 to be asked to chair a closing plenary for what's been a fantastic alt online summer summit. So much to think about, so much to take away, and I think these discussions will resonate for a long time to come. Slightly daunting prospect to chair the closing plenary after our closing plenary yesterday in the hands of the Gasteledge and Tom Farrelly. But I think we've got a very appropriate end to the conference. We've got a great panel of speakers lined up to lead us through the topic you see on the screen, learning technology beyond the crisis, policies for a sustainable future. So we're extremely honored to be joined by Mary, Laura, Anne-Marie, and Ian. We have an overarching question, which will frame the discussions for our panel session for the next panel. How could the experiences and lessons from the pandemic so far usefully change policies to ensure a better post-secondary education system going forward? Now, we're going to approach the panel in a particular way. We're going to be looking at the implications of this question in relation to institutional policy and then national policy and then international policy. So we'll invite each of the panel members to give their view on this question in relation to each of those policy levels. And once we've considered each policy level, we will pause for some delegate participation. So if you would like to take the mic, when we pause for questions, please put up your hand, and that will give us the order in which we will hand the mic to people. And similarly, please feel free to ask questions in the chat area. If you have a question for the panel, rather than things you're discussing yourselves, please put the letter Q in front of your questions so we know that it's a question for the panel. And we will take things from there and we will see how far we get over the next 50 odd minutes. So how could the experiences lessons learned from the pandemic so far usefully change policy to ensure a better post-secondary education system? The first level of policy we're going to consider is institutional. And I'm going to hand to Mary, first of all, to give us a couple of minutes on her thoughts on this question in relation to institutional policy. So Mary, over to you, please. Thank you so much and good morning, everybody. I'm coming to you this morning from the traditional unceded territories of the Lunganspeaking people, also known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, here on Vancouver Island in Victoria, British Columbia. It's been obviously interesting for all of us, this whole pandemic. And we have, I think, for many of us who've been working in this field for a long time, it's been a confirmation of things that we knew in our gut but that we didn't have all the evidence we needed to know. And that is that educators were really unprepared to teach online and teach with technology. And further to that, I think, at BC Campus, we've been working a lot with the notion of, who are we leaving out in education? And this, again, the pandemic has really highlighted those gaps in education, where we really haven't prepared educators well to manage relationships individually with students. And so I think that's really for me. And I struggle with policy around here, with using policy to mandate people's behaviors. And so I think as much as it's policy, it's culture. And I don't know if we can change culture with policy, but I certainly think that we need to do some different things around how we prepare educators for having a relationship with students and how we support those relationships. One of the things I've seen that's been the most disturbing, but again, not a huge surprise is the lack of trust that educators have in their students. The whole notion of plagiarism, of students cheating on exams, all of those things have really created a situation that means that students are having their privacy invaded in order to have exams proctored. They're having to use technologies that aren't well supported. And so I think we really have some work to do, as I say, around relationship building and helping educators build relationships that include trust with their students. And so I think some of that as well as some work around obviously at a more practical level, digital literacy are a couple of the places that we really need to go at the institutional level. Great, thank you very much, Mary. And what you're saying, immediately resonating with everyone and particularly the point around who are we leaving out, so I'm sure we'll come back to many of these things. Laura, if we can invite you to give your perspective on our question in relation to institutional policy, please. Sure, so the question of beyond pandemic makes me want to start talking about exciting creative imaginative futures, but I'm very mindful and it's been commented on often in this event how absolutely exhausted we are, everyone, everyone in the sector, everyone in society, everyone whose families have lost jobs. And so what I actually think we need to be thinking about is how we can leverage short-term gains, short-term strategic gains for the longer term. Because what we have seen is changes that we've managed to make during this period and Mary's already touched on it that we would want to take forward. So I just want to tell you what I understand by policy. Of course, Mary's right as part, it's deeply located in culture, but I must remember a definition of policy that I really like and that is that policy is the allocation of values and resources. And so when I'm talking about policy, I'm talking about how those values were allocated and foreground and the associated resources, financial capacity and so on have been allocated. And what we have seen during this period is things we knew before and they've been brought right to the fore, which is around inequality in South Africa that was under the hashtag no student left behind. And in the legislative sphere that was around a multimodal approach, so including the digital and print. And I've heard that in so many different sectors across the world around vulnerable students about students with barriers to learning. And I think that that focus is something that we will want to entrench in policies going forward. I've also seen that there's been a commitment to stabilizing and strengthening certain parts of