Nora Jansone-Ratinika, Director of the RSU Centre for Educational Growth Sees the Importance of the Centre’s Work Daily

The Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) Centre for Educational Growth (Pedagoģiskās izaugsmes centrs, PIC) begins each academic year with the determination to implement new and modern creative ideas. This year is no exception.

I would like to start by asking you to explain your new intentions and plans.

Despite the challenges brought on by the epidemiological situation, we analyse the achievements and develop new plans for improvement in close connection with RSU's new development strategy. This is so that RSU keeps pace with current learning and teaching trends. We look back at the past in a variety of ways: internally at the studies provided at RSU, by examining the Latvian context, and by looking at the Common European Higher Education Area.

We have accumulated a to-do-list based on conclusions we have been able to draw as we organise further education training and consultations for lecturers.

An important source of ideas was the research project “Transformation of Education System: Consequences and Possible Solutions of COVID-19 Crisis”, which is part of the State Research Programme Life with COVID-19 and that is being jointly implemented by researchers from PIC and the RSU Medical Education Technology Centre (METC) in 2020.  We were able to identify Latvian university lecturers’ pedagogical digital competence through the project. No less important was our work on the Erasmus+ KA3 project LOTUS (Leadership and Organisation for Teaching and Learning at European Universities) in 2021 that was led by the European University Association. Here we sought ways to strengthen the role of pedagogical innovation in learning and teaching.

I won’t list all the details but rather outline the major directions that permeate both Latvian and international universities' development priorities: the diversification of study organisation forms for more effective learning outcomes, the promotion of evidence-based learning and teaching, the promotion of digital skills in study programmes and, of course, the strengthening of lecturers' pedagogical competence.

These are broad and substansive areas of work. How does the current situation affect how they are being implemented at RSU?

We will restart in person studies from 11 October for this academic year after a long period of studies being fully remote. Of course, the future situation still depends on how the spread of the disease changes.

We have already realised that in-person studies will be different from what they were before COVID-19 restrictions. Distance learning will become a natural part of in-person studies and work both at RSU and at other European universities.

As we concluded our cooperation with other European universities in the LOTUS project, we realised that the world is no longer talking about pure in-person learning, but rather about blended learning.

At RSU, we have agreed on the following approach: in social science studies, up to 50 % of a lecturer's contact hours with students can take place online, whereas in health care studies, where more emphasis is placed on acquiring practical skills and working with people, up to 20 % of contact hours can be implemented remotely. Of course it is important to be flexible, meaning that programme managers and lecturers can decide on the most appropriate learning format for each study course and each lesson in order to achieve their learning outcomes as effectively as possible. 

While COVID-19 restrictions were in place, lecturers significantly improved both the digital skills and pedagogical skills required to implement remote learning, or what we call pedagogically digital competence. PIC and the Department of Information Technology have provided lecturers with a lot of support during this time, and we continue to do so this academic year.

Taking the challenges of working in an epidemiologically safe environment into consideration, lecturers are very interested in implementing hybrid lessons. Hybrid lessons are in person lessons where some students can participate remotely via video conferencing. The university has invested a lot of resources into purchasing equipment and adapting classrooms for hybrid lessons: video cameras that automatically follow the lecturer's movements, classrooms with interactive projectors, desk microphones that provide high sound quality, web cameras, document cameras and other technical solutions. 

Our priority is to provide high quality in-person learning, but we are able to conduct hybrid lessons in certain situations so that students who are not able to attend their studies in person for reasons beyond their control (who are in quarantine, for example).

In order for these new formats to be fully implemented, you’d need to rethink the pedagogical priorities.

Of course! It is also the PIC's main task to help lecturers understand how to organise learning so that the process is at the same time challenging, but accessible enough for students to be able to accomplish it. We want to avoid students being able to consume lecturer's material passively, but rather encourage them to think, analyse, solve issues, connect knowledge with real life situations, and enable them to apply their skills by approbating them in the work environment.

Implementing blended learning, independent work, and developing self-directed learning skills play a very important role, as it does in remote studies.

For example, 200 training videos were made as part of the SAM project in order to provide students with the opportunity to acquire practical skills remotely. We have also created the RSU skills monitoring system, which allows us to follow the skills acquisition process in all RSU study programmes in a transparent way. 

This semester, we will look at topics such as creating interactive presentations, books, and videos on the H5P platform, as well as talk about interactive digital scenarios. In getting through these simulated scenarios, students face problems that are specific to their profession and which develop differently based on the decisions they make along the way. Unlike the case analysis methods that are currently widely used, digital scenarios provide additional interactive opportunities. In a scenarios for the Medical programme this could include diagnosing a patient, or consulting a client for the Law programme. Through these scenarios, students studying nursing, pathology, internal diseases, audio-speech therapy, radiology, pharmacy, law, and other programmes face a problem, obtain additional information from the client or patient, make decisions about the appropriate action to take and formulate a final decision or diagnosis. 

