Re-Visioning the Future of Teaching & Learning in HE
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Schulte, Dorothée
Cendon, Eva
Makoe, Mpine
Higher education (HE) institutions like other educational institutions are on the cusp of major disruption that is created in part by globalisation, digitalisation and recently the growing pandemic caused by Covid-19. Never before has the HE sector being challenged the way it has been in the last few months and it illustrated that changes can happen faster than expected. In time of crisis, the tendency is to focus on the short term solutions and to ignore what is likely to be faced in the post crisis. However, it is precisely during the crisis that the focus should also be on the future developments in HE to ensure broadening access and equity to relevant high-quality programmes and services designed to achieve learning for sustainable development. This means that the HE sector needs to think about possible future requirements from teaching and learning as well as from an organisational perspective and thus, to re-vision the future of HE. In the session, we will present results of focus groups, which we conducted in May and June 2020 with experts of the University of the Future Network who are working as researchers, lecturers and managers in HE institutions around the globe. The discussions focussed on re-visioning the future of higher education while responding to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The experts focused on visionary paths with regard to teaching and learning in HE in the future and related challenges and opportunities. They discussed significant conditions that need to be in place to ensure accessibility and inclusivity in HE and how visioning of teaching and learning in HE will look like post Covid-19. After presenting results and key issues, we invite the participants of the session to share their experiences and views on the results with us in a moderated discussion.
 Thank you very much and thank you for the nice welcoming and thank you for helping with technical problems. My name is not Dorothy. Dorothy is next to me at that point and I have the pleasure to introduce us, actually three of us, and the project we want to talk about. We are and maybe I try to switch to the next slide. I just click on that. That's the problem when you're not alone, when you're on a different computer. Who we are? We are three women who are working internationally on the future of teaching and learning in different settings. My name is Eva Gendon. I'm from the Fern Universität in Hagen and I'm professor there for university continuing education and teaching and learning. My colleague Dorothy, whom you can't see at the moment, she's working with me together on that. So just a quick look. My colleague from South Africa who works with us on this project at the Institute for Open Distance Learning at the University of South Africa. So these are the three of us and what we would like to do with you is actually in a first step to tell us what combines us or where we work together. We are all connected in a university of the future network, how we call it. This is a network that is an informal network founded in 2016. In this network, there are academics and researchers from around the globe, not only from Europe, but also from the other continents. And while the purpose that unifies us or that makes us work together is that we want to develop policies and strategies for the transformation of higher education institutions. So our topic is how could universities of the future look like? And the second step is how can we get there? So we want to, the goal is to think about how can we make university fit for the future and future oriented? Well, when we go to the next slide. So what we did to do is we discussed within our network and then we made also short research study that we want to share with you or the results we want to share with you. We COVID-19 made many changes to the way we could think about the future. We talked about the future of universities and the future of teaching and learning before, but with COVID-19 things changed. And what we figured out at our institution maybe and you share with us, I'm sure about that is well that COVID-19 impacts directly to higher education. So from one day to the other, we had distance learning, even if we were not distance learning universities. And the thing that is also important is that we need to think how we can have a sustained business continuity of education within this phase, which actually will not stop now and which goes on in the different countries we are in. But what we also can see there is a tendency to look at short term solutions. So there is not a vision of what will be afterwards, what will the changes be in higher education? What is something that we can really take care of and what could change within our institutions? So I think the focus in this sense should be on the future developments on higher education and not only how can we deal with COVID-19 at our institutions, how can we deal with it in our teaching and learning? And with that, I switch to my colleague. Thank you very much Eva. Welcome everybody. Hello from me. A very short time to give enough time for discussion. I give a short introduction on what we did to give a quick response and that just roughed the time, a quick scientific response to that and introduce some results very short. So what we did is like we did some focus group discussions. We did them in the context of the UNESCO Futures of Education Initiative, which is quite interesting. It's a UNESCO initiative that is dealing with future, new future visions for teaching and learning in education in general. And the university future network decided that we want to contribute revisions on teaching and learning in higher education and that's specifically to higher education connected to the university of the future. And the initiative aims at imagining how knowledge and learning can share the future of humanity and the planet. That's a very global goal. And the focus was set from the initiative which we hand over a bit was that knowledge, production, access and governance as well as citizenship and participation issues. That is like outlined by the future of education initiative and we decided to hand it over to our research. And in the next step, I just give you a short introduction on what we found out through the focus groups. So we asked for visionary paths that can be seen and key challenges and opportunities that are related to it. And in terms of visionary paths, the experts said that in future, higher education or teaching and learning higher education is likely to be planned online. The means at campuses will still continue and remain important, but online strategies will be much more integrated. But there will be more personalized learning by offering flexible learning opportunities. That means more customizing of teaching and offering multiple programs for multiple or diverse students. And that flexible movement of students as well as lecturers and supporting professional collaboration is key to opening up higher education. And related opportunities are which can be