 Hello again to everyone, I'm so glad you enjoyed the first session from the remarks that have come up. And now we're moving into our second session, our panel event. I would like to introduce our speakers, you saw their photos just now. We've got an international set with us today. And I'm going to ask the panellists some questions. And we're going to, they're going to answer in reverse alphabetical order, but I'll introduce them in alphabetical order. How's that? Just to confuse everybody. So first of all, a warm welcome to John, John Deming, who's our professor here of computer science. He's also the director of the Knowledge Media Institute. And he's president of SGI International, a semantics focused networking organization. John is always pushing the boundaries with technology, but also with learning, how it can impinge on learning. And he's very well known and leads multi-million pound projects. And we've also got, now we'll move in alphabetical order to Allison, Professor Allison Little John. Allison is the director of the University College London Knowledge Lab. This is a cutting edge center looking at the future of education with technology. She's a learning scientist specializing in professional and digital learning. And she's too started a career as a scientist like myself. And welcome. Professor M. Peany Maker from South Africa. And Peany is the commonwealth of learning, has the commonwealth of learning chair in open educational practice resources at the University of South Africa. That's UNISA. And she's a national research foundation rated research professor in open distance and e-learning. Welcome, Peany. We're looking forward to what you're going to tell us today. And finally, but not least, we've got Professor Albert Sangro Mora from the Open University of Catalonia. He has a distinguished chair, UNESCO chair in education and technology for social change at the University of Catalonia. And has since 2016 is a director of the industrial doctorates program at the government of Catalonia. So welcome, everyone. Thank you. I'll bet. And we're going to start with our first question and take about five minutes as we go round the table. So first of all, you know, what was one of the major challenges of this online pivot? And what did you learn from addressing those challenges? Thank you. Thank you, Denise. First of all, thank you for inviting me to share this session with these distinguished colleagues and however friends too, that I can enjoy this period of time with all of you. So, well, going to your question, I would like to start with some words from a Uruguayan poet, Mario Benedetti, who said, when we thought we had all the answers, suddenly all the questions were changed. And I think this is the feeling most of us had when facing the situation in March 2020. This was the real situation. A lot of things that we considered that were the right ways to do things were completely changed. And we need to start doing things in a different way as if we were starting to learn to walk. So considering this, I think that the change is huge in general. So it's difficult to say what is the major challenge, of course. But in this particular approach, I have to say that as you probably all of you know, I'm coming from an open university that is a fully online since our inception. So in fact, for us, there were not very relevant changes at my institution because everything was done in the same way we used to do it. Other than adapting, let's say a kind of saying softening some procedures to the learner issues. For instance, some lack of good connection, some family problems, especially in some Latin American countries where we have some of our students. So we tried to adapt this situation to the needs of these students in order to make more flexible even all the procedures we have in our institution. But I have to say that probably because we didn't experience with face to face teaching, it means that probably we were better prepared or more ready to face this situation, even if none of us like this situation at all. The second thing is that due to the situation, we were asked to provide some support to other institutions. And I think that this was the most important challenge we had, at least personally. And I will divide this institution into big blocks. One is support to schools. They asked for this support because they got absolutely confused. You know, it had never happened before. To move online was something simply impossible in a school setting. So this is not an alternative for anyone, but suddenly in a moment they should move to do everything online. And then most of the teachers and institutions ask institutions or universities like us in order to help them to manage how they can do things in that way, how they can adapt to this new situation, what they can learn from the experience of other institutions that work in that way for a long time. And the third element or the second block of that is that we have collaborated in and lead several university initiatives. With other universities, we try to support them by elaborating resources and supporting the change in the transformation that some of these institutions should have. To do that, we develop a webinar series in order to support the different elements of change. Let's say design, assessment, activities, dynamicization, interaction, feedback, and so on. And secondly, and lightly, we also publish a book summarizing all these tips and ideas in order to help all people to move to this situation. And this book was provided free of charge, easily accessible online in order to make able to everyone to take advantage of this book. It will be published also in English because we publish it in Spanish because most of our needs were coming from Latin American countries. But we are