 Good morning everyone and a very, very warm welcome to our event today, Open Learning and Education Seminar, which has come about because, unsurprisingly because of COVID, and our provise Chancellor for research at the Open University gave us all some money to have a look at what's going on and to do some research around this very, very important happening. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to review and have a look at some of the work we've been doing during this time on the COVID research front. As there are a lot of projects and a lot of people who've contributed, we decided to have a firehouse event. And of course when there's a fire you've got to be quick and you've got to put the water to get the fire out. So our speakers are going to speak just for two minutes and there'll be time for one question. And then we're going to have a short break and we're going to move into a panel event. We've got some very good speakers with us today to discuss what's going on in HE and their international speakers. So I hope you will enjoy that. Please put your questions into the chat. We want to know what you're thinking and issues that we want to raise. And I know it's not quite the same as being together, but I'm going to hand over to Thea who's going to run this part of the event. I see we've got our first speaker who's really quick off the mark here. So over to your chats. Looking forward to it. Speak to you all soon. Thank you Denise. Good morning and welcome. Just to briefly that this is a firehouse session, which means that our presenters have only five minutes to talk about their work. Two minutes they present their work and then three minutes they get one or two questions from you from the audience. I would like to ask you to keep your microphones and cameras off unless you're presenting. Should you have any questions, please you're encouraged to use the chat functionality. Over to our first presenter Simon. Effective teacher professional development or TPD for short is considered essential for the improvement of teaching quality in low and medium income countries. So our project has promoted TPD in Assam, India by the development and delivery of three digital badges to secondary school teachers. These badges help build teach understanding of and practice in using technology for learning. It's a collaboration between three academics from IET in Wells and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences based in Mumbai. The project has three main aims. First to utilize and scale the affordances of open digital badges and the teaching and assessment tools behind them. Each baggage comprises two to four weeks of study and the task of putting this learning into practice. The latter is important and was intended to help address an often frequent shortcoming of TPD delivery. Course materials were offered in English and Assamese to ensure access for all and each featured peer assessment. Significant supports were also provided such as orientation events, a telegram group, forums and volunteer tutor trainers. Teachers from over 200 schools in Assam have completed and earned at least one digital badge so far. The second aim has been to continue our ongoing work promoting a conversation about digital badges at the policy and strategic level, in particular with a view to rethink and innovate how TPD is supported and recognized. Indian government policy recently set minimum expectations for TPD for every teacher. So how is this to be achieved? Last November, as part of a previous project, we held an event for highly placed government officials. In this project we have enjoyed state support and in April, Assam's principal secretary of education himself hosted and issued a TPD badge. Our final aim has been to undertake research into how new modes and processes of digital assessment at scale, such as digital badges, have implemented, perceived and been used. Early research data indicates strong support amongst teachers, so going forward there will be potential to further scale implementation, to share knowledge and to develop new research opportunities. Thank you Simon, over to James for some questions. Excellent Simon. Firstly, can I ask a context specific question? Have you seen any differences as to how the use of digital badges is perceived by students in different contexts, perhaps comparing India to the UK? Yes, and I think very much in respect to the reception that it gets from teachers, it is clearly informed by local existing cultures and use of things such as certification in teacher professional development. One of the things that I think is really important to understand is the fact that there are many opportunities in places such as India to really build and to develop the concept of digital badges into something which is useful for teachers themselves. I think while we may have a particular formulation of that, it is still very much in its embryonic stage over there. We are at a moment in time where we really have potential to help shape that conversation, as I said in my presentation, and to build on the previous understandings of how one recognises professional development and also to form new conceptions of that. That's great. Thank you very much Simon. We really appreciate that. We'd be happy to move on to the next presenter. Hi, I'm Joe Hanley. I'm a lecturer in social work. This research is about piloting free CPDs of continuous professional development resources to support social workers involved in disasters, including pandemics. So social workers have been essential key workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic response. However, as in previous disasters, social workers have experienced numerous challenges in responding to the pandemic, including a lack of contingency planning and training, difficulty being flexible within strict statutory context, and disproportionate impact on vulnerable people that they support. So prior to 2020, the start of the