 Okay, good afternoon everybody, wherever you happen to be in these particularly challenging and difficult times. Well, that doesn't mean we shouldn't, I think it's more important than ever to try and get together and to discuss things. And while today is suppose a bit of a serious discussion, it's also not meant to be overly serious or po-faced like that. So I've just gone to start off sharing my screen. We're gonna introduce the event today. So, as I said, welcome to the European Online and Distance Learning Week. It's organized by Eden and there's a hashtag there. Hashtag EODLW2020, there's a number of other hashtags which I'll also bring up on subsequent slides. So it's our great EODL week debate. And for us, it's online learning versus traditional face-to-face models of education. So this afternoon here, I just want to say introduce all the participants and the rules of engagement to make this sound a bit like a sort of battle, but it's certainly not a battle like that, as I said. So let's just, I'm very mindful that we promise everybody will be finished by 5 p.m. So I'm just gonna move along swiftly and I'm sure. I'm sorry, your sharing is not right. You're sharing in the presenter way, not on the show way. Change the display. Yep, there. Yep, thank you, pardon. Thank you very much for that, yep. That okay? That look okay? Yep, perfect. Okay, so as I said, just the introduction and the rules of engagement. So what is the actual debate here? As I said, we have this perception of often that online education is somehow some sort of deficit or inferior. So the move is that the house believes that the online learning is just as good as traditional face-to-face models of education. And it's both with any way of debating, we need to have two teams. And so just to introduce myself is Tom Farrelly. I'm based in the Institute of Technology in Tralee in the Southwest of Ireland. It's a relatively small Institute of Technology College soon to be joining up with Cork Institute of Technology from Munster Technological University. But as I said, I'm just trying to be the moderator or ringmaster, whatever type we want to use. We have an expert commentator who's gonna try and help make sense of all these claims and competing claims and counterclaims. Dr. Ulf Daniel Ellers, and as I said, he's gonna sort of at the end of the debate, try and pull it together, make some sense of what's been going on. Team one, the negative or the house, the traditional aspect there, Diana and Don. And we've all of the, on the website, all of the boys are up there. As I said, I'm mindful that we just wanna get back out there. Nick Gula-Vigil and Alexander Kriste, our house team and team two, the ghost making the call for the online, it's Mark Brown, Donald Cot Jr. and Deborah Arnold. So as opposed, that's our teams. So what are some of the rules of engagement, so to speak, and I'm mindful of sort of sense rules. What we would ask is that no screenshots are recorded and there will be an official recording after this. So we would just ask people to respect that. Please use the chat function, we want people to get involved. We're gonna start off with the house or the negative team to start, and then alternate speakers between teams. And one thing I have speaking to all of the presenters, I will be exceptionally strict on the five minutes, five minutes, those really mean five minutes. And just to sort of say to people, I will just briefly say 30 seconds when the 30 seconds to go and that's it. After that, then we will have the expert commentator, Ulf will come in at the end of it. I'll be moderating the discussion boards, they're the chat functions. And so as I said, I will try and take some of them and then pose them to the each panel. At the end of the Q and A, I will then ask for a final sort of elevator pitch from each team. And then we're just gonna have a vote using thementi.com and more details there. And then just very briefly finish up with a conclusions and tanks. So just the final thing, before people are starting to get themselves sorted out, get involved, there's a chat there in Zoom and there's three hashtags here with the hashtag EODLW2020, hashtag EODLW and hashtag EDLW. And also then just to be ready there to vote on menti.com. I will give you the exact room number at the end of the proceedings. But as I said, look, it's just a bit of fun. Just want people that have said be tweeting away, get involved and you know yourself, I will be there strict. I will be making sure we have people voting now going on for no longer than five minutes. So we are now going to start off and Diana is now going to speak on the proposition. So I'm going to just give her a few seconds. So I'll just stop sharing my screen now and just give her a few seconds to start sharing her screen. And Mark Brown has taken social distances here. So what we will do is I said, just to make life fair for everybody, I will not start the clock until people actually start sharing their screen. However, having said that, I think if I feel people have taken too long, I might start being a little bit mean and maybe take a few seconds off. No pressure there of course like that. So Diana, are you ready to bring up your screen? Yes, I am and hopefully you can all see it. So just a small correction. I will not support, sorry, please don't move my slides, those who can. So I will not be speaking for the house, I will speaking against the house. We are trying to combat the idea that online learning is as good as traditional face to face. And that does support- Diana, are you trying to take, are you started your five minutes? If you want me, I will. Okay, now I think that was a little bit, that was a little bit there. Let's get, are we ready? Yes, I'm ready. Your five minutes starts now. Okay, so we are going to speak. There we are the three ladies, the damn lady, Diana, Alexandra and Marie. And we are going to speak with the idea that traditional education and there are forms of traditional education, which are as good as possible. And they will be standing here forever for as long as possible. This means that online education, which is happening now is a choice of a survival. Is it really happening? And you need to keep in mind that habit is the most difficult to change. We've been doing education in a certain way for centuries. And we know exactly how well this has to be done. And especially in universities, we are the most distance education less surviving in the universities. This is a code which we found, which is on the university world news about how the campuses are closed now and the teaching is no longer an option but a