Hello dear colleagues, once again, we have the very final preparations for the webinar that will take place in a moment. If still some of the presenters would like to test microphones, we of course would be still happy to do so because it's very important to hear everyone. Unfortunately, participants of the webinar will not be allowed audio or video, but they will be able to write in the chat. And we will also kindly ask all participants to use the pod dedicated for the open answers and open questions, so we will arrange that. But the rest, the presenters, they would need to mute microphones when one of us will be speaking, so that we don't have echoes in the room. I would like just to ask Sumati, maybe you would like to test your microphone once again? Do you have no voice phones? No, I cannot hear you. Yes, Marce, I can hear you, but we are doing testing with Sumati from Brussels. So, it's okay, we still don't have any voice. But I know that actually, Secretary P for all is at hand, and maybe when we start the session, maybe we can have testing in parallel some chats behind the screen. So, actually, it's the right time to start now, and I need to start the first, very important event, the first webinar in the European Distance Learning Week that has been arranged for another year in collaboration with our colleagues from the United States Distance Learning Association, and they have longer traditions to have US National Distance Learning Week for many years. And since 2016, we have regular agenda every day also on European arena. So, today, we have the first event. I hear echo, and this makes me feel the hope that maybe Sumati is already... So, we can hear you now. Thank you very much for joining in, and now I will ask you to move your microphone so that we don't have echoes any longer. Okay, that's going to be tough. Is that better? I will arrange that. This webinar is the first one, as I mentioned to you, and it is dedicated to open the week and to discuss why it is important to have this event. So, actually, every day, webinars and sessions of experts, scholars, practitioners will be offered to even the European community as well as the USDLA community so that we can together discuss a variety of cutting-edge, open and online learning topics from innovations in design and open education research. And we all agree that we need this event already last year in order that we can exchange, share and know what we are thinking about to fine-tune our understandings and concepts. So, before I introduce the participants of this first important panel, I would like to share with you the agenda that each of you may access also at eGen website. Today, we will open the floor for challenges and opportunities of innovation, but every day, the same time, we will have webinars dedicated on a definite topic. So, tomorrow on Tuesday, at the same time, we will have a webinar on perspectives on open education. It is a very important topic in Europe, and we all understand that we see this topic from a variety of angles. So, tomorrow, we will have Fabio Nasimbeni and Eden Executive Committee member and other colleagues here to discuss open education issues. Wednesday is dedicated to discuss designing of learning spaces in open and distance learning. And here, we will have presentation and discussion session as well. Lisa Marie Blaschke, Eden Vice Presidents, will be moderating that session. Also, the same hour and the same room. On Thursday, we will have a very interesting panel that will be directly broadcasted from KONUS, from the University of West Magnus University in Lithuania, which will be dedicated to discuss reconsidering access, quality and flexibility of education. A very helpful topic for policy makers, decision makers. And it will be direct broadcast from a physical event in KONUS. Friday will be the same time. We also scheduled international experiences with OERs. Here, you will see not only European, but also more global initiatives. And Antonia Lapoccio, who is the chair of the steering committee of the Network of Academics and Professionals, and Eden will be chairing that. And there will be one more additional event. Again, broadcast from Lithuania, from my university. On Friday, November 10th, on a little bit earlier time schedule, which will be dedicated to four keynotes that will be also directly broadcasted from KONUS. So, this is the agenda for those who joined in today and want to know what is planned for the whole week. So, in the very beginning, I mentioned to you that we have a panel today. And in the panel, we have very honorable members of the panel, very experienced people, professionals walking in the area. And also our close friends from sister associations, from the USA, from Europe and also from the European Commission. And I would like to introduce them now to all of you. I will move to the discussion window so that you can see them more clearly, face to face online. So, we have Somalia Subramanian from the European Commission, Director General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, Innovation and Education at the Ethnology Department. We have Briekena Somaki, Director of Life and Learning Platform. And thank you, Briekena, for joining the second year also with us. It's also a part of your activity already also. Rebecca Ferguson, Senior Lecturer from Institute of Educational Technology from the Open University. Marcy Powell from the United States Business Learning Association. Sharon Goldstein from Berkley College Online. And Timothy Reed, Associate Professor, Vice Chancellor of Methodology and Technological Innovation National Business Education University in Spain. Dear colleagues, thank you very much for joining in. And in a moment, I will give the floor to each of you. But now I would like to ask Marcy and Sharon to actually bring this link forward. And I already told that the United States Business Learning Association is holding this National Business Learning Week. So, please share with us what is on at your National Business Learning Week. Whomever of you, lady, Marcy, please. Just welcome and thank you very much for allowing me. You very much value our partnership. Great. Good morning. Thanks again, Marcy. Always good to see you. So, National Business Learning Week began in 1997. So, we are at our 20th year as of this moment. And it was a request actually from the then current president of the Association, John Flores, who is now our Chief Executive Officer. He made this request to Senator Edward Kennedy to recognize distance learning and to recognize the US DLA and to actually name this week as National Business Learning Week. And so, again, we're in our 20th year. We are nationally recognized. And we've now encouraged our state chapters as well. We've encouraged them to create special events in very specific states in concert with the events of the headquarters. And so, I can say proudly that US DLA is offering a very robust schedule of webinars this week. And I believe we have two, preferably three a day. And those can be found on the US DLA.org website. I invite everybody to take part in those. They will be recorded and able to be accessed as well if you're unable to see them live. In addition, our members, and we have constituents in the pre-K market in higher ed, in the corporate market, in government, military, as well as telehealth. And so, each of those members in their respective schools and universities and corporations and so forth are also hosting events. I'm with Berkeley College and we have a very exciting and robust week of events planned. Our events are linked also to the US DLA.org website. So, once again, I invite everyone to take a look at that for an exciting week. And I thank you, Elina, and guests for being open to the collaboration between Sweden and US DLA. And I know Marcia can speak a bit more about that. Thank you. Thank you very much both of you, Marcia and Sharon. Yes, we just, yeah, you are a little bit low, but I hope the voices will increase as you will be presenting. So, now we open the first webinar topic, which is the challenges and opportunities of innovation. It seems to be a rather broad topic, but we notice in European discussions that actually this is not too broad for us as the overview is always very complex and we need to bring in different initiatives and try to start discussing them, grouping them, categorizing them, and trying to understand what they are and how they can be useful for educational organizations and education providers. I just take note that this webinar will be recorded and the record will be published at it in the website afterwards. So, with the opening panel, we address the speed developments of innovations on different levels, micro, meso, and macro level, and their complexity. At first