 Hi, my name is Alastair Krillman. I work at Linneas University in the southeast of Sweden and it's a town called Kalmar and it's my pleasure to present to you today one of the keynote speakers in the upcoming Eden Conference 2014 in Zagreb. And that is Professor Jeff Hayward of my old university, the University of Edinburgh. Hi, Jeff. Hi, Alastair. Maybe I should introduce myself at the start so you know who I am. I'm Jeff Hayward. I work here in the University of Edinburgh, as it says. I'm the vice principal, CIO and librarian, so that, if you like, is my is my suit job. But I'm also still an academic with research and my research interests are in e-learning, the same as the developmental things that I do for the university as vice principal. I'm interested in the moment in how universities decide whether to go into online learning in a serious way. Whether they decide whether to do MOOCs and if so, why they're doing it and what they're trying to get out of it. And it's that balance between the hard core provision of technology-enhanced learning services across the university and the interplay with innovation that most interests me at the present time. Yeah, well, we could pick up straight away on the sort of innovation aspect and the key technologies that are going to influence higher education and say the next 10 years, but maybe even just the next five. There's all the stuff that comes in from left field that you're never going to guess as to what they are. But I think it's clear that there's a few things that we will see a really serious expansion of over the next small number of years. One of them is the use of richer media. I think in particular video, home produced video, but also universities producing many more short videos and full length lectures which they'll make openly available. And so that movement into open educational materials, open so that your own learners can access them easily, but also open so that the world can learn from them. I think we're likely to see. And so technologies around the easy production manipulation, search finding and reuse of educational materials, I think we'll see innovation in. The other is expansion into scale of trying to work out how to deploy the current technologies. We've got discussion forums, wikis, blogs, computer marked assessment, et cetera, how to use those at serious scale. And you see some of these experiments going on at the moment in MOOCs. And you also see a fertile exploration of technologies that try to find ways of doing simple things on large scale. Peer reviewing, for instance, peer marking, peer grading. Those sorts of technologies that exploit the known but in ways that we don't normally step into in on campus classes. I think social media and interaction between people online, discussion forums, the introduction of much more video. It's interesting actually in lots of ways how clunky many of the things we do are that are very text based at the moment. And I think we'll see a movement towards the use of video materials in these traditionally text based areas. I think also that the renewed interest in online learning is causing some people in the artificial intelligence end of informatics to come back again and look and say, how can we make things smarter? How can we make them more intelligent? How can we find ways of generating formative feedback for people without the individual tutor having to do large amounts of that? So I think in a sense not big dramatic things but small scale things that will quite significantly change the way we do stuff. And then looking very slightly further ahead and we're exploring this a little bit in Edinburgh now, thinking our way into it. How do you really make room so that you can have a combination of physical presence and projected digital presence in the room so that you get a higher degree of equity between those people who are there and those people who are not there? I think ultimately it winds up with a sort of Star Wars hollow projection and I'm sure that we'll get there at some point in time. But just trying to make that video conferencing a room, use of Skype and enabling everybody to participate in a much more equal way that will actually have a significant impact in terms of those people who cannot be present at teaching events of different kinds. Yes it's maybe a case of stopping seeing the digital side as being a second best solution and seeing digital arenas as valid arenas for learning just as valid as the physical and that each used to the best of their ability. And I think Richard because there is a really big difference between having a conversation and writing short pieces of material between people and I think that if one could move to a position whereby you were able to talk into that conversation more easily in an asynchronous way and manage it in the ways with threads that we manage written discussion forums for instance or wikis etc. I think that that kind of development would actually transform the quality with which we're able to do and the richness of what we're able to do because body language is a really important part of our interactions in most everyday settings. Do you feel there's a conflict in some ways between this opening up of education and the sort of traditions of higher education which tend to be much more closed, protective, very tradition based and also with the heavy emphasis on research in larger universities that somehow this foray into the MOOC world and open education creates a conflict in some ways? No I don't see a conflict there and actually I don't really come across people going around talking all the time about MOOCs MOOCs indeed dominate my life at the moment. I don't really see that coming through particularly from the heads of the people that I talk to and they don't really have that conflict in their minds. Universities have always thought about themselves as open places. You go back to the Erasmus scholar tradition, universities were not closed to the travelling scholars. Indeed they welcomed them and the whole idea of sabbaticals and visiting other universities and working there has always been something that's very strong. You don't really see that in companies, anything like the same degree. Oh I'll go and spend a year working in essentially what is a rival organisation. So we've always been open in many ways and we've perhaps over the years as recent years as we've grown in scale and the number of students who come and the pressures of time that's maybe made us a bit less open than our roots and our traditions are. So in some respects the opening up of our education to a wider range of the population and of course the population not just local to you that can get on a bus or on a bike or a car to reach you