so let me start i think that we have most of participants already in the room so hello everyone welcome to another eden initiative eden session on uh online together hashtag online together hashtag hobbit19 this is the third uh session in this initiative of eden webinars my name is sandra cuccina and i'm the president and i will be the eden i will be the session moderator uh for today um eden has started with this uh initiative last year uh i will just share my screen so it will be easier for me to speak just a second so just let me okay so i hope you can see it so um hello to everyone um so this is the the sessions uh of webinars uh sorry title time for action in shaping uh higher education four zero uh last year we started with this initiative of webinars first one was education in time of pandemic then we have education in time of new normal and now we think it's time for action uh we had very good response from participants and this is the reason why we continue uh with this session now again also this is our contribution to the situations which situation which we are all facing that pandemic is still present uh now it's more than a year and i'm certain that you are all fed up with it and i'm i myself i'm certainly and that we want to go back to the normal whatever it means but to the times when we were happy without um without pressure of being only online to distance from other people to wear masks uh to to be scared if we talk to other people uh uh face to face so we miss these times never uh less if we are online or in face to face so uh in the with this uh session uh uh of webinars we wanted to help to educators to uh all those uh working in education to move forward because uh we did again significant experience uh we know what we could have done better we have in the ideas how to do uh better we know that we should reset uh the education for digital age we know lots of things but now it's time actually to do something and to do some significant or systematic actions uh to actually make these changes uh happen uh we will try again to provide insight and advice uh on how to help uh to make uh these needy changes to move forward and shape higher education for today and for tomorrow aim of this webinars is to support the educational community worldwide and to provide practice oriented advice uh examples and resources to those faced with the challenges of taking present education practice on the higher level and before we start uh with the session just let me remind you that eden is celebrating 30 years this year three decades of serving modernization in education uh in europe uh we are celebrating it through all the year and uh we have the special web uh related to our anniversary uh please take time go and look what we have prepared and share your story with us share why are you connected with eden how eden has contributed to to your uh environment personal environment and how it has become part of your life because we usually say that eden is like a big family once you get into it it's difficult to get out of it and so um i'll be happy to hear your stories on our eden web let me remind you that eden was established in 1991 the first eden conference was in 1992 in krakow and our uh journal uh eurodollar was start has started in 1994. definitely we have the fathers the the the the people who um established eden sir john daniel uh edwin osha uh alan tate um who had the vision uh how such organization uh how such a network is even can contribute uh to the education area um not only on european but on the global level and i'm happy to be president of eden today and to follow the first steps they can um and uh to continue what the previous student presidents have been uh doing uh so far and to leave when my termination of the of the presidency come to leave the eden in the good hands to continue for 30 more years so let me start with our present session today i'm certain that you are very eager to hear about learning design in the eye of the storm uh this third third session of ebernars have in in the title a little bit poetic uh uh uh a view uh this is uh uh this is meant this is not a occasion but definitely learning design is something which is very important today because the most teachers and educators today work in an online environment and even if they met this uh digital technologies and online environment only year ago uh they had to start uh to work uh uh in it in order to respond uh to the present situation and ensure continuity of education so it brought many challenges to teachers they needed suddenly new and different skills and experience and in teaching as well as support support support to work in an online environment to use these uh digital technologies and they were uh invited for call to collaborate uh with people of different backgrounds and expertise in order to be able to provide their teaching practice so support units learning technologies instructional designers learners designers have become more in focus and than ever and uh they were helping uh teachers to come out of uh of this situation as we say to let the teachers out of the storm uh so things which we planned uh but waited for uh action for a number of years actually happened with pandemic so we can take this pandemic also as a challenge as an opportunity uh to do things better to do things differently uh and how teachers have navigated through these pedagogical changes what kind of challenges they have experienced and what kind of support they require in designing their courses is topic of our session today and i'm very happy to have with me people experts speakers which are i'm certain the right people uh uh for that first is uh gerald uh oh well for me irish names are very very difficult i'll try but i i please uh uh accept my apologies oh swim ban did i be they perfect absolutely perfect good thank you he is the head of department of technology enhanced learning in the minster technology university in ireland having experience of over 25 years in this field the next one is alexandra mihai who is assistant professor of innovation in high education in the department of educational research and development school of business and economics at maastricht university the netherlands she is young person but with lots of experience and she is learning designer recently was at university college london so she has experience uh uh from that part as well and the last but not least is the nick barrett uh director of learner and discovery service at the open university uk who is also dealing with the range of learning design services and who is in charge of uh design development and production at scale of all you open university models so very tough uh role uh so i think that we have right people for for this topic who will share with us their insights and experience and um not to continue too much i'm certain that you would like to hear uh what they have to say i forgot to move the slides but well i cannot do everything uh at once so i'm stopped sharing my screen and i giving floor to garrott to start with his introduction okay thank you very much i'm just going to put up my slides and i hope you can see that okay yeah it's good okay so i'm just going to start with a few words to explain who we are to offer a bit of context i suppose on my slides and some stuff i might say later so um there's about 12 people working in the department we are by the way ireland's newest university we're the monster technological university so depending on how you count there's a dozen or more of us working in the department but does a core team who originally would have done a lot of commercial work would have developed a lot of commercial solutions for some quite well-known clients so we have that background in terms of that aspect of of instructional design and i suppose in setting up the department as it's currently configured the idea was that we would