the workforce. I'm not talking about all the teaching staff who've lost their jobs, I'm talking about the learning designers who've been on short-term contracts which Melissa was talking about yesterday. And suddenly money was found to extend their contracts and to put them in permanent position. So that's what I mean about the allocation of resources. And I don't know about you but in my very traditional university, HR processes are deeply bureaucratic, lengthy and complicated. And in this particular situation, we were able to move fast, make things happen, adjust and push the envelope. And those are the kinds of things that I would like to see going forward. So the kind of reorganizing and making things happen, I think is the work that has happened during this pandemic at the national level. And it's also been a time where incentives have been put in place to recognize the kind of good work that's happened, especially planning for the most disadvantaged in multiple ways that have come up during this conference. So I think I'll stop at that point. And I'm sure others will pick up related points. Thank you, Laura. And I think, again, you're resonating with colleagues in the chat area. I think particularly a striking point around how responsive policy is and how can we ensure policy that's responsive enough to tackle precarity and the type of the nature of the clarity that we're in at the moment. So thank you for that. I'm sure we're gonna come back to that. Ian, can we invite your thoughts on the institutional policy level, please? Sure, thanks, Keith. I mean, often I should explain perhaps I'm the odd person out here and I don't work in an institution. I work for a consortium of institutions which collaborate internationally to produce open source software. So there might be an element of, he would say that wouldn't be about this, but I wanna focus on a couple of relatively narrow areas, small pieces in the jigsaw, about how institutions acquire software and some concerns about privacy, which have surfaced over the course of the last two days, been great couple of days, by the way. So I mean, I think we've seen a good many commercial proprietary software vendors in higher education space offer sweetheart licensing deals in the initial stages of the pandemic as institutions moved and responded rapidly to move online. And how long those licensing deals in or in me, sweetheart remains to be seen. And eventually my fear is that the cost is gonna have to be fast on. It strikes me that we need to review at an institutional level, the processes and policies by which institutions acquire and maintain software and software services. And you'll notice I didn't use the word procure or procurement in that sentence because often procurement processes themselves rule out open alternatives. It's interesting in the conversation this morning in Charlotte's fashion, some of these points were being reached to. But I also think at something above the institutional level, there's a question about how we deploy and support open software. And Melissa Highton's comments in yesterday's opening panel were very interesting, especially when she described the sense of emerging solidarity between institutions in Edinburgh. And I'd be interested to see from the folks in the virtual room here, how far that's reflected elsewhere. But it'll also be interesting to see how far that solidarity develops and matures. Because I think there are some genuine opportunities for collaboration between institutions that may open up and they're gonna pose policy challenges. But I think there's an opportunity there which people may well see. I'll make some comments about privacy later on because I think I've spoken enough about that. Thank you, Ian. Yeah, I think there's this whole notion around the nature of a collective response and a way forward for a collective response, I think is marked nicely by the fact that we're having this event. And I'm sure it's something we'll come back to and maybe some of the examples from Melissa's experience at Edinburgh. And Marie, can we invite you to give your thoughts on institutional level, please? Yes, sure. And thank you, everybody, for having me here this morning. I think most of you are in the large number if you will know me. And the accent will probably throw you. I used to work at the University of Edinburgh, but I now work for at the University in Canada. And like Marie, I live on land that belongs to other people. So I'd just like to say that I live and work. And I'm very well cared for in this pandemic. On land belongs traditionally to the crevices of food and quotas to the black food in the Metis. And that's incredibly important in this moment because some of the communities here in Canada with this concept of not being left behind are choosing for their own safety and protection to oscillate themselves. And that's giving us a particular challenge at this point in time because in some of the places and spaces they're choosing to be safe so there's no good connectivity. So I think there are some institutional responses that address that, but we'll probably get onto some of that in the national space as well. And I'm sure that will look similar in South Africa and also in the UK. But I think there's one key point before I pick on a couple of institutional pieces that I'd like to draw out. And you sort of made it already there, Keith. It was the speech with which we have as a sector being able to pivot and the response, the collective response that we marshaled shows that we are not spoken as a sector and we are very capable of dealing with disruption. We're tired. There's no question that we're tired. But I think that's an incredibly important point because for many, many years now we've been called HE and post-secondary education is broken and it needs disrupted well. It got disrupted and look what we managed to achieve. But if I go back to Laura's points about what the short term gains that we want to now solidify and see strategically, I couldn't agree with more with the various points that have to be made. But to add to those, I would say that on the digital literacy piece, there's a level of investment in the colleagues and students who work with us and our institutions. But I think there's also, I hope, an acknowledgement that we need a level of digital literacy