 I'm delighted to introduce our second invited speaker for this session, and Liam Salman, who's from OCR, is going to talk to us about his role, so we're delighted to welcome you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Amanda. Good morning everyone. As you probably gathered, out is a very interactive conference, so hands up those people that are working in the FE and school sector. Just a lowly one, a two, a three. So, as you can see, we are a bit of a minority, but you know, it's important that we do stick together, and I think it's important that we share and learn from each other, and my presentation is going to talk about our experiences of e-learning within the school and FE space. So, these are the infamous words from Donald Rumsfeld, the known-owns, the known-unknowns, and the unknown-unknowns, and it's a phrase that often comes into my mind in working with school and FE, in that it's a constant challenge. It's a constant process of discovery and learning, and the truth that you hold are being challenged, and we heard from John earlier when he talked about vulnerability, so I'm going to expose a little bit of vulnerability that we have. Now, we do know a few things. For those who don't know who OCR, we are part of Cambridge Assessment, which is part of the University of Cambridge, so we do know quite a lot about assessment, quite a lot about curriculum design, and an awful lot about working with schools. We work with a lot of schools, and in the UK, we work with a lot of colleges. We have an extensive vocational offer. And the two principal projects I'm going to talk about is, the first one is Cambridge GCC Computing. This was, to our knowledge, the first GCC MOOC launched in September 2012 in partnership with Raspberry Pi and Cambridge University Press. It was based on the OCR GCC Computing, so that's meaty. That's 120 guided learning hours, so there's a lot of design involved in that. It was primarily built for 14, 16-year-old learners and their teachers. It was very much our response to the shortage of computing specialist teachers and the transition from ICT to computing. We are very keen to engage teachers in the process. We've got nine master teachers from a variety of schools, a mixture of schools, diverse group. We're really keen on that. They scripted and presented it. As you can see from the stats, it's very popular. We've had about, I think it's about 1.6 million times people have accessed the resources, and that's from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, so it's on huge scale, as MOOCs should be. And then another project that we work on at the moment, and particularly for the one FE College here, hello Gloucestershire, something that you're probably very familiar with. This is a blended e-learning service for those students that do not have a good grade, which is a C and above in maths and English. So, for those of you that are not in the FE sector, this is now a requirement. It's an requirement for young people that don't have a C grade, that they have to do that, GCC, or to do a stepping stone qualification. And it's a massive challenge to the FE sector. There's an estimated short for about 1,100 maths teachers and 1,000 English teachers. Huge curriculum space. We're working across three qualifications. This is Cambridge progression qualifications, your basic literacy numeracy, functional skills, and GCC foundation tier. So that's the C. And the key thing is, and something I want to talk about, I'm just going through this in my experiences, we're talking about engaging the disengaged. These are young people that probably had not the best experience of school, come to college, think, great, I'm doing hairdressing, great, I'm doing motor vehicles. And the first thing they're told is, you've got to do maths and English again. So this is a real challenge. Piloted in Kent, working with unemployed people, that was mainly because there was funding for the colleges and the independent training providers in that area, and extending the pilot nationally. And apologies for the simplicity of this. I'm very much structuring my short presentation around this simple model, which I often use myself when we're designing projects. So platforms, platforms obviously very important. You need a platform. We work with many platforms. We're what I call platform agnostic. We don't have a proprietary platform. We do do an awful of working moodle because it's very popular in the FE and school sector. The thing I would say about platform, bear in mind the title of this conference is Learners as Agent for Change. If you leave it in the hand of technologists, as I don't know if people agree with this experience, it will often be very much, here's the solution. You know, very much, wow, it can do this, it can do that, but the solution to what? What is the education experience we're aiming to? So the other side of the triangle you need is the content. So you need creative, engaging, sustainable content. Content in our world gets stale very quickly. So if you don't have an efficient model, you will run out of content very quickly, and young people are very demanding on content. And the third side of the triangle is curriculum. So bear in mind this is pre-18. This is the accountability system. This is national curriculum. You do need a structure. You do need some sort of curriculum authority to it. And the