 Welcome to you all. Welcome to Eden Webinars titled Education in Time of Pandemic. I'm Sandra Kuchima, I'm Eden President and with you today as a moderator from Zagreb, Croatia. Eden has started with this series of webinars as our answer to this situation in the world which we are faced all together with education which has to change suddenly from teaching in classroom or blended more teaching to the fully online teaching and learning. And Eden has started this series of webinars and after two very successful webinars we had previously. Today we decided to provide somehow collected answers, collected questions and to provide answers on them. We checked and reflected on the issues and topics you have asked us during previous webinars and today I have with me the panelists, people who will try to give their answers and their insights or reviews on these topics. First of all, I would like to thank people who are behind the organization of this series of webinar. These are free people. I'm very happy to be on the board. Antonia Lapocce from University of Madrid, who is Eden Napstream Committee Chair. And then Timothy Reed from UNED Spain, who is Vice President, Eden Vice President for Open Professional Collaboration. And Lisa Marie Blaschke, who is Chair of the Eden Council, Board of Council of Fellows. And also she is from University of Oldenburg in Germany. So each of them is in charge of one part of one group of the Eden community and collaborating together. They try to choose the most interesting and demanding topics and to find the most prominent experts to discuss on these issues. Well, I hope you will find interesting all our sessions. We record them and they are all available to you. And also we have the survey after the webinars so you can always give your feedback through them. And we will try to put all the topics we find that you need and want to be talked about during our webinars. Also, in this session you will see that we have a chat where most of you have already tried to talk and send the greetings that you are participating. But for questions, please use question and answer section and post your question there. We will try during the webinar to answer all your questions. For today's webinar, let me first present my panelists. I'm very happy to have them on board with me. First of them is Don Olcott, Eden CEO of Ferro and Vice Chair of Council of Eden Fellows and also member of the steering committee. Don is in education for quite a long time so I could talk about all his jobs and duties so far. But let me say that he's more than 35 years involved in education in open and distance education, leadership in education and that he has taught and worked at a number of universities, I would say worldwide. So I think that we have really, really prominent experts on topic and on board today. The next person is Antonella Poche, whom I already mentioned previously. She's Associate Professor in Experimental Pedagogy at the Department of University of Roma Threat. And I know her for a long time and I'm certain that all these issues regarding pathological parts in education and how to teach will be certainly answered in the best way I heard. Last and not least, panelist is my dear colleague, Lisa Mari Blaszke, who is Director of Center of Life and Planning in Oldenburg, Germany, long time member of Eden. We have been working for a number of years and I'm certain that she can give you really good insight about ways of teaching of pathological application of web-to-technologies, self-determined learning and so on. So for today, I have my three panelists. We have decided to use this panel in a way that we prepared some topics around the questions we have collected so far and dividing them in these topics. So during this session, we will try to give you some answers on the topics we prepared but also to take your questions and answer them as well. At the beginning, we have found that there are a number of questions dealing with online learning. We can say in general. So this is the first question, the first topic we have chosen to discuss. So I would like to start our session with Don and asking him how do you, Don, see the question of how to move to online education, how to make it in a good quality way and do we have time to implement it in full or we are just now dealing with how to survive at the moment. So Don, please, floor is yours. Thank you, Sandra. Let me start first by saying welcome and thank you to my fellow panelists. Secondly, let me say thank you and I think a virtual applause across the globe to our colleagues who have responded to this crisis. I think the response has been remarkable and in some ways just unbelievable the way that has occurred and certainly Eden has been at the forefront of that so that's been excellent as well. What I'm going to try to do is sort of give you a framework maybe from which we can have our discussion today and I'm going to sort of start with the theme it's about time. And I'm going to start with sort of three myths and then realities and then go from there. So these myths sort of apply to teachers, to leaders and into our field in general. I guess the first myth or at least misunderstanding is that you can be a terrific online teacher in a month. Well, I'm not sure that's true. My own experience is that it takes a much longer time. It's much more involved. We're probably looking more in terms of realistically at a year to really be comfortable at doing this. There's a myth about leadership that organizations have all the time in the world to decide if they're going to jump aboard now. There's a lot of futurists telling us that we've finally arrived. The brave new world is upon us and I think the reality is that most leaders are going to be faced with some very serious decisions in a very short time and they don't have all the time. I think this is a unique opportunity in our profession in which to really assess whether or not your organization is going to adopt digital online learning for the future. I think another point I'd like to make is that I think the game changers and all this is not just technology, it's also leadership. As we travel through the next few months, it seems to me we're looking at three phases. The first phase is the emergency response phase. That's what we're going through right now. Everybody is responding. We're dealing with a national and international health crisis. That's what we have to do. The good thing is that people are becoming familiar with the technologies, what they can do. Equally, people are finding out it's not quite as simple to implement as maybe they thought at the beginning. A second phase that I think organizations will go through is basically deciding what the future is in their organization. In other words, if they're a new organization, are they going to adopt digital learning as part of their organization? If they're an ongoing organization, are they going to expand what they're already doing, perhaps a balance between face to face and online learning? Lastly, we'll have retrenchment and regression. Institutions that will say we're not going to do it, we're going to go back to the status quo and do things the way we did before. I think all three of those phases, if I were giving advice to leaders, are organizations that need to be thinking about those simultaneously. A final phase that we all go through in this field is the embedding the new values