 This is the 10th Eden webinar. We're delighted though that this 10th one is actually a collaboration between Eden and ICDE, the International Council for Open and Distance Education, and that's reflected in the panel members as you'll hear shortly. For those of you who might be attending the first time, all of the webinars are recorded and available on the Eden website as this webinar will be too. We also really invite your questions, your participation. The panel are waiting with anticipation to respond to your questions. To make it a little easier for us to manage, we ask that you use the Q&A tool if you're viewing and participating in Zoom, and that allows us to respond to your questions. At the same time, please do also though converse in the chat box if you want to continue conversing with fellow participants. I don't think there's much else to remind you at this stage. The general format is that we'll start off with introductions. We have a framing question that the women are, is focused on how do we plan for education after the pandemic, so we'll address that question. Over the next 60 minutes might extend a little longer. We've had over 500 participants in some of the webinars, so sometimes it takes a little while to be able to work through as many questions as possible. We'll try to do full justice to the topic. It's a challenging topic as we are all around the world currently thinking beyond the current crisis. In fact, I think what's useful as an introduction to our panel members is I think I'm right in saying that we have three continents represented here. We have both hemispheres represented, and if we really want to stretch it, those of you who know my background, even though I'm based in Ireland, I'm originally from New Zealand, so we can say that if we go from the top to the bottom at the basket, it gets pretty close to the top. We really do have a global panel here and a global conversation because the topic of conversation really has impact across the world or around the world. Without any further ado, I'll probably remind you from time to time about where to put your questions and respond. Without further ado, what we have, and I'm just going to introduce the panel members and then invite them to provide their own personal introduction because I think it's a bit impersonal to read out a formal bio. Much more interesting to hear from the panel member themselves. Sandra is our current president of Eden and she'll be opening out shortly. Antonio is a past president of Eden and well-known in European as well as ICDE circles. In Pine, and I think we'll probably have to get your name pronunciation just right, comes from South Africa as a Commonwealth of Learning chair in OER. And then we have Neil, who is the president of Atabasca University, well-known for its leadership in open and distance learning. So without further ado, Sandra, I'm going to invite you just to tell us a little bit more about your background, perhaps elaborate just briefly on your experience so far with the COVID-19 pandemic. And lastly, because it's late in the day here, at least in Europe, early for others, one thing we may not know about you from the formal bio that I could have read. So Sandra. OK, thank you, Mark. I'm very happy that we are having today this webinar with joint efforts with ICDE. And I'm also very happy to see so huge number of participants from different countries and special greetings to my colleagues from Croatia. I'm calling here from Zagreb. And as Mark already said, I'm president of Eden following Antonio and Irina trying to follow their steps and they are already very good work to push forward. Basically about me, I finished chemistry, but for 20 years I'm doing e-learning. I have master in digital education and also PhD in information and communication technologies, digital skills for teachers in high education. I'm doing all my life e-learning and I think it's very important to help teachers to implement e-learning technologies into educational process. So currently I'm assistant director for education and user support at University Computing Center at University of Zagreb. And within the University Computing Center, we have the e-learning center, which is national center for high education supporting e-learning. And regarding the COVID, I was in charge supporting teachers in high education during this time. So basically for two months we have been working all days to support all teachers who had to overnight push their teaching into online environment. So it was a challenge, but I think we responded in a quite good way. Apart from my primary work as president of Eden, I also had to see how Eden should respond to this challenge. And well, we started with this initiative of online webinars on education in time of pandemic, where we wanted to provide practical information tips to help teachers how to deal with this change. And this is from what I see so far has been very good. In the autumn we plan to move to another series of these webinars, but I'll tell something about it later. Also challenge was that Eden conference this year couldn't be face to face, but it's going to be online. So this is our response to this crisis. And in the end, what should I share with you that is not very known? Well, when I was young, I wanted to be to work in the kindergarten with the infants, and this is still my big wish. So my colleagues at work know that I like small children and they try to bring from time to time their children to work so that I get some time with them. That's it. Well, thank you very much, Sandra. I was smiling and sharing your last point because some of my colleagues would sometimes describe that universities are just like big kindergarten. And sometimes the academics have tantrums that are just slightly bigger than and scale than those that occur from preschoolers. Not sure if that's a good segue to you, Neil. But Neil, could you as president of ICD introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the background? Indeed. So a huge thanks to the group at Eden and Sandra for bringing ICD into this conversation. For those that I haven't had a pleasure meeting, my name is Neil Facina. I currently serve as the president of Athabasca University in just Athabasca, Alberta, which is just north of Edmonton. Also have the honour of serving as the president of ICDE as we do face this global health crisis. And just want to say a huge shout out to whether or not I'm wishing you good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, or in some cases I think good middle of the night for those that are tuning in from certain parts of the world. Personal background, while I've been the president of Athabasca University for just about four years, I came to distance learning serendipitously via a commitment to the mission on both an administrative front, and also a personal front. And I'll get to that personal part at the very end here. But my academic background is actually in human resources and organizational behaviour. And so that's where the distance space is relatively new as kind of four or six years or so for me. But the commitment to mobilising learning around the world and creating universal legal access is truly where my passions rest as an administrator. So I think we're quite fitting whether or not it be with ICDE, with Eden's mission as well, or with the mission of many of the institutions that everyone is from where they're tuning in. In terms of some experience with COVID, I'm going to say it's kind of three levels on the ICDE front, very similar to what Sandra was saying. Beyond making sure that our team members were safe and secure, it was about how do we mobilise resources to be able to support our members. And so whether or not it be through webinar