 Good afternoon, thanks for joining us. I'm here with Duncan Pepperty and he's going to be talking about the rise of hybrid classroom, so I'm going to pass over to him now and he's going to do his presentation. Thank you very much. Okay, so I know a lot of you were expecting John Wilson this afternoon, who's the founder and chief scientist at Agenta, but unfortunately he's just experienced the family bereavement and at the last minute he's asked me to step into his very knowledgeable shoes. I will give you a little bit more of my background later, but I've been working with Agenta for some months now and Intel, whose technology powers their system, collaborating on a wide range of learning solutions with their end users. So I thought we'd just start as we're talking about the rise of the hybrid classroom. I'd just take a moment to be clear what a hybrid classroom is. Now I'm sure most people do know it, but there is some confusion out there. So by its very nature, something hybrid contains two elements. So hybrid cars, for example, run off two different fuels. Hybrid teas for the horticulturists amongst us are very popular roses in British gardens and they've been artificially created by combining two different rose plants. So when it comes to education, a hybrid or hyflex as a lot of people call it classroom is one where students are at the same time simultaneously present physically in the space and joining remotely. So I'm sure, you know, most of you were aware of that already, but I just thought it'd be worth being clear about that point. So isn't that just online or blended learning? I hear somebody people say. So fully online or blended learning, the types of things that people follow on edgy calls or future learning, things like that, is where the student engages with online material at a time and a place of their own choosing. And you might have 10 or 100 or 1000 students taking a class each at their own time in their own space. And any student to student or tutor to student interactions are usually then via chat or message boards or things, not necessarily in real time, because obviously people are taking those courses at different times. And I think, and I'll come back to that at the end as well. But I think one of the things we'll see is that a rise in hybrid learning will also lead to a rise, an increase in blended learning, if we get some of the parameters around that right as well. So are these hybrid classrooms for the long term? Well, right now, obviously, the rise or the increase in hybrid classes has been as a direct result of COVID-19 and the reduced capabilities of students and and lecturers to be on campus. I can tell you of some institutions, probably in a private conversation, that are still hoping there will be no long term change to how things used to be. They are actively looking for a COVID exit strategy, and they want to return to fully in class learning on campus only. And then at the other end of the scale, there are institutions that have that fully recognize the potential of digital transformations in many areas of operations, not just with students, but sometimes with their own staff and flexible hybrid working as well. And there's going to be many opportunities that those who grasp this, they'll create for themselves. However, I think the biggest reasons that hybrid is here to stay are two-fold really. One is the fact that students themselves and the technology companies who are investing massive R&D dollars at the moment, like never before, to improve hybrid experiences for both learning and business meetings. So you've got this push within higher education and further education, but also in the corporate world. Hybrid learning is not going to disappear once hopefully everything goes back to what we used to know as normal, but it won't be no more moving forward. Because there's also going to be an issue about climate change, and that is going to initiate measures to reduce unnecessary travel. So much of the same things are going to be required. So let's just consider the student experience of new learning pedagogies for a moment. So I think most of you on this call today who will know me, they'll know me for the digital classroom roadshow that I initiated back in 2015. Here you can see it in action at Swansea University, where they've been talking about small group active collaborative learning, which is what this environment supports for a number of years. They had a cross campus working group established, but yet they hadn't invested in any spaces. I think one of the reasons for that is those cross campus people from estates and educational enhancement and all sorts of areas went off and saw things independently. They didn't see things together as a group. So that was an empty space. We transformed it with a pop-up classroom for a few weeks and allowing all those different stakeholders to come together, and then they understood better where their part in the development sat. And those academics who wanted to teach that way, and in fact there's the chemistry tutor there with his staff, they loved it as well. So after this disappeared, did Swansea ignore their students and their staff? And the answer to that is no, I shouldn't read that out to you word for word, but essentially having been able to get into that space of this new learning pedagogy, which is essentially what we're now being faced with new learning pedagogies around hybrid, they then actually moved ahead and within a few months we were there in April 2018, but in October 2018 they had their own facilities on campus for their students to use. You'll see it's called the Sticky Campus Roadshow there, because when those roadshows went into JISC and became involved with JISC, they changed the name to Sticky Campus Roadshow, we were then considering all learning spaces across the campus for being developed to enable students to remain on campus, because they've got things they could do there. But those roadshows, I mean, over 7,000 people in a few years came to those presentations and workshops across the right across the UK, Scotland, Northern Ireland, South Wales, bits of Europe as well, and it did help many institutions