 I'd like to introduce our second keynote speaker to you of the conference. He's Martin Bean who is the vice-chancellor designate of the UK Open University. Martin has been in the UK for two months now, but very specially for us, this is the first keynote speech that he's made. I hope that says something about his commitment to learning technology that has come first to our conference today at Ault. I'm sure you'd rather listen to him than me, but I'd just like to highlight that if you listen carefully through his speech that he's bringing together the very complex perspectives of two worlds, the commercial software platform world and our world of education. And I think that's something very special. So I'd like you to welcome Martin Bean to the podium please. All right. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Martin Bean and I'm so glad to be able to say that now because for the last 15 years I've had to introduce myself as Martin Bean, otherwise nobody actually understood what I was saying. So it is an absolute pleasure to be here because this is the place I like to be best. It was an absolute pleasure for me to accept an invitation to keynote here because this is the world that I have spent my entire professional life working in. That intersection I like to call it between education and technology and really thinking deeply about bringing those two worlds together in a meaningful way, particularly for our students. So a little bit about me. Born in Melbourne, Australia, it's been a miserable few weeks for the cricket here. I'll have to tell you that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Freddie, all that. Yes, I get it. And I met my wife in Africa. She's from Northern Ireland. I spent the last 15 years in the United States of America and I have three American daughters. We are one screwed up family. But you'll see as I bring these perspectives together that as was mentioned in the introduction I've kind of spent the last 15 years of my life working inside commercial, largely software and testing companies, but all engaged in education, primary, secondary and tertiary. The last five years has been spent at Microsoft working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the great people at Microsoft trying to figure out where the appropriate application is of technology. And then I made the great decision, the great decision last November to move from the theoretical R&D side back to where it really makes a difference and that's with working at people as a practitioner. And we'll talk more about that. So this is a journey. It's partly a journey of how I got here, but it's also a journey of the way I see innovation actually comes to bear inside education. And as Michael spoke about yesterday, I think what's really important is it's less about trying to find those really pivotal points of massive change. And instead it's about actually sitting back and recognizing that this is a journey and we're a custodian of that journey for actually a fairly small piece of it, but right now a pretty big piece of it. And I think what's really interesting is that, you know, we think that the skepticism that people have about technology today is something new. So I thought I'd just share a few sound bites for you that I bought with me from the United States. The first is from a teachers conference in 1703, which by American standards is a long time ago. OK, so I know that's yesterday here, but by American standards, that's a long time ago. So students today can't prepare Bach to calculate their problems. They depend on their slates, which are more expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write, but it's OK because things got better. Fast forward to 1815. Students today depend on paper too much. They don't know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper? But it's OK now. In 1907, students today depend too much upon ink. They don't know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil. But we get more enlightened in 1928. Students today depend upon store-bought ink. They don't know how to make their own. When they run out of ink, they will be unable to write words or cyphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a sad commentary on modern education. And then in 1941, students today depend on these expensive fountain pens. They no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world, which is not so extravagant. And then in 1950, ballpoint pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students use these devices and throw them away. The American value of thrift and frugality are being discarded. Businesses and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries. Ironic, isn't it? It's really ironic when you think about that. So for all of you that like me think that we're coming up against resistance to innovation for the first time in the world in which we live, it's not true. It's always been there, and it's always been up to us. It's always been up to us, those of us that could see the application of the latest and greatest in the day in which we lived in an appropriate way that could help bring education along for the journey. But man, oh man, are there a lot of forces going on in our society and our economies and in this world of ours that is making that more and more complex for all of us. There's a book called The World is Flat. Many of you have probably read it, and it was actually written before the financial meltdown. So much of what Friedman talked about I think has slowed down, but if you believe the headlines were about to start heating up again. But I think what Friedman wrote has some profound implications for all of us in higher education around the world. One of his conclusions was that globalization is a reality. He went on to talk about that competition is now global. It's no longer about us in the United Kingdom as higher education institutions going hammer and tong with each other in