 Thank you everyone and welcome to European Distance Learning Week, which is an activity put on and sponsored by Eden and in parallel with the National Distance Learning Week that is supported by USDA in the United States. We've got a great session for you today, unfortunately one of our speakers will not be able to attend due to an emergency, Rike will not be here, but that will give us more time for discussion. We're going to start out with some introductions, then Hamish is going to present, then John and Jill and then we'll have the questions and answers. So if you have questions, please share it with them in the chat box and we will answer them or the panel will answer them toward the end of the session. But first we're going to start with Hamish McLeod who is from the University of Edinburgh and he'll be talking to us about playful learning, orchestration and identity. Hamish is a member of the British Psychological Society and of the Royal Society of Biology and Chartered Biologists. He's also a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His areas of research are learning technology, learning and teaching online and human response to technology. So without further ado I'd like to give the floor over to Hamish. Thanks a lot Lisa and good afternoon colleagues, love to be here. I hope you can hear me okay. Lisa your voice was breaking up a little bit as you were talking. So please do shout in intrude. I won't be able to keep track of all the bits on the screen to know who's saying what. So Lisa please do do interrupt if there's any voice or other problems. Right, let's see, yes good that's me. So first of all if anyone wants to contact me here after to discuss anything that I've raised do please feel free with a very short time this morning although we may have more time for discussion so I'd like to give an overview and then leave as much time as possible for folks to chat. A bit closer to my mic, right okay I've got my, let's see if I can give you any more okay and I'll try and hold the cord so the mic's in the right place. Right so to give you a little bit of background first of all the context from which I'm talking is our MSc program in digital education at the University of Edinburgh and that's where the experiences that I would be calling upon have come for me in the last 10 or 12 years. In particular as Lisa said I want to talk about games or playful approaches in learning so that's what I'm advocating as it were this morning. Yes thank you for the sound right okay and that is coming from one of our courses on that program the introduction to digital game-based learning and that I've taught along with my colleague Clara O'Shea. The other thing I'd just like to point out to you is this manifesto which the team at Edinburgh put together manifesto and teaching online it's a provocation so we'd like to provoke you and we'd like you to play along with us it's a playful activity and we'd like you to be provoked and to respond to some of the things that we've addressed there. Why a manifesto for teaching rather than talking about learning I think again this is important to what I'd like to be saying perhaps today and it is this idea that in order to highlight the centrality of the student in this whole business we have tended to talk about learning to emphasise learning and to de-emphasise that all of the teacher and we have felt that it's important essentially to help the teacher to know what he or she should be doing and that's why we want to talk about what it is to be a teacher. We are an online program and I think it's important to say that blending technical approaches into a campus-based program is quite quite different from using those same approaches in a program that's entirely online and I have done a bit of both. I think the distinction is important and that might be something that we'd like to come back to but we on the MSc Digital Education are forefronting the online as the slogan says we are the campus not exclusively but we are part of the campus we are there with you. So what does it mean to teach? And a phrase that I really like is this notion of the orchestration of experience and that's central to what I'd like us to be thinking about today. This comes from a book Making Connections by Cain and Cain way back in 94. So they say because the learner is constantly searching for connections on many levels educators need to orchestrate the experiences from which learners extract understanding. They must do more than just provide information or force memorization of isolated facts however that might work and skills. So the job of the teacher is to create experiences from which learners can learn and I would see that as being very well structured by an approach which is playful and is not necessarily game based but game informed and that's the message that I would like to be promoting here. In passing and I think models like Julie Salmon's five stage model are very very valuable here we have to invest in preparing our students to engage in this way collaboratively, actively in their learning. It's often not something that comes naturally and so as this five stage model suggests we need to take account of the technologies and take account of student motivations and experiences and this has to be done at the level of the mere access and the socialization around about the tasks and then moving on to the substantive business of the domain area that we're wanting to be teaching in or teaching about but it is this notion that we have to invest upfront in preparing the students to engage in this way. So I want us to locate this and again we know all of this but just to locate this in a structure of what it might mean to talk about active learning. So we know that knowledge is constructed by the student, it is not imparted by the teacher and that this is well done within a supported and scaffolded social context. We know also that it's actually well that the construction knowledge is well catalyzed by the building of things in the real world as Papett says he talks about learning through programming so we might be building physical artefacts or we might be building conceptual artefacts such as programs we might be building games, we might be constructing images and telling stories around about those images. And when we take this online then we mobilize opportunities to engage fast numbers and this notion of connectivism from George Siemens and Stephen Downs helps us to think about what unique things are going to be possible when we have connected groups of students distributed, possibly distributed across the planet. Another level of distribution here is this notion of distributed cognition so learners are connected not only to other people but they're connected to tools that they can use in this knowledge construction business and so learners we can think of them as socio-technical assemblages. I like the phrase from David Engelman's recent book Half of us is other people and I think that's a very important notion. I've listed here on the slide, I won't spend any time on it but we can think about different ways in which the interactions of teaching and learning are social. Online there is an opportunity for the hyper-sociability of the connected world and this notion too which I think we miss often of the you-social, the ultra-social that humans, unique among our primary cousins, divide our labour and this is not something that we forefront in education often. It's a very individual, it can appear very individual matter particularly when we think about assessment so we may find that we are working collaboratively with our students but when it comes to assessment it's every man or woman for themselves and so the assessment needs to map on to the teaching structure that we're trying to promote. So I think if I could put it like this in summary