 Hi there everyone. This is Mark Oxy from the Association for Learning Technology. Thank you for joining us for our next alt community call. We're very grateful to be joined by Rod Bailey from Xcensus, who we were just chatting before to call. It's a long history working within educational technology. So, Rod, welcome. Well, thank you, Martin. It's very nice to be here. I wonder if you could just share some of your background with our audience. Perhaps a bit more about Xcensus, if people aren't familiar with that. Some of the work you've done. Okay. So, I've been working for about 12 years now at Xcensus, in one guys or another. We started off our lives in the school sector. We were quite actively involved in some of the Education and Action Zone programs. And then, in about 2000, something, we got actively involved with a new project that then Learning and Skills Council was funding. And that was called the National Learning Network. And we became a big part of the Annalen Materials team, working with Bechtar and a range of other partners. So, yes, our history does stretch back quite a way now. I mean, Annalen is quite long in the tooth, but it's still very actively used, in fact. And we still do run that for the now Education and Training from the ETF. So, for people not familiar with the NLN, can you just give a bit more background about what that is? How it's evolved? Sure. Well, as I say, it was part of a much wider scheme. At the time, the Learning and Skills Council had in mind to provide the further education sector, in the first instance, with a combination of equipment and training and support to use new technologies, to adopt virtual learning environments. At that time, the sector hadn't converged on Moodle, as it has now. So, there were a range of different competing alternatives then. And part of the strategy was to develop some interactive materials that would cover quite a wide range of subject areas within the professional sector and to ensure that the content was very readily accessible, easy to use, easy to find, and easy to bring into these new environments. And that's where we came in. That was our role. In the first instance, we were content managers and repository developers. We've moved on a bit since then, as I'm sure we'll come on to during the call. So, our role was to help the different suppliers of the resources. There were about 23 or 24 external, primarily commercial suppliers, ranging from Epic and Granada Learning right through the BBC, in fact. And ensure that their content was built in a particular way. And conformed to the then emerging international standards for content packaging and metadata and so forth. To ensure that once it was built, as wide a section of the community will be able to access it and utilise it quickly and easily. So, in a nutshell, that's a very quick 100-mile-an-hour tour of what there was all about. That's how it started. That was the origin and that was our involvement. It's interesting how there's always these cycles within our sector. I suppose there's a lot. Do you see a lot of parallels with what's going on with things like Feltag? And I know you're involved in the blended learning consortium as well. Well, Feltag and similar kind of initiatives are well underway even then. In fact, we drew a lot of inspiration from that Feltag. And they were doing some really interesting things. Sorry, I'm thinking of Felt, actually. I'm getting in my acronyms mixed up. I don't think it's happened over the last 15 years. There's been a whole development of different acronyms. But what I was going on to say was that there were lots of really interesting ideas around the time which were developed and then either kind of slipped into obsolescence or whose funding streams have been withdrawn. And yeah, coming through to that side, I suppose Feltag is the latest, the most dominant and has been a very successful movement, I think, in terms of bringing the sector together. Post-vector, post-quango, if you like, and enabling it to come up with some ideas and some potential solutions to some of the problems that people face. So it's very exciting to see it. And I suppose the thing that differentiates Feltag from those more centralized, kind of top-down initiatives like NRN is it's much more a kind of sector-driven initiative. And one of its outgrowths is something called the Blended Learning Consortium which absolutely is a kind of self-organized, self-starting group of colleges that have got together to say, hey, we need a new batch of content, we need a new NRN, I'm sure they didn't think of it in those terms, but we've got the wherewithal, we've got the skill sets, we can do this ourselves now. So that's very encouraging and it's very exciting and it's part of this process that started us such a long time ago and we're still involved in. So for people who are familiar with Blended Learning Consortium, can you give a brief picture, a brief explanation of what that is? Yes, okay, I should say straight away, this is not our consortium, we're happy to be partnering with it. It's something that's stemmed out of work done at part of Worcester College. I'm sure everybody's aware they've developed a kind of blended learning model starting with something called Solar Scheduled Online Learning Assessment which has been very successful in other accounts and has certainly caught the eyes of others in the sector including the Feltag movement that can call it that, the Feltag Initiative. And they have, as part of the blended learning concept and their definition of it, they have decided to pull some resources together to make some resources that can be used by practitioners in the sector which the sector has come together, I think there are about 65 or so in our colleges that are part of this consortium. So they've come up with the funding, they've come up with the ideas about what money should we spend on, what kind of content, what