 Those of you who don't know me, my name is Mark Brown. I'm the moderator for today's webinar. I serve currently as Eden's Treasurer and my day job is Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning, based at Dublin City University in Ireland. This is the third webinar in our current Eden webinar series under the umbrella theme of time for action shaping higher education 4.0. We've had a few questions of what we mean by higher education 4.0 and it's a little bit of a play on industry 4.0. We can debate whether in fact, there is such a thing as higher education or just education 4.0 more generally, but that's perhaps for another day because the particular topic we're going to be focusing on today is teaching after the storm, reimagining the traditional lecture. Before I say more about the topic and introduce today's panel, just for those of you who have just arrived and I see the numbers are still going up, a couple of housekeeping things, please do introduce yourself in the chat, post comments and so on. Note that today's webinar is being recorded so it will be available if you have to leave. We appreciate sometimes it's hard to be able to be attending the whole session so that will be available within days of the webinar and I think that's probably everything you need to know. Other than one last thing is even as one of Europe's leading professional bodies and supporting open online, e-learning, distance learning is celebrating its 30th year this year and I should flag to you that our annual conferences in June, it's being hosted in Madrid but it's obviously virtual online so there's a little advertisement for you to check that out, we'll put a link in the chat box. There's still even an opportunity probably to contribute in one way or another. So without further ado, I'm just conscious of time, let me introduce today's panel to you. I'm actually going to give them a chance to say a little bit about themselves. I don't like reading too much of their bios because that's too much of me and a bit boring hearing it from me. It's much better I think to hear it in the flesh from our panel members. So I'm delighted firstly to introduce my colleague from Dublin City University and the Institute of Education and that's Anne-Marie Farrell. So welcome Anne-Marie. Thank you. Secondly today we have all the way from Colton University in Canada where I think it's still relatively early in the morning if I'm correct. Pleased to welcome David Hornsby and we'll hear from David shortly. Next, and this is in no particular order for the panel because I think we're going to mix this up over the course of the discussion. I'm pleased to introduce Valencia Dijak. Dijak, if I might have not... Oh, good to hear. Thank you. From the University of Zagreb. She has a very distinguished career having, I think we might hear a little more about this, having been the Croatian Minister for Science and Education. So we're pleased to have you here with us. And then finally, delighted to welcome a good colleague from the University of South Africa, Dr Paul Prinslow. Paul's also an Eden Fellow, so he's a very good friend of Eden and we're pleased to have you here to make up the Canadian and South African contingent. You could say even a bit of a Southern Hemisphere contingent because those of you who don't know my background, I'm originally from New Zealand. So we can say we're covering the whole world. At this stage, perhaps I'll ask Anne-Marie just to say a little bit about your background so people know where you're coming from and your particular interests. OK. So, as Mark said, my name is Anne-Marie and I work in Dublin City University. And I originally trained as a primary school teacher and then I worked at primary level for a number of years, then at post-primary level here in Ireland. And I also worked in special schools. So I had a fair bit of background in terms of teaching and learning in those contexts. And I moved into higher education 20 years ago this September, working initially, I work in teacher education and have done for the last 20 years, originally in a college of education. And now, over the last four years, we were incorporated into a university context. And Mark asked me to mention something that maybe wouldn't necessarily be findable online or on my bio. So my revelation is that I'm a bit of a dup and out-of-ballroom dancing. I can do quite a good jive, rock and roll, waltz, and a few things like that. Unfortunately Irish men are great at dancing. So that's a bit of a challenge. But that's my claim to fame. Well, thanks very much, Anne-Marie, for that and your secret is safe with me. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not going to expose that to my colleagues or your colleagues. Let's go with the same order that we were talking. So next up, Valencia. So I think that it is a pronunciation is always a problem when you have to pronounce creation names. So my name is Blaženka, but thank you, Mark, for introduction. It's great. Let me greet all of you, panelists and participants, especially because I'm really proud because I can see a lot of people from Croatia in chat sending greetings. That's good. I really love it because I think it's a great topic that we are going to discuss today. So I'm a professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Organization and Informatics. My PhD is in mathematics. So at the beginning, I developed a new geometry, so-called pseudo Galilean geometry, but I'm not going to talk about it today. Don't be afraid. But I work quite a lot on the topic of education, strategic planning in education, high education, decision-making, but also e-learning, all sorts of learning analytics because I'm a mathematician, so it's rather close to me. And as Mark said, I was a minister of science and education. I just finished my term a couple of months ago, and now I'm back at university. And I'm really enjoying my time back, research and teaching. I'm also teaching large classes. I have classes that are larger than 300 students. So I'm experienced in that area. In the meantime, when I have time, I really love watching some crime series on TV because it relaxes me. And it's really something that I'm not so proud of. But during pandemics, it's much more accessible than as Marie said, dancing. So thank you very much. Paul, we'll come to you now. Hi there, I'm Paul Brinslow. I'm a research professor in open business learning. I'm situated in the Department of Business Management in the College of Economic and Management Sciences at UNISA. And maybe not everyone knows, but UNISA is the oldest business education provider in the world. We were founded in 1873. And currently we have about 380,000 students, with some of our courses having 14,000 students per semester. So, Brezinka, 300 