seen right now is that the crisis can be seen as accelerator for digital change as every higher education institution or education at all had to move online very quickly. And there's an opportunity to create an aspired future to create new visions, as Eva introduced, to rethink the purpose of higher education and to transform education system in general. And related challenges which are some of them are quite obvious right now is the concern of the capability of students who want online and also of the capability of teachers and their online teaching skills, as well as infrastructure barriers that ICT technology is very different in countries all over the world and that there might be resistance to change that undermine progress. And this was very much related to leadership as which is seen as very critical to drive innovation. And another thing is like the students expectations engagement, which was quite interesting that some students are very happy with going online and with remote learning, but others may not want to change or may not remain in that situation. So this needs very much attention when rethinking learning processes and to ask how can I make my students to actively engage for learning. That was very quickly and maybe another very crucial point I want to introduce is like we also ask for conditions for accessibility and inclusivity in higher education. And what was brought to the fore was that bridging digital divide is very important because the digital divide now manifests in different types of inequalities. Might it be access to internet, to devices, living in an urban or rural area. And it's important to foster social justice by including students different ways of learning. That also means not relying too much on the possibilities of students but taking into account the differences in there. That's very much related to customise of teaching and learning processes and offering different modes of delivery and thus supporting online autonomous learning. And to diversify higher education, that means that to allow students to change between higher education institutions and more easily, that also means to allow higher education institutions better to exchange or to implement exchange programs and also to make it easier to the recognition of pre-or learning for universities. So that's to sum up our results. I would like to hand over to Ampina who introduced some conclusions and then we go into discussion for the last 12 minutes I think. Thank you so much Dorothea and Eva for the discussion that we just had right now. As Dorothea had said about the conditions that we want, we also talked about visioning because as we're talking about the future, we also have to come up with a vision, a clear vision of where we want things to be. And social challenges that we have right now, how do we address them in order for higher education to be resilient for the future? So that was one of the things that we needed to work with. And social challenges also have to do with the social justice mandate of equality, of inclusivity, of accessibility and also I mean recently the other issue that is very, very prominent is the digital accessibility. Whether people have access to digital infrastructure but not only the infrastructure and connectivity but also the knowledge, the know-how to use the digitalization. So as we are thinking about that, how do we address the social challenges in order to prepare the university for the future? The second point is the alternative ways of teaching. So that again is quite an important component of the study of what we need that needs to be done. We understand teaching in a certain way but as we look into the future, there'll be online, there will be a blended form of learning, there will be a personalized way of teaching. So teaching in a digital era is completely different from teaching in what we are used to. So we need to begin to think about that alternative ways of assessment. How do we assess for online teaching and online learning? How do we deal with things differently? So all those things are coming up to that. So again, the quality of teaching and learning, the new normal versus the normal, what do we mean by that? And the political will, what are the institutions willing to do in order for them to change and in order for them to be relevant in the future? So political will is the institution, is the policies that needs to be in place, all those things. So the other, in conclusion, we said higher education therefore need to address those issues. Higher education need to embrace open education principles to meet social justice mandate. The mandate of inclusivity, accessibility, making sure that there's parity of access to everything that we need because you may have documents and you may have digital devices, but if you people do not have access in terms of education, then it's another thing. So there's digital literacy skills and all the things that needs to do. And as higher education, there is no way that we cannot survive without adopting blended learning approaches to ensure accessibility, to go fully online or in any other form. And the third part is to address inequalities and to do that is to ensure that students now have the power to choose what they want. They have the power to, they have a power to personalize the type of learning and we have the micro-credentialing that is coming up where people want to come in for lifelong learning for, to use what they already have prior learning to develop what they want for a particular area. So maybe they, the issue of learning a program that is three or four years, now we are going to be learning short learning programs that addresses a specific need for an individual. And after that, then the person gets a credit for whatever that they are doing. So micro-credentialing is going to be the thing of the future and that will assist in personalization of learning. And then we need also to work towards addressing the digital divides that we see were so rampant towards, they were so rampant in the COVID-19, what COVID-19 has brought to us. And finally, transformation needs political will to plan for the future. So this political will is not only nationally, it's from UNESCO. UNESCO, then national, then institutional, even the mindset of individuals who are working in the institution should have a mindset of thinking differently about the work that they have been doing. So I think finally, we have a few questions that will lead to a discussion so that you can help us as we move forward with this study. Question one is the discussion would be on what is your experience related to teaching and learning in higher education given the impact of COVID-19. And you can tell us about that. What is your future vision at your institution and what is needed for sustainable vision of teaching and learning in higher education? I think those will be left so that you can be able to chat with us. You can send it through the chat or you can talk to discuss with us. We are desperate and looking for as much information and as much discussion to stimulate this discussion on revisioning the future of higher education. Thank you very much colleagues for listening.
