 Okay, so let's go, I think. Welcome everybody to our webinar today that I'm really excited about and I'm really happy that so many of you joined. My name is Laura Eichbrecht. I will be presenting the webinar for you together with Wolf. And I'm very happy to have Carmen and Ruben here as well and Lilith will join us later as well. And as you all know, because you signed up, our subject today is called Next Normal, including students' views into shaping future higher education. And before we start, I want to give you a short overview of our plan for today. First of all, of course, we want to introduce our subject to do that we are discussing today, but of course, also us, the panelists, and we also want to know who you are, where you are joining from. I think you're already starting to discuss it in the chat. We'll have a little minty meter on it in a few minutes. And then Ulf Daniel Elas will do a little input on research and theory of student participation for future higher education for us. Then Carmen Romero from the European Students Union will talk to us about what student participation's role was in the last months. And then we will talk to Lilith Dieringer and Ruben Jansens, who've been part of our podcast projects in the last months and who are also very engaged when it comes to student participation. We want to talk to them about the last months and also about perspectives for the future. And then we are really looking forward to all your questions, ideas, and perspectives on students' views and including them into shaping future higher education. So I think the term new normal and also the next step, the next normal is one that we are debating a lot today. But what does it actually mean and where are we right now? Apparently there's a new normal which means that in the last months, higher education has changed so quickly. We all know that this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also we have experienced some changes that already have been there before that have been just accelerated. We're talking about globalization, digitization as one of the central terms of those past months. So almost all higher education has switched to online from one day to the other. And we have started with our research group. We found that this was really an exciting time and this is also why we are talking today because we've never had such a situation before, really. And this also means that it's kind of a very strategic time to talk about future at higher education and also to talk about this with students who are the most affected and the most important group in this because higher education is with them and for them. And that's why we think it's very important to see how in this debate we can do it together with students and how can we talk about where to go right now, what our mission should be for the next months and years for the future of higher education. And this debate is what we want to start with you today. And yeah, we're looking forward to your ideas in this. First of all, we would like to ask you who you are. And afterwards we will present you who we are more closely. And you can see here the QR codes. I will post a link in the second in the chat as well. So you can join the Mandimeter and then we will ask you the question, where are you right now, which country? I think you've already posted it to the chat, but then we can see a little bit the distribution of countries where you are from because this is really interesting for us. So I will shortly stop the screen sharing and post the link to you in the chat. Here we go. It works. Nice. Yes, people are joining already. And I will share now the Mandimeter. So you can see what's happening. Does it work? You see Hungary, Romania with me? Or are you only sending it to the panelists in a chance? Okay, I'm sorry. Thanks for letting me know. So now I think it should be working for everybody. So you can use this link or you can go to menti.com and use the code which is displayed in the screen that I'm sharing right now. So the bigger the word, the more people type the word. So now we have most people joining from Romania right now. I think we got a good mix. So it's, we have a lot of Europe. We have also India. India. Yes. Welcome. Really cool. Welcome. These are only 14 now. So we're missing 56. Oh yeah. We are 82 participants right now. That's great. Where do I have to type my country? You can click the link as well. Yeah, I did it. But then I come to the side and where do I have to type my country then? Don't see that. But okay. Okay. So we have also now Sri Lanka, Turkey. And Ireland. I think the link is shared for the presentation because if we follow the link, we see the same presentation as you show on the screen right now. It's not for entry. So it worked for the rest somehow. So let me just check for another thing. I will stop sharing. It's easier if they go to mentimeter.com and use the code. Okay. Thank you. And here we go again with the shorter link. I think this one should work. Okay. So I will share again and then I think we will move to the next question. And you can stick with the link. It will be the same. Oh, we also have somebody from Mexico joining a Serbia, England, Lithuania, UK. That's really great. So I'm really happy that we have such a spread and colorful audience that's called like that. Germany, I think you made it. Taiwan, Portugal. Thanks everybody for joining. Okay. So you can still type because we can have a look at it later again as well. So I will shortly go to the next question, which is that we want to learn about you, who we're actually talking to. Are we talking to a lot of students or people who are doing research, et cetera? Are you maybe working in higher education as an administrative stuff, et cetera? So I think you can already start because the link is the same. And I will share the screen to show you what I'm seeing right now because people are already joining the poll. So you may answer in multiple answers because for me myself, I would have to type teacher and researcher, for example. And I know that a student representative would usually be a student as well. So this is really exciting to see who we are actually talking to today. Seems to be a lot of teachers, but also researchers and students, what is really great. So we have 32 persons joining. We'll wait until the 40, I think. Okay. So most of all, we have teachers and yes, we have some from the student science. For the other, actually if it would be interesting for us to can, you may type in the chat what your profession is for those who chose other because that's always very interesting. Okay. So thank you very much for joining this survey. I will go back to our slides and I'm very happy that now we know a little bit more about who we are talking to. And now of course, you should know who you are talking to. So sharing this screen, you should see my presentation. And so I think we can introduce ourselves as today's presenters of it. Yeah, maybe I can present you also just to give you a little rest. So you are actually moderated today by Laura, Laura Eichbrecht, she's an academic researcher from the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Germany, in the southwest of Germany. It's the biggest university in the southwest of Germany. And I am Ulf Elas and we are together with some other people, our team forming the next education working group and we're taking care of research subjects in the field of digital transformation of educational institutions and of educational processes. And we do a lot of work on future skills. I will introduce some of them later and very happy to be with you today. Back to you. Thank you very much for the introduction. So yeah, we're happy that Ulf and me from our research team that we're working on the future of higher education to have this webinar today because of course, this is a very exciting time for us but as important as to present our panelists shortly to you, we will have more information from them later but first of all, I want to welcome Carmen Romero today who is the membership coordinator of the European Students Union and herself student in political science in Belgium right now yet, but you're from Spain and really busy with student representation and doing inclusive student representation and also for an active citizenship and it's great that you're here. Welcome. Thank you. Then we have Lillet who will shortly join us. Always very tight schedule because Lillet is also a student. She was also a part of our podcast series that we will present to you later and she is engaged in the student, official student initiative digital change maker that do with digitization of higher education and it's potential so a very exciting time right now and also in lots of other initiatives that she will maybe talk to you about later. So for later, welcome Lillet. And then I'm also very happy to welcome Ruben Janss who I also know because he was part of our podcast project Next Normal for the one of