 We are making a start. So, top class, we are having a anewan to be absolutely loud by insurer. It is discussion that is hosted by Sir Guy who's going to talk to us about flexible learning needs and flexible text. Accessibility is a real big thing. And he is students in the student panel. So I certainly am looking forward to meeting him. I will hand over to you. Thank you very much, and great to be here once again. I remember last year at the University of Manchester, this time a slightly more suburban, maybe even rural campus at Warwick, so wonderful to be here. And thanks all for joining today. I'm here with Kaltura, and joining me is John Cooperthwaith there, who promised to ask me some very difficult questions if no one has any. But we're both part of the education team at Kaltura. So my name is Sergei, John's over there. Pre-emptively, if anyone wants to speak with us, who hasn't already, we're just right outside there, stand 12. So if you've got a question that maybe you think is not directly relevant to everybody in the room, feel free to of course save that and just find us afterwards. Or if you haven't got our sticker yet, you won't be able to win bingo without that. So that's another good reason. So subject today is flexible learning and flexible technology, really being the key facilitator of a truly flexible learning environment. So just to set the scene a little bit, of course our perspective is that of a technology provider and we do work with over 600 education institutions around the world. So that's very much the angle that we're coming at it from. But what we're seeing of course is the world is more flexible now than ever before. I certainly work far more flexibly now than I ever did four or five years ago. And of course, higher education is striving to keep up and I think that's a very good thing. We are seeing more and more terms such as blended, learning hybrid, learning high flex, learning digital, online, lifelong, all have different undertones, different definitions. And I know some of them can be quite controversial terms and people do debate what they actually mean or what they should mean. But certainly the list goes on and there's more and more of this terminology that's been cropping up in digital learning or in our world of technology enhanced learning. And what we're seeing is universities do want to offer students genuine flexibility, but a lot of the time there are legacy systems that do prevent that progress. And the result is a fragmented digital ecosystem and a very rigid learning environment for students. Specifically what that means in practice is often technologies that might not talk to each other or data that is lost or you have overlapping data. So it's difficult to make sense of it. So really the goal is to create something that's not only just more flexible as an experience for students, but also something that for educators or anyone supporting that education is able to make sense, consolidate data and actually use that to improve the experience again. So what trends am I seeing out there? And this is both in the UK and also Constance or Europe and more broadly around the world. I'm seeing more and more reviews of digital learning systems. I think that's a good thing. During COVID, of course, many of us were forced into certain technologies, certain ways of learning that we wouldn't have otherwise done. And now that that's hopefully behind us for maybe another 100 years or so, there's a chance now to step back and think again, well, what is the best way of learning? What is the best digital learning environment that we as any given university can build? And this is across the board. So I'm seeing some of the biggest universities undertake these reviews and that is so, so difficult. And it's a huge challenge to get the community on board, right? To survey students, especially if you're, for example, University of Manchester, they've got an amazing new flexible learning programme with people dedicated to that, new roles being created. Of course, it does help when you can secure the budget and the resourcing for that. But it's hard even then to survey the community, the students, the staff, the support teams that facilitate all of that. And based on that, actually make some sort of sense of that survey and be able to create some recommendations and action that into a better way. And as I mentioned, University of Manchester, new flexible learning strategies being created and really a strong desire to streamline and consolidate both from students and will go into why in just a second. Digital learning or technology-enhanced learning teams, faculty and IT departments as well. I know it's not often as easy as that, but I am sensing from different departments of different universities. And certainly as a trend, we can say that there's more and more interest in consolidating and streamlining now that we are out of COVID, hopefully, for a very, very long time and we can really use the opportunity to rebuild a bit more intentionally going forward. So I said, why do students, why do staff, why do IT teams want to consolidate? What's in it for them, essentially? For, first and foremost, I'd say that the fragmented synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences, that they can sometimes lead into a pretty fragmented experience as a whole, right? Where you're doing one thing for maybe a live class, maybe it's a fully in-person class or it's fully online class or something in the middle, and any asynchronous learning experiences. How does that all tie together? Are they using the same platforms? Are they using different platforms? Is it all tied in nicely with the VLE or do you have to go externally at all times? So for students, what do they care about? Well, as much as we're hearing from them and we try and keep us close to them as possible, they want a more