 So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see so many of you here today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, I'm the host, and I'm the chief cat herder, and I'll be your guide to the next hour of conversation about the future of higher education. But before we dive into this week's guest, let me just give you some background about the forum. Let me explain a bit about what it is, how it works, what it hopes to accomplish, and then we'll introduce this week's terrific guest. To begin with, you should know the forum is a conversational venue. What I'm doing right now, talking at you and throwing a couple of slides in your direction, this is just the introduction. The rest of the hour is devoted entirely to discussion, to argument, to back and forth, to support, thinking out loud together. That's the idea. This is also a venue where we have an incredibly diverse range of people participating. We have people from all over the academic world, from faculty members to technologists and librarians, students and presidents, provosts, and we have people who are adjacent to academia, people who work in consulting or publishing or in governments or nonprofits that are concerned with post-secondary education. We have folks from all over the United States as well as from other parts in North America, as well as folks from Western Europe and some parts of East Asia. It's an incredibly rich group of people, as I'm sure you'll find out as we start going. Now, just looking ahead a little bit, the forum is going to be continuing to cover major topics that shape colleges and universities. Over the next few weeks, you can see topics including how to support equity, how to reinvent public universities. We have two very, very different ones. They're presidents, respectively. We also have a look into the science of learning once more. They'll look at student analytics and also a question of leadership and how that works in higher education. If you'd like to learn more, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us. And if that URL is new, that's because that's our new website. So if you'd like to take a look at that, please go ahead. It's just starting off, but it has all the stuff. Now, we can only do this work with the help of some generous supporters, and I always want to thank them before we proceed. To begin with, I want to thank NizerNet in New York State. That's a nonprofit that helps that state colleges and universities do great things with each other and professional development and also helps them with high-speed broadband connections. We're very impressed with their work and we're delighted that they can support us. We're also grateful to Shindig because, as you can see, Shindig makes available the technology we're using right now. Now, if you're new to it or if you're all zoomed out or you haven't been here for a while, let me just explain how this functions and how it supports conversation. Where I am right now and where this slide is just for a minute is called the stage. This is where our guest is going to be, and this is where you can be too. Think of it as the stage in an auditorium. Now, right below us, if you look across the bottom half of your screen, you should see a bunch of different people. Sometimes you can see their face looking at you. I can look at St. Walker right now or Roxanne Risken. Sometimes you'll see a silhouette. Sometimes you'll see a couple of people gathered around, but each of those represents a login from somewhere in the earth. If you'd like to learn more about one of those logins, just mouse over them and you'll get a little text tag. If I look, say, at Andrea Boquima, I can learn that she's at Cornell University. If you'd like to have a private conversation with them, just double-click on them. If they want to speak with you, your two icons will snap together like Legos and you have your own private audio-visual bubble. Think of it as leaning over to somebody in an auditorium and whispering together. But I said this is about conversation in general. How do you participate in that? There are a few key ways. Look in the bottom of your screen. You'll see running along at a white strip, and that has a few different key buttons. On the leftmost edge of it, you'll see a number. Right now I've got 76, no, 78. That's the number of people involved in this conversation. If you click on that, up will pop a couple of boxes, one that lists everybody, but also a chat box where you can chat with everybody else here. So if you haven't done that yet, just say hi and where you're from. Already we've got people who are saying hello from Connecticut, from South Africa, from Scotland, from the car in Senegal, from Colorado, from Florida, from Ireland. Wonderful group. Now, back to that white strip. The key thing here is a couple of different buttons. One of them is a question mark and one of them is a raised hand. If you press the question mark, up will pop a box into which you can type your question or your comment. And I get that immediately as soon as you send it. And when the time is right, I'll flash it on the screen for our guest to look at and answer, and I'll read it out loud so everyone can hear it as well. Now next to that, on the white strip, you'll see that raised hand button. If you press that, that tells us you want to join us up here on stage. So if your camera is on, and your microphone is on, and you want to be face to face with myself and best of all our guests, just press that button. And when the time is right, I'll press another button, and up you'll be face to face joining us up here on stage. It's that easy to do. So those are the major ways people tend to interact. They do the question answer button, or they click the video. In fact, if that clicking is too much, I'll just make, I'll show you, I'll make an even special button for you all to click on. Now, if you're on Twitter, if you'd like to tweet out from this session, and sometimes people do that, just use the hashtag FTE. And if you can't make it, you'll see sometimes the people who can't make it for bandwidth reasons or mobility reasons, they will tweet into us questions or comments. And I try to relay those and carry those back and forth. So those are all the different ways you can participate. Just use whichever one of them makes sense to you, and I'll be glad to help you as we go. And let me thank Shindig for making this technology available. And last but not least, I want to thank our