make informed decisions, they didn't necessarily go with exactly what they've seen and experienced, but it showed them the direction of travel. And the other thing that the roadshow pioneered as well was that during 2019, crucial, the roadshow actually incorporated some real-time virtual classroom technology from Barco as part of the learning landscape mix and we showed them what might be possible with that as well. So are these hybrid classrooms for, excuse me, for the long term? Well, the first technology enabled active collaborative classrooms that you saw in that photograph a second ago, they were pioneered by Portsmouth and Nottingham Trent in the UK back in 2014. It took a long time for them to get established, but whole faculties such as the School of Business and Law at the University of the West of England, they built a whole structure around those pedagogies, those student-centric pedagogies. So is there really a rise in this hybrid classroom here for long term? I believe there is. And in fact, just in the last few weeks and months, there's been various surveys. Here's one from Advant HG that says that moving to blended and hybrid hasn't shown a negative impact on learning, basically. The outcomes have been the same, so we're recognising that at the moment. There's another one here from the Irish University Association, and that's really saying that 69% of students are already saying that being on campus for lectures is not the best way for them to engage for a whole variety of reasons. And then Salesforce, who, you know, they have a vested interest in online learning, we have to learn that. But again, this was a global survey of over 2,000 students and staff. And as a direct result of what people experience through COVID restrictions of not being on campus, attitudes have changed. And 100% of students have experienced online learning in some form or another in the last almost two years now. So what are the options for hybrid classrooms? So, you know, everybody was forced to connect using the systems they already had when campuses were shut down almost immediately. And for most people, that meant Zoom or Teams as the short-term emergence of response. And it worked very well, despite there being some well-documented issues around unwanted participants, you know, the so-called Zoom bombings. That wasn't down to the technology, that was the way people hadn't set their security settings. Because by and large, that technology worked really well. But using small laptop screens for hours on end became tiring, Zoom fatigue, Teams fatigue. And anybody encountering technical problems, there was no option this time to go back to the classroom. You know, when ed tech has been installed in the past into learning spaces and people have experienced difficulties with them, they maybe give it a second chance. But ultimately, they don't persevere with it. They just go back to how it was, because that's the simplest thing. And perhaps they never wanted the technology in the first place. But they've had to persevere with it. There was no going back. You know, if they had a bad experience on the first class, they had to do the second class in the same way. And eventually, they got the confidence with the technology. In other words, really, it was a learning curve that people could not get off, you know? And it gave staff more confidence. They learned the hard way. They weren't training sessions for them. But for students, it's given them a real different view on how they want to engage. Do they have to travel to the campus? You think of all the commuter students traveling to campus with those journeys they don't have to do. Because most of the time, we know from research that a lot of commuter students, once they've been to that lecture, they just go home again. They're not engaging as deeply as maybe students who are in accommodation on campus. And maybe also for those students, you know, if we look at the way we might provide educationally differently in the future through hybrid, maybe they can study at places that aren't within that short commuting distance. Because maybe they only have to go onto campus for a block of four or six weeks a year or whatever that might be. And so I think the whole landscape, because this is going to change. And the challenge now is, you know, how do we go beyond this emergency remote teaching? Because you can't sit in front of laptop screens all day. And that's what John from Gentry really wanted to talk a little bit about today. And I'll try and pick up on that as well. So at the other end of the scale, I'm sure quite a few of you have seen these images before. This is a Barco virtual classroom. But there's other companies like MASHME with their Room of the Future and X20 with the One Room, I think it's called now, they've renamed it. They've already, prior to the pandemic, they'd already developed these solutions that aimed at remote learning. So not hybrid learning, although they can be adapted. And they had mostly had an eye on global executive MBA courses where student income was a lot higher. They look great, don't they? You know, and they can be configured to work as hybrid rooms, because you could just have one row of screens at the top and students sat in front at the bottom. And in fact, the University of Lurven in Belgium, they have conducted a lot of research into working in that way. But the harsh reality is that for most institutions, you know, having one is probably out of budget and certainly having multiple is very difficult to budget for and get signed off. Essentially, they're too expensive to be scalable to meet the volume requirements of undergraduate learning. It's a little bit different when it comes to MBA learning. So what are our options for hybrid classrooms then? I think we need something, if we're going to see this continued rise, and I think we need something that's something that's affordable, can be scaled across the campus. They have to be simple to use. They have to be woke up to use. You don't have to be any questions about where do I connect? How do I connect? How do the students connect? It's just got to be really, really straightforward. We talk