 I'm very pleased to be able to say this afternoon with me, I have two speakers, Alan Tate who's an Indian senior fellow and also a professor emeritus of distance education and development at the Open University in the UK, amongst other things. I won't go through all your professional responsibilities Alan, I hope you don't mind. Also we have Simon Blackinson who's the head of learning design at the Open Polytechnic in New Zealand and also there's other titles there, which I also won't repeat if you don't mind. So we're going to start off with the results of the question you had an opportunity to answer, which I think we'll be seeing the results soon, Diane. I can't actually see it here. No, sorry, I didn't start with Paul, hi it's Dan, I'm Donna from Polytechnical, I'm the host here. I didn't start with Paul, I was supposed to start with Paul when Simon was doing it, but if you want I can start it now. We still are waiting a lot of people to join the webinar. Perhaps it might be better to leave it when we get down towards the questions a little later on, we can do that then. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you very much indeed. So I think we will start by some personal introductions Alan, if you'd like to start please. For your introduction and it's very great pleasure to be here this afternoon as it is here in England. As Tim mentioned I've spent my career at the University in the UK and I've also been active in Eden over many years and I've given quite a lot of attention in my career to the issues of student support and that's what I should be trying to talk about this afternoon in just a minute. Is that what you want from me at the moment Tim? Absolutely perfect, thank you very much. Simon? Good morning from New Zealand, it's just after 3am so I apologize I'm slightly blurry eyed and I will be serving myself coffee as we go. Thanks to Alan for sending his presentation in advance, I'm afraid I forgot to do the same so I apologize. I'm going to try and pick up what he's going to talk about and I want to deal primarily with the engagement of students in an online environment which has been very much the future of my career over the last 20 years. That's wonderful Simon. Well thank you very much to both of you. I think without more ado we'll pass over to Alan for the first presentation please. Okay thank you very much Diana who's going to help me with the management of the slides. So this webinar is in a series of webinars addressed to education in a time of a pandemic and so I've tried to frame my remarks in the light of that emergency so I'm thinking in particular that there are a great many colleagues teaching in campus or perhaps blended systems who are having to move their programs online not as a result of strategic planning not because they've decided to reach new audiences not because of a sudden new interest in the ways in which technology support learning but because the campuses have been closed. I know for example in the University of London where I have a particular connection now that's exactly the case and one of the things that I want to try and support in my remarks is the anxiety that some colleagues will be feeling about that can they really do a good job and the anxiety that some of their students will be feeling I didn't know I was going to have to learn online I thought I was coming to campus and I hope what I've got to say will reassure you although I'm going to ask more questions and I'm going to give you answers because I think I've got two time frames in my mind one is the time frame between now and September when I'm guessing people have been forced online a lot of people I know around me have just put their seminars or their lectures into a zoom format and are carrying on much as if they were on a campus but I think by the time we get to September October if the campuses are not reopened or even if they are we ought to be thinking about taking advantage of what we've learned and rethinking the ways in which we support students online so that's the sort of context I've got in my head Diana next slide please and the topic that is this afternoon's discussion is around supporting students online it's a very important topic because when people haven't worked online in an educational context the sorts of remarks you hear are well it's working online there's no support you're absolutely on your own or working online it's very impersonal it's very cold there's no real teacher student interaction all of these I think are prejudices which people have before they work online I think they change quite quickly when people have started working online this is not to say that I'm any or most of my colleagues are in any sense saying that all education ought to be online all the time but more and more education is going to be online for the foreseeable future for good reasons as well as for the reasons of the pandemic emergency and supporting students online is a central topic because we want our students to be successful we want to finish their courses and we want them to enjoy the experience so supporting students online is a central topic which I'm pleased to contribute to next slide please Diana one of the things I want to encourage colleagues to think about are the continuities and the discontinuities about moving online there are more continuities than you may imagine but there are also some significant discontinuities and I think for colleagues around Europe and indeed wider field I see we've got people from a much wider range of locations in just Europe working out what are the continuities and what are the discontinuities in your work as you move online is very important and I put this image up here it's a car from about 1910 and you'll see that it's definitely a car he's got an engine in the front four wheels and it's self-propelling but you can see that some of the thinking behind a horse drawn carriage has meant because stayed very dominant in the car designers mind so you can see nobody thought that the driver might sit inside with the passengers it still looks like a coach with a driver outside on the front presumably wrapped up in a black in a blanket and you can see the kind of high box at the back makes it look if you put four horses in the front and they pulled the car it would look a bit like an old-fashioned carriage so the person who designed this car still had his I'm sure it was a man in those days still had his head very much in the world of the horse drawn carriage and some of the conceptions we have of learning and teaching will take some shifting as we move online so that's what I mean about the importance on continuities and discontinuities equally you might think about the cinema early cinema was all taking place on sets and the sets were designed like theatrical sets because that's the understanding that people had about performing arts even in the early days of the cinema and it wasn't until later in the cinema that people rethought that and thought well actually we can film outside on location so working out what you've got to what what your experience you can build on which is secure and safe and helpful and what experience you've got to rethink is going to be very important next slide please Diana as you talk to your students and as you reflect yourself I want to encourage you to think that online learning is not the deficit model it's not some inferior form of learning and teaching that you've been forced to adopt because of an emergency and the issues of quality in campus-based learning are equally pressing as indeed they are in online learning and this picture of this person who's just fallen asleep in a lecture will be familiar to anybody who's worked on campuses seminars on campus where you get an opinionated student who dominates and ruins the experience everybody else on campus learning and teaching has its challenges and online learning can be as good and as bad as campus-based learning and teaching can be as good and bad but online learning is not the deficit model so I would encourage you for those of you who are moving into online learning as a match of emergency for the first time don't think of online learning as a deficit model you don't need to do that and you don't need your students to think that either next slide please so there's a whole lot of experience that you already have working on campus for those of you who are in that position now which will be very important for you and you could be confident that you can take that experience forward into the online world for example many many campus-based learning and teaching systems now use learning management systems they moved from online learning onto the campus about 10 years ago they