 Hello, and welcome to this Eden NAP webinar. Thank you for attending. We have a lot of registrants, and we are still waiting for everyone to join the room. Meanwhile, feel free to introduce yourselves in the chat. Maybe tell us where you are from. And yes, we will start soon. So again, very happy to have you all with us. We are going to have around one hour session about mentors and enablers, and we will have some very interesting presentations from experts in this topic and people with a lot of experience who are willing to share with us their memories and their activities together with the students. I see people are already starting to write also in the chat. So feel free to tell us where you are from. And also, when you have questions for our panelists, feel free to use the Q&A section of the Zoom application. So my name is Vlad Mikhaelscu. I am the Eden NAP Steering Committee chair, and I come from the Polytechnica University of Timisoara, where I do a lot of research and teaching in relation to e-learning MOOCs, digital technologies, applications of the digital in culture, in entrepreneurship, and several other fields. Today's webinar is a special one because we talk about a topic which is maybe not so discussed in these types of webinars. And the Eden NAP is very happy to do this. Eden NAP is the Eden's network of academics and professionals and fights to have a better collaboration between professionals in our field and also to create some bridges of communication between various experts. So today's webinar, as I was saying, is something different from what we've done until now. And we wanted to see how to better help our fellow younger colleagues, the students, and how to better offer them possibilities for mentorship and how to enable them to reach those abilities and those competencies which we seek in them. And for this, as I said, we have pre-very good experts in this who are going to share their experiences. I'm happy to see we have participants from Croatia, from Sweden, from the United Kingdom, from Romania, and many other countries. And I encourage you, again, to introduce yourselves in the chat to tell us where you are from. Without making many more introductions, I will introduce our first panelist, our first speaker of the day. The first speaker is Antonela Poce. She currently holds the role of full professor in experimental pedagogy at the Department of Education and Humanities in the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she directs intellect. She is the head of the one-year post-graduate course of heritage education and digital technologies. Antonela is the scientific director of two post-graduate courses, annual museum education and the annual advanced studies in museum education at the University of Roma Tre. She coordinates national units within European project frameworks and she has been sharing international academic committees dealing with distance learning. She is an author of different publications of national and international relevance on the topics of innovation, assessment and use of technology in teaching and learning in the context of heritage education experiences. And for those of us who are familiar with Eden and Eden NAP, we all know and I hope you also know that Antonela is very dear member of the NAP community as where she held the position of steering committee chair until last year. So Antonela, thank you so much for being back, being back home in the NAP. Good, thanks to you for this opportunity as I was saying. It's really a pleasure to me to be with you today back home as Vlad said, it's really the best way to represent this feeling today. So yes, I'll try to share my screen in order to start my presentation that wants to be support as Vlad correctly introduced this session today, support to anyone who is interested in helping the students, especially in higher education in finding their place, their identity also in connecting to the world of labor, so the workplace. So we have been working as a group, as Vlad told you, I'm now working at the University of Modern Age Emilia, Department of Education and Humanities, but I've been working for almost 20 years at the University of Roma Trem and we have been of course cooperating with this new center that I'm chairing at Modern Age Emilia, the Intellect Center, which is the center to work on the development of the enhancement, especially of cross-sectional skills and critical thinking in particular in the area of heritage education, but not only especially in technology applied in education and so innovative ways of working in education in general. Anyway, in this contribution of mine today, the reflection is focused on this link between higher education and the workplace, telling you about a pilot experience that we carried out thanks to the work of other colleagues from the University of Roma Trem, your Roma Trem University, where I used to be, Maria Rosaria Re, Carlo De Medio, Mara Valente, Alessandra Norgini. I think that those who are familiar with Eden already knows those names who are a part of the group and we will work together more and more openly. Anyway, what did we focus on, especially critical thinking as a place of linking between the workplace and higher education? It's really important to focus on critical thinking in my view, because as many sources say, and you can read it here, it is shared in many, many international documents that critical thinking skills are more and more considered by voter for human and social progress in terms of course of innovation, economic and knowledge growth and so on and so forth. The other aspect related to the importance of critical thinking is that, of course, being good thinkers, we are also active and autonomous citizens, so we really can use our skills and our way of contributing to society. And this is absolutely important. So as a Center for Museum Studies based in Roma Trai University, so let's say last year to be very simple, we worked on a different way of offering certain modules, also taking into consideration the need we had at the time to face a dramatic change when COVID-19 firstly appeared and we had to go online from one day to the other. So taking this into consideration as a framework, we worked on this pilot experience trying to enhance certain kind of activities related to analyzing, interpreting, evaluating and finding solutions through specific