a lot again about providing this equity of learning. And really, we mean that a student isn't compromising in their learning by being either in class or remote. They have the same opportunities to do that. That is a real challenge. How do you make sure you're paying the same attention? And how do you make sure, you've got to obviously ensure through technology that the audio is brilliant, so students remotely can hear as well as the students in class. But it's not just the technology. It's the pedagogies that you employ to engage and immerse students in their learning. So again, students that we don't want to compromise where they're going to be. And again, I just touched on, it needs to be engaging and immersive for both sets of students. For the students that are not there, they need to have that sense of belonging. They need to feel that they're integral to the learning and not just simply logging on and viewing it as they might, if they could come in at their own time. Remember, this is real-time students in both places together. So standard classroom, obviously usually a little bit bigger than that, more seats than that. But you know, you have rows and columns of seats still. They're facing the front wall on the front wall, which is where this image is projected taken from. There will be a projector or there'll be a large format panel and say typically the Zoom and Teams. And I've seen quite a few of these in the last few months as we've been consulting with several end-user institutions. And over the summer, one of the institutions we've been at, they've upgraded a lot of their rooms. They've put in the old PTZ camera at the back. So, you know, some of them don't automatically track, some do. But as the tutor moves around, they can track the tutor through that Zoom or Teams connection. So that's an improvement. Quite a few of them haven't improved the audio. It is still a lapel mic for the tutor. And that can be really difficult because if a student asks a question, you might not hear it clearly because if the microphone's on the tutor at the front of the room, you'll hear the response. You'll hear what the tutor says in response to that and how they answer it. But you know, you've not always heard the question. And I think we've all experienced that and how frustrating that is. So, you know, what does this room look like for students if they're coming in remotely? We'll have a look at that again in a second. But, you know, the tutor can see in this instance, we can also upgrade the room now with screens at the back. We can add in any touchscreen or whiteboard into that as well. So, again, the remote students see it as well as the students in room. And this way, I think putting that image, I think there's too many students on there, but ideally four or six on each screen. So, you really want to see those students as life-size as possible. You want them to be as big and as dominant in the room as the real students who are there. Because you want to pick up on buddy language. You want to see if they put their hand up, you know, and or if they're looking confused. And again, it's essential that you, you know, and that they have become so inexpensive now really to have these AI tracking cameras that follow the face as you go around and move with you throughout the space. So, what does this look like for students really? So, if they're for remote students, so if they're coming in, this is the view they're going to see. They're going to see the students in class in front of them. They'll see their academic at the front wherever, wherever he or she moves around the space. That camera's going to track them. We might have a digital input from the front, front display in which case they can choose to see that as well. So, it has to say, it has to, it has to really be the, the same as that. The only buttons we have in, in this particular space, which is a, a GENTA's VC in space is there's a button at the front that you, you press if you want to teach or if you want the students to learn. And what we mean by learning is that instead of the tutor being in the space, the tutor is remote and they come in on the front screen and the students remotely and in person now see that front screen, that front screen image of the, of the tutor and the tutor, instead of, instead of the image being captured from the back, they see the, they see the whole class through that camera that's just underneath those buttons there as well. So, the key to success in all of these rooms and some of the ones we'll look at shortly is they're really easy to use. And sort of just coming back onto VC and GENTA for a second, just to give you a quick snapshot for those that are not aware that, you know, GENTA, their service that powers this, you know, it started life back, back along as long ago as 1996 as the JISC Video Conference service. It has automatic class scheduling, which means there's no buttons to press, the system automatically allows students to connect and, and record as well if that's required. There's no lapel or podium microphone, you know, a single RAID array microphone goes into those, those rooms. In fact, let me just go back to that so you can see that above that image there, there's a RAID array microphone. So, again, there's no lapel microphones. It picks up the, the whole audio throughout the whole room. So, anything a student says is, is captured very clearly as well. So, to create a room like this, you know, the learning technologists that will, will have done all the heavy lifting to create the room and configure it, the admin people will have scheduled the students in. So, as soon as the tutor comes in, they, you know, when time's ready, they can just teach as normal. And I say we do tend to focus on the EdTech and their connectivity, but what does that look like from that student, you know, you can put in the best camera, but you need to be, you know, here's where, here's where the estates people come in again, because you know, the wall colours, the lighting, the lateral light differs at different times of the day. They can all subtract from that remote experience. And, and so they need to be considered as well. And just