have course materials which students can download students may have applied and registered online they may have paid online they may send their assignments to the learning management system electronically and they may be returned with the professor's comments electronically and they may be communicating with each other through email and in online forums not only with their professors but also with each other and they may have online seminars in just the same way that you'll be managing in an online system so the kind of blended technology supported learning which has developed so fast over the last 10 years provides a very good experience for you to build on them so there's lots that you have if you're new to online teaching which is positive and which will take you forward safely and securely next slide please Diana the other thing that will help you greatly of course is the informal social practice of online interaction which takes place not in educational institutions necessarily but in everyday life on buses and trains gone are the days when you sit on a bus or a train and people talk to each other everybody is as they are in this photograph looking at their screen and they're doing all sorts of things which are very relevant to online learning they're making inquiries they're buying things they're researching topics like where do I want to go on holiday that would be a nice thought and for us like in lockdown England going on holiday that's some while away but now we're researching things where can I buy my new washing machine what book what is the best price I can get on this new book I want to buy and I'll be talking to friends and of course doing Facebook and posting photographs on Instagram etc etc there is a whole social practice of online interaction which supports online learning the practices are not as they were 10 years ago strange to the majority the majority of students on your campus will have an online life and that will transfer to be very good experience for them and indeed of course for you as you work online in the future so there's a wealth of experience which will support and guide your practice in online teaching next slide please Diana and I wanted to spend the next few slides um helping you to think about the benefits that this experience of an emergency should have for your learning and teaching in the future um and one of the benefits of online learning is the benefit of flexibility and this experience may allow you to think about new kinds of student audience people who are much less imprisoned by space and by time than they are with an old-fashioned campus-based system people who are in work people who have families people who live in towns without universities and they can't travel easily to campuses so the benefits of flexibility of online learning are very significant and I hope that this experience over the next few months might demonstrate to you how these sorts of practices can change your practice in the future once this terrible pandemic has disappeared online learning is to use the Open University UK's watchword open to people places methods and ideas the ways that can be truly revolutionary for your campus-based practice. Can we move to the next slide? I want also to put emphasis on the fact that how we support students is integrated in the whole online system it's not a separate field of inquiry or a separate field of practice it is core to the way in which we organize the whole learning management system in an organic way and I think you'll find that this will provide you with a quality of service to your students online which may surprise them and I hope will surprise you so I hope this is going to be a very positive experience for you in the next few months when you can interact with your students not only synchronously not only all at the same time but also asynchronously to a greater and greater extent allowing your students to manage their study around the other ranges of commitments that they will have and so I want to encourage also reflection on what a whole online system might mean and I'm because I'm imagining that as I'd know around me here in the UK that for campuses which are moving in an emergency to online they're just moving to zoom seminars and zoom lectures but actually I hope the next three or four months will allow you to develop your thinking in such a way that you might have an online system available to your students a more highly developed version of the learning management system that many of you will already be using on your campuses today. Next slide please Diana a crucial area for you to reflect on is how we manage empathy online because it'll be important for your students as well as important for you that if they do come with anxiety and fear that working online is going to be isolated is going to be lonely is going to be a cold experience without the warmth that you can get in the online in the on-campus experience then I hope you'll be able to develop practice which will reassure them but it is crucial that we develop empathy online that we allow ourselves to support students in ways that they enjoy we realize the power of the written word in textual communication we realize the importance of including people online so that people don't feel silenced or absent in online webinars and that we intervene if a student is not making the progress that she or he should be making at a particular time and we intervene in a supportive and helpful way so uh those of you who are familiar with online work will I hope agree with me that empathy is manageable in online situations contrary to some prejudices before people work online but it's a very crucial area of practice and I hope from what I got to say today will encourage colleagues to think how they're going to develop their empathetic practice in online working in the future. Next slide Diana and one of the ways of doing this is of course through learning analytics which is um already present on campus-based systems with learning management system as well as some highly developed in online systems it allows you to work out what is happening and to do something about it with your students. There are significant ethical issues around learning analytics principally around the question of whose data is it when you collect data about students nonetheless I don't think there's any suggestion that learning analytics using the data that you collect digitally in order to support students isn't important it is important and it's part of the way in which you deliver success for your students and help your students to enjoy their experience so as you move as I hope you will do by September or October into working into more sophisticated online learning systems learning analytics should certainly be part of those and there's considerable literature about those which you might want to explore and let me move now to my last slide in the next to last slide um there's more information about student support in a document from the international council open a distance education from five years ago and it sets out seven dimensions in which student support can be organized I won't go through it all here now because there isn't time but I this this report was developed from global discussions so we hope this is relevant on a global basis and you can see those seven dimensions will provide you with a comprehensive and an integrated system for students support and you can find that report on the icde website it has a title student success in open distance and e-learning so if you have a chance to look that up I think you would find that will be helpful to you. Next slide please Donald so my last slide is an image appropriately for a european organization from an ancient greek myth this is the woman is euridice who sadly died and her husband orpheus was told if he collected her from the underworld he could bring her back to life bring her back to the to the world but he mustn't look back to see she was still following him but sadly he did look back and she wasn't liberated back from the underworld my message for this for you is don't look back don't regard this as an emergency with online teaching from which she will look forward to ending. I hope very much that the experience will want you to take the variety of modes you use in your learning teaching forward to include more online in the future use its experience as a valuable experience to vary your modes of support not only with on-campus teaching when those campuses reopen but also with more blended and technology supported models but also with some online modules for some of your students because the skills that students learn in online courses are so important for their