and senior leadership as well. But the ability to pivot was very much in some institutions dependent on the existing management structures that were there and the strategic investments that have been made over time in technology. So having good digital literacy right through the senior management team is incredibly important. The other thing I think is the understanding that treating all students equally don't mean doing the same thing for all students and this is where policy comes into play because I think sometimes we're a little scared that we may be treating students unfairly. So using policy as an enabler to allow people flexibility and using policy as a permissive tool I think is incredibly important and that can manifest in lots of different ways that might manifest in policies around care, that might manifest in policies around academic integrity assessments. But that fundamental point about policy is a permissive tool to enable some of the change we want to see, I think is important. And the process of developing policy can be that process of culture change that Mary alluded to as well. I'm not suggesting policy, the magic bullet either, though. One other key point I think, though, is that our institutions are silos. I don't know how many website redesign projects I've seen over the years that try to break the institutional cycle. But to me it's very clear that we still have some problems between the kind of academic and the administrative side of the institutions. And we need to think about how we better embed health and wellbeing resources into students' learning lives. So how can we close out some of those gaps so when our students do need help it's quicker and easier for them to find that help. And that could be mental health support, that could be disability support. But we know in this pandemic that all of these areas of support and that can lead to inequity have been exacerbated and their impact is so much greater. So being able to signpost and more quickly move to those things and really break those institutional silos is important. I could go on for the rest of the talk. No, that's fantastic lots for us to think about there. And a lot of what you're saying has kind of resonated for me in terms of other sessions I've been in where there's been discussion about digital literacies in relation to wellbeing and the fact that we have students who haven't self-selected to study fully or predominantly online. And in addition to digital literacies an important part of that wellbeing is a sense of belonging and ensuring those opportunities for social belonging. So I'm sure some of these things we may be able to tease out as well. I'm going to pause there and just invite any of our participants who would like to take the mic if they would like to ask a question and we will ask you to click on the raise hand icon if you would like to take the mic. And we'll also pause for a moment to see if there are any questions in the chat area. I've not seen any that have been pre-fixed with the queue which would indicate the questions directly to the panel but I'm just going to have a quick look just now. I don't think so but what I will do while we keep talking, I will invite the panel members to look down the comments and see if there's anything in particular they'd like to pull out before we move on. But picking up on Anne-Marie's points and reference back to May's opening question, can we change culture with policy? Mary, you asked that question but I didn't have the opportunity to articulate whether that might be possible. So can we bounce that one back to you just while we see whether there's any other questions coming in? Do you think we can change culture with policy, Mary? I think it's one of the tools that you can use to change culture. We haven't used policy a lot. Just so folks know, if you're not familiar with BC campus, we're a group that serves and supports all of the public post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, which there are 25, all the way from big institutions like the University of British Columbia to very small community colleges. And so it's hard to enact policy across a system that's that diverse. But I do think that one of the things that we've done at BC campus to sort of bribe culture around open education, for example, is that we require collaboration between institutions who are going to be given grants for open education projects. And that's something that we've worked with government a lot with on this as well. I don't know if you want me to jump into the second question. It sort of leads from here. Yeah, I think we'll kind of move on to look at the broader context. We do have a question that's come into the chat room from Chris Morrison. Is there an issue with policy development that people with policy responsibilities are often given a compliance type brief? So Mary, if we stick with you, if you'd like to do an initial response to this and then we'll move to the rest of the panel to check their take on it. Sure, yeah. And I assume you mean this is sort of back to the conversation about does a policy enable or does it put people in a box? And I think for us, it's both, right? Is that we want people to think more broadly about how they're doing their work. And so we can use it to expand the way that people work with each other. But it can also be used to say, no, you cannot do that if you're going to do this. So for example, we have not given money to white people who've wanted to write textbooks about Indigenous people. That's a policy that we have at BC campus that protects oppressed people. And so we use it in both ways. That would say both to incentivize and prevent things from happening that we don't want to have happen. Great, thank you. And then thanks for colleagues who are contributing to the response to this question in the chat area. Can I invite any other panel members who would like to respond to this question? Yeah, I'll jump in on that one as well. And it picks up on a couple of the things that are in the chat, which is about the implementation of policy. And I think that's where the rubber hits the road. Absolutely. I'm communicating it and being clear about how it's operationalized and thinking about how you can structurally operationalize it is really important. I worked on some principles for the ethical