 Well, good afternoon. Well, good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, depending on where you are. Welcome to the Eden webinar. We'll just have a couple of minutes before actually starting. So if you can already write some notes or where you're coming from or what is your background in the chat board, that would be nice. Just for us to get acquainted. So we have colleagues from lots of places and from different continents and different countries. So we have already colleagues from Croatia, Romania, Mexico, well, Sweden, Russia. So this is a very interesting audience. OK, so we'll start now. Welcome, everyone, to welcome to the second webinar of the Eden series on actually education in time of the pandemic. We have started one week ago with the first webinar, and we are having now the second one. It's really a pleasure to be able to share this session. Well, starting by introducing myself, I'm Antoni Teixeira from the Open University of Portugal, former president of Eden. And it's really a pleasure to be here with you. And we've started such a distinguished panel with Dr. Mark Nichols, Professor Alison Littlejohn, and also Professor Christian Andreas Schoeman. Well, before starting and before introducing them, I'll give the floor to the Eden president, to Dr. Sandra Cusina, who will be giving us a brief presentation, some brief words, on the actually this webinar series and what are the purposes of this initiative. Sandra, you have the floor. Thank you, Antonia. Hello, everyone. I'm very glad that we have gathered again today for the Autumn series of webinars. We are our aim to help educators to get ideas and know how to implement new technologies and online education in every day of their work. I'm very happy that Antonia is leading the session today. He was the speaker on the last session moderator in this session. With first two webinars, our aim was to help university leaders, people working in the management, to address the issues of digital transformation of high education institutions today, and also to think about and talk about all the necessary issues which should be taken into account during this process. And I hope that during next few Mondays you will join us as well, because we will continue with this series till somewhere in the mid of October, having different topics every Monday. For the next Monday, we have something completely different, so we will announce it soon. So I'm hoping that you will gather again and join us. And now I'm leaving the floor to Antonia, and I'm very happy that we have really great speakers today. Mark, who is coming from New Zealand in the early hours on the morning, Allison and Christian Andreas, who joined us together from different places in different occasions, but always happy to share their knowledge and know how to help all of us to be better in what we are doing. So thank you, Antonia. Floor is yours. Thank you very much, Sandra. We have now over 60 participants, which is really nice. And well, it will still grow. Anyway, as Sandra was already mentioning, the topic of the webinar is the digital transformation of institutions, education institutions, particularly higher education institutions. And the panel that we have today is really very knowledgeable about this topic, because they're really experts on digital transformation. Starting, well, we're having a brief presentation of each one of them, starting by Dr. Mark Nichols. Mark is an executive director for Learning, Design and Development with the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, is responsible for the creation and maintenance of institutions curriculum. Well, for the ones who are not as acquainted, the Open Polytechnic is Australasius, the biggest dedicated open and distance learning tertiary institution, specializing in online vocational education. But Mark has previously worked at the Open University in the UK as Director of Technology Enhanced Learning. And in that position, he was directly involved with the Open University's redesign and students' first transmission activities. Previously, Mark has also been with the Master University, still in New Zealand, where he was responsible for proposing and sharing the famous Mahare portfolio project. During the period that he lived in Europe, at that time, we didn't have this time difference that we're now having, this little difficulty. Well, at that time, Mark was also a member of the Eden Executive Committee, so he served on the Eden Board. And currently, he is also serving on the Board on the Executive Committee of the ICB, the International Council for Dissemination. Mark is also a Non-Aware Commutative Learning Advisor. Next, we'll have Professor, thank you, Mark, for joining us. Second, we'll have Professor Elsie Zorn. She's now Professor at the Institute of Education at the University of College London, UCL. And she's the Director of the UCL Knowledge Lab, which is a center exploring the future of education with technology. Previously, Ellen has been Dean, Learning and Teaching at the University of Glasgow, also Professor and Director of Digital Innovation and Transportation Technology at University in the UK, and the Founding Director of the Caledonian Academy at the Glasgow Caledonian University. Alison is joining us, not from London, but from Glasgow. But thank you, Alison, for also joining us in this webinar. Well, just another brief description on Alison. A research focuses on the role of professional learning in addressing global challenges, making contribution to the understanding of how people learn for work across the energy, finance, health, education, and international development sectors. She's also leading a study examining experiences of working from home for university staff and chairs, the panel exploring the future of teaching with technology at the UCL Institute of Education. Next, finally, in this panel, we have Professor Christian Anders Schumann, also from, well, an older maintenance of Eden. He's full professor for business informatics at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Light Science in Drikau, Germany. From 2003 to 2009, he was Dean of the faculty. And since 2019, he has also been the university representative for international relations. Through how his career, Professor Schumann was deputy chief coordinator at the Chinese German University of Light Sciences, Tongqi University of Shanghai, as well as scientific vice coordinator for business administration engineering for the German University Network Corporation with the Technological, with the Tech Monterey in Mexico. He has cooperated with UNESCO and the Arab Academy of Sciences in Beirut as a member of the industrial engineering network of the German Jordan University. He's also a fellow member of the board of the Fellows Council of Eden and the vice president of the Institute for Knowledge Management of Board member of the former German University Network for this education. Of course, he's extensive research, includes many topics, and I will just point out a few of them. Most significant, digital transformation. Of course, this is the topic for today. Augmented reality and virtual reality apply to artificial intelligence in the international management, knowledge and information management, project management, interoperability and logistics, PLM, well, and also, of course, business education, E and mobile line and educational networks. Well, just this gives you a brief overview of what are the, what is the experience of all these three wonderful panelists. And I'll just now give the floor to the first one, to Mark, to start the debate. And of course, he will just uploading some slides to help him through. Mark, you have a floor. Great, thank you, Antonio. And good morning, colleagues. Tena Koutou-Katoa, greetings from New Zealand. I'm really intrigued by this question. It's clearly a very important one, given the unprecedented situation universities