and culture and vision of what it means to be truly a digital online organization. And I would suggest to you that's talking three to five years to do that. My main point again here is that all these considerations, I think, for organizational leaders need to be addressed now. Certainly, the crisis and the immediate response takes priority, but I also think deciding and having discussions within your organization for the future, where your organization is going and why it's going that direction also need to occur. So let me stop there and pass it on to my colleagues. I'm not going to move to this pandemic time or something short, that it's something to be here for a month or so, but at the moment it doesn't seem to finish so quickly. So how should organizations and teachers respond to this? And in continuation to don't reply as well. Thank you, Sandra. I don't think there's any easy answers. UNESCO just came out with a statistic recently that 89.5% of all learners around the world are learning remotely right now. And I think that that's a key term to use as remote learning. They're not really doing online learning, at least the way that I've learned and practiced it throughout the years. What they're doing is they're learning far away from the classroom. And so I think we need to frame it that way and look at it as being remote learning and remote teaching. In order for it to be online learning, there are certain things that need to be in place. And for someone, I think that's trying to approach it for the first time and trying to adapt. The question was, do we have time to implement it? Well, we have time. We have time to implement something. And as Ava said in her presentation last week, I mean, we have to do the best that we can with the time that we have available. I've met with some different instructors who are making the transition to online here in Germany. Most universities will be giving almost all of their instruction online over the next semester. And so, you know, it's getting ready for that, trying to get ready for that. And I guess my advice would be not to try to overdo it. Don't try to do everything all at once. Don't try to recreate your face-to-face classroom in the online environment and really focus on some key themes that you want to focus on and then build around those within the online environment. And we'll be going into that in a little more detail when we start talking about instructional design and the other themes that have been identified for this particular webinar. So, Antonella? Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Lisa. I'm moving to Antonella. Antonella, you have been working as a teacher at the university who is not dominantly online university. It's much more, I would say, traditional university. So, from your point of view, how your university and your teachers, your colleagues, reacted to this situation and what do you think how we should prepare for this situation and to provide good quality teaching and learning? Thank you. Thank you, Sandra. Thank you. In my view and from the experience I had these last weeks, we don't have to ask too much to ourselves. We need to activate our networks. We need to work closely with those who can be of support. Actually, we moved one course in my responsibility from one day to the other completely online and it was hard at the very beginning. It was a hard task to carry out but in the end we found the right balance. Having the help of the tutors, the role of tutors in teaching and learning online is fundamental. It's really important with the help of tutors with the help of other colleagues outside the university who were involved and really were able to give an added value to the course and with other stakeholders involved, to be involved in our courses, to give different perspectives also to our students. That was really a winning point, let's say. So in the time of trouble we found a way also to innovate what was our teaching and learning offer. Yeah. Thank you, Antonella. I would just invite our participants to join with the questions in Questions and Answer part. So please share your experience or ask the questions. Now is the time we have three people who are experts in this field and they can answer some questions or at least give you some suggestions on how to solve some issues. So please don't be shy, ask. While we are waiting for your questions we will move on. With the next topic we have prepared and this is the issue of accessibility which we are facing as well this day. So when we want to start with online teaching and find the ways and technologies and tools how to do it, we shouldn't forget that we have to think about learners. Do they have access to online teaching and online materials and everything? So how to handle a situation where students do not have access to internet or technologies? That's further expanding the digital divide and what kind of solutions are available to ensure ongoing education for marginalized groups. So let's start with you Antonella on this topic. Yes, Sandra, thank you. This is one of the toughest questions because of course we discussed this issue also with Abba last Monday. And it requires a strong effort from the various stakeholders again. And governments should be the first ones to ask to support and to help where of course the situation is difficult. In Italy actually they decided to give strong support to pupils, to students and to distribute devices to the young students who are not able to have computers or iPads or tablets at home. Then with these distance limitations and being compelled to be at home maybe in one family there's one computer and that one computer should be used by the whole family. So again, support from the government is absolutely necessary. Other possibilities are given by agreements with companies, with libraries, with museums, online and offline volunteers. The United Nations offer different kind of support in order to limit also the digital divide to provide the necessary skills to access educational resources. Of course open education initiatives are again very important and useful to facilitate inclusion of different marginalized groups. We need to also to say that there are different kind of marginalization that we need to take into consideration. So the most adaptable solutions should be the ones to be favoured, to be used. We have been carried out different researches and if you are interested, if participants are interested, we can provide with links to our findings and resources in different kind of environments and different kind of situations where we provided personalized individualized solutions. Of course from a technological point of view and from a pedagogical point of view. So I don't know if I answered your question but I can give more. Thank you, Antonella. Well, finally we are getting some questions from the audience and they are quite long questions. So before I'm giving the floor to Don to provide more information on this topic of accessibility, maybe to choose the first questions we got today from Julia. She asks, would you recommend tutors for more personal exchange? Should be professor lecturers or could they be at the earliest stage and could it be even students at high semester of PhD candidates? So more personal exchange with students. So maybe Don, you could try to answer this question. May I, Sandra? So, Antonella if you want you start. Just a