use of student personal data recently. That could be self-aware. We thought about how we operationalize it. We built it into our digital governance process. So new projects that are starting up have to engage with it as part of our top process. So thinking about how you operationalize it is important. But underneath this, I think there is an issue that we need to talk about, which is the issue of trust within the institution. Policy is very often seen as belonging to the administrative side of the institution. So I think there is a piece in here around the communication and the ongoing operationalization of policy that has to address that issue of trust. There are a number of people in the institution who believe policy is there to constrain them or policy is not made for them or by people like them. And that's an ongoing project, I think, to try and combat that mindset all the time as well. Great, thank you Ann Marie. And colleagues are contributing other factors that are enabling in relation to policy and Melissa picking up on the link between strategy and policy and the need for policy to be supported by services, presumably if they're gonna be affected and affect change. We did have a direct question for Laura from Amanda. I'm not sure if you've seen that Laura. Amanda's saying that she's really interested in the definition you offer to the policy is the allocation of values and resources. Are there any further readings you would suggest in this area? So, you know, I read that somewhere and then I claimed it as my own and then I thought I had better go and find the original source and then I discovered that I had actually changed it. So, I can find the original source but actually it's become the definition that I use because it speaks to the issues that I think are really important because policies really signal values and when we talk about international policies, you know, the whole kind of question of the marketization of the entire sector in a kind of neoliberal order is the particular place that regulatory policies and frameworks that actually shape our entire societies are a signal of values. But I think the question of that people have been talking about implementation is where the resources come into it because you can have a lot of really good policy signals but if you actually don't put the resources, the capacity, the governance, the infrastructure and the effort that goes into realising those, they are meaningless, they're just signals. So, I'll dig up the original for you, Amanda. Otherwise you'll have to quote me. Thank you. I have a couple of colleagues who are responding and sharing things in the chat area. A few folk came in as the session was underway so I'm just going to let colleagues join us a little later and all that we are having a discussion around the experiences of the pandemic and what that might mean in relation to changing policies to ensure a better post-secondary education system and we're exploring policy at institutional, national and international level. And we're about to move on and hear the panel's thoughts on national policy implications of the pandemic. So, Laura, if we go back to you and we can ask you to come from this one and give us your perspective on the national policy implications of the situation we have been in and are hoping to respond to going forward. Sure, I'm happy to do so. And before I start, I just want to respond to something in the chat from Teresa who was saying how really important it is to try and capture what's happening, which is a really big ask at the moment, given how hard everyone's working and looking after kids and extended families and losing jobs and et cetera. So one of the ways that we've tried to do that in South Africa is we collaboratively put together a paper of our reflections and I think Marin's gonna put it up in the chat. So you'll get a sense of the sector through writing something together. And one of the things that became very clear, writing, I think 16 universities in South Africa we wrote together is how the stratification of the sector has become so explicit during this period with some people not even having started remote teaching months after others. So the kind of levels of disadvantage, not just at the individual level with students, but across universities themselves. And the question of whether universities will survive in the long term has been really important. So I love the quote where Arindati Roy talks about how the pandemic has been an MRI that's exposed the social bones. I think it's been an MRI that's really exposed the social bones of higher education. But before, I don't wanna get completely desperate. There's been some really interesting and encouraging collaboration that's happened. And we all know how competitive institutions are. And some cases it's been universities helping one another. So with exam venues where suddenly students are all over the place and they have to write invigilated exams or proctored exams in one place. So we've seen that level of assistance. But the main area, the main thing that we hear in South Africa is that the sector worked together to negotiate with the cell phone providers with the telco companies to negotiate zero rating for students to access data for what are called white listed educational sites. And I don't think that would have been possible at an individual level. So students, there's a list of, it must be a thousand sites by now that are all educational sites and students can access that on their mobile devices. And I think that shows you what's possible and I think it provides a lot of opportunity for addressing that kind of monopoly that we see and that's encouraging. And then I think at the higher education policy level, there are also opportunities around pushing the forms of provision. Because like so many places, it's an incredibly bureaucratic process around what's online, what's distance, what's how the funding formula works. And we've seen people once again at the national level prepared to break that because it was necessary. It has been necessary to keep the academic project going. And it's an opportunity from a policy point of view to put in place new forms of credentials, new forms of provision that are not just for the purposes of unbundling for the private sector and for the way that unbundling and