around the world have faced this year with COVID-19 and the rapid need for what's become known as emergency remote teaching. I think for the most part, universities and their academic staff should be very proud of the way in which they quickly and tirelessly move to ensure students could continue with their learning while campuses were closed. It is timely now to think on what might be done next. So the question as posed could be answered either positively or negatively. I suspect though that transformation need not occur for universities to prepare themselves for the new normal. I think we need to make sure we're not confusing two responses to COVID-19 and the possibility of future campus closures during emergency times. In my view, the term transformation is applied much too lightly. To be transformed is to experience a marked change in form, nature, or appearance. It requires a fundamental shift in operation, whereby the new will not necessarily resemble the old at all. If universities are going to be transformed, they must first see that what they do is unsustainable and that they need an entirely new way of operating. The other possible response to future campus disruption is mitigation or the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something. In university teaching terms, as in any commercial enterprise, mitigation is a way of anticipating and reducing risk. So we do well to remember that there is a distinction between transformation, which changes the heart of how a university operates, and mitigation, which is a set of pre-planned emergency responses to a temporary change in circumstances. So I suspect that COVID-19 and the threat of future disruption will not result in the sort of transformation needed for effective use of digital pedagogies to make all the differences they can. The internet is yet to make as big a difference to education than it has in other sectors. So how we access music and video, for example, is completely different to how we did 20 years ago. We used to incredible choice in consumption via e-commerce. We have incredible amounts of information at our fingertips. We also have a growing range of possibilities for online education and training, but none of this comes close to truly transforming our universities. There are three main reasons why I think this is the case. Firstly, universities operate along the same lines as dentists, accountants, and surgeons. We treat education as if it's constrained by the availability of specialized gatekeepers. So there is a tendency to think that more students require more academic staff, more lecture theaters, and more timetabled classes. So it's very difficult to scale universities. The assumption is that more students will mean more costs and bigger campuses, and this assumption is seldom challenged. Second, there is no crisis of demand. A 2018 report by the Higher Education Policy Institute, or HEPI, called Demand for Higher Education to 2030, estimates that in the UK, 50,000 more higher education places will be needed by 2030 to match current demography and participation growth trends. So this makes it much easier for universities to just continue how they're doing. No university is really facing a longer-term drop in student numbers. Third, there are high barriers to entry. It's not easy to become a university. Not only is there an extremely high upfront cost of hiring staff and also securing facilities, it's very difficult to get the title of university and build a reputation for excellence. So if you're already a university, you're in a comfortable position. So these three reasons, I think, make transformation unlikely. It's far, far easier to make a mitigation strategy for the likes of campus closure. Also, it takes considerable effort to transform a university. A transformation requires an operating model transplant. That means much of how a university operates must change. If your operating assumption is students attending lectures, you have semesters, timetables, exam bookings, orientations, tutorial posts, and enrollment periods hardwired into how things work. So if you really want to transform universities to be all they can be with digital education, all of this is subject to change. The university's structure might need to change so that learning design and technology-enhanced learning functions become more prominent. Teaching roles might change so that academics might do less lecturing and more subject leadership, working alongside learning design and technology-enhanced learning specialists. Tutorial staff might take on more direct teaching responsibility. Technology applied well might make it possible for students to enroll in any module at any time and yet still benefit from a quality education. This alone means turning several major university systems on their heads. All of this also requires significant levels of upfront investment, coordinated across an entire operating model. So transformation is not for the faint-hearted, but it is possible as I'll outline later. So let me ask you a question. What is the new normal more likely to be? Will universities reinvent themselves through transformation in response to COVID-19 and become all that a digital distance education university could be, or will they instead get better at planning in case their campus needs to close? Well, I suspect the new normal isn't universities operating in new ways. I suspect the new normal is universities better able to temporarily cope with the abnormal. So mitigation is likely to be the way in which universities get ready for the new normal. Mitigation is a risk management approach whereby you anticipate certain events and make plans for how to deal with them when they occur. So mitigation involves changing to temporary ways of working in response to an emergency. It's relatively easy to do this and I'm certain that all universities represented at this webinar have already done this. It involves defining the scenario such as a rapid lockdown of the campus for an undetermined period of time. You make sure you have the technical infrastructure and communication plans ready to begin under emergency conditions so everyone knows how things will work and both students and staff understand the situation. And universities will have thought beforehand about how to teach and what temporary assessment conditions might be put in place. The right tools will be available. Everyone will know how to use them and the disruption will pass. So mitigation is all about planning and protocols. When an emergency takes place, the risk is managed. Contrast this with genuine transformation. Transformation as I mentioned earlier is not for the faint hearted. It takes vision, courage and a great deal of investment. After all, it can involve changing the very way in which teaching takes place and it can affect the entire student experience. It all starts with a vision. Now, if you could imagine the ultimate digital university, what would it look like? How would it function? Because I'm certain you're all associated with Eden, I'm sure there are many excellent ideas out there. Now, for me, a university should provide an opportunity to get a real education that engages and lightens and empowers its students. It should provide students with excellent learning activities, challenge their ways of being and let students proceed at their own structured pace. If life gets in the way, the university should adapt. If a student needs to go faster or needs to go slower, the university should be able to accommodate it. If a student needs one-to-one facilitation, it should be provided. All of this is possible with the right configuration of design, pedagogy, and digital intervention. Much of the remainder is change management, and that's something that is incredibly difficult to get right. It requires people across the university to agree on the opportunity for change, designing a learner-centered model