A very good morning to you joining us for this in the seminar series, which is on designing, teaching and study spaces to support educational change. And I'm really delighted to welcome participants really from all over Europe and indeed all over the world. Delighted to have also quite a number of participants from Africa here with us today. Just a couple, so my name is Jan Palmofsky, I'm the Secretary General of the Guild. And before I pass the word on to Moira Fischbach-Smith, who will lead us through the webinar today. I just wanted to say that just a couple of housekeeping rules. So please, it's really important that this webinar is interactive. So if you have questions, please use the question answers function here in the zoom function. And if you have any comments, please use the chat function for this. And please also use Twitter with the hashtag future of education to so that we can really ensure that this is a lively discussion throughout the morning and afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, we had, and dear colleagues, we launched last June a an insight paper from the Guild that was really authored by Professor Joanne Goorie, but that's really had input from our member universities and that was also supported by a writing team composed of Barrett Eicher, Arnavalg and Karen Amos. And the paper was entitled Reimagining Research-led Education in the Digital Age. And it was really trying to reflect on this moment of transformation when suddenly the world was fully digital owing to the pandemic to really think through what this meant for the future. So how would education and pedagogy need to change and reflect this moment in the future? And we issued a number of series, a number of recommendations, including that the future of education is not and must not be all digital, that research intensive universities must leave their very distinctive strengths to lifelong learning, taking into account really very rapidly changing working environments in the world of work. We emphasised the need to create flexible regulatory frameworks. And we really insisted that internationalisation was more important than ever in higher education, especially at a time reflecting on the pandemic when we were retreating back into our national borders. And that was all the more important to really reflect and articulate the added value of internationalisation. And finally, maybe an important point to highlight was that there was a real need for us to better value pedagogical excellence and to really reward pedagogical excellence and to provide incentives for transformations in pedagogy. So with that in mind, we then following this paper, there were a number of seminar series where we tried to explore some of these themes in greater depth. And that seminar series was hosted by a number of partners and Guild member universities right across Europe. So it started with the University of Warwick, which really engaged with this question of micro-gradentials and transnational and life on learning. We then had followed this up with a seminar hosted by the University of Orhus, which really looked at this question of building and creating standards that in sense help us and not hinder us and that are meant as enabling frameworks. And then more recently we had a seminar hosted by the University of Tartu, which was around national strategies and the role of universities in integrating the international students to the local labour market. And we're looking forward to a final series for now, a final seminar in this series hosted by the University of Tübingen in the early part of the summer. But today I'm really delighted that we can go to the University of Glasgow, because this is a really special seminar in this series, a really special workshop because it is one thing to develop thematic approaches to some of these challenges around pedagogy in higher education. But it's quite another to then really think through about how you create educational change in an institution. How do you involve the infrastructure, the systems, the IT systems, the students and the staff? How do you create a vision that really brings all of these actors together and that really produces a change that really then also has the desired outcomes at the end? And that's of course a hugely challenging question for all of us who are in pedagogical institutions, universities and other institutions of learning. And so I'm really delighted that we can really explore this question in an institutional context in an institution that really has embraced this challenge now for quite a number of years. And so I'm really very happy to now pass over to Moira Fischbach-Smith, who is the vice principal for education at the University of Glasgow, who will lead us through this, through today's sessions, both in the morning and afternoon. And once again, I'd really encourage all of you to really participate really actively in this discussion. And we really look forward not only to learning from Glasgow, but also learning from your own perspectives as you engage with what you hear from the speakers. Moira, I'm really looking forward to to run out here and from your colleagues on this really important subject. Thank you, Jan. And good morning, everybody. It's really great to be here. So thank you to the Guild for inviting us to share our experiences of rethinking our approach to teaching and to learning. And thank you to everybody who's here for making the time to come along today. We, in developing this particular building and this approach, we have benefited so much from other people across the world sharing their experiences of similar types of projects with us. And so we're really pleased to be able to share our experiences to help other people in the way that we've been supported. But also, you know, the idea is to work collectively. So we each keep building on one another's ideas and innovating and developing our approaches to supporting students in their learning. So delighted to be able to do this. As Jan mentioned, we have two sections to this event. The first focus is really on the process that we went through and how we will be thinking, teaching and learning, how we work together in new ways, new ways for us that might not be new for all of you, but they were new ways for us. And some of the challenges that we set ourselves in taking a new approach to thinking about study spaces and teaching and learning spaces on campus. And the second session is on how we are working with colleagues and students now to translate that vision into practice. And although we're separating them into the two sessions for the purposes of this event, I should say that the work was integrated from the outset. We didn't just build a building and then start to work with colleagues on how to change. We did everything from the beginning. And although, as I say, it split a little bit into two sessions, we hope it's clear that this was an integrated process and that you're able to attend for both sessions to see how that all is coming together. Because of the pandemic, some of our original timescales have changed a little, and we've not been able to bring students together in the spaces quite as we had intended. But we have adapted and I know Jan visited the building yesterday and saw that it's being used to the full. Students are in every corner of the space. And our vision remains to embed collaborative learning and teaching across all of our spaces in the university as I hope you'll hear. And really just to emphasise at this point before I turn to my colleagues, it's this notion of collaboration and learning that's underpinning the active learning approach that's been a revision from the start. And so we very much hope that what we have to share with you today will be inspiring and thought provoking for you and that there'll be something for everybody here to take away and that you'll get a really good sense of the building that you saw in the video that we sent around in advance and how that came into being. And if anyone hasn't seen that, it won't last for two minutes and we'd encourage you to watch it in the break. We do appreciate that this opportunity to build an entirely new building and it's a very big venture as you'll see when Nicola talks through the plans has been a particular catalyst for change for us. But I think we also believe that even if you don't have an equivalent project, there are still approaches that we took that might be useful to you and particularly in terms of how we work with stakeholders and how we're trying to support changing teaching practice because we also want to embed that into the renovation of existing spaces and not just have an amazing building that students may get to experience at some point in their studies. We want to really take this ethos through everything that we do. So I very much hope that there's something for each of you to take from here. I'm going to introduce my colleagues on the panel in a moment or two but just to say I will be keeping an eye on the chat function. So as Jan said, please do put your questions in and we will try and answer as many of them as possible. Okay, so I will introduce my colleagues in the order that they're contributing to this session. So maybe Nicola, if you could just say who you are in your role and I'll come to then Dave, then Lauren, then Nick and then Liam and then we'll start with our our input before the Q&A. Nicola, thanks. Hello everyone. My name is Nicola Cameron. My title at the university is director of property development and investment. I joined the university in 2014 specifically to work on this project and our wider master plan. I was only meant to be there for two years but have madly fallen in love and probably will never leave and I've just been so excited to be here and as Moira said, for me the most important thing about all of this has been the collaboration and my colleagues that are on this call with me today. We've worked just so closely together to ensure this is both transformational and I would suggest a huge success. So hello. It's Nicola. Dave. Good morning everyone. I'm Dave Anderson. My job title is director for relationship management and engagement which is part of information services which comprises our library and IT functions to the university. That role really is kind of summed up in engagement. It's about talking to our service users and ensuring that the services that my colleagues in the library and IT are delivering back to the institution are what the institution are expecting, both staff, student, teaching and research. I've been at the university for slightly longer than Nicola. I joined in 1995 and my role has changed and developed and I have seen the university change and develop over that time and this project has been sort of a key part in developing and moving on and preparing ourselves for the next challenge which I'm sure will be just around the corner. So yes, I'd like to be here and looking forward to present and sharing with you all. Thank you. Thanks Dave. Lauren. Hi folks, good morning. I'm Lauren McDougal. My job title at the moment is student experience and partnership leads but I'm here in my capacity as a former student president of the Student's Representative Council and like Nicola, I've been here for a while unexpectedly. I joined as a mature student in 2010 and I'm still here now, probably firmly bedded in and like Nicola, probably never leaving. But here today to share the sort of first elements of student partnership in this project and what that collaboration looks like in practice. Thanks Lauren. Nic. Good morning and I'm Nic. So my job title is Deputy Director, Academic and Digital Development and I lead the academic and digital development team and you'll hear this afternoon. I can highly recommend the session by Vicky. So that's one of my colleagues and we sit in academic services. I joined in 2017 coming from the east side of the Scottish Central Belt. So now I'm in the west side. I can tell you already that I absolutely fell in love with the building, not just at the start when we were all working together which was an amazing opportunity and experience but actually being in the building. And what we do, well it's very much in the title luckily. So we are responsible for supporting academic staff, development academic staff was obviously ultimately in the goal is to enhance the student's learning experience. Thank you Nic. And Liam. Yes, thanks Maureen. Hi everyone. I'm Liam Brady and I currently work at the university as a student support officer. But similar to Lauren, I'm here in my capacity as a former sabbatical officer in the student representative council. So I held positions of vice president education and then president towards sort of the end of the project lifecycle of the James McGuintan Smith. Yeah so I'm also a current student at the minute for my sins as well so I can chip in in that aspect as well. Yeah that's me. Thanks Liam. Okay I'm not going to say how long I've worked at the university but I also love it. I've been here a very long time and this has been one of the most amazing opportunities to work across the institution that I think I've ever had. It's been really great. Okay so I think we're going to Nicola's going to start by sharing a presentation with you that really I think gives you the background and the context of what we were trying to achieve and she and Dave will talk through some of that before I turn to Lauren. So Nicola over to you. You should be able to share your presentation. I'm hoping everyone can see that now. So this is going to be a whistle stop tour. I have a lot of slides but I love pictures and actually I genuinely love this building so you are going to see this building again and again and again and every single aspect of it. This came about 2014. We had this amazing opportunity to expand our campus and there was a hospital adjacent to us. They were moving to a new site and we had the opportunity to acquire the hospital site so it gave us 14 acres and that was really important because where else would you get 14 acres just on your doorstep? So we really started to think about this opportunity. So this was our existing campus and this here was our expansion area but it was an amazing opportunity but it was also a terrifying opportunity but it gave us this moment to really think about how were we going to reshape? How were we going to do things differently? And we speak a lot in our university about how were we going to transform? How were we genuinely going to make a step change? And that was in all aspects our learning, our teaching, our student experience and how actually our staff engaged with the campus and also how our university engaged with the city. So Moira always uses the phrase we were looking to transform rather than just translate and I think that that's key to everything that the journeys we've gone on since that time away back in 2014. You'll see there my big red love heart and in actual fact that's the site of our learning and teaching hub and I think that that's critical. You'll see the blue was our existing campus, the green is our expanded campus. The learning and teaching hub we put on a site that we already had. It was an old car park that was just everyday filled with cars doing really nothing apart from an eyesore and we recognised that that site there was absolutely at the heart not just of our existing but as we expanded it became even more important and it created this area of balance between the old and the new and we identified it as absolutely the right place for a new facility focusing on our student experience because it was pivotal in its location but also it did this important job of creating a space on the campus for our students to be. We have a huge campus, it's leafy, it's green but there were very few spaces for our students to