the regions that we operate in. It's about recognizing that competition is now global. He talked about that we work in this turbo charged environment and we do. Two years ago, two years ago, I guarantee you as I was delivering this keynote that it wouldn't be real time broadcast through illuminate or whatever platform out to a set of disparate users or consumers. But more importantly, there wouldn't be folks like all of you right now twittering away giving your real time feedback and critique of what I'm saying, which by the way I will read afterwards and I do have the participant list and I will find where you live. The next one, which I think is profound for all of us is that it's hard for some of the institutions in which you work and I work to necessarily accept this or accept the role that we play in this. But that increasingly business goes where the talent is. And finally, lifetime employment is being replaced by lifetime employability. What does that really mean? Back in my Nobel days, my CEO was a gentleman by the name of Bob Frankenberg and he and I were discussing education one day. And he said, you know what, Martin, we used to think about education as a once in a lifetime experience and now we have to think of it as a lifelong experience. Because what we're seeing in the economy of the UK today, the economy of Australia, the United States of America, I could go on and on is that it's no longer about that 18 year old cohort getting that once in a lifetime experience and then going on to thrive and prosper. We have millions of people that need us like never before to top up, replace, tune, augment the skills that they've got to again get back to leading the sorts of lives for themselves and for their families that they wanted to leave. So when we shift gears then and we think about what does that mean for the changing nature of higher education, I break it down into kind of three core categories. And the first of that is globalization. There are now 2.5 million students studying outside their home country today. Initiatives, normalisation initiatives like the Bolognau Agreement are purposely built to allow people to move their higher education experience from one nation to another to access the education that's relevant for them in the life that they want to lead. And we're also seeing massive growth, unprecedented growth in distance education. Just take Singapore alone. In Singapore today, if you're an MBA student, you have a choice of over 200 online MBAs that you can choose from. Of course you'll actually do a degree in how to choose which MBA you want to go do, but that's a different story. The second area is about massification. The undeniable reality of the macroeconomic environment in the world is that despite some fairly massive increases of late in supply, the world cannot supply enough higher education places to keep pace with demand if we stick with that traditional brick and mortar environment. So what I often talk about is the need to move from brick and mortar to click and mortar, to have the courage to recognise that the only way that we'll keep pace with that whole agenda of massification is that if we retool and rethink the way that we provide access to people throughout the world. Some of us may sit back on our laurels and say, ah, yeah, but you know what? In recent times we've seen 20, 30, 40, 50% increases in supply for education. Take a look at sub-Sahara and Africa and ask yourselves whether a decade only realising a 5% increase in supply is enough to really allow the citizens of our planet to thrive when a post-secondary education is critical. And I'll come back to that in just a moment. The third area is obviously privatisation. Tax-funded, higher education worldwide is in retreat mode. The private sector is the fastest growing delivery mechanism for higher education in the world. One in three, one in three students now studies inside a private higher ed institution. And the thing for all of us to recognise, as I mentioned before, is that now that it is the fastest growing sector, it has a very different motivation to a lot of the universities that are in this room or a lot of the higher education institutions in the room. At the Open University, I wake up every day and I'm so glad that I do thinking about social justice, how to give people access to a high quality supported open learning environment. Some of these private organisations, they wake up every day, they think about shareholder value and returning shareholder value. A very different set of motivations that makes them an extremely formidable competitor within the sector. Fastest growing, 30% are already there, massive uptake of technology, riding the wave of distance education. That's the world that we live in. So thinking about that then, what do we see then as our collective challenge? Well the first collective challenge is we've got to get real. We've got to realise that the economies of the US and the UK are now largely overshadowed by economies like China and India, which are number one and number three in higher education systems in the world. When you look at China's investment in R&D that has been massive, I guarantee you the rankings for the top research institutions in the world are going to look fundamentally different 20 years from now. It used to be that when PhD students came to the United States to study, the great thing the US could rely upon is they'd do what? They'd stay. The vast majority of those people now, they go home. Second thing that we have to recognise is that our collective challenge is about the need to educate our citizens for new types of work. You know when you think about it in the UK context for example, we're ranked number 17th for low level skills, 18th on intermediate and 12th on high level skills. And if you think about adults of working age, just shy of half, just shy of half are not qualified above level two. If we're to be the underpinning