Back to campus - the intangible assets matter

Photo by Loïc Fürhoff on Unsplash

The pandemic revealed cracks in the value of the campus and physical work spaces that are now being hastily papered over as most institutions revert to business as usual. But we have shown that courses can be successfully run online and staff are able to do most if not all of their work from home. Many staff and students are keen to continue working online, at least a few days a week. Some institutions are offering hybrid/hyflex teaching with students able to choose between online or on-site participation. They also allow staff to choose whether they wish to work from home or from the office, in agreement with their boss and colleagues. However, other institutions have reverted to campus-only teaching and insist on staff (usually administrative staff) being physically on campus.

This creates tensions. If a significant number of staff and students choose not to go to campus so often the sense of community offered by the campus is diminished. Management naturally want to make optimal use of their expensive and often recently built or refurbished campus facilities. They are caught in a difficult position where offering flexibility is clearly positive but will result in a sparsely populated campus that will become increasingly unattractive. At the same time forcing everyone back to campus will sow dissatisfaction and create negative publicity. 

So what is the value of the physical campus and what is missing in the digital campus? This is discussed in an article by Jasmine Price, Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps, COVID, Campus, Cameras, Communication, and Connection, in the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning. They interviewed students (undergraduates and post-graduates) about their learning experience during the pandemic and how they feel about returning to campus. The difficulties that arose during the terms of enforced home study are familiar from many other studies but the core of the article is about how the online experience has affected student attitudes to the physical campus. Online lectures work well, as do most administrative routines, but somehow the online environment lacks soul, presence, ambiance, a sense of fun, being part of something. These intangible factors are central to being able to identify as a student.

We found that, for the students we spoke to, a return to campus implied access to fun, spontaneity and interaction with peers, lecturers, and other staff members. Even as students did talk about the flexibility that online places and platforms afforded them around attending lectures, and taking exams, they also highlighted their need for the physical spaces of the university campus to facilitate their focus, as key locations for group work (particularly important in undergraduate second years), and for socializing.

The digital spaces work well for some things. Chat groups on Whatsapp and suchlike offer instant interaction and a sense of group identity, course material is always accessible and online meetings became valuable after an initial period of trial and error. However, the digital campus still lacks a sense of place and social interaction. The digital spaces are somehow fragmented and support services that are visible on campus are hidden online. 

The digital campus, as yet still feels difficult and obscured for some students, lacking the well-established paths and cues that are familiar on a physical campus.For the digital campus to realize the potential and possibilities exhibited on the physical campus, universities need to find ways of enabling greater transparency so that students can tell where the pathways are to meet and engage with their peers, and with staff who can teach and otherwise support them. If we are going to continue to cycle through times when we are only in digital places for university education --and it looks like that is likely--we must find ways to make visible and accessible the entirety of the potential support network.

The students did not really miss the lecture halls and classrooms during the pandemic. That part worked well online. What they missed were the intangible assets of the campus - a sense of belonging.

The end of social media?

Photo by Dasha Urvachova on Unsplash

Are the social media platforms that have dominated our lives for the past 15 years or so nearing the end of their useful lives? As Meta/Facebook transforms itself into the so-called metaverse and the Bond villain lookalike Elon Musk takes over Twitter, these platforms are likely to be completely transformed and millions of users, like me, will choose to leave. An article by Ben Werdmuller, The end of Twitter, mourns the demise of a networking platform that has been so important to many in education over the years but is now drowning in the vitriolic hatred and disinformation that has polluted today's society and is likely to get even worse as Musk makes massive staff cuts and reinstates banned accounts, thereby removing the present inadequate controls against hate and threats. Indeed, since Musk's takeover the levels of hate content has risen steeply, according to an article in The Guardian. Community and collaboration are being sacrificed for whatever gives the best financial returns and today that means scandals, insults, lies and conflict.

I have benefited greatly from social media over the years, allowing me to build a global network of educators and friends who have inspired and encouraged me and I hope I have returned the favours. I would be so much poorer without access to this network but sadly I see the end of this era rapidly approaching. Facebook and Twitter will not disappear overnight but will either fade into irrelevance or drown in trash and hatred. They will no longer offer the social interaction and and sense of community that they pioneered and that we have all enjoyed. 

I have a Mastodon account, the multi-server platform that offers a safer alternative to Twitter, but have not really discovered how to make it work for me. I haven't found many of my Twitter contacts in there yet and have no appetite for building up a network from scratch - it took several years to build my Twitter network. It's not so easy to start all over again but there are, however, some useful tips by for example Martin Fowler, Exploring Mastodon. The same applies to alternatives to Facebook like MeWe (I'm sure there are many others out there). Ideally I'd like a social platform that is safe and where I can continue to interact with the people and groups I have built up over the last 15 years. If that doesn't work then I will have to rediscover what life was like back in the nineties.

Werdmuller sees a shift to a multitude of new social media channels and a more complex landscape.  

As big tech silos diminish in stature, the all-in-one town squares we’ve enjoyed on the internet are going to start to fade from view. In some ways, it’s akin to the decline of the broadcast television networks: whereas there used to be a handful of channels that entire nations tuned into together, we now enjoy content that’s fragmented over hundreds. The same will be true of our community hangouts and conversations. In the same way that broadcast television didn’t really capture the needs of the breadth of its audience but instead enjoyed its popularity because that’s what was there at the time, we’ll find that fragmented communities better fit the needs of the breadth of diverse society. It’s a natural evolution.

The main benefit of the major platforms was that everyone was there. If we all scatter into a multitude of closed communities we lose that global connectivity that was so empowering and fun. The embryo to this inter-connectivity already exists in the Fediverse concept, gathering a number of open source social media platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube and allowing people to connect across the platforms. I haven't dared to investigate this much but it seems rather complicated and I wonder how many of my contacts are out there.  

I deeply dislike both Twitter and Facebook and how they profit from the spread of lies, hatred and horror but I still appreciate the human contacts I have made through them. But I sense that very soon I will have to move out. I can maybe find another platform that offers some consolation but I fear that many contacts and groups will be lost forever. Very sad.

Is it still a conference if the keynote speakers are all online?

Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels

Conferences are reverting to their traditional on-site format but the effects of the pandemic can still be felt in that it has become difficult to attract speakers to attend in person. Many speakers prefer to contribute online for both environmental and time-saving reasons. Travelling half way round the world to speak for 45 minutes, with the resultant massive carbon footprint, is simply not sustainable. The appearance can take several days out of a speaker's schedule and although the experience of seeing new places and making new contacts is very enjoyable, it disrupts regular work activities. During the pandemic we all realised that keynote presentations work very well online and now that the conferences are back on site many of the speakers are not. But what happens to an on-site conference when the speakers are all on screen and no one is actually on stage? Why pay high fees to watch a video meeting?

