 I've got to welcome you again this morning first thing with just a little bit of what's in store today. We want to as the yesterday thank all the organisations who are supporting our annual conference and making it possible for us to put on this event and bring together our community in person and online. And a special warm welcome to those of you for watching us online and joining life. Now, I'd like to speak to you Roedd y adrodd yr aroed yr adrodd yr aroed yn ffordd. Fodd iawn yn cyfrifadau bwydol, mae'r adrodd yn anhygoel ar y lliwyddiadau yma, mae hynny'r adrodd yn y cerdd i gyd yn ddiadu'r adrodd ac yn yr adrodd, ond anhygoel'r adrodd yn ddeidag. Rydyn ni'n cael ei hunnwud drwy canlygon gweld ydynnu i gyrsbydd, ond roedd yn go需dd â'r adrodd a'r adrodd yn tynnu i'w ddweud ac i nhw'n dweud. ac yn bwysig fyddon i ni i ni i ni i hwn i AGM ym 150. Yn y gweithio, rydyn ni byddwn ni'n cyfrifio fyddyng yma, mae'r dros yn gweithio y mactoedd ffordd ag diogelol mewn I TN ddau wedi'u gweithio. Ac rydyn ni'n gweithio y ffyrdd ymddangos cyfrifio cael ei gwneud yn cael ei chymfó Strathiaeth bicicol â Lai Maes, lle mae'r gweithio ni i ni i ni i ddim yn gwybod felly bydd y cwyleth. Mae'n dechrau'r ffordd o'i ffordd C.Mold yn y prynhaid yma. Felly byddai ddod o'i ffordd C.Mold o'r ffordd, gyd-do'n gwneud ymddai'r ffordd C.Mold. Lorna gynnwys ddiwedd dwi'n meddwl fyddwn i'r ffordd C.Mold wedi'i gael'r ffordd C.Mold. Dwi'n meddwl yma, mae'n gwyllt dechrau'r FFM at Tech, sy'n gwyllt yma yng Nghymddol yma. I'm very grateful for every member of the community who has made it possible to bring this project, which is now three years in the making, to the conference and display it here. And this evening we invite you all to join us in a big group photo in the four year for us to be able to admire and appreciate the work of this community, but also to have a photo of us as a community at this conference. Now there's no housekeeping notes today, so if there is a fire alarm or any other announcements please do follow that and take that seriously, it won't be a drill. And now we're going to have a practice round of applause before we welcome Helen and the panel to the stage and give a very warm welcome as we welcome Joe to the stage. So hello Joe. Awesome. Thank you. Really nice to see you guys again if you're here for the first day. You look lovely to meet you. My name's Joe. I'm from Vvox. We're one of the partners, sponsors, exhibitors with ALT. As the title of this slide implies, we've been working with ALT for five years now and it's a lovely relationship we have. So Vvox is a student polling and engagement app primarily used for live polling, asynchronous surveys and Q&A. And we're primarily going to be using Vvox for Q&A throughout today's conference in this room. So you'll see on the two side screens the Q&A board is up. Let's enjoy the instructions up there for using it. As I said, we are exhibiting here as well. So we're down in the exhibition area on stand 12. So do come and see us and say hello. We'd love to meet you. So yeah, as I said, this session is interactive. So you've got some joining instructions there. So we're going to run another word cloud. We ran a word cloud or a couple of word clouds yesterday morning. So I've got a new one that I'd like to run with you now. So I was wondering if we could open that word cloud for you guys now. Awesome. So the question I wanted to ask is if you could have one extra hour a day to do anything, what would you do? And we'll start seeing those responses coming in. So sleep already coming up. Yeah, quite large. I think as we start today, which quite a long day, I think I can definitely emphasize that. Play D&D, I can see. A little language. But sleep still the most popular. But I can see drink more coffee as well. So if you haven't joined the session, the QR code is on there. If you're joining online, obviously you can take part as well. So just go to the box.app, enter in that session ID or scan the QR code. So one of the nice things about this is everyone, whether you're in the room or if you're online, can all participate. Read up there. Awesome. Cool. That's brilliant. OK, let's close that now. Thank you very much. That's really cool. Another thing as well, you'll notice on your seat there's some joining instructions for Vivo. On the flip side of that, we've got a crossword which you're able to complete. Just a little bit of fun. But once you've completed it, if you'd like to bring that down to see us, we've got some prizes we'd like to give away. If you're joining us online, please do feel free to complete that, send a picture, email it to education.vivox.com and we'll be able to send you a prize as well. So yeah, have fun and feel free to share it on social media as well using those hashtags there. So just to get you guys started, I thought I'd give you a little clue. So this is just a little clue for free down on the crossword. And the clue is that this actor has starred in the title role in the Doctor Strange movie franchise. Awesome. And that's it. So I hope you guys have a wonderful day too. I really enjoy seeing those word clouds and sleep is going to be not very much on the menu today. But hopefully you will enjoy your long day with us anyhow. It is now my great privilege to introduce our chair. And I just wanted to say before Helen takes the mic that Helen has been our chair since 2020 and took over an alt amidst crisis in the summer of 2020. And has since been unable to see what our community is coming together like in person in leading the board. So I know yesterday we gave two and a half worth worth of applause to the winners of the awards. I hope this morning you can give two and a half worth of applause to our chair who takes the stage for the first time. So welcome to Helen. Thank you. Thank you, Marin. And in fact, this is my first alt conference since 2017. So I'm even more excited to be here and see everybody in person. And especially I haven't seen many of the trustees, my fellow board members in person. So that's been fantastic to meet them as well after seeing them so regularly on screen through these through these years. So today we've got a very special session, a panel session thinking about how our profession is changing. But I thought I'd just start with a few comments about the annual survey, which is the baseline by which we track how things are changing in the profession. And many of you will have read the survey and have looked at our summary of it. But some of the really interesting things that have come out is the... One of the things that we're obviously really pleased about is the emphasis on professional recognition. And I think our colleagues in the profession now and all of you here today and online watching in will be able to reflect on this. That there's an increased recognition of the role that learning technologists and learning technology play in the life of educating our students. Now that's hardly surprising given what we've been through