of making sure that the UK continues to be a world leader and thrive and prosper, we have to face up to the collective challenge that we've got in the skills agenda of making sure that our students are equipped with the right set of skills that our economies are demanding. The next challenge, STEM is a key for competitive workforce. And yet as we all know, I won't go into the details because you know it better than I, but STEM is challenged in many of the developing countries around the world. Why is STEM so critical? Ask that question of policy makers and see what answer you get. But STEM is critical because STEM fuels innovation. And the only future for economies like the United Kingdom and Australia and the United States is the innovation agenda. And that's why STEM is so darn important. Next of our collective challenges is of course the increasing importance of sustainability. And again, won't spend a lot of time here, but I think one of the roles that higher ed institutions plays in societies and it's always been this way. One of our roles is to make people feel uncomfortable at times. There are critical times in history where we have a very unique role of actually making people feel uncomfortable to bring about the sort of change that is necessary. And I think sustainability is one of those. And I don't think it's about offering courses necessarily in green jobs or creating new engineering qualifications. I actually think it's multi-disciplinary, multi-faculty. I think it's about going horizontal. I think it goes into our research agendas. I think it goes into our teaching agendas. I think it goes into our leadership agendas. I think it has to go everywhere because we've got to play our part in helping people feel uncomfortable. And it's also about transforming information into meaningful knowledge. Transforming information into meaningful knowledge. I'm sure Michael's presentation yesterday talked a lot about that. You can nest it under 21st century skills. You can talk about it as me as an educator moving from sage on the stage to coach on the side. You can talk about it however you want. But the days of rote memorisation and regurgitation and assessing. For that I had a 14-year-old the other day describe school to me like this. You know he said Martin's school is like being on an aeroplane. You sit down, you've got to put all your trust and confidence in somebody at the front that you've never met and you've got to turn off all your electronic devices. Think about the classic examination setting still in the United Kingdom and the United States. Put them in a room. Take away all their tools. Hand them a pencil or a pen and a bit of paper. Knock yourself out. Somehow we're measuring their 21st century skills. It's ironic, isn't it? All right. I've got to speed up or I'll never get through it. Mind you though, I actually coming from Microsoft do not believe that a PowerPoint has a constitutional right to be start and finished. So just so that you know that. So let's talk a little bit about the student experience though. Many of our students have never known and increasingly so a world without the web, mobile phones, SMS, video on demand, MP3. You know some recent surveys in the United Kingdom. You know 90% of students say they use the internet now or young people, 16 to 19 year olds. 73% say they use it on a daily basis. Over 60% of them say they now have a social networking profile and I didn't measure it, but I bet at least 40% of them have more than about five. Often with different personalities in each of those sessions by the way. If you look at the uptake of technology in the homes of the United Kingdom, you know approximately 70% of the homes in 2008 had access to the internet and from 2008 to 2009 that went up by 2 million homes. And so it's clear to me that you know we can continue to have the conversations of access. We have to have conversations of access, but we also have to get real about the changing nature of our student population. And you know we did some research when I was at Microsoft and you know we really decided to say so what's on their mind in these 18 to 24 year olds and we looked at their values, their priorities, their likes and their hates and their values, autonomy, authenticity. They wanted to be able to connect and share creativity, individuality and constant stimulation. We looked at their priorities, that didn't change much from when I was at university. Friends, fun, music, but again look at it again. Real time interaction and self presentation. What do they like? Devices and phones, identities, cool stuff friend, the stuff that friends have and new stuff and what do they hate? Complexity, bad design, anything that costs the money and things that get in the way of self expression. Probably end up doing my PhD in thinking about is this desire to connect and share on mass something new? Or has it always been there and all the internet did was to create an environment that allowed it to happen much faster and much more at scale. But if we think about that, if we think about that's the world in which they live and that's what they do in their lives. I believe that we have a crisis of relevance. Some surveys that we've done in the United States, around 70 to 75% of what would be our new entrance believe that a higher education is critical to their success. Same group, only about 23% of them believe that the education they're getting is relevant. That's why I call it a crisis of relevance. If we think about what it's going to take to be more relevant, the first thing I believe is that it's about blending digital lifestyles and digital work styles. It's not about unplugging them, it's actually allowing them to have the best of both. It's about recognizing that future jobs will require those specialized skills that I discussed before. It's about recognizing that it's about lifelong learning. We cannot depend on young graduates alone. And certainly