 I got it about welcome to the session. This is about blended learning essentials, which is the name of the two online free open online courses, which we've been running through the University of Leeds on FutureLearn for the vocational education and training sector. So what we wanted to do, the team who put this together, is to give you a brief sense of what the courses are, what they do and why. And then to talk about some of the evaluation of what's happened on the courses so far. Then to talk a bit about the future of what we're planning for the way forward and what we'd like to happen next on the basis of this experience. And then to get your own sense of where we should be going and if any of you have taken part at any time in any of the courses that we've been running, we'd really like to hear from you because we don't get very much opportunity, obviously, to meet people face to face. Could I just ask, did anybody here take part in any way in any of the two MOOCs that we ran over the last year? Or there's a spring thing, that's fantastic, great. Okay, well, that's great because we would really like to hear more from you, especially. So blended learning essentials for vocational education and training was a course that was funded by the UFI Charitable Trust because it's part of their mission to support learning technology and its use throughout the vocational education and training sector. This is what is particularly important in their mission. So the course itself was set up through the University of Leeds Partnership with FutureLearn. Neil Morris and I were both coeducators on the course. Since that time, I'm delighted to say that UCL, where I'm located, has since joined also as a partner of FutureLearn and we've now begun to develop further courses ourselves. But this particular course was designed for lecturers in further education, skills, training, vocational education, workplace learning, lifelong learning, and adult education. So all of those different sectors, all those different parts of the vet sector that we wanted to put in. The course is free, online, and it's a professional development course. Now, one of the things about MOOCs is that because they're completely open and they're online, you can get people from absolutely anywhere in the world. We were aiming for, and we were very explicit about this being for the UK sector, people who are interested in vocational and education and training. But of course, that phrase is not in common currency necessarily anywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world, they do this kind of training, but they call it all sorts of different things. Sometimes it's called development education, sometimes it's called further education, sometimes vocational education, sometimes vocational education and training, sometimes just training. So there's a multiplicity of linguistic problems in this area. But inevitably, because it was a MOOC, we got lots of people coming in from other countries. However, when we looked at the demographics of people who were coming in, we were able to see that they were predominantly in this particular sector. The aims of it were to help people understand the benefits of blended learning. By blended learning, we define that as being a mix of digital and face-to-face traditional learning. And so the digital could be in the context of a face-to-face lab or workplace environment or field trip or something like that. It didn't necessarily have to be purely online. So there were different kinds of technology and traditional mixes is what we understood that to be. And the point of it was to enable people to make more effective use of technology to be able to support their learners. So what UFI were particularly focused on was learner success, that's what they wanted and that's what we all were aiming for. For the course partners, we joined forces with several of the key agencies in the sector and we had five colleges from different parts of the country helping us with developing and with sharing their own experience of what they've been doing. And the key main partners were Leeds, UCL and Alt along with Future Learn, which provided the MOOC platform. Future Learn is the only UK-based MOOC platform and MOOC just in case anybody hasn't heard the word before is an acronym for Massive Open Online Courses. They're massive because they're open and because they're online. And when they originally began in the States in the field of computer science, they could attract hundreds of thousands of people to them. Since then they've been MOOCs in absolutely every subject area. The most popular ones are still in computer science and in the finance sector, those are the people who live on the web so inevitably they get very high numbers. But they've since branched out into all areas of education and training, mainly higher education, mainly the world-class universities putting these courses on. And they are doing it to attract more people into understanding what they as a university have to offer. So it's a good way of doing marketing and promotion. But for us we were particularly focused on how do you get a very large, very diverse sector of lecturers and trainers to engage on a large scale with what can be done with learning technology. So obviously a MOOC platform was a good one to have and we were delighted to have all kinds of other people involved. We set it up in terms of two courses. One was called Getting Started and the other was called Embedding Practice. So Getting Started was a five-week course that got people involved in being able to use a range of effective blended learning practices and technologies, focusing on enhancing their teaching and learning by using free and affordable technologies. So we weren't expecting people to have fantastically elaborate setups and helping them to design a pedagogic approach to make the best use of these tools. So the focus was on use, enhance, and design. Then Embedding Practice was going a bit beyond that. Once you've tried it out and you've done something, then it's not just a one-off. It's something which does have to become embedded. It has to become a normal part of your everyday work. So how do you do that? And there the objectives were about enabling people to integrate, to use, and then to contribute because you can't just stop at the individual. You've got to get the individual then enabling them to pass it on to others, to bring in others into the fold, to expand and proselytize about what this can actually do. So there we were focusing on integrating new technologies into courses and teaching and training, noting that institutions have their own logic, they have their own ways of doing things, and you can't just graft on this extra thing. You've got to try and go with the flow of what the institution is trying to do. So part of embedding practice is about making it take. It's like tissue rejection, otherwise. You just, if you're trying to lob it onto something else