 Hello everyone and welcome to this the second webinar in our national in the national forums webinar series, but our first webinar that's dealing with the topic of the agile curriculum. And can I thank everybody for their attendance we've had a really good registration for this it's obviously a topic that's really of interest to a lot of the sector. And I'm delighted to introduce our chair for the day, Dr Jim Murray from FIA and Jim is also a board member from the National Forum. So Jim, I'll hand over to you. Thank you very much Terry, and again just to reiterate warm welcome to everyone that's attending today and thank you for doing so. Today's topic is a very interesting one. It's a two words topic agile and curriculum. And their words I think are replete with meaning, and I suppose the purpose of today is to try and work towards developing shared understanding around this whole area of the agile curriculum. It's a fairly packed hour that we have had so I'm not going to speak very very much my main role today will be to keep things moving, but just to outline very briefly what we intend to do. So chair back, Vinnia will be doing a scene setting and context for us just so that we get a broad understanding of what we're talking about. And then we're going to have for lightning talks from the project leads of a number of HCI pillar three I'll introduce the speakers as we come towards them and similarly to for the third item on the agenda perspectives from employers panel will come together then at the end and we'll have a discussion. So, we might just move on then to the next slide. The webinar has been recorded to support this discussion on the notion of the agile curriculum, and we will have a publication on that coming from the forum. We very much welcome comments and questions via chat throughout the webinar. And, you know, all the sponsors and ideas that you can think of we will, we will welcome them with open arms and we look forward to a very engaged webinar. So, Spritely chair here moving on, and I would like now to introduce Dr Claire McVinnia from the National Forum, who is going to do some scene setting for us. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jim, and welcome to everybody and as Jim has said we will really welcome your responses and your perspectives on this topic today. I'm just very briefly going to give you a little sense of where this has come from and and the work of the forum is coming from in relation to the webinar today. We know that it's very difficult to define curriculum in higher education, other parts of the education sector. For example, at school level might have a set curriculum or a national curriculum that we hear about, but it's much more complex for us in higher education. And this has been well discussed and debated in the literature over many years, both in Ireland and internationally. But there is consensus, nonetheless, that curriculum is no longer just the syllabus or content or subject matter of our disciplines. And a sense that it is dynamic we have the text from some years back edited by Jean Hughes and Louise Tan called the dynamic curriculum. We've heard a lot about the connected curriculum from work in the UK that's been influential in Ireland in recent times. We've heard discussion of a co-created curriculum with students and that's been at the heart of a lot of work into Dublin recently. I'm thinking also about sustainability now in the curriculum. And since the pivot to online, we're more and more hearing about learning design as an essential part of curriculum as well. So all of these terms have been very important in our evolving thinking about curriculum. And it's also been the focus of intensive work across the sector in recent years. This slide is by no means representative at all. It's purely cherry picking a couple of projects people would be familiar with in the sector. We know the connected curriculum has been picked up and used in UCC, for example, we've seen the Trinity education project over the past number of years. Colleagues in the sector are partners or will have engaged with the ABC learning design project. And that's been particularly important since the campus closures with the emphasis on remote teaching and online. So there's a lot of momentum here for us. And we have this key question that we're addressing in the seminar today in the webinar. Why is it important to develop an understanding of what we mean by an agile curriculum at this time. So the HGA human capital initiative pillar three innovation and agility has seen a substantial investment in this area. So 197 million euro over the period taking us up to 2024. We have 22 large scale collaborative projects which have been funded across the sector and we're very fortunate to have the leads of four of those projects with us here today. And we'll be having subsequent projects featuring in the June webinar and agility has become an increasingly prominent concept and we see this in other fields that you're no doubt familiar with those of you participating here today. For example, in project management or in software development or an e learning and I'm sure you can think of many others where we we talk about agile responses agile development. However, we don't have that shared understanding of an agile curriculum in higher education just yet it's emergent and it's something that we can look towards now, starting with with conversations like the one we have today. And just to pick a few points from the original HCI pillar three call that speak to this, you know we're thinking about innovative methods of teaching and delivery, benefiting the learners the focus being on lifelong learning on responses to changes in technology and enterprise, and in the social setting in the community and what we need to do nationally to provide lifelong learning and upskilling opportunities. And when this call appeared we didn't know about the pandemic but the pandemic has thrown it all into even sharper relief as something that we need to to consider. So that's just to give a flavor of the thinking around this as it has influenced to the project and our thinking leading into today. I'd really like to hear your ideas in the course of today so we have set up an open Google document for people to contribute to throughout the webinar and we have two prompts. In this part of the webinar we'd like to encourage you to respond to the first prompt, which is just highlighted on screen here. What do you think are the key features in here in the agile curriculum. And later in the webinar we will come to the second prompt on the slide here. So I think Terry has posted the link through to the chat for you to access there now. And at this point, I'm going to hand back to Jim, and we'll move to hear from our speakers. Thank you very much Claire. So our four speakers today we're very fortunate to have them. We have Professor on led