 There are over a quarter of a million students participating in higher education, many of them attending an institution similar to this. Lecture theatres, labs and corridors buzzing with the sounds of vibrant communities. That all changed in March 2020 with the global pandemic. I remember we were here in our offices in the Royal Irish Academy, myself and the team we were getting ready for our first online meeting with the National Forum Associates because of what was happening and the restrictions at the time. And we heard the announcements. We threw the agenda of the meeting out the window and we met with our associates. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Nobody knew what the future was going to be like. And we were there saying, you know, how can we support you? What can the forum do for you? Because we were all, we all were in this together. At the time we were also trying to organize the launch of the Irish National Digital Experian Survey which we had collected in October prior. And little did we know how valuable that data set was going to be for the sector as they made decisions around digital over the months that followed. Initially I think it went to this absolute uncertainty, the shock factor of all of a sudden the doors are being closed and locked and how long was this going to go on for? Would it be just for two weeks or was this going to move into the future in a long capacity? Or how were we going to shift our teaching into an online environment where some people had expertise and other people were maybe beginning to learn more about that field? How were we going to do this across the board with every student? I think my thoughts went straight to the students. How all the assessments that we had lined up, how would we communicate with them? What technology platform would we use? We use virtual learning environments and institutes have won. But now we have Teams and Zoom, we have all these different platforms that we're familiar to many. So we had to certainly work out which one was the best and which would work for the students. How would we communicate with the students? How would we engage? What about the circumstances that they have? So for example, some had no broadband, some had no laptops, some were thousands of miles away from home and all of a sudden they're in rooms, in busy houses, noisy broadband issues and here we were trying to work out ways in which we could work in synchronous or asynchronous ways with our students. So it was this shock of how were we going to achieve this momentous task that was ahead of us with almost a blank page in front of us, a blank canvas as to how we were designing it. COVID-19 was the iceberg that few could have predicted. No one was truly prepared for the devastating effects it was to have on the education sector. A few were competent swimmers, some treaded water, but for many it became a fight for survival grasping onto anything as they tried to stay afloat. When lockdown happened I was head of student support services in TU Dublin City campus and really just in one day the whole world turned upside down and we all had to learn new technologies and new ways of supporting our students and for us initially the key thing, the big risk for us I suppose was our students who were using the counselling services and the health services and we had to learn new ways of supporting them through Teams and Silver Cloud and then after that it was the students who didn't have the technology to access the online classes and the teaching staff were great, they were very much in touch with the students and they identified the students who needed support. Our head chaplain had an essential workers pass and he was able to drive through deserted streets and deliver mobile phones and laptops to the students who needed them and then we got some additional funding from the government and we were able to in a more structured way I suppose support students and the financial aid staff worked through the night to make sure that the students were supported but I suppose really I mean everyone in that period really pulled together, it was just phenomenal to see the work that people focused on and pulled together to make sure our students were supported and our students could continue to learn and progress and graduate and just continue with their lives. There was a very steep learning curve for everybody and especially for lecturers, the vast majority of whom would not have had any experience of teaching online. On top of that the speed at which everything happened meant they were practically swept off their feet and in the initial stages at least that was very disorientating. I know lecturers were putting in very long hours attending, training, redesigning classes and providing additional support to students. Professional staff too did a phenomenal job in transforming all those myriad of processes that enable teaching and learning to happen for the online environment and providing crucial support for lecturers and students. If you think in terms of the usual trajectory of moving courses online it usually requires an intensive planning, designing and development cycle that takes months if not years for just a single course. In response to the pandemic literally thousands of courses across the entire sector were adapted and delivered to give that continuity and structure that was so important for students and everyone while the pandemic was going on. When you stop to think about it it really was an awesome achievement. The pandemic accelerated the use of technology to access and deliver learning opportunities. It was in effect a real world experiment that allowed us to utilize a multitude of online blended and hybrid approaches to teaching, learning and assessment. Everyone had to learn how to use Zoom but then we also had to learn how to use other features of what we have as loop so that's somewhere where lecturers can put all our notes in our assignments and we had to learn how to use other parts of that. We all knew how to get things like PowerPoint presentations and class notes off but we also had to learn how to submit an assignment through it or how to do a quiz on it and it was something that certainly in science subjects we'd never done before. Even though no one has done this before at the time I was surprised that we were still in the college routine despite the fact that we were sitting at home. In my case I remember being a little bit worried about missing something important and being a class rep I felt overwhelmed with questions from my classmates. Pivoting to teaching in an online learning environment provided increased access to materials and potential for additional flexibility as students could work at their own pace. Learning via technology can also help students develop the digital literacies necessary for their future careers. It was a new challenge for many staff and students particularly given the speed at which they had to respond. Students really value the on-campus experience and have missed the live in-person interaction with their peers and lecturers but students also appreciated the flexibility and accessibility that online content and videos provided. As the pandemic continued and the country went in and out of lockdowns the phrase the new normal was adopted to describe many aspects of our lives but what would the new normal be for higher education? From a learning perspective we can look at two