 The meeting is now being recorded. We have 83 people registered. Most of them are from Europe, but we also have some from the US and also one from Canada. So each presenter will have 15 minutes to present. We'll also have 5 minutes for questions. And I've asked the presenters if we can't address every question in the 5 minutes remaining, whether they're prepared to take those questions by email. They've all graciously agreed to that. So if you have a question, please don't think it will take up too much time. Do ask it in the chat box, and there'll be an opportunity for the presenters to address that question. Earlier in trying to set up, we did have a few technical problems uploading presentations. So the presenters will be sharing their screen. So do bear with us as those connections come through. So let me start now by introducing Fabio Natanbini from University of Athens, in Rome. His presentation is a Building Critical Digital Literacy for Higher Education Teachers, The Edgerhacker Punch. So Fabio is a Senior Fellow of the European Distance and E-Learning Network. He's a member of the Advisory Board of the Open Education Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation. He's a Fellow at the Centro de Estudos Sobre Technologia e Sociedade, which I have not pronounced well, of the University of São Paulo and USP in Brazil. And he's also at the Nexus Centre of the Politecnico de Torino. He's been active in the field of learning innovation and ICT for learning since 1998 by designing and coordinating more than 40 research and innovation projects and promoting European and international collaboration in different areas, from school education to higher education to lifelong learning to ICT research. He's been working across Europe as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, the South Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. His main research interests open education, learning innovation, digital literacy, social and digital inclusion. So Fabio, it's wonderful to have you with us. We look forward to your presentation. Thank you very much and thank you to everybody for being here. First question, can you see my PowerPoint? I'm sharing the screen. It should be working. Okay. Good. Right. And I guess you can hear me well. Perfect. So I will try to be quick to allow time for questions and also for a little debate in case I would like to hear also the opinion of my fellow speakers on what I'm going to present. What basically is a new approach to, I would say, digital competence is building and digital literacy building for university teachers in Europe. And many people come with new approaches. It's hard to say what is really new and what is a repetition of what was new yesterday. But let's say with this work we are doing, collaboration with a number of colleagues around Europe, we are trying to hack the way, and that's why the project is called EduHack. We are trying to hack, so to try to change from within the way the university professors, especially at the beginning of their career, are trained as far as digital competence is concerned. You might be familiar with these or similar frameworks, these nice pictures which try to simplify the complexity that comes with being today a digital competent citizen, learner and even more difficult digital competent teacher. And especially what is I think the most interesting one for our work is the one on the bottom right, is the Edu framework by the European Commission, by the Joint Research Centre in Seville, from which we started for this work. Basically you can see that in that candy shape of the framework, we took the central part, so the center of the candy, actually the four areas of the candy to sort of operationalize them, because in fact by reading literature and by talking to people in charge of developing digital competencies of teachers, people like Hugh Mark in New York University and others, actually the big problem is how to make operational these frameworks, which are very nice and take normally everything into account, sometimes they are not critical enough, sometimes they are very broad, sometimes they have a very specific viewpoint, but the issue is how to make them work in practice and how to make sure that the competencies that they say, the Commission for example, the European Commission, that every teacher should have are actually acquired by teachers. And so we came up with this idea of this EduHack project and you can see the site EduHack.eu and basically this work will come up with a capacity building program for university educators who develop skills and knowledge that at the end of the day should be able to create or produce or support technology enhanced learning experience for their learners. I'm not opening up the full screen because I did it before and Adobe was collapsing, so I'm keeping it like that, I hope you can read it. So there you can see who we are, so it's us from Unir in Spain, it's the Polytechnic of Torino in Italy, it's a knowledge innovation center in Malta, art in Belgium and the Coventry colleagues at Coventry University Disruptive Media Learning Lab. And basically what we propose is an approach that has four features. First of all it is open, so everything we're doing is not only and we are producing, it's not only open in terms of license but it's actually sending people out on the open web to look for stuff, to look for content and to try to experience what it means to live today in open and participatory web-based society for the students and so for the teachers. Then the approach is collaborative by definition in every activity we try to work with peers and possible co-creation also with students, you will see in a moment, it is active so the three keywords for every activity we propose are read, watch and do and as you will see read and watch are very fast, very quick whilst the do is what we are really keen on so it is an active, very active approach and we are not focusing only on of course on digital literacy in the classic sense in being able to meaningfully use the let's say online tools and digital tools but also we try to focus on new literacies and delicate issues like online identity management, personal data management, intercultural competence ethical issues and privacy issues so we try to touch upon these issues basically we have an online course I will show it to you in a moment with the number of activities from which participants can choose from then in every one of the three universities that are part of the project you will run a hackathon with the teachers who have been taking the course and who will experiment in real life with some experts to support them what it means to create an OER for example to create an open book to develop an open assessment strategy and so on and so forth and everything they will produce through the hackathons and also before but mainly through the hackathons will be documented and connected through what we call a semantic platform let's say it's a sort of basically a very simple platform where all the posts from the blogs of the teachers and the products of the hackathons will be shared, commentable, voteable and should represent a sort of a growing knowledge base around the project so basically the online course which is about to get public now I can show it to you in a moment but basically we are talking about a self-directed course based on four areas from which the learner can focus with some 20 activities so the learner is able to really select the ones he or she prefers each activity takes about one hour to complete so it's not as you can see a lot of work most of the activities have to do with specific tools that we are explaining how they work explaining how to use them in higher education settings and why they should be used with some examples and then we bring to the tool again for every activity we have a read-watch-do logic so you read something pretty short you watch a couple of videos and then you work on the task, on the assignment ideally the output will be an open portfolio so every learner is provided with a simple blog or can use his or her own blog to do the work and of course you can both take the course by yourself or as a part of the cohort in view of the hackathon this is how the course page works so you can see you have a read page very short, you have a couple of videos and you have a