bring those same skills and offer them internally okay and as we all know there's always a next big thing coming along in that space where technology meets learning so we continue to do a lot of exploratory research so we do services in the here and now we do exploratory research into things that are a little ways off and as you might be anticipating when it works out right it forms a bit of a virtuous circle because the services give us end user insights and bring a certain realism to the exploratory research otherwise we'd just be going around with vr headsets on our heads or something with no purpose but the exploratory research feeds into the mainstream stuff it feeds into the services as well and ensures the currency of our of our provision this is what our website usually looks like where we're promoting all the great online courses that we support but this is what it currently looks like because of course since march of last year we all of our time effectively has been taken up with supporting um the the move to what some people call emergency remote teaching so our entire website is given over to all of these various different guidelines and supports so that's a bit about me um and so i think i can maybe speak a little bit to the commercial world and a little bit to the higher education one and the question i said i'd look at isn't actually the covert 19 question but the question of instructional design versus learning design okay and we might get back to it but it's probably not designed in the in the same sense because uh instructional design has been around for a very long time and certainly predates any talk of design thinking or human centered design or anything like that so here's a bit of a table that i've put together to keep me on the on the straight and narrow you can take the table in various different ways on one level these are just notes that i tried to put together for myself on another level though i suppose i'm being a little bit provocative with some of the things i've put in here but i'm also being quite sincere in trying to put in trying to figure things out so the first item there i have instructional design is older so it often dates or many sources would indicate it dates back to at least world war ii uh depends on who you read but learning design only dates back to the naughties i would have said and uh you know some of the literature appears to agree there and so it's worth mentioning you know that a lot of the technology has changed over this time so it's possible to caricature instructional design with reference to models and processes that were really developed for a different time for different technologies and of course for different pedagogies because the dominant pedagogy of the day would have been behaviorism and then later we see instructional design catching up with cognitive science and cognitivism and constructivism and all of that stuff whereas learning design has the advantage hasn't it it arrives when all of this stuff has already been has already been uh put in place um it's probably true to say that traditionally at least instructional design models tend to be linear you know you do one step and then you do the next so in software development we would call this a waterfall model so with adi for example you know you finish with your analysis phase then you do design then you do development but of course we've changed it all up now we've made everything kind of iterative and we have instruction design models like sam for example which is the successive approximations model which is deliberately and explicitly iterative but that iterativeness is definitely baked right in to learning design i would think you know because it shares a certain kind of dna with user-centered design human-centered design and that kind of thing similarly instructional design was originally instructional systems design so it's maybe linkedin with a systems engineering view of things another way in which the distinction is made is to say that instructional design is content centric and then learning design you see becomes about experience but i don't think that's quite fair for for many years certainly my working definition of instructional design has included the notion of of experience but some of you as well of course will have heard of l x d which is learning experience design so there's another term you have to kind of contend with and then finally while instructional design talks about systems learning design people tend to talk about learning environments i'll give you one more and then i'll move on because i know i'm only supposed to talk for a short while to get to get you all warmed up as it were but if we were going to talk about a quintessential model or framework for each of these i would say that adi excuse me that adi is still the quintessential model for instructional design with lots of different variants of it and obviously there's a dozen or more models of frameworks and i'm sure that we could all speak of when i hear learning design i think abc learning design so that might not be quite right i know some learning design people will think of learning design as being about applying digital thinking or design thinking rather to the problem of edtech design and development if you're with me on the abc design you're with me on why i've put laurellard in the in the kind of box there as being the uh the kind of theoretical seed if you like of of what's there um one more final one maybe who is instructional design for you might say it's for the learner or for the teacher but as a practitioner i think it was often for me the instructional designer it was a way for me to solve my problems so i might share that solution with the teachers or the subject matter experts but it was essentially for me by contrast i think learning design is for the teacher and is probably developed with them okay so there's a few more things in the box there that i'll get back to but i know i'm at the time pressure so i'll just give you this final one right so i'm doing a little bit provocative with this and basically what i'm saying is i wonder in the context of covet 19 if it was really the instructional our learning designer who was leading the charge who to use the sanders metaphor was really helping the teachers and the educators find their way out of the storm so you know i've used the distracted boyfriend meme here but it's a bit overdone but it's it's a very good fit so we are the instructional our learning designers we think we've got a good thing going that we've got a very good relationship with uh with teachers and teaching staff and other educationalists but remember junkover 19 the move was towards emergency remote teaching not planned online teaching with a proper lead-in which i think is where the instructional designer and the learning designers really do well and if i think back to march and i think back over the whole long year a lot of the questions that we receive still to this day are how do i upload a file how do i share my grades how do i do breakout rooms again i have a graphic tablet can i use it with zoom so less about design in terms of either planning or iterative design less about working over time you know with subject matter experts and doing instructional task analysis and all the stuff that we love to do but much more about the place where the technology meets the day-to-day things that a teacher does that a member of teaching staff staff wants to do so i've been an instructional designer i sometimes pretend to be a learning designer but i would say for the last year i have more been a learning technologist thank you perfect perfect i know how you feel because i do support of teachers every day and yeah well i have to say hi to all the colleagues from croatia i see there are many of them and uh what i think is the the good motto is to work with teachers not for teachers uh and