new forms of provision have generally been playing out, but actually offer opportunities for addressing inequalities. So I have been encouraged at the national level about what's possible. That's fantastic. Thank you Laura. I think on the whole topic of breaking monopolies and then seeing what can be done kind of collaboratively, we're due to come to Ian next to get his take on the national implications in relation to policy and discussions at the moment. And Ian, you've actually put something in the chat area too around resilience networks. Can we pass to you to pick up on this please? Sure, the resilience network point was a relatively small one, but there are efforts in the United States for sharing institutional experiences of the pandemic that I think it's worthwhile following through on and posting can go and search for that or I can pull some links out and pass them to Marin. I think one of the concerns I have at a national level has been raised several times in the last few days. And there's a danger in any situation such as the one we face, but basic safeguards around privacy might be set aside or sidelined. There are privacy concerns I know around data collected by the major platform providers and what that data might be used for. And I think that connects very directly with the topic of yesterday afternoon's keynote with Angela Seine, that she'll have amplified this morning. How do we better expose the fact of algorithmic bias? And this actually I think speaks to both institutional and national level. The A level results chaos in England has opened a few eyes in the UK, I hope. And it's already had some impact on local government use of algorithms. I don't know whether folks saw the press reports earlier in the week about local government at least pausing their use of algorithms to help determine welfare and benefit provision. So it strikes me that we've got an opportunity here at a national level to push against this opening door a little more, that we should be demanding as a minimum that algorithms and the code that surrounds them are open to meaningful inspection and interrogation. I think the cause for algorithmic accountability should be a principle, but at present they're also a useful tactic. And there may be a role, a very specific role for some of our colleagues in computer science here. But that's an area that I wanted to pick at that I think is a thread that's run through the last two days. But I think we need to do further work on and we need to do further work collectively at the national level. Great, thank you, Ian. And that whole theme of computer science and striving for unbiased and ethical computer science, I think is one that has kind of resonated very strongly over the last couple of days. Reminding colleagues, if you do have any questions for the panel, please post them into the chat area, but with the letter Q in front of it, so we know that it's a question for the panel. Anne-Marie, we're due to come to you next on the national implications. Share your thoughts, please. Sure, sure. So I should say Amiru can speak eloquently to this as well. The situation here in Canada is a little different. It actually may be more like the UK than people give it credit for. Education, post-second education is regulated at the provincial level, so maybe not unlike Scotland and England having different education systems. The scale is a little different. The scale of everything in Canada is a little different. I've only been in the country for seven months and I'm still getting my head around how the provincial and the federal pieces work. But the one thing I would say, and it touches very strongly on what Laura said as well, is that the inequities in digital provision and digital infrastructure across the country have been written large and touched on this a little bit earlier with communities who choose to isolate themselves a little bit more about the cost data plans in Canada, the extent to which high quality infrastructure has been rolled out across the country and the vast distances are initially there, but that has proven to be very challenging and what's become really clear is the number of students who relied on what we call community broadband, the community internet access. They would work in their local Starbucks or, or what is more not uncommon anyway, is driving to somewhere within reach of an internet signal and sitting and working in your car and there are, you know, there are even institutions that build good parking lots that kind of provision in the north of the country. So I think one of the things that's coming up and it's true for education, but I think it's true for the country as a whole because businesses require, it's reliant on the same infrastructure is the extent to which national infrastructure to support online in lots of different contexts is not, you know, the infrastructure isn't good enough yet and these better those inequities that were mentioned. Great, thank you Annemarie and I know that will resonate with a number of colleagues here, particularly those of us that are in the Highlands of Scotland and we can relate very much to those challenges around infrastructure. I was on rural broadband in Scotland as well. It's difficult and I think, you know, it becomes really important to ask ourselves is the college or the university located and co-located where are digital rich spaces that our students can get to get access to us and to each other? We have a question from Karen, but just before we move to that, if we go back to Mary who's not had a chance to talk about the national context yet, so back to you Mary and then I think we will take Karen's question and see who in the panel would like to respond to that. Yeah, you bet. Just actually in response to Karen's question quickly I think the first way to do that is to include people of color in the design and that I think has been one of the biggest issues is that we don't have diversity in software development teams and that's causing us problems on the other end of that software. As Ann Marie said, education is provincial although that's one of the things that's happened during the pandemic is that the federal government has actually given more money to the provinces than they treated you for. And there's been a little bit more collaboration there. And I think to pick