 Welcome everyone to this next session so lovely that everyone's here and found a way to the space and it's all about pathways to learning and open collaboration to support the online pivot and I'm very pleased to be able to hand over now to Rob Farrow to hear all about his project. Thank you very much. This is exciting, I've never been on TV before. So for those of you that don't know me, I'm Rob Farrow and I'm a senior research fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. I work on the Open Education Research Hub and its portfolio of projects including GOGN, the network for doctoral students but today I'm here to talk about a project which involved a wider group of colleagues at the OU but there's still an openness angle and an openness connection and I'm going to explore that with you today. So you'll see here I've put my name and et al. The reason for doing this is not to try and claim the credit for what other people have done but to just reflect the fact that there's 18 co-authors on this research and it involved a lot of people working on different discrete parts of it. I saw this tweet last night I thought it was kind of apt but also we didn't spend years on this research this was a very much an agile quick turnaround project and the context for that was very much the 2020 pandemic. So the project in question is called Pathways to Learning and was funded by the GCRF that's the Global Challenges Research Fund and it was set up as a collaboration between the Open University in the UK and the African Council for Distance Education and what we did was rapidly develop two courses specifically for audiences in Africa one which was a program for teacher education and one which was a program for tertiary educators and both of these courses were available openly so anyone could sign up for them and take them and they're presented on the Open Learn platform which is the Open University's OER repository and through July and August last year over six weeks we ran this very quickly developed pair of courses and we did that by using material already produced by the OU both in terms of core provision but also from edtech research projects and sort of tried to find the things that could be appropriated most easily and kind of most agilely in a way. So when I go through the rest of this I'm just going to invite you to reflect on some things which I'm sure we've been reflecting on anyway. All educational institutions have had to make some changes in response to the pandemic obviously those are up for distance education and have some advantages in some ways and the long-term impact remains to be seen. Most people are predicting some changes to the world of work and to the world of education but one thing I'd like to invite you to reflect on while I'm talking is the role of openness in this kind of thing because you could have a sort of rapid agile COVID response but it need not look like an open response so I'm going to explore a bit of that in this but I just invite you to sort of consider that as I go ahead. So why do this work? The idea was that a need had been identified in north and sub-Saharan Africa for professional educators to have access to fresh and development specifically targeted around online and blended education and involved in the UK side at the Open University we had representatives from Wales which is the Faculty of Wellbeing Education and Language Studies, IET the Institute of Educational Technology which is Warren based, the International Development Office which runs a number of development projects in the Global South, the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sports and then on the African side you have the African Council for Distance Education, Centre for Research and Distance and Online Learning in Lagos, Nigeria, National Open University of Nigeria, the Open University of Tanzania and the University of South Africa. So the idea was to produce something very quickly, roll it out very quickly and evaluate it very quickly so although there was a sort of history of collaboration and there have been a number of ed tech and OER projects in Africa by the OU so there was some you know groundwork already in place there was some networks already in place but everything had to be done quite quickly so we all know that the pandemic has created a drive to move education online a lot of it was maybe happening already anyway and just catalyzed but we know the sorts of challenges that are associated with this kind of thing and in this case we didn't necessarily know who'd be taking the courses that wasn't you know that clear at the start and we also knew that bandwidth and access to technology and and to data would be potentially an issue and so what are we offering we have these OERs these free courses already there and we have expertise in distance education and training educators but also on the tech and delivery side innovation in platforms and the way we sort of deliver learning so the real kind of rationale for this work was how can we make the most of these free and open resources that we have to meet the needs of those practitioners in Africa so two courses one is the take your teaching online course which was adapted and this is aimed at people who are already teaching and to help them make a move to become an online or blended educator and that's partly on the tech side and partly on the sort of practice side and kind of how you approach what you're doing so that was one of the courses that was used and the other one was this course originally developed for the TESA project teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa and again this course was for teacher educators and if you like provides a scaffold for the courses that we were developing in the pathways project so Global Challenges Research