 and welcome to the Out On Land Winter Conference. I'm really looking forward to talking to you this morning and welcoming you to what is going to be a very special event. My name is Maureen Deepwell and I'm the Chief Executive of the Association and it is my pleasure and my privilege to be the first to wave hello to you. I can see plenty of people already saying hello in the comments and in the chat so if you are just joining us do please say hello maybe tell us where you're joining us from and what you're looking forward to over the next two days. Now I thought I'd start with talking a little bit about the history of our event because in 2021 in the current reality that we're all facing online conferences are happening all the time and there are many of but our winter conference has been online since 2015 and the origins of this event for some of you who are watching that might have been a distant memory by now were in 2014 when we first started running a winter conference for our community and in 2014 we were at the beautiful Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh one of my favorite university buildings in Scotland and it snowed a huge amount on the day meaning that many of our participants couldn't actually join us for the conference we prepared little giveaways and Christmas presents for taking away for everyone and very few people managed to come to what turned out to be a very very cold Friday event so learning from that lesson we thought well maybe next year we'll do it online so just in case it snows again or there's terrible weather everybody will be able to take part and since 2015 in a number of platforms and iterations we've welcomed a whopping 2,600 participants to our winter conferences it's been a fantastic history for an online event that's been both a sandbox to try things out an opportunity to catch up with familiar friends and new faces just before the end of the year there's been tweetchats and presentations but also weird and wonderful and sometimes wacky open sessions we've incorporated award ceremonies in the past and our seminal ceremony and there were editor thumbs and working on documents together there's been so many different types of sessions over the history of our event and I'm really looking forward to the rich and varied program that we have installed for you this year one of the favorite parts of the event for me personally has been the activities of our open education special interest group who have held annual campfires where we've roasted sometimes real marshmallows over candles in our houses and connected in what's been very open and warm sessions and this afternoon there is an open house session to which I hope you will all join us come and have a bit of a warm and open conversation with everyone involved now I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been supporting our event this year in particular Moodle our scholarship sponsor but also Open Academia our publishing partners for Alts Journal Research and Learning Technology positive internet on whose infrastructure our servers have been sitting for many years very happily amplify FAE in partnership with home and our FAE community we're running a Twitter chat and a special session at two o'clock today and I'm proud to say that we continue to support the open COVID pledge for education and I'm going to speak a bit more about that later excuse me now I want to introduce you to our team behind the conference because there are many of us who are beavering away in this court of the virtual help desk and overall moderating and supporting sessions and I want to introduce everyone to you today whom you're going to meet online starting with Emma Jane who is our events manager and the lead for our events overall Emma Jane heads up the event overall and oversees all aspects of the delivery Jane Frankel who is our finance officer manages the virtual help desk so if you have any problems do go head to discord or email our help desk and Jane will be there to help Emma McAllister who I'll be introducing to you in person shortly is heading up a lot of our session moderation there's also been working with our technical colleagues on setting up the interactive program Christina Vines who is with us as an administration officer looks after all of our social media and communication and she's also moderating a number of sessions and I am delighted to welcome back Claire Johnny and Caroline from Study Group our colleagues who've been working with us already at the annual conference and will help deliver sessions and support our authors and speakers now we're here to help and we hope that you enjoy the conference but online conferences can be a little bit overwhelming even though we now all have a lot of practice we're using both stream yard youtube and discord to deliver this event and make it as engaging as possible but if you need help help is here there is a help channel on discord our virtual help desk where you can ask Jane questions and you can also email us at helpdesk at alt.ac.uk we hope that you can join our winter social space on discord if you haven't yet done so I know many of you have and it's been fantastic to start saying hello you are in the right place because in a moment Emma will show you how to get involved and meet a few people along the way now the interactive program is really the central heart of the conference and gives you access to the full program and all the live sessions use the menu at the top to navigate between the days and also our list of speakers and use that blue button on the right to look at the full day program from the full day program just select the session you wish to join and it will open up tell you all about the session and the speakers and just click the blue button to join the live session if you're looking for session recordings of any session you may have missed that's in the same place just click this button as if you were to join the live session and you'll be able to see the recording live from there now I'm very mindful that we're running yet another event during what's been very difficult times for all of us and it's now the second time that we're closing a year here at alt supporting a community that's been at the heart of making this herculean effort to deliver blended and online learning for learners at all different stages of education and work tirelessly and often so far above and beyond the normal call of duty that I'm not quite sure what to call it anymore so we hope that for those of you who have been able to make the time in your diaries even if it's jam packed in between other team and zoom meetings to come to the conference we hope that it will provide a moment of inspiration and reflection for you as well as time to connect with familiar faces and I want to thank you personally and on behalf of my whole team that you come here and join for our event today we've thought very long and hard about how we can make our online conference conducive to your well-being and obviously there are limits to what we can do while you're stuck at a screen but there are 15 minute screen breaks between all the sessions designed into the program session recordings become immediately available via the program so you can participate asynchronously particularly if you've got other responsibilities throughout there's a social space with a dedicated hangout area for hallway chats so if you just want to have some space to catch up with people or have a chat with someone maybe you've not met before do head to the hallway chat and I'm really excited that there's also a lot of social activities as well as lunch breaks offering flexible time outside of the parallel sessions for some of our veteran participants you may be familiar with the karaoke that gemgroom and here and here are going to be hosting today at six o'clock your daily email should have details of that and I hope very much that many of you will join us I might drop in myself I'm looking forward to having a rendition of a maybe not so popular Christmas tune but we're looking forward to seeing many of you there now for the second year running our conference art has been created in collaboration with student students from the BA illustration and visual media and I really want to say a big thank you to all of our colleagues at the London College of Communication who've been making it possible for us to put students vision of learning technology at the forefront of how our virtual events feel and look now Vanja has created the artwork and we hope that you enjoy it there is this dedicated blog post on the website and the events blog where you can read a little bit more about her perspective on our conference and the story behind the artwork so thanks again to Vanja who's won this particular competition to display the artwork and help us make this event a special one for you this week now last one I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's already gotten their badge and got some micro credentials for participating or speaking at this event you should have received an email from badges at alt.ac.uk with your details of how to claim your badge if you haven't yet do please maybe have a look at your spam filter if it's got lost somewhere and do share these and display these online or on your cpd pages and maybe use internally as well I hope that those badges will help show how much we value your participation as speakers and participants but now enough from me I want to introduce you now to my colleague Emma who is going to come and help us navigate discord and Emma before I finish I just want to reiterate that we do want to make sure this is a safe space for participation particularly for those of you who participate in the social space so please familiarise yourself with our netiquette and code of conduct so Emma I think I've said as much as I needed to and I know we've got a bit of interaction coming up now with you so a very warm welcome and over to you thank you thank you very much Maron and hello everyone welcome to the alt winter conference we're going to take 10 or 15 minutes now to get familiar with our social space on discord and hopefully this is an opportunity for you to make some connections with other attendees and get some really good recommendations for sessions that you can't miss today