actually just come and to be and we were keen that we started to become a really sticky campus. We gave our students a reason to stay, to stay longer, to stay and build new friendships, new relationships, new networks and so this site was absolutely pivotal to really readdressing the balance. And then we looked at you know so here's the the GMS, the Learning Teaching Hub there and this is our new expanded campus and you can see it all starts to beautifully bend together but the university took a decision to actually focus our our energies on the Learning and Teaching Hub before we actually did any of this because it was so important to us to really start to work on enhancing that student experience. The site itself was very interesting and it had huge levels differences. It faced on to a main road and in one side it faced on to a leafy sort of almost pseudo residential area on the other side and it's it had a levels difference from back to front, it had a levels difference from right to left, it had a beautiful 1960s concrete monolith beside it, our beautiful boy door building and we really started to think about well how do we, I'm a surveyor so this site would have been the ultimate exam question you know what do you actually do with this site because it had underlying ground conditions, it had a little bit of contamination, it had an existing building, it had levels differences so it was the perfect exam question but we felt well let's actually harness those challenges and turn them into opportunities for us and so you can see that we started to look at well the levels differences gave us lots of different opportunities for arrival points you know so how were people going to really use this building as a place that they came to but a place that they cut through, we used the levels to enhance the accessibility of the campus so the building itself actually allows people to move through different levels of our campus in a really seamless and accessible way. We started to think about well how do you tie in to the boy door you know how instead of just creating one building can we actually create a complex and scale up everything that we're thinking about so we harnessed the boy door to give us additional space. We thought about you know you have all these amazing views so how do we really start to look at the the sort of the drawing light into the building how do we create simple wayfinding for anyone who's been to our campus it's absolutely stunning it's very hard sometimes to find your way around and all of us who work on the campus spend our first month of every term in September helping students find a room because you just see them standing looking slightly bamboozled because it is very hard to orientate yourself so with this building we felt it was important to almost stack the types of spaces to add to that sense of ownership and an ease of orientation so we stacked our learning and teaching and we stacked our study spaces and then every space in between is doing a job and so we we talked about the nooks and crannies which is a very Scottish term so those those little spaces that you find we wanted them to be working hard for us as well there is no wasted space in this entire building and it's been beautiful to see students coming in and actually just enjoying the nooks and crannies because there are big spaces but there are also those small much more sort of human intimate sized spaces so that that was the sort of the the concept and you can see from this sort of cut through of the design it was a really open and permeable building and interestingly this was the first building that the university and possibly the last but it was the first building that we've put escalators in because we had to really think about that vertical transfer of students at any one point there could be three four five thousand students in this building and we needed to get them moving around quickly and in a way that introduction of something like escalators started to get us thinking about what does that mean for everything else that happens in the building and I used to liken this building to colleagues it's like a small airport there are people coming through continually it's like a very busy shopping centre people are there they're doing things they're in they're out and therefore everything that we did had to shift to match that so in the old days we would have come in and we would have cleaned a building like this at eight o'clock in the morning before our students arrived and then that would be it and you know the next day we would come in and clean it again at eight o'clock with this building we have a team who are constantly checking everything they're you know checking the toilets emptying the bins because this is just so busy we started to recognise that the ways we had previously been doing things weren't going to support this building and we'll we'll sort of come on to that later again just Nicola just a quick question someone's put in the Q&A when we say we who exactly do we it really means so I know only we will pick this up as we go through but just when you're speaking if it's possible to mention who they you know where the architects play the part and so on just so we pick that up as we go alongside interrupts no no no absolutely and I do say we and it's not it's not me just the we it was an amazing collaboration and actually Moira will testify to this that when we started this project we actually said you're not going to meet an architect for the you know a considerable amount of time because we the universities so myself Moira Dave and other colleagues who aren't here today we had to spend time working out what we wanted this building to do we worked with Lauren you know we engaged with our students what did they want what did they need what was missing from the campus this building doesn't sit alone it is part of a wider ecosystem of spaces so we have an amazing library we've got you know student services so what did this building need to do of course it has you know fantastic teaching facilities in it and great study spaces but what were all the other things that this building had to do and so we kept the architects out of the conversation for for the start of it because we needed to be sure of our own vision and then when we brought them in it was actually it was a wonderful collaboration we worked very closely with the architects and if they were here today they would say that yes we were probably a very annoying client at times but that we were great because we were involved in every step of the process and we genuinely knew what it was we were trying to achieve so when I say we it's it's the wonderful team that we had just a quick image of of where we got to sorry Moira I flipped on there but just just to show you how we started to use the building linking into the boy door stacking the spaces to aid orientation really creating routes through and around and actually importantly for us drawing the the sort of surrounding landscape in and making the best of the the wonderful light so we have one sort of south facing elevation we clad that all in glass so that we could bring the light in anyone who's ever visited Glasgow knows that sometimes we don't get a lot of sun so when we were getting it we wanted to make sure that our students were getting the benefit of that natural light and those views out everywhere in this building there is a window that you get a great view and we worked very hard to make sure that the windows were framing views so you can actually see my background this is one of the views out of our window in the jms you know again framing that that great Gilbert Scott tower that we have so I was talking there about that sort of southern elevation and really creating this light shedding out into the surrounding environment to give our students that sense of there's activity there there's you know there's people and really working to draw them in and I think I was speaking about the vision we worked very hard on the vision and it was on the vision and it was very clear to us what we were doing and I always like to show this side so on the left is the architects and sort of representation of what it would look like and on the right is actual the building so we stayed pretty true to our vision of what these spaces were going to do for us but importantly as part of that vision and Moira's mentioned that you know we collaborated with a number of different universities across the globe and many were so kind in their time and you know their their learnings that they they had undertaken so for example with McGill and their lesson to us was you know set out your design principles set out what it is you're trying to do and we worked to create a set of design principles and as Moira said it's important for us that this this concept is rolled out across the entire campus we can't just have students coming into our gms and having this amazing platinum experience and then going into some of our older spaces and really feeling that you know they've had a slightly sort of bronze experience so our design principles allow us when we're doing refurbishment to try where possible to really have a consistency of experience and we also learned you know we're creating an ecosystem here it would be very easy to build a building and to hand it over to colleagues and say there you go but actually we worked together and started to truly understand that if the student experience was at the heart of everything we were doing that encompassed so many other aspects and you know Dave's here we worked so closely with it how how did the it enhance the experience in a seamless integrated way how did it support the teaching how did we support our students to study and how did the service model that sat behind all of this all work seamlessly so that the students just came in and enjoyed the space and it supported them in their learning and those sort of social moments that they had we understood as well from speaking with other colleagues simple as good and I went to see a building in Australia that they had put millions of dollars of it kit in and when I said now it's all working and they said oh actually we've never switched it on and so we realized simple as good and we worked closely with partners and steel case to get the right the best writing surfaces and actually throughout the entire building if there was a wall that wasn't being used for something else it's got a rightable surface on it and and again really encouraging people to just take ownership of the building we wanted our students to come in enjoy it engage with it and feel that sense of ownership there are very few signs in the building telling you what to do which which is just a joy to me when we opened the doors students just came in and got on with it as if they'd always been there and actually that that's the best testament to the design that I can ever ask for what else did we learn and Dave can jump in on this you know don't overspec the technology we particularly looked at the connectivity in the building how do you make it seamless for our academics coming in we may have people coming in to teach in this building for the first time how do we make that as you know the minimal stress experience as possible and also that assumption around and it's it's it's grown exponentially even since we started this project people have multiple devices and with multiple devices comes the need for multiple charging and so one of the things that we focused on in this building was plugs and sockets how do our students get power and that that's always the biggest challenge Dave I'm going to hand over to you thank you Nicola picking up on the point Nicola was making there around the technology and how we evolved that the Deanswick and Smith building is part of a much wider ecosystem so while the teaching spaces within the new building are state-of-the-art and are carefully designed and considered we wanted to make sure that we weren't leaving the rest of the campus behind and that staff and students moving from our existing campus into the new building would feel part of a consistent University of Glasgow presence we did that through standardising some of our technology interfaces so the teaching space lecterns the control panels staff trained in the Deanswick and Smith building would be able to teach in any of our buildings and vice versa and similarly from a student experience the wi-fi connectivity and the support service model was consistent with the model that we have across campus and as part of that I use that as an ideal opportunity to review our support model across campus and through engagement with students we developed what has become sorry what has come to be called our reach out support model which was branded and designed by students through a student competition and essentially puts in place peer support for students using our services with staff involvement IT help desk library facilities and a one team approach so that we're able to deliver a consistent joined up service as part of that approach we're currently in the middle of our annual review period so we're looking at what's working and what we need to improve on and this whole project has kick started that service improvement methodology and given us that opportunity to go in there and and listen to the users and make make changes where they're required just speaking to this slide when I was given the brief of the Deanswick and Smith building from a technical perspective um once I had got my head around the enormity of the whole thing um actually it's it's quite a simple challenge breaking it down looking at who the building users are what will they be doing when they're in the building how will they be interacting with the technology and does that change throughout throughout the period and it does we have now formal teaching events running through now normal university teaching hours and all of the spaces are available for students and student societies outside of that one of the underlying visions was to make sure that this building was usable and used as much as as as we could we could manage and support and it's been fantastic fantastic to see students using the spaces for a huge number of activities and using the technology in a way that now is seamless and they're able to make use of the resources that are there and make use of the spaces in ways that we as a board haven't envisaged but we have provided that canvas to let students develop and make use of the space and make it their own which I think is really important so my role in that has really been kind of translating the requirements coming from from Moira and from the learning and teaching streams from Nikola and the estates development and how the the infrastructure is is interconnected translating that to a language that my technical colleagues understand checking that reiterating and through an iterative process developing what has become the the avian installations in the classrooms teaching spaces and the the wi-fi development across the the building itself but underlined and underpinned by the support model which I think is is the biggest success factor the technology changes it develops but having that support there and having a front foot support so rather than students or users of the building necessarily having to go to a particular area to ask a question or to ask for assistance we have roaming peer support reach out staff who will be now there and if students are looking for help they can they can receive that where they are rather than having to to go to a particular location and that's developing and maturing as we go and we're now taking that same support model and using that as the baseline for the other campus buildings as they're they're coming on stream I'm just going to quickly flick us on so in addition to