So just moving right along into the next talk. This is diversity inclusion in digital reading reflections and the active online reading project Lincoln collaboration between Lincoln and Nottingham. Dr Anna Rich Abad and Professor Jamie Wood. So take it away. Actually, Jamie's staffing. I'm starting and everyone hear me. Yes. Good. Yeah, so I'm, I'm Jamie Wood. I work at the University of Lincoln. We're both medieval historians, but we're not going to talk to you about medieval history today. Probably relieved. Yeah, so we'll get going with a tell you a little bit about our project. So I'm going to do, and there's going to do a brief introduction to the project what it was what we did. So the kind of conference theme we're going to talk about some of the, what students and staff had to say around their, their perspectives on the challenges that they face when they have to read digital text and online platforms or in online spaces. Then we'll do a bit of reflecting and then we'll have a bit of time for discussion. There'll also be an activity in the middle. So, over to Anna. Okay, thank you everybody for being here today. And as Jamie says I'm going to introduce a little bit this project that we have been running for the last year, year and a half. It's called the active online reading project and is a project that gathered scholars, academics from three different universities, basically, Lincoln, Jamie, me, and another colleague from UCL in London, who can be here today. And we, we came to this. I'm sorry I forgot to say that there were also people from Sheffield Harlem University and South or that joined in, and we were assisted by Tali's, and by the QAA, who gave us funding for carrying on with the research. We came to it with the thinking that, and has been said already that the students reading practices have been completely transformed over the last 20 years with digitalization of resources, emergence, and then ubiquity is Jamie's favorite words of the virtual learning environment and the widespread of mobile devices. So, the pandemic, and it has been mentioned before by Elizabeth as well has accelerated to developments. And then we went into the rapid roll on of online and blended learning. And what's happened is that all this was working but we did know very little actually about how students did actually read online. And how these practice of reading online related to their overall understanding and their overall learning experience. And we did have very little understanding of what pedagogical strategies were effective in this situation. So we wanted to work on this. So first on the reading reach perspective of medieval studies and history in general, and then we came with a definition or a working definition of what we understood was active online reading. That is the practice of deep engagement with a text using techniques and annotating, responding, questioning summarizing and sharing. So that was important. An example for us would be the reading in a kind of an academic article, and making notes of it, and sharing it with fellow students. There were a series of things that we were very interested in involving. I'm sorry. So we were very interested in working on what we understand was a community of practice in history initially but that it would be broader, broader into other disciplines as well. So for us as historians it was very clear that reading was a very important thing in our discipline and that that may create a specific situations that were specific for history or arts students. So we wanted to expand it to students in other areas as well that were not so heavily reading focused, for example, design and business studies. And we worked with also teachers in schools and try to go with the idea of how does that work from going from school to later on university. And then we wanted to work on this sharing experiences and best practices so that's a community of practice. And the other thing that we were very, very keen on working is that we needed the student perspective for this so we wanted to see how to teach. Well, we needed to see how they want to be teaching. So we engage student researchers in each one of the institutions and we engage them in collaborating in doing the research not only answering questions but also in producing their own reflective blogs and working on the analysis of the data. So that that leads us to the method so that's what we did we found out that reading and online reading was actually quite lively topic of conversation and there were many people wanting to be engaged in discussing it and learning more about it and finding out techniques and resources. And we wanted to work on this and, and we did in several forms so one of them was organizing workshops and we brought and gathered colleagues and students to write reflective reflective blogs. We did a literature review and we put on some case studies to share, and we tried to develop and we have tried to develop some pedagogic resources to share with everybody that is interested on this, and that we will show you later about. And the main core of the research was carried out through the conducting surveys for staff and students so we wanted to see what students wanted but we needed to see how staff were willing to give it or what the staff were thinking that they were already giving. Passing to you. Cool. Yeah, so we did the survey. We got responses from 10 different countries about 50 different institutions, given our backgrounds on our networks, and perhaps the sorts of people who are interested in reading a bit more we got a kind of humanities sample about 100 stuff. There were responses we could actually read there were lots we actually got several hundred more but we're about 100 staff responses and about 450 from students. And about 15% of the student responses self reported as having some sort of disability that affected their, their, their ability to engage in reading in digital spaces. So I'm going to talk you through some of our responses this is some of the things from the staff questionnaire so there are three three different visuals here. We're going to start with the one in the top left hand corner, how important is online reading to students learning in your discipline, unsurprisingly, given what we heard in the first presentation and common sense. So really really important was the overall summary of that particular graphic. So academics, or the hundred academics who responded to our survey think it's really important. But the next question the next responses the bottom left hand corner. How much attention do you actually devote to it. So it's really important and we devote some attention to it, but not a great deal it seems in that individual modules. So how good do you think students are doing