areas, whether it gaps in the market or gaps in provision currently or whether particularly there are areas that are particularly susceptible to being helped and supported using online learning. And they very recently, in fact this last week had a kind of launch conference at which we were invited to come and showcase our contribution to this consortium which is in the same way as NLN to provide an access interface such that practitioners can quickly browse to resources that are being created, preview them and then either bring them into their environment, whether that be a Moodle learning environment or any other environment that they happen to use. Wherever the interaction takes place between students and teachers they can bring the blended learning consortium resources into play. And optionally, and this is where we come in and this is what we think we add where we add quite a bit of value to this, they can add those resources to collections of other resources and they could be BLC resources but they equally could be resources from elsewhere, NLN resources, YouTube videos or indeed resources created by the practitioners themselves. You've already mentioned there have been a number of initiatives to pull together resources and present them to users, to educators. Yes. So it's particular about the way that you approach this that you think is unique or provide something that other solutions, you know, we do have Jor, but not for much longer. Which in a way makes you unique in that way. But I just wonder, perhaps it's easier to see what you're talking about. Is there anything that you feel that your platform does, is it the integration? Is that the... Yes, I think so. I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that we kind of moved on a little bit from our initial role as repository providers. And a lot of that was driven by our experience running NLN because it was a very substantial initiative and there were lots and lots of practitioners, I think about 25,000 practitioners have accounts on our NLN site. And that's a really important part, by the way, of the initiative because although it was about creating materials, it was also about building a community around those materials and that's really, really fundamental and it's a big lesson that I think could and should inform other initiatives. And I know that the BLC initiative is placing great emphasis on supporting and advising and training the community that is going to build up around that content set. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is that however easy we made it for people to find NLN resources from a kind of repository perspective, the practitioners are still nevertheless left with a dilemma of, so what do I do with them now? Can I preview them? Do I have enough information about them on this particular repository? And can I bring them into my environment? Can I bring them into my moodle? Can I bring them into wherever I'm teaching, wherever teaching and learning is taking place? And can I meld it with content from elsewhere? Because at the end of the day NLN was never going to be the entire supplier of resources for the FE sector. It was never intended to be a normal BLC. So practitioners are always needing to bring content in from different sources. And there have been initiatives to bring repositories of repositories together. Things like the Exxon's Gateway for example is a good example of that. Durham in a sense was an example of that. Because it not only had content that it had uploaded or had the sector upload but it was aggregating smaller repositories of content from elsewhere around the country. And we felt that there was a real need to help the practitioners not so much with that content aggregation but with the collection and delivery of that content. So we're agnostic about where the content actually is sourced from. If it's Durham that's great, if it's NLN that's fine, if it's BLC, if it's on the web, if it's teacher's own files. The challenge is to bring it into a usable environment where you can collate them, organize them, annotate them, contextualize them and then make them available to your students. So that's where we started. In fact we had a collections capability within the NLN site and that was massively popular. Besides that because it gave the practitioners some control it enabled them to bring individual NLN resources into a basket so that they could then customize and pass the URL off to their students. And there was an overwhelming cry for that functionality to be expanded such that we could bring resources from anywhere into play and press into service resources that the practitioners have made themselves. So those are the origins, that's why we think it's different. We're not competing with the Durham or any other repositories. We're providing, we think, a very complementary and very valuable service that sits in the space between repositories and sources of content and wherever teaching them any takes place. That's a rather long-winded answer to your question. No, I think it's really, as someone that's come back, come from a standards and interoperability background I appreciate the challenge of actually doing that as well. So, yeah, it's interesting how things have evolved but there's still, I think, in some ways it's a bit easier but there's still some technical challenges but also the human challenges of doing this as well. Yeah, I think one of the problems with some of the bigger earlier initiatives and NLN was probably one of those was that it didn't hide the technology enough from practitioners and I think probably scared quite a few people away with talks of metadata and SCORM and packaging and all that kind of stuff and there were some initial tools that were developed to help practitioners the idea was that they were going to be able to disaggregate the content and then re-aggregate it and they were rather challenging tools for anyone to