 Welcome everyone, this is the session, the plenary session, the afternoon plenary session on Eden conference, where we are going to have some very interesting guests speaking about different topics coming from future skills and the experience on using future and next skills up to how we can build up the new future of learning with a vision from Blackbot who is one of the sponsors of the Eden conference. But first let me introduce myself, I am Diana Adonet, I am the director of the e-learning center in Polytechnica University of Timishwara and I will be this plenary session chair. Welcome again to everyone who is joining us a bit later. I will first let Professor Rafael Pastor Vargas who is coming from UNED who is our host for this conference in Madrid to say an inauguration word. He is currently the Dean of the Computer Science Faculty at the Spanish University for Distance Education which is the English name of UNED and he has more than 20 years of experience in teaching and he was also the director of technological innovation in UNED and he had several positions on innovation and technological development also with UNED and also around Spain. He has more than 17 research and development projects funded in public course and he is a member of IEEE Education Society. We joined that thing together with me and he participated also in the board of the Spanish IEEE Education Society and is a senior member of IEEE. I kindly ask you Rafael to say the inauguration words for this session. Thank you Diana. I'm going to try to be very brief because I think the more interesting part of the conference is the two participants we have later. So first of all I would like to thank the organization of the annual meeting conference for the opportunity to open this session and to give a warm welcome to all attendees as hosts of the event. It's a pleasure for the Computer Science Faculty and the UNED itself to host this conference. So the School of Information Faculty in the UNED has been working in digital education since its foundations offering different degrees, master and doctorates. However, not only at the teaching level but the Computer Science Faculty has different groups that research on educational technologies operating the implementation of digital learning models, specifically user modeling and active learning are one of the faculty's favorite lines of research. In addition to this line the faculty has been working on implementing open courses and MOOCs since 2004 on the development of educational platforms and receivable educational objects. Without going any further, the faculty led the implementation of the UNED Virtual Campus Platform 12F ALP that is the acronym of Active Learning Framework. This is 50 years ago and currently the platform is going on. So for all of the above, we feel very involved with the experience of UNED itself and the role of the faculty in digital and online education has been very active during these last 20 years. Likewise, we will continue to participate in the evolution of digital and online education as a fundamental factor in education in the 21st century. With support of all, I take my leave and I reiterate my thanks to the organization for allowing me to make this brief presentation and be part of this incident. Thank you very much for this. This is very nice for you Raphael and thank you very much for coming virtually from Madrid into EDEN Conference. We are all very sorry that we cannot visit your faculty and also also Madrid, but this at least has given us some impression of what is within the computer science faculty in Madrid. So it's my great pleasure now to move on to one of our keynote speakers from today who is, if I can say that, a very, very close friend and colleague from EDEN Executive Committee. I was until, in fact, at the end of this conference, I will give up my position as vice president for communication and my position on EC and the thing which I miss, I will miss a lot is exactly this friendship with friends like Ulf Daniel Ellers, who is a professor for educational management and lifelong learning at Baden-Bootenburg Cooperative State University in Germany. Ulf has an extended experience in in e-learning and in educational management. He is, since yesterday, a senior fellow also of EDEN and, as I said, already an executive committee member. He was also, had his degree in University of Bielefeld in Germany, but he grew up in the Baden-Bootenburg Cooperative University and is the director now of the research group of NEXT Education. He is very famous for his books and his ideas on future skills and in NEXT skills for which he presented constant plan continuously everywhere. He's also an editor of more than 15 books and 150 scholarly articles with more than 3,000 academic citations and several numerous academic presentations as a keynote speaker at several events. He is also a serial entrepreneur as he found these three startups, amongst them one which is a world-winning tech startup. He is also the vice president of European Association for Institutes of Higher Education and he had several leadership positions as past president of the Association for Media and Science and president of the European Foundation in Quality in Bielefeld. He is now just recently turned 50 and he believes that in his lifetime it will be not AI which will change higher education as much as people fighting to save the planet. I quite like this and even that I'm a computer scientist, I still consider myself that we can jointly do good together with the support of technology. Ulf is going to speak about future skills for future education, the day when we started to rethink learning and Ulf, please the floor is yours. Yes, that's perfect. Thank you. Thank you very, very much Diana. Thank you very much. It's an honor to speak here at the Eden conference in 2021 at the online conference and congratulations to my Eden friends who organized this conference. You do a wonderful job of bringing us here together. I would like to start my talk actually with a thought experiment. The Eden community has made it all always a natural habit to think about the future. That's why a title like Future Skills for Future Higher Education is nothing new to you colleagues. We are always imagining what will come and formulating strategies and concepts to be prepared or to build a momentum also for change. We usually do that by thinking about and analyzing and many, many papers are about exactly this. Analyzing which are the most influential factors of today and how can we project them into the future. And today I would like to challenge this method as a thought experiment. I would like to invite you not to ask what is going to happen in the future. Let us rather pretend we are already in the future. We are already there and way beyond it. And now we are all looking back. The future has already happened and the question then is who we were. So we take the point of time in the future, can you imagine? And we look back into the past which is today. Why is that useful? Of course because of the power of contextualization. We can easily, we all can easily make sense of our own past. Think about your own history, your history. And what we are doing is we are framing a context around our experience. In the future this is difficult. And secondly also when we look back at our own lives and at the development of our institutions and societies and countries and regions and families we can immediately make sense. We can immediately understand that of course all our actions had consequences. But we can also understand that our past and our today is not the result of a big plan of careful strategy. It is rather the result of reactions to unexpected events which often we had not even imagined to be possible. And Covid is just one example of this such events. So we begin to understand that just like the past also the future is characterized by the unexpected. The emerging, the unforeseeable. Any education which claims to be future ready education has to aim to prepare learners to deal with this unexpected. What education and higher education specifically can contribute to gain in future readiness is to equip learners with a compass with clear values to take their decisions in the future and a community to reflect share and learn. And that is why today I would like to invite you to start to think about the future with the same perspective you are looking at the past with the same understanding who we were. To think about who we were allows also to ask the question was that the future we wanted. I would like to structure my reflections into three part talking about a distant emerging future then a snapshot of a current future and then the immediate next. So you see I'm a bit obsessed with futures and different futures and different shapes and forms. Part one the distant emerging futures looking at future higher education with a very long term and very removed you. And we will see that education in essence always has been a struggle for the next