future lives professionally personally and socially the skills of working in virtual teams the skills of managing resources in virtual ways these are skills which are so important not only in their personal lives but in their professional lives and i think online learning and teaching delivers those skills in highly developed ways there's a lot to be positive about as you move into online teaching for those of you in that situation don't look back look forward and i hope you'll enjoy the time as you get to grips with online learning and teaching and supporting students in that mode so tim those are my remarks i'll hand the mic back to you thank you very much Alan i think that's a very interesting and thought provoking presentation you can and you can tell you if i just a little bit of experience in this area that was very interesting indeed um got quite a few questions coming up i think what i'm going to do is ask you some of the more directly relevant to your presentation questions now and then the other ones perhaps we'll say for a little a little later on perhaps before we start with the questions um Zephanon actually asked for clarification if you could just briefly explain when you what you mean by deficit model well for some people i think in fact i know because i'm surrounded by people in exactly the situation they've been forced off their campuses by this emergency pandemic and so they regard going to online learning as the result of an emergency not a choice they made and indeed it's true it wasn't a choice they made their senior management said we are closing the campus you will move your teaching online and so they regard online learning as a second second rate thing not that they've had much experience of it but they are expecting it to be a bad experience they regard online learning as a deficit in other words it's what you do when you can't do campus teaching and the whole theme of my presentation has been that is to be trapped in a false paradigm online learning has a great deal to offer alongside campus based unblended modes and i think it can be a very fruitful mode to include for the future so don't look back look forward that was that was my theme okay that uh that makes a lot of sense oh so you um you touched on empathy and we had a nice question from from allister um i mean obviously scalability is an issue i mean because when you're trying to engage with students i also know from personal experience so when for example you've got a doctoral course online and you've got half a dozen students it's very easy to engage with them and reflect and discuss but when you've got perhaps i don't know 400 or 3500 students having one of my subjects it's not quite so easy so what i'd like to ask you there is um how do you think you can actually show this empathy when you've got a large number of students in the course make them feel welcome and part of a community well um that's that's a very very well-directed question if you have a large number of students on a course um you have to have a large amount of resources to support those students with i think it's absolutely crucial that a student even in a large course or in a big university feels that he or she is an individual who is known and recognized the experience for the student should not be an impersonal experience but should be a personal experience so online learning isn't as cheap as some senior managers would like to think it can be online learning demands resources well developed resources highly developed resources for student support in particular so to to be able to deliver empathy we need to have adequate resources to do that so i absolutely take your point there but also i think there's a whole set of skills which move well from sensitive and supportive campus-based practice which need rethinking but can move successfully into the online world and i think it's absolutely crucial that that doesn't get overlooked our students need to feel that they're recognized and known as individuals they need to feel supported they need to feel respected and they need to have help when they need it and they need to have empathy in learning and teaching practice online just as much as they do on the campus okay thank you very much and a question from from vnode and welcome back vnode i've received questions from you in in other of our webinars it's nice to have you back here again um you've asked about the increase of online education Alan do you think that um we would have had this this grand great expansion of online education if it hadn't have been for the COVID-19 pandemic um i think the pandemic has definitely driven a lot of courses online as a result of an emergency so no i think this is an accelerator which was unexpected horribly unexpected in the pandemic in the uk is is at a very serious level it's it is a real emergency so i don't take any pleasure from this at all um but i think the whole movement the whole trajectory of modes of teaching is towards more and more technology supported learning and is towards including a wider variety of students who need flexible modes of study which can only be done in technology supported ways so i don't expect the campus based practice to diminish in its importance in the future and particularly for high school leavers but i do expect um high school leavers to have the chance to learn online there are already some states in the usa where you cannot graduate without having done at least one or two online modules because it's recognized that the skills that you learn with online learning are absolutely crucial for your future professional personal and community life but i also expect the imperative for lifelong learning the ability to bring adults back into study for professional and for personal motives to become more and more important and indeed the UNESCO sustainable development goals put a great emphasis on that over the next 12 or 15 years and i'm quite sure that online learning will play a significant part in that thank you very much and one last question in fact is it's two questions that are so very similar i think i can ask them both both of them at the same time and i really think they're focusing in a way on the on the digital divide and in a sense if we're moving more online then we need to have a certain base of technology logical access to make it possible so here madhukar is asking for advice for her country which is napple so what can students do to to study online if they don't all have access to to technology and in a similar way regime is asking the same the same question for the philippines i don't know how you see we can actually overcome these these fairly basic logical limitations to be able to do online learning yeah well these are these are critically important questions absolutely important questions because the digital revolution can exclude people from the major goods of society as well as include people so it's absolutely critical that people reflect and think about that i can't give advice for nipol or the philippines because i don't know those societies well enough but it's a familiar problem in especially in in in poor and middle income countries is how you move learning and teaching and higher education forward for the majority and not the only the elite and of course within a middle income country or in the major cities people's lives are often like the lives of those in in richer countries but in the rural areas they are excluded from from broadband and the broadband costs which make online education very difficult so there is no easy answer but equally the fact that it's difficult doesn't mean to say it shouldn't be attempted i think it's a matter of putting pressure on governments on broadband providers in order to try and move your societies forward together rather than developing a digital divide but i mean it's a very well-directed question there are no easy answers to that thank you very much and it's it's particularly unfortunate in times of lockdown because i think what lots of institutions have done in perhaps poorer countries in the past have set up local or regional study centres and people who don't have the technology can go to the study centre and they can they can share it up to a certain extent but obviously in lockdown when you can't leave your home that sort of approach is sadly limited well thank you very much Alan we'll have a chance to talk to you again a little later on so i'm going to pass over to to simon there and hopefully the coffee's having effect and you'll be able to give us an inspiring presentation simon thank you very much thank you very much it's fascinating thanks Alan and thank you again for sharing your presentation in advance it gave me targets