 Hello everyone. Welcome to one more session of Eden Webinar's Education in Time of Pandemic, or called eLearning Online Together. Today we have our final webinar, final session before the summer. This is our eleventh webinar and it's titled, Developing 21st Century Skills for Teaching Online Opportunities and Challenges. And I'm very happy that today with me, I have two professors who are going to talk about digital skills. With me today is Associate Professor Palita Edirinsingua and Professor Ulf Daniel Ellers. And at the beginning I will let them introduce themselves briefly and then we will start with presentations. So please Palita, please can you introduce yourself shortly. Thank you very much Sandra. My name is Palita Edirinsingua. I work at the University of Leicester in the School of Education. So I work on distance education, eLearning and international education. I'm really happy to be here and especially to talk to you and talk to you about 20% of the skills today. Thank you. Ulf please, can you say something about yourself? Hello, yes. Great to be here with you all and to speak out into the world of learning and to share a few thoughts. My name is Ulf Ellers. Thank you Sandra for introducing me. I'm very happy to be here with my colleague Palita. I'm working in Germany in a university in the south, the biggest university in the south of Germany. I have been there the Vice President of Academic Affairs and tried to turn the ship a bit into the online learning and eLearning direction. I have founded a couple of companies and since three years are heading a research group on next education. That's how we call ourselves and for the past three or four years actually have chaired a research project on future skills, which I will talk about and report about from today. Thank you Ulf and just to briefly introduce myself, my name is Sandra Kucina. I'm Eden President and I work at the University Computing Center University of Zagreb and I wish to say hello to all my colleagues here today as a participant. And now, well, we will start with presentations, but just before, please, you can ask your question here in Q&A. Not in the chat, but please use Q&A for the questions and we will try during the session to answer all your questions. But now for the start, let's have the presentation which will be introduction, representation into our session, so that you get some ideas and some overviews on digital skills and such as such, but also as the digital skills which have been acquainted and developed during this time of pandemic and working online. So, Palita, I'm giving floor to you for your presentation. Let's hear your point of view on these digital skills through teaching online. Thank you very much, Sandra. So we are talking about today, developing 21st century skills through how we might use teaching and learning methods, especially online methods. And also, in this part of the presentation, I'll talk a little bit about opportunities and challenges as well. So these are the three questions I think that were on the Eden Webinar site in terms of our main focus. Here, what I will try to do is I'll try to bring some examples from our international teachers in terms of how they have been trying to use current situation, kind of online look down learning situation, how they try to do, try to encourage their students to develop 21st century skills. I think it's quite important in a way to think about what is happening now, whether it is homeschooling, distance learning, online learning, or is it something else, because all of the other things have a rich tradition of literature, but I think what is happening now is a little bit different. It's not really home learning because homeschooling because homeschooling in homeschooling situations, children can go to things like museums and meet their friends and so on. So I think it is really, really need to think about what's happening these days and how we can really conceptualize the learning that's going on in the current situation. There are some challenges in terms of teaching and learning happening in these days. These are some of the reports I have used to look at more recent reports. A report came from Institute of Physical Studies say that better of children are studying better or more than poorer students. And also a report from a certain trust in the UK say that there is a widening and deepening inequality happening as well. So I think we need to really think about the, while we think about the potential of technologies, we also need to think about the challenges as well. So I'll look at somewhat a critical look at critical view of the idea of 21st century skills. So this is from a paper published in 2015 where the author somebody called Greenlow was looking at the idea itself, the 21st century skills, the notion of what we mean by 21st century skills. So he's got a number of critiques of this particular idea. So it is coming from big business and quite connected to technology and so on. So I think it's really important for us to think about, if you want to bring our teachers together with us, we need to think about the idea of 21st century skills itself in a more critical way. Whether when we think about in a particular way 21st century skills, whether it will, it is really leaving some of the skills like social emotional skills, children's moral development and cultural identity formation, whether we are leaving those kind of things behind. This is a keynote address by Richard Nos, who was at Institute of Education in London, where he was looking at the idea of 21st century skills and 21st century learning. So I think there is a rich tradition of literature that we can use to look at the idea of 21st century skills and to synthesize. So looking at the different kind of way people look at the 21st century skills, one of the critiques of the idea is that it is having a century specific level is misleading. So what we might call in about 20, 30, 40 years ago, whether we will still call this 21st century skills is something we need to think about. And also the second bullet point on the right hand side of your screen, this is from a report by two authors in 2009. What this is, there is a focus on work related competencies. This is an OECD report at the expense of more holistic development. And also there is overlap or rather a compilation between the 21st century skills