few words because we have actually experienced this issue and tutors are as I was saying, fundamental to good success of any initiative online. There are different kinds of tutorship and so as Julia mentioned in her question, of course we need different levels of tutors. Tutors that are not professors can be very much helpful in a peer to peer situation so that students can be felt, can feel they are, you know, able to ask any question to learn about how to manage with the learning process in a very free way. Other kind of tutors are the ones that are more experienced. Let's say so PhD students or, you know, young researchers can be very helpful supporting with contents issues and with also the study of the topics for the exams for instance. So there are different levels there but different figures, the more, the variety the better. That's my view. Thank you. Okay, thank you Antonella. Don, I'm giving it forward to you. Could you comment a little bit about accessibility and then I will give you a question from the pool of questions. Well, I don't have a lot more to add to what Antonella said about accessibility. I think we need to do everything we possibly can to reduce costs. We know from research in rural sub-Saharan Africa for example, people are, the poor are spending a disproportionate amount of their personal income on technology where the higher social economic groups are spending maybe 5%, the poorer groups are spending 20%, 20% of a much smaller amount. So, you know, we need to remember that as much as ICDs are important, sometimes in fact they can, you know, intensify embedded inequities that already exist. So we need to do a better job and I think Antonella touched on this, of bringing different groups together, working together in collaboration, and I think we need to particularly pay attention to rural communities. It's a completely different environment when we go very rural as opposed to being in an urban area where the availability of technologies are, you know, more ubiquitous. I think that's all I would add to that. Yeah, just to continue, because you touched this, I'll give you an overview of the possibilities. I have a question from Claire. She says, university have been implementing online blended learning for some time, but now many schools, primary and secondary, are also needing to do remote teaching. Is there a resources set of links giving advice for these sectors? What would be your recommendation for schools for doing? Are you asking me? Yeah. Well, I think to go online to any of your K-12 associations, most of them are making those kinds of resources available right now. For middle and secondary schools in particular, remote learning, online learning for K-6, quite frankly, I think that's a whole other area of discussion. It's sort of the, just because we can doesn't mean we should. There's a lot of, you know, very strong reasons why third graders shouldn't be taking remote learning or online learning other than in games and those kinds of activities because they're still maturing. Their maturation and intellectual levels are not fully mature. So I would go to your associations around K-12, and there's lots of curricula that's available through these organizations. I saw yesterday, I think the European Commission has just released a website where it has a whole range of materials and resources. I don't have the website right in front of me, but it was posted, I believe, today or yesterday. So yeah, I think there's plenty out there to find best practices for, particularly for high school and middle school. Thank you, Don. I can provide a little bit insight from Croatia because here in Croatia we have very successful project E-Schools, and now in this situation the schools have started online learning, not only via computers, it's also part of learning via television. So television programs are used for learning for smaller children, K-12 especially, but also for children going to the secondary schools and preparing for Mathura. They have part on the television and part online via computers in order to ensure that all have access, same access to all resources. So this is one kind of example, and I have heard that UK has chosen our way of doing it and they plan to do it via BBC as well as we have. So okay, I'm now moving to the next question, and I think, Lisa, I think you can answer maybe this question regarding accessibility. So we are still at accessibility, but we have also questions saying accessibility also means being accessible to learners with special needs and making materials accessible to all. How can we make online materials, material designers aware of this important issue and teachers moving online as well? Please share your views. I think from my own experience working with students with special needs, it was having a student in my classroom for the first time that taught me of what was really necessary to assist that student and support that student. Within the classroom, I think when you're designing, you need to think about, for example, if you're going to have video that you'll need to have subtitles for students that are hearing impaired and especially for those who are hearing impaired and transcripts are also necessary. Usually at the university there's an accessibility office that will be able to support you, at least within our university. There's someone that can provide guidance. Just one really simple thing that you can do is if you're including a link, don't embed the link. Make sure that the whole link is there so that the learner can type it in if they need to. There's a lot of different accessibility guidance available on the net, so you need to be also available of some of the SCORM issues that are involved there. Great. Thank you. Thank you. We have several questions regarding accessibility as well, but I think we have answered it. And let me see the questions. Okay, I'm opening these questions to any of you who would like to comment. The question is from Svia. Some of you mentioned the need for more time in order to have a real change. What are the milestones you can see right now that are needed when an organizational leader decides to make that change towards digital learning transformation, hence teachers and other employees? So, who of you would like to provide an overview on these questions? Maybe I mentioned in my previous contribution the idea that we have a great opportunity to innovate and to change. And this is absolutely true. What we need also to find is the courage to change perspective. And so, what we need to teach actually is a way of working together or creating the right teams of exchanging skills and of enhancing different kinds of skills in our students. This would help also the online process to be successful. So, we need to support critical thinking, cooperation, creativity, different kinds of skills and to work all together to gain such skills. This is, I think, is a change of perspective and an opportunity to change that we really need at the moment. But we need to be brave. Great. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Antonella. I'm going to move now on the next topic. We prepared, because I see that number of questions are going into way of instructional design. So, we have chose the question for instructional design. How do we find the right mix of synchronous and isochronous activities? How can we reduce time spent on computers from the point of teachers and students? And how do we encourage a social learning environment? So, quite wide topics. And, Lisa, I thought maybe you could start opening this topic, and then we will move to the other panelists. Yeah, Sundar, I think it's challenging to find the right mix of synchronous and isochronous activities. But it's important that you start small. And as I mentioned before, try not to recreate your classroom, your traditional face-to-face classroom within the online environment. If you're going to use a webinar or if you're going to use a video, it's really important that it's short and that students can use that video and view that video afterwards. So, if you're having synchronous videos, try to keep it short. Try to keep it around 15 minutes per video and allow for discussion, questions and answers from your students so that you can increase interactivity. The asynchronous part, I think, is finding the most activity where you can identify certain discussion topics that you want to have about, perhaps a video that you've posted. And so then use that to use the video and the asynchronous discussion forums to explore the content a little bit further. And this also leads to the question that was asked about having opportunities for interaction amongst the groups. What we do within our course is we set up a place right specifically within the course where students will have an opportunity to interact, to ask questions, to post videos, to make jokes. It's their own little cafe where they can get together. Students will also create those kinds of environments outside of the classroom where they can get together. These can be Facebook groups or WhatsApp groups. And this is often the case when students are online. They need to have that place that they can go to where they're not necessarily in the classroom and busy with the content at all times. The other questions, how can you reduce the time spent at the computers? Right now that's really challenging because we are in front of our computers all the time. I've found for myself just being able to just shut down and close the computer, close the door, walk away once in a while. And if you can provide opportunities for students to do things offline where they're not using their computers, try to incorporate those kinds of activities into the classroom. Thank you, Lisa. Maybe Antonella, you can add from your point of view how to organize it. Yes, of course. As regards synchronous and asynchronous activities, we need to focus on the pedagogical model that we want to implement. There are different models that can be effective online and they are all based on collaboration. It could be collaborative, cooperative learning, project-based and problem-based learning, collaborative knowledge building. We need to, again, to find a balance. A balance between asynchronous and synchronous based on individual work, on collaborative, on project-based. There are some activities, for example, that support, for sure, those cross-sectional skills that we were mentioning before. For instance, discussion forums around a certain topic are those activities that actually support reflection and also the use of different sources by the students. On the other side, synchronous activities are necessary to involve and to enhance social skills and also our communication skills. So we need to find a balance. Of course, each teacher, each lecturer knows which is the focus that is needed for their own objectives. We always need to focus on which are our objectives when, of course, thinking and designing our activities. As regards reducing the time spent on computers, this is a hot topic, really. What we managed in our experience was that related to support activities like those foreseeing and tinkering, for example, the maker movement that has developed in tinkering really produced different ways of engaging students, but at the same time making them work not all the time at the computer. So asking students to make paintings or create objects, having the visual representation of what they have learned will be really a way to stimulate them and at the same time limit the time on the computers. Again, as regards tinkering, we carried out different researches and we published different articles and links to the open source articles can be available to the audience if participants are interested. So tinkering don't miss the Exploratorium of San Francisco that was the first institution to start these kind of activities. So again, go to their website and they are offering different activities also, especially during this time of emergency. So I really suggest to go there and see what they offer. Yeah, thank you Lisa. We have some questions pointing to the specific subject like for example the chemistry, teaching English how to use, how much to use technology, like what's up and so on. So I saw the question that say it's much going beyond the technology. So we have this issue saying at one point of view not to spend too much time at the computer but for teacher and for students it means to get acquainted with the new technologies but also with the new ways of teaching and learning. So how to provide training to faculty and students to teach and learn online or to teach and learn so questions for any of you who would like to answer. Don maybe you can start. Well, I'm one of those that believes that you play the way you practice whether it's teaching or whether it's the guitar or whether it's football and I think our training for faculty needs to be online. In other words you train online faculty with an online training program that's how you allow them to learn the different aspects of the actual training. So that's one of the things I really strongly believe in. It sort of links to the question earlier about what can leaders do once they decide they want to transform their organization. The first thing I usually tell leaders is remember that the most important resource you have in your organization is the faculty and they can bring any initiative right to its knees anytime they want if they're not aboard. So again I think it's giving the faculty the tools that they need, the training that they need and yet at the same time having enough empathy to respect what they do for a living. I think a lot of time advocates run into faculty members' offices and tell them to jump aboard technology is going to make your life so wonderful but we really don't talk to them in ways that really relate to what they do for a living. They have to research and they're listening to us tell them, you know, go digital. I just think we need to really keep in mind that our faculty really make our programs. We don't take good care of them students don't get good programs. If we don't take good care of them we can't roll out new programs when we want to. So I really think that's a critical, critical issue and training of course is part of that. I agree with you Don but at the moment we are faced that we have to do something to go to any training or institution didn't organize any training so far we have to find out how and from where and I can tell you from my point of view for example I'm working at the eLearning Center for High Education Institutions so basically this is the place where you can start asking questions how do I get some training or how do I get some materials and definitely you will get something out of it and this is the good start. Okay