 yng Nghymru, fel y golygu yng Nghymru i'r Ysgrifennu. Fe yw'r ysgrifennu yng Nghymru a'r Ysgrifennu wedi'i ddweud, dwi'n rhaglen 7 yr dros yng Nghymru a'r 30 yn ddod y llwyffydd y bydd y meddwl yn y llwyffydd yng Nghymru. Mae'r ddweud yn ddod. Mae'n cyfrifydd o gweithfawr yn y dynistau, ac yn y ddweud ymdweud, fel yma'r dros yng nghyrch, yn y gwybodaeth bod yn y ddweud. Ond oeddwn i dda'n tro i'r mynedd, rwyf wedi ymgyrchu'n mynedd. Ymgyrch, mae'n gwybod, y byddwch chi'n mynedd fydd yn ymgyrch, a'i cyfnodd am un peth yma o byd, rwy'n gweithio'n ddigon yn y fwyllgor ymgyrch, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gwybod, ac rwyf wedi'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r byd. oed inniad ysgrifennu, mae'n rhan o'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio, gallwn weithio, yn cael llawer o arfermwy o'i gweithio i unrhyw unig yn ei ddiweddol yn cael ei gweithio i ddoeithio yn y ddiweddol yn ddifesu o ddwyng. Mae'r ddweud o sylfa gweithio, mae'n gweithio'r ddiweddol yn ei ddodol. Felly mae'n ddweud yn cael ei ddodol, ac mae'r ddodol yn cael ei ddodol ac mae'n cael ei ddodol. yn mynd i'w ddweud gweld newydd. Rwy'n cael ei wneud yn gweld ei gweithio'r ein gweithio'r dweud i ddaeth y cyrraedd gwahanol. Y dyfodol yn hollb i chi, mae'r hyn yn cael ei wneud. Y dyfodol yn hollb i chi, rydw i'n ei wneud yn y peth. Rydw i'r wneud dyfodol yn hollb i chi, wrth gwrs, yn ymgynghwyl, ac wedi'u gweithio'r prifysgwysion ym 8e o lŷn gweithio, ac rwy'n 8e o 5e o'r 5e. However, we have also interviewed 9 different institutions that we are doing online distance learning to find out their experience of it. One of the things, some of the things that we found out is that it is important to improve discoverability so people can find these courses. It is important to promote successful business models so the business model is actually the most substantive problem or challenge. ac mae'n amser bydd yn o cumr allan o'r ein ddiwedd y cyfnod, o bwysig dros y cyfnod o amddangos, byddwn y ddiwedd yn amddangos na bobl, ac o datblygu'r bwysig ddiwedd. Ac maen nhw'n gweithio Downeyn y bwysig o'r ganwyd o'r rhwng yn maen nhw yn dod o wneud o'r roedd i ceisio'r cyfrwyng a chdiweithio arlawn. A'r rhwng gennym yn cyfnod o wnes,wn mor bwysig yng Nghymru yn ei gael blaen autog ar gyfer ynghylch I did was we went to the aggregation service, Education UK and it was just a quick way of collecting what was going on and filtering it because we didn't really know what the output of the UK was in terms of online distance learning. We found about, I think there's about 424 courses which are broadly online distance including blended and we mapped them against these simple subject areas and these are ones directly provided by educational institutions and you can immediately see a kind of pattern emerging here in terms of level 7 courses postgraduate professional in these kind of professional subject areas and business. Then, I think I've gone to the end of my, this is the talk backwards at 100 miles an hour okay, if you've got a photographic memory you can leave now. Okay, then we went to, I like this cartoon from XKCD, it's actually horrifically accurate. We went to the institutional websites to see if we could find more courses that they might put on online distance. What we actually found was less courses, we couldn't find courses that we'd found in the aggregation service because the websites were so poor. So we know that there's a job of work to be done there in terms of institutional websites and I think a body like just can get involved in that. That's a straightforward thing that we need to improve because if you can't find it in Google it doesn't exist. That's a bit of a strong statement obviously. Then we went and had a look at private partnerships so these are the partnerships with them educational institutions that are working on a commercial basis and we found about, I think we found about 170 courses and you can immediately see how skewed that is okay. Almost all of it is in business, a little bit broader in terms of level and a few other subjects as well. So we've got a very particular picture here of level 7 courses. This is what UKHE looks like to the world. It looks like level 7 courses that are in professional areas and there's a good reason for that obviously. You need the flexibility of online distance learning if you're in full-time work and there's a natural kind of income stream there if you're in one of these kind of higher level sort of jobs. So that immediately brings us, I mean you're probably all thinking this. Are we progressing towards the kind of situation whereby we have the danger of producing this kind of digital diploma mills idea? And I like this tweet that was on behalf of John Traxley the other day. Is industrialisation an analogy or a description of e-learning in higher education? And there's a sense out there that technology and e-learning is there to make things more efficient and to help scale things up. We're going to use technology, it's the big other that's going to solve all our problems and we're going to be able to go big and it's going to solve all of these economic tensions. It's not quite as simple as that and here's the reason. These are some of the quotes that came out of some of our interviews. If you have more than about 20 or 30 people to a tutor in terms of ratio on online distance courses, people just start dropping out. And we know this and we found this to be true across all of the people that were doing this stuff. Even the private partnership we interviewed almost disappointingly said we can't find a way of scaling this beyond these kind of numbers. So we're not going to see that kind of massive factory industrialisation of online distance learning. It can't scale like that because the students need and expect contact. Now I think that the edges of universities are obviously quite permeable now. Last year