 So let me start. I think that we have most of participants already in the room. So hello everyone. Welcome to another Eden initiative, Eden session on online together, hashtag online together, hashtag COVID-19. This is the third session in this initiative of Eden webinars. My name is Sandra Kucina and I'm the president and I will be the session moderator for today. Eden has started with this initiative last year. I will just share my screen so it will be easier for me to speak just a second. So just let me. Okay, so I hope you can see it. So hello to everyone. So this is the sessions of webinars. I'm sorry, title time for action in shaping high education for zero. Last year we started with this initiative of webinars. First one was education in time of pandemic. Then we have education in time of new normal. And now we think it's time for action. We had very good response from participants. And this is the reason why we continue with this session now again. Also, this is our contribution to the situations which situation which we are all facing. That pandemic is still present now. It's more than a year and I'm certain that you are all fed up with it. And I myself, I'm certainly and that we want to go back to the normal, whatever it means. But to the times when we were happy without without pressure of being only online to distance from other people to wear masks to to be scared. We talked to other people face to face. So we missed these times, nevertheless, if we are online or in face to face. So in this session of webinars, we wanted to help to educators to all those working in education to move forward because we did again significant experience. What we could have done better. We have in the ideas how to do better. We know that we should reset the education for digital age. We know lots of things, but now it's time actually to do something and to do some significant or systematic actions to actually make these changes happen. We will try again to provide insight and advice on how to help to make these needed changes to move forward and shape higher education for today and for tomorrow. The aim of these webinars is to support the educational community worldwide and to provide practice oriented advice. The examples and resources to those faced with the challenges of taking present education practice on the higher level. And before we start with the session just let me remind you that even is celebrating 30 years this year. Three decades of serving modernization in education in Europe. We are celebrating it through all the year. And we have the special web related to our anniversary. Please take a time go and look what we have prepared and share your story with us share. Why are you connected with Eden? How Eden has contributed to your environment, personal environment and how it has become part of your life. Because we usually say that Eden is like a big family once you get into it, it's difficult to get out of it. And so I will be happy to hear your stories on our Eden web. Let me remind you that Eden was established in 1991. The first Eden conference was in 1992 in Krakow. And our journal Urodil has started in 1994. Definitely we have the fathers, the people who established Eden. Sir John Daniel, Edwin Hidosha, Alan Tate, who had the vision how such organization, how such a network as Eden can contribute to the education area. Not only on European but on the global level. And I'm happy to be president of Eden today and to follow the first steps taken and to continue what the previous Eden presidents have been doing so far. And to leave when my termination of the presidency come to leave the Eden in the good hands to continue for 30 more years. So, let me start with our present session today. I'm certain that you're very eager to hear about learning design in the eye of the storm. This third session of every nurse have in the title a little bit poetic view. This is meant. This is not the occasion. But definitely learning design is something which is very important today because the most teachers and educators today work in an online environment. And even if they met this digital technologies and online environment only a year ago, they had to start to work in it in order to response to the present situation and ensure continuity of education. So it brought many challenges to teachers. They needed suddenly new and different skills and experience and in teaching as well as a port support to work in an online environment to use these digital technologies and they were invited to collaborate with people of different backgrounds and expertise in order to be able to provide their teaching. So support units learning technologies instructional designers learners designers have become more in focus and then ever. And they were helping teachers to come out of this situation as we say to let the teachers out of the storm. So things which we planned but waited for action for a number of years actually happened with pandemic. So we can take this pandemic also as a challenge as an opportunity to do things better to do things differently. And how teachers have navigated through these pedagogical changes. What kind of challenges they have experienced and what kind of support they require in designing their courses is topic of our session today. And I'm very happy to have with me people experts speakers, which are I'm certain the right people for that. First is Gerard. Oh, well, for me Irish names are very, very difficult. I'll try, but I please, Gerard, accept my apologies. Oh, Swim Pan. Did I? Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Good. Thank you. He's the head of department of technology enhanced learning in the minister minister technology University in Ireland, having experience of over 25 years in this field. The next one is Alexandra Mihai, who is assistant professor of innovation in high education in the department of educational research and development. School of business and economics at Master's University, the Netherlands. She is young person, but with lots of experience and she is learning designer recently was at University College London. So she has experience from that part as well. And the last but not least is Nick Barrett, director of learner and discovery service at the open University UK, who is also dealing with the range of learning design services and who is in charge of design development and production at scale of all the open University models. So very tough role. So I think that we have right people for this topic who will share with us their insights and experience. And not to continue too much. I am certain that you would like to hear what they have to say. I forgot to move the slides, but well, I cannot do everything at once. So I'm stopped sharing my screen and I giving floor to Gerard to start with his introduction. Okay, thank you very much. I'm just going to put up my slides. And I hope you can see that okay. Yeah, it's good. Okay, so I'm just going to start with a few words to explain who we are to offer a bit of context I suppose on my slides and some stuff I might say later. So there's about 12 people working in the department. We are, by the way, Ireland's newest university where the Monster Technological University. So depending on how you count, there's a dozen or more of us working in the department. But there's a core team who originally would have done a lot of commercial work would have developed a lot of commercial solutions for some quite well known clients. So we have that background in terms of that aspect of instructional design. And I suppose in setting up the department as it's currently configured. The idea was that we would bring those same skills and offer them internally. Okay, and as we all know there's always a next big thing coming along in that space where technology meets learning. So we continue