 Hello everybody and good afternoon and welcome to this 14-25 session at the the conference. Thank you very much for anybody in southern England it's a beautiful sunny day outside so I hope you're either sitting in your garden but also thank you if you've if you've left the outside world to come in and listen to this presentation. So I'm chairing the session this afternoon and I will introduce the speaker now so Michael Dutina from Kings College London and he's going to be talking about his experiences and reflections on hybrid flexible learning. So over to you Michael. Thanks very much Fiona and I'll just put my slides full screen. Can everyone see it? Can you see it? Okay Fiona is that fine? That's looking good. Okay perfect. So as said the top of my talk is reflections on hybrid flexible learning while high-flex learning and its implementation. My name is Michael Dutina I'm a senior fellow of the AGA and a fellow of the Royal Teographic Society and I work at Kings. So I'm going to be talking a little bit about how it was implemented what the rationale for it was and also reflections on it as as an approach and I emphasise I'm not a used car salesman trying to promote this as an approach I'm just a fellow practitioner I'm hoping to share my experiences and talk to you about both the challenges and potential solutions to some of those challenges. So I'll start off with an introduction and overview. I should contextualise this by talking briefly about some other research on physical learning spaces that I've led or conducted. One was some research about what the classroom of tomorrow would be and another piece of research was on a new space that we've got in one of our strand buildings right next to Houses of Parliament and thinking about the pedagogical basis for this new innovative learning space. We did an alpha test space looking at different software and hardware. We found that before we started looking at technology we would want to look at pedagogy and we found that the big difference between how staff members felt that the current learning spaces were compared to an ideal learning space was that current learning spaces focus primarily on acquisition and discussion and less on other forms of teaching or discussion like collaboration investigation practice and production and we use that to inform the technologies that we introduced into that space. I've also led on some research on virtual reality and some of those papers some of these things have been published and I've just put some of the papers there. So the main topic of this talk is about hybrid flexible learning and what was the drive for it? Well as you can imagine because of the impact of COVID there are some students who wish to learn fully online and some students who wish to be in person and hybrid flexible learning allows by synchronous delivery of both things at once at least in theory. Of course it's not the only option there's many other options that are a lot more straightforward such as teaching an online class on a Monday and then a face-to-face class on a Tuesday or doing blocks of time or alternatively you could teach fully online as I'm sure you're aware. I wrote a position paper looking at different methods for synchronous teaching this hyplex was was one of those and that was used to grant funding which would then worried me a lot because my position paper was something that was then taken forward but I could realize that there would be a mountain of potential challenges which have illustrated this with this picture of a mountain. When we first started looking at this in March of last year we couldn't we approached I think 15 different institutions and we couldn't find a single institution in the UK that was adopting it. There were however some institutions overseas such as in the Netherlands and in the US that were adopting it and a literature review on this topic by a Dutch researcher called Race and her colleagues wrote that they felt that the literature showed cautious optimism about synchronous hybrid learning which in their view creates a more flexible and engaging learning environment compared to fully online and fully on-site instruction but they say that this new learning space has several challenges which are both pedagogical and technological in nature and I would I would emphasize that last sentence it does have a lot of challenges. So how do we deliver this against? Well there's a pathway up the mountain. First personally I conducted a literature review and did some overview as such then we had to design a completely new system so working with AV working with a number of colleagues then we had to pilot it so we had to analyze it we had to review it we had to consider how it was being developed then we had to gather data around that and analyze it and think about how it was being used then we had to then plan update it consider how it could be used then we had to agree this and then build it out to employ a contractor to build this out across a range of campuses then we had to say we I had to write some guidance so that needs to be researched and planned and considered and then that needs to be written up that needs to be designed there needs to be learning objectives clearly put together there needs to be things put on a virtual learning environment and then of course we need to deliver training guidance to a range of staff members and AV members staff and then eventually at the beginning of term last year there was a go live and monitoring phase so then it was live but that was for just a pilot group and I would say there's still quite an ongoing a large ongoing piece of work around this particularly is the number of faculties that have engaged in it has now increased the number of staff members in total has increased by a factor of five so we've got a lot of people to to to induct in terms of the only broader UK sector and from when we started looking at it or when I started looking at the Microsoft last year as I said I couldn't sign a single institution that was adopting it so you could call us by in years if you wanted but we've now found that there are a few institutions that are adopting this and if that was quite a few and quite often get asked for advice and feedback on it and on those institutions that have adopted it Blackboard collaborate zoom and teams are used we use teams at King's there's general concerns about student perceptions all institutions have encountered challenges by technically pedagogically I'd say different institutions are at different stages and there's a variety