 Okay, so we'll get started. You're all very welcome to today's webinar and part of the European online and distance learning week which Eden is organizing along with several other universities such as the Open Distance Learning Association of Australia and the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand, the United States Distance Learning Association and the National Distance Learning Week and we also have special contributions during the week from ICDE and so really this is very much a global affair. My name is Elaine Byrne and I am from Dublin City University in Ireland and I will be moderating this session and the title today is Making Higher Education 4.0 The Inside Story and we'll essentially be getting a behind-the-scenes look at the design, development and implementation of the MOOC higher education 4.0 certifying your future and some of our panelists will be sharing their different lessons learned along the way. I suppose this is a very timely discussion and as the second iteration of the MOOC has launched today I'm sure we'll hear a little bit more about that from our panelists. So who are they? Well first off we have Professor Mark Brown, the director of the National Institute for Digital Learning. Hello everyone. And then we have Professor Maree Vigil-Vigil, director for my confidential strategy and innovation in DCU. Hi everybody, how are you? And then finally we have Profer McLaughlin who's a researcher and project doctor also in DCU. Hello everyone, nice to see you. So I suppose then in just quickly in terms of the format we will start by kind of Mark will present a rationale and an overview of the content and structure of the MOOC just to give us a little bit of context in that regard and then we'll engage the panelists in an open discussion kind of reflecting on their experiences of being involved in designing and facilitating the MOOC. And then the last 15 minutes or so there will be an opportunity for you to ask any questions you may have or give your feedback on the MOOC if you've taken it. But of course if you have any questions along the way please do post them and I'll do my best to incorporate them into the discussion as we go. We will also be asking you some questions in the chat via links to Mentimeter and we hope to have a look at those responses towards the end of the discussion as well. So I'll pass it over to Mark if he wants to get started. Well thank you very much Elaine I'll just share some slides here to give everyone a little bit of an insight into what we're going to be talking about from the inside. What we don't want to do today is just be seen as if we're promoting this course that we developed back earlier in the year and as Elaine said the second facilitated iteration of this course actually started today. So you're not too late to join and this is what it looks like if you haven't clicked on the link that we put in the chat box there. Higher Education 4.0 certifying your future. So what I'm going to do is just take a few minutes to kind of give you a little bit of an overview of the course itself. But really what we want to talk about is how we designed it, why we designed it, what we've improved, what lessons we've learned about designing such courses and so forth. It's also important for us to acknowledge that this course has been developed with the ECIU University. ECIU is the European Consortium of Innovative Universities. It's the largest European University Alliance with 12 partners in addition to DCU and we've used the course as a way of helping to raise awareness of some of the big issues facing higher education with a particular focus on micro-credentialing as you'll see in a second. So we're delighted to have the ECIU as a formal partner. The term higher education 4.0 in fact I've even seen some people talking about 5.0 but it's borrowed from industry 4.0. Borrowed in a critical way as you will see because we shouldn't just accept technologically deterministic view that somehow the future is being changed through new technology. People also have an impact to technology as technology has an impact on people but nonetheless that's the origin of the term. And there is some literature already in education about higher education or education 4.0. I think we're going to post some of these links that I referred to along the way. This comes from a journal article by Jelly Salmon. Many of you I'm sure are familiar with Jelly Salmon's work. She talks about education 1.0 being a transmission model and then 2.0 a social model, 3.0 about digital lives and then a question to mark what will 4.0 be. So you might want to pursue that journal article. It's available online for you and it's also incorporated within the course with some commentary to go with it. Also because the course is using the FutureLearn platform I thought I'd just give acknowledgement to this FutureLearn report that was produced at the start of the year on the future of learning and we do draw on some elements of this report within the course itself. But in terms of the course we've actually called it a master class. We sometimes will interchange master class with MOOC. We're just conscious that what we wanted to do was signal what the course was about and there's no reason why you have to do this in a facilitated way. The course can be done quite self-directed after we finish the three or four weeks of facilitation. All of the social learning side will be there as well. But we begin by introducing Higher Education 4.0 and it's made up of just three weeks, three themes. Future skills, micro-credentialing and new sort of authentic ways of teaching for new times and I'm going to touch on each of those just briefly. We begin the very first part of the course with this sort of screen dump. I didn't take you in here live. I thought it was easier just to show you some of the features of the course and in particular we are outside of their own mugshots in a video welcoming you to the course. We feature this video that was produced in the United Kingdom by the agency called GIST which generally has a very good reputation for its resources that it produces in education. But actually we want you to be quite critical of this video and I might just give you a 30-second snippet of it. It's only four minutes but you probably don't want to watch four minutes. But I'll give you 30 seconds which hopefully wets your appetite for you to go and explore the link on your own. So take a look at this. This tool controls the way there must be an industrial revolution in education in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combines and modernizes the complexity and efficiency of the procedures of conventional education. Sydney, our president, 