to do a lot of exploratory research. So we do services in the here and now. We do exploratory research into things that are a little ways off. And as you might be anticipating, when it works out right, it forms a bit of a virtuous circle because the services give us end user insights and bring a certain realism to the exploratory research. Otherwise, we'd just be going around with VR headsets on our heads or something with no purpose. But the exploratory research feeds into the mainstream stuff. It feeds into the services as well and ensures the currency of our of our provision. This is what our website usually looks like where we're promoting all the great online courses that we support. But this is what it currently looks like because of course, since March of last year, we all of our time effectively has been taken up with supporting the move to what some people call emergency remote teaching. So our entire website is given over to all of these areas, different guidelines and supports. So that's a bit about me. And so I think I can maybe speak a little bit to the commercial world and a little bit to the higher education one. The question I said I'd look at isn't actually the COVID-19 question, but the question of instructional design versus learning design. And we might get back to it, but it's probably not design in the in the same sense because instructional design has been around for a very long time and certainly predates any talk of design thinking or human centered design or anything like that. So here's a bit of a table that I've put together to keep me on the on the straight and narrow. You can take the table in various different ways. On one level, these are just notes that I tried to put together for myself. On another level, though, I suppose I'm being a little bit provocative with some of the things I've put in here. But I'm also being quite sincere in trying to in trying to figure things out. So the first item there I have instructional design is older. It often dates are many sources would indicate it dates back to at least World War Two. Depends on who you read, but learning design only dates back to the naughties I would have said. And, you know, some of the literature appears to agree there. And so it's worth mentioning, you know, that a lot of the technology has changed over this time. So it's possible to caricature instructional design with reference to models and processes that were really developed for a different time for different technologies. And of course, for different pedagogies because the dominant pedagogy of the day would have been behaviorism. And then later we see instructional design catching up with cognitive science and cognitivism and constructivism and all of that stuff. Whereas learning design has the advantage, hasn't it? It arrives when all of this stuff has already been has already been put in place. It's probably true to say that traditionally, at least instructional design models tend to be linear. You know, you do one step, and then you do the next. So in software development, we would call this a waterfall model. So with Addie, for example, you know, you finish with your analysis phase, then you do design, then you do development. But of course, we've changed it all up now. We've made everything kind of iterative. And we have instructional design models like Sam, for example, which is a successive approximations model, which is deliberately and explicitly iterative. But that iterativeness is definitely baked right into learning design, I would think, you know, because it shares a certain kind of DNA with user centered design, human centered design and that kind of thing. Similarly, instructional design was originally instructional systems design. So it's maybe linked in with a systems engineering view of things. Another way in which the distinction is made is to say that instructional design is content centric. And then learning design, you see, becomes about experience. But I don't think that's quite fair. For many years, certainly my working definition of instructional design has included the notion of experience. But some of you as well, of course, will have heard of LXD, which is learning experience design. So there's another term you have to kind of contend with. And then finally, while instructional design talks about systems, learning design people tend to talk about learning environments. I'll give you one more and then I'll move on because I know I'm only supposed to talk for a short while to get to get you all warmed up as it were. But if we were going to talk about a quintessential model or framework for each of these, I would say that Addy, excuse me, that Addy is still the quintessential model for instructional design. We've lots of different variants of it. And obviously there's a dozen or more models of frameworks and I'm sure that we could all speak of. When I hear learning design, I think ABC learning design. So that might not be quite right. I know some learning design people will think of learning design as being about applying digital thinking or design thinking rather to the problem of edtech design and development. If you're with me on the ABC design, you're with me on why I've put Laura Lard in the kind of box there as being the kind of theoretical seed, if you like, of what's there. One more final one maybe. Who is instructional design for? You might say it's for the learner or for the teacher, but as a practitioner, I think it was often for me, the instructional designer, it was a way for me to solve my problems. So I might share that solution with the teachers or the subject matter experts. But it was essentially for me. By contrast, I think learning design is for the teacher and is probably developed with them. Okay. So there's a few more things in the box there that I'll get back to, but I know I'm under time pressure. So I'll just give you this final one. Right. So I'm being a little bit provocative with this. Basically what I'm saying is I wonder in the context of COVID-19, if it was really the instructional or learning designer, who was leading the charge, who to use Sandra's metaphor was really helping the teachers and the educators find their way out of the storm. So you know, I've used the distracted boyfriend meme here, but it's a bit overdone, but it's a very good fit. We are the instructional or learning designers. We think we've got a good thing going that we've got a very good relationship with teachers and teaching staff and other educationalists. But remember, during COVID-19, the move was towards emergency remote teaching, not planned online teaching with a proper lead in, which I think is where the instructional designer and the learning designers really do well. And if I think back to March and I think back over the whole long year, a lot of the questions that we receive still to this day are, how do I upload a file? How do I share my grades? How do I do breakout rooms again? I have a graphic tablet. Can I use it with Zoom? So less about design in terms of either planning or iterative design, less about working over time, you know, with subject matter experts and doing instructional task analysis and all the stuff that we love to do, but much more about the place where the technology meets the day-to-day things that a teacher does that a member of teaching staff wants to do. So I've been an instructional designer. I sometimes pretend to be a learning designer, but I would say for the last year I have more been a learning technologist. Thank you. Perfect. Perfect. I know how you feel because I do support of teachers every day. And yeah, well, I have to say hi to all the colleagues from Croatia. I see there are many of them. And what I think is the good motto is to work with teachers, not for teachers. And maybe in that way, why do you think the teachers are