for access and flexibility and agree on how tuition will generally be shaped. The strength of the approach I'm suggesting here is that it systematizes the digital. In other words, it doesn't just add digital to how things are done, it integrates the digital at the very heart of how things are done. I discuss this in much more detail in my book released earlier this year by Routledge. I sincerely think it's just a matter of time before universities take digital distance education seriously, but I don't think COVID-19 will be the driver of transformation. Instead, I think that eventually, universities will sense that their current operating models just don't make sense when things could be so much better for students. So as I suggest in the slide, it's difficult to change our university's work, but it is inevitable that most will need to adapt their operating models to remain competitive as digital education continues to unfold. So the issue is not what education is or seeks to achieve, rather the issue is how education takes place. So I think we must critique the how without damaging the what. So to return to the question and just in summary, online transformation of universities, having faced the challenges of the pandemic, are they prepared for the new normal? Well, I think that universities are prepared for the new normal, but only as a response to emergency. Real transformation takes a whole different level of leadership and let me finish there. Thank you. Well, thank you very much Mark. Well, let me also invite everyone to use the Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen to ask your questions and to, well, you can ask your questions during the presentations as well. So we can collect them and collate them and at the end, collect them, and at the end convey them to the speakers. Well, Mark, in your presentation, well, excellent presentation, you set the agenda, I mean, set the discussion in this sense. What is happening is forcing the higher education institutions to adjust, but not to transform. So in a sense, okay, they will have to cope with what is happening. They have to adjust some of their procedures, some of their infrastructures, but this is not actually pushing them to a change. What I would like to ask you is, don't you consider that after a first, first impact, which was actually caught everyone by surprise that the fact that such an immense, such a massive number of, well, both teacher staff and also students had to be engaged in some sort of remote teaching and learning that in most cases is already some kind of organized online learning process is not actually also contributing for them to push their own institutions in order for them to change. So isn't that this is also actually accelerating the transformation process, Mark? I certainly hope you're right, Antonio. I see it in terms of a tipping point. So I think at the moment up to this point here, until universities really have to change for the longer term, I think we will just see better emergency responses to temporary adjustment to teaching. I think it will take much more for universities to make a fundamental shift in how they operate for the longer term, but I do hope you're right. I think universities are now a lot more open to digital education. I do think though that some of that reinforces the current approach to lectures which aren't necessarily required in a digital teaching world. So I think that the response has helped. I think people are a lot more open to the digital now, but whether it will result in the sort of transformation I think we all know is possible. I do have some doubts. Well, Mark, one of our participants is asking, well, basically if you really are convinced at this stage that most universities have their infrastructures ready for the transformation, but I would also add another aspect which is do also have the teaching staff, the faculty ready for it? And the students themselves. That's a really big challenge. For many lecturers that have been appointed on their subject knowledge and they're very, very good and passionate about lecturing their subject to their students. Changing that, which is something that's perfectly possible under a transformation is very difficult. I mean, you're challenging people's identity as academics. There are better ways in which academics might still have the impact of teaching, but it doesn't necessarily involve being in front of students. I think what we should see in a digital education world is a partnership between learning technologists, instructional designers working with lecturers in very, very tight partnership. That though, not all lecturers will be open to that so that there's some very serious challenges, I think facing university leaders if they are seeking to transform in ways that digital education might make possible. Well, Mark, the final question before giving the floor to Alison. Well, one of our colleagues is also asking first to give you the example of the UK in which the university hierarchy is very, well, very in a way could hurt a little bit the dynamics of the transformation. What I would also add in this sense is at what point isn't this fact that, well, basically everyone was caught by surprise and it was also very clear that from governments to university leadership, no one was actually prepared and had some kind of contingency planning for this. Isn't this also giving much more floor or I would say much more space for the ground roots of institutions, so teaching staffs and so on, have more leverage in pushing forward the transmission. I certainly hope so. Again, though, I think what we've seen in the emergency response to the COVID crisis is people taking what they've traditionally done and doing it online. I think a true transformation would challenge what's traditionally done. So going forward, I think, again, transforming universities does require a different operating model, a different way of thinking about teaching and learning, which so far the COVID crisis hasn't forced upon us. Thank you very much, Mark. We'll, of course, we'll have a chance to resume this discussion later on. I'll give now the floor to Alison. Thank you once again, Alison, for joining us. You can upload your slides. Thank you very much for the kind invitation to be part of this event, which is great. I really enjoyed the presentation that Mark gave and I'm just about to share my slides. Can you see them? Can you see the slides? Yes, good. What I'd like to do is following on from Mark's presentation, is to think about the experience of colleagues over the past months and what it's meant for them. So education and time of pandemic, and I particularly want to focus on what's been happening at University College London where I'm working. The questions that we've been asking over the past months are things around how academics and professional services staff are experiencing this online pivot or however we want to term it, but the rapid change to online teaching. What's the effect of that? And in particular, we know that there have been structural disadvantages within education. So are these disadvantages taken away or are they exacerbated? And we want to think about that. Then what kinds of things can universities do to try to reduce these inequalities? So to think about these questions, we opened up a survey to all staff at UCL in March once we knew that we were going to be working remotely and that we weren't on campus. And we've had over 400 responses. We asked people to fill in online some demographic information about themselves and then to upload an image that depicts how they felt about this working from home and then write some narratives around their experiences. And since then we've interviewed around 32 colleagues who've told us about their experiences. So what I want to do first of all is to think about the first question. So what do we know then about how staff are experiencing