1924. These young people are studying in a new way. A computer calculator designed for use in high school classrooms has created tremendous excitement about how to do it. So I'll stop on that note. Hopefully that wets your appetite to take a look at. It's only four minutes I think. A couple of lessons. One, the use of new technology in education is hardly new as you saw from some of those primary clips and some of the quotes from the 1930s. The second lesson is as you go and watch a little bit more of that video and you will see the question that we asked at the bottom of who's shaping the future, whose voice is being heard. What you will see and in our introduction to the course is really concerned that what we have is a very elitist view of education and generally speaking based on those who are speaking throughout the video, a white male-centric view of education. Quite disturbing that we would still produce a video like that talking about education 4.0 or in our case higher education 4.0. And that question about who's shaping the future, whose voice is really being heard influencing the future is one we have coming back through out the design of the course. But you can see this first section on the new skills agenda. We look at some of the pressures and forces at work on higher education to change for better and worse. In fact, we ask a poll and the results of this poll come from the last facilitated iteration of the MOOC. We asked how many people believe the rhetoric that 85 percent of jobs that don't exist today or won't exist by 2030, they haven't been invented yet. Usually you hear that figure being 65 percent, but actually we will link to an online publication that talks about 85 percent of jobs not existing. And you can see the responses of last group of participants. The cohort was almost a thousand educators around the world. You might be able to read as I've been talking what was called hogwash in some quarters that there is no empirical evidence actually substantiating some of these claims. That's not to suggest that the future of work is not changing and changing quickly, but we do again need to be a little careful that we don't just accept what we're being told. Then week two, we drill down if we need new kinds of skills, if we accept that future skills, some people call them transversal skills or soft skills for future of work, but also for future digital society or even the post digital society. That also brings into question what sort of credentials we need. And so we explore the growth of micro credentials and in particular ask the question is small, beautiful. Is it actually the case that we need these smaller units of learning to recognize the kind of learning that needs to be developed, more agile approaches to assessment and recognition. And hopefully you can see on this screen the various things that we explore around micro credentialing, but similarly with a critical lens. So we do introduce some quite critical pieces arguing that micro credentials and the unbundling movement isn't unproblematic. In fact, it might almost be like the supermarket model of education where the learner is building their own curriculum. But when I go to the supermarket, sometimes I buy things that I know are not good for me. So it raises some quite serious questions. Again, a poll that was from the last MOOC as well as some a poll that was done earlier in the year by Holden IQ. You can think what you like about micro credentials. Some see them as the next big thing. It does seem that participants in the MOOC were very much of the view that they are going to have more of an impact over the next five years. Just conscious of time. I don't want to take too much longer. But within the course, we also give some interesting case studies of micro credentialing activity around the world. And here in Ireland, we have a national initiative being led by the Irish University Association, the micro creds initiative. So you'll learn more about that if you do go ahead and join up in the MOOC. And we also bring many resources about micro credentials to get that into what we call the micro credential observatory. So if you have a particular interest in this area, we really encourage you to have a look at the URL link that we'll put in the chat box if it's not there already. It's probably the most comprehensive resource of links and reports and research projects on micro credentials. Finally, in the third week, new pedagogies for new times. We look at a number of so-called new pedagogies. And I say so-called because in some respects, the future lives in the past. Not all of them are that new. Discovery approaches to learning, inquiry approaches to learning have actually been around for quite a long time, although we do look at initiatives like hackathons, sprints, and in particular wrapped around what I'll call a signature pedagogy of challenge-based learning, which is something that the ECIU University has committed to. So you'll see frameworks like this of explaining challenge-based learning and what it is and what it isn't. But at the same time, we'll be a little critical in asking questions about where does this all fit if assessment approaches do not change? And if there's one thing in the COVID experience we've had, we've had to rethink assessment, perhaps hopefully rethink the traditional final examination approach. Here we ask quite a, I guess, controversial question in many respects about whether the final examination is evidence of learning. That's set against an idea that actually the measure of learning is the ability to transfer that learning from not normal academic settings, but to more authentic like settings. And we introduce some literature around high road and low road transfer. We bring the course to an end with a call to action. What is it that you might change after three weeks? What might you not need to change? And to come back to this idea that perhaps higher education 4.0 is about developing new ways of doing things for new times. There's a great quote there from Michelle Obama. If my future were determined just by the performance of mine on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that. So we hope that you will take a dabble into this course. And what I've done in the last 10 minutes or so has given you a bit of an overview of what we've produced is what we hope is a really powerful and valuable learning experience. But the intent was not to do a sales job. Ultimately, the intent really is, in many respects, we're hearing a lot about education in change. And what we're really trying to do is get educators to be the ones who earn the box seat who are driving education for change. And what is the type of change we want? Not the