glance, in Europe, we have preconditions, the majority of preconditions established. We have immense possibilities established for innovations and for implementing, embedding those innovations and practices, but they are very complex and concise solutions. We have open education in a variety of forms. We are happy about open coordination groups. We discuss how to foster development in member states, and this is led by the European Commission. We have new instruments and tools that have been established to agree upon digitally competent organizations, speakers and teachers, learners, and they come of great help as the new instruments, but how to put them in practice and how to do and how to proceed with them. We also think about new training schemes, certification possibilities, recognition of digital skills, employees and companies, but also recognition of open learning and open education. And we think that we are all here to address these very, very emerging and very pending issues together and not otherwise rather than an open discussion and open collaboration. So with this, I now will invite each panel member to reflect upon the innovations maybe mentioned, maybe you have additional ones and other insights. And I would like to start with Sumati. I just don't know if you are going to use any slides or we shall proceed without them. So please let me know and I invite you, Sumati Subrahmanyam, European Commission, DG Education, Youth Support and Culture from Innovation and IT Department. We know that the landscape is very complex, it's quite developed in some member states and it's at the point where lots of developments are being put in place in several others and this brings its own challenges in terms of access to students, to teachers and so on. But what I would like to address today maybe is what teachers need in the form of training to be able to use all the panorama of instruments and methodologies and various other programs that are available and how to make it interesting and what kinds of training needs to be in place and what can the Commission do to support this. I think in our document which was published in May 2017, which is the EU Agenda for Higher Education, we did mention several points, some of them being the need for more flexible and modular courses and for informal and formal training to be integrated and as the students for the composition changes, we have to make all these available and we're always constantly looking out for models that really work for best practice sharing so we'll be more than happy to highlight these examples and also to learn and support if more development needs to be done. Thank you very much. I think these are very important and relevant questions for our discussion that will take place also after this panel introduction and reflections from each member. So I took also note of these. Also I encourage anyone, either participants or speakers if you want to post any URL or important reference or post an important question, please do that in the chat as well when we are making reflections. So now we continue and I would like to invite Dikana. Just a moment. Yes, we can hear you Dikana, please. Hello everyone. Do you hear me? I'm in a Skype room so I apologize if the sound is weird. It just went out of a conference here in Brussels about crisis management. And I had to leave lunch break which was a Syrian cuisine lunch break. So just to say that I'm really glad to actually come and contribute to this discussion as I did also last year. What I can bring from the perspective of a lifelong learning platform which I represent and for those that don't know the platform we are an umbrella organization of more than 40 European networks. Some of them are also worldwide so they are not necessarily just limited to the European Union or the European geographical European and our main mission is obviously to have this holistic approach to education and promoting lifelong learning. And I can move to the second slide. So here it is. So innovation and life from learning. I think I wanted to physically say a few main points which are very important and become a much more important one. Let me talk about innovation. Learning and innovation shouldn't go hand in hand. If we want to innovate late we need to invest more in learning and we have to also change the way we learn based on our education system. Therefore we believe that the secret of innovation will actually late in the lifelong learning. And this was also something that we worked on during the year. And also we know that we are promoting at European level as much as possible the concept of lifelong learning which is yet relatively new. Although there are many communications from the commission that do promote lifelong learning do encourage each member state to have lifelong learning strategies. And most of the member states do have that strategy but that's not enough because implementation is yet like talking in most of the member states. So it's yet a lot to do in lifelong learning and we believe that is of course an advantage that is the most innovative concept in a way but it's also because it's calling for true transformation of our education system. Changing our course is like you mentioned before having more flexible curricula more flexible pathway that are more adaptive to a lifelong learning concept. It's of course the transformation from current to future education system that needs to happen at some point but it's yet not happening. And I put a picture of my guide over here because actually it's an interesting thing I found out when I was searching about innovation and lifelong learning he was an innovator. He was innovating over time but he was learning by himself. He was learning, reading and he was alive. Thank you very much Pricana. That was really very interesting and I see that there's a lot of added to one point like open source learning which is an emerging education practice. Also I think you all can see the pod with the question which recent innovation would you highlight. I mean anyone from participants and speakers also please use this pod to submit the key what that is important to you and then we of course will open the discussion. So now we continue and I invite Rebecca and we'll be opening the slides in a moment to continue our reflection time. Please Rebecca the floor is yours. Okay thank you very much Irina and hello everybody. So I'm Rebecca Ferguson. I'm based at the Open University in the UK and I think the reason I've been invited here today is at the moment I'm the lead author on a series of reports we've been producing for the last six years about innovating pedagogy. This is a series of reports focusing on teaching, learning and assessment in the interactive world and it's designed to guide teachers primarily in how they can move forward in this area. So I think it's very apesite that I'm following on from Pricana. She's talking about the innovative practices in knowledge education. She's talking about lifelong learning talking about linking formal and informal. These are all sorts of things that we've been covering in the reports. So what we found going back to 2012 was that people who were talking about innovation in education all tended to be talking about technology. They'd say you know we've got tablet computers we've got this piece of computing we've got this piece of computing really talking about what we can do with it and what we can achieve with it. So this series of reports it's produced by a large team of academics here at the Open University we're in the Institute of Educational Technology we also work with partners around the world so we work with SRI International in the US we've worked with people over in Singapore and this year we're working with the Lynx Lab in Israel and every year we pull together things which we think are of interest, pedagogies sort of practices and theories of education that are rising to the surface we listen we usually come up with a list of about 30 then we discuss them we sort of rough out some ideas and we narrow it down each year till to 10 so so far we've published 50 pedagogies we've got another 10 coming up next month so our belief is that if we don't have innovative pedagogy we don't have new practices in education our technical innovations don't necessarily achieve anything I'm putting up the example here of the interactive whiteboard interactive whiteboards were very big 10 years ago when my children had just started school I remember their school getting them in I remember ever being very excited about interactive whiteboards actually the teachers didn't have the time to sit down and think about new ways of teaching because they were busy teaching and quite often they ended up just having a very high tech blackboard which