students sounds like heaven to me. One thing that many people don't know about me, I used to run ultra-marathons. Luckily, I stopped and I was still alive. And I completed what they call the ultimate human race. It's a comrades marathon in South Africa. It is only 89 kilometers long. And I managed to run it twice. And I'm still very proud of it. Thank you, Mark, and thanks for being here. Well, there you go, Paul. I didn't know that about you. So thanks for sharing that. And David. Thanks. Thanks very much, Mark, and greetings, everybody. My name is David Hornsby. I'm the Associate Vice President for Teaching and Learning at Carleton University. I'm also a Professor of International Affairs at the Norman Patterson School. So I like to play in different spaces. And teaching and learning is where I'm working. At the moment I have a particular passion for large class teaching, which actually got started, funny enough, in South Africa at Witt's University, where Paul and I became Twitter buddies very shortly after I think we both caught into Twitter was a thing. And I noticed that there's a bunch of people here logging on from South Africa. So a big hazard to everybody and happy Africa Day. One thing that people don't know about me is that I'm actually, as well as a social scientist, also a published scientist. Having in an earlier incarnation of my career been able, had the fortune of working in a biomedical sciences space on the hormone relaxin' and its effects on, get this, testicular descent. So from testicular descent to large class teaching, here we are. Well, that's a, how can I capture, how can I beat that with it? By sort of sharing something you may not know about me. Well, some of my closer colleagues know that I'm colorblind. So I see the world slightly differently than others when I select to, but no, it's quite common in males, but quite rare in women and my mother was colorblind. So women have the dominant gene. Folks, let's get our teeth into the discussion. I almost said debate, it might be a bit of a debate. We'll see how the panel, what perspective they take on. Our opening question, which is really, is the lecture dead? The traditional lecture dead, it's a bit provocative. Will the traditional lecture format be a casualty in the efforts to build back better, to sort of borrow some of the language that's used right now? It's certainly the case that one of the biggest challenges we faced when we had to quickly move to so-called emergency remote teaching was how to teach large classes effectively. And there's been certainly a reasonable amount written and I know Anne-Marie's published a report that we'll share with you on that very topic. So what we're really here to think about today is looking to the future and drawing on the experience and reflections over the last 12 months or more to see whether or not a lecture is going to be a format that we continue in, shall we say, Education 4.0. So to kick things off in that sort of response to the question, we do have a short poll. We don't want to take too long on this but we are interested and I know the panel is interested in seeing what our participants think. So let me see if I can just launch this poll. It's one simple question for you. Hopefully you've got that up there now. I'll read it for those of you who might that be a bit small in the text. As we look to the future and attempt to design more engaging learning experiences for our students, I believe the traditional lecture is dead. It's deliberately written in the language and in the affirmative. So let's see. We're seeing the responses coming through here. We'll share these shortly. Just give people a chance to engage in that simple poll. A few more seconds, maybe 10 seconds to give you your ideas, your thoughts and at the same time, by all means, put your response if you want to add a little more detail to why you answered in a certain way in the chat box. Okay, I'll close it off on that note and end the poll and let's have a look at the results. You're able to see those? Good, the panel's nodding. So actually, I think we've got a quite a split group really in response to what is a very, very forceful and black and white sort of question. So maybe it's not surprising most people, it seems, when I say most, we don't have a majority but the largest responses in the not sure category. But perhaps that's a little bit more polled than I thought it would be in terms of the various options. And without any further ado, I'll stop sharing the poll and Annemarie, I'm gonna give you the first chance since you're a DCU colleague to see what your responses to the question. The floor is yours as such. Thank you. Well, I think, as you know, I'm a teacher in higher education, but I'm also currently a student in higher education. I'm doing my doctorate in Sheffield University. And I think this is probably my fifth or sixth higher education course that I've become a student on over the last 35 years. And across those years as a student, in my very first undergraduate program, I would have called every single session I went to a lecture, regardless of size, what it was about, what structure of it was, they were all lectures. So I suppose one of the things when you ask a question like that is what do people understand by that word? Do they believe it to be a word that infers that the teacher is talking at their students while the students sit passively in the class without a two-way communication? Is it about those really big classes? And if so, what do we mean? Or how do we quantify big? Or is it any class in higher education? Like, you know, people call me a lecturer, regardless of whether I have, you know, five people in a class or 450 in a class. So I think the word is a bit laden with beliefs and assumptions. And in terms of change after what's happened over the last few months, I wonder is it more about how we can breathe life back into teaching? Like, one of the things that really seemed for me is the centrality of teaching. Throughout this pandemic, it is what certainly in my own university, huge resources were poured into supporting teachings, supporting students and so on. And that seems to have been replicated, even social media in particular, around my peers internationally, very much talking about their teaching and supporting that. So I think it's brought teaching back to the center of higher education. I think I don't believe the large class, if that's what we're talking about, that large classes are dead. I don't think they can be and I don't think they should be. And the reason I don't think that is because I, from everything I've read, it is very different. There is no definition of what a large class is. And it seems to be more conceptualized around how the teacher engages with a number or