in the last couple of years. But we're seeing that born out in things like investment and in the number of our members who are seeking accreditation. And I suppose when all this started we were a little bit worried that accreditation might fall down the list of people's priorities with everything else that they had to do. But seeing that continued interest and increase in applications for membership has been really fantastic. And it shows to me how I think it shows to me that the standing of the profession is increasing. And you are recognising that being recognised through Alts gives you that professional standing in your institution. So I think that's been a fantastic development. It's really interesting how much the pandemic has in general made people reassess what they want to do with their lives and the sort of work that they want to do. And that's especially true in educational institutions. And we've seen that in our members as well that a third of our members and any third of our members I think they might want to change jobs in the near future. And I'm sure any of you that are in positions where you've tried to recruit somebody recently into one of these roles. There's a lot of demand for people with these skills and with the experience that you all have. And therefore there is a lot of change going on around the sector. So that's really, I think that's exciting because it's showing that people can develop their careers and accumulate new portfolios, new skills and what have you. Continue to do interesting work and develop their own careers. So if you want to look into any of these in more detail you'll see we've got all the resources are on the website. You've got the annual survey, the full reports and then the full set of previous surveys. So you can have a look at some of this and how it's been changing. So to really dig into this in more detail and have a think about how our profession is changing. What we're going to do this morning is have a discussion with eminent colleagues from the sector to think about how our profession is changing and be really interesting to get some of your feedback on that in discussion later. So I'm going to ask my colleagues to introduce themselves as I go and sit back down. So perhaps a fit of microphones are on. So we should start with you. Thank you. I'm Helen Beatham and I think I'm on this panel as a sort of crone in the corner who's been asking questions about the profession for quite some time. So I ran what's been called a landmark study. Thank you Marin just this morning in 2001 about what was emerging as a profession of learning technology professionals then and in a follow up study in 2010. And recently have done a whole number of interviews with maybe some of you in the room but mainly with academics but also with learning technology professionals about digital education and how that's changing. So I kind of come at this from the side but of course I've also been very passionately involved with ALT and with the ALT survey. And so I'm not a practicing learning technology professional but I am very excited to talk about what I see the profession becoming and doing for universities and how that's changed over 21 years at least. Hello everyone. I'm Ferisle Grostos a lecturer in online learning and teaching from the Open University, the Institute of Educational Technology. It's been ten years that I've been involved with digital education online blended and other forms in different roles as a for example distance programme coordinator and lecturer tutor student support. So I've experienced it from different roles but one thing I would like to remind you today is mostly my research and my teaching has been around educators. So when I respond to the questions I come from the lens of educators and I mainly train educators both inside and outside UK in digital education. Morning everyone. Keith Slyth, vice-chair of ALT, mostly dean of learning and teaching and professor of pedagogy at the University of the Highlands and Islands. I started in HE as a learning technologist both as a job and also in terms of what we're studying and learning technology and enriching learning and teaching through learning technology has always been part of my practice and ethos and outlook. And yeah, I think that's maybe why I'm at least sitting here today. Thank you Keith. So what we're going to do is I've got a couple of questions for the panel to get us started with their general views and then we will open it up to questions from the audience. So without further ado shall we start? Let's go back that same way round to start off with. And I wonder if each of the panel members could just start by talking a little bit about what you think the biggest change is that you've seen in the way that we use learning technology and the way that we interact with learners over the last couple of years. Gosh, well I think again I'm going to cast my vision back a little bit further if that's all right Helen and just think about that first survey we did of learning technologies in the UK 21 years ago when we identified 56 discreet activities that learning technology staff did and 10 completely different clusters of those activities but everybody was doing a large number of them. And I think something that probably hasn't changed is the diversity of work in this space and certainly the last two years the intensity of demand has picked up but the diversity of what people who call themselves learning technologies are asked to do I think to some extent continues. But I think also some of the content of that may be changing and I just actually want to ask the audience if that's okay how many of you consider that a primary part of what you do is running a learning design service at your institution. So I think if I was sitting in another European country or the US it would be more than that number which I think is probably about a quarter and yet 21 years ago that role didn't really exist at all. So I think it's really interesting to see how learning technologies have got their feet under the table in terms of really thinking about the content of the curriculum and of courses. But at the same time we carry on doing all those other things which are particularly around supporting platforms, supporting people to use platforms, thinking about what those platforms should be. And I think the classic role of a learning designer typically doesn't involve having your feet under the table when those important decisions about platforms are made and how they're implemented and how they're rolled out in universities. So I think it's really exciting that in the UK and I think Alts is probably quite significant to this, the role of learning technologies has become and continue to be a really diverse, really rich, really interrelated role. But I also think probably necessarily as it becomes more central it's also becoming more specialised and I wonder how many of you have different job titles from each other. I think if we