pandemic, I've been working alongside the British Association of Social Workers, some experts, government partners, social workers and people with lived experiences of disasters to develop and support knowledge around the role of social work during disasters. The expertise of this group was actually drawn on quite a bit during the pandemic, and I supported in developing a number of guides and supporting documents for social workers working during the pandemic, including in relation to ethics, self-care, the role of social workers within multidisciplinary teams. The project that I'm undertaking as part of this looks at piloting the use of free online continuous professional development resources to rapidly upskill social workers during disasters or working in disaster response, including during future disasters or pandemics. The online resources have been largely completed with the support of colleagues in the Institute for Educational Technology at the OU and an initiative that I should say that they were also based on an initial systematic literature review carried out by colleagues in the University of Sterling, who have been great partners as well, who identified key themes in research, building on the work of the working group. So we're just about ready to start the pilot now. Thanks, Joe. Sorry, I couldn't see you. James, over to you. Thank you, Joe. Really interesting. Can I ask how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed or influenced the specific need for these materials to be available? I guess we were previously always working with social workers who had a small group of social workers who had experience in disasters, because unlike a lot of places in the world, the UK has been relatively lucky in the fact that we don't deal with regular, we don't deal with regular hurricanes or tsunamis or earthquakes and things like that, whereas a lot of social workers in other parts of the world have a lot of development around this. So we were working with a lot of social workers who had been involved in, say, Grenfell Tower and the response and supporting people after that or the Manchester Arena bombings and then historical things like the Hillsborough disaster as well. But the pandemic has really given almost all social workers, if not all social workers in the country, the experience of working during a disaster. So suddenly we've gone from having a relatively small amount of social workers who had experience working in disasters to arguably every social worker in the country having an experience of working in a disaster situation. So I think that this has driven the point home about the need for specific training because social work, to a large degree, has become more narrow in its focus and quite focused in statutory specific tasks, meaning that social workers can be a bit uncomfortable stepping outside that context. And we really hope that these resources provide, you know, deep social workers the skills and also just the confidence to be able to step outside those specific statutory tasks and to more effectively respond to disasters and or pandemics in the future. Excellent. Thank you, Joe. And if you could give a rapid twenty second response, how will these materials and the pilot be evaluated? Twenty seconds, well, I'm going to be focusing on democratic evaluations. So the idea of thinking about these materials and the pilot within the wider public valuing. So not necessarily specifically just focusing on what people thought about these resources of the specific impact they have on one social worker or one team, but thinking about their wider, broader impact and potentially even things around developing more awareness about this topic. Excellent, Joe. Thank you very much for that. We'll be happy to hand over to our next speaker, Professor Teresa Kremen. Thank you, Joe. Sarah is going to start us off. Hello, good morning everybody. This work addresses increasing concerns about the well-being of primary aged children in the UK and in particular those most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Given that research has predicted that the impact of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable of children is likely to be profound, the aims of the project are to provide rich texts and conversational resources for teachers and parents as they seek to support children's well-being at this time through reading together. That's teacher to pupil or parent to child. Reading together supports young children's well-being by providing a relaxed space to explore issues in sensitive, subtle and respectful ways. From a list of over 150 picture fiction, the OU team selected 30 books that focus on social and emotional challenges such as bereavement or anxiety and reflect children's diverse lives and realities including disability, culture, sexuality. Diversity of course is significantly underrepresented in children's literature. Those books that are available are not well known in classrooms or in the home. We analyzed the books multi-modally and we've developed a framework to assist parents and teachers to select, discuss and share picture fiction. We're developing CPD and home resources to mediate that framework so that parents and teachers can deepen their engagement with picture books and these will guide open-ended book talk in which and foster conversations in which children's voices, concerns and issues lead the way. This will encourage understanding of others' worlds as well as the capacity to cope with uncertainty together. In this way our research and the accompanying resources will support children's social and emotional well-being. We'll be sharing the work through the OU Reading for Pleasure Network that's over 100 teacher reading groups across the UK, 34 initial teacher education institutions and I'll work with over 60 schools and of course our research informed website. Thank you. Thank you Sarah. Can I firstly ask as well as well-being support, is your work going to