seamless learning experience. So they just want to be able to have a very intuitive journey, really, whenever they've got any online learning or digital learning, they want to minimise training materials or minimise the need to go to technology support teams to actually help them in their learning. It needs to be really, really intuitive. For faculty, and of course connected to that, our digital learning or technology enhanced learning teams, we want really, really high adoption as much as possible. Because if technology is adopted, then of course it is used, it stays, it's much easier to keep it in the system, much easier to renew it going forward. And IT, of course, often care about, amongst other things, but they care about lower cost. And managing fewer suppliers, managing paying fewer licences, doing fewer due diligence processes, of course, it's a big, big, big deal for them. If they can streamline and consolidate that, and if we can sell it to them in that way, then they'll be very happy, and it certainly does make a project much, much more likely to happen and then actually succeed. A mention of inclusivity and accessibility is very, very important in the context of flexible learning, because ultimately what is flexible learning if it's not a personalised way of learning, where we give different types of learners the opportunity to learn their way and the way that works best for them. Now, of course, there are those who have medically diagnosed conditions that require them legally, and there's just no other way to learn in their own way. But actually there's great research that says that that's actually a minority of the preferences for different learning ways. There are plenty of students. Some research says that it's almost half of all students prefer some other way of learning than the traditional standard way, whether that's to do with how videos or online content is captioned in terms of what those captions actually look like and how do they correspond to the video itself, different formats, different colour schemes, different languages, different, you know, there's other things in there as well. So, you know, as I mentioned, automatic captions, how can we as a technology provider give our universities the most accurate automatic captions? That is, it's difficult, especially when it comes to something very technical. Are we talking about maybe a medical course? Are we talking about a linguistics course which has a lot of terminology that the AI captioning service would find difficult to transliterate properly? So we need to constantly be on the lookout for the best, most accurate providers out there so we can integrate them into our system and give universities the best automatic system there. Human captions cost a lot, but sometimes they are necessary and I know universities do sometimes want to invest in that, at least where it's most needed. And for example, like I mentioned medicine, transcriptions, translations, audio descriptions, and also automatic chaptering. I know certainly if I get an hour-long video, how likely am I to watch it straight through beginning to end? Well, if I'm really, really keen, obviously I might do it, but if I'm on the fence or maybe the material, we don't know how engaging it is, what could help me? Of course I can speed up the video. If I could do it on 1.5x or even 2x speed, obviously students love that feature. If it's chapted, that really, really helps. Chaptering, if it's manual, takes time, but if it's automatic and if it's smart, then it can be a very, very good way to break down a very long video into digestible chunks. Something else that we are working on and we want to do more of in the future is kind of boiling down long videos into more digestible chunks. Basically thinking of all sorts of different ways to make large data sets of information more digestible. Easily accessible, right there at your fingertips. Obviously in a familiar environment of a VLE. Can we do more? Well, yes, and this is a huge part of our organisation. If we talk about Kaltura for a little bit, we think that a university's video platform shouldn't just be for current students. It should also be for the entire student journey. And where does the student journey start often before a student is actually enrolled? Someone's first interaction with the university is probably before they go there, right? When they discover it online, maybe someone recommends it to them. Their school says maybe you've got a chance of getting in somewhere like this. There's always a way that someone can discover a university before they're actually enrolled. So then the question is back on us. Well, can we support that journey? Can we support a closer engagement, better reach, a better conversion for student recruitment teams from applicants to students? And so the use case outside of the VLE becomes really important. Then a student is an enrolled student. They're part of the system, they're authenticated. It's all in the VLE, great. When they leave, what happens? Did they just stop being a member of the community unless they maybe live locally or sometimes they come back to work for the university, which is always a nice thing. But alumni are often a university's biggest community. And it's often an untapped community in terms of potential for helping out current students with their first job or actually supporting the university and let's call it as it is financially. Often university for someone can be the fun time that they remember some time ago, where they made their best friends, where it was a bit more carefree. Can they, if they have the means, give back and maybe contribute to new facilities or contribute to a new scholarship or contribute some other way, maybe even if it's very small to make that institution that they hold so dearly even more successful and more sustainable for the