 So welcome to this session. We've got two speakers for this hour. We have Peter Bryant and we have Elaine Huber, both of them from the University of Sydney, and we will start off with Peter. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Peter Bryant. I am the professor of business education at the University of Sydney Business School. I'm also a trustee of ALT and have been for the last six years. So it's great to be able to present some of the work that we've been doing at the University of Sydney, particularly around the critical importance of student voice. So at the very heart of what I'm going to talk about is, on one hand, a curricular transformation project. On another hand, it is bringing technology to bear to address the challenges of scale, but it is also how we better embed an authentic representation of the student experience in those two other factors. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge the fact the University of Sydney is built on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, who have used where the University is built as a site of learning for over 40,000 years. It is at the intersection of what were three main sort of tracks between different Indigenous peoples in the area, or with their own unique culture, each with their own unique language, each with their own unique approaches to education. But at that point, at that site of learning, they came together. And it's a unique site that the campus is built on. And I'd like to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and note that the land the University is built on has been always and always will be Indigenous land. So I want to introduce you to the University of Sydney. Like most of the universities that were built around its time, it built itself a replication of Oxford. And in the time when the university was developed, its motto was, whilst the constellations may change, the learning remains the same, which is quite a sad representation of what the university was founded on. It's changed a lot since then and right at the very heart of the university strategy these days is the critical importance of First Nations knowledge and putting First Nations knowledge right at the very forefront of what we do. So we are Australia's oldest university. We're founded in 1850. As I mentioned, we're on Gadigal land and have been a site of learning for over 40,000 years. We have 70,000 this year. I think it's actually closer to 75,000 students across five faculties and three university schools. We are a research-intensive university with 75,000 students, which is quite a challenging dissonance sometimes. And then the strategic intention of the university is to develop leaders for good. The business school, this is the inside of our business school building. The business school itself has 15,000 students, so that's just the school that both Elaine and I are working in. 68% of those are international and in our biggest post graduate program, which is Master of Commerce, which has about 8,500 students in it, that figure is closer to 90% international, mainly from one market, which is China. For anyone who's involved with business schools, we have the triple crown of accreditation, which gives us the kind of institutional cache that comes from being considered to be a leading global business school. We're highly leveraged in terms of staff. We have 15,000 students. As I said, we run about 300 units of study every semester. We have 280 full-time academics. So we don't actually have a lot of academics to deliver that kind of program. So we run big classes. Our largest class unit is our postgraduate core unit, which has 2,200 students in it in its biggest semester. So they're big classes with big numbers in there. That makes the challenges that we face quite complex. So what I want to talk a little bit about is something we've been playing around with, which is called teaching and learning ecosystems. At scale, when you've got so many different people with so many different programs, and we run from this huge program in the master of commerce down to an MBA, which has 30 or 40 people in it, one-size-fits-all struggles when you're making change. Technology doesn't help that to any great degree. The trouble with one-size-fits-all is you end up often with the lowest common denominator. That's what seems to work. You make it simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler, and you move down to the lowest common denominator. What we've approached this challenge of scale and this challenge of complexity is by looking at how you can create interactive networks of activity to engage the widest span of the community in your pedagogical change. So it's not one-size-fits-all. It's many different ways to engage with many different contexts. Now, that makes the challenge of pedagogical change difficult, but it makes the output of that pedagogical change far more rewarding. So our connected learning ecosystem, which is what we have based most of our change around is this notion of connected learning, started as this drawing in 2018, which Elaine will recognise is on my office wall and has been on my office wall since June 2018, and I started in May 2018. And it eventually evolved into this quite complex drawing, which I'm not going to go through. It's to point out that ecosystems are not simple. They're not just, I'm going to change X and Y will happen. There's inputs that go into that. There's different understandings of the notion of connection, and then how it becomes manifest in different projects that we do. And it was quite, when I put this diagram is relatively recent, this current version of this, when I put this diagram together, it's amazing how many bits and pieces of our work integrate together. And that's what makes it successful. There is complexity in what we do. But there's also synergy. These things are all connected and they work together. The most important thing I want to point out for the relevance to this presentation is in what I can see in my top left, or your top left as well, a project called WorkLiv Play Learn. WorkLiv Play Learn is a project we've been running since 2018, which is about understanding, collecting, sharing and giving people opportunities to connect with the authentic student voice through digital storytelling. And across the rest of this presentation, I will constantly come back to WorkLiv Play Learn. I just wanted to flag it right up front. At the very core of what we've been trying to do is we want to move away from this. Linear learning, particularly when you're coping with scale, is how you deal with scale through, you simplify what you