my university understands that better than most. It's about recognizing that it's got to be about continual development. That learning in the workplace needs to be integral. We just can't have people any longer for their own sake to just simply stop their lives to top up their education. We have to be prepared to bring it to where they are. And it's also about breaking down the barriers between informal and formal learning and removing what today are these very tough, rigid barriers we artificially create for people to knit pathways together at all levels to seamlessly move in and out of higher education as and when they need it. In fact, our system is engineered to do virtually the opposite. Our funding systems make it difficult for that to happen. You can list the barriers one after another, but that's not what our students need. It's not what our communities need. It's not what our economies need. And it's not what a quality higher education experience should be. It's also about recognizing that we've got to get back to putting the learner at the middle. The days of just simply pushing great globs of information at them and calling that in an education are gone. And it's recognizing that higher education is about making sure that they're at the middle and that the content, the pedagogies, the services, the touch, the support all revolve around them. And so what therefore with that is the backdrop. You've got Friedman's macroeconomic backdrop. You've got the implications for higher education. You can see a little bit about where our students are going and what their needs are. So now we come to our world. We come to the world of so why is technology relevant? There's a few areas I wanted to touch on there with you. The first is I believe that it's about expanding the reach of high quality education to all. I'm going to come back and talk about open education resources later as one example of that. But in all the research that we did at Microsoft, the number one thing that we netted out that technology could help with is it could help people get access. It could help people get access to a high quality education experience, higher education experience, and K through 12 when normally they wouldn't have been able to access that. It's about nurturing powerful communities of learning. This is one that I'm particularly believing. This notion of formally and informally, as I mentioned before, moving away from a very sage on the stage centric environment and using the technology to allow communities formally and informally to spring up and take advantage of education and figure out the complications around how do we assess that, how do we credential that, et cetera, as part of the journey that we're on. We're recognizing that it's about enabling relevant personalized engaging learning. I'm going to talk about that in a moment in the OU journey section of this presentation. But one thing's for sure, in the world that they live in, the classic textbook model four year refreshed that has been basically the bastion of higher education since the Second World War, those days are done. And it's also about giving educators greater insight and more time. It's nothing new here. Most of the thinking around this has been around really for decades. It's about recognizing that instead of this environment when we walk into a lecture, being exactly what I'm doing to you right now, which is kind of giving you new information to digest. All of that could have been done in advance. You all could have just as the young people are doing today. They're out there distributing the lecture notes from last year and the year before or yesterday and they're getting it all done. It's about assessing where they're at, greater insight as to what did you all get from my words before you even walked in here today. You know what that would allow us then to do? That would have allowed us to have the most awesome dialogue between us, to test theories and assumptions, to share ideas, to really get down to where the learning takes place. But it's also, and it's very important, it's also about agile, efficient and connected learning systems. Number one challenge of the CIOs of the world in higher education when I meet with, it's data. Data locked up in silos. Silos, some of which are homegrown, some of which are off the shelf, commercial, where they're designed to lock the data up. And what everybody wants is the ability to unlock that data. So when I talk about agile and efficient, what I'm really talking about is systems that whether we call it MIS or something else, get us access to the information we need as and when we need it. The voice just went back to America, I'll be right back. It's somebody cutting me off. All right. So let's pause though. We've looked at the role of technology and where it's appropriate. The number one thing I've learned in the last 25 years about the application of technology is, it's more about the people and the process than it is about the technology. Why does technology innovation fail in our institutions? 