 And welcome back for our final plenary keynote discussion here at ALT's annual conference 2021. We are absolutely thrilled to have 389 participants from 24 countries taking part in this week's conference. And in a moment, I'm gonna hand over to two of our co-chairs, Fasana and Roger, to kick us off this discussion on future of learning technology. But first, a couple of quick announcements. Following this session, we're very excited to host the Amplify V Sector Ordered Report 2021. The launch starts at three o'clock, so stay in your seats and head to the report launch straight after this session. Also, we hope that you enjoy the event and if there's anything we can do to help, please head to the help desk on our Discord space and the Discord space will remain available for a month after the conference. So you can keep those conversations going and continue to share your resources. Over the past three days, we've had a lot of input from many volunteers and speakers to help make this event fantastic three days for everyone. And I do want to continue to acknowledge the support of our partners and sponsors who help make it all happen. In particular, our headline sponsors, Canvas L&S by Instructor. And I hope you've all made the most of the opportunity to meet some of the experts and get some conference goodies. Now, recordings from this and all other sessions are available via the interactive program as soon as the session has finished and will continue to be available to participants. We'll also publish them openly after the conference. Now, importantly, particularly as we have such a large audience this week, please make sure you adhere to our Code of Conduct and our NETICAD to ensure everyone can enjoy the conference safely. And now with further ado, I'm going to welcome Roger and Fazzano onto the stage to introduce our panel. So please put your best emojis together to welcome our coaches. Hi everyone, good afternoon and welcome to our second panel discussion at the conference. In our previous discussion on Tuesday, we considered learning experiences. And now we're going to be taking a look at future perspectives for our closing plenary. The focus of the discussion is about looking ahead to the future in learning technology, both for the next academic year and beyond. I have the pleasure of introducing our panel members and Roger will be facilitating the discussion with them today. So do start thinking about questions because I'll be collating them in the background to ask the panel once we've asked a number of questions to them. So our first panel member is Dr. Monica Chavez. She's educational developer at the University of Liverpool. She has an interest in the decolonization of education, technology and professional learning. And she's one of the facilitators of the anti-racism and learning technology group. We also have Professor Tim Drysdale with us. He is chair of technology enhanced science education in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and creator of remote laboratories. Next up, we've got Rebecca Garrett Waters, who is chief executive of the UC Vok Tech Trust, a grant funder and investor that supports digital technology for adult vocational skills. And last but not least, we've got Roe Tomlin-Willis, student inclusive curriculum coordinator at Saloate University. And she was previously head of student engagement at the Saloate University Student Union. So over to Roger, who's going to be chairing the session. Thank you very much. We seem to have lost Rebecca off screen there. Thank you, Hazana. Welcome to Monica, Tim, Rebecca and Roe. Hopefully Rebecca will rejoin us in a moment, I don't know if there she is. We'll carry on regardless. Welcome. I'm going to begin the session by asking a series of questions to the panel and then open out to the audience. So please keep your comments and questions coming in the comments box. Firstly, I think I'll start off with Monica and ask, first, what do you see as the biggest challenge ahead for learning technology? Well, thank you. It's an honor to go first. Okay, so I think I can think of two. Then the first one has to do with learning design frameworks. I think we have gone through a radical change and the dream of learning technologies have become true. People have adopted technologies massively at a massive scales. And now the question is, is it effective? It's not just a matter of adopting the technology, but it's also about the pedagogy and the learning design framework. So that adds the complexity of the change and the challenge for learning technologies is to make sure that the technology is used effectively. And the second aspect, I think it has to do more with our work life and many employers are going for the hybrid model of working. And I think a challenge would be that sense of belonging and connection with colleagues, with their institution, with the students and thinking about what kind of impact are we having where we're working from home. It feels a bit detached at times. So to me, these are the two challenges in the next five to 10 years, I would say. Thank you, Mathew. I just want to pass over maybe to Ro now. Ro, from your perspective, dealing both with student engagement and Lutterly with the inclusive curriculum, how do you think that these changes in learning technology will kind of affect the student and the student experience and the challenges for the student experience? You're on mute for some reason. I'm always that person. I think it's kind of the engagement element. At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone was kind of rushing to kind of get used to things and having things on and everyone kind of onboarded that this was our new way of life. And I think slowly people are starting to realize that actually we're potentially never gonna go back to what was and it will be moving more into hybrid and blended learning. And I think it's kind of that. We've all been in sessions with students where the cameras are all off, no one's really responding. And it's how to kind of keep that engagement alive, I suppose, and learning that our pedagogy does need to alter alongside that. And as Monica said, that sense of belonging, when you're teaching students in a classroom, you have more familiarity. You can see when people