and digital competencies as well. While there is an inevitable link between the two, I think we really need to think about what we mean by 21st century skills. So on the other side of the screen, I have tried to synthesize what we mean by 21st century skills. It's really looking at the process of children's learning, students learning rather than actually the product. And also things like how to think critically analytically and trying to take control of their learning. I think that sort of things, although these kind of things can be done quite well using technologies as well. So it is about giving young people the chances and opportunities to develop creative capabilities and in a rapidly changing world of where there are a lot of uncertainties and challenges. And these uncertainties and challenges are, if anything are increasing as well as we know what's happening these days, how we live and work. In terms of moving on to looking at the ways in which we might be able to encourage teachers to help their children to students to learn 21st century skills. One of the ways when I was looking at the our international teachers on our programs, quite often they come up with the idea of project based learning, which is grounded in educational thinkers like Dewey and quite early educational thinkers as well. So it's an innovative approach. I'm sure a lot of the participants listening to or watching this webinar are quite familiar with how teachers give control to students to guide their or navigate their own learning process, regardless of the age and other conditions. Helping students to develop learning, learning to be self reliant through self organization, a lot of social learning happening as well. So this article I have cited in publishing to 2010 is really a good source to look at. There are other literature as well. So I have listed them at the end of the presentation. So from this point onwards, I'm going to talk about the experience of two international teachers who shared their experience with me last few weeks. They are course participants on our international education program. And so this is very much the experience of using approaches and using obviously technology these days and then the kind of evidence of developing helping students to develop their 21st century learning skills. So and from the very much teach initiated activities week one, starting with Google classroom and trying to connect to previous weeks work and from week two onwards, this particular teacher really started to use project based learning activities. So when I ask the teacher, why did you think it was important to use project based learning what she said was, because that is the way I teach, and that's my philosophy of teaching. And I don't like teaching like I have all this information and I can read this to you and you can learn this. It is not the way I teach. So I think one of the important points is the teacher's philosophy of what teaching and what learning is is quite important in this context. So what she said was, she's getting the students to identify a topic in this case the topic is survival, and then students are building a small shelter building a water cooling system. They all do their in their gardens, but I think quite important thing is how they use online methods to collaborate online, for example, present their findings via PowerPoint presentations, and also having lots of online activities happening throughout the day. So these are some of the examples that she shared with me. So children do these activities online together with other children. These are primary school children as well. So it's quite amazing and if you look at it. So there is another one. So the second example I'm going to share with you is from an international teacher in Switzerland. He is somebody who took led the school to move on to online teaching over a one week period when they knew the school is going to be going to close and they have started their schools recently. So he said he made it abundantly clear that this is our opportunity to really go and develop those skills that we wish everyone had. So in the in the groups he was working with he tried to convey the idea that try not to do the things you normally do in classroom in face to face, you can do things really differently. And so this was something they took a week to prepare and all of that work happened during the after the children went home, the remaining time they worked with groups. So the experience was that they realized that within a week or two students began to work online and share their work using videos and then the teachers eventually within a very short period of time were able to take a step back. And then the like when we were these days we were we use Microsoft Teams and they use Microsoft Teams as well. And so students are working together they're doing their own work but they're talking to their friends as well. And so this is very much the way the teachers have developed their activities in the classroom. So here in this slide he he's talking about that the kind of messages he was trying to get across to his colleagues in the school in terms of how we can really change the way we teach and this is really a good opportunity and so on. And then when I asked him about do you have any examples and he talked to me quite a lot of the kind of examples. And so I'm going to one of the things he was saying was that giving the control to students in order to give them the opportunity to organize their work so all they did what they gave them a plan for the week. And some students were doing one project or one subject a day Monday something to use day Wednesday and so on and the others had spent one week one hour a day and so on. So they all they need to do is to they would take a step back and try to monitor what's going on. So in this example this is one of his students for one of the assignments was to create a news report. So she the student primary school child got her parents involved as well and the parents acted as the anchors. And so they started the anchoring the little broadcast program. Welcome to today broadcast and then they said let's go to our reporter in the field. And the child went around the house and started talking about the kind of things that are contributing to the global warming warming. Things like palm oil products in the fridge and the two