here's the point which I'd like to engage with you about some of these ideas about playfulness and about identity. So we can think of teaching as creating good tasks and a colleague of mine Michael Begg described a game as a task with a backstory and I think that's a very good definition because what we're thinking about when we think about the backstory to a task is we're trying to forefront the relevance to the learner of what it is that they are doing in these learning activities that we give to them. Now that's very easily done in the context of professional learning like education, law, medicine and so on but it's not so easily done perhaps in as it were the pure academic subjects like history or psychology or anthropology but we can think about ways in which students can play games within the world that we are introducing them to and paradoxically perhaps this idea of fantasy and role play can make the activities more relevant and more meaningful to the students day to day. Clearly as I suggested we want to mobilize the social and constructing ways in which these experiences can be social and collaborative is very very important and again if we think about connectivism the possibility that we can make connections across the planet to provide opportunities for one of our students to be a resource for another and so the students are in touch and are doing things they're finding out about other places, other cultures, other societies, other perspectives on the area that they're working on by utilizing the links that they have with distributed peers. Again though as I say we need to invest in this up front we need to take time and that is going to be time out of our curriculum if you like in order to give the students the confidence, the tools, the skills and the social opportunities to work in this collaborative way and finally just to highlight again we need to think of ways in which we can align the assessment with these learning approaches and this is something that we're talking about a lot in Edinburgh and thinking of new ways of assessing there is absolutely no point in having novel approaches to teaching and learning if those aren't mirrored and aligned in what we do in our assessment because whether we like it or not and again this is a contentious idea but assessment does to a very real sense and a very real sense and a very great extent constrain and direct the students learning what we think it's important to assess they will see as being our view what is important for them to learn and so if our assessment doesn't match with our approach to teaching and learning then we have a problem. Forgive me I think I should probably stop there that's covered the ground and I hope to give more time for discussion questions at the end so if I may please I'll pause at that point. The different ways of approaching learning design our next speaker is going to be John Trasler and just to give you a little background about John John is the founder of eLearn which provides consultancy and distance and blended learning together with training programs for individuals and organizations management leadership and coaching. With over 25 years in the experience in the education and training business John has managed multinational companies for Pearson and New Corporation in both Europe and Asia. John holds a master's degree and is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and is president of the European Association of Distance Learning. Again questions will be done at the end of the panel session if you can just hold your questions if you do have questions that come up as the speakers are speaking feel free to enter them into the chat box. So John your slides are now up so you can go ahead and start with your present thank you. Excuse me John this is Lisa can you share the results of the polls and from the poll before? Thank you very much Lisa I hope I'm not too croaky for everybody I joked earlier in the warm up that I was hoping not to do a Theresa May so I'll try and speak clearly I do have some water if I get into trouble so let's hope that that will be okay. I just want to say that my perspective my experiences that I'm bringing to you today come from being part of the European Association of Distance Learning and having looked at the trends and the inputs from our members so much of what I'm going to say is a kind of a bit of a global tour of a few things most of which perhaps will be trends and so on that people are picking up on. So what we're going to look at in the next 10 or 15 minutes I think is what we know is happening with visual education and the kind of things that are driving that and I'm going to focus primarily on video and maybe we'll look a little bit at apps I suspect that quite a few of you are already using both of these but these are trends that our members are continuing to see developing and so on just to put it into perspective the European Association of Distance Learning has got something like about 4,000 different courses from 60 members and about a million students in Europe we are in the for-profit sector so that gives us a slightly different perspective probably on what we're doing but nevertheless quality and learner experience is central to the sort of things that we look at So what do we know in terms of where we are right now well Hamish was giving us some inputs there on learning theory and support and so on and I don't want to spend too much time on it but I think it's pretty clear that although there's been some discussion about the relative merits of visual activities with the use of videos, replacing flipped classrooms and so on and how effective that is those of us who are engaged in distance education tend to take it as a red that if we design our things on cold and give people a rich experience and an opportunity to reflect then hopefully we're going to get a good result and so that becomes kind of central to what we're looking at there is also recently some evidence from Thomas Nigel at Stanford about the use of mental imagery and how can that accelerate learning so I think we're on reasonably safe ground when we start to think about engaging more visualization in our content and in the processes that we are looking at we mustn't forget of course that although people like Prentice Hall and Pearson tell us that something like about 65% of the population are visual learners nevertheless that still leaves a substantial number of people who perhaps are going to benefit from having different learning styles and different processes in place to support what they're doing and I just pick an example there this is taken from the University of Queensland and you'll see as you read through it that we're already not just talking about the use of visualization and video for the presentation of teaching but also getting students engaged in using and devising that kind of content and so on so let's have a look at some of the market research I've got all the references for the things that I'm using today by the way are in the last slide and you can have a look at those after one this is from the Caltura report for 2017 and it doesn't just cover the US it covers quite a large number of parts of the world but something like 99% of US institutions report that teachers are including video I'm not sure if we can do the little poll now but it'd be interesting to see how many people are using video so maybe we could just do a little poll and see if we get anybody who's currently using video okay so we can see the numbers I know if you can see them I can see the numbers coming in yeah so a fairly substantial number that seems to sort of back up the figures that are in that report is creeping up to a 90-10 split okay so large numbers of people using some form of video in their teaching and so on okay well thank you thank you for that