maybe in that way um how why do you think the teachers are sometimes skeptical or uh i wouldn't say scared but uh reluctant to to ask for the for the help from uh uh instructional learning designers uh in that way well i think it's a bit kind of awkward really isn't it because you know um the teachers feel themselves to be both subject matter experts and pedagogical experts often we have you know a whole lot of stuff that we know will be of use to them but we can only start giving it to them when they have experienced the problems that we have the solutions to so i think initially a lot of the focus was on the kind of functionality kind of questions that i just mentioned how do i upload a file how do i share things it's near it has nearly taken until now i think for a lot of teaching staff to move away from those kinds of questions know that they have this kind of kind of repertoire of technical skills to start asking some of those pedagogical uh questions as well you know but going back to the question about the role of the teachers you know teachers are still crafts people really aren't they you know um some some of you may have heard of otto petters you know and he says distance education is education in its most industrialized format where we have division of labor where you have the subject matter expert over here and you have the instructional designer and maybe there's a videographer and a graphic designer and all of those kinds of things and that's kind of the way it works in the commercial world but it's not the way that it works yet certainly in publicly funded education and training so we have to go softly softly and allow people to realize i think the value that uh that we can bring to them but there's also a kind of a maslow's hierarchy of needs here isn't there because you know initially the struggle was how do we just get something up and running you know i mean i think of the the sheer numbers in our place 15 000 students 1 000 staff we've had lots of leaps forward in the past but it was always you know people who for one reason or another wanted to kind of make this jump with us so the most unprecedented aspect i would say of the whole kova 19 crisis was everybody had to get involved absolutely everybody so the first question became what's the minimum viable product and then all the questions you see we're about the technical stuff but it's just as well by the way that we are now getting questions and having discussions about the pedagogy stuff because i think the biggest challenge is yet to come in september we're going to see mixed modalities high flex and hybrid and that in many ways could be far more difficult far more difficult than anything we've had to deal with so far yeah don't spoil we have we will leave this for for for discussion uh thank you uh you can look at the chat uh and uh maybe you can uh reply to some uh comments in the chat um you have really good set the good floor for alexandra because she was doing the abc uh learning design model at university college london and uh so alexander not still taking too much time you can go on and please have your introduction thank you so much sandra thanks a lot tara for your for your introduction i think it was absolutely perfect i can continue as if i had prepared together i think because it's absolutely seamless um i'll just try to so i will try to talk a little bit more about learning design from two perspectives first of all the emergency learning design so or learning design in terms in times of emergency and there i will probably pick up from your meme because that was a really good point to pick up and it really um resonates very well with my experience in the past year um and i think leo mentioned in the comment in the in the chat we really had a hybrid role so uh i think we were both the girlfriend and the other girl which which makes it quite complicated but i think it really uh was like that and also the point you just mentioned of the needs that have been changing throughout the year that's also very important because i noticed while working as you know formally at least a learning designer more in the beginning of the pandemic i had a lot of technology related questions and later on the questions really were focusing more on pedagogy so you could really see that there was a learning curve that people were getting used a little bit more or at least more familiar to technology to the technology they were using at least and then uh trying to ask other types of questions how do i achieve certain objectives how do i engage students so i really could notice these changes this shift throughout a few months so um that was kind of really encouraging i would say um but i wanted to say a few things about my impression at least and my experience of what learning design actually meant in times of emergency and i'm really happy that you already mentioned the distinctions that list your view of the distinctions between uh instructional design and learning design um i agree i think with your discussion uh and but i think really really a complex topic i think it's so complex especially because of the level of labels and definitions there is such a diversity it's then you can also add educational developer um there are lots of different roles that i have to say from the different universities i've been to in like four countries i think by now um they really don't correspond with each other so they're really very very diverse and they mean really maybe not such different things but there are lots of nuances so it's very difficult to really label something and say that's that's gonna stick i think we really have to just adjust ourselves to being uh open to definitions and to labels uh but back to last year and and what learning design meant for us and well as faculty and as learning designers um i think what we we learned is that basically we could at least partly forget about all the models you mentioned or at least applying them very very uh rigorously because a lot of the times i feel at least in the beginning when the focus was a lot of technology on and on how to use the different tools nobody had the time or the patience to really dive into those models nor had we as learning designers the patients to actually go through all the motions so basically uh we did base our work on that because i heard a lot of debates lately whether we just you know gave up all our everyday evidence and all our uh scholarship and forgot everything when we were dealing with with the faculty last year it's it's not the case we build our work on it but we just had to be more versatile in our work we had to be more adaptive we had to listen more to the faculty to really see what the need in that particular moment is or in that particular context is and try to come up with new formats with new models sometimes well actually the biggest the the biggest the thing that i liked the most i think or everyone like the most is that was time because like you said for both instructional design and learning design we normally work with faculty for a longer period at least six months i would say if not more um and there is a whole process and you you you go through through certain stages we had to cut all that now so it was basically doing more with less time sometimes doing more with less resources depending on what university we're in in some universities we're not that lucky to have a lot of people in those roles so i think it was really about trying to adapt to the situation and support as much as we could but also to try to be more creative ourselves and try to to come up with new maybe even with a certainly with a certain new role i would say like really rethinking our role rather than just say this is what we do as learning designers it was really a continuous redefinition of our role i would say and also it was a lot or i connected it a lot with the idea of faculty support so