with from the University of Lumeric who's going to talk about the you at work project. Professor Denise Rooney from Manoos University who will talk about the virtual laboratories and higher education. Dr learn Ramsey from the Irish universities association is going to talk about the multi campus micro credentials project. And finally Dr Deirdre Lillis from to you Dublin will talk about convene project. So again, with the sprightly moving on. I'd like to call upon on to give our first presentation. Thank you. And so I work I know with only five minutes I work very quickly through this. So the, and I suppose the overarching team of our UL proposal, our UL at work proposal was to work very closely with industry to develop a suite of flexible programs for 4.0 skills or and digital skills data AI machine learning that whole realm of kind of jobs for the future. And one of the things that we were, you know, there were a couple of eyes was innovative that what we were defining as the unique elements of our program. The level of collaboration that we were planning and our, in fact, having very deep level of collaboration with industry, both in program developing and defining what programs were going to develop. And, and also in delivery and that that's something that we have done in patches across the UL for the last number of years, but we're going to formalize it as part of this project so it would be a very deep learning, deep collaboration with industry. And I think in these areas it's particularly interesting and we're involved in a couple of EU projects looking at AI machine learning and one of the problems that's been posed across Europe is the fact that industry is ahead of academia in a lot of these areas so how do we teach graduates. If we're not even at where they need to be to be in the workplace so that's one of the things that we will be one of the issues and problems we will be addressing. One thing we want to do is to increase our flexibility. So that, like, like other institutions we all have long processes for accrediting programs and they make a lot of sense it means we do things right we do things in time for the CAO in time for recruitment cycles. But those same cycles are not always the cycles that we need when we're, when we're working with industry and we're upskilling with industry so we want more flexibility that will allow us to move more quickly. And that will be achieved to a large extent by by learning blocks by breaking our learning down into smaller blocks and that's one of the things that we're working on now to set up the whole project so that we can start to reuse almost like Lego blocks to build different types of programs and bring in different flavors and bring in different topics. So we will also be looking at that as much more kind of an open structure so that we will be working with other content providers as well to bring them into our programs and our roles and I think this is something that we're seeing across the board or your roles as educators are moving from being content providers, almost to scaffolding and curating and bringing courses together so that's part of the kind of the one of the teams that we want to see within you at work. The other thing that we're doing and I'll talk about it a little bit more on the next slide are these unique challenge based degrees, and those are very exploratory so I'll just move on to my next slide. So in the media that you have just released these immersive software engineering degrees which are looking at a totally different way of learning. And it was interesting in the university and that there were two parallel paths. There was the conversation on the immersive software engineering, and we were working on our UL at work proposal. We touched at some point close to the end but we had actually arrived in a very similar place, working in parallel. So the idea of these is that they're going to be accelerated undergraduate degree programs. We have working titles. Again, it will be in consultation with industry that will actually fully define those titles, but the features are going to be different programs will not work on our standard 12 you week work learning blocks of 15 weeks semester where students go to lectures and, you know, take a whole pile of different modules. We're looking at a much more integrated approach to education integrated with industry and integrated throughout the curriculum. We're asking more of our students so the notion that you go to college to spend half your time on a summer job or part time job or in the pub is going to be different so we're looking for different type of students and a different type of learning. And we are hoping that the final year of this program will be spent in industry but continuing to learn while you're in industry so that's the overall structure of the programs. We're still under development I can't say any more about those with work on top of degrees which would be very close collaboration with companies we've done this kind of stuff before, and one of the key features of those top of degrees is that we will work to develop content based specifically on the needs of companies and I think, again with changing roles of university this is something that we're going to have to look at we don't own all the content we're not going to own all the content moving forward. Okay, so that immediately the first to the front ends kind of front loaded parts of the project is our new professional diplomas so we have a speed of seven new professional diplomas that will start in September, and a digital futures master so we're building those as we speak. And they're in areas that we've identified through consultation with industry we would be developing delivering them with industry, and those professional diplomas again it would become building blocks of the master's programs that would be for full time program for full time students. One of the challenges to us is how to integrate those two groups of learners and that again is something that we hope to to work on and move forward on throughout the duration of this project. So I think that's really all I have to say hope that was within my five minutes. Thank you very much and that was great. And definitely structure five minutes. I'd like to call on Denise now to make our contribution. Good afternoon everybody I'll try and share my screen. Thank you again and I'm very pleased to be telling you about our HCI project to integrate virtual laboratories in an experimental science. I think what's quite exciting about our project is we have five partners working on it. So we five partner institutions across Ireland and I think that gives us a curriculum advantage and the first advantage that I can see from that is that scale. We can work with a larger number and diversity of students that anyone institution could do alone. The second thing that I think is an advantage in terms