Hi everyone, my name is Lucy and I’m a fourth-year medical student studying at the University
of Nottingham.
Half way through third year, my course moved from being a clinical placement to being entirely
online and so I have had many weeks’ experience of online learning.
In this video I’m going to be talking to you about how online learning actually works
and how you can make the most of it while you’re at the University of Nottingham.
So first thing’s first, I’m going to show you around Microsoft Teams. Now, you can download
the Microsoft Teams app onto your laptop when you get to university and essentially this
is where you will have any online webinars.
The main two features I want to show you on the Microsoft Teams app is first this section
where it has all of the teams that you’re in. So if you’re in a particular seminar
group or something like that then likely you will have a team set up for that. This is
where your lecturer or your tutor will communicate with you when the sessions are going to be
and there might be opportunities for you to ask questions on there and to contact other
members of your team. I also wanted to show you the calendar feature
so this is where all your webinars will show up so you can see all of your past and future
teaching sessions.
So when you actually get invited to a teaching session, you will get invited by email and
in that email there will be a link. Now you can access the online teaching through that
link or what I tend to do is use this calendar to join the actual teaching sessions. In the
email invitation, your lecturer will probably tell you how they want you to interact in
the Teams meeting. So it might be that you have a small group session and it’s very
interactive and in these sessions you might have your camera and you microphone on so
you can actually interact with the lecturer and with other members of the group. But there’s
kind of this Teams etiquette that when you’re not speaking you turn your microphone off
as it just decreases the background noise and it improves the quality of the call.
However, if you are in a large-scale lecture for example and there’s like a hundred of
you in it then you might be asked to keep your microphone and your camera turned off.
In these situations, if you are asked to interact or you want to ask a question, then you can
use the chat feature to type a question in or the lecturer might prefer you to use the
raise hand feature. So when you click on this hand it kind of indicates to the lecturer
that you want to ask something. However, don’t worry about this because
the person running your teaching session will likely tell you how they want you to interact.
The next thing I wanted to show you was Moodle. So Moodle is basically the University of Nottingham’s
online platform and this is where you will be able to find all of the learning materials
that you need for your course. These are structured into different modules and as you can see
with mine, we actually had our teaching structured into different days of the week so for example
we had a certain number of things set to do on Monday and then different things to do
on Tuesday and it just enabled us to structure our week really nicely. And there's a very
wide range of online learning resources that you might be using. So often you will get lecture
slides in the form of a PowerPoint and the lecturer will record themselves speaking over
the slides and you will be able to play the audio on each slide to hear what the lecturer
is saying. Some lecturers will just upload a past lecture that they've given so it will
be sort of like a 50 minute long video and you'll be able to see them clicking through
the slides as you go through it.
There might also be PDF documents for you to read and you might have quizzes to complete.
We had a quiz set every week at the start of the week and at the end of the week so
that we could test our knowledge and check that we were learning as the week went on.
From Moodle you can also access the University's online library so basically if you navigate
to where it says NUsearch you can then type in the title of the book you're looking for
or the particular article you're looking for whatever it may be and then you can almost
always find it online somewhere. So if you do like using textbooks to support your learning
you will still be able to use the books that are on offer in the libraries.
So now I just want to talk a little bit about how you can make the most out of online learning
and actually some of the benefits that there are for learning online rather than going
into lectures.
So the first point to mention is that it gives you so much more flexibility. So obviously
some of your webinars will be scheduled and they will be on Teams but what I found is
that the majority of my lectures have just been put onto Moodle for me to just complete
in my free time and you really can use it to your advantage to enable you to work at
the time when you feel you are most productive. Now I'm able to choose when I actually sit
down to do my lectures it means that I can take a break when I need one and I don't need
to just sit in a lecture theatre for hours on end when I'm not really taking in the information
anymore.
Doing lectures online also means that you can do them at your own pace. When I would
sit all day in a lecture theatre I would often struggle to keep up with taking notes from
the PowerPoint, also listening to what the lecturer is saying and trying to scribble
down all the information but when you do lectures at home you can just pause the recording so
if you want to listen back to something again or you haven't quite understood something
it's really easy to do that. I think it just makes the whole process of note taking so
much more efficient because you're not having to sit through the lectures once and then
come back home and then have to go through them all again to make your notes. You are
able to just do everything all in one go.
Another benefit of online learning is the ability to be able to ask questions as you
go. I have found myself asking questions on the Microsoft Teams chat feature way more
than I would have done if I was sat in a lecture. It can be very intimidating when you're in
a big lecture theatre surrounded by people and you have to put your hand up and speak
directly to the lecturer but on Microsoft Teams it's definitely a lot less intimidating
to just type your question into the chat.
To really make the most of online learning though I would definitely recommend that before
you have a webinar online that you do the reading that is required or you prepare yourself,
you look through the resources on Moodle before you join it. This is because in small group
seminars you probably will be asked some questions and you will be expected to interact and share
what you've learned so it's important that you do actually know what's going on when
you're in those webinars and it means that you're able to participate more fully if you
actually do understand the content.
Finally I think another point to make is that because you're not going into physical lectures
it can feel like you've lost a bit of that sense of community because you're not actually
mixing with all of the people and you're kind of having to communicate just through a screen.
But to combat this and make sure you join any group chats that are made. So for example
I have a group chat that I'm in that has all of the medics in our year group and it just
means that if we get stuck with anything or there's a technical issue with some of the
online learning resources then you can just pop a message into the group chat and someone
might be able to give you a solution. And it just gives you that sense of belonging,
that you are still part of the year group and you're part of the University even though
you may not be physically in the University buildings as much as you thought you would be.
So I hope you found this video helpful and if you're starting at the University of Nottingham
this year then I just want to say good luck to you all. Thank you very much for watching
this video. If you'd like to subscribe to my personal YouTube channel then it's called
Lucy Brett and you can also follow me on Instagram where I post all about university life and
medical school. So thanks for watching and I will see you again very soon. Bye!