how they perceive numbers to be a challenge or not. And that's, I think, more to do with our own confidence and competence in teaching, regardless of the context. And there are, I mean, one of the questions we might ask is, can we quantify or define what a small class is or what manageable means in terms of teaching and learning as well? So from my perspective, I don't think they are dead. I don't think they should be dead, but I absolutely do think whether we are talking about very large numbers of students or classes of 30 or 40, I do think we need to consider what teaching is in higher education and how that aligns, how teaching and learning align regardless of the context. Well, thank you very much. And you came out with a very clear answer to the questions. I mean, lots of interesting qualifiers and proving a little deeper. Who wants to go next in answering the question? Sure, go ahead. I might go just pretty shortly. Sorry, Paul, I think we just did, Valencia. So, thank you, thank you. I think that I'm going to be a little bit provocative because I think that if you're talking about large classes and teaching in a way in this old school, 19th century format, I hope it is that. So just one way street and delivery of content, I hope it is that or even worse. What we have right now, it is a modern version of reading over PowerPoint slides or something like that. I wish to be even more than this old stuff. So I agree with Anne-Marie that we should distinguish not between the numbers, but between the kind of how we are engaging students, how we are working with students, how we are preparing our lecture. Are we going to use some tools to engage students, but also to trigger independent learning? But to be honest, I think that large lecture is not going to die because for a very long time, universities are keeping them because they are very economic. Cheap, but counts. So it means you have your lecturing, but it is really cheap. And very rarely there are questioning about it. I think that this pandemic is now really opportunity that we ask these questions to analyze and find another practices. So in majority of cases, it is not effective or engaging form of learning, but it's very economic. So in that sense, I hope we are going to change it. And it is one of the good things that we use this opportunity of pandemics to change it, to introduce hybrid forms and to have a hybrid forms using online tools as well as lecturing in physical classes, but to reimagine this whole stuff about it. I couldn't help but have an image in mind when you're talking about variations on how people lecture. I well recall, and I don't know if the panel have had this experience of someone standing for almost an hour and reading their notes to me. No other visual aids, just reading. And I looked around the room as people were copying notes. And I couldn't figure out why I would bother, to be honest, and never did. I was one of the few that didn't take notes, but if that is the lecture, then I kind of have to say I come on the side or as one of the participants in the chat box has said is the lecture alive, if that's what we're talking about. Paul, sorry I cut you off before. The floor is yours. Thanks, Mark. I'm sort of in between Anna Marie and Bla-Blazinka. Three short remarks. My question is not whether the traditional lecture is dead. I'm asking is it still alive? So that's a first remark. The second remark is what do we mean when we speak about the traditional lecture? What do we refer to? Is it the monotonous reciting or reading from a page? Or do we refer to the format and the gravitas of the lectures given by Michel Foucault or Karen Barat or Judith Butler, which are powerful performances of word and intellect. If that is the traditional lecture that we're referring to, I hope it lives forever. But if we refer to the traditional lecture as death by PowerPoint, I hope it dies soon. So I'm sort of in a double bind between what do we mean about the traditional lecture. My last comment is from my own context of a business education provider with 380,000 students. What is a traditional lecture in business education? In the context of UNISA, the learning materials or the resources is the outcome of a two-year process of design, production, and delivery. So that's very much alive and should be alive. So I would position to say that in that format in business education, the learning resources will be very much alive and even more alive than ever before. I'm questioning is if the lecture in business education is alive in the terms of learning resources, is the learning and the pedagogy alive? And then I get back to Anne-Marie to say that even if the learning resources are there, well-designed quality, it does not mean learning will happen. So the focus, if I asked Anne in closing whether the lectures that I say maybe it is, but I'm more concerned is learning alive. Interesting. And I guess it just shows you how this question has so many different layers to it. When you first talked about double bind that really resonated with me because I have to be honest and say that I enjoy lecturing. I say that in the sense that most of my teaching these days is probably more done behind the podium in a keynote address. But that is a dressed up lecture and the opportunity to perform, if you like, on a stage. And at least I hope I'm self-critical to say, am I doing this for the participants or is it for me? Is it something that I feed off? I certainly do feed off the energy in the room of that nature, but there is that performance dimension, which I'm not sure the learners to pick up on your point. Paul really actually need to support their learning. David, your floor is yours. Thank you. And I really, I would not in any way, shape or form disagree with anything that my fellow colleagues on the panel here have said. I think I'd absolutely agree with the nuance that has emerged. And I would also concur saying that there are many positive attributes about the lecture, the traditional lecture. And I think I think about it from the space of creating community and bringing people together and the opportunity to learn from each other. And within that context, there are particular attributes of the traditional lecture that I would like to see die, namely the talking at rather than talking with type of mentality, the transference or assumption of students being empty vessels, participants being empty vessels, the transference of disciplinary content as opposed to trying to focus on student engagement. Those are some of the things that I would absolutely think that need to change or need to be, the traditional need lecture needs to get rid of. But under this context of sort of the pandemic, the big question for me is if we want, if we're really serious about this