 So I think we're going to go ahead and start as I said welcome to this webinar, which is the embracing new pedagogies for new times, the rainbow after the storm of the pandemic and it is the last webinar series of the summer. And there'll be more webinar series being offered in the fall and of course, please be sure to stay. Keep a good look on our website and we'll keep you updated on all of the new developments in terms of in terms of webinar sessions. And today we have with us four very wonderful speakers. We have Dr. Roshin Lyons, who is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and innovation, who is formerly from DCU and is moving to the University of Limerick. And we've got Katra and Otrell Katz, who is a professor in educational science at the University of Graz in Austria. We've got Marta Markowski, who is a policy officer in digital education from the European Commission. Very excited to have her here. And we have Thomas Reiberg, who is a professor in the Department of Planning at Albert Center for Problem-Based Learning in Denmark. And so we are going to start with Roshin first. And let me just give you a brief introduction about Roshin. As I mentioned, she holds a PhD in entrepreneurship education, has taught innovation entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship to cohorts in Dublin and Saudi Arabia for over 10 years. Research has been focused on open source innovation, entrepreneurial tendency development and pedagogy, hackathons, gamification, experiential activities for large class cohorts, contacts. And she was a former high school science teacher, and she is now heavily involved in many social enterprise and startup initiatives such as Enactus Startup Week and is a founding member of Team OSV. And the title of her talk is Using Hackathons to Leverage a Hybrid Learning Experience. And I will hand it now over to you, Roshin. Excellent. Thank you very, very much. Can you see my slides, Sarah? Okay. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. It's such an honor to be asked and to be among this panel. I'm really, really excited. And as Alisa mentioned, I've just moved to UL. So this is my first event as a UL staff member. Today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about hackathons. Now, without going into it in too much detail, some of the teams that we've been talking about in education of late, some of them that we talk about in enterprise education, circle around experiential, industry engaged, applied projects, how to build inclusivity into our pedagogy. And something that's very relevant to me is large class pedagogies, how to make something scalable, replicable, and also time efficient and resource efficient. So with those things in mind, you know, we worked very hard on a module that I want to tell you about. We also know that teachers have been evolving their skill set and some of the competencies that have emerged that are even more important for a supposed pandemic are in the lines of gamification, agility, micro credentials, etc. And the module that I'm going to tell you a little bit about was a module I created two years ago. It has over 600 students annually. It's year long, it's 10 credit, and it's blended team taught lots of the things that we think are important in a kind of a hybrid learning experience. We started to develop two years ago, and we were very lucky, I guess, when the pandemic hit in the sense that we had already created a lot of this content, we were able to really move to a hybrid context very quickly. If you want to learn more about this module, it's the case example in a future course about higher education 4.0 as well, provided by DCU, if this is of interest to you. So just to tell you a little bit about how we were blended, and this was two years ago when we started this course, we have a lot of gamification in the module. Students get engagement marks based on the different activities that they engage in online. They had to do mini documentaries as their assignments, e-portfolios were a major feature of the modules. We also did really interesting things like we had required journal reading lists, a very minimal amount of reading lists because these were first year students, but we really went deep into those readings. And we recorded podcasts with other academics discussing those papers in particular. We even got some entrepreneurs to read the journal articles and give us their honest opinion of how valuable those were and where they saw themselves lying in those academic texts. So we also spent a lot of time creating primer videos, content videos. We played around with the timetable, having, you know, 35 minute lectures, and then sending them out for a walk to listen to a podcast and tell us how many steps they got, or do something and send a picture of what they did in the interim, the commute, for example, of where they were. So we really tried to, you know, do something a little bit novel. We realized that students were going through quite a lot. They were in lockdown at the second iteration of this module. So we tried to meet them where they were. And the other thing that we did, which was a large part of our course and which I want to talk about is hackathons. So if you're not familiar with these, because they do come from the computing innovation entrepreneurship side of the house, originally, not necessarily anymore. But their experiential workshops or learning events, they can be held over a day, a weekend, a series of a couple of days. And they are really innovative. They involve when they're designed carefully, they involve a lot of opportunity recognition, needs assessments, creativity, innovation, pitching and priming, working in teams and meeting industry. And I think they have a huge potential going forward, where potentially students may not need to be on campus all of the time, but when they are it should matter and it should count. And I think that this is something that if you haven't been involved in a hackathon before, or you haven't seen them try and experience it yourself. So I'll just show you a quick video of where we went from an on an offline to an online course. In 2020, we launched our first ever DCU hack for