work-based activities. For this reason, we involved different stakeholders, different partners in our teaching and learning offer that were called to be part of the organization of teaching and learning and that contributed directly with specific activities that were designed taking into consideration the need to support critical thinking skills and the need to match also what these kind of partners that were mainly companies working in the field of education and heritage education in particular were asked to do. We worked on different research questions as you can see here and so I'll report about what we found related to this kind of research questions especially related to the student critical thinking indicators levels in this kind of teaching and learning activities. So the trend that we could identify through specific assessment and evaluation tools what is this critical thinking level perceived by the students themselves and which kind of other cross-sectional skills were supported through this kind of work-based activities. How the online activities including of course assignments and meetings with this kind of educational professionals could improve levels of critical thinking skills. Actually in this contribution, in this pilot activity participants were about 125 as you can see here from two different modules two different courses. One as you can see was one group was just represented by seven students but the other main group was made by 118 students from the first year of the course research methodology in education. Which kind of learning activities we worked on together with these stakeholders problem solving, of course dissertations or dissertation digital storytelling analysis and critical reflection. We had actually different meetings with different experts, I would say experts but as I said they were actually stakeholders, partners in our university activities and I'll give you some example but I don't want to spend too much time on that anyway you can see here the kind of topic and the activity that students were involved in for instance, building relationship through heritage was an activity where students were asked to work on specific case study analysis and then they had to report orally about what they found. Other kind of activities directly related to critical thinking development can be reported in this one an inquiry approach to museum education where students were to reflect and work together in groups on the inquirements related to the restoration of Palmyra site after the attack and the analysis of different scientific articles and then report again about their findings. Anyway, I think that it's important to focus on what we did collecting data related to the above activities especially those related to the evaluation phases. As I said, we tried to work on different kind of assessment tools of course, we worked on critical thinking assessment during the modules but also at the end of the activities we asked for the filling in of a questionnaire aimed at assessing their students' perception of transfers or competencies requirement after the activity. The tools were mainly true the first one is critical thinking evaluation rubric that we've been using for different activities that is being already tested and validated and is composed by six macro indicators. You have here a picture of the rubric so basic linguistic skills, justification, recommendation, relevance, importance, critical evaluation, innovation, novelty, a series of indicators, descriptors and marks. The second tool instead was another questionnaire actually this was actually a questionnaire not a rubric and it was organized as you can see here on different sections evaluation of the course, evaluation of the online meetings with stakeholders and the activity actually and the activity related to these meetings professional skills, self-assessment and cross-sectional terms of skills self-assessment through mainly legal scale options or multiple choice. Some data I'll go very briefly because I don't want to steal time but anyway just to tell you that regarding the quality of this kind of interactive meetings we can say that 56% of the participating students considers the activity absolutely good assigning the maximum score of five to the tools used and also to the organization of the meetings the videos, the PDFs, the slides, the materials that were given during these activities the language used by the stakeholders slash lectures is defined as extremely clear for 45.6% of the students and 22.4% of participants assign a score of five so the way this kind of meetings was organized was absolutely appreciated as you can see also from this graphic if we go to self-assessment of the most simulated transversal skills we see that there's great support related to the idea that through this work they could develop collaboration, creativity, critical thinking instead problem-solving and innovation were the least selected and this is something on which we need to reflect and work on you have a graphic that mainly reproduces what I said and regarding critical thinking skills we can say that there's a good improvement in fact both the courses and according also to the indexes that we calculated related to statistics significance of the evaluations we can say that there's always an improvement from the first to the last activity and also standard deviation is supporting involve the groups of course one was a very small group but what is interesting is of course the larger group where we worked together as you can see here the distribution of the scores is really encouraging so to conclude we can say that this pilot experience of course has a large room for improvement but it presents some important indications first of all for the implementation of certain kind of online learning paths what we realized really was that notwithstanding the difficulty at the very beginning in this kind of adaptation from a mixed blended learning course actually mainly online course the improvement in the quality but also in the appreciation and in certain important development attitudes and skills in the students was really relevant and important especially if we manage involving those who are directly involved in the workplace and that should be more and more involved in higher education design for learning but for enhancement of quality that's my main thought regarding these