of degrees of enthusiasm from guided optimism to being it's not appropriate and I wouldn't say there was any institutions I think has that gung-ho in favour of it what does it look like well here's a glance at the system you can see two screens one shows the teams windows you can see the faces of all the students online and then people in the room can look at online participants trying to communicate there's a camera which will show the room to people online and then there's visual aids at the front and then there's a tutor's laptop which is shown on dual monitor and connected to the room display so that everything is is controlled by one set of keyboards and mouse and we ask students to raise their hand if they want to speak and so check that they can be understood and there's a variety of different issues that can come up for example audio feedback from people who bought a laptop into the room and masks covering up their faces so there are a number of issues however having said that I would say that the acoustic system that my colleague Rodrigo put together and he's doing a PhD in acoustics is excellent and um there are some pedagogical challenges but a lot of them can be overcome um so just briefly what does it look like in terms of the setup of staff and they have two screens both the teams window on the laptop and the presentation both of those are duplicated and then there's a series of steps to log in in terms of the overview of the setup of kings we designed a system written up and commented in those testing completed um last year we have 34 rooms have been argued in the case of additional funding so we now have an additional 10 rooms so by the start of next academic of this academic year so in a few weeks time there will be 44 rooms so far there's been one one half thousand seminars delivered by this method and there's effectively eight major projects all under one name a literature review and eat analysis testing phase implementation guidance induction monitoring evaluation there's a lot of different things that need to be done it's it's a huge huge project in terms of feedback that we have this is an initial evaluation um and basically I would say that feedback is mixed that people have uh gained knowledge about how to use the system through induction and felt that that was useful but a lot of people found it challenging particularly compared to fully face-to-face teaching which unfortunately wasn't available to people um they said that they would uh favor fully face-to-face teaching a lot people wouldn't recommend it a lot people would so it's a mixed group um and I would say it is not an approach that suits everyone qualitative feedback has been mixed and it's been very positive and negative feedback um that's why I'm always recommending that consent-based approach and not pressurizing people into adopting it if they don't want to and recognizing that it isn't for everyone in terms of my reflections which is the the heart of this topic I'm going to use uh Daniel Radcliffe sorry not Daniel Radcliffe's pedagogy space technology model he's an Australian academic who argued that all uh technology in a learning space needs to be brain door understood through these three lenses one of pedagogy one of space and one of technology um so in terms of pedagogy what what challenges or issues are there well one is equity challenges have you ensured that both online and on campus students have an equitable experience um and one thing I think we've come to the conclusion is that they won't necessarily have an equal experience by definition but they we try to ensure that they have an equitable one so there's benefits to being online you don't need to uh lug a huge uh textbooks into the club campus because you've got them with you but then there's also benefits to being on campus in that there's a library nearby and that that very you know that um that point um can be used for of a range of different issues um in terms of the concentration cognitive load can be a real challenge for staff members and focus and attention attention are affected by multitasking and transitions particular activity and the thing a thing that I would really emphasize on this is the power and value of self-reflection for academics that self-reflection is such a powerful tool to think about how to adopt this in terms of reflections on space I would say that um there are some issues to be mindful of students online can feel excluded from the main space unless actively engaged they can feel a bit like they're uh outside of a shop looking in through a class window unless there's a kind of active engagement with them and lecturers need to think and plan ahead to ensure that they use the space effectively and the position is important to ensure the good acoustics and good camera positioning and in terms of technology I say the AV equipment is less of an issue than the overall technology implementation and the setup and use can be cumbersome and this can be difficult to resolve and to emphasize as well that this is not our approach to suit everyone and some of the staff members see the technologies and hindrance as much as a positive and of course there's always the alternative of teaching fully online in terms of my reflections on adoption I would say if you want to adopt it it's a novel approach some people have said that it is the future I don't know if that's necessarily the case but certainly a lot of institutions want to adopt it and I would say that it requires careful consideration that it can provide flexibility for students but also the lecturer will encounter challenges and it can be quite difficult to implement so reflections are not adopting easier it's more straightforward it's a lot less straight stressful and but then you also need to consider what do you do with a mixed cohort that some of you are online and some of you are in person how do you teach that group and that's something to consider and there is no perfect solution within this pandemic emergency situation or in the moment but my my key point is that I would stress that no one should do unless they feel comfortable doing it. There's other some points here on some common challenges so there might be issues like the lecture being few minutes late and then we would emphasize that the value of having a GTA's provides part for discussion and there's a variety of other common challenges that I'm not going to go through here. In terms of ongoing work there's a range of different tasks ongoing and evaluation right up the A's on the different