change that we're being told. So what is the change as future makers that we might need to put into place, particularly in a post-COVID environment? I'll finish on this quote. The quote, again, I mentioned earlier that the future lives in the past in many respects. Well, this is quite a dated quote. All education springs from images of the future. All education creates images of the future. And I won't read the rest of that. I'll give you a moment just to take it in. From Toffler, Alvin Toffler, 1974. The key one at the bottom there, though, is if we don't understand the future we are trying to create, we may do tragic damage to those we teach. So Elaine, I think that's my overview of the course. Hopefully it came in within a 10 or 15 minutes scope that you gave me. And back to you, essentially, I'll stop sharing the screen. Yes. Thank you very much, Mark. I think that definitely sets the scene and gives us some context from which we can now kind of develop our discussion. And I suppose in that regard, I'll start with Maureen and maybe bring you into the conversation and ask you just about to give us some insight in how you went about designing this move that we just looked at and what were some of the key considerations that came into play along the way? Thanks very much, Elaine. And I think Mark has done a great job of outlining sort of the different areas that we were trying to explore. I think the key part in the design process for us is that we really wanted this to be by educators for educators because really there's a huge awareness piece in and around this whole, the three elements of the agenda perspective really was to be to be give really practical and good and helpful advice to those who were entering into this domain so that they would be aware of what was going on. We had done an awful lot of research prior to this as part of some of the micro potential and work that we do. So we knew where and what people were looking for. And some of that is in around the house. So particularly if you look to week two of that course, you'll see that we're trying to really explain some of the key issues in and around the house. We're also trying to be, I suppose, and this comes from our own backgrounds, is to be critical of this whole, so not to be this hyping it up as something that is going to be cure all ills and be the panacea to all of the questions, but actually to call out some of the big questions, to call out the issues around adapting this type of approach, to call out the issues around saying that is unbundling education, the best approach or the most needed or the most required approach, to take some of that. And I think there's some really good, you know, we've drawn on some really good resources from other educationalists and theorists who are talking about these things and also to put that into perspective. We've looked at some of the, I suppose, the leaders in the pack, you know, the early adopters and how they're getting on with it and how they've done it, how they've conceptualised it. And I think there's a really good resource for me, I think it's one of the most valuable resources, particularly from the implementation side of it, is because there's a plethora, an absolute plethora of talk. It is one of those things you can talk about, I think Rebecca Ferguson said it there at our last eating conference, at our last eating webinar about our primer for micro-credentials. Like usually when people talk about micro-credentials, they talk about micro-credentials and the online and the platforms and the technology. And there's a really, really good resource there who, completed by a master's student, was part of the ECIU University, Ahmed. And that, I think, it goes through the platforms affordances. It gives that really, really, you know, practical functionality that I think a lot of us who are in the space of translating visions and strategy, which really come from the first week where we're talking about skills and all this sort of this demand led and future focused on skills. I think translating that into acting and how best to do that and then of course wrapping that up. So I think for those key design things where it was to be hugely practical, to be critical, but also divide a forum by which we were both provoking thought and also engaging with the learners who and the educators, many of them were who were engaged in this. And I think giving them that opportunity to comment from their own context, because I think that's one other, was that we were very cognizant of, you know, the view of micro-credentials in a publicly funded system versus a view of micro-credentials in a commercially driven, private focused higher education systems are quite different and there's tensions in and around that. So I think we took a lot into consideration. We also try to reference some of the really good frameworks that have come out from Europe as well. We spoke to them because I suppose without trying to be European centric, we knew that a lot of good work has taken has taken place already in this and to draw on that. Because again, you know, it's this notion of you don't have to keep recreating the wheel. And I think that was one of, that was a few of the design thoughts. I don't know if anybody else had any others that come to mind as we went through it. Thanks Marie. I definitely think what stood out to me there was about that facilitating conversations among peers and giving people an opportunity to address those key questions. And Mark also mentioned the social learning aspect of the course. So Kaur, I might ask you what kind of participant discussions or questions stood out to you in the course and why they stood out? Yes. So thanks Elaine. It's a really good question and I think that it's kind of, I know we might speak to what kind of advantages and disadvantages MOOC-based learning has, but I think a big advantage is that it does give people the space to actually discuss these questions. So the fact that, as Marie was saying, that this was by educators for educators, I think was very important because we found, first of all, that there was a vibrant amount of debate because people tended to have experience in particular contexts. So for example, someone coming from a Canadian context or someone coming from an Italian context. Education, obviously the principles might be human universals, there'll be a debate about that, but the systems are so different that you're actually learning an awful lot from your peers in different contexts. And one that I wanted to highlight actually, because I think it's a good example of an activity, I might just share my screen, I see that I am allowed, is one activity we asked participants to engage in was what