support teachers as they seek to achieve academic catch-up? Yes, thanks James. I'll pick up that. Certainly it is the case as international research evidence that shows that when parents or teachers have conversations with children around books, conversations count, conversations matter the quality of that conversation is partly based on the talk itself but partly based on the quality of the text and we've identified very high quality texts and so that conversation will feed in to a young child's comprehension, widening vocabulary subtly and unconsciously but over time, but more importantly perhaps it will feed into the child's motivation to read their desire to read for pleasure and we have much stronger evidence that shows the will to read influences the skill. The OECD data unequivocally shows us a clear trajectory between the two. They feed each other in a kind of bidirectional relationship. So if these young children are reading these fabulous books, talking about these fabulous books, they're going to be feeding into their wider comprehension and vocabulary but more importantly perhaps they're going to be feeding into their desire to read and when they become readers, habitual readers in childhood that will stand them in good stead for the rest of that journey because if young people read for pleasure they fly faster and further through the curriculum and into their future careers than those who don't. Thank you, Theresa and could I also ask how will you ensure that parents as well as teachers hear about this work in order to support reading together at home? Thanks, good point. Well we do have a very strong professional network of teachers but in recent years we've been working harder to develop connections with parents not only through teachers but also directly through parents. On one of our advisory board is the CEO of ParentKind which is the umbrella organisation for all parent teachers associations in the country and so we're working with them on blogging potentially a webinar haven't fully explored ways to do that yet but we will be and we'll be linking this in to the OU's booknick which is part of this Department for Education's summer of reading this summer to try and reach out to parents to have family reading picnics as it were and to begin to share it there too. Great, thank you very much for that. We'll be happy to move over to our next project presenter, Hilary Collins. Hi, thanks very much for the opportunity. Our project is actually about the impact of COVID-19 on continuing professional development requirements for organisational development in the UK. What we actually did was realise about October 2020 that people were being devastated, certain industries were devastated by COVID-19 as we all know. We reflected on industry reports from McKenzie and Deloitte which were highlighting certain skills laps and from that we developed a proposal to do some in-depth creative workshops with different organisations across organisational sectors and industries in four nations to try and establish what the job requirements were that were required. We did this using a design thinking technique looking at a collaborative approach, a creative approach with people to define their needs and we used the design thinking approach which looks at empathy first, understanding what the user requirements are and you can see here a couple of illustrations of personas. In order to kick this off we did a wide range of audio surveys with people who've been impacted by COVID asking them what they thought their work skill requirements were and we developed these six personas which we took out to industry and to other universities as a starting point for our discussions on requirements. We found out actually that the job skills that were required certainly things like emotional intelligence and creativity were really very much in line with the future of work field what they had denoted. We also found Sorry I have to stop you, time's up thanks for your presentation. Over to James for some questions. Thank you Hilary Can I first ask what was the most surprising data or aspect of the data that you collected in the project? I think the most surprising aspect of the data was that industry at that particular point didn't have much of an inkling of their job skills requirements and during the workshops we had to go back and actually work with them on what their business model was likely to be first and from there move forward to the job skills requirements that would come from that shift in the business model as we all know in industries like creative industries and hospitality are really looking at how they can operate in different ways now. Thank you Can I ask something slightly different have you got any early insights as to what they consider to be key skills needed for upskilling or re-skilling that would help people secure a job? I definitely think creative skills and emotional intelligence are the key skills and we've reflected that in the development of our new micro-credential which is being launched in June so that people who have been affected or furloughed or lost jobs during Covid can actually have free places on that micro-credential. Great Thank you very much Lynette We'll be happy to pass over to our next project presenter Lynette Thomas at the OU in Wales. Hi there, good morning Bordard. In 2019 I began conversations with Council around the potential for professional training for teachers. Originally this was to look at increasing teachers digital competencies for the new curriculum for Wales which is being introduced in September 22. This was exerted by the more pressing need to support teachers to pivot online as a result of the pandemic. Funded by HEFCU, a Cardiff commitment CPD pilot project was co-designed to support the professional development needs of teaching staff in their approach to blended teaching technology. Over a period of six months we delivered six workshops and six webinars to a range