where it doesn't fit, it just won't work. So it's very important to get lecturers understanding what the institution is really focused on. What are you trying to do to adjust the challenges that your institution is most interested in? Whether it's something like broadening the reach of people who are coming to the college or whether it's trying to motivate students to spend, to engage more with what they're trying to learn if they're in apprenticeships or if you're trying to train people in a workplace environment. So what is it that that environment is really trying to do and how can technology help it? So that's what integration means there. Using new technology tools and resources to meet the key challenges. So start with the challenges and look at how technology can help and then you get better embedding and engagement. And then once you've done that to be able to contribute back to the community the knowledge that you've then developed about the best possible uses of blended learning. So embedding practice was indeed going beyond getting started to now making this part of what we all do as a natural part of our teaching life. Participation in the courses because they are these online courses a lot of it is done through videos and that's tremendously valuable when you're trying to show someone who's a little nervous about technology hasn't really tried it before you can show them someone else like them using it in a classroom, using it in a workplace setting using it in a practice environment. So showing examples of blended learning was very important. We sent camera crews out all over the country to find some of the best examples and that's where having those five colleges and those sector organisations involved was so helpful because they could locate the good case studies for us to go and film. Online tools and resources were giving people just access to what there is and we'll give you some examples of that a bit later on. The kinds of tools and resources which they were looking at. So we'd say here's something which you might find useful and here's something you can do with it and they would engage them in going off to try that out in their own environment. Discussion is very important and FutureLearn puts a lot of work into making discussion work in an online course. So online forums were always there added to whatever the particular learning point was for a step within the course. So you look at a video then there'd be a question about so what are you really trying to do here and how does it work? How would it work for you? And then the discussion would be about that. So trying to get people engaged in discussion means that we begin to collaborate on this immense problem of trying to make learning technology work. The exercises were interactive some had feedback and some had feedback which enabled peers to share their ideas or opportunities to share links or useful resources that they found so that you've got peer collaboration in things that we found which are useful and interesting so that the learners are learning from each other and indeed we are learning from the learners as that process operates. Assignments weren't a big part because these are not students as they are in undergraduate courses but getting people to do something with what they've learned and submit ideas and learning designs and then give each other feedback was a very successful part insofar as people engaged with it. So obviously that's a bit more work doing an assignment but going through that process of receiving and giving feedback was a really critical part. That's a sense of what it looks like on a screen. So there's the video which you play through the video which is a case example of something rather in this case different ways of using multimedia in the context of I think that one sports training. And then associated with that there will be a bit of blurb which says now go away and discuss what you think about XYZ in relation to that video. So there'll be new video presentation and new approaches and methods and then dynamic links to other resources and that's where we found many of the colleges which put online something which they've discovered which is interesting we could link through to their resource or to GISC resources or to the Educational Training Foundation has resources which are of interest to people trying to use blended learning. And then here is the discussion and debate with their peers. So just to give you an example of one of the assignments this is where we were asking them to adapt an existing blended learning design. So the task would be for a blended learning design you would like to develop for your learners use the learning designer to begin creating a new design in one of the following ways either create a design in the designer screen or revise one of the existing ones which we put up there for you which would be appropriate for the vet sector. So you can either start from scratch or you can redevelop something else. And then I don't know if you can read any of that but the discussion around that was about people's experience with using the learning designer tool which is something that we've created especially for teachers to be able to create learning designs. So you can see there's a different kind of conversational process going on there and I'll see if I can link through now to that's it. Whereas it's there. So can I move it? So there's a page from week five of Getting Started with a video about inclusive teaching which is showing how these learners and these are special needs learners for learning to make animations with clay designs. And it's a nice example of how it gives teachers an insight into what's possible for their kinds of learners. So we try to make sure that we've got the wide variety of different kinds of learners. I'm not writing the sound on that because that would make it too confusing. Here's another example of, this is the final step in the course I think when we were looking at Q&A. And I just wanted to show you here the kind of structure of the conversation. So this is going from most recent at the top to older as we go down and you can see how some of these do become conversations. This is a comment on the comment and then somebody's commenting on that and you can get quite long threads of discussion going on for each point that people put in. So in this kind of area, it's not just people saying, I think this, I think this, I think this. These are peer professionals commenting on each other's work and experience. And that's one of the most valuable things about this kind of use of this sort of online course is that you can get people who are very knowledgeable to share their ideas. Right, now I've got to try and get this back again. Is, only go, is this really going to work? It's a little technical for me. So I really forgot through that. So then once you've gone through the five weeks, you get information about pathways to accreditation because some professionals do want to use this as professional learning. So to gain professional recognition and accreditation for participating in the course, there are these options. Future Learned Statement of Participation, accreditation via professional bodies and continuing professional development and past accreditation, for example, via a University of Leeds Masters or via UCL Institute of Education. So did it work? Well, we did some analysis of the data which is collected by the MOOC platform. And these platforms do collect a lot of data because they collect online surveys which are carried out at the beginning of the MOOC and then they track everything that every participant does all the way through, every step that they're engaged in and so on. So we can get quite a lot of information. I'll just do a few highlights. Who participated? Primarily people in vocation and education and training. 