cars outside and the electricity and and so on. So in a way he was very enthusiastic about talking about this particular example and he said there are a lot more examples like these. So the and also one of the things he said was this kind of things would not be even if they are they are general philosophy of teaching is similar to this. It is not it won't be possible to do this in the classroom because in this case students are learning the skills learning the content at home so trying to use the home environment to the full extent. So there are there are a lot more he shared with me in terms of the kind of philosophy in terms of developing students 21st century skills. So one of the things that came quite frequently was the idea of communicate talking about things getting children to share their ideas and then using videos video conferencing methods. These days happening and now they have started their school back in the normal way. But then the now they are thinking about how they can capture the all the good things happened these days in terms of developing 21st century skills. And so and so these are two examples there are quite a lot of other examples as well where everything went on very well. But there were quite a lot of the time again it all depends on the teachers philosophy of what learning is what teaching is. And so some of the examples are where the teachers will take a quite a safe route if you like where trying to teach content and getting them to students to listen and do some tests. And then trying to see what how best to manage the situation. But there are other teachers like the two examples I shared with you where they have taken a little bit more innovative approach and and they have a very good idea of what 21st century skills is and as well. But they were not the teachers who are interested in technology in general they were not really interested in technology as well let's say too much. On our program we have a technology pathway they were not the ones who were specializing on the pathway they were specializing in more like innovative approaches to teaching and learning. So I think that is quite important. And so in a way the final remarks and I think it is important to develop a critical view of what we mean by 21st century skills and identify a good pedagogical method. And I think as teachers and through teacher training I think a lot of us have that kind of fun idea. And then creating a learning environment where students can develop their future identities as moral agents responsible citizens and lifelong learning. And this is a long quote I have taken from Greenlaw's paper and what this is let's take let's let us more cautiously and then try to capitalize on good pedagogy that we we know we've been developing. And so I think that is the end of my part of the presentation so I just want to show you the last side. So these are the two teachers who contributed to the this talk this presentation and I've got a few useful videos as well and the list of references. So thank you very much. I think I have. Yeah, I hope I haven't run out of time. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. We have a question here for you from Dr. That's education means just transfer of information from one source to another by any method. What about other aspects of education? Is online education work enough? What would you say? Right. Thank you very much. So yeah, that's really an important question. And I'm sure some of those can be tackled by as well my colleague. So yeah, I think education is not really transferring information from one source to another one person to another. I think we know it's really requires some kind of a synthesis, some kind of a developing understanding by the person who is involved other people, students involved in learning as well. There are certain things perhaps important in the way if you like a transferring. So I think sometimes we need to know facts, because facts, I think learning facts through some sort of understanding. I think if you go to a hospital, if the doctor has to search Google all the time, I think that that can be a little bit worrying. I think they need to know certain things, but not know certainly education is not transferring facts or information from one source to another. It's something that happens through a process of developing an understanding, a personalized understanding. Yes, online methods are useful. Especially these days, there isn't any other way as well. I mean, in the UK, we are dealing with this situation at the moment, teachers are talking about how we can do it. So we are in a situation where actually we can test it, whether how to what extent we can do it better. But we can also use online methods to transfer information. I think I know unfortunately a lot of the time that is what's happening as well. But there are good examples as well. Thank you. Thank you, Parleeta. We should always look for the good examples. Yeah, that's important. Well, please look at some questions in the question and answer box while we move to Ulf. Ulf, please, this is time for your presentation. You have been doing very thorough research for the last three years regarding the digital skills, future digital skills. So, please, can you share your view on 21st century skills through online teaching? I need to unmute my microphone now. Everything should work. So thank you very much. That has been a really fascinating talk. I have been vice president of my university for six years. And I was always fascinated when I went to the teachers and to the professors in our seminar rooms and lecture halls and saw how creative they actually were and how actually the best method to really innovate education from the bottom up is to go there and to learn from them and to in a way widen and spread and disseminate what they do and not only to think about top-down new innovation programs. So that was really fascinating. Thank you very much, Parleeta. I'm currently spending time here and that's also a result of the COVID-19 online, new online cultures. I'm currently spending time on the beach. This is a picture from last night in a German island. Many people don't know that we have islands in Germany. We have islands in Germany. They're quite nice actually. When I'm going to work, I'm working here in Baden-Württemberg, which is a small state, one of the 16 states in Germany. You can see here in red. And I'm working for a university called Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University and we are the only state university in Germany and have 13 locations based throughout the whole state and are quite fairly big actually. When COVID-19 hit, we had to move suddenly from one day to the other. 