very simple activity in this case even shorter than one hour and then some additional resources let me just, since I'm using the share screen I can show you how the course looks now you can see it's still under internal evaluation but it's pretty simple, you have all the activities you can just select one activity and you will get here in this case it's about modifying existing digital content by using Wikis, so you read why this is important you watch some examples on how to do this and in one hour in this case you play the Wikipedia adventure so you spend an hour on Wikipedia doing a number of things and then of course for every activity you should reflect on your blog on how this could be used in your teaching and why this was important for you and so on then you're going to have the hackathons one in Madrid, one in Torino and one in Coventry each university is different in our case but also outside the consortium and every hackathon will differ from the others some ones will be smaller, more open more closed, open to other universities also some will have a stronger online part some will not and so everyone will be in events but what they will have in common, a separate event but what they will have in common is the fact that teachers will come in with an idea developed and inspired through the online course and will work for at least one full day if not more in order to develop this idea and to come up with either a plan for a MOOC or an open resource or a plan or starting to use some specific tools by the way we are already getting expressions of interest by a number of universities I'm now quoting by heart the University of Luxembourg we are talking to the University of Pavia in Italy the University of Torino also in Italy the other university in Torino and a few more and the London Banking and Finance Institute and a few more who basically like the idea of having a very light course and then meeting for one day or more with the professors to really work in practice on how to change even a small piece of the teaching and by changing the small piece in an open collaborative and active way the hope is that they will see that things can be done differently very quickly these are the activities in terms of digital resources so just have a quick look at it we tried to be as basic as possible but as inspiring as possible so we tried to touch upon very easy things that can be done in one hour time and that can change a bit something that can produce a minimal change actually in the mindset of the teacher in the cultural way teachers are approaching digital tools in the class so you can see there with us upon assessment, content, pedagogy and the four area empowering learners which is possibly the more delicate one it has to do with evaluating online tools discovering the cost of free social media platforms appreciating risks of personalization in learning and dealing with technical accessibility of platforms and resources for each one of these, for example, activities we are proposing a tool that the teachers can use also in the classroom with their students regardless of their field actually you can teach anything but you must know that when your students are going out and looking for some content they need to know what it means to search for something on Twitter or other free commercial platforms and so on what it means for a site to be accessible and so on and so forth and this is it in a snapshot so we have an online course which is already there it's going to be available in English it's already available in English we are just waiting for the Spanish and Italian translations to be ready before launching it which will happen I would say no later than the end of the year we plan to have some 150 certified learners that will go through the hackathons in the three universities which all in all will produce more than 100 artifacts, products, OERs courses, ideas teaching strategies, course designs anything you can imagine maps, timelines, padlets anything you can imagine that will all be connected into this platform, very simple connection collection of artifacts which hopefully will survive the project and will then become the house of the many others we hope universities that want to adopt this approach last slide we have been working on this for one year and I'm happy to say that this has been raising a lot of interest last week at the Mozilla the Modfest in the UK we presented this and we had a lot of interest by a number of universities we presented it at the Eden conference in Genova this summer and again we had a number of interested organizations so what's in for you in this work we are doing you can help us improve in the course by adding an activity proposing a video proposing a practice that you are doing or saying that something is missing and we can work on that for you we have one more year to do this you can take the online course either as an individual as a teacher or as a university so ideally we are talking to people responsible for teacher training and we are asking them to to embed this course in their offer so and then you can use the content the way you want you can organize a Macathon, some mini workshops like they will be doing for example it seems in Luxembourg University you can really tailor it your own way the only thing we would like to happen is for this to be not to be replicating the classic courses for teacher training in ICT but really to be as open, active and collaborative as possible you can organize an Eduhackathon we are developing a mini manual for you to start thinking on what this would look like in your institution to do some design thinking and to really design it together with your colleagues and we would love to see a few more Eduhackathons happening in Europe during the lifetime of this project so you can join the community becoming part of this exercise that is the website eduhack.eu and again the invitation is open to everybody to just come there let us your data and we will be in touch with you to see how we can work with you on this to actually to change a bit but substantially and hopefully meaningfully the way we are building digital literacy capacity in our teaching population I am ready for questions can I Mark can I take questions the way you see them wonderful thank you Fabio you have certainly lived up to the theme of this event I wonder if everyone is quite difficult to show appreciation in Adobe Connector I wonder if everyone could just type the word clap in the chat box Fabio the appreciation we have for the presentations you put together for us wonderful thank you see the applause coming through there thank you very much are there any questions could you please type them in the chat box as well I see a question by Kaspar about the technology behind the course if that is open source as well yes so the technology where the content is sitting is just a WordPress site so it is totally open and that is pure html pages very simple and then in order to this platform I think is built in ghost if I remember well that is another publishing system that allows to have mini blogs simpler blogs than what WordPress can give you for the teachers and then will allow to get from the blogs of the platforms and also from other blogs of teachers all the posts related to the course and to present them to the to the the other learner but basically the technology of the course itself is not that important what is I think most important is that we are trying to really point teachers to as many other technologies and tools as possible we know is not so nice to us to register everywhere or in many places but we really don't care I think teachers should be able to be let's say allowed to experiment to register somewhere to you know to like the thing that the tool is doing or not to and of course when we find like in Wikipedia things like the Wikipedia adventure that can really bring you through a through a solution is something that we do but in other cases we simply propose some activities where teachers can experiment with a specific tool like time maps and stuff like that and for the moment you have been testing this with some 20 teachers if I remember well within the universities the three universities and I have to say like the this approach let's say this quite daring approach there are no other questions coming through we do have some time for