Conference organisers are now trying to put pressure on speakers to attend in person according to an article in Times Higher Education, Academic conferences scale back hybrid ambitions. Having the keynote speakers on-site means that they also attend other sessions and chat with participants during the breaks, meals and mingles. This adds value to the conference and justifies the fee. 

The moves follow concerns that the travel-free option for speakers is leading to empty podiums and an “us and them” culture between remote panellists and assembled delegates. Some organisers have also flagged the logistical complexity of enabling online speakers and the vastly inflated cost of running hybrid events, which often require numerous video and audio production staff, producers and technical support.

Many conferences are adopting a hybrid format, or at least a semblance of one, but the default is still on-site. Online participants can only attend some of the sessions and few have attempted hybrid mingling or social events. Of course there are technical difficulties with hybrid. Just as in teaching you need an advanced technical set-up to make hybrid work reasonably well and in my experience the online participants tend to take a back seat in the sessions. Online keynotes work best when everyone else is online but when you mix online and on-site there are always risks of bandwidth issues, sound and video quality or other technical hitches.

I generally present live on Zoom or Teams but when the conference venue is far away I prefer to record my session and let them play the recording in the conference hall. Then I am available live for questions afterwards. This minimises the risk of bandwidth issues and they get a high quality video to watch. At the same time I never get any real impression of the audience and no sense of place at all. The question time is often rather awkward since I can't hear or even see the people asking the questions and need to rely on a moderator. In addition, few participants are willing to ask a question in a hall at the best of times and even more so when the speaker isn't even in the room.

I have written on this theme several times here and firmly believe that large on-site international conferences are not sustainable and need to be phased out. It is absurd that while our colleagues in environmental science are sounding the alarm bells about the climate crisis, higher education is still responsible for high levels of carbon emissions due to our reliance on international air travel. On-site conferences are very rewarding but only for those who can afford them. Online conferences are not the same as on-site ones and we should stop comparing the two. They are still evolving and need time to develop new forms of interaction rather than trying to replicate traditional practice. They can be more inclusive and diverse and offer opportunities for longer collaborative processes.

But it's not a matter of a free choice between two alternatives. One offers us hope for the future, the other doesn't.

My farewell to on-site conferences - at least as a university employee

Session in the EDEN conference (CC BY Alastair Creelman)

I have just returned home from the last educational conferences of my professional career. I am retiring this summer and any conferences after that will either have to be by invitation or if I feel rich enough to pay it all privately (unlikely). I attended NU2022 in Stockholm, a Swedish national conference on pedagogical development in higher education, and EDEN's (European Distance and E-learning Network) annual conference in Tallinn, Estonia. My next post will discuss some of the issues raised at these conferences but here I will just make some general comments.

I must admit that although I have spent the last few years organising, hosting and participating in many online conferences and meetings, the chance to finally attend an on-site event was very welcome. It was wonderful to meet colleagues, mingle, nibble snacks and do a bit of sightseeing in the evenings. A reminder of days gone by and a nice way to round off my days of university employment. 

One theme I would like to comment on here is that of the role of the online participants and their use of the back channels. Both conferences were billed as hybrid with live streaming of many sessions and the option of a Q&A function or chat to interact with the on-site audience. In the Stockholm conference there were hybrid parallel sessions and although the production was fine there was virtually no input from the online participants. In my two sessions I tried to encourage questions and comments in the chat but sadly nothing came. At EDEN there was a Q&A function in the streaming platform that was used quite often but there was no room for discussion between participants. One interesting feature of the EDEN conference was the inclusion of sessions held exclusively on Zoom. Here, on-site participants, including presenters, had to find a quiet corner to sit in to take part in these sessions so that they were fully online and therefore avoided the risk of the on-site participants dominating the discussion. I did not participate in the Zoom sessions at EDEN but I am sure they were more interactive than the hybrid sessions because everyone was online and had access to chat and microphone. Maybe the conclusion is that the focus in hybrid sessions is almost always on the on-site event and the online participants do not see themselves as full participants. If you really want the online participants to be active then offer fully online sessions.

Both conferences had hashtags for Twitter but only a few participants took advantage of this to share ideas and links. I have always enjoyed the Twitter feeds at conferences because I get so many good reflections and interaction with other participants. It's also great to see non-conference people getting involved, thus widening the reach of the conference. I use Twitter to write reflections, links and quotes and then refer to the feed when I write about the conference later. The next post will do just that. It's sad that the Twitter discussions this time were a bit limited. Are people tired of back channels in general or of Twitter in particular or are people just reluctant to share their ideas?

Then there is the sustainability of on-site conferences. I firmly believe that we cannot continue holding large-scale international on-site conferences if we want to have any environmental credibility, given that most people have to fly to attend. Maybe justifiable if the majority of participants can travel by land. I travelled to Estonia by train and boat but I strongly suspect that the carbon emissions of today's giant ferries may even be higher than travelling by plane. I have not dared to investigate this.

I will try to keep up with future conferences by online participation unless something remarkable happens. But I thoroughly enjoyed this final fling.

Part 2 of this post will follow in the next few days.

Hybrid classrooms - impressive solutions but are we asking the right questions?

Photo by Col·legi de Farmacèutics de Barcelona on Unsplash

Educational institutions all over the world are busy redesigning their classrooms and buying lots of hardware to facilitate hybrid teaching. The pandemic has revealed a need to offer more flexibility in how courses are run, offering students the choice of whether to attend classes on site or online. Many institutions have been doing this for many years but suddenly hybrid has become mainstream and there is a frenzy of ed tech investment. The challenge is to ensure that the online students are not simply passive observers but can participate as fully as their counterparts on site. This inevitably involves more advanced technology in the classroom with multiple screens, microphones and cameras so that everyone can be seen and heard clearly and that slideshows, whiteboards and collaborative tools can be easily shared. 

Some excellent examples of hybrid classrooms are described in a detailed post by Zac Woolfitt, The future is bright - the future is hybrid. He describes how four European universities are redesigning their classrooms for a hybrid future: University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, Imperial College London and Oulu University of Applied Sciences. All are very impressive and I urge you to read the article to get the details. Online students are visible on large screens, cameras automatically focus on the speaker in the classroom and high quality microphones ensure that everyone is heard. Not only have they upgraded their larger lecture theatres to cope with hundreds of students at a time but they have also equipped smaller classrooms and group rooms for hybrid sessions. Some solutions are like sophisticated TV studios and each lesson will require careful planning between teachers and production staff. Others are less complex but still demand that teachers rethink their teaching to adapt to the technical affordances.