35,000 students online that was really, really a challenge and also 780 professors, colleagues online. More than 6,000 part-time lecturers in our nine main campuses basically and suddenly everything had to function. We did that fairly well, I found, but I have to say that unlike the discussions we have often around the tables when we are planning online learning, what we saw here in our live big experiment of the COVID-19 crisis, technology remains a hygienic factor. It is not unimportant, but even if we really invest in it, it's not going to lead to a greater education satisfaction. This I think is a really, really important first learning of the COVID-19 crisis. My main message of my talk today is that while we are talking about COVID-19 in many, many countries and institutions about a challenge of space, it might be a different challenge. We are using vocabulary to describe our current challenge like digital process, digital transformation, remote learning, distant learning, online learning, virtual learning. So the whole metaphoric world of terms we are using actually is describing that we are facing a challenge of space. We cannot meet physically anymore, we have to meet online and all of our challenges are coming from this situation. However, I believe rather than that's actually my main message that COVID-19 is actually showing us that we are facing a clash of teaching and learning cultures. We are currently on a large scale trying to put face-to-face traditions into online learning, face-to-face traditions into online learning. We have what I call the synchronous reflex. We are suddenly trying to give live lectures to all of our students and colleagues from all over the world. I know that sometimes this is the only thing we really can do. And when I say to you that we have 780 colleagues in my university, of course going online from one day to the other, COVID-19 is not making high education professionals online learning and teaching professionals. But that's actually the main message that I think the clash of teaching and learning cultures is becoming very, very apparent now or when we are trying to put face-to-face traditions into the online world. So the big question really, and that's where I come to the future skills and I'm very happy about what Palleta talked about, is how can we actually use this crisis, this moment of crisis. Crisis is always a moment when we take distance to a process, to an intervention, to a system. That's the crisis. It doesn't work anymore like we wanted it to be, like it usually used to work. So this moment of crisis can also show us and can give us an opportunity to look ahead and to clearly paint the picture of where do we want to go in the future. Should it be only a digital turn which we are looking at or is also something larger on stake? Of course, COVID is just one example we are having. We are facing other challenge scenarios with the climate crisis, migration, globalization, digitalization and so on. There are many, many emergent scenarios ahead of us which are actually telling us, telling us that we need to take a larger view, a larger angle and that we really need to try to crystallize what is actually the innovation push we need to look at. In the last years, we have done a lot of research about future skills for future graduates and you can go to our website. We have created a portal just started in March now. You can go to the website and you can have a look at all our findings there. We have published our main publication just recently in German Open Access and in English Open Access. So feel free and go there and download your personal copy. The future skills work which we did is based around a set of research studies. These were analysis, scientific screenings of organizational human resource development concepts, also in-depth interviews with responsible leaders in organizations and also Delphi studies with an international Delphi panel, which we conducted in 2017, 18 and 19. We were always asking, what do you think are the future skills which your organization's members or which citizens of today's societies need to meet tomorrow's challenges? The second question we were asking was, so what in your view should universities, should higher education institutions do in order to prepare graduates for that? And what we found there is that there are actually three big spheres of change. The first big sphere is that the nature and dealing with knowledge will drastically, dramatically change in the future. There will be much more about designing and much more about critical reflecting than learning by heart and reproducing knowledge. So this attitude and this aspect of creative development of the new, of the new knowledge will be very, very important. The second sphere of change is that education will turn more and more into a flexibilized, personalized, individualized development pathway. And the success of our institutions will depend on this issue how well they will be able, our higher education institutions, to support individuals on this pathway to lead their personal learning revolution and to be a supporter, a facilitator, a curator of opportunities for this personal learning revolution. And the third sphere of change will happen in organizations actually, in organizations on the labor market of the world of work. These will become organizations which turn from being hierarchical organizations into completely networked organizations. And graduates of the future, in order to be able to shape those organizations, will have to be reflective social artists. So these are the three sphere of change which we discovered and put into our sphere model. We developed also a number of what we call future skill profiles and you can download them as well from the website which you see here. We have created little fish of future skill, so to speak, profiles, portfolios. Feel free to go there. There's also a video series which you can have a look and download our publications. Our research is incorporating an analysis of all up-to-date recent