didn't work as well as when they had chalk so there was more work that needed to be done in the background more work that needed to be done to support teachers thinking back about 10 years here Charles Crook and his colleagues looked at Web 2 being rolled out in UK schools and I thought they came out with a series of very good points that innovative technologies can do several things they can stimulate new ways of inquiry they can provide opportunities for engaging in collaborative learning now of course we could engage in collaborative learning without any technology at all we can just talk to people next to us but the internet allows us to talk to people around the world or just across the town or talk to experts they provide opportunities for engaging with new literacies and of course we need our students to learn to engage with these literacies we need them to know what to do with these new technologies importantly at the moment we need them to be able to distinguish between a real news source and a fake news source between real news and fake news and they enable learners to publish and have their work viewed by an international audience and of course beforehand we could publish but it was much more of a long drawn out process now we can have students in a classroom producing things online and putting them up that day so these are all the things that you can do but you need to adapt your pedagogy to be able to make use of them so I'll just nip through three of the things which we've, the pedagogies that we've covered they're probably pedagogies that you've dealt with to some extent just to show you the sort of thing we're thinking about so one of the things is the flipped classroom so with the flipped classroom the learners are sent to access the content at home now that gives them the option to look at it at their own pace notes if they want to, to go backwards, to go forwards so when they come into the classroom you can make really good use of having the teacher there to support you and guide you so in the class you might be engaging in activities around critical thinking you might be doing critical exploration you might be talking to the teacher about things that you didn't understand so it's, in some cases a much more effective way of teaching and it's using teaching time sort of flipping what you do at home and what you do in school of course it comes with its own limitations you need to be sure that all your students can access things at home and are able to do that and you need to be sure that your students are doing their homework because they're not doing their homework things fall down so we're not saying that new pedagogies are always good but we're saying there are good things about them and we need to think about how they're implemented a second one I suspect everything in this conference is aware of MOOCs the massive open online courses this was massive open social learning thinking about what the advantages are of scale in a massive course because we hear a lot about well I've got a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand five hundred thousand people in my course but what's the advantage to the learner do they benefit from being in there with another half million people or would they really rather be in with just ten people and get attention from the teacher so we were thinking here about the benefits that you can get by being in such a large cohort and a clear benefit is you can access new information you can access new perspectives perspectives that your teacher however expert your teacher they're not going to know about perspectives in every country in the world in every sector so you can really pull what you know but in order to do that A you need the option to be able to do that you need chat spaces to do that B you need to be encouraged to do that you need to see the value of doing that so it's not just a matter of having some content up and having a forum that people can go to it's about having a pedagogy which really brings the two together and engages people and third one I'm going to think about here it's a slightly different one about learning by doing science with remote labs quite a lot of the new pedagogies that we've covered have dealt with science for example about learning together with science this one is thinking about how can you get an authentic experience of being a scientist and using real equipment so that picture there is the telescope which we have on our campus at the Open University but we're of course a distance learning institution so none of our students actually come to that telescope they operate it online and they book time on it we also have access to a bigger telescope in New Yorker again our students aren't actually in New Yorker but they join together in groups of six or seven they come up with questions they book time on the telescope and they use it in the same sort of way that an actual astronomer would use it because the astronomers aren't necessarily by the equipment they're using it remotely so it's giving a much more authentic experience the telescope is one example but of course there are lots of forms of equipment that you can use at a distance and get the same sort of experience that a real scientist would do so again it's thinking about technologies that are out there and how we can use them to support our learning so I'm just ending up with a slide there those are the pedagogies which we used in the 2016 report which we did this year's new report will be up on the website on the 7th December so I encourage people to go and take a look and see what innovations we've spotted this year that's the end of my talk Thank you very much Rebecca that was of great interest indeed and I noted several important aspects to be addressed in the discussion afterwards so now we as promised proceed with further reflections and now it's time for our colleagues from the USA so Sharon Goldstein is the first in my list so Sharon I will be opening the slides in a moment and help you ready to provide your insights okay are you able to hear me? okay so my role at Berkeley College is the campus operating officer we have about 6,500 students at Berkeley in New York and New Jersey and we have approximately 1,200 students who are studying completely online and my role as campus operating officer is to deal on the administrative operational almost non-academic side so I think that I am coming at this topic a little bit differently but you'll see that at all I believe meshes together Berkeley College is probably recognized by USDLA as being certified for our quality standard certification and we've also been recognized for the fourth year in a row by the US news and world report for best online bachelor's degree so I want to talk about engagement and how important targeted engagement and personalization is in retaining students and so we have come to understand of course that by being engaged and connected in a virtual environment that will lead to more of a feeling of engagement and ultimately retention and so the more the students are academically and socially involved the more they're likely to persist and graduate and clearly you know that is our target we want to see our students to be successful and so our goal here is to connect with our population of distance learners with a targeted and personalized outreach and create opportunities for students to engage within our virtual community so innovation and technology always remains at the forefront because this is how we can improve the experience of our students we recently put together online opportunities starting with our students right at the beginning when they apply to Berkeley College and we actually have a very interactive admissions process they work closely with admissions representatives virtually of course with the webcam as well but we are currently using a blackboard platform and we have the students right involved in blackboard working in blackboard as they complete their enrollment process we also have a new student orientation and it has the theme of students traveling to different different destinations and each destination is a support service that is offered at Berkeley and we've animated this a bit and we've made it very engaging and what we did this year well let me back up a bit and say that the support services are very important to our students in succeeding the classroom experience is indeed what they are here to do but if we don't have appropriate support services in a way that we can deliver to those students in a flexible and convenient way the picture is really not complete and so our orientation is designed for the student to engage and to see what in fact is available and so this year we added an interactive component to it and we start out by asking