 Well Larry, it's great to be in the UK and great to be in Nottingham, I think I'm saying that correctly now. My US accent wants me to say Nottingham or Birmingham. Let's introduce ourselves. We start with you. Sure. I'm Larry Reagan. I'm the director of a new center at Penn State University in the States in Pennsylvania. Our center is called the Center for Online Innovation and Learning and a little later on I'd like to talk about the center and some of the things I've seen with ALT. I've been with Penn State for going on 30 some years now in a variety of capacities and almost always in the area of adult education, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And I'd say for the last 20 some years of that around instructional technology. So it's been a wonderful career experience for me being at Penn State and I'm most excited now about this new center as well as our relationship, which is one of the more pleasurable things I get to work on, which is Sloan Sea, we'll hear it a second from you, but Penn State's relationship to Sloan Sea and in particular the Leadership Institute and we could chat a little bit about that. So Larry, can you swing back to that for you? And you didn't mention the creamery, some of the best ice cream in the world right there in state college. I wish I could take some credit for that, but we do have great ice cream. And I'm Bruce Shalu, I'm executive director and chief executive officer of an organization called the Sloan Consortium. We are 20 years old, roughly the same age as our colleagues here in the UK, ALT. Social Society organization focused on the integration of online learning into the mainstream of higher education, both in the US but globally. Spent a lot of time focused on quality, quality assurance, how do we make sure for institutions and the students who utilize online courses and programs that they're getting a quality product, trying to expand the community, focused on research activities. And with you and colleagues at Penn State have moved very quickly over the last now almost six years into a focus on leadership and online learning because as anyone who's watching this can see, we're not getting any younger. But of course they're not getting any younger either, so and we think that there are going to be some real leadership challenges as more and more folks move to online strategies both in institutions but also more students seek online learning. Bruce, if you don't mind, maybe I'll lead off with a question about Sloan C because at least in the states, and I think this is growing internationally as well, there's a recognition that that collection of institutions and individuals has really helped to galvanize the, as you said, the research, the development, the exploration of this online environment. You know, I happen to know that you've been with Sloan C in a variety of capacities for all, I think the whole 20 years, if not pretty darn close. My question for you is what changes have you seen in the organization over that span of time? About 10 actually, I attended meetings prior to that. Our similar alt-conference, the one we're at now is, we'll hold our 19th annual conference in November. I think I attended one of the first five or six and then kind of moved away, but over the last 10 years I don't think I've missed a beat. I served as an advisor to the program officer, Frank Mayotos at the Sloan Foundation who we view as the father of the consortium. When we became a, in U.S. terms, a 501C3, a non-profit charitable, if you will, organization, I think is the term that they use here in the U.K., we established a board, Frank asked me if I would take leadership of the board early on, and somehow I was re-elected twice. So for about four years, three and a half, close to four years, served as the president of the board, but it was really a chair position, and then left the board to take this new position of the position I'm currently in, and have been in that for about a year and a half. Now, so back to your question, because I've filled in some blanks. I think the changes have been dramatic, and in some measure that is due to three things. One, clearly in the U.S., the immersion, the movement, and the growth, if you will, of the immersive nature, as far as I was going to go with that, of e-learning or online learning. It has moved from kind of off on the side of most institutions, that's probably not the case at Penn State, but we are structured with the World Campus, but really into the mainstream, the thinking, strategic thinking. Secondly, ten years ago, I think one of the more brilliant activities of the consortium was conducting an annual survey on online learning, and a colleague of ours, Jeff Seaman, the Babson Survey Research Group, conducted that survey. We didn't have ten years, so this past year's report was terrific because it gave us a ten year kind of trend analysis but I think we have kind of witnessed the growth over that ten year period. It's also given us an insight by polling more than 3,000 institutions every year, their chief academic officers. Where does all of this kind of sit? I could go through too many statistics. Just one I would mention, three quarters of all colleges and universities in the U.S. that are surveyed have indicated that e-learning or online learning is of strategic importance to them in their future. What do you think about that? Over 3,000 institutions, there's only a small sliver, about 10%, and we think, in fact we know, those are primarily independent, smaller, single-purpose institutions, very traditional and campus-based, that do not have e-learning or online learning as a significant part of their future strategy. So we've seen that shift. And then the third shift and then I'll let you comment, it really speaks to what we've been doing with leadership. And I think we've seen a significant change in the nature of folks who are coming into online learning, many of them not through the traditional faculty channels that we came through and then maybe into administrative positions. And secondly, a far greater understanding of kind of where the field is right now and then we're trying to blend and mold them into taking all of us to the next level. And, you know, so being in a conference like ALT is really interesting for me because in many ways it's very familiar. When I look at the program and go to the sessions, I could easily see myself being in Orlando in October, November. The theme and the thinking in the conversations I think are very similar, which strikes me and I just came from a research strand this morning as an opportunity for Sloan Sea, for ALT and more personally for me being at Penn State in this new center is the power of the collaboration, the synergy that can be created by us joining forces. I'll give you an example. We do small grants at Penn State to faculty and staff and actually even to students that look at online innovation. And we've had two rounds. We're not even a year old yet. Actually, today is, we are, we are a year and one day