we saw that report come out of Demos called the edge of this university and that permeability goes both ways. So we're putting online distance courses out there. We're also putting open educational resources out there. We're filling up iTunes U so we've got some flow in that direction. I think what's coming in to universities is not necessarily an expectation of particular types of platform or technology are going to be provided. I don't think students expect their course to be in Facebook. That's not what they look to the institutions to do. But I think what's happened out on the web is that social media has created this expectation of a particular form of engagement. And it's that form of engagement, that cultural expectation that people are bringing into university. That's what they want. So you could argue that social media is a good thing on the one hand because it helps solve the problem of the atomisation of society, of not knowing who your neighbour is, of the problem of bowling alone. So you can have distributed peer networks geographically distributed and they can come together using social media. That's probably a good thing. It's not very utopian because of the problem homophily obviously. But on the other hand, I think what's happened because of the business model of social media, they want you to go to their site little and often. They want you to post little and often. They want your eyeballs as often as possible. And I think what's happening with social media is that it's atomised self-esteem and motivation. So we need to be fed these tiny little pellets of self-esteem and motivation very, very often. And I think that that's the expectation that a lot of students come to university with. And it's very important in terms of online distance learning. So we need multiple points of feedback. We need a lot of peer-to-peer learning and a lot of contact with the tutor. And the people who are doing this stuff successfully were finding ways of having those multiple points of contact. Now, just coming back on the keynote yesterday morning, which has been the subject of a number of talks. The lecture. Let's think about the lecture. OK, this situation here. Now let's not think about it from the point of view of pedagogically. Let's think about it in terms of because knowledge transfer, the rights and the wrongs of the lecture, et cetera, et cetera. We won't go into that. Let's think about it in terms of eventedness, of presence, of fellowship. Personally, I think that the lecture is a very, very efficient way of helping students feel like they're part of something. And students need to feel like they're part of something. Very important online distance learning. In the face-to-face institution, the lecture functions reasonably well in that way. So what I want to do is just a little experiment. Without looking, I want you to think about the people that are sat next to you. What are they thinking? You can sort of feel their presence. Are they particularly attractive? Hands up if you're sat next to a particular... No, don't do that. OK. So I think that this is a broad challenge, this expectation of contact. We used to talk about content and then somebody invented Wikipedia. We talk about contacts, contacts quite a lot. I think contact is a challenge for e-learning. And I think it's a challenge for the face-to-face institution as well. And as I say, this granularisation of self-esteem and motivation is a little bit like, and here's my snack-based metaphor, social media is very much like Pringles. This is a visual prop, so you remember it. I actually opened it, so I've eaten about half of them. I managed to stop somehow. Did you know that Pringles, the flavour is chemically engineered so that when you eat the first one, you get a massive hit of flavour and it fades off very quickly, so you want to eat another one. But when you eat the second one, your tongue is slightly satiated so you need to eat the third one. And you have to go on and on, you have to eat more and more to keep the flavour level up. And I think in some ways, in terms of contact, motivation and self-esteem, social media is a little bit like that with the little and often. And I think that that's causing a kind of cultural challenge within universities. And as I say, this is quite broad. I like the statistics that come from Australia. There's no such thing, obviously, as the traditional face-to-face student, although we do tend to put online distance learning in the context of some sort of mythical face-to-face student. In actual fact, a face-to-face student is spending an increasing amount of time online and I like that second stat there. It's difficult, because of the scale of the thing, for them to feel that they know a lecturer or that a lecturer knows them. So, again, there's that challenge, there's that contact challenge. This is a quote that comes out of the study. And when you read it through, I think what's at the heart of it is, is it an academic's responsibility to have the students come to them? Or is it their responsibility for the academic to go out to the students? Now, I think because of what's been happening on the web, there's an expectation that you go to the students. And that, rather than any kind of technological challenge, that is the problem that we're trying to solve in terms of moving this area forward, is how to go about doing that and work with quite large numbers. Okay, a couple of other things that have come out of the kind of task force area. These are quotes that have come out of the task force and I'm not really critiquing them because they're broadly held views, but we know that the top one isn't really true. And even if students do live and breathe Web 2.0, we don't actually know what that might mean for their education. It's not clear what that might mean. And then the second quote is, there's a big difference between the idea of ability and willingness. And