58% in the first course and 55% in the second course. A lot from higher education, a lot from school education. They don't add up to 100% because some people actually are engaged in more than one sector. So it was broadly speaking, it was certainly getting to the people we wanted to get to. And what roles do they have in those sectors? Primarily these were people who were teachers or trainers in vocation and education and training. More than 60%, nearly 70% in those cases. People who are training and development professionals, managers of vocation and educational training, learning technologists, librarians, ICT technicians. So a reasonably wide range, but we were getting to the teachers and trainers themselves. Then there's the issue of how they engage and the issue of dropout as you may be aware is one of the big issues in relation to MOOCs. Dropout isn't really the best term for it because what it takes to enroll in a MOOC is a click-through and really not very much more than that. So it's not like enrolling in a course in higher education or further education. It's much more like, yes, that looks interesting. Let's see what that's about. So the fact that registration starts at somewhere near, somewhere near 13,000 and then engagement starts at somewhere near 7,000 is very usual. So that big drop from thinking I might do this to actually doing it is very substantial. And then of course, you don't keep people all the way through. There's a five week course, then they do tend to drop out part way through. But if once you're registered, you can come back at any time, even once the course is over. And we do see that the people come back into the course when the period comes, which is more appropriate for them. However, we keep running them over and over again. So people can come back and join native versions of the course. But those are not bad figures. What it means is that we've been able to engage with a lot of people over the whole year that we've been running these. When do they engage? Well, this was interesting because this was a complete change for us. You can see this as a kind of heat map of when people are engaging with the course. So you've got Monday to Sunday down the side. You've got midnight to midnight along the bottom. And what you see is that there is no rest for people in the sector. I don't think there's a single bit that isn't pink. So three o'clock in the morning, Friday morning, Sunday morning, still people in there. So it's interesting to see also when the most activity is, it's the middle of Monday. So it really is a time when people are using this as part of what they're doing in their normal work. But we're continuing to collect this kind of data and try to interpret it and interpret it also through the kinds of surveys that we ask. Did you have a question? Yeah, this is UK time. So there could be some people who are from far away. They would be coming in at those times. But the numbers are such that it suggests it's not just from everywhere else in the world. Okay, so insights from evaluation. I'm going to go through just a few highlights here and then I'm going to ask Eileen to come up and describe the case study material that we've done. So these are just a few numbers from the course. We've had over, it's now two and a half runs. So we've had three, three and a bit runs. We've had three runs of getting started and two runs of embedding practice. And over those we've had 15,000 who are engaged with the course. Over 30,000 have registered and as I said that drops down to activity. But there could be therefore another 15K coming along. But those are substantial numbers which mean that it is of means by which we can get to large numbers of people in the sector. There's been excellent engagement. I've shown you a brief selection of some of the comments and forums. 20,000 comments in the first run. Just a few highlights from what people think they've learned from the course. Awareness of tools and technologies increased from 46% to 90% from the pre-course to the post-course test. A significant increase in those who felt that blended learning would work for my context. The most significant barrier, my sense of my limited knowledge fell from 54% to 14%. And for more than half the participants, the courses exceeded their expectations. So for us it's been an interesting journey of finding out that it can work for this sector that people do share their ideas. They are willing to participate. And what we wanted to do therefore is to find out much more about what the impact was for them in their own teaching. So that's why we set up some cases of impact and that's what I need to tell us about. Okay, so we could see some impact from just looking at the forums and seeing people sharing their tools, for instance, on padlet walls that we had embedded within the course itself. So we knew something was going on, but actually getting to find out what people did with everything that they were learning was something that we thought we needed to move away from just looking at that data, looking at what's there, to actually going to talk to people, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do because the nature of MOOCs are that people come in and then they go away and it's difficult to keep hold of them and to go back to them. But nevertheless, I've tracked some people down to interview some participants. And what's interesting with the participants who I've talked to that I've managed to build up some case studies that indicates not only what they've been doing with the course material in terms of impacting their practice, but also indicating how their colleagues, other people that they know have been doing stuff. So far, I've interviewed 10 participants and I noticed there were some participants in the room. So if you would like to contribute to this, it would be absolutely great. And there's been a few things that have come up across them. Some of these things, there's certainly been some popular tools that people repeatedly say that, oh, yeah, I picked that up, I really used that. And of