of curriculum is that we are working together in partnership we are sharing our ideas. We're sharing our experiences. So we should end up with something that is better than if one institution was working in isolation. And I think that's a really nice feature of our project. An additional factor for our project is that we also have enterprise stakeholders. We're working in the chemical sciences and as many of you know the chemical sciences. It has a very big industry in Ireland so we're very fortunate in that regard. And our partners are going to work with us to help us design our curriculum where they're going to give us feedback as we go through the project. They're going to work with our students through seminar series and site visits. This is going well. Thank you. Sorry. Always works better in practice than in reality. That's why you need the virtual. So what is a virtual laboratory? A virtual laboratory is a simulated learning environment which allows students to either carry out in a laboratory experiment online or to study the concepts and theories associated with an experiment outside the physical laboratory space. So why would you want to do that in an experimental science? What is the educational advantage of that? Well, I just want to highlight a few of these to you. The first thing I would say is that the physical laboratory experience can be very overwhelming for students in which they have to learn a lot of things in a short period of time. Whereas if you can reinforce that with them carrying out the experimental techniques virtually, they can come to the laboratory more confident in their skill set and more willing to or more confident to learn in that environment and let with less cognitive overload. The second thing that you might think about if you're not doing an experimental sciences, that undergraduate experiments are designed so that they do not fail. We don't have the luxury in terms of time and resources to allow failure to take place. And that means it's not really like a real science experience. Whereas in the virtual world you have the resources to let the experiment not work to have the student repeat the experiment and to have to problem solve through the experiment. So they're learning a different skill set. The third thing I think that's very important is when you remove the necessity to come to a lab at a certain time at a certain place, you are allowing flexibility in access to the experimental science education and you can see that that could be of real advantage for our lifelong learners. So then you get to the hard part, which is your implementation, which is what we're talking about today, which is our design implementation and assessment of our student learning. And we think we are doing that in a very considered agile way. So the first thing that we are doing is we are piloting this with a small cohort of students in each institution. The feedback from all our partners on the program are enterprise holders or our staff and our students at each stage where in the moment are taking up our baseline surveys from our students to get a feeling for their experience of laboratories and what they are learning from them to inform what we do in our design Then we're going to refine our curriculum as we go through the years as we roll it out with larger numbers so that each year that's adaptive and flexible and we will be improving. The third thing that we are concerned about and I think everyone was concerned about is assessment. We are considering how we are going to carefully assess our program that we are actually improving the learning of our students. So, that is a very important consideration in any agile curriculum. So, the other thing I would say if you're thinking about developing curriculum and doing this in a really well designed way is to keep an eye on what are your outputs. So our goals of our program are to help our first years and second years in their learning by reinforcing their chemical techniques with this blended approach of in situ learning in the laboratory and doing those labs or related labs outside the laboratory so they can reinforce their skill sets or they can work as take the skill that they learned in the lab and then do a simulation to see how a chemist working in a hospital or an environmental lab would use the same technique to solve a real world problem. And so they learned the significance of the techniques that we are teaching them with our third year and fourth year master students we are going to work with get industry relevant problems for them to solve with partnership from our enterprise partners. We're going to get them to do that in a virtual way so that they can be problem solving and troubleshooting through this industry relevant problem and they can develop their team parking working skills. So we are hoping to our goal of this project is to have more work ready graduates. A final goal of our project is to have better links with industry in order to train our students so they have a better understanding of how we're training them. We have a better understanding from them what they need from our graduates to train the graduates of the future. So hopefully, I know there's no more time today but that's my email address and if people are interested in asking me any more about the project. I'm very happy to take any emails from people. Thank you. Thank you very much Denise. It's clear from the two speakers that we've had so far that the tests of flexibility, innovation, so forth are very much being met by these projects. It's very exciting to think of concepts like unique challenge degrees and simulated learning environments, to the extent that we are now thinking about them. So anyway, I won't say any more. We leave that to the discussion later, but I'd like to call now upon Lynn Ramsey from the IOA to talk about the IOA's micro credentials project. Thanks. Thank you very much, Jim and good afternoon everyone delighted to be here. I'll share my screen with you now. I've just a few slides to give you a sense of the project and our ambition. I'm going to start from the project. Everyone see that okay. Yeah, great. So this is the multi campus micro credentials project and the IOA are leading this on behalf of the seven universities so it's working across all seven of the Irish University Association universities and across a wide range of disciplines and enterprise areas. There's a diversity in this project and it's an ambitious project and one for which we have. In essence, we have four elements in the multi campus micro credentials project. The first is to develop a framework of multi campus micro credentials for all seven partner institutions, and that talks to a commonality in terms of nomenclature in terms of definition of micro credentials and looks at the range of the credit base for the micro credentials and also looks to how the credit credentials would