future. So then I always enjoy those conversations with alumni and development teams when we're talking about ways to engage university communities that maybe aren't talked about enough in this way. And it is challenging, but I will say that it is possible to have one video platform that supports synchronous and asynchronous learning for current students, for lifelong students once they graduate and they're part of the alumni, big alumni world and throughout their career they can come back and reskill or upskill themselves as they need. Very briefly about us as a company just to give again some context as to why we have this perspective. We know how do we actually know what we're talking about in this respect? Well, we do a lot of work with higher education. We work with other industries as well and this is something that really helps us. For example, we work in the media space, we work with enterprise and there's certain high demands in those industries that force us to improve our product, that force us to have a really resilient video player or just constantly modernize our interface and experience. So actually we're happy to be kind of kept honest by those other industries, but education still remains our biggest single industry that we're in. We've got about 600, probably more than 600 education institutions that are part of our community and we keep a close connection with them of course as they use us and we survey them. We want to hear how we can improve and what we can build that is more useful. And of course when it comes to some notable institutions around the world, now we could put all sorts of logos on there, but some of the notable ones in the UK include University of Sheffield and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Cambridge and KCL and there's always more that are exploring coming on board for sometimes common reasons, sometimes very specific ones. So I'll leave it just before we maybe give some time for questions with this slide, which I think really illustrates quite well how we can be useful to your institution. So if you're thinking of taking a photo of one slide that's about Kaltura, make it this slide because the red part is probably what you'd expect and that's video for teaching and learning. And as I mentioned earlier, it's synchronous, virtual classrooms, et cetera. It's asynchronous, lecture capture, video content management, et cetera. But also look at all those other use cases where we are involved in it and could be helpful. I realize that might not be your department, it could be someone else at the university that we'd need to be working with, but if you sense that there's an interest there, we could be useful to them. So that includes, as I mentioned, campus communications, events, marketing and student recruitment, alumni relations, teacher training, and even more than that. So if this is of any interest, again, if you've got questions, if you think it's useful for everyone, please chime in. And also curious, even if you haven't got a question, if it's just a comment or you disagree with something or anything like that, then feel free to chip in. But otherwise, we'll be just there on stand 12. John and I will be holding down the fort today and tomorrow. So thank you very much for listening and, yeah, curious to hear your feedback. Yeah, at the back. So I think you talked about preventing the ecosystem and flexibility. So I was kind of wondering, well, basically, I think it's that same, how should we actually compute and see if it's together into a system behind a single sign on and this kind of thing's not all that's there. But if I was like the university administrator, I'd say, well, what are the risks of the thing I'm raising one basket? Do you have the good about the style of the data? Have you good about the term educational futures? So I was wondering, maybe, you know, maybe if it's ever that difficult, and say, rather than raising one box, doesn't have to be looking from the diversity of tools, which we use it properly, which, you know, the piece is scaffolding, you know, we basically are part of an education design which is for hearing, rather than just one box for everything. Oh, I think it's a very fair point. I'm sure many of us would agree that you shouldn't consolidate too much and you shouldn't force yourself. You shouldn't kind of depend too much on one platform either. I think that I can't remember who told me this, but I think it was actually the University of Manchester, Ian Hart, who leads the digital learning team there, said that they have about 1,300 digital tools, 1,300. And it's just such an overwhelming number that I think that's just too much. And I don't think they're an outlier in, they might be because they're so huge in that exact number, but I don't think they're an outlier in how many tools there are at the university, how many licensed fees are being paid, how many tools are kind of sitting on the shelf, whether for real or metaphorically. So I'd say, I completely agree that you shouldn't put too many eggs in one basket, or where you can consolidate and create what's a visibly better journey for the learner. I think it should at least be explored. And you might at the end say, actually no, yet we've seen that, but we still want to have this platform for A, another platform for B, a third platform for C. And if, as long as that's an intentional decision based on a conscious review, I don't think anyone can argue too much with that. Graham. I'd like to illustrate what is expected, specifically around your idea. So in 2017, we noticed we had a problem that we didn't really have, a suitable and truly a hosting platform that was really there for any part, key vertical requirements on our institution. And in fact, what happened was because we had, we ended up with a number of variously, people, and we had a natural recording, which