 Hello, everyone. This is another in the series of keynotes on online and blended learning. I'd like to thank the Commonwealth of Learning for their support in making these videos. This one is about digital learning and the new economy. One of the things that we're seeing happening is that the requirements of the workforce are changing rapidly. And digital learning, I believe, has a very important role in preparing learners for living in a digital age, not just for work, but for all the other things that they need to do digitally. So I'm going to look at, first of all, the demands of a digital society about developing intellectual skills and what we know about developing intellectual skills. I'm going to provide some examples of online learning for skills development. And then I'm going to be talking about open education resources, which I think is a game changer in the sense that it so suits the needs of a digital society. And then some conclusions. First of all, the demands of a digital economy. We have a changing workforce with new work and new knowledge and skills. There was a report from the Royal Bank of Canada who did a very interesting study. They looked at all the new job postings in LinkedIn over the three to six month period and looked at what the employers were asking for in terms of what they were wanting in their new employees. The bank was particularly interested in the impact of automation and artificial intelligence and how that's going to affect jobs and work. And what they came to, what they concluded at the end was there is a future for jobs. There's going to be plenty of jobs out there, but we're not actually preparing learners properly for them. And when I say we, they referred to both the education sector and the employers themselves. So artificial intelligence, automation will have a big impact on jobs, but there will be new jobs, but we don't have people trained for them. So what are 21st century skills? Well, back in 1993, the conference board of Canada identified some of the core skills and they haven't changed very much. We still need these independent learning, ethics and responsibility, teamwork and flexibility, communication skills, thinking skills such as creative thinking, problem solving and creativity, which universities always thought they'd been teaching, IT skills embedded in the subject area and particularly knowledge management. And I'll have a lot to say about knowledge management, which I think is a core 21st century skill. So what are the 21st century skills? Well, you see they had a range of them. The dark blue means very important and the very faint light blue is not important. So if we look at the ones skills most in demand, you can see there are things like active listening, critical thinking, etc. And if we look at the least involved, at least in demand, there are some surprising things in there like while repairing and maintenance and installation are least in demand, science least in demand, programming least in demand. One reason for that is a lot of programming will be automated in the future and that's where artificial intelligence will be very strong. So what does that mean? Well, it's not just about meeting employers' needs. What the bank found was that the skills most in demand were the ones that were needed across a number of different jobs so that if you have those transversal skills you can take it from one job to another. An obvious example is good communication skills. If you have a range of communication skills in one job they'll probably carry over to another job. And so this gives learners some control over their own life in the future. So what I'm talking about here is empowering learners to manage their own lives by controlling everyday technology in life as well as in work. And this includes managing their own use of data for instance, understanding how the big tech companies work and how they're using your data and things like that. But also knowing how to use technology in everyday life. I make a rather artificial distinction between content and skills. Both are important. But content are facts, ideas, principles. They're about knowing something. Skills are about doing. They're understanding, analyzing, evaluating, applying. And they're both necessary, but particularly in university education content has been the traditional priority. Most instructors are content experts. That's their speciality, their biologists, their forestry specialists, their health specialists. But also increasingly we need to focus on the skills that content needs to support. So we know that a lot of skills are context specific. Problem solving in business is not the same as problem solving in medicine. For two reasons. The content you need to know in order to solve problems is different. But also the approach to problem solving is somewhat different. For instance in business you have to take some risks. You have to take a certain amount of uncertainty if you're going to be successful in business. In medicine decision making is risk averse. Do no harm. Do not do anything that could cause harm for patients. So now that's a fairly subtle distinction. And certainly some of these skills probably do generalize to some extent. But because I'm a thoughtful academic researcher, it doesn't necessarily make me a thoughtful husband as my wife has often told me. Now learners need lots of practice. We know that to develop a skill you have to go on using that skill. You need small steps initially. And very important you need regular feedback from an expert, a coach, or someone who knows a lot more and has much more experience than you do. And again I'm making important distinction here between skills and competencies. A skill is something you develop over a lifetime. Critical thinking I like to think I'm a better critical thinker now than when I left university when I was 21, 22. Whereas a competency is a kind of skill that gets to a