sometimes skeptical or I wouldn't say scared, but reluctant to ask for the help from instructional learning designers in that way? Well, I think it's a bit kind of awkward, really, isn't it? Because, you know, the teachers feel themselves to be both subject matter experts and pedagogical experts. Often we have, you know, a whole lot of stuff that we know will be of use to them, but we can only start giving it to them when they have experienced the problems that we have the solutions to. So I think initially a lot of the focus was on the kind of functionality kind of questions that I just mentioned. How do I upload a file? How do I share things? It has nearly taken until now, I think, for a lot of teaching staff to move away from those kinds of questions, know that they have this kind of repertoire of technical skills to start asking some of those pedagogical questions as well, you know. But going back to the question about the role of the teachers, you know, teachers are still craftspeople, really, aren't they? You know, some of you may have heard of Otto Petters, you know, and he says distance education is education in its most industrialized format where we have division of labor where you have the subject matter expert over here and you have the instructional designer and maybe there's a videographer and a graphic designer and all of those kinds of things. That's kind of the way it works in the commercial world, but it's not the way that it works yet, certainly in publicly funded education and training. So we have to go softly, softly and allow people to realize, I think, the value that we can bring to them. But there's also a kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs here, isn't there? Because, you know, initially the struggle was how do we just get something up and running? I mean, I think of the sheer numbers in our place, 15,000 students, 1,000 staff. We've had lots of leaps forward in the past, but it was always, you know, people who for one reason or another wanted to kind of make this jump with us. So the most unprecedented aspect, I would say, of the whole COVID-19 crisis was everybody had to get involved, absolutely everybody. So the first question became, what's the minimum viable product? And then all the questions, you see, were about the technical stuff. But it's just as well, by the way, that we are now getting questions and having discussions about the pedagogy stuff because I think the biggest challenge is yet to come. In September we're going to see mixed modalities, high flex and hybrid, and that in many ways could be far more difficult, far more difficult than anything we've had to deal with so far. Yeah, don't spoil. We will leave this for discussion. Thank you. You can look at the chat and maybe you can reply to some comments in the chat. You have really set a good floor for Alexandra because she was doing the ABC learning design model at University College London. And so, Alexandra, not taking too much time, you can go on and please have your introduction. Thank you so much, Sandra. Thanks a lot, Kara, for your introduction. I think it was absolutely perfect. I can continue as if I had prepared together, I think, because it's absolutely seamless. I'll just try to. So I will try to talk a little bit more about learning design from two perspectives. First of all, the emergency learning design or learning design in terms in times of emergency. And there I will probably pick up from your meme because that was a really good point to pick up and it really resonates very well with my experience in the past year. And I think Leo mentioned in the comment in the chat, we really had a hybrid role. So I think we were both the girlfriend and the other girl, which makes it quite complicated. But I think it really was like that. And also the point to just mentioned of the needs that have been changing throughout the year. That's also very important because I noticed while working as, you know, formally, at least a learning designer, more in the beginning of the pandemic. I had a lot of technology related questions and later on the questions really were focusing more on pedagogy. So you could really see that there was a learning curve that people were getting used a little bit more or at least more familiar to technology, the technology they were using at least and then trying to ask other types of questions. How do I achieve certain objectives? How do I engage students? So I really could notice this change is this shift throughout a few months. So that was kind of really encouraging, I would say. But I wanted to say a few things about my impression at least and my experience of what learning design actually meant in times of emergency. And I'm really happy that you already mentioned the distinctions, at least your view of the distinctions between instructional design and learning design. I agree, I think with your discussion. But I think it's really a complex topic. I think it's so complex, especially because at the level of labels and definitions, there is such a diversity. Then you can also add educational developer. There are lots of different roles that I have to say from the different universities I've been to in like four countries, I think by now, they really don't correspond with each other. So they're really very, very diverse and they mean really maybe not such different things, but there are lots of nuances. So it's very difficult to really label something and say, that's going to stick. I think we really have to just adjust ourselves to being open to definitions and to labels. But back to last year and what learning design meant for us as faculty and as learning designers. I think what we learned is that basically we could at least partly forget about all the models you mentioned. Or at least applying them very, very rigorously. Because a lot of the times I feel at least in the beginning when the focus was a lot of technology on how to use the different tools, nobody had the time or the patience to really dive into those models nor had we as learning designers the patience to actually go through all the motions. So basically, we did base our work on that because I heard a lot of debates lately whether we just gave up all our evidence and all our scholarship and forgot everything when we were dealing with faculty last year. It's not the case. We build our work on it, but we just had to be more versatile in our work. We had to be more adaptive. We had to listen more to the faculty to really see what the need in that particular moment is or in that particular context is. And try to come up with new formats, with new models. Sometimes, well, actually the biggest thing that I liked the most, I think, or everyone liked the most is that was time. Because like you said, for both instructional design and learning design, we normally work with faculty for a longer period, at least six months, I would say, if not more. And there is a whole process and you go through certain stages. We had to cut all that now. So it was basically doing more with less time, sometimes doing more with less resources depending on what university you were in. In some universities, we're not that lucky to have a lot of people in those roles. So I think it was really about trying to adapt to the situation and support as much as we could, but also to try to be more creative ourselves and try to come up with new, maybe even with a certain, with a certain new role, I would say, like really rethinking our role rather than just say, this is what we do as learning designers. It was really a continuous redefinition of our role, I would say. And also it was a lot, or I connected it a lot with the idea of faculty support. So because sometimes this is also not seen, I don't know, or it depends again from context to context. But here you have a lot of ways of supporting