(Moderator) We have with us someone who has been involved
in digital learning innovation for more than 20 years
Please welcome the University of Western Australia Pro Vice-Chancellor
of Education Innovation, Gilly Salmon (0:12)
(Applause)
(Gilly Salmon) So I'm going to talk to you about the impossible.
So if you're easily scared, you can leave now or at any time,
that's OK with me.
So I come from the very young country of Australia.
Most of you know I'm not Australian, but I've been living there nearly 5 years now.
Probably another 20 .... except me (check)
But in the young country of Australia, a university that's 100-years old
is very, very, very old.
So, and now, the University of Western Australia is very, very old.
It's a research-intensive, one with the most schools and campuses in the world,
on the mouth of the Swan River, in Western Australia,
and I'm going to show you a 1-minute movie to get a glimpse of our environment
and also our dreams.
So, you need to watch very carefully, because I'm going to talk about
the brief glimpse you get of the buildings because that's where my center is,
the Centre for Education Future.
So, we will move to the movie, please.
(strong-beat music)
(shouts)
(panting)
(narrator) When we start moving forward, the world starts with us.
(strong wind in branches - panting)
(narrator) So chase your dream. It's only impossible until it's done.
[Pursue impossible]
[The University of Western Australia]
(Applause) (Salmon) Thank you. 2:52
We made that movie to try and inspire our students
but we actually found it inspires us even more.
So, right at the beginning you saw some work for
University of Western Australia are true heritage buildings.
And I -- in there, we've put a future's observatory
and a learning design studio, to try and inspire the impossible
in both our faculty members and ultimately our students, to new design.
So, I've got this weird job title,
Pro Vice-Chancellor Education Innovation.
I'm sure when I was appointed, just over 12 months ago,
nobody knew what that meant.
Fortunately, they did allow me to invent it.
While you're listening to me, just to say there's going to be
a bit of a poll at the end.
If you got the My OEB app, you can look it up,
if not, there is a website, there is a link there up,
so that you can take part in the poll in a bit.
Now, I actually think an incredible number of words have been written
about innovation, especially in the scope of educational innovation
and disruptive technology.
And I did a bit of a survey.
i wasn't as knowledgeable as some of those people
that you've just heard speaking,
but it was rather odd that probably one of the very top things
that you can see, was how to promote innovation
in the changing modes of teaching,
which I think is probably one of our biggest challenges of all.
And actually, creating an evidence base for that,
because you all know, in universities, that's the way it goes:
If you haven't got evidence for it, it doesn't exist.
And so, we did a bit of a survey; there were the top universities,
we did some visits as well, in the US as well as other parts in the world.
And everyone, just everyone has still really not got into
achieving true innovation.
And so for me, that's still a bit of a mystery, and I think
it's really rather extraordinary that everyone in education,
all of you, at every level, is trying to do this
and yet most organizations, most institutions
are still striving to reorientate themselves to an innovation culture.
What will distinguish them, what will differentiate them?
What they offer their students and stakeholders.
So, we could very very easily blame it
on the level of dogmatic approaches and resistance.
And yet, by their nature, don't you think that most staff working in education
are often the most open to change and development, would you agree?
So I found it really quite a conundrum to tackle this.
So, maybe, you heard the first keynote this morning, David Price.
Maybe we're in denial that we even need to change, possibly:
that's one answer.
So some of my answers:
I know the university sector best, so I'll talk about that.
But I do actually think that this may apply
to many of the other sectors represented in this room.
The higher education sector, across the world,
is very compressed but also highly competitive now,
but also marginally differentiated.
It's mainly differentiated by .......... (check) research profile,
research orientation,......... reputation.
And also, everyone is upright
in an increasingly less and less and less regulated world.
Those of you standing, there's a few white pods, you can sit on them
in the front here......
if you're not too frightened.
Now, governments around the world are pressing for larger proportions
of their populations to attend university.
Most of them, not here in Germany, I understand, but most of us
have made paying for the experience a lifelong one.
For most students, and even that has done little
to dampen the enthusiasm for higher education,
There's more people going to university than really ever has in our lifetime.
Our children and our grandchildren are going to go
forward and forward and forward.
So there does appear to be, using the entrepreneurs' word,
reliable growth in the market place.
So therefore, we need to innovate.
We need to find ways of reaching that growth.
Second. Of course we know -- it has just been mentioned in the session just now --
that the number of university campuses would have to increase
at an incredible alarming rate.
I've heard something like 1 per month for the next 10 years
in order to meet the requirements of teaching in traditional ways.
Clearly, that's not going to happen, it's also not practical to extend
the existing campuses that we have with physical capacity and real estate.
So therefore, innovation, again, is needed.
Third. We know much of the way that we are teaching in Universities
at the moment, will not provide the citizens of the future
with the right skills,
nor will they graduate with the ability to undertake multiple careers
during their life times.
We've also heard most babies being born today will live to over 100.
I mean, we really need to be educating those people, don't we? Not ourselves.
So in short, the nature of work is changing.
So whatever our educational purposes, the need for change is striking.
And everyone of us has a shared responsibility, as educators,
to innovate to meet these and many other challenges that we face.
So, why would we turn to technology to assist us in this conundrum
is one of my questions.
But one of the things I've done,
since I've been at the University of Western Australia,
and as I mentioned, we put a physical space.
It's kind of a cross between a space for the community to gather,
a bit of a makers' space too;
somewhere a bit different, a bit different from the traditional areas
and it's actually for staff, not for students.
Most universities in the world are changing their libraries
and many of their traditional buildings into informal spaces for students,
so we thought we might do that for staff too.
And we called it The Future's Observatory.
So why put some technology in it?