future skill, 21st century skill, key competence frameworks of the last 15 years. And we have made a synopsis and an inventory of all different skills which are in these 48, we were selecting 48 different future skill approaches and we were creating an inventory and analyzing this inventory according to certain criteria. Our research is resulting into 17 individual distinct future skill profiles which you can see here. So these are things which you might be familiar with. Each of these profiles is containing several reference competencies. That's why they sometimes carry different or funny names as you can say. Design thinking competence, for example, is rather a title than a competence and in this category, in this profile, you would find, again, different reference competencies. So you have 17 different skill profiles and each containing reference competencies. What you can find here is some of them might be familiar to you. Of course, learning literacy is an important one which we know also digital literacies are important here. By the way, something which many, many future skill approaches are focusing on digital literacies. But the future skills which we define as the ability to act successfully in an unknown future in an unknown complex and highly emergent future. That's our definition of future skills to be able to act successfully in an unknown and highly emergent future where you cannot predict the future, the next step from knowing the past. So you really need competencies which are focusing also on the personal development like self-determination, self-efficacy, self-competence. What we also did is we found a structure within these 17 future skills. Many of them are focusing on individual development related skills. Some of them are focusing on the tasks, on the objects of doing, of action, the work itself, individual object related skills. And some of them are focusing on the ability of individuals to relate to their social environment, their organizations in which they work. If you distribute this and see the whole picture, you can find it in our publications also. You see how you can, in a way, find a structure. We are currently developing a skill map and a skill finder. And here we take a step into asking the question, how can we actually learn those skills? How can we actually put those skills into online learning? What are pedagogical scenarios? Learning designs, which are suitable. And our imagination is that we would like to collect good practices for each of these skill profiles from universities. And we would like to ask you to support us there and to send to us actually good examples from your own practice. We would like to push this back into the global community of online learning professionals so that more and more online learning can be oriented towards this kind of thinking and this kind of future skills. Future skill and acting in a highly emergent context is, of course, not the single ability of an individual with regards to their personal development or to their ability to relate to their social work. But it's really like a triple helix structure in which everything comes together to find a solution for tomorrow's world. In higher education, we often have a reflex when we face new things. We put on top of what we have. We did that with key competence centers in the 90s and also with other new demands which we had. And our view on this is really that we need in the future a more integrated view. We do not need future skill courses, not 21st century skill courses. We really need to integrate these kind of values, these kind of skills in trainings into the curricula which we have. And the good news is really that in terms of educational approaches, and Palita has talked a lot about this, we have everything which we need really since many, many years. We just need to put it into practice. One very, very good approach is, of course, this one which comes from Harvard professor Michael Reissnick, Project Passion Play in Pierce, the four big P for learning designs. Another one is, if you see here, Bloom's taxonomy on the left side, moving from knowledge to creation, and you see here future learning which really aims at creation, analysis, evaluation of scenarios, of knowledge, of developing new knowledge, is taking approaches to learning and teaching which have to do with competence and professional development, with taking perspectives, with teachers who are dialogic learning experts and coaches, active, self-organized, cooperative learning projects like Palita also talked about problem-based learning, for example. So these are things which are available and we need to put a new focus on that. The new thing is really that there is a completely new relevance. COVID-19 is showing us this completely new relevance. We need to overcome the synchronous reflex. Nobody wants to watch three hours of lecture videos today anymore. We need to really put into place the entire power and the entire horizon of online opportunities to connect learners with each other, with resources, with teachers, with experts, to really guide them into this fascinating world of online learning. We have started just recently to ask our students, our students and asking them really, how can we learn of what happens today? You are all learning home. You are all in shutdown. You are all in this crisis, this catalistic moment now. Things are stopping. Take this perspective, have a look, and tell us about what is your expectation and your view on what we should keep for the future after COVID and what we should improve. So this is a new journey we have just started in form of podcast series and we are really happy to share this I think at the next even conference where we workshop our presentation on this issue. I'm coming to the end and I think that it's really the most important issue that we really start a global coalition to move from this one-dimensional idea and concept of online learning as a transmission tool of knowledge into the next step, into the next sphere where online learning is a full-fledged individualized, personalized pathway where educators are curators of opportunities of learning. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Thank you. Very good presentation. I have a question from you here. We have a question. Why are we always talking about only about skills, not about about complete competence? Can you define? That's a big discussion and I think we have written an entire chapter in that in our recent book publication and the issue is rather than focusing on the terminology is really the definition. We define competencies as the ability to act in a complex unknown future situation and we define future skills as a specific set of those competencies. Future skills are a selection of competencies which you need specifically in emergent situations in the future. When you cannot predict the future from knowing the past in this situation these are the problem areas for which we try to find skills. One more for you. Have you found that some of the 17 skills competencies that you identified were more relevant in some disciplines than others or are they relevant across all disciplines in equal measure? No, we are not yet there actually. This is a question we are now trying to unfold an entire research area and this is also a call for networking with us actually, for alliance with that because we see that all over the world not only in Australia and Canada national future skill initiatives are evolving and emerging at a regional level we can see that institutions are starting to embrace this idea and give themselves future skill strategies and we really want to work out good practice with this skill finder which we are going to put on our website I hope to really show an entrance or a portal to our research where you in your discipline then also can go and find examples. We have no discussion as such we have a number of questions in the questions and answer and you can both look at them some of them are just for you because they are related to your book and things like that but now let me ask Palita, we have one comment from Kiriakos Lingas he said, I was struck when my son 11 during online school in a quarantine stated the following, online schools is like TV switch off right, but you cannot just walk out of the classroom right, so this is about the school as an institution, it's role socialization in general so what would be your comment about this how the students are getting this feedback about online education please start. Thank you very much for the question I think that really brings a really fundamental issue of the sort of online education we are talking about I think we have articulated it very well when he was talking about the challenge of moving face to face teaching to a large group of students and engaging a large number of professors as well I think it depends on the kind of teaching and learning that the school is providing for children, I think in this case it's about education in schools if the teaching is done through the teacher talking about presenting information through video or audio and then you can switch on and off but I think the two examples I shared with you, there weren't any in the case of the Uruguay there were certain elements of teaching going on but the student had a timetable running throughout the whole week and they had work to do depending on how much time they can spend so there wasn't really any kind of switching on and off in those locations the parents had to be involved as well which is one of the challenges I think when I was talking to the participant from Uruguay while I was talking to her daughter came and brought her an iPad so then she said excuse me I had to do something then she said she had to help her daughter to login to use the iPad so she is actually teaching and the child was learning as well so there aren't challenges in terms of how much parents had to get involved so I think it depends on the nature how the teachers in the school organize the teaching and learning sessions so sometimes it can be done maybe in the way you can switch on and off but in other cases it is very much involved, immersed throughout the whole week I think okay thank you and we have one more question maybe you can Palita also start and then Ulf can continue on this one Maria Kutajar asked how does digital intelligence configure in all these emotional cognitive and social digital intelligence I think this kind of requires a little bit of unpacking I think Ulf can help in this regard I think the way I think you can think about this in different ways one is digital literacy skills digital competencies and so on I think there is a sense in which emotional skills social emotional skills are left behind but I think we need to think about those things as well especially in these days when I was talking to teachers we talk to teachers about how they use how they do this how they use the online methods for teaching but some of them are talking that you need to talk to us about our own emotional status as well in these days because you go to be kind of working from home depending on the space that you have so I think both are important considerations so maybe I can point the question towards Ulf, is that okay? What's your point on digital intelligence? Digital intelligence is an interesting term I've never heard up to the last 60 seconds but I can reflect on it in an instant being very digital intelligent probably also as reflection in digital virtual environments I would say that for a long time it resonates with me we have really taken digital competency digital literacy to narrow actually and I think that the term digital intelligence is probably a term which relates to the fact that digital activities actions are based on a very very broad understanding like the intelligence of a person a human being in action in their normal world and that means we need to think when we think about digital intelligence about many many dimensions and I like this notion which I now reflect on I hope that's what the person was meaning actually that we need to unpack this term in that way that it's a very very broad concept actually which is not just creating not just encompassing the consumption but also production, organization, critical action and so on Okay let's move to another question we have a question from Mahab Ali he says in the 21st century where there is information explosion and use of OER education will be learner centered rather than teacher centered it is important to look at the 21st century skills from the learner centered education rather than teacher centered so how much teachers should know and prepare their lectures for learner centered education and how much students and children prepare