it if it's really important how good a student for doing this, they're not really very good at doing it, and we don't spend much time teaching them how to do either. So there's clearly a series of disjunctions going on in what's happening when academics are that they're they're sort of like thinking about the importance of digital reading, and then what they're actually trying to do or not to do with the students. There's another disjunction between staff's ratings of how good students are reading online, not very good, or you know, okay, but not not particularly great, and how students rate that they're reading. They're pretty confident in general sort of like medium to confident if on the ratings that we looked at. So again there's a clear distinction that staff think student aren't particularly good students think they're pretty good. We need to think about that these sorts of these these divergences are some of the things that we're sort of like digging out through the process of the research. And we asked students about their reading practices, it won't surprise you to know that students, you know, don't read that much of self report themselves is not reading a great deal. There are a few pieces in the bottom left hand corner that they do read more as they go through their studies, which is good. They're reporting that they read more as they go through. There is one PhD student who still reads for less than five hours a week which is a bit worrying. And I think this in terms of the kind of the theme of the conference the bottom right hand visual is important because it's showing that students who report themselves as having a, it's not surprising. There are students who report themselves as having a disability that affects their reading, read less than that the average of their peers, the overall the overall group who don't report having a bit so they're already kind of at a disadvantage and they're engaging less with reading, which again is something I think we want to kind of dig into a little bit. Yep. Okay, so I'm going to change the order of the slides, we couldn't do it. Yeah, earlier. So, have you seen these discrepancies between students perceptions on staff perceptions on on the students ability and effectiveness and reading practice we would like to ask you, what is your perception as well. And if you would not mind to scan this code and answer to the question is how would you describe the effectiveness of a student academic reading practice as positive negative or neutral if your answers should be true in the mentee it worked earlier. We were getting the error message before and it did work so don't let that put you off. Yeah, if it doesn't work we'll do it with hands up if that's okay. Technology. Is it not coming. No. Okay, so is that all right. How many people here more or less think that the effectiveness of the students is positive somehow positive. Yeah. I'm not positive at all. Okay. So for the declarations are quite similar. And what that that means for us is that there is a discrepancy also in the fact that they are challenges that are not a knowledge probably in in one way or another and that that was something that was actually in the surveys that we conducted we asked academics and students, what were the challenges they thought were important for them in their reading practices. So, again, so different responses marked typical ideas or. Physical and personal challenges concentration accessibility for students, the building up of confidence. And you mentioned earlier that I will go into a lecture and it's daunting perspective to have to do these things and physical challenges visual strain postural problems. There are things that the staff also marked and I'm saying these are the perspectives of the staff sorry I didn't mention that. And one of the members of staff mentioned that there was a lack of quality control, like the web is a huge we will during place, and it's home to good articles and dreadful on professional articles how do we teach students, or how do students navigate this, if we don't help them, because they don't have enough experience. So also the approach students assume that anything worth reading online will be immediately discoverable with Google. So is Google a good reliable tool, how do we tell students that is not and yet they keep doing it. So there's something that we detect that there are these problems but they are not dealt with a drood. Some of these issues. And another problems that were highlighted by members of staff where that members of staff are not necessarily interested in developing digital skills or helping students to develop the digital skills. So it's not my job, especially academic staff. So how do we deal with the situations and these were lots of different barriers that we were detecting that were coming and we're relating to issues with workload as well by members of the staff or lack of communication between the different areas in the universities that could put solutions and support the students, but they do it in separate ways and they don't talk to each other. That's the impression that it gave us. And from a point of view of the students, what were the challenges Jamie will talk about this. Yeah, so the students, some of the things that the students outlined aligned really well with, you know, closely with what the staff were telling us. One of the things that surprised me a little bit was like there's a real focus on the physicality of digital reading and the student responses perhaps the most prevalent thing they talked about as a challenge was things like headaches, eye strain, backache or different sorts of aches and pains that result from having to sit there and read, you know, read digitally or read online so that was kind of something that was a little bit surprising to me initially. Another thing that they talked about was linked to the stuff that the staff talked a bit about like students can't concentrate anymore apparently, and this is apparently the fault of social media. Students also talked about this like being distracted, having to figure out tactics that enabled them to keep themselves focused on the reading or the other kind of learning activities they were doing. So the pull of the wider internet and all of its various interests was one of the things they talked about. We heard about sort of digital problems of access around digital poverty. That's something that students talked about as well. Not having sufficient bandwidth, not having access to sufficient devices that would enable them to get online to engage with these sorts of texts. That pertained both to the UK students and to the international students as a sort of like link to the previous talk. And one thing they also discussed quite frequently was