 I'm conscious of the stopwatch of time, conscious that I am the nervous eight year old, standing in front of this knowledgeable audience where to noticeeducated audiences, first thing I'm going to do is lose my jacket and become slightly less formal, perhaps a little more relaxed. Although my title is about design at university education I think a lot of ac yn ymddi'r wyletiad, a o'i myfnod i'r llyfr yn sgol. A'n myfnod i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r hyn, oherwydd mae'n feddyl o'r ffordd o'r gyflym ar y mewn Llyfr. Mae'n gweithio ar gyfer mwg. Mae'n cyd-dwy'r ffordd o hynny, a'n myfnod i'r ffordd o'n myfnod o'r ffordd o'r mewn. Yn ymgyrch i'r ffordd o'r cyfrifio'r llyfr. maen nhw'n yn ddigon ni'n gwrs iawn, a i nhw'n ddweud am y 21 yr wrth gwrs iawn cwrdd fel byddwn ni fydd cyd-gu'n gwybod bod mai'n ddweud, yn y cyfrifodau cyerdraethau iawn, yn y ffordd swnor fawr, ac rhaol yw'r hyn yn y ddweud, er mwyn ni'n dweud yn bod hyn yn ei ddweud. Felly rydw i'r ffordd seriol wedi gwbl o'r fusill, fyddechrau, chi'n symud ond yw'r gwrdd dyfod o'r effeithi, boedd yn ychydig iaeth cyfnodol, a efallai ddod o'r ddweifio mewn fach mezhyll ymddi, mae'n bwysig lle gaf яwn ei ddafyn sydd wedi eu ddweud y fbadd lle yw ymddiannol, dyfodol sydd wedi ei ddweud ifaith, nid i gael ddweud o'r banner gwaith eich hiten ymddangos y bydd eich hiten, ma' siarad yn ei ddweud o'r fytlir ar gyfer mamnodol a chyffodd yn ei ddweud yw Ond ydych chi'n gweithio ar y tor. Mae hynny yw bod I'm yw Teris Grent Ogday. Mae hynny yn cyfnodd ar gyfer tympai addysg ffrindigau ar ddechrau Moux ac yw'r newid yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r ddefnyddio'r dyn nhw'n ddechrau i'r proses edrych yn ei ddefnyddio. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r ddechrau'r proses yn ymgyrch, ond mae'n meddwl i'r proses yw'r ddefnyddio, felly pergynwyd i'r hyfforddiant a ant Interesting is actually probably one of the things that that's most important for us to bring in. I've got a set of fairly simple questions to structure the talk I'm going to look back about 10 years and briefly review where we were 10 years ago. Try to try to sum up where I think we are now and some of the signs that we can see about the things that are changing. And then I'm going to step into the thinking that that's caused us o'r unedig sy'n gyd yn bwysig fel y university o'r unedig yw ei wneud i chi ysbyty ac yn ystafell yn ystafell, yw ei ddweud, y university o'r unedig yw ei wneud yn ystafell, gallwn i fud o'r ei wneud, mae'n rysyn i'r unedig yw'r unedig ac o'r unedig yw'r unedig yw'r unedig yw'r ysbyty. Mae'n rhaid i'r llwydd dros y sydd yn ysbyt â'r unedig yw ei ddweud, mae'n rhaid i'r llwyddiad hwn, ac yn ystafell, ond eu bod yn ei wneud yn ystod o'r llesen ar y cyfnod. Weithio, mae'n meddwl yma? Rydyn ni'n gwneud y gwirionedd y 2004. Rydyn ni'n credu i'r llesen arall y llesen. Ond rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r llesen o'r cyfnod, bod o'r cyfrifau yma, sydd wedi'u cyfrifio'r ysgol yma, Felly, mae'r brydyn nhw ar gyfer gweithio eich bodi chyfodd i'r bwysig. Mae'r bwysig arweithio eich bodi'r bwysig ar gael y bwysig o'r bwysig ar gyfer gyfer gweithio eich bodi'r bwysig ar gyfer gweithio eich bodi'r bwysig. Rydyn ni'n gallu bod yn ei wneud i gwneud o'r cyffredinol, yn gyflawni'r unrhyw uneddau, ac yn ymgwrs, mae'n ffordd yn ei wneud hynny ymgyrch chi'n cerddio ar y cerddiou digital oherwydd ymddangos cyflawni, if it had not come of age, and it was possible to think seriously about delivering fully online education internationally. Now, for a mixture of reasons that, and I think the struggle that the European Commission had with the Lisbon strategy, which was a strategy to transform and modernise education, and perhaps the limited impact that the DFES e-learning strategy actually had, you know, a limited follow-through, that actually it was much more difficult than people had hoped to make that big step forward from where we were in terms of embedded use of technology within the campus setting to stepping well outside the campus and offering substantial and high quality online education. Since that time, we've really seen an explosion in the number of technologies and applications and choices, I guess, which are available to us, and of course actually an explosion in identities, because if we step back to 2004, often the VLE or the email address from the university or the college or whatever was your identity to now an explosion of identities, and a range of tools that have appeared and a range of technologies, and actually the interesting thing about them is that they were not education-focused but were standard social consumer products that people brought to their work and to their studies because they were of that kind, you know, these, the utilities that you work with, you study with, but actually they are just part of you and not part of the institution. And I think that that's probably one of the most important things that we need to remember as we go forward, that it's changed in those sorts of things, and I've got some of them to talk about at the end, it's changed in those sorts of things that are likely to have quite a substantial impact on the way we go forward. But I think that over that period of 2004 to now a couple of things happened, and actually all is one of the examples of that, and that was the maturing of networks of people who worked in this area, professionals who worked in this area from all different kinds of settings in every subject you could think of in all sorts of different roles, the maturing of those networks and a sense of common understanding that this stuff actually as Christina said was core to the university or the college business, but also I think a real understanding and increasing evidence that fully online could be done at high quality, and so therefore from that 2004 point at which that was an uncertainty I would say as we've moved across the 10 years we've got to the point at which that is a certainty regardless of whether we as an individual institution do that or not. So it's always easy to look backwards because you can do that sort of playlist of stuff that's there and you stick it on a slide, it's much harder to do it now as to where we actually are and I realised actually after I'd produced the talk and then I read back through it as trying to rehearse it in my head that I was actually bipolar about it, I was split-brained about it, I've actually got optimistic stuff and I've got pessimistic stuff, I've got glass half full and glass half empty, I'm actually hoping that the glass half full dominates and I certainly want to come back to that at the end, but there is undoubtedly some challenging stuff. A lot of the data that I'm going to talk about is drawn from the US and that's not because I think that the US is a sort of the perfect model that we will see here if it hasn't already come, but it's partly that the collection of data is much more extensive than the US than it is here and I think that's pity actually, there are questions about why we don't know with the same certainty about ourselves as they do across