this transfer? So I mentioned that we asked people to upload images that depict how they feel and we've generally had four different types of images which are quite illuminating in themselves. Most people took a photograph of the space that they had created for themselves or already had at home. And one of the most incredible things about these photographs is how different they are. So they range from the photo on the left which is a reasonably well organized corner of someone's sitting room where they have books, they have their laptop, a desk and so on to the right-hand side where we have a colleague who's in one very small room and there's almost only room for the bed. So this person has all their digital devices on top of the bed. So you can see the very different circumstances in which people are working. And that will tell you a little bit about how they're experiencing the work from home and how they're feeling about it. Another set of images that we had are like this. So these represent the kinds of things that people are doing in order to cope with we're not just working from home or teaching online, we're working during a pandemic and it's a crisis. And in the future we can probably anticipate even more of these global challenges and crisis. So how do people cope with it? And what we found is that a lot of colleagues have structured their day or done something that helps them to deal with this working problem. So on the left-hand side we see a colleague has taken a photo of his beautiful roof deck in London where he's been working. This is a professional services colleague who before had very limited opportunity to work at home. And on the right-hand side we have a picture of a heron in a park in London. Again, this is a colleague who every morning goes for a walk. And basically this is one of the ways that people are able to mentally and physically cope with working from home is to structure their days around activities that will help them. The next set of images really deal with the kinds of emotions that people are feeling. And they're very varied. So it ranges from the top left, which is the moon base, the idea of feeling like you're on another planet or it's otherworldly, it's very different to the bottom left, which it says collapsed by structural failure. This idea that the whole structure around this person is collapsing and has to be completely rebuilt. And then the image on the right-hand side, you can see there's a whole range of different emotions that are depicted there. And many people have told us that what they feel is not negative or positive, but it's a whole range of different things. We have another set of images that are pretty much like this. And it tends to be almost exclusively women colleagues, either academics or professional services colleagues who sent us these images. And you can see that it tends to be this idea of the emotions and the balancing what you have to do at work with what you do at home, particularly when schools have shut down and children are at home. So the image on the right, I actually talked with this colleague and she said that what she was trying to convey is she's holding up her laptop. She's trying to perform as if she is a professional. She's a senior person in professional services. So she's trying to look as if everything is going okay, but you can see the chaos below her. And we've had a lot of feedback from colleagues who say that this is exactly how they are. They're trying to be very performative and the digital has given them the screen through which they try to communicate a very different person from what's actually happening in reality. So a lot of these images are about balancing work and life. And you can see on the right hand side, we have a whole range of different emotions that people are feeling. So when we ask people to rate how they feel about working from home, most people said they were undecided and that's because they feel lots of different things at the same time. So what are the opportunities in terms of particularly the academic life because it tends to be academics who are doing the teaching. And so these are some of the opportunities that people have identified that they're not spending a lot of time commuting. They're not sitting in their office on their own. They have plenty of time online to be able to connect with other people. They've been surprised that the technology has largely lived up to what's been asked of it. And they've also been able to connect with students, the students who were quite in class have maybe been able to speak out a little bit more because there's all different ways that they can communicate. So what they've been saying is that staff need this fundamental shift in the way they're supported. So what Mark was saying about having this real infrastructure in a different operating model is absolutely critical here because staff are not supported in a sufficient way to be able to take up the opportunities. But of course, there are a lot of challenges ranging from practical things like conferencing systems not working if people try to do things synchronously. Difficulties with time zones. Mark is demonstrating to us, getting up at 2.30 in the morning is not ideal, but sometimes our students are having to do this and that's not the best way to learn. There has been this idea of doing what we do face to face online, which is, as most people in the seminar will know, it's completely the wrong way to use the technology rather than trying to transfer everything online. We should be completely rethinking and redesigning. We've also found that colleagues have given a lot of pastoral care to students. So they've been spending a lot of time at home helping the students around the world dealing with the pandemic and because they're doing that from home, they're not leaving those emotions in the office, which can be difficult for them. Now, a very interesting finding we've had is that people who have limited space at home, so if they've one room to work, they are more negative about teaching online. So here's the data that we have. They tend to be more negative. Some of them are neutral or positive, but we're really looking into the reasons why people find teaching online so difficult. We didn't get the same response to research online and we think it's because teaching is basically reaching out and connecting with people, whereas with research it's more inward and being able to find space and time to think. So what I'd like to do is also tell you some of the opportunities that the academics have been telling us in terms of their research because this is a big part of the job and in universities like UCL, the connection between research and teaching is absolutely critical. It's enabling students to develop that research mindedness. So as I said, researchers feel free from distractions working at home. How positive they felt, depending on which stage they were in the research process. So if they've gathered the data already in the writing or doing data analysis, they tended to feel more positive. We found a lot of colleagues move to submitting articles, but not women, and that's interesting. I'll come back to that in a second, why women have not been submitting as first author. And we haven't found any clear patterns per job role or grade as to how people feel. There were of course challenges. People are anxious, particularly those who are on fixed-term contracts. They're anxious about their jobs. They miss connecting with people, just being able to talk with someone. All meetings are now becoming formalized because people are having to arrange a time to meet or email other people. And of course they're concerned about what the impact will be on their career. So the second question that opposed was which groups, and we're talking about staff here, which groups are disadvantaged by the work from home? And we have evidence that there are