them to put their name in and then you can see that the screen will then speak to them directly and so the first thing that our students would do is to select the type of student that they are whether they're a new student or returning student or they are an online student after taking courses elsewhere and so once they select that they continue on a very specified orientation route again we are looking for information from our students so we have included questions that we ask our students that we will be able to retrieve on the back end and learn a lot about them so as they're going through this orientation they're not only learning about what we have to offer to them but it's an opportunity for us to engage with that student of course asynchronously and learn about their motivators and the things that are important to them so we start out by asking them why it's important that they commit to graduate this is something we've done at our on-site campuses and so they will type the answer in there and another question that we might ask in college classes to already busy life can be challenging how can we help you be successful sharing or whatever our students name is and we're getting a lot of really good information back from our students and while online learning is certainly convenient and flexible it does require a lot of focus and it requires people to be very well managed with their time and we find that our students struggle with being able to balance all of the things going on in their lives so we feel that if we can learn this early on it can help us support our students and so this is what it looks like just an example on the back end you can see across the top those are the questions that we ask throughout the entire orientation and it's an example of two students and their questions and their answers and that information is given to the support various support services so that when we do our outreach to the students we have talking points we have areas where we can pick up on a conversation we can say I see that this is important to you I see that you may be struggling with this I see that you might like more information on that and so it allows us to have a more meaningful conversation so the commit statements and I commit to graduate we actually turn these into banners and those banners get posted on their individualized homepage of Blackboard so every time that student logs in to access their courses they are reminded why they commit to graduate again this is just a screen shot of a theme in the orientation we do have the airplane theme that we're flying to different destinations so we've incorporated that just some silliness I'm showing you and here is a picture actually of the portal when the students log in this is updated by each of our support areas minimally once a week so that every time the students log in they get a sense of what's important for them what is going on in the different support areas and of course you can see in the upper left hand corner their commit statement is right there and on the upper right hand corner it lists their academic advisor and their career services advisor as well so they will always have this within reach one of the newest features that we have incorporated with the use of technology is data analytics which has been very helpful we are working with the civitas platform and this technology looks at about a thousand different touch points of our students and it goes into our records it goes into blackboard it goes into people soft which is our support platform as well and it gives us a predictive look at each student and it talks about whether they are a high or a very high persistent low very low moderate and so it allows us when we are doing our outreach to really focus on targeted groups in addition we can see that it breaks it down by the powerful predictors for example one of the powerful predictors is engagement with the LMS and so we can actually chart that out and we can see with this data or who is participating on average less than others within the same class and it gives us really great information and it allows us for further enhanced outreach so with that information we put together four different initiatives based on this information and again one of them was distance from average in the discussion board and we have very targeted outreach with not only our academic advisors but our folks from the Center for Academic Success we have another initiative that we use this data with for our readmitted students to the online campus and we find that those students do not always succeed and what I want to point out here is that we are working here not only with academic advisement but with our student development and campus life group as well as campus operation our third initiative is looking at first term student persistence our students we find that if we have them complete the first term and the second term they're more likely to persistent graduate and so this data using this technology is really helpful to see who are high persisters, our predicted high persisters and who may need additional support and then we went ahead and we put together a very inclusive outreach initiative and then finally the last initiative was to provide time management support and again you can see we target we look specifically for our moderate folks the moderate and the low we feel that the very high will persist regardless of what we do our very low persisters will likely not persist regardless of what we do short of doing the work for them which of course we're not going to do and so it allows us to really hone in on the students that need specific help as we go along and so this is just a snapshot of the four initiatives across the top are the weeks of our semester and across the vertical line we see the different departments and so you can see there's quite a bit of collaboration and outreach among and between the various departments and again this is all driven by the use of this innovative brand so in addition to our cross developmental practices you know it's just technology aside we really come back to the basics and we believe that our students write their own stories and they have their stories to tell and as much as innovation and technology is a wonderful thing sometimes there's just absolutely no substitution for good old fashioned caring outreach empathy and we find that that's truly helpful as well and so we're looking for ways to do that as well and so at the end of the day we're looking for retention we're looking for persistence and through these different initiatives we have broken it up in either semester to semester retention year to year retention while this is relatively new we are very optimistic because we are seeing positive signs and indications that this targeted engagement is in fact leading to better persistence in addition we are also building in virtual reality into what we are doing at Berkeley we have a task force that we started about a year and a half ago to see how we can incorporate that into the classroom and we have started with our health studies school and we have brought VR into that in addition we have piloted very excited about this a virtual reality orientation experiences on the campus and we have our students using VR as they go around the campus looking at various things and being introduced to the various support areas so we are actually going to be entering 2018 is entering Berkeley's 20th year of offering online education and so we have a year pack of innovation in 2018 and we are going to be doing a system-wide VR exercise program that we are going to hopefully be involving thousands of our students with Berkeley branded cardboard devices and having a very exciting event we are also working with adaptive learning as we know that this is something that is truly helpful to the students and allowing them to work at their pace at their learning style gamification is something too that I wanted to include that our instructional designers are working with our faculty to include in not only our classroom experience but some of the extracurricular activities that we work on delivering to our students that we include gamification our orientation is going to in the future we are working on updates that will include a gamification experience as well and we have not yet gotten involved in geo-targeting in real time on the campuses but it is something that we are exploring and so that wraps it up for me innovation is what drives us at Berkeley and our students getting to the finish line, walking across the graduation stage finding ways to engage them and to have them feel like they are not lost in cyberspace but very much connected not only in the classroom but in a greater community that is our focus and that