 Rhaid i chi. Si'n meddwl, Simon Nelson is now almost a year since I was summoned over the road from where I was normally doing business, which was in the MTV building in Holy Crescent in Camden, to meet Martin Bean in the Open University, vice-chancellor of the Open University, in the Open University building on Holy Crescent. ac ydych chi'n gweld i'r acronym Ym Mwg yn ymdegwyd. Rydych chi'n gwybod i'ch gweithio ar gyfer hynny. Rydych chi'n gwybod i'ch gweithio ar gyfer y ffugyr maen nhw yn ymryd deisio a'r angen. Dyma'r gweithio sy'n gwybod i'ch gweithio, Ond mae'n ystod am ystod i'r ymddir i gyd yn y cael ei ddeilid. Ei'r gwrth ag ymddir i'r gwaith ymddir i'r gweithio'r panthau. A'r gweithio'r panthau yn y rŷn, mae ei fod yn y ddau. Ond mae'n mynd i ddod oherwydd a'r Gymru, ond mae'n amddir i'r gwaith ymddir i'r gwaith ymddir i'r gwaith ymddir i'r gwaith? I'm going to give a presentation about twenty, twenty-five minutes. I hope in it I'm not going to teach a room of world class learning technologists to suck eggs but I probably will from time to time please forgive me if you have to give me a few minutes to so that I am going to do well. I hope in it, I'm not going to teach a room of world class learning technologist to suck eggs, but I probably will from time to time. Please forgive me if I do and remind you of some of the basics, like the fact that future learns a platform for online learning, and we sort of put MOOCs within that. I don't say we're exclusively a MOOC platform because I think MOOCs is such an early and emergent market that I think this thing could go in a number of different directions. But it's definitely an exciting start point for us. I suspect that this room knows what a MOOC is, but our own interpretation, large numbers of students open to work. Two to six hours study a week, six to ten weeks duration, and a high degree of social interaction involved. We have, I hope, a pretty simple and clear vision of what we're trying to do. Inspiring learning for life through, telling stories, provoking conversation, and celebrating progress. Of those three points, the most controversial whenever I've spoken to academics or partners is always the first one, telling stories, but I therefore leave it in very deliberately because I think it provokes exactly the kind of conversation we should be having about how to use the platform of the web to deliver new forms of learning. And it's also a bias to my previous 15 years at the BBC, where I was certainly not, I wouldn't take all the credit that Hughes has given me for the development of the iPlayer, but I was certainly heavily involved in that and the interactive web services for radio and TV. So we delivered through, hopefully, an expertise in distance and online learning, drawn from our founder, our owner, the Open University. But also that area of broadcast storytelling, a lot of my team have got that BBC background. But also I'm bringing in digital start-up people, very grounded in the new social tools and technologies that we believe can really bring this thing to life. And the marriage of those three areas is always the easiest thing, but that, for me, is what future learn is about, and that's what the beauty of our ownership structure and our relationship with the Open University potentially gives us. So I'm able to draw on world-class talent from the academic side of the Open University. Mike Sharples, my academic lead, drawing on world-class experts like Simon Buckingham-Shum in the area of learning analytics. And as I say, my background, media, Martin Bean, my chairman, vice-chancellor of the OU, education technology. So if we can get those sort of things working well together, and I think we have done so far, then I think we're onto something, particularly if we can exploit these amazing relationships that we've been able to build up so far. So 26 partners, 23 UK, three international, and the latest to come on board, University of Auckland, Newcastle and Liverpool, but an extremely powerful group of universities, in my view, and I think increasingly starting to see some of the collaborative potential of this grouping. I'm very clear that with FutureLearn we're nothing without our partners, and actually we have to be really, really good at building a product and a platform for online learning, but also at working with these partnerships, because if we do that then I do think there's very exciting innovations that are going to come out from the collective partnership. There are a whole range of different motivations, I think, that bring those partners within the FutureLearn family, but I think the potential for global reach is a key common driver, but also that opportunity to experiment in a new MOOC landscape and experiment in terms of online learning, online delivery of their existing expertise. I sort of class these five broad motivations as some combination of each, I think powers most of our university partners. It's not only academic partners. We have three high class content partners who we're working with, and our vision for these is to use them toward men, the content, the courses that are coming out of the universities, but also potentially to co-create some of those courses and to place the actual online learning at the heart of a broader online knowledge offer, drawing in the digital archives of, for example, the museum, the library, etc. Behind these there's a whole range of other potential partners, cultural content commercial, who are interested in working with the university sector to bring these new forms of learning to life. I don't have the BBC up there, but it won't surprise you to know I've been working quite hard on them over the last year. Two weeks ago they announced the first collaboration with FutureLearn and its universities as part of its centenary of World War I commemorations. So we're working on the first potential courses to come out of there. So not only cultural corporate bodies, so first commercial corporate partner, British