supporters on Patreon. Patreon is a collaborative crowdfunding support project where you can support somebody's ongoing work in an area. In this case, the area is the future of higher education. So we have people who contribute as little as a dollar a month, which is greatly valued by us to help keep the machines turned on the lights running. And you can see people on this slide contribute $10 or more a month. You know, wonderful folks like Laura Ammer, Todd Bryant, Fritz Van Dover, Maria Anderson, Vicki Tambolini, we're really grateful to them for their support and you can join them. Just go to Patreon.com. All right, now all of that is introduction, all that gets you up to speed about what we're doing and how you can join us. Now, it is my great honor to welcome Professor Diana Lorelaard. She is currently a professor for digital, for learning with digital technologies at the London Knowledge Lab. She is an extremely well-known scholar, a well-known pioneer, a well-known researcher, and thinker about how to teach online. In fact, if you go to her Google Scholar page, you will find that she is currently being cited by 19,375 different articles and books, nearly 6,000 just in the past five years. She's one of the world's great squalors, and I can think of no better person to help us think about teaching online. Welcome, Professor Lorelaard. Thank you so much, Brian, and for this fantastic opportunity. I think what I really have to start by saying is to apologize to you and to this community for failing to turn up to the last gig. And as you understood, I had a student crisis to deal with, but I'm just so grateful that you forgave me and gave me a second chance, so thank you very much. That you are this caring of students is one of the reasons we love you. And that's why we're here for teaching. Thank you. I also appreciate you coming here a bit later. It's around, what, 1900 hours there or so? Yes. Well, thank you for coming here in the dark. Did you have to adjust your time as well to make it earlier? Not this time. We actually, it's taken a little while to settle it, but this is kind of the best time for grabbing as much of the Earth's surface as we can. We're actually thinking about spawning a future-transformed East in order to get Eurasia covered because we really can barely touch Eastern Europe and most of Asia. Well, I'm so glad that this kind of navigation and timing and so on was invented in London because it put us at the center of time zones. We're so grateful for that, I must say. Indeed, indeed. We still have Greenwich. We still have Greenwich. We still have them already on. At least we have that. If you take everything else away. We take everything else away. We've lost the empire. We've lost Europe. We lose a lot of things, but we still have them already on. That's good, just in time. Well, I like to ask people to introduce themselves in an unusual way, and it's a forward-looking way. And the way is to say, what are you going to be focusing on for the rest of this year? What are the big projects and what are the big ideas that are going to be top of mind for you? Well, I think this coming year is going to be one of the most exciting that we've ever had in education because we're just coming out of one of the most tumultuous years we've ever had, and with a lot more knowledge about some very interesting things than we've ever had before. A lot more experimentation has been going on with online and blended learning. The interesting thing is that people have discovered that it's not quite what they thought it was in two very important ways. One is that it's not second rate. It's not worse. It's different. It's tough. It's hard work and so on. And it's definitely not a cheap version of campus-based teaching, at least as far as teacher time is concerned. I mean, you're not providing a campus, of course, but the campus will still be there in the end. So this coming year is going to be a year of rethinking, reinventing, reimagining what higher education can be now. And we've got a lot of minds on that, a lot of very brilliant minds thinking about this because they've now experienced what we can do in online learning in such a different way. So this is going to be hard to harness, I think. I mean, I've spent my life advocating for this and there are people on this call. I know who've done the same. Phil Long, I know this is on the call. I'm delighted to see him. Phil and I go back some decades now, Phil, I think, of trying to get the rest of the world to understand what we've got here and this extraordinary toy box of different kinds of technologies that we can play with. And it took a pandemic to enable the world to realize what this is. But now everybody's going to take it, run with it, think they know, and think that their version of the future is going to be the right one. I'm going to have a tough time of it, I think, actually kind of reining them in and saying, hang on a minute, think again and don't go down that route and think about this because it's, you know, you don't know it all, basically. So I think we're going to have quite a tough time but it's going to be so interesting. Yes, yes, indeed. Thank you, thank you. That gives us a great glimpse of your vision and where you're thinking about this. Friends, two quick notes for a meta level. The first is that this is your forum. This is your venue for questions and answers. Please don't let me hog the mic, I'm just a facilitator. So any questions, comments, thoughts you have, again, remember just to use on the bottom strip along the screen, just use the raised hand to join us on stage or just quickly question mark with your comments and questions. And the second thing is for those of you who are in the middle of very, very bad winter storms, please be careful. And if you are in danger of losing power, if you are about to run out of connectivity, please let me know and I can take your questions first in order to make sure that you get in before you have to get out. So think of questions, think of, and before I could even finish that sentence, even before I could finish saying that, we have our first comment and question. And this is from a wonderful doctoral student at the University of Maine and FENSI. And she has, what are you cringing about that you hope will not continue as people adjust to distance education? What I, it's a very nice question. What I always cringe about is to focus on the technology. Focus on technology first. And that's