matter of survival for a lot of universities and for a lot of professors and teaching and students. So is this possible in our limited online experience? Because all of our professors and students, the majority of them, more than 95% of our professors and students in the universities have always been taught in the past and in the present, mainly face to face, never online or very, very little online. We don't count here the blended learning experience or the education which is supported by computers or internet connection and so on. So it's so difficult for all of us to do this education where we need to multitask continuously. We need to access so many different devices at once and to support all of these activities constantly and continuously. So for example, how you teach engineering, how you teach science, how you teach medical sciences and art and especially all of those practical labs and seminars where you need to get hands on experience. This is a real example which was just yesterday. In fact, today, happening in my university where a professor who teach principles of an equipment of testing needed to be able to show in real life how to move different buttons and how to connect different connectors because last week it showed the simulation and the students were not really able to understand in full that. How you teach education in a medical science. Would you really want to have a nurse drawing blood from your veins without ever touching an injection or being able to do that? Or a surgeon which will only perform surgery after he only done simulation, never done a practical placement or never touched something practically under a supervision of another professor. And how you teach art, how you do mentoring in art, how you are able to really encourage people to express themselves through different abilities and different forms of expression, especially in art if you don't meet at least from time to time, face to face. And also what we found more difficult and especially this is my personal experience here. How you mentor students, how you encourage those which have difficulties of speaking out or being too allowed to public or to encourage them to really be available online. When it is in face to face, you easily pick them up. You see from their body language that they have problems and you try to put them forward or you encourage them to do it. And how you really do mentoring, especially in engineering field. Here are students which are learning how to put a Mars robot going to the Mars planets. It's so difficult. And learning is not only about knowledge, it's also a lot of habits of your specialty is how you teach, how you present different study cases and so on is something which also, especially in different sciences, people need to learn how to do it. And student life. Student life is not necessarily only about learning. Student life is a lot more, is a lot of clubs, fun interaction, working and living in a large city, going away from home, growing up and becoming an adult. 40 seconds. So how you do that. And also how you make accessible and availability available for everyone. How you make this possible and how you don't get the technology affordances in the place of your learning and knowledge. Thank you. Well done. Very well done. With 10 seconds to spare. Absolutely brilliant. Well done. Mind you, it takes away some of the fun that I love to be able to just stop speakers as everybody knows me from the guest today. We certainly know that that's one of my, the things that I live for. But actually a great, great, great job. So well done on there. Our next speaker, we're now switching over sides to make the pitch for the online and we're joined by the inimitable Mark Brown. Now, actually it's an interesting set of presenters here because the one side of the team, the one side of the debate has gone for slides and the other side has gone for, oh, natural, just no people, sorry, no present or no PowerPoint presentations whatsoever. So that's an interesting story, which I thought was actually interesting to think that the team making the pitch for technology is not using technology. So, not sure if we have someone else's presentation slides up there, Alexander, are they yours up there? You're all ready to go over to the next one. I'll just continue on the same slide. Oh yeah, you're trying to get a quick one in for your one already, so we'll have to get your side to stop sharing. I'll tell you, Diana was trying to take a few seconds over. Alexandra is trying to shift in there underneath, so she'll have to get stopped. Mark Brown, where are you? It's not like Mark Brown to be quiet and take this lying down like that. Well, Tom, our team doesn't need any prompts or props or, you know, sort of techno sophistication effects, but it might be helpful if they can stop sharing the screen so people can actually see us. Yeah, so Diana or Alexander, can you, can one of you stop sharing? Alexandra needs to stop sharing. Am I not going to talk? No, no, no, it's Mark now. It's Mark. It's Mark, it's Mark now. You see, I tell you, unbelievable, Mark. I really share the pain there. People are trying to come in here, they're trying to mute a few seconds out of the screen. Ten oldie, ten oldie. Yes, yes, I think so. I take a yellow card for the yellow card. It's a technology fault, sorry. Technology fault, you see, yes. How ironic. Okay, Mark, your time starts now. Well, after listening to Diana, quite frankly, I don't think I need these notes. Actually, I feel like what I should be doing is wearing our masks again to protect us from the verbal diarrhea and quite frankly, dangerous myth and misinformation coming down the pipe to us. Did you know that, as we've already observed, the opposition team are having to rely upon a 19th century lecture, traditional lecture model to present their argument to us. The good news is that our team, unlike the opposition, does not need a health warning as our credentials are background experience and depth of knowledge is beyond reproach. My colleague, Deborah, is really the rose between two old thorns as she brings a unique insider experience to this debate. And then my colleague, Don, well, he's a global higher education consultant sought after around the world. He brings an incredible wealth of experience and wisdom to our team as you'll hear. Unlike our opposition, our team brings a truly global perspective to today's debate with not only a deep knowledge of research, but also firsthand practical experience from both the northern and the southern hemispheres. The point is that you can trust us. In the short time remaining, I've got three