maybe Lisa could you add something to this topic? Yeah I have to just reinforce what Don said about you know you learn the most when you're actually doing it so you need to take an online course if you want to really learn what it's like to be a student but there are a lot of programs out there the program that we offer through the University of Oldenburg is one of those programs with our management of technology but there's lots of resources out there in addition to that there's things like the videos for example from Dave Cormier on how to get online quickly one of the really good examples that I read just this week was from Brian Lam who talked about his experience working in the trenches of being an educational technologist trying to bring his faculty on board and one of the things that he did was identify the faculty Avengers within his organization and then he called on them to support people within his institution and I think that's something that everyone can do is identifying who are the people within my organization that can support us during this time because there are a lot of people who have this experience and perhaps people are just not aware of what that experience who those people are and what that experience is it's really important to identify who those people are and then to call on them to do things like webinars and different types of activities to support the individuals who are moving into online I agree with you Lisa this is why Ether is here so that through our communication channels through our community we also share our knowledge and experience to help all of you start with online or to advance with online we have one question saying how can we find and engage volunteers to help with online courses so maybe Antonella could you try to answer this question it's interesting volunteers who are the volunteers yeah yeah yeah this is a good question you know in my experience I can tell you that in a peer to peer view we can involve senior students and senior students can work as tutors and volunteers to support teachers to support the community to support the group in a very very practical way I can tell and maybe many others can share my situation because it's always difficult especially in this time of crisis to involve the higher levels to involve the governance to support from the governance in a very quick and immediate way even if we had a quick response from the government but if you have to move especially with the postgraduate courses online from one day to the other you need to find a solution immediately and I realize that senior students can play a very important role because they think they are part of the group they think their action can have an impact they feel useful and so it's good to involve them in this peer to peer ideal situation where they can start helping the community yeah I agree with you Antonella the advantage of the students and their knowledge of the ecology because now they can help you in preparation of teaching with all the tools they use already and maybe they are much more acquainted with this okay let's move to another question I'm just having some problems with my computer getting to me two questions so we are moving now from instructional design to online assessment how can we organize trustful and credible examination in an online environment where we can ensure students are not cheating and do we have some tips for preparation of online exams I know we will devote much more time on this issue in our next webinar next Monday but for the present I would definitely like to share at least some tips regarding the online assessment so Lisa maybe you can start yeah I think one of the biggest reasons that students cheat online in online environments is because they run out of time we are not giving them enough time to complete assignments they are under a lot of pressure they are not able to complete the work they need to within the time allotted so I think it is important as faculty to be flexible with your students to allow them to submit their assignments later over time one of the current trends that I personally really look at is the ungrading of assessments that means only grading the really important assessments toward the end of the course and focusing really on formative assessment throughout the course meaning you give them certain learning activities that are defined based on what you are learning outcomes that you want to achieve through the course and then work toward those providing them for example no grade or pass fail grade one of the people that is written quite extensively about this is Jesse Stommel and Mahabali has also published some work on this and it is really it takes the pressure off of the student and it gives them more motivation to do the work because it gives them a sense of being more responsible for the work that they are doing so I personally push the ungrading and allowing students to develop that formative experience self-assessment is also a key part of that I have done this throughout the past giving students an opportunity to grade themselves where they say break your participation I will give them a rubric or I will ask them to define their own rubric how would they assess their own participation the work that they have done within the classroom and I would say that in almost all cases students did a really accurate representation of what kind of grade I would have given them and often times they give themselves a lesser grade than what I would have given them so I think the cheating thing is going to be an issue in whatever classroom you are in whether it is a traditional face-to-face classroom or an online classroom try to make your assessments how you assess the students work to be unique don't give them an opportunity to have an activity or a certain assessment that they can just take off of the internet or have somebody else do for them make it unique for them and make that assessment for them that's what my advice would be thank you Lisa it's easier said than done actually but yeah definitely this is what I am saying to teachers as well Don would you add something to the online assessment because it has become crucial at this moment because if you look at the high vocation in the middle of the semester and lots of teachers need to do some colloquials or even provide the exams and they have moved from face-to-face environment to the online environment and suddenly they have to do tests an online assessment I guess the one I would just point out is for teachers to look at it as a continuum and look at alternative assessment I have students even at the doctoral level to learn better one way than the other on the same kind of content that I am teaching I have also had high school kids that have the same thing so is that directly related to cheating no but I think sometimes if we can align some other options for assessment that get at those same outcomes I think we begin to offer other options it is not going to solve the problem completely but I think that is a general area that we are often restricted from doing because of resources I understand that and time I started with time tonight when we talked that keeps us from doing all those things I sort of like that I like it when I have a student who I can see is not learning but if I give them another context to think about the same material they can demonstrate to me that they know it and do