up on what Laura was saying, collaboration is really the key here for us and it's how we've gotten work done at BC campus for many years. But one of the new things that we're doing is a project where we're developing open educational resources across the system for courses instead of textbooks this time. And one of the uniting features are we have a very robust transfer system in British Columbia and one of the features of the new collection is that the metadata will include the transfer agreements. So if you're teaching a course at one institution in British Columbia that transfers to another course at an institution in British Columbia, you have the same learning outcomes, you don't both need to develop curriculum. And so we're building courses that can be used across the system as shared curriculum and then once it gets into the institutions with individual instructors, they can make some modifications to that because they're openly licensed. And so I think that ability to collaborate on curriculum, we've also seen and again have had NBC for a number of years in organization that provides a shared service licensing for educational technologies. We don't see as much of that around open technologies. We do have and we've got Tannis Morgan on the line here and Anne-Marie is well aware of the Open Education Technology group that does collaborations here and enables folks to use open technologies so that they don't have to go to these big proprietary systems. And so that's a service that we're trying to make more robust here in British Columbia and enable more of that. But I think that collaboration piece again, using policy to drive the culture of collaboration, we're seeing that happening more and more in British Columbia. And again, that even just saying to an educator, you need to find out what other courses your course transfers to in this system to get a grant from us opens up their world to what else is happening around them that they might all benefit from. And so I think that's where we wanna go with policy at a provincial level certainly is around more collaboration. Great, thank you very much. And I'm fascinated about the idea of developing curricula that can be shared rather than I guess more granular open educational resources. And I think, yeah, I'd love to ask about that but I'm kind of conscious of time and other things we need to get through. So I'll maybe drop your line separately and find out a bit more about that. Before we move on, we've got a little bit of time left to explore the sort of international context which we've started to unpick anyway. So I guess we'll just be exploring any additional points in that area. I just wondered whether Ian wanted to respond to Karen's question around what could be visionary, equitable and useful ways of using algorithms to guide the digital education policy provision. Because I think that may have been in response at least some of the points you raised Ian. So would you like to come in here? Yeah, sure, just briefly to amplify and I don't have an answer to the question although I think answers will emerge. I think what we need to do at the moment is make sure as Angela explained yesterday afternoon, the fact of intrinsic algorithmic bias, the fact that algorithms point backwards and frequently point at prejudice and are written by humans and maybe bias. But I think it's also very true that we have to spread a deeper understanding of that. There's no expectation that everyone understands the algorithm but sometimes it's possible to explain their impact better in the forms in terms of concrete impact. The Oxford Internet Institute have got some very interesting material on what they call counterfactuals which deal with the practical impact of algorithmic deployment. And in a sense, the UK or England at least has just seen a very good counterfactual example in the A-level results, the ASCO that I mentioned earlier. But I think there's a lot to explore there and I think also that meaningful interrogation of algorithms doesn't just require open algorithms but potentially open test data sets. And that's one reason why I think it's particularly important that we engage our colleagues in science at the moment. I have a link to some of the Oxford Internet Institute stuff which I'll paste into the chat. There you go, if anybody's interested. That's fantastic. Thank you very much, Ian. And I think at this point, we just thank Karen for the question as well, which has generated a lot of discussion and thought there. I think at this point in the remaining time we've got, we'll move on to explore international dimensions and just to remind colleagues of the overarching question that we're exploring in this panel session. Our overarching question is how could the experiences and lessons learned from the pandemic so far usefully change policies to ensure a better post-secondary education system? So in the time remaining, we're going to move on to explore that question in relation to the international context. And we were asking Ian to lead us off on this particular one. So it's back to you, Ian, for any responses at the international level. And I know we've started to explore and share some examples, but anything else you might like to see in this area? Sure. I mean, I think that looking at the kind of patchwork of provision internationally is a useful learning experience and it's a useful source of models in the area that I work in, particularly around open source software to support learning, teaching and research. We've got a strong partnership with a consortium of universities in France, which represent about 80% of French higher ed. And it's such a different model from where I live in the UK. They're developing shared or mutualized services around open source code as platforms for innovation and for service delivery. And it sometimes I think is a very good thing for those of us who live in the Anglo-Saxon world to look at these other experiences and attempt to learn and generalize from them. But that's all about, I'd like to say at this point, Keith. Great. Thank you, Ian. And Ann-Marie, can we invite you to share any additional thoughts that you've got around the international dimensions to what we're exploring here today? Sure, absolutely. I'd like to echo Ian's point really strongly that we need to break out of her