 Yn ymddych chi'n gweithio i gyd, ac yn ddod i'n gweithio i'n gwneud am y dyfodol yma'r llesol 50th anfertyn yn y Llewsiais. Yn ymddych chi'n gweithio i'n gweithio i'n gweithio i'r ysgol. Fe yw Lysmar, yng Nghymru, yng Nghymru yng Nghymru yng Nghymru ymddych yn ystod i'r ysgol ffordd ac yn rhanol i'r ysgol ffyrdd a'r unig o'r unig o'r ysgol 50th anfertyn yn ysgol, ar gyflwy hynny'r cyffredinol yn ymddangos hwnnw. Mae'r ddechrau, yng Nghymru, os ydych i ddechrau'r ddweud a'i ddechrau ac yn ddechrau'n ddweud ymddangos i'r lle bod ychydig yn ymddangos iawn. Yn y crofadau'r ymddangos iawn, yma'r ymddangos iawn yw'r ddweud yn ychydig i'r hynny'r ddweud ymddangos iawn, sydd ymddangos iawn yn argymau ymddangos iawn o gweld yn ymddangos iawn yn ymddangos iawn. This evening we will hear from Professor Martin Wellar, a Professor of Educational Technology, who will challenge us to think about what the term open means. The Open University has become, in many ways, a household name over the past 50 years. And, as with many familiar terms, we often don't stop to ask ourselves what exactly they mean to us. He will challenge us even further. By asking if we were to invent an open university now, what would it look like? We at the OU have been engaged in research on education since our inception in 1969, since then we progressed from producing late night BBC programmes to online teaching and online laboratories, so Martin Weller's talk on openness is more relevant than ever this year. But before Martin takes us on that journey some housekeeping, the lecture will be followed by a Q&A session and then we invite you to celebrate with us downstairs. For anyone in the audience using Twitter please feel free to tweet using the hashtag displayed and tagging at Open University and let the world join us this evening. For members of our audience joining us via livestream please use the email address provided and keep your comments and questions brief so that we can address them during the Q&A. Now some background about Martin Weller. Martin was Professor of Educational Technology here at the Open University and his interest has always been in the application of new technology to academic practice. He leaves the Open Educational Resources, OER Hub, research team running a portfolio of projects examining the impact of open educational practices. He joined the OU in 1995 as a lecturer in artificial intelligence. He went on to chair the OU's first major e-learning course, U, your computer and the net in 1999 with nearly 15,000 students. This involved a number of strategic shifts to move the OU to become an online as well as distance provider. He was the first director of the virtual learning environment recommending the adoption of Moodle, a free and open source learning management system. He is currently academic director for the learning design project and director of the OER hub. His research area is in open education and digital scholarship. He blogs about this and has authored two books, The Digital Scholar and the Battle for Open, both available under open license. He's a regular and well-known blogger at edtechie.net and is the OU academic with the most followers on Twitter, topping the scales at 9,760. If anybody wants to try and beat that, just let us know. If you want to tag Martin in your tweets, his Twitter handle is at Mweller. So it now gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Martin Weller. Thank you. Thank you. So hi everyone, thanks for coming out on a cold February night to Milton Keynes and all those people joining online. Thank you for coming in. So as Liz said, please join in the conversation with the hashtag. And warning, it's going to get a bit interactive. You know, I apologize, but we're not doing jazz or size or anything, but I'll be using some polls. So if you've got a mobile device or laptop, you can go to that link and when the polls become active, they'll come up there and you can partake and join in the conversation. The link comes up on each of the polls anyway, so you don't have to have it in there now. So as Liz said, this is my inaugural lecture, but I shouldn't really be here because I actually became a professor about 15 years ago. But at the time there was a backlog and I kind of got forgotten. But I like to think the talk I'm giving tonight is better than the one I would have given 15 years ago. So if you don't like tonight's talk, just console yourself with how much you wouldn't have liked it 15 years ago. But also as a comprehensive, educated, working-class lad, working-high education, I'm no stranger to imposter syndrome, so tonight are the marks, the peak of that or its final resolution. So just in the interest of seeing where this interactive stuff works. And as an example of openness, so if you go there, you should be able to click on the map and say where you're coming in from. So I know we've got a few people and my friends and colleagues from different places watching online we should be able to see where they're coming in from. I expect it will be quite a high density around Milton Keynes, but you know, let's see if we've got anyone coming in from Antarctica or anything. Okay, so we've got one in America, a couple out of Canada, that far one in Canada that might be Clint Melonde, if it's Clint High Clint. I want some South America, good. I don't believe the person in Antarctica, good, but let's go, that's great. So thank you much everyone who's coming in and watching online and the people