old. September 10th is our month. And it just struck me this morning and listening to this research strand that, boy, we need to be talking to this community. We need to be finding a way to connect our researchers to this broader entity because one thing becomes increasingly clear that we can easily get locked down into thinking that our domain, our region, our institution is the hub of all thinking and such in this domain. And it is not anything, but and I'm wondering if you're also, as you're moving about, do you see those opportunities? I do. And to be very transparent, one of the strategies that we've employed since I assume the leadership position in Sloan C, which is typically how most people refer to us as, is that if we're going to move forward, we're going to do it in a collaborative fashion. So I've been particularly sensitive to reaching out. And in fact, our engagement at the ALT conference, and it was great to be invited and looking forward to our session later today, came about when I met John Slater at Askelite. We were both presenting, he on ALT, and I was presenting on Sloan C. And we sat next to each other and became, I think the down-underterm mates. We became very close mates and began a conversation, good friends. We followed up following that conference and he said, you really need to speak to Maron, who's the head of the equivalent executive officer. We had an initial phone call and then that has kind of mushroomed into not only our being here, but ongoing discussions about collaborative efforts. We're here. She's going to get to our meeting next year. She's scheduled that. So I think you're right. I love coming to conferences and it does have, although it doesn't feel like Orlando here, it does, the conference proper, you see similarities. And yet you see great differences. You see some stylistic differences in presentations and some of the research that's going on. Some of it mirrors some research that we have going on. But it's great learning experience and it's been enjoyable. The people have been very warm and it's been a great conference. So transitioning a little bit to this afternoon's talk, we're going to be looking at sort of a snapshot of the forces of change in higher education as part of our talk. And this has grown out of this six year, well going on six years now of our leadership institute. And I've made an observation and we've shared this offline as well, that the nature of these changes, the forces of these changes, like a snowball rolling downhill have only accelerated over time. They seem to be faster. They seem to be larger in impact. MOOCs is not a small thing. MOOCs is a big thing and it's going to roll over you and that sort of pressure that's created. And we observed this year at our institute, which had the face to face event at Penn State, the level of preparedness of our participants has bumped up. When we started five years ago, some of these things weren't even bubbling about at the time. And today now, we seem to have folks who are a little bit more oriented and sensitive to some of these forces. Has that been a shared observation? Yeah, I think that's true. But I think there's a broader context, again, some points that we will make today, that the traditional paradigm of higher education, whether it is in the U.S. or internationally from the U.S. perspective, be it the U.K., the Middle East, we've been in Australia and New Zealand as we mentioned, has really changed. And I think we are in a period of great transformation. Some call it revolution. I believe it's more evolutionary. And you've heard me say this far too many times, but I think one of our challenges as an organization, you as a leader at Penn State or other leaders at institutions is to create best teaching and learning environments that we can for faculty to do their work and for students to do theirs. And I can't imagine a scenario where some level of technology integration is not there. In fact, I think the vast majority of institutions would kind of take the University of Central Florida's approach and say we don't offer anything but either blended or fully online programming. And I think that leadership is sensing that. And you mentioned MOOCs, I wonder if there are MOOCs. No, the MOOC effort I think is driving some of this change. It has gotten some of the elite institutions in the world either delivering free education, free programming, or at least thinking about doing that. We're talking with a colleague from the UK and they're getting ready to launch FutureLearn as part of the open university system. So they're getting into the MOOC activity and it is changing the thinking of institutions. It is changing the thinking of our policy makers both at the federal and state level in the US. One of our challenges, quite honestly, is people reading about MOOCs and thinking, oh, we can do this. It doesn't cost us anything to do it. It's free and you can serve 150,000 students. And in some fashion you can, but I think you would agree with me. Don't leave me out on a limb on this one. That as great as the MOOC movement has been, we would not view that as really high quality online learning unless there was some level of engagement, a set of support services, and obviously tied to credit. It's not that they're, I mean, I think the MOOC activities, and both of us have been in MOOC courses, have been great. But in terms of them being for academic credit, most of them do not have the kind of interaction support services that we think are important. So I know our time has to be wrapping up now. And so I would wholeheartedly agree with you. I guess as I watch that phenomena, the MOOC phenomena as one, it's so interesting to watch it. It may not be the final product in the end, but it's certainly moving the ball down the field to use the sports metaphor. And it certainly has got people's attention in here at the Alt Conference, which I've really enjoyed. I've enjoyed the interactions with the faculty and administrators I've been meeting. As a matter of fact, I just said to someone, a colleague a couple of minutes ago, I'm sorry I booked to leave early tomorrow. I wish I had stuck around a little bit because the conversations have really been good. And I think it's a challenge. It's a, all of this is a challenge that for me at least, and I know this is for you as well, creates an energy and an excitement about how we can help shape and form the future of learning. Well, I tend to be an optimist and not a pessimist. And I think every challenge creates an opportunity as well. And I think the more we can learn from our colleagues in the UK and others from Europe, literally or globally, what is going on, I think that it only speaks better for what we're looking to do in our organization, what you're looking to do with Penn State, what we're looking to do with the Institute for Emerging Leadership and Online Learning. And five years down and looking five years ahead, we'll continue. It's always a pleasure. Nice to see you, Larry. Thanks a lot. My pleasure. Thank you.