 session today. Okay so thank you very much Maren for this nice introduction and for doing the housekeeping first. I have to say I'm not really familiar with BlackBot that much but it seems to be a really a nice going platform. Andreas and IID liked it to be here today and to be able to tell you a bit more about the project that we are currently doing in Germany but the main focus really will be on the aspects of the project that might be transferable to a UK context or beyond the UK and we would really like to sort of foster international collaboration with with the idea set with the pool that we're presenting here today. Andreas could you actually share the slides because yeah there we are. Okay right so matching expertise with higher education institutions, staff training and development demands. We are going to present the expert and pool flying experts and I do apologize for the flying experts here. Well in the sense that flying experts might remind you of flying doctors or something like that. It's just that flying experts seem to be a good English name for a very German project so if we talk about the FE pool or flying experts pool here it's not about further education it has more to do with higher education at this stage but of course who knows there might be aspects which might actually be transferable to the FE sector, the further education sector as well we'll see. Okay Andreas would you like to say something about yourself first? Yes I make a very brief hello I'm delighted to join you all here today I'm Andreas I'm an historian by trade but in this context I'm the administrative coordinator of this project which Martina and I are working in together and I'm here today joining Martina and to help her out and to fill in some background information for the project. Okay and my name is Martina Emke and I'm the coordinator of the pool of experts in digitally enhanced teaching and learning in high education called expert in pool flying experts. So what's the problem with staff development? Of course there are a number of problems with staff at development or there can be a number of problems with staff development but the ones that we would like to concentrate here and point out because they are relevant to the pool of experts is actually give you a bit of background why it was created in the first place. So as we all know there have been rapid technological changes especially in the past two years or so and not at least due to the COVID-19 pandemic which required teaching staff to develop their teaching skills and in particular their online teaching skills at a very fast pace. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as an accelerator for change so some of the movements towards more online teaching that we actually saw before COVID-19 have been obviously accelerated through the pandemic and it's very likely given the increasing unfortunately increasing numbers of incidents all over the world that this challenge that we're facing is actually going to persist for some time. At the same time we've been seeing decreasing staff training and development budgets and not just in Germany. From what I've read in the literature it seems that all over the world a staff training and development budget or in most parts of the world have been actually decreasing rather than increasing because money has been dedicated to other purposes in HCI to accommodate the changes that the HCI sector is going through at the moment mainly having to do with a digitalization and of course budget restrictions are always a general impediment for targeted development offers. What do we mean by targeted? The idea is not so much that staff training and development offers are being made to the staff but the question is does your teaching staff actually need what kind of training and development offers do they actually need and are these offers available to the staff and at what cost possibly. So in general staff training and development offers are planned and organized in advance but this also means that there might be a possible mismatch between current staff development needs and available offers. Just to give you an example in Germany for instance the demand for development offerings in hybrid teaching or in online teaching have increased enormously as I know has been the case in the UK for instance but the question is where are these offers and these offers need to be made now but because the training plans were created about half a year ago or even longer than that there might be a possible mismatch between the needs, the training needs and the offerings that are possible. Now what's the conclusion here? So faced with multiple challenges in preparing their teaching staff adequately for digitally enhanced teaching, higher education institutions are in need of professional development offers that meet their specific training demands in timely and flexible ways and this is actually the background or this is the specific problem that the creators of the pool had in mind when they decided to actually set up the pool and in the next slide Andreas will actually know the next slide sorry the next slide is what's in it for you today. I was just thinking that in next slide we will talk to you a bit more about the project itself but first of all let's just go back and see what's in it for you today. So what can you get out of this webinar? Andreas and I are not so much here to talk about our project but more about actually trying to encourage international collaboration and trying to give you a given opportunity for thinking about how this