the, how there are millions of platforms for reading online, like there's different, there's the VLE then there are different platforms, there's the PDFs but then there are different platforms by which you access different types of different types of texts that you might be expected to engage in. And this kind of like proliferation of different, different ways of accessing online reading was something that I mean, I think does their head in because it does my head in when I'm trying to do research and trying to access these, these readings. So that was something that students talked about. We asked students about one thing that they changed their about their reading practices. The top response was that I wish I'd done more reading was one thing so I think one of the things to consider is how can we help students to build the habits of reading. And lots of things related to that kind of the nitty gritty of accessing texts of engaging with them of thinking critically about them. So we came up with a number of recommendations, including that we did academics shouldn't we think it's not productive for academics to absolve themselves of responsibility for delivering this at the same time as complaining about students not being able to do it seems to me that that's not not very productive way of proceeding. We think that thinking about how digital reading specifically might be something that students need to learn or need to learn skills that that will help them in digital reading alongside kind of analog reading would be helpful. Note taking was an issue that came up a lot. And I know that is that is available in lots of places but students don't always know how to access it. So students tended to like the idea of collaborative reading. So getting to sort of share their ideas and annotate things together was something that they liked. They thought open access and the widespread digitization digitization of resources was a really good thing so so more of that was to be positive. And alternative ways of accessing things like read aloud audio books, those sorts of things were viewed positively to and providing just like hints and tips, how to avoid being distracted. Some of the students we talked to had some really great ideas about how to do this but they sort of figured this out on their own, rather than it being something that was a bit more systematized. We also made a bunch of resources of help sheets which are welcome to access and there'll be another QR code on the final slide seeking so you can get back to them. And Anna's going to conclude because we're running out of time. Yeah, just a minute for the conclusions if that's okay. So basically, the end conclusion is that the students come up with challenges that are fully acknowledged by the staff but that supporting students to engage in reading digital text in online spaces is not a priority for academics. And that it's open is often left to support departments and students are left to communicate separately from the communication that they have with academics with those departments. There's no communication between one thing and the other. And then any inductions or any skills based modules or teaching that is done to students seems to be disjointed from any other kind of learning into their experience. It also seems that technology is applied randomly and some academics may engage because they want to. We do, but others don't. And then the experience on digital learning for the students is also very regular. So we, we don't have a solution we have some ideas. And we, we understand that there's also a challenge for institutions and for academics to try to integrate digital teaching in our practice. That's it. Thank you. I think with both the people who are likely to respond to this survey were academics who, well, you know, yeah, well who can play but I also think that, you know, we were we're using our own networks we were disseminating it widely but we're also using our own network so we were getting people who are a bit like us and therefore so I think we were probably getting people who are interested in this topic in general, but we also got some quite shocking responses that I was like why did you, you know, it's really interesting that the ones that go against the grain that the ones were like that Anna was saying it's totally not my responsibility. It's the students responsibilities up to them to skill themselves up skill themselves or it's up to the library and other other service departments to to up skill the students so there's a kind of there's definitely something around the sort of sample that we that we got. I think, and we probably got keen students who responded, but I think that's that's going to be the challenge with any sort of server like this that you're going to get students who are kind of interested so that we probably are getting a bigger divergence than we then we otherwise would certainly in the student student response I think I think you had your hand up. I didn't see that. I can ask the question is it's a very active course, but I am struck.  So it's not like I'm going to achieve it's overachieving in my actually thinking that it's above you. But I just wonder just thought I've just got better at showing students how to focus in on what we need to win to pass assignments. Yeah, I'm struggling to kind of summarize this but so it's around like, like they're like why did students why students perhaps not been asked to read very much and and those. I mean I do there is definitely one of the things we definitely think needs addressing is the transition that the student expectations of student university are about reading are very different to what they're expected to do at school at school for history which is the subject I know most about and I don't know much about it. It's it's these very, very focused kind of not reading very much at all, whereas when they come to university we're trying to gradually get them to read more, more widely more independently more critically. So you've got that kind of how do we get them to be to become more independent. And again, I think what the tendency amongst some of the respondents the survey and me just talking to colleagues is to see well it's the fault of the school. Teachers at school is teaching students for a different purpose to what we're trying to teach them at university so we want we think it would be really important to do more sort of intelligence sharing around what you know what you know. We don't really know what the gap is because we don't we don't have any clue about what's going on at school really. It doesn't impact upon what we do what we're trying to do with them when they come into a history degree or any other degree. So there's a real sort of problem with with think