going to publish the book also in English next July or maybe first of September. So the second question about what did we learn or what did I learn. I tried to summarize very briefly some of the learning from this situation. First is COVID-19 has been a historical emergency, both health and educational, and that is very important to take into consideration because it didn't happen never before. So it's important to say that we were in a situation that all the educational institutions were closed and this was the first time we lived that in our lives. Second lockdowns don't let the students to attend to educational institutions. So this is also very important because we can say that maybe, okay, we don't like online and so on, but if the digital growth in reality has been the only escape variable because no online education meant no education at all at that particular moment. So this was something that has been learned by a lot of people in that sense. And we also learned that we could not plan the reaction to the situation, but we know that it could be improved. And this is something that has to be assumed as a learning from this process. We can improve our reaction to this situation and probably we can do it from another learnings we had. First, the digital divide is still a grid barrier. We did know that, but now we probably have suffered even more. That teachers' digital competencies is far away from the expected or desired. That not all that glitters is gold, and I think it's important to highlight this, that remote teaching is not quality online education. And a lot of people have understood that this is true. And finally, that hybridization of learning is already there. And probably we need to think on new hybrid models in order to develop the real potential of technology without avoiding face-to-face education, especially at the school level. Of course, but we need to integrate technology in a different way as we did until now. I think that in order to be short, these are the most important reflections I can share with you at this moment. Thank you, Albert. Thank you so much. Now I'd like to move and ask Alison to give us her views. Thank you. Thank you, Denise. And can I just say what a pleasure it is to be with friends and colleagues at the Open University and to share the day with you today and to learn. I've learned so much already about some of the insights that you've had. I think that the questions that Denise is asking are very important. And, you know, going back to Albert's statement at the very beginning, when we started finding the answers, the questions changed. I actually think that when we started finding the answers, some of the questions that should have been asked could not be ignored. And that's going to be the theme of what I say over the next few minutes. At University College London, in March when we had the closure of campus, we decided to investigate how academics and professional staff were experiencing this rapid transfer to working from home and moving to online teaching and research. We recognized that this was one of the biggest moments that higher education had ever experienced in its many hundred years history. And in particular, we were interested in finding out where any specific groups disadvantaged by working from home. And could universities stop ignoring and try to reduce these inequalities? So in March what we did was we launched a survey which was based on some work by some of my colleagues, Leslie Gurley and Martin Oliver, who you may know. They had a methodology where we asked people to upload photos of their experience and something that would depict how they felt about the experience of working online, teaching online, researching remotely and working from home. And then to write some narratives around this. And, you know, many people uploaded pictures of where they worked. So we could see that people, some were in very nice offices or had repurposed a shed outside. But a lot of people also were working in very cramped conditions and we had photos of people who were in shared accommodation, had a very small room, not much bigger than their bed. And they were actually working literally from their bed and teaching from there. And that was quite distressing for some people. We also had a number of images which depict how women in particular felt about being pulled between their work and also the caring at home. But also many women were taking on more responsibility for supporting students. And we were very interested in the idea of a pedagogy of care in online learning, building on work by noddings from the early 90s where the idea is that relationships with students need to be built on trust, respect and reciprocity. And how were teachers engrossed in their students in these new environments? Now UCL, like many campus universities, tended to move from onsite on-campus teaching to lecturing online and tutorials online, particularly people who didn't have a lot of experience of online teaching. And so we recognise that we perhaps weren't implementing the best online learning or the principles or learning design in the best possible way. But colleagues had literally a weekend to transfer to online. And we were interested in the caring aspects of pedagogy and how that was enacted. And so there are four key learnings that I'd like to share with you. The first is that we found that teachers really need to interact with students and that caring for students involves understanding their needs rather than assuming what those needs are. And that requires teachers to be disposed to students and to make themselves available. And that could be very difficult for a lot of the academics in the lockdown conditions. And as I said earlier, we found that it was women who were tending to make themselves