existing structural inequalities within the university system, which is exacerbating things for these groups of people here. So people with caring responsibilities who are at home at the moment and have been homeschooling, then they have more interruptions to the work compared with people who don't have caring responsibilities. But even people who don't have children, some people have been spending a lot of time either caring for other colleagues or helping students through pastoral care. People with disabilities have had lots of access issues, particularly in terms of the technologies that universities have adopted. People with mental health issues have found that these have increased. Black Asian minority ethnic colleagues tend to have particular issues which are not being addressed, at least not in the UK. And as I said before, anybody with limited space at home. So how can universities reduce structural inequalities? Well, we've already seen around in different countries that universities are giving guidance for managers and for people who are working on how to set up their home in a very practical way, being able to purchase equipment or set up their workspace. They're also opening up campus so that if people have issues in terms of working from home, they can go onto campus and work. And they're prioritising people who are having difficulties at home. But this really doesn't go far enough. There needs to be a fundamental rethink about caring responsibilities that people have at home and also how people carry out caring responsibilities at work. So things like pastoral care to students and helping other colleagues really needs much more recognition and reward than it has at the moment. So I'm going to leave it there really and I'm looking forward to feedback and discussion from people in terms of what's happened at your university and in your country and how can we make sure that the staff who are so important for the university are enabled going forward. Thank you. Thank you, Alison, for this excellent presentation. Let me just, based on what has been already asked by some of the participants, just let me put forward a couple of questions. A very striking thing in your presentation was the fact that you, and not many are doing it, have pointed out that this particular scenario that we're contemplating now is not a typical one. So when we're talking about the transition to a digital education format in a sense, this is not exactly what is happening today also because the conditions we're facing are not typical ones. So when people discuss and colleagues even as well discuss the advantages and disadvantages of moving to online learning, for instance, this is not what is actually happening because we are facing new things that were not taken into consideration before by the research and by the practice. Notably, what you've pointed out that people are working at teaching and learning both and also working because institutions, also the administrative staff is working from home. So everyone is working from home and in many circumstances, they don't have the right conditions to do so as you've pointed out. And this is, and they also do not have them because of, well, because that's the reality of things. And so this will in a way reiterate the digital difference, the social inclusion aspects that are already common, but also because since people are all forced to work from home, families that typically had conditions to work from home, they're not having them because everyone in the family is using the same broadband, the same computer sometimes and so on. So this is a different scenario from what is a typical one that has been considered by theory and practice. In this sense, one of our participants is asking, what is the impact based on your research? What is the impact that this is having in academic performance and also professional performance in the sense of the faculty as well? So this would be my first question. It's a very good question. It's quite difficult to answer because it's so broad. I would say that one of the main impacts is more people are teaching online than before. So we are likely to see a change. I don't think that people will go back to the way they were teaching before. I also think that people will think differently as well. Now, what that will look like is really difficult to predict. It's not going to be the complete change in the operating model that Mark outlined at the beginning. So it's not going to be a complete transformation. However, it is getting people to really think about how can they teach differently? How can they connect their teaching more with the research? And of course, one of the things to remember is universities also been making, it's been trying to make a difference in terms of contributing to the pandemic itself. So immediately, the medical people went into hospitals or the epidemiologists started modeling, people started trialing vaccines, and educators as well tried to work with schools to help them get online. So it's also this thinking about not just teaching, but what is a university and how do universities contribute to society? So I think that the real impact long-term is more likely to be questioning what is the value of a university? Well, Alison, an additional thing that I would like to ask at this point is of course linked with this last aspect that you've just pointed out. One of the conclusions that we may already draw is for instance, how people very quickly understood how for instance, assessment has to be redesigned, how it is not working any longer in the same way. Also some of the way people access resources and use them, all of this. But one important aspect that is being asked as well is how much in your research did you find that the staff, the faculty was feeling prepared, but lacking support from the institution or neither prepared and also lacking support? It's a very good question. I think the responses that we got were very varied. So some people said to us, they already had experience of teaching online and so they felt it was very rushed, but they felt they had the skills and expertise necessary to go online. I would say that our colleagues in the arena center in digital education were working night and day. I mean, they made heroic efforts. However, those centers were never set up to support the university in the way that was needed. We had other colleagues who were very skeptical about online learning, mainly because either they were practice focused, so people in laboratories for example who are saying we can't learn practical skills or doing art based or design work or people who simply feel the need for that connection in terms of having students question in very small group classes and so on. They didn't feel that that could be of the same quality online. Now we can discuss whether that's true or not. But overall people were saying that even if they were, if they did feel equipped with the right kind of expertise that it was very rushed and people had to move over very quickly. So I don't think anybody would want to do that again. However, in the new academic year, which starts this week, we're having to do things differently again because in the last academic year at least the students had had an opportunity to meet or at least those in face to face courses where as this year, it's much more difficult because of the social distancing. Well, Alison, just to make a kind of a link with what we'll be discussing in the end of this webinar you already spotted and before giving the photo question you'll have already spotted in your research the clear signs of dramatic increase in the number of researchers researching in technology has learning or in open and distance learning as well. Do you think that there is space for having some kind of increase in funding? As for instance, we tend to forget that medicine was not prepared for the pandemic and so there was