for learning so Polita maybe you can start Thank you very much that's again a very interesting question so I think in this case I think in any case it is important for teachers to have a certain kind of philosophy in terms of what learning is what teaching is and what learning is so I think it all depends on the teacher's understanding of that kind of what sort of view they have so I think the teachers regardless of whether the number of resources that are available I think it will be quite often difficult for students to do their own learning activities on their own I think and maybe it might be possible if they learn is quite an intelligent or somebody who has well developed learning skills so a lot of the I think research show that a lot of people who are engaging in open educational resources and so on they are quite well educated people although they are not supposed to be for a particular group of people so I think teacher has a role I think in terms of helping guiding students to choose and develop some kind of a learning pathway but I think after while their role should be much more like a guide on the side or somebody who is helping and then providing a more guiding role rather than directing too much I think the example I have shown from the Switzerland teacher from Switzerland I think there is a lot of what he said was we should not be in front of the students all the time teaching and asking them to listen to you and also the same with the teacher from Uruguay as well her philosophy was not one of I know a lot of information and you go to listen to me and then you're going to learn I think moving away from that kind of philosophy but while while keeping an eye I think giving some sort of a guidance and also that they we will have a role in terms of assisting as well creating the right kind of learning environment okay thank you Palita both we are comment versus teacher centered learner centered education yeah I think that we need a new dialogue between these two groups we really need a new dialogue because we I'm chairing a group of European ministries on the future of teaching and learning and I can see there actually that we are focusing our discussions around what should be our future role you know where are we are we there are we not there are we in the picture are we not in the picture do we lose our positions do we not lose them or not I think that teaching and learning requires both the learner and the teacher of course but constantly in changing environments and roles and identities in our future skill work we have defined four future university scenarios one is for example a scenario which is called the life learning scenario which says that in the next 15 years universities will move from an upfront preparation model to a lifelong guidance by the side model that means the bachelor the master will just be an initial phase and then afterwards education academic educations increasing not decreasing over the last year so that means that educators need to be creators of opportunities along the episodical biographical life learning another scenario is a scenario which we call multi institutional study pathways so a student in university A graduating from university but throughout their studies is taking a course through different campus different institutions different courses different study opportunities and again the idea of the autonomous learner is much more in focus there and teachers are very important but they have a completely different role than being the definitive place and position in which it is defined when I have to learn what in which quantity intensity and measure and how am I assessed against that so this is I think an important conversation we need to lead but not in a polarized way that we say teachers need to keep their role and learners need to be more important but it's really a new dialogue a new allowance which we need yeah thank you Ulf I have a question from you from your former student he says I was your student back in 2010 at UMUK MD in US so his question is one of your slides mentioned that one of 21st is more alignment with employability how do you see that happen in an online teaching environment well it's always a danger or an opportunity to have a past student there this is the risk it seems to be seems to be constructive well I think that that's one challenge we are facing actually in right in our in my university we are working we have four strategic goals for online digital transformation and one is really how can we use the question how can we use to bridge the academic learning and study location and the world of work and I think this is something where we are still even in today's world are not having enough experience made enough experience on we are still having a bit of touchy relation between these academics and this world of work and the world of work actors are not really having a very good opinion often or always of the academics and don't think they really understand what they are talking about and the other way around and I think we need to bridge this and the presupposition is really that we create a culture of understanding and dialogue also here actually we are able then to use technology to really understand that learning is nothing which is encapsulated into the university into the academic environment it is really something where from the learner's perspective which happens all the time and we as companies as employers and as academic institutions need to collaborate to support this learning in an ideal this way okay thank you I have questions for you from YouTube as well so you know how Chen is asking if students feel lonely in their studies how to solve this problem how to motivate them yeah thank you that's also quite an interesting or very important question I think especially these days a lot of us are working from home as well and that is quite a common occurrence because they would not have chance to talk to their friends they would normally do and when I ask I'm doing some research with colleagues from China as well when I was asking students what do you expect the first thing and when you go back to school and the thing the first thing comes is meet friends and that's the only thing they were saying that they are missing from schools and apart from teachers as well so I think in the examples I mentioned they were doing certain things