opportunities or the mobilisation of digital resources to help our members and their many team members try to respond to what was a very quick transition over to very digitally mediated environments. On a personal front, I have the privilege now of working with a 12 and a 13-year-old at home. And so it certainly makes for some new experiences, but nevertheless very exciting to be able to watch my kids now have to respond to a world that I've grown accustomed to being the president of AU. And then last but not least is the AU response. Again, first and foremost making sure that our learners and our team members were safe and secure, and then making sure that we are trying to mobilise our resources to help many partners, whether or not it be in Canada or around the world, move their environments into a very digital first environment. It's very much, as Mark was saying at the start, when you've got a background or a reputation of being a global leader in this space, it's nice to be able to help as best we can when other people are looking for that support. To close the loop around something you might not know about me and how I came to distance education, I actually did my wine education certification via distance. And so I know what it's like to do something which many would expect is very physical and quote-unquote lab-based via distance. And so I've got the experience as the administrator, but also as the learner. But with that, Mark, I'm going to turn it back over to you. Well, thank you very much, Neil. And that's an interesting experience that I personally didn't know about. So I'm not sure how you pour wine down the pipe as such. So clearly that helps to answer the question that has come up over recent weeks and months about can anything be done online? And I think generally the answer is yes to that, but perhaps we may discuss that further in the panel. Empai, can I ask you to give us a little bit about your background for the participants in today's webinar? Good afternoon, evening, morning, night. It's such a great pleasure to be invited to this webinar today. My name is Empine Makwe. I'm a commonwealth of learning chair in open education resources and open education practices at the University of South Africa, one of the largest and certainly the oldest distance teaching university in the world. I call it the grandmother of all university distance teaching universities because it's the one that started as a correspondence many, many years ago and then it changed to be an ODL institution. So we have tasted almost every other aspect of distance teaching and distance education over the years. And a lot has changed and besides being the commonwealth of learning chair, I'm also very much involved in all associations of distance education starting from the national distance education in South Africa and the regional one called Diyasa and I'm also the director of the African Council for Distance Education as well as the ICDE where I'm an OER ambassador as well as working with the OER Act. It's the OER Advocacy Committee. And some few years ago I think in 2015 we hosted the ICDE conference here at UNISA where we started a doctoral consortium and where we invited different students who were in doctoral programme for open distance learning. So it's one of the things that I personally contributed towards the ICDE. And since March, mid-March, when we all went into lockdown, now I'm getting into the COVID story, when we all went into lockdown, we had to act very quickly and it affected all of us in different ways and in developing context as you know that resources are not easily available and things are a bit difficult. However, learning had to take place, learning had to occur irrespective of what is going on. Then what I did as a community project because I call it a community project because I'm dealing with people who are not students within the university. We developed a programme that is based on OER. I just looked at OER that deals with how to teach online and one was Digital Literacy Course that is an OERU course and the other one was teaching, taking your teaching online which is the Open Land course. And I used those two courses and used mobile learning to support students who were involved in it. In the first two weeks of just sending out an email or saying any teacher out there who is interested, here is a free course that they can go through it and the response was just amazing. 300 people showed interest in the course. We are still running it and some of them have finished the course and some of them have received badges, certificates and you can tell very quickly that things are moving in the right direction. The thing with COVID is that you need to act and respond very quickly and rapidly. It doesn't give you time to think about how you need to plan ahead. So we used both online space that people are not familiar with and used mobile learning as something that people are familiar with just to provide that added support and also we used a lot of peer support developing small groups so that they can support each other. Then the last thing about me that many people don't know I'm not working from home. I'm at home trying to work. As you have seen, as I'm trying to talk to you, my daughter had to go across the room so I had to ask, turn on the lights and whatever and that's the type of teaching and probably that's the type of our work environment going to look like in the future and I actually love it. It's fine and I think as long as I'm in my mind is I am working at I'm not working at home. I am at home working. Thank you very much. And just to come back that's a very interesting background. Was there one thing that we don't know about you that doesn't get revealed in your formal bio? In my past life I was a journalist worked for a newspaper for a while and when I got into higher education I didn't know that I would last for a year. It was so slow and nothing was happening quick enough but I found more than 20 years later I'm still in academic space. It prepares you well for the fake news environment we live in. Antonio, I'm going to invite you to you know the routine. Basically tell us a little bit about yourself your COVID experience and something we may not know about you. OK, well thanks a lot Mark. Well, first of all I'd like to thank the invitation, the kind of invitation it's a pleasure to be here to have the chance of participating in this session, this debate and also to share it with a lot of friends which is also very nice. Regarding my brief presentation well as well most know I'm an associate professor at the University of Portugal I'm currently the head of the Department of Education and Distance Learning and well in the past I've been a president of Eden as Sandra has already mentioned but even before that I was also a pro-rector at the Open University of Portugal and at that time my task was exactly to conceive and manage the transition process or the transformation process from a paper-based university a paper-based distance university to a fully online university in a way these experiences is a little bit acquainted to me although the timing is quite short this turnaround so it's something that sounds familiar to me well my basic training is in philosophy so I'm a philosopher by training and well I have a doctor in philosophy and all of these I'm a true PhD which not much can be proud of and of course besides my work at the Open University of Portugal I'm also a researcher at the University of Lisbon and was collaborating with other universities around the world, Europe and the world and even with UNISA had already the pleasure of addressing the doctoral programme that Mbina has started and well also collaborated with Sandra's University and so on regarding