points I want to make. Firstly, in any debate, words matter. And in this case, the key word that we all need to focus on in unpacking the moot is traditional. I already saw Diana qualify it with forms of traditional. No, traditional. This house believes that online learning is just as good as traditional face-to-face models of education. Make sure you keep traditional squarely in mind. The truth is that we all know that our opposing colleagues that I'm looking at them face an impossible task. You only have to take a look at their publication records to see where they really stand in this debate. We actually feel a little sorry for them and you can see that we're actually being quite kind and gentle in trying to make our affirmative case. The second point to ask is what does the research tell us? The answer is clear in the numbers. We know quite conclusively from over 25 years of research that online learning is just as good as traditional instruction. There is no significant difference. Mode of delivery is not a key factor in determining the quality of the educational experience. We can table numerous studies dating back over a seminal 25-year period, including that in 2004, the review that was published, a meta-analysis in the review of educational research. But perhaps more recently, many of you will be familiar with George Siemens and his colleagues work in 2015, their meta-analysis of 350 studies where they conclude, I quote, online learning is equivalent to, or in certain circumstances, more effective than traditional face-to-face instruction. I quote. This year, 2020, in a systematic review of 600 publications on 2009 to 2018, Martin concluded that there is nothing to be gained from such comparisons. The answer has already been answered. Sorry, the question has already been answered. Actually, a recent COVID-19 study conducted by Deloitte's very credible organization published in the Australian Business Review even found that uni students prefer online learning. Direct quote. And Tony Bates, I'm sure you saw just last week, took this conclusion one step further in his blog when he argued why logically online learning is superior to face-to-face teaching. Take a look at it. We'll share the link with you. What more do we need to say? And don't try to cite issues like retention and completion rates, there's more concrete research, these are very traditional measures of traditional higher education. My last point is it's in the narratives. We can give you powerful stories, but my own story is in stark contrast to what you're going to hear. As a traditional student who frequently fell asleep at the back of a lecture theater when someone was delivering the content of their traditional lecture to me, I can't possibly think how you could argue tradition. Time, time, time, excellent. My God, remind me, Mark, never to go on to your bad list. Ha ha ha, brilliant. So yeah, there's no holding punches there from Mark Brown there. It's gonna be interesting to see now how Alexandra responds to that. He certainly has thrown down the gauntlet. So Alexandra, we'll let you bring up your slides and you can start sharing them again. You liked sharing them so much the last time that you wanted to share them and you were there. So. Yeah, we have a lot of issues with the computer, but obviously the other teams seems to have, to find this the best way of communication for some obscure reason. Just a second, I'll get there in a GFI sharing screen. Don't need to look at images of what I've been just told was done in the university. Yes, well, this is part of what you're missing if you want to go only online, but that's... As long as you have the right accent, is it? Well, we have, actually, we have 30% women in computer science, which beats all the other universities in the UK at the moment. Okay, so. Right. Are you ready to start? Your time starts. Yes, go on. Your time starts now. Okay, hello. Thank you for listening to me. I'm Alexander Christa from Durham University. And I'm going to talk for the traditional education. We're all now online and we're experiencing hands-on all the problems that this is bringing. I don't have to tell you about issues with transmission, issues with putting on the wrong slides, issues with all sorts of interesting bits. But from our point of view, we're universities. We're higher education. And we have a long tradition to teach in a certain way. Durham University is the third oldest university in the world. It's slightly disputable, but there you go. And we have taught students face to face. And that was always our strength. Students have made, have networked in our university and have built their careers upon this for many, many years. So moving online, honestly, we're doing our best. We are, we all are, but we're not there yet. We're not really prepared. And we're not fully online university. So here are a few slides, which I haven't prepared. So thanks, Diana. I'm just gonna go through them. Digital divide, people being, people that don't have the access. The social interaction is completely missing. Interruptions that you can hear my little daughter in the background, by the way, that keeps walking about here. This is a little funny one, right? So how long will you wait for interaction to occur? Well, we know that in five minutes will be cut, so that there's at least something. Online classes, it's not always clear what's the etiquette, and there's all sorts of interesting videos that you can look up. So this is one of them. Okay, double click on my computer. I can see your computer. No, no, click on my computer on your computer. Can you hear the sound as well? Go for the my computer. There is an icon labeled my computer on your computer. Double click. Okay, and it goes on and on. This is also a very interesting one, how to cheat online, right? And I think you can find lots of these things all over the place. And diversity, I mentioned, gender diversity and sitting in front of a computer is making basically everybody to be treated in a percepts, not the personalized way that they need to be treated. I work in AI myself, and I think that it's a wonderful area. But again, we're not there yet, and these are some of the examples. So this is a chatbot that has been released relatively recently, only four years ago, and it was learning interesting stuff, and it ended up talking like an 19-year-old American girl and being very rude to people, and worse than that, being slightly, let's say, not gender-neutral. So look it up, it's quite a funny one. And there's several examples of bias in AI in general. This is another short example from gender classification. If