idea of the traditional lecture dying, what are we doing about it in our universities and in our sector? How are we modeling different ways forward? How are we placing and positioning pedagogy within the incentive structures of university environments to be taken seriously? And I think what this whole pandemic has shown is actually just how important underpinning our teaching practice with good pedagogy, with good learning theory and understanding of it, how important that is. And so for me, when we move forward in the post-pandemic world, it is going to be about how do we continue on with some of these things? How do we continue on with the gains that we've made in terms of our collective understanding in universities around a good pedagogical practice? Because this, as much as the pandemic has been an awful and horrific experience, the silver lining is everybody's been thinking and talking about pedagogy. And that's something that we simply have not had before. So if we want the traditional lecture to die, if we want good learning theory and practice to be forefronted, what are we going to do about it going forward? How are we going to structure our environments in our universities to reinforce those good practices? I think that's a great point there, David, about how there's a legacy that we have been talking about teaching and learning about pedagogy, the mere fact even that this conversation is taking place albeit in the shadow of COVID. So it really kind of raises for me the question then what is it that we have learned that we can take away in building back better? Whilst we're talking about the lecture here, I don't want to just focus too narrowly on that because it may be in light of your responses. There are other aspects that you want to bring into it. But the essential question is how can we apply the lessons we've had over the last year or more and build back better? We would like to start off on that. Just jump straight in. Blazinga, you go first. Yeah, thank you. I think that there are many, many lessons learned all wrong, but this systematic approach, I really like that Henry performed in this report that we should gather it and try to analyze it because it is not something that we can just remember afterwards. We should have this action, action research right now because we have opportunity. And to gather, to analyze all these practices and to understand also that online lecture cannot just be a second trade copy of face to face and vice versa. So we should try to merge and learn from that and try to have the best from both worlds. For example, as I said, student engagement and encouragement for independent learning are prerequisites for deep approach to learning. So for me, it can be done in education 4-0 even when you have a bigger group of students because you can perform with flipped classroom with the use of technology with work-based learning when you have tools because sometimes when you have 300 students in one big classroom, just imagine how it would be to work in groups. But if you combine it with online tools, you can redesign it. And also you can redesign your assessment, you can redesign your feedback. For example, now we have this very short poll with our participants and it was fine and also chat here. And for example, if you have two teachers working with a class online and a class on campus, you can have both chatting, you can have new ideas coming, engaging with students. Of course, it means that we should count on their preparedness to participate in a flipped classroom or some other forms that the prerequisites are, the students are acting because it's not just for teachers. This lecture learns, what we learned is for students as well because there is no good lecture without good students, engaged students, interested students. We can perform, we can engage, but if they are not willing to participate, somehow it is difficult to have it. So I really would like to emphasize this that we should transfer this message to students as well. You are also responsible to have a good lecture in a small or big group. That's a really, I think, pertinent point. As you were talking, a phrase came to mind about shifting from the learner being the audience to the author. And there's nothing preventing them within the broad methodology and even the physical space. So we're thinking of a traditional lecture theatre of the learner taking on their author role where they themselves are actually part of the co-construction. And I'm conscious, I saw a comment in the chat box from Monica who said, not all lecturing has to be about performance. So even the concept of performance has many different aspects to it. David or Paul, do you want to pick up? Paul, David, sorry, come in. So if you don't mind, Paul, I'll be quick and then jump in. I mean, I think building off Blaschenka, I mean, you know, one of the important things I think we've learned about the art of the lecture is that we have to adopt a multitude of tools and practices in order to make our learning environments work. I think, you know, many of my colleagues here at Carleton University learned early on that in this pandemic to have a successful online course, they simply could not just record a video of themselves lecturing and post it online, that they had to develop other types of opportunities for students to engage with the material. So one of the things I think we've learned here in this moment is that, you know, it's okay to de-center ourselves as lecturers and from the lecture to give our students and empower our students to have more self-directed types of experiences and that actually students will be okay in that. And that actually doing that fosters student engagement. It gets them connected into the disciplines and it gets them curious. The third thing that I want to say that I think we've learned from this moment in building back better is actually just how important compassion and the feeling of welcome matters to in our classrooms. I know throughout the pandemic we've been encouraged to be compassionate. This is something that I think is just good pedagogical practice, good way to foster learning and a good thing for us to keep as we move forward. That's a very important point, David. And I wonder, you know, pre-pandemic how compassionate and caring our classrooms were. So this is not, I think, just an outcome of the COVID crisis. And also a cold hard reality if we want to be honest with ourselves is there's a high proportion of students variable according to faculty and discipline that pre-COVID weren't attending lectures. So when we're talking the traditional lecture, whatever that might mean. So that is a message for us about something happening, whether that be the quality of the pedagogy or the learning, but that is