 I'm sorry about that. Good, thank you to Brown Rivers, everyone. Welcome, and again, just to reiterate message from the previous talk, thanks for sticking around with us on the last talk of the day. I just felt a lovely breeze, however, on my back, so it's nicely freshened me up for the talk now. So just some very quick introductions. So I'm Jamie Morris, I'm based in the Higher Education Futures Institute at the University of Birmingham. And then, I'm Joey Spink. I'm also based within, I'm gonna say, HEFE. Yeah, yeah, if we use the term HEFE, it's an abbreviation for the Higher Education Futures Institute just to clarify that acronym. We tend to use acronyms a lot in not just our institution, but nearly every institution. So just clarify that. So what we'd like to do is give you a very, very brief whistle-stop tour again, and contain some of our reflections from certainly the last couple of years, organizing and managing our annual learning and teaching conference in HEFE as well. So we will give you a bit of context on exactly what HEFE is. But I think then get into the really interesting part, which is where Joey will come in and talk about what tech we used to really facilitate that and bring it to life and make it an ongoing and active event as well. So as I mentioned, HEFE, so with the Higher Education Futures Institute, that's a very brief synopsis of what our mission statement is. The reality of that is that we do a lot, lots of different things that encompass that, but we are a staff-facing development unit and very, very roughly what we aim to do is encourage staff to adopt good learning and teaching practices, be it generally, but also using our core digital tools at the university as well. So again, we are based centrally, and we've been around since around 2017, which predates certainly when I joined in 2018. And we very crudely have two strands of work and team. So I'm in the educational development team. So we run various accredited programs at the university. So that includes a PG certain higher education for new staff at the university who are involved in teaching and learning, but also having our in-house professional recognition scheme to apply for fellowships at the Higher Education Academy as well, which we call the Beacon Scheme as well. So that's roughly what we do. There are lots more provision that we do, but that's in a nutshell what education development aims to do is core. And we also have our happy digital team, which have a mixture really of centrally based staff, but also teams that are situated within colleges as well. So quite an interesting mix. And I suppose it's worth also noting as well that in relation to the conference, it often acts as quite a nice focal point for educational development and digital to come together. I think historically we have been quite separate in some elements and the certain collaboration that it goes on, but I think the conference often provides a nice opportunity to bring us together. We do tend to deliver the conference at the end of the academic year as well. So it acts as quite a nice culmination, I think, and reflecting on the academic year gone and just offering a space really for staff who are based within our colleges and in professional services to come together and talk about their learning and teaching practices on whichever theme we base the conference on. So if you go to the next one, Joey. So just to give you a taster really of what we do in relation to our annual learning and teaching conferences in HEPI, they tend to be focused and certainly influenced by what's going on externally as well. So if I point to this here, you can just see a very rough overview of what we've done since 2018, since I've joined in terms of having a very rough overarching theme. And then it's our job institutionally to explore that and offer that space for people to come in and showcase what they do in relation to learning and teaching. I suppose just to reiterate the overall aim of what we want to talk about is our narrative will really focus on our reflections from 2022 and 2023. So our conference on sustainable education also had a sub theme of future skills, but also it was really influenced by the sustainable development goals. And also the 2023 version this year, which we'll finish with some reflections on, was very much influenced by the teaching excellence framework of having recently submitted narrative for that. And we decided on educational gains because it was very much this nebulous area that I think in particular how you sort of articulate is quite interesting to get people from different disciplines and then talk about their practice. So that's roughly what we want to do at the conferences very generally as well. Yeah, so in terms of what that looks like, there's quite a lot involved in the planning of a conference. And I think where that kind of a Dev and Digital strands of heavy meat is kind of how to maximize the efficiency of that conference in terms of inputs. So how we're having people engage with the conference, whether that be on our Edge Basin based campus or Dubai campus, how we make that feel like one conference and not two kind of distinct versions of the same conference and then how we make sure those themes are permeating through how we do all of that. So initially, one of the challenges we had coming into planning HEPI 22 we're looking at now was a sudden peak in COVID again. And we're talking a week, a week and a half before the conference ran, which meant that we weren't just getting dropouts of people that were attending, but we were getting dropouts of people who were planning on speaking. So suddenly a conference that was designed as being the kind of big return of face-to-face conferences for HEPI had to pivot slightly and provide a bit more of a hybrid model than we were planning on. There was always some intention to deliver hybrid in some capacity. So as we mentioned, we have the Dubai campus. There was a need to provide a version of the conference that was accessible to them. Suddenly we had speakers that had to be presenting from home and whether that be through COVID or I think we had a speaker who rolled his ankle the morning of the conference. So it still managed to speak, but had to do it remotely. All of those factors meant that we suddenly had to rapidly change the way we were approaching a lot of this. The themes of sustainability permeated through. So we had poster presentations. We made sure that those posters were displayed on screens rather than printed. And that kind of idea of having things digitally available where possible also folded through to our conference app. So all that being kind of pulled into one place as a kind of central focus for the digital aspects of the conference. And then again, a quick touch on the Dubai campus provision. So