small improvements in each of those areas can, can make a big, big difference. So, talked about VC, up to the present day, a little bit of a snapshot there again, you know, very heavily involved just in education, just for government, got the system within the UK's on the Janet network, fully GDPR. They interestingly offer a 10-minute in-call SLA. So, any, any user, whether it's an academic or support or student or guest, somebody you've invited joining, anybody's having problems, there's a, there's a, there's a, they can access support and they offer a 10-minute resolution on that, and she's, she's pretty good as well. So, simplicity of use refers to the engagement of technology, the walk-up of use of no buttons or just one button, you know, because essentially we do want, you do want academics to try and teach as normal, you know, but how do we teach in a room like this, you know, that these are some of the bigger questions, you know, are the attention spans of the two student cohorts different? How do we form breakout groups that have both present students and remote students in them? You know, do we want just to have a little, if we have a little huddle in the, of students just in the room and then huddles of students not in the room, we've not got that equity of learning. So, how can we do that? And we, and we can do that. Are there any accessibility inclusion issues that we need to overcome? Maybe we need to assess students differently, you know, to how they currently assessed. And then there's a whole topic about, you know, assessment and examinations and remote proctoring and things like that, which I'm not going to go into now, but they're all things that need to be taken into consideration. And what about other room consideration? One room we just looked at, that's not right for everybody in every occasion. This is essentially the same thing, but just in a different format. It's different screens. This is at USP College in Essex. It's a brand new facility they've got. And at the moment, there's only enough remote participants to put one person on every screen, but as the next, very quickly, there's 20 screens out, when the next 20 students join, if that was the case, then there'd be two on each screen, because it balances the load up on it and it looks like, so that, you know, you've not got that compression of lots on one screen and not much on the others. So it's the same thing, but it's a different configuration. You'll see it's resting right on the floor there for a particular reason. And that reason is because it can have multiple uses. So here you see it now as basically a giant video wall. And in this new facility at USP College, they're utilizing it for other learning activities as well, not just to bring remote students in. There are some remote students in on this particular call at the moment, but essentially in this area, they're doing a lot of development with AR and VR. It's a performance area where they're using full-body Tesla suits. And so again, one of the, one of the focuses on these hybrid rooms is what other use can we get out of them? They don't just have to be used for hybrid. Can they be used for just in room as well? You'll get a better return on investment and more usage if they can be. So that's something we should be looking to do. And again, another reason why there'll be a rise in these spaces, because they are more adaptable. If you think of, you know, lecture theatres, very one-dimensional as you've got invested a lot of money in collaborative lecture spaces. Here's another space as well. This is Visual Learning Lab at the City of Glasgow College. This is very much a development. It's not a finished product. And it's very much a partnership between the college, myself, and some of the ed tech partners there, Principally Intel, View Sonic with the displays, Cramer with some collaborative technologies. And you'll see that we've got, it looks like an expanded desktop. It's actually a collage. So we've got those two screens hosting one desktop. We've got full interactivity across it. So now we've got a large writing area. There are some new screens coming next year where the bezels will get smaller and that bit in the middle will reduce, but it doesn't put too many people off. We can bring in different sources of information and very quickly snap them onto there. So one application to the left, one to the right. The left hand one might be doing some, might be just presenting some theory with PowerPoint slide. And then on the right hand side, we could bring in a live webpage or something from the visualizer or a student can cast something up there. So now we can reinforce that in a single panorama. And it's in an open plan space as you'll see from, you'll see from the next slide where it's actually being used with, with Elektra and her students. And it's, and it's changed in a few months it's been there. We've changed some of the software, we've changed some of the usage models and we're just learning from it at the moment. We've also got some video observation in there. If you go, if I go back a slide, you'll see that there's a little camera on the top of the screens there. We're doing some video observation of student engagement. It's totally anonymized. So it meets all GDPR. But there's, you know, we're starting to build, well, can we build a smart campus around it? Can we do things, you know, not just with the hybrid facility itself? And here's a couple of students are actually using it and they're honing their presentation and communication skills and talking to the rest of their class as well. So very much a work in progress, but something again, that's hybrid, we can bring students in with Zoom or Teams, whatever they want to do in that space. And it's, as you can see, it's a, it's a sort of mobile system as well, although there are some challenges around that as well. So with all these different spaces, you know, if hybrid's going to be here and going to be here for the long term, it needs to be successful. How do we measure that success? What, you know, what is that success? There's many forms that some I've not thought of, I'm sure, but here's a few, you know, to