of teachers from 21 institutions across Cardiff from primary, secondary FE the music service and the regional consortium working with the OU's learner and discovery services, the Institute of Educational Technology and the School of Education. Webinars were recorded and made available by the Welsh Government Education Platform Hub to teachers across Wales and we also translated taking your teaching online and open-learn 24-hour course for our Welsh language teachers. The project was also an opportunity to raise the profile of the OU and the benefits of quality online distance learning in the education sector an area where we want to grow our activity in Wales. IET evaluated the project and we've been able to share this learning with our partners. Engagement levels did decrease for many participants due to the challenges faced by schools during the winter lockdown but those who were able to remain engaged felt the intended benefits. The findings have stimulated ongoing discussion within the steering group partners and we are currently in discussion with Welsh Government about future funded rollout across Wales and how we use the OU's curriculum and expertise for delivering blended learning for upskilling teachers to deliver the new curriculum for Wales. This project is a great example of OU collaboration with local partners and in Wales all this our civic mission. Thank you, Diolch. Thank you, that's great. Right on time. Over to James. Thank you Lynette and nice to hear that kind of sense of localisation. Can I first ask how has the project helped the confidence of teachers in their delivery of a blended pedagogy? I think the fact that we had mixed learning groups was really important so fellow teachers were able to engage with each other across all levels in primary, secondary, FE and of course in the music service and they were absolutely essential to the co-design ethos of this project and for example one of the first workshops delivered by OU experts was around online classroom management and came from the participants themselves so I think the fact that we were able to make them available afterwards also helped grow their confidence. Great. And could I secondly ask where do you envisage or hope this pilot's project will lead to in the future? So we have started discussions with Welsh Government about how we can really roll this out across Wales. So this was in a specific local authority area and actually what we'd like to do is to roll it out across education consortia across Wales. So it's something available for all teachers in Wales with the added impetus of course of the Welsh language that we need to do everything bilingually in Wales for all of our public facing work. So I think working on sort of that confidence of teachers and educators being able to deliver online through the OU's expertise but also for COVID but also for the new curriculum for Wales which is a really, really exciting period of change for our teachers and so how to get access to training across the board across Wales will be really essential so great partnership opportunities with Welsh Government and our educators across Wales. Excellent and I think we have time for just another quick rapid response to the question from Mary Jacob in the chat which is what lessons from your project might also be useful for HE lecturers. Well actually we're also working with Cardiff University at the moment around one of our micro credentials for adult learners so I think it's a very different approach in many ways for working with adults and working with young people so I'm more than happy to share our findings for you and send you the report the evaluation with our recommendations should you wish. Great, thank you Lynette really excellent. I'll be happy to pass over to our next presenter Nashua Ishmael. Good morning all I'm waiting for my slide okay, thank you good morning all again in June to August 2020 over 500 teachers and educators from Africa took part in the pathways for learning project through open learning courses to support this shift to remote teaching and respond to the pandemic. Survey data in this project suggested that E-assessment is a challenging area for our colleagues in Africa and more understanding about this topic is needed. This current new project is a follow up from the previous summer project and it is a collaborative approach between the OU and colleagues in Africa. This project goes through four steps step one which is ready done identifying the needs by a poll that has been released with a participant from pathways projects to end up with three to four key issues and in the as a response to their needs to give them priority in the research. Step two developing resources to respond to the needs and step one by experts from the OU. Step three is a dissemination of these resources to facilitate experiencing these resources by their beneficiaries in Africa with the help of the ACDE African Council of Distance Education in Africa. Step four co-evaluation of these resources in real time interactive webinar attended by assessment experts from the OU and from our colleagues in Africa and colleagues who have already experienced these resources. We aim by the end of this project to help colleagues in Africa to customers and tailor these resources to respond to their local and contextual needs and that will inform higher education in Africa to respond to the shift to remote teaching and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you. Thank you, Nadja. You finished before the time end. I'm trying to make it. Thank you. Very prompt. Can I first ask what are the most challenging topics in E-assessment for HEE or higher education academics in Africa? The first hot topic with our colleagues is integrity, malpractice and cheating for assessment. That is one of the hot topics. The second one is E-assessment for large class number and we'll ask about this it's like over 200 students in the class how to assist these