the Atlantic, but I think actually the trends that we are seeing in the US, we are also seeing here and they will undoubtedly come through to us. One of the things that I always watch is Gartner, I like the curvy sort of thing and it's quite fun to laugh at stuff that's going into the trough of despondency. It's even more interesting actually to laugh at stuff which is marked as it is in that bottom right hand corner which says obsolete before plateau and there is one item, no there's one or two items on there that are obsolete before plateau and actually MOOCs they've got as obsolete even before they reach the trough of despondency and actually in lots of respects I think that that's probably right, but of course one of the things about the progression as we've seen e-portfolios and VLEs and all sorts of things have been through that curve and come out the other end is actually that most things do come out the other end and do reach a kind of plateau and a stabilisation point, they'll be easier to read when you get the slides than they are on the screen, that they do reach a plateau and a stabilisation point and some things that become obsolete before plateau actually transmutate into something else and actually I think that that is probably my optimistic view about where MOOCs will go, but we can see them as steady maturing, maturing in the sense that you can run them at scale and you can run them reliably of all of the kinds of tools that underpin education that we're doing and we can see emergence on that up curve and I've marked badges as one of them of the things that actually we do have to watch because they have a potential for significantly shifting the way our business is offered, the way we do education if they come through into maturity, in other words we will have to engage with them at that point, as they may seem at this point in time. So, if we look at some of the studies from the US and some of the data around, it's interesting that the study, and this is an ECAR out of education study of American faculty of academic staff within universities and in colleges and with the usual caveats and scepticism about surveys as to how robust they are and how good a representation they are, the interesting thing about that and it's now shown quite strongly is that over the years, the number of academics who have said, I have experience of teaching fully online, teaching online classes, and by online class they do mean an online class and not just using some technology in class. That has risen steadily and the number of academics who say that they are familiar with MOOCs doesn't mean to say that they've offered them, it probably means they've been in there for a week or two and had a look. But that does not suggest an audience which is resistant to technology or resistant to change, it suggests an audience that increasingly is getting to grips with that medium. And the motivators down the bottom corner always release time, design time to do work and I'll come back to that later, confidence that it will work and evidence that students will benefit and I'll come back to that later too. When you look at students in similar surveys, when we take the ECAR survey and look at what students say, interesting again that students are gaining more and more experience of fully online education in some form and doesn't mean that their institution offers it but they are getting it from somewhere and of course one of the things about online education is that your institution may do none but you are perfectly able to take it and I thought interestingly the very positive view of open education that we can see down there in the corner of the fractions of students who are finding open educational resources and the positivity of their view towards those sources so they're not just looking inward to what their institution is giving them but they're actually looking outwards. Rather small number of students that say that they've taken MOOCs but there again it's a survey that was taken right at the beginning and certainly the data we have from repeated iterations of our MOOCs in Edinburgh do show that our young audience is increasing as a fraction of the audience that's taking it so that initial curve that that bunched them so much in the adult in the in the mid-range adult group, the number of younger learners is rising and their purposefulness in there is increasing and it seems to me that's a trend that we are likely to continue to see and it may be that MOOCs whether you love them or hate them will actually be one of the sources of online education experience for American students and for our students. If we look at the Sloan surveys done by Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman over the years again we can see a steady increase in the number of students sorry a steady increase in the number of students that have actually taken online courses rising steadily over the years not a dramatic rise you know at any particular point but moving steadily upwards and you could see that a point in in not too many years time that number could be one in five have actually had that kind of experience and also I think that in terms of provosts as they would call them in the US chief academic officers here that those that come from institutions that offer online view their education as online at least as good if not better than that on campus and that the inferior fraction is quite small the interesting thing about the the the bars below is that those without that experience see it very much the other way around and so I guess the question will be that if that number steadily rises and those people change their minds we will again move towards a point at which senior academic officers with institutions actually view online learning as a sensible and a decent thing to do if you look at the general public within the states and this is a Gallup poll it's the last of my service from there there's a caution in it as well as an optimism the optimism in it is that is that the view of online net better in terms of winding wide wide range of options and good value for money which is a positive but there is a sting in the tail on it and that's this which is a distinct view there that employers will not trust online education and indeed that to some degree the assessment of online learners is actually itself inherently suspect and weak and so therefore although there's an increasingly positive view amongst students and amongst academic staff there is I think and and I think that this has been demonstrated in other areas that it's not yet the case that it is as good as residential and that it is as trustworthy and as valued is not yet made okay so those those are the kind of cautionary things on the other side if we actually want to look and say what about the range of tools we've got then we can see an enormous explosion of of of technologies which are available to us and they're they're they're wrapped out in the conversation prism and I'm sure lots of you have got examples of that looking at that huge range of tools so the numbers of things that we might want to do online the