everything that we've just spoken about we recognize this building needed other things and you know if we wanted our students to really come in to embrace it to own it to dwell there you know to feel that it was you know a home away from home a place they wanted to be and we recognized it needed not just coffee but great food and different catering options throughout the day and throughout the building and so we worked with our colleagues in our commercial team to really understand how could we do catering differently in this building and I think that that was critical actually at you know I wouldn't understate the importance of really engaging with the student body asking them what they wanted and then trying to deliver that and we also recognized that not everyone can or wants to buy their lunch from you know from the university so we created student kitchens in this building and we put microwaves and zip taps for those that wanted to bring things in from home and again you know if you were having an intense study day you could be in this building from you know eight in the morning till eight at night so you're going to bring your bits and bobs that make you comfortable as you're going through that journey on your day so again the microwaves the zip taps we've got chilled water on all of the floors for students to access so really trying to think about the things that that would make it just the most supportive space it could be coffee is really important and there is a plethora of coffee outlets in the in the building but also we've put really really high quality coffee vending in the building and so that people can get coffee out with those sort of those key hours where our catering is operating the other thing that we looked at was lockers and where do people leave their stuff you know everybody's got quite a lot of stuff nowadays so we worked closely again with our colleagues and or our partner's steel case to get the best locker solutions and to stop people having to fiddle about with keys our lockers tie in to you know the student card so it just was to make it as easy as possible to enjoy and be in this building and I mentioned it earlier but I'll mention it again never ever underestimate the need for sockets and we had to our building has a concrete floor so we've had to bring power in from above and actually we came up with really innovative solutions where we have power cords that people can just pull down and then at the end you retract and they go back up so just never underestimate how many devices people genuinely want to plug in and so we started to think about all of the other things that would make a building feel like a place you wanted to be messages from study space again you know we said it about technology we said it about other things keep it simple and we wanted our students as well to own these spaces and and also understanding that study needs change throughout the year so we made sure that the furniture was as flexible as possible that people could configure it we had really interesting discussions with our janitors at the start and this is the same of the teaching spaces and well who'll reset that room at the end of every night or who'll reset that that study space and we said it doesn't need to be reset people will just move the furniture so that they can use it for what their need is at that moment in time and it took us a long time to kind of break that pattern and again this building has has done that across the entire campus so we've really changed a lot of the service models that we have across the campus and and this building the jms was definitely the catalyst for that shift in our thinking and dav mentioned there the reach out i won't speak to these slides but you know we worked with our students we started to think about what people needed the way i always explain it is we used to have a service model that was like the the cheese counter in a supermarket and you would take a ticket and wait in line to be served and we shifted that much more to the the google uh not the google the oh what do you call the apple shop um you know the the genius bar with people out roving and helping and being really visible and available and we recognize that a lot of questions can be relatively easily triaged you know how do i get to connect to the printer how where do i where do i collect my printing my laptop isn't linking to the wi-fi these are the general questions we get and so we triage them on the floor and then when the questions are more difficult our reach out team can then show you how to get the more specialized service that you require and it's been unbelievably successful i would suggest and i'm just going to say um you know we've had i think davil dav can back me up on this with 19 000 digital adult inquiries since it's launched super positive feedback from students and actually the brand recognition you know the colors people know who to look for for assistance and it's it's been very very positive and again fundamental to the success of the the facility and that whole piece around transforming and then a last couple of slides for me i just like to um to show the building itself and you know people just sitting about doing things always you know somebody's got a laptop there's plugs you can see there even on the sort of the bleacher seats that are sort of quite informal we put sockets for people to plug in um every space is a space that people want to use um so i think uh that that's everything from me but the the best moment that i had with this whole building and i've worked on it for a long time and i'm very much in love with it was when we opened the doors and our students just came in and got on with it we didn't have to explain it we didn't have to put signs up we didn't have to have people directing them they just came in and got on with it and started to enjoy it and what i love is that you know next semester september the students the new students that will arrive will think this has always been here they won't know that you know the tears and the angst that we all had delivering this they will just think it's always been here and it'll be part of their lives so um and that's it from me thank you thank you nicola okay so um thank you for that and i i hope that that kind of holistic introduction has given everybody a sense of the the scale and the of what we were trying to achieve and and why we've why we've talked about systems and processes and ecosystems because it's so fundamental to to the whole concept i'm going to pass over now to um lauren who's going to say something about how we worked with the students nicola has mentioned students a number of times this whole building was for students and we really wanted to transform the student experience um but i'll i'll give you some time to hear this from the perspective of lauren and her former former role and then subsequently liam when they were involved in their student capacity lauren thank you maura i don't have slides this morning because i'm trying to paint a picture of a story here so there's nothing really for you to look at and and i am going to give a bit of context because i realized that we have a really diverse audience this morning who may not know the approaches to student partnership within a scottish context or specifically within the university of glasgo so it's going to be a bit of a whistle stop tour um but hopefully it will help set the scene and give some key contextual examples of how we actually enacted that collaboration at glasgo um so we're going to start with my involvement which began back in 2015 so quite near the beginning of the project um and it's worth noting that the collaboration on this project also predated me so this was something the src which is glasgo students representative council was involved as a core part of this project from the very beginning um so just to set that scene around student partnership at glasgo so you can really see the foundation that we were working on glasgo is quite unique in that we have four different student organizations rather than one student union or guild but what this means is that the student representative council which is the the legal representative body of students is really able to focus on that representative angle and on learning and teaching enhancement and student support and within that students representative council which you'll hear us call the src from here on in um there are four sabbatical officers so these are four full-time paid student officers who are elected by the student body to represent them um and these sabbatical officers tend to be very interwoven into the the running of the university and in representing students voices on everything from new policy implementation to things like this enormous estates development and in addition to that the src also has academic representatives and well food and equal opportunities representatives which are volunteer student roles which are elected and represent the student body for a year so it's important to to realize here that the src we're already very involved in a range of activity at the university from learning and teaching strategy and policy right through to equality and diversity in the broader student experience um in addition to the the council part of src we also have around 800 to 1000 course representatives who we'll mention later on as well who are involved in leading change at a very local area um level within the sort of local subject areas and degree programs um and so they're really the ears on the ground of what students want and they kind of represent often that the change and it's through that kind of representative structure of the class reps feeding student feedback right up to the sabbatical officers at the top that makes our represent our representative structures so effective at Glasgow I would say um but within that I think it's also important to recognize that student partnership and collaboration is is very much part of the Scottish national context in HE this is something which is legislated and regulated student partnership is embedded within our quality processes and our governance so this isn't something that's coming from from nothing Glasgow sits as part of a broader context but what I would say is that Glasgow in particular has been commended for the strength of student partnership and it's something that both the students themselves feel but also the staff members recognize that the value that comes from that really embedded student partnership but despite all of that despite all of that context student representatives don't really come into post expecting to be involved in estates development this was something entirely new to the students getting involved in this project most of us when we stand for election you know we we have manifestos that are shaped around student experience that are shaped around learning and teaching and extracurricular activities not around the building of buildings and I I still recall the moment that I learned what a baffle was and never mind just learning what it was but learning having opinions about what it should look like and where it should go and so I think it's important to to to recognize that this does represent a real shift and a steep learning curve for the students involved in these projects this was not something that any of us had been involved in before so I think this added layer of complexity you know it added challenges but what I will say is that we had such a strong partnership with estates colleagues who really supported the student representatives in getting to grips with this new landscape and all of the new terminology and everything that we needed to understand really quite quickly because one of the the unique context for student reps is they were often involved in this project for a year and student reps are generally elected for a single term of office and some of us stick around and get involved in more and more but there are students who have to to get to grips with really complex things really very quickly and something that I have reflected on a lot is just how important that relationship was with the estates team and how essential they were in equipping the students to be able to to really meaningfully contribute to the project and so for me it was about ensuring that those students could be effective partners and as somebody who started very early in the project I really was supported to to be able to understand what I was doing and contribute really meaningfully and I think what's testament to that is the the amount of students who've gone on to actually work as part of the campus redevelopment who have really kind of experienced a really steep learning curve but discovered new things that interest them and we've had students who've taken on internships and who've gone on to work in permanent roles within the estates team due to their involvement in this project which I think speaks really highly of the just how how embedded that student partnership was it wasn't ever tokenistic it really felt very genuine and so just to think about a couple of the examples and the way that we actually did that as as Nicola has said and Moira said right at the beginning this was never just about a building this was about a transformation in the way that students learn and with students contributing to that vision for transformation from the very beginning and everything we're talking about this morning as well I think is important to reiterate as Nicola said can be applied to any project so regardless of whether you're building a 90 million pound huge learning and teaching building or you're refurbing some spaces or you're thinking about a new approach to learning and teaching really it's about the the key tenets of that partnership I think that are important to focus on here and for me that was always about a shared vision and a shared philosophy for the future of learning and teaching at Glasgow and students really contributed to the shaping of that vision from the very beginning through workshops through participation in committees and working groups and through surveys there were so many different methods that we use to involve the student voice and the student voice says I should say because something that's really important to to acknowledge as well as the diversity of the student body Glasgow is an enormous university with around well over 30,000 students now I think we're close to 35,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students from a really diverse range of backgrounds so Glasgow has a really significant international student population and a really large local student population from in and around Glasgow so there's something really important there about catering to that diversity and recognising that there was never a single student voice and that was captured through the variety of ways that students were involved and despite there not being a single approach there were some key messages coming through from the students through the representative structure that really helped to shape that ethos so we knew that students wanted more active learning participatory learning about inclusive and flexible learning spaces more work more space for group work for extracurricular activities and really to come back to I think Nicola mentioned the concept of sticky campus so creating a facility where students would want to come and stay and students shaped what that looked like from the very beginning right from the first accessibility review of the building plans in 2015 which I was involved in which resulted in concrete changes to that floor plan to make that building more accessible for our students as we mentioned the design principles that underpinned every element of not just this building but the campus redevelopment as a whole was shaped by students students