 Thank you very much and thank you for the nice welcoming and thank you for helping with  technical problems.  My name is not Dorothy.  Dorothy is next to me at that point and I have the pleasure to introduce us, actually  three of us, and the project we want to talk about.  We are and maybe I try to switch to the next slide.  I just click on that.  That's the problem when you're not alone, when you're on a different computer.  Who we are?  We are three women who are working internationally on the future of teaching and learning in  different settings.  My name is Eva Gendon.  I'm from the Fern Universität in Hagen and I'm professor there for university continuing  education and teaching and learning.  My colleague Dorothy, whom you can't see at the moment, she's working with me together  on that.  So just a quick look.  My colleague from South Africa who works with us on this project at the Institute for  Open Distance Learning at the University of South Africa.  So these are the three of us and what we would like to do with you is actually in a first  step to tell us what combines us or where we work together.  We are all connected in a university of the future network, how we call it.  This is a network that is an informal network founded in 2016.  In this network, there are academics and researchers from around the globe, not only  from Europe, but also from the other continents.  And while the purpose that unifies us or that makes us work together is that we want to  develop policies and strategies for the transformation of higher education institutions.  So our topic is how could universities of the future look like?  And the second step is how can we get there?  So we want to, the goal is to think about how can we make university fit for the future  and future oriented?  Well, when we go to the next slide.  So what we did to do is we discussed within our network and then we made also short research  study that we want to share with you or the results we want to share with you.  We COVID-19 made many changes to the way we could think about the future.  We talked about the future of universities and the future of teaching and learning before,  but with COVID-19 things changed.  And what we figured out at our institution maybe and you share with us, I'm sure about  that is well that COVID-19 impacts directly to higher education.  So from one day to the other, we had distance learning, even if we were not distance learning  universities.  And the thing that is also important is that we need to think how we can have a sustained  business continuity of education within this phase, which actually will not stop now and  which goes on in the different countries we are in.  But what we also can see there is a tendency to look at short term solutions.  So there is not a vision of what will be afterwards, what will the changes be in higher education?  What is something that we can really take care of and what could change within our institutions?  So I think the focus in this sense should be on the future developments on higher education  and not only how can we deal with COVID-19 at our institutions, how can we deal with  it in our teaching and learning?  And with that, I switch to my colleague.  Thank you very much Eva.  Welcome everybody.  Hello from me.  A very short time to give enough time for discussion.  I give a short introduction on what we did to give a quick response and that just roughed  the time, a quick scientific response to that and introduce some results very short.  So what we did is like we did some focus group discussions.  We did them in the context of the UNESCO Futures of Education Initiative, which is quite interesting.  It's a UNESCO initiative that is dealing with future, new future visions for teaching and  learning in education in general.  And the university future network decided that we want to contribute revisions on teaching  and learning in higher education and that's specifically to higher education connected  to the university of the future.  And the initiative aims at imagining how knowledge and learning can share the future of humanity  and the planet.  That's a very global goal.  And the focus was set from the initiative which we hand over a bit was that knowledge,  production, access and governance as well as citizenship and participation issues.  That is like outlined by the future of education initiative and we decided to hand it over to  our research.  And in the next step, I just give you a short introduction on what we found out through  the focus groups.  So we asked for visionary paths that can be seen and key challenges and opportunities  that are related to it.  And in terms of visionary paths, the experts said that in future, higher education or teaching  and learning higher education is likely to be planned online.  The means at campuses will still continue and remain important, but online strategies  will be much more integrated.  But there will be more personalized learning by offering flexible learning opportunities.  That means more customizing of teaching and offering multiple programs for multiple or  diverse students.  And that flexible movement of students as well as lecturers and supporting professional  collaboration is key to opening up higher education.  And related opportunities are which can be seen right now is that the crisis can be  seen as accelerator for digital change as every higher education institution or education  at all had to move online very quickly.  And there's an opportunity to create an aspired future to create new visions, as Eva introduced,  to rethink the purpose of higher education and to transform education system in general.  And related challenges which are some of them are quite obvious right now is the concern  of the capability of students who want online and also of the capability of teachers and  their online teaching skills, as well as infrastructure barriers that ICT technology is very different  in countries all over the world and that there might be resistance to change that undermine  progress.  And this was very much related to leadership as which is seen as very critical to drive  innovation.  And another thing is like the students expectations engagement, which was quite interesting that  some students are very happy with going online and with remote learning, but others may not  want to change or may not remain in that situation.  