 Thank you Caroline and Helen and indeed yet it's worked out beautifully that our themes are linking so well across this particular strand. So I'm here on behalf of a number of colleagues and many of you in the room will know them. Jen Harvey is the head of our Learning, Teaching and Technology Centre in Tew Dublin and Kevin Owork is our digital campus architect, which is an interesting role that comes obviously into this topic as well and Kevin will be here tomorrow he's not able to be here today if you did want to talk more with him about that but we're also collaborating with Purdue University in Indiana on this project and our colleague there leading on the project with us is Jason Fitzsimons. So we were inspired to look at openness around physical learning spaces in a campus based institution really following the keynotes and the discussion of openness at ed tech the Irish Learning Technology Association conference back in 2018 and when we knew that OER 19 was coming to Galway it seemed like the ideal chance to begin to engage with this and think about it but we are novices we're hopefully legitimate peripheral participants in this community starting to think about openness and it's very very timely because not only are we constructing a new technological university it's the first one in Ireland we're also constructing new physical campus buildings in the city campus and they're also engaged in that in Purdue so we're going to think, we're thinking a little bit in this paper about open education the context of learning space design and what a learning space is in terms of physical space in 2019 how have learning spaces in campus based institutions been opened up and technology has clearly changed how we use our physical spaces so therefore what has the design and use of physical learning spaces how's that changing, how's it being remediated through the evolving use of blended and online learning and if we have more open spaces does that mean we're going to have more open practices and that's what we've been thinking about over the last while a little bit of context here as I mentioned both our institutions are involved in the redesign of physical spaces so in Purdue a new active learning centre has been built and Jason has kindly supplied these images we haven't been able to go there just yet in 2017 and placing that at the middle of the campus as an active learning centre was a deliberate decision and hopefully again is opening up and changing the kinds of practices people are engaging with there the building has 27 active learning classrooms and the STEM focus in that institution obviously is very strong and they're consolidating libraries into one location as part of this progress so we're looking at active learning becoming very central to the mission of the university expressed through those spaces in Dublin Technological University Dublin city campus we're constructing a new campus at Grange Gorman in the west of the city we're on multiple sites at the moment and the longer term plan as colleagues in Ireland will know is to draw us all together on the one site in Grange Gorman and that's a big cultural change as well as a big physical change because our individual sites have their own working practices and cultures established over many years and suddenly we're going to be on one site for the first time so we're looking specifically there at how architecture is shaping that campus that change how change management is happening and in turn how we are changing pedagogies and use of technologies are influencing and interacting with that this is very much a work in progress it's exploratory and I really do welcome responses questions, suggestions, critique at the end of the presentation so what we're finding in our work so far and looking at the literature around this in terms of architecture and education there's very well developed research on the design of schools and classrooms for obvious reasons that's the compulsory education sector and clearly there's a lot of public investment in those kinds of buildings this seems to be less well developed for higher education so we don't see the same amount of literature and the same amount of investigation around this there are differences to important differences where more digital we might say in schools digital interactions with the web and so on are more tightly controlled for obvious reasons and far world and so on whereas we're all interacting in the digital space right now I imagine albeit we're in a lecture theatre of this kind and we're in the post compulsory sector we've got people opting in and out, we've got flexible learning action with the institution and the physical spaces so the question we've been asking is how our current learning theory and innovations in teaching learning are being reflected in the design of our physical spaces and the drawings here perhaps reflect some of the challenges that we might have when new spaces are commissioned these are the kinds of drawings that can come back showing very fixed linear spaces and so the challenge for us is how to have discussions across the institution and with the people designing those spaces to make them more flexible and to open them up to different kinds of activities on site I think everyone will probably have seen this picture before it's a 14th century image of a lecture and we use this very often in the postgraduate diploma and third level learning and teaching in TU Dublin as a provocation to get people talking early on in their workshops, they may have only been with us for a couple of weeks and they're early career lecturers who are engaging with learning and teaching and active learning methods for the first time and we ask them just to look at this image and to respond to it and I'm sure you've been asked to do that yourselves at conferences and in other settings up to now and so we see the construction of the space here as very fixed and it's also reflective of power we have the speaker elevated and we can see the steps up to the lectern to the podium there the class, the gender, the age range the ethnic background of these people but we do see that there is some collaboration and some discussion going on even if it's not supposed to be there are two people talking up in the back corner there's somebody having an app there as well so it's not that lecturers have necessarily changed all that much in some respects from this time but the physical space perhaps hasn't changed as rapidly in our student body and in the kinds of work that we're doing and we're also looking here at an age of information poverty if you like, the information is held by the lecturer by the reader and it's not abundant it's not available to the other people in the room and they need to hear it from that person in spite of the length of time that's gone by since that image would have been