to hit i'm going to focus very much on the engagement piece and i'm going to do this very much with the european countries in mind i recognize we do have a global audience i recognize we've got a global audience and just apologies to those that do struggle with some of the basic structural issues around access because i i don't i like Alan i don't have an easy answer to that so there's no point in just repeating what he just said i'm going to run through a presentation but i want to start with basically a question which i believe there will be a poll posted within the zoom environment and just very very quickly just tell me what your main role is who do we have here i know we've got lots of people from different countries but i'm just curious to see how you would define your role it's curious to know if there are any students in the room so your main role i would hope that we're all students we're certainly all students of online learning and teaching and we wouldn't be here but what's your main role give you another 20 seconds or so to respond to that apologies to the people on youtube who won't have access to this particular poll i'm going to i think i'm going to let someone else judge when we've done this long enough so i don't know tim when you want to say that's done okay i think you can present the results now even if they're not completely yeah let's see what they look like okay so that's roughly what i would have expected i'm a bit surprised there aren't a few more sort of student supporters or advisors but it might be somewhat misunderstanding in terms of the the way the question is actually i actually asked it because student supporters in my context means people that work as learning support advisors or in their library or in their information systems or so on but nonetheless i think there's there was a predominance of of tutors teachers and lecturers and so that's really valuable just to have that that perspective i think that does mean at least that i'm going to be hopefully slightly at least largely on target with my with my comments so that's very very grateful for that had there been entirely management i probably would have had to have been slightly more circumspect in what i'm going to say so thank you very much for that so i just want to reinforce what alan said clearly we're we're facing something of a crisis people talk about it as a war i think that's slightly not necessarily the best use of the term we've just celebrated anzac day here in new zealand it doesn't seem like a war to me but clearly there's a something of a health crisis going on globally and this is not normal teaching so we recognize that emergency remote teaching is has been certainly in the last sort of six weeks eight weeks and in which country you're in has been the pressure that everyone's been under but i think it's just important to note that that as alan said they're not equivalents so what i want to do is to think about dealing with some of the original or imminent crises around emotion emergency remote teaching and then thinking about how we're going to transition that in online and distance learning hopefully by september possibly into next year there will be a transition in people's thought processes so i just want to make a point that when everything i'm saying in in this presentation we have to take into account whatever your technical restrictions are imposed by your institution whatever institutional policies are in place to protect students and whatever it systems that you have and obviously there's also the general data protection regulations the edpi in european countries all of which you do have to take this into account so what i'm going to say to you please don't rush out and start using what's up without actually checking what how your institution is is how they feel about that but on that basis with that little caveat i'm going to to talk about the fact that we're moving really from the initial supporting need that students had when we moved moved into this emergency remote teaching space we're now thinking more about how we move into an engagement mode which has basically been the the major challenge in online distance delivery for a long time there is also a pdf that goes with this presentation so all of my comments are in that pdf and i'll share a link to that at the end of the presentation so those studious students amongst you that are trying to make notes for anything that i've put on the screen don't worry it is available as a pdf so i wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago now for linkedin basically in response to hearing hearing a vice chancellor tell his staff to just get their courses online and it was such a cavalier comment i found it quite enraging at the time and i think what it does is an allen made the point that it's it's been a a major challenge for people to reconceptualize their practice from what they've been doing on campus doing it online and i think we have to acknowledge that there are changing roles that have evolved in the last 30 40 50 years for faculty from being the the sole provider sometimes and just think about the oxford tutorial model the individual tutor basically did everything for the student there's clearly been a division of labor and lots of new specialisms across education have evolved as indeed they have in most industries or sectors industrial sectors educational sectors not been any different so all of these changing roles have been the result of people moving from in the massification of education but now more more recently into the online space and some of that has now somewhat collapsed in the emergency environment that we've been in tutors have been forced into providing things that perhaps normally they wouldn't on campus and they don't necessarily have the skills to do that i think it's also worth just remembering that the spaces that have also changed allen again made a reference to people using social media on the train and on the bus and so the reality is that the digital space that people are working in has also evolved quite dramatically and just to pick up the comment that was made from our colleague in napal i did some work in kenya in the mid-2000s in 2005 i went to kenya and they were talking about producing an online environment and the any learning platform and everyone had a mobile phone and everywhere all over the country there were these red and yellow red and white poles everywhere and i said well why are you trying to provide a network so about 256k copper wire connection when all students have their phones that's still that's would be more effective as a learning environment to work with so i don't think we should be too thinking too strongly about the individual technology environments people are working in but i'm going to give you a fairly sort of broad overview what i'm sharing here is based around a particular learning model that that i've developed but i think my point is it's very useful for everybody to have some kind of conceptual model of learning when they encounter these kinds of crises whatever it is harrisons garrison harrisons gunye doesn't doesn't matter whatever model you've got in mind is very useful to provide you then as a lens as you look at your challenged practice so as you're starting to think about changing your own practice you've got something that you can refer back to so that's what i've done for this presentation is i basically have taken the sole model and i've broken it down into each of my responses around how i would anticipate engaging students more using technology so clearly if you're informing students you would provide them with the usual readings the usual pdfs you might want to be thinking about putting some personalized voice into the presentation so you might want to think about generating a podcast you could link to existing youtube and and ted talks but i think it's also important just to think about there's a an opportunity a serious opportunity here for colleagues to be thinking about how they can raise their own digital literacy most of us use powerpoint very badly and so there's a real trick here to be able to to to use the notes field to generate the notes which then generate this notes that notes view that you see on the screen here in the middle there's also if you design a wealth a well-formed powerpoint that with all of the right bits in the right place so you've got titles and you've got notes then it gives you the opportunity to generate a more meaningful learning resource so this happens to be one that's been generated using adobe presenter which we don't actually have a license for the open polytechnic but you know you can download a free version do any no get