Moving Maths Online - Digital Accessibility

There’s been a greater focus on digital accessibility over the last year, which is great, but often the advice wasn't taking into account the specific difficulties of maths and stats. It feels like this is quite a niche subject, but actually, I think it would be hard to find a university subject that doesn't use at least a few equations from time to time, like finding averages. This post isn't going to be about why it's important, because if you're here you probably already know that - and it's definitely not going to tell you all the answers. It's been a really interesting journey though, so that's what I thought I'd share.

How do you write guidance beyond what you know

I'm still getting my head around the scale of the university and working out how it all fits together. so the first task was trying to find the right people to talk to. A background in psychology, maths and teaching is fairly useful and you'd think it would make me fairly well placed, but at the start I was pretty out of my depth. To write decent guidance, I needed to know more about the specifics of how different courses teach maths and stats and the support needed by our students. With a bit of a scattergun approach, I tried to pull together people from academic departments, MASH, and those who support disabled students. This made for a brilliant working group, which I'm very grateful for. I'm not a regular LaTeX user, which was one of the main areas of concern, so having people testing things out was invaluable. I was also given copies of course notes and other things to play around with to make sure that it was as realistic as possible. 

Agreeing on things

Early on someone said something along the lines of, ‘great, now you've got them together you just need to get them to agree what's best and it will all be sorted’. I'm not sure what the punchline of the joke about a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer walking into a bar would be but the answer almost certainly isn't agreement. The fundamentals of mathematics might not change, but the way things are used and presented definitely does. 

My definition of what should be included in the guidance was that it should only be things that we are confident will have a positive impact for students. Adding to staff workload, even if it is only small changes, needs to be justified by ensuring that it is actually helpful. I know from initial testing with checkers like Ally that it's easy to either accidentally, or by gaming the system, get a great score while also being functionally useless to those it is supposed to help.

Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater

One of the trickiest problems is hand written notes. They don't translate well electronically, and while we're looking at ways to help with this it's also important to recognise how useful they can be. Seeing mathematics written out by an expert models the good practice that our students need to get used to. This is particularly useful for students with specific learning difficulties. One thing does not have to be perfect for everyone, if there is another way they can access that same content. For example, where there has been a tutorial online and a tutor posts up a video, the slides, and the notes, this gives students the opportunity to access the content in the way that works best for them.

The guidance and the next steps

In the end we've put some guidance together that hopefully will help, but behind the scenes quite a lot of work is still happening - testing things out and seeing how we can make it better. Imperfect is better than nothing though, and it's really good to have people interested in and helping with this.

Have a read, and, if you're interested, I'm looking at ways to turn the working group into something broader for people interested in digital maths to get together.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/apse/digital/digital-accessibility/accessible-maths

Blackboard Tests: rounding and other quicks

Defining accuracy

If you were marking a question that asked for the area of a circle with radius 1 where you’d specified accuracy of within 5% and were expecting an answer of 3.14 you’d probably also accept 3.142 or 3.1416. Turns out that Blackboard tests checks the rounding first and if it’s not to the correct number of significant figures it’s automatically marked as incorrect. That’s fine once you know but a massive pain the first time you forget to tell students the accuracy level needed!

The horse before the cart

I’d like to say that assessment should be all about what you want to achieve and not the tool that you are using. In practice though knowing the way something works and limitations is important for being able to design good questions. A bit of both is probably needed where you work within and sometimes around the tools to make an assessment that gets as close to what you want to achieve as possible. I checked an awful lot of Blackboard tests that came into the help desk and the best one I saw was one where they’d used a variety of question types to really good effect with random numbers, multiple choice and explanations.

Finding the quirks and limits

Working out the quicks of tools takes time and lots of patience and creativity to come up with all of the possible things that might be asked. Time wasn’t really something we had a lot of when getting the summer assessments online fast. Luckily staff from across faculties have been flagging things up contributing to a Google doc of hints and tips which has proved invaluable. A few weeks ago after I’d spent time trying suggestions, answering questions and checking workarounds from people I felt like it was pretty much complete. It’s been written up into a help page for our website. This is the link to the page if you’d like to avoid some of the common mistakes. Of course since then I’ve done 2 digital advice slots where people have brought interesting questions that we’ve found workarounds for so I guess it won’t ever be complete. If you find something or have a question get in touch because the more we can share the better.

Moving maths online - Handwriting in the digital world

In the last post Hope talked about tutorials. Todays post is from Jenny looking at how to deal with handwriting in teaching. 

The problem

One of the frustrating things about moving online is that for most people a lot of maths is done with a pencil and paper or by showing students your thinking on a board. That doesn’t neatly translate to the online world. With everyone stuck at home it’s been a case of making do with things that you’ve already got. That includes the digital learning team, we can only test out things that we have access to which can be frustrating.

Graphic tablets

I’m lucky enough that I had a graphic tablet (it’s a Wacom Intuos small) which is great and I use it instead of a mouse as it connects to my laptop via bluetooth. People have their own favourites. There's lots out there and they go up to silly money. I chatted to a graphic designer about what she had saved from her office to bring home, she’d only brought the small one with no regrets. The biggest challenge though was what to actually use it with when presenting. The Blackboard Collaborate white board and tools for feedback on work are a bit clunky . They’ve been listening though and it’s getting a really good upgrade ready for September 2020 (have a look at Toms post here). Until then or if it's going to be a video rather than live then there are a few University supported options. I tested out loads of things with varying results. All have some problems, Smart notebook has an annoying watermark, Powerpoint doesn’t let you erase or go back to slides, Jam board seemed to make my writing even worse than normal. One of the unexpectedly great tools to come out of my playing around with things is Adobe Acrobat. If you’ve got slides or worksheets that can be made into a PDF the annotation tools are great and this became my favourite for recording with Kaltura.

