countries and different cultures. Is that kind of cultural barrier? Has that been removed, largely in the past 12 months, do you think, or have you an acceleration there?

Josh Beutler:

There we go. Great question, and I think that we can speak about it in two ways, pre-COVID pre-pandemic, there was still a lot of inhibition for student learners and instructors to really just put themselves on video. No one really loves to see that at first, except for a small portion of some people, right> Love to see themselves on video. And yet when we look at the pandemic, and COVID as an accelerant of the change that was required, we’re all on video. And sometimes I’m on Zoom calls like this, where only there may be a fraction of people that are not on video, but it’s only because they can’t really show themselves in the right light for that moment, so it’s very common for people to see themselves and use video. And so the cultural shift, we go to that, it does vary and it does cause some challenges sometimes.

Josh Beutler:

And yet, what happens is once people are able to get over that, there’s this moment to realization where, you know what that is me, and that’s what I look like, and I need to be able to look at that from a way to learn from what I can do, rather than feel like I’m my worst critic, or other people might be criticizing me, and there’s this term that we really try to emphasize in the work with our universities, especially at this scale, and they’re always asking us, “We want this to be authentic. We want authenticity in the way we see our students, the way we assess their disposition to do certain things, their abilities to progress. And we want to connect with them in an authentic way that they can feel, even though we may be at a distance that they can actually say, “Wow, that was really insightful.””

Josh Beutler:

And maybe some of the comment we’ve talked about today of being able to be provided time coded feedback, or all these resources, those feedback moments, aren’t just text; that’s the instructor also saying instead of a text comment, which I know is good, a better way to give this student feedback is in a video. I want to give a ten second video clip to say, “You know what? This is great. I would’ve asked a question right here, or I would’ve signed this way differently.” And those are moments where students say, “Wow.” The funny things we see at the macro scale is we hear a lot from instructors and students alike that say, “The best part I liked about the feedback I got is that I could act on it. But when my instructor do gave me a feedback, I heard their dog barking in the background. I heard real life happening while I got a video comment from my instructor that was 10 seconds. And they actually showed me what I could have done different.” And that video, that picture worth a thousand words, couldn’t be more evident or more clear than when you use GoReact.

Josh Beutler:

So there is a cultural shift, and yet we are really working hard on our end to help programs at any stage of adoption to zero in on what they need to do and to really make it so simple that it’s a natural extension of what they’re doing already, and that first exposure to GoReact is maybe a little bit thought provoking for the student or the instructor, and then they get really comfortable with it. Then they get really excited to be able to do it, and have it be something that’s more focused on them rather than criticism or scrutiny, it’s growth, and facilitation and coaching. That’s what we love to do. Does that help, Alistair?

Alistair Lawrence:

Yeah, no, that’s great, thank you, Josh. I appreciate it’s not a process that happens overnight, so it’s something that you’re gradually working with people to change the way that they learn, and they teach, and that they’re assessed. Dot, you’ve got your hand raised, if I come to you. You can they give us your thoughts?

Dot Powell:

Yeah. I think that some of it is about managing the process upfront. So it’s about communication. And so I’m speaking mainly about in face-to-face teaching context, where we would be putting a video camera in a classroom and videoing a group, we’d be letting them in advance that was going to happen, because there would be data protection and issues about us capturing recordings with face and being one of the personal characteristics that would be covered in GDPR, we’ve had to create consent forms that we use with students, but that all makes part of a process, which means that the students are well aware of what’s going to happen in advance, and we also sell the benefits.

Dot Powell:

I think partly as well. It’s because of the context that we are all in, the things we are capturing are very visual things. It’s very obvious why you would want to capture that in a video, and all of that contributes to it being quite a smooth process. We haven’t had very many people at all who’ve raised any objections to this, and we’ve also found that if we fail to let the students have access to their videos swiftly, they will be getting in touch with us and saying, “Where’s my video? We want to see the video. We really want to see the video.” And the reason we have delayed sometimes is if we’ve got moderators who need to see videos before we can release marks to the students, we might have a little bit of a delay, but they’re very excited to see the video and the feedback that goes with it.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you. And yes, Josh.