So this needs very much attention when rethinking learning processes and to ask how can I make  my students to actively engage for learning.  That was very quickly and maybe another very crucial point I want to introduce is like we  also ask for conditions for accessibility and inclusivity in higher education.  And what was brought to the fore was that bridging digital divide is very important because  the digital divide now manifests in different types of inequalities.  Might it be access to internet, to devices, living in an urban or rural area.  And it's important to foster social justice by including students different ways of learning.  That also means not relying too much on the possibilities of students but taking into account  the differences in there.  That's very much related to customise of teaching and learning processes and offering different  modes of delivery and thus supporting online autonomous learning.  And to diversify higher education, that means that to allow students to change between higher  education institutions and more easily, that also means to allow higher education institutions  better to exchange or to implement exchange programs and also to make it easier to the  recognition of pre-or learning for universities.  So that's to sum up our results.  I would like to hand over to Ampina who introduced some conclusions and then we go into discussion  for the last 12 minutes I think.  Thank you so much Dorothea and Eva for the discussion that we just had right now.  As Dorothea had said about the conditions that we want, we also talked about visioning  because as we're talking about the future, we also have to come up with a vision, a clear  vision of where we want things to be.  And social challenges that we have right now, how do we address them in order for higher  education to be resilient for the future?  So that was one of the things that we needed to work with.  And social challenges also have to do with the social justice mandate of equality, of  inclusivity, of accessibility and also I mean recently the other issue that is very, very  prominent is the digital accessibility.  Whether people have access to digital infrastructure but not only the infrastructure and connectivity  but also the knowledge, the know-how to use the digitalization.  So as we are thinking about that, how do we address the social challenges in order to  prepare the university for the future?  The second point is the alternative ways of teaching.  So that again is quite an important component of the study of what we need that needs to  be done.  We understand teaching in a certain way but as we look into the future, there'll be  online, there will be a blended form of learning, there will be a personalized way of teaching.  So teaching in a digital era is completely different from teaching in what we are used  to.  So we need to begin to think about that alternative ways of assessment.  How do we assess for online teaching and online learning?  How do we deal with things differently?  So all those things are coming up to that.  So again, the quality of teaching and learning, the new normal versus the normal, what do  we mean by that?  And the political will, what are the institutions willing to do in order for them to change  and in order for them to be relevant in the future?  So political will is the institution, is the policies that needs to be in place, all those  things.  So the other, in conclusion, we said higher education therefore need to address those  issues.  Higher education need to embrace open education principles to meet social justice mandate.  The mandate of inclusivity, accessibility, making sure that there's parity of access  to everything that we need because you may have documents and you may have digital devices,  but if you people do not have access in terms of education, then it's another thing.  So there's digital literacy skills and all the things that needs to do.  And as higher education, there is no way that we cannot survive without adopting blended  learning approaches to ensure accessibility, to go fully online or in any other form.  And the third part is to address inequalities and to do that is to ensure that students  now have the power to choose what they want.  They have the power to, they have a power to personalize the type of learning and we  have the micro-credentialing that is coming up where people want to come in for lifelong  learning for, to use what they already have prior learning to develop what they want for  a particular area.  So maybe they, the issue of learning a program that is three or four years, now we are going  to be learning short learning programs that addresses a specific need for an individual.  And after that, then the person gets a credit for whatever that they are doing.  So micro-credentialing is going to be the thing of the future and that will assist in  personalization of learning.  And then we need also to work towards addressing the digital divides that we see were so rampant  towards, they were so rampant in the COVID-19, what COVID-19 has brought to us.  And finally, transformation needs political will to plan for the future.  So this political will is not only nationally, it's from UNESCO.  UNESCO, then national, then institutional, even the mindset of individuals who are working  in the institution should have a mindset of thinking differently about the work that they  have been doing.  So I think finally, we have a few questions that will lead to a discussion so that you  can help us as we move forward with this study.  Question one is the discussion would be on what is your experience related to teaching  and learning in higher education given the impact of COVID-19.  And you can tell us about that.  What is your future vision at your institution and what is needed for sustainable vision  of teaching and learning in higher education?  I think those will be left so that you can be able to chat with us.  You can send it through the chat or you can talk to discuss with us.  We are desperate and looking for as much information and as much discussion to stimulate  this discussion on revisioning the future of higher education.  Thank you very much colleagues for listening.
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