course, Padlet has been one of them. But those kind of polling and quiz tools like Sokative and Kahoot, also very popular. And an app that we featured in one of the case studies I observe also has been mentioned a few times. And what people say that they got out of the course in particular was interesting because again and again, I was hearing people talk about how the discussion was so valuable. And it was about learning from, you know, each other, learning from teachers and trainers just like them. And also being able to chat to Diana and Neil as well and getting all the notifications from the Future Learn platform. So somebody the other day was saying to me, well, you know, I'm really tired at the end of the day, but when I log on to the platform, there were always like notifications that really encouraged her to get back involved. But lots of people also were doing the course in conjunction with their own personal, professional development agendas. For instance, you know, PGCE courses and so on. And so it really did fit with what else people were doing. And as I say, lots of participants reported on other people's engagement that they knew about. So maybe from these few case studies, we can get a picture of the activity across the sector. And as well as we tried to use digital champions to hold, well, to provide local support. And that also seemed to be working. But so what I'm gonna do is take you through a few of these kind of case studies of participants. And the first one was an Effie College lecturer who was teaching ELT trainers. And she was doing a PhD, a PhD PGCE herself. So she was looking for something to use for her action research study for her PGCE. And you know, the kinds of tools that she said that she was particularly interested in using the concept of flip learning and a peer assessment and the test blend space. So this is an example of the picture there is from something that she created for her learners using test blend space as flipped learning. So she put the videos there and got them to look at them before the class. And as part of her PGCE action research project, she evaluated it as well. And she's got lots of data saying that learners really responded to that. And you can see that some of the things that she said about the course were that, you know, you could actually see what was going on in the classroom. And it gave people like practical points. And so that discussion was really important. And she really liked the learning designer element, the idea of, you know, not necessarily inventing the wheel all over the, the, again and again. And her perspective on what she could do completely changed. She had another idea for her project. But when she found out about flip learning, she thought, no, I want to do that. So she learned, she developed, I think she learned about the test blend space from a participant conversation. So, you know, she picked up the concepts and the tools and she was able to put it together. And now after doing that, she's progressed in her career and she's teaching on PGCE course herself, I think. So that's obviously a successful example. And she was working with a digital champion at her college. So that was also useful for her. But the next case that I want to present is somebody entirely different, somebody from the corporate training and development sector. So somebody working at a, well, being the lead for professional development at an international utility company based in the UK with, you know, 400 trainers. And, you know, this person was absolutely delighted with the course because they wanted to shift all of their, well, most of their training to blended learning. And they didn't know how to do that. And what they, what he said was that having a course to see what other people were doing was the thing that was really successful. You know, so that he could see that other people were adopting these approaches and they knew what then to do. So, you know, from one person, I got a sense of like a whole organization, you know, using the course to change what they were doing. But again, they said the same kinds of tools that the Padlet Kahoot Socketive I observed. This is an example of the PDF downloaded from a Padlet wall that they used in one of their training sessions. And what this person was particularly pleased with the course was that it was a course. It wasn't just standalone resources. It had a structure and it had a discussion and, you know, proper communication with other learners and they got an awful lot out of that. It lends itself to the way I like to learn things, he said. And also, it lends itself to the way they wanted to deliver training themselves. And so, you know, the other quote from this person was about, you know, like the validation from having of your ideas from seeing what other people were doing. And then another case was from somebody who was a digital champion on the course. And so it was useful talking to digital champions because they potentially were in touch with other people in their own organization or, you know, other organizations that they work with. So they could kind of tell us about what other people were doing. This person was somebody who's working in an FE college as a program area lead. So working across a range of disciplines and also a range of qualifications. And she, you know, was encouraged by her institution to promote the course as a digital champion. But she didn't just stop at her own college which went on during the course of talking to her. It became apparent that she'd been promoting the MOOCs to people within her professional associations that she was a member of and within the NHS. So again, it kind of gave us a sense of, like, there was an awful lot of stuff going on. And the tools she mentioned, Socrates and Padletto and Prezzi. And the thing that she talked about, the effect of people using those tools in the colleges so that she'd go around and observe people and she'd see, you know, her teachers and lecturers, you know, responding really positively to Padlet and the learners responding positively to Padlet. And she said that she could see where people or other teachers in the college were within the program because of the tools that were popping up all of a sudden in their teaching. So that's like, you know, it was really great to hear that it really was working when people were trying things out. And there was positive feedback from those tools. You know, the students loved Socrates, for instance. And there was another thing that was coming through was the idea that this enabled a lot of teachers and trainers to see a way of using, getting students to use their mobile phones so that instead of it being a thing that they were trying to stop them using, you know, so that they would encourage them to use this in terms of, you know, answering a quiz or a poll. And that really seemed to have a major effect. And that particular thing also came through from the final case study I want to