 Good afternoon again everyone and on our panel today we have everyone here has a doctorate which is amazing and brilliant and Samantha is with us she's recently finished her postdoc at University College London's Knowledge Lab and she's now working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their research centre at Cambridge University as a research scientist where she's exploring ways to teach AI in schools and we've got Garen with us and he's a Bill and Melinda Gates postdoctoral associate in the teaching systems lab in MIT and he leads work on an open source simulation based research and development platform known as DEX and the rest of the panel are the three professors sorry they're not the three tenors but I know that Eileen has a very good singing voice and she's our regus professor very prestigious post here in the university we've got Regina lovely to have Regina here she's played an important role in this program as she was associate dean for research in wells and of course we've got Bart here and Bart has been a real driving force in this program of work so thank you for that Bart. What I'd like to do now is start with a question which is for the three professors so there were three major themes evolved from this project and that was with learners and the power of language innovative technologies educators and inclusive practice and I'd like to you to tell us about what you think the major take home messages for the academy are from these three strands and especially since the work focused around multi-disciplinary teams so I'm going to put Bart in the hot seat first then Eileen and then Rigging so please take over the three professors wow no pressure Denise I think the one thing we've learned across the 19th chapters is that one size does not fit all in all the chapters that's become really clear that what may work for one group of let's say English learners learning a language does not work for French learners in another country and I think what is for example really powerful by for example the work that Simone has done is whatever we design from a UK perspective may work for our UK learners but it definitely won't necessarily work for learners for example in China or learners who have accessibility needs as Paco has shown so these are my one size doesn't fit all thank you Bart over to Eileen sorry about that I couldn't get my mic to unmute I've been really interested in changing the little breakout group that I had and that slightly changed the nature of what I was going to see I was inspired by the person this morning who said that we need to look at these doctoral scholars and recognize both their ambition and bravery in the way that they approach the work and that came very strongly to me from listening to the four presentations that I had in my section in terms of technology I think not so much conversations about technology many more conversations about what still needed to be done to make open world learning truly accessible and effective and for example able to cope with the global disparity that Simone picked up from her work the approach that Garon took to understanding the different community perspectives even on things like classifiers of emotions that needed to be looked at accessibility in general I mean I think the work that Paco talked to us about in the break says we have done lots of work on accessibility we've raised lots of issues and concerns and developed methods but there's still tons to be done and finally the contribution that we had by video very nice video from Juan he talked to us in quite a lot of detail about trying to unpack learning design student engagement learning analytics and student achievement and I think what comes to me most strongly from the body of work that I was reminded of this afternoon in these particular presentations but is very well represented across the book is the ambition behind the program to make things better for everyone in open world learning and a recognition that we've made some good steps along the way but there's still tons of work to be done and I see that in the careers of the doctoral scholars who've left us they each of the presentations I had was relying on the interesting methods that they've developed interesting and actually groundbreaking methods that have been developed to study these complex issues and I'm so delighted to see that particularly for the people who return to us today that I can only predict a really important future in developing the idea of open world learning and going forward thank you thank you Eileen and now over to Ricky thank you yes sort of following on for that so from my point of view the take home message or the key take home messages the impact that the new technologies are having on learning and on teaching and the implications of this for educators today so I think over the past years we've really been witnessing the development of new learning ecologies which really have the potential to be more inclusive than what we're used to in our sort of traditional learning and teaching parameters educators can really make use of today's technologies to make learning more exciting and also more relevant I think that's really important they can use it to bring the world into the classroom and at the same time move education out into the wild so I think that's that's sort of a real opportunity however they do need the kind of skills to do that that many I think currently don't really have so I think that's sort of one of the issues but I think if you look at the studies done by our PhD students which which are sort of really amazing you'll see how very many really focus on different tools and technologies that are providing examples for this sort of change of how we learn and teach languages and and other other subjects so I think really it's been great to sort of read the the various chapters of the sort of work that they have done and also to hear today about about their work thank you thank you so much a wonderful summary there and I think a great taster and an invitation for people to actually go away and read this important work now I'd like to ask Simone and Garon to answer some questions do you think you could put your cameras on there's Garon is Simone with us yeah I am can you hear me oh good good good yeah there she is so really we'll start with Simone and then we'll move on to Garon and I've really got two questions for you both and one is what surprised you most about the topic you were researching and secondly you know if you were given unlimited funding now your fairy godmother suddenly appeared what research would you like to do to take forward now that you think it's going to really make a difference so if we start with summer and then we'll move on to Garon thank you thank you thank you for your question that's very interesting I would absolutely love to meet this fairy godmother yeah so what surprised yeah what was the most surprising part to give you some context in my research I was trying to explore how online learners learn from those who are from different geocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds how do they engage with different types of learning design elements or different types