 So hello everybody and a very warm welcome to ALT's first virtual summer summit. I'm Mara Diebbel, I'm ALT's chief executive and I've got the sad duty this year to cancel ALT's first annual conference, to be the first CEO to do that, but in return I have the pleasure of also being able to open ALT's first virtual summer summit and we have a wonderful opening panel for you today. Now before I hand over to ALT's chair Helen O'Sullivan, who is going to walk us through this panel and chair and hopefully exciting debate, I just wanted to do a few quick housekeeping announcements as part of our welcome. So usually if you look at our hashtag in late August and September you'd hopefully see signs of a big vibrant conference, but this year nothing is normal and we've had to pivot very quickly to bring hopefully a useful event to bring our community together at this time of crisis, but also to help prepare useful resources and a useful forum to prepare for the next academic year. We are championing learning technologists across all sectors at a time of crisis and care and complexity and I'm so thrilled that we're able to welcome 275 participants from over 25 countries and since we made these opening signs this morning we've had more registrations come in so hopefully by tomorrow we might be welcoming 300 people. Now there is a little bit of participation now as I wanted to say hello to some of the different countries represented here at the summit this year. Half of our delegates are from the UK so hopefully wherever you are joining us from, whether it is from underneath an umbrella in Kendall or from your desk at home somewhere across the world, if you can give us a wave if you're participating from the UK you can also use the summit hashtags hashtag all see hashtag all see summit to give us a wave on Twitter. If you're joining us from Ireland where nearly 13% of our participants are from big wave to you as well 10% of our delegates come from Canada so hello to our Canadian friends then about 5% from the United States very warm welcome and also 4% from Australia. Participants also from Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Egypt, hello France, Hong Kong, Iran, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Korea, Mexico, Qatar, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden and Turkey and also Uruguay so it's fantastic to see such an international participation in our first ever virtual summit. This morning we started with some asynchronous sessions and in one of them we asked our participants to in three words describe how the last few months have been. I'm just going to pause here for a moment and give you a chance to read thanks to our sponsors Feevox what people answered in the word cloud today. Challenging times indeed for everyone in learning technology and you all deserve extra thanks for how coming to the summit and making it today. Now virtual conferencing just like face-to-face conferencing brings its challenges and while you might be able to find the Wi-Fi password in your own home or wherever you're joining us from there are certainly things that you might need help with so help us at hand and as well as a lot of online resources you can also get help in a number of other ways including calling us, emailing us, asking us on Twitter so please do make yourself available if you need any help. Now behind the scenes we wanted to share with you what it actually looks like when you run a big international conference with six mostly part-time staff from home in the middle of a pandemic where you're working with pets and family members and many many screens to make this virtual summit happen. So I wanted to give a big shout out to all of our colleagues who've been working hard these last few months to pull this together. Our Emma Jane, our events manager who's our troop leader and quiz mistress for tonight's quiz. Martin Hawksy who needs no introduction and who can only be described as mission control for all virtual and face-to-face events. Debbie Buff who normally leads on membership and professional development but who's also our guest here and chief welcome her today. And as Fiona Jones who is our lead Twitter looks out for our Twitter account who will moderate many of our webinars and also makes our press releases. And Jane Frankel who looks after the help desk so she will be responding to many of your inquiries, helps participants and she has the money. So if you owe us money you will hear from Jane. And there's me. I'm the executive troubleshooter during this event and also hopefully tonight for the first time a very reluctant curry OERK participant. So thank you for joining us at all see at the summer summit the first one of its kind and please put your hands together and find the clap emoji because I'm hoping that we can give a really rousing welcome to Helen O'Sullivan our chair. Helen over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Marin. That's really exciting. I'm seeing all the claps coming up. It's really weird and very exciting at the same time. So thank you very much, Marin. You know, she said it's sad that we can't all be meeting in person for the usual conference this year. But this online summer summit is just fantastic. You know, there's so much interesting stuff going on. We've got contributors from all over the world, participants from all over the world and in many ways as we're all finding in these these times of mostly online. There are some advantages to this. So, you know, participation from people wouldn't normally be able to come. Contributions from people wouldn't normally be available. So we've got a fantastic set of sessions here over the next couple of days. And I'm really looking forward to it. I'm not sure I'll be participating in karaoke, but you know, never say never. So this is the first session. And I'm really looking forward to hearing what our formalists have got to say. And the title, obviously, the summit this year is is learning technology in times of crisis care and complexity. And we're starting off with a strategic view. And we've got four really experienced panel members who are leading learning technology across the sector. But more importantly, I