Josh Beutler:

And I love that, Dot, that eagerness by the student, right? And we’ve mentioned commented feedback or time coded feedback, we’ve also mentioned the ability to use rubrics as a student or as an instructor or reviewer. There’s this moment of, I want to see that video and then there’s the commentary of, well, and I need to see what people said, so I can improve, or change, or see even my grade. And if you’re looking at a rubric and as you see, GoReact and we’ll give you a better look at this whenever you like, if you like to see what it looks like, but there’s a moment where a student may be seeing their video, and then they see the comments and then they actually see the rubric that’s used, and sometimes it’s the first time the student knows the difference between one score and a different score for a specific competency.

Josh Beutler:

If it’s in the speech mechanics of their public speaking, if it’s a proficient versus good, that may be the first time they know the difference, and they know the common language, they know the references. And so they’re saying, “Okay, now I know not just my video and I got great feedback, but I know what I do need to do to be able to be proficient, or excellent in this competency.” So if we put those things together, right, in reference to that student’s presentation or their video, they have no reason to not act. Nothing’s abstract anymore. They’re able to really look at it with clarity and say, “All right, I want to know, and I’m going to act on it,” versus, “Know that I got a grade on my video.”

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you very much. So a host of questions that I’ve got, but also we’ve got a couple from the audience as well. I was just wondering, we’ve been asked about the overall integration of using video, teaching, learning, and assessment into the online systems that are becoming the standard at universities now. So there are many different suppliers who offer learning management system in virtual learning environments. I was wondering how the panel found integrating video teaching and assessment into the general digital transformation process that their university is probably still undergoing at the moment. Has it been a smooth process? Have there been challenges? I wondered if perhaps, Dara, we could come to you about this. I mean, you said obvious you were doing some remote teaching and not… Has it been a fairly smooth process to integrate video teaching, learning and assessment into the other digitization processes that are probably ongoing, I guess, at your university?

Dara Murray:

Honestly, it was not hard for us. We did already have GoReact in place before the pandemic. So our students were familiar with how to use the product beforehand. So that was not hard for us. And if I think back to when we first began using GoReact, it was very simple for the instructors in the students. We do occasionally have students who have some anxiety about the technical side of it. We have students who are not as efficient with technology. I would say, that’s the only part that is a little bit difficult for us, and we have to work with those students. They usually quickly see that it is not difficult to use, and it is user friendly, so we can usually overcome that fairly quickly.

Dara Murray:

But that is usually the main source of anxiety that we get for students is if a video does not upload correctly the first time, but as far as integrating it into our program, it was a very smooth transition. We’ve had a lot of support from GoReact. We also talk to some other programs that we’re using it to make sure that we were doing it the right way. I think planning that integration is very important for a program, and not just jumping into it here it is. We’re going to use it, but some real thought and planning into best practices, and how to use that and how your program wants and needs to use it and how it will best benefit your students.

Alistair Lawrence:

Okay. Great. Thank you. Joel, I wanted to ask you, I mean, I appreciate you’ve been, you’ve been using this technology for a long time. So I imagine that the adoption of the integration model was fairly straightforward for yourselves, but I wanted to know how the requirement for sign language, the teaching and learning is changing now that we are spending more of our time online, more of our time on screens, and communicating with each other in a different way?

Joel Bäckström:

Yeah. When it comes to the software, you talk about the smooth way to use GoReact. We have things in the cloud nowadays, so we don’t have to install things in our computers. We use the cloud instead. So it works really nice when you want to connect to the GoReact tool through the internet or through the cloud. And during these eight years we’ve been using it. And when the pandemic came, it was really resourceful to have. And as you see, it is a visual language; you see me and the interpreters signing. So, it’s best to have a physical contact, to be in the same room, to have the eye contact with everybody in the same room, of course, but on the screen, the screen is flat as well, so it’s just 2D, it’s not 3D. In person is 3D, but on screen, it’s 2D, so it’s a bit different. The same language looks a bit different.