this massive investment in the development of the vaccines. But do you think there is also space, I mean, and also this perception that a stronger investment, so a stronger funding of research in digital education is needed? I think so. And in fact, there have been open calls from the research councils in the UK for projects that can be in any area. It doesn't have to be medicine. And in fact, the more interdisciplinary they are, the better. I mean, I think one of the things that's really important is not just for us to do something and Mark called about a vision and an operating model but we have to understand very well what is we want and why is, have the evidence as to why we should go in a specific direction. And in terms of digital education, a lot of the feedback that we're getting is it's the connection between the academics and the students, which is really important. We're hearing that from the students as well because the academics themselves are modeling what it is to be a world leading, choose any subject, world leading medic or a world leading economist, for example. And we can't do that simply by creating education materials. There has to be an interaction. The students need to work with experience, have feedback from these people in order to really understand what it is to be a world expert. So yeah, I think this is really important. Thank you very much, Alison. And now I'll give the floor to Christian Andres for his presentation. Christian, you have a floor. Thank you. I try to, yes. So, fine. Sorry. Second please. I changed something in my presentation. So, on the last slide now, I thought it was quite true. I say hello from Zurich because I'm one of the victims of the pandemic development. Normally I should be here tomorrow, but the Lufthansa and the Swiss rebooked several times my flight. So I'm now in the lobby of hotel and I apologize for some noise from surrounding. I try to find a fairly quite place in the lobby, but I'm not quite sure. Over the full time that it works. So my presentation here was some questions of balancing in the time of disruptions and instability. We had already about 10 weeks ago and a wonderful meeting was annotated and webinar in the framework of the British Icon of Management. Besides, I'm responsible for the European network of the BAM and it was only a short some seconds for advertising for the BAM. So now I come back to the Eden network and we will discuss, or I will discuss in some minutes how we can improve solutions in order to be in a very good strategic position. We have to decide rather we should go in the direction of generalizing our activities or specializing. I come back to this question some slides later. The second question for my presentation is how we can organize the balance to react successfully to changes and to be in the position to react to disturbances in the development of the university as well as of the faculty. So sorry. So I see my slides in a better way. So starting with the context of system disruption as resilience, we can start coming normally from system theory, especially in business informatics. We have looked to the interdisciplinary approach, systemic description and so on. So we have a systemic understanding of the problem. Then we have the definition of systems. We have the wholeness of objectives with ordered relationships in among each other. And then we have the disruption, impact and entrance of plant developments or processes by unexpectedly occurring events. And resilience, balancing, balancing means we try to avoid instable status of the systems and we try to maintain the system integrity and in the case of faults and moral functions. So theoretical background for our activities in this field, I was responsible, Antonio mentioned it. I was responsible for the development of faculty or I'm still responsible for the development of faculty, especially as a study programs. And now since last year, I am responsible for the whole international relations of our university. And that's why it's always good to look what we have in this theoretical area, what we can use for our very systemic approach to solve our problems. In this case of the balance systems, we have the balance theory according to Heidel. We have the theory of balance growth from the economical side, economic side. And we have on the third hand, there's resilience theory and for instance, going back to the roots from Nietzsche, Nietzsche, what does not kill us makes us stronger as we balance approach. And last but not least, we have theory of dynamic systems as continuous temporal changes and reharmonization to define system state and adaptive control. And it's a normal thing today in the digitalization and artificial intelligence and as well in industry 4.0, education 4.0 and so on to deal with theory of dynamic systems. What we have to understand is transition from partial to equilibrium model today in many cases, we have still different kinds of views to system but we have in many cases a combination of different kinds of views but we haven't still yet the systemic approach for balance system. So and that's why we try to go to more balance models to pull balance and systemic developments. So we from this point of understanding, we derive holistic strategy for this organization and we start with integrity, holistic strategic development in higher education. So most easy step is in my opinion, the specialization, we have what we can organize, work sharing processes and cooperation networks. We do it worldwide since a couple of years in a very successful way. So more complicated way and complex way is generalization. We have generalists approach to all fields of our own organization and it's much more complicated because we have a trans faculty cooperation to develop and so on. And the third one is a hybrid ways and we can be in reality, normally we combine both ways. We have some generalists and we have some specialists and we try to do it in a very good balance way in order to be successful. All is at the end, it's a question of consistency of the quality and we have to ensure a high level of excellence in our universities. This is our main objective and strategic understanding of one university and of every university in the world. So Antonio used in his presentation last week and very nice picture dealing with the complexity of the educational organization related to digitalization and from this point of view, I'm quite sure that we can derive the balance theory in education. We have to balance education models, we have to balance education systems development and we have to balance education application up to the level of balance education organization. And why I do underlying this understanding, I'm quite sure that we have a very complex, a very complex problem and challenge on the side of the educational organization and we are only able to solve the problem by balancing all such things. So I don't describe every project that we have done but we started already about 1990, it was a huge cooperation with IBM Germany in the field of multimedia and multimedia application research and education. And over the years we were in different kinds of very interesting projects what was most very interesting, I'm in director of the research institute and I'm the dean of the faculty and responsible for education. And that's why what we do in the research institute, we immediately try to apply in the daily business in the faculty. And so we, and this way we come from the third place in our universities, the first place as we are the largest faculty, we have about now more than 35% of the students of our university. Some years ago we had only about 15%. So, but it was very essential to start early and I'm absolutely with Mark that we have to change our operational models. But a little bit earlier, we have already to change our strategic understanding, our strategic development, our strategic concepts. So, and