think for this session, they're at the sharp end of leading the crisis response over the last few months in their own organization. So what we're going to do is we're going to hear from each of the four panel members, just opening remarks, and then we're going to open it up for questions. And what we're going to try and do is is keep an eye on the chat. And we'll help with that as well. And if you've got a particular question, if you could put a cue before your response in the chat, that would be great. But also, because only one panelist will be speaking at any one time, the other panelists will be looking at the chat and will be responding to anything that comes along as when they can. So if comments or other questions, please feel free to put those in. So we'll hear from each of our panelists, and then we'll open it up to a bit of Q&A. So without further ado, I want to start by welcoming Melissa Heighton, who's Assistant Principal and Director of Learning Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh. So over to you, Melissa. Hello, Helen and Marin, thank you for the welcome. It's lovely to be part of this panel. And lovely to see everybody or to know that we're all together in this online place, even if we can't be together in a physical place. It was last year, you were all here in Edinburgh, and that picture that Marin put up of us all together in McEwen Hall. That was a lovely event. And I'm sure that this will also be lovely. And I remember that in 2018, at the conference in Manchester, I did a presentation. And its title was Next Expect Locusts. And it was about the importance of business continuity planning in the face of big challenges that might beset universities. Obviously, little did I know. So here we are at a time of uncertainty around the return of students and staff to campuses, and the long term impact of major social behavioral change. Some institutions are facing an existential threat, or at least a major rethink about size and shape and funding and what our business really is. And I think that the it's vital that learning technologists at all levels in the universities, take some time, if we can, in this rush to think about how our services and support and how we evaluate what we do will need to change. I think that the strength of our partnerships with academic colleagues, and our partnerships with vendors and platforms is being tested under extreme conditions at the moment, as is our capacity and capability to work remotely from home. And the policy environment is changing. So accessibility and inclusion, and we are, and assessment and e safety and care online in our institutions has suddenly become much more important. And the role of the learning technologist has become the sexiest job in it with everyone so interested in what we do, what we know, how we do it. And I think that when we come to write our semalt portfolios this year, and reflect on the critical incidents, we will be thinking about our core values, our specialist areas, and the way that we worked as a community in our separate institutions, but as part of a whole sector, to try to save students from bad e learning on a biblical scale. So since I get to go first on this panel, I'm just going to talk about so at a time of crisis caring complexity what I did first. And for me, the immediate strategic priority was to look after the people, the people who are the learning technologists in my organization. And I think we're going to hear over the two days, lots of examples and lots of explanations and stories of the way people have dealt with this learning technology emergency. But since I get to go first, I'm going to start with what I did first, which really was just about keeping our staff safe, keeping them in jobs, and then channeling all of our resources into surviving this flood of demand on our services. And I've written a guest post for the old blog about this, it's called growing your own learning technologists. And if that's useful to anybody, in terms of making a case to senior management, please do have a look at it. But also, let me know. So for me, and I think for many digital leaders, the immediate priority is to think about your staff. And as soon as we had all moved safely home, it was very clear that the university was going to have an ongoing need for learning technologists. So we immediately moved as many colleagues onto permanent contracts as we could, because the whole feeling as to what was going to happen in the university and the precarity of some of us in our roles was very important, I wanted to remove that uncertainty for the staff in my organization. And we set about upskilling and reskilling and growing our own in-house to be in the best shape we could to support the institution. And the institution is an ancient and interesting place. But we certainly needed a strategy to create a lot of learning technologists fast. And as well as advertising new posts, and there were many posts advertised, it was great to see so many universities investing in their learning technologists. I was particularly interested in looking within the organization to see where we could find new resource. I'm just going to talk about a couple things that we did. One of the things I think that's important to a strategic institution level is to look at who you already have in your IT sector within the organization. So for us, during lockdown, it quickly became clear that some of the staff who work in IT in libraries and museums couldn't do their roles from home. And sometimes that's true for whole teams. So particularly the teams who manage the library shelves, the museums who do the AV fit out in the rooms, people who staff help desks. And one of the things that we did with that group of people rather than putting them on furlough was to actually try to train and upskill and develop those people in house to become junior learning technologists, starter learning technologists, who perhaps some of them will be able to continue as learning technologists. And so perhaps we've created a bit of a pipeline. But certainly in terms of welcoming people, a group of people into our area of work that I think meant that they are had something that they were able to do during lockdown, but also has been made our community very vibrant in terms of explaining what we do and what kind of support we thought the institution would need and embracing the skills that that group of people brought to the discussion. So I think that that reskilling in house and investing in the future is a big part of what we do in this community of learning technologists and alt, of course, provided us with many tools in terms of the Seamalt structure, the explanations as to what learning technologists do, what our role in institutions should be. And that has been really useful for University of Edinburgh. So I would be really interested to hear whether other people have found their institutions doing any of that same kind of stuff. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, I'm just putting my video back on again. Sorry, I can't speak and click buttons at the same time. Thank you, Melissa. That was really, really interesting. I like that idea of reskilling and upskilling other staff. That's that's a fantastic thing to have done. So moving on to Osama, who is, as some of you will have spotted earlier, doing an outside roll cut for us from Kendall in the Lake District. So we're all hoping for it. So over to you obviously as a senior leader in the organisation, you'll have had quite a significant role in managing this crisis. So happy to hear some thoughts from you. Thank you very much, Helen and all the colleagues in ALT for having me here. And it's so lovely. I know that I'm virtually with you, but I do feel the presence of a lot of us enthusiastic about technology enhanced learning. Little did I know when I took on the role of a pro vice chancellor learning and teaching at Surrey back in December 19 that there will be a pandemic in three months time. So, you know, within the PVC learning and teaching world, we pretty much basically it's a common curse that I curse you to be a PVC education in the in in a pandemic situation. You know, those are obviously large hearted notes, because I do believe that, you know, we should never face anything like that ever in our lifetime in terms of the deadly nature of this crisis. But on the other hand, if there are little hopes, dimmer of hopes of change and transformation, I really think that this is the conference of the platform where we can share some of this glimmer of hope that we have seen through this crisis situation. So I'm going to go through a few things that are I thought were instrumental in moving to the University of Surrey. So the first thing that I remember doing that was probably second or third March 2019. I formed a team called an online learning team. Now, of course, we do have a learning technology team, a Department of Technology, enhanced learning and a Department of Higher Education. But what I meant by the online learning team is six academics who are from three different faculties. The librarians are learning technologies, education department coming together as a scrum and sprint team. And since then, they have been meeting on a weekly basis, sometimes twice or twice, where we through challenge at them, they come up with a solution. As an academic, I'm from finance background. I taught finance in the business school. Little did I know about computer coding, but I learned a lot through the project management that scrum and sprint is a good way of solving issues. And the pandemic has been so uncertain and it has been there has been so many moving parts, particularly the government didn't help. They were changing the policies on a regular basis. So looking down the university and then right now trying to open it has always been an uncertain situation. And this online team has really helped our learning technologies. If you give this kind of crisis to only to our learning technologies, it would be a mammoth task. And I do worry about their well being like Melissa mentioned. So I did the same thing, put forward all the permanent contract that was not permanent, and then gave them that support through the online learning, which has really helped. The other question people tend to ask me that, you know, how to transform. I give these anecdotes to my friends and family who are not in academia. I basically tell them that if you ask Tesco that you have seven days time, even less. And within that time, you need to transform your business model from store based selling to completely like Amazon online selling. That's exactly what we did as a sector. So as much as we are puzzled, there is something to celebrate for us. This shows how resilient, how perseverant our community has been together. And one thing I learned in this process that when you are managing crisis like that, or when you are managing transformation of the scale, the few things that you really need to be clear about. Number one, the instruction and the principles needs to be very clear. I know that some of us are very passionate about our educational research, and we try to point out the literature. There is time for that when we evaluate the situation that we faced in pandemic. But what I would say that give our academic community very clear instruction. Remember one thing that we are in unprecedented amount of uncertainty that is already there. As a leader, I felt like my job is to provide for the certainty I can provide. Now that is quite difficult. I'm sure Helen will agree with me that as a leader, sometimes we take decisions and sometimes we feel like that maybe that decision is not right, but you just have to stick to it. Because the community look up to you for direction. And that's another thing all of us as leaders can play a role, is provide that direction. What am I going to take out of this pandemic transformation that we have done? So we have created a principles of hybrid education. We're doing some research on that as well, alongside implementing hybrid. I think we would like to keep hybrid education in the longer term. That basically means that we have the flexibility and delivery that our students want. There are some anecdotal evidence that some students are actually surviving out of online education, which is there as well. But I do worry about those