i'm gearoid of suilleabhan and i'm the head of the department of technology enhanced learning and it gives me a great pleasure to uh to welcome uh professor frank rennie onto the virtual stage today fresh from last night's gasta event uh i know some of you some of you may have tuned in for that so frank is a professor at the university of the highlands and the islands in scotland um it's a highly distributed university highly successful university and it really harnesses the uh the potential and the the affordances of the of the digital and the online and it's also a university i happen to know that was referred to often when plans were being drawn up for our own regional universities so look frank is the right man to tell us about all of this and has a special research interest also in how the online world and digital connectivity can can support regional development uh which which of course is a great interest to us also in mtu but i think he's going to have lots to say also just about the underground experience of online um teaching and practical ways in which we can we can use digital solutions to enhance what we do as as lecturers and as teaching staff so usual format i think frank's gonna talk for a bit and then we can have uh some some questions and some and some discussion if that's okay with you frank and so i'll hand it over to you i'll mute myself and uh you can take over okay thank you for that deduction um um i would like to kick off by saying that i don't want this to be me just talking at you and telling you how you know how the world should look as it were um i i would i want to say a little bit um and i've got a couple of slides only to show you that geography that i'm talking about i don't intend to give you a powerpoint slide or any sort of stuff what i thought we'd rather do is i'll give you some starter comments um and then we can open it up to questions and answers and and discussions and comments you know you'll be relieved you don't have to agree with what i say um i tell my i tell my two daughters that even i don't believe everything i say all the time so you you have to you have to realize that this is an ongoing dialogue um and although there's a lot of experience that we can share um the answer to the question depends where you're starting uh there isn't there isn't a one way to do these things or one way that stays in perpetuity to do these things so there's a whole variety of different ways of approaching online education you know as jared says that my my um my into my interest my introduction to this um didn't come as a techie person it came as a person who was doing rural development all through europe um and wanting ways to get high quality education out to the end of the line as it were to the croft gate to the farm gate and not to not to make people leave rural areas to move to a city in order to get that education because what happens by lars is that often particularly young people but people in general go there and then they get dislocated and then they cannot go back to where they came from because the job that they were trained for doesn't exist or because they've got you know connections in the city and so on and so forth so higher education was rather than contributing towards real you know regional development it was actually making things worse because it was actually getting courage to go away and so my interest was about how we deliver that um at the distance um using a whole variety of different technologies i began very early days in open university just teaching by telephone and i still remember the first time i actually phoned somebody up cold and said you know as a as a 24 year old hi i'm your lecturer um we're about to talk about so-and-so and i was it was absolutely bloody terrifying from my perspective because you know i was expecting someone to turn around and say you know who are you to start teaching me down the telephone but you know these things were well so i was an early adopter of of the world wide web um basically the year after it was it was made public in the in the early 90s we began to put things like course lecture notes on there there were no no such thing as brightspace or blackboard or moodle in those days it's just purely hdms html content straight onto the web no passwords or anything and so you know the highly frowned upon nowadays obviously but that was the way they got access to things and that was for the real development classes that wasn't for the for the computing students i was given access to worldwide resources and that people could learn about development and community development in rural areas and what we noticed very very quickly was that the students um began to attend classes less regularly because you know why would they drive for an hour to come to our campus for a one-hour talk and then go home again and have another talk the next day so the conventional way of time tabling lectures and whatnot did just didn't work with us in a rural area and so rather than some of my colleagues getting a bit uptight about students not coming to their classes i said let's turn that to an advantage um why i wouldn't do that so why would i expect them to go and do that and rather than give them all of their classes over two days or three days and give the rest of the time off we turned it around as much as possible was on the web and then we turned the the the face that the face time conversations the things that were really urgent so they're discussing tutorials and problematic questions and new concepts and so on question answer sessions that was going to be beneficial to the student rather than coming to them listening to what i was talking about as a lecturer because i could record that and send them a cassette tape if i wanted to do that so that was a new way of doing that and that that picked up steam that was probably 1993 i think began to do that in 1992-93 um and it's developed since then um so the whole variety of ways that we can do that now what i would say is um and i want to open up to questions or comments any any people have you know maybe you can actually field some of the questions if you if you if you know people um are raising questions that you wanted to raise and just sure just just stop me anytime i don't i don't get flustered by by being stopped mid floors it were to to say something um what i would say is that um in all the different ways of delivering online education there are two things that i think or three things perhaps that are really really important the first thing is there is that um i've heard it all before i've traveled the world speaking to different institutions and everyone will tell me that this is a great thing this is wonderful technology but it doesn't