because sometimes this is also not seen um i don't know or it depends again from from context to context uh but um here you have a lot of ways of supporting faculty so you can work in partnership with them and i will definitely discuss that in my in my next slide um and that's my take on it so working in partnership and i'm going to develop more on that but there is also uh there were lots of calls of course at some point to develop basically the courses instead of faculty and i'm just putting it here also as a sort of provocation i think we have maybe to discuss about that it is going a little bit more than more or further than the idea of design but more developing and content development which is which is something different i would say but it was also brought on the table at a certain point so i think our main message to take also from this period is that we need to be adaptable ourselves to um kind of um inspire faculty to be adaptable to to think okay this is not gonna be the final product we're just gonna create recreate design redesign and so on so what can we take from this emergency it was not all bad so this emergency learning design i think it has thought that taught us a few things uh that maybe perhaps you should focus on uh in the next period which is probably not gonna be the easiest as was already mentioned before so i think obviously we cannot as we all know we cannot design learning so we want to design for learning and i think here we can think of designing both learning experience which just mentioned before but also designing learning spaces and here i'm talking both about the physical spaces which hopefully we will return to at some point uh and the virtual spaces which i hope we will be able to define as well in the future um but no matter which of these angles we are taking i think what we learned from this idea of doing more with less was that basically we and faculty need to focus on what matters so going to the core trying to cut away from the fluff and really going to the core and i think this has been very helpful for faculty because often they were not even questioning this before the pandemic and obviously a lot of them were not even thinking in terms of learning design either they were simply thinking about creating their course teaching their course evaluating and so on so i think just and i'm going to come back to that the idea of working together with someone from a different background that can help you both in the design on the pedagogical side but also on the technological side was really something um that really came strong i think in the pandemic and i think it's actually good to take that further and then the other thing is really to be intentional about the tools you are using and the environment you are using and the modes you are using so again the pandemic made us more aware because we were lacking certain environments we realized what we actually lack most um but also we tried and i think successfully sometimes to make use of other environments or tools which surprised us with their affordances so i think regardless of the tools that we settle upon in the end it's important to actually use them with a purpose always question before as faculty perhaps even discuss with the learning designer if there is time for that to why you are using which tool which mode for a certain activity or for a certain objective i think this is really important the other important thing i i i think we also draw from the last month is to try to involve students as well in the design process and i know the open university has that as quite a strong model and i hope maybe we'll hear more about that i i am really inspired by that and i think it's really really important because also what we've learned in the past year is that it's really important to develop empathy empathy or even to train our empathy um it's not that this is not applicable to face-to-face teaching or to in-person teaching but it is really really uh at the core of online teaching just because we are not we don't have the proximity we don't have the immediacy uh we don't have the non-nonverbal cues and so on so we need to develop and train our empathy and i think by working with students by involving them um already at the design stage i always i think this is one of the pieces of advice that i give most often is to try not to be scared to show students backstage to show students our design how we are thinking how how we design the course not in any you know very technical terms but explaining the choices of tools and models and and environments that we made explaining it to them and and getting them on board and in that way getting suggestions from them as well so trying to build this feedback loop that is very very useful i think and then technology of course what are we gonna keep what are we gonna keep from this period um how are we gonna best use technology based on our experiences i think one of the good things in the pandemic of course is not perfect to talk about good things but i think one of the good things was that we got to try our faculty got to try a lot of things that they were afraid of or didn't see the point in trying beforehand so having tried all that possibly they settled or they found something that is very useful to them and they will continue to integrate that specific it can be a very little tool a very little routine something that involves technology that they will um happily take over back to the to the post-pandemic world and last but not least i think on this point we need to definitely base it uh base our approach our our learning done approach and keep basing it on evidence so doing research and i think what god mentioned before this circle i i do hope that many of us are based in institutions where we get to do this we get to close this and make it a a virtuous circle not a vicious circle uh i i myself i'm just starting a new job and i am happy to be in such a department that mixes educational research and development so it's really a good a good way to to work i think and one other thing that we take from the pandemic is basically everything we really have to insist of the idea of uh having an iterative development so also trying to instill this to faculty that the first version of your course will not be the last involve the students get their feedback it doesn't mean you're not prepared it's just the process the process of designing and teaching a course and the last point i want to make i already hinted at it before and i think santa already hinted also even earlier is that the way i see learning design is really working in partnership so a partnership between whatever we call us learning designers instructional designers learning educational developers faculty developers whatever we call us working in partnership with faculty so working not against because we couldn't even if we wanted to but based on the individual uh teaching visions and philosophies of faculty so trying to to to to really build the whole the whole experience on that um having that at the core also trying to uh play more or try to to create a new habit you know habit is not easy to create we all know but this new teamwork habit so faculty working together with somebody a specialist that can help them on a certain aspect of their course i think this is something definitely worth cultivating and then of course we should be sensitive to nuances and to context because it's really easy to generalize but the most important thing is that and that we noticed i think uh uh quite a lot during the pandemic is that there are no uh you know foolproof recipes for success there are no rules really strict street rules for doing everything or or uh silver bullets that will take us from out of any situation um we have to to take on board uh discipline specific approaches uh different nuances as i said before evidence-based uh approaches everything