all the sessions were recorded, but there was that need to kind of deliver it in remote where possible. And there was kind of some conversations and decisions on how much of the conference do we offer. And I think one of the takeaways from heavy 22 was that we probably bit off a bit more than we could chew in terms of the delivery of that remote conference. Partially coupled with the amount of work we were taking on partially coupled with the changes on schedule, but there was kind of an attempt that streaming as much as possible. And actually that meant that the requirements from staff members to support that was much higher. So the next slide to take you through our conference app which is really kind of the centerpiece of everything that we put together. We say it's an app, it's not really an app. It's of course developed in Articulate Rise, which if you don't know, it's a browser based authoring software. The idea behind this was to provide the resources and agenda for the conference as easily accessible as possible. So we could send this out via a link. If you look at the top right hand corner, we're able to stream essentially the same version of this app on any device, which meant that we could send it out beforehand so people get an idea of the program, but then on the day they could use their phones and still be looking through that program initially. What you'll see is we actually ended up expanding the use of that much more than we initially intended. So all of the conference recordings eventually sat in the app, all of the resources, so whether that be posters, slides, any of the kind of peripheral stuff around the sorts of the launching stuff of the conference, that all sat within the app. And actually became a bit of a bigger project than we initially intended, but one that was really well received. So we go to the next slide. We've got some feedback. So we had an average of 4.5 for our overall experience, really positive. The hybrid presentations were received really well. And I think from our point of view, that felt like the more chaotic side of it. We felt like that was maybe where we fell over and definitely took some of those learnings into the next conference. And the conference app was praised. And I think this comment from that feedback really informed a lot of what we did the next year, which was we felt the app was quite good, but kind of didn't really see that practically on the day. But we got some feedback saying that it felt like it was a treasure trove of conference resources and meant that there was a support resource there that was there well beyond the conference itself, the feedback we got was. So that was really interesting because this thing that was initially just a digital program actually became a real focal point for the feedback we got. So moving forward, what did we take into HEFE 23? This was predominantly a face-to-face campus and a face-to-face conference. And because we didn't have the complications of needing to provide hybrid as consistency, as consistently, if we had Edge Bass and colleagues, they were told that it would be face-to-face, they would be on campus. Remote provision was simply for Dubai. So there were some conversations around how we do that. We developed a Dubai-specific program. So the decision was made to slightly scale back what we were doing before, not stream every room because that kind of prevented flexibility on the day, but take one room, stream that room fully for Dubai, make sure the campus know which rooms are available, know what they're gonna be seeing from that and know kind of how to expect that. But also part of the decision to make sure Dubai didn't feel like they were just watching a stream of a conference, but they were in a conference, informed some of the other stuff we did. So the conference app suddenly became less passive. So all the questions for the day ran through the app. Every room had a paddling wall, that paddling wall was used to answer questions whether or not you were in the room watching Geat Ball sat at home in Dubai. And that meant that there was an equal footing in terms of whose question was gonna get asked and whose ideas could be kind of explored within the room. We included the social media wall and a specific Dubai program to them. So again, pulling that out of the app and giving them their own version so they weren't seeing, well, I can see one room but there's actually eight rooms, but it felt like a focused curated program for them. And then making sure we were plastering hashtags plus all of those social media channels. So that again, all that kind of feedback from social media whether that be on Edge, Boston or Dubai comes into the same place. And that has a kind of development of the app as the kind of, I guess central side part of the conference really kind of improved my use of Peppy 23. And then one of the more important things we did, it's underrated, but we pulled in a lot of students to volunteer, which meant that some of those problems we were having in the first year, people not knowing where the rooms were, people arriving late and not having their badges. Some of the people that were more technically able to support weren't involved in those queries. We had students who could help make sure people knew how to get to the app and where they were going, which meant that I essentially sat in a room and helped stream a room all day, but means that some of those kind of firefighting issues that are the crop of the day that you can't expect, you've suddenly got slightly more capable people available to support on. I guess it's also part of an ongoing, I guess area of strategy, I suppose, to bring in happy to start including students in lots of our core areas and core practices. So although quite a small inclusion in terms of bringing students in and helping with the organization is actually huge just so we could focus efforts, particularly on that hybrid room that we used in the end was not. Yeah, it didn't all go perfectly. So this is the stream that we have from Dubai. I think you'll pretty quickly notice that there's no heads in that image. That was a result of using a teaching space room that was tested for use a day before the conference. Everything was fine in between us testing and getting the conference running. So when it'd been in there, the camera had been moved. So there's definitely takeaways to pull from that to make sure that you can see faces, but also understand that the conference is bigger than Hethi working in a building, but there are other departments that handle other parts of this that need to be aware that there are parts of this conference that need to run smoothly. They also involve quite a lot of running across campus. So the next slide is just us with trolleys and hundreds of bottles of water running