here. So my talk tonight is really trying to answer this question. What does the open in open university mean? And I want to try and explore that evolving nature and definition of what open education is. And that's Jenny Lee, who was the Arts Minister when the Open University was founded and wrote the portfolio for us to go into existence. And also to try and think about what could open education mean or what should it mean. And I was prompted by this, but I was at a conference in the US recently and I was talking about the open university and open education. And someone came up to me afterwards and said, just know what, it's never occurred to me before that it's the open university. And I kind of know what they mean. We often just say it as one word, it's the open university. But openness is kind of core to our very identity, it's kind of in our DNA. So I want to explore what that openness means. So what does the open in open university mean to you? Keep it clean, people. Okay, so we're getting words like accessible, open, open entry, barriers, inclusive. So I think the kind of message coming up there is this idea of removal of barriers to education. Open up education, which is no surprise, that's what we're there for. Very good, very nice. I'll move on, thank you. So this is our charter. Now open university mission statements are actually, generally when you look at them, really quite bland and interchangeable. It's like they're about achieving excellence, everyone reaching their potential and stuff. But the Open University's mission statement is almost like a work of poetry. It's applicable now as it was then. And each element of it is really important. So open to people meant we removed entry barriers for people to come and study with us. Open to places meant that we allowed people to study at a distance. Open to methods allowed us to do distance education, new technologies and those kinds of things. And lastly open to ideas, which we'll explore tonight, particularly around what open education means. So prior to the 1990s, before the internet, open education more or less meant the model that we had defined. It meant what open universities were. There were some other definitions, but it was largely our definition. But an alternative title for this talk could be me, the OU and Open. As Liz said, I joined in 1995, and at my interview I stupidly said, we thought we were using the web for teaching. And they took that to be a deep knowledge of the web and the internet, which wasn't quite true, but I got the job anyway. It's interesting because at the time my career at the OU almost also matches the internet years of the Open University. I want to explore the intersection of these three things, my own experience, the OU and open education. The reason it's interesting is because around 1995, Tim Berners-Lee and the web was becoming popular, built on the internet. The point of that is that these were open technologies. Anyone could publish anything, so there was no central control. We've got these very open technologies, removing filter for publication, and now that affects an open education system. So the two things are going to come together, I think. So I want to talk through a number of projects, really, that demonstrate that change in evolution of openness. So something we explored, and John Milton, he's here tonight, led this project called The Open Source Teaching Project. The idea there was, can we take the ideas of the open source software community and apply them to teaching? So in open source software you can take bits of code and other people can take them, adapt them and reuse them and put them into a new bit of software. So we came up with this idea of having discrete kind of learning objects, discrete bits of teaching content. You'd then put into an online repository and then you'd be able to reversion those in someone else's come along and reversion them into a new course. And we didn't really follow this through as much as we could have done, I think, which was a shame, because at the time lots of other people is one of those ideas that other people were coming to simultaneously. So in the US, David Wyandie, for instance, was coming to the same idea and looking at some of the ideas around licences. It was from this kind of work that Creative Commons licences agree. So here we're beginning to think about different ways of creating courses of teaching in terms of openness. As Liz said, I chaired our first large, large-scale online course called T171. This is a graphic from that course I managed to find somewhere. It looked really cool back in the day. This is in 1999. And I remember at the time an academic colleague here said to me, no one wants to learn that way. You'll be lucky to get 50 students on that course. And of course we've got 15,000 students on that course and it turns out lots of people want to learn that way. What was significant about that was it demonstrated that we could take the Open University's supported open learning model and adapt it to online provision. If you weren't sure, we could do before then. If you had something like 600 tutors operating only online tuition, there was no printed units, all the students submitted their assignments as HTML pages. I still remember fondly, the pages would be unwrapped into a website and this was back in 1999 when things like GeoCities were popular. Someone had scrolled in text through a tiny window that you had to click on to get into their assignment. So