 Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. This is Anashalk from the LTTC into UW. Welcome to this session. And with my colleagues, Claire McAvina and Pauline Rooney, want to say a big thank you for being here, knowing that this is the last part of this intense summit. We appreciate your presence. Our objective is to share with you the initial findings of our research, responding to complexity, exploring the concept of the digital educator during COVID-19. All your thoughts and comments about them will be welcoming once we finish this presentation. This research emerged because of our experience lived in the model digital education, which aimed to give the participants an opportunity to reflect on their key issues, impacting their teaching and learning in a digital world. The characteristics of this model was a formal activity with five ETC for mainly higher education lecturers, but people coming from other disciplines were accepted. It was a schedule in a blended modality along six weeks. In this slide, even if it's a little bit small slide, but you can do assume with your control, in this slide it's possible to see the trajectory plan for this model, starting with the concept of digital education, moving forward to teaching in the 21st century. After that, we analyzed open education and open research as a significant dimension of digital education. Therefore, all these analyses we morphed onto digital identity and individual practices. In the fifth session, we reflected on how we could get an open understanding of the key issues analyzed in the previous sessions to end up evaluating what kind of digital practices could affect their individual and professional identity. We just started with our model when March 12 arrived, after all of us initially considered a temporary decision where pivoting online across the higher education sector began. Our participants were not only studying online after the point, but also rapidly adapting their own teaching and assessment to move online within an organizational context which was also grappling with the complexities involved. We witnessed how the 8th of April exams were canceled, and on the 7th of May, we knew our semester were closed online, so school exams were canceled as well. In doing a more permanent sense. With Pauline and Claire, this can be defined as a teachable moment, and we conclude that this research could add some findings to understand not only the complexity, but also the process which digital educators could go through. As foundations of our research, we explored the concept of digital capacity and decided to underpin our decision based on GISC, considering two dimensions, the organizational and the individual levels. In the first one aspect, as such as culture, policies and infrastructure, enabling digital practices, and the second one, the capabilities of those who live, learns and works in a digital world. To enrich this concept, we added the national forum perspective understanding the similarities with GISC and adding how people, lecturers, learning support staff, students and leaders are constantly moving between the external digital environment and the campus digital environment. The second definition related to our research was professional and personal identity. The relevance of the individual sense of belonging to the profession by highly influenced by the environment, the economic, cultural, political and historical forces emerged from recent research giving strong support to our research. And the third element was digital educator and skills underpinning their practices where discipline, knowledge, pedagogical identity and didactic aspects are involved in the context of the digital era. To add another aspect of complexity, our institution became recently the first technological university in Ireland comprising the former DIT, IT TALA and IT Lanchestown. In this university project, mission and values focus their programs and curricula. A wider diversity of disciplines such as engineering, business, arts and tourism, science and health and most lecturers coming from the field work with contracts around 18 to 20 hours weekly are part of this reality. So our research variables were defined as digital capacity in a recent institution, the digital education model in the context of COVID-19 and digital educator identity as a complex process. Having said all of this, I'm going to leave Claire to continue with our initial findings. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Anna. Hopefully everybody can hear me okay. So as Anna has said, we had a number of different things happening at once in terms of the module being offered to our colleagues in TU Dublin, the transition into being a technological university and also the sudden change to online that occurred during semester two this year. We had all along planned to research the experience of our participants and how their identities might be shifting towards becoming digital educators and obviously that became quite nuanced and quite different with the pivot online this semester. But we did want to look at this, the sense of teaching identity, conceptualization of being a digital educator during and after the module and to use that analysis to consider digital capacity and how we would navigate the challenges that would face us which of course are now somewhat different to how we might have imagined this time last year. Equally it was a research challenge. So when you're trying to frame questions about what might have changed during the past semester, it's just so obvious what's changed. We've moved online, we've had this online pivot and you're trying to design questions to research with people that don't automatically keep defaulting to that. We were also now all working remotely and trying to conduct research remotely with staff under huge pressure. We were also under a lot of time pressure ourselves. So we're holding our hands up here to say that in the session outline you'll have seen mention of semi-structured interviews. We actually had to change that to a questionnaire format. So what we did in the end was write a very detailed open-ended set of questions hoping people would respond to those but we also set it up such that they could respond verbally and record a response if they didn't have time to be typing and hopefully we would have got more rich data through doing that. So we had six responses from a cohort of 14 participants. Five went with the text option. They did actually write quite a lot so we got some good rich data from there and one person did the voice recording option. But the questionnaire is still open so we're hopeful we still might have some further responses to it. In a nutshell then just to give an overview of the responses we had three people who took the module on a standalone basis for continuing professional development. We had three people who were participants in our MSc education. A little bit surprising was the amount of teaching experience because we