more questions and I can email them to Fabio later questions by the fellow speakers say if you want I'd be interested in knowing what you think there's not a question from Kespa there do you validate the OER resources is there a kind of quality control in my opinion we have been overly validating this internally in the sense that we have been producing the content mainly by using existing OER so let's say we have been structuring the curriculum in a rather original way we have been inspired by university in terms of structure by the 23 things course I don't know if you know it it's really nice called 23 things something similar very I would say this structured approach towards digital literacy and so we started from there as an approach and then we validated the quality of the resources internally with instructional designers and we have just finished this not only in terms of the quality but also in terms of the adaptation of the course to the context of Italy and Spain because we are doing this in three countries so the hardest part has been when you have to find a video in Spanish that can substitute a video in English which is so good and the video in Spanish is not as good as the other one what do you do so in the case you use you know YouTube subtitles it's quite easy but when it's a tool that does not have the Spanish version what do you do so we have been into evaluating this quite a lot and we are going to open and at the moment we are also evaluating this the content with real teachers we have some five teachers per university that are looking at this and we are going to open this up to the I would say the community also for evaluation I just discovered that WordPress is a very nice system where you can just click somewhere on the screen and put a comment there so people are commenting on the screen whatever they want and this is working so we are getting some ideas especially some people are saying why don't you use also this tool why don't you talk about gaming why don't you talk about MOOCs we don't talk about MOOCs for example with this name by choice but we will have to because people want that so at a certain point some MOOC activities will come out there is like some important challenges there is another question from Simon I am wondering if you could answer that one by chat just so that we can move on to our next speaker I can do that sure wonderful thank you very inspirational presentation great to see some innovation working well especially across languages so very well done to you thank you very much I would like to hand over now to Dr Jean-Claude Callens who is coordinator of the distance education program in vivis the focus of this talk is a challenge to reduce dropout in distance education because we are making valuation in place and time more flexible so Dr Jean-Claude Callens the floor is yours thank you thank you I suppose you hear me well you do hear me so I turn on the microphone thank you so as we want to be on the same page I will start with a brief introduction of the research that we have done in vivis then so some results of the research and I will conclude with a summary so we started in vivis with our distance education in 1997 and we started in the teacher education program we have only 7 students now today 20 years later we have 30 programs and we have around 2300 students we have 5 areas we have commercial science healthcare applied social studies education and biotechnology so to put something in perspective the 2300 students that follow a program through distance education it takes about 15% of the total of the vivis student population so for us the distance education programs are rather important however we see that only a small number of students are getting their degree so we have 18L distance education programs a higher dropout on interface to face programs so the challenge that we have is how can we reduce the dropout in distance education in other words how can we enhance retention to find an answer to use the dropout our starting point was the student profile so here you see a cross tabulation here you see that almost 30% of our students who follow a distance education program have to combine work 50% or more with the family with the care of the family so they have challenged to do their study to combine it with work and their family to make it possible to combine work care for family and study in our opinion it's necessary that they have learned control that they have measure a measure is that they have be able to combine work and their leisure so for us for us learn the control it's a very strongly connected to a distance education for us learn the control on distance education we are like normal and hardy we're inseparable and for the flannish among us for us distance education and learn the control are really like nicole and huho for the not flannish nicole and huho they are two very famous singers and songwriters as you can see so to find an answer the focus of this research is the flexibilization of evaluation in distance education students have to come over to the campus at fixed time so when they have to come over at fixed time they have less learner control so we try to find out what the impact could be if students can choose the moments that they take their evaluation and what impact could be if they take exams remotely for instance at home so in summary our research is about the challenge to reduce the dropout true enhance the learner control by the flexibilization of evaluation place and time we do this by two elements we have done some literature analysis and some analysis of the data if you look like a dog you thought that it looks like a dog works like a dog it is a dog so what does research say about learner control first there has been a lot of research on learner control and on several results I only mentioned two first one we have chosen these two because for us they are the most important one first it seems that learner control works if there is enough structure students has to know how with whom and when they can communicate with their professors they have to know where and when exams are taken etc etc there has to be a clear structure to give learner control to students the first one that we take the second one is it seems that learner control works that it has an impact on the student results if the student has enough prior knowledge without prior knowledge it seems that learner control works less secondly some data analysis we have done we have the focus on two things the flexibilization of time is when the students can choose when they take their exam and secondly we focus on the flexibilization of place for instance they take their exam at home and the proctorate happens through the computer the flexibilization of time in our distance education programs the students take their exam in what we call an exam center so they have to subscribe online when they will take their exam at the exam center so we have all the data of the students when they have taken their exams we also have all data from the 30 programs that we have in distance education when students are able to take their exam you have to know that in our 30 programs some programs are very flexible in those programs students can choose whenever they take their exam in other programs they are less flexible at times from which students can choose when they take their exam so we put all the data together and what we see was that the programs where students have more flexibility to choose a time to take their exam in those programs the students have significantly better results than the programs where they have less flexibility of their organizational exams second we have looked at some students characteristics what we see was if students are further developed in the program then they are almost ready to graduate in those students have better take more benefits of the learning or of the flexibilization than students who have just started their program is it again it seems that prior knowledge has impact on the learning protocol secondly I have shortly get on the flexibilization of plays the challenge is how can we support students with written exams remotely it's not in the exam center remotely we have first done some systematic search on literature and we only find here we can see how we done that search based on that search we only selected two articles