are looking a bit confused, you kind of have a bit more of an ongoing conversation with your students as they're coming in and out of the classroom. And unless you're a particularly high-confident student, you aren't necessarily going to be that kind of pragmatic with your lecturers in an online platform. So, but do you think there's the opposite to that? That those students that may be less, more nervous to put in the hand up or talking in class can engage more online? Does learning technology provide that advantage to them? Yes, but I think there's definitely a lot more back chat, back of house chat between students amongst themselves on their own private forums around it than wanting to really like put their hand up. I do think that where the emojis and things are kind of added on in different things where people can clap or agree, I think that definitely helps people. But I also think, again, with the engagement thing, it is the educators, I think it's that kind of readiness to keep up with the technology. And if you're in a lecture and someone goes, oh, I'm not really sure how to do this. I can see students starting to disengage straight away. So it's kind of that readiness from educators to also continue their like CPD kind of stuff and making sure that they're still keeping up to date with what's going on and the new technologies that are coming in and not just relying on the support staff to do the work. Yeah. Okay, thank you, Rose. So just going over to Tim and I saw you nodding there, picking up on that as an educator and especially in a subject area that can be quite practical. Do you see challenges for you in that and keeping students engaged and actually practically teaching them on subjects where they may need to be in a lab or in some workshop area? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I build remote labs for exactly the reason that we do not have enough resources in this sector to give students in STEM subjects and art subjects access to the artifacts that they need for enough hours of the day, the way we want to. But I think if we zoom out, there's an even bigger challenge that we're facing here. And this group is at the heart of or indeed the front line of a silent slow-moving fight for the freedom of our expression going forward. You know, digital technologies filter our thoughts and you can only say what you're allowed to say by the tools that you're using. And universities are there, further education institutions are there, primary schools, high schools are there to create people that improve a future world. That future world needs things that are different to what we have today. And if we come up with something that cannot be expressed through the digital technologies we have now, we're effectively silenced. So there are many great technologies, you know, the responses of this organization that do things that make it possible for us to do what we do today. However, there are additional things on top of that that are new and this sector and this community in particular need to be able to create those things so that we have a vehicle for the voice that we need for the new thoughts and the new ways of working that we need to be able to express. And they have to be especially digital technologies because that is where the world is moving at as fast as pace and bigger scale. So just picking up back there on one of the things you mentioned, you know, the silencing because the tools aren't available. Do you feel that learning technologies encourage bias and particularly as we get more and more artificial intelligence? You know, there was a great keynote earlier in the conference, you know, looking at that area. Do you think this is an area that's helping some and hindering others? Yeah, definitely help and end it. And I think Monica with decolonialization perspective will have an amazingly elegant way of describing this but basically the way I see it, we are already facing challenges with tools that we have that make cultural assumptions that do not apply even though we're, you know, just over the ocean from somewhere or just down the road from somewhere, we will have cultural differences and we need open source tooling to allow us to make those tweaks to things to suit our local context. 389 people, 24 countries, I bet we couldn't all use the same stuff exactly the same way and feel like we were expressing the kind of education we need for our people and our situations. Thank you, Tim. I'll pick this up with Monica at the moment. I just want to go to Rebecca, turn your microphone on to be prepared. And just looking at the adults vocational side and those that aren't necessarily in or attached to an institution on a regular basis, they may be in the workplace, they may be elsewhere. How do you think learning technology is going to shape and change that sector in that area over the coming years? And what do you see are the challenges there? There is a really interesting time at the moment and obviously with all kind of parts of learning tech and we've seen there's been a huge increase in an interest in talent tech, if you like, and how you kind of job matching employers and potential employees. But linked to that is around kind of skills acquisition and how you evidence and potential those skills and we're seeing certainly, you can see in the market, actually there was sort of a three times more investment going into that space than there was into ed tech more broadly. And I think that the challenge we're seeing on the vocational side, there's all the normal challenges that you would expect around how you can best use tech when you're talking about skills that are considered to be more manual and all of the things I think that Tim was leading to as well, but on top of that, you've got this kind of increase in the focus on skills particularly and how you evidence the skills that an individual has. And I think also picking up on what everyone else has said, actually, there's a lot about managing expectation of what technology is actually gonna be able to achieve and how then you blend that and you kind of build on what we know is kind of blended learning and what the kind of buzzwords are around hybrid now, hybrid working and hybrid learning in the workplace. And so how the integration can