Joel Bäckström:

So when we have our classes in Zoom, we have mostly on zoom nowadays, we also have GoReact, we still use the same kind of ways to use, GoReact as we did before the pandemic. And also a part of the education is that they actually say maybe some people are afraid to use the system, but when they come here, and they see for themselves and maybe they see themselves and think, “Oh, I look awful.” But then after a while, you just get used to it. After a few weeks, it’s no problems. So answer that prior question. So, okay.

Alistair Lawrence:

[inaudible 00:38:40], I imagine that your discipline has been very heavily affected by the lack of physical events and other restrictions that we have at the moment. Does that change the way that you are educating people at the moment?

Dijana Tockner Glova:

Yes. Well, like for sign language, we need a presence on site to teach conference interpreters. The conference interpreting competence has to be developed in different levels. So what we change, or what we see right now as an important aspect of training conference interpreters is adding an additional layer of competence, like digital competence in conference interpreting. When you cannot meet on site, you meet virtually, you meet in a video conference, all the meet things have migrated to video platforms. So there is a great demand on virtual or online interpreting, but it means that adding [inaudible 00:39:51] to the basic interpreting competence, our students need to learn also additional competencies, how to use their technique, their competence in a new environment. What does the remote interpreting systems look like? How the communication between interpreters change? Because they are always two interpreters per language combination working at the same time, and they need to communicate with each other. In this virtual setting, they’re not sitting next to each other. So there is no direct communication. So the communication set up is changing completely, and we just have to look how it’s going to develop further, or when we can meet on site, when we can meet each other physically.

Alistair Lawrence:

I wanted to ask also a quick follow up question; is it changing the collaboration with industry that you have as a course provider? Do you do much interaction with industry partners when you talk about conference interpreting or is it very much taught as a discipline, and then the graduates move on? I’m just thinking in the past, when I’ve hosted previous discussions, you’ve done a lot of talk about how student placements in the workforce have changed dramatically over the past year, for obvious reasons. I imagine that must be a real challenge for you in your field.

Dijana Tockner Glova:

Yes. We have their quite different approach to it when it comes to working together with the industry, our main goal is training for the market purposes, and we have also, we do work together with big institutions, international institutions like European Union or United Nations, and so on, who are also interested in conference interpreter students becoming their interpreters afterwards.

Alistair Lawrence:

Thank you very much. Dot, you spoke, obviously being a business school, you sit very close to industry and employability is a huge focus for institutions such as yourself. I had a couple of questions. One is, how is this complemented general level of digital transformation at Warwick over the past year, the video tools that you’re using now? And has it made the challenge of student placement and teaching employability skills a little bit harder?

Dot Powell:

Quite difficult to answer that question actually, because one of the downside of moving to online delivery of resources and modules in our area has been that people have been a bit nervous about using groups and group work. They haven’t quite been able to work out how to do that. They’ve worried about whether our students in different timezones would be able to find each other and contact each other. They’re worried about just integrating that into an already very busy and very, very pressured 12 months that we’ve had just trying to get lectures delivered seminars delivered and what have you. So I think we’ve seen a little bit of a dip to be honest in the way that group work, which was our main focus with GoReact, has been handled. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to revisit that and beginning to say, “Actually there’s no reason why we shouldn’t include group work, and we shouldn’t continue to develop those presentation skills.”

Dot Powell:

So it’s something that we are aware of, that we need to improve on. And I think it will be interesting to see how the students digital skills have now changed. I don’t think the concern about them finding each other and being able to work together is founded, actually. And we’ve had some really good examples of groups producing videos that we could actually assess using GoReact, but like many people, we have been up against it, we’ve just been trying to do the best we can in the current situation.