work for my subject yeah and i go absolute nonsense i give me enough time and i'll show you how it works um and that's because we tend to come from our own perspective and we do the thing we're comfortable with in the way that we learned rather than learning something new and innovative and threatening and quite challenging that actually makes us as subject experts wrong-footed and seem to be the one that's trying to catch up and learn ourselves so i would say it's applying to all different topics and all different subjects some more so than others absolutely but i was a visiting professor at king's college london for a number of years working with a dental school for example i know nothing about dentistry but i was working with them to to help their to help their course material for training new dentists and new dental nurses get that online because they realize that delivering online meant that you didn't have to remove people from the workplace and they could learn in the spaces in between there so it was going to be much more beneficial to them they could continue to live where they lived with their family and without having to go to the expense of traveling to glasgow edinburgh london wherever else dublin and in order to just go to that face-to-face and so they they minimized what they had to do face to face um and extended the bits around it that they could learn online you don't have to be um you don't have to meet face to face to know that that is a black pen and that is the silver pen and this is this is the new version of this and this scalp will be used differently because it has these techniques and so on and so forth so there's a lot of things you can do online i think secondly the thing that that that the objectives that come up from looking online as well you know it's threatening my job if all this stuff goes online you won't need me and that is absolute nonsense as well because because we need we need that human contact to actually guide the students through the resources and to help people learn about how to learn and so the idea of of putting everything online the courses that i teach for a number for a number of years now for probably two decades now have been you might call them wholly online um i i would say they're wholly online with tutor support so we don't we don't just plug students into a computer and leave them we design it in such a way that they can learn by themselves they can learn at their own pace they can learn one o'clock in the morning or one o'clock in the afternoon and so on so forth because it's online they can look at it again and again but they have a human and subject expert there that they can interact with to ask questions or to raise problems or to challenge or to share their own experiences and whatnot so i think the third point is um when you're looking at the move online i said last night on the gaster thing that for example one of my colleagues mentioned that it was like trying to teach people how to swim once the flood has arrived because all of a sudden they've been resisting and moving online they've been they've been resisting moving away from face to face and all of a sudden face to face was not an option and they had to teach online but they didn't have the experience they didn't have the confidence they didn't have the resources they didn't think technology they didn't have the software so everything had to be learned that emergency piece um and in doing so it was like teaching people to swim once the flood had arrived for me that was not the case absolutely not the case i can appreciate that might be the case for many people but for me and most of my colleagues my teaching and tutorial work with students has continued for the past year and a half almost without a blip almost without a blip the the only difference is that i no longer have to drive half an hour to town to sit at a computer in town and do this i can do it for my own desktop and my one i can i can make my coffee and breakfast or a cup of tea walk through plug it on and start from there it has advantages and disadvantages and we can come to that in a second or two but the key point about this is it's in the design if you try and do what you do face to face without any change without any modification without any consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the different technologies and resources of digital materials you can use you will crash and burn you will provide a second rate or a third rate or a fourth day experience because you haven't thought about the materials it's a bit like having a having a tradesman turn up at your your house to fix your washing machine and then you get alarm because they open up their tool bag and all they have are different types of hammers there are no screwdrivers there are no pliers there are no cutting tools there are no measuring tapes and whatnot just a different set of hammers and you realize very quickly that it takes more than a hammer to fix your washing machine you need to have the back off and you need to have technical screws and so on and so forth so it's a bit like that with learning technology there are different strengths um of different technologies and i've written about them quite a lot and doing various books about what you can do and some things are good for a but not so good for b if you want to do b don't use that technology use this one as well and it's about playing around with some of these to work um in some cases we can we can test these things out with small groups um so that you're not experimenting on the students what i talk about now really is developing um pedagogy we talk about sloppily we all talk about it i talk about it as well you know the pedagogy of this that next thing actually pedagogy strictly speaking is about learning with children as in pediatrics yeah with learning with adults the technologies and the practices for living with adults is called andragogy because andragogy comes for adults with other baggage we don't come with an empty vessel we come with our own experiences our own prejudices our own strengths and weaknesses um from growing up over the last um however many years um it's my birthday on sunday but i won't tell you what portuguese is it's put it this way it's long past 21. um um and it's about how you do these things so if your technology now is self-directed education and it's about it's not about just telling you bugger off and do it yourself it's about providing a whole range of resources like a like a scandinavian smorgasbord sandwich or a buffet where you can have a whole range of different things and say look at all this range what do you want to learn how do you like to learn when are you learning who you're learning with what are you