fit in the best way possible. So yeah, you said about the managing expectations there. So do you feel that, you know, educational technology is being oversold or do you think in the next so five years it will start meeting some of these expectations that people seem to have? I mean, what's in the press and what's in our community is obviously slightly different. We sort of know a little bit more about what's going on, I guess sometimes. Yeah, I think, you know, within our community and within practitioners, there's less of a concern about an overselling of it. And I think what's actually happened over the last 18 months is that an acceleration towards meeting meeting those expectations in many ways. But we all know that there has been a danger in the past of tech solutions being sold as a silver bullet and actually there should be part of an integrated approach. And I think we've seen it in so many different ways. So just picking up on this earlier point of, you know, and really running into my next question for us all, what way do you hope the future will be different from today? And I just want to pick up on that point of bias that the technology brings. So I'll bring Monica back in there. You know, how do we actually overcome that? And is it the technology? Is it people? Is it policy? Is it the vendors that have to do something? How do we do that and make our learning technology more inclusive? I think it's everybody's in this journey. And part of our role will be to empower those that are on the ground, they're teaching. So they in turn empower the students to explore, become self-aware of the structures, of the hidden structures behind the curriculum and also the structures behind the inherited origin of higher education and further education institutions. So it's coming to terms with historical background events and facing the reality of where we are and having that awareness. I think it starts with the self. You have to become self-aware of your own practice and then you have to implement changes. And in this way, you can influence how technology is being implemented. The ones who are going to benefit the most are the students, of course. They also have to be empowered. And we need, in my opinion, very practical tools that can help us. Again, we can rely on technology, but we have to take control of how we want to use that technology to empower people. And taking control of that technology, there's a number of vendors and apology sponsors as well, but there's a number of vendors who design products and we kind of fit in with what their products give us. How can we push that more? How do we get more empowerment there when there's a small number of large players? And the market seems to be consolidating more and more. I'm going to switch that question over to Tim, actually, just to open that up, but particularly in your area for teaching as well. Yeah, look, it's a really important thing. I think framing is important. We've had a question from Matthew saying, am I basically implying that corporates are weaponizing their things? No, they're not. Corporates are like us. They're people. They've got incentivization schemes that need to make money for their shareholders. And that's the same problem we've got as academics, is that we have bottom lines we have managers and principals and so forth that have to make a budget work. And it's really widely accepted, even if we don't talk about it very often, that is a dysfunctional sector with a very short term accounting horizon and we can talk to ourselves in a million different ways to keep the lights on. So that's what the fight is for me is that we need to have this narrative about, look, we've got this great stuff coming in from corporates, but because it works for so many people, by necessity, it doesn't include all of the extra customizations we might need locally. It even includes some things that would be decustomizations. But we need the corporates because actually building digital platforms is a big expensive game and you need a community of scale in the modern era to pull it off. My view is that it's like living in a city. There are parts of a city that as academics, we need to go into and we need to say, hey, look, this little industry in the wasteland-y thing here, we need to start a community garden and we need to start building something that's built by the community for the community to give us a thing that we're not getting somewhere else. Meanwhile, we keep using the mass transit systems. We keep using the broadband infrastructure, whatever the analogy is to the things that keep the lights on in the university. Let's not throw that out because we could spend a lot of effort and just end up in the same place using similar technology but miss the opportunity to build some custom things that we need. And that's where I think the customization and the open source is essential because as Tim Forms, one of my colleagues here at the University of Edinburgh saying in another talk earlier this morning, at a different venue, having students involved in the design of the digital tools is as much value as the thing you get at the end, if not more. So if you have something that students could potentially see the designs end up in, like a remote lab system, for example, or a medical simulation tool, or the examples are boundless, going through the design exercise on paper with them is an incredibly relevant educational experience, but we need the ability to actually deliver that at the end to give that the authenticity. So I'm just bringing Rebecca actually on that point because we say students being involved in the design there, we've got different types of students out there and I'll come to a row after Rebecca because we've got the, as people would possibly see them, the standard student, the average student goes to university 18 to 25, something like that. But in the adult vocational training area, everybody's a student, actually, we're students ourselves. At all points, really, we're all learning it all the time. So Rebecca, how do we bring in, and when you're looking at your grant funding and investing in digital technology for adult vocational skills, how do we involve the learner in designing the platforms and designing the experience for themselves, especially