Well, many forces, of course, in our society,
can bring about large scale changes in economics and societies, but
since the Industrial Revolution, say, the late 18th, early 19th centuries,
technology has had this unique role,
empowering growth and transforming economic value.
It has to be technology.
Technology represents in itself new ways of doing things
and once mastered, creates lasting change
which, applied to universities and schools, and training of all kind,
we won't immediately unlearn, you know:
our teachers, ways of teaching, our campuses, physical and virtual,
finally, through technologies, the ideas become implanted as innovations
and our world starts to move faster.
We can make it faster.
So, the most interesting part of this, for me,
is that some technologies have the potential
to disrupt the status quo in education,
-- and we've just been talking about some of them --
and lead finally to true innovation in the service of learning
and alter the way we imagine our teaching, teach our students, choose a curriculum,
assess their ability, instill new coaches in them,
so they live and work differently in the future:
in practice, create entirely new products and services.
And others simply do not.
And for me, things like lecture capture simply does not,
because it reproduces the ways we've undertaken learning for centuries.
So I think we need to be very careful in what technologies we choose
to disrupt and drive our innovations.
Otherwise, we simply embed the old better than we did before.
And the other thing to say is that education leaders cannot wait
until the meager, meager evolution that I've seen in my 20 years in this field
catch up, somehow, and we're not going to do it with Learning Management Systems
and we'll really not, you know, they're simply not moving.
I've just chosen a new Learning Management System
for the University of Western Australia.
I got the best I could, but the original values
of the way people teach and learn are still in there,
and we need to change that, we need to move forward on that.
And we also cannot be held back by other industries on which we depend.
You know, so the patch defense, going on, for example, with publishers.
We cannot let that happen, we do need to change this.
So it's time -- referring back to this morning --
to stop being 12 white men sitting around the table,
to stop rearranging the furniture and actually move on with the world.
And if we don't do it, no one else is going to.
It's those of you who are here with me today
that's actually going to do that run that you saw my students do earlier.
So at the moment, the link definitely between height and potential
is very unclear.
And of course, there are still surprises to come.
The future is like that, the future is like that.
Nobody can be certain.
We need now to understand how we can experiment,
how we can take risks, how we can ............. (check)
how we can prototype.
In practice, to learn from the future as it emerges; be ready to respond.
In short, create much more radical innovation
and stop taking baby steps: it's time to shift.
This is the Future's Observatory.
Objectives we saw are in this rather nice buildings
that look a little bit like Stanford at the beginning,
but flow by the river.
And we are reaching out to the impossible.
So I'm trying all sorts of different ways to try and reach out,
to achieve the impossible.
We're looking to partner with those who say Yes
rather than shake their heads in sorrow.
We're seeing the Observatory for staff
as a location used for observing terrestrial and celestial events.
Historically, of course, observatories were as simple as containing
an astronomical sextant for measuring the distance between stars
or perhaps something like Stonehenge,
which has some alignments on the astronomical phenomenon.
Now, the way we're seeing this, is we're trying to observe the future.
And I guess, some of the celestial events will be some of the digital life
and educational purposes.
So, it's a metaphor, OK, but we're trying to push people to understand
how a technology might help you to imagine an action, a future.
So this is what we're doing in here, and we've got some technologies in there,
I mean, this -- you can see the cruiser table that you can stand around,
so it's focusing very much on collaboration,
which a lot of our students tell us they actually want.
And of course, we're trying virtual reality:
everyone is in there playing around.
Yes, try some ramification (check), bring it into the classroom,
see how it works.
None of this is costing us this much:
it's all consumer technology that we can readily buy.
Obviously, we're trying out the robotic stuff too,
and we've had quite a lot of fun with that, actually.
I think someone mentioned earlier how much fun that is working with students
and helping them to understand a bit about coding.
So we've learned quite a lot ourselves.
.............. that sort of thing (check)
So we're actually bringing it to the staff to enable them to play, and to hope
they can imagine the pedagogical purposes.
And this is one of the key differences between consumer technology
and stuff that's been produced for learning purposes.
You invent the pedagogy, you identify the learning challenge
and then work out how the technology can support it,
not the other way round.
So, did you get the idea?
You got a bit of the how, of what these technologies might actually
help you.
Does anyone want to go back to the URL at the beginning, there?
You should be able to find it on your My OEB.
I've given you 10 -- are we going back? ..
I've given you 10: robotics, 3D printing,
internet of things where both virtual reality, space exploration
predictive and cognitive analytics (check list on big player)
Now, opportunity with this particular software to add your own three.
You'll have to pick three, one vote each for those.
Just to remind you, these are some of the things
that you might like to look at.
We're looking for fast development.
We want something that if we found a pedagogical purpose for it,
it would be easy to embed it.
We want very wide and broad potential
and we definitely want to disrupt age-old educational models.
So if you can't choose, use those three.
So we'll give you a bit of time to vote
and then we'll be able to get it up on the screen, yes?
So, all vote now.
OK - can you see it? Quite small. can you see, at the back?
No? OK, so the top one we're getting is virtual reality,
almost everyone voting for that.
I think there's one -- no votes for wearables, I'm surprised about that.
Keep going, it'll keep coming.
......... (check) augmented reality analytics.
OK, I'll just leave you a few moments.
Has everyone finished voting? Anyone still voting?
Still shifting.
I think this will stay on the app, so you can have a look later if you want.
So it looks to -- oh no, we're still moving,
Somebody else has just got in.
So it looks to me like internet of things, virtual reality
and predictive and cognitive analytics
are ..... (check) with augmented reality, 3D printing coming soon after.
My challenge to you is to take some of the wackier ones,
like the space exploration and the mobile scanning and ultrasounds
and see how they may affect your teaching. 21:23