the episodes on Belgium and he's a representative at the European Students Union for the PBS, the Flamse Verenigring von Studenten and also a student in Grend and I'm really happy that you're joining us today. Welcome Ruben. Thank you very much. One thing I forgot to say actually is that Laura is actually the face behind all the podcasts we are doing. So I have a look at her when you think about our podcast that's who's behind the, not the camera but behind the microphone. I'm also very happy to have you all with us. Okay. So of course we are excited to hear more from all of you from all of us later but we'll start with a part from you Ulf, perspectives from research on student participation. Participation, the floor is yours. Okay, thank you very much. That's super that you introduce it like that. Actually I'm just starting my time. I give myself 10 minutes which is not so easy for me. I love to talk about this. Student engagement is really a big, big topic and can be seen from so many different angles and student participation is a bit the same but maybe also a bit different. I'm an educational researcher. I'm coming from this perspective actually. Also I'm a professor of educational management. That means I have a perspective on an organization. How do we organize in our institution education, higher education? That's a different question than an educational researcher and educational scientist would have per se. Next slide please. I think one thing we have to keep in mind is then when we think about students as an institution, as teachers, as those who create a curriculum, we really have to keep in mind that when these people are ready in our institutions, they're graduates by the time they are graduates and by the time they start working and by the time they will then go through their lives we actually do not know a lot about this time. And this is what this thought experiment shows. A school beginner, my son is actually, has started to go to school in 2016. He's 10 years old now. When he's now actually 2020, he's just changing school and going to high school the first year now. When he's graduating from high school, it will be 2028 and so on and so on. And when he's receiving his master and starting to work, if he's going to a university, then it will be 2033. And if you think back 15 years, or if you first think ahead, 15 years, it's 2033 or let's say 13 years ahead. If you think back 13 years today, you come to 2007, that's the year when the first iPhone has been sold. And think about what has changed there. What do we know really about this kind of life we will have them, this kind of society the challenges society, we know nothing about that. So what we have to think about when we think about students and student participation, we have to keep in mind that it should be really our aim to develop an autonomy, to support them to develop a learning autonomy because they will be the you or will be the decision makers in our society and you will be faced with problems we cannot prepare you for. Next slide please. And there are several models to think about that and that's the good thing. In general, I brought you here a picture which shows three different models. In general, when you think about teaching, you can divide teaching into three different philosophies. The left philosophy called know that or facts is a philosophy in which teachers are fed, in which students are fed with knowledge by teachers who know what the students have to know. In the middle one, the procedures one, it's a different model. The different model is that in the middle one, the philosophy is following a concept in which teachers are giving problems to students, problems and the students are asked to solve these problems and thus become a bit more autonomous in their learning and these problem solving is done with the help in eye to eye, so to speak, with the teachers and with others. And then we have the third one which is a really exciting thing but also very challenging for our university. It's going beyond this problem based learning philosophy. This is the social practice philosophy and that's a mode, a model of teaching in which teachers do not give problems to students in which teachers are actually asking the students to first develop their own problems. And we can talk a lot about that but I don't have time for that to go really in depth but this is a real exciting thing. Students in this, according to this philosophy, they are asked to go out in society on farms, into organizations, in hospitals, in the next school and so on and to understand how the system works there and then to find out where is the break? Where is the problem? Where is something which doesn't work and then describe that, identify that and come back into university, go into groups, make projects out of that and develop a solution for that. So that's what the future really needs. So, and you can understand already what it means on this kind of micro level I'm talking about on the learning design level to have student participating into this kind of learning and teaching because then they are the ones who gives the curriculum. They are the ones who develop the learning problems. Next slide, please. Another model which we have developed already some years ago which is now becoming more and more popular is the model of open educational practice. Open educational practice now combines this idea of a student-centered learning design with using technology. So on the left side you have, so to speak, the dimension of open learning design which means basically a voyage from what I just discussed from the point where you give students a predefined curriculum to the, where you progress to the point where you are allowing students freedom to choose their learning pathways and to choose their learning objectives as well. And to combine that with implementing more and more technology and, so to speak, empowering and developing a partnership and alliance with students to use technology to network themselves with other peers in their learning pathway. And you can see how this voyage could go from the red to the green path. Next slide, please. I'm showing you this all because in educational philosophy, educational science we have all these beautiful models like this one now is the last one where you really see that the metaphor of participation is really embedded into this model which is called the community of practice model by Wenger which probably most of you if you're in the teaching business know if you are students, you might not know that but it's really worth if you're interested in this field to go in there and to have a look. So this is a model of learning in which you are actually do not use the metaphor of acquisition of knowledge anymore for learning but in which you are really using the metaphor of participation in which you are becoming part of a community and you're moving from the periphery to the center of a community through targeted let's say support actions which you can call engagement, interaction, collaboration, scaffolding, maybe you have had this. Next slide, please. So we can actively support student participation on this micro level in terms of educational design which I think is really, really key to help students to develop an autonomous learning capacity and capability. We've done a lot of work on what we call future skills and we've just published half a year ago a book and our results of a four year research journey and we published 17 different future skills profiles. That's what we call them. I won't go into details here. You can download them all open and free of costs, open access and free of costs but what we found is that this issue of self-organization and autonomy is one of three key issues for future skills of future graduates. Next slide, please. You can go here to our website. We developed a skill finder which where you can click on each skill and find the definition and what is entailing. Next slide, please. And as I said, I talked about different levels of participation as an educational scientist and as a teacher, I'm interested in this micro level on the classroom floor, so to speak, to work with students. Then we can also think about participation on a major level. That means how do we involve students actually into our organization, into our institution? What is the governance structure which we are giving students which where we allow them to participate in curriculum development, in organizational development, in policy making within our institution. And then, of course, on the macro level, also student engagement is important in which we, so to speak, ask students to come and participate in policy making of educational policies. Next slide, please. Just some small examples. The future university will probably not look like today's university. The future university will be an institution which, of course, is more future skill oriented where other skills, new skills, new skill profiles will be the object of