ones that are much more distributed in the community? That's a really interesting, it is a really interesting question and that idea of kind of learning design that's focused on the user is hugely important to what we do and it's something that we really champion. And it's very much about understanding how you know this, understanding your target audience and making sure that your user testing is properly designed for the users that you ultimately want to target. And it's an area where we have we know that it's, we've just recently kind of rebuilt, we designed one of our grant funding calls in order to put an extra bit of time and resources into that just because of how important it is to the success of the end product in terms of both the user engagement with it and also the learner outcome. But it is more tricky when you're dealing with lots of different types of people but the reality is there are more hours of learning happening after you've left education kind of collectively than there are. It's just less intense and less kind of focused, I guess. And in some ways, that's one of the other challenges is how do you make it engaging? How do you make it relevant and how do you make it relevant to the employer as well as the learner? So I think I've drifted off from your core question there but it is a challenge. This is an open discussion. So, Rowe, just bringing you back in. You've done a lot of work with, ensuring that the curriculum is inclusive in a university. So maybe over the next five years, how do you hope to see the future and certainly almost not have to do that. How is it, how do we get our curriculum and therefore the learning technology we use inclusive from the get-go rather than having to be almost chased up as sometimes an afterthought? Unfortunately, I never think we'll have it inclusive or truly and closer from the get-go. I think it's about kind of having a growing model where you constantly have students at the heart of what you're doing. And instead of having kind of that tokenistic student voice, you treat them as a true collaborator. And for example, the students that we have, we now use them as consultants and we let them guide us in what they want because they are the consumer at the end of the day. They're the ones consuming the educational product that we're delivering. But it's making sure that we listen to them in a meaningful way and actually action what they're saying instead of us kind of maybe being a little bit of jaders, the educators and going, oh, we're the experts. Well, they're telling us what they want. We should be listening to them. So I suppose it's kind of making sure that we move away from tokenism to true cooperation. To true. And also from your previous perspective of the student union person and I don't know if others here and the conference feel, sometimes it's the same VP for education that has to turn up to every single committee meeting across the entire university. And actually there's one person who's no longer a student, representing all the students. So are you sort of advocating this sort of current students are involved more and deeper across education, not just universities, but colleges and schools? Absolutely. Whilst I obviously loved my time as a Sebastian professor and I wasn't VP education. I was VP in basically activities. But I still went to lots of these meetings because I'm quite nosy and I found it really interesting to be on the back of how stuff happens and operates at a university. And I do think having more live actionable students who are actually currently doing their courses to get their feedback. Because when you're a SAB, you take time off from your studies. So you obviously are listening to students but you're only hearing from a certain engaged amount of students who are with the SU. So I think having students across a broad spectrum of courses and from different backgrounds be being involved in what's going on as they're the ones actually on the ground across groups level. And just another point coming up and maybe I'll come back to Monica actually to give you some chance to talk. Are we actually moving fast enough? When I talk about the future, I don't know if I am talking about three years, five years, 10 years, but are we acting fast enough on all of these fronts to be more inclusive, to be more involved with our students and to steer the technology rather than let it steer us? I think in the last year, things have accelerated as well for inclusive learning design. And perhaps there are stages and is that the stage of awareness and that a lot of institutions are at is a journey. And perhaps some are more advanced than others. I'm sure Solland Rock and probably share her experience, but other institutions are beginning to become aware and taking baby steps really. And really if that's where the institution is or you personally in your practice, that's okay as long as you make that step. I would like to recognize that people are moving forward with this and we should celebrate it as well and not beat ourselves up saying, oh, we should have done it a long time ago because this is where we're at and we can learn from the best practice of colleagues across the sector and other institutions. And Rebecca, do you feel from your perspective on your side that things are moving fast enough? Has the pandemic been a really good catalyst for educational technology? Has it been our little mini ed tech industrial revolution that's happened here? I don't think I'd want to say the pandemic's been a really good anything, but the- No. You've certainly seen the kind of, the acceleration of pace, of uptake of things. But what I think has been particularly interesting is, and I think someone alluded to it earlier, when the lockdown first happened, we were in a sort of crisis mode of people just having to get something done. And as time has progressed, there's been a sort of a collective movement to understanding, okay, well, this is what we can do and this is how we can make it better in different ways. And I think the, actually the acceleration that has been most interesting has been in that start, that kind of the nuance in piece rather than the whole shift from nothing to something. And I know sort of people joke that it's taken 18 months of pandemic