best future. Part two is about capturing a bit more from our time today what we can perceive already in the future to be important and relevant. But for which we as institutions of higher education maybe are not really yet exactly to cope with it to shape it. And then part three is about the immediate next future which we are already having on our fingertips. So let's start with part one. Let's have a look at long-term perspectives. Education you know is always a history of ideas and if you would have asked Aristoteles here on the left lower corner 2300 years ago he would say education has to serve happiness and leisure one thing which I like very much. Then Descartes and Cunt and others Horkheimer Adorno came in this age of enlightenment with this idea of inner emancipation. So education had to serve the freeing of the individual from societal structures. And then again few centuries later Humboldt inventing the idea of the modern university wanting very much to serve the state to serve the state practice so that the state is actually working qualification became an issue. Today we can see and we can I think understand that the future general principle of today is actually transformation which is a totally different idea than a functioning state in an ordered system. Transformation is the idea of a mutually dependency between systems in societies. If we look at higher education history we can say that while it is changing its mission it is always also changing its architecture. If we look into the architecture of higher education systems we can literally see how this is taking shape and how the change is taking shape. From a very exclusive but content rich liberal arts idea of the early Bologna University campus in 1088 for chosen few the elite very very few people could only participate to today the massified and standardized idea of higher education in a time in which academic education becomes a standard experience to the majority of people. We have heard about that in the talk this morning. And then again to a future which we view here the compass of the MIT the Stator Center. The future which we view already as a post-modern architecture style of ribbon mix which alludes to an individualistic style which again carries this idea of diversity catering for the individualistic personalized education path but this time was an inclusive idea. So the future of higher education can be well imagined in an almost utopian way as inclusive and diverse catering for individualistic needs for all this we know will not be possible without digital technology platform ideas platform concepts micro credentials and the entire set of development which we still have to develop and introduce our discussions also is often centered around this idea of the digital and its influence on higher education often very very often it is. I think that when it comes to the future of higher education it is important to understand two things first the digital is the engine the catalyst of the process not the final result and secondly we are definitely not through with it we are definitely not through with the digital transformation but rather in the beginning on the verge of a next society. This was impressively analyzed by Diek Becker who shows that the transition process from one leading media to another always was causing huge societal disruption he calls this media epochs and the transition transition of one epoch to the next epoch is always involving a major disruption it's characterized through a huge huge overflow of information and communication possibilities and societies usually need a long time to get to terms with it where society took about 60 to 80 years for the last machine industrial age to unfold in all its recuperations on on society social structures economic structures labor structures and so on we are now still in a very early stage of a next society under digital change to take shape today we can virtually feel that we live in a world with limitless possibilities but without a good idea how to bring it into a sustainable zone these are the challenges i don't need to name them in a society 5.0 higher education needs to focus on transformative skills or like Otto Schama likes to call it vertical literacies to enable learners to deal with the unforeseen where we the ones who used education technology to support transformative literacies i come to the second part of my presentation in the second part of my presentation i would like to talk about the futures which are a bit closer to us the current future is often described through trends these are trends what i want to talk about so i want to use casual causal not casual causal reasoning foresight what we expect to happen what will that be let's have a look in our research we were designing four prototypical personas which i would like to tell their stories now first of all there is flores flores is just 20 years old and wants to start her studies since she has just recently joined the global change makers a group of european environmentalists she knows she wants to study to shape the future of society and she wants to enter through the limestone she wants to go to google to break the system from inside she thinks from conversations she knows at google they are not interested in university degrees but in what we call future skills this is about rather developing a mission than making a master future skills are for example taking responsibility taking decisions we will learn about that later a little bit more being able to work well in international teams and so on and so on so flores asks herself where can i study that do you have an advice for flores then we have lena lena wants everything in life she has already started her studies and is now finding out more and more and more that there are also interesting courses at other universities many of them are also online she therefore decides she wants to study in a completely networked way and enrolls at many universities at the same time we call this the multi-institutional study model she lena wants to become a marine biologist it should be networked preferably at universities around the Baltic sea because she likes the sea or the Mediterranean and it should be european but is that possible and then here meet Bashir is frustrated he has dropped out of his studies somehow he doesn't fit into the system it seems sure at first he was very interested in business psychology the subject he had chosen but then he was also interested in literary studies and theater pedagogy after all he thought that's exactly what you can use later as a human resource manager he would love to build his own curriculum we call this the personalized my curriculum concept where can you do that and now lastly nils nils has been an experienced social worker for 15 years and works with young people he now wants to study social management but with only as much time as he has available besides family jobs and sports club and he wonders if there isn't a way that all of his experience can then be recognized in the new studies as well because he has already a lot of experience a lot of knowledge with deviant behavior and adolescence or social psychology so he would like to find an possibility to bring this all in and have it recognized couldn't he just study the way it suits him we call this lifelong academic education yeah what are these what is this meaning for the ingredients of the master narrative for future higher education lifestyle integration is important lifelong learning we have talked about that a long time already is important never realized it really in higher education so far it should be borderless it should be experiential it should be digital but in a meaningful way there needs to be a compatibility between the courses between the different institutions and not just long modules also short courses so we make from that in our research the four core elements composing the future of higher education we believe that future higher education institutions probably will take from them certain profile aspects and compose their new profile and now I would like to make an experiment with you go to menti meter take your phone or your laptop go to menti.com and enter this code there 15 39 11 39 you can also scan the qr code and the question is in your view which of the four futures will impact higher education within the next five years strongest is it lifelong learning is it future skills the turn to future skills is it the my institutional networked university or is it the personalized curriculum development so what do you believe is the future of higher education going to be influenced by strongest go to menti meter go to menti.com sorry go to menti.com or scan the qr code or use the link in order to tell us your vote i'm trying to find the i did it for you also don't worry so i put post the link so you can go directly online perfect thank you okay it's not working yet so maybe i'm okay so we have 21 people which have already finished but it's not showing it on my