available. The second thing is the emotions associated with these interactions is not normally acknowledged in our everyday work. And that's something that we need to think about. Teaching involves the management of a teacher's emotions and the emotions of the students. And it's something that we really need to highlight and perhaps reward much more. The third thing is there's a personal cost to the idea of a teacher replicating caring pedagogy online. We know that on campus it's relatively easy for a teacher to understand how the student feels and to respond to that. But we found that our academics, some of them felt responsible. They felt guilty for not being there. And also because they didn't have the experience of using technologies to really understand how students were feeling that was difficult for them. The final point is these emotional dimensions are exaggerated when you make yourself disposable to students. And we found that it was quite difficult for academics, especially when some of the students were not switching on their cameras and so on. So what have we done to try to address them? Well, we're trying to recognize more this pedagogy of care and the demands that there are. We're also looking at some of the structural inequalities and we want to try and really recognize these and reduce them. One of the ways that we're doing this is to try to develop much better informed policy in terms of HR and also the support for teaching for students. So UCL has significantly changed policy going forward. But obviously what we need to do over time is to test these policies. And particularly when we return to campus and when the teaching changes again and perhaps becomes more blended. So I'd be interested to hear what colleagues think about some of these points I've raised. Thank you, Alison. And now let's move to Ampini. Could you help us now, Ampini, with the discussion moving it forward? Thank you very much, Denise, for the opportunity to come and present at this seminar. And I listened attentively to what was presented earlier and very, very interesting presentations well done to the researchers. I'm going to be speaking about what we found ourselves in, almost all of us. And as we were faced with lengthier shutdowns and I think for some of us when it started we thought that we will be back to normal in two months or something like that. And then things kept on going on and on and we realized that we need to do something. And governments and everybody wanted to start with us moving into an online space. And then we had to respond to this need very urgently, whether we're ready or not. And this was happening across lecturers. We at UNICEF, it's a distance, it's an OGL institution, but we have not been doing a lot of online. There are courses that are 100% online, but many of the courses are not online. And when we are faced with a situation like this in countries of limited resources, we found that there are a lot more challenges of issues of connectivity, of the ICT infrastructure in general, the devices that people have, the accessibility of those things were just not them. And then secondly, when teachers have to teach and they are used to teaching in a specific space, then you are expecting them to teach in a different environment at a high speed. I might add, they need some element of pedagogy. How do I teach in an online space? And what we found during that time, especially with teachers who are already in the field, not necessarily our student, is that they took their classroom, literally taking their classroom into an online space, where a teacher would stand there in front of a student or a group of students who are distributed all over the place and teach them the way they would teach them in an online environment. And for a young 15-year-old or 12-year-old, it was a grueling exercise. It was not easy for them. It was not also easy for the teachers, but they had to do it because that's the only way that we could have done that. So as we were looking at that, and this was towards the end of April, we were looking at that, we decided that we should try to do something. And this is, I'm going to report mainly on the community-engaged project that we do. Once our students get out of the system, we forget that they have gone out and they can be able to perform wherever they are. So the challenge here was how do I recruit these teachers who are already in the field to come in and just be assisted. And this was really a stop-gap thing. So what we did was to use our networks and invite teachers to those who are already in the field. And at that time, all of them were on lockdown, so they attended this course. So what I did was to come up with two open education resources. One from the OERU on Digital Literacies for Online Learning, and the other one was from OU, Take Your Teaching Online. And I thought that once I give them these resources, they will be able to navigate their way through it. And little did I know that I'm going to get so many response based on this, that there's this free course that will assist you to work in an online space. And when people came through, then we had to think on our feet, organically changing things as we moved along. We realized that we're getting far more than the numbers that we anticipated. With the first email, we got the response of 190 teachers who were interested in doing this. And I thought there wouldn't even be more than 50. So I thought, well, I can handle it. Then I had to recruit other people to come and assist me in this regard. But as we were starting, the numbers started to grow. And we had to come up with other different ways of doing things. And I realized that although people have technologies that we think they do have, they don't know how to use them for teaching in