do. You do it in the simplest possible way, and the simplest possible way is doing what I'm doing now, standing in front of a room and talking. You magnify it. If we didn't have audio here in a room of this size, you couldn't hear me. So we magnify a single person's voice so that multiple people can hear it. We do it through lecture recording. We do it through a whole number of different ways. We multiply it. We run it multiple times. How many of you and your institutions have large lectures that have to have spillover rooms, where the students sit in a room and watch other people's recordings being played to them synchronously, but they're persons in another room? We have that in a number of universities in Sydney. Not at our university. We've not done spillover rooms, but certainly in other institutions in Sydney do that. And a lot of that is all done using technology. It's also very structured because to do that, you have to do things in a very structured way. You have to know what you're going to do each week. You have to prep that because the technology has to be in alignment. The rooms have to be in alignment. The timetabling has to be in alignment. All those institutional systems that rust on practice have to be in alignment. What we're trying to move to is a connected learning approach. And that's not about coping with scale. That's about managing scale. That's about leveraging scale for learning. And we've done this through three principles, which I think Elaine will talk a little bit more about when she does hers, but they are very much about how we transform the way students engage in information, how we transform the interact with each other, and how we transform assessment. And we don't want students to come back to us and have a thousand students singing the same song. We want a thousand students coming back to us singing a thousand different songs, singing their song. And that's the really important difference with connected learning. It's not structured. There's a lot more flying without a net for both the students and the teachers. But the end reward is far more valuable than the kind of very highly scaffolded approach to the scale required. So I'm going to play you the first segment of a video. This one was recorded in 2019 from our WorkLib PlayLearn project. And I'll have a question for you after. It would definitely be more campus events and more connection between students and employees. More emphasis on societies because I believe university is partly of study lectures, tutorials, and as well as having a very social aspect and making new friends and connections. Coming into university you hear a lot of stories and rumors about how everyone in university is unfriendly and people don't really talk unless like you talk to them first. But I found that with the tutorial it was it was definitely really engaging in how we interacted with each other and it was a lot more friendlier than I anticipated. Make the most of the time that you have because this could be three of the best years of your life or three is that you didn't turn up to uni and didn't do anything right. Just join any clubs that you think you have an interest in. You can only go the first time doesn't matter if you stick with it. I think I enjoy sort of experiencing that there are aspects of uni life aside from studying like you know joining clubs, societies, sort of like going for like uni events or external events. Just sort of enjoying and learning a lot from those aspects besides joining clubs. Okay thank you we'll stop that there. So that's a group of students talking about connection. Now let's put that in the context it's pre-pandemic 2019 but they're talking about the importance of showing up. The importance of putting yourself out there and talking to people. So I'm going to pose you a question. The VBOX link is there so open up your VBOX and put some of the text into that. There's the VBOX link there's the the QR code. What does learning through connection mean to you? So you as a person, you as a learner, you as a person supporting learning, engaging learning, helping others to learn what does it mean to you? That notion of connection. This will come up as a word cloud. I'll give you a couple of minutes. If you're sitting next to someone you can always have a chat to someone about it as well. But there's the word cloud popping up. I do like the appearance of the word rhizomes. I'm going to take a wild stab who might have put in there but I'm not going to do that. Yeah community coming out right at the top there rhizomes coming up again. Look I think right I think that those two are really powerful words because that notion of rhizomatic learning that idea that you can do something that seeds learning often far away from the context in which that learning happened is quite powerful. So is the notion of community. I think that's really powerful to what we talk about but interestingly across Australia the Australian version of the NSS is called the very cutely named Quilt which is quality indicators of learning and teaching and in that community and belonging at every university that isn't a university of only a couple of thousand students is the lowest score that any institution gets on the quality indicators of learning and teaching that notion of being part of a community and feeling belonging. The only universities to do really well are universities like Bond which has about 3,000 students the University of Divinity which has about a thousand. Universities like Sydney with 75,000 do horrendously on it. Fantastic thank you for that we might move to the next thing. So this is a project all we've brought together called connected learning at scale. The idea of connected learning at scale is to move from coping with scale to a designed for scale approach. There's things that come out of scale that are amazing. You know you can leverage the capacity to crowd. You can crowdsource ideas. You can bring people together and really crunch quite complex things because you've got the processing engine of people. It for us is designing an ecosystem that deploys a many sizes fits many context strategic approach. It is to reimagine every aspect of the learning teaching and assessment experience. We take units particularly at our very deep level. We take units and completely transform them and the outputs we get are fantastic student satisfaction data. We get really good improvement in student performance and now increasingly particularly in the modern era we are getting better student retention. We never really had a retention problem before COVID but it's become a much bigger problem for us in