any number of presentations done and you can keep them so i'm not presenting you with things that necessarily going to cost you money and obviously there's youtube which is an invaluable platform in the current circumstances so it takes a little bit of time to get used to using it i wouldn't be too worried about the quality in terms of broadcast quality at the moment because we're still moving from emergency remote teaching into online distance so let's not worry too much about the quality as long as your voice is clear as long as students are getting value from what you're presenting there are new technologies available to just beyond just sending them to do more readings when it comes to connecting synchronously which is a big challenge and certainly for very very large cohorts it's a very big challenge but there are a number of different platforms so i've used doggie connect but there are others blackboard if you've got blackboard is your lms system you've got connect there's zoom which obviously we're using microsoft teams webx and again youtube so we've got 50-odd colleagues here on youtube who are listening to this presentation and are making comments the screen is far too small for you to be able to address anyone by name but but yeah they are fully engaged online and so you should be able to connect with your students in a personal way to let them hear your voice to see you and i think that that in and of itself starts to develop some of those engagement principles when you come to asynchronous learning then there are lots of options that there's the the sort of ubiquitous use of discussion forums in vle's virtual learning environments i'm not a big fan of discussion forums myself i've done a number of online study in the past and managed to avoid making contributions to discussion forums it's just not an environment that i feel particularly comfortable in and i have i've heard anecdotally from a lot of colleagues that they don't really enjoy doing that either and yet when they come to teach online they tend to smack them all over the place so i think we have to think about them very judiciously have to make sure that you are using them with a very clearly defined purpose and that that purpose is very clear to the student again developing podcasts or any i use the term podcast very generically just an audio recording with your voice so that level of asynchronous engagement the empathy in your voice the tone of your voice makes all the difference you have to make sure that you do provide transcript to go without and if you want to be a bit more adventurous annual institution has a little bit of money a colleague of the university of hull and myself back in the some decade or so ago now did some work around voice thread which is still available as a platform and it's a sort of a multi-media discussion for us so there are different ways that you can engage students asynchronously discussing around a key bit of learning there's there's and one things i would suggest people try and experiment with if they got vle's is embedding discussion media in the forum itself which is a definitely get a much higher quality response from students if they've got a video or a powerpoint to watch at the head of a particular discussion forum most of the environments will allow you to do that in terms of collaborating again engaging students with each other most of our institutions certainly in europe would probably i'd have office 365 or google suite the g-suite but there are other ways there are plenty of other tools students will be doing this already they will already have set up their facebook pages for their team for their groups but there are some that all of these environments do allow you to provide a comment stream if you like a chat stream around whatever your resources so you could do a literally a one minute instagram video and then track the track the conversation that happens after it the difficulty is instagram's a little bit too public for most people unless you make it a restricted account you only you have to have people sign in and like likewise whatsapp you have to think about who has access to your content so most of us most of us would be working within institutional environments that have an it department's looking into these things for us but just to bear that bear in mind they are available contextualizing i think is also very important so when you ask a student to do something give them a context to engage with we do have a bit of a habit in campus-based universities to become to think about our voices as being very much the the dominant force with a with a source of all wisdom and we expect them to come to us and hear and listen it's very ecclesiastical model like the old church preaching model and so trying to embed learning that's in the context of the learner is also very important i think in this context i'm thinking about it very much about the professional context that the student is going to go towards so if they're doing a business course maybe they could be drafting an article and putting it up in linkedin for example and then you go in and you would assess it as as would deed everybody else but if they were doing an art subject they might post something to a more portfolio based site such as deviant art for example which is a portfolio site for artwork so there are pretty much environments for every discipline across the piece i'm aware there are some in health there are some in law and so you might want to think about trying to to reach out and use some of those public platforms to assess students that way personalizing learning or clearly having that level of reflection which alan also referred to is is absolutely important i'm not again i'm not a massive fan of the some of the social construct this models of learning but there are certainly so some advantage to having students sharing their own reflections online and personalizing them through some kind of blog system if you don't have an institutional portfolio tool you can always use what wordpress i've used that quite successfully in some programs i've run in the past having students just literally create a private site that they don't share with anyone other than the individual that's sort of slightly defies the notion of a blog but it still works getting drawing reflection so again portfolio systems this is actually an example from university technology sydnes as a student posting on to video youtube his reflection on his study plan so there are lots of ways lots of tools that you can use to elicit that kind of level of reflection from students and assessing i know mark brown ran a session i think last week around assessment so many of you will have attended that already there's not much point in me going into too much detail about this particular slide other than to say that it's um oh i've lost control of my mouse um it's it's very much about trying to reset your mind really when you think about assessment everything you thought you knew about assessment in a campus-based environment needs to be reset most of what you did on campus you can adopt or adapt to online delivery but it needs a slightly different mindset i was party to a conversation with someone teaching dance more recently who was horrified at the idea of lockdown how possibly where they're going to assess their students without access to a dance studio so well just have them stage their piece of contemporary dance in their own living room that would be a challenge in and of itself they could then record that themselves on their phone submit that so so there's a there are some advantages the possible advantages that we all almost want to be thinking about in the future so as alan said earlier you know there's an opportunity here to be thinking forward to how you might want to change your practice and future in response to this current crisis and i want to pick up some of the comments i think allister asked in the chat around the sort of how you get empathy and i know alan responded i think just having your your voice is absolutely critical so if you've got a very very large class providing cohort feedback possibly touching on one or two individuals by name where that's appropriate to make sure that it's it is personalized making sure that you you are providing something that is up to date and current so you have to do this very promptly after students have completed a particular task or a particular topic to go in and actually provide that level of cohort feedback students will welcome that they'll welcome your personal engagement with them if you are providing individual feedback then i'd say again use the technology tools the annotation tools within word and pdf are superb