were involved in the committee that pulled that together students contributed ideas through surveys through workshops to what that inclusive design looked like so that's not just about learning and teaching spaces it's also about the importance of having showers on campus having student kitchens having reflective spaces and prayer spaces these were all things that underpinned those design principles to ensure that this building and all of our buildings indeed are really focused on what our students need and what they want from that and as Dave mentioned we also held a student competition to design and brand the service model which was incredible as one of the judges on that and the level of creativity and ingenuity from the student submissions was incredible and seeing that now on campus those students will have long graduated but knowing that they have left behind that legacy I think is pretty incredible and in addition to that I've mentioned the formal student partnership the sabbatical officers council members but there were also pop-up consultation and engagement events getting ideas from students who were in no way engaged with student representation at all really ensuring that that broad student experience was captured and it really was at every single stage of that process and I think that's what is really important to recognize is this wasn't just about coming in at the end this was about shaping the very ethos of the building and the approach to learning and teaching and that that was really founded upon a strong foundation already of student partnership and collaboration at Glasgow so I think my key message is around ensuring that you make good use of those existing partnerships with students to make sure that these projects are really speaking to to the needs of your students and that you create a building that feels like home on campus which I think really we have managed to do with this building and I'm not going to talk about how students are using the space I'll leave that to Liam I think he'll probably cover that briefly and but I'm now going to pass over to Nick who's going to talk a little bit about the staff involvement in the development and design yes thank you so let me just share my slides here we go so um just to reiterate what what Lauren has said is um bring in your your staff or educational developers early on as well so um I mentioned before I started in 2017 so there's a little bit about my team so we currently have 13 full-time members of staff with seven academic and digital advisors and I was actually almost a little bit surprised myself that I was asked to to join and therefore for our team to join and immediately it became clear why because of the whole transformation and you've got the staff um who contribute you have the students who contribute but also I think you need a bit of a meta overview here we are transforming learning we are transforming teaching so the support needs to be there um oh yeah there we go so the question is to me it was always wide was there such a wide and varied team that was so early on part of the development of the hub why the student staff at the partnerships well and Lauren explained the reason why and well why did we even want something like the jms learning hub well it comes down to again what my colleagues have already talked about so we're changing teaching but then we also have the question are we changing learning I put in the question mark but I would say well yes we are it is driven by students and staff I mean that is hopefully really clear already from what we have been talking about this might sound a little bit out there but really I feel that it is not just a building it's a philosophy it's far more than that it's it's it's not just a space and really I think that everybody who goes into that space realizes it is more than that it's all about why the jms it is all about learning but actually it's all about active learning and it is so important that this has been at the forefront of everything we've done and our thinking about this building um because there is of course a bit of a difference between perhaps sometimes more classic traditional old ideas of learning and now early on I remember we were sitting down with a team and we were thinking about okay so we've got this we're going to build a building and by then we had architectural drawings etc already because we're talking about 2017-18 and we were thinking about well learning and and where does learning take place well we obviously have going to have a building we have physical spaces but active learning very very often also includes um technology so we also have some sort of online spaces very often but that's a very important one to be able to learn to be in your best position to learn the mental spaces are incredibly important so all of these need to come together and none of them should really be the one that stands out more which is why it goes back to this whole philosophy it's not just a building and then we're thinking about the other things we have been thinking about all of those spaces at the same time so the question is what's a bit in the middle is it the zone um you could put lots of different uh labels on it I think but if everything comes together then I think it might be a little bit of a Shangui line I suppose and um let's hope that students are able to experience that I would think they might do but I'm not a student anymore so we need to ask them and we have so we've heard about the principles we've heard and and now um the way we're thinking about active learning is so we summarise this so as students well what does it mean they should be active if not passive learners so not talking at them therefore all of the building is designed for interaction of diverse means they should have the opportunity to engage and learn with peers even you look at the building there are so many spaces where you can do exactly that oh basically they're just everywhere from the steps that you saw to um little um study looks and little study study spaces that look like a oh difficult to explain I've not a photo of that one but it kind of looks like a block with with with a window and you've got a table around it um to the massive lecture theatre where you can actually turn around and talk to the person behind you because these things are designed that way um they should be constructing understanding by building on an expanding existing knowledge uh have the chance to contribute to their own learning again that's a very important core that um tenant that went throughout our design principles and of course they should become independent self-directed learners guided by staff and that's once more the way the building is is set up because of all of those spaces coming together so active learning yes incredibly important but that's not all what about inclusive active learning very early on we started to realize um that there isn't really much research out there and we did a literature review and we were looking at specifically inclusive active learning and that wasn't really anything there is a lot about inclusivity and Nicola already talked about and also Lauren talked about all that work that went into to make the building accessible that was in hand but inclusive active learning is even more than that it needs to be welcome it needs to be there for everybody and we were still making assumptions while we were designing it and I get to that so this is rotating because we did some uh because it is a um a poster that um research participants were working on from all sides so we did a little research project using rich pictures methodology and we asked participants that well what does your ideal learning inclusive learning space looks like well unsurprisingly look at the bit here on there on the bottom so all gender bathrooms and guess what that is everywhere in the building um nothing is binary oh no we don't do that all of the bathrooms all of the toilets are available for everybody and they're all single ones and they're all big and they're all accessible and that is amazing that is that is I think the really important bit behind it that we don't single out everything is for everybody and you can see this here so these are photos that were taken before the building was opened but let's see for example this one what you see here on the chair on the left it's not just you and I was wondering about you know what's the little me thing there well actually this chair goes all the way up so that it becomes a stool and when you look at the tables here on the right now I remember we were really practical as well in designing for for learning so I remember being there with my team and others as well in the university and testing out furniture and one of the furniture had uh the this bit of the book sorry but it's not what I meant to do this bit of the table was when up and down but not the others and again we had this whole inclusivity ethos behind the method but no no everything should go up and down because we don't want to single out somebody we want to make it as welcoming and as open and as usable and inclusive as possible so that's what we did but then we were also talking about well active learning is great group work but the noise uh I can tell you that this building is amazing so there was so much work and Nicola would be able to tell you about it so much work went on into to get the acoustics right and it is amazing because you are you can be in the middle of the building and you're not overwhelmed by noise but then in the spaces where we have the really the the group working space is what really active spaces was teal etc you know technology in there and then we were thinking well that's great for most students but what if somebody becomes quite overwhelmed what if somebody feels like this is too much I need some quiet space and all of those rooms now have little locks where you can sit a bit quieter but where you can also work with your group a bit quieter so and this here is the photo of the not quite finished massive lecture theater and it's remarkable because when you stand in the front and the whole thing is opened up so the sky wall is opened up you can see every single seat but the students as well when you're in the seats can see everybody it doesn't feel claustrophobic as it tends tended to I remember the old lecture theater the old kind of amphitheater style theaters but if you feel claustrophobic because you felt like you were squeezed in it's not like that at all and as you might be able to see here with the stacking there's a lot of space in between so when you're teaching you can walk through and you don't have to squeeze but also the students as I mentioned before so this student can turn around and easily talk to that student so there are ways of getting students to work together work with peers in a lecture theater so I wanted to add those ones as well just like Nicola it's just nice to see some photos and I really did like that by Kara Makara because the sun's shining and you can see how it streams into through the glass it's a lovely and welcoming space it was actually even better than I expected so having worked on it for so long the first time I was there and it was full you've got the students there it felt like yes this is a space to learn this is a space where all three areas come together and I put this one into reminds you of the this afternoon session and Vicky my colleague Vicky will be talking a lot about how we actually are tackling to make it happen that that that is the support of the teaching transformation which does include all the way it goes all the way into curriculum design assessment aligning etc so that's me and I am now handing over to Liam okay thanks Nic I don't have any slides so everyone just has to look at my face that's when I apologize but I started with the project formally in 2019 when I started in the SRC as vice president education so while I'd like to say I come in dotted some eyes cross some t's and take all the credit as you can see so far it has been a massive project and there's just been so much that has gone into it but from the very start for me remember when I was considering running for my role I asked my predecessor what the strangest thing about the job was and they said they just come from a meeting where they were deciding on what chair we're going to build in something you never really think that you're going to decide you're going to work on when you win the student representation but it shows the breadth of sort of areas that we ended up working on and that the university had us involved in I think again something that Nicola touched on the key message for me was that students want wi-fi plug sockets and coffee and that was just to be re-edited and every meeting that was my orders when I went in but at that point in the project that was more about getting students on board so the sabbatical office was wonder and intense set of training and induction over the summer months when we start just sort of for all aspects of university life and part of this was a session with the state's colleagues to get us all up to speed with the entire campus development which really allowed us to hit the ground running and I think a really important part of that is that it wasn't just our education reps it was the president education students were on student activity so it really was taking that holistic approach to the building that whilst learning and teaching is a big big part of it it was to make sure that students from sort of all walks of life and people representing those interests had a say in the direction of the building at the same time sort of around me starting with the project where I was beginning to work on the learning teaching strategy and me and my predecessor we got to present at the away day on that to set the tone of the strategy and I think that there as well really shows the student involvement that we had sort of at different parts of the university but I really think the strategy does go hand in hand with what the building aims to do and it really sort of sets the tone for the future of sort of learning teaching at the university and whilst the James Fakene Smith is one part of that it really does sort of have a ripple effect out with that the wherever you are it might not be in this brand new building but that it really has transformed learning teaching in all aspects of of university life for us similar to that we also had involvement at the class rep conference that the S4C run so as Lauren said we have about eight or nine hundred per year so there was a proportion of that came to this conference and had impact and sort of shared their views on many things so the strategy was one of them but we also had Karen who believes speaking at the later session come and share with students what sort of the vision was for the campus redevelopment so I think the one that sort of did get the most interest from students was the James Fakene Smith because it was the one that's coming more recently but it also really showed us that sort of the idea of active learning wasn't just this top-down approach that it was it wasn't just senior leaders in the university saying oh this is the future this is what we're going to do it really was coming from us that students wanted more and more of their learning experience and almost that the idea of just sitting in a lecture is is long gone that we really want to have to not have to but we really want to get that opportunity to sit with our peers and actually discuss the material that's being presented and not just have to to listen to a lecture speak for an also it has been really reassuring for us at that stage that this wasn't just something that we were doing and not taking into account the opinions of others but it really was something that was coming at us