created as I say we don't necessarily see huge change in the design of some of our spaces today you're not feeling obliged to listen to the speakers but you're free to interact online and with each other in the room even if we're in a lecture theatre space but often students don't feel that they can do that and Kevin picked out this article a while back from the Irish Times talking about Irish students reporting having less contact with their lecturers than they would like and one of them here talking about the lecturers standing and reading off the slide at home and this is affecting their attendance so this is calling into question what we're doing in these spaces what's going to make it worthwhile for students to join us on campus what should the campus look like and what should we be doing so our approach to this project is collaborative research undertaken in partnership and currently we're at this preliminary stage of literature review and also some desk study per do are ahead of us because of the active learning space that they've recently had built over there and they have already been out to the field and done some data gathering around that space so we're looking at that and analysing that with them looking at the methods that they've used and how we might deploy them in Dublin and identifying existing institutional practices and how we might influence and change those we also have a symposium coming up which I really wanted to highlight in the talk today it's been funded by the National Forum here in Ireland and like any of the forum seminars they're open to all participants so we're very welcome to join us and maybe we'll have some online dimension to that for colleagues not based here this is going to inform our research further and we are hoping to attract academic students, architects and other interested parties to that symposium shortly and then primary research beginning in Dublin in September drawing on the approaches and methods from Purdue case studying we will draw on activity theory as well to look at how we model the practices around the campus and again just to pick up on Helen's work from Citing Barad the fact that there are no boundaries around our learners any longer that we draw on some of that work as well so that's where we're at in terms of planning and taking forward this work and the outputs are intended to support the planned use of spaces in both institutions I think Helen has articulated and Caroline beautifully already open and what we're talking about with openness I just wanted to include this in terms of how we're defining open again it's difficult for us to define but thinking about the kinds of pedagogies we would like to see how are we going to open up teaching how can our spaces contribute to that and give more agency to learners as contributors to knowledge and that's again what we're thinking about in terms of the design of spaces here we know that spaces have been blurring for some time VLEs are part of the mainstream since the early 2000s we've had the previous projects around open educational resources here in Ireland we had NDLR which was referenced earlier today Jorum Merlow in the States and in North America we have open scholarship and access in libraries and we know that students are constantly connected ownership of smartphones amongst the Irish the population of students in Ireland is estimated at over 90% so learning has been taking place inside and outside of the classroom and the campus for a long time and how do we exploit that further we could argue that any space is a learning space in 2019 we can access our learning through our devices no matter where we might happen to be whether that's formal or informal we have some nice examples here from Purdue and again that would reflect the move from formal to less formal spaces and spaces that are flexible and allow for different kinds of pedagogical approaches to be taken so moving from our more traditional lecture settings into open spaces under stairwells and so on that were perhaps not used in days gone by but that can be made over slightly changed given appropriate furniture in order to allow students to work in their groups outside of class this is a padlet wall from a little exercise we ran briefly again in our diploma class just as they were starting their studies this semester and we asked them just to go out for 15 minutes and walk around the building in Angel Street in Dublin and take pictures of what could be learning spaces and interestingly most of the pictures that came back weren't lecture theatres or formal tutorial rooms so it's a little bit difficult to see on the slide here but you can see that we have corridor spaces we have landing areas on the middle of floors of the building we had canteen spaces, coffee dock areas turning up and we've run this before with our masters groups and asked them to take pictures of places where they learn when they're not on site and we've had garden sheds, kitchen tables, spare rooms all kinds of spaces coming back I think evidencing that where we do our learning has clearly changed and how we respond to that is important in the design of our new spaces in terms of the literature what we've seen so far is an emphasis on trying to explore cause and effect to some extent so we see people reporting changes in the design of space contributing to some learning benefit or a benefit for teaching in terms of growing confidence amongst academics or more success with trying active learning strategies but perhaps what we haven't seen so far in the literature is a closer look at the interaction between space technology and the pedagogical practices and again if I can reference my colleagues talking about entanglement talking about the lack of boundaries that's the space where I think it would be useful for us to do some further research that we see both students and staff I would argue as co-creators of that environment and that digital environment so there is evidence out there in terms of the effect of space on what we're doing and as I say some of the work around confidence and enhanced practice amongst lecturers using active learning spaces and we would like to build on that and look at what those interactions might be what's the connection between the students and the technology and the learning as they're doing it and how are educators evolving their practice around that and then we change practice by changing spaces and that's the next question I suppose we're interested in here and trying to theorise around that Rook Choi and McDonald's have looked at learning theory and architecture and called for a much stronger connection to be made there and again I think that's something that we would like to look at in the course of this project as well perhaps drawing on activity theory theoretic approaches as well where we look at how tools and instruments