present to you, which was somebody who was leading a PGCE for the post-compulsory education sector and who had embedded the course within the PGCE so that there was previously an ICT component. But for this, they tried to, for the first run, to take the Blended Learning Essentials first course getting started and invite the students or ask the students to take that course as part of the PGCE. And they had to provide evidence that they'd done it, you know, so it wasn't just like if you'd like to do it. They had, so every one of those students and there were 100 of them had to show that they had contributed to the course. So there's evidence of proper engagement there. But what also happened was that, you know, the tutor was going out into the colleges and seeing what they were doing on their placements with the course. And he, you know, again, said, you know, that they were using to paddle it, they were using Kahoot, they were using Socrative. They were even making screen casts and using those in all sorts of ways. And whoops, I've gone the wrong way here. There we are. I mean, one of the things that the tutor said was that he could see, after having observed teachers in their, on their placements for years and years, he just noticed this complete change after the MOOC. Like before he'd get a few things, you know, people would be doing things that they'd be very anxious about it, but after the MOOC they were doing so much more. And he was really impressed with the trainee who was using screen casting within the classroom and he was able to be there. And as he says, he took some headphones and he could see the screen cast himself. He could see how the students were engaging with it and that's the screenshot of the, it looks like a PowerPoint based screen cast that somebody made. And, you know, so you can really, one of the things that he said was that he could imagine that after a while this stuff would really filter down and lots of people would be starting to do this. So, and a nice quote to sum up what I was saying about the mobile phones. He said that, you know, the mobile phones went from being a nuisance before, but now they could use them in a constructive way. And that's really quite meaningful impact, I think, to change practice. So I'm gonna now hand over to Neil, who's gonna talk to us about digital futures for the course and generally. Okay, thank you. So, one of our kind of challenges and questions is always in this course, you know, how much is digital technology really being embedded in the education sector, not just within the vet sector, but within schools and higher educations and what are people using technology for? So, Diana and I and everybody involved in the course, I've always kind of preached, I think, this constant view that digital technology is there to support learning. That's always been our mantra and our focus throughout this course and throughout everything we've done. And it's become quite evident to us, I think, from this course and from other projects that we've done that there are many now sources of evidence that show that digital technology can support learning in a large number of different ways. And in fact, Diana and Marilyn and Eileen and just what they've been saying today have provided evidence just from this course of how an online course such as blended learning essentials really can support a whole range of these different, really important aspects of people's development be that within the school level sector or as professionals. So, this is some of the work that I'm doing at Leedson with colleagues to try to bring together this evidence to still convince, we're still in convincing mode, remember, I'm kind of speaking to the converted, the people who get this, but often, as I'm sure Diana does, spend a lot of time talking to academic colleagues and other colleagues who do not yet realize the opportunities provided by digital technology. So, I think we're building up good evidence both in the literature and from courses such as blended learning essentials that really we can support learning at any level by the use of digital technology, including online courses. Many people ask me regularly what I think is going to happen in the world of online courses. So, I thought I'd share just a couple of insights on that today in the relation to blended learning essentials. So, as Diana said, blended learning essentials is a CPD course. It was designed for, as professional development, for very busy and under-skilled professionals in the vet sector. It was done through the generous funding of the UFI who recognized this need. But it is an example of a much larger picture of the fact that digital learning is growing massively in terms of professional development. And those of you that follow the news may have heard the other day that Coursera, the U.S.'s largest MOOC platform, is taking a very different strategic direction into online CPD for business and for corporate organizations. And that is just one of the changes that we will, I think, see increasingly. But there is a lot of evidence out there about how digital learning is becoming embedded into CPD for professionals but also for in-house corporate training. And online courses offer really fascinating opportunities for workforce development training, whereas people were traditionally following watch-and-click e-learning courses online. There are now opportunities for global interaction and collaboration. And actually to be able to do work online with geographically distributed individuals. And we're seeing a lot of demand from people right across a whole range of different sectors who are starting to see the value of platforms like FutureLearn to provide that space, that community space for both content delivery but most importantly for interaction, collaboration and professional working. So I think what we're going to see a lot more over the next few years is the growth of this online CPD market. And our challenge, particularly in the HE sector, is to stay part of that and not to be left behind. So in an effort to keep pace, many of the FutureLearn partners who including UCL and Leeds are increasingly thinking about how to develop MOOCs both for students in HE and for that CPD market. And we've just recently launched credit-bearing courses within the FutureLearn platform. In fact, it's just started this week. So people from anywhere in the world can now get undergraduate credit from the University of Leeds entirely via the FutureLearn platform. And we're strongly encouraging the rest of the sector to provide more of these opportunities because it really does provide real opportunities for people who can't access the HE sector in traditional ways to build up a portfolio of credit that they can use either as professional, evidence of professional development or to get them into employment or into university sectors. So we're starting to see what I'd like to call the unbundling of higher education. It's not a new