slide it will work in a moment i'm sure i'm just presenting it like this okay now we have 32 okay so i'm sharing this like this now i hope you can see it so there are 38 people having voted and the first rank goes to personalized by curriculum uh-huh then we have the lifelong learning not uh unexpected on place two and the future skills university and then the multi-institutional network university by the way in our expert interviews we were also finding that the experts were saying there are a lot of concepts around like micro prudentials and building standard european tools which make a compatibility of education higher education pathways but this will be the the biggest challenge to to overcome so thank you very very much for your opinion here and i go back to my presentation that's this one okay perfect thank you very much yeah so the question here is where were we the ones who let the coalition to shape future higher education in that way and i come to my last part the third part of my presentation um about the immediate next future we did a large-scale research project to find out what can be said about the immediate next expectations in the future of higher education um and we were finding out that future skills are very very demanded so the people we were asking quantitative and qualitative uh qualitatively were often very very passionate about that higher education needs to change its mission of course that knowledge is not becoming unimportant but that the way the mode we deal with knowledge needs to change and that it rather needs to be an education weaving into knowledge the attitudes the motivation the values the discussions liberalizing liberalizing young people to really rethink where they are and what they are up to we were first then going to analyze what's actually available the future skills approaches which were available and we found that we were analyzing 47 of them i think that they were often focused on digital literacies or on special literacies like health health literacies for example that there was often also a strong alignment with employability which we found quite narrow because the future society is not always only shaped on basis of employability reasoning that there was no empirical validation often and that often these approaches were not rooted in education theory or at least education reasoning or competence concepts so that they were merely lists of aspects where you didn't understand how they were composed the 17 different profiles for future skills which we then obtained and refined and reformulated and then put into an expert daily fee was two rounds to let's say reformulating refining them again and also a little bit to validate them were then published there are literacies and skills which are of course known to everybody learning literacy and self competence but there are also others having to do with self determination a special kind and description of decision competencies ambiguity competence dealing with different expectations in different roles of course digital literacy is also on board reflective competencies ethical competencies and so on we were developing what we call the future skills explorer so here you can go to the website nextskills.org nextskills.org you find this explorer and you can click on a competence on a skill and then you get a description a definition an effect sheet which you can download so that you have everything at hand we're also looking at the inner structure of these future skills these 17 we're finding that some of them are more individual related some of them are more object related to the tasks and some of them are more related to organizational competencies social competencies and we were then also developing this idea that successful action and unknown emerging context probably demands so to speak an interdependent understanding of the skill development we are i'm coming to the end we are actually currently starting what we call the global future skills project so we want to find good examples of good practice of these kind of a university high education programs on all five continents and would be happy if you can spread the call which you find here as well everything is to be downloaded also on nextskills.org all publicly available published as open access and for the end i'm coming back to the beginning to the question who we were were we the ones who started to rethink learning with future skills i believe colleagues at in our Eden community we know what we have to do the implementation is the challenge not the development and it is on us it is clear that it can only be done through a systems approach not an individual teacher we know that the fundamental pedagogy which we need is available we are piloting as it often and we need to start two issues are necessary strengthening the belief and the competitiveness and viability of a future skills university that's not a deviant idiotic idea that's really something which is demanded and expected of higher education for the future and secondly we need to spread this practice i firmly believe that in a way for higher education the the future skills turn as i have described it in the in the study and in the presentation is representing our landing on the moon of european higher education for the future so were we the ones who started this or were we the ones who knew but did not understand full of information but lacking inside grooming with knowledge but lacking experience so just keeping forging ahead unstopped by ourselves as roger williams in a german intellectual phrased this question in his famous speech of the future a couple of years ago who we were think about who we wanted to be let's start telling the story from today on thank you very much for your attention thank you very much all this is really a great pleasure to see you and to have you here and i will also like to have several questions for you and i think it was as always a very inspiring talk and a very interesting one i will start there are some two or three questions there but if you will allow i will start with mine as a chair and i quite like the idea which you posted about the multi institutional network of universities for learning this is something which has been around in the market it was the basis probably for some of the unions of the university for example the first one which comes into my mind is university of health which became a strong force since they became a multiple one and in the past even 100 years ago was university of oxford and Cambridge which does similar things that become to become powerful and to counter fact the american universities and i think it's also the basis of the idea of european universities which i know that you are also involved in one so do you see that's really the future what the european union has somehow asked the universities to think and to gather and to join in networks where they can start doing things and even double curriculas of something like that for the future absolutely i think that what i said in the in the end of my talk i firmly believe that we actually have developed most of the concepts which we need and when i look in the chat at the questions i would say it doesn't matter really if if the list of 17 needs to be a list of 17 18 20 or or 13 the real issue is how can we integrate this idea into our curriculum and not how can we set it up as an add on to our existing traditional university or higher education because that's the real issue how can we measure it is another another issue can is there a valid way to measure it no actually we have to develop this way of validly measuring it and also what validity in competence terms means is something we would need to discuss as competence is always directed to performance which is actually bound to a context and how can we bring this context into our higher education institution is another question so i think that we have the concepts there actually maybe not exactly in the measure and amount we need it but we have it there we just need to implement it's an implementation challenge a policy challenge actually a management challenge not so much a challenge of finding the concept first i think you somehow also put it into the perspective of what our colleague mark brown has asked about the accuracy of measuring and tracking the development in future skills and their validity and also team was also in the same thing thinking about how the future skills have changed over the last very complicated year in education can you jointly answer to these two questions please yeah i think that assessment curriculum development and assessment assessment is often a challenge if i do be very very frank with you now if i look at the curriculum i was a vice president of my institution for six years and i have done two curriculum reforms if i look at the curriculum of my institution for example for the faculty of economy we can very very nicely see which competence objectives we have put into the module description for our courses but then in