something that I think has now been brought to the fore if we're going to build back better. But Paul, that has a probably different context for you in your situation. What does that mean, a lecture in your large organization going forward or by all means come back to the original question? No, thanks Mark. I think I really love the question focusing on the art of the lecture and I think the history and the evolution of distance education has a proven track record of actually perfecting the art of designing, producing and delivering well designed quality experiences to a multitude of students. So from that perspective COVID didn't catch distance education with their pants down. In contradiction or in contrast to high education institutions when they moved to emergency remote teaching there was no time for design, there was no time for input of a team of experts that could actually assist the lectures or learning technologies. So lectures were left to their own devices literally to get the content not the lecture to students and they produced traditional classroom settings using long unproductive Zoom sessions. So there was very little consideration for design and for the importance of considering that not all students have equal and equitable access or equal access to a good bandwidth. So the danger is that these long unproductive Zoom sessions of the lecture on the stage with no audience will become the norm. So finally for me two things stand out that we really need to think of not the lecture but the learning experience as the end result of a well-designed process where not only the lecture has the disciplinary knowledge but that we can involve learning technologies and a whole team of experts. And then the second aspect that I hope we become a permanent feature post-academic is that we really consider low bandwidth asynchronous communication with students to really make our access to online learning more equitable. Yes well I guess that's very pertinent given we're taking up a fair amount of bandwidth in this kind of video streamed discussion perhaps slightly less because we're not using slides. I felt that we couldn't really turn around having a conversation about the lecture and all be reliant on our slides. I'm going to steer us in a slightly direction looking to the future located perhaps in your own institutions building on the question we were just talking about. But because the last question was there about the art of lecturing I guess what Paul was saying is I think another legacy potentially of COVID is a better understanding about learning design and being much more explicit and mindful about the designs we choose. So in that respect it's not just the art but there's a craft and a science that goes with this as well. It's not like we are just developing this on the fly with our creative flair and innovation. So mindful of those three dimensions the art but the craft and then the science that's informing it. I know Annemarie I posted a link to your team's research report there. I'm wondering what is going on currently in your own institutions. Thinking around and what you know at least about doing things differently in the context of the way you're doing teaching. Whether that's be face-to-face blended hybrid or fully online I'm going to ask Annemarie just to go first because it's just easier to rather than give you all the linear sort of approach to do this but perhaps someone else can come in second and then we can go from there. But Annemarie can work in the space. So I thought I'd give you the chance to go first. So I think one of the things that the pandemic did was force us to think about teaching force every teacher to think about teaching some may have changed their pedagogies significantly others perhaps less so but it forced everyone particularly teachers are very large class cohorts to engage with their understanding of teaching, learning and assessment. And I think in particular because particularly with those really large cohorts we were all forced to work online within our virtual learning environment that moved from being what might have been seen as a repository or a filing cabinet for materials and lecture notes to becoming a much more alive, vibrant space where teaching and learning was happening either synchronously or asynchronously. And I think the asynchronous element, somebody mentioned it already the asynchronous element of reconceptualizing how to the multiple ways in conveying concepts and ideas is something that I think is very important going forward even when students are all back on campus and we do have some face-to-face teaching. I think it's crucial for the very very large class cohorts because it provides it has the potential to provide an opportunity for those flipped lecture, flipped class context and it also has if the asynchronous learning is structured independent learning so actually the teacher's hand is in there but they're structuring what the students may be doing independently either themselves or in smaller groups you can specifically align that then to either synchronous online or face-to-face learning. So it's a real alignment and support and scaffolding of learning through good teaching now you can't transmitting a 50-hour talk at you lecture onto a video is obviously not the way to go but I do think that higher education teachers have been forced into a situation where we have to think about how we teach what we teach how we make those decisions and to think about the possibilities and the opportunities that firstly that the pandemic actually provided us in terms of teaching and learning but also teaching very large class groups I don't believe a large class group requires you to talk at them it requires you actually to not do that and to something David said earlier around the resource that a large class is a really large class contains lots of people who already know a lot about what you're going to talk about and harnessing that either asynchronously by asking your students to do a piece to camera that you can use then in your VLE or to come live like this as part of a panel so that you are creating that classroom atmosphere and that engagement from students and I do think there are times as well when like in any classroom at any level we may need to explicitly teach something or explicitly make the links and sometimes that might feel like the class is passive but if people are listening listening is active it's when they're not listening that it's passive so I would just think about that in terms of how we conceptualize student engagement and what is and isn't active learning and also the multitude of ways that a teacher can engage students in a 15 minute session or across a module the different teaching approach and a teaching approach isn't a