DIY visualisers

While a few people have graphic tablets for a lot of people a more DIY approach of making a visualiser can work with what you've already got. When I taught in a college this was my favourite piece of tech because I could demonstrate or stick students work underneath quickly. With a phone, tablet or web cam it’s possible to make a type of visualiser to write and draw under. As someone in a session for the faculty of science put it OHPs worked well and this is just an update. In Kaltura you can have your slides up and change the webcam so students can see you handwriting the solutions instead of seeing you talking. Once it is uploaded students can switch views to see both or just one at a time. Blackboard Collaborate even introduced a new feature recently to connect a webcam in addition to your standard camera which works well for live session. My webcam is one I found in our box of unloved tech and cables, they are about £20 online now so not an especially good one but it works well. There was a lot of rearranging desks to try out different solutions, my webcam sits on a cardboard box. My desk is in front of the window and there was too much light which was quite variable so this helps keep it controlled. There are more professional versions available if you search for mini photography studios.

You can see some of the setups and advice as well as how a graphic tablet can be used to annotate, draw and write.  (https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/apse/digital/coronavirus/handwritten)

Moving maths online - Tutorials in 301

In moving the university online very suddenly, finding new ways for learning and teaching mathematics has been challenging and interesting. Hope Thackray works in the Maths and Statistics Help Service (MASH) and Jenny Hughes is an ex maths teacher who joined the digital learning team in March (the same week the university moved online!). Together we’ve been sharing ideas and testing out tools. This is a series of blog posts about some of the things we’ve tried.

The first is from Hope about the experience of running tutorials in 301.

Tutorials

The sudden shift from face-to-face to online meant that overnight, online teaching became a real (and daunting!) thing. This meant finding a way to change lectures, tutorials, seminars and 1-1 meetings into something which would work well for both the students and staff. Lectures were easy enough to fill the immediate gap, with most lecturers having previous versions of lectures available thanks to Encore, but anything smaller than that needed to have that interactive element between student and staff.

It became clear Blackboard Collaborate was suddenly the saviour of the online teaching problem, especially for us in 301. For 1-1s, staff and students alike could use the sharing features to take pictures of maths problems or draw on the interactive whiteboard. Since I had an iPad and Apple pencil, this was really useful for going through problems with the whole group. It wasn’t perfect but with it we found a whole new cohort of students who liked the privacy and flexibility that online learning gave them. They didn’t need to leave the house and find the building, and could ask difficult questions about their work without leaving the comfort of their own homes. 

Similarly, tutorial-style sessions, such as 301’s workshops, could be adapted to work within the Blackboard Collaborate environment. It was very quickly clear that the larger the student group, the harder it was to get a good flow of input from both the person leading the session and the students themselves. Anything beyond a ratio between staff members and students of about 1:8 meant that students were more unlikely to join in with conversation, whether using the microphone or on the chat. Similarly, if the students were resorting to using the in-built chat function, it would be a case of having to look out for both questions asked audibly and through the chat, which is very difficult to manage with one staff member alone.

Thankfully, Blackboard Collaborate’s Breakout groups function came in extremely handy for splitting up large groups of students into more manageable sizes. The groups could be either used to target specific problem areas (such as in the case of revision sessions) or just to make sure each group was sufficiently small to facilitate proper discussion. Once in the groups, students were automatically able to share content and discussions between others only within that group. The polling function was great for seeing where students' attention should be focussed (for example suggesting two different topics for revision and seeing which one students preferred).

Blackboard Annotate - New Features to Support Marking in Blackboard

In August (between 10th - 14th) the Blackboard Assignment tool will undertake a change to enhance its feedback functionality known as Blackboard Annotate. This update will require no downtime and the tools can be continued to be used as normal whilst the migration happens.

TELFest 2020 - Call for participation now open

TELFest, the University of Sheffield's festival of technology-enhanced learning and innovation, is returning for its seventh year, 30th June - 2nd July 2020, showcasing the use of digital learning in higher education. We are inviting you to join us in promoting and exploring how we can enhance our programmes of study, and improve engagement, satisfaction and overall success of our learners.

The festival offers a variety of opportunities to share practice with colleagues across the the sector, with speakers and delegates in attendance from a wide range of institutions, providing a chance to learn more about the affordances of technology in learning and teaching.

This year our suggested themes include topics at the heart of the University's learning and teaching priorities - how can technology and innovation help us be inclusive teachers for all our learners, and how can we harness technology to enhance employability opportunities and digital skills?

Submissions on the following topics are particularly encouraged:

• Inclusivity - how can we harness technology to create inclusive environments, and ensure our teaching materials are accessible to all learners?
• Digital Skills and Literacies - how can we ensure our students and staff have the skills to navigate a digital world?
• Employability - how can digital technology be used in ways that make our learners more prepared for the world of work?
• Education for Sustainable Development - what role can technology play in helping us produce informed graduates with the skills to address the global environmental, economic and social challenges we face?
• Students as Partners - how can our learners collaborate with us to shape their learning and what part technology can play in this?
• Classroom engagement - how can technologies engage our students in small and large groups? How can technologies enhance - or disrupt - traditional forms of university teaching?

The festival is aimed at academic and teaching staff, and those who support the design and delivery of Learning and Teaching. The format of sessions in previous years has included workshops, case studies, panel discussions, debates and gamified activities, on a wide range of topics including social media, flipped learning, course design, electronic assessment, mobile learning and much more. Attendance is free for HE, FE, NHS and relevant non-profit organisations.

To share your practice during TELFest, please submit your proposal by Friday 20th March 2020.

For more information about TELFest please go to: https://www.shef.ac.uk/telfest or contact the TELFest team at telfest@sheffield.ac.uk.