 Hello, and I'm going to give you all a very, very warm welcome to this session on behalf of the conference team. And I'm very pleased to introduce Giovanna, who's coming to us from a very sunny and warm Italy for this session. And she's going to be talking through her work around digitally enhanced collaborative international spaces for content and language learning in the post-academic university and importantly all about openness and care for this new normal that we're all about to enter. So very warm welcome and round of applause for Giovanna. Okay, thank you. So to design effective online learning for post-pandemic university, it's important to analyze first the pathological practices experimented during emergency remote teaching. This is the reason why in this presentation I'm going to present first the findings of a study carried out to analyze the effectiveness of the digital practices implemented during emergency remote teaching in a foreign language teacher training course. In this respect, when the course moved online due to the pandemic, the instructor decided to modify some of its components to foster engagement and active learning within a community of inquiry framework. From a pedagogy of care perspective, the instructor scaffolded students' social presence online through icebreaker activities, collaborative activities, and formative assessment. During synchronous online classes, activities were organized in small chunks in line with digital pedagogy. Student-centered learning was implemented through digitally enhanced activities through an open pedagogy perspective. In this respect, various free tools were used such as padlets, head-to-head play, bulky cahoots, tag-heads, and t-meter and Google slides. Moving the course online also entailed the instructor's switching the focus from content to skills development in keeping with online pedagogical practices. At the end of the course, when asked to identify the main opportunities of emergency remote learning, students selected to get more feedback from the instructor to carry out more interactive activities, the feeling of belonging to a learning community, more interaction and the feeling of having a closer bond with the instructor, more active learning, the chance to ask more questions, and the possibility of engaging more fully in the construction of knowledge. It was in particular being engaged in collaborative learning which made students feel more motivated to engage more deeply in active learning while at the same time feeling more and more as members of a cohesive and cared for group. Collaborative and active learning, along with flexibility and a pedagogy of care, have thus emerged as key dimensions of effective online learning in a post-pandemic context. As a result, together with students' various needs in the new normal, a high-flex core self-line has been developed for foreign language teacher training or other disciplinary courses also taught through the medium of an additional language. In high-flex courses, some students study in class while others study at a distance either synchronously or synchronously. The high-flex core self-line devised is suited to design digitally enhanced collaborative activities suitable for connecting students locally that is from the same university and globally that is from different universities worldwide. The high-flex core self-line devised features values digitally enabled collaborative learning activities designed using a design for learning approach which fosters students' active learning and agency in online context. The high-flex core self-line relies extensively on digital technologies instrumental in fostering students' multimodal meaning making. Now I'm going to illustrate some key aspects of this high-flex core self-line focusing on collaborative activities. As you can see, the high-flex core self-line adopts a flipped learning approach. It is students carry out some preparatory activities before class so that they can engage in active learning during live classes. Due to time constraints, today we are going to focus on in-class students and distant learners who work collaboratively during synchronous classes. However, if you're interested, you can browse the entire high-flex core self-line which is available in open access on your own. So in line with the pedagogy of care, like classes where in-class and distant students study together synchronously, usually start with unscrupulous activities targeted at the development of student social presence. In general, activities are organized with small chunks. Jigsaws can work especially well during live classes. Break-up rooms here as in all high-flex collaborative activities play a key role. Now, distant reading seems to be especially suitable for designing digitally enhanced activities suited to being carried out online while fostering active learning. Giovanna, can I just stop for one second? We can see your slide deck and we can see slide one, but I don't think we're following along with the slide two properly. Oh, okay, because I must slide six. So we can see your PowerPoint itself, so we can see slide six now, but we can't see it in sort of the show mode. Okay, shall I go on using this one? If you keep moving it in here, then we can see, yes, that would be very helpful. Okay, I'll do that. Sorry about that because I was using, okay? Okay, I must slide six. Sorry about that because I was on the other mode and I couldn't see the difference, okay? So I was talking about distant reading. Visualization can be especially useful to foster text comprehension by making undefining semantic relationships surface. In this perspective, Moretti elaborates the concept of distant reading aimed at synthesizing the main features of a large amount of aggregated data through the visualization of the current patterns. Distant reading entails identifying the main textual patterns and representing them through various types of visualization, from networks to charts, instrumentally making latent semantic relationships emerge. Although distant reading leads to a loss of the semantic content in terms of granularity, when compared to closed reading, distant reading contributes to the surfacing of meaningful patterns underpinning texts. Moretti's distant reading can be operationalized through text mining. There is computational text analysis, which transforms unstructured natural language text data into structured and usable knowledge by means of algorithm-based program analysis. Text mining is useful to detect patterns of text and thus uncover hidden semantic relationships. From an open pedagogy perspective, disciplinary text can thus be investigated through text mining using open educational resources. As a result, visualization-based language awareness and text analysis based on distant reading can be implemented online, fostering student engagement in active knowledge making. Text mining enables students to carry out digital activities that could not be implemented otherwise. Text mining, in fact, enables and uses experiments with text analysis while engaging in critical thinking. Text mining-driven activities trigger students' higher-order thinking skills, since through digital text analytics, students can deconstruct the text and as a result understand more thoroughly by investigating its patterns in a non-linear way. In particular, text-mining-driven activities can foster student recognition in terms of genre-based knowledge management and subject-specific language awareness. In particular, through