let's end that poll I'll just move on to the next one here is what type of video is actually being used let's just see how can we start this so we're going to look at some trends from the market research in a moment and we'll see how those figures kind of stack up we've got about half a view is that okay right so we've got some thank you John we appreciate your presentation this afternoon we'll now move on to our next presenter with Jill Farrell who is from I have it on the screen here but I can't seem to share it she'll be talking about digital by design designing learning and assessment in a digital age and just to give you a little background about Jill okay well I think maybe we should we should not dwell too much on the poll but I think it's quite interesting to see that the first poll there if you can go back to the slides okay so we've got a large number of people using video in their programs we don't know exactly how that's being used but nevertheless large percentage coming out as a sample of the people that are supporting this and I think similar sorts of numbers for people using video for assessment whether that's assessment by being looked at or whether it's assessment that's self generated we're not sure but there's a trend for both of those things and I think what's interesting in this cultural report is that something like 21% are reporting that more than half their students are actively creating video and that percentage has gone up quite substantially in the last year so there's a big push and a trend that we're anecdotally finding with our members using more video which seems anecdotally to be supported by that little poll there and so on so I think we can see those kind of trends not too much of a surprise that those of us involved in distance education are using these kind of things for remote teaching and learning the other aspect of it is this rapid increase there you can see some of the year on year changes easy to use tools for video capture seem to be on the increase and we'll have a little look at some examples of those in a moment and it feels like the process for people to produce and develop these videos is perhaps getting a little bit easier I noticed in the poll that quite a few of you were using in-house content and so on so the numbers are quite compelling really the direction of travel the NMC Horizon report for this year gives us perhaps only three key things that are of direct interest to people in distance education although I would encourage you to have a look at this report both this report and the other ones by the way are available as free downloads what we find not surprisingly I suppose is despite the increase of technology online material and so on people's access to this is unequal across the world in terms of socioeconomic groups, ethnicity and so on and of course internet access is also variable both in terms of speed and quality even in developed countries the second thing that I think is relevant for distance education is although understanding what the digital stuff is is one thing but how we get it integrated and make sure that we're using it correctly and becoming fluent in its use is another thing the third point which I find absolutely fascinating is that online mobile and blended learning now is taken as a foregone conclusion and in fact the report goes on to say that institutions that don't have a strategy for integrating that are going to be in trouble so I think that's kind of an interesting interesting trend so there's just the covers for those two bits of reports which as I say you can have a look afterwards and download for yourself so what is the role that technology is playing in this primarily on video and I think there's really a couple of things that we can say about that there's a greater use of visual content in the ways that technology is helping us to do that and it comes with a warning of course if you use other people's content you've got to be sure about what it's subjected to and where it comes from but there are two or three great sources that I'm sure you will know about this is YouTube my field of leadership and management I did a search yesterday and got over a million hits and most of us I think have probably used YouTube to help us work out how to do a small task or learn something if we're not up there using it for content for learning then a lot of people are using it as a place to give a sample of their course and so on and you know that's a place where your students will perhaps expect you to be or to have a look at the next one you may not be so familiar with this I don't know it's this teacher tube which specializes particularly in content that's been designed for education perhaps about three quarters of it is school based but there's still nevertheless a significant chunk of content there that's designed for higher education and you'll see on a similar sort of search I've got over 500 kind of results for various aspects of leadership and so on so some good sources of content and then finally the other one I'd like to show is our old friend I call it an old friend Ted Ted's not been around a while now and it feels like it's part of the furniture but nevertheless it's good stuff to use for high quality presentations that you might want to use to stimulate and get your students discussing things I guess the biggest area that technology is making it easier for us is in the last two which is about designing and making your own and getting students to design and collaborate in fact most of us probably find that our students are better actually doing this stuff than we are as teachers and educators so I just wanted to show you one this is not one that I've got an interest in but it's an online service for making your own animated video clips and so on there are similar tools for non-animation for those of you who feel that's not appropriate but nevertheless what's impressed me about this is that you don't just get the tools there is actually some learning design built into the process so if we have a look at this, this is the opening page once you've signed up already we can see on the right a three-stage process to writing the script recording a voiceover and adding visuals the first thing is combines with the story board and everything so there's some in-built things in there which I actually think are quite important you get a little bit of help on how to put your story together and some in-depth things that make it really quite straightforward for people to design their own video and then you come back and you can do the same thing for recording voiceover you can do your own you can get other voices that you can use and you can add visuals and so on so it becomes a much more easy to use experience another aspect of video in the classroom is now the number of apps that are available just to help you make the videos this one's from the teacher thought website but all of these things are there for us to use and our EADL members are certainly making use of that to develop their own content where are we going next and it would appear from the bits of research that I've highlighted that video continues to be more pervasive and ingrained in what we do and more important year on year and will have a big impact on the learning processes I think the other trend which I think we're just starting to see at the beginning of is the use of apps I know a number of institutions have designed apps a number of learning providers have designed apps and apps for education are increasing at a quite staggering rate something like about 30% per year and I think it says a lot about Apple and Google which is where those clips come from they both have mechanisms to help people to develop and create those kind of apps in the classroom we're also starting to see development of similar sorts of websites