students. The third topic it's about E-assessment for hands-on experienced subjects like nursing physical education. Educators asking how can I assess the student who needs to for example take the blood pressure for a student. The fourth one which actually we founded with a team that cross-referenced the other three which is innovation, innovation of technology in E-assessment and of course we consider this the limited broadband affordance and the limited technology accessibility in some areas. These are the four topics that are the result of the surveys. Thanks, Nashville. We have a comment from David in the chat who thanks you for highlighting these challenges that have been experienced across HG in Africa. Can I ask secondly how do you see this project informing research as well as scholarship in the OU? Well we found I think it's a win-win agreement for the OU side where I think that can develop, we can develop learning resources that for our colleagues and maybe other similar contexts with the same approach because as a feedback from this project and also from the previous project we found that there are other similar areas that maybe they need resources to be developed like real-time teaching, non-real-time teaching, technology, developing technology which was limited affordance so similar resources can be developed the same way. Also knowledge exchange events I think that can open pipelines for different initiatives with knowledge exchange between ourselves, the OU and other African countries and other countries who have similar contexts and I think that also may open other opportunities for bidding in the same area. Excellent, thank you Nersha. We really appreciate those responses and we're happy to pass over to our next project presenter. We will have Sylvia Warnick and Maryam Hawke. Hello, thank you very much for having us. The OU's Open Centre for Languages and Cultures launched in 2020 carries significant political relevance. Within the context of a declining languages sector in UK higher education this important investment recognises that languages are strategically vital for recovery and the future of the UK. Therefore this development is designed as a test for alternative learning products alongside traditional accredited modules with for example new delivery models assessment approaches like professional body endorsement and types of curriculum. Our objectives are equipping learners with highly relevant communication skills also in times of crisis addressing disparities and access to languages provision and to fulfil the OU's social justice mission this week. Our principles of working in the centre are co-creation with partners like charities and research informed provision. Here are some examples of our COVID related or resulting in COVID short courses. One is the languages of disaster course exploring ways in which COVID-19 has been narrated across the world in 11 languages equipping learners with a toolkit for critically evaluating global crisis. Another one is spoken English for health and social care workers which is applied learning and use of English when environmental and non-verbal cues are missing due to face masks and PPE. We also do a lot of work in Indigenous and community languages for example our development of British Sign Language for Deaf people curriculum together with a charity and this is informed by collaborative research with the Deaf community to remove their barriers to participation in society. It features a novel pedagogy and means for digital communication. Sorry I cut you. It's fully online. Thank you. That's it. Thank you very much. Firstly ask now that Britain has left the EU is there really a need for more and new language courses? Thanks for the question. Well there is a report from August 2020 almost hot off the press by the British Academy the Arts and Humanities Research Council the Association of School and College Leaders the British Council and Universities UK. It states very clearly what Sylvia has already mentioned that languages are strategically vital for the future of the UK post Brexit and post pandemic. Last week there was a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages and there was a report presented that illustrated that language capabilities are a key driver for the success of small and medium enterprises in the UK. For the first time that report provided statistic proof that language capabilities add 30% in value to expertise and this is really good news for modern language teaching and our short courses in the open centre for languages and cultures are ideal for the employees of these enterprises. Thank you very much for that and frankly so. Can I secondly ask what are the challenges that come with teaching British Sign Language in an online medium and particularly perhaps a more advanced level what are you going to do to overcome these challenges? That's a very good question, thank you. British Sign Language is obviously a spoken language that it's why online delivery needs to allow us to capture all subtleties of signing and related body language so that we can recreate the immersive experience of face-to-face communication with sign language through the online medium and to achieve this we are working with the development team of our conferencing software provider to create a solution that is accessible for deaf and speaking learners and that for example incorporates features like mirroring and we are also undertaking research into effective multimodal transcription of recorded communication using the same tool, same conferencing tool and we are working on the development of a dedicated teaching approach for distance learning of British Sign Language we are going to trial a combination of synchronous modes especially at higher levels of British Sign Language where the courses need to cover a significant amount of content in the relatively short period of time and we are also developing students British Sign Language study