the first period and the first is summarizing said that there is only little information available about unprocted internet testing so there are not much studies about testing remotely secondly studies mentioned in the study of livens and birth said that there is no significant difference between procted and unprocted internet testing results of the second study so is summarizing four elements it seems that the student perceptions about the implementation has an impact secondly it seems that the assessments used are often often are poorly designed third there was a warning that the use of new forms of educational technology may lead to further excluding some already social excluded finally it seems that the feedback after the assessment is really important so in vivis we use a tool to organize our exams remotely and it's called proper exam and if you want more information you can see the link there when you find a brief information about how proper exams work and I'll give you a short description then a student takes his exam at home he has to take an exam on his computer and reuse the webcam we share the screen we also are filmed without an iPhone smartphone so we have actually three angles so we have the screen sharing we have the webcam and we have the third source and that's the mobile phone so we really can procuring what the student is doing at home to see there's more crowd so what we have done in our solicitors when we started the program of taking the exams remotely there were only a small number of students that take their exams remotely we started about three years ago and in the first days there were around 40-50 students who take their exams remotely at this day I'll check it I'll take the numbers here last year there were 1,474 exams who have taken remotely that's about 10% of all the exams in our distance education program are taken remotely and not in our exam center so we have taken when we started the program we have taken a survey of our students and there were 37 students who participated in that survey here you see some results of that survey most importantly this study of course have to be considered as a very explorative study there were only 37 participants and were only asked for their opinion were only measuring their perceptions was this very explorative however when we go into the comments that students gave almost all students who participate in that survey said they would take their exams remotely again although they had experienced some stress by doing the exam at home so this is my last slide summarized so the main topic of this research was how can we reduce dropout and distance indication the focus was we can look at the organization of our evaluation and we do see that more visibility of the organization of exams lead to better results but we have to support students with less prior knowledge again these results that I mentioned are really very explorative but they do give an idea for further more grounded research our thank you and who has to be if someone is interested this is my e-mail address if there are any questions please that's wonderful thank you there are a few questions that are coming through I wonder if we could just show the same clap appreciation that we did for a wonderful presentation showing quite an ambitious innovative approach to exams so there are some questions that came through from Monica how can you be sure that your online student is taking your exam and not another person oh we're filming so we have the webcam they have shown their idea with the idea then they start the exam so we can really check if the person who takes the exam is really the student that we have set in years and we were recording the time when he's taking his exam have you come across any instances of cheating it yes we have most of the time not cheating but we do have some discussion with students for instance that there was an online so we work in online when there was a small break in the internet we do check if there was during that time if there was fraud or not at this moment what we see is that there are less frauds almost none in comparing with the exam center so the student we think that it has to do with the fact that the student knows that he's been filmed so he knows he's been filmed so students are more cautious have issues but less than in the exam center there's another question from Lucas has asked us have you noticed any collaboration between three angle video or any proctored exam and students stress levels which could impact their results during the examination no we didn't have done that at this moment how they perceive taken exams remotely and but we did not further research on that it's an interesting topic another question coming through from is there a statistics dropout ratio of before and after the intervention and I'm just thinking now no we don't have it it would be interesting to have those but we have only started the recording when we we have started the exam center just three years ago so we are able to gathering the data three years ago was also the moment that we started with more flexibilization of our program so we could not compare to earlier periods and we compare between programs that are less flexible and more flexible and the most flexible programs seem to have better results than the less flexible time for probably one more question but there are some others who might answer for us by chat one asked by Mamud Haramde who I think has asked a question on most of our minds how can we get this research is there anything published we can pick up on and read later yes there is a publication of this but I don't have the time for here now we have done some publications on this issue but I don't have the time for here at this moment would it be possible to have some copy and paste some of those and put them in the chat box so that some more audience can pick up on that very very interesting very interesting work there is a question too from Simon perhaps again you could answer that one through the chat that would be much appreciated lovely thank you Jean-Claude a very innovative work very interesting I think a lot of distance universities are looking to do the sort of thing you're doing but it certainly takes a lot of courage to go first thank you thank you let's turn now to Simon Paul Atkinson who is a principal fellow of the Higher Education Academy MA PGCL-THE Educator, Researcher, Developer Consultant and the title of his presentation is Designing Pathways Which Way to Innovation Simon has worked in online and distance education since 2001 holding senior educational development roles in the United Kingdom and also in New Zealand now the focus of his research has been the development of visual representations of learning designs to assist course developers and he'll be joining the learning design team at the Open Polytechnic in New Zealand in December and Simon I just want to add quickly I'm looking forward to working with you because of course I'll be joining you in February of next year greetings thank you thank you very much for the introduction thank you we have had some technical issues so I'm going to start talking before you can possibly see I can't see anything on my screen at the moment I know we had uploaded my presentation as a PDF but I can talk without slides if necessary it just means you're going to have to focus on me at the top and I'll try and be as hand-majored as possible while we see if the presentation can catch up thank you very much I'm going to start by talking actually to hear colleagues particularly from different European perspectives and certainly some of the work that's happening between countries between languages and the danger of coming third in such a setting is that things that have already been said slightly undermine some of the things I'm advocating or possibly I'm going to see if I can strengthen the things that have been said already so I'm going to try and turn it around particularly I want to pick up on two issues which I'm going to follow on through when I think about innovation in terms of designing pathways one is the social context which Jean-Claude talked about the blending of leisure and work I think social context is very important in everything that we design for distance learning not least because the learners are generally not in front of us and they are in their