you had makeup on, you automatically are classified as a woman. But there's more serious ones where people actually have to go to jail because AI is mistaking and getting things wrong. So if we want somehow to help online learning and go the AI way, it's not all there yet, and there's a lot of bias. There's credit card, Apple had credit card issues with giving higher limits to women than to men, et cetera. But I can give you just a very simple example right now. So if we look at Google and type, why are men so? You will find that men may be complicated or angry, but if we do women so, then it's all jealous and needy and way more bias. Thank you. So in general, there's a lot of issues yet, and we're not there yet. I would also recommend this beautiful video with a conference call and how things go wrong in a conference call. And I will stop sharing right now. Thank you. You ruined it. At five seconds, I would have been able to stop you. Well done. Well, Alexander, you've certainly thrown back the traditional, you've certainly picked up the gauntlet, thrown down to you by Mark on the part of the traditional there, and you've certainly raised some very, very interesting issues and points there. So I think you certainly rebutted and came back with some top-provoking stuff. So our next one, and once again, the unicide is not relying on PowerPoint. So we're just going, oh, natural again. We're going to just bring Deborah over now if you're going to just speak. Yes, that's fine for me. And oh, natural is perfect for me speaking to you from France, which I wouldn't be able to do if you're in a face-to-face setting. Right, I think I'm ready to go. Okay, so I'll just, if you're ready, I'll just reset my timer. So, so, okay. So if you're ready, Deborah. I'm fine, yep. Okay, your time starts now. Okay, so yeah, I firmly believe that online learning can be just as good as traditional face-to-face models of education. I've taught online, I've studied online, I've designed and facilitated MOOCs, and I can confirm that it's absolutely possible to provide a rich, engaging experience for all concerned. And if it weren't for online learning, there's no way I'd be doing my PhD right now while holding down a full-time job. Of course, we all know that simply transposing a three-hour lecture or posting PDFs in the early years is not the answer. And some disciplines which rely heavily on practical work are more challenging than others. Diana made a few very interesting examples earlier. But when we respect a couple of basic principles, I think that any teacher in any field can design pedagogically sound online learning. Let's call these principles people-first and pedagogy-first. People-first means thinking about our learners and about ourselves. Who are our learners? Where are they? What access to technology do they have or not have? That's the access in the digital divide question. Once we know this, we can begin to design inclusive learning activities that respect our learners' environment. And of course, we have to think about ourselves and the mental health issues as well. Pedagogy-first means thinking about teaching and learning before technology. It means thinking about learning activities rather than simply how to get across content. It means thinking about learning objectives and how we plan to assess the achievement of these. And if we bring these two principles of people-first and pedagogy-first together, it means thinking of our students as partners in the learning process rather than as passive, empty vessels waiting to be filled with all that knowledge. And the argument that online learning doesn't give a feeling of community as well, to be frank, absolute nonsense to use a polite word there. In our daily lives, many of us communicate across a variety of social media platforms to reach out to our own communities of friends, family and colleagues. It's exactly what we're doing here. Online learning doesn't need to be restricted to the dull forum of a VLE. It can and should be a conversation. So let's take a couple of real-life examples. Last week, a colleague told me Deborah, I'm dreading teaching online again. I find it so draining. I just don't get the energy from a group of students that you get in a face-to-face setting. And my response? Well, that's interesting because someone told me the exact opposite. They said that they were astounded at the energy and satisfaction they found when their students took ownership of the collaborative tasks that they were given to do online. They brought in some really exciting new ideas and it was wonderful to see them functioning as a team and growing as more independent learners. And we had some great informal moments too. Of course, if you try and reproduce the face-to-face experience online, there are things which won't work as well. But let's stop thinking in terms of deficit and look for the affordances. Many of us don't have the choice right now. So let's do it well. It's not less, it's different. Just as an example, this is what I found on Twitter the other day. Someone said, if all we're doing is making our hand out some textbooks into PDFs and putting them into our LMSs, Zoom sessions that replace our face-to-face lectures and worrying about academic integrity, we're completely missing the point. This is the time to fix what didn't work, not amplify it. There are hundreds of examples of good online learning out there supported by decades of research, as Mark has said, and a whole community of scholars and colleagues. In fact, as we've seen, the members of the opposing team are part of this community. So I don't know, but I find it a bit surprising to suddenly hear them arguing against the mood. And the solutions to those challenging disciplines and activities might just be out there. You run an art class. Why not get your students to explore digital art forms? You need to run those practical lab-based experiments. Someone somewhere may well have designed a virtual lab or simulation you can use or adapt. And my response to the example that Diana gave earlier, maybe the problem wasn't with the simulation, it was with the pedagogy. It's not for me to dictate which solutions to use, but simply to say that with a student-centered approach to teaching and learning and awareness of the possibilities and a willingness to take a few risks, online learning is easily just as good as traditional face-to-face models of education, if not superior in many ways. Thank you very much. Thank you, well done, Deborah. Well done. Sadly, the only one who's actually been a little bit naughty and took the extra time was every young man