centre, and I'll just put this on, this guy's called Jake. Jake is 18, he's unemployed. He was sent by JobCenter Plus to work on our time project, and I just played a short clip on his experience of learning. When I found out I had to come on and do the course, I was a little bit admittedly I was a little bit, you know, not this again, not learning maths and English again. But ever since I've been on the course, it's been a little bit of a ride, it's been okay. And I've enjoyed it, I've enjoyed the maths and English, and I'm just working towards getting my seat grades in both. Well, in school you're sat in a classroom with maybe 30 people, and the focus level was a bit different really. In my opinion, when you're sat down there on a computer and you've literally got your headphones in, you're in your own little world, you're in your little bubble, and you focus on what's on the screen, and you don't have to look around, you don't have to focus on time, you don't have to focus on anything else, you just focus on the work, and it's much easier for me personally to crack on with maths and English just on the screen. Now, I really like that video because, you know, we, big organisation, we produce our polished marketing videos where people are randomly pointing at things and smiling. Jake's not a tech evangelist, he wouldn't digest anything that's technical, he's a young lad. Oh my God, I've got to do maths and English again, really? All right, he learning, I'll give it a go, it works for me, and he's got a purpose now. He wants to get that scene maths and English, he realised that improves his opportunities in life. I think it's really powerful, I could literally end the presentation there, that it's all about the learner, it's all about Jake, and if you lose sight of that, the content, the platform, the curriculum are pretty purposeless, but I don't think I might be impressed if I just ended there, so I'll move on. So, talk about platforms. So, like I said, we work with a lot of platforms, adaptive learning, God, I won't even list all the people we work with, and I often think about platforms, my experience of platforms, it's like TVs, you know, at first it's the awe of the technology, it's like wow, I don't really know what I'm watching, but look at this box in the room and look at those pictures. And then, I don't know, depending on the platform, depending on your experience, how quickly you move to that, yeah, but why doesn't he do this? And I am that kid there, I was in the 80s from a portable TV trying to get the tube, trying to get that reception, you know, and it's like, ugh, and how it should be is there. Platform should be in the background, you shouldn't see the platforms. Now, it's really interesting with the time work. With the time work, when we did all those video interviews of students, they talked about the learning experience, they talked about the peer support, they talked about the tutors, they talked about the content, they never mentioned the platform. And when we stood back and looked at this, we thought, God, should we be wide about this? And they realised, no, we shouldn't. The platform should be invisible, the learn and the tutors should be in control. So I just use this piece of research, not because it tells you probably anything different that, you know, it's all about the technology, we're talking about generation Y, actually we deal with generation, let me get my alphabet XYZ, we deal with generation Z, we're dealing with people that haven't joined the workforce. But what's really interesting, two things about this piece of research is one that quotes about young people's relationship with technology may be more complicated than might first think. Steve talked about it yesterday. I don't like the language of digital natives. I am the tech support for my wider family. My nieces and nephews phoned me up when they want to get things working. I'm in my forties. So, you know, this idea that everyone comes to it tech-savvy, really you've got to think about the jakes, you've got to be personalised. The other thing I love about this is, and this is CIPDs, this is personal development, they work with employers, they interviewed a whole load of apprentices, a whole load of graduates and the thing they hated the most was e-learning. They did not like that. Why they didn't like it is because they come to it with the experience of Facebook, with Twitter, they come to it with the experience of Netflix, YouTube. If you give them what I call that dead finger, that clicking, clicking, clicking experience, they will turn off very quickly. So, learning analytics. I don't know if people are probably the HE colleagues, you'd be aware of the work of solar, a lot of good stuff they do on learning analytics. And we are broad in this space. And according to the research of solar about 70% of people in that space now. I don't know if you could hear the glossure if they're different, but FE in school in my experience are probably 90% in that space. It's still very much learning. So, we do your granular data, how you can really engage, we do your visualization of data, but we need to move into this space. It's about how we support the sector, particularly the FE in the school sector, how we support them to make sense of this data because data in itself has no value. Only if you continue to intelligence, only if intelligence can