learning and teaching, how I just described it. Self-organization, autonomy will be very, very important. Self-management and so on. Leading social movements will be important, et cetera. But there's one thing which I would like to emphasize also in our work on future models for future universities. We also saw that our experts, which we ask in Delphi studies, they were expressing that probably the future university, the future studies, study pathway will not be a one institutional pathway where you study and start an institution one and then you finish an institution one. But probably which will be rather a journey through a longer time and through several institutions where the learning from one institution is recognized mutually from the other institution. And that means basically we really need to see that students will become more and more and will be allowed, actually, more and more autonomy, not just in the curriculum but the learning objectives in classroom but also in the institutional setting which they are choosing. And it will be important for our universities to start developing the scenarios so that we can understand what is actually entailed with that because this is not the reality today. Next slide, please. We are practicing with several of these student participation metaphors in our own teaching projects. One very, very important which you see here is called the Grand Challenge which we practiced the last three years is a project in which we try to bring teaching and learning in university into the open. So what we did is actually we started with a teaching learning project with students and then we organized a fully-fledged country-wide student online conference which even was broadcasted on TV, et cetera, et cetera. And we found that for students it is so important to move the learning from this artificial boundary limitation of the institution into the open where they can participate with their visions for society. Next slide, please. That's what Laura will also talk a little bit more about. That's student participation on a different level. When the shutdown came in March two weeks later already we started, and Laura that was Laura's initiative actually and she's the energy behind that, we started to interview and to discuss with students. And the real, real astonishing thing is that about their situation, how they are, how they study from home, how that works, what are their strategies, self-organization strategies and so on, how do they survive actually? What are their tips and tricks and what do they expect from the university? But what the real issue is really that this kind of project was gaining so much media attention because not just us as teachers but also society, societal stakeholders were wondering how is the situation actually for our learners and how can we learn about that? How can we listen to them in order to be informed? How we can create solutions for this difficult shutdown online digital time? Next slide please. You can download what I said about the future skills here on nextskills.org. There are several videos and open access publications. Next slide please and I think that's already the last slide. And maybe Laura you want to tell us a little bit about our newest kid on the block. That's the newest EU project. We just one together with the European Students' Union and others which will start soon. But what is it about? Yes, what is it about? It's called Inclusive PHE for the professional higher education and I'm really excited about it that we are part of it. The acronym stands for Inclusive Engagement of Non-Traditional Students in Professional Higher Education. It's a three year project with seven project partners amongst them also the European Students' Union. I'm pretty sure. And it's coordinated by Mondragon University in Spain. And the goal of the aim is to create a more inclusive environment and professional higher education institution. But this is done by more students participating actually in higher education. That means that they are represented on all levels of the experience of being a student at a higher education institution. What is lying below it is that professional higher education institutions attract a more diverse audience or more diverse student body with more non-traditional students. For example, adult learners, lifelong learners, students with kids, students with background of migration, students with disabilities, et cetera. So there's the goal of finding better practices for inclusive engagement of our students regardless of the background and circumstances. And the goal is also to develop means to improve it. So we're really happy to be part of this project. Ulf, there's a question for you. Maybe you want to shortly answer it. It's before we move on. It's from Thomas Richter. And I would just read it. Ulf, don't you still need to teach basics before the students can even identify and describe problems they may solve in future further steps? I think it's three education models. Thanks, Thomas. Thank you for the question. I think you're right. I'm thinking about this like a funnel or like a progression scale. When students arrive, they are usually from school in the profession. For example, they're usually not socialized in a free environment, open environment, in a curious environment, but they're socialized in an environment in school where it counts to learn by heart and then write that down and test. So that's true. We have to take them on this journey of progression of enlarging autonomy but I think that this, of course, can be done from the beginning but with a bit more guidance for sure. Thank you. Okay. So I will quickly move on with shortly presenting those podcast series that we are talking about all the time that we also have some very important people for this podcast project here. All of you who've been a lit and Carmen. So while we started the podcast, we said it was important in this very special situation for us to ask actually how are students doing and how are they coping and how are they actually managing this totally different situation or studying for them and how do they experience the recent situation and what are their needs and what can higher education institutions actually learn from it because there were a lot of decisions taken that students' views were included. So we have two podcast series. We actually started the first one in German Studium im Shutdown via Studien zu Hause. We started in the beginning of April. So really some weeks after our German University shutdown started but I think it was about the same date for most countries actually. We've released 16 episodes so far and in this podcast we normally talk to individual students about their study experiences and how they are coping with the recent situation and what could be done to improve it. We decided in summer that we want to take as well a more European perspective because we are also working and moving so much in the European context and it's also for our higher education. It's a context that is very important no matter where you study and in what institution. And we are really happy that we could gain the European Students' Union as a partner for this. Carmen is helping us a lot to find students from all over Europe who are mostly also student representatives in the National Student Union and we've done five episodes so far but more up to follow and we're doing group interviews with students always from one European member state and the focus is more on developing visions for the future of higher education so it's a more visionary approach. Most podcast series are still out there and of course you can listen to them and we are happy if you do so and we are also very happy of students who are interested in it and we are also analyzing it as part of some research that we are actually doing of also taking into account students' views on the recent situation and I won't talk about it a lot but there's a lot of stuff that we could talk about like how are things changing in what dimensions what are student self-study strategies this is a very important subject right now but also what about the cause digital social presence is there a solution of finding ways to avoid isolation when studying at home etc. So there's a lot of very important subjects that we collect views in the podcast and some central findings is that students are actually able to master with self-organization and self-learning competences but of course this is not true for everyone and that's also what we hear about in the podcast that of course there are major challenges to face and one of them is the cause of social presence of not feeling alone when studying online and that's also something where we're still looking for good solutions. Students are also not appreciating when there's only like lectures or only one form of education but they're asking for rich learning scenarios and also we hear a lot that there shouldn't be there's no way back to the old normal as it was