 Hi everyone, thanks for having me and for allowing me to visit from the westernmost coast of Canada. Today I'll be speaking about online and blended learning, in our current context and in our post-pandemic settings. I'll first provide some context as to where we are, where we might be headed. I'll wrap my discussion on student voices in particular, the notion of interactivity, resiliency and flexibility. I was asked to respond to the prompt, the digital revolution is over. A phrase that pays homage to Nicola's necropond, who famously said, Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence. He went on to write that the really surprising changes will be elsewhere, in our lifestyle and how we collectively manage ourselves on this planet. Some have started referring to this as the post-digital, Dave White summarized this as follows. Now that the digital technology and the network are so prevalent, our thinking should go beyond the technology in and of itself and focus on the ways our introductions are played out in on the digital. So, are we in the post-digital era and what does this mean? Before I begin my talk in earnest, I would like to acknowledge that Railroad University and the neighborhood where I live are in the traditional lands of the Quasapsum and the Lekwungen ancestors and families who have lived here for thousands of years. Indigenous communities have long lived on these lands and I'm grateful to be able to live and work here. To acknowledge these lands is to acknowledge the need for consideration and the harms that colonization has had on Indigenous people here and around the world. Much of the conversation and higher education at this particular point in time focuses on building back better versus returning to an imagined normal that existed before the pandemic. To engage in such rebuilding means to recognize that various pre-pandemic teaching, learning and institutional practices were problematic. Building back better invites us to engage in practices that are cooperative and inclusionary. Territorial acknowledgments, therefore, should remind us that colonial structures impact our universities and our teaching and learning practices. Let's start by taking stock of our broader environment. Online and blended learning has a long history and has been a practice considered by the majority of Canadian institutions prior to the pandemic and very many global institutions before the pandemic. In 2019, nearly 75% of Canadian universities and colleges reported having or developing an online learning strategy and about 20% of them were applying it. In the US, the latest data that we have show that between 2000 and 2017, the number of students that were taking at least an online course more than quite troubled. Approximately 33% of students take at least one online course prior to a pandemic. And now during the pandemic, nearly all students over the last 18 months have at least taken one online course. Of course, these numbers vastly underestimate the number of people who participate in online forms of learning. Once you consider non-created offerings such as MOOCs or online training, or a slew of other online learning actions and activities that people undertake on a daily basis, then you begin realizing that online learning is normal, not just an exception. Most people have participated in some form of online learning or another. Now let's talk a little bit about the students. Over the last month, we identified about 20 surveys of students in Canadian institutions. There are about 200 higher education institutions, public higher education institutions in Canada. Our populations are around 37 million. These 20 surveys were completed by individual institutions over the last 18 months. And by analyzing it, my colleagues and I are finding that student concerns with remote teaching and learning predominantly focus on four areas. Mental health and well-being, financial concerns, quality of the educational experience during remote teaching and learning, and the impact of the pandemic on students' future plans for education and work. Some of these are broad, but they bear direct relevance to the courses that you and I might teach. Part of my work focuses on the idea that we need to understand students as people and not just students. We need to see students as individuals who have agency, desires, mishaps, dreams, life-changing experiences, and as individuals who face the daily minutiae of life like the rest of us and experience frustrations, excitement, disappointment, and living life just like the rest of us. For example, many students in these surveys indicate that they have experienced a decline in mental health. A national survey reported that around 60% of students were worried about the pandemic. One college survey reported that a large number of students were struggling with isolation and loneliness, and nearly 40% of students at a large public university reported symptoms of psychological distress. What is also important about these surveys is the recommendations that students put forward. The recommendations include financial relief for students, greater flexibility, more academic accommodations, improved mental health support. Importantly, technology and the ways that technology is used are not showing up in these surveys as important areas of concern. So, are we at a post-digital place? Are we at a place where technology doesn't necessarily matter, where it's invisible? Let's turn to post-pandemic environments. Let's turn to flexibility in the context of post-pandemic futures and discuss how flexibility can be a powerful mechanism for access, equity, and success. Flexibility can center on individual and institutional responses, can be mobilized as a result of a technology, such as, for