become teaching interventions and strategies, does it have any value. What we have learnt about data is tutors, lecturers and teachers are time pressured. Don't drown them in data. And this is one of the challenges we find working in adaptive learning. It is a waterfall of data. What they want is the few buckets. They want to know the few buckets and what they do with those few buckets. Don't give them a fighter pilot dashboard. Give them a Morris Miner. Give them the four dials that help them know what to do and turn what to do with. Moving on to content. I've got a team of three developers, designers just working on time alone. We've produced an awful lot of content. We're very much on publisher scale. This is not so much the HE experience of lecture capture. We do the whole suite. We do pitch and picture, talking heads, tutorials on screen. We do the whole lot. We're really interested in what works. It's quite interesting the researchers coming out on what works. I apologise if I mispronounce his name. They did research on four courses on edX, 6.9, I think, or 6.1 million learning episodes. It's a really interesting piece of research. I won't read them out to you, but you've got these key things. Keep it planned, keep it short, personalise it, keep it flowing. Talk fast, that engagement, something I pick on later. Different formats, different purposes. High production value isn't enough. That's something that we're learning. You can spend a fortune on content. That's something I draw on. I do have a little bit of research on our own videos. This is for the MOOC, this is for a year, the 200 top videos. As you can see, we've had 337,000 views. That's a lot of views, a lot of rich data there. Look at that distribution. First of all, you can see the ABCs and Ds. We were already from GUE, realising you've got to break this down. We didn't have young people here. You can't give 30 minutes of lecture capture. You've got to break it down and atomise it. Look at the distribution. It's really interesting. I thought, let's have a look at the top four. Why are they the top four? Number one, this guy is called Clive. I don't know if people know about Raspberry Pi. Really exciting. He's from Raspberry Pi. X just left teaching when he joined Raspberry Pi. Engaging, really engaging guy. He's got 24,000 views. But the other thing about that video is it's the first one. This is a MOOC. MOOCs, as you know, have that terrible drop-off. So is it that people are just going there, watching the first one and they're not progressing? The second and the third one. Animations, Clive again. The guy in the bottom-down corner is Jason. So we had animation within there. They're technically complicated. You know, I'm no computing expert, but algorithms in pseudo code is quite hard. So is it that the students are going to them because that works for them? So again, I looked at engagement. I looked at, well, okay then, what are people watching the longest for? So this is just a plot, duration watched against duration of video. Now that bottom one there, that sample assessment material, right? Weep, this is quite a dull topic. I mean, just to bore you GCCs. You have a thing called controlled assessment. It's a project. It's actually part of your grade. So it's very important for the student to understand it. It was an eight minute video because you can't necessarily break it down. They've got to understand the synoptic. They have to understand everything that's required. So we outsourced a animation. I thought it was beautiful. It was a sock machine. And we had these people in there who, well, no, they watched it. They only watched half of it. So why spend all that money on the content? Could we done something differently? So what does that tell us? You know, and this is now, I think, moving into the known unknowns. Although hopefully some of you may have these answers. Is it about video format? Is it about content and subject matter? Is it about core structure? Is it about presenter? It's probably all four. And this is one of the areas we want to know more and more and like to understand more. I think we need them choice. Personalisation of content. We talk about personalisation of data, but personalisation content is really important. So just very briefly, this is what we're doing with time. This is the work in maths and English. So, you know, we do an initial assessment. We then determine which level they are and that little picture of levels there is a spiky profile. That's sort of like say someone's level two in their comprehension, but they're not so good in their spelling and punctuation. This allows people to move around. But what's interesting, how they move around in pathways is they move around with different content pathways. So these five things are stories. We've actually got actors in. Scripted stories. So it's contextualised learners. You're dealing with young people that have gone to college, probably had a bad experience in maths and English, particularly maths. So we're trying to engage them in different ways and we've given them different pathways. So it may be, you know, I don't get learning context dealing with fundraiser. I'll do it in the moving on. So this is our skiving choice, pathways and choice really important, control and choice. So talking about curriculum, the final part. So I'm drawing in here the language of curriculum