change, where more than 600 students engaged with over 90 industry experts and work together to find solutions for some of society's biggest challenges. In 2021, we're doing it virtually. We're running a week long hackathon covering the core topics of climate equality and mental health and wellbeing. Each day, students will be given different challenges based on the problems we face in society. They will then work together to come up with creative solutions to these problems. We'll be using a platform called Gather Town to provide an innovative experience for our students, where they can attend talks, take part in activities, competitions and where they will present their pitches around the core themes. Our goal is the hack for change will help to inspire the next generation of social innovators. We can't wait to hear our students' ideas and how they address these important social, environmental and economic challenges. Okay, so you see some clips from the onsite one and also from the online one. The events were both in their own way very, very successful. But I think we're in a really good opportunity to take what we learned from both iterations and try and come up with a very efficient, effective way of doing it. And we are going to publish a paper related to this and the model that we think works well. But a couple of the things that came out from it, our key notes, we don't have to cannibalize speakers by bringing them onsite. We can get really good experts online. We can mix online and offline events. So again, when students are onsite, they're doing something that's very experiential. Experiential usually means intense and collaborative and engaged. And we have to be careful that our high anxiety students and our maybe autistic students are not left behind in that race. Hackathons can be great, but they have to be very carefully developed and not too much for our student cohorts. Teams and students are now different at meeting online. They actually feel a little bit more comfortable meeting for the first time online. So bring it online, introduce themselves, bring them onsite, get them to work together, put them back online to collaborate on their resources. There's a lot of potential there. So we can make really short, sharp multimodal hackathons could be half day onsite with some priming events before and after. And it could be really, really resource efficient for our teaching staff. So just to leave it with you, a couple of things that came to mind for me was will the students miss our chat function on Zoom when they return to the classroom? I think that they will. Do we need to be reintegrated into our classrooms? How do we feel as teachers? And I'm really excited about a few things. One thing in particular for social innovation and social enterprise is the or getting students to empathize with people around the world by giving them a virtual reality experience of someone in a war-torn country, someone in a climate change context, giving them that optics. I'm really excited about the rainbow, and I hope you are too. Wonderful. Thank you, Rosheen. If you have questions for Rosheen about her presentation, please be sure to enter them into the Q&A area. Rosheen, I do have a question. One of the things that have emerged in the last, well, since the pandemic has started, is that a lot of the latest research is showing that students actually do not want to return 100% to on-site classrooms, whereas instructors tend to want to return to the on-site classroom. What has been your experience and how do you see that impacting your hackathon approach? Yeah, I think students in general, they like to work and they like some social element. But when it comes to recorded lectures, especially for international students that may not pick up something in the first run in a traditional context, I think there are those parts that they want to hold on to. But I think when we're thinking of recorded lectures and, you know, that content, we have to be careful for our temporary staff and our temporary teachers, because there is an IP element to this as well. So I think students will like those recorded parts. They'll like some of the online kind of curated content, podcasts, things like that. But there's nothing like really engaging in a classroom discussion with students. And I think we need to get them to fall in love with that again because teachers love it. I'm also wondering what kind of challenges they may have faced in shifting from the face-to-face to the online. How would you see that shift? Yeah, I mean, I think across the world it was very different in terms of a lot of students had to return to their own countries. And then there was time zones and there was a lot of things involved in that online context. For first year students that hadn't been on campus yet, there was a real high anxiety of what was the norm in college? You know, what were they able to ask questions about and what were they not able to ask questions about? They really had no induction into college life. And I think we're going to have to spend a lot of time going forward showing them what it was like before and showing them that trajectory, what it is like now, giving them that history of what college is and what college will mean to them going forward. We have a couple of questions in the Q&A area from Dustin Hossini who's asking, Hello, just a very technical question. I saw that you used a variety of tools and systems and I enjoy doing this myself. How did you get around and or counter any queries or issues around GDPR? That's a very good question. GDPR often raises valid concerns but like some policies it can also be used to simply say no to using specific tools but I would also be very interested in your response to that. Yeah, we had to be very careful about that and very cognizant of it and actually the platforms and the tools that we used and I can share a list were all web browser based, no login needed or they were internal systems through our universities. So we had to be very careful and even more so when we were having industry mentors and things login. We had to take a lot of time and care in doing that. And it's something that we dismissed many tools on that