had early career people in the module but all of the respondents had at least 11 years teaching experience. We had two external participants. The rest were from within TU Dublin but from two different faculties and they gave the usual kinds of reasons you might expect for participating in a module like this to update, to be contemporary in their skills, to be more creative in how they were using technology. So we did acknowledge the campus closure in the questions and we asked them to comment on what kinds of changes they'd experienced and as you might expect and as we expected they all reported a rapid move to online teaching, learning and assessment during the past number of months. But within that there were some indications of innovation. It's just very difficult for us to pin those down and to disentangle them from the pivot online. So we can't really attribute those to the digital education module and things they were learning and they didn't attribute them to that either. It's not very straightforward. But there are people talking about planning for activities rather than just delivering lectures online. One person talking about this big change to a large physical exam hall with 2000 students and they actually go on to say they're going to keep that change no matter what happens in the future. One person was directed not to teach synchronously online which is very interesting to read. So they were teaching asynchronously but they then activated email and chat channels for other reasons, sort of more pastoral reasons to see how the students were getting on, how were they covered the whole of COVID-19 as they put it here. We did have a closed question there to ask what had influence changes in their practices apart from the move online. Again, this was a real struggle to try and frame a question like this because really how do you get away from the pandemic and the pivot? But what's interesting here is that they tend to be focusing on the students. So we see students' needs and requirements. Everybody checked that box. They did mention the module obviously as well but what's most striking perhaps out of this set of results is the lack of mention of other colleagues. There's a sense in emerging in the data of people working on their own and working in isolation and their colleagues not really influencing changes in their practice but at the upper level when it comes to management and the institution that influences there but perhaps not in the day-to-day with their other colleagues. When we asked them about pivoting to online during the module and again we were trying to work out what was happening and why we did see them commenting on having increased confidence supported by participating in the module but the move online was by necessity. It wasn't by choice and we know this. We're realistic about this. They wouldn't necessarily have moved online without the pivot but they did feel more confident in the choices they were making and we have comments here like I didn't think my stuff was inferior to what I was seeing and now feeling more confident going into September. So a little bit of a mixed response but confidence is there perhaps more so than learning particular skills. We tried to get a sense of what their students' experiences were at this time with all the change going on. Again a sense of positive responses that students got on okay. They were saying well we did put a lot of extra accommodations in there for them. Somebody commenting that we did have an existing relationship. We had social relations set up with the students. If they weren't there it would have been much more difficult. People reporting good attendance but on the other hand it's a captive audience they were locked down. They literally couldn't do anything else. And one person highlighting digital literacy is saying well yes we kind of expect students to be very at home with all of this. They're cottoned onto it but actually that's not the case and we know that that's not the case. So that's maybe highlighting things we might be more concerned about now. The immediate first wave is over so to speak. So we did try to get into this business of identity a little bit with them in the questions did they conceive of themselves as digital educators? Would they perhaps think more about that in a few years time? Mixed responses here. I think probably we were reflecting when we analysed this data that it's sort of too soon to say we all need more time to reflect on this and on the impact of everything we've experienced over the past number of months. So perhaps we were a little naive and expecting to see very definitive answers here at this point. Three of them did say yes. They considered themselves digital educators. One said no just skimming the surface. Then some mixed views coming through. So this person says a semi-semi-digital educator. It's changing so much all the time. Someone else saying well it's all around us anyway we should be able to deal with this as educators and we should just get on with it. But the last comment on the slide hopefully you can see there is somebody saying I didn't see myself as an educator kind of anyway. I didn't go into teaching. I had two other careers before I came to TU Dublin. And I think this is something that's interesting for us when we think about identity in the institutes of technology and the technological university sector in Ireland and beyond that people are overtly juggling identities. So it's not hidden away that they have more than one identity. There are professionals coming in from industry and from professional fields to teach. And digital is another identity that's now coming into the mix for them which again makes for more complexity around developing digital capacity and the agency that they might feel around digital. We asked them what would they keep after all this and of course we're going into a new normal where we're not going back to how things were but nonetheless there were some interesting comments here and again pointing to how digital capacity would be crucial really for their ongoing development. A nice piece there just highlighted at the top somebody saying there's no way back now another person saying I will be teaching online I am going to continue delivering these exams online not these 2000 students in a room but that other factor is going to influence how that goes institutional and organisational factors buy-in from staff and students time needed to prepare the quality assurance site if the students achieve the learning outcomes will continue but that has a bearing on things. We went back then to this issue of interaction with colleagues and the feeling that perhaps isolation is part of all this we were socially isolated we're physically distant anyway at the moment that does seem to be affecting the interaction between these participants and their immediate colleagues on the ground so to speak that they would have seen every day in the ordinary course so they're continuing their