faculty. So you can work in partnership with them and I will definitely discuss that in my next slide. And that's my take on it, so working in partnership and I'm going to develop more on that. But there is also, there were lots of calls, of course, at some point to develop basically the courses instead of faculty. And I'm just putting it here also as a sort of provocation. I think we have maybe to discuss about that. It is going a little bit more further than the idea of design, but more developing and content development, which is something different, I would say, but it was also brought on the table at a certain point. So I think our main message to take also from this period is that we need to be adaptable ourselves to kind of inspire faculty to be adaptable, to think, OK, this is not going to be the final product. We're just going to create, recreate design, redesign and so on. So what can we take from this emergency? It was not all bad. So this emergency learning design, I think it has taught us a few things. That maybe perhaps we should focus on in the next period, which is probably not going to be the easiest as was already mentioned before. So I think obviously we cannot, as we all know, we cannot design learning. So we want to design for learning. And I think here we can think of designing both learning experience, which was mentioned before, but also designing learning spaces. And here I'm talking both about the physical spaces, which hopefully we will return to at some point and the virtual spaces, which I hope we will be able to refine as well in the future. But no matter which of these angles we are taking, I think what we learn from this idea of doing more with less was that basically we and faculty need to focus on what matters. So going to the core, trying to cut away from the fluff and really going to the core. And I think this has been very helpful for faculty, because often they were not even questioning this before the pandemic. And obviously a lot of them were not even thinking in terms of learning design, either they were simply thinking about creating their course, teaching their course, evaluating and so on. So I think just, and I'm going to come back to that the idea of working together with someone from a different background that can help you both in the design on the pedagogical side but also on the technological side was really something that really came strong I think in the pandemic and I think it's actually good to take that further. And then the other thing is really to be intentional about the tools you are using and the environment you are using and the modes you are using. So again, the pandemic made us more aware because we were lacking certain environments we realized what we actually lack most. But also we tried and I think successfully sometimes to make use of other environments or tools which surprised us with their affordances. So I think, regardless of the tools that we settle upon in the end, it's important to actually use them with a purpose. Always question before as faculty perhaps even discuss with a learning designer if there is time for that to why you are using which tool which mode for a certain activity or for a certain objective. I think this is really important. The other important thing I think we also draw from the last month is to try to involve students as well in the design process and I know the Open University has that as quite a strong model and I hope maybe we'll hear more about that. I am really inspired by that and I think it's really, really important because also what we've learned in the past year is that it's really important to develop empathy, empathy or even to train our empathy. It's not that this is not applicable to face to face teaching or to in person teaching, but it is really, really at the core of online teaching just because we are not we don't have the proximity we don't have the immediacy. We don't have the non non verbal cues and so on. So we need to develop and train our empathy and I think by working with students by involving them. Already at the design stage, I always I think this is one of the pieces of advice that I give most often is to try not to be scared to show students backstage to show students our design how we are thinking. How we design the course, not in any, you know, very technical terms, but explaining the choices of tools and models and and environments that we made, explaining it to them and and getting them on board. And in that way, getting suggestions from them as well. So trying to be build this feedback loop that is very, very useful, I think. And then technology, of course, what are we going to keep, what are we going to keep from this period. How are we going to best use technology based on our experiences I think one of the good things in the pandemic of course is not perfect to talk about good things but I think one of the good things was that we got to try or faculty go to try a lot of things that they were afraid or didn't see the point in trying beforehand. So having tried all that possibly they settled or they found something that is very useful to them, and they will continue to integrate that specific it can be a very little tool a very little routine, something that involves technology that they will happily take over back to the to the post pandemic world. And last but not least, I think on this point, we need to definitely base it base our approach or learn that approach and keep basing it on evidence so doing research and I think as Gerard mentioned before, the circle, I do hope that many of us are based in institutions where we get to do this, we get to close this and make it a virtuous circle, not a vicious circle. I myself I'm just starting a new job and I am happy to be in such a department that mixes educational research and development so it's really a good, a good way to to work I think. Another thing that we take from the pandemic is basically everything we really have to insist of the idea of having an iterative development so also trying to instill this to faculty that the first version of your course will not be the last involve the students get their field feedback. It doesn't mean you're not prepared. It's just the process the process of designing and teaching a course. And the last point I want to make I already hinted that it before and I think some already hinted even earlier is that the way I see learning design is really working in partnership so a partnership between whatever we call us learning designers instructional designers learning the educational developers faculty developers whatever we call us working in partnership with faculty so working not against because we couldn't even wanted to but based on the individual teaching visions and philosophies of faculty so trying to to to really build the whole the whole experience on that. Having that at the core also trying to play more or try to create a new habit you know habit is not easy to create we all know, but this new teamwork habits so faculty working together with somebody a specialist that can help them on a certain aspect of their course. And this is something definitely worth cultivating. And then of course we should be sensitive to nuances and to context because it's really easy to generalize, but the most important thing is that, and that we noticed I think quite a lot during the pandemic is that there are no, you know, approval recipes for success. There are no rules really strict strict rules for doing everything or or silver bullets that will take us from out of any situation. We have to take on board discipline specific approaches different nuances as I said before evidence based approaches, everything needs to fit into the way we take a learning design in the future. The last point I want to make actually because I think that's actually