learning for do you need to read this thing some people like to experiment and do these things rather than just read about them others have to read about it first and then experiment and so on and we all do that we all do that at different times this nonsense about um digital natives that young people drop out the womb with a natural ability to use technology that is complete nonsense you'll see there's lots of research now that shows that the there's as much difference but within the age groups within the age bands as there is between the age bands so you get young people that can do it really well and young people that can do it really badly you can get older people um who you know who are very good with technology and other people are they're completely rubbish um i i would regard myself in that terms as the digital native because i've been around that for a long time but it has started you know after i was born so by the stick definition you know that the terminology is actually quite flawed and quite quite quite dated so in terms of using that technology it's about my skill as an educator looking for ways that i can present to people so that they can learn they can select from these things to work their way through and then when they get stuck they can come back and ask questions or make their own suggestions their own comments and so on and so forth in a way a more traditional style would say go and read chapter five of the book by mcpherson and then the student comes back and says well i found that that chapter quite difficult to understand i don't i don't really follow it and so you might say well here's another book by mcdonald you're going to read chapter 7 in that because it talks about the same thing but it's written in a different way a different style a different a different person and the person goes away and reads that and says ah yeah now i understand it not because it's any different but because they've got a better or a more a way that sort of chimes with our way of learning that is the same in the digital variety as well we can provide videos we can provide audios or podcasts we can provide images we which share images with people still images we can link people to to journals they can read this article if you want to these things or we can bring in people to do animations and work work in progress early days we used to use quite often within uh i used to teach by video conference we used to teach like this and then we realized and most of us quite early on that that was that was a waste of their technology because you could record that and make it like a television program the strength of the technology was that you could interrupt and ask questions and we could begin to share these things and it was a bit like watching the david attenborough film and then and then what he said to adam but hang on go back to that bit with the with the gorilla that was really good how did you do that and he would stop and discuss that and that gives you that interactivity that you couldn't get you know in a broadcast format so i think it's about picking these tools for different purposes so i'm going to stop there there's loads of other things i could say but i don't want to talk the whole way through are there any particular issues or questions or concerns or well great let's see so if if people want to put a question to frank you can do so in a number of different ways you can raise your hand and we'll give you the mic or um if you're feeling a little shy you can use the the the questions and answers area i do see somebody who's known to frank in the audience they're tom farley i don't know if tom wants to uh wants to come in and make a bit of trouble for uh frank there are you with us tom i am yeah sorry about that um i love the whole thing you're saying uh mark penske digital native um do you think it has been an oversimplification which i think sometimes you know um the media management sort of latched on to and didn't sort of oversimplify something which was as you said it's far more complex absolutely absolutely and we've proven time and time again tom that just because for example um a bunch of teenagers are using facebook um for their social activities and their planning and their parties and whatnot that doesn't mean you say they can use that social media technology to learn because um it's like it's a huge simplification but by and large older people tend to be more afraid of technology but more disciplined than their use of it whereas younger people tend to be much more cavalier and much less intimidated by by the technology or try anything they just say well if it doesn't work it doesn't work you know um but at the same time less disciplined in the use of it and so we have to say for example uh very early days of um the students starting with a set of courses i'm teaching we spend some time um and they we have an induction in the day so we learned very quickly that that um just throwing the students at the deep end wasn't going to go anywhere just because they can actually use social media because they can log on and use email and so on doesn't say they're going to use this technology in a way it's a bit like stuff um bringing home a new porsche and said to the you know tossing the keys to your 14 year old and say hey i got a new car go and take it for a spin yeah right that's going to happen you know you will say you'll come with me first and i'll see you driving and i'll make sure that you look after her and so on so forth so it's about learning that that confidence to use this situation i think in the early days we realized that spending a day or even two or three days at the start of the year to do a student induction with them was really really really valuable because we can sit down with a student and show that how they could log on to the in a face-to-face i can lean over their shoulder basically and check this is where you type your password put your thing in here and don't worry about if if you get that error bar don't worry about that you get all the time you just need to log in again and start again um this is where you find the library this is how to use the library section here's how to do referencing properly here's how to access you know online journals or whatever else you can go through all of these things with them and so that when they leave the induction and go home because most of our students work from home then we know that they can use the system competently and they know that they can use the system competently it's not a challenge and some of the early days uhi has got over a hundred and something other different local learning centers we have 13 main campuses many smaller campuses um i was going to show you that a slide in