kind of partnerships and of course the continuous instructional learning design is needed but in this kind of teamwork project so I think that's all for me now and I'm here available for any questions now and as you prefer thank you so much very interesting presentation and research as always for me I think the most intriguing aspect is the fact that for the self-assessment of most stimulated transversal skills we have collaboration and creativity there in the top but then we have innovation at the bottom I think the students don't trust themselves too much in fact that's my thought in fact because actually we don't have time but if you're interested I can send you also some examples of what they produced actually they were innovative and so because creativity and innovation are very close but in their self-assessment they couldn't understand how much they were innovative maybe also the concept the idea of innovation is not so clear sometimes and we have one question in the chat also a very quick question from Uwe Matias Richter a research question looking at the link between learning on the course and the workplace applying learning to practice and critical thinking so let me get that looking can you repeat that from Uwe Matias Richter was there a research question looking at the link between learning on the course and the workplace applying learning to practice and critical thinking no actually but that's a very good suggestion Uwe and we'll as I said with that was a start but we really need to improve our ways of also assessing of self-assessing by the students their work so we'll introduce that because of course many issues were in a way implied but not so open so that's a very interesting point thank you thank you Antonela we will see if maybe participants have more questions after we finish absolutely yes yes yes and I encourage attendees to write their questions in the Q&A section and also people who are watching on YouTube you can write in the chat and we will answer here live we move now to the second speaker of the day second panelist and it is a great honour for me to introduce for the first time in an Eden webinar Julia Gonzalez-Ferreras who was awarded the Bo Gregersen award in 2011 for elaborating designing and coordinating the innovative project tuning educational structures in the world together with Robert Wagenar based on close cooperation of hundreds of academics from Europe and around the world tuning has contributed to the modernisation of higher education by developing an approach for designing and implementing curricula using the student-centred approach and the concept of key competencies that comes as focal points as I said a great honour Julia please the floor is yours thank you, thank you very much it is a pleasure to be with you my first time here in Eden even though I know about it you are too famous to be ignored so anyhow what I have done in this case is a reflection on mentoring and the importance of that with in relation to the students so if I will share my presentation I think somebody was asking for a full yeah a full screen okay so what I'm going to talk about is a reflection that brought us to prepare something which is a new project on actually assessment of competencies with the students but that's what I wanted to say today is something about what we have learned in relation to mentoring during this last period what may be implicit but do not always happen in learner-centred activities then competence-based learning a reflection on the critical dimension and then some good practices I think that one of the things that we have learned during this pandemic time is that this type of learning is very important and also the beauty of linking both distance learning with the presence of the professor with the presence of the mentor here in Edem you have been pioneer of quality and I think it is very important to keep this idea in mind in relation to the future the importance of presence and proximity and I know that that can happen very often also through distant learning encounter but the importance of following the student this is the mentoring this old tool that touches the essence of learning I was considering how important it is for us as teachers to have a little bit carried away this is something that happens to me and I was reflecting and I want to share with you my reflections in the learner-centred learning I think it is very important the awareness of the capacities of the students and the only way of really getting to know the capacities by the close proximity the intense interaction with them whichever format it is the only way I think that we have of knowing the style of learning because I take mentoring in the straightforward sense and the mentoring is really knowing their capacities their style of learning, their difficulties their strengths and to be able to have to offer some kind of contrast in the process well in the title the idea was to help the students to get the competences and the competence based knowing the objective I wonder how often the students are really knowing the target of where they are going this is a reflection that they often do in the projects I am running with at the moment I am running in several of them and it is very important to be able to discover where they have understood where we are going because the mentoring could start really from knowing the objective knowing where we go the other aspect would be facilitating the road and working together with them and I think that going back to this competence based situation that we do, I think that all these issues would be very important relate to working with them to be able to understand where they are and so on now in the project we are doing in order to in other fields but we are doing teacher training education and looking at the different dimensions imagine that we feel that it is important for the teacher we came across and we emphasised very strongly the dimension of learner empowerment potential and creativity the previous speaker Antonella was talking about the strength in the thinking the critical thinking which we are all fascinated and see the importance and also when we think about the types of particular types of thinking creative thinking is related is another aspect in a way of critical thinking there again we were discussing of the strength the creating and focalising in the empowerment