will continue to be our focus so thank you very much, I appreciate it Thank you very much and it is an interesting presentation from your side let's move on as we are getting a little bit of time let's move to the presenters without posing many questions now, so Marcy I will be ready Thank you I knew that I was going to be taking coming about 5th or 6th in the process of speakers so I wanted to take a broader, a different approach to challenges and opportunities so when you look at the challenges some of the things have already been mentioned let's look at a few others one of the things we see quite a bit of course is regulatory no matter where you are located throughout the world there are requirements or restrictions that we have to work through with policy speakers to help them understand the power of our language and to open up the doors for innovation there are ways to address this funding is always an issue we have associations like EDEN, SDLA and others so that we can find collaborative partners and we can find innovative approaches together privacy issues is quite a big topic right now earlier this year our partner EDEN and USDLA's partner ICTE hosted a learning analytics event and I'm saying friends when we look at learning analytics the personalized data some of the issues that we've run into with resistance that's always a challenge that we need to do on the other hand there are other challenges like for us who are trying to innovate and those of us who are in the world of online business we look at how fast the technology changes how quickly people are changing algorithms and everything else that they can do from software to hardware really changing the way things are possible and so when we have to imagine what is possible it becomes difficult it becomes scary for others so we have to look at that the important thing though is that we make sure we don't lack the attention to stakeholders why that, I mean let's look at the students why we're let's look at who we're preparing the student to work for or the way we're revealing our students and that lifelong learning perspective where they're going to use that education to really hone in on not innovating for innovation's sake not implementing technologies for technology's sake but really how we're able to do this for the learner and then it's already been mentioned but we always need to focus on the sense of opportunity two things that I've come across also with this is FUD what we call FUD here, Uncertainty Out there's a lot of people that many of you will be working with there will be faculty members instructors and instructional designers and occasionally administrators who have a fear of trying something what if, what if, what if it doesn't work what if we can't do this what if it replaces us as teachers and those are big challenges have you ever worked with people that have said why don't we have a yeah but that won't work in education or yeah but you know that's all fluff we need to get back to good pedagogy or yeah but there's always people that are going to be negative when we're trying to innovate so we need to figure out how to address those when we look at the opportunities we realize that we need to we can replace this fear, this uncertainty, this doubt and even open up the minds of politicians and those that are going to control the regulatory requirements or restrictions if we can enlighten them on the power of these technologies and these capabilities in education so we need to also proactively serve to impact the policy we can deal with the privacy issues we just work together in our partnership to figure it out and one of the new things that we also learned is that it's very important to when we see these old and new technologies how do we apply them to teaching and learning and then what is good pedagogy, androgynous how are we providing proper training one of the things I've been working on for the last couple of years with Drexel University which is in Philadelphia it's their top 100 universities it's a private state the president of the university knew that she wanted her faculty to innovate and she wanted them to be able to try and experiment and opportunity to really change the way they were delivering education but she knew she needed to show them what's out there, what's possible now what is augmented reality versus virtual reality virtual telegraphy, what is adaptive learning now is that changing the way that we can teach, what is artificial intelligence and helping people understand how that can be applied and what's available and so we've worked on this research to go out to see innovatively what people were doing throughout the world and we looked for innovations in many of these topics these are 10 that we're going to cover this afternoon for me it's this afternoon, this evening I just put up a link for USDLA and what we did was we went out and researched in these topics and several others who was innovating, how was it impacting education, what's possible and then we decided to put it in bite size chunks for our faculty so that they could easily say ooh how could we apply robotic telepresence to our nursing faculty, our nursing students how would that transform the way they're getting their online education possible in these little three minute videos of how a wonderful university has implemented the technology and changed the way they do things, whatever their innovative approach might be so we created this website and made it possible for everybody to go and see in bite size chunks what's possible, what people are doing now Coventry University in the UK is doing some amazing things in serious games. Now Stahlsburg University of Applied Sciences worked with their government to create a new augmented reality version of their sustainability garden and how that led to them creating a company called Polycular and it has a new learning platform so that we can design easily use it to design AR lessons. These are the things that we went out and included to cover some of those in this afternoon but all of those are available if you want to peruse and I'll put the link up in just a moment it's called Virtually Inspired and the other reason that I bring this up is very important not only will you be able to see what can be done but you'll also be able to use and there's a place to share your story many of you on this webinar or that watch the recording are the innovators share that with the world share that with us so that we can highlight you those are just a few I'm not going to continue any longer because I want to hear what Tim has to say but I'll just stop the presentation there and wait for more questions thank you thank you very much Marcy I still hear the echoes you know every time I have the presentation on Virtually Inspired people get really astonished you know and ask a lot of questions and one some practical examples so this is a very great reference thank you very much so I will stop the presentation here because yes Tim is here with us he also has a very interesting story to tell I think I found your PPT version Tim if I'm not mistaken on Adobe Connect and here it is thank you very much Irina can you hear me yeah okay thank you very much it's always difficult coming last after it's a strong presentation so I wanted to give a slightly different approach to the question of innovation because my background is in computer science but I've been in university governments for more than a decade now so I've seen innovation come and innovation go so I wanted to if you like try to defend the need for innovation and make some practical suggestions and how we might harness it and overcome some of the difficulties I'll define these terms in a while what's clear at the moment if we actually pay any attention to the press at the moment is that the future of universities is really being questioned some analysts even goes far as to predict a closure of up to 50% in the next 10 years which is actually really quite interesting when you consider what's actually been said that the educational market is worth something in the reason of $6 trillion so there seems to be something which isn't quite fit together there about these two different aspects okay so I think that innovation is really going to be absolutely key in the future of education all different types of levels of education not just higher education and I think we can borrow the term disruptive innovations specifically in this context because at least I use disruptive innovation to mean innovation that can really actually bring about a change in the base business model of an institution because it's naive to believe that innovation is not going on in institutions all teachers all good educators and professionals are innovating every day but unfortunately