basis and we had to be able to get a lot of clearances and stuff but I actually have a list of ones that I won't share the ones that we didn't use but the ones that we would recommend it will all be related. We have a website that we share kind of the best practices from these hackathons. We'll give a nod to Gather Town for that online platform. It was really excellent and they worked with us on a lot even giving us sham rocks and things because the hackathon ran over Paddy's day. They helped us to create a virtual parade. That's great. If you could also enter the website in the chat box that would be super. And one last question from Alistair who asks, who says very inspiring example. Roisin, did you do it completely online or has it always been blended? The first time that we did it was onsite. We would have always given the students blended content to kind of get them ready for the hackathon. They chose their teams. They chose their topics. We moved them into kind of teams ahead of time for that. But we went completely remote then for 2021 and you know for 2022 or thereafter, we're definitely going to have a mix. Great. Thank you, Roisin. Really appreciate your presentation today. Our next speaker today is Katrin Marie Ortegaas who is a professor at the University of Gras in Austria. And she has worked over the years at universities in New Zealand, Denmark and in Austria. And her interest is in innovative approaches in teaching and learning both in higher education as well as primary and secondary school education. Katrin has a special interest in teaching and learning and science technology and increasingly works in interdisciplinary research environments. Amongst other associations, she is a member of the human factor in digital transformation network at the University of Gras. And her presentation today is learning and teaching in the digital age time for new pedagogies. And I will now pass it over to you, Katrin. Thank you very much. And I'm just quickly making sure that I also start my slideshow as planned. Yes, thank you also very much for the invitation. I will start or I will use this time that I've been given to reflect on my own experiences through the pandemic and also the reflections on experiences pre-pandemic. When I'm thinking about the changes that I experienced, I was reminded of changing also educational cultures. As you have heard, I have worked previously in different countries and have been lucky to experience the different educational cultures that resided there. So about two years ago, I went from Denmark to Austria and I encountered a really interesting change because when I went into the lecture theaters in Austria, hardly any of the students actually had laptops, but they were taking handwritten notes. And that was quite a change for me coming from Denmark where your normal student group would always work on computers. And that is a significant observation in terms of how people are also used to engage and with the teacher and the interactions they expect. And that of course changed dramatically when we experienced the closures also in Austria and everything had to go online. So for the students there, it was quite a dramatic change and also for the teachers. So it was a challenge for both sides really. What it means was that we experienced an acceleration of tools that had to be changed. And here I'm just drawing on an example of assessment here that in higher education we of course moved from paper and pencil tests or perhaps more classical versions. And I remember during my own studies that I had a lot of oral exams in Austria to a lot of electronic exams that were done. But actually when you think about assessment and I found this very useful mind map here also. The digital tools that we can use and merge them with more traditional approaches to assessment as a form of pedagogy of course. We can see that there's a huge range of options out there. And so the digital possibilities really have amplified our possibilities and really transformed our pedagogies. And of course that has accelerated during the pandemic because we were not able to come together. We were not able to do things as we used to do them. This is this is Lisa just a short question. Are you moving through the slides because we're still on the same? Oh, okay. Okay, thank you. Yes, I am. Can you can you see my. We can now. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So when we when we used to think about technologies, we were thinking about technologies often as tools that we're doing things for us to achieve certain things. But what we have experienced now and also again, you know, amplified and accelerated during the pandemic is that we encounter the fragmentation fragmentation through different tools that people were using. So, for example, at our university, we had, we were using different tools to communicate synchronous or asynchronously with our students. And so students as well as teachers had to become very capable of managing these different platforms and appearances on online and offline. And, and that has, again, you know, increased the fragmentation. However, the this fragmentation, you can also argue is something that we've also always encountered in some ways. And, and the technology that we're using have become tools for ways of how we are thinking. So when we're using, for instance, so as a platform to engage with each other, we've learned that we can use breakout rooms, we can use chat functions. And so that that those digital tools have have shaped this interaction this and shaped the pedagogy around it. What I was also thinking about when I was in being reminded of the activities during the pandemic is that we needed to think about our own and the students pedagogical traditions. What were we used to in terms of our engagement? And how did that, how could we transform that in a way that it was connecting to existing traditions? We also needed to ask ourselves questions about justice, you know, how fear are we actually actually operating when we are connecting with our students who are working at home with their children or in different situations where they had significant challenges continuing with their education, but