that i might do that in a minute or two but um we have hundreds of um local learning centers um over 100 inhabited islands you know to go around so if you visited if you visited each of the of the um the the uhi campuses in turn the main campuses only and you could go and visit one a month you couldn't do it in a year yeah if you were to i worked out before if you had to do a full day's work on each of the major campuses um and then go to the next one and do a full day's work there and go to the next one it would take you almost three weeks continue traveling just to do that so the idea of just popping down next door and picking up something from the photocopier is not an option for us it is not an option so we have courses that are taught um deliberately um at a distance um through network teaching the students don't know that if you're teaching in dublin and i'm teaching in in the installing way and somebody else is teaching inverness or whatever they don't know who you are it's a material to them they're still it's in the same learning space however um we have courses that are taught face-to-face um some cases 100 face-to-face in some cases it's a blended variety of these things basically depending on the subject depending on if it's taught in multiple places or one place within the uhi network it's a thing that we're still resolving we haven't got it right in my view we haven't we haven't we still teach the same thing for example technical skills in three or four different places with three or four different um lecturers and one another nes and one in perth and one somewhere else doing this stuff we've now harmonized the same assessments and the same course materials and so on and so forth um in a much more efficient way but we i think we still got a lot to go right so just because using technology doesn't mean you say you can use it well can i jump back in there frank because i suppose um and i'm familiar with the the geographical disparity of uh joy and i suppose with our new university we're very very geographically disparate and as well we'd also have issues around broadband connectivity do you find that's an issue because you're talking about departure i mean i might be able to i might live on an on a country where i have great roads but they do you have to temper your design activities because you wanted to do something but you know some people just don't have good connectivity um a bit of a bit of both a bit of both i think you have to that's part for me as part of the design of the thing as well so in the early days for example we put in loads of of um images and pictures and whatnot um and so as students would click their way through the course materials they would click a hyperlink and then slowly slowly they would download this picture and the picture might be for example a a picture of me your lecturer um and really to have a hard look at yourself they don't need that they really don't need to spend 10 minutes downloading slowly a picture of me to see what i look like um they could do that in a different way or they could do we could put a warning on it you know click on here if you want to download a picture of of the of the tutor so that they know what they're getting in advance before it just slows up the system entirely our bandwidth in the highlands islands has hugely improved over the last decade hugely improved um i i find the biggest problem we have is speaking to people out with the area um you and i and and some of the colleagues on on the site just now we've corresponded um because of the regular correspondence between uh scotland and ireland over the last little while um but to be honest with you um there's always a slight free song when i'm contacted when i'm when i'm doing a presentation to another university sometimes big famous universities because their competence in using video proficient technology for example is much much less and much less aware of it and they're more likely to screw up than we are and they don't like to be told that they don't know how to do it properly because they think that they are oxford or cambridge or whatever else it is um when in fact we can do it much better than them so i think you design for it i think you also um you can design various courses that are offline and provide the material offline as well so you can do a backup you can do a bike version um we used to use things like usb sticks for example with the whole material on there on a a format that you can navigate around and you navigate only um on the usb stick and you're only connected to the internet when you have to so for example to send an email or to receive an email um one of the the game keeping course in uh i was running from the from thursday college and many of the students there are actually out on estates out on the moor hunting you know shooting stocking they don't have wi-fi and they are right you know their fingertips and but we have um software technology that allows them to take on their tablet or on their laptop which means that when they take it back into eduroam or or into a wi-fi environment automatically downloads what they need to download upload what they need to upload and it's on the device so when they go out into the mirror or into the hill they have all this stuff on their device so they can work in a way that they don't have to have that you know permanent bandwidth so you need to think about what situation you want to have these things before you before you actually start you know giving the material there's no point in it's a bit like walking into a huge big library incentive librarian hello i'm studying archaeology give me a book and they say well on what on what period is it byzantine archaeology or roman archaeology or celtic archaeology or you know you have to begin to navigate the subject level the content the language itself and so on main learning is exactly the same as that there's a whole variety of different ways you can do these things start simple but branch out and have various options to do these things i might come in there frank could just say that there's a lot of other questions as as well there but one that maybe ties in what you were just saying there in terms of beginning simple and then branching out an anonymous attendee why anonymous i'm not sure asks uh what would the basic tools in your tool box be beside the hammer so earlier you were talking about somebody arriving to fix a washing machine with a whole bag full of hammers so is the vle the hammer frank and and and is all the other stuff that we plug into the vle the the the screwdrivers and other and other tools well for me the vle is the tool bag the container for all these things um i've i i've slowly developing pioneered you want to