like mindset, thinking about students as being in deficit all the time isn't helpful in terms of developing them in this area or in any other area really. We, sorry. We have different practices in different situations but we give minimums to students to read. And, but we don't give them maximums. So that's another thing. So I'm linking with what Jamie was saying it's a matter of transition so we give them a minimum in which they have to engage deeply during a course of one week or two weeks where they discuss this with this person with the tutor or the lecturer in the class environment, but they have extra material and they can develop and runs on that as they feel they are able to do it we encourage them to go a little beyond what they are given as a set reading for the week. Okay, so that's, that's a thing but it's about this transition thing that is worrying is that not everybody evolves at the same pace. And there is also the fact that the students have been drilled in a system sometimes in which do this this is what you have to do. No, we tell them go and explore but the level of exploration or somebody has been in a very strict system so far is sometimes a bit daunting and then that is also transitional problem. So to give students a bit the wings. We're going to take one more question but before we do that. Sorry, I saw your hand first we can maybe take one more ADHD doctoral student structure signposting or really helps you using talus. So if anyone uses reading list, you have to say what's recommended what's essential. Otherwise, someone like me, we might read all the things. And we will go down rabbit holes, because it's interesting, and we might use it later, but we might not. But yes, there are proliferation of tools. There was an article in THC recently, which was trying to say that people who have ADHD are going to suffer from that. The community practice set about neurodivergency Glasgow we responded very strongly to that with our own teacher article because there's actually a lot of good digital tools which will help us. That person had no lived experience. They have dyslexia, which is different. Yes. I'm not saying it's about reading, but whether they've read it, they all say how much they've been taught it and actually, so I wonder whether I've been able to read it. Excellent question. This is about how little exposure to actual reading students have before university sometimes. And when they engage with reading at university today they end up saying oh it's enjoyable isn't it. Yeah, I think I think this this is something I can relate very well my daughter is just passed a levels doing sciences, and it's been through YouTube.  So this experience of reading. We might understand now that reading has many other different work forms than the book as we know it in the past. This is, for me, a little bit more the depth that they achieve in reading. And when they focus normally with tools like tally's a little bit and then they cannot not take together and share, or, or, or highlight in a physical book, then they get a little bit more of that and they end up enjoying it I have students with sets of different colors of highlighters and they love doing that. So, and I need that is not, it's not just a frivolous thing is a way of doing it effectively for them and understanding how to highlight and prioritize what is important in the text. So I think that we have to think about reading in a more visual way that we, we, we did in the past and that, and that matter in a minute. Do you want to ask your question Elizabeth. Yes, I find this incredibly fascinating, having been a librarian in a previous life. But what I wanted to ask you said that Alice has been involved in this research. So, or as a supporter of it. What are they looking to get out of your findings what what were they, what are they planning on doing. Well, that's a good question I mean I think they, they funded it so we've spoken at some events that they've done, but we have, we haven't been, you know, plugging their product really it's been more sort of like, well, they're interested in how students learn and how, you know, what impact the ways in which we or other people might be using the tool might have on on student learning so so that I mean so there's a kind of virtuous connection in that that regard. We have been working with other the companies and other like a range of different institutions. And we weren't, you know, when we did the survey we weren't asking students specifically anything about TALIS elevate or any other product for any any other company. It was, it was a kind of general open, much more of an open type of survey. I guess what was interesting is, you know, maybe putting some guidance within their systems to help students look at how they might approach. Well, I think, I think it's not not just companies like TALIS it's it's a lot of different groups that are developing e reading platforms and also kind of different types of, you know, so your documents and approaches that they are looking for different ways in which you can you can structure the reading for the students through the use of AI to generate questions through stuff that instructors can insert into text to guide students through the reading process, ways in which students can kind of collaborate with each other around reading and I mean it's yeah the proliferation of different platforms and different modes of engagement is also means they're all trying different things so it's kind of interesting to see that there are these different different approaches being taken. Okay, thanks very much Jamie and Anna. It is now lunchtime. Unless you have further questions which you would like to ask the presenters. Thank you very much.


We're in St. Pete, Florida today doing a little red tide cleanup as many of you may know and if you don't know I'm going to enlighten you a little bit on the red tide situation here in Tampa, St. Pete. It's been hitting us pretty hard you know it's been a lot of dead fish you know washing up on the banks here people's homes and residency and on the beaches and stuff so it's really making it very difficult for a lot of people to have a way of living to where you know they're very comfortable going on their docks or going to the beaches and bringing their kids this that and the other and you know extremely hard on the fishermen and marine life here in Tampa St. Pete area so we're here to do a little cleanup as someone's residence to where their docks are you know full of fish and the horseshoe crabs and stuff like that and it's giving off a bad aroma so we want to make sure that we're cleaning that up getting rid of that disposal of that properly so that way you know we can get back to enjoy this beautiful scenery here in St. Pete.