similar sorts of processes for people without programming experience to start to make and create apps and I suspect that the trend for this is going to increase so that we get to a point where it will be almost as easy to make an app as it is to make a video and this is supported by some of the work that some of our members have been doing this one is in German it's from the BWL Institute in Switzerland it's really turning a number of concepts in management into kind of quiz and cue cards that work on the mobile on the mobile phone so you get a card with it quickly you get some questions about a topic and then you get a card coming up with a question that you have to answer so it's reinforced as a trend I think that we're seeing in terms of the way in which things are moving just a reminder that wherever we go with this stuff it needs to be embedded in our underlying pedagogy I like the Margaret Cool framework which seems a little bit old now which is quite interesting but nevertheless it gets us to reflect on what devices we're using where the learner's coming from and what's the social ability of mobile learning on where it fits together so in summary I think what we're finding is that the use of visual learning in distance education is growing and that's a trend that looks set to continue technology is helping to support this development and perhaps driving it to some extent the use of apps and mobile learning continues to grow and there's a sense in which the people that are coming on our programs will expect that the next generation is going to be learning to make apps in primary school so when they turn they get to higher education it will be second nature, it will be something else and probably one of the things that we need to keep a focus on is our understanding of its impact on pedagogy and making sure that we keep ahead of that and how we can make sure we can integrate that as it grows and then lastly there are the references which say it will be available when you collect the slides so thank you very much that's all I have to say for now and look forward to the panel discussion and the presentation space as well as good practice guidance and strategic planning and the project and change management needed to deliver enhancements in learning teaching and research she's directed projects in support of the strategic goals of the English and Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and advised on the development of e-learning strategies for England and Wales thank you Jill for taking the time to be with us today thank you very much Jill that was a very enlightening presentation and I think it gave us a lot to think about we've got a lot of participants today and a lot of questions have come up in the chat I'm going to start with the first set of questions and that's from Gabriella who's asked this was directed at Hamish but it can also be answered by other members of the panel good online assessment tools would be good to hear hi everyone can I just check that you can hear me okay I'm having a few technical problems and I'm having real trouble getting in front of this camera so I think I might just turn it off in a second and carry on the trouble with going last is I've now completely changed what I want to talk about but you've got my slides already so let's let's make do and mend as Lisa said I work a lot with JISC in the UK and I also coordinate the activities of the UNIS learning and teaching task force which operates right across Europe and what I'd like to just briefly talk about today is the outcomes of a JISC project that's looking at learning design and then start to think about how we can use the outcomes of that work to continue the conversation across the wider European community now the work that I'm talking about looks at learning design more generally not specifically at open or distance learning but many of the principles and the lessons learned across all types of learning it feels to me as if after a quiet period when people didn't talk much about learning design it suddenly seems to be surfacing as a major theme of interest certainly in terms of requests that JISC gets for guidance and renewed interest in an international learning design community that a network that I'll provide a little bit more information about at the end so JISC's been working in this area for more than 10 years now I've highlighted some of the major programs of activity and I'd really just like to stress the scale of the research that's gone on here as an example assessment seems to have popped up a few times today the program that we did on assessment it worked with 40 universities and directly with 2,200 staff and over 6,000 students there's a legacy of tools and resources that have come out of these activities that are still being used and adapted and have had a major influence on the way the sector approaches learning design now I talked about fashions changing in the overview just because it gave me the chance to use some lovely photographs from Birmingham Metropolitan College but I do find it quite striking especially when you're working on this kind of scale that some of the small changes in thinking that we see happening incrementally they really add up to big shifts over time and I want to talk about some examples where I see this direction of travel going and what I think it might mean for people developing open and distance learning I think the way the whole way we view learning design as this whole space is much more holistic than it used to be we used to talk about design and delivery as separate things and I think that was founded on a content based model whereby we designed learning content to be served up to students during a delivery phase and the approach now is much more about designing learning activities and experiences a much more learner centered approach that doesn't say what am I going to teach but rather how are these people going to learn content is no longer king and the curriculum itself is much less of a fixed thing and much more a fluid set of activities that can produce different outcomes with different groups but I think this traditional focus on content rather than activities and experiences has been even more pronounced when it comes to online learning one of the things I've done with UNIS over many years is judge their annual e-learning award for many years and we get loads and loads of entries from people who've created very high quality learning objects but without a clear idea how learners are expected to engage with them or what kind of difference it should make to their learning outcomes I should probably qualify that by saying we also get some excellent examples of learning design very often from people that are actively engaged with this even community but some of our top tips for learning design that I'll come on to in a minute really talk about that turning them more into engagement and activities I couldn't agree more with what Hamish said about the extent to which assessment drives behaviour one of the biggest shifts we've seen over the last few years is the move to an assessment for learning approach an approach that focuses on feedback and formative assessment activities rather than assessment of learning that's kind of summative and at the end although we're seeing that shift I think it's an area that traditional practices dominate very, very slow to change I've tapped into the chat box the URL for a guide we did on transforming assessment and feedback I haven't got time to go into a lot of the issues now but there's loads of good guidance in there and it has really important implications for learning design because we need to ensure we build into these designs loops where feedback becomes a dialogue with a learner and to ensure that the learners get the feedback in a timely fashion so that they can