 Rebecca Ferguson, now Professor of Learning Futures at the OU. How do you feel about this achievement? I'm really excited about this achievement. It takes a long time to become a professor. I've always looked up to the professors in our department and across the university, so I'm really pleased about it. When you reflect on your academic career, what significant experiences come to mind, which you were considered to be milestones that helped you during your career? There are so many things that come to mind. One of the early things that comes to mind is a project I worked on called SCOME, which was exploring the futures of education. People working on the project had found that if you talk to people about the future of education, they either describe to you something which is a bit like school, or they describe to you something that's a bit like learning at home, which wasn't very exciting. The project took a whole group of teenagers into a virtual world, the virtual world of second life, and said, right, we're going to develop a whole new learning environment here. We'll build it from scratch. Let's see what you come up with. And just immediately, flights of fantasy took off. We assumed that people would start building some sort of seating area, and they'd all sit around in seating area. So immediately teenagers flew up into the air and started building clouds and flying around on the clouds. And we thought, well, we're going to have to arrange the learning sessions for them. And they said, no, we've got a sense of what we'd like to learn. Let us arrange some events. We're a group who are very interested in physics, right? We are going to do some experiments in this world to find out what the force of gravity is in this world. Because, of course, there's no point doing that in the real world, because everyone can find out what the force of gravity is simply by googling it if they haven't already learned it. But in this virtual world, they actually had to do the experiments and really work it out. And then there was another group who said, we're very interested in Roman history. We're going to reconstruct some Roman buildings, and then we're going to read up on them and we'll give some talks on that. And you as academics, you can come along and sit in if you'd like. And then somebody else said, well, what I'm really interested in is sailing. So I'm going to build some sailing boats. I'll give everyone some training in sailing and then I'll set up a regatta. So what we found was people being very inventive, reimagining how learning could take place, and very much showing that people are possibly more capable than you give them credit for. So usually, if you go into a room and there's a senior professor and there's a 13-year-old, you'd expect the senior professor to be explaining things to the 13-year-old. But in point of fact, quite often in this case, the 13-year-old would be going, wow, I've been and I've investigated this and I've found all these things out. Let me show you how to do it. And that was really exciting. Great. And it sounds very accustomed to the type of activity that goes on in IET, whether that be innovating pedagogy or innovative pedagogy or otherwise. What would you say have been maybe some significant work-related challenges that you've experienced during your career? And also how have those challenges strengthened you and helped you overcome them to achieve a particular goal? I think one of the challenges that I face is through working in IET, because that's the Institute of Educational Technology. People tend to assume if you work in something which is named after educational technology that you're a very uncritical enthusiast. And so whenever you talk to them, you're always going to be recommending some technology and not seeing the downside of it. And people will say, well, you don't realise that in my context we couldn't do it for this reason or that reason. And that is so much of a misconception because although we explore what these technologies can do, we always do that with an eye to what is practical and what would you want to achieve. A lot of the work we do is not around technology per se, it's around achieving things, thinking about what you want to achieve. So in the project I was just talking about what we wanted to achieve was thinking about how education could be different. We weren't saying everybody has to go into virtual worlds. We know that that's quite difficult, it's impossible for many people, but it was useful for that project. So one of the things that we do every year is we publish a report called Innovating Pedagogy. And we include in that 10 pedagogies. They might be new, they might be ones which have recently been refreshed. They might be ones that you can now apply in new ways because the situation has changed. Now some of those are very technically based, making use of robots or chat bots for example. But some of them don't involve any use of technology whatsoever. They're just different ways of doing things in the classroom. They're different ways of bringing together the classroom and the home environment. They're different ways of doing training. So I think in every case it's thinking about where you're going, what your vision is of what you're trying to achieve and how can you get there. And that might involve technology. It's definitely going to involve pedagogy and sometimes it'll involve a combination. And finally looking forwards to the near future. What does that hold for you working in IET and the OU? And what are you looking forward to working on? Well there are always exciting projects going on and new ones come in all the time. I'm working on a book at the moment about microcredentials which are a new sort of qualification. But I think the most exciting project I'm working on at the moment is one with the country of Kenya, the Kenyan government. Like educators around the world, the universities in Kenya had to move online very, very quickly last year in the pandemic. And like so many people around the world, they had to do that without the necessary resourcing, without the necessary training. It was very, very tough going. But over the last 15 months or so they've thought, well, yes, we'd like perhaps to incorporate some of this in our teaching going forward. So let's think about how we could do this better, what we need, what we can explore. So we are working with university educators across Kenya to upskill them in online teaching and in blended teaching, which brings together the face to face and the online. And some of that is sharing with them expertise which the Open Universities developed over 50 years and IET has developed specifically. And some of that is bringing them together to talk about what works in their contexts and to develop new ideas and perhaps new ideas that we'll then bring back to the Open University. So it's really great to be working with a different group of educators who've got different ideas, different experiences and are really enthusiastic to move forward. Excellent. Thank you very much for your time, Rebecca. Thank you.