have to use. So, but since then, as you say, the world's moved on these kind of tools are available we don't need lots of external contractors to build content anymore that's certainly something that's well within the realm of and capability of practitioners and certainly specialist teams within colleges which is how BLC is coming out. But nevertheless, we think it's really, really important to be able to hide the complexity of this aggregation this content collection and delivery as much as possible and certainly hide it from learners so that when they get to experience and enjoy and interact with and utilise the materials they can do so in a nice uncluttered and modern browsing way and that still eludes quite a lot of learning technology today I would suggest. The geeking me is desperate to ask for some of these, you know, what technologies are hidden behind the scenes so I'm probably going to lose half the audience when I start mentioning things like LTI and some, you know, LRNI, things like that Do you want to go down that route or do you? Well, I certainly don't want to lose half our audience I suppose at one conceptual level what we're doing is providing a social bookmarking service for teachers it's sort of delicious for teachers if I can put it that way so we have a similar kind of bookmarklet for practitioners to utilise it sits on your browser toolbar actually can be embedded in repositories and appear in lots of different guises but the idea is that we have a little bit of technology in that bookmarklet which will analyse a resource and depending on where that resource is of course we've been around for quite a long time so we know about a lot of pre-existing people we know about Joram, we know about the gateway we already run NLN so in some cases there are IDs that we can recognise which helps us to pull in lots of useful information about those resources and in others we use OE Exchange there are plenty of nice standards sitting around now and our job is to utilise the most appropriate ones at the time so that we can pull that resource in that all the practitioners doing is hitting this little bookmarklet but we're doing lots of beavering behind the scenes going oh that's okay, that's a YouTube video here's the title description it's got two URLs on YouTube video obviously one is to the information page with all of the potentially extraneous at one point potentially useful to practitioners alternative videos and comments and so forth but once the teacher has selected that video and is wanting to present it alongside videos in a collection they really only want the student to be seeing that particular video so we'll take separately the URL to the content itself and store that that's something we got from NLN by the way because NLN had lots and lots of really useful metadata to help the practitioners decide how this resource could be used and should be used and had been used in the past but that's not information that's useful or interesting so a learner at all they just want to get on with the content itself so that's separation of the information about the content and then the content itself is a really kind of fundamental part of what we do and that allows us to put these pretty themes and backgrounds together which maybe the geeking you are is not quite so excited about but we think it's really important and we're big on images and thumbnails and visual cues as to what the resources are all about and what collections are about and all that can be fitted and formatted and embedded in a VLE so that the experience with the learner is as close to browsing around the web as possible but all that complex adding and manipulating of information about the resources done in the background does that help and how many people have we lost? That helps so the community calls it's about touching base with our old membership and I know a bit ExCensus is an organisational member and I also know that you're quite active with an educational site which is organised by old members which leads me on related to that you talked about pulling out information about resources and I just wondered because I know there will be quite a few people interested from an opposite perspective about creative comments and open resources so is that something that you're... when people are creating their own collections is it quite easy for people to remix and have different licences in that sort of thing? Okay great well that's a really... I should have said something we should have talked a bit about the initial contact that we had with Alts all about using ExCensus to bring different sources of content into play and I'm not talking about just different formats now but yeah of course content with different licences so yeah we I suppose philosophically speaking we're agnostic about the problems of content and the type of licence but while we're doing that background check on resources as we bring them into the system one of the things we're checking on of course is licence and we... there are two fundamental types of resources ExDLN handled, one is a web based resource which we're effectively gathering from the web and another is a created resource which you either create from pre-existing files or using a little content editing or just developed and yes you can assign a licence at that point and that can be anything from creative commons whichever one you wish right the way through to paid for licence and then there are schemes of authentication and so forth and pay wars that we have to put in place for that so yeah I mean we're very interested in fact we've been to as you rightly say from the OARCIG we went to OER 15 I think it was in Cardiff and I know there's OER 17 coming up and we're very keen to find a way of being involved with and supporting that kind of activity whether it be on a kind of OER only basis or whether alternate members and the initiatives are prepared to go from a more