I'm not going to go into this in detail, but anybody who knows my visitors and residents stuff, there's a link there, you'll know what I think about that. Underlying this is this sense that if everybody could just get a bit better with the technology, get the heads around the new stuff, then things would become much more efficient, the world would be just a much happier and better place it would all start working. That's the sense of it. Now, you might sit there and say, but that's fine, you might sit there and say, I'm not a technological determinist, I'm learner first, pedagogy first, and I use the technology like a tool to help facilitate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But let me just show you this image. How many of you want one of those? People are actually putting their hands up, lovely. And why do you want that? Is it because of what it does? Or is it because it's really, really thin? I really want one of those. That's fake by the way, I'm sorry to have to, that's a fake image. So just looking at that kind of area more broadly, there's a kind of ideological underpinning to this idea that we're moving towards this global knowledge economy, this flat world. And I think that because ed tech, the ed tech role and e-learning is becoming increasingly mainstream because of the funding situation will become more so. It's important that we consider where we sit relative to these kind of larger issues. I quite like the idea of a future that has knitted robots in it. That might happen, it's unlikely though. Another way of putting it is this, that's ironic by the way, but I just thought that was a fun tweet. But I think sometimes implicit in the way that we act is that sense that, hey, if you don't get this stuff, then no wonder if you're not on board then you're just way out of it. This is the only way to go. Okay, quiz time, right? And I couldn't find miniature packs of Pringles, so I've got, you have the opportunity to win some mini-chedders which I will throw at you, okay? So I'm using a very basic pedagogical technique here, which is if you don't pay attention there's a mild threat of violence. If you do pay attention you might get a snack, all right? So let's just have a look at some of the people that have been sort of promoting this kind, this kind of ideological, particular ideology. Okay, Tony Blair, what did he study? What was his main course? Well, hands up, come on. Law, okay, yep. Oh, I couldn't get it far enough. I'm going to have to come down to the front. Okay, hands up. I want to see hands up. Okay, you're nice and close to the front. So so far economically useless subjects, okay? What about the remote participants? Well, if you could sort out some cheesy snacks via illuminate and go ahead, be my guest. Okay, this one's more difficult, so you have to do both of these, okay? Hands up and you get a transformer snack, which is pretty good. You can make yourself a maze-based car, yes? What did you say? Yeah, but what about the other one? Yeah, not German, no. What? No. Right, you've taken too long. I get these. I get to keep these. Okay, the answer is PPE and social anthropology. And at the moment, there are seven people in the Cabinet that did PPE at Oxford, which has got philosophy in the middle of it. So why is this massive promotion of STEM subjects? The people who actually run the country did useless things like philosophy, which I find intriguing. And there's a really nice quote here from the Times Higher from a guy that helps run that course. And they said, why has everybody come to Oxford to do PPE? And he goes, it's how the class system works, which I thought was a great response from somebody who's supposed to run PPE. There's one more person who, a very famous politician who didn't do a useless subject. Can anybody tell me? What did she do? Chemistry, absolutely. So she actually did something useful. That's a bit of a cheap shot, I suppose. So what does this actually mean? Okay, that's the end of snack time, people. I'm sorry if you didn't get any. I've got a couple of bags left if you want to see me afterwards. Sorry about that. And half a tub of Pringles. I think that what's going to happen is we're going to end up in a situation whereby there's going to be this divide between, and there already is, obviously, between these economically viable courses and those who can afford to do things like arts and humanities. And I think that also there's going to be a divide based on how the institution works, based on mode of delivery. So those who can afford it will go face-to-face and those who can't might end up doing it online. And we need to be very careful in our community that we don't end up in that situation where online distance learning becomes just postgraduate, professional, STEM, MBA-type subjects. Now, I've got no problem with those subjects at all. I think they're brilliant. I think they're excellent. We should do lots of them. And again, this came out this morning. You know, there's this sense that you'll have less social mobility if you don't get that full university experience, that full face-to-face experience. So these kind of reports are situating online distance learning as a second class mechanism. Whereas personally, I think because of the way that lectures work, face-to-face lectures work, I think there's a chance that you'll have more contact with your peers and your tutors when you're doing online distance learning, if it's well-designed. Then you would at a traditional face-to-face course. So we need to be careful to defend that area and not end up looking like the kind of return on investment option. And it doesn't have to be like that. One of the people that we interviewed during the report, putting the report together, was the Sheffield College, very interesting, further education college that does at HENFE. And they do online distance courses all the way through from pre-GCSE, all the