of the learner we are developing a number of indicators for this sketch which would be obviously with knowledge skills and wider competences situations we find actually that the whole issue of wider competences sometimes is better to start with in order to go back and think what kind of knowledge do they need for that but supporting the learner the holistic growth and development is something that in our capacity as mentors as first daters is very important to develop they are the second element that we were discovering and discussing is learner self-esteem and confidence I am now working with the students who are at the university and also we are developing non-formal learning for those students the capacity or the moment that they lose their esteem and confidence is really an important element of breaking the whole system of their capacity obtaining and gaining capacity in that of course the learner motivation and resilience this is another element that would be very relevant to see what type of knowledge what type of skills would be supporting this learning and finally obviously the whole aspect of tutoring how we carry out the tutoring and how they as teachers are able to follow that with the students the whole reflection on the impact or the importance of how we develop this capacity both as university teachers and students or professionals developing student teachers or people who will be future teachers of education would be very relevant I was just thinking of good practices that I think we would have to emphasise and the issue of giving feedback to people knowing exactly how many times we actually do this practice in the development of encouraging the essence of the things that are beginning to appear in their work or making them feel where they have actually gone on a different track and another very good practice is the whole issue of partnership with the students developing this situation where we work together with them I wanted to comment something about ASSE which I think is a very interesting project out of the ones we are doing which is incorporating students in learning centre in the students there a whole revolution is taking place in the universities which are participating in Latin America because in the project something that was very revolutionary and the commission would hardly allow us to do which is incorporating students into the whole process of development of learning what I hear the reports that I hear is that the universities are completely mobilised by the fact of having a partnership between the students and professors learning how to teach or learning how to give a better presentation or a better track to get the competence and another aspect that I wanted to mention in terms of good practices is learners as mentors and enablers I think they are again the capacity for student peer learning is a good practice that is extremely relevant I'm sure that you all practice it but I think it's worth mentioning it's worth reflecting as something to be not to forget it to be incorporated and obviously in the teacher mentorship which is in a way what I could see that you develop then reflecting or in conclusion I was just thinking looking back on my personal life it is the first time that I talk about it thinking of my personal experience I have never had more tutors in my life that I had when I was writing my PhD at Oxford University I had a model tutor I had a supervisor I had a team group of colleagues there was a very strong and the undergraduates also had a very high level of tutorship and what I learned from that period and I carried through my life is that the capacity to make the other person feel that their ideas are important that the capacity to create to innovate to think out of the box is important and perhaps it is an atmosphere or it was an atmosphere in which made everyone they felt very much encouraged to feel that things were possible now sometimes in some of the systems that I have been looking at before and after it I see that the mentorship to the students is rather rushed is not giving enough time potential and I just wanted to bring to the colleagues here this concern because I believe that this capacity or this tool is very relevant both in terms of competence based learning and in a student or learner center learning and also in the whole process of growth of our people now after the pandemic I think that probably we will revise our practices and the time given to different tools different practices and I thought I was very interested in this mentorship and facilitation that was put in front of me by Alfredo and say well think about it and I was interested to develop to encourage and to have the feeling that there is a very strong element there in the empowerment of our youth that can, should, must be done through our mentoring practices and through our mentoring capacity because their empowerment is very much the future and their empowerment really can bring them to fulfill what they wanted to have the needs of society looking at their training and development from whichever angle thank you very much and I just want to offer to you this reflection and if there is any comment I will be pleased to listen to it or to answer, thank you thank you so much Julia for this very warm presentation and for sharing your experience and also these personal memories which you shared with us I think Alfredo wants to ask a question I saw you unmuted I have one question for you you mentioned as a good practice and we know good feedback is easy to be given and therefore we forget it many times with our students we are mentoring but I was wondering if you can just share your approach on how to best give the bad feedback when students fail to accomplish the objectives we set for them and how is best to do that in order for them to still be motivated to continue to work this is an excellent question because it is a hard one but sometimes they can come to that conclusion themselves when you are reflecting and they can almost show the road of where they are they actually have thought about what they have done what they have presented I think that they are ways in which if you know the track they are going they know where they are, their learning style it would be very important to show them what they have done so this I think it would be much more if you know them on the potential that they have, that they