example, through a piece of software that allows us to meet even though we're in different physical locations, like this one, or through teaching practices that we use that make teaching learning more flexible, such as, for example, providing multiple assessment options for students, regardless of the kind of technology that we use. Typically, practitioners and researchers have been optimistic about digital learning, expecting it to broaden access to education, reduce the costs of education, support new pedagogical models, and enable flexibility. By digital, here, I mean any form of teaching learning that includes use of technology. It may mean online learning, or it may mean integrating technology in a face-to-face setting. It might mean hybrid. It might mean blended. What I would like to do here is focus on that last bit, that digital learning enables flexibility. Optimism for flexibility is reflected in the ongoing claim in the literature that online and blended learning provide people with the possibility of learning anytime from anywhere. Flexibility is mobilized as a rhetorical device to mean more of something, more accommodating, more flexible, more equitable than the alternative. Oftentimes, this is true. In-person instruction can often be inequitable and inflexible. We often fail to recognize the fact that in-person education has significant shortcomings. For example, Doven takes place at a particular point in time and in particular places. It forces people to uproot their lives to come to our institutions, or to drive for an hour or two after work to get here. Or worse, it excludes those who cannot uproot their lives to come to our universities. It's worse because those who cannot leave their home to come to us. Maybe people who are traditionally excluded. People who we should be doing a better job at serving. People like those who are caring for their family, their children, or their parents. With this lens, in-person education is not the most equitable option we have available to us. It's the one that we're accustomed to. It's the default. It's the status quo and it's problematic. This, however, isn't to say that all education should be online or that all education should be blended or that one approach isn't always better than the other. There's no single solution to the problems facing education. In the same way that online learning isn't the solution, in-person education is not a silver bullet solution to the problems that we're facing. I want us to pause here for a little bit because I find that conversations or modalities like online, in-person, blended learning often become abstract. What I'd like to ask you to do is to imagine students. Imagine your students or imagine the students that your colleagues or friends have in their classes. Think about their day and their responsibilities. I'll pause for 10 seconds to give you a moment to think about them. Okay, ready? If we had time for an extended conversation, I would have asked whether they're full-time or part-time students, whether they work, whether they have children or family that they take care of, whether they have health concerns, whether they're facing housing unaffordability or food insecurity, whether they live alone or with others, whether they have private rooms to study or what they hope to get out of their education. But when you imagine the students, do the students really study anywhere at any time? When and where do they study? I'm asking these questions essentially to say that the idea that people study anytime and anywhere is an oversimplification. Students study at particular places in particular times. They study in times where they're able to. They basically need to fit their studies into times for which there are competing claims. Perhaps after they put kids to bed, after they cook a meal for the family and so on. All of our time relies on competing priorities. We rely on making the most of our time to satisfy other responsibilities that we have in our lives. Students do the same. So when we think of the post-pandemic or whatever reality or normal comes after we're through with the pandemic or even now, we don't need to think post-pandemic. We need to think about the now. We need to recognize that there are different solutions to different problems and that one of the challenges that we have is that we have imagined universities and places of teaching and learning as being at the center of students' lives. Instead, what I invite you to do is to consider lives being at the center of students' lives and universities and learning environments surrounding them. What this invites us to do is to imagine different kinds of teaching and learning environments that cater to the needs and the lives of students. In other words, what this might allow us to do is to offer in-person learning, online learning, digital learning, asynchronous learning, cohort-based approaches to education to different kinds of people based on their different needs. Instead of imagining education as being a one-size-fits-all approach, there are spaces to think of education and to think of different institutions serving different kinds of people for different kinds of needs, for different kinds of topics, for different kinds of learning experiences. I should end there. I'm taking you on a tour of some of the more important issues that I see around learning and flexible learning at this particular moment in time. And I want to end with a prompt. Right now, my colleagues and I are working on a project that is informed by faculty perspective about the future of higher education. This is one of the problems I've been faculty colleagues. I think it's a question worth reflecting upon. Thank you again for having me and for making time to be with us today.