certain point where you can do it perfectly but you don't have to progress much beyond that because you're competent in that. So if we take that view of skills as ongoing development rather than something that is static once you've got there, it has big implications for the design of curricula. In particular, if we're teaching critical thinking for example, what are we adding from year one to year four? How is that critical thinking progressing? How is it getting better from year one to year four? Now an interesting study was done by the Higher Education and Quality Council of Ontario which found that in terms of critical thinking there wasn't much development. They looked at students coming in in the first year in Ontario universities and tested them in numeracy, literacy and critical thinking. And while their numeracy and literacy skills improved, they found no improvement in critical thinking skills. Now you could criticise that study because critical thinking needs to be embedded in a particular subject area and assessed in that way and they used a generalised test. But it raises a good question. And it's an issue that Dalhousie University School of Computing Science tried to address. They found that something like 30% to 40% of their students were not going on to complete the Bachelor of Computer Sciences a few years ago. And they were concerned about that. Why are so many students not completing? And so they got all the professors together teaching in the programme and got them to write down their learning outcomes or learning objectives, what the students had to be able to do at the end of the course. And they also asked them to say what learning skills or objectives do they have to have before they come in. So they put these all in a big spreadsheet and they found that some of the subjects they were teaching in the wrong order. And in particular, they were teaching theory in the fourth year and it became clear that students needed the theory in the first year. And what they developed then was a set of learning objectives for every course and so you could see what students would go out with but also students could see what skills they needed to have or what commonities they needed to have before they took the course. So they could then route their way through. So they made basically the development of skills transparent throughout the whole programme. And incidentally this programme is now being used in a number of universities in Canada. Now I'm going to give some examples of using online learning for skills development and I want to give these examples to show how digital learning can be very helpful in developing skills. At Simon Fraser University in their biological sciences programmes Professor Joan Sharp, the professor, found that students coming into third year classes were expecting a right answer for every scientific question. They thought science will always have a clear answer whenever you put a question to it. And of course that's not actually true as we found in COVID-19. There were a lot of grey areas that we didn't know, certainly at the beginning. So she thought they had poor skills at scientific argumentation. So working with the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser she developed a simple web-based tool. In northern British Columbia and Alberta there's a policy to kill wolves to protect endangered woodland caribou. So you'll see that this is the web page and on, very simple, on the left hand side there's a box, there's a screen, the green screen for pro reasons, on the right hand side for con reasons. And on the pro reasons side you'll see a long thin box which is where they had to put their reasons why it was good policy. And underneath, and the critical part, is another box where they had to put the scientific evidence that supported that particular reason. But students also had to complete the other side, the con reasons. They had to put reasons why it was not a good policy and the research that supported that particular argument. And then at the end they had to come to a conclusion. Every student had to come to their own conclusion based on the arguments and evidence they placed. And Professor Sharp being a scientist had divided the class into two groups. One who had taught scientific argumentation in the traditional way and one that used the web-based and she found that the students who did the web-based version did 30% better on the end of course exam. This is an example of using pre-existing apps and adapting them slightly for an educational purpose. What happens in soil science at the University of British Columbia is that students have to go out into the forest and collect soil samples. This is very time consuming for the instructor who goes out with them and directs them and probably handles six students at a time. That's the most comfortable number you can handle. So what she did with working with the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology at UBC they identified a kind of quest program like Pokemon Go, a local developer in British Columbia and got them to adapt their already existing app for the soil sciences program. So the students go out, they use their mobile phones to find the spots that are marked on the map on the app and then they have a set of activities to do. They have to take the soil sample, they have to do some tests, they have to enter the results into their phone. That's sent to the professor who can then mark them and no longer having to go out in the forest in the pouring rain six times a week. So it's a kind of gamification as well because students get points for finding the right sites, they get points for doing the activities and so on. Bristol University, this is right at the other end, this is a much more complex piece of technology. The professor of chemistry there, David Glowacki, found that when his graduate students came to do research they weren't very strong on the