Telecom, and I'd say that my approach to British Telecom, as with those first three content partners, is about piloting different ways of working with the universities and then using what we learn from them to open up to a wider range of potential partners. So watch this space there. So we're up and running. Our first courses are out there at the moment. Course four launched this week. The mind is flat from the University of Warwick. And we'll be running eight in total by the back end of this year. And as I say, Web Science starts on Monday. And I'm very much enjoying the experience of working through some of these courses. So we're not in here just to copy this emerging MOOC landscape. We do think we can bring something new. We think we can bring something fresh, something different to this area. If we really exploit those partnerships with our universities and bring that open university and social web development together. So we're particularly excited about the idea of transforming the convenience and accessibility of learning and making it available at times of the day. And on devices and in locations where traditionally people wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn. So we really prioritise mobile learning. We've made sure that we've developed the whole future learning platform in a responsive way so that it renders appropriately on small mobile phone devices of tablet, as well as on the desktop or laptop. And surprisingly, I think that already puts us a little ahead of the game of some of the existing providers out there, although I'm sure they're catching up very quickly. There's a lot further to go in here. I want to be providing offline access in some way, not least for myself. A metro system of London, of course, is the perfect environment to get through some of those six-minute videos. So watch this space on there. And we're also intrigued by some of the other potential that native app environments could provide us. I want to emphasise we've launched in beta. We've done that very deliberately. I would say that I'm incredibly proud of the beta product we put out there, but I'd say at the moment it's the foundations of what future learning is going to become. It's not the end product. And in some ways, I sort of think we maybe should always stay in beta because I'm never getting rid of my development team. There's always going to be the next innovation to come. We're always going to be learning from what happened in the last month and hopefully iterating rapidly that product in order to get it better. I'll talk a bit more about that in a bit. But, as I say, you can now go to future learning. I'm hoping many of you will also have a second experience. So learners can just go on and join that course. As I say, I think we've got... The thing I asked my team to prioritise was the foundations, the core architecture. I remember at the BBC, I'm very proud of a huge amount of stuff that we built and developed and the audiences we reached, the innovations we reached and so on. But there are a few things that I just could never do well. One of them was mobile and another one was social. And that's because I was building on a legacy system, a sort of Frankenstein technology platform that had started in 1997 with the BBC News site. In fact, the original architect of that site was my lead technologist at the start of this project because the thing has managed to grow to however many tens of millions of pages or whatever based on that same architecture that was designed at the beginning. But to then actually turn that oil tanker to do social simply and well was almost impossible. So the priority for the team has been fewer bells and whistles, but get that functionality, get that architecture in place so that we can grow, we can build on it, et cetera. I think they've done that superbly. So the sort of core architecture is once-to-do list with hopefully a clear representation of the course structure, how many weeks are where you are in that cycle at the moment, you've got your steps underneath, you can watch an individual bit of video, read an article, join in a discussion, and once you've done that, you're self-complete by marking something as complete and that then tracks back to your to-do list. You can see what you've done, what you've still got to do, what's coming up next, et cetera. Again, a huge amount we're learning about this area from our first experiments with it really. How does it feel if you've only ticked off three quarters of week one and week two has already begun? How do we communicate to the learner that that's sort of okay? Is it okay for the course structure? And then what counts as complete? So these are very interesting questions for us. We've heavily prioritised, as I say, these aspects of social learning. We think that learning together is one of the key opportunities that the web offers to develop on where we're coming from. I've been absolutely blown away by the first real learner reaction to these features. So I'll be honest with you, we put them out going, okay, at the moment they're not that sophisticated. There are basically long discussions. It's very hard to filter at the moment. We haven't got the opportunity for small group discussion. I promise you all of this is coming. We have all sorts of ways that we're going to be able to manage large amounts of social activity. We decided we're in beta, we want to get this out there. The reaction's been amazing. The volume of take-up, the quantity and quality of discussion in these environments, again vindicating I think some of the early decisions we took to place the discussion at the heart of the content rather than send people off into different environments to discuss a chat, et cetera. But if you go through one of our courses, then I think you really do find, and there's something about anyone who's been involved with the MOOC development, and I'm sure there's Amy from Edinburgh at the back there who's been one of the UK pioneers in