However, all of them admit that they have still not found the best solution and that hybrid teaching still presents many challenges. Complex technical solutions demand qualified staff to assist the teacher, or require teachers to be well trained in using the equipment; resulting in an almost impossible juggling act trying to focus on both teaching and on managing the technology.

Finding ways to combine collaboration online and on campus remains a challenge. Those presenting here thought that there is more hybrid collaboration than every before. The solutions provided currently work, but it is expected the demands and context will change in a few years. Some have only been running Hybrid classrooms for less than a year. The feedback from students will provide lots of input. Creating really good hybrid breakout rooms has not yet been achieved yet and requires improvements in the technology. For some students, it is not easy to learn remotely, and they want to be in class, in contact with fellow students.

They are all impressive initiatives that aim at providing all students with a high quality experience no matter how they choose to participate. However, I wonder if we are asking the right questions here. These solutions are expensive and unrealistic for many institutions, especially in less developed countries. I also wonder if we place too much importance on synchronous events. No matter how much technology you have in the classroom, any gathering of more than 30 students means that the majority of them will not say a word during the session and that interaction will be limited. Large lecture theatres, no matter how much technology you buy, will always favour lecturing with the teacher in focus. Of course there is value in gathering all students in a synchronous event from time to time. It reinforces a sense of community and common purpose. But I would like to see a greater emphasis on group work, investigating, analysing and solving problems, and this is done in a combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration rather than in large class meetings. Maybe the hybrid classroom does not need to be so sophisticated. Shorter focused hybrid sessions to set up the task and then let the students work together in hybrid groups. This requires lots of flexible group rooms on campus but those require often only a screen, webcam and microphone. Learning to work in virtual teams to solve problems and find solutions are also vital skills to learn for most professions in a world where international travel is likely to become increasingly unfeasible.

The invisible students

"invisible time" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by paolobarzman

I've read lots of articles in recent weeks about the return to campus after the pandemic. There's naturally a great feeling of relief from students and staff alike. Many articles focus on how students prefer campus teaching to online. Well of course they do - that's what they signed up for! If you commit to a traditional campus degree you naturally want the whole package even if the use of digital media and online spaces will be an integral part of the programme. They accepted online teaching as an emergency solution but although it worked well, they lost out on all the benefits of being on campus such as the network building, social events, sense of identity and being part of a major institution. No-one suggests that they should switch to completely online. The traditional university experience is a vital stage in so many people's development and a completely life-changing period for many. Most reports indicate that staff and students have realised that online spaces add important elements to the campus experience and expect a greater blend between physical and online spaces in the future. However it's sad that all too often the media and politicians want to use this to create a false polaristaion between on-site and online. 

It also brings up the question of what we mean by the term student. All too often it means an 18-23 year old, full-time campus student. However, an increasingly large student population is conveniently forgotten in media discussions. There are millions of people who sign up for an online course or degree because they simply can't move to a campus or university city. Campus is not relevant for them because they already have their identity and networks firmly established where they live with their families, work and community. This group is growing rapidly in response to the demands for lifelong learning and reskilling in an increasingly unpredictable labour market. They value the learning but have little interest in the university experience. Sadly their voice is seldom heard and no-one really represents their interests. .

The main student organisations have difficulty attracting online students. The online students see the student organisations as representatives of campus study but at the same time the student organisations can't represent the online students because they have so little contact with them. It's a vicious circle. This in turn means that the needs of online students do not reach university management and academic boards. The dominance of young campus students on university websites and brochures reinforces this disconnect.

Universities are very willing to hear the voices of their campus students and they are represented in the highest decision-making bodies. How do we give the online student community a similar voice?

Building connections in open online courses

Photo by Fabio Bracht on Unsplash

A vital motivator for most learners is the sense of being part of a community where your efforts are acknowledged and where you get support and encouragement both from teachers and peers. Ever since MOOCs came on the scene course designers have been searching for ways of building a sense of community even in large-scale courses of hundreds or even thousands of participants. Courses have discussion forums, volunteer facilitators/moderators, chatbots, options for self organising group work and so on, but the quest for that ideal solution to make these course more "sticky" continues. It is not enough to simply suggest groups and let the participants get on with it. The groups need to be guided and encouraged, rules of engagement need to be agreed on and a community of trust must be established and to do this usually requires a facilitator/moderator with experience in team-building. This is very hard to scale since it can be difficult to find enough people to act as facilitators and when it comes to courses with thousands of participants this becomes virtually impossible. Furthermore, good facilitation requires some degree of training. Thus, in a course where you aim at offering a consistent experience to all participants, facilitators should share a common idea of how to support the groups..

There is an excellent description of providing this kind of support on a relatively large scale in a post by Joitske Hulsebosch, Large-scale online course design? Use collaborative learning for high engagement. She describes the development of an open online course in food systems with an intake of around 500 participants. Learners are divided into groups though this is not compulsory and each group has a volunteer mentor to motivate and support them. The organisers put a lot of work into creating a course community with onboarding activities like interactive maps to show where everyone lives (enabling people to link with others in their region) and a gamification element rewarding contributions and active participation in activities. Groups are encouraged to create a name for their group thus forming a common identity and the establishment of group chats in Signal or Whatsapp is encouraged. They are also careful to make sure that those who start the course are sufficiently motivated.

In addition to social learning and good content, I think there were a number of other factors that helped to keep people engaged. First of all, a good intake and selection. People were asked if they had time (some answered no and were therefore not selected :)) and what their motivation was. The 500 fortunate participants were selected from more than 900 applications. In addition, there was continuous feedback from the experts and some mentors on the contributions. This was highly appreciated and even more feedback was requested. In addition, there was a clear structure with a final weekly assignment: the gateway to the next week. When all gates were completed, people could download a certificate. This was certainly an incentive for many participants.

In this way they achieved a 54% completion rate and high learner satisfaction, remarkable for this type of open course. This cannot compare to a regular campus course since the participants are doing the course in their spare time and it is not part of a degree programme that they are committed to with financial consequences for non-completion.  

It is clear that collaborative and social learning have contributed to keeping participants engaged in the food systems e-course. The organization and supervision takes time, but you can minimize it through clear instructions and the use of voluntary mentors. Online you have to look redefine participation differently compared to face-to-face. You will never get 100% of participants doing all learning activities. Someone who does not fully participate but does participate in two online sessions can also learn something from this what he / she wants to learn, self-management and making choices become more important. It seems that a percentage of 50% is a good achievement for a large-scale online course.

This approach is similar in many ways to our experience with a course called Open Networked Learning, aimed at university teachers who want to explore the opportunities and challenges of online teaching and learning. We are colleagues from four Swedish universities who organise the course and run it twice a year together with a network of up to 15 partner institutions from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa and Singapore. It's on a smaller scale compared to the food systems course, with usually 100-130 participants from the 13-15 partner institutions plus about 30 open learners who are admitted each term on a first-come-first-served basis. We have a good completion rate, usually around 70-80% and this is largely due to the fact that group work is a central feature.