pool could actually be taken forward for international collaboration. Which aspects might be transferable to your context or how might they be changed? This is basically what we would like to do today so this is a very and we hope this will be a very interactive webinar not so much a presentation. So what's in it for you today? Of course you will need to hear about the pool of experts that we have created and you need to be able to understand how this pool currently works in a German context. Then we would like to encourage you to think about the elements which might be transferable to a UK context and to jointly develop with us first ideas to build an international network of experts in AGI teaching and learning I should say. To that purpose we have also created a padlock which will be made available a bit later on and we will give you time within the webinar to actually post your own ideas, give feedback and hopefully this padlock will be a good sort of testing ground and also something that will stay for us to document the activities that we've been talking about today. Okay over to you now Andreas. Yes for the background of the project as first and foremost as Martina mentioned staff training funding is decreasing so we are very lucky to have secured quite a large amount of money for our project. We are funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine Westphalia. Our general focus is training higher education staff in digital matters and assisting with developing associated skills. How are we in general hoping to accomplish this? The project has four main parts which you can see in the presentation or components and which are developed and implemented by 13 higher education institutions in the state of North Rhine Westphalia. This is quite important because in Germany I'm not sure if you're aware because of federalism we have quite high barriers for cooperation and higher education institutions like universities normally work very independently. So one of our main tasks is to get 13 higher education institutions in sync and work to those four components of the project. But what are those four components? First and foremost we have the digital teaching lab which is tasked with developing a genuine new teaching and staff development program for all 42 higher education institutions in North Rhine Westphalia. The program teaching at the digital age is currently under development and will feature short formats, long formats and self-learning materials which will be open educational resources but as long as it is under development we need our flying experts pool. Secondly we have the community of practice and the aim here is to generally promote exchange between higher education staff. On the one hand this means giving all people the opportunity to talk to each other to people who are in our development I'm very sorry in our staff development program teaching in the digital age but on a broader sense it's our aim to establish and working network of higher education staff in North Rhine Westphalia concerning our topics. Thirdly we have the pool of experts which Martina will explain in greater detail in a moment. And finally we have quality assessments and now I'm going to start over. On the presentation you see very slightly mentioned IFAQM and this is our quality assessment and evaluation and team which is working on for all three components. So far for the general scope Martina back over to you. You're still muted? So I am thank you very much Andreas. So the question here is how does the FE pool work and as I said earlier on FE stands for flying experts pool here. As you can see from Andreas's short introduction this is one component of a very large project which consists of four components all together. So the pool of experts is currently a website basically which I will show to you in a minute. On this website you will see the areas of expertise that the experts can actually cover and in which they can offer workshops or consultancy offerings or inputs for instance. Before we come to that how does it typically work? How do the experts and the HEI in North Onesphalia find together? Because this is basically essentially what I'm doing for the project. So let's say an HEI would like to offer their teaching staff a workshop or a targeted input or a consultancy that they cannot realize with their existing means. Let's say this could be in for instance gamification or in hybrid teaching. In this case somebody from the HEI would get in touch with me as the coordinator of the pool to discuss the options that they have. So they would actually request a workshop for instance in hybrid teaching and we would discuss which experts might be suitable for the particular context in which this workshop should be given. Then the coordinator checks the availability of an expert and the coordinator or well that's me obviously would put the HEI in touch with the experts. In the next step the organization and the content of the offers would be of the offer of the hybrid teaching workshop would be negotiated between the person from the HEI and the expert. So this is nothing that has anything to do with me so to speak but it's more between the HEI and the expert. Why? Well it's simply because the actual workshop will take place at a particular HEI. So to have the coordinator being part of this discussions wouldn't really make sense because the pool does not organize the event. The HEI and the expert together organize the event and the workshop itself takes place at the HEI. The coordinator would then say for instance that the HEI