equally also from the teacher's point of view. So for also for teachers, it wasn't necessarily an easy transition into this online environment. And also, what does it mean to stay human through this increased digitality and with that, I'm just taking the simple example of what it means to be speaking to groups of students who have blacked out their video. So, as an example of the new materialities here, a shift, for example, again, I started with assessment that on the left hand side, you see a typical Bachelor Graduation Certificate with grades and all that. And now we have the opportunity and move into using technology so that students by using e-portfolios can really shape their own presentations and how they have experienced their education. So as a reflection, a final reflection for my end is what I'm proposing is that we have to think about post-human connectivism and pedagogy. What I mean by that is that we've learned that we are post-humans, meaning that we are people who are entangled with the digital environments and the on the offline environments. We are connected with each other, but we are still humans with human needs, so the need to look into each other's faces, the need to talk to each other as humans. However, if we merge these different tools and if we remind ourselves of the humanists and the human needs in pedagogy, we can also transition into new forms of pedagogies that take us further. And this means that it allows us to tinker with our own selves through technologies and allow us to make meaningful new connections. And with that, I'll finish my talk. Thank you very much. Thank you, Katrin. So if you have questions for Katrin, please enter them in the Q&A area. I have a question. You stress the importance of humanness and the area that I'm currently working in after working with graduate students at university for many years. I'm now working with K-12 students. And one of the things that we've encountered in working with the students is they really miss that human element. They miss the socialization at the same time. They hate turning on their videos. They're teenagers. They don't want to do that. So can you give me some examples of how we can bring that human back into the digital environment? I mean, I don't think that there's a simple recipe to that, but I think it starts by acknowledging that we are people in real lives. And so that means that if we have to teach in environments where we are looking into each other's bedroom or office or home, we have to give that space. So I mean, in my own teaching, I had students who had to hold babies while we were having our session or who had internet problems. And I think we need to acknowledge that and allow that for that space. But also because I also work with schools, we had examples where teachers were deliberately taking teaching approaches where they would go into each other's spaces. For example, doing a science lesson and cooking something and showing each other what they are doing and what's happening in their lives. And that really brings us back to making those human connections. It brings to mind the work of Boria Holmberg on empathy and just how important that is in distance education environments. I mean, being empathetic, being understanding of our learners and what they're experiencing is really so important. We have a question from Don Olcott who asks, in your view, what are the detrimental effects on learning from too much technology? Can we truly go back now? We live in a world that technology is viewed as synonymous with progress. We know that assertion is double-speak. What do you think are the detrimental effects on too much technology? I think the bad sides are if we just transition from asynchronous to synchronous without considering that fundamental things are changing. If we try and do as if we are behaving like in a normal classroom, then that's terrible teaching. I think if we consider that the environments within which we are operating have changed, then acknowledge that again, things will go smoother. But of course, there's a need to also realize what was missing when we couldn't see each other and think about ways how we can bring that back, but also take some of the very good lessons that we learned. Thank you, Katrin. We'll now move on to our next speaker in the series today. And that is Thomas Reiburg, who is a professor at the Department of Planning, Alberg Center for Problem-Based Learning in Alberg, Denmark. And he is a professor of PBL and digital learning. And he is part of the Alberg Center for Problem-Based Learning and Engineering, Science and Sustainability under the auspices of UNESCO. His primary research interests are within the fields of network learning and problem-based learning. And in particular, he is interested in PBL and how new media and technologies transform our ways of thinking about and designing for networked and hybrid learning. He's co-chair of the International Network Learning Conference and co-editor of the Springer Book Series Research in Network Learning. And currently he is engaged in the PBL Future Project, which is developing new directions for PBL in a digital age. And the topic of his presentation, and this is no surprise after reading his biography, is on PBL and expanding problem-based learning pedagogies. So, Thomas, on to you. Thank you very much, Lisa Marie. And then I hope you see the slides now and that they also shift out. That's great. I should have shortened that by a bit. Sorry about that, Lisa Marie. You have to read so much. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about expanding problem-based learning pedagogies that come from Opal University, where the whole university is actually based on PBL right from the beginning, since its inauguration in 1974. But I'm going to talk a little bit about some emerging trends, if you will, that are challenging in some ways, how we understand collaborative pedagogies and group work within problem-based learning and collaborative learning. But I also see them as kind of opportunities. So one trend we're seeing is really the growth of personal learning networks. I mean, I think we're really not thinking enough about how big a change that we've suddenly grown big personal learning networks and social networks. It's quite a change that happened with the internet and social networking sites and so on. And it's quite radical change in a sense. But we formed these egocentric networks where we use social network sites of all kinds of more formal or informal parts to harvest and get a lot of inspiration. If you use Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, you know that you gain a lot from these networks. You get feedback, you get in touch with people, you hear about conferences, papers and so on. And it's becoming more and more important for all of us to have the capability to sort of sustain, to harvest these networks for knowledge and create good learning networks. So that's one thing. But that's also kind of very individualized take on learning in a sense, very much about the individual. On the other hand, we are seeing an interesting move towards what I would call mass collaboration, which can both be seen in terms of something like Wikipedia and open source movements, some MOOCs even, where you have a lot of people collaborating together in sometimes a bit unordered fashion and other times it's more ordered. But you can see them as more ephemeral where you suddenly have wildfires and activities gathering around a particular hashtag and suddenly what we'll meet to is a good example. Suddenly something erupts and then comes together and the same collaborations that are happening. Jean just mentioned hack times is a great example of that. But this is also a new kind of collaborative environment, which has come with the technology, you could say. So in a sense, we have a challenge within education where we suddenly can move from the individual to a group to a large network to this very, very sort of blurry collective of people. So all the time and Catherine mentioned lectures and students sitting with computers. What are they actually doing? Are they playing World of Warcraft or are they actually doing notes? Are they connecting to others? We don't always know and sometimes something very important is actually going on and they're trying to find other resources or asking questions of others and so on. So it's suddenly we have these multiple connections all the time at different levels of scale. And one thing in particular I also think is interesting is how the sense of collaboration is changing. I'm inspired by Spiritsis, all edge, autocracies and Engelström's idea of not working. It's not working but not like in a nut. I don't know whether it's pronounced differently. But where we see forms of collaboration where people convene over the shorter periods of time, temporary convenings, autocracies that are formed around particular tasks and then they disband. It could be for two days like where I shouldn't mention hackathons or in companies you suddenly get teamed up with somebody in another department in another country and you go together, you do something and then you disband afterwards. So that's also a kind of reality we see that is happening. And I'm thinking how should we respond to this from a sort of educational perspective in a sense. I'm just going to share an idea of what we call full scale. But I'm thinking of the current model in all the universities that students every semester write on a project that's half of their credit for a semester. They work on a particular problem that they choose themselves that's 15 ECTS and then there are courses and courses are five ECTS and they sort of run besides the project. And what we've kind of experienced is the coursework and project work are sort of drifting away from each other. So the coursework is not really in sync with the approach or the way around. So we've come to say, well, what if we try to reinvent the old way of working with problem and project based learning? If we look at the problem and the problem analysis is the main vehicle of the semester. So what the students within a framework would sort of say this is what we want to work with climate problems or other stuff and courses and lectures become online resources that students can access. They could be self-developed or they could be something that students find from outside that's recommended, something teachers find and time is organized, workshops, discussion and so on. And we then use social media as a way to put these 100 or 200 students together, connect them, let them find resources and develop a learning community amongst them. Where we use social media in a way for them to connect. I've made this graphic, which is horrible in many ways and it's even horrible when it comes into new templates, all the colors change. But we sort of see what if we have these students groups work on their problems and rather than having courses and lectures, we have workshops, seminars, discussions around these. And much more will be based on online resource or external resources or what the students find because we do know there's a lot of great resources out in the open that are available to both us and the student. So this is one idea I had for sort of moving a bit forward with that I'll close. I think I haven't quite followed the script what I've learned, but I just want to share these ideas and how to organize differently as a semester. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas very interesting insights very interesting, interesting example of how we can use ICT and social media and really, you know, create projects and solve problems, you know, using using student groups and how working together they can they can really find the kinds of solutions that we need in today's society, especially in a VUCA world. I just want to tell everyone if you have questions enter them in the Q&A area. And of course, I have a question Thomas and that is, do you have examples that we can look at that you could share with us maybe some research that you published or papers that you've given about that a little bit more information about the problem based learning that you're doing. I'll share some some some links in the chat to our UCPPL Center but but but also this is research we've been doing over many years and the university was kind of based in this pedagogy then we do have some research accumulated over the years. So I'd be happy to share some some some things in the chat. It's difficult to do simultaneously. That would be great. Thomas, can you please stop sharing your screen because the audio is breaking up so I want to be sure that we can hear your response. We have a question from Alistair and he says, Thomas, I see your model as a solution to the hybrid teaching problem we are facing lectures with onsite and online students. We need to get students working together rather than gathering them for synchronous events like lectures and focusing on the process rather than the event. This is also something that that that I'm very actively engaged in with my learners. One of the questions that I would have Alistair doesn't ask a question it's it's more of a comment. How do you get students to the place where they can be self directed in this way to make decisions about their learning when perhaps they've been for a longer period of time then really told what it is that they need to do and not have an opportunity to make decisions about their learning and really take responsibility for it. That is also very difficult. Of course, there's some background to this in the educational system where they are used to doing group work and things like that. Also, we do have training when they start in the first semester we have a five years module on problem based learning and how we are expecting them to take ownership and still it can be quite hard actually. Because suddenly what's interesting is actually I tried to do a course but I said OK, let's do it more like the project and you're more self directed. And when it was a course it suddenly became difficult for them to take direction and be self directed. So really being very clear about it and sort of laying out the expectations and being very very clear and also I think scaffolding the process. So in the first semester there's some more help and supervisors for all the projects and so on. But really sort of being very careful in designing and helping the students take responsibility because you just say go do something. They can't do it so they need some scaffolding and that's carefully designed into the semesters as well. Yeah, I really love that approach because when you see them when you scaffold them through that process by the time they get to the end and they really get their wings and they can make decisions. It's really just a beautiful thing to see. One more question from Alfredo before we go to our next speaker and he's asking do you tell clearly the learning outcomes of each PBL action. Interesting question Alfredo. Yeah, I don't like learning outcomes personally if we do have them implemented now. I think actually PBL is the foundational pedagogy is actually the problem is the learning outcome. So but we do in a semester we do have some learning outcomes and that's a thematic framework where it's more or less clear what the students, what disciplinary skills for instance they need to acquire throughout the course and what's expected in terms of their projects. So yes, there are some clear learning objectives in the curriculum. Great. Thank you, Thomas. We are now moving to our final speaker of today as well. And our final speaker is Marta Makowski and she is a policy officer for digital education in the directorate general for education youth sport and culture at the European Commission in Brussels. Her previous policy work in the European Commission focused on social inclusion and equality implementation of European strategic framework for education and training, as well as working as a press officer. Prior to joining the European Commission Marta worked as a teacher television story producer and public relations advisor in Canada the US and South Korea. She is speaking up to us she currently lives in Brussels and is a mom to two little boys. Our title today is bringing together pedagogy and policy. What is coming up next. Marta over to you. Good afternoon, Martha Makowski from the European Commission pleased to be here today. I'd like to begin by thanking Eden for organizing today's session. I think it comes really at a timely moment and that I think over the last year, 16 months we've discussed quite a bit about digital education and the shift to distance and online learning for the 100 million educators and teachers across Europe. But this is really a good opportunity to do a real deep dive on pedagogy and digital pedagogy and looking at effective teaching practices and learning practices within the digital education field so thank you very much for organizing this and likewise to the panelists who have already spoken lots of food for thought that I will take back to my colleagues. You got the commission in terms of inspiring practices and great always to see what is really happening sort of on the ground within education and training systems within academia that's always very very inspiring for us. Now my focus today will really be looking through I would say the policy lens in that how can we through our work at the level through our cooperation with member states through strengthening best practices what this means for pedagogy. Now as many of you know the commission adopted the new digital education action plan last September so that would be September 2020. And essentially it provides a real ambitious vision for I would say the rollout of high quality, inclusive, accessible digital education across Europe so what have we learned from the pandemic. How can we build on those lessons, but also looking to the future you know what does it mean to ensure that essentially no learner is left behind. I should add that the action plan was I would say co created. There was a large public consultation that took place, both online, as well as independently with stakeholders now the OPC the online public consultation there around 2700 respondents which head into it. So it was a large large sort of interest in the initiative and willingness to share on the perspective of stakeholders organizations education and training and onwards. The action plan has two strategic priorities. The first one is developing a high performing digital education