potential for us has risen and one of the things that's been come quite clear to me within my only university over the last year or two is that the focus that we've had in the past about the VLE and the portfolio and the assessment systems in other words our staff an obsession I think actually with European Commission still has is actually misplaced I would guess that about 90% of the technology that's used at my university is brought by and used by the students in remarkably creative and remarkably invisible ways in other words this is the stuff on which they do their learning and to a limited degree it's the stuff on which we do our teaching and it's it's something that we need to find a way of getting to grips with and understanding how to capitalize on how to ensure that what the students do is valued and recognized as much as the stuff that we do and also that it's measured because the problem is that the view of us as not using a modern range of technologies is because largely this is actually student-oriented rather than institution-oriented the next thing that I want to look at briefly then is is the horizon report and I've watched the horizon report over a period of years and I've always had a degree of skepticism about the time scales I've always thought that they were overly optimistic but they do give you a pointer to the sorts of things that you need to watch and although I think that there's not a cat in hell's chance that flipped classroom and learning analytics will actually be adopted in a serious broad across across education way within the next year or less it is undoubtedly that some of that stuff is on the track now to incorporation and some places have made significant steps in bringing those two in even though for many of us we're still struggling with it I'll come back to the two to three years and the four to five years when I get back to the end on my look a look ahead but I think that it's undoubtedly the case that they are right in that these things over the time period that we're talking about here out of about 10 years those things will undoubtedly impact on us as we look forward so the dreaded M word and I said there wasn't really going to talk about MOOCs and I'm not particularly I've only got three rather modest things that I want to say about them I mean one of which is you've always got to brag about your MOOCs and so I've put pictures of our MOOCs up there but what was actually interesting was that I was talking to a conference the other day which was about marketing higher education and I reflected on the fact that the the slickness of the marketing that we do in this space is considerably better than the slickness of marketing we do for our traditional stuff I wish we marketed our traditional stuff like that that was actually quite a sobering thought when I looked at it but I think that whether you love them or you hate them or whether you're entirely indifferent to the MOOCs have done three things they have forced open and they've reopened an education and a debate at policy level about digital education and what does it mean and is this going to disrupt our business how must we change what do we do about it not just what do we do about MOOCs but what do we do about digital education more broadly and I think that that is an enormously useful debate and it's one that we must not let clones the other one is it has shown that courses can be run at surprisingly large scale and they don't fall to pieces and okay most of them are pedagogically not exciting etc but nevertheless they do run at very big scale and surprisingly they touch learners much more than you might think charismatic teachers in the online space can reach their students just as powerfully as they do in a lecture theater and indeed actually the people who are way up in the back row are as distanced in a sense from me as as watching a screen so we have demonstrated that we can do this stuff at scale and the other one I think is that we are seeing out of the MOOCs a range of technological innovations to say how could we do this particular thing at scale how could we form groups automatically how could we let people select into them what sorts of tools can we use to to manage peer assessment can we do comparative judgment online in an automated way there's a range of questions being asked that will result in a whole set of tools and applications which are educationally oriented which we actually if we look carefully at them and adopt them we'll actually find them quite powerful and I think therefore that that set of things that's come out of it are things that we need to capitalise on and and use as we go forward over the next few years okay so what lessons have we learned and I think my answer to this one is that the lessons that we've learned are probably hard ones there there there lessons that that some things we struggle with and and some things we're unsure how to do and if you take the page the next page in the horizon report 2014 and we look at those challenges to my mind they they exactly sum up the things that faces I I have to say that I did have a hollow laugh when I looked at the first one which said soluble challenges those that we understand and know how to solve when it says low digital literacy of faculty which actually if you go back 10 or 20 years and look at the big issues it's been there all the way along and relative lack of rewards for teaching it's been there for at least 25 years so it may be a one we understand that we may know how to solve it but whether we can and will solve it is is is interesting and and I again I shall come back to to some of that as as as the as the points that that I want to close and at the end but those are the challenges that faces they sum it up quite neatly how do we transform our business how do we shift into new ways of doing things particularly how do we scale teaching innovations how do we get them to scale so that they run right across our institution rather than them being biju and niche so I want to just know actually I think I've changed my mind I'm going to skip those I shall run too short of time you get all the slides so so I was struck looking at this quote from Bill Bowen who's a very respected higher education economist in in in the US who gave the 10 electures which are definitely worth reading in stanford a couple of years ago and he sums up I think one of the challenges that we we have to face as a as a community in that the technologies that we've used have mostly been focused on enhancing the quality of the existing things that we do we've been proving what we do but not particularly focusing on changing the economics of of how we have how we offer education and I think interestingly one of the one of the one of the outcomes that we have seen from moves is a direct experiment in can you change the economics of the way that you do it but but one of the things we must have an eye on because it won't come accidentally is can we find ways to use this range of technologies and to use the range of of of knowledge that we've gained to increase either the throughput of students and one of those I would