from all angles that this was really was but the future of the university was going to be so that was quite nice for us yeah so I think the one thing that Kim was apparent to me that was that it was vital for students to really have a seat at the table for these discussions and we it was it was very reassuring that wasn't just an afterthought it was you sort of in the door in the door is a student rep and you were sitting on these high level meetings having these high discussions and I think Lauren shared her fun fact from estates but the one that I took away was that escalators the most efficient way of moving people through a building so we got more out of it I think that maybe put in sometimes but it really was a very successful relationship I think but yeah so we were involved from SOAR and throughout the project she put an influence not just as I said this the future of this building but also policy and practice around learning and teaching but has just transcended the the building itself um we did speak on Monday at a pre-session about the role of strong leadership from university management senior leaders in this but for me as a student in the early days of the project it was the impact of Lauren as a student leader when I was on council and she came to us and talked about this new building that there's going to be and oh we're going to do this this and really sold it to students and I kind of hope that had the same impact on other students so it really was I think a key role getting students on board sharing with us the advantages of what this new direction was going to be and then we translated that because we really did believe in it and in all honesty being a student now I do get the reap the benefits of that I have the privilege of experiencing this building as a student and it's really interesting seeing something I worked on as plans and got a tour of the concrete building so now I'm sitting in the classroom get seeing all the behind the scenes of work that went into it but I think my favorite thing about the building now is seeing the personality it's gained you you start to see students cluster in different areas that they've all chosen to be their favorite and it's also somehow come around that the building has been the name of the Jimmy so yeah that is my job and for my experience on the building but thank you very much for allowing me to share. Thank you thank you Liam and thank you everybody and I can see that we've got some questions in the Q&A and I can see that we're also we've been answering them so thank you to the panel members for doing that I'll come back to one or two of them just before I do though can I just say that there is somebody not on this call who was absolutely core to this project and that's Professor Frank Cotun who was the sponsor for this project he was the he had the learning and teaching portfolio at the time that I now have and he's now our deputy vice chancellor but it was his I think it was his vision and his ability to kind of keep that focus and to really push us so Lauren and Liam both spoke about feeling a bit overwhelmed about being asked as a student what kind of spaces they would like and be involved in the state's project they weren't the only ones when Frank asked me and another colleague Dawn to to help lead the design of these learning teaching and study spaces we felt we felt completely overwhelmed and you know really worried we would let everybody down but it's been that that team approach I'm working with our external partners the architect steel case and others that's helped us build the confidence to do the things that we've done but it was Frank who who had that vision and I think I can't understate that and I know one of the questions is about you know can you do this even if you don't have a new building and I would say absolutely it's about really being clear what is the educational ambition that you have and Nick spoke really clearly about active learning for us that was the ethos that was what we wanted to do we wanted to enable students to really engage in their discipline and we know that they can do that so much better in these kind of collaborative environments so as a research lead institution we wanted that active collaborative learning environment to permeate everything we did but we've piloted as others have mentioned we've piloted spaces like this so if you have a distributed campus like one of the questions said I would really encourage you to try different things and find out what works for you because although we learned from others there were designs that other universities had that didn't work for us we tried them in our pilot spaces and they just didn't work for us and I were students so you know what we've done we believe is working for us but it might not work in the same way for you so if you have a space that you're refurbishing it doesn't all have to be really expensive it's just about giving that thought firstly to how you want your students to engage how you want to support their learning whether they're bringing their own devices what kind of atmosphere you want to create but crucially how you support colleagues to change their teaching practice because just putting them in these rooms doesn't make them teach differently and I know we're coming on to that this afternoon sorry after this session and so those things are really important but it was that vision from the senior manager at the start that really kind of set the tone for this and made a stick to that the whole way through and there is a question that I don't want to lose sight of from Andre about whether or not we are going to further transform these spaces to allow hybrid teaching and so I think Andre you're using that term in the same way that we've been using that term which is that you would have students in the same class with some physically in a room and some joining remotely and I might pass to Dave and Nick in a second but at the moment we are not particularly advocating that approach where of course we're doing it to some extent because of the pandemic but it's not one that we feel there's really quite the right technology to make that inclusive and Nick's talked about how we really want the experience to be inclusive so we don't want to do too much hybrid until we know students who are joining remotely really can engage as effectively as the students who are on campus where there are strategies for dealing with that in the short term but it's not a strategy that we are advocating as being core to our educational experience at the moment but Nick and Dave I'll just turn to you in case there's something more that you would want to say particularly in terms Dave of Andre's question which is you know how would we transform you know would we have to do an awful lot in terms of technology but Nick I'll come to you first. Yes so as Moira said this is not one of our this is not really core and it's not something that we really say really advertise or is all that beneficial because the reason why it's not just for the students but it is an extremely cognitive load for the teacher so no matter what kind of technology is set up and by the way I'd recommend if you're interested in talking to a university that has been doing put a lot of work and investment in at Sydney University so I can highly recommend they are very happy to talk to you but so then basically you would also have to change the makeup of the staff because granted some of those really flexible and active areas require more than one teacher anyway so you can't just have one person you probably need others as well but the moment you're talking about hybrid to not just forget about the ones that are online but to really engage them in activities and potentially even in activities with the students that are in the physical space there is absolutely no way you can do this with one person because it is so overwhelmed you will lose sight of something and also kill yourself and it's not beneficial to anyone not to the students on campus not to the students remote and not to the teacher so you need to rethink you need to have a teaching team and you also need to completely redesign really how you actually and what you're teaching because you want students to be active so you might be able to have activities with the students on campus but also at the same time the students online have an activity but do you know how many students you are going to have online how many you are going to and so on so it's a very complex area we are not really going down the route we're doing things because we have to but do talk to Sidney because they've really been investing in that and Dave thanks Nick so I think Nick's outlined the challenges in hybrid from a pedagogical approach setting out those spaces from a technical approach in some ways is relatively easy but I think we recognise quite quickly that hybrid teaching isn't about presenting to camera and presenting to students in the room at the same time it's much more involved and there's a significant change in approach that's required and it has to be interactive and it has to be engaging to meet our strategic objectives and to ensure that student experience that we're trying to make at the core of all of our planning and decision making so going back to the question that in terms of what we would need to do from a technical perspective we do have a lecture recording we had lecture recording before the pandemic it's become invaluable during the pandemic and will be a key part going forward for for much of our delivery how we do that in an active learning mode is something that we're working through and developing and it may be that the collaborative engaged activities that we're encouraging and that the students have demonstrated that they want to be participating in we use the the flipped classroom approach where we record and then we engage in those activities the challenge for us technically is how do we have collaboration and engagement with students who are in Glasgow and on campus and are able to work remotely and participate in group work with students who aren't on campus so that we have a an integrated cohort of students that's something that that we're working through from a software perspective from a technical technology in the room perspective we would be looking to use what we have already and with one eye on the future I think that's that's what we've we've tried to put in place in the James McEwen Smith and we will integrate with various different providers and cloud services to try and make that happen once we're sort of further down the line in defining where it is we want to get to with the with the teaching approach because it's all well and good to having a technology solution if it doesn't fit the teaching approach it's not a solution so we we need to focus on the teaching side first. Thanks Dave um I wanted to kind of come back a little bit Antoine you've you've said that your question's been answered and I can see people are still typing answers to that but there's something in your question about the kind of distributed campus that I'd like to bring Nicola in on in a minute um because I think it also connects to Andrew's question whatever we do one of the challenges is for colleagues who we're trying to give a consistent experience to across the campus and it's it's it's great that we've been able to have a very consistent experience in this particular building but across the campus we have an array of rooms um with you know um IT setups that reflect not quite when they were created obviously but perhaps previous versions of our IT setup um we don't have lecture capture software in every space we don't have the same lighting setup in every space so sometimes for colleagues when they run from room to room to room that can be quite challenging so the design principles I just would like to come back to them for a moment we technically shared the design principles that we adapted from McGill we actually translated them into what that means for you know the lighting in the room what that means for the kind of audiovisual IT setup so when people go in they have a roughly similar display setup irrespective of the shape of the room and so onto and I would really say that being able to develop a shared understanding and a shared language and a shared sense of purpose and priority with your colleagues in the States and IT or however your institution is structured across these distributed um buildings would be really important because that starts to give colleagues academic colleagues and students confidence that you can change teaching practice and and for us that's always been really important is we can't ask our colleagues to change what they do and to put all of the work into changing what they do to work in a collaborative environment if we then can't give them a space that works for that so we've had to and again we'll talk about this more in the next session but we've had to to really try to coordinate that but to work with colleagues and to really reassure them that we can have some baseline consistency across the campus and I think we still got some work to do on that but translating those design principles through really helped and I think in the pivot to online it meant that we had a shared language and a shared understanding across these key parts of the university about what we meant by terms like active learning and so really that's that's about keeping up conversations and trying to align different the strategies from the different parts of the university but Nicola I'll maybe pass to you because I think I think this will be a challenge for probably everybody on the call to some extent yeah I mean we were very fortunate we had a site and we we had a capital budget and we delivered a building but the the the James McHugh and Smith is a fraction of our teaching estate and actually day to day huge swathes of our staff and students won't be taught in that building so Moira's right what we did was we took the principles and actually you know we've got the the sort of full list of principles for each of the key themes lighting IT accessibility furniture you know look feel all of the sorts of things but we also then sort of graded them what was the bare minimum that we wanted to be able to achieve and we have a five to ten year program now and you know we have a a board or a group looking at refurbishment and we're actually surveying all of our teaching rooms looking at where interventions can be made to to have the most impact you know where will will it benefit the most people and we're actually looking at what what does a program of refurbishment look like over the next 10 years to get us from where we are now to a level of sort of parity of experience for everyone and that that doesn't mean that every space everyone walks into is going to be exactly the same because we will never achieve that as Moira says we have a very varied campus I've got buildings that date from 1840 I'm I've got you know interwar buildings I've got 1960s concrete buildings so there are there are limitations to what we can do but where can we have a consistent level of experience at you know that everyone everyone experiences and that that's what we're working towards but the jms it's amazing it's fantastic um but it's only a fraction of our teaching space so really the challenge for us now is how do we make sure that everyone is getting a similar experience across the campus and as as David Moira said there is nothing more stressful than walking into a room and not being able to find the on switch um you know and that that's just horrendous and instantly it sets the tone for the whole session so if the only thing that we do across the entire campus is you know make sure everyone has a comfortable seat and make sure the on switch is in the same place then