a terrible mistake. You've got to start with, what is the student needing and what's, how can technology help? So, I mean, it's what we say always in learning design, you know, you start with learning outcomes, you focus on the goal in other words. So be very clear about the goal and don't just pitch in because you happen to know this technology or you happen to come across this new thing. So this goes back actually to the 90s and it's the reason I wrote my first book is because I could see people all over the place kind of hungry for these things. And yet Charles taking the first thing that comes on and think, okay, how can we use that? How can we use that? Which only gets you so far. And the most important thing was to come at the technology with a critique with a sense of, but I want this, what can the technology do for this? And to a great extent, I think the advances in technology that we've had over the past, well, let's say 30 years. We've in education, we've harnessed them, we've brought them in, we've borrowed other people's technology. You know, most of the technologies we use in education, honestly, are made for business or gaming or the commercial world or something like that. All kinds of things that we've adopted and adapted. The things that we've made for us, things like virtual learning environments, honestly, the quality of those in comparison with everything else we use is honestly pretty poor. So the most important thing is to think about what we need and VLEs without knowledgeable academics saying, but we need this. This is how we teach. This is how we want to communicate with students. This is how we want to be able to listen to students or engage them and so on. So you must not start with the technology. You've got to start with what we need to do. And that's what I cringe about. So thank you for that question. Thank you, indeed. And what a perfect answer. And I know you're in Maine, you're used to snow, but please stay nice and safe. Professor Laurel, you mentioned Phil Long. Yeah, please call me Diana, Brian. I'm happy to call you that. Thank you. I tend to default to the formal and especially when I'm star-stracking. But Diana is such a fantastic name. I can't resist. You mentioned Phil Long earlier and naturally he has a question and naturally it's a deep one. How much of a sudden transformation to online for many might lead to a misplaced association of the rough edges of that transition as a perception of what online learning represents? Gosh, just leave the question up there. There's a lot of causes in that. Yes, there are. How much of a sudden transformation to online for many might lead to a misplaced association of the rough edges of that transition as a perception of what online learning represents? Okay, yes, so it's tough and it's tough for those who have not particularly been used to it and you launch into trying to do your first online lecture and it's a mess and the students don't put their videos on and the interaction is awful and you hate it and you think, oh, technology is not for me. So I'm taking it, that's the kind of transition that you're thinking in terms of, Phil, and it will always be rough at the edges there as soon as it can go wrong with technology. But I must say I've been pleasantly surprised by the extent to which in the academic community that I'm aware of at least, the teachers have been tolerant and partly I think it's because in over the last, I would say 20 years for academics, they've become so digitally literate that they do know how these technologies work and especially in universities, we've been using them for research collaboration for a long time now. So we're reasonably comfortable in the digital space and in the way that 20 years ago, we certainly went through even 15 years ago. So for a lot of people, they're quite intrigued by the technology and they've worked at it and made good use of it. The first thing that's happened of course was everybody tried to deliver 50 minute lectures through lecture cast or something and that was awful. Unfortunately, they quickly realized that. So they have adapted and we did a survey amongst our staff at UCL a few months ago now and they were all of them kind, I mean, if you ask them, has it been a good experience? It was a pretty straightforward normal curve from very negative to very positive and the largest number with a 40% saying not sure yet. So it was quite a wide range, but there were a lot of people who had understood that. This is something we can now experiment with and we can take our time to experiment and we'll figure this out. And the student response has been really surprisingly good and they value everything that we've done for them. And even the student union sent a message to the staff saying, thank you very much for everything you've done over these past few months. You know, we really appreciate it. And that's really something. So academic staff in universities that I'm aware of at least, I mean, there's going to be a range of course. And there were, I mean, certainly there was a national study done here. I don't know what the situation is like in the States, I'm afraid, but the national study done here showed that the bottom tail wasn't so great. There were a lot of people, a lot of students who weren't getting anything very good. But by and large, the academic community understands and is prepared to work at making it work because they've done it in their research. So they figured it out. So it's not quite as bad as I feel it would be. Well, that's good. That's the voice of experience of Britain. And I think that applies very well to the US. I would imagine so. And to the rest of the world. All of those conditions are the same there. You know, you have very well equipped and resourced academics in the whole university system who've been using these kinds of technologies for years. So, you know, a couple of folks, they can adapt. Okay. And in the chat, Mathieu Plourde says, he's worried about the people whose perception of online learning is that of those who've experienced only remote three-hour lectures, which does sound like marriage, but I think we're trying to move past that. Friends, those were examples of the question and answer box. Now I'd like to give you an example of the video box or the video option. And I want to bring on Deca, Tom Haynes, who's coming to us somehow from Technus, an amazing person outside being chased with flames or something. Well, thank you for