were sitting in this hall maybe five years ago we'd probably all meet each other and we'd have quite similar job titles written down. And I suspect today when you go around meeting people you find very different things written on people's job titles and you maybe even your own institution have moved job role and title and been asked to do different things. So I think one of the changes that I'm seeing through talking to people in the profession is that greater specialisation and one of the real benefits of that is we can get accredited for the specialist things we do, we can get recognition for our specialism. I think one of the risks though and I'm sure other people will talk about that particularly as platforms become more and more embedded and integrated is that some of those specialist things can then be outsourced, they can be bundled up, they can be passed off to the support services of platforms that have been brought in for example. So I would like to kind of, the tenor of what I say is the glorious diversity of learning technology roles and of the profession itself. It can be intensely frustrating because it's hard to get recognition for the things we do. But actually I think that diversity is also incredibly powerful and gives us feet under the table when a lot of decisions are made within institutions. So I'd hope that the changes that we see create positive specialisms but also allow that diversity and that breadth across education, technology, policy making, development of skills that that breadth can continue and we can continue to have productive conversations. Thank you Helen. Thank you Helen, following on the point that you made, I was thinking brother and you went directly to the roles and the diversity of roles and I was thinking probably from an outside that tell generally for me the biggest changes from the peripheries becoming central. What do you want to call it the diversity of roles? What do you want to call it recognition? You know people at university started seeing actually that is a valuable unit individual that is contributing to different aspects of learning and teaching. It's not just teaching and student support. There are so many other aspects and sometimes it goes beyond with an institution for example the internationalisation strategy of university. Working with international partners or outside partners such as Pearson, the commercial partners, a big part of this also relies on, if you want to call it technology enhanced people, learning technologies instructional designer or technology champion because I've been recently looking at different universities when they advertise. Digital education lead for the faculty of medical health and other roles. Another big change that I'm seeing is generally flexibility in learning and teaching that is offered through digital education either online or blended and the adaptability of teachers and educators. I think they are becoming a little, I'm not saying that the resistance is not there, it is still there but they are becoming more adaptable. Another observation that I had is technology supported learning and teaching and people in this role. In addition to learning and teaching, their part of the role started focusing on implementing social values such as social justice. You talk about digital poverty and you are the people that actually bring these things to the attention of educators, educational leaders or kind of direct look this is the problem and here we need to invest or find a strategy. Last night I was googling and I found 668 online courses on climate crisis and I think this social kind of dilemma that we are facing is kind of being embedded. Mental health is another one in the role of a digital technologist or a learning designer. I'm saying this diversification is in so many different areas, so many strands of the university for me it's no longer just learning and teaching, it's internationalisation, it's medium term and long term planning of universities. Thank you, that's interesting. Thank you. I concur with all of that but maybe picking up on Fresh's point about diversification. I think one of the key current changes we are facing is diversification in practices and also diversification in student expectations and preferences for how they might engage. The last two years has put a greater range of approaches and interventions in the hands of our practitioners and it's also shown what's possible in terms of using technology to make access to education more actual, more democratic. We've kind of hopefully moved away from that old argument about you can't possibly teach a subject online. We know that digital education practice can be a really important part and a really core meaningful part of any learner experience. But the challenge around that, I think particularly for learning technologists, is how this all cohears. We're very much in a transition year at the moment in the same way we were when we transitioned to online learning at the start of the pandemic. I think one of the challenges there is around collectively being involved in making decisions about curricular program design and what the student experience should look like. Because up until now, particularly within modular system that most of us have in universities and colleges, individuals make choices about how they teach, how they engage their students. It's not often done coherently across programs. That's a big challenge now and I think it's a key thing that we all have to confront in the coming year and beyond. Because what we don't want to get to is a state where a student has a 9am lectron on Monday which they're told is fully online and remote and joined from home and they're expected to be on campus for a workshop at 10.30. We have to think about learning and teaching and the role of digital spaces and places in a coherent, connected way, looking across and within the curricula. I think learning technologists are at the forefront of that, but I think an added factor, and it can be a good added factor because it's brought learning technology practice to prominence, is we've now got learning technologists and dedicated learning technology and technology leadership roles, but now everyone else is a learning technology practitioner to some extent or another. So how do we reconcile that and how do we take that forward in a way that's joined up in meaningful? That's a really wide range of ways that things are changing. I think that diversification and those points you're making Keith about the integration of learning technology into everything now and into all of our programs. I think that's a really fantastically important point about, and Helen, what you were saying about learning design coming in and certainly in the two institutions I've worked in during the pandemic. That idea of more programmatic design and less freedom for module leaders to just decide this is how they're going to do things. I've really seen that change. So can we move on to thinking