Or, 10 things I remember from Edulearn24 (the first five).
Contents
1. First flight since Covid
I was waiting at Gatwick for my first flight since just before Covid hit – a full four and a half years out of the air and the first one of my 50s. As the masses of carefree travellers swarmed around me, I shut myself away in an audio cocoon and pondered about the personal and professional circumstances that awaited. A first visit to Majorca. The first part of Spain I’d have visited outside of Barcelona. And what was probably going to be the biggest conference of my career at that point – Edulearn24, with an expected 600-800 delegates from around the world.
England were playing Slovakia in the knockout stages of Euro 2024 as I boarded the plane, 1-0 down. No WiFi on board, so I powered my phone down and sat tight to see what awaited me on the other side.
Turned out once I landed at the other end to be two goals late into extra time and a place in the Quarter Finals. Maybe, this was a sign that a good conference was ahead.
2. Conferencing Med-side
One thing I aim for whenever I go away to a conference is to try and get a swim in, particularly if I’m going to be presenting something. There’s something about a swim that helps with getting in the zone for talking to an audience about what you do back in the day job. The conference venue not only had a rooftop pool, but I was also able to roam barefoot in the Mediterranean in the evening once all the sessions were done. Not something you tend to get at a lunchtime event at a university just along a Tube line, and very much recommended.
The conference put on an array of other activities to help delegates with socialising, relaxing or building community. This included sprawling European-style buffets at lunchtime that put all delegates together around big round tables for breaking bread with strangers. There was a terrace yoga session as part of the programme (pitched at ‘busy teachers’), a delightful cocktail reception in the evening, and even a bus tour to the nearby town of Sóller, on the other side of the mountains that ringed Palma.
There’s something very rewarding about being able to take your practice to different communities from the ones you’re used to and getting treated well in the process.
3. Edulearn’s scale
The conference itself felt vast. There were 753 registered in-person delegates from all around the world, which after furtive post-pandemic forays into social environments I’d been making in previous summers, felt like quite a contrast. Social distancing was now much more of a memory than a daily reality.
Edulearn is also a very presentation-heavy conference – some of them were very interesting, but a few others were to be rather politely endured instead. I guess sometimes when you’re confronted with an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet, you might have the odd few mouthfuls that don’t quite agree with you, alongside all the other tasty morsels. There were nevertheless plenty of treats all the same.
4. New metaphors and playing parts
My session was in the final block on the last day. With most conferences, this tends to means that you get far fewer bums on seats than you would do earlier in the programme, and so it proved with mine. All good though – I had enough ears in the room to be able to give my talk and tell my story, thus justifying the journey.
I was also asked by the conference organisers to chair the session and therefore keep things to time and introduce the other speakers. One thing to now tick off the professional development bucket list, and it was a great way to feel a part of something bigger beyond just giving my talk. At the end of the session, one of the organising team presented me with a small ceramic sculpture that was apparently part of a local artisan tradition. This gift of appreciation was a really nice gesture.
I was presenting a paper about academic podcasting and the conference gave me an opportunity to introduce a new metaphor into the sectoral bloodstream. My paper was titled ‘From the Sage On The Stage To The Peer In The Ear‘. In this paper, I explored the benefits and challenges of using podcasts in higher education and of what happens in the relationship between teacher, learner and educational material if you move the educator from the lecture theatre stage to place them (metaphorically speaking) directly into the learner’s ears.
This was a riff on King’s (1993) analogy of moving the ‘sage on the stage‘ and the transmissive academic teaching style associated with that to that of the ‘guide on the side‘, or seeing the educator as more of a facilitator of active learning methods. My paper (Pates, 2024) can be found here, and draws on experiences of both co-developing the ‘Teaching Here And There‘ podcast about hybrid teaching in HE and of listening to the ‘CLS Law and Society‘ podcast, out of The City Law School.
Drop a comment at the bottom of this post if you’re interested in discussing more about academic podcasting.
5. A model for Flipped Learning
Some keynotes come and go, but the good ones stay with you, whether it was the performance that stood out or the ideas introduced. Manu Kapur‘s was one of those keynotes that has stayed with me. Kapur, Professor for Learning Sciences and Higher Education at ETH Zurich and a leading researcher on ‘Productive Failure’, opened by suggesting that a problem in higher education is not that we learn poorly from bad lectures but that we learn poorly from good ones. An intriguing-enough proposition, he then went on to ask whether flipped learning was the answer to this problem.
Kapur recounted a (meta) meta-analysis that he and colleagues had conducted on flipped interventions. They looked at 173 studies on flipped learning, finding that there was a positive effect size in favour of flipping but as more active learning was incorporated into traditional instructional methods, the comparative effect of flipped learning tended to reduce. A key finding was that problem solving prior to in-class activity had a significant effect. In other words, the key to successful flipped learning seemed to be for the pre-class and in-class activities to be active rather than passive. He further suggested that educators should design for Productive Failure to help their students learn more effectively.
Kapur then introduced what he described as the ‘4F Model‘ (Fail > Flip > Form/Fix > Feed). With the first Fail phase, the focus should be on problem solving in a safe space. This means creating new problems for students for which they may not have the skills to succeed, and which are designed in a way to generate some ideas and try to solve the problems. The Flip phase involves giving the students some pre-class content, such as videos, activities or reading notes. These should be active rather than passive, so might include things like quizzes. The Form (or Fix) phase reintegrates the lecture and can include direct instruction, though this should not be a traditional lecture as active learning would again form the core. Here, a balance between the lecture and interactive activities is key. The final Feed phase involves differing modalities of feedback, through groupwork, tutorials, individual comments, group feedback sessions, or digital feedback tools. According to Kapur, direct instruction is important, but timing of when to apply it is key.
The full paper (Kapur et. al, 2022) that the 4F Model is based on can be found here. It’s definitely an approach that I’d be interested in exploring back in the day job.
Part II on this account will be published next week.
References
King A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching; 41(1), pp.30-35.
Kapur, M., Hattie, J., Grossman, I. & Sinha., T. (2022). Fail, flip, fix, and feed – Rethinking flipped learning: A review of meta-analyses and a subsequent meta-analysis. Frontiers in Education, 7, 956416.
Pates, D. (2024). From The Sage On The Stage To The Peer In The Ear. Edulearn Proceedings. pages 4986-4992.