phrase, but it's one that we can now apply convincingly within the higher education sector where online courses such as blended learning essentials can be taken in combination or as part of a bigger professional development opportunity to really provide a portfolio of accredited online training which can support people in their professional lives. And really it all comes down to me for the ability for flexibility. And this picture on the right is from the H Higher Education Academy who produced an article on flexible learning a few years ago. And the idea of flexibility and pace, place and mode has stuck in my mind ever since because I think it's something we can really achieve with digital technologies and with online courses and it's something that we're actively doing through the blended learning essentials course and through future learning. So that leads us to what might we do in the future with blended learning essentials. As Diana said, we're coming to the end of the official schedule of courses. We've run five out of six runs for the course. So we're discussing with UFI what they want to do with these courses in the future. And obviously we're very keen to continue to run them. I think that we're just scratching the surface of the number of people who are looking to engage with these courses. In fact, I was telling Diana today that I'm now getting emails on a weekly basis saying when's blended learning essentials going to run again. So I think people are just starting to hear about it as is often the case. So we've been starting to think about the future and thinking about the kinds of courses that we think are going to be useful in this sector as we move through the challenging political environment that Marin alluded to earlier on. So in addition to looking to continue to run the two blended learning essentials courses that we have already built, we have scoped out plans for a number of other courses. And we wanted to spend a bit of time today getting your feedback on the kinds of courses that you think would be most useful in this sector. I think we think degree apprenticeships and apprenticeships generally is probably top of the list in terms of a very large growing need within the sector for improvement of skills and understanding about how this is going to work and particularly how it's going to make use of digital technologies. And then what would you prioritise next? Is it around assessment? Is it around developing skills? Is it about managers and leaders embedding practice? Obviously in any difficult funding environment we're going to have to make choices about the courses that we build and the order that we do that in. So perhaps after general questions we might put this slide back up and just get your feedback on what you think priorities should be for this exciting project. I think I've said everything I want to do. Is there anything else that you want to say? So that's it. Thank you very much. We're more than happy to take any questions. I think we've got plenty of time for discussion and we'd love to hear your views about the course. Thank you. Neil, I'd be very interested to hear about what changes you are making to it between versions. Are they little tweaks or are they... Okay, so changes that we've made between runs that we've done already have been very minimal. So it blended learning essentials getting started. There were a few minor annoyances in terms of the way things were presented and the way things worked. So it was actually the most changes we made were between run one and run two of blended learning essentials getting started because that was our first one out. It was kind of the one we had to work really hard to do under a quick time scale. So there was a few changes we made but nothing major is substantial. I can't actually think of any changes that we made to embed in practice. It ran very, very smoothly and we just put it out a second time without any change. So we haven't had to do a huge amount of work looking to the future in terms of how we might put those two courses against that portfolio of additional courses. I think there would be some more changes we might make because if we were going to do a whole course on assessment we would want to pull out bits that we'd started to cover in the first two courses that we'd done so we could have a focused course on assessment. But other than that I think we're still imagining that there is a strong need for a getting started course and an embedding practice course. Was there a statement behind that question? Not particularly. I think I fed back a little frustration in the size that the Padlet War came to during one thing. It took a long time to load if you were at a rural site in Australia with a slow connection. That became a bit frustrating but the guys took that on. The other comment I wanted to make was that I felt as a teacher and a teacher of teachers that there was a little space in the world for me to be a student still and that it was safe to not be perfect even if you were supposed to be a role model in what you were doing. And that was a sort of community bit of joviality and that thread was emotionally satisfying during it and so that probably reflects the way that you deliver that calmly and supportively. Calmly. That's a very nice comment. A safe place to discuss. It's very interesting because both Diana and I separately have PhD students and I haven't told Diana's about mine but we've both got PhD students looking about the role of the teacher in MOOCs and the way that teachers support online communities and so that kind of comment is very interesting because we're currently analysing the kind of things that we've been saying online to participants. Good, thank you. Hello, that's loud. Course was great for us in Hull. I think we tried it originally with every single member of the teaching staff but we've got the usual MOOC tail off. So bearing in mind I'm trying to transform the way that people work in the classroom, everything that you were trying to do with the course. How can I get away from the traditional engaged staff who always like playing around with the technology and were the ones who completed and I've paid for the certificates, et cetera, et cetera. But then there were the people that had a look, had a little go, forgot it, went straight back into the classroom. How can we organisationally help that because the MOOC model is fantastic but it doesn't help us get people engaged that are just never going to or unless we give them a different level of support. Okay, let me try it first. I can immediately think of about three different ways depending on which hat I'm wearing. So as a senior manager in the university you could say this is going to be something that everyone has to do and complete as part of your professional development it will be part of your annual appraisal. We're starting to hear stories of that in the sector of vice principals of colleges saying I know what this