coming on, Professor Orillard. I with Brian actually appreciate you quite a bit. You've been very influential over the last few years, particularly as I've redesigned a lot of stuff I'm doing in the classroom. As I've returned to the classroom after a decade doing, more than a decade doing technology administration. So I wanted to ask you, and I was actually because of some of the things that I did as a result actually of your work, when the pandemic hit, my transition was actually a lot less painful than a lot of people because I had already digitized those parts of the class that were appropriate. And actually, in some ways, my class is better now because I've been forced to create all of those materials that I've been putting off because it didn't have time. Well, all rooms, that's what it was all for. Yeah, and so, and when I go back, when we go back to in-person classes, one of the things that I have been wrestling with of late and looking forward to the next year, and this leads me to my question, is that I'm wondering whether the idea of having an online education or online, referring to classes as being online, is something that may have run its course and that we need to think of a spectrum of tools that include all of the online tools that make sense. There's probably some that don't make sense. That's the other things we hold on to things that we should probably have discarded just because we think that's the best that we've got, right? Like having the railroads the same width as the Roman roads and things like that. We have a lot of that sort of thing in our LMSs. But what I'm wondering is, do you see an evolution of, from having digital tools and in-person tools to having much more of a blended environment to where the idea of having an online class or an in-person class really has no meaning. There's just different, depending on what you're teaching, what you're trying to do, you do more of it online, you do more of it in-person, and that there's a spectrum of activity that defines the teaching and learning driven by the students and the students' needs and the learning needs, rather than being driven by some sort of artificial modalities imposed upon us by the technology. Well, I think that the term we use a lot, and I think you do too, is blended learning. It's meant to really represent the full combination of conventional methods and digital methods of various kinds. And digital methods may or may not be online. I mean, it might be just using digital resource, which you've downloaded. So I mean, there's a wide variety of things. And of course, online itself means a whole spectrum of different ways of using online tools and resources and environments and so on. So the important thing is, again, there are four ways to start with, what do we really want here? And the surveys we should put a lot of students in the UK is that they want it all now. I mean, they like this. They like a lot of aspects of online learning, even in lockdown, not having to commute, being able to spend a lot of their own time figuring out when they do things and when they don't. The problem is that they do need a lot of guidance when they're not with you in the classroom. Now, in reality, actually a lot of our students don't spend that much time in the classroom with a teacher who, I mean, it'll be for sometimes it's 10 hours a week maybe. Some subject areas, it might be far less than that and sometimes it'll be more. But what online teaching and learning brings you into is thinking much more about what the student is doing when you're not there. Right. So instead of just thinking about your classroom and what you can do in an hour or two hours or whatever you've got, you've now got to think in terms of, this is what I want my student to be working on in this subject for this week. How do I scaffold them through that process? How do I support what they prepare for? We've got one hour together now instead of three or whatever because of distancing on campus or whatever the conditions end up being. So I've now got to take responsibility for that. Now, one of the things that was found in the surveys of students was that the amount of independent learning they did wasn't very much. You know, it might be about 10 or 11 hours a week. That's not enough. Yes, I can testify to that from my own students. Good. Now my question to that would be how much do you think they normally do? Right, exactly. That's not that much either. No. Now, in Europe, we have this fantasy notion of credit hours per qualification. Same here. So, you know, it's 1200 hours a year or something for a master's. It's 1800 hours for the whole master's for a full time year and so on. Now, when I was teaching my master's course, I used to ask my students who were on a 30 credit course, which meant 300 hours. I used to ask them how much time they spent. Not one of them got above 150 hours. Not one. No, not one. And that's grad students. That includes Chinese students and their graduates. I mean, most of them are part-time, to be fair. And I'm teaching freshmen and sophomores. Alongside everything else. So, I mean, this is just fantasy on our part. That we provide 30 hours over the term of face-to-face work with them. And then they've got an assignment to produce and here's a book list and a reading list and off you go and you do that and you do a lot of thinking. And we have this thing called self-directed learning. And there's a lot of those 300 hours devoted to that. And that's where the discrepancy comes. And if we don't spend any time supporting that process, then that's what makes it come down to 10 or 11 hours a week and it's just not enough. Now, what I think lecturers have discovered over the past year is the ways in which they can support the students when they're not there. And what students appreciate is instead of having a 50-minute lecture or something, you get four or five, five-minute lectures with quizzes and exercises and things to do together cut in between and they love that. That's what they want more of. Now, that's gonna take lecturers a lot more time to actually prepare because we never worried about all that before. It was self-directed learning. Off they go and you do it yourself. So, I think this is going to change. It's going to require a change in the way that teachers bring themselves to the preparation of student learning. And we're gonna have to acknowledge that. And we all know that online learning and digital stuff and so on takes