across campus. The sorts of things that you don't really think about, you buy water for your conference, you put it in your office, you forget that that needs to get to the conference. So it was a very sweaty morning running through that. But overall, I think Hethi 23 went really well and there's some really good feedback we can kind of pull from that looking into next year. Yeah, and yeah, as Javi said, there were certainly areas in regards to the sort of tech components that we can take away and improve on, particularly the headless keynotes and various other things. But yeah, I think in generally went well. The RISE app was evaluated quite well and mentioned quite consistently in the feedback that we got, which was great and it was great to see also the active component mentioned as well. The social media one was great, wasn't it? It was a real sort of hit overall and that consistent place to sort of reference the social media engagement was great. And also the inclusion of that student voice, as we mentioned, we've been trying to do a bit more consistently was also mentioned as well. I think actually the feedback overall was, as I mentioned, very much positive in relation to that, but also we did get some slightly negative feedback around some of the more logistical elements of the day, which were things that we can address. So we were comfortable with that in the end. So if you wanna go on to the last couple slides, Joey. So we have put together a very short list of our sort of lessons learned and recommendations and those of you who have been involved in conference organization might agree. We mentioned that RISE was received well and I think we'll continue to use that, I think for the next conference. The idea of making sure, particularly for that Dubai element and not treating it like an add-on, but as something that's core and central to the development of the conference program was key in something that will be continuing to do. And one thing that was really useful, particularly just to give an overview and ensure people were confident on the day when facilitating sessions were giving very detailed briefing documents and offering a space to brief any facilitators before the day as well. So they were also received very positive. If you go on to the next slide, which I think is the last in terms of the slides around this, it was also good to have a look at some of the literature. There was actually an article based on organizing and delivering hybrid conferences and higher education, which was great. So there were some examples of recommendations. There were around 15 or 16 of these recommendations or slightly more. And it was just great to have a look at some literature which basically reinforces some of the principles that we'd adopted in the first place, which is like a slightly backwards way of doing it, but it was always good to know that some of those are reinforced. And in particular, and it's something that's been noticeable today as well, is the importance of having those spaces for interaction, for that informal networking and digesting the talks as well. So I think that's it from us, I believe. Happy to take any questions. Otherwise, thanks everyone for coming along and listening to us. Thank you. Yes. Thanks. Thank you. It's always me that goes first with the questions. I thought that was brilliant. I'm really, really interested. I'm responsible for organizing our... I like your branding, HEFE conference. Ours is very imaginatively called the Huddersfield University Teaching and Learning Conference. So I think we need to look at that. I think we need to look at our branding. I think you've done some fantastic stuff there. I just wonder if I could contact you after this and we could share ideas and share your experiences and perhaps leverage some of the fantastic things you've done to organize our conference next year. We are face-to-face. We don't do hybrid. We didn't do hybrid in 2022. Either we wanted to have that social and peer networking element to our conference. Actually, 22 was relatively successful. We had quite a high take up on that. But I'd love to talk to you offline and bring some of my other team in to have that conversation. Look at the stuff you've done and pin some of your ideas if that's okay. Easy answer to that, yeah? Happy to do that, yeah? Great, thank you. Absolutely. Happy days. Thank you. Yeah, I think we've got time for one more question. I don't want to keep anyone from drinks, which I'm sure are out there, but I think I think you deserve another question. Yeah, it's fantastic. The organization looks really good. Just in terms of my reflection on when I've engaged with conferences online, have you noticed any difference or did you notice any kind of difference in the engagement to your face-to-face participants in the online with things like the engagement with the Padlet? Was that something you were even able to get some kind of metric on? Yes. So the majority of the Padlet comments from Dubai was that they couldn't see any faces, which was useful feedback. I think we didn't necessarily have a way of determining which ones were from Dubai and which ones were from the room. Partly by design, I think the idea of having them all feel like one bank of questions meant that we weren't really asking them to differentiate. We had consistent viewers in the room. I think the sign-ups from Dubai weren't huge, but it's not as big a campus. So I think where we were looking at a few hundred kind of on campus, we were looking at kind of within the 10s and 20s in Dubai. We were consistently getting people, I think, you know, we'd hold their hands up. We'd say that if the technical side of things and the cameras were working better, maybe the retention for some of those is that they went on would have stuck around. But also the timing is weird. It gets later there quicker than it does with our conference program. So I think there's some feedback we got from them and all the feedback kind of spoke to what we already saw. So it's good to know that we were at least planning on fixing problems that did exist and weren't being given new ones. Perhaps there's some room for us to... Perhaps there's some room for us to think about because what's missing when you attend online, unless you specifically design it in, which I think we could do the next time, is where that social interaction takes place. You're there and you can follow along with the sessions, but what goes on beyond that in terms of networking and that collaboration and conversations that happen is probably something that we could potentially consider the next year as well. Okay, thanks everyone for coming. Thank you to the four speakers today. I hope you've had a good day, one of this conference and have a lovely day two and three as well. Thank you very much.