the end what we give to our students is a written test and that's not not you know that's not my university only that's what actually universities today do they write about competence and their practices are not always but often they are in the end of the line so to speak not really meeting what they promised in in the beginning because with a written test you can barely assess a real action competence or performance in order to see is the student actually having acquired this kind of competence so that's something i think we it really demands a turn what today we we at least in our our discourse i know that that so to speak the terminology throughout europe is a bit mixed also but what what today we we can see is we can certify certain kinds of of qualifications already of professions of qualifications already we cannot really certify and and validly test competencies yet although there are now more and more approaches which are trying that and that also leads to a changed education setting then because if you are really wanting in the end to certify a competence through assessment we we need to change the education setting as well and the last point a standard bachelor today as 180 credit points and usually one module has five to seven eight maybe 10 ects european credit standard points that means that a standard bachelor has about 26 28 30 modules often in three four four and a half years and if you think about that every module um um so to speak finishes with an assessment i firmly believe that in a in an age where we take seriously the challenge of future skills and competence oriented testing we need to cut that down by two-thirds i was by two-thirds so that means we are going to have longer assessments more overarching assessments more multimodal assessments so written or practical assessments all coming together and that is the change we have in front of us it's not an easy change but i think that's the way we have to go yes that's probably very very interesting if i can say that and probably quite challenging for a lot of universities and also for students uh based on a lot of research and also the questioners which we are for example if my university or in other main universities is quite often that the students prefer more diverse and more often assessment than just one general one and a big one and so it's going to be quite a challenge this and also i would like to ask you the further questions which is a combination from Osula girls and also team read our host from from UNEDD which says and discuss about how we can explore the world the future skills at the world scale from our european perspective and also one which comes from team and i found it so interesting but these are quite transversal skills how you ensure that it's not a fight between professors and faculties which one is going to be offering what so this is not easy yeah actually i mean we we have a long history of in in high education of thinking about what today we call often like to call especially in european european level transversal skills and we believe that that or we understand in the concept that this transversal skills are actually something important but that the real important issue is the knowledge in engineering the students should have yeah so and there is a certain dichotomy in the debate which is actually a false one yeah we don't need to take this apart the the the issue is that the very concept of a skill is included with the knowledge so a good engineer or a good manager is always needing knowledge but then on top of that it is impregnated with emotions with motivation it is impregnated with values attitudes and then it makes a professional in the end of the day so and i think this kind of integrated concept needs to be let's say more discussed openly also because there's always i know that when i was the vice president of my university for academic affairs and we we were talking about competencies or knowledge the colleagues were saying okay we we take on both these two more competencies but you know then we have to cut away these knowledge pieces and and that's exactly not the point you know you need this knowledge it's an integral part of the competencies and we just need to deal with it in a different way we need to educate people and and and then the last thing if you go to go to companies today they will clearly tell you the new hard skills other soft skills okay thank you very much that's very interesting you still have some questions in the chat and i will kindly ask you to answer them there because we are running out of time if the debate will still be able to continue to work the end please we'll stay with us and we will still discuss at the end of this uh primary session we are moving now to america where it's my great pleasure to welcome dr darcy hardy who is the associate vice president for academic affairs north america at blackboard incorporation dr hardy is an award-winning distance and online learning professional who has worked as a higher education administrator as an api with the obama administration a board member in state and national association and as a contributor in higher education at tech within the field of online learning she focuses on strategy and vision on organization and governance on policy process and practice and quality oversight she heard her phd university which i also know quite well the university of texas in austin at austin in 1992 she has a position now with blackboard but before that she was also working at several universities around texas and also with obama administration within the department of labor and department of education she is the founder of the popular usdla sponsored international forum for women in in learning which i encourage quite a lot of you to follow and to look at and was also honored by the texas state university as a distinguished alumna in 2012 and inducted in the usdla hall of fame in 2009 and received the mildred and charles's weather my outstanding distance learning practitioner award in medicine wisconsin in 2006 she is now also received the wc at richer johnson award in 2000 friend she's going to have a very interesting talk about the light at the end of the tunnel now what gathering from the experience of this last year and also the experience of technical and technology education and how remote learning and interaction and engagement by web can be done in real time uh darcy the floor is yours thank you so much thank you so much diana and uh it's really a pleasure to be with everyone today i'm actually coming to you from may excuse me can you switch the screens because we see uh the presenter mode another the slideshow mode oh okay sorry i'm not sure uh if you go the is that better now if you go at the the second button in the left up corner display settings and you just switch the screens that will be perfect all of you do it again let's see let's see i'm not sure what you're talking about so i'm not just using the regular share screen yeah so just uh we don't see nothing so you just need to go back okay we had it up yesterday so i'm not sure i know it's i'm pretty sure it's going to work so if you share it again and now go on slideshow which it's on um but we still don't see it let's see it should be showing it's showing to me as a slideshow no it doesn't show to us it's not shared Darcy okay let me try again thank you sorry for this sorry for everyone this is the life sometimes and it's very early hours for Darcy also it is all right so if i go to share screen and then select the power point and then do the now we see the whole screen with your families i don't think that's i'm sorry i want to see don't worry i'll stop this as it's going live also on youtube so let me try something else uh if you just share the screen as it was before with the power now i'll help you to guess it uh done probably sorry again for everyone don't worry Darcy don't worry that's fine oh i'm not i i know technology can always be tricky yeah may i send you this representation and you can load it uh let's try again i'm pretty sure we can manage because it's going to be much more easier for you to handle it so if you go share screen then then select the power so far point if you have it open i do i have it open and it's showing on where i can select it when i select it and then share screen the the button in the left corner i know you have much more use with blackboard uh video conferencing system i actually use zoom a lot so okay good so but what i'm not getting is the opportunity okay okay and now if you go on on the show mode that's perfect now that's perfect thank you so much perfect so good luck Darcy thank you thank you sorry about that um well good afternoon everyone and good morning for me it's uh almost 6 a.m and i'm coming to you today from Seattle Washington i actually live outside of austin texas but we are visiting my youngest daughter her husband and our 14 month old grandson Owen let me just say for those of you that are grandparents out there it's exhausting