about the sort of skills development? We could talk about skills development and a whole range of issues, so I'm not talking about that sort of basic digital skills. But what are the emerging CPD requirements, skill requirements for the colleagues that you're supporting and in general that you're seeing emerging? Is there any difference in that? Are there any emerging trends in those sorts of CPD? Should we start with you, Freshda? I thought about this question actually last night and I started searching, but then I just left everything and I said, what do I think? Because you can list, you know, educators need to be able to do this and that and that. And then I thought we need to do a kind of reverse engineering. What kind of good outcome do we want to get out of the students? What we want to enable students? Okay, and then when we have that one, we do a reverse engineering. We said, we want these outcomes or we want to enable students to be able to do this. And then go back and see in order to enable that how and what educators need to be trained or what skills do they need. So I answer your question with another question. What is the outcome and then what kind of skills do we need to equip educators with in order to be able to deliver those outcomes? Because otherwise, based on the work that I've done, especially during the pandemic, I saw that, for example, online assessment is a big challenge for most educators. So I can say that, you know, the CBT needs to be around online assessment or this aspect of pedagogy. But I think they are not contextualised. If we see the bigger picture, I think that's much easier and productive and probably effective way of getting to the skills that educators need. Do you see any difference? I know this is a false dichotomy between the technical skills. So I want to do an online assessment. What order do you see in terms of the pedagogy, the assessment design, thinking about how the assessment fits in the programme? And the balance with, oh, we've just got this new fantastic kit which enables you to do online quizzes. How do I use the kit? So, as I say, I'm painting a false dichotomy between the technical and the pedagogic. But do you see in the sort of work that you've done, any balance in that? Where does that come? Are we in danger of allowing the shiny kit to drive some of this? We are. And especially those, because we've got, I don't want to generalise, but mostly we have those faculty members who are always eager, always keen and those who do not want to have anything to do with technology. So those who are interested, they may forget about pedagogy for a while because that's shiny, that makes me look different to my students or maybe engaging. And I think we need to be careful. It's about, again, the drivers of using technology. And when I run a session or we have a discussion with colleagues, especially outside the UK, that they seem that we can't do digital education because we don't have technology. I'm saying, let's go back a step. It's not about technology. What is it that you want to do? Tell me your assessment. What do you want to assess students on? And then we said, OK, forget about technology online. You want to do it face to face. And then let's see what options are available. So I think pedagogy is always first. And I used to say pedagogy first, but now I say research informed pedagogy because some of the pedagogies may not work very well with the, for example, mental health is a big aspect. That we started embedding in curriculum. Yeah, we have mental health support, but in our curriculum, you will see that it's embedded and we've trained staff to embed that in integrated. And I think when we are using technology, we also have to think about things like mental health that we are not affecting so different social and environmental factor as well as the pedagogical factor. That's really interesting. Thank you. In my previous institution, we were looking at the digital skills and capabilities before the pandemic. And we were thinking about the role of humanities and critical thinking and philosophy and all of this as the world becomes more technological. So I'm really interested in your identification of different aspects, the environmental and mental health and all of those. Pedagogy of care, I think, is previously we used to say it's pedagogy and it was usually technology supported pedagogy. But now I think that element of humanities is highlighted. People call it pedagogy of care. Some people just focus on certain aspects of it. Intel, I think, we always had it as accessibility and inclusion, but I think it's getting much, much broader, that area of accessibility and inclusion. That's really interesting. Thank you. Keith, what's CPD and skills do we need and what changes are you seeing in that? I might take a slightly different angle with this. I'll address the point, but I think it's also really important to recognise that in the same way that all our lecturers had to suddenly transition to online teaching, all for colleagues in wider professional development roles, education developers, academic developers, also to make that transition in terms of the support they provide, whatever that support was about in relation to learning and teaching. I think that's quite interesting. I think that's something we need to explore a bit further in relation to CPD and skills development, because it's now a really good opportunity, and it happened during the pandemic, but there's now a really good opportunity going forward for all forms of professional development around learning and teaching to role model technology enhanced approaches to learning and teaching and immerse staff in those experiences so they can make informed decisions about how they support their own students and their own learners. I think more broadly, there's also a really important consideration around how we can support a colleague going forward to think more carefully and more creatively about the relationship between digital space and digital practice and our physical spaces for engagement and where those intersect and what those mean. I think it's part of the wider issue here is that we have seen what's possible when we confronted a chance for the pandemic. We did see what was possible. We did see how we could make engagement in learning and teaching more equitable, which we've touched upon, more democratic, supporting learners to gauge effectively from wherever they are. I think those issues after me into the forefront of how we develop CPD professional development going forward. I think now more than ever, there's a critical need for not just our informal CPD to role model effective uses of technology. We need to look really seriously at our formal programmes for staff. There's some excellent PG certs and teaching qualifications and FE out there. There's a range of MED-type programmes, some of which allow you to specialise in technology enhanced learning. They're all vitally important, but there's