around. Okay, so some really, really good debates there, traveling in and as I said, coming in from France. So we're now gonna come back across and head back up to Ireland to marade in Dublin. So you're gonna have those ready up and ready and screen sharing. So thanks very much, Tom. Delighted to be here, Della. Hang on, hang on, hang on. How did you do? He gets all trying to this little, and your time starts now. Delighted to be here, Tom. Delighted to be sharing some of our thoughts. I won't go down the route of lecturing or trying to undermine our colleagues on the other side. In fact, they had some really, really good points, but some of those points are just wrong. We got together to discuss about this debate. The three of us had literally come out of teaching. The three of us had been teaching online that week. So when we talk about online teaching, we're talking about, we're basing it in our experiences. We're basing it on designing modules, delivering modules and doing that both for traditional online. So we speak from experience when we talk. So when we come back and we say, when what all is said and done, is it just as good? I think Deborah has made my point for many times and she said, if we try to replicate, we know that a lot of online is trying to replicate what happens in the traditional face to face. And that's why it's not as good. And that's why we have to keep thinking about it. So we've also heard of how good online can be or could be if you only do this or you only do that. There obviously is an issue. And I think my colleagues on the other side recognize that there is an issue because you have to follow a formula, you have to do this, you have to do that to make it as good as. So if online was as good, my question to you, well, why isn't it mainstream? Why isn't it available everywhere and to for everyone? I'm just gonna move my slides on. We all have listened to the hype about online being this great disruptor. Lots of hype, not much impact. It's been sidelined. The demand for students is not there. So if you take away the COVID pivot or the so-called pivot, we know that it's not there. We know that students still prefer to be in face to face environments. And that doesn't matter whether you look at traditional newer forms or whatever, they just prefer to be face to face. They like the feel of going to college. They like to be in their networks. They like to hang out at the clubs and socks. They like to do all of that extracurricular effort. I know myself when I was at college, I wanted to sit in lectures that weren't in my area, in my subject area or in my degree program. I can't do that now if I'm a student learning because I'll get a Zoom link for a Zoom call and I can't go into any other lectures. I used to sit in in law lectures, but I couldn't do that now or I'd have to get the link shared from somebody else. So it's very much siloed the way we've approached online. So therefore the quality isn't necessarily always there. Adapting is not the same as program design. You're absolutely right. Don't think it's anything more response than to challenges. So the great online, I think we can all say that, I think it's going to be the, the great online is going to have a massive effect on us as a community within Eden. And I think we need to get to grips with this. It's a lot of aspiration. We've heard about a lot of aspiration and a lot of things, what could be done, what should be done, but what is the reality? The reality is this, we have learners and students who now, instead of going into a theater or a lecture hall or a lab, they now have to go into places like closets to get some peace, to do some online learning. Or they have to go and sit out in front of a restaurant as these two poor little kids have to do in America to do this. So we have here my esteemed colleague, Mark Brown, in a recent Irish Times, who said, aside from successfully passing court, the real measure is whether the learning experience was engaging, enjoyable. Well, you wouldn't have a Taco Bell employee coming out to see if the two kids were fine or to make sure the wifi was available if online was such a good quality. So the great online, the purely online distance model, educated like students of freedom at their own pace, it's not going to be likely adopted. So this is my issue with online. If it was so great, if the quality had been great, you think about the COVID-19, we've all had experience of it. You, most institutions are not going to go to online or tradition or blended because a lot of them are going to listen to what their students are saying, listening to the feedback from their teachers and their lecturers and academics are saying, to know what, we've tried that. It didn't work. Our students weren't very happy, but if we weren't very happy with it, we need to go back into the classroom. We need to go back into the classroom. Finally, we know the culture at each strategy for breakfast. This is a message that came out from one of a very university that was dedicated. He said, it was just heartening and we're not an online university. Halloween is over, but online is a shadow of what traditional forms of education and we're still maybe to come. It might just end up to be a ghoul. Thank you very much. Well done. Excellent. Five seconds to spend. Some of the timing here today is absolutely brilliant. You've really thrown some really good points there. Very, very well argued we're out. You certainly didn't pull your punches. So I've actually been waiting with baited breath because when I heard Mark's introduction to Don, I thought, my God, this is a behemoth of educational technology who has come down after the education technology Mount Olympus. And I was said, I can't wait to hear that. The pearls of wisdom, which will be dropping from Don's Mount. So without any further ado, I'll hand over to you Don and I'll knock off my microphone and I'll accept a call of time on you. So Don, if you just want to get yourself set up and as I said, I'm sitting here with baited breath. Can everybody see me? Do I need to share my screen? No, no, just put on your mic. I'll knock off. You should be coming up now. Okay, my mic's on. Can you see me? Still no joy. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Good, so you can see me. Linda, Robert, can you please switch off and make spotlight on Don? Yes, that's the question. Hello. Okay. Okay, so what was the talk? Don't let the team down. The other team, I've tried to invade a few seconds, but your team has been very, very good. But listen, we will start now in two seconds. Are we ready? Your time starts now. Great introduction. Thank you very, very much. What was the topic again? Just kidding. Okay, first of all, great comments on both sides and it's, you know, we're having a little fun here tonight as well and trying to be a little bit collegial. And it's really disheartening that I have to start my comments with the opening line that you've got it wrong from the beginning. We made an assumption a long time ago that the quality and standard of face-to-face instruction was the goal standard. I wanna ask my opponents, what other profession in the world allows you to get a bachelor's, master's and doctorate degree and tomorrow I can put you in a classroom as a professor hired by a university and you will not have had one hour of teaching your entire life. And now you're gonna go teach at a major university. So the standard of excellence for teaching learning in face-to-face never existed. If you go back to the 1990s, there's another feature that goes with this and that's when there was incredible, incredible resistance to distance teaching. And that is the idea of academic freedom. You did not dare tell a faculty member how to teach, what to teach, what technology to use. You wouldn't even walk into a faculty member's classroom without permission. Today it's changed. So that's the environment that you want me to sit here and defend online learning against. You've got to be serious in the words of that great English philosopher, John McEnroe, you can't be serious. Now, we've already talked about data. I'm not gonna go through all the data. Mark said you could look at 25 years of research. I can take you back 50 years and bring research into this and I'm happy to give you the references to do that. But let me address three comments that were made by the opposite teams. And I know they did it with good intentions. Let's start with Diana, okay? Do you want a surgeon operating on you who's been taught how to do surgery online? Nobody would make that argument. Nobody in their right mind would say I should learn how to do surgery online any more than you would say a nurse should learn how to be a nurse by watching it on TV. We never made that assertion. There are certain professions in which you must have that hands-on experience. Nobody makes that argument. Alexander referred to interaction in a regular classroom. You've got to be kidding me. I can do more interaction, more individualized instruction with my students online than I could ever do. And if you were to go back and look at the research on traditional classroom patterns of interaction, do you know what you will find? You will find good intentions, but those intentions are sabotaged because not everybody in a face-to-face classroom feels comfortable talking. I remember when I was an undergraduate, I had professors who would try to embarrass students to get them to talk. Take those same students, put them in an online environment and you can't shut them up. And so I can do that much better. Theoretical things like community of inquiry theory, the three presences, I can ensure that much better in an online environment. In the end, perhaps the most important key points is that in an online environment, I can ensure student autonomy and self-determined learning, much easier than I can do in a regular classroom. And here's the big question I have for the opposing team. Almost every on-class, on-campus class today is supported with probably at least 50% digital technology. So that means really out of 100% of teaching, 75% of it is being done with online technologies, but you want to argue face-to-face. Remember that was that one that doesn't have any standards of excellence and quality. Do you know why there are standards of quality and excellence today? Distance teachers will tell you around the world and I've talked to thousands. I am a better classroom teacher today because what I learned in distance teaching, that says it all right there. Case closed, closing arguments, please. Thank you. Well done. Perfect timing again. Absolutely brilliant. Well, we've certainly had, I'm just making sure now I'm a little bit worried about what screen I'm sharing now and am I sharing the presenter one or no? Excellent, thank you very much. Okay, so there we have had the debate. So I think some great points from both teams, a very interesting clash of styles. We now have, I mean, we have such things, I suppose like we have hybrid models, we have blended models, and now we have a male model now, Ulf, who is now going to, I mean, I saw this man, what an absolutely stunning looking man. I was so jealous, but with my follicles challenged. So I said like, what better way to sum it up and bring it all together? So Ulf, we're now going to hand over to you now. Thank you very much, Tom. That's very nice what you said, but I'm not really sure if I feel charmed or ashamed, but okay, let's keep it with that. I think that everything has been said, but of course not by everyone yet. That's what Karl Valentin said. And then the great French author, André Guide, the Nobel Prize winner said, everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening really from the both sides to each other, everything must be said again. So I will try to give that actually a go. What has been said here really? It was a good, a daring debate. Clear statements have been made, clear confrontations, a gap between both teams was becoming apparent, very, very good. Thank you very much, colleagues, really good. So online learning is just as good as face to face. That is the statement we're debating about. To tell you the truth, I have been Vice President of my university, the biggest university in the Southwest of Germany here. And I have sat in many, many faculty meetings and still I know we are here in the Eden community and we all believe in online. But I can tell you, if you go to university faculty meeting, there's no automatic enthusiasm for online in our universities. So exactly what we are doing here, debating the points pro and against is exactly what is happening in our universities. And I thank you very much for really bringing that to the point, colleagues. So what have you said? There was a counter and a pro team. The counter team said, it is a nice vision, the online is a nice vision, but we will not be able to change the model. We are not yet there, not yet there. The typical point was made, you cannot teach every subject. The even more typical point was made, do you want to be treated by a doctor who has online education or not? Can we guarantee equity and equal rights for disadvantaged students who have no access? Was another point of the counter arguments. A number of