act on it for the next assignment and technology is helping us promote these approaches in many, many ways online formative assessment, self and peer assessment really, really powerful tools in enhancing learning and the increasing use of dashboards so that staff and learners have greater transparency about a shared understanding of progress briefly mentioned employability here and bundled it in with digital capability because the two are so interrelated it used to be that there were only certain kinds of subjects talked about employability and that's no longer the case, we can't view employability anymore as a thick set of skills that you get from a particular course of study digital capability is key to future employability, it's key to all professions becoming a digital professional and really developing the capacity to be a lifelong learner and I think it's useful to make this connection for staff because it helps them see the need to ensure their own digital capability helps them meet the future needs of their learners, you don't hear many people talk about digital literacy anymore because it's hard to get staff interested in that for its own sake but talking about what it can actually do for your learners and their future needs learning analytics really hot topic at the moment the amount of data we have about the curriculum and about learning can help us create better designs however most of the emphasis that you hear about learning analytics at the moment is on predictive analytics it's on the individual learner identifying learners at risk of dropping out etc but it's equally useful to look at data about the curriculum itself and how it's designed we need to be asking whether similar modules composed of different types of learning activity produce better or worse outcomes with digital information we can also much more easily identify structural issues such as assessment bunching over assessment and designs that don't allow for the type of feedback loops that I was talking about earlier and in the online environment we have a lot of data about students but it's not necessarily any simpler to interpret just as turning up to a lecture doesn't mean a student learns anything then simply logging on to the learning environment doesn't necessarily tell how much the student is engaging in learning activities so how we use analytics to support the design of online learning space might be a topic that we want to talk about later I briefly mentioned changes to the physical learning space because they are exhibiting the same trends and again when we first started talking about next generation learning spaces we were focused on access to content we started with those temples of content the libraries and learning resource centers we began to understand the importance of social learning and see increased emphasis on informal learning spaces and it's much more recent that we're now tackling the bastions of traditional teaching the classrooms, the lecture theaters interactive lecture theaters, active learning classrooms are popping up everywhere other types of formal teaching space such as science labs were seeing them become multidisciplinary where they're reflecting a shift in approach away from what are called recipe based experiments where all students do the same science experiment to produce a known outcome to more problem based approaches where students might be asked to design an experiment to shed some light on a problem and the challenge in distance learning is how to reflect these types of changes in the virtual learning environment so the new guide that we've created is based on the assumption that nearly all of the learning that takes place in future is blended learning it will involve some blend of online and face-to-face activities so that's the emphasis we've taken rather than talking about fully online courses although we do talk about that in the guide and the hints and tips here I think apply in both cases because in order to fully engage in online learning students need to see the value they need to believe it's not second best and the way to make that happen is to see that staff value online learning that staff engage with learners in those virtual spaces and the students need to see these virtual spaces as places where they can engage, collaborate and be part of an active learning community the approach we've used to staff development and the kind of tools we use to support learning design has changed a lot over the years we used to be very focused on creating tools to support the sharing and reuse of learning design the tools that are most in use now are based on stimulating conversation in a face-to-face setting they're often based on a set of prompt cards that just help you ask the right questions and move things around physically to see the impact of different design decisions and we get a very clear message that asking staff to do their initial learning design in a digital environment is a barrier to creativity so what I've given you there is some links to some very very popular staff development tools that are all freely available to use another clear message that we have final message really is the need for a strategic approach to staff development before staff are asked to engage in learning design at the minute we've got some very good tools and some great examples but it's a bit ad hoc and on demand there's a lack of understanding from senior managers about the need for a strategic approach and particularly about the skill set and the resource requirements needed for designing fully online learning not exactly the same skills so take a look at those resources this is the model the new guide is based on I'm not going to talk about it but it's based on an appreciative inquiry approach that concentrates on what you do well and building on that if we've got a couple of seconds just to kind of stimulate the next discussion and I thought it would be nice to hear from you so I've posed the question what do you think is the essence of good learning design and as you're all online I guess you should be able to just go into menti.com and apply that code to give your views on the question so menti.com the code is 579789 conscious of time so I will come back to you later on with those results publish the answers back to you what I will just show you here is the answers I got back from posing that same question to a group of people in the UK couple of weeks ago so the GIST guide should be published in December the next step is looking at how GIST joins up the work it's doing around learning design and learning analytics to create some staff development resources on data informed curriculum design the international network I mentioned you've got the URL for its website the next meeting is 24th of November and you can participate virtually in that I'm very keen to extend this theme and this work to some workshops and activities around the annual UNIS conference which takes place in Paris in June if you're interested in that please get in touch and hearing John's talk just made me think that you may also be interested in the integrated systems Europe event which takes place in February in Amsterdam there is an HE day on Tuesday the 7th of February where we'll be looking at integrated learning experience with AV tools things like virtual reality 360 degree video so if you're interested I will get the free invitation to that event extended to this community as well thank you very much sorry for my late arrival sure to check those out do you have any responses then in addition to what Hamish has already said anything else to add I also appreciate the reference to David I will definitely look into that the next question Ali you asked about the work that Hamish is doing and the team of Edinburgh is doing on assessment I think John yeah good question I think one