of learning activities for example instructional videos reading material or discussion based learning activities or quizzes and when I started working on this project my surprise it had three parts if you allow me yeah so first was how much data is available there it's it's just literally sitting there from millions of users who got enrolled in one or the other move and second how supportive the research community is so in this particular context so for example we made some strong collaborations with researchers working at for example Stanford or at Cornell so they were super supportive obviously the data is not exactly residing there you will have to sign an MOU which we did but they are super supportive and third part of my surprise despite the availability of this voluminous data and this amazing amazingly supportive research community how limited research has been done in this domain so that that was the surprise and sorry what was your second question yeah so funding yeah so I've already talked about this mouth watering amount of data which is residing there but that was this that research was conducted in a pre-COVID world and revisiting my research in a post-COVID world could not be more timely and the implications and lessons that we learn from this research will appear more relevant if a replication or for example extension is performed and for that I have two linked thread in mind first and imagine how how amazing it would be if we perform an extension or replication in a context other than MOOCs so for example in hybrid or in face-to-face learning environment and that's something that higher education all around the world has come to rely on in post-COVID world and the second even more useful dimension would be our design-based research where we we use the lessons that we learn from this research and we implement them and we design MOOCs following the guidelines or following the recommendations from my research and then we start a cycle we analyze data from the from the newly designed MOOCs and see what we can do about about it if it makes sense does that answer your question yes it does and it it sort of points away to things we're thinking about in IT and at the year you're about open research and open data and sharing so we've got scalability and we can see across the world what's happened I think you're absolutely right and I I hope you can get your funding thank you can I move to you now please sure thanks thanks Denise um not exactly the prompt but first I just want to express gratitude for all of the fantastic learning that took place within this program and how it's planted so many seeds that have really generated a lot of really interesting work post PhD and in my postdoc but with that said the first thing I'd like to say is one of the things that was really surprising in my work was all of the work that I did in again interviews if you're doing quantitative research find a way to do an interview because you're going to find some of the most gems of surprises there and in one of the interviews that I conducted I showed predictions of a classifier of emotional expression to people about their own communication and I asked them if the prediction changed their mind about what they thought about their own communication and what I was trying to understand was that if we built a classifier that represented some form of a consensus from the community built on the perspectives of the community would that sort of help people work toward a consensus and there was places where I saw what I was sort of anticipating which was I'd show someone like 20 or 30 of their own messages and they'd change their mind about one or two things and they'd be like oh I can kind of see what's going on there and that kind of makes sense to me that was fully anticipated what was surprising was one of the interviews that I conducted someone changed their mind 22 or 20 times like about half of their communication they changed their mind to agree with what the algorithms prediction was and I was concerned about that I was concerned about how much people might just acquiesce to the opinion of an algorithm and not really be learning from it but just sort of saying oh it must be right and I think that that raises some really interesting concerns around fairness transparency accountability algorithmic designs that we really need to start thinking about as we start moving in towards adoptions of AI within learning environments that that sometimes those predictions might just actually become self-fulfilling prophecies and so we have to be careful about what we're predicting how we're sharing and how we're supporting people to interpret those predictions I think that that's going to be a really interesting challenge coming and if I had a magic pot of money to work with I think that the the thing that I'm I'll say is that one of the seeds that was planted in this program was when Rebecca Ferguson invited me to contribute to the innovating pedagogy report where I got to write a report on decolonizing learning and and I see that in an intersection of that style of work with sort of community driven machine learning classifier work as a way of framing and thinking about how I'm working on the platform decks that I'm working on right now where I let communities create their own simulations about difficult social interactions where often there's some sort of a power dynamic like a teacher and a student or a police officer and incarcerated youth like there's a variety of situations where these difficult social interactions take place and then thinking really deeply about like who's participating in establishing what the classifier is considered to be truth and so you can imagine that when there's these interesting power dynamics at play and these different perspectives the student perspective the teacher perspective I think that that was something that I'm thinking about this work that I'm doing from like a scale from the start totally informed by the four P's of the open world learning research agenda and and trying to think about how do we include communities in the process of creating algorithms that are making interpretations about social interactions and how do we get people to learn both where those algorithms can be beneficial and where it might shape one or two of your opinions and also with a sufficient level of sophisticated understanding so that you don't just agree with every prediction that's shown to you and so I feel like that's a challenge where if we want to benefit from some of these innovative technologies we need to help build some level of sophistication in sort of the consumption of those technologies and the strategy that I employ in doing that work is by empowering communities and shifting power to communities to be participants and sort of community-centered research and development around both the materials that are being used as well as the measures that are being used to make predictions about what's said within a simulated difficult social interaction so thank you in fact you've answered the next question that I wanted to pose to everyone so thank you and so we'll have all the panel back on board and Garon has actually given us the answer