challenges is still unsolved, proctoring, assessments, et cetera, et cetera, exams is difficult online. So we are not yet ready. AI still is a disaster and online is often a real replic of the face-to-face trail of the face-to-face model. So that was the argument set of the counter team. The pro team on the other side said, there's a clear 50 year going back heritage and research on the no significant difference between both delivery models and modes. There's a good point also was made that traditional measures, our traditional understanding cannot be used to measure new learning. If we put people first and pedagogy first, online is better. It was clearly expressed. Everything that can be found in online, what can be found in traditional art classes, laboratories, there is no limit to that actually. We are expecting from distance often much more in terms of teaching quality than we do from traditional. Interaction is low in online, that is a myth was expressed. There is much more possible in online in terms of interaction than presential. So these was the set of arguments countering the counter team brought up by the pro team. So there was a clear cut gap between both teams here. I strongly believe both points cannot be really, really, really well compared. Online is not better or inferior is just a different way that was also expressed. But now, how would you decide this case? How would you decide this case? I was thinking a good thought would be to think if you would have to invest 1 million euros, where would you place your bet? Online learning is just as good as face to face. That was the statement, how would you decide? Thank you, back to Tom. Thank you very much, Ulf. Really appreciate that. I'm just getting so nervous now about how my screens actually look. We're just watching the time here. So just a quick Q&A for the team proposing online. There was a question here. How will the heritage of universities be maintained if it goes online? I mean, to my mind that question smacks off and not trying to be too blunt about it, but of trying to defend the undefendable. The online and the offline worlds do not exist in parallel. So you can't defend the tradition without embracing the contemporary. The two go hand in hand and that's part of our argument, just as good. You didn't say better, the argument was just as good. So there's nothing wrong in defending heritage. But at the same time, heritage and culture are not static things. They evolve and the online world is already having influence on digital culture. Okay. So at the traditional that you want to just respond, do you think that the traditional does maintain the heritage of the universities? Look, I've been very glib there and I've put in the chat, how the heritage and culture is being maintained by those universities now is as a background. You can see there with Alexandra, the background of Durham. That's the way many institutions and a lot of us will do that as well. It's not being factored in. If we're going to talk about that there, the holistic nature of education, then we need to talk about the holistic nature of education. We can't keep just trying to silo it down into just the purely learning experiences. We know that the informal learning experiences that happen outside the classroom are just as important as those that will happen within the classroom labs, et cetera. So I think we need to look at all of these things and stop trying to, trying for on the opposing team, trying to suggest that all they have done is to replicate provision. And we know that a lot of institutions want to come back to what they've been doing before and they will do that. It will actually make no significant difference to their strategy pre COVID. Tom, can I say something? Yes, please do. Regarding the heritage, I'm going to say something that's a little out of context for what we're talking about. I don't even think it's an issue about face to face versus distance. In fact, I don't think it ever was. Most of the faculty that I've worked with the last 30 years, they know that distance teaching can be done just as well as face to face instruction. The issue here is the destruction of the status quo. And that is the heritage of the university because faculty think, if this makes an inroad, what's next? Does promotion and tenure go next? And then does academic freedom get restricted? Do we take unions away? They see the whole house tumbling down. So it isn't just about the teaching methodologies. That heritage goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. And even parts of it that they're obsolete, they don't want to admit it. Because if they admit it, then we would be in a good position to say it needs to be changed. It needs to be updated. It needs to be nurtured for the 21st century. And that's not about even right now, the same faculty that Ulf just referred at his institution, I believe every one of those faculty know who are resisting know very well that technology can do just as well. But they're afraid that more is going to come down than just the teaching. I think it's a bigger cultural picture than we have time for to talk about here. Okay. That sounded suspiciously like an elevator pitch, but I will be, okay, let people. Can I just say something to this? Because I really believe that we are going off the track. We need to say, we need to say that we immediately from the beginning stated that we want to have a choice. This is the entire idea. We never said that we want to go back to what was pre-COVID and we never said that we only want to go back to chalk and the table and to teach like that. And we never said that we don't take into account pedagogy and technology. All of us three, we are computer scientists. I'm a computer scientist, Alexandra is the same. We believe in the power of the technology. If it used right and in the same time, if you have experience and support for that. And this is what we wanted to say, that moving online and doing only online teaching, it doesn't mean that is the traditional way of teaching. Open University and a lot of others consider their traditional model the online teaching. So remember what was the question in the house? Is it the traditional models of education? So that means the thing which you know to do the best. You change, you adapt, but you do the thing which you know the best. Okay, was that your elevator pitch? Because that sounded, I tell you now. I was my answer to that. Yeah, but that didn't answer me. That's a completely different point of view. So, okay, I'm really watching the time and I will be strict, so hopefully this is coming true, okay? Mark, you