text-mining-driven activities, students become active knowledge makers and knowledge designers. In addition, text-mining-driven activities are suitable for fostering differentiated learning by enabling students to carry out investigation using various visualization-based digital tools and represent knowledge in a multimodal format. In a high-flake score, students can analyze text using text-mining before class. Students can thus engage in processes such as deconstructing academic texts, retrieving and organizing patterns of information on their own before class and then they can share their findings through collaborative tasks such as jigsaws during live classes. In this respect, students can use voyants, for example, to carry out text-mining-driven activities, such as text analysis. With voyants, students can analyze genre-based features of academic texts. Students can also use text-politics to engage in topic modeling, likewise students can use flair to analyze syntactical and grammatical features of academic texts. At the end of each live class, students carry out a reflection activity, which is pivotal to foster metacognition in online learning. Students can fill in a questionnaire, they can draw or they can post an image. Inclusion is thus fostered. As mentioned, students carry out some preparatory activities before class. During live classes, they can then engage, for example, in think fair share. That is, students think first individually how to address the problem for this scenario provided by the instructor, which is a practice that students really enjoy. Then they discuss the issue in pairs, and finally they share their findings or solution with the class orally, all through multimodal artifacts. Before class, students can annotate an article or a video collaboratively on Perusso, and which students will enjoy. Then during live classes, students can engage in peer instruction. Peer instruction, which is highly structured, features seven steps, including answering multiple choice questions and engaging in collaborative learning. MSU has developed the method at Harvard University. Students can also engage in SOFLAB, which is a synchronous online free learning approach, which features eight steps. The first step in the work is usually carried out individually before class, while all the other seven steps, that is, signing activity, whole group application, breakout group activities, share out time, preview and discovery, assignment and reflections, take place collaboratively during live classes. Before class, students can argue foreign against the hypothesis provided by the instructor and comment on their peers' ideas using Kialo. Then in class, students can engage in a liberating structure activities such as one, two, three, four, all. In one, two, three, four, all, students think first individually how to address the problem, provided by the instructor. Second, they discuss the issue in peers. Third, they discuss the issue in groups of four. And finally, they share their findings or solutions with the class thoroughly or through multimodal artifacts. During live classes, in groups, students can also create digital mind maps to represent their newly introduced concepts. Students can then peer review anonymously their peers' mind maps through peer grades and then modify them on mind maps on the basis of the peer review received. Students can engage collaboratively in problem solving or they can create a new product or generate a new idea using scumper, which consists of a series of strategies such as substituting, combining, adapting, modifying, putting to other uses, eliminating, rearranging. That students can use in the order they prefer. Students can represent visually the process they engage in to find a solution or to create a product or an idea. As a result, the process emerges as a native value of collaborative learning. In conclusion, to foster effective collaborative learning in online high-flex courses, value strategies and activities can be used while at the same time catering for students' emotional and flexibility needs. Thank you. Thank you so much, Giovanna. That was absolutely wonderful. Such a rich response to the pandemic response, the situation. As we're waiting for questions to come in, I'll just start by asking about the formation of the groups. Were they made and kept with the same students throughout the course or did it change up depending on the task? No, the group was always the same. Yeah, because it's something that comes up quite a lot. That whole sense of belonging that you talked about at the beginning? Yeah, and we tried with a lot of high-frequency activities. We managed to make real students feel as part of the community. But we also explained the reason why we implemented so many high-frequency activities because students were induced to these new practices. So metacognition appeared to be extremely important to make students also open up and share parts of their lives, their wishes, their hopes, their expectations, but also their fears and that was extremely important. Yes, and that's not easy at all to bring forward to a strange purpose. So we've had lots of thank yous in the chat. I'm not sure we've got any questions as such at the minute. So I'll probably pick up on another point which was about the number and the variation of the tools that you used. Did you do a kind of awareness part at the very beginning of the course or did you cover each tool as they came to use it? I covered each tool when we decided to use it. So students were prepared to use it, but I presented each tool each time I decided it would be the right time to use it in an activity. So it was very contextualized then, situated? Extremely contextualized. Yes, also because I thought it was the best way to make students feel that those tools were used in a meaningful way. So and if you contextualize the use of the tool, it's easier to make students see that the tools can actually be meaningful for the activity and for them as learners. Yes, and you seem to have an incredible amount of engagement from the students, so that's really brilliant. Yeah, that was amazing and because they really, I think that they also needed to feel engaged, to feel together, to feel as a community. So working together, help them from a cognitive point of view in terms of content, acquisition, but at the same time as a way of creating a community. And they really needed to feel as part of a group. So we now have a question in from Matt and he is saying that one aspect of flip learning is that under recognized and under appreciated is that students can work collaboratively outside of the classroom. So have you find that in your work? So we actually ask students to work collaboratively during class because classes are supposed to last two hours. And if we ask students to work collaborative also out of class that would be too much work right now. That's a bit of a problem, but we'll come to that, I guess, a little by little. Yeah, yeah. And I think Matt's just actually clarifying so that he means that they're doing it in synchronous situations. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So I think that is all the questions we have done really well with time. We're pretty much perfect. So I'd like to thank you very much for delivering your presentation today Giovanna. And I'd like to thank everyone watching in the audience. Thank you so much for coming and we'll give a big round of applause to Giovanna and I virtually. Thank you. Om nom nom.