well of course my connection with university however although my basic training is in philosophy has always been linked with education with the field of education and with distance education in particular well in that sense so getting to the experience with the Covid-19 well my experience is slightly different from most of the colleagues in the sense that our university works fully online so these crises did not present to us a need for changing of the process of learning in the sense all the procedures were kept well as they were so there was no big impact regarding the learning process or teaching and learning process our students were not experiencing the same conditions as before so although we didn't have to change the methodology in a sense we didn't have to transform our way of teaching and also the way of students learning we had to adjust and to adapt to a number of important personal situations at a particular context that our students had to migrate and well one of them was exactly what Neil was talking about which is everyone is now living in the same space sharing the same space working in the same space together using the same equipment and that presents a problem anyway apart from these although the university works fully online it doesn't well all the administrative part well so the support services do not work online and so we had to adjust the work environment of the university to well a remote working environment as well so we are doing telework across the university and that presented a huge well managerial task as you can imagine apart from this of course given our expertise and experience well most of us myself and my colleagues have been asked by other universities and schools and well institutions and teacher communities to share our knowledge with them to support them and we had even started something which I think is quite interesting which is a community that was actually well created and managed the experts in open and distance learning in Portugal so the experts community had started an online community to support the transition of the other colleagues to online learning well getting to the point that Mark is pushing us to which is basically tell us something that nobody knows or sell them only if you know well it's not a big secret but well I started my career actually as a TV director so even at the university at the open university my first interest was actually educational TV but it was just a kind of a phrase I wanted actually to go to Hollywood and fortunately it didn't happen still I'm still counting that I'll get there some way in the future somewhere in the future but anyway that was my big secret but anyway so it was also interesting given that background for me it was a kind of a personal curiosity to see how much attached people are to using Zoom which is quite interesting given that particular experience so back to you Mark well thank you very much Antonia and I had an ulterior motive I now know all four of you that I didn't previously but I guess to be fair to not only yourselves but to the format that I put there as a question I should share something about myself I didn't prescript this because there are a number of things I could share I don't think any of my colleagues at least those on the panel know this there may be some of my colleagues that I work with but my real name is not Mark Brown I'm not going to elaborate any further you can do all the internet research you like but I've lived with this name for quite a while but it's not my real name so on that intriguing note and not wanting to side rail us we're here to talk about education and planning for education after the pandemic I note there's already a question in that question that in itself education after the pandemic what sort of time frame are we thinking about but I'm going to ask Sandra and we'll just stick to the same order initially and then we're going to mix things up for the participants and we'll hopefully get the questions that you're posing in we haven't got many questions yet understandably but as we get underway a little bit more around the question please do share your questions in the Q&A box so the question is how do we plan for education after the pandemic what should we be thinking about right now and I will just put a couple of qualifiers because we are an international panel I wonder to what extent that thinking changes depending on when your semester cycle is and where you are located so those are considerations we may have to think about Sandra Yeah, thank you Mark I think that there is no clear answer because lots of there are lots of different educational scenarios and lots of countries lots of different heritage and cultures and way of education so everyone will adapt to own needs what they think is the best but coming from traditional universities and very traditional environment where the only education which is really appreciated is the education which is done at universities and schools physically I would say that people really need some different some very strong push to make changes and I'm sure that some of them will try to go back to the time before although I think that on this way they will find out it's not possible but from mistakes we learn so basically it would be good if everyone would start to think now how to improve the education teaching and learning to define new strategies short-term or long-term strategies how to include digital technologies is in a blended way or online way fully into educational process but all things should be included into this and I can elaborate about this a little bit further but basically it is hard to change the mindset of people and I think this is what we have to focus on because it's not only teachers and students it's also management administrative parents community society as such we had seen the rise of MOOCs they were really something new but they're still here but they didn't change everything over the night with open the education we are working on it we are pushing it so much but still we are not making it as the mainstream so there are lots of challenges and I think that people face-to-face teaching and learning will try to find a way to go back but they will find eventually that it's not possible we are talking about new present and future present there are no ways of going back thank you Sandra and I think you identified something very important that I should probably have made more of knowing at the outset is in our panel we know only have geographical representation different leadership roles but we have different types of institutions and I'm sure there are many people who are participating here today who come from universities or institutions that are traditionally campus based my own institution is primarily campus based with a smaller online program but Neil I'm going to hand over to you because you're coming from a fully online institution so I'm wondering how that question might look from your institutional perspective but no doubt you're also having conversations of colleagues in more traditional institutions as well particularly wearing your multiple hats indeed Mark and I think I'll probably echo a little bit of what Sandra said and potentially preempt a little bit of what Antonio is going to get to as also a fully digital environment and I think something that I said in a different context was that the future of learning is already here it arrived at the beginning of 2020 the challenge was is that we weren't globally ready for it the concept of technology being embedded and ubiquitous in education is coming and just some of us in the case of pure online institutions were fully embedded in that environment those institutions that were in the traditional place-based learning environment