be delivered, whether it's onsite in a work environment blended or fully online might depend entirely on the needs of the learner, the relevancy of the discipline, and or indeed the demands of enterprise at any given time. The second element, and one of the elements which I'd say is in common with all of the HCI, which have been awarded is rethinking the nature of the enterprise engagement. The enterprise engagement is supported for the project by an enterprise advisory group only four members of the enterprise advisory group but the thinking is to reimagine what a dynamic sustainable model of enterprise engagement would look like. Looking beyond that which is there in terms of data currently and looking again at the models of how we engage with enterprise so whilst our established large multinationals might have that piece really well thought out and have a mechanism for doing that. That's not the case for a lot of our indigenous industry, and we want to reimagine that in a very different way and there's very interesting models in private industry, and we're keen to learn and share for that and work with all our partners across the entire sector in those conversations. The third element then is to develop a really sophisticated communications piece around micro credentials. What we're talking really here is about a culture change and how learners engage and how we engage with learners and how we engage with enterprise and how we engage with social partners so whilst the development of a portal as a shop window if you like for the micro credentials is one of the key features. It's thinking beyond that portal and thinking as both what that portal looks like in a very engaged and understandable way. And if we're working with different groups of learners and working with learners in a lifelong learning space. What does that upskilling reskilling look like what does the learner journey look like what are the learning personas with whom we're engaging because it'd be quite different from a normal undergraduate student so that challenge around thinking about the cultural change of lifelong learning and then how you communicate in a dynamic way. And because there is no point in us developing a suite of micro credentials which look fabulous, but no one wants to engage with at the end of so that relationship with the learners and wider stakeholders and the communication piece, I think we need to think about that differently. One of our outputs will be a portal, but that's not the end of the communications piece. And then the final element is within each of the universities there is a project lead who works right across that university developing a suite of micro credentials. And as I said at the very beginning, those will look and feel different depending on the specialisms but depending on the priority pieces for for the university so they're ranging from FinTech to humanities to enterprise through to engineering in the professional bodies, which is a really exciting range of learning and a range of possibilities and also then different learners and different ways about engaging with the professional bodies and enterprise so those are the four key deliverables and I thought about Terry's and Claire's mandate to us to think about agility and innovation and what that means, particularly for our project because the projects are about the big ideas aren't they they're about what we leave at the end of it all. And I think for us that piece about reimagining lifelong learning is foregrounding a lot of our thinking. So we understand the learner to be a different concept so we need to drill down into that. We're thinking about what flexibility means in terms of program development. So obviously shorter pieces and in some cases maybe very short pieces, which are developed quickly in response to enterprise needs or societal requirements, but also delivered differently so not at a time that suits us in aligning with core times, and we're thinking over weekends and evenings and we're thinking online and blended and on site and on campus whenever that might happen again, and all combinations of those so it's thinking about what would be the models that would work well for all of those groups so I think we're reimagining the learner, reimagining the engagement and reimagining how we do things in a positively disruptive way. So apologies for the PowerPoint, but hopefully that's giving me a sense of our thinking in this space of multi campus micro credentials and looking forward to working with colleagues right across the sector, and we know that micro credentials are a part of at least 15 of the HCI so our plan is to work collaboratively colleagues right across the sector. Thanks very much. Thanks so much Lynn. Again very exciting to see what's what's coming through I mean with you know, and mentions the cycles for industry and the need to be responsive and then again you've picked up that team with no speed of development which is, I suppose, something that they're not famous for in he and maybe in the past but I certainly sense there's a big change foot. So, the final speaker from the HCI session is Dr Deirdre Lillis from to you Dublin. So Deirdre, I call on you now. Thanks. I'm ahead of computer science in a day job so I guarantee the technology is going to let me down let's say but just thanks to everybody. Thanks to Claire in the National Forum for the opportunity to present today. Convene it's a new way of working it's aiming to transform university enterprise engagement in that co created skills and innovation ecosystem it's picking up on Lin's point I think about how we work with enterprise. It's a partnership between to Dublin and the UCD Innovation Academy with 36 enterprise partners from seven economic sectors, working from tourism to farmer to ICT to creative and cultural. And then there's a white white spectrum. There are two mine shifts I think needed in convene and to really in terms of how higher education works with enterprise. The first is, it's not about us. We've got to get out of that mindset. It's not about what we want to do. It's about what enterprise needs. The enterprise will tell you they want a cup of coffee and a quick solution but what they actually need is a longer term partnership for talent and innovation. The second mine shift really is to recognize that we don't have all the answers in higher education. There's a massive on tapped talent pool in enterprise itself for its own skills and innovation development and higher education I think needs to recognize that it needs to learn from it and it needs to learn from it. So convene and it means to come together for a purpose. You know that the innovations I suppose and the agility in convene are coming from three places primarily. It's integrating a pen university response to a sector needs so it's very much sector facing and that's really important distinction I think because