and the expert have agreed on the date for the workshop, the content, the target group and everything else that has to do with the actual offering. Then the HEI would turn back to or what get back to the coordinator to me and ask for the contract to be issued and this again would be part of the coordinator as part of my work to actually issue the contract and after the workshop has taken place the invoice, the expert's invoice would be settled via the pool. So in other words I also deal with the invoicing. So from the HEI the advantage is that they don't have to find a suitable expert for a particular training or staff development offering. This is something that is done by me. They don't have to check the availability of this expert that's done by me and they don't have to pay for the expert that's done by the pool. So they don't have to do anything, they don't have to deal with the invoicing, something that a lot of HEIs that would rather like to concentrate on actually negotiating the content and having, you know, discussing content, discussing how this workshop will be facilitated, how it might be targeted so that it meets exactly the needs of their teaching staff. This is the really sort of enjoyable part of the workshop or of the job of the HEI. But when it comes to invoicing and when it comes to contracts most HEIs are not so interested in that. So I take away that part of the work as well. So this pool has been operational since January 2021 and we have experienced quite a high demand for the services of the pool. So currently we have 45, no, 54 experts and two are from the UK. We have had 55 requests from HEI and we have issued 47 contracts so far. So to explain the difference between 47 and the 55, the remaining difference is still in negotiation, but contracts will be issued for all of the requests. Then staff development offerings, so how many workshops targeted input consultancies have taken place, 32 so far. And the feedback that we have received from the HEI has been really, really positive. And all in all we've had 440 participants who participated in these offerings which have been jointly organised. Let me now show you the website of the flying experts and for that I will actually share my screen. Right, can you see the screen now? No, currently not. Okay, let me just get back. Right, how can I share screens here? I thought I could do that easily. So note to where it says share content, it should give you the option second from the top to share a screen. So near the chat or the participant list. Yeah. Right, can you see it now? Wonderful. Okay, so this is the... I don't, I can't see it. Andreas, can you see it? No, I can't. I'll try to share the screen. I have it at the ready, I think. Well, that would be wonderful. Can't say what's not working here. Is it working now? That's the big question. Yeah, wonderful. Wonderful. Yes, I can see it. Can everybody see it? Yeah, all good. Yeah. You have to tell me now, Martina, because I'm partially blind. No, that's perfectly fine. I'll just, no, I'll just run over the website very quickly. So this website is currently, and I do apologize, but it's currently in German only, but we're working on a translation. And I hope that will be available soon in 2022. What you can see in the upper part of the website is the offers. So it's basically just a quick or brief description of what the pool does and how it works. And then we've got the offers for the HCI that I've just explained. And we also have the offer for the experts themselves because the offer is that they could actually, they can actually post their short bios on the website. And I will show you one of the bios a bit later. So which gives actually the experts another opportunity to show their expertise and to attract the attention of HCI, not just in Northern Australia, but in other parts of Germany as well, because I've already heard that some of the experts have received requests from HCI outside Northern Australia for their services. The thing currently, or the restriction that we currently have is that only HCI from Northern Australia can actually request the services of the pool. And the pool will actually pay for the expert's fee. If there is an HCI from outside Northern Australia who seeks the services of one of the experts in the pool, then unfortunately, at this stage, we cannot pay for the services of this expert. But this is one of the things that we hope to remedy in the future one way or another. Next, you will have the map, which actually shows you where the experts are located. And if you draw the map exactly, if you enlarge the slide, you can see, oh no, make it smaller actually. There we go, that's fine, Andreas, thank you. You can see that we currently have two experts in the UK and one actually in Austria. So these are all sort of international experts that we currently have, but we hope to have and to attract more in the future obviously. Underneath the map, you have the themes which we currently offer, or where the experts have their expertise. And you can see podcasts, for instance, some of them, even if you don't know any German, some of the themes will be familiar to use. Podcasts, for instance, or gamification, or even something like augmented reality and virtual reality. These are topics that are very high in demand in Germany at the moment. And we are quite happy that we have a few experts who can actually offer targeted input or workshops or consultancy services in these topics. Now, if we go to Krissi Neranzi's profile, Andreas, could you please type in Krissi Neranzi or look