ecosystem, and this is really the digital readiness of education and training systems. So we ask ourselves, you know what do we need in place to deliver on effective digital education it's sort of the stuff the, the infrastructure the connectivity, the pedagogy, the digital education content. Highly skilled committed educators and teachers, and the second priority is really looking at enhancing digital competencies for the digital transformation. So here we're really looking at skills, competencies, digital literacy, computational thinking, stem, all these elements that come together. And also to add, you know, we can't really speak of the digital transformation of education and training systems, without really looking at pedagogical practices, in terms of what do we mean by interactive learning. How can pedagogy help foster and promote learning that looks at really the individual needs of the learner, looking at inclusion, collaborative learning, learning through working in groups, critical thinking. All these interesting aspects that really come into play, if we look at the pedagogical aspect within within the bigger digital education arena, if I can call it that. And I think we can go to the next slide. Now if we look at delivering on pedagogy, there are sort of, if we look at the work that has come out, the lessons learned, the evidence, which we also discovered through the online public consultation leading up to the adoption of the digital education action plan. There are several sort of what I would call sort of policy pointers. Big flames that kind of tell us, you know, where to go and what we should be looking at, in terms of how best to develop policy, but also where are the needs where the gaps and what do we need to address for our work at EU level. And essentially how can we help member states across Europe delivering on, you know, high quality digital education and pedagogy. So obviously the first, the first sort of pointer that we come to is the importance of teachers and educators and we can't address digital education or pedagogy in classrooms without this in place. Now we know the pandemic revealed real shortcomings when it came to the preparedness of teachers and educators to use digital technologies. We have evidence on this. I think around 39% of teachers in the EU felt well or only very well prepared to use digital technology. So less than half of the opinion that, you know, I know how to use ICT confidently. I'm ready to see how a technology in classroom can help enhance learning how to make it more interactive and personalized. Now we also know that simply, you know, introducing technology in classrooms is not enough. It's not just a case of putting, you know, laptops and iPads into classrooms. There is a need there for robust planning, the role of the organization in terms of what needs to be placed to be in place to ensure that this sort of effective use of technology takes place. The second aspect is really the role of technology and how do we use it to help foster learning and promote learning. And it's not simply replicating teaching practices. It's not simply saying we have face to face, but then we're going to add, you know, a little bit of tech and then we're going to help that magically this all comes together. We have capacity and planning for organizational change in terms of vision led organizations, education training institutions that have statements, you know, that have certain statements within the charters of how they're run saying that we will invest time in the training of our teachers. We will ensure that, you know, technology is in place, but all the other elements that need to be there. And obviously this is not a one off. It's not simply saying we're going to do this once and we're going to go for the best. It's a continuum of monitoring, of evaluation, of looking at what works, of benchmarks, of mutual learning of inspiring practices between member states. So it's a real continuum when we look at this. And in terms of pedagogy, you know, how do we blend effectively pedagogy with digital technologies. And one of the key lessons that came out of the COVID pandemic is really the preparedness of education and training institutions and member states. And that member states that were prepared with the role of digital education content, infrastructure with connectivity in place. These were the member states that were able to, to I would say, you know, quickly adapt when we have shutdowns. I'm just looking at the clock here. So maybe we go to the next slide. Now in terms of what are we doing at member state level to deliver on this to help bring together the policy and the pedagogy. So these are initiatives that are in the digital education action plan. One of the, the first initiative actually is a strategic dialogue with member states. We will be working towards a possible recommendation where the commission will provide guidance to member states on what we are calling the enabling factors. So what is needed to deliver on digital education for all connectivity infrastructure gaps pedagogy is one of them, ensuring that we have close dialogue between education and training institutions and stakeholders that is something that is coming up. We also have a council recommendation coming up on blended learning for high quality and inclusive primary and secondary education. And the goal here really is, you know, not only what have we learned from the pandemic, but how do we support learning that includes a blend of learning tools to digital non digital online. How can this come together and how can the support education and training looking to the future. We have the Erasmus teacher academies which are part of the European education area. And here we will be looking at policies and practices including, you know, rolling out a network of cooperation, but specifically also looking at digital literacy and digital education and how can we inspire ourselves through what is happening across Europe. We have Selfie for teachers, which is a self reflection tool, and essentially it will provide teachers with a snapshot of where they are in the digital skills and competences, but also where do they need to be, and how