design. So you get this notion of, actually I think it's six facets of curriculum, but I won't get into curriculum. It's not curriculum lecture. Intended. Intended is very much that policy, that framework, that structure. What is intended? And remember I'm talking about the school and the FE sector. They have your office there, they have your national curriculum, they have your accountability measures. So these are really important and government is very important and they don't have the freedoms of HE. Now how that translates into the language of e-learning. Well, you know, this is more instructional design process. I probably couldn't tell you enormous amount of that that you don't know already. You know the work done at it. This is probably the area that's really interesting for us as an organization, the enacted curriculum. What actually happens in the learning experience? Because that's the space in which people learn. And I won't read that out to you. But what's really exciting about dealing, I mean Steve mentioned yesterday, disruptive pedagogies. You know you're dealing with an enacted curriculum of which you don't have enormous control. It's not the intended curriculum, the didactic, the chalk and talk. This is disruptive. It has content-sized learning. It has learner agencies, learns with control and it spins around. And this is quite challenging for a sector that is under pressure, has got to meet a whole load of targets. Now we, I mean one of the biggest things we feel we can support as an example is in that support. Letting people be brave. Let people take risks. I mean one member of my team is lovely to learn as the tutors engaging on the pilot with time. They said blimey it's like we've taken to the playground and they're going down the slide head first. We can't control these experiences and it's something we should celebrate. So just ending with that, Donald Rumsfeld again. So this is his biography and he's more humble tome than this known unknowns and it's very much that humility of knowledge and that sharing, how we learn and share from each other. And what I find very interesting is apparently attributed that known unknown to somebody NASA and something nice about that NASA that exploring that discovery that going star trekking beyond borders. So that's me and I think my final word is let's just go down the slide head first together. And I love to hear more about what you guys are doing and any comments. Thank you. Thanks very much Liam. Questions, comments. Thanks Liam. I was really interested in your talk, particularly what you talked about what you can learn from your data about all the different examples of learning materials. I think one of the things we found over the years it's quite hard for providers to kind of engage with learning those lessons if we don't share sort of what works and what doesn't. In terms of your work at OCR and what you do, is there a way of kind of getting us to understand sort of what works and what doesn't for learners? Things like this. I think it's been more open. I mean, you know, we're really keen to get engaged about as you know now and you know how we can do it. We work with virtually every college and school in the country. So it's doing these sort of things, doing blogs. I'm trying to get involved in the colleges in the east of England. So don't reach out. I'm worried whether they'll be able to respond to the new gender, particularly the FE and the funding cuts that come in their way. They do need to look at new delivery models. Yeah, I think it's just sharing and being will be as open as we can. And bear in mind they ask commercial interest in here. We know our competitors will be looking at this, but from our point of view we are going on education mission. We part of the University of Cambridge will be as open as we can and share. We met yesterday really, really interested in your time platform and I work in post 16 and adult as well as secondary learning and in making online learning courses. So really, really interested. I was going to ask a fairly simple question I guess which is that I'm very interested that your time platform is aiming at a whole range of qualifications. So Cambridge progression, functional skills and GCSE. And I guess if the simpler question that that would be, how do you go about synthesising all those qualifications into a framework for learning that you can take the learners through. But I guess the underlying question there is a sort of a more complex and political one about actually if these are learners who've been failed by the school system and by a traditional exam system how do you get the balance in that sort of curriculum design for that course between good practice and teaching people to and supporting people to pass qualifications. Does that make sense as a question? I'll break into two, shall I? I think the first bit is about that. Yeah, you're right. It is really meaty. I can't remember how many hours the content is. It's a huge amount of time. It's careful design. It's having those pathways but giving guidance in that choice. So it's that spiky profile theme. We've got to allow people. I think there's nothing worse than a learning experience of. And we've all experienced it of like, well, I get speaking and listening. I get it. Why do I have to go for another three bloody lessons on speaking and listening? You want to personalize