of the things is that when you take the active assessment even conventional forms of assessment online you make lots of new things possible so it's much easier when you have an electronic submission for students to include images sounds and so on in a conventional essay then if you take the next step and as John was suggesting if we want to use video in our practice why not get students to make videos and that can be incorporated then into the assessment thinking about tools I think there are some great tools for orchestrating peer assessment and I would like to suggest people look at things like peer wise, web PA as possible ways of allowing students to gain the experience of providing feedback and interacting with their peers Jill I think used the phrase that assessment should become a conversation and I think that's terribly important and again the electronic can make that conversation the turn taking in that conversation can happen more rapidly more creatively just one last thought I'll stop the notion of feed forward as well as feedback again people have come across this notion a colleague of mine I think I mentioned Clara Clara O'Shea does this actively in her course on assessment she offers the students the opportunity to receive feedback on a late draft or feedback on the final summative piece and she offers one or other not both so there's no increase in the workload for the teacher but surprise surprise nearly every student opts for the feed forward opportunity and of course one of the things that you are able to see then is not only as it were the quality of their unassisted work but the skill with which they engage with feedback and incorporate that feedback into the final piece so that's a very very important skill to develop I'll stop at that and we'll get back to you I think we've already asked Aarna asked a couple of questions in relation to John's presentation is there really a need to distinguish mobile learning as all learning is essentially digital now and should we design learning with these students I just support what Peyton says there about the feed forward much more, I think, formative for them in the sense that they're learning as they go through the process and ultimately enhances their experience and stops them being as concerned as they might be about the sort of summative type assessment. So, John, if you want to go ahead and respond to that. Yeah, I'm worried about speaking. I'm at an event. There's an awful lot of noise behind me. So just tell me if it's too distracting and I'll shut up, yeah. I mean, absolutely to, you know, echo what everybody has said, that the way you create the feedback loops in the feedback environment is absolutely critical. I suggest people look at the work of David Nickel at Strathclyde University. The REAP project redesigning, re-engineering assessment practice has been very, very influential in getting people to think about what are their principles for assessment and feedback and making sure that they design in accordance with those feedback. And the way that David's thinking developed over the years, it's about trying to make students independent learners, make them take responsibility for their own learning, take control of their own learning. He started thinking that self-reflection and self-evaluation was central to that, and it is. But he began to think that peer review was even more important and that actually constructing feedback for other people and comparing, you know, if you set the same question, comparing your work with the work of others who've tried to answer the same question, the kind of cognitive processing that you do to generate that feedback for other people is even more valuable than trying to self-evaluate your own work. And yeah, somebody's just posted a question. Is REAP, I'll try and post you a link in a second. Jill, is there anything you'd like to add to the conversation? Our next question is from Gabriela, and she has a question for all of the panel. Do you all think that it would be good or useful for a training institution to have a person who could help with IT issues and IT methods to teachers who are not very familiar with these techniques compared to the case when a teacher has to do everything, teaching, designing materials online or everything together? So who would like to answer that question first? I'll just come back to that. That's a really interesting question because it already shows how thinking from two or three years ago has probably moved on, because I think in essence what we're talking about now is an integration of all of these things and how we make sure that comes together in the design and the way that Jill was talking about. So I'm not so sure that we need to make that distinction. It's about the learning experience. Can I add an observation there, John? Yes, I completely agree with you. If you like learning as learning, the digital adds something. I think the mobile can add some of the elements. So if you think about what it's possible to do when you are out and about. So I think one of the things that you might think about would be to be sending students out into the outside world to gather data, to gather evidence about some topic. So it's not so much the mobile per se, but it's when you've got a device which is portable and you've got a device which knows where it is, then there are things that we could do with that opportunity. So I think it's thinking openly about how we design experiences for our students. Sorry. We have another question from Stylianos and he's asked, are there any... I guess only to say that when you're thinking about supporting people managing their own learning as well and there's a lot of emphasis on dashboards and things like that at the moment. But we're finding that apps that people have on their phone, in their pocket there, things that are pushing, things about your progress out to you, students, busy learners are much more likely to take notice of something that's just on an app and feels so easy to them rather than having to log into some big system and find what you're looking for. They'll log into these things two or three times over the first few weeks and then you find it drops off whereas if they've got an app in their pocket they're more likely to find it convenient to engage with. Yes, may I? Just a thought on that Stylianos. Forgive me if you said this in your earlier presentation, but timely feedback about how things are going. There's a lot of evidence that that promotes retention on programme and so it doesn't matter if it's good or bad actually, it's just to know that you've got some measure of what's going on. And yes, I think that's possibly very well done in the mobile context because that's, as it were, forgive me, I'll use the hideous phrase and the Bible was just by back then and I hate it, but a shot of dopamine, you know, you can give the students a bit of supportive feedback very readily through the mobile. Hamish is up. I had a follow-up question since we don't have any further questions in the chat unless anyone would like to add their question if I missed one. During the presentations, you know, Hamish talked about assessment driving behaviour. John was talking about realising fluency within the NMC horizon report. Jill was talking about the challenges of having actual active learning spaces and I saw these as some real challenges. Can I just go for a guess? Yeah, it's disingenuous for somebody in an institution like Edinburgh. You know, we have massive resources that can support students. So I think, I beg your pardon, staff, colleagues, teachers. And so perhaps there's a bit of me which values the message that we can do a lot of things quite readily by ourselves and it's quite empowering to go that way. But as I say, that's easily said when you've got a lot of backup. So that, you