needs to fit into the way we we take a learning design in the future and the last point i want to make actually because i think that's actually really important and perhaps we'll get back to it at some point um is the focus on a community of practice and here i mean it in all senses i mean it in a sense of community of practice where faculty comes together with learning designers or educational developers um again in this uh um idea of partnership but also a community of practice that has started to develop or it has it existed before obviously but it became more and more prominent during the pandemic uh at a global level among educational designers educational developers i think this is really really important because it gives us more support and more um it makes us more attentive to all these nuances that are not in our context but probably very prominent in other contexts and we could not be aware of that without cultivating and being part of these communities of practice or personal learning networks whatever you you prefer to call them this is i think an important message this was all from my side uh obviously we'll happy to discuss the questions thank you alexandra very good points uh just briefly uh to to to give you a possibility to answer one question um community of practice i will just take the last one you have really good points a community of practice can be learning designers actually how much they influence uh the learning design and what is the importance uh uh there uh because i i think that maybe many teachers took a chance to be involved in some uh professional networks like communities of practice and learn from there instead of going to learning designers at their own premises uh if they had the such chance so what would be your your short reflections of importance of community of practice and learning designer yeah this is a designer this is a very good point because of course for the sake of time i condensed my point earlier so thanks for letting me explain that a bit more um obviously first first and foremost i totally agree that we learn best from each other so i think the community of practice among faculty is very very valuable and i've seen that develop as well quite a bit in the past months on the other hand there is also community of practice among learning designers and faculty developers and that has also been developing now as i've been working at a sort of intersection of these two for quite a while i do realize that it's not in a lot of fora that you get both of them at the same time so perhaps that would be a challenge uh um i think we can still i i think there is still a value in having a space where both voices are represented um just because like you say it would be extremely helpful for those people who do not have the luxury to have people in these positions at the universities there are many universities where this is not the case so i think for that you know working towards having a space where both voices are represented it's it's very important but still if that's not the case both of them in turn are really really important communities of practice thank you there are some comments in the chest please please look at them we have to go one week we are coming to you we are working at the open university so everything is settled at your university you have already such experience pandemic didn't make any changes uh uh to you but uh uh taking into the account the the first two introduction uh what would be your reflection please well i wish that were the case and i wish everything was settled but um i'll come on to that maybe a bit later i have a slide deck it's quite lengthy i'm very happy to share that at the end of the session with all participants and just a few words though for what people who aren't familiar with the open university we were founded 52 years ago and currently we have 200 000 students enrolled with us so we are by some distance the largest in the uk and but the reason we can support that number of students is that we set out with a social mission to open up learning to a wider element of the population often people without any formal qualification and when we were established we put learning design at the heart of what we do so the institute of educational technology was founded we've got the knowledge media institute that's in existence today and my unit learner discovery services builds on the research led pedagogic best practice coming out of those areas so that we design and produce content at scale so to support those 200 000 students we have anything upwards of 100 live modules being designed developed and produced at any one time with another two to 250 that are in flight so it's a vast scaled operation but it is driven by learning design now i'll come back to that in a little bit but it's not in isolation and i think that's one of the key points that jared and alex have been mentioning so far this knee-jerk reaction to the emergency has thrown learning design into sharp focus whereas i wouldn't say it's necessarily in the background of the ou but it blends alongside our media assistants and our editors and also integrates more seamlessly with some of our systems whereby we publish and present our content because we are a social mission there is a different relationship with our students and as alex has already mentioned we involve them very closely with some of the learning design and some of the presentation and production work not necessarily as closely perhaps as people think and i'll come back to that when we look at the impact the pandemic has had on the way we view learning design within the open university but we are blended and we have been delivering a large percentage of our content and learning online for the last 20 years significantly so said that at least 80 of all content is online only and the majority has some element of online activity going on and the impact though has been quite challenging and just to share some of the learner voices from amongst our students we have had a lot of face-to-face and in-person examinations which had to be paused and suspended this blended model that we've talked about and so a lot of our students have said well actually studying during the pandemic and lockdown even with our learning design led pedagogy is very different to normal distance learning some have reported struggles with motivation others have been even more motivated and see study is a good escape and you know with time we can talk about our free learning model on open learn where we provide elements of our curriculum for people to try before they buy in many ways and we have anything up to 100 000 unique visitors to that site every day so it's a vast operation we found many have finished their studying early during lockdown and want to get their teeth into new things so in many ways we're helping them on their learning journey and that design across modules across the curriculum is implicit in what we do but to do that we have to make sure that we don't just get into that mindset of let's just get content online for the sake of it we have to look at the activity and make sure the pedagogic research into how that activity supports the learning outcome can be designed at a very early stage and with that comes a desire sometimes not always adopted by our academic colleagues to avoid a complex environment simplicity is really key particularly as i've come on to when you start to analyze the interaction with online material by our students and that comes back to a point that everyone's mentioned already we we need to understand the students and their needs and because of our constituency we spend a lot of time understanding upfront where the technical challenges where the digital skills challenges are whether our students and ideally try and create a flexible and also blended learning environment that they can flourish in so what are our