people who need social interaction. After all, we're human being. Social constructivism is in our DNA. So we have to make sure we interact. Like when we were meeting just before this conference, we were having chit chat. In a typical physical conference, we would have had the conversation with the neighbors. So just keep those things together, but I will definitely carry on doing the TED talk style lecture capture as much as possible because they're really helpful for students. Meetings virtually, conference virtually if possible, and a blended approach where students can choose how they're going to engage with education. One last thing I would say nothing to do with learning technology, but I genuinely think that we need to rethink about campus model. These roles of offices that the professors and the lecturers hold, the roles of offices or banks of offices or professional services hold. What can we do about them? How can we utilize the space for learning? Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Osma. I certainly do share some of those comments about sometimes feeling quite lonely and a little bit trepidatious about making some really significant decisions and trying to keep the consistency there. OK, let's move and hand over to Simon. Simon is at Liverpool University. A slightly different role and a slightly different take, but be interesting to hear where you've got similarities or differences with your the approach you've been taking. Good morning, everybody. Hopefully you can hear me OK. Take that as a nod, Greg. I was trying to think back to where this started. I remember on Friday, the 3rd of March, the team that I lead in the Centre for Innovation Education actually were implementing our business continuity plan for working off site, who spent a whole day working remotely. Little did I know that a week later that would become our standard norm. So we didn't, like many of you, have much practice at this. It was something that was forced upon us in a moment of crisis. And all of our staff across the institution and many institutions have had to kind of deal with that very quickly. And I suppose what it demonstrated to me is that actually all of the digital training that we give to staff and all of trying to equip them in digital fluency is actually nothing like the real thing is to get people moving and changing and thinking about their practice. So although the whole experience is obviously put us in a moment of crisis, I'd like to think there are moments of positivity and that have emerged from this. The first thing I want to do is to say to our community, now is our time maybe to take a breath because, you know, I think as a community and as a group of experts and practitioners, we have been amazing. I could probably do with giving ourselves a well deserved path on the back. And no doubt we'll have many stories to tell from this experience when we do actually come back together at the next old conference. I also think this is perhaps our moment to shine. And I've written a lot about learning technologists and I did a series of blog posts with some colleagues around what is the role of learning technologists. But I think this is the moment and Helen picked up in the chat earlier that the conference when it was at Liverpool was all about learning technologists coming of age. And I think this is the moment that we have really come of age as a role, as a community demonstrating our real value, because often that can be quite challenging. Demonstrating value in the kind of work that we're doing on a daily basis. We all know that it's really valuable, but it's really difficult strategically in an institution and to always get that recognition. And I think finally, there has been a recognition of the roles that we play in supporting our staff to be able to move quickly and adapt to make the very best use of digital tools appropriately and learning and teaching. And I think this is our opportunity really to shine. And you can see that through the growth of the digital learning technology roles that have emerged. This number in the sector are recruiting to these roles at pace. And I suppose that's a real strength now to say these are really legitimate roles in an academic environment. And we need these roles to be able to deal with the kind of hybrid environment that Osama just kind of alluded to. I think finally, people are starting to get what we do. And it's not just about digital skills. It's much more than that. It's about the marriage between learning, teaching and digital. And I think this is where our real strength lies. You know, all I can talk about is the University of Liverpool experience. But all I can say is that our staff have been amazing. They have really stepped up to this challenge. And I mean the staff within the centre of that lead, but also across the institution, I think staff have generally really stepped up to this challenge. First of all, quickly switching to a remote teaching environment. And now as we kind of put in place more longer term strategic approaches, adapting and shifting their curriculum and their pedagogy to meet the new environment that we will all have to work in in September. In terms of the centre, what we did is we very quickly pulled together a whole online asynchronous resource to help people move to what we've called our hybrid active learning model. It's called Howl. If you remember the the film 2000, you can see Helen drowning there. So yeah, it's called Howl, but obviously HAL. Although some people might feel it's a little bit HAL. But I think ultimately what we've tried to do there is we tried to build on our strengths. And I think when we were thinking through what a version of our curriculum might look like, it is in a hybrid mode, but it builds upon the strengths around active learning that we're already embedding across the institution. So what we've asked our academic staff really to do and what we're doing at the moment, colleagues in CIE are really under pressure to support this. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to get our academic colleagues to think about three different modes of teaching. We are planning some face to face on campus teaching as our many institutions. And I think we fear if our students particularly want that interaction. So they'll be planning for some of that activity. We also then the other mode is online asynchronous and online asynchronous. And the analogy that we quite often use is if you imagine you have a hybrid vehicle and you think about the journey that you want to take with that vehicle, you make a decision about whether you're going to use the electric motor or you're going to use the combustion engine. And what we're asking our staff to do is to think about, yeah, what is really going to work best in each of those three modes? And I think for me, what's really, really interesting is not necessarily the online, but us really having to think about what we value as face to face, because we really are going to have to limit our face to face interactions. But they are going to have to be really, really valuable. And they're going to have to be really, really purposeful. So I think actually the biggest challenge is, yeah, what are we going to do with our face to face time? So that it's worthwhile for our students to be on campus for that time, and that we make real sense of being together in a physical occasion. There are also other challenges around moving into online, but I would honestly say that I think the majority of our staff have adapted to remote working and working in digital and online spaces exceedingly well. Without there, I'd say, a lot of digital training. So it also questions to me in times of my role, the value that we place on training in digital, where actually, maybe it should be more about scenario building, experiences around using technologies in certain scenarios. And I think learning technologies have a really, really important role to play in the short term for that, but also in the longer term as well. Thank you. Thank you, Simon. Funny you should mention that that conference in Liverpool. I was talking to Pete Olston, who's the co-chair with me at that conference, and we said we should have we should have trademarks the new normal. Could have made a lot of money. But thank you. And finally, Dave, if you'd like to talk us through some of your opening comments and observations on this, these interesting times. OK, yes, happy to. So first of all, a big shout out to UAL College colleagues who are in the room. It's a good turn out today. That's lovely to see and people that I've been working very, very closely with. So I just wanted to start with a quick question to the room, which is you can answer that. Well, we'll just answer this. Yes or no in the chat is let's get this right way up. Have you found that your institution has become more collaborative over lockdown? Yes or no? OK, so we've got we've got broadly yeses and a few noes, which is interesting. And I think that highlights one really important thing that is that in terms of caring and complexity, people have very have had very distinct experiences of this time. Certainly our students have. And we I think what we found we we undertook a really lightweight survey with staff and students in June about their experiences of of of covid and teaching and learning. And what's clear is that students experience is very massively depending on their personal circumstances, you know, what kind of living environment they're in, what the connections like. We know we've got students who've been undertaking the whole of their undergraduate degree, only using a mobile phone, for example. But actually managing it, but it's not ideal. So I think it's the same to a certain extent, it'll be the same in terms of staff as well. But my overall experience from the point of view of UAL is being that there was as soon as lockdown hit, there was this there was this just really, really heartening collaboration that took place very, very quickly. Everybody pulled together. And I think it's it's partly because the the covid was like a non-negotiable challenge. We didn't have to have a long conversation about what about whether it was important. It was just something we had to deal with. And given that, we saw a collaboration across, you know, the digital learning teams in each of our colleges, because of six different colleges, I.T. Registry, attainment, inclusivity, disability. And so a lot of the sort of emergency guidance and staff training that we provided was covered all of those different things in a in a more integrated way than perhaps done before. So yeah, Jane, is that question of silos, new silos or old silos? But I think certainly immediate response, it felt like the silos kind of fell away, which I which I think was really important. And I think many colleagues on that really exhilarating, even though it was a challenging time. So just quickly, I think what we've found is that students I think what would be interesting for certainly for me is that students because I want to talk about students for a second. It was clear that that certainly undergrads can conception of what university is is more cultural than it is pedagogical, which is fair enough and cultural in the sense of a cultural experience. And that's especially the case for us being sort of groovy up, which is in London and also cultural in terms of cultural capital. And so and an awful lot of that conceptualization is around the building, the physicality of the institution, which is amplified to a certain extent in our case, because we have so many making subjects and obviously, you know, depending on the nature of the course and how much it was focused around physical making practices, different students would have different experiences. And what I see coming out of research that we've been doing, institutional research that we're doing is that some of what students are calling for is a reflection of that cultural conception of the institution. So, you know, synchronous sessions, recording of lectures, and also community. So these are things that, you know, these are things that are very much sort of hard wired into the into the physical nature of the institution. But not necessarily everything we could be doing pedagogically online. So because it all happened so quickly, I think one of the big challenges is is