could reach but they haven't reached if they have done a huge effort maybe the emphasis would be much more on the effort and how far they have got but there is still a little bit to go of the road you have mentioned the word being motivated and I think that being motivated is a very important element that must be kept and I think that saying this is as far as we have got perhaps you can emphasise either the effort or what little is still to be done how far the potential that this person can have there are certain elements that can be brought in the counterbalance of obviously mentioning and telling him or her very clearly what should be done and perhaps which route should be taken in order to get there and that is a very interesting question Thank you and that was a very interesting answer and a good approach and I encourage our colleagues who are attending to try to follow that advice you gave if any other participants want to ask questions to Julia or to Antonella or to Alfredo please feel free to do so in the chat or in the Q&A section at the end of the session I move now to the next speaker and this is a good colleague of mine from the Ida Knapp steering committee also an Ida executive committee member and an Ida senior fellow Alfredo Soiro from the University of Porto Portugal Alfredo holds a degree in civil engineering from the University of Porto, a PhD from the University of Florida who is part of our continuing education he was a founding member of EU SEN European University C Network RECLA and AOPEC many organizations related to education and universities his positions held were the Vice Presidency of EU SEN Vice Presidency of CEP, President of IACEE and many others his main interests are engineering education, continuing education and learning focusing on networking, international cooperation and student evaluation without further ado Alfredo please share your experience with us Yes I'll try, thank you very much for the kind words I'm a little bit concerned that I may be somehow duplicating the presentation of some of the topics I'm presenting because in fact I'll take this last remark from trying to put it sorry I don't know how to get out from here so I'll stop sharing and keep talking so I'll keep talking and then going back to where I was but the point is that the motivation is very important especially when we're talking about assessment which is a very important perspective of the students position in terms of making their own come on, I cannot see one moment I think I'm doing it Sorry for the delay and this question of motivation is related to the assessment and something that worries very much but goes in line with what Antonella said in the IACEE study and with the addition of mentoring and tutoring students and what I'm presenting for those who know me, I'd like to present things that I've been involved so that's what I'll do, I'll present four case studies I'll start from the last one which is in this case that it's called digital immigrant survival piece it is a project where we have 15 modules to help people that are not comfortable with the digital tools and the digital transformation of the communication and other aspects of life and one of the things that was agreed by the partners was to have this mandala, let's say this way of somehow understanding their own skills, so we have several degrees of domain of the skills we are handling it and we are using this mandala before each participant uses each one of the modules and afterwards so we had a perception not only we, those that are somehow mentoring the courses that are being handled by the learners but especially each one of the learners that is using this, it's where they are and where they feel they have progressed after attending the module, we are going to present this project in the synergy session of the next Seed and Conference in Madrid on the 22 to 25 of June this month, it's virtual and maybe you can attend and know a little bit more about this experience, so this is something that it's trying to help each learner to conduct their own efforts to acquire some competences in certain areas that are defined in this 15 modules. Now a second case is the tuning experience, we did it with Asia and it is this tuning with Asia, it was we're going to have a second edition and Julia probably knows more about this than me but what happened was that I was working on the civil engineering program and they invited me to attend a two day seminar in the University of Malaysia University of Sains in Penang it was interesting because it's a school where the programs are already based on outcomes based education so here is a list of the program outcomes for civil engineers I think you are interested in knowing in detail what they mean etc but they have it and the approach they have for other courses is the same, but what is interesting that I wanted to show you is this they have a platform that is called CODIS and this platform analyzes the progression of each student towards this program outcomes here is a sample it was sent by my colleague professor Ahmad but here is a sample of a student that has let's say placed in the middle of the population apparently according to the GPA and you see the progression and the intended let's say program outcomes attainment and their overview of the situation and the definition in which program outcomes they probably need to intervene so that's why this question of mentoring and enabling is very important in terms of making them happy, I always remember a situation where at least they know what they are for, they have the program outcomes and they know for which reason they are studied and this is interesting because they follow each student regularly and I think that every week I don't remember but they follow and they control their progress towards the program outcomes here is something that I wanted to show you that in this picture on the left the majority are women I don't know if this is a consequence but I don't think so it's an approach of the school and I'm very surprised to see so many women involved in education in this case in engineering education the third case and I'm speaking quickly because I'm just presenting the case studies that you may like to study later is this one that is on vocational education and training school, I'm an expert in Portugal, the ECAVET ECAVET is European Quality Assurance Education