it so it is an indirect way to get at the cheating issue we have a very good question here do you think the mental situation of students are ready for exam in this pandemic time can you repeat the question is the mental situation of the students how students are prepared mentally for examination in this pandemic time we have to take into account that they are at home working by themselves mostly deciding how much time they will devote to learning they are maybe not so it is not in their nature maybe that they ask for online they are much more practical issues how mentally if they are prepared for online exams I would invite Lisa and Antonella to jump in this all I will say on that is we need to throw out the current schedule completely what we are trying to do between now and June and think about what is on people's minds going through this whole process with the pandemic and everything and I think we need to lighten up a little bit as I have said to Lisa scale our speed dial from five down to one and just say okay chill I would rather have my students learn three good things than trying to jam 20 things into them because lesson plans say we are supposed to do that so I think we just need to step back for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of our students and teachers who are trying to do this and give them a break give them time give them support we won't do it perfectly but that is okay what is impressive has been that we have responded I think that is something this profession can celebrate for a long time to come I think at the moment it is very important to make sure to keep them to make them be present and online so to take care of them next question we have I think until now maybe you can share your view on online assessment but with this question how can you as a teacher rate how much time does the student need for a task to know how other and how much other online classes and tasks they have we don't have official schedule of online classes we even do not have official schedule of online classes on faculty so how to measure how much is appropriate for students to work on within one class sometimes very I would say very happy to do a lot with students but sometimes they exaggerate and do a little bit too much than it is possible than it is needed it is not the only class that students have so how to measure is it enough or not enough for them this is a very good question because what we are noticing with teachers of course is this idea of transferring what you normally do in class face to face to an online setting and that's the first mistake we could all do so we had that one hour in class face to face is the same as one hour online it's absolutely impossible a colleague of mine put on Facebook as a joke a picture of a computer with a stick where the photo the picture of the students hang in front of the screen just to say that he was there but he wasn't of course so we need to engage students as what I was saying before involving them in activities that they can carry out and this idea of being part of a team can help measuring also the time that we need to use for an employee for our students online if I could give a measure but it's difficult because it depends on the objectives of your lecture so the tasks should be balanced taking into consideration what are your teaching and learning objectives and what you want your students to learn to manage so of course one hour is not equal one hour face to face is not equal to one hour online you can give small peels of lecturing in the traditional way and then ask students to do something so very practical activities as we were mentioning with tinkering or other kind of activities where they are directly involved thank you Antonella let's move to another question from our panel so the next question we chose is teaching so how can we avoid over work and burn out we are working all day and have classes all day we even get emails at midnight how to organize class in an online environment and how can we avoid just passing information to students via online lecture and available learning materials what we have at the present is that some of teachers who didn't do anything online before are actually doing emergency remote teaching and trying to find the way how to conclude this school or academic year so we have already tackled some of the issues relating to teachers regarding tutors regarding their training volunteers and so on so Dom let's start with you how to organize online class and make it a good quality class not just teaching remotely face to face usually face to face teaching well interesting the basic design Antonella and Lisa both alluded to this earlier are very important components for example do you do week to week in terms of your content or another option is maybe you go use a module approach that takes three weeks I've used both they both can work it requires careful selection of content I place a high premium on interactive discussions so I think interaction from the very beginning when I'm trying to get organized my classes because research supports better and deeper learning happen when people engage and interact we go back to Anderson and Archer and the community of inquiry theory and social teacher and cognitive presence for a while there we were saying well teacher presence really isn't that important I disagree with that I have found in fact even among older adults they want you there it's almost like when your young child says oh you don't have to come mom okay if you're not there well yeah it is they want you there and I think our students are like that sometimes they want to know you're in the building okay I think people need to hear this clearly to be good online takes time there's no easy way around it it takes time I probably spend at the master's and doctoral level two to three hours a day two to three hours a day interacting primarily with my students doing other things too but you know I think I think in the current situation again we're back to that immediate response but in the long term I would certainly encourage faculty and teachers to remember it's like anything you got to put the time in there's still a lot of teachers and faculty who think you know 20 minutes a week that's that'll do it no that's I think that's Lisa's distinction earlier between remote learning and online learning it's quite different so again everybody's a little bit different but again I go into my classes I want my students engaged and if they feel like I care about them they're going to be engaged and they're going to interact and they're going to I think enjoy the class more and learn better I'll stop I agree with you to engage students it's not easy always to do we have a question that teachers enable quizzes for students to do some self-evaluation but if it's not compulsory they're not so eager to do it so Lisa in commenting on this topic and also on this question how about teaching in an online environment how to engage students John was mentioning before teacher presence is really important I've often had this situation where students will want to engage with me because they want to be hearing the feedback from the teacher what does the teacher think about this subject am I on the right track as a way of affirmation about what it is, the way they're thinking the way they're carrying out certain tasks but what I think is also important is that they also have