we called a future skills tree. And what we were intending to do with this was essentially we asked them if you were thinking about skills for the future. So this was in week one, this is actually live again now. But we asked them to think about skills as a tree. And then we wanted them to kind of tell us, well, what does it look like for you if you take that kind of metaphor of a tree? And what I couldn't get over, because I was thinking about this question earlier, was how much people actually did this. So these are all individual contributions from people. A lot of people went very flowery with the metaphor, water and oxygen, the main nutrients in life. Some people were very, very detailed. So they talked about renewal. And actually, Mark, as you were speaking, one I thought about was someone down here had a very nice one, where they talked about the future as something that never arrives. So floating into space into the future, which never arrives anywhere, a lovely kind of way to think about it. But you can see that the detail and the way that people actually engaged with the question was really quite remarkable. So we've been looking at these responses. And I think the other thing I'd say on it as well is the diversity that's actually inherent here in terms of what people approach it as, because I think as educators and anyone who conducts research on this will know, if you talk about skills, some people might talk about the psychological dimension skills, skills as a ability to self-regulate, the ability to self-direct, et cetera, things that we now recognize as very important, critical thinking. But there's also, and our moderator can speak to this as well, because it's a special research, or it's a research specialism of her, but the emotional aspects actually of skills as well, the ability to thrive, to be a citizen, to be a member of a community. So these are all things that we wanted to explore as well. And Mark has done some fantastic work on this too, in our ECIU project on looking at pillars of learning. So we were looking at adopting some of the United Nations pillars. And it is very telling that some of the pillars they identified years and years ago, so talk about again, the past repeating itself is learning to be, for example, so how to be a relational human being in a complex and changing world. So these questions are as old as time in a way, even though a lot of these, even though our technologies might change, our social context might change, but a lot of these questions are human universals. And so I wanted to highlight that because I think it really was an example of there's the famous quote from Field of Dreams. I think it's butchered a lot about build it and they will come. If you build these kind of social fora where people can actually interact with each other, and educators in particular, I think, are people who enjoy interacting with each other. I think that's something we've probably all experienced at conferences. And there is a certain educator attitude, a can do attitude if we wanted to talk about one of the skills that one person referenced here. So I would say that it was an incredibly enriching experience actually to see those discussions. And I think it speaks to where these kinds of courses are really useful. I know we might talk about that further. But I'm not sure if anyone else had a particular point that stood out to them, but certainly when I think about it, I was really impressed by this skills tree and the contributions we got from our participants. So I might close the stop share there. Thank you for her and thanks for the mention to my own work in the field of emotion. But I suppose, Mark, I'll give you the opportunity to come in here because essentially, you're a facilitator of the course, but you're also a member of the target audience for the masterclass. And from your own personal perspective, was there anything that you learned or new viewpoints that you got from discussions like this or activities in the MOOC or the masterclass? I think you're still on mute there. Lost my mouse before a minute there to turn my mute off. My answer was heaps. It's really rewarding contributing to MOOCs like this or masterclasses that have a truly global community of learners. Some people wonder why we do this. And it was very clear the impactful nature of not just the framework that we had, but the conversations. And in some respects, I'm not sure if we've already said this. There's a sweet spot in learning design, because we want to think about the making of the MOOC, if you like, in the way we frame today's webinar, having an emptiness. So it's sort of almost a contradiction, but designing for emptiness. And one of the things I think we have to be very conscious of an online learning and a MOOC platform is in particular is no two MOOCs are the same. There's a framework they operate. There's a platform, but that platform can be used in many different ways. So we try to design for a degree of emptiness that really valued the contribution and experience of our participants. But our job was I'll use the analogy of a coat hanger. We tried to frame that discussion and have interesting polls and and questions that we would pose and the way in which people engaged in the conversation. I think the one takeaway, if you know, I was put in on a spot, say what I learned, I just learned that change in and the future is never going to follow a straight line. And one thing that we had was differing viewpoints. Some came through in some of those polls. Here we have a group of educators that disagree, for example, on the future of MOOCs or on the different way in which future skills are being framed. We had some really critical contributions and links that then went out to examples that I wasn't aware of are much richer now having seen those and I may be preempting a question to come. But some of those links and resources people referred to are now in the situation of the MOOC that we refreshed and redesigned accordingly. So not in a straight line. The future is not unproblematic and that if we don't engage in shaping our own future, we're going to get one that's given to us and that's why we need to be engaging in these conversations. Great. Yeah. And I suppose then on the other side of we've kind of discussed so far what has worked well and the conscious decisions made in the MOOC. But I suppose sometimes the best thing, the most important things we need to reflect on and what were the challenges and what didn't go as well. So I'll open this up to all or any of you about kind of to critically, if you were to critically reflect on the design and delivery of the course, what were the challenges and how did you kind of circumvent