for her profile? You could also do this via the map obviously, but there we go. If you could click on her profile please. It's a new tab, I'm sorry. It opened. Oh, it opened, but we can't see it because it's a new tab. I'm changing it. I'm sorry. Okay, wonderful. Yeah, these are the joys of technology when you change tabs, sorry for that. It's open. Yeah, there we go. So you could actually see Krissi has given a workshop for the Heinrich-Heine University in Germany about creative methods in higher education. And we've actually written an article about this which will appear soon and we will share with you as well as soon as it's published. It's in English, so you might be interested in its open access as well. So you might be interested in reading a bit about her experience as a facilitator of a workshop and seeing the university perspective and also seeing the coordination perspective because we try to capture all three perspectives in one article there. So each, the profile consists of the picture and then of three thematic areas that this expert has an expertise in. And then underneath the three thematic areas which you'll see in bullet points here, you will have a short veto of the expert which gives AGI an idea of what the expert specializes in and to see whether this particular expert might be the right expert for the particular offer that an AGI has in mind. Okay, thank you very much. So we can actually stop sharing the screen at this point and maybe return to the PowerPoint because in the next step, after showing you this website, and I will actually post the website in the chat as well. So something I should have thought about a bit earlier but it's not too late. So you can always go back there and see what it actually looks like even though it's in German. In the next step, we would like to give you time for asking you questions because we are aware that this is very dense content, content that we have presented here. And you might have some questions at this stage that we would like to take before we then move on to jointly thinking about this pool could be extended or which aspects might be transferable to the UK context. So basically, the stage is yours now, participants, if you have a question or if you would like to post your question in the chat if you're more comfortable with that, then we would happy to answer your questions there. How did you identify the experts? Yeah, very good one. First of all, we started with our own networks of experts, to be honest, because we had to start from somewhere. Within the pool, within the project, we had discussions about which or where we saw most demand for the development offers. So which topics would be in high demand, for instance, or where what sort of topics are interesting for teaching staff at the moment. And one of the things was actually, as I said, hybrid teaching, for instance, and we drew on our networks first, but we've now come to a stage where we find experts through recommendations, for instance, or where experts or potential experts actually turn to me and sent me an email and say, okay, this pool is really interesting. Can we discuss whether I might fit actually, or my expertise might actually fit in this pool? And then we'll talk about this. And it's never just a question of sending an email and automatically you are being put or your profile will actually appear in the pool. It's always a process of negotiation and about discussion with the expert, but also with the HEI, because the sort of the success factor, the biggest success factor is actually in matching the need of the HEI and the expertise of the expert as well as possible. How do your experts share the learning practice or insights from the sessions they deliver across the many different HEIs and feed that back into the pool? Well, actually, this is something that is not currently happening, Jen, sorry to say so, but at the moment, this pool of experts is just for matching purposes. It's not a platform for teaching and learning in itself. It just contains information which HEIs find useful for finding a suitable expert for their particular need and for experts to publish their expertise, basically. And this is what the pool covers because as I said earlier on, the workshop itself takes place or the organization expert and the workshop itself, for instance, or the consultancy or the input. Everything that has to do with the offering itself happens between the HEI and the expert. And obviously, HEI have their own platforms and they use what platforms they find suitable. One might add, it is, of course, possible for the experts to join us in our community of practice which is currently, the technological part is under development. We are in the midst of sorting a lot of things out, but those kind of exchanges you mentioned are of consideration for the community of practice and we would be very happy to integrate those as soon as we are ready to accomplish this. Yeah, and something else we might want to add at this stage. Yeah, I'm really interested. Thanks, Marin. This is exactly what we are interested in as well, how to develop or scale this approach. And one other thing that we should mention at this point is actually that North Islander's Failure is currently developing an OER platform, a really big one where HEI can actually publish all content that has been created, for instance, in one of these collaborative offerings. They could actually publish their OER on the platform. But again, this would be exclusively for HEI from North Islander's Failure and we are thinking much beyond that