to get where we were trying to get to for 10 years prior to it. But, and of course I'm happy to see an increase in uptake of technology for positive outcomes. But I think that we will actually see over the next couple of years, now that there's a realization of what is actually possible. And a continued acceleration of both uptake and development that is much more targeted to kind of learn outcomes and uses than it has been in the past. And a lot less driven by kind of cost savings and things that used to be talked about in the same graph as the tech group pandemic. So I'm just gonna move on to sort of my last question before we turn to audience questions. So please, audience, keep your questions coming in the comments area. Broadly, what, and I'll start with Tim, actually, what's your hope for the future? And I'm thinking, you know, for learners, teachers, educational institutions, vendors, and when I say that, I'm also thinking, you know, private sector universities as well. Will there be consolidation? Will we just end up with a few big players all selling online courses? And, you know, will it be like, I don't know, the supermarkets have happened, the online shopping's happened, the online banking where it consolidates to a few. Is that real or will we remain with lots of specialists and stuff? So what do you think the future is and what's actually your hope for the future? So that's sort of the hopes and the fears, maybe. Well, the risk is always there. I've certainly been in meetings with ed tech companies that have looked me in the face and said, we want your business, we're gonna take your reputation by working with you and then we'll take your students off you. So, you know, who knows whether that was just pub chat or not. Who knows whether it would really happen. Does it matter if that's the threat? I think what we actually need to do is stop worrying about attacks and weaponization. Just say, look, we're in a world. The world is as perfect as it's ever gonna be. What can we do to make it better? And Ro is right. We are in a producer-consumer model right now. But the problem with that is that we have in the UK in particular become brilliant at dangling feedback in front of students and expecting them to want it and be able to use it when we've got it ready for them. We've produced feedback and then we want them to play the role of consumer. But as David Bowden coworkers have been saying for many years, learners learn best when the feedback is available when they want it. So we have to subvert that whole producer-consumer linearity and become much more porous, much more responsive and evolve in a way that actually gives people what they need in the modern world and allow that customization to suit local areas. So for me, the future involves an increasing percentage of philanthropic, university, biotherm education and school sector developments in digital tooling so that we have the freedom of expression to customize and add on the extra bits. Whether we turn into supermarkets or not, I don't know. My personal feeling is that that sort of heart-to-heart connection between educators and their students on the same side of the table, facilitating what's going on, modern opposite-size producing, consuming is incredibly important. And there might be a sort of intrinsic staff-student ratio that is defined in the laws of humanity that may prevent the university sector collapsing like every other sector has into a few large conglomerates. I don't want to make a prediction on that. All the options on the table, but I think the best thing we can do is do the very, very best that we can to follow our own values and enact them in our daily practices. That's going to be challenging though, because there are a lot of factors that are against this kind of viewpoint. And Monica, just turning to you, do you have hopes and fears that are similar to Tim's or have you got some others to offer there? Yes, I would like, I think the last point, Tim, I was thinking on the same lines. And often we wait, someone to tell us, what is it that we need to do to make the changes and part of our role, but me as myself as an educational developer, I don't not only see my duties and the responsibilities in the description of the post. I think I have a responsibility to be a change agent. And I think it was Christy who said that we need more champions and this peer influence, we need academics, we need people who are teaching. If you're not teaching, find those people, find those allies who believe in what you believe. I would say, don't wait. Don't wait for someone from the top to tell you, this is what we're going to implement because this is the way it should be. We can do a lot from the bottom up and at some point, someone finally will listen and then your expertise and your change agency will pay off. So that would be my hope for the future is that all of us gain that courage and that confidence to experiment, fail maybe and try it again and really put ourselves out there for what we believe in terms of inclusive practice or decolonization or the effective adoption of technologies for teaching and learning. And Rebecca, do you have other fears to add from your perspective in your sector areas? And what's your ideal future for 5, 10, maybe even 20 years time for where this... Gosh. I think I might go about that in a slightly jumbled up way but I think that one of the things that we're really passionate about UFI is the idea that kind of going back to that idea of designing and inclusivity and if you start designing for all, you end up with a better product and it's that kind of, you see it from lots of different angles. And so in some ways that kind of links into my dream for the future actually is that we see technology that has been designed in such a way that it is, we don't have to have these debates about how you kind of worry about inclusivity in the future. But also we see a much better integration and less of a disconnect between kind of that flow from education into the workplace. That's partly because, to me, in a perfect world, it's partly because that sort of lovely understanding between education and work, but also because once you're in work, education is not something that you've left behind but actually people kind of