to the next question which I'd like to ask you all to address which is what is the grand challenge now for open learning and I can see Eileen and I can see Bart on screen then we'll go to Samar and then we'll go to Regina so take it away Eileen yeah I'm not sure I think from what I've been hearing today that the grand challenge is to properly unpack what is meant by accessibility to learning I think we've you know we've talked about providing access and we've talked about learning design and we've talked about student engagement attitude all sorts of things but across all that you know with this is the 10th year of the MOOC this year since the first of the X MOOCs was launched from Stanford and I think that the hope that was behind some of that activity that by providing free access to materials all problems in education and society would be solved it's obviously that hasn't happened what has happened is there's more access to more open material and the challenge that we have as educators is trying to make sense of the research quite a lot of research that's been done in the past 10 years to to further I don't want to say the level the playing field that has terrible connotations but further make the kind of inroads into inequalities in education further develop work that helps the remove the barriers to learning across the globe just a small one thank you thank you Eileen that'll keep us going a long time right off we go so if I go next if I take a dark perspective I mean I think over the last five years what we have seen is that the role of experts and the role of knowledge has been really heavily criticized and you know if you now say oh I'm an expert in this then there will always be someone who will find well who's who's that you're saying that you're the expert and I hopefully can trust my doctor for example but there are lots of people who don't seem to trust the knowledge that is out there on the web so I think from a dark perspective open world learning has opened a fantastic can of worms that you can find your truth anywhere online if I take a positive perspective I think what we need to do is to how to find out mechanisms and ways how we can effectively train the next generation of educators researchers and learners to make sense of this so that they can really try to understand the powers of open world learning but also be critical if something is stated on the internet that may or may not be necessarily true so I'm handing the ones to Rikina thank you yes and I actually want to talk from my position as a language educator and sort of shift things a little bit because I think there are a number of studies included in the book that focus on language learning and teaching and I think that's really really good because if we look at the situation in the UK there is a really worrying decline in the take up of languages and I think you are all aware of that so many adults in the UK only speak English unless they have a migration background and so possibly have access to another language and so there are lots of people who have little access to the sort of benefits that exposure to a second language can bring and those are cognitive effective social and economic benefits and I think Brexit to sort of bring that in as well hasn't helped the UK's international focus is really shrinking and all of this results in a quite a worrying narrowing of people's attitudes and intercultural understanding and I think that links a bit to what has just been said and there's also a narrowing of opportunities so for me the sort of challenge really lies in encouraging people I don't know probably especially politicians and educationalists to actually make a push for languages and just make sure that the importance of being able to speak a second language or several second languages is recognized so that's my sort of pitch thank you so much very valuable is Regina and summer would you like to close this question now please yes so grand challenge for open learning so in my opinion and I might be wrong obviously sustainability but that's not new so the challenge this challenge was always there and one of our liver human fellows actually Dr. Nguyen has done some amazing work on this students engagement in open learning environment making open and accessible learning resources is one thing and keeping the learners engaged with those resources is another thing so yeah sustainability keeping them afloat readily available and engagement in my opinion is a skill at end thank you I want to close the question with a quick fire answer and we'll go in the order that we had just now so we'll start with Eileen so I want you in two three words now so that we can leave the our visitors our participants with some keywords let's say reverberating in their ears about what building on what we've got here and we've done and what areas of research should be funded going forward now Eileen if you'd start please thank you I'm going to steal Bart's I'm going to say read capturing truth and reason in the open world learning community thank you Eileen privilege of going first I have a quick rethink Bart I'm going for unique learning trajectories thank you Regina okay and I'm going for today's digital transformation especially in education and a pedagogy of multiliteracies thank you thanks to summer and then to uh garyl yeah I'll go for innovation and sustainability let's go innovative thank you and then I'll I'll have the final word with uh we should be focusing on community driven learning thank you all so much thank you for being such good sports a very interesting panel and also not only that really thinking about these big issues which we all need to be addressing and especially in the OU now with our big focus on societal challenge but thank you all so much it's been such an enjoyable afternoon and I'd like to ask you all to um show our appreciation for our panel and I'd like to hand over to Bart now to close the afternoon thank you so much yeah thank you so much to all the panel members and the amazing chairing by Denise and thank you for attending this this event we've seen people from across the globe again attending and we know that lots of people because of the limitation of time zones we are currently at nearly three o'clock UK time which is not very convenient for our friends for example in Australia to join but I know that they will watch the recording so thank you also for those who are watching this afterwards also I'm really grateful for all the Leavium students that were here today but also who were unable to make it because of time zone issues and the 30 plus supervisors have done a fantastic work and I also would like to in particular thank James, Michelle and Christina for the amazing support in making this this event possible of course I would like to be very grateful to Leavium sponsoring 15 out of the 18 students and I also am very grateful for the three sponsored students by the Open University again the book is available from now on words today and if you are interested in the work we're doing we will keep posting all our amazing work on our website it.open.ac.uk so thank you so much for joining and well see you somewhere on this open planet bye for now