course is, I know how important it is, you're all going to do it. So that's option one. I think option two is to pull out bits of the course that are relevant to individuals and present it to them at a time of need. That might be just as they're about to do something new or have done something and maybe haven't got the feedback that they were looking for or to get a peer to present them perhaps a different way of doing it and that might be a way back into the course. And the third I think is to keep using that kind of digital champion network of just keep raising the profile of the course. These case studies now if we can get them out into the community I think we'll really have some traction with people like you and your role to be able to say look, there's real impact of people taking this course and people are proving that it's changing not only their practice, but their learner's success and lots of academics work off the basis of evidence and now we can start to get the evidence to show that the course does help. So am I three? But actually I mean certainly what Neil's saying that's borne out by some of the people I've talked to because you know for instance the guy from the corporate training sector you know he made all his trainers do the course and he gave them time and he's like and of course that is the bit that is where everything falls down if people don't have time. But in terms of that previous point about why it's so friendly and of course why people get you know enjoy I think it's I think it's the that everybody has revealed themselves as teachers you know that we see the teachers in the videos we see that the real people there and I think that that's the things you can get people into those forums and get people to see that you know it doesn't they don't have to be scared you know that actually everybody is a real person struggling with things that seems to be the thing that people really enjoy about that aspect of it. That's true there's just one more thing though which is the importance of the leadership and management in engaging people in it because they're all doing something aren't they those people and what do they choose to do what do they prioritize they'll prioritize the things they have to do the things they know of value. So that's one of the things that the embedding practice course begins to get people into thinking about is what are the challenges for your particular institution or workplace environment or whatever it is what are you most worried about and if you can hang well technology can help onto that then you might get some really important people saying okay everybody's got to do this now it's got to be those kinds of things that make the difference I think. I wasn't next. No no I agree with all these that said and you know I have come across examples on the last week of a Furnace College in Cumbria gonna put it in everybody's performance management I think the most powerful way of doing it is teachers telling other teachers you know that word of mouth that said hey listen I've tried this you know and you've heard me say this before I've lived and worked and married and been divorced by teachers and remarried teachers and teachers will believe other teachers and that word of mouth is really powerful. So you've yeah so it sounds like this role as a digital champion is really important to sort of making you know supporting students and making it stick. Could you say a little bit more about who they are how you recruit them do you recruit them sort of how that role works organizationally and if how do we if I was starting a MOOC how would I set up a sort of similar support network? Yeah well we just we advertise for people to become digital champions and they volunteered and we recruited them and we were delighted by how many people responded to us and in terms of who they were they a lot of people were you know based in colleges and they were working they were maybe learning technologies in their college and they wanted to you know sort of encourage a cohort to move through the MOOC and I mean yeah it's not as easy as that one of the things is that they also needed to find out who was doing the MOOC and that wasn't always straightforward so it's not I think that we can do more with that particular role but we also got people who were you know independent professional trainers in technology who were used to working with people in the sector and working across the sector and I think one of the things that is was really amazing to me to listen to the motivations for those people to get involved in being a digital champion was that they thought that those people who maybe were private trainers who weren't in a college that they wouldn't be anyone to support them and there wouldn't be anyone to answer their questions so they'd taken on that role in order to support those people for no pay and that's something that they are normally paid to do so there was so much commitment to actually making this a success from the community and again I think that's why people enjoyed it so much but you know people want to do it so that's an answer to you you know like how do you recruit them you know you get the people that are really committed to this stuff and then they would do it but I think that we also do need to work really hard to kind of provide them with resources that can make the most of the position that they're in and that may be something that we could do more of as you know if we extend the project and you recruited them via the course itself or separate partly but also through the word of mouth and running into people at different times we advertise on Twitter for instance you know in the promotion of course was do you want to join, do you want to join as a digital champion there's one more point to say on that which is what we're trying to do in bringing people into getting excited about online learning is through online learning and people who are a bit dodgy about technology wouldn't necessarily go to a wholly online course to find out about it so the digital champions were really important for running those sort of lunchtime sessions where and one of these sessions in the embedding practice course gives them a few sort of short video clips to use and a few PowerPoint slides and things like that so that can really help you know just a safe place to begin trying Can I pass this on? You know, questions too So I promise to show that slide of the previous Yeah, oh yes comments on the the ideas that we've had so far of possible future directions any feedback on that and also of course, any feedback you have on why people might have dropped out of the courses because those are the very people we never hear from so it would be great to hear anything on those lines but we've got a question up there Maybe speaking of the apprentices bit because they came up in the Feltag piece earlier I think we talked about the connection between the learner sitting in the office and their