that's why we try to use different kinds of technological disruptions in the past and the last 20 years in order to use and new technology to include and embedded all things in our daily business and the faculty work. And that's why we were, and then it was one of the main reasons that we were able to complete the conversion of various forms of learning from online MBA and distance education. We do it since about 20, 30 years already we're active in this field. On this basis, we were able to complete the conversion of various forms of learning to online teaching within two weeks for the whole faculty. But without traditional understanding of using technology for our development as faculty of business administration and economics, we were not able to solve the problem in a right way. This is such a short time, short period. Our way to balance education organization is so we started with in-house studies and it's all in a special ratio to distance online studies. We have both sides. We have own study programs and we have also cooperation study programs for instance, China, Mexico as well in other countries in the world. We have classroom instructions as well, virtual learning, we have lifelong learning was a certificate training in a short periods. We have research studies as well as application orientation and learning. We have formal versus informal learning and all is essential for come to a balanced diversity for sustainable resilience in our faculty. And according to the changes and the disruptions and the different kinds of challenges in our work, we can change simply the ratio between the different kinds of opportunities and the different kinds of dimensions which we have to fulfill in our daily work. We also use for, and it was, this is always essential also to look for the economic side. We started to use a balanced scorecard for educational organization already 15 years ago. After 2000, we were in the situation that we have the transformation of the diploma decreased to the worldwide usual system of bachelor master's programs. And in this time, we started to use a balanced scorecard for educational organization in order to be in the right way in the financial dimension, customer dimension, business process dimension as well as learning and growth dimensions. And so we can derive objectives, key indicators, targets and initiatives in order to be successful in this way. Rebalancing in the case of disruption of the resilient organizations, this means we have situations that we have success as organization in a balanced situation. Then we have the system disruption, for instance, COVID crisis. And then we have the adaptive transformation in competence-based resilient organizations. And at last but not least, we have a new stable balanced state of the organization for sustainable development. And then we can start against a cycle with successful work in a balanced situation. That was a short overview of our understanding what happens recently. To summarize it, we believe we should start early some years before we have the disruption, before we have the problems in our systems with a new strategic development, a new strategic understanding. And then we can go step by step to a balanced situation in our universities and faculties. On this basis, we are able to fulfill the requirements of a sustainable development in a very successful way. And I'm with William Edwards Deming from the New York University. He said, it's not necessary to change, survival is not mandatory. Thank you very much for your interest and your attention. Thank you very much, Christian, for such a challenging presentation and also congratulations for the successful transformation process that you have started so many years ago. Of course, survival is not mandatory, but it's nice. And we are all trying to achieve it. Before actually opening the debate to all of us, all of you in particular, I will just ask you for a specific thing which has to do with your own personal experience to be able to conduct this transmission process and this planning, this holistic planning, strategic planning and so on. How much was it fundamental in a sense, the cooperation with the other organizations, both internal and external? So what is the role that you see for international associations, for instance, and other kinds of organizations to help to guide and to support these institutional transmission processes, Christian? The first prerequisite is that you are strong enough to be a real partner for the others. You have to develop your own competences not in every field, but in special fields so that you can add some value for the other contractors in networks. And on this basis, we are now in different kinds of networks, not only need and guide, and especially in the large university networks in China, we are now about 35 universities from Germany and a special network with the Zitong University in China and our Ministry of Foreign Affairs mentioned the project again and again as one of the key projects of the cooperation between Germany and China because we are also focused on the main topics in the recent development. This means engineering, digitalization, artificial intelligence, and it's a hard job to change every year the subjects in this relation that we have a permanent change of our subjects according to the change of each subject, mathematics, mechanical engineering, business engineering, logistics, all of the things we changed in the last five years according to the digitalization in the world because it's not only one special topic, it's digitalization is omnipresence. So omnipresence, so this means we have to look in every hour of our teaching activities and have to look for the changes according to digitalization in the world. Thank you, Christian. Well, now we're going to the second part but the second part will be perhaps a little bit more compact than previously planned because most of the, almost all of the questions that were asked by the participants who already responded answered in some way. So I would like, anyway, there are still a couple of ones left and I strongly encourage everyone who would like to still put forth some questions to do it now, but I would like to ask each one of you to one question that has been also asked by some of our colleagues. A more practical thing, what were the main tools that were used by the universities in your countries in order to conduct digital or online learning? So basically I believe that what the question would be more is what kind of tools or Zoom or Teams or whatever is actually being dominant in how the communities be reacting to this challenge. And on the other hand, something that has also been asked and it's quite important, what do you consider to be the most important competencies that not only faculty but also students have to need to have to teach and to learn online. A problem I'll start by you, Mark. Right, which tools are used? So in New Zealand, probably like elsewhere in the world, the likes of Blackboard, Canvas, we have our own system at Open Polytechnic called iQualify, which is built from a user experience basis, which we use quite well. In terms of synchronous, Zoom is obviously a big solution worldwide now. I think there are some universities also using Teams, we're certainly using it at Open Polytechnic. Alison? In terms of tools, yes, we're using Teams and Zoom. We started by using Teams, but then there were features that Zoom has that staff wanted. So it was by popular demand that we started using Zoom and we're also using Blackboard Collaborate a lot as well. I would say that we've had some issues, particularly in terms of accessibility, for example, it's difficult to use captions and we have a lot of staff who need captions for all kinds of reasons, either they have problems with hearing and we also find it's helpful for the students if they're captions, particularly if they're working in