and it was not perfect and it's not possible to create the kind of face-to-face environment that people are usually used to, specifically for children without friends that's a very difficult thing for them to handle in the examples I showed the teachers have created learning activities where they can talk to each other so this is all again using online methods and the learning activities involved working with small groups and the Switzerland teacher what he said was the students were chatting to each other all the time while they are doing home their school work and also the teachers would have a tutorial group class with everybody almost every day and I mean this kind of things create a lot more work for the teacher and what he said was he's working until about 7 o'clock 8 o'clock in the evening some days so a lot more work for the teacher but there are that kind of opportunities they create for students do not at least reduce the amount of loneliness they feel but that is a really important issue okay we are coming to the end of our session I have a final question for both of you meaning in your presentation you said we have to make the shift to move to a different sphere of learning and thinking about how to produce teaching and learning how to engage students more actively how to change from this you know teacher centered where we transfer the knowledge where we working in the classroom so actually COVID brought us the challenge we moved through the night to online but things were going a little bit to back to normal some kind of normal teachers and students are not so eager to stay fully online they would like a little bit to go back and not to use everything that was done before so actually to shift to make this shift what should be done what steps do we need to make in order to make this shift so that teachers students get skills that will enable them to easily move to this shift to make it so that it will be more naturally for them I have made a big question from it but I think you understand what is my point so maybe you can start I try to make a short answer which will not answer the question but dimension it into its parts I think that we can look at this question what has to be done from a policy let's say a macro view from an institutional a meso view and from a learning and teaching view from a learning design view from a micro view and just colleagues just look at it from the macro view five years ago linked in which has 550 million users now announced that they will be the new university because they have skill profiles of everybody they have a skill path explorer built right now and they know what our job profiles demands so they can give you everything in the same week the CEOs of IBM Google and HP were announcing that bachelor certificates from universities are having no prognostic power in their recruiting processes anymore but that they will need proof of what people can really do and have experienced what linked in announced a week before they can do so if we want not to be marginalized in the future we need to shift we need to take this seriously actually and that's the environment in which we are and COVID and climate crisis and migration challenges and whatever kind of things are coming up this will serve as an accelerator of these kind of developments and this will hit us on a meso level of the institutional level and will ask the question what are your strategies to support inter institutional study pathways to support personalization life-long learning scenarios like I said it before in a better way than you did that before and that's the break up of the university how we know it and that's the turn towards more digital integration which because other than that we will not be able to really facilitate it and then all of us we are the community we are the academics we are the university and we are the society and we need to take care that this is not happening in a way which we would ethically not appreciate and that's why it's so important that we all form an alliance and work on this issue very very intensely thank you really good palita what would be your reply to this final question yeah I think thank you very much yeah thank you just building on connecting with what was three marks yes I think there ought to be a shift how we can make it more natural but I think as human beings we all have seen how we change our behavior last few months I think I don't know whether you are following anyone not you are following news in the UK and how government was how government in the UK was to take some of the measures and they were really worried whether people will change follow the advice apart from few people who didn't follow the advice which you all know as well anyway so so I think we have time I think in our university as well we are at the moment planning for the teaching and learning how it is going to and then from January and next year and so on so we can think about what it is what it is that we won't offer to our students and what it is that students are expecting from us from a university and how we can change the mode of operation from completely face to face into some sort of gradually to online blended and seamless between the two and trying to identify what is the face to face element can offer and how we can do it and it is happening in the society as well the restaurants pubs, bars and shops and everywhere they are really thinking about how they provide the service in a different way I think educational institutions can do as well Thank you Paleta Thank you for being my guest today for joining me for the last session before the summer I'm very happy that we have done this series of webinars they have brought really huge number of participants from all over the world we plan to move again with these webinars in autumn but before that we have the annual annual conference it will be online from 22nd to 23rd 4th so I ask all of you to join and to follow similar different topics on present issues also I would like to invite you to follow either an app webinar which will be on Wednesday the topic is of inclusion and let me say I just have it here the accessibility inclusion in time of pandemic so thank you my colleagues thank you Lisa and Diana for being in back and helping us and I wish to see you all at Eden conference in Timshuara online Timshuara from 22nd to 24th see you bye