a number of programmes aimed at educators, aimed at other professionals, including learning technologists, that are quite orthodox in how they're delivered. It's still not uncommon in PG cert-type programmes to see a module about collaborative learning where, I think you know what I'm going to say, where new academics and other education professionals, many of our learning technologists, take PG certs. They'll engage in a module about collaborative learning. They'll read about collaborative learning. You might maybe have a discussion board with and share a few views about collaborative learning, and then they'll write and submit an individual essay about collaborative learning. There's a disconnect there. We're not immersing our staff, whatever the role, in the rich experience we ideally want them to fight our students with. So I think those are some of the key challenges for CPD of all types to face going forward. That's really interesting. One of the things that I've really been thinking about for about ten years now is the role of collaboration and social learning in student engagement and in successful student activity. It's really interesting because at one point in my career I was responsible for a fully online activity with thousands of students who were all studying completely online. And I would always make a big point about how you could collaborate really effectively online, but it's the collaboration that was key, almost not the online study. And then it's so interesting coming through the pandemic having passionately been defending and supporting the idea that you can collaborate effectively online. I'm thinking now we need to really reinvent the idea of in-person collaboration and how that works. Because successful collaboration didn't happen in person by accident. It only happened when it was designed in. So what do you think the role is for in-person and online activity and that sort of person centred and machine centred in that collaborative learning, that continuum? Where do you see that all going and how do we develop our students and staff for that role? I think one of the key things we need to recognise is that all the spaces we have at disposal are spaces where meaningful engagement can happen. We need to think really carefully about what that means in relation to what's possible online and what's possible or best in person, face to face. I maybe want to bring in the point about pedagogies of care here, which I think is critically important. Pedagogies of care predigate to a certain extent on people being able to cluster safely around shared issues and have safe spaces to discuss things. And to come together with other colleagues, other individuals that are like minded or want to explore similar issues or face similar challenges. Those are things that we see in various articulations of pedagogies of care. There's a slight problem there in terms of collaboration and peer support when we look at our digital spaces because that whole notion of clustering isn't easily enabled within our institutional spaces. We saw that at the outset of the pandemic when we could all self-organise through teams and through our institutional technologies. Our students couldn't use the main technology we provide them with the VLE to self-organise because the relationship between the VLE and student record system meant who they could connect with and who they couldn't connect with was designed in to which modules and programmes they have access to. If we are going to look at collaboration seriously post the pandemic and all its forms and all the spaces that might take place and bringing in issues of well-being and where some conversations need to be safe and quiet and personal and other collaborations, conversations and more broad-ranging involving a broader range of peers maybe not just those people in the modules that we are studying right now then we need to look at where our technologies enable or disenable that and we need to look at where our technologies and our digital spaces how they relate to our physical spaces on campus and I don't think there are easy issues to address because they're designed into the infrastructure they're designed into the systems, they're designed into the guidance we give about how to affect the engaged students with technology so I think there's a lot to be unraveled there. Helen, what are the answers to all this noise? CPD and our skills, how do we develop? What do we need to develop? What are the skills that we need to give our colleagues? It's kind of hard to follow those two but I think completely picking up on what Keith said about spaces and places and modes of participation I don't think we're in a situation where we know the answer, we know what effective digital pedagogy is our task is simply to impart that to our colleagues I really think that embodied teaching is not the same as it was three years ago when I talked to academic staff they have this really profound understanding when they care about students, when they centre students about how they use space, voice, position, different groupings of students in the embodied classroom which they were unaware of before those capacities were taken away from them how they think about answering and asking questions in class how they move energy around the classroom how they pick up when students are uncomfortable or when a lack of care has occurred and they remediate that so I don't think that physical embodied teaching will ever be the same again and I also think we are learning all the time about how to create those spaces of care, those conversations of care in very different configurations that meet the very diverse needs of students so for example we know that there are mental health issues attached to how students participate in a live classroom that perhaps were very deeply hidden before there are many students who say actually I like participating in a setting where I can use an emoji rather than having to communicate in some other way my lack of comfort or my interest or my engagement so I do think and I'm not being naive about the constraints on time resource, energy, intellect or capacity we have this incredible opportunity to really explore and engage our colleagues with modes of participation what they look like, pragmatically open spaces of care not just talk about it but notice when spaces are less caring or more caring for different students notice when spaces are more and less challenging and some of that and I'll come back to criticality is encoded in the platforms we choose to use with the permission students are given or not given with the roles that are allocated or not allocated but much of it can be enacted by caring and skillful teaching staff in collaboration with professionals in creating ways of grouping students ways of engaging students, ways of making spaces safer for students ways of being transparent about how we're trying to do that ways of of course I would say making open resources and practices