The focus of the course is problem-based learning (PBL) and we divide the participants into groups with 8 members per group. Each group has a facilitator from one of the partner institutions and a co-facilitator who is a former participant who volunteers to support a group as a study buddy; someone who knows how it feels to participate and can offer advice and understanding. We provide support for these facilitators in the form of a course guide and regular meetings to discuss the groups' progress and current issues. This way we hope to offer a consistent experience for all participants and all facilitators share a common approach to facilitation.

The institutional learners get local support and also receive a certificate (or in some cases credits) for their efforts whilst the open learners have no such foundation and this has sometimes led to lower motivation. To counter this we now we now offer online support sessions for them and the response has been extremely positive. We have also found that quite a few of our co-facilitators are former open learners who volunteer to return for another course where their only reward is a recognition certificate. They simply enjoy the course and want to continue to be a part of it. That in itself is a reward for us as organisers.

Theoretically anyone is free to follow the course since the activities (webinars, recordings and tweetchats) and the topic work are all available on the public course site. However we have found that those who try this option seldom stay for long since they do not have access to the course community and above all do not have the support and motivation of joining a group. So now before the course we contact all the open learners and inform them that participation in a group is a prerequisite for certification though they are welcome to follow informally on their own.

Our model is probably not very scaleable because recruiting and supporting the facilitators would be too time-consuming and increase the risk of groups not getting a consistent course experience. So we keep the numbers low by recruiting through the partner institutions and using word of mouth to attract open learners. The example of the food systems course described above does however show that maybe a certain upscaling is possible. It's a fine balance though to combine the intimacy of group work with a large scale course environment. 

On-site, online or hybrid? It depends on what you want to achieve.

Photo by Alexandre Pellaes on Unsplash

As more and more conferences return to on-site mode, many feel the need to offer a hybrid mode where most of the event is also available to online participants. Is this just a symbolic gesture to show that we have learned something from the pandemic? How involved are the online participants and how do organisers charge for the online experience? How do we facilitate true interaction between the two groups of participants? Most importantly I think is the question of whether hybrid is the way forward of just an awkward and technically demanding add-on. 

Attending an online conference is very different from actually being there for many reasons. I have found that I sign up for more online conferences than I would ever attend physically but when I'm online I only attend the interesting parts and skip the rest. In some sessions I listen with one ear and continue with other work. I attend but I don't really engage. I am still at work and the conference becomes like background music with a few highlights when I fully concentrate on it. Maybe similar things happen with hybrid teaching. It would be interesting to study the distraction levels of campus and online students.

But maybe the answer is not to try and cater for everyone but focus on your target group. If the whole point of the event is for people to meet and discuss on-site then make that clear and restrict it to on-site delivery. However if an on-site event would automatically exclude important members of the target group then make the event fully online or even asynchronous. By trying to include everyone you risk excluding everyone and the event becomes a messy compromise.

I started thinking about these questions after reading an article by Mark Carrigan on the LSE blog, Is hybrid a desirable ‘new normal’ for academic events? The problems with hybrid are well known in terms of technical complexity and the risk of online participants being flies on the wall, passive observers. If you want an online audience then focus on that and don't try to do two things at the same time. Conferences can instead become processes with asynchronous online interaction over a whole week or several weeks. 

The equipment and expertise which are currently necessary to run a hybrid event mean it probably isn’t the right (or sustainable) choice for a relatively niche event that is unlikely to attract much of an online audience. In which case it might make more sense to have a physical event, with a collective output which can be distributed asynchronously. Digital artefacts like blogposts and podcasts have a tendency to circulate far beyond their original creators. The raw fact of access can be valuable, but the careful packaging of ideas and discussions can be a much more effective way of facilitating remote participation. It might be that only a small number of people would tune in synchronously to engage with an event, but a digital output from that event over time might assemble a significantly larger audience.

It's similar with hybrid teaching. Some sessions must be on campus and therefore we need to make that clear well in advance. Other sessions can be online only and even campus students will join the session from their own laptops. Maybe some sessions can be hybrid but we need to work hard to make them truly inclusive and collaborative. Hybrid sounds like the best of both worlds but can so easily be messy and a disappointment for all. The solution is to decide on the best format for the group you want to be involved. There is no default in the future - decide the optimal format each time.  

This isn’t an argument against physical meetings, but rather a plea that we avoid drifting back to them. The familiar rhythms of seminars and conferences feel intensely alluring after the isolation and suffering which have characterised the last eighteen months. However, do we really want to return to a situation where they are the default? Or could we imagine an approach to academic events which recognises how these options (face-to-face, hybrid, digital) are equally worthwhile depending on what we’re trying to achieve?

Being there - that feeling we can't achieve online

Photo by Aranxa Esteve on Unsplash

No matter how many amazing new platforms and tools for online events we create, none of them really match the feeling of physically being there. The online event can actually be more flexible, more interactive, more inclusive and offer higher quality video and audio than sitting at the back of a hot and stuffy lecture theatre but it can't match that feeling of presence. It's the same with TV coverage of concerts and sporting events. You can sit at home and watch it all in super high-definition quality with surround sound, close-ups, slow motion replays, commentary and analysis but the sad truth is that you weren't really there. There are no credibility points for saying that you saw it on TV. I've been to many memorable events where I couldn't see or hear the action very well, was packed in a sweaty and noisy crowd, had great difficulty getting there and getting away afterwards (endless queues, pushing, noise, waiting) but I can always boast that I was there and that's what impresses people later on. That feeling of being part of something, an exclusive community, cannot be underestimated. That's why people will still pay extortionate amounts of money to attend events that are broadcast live. Feelings are worth more than quality. Even if there are billions of photos and films from all angles of, say, the Taj Mahal, I would still take at least a hundred more just to show that I have also been there.

If we think of academic conferences and events there are digital solutions for almost all the usual activities. You can mingle and network using platforms like SpatialChat, Wonder or Gather, use Zoom for plenary sessions and group discussions, create exciting virtual world conference or exhibition centres with Virbela or Virtway, go on virtual city tours, sightseeing with Google Streetview, have immersive virtual reality meetings in Spatial and so on. The list of platforms is impressive and is growing weekly so logically there should be no reason to return to on-site events. In addition, the environmental arguments against returning to large on-site conferences are overwhelming. 

But no matter how much we can achieve online we will still want to meet at a physical location. The need to be there is all about intangible factors: emotion, atmosphere, sense of belonging, sense of space. We can achieve a lot online but maybe we have to accept that some elements will always be missing.