a lot of upfront preparation. So, it shifts the workload forwards, which is precisely what's made this last year so difficult for people. And we're gonna have to take that into account. But once you've made those resources, just as you said, Tom, when you were talking about what you've made these things that you've always meant it. Once you've made those, they may only need tweaking or just updating a bit or something. Right. That's a lot easier this semester. You get paid off. Yeah. So, if you look at the distribution of your time over three years, and we have an online tool to do this with, the support lecturers in working out if I'm taking this course online, how much of my time does it really take and how am I going to amortize that investment I do up front over three years, let's say? Now, it's a lot of million miles from doing the same lecture every year, but it's different because the quality of what you do is better. And the quality of your support for them is better. And I think that is what students need. I don't think we do a great service to our students if we just give them, you know, 100 hours of directed learning as part of their 300 hours for the course. No. I used all of my... About it. Yeah, I used all of my synchronous time for interactive stuff. I don't lecture it all in person, it's like this. I record all that, or I put it up in some other form, and I say, you know, look at this when you need it. But when we're working, when we're live like this, we're working on dissecting their work and their arguments, evaluating what they're doing. That's great. And I mean, also, you know, a lot of formative assessment kind of things where we're doing that, you know, interactively, and I've divided them up into smaller groups and shorter time blocks. So, you know, I'm not gonna let most of that go. But then, exact, but then the campus work should always be like that, shouldn't it? Yes, right. Exactly. And the notion was you watched the video beforehand, but there's a problem with that. How long is that video? Is it really 15 minutes? And whoever watches a 50-minute video? Have you ever watched a 50-minute video online? Well, I have, but not if somebody just talking for the most part. Well, that's fine. Except for Brian. No, but yeah, no, I mean, the question I have is a little bit more of how much of that is going to, how are we going to do that systemically? You know, how are we going to operationalize that? Because right now, systems are designed to encourage you to sit there and talk at them for X number of minutes, twice a week kind of thing. And digital time works differently. You know, I spent a lot of time writing on that anyway. But yeah. Yes, okay, I think you're absolutely right. You have to do the range. Let me let you go to the dogs for a minute, Tom. Oh, sorry. Oh, when we, well. Thank you. But thank you for the great questions. And we have a stack of people who have a whole series of questions. And thank you, Diana. That's a very, very rich answer. I'm already rethinking my class and ed tech right now response. But we mentioned assessment and that brings to mind one question that came up from this is Walter Patterson, who says, is the challenge of assessment a much greater one than that of learning in an online digital delivery system? It depends which kind of assessment you're talking about. Do you mean formative or summative or? I think he had in mind the whole gamut. The whole gamut. Well, certainly, I think the summative is quite a challenge, but mainly because of the authentication issue. Mm-hmm. There have been reports of huge increase in fraudulent essays and things like that over the past several months. So you've got to have very good authentication and identification systems. Other than that, producing a digital output or product as your assignment that gets summatively evaluated, I think can only be a good thing because it allows you a much wider range of the kinds of things that you can produce. So if, for example, you're trying to get students to describe a physical system, I'm on thin ground here because I'm not a scientist, but say it's something like the water cycle and you get them instead of writing 300 words about the water cycle, you get them to create an animated PowerPoint presentation of how it all works. You've got to be very precise about that. I mean, everybody who goes into creating digital games or tools for students to use or simulations or anything like that, you immediately realize it makes you really think hard about the science in that model that you're creating. Yes. I think that we should be able to massively expand the kinds of things that we get students to do as their assignments, that's one good thing. So for summative, then you've got those kinds of technical issues, which are a bit boring but are sortable. But then for formative assessment, I think we can again look at a much wider range of what we use. And I don't think we use enough peer assessment people are very keen on self-assessment and so on but it doesn't give you the same kind of feedback or experience that peer assessment does. And one of the things I try to emphasize in talking about peer assessment is that the most valuable part of that process is doing the assessment of someone else's task that you've just done yourself because it makes you realize what you just didn't, shouldn't have done, or the things that you could have done. Even if you're evaluating someone's work it's much worse than yours. It doesn't matter because it still makes you think about what counts as worse and how yours is better and how it could be even better. So that process of doing a peer review is extremely important. I don't think it should be called peer assessment really. I think peer review is better because it's a review. It's not an authoritative evaluation of your work. It's a peer. So you take your feedback from a peer and of course that feedback is very often they'll point out something of value. So it does work very well. And as a way of getting students to do something before the teacher sees it, so if you're waiting for an assignment you get your students doing peer reviews of each other it's just in pairs. I mean, just get one other view of what you've done before you submit it to the teacher. The teacher will end up with far better quality work than without that intervening process. And the students have a much richer learning experience. It's a win all around. So that's a genuine win-win, I