Fund made some funding available for kind of rapid and turnaround projects in the context of the pandemic and so to meet that need the idea was to develop these two courses so one's a badged open course take your teaching online one's the TESA MOOC so these form the basis of the content that was delivered so two programs one for tertiary educators one teacher educators and the way this was set up was that you'd have a sort of core section which would be a one of open course but because the because we wanted to develop a sense of community we had two to three webinar events for each of those courses and in the range of additional activities and so this drew on expertise from across different departments in the OU to bring in specialists from different areas and have kind of focused things and we also used platforms that IETs developed for different research projects in the past as part of the offering so from our side on the design side the question is how are we going to make sure that we can deliver something consistent how do we know that we're doing this at the right level for our learners and engaging them in the way that's effective and so on and so the synchronous activities proved to be a quite a sort of important part of this so just to give you a sense of what these courses look like is the familiar 2020 Zoom meeting kind of set up for each of these weeks there would be this kind of clear distinction between here's the core stuff that we want you to work through here's the webinar here's the additional activities is a sort of community activities and so on and so essentially they're sort of MOOCs with with bolt-on bits so you've got kind of MOOC core and then you've got these kind of additional things added to it and you know you're getting you know basically experts in their particular bit coming in and delivering that section and one thing I'd note with that is that I'm not sure anyone really had an overall picture necessarily of what was going on because it's happening very quickly and people getting assigned to different different tasks in different weeks so in terms of the number of registrations 771 for the tertiary educates program 602 for the teacher educates program they came from 16 African countries with most people coming from Nigeria and Cuneo and now we were sort of maybe assuming that a lot of people might not have online teaching experience but 77% of people said they did in the pre-course survey and many had also taken part part in an online course on the student side as well and maybe surprisingly more than 10% so 11.2% had already taken some sort of free learning from the open university so I'm going to go into a bit more of the detail about the impact of this in a second but as a headline figure 62% so just below two thirds said they had a major change in the way that they do online learning as a result so looking at the enrolments you can see here for this goes from May 19 to January 21 around the time of the delivery of the pathways courses you can see here so this is just for the take your teaching online course you can see here a big jump around May and actually even though the course didn't last that long it was over by August the sort of formal presentation you can see that the the ongoing impacts of people you're taking that course continues and it's still popular this graph shows you a sort of pattern of engagement and this is from the tertiary educators so the dark blue shows you who's been ticking through the activities and saying that they've been doing them the orange shows you people who registered resume events and the turquoise or cyan shows you who attended and now what you can see is that the dark blue is fairly sort of consistent you know there's a bit of drop off which you you know probably expect with any course officially as well free and open one the orange line I think is quite interesting because you can see that more people were signing up for the zoom sessions than were actually going through the course and taking the kind of formal route through it the idea of getting a badge or certificate or whatever and quite a lot of the time the number of the people attending the new meetings is also bigger than the people who clicked through and said I'm taking this course and I'm doing all the bits so for the other course you see again pretty similar pattern of activity more people attending the events than going through the formal course so there were lots of kind of unanticipated forms of interaction and this is partly down to the sort of agile delivery of the whole thing so we had forums in open learn create telegram was a popular app in african countries for sharing stuff and communicating around the course offering people options and a bit of flexibility in terms of how they interacted with the course I think it was a pretty you know important step here there was no telegram group at the start and we created it during the course in response to demand in the evaluation around 97 percent of the people who responded suggested that they were they were either satisfied or highly satisfied with the quality of the programs that were offered that's pretty good impact on practice this is a bit more challenging maybe a bit more bit of harder standard to reach again you've got about 93 percent indicating a significant impact on their practice from taking some of the pathways courses similarly people are expecting and anticipating further change and this kind of went right across the whole board so changes in how teaching is organized and how learning is designed how it's assessed but also kind of how career progression works in an african context and whether it could be changed to make it more reliant to an online learning scenario blended learning scenario also I think quite a few people were inspired