the learning experience. Now if the e-learning, if the support does not match that personalization then where does the tutor and teacher go? So we do have a huge curriculum space you're right. It allows people to move around. Going back to your qualification if I get it right. We as an awarding body we're very passionate about it's not all about assessment. It is the learning experience. Assessment is only one component of curriculum cohesion. I think that language is. So that's why again what we really enjoy about e-learning is you can have that bound with the borderless boundless. You can allow that sort of like that form and someone says, oh I found this something really interesting. It's got maybe nothing to do with Jesus English. Something like that. And that's really good. It allows people whereas before and we work with the publishers and they're great. But if you're working with a textbook or you're working just as specification you're in narrow confines. The tell allows you to be borderless. It really is just great. It allows for that exploring beyond the specification. But let's not be naive because if you type into Google or if YouTube put GCC maths you get 40,000 videos. It's a structured learning experience. We do need to give structure to it. People are purposeful. They do want a qualification. So it's that leading to a qualification but allowing people to explore either side of those boundaries. Martin, do we have any online questions? Okay. Shall we take that one straight afterwards? Online questions for me. Yeah, I was thinking, was it Ken, the name of the guy in the centre of the triangle? Jake. There's a K in it. That's as close as I get. What's fascinating with me is maths he was doing. He was also doing his English and he was incredibly articulate. But he also talked about that difference of concentration. I recall a friend in school was one of the brightest people I knew but dropped out of school, became an alcoholic in fact. But because in the class he had to be the class fool. It's something that's so critical to these situations. It's not about the knowledge pouring bit but the social situations of schools which sometimes work to people's benefit because sometimes you concentrate better whether there's other people don't. It's not really a question but it's a really big, big issue. It's a really good observation. So I only chose Jake and I only did a one minute slot hour if I think it's about five minute interview. But there was about six other people which you can go on to the time website and get them. What's fascinating they all talk about bad experience at school. They don't talk about bad experience. They talk about I was lost in a classroom. I was literally part of a fodder factory. With e-learning and particularly this is blended learning we're very passionate about blended learning so it's still tutor supported. This is not autodidactic. We're my colleague earlier he asked the question about the personal where we got bit scared is they start really sharing personal stories but that's part of the experience. So I agree with you it does give I do passionately believe that it's a disruptive pedagogy. It does change things and I'm not against the school experience in any way but the school experience is a different one and the post 16 does allow possibly different experience. We've had quite a lot of people following this online and making comments about the challenges that have been faced in FE and I was just wondering following on from what you said you talk about it's all about the learner and their centre stage but with all the pressure with the funding cuts with the policies being implemented what is your personal take on what we can do to really put the learner centre stage rather than just efficiencies on the bottom line. Two answers to that I think one I'm very blessed I've got a really creative and bright team but they come to me with techie talk and it's a bit of that techie solution and part of my job is to translate into management talk. I'm a director of OCR and I've got experience doing many contacts with principals across the ecologies. You've got to talk their language and I go back to that solution you've got to say this is the problem I am solving not this is just the solution. The other thing about the efficiencies is not just the cost driving but the end of the technology we place in the teacher not in any way does lead to a more efficient and impactful models. I think it's actually an expansive agenda so one of the colleges we're working with is Keen College they do a lot of work with employers I think it's one of the big actually I'm better not just in this case it's commercial confidential they deal with one big employer that has a lot of shift workers with literacy and numeracy problems you can't get them into a classroom that helps you with that that's an expansive agenda that is colleges tapping into new markets whereas traditional delivery models you can't do that if you're going to say be in this classroom at nine to five at nine to ten on a wet Wednesday morning well employers are going to go not a chance mate so I think it's an expansive agenda it's not just a reduction one Right and the final questions I think we're just about there Liam thank you very much so evangelist you brand it's all a bad day your marketing tool for this it's been very good thank you very much