way through to a BA, all online distance. And it's an absolutely fantastic opportunity for people who want to, just if you like, raise their educational capital, really get stuck into education. So there are people, and it's a real minority, who are working at kind of the other end of the spectrum. And I wonder how well that's going to get insupported. So we're looking at social return on investment rather than return on investment. OK. The other phrase was, along the lines of, HE should enrich society, not make society rich, is another little meme. But my favourite one that came out of a session on Monday was, we're talking learning, not earning. Which I liked. It was nice and kitsch. So these are my thoughts. These aren't specifically in the report, and they're not the task force's thoughts necessarily. They report later. I think that perhaps those professional postgraduate courses should operate largely within market forces. They should survive within that environment. I think that's fair. I think it's important that courses that are outside of the business sort of stem area, the ones that don't have an obvious immediate return on investment get supported. And personally I think that that's what a government should do with regard to education. They should be there to fund things that don't work necessarily directly as part of the larger economic model. I think the role of the ed tech needs to evolve because over the next decade or so it's not going to be the science of the internet. It's going to be the social science of the internet. There's going to be the real challenge and how we engage with that. And I think as ed techs we need to continue to move that way. I mean I've seen the character of alt change over the years in that direction and I think that's a really good thing. So just to finish up on the stuff about the report. We talk about digital identity quite a lot. We talk about it for individuals so whether that's students or staff. But when we're talking about online distance learning across the UK then we need to be thinking about what is the digital identity? How are we presenting UKHE out there globally? And at the moment it has a very particular character and I'm not sure that that character is... I'm not sure we're properly reflecting the character of what we do out there. And I think it would be good if that could change. I don't know what would make that change but I'd like to see it change. And for yourselves in your own particular institution what's the digital identity of your own personal institution rather than yourself, rather than your Twitter feed? And what can you do to influence that? You might feel like you can't do anything to influence it. You might feel you can but as I say I think that increasingly those of us that work in educational technology will actually be able to influence things like the digital identity of our own institutions and I think it's worse standing back and considering what that might be. So the report comes out in a couple of weeks time. You can read that for yourself. If you want to talk to me more about the nitty gritty of the report and some of the details then come down and talk to me afterwards or at lunchtime. I'm very happy to talk to you about that further. If you're interested in these broader topic areas in terms of the role of technology within education and how that relates to what's happening out there we're going to try and convene a series of seminars and if you're interested in that then follow that link and just let us know if you're interested. And that's me, thank you very much. Okay, thanks very much indeed Dave. It's thrown a few things at you physically as well in terms of ideas. We have about ten minutes for questions and we have roving mics around. I'll take top and one down here please. Hi Dave, it's Mark Johnson from the University of Bolton. I was very interested in your thoughts at the end of that and the phrase that crossed my mind is public service education in the same way that we have public service broadcasting to try and balance out the provision of the market what can survive in the free market with something which balances things out. But also I think education as a service to society is something which has not really been high on the agenda both of the previous government and of the current government. There seems to be a prevailing view that education is a series of competing businesses and I don't know how you see this planning out but certainly my Vice Chancellor sees himself as the chief executive of the business. I think what I'd like to see happen in that area and I've got no right to say it apart from the fact that I happen to be stood here today is within each individual institution I think that Vice Chancellor should if you like top slice the kind of profits that come off these very successful online distance postgraduate professional things and top slice them and I think they have a responsibility to feed some of that money back into the areas that might struggle. So if you like it's a kind of arts and humanities tax for the good of society. I mean that's what I'd like to see happen and I do think that universities certainly as institutions have a responsibility to do that so that they remain something that as I say enriches society rather than simply becomes just the next just one step in an economic cycle where those who can't afford to do the course of their choice have to do something that gets them a good job and that worries me especially as the people who are telling us that did PPE which is as I say hypothetically a useless subject only hypothetically. I think the tenor of what you're saying I think the tenor of what you're saying what I'm getting is that we should be asserting that education and knowledge and research are a public good rather than a private good I think we need to say that really clearly I mean at this stage in the history of higher