different ways in which we learn. The first we call it additive learning that simply that we add to what we know accumulates our different abilities and skills and the second is transformative learning and that's where there's a more fundamental change in our understanding of the world and when the pandemic happened and we shifted mainly to our homes to deliver our lectures and our teaching and we had to look at online methods what happened there was not additive learning but transformative in that our understanding of what it means to learn how to work with people has changed from a values perspective. So we have a new understanding now of learning and teaching and what the possibilities are and also what the challenges are and hopefully that will stand to us in the future. A sector characterised by considered researched and incremental change was overnight forced to begin remote teaching, learning and assessment. This dramatic shift resulted in both positives and negatives that posed a series of questions for students, staff and other stakeholders. Though still living through the pandemic in March 2021, 15 partners from across the higher education sector agreed to work together to answer one shared persistent and urgent question. In the context of COVID-19 what have we learnt and what does it mean for the future of teaching and learning in Irish higher education? In the next steps project we work together to try to understand the Irish higher education teaching and learning experience during the pandemic. With next steps we want to demonstrate the potential of broad collaborative projects of this nature. Want to contribute to conversations about higher education policy research and practice now and in the future. Want to work in partnership with the HGA and Minister Harris and we want our work to have a positive impact. We hope that our next steps outputs are seen not as the end of a project but as the beginning of where we want to go to from here. So you want to get involved because that's absolutely essential for us to sectorally work together to actually learn from the experience of the past 18 months. Actually work out what worked well for us what didn't work as well as we might have hoped and critically what issues and aspects might we want to maintain into the future. The partners combine the key insights and findings from almost 55,000 staff, students and external stakeholders. The numbers involved, the range of perspectives and staff roles represented and the referencing of previous consultations and reports provide a strong evidence base for the key messages and recommendations of the next steps project. What is clear from the findings is that how institutions and individuals address challenges was as important as what they did. Well I think when we look at teaching and learning in higher education it always needs to progress. That's why the term next steps is very appropriate because we're constantly improving and for that to happen there needs to be an enabling culture. By culture we mean the way we do things and that means that we're all the time looking at ways and means of improving our teaching and learning practices both at an institutional level and across the sector. While many staff and students struggle to cope with teaching and learning from home COVID-19 has also advanced some teaching practices in Irish higher education that are more informed by accessibility, flexibility, choice and autonomy. A deliberate emphasis on equity, diversity and inclusion must be preserved and further developed for teaching, learning and assessment so that all students and staff can succeed and thrive. Learning is as unique to humans as their fingerprints and in order to reach and teach the huge diversity of learners now in our physical and virtual classrooms we need to build more flexibility, more accessibility, more student voice and choice into how we design and deliver higher education spaces and programmes. Locally, quality, evidence-based and internationally recognised frameworks for inclusive teaching and learning such as UDL or Universal Design for Learning can guide us in how to achieve this goal and ensure that every single student has equitable pathways to success. Community, well-being, collaboration and partnership were themes which stood out in terms of what worked during the pandemic and what should be maintained into the future. So one of the few advantages to all the lockdowns was the fact that we could use online platforms to collaborate much more frequently as staff nationally and with students nationally. And I think the highlight of a lot of our weeks or our months was the time when the staff and students could come together and share insight and learn about each other's work and the way that students were responding to the work. And next steps is a great opportunity for us to keep that collaboration going and to learn more about each other in a collaborative space with student partnerships. Community and well-being supports are important for all students, including international students. And studying abroad can be challenging in normal circumstances, not to mind during the COVID-19 pandemic. International students experience, you know, changing culture, changing environment, after a new language, being away from family and friends. And this really contributed to isolation, I suppose, and feelings of loneliness as well. The pandemic has revealed the need and demonstrated our ability to work together for the common good. By tapping into the wealth of experience and expertise from across the sector, we can influence the future. Co-creating new ways of informing and making decisions of identifying priorities and developing coherent strategies. The beauty of the next steps project is that it's sector-wide. It allows all stakeholders across higher education to work together collaboratively to develop a shared understanding of what we might want to carry into the future of higher education. For Thea, in particular, we took the perspectives of the chief academic officers who are responsible for overall academic provision for their institutions. And we wanted to provide an opportunity for these key senior leaders to reflect on the experience of the past 18 months and to plan for the future. The National Forum Next Steps Project is a welcomed continuation of higher education sexual collaboration. And it was important for HECA that we could bring our unique perspective of higher education, our learnings from COVID-19 and our vision for the future of teaching and learning to the National Partnership Project. The success of working together and collaborating with partners has brought to the forefront many valuable insights for the future of higher education teaching and learning, particularly the importance of inclusion and ensuring that teaching and learning will be more accessible for all learners. One of the key findings coming out of our series of focus group discussions with heads of services across the universities such as IT services, libraries, heads of student services, heads of teaching and learning, and exams officers was the crucial role that these groups had played across the sector in helping informed decision making and really good decision making at key moments during the pandemic. This meant that services could continue, students could complete their courses, do their exams, graduate or progress as almost as normal, obviously in very different