so that's the prism that i took on this engagement question was using the particular model that i have in mind so that's the model i look at all problems or that we face in learning but i think i would just want to pick up another comment that alan made about thinking forward and so you want to think about what's coming down the pipeline so i'm keeping an eye on what's going on in some of the reporting around the school sector at the moment because i think they are our future students and so their expectation their experience in this environment is also going to really affect what we do in the future further reading i'm a big fan of allman simpson's work it's from 2012 the last edition i've got i don't know if there was another edition i think that's the third edition it's a good read if you want an orientation some of the things that alan presents in his piece and my colleague martin nickels here at the urban polytechnic has a book just about to come out which is on the fork for the future of formal learning transforming universities with digital distance education and i think we all need to take the opportunity in this environment now to be thinking forward i want to plug a couple of webinars in addition clearly to the eden webinars the point is the only reason i pick these two very much around them is say if you're interested in something do a web do google search you will find someone out there is currently running a webinar that deals with some aspect of what you're doing so if you it's a great way to engage with colleagues get great way to hear different voices and make sure that you are aware of what's going on in the field but these are two that i'm planning on attending although i'm more inclined to go to the australian one which is a little bit better time for me than the european one and this particular resource uh please don't take it as an as an exemplary example of the presentation but it is an example of reusing the same resource so it is a powerpoint resource it's available as a pdf with my full notes available which has references attached and i've also will by the end of tomorrow i will have also posted the version up into a web space this this address of the adobe connect captured version as well those are my contact details if anyone's interested um and i'm happy to hand back control if i can find my mouse which seems to keep moving around but uh oh here we go okay thank you very much indeed uh summer that was a very entertaining very interesting uh presentation with lots of lovely juicy resources and uh i think of all the people in the chat at least uh rukmini will be will be very happy with your presentation because you just started to speak and then um they asked the question could you please provide some practical tools and resources and i think you've you've definitely done that for us and i think there were lots of lots of interesting choices and that's given rise to a series of questions so perhaps i'll um i'll ask you some of these now just briefly before we do that a word on the time it's it's eight minutes too so since we started a little late i think we can afford ourselves the luxury of finishing a few minutes late as well because it's a shame not to make the most of having these two wonderful panelists here with us okay so um the question is that if you have all these wonderful tools and technologies then it leads you to do sort of two situations i think one of them is is what um um we might also have spoke about when asking for a set of tools but the question there is what about the learning curve because in a way we've got two learning curves we've got learning curves for the for the teacher because for example if i'm a teacher in a specific area that doesn't make me an expert in education and technology so for example i've got just as much trepidation when i approach one of these tools as my students might have that's the first part of the question and the other part of the question is is that i might well find myself with students who know considerably more about using this technology than i do in which case um simon do you think this opens up the interesting possibilities for actually um making the most of this these extra conferences they've got to actually drive learning in a way i was going to say actually one one of them one of the major concerns that faculty have always expressed to me is oh my students know more about it than i do and i think actually the reverse would be more problematic and in fact the reverse is sometimes an assumption that faculty make that everyone assumes that if if you're under 25 you are completely digitally digitally literate which is clearly not the case and particularly when you when you embark on any new technology or you redeploy an existing social media technology into a learning environment that the reaction is not always what you would expect so i recognize that there is that challenge that's um i think there's a need to be gentle on yourself and your students so you need to negotiate with your students you might identify a couple of champions amongst your student cohort that can happily support you in delivering your learning and they would probably would would embrace that opportunity um if we were an american institution i think we could probably find a way to award credit for that i think most european universities don't do that kind of thing um but it's certainly something that maybe somebody might want to think about um in the future so i think using the right technology and again i i didn't i don't want to people to think that all of these technologies need to be used all the time in everything you do it's more about making sure that if you've got a particular learning challenge and you can identify a resource that you have access to yes you may have to teach yourself a little bit how to use it but that will be time very very well spent okay thank you and i think a related uh uh question from madhuka in the uh has come up and that is of the resources you've uh you've shown them obviously some of them are free some of them are not free and some of the paid ones have um free options how do you see it be impossible for teachers to actually put together a reasonable set of resources without um having to generate large expenditure for their for their institutions and i suppose also the flip side of that question is um what does that mean for for for digital protection the the european laws of uh of data protection really because if you're using a free american platform and the data is not stored in europe then that could be problematic yeah well as i said i did put my caveat around the the intro just to suggest that gtpr would be an obstacle for for certainly a lot of what i'm suggesting um it's more about provoking people to think about what technologies and alternative technologies they they might want to to use so the free the freeware um the free options are very often perfectly suitable for relatively large small cohorts um for larger cohorts the chances are you're going to end up having to pay licenses and that might not be sustainable for a lot of institutions i think it's it's really about trying to think about what what it is you want the learners to be able to do and to gain from your from your experience so take wordpress for example i'm not suggesting that anyone has to have to mount an institutional instance of wordpress which you could do but you could just ask students to access wordpress themselves as individuals um now you'd have to provide some additional resource some guidance as to how to do that because you might assume that since you've managed to do it that they can do it but that would be a false conclusion so i think i think this is a lot of the challenges that we face are very much around our own professional development which is one the reasons why i think i cited a couple of the education of the sort of compulsory education reports at the end of my presentation because let's be honest a lot of our colleagues won't have ever taught won't have ever done any training on how to teach and that's increasingly rare but a lot of our colleagues who are faculty may not actually have ever done a teaching course of any kind whatsoever and so they will be learning as they go and so i think this is one of the reasons why i pay a lot of a lot of attention to the compulsory sector because our school teachers are all taught how to teach and so there's a lot of there's a lot that we can learn from from them but we have to be honest about the fact that we are all learning all the time and so whatever whatever application you choose to use i think it's important that we just didn't take the opportunity basically to see that as a