lecture versus a workshop their context a teaching approach is the actions and strategies I think anyway that a teacher uses to enable learning and so I think and at DCU I can report that we actually have a number of new degree programs by their design no longer going to be building in an online component as a formal part that wouldn't have happened perhaps had we not had the experience I saw you nodding your head there David so I'm going to come to you next and then we can fight over who we go to but one also thing that you triggered me to Anne Marie was I'm old enough to remember this I don't know how many someone could help me out with the accurate reference but Charles Crook published a book if I remember correctly Computers in Collaborative Learning in 2005 and one of the introductory chapters points out that when someone is lecturing there is a conversation going on in the mind between every learner and the lecturer when I'm saying lecturing here that doesn't mean in a lecture hall necessarily because the physical environment might be very different but David give us an insight and do what impact the thinking is having in your institution and your work yeah thanks Mark and I mean just to simply you know back up a lot of what Anne Marie was saying I mean I think absolutely spot on about using the using these spaces and using multitudes of different types of approaches and I mean just reflecting on my own research and experience within large class teaching I always adopted what I called the 15 minute rule and that was every 15 minutes change my sort of pedagogical strategy not the content but the approach in order to try and keep that attention span so even if there were moments where I was you know just giving that didactic talk at lecture I knew that they were listening because I knew that their attention spans would last and then it would restart right and I would I would bring them back bring them back in but what are we doing at Carlton I mean think what we're trying to do is we're trying to consolidate some of the gains that we've seen in terms of people thinking about different types of approaches Anne Marie mentioned things like the flipped classroom I think we're going to see a lot more of that take place even at my home institution the challenge will be is making meaning out of flipped right so actually what will we then do with our face-to-face components because now we're going to sort of de-emphasize the traditional lecture as the moment where we all come together physically what are we going to do with that instead and fortunately you know again when we come back to thinking about my previous provocation but how are we going to model the way what types of supports and incentives structures are we putting in place well we're putting it together all sorts of training we are incentivizing the students as partners program so that faculty members can actually involve students in their course design which then hopefully brings about we're trying in explicit ways to bring about more student engagement and student center type strategies for those meaningful face-to-face interactions but I will say you know we're also thinking about design of our physical spaces differently again like the way we structure our classrooms if you imagine a traditional classroom fix seating pointed forward you know stadium style with the for the large classes which makes it hard then to engage and interact with people around you we're rethinking all that and our new buildings that we're imagining or that are currently being built we're actually rethinking some of those the physical design in order to take advantage of bringing people together in meaningful ways as opposed to reinforcing that face-forward listen passively engage and minimal engagement thank you Dave what about University of Zagreb what's happening in your area or beyond in terms of rethinking how pedagogy might be done yeah it is quite diverse because University of Zagreb is big one with 75,000 students so it means that there are really wonderful examples of innovative teachers but at the same time there are others and I'm really sad about it but it should be said they're just waiting to pandemics to stop and to go back to their classrooms and their old way of doing things and I'm really afraid of that I know that it's not probably one third of teachers are like that but sometimes they are very loud they just said okay it is temporary let us let us pass and then we will be back and everything will be good again as it was so I hope it wasn't so I hope it wouldn't be like it was because it is if you look at what we have right now it is like big laboratory we can even though we are online we can really have different approaches actions designs and everything is open so it's like real research laboratories because just imagine if you would like to have some kind of action research and education and all sorts of committees all sorts of permissions all sorts of curriculum approval should be done but now you are really a teacher you can design you can evaluate of course co-create with your students with your colleagues and really think about students in a different manner because you know when we were in a classroom even though there are 200 students you can see some of the faces and you can judge by their expressions if the students are catching the concept working making notes or answering your questions online is little bit different but at the same time just think about the student who is visually impaired in the last row in a classroom and now they are very close so even though we are talking a lot about physical distances it's physical distancing but at the same time it can be social proximity because I know that some students that were very shy when they were in a physical environment they can chat they can participate in working groups and we can organize all sorts of things that engage them of course as David said it is not easy after a while you can see that they are tired of online environment they are tired of certain method they are tired of flipped classroom because they don't have time to perform everything so you should be really aware of not students but these students and I hope that we are doing a great job at least at my faculty because we are really keen on having all sorts of innovative practices on board but I'm really looking forward on modeling our hybrid approach when we are fortunately an autumn back at campus but not to force our students to be here but to prepare to have a flexible environment to have accessible not just physical but also online tools and because as I said we learned so much and we should use it but use it in a structured organized way Paula thank you I'm wondering Paul here you've got perhaps the reverse challenge is