those challenges along the way? Well, I'll just jump in initially and say we're doing this on top of our day job. This is something that we're making a contribution to for all the reasons that I think we've explained. But it's hard to sustain that contribution. And when you get hundreds of discussion posts, as we did, it's really tough to reply to everyone. We committed to trying to really have a dialogical experience. The future and platform itself is actually designed in a way more so than most other platforms to engage in that conversation. So I think for me it was keeping up with the conversation. But that's the great thing about doing an experience like this in a team. If it was just one person, I think that would almost be impossible in teaching at scale or mass pedagogy. But I'll hand back to my other colleagues because between the three of us, we were able to balance some of those pressures. Yeah, and I was going to come in there and just sort of say what I found was we're typical academics in a way. We said it was a mook for a certain amount of time and that. I suppose we could, some of the comments that came back, that it took a lot of people a lot longer to do the mook, to reflect on it. And I think that's one of the things. And I think we tried our best to put in those spaces for people to have that reflection time into it as well. But we were also conscious of the design of the mook itself as well. And that gratification of having a step completed was another thing that prompted people to complete it. And we all know about completion rates and all that type of stuff. And actually for this mook, we had very, very high completion rates as it happens and engagement. So it's sort of that tension between allowing people to move progress through it and then also providing that reflection piece. That for me was a critical part of it. And also, I think that you could necessarily, we could say that the mook could take an extra week or two weeks for people to complete. I think that would be a fair assessment as well. So for me, it was that sort of thing of trying to bring people with you, bring the conversation on, move them on. And some people were quite diligent about doing it. And they went through it in one sitting, or they went through weeks as they went there. And I think the other part was that the other part that I would have liked, and I came back with this notion, and maybe Courier will speak to this about the synchronous version of it as well, that there was maybe an opportunity. And I know Courier, you were particularly, you know, getting some feedback with respect to that, that we could have also facilitated that screen time with people or Zoom time or whatever time we wanted to call it, that they also wanted that to have that element of it. I don't know, Courier, if that leads into somewhere where you were particularly looking at. Yeah, well, absolutely. I agree with you. And actually, I agree with your other point as well, because the thing I was going to say was it's kind of like that thing, if you ever read any handbooks on like ethnography or something, they often say that the problem, if you're studying humans or if you're working with humans, is when you leave. Do you know what I mean? That's when the problem emerges, because if you're conducting your research, you've gotten access to the field. How do you say goodbye then? How do you say this is the end of the project? This is the, you know, we're finished here, we're moving on with people that you've kind of built relationships with in a way, often case. In our case, it was short, so we didn't necessarily have relationships in that sense, any emotional form of connection, albeit that we know and like a lot of our participants. But I think that the finishing is a problem often in MOOCs, I think, is because you want to promote this discussion, you want to promote the dialogue, but it has a date when it finishes. So I really agree with you, Merade, on that. I think that's a big thing is how do you contrast the formal end? You know, this is the calendar end. This is the day that it's finished with. Well, maybe I would have liked to continue that discussion. And that actually leads to I think the other thing you were saying, which was yes, there was quite a bit of feedback about that, that would it be possible, for example, for us to meet up, to have some form of synchronous session, which is something, again, I don't want to preempt a question, but I think it is coming up. But yes, this was a change that we were certainly looking at was, would it be possible to incorporate live sessions? And we're happy to announce that it is. We have ones coming next week and the week beyond that. But I think that that's a really, really big point here is the, it's, and it's kind of design-based, but it also has the human element as well of how do you ensure that people get different forms of communication as well? You know, I think just Elaine, just a thought sort of sparked when Coher was talking. I think one of the important bits when we were doing the refresh of the MOOC in itself this time was, was that so much has happened since we originally published this, you know, and I think one of the challenges for us as sort of academics and researchers in this area and et cetera, is keeping up with that, but also maintaining the rigor that there's people still coming to the table of micro-credentials and future skills and pedagogies who may not have the initial or ab initio experience, you know, they may not. So it's balancing out, trying to course those educators that we have and we've had some really, really great participation from people from all walks, from institutions, not only education institutions, but also from super national bodies, from the commission, you know, from other bodies, from training, education and training networks, from government policymakers, we've had them actually participate in the MOOC. So that for me was, it's an important balance we've been trying to maintain so that we're not losing people because we take it for granted in this refresh that they've understood. So we've tried to maintain the integrity of building the narrative, building the story, building, demonstrating how it's been moving on, and also then providing avenues for participants to go out and become part of a wider micro-credential community. So whether that's the micro-credentialsonfrontier.org, that Beverly Oliver and others have put together and that I think that's a really important part of it, you know, and as Mark has put in the chat there, you know, there's a huge, huge, huge number of reports that have come out. And we also know that we're in a cycle in Europe of where we're waiting for