this area. I'm sure you'll agree. There is a moment where you actually see real people in there talking, and it brings it to life in a way that's quite inspiring, really thrilling, and particularly on something so global. I mean you get people introducing themselves. I'm from Peru, I'm from Korea, I'm from Nigeria, I'm from China. I want to learn this, I'm here for this. I work part-time doing this and have time in the evening. I'm trying to navigate around my two-year-old toddler helping me do this. It's brilliant the way you see this come to life and the communities that build around it. As I say, we're scratching the surface of what's possible here at the moment. Our first basic filtering techniques are in there. We're drawing on the principles from social media that we believe the core audience is very familiar with, so the ability to follow people who you're particularly interested in and be able to then filter your discussions by filtering the social activity you view by the people you follow. I'll show you a couple of things that are coming soon as well in that area. Our first assessment tools are in place and the key here is to try and use these as formative experiences, so try and develop learning, not just test it. It's interesting working with bringing together those different cultures in my team. There have been times when the web development side has come at an issue like assessment and multiple-choice quizzes and gone, how hard can that be? Then we've brought in the pedagogic experts from the OU and we've got a bit to learn about this. Again, that fusion of those skills is challenging because we're trying to do this in a MOOC environment, in a free environment, so finding the right area to pitch this at is key, but we're also there. We know that we've got the brands of the Open University and all our partners behind us, so we want to make damn sure that what we're putting out there is quality. I think in just something as basic as multiple-choice quizzes at the moment, we have put a lot of thinking into it, into the ability, how many tries people get for an individual question, what happens when they get one right or wrong, making sure that we provide hints from the educator, send people back to the areas where they might be able to go over their learning again in order to get that right, track their progress through and score appropriately. Again, these are our first weeks of this. We're still learning what works, what's appropriate, etc. But again, in all of these areas, we're just looking to pick them off and do them well, but appropriately for a MOOC space. So coming soon, and you can imagine my day job is tied up with a roadmap of things we could do, and making sure we prioritise those appropriately. But one of the things that's starting to come in now is little innovative test assess in those kind of areas, and we've got other demands for, for example, audio inquisits and audio testing and comparison and video, etc. And also, there's innovative HTML5 apps, etc. that we want to embed into some of our courses to enable us to really exploit the interactive potential of the medium, so to do some, you know, whizzy, funkier stuff around content coming soon. Peer review and assessment. So peer review, we're going to be starting with, that's a heavy priority for us, because again, we think that that hits several sweet spots of where we believe the MOOC space has to be and not least our social aspects of utilising the crowd. So these are, you know, early designs for what's coming. And actually it's going to be tested quite shortly. We are hoping, maybe with Southampton. So then some of those aspects of, you know, actually utilising these crowds in slightly more sophisticated ways. So group discussions, again, that's an early priority. And then there are much more ambitious, sophisticated ways that we could do this. Forms of jigsaw learning argue, graph some of you will be familiar with those concepts. And we definitely, you know, I have people like Mike Sharples just ready to unleash themselves on the tools we give them in order to try and innovate in these kind of areas. Filtering those discussions. So one of the things that we found in our alpha test was that there was a person going around all the comments and replying to lots of them going, just saying like. And he just dotted all around and kept saying like, like, like, like. We thought, oh, okay, maybe we need a like button. And it's true, you know, because you go through and you do, you know, you see these incredibly warm sort of responses or incredibly clever responses and you don't necessarily always want to reply to them. Just want to, you know, hit like. And so the ability to like stuff, to filter stuff in that way and, you know, experiment around how do you scale, how do you filter social activity. And critically, you know, one of the things I'm really, it's really coming home to me. We already was there, you know, celebrating progress is a key part of our vision. But, you know, trying to understand what a learner's targets are, what success means for them, moving beyond the sort of crude, you know, retention completion rates that are sort of, you know, that the media is obsessed by potentially correctly, but there's something more sophisticated going on in here. And if we design these courses in the right way, then, you know, some people are going to come in and get, you know, chunks of learning that actually we should celebrate, we should maybe reward them for. And we're trying to find interesting ways to sort of visualise and use a learner's data, play it back to them so that they can, to improve their own experience and set their own targets. Data, let's say, is the lifeblood of the future learn-offer. Go back to the BBC again. You know, 15-year-old platform, basically powering BBC, getting sophisticated data and analytics. Never mind then reacting rapidly to it. Again, really, really difficult for a legacy business. Future learn doesn't have that