was great for the natural recording application. We had an old media host system which really wasn't in front of it, because it was a very weird kind of user managing rights. And something was definitely stuck in YouTube. We had Apple-based content in our G&G. And what we basically ended up with was a complete mirroring of misunderstandings. There was no single way to find and locate any video information that was very, very weird. So whilst I think I'll tell you, Ryan, in certain things, we need to understand that there are, I think there are certain compartmentalisations that are worth making. So if you really want to take a video series or if you want to use a very specific requirement of how that's actually going, definitely not something that I would like to want to discuss. So we actually, in some way, to go out and video, which is, and actually, as it just happened, we went with that show. So I think that, I understand what you're saying, we've all got every single application. But trying to control, manage, decide with my job to manage video across five platforms, none of the general ones, really, or none of the four, you know, that they all have issues, is really, is not, is not an impressive case. Sure. So it's just a quick one. How do you licence in the market? Is it due to payment as to why, by a sense? And I'm just wondering if you could add a little bit on the fact that you end up with a lot of views as well. I know what you mean, yeah, of course. So anything that's external, so think, is this a prospective student, you know, an applicant? Is this an alumnus or an alumna? The way that the licensing would work there is, is by registrant annually. And it's not a kind of FTE basis, where it's, you know, we can say this is a learner that engages basically almost every day with technology. It's often through virtual events or hybrid events, or some kind of digital experience that someone will have. And if it's external, then the licensing works by registrant essentially. And they would often register just as an external participant to that. They don't need to be authenticated via SSO or anything like that, or go through the VLE. They wouldn't have to pay, they wouldn't have to pay. I mean, someone has to pay at the end, obviously. And if an alumni department thinks it's worthwhile having a platform to facilitate that digital engagement, then they often, you know, are happy to pay for it. And if they have many people joining at the end, then actually the cost per registrant is very low. Very good. Anything else before we wrap up? Just as a trick to you, we talked about lexicans language and technical terms and how they're reflected in captioning. I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges that the sector is facing, the scheduled lecture recordings. And it's a huge work, though, to start to correct. You talked about your suppliers and, I mean, how are you solving that problem? And, you know, if you're on medicine, this affects the whole science disciplines in particular. But also it addresses our international faculty, different accents, and it sets it to the software to actually produce an accurate caption. So how are you tackling that problem? We have to realise what we're good at and focus on that. We have to realise when something is not our game to play and how can we bring them to our system by integrating with them. And so we've long realised, and I don't think any video platform brings it completely upon themselves, maybe Zoom or some of the teams or huge ones, right, backed by Microsoft or whatever, they can maybe develop their own large language models and AI captioning services. But for us, we just have to stay as close as we can to the most innovative specialists in that field. And some of the common names you guys might know, a verbit, ambascript, they could be the ones for today, but they might not be the ones for tomorrow. And if we sense that there is a better way, if there is a technology that's emerging that is much more accurate, much more sensitive to different accents and dialects, then we have to make sure that we can integrate that into our system and get the API talking to each other. The end user never has to worry about that because it's just a technological tech integration. So for us, it's really just being ahead of the game as much as possible. And, John, I think you've got something to contribute as well. Just to add to that, we have some reach services. So it's part of the ship agreement where it's probably about a total trend of companies of all the different types of captioning and chaptering and dubbing and translation services. One other thing to mention as well is the ability to add key terms into a dictionary. That's about 8,000 terms or words to be added to the dictionary within the institution system. And those are words that the providers can look up. And if they're frequently misunderstood, sometimes they will then be read through the dictionary that they provide. So we are primed to address those issues of misunderstood words, key technical terms, and kind of have a forcing mechanism within the system that you can find in those dictionaries. Yeah. It's often about not making the same mistake twice, or at least not three times or four times. So being able to learn from when the system gets it wrong, if we've got time to review that, to make that improvement and then the system actually should learn and not make that same mistake again. But yeah, there's no perfection in that. But we're always, I think we're getting there. We're getting a bit closer. How are we doing for time? I think we're almost there. Perfect. Well, thanks again, everyone. I love talking on the subjects, and I'm sure many of you do as well. So say hello to us at Stand 12 if you haven't got your stick already. But great to see you and enjoy the rest of the conference.