the commission's recommendations, et cetera, with respect to the roadmap. But again, that's a really, really important aspect of it. So I think we'll be in a state with this course where it's going to be maintaining the integrity of it, but then also providing those who are advancing with it to give them the new and the updated and to maintain that sort of thing. Whilst also keeping the integrity of those critical questions that we had around unbundling, holistic approach to education and that criticality. So yeah, so it's been a challenging time, but I think it's also been a great learning experience for ourselves as a team. Yeah, it's a, I think there's a lot of lessons there as well that can be kind of applied to other contexts as well and not just the move, this master class. And you touched on it a good bit there, but I just wanted to give you the opportunity as well to talk about now that we are in its second iteration and how the course has developed over time to the, we mentioned there, you mentioned there about the updated research and how that has been incorporated into the course. And if you've had, I presume that was based on feedback as well. Yeah, definitely. So, and actually the two teams probably of changes they have both been touched upon, but to maybe even just synthesize them is, as Morade says, I think that's the particularly in the microcredential week, that's a big issue is that things are changing almost week to week. So the question then becomes, well, our resources out of date, do they not actually keep up with developments in a field or does someone say, oh, well, this report is actually version 2.0, we're now on version 6.2 or something. So there's actually so much movement in that field that I think the first run of that are changes. And in a way, it's a nice metaphor for the MOOC about the future is the fact that today's present is yesterday's future. And so there's this constant wheel that we're talking about of time that we have to be cognizant of. And as Morade says, actually make sure that the course balances that as well, that it still covers the initial content, but also has updates. So we've made pretty substantial changes to week two in terms of content. And then the other element is also including the synchronous elements. So as I said, we actually have upcoming synchronous sessions, just to allow actually not only as a result of that feedback, but to actually allow a richer form of feedback, because there is nothing like and I mean, even we're looking at the chat here as we're speaking, I don't think there's anything like the actual, you know, human interaction again of it's grand when you get a form back, but then you're actually chatting to someone in a dialogue, a live synchronous dialogue. I think that's a bit different as well. And so we're taking the lessons of that also. Yeah, and I think you touched very nicely there on Kathy's question in the chat about whether there were synchronous elements of the MOOC or whether it was a drawing in its entirety on asynchronous methods, but I think you answered that nicely there as well, that there are synchronous elements incorporated in the form of workshops and webinars. Yeah, yeah, in this iteration, but in the previous one there was and as I say, I think it is something, but again, to touch on something Mark was saying earlier as well, part of this is to do with resourcing as well. It can be very difficult to find the time and the amount of investment that's required on the time side is huge as well, but this has been such a rich and valuable experience that I think we can see the advantage of doing so as well. Right, I might just ask you if we were to kind of widen this discussion and thinking more of the MOOC as the vehicle through which this course was delivered. How do you see MOOCs kind of moving forward in and the role that they play in kind of providing continual professional learning and development for educators? And maybe the role that Mike potentially plays in this as well, given that that's such a tough point at the moment as well. Yeah, so I think having they said that 2020 was the second year of the MOOC, and I think that's partially towards obviously the pandemic and people reaching out and engaging with learning in that format due to the restrictions, et cetera, that we all live through or live and live through. So I think definitely MOOCs are there and have always been seen as sort of that stepping stone into professional development. I think Beverly Oliver does a lovely piece about talking about how MOOCs are now seen as part of the fabric. They're part of that tapestry of CPD that's available. So I think, yes, definitely MOOCs, I think are here to say as part of that. I think with the microcredential aspect of it, I think this is an interesting thing because not only the subjects that we're touching on obviously, and it's that notion. And I come back, when we talk about change, we talk about it usually in the static sense where I'm more comfortable with the sort of verb changing as a continuous action. And I think that's become a part of what we have to consider. But if we take a snapshot and a shot on a point of time, I think this type of approach to CPD with regards to sort of not, and I use the word cutting edge, but those that are really those sort of initiatives, those innovations, those sort of trends that are at that edge that are being progressed. I think it's important that you can use this platform to reach at scale a breadth of people, a wide breadth of people, and to be able to publish. And I think that for me is the flexibility of the provision, you know, born out by the participation rates, but also the engagement rates. And also what was interesting for me was was that the breadth of participants globally engage with the MOOC. And I think that learning, that breadth of learning is really, really important. I think one of the things, you know, when we were reflecting on this webinar, we were saying, well, if you were to go down another area, you know, and look at what could be or should be included. I think one of the things that we, myself, I think is a really, really important part of this is that through the pandemic, we've learned an awful lot and more people have learned an awful lot about the support and the provision or the affordances of technology to provide some form of learning. I think there's a note, there is a necessity for continued CPD in that moving from transition based models of engagement and teaching and learning, but also then through, and this is potentially just true lack of knowledge or need for the development of knowledge and skills in the notion of people being very unaware of the sort of tracking, the