challenges well with all of this learning design built in up front we've still found a real issue around stopping face to face with a large student number comes a large number of associate lecturers and whilst most are very happy to teach in an online and blended environment many still have face-to-face activity which has had to stop hence some of those student comments we've also found that we've had to shift quite rapidly are modes of assessment face-to-face exams still played a very large part in our assessment mechanism so we've had to try and find alternative ways which of course have challenged some of the learning outcomes and learning activities that have taken place within the modules as the assessment changes so too does the pathway that leads you to that assessment and so we've had to think a little bit around our existing model so yes in one sense we haven't been as affected as many um by the pandemic but we have had to take on board some lessons learned ourselves um some of these i think are replicable across the he sector and the first thing is the lead time that is required to embed learning design at the heart of creating new content and activities and for us it can be anything up to two years so obviously doing it at pace has provided these gaps in quality and gaps in experience which we have also suffered because we've had to change elements of our mode of delivery so if you want to do really effective learning design you need to be working with your academics at a very early stage as well and sometimes we too struggle with that so we're just embarking on a new program redesigning production which places a greater emphasis on learning design in many ways the pandemic has been very timely to re-emphasize this message to some of our academics who again you know i come from an arts and humanities background some of my colleagues in that space still like to produce vast quantities of printed paper material whereas the pedagogic research shows us that actually students engage differently to different modes of learning so the learning design voice is really strong as a result of the pandemic not because you've got it right for 52 years the other thing i think it's worth thinking about is that you can have fantastic learning design in small pockets across your institution but to replicate it at scale does require a different way of doing it hence the ou model has these separate engines if you like that drive both the research and the innovation and the delivery iet institute of educational technology kmi knowledge media institute that looks at a lot of the innovative practice and ourselves in learner discovery services that take this and bring it together with the academic insights and the way they do things in faculty so that it is scalable we do this for the whole university for all 300 350 modules a key thing though is to play back both the students als and academic authors how successful this is and i think this is where you know some of the previous slides ring true with us as well it has to be iterative and there was always a temptation to gold plate everything whereas sometimes it's much better to get something out there and work with your students both in terms of early engagement during the design and production phase but also live test flights of materials what works and what doesn't so we run a parallel analytics for action program where we not just wrap metadata around our learning objects but also analyze how different student cohorts perform and react so we've got some really granular data that helps then create that virtuous circle that talked about earlier something might not work we can tweak that in flight and then feed that back to our learning design teams so they can then reflect upon that and improve it for future iterations so that gives us a flexibility of our model you know if you're doing it at scale you also need to be agile and flexible so that you don't have this rigid straight jacket that makes everybody conform to the same thing so flexibility within that framework is the way we're heading across the piece and again that learning divide design voice needs to be different for a stem faculty compared to an art of humanities compared to law or well-being for example and therefore alongside that design focus comes the skills focus we've heard about skills in how to work with our learning designers how to translate that into learning and teaching and then how to respond to student challenge it's not a transactional university it does feel a lot more like a community of practice we've created a range of resources that we've published freely both in terms of helping people move their teaching online there are some micro credentials that are available but also a lot on our open platform and the iet website has a range of innovating pedagogy resources published annually that brings together best sector practice that you might want to then bring into your own institutions as well as a series of sheets around how you can do flipped learning so there are some very practical tools that we can share in the community of practice that alex was talking about earlier but i think the key message i'd like to end here with is that we are still learning we don't have all the answers the pandemic is tool there's an awful lot about our own model there is that assumption that yes we've got it right but it's shown that we've got an awful lot wrong as well so the key thing apart from having a learning design team in your back pocket if there's to be another pandemic or crisis is to make sure you're giving yourself enough space to fail space to experiment and then think about what the next two years look like i know there have been some chats around next term is going to be challenging well yes it probably is but the institution can't then implement what we've seen as 52 years of learning in six months you need to give yourself almost enough time and space if you are going to go down a blended or online model to get your learning design teams lined up and see what infrastructure and resource you're going to need if you are going to replicate this at scale because otherwise it does lead to patchy practice and ultimately a poor experience for the student as well as the teachers thank you very nic very good point um definitely uh i i would say that um there is a change in the mindset regarding the teachers because they were so designers of their teaching you know and some some somehow some now they need support they need help they cannot be their own so um experts and and and and and the uh owners of of their teaching uh experience now they need this help and yes we need to allow us time to fail and time to experiment because we will learn from this efforts and and failures but let's hope that failures will not be so too hard you wanted to add something yeah i was just going to say that um by having that early student engagement those critical friends and who can be very challenging but in a good sense allows you to have those experiments in a safe space rather than seeing it play out across your modules in one go and that is where the learning design comes in but we have those same challenges we haven't got the model perfectly right ourselves in terms of trying to break into faculty ways of working the pedagogy that sits within there and what we've found is that we often get that waterfall effect that jared's mentioned already in that a way of doing things 30 years ago at the ou should still be rolled forward because where's the problem whereas actually what we're trying to do with our redesigning production approach is focus much more on co-design early enough to describe the component elements that sit within that module which we can then test with students and als at a much earlier stage rather than wait your presentation and then have to make more course corrections as we go through so that early engagement