really important and perhaps we'll get back to it at some point is the focus on a community of practice and here I mean it in all senses I mean it in a sense of community of practice where faculty comes together with learning designers or educational developers. Again, in this idea of partnership, but also a community of practice that has started to develop or it has it existed before obviously but it became more and more prominent during the pandemic. At the global level, among educational designers, educational developers, I think this is really, really important because it gives us more support and more. It makes us more attentive to all these nuances that are not in our context but probably very prominent other contexts, and we could not be aware of that without cultivating and being part of these communities of practice or personal learning networks, whatever you prefer to call them. This is, I think, an important message. This was all from my side. Obviously, we'll have you to discuss the questions. Thank you, Alexandra. Very good points. Just briefly to give you a possibility to answer one question. Community of practice. I will just take the last one. You have really good points. Our community of practice can be learning designers, actually. How much they influence the learning design and what is the importance there? Because I think that maybe many teachers took a chance to be involved in some professional networks, communities of practice and learn from there instead of going to learning designers at their own premises if they had the such chance. So what would be your short reflections of importance of community of practice as learning designer? This is a very good point because, of course, for the sake of time, I condensed my point earlier. So thanks for letting me explain that a bit more. Obviously, first and foremost, I totally agree that we learn best from each other. So I think the community of practice among faculty is very, very valuable. And I've seen that develop as well quite a bit in the past months. On the other hand, there is also a community of practice among learning designers and faculty developers, and that has also been developing. Now, as I've been working at the intersection of these two for quite a while, I do realize that it's not in a lot of fora that you get both of them at the same time. So perhaps that would be a challenge. I think we can still, I think there is still a value in having a space where both voices are represented. Just because, like you say, it would be extremely helpful for those people who do not have the luxury to have people in these positions at their universities. There are many universities where this is not the case. So I think for that, you know, working towards having a space where both voices are represented, it's very important. But still, if that's not the case, both of them, in turn, are really, really important communities of practice. Thank you. There are some comments in the chest. Please look at them. We have to go on. Nick, we are coming to you. We are working at the Open University. So everything is settled at your university. You have already such experience. Pandemic didn't make any changes to you. But taking into the count the first two introduction, what would be your reflection, please? Well, I wish that were the case. And I wish everything was settled. But I'll come on to that maybe a bit later. If you have a slide deck, it's quite lengthy. I'm very happy to share that at the end of the session with all participants. Just a few words, though, for people who aren't familiar with the Open University. We were founded 52 years ago and currently we have 200,000 students enrolled with us. So we are by some distance the largest in the UK. But the reason we can support that number of students is that we set out with a social mission to open up learning to a wider element of the population, often people without any formal qualification. And when we were established, we put learning design at the heart of what we do. So the Institute of Educational Technology was founded. We've got the Knowledge Media Institute that's in existence today. And my unit, Learning and Discovery Services, builds on the research-led, pedagogic best practice coming out of those areas so that we design and produce content at scale. So to support those 200,000 students, we have anything upwards of 100 live modules being designed, developed and produced at any one time, with another two to 250 that are in flight. So it's a vast-scale operation, but it is driven by learning design. Now I'll come back to that in a little bit, but it's not in isolation. And I think that's one of the key points that Jared and Alex have been mentioning so far. This knee-jerk reaction to the emergency has thrown learning design into sharp focus. Whereas I wouldn't say it's necessarily in the background of the OU, but it blends alongside our media assistants and our editors and also integrates more seamlessly with some of our systems whereby we publish and present our content. Because we are a social mission, there is a different relationship with our students. And as Alex has already mentioned, we involve them very closely with some of the learning design and some of the presentation and production work. Not necessarily as closely perhaps as people think. And I'll come back to that when we look at the impact the pandemic has had on the way we view learning design within the Open University. But we are blended and we have been delivering a large percentage of our content and learning online for the last 20 years. Significantly so, so that at least 80% of all content is online only and the majority has some elements of online activity going on. The impact though has been quite challenging. And just to share some of the learner voices from amongst our students. We have had a lot of face-to-face and in-person examinations which had to be paused and suspended this blended model that we've talked about. And so a lot of our students have said, well actually, studying during the pandemic and lockdown, even with our learning design-led pedagogy, is very different to normal distance learning. Some have reported struggles with motivation. Others have been even more motivated and see study as a good escape. And if time we can talk about our free learning model on OpenLearn where we provide elements of our curriculum for people to try before they buy in many ways. And we have anything up to 100,000 unique visitors to that site every day. So it's a vast operation. We found many have finished their studying early during lockdown and want to get their teeth into new things. So in many ways we're helping them on their learning journey. And that design across modules, across the curriculum is implicit in what we do. But to do that, we have to make sure that we don't just get into that mindset of let's just get content online for the sake of it. We have to look at the activity and make sure the pedagogic research into how the activity supports the learning outcome can be designed at a very early stage. And with that comes a desire sometimes not always adopted by our academic colleagues to avoid a complex environment. Simplicity is really key particularly as I've come on to when you start to analyze the interaction with online material by our students. And that comes back to a point that everyone's mentioned already. We need to understand the students and their needs. And because of our constituency, we spend a lot of time understanding upfront where the technical challenges where the digital skills challenges are whether our students and ideally try and create a flexible and also blended learning environment that they can flourish in. So what are our challenges? Well, with all of this learning design built in up front. We've still found a real issue around