introducing forms of online pedagogy, which don't just sort of practice mirror face to face pedagogy. Now, it's obviously it's fair that we would start there. It's perfectly reasonable. So the question for me going forward is how we can extend that. We put on we created specific guidance in lockdown very quickly. Within three weeks, we had an online staff development program that I think we had 750 members of staff through just in one week just before Easter. So the demand was huge. And as soon as term started, that demand dropped off because people turn around and just started teaching and engaging with their students. So I think there's some really important things to consider. And a lot of them for me in terms of care, not only with the students is in terms of the staff. I mean, you saw from Marilyn's sort of word cloud there that you've got things like, you know, exhausting and fatigue and challenging and things like that. And I think that's partly because staff was so keen to do as good a job that they could. We've seen as lots more one to one tutorials as a way of responding to the crisis, which obviously students love. But there's some really interesting questions about how sustainable that is when you're in a massified system. And so I think one of the things sort of moving forwards is how can we take the best of what's been going on online, but make it more sustainable for staff. Because we're, you know, as institutions, I don't think we necessarily geared to be doing the best of online and the best of face to face. I think that's going to take a lot of regearing. We've we've just recently advertised seven new full time posts for people in quite senior digital learning roles. So we're we're looking at it from that perspective. But I think more broadly, there's a real question because I think and I'll just finish here is that going into the autumn term, my feeling is that students that their expectations are going to be absolutely maxed out. They're going to want the best of what they've seen online and the face to face potentially. And I think they're going to want everything that ever happens anywhere recorded and placed somewhere. And there's a big question as to, you know, how well placed are we to respond to those expectations. And I think those expectations really only mirror what we've been hoping for in that in in the sort of online learning, digital learning community for years. But now there's a big challenge for our institutions to actually structure themselves around those expectations. And I really hope that we can do that and not sort of slide back to online being something that supports face to face. I think if this is going to work, then online is going to have to be considered a central part of the offer fundamental to the offer. And we need to communicate that to students as well. So yeah, I'll stop there. Thank you. Thanks, Dave. OK, so I've been having a look at the chat and we've got some questions coming in and I'm going to direct them to particular panel members and we've probably got about quarter an hour left. So if I could if I get one question into each of you, we're going to have to be quite brief with the question. So apologies for that. So that the first question that I wanted to ask Melissa. So it comes from Matt East and it's like, will this last? You know, there's been a lot of change and a lot of loosening up of bureaucracy, but to what extent are we going to fall back to all practice, especially around the bureaucracy and I understand probably where that's coming from. Melissa, if you how are you managing to kind of hard wire in the change at Edinburgh? Well, so the working home is going to stay for a large part of the institution. I think so that will stay for some time. And so the need to be doing teaching, using technology tools is not going to go away. I think the more serious structural issues. Yes, I think that a focus on accessibility. I think that's going to change enormously. That used to be something we couldn't get many people interested in. And that will change. I think that, as Dave said, we aren't in a position where for many of our colleagues, they are just trying to replicate what used to happen face to face online, which is something that we as those of us who are interested in online pedagogy have always said, isn't, you know, isn't properly at taking advantage of what digital education can be. I suppose at Edinburgh we're very lucky in that we have quite a portfolio of online courses and a strength in research and digital education. So again, as Dave and Simon said, the importance of staff development suddenly became really clear. And we rolled out programs of staff development that hundreds and hundreds of academic colleagues who had never been anywhere near this before now came along to. So that should, if our if our teaching is any good, that should have changed the way people think about this topic. And if the models that we taught on those courses and the technology that we provide is good, then I suppose that's part of the impact. What did we train them to do? And did we instill in them hunger for more knowledge about how to do this differently? I also was interested in Dave's question about collaboration. And I think that one of the things we're seeing is a shift in the way that the universities in the same city or the universities in cities are thinking about themselves as part of the wider population of the geographic area. So whether that's because we're working from home and we're thinking more locally. But it's become town and gown and face mask now. So certainly in the city of Edinburgh, with the fringe cancelled and the festival cancelled, the four universities are having to work together to think about how we reassured the city that when we are the main reason why a huge migration of people from all over the country and all over the world will be coming into the city of Edinburgh, what our responsibility to show that we know what we're doing is and part of that is about showing that we understand about the pedagogy but also about our role and our civic role in the city. Thank you. Yes, that's that's a really important point, isn't it from local relations