particular. And trying to teach them in an environment that they are unfamiliar with is even much more difficult. So we introduced a wide WhatsApp groups. So we decided to take them back to the WhatsApp groups. And in these groups, it was a group of small groups. And we divided people or students into seven to eight persons because when they are smaller groups, then they're able to talk amongst themselves. So WhatsApp groups had two functions. One was a peer support, was meant to support because we already have content through OER to support them on how to navigate the digital space and understanding how the digital space work. So what they did is that their peers, their friends, were assisting them during that. We don't learn the same way. Some learn better or faster than others. So those that have learned faster, like in a group, you'll find one person who has learned faster. They were able to go back and say, if you click this, this is what happens. If you click this, this is what happens. So people began to understand that program. And part of it, again, was to strengthen the network because we were afraid that we're going to lose them if there's no clue that keeps them together. So the peers strengthened that network. And unfortunately, because we're doing this in such a hurry, we didn't really look at how we saw it working and we left it there then let it continue the way it continued. And by that time, we already had about 300 teachers who have signed up for the course. So then we realized again that probably they don't know how to start. Then we had an orientation program. And this would be an online workshop where we orientate them to the material. We orientate them to how they need to navigate the space and all those things. And I think what was critical was the digital skills. It was very, very difficult for people to get their way around the digital space. And like all of us, when you press one button and it's not functioning, you just give up. So that's why the peers came in to support them in an environment that they were familiar with. And then I had a group of six colleagues and we called us a laborers of love because this was not attached to the institution. This was something that we did just to assist teachers. And all they did regularly was to send a question and just to make sure that students engage and also check out the progress that the students were making and also gauge the learning by posing questions on regular basis so that the students can see that there's a teacher even in those groups. So the groups would be managed by a teacher, maybe a group of six people, of six groups will be managed by one E-Tutor. We called each other E-Tutors will be managed by one E-Tutor. So the E-Tutor's role was not to look at things as individuals and looking at students work as individuals, but looking at students work in terms of groups and then send it back to groups so that groups can be able to assist each other. So we learned, I think maybe just what we learned during this responsive stage is that really is what Albert was talking about, that we were just doing things organically. That's the first thing, we did things organically, we did things that we are not aware that have not been tested, no plans, no nothing. We just went on with it as it's going around. We recognized the need and we identified the need, we identified people that will be able to, that we will be able to assist. And this because was community-based and community-driven project. It also assisted us that sometimes as we are doing things, we forget that there are skills that needs to be renewed. And this is also against policies and practices that we are familiar with as teachers in the field. And the familiarity again, when people are in so much unfamiliarity test, it's always important to take them back to the familiar space. And the familiar space for us was to use WhatsApp in order for them to teach them to do what they can do. So I will leave it at that. I think I've gone through my five minutes, but thank you very much. Thank you. So last but not least, we're going to ask John to come in. And over to you, John. Thank you, Denise. So I'm not sure if I want to speak, but just sit here and applaud my previous speakers. So thanks a lot for that. I take a slightly different view from them because so I lead a unit with 80 people and we don't do any teaching, but carry out research into new technology, which the OU can use to teach its many students. So I really liked Albert's quote at the beginning of all the questions suddenly changing and about even describe my job. So my job is to ask questions of the OU and say, by the way, did you think of this? Did you think of that? The pandemic is obviously objectively a very bad thing. But from my professional point of view, I see it as a lens that the pandemic has exposed structural weaknesses in society at large. In Mary areas in, for example, in race, in disadvantaged, in inequality in jobs, etc. In the education sphere, what I see is exposing issues that have been around for decades in that education has always been a laggard with respect to technology. There's a mismatch between the affordances that technology provide and have provided for a long time, what society needs and what employers need and what education provides. And this very big jump to online just exposed on them. And as MP was saying, what a lot happened at the beginning is, is what I see in the early days of film, where instead of making films, they put a camera in front of a play. And that's not putting a camera in front of the place, not the same as making a film today. I can think of examples of examples. Why do we test students, especially in STEM, by making them write with a pencil on a piece of paper without the internet? How's that related