Keynote speaker – Diana Laurillard

Teachers in all sectors have learned a lot about what does and does not work well in online teaching in the last two years. The significant move they made as a profession was to discover that digital and online methods have many advantages, as well as disadvantages. The consensus is emerging now that we need a balanced blend of the methods of presence and distance, of conventional and digital technologies. But how do we discover and develop that ideal blend?

The talk will work through some of the key themes of the conference to address this question, now shared by the whole teaching profession. First we will look at what makes digital learning special, and why online learning is especially useful. To develop an optimal balance between presence and distance we need a pedagogical framework that embraces both the conventional and the digital, so we will consider how the Conversational Framework can help us achieve a good balance. Then we will look at the issue of learning design, and how its focus on the student’s experience of the teaching- learning process guides us to better use of the old and new technologies now available.

Finally we should acknowledge that we have a great deal to learn about this balance of presence and distance. The teaching profession must now collaborate to innovate, just as we do in science. We have an exciting prospect ahead, for reconceptualising teaching as a design science – bringing teachers in all sectors together, to exchange and develop new knowledge about digital pedagogies