an opportunity to engage with each other if you're only interacting one-on-one with your students you're going to burn out especially if you have a classroom full of students if you've got anything over 50 students you won't be able to do the one-on-one interaction with the students for the most part so my advice in those kinds of cases is to really focus on what are the key points will I define or support my students in achieving those specific outcomes what kinds of discussion questions will I have within my classroom environment that students can reflect upon, debate, discuss within the online classroom that will help them to gain the knowledge that we want them to acquire what knowledge can they contribute from their own experiences it's really important that we make the teaching relevant to our students too on how that applies to their specific context so I think as an instructor it's really important that you, in order that you don't burn out is that you also use the community of inquiry from the content perspective the social presence and the student presence and really maximize that in order to make sure the students are engaged Yeah, I agree with you but let's remind ourselves that we have interaction between students and the content, students with students and students with teachers so let's use all of these possibilities for interaction, it doesn't have to be only student teacher all the time so let's use advantages of other possibilities if we move to another topic I have very good questions and start first with this topic we have chosen and it's student engagement and how to, we have already opened this topic about best, how to best engage the sustained student involvement and what about a big group of students about 400 of them, how can we engage them and this is the question I already had when you have 400 students how to work with such big groups and I'm quite aware that in Croatia we have quite a big number of courses with even more students than 400 when we have 700 students or 1000 students especially the first years of the faculty where you have joined the classes for all the studies on the one course so student engagement working in the small groups is better what about Antonella working in a big group of students can you provide your experience and ideas how to deal with this I'll try actually as you said in Italy and in my department in particular we have the same situation that you have in Croatia so we have large, large numbers of students and it might be difficult to organize work and engage them very lively actually the solution is in finding a meaningful individual or group goal to achieve we need to negotiate the goal with our students and find a goal in our activities that can have an impact in the outside world so that they feel that they can be helpful to the community and also the society where they are based of course as we said we need to be present and to give feedback continuous feedback in order to keep them involved in my experience I can tell you that in different occasions we have large classes more than 100 students especially in training primary school teachers those are our students in the master classes we for instance started to make them work on digital storytelling regarding in particular some work of arts we managed in organizing groups in Moodle and we assigned them these tasks making them work on narration and also on storytelling using wikis for instance and they used spontaneously also Skype and WhatsApp to compare their ideas so they felt they were so much involved and that they could be part of something that was going to be used to be used in real context because their products were then part of a larger project that could be used in the development of technological tools for museum education so knowing that there was a shared goal that had an impact also outside the goal real they felt they were useful and so they participated and we reached the end of the activity very successfully not missing anyone so the key word is to find a meaningful goal to find a motivating goal to find a goal that has an impact outside the context of university and to give feedback that's for sure to have a continuous feedback maybe through senior as we were saying through senior students that can help and be part of the groups and supervise the groups together with the teachers in order to avoid burnout as we were mentioning before Thank you Antonella Don, I'm moving to you with the same question but I would like you to add your view how open educational resources can be used as a way to empower students' involvement in the online class Well, I guess my first comment is the three words that academics don't like to say and that is I don't know in the large classes this isn't just an online issue we've got universities with first year students taking classes of a thousand students now the idea or sort of the mantra is well we've got more students so the university will be able to hire more tutors so that you can do more interactive activities the problem that occurs is those people never get hired because resources get diverted in other directions so it's an increasing challenge I think there's no perfect way to do that when you get into those kinds of numbers I think we need to we need to be willing to accept that you can do a lot better job with 20 students than you can with 500 that's just the way it is for the most part because we don't have the resources to hire additional people to do some of those things in some cases maybe we get a few tutors that we can do some things with whether they be small group kinds of activities or those kinds of things but it's an ongoing challenge it's the one that makes me chuckle every time I see a MOOC with 22,000 students enrolled you know it's okay great took us 30 years to do research that said interaction and engagement were important and things that were out there advocating for or violating those very basic pieces of research that we are on Monday advocating for how can OERs help that well I think OERs can help in the sense that it can bring down costs does it give students easier access or does it make it more engaging if you're using the resources or the OERs as part of the course it's part of the content it's very difficult to change the dynamics of interaction in my view because it would form part of whatever you were planning to do in terms of your interactive strategies anyway in the masters of education program at Oldenburg University that I work on with Lisa our classes are designed entirely with OERs and it's great because we don't have to go through all the copyright approvals most of the content is a Creative Commons license with attribution and usually no derivatives we can't change it but we can distribute it and use it so it gives us certainly the opportunity to use those materials broader among 500 people does it increase interaction I don't know that's my honest answer I don't know thank you Don very good answer yes we do not need to know all the answers they are not always the one answer or the unique answer every experience is different every subject is different every environment is different so every group of students is different so it's always some way how to adapt already what is used somewhere to your needs and see how it fits into your teaching classes so let's move with the last topic we have here with us we already talked about it so we