see you might say a system for course design over the years um and myself and a colleague keith that tom knows about you may know case might as well keep and i are planning to write about this actually um possibly over the summer um looking at these how we evaluate this thing but basically if i can share this with you as well is if you think about a table a matrix and you have the weeks down one side and the left hand side weeks one to ten or twelve or however many weeks you have in a semester and then the columns along from left to right at a variety of different resources and so each week has this has the same complexion the same variety of different resources so it starts off for example with a small piece written by me um by i mean page and a half two pages about what this week is about this week we're going to discuss this concept okay that's what about the key things are one two three and four and you know here's now in column two some basic reading go and read chapter four of this book by martin weller or whatever okay next week read chapter five and so on and so forth and then you go into things like um maybe giving you an example so or or a video so yeah you have an orientation document and then you have some background reading which is which is core then you have a video watching somebody who's talking about that particular activity and that could be anything that could be a ted talk it could be a youtube clip it could be something you've recorded in advance yourself it's a whole variety of these things but it's basically a visual piece like this not a long piece a short piece i would say between three and ten minutes let's see maybe three and 15 minutes max the last thing you want to do is to click on a thing then discover that the video you've just signed up for is an hour and a half long you think oh my god really really let's can we play this faster and students are doing that they're just playing at double speed you know i'm taking taking fast notes they're not learning they're just actually skimming what's going through it then you give an exemplar of what you're talking about so you have the the theory and the real hard concepts um i like to give things what i call snippets so so bits of nice to know information that are written related to that topic but aren't really essential to to learning about it so so kids for example love to you know they love to know that you know i don't know spiders can jump five times their own length or you know the the whatever rabbits breed like you know so that they like they love all these you know wonderful little quotes and facts and pills that which ties in with about how we learn and think about the application of the the facts we're learning and then i give links to things like follow-up reading in depth journals materials for example you know academic journals um which i can add to every time the course is taught i can remove or add things somewhere through there and that's to say that students don't have to read all of these things but if you like the topic of this particular week and you want to know more here are three or four papers that are really good that you can dig into and the kin student will read all of these things the following week you might not be quite so enthused about the topic of the week's conversation so you do the bare minimum and you you know have a quiet week and then the further we go oh my god this is fantastic well i've discovered about such as such this week and that's what they can so you delve into that so they're always coming back for more information and then finally i i i sort of tail end up with um what might be called a formative assessment but a learning activity that the student can go and do without anybody else seeing it without me needing to market without me needing to comment on that um quite often so they might be for example um very early on you might get to sign up to uh a bibliographic management tool mendeley or one of these things right and they say here's how we're gonna do it here's a video how to how to actually set it up and sign on your account and here's how to use it there's a little a little tutorial guide um if you're interested in this go away and do it and then come back onto the to the module discussion board and tell me how you go on i don't have to know how you go on you know it's not it's not critical to the to the activity but if you want to come in and say oh my god that was so easy i i've been putting it off for years and now i realize that it's like three clicks and i was in wow but somebody else comes back and said well i tried that but actually you know if the password is longer than ten letters one no it doesn't it doesn't understand you know and so people can have a discussion around that and a learning activity so that they know that they have learned something so that they get that confidence factor to go in there and so that basic grid is the same week by week by week um as you go through there and that's that's the smorgasbord i'm talking about it's a variety of different things what is the big mistake about the whole digital native thing and learning styles in particular there are various there are various buzzwords that really get me up get on my soapbox learning styles we all learn differently okay some people like to read some people don't like to read some people have to do it and get their hands dirty and you know get their sleeves rolled up and actually do it other people like to hear these things other folk must discuss and you know and we all do all of these things at different times and so the myth that has grown up around learning styles is that if you find the way that you the learning style that you prefer and teach people in that style they will learn better that is absolute nonsense that is the reverse actually i would believe um what happens is there because you learn in the most comfortable style then you and perhaps enjoy it more and you perhaps can you can take refuge in a book or you can take refuge in a and by grabbing a spade and going out into the field and doing something it doesn't mean you say you're actually learning that you only learn when you have to make an effort and when you make the effort you actually remember that effort and what you've learned in that effort and i think if you learn it easily you may just lose it easily as well so i think the learning styles thing is has been grossly simplified to the point of uselessness i would say yeah there's a lot of it around a lot of those myths around one more maybe frank because i know you have i know you have some slides you mentioned one thing to to share there so kind of similar question what do you think are the most important changes or skills which students