to their future careers? I struggle to understand that sometimes. So online teaching, as the EU has known for the whole existence, 51 years, is really can be split into two parts. The generation of high quality content and teaching delivery. At the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020, I focused on content generation. I saw other universities struggling how to produce high quality content because we know the EU. This is a time intensive, costly business. We spend tens of millions of pounds, many tens of millions of pounds every year in generating content. And I thought with a team, wouldn't it be great if there was an online library of high quality educational materials for educators, where educators could go to and then pull the elements from. So I started, we invested some EU funds in producing a proof of concept for this. And we also had funding from UFI to look at this from a further education point of view. This is plus 16 education and then from January we've been collaborating with GISC. So the question for us was how can we support people in further education and in university education in having a nice library? And we built some proof of concepts and we went out and talked to 150 people. We also ran an event with 100 people in December. So if I talk about the issues and barriers, I think pretty much all of these have been said before. And it's funny how somehow when you look at this, they're obvious, but they're not taken up. There's a lack of digital expertise. There's a lack of online pedagogical expertise. Generally, both with the practitioners who are the educators, this is not everyone, but in general, and also leaders. So there's an issue that you may have individual educators that say, this is a great thing. I want to do it. But if they don't have support of leadership, then that's an issue. And vice versa, the leadership may think it's a good idea, but they need the expertise in the educational workforce. And there's also lack of capacity. We talked to lots and lots of educators. And the first thing they said to us was, I have no time. I have no time to make materials, even if they wanted to. The other thing we had from FE educators was people don't want to just find materials. They want to adapt them. They need to adapt them to the local context, which is mostly driven from the assessment. So what assessment and what curriculum are they targeting? And how can they adapt them for this? And then also, as others have said, there's a lack of infrastructure around these. On the positive side, there's enormous appetite from the community. So at the events that we ran, we had, I think, 4.4 or 4.5 out of 5 in terms of, would a national aggregator of educational resources be a good thing? The other thing that we found, which was a bit interesting. So even though we're talking about a national resource, which is online, regionality is important. So in a couple of ways. Some of the learning contexts, at least in the UK are regional. So for example, in the Midlands, in England, people like to teach engineering because there's a large automobile industry there. We saw these aspects of the local employer context influencing the online teaching context. Regionality was also important for trust. So if an educator is looking for online materials, they tend to trust recommendations, not general, but from known colleagues or from the local area. We posited that what one needs is a federation of regional aggregations of learning resources that we're feeding together. On the technical side, I won't say so much about this, but really in terms of the things that we built, and some of these are online, if you go to vocteach.ac.uk. It's really one needs an aggregator of content. So the whole system needs to be easy because the educators need no time. So imagine something like Google, but it's a search engine which is specifically geared to learning. So you're not typing in keywords, you're typing in learning outcomes. Learning outcomes and skills and employment and your finding materials. Educators may want to look for different types of materials. So I'm looking for an assessment, I'm looking for a quiz, I'm looking for a video. In my lab, we have an aggregator already. It's not for education, it's for research papers. So we run a national service in the UK called CORE, CORE-ACUK, which is in the top 2,000 websites on the world. And it aggregates over 200 million research papers. So it scours the web, looks for open libraries of research papers, and then automatically integrates them. And we thought something like that with trusted sources of content. So from the open university and maybe from the BBC would be useful. The other ingredients one needs is something to generate the metadata automatically. So there's no human effort. So saying that this piece of content I found is for this level, it's suitable for this curriculum or this assessment. You need this reading age and it has these types. It contains quizzes and videos. And then the last element in terms of usability is educators don't really want to search engine because if you search you can find lots of things that aren't useful, but really a recommendation engine. So more like Netflix. So people have their favorite online media company like Netflix or Amazon Prime where as you log on it knows about you. So it would know you're an educator. It knows you're teaching 17-year-olds. You're teaching a craft course or an English course. You're teaching vocational skills. And it knows about your context. So heavy engineering content. It would know about your region. It will make recommendations about your local education network. There'd also be the ability that if I adapt things, I pull some things, I generate a new learning path on the things I found. Then a bit like