before but for the next normal we have to check what went well and what totally did not go well and how can we include students' views in this. This is very important that most students say okay you have to when you plan on the future you should really look for the experiences and include students' views in this and I think for this it would be very interesting to hear Carmen Romero who as I already said helps us with the podcast but who is also the membership coordinator at the European Students' Union so you're in touch with so many student unions by Europe and I'm excited to hear a bit about what role they took what student representation did in the last months and what are the central potentials and challenges for the future. So the floor is yours. Thank you a lot. I'm really enjoying your presentations. Well first of all I would like to thank you for inviting us to participate in this webinar and of course for involving us in such a wonderful project where students are being asked fundamental questions and they are able to raise their voices and share their concerns and opinions. All of us are living turbulent times from students and youngsters to the elderly as well as women, migrants and unfortunately along etc. This crisis is worsening the inequalities that already existed in our societies and many governments have been used these health global crises as an excuse to breach civil rights. In the concrete case of students we have witnessed as many times in the past how academic authorities but also policy makers try to avoid including us in the decision making process. ESU and its membership have been developing many initiatives to keep on helping students. Some of our member unions for example FEF in Belgium send a survey to the French speaking students that had thousands of answers in just a couple of minutes asking them basic things related to their necessities and challenges that came along with the study from home. Our member union in Iceland, Lise shared with us the result of another survey where students were asked about how they felt on a scale of 1 to 10. Over 73% of students felt their well-being 5 or lower. In Cyprus Pofen the National Union of Students has been informing about Pofenus or updates through their social media. They ask the government to extend the application period of students grant for a month and additionally right after the lockdown started they managed to ask airlines to set a free of charge policy to enable students to change their flight without any extra cost till April. PSRP in Poland started a campaign student home alone in which they did their best to convey the traveling around the country and returning to their families could expose other to danger. Every day they publish activities which can be done at home promoting a lot of ideas, blogs, platforms and podcasts. Moreover they open a help desk for international students in Poland and they had support in several languages such as English German, Russian, Spanish, Italian etc. These are just some examples of how engage our students even in these hardest times. And in my humble opinion I think ESU as an organization can be proud of its membership and of course support them. The 6th of April ESU published a statement COVID-19 multi-dimensional crisis that affects us all and of course we reflect on the consequences of the health crisis meaning that we are pretty much aware of the fact that there is a mobility crisis that of course affect students but not only and unfortunately we are seeing and we'll see the beginning of an economic crisis and most probably a political one as well. At the end of this statement ESU called for a global response to the pandemic with full access to reliable information, discoveries on the virus, its remedies and vaccines as well as a common response to the developing economic crisis. It is important to mention that ESU as well as many other members of the civil society has been carrying out the same activities that we had already planned but online. We had webinars, workshops and conferences, projects and probably even more workload because the current situation adds extra complexity to the things we do and we have to rethink not just the way students participate but also the way ESU as an organization keep on moving forward. ESU together with the University of Sadar and the Institute for the Development of Education in Croatia led a survey on students life in the European higher education area during the COVID-19 pandemic, the first wave. The Bologna follow-up group and its national committee for social dimension in higher education supported this initiative. This survey had over 17,000 responses. The majority of the respondents aged 18 to 30 and this survey gave us an overall picture of the situation by then. For example, most of the students prefer face-to-face teacher-student interaction. 19.22% reported that their seminars had not been replaced with any online format and 24.62% reported that practical classes were not being replaced by an online version. Regarding the workload, almost 50% of the responses stated that it was larger than before on-site classes were canceled. The situation for those who were working or were planning to work changed as well. 28.90% lost a job temporarily, 12.20% lost a job permanently and 9% had a salary cut. With regard to tuition fees and scholarships, 75% replied that the fee payment has remained the same and just the 13% answer that their higher education institution had introduced flexible ways of paying fees during that term. In the case of scholarships, 87% had the same amount of their scholarship while a small but important 4% experienced how the amount of their scholarship was postponed. Let's remember that behind those numbers there are thousands of students dealing with many challenges every day. What did they do with this information? Of course, we shared with our membership to seek to have greater emphasis on the role of higher education institutions in providing support to students, lobby for better student support service and especially during these difficult times. The things mentioned before have been challenging students and student organizations in many many different ways. I can't say that all we did was perfect but I can say that student representatives and students in general did and are doing their best to cope with a situation that is not pleasant for anyone. If there is something we can learn from this crisis is that there are necessary things to be done and urgent things to be done. During this period, the whole world has focused on the pandemic and its outcomes while many other issues are raised. For example, in Belarus tens of thousands citizens have been demonstrating in the streets and showing their displeasure with Lukashenko's regime. Together with BSA and both national students' unions in Belarus demand the Belarusian ministry of internal affairs to free all detained students and stop the use of riot police brutality and detainment of peaceful protesters. Demand justice for victims of police brutality and persecution and call upon the European higher education area to use all the international pressure on the ministry of education in Belarus in order to ensure that the rights of Belarusian students are protected. Additionally, many of our members' unions address their higher education ministry's representatives to condemn human rights abuses in Belarus and to recognize that Belarusian government has an illegitimate one. Not even a week ago, during our first online board meeting delegates from all our member unions supported and stood in solidarity with the women in Poland facing attacks on their fundamental rights and the students protesting against repression and injustice there. Finally, as a society we have many challenges ahead the pre-existing ones and the ones that came along with the pandemic. I would like to just mention because it is something trendy now, one of them, which is the way we integrate digital tools in our routine. Lately a lot of people talk about digitalization of education and I do believe we can use technology to improve and make our lives easier, but we need to make sure that everyone can have an access to the tools and that higher education institutions are going to have enough resources to make it through the digital transition. If we don't and inequalities are accentuated the new normal is going to look quite similar to the old normal. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to questions later. Thank you so much, Carmen, for the preparation but first of all for all the work that you have done to coordinate all this in the major challenge for this situation for students and I think it was really really good from your presentation to hear that what we also always need to stress is that studying it's great that we have digital tours to ensure digital teaching, but that's not all there is about studying and we really need to consider all students personal situation and include them somehow in the debate and that's what you're actually doing and I think the enormous amounts of surveys and participants and measures taken etc show how important that is and I also like that you really stress the importance of students as civil actors as well. So thank you very much for those very important insights that show how much is done in student representation as well. So thank you very much I'm also looking forward for everybody's questions later so you can already think of them or post them in the Q&A and I want to welcome Lilith Dieringer who joined us now and as I already said Lilith is also a student in Germany she was part of our first podcast series Studium and shutdown where we interviewed her about how education is working right now and how it should like in the future and Lilith you had a lot of great ideas I think about what universities can learn from this and you're also part of the digital change maker initiative and being an expert for many things I know because you're busy with many initiatives but also for digitization which is one of the major topics right now so I want to ask you like from a point of view as a digital change maker maybe you can also shortly present what that means how did you perceive the last months and what role did digital tools and digitization play in this and maybe how is digitization linked to student participation as well welcome Lilith Thank you for the nice introduction maybe first of all what is a digital change maker everyone can be a digital change maker but the term in which is used in my context is kind of group initiative that is based on the HFD Hochschulforum für Digitalisierung and this is really great network that is also connected with many many universities and leaders at universities also teachers and helps all of them getting more into the digital world and this has been a topic for several years now but of course during the Covid pandemic and the restrictions now the need for going digital was quite high and we had a lot of universities that started to call us write us emails and ask what to do and what best practices exist and we tried to help by possible however already before we started from a student perspective to change universities the main focus program is that students are asked what they want and what is important before we decide to introduce new kind of lectures or everything because this is an important perspective that at universities the main people that are there are students but in the last years we have maybe experienced that the students were not often involved and on the other hand the teachers and lecturers which we talked to they were quite not really nervous but they were a bit not knowing how to involve the students like we had some people that were really highly engaged and that I really want to put effort in it I really want to change something but I just cannot reach my students so how can I do it? I feel they are not really interested in my ideas and just say yes to everything that I do so how can I really get feedback and give them and involve them in the process so we were highly interested students in this topic who first of all helped those teachers and suggested them some ideas and best practices how to engage the students and on the other side we also tried to spread the idea of getting involved into the student community because till now the students are kind of used to say there's just something that is offered to me and I basically have no chance then doing it but we try to plan the idea of getting involved and really give your ideas to lecturers to the university so what we did also during the last year is a lot maybe I pick out two things one is that we started to found those initiatives not only on a national level as we are at the moment organized from the HFD but also on a local level so we try at the moment to put digital change makers into universities all over the nation so that in kind of any universities there's a small group of students who are in contact with the university leading board and who are kind of responsible to get the vibe out of the students and communicate with the rest of the university and that's why we now started some local groups that are still connected we are digital formats at the moment and also this enables us to share experiences and best practices all over Germany. The second format that we tried out this year is the so called winter semester is coming format in which we every Monday during the Covid pandemic in spring we interviewed some people mainly it was a mix of lecturers and students and ask what is happening at the moment at the university what is good, what is bad what needs to be improved regarding technical, methodological aspects but also kind of on a policy level if the students were involved how they can be involved better and at the moment we are kind of using all the knowledge that we gain from those interviews and put it into a video and also a paper that we soon want to publish hopefully and in which we kind of suggest what we can learn from the summer semester so that's why the name is winter semester is coming because we want to learn what happens in the summer semester and what can we improve based on that for the winter semester and we had really interesting talks who still can watch those videos fortunately they are in German for all of you who can understand a bit of German you can still watch them and as I said we will also publish a video and a paper regarding the learnings so only two small insights and what the whole digital change maker movement is doing but I'm open for questions and ideas from your side thank you very much Lillips for the really cool presentation and also interesting insights into the digital change maker initiative I think it was already really important what you did before but now it has gained I think a lot of visibility as well in the world of higher education and I also will take as learning that the point of actually asking students what they want in education is very important and that we need to find ways to do this and to actually ask them and not only give them some choices that we already thought about before but maybe really ask them beforehand to make it really open and I think something else that you mentioned which is really important is that we are having a new semester which is kind of a flashback to the old one because it's getting less and less hybrid and more and more completely digital so I think your learnings will be very important so also for everybody questions for Lillips you can already type in the section here in Zoom and we'll do some discussions later. Thank you very much Lillip I now want to introduce Ruben I have a question to Lillip The question is from my experience it is often not so easy to get into a good exchange on a good level between students and professors Professors who hear about students wanting to choose their own curriculum wanting to be involved into the teaching learning design they are sometimes afraid I'm not sure if they are afraid if something goes wrong but out of some reason they are afraid that they lose their status there and on the other hand I think it's the only way to really get into a partnership between students and a real partnership between students and teachers and break this situation what is your experience there Lillip what works and what doesn't work and how do you really get into an exchange and a dialogue with professors, with teachers and higher education I mean that's a really important point and I would say that the basic is that break kind of the barrier between teachers and the one who is taught because in the end we are both teaching each other because I think that everyone can learn something from everyone and it's not basically the only one person who has knowledge and spread it into the heads of the students but also the students might have knowledge that the younger generation has and ideas how they grew up etc so this is a really important point that you maybe step back and understand that it's more like we learn together and we try to have a good and effective time and it's interesting to discuss with the students and to get their way of or to understand their way how they understand it so it always should be my approach to say okay my goal is that they have fun learning and that they really are interested and motivated so in the end every student kind of is individual and there are formats to fit for the ones and don't fit for the others so it's also I would say don't be dis-motivated if you start to try something out and this just fails because I mean still from the fail you can learn and it's not guaranteed that a best practice that works at one university or one class works in the other the same way so just to be open and as you said ask the students so possible you start for a small lecture with an idea and then you immediately try to get feedback at the second lecture because then you're kind of agile and you're not