MOOCs in study circles for teacher professional development

"Workshop" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Global Landscapes Forum

A return to an old theme this week of how we can use MOOCs to complement on-site training. Even if many MOOCs offer opportunities for forum discussions, many people would benefit from face-to-face discussions around the course material, especially in their own language. There are many examples around the world where groups of people decide to form a support community to help each other through a MOOC (MOOC meet-ups, learning hubs etc). This community can meet weekly either online or better still face-to-face. The community offers a safe space for asking question and discussing course topics and can be the difference between completing the course and dropping out in confusion.

The idea of self-organising study groups is firmly anchored in the Nordic tradition of study circles developed in the 19th century by pioneers like the Danish pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig. The principle here is also collaborative learning, a kind of community of interest. None of the group is necessarily an expert or teacher so the group decides together how to structure the course and one course can inspire a new one. Generally one of the circle acts as a facilitator but the study form is collaborative investigation and discussion. This form of study has spread internationally and can today be applied to studying a MOOC. The general principles and generic examples of the MOOC can be adapted by the study circle to local and specific cases thereby adding relevance and practical application.

One area where MOOCs can make an impact is in professional development. There are, for example, plenty of courses aimed at teachers and the study circle approach can work very well. To encourage this the European Commission’s Teacher Academy initiative on the School Education Gateway has published  a guide entitled Using Massive Open Online Courses in Schools. How to set up school-based learning communities to improve teacher learning on MOOCs. This is a step-by-step guide to organising a study group at a school or college to study a MOOC as professional development. Studying individually is challenging for many: finding time and maintaining motivation as well as the challenges of adapting to the course technology and learning in a foreign language. The moral support of colleagues adds a dimension that is not available in many MOOCs and the group can discuss how to apply the lessons learned in their own practice.

The study groups therefore offered a framework to support colleagues with low levels of digital and self-regulated learning competence to help them benefit from a MOOC, while at the same time contextualising and localising what was learned on the MOOC and facilitating a transfer to practice. Feedback from study group participants and the eight pilot teachers suggests that the study groups successfully addressed all of these areas. 

Here's a short film that gives a clear overview of the project and its outcomes.

Conferences - from exclusive to inclusive events

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Technology is often used simply to enable us to continue doing what we have always done but in a digital space. The same seems to be true for online conferences. New platforms and tools are being launched almost weekly and there is a bewildering diversity for organisers to choose between. The corporate market for online conferences is booming and will no doubt replace many of the on-site conferences after the pandemic has faded (though that could be further in the future than most would like to imagine). Digital media have the potential to help us rethink the conference into inclusive and accessible spaces for networking and sharing and there have indeed been many innovative examples in recent months, offering more spaces for discussion and networking as well as offering both synchronous and asynchronous activities. However, it is extremely hard to break from tradition and academic conferences are vital rites of passage for young researchers by having a conference paper accepted. 

This week I enjoyed reading a couple of articles by Catherine Oliver of the London School of Economics. Her article in The Post-pandemic University, Post-Pandemic Conferences: Academic networks and changing conference spaces, describes how online conferences have the potential to become more inclusive but that there is a risk that we will return to the the old hierarchies and privileges. Changing traditions involves so much more than simply creating the potential for change, there has to be an awareness that things need to change. The academic conference model is tried, tested and comfortable. After the pandemic most people will want to return to their comfort zones.

The doors of the academic conference create a boundary that not only produces insiders and outsiders, but also the outsiders within. The doors of the academic conference have opened during Covid-19, but a return to in-person conferences threatens to slam them shut.

There are new opportunities to open up conferences but technology does not automatically bring change. It enables change but the will to change has to be there.  

Conferences are an important space for the making (and breaking) of academic communities. The doors to the academic conference are, in theory, more open than ever. But, with the UK government’s intention to get life “back to normal” by the 21st June 2021, the doors might be about to slam on accessible conferences. Conference hierarchies have not been flattened by the pandemic, but new spaces and opportunities are beginning to emerge. While conferences produce insiders and outsiders, they also allow for radical connections to be made; encounters that are more difficult to replicate at virtual conferences. Online networking comes with a host of new relations and rules. But, as we move to post-pandemic hybrid conferences, we must maintain the momentum to radically reimagine not only our academic spaces, but our academic communities.

Another article by Catherine Oliver, on the LSE's site, Online conferences: opening opportunities or reproducing inequality?, looks at those who are often marginalised in traditional conferences, precarious academics such as doctoral students looking for their first foothold on the academic ladder and researchers without the resources to travel. Many have benefited from this year's online conferences, being able to participate and contribute at very low cost and without the need for travel and lengthy visa applications. Many conferences have seen significant increases in attendance by going online and reducing or even waiving attendance fees. It is important not to forget them in our rush "back to normal".

The same care and attention owed to ‘in-person’ events needs to be paid to the organisation of online academic conferences if they are to be fertile spaces for doing academia differently. As we face uncertain futures, now is not the time to abandon precarious academics but to radically reimagine our knowledge production and communication spaces with accessibility, transparency, and openness at the centre.

There will certainly be a sigh of relief when on-site conferences return and many will flock back to the sense of community and shared experience that they offer. But we must remember that such events are always exclusive and many voices are never heard there. We need to learn from the past year and create more innovative and inclusive online conferences with a much lower threshold for involvement. The traditional conferences may hopefully also widen their scope and allow a variety of forms of participation.

Saying something stupid - giving students time to think

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How often do you wish you could delete something you said or at least get a chance to reformulate it? I do almost every day. In conversations and meetings we often make spontaneous comments that were not well formulated or even thought through. In discussion forums I sometimes edit something I wrote in haste, or I write a new statement showing that I have revised my idea. However, in spoken communication or indeed on Twitter it's hard to edit or retract. Once it's out there a remark can fly off into circulation - as many indiscreet celebrities and politicians can confirm. As a result, many people are reluctant to speak in meetings (physical or digital) in fear of saying something that may come back to haunt them in the future. Fear of revealing your vulnerability, that you don't really understand the topic yet and are fumbling for clarity.

Learning is all about changing your mind. New information and arguments mean that we are constantly reforming and refining our opinions. Curiously the media tend to attack politicians who change their mind about an issue seeing it as a sign of weakness instead of realising that we are constantly changing our opinion as new facts and ideas are assimilated. Of course we have very fixed basic principles of what is right and wrong but the rest is flexible. Changing your opinion is a sign that you are learning and can listen to other arguments.