Pinterest, if people know that, you can put a new pathway or a Spotify playlist. So I put my own playlist of learning resources up in there. As I said, we built a couple of proof of concepts and we did preliminary tests with educators and they seemed to think this was good. At the end of April, we had a discussion with the Department of Education in England and they're going through a discoverability phase, which we will learn through them. So I would say that the main lessons that we learned is similar to before. There are various barriers, but there are also opportunities into what this tech could provide, especially as one of the silver linings in the pandemic is online learning has had a lot more awareness and visibility and far more people, including decision makers, begin to understand the possibilities for this. Thank you, John. We've so much to think about from what was presented and spoken about with great heart, I think. Everybody is so involved in this and wanting to improve everything for everyone, all at the same time, which is quite a problem. So I've asked a very difficult question because we haven't got a crystal ball, but I'm asking you really to have a look inside your crystal ball and just give a few pointers to how you see things developing near future, longer term. So I'm going to ask Albert again to kick us off with that thought. Well, thank you. Well, I also forgot to break my crystal wall then, and in addition, I know that the future is no longer as it was. So it's more difficult even to identify that. But anyway, I will try to share some thoughts from my humble perspective. The first thing is that I used to think that even previously to the pandemic, there were, from my perspective, four catalysts that were helping to make a metamorphosis of learning. There were these connecting networks that enable connected learning on one hand. The second one was the empowerment of learners, and here there are related the concepts of self-regulation and autonomy. The third was the overcoming of time and space barriers, and here it's linked also to the concept of time management. And the fourth one is the acceptance of the existence of an unconscious, informal, invisible and silent learning. But the pandemic has brought us another one, another catalyst for that, that kind of discontinuity or intermittence generated by the situation of the COVID-19. So all these are making the learning change. But my question at the end is, okay, it could change, and some of the questions, the words I have mentioned, I think they will be very important, but as I will finish my short speech, I have some doubts if at the end these things will make the learning really change. On one hand, I have a question for myself, that is, do universities have a wolf by the years? Because I'm not sure about, they should have learned that they must begin to develop a kind of high quality student-centered online programs as offered by institutions with experience in the field in order to be ready for other similar circumstances, because they have had to learn that probably the only screen-driven face-to-face lectures were not the solution for pivoting online. This is important, and most of the universities said, we did it, but they don't ask themselves what they did, that it's not exactly what they could do in another environment. So, on another hand, institutions that are not able to work differently will simply end up having to stop working, and this will be a real disruption in this sense. In other words, also, transformation of higher institution educations cannot be relegated to a mere change in management or technocratic engineering that sometimes it seems to be. We should need to rethink everything, because this situation is provoking a rethought of the whole approach to education too. So, I think that one of the lines to follow is the move to hybrid models of education, and even if I'm not going to go further on that, even if fully online will persist because of the students, some people say the future will be only hybrid, I don't think so, because I think that there will be students that need that 100% flexibility in order to follow the learning they need, so probably they will keep some institutions being fully online, but most of the face-to-face ones will need to move to a hybrid model in order to provide the students some of the flexibility that they have experienced during this period of time. But they should be a good experience, not the bad experience that some of them have lived. So, moving to these hybrid models of education will mean probably to take advantage of the distance or online look to design consistently added value hybrid models, quite different to those that are considered blended in which the look is from the face-to-face vision and they add some online drops to that. This is not the good way in order to build consistent hybrid models. They should be more flexible regarding organization, structure, and time these models. So, time management, as I said before, is very important. Not everything has to be or could be synchronous. Yes, I'm finishing, yeah. Because my time management is not doing very well. Yes, so I will finish. The only thing I will say is that I'm a bit skeptical because after the storm comes the calm and the kind of pendulum effect that can have, I think that will make us to come back to try to consider the new normal as we did before. And this is quite dangerous. I have some other thoughts, but it's okay. So, sorry for going beyond the time. Thank you, Albert. Over to you, Alison. You're muted, Alison. Can you hear me now? We can. Good. Difficulty on muting. But we had to say you're muted once in this meeting, at least. I was saying thanks for the question, Denise. Because predicting the future has just, we've