might have been trying new things out but weren't really into the deep end of that learning curve yet and I think this is where I'm going to suggest or I'm starting to build on what Sandra said and that is we have to recognize that learning has been disrupted period and the concept of going back and trying to embrace what used to be there without seizing the chance to actually learn from what we've all had to do and embrace some new things I think we actually if we actually try to go back to what it was before we're actually going to do a disservice to our learners you know in the question box is you know around assessment and we've got a chance now to actually know when on how do we create fully immersive quality whether or not it be learning experiences or new approaches to assessment in a way that we didn't before because today we're doing it from a place of discomfort before we were doing it from a place of comfort right and so we tend to be a little bit more willing if we're already in the uncomfortable spot but we need to definitely think about how do we amplify quality the second piece that I want to say is as we're planning for the future is that we also need to know that our learners have been disrupted they are now going to be expecting something entirely different and we've got again a chance to reinvent how we bring learning opportunities to the broader community that is authentically student first right that we enable the learner to identify what their needs are and enable them to curate their own learning pathway but in order to do that we need to challenge the assumptions that we have within our own institutions we authentically need to break our own systems if you will to make sure that we're not just trying to adapt what we do today to a new reality and I'd say that that's that last point that I just want to make is that moving to a digital first environment then taking your place based experience and trying to digitise it it actually means starting from a digital experience what's the ultimate digital experience and how do we make it look like a learning opportunity right rather than saying how do I take a classroom and make it digital and so Mark I'll leave it with that because others have got I'm sure incredible things to say as well well thanks Theo I was just jotting down a few notes there last comment effectively around planning for digital first and of course one of the things you mentioned is how the future of learning is already here in my own observations on COVID-19 I've often said or I've written that the pandemic has fast-tracked the future and it's very hard to go back but on that note I'm going to hand back and hear from our next panel member okay thank you very much I think Neil talks from the perspective of distance education and online learning those kind of universities that we've been and the universities that have been preaching about moving to this mediated form of learning and all the time we've been questioned about quality and when you ask our colleagues they're questioning us about quality and we say what do you mean by quality they say but you don't know if the student who has written the assignment is the same student that is going to be examined or all those things and I always tell them that we are not here to police people we just have to do assessment in a different way but I think planning for the future for education of the future starts now especially during the crisis if we do not take the opportunity during the crisis to plan for the future that we aspire for that we want we are going to be left behind during the crisis phase obviously we respond to the crisis we start with little projects that will assist us to survive it's all about survival to survive during this phase however if we survive during this phase we need to think about the recovery phase the recovery plan what is it that we want to do what is it that we want to keep that has worked during the crisis because I believe that if something works during the crisis it's bound to work even during even during good times because if it survives the storms it's definitely going to survive when everything it's all good so during the crisis phase I've jotted down that the biggest challenge that we found is that many people are not trained to go online and all of a sudden they're expected to move everything to an online space and as Neil puts it they take it last room as it is and put it into an online space and that doesn't work so then you find many people come into us asking how is this done and all that and we find ourselves and even Sandra was talking about it we find ourselves having to professionalise to teach people how to use staff development that's number one that you need to do during the crisis so that you get people who know what they're doing and as they're moving along in my case we started developing staff, community teachers community teachers in the community to enable them to teach online now it is during this period again that we need to think about the recovery phase and the sustainability phase and in the recovery phase we need to think about how to implement measures to regain lost time lost time if we want to regain lost time lost time how institutions will start preparing investing and reinforcing because now we are looking at different business models that universities are comfortable with what type of business models will work in the next phase and then when we deal and then it is also at that time when leadership need to rethink the university space leadership need to rethink what the purpose of education is which takes us back to the mission of education because even before covid we were already been told how irrelevant we are in higher education we produce people who are irrelevant and covid now is forcing us how irrelevant we were we kept on covering that and saying no we are fine there's nothing wrong with that but covid covid showed us when we couldn't move quickly enough to get into the world that the world wants us to be at banks continue doing their work other sectors continue to do their work but it's in higher education where we find it so difficult we are even saying we need to start trying to open up education phase to phase but I'll just leave it at that but I think those three phases are very critical now during the crisis and the sustainability phase because that will help us to know where we are going thank you well thank you that's really articulated very clearly how we need to think about the different stages and it will link back into what I hope to bring in shortly after giving Antonio a chance to respond a couple of the questions that have come through that might want to take that conversation even further so thank you ok well just a couple of remarks following what has already been said first of all well it comes to my mind the title of a need and conference that we organised at the start of the decade in Greece at the height of the financial crisis and the title of the conference was Never Waste a Crisis this is more true than ever well we shouldn't wait this crisis getting back to the point what will happen after the pandemic well first of all we don't know how much time it will last the pandemic and its effects secondly we don't know what the impact will be in social terms economical terms and all of this and this will have also impact on how education systems will evolve I'll give you an example if as it most possibly it will happen there will be a need for institutions to downsize to focus on on cutting costs on also widening the outreach to many learners who could not afford to pay the tuition fees and all of this this will imply a lot of transformation and how higher education and other public education institutions are