is absolutely critical yeah thank you um we could chat i could ask you a number of questions because uh well uh i i support teachers every day so i can share lots of stories but let's let's move to the questions i invite all the the participants to put the questions in q a uh we have some uh questions already so first is from uh don olcott he said we pulled terms out of obscurity such as remote learning which will be buried 30 years ago because it literally meant student isolation oh i'm sorry someone okay so student isolation and alienation only to return because quality advocates need a differentiator and scapegoat for poor online quality during the pandemic it was only response option available the lack of leadership support services and available teacher training ubiquitous and the quality advocates through teachers under the bus do you think this will inhabit many teachers from engaging going forward in online teaching by the way the field embraced the term pivot 2 and it should be noted that this is basically term and has been for nearly 100 years so who would like to to answer uh uh this uh this question i can say one or two things very quickly yeah please um okay well it might be of interest to note that in our university it was actually the teaching union who were keen that we would call it something other than online learning because they didn't want to stand over it being uh online learning because it was you know done without doing all the things we would like to do when we do quality online learning like having a long lead in time and all of the great stuff that uh alexandra and and nick told us about there um so it was them rather than the qa people or the registrar's office um i share fears yes that we will come out of this that eventually covert 19 will recede into history and memory and people will say well we gave it a go didn't we the online stuff you've you've been back with it for ages we gave it a go and let's never talk about it again because it just you know wasn't wasn't any good didn't compare well with face to face that that's a fear you know and i i really um even in several kind of reports i've written around how it's all going have been very keen myself to continue to use that language that emergency remote teaching language you know in order to kind of emphasize the point that you know this isn't high quality online learning it isn't all that we that we'd like it to be on the other hand look we've done this thing to scale with more time and more resources we can we can do it any we can do it even better and yes pivot is terrible terrible term i didn't know it was from basketball or baseball or whatever the person had said i associate it with uh you know venture capitalist types who might go well we were going to do this but then we pivoted into this we don't really know what we're doing really but we if we use the word pivot it's going to seem like we're um you know on top of things or what have you so just a few thoughts there thank you um maybe uh okay alexandria wanted to continue with this just one one point i think uh actually even the question implied that a little bit that i i think it's a complex of things that will need to happen in order for faculty to continue using technology i mean again i'm afraid of a backlash as well of really going back to the classroom comfortably uh like many of you know many people want actually at the moment um but i feel first of all there needs to be enough support and not necessarily in using technology but support with teaching and learning with learning design with you know more of what nick was talking about so if if universities but again we we agreed that it's really not ubiquitous it's actually the opposite seems to be rather ridiculous so i agree that if there was more support um and the faculty at this point in time which again it's difficult now to to see whether which way we're going it can still go both ways but at this point after one year and in the coming months i think it's important to give faculty the time and the chance to reflect on what happened we feel like we don't have this luxury now because we're still in the eye of the storm i really think that we're not yet out of it at least not where i'm in now but uh definitely a little bit of time to reflect on what actually worked for them you know beyond these generalizations online learning is good but you know what actually what were the three tools that you actually liked and what were the three things you hated you know what would you ditch and so basically this really uh honest thinking to yourself and maybe with discussion with colleagues you know it has to be it doesn't have to be very formal but the the universities and the institutions have to i think nick made a very good point here there has to be really this time and space to to try still to fail to reflect on what went on and and also this uh encouragement towards a more iterative approach which is really not like higher education at all i would say it has to be really you know your course is ready and then it's ready and that's it you're gonna deliver it again another term that it could open a whole discussion so i think there has to be really a willingness from the teacher side but also uh from from the institution there is really a mix yes just before giving the the the hand to garrett and then turn to nick uh just just to comment uh and looking at the questions and comments uh uh especially there are universities where there are no learning designers or i.t support is just basical and teachers were left on their own and i hope that now these universities will recognize the need for providing such kind of support uh not only technical but the pedagogical support uh in the support and design of the course uh uh courses as well and i think do think that we lack this pedagogical part a lot uh basically we at the first moment we try to see which tools we can use to move on and then we become quite familiar with this okay like me in the zoom so okay i know how to use it i can use it and that's fine and that's fine but how to organize uh interaction how to uh def see different uh numbers of participants it's not the same if there are nine or ninety it's not the same if they are english learning uh students or math students so this is things which which uh go on uh but uh i will give the first hand to garrett because he he asked the before and then yonick after him minus super quick i was just reminded to say something um from what alexandra said and it is there's a real danger i think this time will be forgotten you know so the pandemic will retreat into memory and history and uh even emergency remote teaching will be set aside and it has shown itself to be this crucial support for academic and business continuity we were always part of the disaster recovery plan but nobody realized it even we didn't realize it um so there will be future public health uh crisis if nothing else you know which it should be remembered for this there will be climate crisis there will be other natural disasters so in that context what alexandra was talking about the reflection and the action with respect to this period it's just so important as is you know organizing the research analyzing our survey findings cross-tabulating it with our systems analytics and reflecting reflecting um it would be such a pity if we missed that opportunity that was all i wanted to add yeah thank you nick you're on i was going to build on that as well i'm a medieval historian by trade and training i'm not learning designer and it strikes me that the model for higher education is pretty similar to the emerging ways of teaching in oxford and cambridge in the 13th century onwards it just happens that we use online to deliver a lecture remotely in the same sort of way we just packaged up the content differently and that's where i think the learning design element