A presentation from Connect More by Julia Ault, lecturer and digital skills coordinator, UWTSD - University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The UWTSD's skills for the workplace outreach classes are normally held at a range of venues in the community in the evenings and at weekends to enable mature students to return to full-time study whilst working and/or having caring responsibilities. Their skills for the workplace day classes are held on campus and attract students from a range of different backgrounds and walks of life, including Eastern European, Asian, Welsh and English students in their Swansea day classes. All of these students require specialised support and teaching methods, including hands-on practical and emotional support and encouragement, to build their confidence and help them acquire new skills (including digital competency) to progress in the modern workplace. Julia has been particularly delighted at the way all of these students (both outreach and day cohorts) have willingly and cheerfully embraced a completely new way of working for them in an incredibly short space of time. The first module they had to move wholly online, with only a few days’ notice, was a module on effective team working and communication which required each student to create a PowerPoint Presentation and deliver it live online with a voice-over in a recorded session on a Microsoft Team site, with the tutor and a group of their peers watching, in order to provide verbal and written feedback on their performance. Reflection and analysis of this feedback also formed part of their assessment.

1. 16-18 June
Online assessment via
Microsoft Teams
Julia Ault, lecturer and digital skills coordinator,
UWTSD - University of Wales Trinity Saint David

2. Online Assessment using
Microsoft Teams
A personal experience
by
Julia Ault

3. Introduction
Good morning everyone
My name is Julia Ault and I am a lecturer at University of
Wales Trinity Saint David, (UWTSD) based in Carmarthen
and Swansea in South West Wales.
I would like to talk to you today about my own recent
personal experiences in moving a formerly face to face
teaching and assessment process online via Microsoft Teams
- with almost no advance notice!

4. About Me
Passionate about digital
empowerment for ALL to
improve employability
and enhance life skills;
I have never believed
that age, gender,
experience, disability or
lack of formal education
should be a barrier to
new learning. My LinkedIn Profile

5. My Background
I was delighted when the opportunity arose to become one of
3 Founder Members of a small Team led by Roger Maidment
(the current Dean of the Institute of Management and Health
in UWTSD), which was created to develop, validate and
deliver an innovative new Certificate in Higher Education
qualification in Skills for the Workplace, for UWTSD in the
autumn of 2012.

6. Skills for the Workplace Programme
There were two main areas in which this qualification was
“innovative” at the time.
1.The qualification content consisted of a number of ‘soft’ or
‘employability’ skills that employers had consistently identified
were needed by their workforce and were often lacking in
new recruits as well as current employees.

7. Skills for the Workplace Programme -
modules
Modules were developed in the following skills:
Digital Competencies
Professional Career Development
Effective Team Working and Communication
Problem Solving and Decision Making
These modules were taught alongside the more traditional
skills required for successful academic study, such as
professional writing and research methods.

8. Skills for the Workplace Programme - aims
2. The qualification was aimed at non-traditional students and
a typical learner profile was of someone who:
Was working full time in stable employment
(approx. 90%)
Was anywhere in the age range of 21-59 years
Had minimal post-school formal education
Was seeking to improve their workplace performance for
personal career development

9. Skills for the Workplace Programme -
delivery
2. As this qualification was aimed at people who were either
working or had family/caring commitments, they were unable
to attend classes on campus in the working week - and so we
decided to take the university to them.
We devised a flexible delivery pattern of one evening session
per week, plus monthly weekend classes held at a number of
venues in the community, to enable learners to continue with
other life and work commitments alongside their studies.

11. So far, so good….
Our qualification has been incredibly successful over the
past 8 years - and all was progressing happily as usual
when along came Covid-19…

12. Going Online…

13. Going Online…background
As Lecturers, we were given around one week’s notice that
the campuses would be closing and that we would all be
working online from home.
We were then required to seamlessly transfer all our offline
teaching sessions online - regardless of where teaching had
previously taken place – on campus or in the community, as
in our case.

14. Going Online… VLE
We were also instructed to use the Microsoft Teams
platform as our online classrooms.
This platform would be supplemented by Moodle as the
university VLE (virtual learning environment) to host
learning materials and assignment submission.
Fortunately, the extensive use of Moodle has been the
practice in the university for some years.
Teams however were a brand-new experience for us….

15. Teams

16. Moodle
As shown in the sample course on the next slide, using
Moodle as an online repository would not prove to be a
problem, as our teaching materials were on there anyway -
but we did have to re-think our lecture delivery approach.
Was it realistic to ask students to sit at their laptops at home
for a normal 3-hour class session?
Health and Safety issues immediately came to the fore….