providing education and how of course online learning could become mainstream in a sense so this will also be important and we don't know exactly at this point how this will change but definitely there will be some change as Sandra was pointing out as we learn from previous phenomena even the MOOC phenomena although the MOOC phenomena is different in many ways from what is happening now of course what we are now expecting as the big change will not occur exactly as such what we can know for sure is that something will change dramatically in most probably will not change in the way that we are thinking that it will change and we are not still ready to understand the change process that will occur secondly because we are still in the middle of it secondly it is true what Nil was saying that from a first point well a kind of from a first perspective well a prior perspective we can say that what this crisis has clearly done was to accelerate to a large extent and also to scale up what was already happening so the digital transformation of the higher education system for instance was already occurring but this has changed it overnight in the sense that it gave it a speed and a scale that we were not expecting that it would have however we should also pay attention to the fact that increase in speed and scale is also creating a new reality that we are not prepared for taking into account because from over I mean we'll give you an example even at the end of last year in Portia it was approved a legislation well a specific law a distance education act in which there was a kind of kind of a goal a long term goal that was a specific well in a decade to increase the number of online for more online learning students by three fold by well going from 10,000 to 30,000 well it just in six months it exploded to hundreds of thousands so and of course everything that was planned in that in that specific legislation or legal framework is now basically updated so this is something that it's not just scaling up and speeding up it's a new phenomenon that we have to understand as Sandra was also pointing out there's what is most and from my own experience what is most difficult and it takes more time to change is the mindset basically a transmission process as the ones that we're discussing in its essence a cultural process and we are basically changing the culture of learning and the culture of teaching and that is something that is not just done by changing technology methodology it's more than that and so getting to the main question how do we plan for education after the pandemic I think that all the actors are called to have education from a governmental perspective from the perspective of top leadership in terms of national leadership at least or international leadership as well it's important that new legal frameworks are designed that are flexible enough to be in a way facilitators of this change process secondly it is also important that from institutional leadership perspective sustainable strategies long term strategies are designed and implemented that are designed in an holistic way including all the main actors of their communities and having a clear focus on the cultural change of the institution from the teachers perspective of course one of the most clear lessons from this crisis is the fact that all the teacher training that has been conducted basically failed and it was obvious that it was going to fail because most of the teacher training that was conducted was not done in a in a how can say immersive way so people learn to teach online without prior being having any kind of experience as an online learner and that is a dramatic factor in this sense I mean bearing in mind the experience that we had at the University of Portugal that was a critical aspect the fact that we've made it mandatory that anyone could only become an online teacher after having first having an online learning experience an immersive one the same pedagogical model and so on it was critical of course from a learners perspective and that is something that is also an important lesson and we should have known it before learners they are not necessary even if they are digital competence from the sense of well managing technology they are not necessarily digital literates from the perspective of online learning they have to be trained they have to experience before they have to adjust to this new environment because they never had most of them never had that experience before and so there is also the need to train students to give them the opportunity to learn how to learn in this environment so of course there are a number of other things it's a complex issue but basically I would state that most and of course it's also a lesson from a pandemic we have to include also families and the communities they play a major role in this either supporting or exactly making some kind of obstacle to the changing process Back to you Mark Well thank you Antonio I let that conversation run from all the four panellists because it really was the core of the question that we posed as you can tell there is no simple answer here and I want to turn a little bit now to some of the questions that have been posed that really blow out of what you've said and the very first one I'm just going to ask for a really quick answer before we shift to maybe thinking a little bit more to the future the first question is around I'll say evaluation I'm wanting to know whether because I guess we're still as someone said right at the outset in the pandemic and one of the observations was when is the pandemic going to end what planning timeframe are we working to so my very short question is in your institution have you had enough time yet to really reflect and evaluate on the experience to date whoever wants to take that first off Can I try? Well I would say we didn't have time we didn't have time we are trying to ensure that teaching has moved to online environment and to finish the academic year at the moment the focus is on exams and how to finish the academic year I hope that we will try to think about it and to reflect much more now when the exams finish I just have to say that in Croatia we had additional a catastrophe we had a strong earthquake in Zagreb and lots of faculties are not able to move back to their premises so we have two challenges as well but at the moment teachers and institutions are looking how to save the academic year Right so the short answer from Sandra is not yet How about you I'm planning the same and I think that's how education institutions has been structured we are in a pandemic and yes we understand that we are in a pandemic but we are not even focusing on that we are focusing on how best can we get the students to how best can we pour as much information into their heads so that they can write an exam so that there is an exit point about how best to use this pandemic at this time to develop systems that are going to sustain the type of education we want and even thinking about that all we are thinking about is how to make sure that the students go through and we are not even thinking about the calendar year and all the things that goes with it because in my view we should just have stopped the calendar year and refocus so that when we go and we said we should start in this time and end this time why are we still following things that maybe are not even working So interesting Neil what about your organisation and institution Short answer Mark is that we haven't had the chance to sit back and reflect on the pandemic itself but what it has forced us to do in short order is actually reflect on the direction we were heading to begin with because it has forced us to accelerate many of the questions we had anticipated answering but