already we're we're you know we're moving us forward I hope that answers that question but we did we did pilot a lot of spaces and we learned a lot from piloting things we did one space in our school of medicine it was a chill space it was active it was oh it was just so much technology and actually after three minutes of being in the space everyone had a headache and had to leave because we painted the walls red and orange and vibrant colors and really it was just awful I mean it was awful and we learned so much from that mistake so from all the good things that we've done we've also learned a lot from all of the the huge mistakes that we made and you know we're we're we're happy with those mistakes because they took us a step forward on our journey thank you I was I was trying to reply I'm not very good at typing and listening coordinating things at the same time I was trying to answer a question about our collaborators so Nick has mentioned Sydney and provided a link we did work a lot with McGill in Canada and actually McGill is a good example of a university a bit like ours with lots of historic buildings where they did introduce active learning and have again approached that from an educational perspective and we adopted their design principle approach and adapted theirs to something that worked for us but I'm wondering if any of my colleagues from either academic and digital development or student learning development who who're involved in this today could could find the video and we had Adam Finkelstein from McGill give a talk at our annual learning and teaching conference about what they have done in McGill and he talked about the evidence base for the merits educational merits of active learning but also the kind of improvements they've seen in student attainment as a consequence of adopting that approach and so he gives a really nice narrative it's about an hour long video keynote session if you're interested we'll try and track down that video I'm pretty sure we have a youtube link we can pop into the chat if you would like to to see that I know we have another 15 minutes or so for questions and I'm scrolling through trying to make sure I don't miss any I'm aware that there are some about exams I'm going to come to that at the end if that's okay once we've covered all of the ones that relate to the building but I did want there was a question about lecture recording that I have now lost I read it and I can't now find it but the question I think was do we require all of our teaching staff to record their lectures or can they opt out so we used to have a an opt-in policy and we changed that actually just before the pandemic to an opt-out policy and we have a range of reasons as to lecturers might not be recorded but actually one of them is that the more active they are the less suitable they are for recording because you can imagine a scenario some of our large flat floor spaces hold several hundred students who could be working in groups and showed a picture of one of those spaces with the group tables it just wouldn't work to record that so I think we're having to rethink what what are what is the type of digital resource that is supportive for students if somebody's standing giving a lecture or doing that live on on zoom actually there's been a considerable uptake in the number of people who do that and we can auto-schedule that into our own campus classes but actually for a lot of the learning design that we're talking about the lecture recording policy doesn't really apply in the same way not least because we would also then get into the territory of needing students consent for their recorded input to be shared online so we've had to keep revising our policy actually to try and keep it up to date with the way in which the the world has been changing so I just thought it might be be worthwhile picking up on that for a minute or two. Laura I saw that there was a question in the chat about how to deal with an architect who has another vision of the project and I thought that was interesting so so we went through a really detailed process of procurement of the architectural team the design team and we spent a lot of time getting to know them and before we made our decision about who we wanted to come and be part of our sort of collaborative venture and so I think that the work that you do at the start of any project like this absolutely reaps the benefits as you go into the more detailed part and we we chose an architect who A had experience of learning and teaching and higher education but B who wanted the client's involvement and who didn't see it just as a sort of a transactional relationship who genuinely wanted to learn from us as much as we wanted them to you know to learn from them and so I think spending that time at the start and us being very clear in articulating what we wanted and we didn't speak about a building we spoke about the activities so a building is really just if there's any architects on the call I apologize already a building is just a box in which to house things and we were clear about that from the start don't show me any pretty designs don't show me any features or walls not interested what we were interested in from the get go was what activities are we going to support here in this space and how will these spaces work together and and that that was key we we do very quite complex governance you'll be surprised to hear in our university and so we have court who oversee everything but the way that the university has set up running all of these sort of individual capital projects is as Moira mentioned we have a sponsor and then we have a board which brings in all the different disciplines so the students the the academics it estates we're all together and collectively we are driving forward the design and then the delivery of the project and actually that that sort of shared accountability meant that we were all very very engaged but the one thing that I would say is we we didn't underestimate the time that people would need to be able to do creative thinking and work together and we also didn't underestimate the fact and Lauren and they both said we were bringing people into a world that is mine and I am I love my world but we were bringing people into a world that they weren't particularly familiar with and that we had to genuinely give the time and the support to get everybody to a sort of a common level of understanding surveyors love acronyms so do academics right enough but you know we had to find this common language to work together and the time that we put in at the start of the project doing that absolutely reap the benefits as we went on the journey so just a quick answer to that question yeah and and I think you Nicholas mentioned this but just a little bit more in the kind of governance and governing body they were governing body the university court that Nicola mentioned you know they are so key in decision making and really helping them understand where we were going in terms of the overall campus is one part of that but helping them think we think what educational change means and the timeframe for that is also really important because you know these things can't always change quickly when we're redesigning Nicola mentioned you know aligning assessment and learning outcomes you know that that's not something you just do overnight these are re framing of how we teach and how we engage students that we need to do over time so all of that has come into the discussion and Liam talked about the learning and teaching strategy we developed that during the pandemic actually but it's allowed us to build on a lot of the pandemic work and to incorporate everything we've discussed today into that longer term direction but it links to a question that Julius has asked about how do we essentially how do we prepare students for for working in these spaces in the way that we had intended so we've talked about staff and how many to support staff in changing how they teach we also need to support students and in adapting how they learn and how they engage with these new ways of of learning and so actually the next session we're going to talk about that so Scott and Andrew both work as part of the team who work with students and offer a lot of that central support so they're going to discuss that more fully because you're absolutely right we can't just it's one thing to have students intuitively use a building it's another thing for them to be supported in learning differently and thinking differently about how they work with their colleagues but it's really important to us Nicola said right at the start that they have the opportunity to develop the sorts of skills they will be expected to to have to use in the workplace and the chance for them to work with students both in their private study and in classes is something that we've we've not been able to do in all of our campus just because of the way that that it's been the way that the summer teaching spaces have been set up so we are really trying to work with the student body on that and we'll cover that a little bit more in the next session and I'm just trying to make sure if anybody thinks that we've missed any of the questions about the building or the active learning and it's the only thing I was going to admire and Nic's already said it you know how do we ensure students are using the building correctly um I actually think that the design supported that and of course there's there's how are they engaging with the teaching but actually how are they you know how are the behaviors in the building and we were very keen that there wouldn't be signs everywhere you know with the circle and the cross across it for you know you must be quiet in this space or you must not do that or we really wanted people to take ownership but through some of the design we um we gave the sort of supported different types of behavior so for example on one floor in the building and it's the only floor the study space is glassed in and that for us is that's the focused really quite silent study space and the furniture in that space is much more individualized you know people are very much you know focused and and sort of studying by themselves rather than the more sort of group supports space study furniture and again in that space and it's interesting Liam mentioned the escalators but the escalators bypass that space because you genuinely have to have made the effort to use the stairs or the lift to get to that level so just little things to design we tried to support different behaviors in different areas of the building so that we didn't have to have people going around telling people to be quiet or you know that this is sat we didn't really want laminated signs everywhere that that was the thing that we tried to resist as strongly as possible was a plethora of laminated signs and so through the design we've managed to just give those cues to the different types of behaviors for example in the ground floor catering space we didn't put sockets because actually we didn't want people sort of table blocking you know I've gone in at nine and I'm just going to sit there all day with my laptop and because that is actually the social engaged you know coming together in fellowship space so we didn't we chose not to put sockets there so that people would then have to move on to recharge and blah blah blah and again just these little subtle design cues kind of have supported really really great behaviors throughout the entire building I just pick up on that briefly Moira just to say I think it really is in that design that you see the way that students use this space I think as Nicola said earlier as we move forward you know each year a new cohort will come in and they will think this building has been there for forever and but they will also learn to use the building in the way that works for them and the space is flexible enough that students really can use the space I have gone in there on numerous occasions to meet colleagues or to meet students and seen students interacting in the same spaces with the same furniture but in totally different configurations doing completely different activities and I think it's that it's that flexibility being built into the space but also with those subtle cues as Nicola said around trying to direct behavior by the space that you create and I think that's really important that there's no clear prescriptive way of using the space but there are cues that facilitate students using the space in the way that it was intended and it's it's really I think rewarding to see the ways that students use the spaces now and how innovative they can be in the way that they use spaces, ways that we didn't even envisage they might use that space and I think that's what's been really great and seeing the building come to life is really it's the student's building and they shape how that building is used. Thanks Lauren. I think that we have gone through all of the questions except for Robin's questions about exams which I'll just address briefly before we come to the end because we were due to finish in just two three minutes. So Robin how are we dealing with digital online exams and what's our future plan? We could probably take another 45 minutes to talk through that because there are so many different aspects of that question which I suspect you are also working through otherwise you wouldn't have asked this question. In relation to this building actually it's one of the few buildings that could potentially host what we would say digital exams on campus so when students bring in their own device because we have much more power in these spaces if we were to host more kind of bring your own device either invigilated or uninvigilated online exams that's much more difficult to do elsewhere on the campus because we don't have that pervasive access to power at that kind of scale for students to use but we are we are currently trying to work through our strategy for the future of exams whilst also addressing the fact that we remain operating within a pandemic so we are going to have a combination. This spring our exams start in April and May our exams start in April and going to May we will have a combination with some exams on campus and we have quite specific criteria for for those and why we would hold those exams on campus but many more exams online not least because not all of our students manage to travel to Glasgow so we need to make sure that we assess students on a course in the same way so we have a kind of arrangement at the moment and then we're working through our longer term strategy so that you know there's we're looking both at student well-being and academic integrity but also I would go back to to something Nick said this is about redesigning learning and teaching and assessment and so we we are really trying hard to work with colleagues to think about what does assessment of active learning look like what are better ways of assessing students where is their role for exams and where are their other options and I think some have found it very challenging with all of the pressures of the last couple of years to develop that thinking as far as they would like but we are trying to to work with colleagues to to to be sensitive to the different disciplines and the way those disciplines teach and assess but at the same time to progress the conversation about assessment and we talked about inclusive learning we have a strategy for inclusive assessment so quite quite some big questions about what that means so Robin I haven't answered your question in detail but I hope I've expressed the approach that we're taking and what we're trying to take into account so in just the last minute I'm going to say thank you so much for for the questions and for the very positive feedback in the chat we're just to take a break for 