and Training and they have audits to have the label ECAVET and this is from one of the schools that I visit and as you can see they also have the same approach they have a platform where they analyze the behavior of each of their students and there are more screens and more perspectives on this platform but this is the usual and it's interesting that they have this denomination for monitoring the progress of the schools in Portuguese what you have in the title is the methodology from dating to marriage and marriage means to motivate the students to get involved in what they are learning and with the school and with the teachers it's a very interesting process on a vocational, like I said, on a vet school but higher education can learn a lot from this approach they have here different perspectives from evaluation to the chronogram of the activities their intended learning outcomes and competencies and reports from the teachers it's a very interesting school because they have two psychologists with the school to also help the progress of their students and also here again there's the platform that is called dating where they monitor the progress of each student not only towards the program outcomes but basically with their behavior their participation, their involvement their relationship with the other it's a very detailed intervention in the progress of the learning for each one of the students with this intervention from all of those involved when necessary and properly to try to make the learning much smoother and effective another, and this is the last case study this is where I'm involved this is one that I've been working the last years which is the use of ePortfolios where I use this with the students from the last year, graduating students they are between 21 and 23 years old but I think that it can be used in other levels and what it's done here with the ePortfolios is that they know for each one of the working weeks what are intended learning outcomes and they make a weekly report on the portfolio with what they think they acquire but what happens, and this again goes in line with what Antonella and Julia said that goes with the individual discussion with me, for each student each one of them talks with me when they are there sometimes they are not so I'll talk in the following week but talking about what they reported their difficulties have they learned what they demanded, what they didn't like or if not didn't like but they didn't understand well and how I can help them achieve the intended learning outcomes of course with the pandemic in this last year some of these discussions are virtual, personally except the bodily language of the students I think this communication was done virtually and it worked well but it's always better to have a face to face there's this look in the eyes of each other and like I said the bodily language which sometimes speaks more than many words and like I said this is the idea that it's behind this mentoring or tutoring and formative assessment that it's done just the last slide which goes in line with that one I said and I and Julia that assessment in English comes from the Latin verb acideric which means to sit with and I think that we are using a lot of assessment modes that don't provide possibilities for this mentoring and tutoring and adapting to each learner so this question of sitting with a learner is something that we have to consider like it's mentioned here by the quote that I placed here and we have to sit with the students and learn what they think, what's happening how can we help them and not how do I say treat them as numbers I had here another quote from a PhD student of mine that did a PhD precisely on assessment of students and she once turned to me and said well you know the student is a person not a number I don't know why she told me that it's right and we have to treat them as persons and we have to sit with them so this question of mentoring and enabling I think it's only possible with the individual sitting with each one of the learners I don't think one size fits all which is a danger of the online teaching right now we concede more than all some of us consider that one size fits all and one format will work for everyone so this is it and I'm stop sharing my screen so there are questions thank you Alfredo this was very interesting especially since we saw an approach in another part of the world so we can make the specific application to Asia so we can make maybe some comparisons in our heads there is a technical question for you in the Q&A and I will kindly ask you to answer that in typing about data and platforms but I have one question for you because you mentioned about the individual discussions with students and also I agree that the students are persons not numbers they try to do what the exact thing that you suggest however I am wondering what would be the best solution for scaling and if scaling can be done because we have colleagues who have 100, 150, 200 students how can they manage to mentor everyone with this individual approach let's put it this way I don't have an answer that it's black and white what I'm thinking is that when you deal with students you have many students you also have probably many teachers and many hours in your working schedule so it's really a question of planning your time I have about between 40 and 50 students and I can talk with them every week because I just how do I say just use the time of the classes we have a system in Portugal that it's not very common around the world but I use the practical schedules to talk with them and when we were having the pandemic we would schedule the time it's this one and that one but I think the results are more rewarding if you have 100 students I don't know it depends on the internal regulation but that is generally proportional to the work schedule so the hours you are assigned to teach and you just have to do it in accordance with your logistics and your regulations or if it cannot be done at least you should try if you don't meet with them every week I don't know but I'll type the answer the question is interesting what data do they use in the COPS platform to monitor progress is that they make regular examinations with the homeworks and the quizzes and that's how they verify the progression in terms of the program outcomes and they have an office that it's only dedicated to assessment