circumstances. We found too that student leaders were really good during the pandemic. They had good structures in place they could and they helped feed in from a student perspective to ensure that the decisions that were taken were beneficial to everybody and could work. Effective Student Partnership emerged as central to institutional responses to the pandemic with the backing and participation of senior leaders student partnership was prioritized. Students were consulted regularly their voices were listened to they participated in decision making and contributed as valued partners. We have a good culture of listening to the student voice in Irish higher education but more active student engagement in decision making means that students should be able to become partners who can shape change and not just provide opinions for staff to act upon through governance structures in the classroom, online and on campus and throughout the student learning journey. Students are experts in their learning experiences. When students work together and share their experiences with one another they can build a bigger picture of the kinds of positive changes the students can support in Irish higher education. When staff are open to partnership higher education becomes more responsive and proactive in shaping a shared vision for the benefit of all. Going forward students, staff and institutional leadership need to come together to plan the way to support more proactive approaches to student partnership. Students such as myself are experts in their learning experiences. When we work together talk share experiences with each other we can build a bigger picture. This picture contains the different kinds of positive changes that we as students can support and create in higher education. When staff are open to partnership higher education becomes more responsive and proactive in shaping a shared vision for the benefits of all staff and students alike. This approach will help shape not only our future learning experiences but also staff teaching and learning experiences. Where and how we teach, learn and assess changed during the pandemic. These changes revealed new opportunities and gave rise to some new challenges. When teaching moved online in March 2020 it was a shock to the system for all of us no matter how skilled we were using technology. Now over a year later we've learned so much. The move online meant that we had to reflect more deeply on our pedagogy and to really consider the skills that students need to navigate and participate in their learning. The higher education community in Ireland has been incredibly generous in supporting each other throughout COVID. Colleagues have shared experiences, resources, discussed challenges, provided peer training in the use of online tools and collaborated on new projects that support student success. We're now aware of choices and possibilities in learning, teaching and assessment which maybe we hadn't considered so much previously. We've seen the physical spaces of the campus are just one of an abundant number of ways through which learning, teaching and assessment are mediated and how we engage our learners. So the next phase has the potential to be very transformative as we rethink and redesign our learning environments both physical and virtual and they've traditionally been somewhat closed and now we have the space to make them open and inclusive. And that also means we can respond to a rapidly changing world and changing demographics where people will return to education in the future at different career stages and different life stages. COVID-19 crisis reminds us that approaches to internal and external quality assurance need to be flexible and agile. More generally, it reminds us that our qualification system needs to be capable of evolving to keep pace with society's changing lifelong learning and qualifications recognition needs. It's timely to reflect on the need to ensure the teaching, learning and assessment practices contribute to widening the diversity of learning pathways and the enhancement of the permeability of the qualification system. The pandemic brought sharply into focus the scale of the challenges that we may face nationally and internationally. Higher education has an important role in addressing many of these societal and economic challenges. The rapid pace of change will require multi-disciplinary expertise together with critical thinking, collaboration, communication and digital capabilities within our institutions and beyond. The world of work is changing. Higher education has an important role to play in helping our students to be work and world ready. Lifelong learning will continue to grow and develop as a feature of higher education. Through inquiry, interdisciplinarity and the use of appropriate pedagogies we can help our students to develop necessary attributes and transversal skills that they will need to thrive in the workplace and to contribute to communities and to address their urgent economic and social challenges. These key messages have implications for our higher education institutions and future policy development for the continued enhancement of teaching, learning and assessment. It is time to reimagine teaching, learning and assessment in higher education to capture not only what we wish to change from the innovations required as a consequence of COVID-19 but also how we can most effectively maintain and build on successful elements. The COVID-19 experience challenged many assumptions that had gone unquestioned for too long. Issues that had been seen as important but not time sensitive suddenly became urgent. Through the Next Steps Project the sector can build on the lessons learned collectively. It is an opportunity to re-examine old doctrines and reimagine higher education, not just for learners but for our whole society. The Next Step Report is a report of its time. The pandemic isn't finished. We know that. But what we've done is we've worked together to pull all the data that we have as a sector together to synthesize it and to collect the key messages in terms of what data is telling us to act as a starting point for further discussion and development. The report is just one part of what we've done. In tandem with the report we have also produced a number, a collection of Next Steps Insights each one developed by one of the partners that capture the actual context and the issues within their own particular context. What all of this does is it gives us key messages that we now know from what we've learned. And based on those key messages we've actually identified good practice and we've highlighted recommendations to improve strategic alignment. We've encouraged through these recommendations that we continue to review, we develop and we continue to collaborate. What COVID did was to show cracks in the higher education system. And there's now an urgency to actually deal with some of those. And what Next Steps does is situates us really well to continue the conversations, to enable us to enhance teaching and learning for our students into the future. Changes to how we live, learn and work have occurred as a result of COVID-19 and it'll take time to understand these changes and plan accordingly for what happens next. We're at a crossroads in the development of Irish higher education. It's not one of divergence but of convergence. And it's together we begin the journey and take the next steps.