9 times out of 10, it fails because we spend all of our time thinking about the hardware and the software and very, very little time thinking about the brainware. And yet you see it repeated over and over again in primary, secondary and higher education. Whenever I would sit with a minister of education and believe me, I have sat with many and they say, guess what Martin? Or Martin. I'll say, yeah. They'll say, we're about to give every 10th grader a laptop. And I would look at them and say, you are an idiot because until you have really thought through what's got to change in the teacher enablement, the pedagogy, the content, the processes, the enablement. And you know what? You can pay a lot of lip service to that where the rubber really hits the road is that you're prepared to invest in it. You're prepared to give all the stakeholders the training, the time and the resources they need to come along for that journey. So if you take nothing else away from my presentation today before you go introduce the next fangled piece of technology, stop and ask yourself the question, have we taken care of the people and the processes? So now we're going to segue a little bit and we're going to talk about the Open University. And we were founded on four key themes that I am so proud of and that will not change when I am the vice chancellor in two weeks time. So sit back and reflect. Elbow patches, freshly ironed and hair on standby. In January 1971, the Open University was finally open. Morning and a very happy new year to all of you. And everybody was going to get a look in on this university. I think that's pretty clear what each of these vectors represents. And then it's a simple method for you to find the restriction on the side H. Then taking a little grease, put it out on eyelash. See if I can find one. And get the eyelash into the grease at the end. Right, well that's how you make the micro needle. I'd like to consider the features that you might say make up the new and exciting manhain side. But strangely, not to keep a tie in sight. We agree that that's a pretty complicated motion. So, that's where it was born. The challenge for us today and for all of my colleagues, by the way, I wanted to do this. If you have been a student, a tutor, currently work for the OU, or have once been employed in a different capacity, raise your hand right now. Look around that room, ladies and gentlemen. Look around that room. First of all, thank you. But that is the awesome responsibility that my university has to continue to lead in the sector and continue to do great things. Because we're going to remain open to people. We're going to do it wherever we can do it. We're going to take the best we possibly can and through great solid research that informs what we do. We're going to implement new methods. And we are always going to be open to new ideas. And that's why I joined the Open University. And that's the quest that we're now on, not as a revolution, but as an evolution. And I wanted to talk about that because it's going to happen at the OU and is happening at the OU in a few really interesting ways. First of all, it's about student support. It's really always been about personal, but it's now just about personal in a whole new way. The great news is the web's coming our way. The web's moving from content-centric to people-centric. So what we're going to do in the Open University is we're going to ride that wave. We've actually made sure that we took the best of what we've got and take a look at these numbers. This is our student support challenge. 1.25 million telephone calls, 240,000 registrations, 500 courses, 200 qualifications, 800,000 student assignments, 125,000 examinations, 87,000 end-of-course assessments, and 33,000 qualifications awarded every year. And we're going to do that high touch. And we're going to do that high touch by redefining our student journey and thinking deeply around the application of technology at absolutely every stage of that journey. We're also going to be thinking deeply about meeting them where they live. If any of you believe that they want to hang out in your VLE, the last place in the world, they'll be there when you tell them to be there. Otherwise, this is where they're going to be, so go meet them where they live. We're also going to take advantage of this revolution that we're seeing in changing delivery models of content creation, consumption, and manipulation. I don't know whether it's right or wrong, but it's what I believe. The iPod never would have happened without Napster. Napster broke the business models of the music industry that created the opportunity for us to now have an extremely profitable, rewarding new way of consuming music, the same as now happening for textbooks. And it's being driven by, this is the iconic symbol, ladies and gentlemen, of a transformation of content. I think it's a little simplistic and I'll come back there, but we'll talk about it in a moment. It's really being driven by initiatives like Open Education Resources. What you're seeing on the screen here is Open Learn. It's our particular Open Education repository that we are unbelievably proud of. And we're proud of it not just because we've had 4 million visitors since launch and 400 self-study web units and we're using new technology, but we're proud of it because we recognized it should be part of an overall initiative to change and lead. On behalf of the sector and in collaboration of the sector, our SCORE initiatives, for example, are going to leverage what we've learned in OER and help everybody take advantage of them going forward. Because best of all, going back to my thought about access before, the thing that's disruptive about Open Education Resources is that free to browse, free to register, free to use, free to adapt, free to share. And that makes it very disruptive indeed. We also believe that it's about going multi-channel and going multi-channel in a big way. When I talk about multi-channel from a technology perspective, it's about built once, put it in a content repository once, but then go meet them where they live. Go meet them in Miro and iTunes and YouTube, as well as in your VLEs and your internet and your lectures. That man, we have to get out of these rigid models because take a look. This is our instance on iTunes University. What people do here is they visually surf. So the only way for you to get attention is if you start recognizing it's a place for you to extend your brand and it's a place for you to be visually attractive. To be successful here, it's not just a matter of putting lecture notes into a display factor that can be put on an iPhone. It's about recognizing we have to produce a whole new generation of engaging, interesting digital content. If you take a look at where we've been in such a short time with