for instance no professor can deliver an exam without the overview of this office that is in charge of verifying what is done and according to the policy or strategy evaluating the program outcome thank you for answering both questions now we still have some time to have a group discussion Antonina raised her hand on the scaling question you read my mind I wanted to add something to what Alfredo said actually in my experience especially in Italian universities we normally have very large classes and during this last lockdown I had the opportunity to work with very large classes and also the report that I presented related to some of the classes we had last year with large, large classes what I found out is that if you manage do project work with the students organizing them in different groups there's also a peer to peer mentoring system that comes in and motivation is really supported and actually especially this last term many students told me that not having the opportunity to go to the university and meet other people especially first years of the courses through this kind of online working in groups they had the opportunity to meet other students to exchange ideas to create groups that were able also to cooperate on other subjects I think that is not so easy even when you go face to face because sometimes you in large classes especially even if you sit close to someone and maybe you have some words with someone close to you but then that's it instead working together in groups online really help them and actually they use different kind of channels they use of course the teams that was the platform given by the university but they also cooperated through different channels so they met with WhatsApp or other kind of interactive tools so it's possible thank you Antonella I loved most the idea of peer mentoring I think that's great I also saw that sometimes this works in a miraculous way sometimes from people you don't expect but they step up and yeah exactly that's true we have some more questions and I would like first to read the question from Diana Andone is there a good approach to blend professional and personal mentoring how personal can you get as a mentor with your students and I saw that Antonella already answered this I would ask Julia to also answer this so how personal can we get as mentors with our students this is very difficult to draw a line but I think that we have a task with them which is to bring them to a particular profile to a particular personal development and I think that there is a task and going beyond that unless they come along with a question or a comment I don't think we should interfere in their lives however I think that it is important to know the difficulties they go through the situations where they can be which can be making it difficult I was very interested with this comment by both Alfredo I think he has a great capacity to come closer to the students I must admit that he has a capacity to design because I think there is a lot of creativity in the way we design the lessons of the classes in such a way that for example Antonella was talking about group mentoring in a way they are mentoring each other and they come up, my experience they come up much more prepared to be mentor at the level of the teacher because there are different levels they have been discussing each other and filling up as far as they could go together then they come up with questions and they will be much more open to see further stages of progress and ask the tutor for that but in relation to the question I think that it is a very delicate line and it is only knowing we have a task, we have a of bringing them, developing them as people and particularly in the sense of their capacity to reach what we promise at the level of the university and that is our task and I think that the respect and engagement with them has their two sides of the same line but I can imagine this setting of diverse class and groups very often I have done lots of groups during the classroom but as Santorella says it is a very good moment to find where they are how they go Thank you for this indeed it is a very delicate question, I thank Diana for this question and I think the answer will differ from culture to culture politically correctness is different understood in various cultures and this is a challenge indeed Alfredo would you also like to answer this question about the blending professional and personal approaches Microphone please Alfredo Let me put it this way I try to be less personal as possible I think that because we all have different lives we all have different personalities I am an engineer so I am sorry I want to have this problem solved of the competences etc so I concentrate on that that is my approach but sometimes I was dean of studies and I had to deal with personal situations but during the mentoring I tried to concentrate on the personal not on the personal but on the professional and like Julia said it is a very thin line so my mind is always trying to get away from the personal let me tell you a story I think everyone here started teaching we just applied for being a teacher at university sometimes even without doing the PhD and we started learning without a net and when I started I had a professor and she was very competent as a teacher etc but when we were getting grades and we did it all in a group she always said oh this boy is so kind, so educated we cannot give him that grade and these things are, how do I say mark me a lot because we were giving grades not as a function of the person but a function of the other and it was an approach that some some teachers still have I have old students of mine that when they are teachers they have this personal approach but it's not fair because I know that each one of the students is the first, that's okay but as a teacher when we are evaluating and that's what I talked about we should concentrate on the outputs so that is my recommendation that if I can say just a word it's a way to honor and respect the students first of all and our roles as teachers as you said, especially whether in European or area we are not trained especially to be good assessors and this is an issue actually we should really work on that with the young generations because that is essential and so doing we should also teach our students how to to consider that the more the objective assessment and