departments benefits realisation ongoing training as guidance updates and experimentation and updates we've had to put some of the experimentation on hold because inducting staff has become such a huge task we've had so many people that want to adopt it that we've had to really focus attention on that and then some key challenges and solutions if staff members don't know the technology we emphasize the value of completing induction in terms of pedagogy challenges we emphasize the value of welcoming students and then in terms of things like feeling of a world we try to emphasize the staff members not to do too much too quickly and keep it simple. In terms of the support model we talked about they're a devolved model but it will still need substantial involvement from the central departments so AB issues are raised by the AB department immediate teaching issues are resolved in theory by graduate teaching assistant and tel issues are resolved by the technology and slaying teams because there are always issues with these the GTAs need to be recruited not every faculty is recruited GTAs and AB issues we say that they provide immediate support but of course that requires there to be enough manpower there's always budget tree issues around having enough people so I wouldn't say that we've got a perfect solution in terms of support at the moment but we're doing the best that we can with the constraint that we have and I'm just briefly going to touch on some of the references here so Brian Beattie is an excellent academic who's written about this in the United States Koskeden has talked to her about the needs of graduate students and Reisa Al is a Dutch academic who's written about it from from both their perspective and also run a literature of you and hopefully I'm writing three papers on this stuff at the moment hopefully next year or so we'll get some of those some of our published on this but I think I'm almost exactly to time so I'm going to go back to the main window maybe I'll stop sharing my screen and I noticed we've got some questions so Fiona do you want to yep we do let's um um racing back through the chat so the first um there's been lots of discussion actually in the chat Michael which is really interesting I'm sure you'll enjoy going through some of those questions and looking at the chat afterwards um but the first question um from Lucy Am said um what choice do students have i.e do they have to be there in person and online only if they can't make it to the session or is it free choice one day everyone is online and no one in the room well going back to the drawing because for this in the first place the reason for it was because of the pandemic and some people being um online because they have to be online particularly students from China and other places which are on the red list it's difficult for them to travel so for them there's obviously no choice um it's depending on your department and your your institution you could organize it as as you wish there is a degree of choice and that's the point of flex and high flex so students can choose to some extent um but obviously if they can't get to the country then they have no flexibility so it depends basically but there is a degree of choice but for some for some my recommendation is it's more of a mixed group you have try to get it more kind of 50 50 if you get all the students online it can be you lack a kind of vitality that you get from an online opening person group that's really interesting actually and thinking about that kind of going forwards how it might be used in the future that's that's worth worth bearing in mind so thank you um another question um from tim roughly what is the spend per room for this solution it does seem like a medium spec i.e better than just sticking an additional mic cam into a room but not as good as more specialized tech i think the rav team would be greatly offended by um it's uh it's the top of the range a uh microphone system that we can get is like the really as good as we could possibly get and we they also have a kind of computing system built in and such that it's um it's got the computing system will create what's called virtual microphones so it doesn't work perfectly but in theory at least you can pick up you can create a virtual microphone and pick up the sound from everyone everywhere around there in the room um and we you know the ab spend was um about 20 more than the standard ab setup so normal ab spend is about 50 000 pounds per room it seems huge amount to me but that's that's the cost of ab equipment and then this this solution provides an extra 12 k so that's about 20 extra um of course the project managers and others um built up the overall cost so expense there was quite a lot of expense um in terms of not not more specialized tech i mean we it's a completely new solution we've we've you know built it up from scratch so it's completely novel um and uh yeah and then the solution involves both the cameras the the lcd screen and the whole setup um plus plus a laptop that will sort of power everything um comes together the next question yeah that's really interesting and that and that kind of addresses some of the discussion in the chat as well about so it will come you know the crunch point is the audio so it sounds like that's where you put a lot of the the investment in that really high spec audio so that's that's really interesting thank you so simon asked um which staff and teaching has high flex been most appropriate um i think it's most appropriate where it's primarily discussion based so all of the sessions are for seminars but some seminars could be meant to be discussed but they they can sometimes be a bit transmissive um i feel that it doesn't work as well for um systems where we have to um do something hands-on so nursing for example physiotherapy where the seminar would be hands-on it doesn't i don't think it works as well and therefore the demand from those faculties is being limited and i think that's the right approach um but departments that would work really well in i think uh things like uh law philosophy particularly when there's a kind of narrative to it there's a form of storytelling and you can engage people in that sort of form of storytelling as part of the seminar and i have to be honest i've seen i've seen some sessions where it's really not working well at all and as i say it doesn't work for everyone however i have seen sessions particularly in law where i've been sort of swept away by by the and i think that partly that's because of the law lectures