not immediately so as an example the assessment question so even for a fully digital university we had the question physical based assessments so we have been forced to think through and reflect on some of the assumptions but not necessarily on the pandemic itself So I'm getting a picture here and I'll let Antonio come in last, sorry again I'll give you first dibs next but this is very much reactive it might be not fair to say planning on the fly because it sounds like from Neil's last answer some of this was in the pipeline but I think in answering and reflecting on the question of how do we plan for the future I wanted to make it really clear for all the participants that I guess we're trying to answer that question where we're still in the forest a little bit Antonio Well Mark, or should I say alias Mark well Mark actually in our case it's interesting because well we're basically facing the same problem as all the other institutions and the colleagues have already said of course we're still in the midst of the pandemic in the middle of the crisis and we have to finish the current academic year and only now are starting to plan the next academic year however there has been interesting development especially linked with of course this hot topic of assessment because we had the same problem I mean all the distance universities had the same issue because of of governmental regulations we should it was mandatory to have physical examination I mean physical conducted exams and of course this is clearly impossible it's impossible for us but also for the other universities and that was a change a game changer in the sense that government and society in general understood well it's not working and we have to end the different solution of course in this sense I think there was a very positive development not just regarding the university but the community in general the higher education in particular people understood that not only it was difficult to adjust the examination process to the new conditions even to conduct it online because there was of course all of these issues that are well known but these also led to people start asking well but maybe this is not the best way to assess and this is for me the most important thing it's happening step by step it's not clear still but step by step people are understanding that they have to change assessment methodology and to change it in a way that it becomes much more a continuous process and of course a process that is related also on how we can collect evidences of learning outcomes and how can we actually conduct a more I mean a better a better way of assessing the competencies that should be developed by the students so I'm going to park assessment up for the moment we may get a chance to come back that I know that's a very topical issue we've had webinars on that but I want to ensure that we do have time to think about the future the reason I just wanted to come in with the question is I think we need to understand that our current reflections are a product of where we're at at the moment and we're all in different situations in different countries but the question that I thought was very relevant that was posed in the Q&A is what type of changes do we actually expect the original question was how how are we planning but what are we planning for question and so Neil I thought I'll give you the first chance this time what is it that you're wanting to see come out of this another way of looking at this I know some institutions have been involved in mario planning but there's the concept of backcasting what is it we want and how might we work backwards but Neil basically the question here is for all the panellists what is it that we should be planning for well well since that you asked me to start answering well one important thing that I believe that it should be clear for us as well is that these as also transform the field in the sense that we are now I mean the experts and the traditional distance education and online learning practitioners we are not now the owners of the field we are just a small minority and the actual field is now made up all the other ones who are now practitioners even against their will in some cases so when we say what do we expect will happen we should be careful about that because what will happen it will not depend only on what would be a typical development process regarding the how the field would evolve anyway what I would be hoping for in particular would be a clear emergence of good strategic planning regarding leadership a new importance even by the governments to legislation and regulation of online learning provision also importantly because it is critical a new much more improved model of teacher training much better use of resources in terms of the investment in the infrastructure in the infrastructure capability of institutions also very importantly given more space more opportunity to students to participate in the process of co-design their online learning processes and well because otherwise you are going to leave nothing for anyone else to say so without wanting to be too biased on the balance of gender here I'm going to let Neil come in first and then you can debate Sandra when you want to come in Neil Thanks Mark recognising again wanting to lose the chance on seizing a crisis I think we've got an opportunity to plan for the future that we want not the future that is going to be handed to us with us reimagining work reimagining community reimagining family the need for learning is going to go up not down and so I think we need to plan for greater access and the way that we're going to be able to do that is by bringing together the place based and the digital it's not about one being better than the other it's about recognising the value of each and how they can complement each other rather than try to try to displace each other I think that's going to end up creating better choice for learners it's going to end up creating better quality whether or not it be on the digital side or the place based side but authentically it is to me about trying to meet the needs of the learner wherever they are and being able to adopt some of the pieces that we're seeing today out of force but actually being able to mould them so that they actually create fantastic opportunities but we need to actually seize it and say that's the future we want as compared to this jeez I wonder where this pandemic is going to leave us let's look at the silver lining on what is a very dark health crisis and say how do we actually achieve learning goals that we've been talking about for a generation but we can do it quickly now we won't get it perfect but let's at least make it there Thanks Neil I see a lot of shaking heads nodding heads I should say amongst the panel and I hope that resonates with many of the participants I'm wondering how that resonates with you in Africa as a continent and a developing continent that shifting the discourse from education in a crisis to education for change what's the sort of change you're hoping to see in Barney Thank you very much again I think also I also tried to check out what type of change that was brought in by earlier pandemics we are not new in pandemics they've been there before and what is it that we have learnt from them and yes they were there but they had not been at the scale at which they are in right now and if you can see other systems how it worked there were certain things that was happening especially in the education sector but because education is controlled by so many bodies and regulatory bodies especially they tied up so much to something that they want to do that they control and again they go to assessments part of the reason that in distance education we still