just seen it's much more difficult than we can ever anticipate. And what seems unbelievable can become real. I think going forward and talking with our students, we know that they're very keen to go back to campus. Now, I'm talking from the perspective of somebody who works on a campus university. They're very keen to get back because at UCL, the students like the experience of being in London, of meeting face to face with other students and so on. However, when they get back, we know that they'll expect things to be quite different. So it's a kind of subtle, let's go back to the way things were. Actually, things will never go back to the way that they were. And what we need to do is to learn yet again how to deal with the new normal situation, however it unfolds. And I think there are four key things that we need to think about. The first is, and related to what I said before, how we deal with the emotions that we have when we have the online and how we regulate those and enable them. So for our teachers, for example, it's really important that they develop the ability to understand how to properly interact and understand what students are experiencing. And similarly, that students are able to interact with their academics in a far broader range of ways than we did before. The second is around data usage because we've seen that a lot of tech has become embedded in ways that it wasn't before. And so this is, in some ways, a good thing. It allowed us to do things that we couldn't do before, but also it has to be regulating. I think that governments have to get really serious about how they regulate the use, the measurement and analysis and use of data. Otherwise, we'll end up with a pandemic, which is around the data. Third is adaptability. We've seen a huge change and this adaptability is going to be an integral part of how we work, and we need to be able to learn about how to do that better. Otherwise, we can all end up with some kind of burnout. And finally, there are structural inequalities that have been highlighted during the pandemic. I mentioned particularly pedagogy of caring and how that particularly affects women, but we know that there are also other groups, so BAME colleagues, people with disabilities, all kinds of groups who've been seriously disadvantaged. And this disadvantage is not new. It's just been exaggerated. So we need to find ways of dealing with it. Thank you, Alison. Over to you and Pini. Thank you very much, Denise. A lot has been said already. I just add my two pens. I don't think we should try to predict the future, but I think what we need to do is to identify desirable features that may need to be strengthened and those that we need to eliminate in order to come up with the futures in plural that we would like to do. And part of the reason that I'm saying this is because this is my research work that I'm currently doing for UNESCO and also for the University Network. The University Futures Network. So when we look at this, we are in a recovery stage before it was responsive and now we are in a recovery stage where we need to look at those features that we want us and want to see happening. And it's obvious that one feature that needs to be the one that we take forward to higher education in 2050, we can't even plan for 2030 anymore. We need to plan for 2050. Higher education is going to look completely different from what it is, from completely close, probably to more openness. And by openness, I mean it has to be flexible. It has to be accessible. It has to be affordable. It has to be inclusive and inclusive, not only in terms of the students that we get, people with disabilities, marginalized communities, people from rural areas, but also inclusive in terms of the curriculum. And I'm talking from a developing context where our curriculum has, by and large, been very colonized, for lack of a better word. And also looking at the knowledges that are not really ingrained into, that are not part of our own Indigenous knowledge system. So we see that in the future, knowledges will be more diversified if we include, if we open up education as we need to open it up. And all this will only be done if one does a political will. And by political will, I'm talking about across the board, from government, institutions, everywhere. There must be a political will. And I believe that the only institution that will be resilient are those that are going to be changing the practices that they are comfortable with. And the practices that they feel that they will go back to and all of us are talking about, there'll be no way of going back. And there are new players in higher education. There are new people who are coming in. And these people, we need to embrace them and work with them. There'll be more networked learning hubs because digitalization also makes it, it increases collaborative, it increases partnership, it increases interconnectedness. And this interconnectedness will be used in different ways and in different formats. So it is also critical to do that. The last point that I want to raise is that I think we need to reimagine the mission of higher education. Are we in the business of just re-judging content that we've already have? Or we are in the business of responding to climate change, poverty, peace, migration issues. There are so many issues that the world is expecting us to respond to. Now we are talking a lot about knowledge economy, but there is green economy that we need to focus on as well. How do we live side-by-side with other features within the world that we live in? And the last part is about... So good point to finish on. That's an excellent point to finish on. And poor John's got to pick up after that. So over to you, John. Thank you. Actually, the checks in the post in these let me go last. Brilliant