the last couple of years. And it makes a change in the way that we engage with partners students and industries in a community of co-design. The team that Elaine will talk about it in her in her talk that she leads is a team called business co-design and it was called that very deliberately because at the heart of this is the principles and practices of co-design. And this is how we connect them. We don't just connect them through working together on group work or talking in a classroom. It's about the spaces that they do assessment in. It's about the physical spaces they're in and how we transform the physical spaces that we are designing. It's about the curricular spaces and how connection is built through the curricular. It's about the online spaces they engage in and that we engage with them in and it's about the social media spaces that they keep hitting that microphone that they use. And at the heart of this is this idea that university is a transitional space. Now if you take the market eyes near liberal argument university is a transactional space. You pay your fee, you get a degree to get your first job. That's the transactional space. When I was working at the London School of Economics a student report was entitled about the student experience was entitled get a two one and get a good job. And that was the sort of transactional aspect of it. We as people who've all been through university education and have been transformed by university education or higher or further education or any form of education look at how that particular experience made us who we are today. We wouldn't understand it otherwise. But in the middle of this is this notion of transition. We're moving from different forms of life, we're moving from different social structures, we're moving if you want to use the academic word, we're moving through liminality. But this idea of transition is really powerful and how do you design a connected experience for people who are going to learn something for a context, an environment, a crisis, an experience that has not yet happened. They're in university, we're teaching them to be leaders for example. They're not going to use a lot of that, they may not use that leadership knowledge for five, 10, 15 years. How do you create an experience that in five, 10, 15 years time will come back to them and they'll go, yeah that worked. That's what I learned something there and I can apply it. So the next question is going to be about this. What kind of behaviours work in this particular space, kind of space we're in now really? You don't need to be, if you're in the room, you don't need to be imagining it. But for those online there's one of our lecture theatres in our business school. So we'll play the next video. This is what we have. Space is important but it's more than building it. Whether that be from home or on campus, it's the social dimensions of feeling connected to your peers. Yeah well I think online a lot of the times you're in a classroom where there's just a sea of like no cameras, like everyone has their mic muted so whenever there's like a breakout room it can be a little bit challenging to like engage in a conversation whereas when you're in person you can really just like talk to anyone you want. Like you have more study feelings on campus because online you're just like watching a video or something like you come to focus on your course. In the Fisher, in the Library you can feel all of us are studying. You can get a more better sense like oh I am in the university and I am studying not just playing the computer or just watching a video or something like that. I like being face to face and being on campus in the very hands of the person. So being on campus just like physically coming here, coming to the classroom, it's a lot better than being in my room. Okay we'll stop there. So there's three students talking that that was recorded in 2022 that so that's post pandemic they've just come back to campus and many of them had been remote in China for three or two and a half years. So there's some interesting versions of their space but I want to pose this question to you which is how are modern lectures that we give our students different to the experiences they had during the pandemic because we are snapping back to lectures. There's the V-box link but how do you, what do you, what do you think students experiences that they're experiencing now are different to the kind of experiences they had during the pandemic? A couple of words, nothing particularly full on. Yep more interactive that's something we'll talk about, I'll talk about a little bit but yes definitely. Yeah see look at the commonalities in that, it's all about interactivity. While you're putting that in there think about the way this kind of room works. It's almost impossible to have interactivity. It's really hard for you to talk to me. It's really hard for you to talk to each other and it's even harder if you talk to each other for then that to get communicated back here. These rooms are designed to amplify what's here and turn what's there into an audience, a passive receiver of information. Yet when they were using Zoom or any other form of online delivery interactivity was at the very core of that capability. Whether it was used or not is another issue but interactivity is very much at the core. Cool thank you for that one. We'll move on to the next one. So what we did over 2023 is we've changed our lectures. Our lectures are chunked We are still pretty much most of our lectures are delivered online and we are going to continue doing that as an important part of what we do. We do not let people just deliver online and do what they would normally do in a room and do it online. If they want to do that they can go in a room and do it in a room. What we want people to do is think about how they chunk their lectures make them interactive. A lot of our lectures use multiple voices. So a unit we run which is our kind of Sandpit unit called leading in a post crisis world has over 100 different voices rather than the singular voice of that person on the right hand side of the screen who's reasonably present because I'm the lecturer but there's a lot of different industry academic community students all those voices are talking about leadership in their own experiences and they tell their stories. We use a lot of hybrid media we don't just do use video I'm recorded there I'm one of there in my backyard with my plastic owl but we use hybrid media and it's all DIY as much as we can. We have an excellent media team but they'll do the high tough stuff but we really encourage people and in