I would say and this is challenging is is you move through the curriculum at your own speed rather than the speed that I define it so if you can learn it by the middle of October you don't have to wait till the exams at the beginning of December which is a very traditional kind of model or some parts of the curriculum you can scale to much larger and so instead of a large class being 400 a large class could be 4000 which is actually abnormal in in in this UK and European education purposefully using education to try to address that question of how do you increase the productivity of education as a system without a decline in the quality and I think that unless we have some eye on that then we do run a risk of polishing the current system and making it better smoother more 21st century without addressing a fundamental question of access on a large scale global access on a large scale without with with our current limited funds it was interesting that and it's the slides before but I won't talk too much about those we posed this question to a set of people across Europe who are in communities like yours and asked them about what technology might do and this was one of the things increase the productivity of the system and the thing that I was perturbed by about that was that most of them hated the idea and found that what they really wanted was to increase the quality perhaps increase access a bit but increasing productivity was not something that was in there in their vision if you like looking forward and so although I'm conscious that this is a rather unpalatable economic view actually I think that it's one that we as institutions and and we as individuals with institutions need to consciously think about and and to test okay that that's the end of the pessimistic bit I'm now going to move into the sort of optimism out to 2025 and and all that wild stuff and so the question really is what do you want to look like in 2025 and indeed this was one of the questions that we were posing for the European Commission and actually we posed to them and to which they had no answer well if it's all going to be modernised by 2025 what will it look like and to which they had no answer and he did actually to which many people I think in reality don't have an answer I think it's important that we do have an answer that when somebody says what will university or college education look like there is an answer as as my ph very first phd supervisor used to say to me if you can't explain it to your grandmother or your grandfather in a minute or two you don't know what you're doing and in the sense that's what I'm saying here so that's my list that's that's how it would be to me an education system that was on demand in other words you could take it when you wanted to and not when you didn't that was self-paced so that you could move at the speed which was appropriate to you rather than being locked step down that was location flexible so that you could be in residential or you could be out you could be in today you could be out tomorrow relevant relevant to the to your future and not just relevant to the immediate employers needs that is global and local because I think that that all of our all of our graduates should have that global international view personalised to your learnings play style speed affordable always and that actually goes back to my question before about about productivity and and efficiency and high value added in other words you don't just come you don't come in and go out with nothing particularly added to it and actually it is interesting that there are studies going on at the moment trying to work out to what extent education is value added and inevitably of course across a wide range of subjects so this just isn't just about business and the professions it's about the humanities and the social sciences that's not about technology the word technology doesn't appear but it does seem to me that to reach that point without systematic application of technology it is undoable and so therefore the technology that we use must underpin that vision and the question for us is what's the road map how do we get there and I confess here to being a horribly kind of top downish person in my thinking and so I'll I apologize for that at the start but I do think that without a vision at policy level and policy level actually means government and it means the vcs and all of that and the discussion box that was opened that discussion at policy level and that formulation of a vision at top level without that the system will not transform and you need a roadmap of purposeful steps but they are modest but 2025 is 10 years away and so unless one actually knows with planning rounds that run every year or every three years however you do them in your university if there are not steps written into that roadmap you we I will get to 2025 and will not have made any progress so we are talking about roadmap that has steps for next year the year after the year after out to 2025 and beyond that I don't know but unless they are planned in they will not happen systematically across the board it does require investment we see signs that recession is easing I know that money is tight but this is a strategic decision about investment into the future and it's got to be done with an agility and that means one's got to be prepared to adapt and change and and and perhaps pick up MOOCs or child of MOOCs or whatever comes next that one's got to have an agility within it to be able to to pick up on things as they change determination as I said and analysis and evidence space is this actually changing the quality is this actually cheaper there are some quite hard things there for us to to look at so I'll talk for a few minutes about my view for Edinburgh and I've said my view and I'll say our view and my view it's it's a kind of Edinburgh view but it's actually a lot of it is my view but I don't find people who are disagreeing with me so maybe it's our view so the question is so the question is where are we now so this is 2013 and so I did this I did this a year back for for a talk actually as we were beginning the MOOC stuff and I've updated it a bit since 30,000 learners on campus so we are a very very residential university and as it shows on there technology runs all the way through everything that we do so we've got VLEs and e-portfolios and all that stuff technology is everywhere throughout it and then off campus we have 50 odd fully online master's degrees so this was our step into the fully online space was to choose master's level education and not undergraduate education as the ground in which we would do this we've got about two and a half thousand students now and rising steadily and we've been doing that actually now for almost 10 years since we introduced our first ones and then the tiny little thing the MOOCs are just one small proportion of the university's business despite the huge publicity and noise and and and all of that's gone around them and at 2013 we had six MOOCs we had 300,000 learners I call them of course most of them came and and didn't really learn all that much but