if you're a tourism company with a digital transformation you're not going to knock on the College of Business or the School of Computer Science or the incubation center or the research center or all of them or none of them. You know that's the first thing. Everything convene will do is co-created with enterprise so there's an enterprise partner involved in everything we're doing. It's also embedded in our education research and innovation mission so everything is embedded in the curriculum on the education side. So I suppose four kind of key agilities then the first idea is to develop a kind of a Velcro interface with enterprise where there's lots and lots and lots of small frequent interactions between staff and enterprise and staff in academia. We're calling this the enterprise faculty and it's comprised of enterprise staff. Maybe as guest lecturers as mentors as all the other things we ask them to do for us working with academics researchers and innovators. The second innovation is global innovation teams. It's bringing enterprise into our universities embedding it in our curriculum basically student teams international student teams from many disciplines working together on enterprise challenges with enterprise and academic mentors. It's a really light touch low cost low commitment way for SMEs in particular to engage with us. The third is accredited talent development. If you're familiar with LinkedIn collaborative provision it's really an expansion of that and it's basically for us taking TU Dublin's reach out into enterprise and creating almost an enterprise campus. So it's where we accredited an enterprise company for example to deliver a skill solution to other enterprise companies so it's extending our reach that way. The fourth then and I think UL at work have beat us to this but it's basically to stop reinventing the wheel because there's a huge amount of really high quality online commercial content out there that can supplement our deliveries. It really should be freeing up staff to do the real value add of assessment and feedback to learners so I suppose in summary what does convene do or hopefully will do soon it's really to translate between the economic sectors and our core mission and there's a real challenge there I think between industries and sectors. It navigates what is a really really complex skills and innovation ecosystem who's doing what where why how can we connect the dots joint joint up and bring back one solution to enterprise not not 40 you know and internally you will act as a sort of internal incubator for staff can bring their ideas work in a supportive environment maybe for a semester and then go back home to their their faculty so that's a whistle stop tour really and some contact details there and be very happy to follow up with anyone. I would say one of the exemplars we're looking to is the way the National Forum organizes itself because I think the ecosystem it has created around teaching and learning for her education is is phenomenal and I'd be definitely knocking on Terry and in store to find out what the secret sauce was on that you know so. So thank you very much for the opportunity to present today and I'm sure we would be seeing lots of each other over the next few years so thank you. Thank you so much. Dear that was really excellent and I love the idea of the Velcro interface between faculty staff and enterprise. And again just to thank all the speakers for packing so much in on being so succinct in doing so. I think Claire wants to come back in now just with a general message to the. To the attendees. Thank you very much Jim. At this point we thought it might be useful just to just to visit the Google document very briefly I'm not going to bring it up live on screen and this will be very brief because we were going to move ahead. But I think thank you first of all everyone for the contributions, which are very rich in Google document please continue to do that. Emerging is a sense, actually a lot of the themes the speakers have raised, but if I can put that into a nutshell in a couple of seconds, the sense that we have pivoted in terms of the pandemic both that we might take that to mean a much wider set of changes that we can make that we can reflect agility in terms of the effects of technology on our sector, the options that learners will want to have into the future. And then was saying reimagining the positive disruption that we're going to see which would have been coming along and in any case but which has been accelerated by what we've experienced over the past year so please do keep contributing into the into the document and I'll hand back to Jim now for the next part of our session. Thank you very much Claire. Well we've, we've heard, I think enterprise mentioned in, in every segment and session of today's webinar so it'll be nice now to hear the voices of enterprise speak for themselves. So our two speakers are Dr Kevin Marshall, who is from Microsoft Ireland and Garth Lee who works for Screen Skills Ireland. So, without further ado, I'll hand over to Kevin. Thanks Kevin. Good morning and I haven't changed my, my appearance I've just gotten older and been away from the office so that's the difference. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. It's a very important discussion. So, just by way of background, I head up education Microsoft and that's why I didn't use a PowerPoint. I think it's safer and our interaction and work with the HCI initiative at the moment, we are involved as an enterprise partner in four or five projects so we are involved in DCU undergrad curriculum transformation. We're involved in or CSIs pharmacy project. We're advisory working with Lynn on some aspects of the microcontentioning. We are working on the convene project with to Dublin, particularly in Tala with Barry Feeney, which is ongoing long term collaboration and we're trying to scale that up and we're also working in various assets in very smaller projects with the UCC on particularly technology and the sustainability. So, and I think we're new we're new CD as well with the advanced product so we're in the mix and a lot of these things and it's, it's quite interesting as they get up and running. You get a real sense of the challenge, the challenge that that to change, and that's not just universities that's also industry as well. I think the pandemic has accelerated a lot of this change and can do because technology had to play a bigger role than maybe wasn't business and some of these. The tenders were due before the pandemic so a lot of the innovation, some that's already happened so now we get an opportunity to go even further which I think is a good thing. And that's not without its challenges. But I think just to step back for a little bit and go well what do we mean by agility agility and what do I think of it and what, what's important from, you know, an industry