data failings, the surveillance aspects of platforms, technologies, et cetera. And I think that's where there's a need for criticality, a little bit more criticality as we widen out provision as we widen out use of technologies, et cetera, because you'll see, and I follow a lot on Twitter and a lot of academics who are now engaging or embracing new moves into online based learning or digitally enhanced learning, whichever way you want to put it, but they're engaging in practices that need to be ethically considered. And I think we need to have some sort of open conversation about that a little bit more. So even for me, we've taken a trend and we've seen it, but I think there's a door that needs to be pushed a little bit more on a wider scale and outside of potentially the community that we're very much in Wisconsin, but to a wider, the wider community of educationalists and academics to understand those issues. They understand it quite well in classroom conversations and face-to-face situations, but I just think there just needs to be a little bit more work done on that. And I'd love to see some resources coming out, maybe in a MOOC to talk to that subject area. Yeah, thanks. And I think that leads into a question I might bring Mark in on this about other similar initiatives or forms of ways to address higher education and professional development. Have you come across any or similar initiatives that would complement a course like this, or are another way or methodology to look at this kind of area? Yeah, well, Elaine, right from the start with this MOOC or masterclass, you can see I said, at the start we would interchange is that we were thinking of a blended form of delivery or hybrid form of delivery. Those are not entirely the same blended hybrid, but essentially there's no reason why a cohort of learners from one university, one higher education institution couldn't be using the course alongside some opportunities to interact together, perhaps alongside another course they're doing or a professional learning experience. Essentially, we would be advocating that. And for the ECIU University, we were probably a little bit early with the MOOC being available. Sometimes we had some deadlines to meet for funding purposes for the consortium partners to come together and share across the 12 universities. And so we are doing just that with this iteration of the MOOC that we hope to bring people together from the partner universities, but also promote conversation within each partner. One thing we tried to do, and again this would be one of those quick answers to the question about our feedback and what we know sort of happened and what we don't know, is we tried to design for some action, a call to action. I think I may have mentioned that at the end, we didn't want people just say, oh, that's interesting and go away and not change anything. So we challenged people to say, what's the one thing you're going to change? But that change operates sort of at an individual level, at maybe a unit level and a higher whole of institutional level. So for me, if you really want to get that change at a more systemic level, then you have to go beyond just the MOOC experience. So if we've triggered some conversations, that would be great. We would want to continue to trigger those conversations because in terms of professional learning, what we know from more than 50 years of research on the use of new technologies for education is that people largely assimilate new ways of doing things, whether that be a technology or an innovation, into their existing pedagogical orientation, their existing approach to teaching. So MOOCs can be used for transit, transmissional learning, or they can be used for conversational kinds of learning. And I use the word conversation here to quite intentionally draw on Diana Laurelard's conversational theory as an example. So I guess it doesn't stop at a MOOC, but I think the MOOC is a permanent fixture now in the professional development toolkit that we have available. And the fact that you can interact with educators around the world and get different viewpoints is something that's a strength that you may not have from just your solid, institutional-based approach. Thank you, Mark. And I think now it would be perfect time to bring in some of our participants and address some of their questions. So please do post in the Q&A section of the Zoom here. And I'd also, we're going to post some of our own questions to you that you might want to consider and we might reflect on them as well. But we do have one question in the Q&A box, and that is, what do you think of the transdisciplinary approach to education? And I'll open that up to the panel for whoever wants to jump in. I wonder what's meant by the term transdisciplinary. And I might go to Mulky task in a second while someone else is talking and share a table that I have that helps to define transdisciplinary for multidisciplinary from interdisciplinary. So I'm not entirely sure we're all speaking the same language when we use those terms. So I will see if I can find the table that I can share my screen. But one of the things, if I just pick up on the point about transfer of learning that I was referring to in the last section of the course, what we know is that learning that takes place in predominantly academic contexts that makes no real link to the rest of the world. I could say real world, but academic contexts are part of the real world. That has weak transfer and therefore weak potential for learning. And in the real world in inverted commas, when I use that term, knowledge is interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, it doesn't get siloed and ring fenced into all I'm doing physics now. All of these disciplines that we have come to bear in solving problems. So for me, it's implicit that you have to adopt and promote such an approach. Thanks, Mark. And you might have some of you might see now we've posted them, one of our polls in the chat box, where you can contribute and reflect yourself on what you think are professional learning gaps that are emerging for higher educators at the moment. And perhaps some of you may want to comment on that yourselves openly. I know Mark has already taken the opportunity to give us what his key takeaway from the course is, but perhaps for her, you might have something to add there as a last kind of encouragement for people to get involved. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the big takeaway I took probably was, and it's a funny one, but it's probably the degree to which what you know is kind of limited to what you know. And what I mean by that is kind of the real enriching nature of these abilities to when we talk about transfer, transfer knowledge and transfer experiences as well. I think that's really important, you know. And I think that's something that I took away definitely was that people are engaged with and ready to discuss these conversations, because I think sometimes a lot of discussions are had this is something Mark touched on at the start, but they're often had about educators and about people in higher education, but there's not necessarily that higher educators voice. But then when you actually talk to educators, they do have opinions, they've talks, they've disagreements on all these issues. So I think if I were saying what my big takeaway would be, would be to harness that in your own practice, I think as well that criticality, it's something Ray touched on as well. I think there are a lot of questions, implicit questions to these types of practices that aren't always brought to the surface. And I think that because of COVID as well, we're seeing far more people engage with these questions than might have before. And distance education is its own subfield, however we want to find it, digital learning, etc. But a lot of these questions are starting to become prevalent across areas where maybe they might have been historically as well. So I think that's a really important takeaway I'd have would be to be open and to invite everyone as well who hasn't registered to register, because I do think that conversation is something that I imagine you're very present here today, I think, makes me think that you would probably be interested in that conversation as well, contributing and hearing what others have to say also. You're on mute there, Mark, if you want to come in and give us a little bit of context to your slide. Now, am I still sharing the screen? You're still seeing that? No, not anymore. Okay, I'll share the screen. Sorry to cut in there, a grower, but I just thought since I did find what I was looking for. So I think I'm not going to take time to walk you through this, but just to say, if there is a takeaway, and maybe this is the scholar or academic in me, that words do matter. And even the concept of challenge-based learning, even though our institution has made a commitment to this as a signature pedagogy, we're quite critical about what's meant by challenge-based learning and what it isn't. In this case, just to give you one take on the difference between transdisciplinary into disciplinary and so forth. So there are various domains that one needs to think about. So since that just came up, I thought it was the teachable moment. Thanks, Mark. And I think while you've been chatting there, we got some input on our poll. So I'll share my screen and it might be something that you can reflect on as panelists in terms of. So this is the different professional learning gaps that some of our participants have seen from their own experience or context. So we have a lack of collaboration, and again similar around more flexible opportunities to interact with different cohorts in a boarder's time, space. Please do continue to add to these, and we can share them via our different platforms after the conversation as well. I also added another poll about just to get over regards to feedback on the MOOC itself, whether you've taken it, or listening to Bob and talking about here today. That's also there. I suppose I'll just come finally before we finish up, unless anybody has any other questions, just to Maree to give you an opportunity as well, just to reflect even on these points, because I know you spoke a little bit about CPD earlier, but also kind of your key takeaway from the course as I've given you the opportunity to talk about that. Yeah, I think again for me, like these are really interesting innovation, management, and design thinking really important areas now. And for me, I think one of the things is this notion of agility and changing. I think we're being presented with so many different trends, concepts, and I think there's a need for a lot of synergistic thinking that you get when you engage with creative processes. I think it's one of the things that I would say is having been able to look at being able to draw together those notions of design thinking when you boil it down to agility based approaches. They all come down to that notion of creativity, and I think that's becoming sort of a CPD area that I thought I'd never have to engage in as an academic. But I think actually it's becoming more required because we are being asked to be chameleons, we are being asked to reflect on and to be able to pivot into new domains. And I think one of the things, and even following newer academics, and those who are coming through PhD programs and are coming into their first few years in academics, is that being able to juggle so many things, but then being able to focus, to have that laser focus within them as well. So I think there's a notion of the creativity, the agility, and then also focus on how the three of those meet together. So I think that would be a really very interesting area for me as an academic. But also I think for other academics, as I see them progressing through their careers, because today we're doing this webinar, I think that we're looking to challenge people to think about their careers, to think about what's coming down the line, to think about also their research areas as well, and how they should meet. So for me, the capacity to have that innovation, to have that entrepreneurial spirit as an academic, which we're very privileged in many aspects due to the nature of our work to have, I think to develop that out for academics would be an interesting area to explore with other higher educators. I think Mark is having a step out to a meeting, so I'll hand back to yourself, Elaine. Yes, thank you. Yes, he has indeed. But Justin, I suppose we can finish up now anyway. I want to thank you all for joining us here today, and in particular to thank our three panelists. And I hope your contributions have been really insightful, and I hope everyone here enjoyed listening. And also, thank you to anyone who took part as well in our by asking questions or taking part in our interactive questions polls. But please do join us on the MOOC itself. We'd love to continue our conversations there, and I think some of Moray's finishing points there allude to maybe opportunities for future MOOCs in this area as well. So please do keep in touch, and we will share some of the contributions to the Padlet via Twitter and things like that afterwards. So thank you all very much, and have a lovely rest of the day wherever you are. Thanks very much, Al. Thank you very much, Banya. Thank you, Gorma Hagwif. Thanks, Elaine. Thanks, Eden. Thanks, Elaine.