saying okay I have now perfect idea for the whole semester and I will do it from 0 to 10 until the last and then in the end I give them a feedback form and then it's kind of okay it was the last class and then they were the exam it does not really help a lot so that's what I would suggest to have maybe small ideas try to implement them get immediately feedback and try to still be flexible because everyone is individual in the end Thanks a lot Thank you very much for this interesting answer very important so again Ruben welcome here I already introduced you a little bit before you also I didn't say what you're studying actually it's computer science engineering at the University of Belgium and you're being a student but you're also much more amongst them student representatives at the VVS the Flamse for anything from students and in this also a representative at the European Students Union so for me since you are busy on so many levels be it national, local and Europe how did you perceive the last months from those different points of view Yes thank you Laura thank you for the great introduction well of course student representation was very needed but also very difficult in the last bit more than half a year we've been in this situation now we have an expression in Belgium well no in Dutch that says you have to row with the paddles that you have so it basically means you have to well make do with the tools that you have one of the students her input on how she experienced the past months she said well we had to row without paddles I think that's maybe one perspective but there's it's been a bit difficult let me talk a bit about the different levels that we have of course what's been talked about right now a lot is the micro level within one course and we have a lot of student representation in certain courses and within certain programs as well we talk also about student participation at the level of a university at the level of the national level or for us at its founders and the European level but basically everywhere we have two tasks as student representatives we reach out to students to know what they want and to know what their challenges are and we reach out to the university management or the professors and so on and that's the same in all these areas and in both of those areas we've seen some problems on one side reaching the students it's difficult to continue reaching students because obviously normally as student representatives we're students too we meet students we are able to talk to people we are in classes together most of the time so that's a difficult situation there's a lot less social contact then and some people are still in contact with each other but some other people also get more and more isolated which is a problem that we've seen and that also has its ramifications in student representation and it's something that student representatives always struggle with of course not just looking at courses or a policy from your own perspective but taking into account those of others as well and something else I heard about this from one of my fellow student representatives is we've seen that the pandemic has a toll on the mental health of students and it's also the case of student representatives and of course everyone's capacity has been a bit lowered it's been difficult for everybody and then combining this with keeping studying from a distance and representing the students in a good way is sometimes a bit difficult so those are a few of those challenges and on the other side as well I think what's happening to the students has been difficult to and I think there's a shared responsibility on many levels there and we've seen this a Belgian perspective of course that students and young people in general were a bit forgotten in the student representation and in the communication about the crisis and that's a big problem and we've seen that as well it's always difficult for student representatives to reach all of the students and have the reach of all students in one university for example and we've seen that the students expect a lot of us and a lot of the universities as well and it's been difficult to explain all of the rules that were taken all of the changes that were happening often because the rules were very confusing maybe that's just a bit of a Belgian thing as well but we've seen that individual students start with for example to ask for the government for more social support for example students who have lost their student job that's just one specific area but we've seen a lot of these individual actions from student representatives and it's been difficult because it's difficult especially in the pandemic to reach all of the students to kind of have a unified voice here however I also have seen some positive things on this side for example my local student union started a survey very specifically about do you have a place to study well because that's obviously one of the big problems that we've had students who didn't have a good place to study who had problems at home and a lot of input was was given here to the student union and they did a lot of work on contacting people all over Flanders to make sure that local city governments for example some study spaces and then they created a website where students can find all these study spaces so we really see this grassroots action to provide to each other these spaces to study for example and to provide these services so that's a bit the one side of involving students but the other side is of course involving the professors and university management and so on and it's been difficult because it was dependent on how student representation was in this specific level or in this specific program before and in some places it was really good already I think in the university again we've got a pretty solid student representation but again that difference from faculty from program to program and in those where it went well students were I think especially after a bit of time very well involved in others it was kind of too difficult because then we also needed to have the initial cost of setting up good student representation and then I think some people may have done the short cut of just kind of forgetting about student representation and especially in the beginning this was very difficult because everybody needed to make very quick changes and then students were often forgotten in this in this path also at university levels and one of the things that we've seen not only in Flanders but I've seen in beyond Belgium as well is that sometimes the media was informed of new actions were taken by university or by government before the students and that was something that would be frustrating everywhere it's gotten a bit better over time but it's always a challenge but after while we've seen that teachers especially professors have been involving the students more and more they've I think this has also been an opportunity to rethink how student participation works and to revalue the role of student representatives even at the micro level and I think professors have seen now because they've had to ask students well how do you want to do this digitally and they now see okay well we can continue involving the students and I think that's a very good evolution in student representation but however as I said that the mental health impact has not only been on students but also on professors and of course as the situation where people are less open to input from students as well but it's a bit of everything let me say a few things about the national level too one of the difficulties in the policy making is that not all institutions were there was a lot of differences in Belgium the institutions have a lot of freedom in how they conduct their education there was a lot of difficulty so the Flemish role could not play as big of a role as maybe the national level did in other countries but as students we do have a national students union of course which is the Flemish union of students for people who don't speak Dutch and they because we had that one unified force there at the national level we were able to do some to realize some things and for example there was an emergency decree from the government stipulating some changes in the educational policy to be able to cope with this fast situation and one of the things was that student representatives had to be consulted at basically every step which is of course a very formal and policy wise accomplishment that is very important but again at this national level explaining what's happening to students has been a difficult thing and lastly because you asked about the European level as well this is of course difficult because there's not too much responsibility for it well there's a lot of responsibilities for education at the European level but a lot of things of course still happen at the national or at the institutional level but I think one of the big difference is that at the European level we are more