have face to face assessment when everything else is at a distance is because of that there is something that they associate that with quality so I think we need to rethink our higher education rethink the mission of the university it's one thing to say we teach it's about teaching and learning and research and community engagement without involving the people who we are trying without involving the future of the people that we are producing because that's what you are saying it's all about me who teaches you what I think you should get rather than you coming back and telling me this is what I can do and we wonder why we are not getting innovative people and we wonder why we are not getting creative people because we do not allow creative enough we don't give them that space I think for me education needs to be a little bit open and a little bit creative so that then we can be able to move towards the future that we all aspire for not the future that has been established by the industrial era and agricultural era and also a minimal impact on the time that we use for different things and thank you very much and Sandra I'll give you the chance here to equally come back with that longer term horizon the kind of future we want I would start from the point that actually we do have lots of strategies national strategies on education we have European commission recommendations on education and digital technologies so we have the background which can provide us to move things into action what is the point that we are still not eager to make some changes and move from the paper to the practice when the government decides that they want to do some changing changes really changes and invest the time and people into this then we will have some changes otherwise it will be just paper strategy and nothing else but when you say to teachers you have to change the way you are teaching what does that actually mean they have their workload if it's not change the frameworks and regulations are they allowed to change the way they teach also curricula it has to be adapted on the university and the national level if it's not able to change it into move more blended in way how it's possible to be done so we have to and so much so much more teacher training Antonio said we have to really think about it for example for high education teacher training is not compulsory it's option which is usually left to teachers so we do need to make environment that will enhance and motivate teachers to make the changes and this is where I see the role of institutions and government and European commission to force this push we have a good start with the Covid so it opens the door and stressed us to show that changes can be done but take this as opportunity to do some real changes on a national level although the government doesn't say they find education important and they want digital citizens changes will not happen systematically thank you Sandra and that was spoken with some real conviction I have to say folks if you're wondering we'll probably continue for about another 10 minutes we left the time a little open depending on the number of questions I want to come back with what I'll call the elevator question because each of you in your own way touched on the importance of our policy makers and also our educational leaders so Neil you're going to be first in the spot in the elevator with the Minister of Education for Canada should we say or someone in a very important policy making role what's the one thing you're going to tell them they have to do post Covid-19 to hire education wow the elevator started to better be a tall building I think it's a function of making sure that we are investing in the parts of education that are going to create authentic change and I like how someone used the words education for change I think those were yours Mark it's about investing in the digital literacy it's about investing in people's knowledge skills abilities for the future so when we have to deal with another black swan event like this we've got a society that's ready for it thing and you did that before you got to the floor so excellent impai how's the elevator is about to take off okay maybe before I even get to the elevator one of the biggest challenges in developing countries is the issue of connectivity infrastructure all those things that are very critical for digital technologies now the person who will ensure the ministry that ensures that there is digital connectivity is one minister and the other minister who deals with education is another minister and the other minister who deals with other issues is another minister so we need all this group of people to come together and work together and one says this is what I will provide in order for connectivity to happen infrastructure needs to be developed for this particular peoples then you get higher education telling the tech guy that this is what I will need for education purposes so you need this very strong partnership not only in government but in all other industries that deals with technology because once we get that very strong partnership from the government perspective and then you get also regulatory bodies that are also having their own issues that everybody needs to be at power so that we all understand how to move forward with this particular issue as it stands right now when everybody is trying to compete with each other it's not going to work so if I extend my elevator question what you're really saying is what a large elevator or lift that fits all of the stakeholders in there so they can be starting to talk to each other Antonio you're one thing as you get in the elevator well in my case if I look at the situation in Portugal I would tell the minister well take it seriously because for some time it has been quite a hard task to help, I mean to have him take the distance learning and online learning seriously and both what Neil said and Pina said and other things that we could add lead to that question I mean what we are discussing now is that the entire higher education but also the other sub sectors of the education system will become hybrid and becoming hybrid does not mean necessarily blended it's a different thing we can much more diverse there will be blended there will be online there will be face to face and they will be mixed and in the same student in the same programme for instance could include parts online parts blended and so on you've hit the floor so your time is up the minister is gone well I don't need money for that you will lend us some money that will be helpful well thanks Anthony I hope I didn't mean to cut you off too much there but it was just useful to kind of hear how you have to crystallise that I'm going to have just two questions I'm going to pose the first is just going to go to Sandra and Neil in their respective roles as presidents of two professional bodies so my question is what role should Eden play in the current crisis or thinking perhaps to the future Sandra do you want to take that initially thank you Mark but I just want to take the advantage to also ask say something about elevator because I miss that that one I will be short this crisis the health issue showed us that we could move fully online because I have been listening from teachers for the decade that some subjects and some courses cannot move online now we have seen that it's possible and my message would be what is your target group universities and government it's student and they should be in a focus and in order to provide good quality education for students we have to train the teachers to be motivated and skilled for that and regarding the Eden part well I think that association as Eden and ICD are really good place to collect examples good case