perspective. I think it's not necessarily speed, which sometimes is thought about as a do things quickly it's more about from our perspective is able to manage continuous change in a volatile complex and uncertain world it's what we're right now. And the way we prefer and like to engage across the board with academia is in constant dialogue about what we need, what you have, how can we work together and how do we co created. And like a couple of examples that have changed in, in say the last decade or so springboard is and was a fantastic program of work over the last decade in response to the crisis in 2008. My question in our thinking about the microcredentialing for example is that from a learner perspective, do you really want to spend two years in a HD is there a better way to do it is there a quicker way to do it. Is there, what's the balance between skill and learning. I think those are important discussions and they're the discussions we're having in the microcredentialing because in certain tech ideas. Not everyone would want to do a two year blockchain masters for example but maybe 12 week as a someone in the management level to get a handle on it, as they're running teams maybe way to think about it. I think that's really interesting. That's really, that's good but it's, it's complex, and we had a really interesting conversation last week on the advisory forum and listen to the work in DCU which I think it is. They just presented it was actually really interesting and they've a lot of thought there, and I think that's a great model going forward. And I think the other key thing about agile curriculum is this notion of assessment. One thing we do not do not what do not do well in this country and that's across the board. And if I look at leaving certain what happened last year and what's emerging now and what it's all about. We need to rethink that I think we need to rethink it in higher ed as well. And how that fits in to this kind of old triangle of learning, teaching and assessment and what that means for the learner at any particular space over lifelong learning. That's something I think we, this project should grapple with, because that's, it's not easy. It's, it's complex, but the old models of how we are assessing, we need to rethink what they could be in a world where you have all this cool technology and could do different things differently about it. And we could really reimagine the portfolio has learned experiences and things like that which I think now we can think about the other point I make is the notion of a distinction between learning and skills. And this is the time point issue. I mean, you do want other grads to explore all these great books and ideas, as well as developing skills. And I think there's a balance and we shouldn't forget that. And all about, I want the best data scientists coming into my organization. I want the best well rounded guy or girl who can think, and who's read lots of stuff, and can apply those learnings to a particular problem across multiple teams across the world and what they will come into, you know, so I think that we need to get that balance right. And the other thing is that in some regards the universities at one level will never keep up with the emerging tech. But I mean, we can keep up with the emerging tech to be honest. So I think that's not really the way I would think about it the way I think about if we're in constant dialogue about what is actually coming down the line what we see what we need. What can you provide how do we co create that course or that learning module or how do we integrate that in a timely manner, I think is is probably the way forward and I think that's the value and some of the stuff with the micro credentialing. And the final point I'd say is this notion of data and data literacy, we really got to think about what that means. And what we how we embed those particular skills in a way that we've never done before across the curriculum everywhere for everyone whatever subject you're doing and push it down into the leave insert notes up but let's talk about higher ed. That's something I'm giving all the stuff that's going on with data and vaccines I think that's the better we are we're thinking about data, the better we will, we will be. But that's I'll stop there. I could go on forever. But thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to share some comments, but we look forward. I mean the only way this is going to work for the country is we do we work in dialogue. There's no other way and I think that's the one thing. You know the good things out of the last 10 months or years that we can solve these together. And I think that's the important point. Thank you. Lots of food for top there. It's a little bit reassuring to know that Microsoft can't keep up with the technology. But you make some very important points about assessment and of course balancing balance between learning and skills. So our final speaker today is is Garrett Lee. So Garrett, the floor is yours. Thanks Jim, share my screen. Yeah, everyone see that. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, so my name is Garrett Lee. I'm the manager with Screen Skills Ireland and delighted to be here today to talk about agile curriculum from a screen sector perspective. Yeah, I only have five minutes so I'm going to crack on. So I think it's good to start with a bit of because we're coming from a sectoral point of view it's good to start with a little bit of overview and context so Skills Ireland is the skills development unit within Screen Ireland which is the development agency for Irish film, television and animation. And through the Skills Unit we support the sector in a variety of ways to continues professional development programs so in 2020 we rolled out around 84 CPD programs to over 1500 professionals. Of those 84 programs, they were all oversubscribed. All five of them were certified. And that kind of demand I suppose is constant and we've seen that over a number of years. We also have a role in terms of oversight of Section 481 skills development requirements so through that role, every production in Ireland that avails of the tax credit has to submit a skills development plan to Screen Skills Ireland for approval and through that plan, a number of participants on the production or people involved in the production, their skills development progress is tracked across the production and quality assured at the end. So it's a really interesting work based learning initiative that we're really involved in in this sense, and it gives us great insight into the skills needs of the sector as they're emerging. And, you know, from the front line, we also as an organization carried our own research and analysis of sectoral skills needs and we publish an annual report in that area as well. In terms of the sector overview there's approximately 12,000 people employed in the