of a kind of mixed bag or mixed market and we can support both so yeah we would be very interested and continue to be interested in talking to initiatives and groups that want to do something in that area because we think this technology has got something to offer them what's your... actually just beginning to lose it there Martin I'm afraid you've slightly frozen on me yeah I'm sorry Martin you've gone you've stopped sitting against your end or the end I lost you to what I was saying oh you're back I was trying to anticipate your question and give an answer in your absence but I couldn't I'm afraid so unfortunately I've been able to come up quite quickly I just wondered from your experiences with working with different partners where openness are people coming to you and saying does your product support educational licenses do you think that whole area is still very niche and similar to what you've developed hides a lot of what might be described the messy mechanics people just want to get on with it is that your sense you're getting from the people you're talking to the less concerned about licenses and just want to get things done yeah well we're in that camp we really like to get things done and we think we've got tools that make it really quite easy now for people just to do just to jump in and start playing with and messing with and organizing and mashing up resources and sharing them so we were very excited to hear about the OER movement and you were talking at the beginning of the call about different zeitgeists and phases and so forth and OER 15 when we went to Cardiff was full of kind of enthusiasm and theoretical ideas but also lots of really interesting practical applications as a whole network of schools in Leicester I think you recall that certainly from a policy perspective had bought into and were keen to implement those ideas so I suppose from a marriage point of view we would like to find some way of being involved in supporting those if that's at all possible I think there are some open source type OER aggregators that exist and abound and that's useful but it really doesn't do it's part of the solution to the problem I think possibly but it's a bit more philosophically like the gateway they're aggregating repositories so something nice and nimble like as Martin I think could play a neat role so if there is anybody out there who wants to just get going with OER even on a small scale basis maybe that's the best way to start we'll be happy we're certainly going to come to OER 17 and see if we can look at with some thought there just to try and unpick that do you think we talk about OER quite a bit but I don't want to describe it as a problem that we've created for solution artificially but it sounds like we're doing they've got a foundation for some really interesting stuff and that obviously isn't it's not where we are it's not and I just wonder I I suppose the danger is I'm going to answer my own question I think it works there's obviously many flavours isn't there yeah so you're trying to fit into that kind of the store of many flavours you're trying to fulfill what you're doing here's the deal, when we first came into contact with OLD it was around as I mentioned just before the government funded project it was the technology strategy board and our pitch to there was lots and lots of different competing models out there there are publishers with masses of legacy content which they want to sell at the one end of the spectrum there's lots and lots of free stuff NLN for example FURL I mentioned that we were involved with many, many moons ago and then there's the World Wide Web and then there's this new movement, relatively new movement to do with open education resources and nobody quite knows how this is going to pan out the publishers don't know so they're thinking what the model is going to look like what kind of models for selling the content do we need or should we be selling content giving access to content and giving tools and support around the content and then OER is taking a kind of more purist view about how the content should be generated and how it should be distributed and utilised and I remember at the time OLD was very, very keen to place itself in the vanguard of OER and they didn't want to be involved in the project unless it was quite clear that that's where they saw themselves sitting at the head of this but nevertheless there was an interesting role they could play in terms of helping the research and the idea was we're going to establish lots of different practice groups who are going to be bringing content together from different sources so we've always said that we don't really mind and we don't know we don't know where this market is going and how it's going to evolve and it's not going to be easy for us isn't it to say we're agnostic and we still are and if OER ends up being triumphant well that's great I'm sure that as things develop more and more resources that currently are not OER will become OER more and more stuff that's currently being charged for will not be charged for but exactly where on that continuum will end up I don't know well on that note I'm conscious of the time so but what we'll do is there are a number of things that we can put together as part of this call so what I can do with you Rod if it's okay with you we can put a blog post together for the OCC blog so we can share some of the things for people to go in the care oh sure and with finally Rod thank you very much for your time it's been fascinating to unpick some of things and how things are evolving so thank you very much for your time no I saw a man it's been really fun I enjoyed it in the run up to the call so thank you and we obviously got the annual conference coming up someone from extensors yourself be popping in for a day for who you be I will be there myself that's great so we look forward to seeing you and what thanks thanks for watching