anglophone bubble a little bit. There are other ways to do things. And I think we tend to, you know, look to Australia, New Zealand, North America, the UK. We stick with the language family. It's easy to do that, I understand. But there are other ways of doing things. And some of the agendas that we don't particularly enjoy don't exist in other countries. So I think taking a more international perspective and getting into that anglophone bubble is incredibly important. But the other point, I think, is we can't avoid the fact that higher education policy and post-secondary education policy intrinsically bound up immigration policy. We saw that in the UK over the last few years where UK institutions were generously given a monetary requirement for international students and arguably became an outpost of border control in some ways. What we've seen with the impacts on international students, I think, I'm sure most people will have seen what went on in the US where it was a very strong line taken against international students who were located in the country, but were going to be studying online. At that point, their visas were going to be null and void and they would be ejected from the country. So we have been, as a sector, we've been very keen to internationalise. We see having a vibrant international student community as a positive. I think we have also relied on international students as a source of income. And so when we come into this direct conflict with border control, there is a very, it lays bare that intersection very, very strongly. So I think there's going to be some interesting conversations unfold about international students and reliance on international students and the benefit of an international student community which are going to be interesting and probably quite challenging in some ways. Thank you, I'm Naree. And having been almost all of the event the last two days, but needed to step out this morning to go to a meeting that partly covered tier four visa policy and expectations for international students to be able to study and be seen on campus, which pokes COVID as an impossibility, then what you're saying resonates very strongly and I'm sure it will with other colleagues as well. And I think also the point around where policies may cancel one another out, so we could have very kind of progressive, ethical, inclusive educational policy around learning and teaching. But as you say, that is going to rub against national policy around immigration. So huge, huge issues to be challenges to be addressed there, I think. Mary, you're due next to give your thoughts on the international dimension. And again, I know we've covered a few things already, but is there anything additional you'd like to add on the international dimension? Yeah, I think the international student issue has really been an interesting one because as Ann Marie says, we've really been taking advantage of them and their desire to study here in order to take large sums of money from them to support our institutions. Hi, tell it like it is, how about... What I wanted to say, and again, this will probably come as no surprise to you, but I think one of the things that, from an international perspective that this has again highlighted is that those of us in a Western context and the colonial context have seen ourselves as the one to bring innovations to others in our savior mindset. And I think we can think differently about those relationships and think of them as more reciprocal because we're working with folks in other jurisdictions, countries, where they have been disadvantaged by the ways in which we do Western colonial education. And so they've innovated in order to manage those challenges that they've encountered. And we can learn from those innovations. We can learn from the ways in which they have solved the problems that we've created for them. So I think that's sort of where I would land on the international front, aside from more sharing, more learning about each other, more finding out what each other needs and helping each other in that way. Great, thank you very much, Mary. And we'll turn lastly to Laura for any additional thoughts on the international dimension that you'd like to share with us. Yeah, so the thing that's been on my mind around these international issues is the way that surveillance capitalism is getting entrenched during this period. And we unfortunately are so busy we don't have time to pay attention to the antitrust hearings that are going on, for example, in the US, which have incredibly important implications for us because if you look at the number of companies that Alphabet has been acquiring and investing in and the complex data systems that they are embedding higher education into, it's really worrying. And I was reading into a podcast and I'm going to share it in the chat where starting to see with Google searches, for example, is that Google is now sending an increasing number of search results to its own products. So on average nearly half of the first page of results from a Google search directed the user to Google products 41% of the time, 63% of the time on different types of devices. I'll show you the link. So this is really scary for search and education because obviously it's through search that knowledge is found and materialized and reenacted. So this is really worrying me in terms of the international policy framework. And I think it's kind of outside of our sphere is global trade agreements. I think we really do need people who can move between the spheres of global trade agreements and higher education to keep a look after this marketization that's happening because it's actually removing the rights of governments to protect local people and the public mission which we understand to be public good. So those are the two areas I'd like to mention particularly in the public sphere and that's actually quite depressing. I was struggling to think of something positive to say here and the only thing I could think of was that there is some work being done around metrics around social justice and the SDGs. So I started trying to think of what were the metrics for a social justice rubric look like. I don't know the answer, but I was trying to kind of think about in a different way. So I think I'll leave it at that and I'll share those. Thank you. Thank