more available thinking about what openness means in a highly platform intensive university what small niches are still available for openness and how openness intersects with care but I don't think we have the answers to this and we're developing our colleagues to know them I think we are working with our colleagues to understand what those answers might be or how we might frame them so I think there's some theoretical work to be done because I'm not convinced that the pedagogies we espouse necessarily have all those answers there's definitely ethical work to be done and it's so amazing to be part of an organisation that does centre an ethic of care in everything we do which is old there's research to be done but there's also really practical work about critically engaging with what the technologies enable and don't and so I think you know as well as all those pedagogical exciting pedagogical explorations I think our role is to be very critical and to support our colleagues to be critical when and where they can about the platforms that are available what they enable, what they disable what kinds of care they bring forward what kinds of students they support and don't and some of that also involves a very critical awareness of what our students are doing with technology which is out of the sight of those formal structures you know I'm teaching and supervising students at the moment and I'm deeply aware that their engagement with AI and with things like paraphrasing applications is a deeply part of their intellectual development now and we ignore it at our peril so I don't think we have the answers to that issue I don't think we have the perfect critical approach to platforms I think we have to work with our academic colleagues to do that and it's an exciting conversation I think people don't have a lot of time for those really engaged values led scholarly conversations about what it is we're providing students and what we should be providing students and the best we can do with what position we have is to open the space for those conversations to take place which may sometimes look like a training workshop but sometimes it might look like a meeting or something much more informal where we can have an impact Thank you so I think the message from all three of those contributions is that the way that we develop as a profession the way that we enable our colleagues to develop is really an iterative and collaborative process to even identify what those skills are so it is exciting I was just reflecting when you were talking Helen about how I suppose a lot of us were quite naive thinking that the pandemic was going to come to a reasonably abrupt end and then we kind of reflect quickly on what we learned and then there would be this post-pandemic thing that would be quite clear how it would work and how completely complicated and complex and phased this transition if it is a transition has been so thank you very much for those comments panel I'm going to open it up now to questions from the audience and are we doing this through Vvox? Okay, so if there's anybody who's got a question first in the audience who would like to start with a mic please put your hand up any comments? Or comments? Or please post online Yes, I will come up to you Oh, for the online audience Because we've got people online so we need to take it online If you could let us know who you are please Thanks for a very interesting debate there Slightly tangentially but I think it's an interesting way of addressing the topic is say if you were given say 5,000 pounds to organise a research to look into this what question would you ask as your research question to try and formulate trying to answer some of the problems that you've brought together here? Well, that is a good one Well, we've got researchers on the panel Hello Well, I don't think 5,000 pounds is quite enough to engage the expertise at the front of the room Well, all I can say is from my experience of interviewing in the last 18 months is that a very productive set of questions I've asked and this is very much around my personal interest is the nature of criticality and how is it changing and being changed by the digital technologies that we have available to us to support our intellectual life and I find that talking to academics that's a very good way in to get them really talking deeply about their pedagogy and their pedagogy commitments but also thinking about the fact that those can't be staying the same and so I think research that engages at the level I think there are hundreds of research projects that could make very good use of your 5,000 pounds but I do think this cusp when academics have suddenly realised that what it is they do when they're teaching is really difficult is really complicated when you change the conditions it changes radically so I would be spending them when you're going and talking to academics with the support of the kind of professionals that we are about how what they think students need to know and learn and understand is changing and I think that would give us a lot of insights that freshly started with about what is it that students need to be able to do which therefore gives us the template for what our staff need to be able to do so some questions around how criticality is changing and the nature of learning is changing I would not get very far with your 5,000 pounds but I'm sure it's where we need to be going that may not be an immediate research question there may be more important or more immediate not necessarily more important but something that I've observed quite frequently is that currently we are providing students with flexibility in learning path you can do this you can do that you have these option modules but we are not really providing optionality or flexibility in delivery mode there was a picture on Twitter or an image on Twitter about equality and equity and it was about different people with different shoes we feel comfortable walking in hills some like me we prefer trainers and then there should be a condition that if a person wants to walk with perfect that's perfectly acceptable and also possible so if it was me I would spend to explore how we can provide flexibility in delivery mode rather than in learning path or in addition to the learning path thank you we've got quite a lot of questions coming so I'm not going to ask every question to every panel member so that we can get a few questions in so I think I'll go to the first question from the polling for the Vvox polling and I'll address this to you Keith I think this is really interesting one there's a couple of quite similar ones and it says academics have done e-learning for the last few years but a lot of it is stuck in the lecture capture teams delivery model and if anything learning technologies are consulted less and I suppose this is one of my I like this question because it's one of my massive bug bears about we've done technology we've put lecture capturing and we can stream