fact Elaine's team gave out hundreds of cameras microphones stands here she had one of her team during the pandemic driving these kits to people all across Sydney to deliver them so that people could make their own media and this is what it looks like to the students they get to see all of these people they get to hear their stories we bring in industry judges we have industry and academics collaborating together on research conversations that the students feed what they want to know it's highly transdisciplinary this changes the way the student voice is represented it's changes the way we deliver learning and it makes it highly interactive but still uses media because media then brings capabilities for accessibility it brings capabilities for reuse it brings capabilities for learning it certainly better supports people with disabilities because you've got different ways in which they can engage with the content and it's a very powerful way of doing it what it also does is you're not hearing a singular perspective you're hearing an incredibly diverse perspective of people you can follow that you can choose your own way pathway through it what we want to move from is this this is a university of Sydney veterinary science lecture first lecture of the year in August 29 2022 that's what the academic turned up to 400 students were meant to be in that lecture in total that's a small little segment of the room no one turned up so he tweeted this he actually taught to an empty room the next week he did it again one person turned up but they were an hour early for the next lecture and it wasn't even in vet science but he had a great conversation with them so we want to move from that because students are voting with their feet with that kind of that kind of lecture and to be fair to Jan he's a very engaging academic but it was going to be a very didactic lecture we want to move to this this is a piece of work we're doing around interactivity at scale we are developing activities and engaging lectures that are not people talking the one on the bottom left is a organisational theatre interactive session where three actors play out an ethical scenario those three actors then interact with the students through platforms like V-BOX with different questions and pose them different which scenario should we go down what kind of ethical strategy should we use the brilliant bit that they've been doing recently is they've actually been going and interacting with the students while they're working together on coming up with what ethical scenario they're going to go with in character and that is designed in rooms often for anywhere between 150-200 out we've done it in lecture theatres of 400 in the top left that's the person who moderated a panel session on AI and we had the panel session moderated and running for ages with an expert in AI from academia an expert I think it was a journalist talking about AI and then at some point during the session we actually told the students who were moderating it that that person was a bot and it was a bot doing it and the question then became how would you feel if your boss was a bot which is a fascinating way of doing it might skip that one and just move on to just talking about where these voices come from the heart of our co-design approach to this project is bringing student experiences into everything we do this project called Work with Play Learn started in 2018 we collect digital stories of students collected by students or recent graduates and they start to talk about what their experiences are and how this influences what they are yet to experience that transition state first year we talked about how students learn second year we did the importance of connection last year we did the impact of the crisis that was 2020-22 we did flexibility and this year we're doing community and belonging we collect about 100 digital stories every year and you see the kind of bits of them the aim of them is that they are all shared they're on screens around the university they're shared with developers with academics with senior leaders they're shared across the university they are they're not just for the student voice of that hundred that are in it but to create an associative community by that I mean people see themselves in those stories or don't see themselves and want to share their own stories we get people now who have seen these videos who want to be a part of the next year's project because they see it such a powerful way of being heard but a powerful way of their stories informing education not just for them but for future generations it feeds into curricula and the student experience and we use it in three different ways rhizomatic learning is one of the big things we use it for because these are a hundred students out of 15,000 so we want their stories to seed inspiration and co-design across the business school and across the university we use it for co-design co-design is at the very core of what we do we run we have students involved in everything we have student researchers we have we have student media makers we have student podcast makers we have student as students as designers they are at the very core of what we do and we use it as a strategic planning tool for the university the dean the dean's executive committee the people who run the business school all get annual exposure to these stories so i want to finish on a little important thing here this is the self-accrested cockatoo a very ubiquitous animal in Australia everywhere they're loud as all hell and they are very clever animals because what they taught themselves is they taught themselves how to open up rubbish bins now i am not an expert in ornithological biology but a person who is told me that the skill it takes for a bird to lift a bin is not in its normal biological makeup claws are not designed to lift claws are a scraping and a holding tool beaks are to break things they use their beaks and claws to open up bins and inside those bins they get amazing tasty morsels one bird taught themselves how to do that they taught every other bird in the flock how to do it they are a community they share they co-designed that and they also made sure they didn't tell the really pesky ibises that are around because those ibises do know how to open bins because they've got big curved beaks much easier for them but they act as a community they work together they work collectively young old it doesn't matter to them they want to be a community who can survive in a changing urban environment so i just urge you to be more cockatoo and be like them and share that with the community thank you very much