need to be made aware of or provided with in order to study effectively at a distance i find they by necessity are an afterthought in the process of providing good distance education so we often hear of the loneliness of the long distance learner and we often hear our eye often here this stuff is a bit like what you were saying earlier this stuff is fine for post graduates but it's never going to work with undergraduates or this stuff is fine for humanities but will never work for engineering or what have you are there common things common skills common attitudes you need to give them i think there are two things that are that are coming through all um so i i if we had if we had longer or if we had a specialized focus on that we could look at all of those aspects and i i'm quite happy to come back another time and look at some of these things in more detail if you if you want because i think i think you can you can explode some of these myths um i've spent years discussing arguing whatever you want to call it with colleagues that will say ah how do you do this online how do you guarantee this online and my response nowadays is always you know very easily how do you guarantee the quality offline you know how do you guarantee how do you do that in a normal conventional class okay so why do you think it's different from from online do you think it's impossible to cheat in exams do you think it's simple i mean people can buy it so i give my students an essay you can buy s's you can basis at the webinar for goodness sake this is not rocket science um you're kidding yourself if you think that it's any different and in fact i think that in many cases and i've given talks before about the quality of height of good well-designed online courses i think are better in many cases than face-to-face because you get 24 7 access you get specialized you can pace it yourself you can put in layers of complexity and the student the slow students can look at that again and again until they get it the faster students can actually delve and go into things that you haven't got time to go into in a conventional face-to-face class because you can provide that effort as well the two things that are common to all of these things regardless of subject material discipline or level i think are twofold one is about um learning how to learn teaching people how to actually learn the systematic process of thinking the way through that's a good question i don't know the answer let's work out together yeah that's the thing through and i think related to that and increasingly these days it's learning how to differentiate quality how to spot fake news just because it comes online doesn't mean you say it's correct and you know all these conspiracy theories that have grown up and follow these things through there's a whole variety of stuff there we are used to and people of our generation now have grown up with newspapers um from our parents and we know that this is a good newspaper and that's not not such a good newspaper they they they deal with the skinless you know scandalous stories and we don't we don't really want to you know waste time with that sort of stuff whereas this is a very hybrid paper we don't you know we don't we don't want to read this this story establishment stuff we want something that's a bit middle of the road or you know a guardian or whatever um we learn that as we go through life and the fact is as i said last night we're using 21st century technology with 19th century etiquette means that we haven't actually learned how to differentiate just now the quality online so we either believe everything or we believe nothing and we have you know we have um representatives of both in our political sphere right now um who believe everything or nothing and therefore you actually it takes harder to actually understand how to spot uh how to back up the evidence and how to provide the source material to justify your arguments i think that that's the common factor excellent excellent so i i i know there's something you want to get back to but i'll share a comment it's not a question with a comment zed says i just wanted to compliment frank on this pronunciation of the word who godzi sounds really cool in a scottish accent yeah very good very good so did you have some slides you wanted to share frank was there was there something you wanted to give us a visual on um i was just going to i was just going to two seconds and i'll sh i'll share the screen i was going to share a couple of these things i had last night on um and can you see that yep okay so that this is the slide i had from last night so this is i just wanted to show you the extent of of of of uh i mean this is this is where i think the stars are where the the main campus bases are yeah i'm up here um well i thought that nicely happened to the tip be the very tip and the north of the hebrides here but the campus that i go to is in the stoneway that sort of location there um but right from from shetland down to perth um argyll west west coast mainland here in berneses here obviously and these 13 different campuses are the range of the uhri main campuses the area of the highland region the mahila region mainland is this this area in here is about the size of belgium this area here however is much much bigger and all these 110 different islands as we go through there are um you know the island might be just within sight of you but if the ferry doesn't go there that day you don't get there that day you have to think about how you plan these things and you can't just pop down there to pick up the handouts so the delivery of things by by online education part of the secret is to be well prepared so i think we've all done it in face-to-face classes you're halfway through a session and you think hang on i'll give you this as well and you can take your paper and go in the corner and photocopy 10 copies and bring it back and give it to the class of 10 people you cannot do that in an online situation so easily so you have to think in advance about the things you have to give the handouts you get in advance there or follow up with it with examples obviously you can you can send things out afterwards but if you want to discuss that at a time you have to have it there what what sometimes quite astonishing for people if you look at that footprint of uhi and transfer that to the map of england you realize that the uh area goes from the south coast of england halfway up scotland it goes it goes further north and sky it's a huge area ireland fits in that quite comfortably the whole of ireland um and that's the area that we would call our local campus that's all i wanted to show to you in that sense because i think that the idea about um you know why