this doesn't really see its way through to the changes in the institutional practice which I think is so important so let's move on to think of an agile approach to how we can actually apply innovation now I'm borrowing the term agile from the agile methodology which comes from software engineering which really to simplify refers to its iterative approach with a set of evolving requirements and solutions we're constantly needing to change what we do and how we incorporate it into our overall educational process and I think this can be really characterized as something which we can provoke in our staff it's something we can promote and also once it actually happens it's a question of how we can actually channel the results into fine tuning our business model and helping our institutions to provide a more effective educational practices which are actually what the students wanted in the first place now if you like two ways we can think about this we can think about it in a top-down fashion also at the three levels highlighted in the introduction to this particular webinar it can be either an individual institution or outside of our institutional initiatives to try and get us to innovate and incorporate these changes but I think being more realistic a lot of this innovation is bottom up and I think the key technique here is just to get out of people's way I think as I said before a lot of good teachers know what they're actually doing and it's a question of letting them get on with it and trying to make the best of this and incorporate it into our overall institutional strategy so the key thing here if you like in my opinion is trying to reach this delicate middle point of achieving a high level of flexibility while at the same time achieving or maintaining quality across the educational services because sometimes when we want to innovate we want to try and use things out on our courses then we're not always allowed to do it from a managerial perspective because there's this fear somehow that it's going to negatively impact upon the way that our institution is brand and the way we're actually doing this overall process and I think the expression of dog fooding is really quite relevant here the idea of eating our own dog food in this sense what we do on a daily basis is what we can actually do into the overall process and I think what's actually quite important here is the idea of the speed which actually our jobs and agility to actually bring about change in this particular process I think I put the picture of the oil tanker here because you know I sometimes get the feeling in a big institution that trying to produce change can actually be slow and difficult process but if we can only get the boat to behave a little bit more like a jet fighter and bring more agile then I think it would be very very valuable and obviously another factor of this which I think is really key is the idea of staying relevant I mean if you had a chance to see some of the news clips I put up at the beginning companies like Google for example now don't appear to be concerned about whether the students have studied at a university and have an official qualification they're looking for other kinds of ways of assessing the person's ability to be able to integrate into their workforce and actually provide value for their company so this in a way is something we need to do we need to be able to try and see where the ball is going if we had a crystal ball it would be really handy but unfortunately we don't so I think really sometimes the experience shows is really quite a good idea just to try a load of stuff and keep what works and discard the stuff that doesn't really work so maybe I can give an example of a way we've actually done this at UNEDWI where I work and we've done it in two different ways actually trying to figure out what our students actually want how can we actually listen to them and to make it clear to obvious which is actually to ask them we set up a collective awareness platform and actually got them to make suggestions about the sorts of educational services they would like from us and where do they see the bottlenecks in this process and what could we do to really improve our game here and from this we got nearly 900 different ideas which are now to be analysed and we're trying to we're trying to figure out how we can incorporate them in our educational processes but on the other hand as well as asking them we can see what they actually do and we've seen briefly references to analytics made in previous presentations and they really are going to be key we've tried to use them in a very elementary fashion so far to actually see the way that the evaluations have actually been used by the students because if we can anticipate what they want and adapt the services so they work in a better fashion it's actually very difficult there's a lot being published on the advantages and disadvantages of analytics and I think we're all painfully and slowly climbing up the learning curve here and this will have a lot to offer in the future so if I can just finish with the way that I kind of conceive of this whole conceptual space of innovation and I really think that these days and I think more so in the future we're going to see a blurring between what is the formal and perhaps non-formal learning context which institutions have a key role to play and what we might call digital living I mean if anybody as part of their daily transport picks up an underground or a bus you see the majority of people using mobile devices and I think a lot of them are not actually playing games on these devices but I do meaningful things with this so this whole way that we interact with our learning and our living is actually changing and we need to be able to reflect this in our educational process and I think this is quite important because in a way there are sorts of jobs that our students were being prepared for maybe 10 years ago or even 5 years ago and are quite different from the sorts of things they're doing now and will be doing in the future so in order for us to Thank you Thanks a lot Tim so now we have really a bunch of very very important insights and I would like to keep this time for discussion really active so first of all we have interesting questions already posed one of them was by Sumafi so what training needs to be done and actually we heard some suggestions already during presentation like when speaking about opportunities I heard them very well listed by Rebecca who mentioned ways of inquiry collaborative learning activities engaging long lasting new literacies as a thing and then we talked about well about the risk actually of underestimation of misuse of innovations and I think this trend was through all presentations that we need to share the concept, the practice the outcomes, the impact as much as possible I try to link somehow these ideas with authentic experiences that also were mentioned in your presentations and how to use these authentic experiences to establish support and help and to use this support and help from all over the world because we are global with the help of experiences and we should find the best way to put these innovations in the area of open and distance learning to contextualize them in correct pedagogical situations and to share this so that we all together establish training and support and help and then to focus maybe on some priorities in Europe and other regions so one thing is how you see this help, training and support to be realistically implemented from the perspective that you have from the organizations, countries regions, expert networks what do you think should be the priorities now as you think we also may absorb divide actually we talked about divide with the people in open coordination groups and the European Commission and also an expert professional network the divide is obvious a misunderstanding of let's say misuse of innovation that sometimes cause very very expensive solutions in countries and organizations we also notice divide in the programs we see horizon program for example in Europe which is very scientific and already very high level productive consultia walking on research but the divide is obvious with a practitioner with a level where the majority of teachers and learners walk to bridge this divide I think again we need to think about training, sharing and authentic help and authentic experiences I would like your short comments on what you hear now from me in these questions and maybe some deeper insight because I am among most outstanding professionals now so shall we apply hand raised or maybe I already can see someone who would be willing to reply on these questions if not Tim maybe we could start with you as I move forward over the next decade or so then