 Hello everyone, my name is Michael Cummings, I'm the sales manager for National Geographic Learning, some of you may know me, some of you may remember me. I hope you're all doing well. I very much miss coming over to Ireland and visiting the schools and visiting family and holidaying there, just excuse to leave the house really. I very much hope that you and your families have not been too affected by recent events of the pandemic and I'm here today to talk to Peter and hopefully give you some insight as to what we've been doing to try and support schools and survive. Thanks Michael for agreeing to take part. Can I start by asking what the overall approach has been in response to the pandemic at National Geographic Learning? Well, National Geographic Learning has had the same experience as everyone. I think it's been constantly evolving our response in terms of our expectations for what would be working, normal operating conditions, but if I would sort of heart back all the way to to April, the first thing was really engagement with schools and trying to support them in able to access materials and access materials that could be delivered in a multi-mode scenario. Adaptive synchronous and asynchronous published content is incredibly useful, is particularly useful, it appears in an online context. So one of the first things we did was was essentially try to ensure that we had visibility of our portfolio of digital content, e-books, presentation tools, online workbooks. They all came to the fore as useful modes of delivery for students to access the content that they'd usually have perhaps in print form in their classroom when they were doing their courses over video conferencing. What two or three resources would you suggest from National Geographic Learning that would be useful to schools or teachers or students at present teaching this kind of scenario? At this point I maybe, I don't want to try and teach people to suck eggs. I think most of you will know that the most useful things that you can access are probably firstly the presentation tools for coursebook series. If you're using that they're incredibly useful and while not optimized for sharing over video conferencing they're absolutely brilliant for that express purpose. You can share screens, you can give students control and they're interactive and they offer a perfect structure for students to lead students through a class. In addition to that obviously the e-book would reflect that most of the report board have a high level of functionality or interest and I think that seems to be a demand from our customer which is very important. I've already mentioned these but yeah and then again the online workbook which allows for more blended approaches. It allows for students to work autonomously. It can be tailored towards students that, well they're a captive audience for a start so they're perhaps a little bit more motivated and they have more time to engage with that particular form of work. Without wittering too much I think one of the key things that we probably produced is the support network. I know that every single publisher has over a period of time developed and that support network is built around webinars that are recorded that specifically try in bite-sized digestible forms to help teachers understand better how they can utilize not just our digital assets or components that we publish but all of the breadth of digital online resources that support teaching students in a blended or online context or if you want to introduce that even to the classroom. We've done that with webinars. We've got a large selection of webinars on our landing site and in-focus blogs that are built around trying to help teachers and institutions understand how better to deliver classes under the restraints of the pandemic. Where is the best place for teachers to look for updated information about your materials and activities? Well I understand you're going to be sharing this but I will give you a quick example of this very thing. Just bear with one moment. Sorry for the pause but you'll all be used to that. Here we go. You can visit the landing page which is very simply eltngl.com and you'll see four navigatable simple tabs, the in-focus blog which has lots of resources that are free and available and in these include ready to go classes and what's the word? Lesson plans is the word I'm looking for. I don't know why I was reaching for that. Webinars as I've stated. I won't click the link but please feel free to explore. There is a breadth of support on there for teaching everything from adults to academic to young learners but I know that predominantly this is an adult market and we have huge amounts of support on there and then in addition to that we've got an overview of the digital resources that I've referred to and how you can best access those and also request from me and my colleagues material directly. One of the things that's been very important throughout this is to make sure that things are readily available and can be delivered to people and they're economically viable in a time when things are very very difficult. These are all things that we've tailored our catalog of content to. We have one of the things that we've focused on most is trying to give as much flexibility to our customers as they require. We've done that by learning from our customers so we have flexible bundles of all of our content which can be basically tailored to whatever need and whatever way you and your school are teaching and that's been a really good thing. It means that when you come to us you don't feel like you have to settle for a specific prescribed program. You're able to to a large degree build your own and without everyone who does know me knows that I'm not in any way concise so I'll just let this run on but one thing that we're probably most proud of I'm going to answer my own question at the crowbar again but the thing that I'm probably most proud of and NGL's most proud of has been we've worked with our customers a number of customers that we've been with us for a long time and we've been extremely grateful for all of you that have worked with us and we've had a few opportunities to essentially customize our programs and work and collaborate with customers on bespoke programs and this has included what you would expect in this sort of scenario which is some really quite sophisticated transitions of learning ecosystems into the online or virtual space so we've done a lot of complex and granular learning technology integrations into platforms and within that we've also built in our online workbook and allowed by licensing our content for customers to actually develop their own assets which match some of the syllabus specifically that they've done and we've done that in ebooks, in print form like on the LMS itself as a direct access LMS that the customer's built but with the support of utilizing our content and that has been probably one of the most rewarding things as well as incredibly complicated and a very steep learning curve. Can I then ask my final question there which is why are you supporting the ELT Ireland conference this year? Well it's an interesting question which part of that would you like me to break down Peter? This year part? Well we're supporting it this year because as long as we're around we're going to support ELT Ireland I mean this is very important to me and it's very important to NGL. The entire probably everything is going to seem a little bit more meaningful when we get back to normal conditions or something close to that whatever the permanence of Covid's influences but we've always tried to support ELT Ireland and we've always tried to support the the market as best we can with the resources we have available. ELT Ireland has been an excellent conference for us and it's represented the schools of Ireland extremely well. It's also been very enjoyable I miss the beer part particularly that's probably the most crucial part of the entire event but overall they've always been excellent and we will we want to support you guys and this is a great way for us to still access the Irish language schools and the teachers and who are working very hard still in very difficult circumstances so you know for us it's a no-brainer of course we're going to support ELT Ireland. Great we appreciate the support and my bonus question at the end is like we had to all of us have to consider what are our values and what's really important what's our mission and examine everything that we've been taken for granted and doing as a matter of protein is that something that you also feel that you had to do as a result of this? Well I think probably one of the things we've worked in for National Geographic Learning is that more and more so we recognise firstly prior to Covid that our mission really should reflect the sort of values that you would expect of National Geographic Learning so one of them you know would be you know what is our footprint what is our environmental impact and how can we reflect and showcase exactly how our how we work is actually sustainable as much as possible and aligns with the sort of environmental concerns that is shared you know across the industry but way beyond so that was being done before Covid. Covid hasn't changed our values our core values in any sense you know we still want to bring the classroom the world to the classroom and probably it's actually become yeah a little bit more apt given the fact that there's so many restrictions to doing so so that is essentially what our material always did our material is about creating global citizens it's about 21st century skills is one component that I know all publishers incorporate but certainly for us it's about representation it's about being modern it's about being relevant it's about the Hoover in the background that you may or may not be able to hear but I think that we probably become more important in that sense than ever because what we do or what we attempt to do is is give the student the ability to experience the world.