have the tools still to learn in a way that are available to them through technology and it's much easier. I think at the moment it's still quite, it's not as smooth that transition and the tech tools that are available are starting to see some really exciting things. And we all know of the kind of the forefront of little apps and lovely bits of tools that we could use to improve ourselves. But actually if you can link those into your working life and it's seen as a more of a holistic piece, I think that that would be a fantastic outcome. My fears are actually that we go back to where we were in November 2019 and that everyone forgets all the wonderful things that people are able to do and just rushes back into the classroom and throws all the tech back out there and that's my biggest fear. I think that was the hashtag from the morning's keynote was no go backery was floating around this sort of new movement, you know, we've got to start. So, Ro, from your perspective, where do you hope to see this gene experience maybe five, 10 years time and what are your hopes and fears for the future of learning technology and the ideal as well? I suppose that AI has a huge potential to create really unique individual learning environments that are tailored to the learner's needs and preferences and then also that there's true enhancement of education that provides multiple routes that are inclusive, accessible and usable for many different types of learners but these are delivered in a meaningful way and not just because we can do it but what is not just what is possible with technology but what is actually best for the students and then I suppose on a more personal note or more within my job room, I just hope that there's true equity within HE however that playing field looks and however the sector will be, I just hope that that will be the case that no matter who you are, whether your preferences are, et cetera, et cetera that everyone has the true equity to provide them the best learner journey and experience and I suppose a fear is that if everything does become an online platform when I was a student I was very involved with sports teams and things like that and I suppose my university experience was really shaped from being on campus and I think there is an air that that creating bonds and connections could be lost if everything is solely on online platforms. I have heard sort of in teacher training that the first thing people do is teach the way they were taught and I wonder if we've been taught in classrooms and in the physical environment and I wonder, I've got a couple of children that have had a couple of years of online education whether that just becomes normal eventually for them and we're just already the last generation, we're already the old guard, we're already past it, we're something else is gonna happen that we won't necessarily understand or be familiar with. I just wanna sort of start looking at some of the questions that are coming in through the comments and chats one. Just picking up back on the students one, so I'll stay with you for a moment, right? Sarah Honeychurch is our, shouldn't we be helping students produce their own feedback and not rely on others to deliver it to them and I think this, you know, you said about the personalized learning journey and so on, you know, how much are we, we still, I guess it's educators, the stage on stage and how much are we, you know, getting students, you know, facilitating the students' learning and feedback and just in the perspective of sort of learning technology, you know, can that help and how we're gonna do that sort of a grappling question there, but just looking at, you know, should students be generating their own feedback and learning how to learn themselves? I mean, for individual learn, I guess, obviously giving feedback when it's desired is a great thing, but then it's kind of from the services end of things, how do we then as institutes manage what's coming in and what's going through and how does that get redirected out and is there then a timeframe on the feed, ask if providing feedback for the feedback that the students given? I definitely think there needs to be more open kind of forums for students to discuss issues that they're having and receive, I think potentially that's where AI can probably mesh quite nicely into, particularly with services. So I'm just gonna pick up another audience question here and this is going back to the Nobel Bacary, I think, is I think I'll start with Tim maybe on this one, is how do we avoid the pressure to return to the pre-March 2020 and how do we avoid that return? This is a question from Simon Parr. Yes, Simon, it's a really important question. I led a huge amount of change on the technical side in my school year and a lot of that was an emergency response to the teaching. Now we learned a lot of interesting stuff on the way and yeah, there's overwhelming pressure to go back. So we have to zoom out a bit and say, well, why are we trying to do what we're trying to do? And I think perhaps more important than trying to ram down our colleagues' thoughts that we should or we shouldn't go back to a particular way of teaching is that I think we now need as a sector to start embracing the idea commenting more on higher education sector here where there's a very strong research focus on a number of universities which sometimes comes in a different of teaching or sometimes teachings is put in a box for 10 or 20 years and then it's pulled out and it's sort of changed and then put back in the box and it carries on in a very static way for a while. I think we're entering an era now where I would like to see people discussing what they're doing and why they're doing it and keeping, you know, don't throw the baby out of the bathwater but make evolutions where you need to. We don't know what the right answer is quite frankly. We just tried some stuff in an emergency. So we need a lot of different pilot studies of a lot of different techniques so that we at a low risk small scale can start getting some evidence of the contextualized way in which some things work. There are no universal truths in human life when it comes to do this thing that will work for everyone. We've seen that in the educational literature. It's very