it was kind of quite creative. I had a kind of epiphany moment. I was sitting in a production meeting early on in the productionist course and I explained to them we're kind of no printed units, nothing's going to be sent out, it's all going to be online. About half of the room stood up and walked out because there were people involved and that kind of made me realise how much of the OU was built around delivering physical stuff and how much of going digital was a real challenge. But it was very successful and it sort of led to a lot of cultural change in the OU. So this kind of demonstrated that the OU could shift itself online. We had a lot of students in that 15,000 so I hope you'll permit me a slight kind of eye roll when MOOCs massive open online courses come along in 2012 and claim to have invented large-scale online learning. And then a couple of years later I became the OU's first for the Elite Director of Virtual Learning Environment. Because at the time we kind of had lots of different packages around the OU we had done some in-house systems, some third party systems, some bits and bobs for creating websites, for communication for doing various bits and pieces. And we wanted kind of one universal enterprise system across the university. I did a big kind of stakeholder analysis talking to people and the thing I proposed at the time was what we called a service-oriented architecture. The idea was that you could plug in kind of best of breed things into one kind of motherboard and have this enterprise system. And then Ross Mackenzie who came after me is the VLE director and actually did all the hard work implementing Moodle. The good thing about Moodle was that because it's open source we could take it to the needs. A lot of the kind of out of the box really didn't really suit us as a large scale institution. And we're the largest contributor to the Moodle code base. So here we've got openness as the means of creating a large e-learning platform for a thousand thousands of students. And then around 2006 I was part of a project led by Tony Walton. We got funding from the Hewlett Foundation to set up Open Learn. So Open Learn was our way of creating open educational resources. These are resources that are freely available online with an open licence anyone can take, use and adapt. And around 2001-2002 MIT in the States had started off the OER movement when they said we're going to give away all of our content of course content freely online. At the time that was a real kind of revelation because the received wisdom was that content is king. You can keep your content, don't anyone have it. And they just said we're going to give it away. But actually it turned out that a lot of MIT content doesn't make much sense outside of the context of MIT whereas your content is designed to be studied online. So we got funding from Hewlett Foundation and Andy Lane and then Andrew Law took on the Open Learn platform and it's been a huge success. We have 10 million years at visitors a year is that right? Okay, let's go with 8 million. And lots of those then go on to study with the OU. As other OER forums have closed around the country, it's now the biggest OER repository in the UK. A big kind of success. We're here, Openness has learned the OER to explore our kind of public engagement mission, public teaching mission. There's a new way of doing that. So just to kind of stop and recap for me is we get to the end of the late 2000s we've got a large scale open source VLE supporting thousands of students. We've got a large OER repository which live in large scale online courses. All of our courses have a digital platform we implemented an e-learning policy that said all courses need to have some online element and provide a range of free digital content across different platforms such as YouTube. Now that looks like quite a digital transformed university to me. And the reason I mention that is that I sometimes wonder if we didn't do a good enough job at this stage of telling our story. So again, last year when we were going through some of our troubles the kind of often, the perception you often heard and the professor was the OU needs to get digital. We've been digital for a long time and I found it very confusing. So I'll come back to this. I think it's about kind of the story we tell about ourselves. Then about 2006 late 2000s I kind of took a turn away from more institutional projects to more kind of think about the individual to give the rise of digital web 2.0 and started blogging. So I recently did my 1000th blog post over 12, 13 years. So not prolific, but steady it gets there and I get about 2 million visits a year on that blog so it kind of has quite an impact. I think it's been really important for me to kind of develop an academic identity and it's also allowed me to make lots of connections around the world. I often say that becoming a blogger was the best kind of academic decision I ever made and I think again last year when we were going through some of that, there's more trying times. I think social media and blogging allowed a lot of the OU community to kind of come together and have a voice and feel like they could make a connection with other people. And through blogs I got to meet people such as George Siemens and Stephen Downs who often attributed as being the founders of MOOCs, massive open online courses and we experimented with those so I think George and I ran a MOOC about the future of the course online and I