have been given 30 seconds and it will be 30 seconds, a quick elevator pitch before we do the menti.com speech or that vote. Are you going to stop sharing the screen first? Well, thank you, Tom. Can I start? Please do, sorry, yep. Great, well, thank you, Tom. You've heard all the pros and cons. What I can say is that our team stands for truth over lies, hope over fear, failure, sorry, the future over failure, access over restriction and opportunity over our opposition. And if we need to say anything more, just yesterday, Diana tweeted on a hashtag wisdom of the crowd, asking people to share their worst experience of online learning. And guess what? No one replied, end of story. Thank you. And Diana, are you, are you, are the more out who's going to final pitch? And no pressure, but Mark done that in 28.5 seconds. So... It's going to be my read and I will not answer to Mark's one. No, no, you have your elevator pitch. Already go, 30 seconds starting now. Mark had realized that direct messages work on Twitter as well. Anyway, we're asking at straws, no significant difference. What we've heard here is something that hasn't been mainstream. We know that it hasn't disrupted. The quality is not there. Otherwise it will be across and wanted by so many. So the universities and higher education don't have the resources to go online. All they have is for the lowest common denominator of service provision. And that's what online means, not for quality education. Thank you. Well done. Okay, two great quick elevator pitches there. We'll just go to the final, our final deep mentee and that's what we're going to go to. So I'll just bring up my screen here and if just to make sure that I'm not on the presenter view. So we'll do something. You are on slides view. Okay, well, pencil. Is that okay? Nope. No, it's not. You're still on, you have to change the display settings. Yep, that's good. Perfect. Thank you. Okay, so just go to mentee.com. So as I said, just on today's presentations whatever views you have or don't have beforehand, this is just about, it's just about having a bit of fun today and just that people engage with it. So I'll just leave it there for a little bit, little bit longer. So I've got to mentee.com, use the code 5812323. Good votes here at the moment for the traditional. Yeah. This is cheating Tom. You are encouraging the others to vote the opposite. Oh, no way. Yeah. Unfortunately that money is not resting in my account just Diana. Okay, so mentee.com 5812323. Okay, I'm going to give it another 20 seconds and then I'll close the vote. So mentee.com 5812323. I hope to 700 people I call voting. I did, I did actually say that, Jess. Well, some of those ballots can be counted for up to seven days, Tom. Tom needs to postmark it properly. Hey, at least we can argue you can't tamper with the online voting. Yeah. The other team can prevent people from going to the polls, which will probably happen tomorrow if you want to watch some good TV over on the other side of the Atlantic. Okay. Do we have a timeout? How long will we wait? No, I'll just stop that there. No, do we have the results? We need to say that it doesn't matter to all of us. It doesn't matter at all. It was the biggest one ever and I quite like how Mark was going after me and after Alexander and Marie, we're the girls' power. You need to- That was a good dialogue. Very good dialogue. Can you see that now? That's almost the door. That's almost the door. Tom, close the debate. Close the poll. Close the poll. Close the poll, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's cheating. That's cheating. Somebody's cheating. Let's leave it at that, yeah. I'm going to stop at 50-50 and that's it. 50-50, that's it. 50-50, that's my decision. 50-50, no more, no more after. Yeah, but it was 51-49 before. I got it, Tom. I got it. 50-50. Let's bring it up to the Supreme Court. I am the moderator. I am given the full executive powers. Okay, Mr. Moderator, do we know how many people have voted? Three. Oh, no, not really. Yeah, well, people wanted to go for blended, didn't they, so the 50-50 is a sign. Yeah, do you have the casting vote, Tom? Yeah. Oh, good guess, yeah. Also, how cute. That's an awesome decision. We all agree it's the wrong question and polarized like that. It's not going to find an answer. It is still a question that policymakers and institutional leaders naively ask. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Definitely. Yeah, no, look, I think it's, you know, the way the question was posed was certainly an interesting way of doing it there. But look, I just wanted to say, and before I hand back to Diana, I absolutely thoroughly enjoyed the session. It was absolutely brilliant. Everybody really entered into it into the spirit which was intended. I'm delighted to say that honor was served and we ended up with a 50-50 vote. And I think, look, I think it's really important and these are difficult times and I think it's been brilliant that we can all come together, as I saw people from Oman, Sri Lanka, Romania, you know, so we people all around there like that. So I definitely think this has been a wonderful, wonderful thing. Diana, I'll just hand back to you but just to say, thanks for the invite. Thank you very much. Thank you everybody and me and Mark, we planned this together with the support of the Eden presidency, Sandra and the secretariat. Thank you Eden for this. It was a big fun. And just taking into consideration that as Mark said, what we mentioned and what we said here is exactly what a lot of policymakers and professors in the meetings and students are asking nowadays. And it asks in the Eden community to find or to try to find the best answer possible and to support for the future of education and the change to happen. All the best to everyone. Yep, good job everyone. Great work. Thanks very much. Thanks very much guys. Thanks Diana. It was fun. Yeah. It was a mess for the most. I would have a disclaimer against any use of this being used against us at any future point. That was the time to stop the recording. My job is to promote online education and blended learning mode. So it was difficult. You had an impossible task. I had the most impossible task now. Yes, it really was. It was very difficult. Coming to these things are actually already doing online learning. Yeah, it is actually not a bad result because the ones that wouldn't they wouldn't be here in the first place. Yeah. Oh well. Thank you. Thank you Diana. It's 7 a.m. in the morning. Is it not, Marey? Yeah, open 7 for tomorrow or 6. Oh, all right. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye everyone.