excuse and has all of that opportunity. So we're putting heavy emphasis on what we can do here and we just see the benefits for learners, for the educator themselves, partners as a whole, and for future learner products and the company as manifold and actually critical to our success. So helping learners to track progress, set targets, understand how they're doing. Educators, you know, if we get the right kind of dashboards in front of them, provide them with dynamic and powerful data, then they will help to improve the courses we are making. For partners, no doubt that this is an opportunity to reach new students and to reach out into parts of the world where the traditional physical university has not been able to. But also all of them are interested in the research potential of this big learning data, and we're trying as a partnership to find the right ways to collaborate and to make those opportunities available. And then, of course, for future learn, we have to be a learning operation. We have our first learners on the platform. What are they telling us? What questions are they asking? So I'll give you a few that are exercising me at the moment. I will say, I don't think there's any... What one of the things about this area is, I don't believe there's a one-size-fits-all solution to what a MOOC is, but I do think there's stuff we can learn from everything we're doing. In the first few weeks, we have had a 10-week course start. We've had a two-week course start and finish. We've had a six-week and eight-week course. I'm very interested to see what we can learn about the different rates of progress through there. I spoke about that number of steps that people are doing per week. What's appropriate? How do you structure a course in case the majority of people are getting three-quarters of the way through an individual weaker step? I don't know, but these are the kind of things that I want to put in front of our educators, really, and get them playing around with and testing. Video characteristics and length. I was going through a course the other day and watched an incredibly stimulating seven-minute piece of video that then was confronted with an 11-minute piece of video. And just in my own head, a trigger went, I just can't justify that time now. There's just something about understanding ideal durations, ideal scheduling of a course, understanding the rhythms and pattern of the learner. Again, no one-size-fits-all solution, but you can imagine the depth and quality of data that's going to be coming back course by course and across the whole piece. Marketing and scheduling courses. Scheduling is a word I've used a lot bringing it in from TV. I remember when I moved from BBC Radio to BBC TV, I was blown away by this engine they had of planning and scheduling, planning, commissioning and scheduling courses. So they analysed the hell out of what they thought viewers would want. Then they commissioned and went over everything with a fine tooth comb through a very long production process, etc. And then, in terms of knowing exactly who would be there at what time, what they would be interested in, what else they might be doing, this was down to an art. Some would say they've actually replaced some of the art with science in doing that, but if you can get the right balance, it's amazingly effective. We're nowhere near that yet. Again, as a partnership as an operation, I want to get into much more of a dialogue with all of our partners about understanding what works here, what learner appetite is, what learners we're after. And then, all of us learning how to market to them. Because there's a web science course starting on Monday. Does everyone who would be interested in that know that the early stages here were in beta? But you know what, that is a key discipline we all need to learn. And actually, it's not something that is traditionally, I think, in our maker. Titling. I will make no comment, but if you go through our title list, you'll see some things that are really clear, do what they say on the tin, and really suck you in. You'll see others that may be done or a bit more confusing, et cetera. We cannot just translate the traditional university course titles, et cetera, into this environment. To be fair, I don't think anyone really is, but we need to get good at this. How open should we be? So this is one of the things that's in my lifeblood and the rest of the team is actually making things open, discoverable, shareable. But it's sort of like a paywall argument with a newspaper. How much should you open up pre-registration so that you can really take the benefits of that discoverability that the web can offer? But then we encourage people or even force them to register in order to take part of the whole experience. I'm running out of time. Use of email, key marketing tool, we need to get really good at it. Learner expectations and targets, that's progression I've spoken about. From all of that, what are the right metrics to measure success or failure for this? Because I think it's a lot more sophisticated than some of the traditional ones out there in the market. First demographics, so pretty balanced, pretty typical. I think Helen is going to give a bit more insight into some of the learners that she's had on the power of brands. So I'll just leave that for a second while you take your photo. And then I'll move on and end with the only stats I'm sort of putting out there publicly at the moment. So we actually got 20,000 people in the first 24 hours, but I've just adapted it to say 25,000 people in the first day or so after launch because it juxtaposes beautifully with something that my chairman said to me, which is that in its first year after foundation, the Open University had 25,000 students. And so I think in just over a day, future learn registered 25,000 people from over 150 countries. I find that dead exciting as I do the whole future learn proposition. Thank you for your time and I'm happy to take some questions.