social context when they study and also I want to pick up on some of the fabulous comments about the very interesting modelling that goes on in the Edu hackathons we've had a private side conversation about some of the value in video recording some of those group interactions for future research but I just want to I want to really tackle the issue as to whether or not at a kind of philosophical level if you like we are in danger sometimes of looking for technical solutions rather than trying to put the learning design focus very much on the learner so again my question to Jean-Claude then at the end which was do you find it overly restrictive in terms of the models of the examinations that are possible given that you then have a technological constraint so those are the kinds of issues that I just want to talk about and I'm going to start by thinking about this in terms of an analogy which is basically what we do effectively is kind of drawing maps for our learners it's a little bit like navigating a map we produce content we map we produce road maps effectively through our content and we then produce assessment as stops along the way if you like and I think that's quite a useful analogy the travel analogy is quite common in education when we think about who we are designing learning for and who controls the journey it's useful to kind of keep that cartographic analogy in mind some of the things that we've talked about already today are the differences between whether or not students are studying as part of cohorts or whether they are studying as individuals to extend my analogy and I'm going to flog this analogy to death by the way is that you can think about cohorts as taking a bus on a particular journey stopping exactly at the same time taking exams at the same time or driving a car having a solo journey and stopping whenever you like and clearly that both of those present very different technological challenges but more importantly very different design challenges as well I think sometimes we over-expect our technology innovation we anticipate that we are making much more progress simply because the screens look different what our students look at see every day looks a little bit different and that's an innovation in and of itself we go from this VLE to this open source application and we can get a bit carried away sometimes in thinking that that in and of itself is an innovation I think arguably there hasn't been a great deal of innovation in terms of truly learning modes other than the interruption of technology so we've gone from classrooms to remote access, printed materials to digital materials, physical media to the virtual experience but we haven't really changed as much as perhaps we sometimes think we have and I would question whether or not a lot of the forms of learning are really new forms there's been a very interesting discussion online in the UK recently about people asking for alternative pedagogies and my interaction was simply to say what alternative for who and university might change platforms that's an alternative methodology for delivery it doesn't necessarily change any of the underlying pedagogy itself we can argue at a different point about the distinction between pedagogy and androgogy and horticogy and other things but in terms of the learning delivery that technology is not always particularly refreshing any of those other underlying messages so we've seen in the last 20 years 25 years that we've got new lexicon we've got new words that we use when we talk about learning we talk about synchronous and asynchronous learning we talk about blended flexible distance open online but arguably I would argue what we're really doing is very often is we are simply taking existing practice and we are effectively transmitting it into our own environments and I'm as guilty as anybody of doing that I basically I went back in 2001 when I worked at the open university I did some what I thought was very innovative work in providing a visual metaphor visual interface for an online discussion forum where people could drop their comment within a particular visual graphical interface rather than in a list I was positing that you might want to have a discussion forum alongside a document just by using iFrame so when you change pages you'd get a new discussion forum against each bit of text now the technology has moved on significantly since then but the underlying message hasn't really changed particularly in the last 20 years we're still doing the same thing we're just doing it in a slightly different way I think a lot of us were very enthusiastic when Second Life came along because we thought this is a completely new experience for most students apart from the connectivity issue most universities logged on and built entire campuses I visited any number of empty lecture theaters and wandered around virtual campuses in Second Life because the programming was actually quite intricate to try and do anything really very immersive was actually very very difficult so it was much easier to just basically take the same visual metaphor and reproduce it so that was something of a disappointment I think there have been some fairly innovative technologies I'm not against technology I am an educational technologist at heart and an academic developer but I think I would advocate something like VoiceThread which some of you will be aware of I'm sure which is basically a discussion for that is in effect a virtual environment you can contribute by audio, video or text annotation and you can see that illustrated on the screen there and you can embed that in various virtual learning environments certainly some of the experiments that I've done in teaching post graduates it's enabled them to respond in a much richer way in a more immediate way than composing a well thought out written text piece so I think it I think it's very important to try and work out whether or not you are really just establishing root and the mode and even if it's something like a micro credit all we are often doing is literally just laying a pathway through individuals and laying a groundwork for them as to where we think they should go and I think real innovation comes when we focus away from us to them so picking up on the two previous comments I think certainly Jean-Claude talking about the ability for students to make choices as they go Fabio's comments about getting faculty to brainstorm and work together there is a danger that we still think about innovation based on what we do for them rather than what we ask of them to do and I would argue that if we try and get to focus on getting students to agree their own destination set their own outcomes with agreed awards to determine a personal pathway and how they are going to evidence those outcomes and then choose how best to evidence those agreed outcomes Fabio made a comment in his presentation to say talking about assessments and hopefully a portfolio and I think portfolios are almost certainly going to become the emerging form of the dominant form of assessment for any kind of independent flexible learning mode just because it then releases you in terms of the same sort of timetabling of exams and so on so I think we shouldn't really be thinking about tweaking their mode of travel giving them a new car to drive we want to be thinking more about the way in which they are envisaging the journey and helping them to plan that journey ahead of themselves we recognize learners are individuals they live in a social and professional context that's already been picked up on certainly by what John Claude said and I think that's really very very very important not least because we want to as we increasingly teach internationally we have to accept that students come with very very different epistemological notions a lot of different cultural contexts that lay themselves very differently to their engagement that requires us of course to lose a little bit of control if we focus on the technology we then start worrying about how we're going to deliver that technology how we mandate how we make sure that it is the same individual the question about whether you can check that the person sitting the exam is the person that then becomes something of an obsession and I think we then take some of the power away from the student so my suggestion is that we really should be thinking about