think. In the chat, Walter adds, yes, he meant all forms of assessment and says thank you for the constructive answer. The following, following along that line or I guess kind of clipping a little bit. We have a question from, and forgive me if I mangle this, Jean-Yves Clamanzot who asks us to think which potential limits of teaching and learning online, do you see a non-formal education? Again, Jean-Yves, I'm sorry if I've completely butchered that. And if you'd like to add more, please follow up with another comment in the chat. Well, I think non-formal education is going to change out of all recognition as well. I have a sense of this because my older daughter works for the Scouts Association. Now you have the Scouts Association then. Oh, yeah. She's at Scouts headquarters and she's responsible for developing the activities which all the Scouts associations now have to do in lockdown. Right. So they have this program called The Great Indoors. The Scouts Association is extraordinary because it's full of all these volunteers who are in it for the fun of being outdoors and the last thing they want to do is be doing anything remotely online. But nonetheless, they've beaved away at this. What an appropriate analogy. Yes. If you're familiar with the terminology of the Scouts. And they've got people like HSBC wanting them to create a financial badge, for example. Now, that's not the sort of thing you're going to do out in the woods, but it is the sort of thing you can do in your home and talking to your family and your relatives or friends and so on. So there's a tremendous opportunity here for all kinds of things which nobody had ever thought of before. Not to take away from the great outdoors. It's terribly important and that's why they're all there. But there are still other things you can do in addition maybe. So yes, I think for informal education, it's just as important and just as transformational. Thank you. It's quite a world away from Bodden Powell. I'd like to see him think about this. What would he say? Yes, what would Bodden Powell say? Well, we have more questions coming up and I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask this again, friends. If you're having environmental problems that Bodden Powell would have enjoyed, please let me know so I can bump you to the head of the line. Coming to us from the American Northeast, we have Alexia Pritchard who asks in online learning, how do we deal with the elephant in the room conundrum of students undergrad needing community and or face to face with professors? Well, they do need that, yes. And I think it's not just with professors, it's with each other. The importance of those corridor conversations, that's what we all miss, isn't it? It's the chats you have before you go into the lecture when you come out to the lecture and you go to the coffee bar together and you talk about what you've done. Those are the ways in which you build friendships and lifelong partnerships and friendships. I mean, those things are so important and they don't happen that way online. And the other things that don't happen are the cut and thrust of conversation around a problem solving process or an argument or a debate or something like that. I mean, online we have to, it's almost a sort of over an art process has to go on. You know, the cut and thrust doesn't quite work. We can't all talk at the same time and let somebody win. Well, we do all talk at the same time sometimes, but it doesn't work online and the way that it works around a table. So those things, you've got to find ways of preserving. We do our best with things like Shindig and Zoom and so on to create the opportunity for those side chats. And I think Shindig looks to me as though it's oriented itself towards enabling that sort of thing extremely well. The interface lends itself to it extremely well. So I think it's very good from that point of view. And we have to encourage those things amongst our students. In all honesty, the interaction between students and professors is not that great in most higher education. You've got the odd minute or two at the end of the lecture and you might get a quick conversation with them. You have office hours or something and you managed to get maybe 10 minutes with them. But professors don't have that much time for interacting with their students anyway. Quite often, I think you can have the opportunity for certain kinds of exchange online that are more difficult to manage in a face-to-face room. So if you imagine if you're in a kind of, you've got 30, 50 students in the class, you're not gonna have a one-to-one with many of those students ever. That's cool. And in breakout rooms, you can put people into rooms and you can notice that someone has not been taking part at all and you can take them off into a one-to-one. There are ways in which as we get more experience with these technologies and we demand more of them that we will begin to overcome these things, I think. But it's extremely difficult and we can never fully emulate what the lived experience of being together in a room is. We can do our best. That's all we can do online. That's a very, very balanced humane answer to a great question, Alexia. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I spent 20 years at the Open University which is an entirely distance teaching university. And in the old days, students would have a tutorial once a fortnight with in a group of 20 students. And there would be a summer school for a week each year and gradually over the decades, that has been eroded and eroded and there's much less of that. But the thing that they recognized when they were setting up this whole new kind of teaching, distance teaching, was how important that face-to-face interaction was. So they built a lot in. And modern life being what it is and students being parents and professionals and students all at the same time. Every single survey done on those students would say, we want more tutorials, we want more summer schools. And yet the attendance of tutorials in summer schools kept going down every year. That's life. That's modern life. I mean, I'm afraid it's the advent of the internet and massive workloads. And caregiving, which is caregiving. Caregiving, caregiving has always been with us. And it's now thanks to the pandemic. Oh, in the pandemic, yes, certainly in the pandemic. No, I'm talking more generally than the pandemic but I'm talking about decade of change here. We have a lot of open