It’s been a while since we posted as there have been some changes in the world. We have adjusted to the lockdown, found good routines with the kids and pets and established our new norms. We’ve been busy since the last post. Working remotely has sparked the notion that there may come a time when working as a group solely online may become the norm. Some form of remote group work must happen with distance learners already and this is a new direction for us to research into. We have presented our research at the conference we had always planned to, but it was online with an amended focus: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WglR4sO2OTKcnKQkclcPwkMngBq68Jtq/view?usp=sharing

The student we had recruited to join us in person for the conference at the start of April couldn’t join us online at the end of April. For the online presentation we talked about our journey to date and interviewed a tutor we had worked with about her experiences. Our next steps will be to look at the issues surrounding online group work and try to establish which areas should be emphasised in teaching at the start of the process. We will be leading a cracker barrel discussion around this at the University’s forthcoming Learning and Teaching conference: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/ilt/news/call-for-proposals-lt-conference-2020/

That being said, we are not abandoning our hard work to date. The plan is still to deploy our toolkit and the session plan of creating and filming a video when we are in physical rooms with students in person in order to get more feedback and ultimately write up our findings.