Alistair Lawrence:

Absolutely. Yes. Dara, I actually had one question about sort of continual assessment and improvement. In a field like medicine, does it become easier now with online teaching and learning to offer an easier model for upskilling and reskilling medical professionals? And do you think something like video assessment has a part to play in that?

Dara Murray:

I do. I wouldn’t say that it’s easier now, but I do think that video assessment could be used outside of nursing education, with practicing nurses or graduate students in nursing. I know that just in some research that I have done, that teacher education students use it in the classroom. I think that nursing students could use it in the clinical setting. I think that practicing nurses could use it in the clinical setting when we’re talking about competencies. Most nurses have to complete yearly competency trainings or evaluations. I think that would be effective. I think that in a time where the medical field is stretched very thin, we have a shortage of nurses in the United States, and I don’t know what it looks like where you guys are, but our hospital based educators are, are stretched very thin. And so I think the ability to train and evaluate nursing competencies remotely would be a tremendous impact, probably even in rural areas where access is limited. I think being able to use a tool like video feedback with skills based competencies could be very effective. I hope that answered your question. I’m not sure if I went into the direction you wanted.

Alistair Lawrence:

No, it’s fine. I appreciate that, yeah, I think that the medical professionals around the world are, as you say, being stretched very thin at the moment. And at the moment, the first concern is obviously fighting the pandemic. And then on top of that, it will eventually become time to take a step back and look at how well all students are integrated into the workforce in a slightly different way, particularly to deal with staff shortages and things like that. So I very much hope that you are able to use the tools that have to make everyone’s lives a little bit easier in that regard.

Alistair Lawrence:

Josh, I just wanted to come to you for a couple of points; one was something you mentioned right at the top about integration for micro credentials and things along that line, and the way that assessment is changing. We’re in a tremendous period of flux at the moment in higher education. It’s not entirely clear around the world of what a micro credential offering will look like. Australia announced some plans, and some integration into policy there, but the rest of the world seems to be taking more of a wait and see approach for the time being, shall we say. On top of that, it is the case of there is a recession looming, and mass unemployment looming in certain sectors, unfortunately, how important is it to start thinking about quick, effective ways to get people back into the workforce and using a more agile, on-demand service that something like video can support?

Josh Beutler:

Yeah, it’s incredibly important, and it’s incredibly important that the systems of support for people to retool, or repurpose, or reboot some of the work that they’re doing to be able to upskill in different disciplines, get them ready to be able to support them as things shift and change so rapidly. There’s this underpinning of digital transformation that we all kind of idealize in saying that, “Well, it’s going to be hard in some ways,” but I think on the GoReact side to speak to this for a moment, just from a very limited technical perspective is we taken upon ourselves just from planning, and preparation, and a technology interoperability perspective to make GoReact available and accessible anywhere. We integrate every in every major learning management system. GoReact is embedded in every learning management system that’s broadly adopted in some custom learning systems where people are using and they’ve built them on their own. We leverage the LTI standards to be able to do that and provide custom even experiences based on that. And so, the key here is wherever the learning is happening, wherever the upskilling is happening, or the micro-credentials are being created, and managed, and assessed GoReact can be seamlessly available there.

Josh Beutler:

And the last number I heard was of all the users that use GoReact, I think we’re 65% are using GoReact within a learning management system, within a learning experience, no need to log into somewhere else, no need to create accounts, no need to do those types of things. The learner and even the instructor are doing things that are right in line with what they expect to do, and are expected to do, but they don’t need to be oriented or trained in a lot of ways.

Josh Beutler:

And so, the need can only be satisfied by the way, with which we support the need to upskill, even in professional disciplines. And we know, we have a lot of interest and curiosity from the healthcare world, even from nursing, but also behavioral health, to be able to do this skill and credential certification that’s regular, that is focused on what and how people do what they do, and make sure that they, again, have video evidence of it, that they can actually show and that they’re ready to do these things, and continually ready to do it as things change. It’s very important to us on the interoperability side. And an example, we have these large universities that use GoReact, competency based universities. We had a very large university kickstart their work with GoReact and teacher in last fall, and they were so excited to be able to get GoReact in the right place inside their learning management system.