but those who could never physically come to you, that's actually gone back to the spirit of what universities were about. Now of course there is a side to it in which known people enrol on known courses and pay fees or somebody pays fees for them and they go through an accreditation process and they sit exams and they come out with some piece of paper at the end and that side I think by definition has got to be closed in the sense that you select people into it and you manage that experience really well for them but it's not an uncomfortable thing to sit alongside open and actually if you look at lots of universities like mine here in Edinburgh I mean we've got 33,000 students but we have 17,000 people signed up on the books of our open studies courses and traditional research based universities have always done open studies like long learning you know whatever you want to call it. We've always done that kind of stuff so I think that what we're doing is we're re-emphasizing the links between the core university activity the open studies and then a third element into that which is the digital so that your reach is now no longer just those people who happen to be able to be with you and I think that actually works really well with the spirit of universities and indeed experimenting and researching into new spaces is actually what we are supposed to be about So in a way it's returning to our roots in many ways I see it as return to that spirit and I see it as something that actually it's not been possible to do up until now which is to make part of the educational experiences that you offer available to people regardless of whether they are able in the Erasmus Scholar sense to come to where you are and I think as a consequence of that and that opening up and the opening up of a dialogue so it's not just a one way transmission of our learning materials it's the ability to open up a dialogue with people electronically from around the world that actually then expands the academic community and enriches it and I think I don't know anybody around that I talked to about online learning who doesn't actually agree with the spirit of that The theme of the Eden conference is of course about sort of education to employment and if we tie in here the world of work which is increasingly demanding skills based learning and more entrepreneurship and innovation and so on and there are more and more pathways to learning today than in the past Could we say that the degree has been a bit of a gold standard in post-secondary education Is there a new order coming? Do you see new different levels of certification different levels of qualifications or is university still the standard? I don't I mean I've never really thought of the university degree as being the only valid certification that you could have for your knowledge and your skills it's pertinent to certain groups within the population and it's pertinent to certain sorts of activities but you know if you are in IT and you are in networking then a Cisco qualification is a very highly valued qualification to have so there have always been a range of certification options open to people and some of those have sat alongside a degree and some of them have been a substitute to a degree I think that clearly governments over the last few years have moved to a view that for economic reasons they need a high fraction of their population to be trained to a high level and that's actually become a bit synonymous with what fraction of your young adult population goes to university whether the universities as we've got them configured are ideally suited to produce all of those outputs I think is an open question but from my own university's point of view what we see as graduates coming out from us and what we are hoping to help young people to become is critical thinkers those who understand and are prepared to take the risks of innovation and we spin out a lot of student companies from my own university every year so critical thinking, innovativeness, entrepreneurship the ability to think in a research way, evidence base the ability to present, to work in teams, to work alone to understand what motivates and what commits you and to make choices and be reflective I guess as an individual but also actually as a citizen because universities don't just produce graduates for employment they produce graduates for society as a whole I mean this is part of the training in citizenship and in global citizenship these days as well so I think that there's a set of different attributes that you can come out with not everybody needs to come out with the same attributes, it doesn't make sense and so the challenge for us is how to enable young people or anyone who enters university onto a degree program or training program of any kind to understand what it is they would like to get out of it so this is about supporting people to make the right kinds of choices enabling them to experiment and then supporting them towards the end point that they're actually trying to reach and if that's a set of specific employability skills and so for instance if you wish to become a lawyer this is legal training as well as legal education the same is true for medics, the same is true for engineers etc if innovation and entrepreneurship is your interest then to support you in that but if you would actually like to become a blue skies researcher then we support you towards that and so the challenge for us is how do we structure curricula and actually I think particularly these days how do we make the best of technology to help us build those personalized pathways that lead our students towards the end point they would like to achieve I mean there was a while ago I was interviewing employers when in the early days of IT skills back in the 90s when there was a lot of discussion about IT skills in graduates and we talked to a lot of employers and said what sorts of things are you looking at you know the bottom line was what they wanted were independent reflective critical thinkers and most of them said you know I could train people up to use word excel email and all of that kind of stuff we were talking about they said what I really want from you guys are people reflective they're independent they're able to work they take responsibility and they're critical thinkers and I think that's a generic and I don't see that changing so from our own point of view as a university that's what we're trying to do and we're trying to find the best ways to use technology to help us achieve those generic goals Okay I think we better wrap up there and basically look forward to hearing more of your thoughts at the conference in June so thank you very much and I'll see you in Zagreb See you in Zagreb, thank you