 I suspect we'll have a few people coming in the room. Welcome, I know there are a number of these new staff here, but quite a number have come from other institutions as frequent to the other hand, a couple of quite outstanding key notes just like today as well as a number of people in Ireland who are doing very experienced things in relation to the books. We're very pleased to host this symposium. I'm co-faciliterating it with Amon. My name's Mark Brown and I can have an echo before. I'm the Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning and I'm hosting here at DCU. When we were talking about moots and we were talking about where there was any value and pulling together, the people who have an interest in this space, we sort of asked, well, why would we do that? And I want to spend just the first few minutes, maybe five or ten minutes, to context before we then get into the programme which, hopefully, you've had a chance to see in your past. I want to sort of just look at the bigger picture of why this term, this acronym that has a very short space of time, dominated the educational literature, both popular literature as well as the academic literature, perhaps like nothing else in recent history, certainly in the last 50 years, from next to nothing, to suddenly be one of the most dominant terms in our discourse. Certainly it has been here at DCU because the last couple of days we've been hosting a time prior to actually being at a university summer and the Vice-Chancellor is in presence of universities as I was attending this summer, moots were still dominating their thinking. So, I'll just spend a few minutes answering this question why and I'm sure the rest of the day is going to grapple with this question of why we're interested in moots and why we can't ignore them and why we do need to engage in some debate. So, first and foremost, why has it been, well, depends who you read and who you believe and, of course, we talk about X moots, C moots, which is more of the reflection here I might just give a little light actually, and this is likely to be a little bit of a secret. I don't know. I need to be able to see you. So, depending on who you believe and, of course, now we've got spooks or any other kind of acronym that goes with the term moot, perhaps it's appropriate, I think, for us to acknowledge, since we're having this symposium here in Ireland, and Ford's magazine acknowledges that Allison was the very first moot system originating, obviously, in Ireland and Norway. So, at one stage, we talked about bringing Mike Ogre, but I didn't really think that that would be probably quite as relevant as some of the more academic speakers we have over the course of the day, but I've been wanting to acknowledge that also the still-place problem, an interesting role in Ireland, as well as Europe or generally. And then, of course, a lot of the reasons why moots have dominated our discourses because this infamous report now published, of course, by some authors who really worked for Pearson's to be putting at grunt and the concept of this avalanche that was going to be sweeping away in higher education. Time and tell, of course, you might think that that we were already past this period and the avalanche didn't happen. Again, I hope over the course of today we'll have some debate about that. And what we're now seeing in the academic literature, although this is now 12 months old, even probably longer than 12 months old, we're seeing a reasonable amount of critique. This is a fully open-access book that we've come across previously. And there's an element in which I know one of the chapters talks about how moots are just another form of neocolonialism in the way in which a curriculum, a certain curriculum is being pumped to parts of the world. So we're seeing some critique. We are seeing some very, very deep critique from people like Michael Peters. If you haven't come across Michael Peters' work, he's probably offering, I think, the deepest sort of critique around what moots are and what they're not. Again, most of these things are available online. I won't go into detail. And then, you might think, while the moot debate, the heat has gone out of it, the hype has gone out of it following the hype cycle, which is a little cliche these days, but last week there was a whole new push, and I met him, a whole new interest in the media, particularly in the United States, but certainly got picked up here in Europe around the announcement that our own State University, this was in the New York Times, are now going to offer credit for the first year of the moot initiative that they've signed up with edX. They've actually launched what they're calling the global freshman candidate. This has done the work of, say, a fresh person. So I always struggle with saying freshman, be a census student in this context. So this is quite a significant development. The first university, Arizona State, if you're not familiar with Arizona State, they are the largest public university in the United States. 80 to 85,000 students depending on who you read, 20,000 of those online, and they've gone from basically no online students just over five or six years ago to that kind of size. And they're a very, very well-went university, very rich in the university. Just so it happens that this video, I think, captures the sense of what they're trying to achieve. Everyone had access to higher education. It's a full, amazing possibility. But uncrusted and unchallenged. The only way that can solve problems is to unleash the human spirit. How is it that we can provide more people with access? Higher education is often marked by its exclusivity, by its selectivity. That model will not scale with the demands of the 21st century. Existing systems of education are insufficient for the demand. And so a combination of technology and the best of the educational principles we've learned over hundreds of years is what's required in the 21st century to now extend the gifts of civilization much more quickly and to heartily innovate the power of people all over the world. The extension of smartphones and cell phones for around the globe is happening faster than any technology that has ever occurred in history. And that global network makes it possible for people to communicate with the highest possible capability and learn from them in ways that they've never been able to learn. At Arizona State University what we seek to do is find as many ways as possible to extend that first year of