Josh Beutler:

And as we kicked off, as we helped facilitate the process, the team, their first pass at using GoReact, they said, “Well, we want to start with using, GoReact in 300 different courses, with over 160 instructors or supervisors to do this work.” And we said, “Wait, that’s great, but that’s a lot to start with, just from a digital transformation perspective.” And they said, “No, because it’s there, because we can design GoReact centrally, because we can allow GoReact to be the LMS for each instructor and it’s ready to use, they don’t need to be trained to set things up,” that’s where they had great success. And it was very exciting to watch them move forward, and even to see how much they could scale using GoReact because it’s interoperable in the moment, and instructors don’t need to get trained to use it. They just know because it’s available already based on the use case that they’re designed to do

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you. We’ve got about 10 minutes left I’m going to try and summarize some of the questions you’ve got from the audience. We’ve had a lot, which is great, but obviously we don’t have time to answer all of them, unfortunately. Some of the more technical ones about GDPR in Europe and also pricing, we’ll leave our colleagues at GoReact to follow up with you about those. One of the main questions that’s come up is about the question of access, which is, I suppose, not just a question of having a reliable internet connection, but also having the time and space needed in order to study effectively. I was wondering if any of the panel have experienced problems with students bringing that problem to them, and if so, how their institutions have tried to make it a bit easier for students to study in this way?

Alistair Lawrence:

Okay. It seems like the representatives we have, everyone’s thankfully not dealing with that problem too much. Josh, is there anything you can speak to on that front if somebody says to you, “Well, these tools are fantastic and just what we need, but I fundamentally have a problem where some of my cohort are from low income backgrounds or their living situations means that it’s very difficult for them to study remotely while we’re all locked down?”

Josh Beutler:

Yeah, no, it’s not uncommon. when it comes to equitable access and be able to access learning experiences from wherever students are with the limitations they have.s First off, we always have to acknowledge that there are limitations that we don’t control. There are bandwidth constraints, there are technology constraint, there’s device constraints. And again, for us, it’s our duty to take whatever those limitations are, and reduce the bandwidth and the system requirements of GoReact, down to as little as possible to provide a great experience that’s still as functional and as valuable as possible, based on the minimum necessary technical requirements to do it. That includes anything from assessing bandwidth and hardware capabilities and letting the user know that, “Hey, your setup here is suboptimal, but you need to do something different,” or, “Your bandwidth is inappropriate for, for doing this right now.”

Josh Beutler:

But that also means for us to say, if a student only has a mobile phone, they should be able to record and submit these videos, and feel like they have full access. And GoReact duty to optimize our work, and our architecture, and our structure on our end, to be able to say that student launched in from their phone, they launched into record. They saw what they needed to do, and because it’s the only device they have, and even if it was limited connectivity, they’re still able to do it. And just, we’re in this middle of this process right now, we’re towards end actually, of revamping everything we do when it comes to mobile, making it even lighter weight and simpler to use and allowing the student, even if they’re in an LMS to be able to launch, to GoReact and say, “Yep, that worked. And I didn’t really get snarled in the… I had an issue just because I only had a mobile phone.”

Josh Beutler:

There is no greater are caused than that in education to make sure that GoReact is accessible to anybody who can and should be using it, but may have certain constraints. Whether those are technical constraints, accessibility constraints, which again, on our end is incredibly important, because of the broad use cases, any student who has certain limitations should also those affordances for them as well. So, that’s what we feel philosophically, and it should be the best things we can do is understand the constraints and minimize GoReact’s technical necessities, or the footprint we require to do this work so that more and more people can use GoReact every day.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you. I think we’ve got time to try and squeeze in one or two more than the next five minutes that we have left. One of the questions we had was about how the educators on the panel may change their approach when the pandemic is over, and campuses are fully operational again, we no longer have to social distance. I was wondering if anybody had any about what their course may look like if they could magically open their practice tomorrow and not have to social distance, but still retain these tools? [inaudible 00:55:38] do you have any thoughts on that? I saw you smiled; I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Dijana Tockner Glova:

Probably a good thing, because we are going to be happy to see each other in our classrooms. Well, we are, and I am also thinking about how it’s going to look in the future. I mean, we are used to blended learning; for a couple of years we do use learning management systems and so on. So GoReact, if I could get all my wishes fulfilled, would be one of the tools that can be used also in blended learning. It could be very well integrated for home assignments, for offline learning, and many other things. So, I see a big potential of integration or integrating, combining the onsite training and this offline or online blended learning component. So I think that is going to be our, our future.

Alistair Lawrence:

Thank you. Joel, you spoke about having a blended approach before the pandemic. Do you think it will go back to, as it was before the pandemic? Or will there be some changes for you?

Joel Bäckström:

Well, yeah, I think, think that before the pandemic came, we still used to GoReact quite extensively, but after the pandemic is over, I think we’re going to need it more even because when we have classes all day, physical classes all day, that’s one thing, but when you are using Zoom, you might have to have like half a day instead. But physical meetings, then you can have a full day and then you can use co react as well. So, when the pandemic disappears, I don’t think we’ll be doing exactly the same thing as we did before the pandemic; I think we’ll be doing more, maybe. A bit more, not just as much as now, but a bit more than before the pandemic with GoReact, and different assignments that you can do from a remote area. So you don’t have to come in every day to the campus. So I wish for all of us to come back in a physical meeting, of course, but also to blend that with the remote teaching as well. That’s my guess for the future.

Alistair Lawrence:

Okay, great. Thank you. Dara, I think you may have already answered my question about this. We spoke a little bit about the need to fulfill capacity and cure things like staff shortages, offer people more flexibility in the way that they learn. I assume, again, if we’re we granting wishes, you would be able to have access to all of those things, and also be able to keep the blend of teaching digital and physical learning, yes?

Dara Murray:

Yes, absolutely. We are, actually, my students are on campus right now in a limited capacity. We have lots and lots of rules in place, and so far it has been very encouraging with, we have had very few cases of COVID on campus, which has been wonderful. I guess our practices are working, but we have a lot of non-traditional students; older students who don’t live on campus, and as you all were just mentioning it, I think that we have learned through this, that we can use this in more ways than we were previously using it before, if nothing, but to enhance the learning of those students. Students who have children at home, students who have families and other responsibilities outside of being in our classrooms all day. I think that we have learned a lot about new, and creative and flexible ways that we can not only teach, but also evaluate our students in a good quality environment.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you. Dot, I think we quickly got time to come to you before we need to wrap up. I saw you nodding in agreement with Doris’s point about having more applications. Is there also a case of being able to gather more quality data about how students are learning using video, that can help more in future?

Dot Powell:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, the reason I was nodding was the reference to creativity, because I think the it, when some of the pressure is released, and we are able to go back and look at what we did, we’ll find that there were lots of really creative ideas, and creative things that we would want to keep using, and to keep going with. And yeah, the evaluation of how people have been using video, and how people have been… We’ve done a lot of worked, for example, creating asynchronous tasks for students to use. A lot of those included in element of video, and I think there will be a real opportunity to go back, then, over that, and single out the really great creative stuff that we could build on.

Alistair Lawrence:

Great. Thank you. Well, it’s nice to end on on a positive note. Thank you so much. I think we’ve got through a lot over the course of the hour. It’s been really interesting hearing about how academics such as yourself who work in very different fields, so have there’s a commonality to the way that you’re working and the way that technology like this has supported the over the past year, and will hopefully be able to support you in your jobs in the future. Thank you to everyone who joined us and thank you also to partnering with GHE for this event. I hope that we see you again in a lot more events in the future, thank you.