45 minutes now and then we will have a second session where colleagues will talk about how we're supporting academic colleagues to change their teaching practice to redesign their learning and teaching for these new spaces and the incremental ways in which we want to support that move not to just from trans to translation but transformation of teaching and how we're supporting students and I really hope that you'll come back and join us for that part of the workshop thank you very much I don't know whether Jan is coming back in at this point or quite what I'm doing sorry I've I've just written in the chat that I'm really looking forward to to the afternoon I think it's been a really inspiring morning and I really just want to thank you for for the really thoughtful way in which you and your colleagues have really talked not just about what has worked really well but also about the mistakes that you've learned from because I think that's always I think sometimes the hardest in our sector to kind of really be upfront about but actually the fact that actually in thinking about these projects we really need to learn from our experience good and bad it's I think a really important message as is the message that it's really important to talk to each other and to talk to each other with institutions wherever they are around the world that are in different contexts because we can always really learn something from them and take that back on our own journey so thank you very much for that I think I found it really really inspiring so and I really look forward to this afternoon's proceeding with this afternoon's workshop thank you okay thank you thank you everyone we'll see you soon thank you right okay it's 12 o'clock in UK time so one o'clock in central european time so I'm gonna begin the second session for our seminar thank you so much for coming back to join us and we have a slightly different panel for this session and I appreciate that it may be that some of you have joined who weren't in the first session so I'm gonna do a little bit of introduction before we start including introducing myself and maybe just a word or two about what happened in the previous session for those who joined us afresh and then we'll start with our input as intended so good afternoon I'm Moira Fischbachersmith I'm the Vice Principal for Learning and Teaching at the University of Glasgow and I'm going to ask my colleagues to introduce themselves in the order in which they'll contribute in a few moments so Nick I'll turn to you first of all yes good afternoon just in case you weren't there in the earlier one I'm Nick and I'm the Deputy Director Academic and Digital Development and I lead that team and Vicky is one of the esteemed colleagues in that team so you're here from her later and we sit in the University of Glasgow we sit in academic services so we are kind of a combination of what academics but also a service as you would assume education developers across the world are so that's just a little bit for me thanks Nick Vicky hi everyone so I'm Vicky Dale um as Nick said part of the academic and digital development team my role is an academic and digital development advisor um so I've spent a huge proportion of my my career supporting people on how to use technology enhanced learning and teaching appropriately um but obviously um you can't just do technology in isolation I think Jan made that point earlier this morning that you know digital isn't that the whole kind of way that we're going so we have to think about our on-campus experience as well and obviously when we think about the appropriate use of technology we can think about that in the context of an active blended learning um capacity so I'll be talking to you about how we support staff to engage in using not just technology appropriately um but also technology in the context of active learning and the wider active learning pedagogies thanks thanks Vicky Scott hi thanks I'm Scott Ramsey I'm or until very recently I was the good practice advisor which I always think is a job title that doesn't tell you what the advice is about or what field I work in so it was good practice in the context of learning and teaching so I would collect curate and disseminate examples of good teaching practice through things like um speaking to colleagues uh to find those but also coordinating uh until recently the university's learning and teaching conference and our cpd series so that's that's the angle I'm coming at this from today thanks Scott and and just to say that you were also very involved in the decisions around the teaching spaces that we talked about in the previous session Andrew hey I'm Andrew strewn um I manage the team of effective learning advisors or learning developers that tends to be the the kind of title of those types of folks now um and we work across all students from undergraduates all the way through um to teach students the academic literacies academic abilities and academic skills that they need to have in order to succeed in their studies so I'll be talking today around about the types of things that we've done to work with and alongside students and with and alongside academic staff as we change practices thanks Andrew so they're the colleagues who are going to be making the kind of presentation when we're talking through their roles but we also have Karen here with us for this session and Karen and I are going to support with the questions and also Karen's here in case there are particular questions around the state so Karen if you would like to also introduce yourself please thanks um my name's Karen Lee I'm part of the estates team I've got particular responsibility for space management and planning around teaching spaces uh and then for timetabling the use of those so I'd spend quite a lot of time working with academic colleagues and colleagues on this call um about how we provision for the future and the things that we need to be taking account of and how we can do things definitely thanks Karen just before we start for the benefit of anybody who's just joined us I'm sorry I just accidentally muted myself we um we spent the first session really talking about the vision the ambition and the educational aim behind what we were trying to achieve with the new building but I hope it was clear that it was really not just about the the new building but it was about really trying to transform education and a huge part of that has been working with our students and our academic colleagues for a number of years now to support them in changing teaching practice um so I'm going to hand over to Nick in a moment or two um she's going to do a little bit of a recap on one or two key points from this morning just um that she felt would be important for anyone who had missed that but but um it's just to start recap before she she starts um to talk a little bit more about the the context for how we were working with colleagues so um I will hand over to Nick and as before I will try and keep an eye on the Q&As and pick up on any that come up during our presentational component but we may leave some until we're doing the the broader Q&A at the end so Nick over to you thank you. Yes just a few slides I'm trying to keep it short but I do feel for for anybody who wasn't here earlier um really I did one of the most important key points was that um the change of teaching and or potentially the change of learning of course that goes along with the teaching as well was driven by students and staff and that's why in this session you'll have people from the student learning development and people from the academic and digital development team talking to you and I said that earlier and I still like it even though it still might sound a little bit OTT but it's not just a building to us it's a philosophy it's much more than a brick and mortar well actually I'm not quite sure how much brick and mortar is in there um so something else to bear in mind and um what we are about and what the building is about is active learning and therefore it might well be that students also have to learn how to engage in active learning and I say I might well be well I leave that to Andrew and Scott and I mentioned those before and that is the way we started out thinking about uh the spaces and the physical space is not just a physical space um active learning very often means uh blended learning so therefore part of that is the technology so you have you need to come together in the physical space the online or technological space but also the mental space it's very important and there's been so much research done on that that students need to have that right environment to actually be open and able to learn so we're looking at all of that together in the zone and nor I just call it like that um I was really trying to come up with a perfect word for it but I don't think it's there so um yeah not just active learning and I just wanted to kind of end with the importance of inclusive active learning because you might very well have and do actually have other potential issues with inclusivity the moment we start really going into active learning and peer learning collaborating um and we need to think about that and just like the building everything we do and I think how we approach it is about inclusivity it's the assessment it's teaching it's learning it's the environment it's the online one and all of that means there's a positive mental space for students to engage with learning but of course also for staff so I'm just handing over now to my colleague Vicky. Thanks Nick that's great that's set the scene really nicely for what we're going to talk about I'm just going to share my screen now so bear with me just for a second and hopefully you can see that slide okay um so this is our vision for active learning spaces and Moira's obviously talked about the overarching vision earlier on um I made some notes while I was thinking about preparing this and so I may refer to some of my notes from time to time but some of the things that I've written down were things like partnership and I think that's come across really clearly throughout the whole morning so partnership with staff at all levels across all areas partnership with students good practice as well and I know Scott's going to be talking a lot more about good practice later on but good practice identifying good practice and sharing good practice is something that's really important and obviously we're doing that today but we do that within our own institution as well and we're really privileged to have a huge number of academic staff who are just excellent at what they do and are really passionate about learning and teaching and then I'm going to touch a tiny little bit on evaluation as well because I think it's important that we don't just capture the successes but also the challenges and I think you know as other people listening into us today you won't be you know we're not going to present something shiny and everything's perfect um this is a constant process and we learn from from how things are going and we need to record you know what are people struggling with what do people need extra support with and then the other point I've written down is that um what's really key to this sort of succeeding with this vision is having supportive leadership at all levels so obviously Moira's um driven this this vision forward and her capacity as vice principal for learning and teaching but we've also had um a lot of leadership from Professor Frank Colton as well um and so I think that without that leadership we wouldn't be able to do what we're all doing at the staff and student levels um so I think that's really really critically important. Okay so some of the things I wanted to talk about then I'll just bring up my slides. Yeah so so one key thing really is our University of Glasgow strategy so so Moira's obviously led on that and that's something that we've all had an opportunity to feed into as staff or students and there's three pillars of that strategy and I think they're very relevant in this context in terms of supporting staff to engage with active learning so the first pillar is student-centered learning um and essentially we know that we need to prepare independent self-directed learners um who are capable of of having that self-efficacy um of being able to solve problems and collaboration with other learners so the the curriculum is is more and more focused all the curriculum for the University of Glasgow are becoming more and more focused on enabling students to be those what we term at Glasgow as world changers you know world changers welcome we want them to solve real world problems and so a lot of the transforming the curriculum activity is about redesigning curricula to enable students to become those world changers to become those problem solvers um so real world problems are really critical to that too but we also have things going on like flexible pathways into courses you know that there's a role of um you know massive online open courses of micro-credentials and so on work-related learning so it doesn't all just happen in the classroom what happens in the classroom is really critically important but it's not just it's just one part of the overarching um curricula and the other part that's really critical in this context of active learning is this whole idea of skills development so we refer to them as graduate attributes but you often hear the terms transferable skills or soft skills um and so you know critical thinking emerges as a key skill here but we also have things like digital literacies um data literacies enterprise and innovation so all of these three strands I think form the foundation for what we're trying to do for active learning and teaching um in terms of supporting staff to enable students um to be those world changers and so what do we do to enable staff so there's there's three things that we're doing at the moment um so pedagogical support and there's a number of ways that we do that and I've got another slide that that goes into some of the strategies we use for that um but we want staff to I guess kind of expand their toolbox of learning and teaching methods you know I think it was um I think it was uh oh gosh uh Nicola was was quoting Moira when she said it's transformation we're looking for and not translation so I think the kind of the hope was that people wouldn't just simply take their existing teaching practices and translate them into this new space but I actually think you know how could how could this space how could it really facilitate an exciting form of learning and teaching that engaged our learners that helped them develop all the skills that we want as well as having that robust content knowledge and and the ability to apply that knowledge um and so we've been talking people through for example um different pedagogies so we already have a lot of staff doing a lot of wonderful stuff and but even things like sharing methods with them like think pair shares a really basic method um towards perhaps more active pedagogies so we've got jigsaw classroom which is still quite teacher-centered in the sense that the teacher specifies the task and um the students move around and they go into one group and then they sort of work together and then come back to the original group and share that knowledge um but then we've got more student-centered methods so team-based learning for example we have a number of experts in the Adamsworth Business School for example who are doing a lot with team-based learning um as a specific pedagogy we've got the scale-up pedagogy um and in some cases we've we've kind of you know we talked about visiting um other campuses and things before so we visited places like Leeds and we visited Nottingham Trent University and they're all doing really good things around active learning as