university fans here in the forum community. So it's another good thing to hear. We have more questions and I'm gonna bring them up quickly because we're running towards the end of the hour. And this is one from Tatiana Canales. Again, Tatiana, forgive me if I... Oh, Tatiana, hello. And she says, loving her own ignorance will be the most surprising things most professors don't know how to solve. When dealing with blended online teaching, even without knowing they lack that skill. That's a great question, that's a great question. Well, I'll tell you what really surprises me. And that is the number of my colleagues who decide, I want to make a MOOC. What should I do? And the thing I always say is, have you taken a MOOC yourself? Right. And the answer is almost always no. So, that's extraordinary, isn't it? Yes. That they should think they could just swing into this and do it without having any idea about what a MOOC is or what that kind of online learning experience is. So that astonishes me actually, that these are clever people, they're not stupid. But when it comes to teaching, they have, I don't know, maybe it's something about the way we regard teaching and in universities as being something, you know how to do it because you're very knowledgeable about your field. We've always had to worry about it. And the idea of having to train professors is sort of a nasa moment in some quarters. How can I possibly ask the professor of engineering to go on a course on teaching? They can't imagine it. Well, you can and you should. And that's why, because they don't know what they don't know. So, the wonderful question, Tatiana. Tatiana's in the course that I've been running on blended and online learning. So it's a lovely to see you here, Tatiana. Oh, great. That's wonderful. Good question, good question. And we have another question which rolls on a different part of your work. This comes from the splendid Ruben Puentadura who asks, when Diana, when thinking about the sixth learning types, which do you see is best or worst supported in the current pandemic online toolkit? And which would you prioritize for development moving forward? I can't really separate them out like that. Yeah. Because I see it as such a holistic process and for the benefit of those who are not familiar with the conversational framework, it's a simplistic model of what goes on between teachers and students during the learning process. So it's a dialogue between teachers and students on the one hand and students and their peers on the other. And it operates at two levels of conceptual understanding and the practical implementation of that conceptual understanding. And it's derived from decades of research on student learning, but tries to shoehorn all of that knowledge about what it takes to learn and what it takes to teach into a simple framework that teachers can imagine as they're designing some learning session. And the six types are learning through acquisition, through practice, through investigation or inquiry, through discussion, through collaboration, and through production. And production is producing something for assessment centres, assignments and that kind of thing. So they're all equally important. And the point of identifying those is they're all distinctly different ways of students conceptualising and practising and interacting with teachers and other students. So those six learning types pretty much cover everything you would ever want to do with your students in any sector, in any subject area. And people will say, well, what about problem solving? Well, problem solving is an aspect of learning through practice or something like that. So I'm never inclined to increase the number beyond six because you can't remember. We've had six types of learning outcome for several decades, haven't we? We've managed with that all right. So I think we can manage with six types of learning. So it's a holistic process and you want to include them all because they all enable those cycles of conceptual development and development of your practice and the links between the two, all of them enable that. So the only one I could possibly take away from that is collaboration, because that is a combination of practically all the others, in fact. And I only, I try to make them all distinct, but collaboration is so important, I've left it in as a mix of all the others. But no, I think they're all made difficult by the pandemic, but I also think they are all hugely enhanced by using digital methods to enable them to happen. And I've always thought of that. So that's why I think a mix of conventional and digital methods is the best we can go for and that's what we should be pushing for in the future. Lovely. Ruben, thank you for the thoughtful question and Diana, thank you for that. Nice question. And this is just a wonderful thing for people to see. Lisa, if you are having an audio issue, just try reloading this page. This is the time of the session where we tend to nudge things a bit forward towards the future, and Ruben did some of that. And I like to bring in a couple of questions along those lines. This is one from Case Western Reserve University Professor Peter Whitehouse. And Peter asks, how critical is a transdisciplinary perspective to helping universities become more effective as change agents in civilization? Well, that's a great question. There's a statement behind that question, isn't there? And that statement is, it's highly critical, isn't it? Having a transdisciplinary perspective, and I entirely agree with you. I think it's a great point to make. And this is entirely independent of what's been happening over the past year, but I think what we have seen actually is the way in which disciplines have to work together and the way in which we've tackled the pandemic has been transdisciplinary because we've looked at quite a range of sciences from statistical to immunology to epidemiology and lots of other things in between, which I can't even name, as well as the behavioral sciences have come into consideration. So we have to learn, we have to certainly work and we live in a transdisciplinary world, so we certainly got to know how to work in it. And that has to be an extremely important part of our future curriculum. And I don't think we spend enough time on that. And every transdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary project I've worked on has had great difficulty in making that mesh happen, of making the two sides come