little bit of self-study and that has some value in and of itself if only because it will make us more comfortable with the digital platform so when it turns out that the institution does move as Alan said institutions will start probably drifting towards online even post COVID-19 we will find faculty that have been out there playing with some of these technologies will be much better in a better position then to embrace whatever the technology platforms are that are then released to them on an institutional basis. Excellent thank you very much okay Alan i think i'd like to get you back into the conversation now we had an interesting combat question from Andrew which was really focusing on student interest and motivation because sometimes with these when we're using technology if you like it's a way of shortening the distance between ourselves and the students the problem can be if you like it it can be difficult if you like to to transmit some of the interest and motivation that we can actually do in a face-to-face classroom because we can we can connect easy with with the students what's your advice on this on this on this question how can we how can we try to engage in a in a positive way so that the transfer of content in ideas is not boring for our students yes i i'd resist first of all Tim any idea that the risk of teaching being boring is only one for online learning you must have sat in enough boring lectures as a student yourself when younger as i certainly did so boring your students is a complete as an overall professional risk in universities not just online education i i think the term that i would push at the core of our considerations today is learning design if we design learning to be interactive if we use assessment to support learning as well as to judge performance if we use a range of media that students enjoy in all their variety including audio and video as well as text i think we will engage students at least as effectively and sometimes more effectively than in campus-based experiences so i certainly don't start from a deficit model the challenges for online learning come primarily in my view from the lives that our students lead because they are likely to be in lifelong learning situations managing jobs and family they're more likely to come out from outside the elite from the best secondary schools and the wealthiest families so those are the way one of the ways in which we have to manage the empathy online to support this wider and wider range of students and all this might sound um paradoxical but i wouldn't start with the technology and although the discussion of what technological platforms are available is of course always useful i would start by saying as you look towards rethinking your teaching for the future what sorts of students do you want to teach what sorts of courses do we want them to engage with and what sort of outcomes do we want to have in what sort of society and when we've worked our way through those questions then we can decide what sorts of technologies we want to use to support them and as i tried to emphasize earlier in what i said the idea that students could graduate without the skills of online learning to me in today's world is unthinkable these are skills which they need for their lives in the community for their lives with their families which are distributed so often in the world today for their lives certainly in the workplace so many occupational areas now work in virtual teams and use virtual resources so i would start with your educational purpose and then decide what sort of technologies we want to deliver that purpose thank you alan that's a absolutely wonderful answer i think you're you're completely right because i can remember for my own my own past i mean learning first of all we learned to use the calculator that we moved on to learn the the personal computer as these were the tools we were going to be using in our in our work in life and absolutely i think the the whole set of online technologies is will form a part of our students future life okay can i can i pass that question across to you simon as well i mean being head of learning design i'd expect you to have something to say about this yes alan stole my thunder um yes no i mean absolutely i think um i because i knew that alan was going to cover that in his presentation at the beginning i thought i would focus very much on the the technology use but i think absolutely if you i'm a i'm a big big john bigs fan i think constructive alignment is the core of most sound learning design and um if you haven't read his books i might suggest that you do read them they're very illuminating um i think designing learning in an online environment is um uses all the same foundational principles as any campus based design it requires good outcomes it requires aligned assessment it requires the teaching learning activities to be aligned to those to that assessment and all of those considerations absolutely have to take place first before you decide how to deliver those teaching and learning activities i think what one thing that comes very early on in the piece but maybe isn't is probably the subject for a future webinar um because we're trying to deal very much about the the response to cobit 19 in this webinar but i think in the longer term as we do start thinking about designing um new courses we need to have a better way of identifying actually who our students are because students embarking on a three year four year degree um maybe they apply or they start making their school choices a couple of years before they go to university it might be five six years between them making a decision to study a particular course and then completing that course and those five or six years those those uh the intended career may have changed quite dramatically um in that space so i think it's very important that we have very um sound learning designs basically around intended learning outcomes that are very well articulated um and if we do that we can we can produce programs that are designed that are a little bit more flexible for students to drive their pathway through so it might be that the program itself might actually evolve through the lifestyle of that particular student particularly if they're part-time students and they're working they might be taking five seven years to do their undergraduate degree um and so that we do need we do need to have absolutely i agree with al and we need absolutely fundamentally we need good sound design to make sure that we can sustain the students engagement through the process yep thank you very much i i also agree with that we can't put the technological cart in front of the horse as i say okay i don't want for you um uh peter in the in the the q and a asks about um what we think of simplifying this whole process because i mean Simon's presentation was wonderful there's a there's a plethora of very good and effective tools but but sometimes one can feel a little perhaps overwhelmed by by the options so i think is what the old aeronautical engineers used to say some time ago when they designed airplanes that you have to simplify and add likeness to make the planes fly better i mean how can we simplify and add likeness to our educational process online um yes i don't really know how to answer that i think um don't work on your own and the reason why the team approach is so widely adopted in online education is because you need a range of different professional specialisms so this isn't just about academic specialism it's also about a range of other professionalisms uh which are respected in the online world so i think if you if you if you work on your educational purpose and then you look around for advice on how to deliver that what sort of technologies you want you're going to have to change the mindset in your institution as to how teaching is organized i think um that is that is a revolution which which which is on its way i mean most campuses in the uk already have learning design and learning technology teams on them i mean the work the world has changed in the last 10 years on campus it's no longer the same place at all um so uh adding likeness i think will at least will be delivered in part i remember that you can work in a team you don't have to find a solution to everything indeed you won't the range of professionalism is demanded in online teaching is wider than any one person holds so look to your colleagues in particular professional colleagues in learning design and educational technology they will help you if your primary role is an academic uh uh in delivering a sound system so i'm not sure i can really uh respond to your questions fully as i'd like but i'll think