point of view. So yes, a lot of people coming to Edinburgh in a few weeks time and Simon if I can turn to you and Julian had picked up as as I your interest in remarks about scenario building and would like to hear a little bit more. I thought it was really interesting the way that I kind of where you're coming from about the digital skills development and certainly at Keel, one of the things we've had lots and lots of requests for is just show me what this looks like, you know, show me how I can do this. And that's exactly the approach we've been taking as well. So just can you just just elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, of course, I think this is about demonstrating what digital tools look like in practice. It's the reality. I think there's a danger sometimes that way institutions deploy technology, staff go on training or development and what in effect happens is they learn how to push buttons and learn where menus are and things like that. And they might get the fundamentals of this system. This is how you do things with it. Actually, what they're really looking for are examples of the use of that in practice. So as part of this hybrid active learning model, we've actually generated case studies very quickly from academic staff using different technologies in their pedagogic practice. And I think staff have really welcomed that the idea of being able to see what these technologies and digital tools look like within the context of learning and teaching. And I think those scenarios is something that we're certainly wanting to explore more of. So we've got a much broader range of examples of people actually using these tools. Let's take Microsoft Teams as an example. You could probably list 50 to 100 ways that you can use Microsoft Teams within a learning and teaching context. But it's very difficult to understand what that looks like unless somebody is actually showing it to you because the reality is that you have to have a really deep understanding of the technology to be able to make the very best use of it. And also you have to have a real sense of your pedagogic approaches in order to be able to marry those two together. So I think what I'm talking about here is small example scenarios of how technology is used in the context of the discipline or in the context of learning and teaching activity rather than here's Microsoft Teams. Well, here's a list of 100 things you might do with it. But actually, here's some real examples of what people have done with it. And this is what those staff and students think. Thank you. Yeah, but I think that's really, really important showing the answer to the possible. There's a couple of questions here that are linked that I'm going to ask Dave to reply to because you started to hint at them in your in your question. One is from Cheryl Mayer, which is how have institutions been dealing with improved accessibility and inclusion issues? And then one from Sarah Chesney. Do we know yet how well students have adapted to the change, practical as well as emotional? And I suppose added to that in your three minutes is have we got any anecdotal evidence of groups of students who are actually thriving under these conditions? We've got some. So our first pass at the data at Keel shows that our awarding gaps have significantly, significantly shrunk, especially between black and white and BAME and white students and students with disabilities and without. So something that we're doing is obviously around assessment has really helped with those with with different types of students. So I just wondered if you've got any reflections on how that's going? Yeah, I mean, we're seeing similar things. I think it depends on the students. I think it depends on that what their experience of on site teaching is. So a very broad way of thinking about this is to us to not imagine that on site teaching worked fine and was completely inclusive and work for everybody. Actually, on sites teaching privilege certain types of students, certain groups of students. It's healthy to be a little bit wealthier so you can live close to campus, et cetera, et cetera. There are loads of different factors. So I think we're probably in a situation whereby students have different requirements, different needs, whether that's part of the general flow of teaching and learning or whether that's to do with disability, ethnicity and the on site teaching place, you know, helps with some of those needs hinders some of them and the same with online and therefore what we need to do is to make sure that that mix. I think a really key thing I just want to pick up on something that Peter Bryant was mentioning is that I think is really important for this community sort of going into the future is to kind of mitigate that potential hustle between face-to-face and online. You know, nobody wanted to go fully online. I didn't want to go fully online. That was COVID. And but yet here we are and that's helped with continuity. And so I think really strong messages around how online as Simon mentioned this, how online is not fighting face-to-face, but actually it's freeing face-to-face to be everything that it can be. My hope is that what will happen is that face-to-face will be seen as the very, very, very spacious and luxurious thing that it is and used accordingly. So then just one last on this is that I think something that's really intriguing and encouraging that has come up over the last few months is that the possibly, slightly contentious point, but possibly the best way to respond to students that have additional needs or perhaps don't have English as a first language, don't have English as an additional language, et cetera, et cetera. So all of the kind of groups that don't, how can I put it, kind of immediately align with the culture of university, if you like, as was. I think possibly the best way to serve that broad student community is actually to design courses so that they work online and the face-to-face sessions just become a version of a synchronous session within a design that is actually a kind of scaffolded online first. Now, I can see how that raises all kinds of politics, but I think what I'd say about it is that