by the course to the extent that they felt like they wanted to become a champion for this kind of approach and sometimes I think because maybe there's a sort of advantage to them as a professional in you know professional development essentially but also the idea that this this can be a game changer and what I kind of you know I was only you know I was only part of this whole project not the whole thing and not leading it but the spirit of kind of an open approach was shared right across the project teams and I think that was a really important part of this exchange people listening on both sides and so on so just to give you a kind of summary of the evaluation itself so obviously the pandemic has had a big effect on on the on learning everywhere Africa is in a slightly different position than other continents over into the youth relative youth of the population but it's still having obviously a very very significant effect and that's still unfolding but what we did find is that as part of that change that's happening there are opportunities for online learning and for open forms of collaboration the evaluation data was overwhelmingly positive about the impact on people and I think a massive part of that was this sense of building confidence with the community as a whole so encouraging people to interact with each other encouraging people to explore things and to and to share their experiences with each other and with us I think that was really important part of it and you see the kind of things that you know you might expect to see improved confidence exploring new ways of doing things again you often have this issue of how do we get how do we help the people have really low confidence because the people are a bit confident can just kind of run away with these things and become you know super confident so it's encouraging when you get the people to express low confidence at the start to express a high degree of confidence and I think there was also a lot of appreciation and I think there was also a lot of appreciation for the sort of open elements of all this so firstly just giving people the chance to take these courses and to have access to this sort of experience but also the sort of extra stuff where there's a sort of generosity to that right we're not just being funded to make these courses available to you we're trying to find extra things that we can do and explore new things new ways of doing things together so flexibility and being agile were really really important parts of this and given the timeframe of the project we certainly prioritized that rather than a very very carefully worked out course design or something like that even though a lot of the stuff had been already validated and used elsewhere the thing that people the technology if you like that people are mostly interested in was really OERs and that might be sort of a bit surprising but people saw massive potential straight away with the idea of resources that you could freely share and use in your own practice so I don't really have time to go into the qualitative evidence but we've got quite a lot of it and it's all you know predominantly positive increased confidence more attentiveness to what's possible and thinking about how you can empower people through this kind of technology and through this sort of approach so I just want to say quick thank you to the project teams I'm not going to go through everyone's name just because I don't think we've got time but these are the colleagues from the open university in the UK plus the people in Africa that we collaborated with and their teams so yeah I will just say thank you very much for your attention happy to answer any questions if we've got some time hi Nashua yes so I was really going to thank you very much for that really interesting talk and to kind of point out what Nashua was saying and I was going to ask exactly that like what did you take back from the whole experience to the OU given the sheer numbers and the amount of really rich interaction you had with everyone I think we're still digesting that partly because I haven't seen anyone right so the project team has never met to discuss this project apart from just online meetings we don't necessarily get everyone so there's still a sort of dissection going on we'll be working on publications and getting this stuff out there in the usual kind of fashion but yeah I'm afraid that has yet to be sort of formally digested just because of time and the way things have worked out yeah you've achieved an incredible amount of time I'm very very impressed very impressed and there's not questions at the minute it's mostly thank yous and appreciation so if anyone has any last we're just about squeezing out a couple of minutes more the other comment that actually from ACPH OU if we bring it up from the point of view that a lot of people assume that maybe you had a lot of advantages in the OU coming into the pandemic but certainly from what I saw you did have your own challenges as well but also the number of opinion pieces that we would see that quite frankly just ignored all of your historical context and all that you had learned and contributed so that's something that's quite frustrating a lot of universities discovered online education last year yeah it was incredible it was just like you know and you guys having to come in and actually say hello so yeah so did anyone reach out or contact or um they may have done but I wouldn't necessarily be the person that they spoke with because I work on external research projects the most exclusively I wouldn't really be in the loop for that conversation anyway I think probably informally there's been quite a lot of that sort of consultation going on in all kinds of ways so hopefully this work gets out for sure I'm sure it will