contributed to some of their very experimental early MOOCs and then in 2012 Martin Bean set up Future Learn as a separate company as we know and I was part of the team that advised that. We also experimented in-house so we ran a masters course and I opened up my block which was about open education as an open block so the formal students got to study alongside informal students you could study it as a MOOC and in open learn we developed badged open courses so students can study and they get a badge at the end of that. So here's the openness as the OU have explored ways of giving out free learning and exploring what it means to take a course. Then around 2012 we got funding from the Hewlett Foundation to look at open educational resources. There's no-one really argues with them giving away free learning stuff is generally deemed to be a good thing but lots of people had beliefs about them that they would state as fact they save students money they increase performance so what we did with the OER hub was come up with 11 hypotheses which generally reflected those common beliefs that people had about OER and we developed an evidence hub so we could then go out and try and find evidence for either for or against each sense of hypotheses. As an aside we developed the evidence hub as an open source platform and it's then gone on to be used in other projects which are nothing to do with OER and it turns out that an evidence hub is a pretty good way to approach lots of research projects. So we went to try and find evidence for and against OER so this was us researching into open education as well as researching into open education what we tried to develop was researching in the open if you like adopting open research practice so we did a number of things so we gave away all of our data openly so we had the biggest data set of OER survey question responses something like 7,500 and we anonymised those and gave away all that data set so other researchers could play with them and combine them with their own research we developed an open researcher pack ethics approval forms survey questions advice on how to conduct research so that other people could then conduct their own research we set up a number of open courses about how to become an open educational researcher and we make extensive use of social media so the research project and team itself has an identity and one project that I really love is GOGN so it's a global network of OER PhD researchers and we get them together once a year about 12 to 15 from every year at a conference and help them to talk through their research and we also run monthly webinars and for a lot of these researchers they'll be the only person in their institution who's researching OER open education even their supervisors may not know much about that kind of area so the GOGN is a real support network for those and a lot of those people have gone on to do great work and also we try to get them to research in the open as well so things like encouraging only publishing open access journals those kind of things so open access publishing has been a real kind of success story in open education the idea that all journal articles that are published are openly accessible to everybody it's often seen as a kind of quite an ethical position if public funding is paying for that research and everyone should be able to access the outcome of it around 2009 this is the one time I've been ahead of the curve fashion wise I said I'm only going to publish an open access journals and that's been my stance and since then we've kind of had things like the REF mandate as well that everything should be available at open access at some point so with my colleague Ann Jones I'm the co-editor of GIME which is an open access journal and we've developed a model where we publish with a publisher Ubiquiti who are open access and through a generous grant from IET we cover the small fee for each article which allows us not to charge anything to the authors I've also published two books soon to be three I hope under an open access licence which is a really interesting experience really because I've published two books kind of conventionally beforehand and soon as you realise you're not going to be rich of writing academic textbooks they're not going to get you that yacht so what you actually want is just them to be out there when you make them open access interesting things happen to them I wrote a book called The Digital Scholar back in 2011 and this is a really good resource to use for staff development so what we did was with the open learn team we developed one of those badged open courses based on that book and because it was open access whereas the strange thing is often when you write a book the publisher owns the text the copyright of your text and similarly I wrote a book called The Battle for Open in 2014 and I found out a couple of weeks ago that someone's taken that and put it all of it into wiki so that students can then add to it and amend it and reuse it and they don't need to ask my permission to do that because it's an open licence so we're just finishing up a project UK Open Textbooks Open Textbooks are openly licensed textbooks so they come with usually creative commons licence digital version is free and the print version is kind of at cost but also crucially because they're openly licensed you can take them and adapt them so you can say I don't like Chapter 2 in this book I'm going to change it and do something different with