skills as well as their language positions. Thank you very much William and thank you both for that presentation I'd now like to kindly pass over to Maria Aristaidu Nashwa, good morning all so the aim of this IT study was to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on OU students so during November 2020 we interviewed 30 students who were studying with us during the pandemic the selection of students was made based on survey responses they gave in a previous study on COVID-19 so in that way we made sure that with our selection we captured experiences across genders, faculties, age groups ethnicities but also the experiences both of those who reported high or low impact on their learning activities our studies main findings indicate that our students learning activities and habits overall were not that much affected and even some of them mainly older students had more time to study during the pandemic students also expressed their appreciation for the OU support and in particular their tutor support however they also highlighted some areas that need improvement these areas were mainly related to their personal circumstances during the pandemic like employment constraints with students expressing their need to have them heard and accommodated to a greater extent. Another important area was the OU communication about changes to the modules with students suggesting improvements and they need to receive more information about the availability of tutors during these times. So our findings made us consider ways that the opinion university could better support the students during the pandemic or other similar disruptions and some suggestions involved reconsideration of the university teaching which is mainly focusing on the computer screen and instead using a greater range of technologies, learning activities and interaction types. Another suggestion is the better signposting of relevant support and available resources and even a space for sharing positive stories for student support. I'm done. Thank you. James. Thank you very much. Could I firstly ask the impact of COVID-19 on the study progress as well as the completion of students? Well, hello again. So actually the impact here some of the students reported that it is negative where they found that's really they are kind of cases of anxiety and feeling under pressure or maybe some of these that then they already lost their jobs. This is a negative aspect but it's not all of them. Other they found it as actually it puts them because they have more time when they to pay to their to their study and it motivated them to the study completion and the progress. One of the interesting themes that came across the impact on the study completion and progress it's the quality of study completion. So what quality the students really go ahead? So some of the students they really for them they said actually we are very satisfied because we got X mark and this is a high mark I didn't expect and that is a quality for them. Other students they say actually we are in this course because it's our interest in the topic and we are really happy because we learned something and other they say no actually because of the pandemic I didn't learn what I'm looking for and that's actually open a pipeline for future opportunities for this project to study what are the motivations for the OU students to get enrolled the course and maybe that we can build up a standardized study to know the motivation at the beginning of the course and during the course and by the end of the course and that will help us to build up a better understanding about the background of our students. Thank you Nashua Could I secondly ask how have students found the communication between themselves and their tutors during the lockdown period? Well this communication is one of the I would say emerging theme across different main topics so it's sometimes it's really down to the students themselves because they are not really willing to communicate so they say actually it's okay it went alright because already I would like to like make it a standard law and study and I'm not really interested to just I would like to do my work other they are on the other hand that they found this one they are dissatisfied because they would like the tutor all the time that to communicate with them and they are really interested that the tutor initiate the communication and other communication for them it's learning behavior so it is behavior that how they manage their learning so it's really what not one size fits all and it's down to the students themselves Thank you very much Nashua and thank you Maria I would like to now kindly pass on to our closing project and closing presentation but certainly not least here's Sas Amoa Marvellous, thank you very much okay so just a bit of context first of all we're going to do this project and we're going to put on the Open Learn Wasting Ethnicity Hub and for those of you who don't know the hub was created in the wake of Black Lives Matter movement last year following course for Global Justice so we thought it would be a great place to have these resources have a hub that pulls all these resources through that show historical perspectives, current day challenges on wasting ethnicity and somewhere that you can have articles videos, audios, timelines and courses that explore themes of race, racism ethnicity across the faculty or the faculties within the Open University yes so the hub was conceived really and developed with the support of the Open University but also the Black and Minority Ethnic Network through which I'm one of the co-chairs so specifically we realized not too long into this pandemic that the research even though it's still happening that a lot of the data seems to suggest that certain groups have been disproportionately impacted by Covid over others and I thought it would be a really good example to actually do a short film to start looking at some of the reasons that the