education Yes now is the time to start saying that Now is the time to say that absolutely so it's great to hear it kind of being said and please say it very clearly but I'm wondering if the edgeless university then means that through that sort of leaky boundary the university and what it offers gets sucked into the logic of the market and the commercialized internet or whether there's now an opportunity to assert some of the values of the academy and of research in a way that have renewed relevance in an era of digital knowledge and I think we can assert those values I think they do have renewed relevance but I'd ask you what you think the values are that we should assert that can begin to have some influence and perhaps reposition universities as sites of public knowledge which is what we need to do Well I think what I'd say is that we're talking about wellbeing and we're talking about value in a non-economic sense and I think that universities have a responsibility to give people a broad enough education whether it's through that kind of membrane at the edge of them or whether it's in them essentially they have this responsibility to give people a broad enough education that they understand that there's more depth to life than necessarily just earning lots of money and at the moment the message is that to be, and this is a quote that I heard on the today program that they might be considering raising the retirement age so that you can be a useful member of society for longer and if you take that apart that's quite a scary ideology which is basically saying unless you're earning money you just baggage, you're just dragging this down and so I think in answer to your question I think it's the responsibility of the university to counter exactly that kind of ideology and as you say we can take advantage of the fact that we can throw things out there now and not totally close units and I'd like to see more of that happen I'm not saying that's not happening I'm just saying when you look at a broad snapshot you don't really see it Okay, thank you I'll take one illuminate from Kath query are we properly preparing students for changes out there? We're properly preparing students for changes out there That's a very broad question Yes and no No I think one thing that's happening is and if you look at what employers want then the kind of values that they want are to do with altruism team player values that are more directly associated with the idea of being a good useful citizen than necessarily being a brilliant professional and I think that what we're doing if the focus has this very professional focus as you go through higher education so that you get a good job and you end up in the workplace with not necessarily the right skills to really get on and progress and do valuable stuff which would be good for the economy which is quite ironic I think there's another problem within that as well which is that if everything we do is assessed in terms of impact and performance that's a bureaucratic process and obviously bureaucracies can only assess against what's gone before now if it's important for us to become an economy of a society of innovators if that's what's good for our economy then how can we assess that using an administrative process because if it's administrative if it's innovative it can't possibly be seen by those kind of processes it just stands to reason so I think we've got a problem there if things become too performance focused we're going to have opportunities for people who really are innovators who really are bright thinkers as well so I don't think, I think in some ways we are missing the opportunity to prepare people OK, thank you. One quick question here Hi, it might not be a quick answer but I think my thoughts from your presentation and from talking to academics and potential students and students is they're going into learning and they want access to networks whether that's face-to-face or distance learning networks or whatever and so your point about some of the politicians that haven't done useful subjects is that they certainly got useful networks and INS and whether that's financial advantage to being in a network or not and how that is affecting universities so we've had lots of discussions about they're doing online for profit or for greater profit and productivity in the business but the sort of impact of why people are going is because of the networks and whether the online is facilitating more fair access to some networks that might have been previously and I think that the point that you're discussing is reflected in that report that came out this morning one of the reasons why so many people do PPE at Oxford is because they meet all the right people so that they can go on to their houses of parliament so I think in terms of online distance learning I think what you say is correct and we have to make sure that our online distance learning does give people access to networks because of the way that it's designed rather than simply trains people how to get through an assessment and getting access to those networks is one of the most valuable things about higher education other than the life experience that whole life experience and if we get too focused on simply doing the course which is quite often just the focus of online distance learning then it will become a second rate option compared with face to face because you'll get the qualification and you'll have nowhere to go with it because you won't have formed that network of people and obviously the way that the technology works in terms of social media hypothetically we have technologically the options to really work and expand those networks and provide access to them for our students so I do think that that's a really valid point OK, well I'll close it there and I'm sure there'll be an opportunity to grab David at lunchtime so thank you very much indeed for a nice provocative