So how can we work with this in teaching? I think it's important to give students time to refine their ideas before they go into a class discussion. If you ask a question in class you are often met with silence. They all have answers but they're not ready to share them yet. If you want a good discussion you need to let them formulate and refine their ideas first in a secure setting. In an online class for example, this can be done by asking everyone to take a pen and paper, turn off cameras and microphones and spend, say, five minutes to write down responses to a question you ask. Then put them in pairs where each partner explains their answer uninterrupted for a couple of minutes and then they briefly discuss these answers. When the class is back together again they can all share their answers anonymously using a polling tool like Mentimeter or AnswerGarden. The ideas have now been refined through pair discussion but it's good to let them appear without names. Then the variety of responses can be the basis of larger group discussions where the group can formulate a new answer that is more mature. Finally we can start a class discussion where the fear of saying something "stupid" has been reduced significantly. This process can also be prepared asynchronously before the online meeting and then letting them discuss in pairs or small groups so that they all have something to contribute to the class discussion.

The main point is to build a foundation for discussion rather than plunging straight in. If we allow for a period of silence before expecting any answers there is a greater chance that more people will contribute. We can't always use the method I explained above but when you ask a question in a meeting or class tell people to think about it for even a couple of minutes before inviting answers. More thoughtful answers are worth a couple of minutes of awkward silence.

PS

Soon after publishing this post I came across a very relevant article by Nikole D. Patson on the same theme: Collaborative Note-taking as an Alternative to Recording Online Sessions.

Great expectations and how to manage them

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Isn't amazing that some people always misunderstand your most carefully planned and explained activities? What seems crystal clear in your head seems unclear and messy to others. Often it boils down to assumptions and expectations that are not clearly defined. Each student and teacher enters a course with their own preconceptions and assumptions of what they can expect and what is expected of them. It is so easy to think of students as a collective instead of a diverse group of individuals thrown together by chance in your particular course. Their expectations have been formed by previous courses and teachers and it is natural that they expect your course to be similar to the course they took last term. Much has been written about the difficulties of getting students to turn on their cameras in meetings or of students dropping out when group work starts but often it is because they don't see the activity as meaningful. Why is the group work important and why do they need to turn on their cameras? Too often we simply assume that this is obvious. The start of each course is therefore a renegotiation of how we approach the challenges ahead of us. The more explicit this negotiation the greater the likelihood of success. 

This is one of the themes in an article in E-learn magazine by Tom Langston, Engaging Students: An Approach to Solving the Zoom Conundrum. He describes the importance of each class negotiating a code of conduct that isn't simply a case of the students agreeing to the teachers expectations but reaching a mutually acceptable framework. It's also about addressing students' expectations of each other.

When you start teaching a class, it can be easy to highlight who you are and what you might intend to cover over the course of the module. It might also be less often that you explicitly tell the students what you are expecting from them. Even if you do, do they explicitly agree to your “demands” on them? This is where a conversation can help shape what is to come throughout the entire teaching block. If you are explicit about your standards and why you approach things the way you do, there can be no recourse from the students about why they have not held up their part of the agreement. Or you to yours.

Managing expectations is just as relevant on campus as online, though the mismatches are more pronounced in online courses. Another dimension that adds to the expectation mismatch is the increasing diversity of students from traditional young campus students to older lifelong learners with work and families to deal with. Mix in cultural diversity and you have a myriad of expectations and potential for misunderstanding. In today's multi-layered university it is unwise to assume. There is no one magic formula but a constant dialogue and negotiation, offering students a variety of spaces for interaction and collaboration.

Avoiding Zoom fatigue and finding new ways to collaborate online

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Many of us spend several hours a day in online meetings and the term Zoom fatigue has become a popular topic of discussion. Our extreme dependence on video meeting platforms is of course due to the exceptional times we live in and when we are able to meet face-to-face again the number of online meetings will no doubt decrease, though still much more frequent than before the pandemic. But what is missing in these online sessions? We can certainly see each other, smile, laugh, gesticulate and interact but what makes it all so tiring and rather repetitive?

A new study by Jeremy N. Bailenson of Stanford University, Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue, has investigated the factors behind Zoom fatigue and offers some remedies (see also a summary of the report in an article in New Atlas, Stanford study into “Zoom Fatigue” explains why video chats are so tiring. Bailenson highlights four main issues:

• Eye-gaze at a close distance. We see a gallery of faces, many complete strangers, looking at us all the time. This would never happen in a physical meeting and can be rather disconcerting. Are they really looking at me and what are they thinking? Do I look all right or do they notice that my hair is a bit untidy or there's a pile of junk on the desk behind me?
• Cognitive load. We often exaggerate our non-verbal signals to make them clear, like nodding very deliberately or looking straight into the camera. It's impossible to turn and smile at a colleague or exchange a knowing glance when a common issue is mentioned. We also have chat messages and other communication tools to deal with.
• All-day mirror. We spend a lot of time looking at ourselves and being very aware of our appearance. This is a distraction and something we never have to deal with in physical meetings. One remedy for this is to cancel the self-view option in the platform. 
• Reduced mobility. In physical meetings we sometimes stand up or stretch our legs for a few minutes but in online meetings we generally sit still for long periods, gazing at faces or slideshows. We also tend to sit very close to the computer camera and this adds to the strain. Maybe if we sometimes switched to audio-only we could all move around while we discuss and thus take a break from the gallery gaze.

But with Zoom, all people get the front-on views of all other people nonstop. This is similar to being in a crowded subway car while being forced to stare at the person you are standing very close to, instead of looking down or at your phone. On top of this, it is as if everyone in the subway car rotated their bodies such that their faces were oriented toward your eyes. And then, instead of being scattered around your peripheral vision, somehow all those people somehow were crowded into your fovea where stimuli are particularly arousing (Reeves et al., 1999). For many Zoom users, this happens for hours consecutively.

We also need to realise that we all need some recovery time before entering the next meeting. Although you can feel super-efficient by stacking online meetings one after the other, you will be much more efficient if you schedule at least 10 minutes between those meetings to simulate the time you would spend walking from one physical meeting to the next. Get up, go outside for a few minutes and mentally tune in to the next task.

So what's the alternative to the talking heads format? Maybe we need to stop gazing at each other and do things together. A post by David White, Spatial collaboration: how to escape the webcam, introduces the concept of spatial collaboration, where we focus not on our faces on the screen but on interacting in a shared space such as a whiteboard, collaborative documents like Google Drive or a storyboard like Padlet, Mural or Miro. We can all write or draw on these spaces and the focus is more on the activity and collaboration than our faces. One simple but effective method is how to create a discussion with the help of a simple drawing of a table and names around it.

My suggestion was to draw a very simple diagram of a table (just a square) and place each of the participants’ names around it for each group. We then shared this simple ‘map’ into the non-space of the platform and asked the groups to go clockwise around the table. This was an easy way to establish the order the discussion should go in, but I also noticed that there was suddenly a greater sense of togetherness and place. You could imagine who you were sat next to or opposite, and while this didn’t change the functionality of the technology it did change the psychology of it. It didn’t take much to help people imagine themselves into a shared location.