taking care of a 14 month old for a couple of days so the 6 a.m part does not bother me so much i've been up every morning at about 5 30 or 6 anyway but i'm really really happy to be here and i've spoken at uh and attended edens before one in barcelona and one in segre pro asia and i'm sorry we aren't all together today because i do love being with these with the folks there and hearing more about what's going on in europe and thinking about what's going on the us and there's really not that much difference really when it gets right down to it i also like looking out to the audience and seeing a couple of familiar faces and and names so let me let me talk to you a little bit set the stage for what i want to uh talk about i i name this light at the end of the tunnel and there's a reason for that i do hear a lot of people talking about post-covid and i can't quite say that because i don't believe there is such a thing uh you know look at you guys you've had three shutdowns we've had one um every every country in the world is dealing with this so the idea of post-covid to me is not really the right terminology and instead i look at it as you know we've got some light at the end of the tunnel so what are we going to do now as diana said i've been in the field of distance learning since the late 80s and i'm sure many of you have been as well and been in online really since it started and you know what we've gone through in the past year or so with regards to digital learning and online learning is nothing short of really miraculous on how everyone responded uh it very quickly within weeks to get content online that wasn't already online to to prepare the students for the experience to prepare the faculties for the experience but but we still learned a lot of what we might do differently in the future now i want to start with a definition because when i speak about online learning i really am encompassing all of these technology enhanced digital teaching and learning or digital learning and teaching blended or hybrid and fully online and i think one of the points i want to make as i as i walk through this um is that whether it's online or hybrid or we call it digital learning and teaching or technology enhanced to me what has always been at the core is quality and how do we achieve quality and the reason i wanted to put this sort of definition up here to set the stage is because when we when i talk with schools that are doing a lot of hybrid and we do you know granted in the us we're doing more fully online you're doing more hybrid in europe you know it still boils down to quality and the kinds of things that i'm going to talk about it really doesn't matter if you're doing fully online or hybrid the quality aspects that i want to target today are the same you know in structural design theory is in structural design theory high quality supports for students are high quality supports for students so when you're when you're thinking about this and then when i say online don't let that throw you to think that i mean only fully all online so i want to set that stage another definition i want to go through real quick is emergency remote learning versus online learning i have a real issue with what's happening with regard to emergency remote learning and it's sticking around so what i mean is what we did last year we took everything we went up quickly you know and some good some bad some in between but the bottom line is it was fast there was a there was not a lot of time to think about it we did everything synchronously and i'll make a couple of points about synchronous versus asynchronous in a minute but we did everything synchronously because what we did was mimic what we did in the classroom online using the internet using a learning management system whichever one you have and pushing the content out there the level of engagement and interaction dropped off significantly and yet what we were trying to do really was take a square peg and fit it into a round hole because online learning and using technology is not the same as face-to-face and if all we're doing is trying to duplicate what's in the classroom then we're making the assumption there is empirical evidence that tells us that the way we stand in front of a classroom and lecture and teach is the best way and there is no such empirical evidence that indicates that but yet that's what we tend to do so it's important to me and i think it should be for all of you that are in this field and have been in this field for a long a long time is as we move away from emergency remote we want to make sure that we learn from it we also want to make sure that what we know and all of you in this audience are distance education professionals digital learning professionals you know on your own campuses where there are good digital learning programs and courses and where they're a little bit lacking now if you take what we did with remote emergency learning and look at that from a quality perspective and you know it may be that some of them are really good there may be some thoughtfulness there may be some instructional design involved there may not be sometimes remote learning emergency remote learning just depends solely on zoom or or blackboard collaborate or some kind of web conferencing tool and there's nothing wrong with that but think of how hard we have worked in this field since the mid 90s regardless of what region you're in we've all been working on pushing the envelope to get the highest quality either hybrid blended or online learning as possible so what we don't want to have happen is any of the sort of bad lessons that came out of emergency remote that we don't consider high quality that they don't linger so it's important to remember the differences between these two types of teaching and learning and again it doesn't matter if it's hybrid or fully online these elements ring true ring true for each one so I wanted to put that sort of variance between emergency remote and online out there as well as the fact that when I'm talking about online I am talking about the whole all of the flavors of online learning and everything in between so this is I think a very true statement I would imagine everyone is going yes we are fatigued from everything digital and yet digital transformations are happening everywhere I'm sure many of you have digital transformation strategies that you're working on and you may be at a different place you know different space different place in those efforts of where you are the bottom line is you know and I'm going to use a term in Texas we might say that the horse is out of the barn or you might say the train is left the station and basically what we're saying is we're not going back we're not going back backwards from where we are now the students have gotten a taste of this the faculties have all gotten a taste of this the demands are going to be very different in the future so looking ahead you can be fatigued from everything digital but it's not going to change anything and when we talk about you know synchronous learning we're all completely zoomed out right we're just zoom meetings zoom meetings zoom meetings and there's only so much you can can take when you're in the middle of these meetings and presentations like this one we want to be together we are human beings we want to be together so we're we're tired of being in zoom meetings but we also learned a lot from being in all of these meetings we learned that it is possible to do this well you know it is possible to to engage with the learners the problem is as we move forward and we're creating our digital learning uh transformation plans and our strategies is that that's not all it is it's not just about the sage on the stage it's not just about duplicating the lecture model from the classroom and putting it into a zoom class or a blackboard collaborate class that's not it and that's not all there is to learning and teaching good tools but as you'll see when I get to the end of my talk you know the audience that you're trying to serve may or may not want to be in a synchronous environment they may or may not be able to be in a synchronous environment so we have to stretch a little bit get past the fatigue start thinking about the future and what that means to our own institutions the collective we you know I'm at blackboard I've been at blackboard for seven and a half years as Diana says I focus on the ecosystem of online learning I don't focus on the technology the technology is great I mean my my doctorate was instructional technology 1992 but you know what I used for my platform for my dissertation laser disc technology I did my study on laser disc technology and feedback loops in teaching and learning from laser disc technology we all know what happened to laser disc so you can't bank everything that you that you feel is the right way to do things on one platform it's multiple platforms it's multiple technologies and it's multiple strategies on how you're going to get there so as we move