in the world's oldest distance provider many of us will be familiar with ideas such as cognitive presence and how it doesn't really matter where you are in the sense of presence you may have but one of my observations in the COVID era is all of a sudden synchronous delivery became very very much the norm for a new model of sort of online distance delivery some of us scratched our heads because this was never really a big part of distance education so is there anything that's going to be a legacy in the way in which teaching is done that's going to come out of the COVID crisis for your institution thanks Mark I think you pointed to it I think what surprised me is that the long and history of theorization in distance education that face to face and residential education is never took notice of the theory the community of inquiry framework or the pedagogies of care and empathy of Holmberg and the others so I do think there's a rich theoretical basis for residential institutions to actually go look at the thing that I think that changed in our institution was the issue was not the lecture it was there it was well designed it was well produced it was delivered what we realize the fact that it was delivered didn't make didn't mean that learning was taking place not all students had access to the lecture and then the last thing from my side is that we realize that good teaching in in remote learning context means that you have administrative and support structures that support the lecture lectures were found and were left carrying the whole weight of teaching without the support of ICT without the support of administration without the support of finance department so teaching can only happen remotely if lectures have the support from the other departments I think that's the crucial lesson we've learned well folks I just took a glance at the time and I haven't been doing a great job moderating because I should have been telling you put more of those questions in the Q&A or in the chat box but I hope like many of you I've been just fascinated hearing the conversation and the different interpretations here so the panel most predictably has probably only scratched the surface of the questions we had that we thought we might explore but I'm going to just with an eye on the time and conscious we all had busy lives to ask the panel just to perhaps share a couple of thoughts because I'm very conscious that we've talked a lot of theory we've talked about the ideas but let's concretise this for a minute in a practical sense perhaps you could just take no more than a minute each to share one or two tips or advice pieces of advice that you might offer for us going forward thinking about teaching and I'll use the word here borrowing from Ann Marie's research teaching large classes shall we say rather let's get away from that word the lecture so Ann Marie since I mentioned you and I'll give you the first chance each time I'm going to leave you at the end so let's kind of work in reverse order shall we on what we've been working on so Paul I'm going to come back to you first and then we'll go along the gallery on my view okay some practical issues rethink physical presence rethink time rethink the lecture as a solitary performance to design learning experience not lectures learning experiences that make the optimum use of physical presence asynchronous and low bandwidth experiences and activities rethink time thank you very much I should just seen from one of my colleagues Monica's saying we should just keep going but I am very conscious of the commitment of our panel and they've got busy lives and I know David's got a whole day ahead of him so we might spill out over more than just right on the hour but folks we won't go for too much longer so David speaking of you I think you're next up thanks Mark and fully fully agree with Paul's points there about rethinking where I would also encourage rethinking is this idea of partnership rethinking the space that students play in our classrooms and engage with the notion that students or partners or co-creators are invested and already deep understandings of our disciplinary spaces to bring them in to the classroom in really thoughtful and legitimate ways and to look at them as partners in that process the other bit too that I would encourage a rethink is around the space and place of disciplinary content we think that we particularly in large classes we have to pack in a set curriculum, a set of information that has to be delivered I think we have to really challenge that idea and put more emphasis on engagement and ways and means to get our students connected into our disciplines because when they get connected into those disciplines they'll go off and figure out and learn that information by themselves we don't need to just give it to them on a silver platter all the time so rethink partnership rethink content the place and space really resonated with me because I think if we do ask many of our learners campus based learners perhaps but equally it could apply to online where do they really do their learning I suspect and I don't have the evidence to back this up opinion that they would say they do a lot of it in their informal spaces the places that are just as important for their learning so thank you for those words of wisdom if you like moving on and do we have I'm wondering is there any where in your previous ministerial role it must have been rather challenging or is there advice that you would have for your current minister for institutions in Croatia of what they do going back in a practical way yeah but it was really enjoyable to go back even though it was just to mention a very good experience in the last sorry I was a minister a year ago also when the pandemic started and it was really enjoyable because Croatia was at that time actually chairing the EU and so I chaired the colleague ministers of education and for the first time I really experienced that we all like to learn from each other so it was unique experience because if there are some other controversial topics there are always certain countries or personalities would like to have upper foot but when the pandemic started and then we tried to find good practices about how to deliver quality even in pandemic study education it was really a good experience so this co-creating and learning from each other was possible among politicians so I know that it would work among teachers and students so I really appreciate that Paul and David said about the co-creation because we know that we teachers are at the end of the day responsible for the certain results so we couldn't avoid that so as Anna said that should be 15 minutes time slot when I explained the concept of I don't know derivative or something like that so we couldn't