accustomed to meeting each other online and to using these digital means and I think that's that we've seen that in being able to switch very quickly to webinar formats because basically we already had experience with it from before because I remember still in March very quickly after the lockdowns were happening the European Commission organized together with the European Students' Union and the Erasmus Students Network webinar about the situation of exchange students throughout Europe and that was very very informative and very helpful I think to everybody involved and this format this form of a European Students' Union has also been very useful for students to exchange just the situations and get a bit of inspiration because everybody has their own style of doing student representation as well we've talked about the civic engagement of student representatives in this situation that's very different of course all throughout Europe and I think we were able to get some inspiration from each other as well. I can talk a lot more things also about how exactly digital education can change but I think maybe we'll see what kind of questions there are and I'll happily ask more about that also so welcome Thank you so much Ruben for all the input and I think as you said that it's really inspiring to listen to each other and to exchange and I think we all got a lot of inspiration from what you just said and as you also heard that there was a very interesting situation for student representation there was more responsibility maybe more visibility and maybe sometimes a lot of responsibility and patterns between teachers and learners and student representatives changed I guess in this way and what you also said it's important to not lose track of students that who are hard to reach right now and also saying things about that there are issues that are hard to deal with right now like mental health issues etc and I think it's very important to keep in mind also in a situation where decisions are taken quickly it's also important to take a step back and to reflect for the future about those decisions thank you very much okay I think we heard so many things and I think there will be very many questions that we will probably not be able to all answer so I think we can start right now with a question to Lilith so one maybe it's quickly answered what is the most demanded digital tool by the students asked by Fortunato Sorrentino the most what digital tool the most demanded digital tool I think that it's not really a tool that can be said or generalized it's more the way the teachers provide the tools and the lectures I want to point out maybe two examples at my university the technical university at Tristen we could nominate from the summer semester the teachers and lectures that we really really liked and which put a lot of effort in the kind of online teaching and there were for instance two different that were really not the same and did not use the same tools but were great in the same way so one was like a Russian course language course and the professor used an online learning platform and on the online learning platform she could put many many links to different videos for instance to support our learning but also implemented some small online tests and uploaded some further PDFs and then we had kind of always one hour of teaching online not one and a half because also the yeah it's quite important not to take too long lectures and then the rest the half plus the homework was on self studying on this platform and this was really great because we had this kind of repeating the stuff always on our own and could still use it and it basically was an easy platform where she could give us a material like in the classroom she could hand out material now on the platform she could use all the tools that are in there and she integrated a lot of tools for instance a wiki in which we could work together and tasks that we tried to use different methods so one learning out of this is maybe don't use only one tool but just try out because otherwise it gets maybe boring or only one-sided and another example was that we had a professor who only uploaded some videos and during the videos there were some questions that you had to answer before you could go on watching the videos and this also was a great way to get the students involved and get them it was a log horse get them really look into the law because you really had to put out your law book for answering questions so it was kind of interactive and really nice as well so I would say it really depends the content but in general try out different tools so that it does not get always be open for the feedback of your students what they say if they say we just cannot use this tool anymore at all it's kind of not helpful for us then try to find another one thank you Lilith and there's another question for you but I think you can have a look at it I think you can also see the Q and A as well and I have a question from Liva van den Brande students which means Carmen Ruben and Lilith do you have the feeling that due to COVID-19 the digital learning is being enhanced and stimulated with innovative teaching strategies or do you see more emergency teaching situations going back to all the teaching strategies and what will be the impact of COVID-19 in this sense I think there's a lot to say about this so I don't know what to say maybe Ruben you have something to say on this or Carmen well there's quite a few things to say about this of course the situation is different for different courses and different professors there's not one answer to give to this and both things that are mentioned both innovative digital tools and just completely reverting to old teaching strategies both of those happened we saw the same as well the lockdown kind of ended around June which is exam time for us and also now in September when it was also still kind of lockdown free everything there were quite a few professors who made a choice well I want things to be as normal as possible but that was not the case everywhere and we've seen especially quite some teachers who have embraced digital tools like well one thing that was required at my university is lecture recordings so every lecture that was still given it could be live stream but in case it was live stream it also had to be recorded so students had to be able to watch it later again because of course it's just impossible to track full personal situations at this time but also some other things like self tests online in a lot of learning environments have this opportunity to have these kind of self tests and that's something that was really appreciated by students so you be able to get feedback without having any scores attached to it necessarily so there's been a lot of different digital education tools but regarding more practical learning experiences and internship as well well there are replacement tasks for this but we've seen that students don't really well they're not the same and they can't replace the live alternative so in these cases we hope that we can return to as much as normal as possible but for more theoretical courses we've seen a lot of experimentation as well with more online courses like lecture recordings, short videos self tests and so on and these things are appreciated by students so I think that's definitely something that will continue in the next normal and maybe one thing to add to this is that students really have the digital education and learning from a screen basically seems to be more tiring and more intensive than sitting in a live lecture and even though maybe technically the workload was exactly the same a lot of students reported that at least the perceived workload was a lot more when everything has to be digital so I don't have the clear solution to this but that's definitely something that has to be taken into account and I hope to have given a bit of an answer to this question now. You have, thank you very much. Can I add something? I'm going to base this intervention in my very own opinion as a student as well so during the first lockdown I had several classes and as Ruben said before like there is not just an answer for this question there are many answers and there are many variables and I do think it depends a lot on the professors like if they are able to adapt the situation and we have also to acknowledge that professors are doing exactly like basically they are not just giving classes from home then they are giving classes from home in the middle of a pandemic which is not easy as well and of course they don't have enough tools or enough resources to be able to adapt from one day to another so with my intervention I don't mean to blame professors on the way that they were developing or carrying out their activities, their teaching activities but it depends a lot on them as it was also different in normal classes before I think most of us can acknowledge that a professor can make a subject completely different