do you need why do you need to actually bring people together well if you have one if you if you've got a a course team of five people and two of them are based here and one's based here and one's up there somewhere you need to have ways of actually functioning together as a course team so you have online video conference meetings your committees are so all the uh committees are online um at one point you know the early days i used to travel back and forth to inverness almost every week now i hardly go there at all no i don't whether at all because of the pandemic but i mean even that not be the case i would just video conference with that nowadays i would join the committee by by vc um and we learn the technique of actually managing a committed that way you don't you don't say if you've got 25 people on the on the on the committee from all the different parts of the university you don't say um okay any questions because you either get a storm of questions or nothing at all because people do well i don't want to be the first to ask the question so i have to go down there and say um let me go to inverness any questions in inverness and so on and so forth so you have to find a way and they could educate a way of using the technology that allows you to bring these things in there and doing so it's a much more inclusive technology than the restrictive one of face to face you know under the pandemic now i'm i have sat in on classes that are history classes that are archaeology classes after i sign up from you just now um after i sign off um i've noticed that one of the irish universities is giving a lecture on corn creeks this afternoon and i've registered for that in corn creeks i want to i've just got a book about concrete it's coming out in fact um so i'm gonna i'm gonna be a student in that thing we um you know and this afternoon that is um become possible because people have been forced into the situation by the pandemic many people would not even have thought of making that public uh before this event here and so over the course of the last year we have been far more collegiate we have been far more um sharing and we have the public coming into some of these talks for nothing and we have using that as a leading edge technology to encourage people to come in and pick up courses um i've been a fellow with the georgia society of edinburgh for the last 40 something years and the only talk i've ever been at on in the wednesday evening talk was the lecture that i gave myself about two years ago um but now because it's all online i'm able to on on a thursday night or wednesday night join in with that with that talk and so it has made the geographical disadvantage of me not being able to go to edinburgh just for that one hour talking an evening because it's going to cost me several hundred pounds it means it's much more more more flexible and much more egalitarian and much more aware i think there's a lot of these things that we can do i'm going to unshare this now and come back to you that's great there's more questions coming in there as well thanks for that and it is useful to to uh to to see the map there connor rock asks any ideas about the difficulties of accessing library resources from a distance so yes there are online library resources but how extensive are they are are they really and is there room for improvement short-term access to many scholarly articles can be can be quite expensive so there's a whole bunch of stuff there isn't there so yeah in terms of access and in terms of the online availability of things this is a whole i i do i do a whole session with postgraduate research students on how to access things there's a whole session on that as well so what i would say is it's absolutely huge absolutely huge uhi subscribes to tens of thousands of online journals and as i say i've been working from from home solely for the for over the last since last a year passed in february um uh i produced um a book that i just sent to publishers last week there written entirely during that time i've accessed hundreds hundreds of of of um academic papers um i think that it's increasingly easier to get information not only do you things the things that you have to pay for there are increasing number of open access journals there are things like research gate um which you can you can register with there and quite often people have put their journal that is available from el salvia for 25 pound free on research gate because they have the they have the the pre-publication you know texts as it were through um i found the book i'm working on was working within other languages so i found that if you actually when i see a reference that's made to concrete and let's say croatian or whatever else i don't speak croatian um but if i if i type into to the search engine to google or whatever the actual title of the paper um whether it's in english or irish or croatian um you will find a copy of that paper um and sometimes you'll find that the copy is the the article was written in croatian or you know french or whatever else it is and if you don't speak that language um it's quite problematic there may well be a summary or a abstract in in english that you can follow but what i've been doing laterally is actually i bring it i can bring up the um the paper on my screen i can use google translate my iphone and hover my iphone over the screen and i can read the paper as it goes through in those little languages so there's a huge a huge number of actually getting access to materials online i i i live and die um professionally with the stuff i do online and over the course of the past year even i have been astonished how much is available things that i've i've downloaded entire phds from different different places and whatnot for falling stuff through there um in some cases i have contacted the author and said um i see you have this thing have you written anything else about this particular topic and one guy came back to me from germany with not just the a couple of papers that i hadn't seen but also some collections of unpublished files that you had and saying i no longer work in this area but you're welcome to this if you want it oh my god i've got all this new stuff that i can talk about so i think i think in fact we're in danger of having too much and i go back to my point about learning to distinguish what is important and what is not important and the quality of the journal and the quality of the article as it goes through that's more important than actually being able to access to get these things online very good very good and i would say to people we had a previous speaker talking about open access and open educational resources katherine cronin who would be quite well known in the