iTunes University, you can see why I believe that it's powerful to meet them where they live. 6.12 million downloads, over 684,000 visitors. Currently averaging over 180,000 downloads a week and we have a significant number of the top 20 titles of iTunes University anywhere in the world and over 50% of the people that do our downloads are outside the United Kingdom. Do you know how much it cost me to do all of this? Trust me, compared to what the rest of us are spending to put signs on the side of buses, it's extremely cost effective. But it's also about not just about doing those lectures. This is a Martian meteorite right now and what you're seeing is a virtual microscope. You're seeing a virtual mice chrysope, you're seeing whether you've got with different polarizations and you've got an entire lab that's getting students ready to actually be able to, when they look through a microscope, understand it. But it gets better. Now we're rotating at 360 degrees, we're allowing the light to shine in different ways, which for the geologists in the room is now giving us the ability to actually look at it from different dimensions and actually look for the different minerals that are in that Martian meteorite. Imagine a full 10-point, 30-point, 60-point course fully loaded on one of these with labs, simulations, microscopes, where you can actually digest it, internalize it and use it anywhere that you want. That's the next generation of what we're talking about with these devices. It's not just simply about building podcasts, ladies and gentlemen, and that's where we're at right now. What I wanted to finish on though is really education meets social networking. It's somewhat of a soft announcement to all of you here today, our friends in the community of technology and education because we believe it's exciting, fast disruption, disruptive, sorry, and inherently social. We call it social learn and we invite you to participate because social learn is really leveraging 2.0 for education, web 2.0 for education, really in the business models that O'Reilly originally envisaged that it would be used. Think of it as building this very rich, personalized learning environment that's very learner-centric, but not an echo chamber with comfort zones. We're building personalized information feeds and mobile tools. We're building learner-selected peer network, learner-selected mentors, personal resource archives, and we're wrapping it all around the student. It's really designed to be a platform that takes advantage of all of the data and services that are out there that inherently were not built for learning. I was with the CIO from Facebook a few weeks ago and we were sitting chatting and he said, you know what, for all of those Facebook applications there really hasn't been anything breakthrough in education yet. And we believe what we're onto with social learn is the type of application inside a Facebook environment or a YouTube environment or an iTunes environment moves from social networking to social networking meets education. And if you think about it, what we're doing is we're building a platform that's tuned to move from people like me to people who challenge me, from friends to learning peers and mentors, from informed chats to learning conversations, to quick facts and info exchange to learning journeys and depth, from simplistic numeric ratings to endorsements and critiques, from tag clouds to connected ideas and from shopping recommendations to learning recommendations. That's what we're building with social learn. And why are we building it? Because going back to what I said before about enabling people, processes and technology, we can build a bunch of stuff, ladies and gentlemen, and ask them to come use it, or we can build what they want and meet them where they live and break down the barriers between formal and informal and some amazing things can happen. Because motivated learners are creating their own reuse models. Innovative learners are creating their own sharing contexts. Creative teachers are also leaping outside of the institutional walls. Moodle is a wonderful example of that. And new forms and channels for consumption and production are appearing and becoming very powerful. The real question that I want to leave you on before we take questions is that we prepared to be our own worst competition. Thank you. Opportunity to ask Martin questions. I'm Australian, you cannot offend me. So any questions are good questions. Well that's a bit of a challenge. So if you can put your hand up, say who you are and there's a roving mic because we are recording. There's one here and can the next person put their hand up so we can get the mic to you ready? One here. Okay, please go ahead. I am Australian so I'll give it the first shot. All right mate and your name is please. David Kennedy. David? David Kennedy, I work in Hong Kong. All right, nice to meet you David. Nice to meet you too. A very thought provoking presentation and some, it's wonderful here at VC talking about the relationship of technology and learning. And acknowledging that that is a strong and powerful relationship amongst our students. The question I would like to raise is being the grand high poo bar of your organisation. May I ask what will you do to the institutional structures that traditionally reward other things besides teaching and innovation and change? Thank you. So the question was what about those inherent structures that might be barriers and thank you. I think, you know, it was described to me in Northern Ireland once by a high school teacher that said, you know what, I'm sick and tired of education being done to me rather than for me. I think if we can't prove the value proposition, the what's in it for me and actually sweep people up in where we're heading and show them the why I call it, the what's in it for me or the why. And going back to something that I said before and demonstrate that we're