know, that there's a tension there. I think if we can design and build rather than design and pass on or some other model that helps us to think through. It's like, you know, a constructionist model of learning. We externalise what we want to achieve by building systems in which our students can work. So I think, you know, having support, great, working, tinkering with things oneself, pretty collage, great, but as I say, easy. Yeah, I think there's something here that might be a blockage in people's minds, maybe a blockage in my own mind, but it's about the distinction between something that's formal and something that's informal. So you don't want to lose the informality of what comes from the teacher being involved with the students in helping to create something or do something. On the other hand, there's a limit to the amount of expertise one should expect somebody to have. And therefore, you want to be able to go somewhere in the organisation or if it's not in the organisation outside where you can get that expertise. And I suppose that's what some of the things that I was pointing to to those tools and apps are doing. They're sort of short-circuiting some of that process and putting it outside of the institution. Some institutions tend to apply a kind of core plus model that there are some core institutional systems that are fully supported. You can get full training in. And there are others that are recommended. We know other people have found them too useful, but we can't actually support them to the same extent. A lot of the kind of free and open source tools. I mean, that's actually quite a good model, because the more digitally competent people can become, the more they're able to just use these tools that are useful for a while and then move on to the next thing as things develop. And it gives the institutions a way to be flexible and adaptable without being expected to fully support everything that somebody could suddenly want to use. Good evening. I'm in confessional mode. It appears today. I think on our program, which is a program on digital education, then again, it's very easy for us. Because when we try something new and it works, the students say, that's great. I'm going to try that. And when we try something new and it falls flat in its face, the student says, that's great. We've learned so much from what you did. In any other area, students want it to work. And so I think we do lose credibility in the face of our students if stuff goes wrong. So experimentation absolutely by all means. But as I say, I think it's very easy for us, for people in other domains, you don't want to lose credibility, respect, trust of your students by doing stuff which falls flat. So again, it's operating at this margin, trying new things, but not putting yourself out there so that you're taking too many risks. Even when I say that, it troubles me. I like risk. So it troubles me to say that. We have to be practical, I think, and think about how our students will respond. Often when things go wrong, we gain a bit of humanity. We go for the sympathy vote. But we don't want to drag our students into stuff which gets in their face and gets in their way. You might want to look at the University of Exeter Students' Change Agents program. They've done some excellent work actually asking students to design research projects around the use of technology. What kinds of technologies would be useful in their learning and their situation and really do it as a formal research project and work with their tutors to evaluate this stuff. I know there's a fear of, in many cases, just kind of looking foolish in front of students if things don't work. But actually engaging the students in talking about what kind of stuff is useful has worked really well in many areas. Any other responses to this question? There's quite a bit of chat activity going on. I'm trying to see if there's any questions here. One of the comments that was made earlier in the session was that we see some of, and this came from Pedro. For me, I think it is this notion of a task with a back story. So, you know, this could turn into a very long shaggy dog story and I'll try and keep it brief. But the difference, for example, between asking a student to write a review of a text and asking the student to take a text and with a given audience in mind and giving them a particular role with respect to that audience, write on that text in a way which addresses the role that you've been given. As I say, I could give examples, but I would get carried away. But as I say, think about the back story. Think about how it relates to the students developing identity as a historian or an engineer or a doctor or whatever and cast the task in the context of that back story. That would be my, you know. I think my answer to that is it kind of depends on the, and it probably is a bit of a follow-up from what Hamish has said, it kind of depends on the context in terms of what it's being used. I know one of the schools that does a social media, of course, for example, does use a lot of online assessment and that has got a lot of playfulness in it in terms of the way in which it's put together. I think it kind of depends on the context. Yeah, I agree with what Hamish said and maybe you could replace the word playful with creative. People are very creative and just asking them the question and giving them the means to use whatever medium they feel suitable to actually produce the answer in, I think, is, you know, if people feel creative, then they're getting a sense of enjoyment and ownership about what they're doing. So, you know, maybe it's a similar... ...are starting more blended initiatives and I know that the Open Universities are kind of running and facing a crisis at the moment. So my follow-up question to the panel would be, how do you see this and how would you anticipate this moving forward? Do you think that Open Universities will be moving toward more blended initiatives? Okay, Hamish, I've got a couple more questions for you and I think that's all we'll be able to fit in for today. And these are from Stylianos and it's a lot four questions. So I'll try to read these to you. I'll also put them in the presenter notes. What are some sources of intrinsic motivation for students you've encountered and how can we help them discover those sources and do you use online collaborative activities for student assessment and if so... If I was thinking about for-credit assessment, it might actually be our regulatory processes. Not only our regulatory processes, but the illusions which many colleagues have about what the regulations will and will not allow. The regulations are often not as restrictive as colleagues believe them to be. So I think as one wants to do things like for example peer assessment, you've got to be talking to the right senior colleagues so that the regulatory processes won't get in the way of what you're trying to do. Remind me never to follow Hamish when answering questions again. I agree with absolutely everything he said. If you want to know what the biggest challenges are, they're assessment, assessment and assessment. And not just staff kind of being set in their way. Some of this stuff is so high stakes that people are worried about changing it and students are worried about changing it. Good students are very good at playing the game of how we do assessment at the moment. You're a bright student, you might like summative assessment because it means you don't have to work for quite a lot of the year. It's challenging for staff and students to actually change these models and some of the urban myths you hear, particularly if there are professional bodies involved in validating qualifications is they won't let us do that, they won't like that. And for the most part they are urban myths. We explored that in programs