coronavirus has really negatively impacted certain groups of people particularly people of colour in the beginning but as well it would be really good to use the short film to just dispel a lot of the myths the problematic myths that arise in relation to ideas of race and biology and genetics but we thought it would also be a really good opportunity to use it as kind of like an opening ambit for a film that starts to explore the inequalities that exist anyway that have been brought to the public's attention recently. It would be a really good opportunity to see that a lot of these inequalities haven't just started during the pandemic but exist and we've got lots of research as well about all of that stuff in the past and it would be really good to use this as just the opening ambit to really explore some of these themes within a short 10-15 minute film so yeah, our project is going to be a film really exploring the disproportionate impact of Covid on certain communities. Thanks Sass, that's great James. Yeah, thank you Sass and such a poignant topic. Can I firstly ask how do you put together a documentary such as this? How do you script it and choose selectively what you want to put in such a short time frame? Yes, so I suppose I mean it really helps to have something that resembles the structure so you've got some idea of the key points and themes that you really want to raise and things you think are really important to cover but you really also don't want to be too prescriptive as well like you might do with a drama where you can really second guess where the story might take you you have to be really kind of open to the kind of answers you might get from the people you're interviewing and you have to be really open to the kind of case studies that you might get as well so on the one hand you have a kind of a vague structure and you really want to touch upon the key themes but actually try not to be too prescriptive as well so the story itself has an opportunity to surprise you and you can learn something new that you had and secondly can I ask is there much video content on the race and ethnicity hub? Increasingly so we officially I think launched the hub after Black History Month last year but during the course of Black History Month we managed to capture a lot of those events which was fantastic not only because we got quite a bit of content but all of the videos were quite specific to OU, the situation of the OU as well in relation to degree awarding after the experience of staff so we've got I think about 10 to 15 videos that exists exclusively based on the content that was produced on Black History Month which is great, really fantastic to have those there and kind of the accompanying articles as well but I think this is the first thing that we would have commissioned specifically for the hub and relates to kind of such an important issue which is so current so we've got I think 10 to 15 existing presentations but in terms of new fresh video content this would be one of the first things we've produced Great, thank you Sir Lynette has also just commented to say that there is also further work being done regionally in Wales. To finally ask is this exclusively a project that involves Open University academics? No, but we are starting off whenever you would be aware of Dr Jenny Douglas and she's a senior lecturer in Wales who's done a huge amount of work on inequalities in race in the past so she'll be kind of reading on this work and it's fantastic to have her on board but we've touched base of Dr Winston Morgan who's a reader in toxicology and clinical biochemistry from the University of East London he's done lots of stuff for the garden as well and he's very keen to be involved so we had those two signed up and a few others we'll wait to hear back from Great, thank you Sass for the project presentation that we've had during this session happy to hand over to Thea to summarize Thanks James Well I would like first to thank all of the presenters for the very interesting presentations and the very interesting question and answer session I put together a summary of the presentations we hear about today so they covered a range of topics and audiences with a special and I would say expected focus on teachers and professional development across different contexts as we have seen the research activity in response to COVID-19 was not restricted to the UK but also expanded in context such as India and Africa activities presented had two objectives one to capture the impact of COVID-19 such as the impact of COVID on OU students their assessment and study practices that means to improve the OU provision and secondly they sought to implement interventions that have the potential to support those experiencing negative COVID effects in particular they produced resources to support teachers and the transition to online teaching parents and their children's well-being the BAME community most by COVID and enable upskilling or re-skilling for various groups such as social workers, the deaf and BSL communities what is remarkable is the fact that many of these projects did not happen in isolation they were the result of significant partnerships or collaborations with external to the OU organizations such as charities and government bodies showcasing the value and direct impact that research can have when it's happening alongside those organizations heading forward these projects could be seen as areas we should focus our attention and put our research efforts on in particular the development of certain skills to cope with post-COVID changes in society and has the quality and access to online teaching and learning promote social justice and reduce inequalities across communities hit by COVID and support the well-being of parents and children this is the end of the first part of this event and this will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by professor Denise Whitelock and some exceptional guests. Thank you