nevertheless you know they enrolled and they did what they wanted to do and and and I and I don't really worry about that and we had we've now got to to 15 MOOCs um we've hit 800,000 that have enrolled and and and and looked at and taken to some degree our MOOCs and we're building about another 15 as it stands so but it's still a modest kind of part of our business and then curiously and I reflected on this when I talked to Lifelong Learning Association a while ago we have about 17,000 people who are enrolled on our continuing education programs and actually their use of technology is close to zero which is kind of curious and they sit out in in a in a side space so that's where we are at this point in time we made that strategic decision that off campus was where we were going to go and we made the decision that it was going to be at master's level and then within that offline space we made that decision that we would move to MOOCs so where would we be 2020 plus well the big shift is that on campus has now become on campus and off we would reach a point and probably our student numbers will have grown but nobody would graduate from the university who have not taken one fully online course in any degree and that means all of the undergraduate degrees and when I say one fully online course I mean one core fully online course not just the peripheral optional extra course and that all of our faculty all of our teaching staff would have some experience of teaching fully online that we would grow our off campus to around 10,000 master students and at that point we have 10,000 on campus we have 10,000 off campus we are 50 50 at master's level as to whether they're on or off and actually in truth they will probably begin to blur and people will say I'll take that module on campus and I'll take that module online so and gradually entering into online doctoral space but this changes this and this changes our university business open I've dropped the M off MOOCs and they're now called OOCs because I don't think they'll be massive but they will be open online courses whether they're offered through platforms or whether we float courses free of our VLEs to become open to be taken it remains to be seen but we would move into offering open education on a significant scale increasing the number of open educational resources and perhaps reaching tens of millions of learners who had accessed and used our educational materials so open has become a core part of the business and for many of these courses this is some of the experience that the faculty would get and then finally we bring all of that continuing education inside the technology fold I've added rich to it because I think that over this period of time we will enrich that and this then this model of the university will have shifted the way we do our business significantly so that online is truly embedded in every student and every academic's experience so how do you get there and I'm mindful of the things that were in the horizon report of the difficult challenges the things that we find it hard to change and so I think that purposeful and modest experiments and pilots and tests that are designed always to scale is the route that is my preference and I offer on here a set of different things that one could decide that in any given university one wanted college one wanted to do and do so that you knew you were looking at that so that you could blow it up to scale it would not be an experiment that would remain in a particular location it would be an experiment that would scale across and a clear example and you can see it up there in the top corner which addresses that question of of academic skills and also student skills is really doing digital literacy for all in a real systematic and programmed in way expanding instructional design the US expression learning technologies if you like people who understand pedagogy and embedding that and working for scale building online courses testing remote assessment and remote invigilation so that you could scale it across the university trying learning analytics in a set of courses or programmes but knowing that this is going to go university wide that doing those serious experiments with an eye to scale from the beginning is the way that one will introduce the kinds of core elements that it's needed to achieve that vision which I set out at the beginning but you've got to watch things on the way and I had the word agile sitting in sitting in the slide earlier and a short while ago I had to talk to our senior management team about the technologies that would impact education as you look to 2025 and so I tried to think of the sorts of things that we might see coming in that we could not ignore and would need to take account of as we plan this set of experiments and as we plan this roadmap ahead and this is my set of slides compressed down into one and and it is of course this is the techie bit top of the list the security which which I see acutely in the university now every day top of the list we will have to address the question of security and then there'll be stuff that we know about but but don't necessarily know what the impact will be the ubiquity of fast internet all those Christine said we have to watch the access thing mobile everywhere but wearable actually there are questions that come from about privacy etc that come out of wearable and the internet of things consumer devices and instrumentation actually I saw a beautiful talk the other day from somebody talking about the internet of things and putting sensors on everything and they did it on toilet roll holders and the interesting the intrusion of privacy that you get from knowing how a toilet roll holder is used was really quite jaw dropping so some of this stuff some of this stuff will be very uncomfortable for us but we will have to think of policies as well as the technologies semantic web you quick pick at his information find and digitize intelligent agents things that come in you can see this being trying to be coded into the MOOC space how can we do this automatically intelligently how can we code away a way of doing this a data driven world that includes learner analytics and that's got enormous privacy questions around it and on demand compute so that students can compute with big data sets at will as they choose and personalization a sense of those models that it's for me and then down in this bottom left hand corner I think a set of hard technologies that that we will see coming through that might transform some of the ways that we think about language some of the ways that we think about about about text and and and speech etc video audio becoming easier than text how how will your rooms cope with video audio easier than text speech recognition and real-time translation so that maybe English is no longer the dominant language or actually its importance begins to diminish it's less of an issue on campus digital physical co-presence I mean we um Christina mentioned they bringing students together and having that but if you could do when the slide there is princess layer in Star Wars if you could just beam