stopping face to face with a large student number comes a large number of associate lecturers. And what's most are very happy to teach in an online and blended environment, many still have face to face activity, which has had to stop. Hence some of those student comments. We've also found that we've had to shift quite rapidly on modes of assessment face to face exams still played a very large part in our assessment mechanism. So we've had to try and find alternative ways, which of course have challenged some of the learning outcomes and learning activities that have taken place within the modules as the assessment changes. So too does the pathway that leads you to that assessment. And so we've had to think a little bit around our existing model. So yes, in one sense, we haven't been as affected as many by the pandemic, but we have had to take on board some lessons learned ourselves. Some of these I think are replicable across the HG sector. And the first thing is the lead time that is required to embed learning design at the heart of creating new content and activities. And for us, it can be anything up to two years. So obviously doing it at pace has provided these gaps in quality and gaps in experience, which we have also suffered because we've had to change elements of our mode of delivery. So if you want to do really effective learning design, you need to be working with your academics at a very early stage as well. And sometimes we do struggle with that. So we're just embarking on a new program, redesigning production, which places a greater emphasis on learning design. In many ways, the pandemic has been very timely to re-emphasize this message to some of our academics who again, you know, I've come from an artsy humanities background. Some of my colleagues in that space still like to produce vast quantities of printed paper material, whereas the pedagogic research shows us that actually students engage differently to different modes of learning. So the learning design voice is really strong as a result of the pandemic, not because, yeah, you've got it right for 52 years. The other thing I think it's worth thinking about is that you can have fantastic learning design in small pockets across your institution. But to replicate it at scale does require a different way of doing it. Hence, the OU model has the separate engines, if you like, that drive both the research and the innovation and the delivery. IET, Institute of Educational Technology, KMI, Knowledge Media Institute that looks at a lot of the innovative practice and ourselves in learner discovery services that take this and bring it together with the academic insights and the way they do things in faculty so that it is scalable. We do this for the whole university for all 300, 350 modules. A key thing, though, is to play back both the students, ALs and academic authors, how successful this is. And I think this is where, you know, some of the previous slides ring true with us as well. It has to be iterative. And there was always a temptation to gold plate everything, whereas sometimes it's much better to get something out there and work with your students, both in terms of early engagement during the design and production phase, but also live test flights of materials, what works and what doesn't. So we run a parallel analytics for action program where we not just wrap metadata around our learning objects, but also analyze how different student cohorts perform and react. So we've got some really granular data that helps them create that virtuous circle that talked about earlier. Something might not work. We can tweak that in flight and then feed that back to our learning design teams so they can then reflect upon that and improve it for future iterations. So that gives us a flexibility of our model. You know, if you're doing it at scale, you also need to be agile and flexible so that you don't have this rigid straight jacket that makes everybody conform to the same thing. So flexibility within that framework is the way we're heading across the piece. And again, that learning divide design voice needs to be different for a STEM faculty compared to an arts and humanities compared to law or well being, for example. And therefore, alongside that design focus comes the skills focus we've heard about skills in how to work with our learning designers, how to translate that into learning and teaching, and then how to respond to student challenge. It's not a transactional university. It does feel a lot more like a community of practice. We've created a range of resources that we've published freely, both in terms of helping people move their teaching online. There are some micro credentials that are available, but also a lot on our open and platform. And the IET website has a range of innovating pedagogy resources published annually that brings together best sector practice that you might want to then bring into your own institutions, as well as a series of sheets around how you can do flipped learning. So there are some very practical tools that we can share in the community of practice that Alex was talking about earlier. But I think the key message I'd like to end here with is that we are still learning. We don't have all the answers. The pandemic has taught us an awful lot about our own model. There is that assumption that, yes, we've got it right. But it's shown that we've got an awful lot wrong as well. So the key thing, apart from having a learning design team in your back pocket, if there's to be another pandemic or crisis, is to make sure you're giving yourself enough space to fail, space to experiment, and then think about what the next two years look like. I know there have been some chats around next term is going to be challenging. Well, yes, it probably is. But the institution can't then implement what we've seen as 52 years of learning in six months. You need to give yourself almost enough time and space if you are going to go down a blended or online model to get your learning design teams lined up and see what infrastructure and resource you're going to need if you are going to replicate this at scale. Because otherwise it does lead to patchy practice and ultimately a poor experience for the students as well as the teachers. Thank you, Nick. Very good point. Definitely. I would say that there is a change in the mindset regarding the teachers because they were sole designers of their teaching. And somehow, now they need support, they need help. They cannot be their own sole experts and the owners of their teaching experience. Now they need this help. And yes, we need to allow us time to fail and time to experiment because we will learn from this effort and failures. But let's hope that failures will not be too hard. You wanted to add something. Yeah, I was just going to say that by having that early student engagement, those critical friends who can be very challenging but in a good sense allows you to have those experiments in a safe space rather than seeing it play out across your modules in one go. And that is where the learning design comes in. But we have those same challenges. We haven't got the model perfectly right ourselves in terms of trying to break into faculty ways of working, the pedagogy that sits within there. And what we've found is that we often get that waterfall effect that Jared has mentioned already in that a way of doing things 30 years ago at the OU should still be rolled forward because where's the problem. Whereas actually what we're trying to do with our redesigning production approach is focus much more on co-design early enough to describe the component elements that sit within that module, which we can then test with students and ALs at a much earlier stage rather than wait for presentation and then have to make more course corrections as we go through. So that