to go last with this group of people. So I agree, predicting the future, especially for the tech field, it's just not a good thing to do. But what I do, in fact, in my job, is I propose lots of nice futures to my bosses with a price tag. Here's a particular future, and this is how many millions it will cost. And in that spirit, I agree with what's been said. I think data and AI is going to be the big thing, and the great transformational power of that is, as Empini said, it's in the connectivity. So it's not data for a single educational institution that will make a difference, but what I call an educational data space. So think about adhering to privacy norms. You connect the data for the hundreds of thousands of students or maybe millions of students who are learning, and you connect that data from the students to the education institutions so they can predict and analyze from that, and to employers. And then one can build AI services on top of that. So one example of one thing that we've looked at in several projects is an AI career coach. You understand how the students doing at a very fine-grained level, how they're doing on their assignments and assessment. You understand their skills. You then can recommend jobs to them, which you're automatically reading online. I take Allison's point about being careful about who owns the data. So we're currently, I do have friends who work in tech companies, but we're currently using Microsoft Teams to being used a lot for teaching as is Google Classroom. So there is one future where Google and Microsoft own all of the student data, which may not be a good one, and we have to be aware of that. In terms of AI services, one can create, of course, this is progressing all the time. There's a text generator now, GPT-3, if you look online. You give it a piece of text from Dickens or from Shakespeare. It will write an essay at undergraduate level from the input text. So that's what happened in the last year. So I see this technology really changing how we represent knowledge. And you can see the movement forward from going to paper, going to PDFs, XML, and now we'll represent all the content in a machine-understandable form. So you take all the online content that's there, and there's some level of understanding that the machine has. And then you can, for example, one of the things we're doing at the OU is we're building, well, we're looking into giving every OU student their own personal AI assistant that would follow them for their career, help organize their calendar, tell them where assessments are duly added with their tutors, generate quizzes automatically, automatically answer questions from their course content, generate, begin to mark the assessment, give informal feedback on that. Also giving assessments, AI tutors to our human tutors to analyze and predict student outcomes. We have an existing tool for that, and organizing calendars. And then maybe finally, I would say, in terms of the point that Alison made, there is a group of technologists that think about what we call self-sovereign futures. And one of the leaders in this field is Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web. So we imagine a future where every student would own, control, and manage all of their learning data, especially if one believes in lifelong learning, you're not going to learn at one institution. So your learning records, your assessments would be on your control. You control how to export to other education institutions and also to employers. I don't promise any of these things will happen, but this is somehow the bright future which I would like to have. Thank you. Thank you, John. So maybe the Turing test is really imminent, and that will be your assignment. There are some answers from a question that you're learning in your area. Which of these was generated by a computer? Which of these do you think is of a standard from someone in your group? Maybe that is the new future for reassessment. So I've taken some really good thoughts away from my own work. We do have time for one question. James, have we got any questions? Yes, thanks, Denise. We do. Tim has questioned in the chat whether John thinks the OU should provide a support service to higher education, to students, and to the public on online learning. So one of the great things about working at the OU, and maybe we all talk about it too much, is our social mission, that we believe in social justice through education. And along those lines, I think the OU should provide a service. I'm not the finance person for the OU, thank God, but I would push to make this for free. So at least elements of the free. The OU, as people will know, already have free learning platforms. Open learn, we co-founded Future Learn. So offering free services, support services would be good. Actually my bosses, I can hear them in my head now, they say to me, I should try not to lose too much money. So maybe some premium services would be chargeable, but we should be offering this. And one of the reasons for this is that one of the things that somehow keeps me awake tonight is the thought of thousands of educators across the globe replicating the work one needs to do for online teaching, building their own materials from scratch, analyzing. And if that's one area where this could be shared, which is why we have the rise of the big tech companies. Thank you, John. So I'd like to, before I close the session, I'd like you to take your mics off and not do the virtual clapping. Let's do the real clapping, because this has been such an interesting and stimulating panel. You have lots of food for thought. But what I enjoyed was the strategic thinking, the robustness of argument, but more importantly the passion that we heard this morning. Thank you. So come on everyone.