models in which we can negotiate outcomes with students this is the distinction between formal and non-formal learning we can talk about some of the UNESCO definitions later perhaps at the end but I think arguably what we really want students to do is be defining some of their own Nintendo learning outcomes now that requires us as institutions to be incredibly flexible in how we're going to validate and accredit and recognize those outcomes and that's the real challenge that's the body of work I think we should be doing as institutions rather than trying to prepare multitude of courses to fit every particular individual if we let the individual decide how they want to learn how they want to evidence and our job is then to do whatever we can in order to assure that learning has happened so negotiating the measurements of success is a very big part of it what I'm very keen on given the work that I've done in the UK around some of the access to education a project called the Poise project which was very much about trying to get faculty to have a conversation with students at the very beginning of their studies what their epistemological ideas are what their frame of reference is and I think one of the things we often neglect which again reinforces what Jean-Claude said is we often neglect to recognize that they are all our learners are situated and are surrounded by in place resources bringing a student from a context to learn something away from that context and to learn that in our environment and no matter how rich it is it's still an abstract model of learning and we need to be putting as much of the learning back into the student context I don't think that's as hard as it might sound given that we've got graduate profiles, we've got competency standards from most professional programs we want to ensure that there is a broad provision and so I suggest all five domains of learning and I can talk about those a bit later but cognitive, metacognitive the effective psychomotor and interpersonal domains all of those domains of learning should be present in every study program that any student ever engages in I think having a broader perspective on assessment I would be very nervous about doing set exams in a flexible online or open distance context so trying to work out how you get patchwork, how you design patchwork and portfolio assessment to track the student to make sure it is the same student that's producing each piece of work basically by making it so heavily contextualized for that student there's no way that they can get an essay farm to write an assignment for them for example and really to try and get them to contribute as much of their local situated in place resources as possible now all of those things do take require us to have a shift in terms of some of the way that we provide our structured learning for students and I think that is a major challenge but I think rather than trying to tweak the map we need to basically recognize that the real innovation I believe is in the learning design process itself I was very intrigued by some of the comments that Fabio was making about the value of bringing people together to design things I agree entirely so I'm suggesting again that running design workshops is absolutely the way to design learning there's no question should never leave an academic to go away and design learning on their own it always has to be a collaborative effort and you follow a particular model the model I follow is an eight stage learning design framework but I think the crucial thing for me is to focus on making sure that you develop profiles of students and that everything is then based around fulfilling those learning objectives for those particular students so my take away from the session today which I hope will at least stimulate discussion later perhaps at the end of the fourth presentation is not to look to technology for the innovation solutions I think building on what Fabio already said I think it's very important that we explore students' life contexts and that we design the learning to try and leverage that to exploit that wherever we can so I think that's me done Mark I'm not sure how my timing went I should have done that in less than 10 minutes yeah provide the applause to you for coming through now so Simon during your presentation there were a few comments made let me just pick up on one of them from Kim Carey who comments surely it is also important to ensure that the student journey visits particular places for example key concepts imagine driving through Europe and missing out on Vienna or Venice you have a comment certainly yeah that's an interesting point and I think obviously anything that's a key concept would have already been agreed as an intended learning outcome I think there's a difference about the way I write outcomes I very often write what appears for some of my colleagues to be too many outcomes because I think it's important to define the skills rather than the content if for example in that example if you're saying to the student you want to explore you want them to understand the chronological pattern of development in Renaissance architecture visit two or three Italian cities on route that's different from articulating that you want them to visit Venice so Venice is the content provision the explore Renaissance architecture is the concept itself that's where we get into really interesting arguments with colleagues in a design setting is getting them to distinguish between the concepts and the content that they're used to delivering an important challenge you gave us, innovation means letting go of control there's a another question coming through yes great I've got a question now from arena if learning outcomes ideally may be negotiated with students they cannot be fixed in curriculum which goes under quality assurance peer reviewing or their definition may not be measurable how do you deal with that again I think there is certainly a need for our quality assurance mechanisms and indeed any external validation system to be possibly pushed the boundaries of that need to be negotiated we're seeing some of that going on in the UK at the moment where we have apprenticeships for professional accreditation and yet the internal the models of how students identify what academic credit they get in order to meet those competency frameworks might vary from one individual to another depending on their context but yes you're absolutely right that's a major institutional challenge I'm not suggesting for a moment that we can solve it immediately I would like to think that most of our quality assurance colleagues are really looking themselves to try and find ways of enhancing the quality of the learning experience and having all the students experiencing exactly the same learning is not necessarily providing what the students actually need would be my argument when we talk about learner profile and we come back to the point that profile may vary in a large scale from housewives to tech junkie teenagers how can we overcome that situation while we're designing our curriculum so that's a really really interesting question I think again when you sit down with a design group I've experienced this at the Open University working with course teams but more lately in another university when you sit down with a team and you identify the reality is that most students tend to group into three or four broad categories and then what you're doing then is providing the flexibility by enabling them to support a dialogue with you about designing outcomes and giving them the opportunity to provide in-situ or in-place contextual assessment evidence you're allowing them to then make those individual adjustments so I don't actually see that necessarily the housewife and the tech junkie might necessarily have very actually they might not actually define their outcomes very very differently if on the other hand you have an outcome that requires an individual to produce say a digital media object and the inference in your question might be that the housewife is less able to do that clearly there is a degree of supplemental learning that has to happen around that learners experience I think in reality that happens a lot now but we don't necessarily acknowledge it students are a railroaded to follow a process whatever additional learning they might have to do