early engagement is absolutely critical. Thank you. We could chat. I could ask you a number of questions because, well, I support teachers every day so I can share lots of stories. But let's move to the questions. I invite all the participants to put the questions in Q&A. We have some questions already. This so first is from Don Olcott. He said, we put terms out of obscurity such as remote learning which will be buried 30 years ago because it literally meant student isolation. Oh, I'm sorry, someone. Okay. So student isolation and alienation only to return because quality advocates needed differentiator and scapegoat for poor online quality during the pandemic. It was only response option available. The lack of leadership, support services and available teacher training ubiquitous and the quality advocates through teachers under the bus. Do you think this will inhabit many teachers from engaging, going forward in online teaching? By the way, the field embraced the term pivot to and it should be noted that this is basketball term and has been for nearly 100 years. So who would like to answer this question? I could say one or two things very quickly. Yeah, please. Okay. Well, it might be of interest to note that in our university was actually the teaching union who were keen that we would call it something other than online learning because they didn't want to stand over it being online learning because it was, you know, done without doing all the things. Doing all the things we would like to do when we do quality online learning, like having a long lead in time and all of the great stuff that Alexandra and Nick told us about there. So it was them rather than the QA people or the registrar's office. I share fears, yes, that we will come out of this that eventually COVID-19 will recede into history and memory and people will say, well, we gave it a go, didn't we, the online stuff. You've been back for ages. We gave it a go. And let's never talk about it again because it just, you know, wasn't wasn't any good. Didn't compare well with face to face. That that's a fear, you know, and I really even in several kind of reports I've written around how it's all going, having very keen myself to continue to use that language that emergency remote teaching language. You know, in order to kind of emphasize the point that, you know, this isn't high quality online learning. It isn't all that we that we'd like it to be. On the other hand, look, we've done this thing to scale with more time and more resources. We can we can do it any we can do it even better. And yes, pivot is terrible, terrible term. I didn't know it was from basketball or baseball or whatever the person has said. I associated with, you know, venture capitalist types who might go, well, we were going to do this, but then we pivoted into this. We don't really know what we're doing really. But we if we use the word pivot, it's going to seem like we're, you know, on top of things or what have you. So just a few thoughts there. Thank you. Maybe. Okay, Alexander wanted to continue with this. Just one one point I think actually even the question implied that a little bit that I think it's a complex of things that will need to happen in order for faculty to continue using technology. I mean, again, I'm afraid of a backlash as well of really going back to the classroom comfortably, like many of, you know, many people want actually at the moment. But I feel first of all, there needs to be enough support and not necessarily in using technology but support with teaching and learning with learning design with, you know, more of what Nick was talking about. So if universities but again we agreed that it's really not ubiquitous. It's actually the opposite seems to be rather ubiquitous. So I agree that if there was more support and the faculty at this point in time, which again, it's difficult now to to see whether which way we're going it can still go both ways. But at this point after one year and in the coming months, I think it's important to give faculty the time and the chance to reflect on what happened with feel like we don't have this luxury now because we are still in the eye of the storm. I really think that we are not yet out of it, at least not where I'm in now, but definitely a little bit of time to reflect on what actually worked for them. You know, beyond these generalizations online learning is good but you know, what actually what were the three tools that you actually liked and what were the three things you hated. You know, what would you ditch. And so basically this really honest thinking to yourself and maybe we're discussing with colleagues. You know, it has to be doesn't have to be very formal, but the universities and the institutions have to, I think Nick made a very good point here that has to be really this time and space to try still to fail to reflect on what went on and and also this encouragement towards a more iterative approach which is really not like higher education at all I would say it has to be really you know your course is ready and then it's ready. And that's it, you're going to deliver it again another term that it could open a whole discussion. So I think there has to be really willingness from the teacher side, but also from from the institution that is really a mix. Yes, just before giving the hand to Garrett and then to Nick, just just to comment and looking at the questions and comments. Especially there are universities where there are no learning designers or IT support is just basically and teachers were left on their own. And I hope that now this university is recognized the need for providing such kind of support, not only technical but the pedagogical support in the support and design of the course courses as well. And I think do think that we lack this pedagogical part a lot. Basically, we at the first moment we try to see which tools we can use to move on. And then we become quite familiar with this okay like me in the zoom so okay I know how to use it I can use it. And that's fine. And that's fine. But how to organize interaction how to see different numbers of participants. It's not the same if they are nine or 90. It's not the same if they are English learning students or math students. So this is things which which go on. But I will give the first hand to Darren because he asked the before and then you and Nick after him. Mine is super quick. I was just reminded to say something from what Alexandra said and it is there's a real danger. I think this time will be forgotten. You know, so the pandemic will retreat into memory and history and even emergency remote teaching will be set aside and it has shown itself to be this crucial support for academic and business continuity. We were always part of the disaster recovery plan but nobody realized it even we didn't realize it. So there will be future public health crisis if nothing else you know which it should be remembered for this. There will be climate crisis. There will be other natural disasters. So in that context what Alexandra was talking about the reflection and the action with respect to this period. It's just so important as is, you know, organizing the research, analyzing our survey findings, cross tabulating it with our systems analytics and reflecting, reflecting. It would be such a pity if we missed that opportunity. That was all I wanted to add. Thank you. Nick, you're on. I was going to build on that as well. I'm a medieval historian by trade and training. I'm not a learning designer. And it strikes me that the model for higher education is pretty similar to the emerging ways of teaching in Oxford and Cambridge in the 13th century onwards. It just happens that we use online to deliver a lecture remotely in the same sort of way. We just packaged up the content differently. And that's where I think