our education to as many people as possible in as many different ways as possible. Rust students at Star College do not graduate. That's a sad state of affairs. This program's intentions are changing. Education is so right. Edit submission is to dramatically increase access to education for students all over the world. Imagine if a learner can take moves without any admissions, without an application process, without avoiding the social economic status of the GPA and if they can pass the course then by being a small team they can get credit. This would make college a lot more accessible and a lot more affordable than it is today. This program is intended to eliminate those barriers to take a high school student or someone else and provide for them a fresh linear experience and it must be advanced, technologically enabled, educationally enriched and deep learning experiences that humans have ever been able to develop with the partnership of ASU and MNs. With the partnership with ASU they can also now on credit this new pathway for college to revolutionise education in a way or another. The need that you can achieve to change your own life and maybe change the lives of many others becomes more of this experience. Earn this credit begin that journey. So it's too early and probably too cliche like to say that this is a real game changer but it's a very, very fresh development in the last week or so. Michael Crowe who's the president of Arizona State recently just booked on designing the new American Education University and Arizona State have been very, very forceful and challenging, very traditional and elitist views of university education. So I think watch this space of interest already. Some of the social media has started to critique what this really means but it's certainly a significant development. In the case of DCU actually it's quite a significant development for us because we have a very close working relationship with our own State University. They're one about four. They're really our major US partner. Last year we launched a joint master's degree in biomedical diagnostics which has been taught fully online. Very, very interesting degree because we're co-teaching it and this is an example of the model of the future. Not MOOCs but actually something quite really seriously addressing gaps in the areas that will be required in terms of health and decent education here. Maybe I might make a little more comment about what DCU is thinking about and what we're planning but certainly the relationship with our own State is significant. I mentioned earlier that the Young University Summit has just been here at DCU for the last couple of days. It's one of the reasons we've been placed in this facility. We wouldn't normally be in this facility because we just couldn't get into their helix building. As I also said the Vice-Chancellor is a president of the world that attended the summit. We're a talking MOOCs and many of you will be of course familiar as you've probably seen on more than one occasion Lord David Putnam was one of the finest speakers yesterday. So, why this symposium? That's the objective that you have written if you want to have a kind of football helix and the path that you had before you. We think that there's real value in maturing the conversation. Helping don't understand where this is taking us. I have to acknowledge that this symposium is actually only possible because we're involved in two quite sizable European funded projects related to MOOCs and funding from those projects is supporting this event. And one of those projects is really about maturing the conversation around open and online forms of learning. So, that's what we hope to achieve today. Thinking about impact there's one lesson that we can take from the history of new innovation in the educational technologies and education is you can actually predict the future and MOOCs were not with us in a very short, less than five years ago when talking MOOCs. Who knows what we're going to be talking about in the next five years and I'd like to think that's a bit of the discussion today where this ultimately might take us. I've mentioned already the kind of joint online degrees that he's you that's already embarked on. That's one pathway that I think there are many more that we all explore. So, probably you've seen that in your own time. We've tried to put a program together with enough really academic content but opportunities for some discussion and conversation at the same time. We'd hope the debate that we have scheduled just before lunch will be a lively activity with deliberately framed it in a way that hopefully we'll really engage with the bigger issues around opening up access to education. And I won't go through any more. Possibly I should have done this right at the outset if there was an emergency in the first few minutes but there is an emergency exit here just obviously common sense and you have to go out to the right here, my right, where you're left as you go out the door to the open area to ensure anything unfortunate arrives. What you will find probably the most important thing is in your pack there is a little voucher that should have three vouchers for those of you who are here for the whole day. That's to cover for morning afternoon tea and lunch, which will be out along to this side and then straight out the doors for the student cap area. We wouldn't normally use that facility when we would be over in our helix for the reasons of that summer. Most of you, I suspect, will be able to log in with Ederoy but if you're a guest, not a university, come from a university or a tertiary institute institute of technology, you're really a guest access fail so the best one, we didn't write on the handout we got there so we'll just come back to that in a moment's time as well in case you need to get that written down or you may want to take a photograph of it so unless there are any other questions I think that's probably enough to set the date. So very good question. Slides will be available while we are doing a kit with videoing the keynotes we can't stream because again we had all our commitments tied up with the other event and so this is a problematic room for us to do so but all the videos will go online. We won't video the afternoon sessions and it's just partly logistics because of the staff that have been tied up with video in the other sessions. You are going to do some part? Okay. The guest one's open, I'm told so you don't need that password.