comes in because we're looking at harnessing those tools and technologies to do different activities and for me that's the subtle shift and it brings in a whole range of new learning styles for the learner a whole range of new teaching styles for the teachers and that's why it's so important that both of those voices are heard and we're beginning to see i suppose because of our constituency we're opening up our students to a different way of of seeing the world which threads possibly more into their way of learning in their day jobs most of our students are part-time they've got careers they've got carer responsibilities they need to fit their learning around their lives yet their lives have already embraced quite a lot of these means of learning in different activities and for me i think that's the really interesting element here as you said let's not go back to the old normal let's try and think of something that looks and feels a bit different that harnesses these tools but actually challenges ourselves to be different so there's a real innovation strand that runs through this thank you um we are already passing at the time uh i take it uh that this this is because of me and my long introduction so um we had really good discussion and just to summarize or or just to give the the final uh thought uh for the end um my question to you would be how much are we prepared to engage students to be active designers of their learning and and uh and the the course and will the role of learning designer or maybe tomorrow it will be something else become a really i would say on the same level with teachers uh you know just work hand in hand so let's start with alexandra first now [Music] yeah thank you as i said i really believe in the idea of uh involving students although it's really not as easy as it may sound i have the feeling because it it there needs to be a sort of very clear model for it and i think they i mean whenever i think about it i always have to think of the open university model but obviously it has to also work into the you know the texture and the structures of each university and the way you communicate to your students the way you involve them and the danger here is and i would have liked to hear more from nick but obviously in a different discussion how how you actually choose the students or how the students self-select you know because obviously we tend to get the students that want to be involved but maybe we want to hear from other students or from a diversity of students so i think that's also important what are the voices maybe trying to involve not only students but different voices in in the design um process uh and yeah i think definitely from the other point what you asked about equal partnership yes indeed i i do believe that um i don't again it's not an easy thing to do because usually faculty you know as professors you want to be like you know uh master of your own classroom uh uh you know nobody nobody uh knows better than you what is best for your course but i think that that way of thinking slightly changed with the pandemic just because they needed help at least on the technical level so i think maybe we can just really really play on that and and try to work more in in cooperation but both are really requiring a change of mindset and the change of institutional structures and and um workflows you know processes and this is something that doesn't happen overnight but let's be positive i don't want to finish on such a negative thank you thank you alex alexandra good points gerald what's your thoughts i'll keep it really quick i suppose um it's interesting that there's always been this uh division you know between content development and student support you know that this is this very kind of traditional way of looking at what uh well what a large organization like like nix does perhaps so involving students is an interesting way of blurring that line is it you know so as we go along as we support students we co-design we create reusable assets for me it's kind of analogous to the open source movement you know which is about peer production models for creating things of value and so a natural bed fellow i think of of including students would be the open educational resources movement you know so uh i think there's a very um natural common cause there and as we work to involve staff more and more not just in using open educational resources but in contributing to it as a movement and partaking of it as a sort of an ideology um i i think we do well to include students also uh without a doubt but very interested also to hear what nick has to say actually thank you thank you nick your thoughts for the end no pressure there then thank you we use a range of different approaches so we have self-selecting student panels that work alongside our teachers as well as our academics who write the course material plus learning design so in that sense it's built in collaboration as we start to think through how we're going to produce the material although like i said quite a lot of the actual academic input happens up front so it's not quite as collaborative as a model as we would like and certainly the role of the learning designer in that needs to change a little bit i see them in the future partly as translators of ideas mediators between those various parties probably provocateurs as well to stimulate what's the best way forward but all of that is driven by the data we have to look at the analytics and one side does not fit all so having the student voice in as you said is only partially representative how the actual module performs once it's live well the analytics for different student types allows us to then really go down and probably create in future parallel pathways to get to the same learning objective at the end as we know people have different learning styles different experiences and we do use a lot of oer openlearn publishes five percent of all of our content for free and we plan to use that as an experimental space so less about publishing stuff that's been produced more about looking at the next generation of learning design led curriculum in all its broader senses what activities will be supportive of a v a r etc a whole range of different new ways of creating those tools which should be there for everybody to test so we're really keen to build that community of practice that alexander's been saying work collaboratively with all of you use our content run it try it see what you think of it and let us know but i think it's a really interesting space and i would be concerned if we slipped back into a traditional way of doing things this is the time for innovation this is the time for change thank you thank you i would just uh uh continue this is time to act definitely and to take this all these advantages all this experience we have gained uh all the expertise we have now uh in our hands and our minds and actually to make this shift uh to what we have been talking for 10 or 20 years that we should should be doing um i wish to thank my fantastic speakers for today for breaking the eyes of this eden webinar series the third one we will continue uh every two week every two weeks and we will tackle the topics we have mentioned uh here today i think the gerard already knows what is the topic for the next session because he talked about that okay anyway i'll just share my screen just for the one slide to announce that uh please our conference is going in june call is still open you still have a time to uh to uh submit your uh papers or workshops or whatever you want to share uh and it's very good that you share that you connect that you uh collaborate and uh be with us so uh thank you all again thank you my speakers thank you for participants for very good uh remarks and comments in the chat in zoom and in youtube and see you in two weeks thank you again bye thank you thank you bye bye thank you