mediate activities and mediate practices I'm very fortunate to work with Keiron O'Leary at TU Dublin whose doctoral research is looking at social materiality and the entanglement of people and their technologies and their practices and again we would see links there to research and interaction between space and activities and practice We'd like to use that research and theorise further to inform the consultations that are going on in our institutions at present between the people teaching and learning and those designing the spaces and building the spaces indeed for teaching and learning and there's a key role for academic developers and educational technologists here and this morning listening to Sheila McNeill Bill Johnson and Keith Smith they talked about academic development and open education being at the heart of organisational development which is a great message that I'll be bringing home from here in terms of the development of the technological university as an entity and also the physical development of the university in the new campus So are we going to see more open practices with changes in open spaces and that's what we're going to look at hence forward in this work We have previously given as many opportunities as we can for students particularly to contribute to the design of what we're doing in the institution back in our DIT days as well and we have a new project called Co-Create which is to design the curriculum framework for the technological university which will involve students in participating there designing their learning we're looking at more opportunities for experiential learning and undergraduate research as part of that framework and the sharing of teaching practices across teams and collaborative working in programmes is something that we've seen thriving recently in our institutions and I think many of us can say that following the DATA initiative particularly that the National Forum has launched which has seen awards for programme teams engaging actively in redesigning and reviewing their programmes So we're arguing that there does need to be more flexibility in the configuration and reconfiguration of spaces to facilitate and promote these kinds of practices both we do need to find out which approaches are most effective and to theorise further around that So the project that we're linked to in the TU Dublin around this is titled Enabling Pedagogical Opportunities in the Design of Learning Spaces or EPAL which isn't exactly tripping off the tongue but we'll try and come up with a better acronym for it and it's a change management project involving staff and students building on our existing practices and also looking at effects of particular room configurations on the kinds of activities that are taking place So what we're doing is configuring spaces in our existing campus as they might be configured in the new campus in Grange Gorman and researching with staff and students as to the effects of that over the next number of months The worry has been that we get to Grange Gorman and if we haven't tried anything before we get there we'll just carry on doing what we always did so trying to use the old campus in new ways before we move So you can see the old furniture and the old rooms on the images here but these are some examples of room configurations that we've been looking at and we're encouraging staff to use these spaces to think about their choices, what can they do in these spaces and what their options might be or what their options aren't going to be in certain cases, how that impact upon the students learning and on their own teaching practice So our next steps the symposium has mentioned please do look out for further details of that and you're welcome to join us We're working on a collaboratively authored paper arising from the first phase of the study and our field work then will commence later on in the year I'd just like to say thank you all very much and I do welcome questions, critiques, suggestions etc Thank you very much We have questions there Do you need the mic? I think... Thank you Claire, that was really interesting One conversation I have with one of my colleagues back in Edinburgh is about when we talk about hybrid learning spaces and we talk about people learning online and learning on campus we end up talking about the choices people have when things go wrong and I wondered whether inside your project you were looking at not just the configuration of space and what might happen in them but how these different spaces might then be supported as well because the conversation we have plays out into there's always a wider set of choices if you're an on-campus student when something goes wrong then there might be if you're an online student and it strikes me that in some of these spaces there is the potential for a wider set of help than there perhaps might be in other spaces as well and that will have attendant implications on how willing people are to do things in them so I wondered if that was within the scope of what you're looking at Absolutely, we're very lucky in the EPAL project that we have a range of stakeholder divisions of the institution are involved in that and AV particularly have been very closely involved and ICT services so we have tried to design that in from the outset but I absolutely agree we had issues with our Wi-Fi a couple of years back on the city campus and there was definitely a period of time where people weren't trying even simple quiz tools and so on in lectures and they just were resistant to that but it does need to be the things people are saying about the Grange-Gorman campus is that it needs water and Wi-Fi and we've all heard that talked about before and it's got to work for everything else to match in with that so one of the interesting things that's happened is because you're building on that scale tendering procurement processes and so on have been going on for years and by the time the designs have come back AV have reported that equipment has moved on and they've had to lists change orders and so on and change suppliers to sort of get the more up-to-date equipment and so there are all kinds of lags in the process that affect it too Thanks Claire just to say we're doing some really similar research at City University London as well that you might be interested in with some redesigned learning spaces and then going in teaching observations to see how staff are using those and kind of building up the sort of evidence of whether it is actually changing pedagogical practices as well or whether they're just kind of going in and doing the teaching they were doing before in these new flexible spaces so I'll be able to put you in touch with the team if you're interested in it That would be brilliant, thank you Jane that would be really helpful, that's exactly what we're trying to look at Any other question?