This spatial collaboration does not have to be noisy to be effective. You can have very rewarding silent collaboration (see my earlier post on this), at least for a few minutes, thus providing variation and reducing fatigue.  

Of course it's great to see each other, but maybe not as much as we do now. 

Visibility in online meetings

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What do you look at during all those video meetings? Many of us spend a lot of time watching ourselves and becoming very aware of what we look like on the screen. That's a major difference between physical and digital meetings; we become much more self-aware and concerned with our appearance and gestures. We are also unaware of who is watching us Since we can all choose gallery view or speaker view you never know who is watching you, even if you are not actively involved. Many people forget that they are visible and will behave in a less than focused manner. Some check out physically but are still digitally present: an empty chair, camera pointing at the ceiling etc. I imagine most of us have done this at least once. The point is that if your camera is on you should probably assume that someone is looking at you.

Then there are the participants who choose not to switch on their cameras. There are many reasons for this, such as poor connectivity and privacy concerns, but unless you can create a very strong sense of community and trust in a group you cannot expect everyone to want to be visible at all times. However, even if we accept this and understand why some people are wary of being constantly on show, this affects who we interact with in the session and how we value the participants. This is a fascinating topic that is described in a post by Autumn Caines, The Zoom gaze. 

She writes about the power dynamics of being visible and not being visible in video meetings. Visible participants can attract attention more easily (waving, physical hand up) and are more obviously engaged; even if they may be doing something else they are looking at their screen and camera. Invisible participants have difficulty attracting attention and have to rely on the chat to make a contribution. This is a problem for those with low bandwidth.

It is wonderful to give students the option of turning their cameras on or not but are there underlying power dynamics (unconscious, implicit, and unintended) of being seen that still create inequities in these environments? Are teachers unconsciously tuned in to faces, expressions, body language in such a way that privileges students who are privileged to have fast bandwidth, nice cameras, and good microphones? My gut tells me yes.

I have written before about the inequalities of hybrid webinars where the teacher has a studio audience as well as online participants. Here the on-site participants have direct contact with the teacher whilst the online group has to make significant efforts to be heard or seen at all. It seems that the division between visible and invisible participants in a completely online setting has a similar imbalance.

It is not just the lack of visibility that can lead to inequalities. Names are also important. A participant with camera on but a cryptic name will be accepted more than the combination of no camera and an anonymous name. After all the fuss about Zoombombing earlier this year people are naturally suspicious of participants with generic or nonsensical names and no video. Anonymity may be vital for vulnerable people but the risk of being taken as a potential spammer and being ejected from the meeting are high.

How can we try to address these inequalities? There is no clear answer to this but one aspect of online meetings that we need to develop is using different media and spaces so that everyone can find a channel for their voice. This means having parallel spaces for collaborative writing (collaborative documents, whiteboard, forum, chat etc) and including group work. It also means extending the discussion asynchronously so that there is a space for those who like to reflect first before they contribute. Maybe we should use the synchronous meeting time for input and inspiration and then allow participants to discuss and collaborate on their own terms, in their own online group discussion or as asynchronous discussions. Then gather everyone together again to examine the results. Focus on a task rather than visible online presence.

Binge learning - keeping learners hooked

"Watching Tv" (CC BY 2.0) by sandra_vos

Netflix fans seem to have no problem devoting several days to watching an entire series (or several series) with few breaks. The series is so compelling and engaging that we immerse ourselves completely in the experience. The creators of the series are extremely skillful at grabbing our attention and carefully embedding elements that will keep us watching: fascinating characters,  multiple plots, cliff-hangers, intrigues. Could these strategies be useful to increase engagement in online courses, in particular MOOCs that still fail to retain the vast majority of those who sign up for a course?

This is the topic of an interesting article, Going over the Cliff: MOOC Dropout Behavior at Chapter Transition, by Chen Chen, Gerhard Sonnert, Philip Sadler, Dimitar Sasselov, Colin Fredericks, and David Malana, contained in new publication The MOOC is dead—long live MOOC 2.0! They have looked at how MOOC participants tend to drop out at the end of modules and suggest the use of a storyline with cliffhanger elements as a way of maintaining curiosity about what is to come in future modules.

One of these strategies is cliff-hangers, which is a widely used strategy for retaining viewer attention in the field of broadcasting, such as radio and television. Common examples include ending an episode with suspense or stopping for a commercial break just before the replay of a critical score or decision in a sport. This article suggests that there is merit in the adoption of this strategy in MOOCs where learners are expected to assume greater responsibility for their learning with minimal guidance and support. The effective use of this strategy in educational settings, however, will require teachers to act as architects or designers of independent student learning experiences, and not simply deliverers of the subject matter content (see also Naidu, 2016).

Just as many courses have benefited from elements of gamification to raise engagement levels, maybe a greater sense of drama and story could also contribute to higher completion rates. This doesn't mean trivialising education but rather adapting elements from drama, film and entertainment to enhance intrinsic motivation. It also requires new skills for a course development team.

Could we ever see cases of binge learning, where people happily spend their waking hours immersed in a learning experience? Why not?

Towards a different model for internationalisation

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In the wake of the current crisis, internationalisation in higher education would seem to have ground to a halt. With international travel virtually impossible and unlikely to recover any time soon, the numbers of students studying abroad or applying for exchange programmes look likely to evaporate, at least for the coming year. This in turn puts enormous financial pressure on institutions who are heavily dependent on fees from incoming international students. International student and staff exchange programmes like the European Erasmus+ will also be on hold as long as borders are closed and international flights are cancelled. At the same time, the present global crisis shows clearly that global problems require global solutions making it all the more important that all students get experience in international collaboration. If physical mobility is going to be increasingly limited, particularly due to its environmental impact, we need to rethink our approach to internationalisation with virtual exchange as the norm rather than the exception. Of course it's not the same as travelling and meeting people face-to-face but it's a much more inclusive practice and can be implemented across the board.

An article in University World News, Is the pandemic a watershed for internationalisation? takes a critical look at traditional practices and looks forward to a new and more inclusive approach to internationalisation. Physical mobility has always been an exclusive activity.

Clearly, international travel is elitist: it is only a possibility for a minority of students and in terms of outbound students from the Global North, these are often white, female and economically advantaged. ... In short, while mobility has enormous potential as a transformative educational experience, it is an exclusive activity and its impact on individuals is variable.