forward what did we learn from the students about this whole you know I consider the courses that we put up quickly I refer to them as COVID courses you know the COVID courses you know again kudos and applause to the leaders and the faculty who were able to take everything and move it quickly to maintain that academic continuity bravo that was great what did we learn from it you know the feedback that we've seen from students and I know you've all seen this it's positive it's negative it's everything in between there's really no real the jury is still out on whether this was a high quality experience we got it done we needed to do what we did but what did what are the students thinking about this this is the couple of surveys one in the US and Canada one from that came from the European University Association the EUA the DELT study some of you if it hadn't been talked about I'm sure it will be you know in in the US it's very interesting that even though the students had such you know there was so much negativity from the students about this whole experience now studies are showing they want more so they've gotten a taste of the fact that they don't have to be in person and maybe don't even have to be synchronous to get their education so these are people that are working and working working folks so they're in the workforce there they have families they're taking care of parents they're taking care of loved ones the convenience factor doing online even if it's hybrid is one that they have gotten a taste of and they're not going to go back these numbers are going to go up and I know that in Europe you know 90 percent of your students studied on campus pre-covid and then they went to fully online like that during covid they don't all want to go back to face to face either now does that mean that the faculty and the leadership don't want to go back to face to face absolutely the students want to but not all of them want to so this whole idea of you know your digital transformation your digital literacy plans have to take into account that even though traditionally you've done things a certain way it doesn't mean that you're going to keep doing the same way in the future adding a digital transformation strategy also means looking at the models you know it doesn't matter what region you're in it doesn't matter what country you're in looking at the various models you've been using and really I know that you know online learning in Europe fully online doesn't have the best reputation but I think part of that is because it's been over sort of on the side for workforce training certificates and so forth and not realizing that for your academic programs you can do this and you can do it well now the one thing that's obvious between these two studies is quality the quality is all over the map so that's what I want to focus in on now this document the blackboard quality learning matrix was one that we developed at blackboard about originally about five years ago and a group of us that are former academics or recovering academics as we refer to ourselves sat down and really thought about what are the different elements that lead to quality in online hybrid blended digital digitally enhanced learning what are all of the pieces and so we came up with this matrix and in 2020 last summer we revamped it to be a little more current and what you'll see in this document is is really a way to categorize the various things that you have to be concerned with and I'm speaking to the leadership when I talk about this when I sit down with presidents chancellors rectors you know provost what vice presidents academic whatever it is I always use this chart because so many leaders and I'm not talking about you but your academic leadership many of them think that when you do online or hybrid that you go behind a curtain and you just do something and poof outcomes this course or this program they're not looking at the processes they're not looking at the best practices they're not even looking at your strategies they just need the courses out there for the students to enroll using a document like this that shows these very various elements and the five different categories is very helpful now when I talk to schools and when I work with leaders does it mean that you have to do all 25 of these boxes to have quality it does not I zero in on institutional planning and vision and strategy because really if you sit down and map out a strategy that is based on the vision of your institution to think about how you want to do online or hybrid or blended if you do the strategy well you'll know which of all of these boxes you need in order excuse me to be successful so having a strong vision and and again every institution has a vision but not every institution has a vision for digitally enhanced learning and teaching you're getting there I say this in the US all the time this is like my mantra you're getting there but you've got to have a strong vision you can't have a vision for your institution for online or digitally enhanced or digital learning and teaching that's not realistic you know I work with the schools and they'll tell me that their vision is to be a global presence in the online learning world and the institution I'm speaking with maybe as a 2000 FTEs they've never done anything online and my question to them is how exactly are you going to be global how are you going to do this what's your strategy so if you don't have a strategy to support the vision that's realistic then you just have a vision and it's not really more than that so you know and I'm happy to share these slides and share this document when I work with people that are in positions like like I was when I was at the University of Texas I was an associate vice chancellor and I also ran a 15 campus entity called the UT telecampus it was many years ago but it was one of the first multi-campus online organizations back in the late 90s if I had had a document like this when I sat down to talk to various presidents across my university system to say look do you notice do you notice what is not listed here what is not listed in this chart is the LMS you may find it interesting that for me from Blackboard that I don't have the LMS here the LMS is the core the LMS is the not the major piece of technology to really make all of this work it has all of the the tools that you need for learning and teaching and it's very much created in a way to empower the faculty and empower the students to engage in very constructive learning through technology that's all that's all good that's an assumption but all of these other pieces are really what makes you successful and what makes online blended high quality and we all want high quality so when I'm working with people I say two things you always start with your vision and your strategy and your strategy really is where you start looking at these various other boxes and decide which ones fit with your programming they might not all fit but I can tell you that the things that are going to pop at you out at you first will be management and policies I'm a policy wonk and I'm a firm believer that without policies and without consequences to those policies strong guidelines whatever you want to call them but something that comes from the academic side of the institution so that the faculty the deans the the chairs will pay attention that these are things that we're going to do we're setting standards for our quality and that's a policy and therefore all of our courses and our faculty develop that will will bleed off of those policies in order to make sure that we have very high quality so you know you're definitely going to need management and policies you're definitely going to think about instructional design and course development you're definitely going to think about faculty development professional development and supports one of the things that we found during COVID and I'm sure that that everyone knows this when you had to flip that switch and go fully online how many of your faculty were really prepared to use the technology how many of them knew more than opening and logging in how many of them understood how to load their content how many of them understood how to use discussion boards effectively how many of them understood how to put their assessments in the online environment there's definitely plenty of faculty who were not at all prepared nor did they like it not their fault I don't blame them I wouldn't like the rug pulled out from under me either but it happened so when you're thinking about faculty development right now is the time to consider a common threshold for all faculty regardless of whether they're using digital teaching and learning tools or not right now but they everyone should understand the basics everyone should understand a little of the pedagogy of how you effectively use these technologies to teach students that should be a base and and right now because of COVID all of you that are leading and and running online or or hybrid or