 Hello everyone and welcome back to UCAT Festival TV with me column Cronin and today I am absolutely delighted to be joined by Dr. George Steele. George, how are you doing? I'm doing well yourself. I'm not too shabby, of course. This is a little bit different this year, ordinarily at this time for an international conference. I imagine you would either be in the UK or making your way over. I would have, if I had my brothers, I would have been over there for a week already. Have you been to the UK previously? On several occasions, yes. Of course, I attended the Sheffield international conference. I was with Dublin, we went back over to England again and Great Britain. We also stopped by and spent a good deal of time in Scotland. I was doing a lot of family history up there as I did when we visited in Dublin. I went up to various parts of Ireland, Northern Ireland, doing a family history. I really regret not being able to be there right now. Indeed, but I think you have done a really fabulous job in terms of putting this virtual festival together. I like the festival team and the social events that are accompanying it. Of course, you are going to have the closing keynote. Before we discuss that, I know one of the things that you have been working on in recently has been some videos in relation to flipped advising for those who are interested in that topic or even as an introduction or want to get to know more. Maybe you could tell me and viewers a little bit about that. Certainly, I appreciate the opportunity. Inflip devising is a concept that really is quite old and one of the things I do in the video is try to show how it is. There was a time when advisors and advisors advising programs used to use an old thing called workbooks, paper and pencil. The idea was to prepare students before an advising session to help them have a more enriched conversation as a way of having the students interact with information, to consider the information and be able to reflect on it in such a way so that in the advising session, we have a higher order type of conversations with our students. So we could help them more than using the advising session just to do introductory type of procedural type of issues and that type of process. So it was to enhance basically the advising session, help the student in the decision making process because it's a little bit more of a structured approach rather than just saying it's out there on the web. All you have to do is go out there. There is the click. What does the click mean? What does it mean to process that? And actually, I was very, very fortunate to work with Dr. Virginia Gordon, who you may know is the person who caught a name there of one award after at Ohio State. And she really moved forward with this curricular instructional approach. And when the internet came out, we started working on two and we used the internet. No longer relying on paper resources. And we also worked on it with learning management systems. So the idea was to start using this learning technologies in the case of learning management systems or virtual learning environments. I think that sometimes people in the UK call them e-portfolios to help students look at the information, consider it. But mostly tie this in with how they end up by creating their goals and their values and how this is related to those type of approaches so they can proceed with their planning. A more systematic way using curated content because we just don't want them out there picking information left and right. Just because maybe Uncle Lou talked to him about it over Christmas dinner, right? So we're trying to really get them down to the point of using curated content in a structured way to help them with this process. Fantastic. I think you did a really lovely job of explaining that. And if people want to access the content, how can they do that, George? Well, fortunately on September 1 academic advising today is going to run an article. And in this article that I wrote but I also was very fortunate I was able to interview folks from four different institutions in the United States who implemented this approach. And each of these videos last between 15 minutes and 30 minutes. And the one I did does sort of the history and an overview and application of how foot devising really fits into the concept of advising. There's learning outcomes, there's pedagogy of critical thinking, and there's an advising curriculum that aligns the learning outcomes in a way in which through the curriculum these could be scaffolded. So that students can have a more enriched experience. These movies that really shift to looking at case studies of individuals who have implemented this in different institutions. One for orientation, one person by doing it as a way of really using the student portal and wrapping these type of learning approaches around the student portal rather than just having a series of links. There's another one where people at the University of Florida engineering really engage students and reflect their thinking about how students develop their goals and what they really want out of college. And then the last example is a really wonderful one by a faculty member of the University of Portland who uses it with her graduate students. And she's integrated not only her learning management system in the portfolio but Google Docs this entire process to help her graduate students. Fantastic. And I mean, you just have so much going on because you have that coming out but also the closing keynote now for UCAT. And I really like the title, How Tutors Creativity Will Save Tutoring and Advising. It certainly caught my attention. And what do we have to look forward to in your closing keynote, George? Well, not to give too much away. No, I think really is helping advisors use the technology tools that we need today, particularly all this has been accelerated with our having to react to COVID-19. We are all now in the deep end of the technology pool. And so I think advisors getting more comfortable using the technology, but really tying it back to what advisors and tutors do. They really want to help students with the teaching and learning approach. That's been my experience over my last, and I even tell you how many years in the field of advising, this makes me feel really old. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of tutors and advisors I've worked with, they really want to do a teaching and learning approach for students. And a lot of times they are forwarded by a number of factors in terms of the way maybe tutoring and advising is organized on a particular campus, expectations of higher level administration, but they still persist. And so because they persist, what I'm looking at trying to do is talk about that creative process. If they want to find out more about the technical approaches to do field advising, we've got videos. In fact, I was very fortunate. I got to work with David Bray this summer and we did a number of workshops on technology. We did three workshops for UCAT members on using technology and doing a teaching and learning approach and meeting the standards of UCAT. But what I wanted to do, take a little bit of a twist on this, because UCAT members also have a wonderful way of looking at their own professional development. And what I sort of want to try to do is to help them begin to maybe reframe it and just state it what it is. They are artists. I think that's wetted my appetite, certainly. And I am looking forward to hearing the full closing keynote tomorrow. George, I just want to thank you for taking the time to speak to me today. No matter whether I speak to you for five minutes, 30 minutes an hour, I always feel like I come away having learned something. So thank you and I'm sure delegates will get plenty out of it. For those people who are watching this, you can find a whole lot more material about UCAT about the festival on UCAT's various social media channels. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter and vice versa. But all the details are there. George, thank you again and look forward to seeing you in Dublin, hopefully in the not too distant future. I will look forward to that and sharing a pint with you. Sounds good.