live sessions through teams therefore we've done it so it's less of a question but Keith what's your response to that comment I think that's critically important I'll maybe go back briefly to something I said earlier which is about us being in this space where we have learning technologists learning technology professionals learning technology leaders but everyone's also learning technology practitioner to some extent or another and if we weren't before the pandemic they certainly are now and I do think we need to open up our discussions about what a good technology supported learning experience looks like going forward based on the experiences of the last couple of years and looking at this whole notion of digital space and ways to engage and ways to diversify how we engage and I think this is where there's also potentially a connecting point into how we offer professional development and CP3 opportunities to staff and how we just have professional dialogues with the staff to open up exploring richer dimensions to the use of technology than the one that's been shared there and I think that's a really good example of what we might be facing with some of our colleagues I think ultimately this is a shared responsibility and we need to put in place means and mechanisms of discussions for the professional development for the program design and approval, the whole curriculum process that means that we don't fall back into those quite narrow practices in terms of our use of technology and I think that is a real danger at the moment I think there is a real kind of danger that some colleagues will have diversified what they do but will now start to retreat back to what they were comfortable and familiar with prior to the pandemic so again I don't think it's a there's a single fix or solution to this but I think the way to move forward is to think about how we collectively have those conversations how we put a critical eye and scrutinise what colleagues are planning to do with technology through how we engage with them how we're learning technologists interface with them how we engage with colleagues through the formal processes attached to learning and teaching and program development and approval so that we do move away from that type of practice Thank you and I suppose it's linked to this fresh job, I'll address this one to you How can we make sure that academics involve learning technologists in the broadest sense in the development of curricula from an early stage and I know you're part of a sort of multi professional team and I know a lot of organisations involve do this do involve this but the number of likes on this question indicates that perhaps that's not always as effective as it could be I think if it's not already practised in an institution that requires a change of culture and sometimes it's not easy so what we did for example with this Kenyan project because what you want to do is not only involve but to make sure that what you do also help them is get them as much engaged and it's about simply building relationship having co-designed workshops meetings if I'm honest with you because I landed very nicely in a team that for example next week we have a kick-off meeting for creating a new online module and there are like 19 people in that list and there are only three who are academic we've got people from library learning technologists and everything so probably I'm not that helpful in saying because I landed and some more experienced people that work within OU may be able to answer that question but it's a cultural shift it's building relationship and also getting because sometimes and you have to see how building relationship in your institution work in some institution it's bottom up you go try to make friends and then little by little you make that happen and in some institution that won't work and it needs a senior manager or executive management to get involved so I think depending on your institution I think that I honestly think that there has to be a really strong steer from the senior team the PVC for education or whoever leads on the education it has to be almost mandatory part of the process and a requirement for the approval of the program to really shift that culture I just slightly moved my questions I've just found a good question for Helen there oh here we go so for Helen do the panel think that senior management has fallen into conflating emergency remote teaching with good quality technology neighbourhood learning well obviously which is why I knew it was a good question for you so I think I think I might answer that a little bit by repeating so I wanted to answer the last question you can do that I think I wanted to follow on from what Fresher said which is I think there is a big opportunity and also a big risk here isn't there so I think the whole teachers are doing it for themselves now is both an opportunity and a risk for us isn't it we've been there we've done that we don't really need these people called learning technologists because you know actually we've made it work and I think there's you know I think one one answer to the question because if you're in the room if the policy and the management structure and culture allows you to be in the room then what do you say what do you do when you're in that room what do you say in what you do when you're in that team and I think there's an opportunity here not to be the people saying oh you know have we thought about whether this technology is actually working this week but the people who can ask some rather more fundamental questions about the content of the curriculum about the learners journey through the curriculum about how different modes of participation will create an engaging journey for different kinds of students about the assignment load I think we're you know we can once we're in the room I think we're positioned now to ask more interesting questions and to make a more interesting contribution which hopefully means that we're not just there in the beginning of the conversation and then the academics go off and do what they were going to do anyway we're actually engaged and embedded and threaded all the way through seeing us people with really relevant and important expertise but I think there's also the risk that the digital piece will fall away a little bit some of you may have been around long enough to remember the idea of the Trojan mouse which was that really what learning technologists were I can see people smiling there really we were all just just educational and academic developers learning developers who had this shiny thing that could say well you know you don't want to talk about your teaching because obviously your teaching is perfect but you might be willing to talk about this amazing new technology and in doing that I will talk to you about teaching and about students needs and this was kind of how we got in the room and I think the Trojan mouse may have died in a corner because I don't think anyone thinks