the learning design element comes in because we're looking at harnessing those tools and technologies to do different activities. And for me, that's the subtle shift and it brings in a whole range of new learning styles for the learner, a whole range of new teaching styles for the teachers. And that's why it's so important that both of those voices are heard. And we're beginning to see, I suppose, because of our constituency, we're opening up our students to a different way of seeing the world, which threads possibly more into their way of learning in their day jobs. Most of our students are part-time. They've got careers. They've got career responsibilities. They need to fit their learning around their lives, yet their lives have already embraced quite a lot of these means of learning in different activities. And for me, I think that's the really interesting element here. As you said, let's not go back to the old normal. Let's try and think of something that looks and feels a bit different that harnesses these tools, but actually challenges ourselves to be different. So there's a real innovation strand that runs through this. Thank you. We are already passing the time. I take it that this is because of me and my long introduction. So we had really good discussion and just to summarize or just to give the final thought for the end. My question to you would be, how much are we prepared to engage students to be active designers of their learning and the course? And will the role of learning designer or maybe tomorrow it will be something else become really, I would say, on the same level with teachers just work hand in hand. So let's start with Alexandra first now. Yeah, thank you. As I said, I really believe in the idea of involving students, although it's really not as easy as it may sound. I have the feeling because there needs to be a sort of very clear model for it. And I think whenever I think about it, I always have to think of the open university model, but obviously it has to also work into the texture and the structures of each university and the way you communicate to your students, the way you involve them. And the danger here is, and I would have liked to hear more from Nick, but obviously in a different discussion, how you actually choose the students or how the students self select, you know, because obviously we tend to get the students that want to be involved, but maybe we want to hear from other students or from a diversity of students. So I think that's also important. What are the voices maybe trying to involve not only students, but different voices in the design process. And yeah, I think definitely from the other point, what you asked about equal partnership. Yes, indeed, I do believe that. I don't, again, it's not an easy thing to do because usually faculty, you know, as professors, you want to be like, you know, master of your own classroom. You know, nobody knows better than you what is best for your course. But I think that way of thinking slightly changed with the pandemic just because they needed help at least on the technical level. So I think maybe we can just really, really play on that and try to work more in cooperation. But both are really requiring a change of mindset and the change of institutional structures and workflows, you know, processes. And this is something that doesn't happen overnight. But let's be positive. I don't want to finish on such a negative. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Alexandra, good points. Gareth, what's your thoughts? I'll keep it really quick. I suppose it's interesting that there's always been this division between content development and student support, you know, that this is this very kind of traditional way of looking at what, well, what a large organization like NYX does, perhaps. So involving students is an interesting way of blurring that line, isn't it? So as we go along, as we support students, we co-design, we create reusable assets. For me, it's kind of analogous to the open source movement, you know, which is about pure production models for creating things of value. And so a natural bedfellow, I think, of including students would be the open educational resources movement, you know, so I think there's a very natural common cause there. And as we work to involve staff more and more, not just in using open educational resources, but in contributing to it as a movement and partaking of it as a sort of an ideology, I think we do well to include students also without a doubt. But very interested also to hear what Nick has to say, actually. Thank you. Thank you. And Nick, your thoughts for the end? No pressure there then. Thank you. We use a range of different approaches. So we have self-selecting student panels that work alongside our teachers, as well as our academics who write the course material plus learning design. So in that sense, it's built in collaboration as we start to think through how we're going to produce the material. Although, like I said, quite a lot of the actual academic input happens up front. So it's not quite as collaborative as a model as we would like. And certainly the role of the learning designer in that needs to change a little bit. I see them in the future, partly as translators of ideas, mediators between those various parties, probably provocateurs as well to stimulate what's the best way forward. But all of that is driven by the data. We have to look at the analytics and one side does not fit all. So having the student voice in, as you said, is only partially representative. How the actual module performs once it's live. Well, the analytics for different student types allows us to then really go down and probably create in the future parallel pathways to get to the same learning objective at the end. As we know, people have different learning styles, different experiences. We do use a lot of OER. OpenLearn publishes 5% of all of our content for free. And we plan to use that as an experimental space. So less about publishing stuff that's been produced, more about looking at the next generation of learning design-led curriculum in all its broadest senses. What activities will be supportive of AV, AR, etc. A whole range of different new ways of creating those tools, which should be there for everybody to test. So we're really keen to build that community of practice that Alexander has been saying, work collaboratively with all of you, use our content, run it, try it, see what you think of it, and let us know. But I think it's a really interesting space and I would be concerned if we slipped back into a traditional way of doing things. This is the time for innovation. This is the time for change. Thank you. Thank you. I would just continue. This is time to act definitely and to take all these advantages, all this experience we have gained, all the expertise we have now in our hands and our minds, and actually to make this shift to what we have been talking for 10 or 20 years that we should be doing. I wish to thank my fantastic speakers today for breaking the ice of this Eden webinar series, the third one. We will continue every two weeks, and we will tackle the topics we have mentioned here today. I think the Gerard already knows what is the topic for the next session because he talked about that. Anyway, I'll just share my screen just for the one slide to announce that, please, our conference is going in June. Call is still open. You still have time to submit your papers or workshops or whatever you want to share. It's very good that you share, that you connect, that you collaborate and be with us. Thank you all again. Thank you, my speakers. Thank you for participants for very good remarks and comments in the chat in Zoom and in YouTube. See you in two weeks. Thank you again. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you.