avoid it but we should be aware of what we are doing and why we are doing and what I really prefer that after each lecture to have just two or three points what you observed during your lecture because it helps you later when you go back when you go back and prepare the next session or material or so on so just keep having this keep writing the diary of your teaching and also what you learned so far and create your own preferable hybrid model to suit your style students you have in front of you and with you in your classroom learning outcomes and be aware of students need so this preparation of your own toolbox with favorite tools with notes it really helps but it is autonomy of teacher in a full respect and capacity so in some respects variety is the spice of life in that there is no such thing as one of the takeaways of the lecture because there are so many twists and creative ways that can be interpreted so Anne Marie I'm going to come to you before I maybe make my own observation if I have the time but the floor's yours okay well in terms of practical ideas I suppose I'm just going to draw on my own experience and I suppose the first thing what completely changed many years ago my approach to teaching large classes was I stopped saying I can't do that because the class is too big I stopped using that phrase and instead I started saying how can I do that in a large class how can I adapt that strategy so I think just that way of thinking in terms of large class is important I think from our learning in the last 15 months the role of the the virtual learning environment Moodle, Blackboard or whatever you're using for me is now an extension of my classroom even if we go back face to face and in order for that to be the case that will mean that really you really have to design your asynchronous teaching and learning tasks in an aligned way and in a supportive way that supports, that teaching supports learning there but also that it carries back into whether it's synchronous or face to face classes when you're working with students in a live class I think provision of choice both in terms of how you teach so teaching you know content in multiple ways can only be enhanced by better attention to the virtual learning environment as well as how you present in the live lecture be it online or face to face and that choice I think needs to be extended to assessment and particularly with large class groups with all groups but with large class groups in particular because they're large you have a huge resource there of potential assessment outputs from students some of which might be shared with the whole class cohort or with other groups of students a huge pool of talent to draw on there and I think that talent potentially grown if you allow them choices in what to focus on for an assessment who to work with how many people to work with all the layers of a task if they are by providing that choice you are addressing the necessary diversity in a really large cohort like that reach out to colleagues to a co-teach with you and by co-teach I mean actually be in the room with you either asynchronously or live and co-teach bring your different perspectives in so that you can model the different perspectives that arise in every discipline and also co-teaching could be more around community of practice and I've done this before in the DPD module we did in DCU a few years ago where we used peer observation I learned so much by watching somebody else teaching and I learned so much about my own class by having somebody else in the room watching me because they saw so much that I could never see in a class of 400 they could so I think they're the big things and I think the teaching presence face to face and asynchronously is really important by putting yourself into those two spaces and literally or figuratively moving in those spaces and sharing your proximity with your students and bringing students in to deliver or to contribute to or to share their experiences or particular elements of what you're teaching will only enhance the student's understanding and motivation and engagement so they're my main takeaways Thanks to all the panel I've just got three things if you like to bring us to a head we are a little over time so I've satisfied some but maybe others have got meetings to rush to three very quick wrap ups the first thing is one of my own tips from a personal experience is asking some students if I was able to look at their lecture notes what they were writing in terms of what they were taking from a lecture that I may have given was really enlightening what I thought they might be taking was what they really were writing down so that was just a window into the student experience a very simple thing to do it's not always an easy thing to ask and students there's a power relationship but I would encourage you just to in that spirit of partnership just see what students are writing down are they taking what you think is important the second I couldn't help but this is completely unscripted I couldn't help but in the latter part of our conversation make a connection to the fact that we're all learners as professional educators and I think there's some pretty important lessons here from COVID and this conversation we've had about the way we go about our learning and perhaps the design of traditional conferences and the way we engage or not with the traditional keynote which is many respects the lecture is personified so I haven't figured out what that really means because I think we're still experimenting with formats for online and hybrid events but I do think there's a link for the future design of a conference just like there is for the traditional lecture if you like and my last point is just somebody to thank the panel came together at relatively short notice they didn't really know each other beforehand so we negotiated introductions and I hope our participants like me have just been really fascinated with their insights from different perspectives right from very focused on campus delivery in a particular discipline to the world's largest oldest sorry not quite largest poor I'll give you that credit yet to the distance university provider fascinating conversation we could go yes for another hour but sometimes it's better to wet the appetite and we might revisit this at some point I hope folks have found something that they can take away from today's conversation and I hope that this is the conversation we'll keep having in our own institutions nationally and professionally in our disciplines as we go forward so thank you very much just thanks to the Eden team also for the organization behind the scenes so have a good evening or for you David or anyone else still with a day ahead of them have a good day cheers thank you bye