anymore that that's a good reason for getting us in the room but that just means we will have to be really interesting and engaging and insightful as we will be when we get in the room and have those conversations Thanks Helen I think that that question really comes to the heart of a lot of what's been going on in the last couple of years that we did the emergency remote pivot or whatever we like to call it and we live streamed teams we did online assessments which were not much better than sitting in an exam hall and regurgitating factual material we kind of put a technological framework around our existing practice which may not have been great in the first place and then we called that online learning so I think there's a lot of comments in here and somebody said can we share the comments afterwards and I think we'll find a way to do that there's a lot of comments in here that make a very similar point about how because academics have now done e-learning or online learning and senior team colleagues feel that they've invested in the platforms that it's done and that learning technologies are receding a little bit more into the background so there's quite a lot of comments about that so I think that's if you just be worth Keith you reflecting on that as we come to a conclusion about where does the learning technologies role sit within the organisational structure and how can we really influence what is going on and be in those discussions sorry sorry I wasn't picking up that question or comment, apologies I thought you meant we might return to that just for the concluding question how do we where do we sit as learning technologists in the organisational structure to really make sure that we move past those discussions so I think we've touched upon some of this but I think the way in which the role and professional learning technologist is becoming more recognised I think that's really important and provides us with really important leverage I do think there are institutional things we can do going back to your earlier point a few minutes ago I don't think we should be developing new courses unless learning technologists, students and also librarians are identified as part of the design teams but I think there's a little bit of reason to be optimistic going forward as well and we've touched upon this in one of the key themes for this year's conference and that's around leadership leadership and learning technology in all its forms whether we're contributing to course teams whether we are leading an academic department we're seeing leadership responsibilities of our learning technologists being more widely recognised I think we can't afford to retreat from that I think we need to hear about within our institutions and the sector about learning technologists as experts in education and it goes back a little bit to the Trojan mouseling but actually now more than ever learning technologists were never just learning technologists but now more than ever we're engaged in thinking about not just learning and teaching and assessment we're engaged in thinking about how to design things so they're more equitable we're engaged not just in thinking about accessibility design we're well placed to think about how different cohorts of students can be engaged more creatively within and across modules and programmes within and across formal and informal learning communities I think if we want to really underline and reinforce the position and importance of learning technologists and others in learning technology leadership and practitioner roles then actually think that the sustainability agenda and discussions about the sustainability of learning and teaching going forward will appeal to those senior managers who breathed a sigh of relief when the contingency worked and that's what happened there were a plod in the success of the contingency arrangements an overhaul of what we do and why we do it so I think some of those is a rather meandering answer but I think all of those things are part of the bigger picture in terms of how we strengthen the position of learning technologists in all forms and all types of roles at all levels and ensure that there's a meaningful contribution to how we move forward Thank you Keith not only was it a fantastic answer to that question but also to my last question which is going to be in a short sentence where do you see what hopes do you have for the profession and where would you really like it to go so I think you've answered that Keith thank you and with Helen what's your hope what's your optimism I hope we get to that point that we can offer students flexibility of delivery this year I don't have any family issue fine I come to campus so we provide the optionality the flexibility in assessment in learning path but we don't provide it in delivery and I hope that we get to a stage that academics and learning technologists together and of course senior management help we can do that for students Thank you Helen I think two things and I think one is that we are positioned to continue to be the critical conscience of student experience and of equity which I think partly thanks to the foundations we get through this profession was in 2001 so one of the really overriding findings from that very early study was that for all the diversity the things that people who called themselves learning technologists had in common with centering students the student experience and centering a passion for equitable access so I'd like that to feel that we can continue to do that but I also think learning technologists in the UK I don't think until you go and work abroad you realise quite how unique it is to be a learning technologist in the UK partly because of the support of alt where it has a glorious diversity and where if you're lucky if you're in the right institution where the culture is right you can have your feet under a lot of different tables whether that's learning skills whether that's librarian issues and e-content whether that's very senior decision making, platform procurement or of course curriculum development and I think I would love to see us support each other to keep that glorious diversity of our interests and influence going Thank you very much and thank you very much to everybody that's contributed to this fantastic panel discussion thank you to those of you in the audience that have oh, thank you that have put the comments up on Vvox and we will find a way of sharing those thank you to those who have done that through the online function as well it's great to have your contributions thank you very much to the panel members to Helen, to Freshda, to Keith we've got a little present for Freshda and for Helen Keith doesn't get one because he's a trustee we got one from last year I've got one as well from a previous thing which are lovely books and it's a nice memento to have and thank you very much for joining us and we'll go to the break now and then we have the parallel sessions following that