and we are not particularly happy to be honest that these offerings are currently restricted to North Islander's Failure only and this is why we would like to open it up and this is our main interest here and this is why we're here today. All it has a directory of experts members and we have been thinking about this a lot. Yes, yes, so if we would be very happy to carry on with this discussion that we started here today with this webinar, Marin with you or other members from the Association for Learning Technology to see what sort of ideas we can jointly come up with. So maybe as a first step, it would be a good idea now to move to the Padlet and to give the participants of this webinar the chance to actually put their first impressions, their feedback, their ideas on the Padlet. So let me just give you post a link here to the Padlet as well. Yeah, there we go, thanks Andreas. You were a bit quicker than I was. Okay, so if you go to this Padlet, you can see on the left hand side, feedback ideas, then important aspects for network formation. So which aspects do you think are important that we should consider, especially when we think about how this pool of experts could be transferred to the UK or beyond. So what barriers to network formation come to your mind and what are your first ideas, how we could actually start discussing or build and not start discussing, we're discussing this already, but how we could actually, what would be the next steps for building an international network of experts that would be very interesting. And we'll give you five minutes now or so where you can actually post something yourselves because I think these ideas need a bit of consideration. Thanks Martina, thanks Andreas. Would you want me to share the Padlet? So that we can watch it kind of move around or did you just want us to have five minutes of quiet time and then we come back? I thought we would have, by all means, please do share the Padlet so that we could see if somebody posts something. I've already locked into the Padlet so I could actually move posts or something if that was necessary. But yeah, that would be nice if we could share the Padlet here. Yeah, great, thanks. Great, hopefully no one minds you'll be able to see me type, but yeah, please do join in. It's 10 past now, so we've got five minutes for this activity and then we'll all come back before the end of the session. So thanks very much, Martina and Andreas. We'll let everybody to contribute now. Wonderful, thank you, Maureen, thank you. Okay, so there's two minutes remaining. If you haven't yet, please do contribute. But we don't really want to put you under pressure. As I said, we know this is something really new and we know it's quite dense context and quite a lot of content that we presented here today. So by all means, this Padlet will stay open for everyone to post their ideas later and also for future discussions. So if you don't know how to put your ideas or to your feedback at the moment, you can always do so later. So please don't feel that you are under pressure to post something now. Right, Maureen, Andreas, I don't know how you feel about this, but I think it's time now to come to a close maybe. Sounds great, I think we've had quite a few comments come in via the Padlet, I can see that. That's fantastic. Okay, great. So Andreas, would you like to start with and show us the last slide maybe of the PowerPoint? Yes, one moment please. And that's the last slide that we have for today, but hopefully not the last time that we are going to talk about the pool with you. Okay, that was our exactly. So what's next? That is basically the question here. As I said earlier on, the Padlet will stay for further discussions. And we would like to invite anybody interested in taking this pool of experts forward or taking ideas for building a future network and of course, associated to questions of how to build an international pool of networks, how to build an international network of experts is actually a question of funding. So in the next step, when we start developing our ideas, it would certainly be interesting to think about funding as well, because as I explained earlier on, one of the crucial aspects of this pool is that the experts fees are borne by the pool which is an incredible advantage for AGI and of course for the experts, because there is security and payment there. But if we talk about how we can take this forward, then it would be interesting to think about funding opportunities for such a network. Okay, Andreas, any questions? Any final words here, at least at this stage for today? Yeah, a big thank you as an order, I think, for having us. We would very much like to hear from you in the future, not only concerning the pool of experts, but all topics you might think worth of cooperation, and that's all I have. Exactly, and one last word from me is, as I said, the pamphlet will stay with you, but we will also provide our slides. So you've got our contact details, if anything. Thank you very much, Kati. Yeah, I really do hope that our pool will expand, the project will expand, and what's even more important that we can foster international collaboration with this idea, or something that this idea gives rise to future international collaborations, because that would be really great. As I said before, we are very much interested in sort of opening up the pool, not restricted to a particular regional state or a country. Thank you very much, Marin. Thank you very much for having us to the Association for Learning Technology. That's it from us. Thank you.