are really excellent but they really kind of take me on a journey and i as a pretend student listening in on the conversation i've really felt that it worked quite well so it isn't for everyone and i'm not trying to promote it um but but i have seen it work really well particularly on um more discursive sessions that have a kind of a nugget of uh storytelling that's really interesting because i mean my question would be how um how do they would they've used group work in those sessions so you know you know in those kind of seminar type sessions i would you know traditionally include a bit of group work you know maybe some pair work how would how did that work in the in those type of environments or did people just steer clear of that um no we have a lot of group work and essentially um the the group work that works best is if we don't try and run before we can so you don't have um uh online students paired up with in-person students in pairs what works really well is if we just allow people to work in groups that they would naturally so obviously uh you can use a breakout room for online groups i'm sure people are familiar with that and then for in-person groups um you obviously it's very it's very straightforward to um to ensure that those in-person groups are grouped together so um it's it's sort of to be straightforward to do that as long as you're not mixing them up i find that that's where the complexity lies and i know there's some staff members are kinds of really keen on that as an approach but it does create a lot of issues um and of course you've got to think about any time you're you're thinking about doing something new in terms of the AV equipment it's not just a question of just getting some new tech and then playing around with it it needs to be ideally if you're doing it in front of paying students it needs to be tested and refined and analysed um so that's something to be mindful of um staff members might often say oh well we'll just do x y z and it will be fine well it might be okay in your head but it might not be work so well in practice well we've got a few more questions coming in um so rods ask what your experiences of team teaching michael my personal experience with my experience in the high flex like the high flex the way that we as i said we high flex has puts high cognitive load on on the lecturer okay because they've got to think about so many different things the learning objectives the name of the students um whatever the learning objectives are in their mind and how they go to them whether that's only when they legal history lecture about french medieval history in the 14th century and then the 15th century plus where they are relative to the camera relative to the microphones there's a lot of different things that they want they have to think about all at once and because the confidence load is so high um we recommend or i recommend that there's an additional person helping so i don't know if you'd call that teacher team teaching but i'd argue a phd project teaching system is there to um help in some way um ideally um online to to make a connection between the online students and the in-person students i mean it can be quite difficult for the lecturer to keep track of all the questions that are coming in so we we recommend that there is an additional person to sort of help out um one issue is sometimes that the lecturers seem to see the gta as a sort of technical support person and that's not really their role it's more of a team teaching person as well as suggests yes so well just to respond in the chat though to another question gta is a graduate teaching assistant so it's it's a it's a student who's employed to help out with the teaching so some institution calls them gta's and i'm going to just skip to because we're getting a bit short on time i'm going to skip to um there's reen's question on is there much uptake or interest for high-flex teaching in the upcoming academic year when presumably we're hopefully going to be yeah so too much too much demands to be perfectly honest given that like uh and i'm trying to get the message you know message out that it doesn't suit everyone so we um we've we've actually been inundated with request and it's very labor-intensive so we've actually i mean last year it was basically me on my own we've actually got a team of five people delivering inductions and that's still going to be insufficient there's so many people who want to to adopt it and there does always there there can sometimes be a a difference of use between sort of management and and local academics and my position always is that the local educators should be like best about what they what they want to do and um so we don't want to we suddenly don't want to be pressuring people but yes there is there's a very high demand primarily because of the situation that we're in um you know covid means that there are people who are online or uh in person and it's difficult to know how to to get get to all of them and do you think that you know kind of post-covid that there's going to be you know that it's going to be part of your repertoire of teaching techniques at kings i think what i honestly think is there's good there's a peak in demand and then it's probably going to go down quite a lot um and then maybe i think it's going to increase slightly um i think there's there's there's probably going to be a number of people who try to outread and like it and then put the numbers going to go down and then gradually as the technology improves over the next few years i think it will it will be a i don't think it'll be the main part of teaching but i think it will be it will be a part that continues long term yeah that's fantastic thank you well so we're exactly on time now so i think um um michael i'm sure you'll be able to kind of peruse the because there's a few other extra comments and and um sort of semi-questions in the in the chat um and i'm sure um michael will get in contact if there's anything or you can contact him um but i think it all is left for me to do really now is to do the traditional can we have a round of applause please a virtual round of applause in the chat for for michael and that really really interesting and thought-provoking um presentation and i i feel that we will be um we'll be hearing more about this over the coming years so um it's great to hear that there's been some really thorough research being done into that so thank you very much thank you help yeah and thank you questions for you as well i really appreciate it thank you