distance learning organizations at your institutions this is your time this is your time to be able to say hey we don't want this to happen again we need to have a threshold for all faculty and I know many of you are rolling your eyes going we couldn't make our every on the faculty do this but you have to try because this is the time this is your window of opportunity to be able to say look what happened we weren't ready for academic continuity because our faculties were not prepared and it's not the faculty's fault it's ours as leaders it's our fault for not preparing them in a way you know so you have to kind of twist this around and think about it from the perspective of what's your responsibility as a leader and how are you going to get there now I also circled something else on this chart and that's data you know going forward you know we have a lot of surveys and we we talk about data that we collect and so forth it's what do we do with it because all of these decisions that you might make going forward to increase the quality of your programs has to be made up based on evidence it has to be based on data so evidence-based data-driven decisions are critical to go forward because you don't want to put a lot of energy into this and have it fail because you didn't do your homework so that's a critical part of this as well I also wanted to share this digital learning and teaching strategy checklist you know what we did it backboard I wrote a blog in April I think last year 2020 talking about in the right in the middle of COVID this is a time to think about your strategic planning and and again you're like wait we've been shut down again we don't yet we can't even think through any of this stuff right now this is your time to be thinking strategically about where you're going you know and this checklist is just something to help again you know with a combination of the quality learning matrix and this strategy checklist these are great tools to sit down and have those conversations with your teams or with leadership especially leadership that doesn't quite understand what you're trying to do when you're building out these digitally digitally enhanced programs so I encourage you to use these and take them and make them whatever you want make them fit for you but it's their conversation pieces and they help people understand really what goes on when you're doing online or hybrid so I want to zero in just on one thing because this is it this is a fairly easy nugget of information to take with you that that again doesn't matter if you're doing hybrid or if you're doing fully online or a combination of some sort I encourage anyone before you start thinking about okay so you've got these these courses these COVID courses and then you've got your regular pre-COVID programs and courses I would separate those I would think okay I've got my COVID courses over here I would take an inventory of how many of those courses do I have do I have 50 do I have 100 do I have 500 and and I would be thinking of them in terms of what are my quality standards so depending on what your quality standards are and if you don't have quality standards and a policy around those standards that would be first on my list as well what are our standards for quality take an inventory of those courses and think about which ones are not meeting the standards in encourage the development of instructional designers I know everyone thinks the technology is so intuitive that we don't have to worry about instructional designers as much as we used to that is absolutely false as you're trying to grow as you go through your digital transformation and your strategies on how you're going to get from point A to point B you've got to incorporate instructional designers as much as possible I realize budgets are tight having the luxury of instructional designers as some people will say is just not in the cards for some schools that's okay but we want to make sure that we're using them when we can your faculty professional development would be high on my list and dealing with the intellectual property issues and accessibility that's remediation for the courses that are out there now and how you can move those forward let me let me close with something about the future this is where I think we're going and and some of this is based on studies some of this is based on reading a lot of articles some of this is based on working in the field but this is where I think you know we're headed personalized and flexible student centered learning we call ourselves student centered all the time oh we're student centered I don't think we are and when I say we I mean the collective higher education folks we don't personalize we tend to build our programs that are personalized to us as institutions what students are going to be demanding is a personalized flexible environment we need to have everything based on data and evidence of what works and what doesn't work there's going to be a stronger demand even in Europe I know you've had hybrid there's going to be a stronger demand for fully online and highly blended programs going forward we're going to see that globally and as a result of COVID and people looking for work and needing certificates and they need you know ways to get their programs in a better way a quicker way we were talking about competency based education these are going to be big so in your strategies be thinking about it the students are going to demand high quality faculty courses and supports and high quality leadership that is driving this digital transformation that it's understood what it means to the students as well as the faculty and you're going to have exploding markets you're going to have the impact of brexit starting in September and the need for stackable credentials stackable credentials where students can just keep going and put one on top of the other and they all count for something so let me close with this quote because one of the things that I hear a lot is this this still continued argument about is face to say face to face better than hybrid is hybrid better than online is online better than face to face you know it's it's going back and forth and we spend way too much time trying to make these comparisons instead of thinking of the big picture where are we trying to go what are our goals what are we doing for the greater good of society so put those conversations aside think student focus and then start building your transformation around that as opposed to worrying about which one is better so with that I'll close I think I did it in enough time Diana and I wanted to mention this afternoon at four o'clock Blackboard will have a round table that navigating the new normal so we encourage you to join that round table and if you'd like to get in touch with me there's my email address Diana yes thank you so much Darcy this is uh was a very interesting and challenging presentation if I can if I can say that and I think it's going to be very useful uh to a lot of us to think about I quite like your matrix and the idea that you don't have any lms or architect that much there and this also relates to the question which team of the read has posted in the chat which says that I don't think that the elements in your quality learning matrix are all at the same level of abstraction for example accessibility versus market research how they can be used with online teaching with teaching styles and how the success of teaching methods can be can be included into into this for example like the the future skills which Ulf has presented just before so a lot to unpack there um the matrix is not meant to be something for everyone you know the matrix was you know sitting down and think what are the various things that people need to think about now the um accessibility for me uh and in the U.S. in particular and I'm sure here now as well that is that is something that is now law I mean it's a requirement we have lawsuits that are happening around the United States uh and in other parts of the world where there have been complaints about accessibility for students with disabilities market research yes I mean I understand what you're saying um and who is that Tim um yes Tim was this but it's also my idea but yeah it's not meant the matrix is not meant to be you must follow these steps the matrix is meant to be a conversation starter particularly when you're speaking with others at your institutions who don't quite understand that online learning is not just the LMS now I don't know if you have that problem but I have it a lot where people think well if you have an LMS and the LMS is intuitive why do you need to worry about all these other things and in some cases I have schools that I work with that they aren't looking to go outside their region they're not even looking to go outside their local environment so market research really is not something that's important for them but yet if I'm thinking I want to go regional I need to do some research and figure out just because I