kind of admin type meetings and for one person they're saying the meetings are actually going better online so we'd like to unpack we might get to talk to them more about that but other people feeling that they're kind of on their own and they're sensing an unevenness of experiences amongst their program teams amongst their immediate set of colleagues the technology you know very dependent on how colleagues engage with it you think sometimes people are very oriented towards it then you find out they're not as oriented as you thought they were the issues haven't been with the technology itself but with the transition to online teaching and feelings of isolation and a lack of engagement are being highlighted there so the implications of our research have threaded at this stage into three themes complexity, identity and change I mean first of all we now realise it's very early to try to draw very many conclusions or maybe any conclusions about the effectiveness of a digital education module that happens in tandem with a pandemic and a pivot to online but that in turn signals to all of us I think the complexity of educational research at this time and we were warned early on in the pandemic Martin Weller had a really good blog post about this but you know this isn't an experiment that's been designed this is very messy this is a research context that is what it is not what we would want it to be and that means we can do research but we have to accept the messiness and the complexity of it we may need different methodological approaches and multi-dimensional analysis of what's going on we also have to acknowledge our own uncertainty we're very uncertain about all of it so are our participants and so are their own students we can see however this emerging trend that maybe some online and blended learning is here to stay and we're not going to go back to how we were and that opens up a complex question for our sector because the teaching contract is based on face to face at the moment that's black and white in print so that's something that's going to raise questions down the line we do see this sense of isolation amongst practitioners teaching is isolating at the best of times very often but now with the campus closure that's very emphasised and that did come through perhaps to a surprising extent in this small data set that they did see perhaps not affected by their colleagues more focused on their students and identity changes are going to be more difficult more complex to trace over time and this is implication for change thanks on the time check so changes have been driven by necessity for now but there is also the consciousness of institution and organisational culture there and a challenge for leadership and we have to recognise leaders are isolated off campus at the moment and I suppose one of the things we would be asking as our campus is reopening gradually now is how leaders can support programme teams the culture programme teams and collegial working to develop a digital capacity to reduce isolation and the unevenness of the experience and approaches to digital as we start to reopen so we are going to continue with this work further research with our participants and to develop a paper out of these findings and we do hope to run the module again soon we're not sure if it will be in the current academic year that's about to start or later but we do hope to run again soon with it we do welcome your comments and if we have a couple of minutes for discussion that would be great we had a couple of questions in mind here what can our leaders do what can we do to show leadership in our individual capacities and how do we manage the research challenge at this time so we maybe come back to those but in the meantime we just want to say thank you for listening and to give you our contacts we'd be delighted to talk with people about this absolutely fantastic presentation thank you so much for that we have got time for one or two questions if anybody has any you can post them in the chat or you can raise your hand and we can activate your mic for you so that you can ask them directly so I'll just give people a moment to possibly type a question into the chat box okay we've got a question from Tom if I could ask my colleague Martin if you could please activate Tom's microphone for me there we go Tom cheers thanks Claire well done you were saying there that management in vast majority colleges are all now working remotely and I think it would be fair to say that they've been exposed to technology that they never did know really much about before in many cases and two they might then simply consider online just to be in a time of webinar and not appreciate it a lot of other things out there I don't know if that question makes sense are you going to see it oversimplified and just see it as sticking someone from the camera I certainly think we're seeing that challenge and it's out there amongst the lecturers in general as well there's the inbuilt assumption that we go to webinar format and synchronous and one of the things we've tried to do over the summer and Anna will comment further on this I'm sure is to put a lot of material out there and we're doing a lot on our website at the minute to say you know asynchronous we really need to look at asynchronous at this time and not to jump straight in there because and it's so hard I mean I think if we look at theory around this and how technology mediates practice you can't short circuit those steps and yet we're trying to move to quite a sophisticated way of providing for learners without all those steps where you play and you practice with it for quite a while before you do that Anna do you want to come in there as well yeah thank you so much and I just good at the interactivity dimension I think that going through asynchronous activities but at the same time with an interactive dimension I mean how students can be actively part of their own process of learning through technology is something that we really really need to reach yeah thanks for the comments in the chat there for my housework Tom and also this very useful paper I'm sure people have seen by Emily Nordman and colleagues including our own Micah Siri who was at at DIT and to Dublin but now is working in Edinburgh really trying to support colleagues with a temporary pivot and now that we're out of the emergency phase and going to asynchronous blending appropriately with synchronous because all the reasons where I think we're well aware of I just want to take the Scott thought saying that synchronous general not suitable or scalable but the thing is not only that if it is scalable or not the thing is what kind of quality of learning we want to deliver to our students how can we define a better way to use technology for their learning so I think that we need to work a lot in this in this level of the discussion thank you an excellent question there that got lots of input so I think that brings us to the end of our first presentation