together. And you've got to have a common problem, which you both sincerely believe in, and you've got to respect each other's contribution to that problem. And you've got to have the means to work together and spend your time understanding each other's point of view and understanding how you can come together. And that can take a year, it can take years. So if it's tough for us as professionals, how much more difficult is it going to be for students? And they need, that's, whenever we talk about 21st century skills, which I think need to be in our curriculum much more explicitly than they are, skills of communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, all those kind of generic skills that everybody should have. Transdisciplinary collaboration should be one of those. So if you're studying for a chemistry degree, you've got to look at what the sociologists are saying as well, because one day you're going to have to learn how to deal with that community that doesn't believe what you're saying or has been infected by false news or something like that. So those are extremely important skills and we cannot neglect them. Well, that's a terrific answer. And not only do I want to thank Peter for the question, but he followed us up by saying it was a leading question. It was a really good question. I like where it was leading, Peter. Yeah, that's very good. What are you thinking about? I mean, these are such great questions, Brian. I mean, they really are. Well, these are wonderful people. And let me, oh, we're running low on time. Let me bring up Matthew Plurin, who I've cited before, who always has good thoughts. And from University of Laval, and he asks, will institutions ever support making learning content open, tagged, and available so instructors can stop reinventing the wheel to focus on supporting the learners? Oh, no, that's a nice question because it's something I'm very much concerned with in trying to help teachers share their pedagogic ideas. Now, the question that Matthew poses sounds more like the exchange of resources. So if you make a great little video that illustrates something, then can you make that open and tagged and available to everybody? And given that we are universities and we share knowledge, and we still have that knowledge when we share it, why wouldn't we do that? And are we really so precious about our IP or whatever that we don't want to put it out there? Do universities really want to try and monetize what the professors and academics are making? I doubt it really. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we did that? So I'm very sympathetic to doing that in the context of resources anyway, open resources. But in the context of learning designs, it's also interesting because we can share learning designs far more widely than we can share specific resources. So the kind of animation of the water cycle I was talking about isn't gonna be a lot of use outside of physics really. But the way you embed that kind of model in a pedagogic sequence of what the student has to do now in order to get to grips with those ideas, then that's a pedagogy that can migrate across other subject areas. So that's exactly what we're doing with the course that I'm running at the moment. May I just put the link into the chat box? Please, please. Along with, and I've got it all prepared here just in case you said yes. Thank you very much. So this is the means by which teachers become design scientists. I remember that I was talking about that. Is this the future learning class? Oh, where's the song? Ah, I don't know, what's happened? Is that the future learning design? Future learning, yes, the future learning. I think I already told you about it. So that's a course which is, it's called blended non-line learning design, which is why the bit.ly link there is, have I managed to do that now? It's called bold. And it's all about pedagogy and it's for teachers in all sectors. So we've got primary school teachers and higher education and professional learning people all in the same thing, all talking about what kind of pedagogy do we use to keep students engaged over a week of learning when they're at home and in lockdown and they're using their laptops which have a thousand other interesting things to do on them. So what they're doing is sharing their pedagogy ideas and you really can migrate those across because we all share pedagogies and we all share lectures and tutorials and assignments and discussion groups and all the rest of it. We've now got a huge new collection of pedagogies due to use of digital means. So what is the optimal learning sequence that you put people through? And the learning designer is just a tool which is a means of sharing your learning design. So it's meant to be a bit like enabling the teaching community to be more like the academic community. As researchers, we all, we would never dream of just diving into something without looking what someone else has done. We borrow, we adopt, we adapt, we test it out, make our own thing with it and then we share our product back with the rest of the community. That's what we're doing to build knowledge and science and scholarship in the arts and humanities and so on. We don't go into teaching and we could. We should. But we don't want to exchange, lengthy journal papers. That's not really the point. The thing we want to exchange is a representation of this pedagogic idea. So that's what the learning designer does and the course embeds that to enable teachers to think about, well, how do we manage this process of converting it? Well, you have a bunch of fans who've just popped up in the chat box to Ijeon, who I believe is Finnish, and Elena Farasakos, an amazing class, which is great. But speaking of amazing class, we're almost out of time. So I've got to ask you, I'll take the moderator's privilege here and ask you an outgoing question, which is at some point, we will have ended the pandemic. The COVID will continue to proceed, most likely, but along the lines of influenza, something that we have treatment for, we have vaccinations for, and so on. So it spreads and it does damage, but it's more controlled and more maintained. The question I have for you is, what happens to online learning at that point? Do we get a massive rush back to the in-person class that our friends in Boston wanted to see? Or do we have a kind of net digitization of higher education? What happens at that point? We adopt blended learning. And for...