are just as continuation collaborative group work yes or no and if yes how do you organize group work online so the students are motivated and truly collaborate together and do we have guidelines for online collaborative work group and I'm going to give floor to Lisa to open this topic so Lisa please thank you Sandra yes I think there should be group work but it has to be well organized any kind of group work that you have whether it's face to face or in an online environment it's going to be challenging you're always going to have someone that doesn't carry their weight you're always going to have situations where perhaps not everyone understands what the group activity is supposed to be so there needs to be more time I think within an online environment to allow the group dynamic to develop in order to realize that you're going to have things like clear instructions you're going to have to have scaffolding of the activities you're going to have to have moderating of the groups it's going to be very important that you provide them feedback as they move along towards whatever the goal is this doesn't necessarily have to be the feedback from the instructor you can have mentors teaching assistants provide that kind of feedback especially in courses where there's a large number of students it's very important that you give the students autonomy to make decisions the group work needs to be also relevant it can't just be well we need to have group work what can we have as a group activity within our class it needs to be aligned with whatever you're learning desired learning outcomes are what do you want to achieve for this class and how can I achieve it through a group activity and I'll give you an example from one of the courses that we teach in our program and that's on the histories the principles and the theories of technology enhanced learning and on distance education and what we do is we ask the students to think about context in terms of the history of distance education and e-learning and they do that as a group and so they contribute different aspects of that into a table and they build this table over different ways of development it's not something that one student would be able to do on their own because they're bringing that together from a number of different sources and this grid that they create is then something that gives them really an overview of all of the different contextual factors that have influenced the development of technology enhanced learning and online learning over time and these are things like social and political and economic movements at the moment that would be the pandemic that we're currently experiencing now technology developments, new theories that are developed new authors that have contributed to the field different models, different institutional models of online and distance learning and this is an example of how what we've done is said okay we want to have a group activity and when everyone contributes it creates something that's even bigger than if one person had done it but in order to do that you need to have groups that have as I said before clear instructions have scaffolding have formative feedback throughout the process from a mentor from the instructor and you need to be flexible and allow them to have the time to form their group and to achieve the activities that they need to achieve during the time frame Thank you Lisa Very good point Antonella would you continue to add something to this Yeah because we have different strategies that we can employ in group work that can be useful and successful we need to understand that besides the emergency which is stressing certain aspects for sure we have the duty to help our students our pupils to develop certain skills as I was mentioning before that's strictly connected to group work and to the skills that are enhanced in group work there are strategies I was mentioning there are for instance two kind of strategies that we can employ in group work one is the jigsaw method which can be very effective in this method you can help students acquire knowledge through collaboration and constructivist strategy students what are they asked to do they need to develop to be instructed to work on a specific a very specific piece of knowledge and when they are faced together each of them present their own study their own development on a specific part of the topic the teacher facilitated in this way we have differently to experts in one part of the old picture and the old picture comes together in the end this is a very effective way of enhancing group work and engaging students in their duties the other strategy is role playing role taking strategy is again another method that can be very effective we have been working with role playing in different situations and it proved to be very very effective you will know how it works but it's useful especially to develop those skills that are very much needed in the workplace and in particular after the the Covid emergency collaborative learning is the key as we were mentioning before and there are different opportunities to learn more about collaborative learning there are different projects we have a project on open virtual mobility that is based on different kind of skills to be developed and there are open resources there so if you want we can give the link again to the courses so the opportunities online are really wide there are lots of them we need to find a way to identify the right ones and the ones that every one of us needs for their own their own scopes thank you thank you Antonella I think we have come to the end of our meeting it has been 90 minutes already that we are all here we have to finish I wish to thank all my panelists for time and willingness to share the expertise and knowledge in how to organize online learning in these times it's not a normal situation then sometimes someone decides to do online learning and have the time to think about it and to do it we have different times and not actually having the time to do that I would like to announce our next webinar which is going to be on Monday as we are always on Monday exceptionally this Tuesday because of the Easter so next Monday at five central eastern time we will have webinar on how to use online assessment to improve learning please join us but also I will share with you that the Eden conference is going on this year as well we are going virtual time for applied for presentation and paper is still open we have to the end of the April so please join us virtually participate virtually at Eden conference and share your knowledge and expertise I got one very nice question about giving some leaders for students you gave me something to think about with my team how to provide as well some information for students we will think about that I wish to thank you all for being with us today for doing 90 minutes recording will be available so stay tuned thanks to all of you and especially thanks to my panelist Don Lisa and Antonella thanks to you Sandra may I say something because the network of academics and professionals you do offer other webinars on different subjects and topics and of course we had to stop for a while but from April 22nd we should be again online with our webinar so stay tuned and have a look at our website at the Eden website for more communication regarding that thank you sorry for that thank you all see you next Monday bye