connection with the college and the connection with the subject I think it's got, I think it's a great area I think if you can, they can connect and access and enjoy the resources through whatever platform it is then I think that could be a nice area and that certainly was something that I think the room reflected earlier That's great because one of the odd things that's happening in the FE sector at the moment is the area based reviews which and even the skills plan actually is talking about what's good for students in the particular employment area and what kinds of skills you should be running for them which means that anyone who happens to be living in that area has got those choices available to them Now, if that college became a specialist in skill X they could be running that online for people in all sorts of places all over the country and to have this kind of geographical focus for skills development is just so restrictive but using technology you can get well beyond that Yeah, I think technology is obviously being used in a lot about e-portfolios but it's more of a people say they don't want a checklist they want something that's more engaging that's more accessible and more flexible and makes them feel connected to that to that local college which I think is achievable and I think it's a really good area That's a good one to work on then, yes, thank you Any more? Questions? New ideas for other things we haven't got up there that are really pressing issues or challenges because again, thinking from the challenge to how we might use technology is the important way around so what are your institutions really worried about whatever kind of organisation it is and then we say how can blended learning help? Did you want to... Was that the question up there? No, yes Okay, sorry, Maury, go ahead In terms of what organisations are worrying about I think the robustness of assessment standards for setting up when you've not assessed in an area before Can you just say what you mean by robustness? You mean whether it's doing the job it should do? Yeah, and whether it has... whether it's meeting the standards and how appealable how robust it is against student appealing I suppose I'm coming from a medical education context where there's a lot of litigious and students who are aimed at breaking the system rather than benefiting from it but I know that's something that we're worrying about Yeah, that's an important point because we're coming to a point within the UK, at least where standards are going to be changing because we've got complete restructuring of the awarding bodies and so on so that could be a very important issue to tackle And opportunity Yeah, thank you Of course not that So you want me to teach online and it's going to be less work, you're right That's what people are worried about Yeah, well it's not less work, it's different work You use your time differently and your learners use their time differently So one of the things that we do tackle in the embedding practice course is trying to get a realistic look at how lecturers and trainers spend their time and how students spend their time because what you do when you're in a class with people and it's a 1 to 20, 1 to 30, whatever it happens to be There's other ways of using that time and if you can get learners doing collaborative learning which is one of the really tricky things to get working but if you've got teachers sharing their ideas about how to make it work in their practice context and then also how to get students working online at home where they're not being supported by the teacher all the time, they're being supported by each other or they're being supported by some kind of technology environment So what we're trying to do is to get teachers to see ways in which it can make better use of the time they put in So it shouldn't end up being a massive workload and it's not going to work when it's like that so we can't attend to that so we are trying to get a more realistic look at that but also trying to get the managers and the leaders of organisations to understand that there is some upfront investment here So you put in the upfront investment of time and resource and you look to see the payoff at some point and there shouldn't be just more and more and more and more work So I'm not sure if that answers your question I think the point of what I said somewhat flippantly there was you asked for what is it that people are concerned about that's one of their concerns and if you're wanting to pitch or present a course in the world of that type of concern then exactly as you answered would be the structure of a course I think it's certainly confronting people's misconceptions because it doesn't have to be more work although at the same time it can be but better teaching is perhaps more work anyway Yeah, it's a good point, I've got to address that I think we're beginning to run over a bit and I think we should just say... We've got one more question Any more? We'll make that the last question and then we'll wrap up Yes please It's further to the point about things that people are worrying about I think where we're at with where we want to move staff eventually is to having them work in an environment that has a number of different tools that they can use taking your point about apprenticeships being delivered across the whole country rather than just in one geographical area but the reticence that I'm feeling from staff is pretty much the point that was just made up there which is does this mean that someone's going to be outsourced or other things that are very emotive and probably quite natural? I suppose the point for future courses could be pretty much what you've just said which is it's not about getting rid of the way that teaching works it's about it changing and it being about how people interact differently and if that was part of the course I think that would help a lot of our staff who feel very time-pressured anyway and just generally under threat because of what the sex is like to feel more comfortable about their role in the future as well That's a very good point and I mean that's why we always emphasise blended because the teacher's also got to be there that's such an important part and they are the people who actually make the times when they're not there actually work well because you can't just say okay go and talk among yourselves it doesn't work you've got to design that process that activity and the follow-up to it and the preparation for it and so on and that's all done by the teacher so some of the things the teacher is doing shift a bit you spend your time doing different kinds of things but actually they're very creative things and interesting and fun so absolutely yes that's a message we've got to get across to okay I haven't got anything else to say let's just say thank you all very much for coming and for your contributions and I think there's drinks outside absolutely there you go, cheers, thank you