the better for them for them and for their lives Thank you I think also Julia wanted to jump in if I saw correctly just a very quick comment because I was thinking I'm very happy with both Antonella and Alfredo's comment because I think we have to have a guiding line of where we are and what is her purpose there but no, I just wanted to comment that in terms of this following up the students there is a moment which I think it is particularly relevant which is first year I think that we didn't mention it and I think I wanted to make just a little gap saying that we are doing some research on first year performances and sometimes it's just lack of specific competences on the part of the students or the professors that actually end up with great failures and people who could do very well never get to that because there is a mismatch there in terms of competences like time management and issues that are completely ways of studies, methodology that they jump from a particular system to another and then there I think I feel that we should be more trained particularly the teachers who are in first year more prepared to take these elements which are really how to perform better their time, what to do best the use of the time, the way of approaching things the whole system that they need to somehow sit with them I like your story because it is there that we can lose them and it is a real pity I will be even bolder and say why stop at first years why don't we go to secondary education and start from there we can go that far and we can continue because there is another moment that Antonella was somehow touching which is when they leave university and sort of that kind of how best they can use their training into their professional life so there are moments I think that even though they may be throughout but there are moments in which the mentoring or the following up or the sitting up with them is particularly relevant Thank you I think thank you all for the patience I know we are a little bit late but I saw that there were several questions on the same topic and I would like to have a short answer in a few words from all three of you so the question is related of how can we motivate students now in the digital environment and in the online course how can we make them pay attention and be motivated to see through our courses I don't know what's the case for the few of you but our students we try to beg them to open their camera so we teach dark screens and maybe some of them open their cameras but it's very challenging even if it's interactive and they sometimes start their microphones you don't know exactly what they are doing a very good very short example what would you do best for them to be motivated and in this online environment we start in whichever order you want I can start if you want but just to tell you about my experience I've seen that of course involvement if the first keyword so you need to maybe and actually that's what I did for all this last term give them some materials in advance ask them to work with specific questions on the materials you give and then ask them to present their work during the online meeting but you need to and this is closely connected to assessment because they are motivated and involved and participate if you reward them some way marking their work and keeping that production that mark for their final mark this proved to be actually essential even if it's a small part of the old grade that they will get in the end but they feel really motivated and they really participate and actually I can tell you that during this last term they really were I was impressed actually because with large classes with different groups involved anyway they all wanted to reach the end and to be productive but I want to steal more time Thank you Antonella Julia? I can follow because it follows very closely I was just thinking which are the activities that are more exciting where I get we have got more motivation and participation and it is when you divide it into teams the results and particularly when there are questions which are being asked from a team to another one because otherwise they just present this is our experience and you run the risk that they disappear but if they have another element afterwards of actually having to answer a question that somebody else has presented then they have to listen to what is going on with the other people they are interested in what other people are doing but sometimes it grows more the interest grows highest if there is a further element that they have to ask each other and then they have some kind of being but the other people have said and they have to answer it in a different way and they have a recession period bringing another kind of elements because they are more prepared and jointly engaged I think the word engaged is very clear Thank you Julia Alfredo? My notion after all these years is that if a student doesn't want to learn he will never learn it doesn't matter what we do you can sing, you can do whatever you want he doesn't want to learn he will never learn but let me give you an example that I do with my students it's on construction management the tactics for certain subjects it's a question of role playing some of them are construction owners some others are the construction workers some others are the construction engineers and I put them a problem and they decide what to do with the discussions among them it's interesting because when you give them time to prepare for this discussion they have very good let's say solutions from each one of them so that's what I do it's role playing but with a concrete problem Thank you Alfredo thank you all for very interesting answers and for very good examples I hope and I believe that we managed you managed to inspire our colleagues to be better in mentoring their students and also to do the peer mentoring between each other not only to let the students do that thank you again for all of you for attending and thank you to our three great speakers for accepting to present today and for sharing your experiences Thanks to you really for showing up at the Eden event so please to meet you Julian we hope to see you at other events for Eden as well let me tell you something in person she's much more funnier and interesting than on a virtual well let's hope we can start to meet again face to face Thank you Bye bye safe everyone Bye