intuitive thinking. Most scientists are deductive thinking, they work back from data to hypotheses and so on. And in fact you often have to think intuitively to generate a good hypothesis. So what he did was to create a virtual reality environment of complex chemical molecules so that you can go actually inside the molecule. Now this needed cloud computing because of the various variations and the intensity of data but you could go in and alter the structure of the molecule, you could see the chain reaction that would happen and you could see the molecule changing in real time as the changes work through the molecule. And he found this really helped students to get a better intuitive grasp of the chemical compounds and that enabled them to come up with better hypotheses as a result. A much more simple use of technology is from the Veterinary Science, the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. This instructor only had one version of a plastinated model of a dog's heart. These are incredibly expensive, these plastinated models are almost handmade, so she only had one for a class of 30. And she had lots of problems with the students crowding around and wanting more time to look at it and so on. So what she did was she took a mobile phone and made a video. She disassembled the parts, she explained each part, what its function was, how it fitted with the rest and put that video up on the web server and you'll notice that there's a QR tag attached to the model of the dog's heart. What students do, they come in, they photo, use their camera on their mobile phone and photo the QR tag which is the URL and they just touch that on their screen and that downloads the video onto their phone. Another example is from the Justice Institute of British Columbia. The Justice Institute trains paramedics, police, fire services, social workers and so on. And what they develop is a tool called praxis for real time synchronous emergency response training. Basically the students who are all working are given a set time when they need to be able to do this exercise. Because it's synchronous. And at that time they'll get a warning on their iPad or on their mobile phone saying there's an emergency. It's usually a video play like a news clip saying for instance there's a big fire in the port of Vancouver. And then they have to respond in real time to the actions that are required. And there's a supervisor who can throw a curve at them. They can say for instance there's been an accident on one of the bridges accessing the port so they have to change in midstream. So all the responses are then recorded and then the learners, the students come in to a face-to-face meeting to be debriefed. And what they're trying to teach are decision making skills under pressure, problem solving and good communication. And also they use the exercise to improve procedures to eliminate conflict or errors that were carried out in the exercise. And also to team build because it means they have to work for instance with municipal officials as well as with the port officials as well as each other in an emergency like this. So there's a special role for technology in schools development. Students are going to need to learn digitally to earn and live digitally. And digital technology can provide the practice and feedback to some extent. Students need to know the strengths and limitations of digital technologies for life and work. The other development in online learning that's really important for skills development are open educational resources. These are free copyright protected educational materials. There's a whole set of them. Open textbooks or open videos that can be downloaded, simulations, games, even some virtual reality programs like the one I just mentioned from the University of Bristol. They can be downloaded and used locally. There's open research and data. If you get federally funded in Canada for research, you have to publish in an open access journal. And increasingly we're seeing open data. Cities are making a lot of their data open and available. And of course you've got the whole internet. But you have to be careful there because you have to be sure that you have the rights to use that material. But the students will often go and use that material anyway. So there's a whole treasure trove of open access materials available over the internet. Now one reason this being brought in is to reduce cost to students. Something like $1,000 a year students have to pay in British Columbia for open textbooks. And that's a straight saving for the students. But also we're finding that open education resources can have a big impact on the way we teach. If you're a creator of the open education resources, you still can retain the copyright. You can get a Creative Commons license that protects your copyright but allows people to use the material for free. But depending on the kind of license you've got, they have to acknowledge where it comes from. Or you'll see there's an NCV non-commercial that will stop publishers, for instance, taking your free material and then trying to sell it and putting it into a book and selling it. And there are many collections of open education resources. I've got a list there. I'll not go through the list. But also if you often Google OER and then the topic, you will often find stuff just with a simple Google search. So open textbooks. These are free online textbooks. In the province where I work, BC Campus which is a government agency has organized for books to be available for all first and second year university and college programs. These books are reviewed by local faculty and made available free for any course that's taught in first and second year university and college programs. In Canada, just over half the public higher education institutions are now using open textbooks. And out of this is something called Open Pedagogy where students create knowledge through their