their second or third language. In terms of you asked about student competencies as well, I think the main thing for students is to be good self-regulated learners. And by that, what I mean is they have to be able to, well, they have to be self-motivated, they have to be able to set their own goals and plan how they will learn much more than if they're surrounded by other people or if they're on campus or getting more direct support from their academics. They need to be able to switch strategies if they try to learn in one way and there's no one there to directly help them to regulate the learning, they need to be able to figure out how else to do it. Help seeking is a really important self-regulation strategy as well. So reaching out for help when it's digitally mediated is quite different from doing it when you're face-to-face. And of course, they need to be able to self-regulate, sorry, self-reflect and self-evaluate when measure themselves, not just against other people in their class, but much more broadly than that. So these are absolutely critical for learning at a distance of learning online. Thank you, Alice and Christian. And I would also ask you about teacher training. How do you think is the best way to do it and what contests in particular should be focused upon? Yeah, so I come from another point of activities and so there's a normal thing in our faculty that we do some applied research, for instance, in digital business, digital production, digital logistics. So the majority of our profs has already, have already access to the, has always access to the digital technology as such. And I believe sometimes digital learning and digital work is more a side product than really the primary access to the problem. But sometimes what I believe for people coming from a traditional way of life, they have some problems to find the right products, especially the combination and integration of the tools is insufficient. It's very difficult to collect all different kinds of opportunities in order to be successful in this way. And we use every platform available and we use every social communication opportunity. But at the end for a person who is not a professional in this field, it's so difficult to find the right products to get the right support. And that's why we have so many problems in other relations, especially in pedagogical things, because it's not a daily business to do a digitalization. That's a problem, I believe. Well, thank you very much, Kristian. Well, this has been a quite engaging discussion that we had today and from the comments of the participants, they're really very happy, which is great. Thank you so much for all of your excellent presentations. I'll just probably round up with the last question to all the three. Also building up on one thing that was also asked. As a way of conclusion to this debate, so answering the question, are universities ready for the digital transformation and to cope with the challenges of the new normal? So your final conclusion also based on your assessment, if do we have at this stage all the conditions for this? And implying also that is technology developed enough to be able to support this transformation? Are of course regulations also in place able to support this transformation? Funding, well, resources and all of these. So as brief as you can, I'll ask each one of you for a final comment on this and probably we'll start by you again, Mark. Well, that's a very, very big question, Antonio. I think technology and conditions will always be what they are. There'll always be opportunities there for doing things differently. I think for universities that the real challenge is how they operate and not necessarily what the environment is. I think the technology is there, we can do some wonderful things now that were just unthinkable many years ago. The conditions will always provide constraint. I think it's really up to universities to work out what the opportunities are and to consider whether the current way of operating best suits the environment that they're in. I think moving forward, we should see a lot more digital agility from universities. It should be possible for students to have a much more flexible experience than what they have at the moment. I think it's up to universities to work out just how they would match those student expectations given what they have available to them now. Thank you, Alison. Well, I think that we've seen that universities have been able to really respond rapidly. I'm absolutely humbled by what colleagues have managed to achieve. I think the technology as well has performed much better than people expected it to, but we all know that what is missing is being able to offer teaching and learning in a fundamentally different way which really supports students and that's where our efforts have to be. Thank you, Alison. Christian. I'm afraid that services are not good enough. Integration of the systems are not good enough and that's why we have some problems. On the other hand, we have to ask every day ourself are we really well educated as teachers and trainers? Well, thank you, Christian. Well, this has been, of course, these are more of a challenge than actually a conclusion of a process. And but I believe that we can, as a kind of wrapping up to conclude from our discussion that actual institutions are responding in different levels of response, of course, having different kinds of resources, having different kinds of access to funding and also having different kinds of expertise. And of course, the differentiated response is something that was unavoidable, inevitable. But on the other hand, things are moving ahead. Of course, on the first stage, there will be more focus on mitigating than actually transforming, as Mark has pointed out. But as Alison has demonstrated, there is a growing understanding, a growing perception amongst the community and families and, of course, experts and leaders as well, that of the new possibilities that, but also the new challenges that we are facing and that we have to cope. This is not just a challenge for applying the expertise to transforming universities. It's also a challenge for the research to develop new solutions, new ideas, new products in the sense, new practice, well, develop new practices that could be also more appropriate to the new challenge that we're facing. And as Christine has also demonstrated, from an institutional perspective, a real transmission process, it requires a holistic strategic development that is not just top-down, but also bottom-up. It implies the involvement of the entire community, only of the faculty, but also of ministries and technical staff, also the student community and, of course, the community that supports the institution itself. So I believe this is a good message. And also responding to one of our colleagues that is participating, institutions don't need to do everything on their own. They can actually use also existing solutions, well, ask for support of other institutions and international organizations, associations as even, and ICD to support them in this transmission process. Well, thank you very much. I would just finish up by calling your attention to a message that has been shared on the next Eden Research Workshop that is going to be held online, not in Lisbon, but online. So it will be in Lisbon online, and in which all of these other important research questions will be discussed. This will be one of the main topics of that event. Thank you very much, everyone. Good, well, a last word of thank you to the appreciation to our speakers and also to everyone who participated and asked the questions that were really so relevant. Thank you very much. We'll be meeting next week for a different topic as Sandra has already announced. I hope to see you on the next edition of this webinar series. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Bye bye. Thank you, Antonio.