 and welcome to the launch of the Amplify V community sector audit. I'm Maaren Digwell, and I'd like to introduce you to my co-speaker. Hi, I'm Emma Foxalleg, great to be here. Hello, Emma, how are you doing? Good, thanks. It's great conference so far, isn't it? Absolutely, I've been enjoying the last couple of days, it's been fantastic to see so many people from FE contribute presentations, and I absolutely loved Lou's keynote this morning. Did you catch that? I did. It was wonderful. So lovely to hear about all the joy for things. Joyful things indeed. Well, we're looking forward to adding to the joy, particularly for vocational education and further education participants. I was so excited to launch today the Amplify FE sector audit, and we're particularly thrilled to follow in this session on from a fantastic plenary discussion that just happened on the future of learning technology, in which we were delighted to have Rebecca Garret Walters, the CEO of the U of I Trust, and with us as part of the panel. So, Rebecca has given us a fantastic bit of food for thought. And Emma and I are now looking forward to launching the sector audit with you. Emma, what do you say? Are we ready to jump in to our key findings from the sector audit? Absolutely, let's go for it. Okay, brilliant. So everybody without further ado, here are key findings from the 2021 Amplify FE community sector audit. Emma, can you hear the sound? Hello. Welcome to the key findings of the Amplify FE sector audit report 2021. So excited to show you all the different findings and hopefully, but you're at the time to read the whole report. The Amplify FE network is led by the Association for Learning Technology in partnership with U of I the Vok Tech Trust. We launched Amplify FE in October 2020. And since then, we've connected over 1000 professionals in further education, and vocational education, providing a strong networking community for them to share, collaborate and learn. This sector audit that we're talking to you about today is a key part of the work that we do to support the sector. Now, when we did our first audit last year, it was very much at the beginning of what was a very dark and turbulent year, one with seismic upheaval for the sector. So from getting through the darkest days of the global crisis to keeping services going, while scaling up blended and online learning, the pace has felt relentless to so many colleagues and communities out there. In this audit, we feature many grassroots networks and communities who have often had to fill the gaps left by too little funding and lack of formal support, such as grassroots efforts that are really led by passionate individuals who give above and beyond to support their colleagues and learners. And if you're listening to us today, you know who you are, we really applaud you. We want to acknowledge and celebrate your efforts. But we also want to note that the need for structural changes, which professional bodies and sector organizations campaign for is more urgent now than ever before. So in this year's audit, we've really focused on what's happened to the 100 communities of practice that we've looked at a year ago and how things have changed. In particular, we focused on communities that have stopped or started their activities, important changes to the sector landscape and tracking where the conversation is moving on social media. And Emma, I'm going to hand over to you now to actually look at some of the key findings. Thanks, Marilyn. So we conducted the audit recently, and we found that there's been an increase in number of communities within the audit to up to 130. That's a 30% increase in community surveys. We've noted that there's a number of different platforms that communities use, most of them use at least two. And that the one where we've seen numbers decline has been mostly with the disk mailing lists. The most notable community that's disappeared are the TES forums. So when we originally looked at it, there were 74 individual forums with three of them dedicated to FE and vocational education. So all of those have now gone. Twitter remains one of the most popular platforms. We looked at a total of 96 different Twitter handles, and we've included 17 new hashtags to the community map. So Twitter really is one of those kind of platforms that where communities start out. In that process of looking through it, we've identified a total of 36 new communities. And we've noted that with COVID-19 that there has been a push towards communities using teams and Zoom. Obviously, because people need to move to have meetings online available to kind of connect with people. Since the last audit, Amplify FE has been used across Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. And the community has generated a total number of 9,823 tweets, which is absolutely amazing. And we would really recommend that you do check out us on social media. So we have this option where you can add your own hashtag to our community map. And during the process, since we opened it back in December, last year, we've had these additional hashtags added. So you can see all of the ones here listed on the right hand side where they are in regular use across Twitter. And obviously, we would really love to connect with you. So please do find us on social media. So we're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're on LinkedIn and we're on Instagram. We've got a mailing list that you can sign up to as well. So find us, start that conversation and just use Amplify FE to help share and grow the network. Thanks Emma. So we hope we've given you appetite to go and check out the whole audit at AmplifyFE.ALT.AC.UK forward slash audit and follow the conversation and hashtag Amplify FE. All data from the audit has been anonymized and made openly available as part of our wider commitment to the open COVID pledge for education. And it's Creative Commons licensed to please do reuse and adopt to fit your own purposes. The audit had such a great response last year, we hope this year's will be even more useful. Thank you very much for joining us for this launch of the Amplify FE sector audit. And with that, it's goodbye from me and goodbye from Emma. Thank you very much.