in so that you had a real sense or alternatively you wear the headsets that give you the real view we might move from a paucity model of not being here to an equality model of not being here with being present social internet and then one that at the bottom that I'm sure will come and I just don't quite know what it will mean for us but we are beginning to experiment with them and that's the 3d printer so a set of things I think that over the next 10 year period we will see those coming through in some form or another and our agility must be to catch on those and pick up on them and work out how to interweave them into the education that we offer so I am optimistic I am conscious that 25 at 2025 we could be saying uh-uh it's just another ground of day I think that there are significant changes this time around the socialization of technology the increasing comfort with doing stuff online has changed the possibilities for us from where we were 10 years ago from where we are I think even now the opening of the box the discussion about education and online that MOOCs have caused and an increased interest at political and policy level has opened a door for us to be able to step through it if we act in a purposeful way to step through it so that 2025 is distinctly different so that the higher education we offer has actually been transformed and is perhaps fit for at least the first half of the 21st century thank you very much for your time um thank you for listening I shall be around for the next day and a half or so so I'm happy to chat to anyone in the there thank you Jeff that was a very inspiring talk you've given us lots of ideas you've covered a lot of ground there and we now have time for questions now as always as you know we have a fair number of colleagues who are contributing to the conference online and we'll be happy to take questions too from our virtual delegates to the conference if you're in the hall please raise your hand if you have a question and we do have roving mics and if you wait until the mic comes to you we'll then allow everyone to hear a question whether they're here or whether they're listening in online so I'll open the floor for questions hello jim harris from university in northampton um extremely interested in the fact that there was a an underlying feeling of what we can do to influence policy rather than simply we're just in introducing new technology one of the biggest problems that we've had is what we what we term cave dwellers colleagues against virtually everything do you do you believe that there will still be people living in the cave in 2025 um I I I try to avoid using words like resistant to change and luddites and all that particularly luddites because it's historically wrong but but resistant to change I I I tend to try to take a more generous view I suppose and that's that that people who teach are cautious of change that might result in an educational experience that fails or is damaging in other words big experiments you avoid but small experiments you might do um unsupported experiments and explorations you are even more wary of than ex than than supported and and and assisted and that's why I think that one of the things that we've actually got to find a way of doing and this is a policy decision for institutions is scaling up the amount of pedagogical and technological support that there is for faculty because I don't believe that I don't believe there are very many who truly are cave dwellers in the pejorative sense that that word's meant I think that the vast majority are agnostic or are cautious or are wary or actually quite realistically a time limited and the question is how can you remove those challenges from those individuals and then you you will always be left with very very late adopters non adopters um and and the answer to them may be the with time they will disappear but I think that but I'm optimistic in the sense that I think the number is small my experience is that the number of people who are prepared to experiment with the right support are quite large and actually what was interesting is if you if you look at the universities that have experimented with MOOCs you see that absolutely that people who have never done online stuff before have come forward and said I would like to do one and the reason is that they know they will get good solid support to do it and so the question is how can one do that even for the the sort of the bog standard within the university teaching setting and a lot of this comes down to capacity in terms of instructional design or learning technology I think and that does cost money so it does require an investment I think to help that happen yes our first online question comes from John Cooper who's the editor of virtual training world he asks do you see any evidence that digital education is providing an opportunity to reach out and provide bridges to employers and industry eg reaching out to students on work placements or bringing lecturers in from industry well it clearly has the potential I think whether whether institutions do that or not varies a lot it is it is clear that in the MOOC space for instance employers are interested in this and there are conversations going on about building online courses and whether they are MOOCs with an M I don't know but building online courses that employees can take that employers can send them to well we have certainly have conversations within Scotland within with small to medium enterprises and these are the most challenged of all in terms of training who actually now I suppose because they have seen the discussions about online learning and they have seen universities begin to offer this kind of this kind of activity which is they've not before have actually seen an opportunity to come forward and say well actually maybe some of the stuff that you might design might be useful to us I think that you can also see an increasing range of professional development courses being designed and offered which clearly will be of value to employers and and there are lots of examples around where I think employers are engaged as teachers in online courses we have some within within our university I mean the employers are professionals you know within the working profession who are teachers on the courses I mean the opening up of the the boundaries of space and time the constraints which the campus normally has and which most employers find most challenging I think that as one moves more and more into online education we will see more and more people doing that of our master's students on our 50 odd master's courses almost all of them are part-time and working full-time against two thank you will burrows OCR in terms of your ooks what is the business model for building and providing them are you charging for them or are you making them by open do you mean anybody can access them at no cost and and how are you sustaining the business and protecting yourself or is this or are you not you're just building it you know building a business separate to it if you like well if you look at what we do with MOOCs at the moment those those are