challenging to take an intervention and pronounce it as good because almost any intervention has a, you know, on what has a significant effect. So at least the first time you do it, what works in a continuous basis, what works on the concepts that you're in. And actually I think the most important thing is not what we do next, but the types of discussion we have next about what we will do. Yeah, thank you. I'm just gonna turn to another point here by actually it's from Kirsty in the chat room and it's about the changing and keeping there. Kirsty says, you know, the disruption has massively upskilled staff and students. So just turn to Monica actually as an educational developer there. It has massively upskilled. You know, we've been talking about digital skills forever in a day and, you know, yes, I can remember the European computer driving license program from 20 years ago that dictated how you could print a document and there was only one way to do it apparently. But we've had this massive upskilling of staff and students. How do we stick to that? And how do we keep up that momentum? And they were there. And, you know, to avoid going back, but, you know, it's not been easy for people. No, we're here. How do we keep here? I think we have to take the lessons and gain momentum with that and keep implementing those lessons and maybe in a quick kind of way for staff, what worked for them. And I think the recognition of the practice in an institution in the sector that really is motivational for them. So it's the carrot or the stick, right? So you have to show that their contribution matters. You have to empower them. You have to show the value that they bring. So to me, that is key to celebrate these achievements and learn from the lessons and keep that momentum going. I don't have an easy answer for that, Ro. I'm afraid I'm really sorry. It's difficult, isn't it? Can you see this sort of going into things like, you know, we have various PG certs in learning and teaching or PCAT programs, et cetera, for new lecturers. So, you know, can we see this sort of educational developers and academic developers in universities and colleges, you know, that have staff trainers including what we've experienced in the last two years in their curriculum for new teachers? Yes, definitely. I think it also depends of the context in a Russell Group University research is key and teaching staff sometimes will not put that much importance or that effort into it because it's progression, what they're looking for. But yes, definitely. And it's a requirement in many institutions to take part in a PG cert or PG DAP for PG CAP academic practice. So perhaps institutionally, the decision making from the top has to be, you have to take this and you have to, these have to be the requirements. These are the lessons from the pandemic and the teaching online and the practices and embed this in these programs. That's a great idea. Which came from you, Ro, actually. Well, you're going right. So, having an influence. I must just quickly apologize to everybody who's got an ECBL in the chat room. I actually wrote some of the courseware myself, I'm embarrassed to say, a very long time ago. Very linear. So, Rebecca, just going back to you, you mentioned to me separately, probably that you did an in-person degree and then a fully online masters. As we, you know, a lot of universities are developing online courses, mini-masters or modular programs and MOOCs and that. Can you see them being, and also for the adult sector, more popular in the future? Will that, where we'll be maybe in five or 10 years, that more people will be coming into education because they've got the affordance of access and asynchronous access at the time that suits them? That's an interesting question. And yes, I did. Yeah, I did the University of Manchester, actually. And it was also a very long time ago in the previous century, which, and I'm slightly biased because I did it. And for me, I did it whilst I was working. And I think it was fantastic because I went, I turned up for the exams and I had online tutor groups in that old kind of, you know, very slow internet way that was happening in the back end of the last entry. But I was then surprised when I was later working in the university, I was surprised that it hadn't taken off because it was such a positive experience for me and the cohort of people I did that course with, which was a mixture of kind of university students and other people in work. So I'm always gonna be biased and say, I do see it taking off because I thought it was brilliant. But there's so many different things that play into that, including the kind of changing global landscape and the changing kind of where students are based and the university growth model anyway. If you then overlay that with the way, the kind of the future of work agenda and the way the workplace is changing and the kind of hopefully a bit of an increase on a personal ownership of learning and opportunity that people have, I would expect it to go in that direction and I would see that as a really positive thing. Yeah, and I think it is, you're right, slowly moving that way anyway and the way the markets have changed. And actually this year's, UCAS has shown more, you know, masters have increased a bit more this year and they have been. One last question, I think we've got time for a final question unless it actually comes from my colleague, Fazzana, who's posted this to me here. She said, we've accelerated the adoption of learning technology to some extent, but what impact does this have on the role of the learning technologist and those that support you? So I know, Tim, you probably and Monica, you probably work with learning technologists or no similar people, I know, Ro, you work alongside those sort of departments. So I'll start with Ro, you know, how should we as a community of learning technologists support our lecturers and tutors with this new world we've got? How should we change as a community to support people teaching and learning? I don't necessarily think it's a need for us to change. I think it's a need to make sure that there's buy-in from our educators that they want to do this. I think you can set up as many workshops as you like, but if people, for whatever reason, don't want