 Well, hello friends and colleagues. Some of you I hope already know me. My name is Mark Brown and I'm the director of the National Institute for Digital Learning here in Dublin. I left New Zealand over five years ago to take up this role where I was previously at Massey University in New Zealand. Stephen contacted me in the context of the sort of forum or range of activities going on over the next period with ACODE. I used to be recently active in ACODE myself so this is just a brief Friday afternoon, very late Friday afternoon off the cuff video to share some thoughts and reflections which I hope we can also unpack and extend through other channels. I've also got in the background there a little embedded advertising so I better get my info commercial out right now. Of course, I'm also the chair for this year's World Conference on Online Learning, the ICDE World Conference on Online Learning and I know that there are a good number of people from down under who are going to be coming to enjoy the delights of Dublin at that time of the year and I look forward to having a Guinness with you in a traditional Irish pub perhaps in Temple Bar for those who are coming. A couple of questions that came with the sort of request to share some thoughts of what's going on in this space at the moment. This is very unscripted but Dublin City University is really investing quite heavily, both conceptually but practically in what we see of the future. We like to see ourselves as our relatively young university coming up to 40 years of age from a ranking perspective sort of a university that typically falls into the top 50 universities under 50 years of age and the various rankings just telling you that to give you a little bit of a sense of DCU and the innovation culture that we have. So we've invested currently quite heavily into new models of teaching and learning. Digital technology is crucial to that and the fact that we host the National Institute that I lead is an indication of that but in more recent times we are only one of seven universities worldwide at this point in time that have signed up to offer our degrees online through FutureLearn of course Deakin. I think Newcastle was it down under Murdoch fallen to that category as well. For us that investment is very strategic it took a long time to work our way through the business case. MOOCs for us are not about MOOCs at all if you're referring to FutureLearn or any of the other MOOC platforms. This is just an evolution fact our first environment into the MOOC sphere if you like was with our courses on the Irish language. At the moment over 40,000 people have done those courses from 136 countries but we saw it as almost like a Trojan horse of a way for us to rethink teaching and learning. It wasn't actually packed despite my sales job here about branding the university and trying to promote ourselves so the original business case was based on innovation. What we're doing right now only last week here in Dublin we hosted the CEO of FutureLearn and some other senior staff with a formal launch of our microcredential through to master's initiatives. We have a very first microcredential coming out in the area of FinTech. This is part of a wider initiative that you may not be as familiar with where about six weeks ago in Europe in Brussels we launched a common microcredential framework across the European MOOC consortium and in Europe MOOCs are still really very large. They're driven with very different drivers I think it would be better say from the United States or even Canada. I say that with some confidence because there are a number of reports that have been published looking at what the drivers are. Here with the exception of the United Kingdom education is inherently still a public good and the driver to open access and expand outreach is really core. In DCU's case we have a mission of transforming lives and societies so one of the reasons we're embarking on what we're doing is the opportunity to take our mission of opening up access to education beyond the island of Ireland. There's a brief video that I'll probably share that you can watch link to that particular initiative but it's really important to us that we are linking up with a broader objective that the university has or a mission which is not just about going out and internationalising or heading for the just going about making money. In terms of our investment with the FutureLearn platform we actually had two false starts initially. We dismissed FutureLearn in many respects those of you who know Ireland because at the time when those discussions were taking place FutureLearn was very much a UK based platform so it wasn't perhaps the best fit. One of the reasons we're doing what we're doing right now with the small family of really global strategic partners with FutureLearn that's the seven that I referred to is that we really feel that we can get around the table to shape the direction of where the whole movement is going. The opportunities that online technologies provide for opening access to education and addressing the global demand, exponential demand. There's an Irish expression that comes to mind is that when I said around the table that if you're not around the table then perhaps you're more likely to be on the menu so there are very solid reasons behind what we're doing. Another aspect to why we're embarking on a micro-preventioning initiative we offer modules that many modules will be made up of MOOCs for our campus based students. I haven't got time to fully elaborate but in part we want to internationalise the curriculum so that campus based students can be part of a wider cohort. Why would we recreate courses when they already exist in the form of MOOCs that we can plug into our formal modules as these mini modules. Another reason why we would be doing that with campus based students is in the future we think learning how to be an online learner is a learning outcome itself that all university students need or any student that's coming through a higher education system because we're all going to have to be lifelong and life a lot wide learners and digital technologies are one form or another and ones that we don't even know about right now will be a crucial part to that. So in summarising I guess what we're doing at DCU and the wider context of the micro-prudential movement how new technologies particularly MOOCs are influencing higher education there are tend to be a polarised response to MOOCs it's certainly my experience there's a very big difference between what's going on across the Atlantic if you like and in our case the drivers are really still linked to drivers about opening access to education. At DCU we first hosted the National Centre for Distance Education over 30 years ago so it's really deep in the DNA of this university to be using these new technologies to figure out how we can come up with new models of teaching learning to address some of the challenges that we face. I guess a couple of the other questions that spring to mind about what's really going on and the challenges that universities are facing right now I'm often asked when I'm back down under what are the big differences between should we say Australasian universities and Europe which Ireland is very much part of Europe well probably the single biggest differences education here is still inherently a public good and so in the Irish system we still have a free fees model as in very many parts of Europe some countries completely free so I think that's something quite a revelation when I first came here compared to perhaps what many of you experienced today it changes the thinking it changes perhaps some of the drivers for innovation for better and worse perhaps when I as business like as you might be in your part of the world but then sometimes that also allows us to do things that don't necessarily always have had a financial return or that have the luxury to innovate perhaps the example I've been describing with FutureLearn where hand on heart I've been unable to really make any guarantees about where this might end up because we can't simply predict the future I'm not sure if there's much more I can add at this point other than we would really look forward to welcoming anyone here in Dublin Dublin who's really a hot house of activity in the IT industry you may be aware that we had the head office for LinkedIn the world head office for Twitter major offices for Apple Google Microsoft the companies just keep rolling off and more and more are moving here for various reasons some of which link to the taxation system as much as anything but Ireland also has the highest educated population of any European country now and in addition another fact sounds like I'm doing a bit of a sales job here for Ireland it's a great place to live and work Dublin here in particular but something compared to maybe even when you were here last now Ireland has the most ethnically diverse population of any European country really welcomed immigration and at Dublin City University we're very proud of two other aspects one is we were the world's first age friendly university helped establish the age friendly network aging as seen as an asset not as a deficit we've hosted two years running the world age friendly conference university conference and the second we were Ireland's very first university of sanctuary and so just yesterday I had the privilege of being able to manage a press release with new announcement around 20 scholarships for study this is the third year we've been doing this for refugees and asylum seekers and 15 of those scholarships this year were for online study because many of the refugees and asylum seekers don't have the opportunity to get out and about in the way that we might be used to so that's just another sense in which the way new technologies are being used at DCU very much with the money on the mission if you like the mission being transforming lives and societies that's probably a good note for me to stop hopefully in all that Friday afternoon rambling there's something here to at least put a human base into some ideas in a rather garbled way but I'm looking forward to following up whether that be online in text-based interaction or perhaps in a synchronous session at some stage. Kia ora.