think about international students who might be learning in a different language to their native tongue that's not often credited and I suspect that really it should be, they should be able to present some of the additional supplemental learning in a portfolio of evidence towards the awards I was trying to find the background so let me so introduce Doctor Estella She's also the president of the Lithuanian Association of Distance and E-Learning. So the topic of her doctoral dissertation in education focused on virtual mobility and higher education. So today she'll be presenting student challenges while participating in virtual mobility gathered from different virtual mobility cases. Stella, thank you for joining us and we look forward to what you have to say to us. Okay, hello everyone. I hope you can hear me well and I'm trying to share my screen so you can see my presentation. Okay, thank you. Okay, for the last slide. So I'm really glad to participate in this event and to listen to the three former presenters who actually guided us through the way of students and focusing on student learning as my presentation is also focusing more on the student, from the student's point of view. And I would like to keep the last idea from Simon's presentation when he stressed that one of the proposals could be to make use of the student's local resources. They have their own institutions and their background and to continue to have a look at this from the virtual mobility perspective. Why I'm talking about it, first of all, that in our university, we have been doing virtual mobility since 2009. So it's almost 10 years now and we have done a lot of research and we have gained some experience and we can discuss different cases from different perspectives. But focusing on students, that's a bit nice and also I think it's what we teachers should do. And first of all, before focusing on the presentation, I would like to start from how we describe what is virtual mobility. Okay, because sometimes people say that it is any course that you can do online, it is virtual mobility course, but to be more precise in higher education, I should say that what is the difference between regular distance learning course and virtual mobility course. And from our perspective, when how we define and understand is that in virtual mobility course, you focus more on international activities, on international competence development of either students or teachers or the ones who are your main target group. Of course, you involve here higher education institutions and based everything on agreements between institutions. And I'll tell you later why it is important. Of course, and today, virtual mobility in the most popular language is English. I understand that the bigger nations have possibilities to do virtual mobility between other countries as well. But in Europe, I think it's English the most common language. Also, the content of the course is usually accessible in virtual learning environment and the communication and collaboration of students and teachers are ensured by the use of technology. But the main stress is and the main difference of the virtual mobility course from regular distance learning courses, this international aspect that comes into mind. Okay, and why do you, from our perspective usually students, why they participate and what are the main benefits. Of course, if you are able to travel across Europe and experience different learning modes in different universities, you are glad to do that, but not every student can do that. So, participating in a virtual mobility course or a course in another institution in virtual mobility mode, you not only experience the different learning modes of that institution, but also you get a wider approach and wider perspective from the content that is delivered by this institution. And also, of course, you can benefit from the improvement of virtual mobility competences such as linguistic competence, cultural, intercultural, ICT competence, of course, learning outcomes come related competence and personal or social competence. Also, if in physical mobility you come to, you are able to come usually to one institution during one semester in virtual mobility that's easy for you to study in two or three even different institutions at the same semester. And what students usually think of that this opportunity enhances their employability and career opportunities. And the main idea or the main additional value that comes from this virtual mobility course is the different perspectives of different learners in the subject. And experts who have done this course say that when you're choosing, you as a teacher choose a subject for virtual mobility course, you should think of the course that is interesting to be seen from different countries perspective where these cultural differences really bring the value and differences and enrich each participant in the course. And this not only allows you as a participant to share your national approach but to experience from this different nationalities and different approaches from the team in your course. And also even what teachers usually say if the course is repeated, the same course repeated next semester, it never will be the same because the students are not the same in the course. And these different combinations of different nationalities is what usually enriches the virtual mobility course. And from our research or experience what are the main expectations why do usually students join these courses is the main driving picture is the recognition if the course will be recognized and if it will be promised for the students that the course will be recognized at the home institution. They will definitely want to do this if it is suggested as an open course where you can choose but we're not sure if this will be recognized somewhere in your even home institution curriculum. This is not such a strong motivating point for the students. Also we experienced that if the topic is good and attractive, this is also one of the motivating factors for the students. If you promise something new that is not commonly delivered at your university, that's what attracts the students to learn. And usually they won't go for physical erasments just due to hear one course or to hear one lecture but if you suggest it in virtual mode that's really what they will go for. And also why usually students see this as a valuable experience, they also think that this course will be appreciated in their career by their potential employer. And so what are these the main challenges students face in this virtual mobility courses? I took here experience from six different cases that were in a way similar but also different cases. But these challenges were seen in most of the cases. So first of all the challenges for the students this different institution. When you have a possibility to come to institution, you have some adaptation time. And when you are learning at this institution only virtually, it is really a challenge for you because you don't have a person you can consult with. It's very valuable if your friends are also studying at the same university. But if only you are alone, it's really a challenge for you because usually these courses are run by different lectures. It's not always that you understand how these lectures speak. It's not always how they deliver what are the methods if you're used to your home university delivery mode. This virtual mobility possibility gives you experience different learning modes by different teachers. But that's also challenging for the students and especially for the students who come from traditional universities who studied traditional studies and not the online studies. Also what we have noticed that all students no matter how good they are in English or any foreign language the course is delivered, they are afraid before the course starts. Because they think that others will speak English better. They are afraid if everyone will understand them. What if the other students will speak better English and my English is not that good. But this usually is overcome after several weeks when they see that. Definitely not everyone speaks such perfect English. Even if they do speak English they usually native language speakers of English language. They usually tolerate other nationality students who don't speak such good English. So