sector. The sector is growing and changing. It's more than doubled in size in the last 10 years. It's, yeah, it's, yeah, it's a, you know, I suppose it's a sector that maybe we haven't maybe shouted about, you know, enough I guess the other thing to mention is there's over 300 roles in the sector a lot of the time. The sector gets seen as you know there's directors there's writers producers but they're actually well over 300 roles and their roles in the creative area the design area business area technical area and so on. The sector a lot of those roles are very future skills focused, you know, in the areas of kind of creativity and communication and so on so they're a lot of those roles are quite immune to kind of automation in the same ways, you know, as opposed to maybe similar roles in other sectors. We also, you know, a huge part of our work over the last few years has been about developing more structured and inclusive sector and a big piece of work that we're doing at the moment is a competency framework for the sector for all roles and we see this is a really important piece of work because it will help with them access routes into the industry progression opportunities, but also will influence kind of curriculum design and development from a CPD point of view, but also potentially at the FE and HE level as well. And we encounter lots of perspectives to our role and I thought I'd share some of those today. And all of these perspectives obviously have to be taken with a pinch of salt but these are the things that we hear most often so I think it's useful to look at them and see if you know agile curriculum can maybe respond to some of these concerns that are raised. So employers often say things like you know graduates can't hit the ground running or there's a skills gap. And I think it's really important for us and this is some of the work that we do, try to drill down what that skills gap actually is, is it about specialization, is it about like that transversal skills, and so on. Also from the employers perspective we often hear that their experience of curriculum program development is frustrating, I think that's often down to, you know, red tape or, you know, the amount of time it might take to get something certified, or not having a single point of contact. And, you know, those kinds of things seem to come up quite quite regularly. From a new entrant recent graduates perspective things we often hear are I didn't realize this role existed. So, you know, sometimes graduates just aren't aware of the amount of roles or how their skill sets might fit particular roles within industry, within industry. I also say things like I learned so much in my first few months as a professional and I think that that kind of intense learning that happens within the workspace is really of huge value and I think the next point is interesting as well we often hear that modules and subjects that they felt were relevant maybe when they were in their certification environment actually became really quite relevant when they were actually in the world of work and, and maybe, you know, consideration around maybe within the work environment and true workplace learning. That's where those that type of content makes more sense. I think it's something interesting to consider. And then from a professional perspective, we hear quite regularly about, you know, people who've been in this in this in the industry sorry for a long period of time have built up huge amounts of skills and knowledge, but don't necessarily have any certification to show for that. And so to finish up then just some general observations about agile curriculum curricula from the screen sector perspective. First of all, I'd say there's a lot of quality provision already happening out there, the work that we do to true screen skills Ireland, but other organizations like the skill networks and many others as well. There's a scope for that quality provision to be certified potentially true things like micro credentials that were already referenced, but I also think that work based element dimension as well as a lot of quality work based learning happening that I think is, is right for for certification and quality assurance, true again true micro potentials in terms of he curriculum agile curricula definitely see all the things that have been spoken about before like flexible responsive but I would also argue there's scope there to link it more concretely to sector roles or groups of sector roles as well. And then I think it's come before already but agile curricula again from our point of you definitely needs to be more than just the what it's also about the who like a lot of the provision we provide and the reason why we built up a credibility around the provision that we provide is that we use people from industry to deliver in particular instances where that makes sense so you know who delivers how it's delivered when and where beat that in the work workplace or wherever I think they're all really important questions to ask about curricula to the other thing then just in terms of quality assurance you know do we need to reexamine what quality assurance means when you're looking at industry facing agile curricula is it different to quality assurance as it would be applied to, you know, a standard BA program or whatever. And then I think it's also been referenced a couple of times already but definitely we would see it as a two way street employers can do more, bring more to the table. But I think there has to be a realistic realistic expectation then on all sides, you know employers are very busy. So I think it's about making life easier for the employer in terms of their engagement and I think where that happens I think you'll find much better engagement and much more collaboration I guess. So the last point is just I do think there's scope for new roles and he you know industry education liaison type roles that link industry and education together. It makes complete sense that there will be, you know, a singular points of contact where where you know language difficulties or whatever are more easily dealt with and so on. So just, you know, like finish up with saying, and, you know, thanks for for having me here today do you think it's really interesting time I think there's great potential and more collaboration between industry and education and I think it can only really help empower students and empower professionals in terms of things like lifelong learning so that's it I'll finish up there. Thank you so much Gareth. It's very important to have that perspective of an organization that has its finger on the pulse of a sector that think there's a key role to play by organizations like yourselves in this whole business of developing a job curricula, because they often know more than anyone what an industry in the round needs. Okay, well I have failed miserably to keep everything on