offered completely free of charge so you take them at no charge and it's a standard freemium model if you like that if you wish to have the value-added optional extras and they are optional extras then you can buy them I think in the open in the open education space actually some of our learning comes from what the open university did with open learn and that is that is that if you if you wish to enable and I think that this is an important element of of university openness if you wish to enable people to see what kind of an education you offer then offering open courses gives them one way of getting an insight into what it would be like to come to you of course the problem at the moment is that if you take an online course and you come to do a residential course they're chalk and cheese and so the residential courses would need to become more technology rich and and your online courses would need to reflect more a more sensible representation of what it would be like to come but nevertheless it's a it's a way of looking and seeing what a course would be like by trying it and taking it and some of those people may come through and then they become fee paying students in some way whether government pays for them or whether whether they pay for themselves and that's obviously directly relevant in our online master space at the present time the open courses that we offer are sitting in a different space to our degree courses and the question is how do you bring those closer together how do you take the material that you're building for your on-campus courses and offer them out without any significant additional cost because you have already built them so they aren't necessarily expensive and indeed some of that would be pro bono you know it's for the world and and it's about outreach and it's part of our mission and as long as it's not economically too imbalanced in terms of excessive cost we do that kind of stuff all the time anyway we do knowledge exchange etc and it no money changes hands so it fits into this into this space of of normal university activity some element of recruitment some element of charge services on top and as long as the balance economically looks about right then it's a it's a it's part of our normal business no i will repeat it yeah the question was does does the residential and online go head to head in competition with each other in the sense no they're different activities um i mean it's you are reaching you are reaching in the pure state with with the fully online and the fully residential you are talking to different audiences our fully residential masters programmes are almost entirely populated by non-working full-time learners our online masters courses are almost entirely populated by full-time working adults so you're talking to different populations in the middle as you hybridize those you will actually talk to people perhaps who are working but could take time off or do want to come to you but actually need to be away some of the time and so therefore they're complementary businesses and as long as you can allow them to overlap so that people can make the right choice for them at the right time you maximize the flexibility in terms of the audiences you can reach so we we just see them as different forms but of equal quality okay thank you um jeff thank you for a tremendously wide-ranging talk i'm here and and lots of really good insights and one of those i thought was the importance of understanding the true cost getting the business model right understanding how to make it productive education truly productive and therefore affordable and i thought you i mean it seemed to me that the universities have always not understood the true cost of teaching whether it's conventional or it's it's digital and once mooks arrived i thought that just reached out a scale of idiocy and you nailed that really well when you said look at how we market mooks which are free when we don't even market the stuff which we charge a lot for it's quite remarkable so that is so important that being able to to figure out how we make it affordable and quite rightly the idea of everybody thinking it's going to get cheaper as we can get students with four thousand watching one lecture but that's the easy bit that's the fixed costs of teaching and the really tough part is how we support and nurture the students through their personal intellectual development and that's where the one-to-one comes in and where the small student numbers comes in so the question is how do we get the technology to support us in that sort of process? Do you see ways? Yeah I do and actually my answer to that is that I'm not sure that I think the answer may be in the middle I mean we know that if you can give a lecture you know you put it on you itunes you and and a million people can watch it together so we know that the lecture the presentation scales enormously and you can break it up into short pieces and it's more pedagogically sensible and all that stuff it still scales and then at the other end you need varying degrees of personalised support and you're right it's the one-to-one or the one-to-a-few the question to me is is there something in the middle where we could find intelligent ways and this means technology intelligent ways of doing that at the kinds of ratios that we run our MOOCs our tutors are one to ten thousand so the question is can we find technologies that will help us do some parts of our educational business that way so we're not trying to automate everything because something's unautomatable but some things might be automatable some things actually and MOOCs have certainly taught us this some things might be crowdsourceable scalable and with the technology support for them that might mean that you can step away because it is quite interesting how much you can step away from from online courses and with a well-engaged student group and a well structured task a lot of that runs with very little from you but but you need to know when to step in and when you look at very large discussion forums you need to know where to focus your attention so if the technologies help you manage those learnings that are going on at scale maybe that's where the economy's come and you retain the expensive small group for where you need it you use the bulk where it works but somewhere in that middle one might actually be able to find new areas in which the economies of scale are really quite significant and so it seems to me that that that some of the exploration that is going on at the moment around MOOCs around managing big groups and building tools that dashboard and help you see where to go and what's going on and semantic analysis is part of that that if we can find some ways of doing that stuff you may be able to look after a lot more students simultaneously than you than you would normally do and so that that to my mind is where where one would put the focus I wouldn't bother trying to find smart ways of doing the stuff that actually does need an individual it's too likely to fail in the end I don't know 50 years from now i'm not maybe very different but 10 years from now not