this is really necessary discomfort. But it is also what we notice is the challenge for students with language barrier. Also we notice that at least we promote that the main intercultural competence development reveals in the group of students when they work in international teams. So they get to know how differently other persons learn. How other nationalities when they learn is that in evening or morning or whatever. And this time difference of course is a challenge for the students to collaborate. But when they have at least one assignment in the course that is to be done by different nationality students that is really possible challenges but also very much valued by students. And of course if there is a group work online group work and some students are still passive that is really a challenge for this group to come along with the different possibilities how to organize their work. Also we notice for that sector when we had one project when in that sector we tried to help partners implement virtual mobility. The pre technological experience and new tools are the challenges if you suggest students the tools that they usually don't use in their daily life. They probably won't use them during virtual course delivery as well. And if these tools are new and they don't have other tools that is really a challenge for them to get to start using them. And in that sector what we notice is that especially if the person is working and does the part time training is this finding time to get to connect and do the activities. It's not that much motivating because he's focused more on what he's doing at that place. So these challenges and technology experience is really important and challenging for different kind of students. Of course as I already mentioned that pre online learning experience is very good value and the students who study online programs do virtual mobility courses much easier. And they found them not such challenging as the students from traditional studies because they are already used to online learning. And this because it's really takes time and sometimes feel students from traditional universities feel this lack of collaboration or at least lack of possibility to come to a teacher and to talk about the issues. And of course the different universities do different semesters and please have the start of the semester in different timings. And it is a challenge not only for the students but also for the teachers to start a course in September if your is the semester at your university start only at the end of October. So it is a challenge for teachers to grab and to coordinate everything. This is what we have been talking here about the importance of students flexibility and choice. And in virtual mobility what we found is a bit different. We found that if the course is not strongly coordinated it's really challenging and you can really get lost easily. So this clarification and strong coordination is one of the success factors of our virtual mobility cases that we have done before. So it depends of course on the approach you have. And what we have I would like to share while finishing to review about the testimonies what students experience in these different cases. Of course this open minded this wider approach and these different skills and competencies and they learn to know how to organize better their schedule time. And usually although they are afraid in the beginning what they receive at the end is more than they expected. And of course they improve the English language they improve the other competencies. And what students say that it helps them professional life but also it helps them to find new people and new friends in these different virtual courses. And it is really feels like studying in a different country although you are physically in your home country. And the last pages with students from our master studies who are delivering each year the same course is delivered for these master students. That they also share that this is unusual and unique experience. And as the course is focusing on social problems from different perspectives to analyze the problem or the same issue from different perspective in different country resources that students have access to is really important. And the teachers also say that this course when the students come from different nationalities each semester is different because you get access to different approaches and different social problems. And of course you appreciate it but it is challenging in the beginning a lot. And I would just like to finish my life slide with the invitation for you so that we open our universities for student and teacher virtual mobility. Because offering the courses for different university students is really opening up your practices and your university as well. Thank you. Very, very good presentation and very clear that there are many benefits to what you just talked about. There are also some challenges. What if we could just quickly give ourselves some chat applause if that would be all right everybody just to provide a clap in the chat area. There is a question that's come through from Simon Atkinson. What kind of approaches to orientations to learning do you think work well? Obviously you need to help your students to come to terms with the type of study you're talking about. How do you orientate them? At least what worked well. It is very useful if you have a person in each university that the course not only in the host university or the course hosting university but also if there is a person in each university that the students come from. It's much easier for students to come to a real person to talk if they have an issue. And we usually cooperate this with the different partner universities and leave this ideas and this work for international studies departments or international relations offices. Who usually have experience in physical mobility and virtual just it is more administrative dealing but this idea is similar. So it is more left for international relations offices but of course it depends a lot on the teacher who is delivering the course because it is also you need to welcome the students to the course. You need to write them more messages than you usually do in a regular course just at least in the beginning so students can know where to address and when the course really started and is it already started and what to do next. So it asks for a lot of different approach but of course the teacher and international relations office are the main coordinators to address. There are some notes coming through in the chat. There were some connectivity problems with that presentation. I think the recording should be sound. There were a few pauses I think in places but the narrative was very clear. For those of you who couldn't quite get all of the presentation, if you take a look at the recording, everything should be fine there. So there's also a call for someone who's up to your contact information. So if you could perhaps provide it in chat, I think it would be appreciated. Let's look as though there are any more questions through there. So let me wrap up. I think it's been a wonderful session. We've had four very, very different but very interesting examples of innovation and distance education. The key things that came through for me, I think there was certainly flexibility was a big focus, a focus on the students as well and taking their circumstances into account. But all have been extremely innovative and helpful. So thank you to Fabio, to Simon, to Jean-Claude, to Stella for your time this afternoon. Do join us for upcoming events. We still have two more days celebrating European distance learning week. So tomorrow there's considerations for QA of eLearning Provision being hosted by Eva Ossi and Olson. And on Friday we have a how we can network and support PhD students in research. That'll be a panel debate taking place on Friday. So I will just share with you the link to what we've got coming up for the rest of European distance learning week. I wonder if everyone, we could just provide another round of applause to all of our presenters this afternoon. And thank you for joining us. We've had around 40 participants at odd stages. Drive their lives down a half. Thanks everyone. Enjoy the remainder of European distance learning week. It's been a pleasure to bring this event to you.