time but anyway we will, we will move on to our panel discussion. Straight away. I'd like to thank again just all the speakers for their very very very interesting contributions on Denise Lynn, Deirdre, Kevin and Gareth. So, will we start I don't know what Claire did you want to come in one more time to talk about the, the ideas, maybe for the next for the second session on this topic. Hi Jim, and it seems I don't need to draw people's attention because they have been contributing huge amounts into the Google Docs so if I can just ask you to continue and you've already been addressing that second point so please do continue, and we can move on to to our panel piece. That's perfect. Sorry. Okay. A question actually which other really is addressed to Anna in the first instance. One of our attendees is asked about the integration of the blocks across the sector, and would you well envisage coordinating this type of work throughout all of higher education. An interesting question. I'm not sure we could, because it's, but I think what we can do is we can pilot, and we can, we can show models of how things can work and how things can work differently. There are several universities across the globe or doing this kind of block teaching and we, they're part of our international panel. So I think probably the best thing we can do is that we can pilot and we'd be more than help happy to to work with other institutions who want to look at how it's going. It's early days yet though I'd wait, you know, until we've kind of a couple of years under our belts because I think one of the things that I like about the HCI funding is that we've got to consider it as an innovation fund sometimes in higher education we're afraid to try things in case they fail. And I think that that's what I really liked about this is that we're trying things, and I can't put my hands on heart and say this is the perfect solution this will work for everybody, but I can say we're going to try and we will come up with something a little bit better at the end of it Thanks very much. I have a question for for Kevin. You talked about embedding data at all levels. One of our attendees would like to know, could you expand on that. Part of the work in DCU is the notion of a transversal skills and one of the key things is data literacy so fundamentals around what is data, how you use it, how you manipulate it, how you interpret that because we find that a lot of the graduates that some come in are not necessarily skilled to the level that we think they should be in areas like that. But I think it's about putting a framework in place where you can access various different competencies around data and data literacy and if you look at the EU competency framework around skills and for professionals on the ICT sector, there's models of that that you could just pair back I think. But it's to be aware of it and go that we think that's a gap. I think that's a gap in the system. And, you know, without getting into the notion of what in terms of statistics and all that sort of stuff but there are some basics that I think we could build into a modern agile curriculum that everyone could have some sort of base on and I don't think that exists and that was the point in the work with DCU was to level that across every degree. And then at least you know you have some foundation if you get the assessment correctly well then you're okay but I mean you can't force everyone to do this but you can at least try and get a base and I think that's really really important because I think the amounts of data, the AI stuff, the machine learning stuff, even to understand where all that comes from is really important because there's some massive fundamental assumptions and all this stuff that I don't think everyone is clear about and I think we need as a society we need to become better at that around digital policy blah blah blah so the but the fundamental to me is let's start with data and build on it. And there's loads of stuff out there by the way and the university is a very good at putting this courses together and have loads of this stuff but it's it's more a systemic idea how would we put that across, you know, 20,000 kids that's Thanks very much Kevin. Yeah, no that's that's that's very helpful. I'm conscious here that we've kind of run out of road. And there's a ton of questions emerging in the chat section. And what we are going to do is we're going to harvest these questions and we will address them at the at the follow up webinar to this one. I mean some of the questions are really interesting and, you know, we'd need another hour I think to debate them, you know, the, the notion of having an agile student for an agile correct curricula and the ethical implications of that and the expectations that and how do how our students prepared for moving from their traditional expectations of of a curriculum to to this new paradigm. There's also important questions arising to around, you know, the quality assurance and how important that is for the credibility of qualifications. These are huge topics and we are going to need more time so I'm proposing that we will bring the session to an end. And I would like just to hand over now to the director forum Terry. Hi everybody and and it has been a very interesting session and we knew it would be and we knew we wouldn't get the conversation finished so we'd always planned for this for the conversation to continue. So just for everybody to put it in their diary the, the next webinars part of our national series on the agile curriculum is on the 23rd of June, and from 1230 to 130. We will be sharing will be asking other projects to actually share and what they're doing, but we will also be continuing the conversation we pull together the features that have been identified. And we pull a structure around some of the questions and issues that have been raised to their to debate further at the next webinar. Just just to tell you that that's on the end of June but Kevin mentioned the importance of assessment and let's tell you that on the 6th of May we're having the first of our two webinars on assessment. The first webinar on the 6th of May is tackling the thorny issue of final examinations. This is the future of assessment of learning through final examinations. And what we hope to do is to share and debate the prospects, the perspectives from a range of stakeholders. And the session I'm delighted to say will be chaired by Dr on you hey she's the register by president from monster monster technological university. And she's also a national forum board member so I would, I would welcome all of you to attend that I think it's going to be a very very interesting conversation. Thank you for chairing and so well thank you again to all our speakers, and I look forward to seeing you all on the 23rd of June, if not before at the assessment webinar. Thank you very very much.