18. Podcast Lectures – redesigning materials
We therefore quickly(!) redesigned our teaching materials to
include a number of podcasts where we recorded the
original face to face lecture content.
All of our podcasts were uploaded to Microsoft Stream and
displayed in Microsoft Teams, enabling simple, easy access
for all.

20. Podcast Lectures
These podcasts were designed to enable students to watch
the ‘lecture’ on their laptops, tablets or phones, at a time of
their own choosing if they became unwell, were working
long hours as Key Workers or had additional childcare
responsibilities due to school closures and couldn't attend
timetabled online class sessions.
Many of our students were affected by all 3 scenarios and
thus the podcasts really came into their own then.

21. Assessment

22. Assessment – initial thoughts
Once we had produced these materials and ensured that all
students had access to them, we were able to proceed with
teaching the module in the new manner.
This went quite smoothly really, but I was still a little concerned
about how students would cope with assessment online.

23. Assessment – initial steps
As luck would have it, the very first module we were teaching
online required students to produce and deliver a PowerPoint
Presentation to the Lecturer and the class, in order to achieve
feedback on their presentation skills, which formed part of the
module assessment.
Students then needed to collate the feedback and produce an
analysis and evaluation of this to inform their own personal
development plan for improving workplace communication
skills.

24. Assessment – next steps
It was decided that each student would create their slides and then
present them live online in a Microsoft Team meeting (virtual
classroom) to the Lecturer and their peers.
This presentation would be recorded by the Lecturer for external
verification purposes.
The first hurdle to overcome was to arrange the presentation sessions.
I did this by offering 4 separate sessions at different times over a few
days and asking students to sign up for the most suitable one for them.

25. Assessment - presentations
Somewhat amazingly really, my students managed to self-
select themselves into suitably sized groups to ensure that:
1.Sufficient peer feedback could be obtained.
2.Students would remain focused and alert whilst watching
each other's presentations, without fatigue setting in.
There were 8 presentations in our largest session - and this seemed
to be quite manageable. I am not sure the sessions would have
been as effective with many more presenters, although I haven’t
tested this yet, personally.

26. Presentations
The topic of the presentation was “Effective Team Working”
and students were asked to produce a number of slides of
their choice to provide an overview and demonstrate their
broad understanding of the topic during a 10-minute
presentation.
Predictably, most students over-ran their time slot, as they
always do, even when presenting offline, but this was not
generally excessive and all students who turned up were
able to present.

27. Problems
Considering my students are quite a mixed group in terms of
technological and academic ability, the problems that actually
arose were relatively small and easy to solve.
The main ones were:
Inability to get online initially due to poor quality internet access
Lack of understanding of how to share their screen in the Team
Meeting
Lack of understanding of how to present their slides on screen

28. Wins
• All students quickly understood “meeting etiquette” and
muted their microphones whilst others were presenting
• Although everyone professed to be nervous at the start,
(again perfectly normal even when presenting offline) all
students were able to present their slides confidently and
without undue hesitation, once they got underway.

29. Feedback
• Peer feedback to each other was positive and
reassuring, particularly on the one or two occasions when
presenters felt a little overwhelmed with nerves and they
were encouraged by their peers to continue.
• Feedback to me from all the students in each session
was that they found it to be an incredibly bonding
experience between each other (and me!) and that they
really felt that we, as a class had ‘worked as a team’
during these sessions.

30. Gratifying feedback
A very gratifying aspect for me was that most, if not all,
students admitted that they had found the entire experience
to be rather less nerve-wracking that standing up in front of
a class and presenting offline!

31. The Presentations

32. Peer Feedback
I created online folders for
each of my students in our
Microsoft Team site to
enable them to drop their
written feedback into each
other’s folders for them.
This also worked very well

33. Results
• I recorded each presentation individually and then
uploaded them all to Streams / Teams as I do with my
own teaching materials.
• I will now be able to grade individually in my own time by
watching the recording and not having to grade on the
spot whilst also managing the online session.

34. Reflection
• Would I do this again?
Definitely!
• Is it preferable to running presentations offline?
For me – yes certainly.
I can honestly say that I enjoyed the whole experience
and was both extremely relieved that the students were
able to do this and so proud of them all for stepping up to
the plate so capably!

35. customerservices@jisc.ac.uk
jisc.ac.uk
Thank you
Julia Ault