use of open education resources. The focus is on learners as constructors of knowledge. So basically you give the students a task, find out something about this, and they go online and find the materials and then create a resource, a portfolio of work based on open educational resources. It's a form of constructive is teaching. Now this is for me as a paradigm shift. If we take the extreme version that all content in future will be free, open and available online, then that's OER, open textbooks, data and research, the whole internet, then students can find, evaluate, analyze and apply content. That's the key 21st century skill of knowledge management. And this is what we need our students to be doing now because you can't teach engineering, everything you need to know about engineering now, even in an eight year program. Engineering is developing so fast that you have to go on learning. So students need that skill of lifelong learning. They need to know where to find and use information. It's going to be a critical skill in the 21st century. But this is a big shift in teaching and learning. If you look at a lecture, who's doing the work there? It's the professor. They're the ones who decide what content to use. They're the ones who organize it. They're the ones who build arguments and so on. The students are fairly passive. Can we not say, here's what you need to study. Now here are some guidelines. Go off and study that and come back with what you've learned about this topic. Because that's how they're going to have to work in the future in whatever job they're doing. The other thing that came out quite clearly from the Royal Bank of Canada report is that content acquisition and delivery can be pretty much automated. Artificial intelligence can easily search out information and can actually organize it to some extent. So what they said was that artificial intelligence can teach decorative knowledge. That's the kind of knowledge that is already classified and already solid and so on. So where does that leave the instructor then? Well, I think still curriculum and course design, that's really important. The instructors must know what's important for students to learn and the best ways for them to learn that. They need to provide individual learners support, especially feedback for skills development. It needs an expert to really develop an expert. They can help with technology integration and use of technology in the learning and qualitative assessment because computers will do the quantitative assessment. If you can measure something and it has a right answer, then computer-based learning will handle that. What it can't handle are things where judgment is required for instance or intuition is required or these higher level skills of critical thinking. So that's where the role of the teacher and professor will become increasingly important in the future. But that's a big shift in the way that most of us teach these days. What I see happening with the new economy is that we'll move away from information transmission towards knowledge management. We'll have more emphasis on skills development, although content will still remain important. We'll have lecture-based courses will be replaced by student projects, problem-based learning and collaborative learning. So they're developing the kind of skills and the environment that learners will need. And goodbye written exams. They test one kind of knowledge only and that's the kind of analytical written knowledge. And it'll still be a place for some written exams. But I see often these being replaced by e-portfolios where students can record what they've done and show that and put that available for assessment and even for employers to see what they actually done, did at university. So again this is a big shift in teaching and learning coming. What does that mean for instructors? Well I think we need more incentives and rewards for innovative teaching. Most of the system is geared towards rewarding professors for research, not for teaching. So we need to look at our promotion criteria to make sure we're rewarding innovative teaching as well as innovative research. We need funds for new designs and maybe reduce teaching load while instructors learn how to use these new technologies and more importantly these new teaching approaches. More course design support from instructional designers, more technical support like Media Labs for instance. The University of British Columbia has a Media Lab where instructors can go with an idea and work with professional producers and they will work out whether it's best done as a simulation or virtual reality and also using graduate students or fourth year students to help build virtual reality experiences or simulations. And then just in time access to resources that will help them work in new ways. So in conclusion the digital economy is going to require high level intellectual skills. This is where the money is basically. Unfortunately we're going to see a divergence in the economy between many low pay jobs and many high pay jobs and the aim is to get as many high pay jobs as possible. There's no limit in the sense to the number of high pay jobs because these are new businesses, new industries that can come. Teaching methods must include opportunities for skills development. Technology enables more flexible delivery and ways to practice skills but all of this must be within a specifically designed learning environment that supports the learners. We need better definition and assessment of 21st skills in every course and the choice of technology should facilitate skills development. I'd like to thank you for this. This is my book which is free and available online and discusses many of these issues, the URLs and my websites there as well. You can see some questions that can be used if you're using this in a conference so you can have questions and discussion afterwards. Thank you very much.