studies, experience know how to share information and gather community to foster some changes you know because people always like to get around someone and as usual we say at Eden we are like a family so we gather a bunch of people around us and this bunch is growing and growing through each year and we share, we communicate we collaborate and this is importance of such association so that you have some place where you can go and find people of similar ideas similar thinking who I wish to collaborate and share and this is the future of such associations we are very much connected to the European commission for example in the Eden conference now in June we will have a person from European commission presenting the new digital agenda and this is very important that this is is a communication channel to push these news to the community so I think that the importance of association as ours will grow Thanks Sandra and our little plug there for the Eden conference but one other thing to alert participants to that the European commission is taking a lead on but I think accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic is really putting some serious conversation around micro-credentialing and rethinking because this has not come up we've talked about assessment but actually the qualification framework that we operate within but Neil, ICDE is going to say three things the first is making sure that we're connecting members to each other so that in essence they're able to help each other regardless of where they are in the journey in response to the health crisis so for those that might be at the front edge of digitally enabled then we can create communities of practice there for those that are new to the digital space how do we provide communities of practice and systems as well I'm going to agree with Sandra another way that we can do it is advocacy this is a moment to show how distributed learning is a viable alternative globally and so we can actually do that through demonstrating success on how people have actually done it in a positive way and then the last piece Mark I think is that we need to also see the surface of this health crisis is get the globe thinking about what the actual future of learning is so if the future of learning is already here what's the next iteration and how do we start starting embedding some of those pieces now so we're not dealing with this the next time we're in a crisis scenario Thanks Neil, that's a perfect segue I think to what will be the final kind of wrap up for each panel member just a short answer please just conscious of one eye on the time so what's one positive outcome that we can already take from the COVID-19 experience as we look to the future I know it's come up that it's a crisis as an opportunity but what is that one opportunity or one experience Antonio, first off since you were the last at the beginning well if I may just to add a small thing to the previous question I would also add that both ICD Eden are a stronghold and actually have a powerful legacy of know-how and expertise so their communities of experts and they represent while in the case of ICD nine decades in the case of Eden three decades of tremendous expertise in the field and this is critical in order to facilitate the process that we were just discussing as for the positive thing I believe that probably given all the circumstances this experience has actually came out quite well and we now have a tremendous amount of people both teachers students families and so on that are engaged in online learning that understand what it's all about and they want to actually continue that experience obviously they have suggestions for improvement they would have expectations for improvement but now they're online in this sense and this has accelerated tremendously the development of the field and this is possibly probably in my view the largest good thing coming out from this crisis. Thank you. I think for me what came out from COVID it brought out the issue of people who don't have and all of a sudden we have that limelight that certain people do not have access to education resources as we expect them to be and however it also brought out this willingness and the need to do things differently from people which has not been there. It has removed us from the comfort zone to a zone that we don't know but we don't mind getting into that zone where we are able to do things differently so even in future when we come back and say people are more willing to go that route than they ever used to be because it removed what we know and just put us into a world that we don't know and we are surviving in it. Thank you. Well said, I think that's very much you pose your own limits and your respects. Neil. I'm going to take this to kind of a humanistic lens you know I will talk about human potential being equally distributed around the planet but consistent with what was just said the opportunity to access education in order to harness that potential is not and I think what this crisis has demonstrated is that the crisis has not discriminated everyone is in it and so it has shown that we are all human and it's a chance for us to look critically at how do we create opportunity where there is universal equal access to education so we've seen the barriers front and centre now for the last number of months let's start dismantling them let's start actually taking on the potential that is brought forward through education Thank you Neil that's a powerful message and Sandra. Well I would say the positive experience is that we actually got the experience of working online it's like you know we had to jump from the ship but we didn't drown we managed to stay above the water with our heads but the experience is different from person to person what we have to make sure that this experience goes to positive not to negative also it enables us to be aware of what competencies we have and which one we lack but also it enables us to see what we are lacking in an environmental level so we have experience that's very good so it's upon us to decide what to do with it that's a really lovely note I think to finish on apart from if I can just add my own comment the one item I think that I'm taking from the experience is just how important some are calling it the pedagogy of care a better appreciation of the role that it motions the affective side of learning plays not just for learners but also for our those who are involved in teaching clearly participants we haven't been able to answer all your questions we've tried to explore and investigate and respond to some of the higher order questions some of the other questions there's a very detailed question on OER we might get the opportunity to follow up in a follow up webinar on OER but I would like to thank the panel members for their contribution I found it very interesting hearing what others have been saying I've clearly been doing a lot of thinking myself in my own institution and talking with colleagues I think we're all grappling with the same sorts of questions just in different contexts and perhaps the one takeaway for me is that we are so still in the pandemic that it's hard for us to stand back as leaders and see where we need to go from here but for me that's perhaps the one takeaway for everyone is we need leadership at this time leadership in a time of crisis is crucial and the right type of leadership so thank you very much the webinar will be available in the next day also for those who want to go back and listen or share it with their colleagues and we hope to follow up with any of the questions that we haven't been able to answer over the next week and come back to you with some responses thanks very much thank you and congratulations Mark for the moderation