to come, they don't want to come. So I think that's where we need to do the work, the communication and also consulting with them about how they feel about things. I think sometimes in this pandemic, I think they've kind of educators, and lecturers have been forgotten a little bit that they haven't necessarily been as consulted with about the changes that are happening and how do they feel in sharing their concerns. Yeah, so yeah, I guess it's happened to a lot of people, hasn't it, rather than being part of it and going all the way back to having students as co-creators and being that they're involved. This last 18 months has happened to people, hasn't it? And we've just had to react. Tim, how do you feel about the same question? How can the learning technology and out change over the next five years to support the new world we're in? I think there's an interesting parallel here to a conversation that's been going on in the conventional IT world for a number of years, and there's been some changes there. And anyone who reads the register and the, apparently it's created by a fellow Kiwi, but the B-O-F-H, I won't repeat what that actually stands for. You know, hilarious series of stories about a CIS admin that tries to own the computing system and keep everybody else away. And it's a hilarious sort of allegory, but the change that's happening is that rather than owning a patch where you're the person that knows how a particular system you've bought in works and it's your territory to maintain it, it's more about now, I think, in the IT industry in places, people be encouraged to keep their eyes and ears out for new things that might help the organization and perhaps take a few risks here and there with some of their time. And having an environment in which it's actually permissible for you to go and explore and create and bring new things in, which then the organization might evaluate. And it's much more sort of open and innovative approach. And anybody who's trying to own a little bit of territory can quite likely find themselves being, you know, completely blown away by a new product which comes in, obvious need for human in that loop. So I think this is exciting in the learning technology space because there's a whole lot of stuff we need to do to support staff with existing products and so on and so forth. But from my perspective, the thing that I am desperate for are more people who know how to do digital creation, whether that's interactives that were in a web browser or do some embedded systems or some cloud infrastructure development. You know, there's stuff going on that we don't know we need or that, you know, academics don't know their needs. So it's a chicken and egg situation. And if there's some sort of technological area that has the broad area of digital creation, digital literacies and that you're passionate about and the environment you're in would let you get a bit of time to actually spend on it. I think we could end up in a much better place because you get to explore something that's fun and interesting and gets your passionate juices flowing again. You may enjoy the other stuff you do as well, which is brilliant, but you get to add something extra to that and then by informally developing some relationships with staff who are open to some new ideas. Not all staff are initially open to things. Some staff are early adopters, some are very late adopters and there's a spectrum in between. I think you can start making those pilot studies of new ways of doing things. You'll get attention for it. It'll be interesting. And, you know, there's a self interest. It's the sort of thing that I'm desperate for. More people who can help me create stuff. I'm going to just finish very briefly, Monica, with yourself. We've just running out of time now. As an educational developer, I'm sure you're quite pleased to hear Tim say, we need to invest in learning technologies. We need more of the man educational developers and all the wraparound services that go there. So, you know, as an educational developer, how do you think learning technologies can change and even you can change over the next five years to support learners and teachers? I think we need more social learning spaces where we bring students, academic staff, learning technologies, educational developers and create those public spaces. One way is communities of practice, virtual communities of practice is a great strategy. You have to be mindful how to use it, institutional politics, but there are different types of communities you can create. And online it has worked in the last years, so I encourage you to try it. So that's social learning space and also create private spaces within the community for experimentation and failing and trying again. So to me, this is something that learning technologies and people in similar roles should be trying to bring together all that complexity that has increased in the last year, the learning design, the technology, the student voice, the academics voice into one communal space and for the exchange of practice and finding solutions and innovation. So that would be a way to adapt really quickly and keep with the pace, the fast changing pace of the developments in technology and learning technology. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Monica. I completely agree with you. We need to work together on this. And as I think Tim said, the supplier consumer, even inside of an organization, the supplier being the learning technology, the consumer being the teacher or the student is something we need to continue to break down and collaborate on building our future. Well, I'm afraid we've run out of time. It's been a fantastic conversation with you today. I'll just put some thanks there to Monica Chavez, Tim Drysdale, Rebecca Garrett-Waters and Rowe Tomlin-Wills for joining us today on this plenary panel. Thank my co-chair for Zana Latif as well for the introductions and supporting the development and also Marin for introducing us and hosting the session. So thank you very much, everybody. There's many more comments in the chat if you want to jump over to YouTube and carry on talking there and I'm sure we can keep the conversation going on Discord afterwards. But thank you very much, everybody. Good afternoon.