that approach doesn't necessarily mean that you're not doing tons and tons and tons of face-to-face onsite work, but when it comes to things like inclusion, disability, different modes, actually starting from online rather than starting from face to face is possibly the best way to design. And I just need to be really clear. That's not saying that we want to replace face-to-face with online. It's the principle of the way that we design our courses, which I hope we can shift. I think it could be really positive. Thanks, Dave. I actually do agree with that. And it's a pity we haven't got more time to really think through that and have a discussion about it. The final question with just a couple of minutes to answer a really big one that came in from Eugene Kim. I'm going to direct this to Osama. Is how have you ensured the quality of your teaching and student experience during this fame? That's a big question to answer in a couple of minutes. In fact, I did post as well that we need to be mindful of the quality assurance. I know that in the face of innovation, those of us who are really enthusiastic about learning technology, we tend to despise all the barrier that our quality office tend to put in front of us in normal time. But I also have seen the sense of resilience from our quality officers in terms of modifying their processes to get it in place. And I'm sure those of you probably have, I would flippantly commenting this, the misfortune of facing the compliance of the CMA and the office for student. You know that how much of work has gone in in terms of making these things fully quality assured. I think few of our existing tool we need to pay attention to them. So we probably all have modular evaluation questionnaire or course evaluation questionnaire. You might want to look into them and see whether they're appropriate for the kind of delivery we are doing now. In terms of observation, I have now expanded the peer observation at Surrey, which could be a peer observation of your virtual learning space, peer observation of your online assessment or even peer observation of the Zoom session that you are doing. So there could be multiple types of peer observation we can do, which will also ensure the quality. And the other thing I would say, and this is the final thing, let's take our students as our partners. If we take our students as our partners and give them the critical lens, they do really good job. So over the last one year and particularly during this pandemic, I had the pleasure of working with eight edu interns within the center of excellence in learning and teaching at Surrey. And they have been instrumental, trying to understand, trying to help the university understand how does it feel to deliver a Zoom session or a team session? How does it feel to do a take home exam? All those things are being collaborated with the students and some of our training sessions were run by them as well. So in terms of ensuring quality of engagement, let's give that onus to the students, ask them to find a diverse way of doing things and evaluate them what works for their learning. Because after all, everything we're talking about in this conference is to facilitate learning. Well, wonderful way to finish. Thank you Elsa-Man. Thank you for the concise way that you answered such a massive question there. I'd like to invite all the participants to give our panel members a virtual round of applause. That's been such a fantastic session. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I haven't learned from it. I think a couple of things that come out for me is this idea of how universities have been a bit of a kicking opportunity for commentators and politicians over the last few years about how we're not changing fast enough in the business model. Well, we have changed our business model in a few short days and the resilience and the flexibility and the adaptability that people have shown has been amazing and especially learning technologists. This has been our moment in the sun and it really has been a fantastic effort. Just on the, just on data, because I was really, I really did want to get into that but we haven't got time around how you design a course. And I do believe in that concept of well-designed courses starting from the concept of the digital classroom and the digital wraparound and then thinking about what needs to be face to face and what should be face to face. I always want to just give a little bit of airspace to a comment from Robin de Rosa. I think about 18 months ago now which was talking about a new continuum instead of talking about his face to face and his online. The continuum is what is kind of machine centered, computer centered learning and what is person mediated. So what is collaborative? What is peer support? What is social learning? Simon's mentioned social learning. We've got social learning at Keel. And we're starting as a sector to focus on what really does need to be collaborative but that does always have to be in person on a council or in a room. That can happen online as well. So building a learning experience that really thinks through what is the most appropriate mode. I think it is the way that this all has to go forward. But I'm gonna end it there so that we can finish on time. Maron, I don't know if you are planning to just come back in to finish the session. Thank you Helen. So I'll hand it over to you. Thank you Helen and thank you everybody. What a fantastic way to get our conference off to a stimulating start. It's been great to see over 160 people joining this session live. So thank you very much for getting us off. And if you are continuing with us at the Alzheimer's Summit today, then it's straight into a next parallel session here at midday. We have had a couple of users having some issues logging into the webinar this morning. So we've sent out an extra email with all the links to the webinar sessions. So apologies to anyone who had any issues but you should now be able to log in very straightforwardly by clicking on the link. And I'm looking forward to seeing you around the rest of the day. Thanks Helen, thanks everybody on the panel. It's been a great conversation. Thanks, bye.