offer up as well. It's not, you know, I'll stop by saying it's not right for every environment or undergraduate program, you know, it's, but it is here to stay because of what's happening in the workplace as well. And you could say, you know, people, students learning in hybrid environments, that's what they're going to face when they go into the workplace. So it's a key employability skill today. So one of the things is not going back, you know, if COVID was to suddenly end and we completely free of it, what will happen? Will students want to go back on campus all the time? I don't personally think they will. I think that, you know, some of the reasons that students went to campus a couple of generations ago for those life experiences, most students have already had those, but there are lots of good reasons for being on campus rather than just doing things remotely. It's where we want to go and engage in small groups that active collaborative learning. We may see a return of part-time students. There's an opportunity to reach out to more people. And again, recruitment and retention, both you're getting students to enroll staff to come and work with you as well. But the success has to be about improving student outcomes. That is the biggest, you know, the bottom line, really, that's where it has to be. And what is the future like? I think we'll see more blended online learning because we're starting to digitize everything more and more. There needs to be a radical improvement in the way digital content is created and delivered, for one. And if you think of all the other areas of our life, so music and travel and banking and healthcare, you know, I did some doctor's appointments with a smartphone a few months ago. It went really well. And it's because it's driven by smartphones. So I think that's really important too. And I say room designs that are multifunctional. And that can mean different rooms. But also there's an interesting thing that John was going to tell you a little bit about today to sort of teach. And that's to say that next year in one of these VC rooms, you won't just have to use VC. You'll have the option of using Teams or Zoom. So you're going to have a multifunctional environment to use what you want, which isn't the case today. You'll be able to feed in and record that not just on the VC platform, but you can go straight into Penocto or Echo 360. So that interoperability of other elements of your learning space is going to be present from them. So I think that's really good. But above all else, it's that simplicity. If these rooms are not simple to use, they won't get used. They're all those things I mentioned about smartphone. We're using them and adopting them because they're simple to use and they're changing our culture. So I think that's where we're at really. So I hope that's provoked a bit of thought. There's my details and to get in touch directly with me. There's the details if anybody wants to get in touch with Agenta. We've got a couple of minutes left for Q&A. If we want to, if anybody's got any questions. We do have Duncan. We've got a couple of questions already. You've got one from Matthew Moran. He's asked, are there opportunities for examples of students co-creating these spaces or experiences, including using their own devices and preferred tools? I can just see that in the chat now. I couldn't see that a second ago. Let me just say, other opportunities. Yes, well, other opportunities. I think as in the way that we did the roadshow and we let people create their own spaces to trial these things, I think that's a really key thing people should do. I think you should go and buy something straight the way that's like the finished article. Go and get an experimental room and work those things out and develop them. There are places where they're working with students and it's just on straight out of my head where I'm thinking about, but I've seen somewhere, oh, it's not in the UK. It's the University of Utrecht at the moment. They've got a future learning spaces program and they are doing it with students. They're creating the spaces. They're changing things, but that obviously takes a budget. It takes a willingness to do that, but usually something really good comes out of that because you're bringing everybody with you then. You're bringing the students as well as the staff and both of those are important elements. Obviously, for the next year's students are coming, they'll just be faced with what's probably there. I see another question about cognitive workloads and things like that. These are all things that as well as being simple to use, that's mainly just the technology, but creating material is beneficial to both students. They've got that equity of learning is really key. Those are tensions about how long should you have soft breaks and hard breaks in those sessions. They're all things that we're trying to put together some sort of answers to how do you teach in a space like this? Do you need to be on campus yourself? You do, obviously, if you've got students there. Somebody's saying some students want to be remote. I don't think there's any one answer to this. I'm trying to work with somebody on creating an experimental area where we can try out lots of different things. We're a few months away from that, but I think in the new year we should have something that we can tell people about. I am actually talking again at the lecture at the end of January. I'm hoping we'll be able to announce something then about those types of places where people can come and see different things because, say, one size doesn't fit all. No, that's definitely correct. I mean, there's so many different approaches that people can take to the classroom and a lot of people have commented on your thoughts on equity and the costs of things as well. So definitely a lot of conversation going on, a lot more questions where this could go. It'd be great if we could continue the conversation over on Discord or if you could share your slides and the resources channel as well for everyone. That would be great. Sure, I'll do that. Perfect. Thank you for joining us, Duncan. Okay, you're very welcome. Thank you.