we need to be able to adapt what we're offering to what they really need and that's why I really would defend the role of innovation and think that we need to try and make it as easy as possible for our staff and our colleagues to participate in this process okay so thanks very much I won't go on any further so we've got time for discussion institutional training is very important but it can also be expensive and I think from experience that people often don't see the value of the training unless they really need it in the short term I think if we accept that we don't apply for example new techniques new tools right across the board we don't go from 0% usage to 100% in a short period of time that we don't necessarily need to train everyone at the same time so therefore we can characterise ourselves thank you I think Timothy's right I think it's a gradual change but I also think we need to begin to think about what happens at teacher training and at lecturer training I think it's unreasonable to carry on training people in exactly the same way and then assume they'll pick these skills up but they go along for example I've been thinking about learning analytics now for several years and how you train people to make use of them and there's a lot of skills involved it's not just a question of being presented by with a specific tool and told you know you can look at this and you can see what's going on it's also about being able to question the relevance of that for what you're doing it's also being able to question the underlying model and say well is this something which is useful to me can I accept these results as valid and reliable just because they were valid and reliable for a cohort three years ago are they still valid and reliable for my students so there's a whole extra layer of data literacy which I think when we were trained we won't be counted at all we'll come across in our careers but I think we need to think every year we need to be rethinking what is it that our new teachers our new lecturers need to be learning about and how can we support them to do that thank you very much we lost Brikena she wrote to me that she has issues with computer battery but I apologize for that but we have Marci and Sharon and also so Matthew I hope you also hear the answers from the experts to your questions on what training needs to be done I still remember your question post and maybe you would like to comment here a little bit or to do you receive the answer to what concerns you Rebecca did touch upon what I was initially raising as the point on training for teachers we need to we can't keep pushing on the fact that we want all these digital technologies and learning in the digital age without actually educating the people who are supposed to educate the students and yes it is differential different types of teachers need different kind of push in some are more willing I wonder though if making more data real world data available and learning through using this real world data or big data or open data would be an easy way to interdisciplinary learning teaching and learning on the part of students would that be feasible would it help with training and would it help with learning at the same time I would take a chance maybe available because you would need to do interdisciplinary thinking critical thinking and analyzing the data and so it would offer an opportunity for learning and for teaching at the same time I just wonder if the other experts are going to use on that from my perspective from even perspective from what we hear from our communities of practices and even I would take a risk a little bit commenting here that actually what we notice is that in Europe we are already quite complex I would say we are complex in understanding we are complex in having very different instruments and tools and in thinking we don't think about segments even though we think about the complexity and the big picture which is very good but at the same time we also identify divide between the complex good part of thinking and smaller bits and pieces that our teachers work with so before giving the whole picture I would say of the big data available and the variety of experiences because we already have a number of innovations for example putting in the pot here in this webinar room what we need is actually a very practical approach to things very practical training and as Rebecca says putting them into context and knowing why we use them and how to use them you know so not to increase the divide but to teach very segmental and then very complex things we need to put them together somehow maybe in the levels or you know different complexity approach or what we have in Europe usually is the levels of FQF and other levels that we have in the system so to bring community together from bottom up in a very consistent way but this is my reply from what I absorb in discussions in European and global events but maybe someone would like to Yes, may I I think one of the things we need to think about when we start to look at the idea of training we think very complex and how difficult and how fast things are changing but when you think especially as an administrator that is very concerned about where everyone knows how to do it or there is a value in doing it of course you have to address the value why what's in it for them as an educator can help them but I think the other thing we need to think about is how much can make the training more for years and years for 20 years after learning people learning different technologies learning LMS systems and all of that just you take an approach like which is in the U.S. they wanted to look at online learning I'm sorry we started hearing you you get a little bit some difficulties in hearing you there is an echo and sometimes you go with us but then you are somewhere in the background for you can you hear me now I can't hear you so I'm going to have to watch you okay I'll say it real quick in the finish what Robert G. was to do was they wanted to really be innovative and they're on my learning program and provide their Ghana students an experience they never forget so they looked at virtual reality and augmented reality and they realized it was very complex they figured out a way to automate it and make it very simple for their instructors and take away that fear and what they did literally they have a global learning center that they created with 10 rooms where you can go and create lessons or teach live and instructor walks in and puts in their phone number 10 digit phone number and when they do the ring knows what the instructor wants to do and they teach a class if so it will connect to the far sight students and to zoom and to meeting room to do video it will enable them to do their lessons in VR or AR if they're not in there for class live class time then it will automatically bring up the tools that they need to create a lesson and they have a repository of over 10,000 learning objects in any subject from anatomy and physiology to sports to all sorts of different subjects history can pull those objects and create a lesson in such a fast time and so easy that the people who don't consider themselves technologists whatsoever feel completely empowered and so I think while training and doing this as a community and sharing learning objects like this repository of 10,000 learning objects all of that is part of what we do as a community and if we can find a way to provide that training back make it where it's as simple and as intuitive as possible I think we empower our students our instructors the best way and I'll just stop at that Thank you we already have the need to prolong the seminar and the discussion because I really appreciate the richness of the insights that all of you bring in here and of course this is not what is discovered today but I only see that our time is running out what we have actually now in the POD people highlighted the innovations that they wanted to highlight which combine sorry not combine but among which we have non formal open learning adaptive technologies blockchain changing role of teachers instructor to facilitator digital credentials self-based learning transformative technology and adaptive technology well what we would follow in the chat we were doing it in parallel with all of us together we received in many important and useful links from our panel speakers on some of the innovations mentioned in the POD this unfortunately we don't have references for all of them but we take this into consideration and I am sure that we will continue on that in in EADNAP areas and also in our conferences and I am sure we are all active on that we still will be able to use Twitter and Facebook and EADN social channels and also the rest of European distance learning