have an MBA online or an MBA at my institution that has a lot of students does not mean that if you put it online the students will come those days are gone if there's no longer a build it and they will come mentality around online it's an investment when you go fully online and it's got to be thought about you know which programs are going to do well in the market if I'm going to go completely online so you know unfortunately you know I didn't hear all of Ulse session because it was a little early but you know I really believe that where we're going in the future has to be based on what the students are demanding and instead you know a lot of times we we in education tend to think about well this is what we believe we should be doing for these students and we're not listening to the students or we're dismissing what they're saying because it doesn't fit with our model you know speaking of students I see this question about accommodating teaching styles and using online teaching well I would you know learning styles teaching styles this is where instructional designers can be so incredibly helpful and you know sometimes when people say well we can't hire somebody well look at your own institution look in your colleges and schools of education look in your departments that have instructional technology programs or educational technology programs find the instructional design graduate students let them be an intern help you help you with that because what the instructional designer is going to do is apply theory to not only your teaching style and your content but also the learning styles of various students and online I am not a zealot for online learning I'm not one that says oh my gosh we have to do everything online I'm basing it on where I think we are now and where I think we're going with regard to student demand students will always enjoy face to face I enjoy face to face you know it's more than just let me get I'm tired of this online I want to be I want to be there I want to be around people but you know if I were up here in Seattle and I was taking care of my 14 month old grandson full time for his parents and I was trying to go back to school I wouldn't be able to go if I only went on on face to face so you know thinking about the students and where they are in the adult population and the workforce and the number of people that were without work during COVID that's worldwide many of those adults are going to be looking for opportunities credentials something that can help them get back in the workforce so it's really being cognizant consciously cognizant of what the students want and what they need thank you very much Darcy yes I have another question from my side and this is probably a bit more techy on the side and maybe it can follow in the in the next session in the workshop and it's just food for thought a lot of the universities and students and professors are so worried especially in the last year of the data the data which was collected by the university sometimes without even too much privacy and security regulations or procedures in place because some were really caught up out of really doing it properly some were really prepared not all of them and especially not only Europe I'm speaking here worldwide and I know yeah anyway Blackboard in a way so how is Blackboard doing this to protect data how important do you see the privacy the security and the data for students and professors and how we play with that data of learning analytics as university management yeah and you know I'm not one that can dig deep into the technology but I can tell you this privacy of data is a critical critical part of who Blackboard is we recognize that we have student data running through our systems we are not housing you know student data we're running it through our systems and when we when we are collecting data the privacy mechanisms are all in place security is very tight in Blackboard I know there will be people like Juan who will be on later this afternoon in his round table that can dig a lot deeper into how the technology works but one thing I'll point out with regard to data you know Blackboard in Blackboard Ultra we've got you know the connections to the LMS we have the connection into Ally which is our accessibility tool which is you know and I'll say something about Ally if you haven't seen Ally Ally works on Blackboard Canvas D2L this is an accessibility tool that is probably one of the first pieces of software that turned my head in many many years after seeing a lot of things accessibility is so critical and this tool helps you but the data collected from that then the data that comes right out of Collaborate our web conferencing tool can come together in BB data Blackboard data so that you are not only secure and comfortable and confident in the privacy of the data that's coming to you but you're getting it all in one place so you've got the LMS data you've got the SIS data you've got the Ally data you've got the Collaborate data all of this is in one place because I think when people are collecting data and it's very disparate it's in all these different buckets and you're trying to make sense of what does this mean all together what we've done is pull it all together so that you can see it in one place and then our teams help people navigate that data so I know that wasn't exactly the answer to your question Diana as far as what we're doing specifically but I'm not in the I'm not a technologist from that level but I you know we we definitely treat privacy and security it's at the very top of our list thank you very much as we are free here with all four so I would like to have just for one or two minutes we have two minutes left in this in this primary session for both of you this this is also coming from Ursula goes and from a lot of people which are asking here that you presented two perspectives of the future one which is more focusing on skills and competencies and sometimes transversal and more abstract than one which is much more probably from the management perspective of the university and more practical oriented but if you will need to say in one sentence or two how do you see the next year and what will be for the university professor or manager the most important thing to do what will be that and this is for both of you please that's it maybe you want to start thank you the one thing that I would say for faculty is you have to be in alignment with the institution and the vision and the goals of the institution as far as hybrid and digitalization and you know taking the bull by the horns and basic there is another reference sorry taking who bull by the horns but being able to dive in to using the learning management systems and the other tools that the institution is providing and understand how to use them not just upload content and build a repository of files so it's more about understanding the technology better so that you can teach using the technology in the most appropriate way possible and for leaders to make that available to those faculty so that they can understand it better but that this is not going backwards whether it's competency based education or flexible personalized learning or whatever it is online is going to be part of it and it's we're not going to go back so it's it's important for them to be in alignment with that I think this is a point where we all agree at places those which we are in this conference your five cents on this place yeah by five I think that we should as teachers use this our zero so to speak this reset moment of higher education to rethink how we can get into a meaningful interaction online and offline with students and to orchestrate the instruments which we have in a new alliance with students together so that they will be the ones they will be woken up again taken on board again after this long long time at home on the sofa so to speak taken on board again to become the transformation agents of of the future thank you very much both of you it was an inspiring afternoon at Eden conference and thank you Darcy thank you all for that I will just briefly with my the support of my of my colleagues from Eden to share with you the afternoon schedule yes thank you so much batteries for this yeah so we are welcome and please apologize for not being able always to access the online website the links for the afternoon session I posted in the chat now and the link for the Madrid virtual tour is the same link as this this session so please join the afternoon session we are having very interesting papers some which are also nominated for the best research paper award and then some which are also to workshops including the blackboard workshop and then please join us to see at this link the Madrid tour which is I'm posting it now here to virtually join us in Madrid and those which are have received their personal invitation to Eden fellow council meeting will meet you there enjoy Eden and all the best from here Timshara Romania and virtually from Madrid everyone bye