than another professor and the thing is like I do think it is important to adapt but it's also important to give them resources and to give them to develop their skills on how to know to give classes from home in one of the classes that I had during the lockdown, the first lockdown most of students were not participating online so out of maybe 50 students we were in each of the classes 5 or 6 which for the ones that were in the classes for me personally it was amazing because the attention that we had from the professor it was even better than in the class we had debates basically anyone could ask a question anytime that we wanted because we were just 5 or 6 but at the same time for example now I still have some classes and I have a subject that basically the professor is doing the same as if we were in the class so basically it's like 2 hours talking about really deep concepts and broad questions that we are asked and if it was already difficult to pay attention for 2 hours from the class it's even more difficult to pay attention for 2 hours from my living room or from my room so I do think in different kind of subjects it's really needed to adapt the way that they are teaching and something that I wanted to share also that it's funny because I'm Spanish so I've seen a lot of memes from students in Spain comparing universities right now with platforms like Netflix or HBO basically saying yeah well for Netflix one year, 20 euros Spanish universities one year 1000 euros so I think this also somehow showcase the way that students are perceiving the way that they are learning and the way that teachers are teaching because it's like really not something bi-directional but also like one direction so it's basically you are in front of the camera or you are in front of the computer watching a film or watching a series and that shouldn't be the case so I love need to be done for sure and I do agree with all the things that Ruben was mentioning before as well but as I was saying at the beginning we cannot blame just teachers or professors because they were also not ready for what was gonna happen yeah maybe just let me add to that as well as professors we are products of an academic of an academic career which asks us to be good scientists but we have never been learning how to teach that's just the naked truth of course that's not true for all of us but for most of us that's the case and when we do normal lectures in the normal normal time we can play with our personality with our bodies, with our being our presence but when we do online teaching that's finished basically because we have black screens in front of us and that's it so online teaching is really serving like a burning glass and it's showing if there is a learning design which is engaging mutually each other with each other entangling us into a carpet of interesting exchanges and ideas and if that's not the case it's just a logistics exercise remaining that's it just pushing over information and this is difficult for us this is really difficult for us so for me the next normal is what I say is an enhanced model actually where I hope that in a normal presential university we can keep one third or maybe a little bit more of online activities because I firmly believe that the value of it the flexibility and the individual opportunities of learning in that is something we should cultivate we should take on board we should really embrace and develop for us into a new after beyond corona into a new consciousness of what academic teaching can be thank you many answers to it but one last remark I also would say that there is not like the border between old traditional teaching and new modern teaching that's offered and just give you a go record your lecture as it was before because maybe you don't have time or don't have ideas and start to just stream the lecture and ask the students okay what can I do better where did you wish to ask a question or whatever so maybe don't see it as a big step to take oh my god I now need to go from my typical lecture to a totally fancy concept just try to do it step by step try to test it out and then you will succeed I guess though thank you Lilith and thank you everybody for answering this I think this is a very highly debated topic that we could do another webinar on so thank you very much we have five minutes to go and I would actually like to ask a final question to the panelists maybe shortly answer the future of higher education thought together with student participation how can we become better in including students views into shaping this future of higher education can I jump in quickly so I think something that it's really important is that we have to acknowledge that participation itself is a privilege all of us even though we have different backgrounds social cultural economic background we had the opportunity to participate there are many students that because they have to help at home or because they have to work in order to maintain themselves at university many other cases they cannot participate and they cannot be heard and those ones are the ones that we need to reach out because those ones are the ones that suffer the most the inequalities of the system so something that I think it is important is to improve overall the situation of students in order to make them be able to participate because as I was saying participating it's a privilege so I do think that it's really important and as I was saying before in my intervention we if we like maintain the same inequalities or worse in the situation right now because of the pandemic the next normal it's going to look quite similar to the old normal it's going to look as well worse to the old normal and I think it is important to ensure that everyone has access to education and that everyone has access to basic services public services in order to ensure that we are going to end up this period stronger and not being weaker thank you so much and you got a really nice answer in the chat if you can see it thank you for your answer you are amazing great presentation somebody else wants to answer to the question of future higher education student participation well maybe shortly first one thing I as one way I saw another student describe the education in the past well in the past semester was like a self-built set from IKEA I think that was the case for both students and for professors as well and I think we can go further of course in the future it will kind of be hybrid we will take on digital things we will take on traditional things and the best way will probably be somewhere in between like they said and I think the best way to incorporate students and student participation in this is to treat students as equals I think was said earlier that there is kind of a difference and maybe a class difference to say this way and I can't if we try to move beyond this in program committees in my university we are equal and it can be this way and also this continuous feedback just try something and then ask the feedback from students from it that's absolutely the key I think not the way it might be more traditionally done implement a new teaching strategy and then at the end of the semester get feedback and this maybe didn't work as well or this actually worked very good and it can be rolled on to other things if you do not ask that after a few weeks then you get just so much more information and you can do so much more thank you Ruben and I think we are sadly coming to an end we have more questions waiting in our question and answer box and I actually saved them and we are happy if you get in touch with us after the webinar as well as we are always happy to talk about those very important subjects and I want to thank all of you for joining for the audience for asking exciting questions and also for giving positive feedback because it's something I think we all can appreciate and kind of need all of us right now so that's great thank you all for joining and thank you very much for our panelists to sum up a little thing we always did in the end of our next normal podcast is asking students for the idea for the ideal future higher education in three words so if you still have one minute you're welcome to type something into the chat about yeah what should the ideal the utopia of future higher education look like for you and for the rest thank you very much for joining thank you for contributing and let's stay in touch here's our websites as well and also our contacts and I think also Ruben Karmen and Lillet are happy to to get in touch with the participants so thank you very much for this really this webinar that I really enjoyed and have a good evening all of you and thank you very much to Laura for moderation and for preparation and organization thank you very much bye bye thank you so much thank you for the fruitful discussion it was really interesting yeah one last thing share your knowledge don't be shy try it out talk to others and then we will do it all together