area and recommend people to go back and have a look at her talk where she actually directed people to some kind of specific sites and and sources that they could go to maybe one final one there frank and it's close to my own heart actually because we're getting people asking a lot of questions about what's going to happen in september or what's going to happen post covert or what's going to happen when we and i hate this phrase when we get back to normal because i would hope we don't return to business as usual but that everything we've experienced will will inform our practice so the question anyway is with the eventual return to the physical campuses how do you see online learning continuing in a way to provide students with truly flexible learning options there's lots this person writes there's lots of talk of high flex options so high flex and hybrid and mixing different modalities and things like that not as much of an issue for you guys it sounds like frank but for the rest of us perhaps i don't think it's a big issue in that sense but i think i think there are two or three things that are worth paying attention to i think firstly um students will drive that students will come come back to me and say um we'll come back to all of us and say i can get tom faraway's courses online why can't i get yours online you know i'm working i'm i'm stacking shelves and in tesco's during the day because to make money so i can so i can do this course and whatnot so i can come to my two-year class at nine o'clock on a tuesday morning have you recorded this can i even can i look at the video from this well why not you know that that guy there's done it in his course why can't you do that so students will actually force you into that i was i was talking to university of iceland a few years ago there they were quite traditional and and quite conservative in their approach and say we don't need to do that because we are the university of iceland and reykjavik and more people come here and they and they come to us anyway and i'll say a good news for you mate students in iceland are signing up for for for um courses at open university we're signing up for courses in sweden they're signing up for courses in canada because they can get them flexibly um online and they don't need to come to you anymore they don't the days are gone when you are the only shop in town and if you don't watch it you'll be saying i don't want to do that in these courses because they're crap they're old-fashioned you know without a d i don't need that sort of stuff secondly in terms of the design to go back to this thing here this this matrix system of of design of course of module design that i've been i've been working on pushing on i reckon that i can take now i reckon i can produce a new module from scratch in the number of weeks that would take you months to do so where it may take you you know traditionally you go along to your head apartment you don't do a new course and so one or two of you or more would go away and say um we want to do this new module on xyz to add to the to the degree program um can we you know can we be out get time when they're in our workload to go and design this new course and the header department looks at the sums and then says yeah yeah okay we can give you this you know we can give you six months next six months you can you can be doing this thing i could do that course in six weeks now because i would start with open access materials i would look at things like youtube like ted talks like academic earth i would look at all the open access journals over a whole variety of things there and i would fill these boxes these gaps in the matrix with all these things that are really well thought out well-produced learning resources and then with the bits that i haven't got good stuff for then i would create them myself so the first in the first instance i'll be looking at what's available because there's so much available when i began to do this 30 years ago i literally had to go and write the book because the book didn't exist the book did not exist so the first thing i do was behind me somewhere um i had to go and write the textbook for the course i would never think of doing that anymore i would i would say what is available what can we do and then the bits that are not available or the bits i wasn't happy with or the bits that didn't cover exactly what i wanted to do there i would say i would create this like myself whether a video or whether an audio file or whether whether a written piece of text and i would add that into the title and i would put that into open access material as well so other people can then use my material as well so i could create that course from scratch in literally three or four weeks probably maybe not the best course in the world but i could get it up and running and functioning and really really really high improving within that time and i think that is the difference i think when we go back to when they go back to a campus-based format we're going to say if we might if we managed to get over this in the past without doing also why we're doing this now well why are we doing this i was listening to a doctor in a um one of the hospitals who was um the covered hospitals and they said what is the thing that you've learned over the course of this year and he said because the thing i've learned mostly over the course this year was that i can put an application for research ethics at five o'clock one day and i can have the approval the next day because it's so there's such an urgency with with the the medical and demand for for learning about this particular and he said if we can do that and we have pro we can't do that why does it take three months and it we know prior to covering what what are we doing wrong there we're trying with red tape and unnecessary bureaucracy you know to decipher the innovation and that's going to change i think and people will vote with their feet if it doesn't change that's fantastic and that's a very good note to to end anything so thank you for such an engaging thought-provoking and very from our point of view i think very timely and very relevant uh discussion and talk i i really think there's no replacing you know the kind of engaged familiarity you have with the whole area so great insights great candor um speaking very directly to things there but also look thanks everyone for coming along i know how busy everyone is and it's really a great reflection i think of everyone's commitment and passion that you've been able to take and make this time so join us next week or another talk with professor larry pheps who might be known to frank actually from from jisc so thanks a million frank will be in contact fantastic stuff you