you, that would be very useful. I think we'd all appreciate that. And certainly much of what you're saying is resonating with comments in the chat area particularly around capitalism. And I think there's a harsh reality here that everything we're discussing does sit within wider international and global economic and political context that we need to challenge and seek to change as well. Colleagues, I'm conscious that we're into the last five minutes. I'm just gonna pause to see if anyone would like to take the mic to ask a direct question to the panel. And if you would, please click on the race hand icon. And at the same time, I will ask the panel whether there have been any points within the chat room over the last few minutes that you'd like to maybe just acknowledge or pick up on in particular in our last few minutes. And saying there's no one picking up the mic. Why don't we just move to that? So, Anne-Marie, any final thoughts or observations from yourself? Either on what we've discussed or things you've seen in the race in the chat area? Yeah, lots of thoughts. It's difficult trying to focus them down. I think one of the points that Mary and Ian made in different contexts, which, well, get outside of our bubbles, look for the answers to our problems in a diverse range of places. Get rid of this severe mindset. There's a lot we can learn. Heck, it might even involve having to speak another language, which would that be a wonderful thing. But more than that, when we think about, if I think about, maybe think about the conferences a whole and it's come up a little bit in this conversation, but I think it's been a really strong thread around care and trust. And we talk a lot about learner agency institutions. That's flattered across policies everywhere. I defy anybody to find a policy in their institution that doesn't have the word learner agency. There'll be one in every institution that has the word learner or the phrase a learner agency in it. How can we really give learners agency if we don't trust them, if we don't focus on their circumstances, if we don't provide them with flexibility, if we don't care for them and we don't think about these equity issues? So, I mean, everything we've discussed today, I think speaks to that, but everything I've seen throughout the whole summit really comes back to, if we're genuine and serious about learner agency, then all of these pieces come into play. Great, thank you. And I'm conscious, you know, that the last two days has brought to the surface so many things we need to be thinking about and making connections between. Back in move to Mary, Mary Kaye, I ask you, have you got any brief concluding comments or observations you'd like to offer? Yeah, not a lot, but I just would say this is about, well, this is about individual people and relationships. And I think let's stay worked up about this and let's, as we go back into our lives once we're done with this pandemic stuff, which maybe we're never gonna be done with it, but let's continue to think of each other as people, as individuals and build on those relationships and let's stay angry about the stuff that's wrong and that will drive us to do something else. Thank you very much. I think staying angry is a very good message to be sharing as we come towards the end of the event. Laura and then Ian can invite you to share any final thoughts or observations before we conclude. I'll go to you, Laura. Yeah, I just posted a quote from one of my favorite Canadians in the chat, which is about the cracks being where the light comes in and really it's about finding the moments of possibility. I don't go for this blind optimism and you know, if we're all happy, clappy and mindful, everything will be okay. I don't think that's useful, that kind of positive thinking. I do think that finding those cracks where the light comes in and identifying the moments of possibility is what we can do. And that's what I'm going for. Staying angry and finding those kind of moments of light, think, yeah, fantastic. Finally, Ian, any concluding thoughts you'd just like to offer before we come to the end of the session? No, I mean, I think we, or few anyway, we came to the point of discussing the issue of surveillance capitalism, platforms and their impact on education. I think the alt community and communities like it around the world have been a very good job of keeping the torch high for open education. I think as well as staying angry, we need to stay networked and we need to make sure that we find like-minded individuals and institutions elsewhere in the world and making darn sure that we network our practice information with them. Great, thank you very much, Ian. And I'll share one of the things that's on the theme of anger. One of my favorite kind of quotes from John Leiden when he was in the Sex Pistols, anger is an energy. And I'd add to that that shared anger has an even greater energy. So yeah, perhaps we can generate some shared anger around all of this. So colleagues, we've come to six o'clock. I'm conscious that in exploring policy post COVID and exploring institutional and international dimensions, all we can really do in an hour is get along the surface. But I think we've raised a number of really interesting points thanks to colleagues in the chat room who have shared various things, including resources. And I think we'll go away with a lot to think about both from this panel and the last two days as an event. So I think it's been fantastic. Could we show appreciation as we're starting to do to our speakers in the chat area, please? And thanks everyone that was here for the final session. I think we've appreciated the levels of engagement and the ideas being shared. So sorry, Marin, with that, I'm handing back to you. Thank you very much, Keith. And thanks from everyone to Keith for chairing this final concluding discussion so eloquently. Thank you, Keith, for really teasing out those important issues. Before we wave you goodbye and wish you a safe journey back to your kitchens or living rooms or possibly even a different part of the place you're in altogether. We'd just like to ask you for a few questions or feedback if you want to stay. And we also want to say thanks to all the individuals and organizations that have helped make this summit happen. So I'm going to ask my colleague.