As regards assessing study results, we talk about the fact that it is not enough to assess students' ability to memorise facts only with a grade, but rather that assessment should be formative, with students receiving regular feedback during the process on what they need to achieve and how to do so most effectively.

One of the advantages interactive scenarios like this is their open nature and the constructive feedback users can receive during the process. They give students the opportunity to explore a problem, to make mistakes and experience the negative consequences of their decisions in a safe, simulated environment.

Learning analytics is a segment of work that is still relatively new for us and very broad. The amount of teaching materials available in the e-learning environment and, of course, the time students spend learning online has increased very rapidly over the last few years. As a result, the solutions that make the most effective use of digital learning tools and materials are becoming more important. This is the challenge we are starting to work on — how to obtain, accumulate and analyse learning data, to provide feedback on the effectiveness of teaching and learning methods in order to promote a lecturer's improvement and to provide automatic feedback to students on how to make their learning more effective. We are currently at the beginning of learning analytics and we are exploring the needs and opportunities to develop data-based design of teaching and learning experiences.

Returning to digital learning materials, it should be noted that one of the challenges is to share and make effective use of various valuable materials. For example, a video or a digital scenario that has been created for one of the core courses in the Medicine programme, like for pathology or an internal diseases course, can be very useful for students later in their studies, when they prepare for a practice rotation or if they are refreshing their knowledge prior to a specific lecture. Now, materials like this are hard to find or not available at all. To solve this problem, we have created a repository of RSU study materials, which will facilitate the storage, availability and sharing of valuable study materials developed as part of any RSU study programme.

It is equally important to strengthen academic integrity.

We promote an ethical and honest study process, both by arranging internal regulatory enactments and by creating materials for lecturers and students on why and how to act during the study process.

The more united we are in believing that fair play is our capital, the more stable we will be in both individual and institutional growth.

We heard from the Rector's speech at the Academic Meeting that your team has done a tremendous job over the past year. What were PIC's achievements during the second wave of the pandemic and what were the difficulties you faced in the further education of lecturers? 

Because I discuss current issues with colleagues regularly, I can say that we really feel that our work is important on a daily basis and that lecturers need the PIC.

This is corroborated by the academic staff who seek individual consultations, as well as the total demand for training. The greatest satisfaction is that we have been able to respond to all needs as far as it has been possible, different ideas, formats, different levels of prior knowledge and skills and different content. The greatest difficulty has probably been in knowing how to combine administrative work with creativity, ambitions with possibilities and, above all, to be able to fix and even predict current needs, create quality content for studies and consultations. All this in addition to developing didactic materials for lecturers. Quality takes a lot of time, but work and the times we live in are extremely fast paced. The PIC team gained strength and inspiration from seeing practical results. 

What study forms and methods do you use?

We try to show different ways of working with participants, so that lecturers gain new ideas for their own courses. For the time being, we are organising professional development activities remotely, but in the future we also aim for a blended format. I will mention two important things: firstly, the combination of pedagogy and IT expertise. In order to offer both technical and substantive training to lecturers in one place, we have stabilised the format of co-facilitating training involving colleagues from the PIC and the IT Department. This also allows us to learn ourselves in collaboration between different departments. Secondly, using more passive and active methods of audience involvement. Just as lecturers are convinced that students gain more by turning on their cameras, by engaging in discussions and answering flash questions, we are also aware that the more actively a lecturer is involved in the learning process, the more fulfilling the lesson is. 

How do you assess whether the learning has yielded the expected results?

This question is very important and challenging at the same time. The pedagogical effect cannot be counted, expressed as a percentage or measured in hours. We see that studies are effective via student feedback, in e-learning courses and in the lecturers' own admissions that the new methods and tools really work. Meaningful assessment of learning outcomes can only be made in a formative and qualitative way.

Is the participants' responsiveness enough?

In the spring semester of the 2020/2021 academic year, the participation of academic staff in PIC further education activities increased by 29%, which is a large percentage. During this time, we have also strongly encouraged our colleagues to become more involved. The most active colleagues have managed to participate in up to 12 activities during the semester. In order to respond to different needs and opportunities, we are constantly diversifying the volume, adjusting the form and time.

We are especially happy for those lecturers who are currently opening the virtual doors for PIC training for the first time.

We appreciate the initiative taken by the heads of various structural units to encourage their employees to participate and then to discuss what they have learned and to share their experience. We could jointly use RSU resources more efficiently if more colleagues both apply for training, which allows us to monitor demand, and remember to cancel their appointments in time making room for others to participate. Overall we are very satisfied with what has been done in pedagogical development, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us.