do we get there. This is a tool that we're piloting currently, and it will be available in all EU languages by the end of this year 2021. We also have our Erasmus program which we are thrilled we have 28 billion euro over the next period with the digital being a key priority so I think that speaks volumes in terms of the importance of digital education and sort of the political and financial backing and the priority has become. And then lastly we are producing guidelines for teachers and educators and this is really on pedagogy for disinformation and digital literacy so how can we help our teachers. promote digital literacy how can we help them address critical thinking in the classroom with the view of addressing disinformation. And the second set of guidelines is on artificial intelligence and data usage in education and training so very forward looking very excited about these two initiatives and both sets of guidelines will be rolled out in September 2022. As back as part of a larger back to school campaign that we will be launching across Europe. That's me I tried to be as brief as I could bringing pedagogy and policy together. Thank you. Thank you Marta Wow that was, that was really a lot I'll very very quickly so thank you very much for and you did an excellent job of bringing those two together. I had one question which you have, I think, answered which is has the implementation of the digital education action plan has it has it accelerated as a result of the pandemic and in what way. I think you have answered that question but if you have any additional comments to that please please. Maybe just quickly in 20 seconds, you know the spotlight and the importance of bringing digital digital education to the political agenda, and not only within, you know, not only within education and training institutions but really it's being you know high on on political and the amount of work that we see now coming out the visibility of the policy agenda gets the strategic dialogue that we'll be undertaking with member states I think this is really just, you know, real evidence and proof that it's there it definitely provided the push that we have been waiting for over the years. Exactly. I can go over another 10 minutes or so if people have additional questions that they would like to ask the panelists. There is one question for you. Marta, which is from Dustin Hosini and he has said we have seen the rise of right wing even fascist tendencies within the realm of politics is fostered by a lack of media and critical media literacy in the world. So, what role would you play within the digital education action plan? This is an excellent question and this is actually a file that I'm working on so thank you for that question one of the actions within the action plan is these guidelines that we are producing for teachers on how to help them inform young people of the challenges of disinformation and how to promote and to ensure that we get the real expertise off the ground, the tech companies, the broadcasters, the journalists, the civil society, the commission launched a call for an expert group which just closed last Tuesday. And we will be launching the expert group in the fall. So the idea is over the next 13, 14 months these experts representing a wide range of expertise will use their knowledge and their insights together because we want to sort of equip our teachers with the best guidelines with something really specific that they can use because there's a need for it as well. So that would be my short reply to that question. Definitely definitely there is there's definitely a need for them. Thank you. Are there additional questions that people would like to address to everyone in the panel and take about five or 10 minutes I don't I don't want to take up too much time from the panelists, but we're having this is such a great topic and people are engaged with their questions so it would be great if we can if we can continue the conversation at least for another five minutes or so if that's okay. There is a question in the chat, which is can policies adapt beyond member states what sort of support is there from the EU and that's from a note on a Radha and I'm not even going to try to pronounce your last name. So if you could perhaps address that. Yeah, I mean on the policy side, there's two ways of looking at it there's the funding through our program so example through Erasmus plus the Erasmus plus program which funds policy reform strategic partnerships exchanges mutual learning that go beyond our EU borders through the partner countries. So that's one element. The other melon element is really the inspirational work so for example, if we look at some of the best practices that we are getting together. If we look at the guidance that we'll be providing to member states on distance and blended learning. This is just one example of, we can take this and there'll be lessons learn their guidance principles definitions that will apply to education and training everywhere, going beyond the European borders. So there's the policy element, and then the funding element and those come together. Great. Any other questions for our panelists. Okay. Well I would like to thank all of you for an absolutely wonderful session with all of your different perspectives and your insights into into just, you know how we can realize these pedagogies not just within the classroom but at the policy level of a discussion that is really for the future so so thank you to our panelists for attending today. As I mentioned at the start this is the last of the webinar series being offered at the moment and we'll be starting up again in September with a new set of panel of webinar series to support educators and researchers around the world in dealing with the issues of online distance learning during the pandemic and after the pandemic. And thank you to all of you who have come today and for providing your questions and also your expertise and ideas to the session as well so thank you very much to our panelists. Thank you to Eden for this opportunity and thank you to all our participants for coming today. Round of applause for our panelists too. Thank you bye bye. Pleasure. Bye.