we did that what people thought their own regulations said and stopped them doing frequently that the regulations didn't say that at all. It was how people locally had chosen to interpret them and this becomes just embedded in layers and layers of procedure. So, you know, try and look at these layers of procedure you've got between the strategy, the vision for what you're trying to achieve and actual practice and just see how if they're actually serving your needs. I think I agree with all of that and that's what John Hamish has said. I think one of the things that is kind of curious is that we're at a stage where the learner or the student can produce their own digital portfolio and so on and yet that doesn't seem to feature too much in some of the requirements of the assessment bodies in terms of the professional bodies for example that some of our organizations deal with. But it probably exists. So I think there are those kind of issues. But I think also this field is changing. You asked about digital fluency. I think it's changing so fast that we all have the issue of keeping up with it and at the same time as we're trying to keep up with it we're also trying to take a step back and analyze the trends and see where it goes and what it fits in with what we've learned before. I don't mean this as an age thing but as you get older you get a bit more reflective about that whereas if you look at younger people they just do it intuitively. John and Jill if you would like to add something to what Hamish has said. John did you have any follow up comments? Well maybe I'll go first because I don't know that I can actually talk particularly about open universities but what I would say about the sorts of them if you like from a private sector perspective is that the degree of blended that you put in is very much down to what the customer either the student or the client if it's an organization actually wants in the design of the process. I think by and large we know that a blended approach is probably better than a complete remote approach and so on so getting that blending there seems to me to be an important element. It's not always possible but it wouldn't surprise me if we do see more I mean the university is actually moving in that direction and there comes a point when the distinction of distance which is still a term that we use is probably not helpful anymore because we're all in the learning game the learning process and we're just offering different ways of getting at that learning. Yes, if I could. Sorry, Jo. Sorry, I was going to say I don't really feel qualified to talk about where open universities are going but just seeing that Coursera, the MOOC provider has started creating physical learning hubs makes me think that it's not an issue that's going to go away and what we can do in physical learning spaces that we can't do online and how people feel that that gives them a sense of community that's important to their learning I don't think that's something that's going to go away. Yes, sorry, I figured the interrupting. I think the point about how do we define distance is an interesting one. A colleague of mine, Geoff Haywood claims that he never said this but I think I heard him saying that if you're more than six rows back in a 500-seater lecture theatre you're a distance learner and I think that's very true and then when asked questions distance from what and distance from one's peers distance from one's teachers and I think Geoff's absolute right ways of cultivating social exchange opportunities for social exchange I would say one can do that in an entirely online program but I'm contractually obliged to say that because that's what we do but I think there are ways of engineering meaningful social interactions without space but I think appropriate design of space is a good way of doing that and often the campus spaces that we have as legacy from previous modes of teaching and learning don't serve that purpose very well and again I would come back to the the mobile often mobile gives us an opportunity to touch gently with one another even if we're not co-present and that can be an important cement for the social interactions that are important in the learning community so I think we're talking here about community and the different ways of helping community to happen all right well I would like to take a moment to thank everyone for coming today to the session and especially our speakers who did a fabulous job despite technology hiccups along the way we were able to get this through just a couple of comments to those of you who are still here tonight will be the Eden Chat session at 8 o'clock in the evening Central European time and we'll be touching on some of the topics that will be here at I'm inclined to say anybody who wants to pursue that may or may but I think the answer is probably yes yes yes yes we have done group assignments which which given a grade to the group and there's lots of scholarship around about how you manage that and how you support students I think it was Joe made the point that when you get students to work together in that way they learn about how their peers approach a task and that's very very valuable to see how somebody else might do something intrinsic motivation right okay I think two quick answers to this one whatever we can but again it's easy when you have relatively small groups of 20 30 people if you've got large groups it becomes difficult but we try and negotiate assignments with students so you've got a broad area of activity that you want you've got an assignment task that you can negotiate with the student about how that task is directed the topic that they take for example and that I think bootstraps intrinsic motivation just giving students agency is a good thing and if you can give them agency in the public that they approach second related to that agency thing we sometime in some places in the program there are opportunities for the students to add assessment criteria to the standard assessment criteria so you've got a task and you say so is there anything that you would particularly like to be doing with this task which we could add to the assessment criteria and I can give you feedback specifically on that aspiration so those will be two quick answers tomorrow and the next day the topics of maybe Christina you can help me out and put those in the chat box because I don't have them right in front of me and as I mentioned before the recordings of today and the slides will be available on the Eden site and I'm also in contact with Rike who unfortunately find it difficult to actually think of a quick answer to that one as well I mean certainly that point about engaging students with the assessment criteria asking them to explain them rewrite them in their own words or even don't give them any criteria ask them against which criteria do you think this piece of work should be judged I think all that is motivating I was trying to pick as well to find and I'm sorry I can't find the link at the moment the Norwegian business school is doing some really interesting stuff with group exams and actually you know people submitting things for as they call exams as a group but I will keep trying to actually find the link for that on the Eden website so you will even if you came here today to see Rike as well please be sure to come back to the website Christina has posted the topics for the next day tomorrow they will be reconsidering access quality and flexibility education and then Friday will be a live open classroom conference which is happening right now in Lithuania they will be delivering the plenary session so we hope you enjoyed this session today thank you everyone for coming and especially our speakers thank you very much it was a wonderful job bye everyone thank you for coming thank you all, thanks Lisa bye