about it delivering that's a good concept um i think it's a very good idea and a very practical advice i'll give you um pass the word over to you in a in a second Simon i mean it is at the end of the day by most things in life a team effort and uh thinking that we have to sit here and resolve all of our problems on our own is perhaps a a bit of a a bit of a mistake okay Simon over to you please i was just going to say i mean i'm incredibly fortunate that they're in polytechnic as as Alan says that's our bed and bed and brothers that's what we do and we've we've got a team of 20 learning designers and six principal learning designers and we've got a digital experience team so we recognize we we're able to do what we do because we are very much a uh a collegial effort um i think if i was going to if i was going to suggest one possible technology which i think is fairly easily available to most people and i think there's a big win to be had from most people in most situations provided you've got internet access is youtube um because i think putting having having that degree of personal presence certainly if you're if you were expecting to teach remotely even if you just do a weekly sort of journal type recording to just overview the topic or overview the readings but for students to be able to physically see you um i think that that there's a big win to be have there so if i had to pick any of those individual technologies that that would be the one that i think i would suggest people wanted to just think about a wet get a webcam work out how to use it most systems have have some movie recording built in um and so you don't have to spend money for it it should be on your machine already um if not just use the the recording facility within youtube don't expect it to be perfect it's not broadcast quality you're not doing a horizon or a bpc documentary you just have to make sure that you are physically present for the for the student absolutely um okay so i'm i'm going to carry on with you uh sorry for the for the next questions since we've we've got the the channel established i mean a topic that's come up in the questions which i haven't touched just yet and um and um this was also after just a couple of minutes ago so i want to i want to look at it a little bit now it's just question of um of social inclusion in a way because we've got a very heterogeneous student population not only in terms of learning styles in cultures and technological aspects i mean if you like we're trying to paint with very broad brushstrokes across a very wide educational continuum and it's very difficult to do this in a practical way but do you have any any any advice for how how teachers might actually want to try and do the best they can really with what's available um so i must declare myself i think i did say in my comments i'm i'm not a massive fan of social constructivism as the ideal type which makes me somewhat of a heretic i think in most online distance learning environments um i think situated learning is something i like to think about a little bit more so gene lay's work is a little bit more prominent in my thinking um and i think we should always remember particularly in the lockdown environment i think this is quite an interesting provocation the way we think about things so we say well we can't now students are now learning together because they can't all go to the library and sit in there they're beautifully design social hub um we we have to think about how we get them to work with each other but we should also remember that students do actually have a life outside of their course outside of their institution they are living with people mostly family they depending on the degree of national restriction they may be able to go and talk to colleagues or friends and if not they will be doing it through FaceTime through through uh through YouTube through uh Facebook so i think designing learning that is situated for the learner is is is as important if not more important than trying to engineer some of these social constructivist kind of notions of we only you know we only make learning together within a cohort of course we make learning with reference to others but that's not necessarily doesn't necessarily require us to try and mimic the on-campus cohort forms of learning within the online space so i'm not a big fan of discussion forums i think i've said that already i think they don't work for a lot of students it's it has a lack of personality of personal mobility to it and it's it's very often there's a massive time lag um allen will remember i think it was robin mason back in 2001 at the open university did a presentation around time is the new distance and i think you know that the one of the things we haven't really come to terms with historically is the fact that um that's still true so 20 years later we we are still trying to force ourselves into delivering synchronous learning online um rather than or trying to find models that somehow replicate that we keep failing to do that so i think just just situating the learning where the student is rather than trying to uh socially engineer them into learning uh in groups that we've formed for them strikes me as a better option okay wonderful thank you very much um allen one final question for you please um how do you think we can try and uh support and deal with students with special needs ah that's a great question um it's first of all it's it's one of those questions that people ask sometimes with an a tone of disbelief like can you teach engineering online of course you can't they say and then you point out that engineering is taught in a number of universities online and very sequesterly it's a very good question but one of the things that online learning can do is to include students in disability to a far greater degree than campus-based systems have done traditionally at least and i think it's true to say um of the open university uk that it present teaches more students with disability and all the other universities in the uk put together so the answer is yes you can but clearly you have to think about what sort of um functional barriers there are to a student um working in an online system and they can be significant we know our research knows that those who are excluded from digital education largely come into four categories the poor poorer sections of society older sections of society to whom these technologies present different sorts of challenges the rural areas and rural elements of our population and the disabled so we need to have um specialist work on how digital um uh approaches can include people with disability this is absolutely critical work because of course the digital revolution and its particular application here in digital education online learning is wonderfully inclusive potentially but it can also be very divisive for example in the uk now as second as schools are working online schools are shut uh we've discovered and it's no surprise to many of us that a significant minority of secondary school students don't have laptops and neither do their families they don't have access to this online education in schools so there are some efforts being made to provide free laptops for the children of some disadvantaged families for people who's you have to look at the functional barriers which disability can provide whether it's sight or hearing or motor movement which affects your ability to work a keyboard there are technological solutions to these they're very sophisticated they're expensive but it is just like the question of broadband access for all which was brought up earlier in the context of the poor and the philipines we want to move forward as a society together including our fellow human beings with disability and not excluding them so it's a critically important question it can be done it takes a lot of expertise and it takes money thank you very much thank you very much Alan thank you very much Simon it's been a very interesting and thought-provoking webinar and we're very grateful to both of you especially you Simon for the sleep loss I mean you haven't hasn't been you haven't really told at all during the presentation um well that's it we've come to the end of another Eden webinar I'm also extremely grateful to my colleagues Lisa and Diana for being there in the background and keeping everything running while we were talking the next webinar we have coming up is on Wednesday this Wednesday on the 29th at five o'clock you can find information on the the Eden website my colleagues copied into the into the chat here on ODLM plug on a question of of care so thank you very much indeed to all of you and look forward to talking to you again goodbye