willing to invest in building the right and enabling the right people and processes, then we will not break down those structures. In higher education too, I think it's extremely important that we are very aware of two very dominant forces that we have to pay attention to. Number one are our faculties and our academics, where it's critical if not vital for success that much of this innovation be born and led out of our faculties where they're making the decisions that they have always made, which is they are the custodians of what a quality education experience is. And so trying to do it skunkworks, trying to do it off to one side, trying to work around it, none of that I believe will work. The other thing is the research agenda. Much of what my institution does, and I've got a very profound sense of it after my first couple of months, is that we don't go and launch anything innovative unless we've done a lot of tremendously grounded research that informs what we do. So I think in short, if we're willing to have a compelling vision that people can buy in on, if we're willing to invest in the people and processes to enable success, if we're willing to ensure that our academics fully inform what we do to preserve our quality learning experience, and if we make sure that everything that we do is grounded in solid research and it works, we'll get it done. Thank you. We've got a question here. Thank you, Diana Laurellard, from the Institute of Education. I was previously at the Open University and enjoyed very much a lot of what you were saying. I want to go back to the changing nature of higher education and you mentioned massification. The Open University especially has been exploiting technology for massification purposes for some decades, but what digital technologies offer, which is so important, is personalisation. That's what education has found very difficult to achieve, I think, on the grand scale, but figuring out how the digital technologies can get past mere massification and offer personalisation of learning is the kind of thing you were talking about with greater flexibility. But it's not just in flexibility of access and when and where and so on, it's also in the way you learn and what you learn and how you engage with people. So would you consider adding another shun word to those future elements of higher education? Yes, so thank you. I missed your name, I'm sorry, I was trying to spot you and then you were buried. Sorry, Diana Laurellard. Nice to meet you and you're a little apple thing shining at me, still blinds me from my Microsoft days. I wasn't able to spot you in the... It is a multi-platform world which is why the browser is a beautiful thing. So this question of personalisation is really profound and I hope I touched on it a fair amount. I tried to get it in there because it's absolutely critical. I've unpacked the OU and put it back together in a whirlwind eight weeks and when I put my university back together, what profoundly has come through to me is the thing that allows the Open University to do what it does is all the personal stuff that we do. It's the relationship between the student and their associate lecturer. It's the relationship that they have with their academic or education adviser before they start. It's the peer groups that we build. Quite honestly, it's the phone call they might get right at the point that they're about to chuck it all in and give up. Now the good news though about because your question was technology related is that I firmly believe that we all get rid of that high touch to our peril. I think technology in a traditional university can actually allow for much better high touch because if you go back to what I said before about all of the stuff that could be done before we get us all in the room and create a massive carbon footprint, wouldn't it be better if all of this was much more about having a personal dialogue and testing assumptions rather than rote regurgitation of content? When it comes to what we think about as distance education, the world that I live in, I honestly believe that the platforms are allowing us to actually create much more of a personalised experience than ever before. So a few quick examples. One of the tutors or associate lecturers that I worked with that's doing some work with 18 to 24 year olds, whether you know it or not, about 20 to 25% of all of our students now are actually in that 18 to 24% cohort, and we're looking at retention and completion rates. Well what they're doing now is they're encouraging the group to bring up a Facebook group prior to even starting the course with the sole intention of just letting people commune, share, get to know each other. It's amazing results. Other things that we're doing across continental Europe as we call it to the students that we have scattered everywhere using illuminate and other platforms to create a very high touch personalised experience using the technology. Now we can all argue and I would agree so let's not argue that there is always going to be a place for this. This is really important. But absent of the ability to give this, boy the technology is enabling us to do things in really special ways that we haven't done before. And initiatives like Open Learn and Social Learn that I talked about is us trying to be on the bleeding edge of take the best of what we can do when we can enable it with technology but always will recognise that what quality is about are those personal connections between educators, students and advisers that really make the magic come alive in higher education. So thank you. I totally agree with your observations. I should have just said yes but I thought I'd go on a little bit longer. Thank you Martin. Another hand from the floor. OK. While you're thinking I'm going to take one. We have been broadcasting as Martin moved and we have a question coming in from Shirley Alexander who's in Sydney, Australia. Hey