week and US national distance learning week to address these issues but we need also to summarize and finalize this webinar for today so I thank you all for being positive on attendance and on the contributions and on exchange my final question would be do we agree that actually open and distance learning innovations contextualized in positive pedagogical situations in correct pedagogical situations meaningful ones can improve quality of education I think we are all working hard on this and we all need to share and to share globally and regionally our authentic experiences but I think all this brings the evidence and some other questions and we need training on innovations on their meaningful applications so for the final round I give the floor to each speaker just to say one sentence that we bring with us to our I totally agree with you that innovation is extremely important in the open educational resources or in the training of teachers or in the use of technologies for teaching and please do keep coming with your suggestions to the commission and we will try our best to see what we can do to support in terms of quality and in terms of operational in terms of product thank you very much you do support and of course we hope that the support will continue thanks a lot the administrative and the operational side and while I am involved in some of the aspects of teaching and learning I'm not as immersed as others on the panel and so participating and hearing about this from that side really enriches my role at Berkeley and it's all part of retaining our students and engaging our students helping them to learn in addition absolutely the faculty training and having faculty and educators be on board and excited to be part of the new technologies and the new learning methods and so forth is critical and so I thank you all for allowing me to be part of the panel and I look forward to more learning and more innovating with everyone thank you oh make sure I got to put it back in so I don't have to pay attention okay not if you hear me my one sentence my one sentence is that we must innovate and transform a reimagine or change education to the opportunity is great for what we can do to reach so many more students and engage them like they've never been engaged before and truly prepare or reskill them for their future we must innovate and we need to all work together to overcome all the challenges and to realize all of the opportunities that are set before us thank you again for inviting us to LA and for our partnership on this opportunity we've got the early adopters we've got the people if you push them a bit they'll jump on board then you've got the laggers the people are always going to be at the back of the queue whatever happens so if we actually do that then we can begin to build up a critical mass if you're like a community of people who have had the early experience they've hoped to debug the tools and seen the value of them you get them on board and they can also become evangelists for the next generation thank you I would also like to thank everyone for the opportunity to participate today it's been a lot of fun I think the go home message is that it's obvious that society is changing very much and my takeaway is that we feel very safe among our friends close friends like you and very high level experts so we will continue and we will put every effort in our network to take innovations in an agile way I learned it from Timothy and create authentic experiences during training sessions thank you very much


Why is it so difficult sometimes to forgive? Then came Peter to him and said, Lord, how off shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee until seven times, but until 70 times seven. We as Christians are to forgive. Well, this might be difficult to do and while you might think your situation is different, the scripture is clear. For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. Forgiveness is not an emotion. It's a choice. Sometimes it's not just the offense you have to forgive. It's the repeat memory of the offense. This is where you'll need the help of the Holy Spirit. Well, it might not seem fair. We ought to forgive faster than they can apologize. Don't just do it for them. Don't just do it for yourself. Do it because it honors and pleases your heavenly father. It's time to forgive.


So, if you were thankful that Donald Trump killed two prominent political dynasties, well, don't thank him too much, because he has basically started a new, perhaps even worse, political dynasty. And we can expect all of his kids at some point to get involved in politics directly. And the first one that we're all looking at is Ivanka Trump, because there are reports that she may be mulling a run for the United States Senate in Florida. And she's going to primary challenge another prominent Republican. So as The Guardian reports, speculation about the post-White House career of Ivanka Trump is now centered on Florida, where the soon-to-be ex-first daughter and senior aide to her president father has reportedly bought an expensive plot of land for a house and may be considering a run for Senate. Ivanka Trump is frequently mentioned as desiring a political career of her own, and during her time working for Donald Trump, has sought to position herself as a more media-friendly version of her father. Now, US media reports are focusing on Florida, where Donald Trump owns the Mar-a-Lago Resort as a potential base for his daughter to launch a political career of her own. Ivanka definitely has political ambitions, no question about it, a source told CNN. She wants to run for something, but that still needs to be figured out. Florida might offer one potential avenue in a Senate race in 2022. When current Republican incumbent Marco Rubio's seat is up for reelection, Rubio was a harsh critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican nomination race, but later morphed into a loyal supporter of Trump once he had won the election. I think she'd be the immediate frontrunner if she ran for US Senate against Rubio given her father's popularity in the Sunshine State. Adam C. Smith, former Tampa Bay Times political editor and now consultant with Mercury Public Affairs, told CNN. So this is fascinating to me. First of all, let me say what is obvious. I hate political dynasties and the thought of Ivanka Trump running for anything is nauseating. Having said that though, I do like that the Republicans who reluctantly endorsed Donald Trump rather than fighting him. Now that's biting them in the ass, like Marco Rubio, by supporting Donald Trump. Now you've given him credibility and now his own children may run against you. But I will say that even though I don't want Ivanka Trump to run for anything and I'd rather her go away, I do like that she's challenging Marco Rubio. Because what are you going to say to Donald Trump's daughter? Like it's going to be a contest about who is most loyal to Donald Trump. Who will they believe is more loyal? Marco Rubio, who previously stated that he hated Donald Trump and is biting his tongue now that he's president, or Ivanka Trump, who is his daughter. And this would be funny to watch because Marco Rubio, no question, like he would embarrass himself. Look, I like your dad, I supported your father, but she's going to bring up all the stuff from the 2016 and 2015 Republican Party primaries. It's going to be hilarious to watch and let me just say this. I want to see them fight. I want to see MAGA chuds and the more establishment Republicans rip each other to shreds. Now this may be a pipe dream because what is my expectation, and this may be wrong, is that, you know, much like with the Tea Party, the Republican Party, like the rift wasn't there for that long. They kind of absorbed the Tea Party. And I think this may be true with MAGA chuds. Like they are an emerging faction within the Republican Party. But I think that overall, when you compare like the Democratic Party establishment and the Republican establishment, Republicans are much more savvy at kind of mending those rifts, right? They make some concessions, give some power positions to this emerging faction, and ultimately the party as a whole shifts to the right. But with the Democratic Party, they kind of try to float against the current or swim against the current, I should say, and rather than embracing these emergent factions like leftists, they fight them. So it would be interesting to see what happens.   So either way, I do want them to fight each other and I say we let them fight. And I hope that this does long-term damage to the Republican Party, but it probably won't. So either way, at least we could be entertained if we have no horse in this race and watch Marco Rubio hopefully embarrass himself.