Traditional mobility will not disappear in the future but it will simply not be viable in the long term.  The last two months have shown us that most educational activities can be carried out digitally, in many cases as well or even better than in a physical space. More people will question the necessity of a physical meeting if the same can be achieved digitally. International conferences and projects can become truly global if they are online and potentially opening up to all those who could never afford to attend the physical equivalent. Digital collaboration with partner institutions is already increasing and will surely increase sharply after the crisis is over. The term global learning is presented as one way forward, meaning that the curriculum is global by default..

The term global learning, as defined by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, for example, provides universities with a way of conceptualising and developing a curriculum that engages all students in “the critical analysis of and an engagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies … and their implications for people’s lives and the earth’s sustainability”.

Another aspect of the new internationalisation is widening engagement with the local community where in many countries there is a diverse and multi-cultural society, something the article describes as a pedagogy of encounter.

A pedagogy of encounter is a powerful concept because it does not rely on mobility. There are many opportunities to engage students in intercultural and global learning in class, on campus and in local communities. Thanks to large-scale global migration in recent decades, as well as the widening participation agenda, in many countries ‘local’ students are more diverse than they have ever been.

A globalised curriculum is certainly possible and there is technology to enable it. The big question is whether we have the will and the vision to move in this direction. I suspect after the current crisis there will be a massive demand for a return to business as usual. Physical mobility programmes are familiar territory, easily measured and very visible. A globalised curriculum involves developing a new mindset among teachers, students and management, is much more complex to implement and is harder to quantify and showcase. I love the vision, let's see if we can learn all this.

Zoom - a question of trust

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Since my last post there has been increasing media attention on Zoom, not just on the phenomenon of zoombombing that I experienced but also on various serious security and privacy issues. The platform has become almost default for millions of teachers in schools and universities around the world, increasing its usage from about 10 million users in December to over 200 million in March. But such extreme usage has revealed that privacy and security were not top of the company's priorities according to an article in NPR, A Must For Millions, Zoom Has A Dark Side — And An FBI Warning.

"Things you just would like to have in a chat and video application — strong encryption, strong privacy controls, strong security — just seem to be completely missing," said Patrick Wardle, a security researcher who previously worked at the National Security Agency.

The article also tells of several unfortunate examples of zoombombing including a doctoral thesis defence that got hijacked and a meeting of a branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, prompting even a warning from the FBI. Zoom has been working hard at calming fears and they are now prioritising security issues while putting new feature development on hold (see the Zoom message to users from 1 April). It was also revealed that the company have been sharing user data with Facebook and LinkedIn (see Mashable), something that they admitted and claimed was a mistake. Furthermore, a bug was found that enabled hackers to access users' accounts (see Mashable). I can imagine that many of Zoom's staff have had little sleep during the past week.

I have been trying to adjust my Zoom settings and giving participants much less control than before. Many articles recommend using passwords for all meetings but I haven't gone that far yet. Since I'm often involved in webinars and open sessions in Zoom we usually want to reach a wide audience. I love the idea of people from different places, professions and areas of expertise getting together to discuss and exchange ideas and up till now that has been possible using different e-meeting platforms. Adding passwords and so on adds barriers to spontaneous participation and it is sad to lose that opportunity because of the destructive behaviour of a minority of idiots.

I'm sure Zoom will address all these issues and are promising regular updates on progress, but the central issue here is one of trust. The education sector works with children and young people whose privacy and integrity we have a duty to safeguard. We are also dependent on commercial platforms and tools that we assume also respect this duty and with whom there are special agreements adapted for the education sector. But if we find that there are loopholes in these agreements that trust is broken and we have to face the question of who we should trust in the future. I can almost understand that if you use a service that is labelled as free there will be a price in terms of how my data is used, but if you are paying a lot of money for a tailored educational solution then there should be very strict controls on encryption, data protection and so on. If these companies want to be in the education sector they have to be able to guarantee security and integrity. The alternative is for the education sector to run its own platforms in its own infrastructure and be in control of its own security. Not a very likely scenario given the costs but in today's world who knows what lies ahead.

Update: A good and balanced overview of the situation is an article, Zoom isn't malware, by three security experts.

The week I got Zoombombed

"Troll" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Observe The Banana

Before the COVID-19 emergency, I travelled to work to sit at my desk and have lots of video meetings, mostly using Zoom. Now I stay at home and do the same thing. I haven't noticed a massive change in my working routines basically. However, since most education in the world is now being conducted online the use of e-meeting tools like Zoom has gone off the scale and all platforms are busy expanding their capacity to meet the unprecedented demand.

But when a service gets popular it attracts the trolls and cranks that get a thrill out of disrupting and sabotaging. They now seem to have found their way into Zoom meetings and this week I got my first taste. I have been very fortunate to have escaped the trolls over all the years that I have been active in social media and online communication. I have also been quite open at inviting people to webinars and other synchronous events. Anyway on Thursday we were running a 2 day internal conference where teachers could exchange ideas with each other on teaching online. The conference ran over two days and teachers could come and go as their schedules allowed. On Thursday morning we had an external speaker and I thought we could maybe attract some external participants by tweeting about it. This is not unusual and I'd never heard of anyone having problems with advertising a live session this way.

Seconds after my tweet, the trolls turned up and started screaming loudly and sharing their screen shots of assorted excrement. I scrambled to cancel the participant screen-sharing and ejected the offenders from the room as soon as I could. I also deleted my tweet. After a few minutes of chaos things calmed down and we could start the session though I was on red alert checking all new participants and immediately ejecting people with generic names like John or Dave. The rest of the conference went well and no more trolls turned up. Unfortunately I mistakenly ejected a real participant who was then unable to join the rest of the conference (once ejected you cannot return). I could have changed the setting to readmit ejected participants but didn't dare unless the trolls came back.

I felt less ashamed when I realised that I was not the only one to suffer from this. There's even a name for it, Zoombombing, and is described in an article in the Guardian, Trolls exploit Zoom privacy settings as app gains popularity. In Zoom we want to create creative meetings where participants have a voice, can share screens and collaborate so we have all these options open. We also want to make it easy to come to a meeting without the barriers of passwords and up till now this open attitude has been possible. But after this experience I will need to be more careful organising events and build in safeguards against unauthorised entry. Zoom have reacted quickly and have now published a page of tips on how to limit the threat from trolls, How to Keep the Party Crashers from Crashing Your Zoom Event. useful measures for future public events are password protection, use a waiting room for monitoring new arrivals, stop screen-sharing for participants (unless the host gives them permission), mute all participants on entry, put everyone on hold until you eject the intruders, temporarily disable participants' video and more. For webinars I only send the link to the room to those who have registered for the event (usually one day before) and that has so far been enough to keep the meeting in order.

I will certainly be more careful in future and I would urge you to do the same. That doesn't mean locking down a wonderful forum for collaboration, just be careful as host and know where the emergency buttons are. But think before you post that link publicly.