thank you um I'm here sorry I'm Ava Lehmann and I'm a Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University so I think about these thoughts that you presented and I have done that for about 20 years like you have now you talked about your 2020 vision 2025 vision you talked about purposeful and I think you said modest steps as we both know you need to make some leaps from time to time if you could indulge for a moment and think that you are the Vice Chancellor University of Edinburgh what would be the couple of leaps one or two leaps that you would invest in at this point in time to get to your 2025 vision which is probably even greater than the 2020 well I mean some of it's underway already which is the expansion of of online master's degrees and and that's that's a growing track so we've already made that that jump and and that you know that was a significant investment of of of real folding money and actually interestingly to go back to what dino said uh there were real financial as well as academic business cases associated with every one of those programs we developed so that was one of the other steps was to understand costs a lot better um I mean to my mind it and it goes back to the cave dwellers um real serious folding money investment into instructional design educational design or learning designers whatever you want to call them we just need a lot more and they need to work as a coordinated team and and although they may belong to the academic units they need to work as a team because otherwise you don't get the systematic um so that's one um more attention to online assessment which is I think has languished for quite a long time and and actually when you look at the sort of stuff that's now out in MOOCs you know true false mcqs and you think oh no no no we got me on that decades ago you know so to really to really begin to move to move into that kind of space um I think that learning analytics it's an uncertain thing but it does seem to me that increasing amounts of data about what your learners are doing and how they learn will help them and and some of that actually mergers into adaptive learning in other words it actually shows you where you are and what you need to do and I think that that is that's a possibility for scaling um right across the institution um so so I I guess that those would be my would be my top ones MOOCs doesn't really feature in that um I'm glad to say it it sort of sits out sits out on the side um and you know there will be games for instance and VR is not one of those that is as it happens is on is on my list um those to my mind would probably be the main the main sort of areas for adventure and I think that you're right that I have said modest because I because I mean you can't go from here to university wide but modest actually can be quite significantly impacting actually I think I would also add fully online fully online courses for undergraduate students which is quite a significant step for us and will require a real mental shift um so they've got they have to be modest but they have to have impact and be significant is I suppose is really what I should have said thank thanks Jeff I'm Nigel Ecclesfield I'm on alts further education committee so this is a question about your vision of the technology changing the universities doesn't seem to indicate that the university itself in terms of its position within the education system is going to change it's almost as if the university is the superset and the rest of the system is there to follow the the lead from from universities I'm concerned that in current developments in schools learners are being taken away from technology back into rote learning we have an fe system which is responding to employers but also their communities and I was hoping that you'd address some of those issues in your talk this morning because I think for me in 2025 what we're looking at as a university may look very different from the traditional institution and its kudos and creed that we have than the ones we have today um yeah I I I take your point I'm always very wary about about telling about um telling people what they should do when my knowledge base is not adequate to help do it and and so although although I did talk about universities I think actually many of the things that I've talked about are equally applicable in the fe settings and for instance virtual workplaces and those interactions may be fully online courses so so I mean I I I feel confident to to in a sense suggest to universities where they might go I feel less confident to do that for fe I'm actually part of the Scottish Government's group to design digital education for schools and I am very aware of of how different the school setting is and and therefore trying to say things about how that should be runs across a very different set of of of issues you know the curriculum for instance is not you are not free in in those settings to decide what you will or won't do in the same way as you are within within universities local authorities make decisions about access policies about bring your own device etc which can vary you know you can cross a street and and you've gone from accepted and welcome to denied so so the settings in in where there's much more local control the challenges there and actually I think the the opportunities are different to the university setting I it doesn't mean to say that I don't think some of this is relevant and it doesn't certainly doesn't mean to imply on my part and I'm sorry if I did the universities were everything and so the rest of the education sector followed suit around it because I don't think that that that is true at all but in some respects the sorts of vision that I think that that I would have for my own institution of much more open open on the boundaries and engagement with colleges as we do engage with Edinburgh college for instance which is the amalgamation of the local fe colleges and we as we engage with our access courses that bring learners from more disadvantaged backgrounds in everything we do in this area assists that and doesn't damage it and indeed some of the stuff that we are doing for instance around MOOCs and around open education is specifically designed to help widening participation and access and is designed to help engagement with with with the colleges but I think unless the university itself has got a vision about its its place and what it wants to do and where it wants to go it's much harder to have those conversations with other organisations and if they don't have a vision about where they want to go then you wind up in this kind of mishmash in the middle I think that it's better if people have got clarity and then you look for where you overlap and where you can achieve common purpose well thanks Jeff for that very stimulating start to our conference is lots of topics there to think about and I hope you'll be able to take some of those forward over the next few days but could you join me again before we go to say thank you to Jeff Haywood so just a quick reminder that it's not quite lunchtime yet we do have our parallel session starting