Shirley, Sydney. How's the weather? Rugby team sucks. And hers is a quick one. Do students really want us hanging out in their spaces? Ah, that's a great word. A great question I should say. The answer is yes and no. That's a classic VC answer by the way. They do if it's meaningful and relevant. When I talk about hanging out my daughter describes, my 13 year old describes my wife as a Facebook stalker. Because many of you have Facebook pages you can go in and see who's visiting your page the most and of course my wife is always her number one visitor. So that's not what I'm talking about. They don't want us in there stalking them. They really don't. But what they would love us to do is to figure out ways where we could actually take those tools, those services, those platforms that they're already using and actually make it more meaningful for them by intersecting as I talked about with social learn. Kind of the best of what informal and formal learning can be manifested in the worlds that they're in. They really don't want to leave Facebook and come to your VLE. They really don't. They would much prefer to stay there and be able to work in their world and be able to pull in the services and things that they needed and take advantage of what we're all building, which is great stuff, but stay in their world and do what they mean. So when I talk about meeting them where they live, Shirley and Sydney, that's more what I'm talking about. Remember, for those of you that were with Michael's keynote yesterday, though, then when he talked about the long tail of learning, one of the things that the web provides us is the ability to actually take quite narrow areas of focus but allow people that want to commune and come together to actually learn around it, taking that one step further and actually giving them the scaffolding that they need and the access to great contents that they need to make that an even richer informal learning experience is really what I'm talking about when we talk about meeting them where they live. But no, they don't want all of us going in there and looking over their shoulder and checking the photos of them last night from the dinner party they were at. So there we go. We've got time for any more? One more, I think, from the web. It's one up the back. Can somebody get right up the back here? Right up the back. Yeah, and while you're getting up there, can you keep your hand up, please? If you could try this quick one while they're getting up there, coming in also from the web, from John Pallister, will the boundaries between HE, FE schools continue to exist? Oh, my favourites. Thank you, John. Will the barriers between HE and FE continue to exist? I'll try and be very brief because you asked me to. They will continue to exist for as long as our policy makers, our educational leaders and all of us allow them to exist. We are the only thing standing in the way of breaking down the barriers between primary, secondary, higher education, sorry, further education and higher education. These historical systems of protection and process that we've set up are now the very thing that stand in the way. The technology exists. The desire in the minds of our students exists. The curriculum exists. The credit-based systems exist. The funding models exist. The only thing that stands in our way is the HN factor, the human nature factor, which is our ability to actually have the courage to get it done. Last question up the back. Okay, up the top here please. Hello, Debbie Cotton from Plymouth University. Was that Debbie? Debbie, yeah. Okay, hi Debbie. Hi. I'm very interested in your social learn. But one of the things that occurred to me listening to you was that some of the research we've done suggests that students actually switch off Facebook when they're trying to learn because they find it a distraction. So I just wondered if you had any plans about how you might deal with that or whether you anticipate them flitting between the social and the learning activities because what we found is that a lot of students find that actually quite negative impact on their learning. So do you have any plans to deal with that? Yeah, so specifically, well first of all I think, like all learning styles, I think what we see reflected in our communities are those that will want to be in that turn it off mode. I think there's a lot of research Debbie that you would have seen too that says that this net generation can actually live in much more of a multi-stimulus environment than I certainly could. For me it was study and music and that was about all I could cope with. But all of that aside, I think the real value of social learn is that because it's a platform architecture that allows them to draw in based on their choices, the other services, the building blocks of Web 2.0 that exist as and when they and their mentor and the other people that they're learning with have a desire to bring them in, will create the hooks to make that possible. So somewhat flip it around. Social Learn's not designed to necessarily take them somewhere else. It's designed to be that environment, that layer, that platform that helps them take advantage of the balance of Web 2.0. But within an environment that's structured with informal learning outcomes. But clearly we're in closed beta right now and without any doubt one of the things that we're thinking deeply about is their reaction to the UI. Because the UI is going to make or break the ability for this to be a seamless, rewarding experience for them. And so I think your observations are right on. The only thing I'd say is that I'd rather be the one to figure all of that out than leave it to somebody else. So if you want to come along and join us in our quest on Social Learn, trust me it'll be worth it when we figure it all out. So thank you. Colleagues, we have to stop now. But I'd like you to thank Martin again for being our first and most fabulous keynote. Thank you.