well Anglia Ruskin University is another good university for doing active learning work um but for example you know the pedagogical benefits of using something like um team-based learning or scale-up um we had hard evidence from colleagues at these other universities that it really enhances the student experience and importantly what it does is it closes the attainment gap between um traditional learners and non-traditional learners so we're really trying to in terms of that pedagogical support it's not just a textbook how do you do this but what is actually best practice what's what's coming out of discussions with the overall sector where's the evidence that actually transforms learning and enables that critical thinking and enables students to actually perform better than their assessments um so so that's that's I guess the pedagogical support which I'll go into in a bit more detail shortly um and then we've got the audiovisual support so Dave already mentioned this morning that um you know there needed to be consistency across the campus there needed to be consistency in terms of how the control panels worked so that um staff weren't thrown by technology for example um and there's also a lot of support in the the rooms themselves so there's QR codes where people run into trouble they can quickly scan that QR code and immediately get help from someone um there's lots of um printed documentation affixed to the the lecterns as well and I think one of the important things that the audiovisual team did and this was Joe Tinkler and these colleagues um one of the the very effective things that they did at the beginning was actually hand holding with academic staff so before um they started teaching Joe and his colleagues would take them around show them the equipment and be on hand you know when they were delivering teaching in that first space because I think it was quite daunting for staff um so it's not just the pedagogy and it's not just how to teach but it's also feeling comfortable in that space and I think that's a key message that comes across for staff and students is feeling comfortable in the space and part of that is knowing how the audiovisual technology works and keeping that simple and then another thing I think worth mentioning is the ongoing evaluation of staff experiences um and so I did some I would call it a quick and dirty evaluation with some academics it wasn't a kind of scholarly study it was a quick and dirty kind of evaluation of how things are going what's working well your expectations being met um you know what challenges are you encountering and I think one of the the key messages that came across from that was the space you know when people walked into the space it was the feel of the space it was big it was bright it was airy it's so many possibilities um and I think as well probably because of the pandemic there was a sense in which people hadn't really made full use of the space as they would like to so for example we've got we've got throwable microphones that you can throw from one end of the room to the other there's um little individual writing boards and things and I think people were frightened to touch anything during the pandemic for obvious reasons so I think that the the full capacity of the space hasn't really been used yet and I think so the evaluation needs to be ongoing and you know our people's expectations being met are they able to do everything that they want to do um and so on so so that's just our vision relates enabling our staff um but it's in line with the University of Glasgow strategy and I'm not keeping an eye on the um questions at this point um in the Q&A but if there are any questions um I'll come back to them and Moira please feel free to interrupt me if there's anything I will and don't worry I'm keeping an eye okay good um okay so this is one of the spaces here um you've seen a lot of photos of the spaces I think one critical thing was when the spaces were being designed we had to think how would the different pedagogies work in these spaces so we've got different shapes of tables we've got different numbers of chairs around the tables we've got different types of screens and individual whiteboards and so on and I remember at meetings one of the things that um I think um became almost a joke was the fact that I said we need to have a scale up room we need to have a scale up room so that staff can learn to use this particular methodology and this isn't a photo exactly of that space but it's a similar space where we've got round tables and the scale up technique students work in groups of three they've got different roles and typically in three groups of three around a table and then they exchange information about their the problem they're solving with the other groups and then they can share it to the class so it's almost like a version of think-pair-share but you know we had to think about the the furniture and how does that support these types of technologies and another thing is you know how do we support staff going into these spaces it was actually quite nice walking into the spaces because on paper it looked huge the biggest rooms they looked massive and daunting and you know we had meetings with the first-year coordinators that I'll talk about in a second and um you know they were they were really quite daunted you mean you mean the lectern's over here but we're going to be standing over here and walking around about um and so some staff are really comfortable with that they're really comfortable getting in amongst the students and and working with them and supporting them and other staff you know particularly new staff might lack confidence to leave the the lectern or the podium that that's a kind of place of safety almost um so that's just one of the spaces and then we've got another space here so Nick was talking about accessibility being really important we've got high adjustable um you know table edges here um that are standard throughout the whole building for these types of tables um but again you've got um you've got a kind of staff lectern over here so that's where the staff member would put their their their bags and their papers and so forth down but you can see that they're already in between classes that the chairs are all huddled around the teachers um table so they've obviously come up to to to get some advice and support um from them and then I just wanted to talk about the lecture theater a little bit because you know one of the things that Frank Colton said was he said this is going to be the last lecture theater that the university will ever build and and I don't know if that's true why I you know I don't know if that's going to be realized in the longer term um but his vision really was that we shouldn't be doing the didactic forms of teaching and so you can see at the moment that the the um the seats are all facing front um but they are unmovable wheels so staff can turn these round as Nick said you can walk among the the different rows in between them and you can turn around to the students and put them into groups and really focus on that kind of discussion so um it is a lecture theater but but it's not a lecture theater the idea is that it is more student-centered that it is more participatory um it's interesting I think it was um you know it was Nicola was talking about you know that this kind of assumption that the janitorial staff would say well do we need to put the room back again the way it should be because because everything needs to be tidy everything needs to be seats facing the way that they should be and I think that was always one of the frustrations of some of the existing spaces on campus was that you would go in and a room that that had the potential to support more student-centered learning was actually put tidily back at the end of the end of the day and I think the idea was that this is a flexible space it shouldn't be tidily put back you know it should be this is this is a place where learning happens and the room shouldn't dictate um what happens in terms of learning and teaching it should help facilitate that student-centered engagement so I just want to talk briefly about some of the work with academic staff so I'm just going to do a shout out here to Dr Joseph McGuire who is here teaching some of these computing science students this is actually in a former technology enhanced active learning space in the well it still exists in the medical school but this is one of the kind of precursors for the new building and and Joe is just um so enthusiastic about teaching in this spaces as well as several other of our staff who are really our champions and I think we couldn't do what we do without our early adopters really enthusing everyone and sharing good practice so I just wanted to give a shout out to all of them really in terms of the work with academic staff we started with first-year coordinators and this is something that Moira was very keen on um for obvious reasons that when you're introducing change to a curriculum we know from previous experiences that if you try and introduce change like you know an element of collaborative learning or cooperative learning into an existing curriculum it's an add-on and so students will be really resistant to do something that they don't normally do and staff will be um you know they will be constantly fighting a battle I think to try and introduce change that's the experience I've had in the past in different roles is that when you try and introduce um student-centered active learning onto an existing curriculum you will encounter resistance because you will know that curricula are overcrowded there's just so much information people feel they need to cover you know people have got developed these curricula over years there's a need to start at ground level and say okay how are these first-year courses going to shape themselves and how is that going to be um you know how are you going to build on that throughout the whole program so there's an element when you're thinking about curriculum design not just of what's happening in one particular course but what's happening across the whole program and how do you scaffold students ability to engage in active learning and independent collaborative learning from day one so we had meetings with the first-year course coordinators and they were held by college and that was really just a conversation about let's have a look at these rooms we had all these beautiful rooms and the plans let's have a look what could you do in this space which of these courses would lend themselves well to these spaces are your staff are you doing anything that would lend itself well so you know Karen will talk later on about you know timetabling but we had to give priority to people who wanted to introduce active learning from the outset and who were prepared to change their teaching so again coming back to that idea of transformation not translation we also had what we called active learning at scale workshops where we brought in people from different schools and these were the typically first-year coordinators as well with the rest of their teaching team and we brought them into one of the technology enhanced active learning spaces in the the education building and just got them to think you know what is active learning what does it mean to you and what active learning practice are you already engaging in and what support do you need what's your blue sky curriculum what does that look like and we brought in librarians and learning technologists and we had colleagues from student learning development all to help kind of you know share ideas and get people thinking and unfortunately soon after that that the pandemic hit and kind of disrupted some of those conversations which obviously we're looking to get back on track but we wanted to engage not just first-year coordinators but all staff so scott will talk a little more about continuing professional development and one of the cpd events that we ran was actually in the active learning space because there's nothing to be getting in that space and getting your hands on the technology and so we sought to emulate good practice and basically staff were set up in groups and we gave them a group work task and we got them sharing the the sort of their kind of you know solution on the screen and then projecting it to the bigger screen so that they could see how that would use being in the student seat they could see how that would then work from a teacher perspective and so cpd so that was one aspect of cpd but then you know there's a whole range of different you know active learning type events and cpd happening that the good practice advisor is organizing as well and another thing that we did was it's called Alps active learning practice and scholarship so we're trying to use that acronym to get people thinking you know what's what's our vision what's the the peak of our dreams I guess in terms of active learning and that's just a professional learning community where people can share experience we can highlight you know relevant readings to people and we can signpost different events external events and so on another initiative I think I can't remember who said it was that that people liked their acronyms we do like our acronyms in education and is a supporting active learning and teaching working group so this is to identify you know what staff resources do we have what what student resources do we have and what staff and student resources do we need to build and another strand of that activity was also how do we support staff on an ongoing basis in terms of their scholarship and so on and we've got strong engagements with the active learning network which is an international organization and universities such as Southampton Solent and Anglia Ruskin University they're very active in there as well there's a global active learning festival coming up later this month and so we engage with them as well and it's an opportunity because we're a University of Glasgow satellite group and we have the opportunity for our staff to engage with that wider network to share their expertise but also learn from others in that that global network too and so if people are interested in active learning I would suggest you have a look at the active learning network and there's also things like the learning and teaching development fund and staff are encouraged to think about you know the key pillars of the active the learning and teaching strategy they're encouraged to experiment their staff student partnership but a lot of that's around active learning in all its different forms as well so it's a multi-pronged approach I would say and we've also got things like for early career staff we've got the postgraduate certificate and academic practice and so I've got that twice academic practice and that's led by Dr Michael McEwen and we've got 13 courses on that program and I would say that there's potential to investigate active learning in relation to people's individual practice on all of these courses so while all of the courses may not be explicitly labeled active learning I think active learning is as a key you know it's a key foundation for that whole program really and then there's Teaching Excellence Network events and they run by my colleague Janice Davidson and there have been some active learning events there and that's for people who are teaching award winners and teaching excellence award winners and also people who have seen your fellowship of the recognising excellence in teaching scheme which is aligned with the UK professional standards framework so that's a kind of safe space for innovators and early adopters to share their ideas with other people too so it's definitely a kind of multi multi-pronged approach and again my key messages I think you know I've written them down to key messages