it or I can make it more suitable to our particular local context Now Open Textbooks are a big thing in the US because the price of textbooks is really primitive out there so it was used as a way to kind of address that the cost of textbooks and they've been very successful things through projects such as OpenStacks and what we wanted to do was see if that model from North America transferred to the UK so we did a trial over here and we did workshops at a number of universities and we went to a number of big conferences to try and push the idea of Open Textbooks and what we found was that Open Textbooks the cost isn't so much a driver here there isn't such a big factor in students deciding not to have those textbooks and the way we use textbooks is slightly differently we tend not to have just one specific textbook but rather a reading list but in some ways that makes the use of Open Textbooks even more likely because people say I might as well make one of those textbooks open and I was quite surprised at how much of an appetite there was for Open Textbooks so I think this is a kind of real area that's kind of ripe for development in the UK and the OU would be well placed to explore and develop that I think and lastly an area that we can loosely call Open Pedagogy so using Open Practices in how you teach we've begun to scratch the surface a bit of this in the European University so I was part of a course team called YXM 130 making a learning count on Open Box course led by Claire Turner and the idea there is that students can bring in their own learning from elsewhere so they can bring in their learning from Open Learn on any subject and then they demonstrate how much they understand that knowledge by doing presentations and making links to other disciplines and then they can get formal credit and move into the kind of formal OU system there on a master's course we've just completed H880 it's going to be the first course delivered through Future Learn post-grad course we're exploring there the idea that students are studying at the same time we send them off to a MOOC which we developed separately and they partake in the MOOC but also study their own participation in that MOOC we're a member of the OER University which is a global consortium of universities who submit courses as OER although I don't think we do as much with that as we might do but they're exploring ideas such as first year free study, OER course is free for your first year then go and get formal credit from one or two institutions and then move into formal study a friend of mine in the US I hope to watch in Robin DeRosa I think he's done a lot more interesting stuff with Open Pedagogy so she teaches early American literature and she wasn't very happy with the textbook that she was recommending to her students so she got some interns and paid them over the summer to create their own open textbook using this platform press books and then what she does is get her own students to come in and suggest amendments to that to add new context, to add videos or to try and find other examples and bring it up I think what that's really interesting is that really it changes the nature of the relationship of a student between them and what knowledge is instead of it just being something you receive something you partake with and can change and alter and construct and go through a course so again this is an area that we might explore further with the Open University so I'm going to play your Vice Chancellor for a year as well as concentrating on our core business satisfying our students, you can say what would be the one area of the ones that I've listed I'd like us to focus on that for this year to put resource into, to explore so we've got MOOCs, OER Open Educational Practice whether that's through individual scholars Open Textbooks Open Access Publishing Open Pedagogy Let's see how those votes are coming in I mean to say people who are watching online can vote as well it doesn't have to be people here, I hope they've worked that out Okay, so the clear winner seems to be Open Pedagogy despite my trying to lead you down the Open Textbooks path but you know, well done for ignoring my lead but I'm happy with Open Pedagogy too so that's interesting and I think you're right, that would be very good for us to explore good, thank you so having looked at the kind of the evolution of what Open Education means and I want to turn to some kind of conceptualisation of thinking about openness so working with Rob Farrow here and Dominic Orr we conducted a project with the ICDE who were interested in what they called Open Online Flexible and Technology Enhanced Learning which kind of had the acronym of UFAT if you forget some letters and they were interested in what's actually going on around the globe with different universities how they're employing online and Open Education and they wanted to try and capture all the different practices not just so that there's one model for this so we came up with this kind of conceptual model does this work, okay and we split kind of university functioning into three main components so there's content which is your stuff and that could be a lecture it could be online material there's how it's delivered that could be face to face it could be blended, it could be online and how it's recognised challenge exam normal exam projects digital badges and for each of these there were two dimensions flexible you are so for example can anyone access your content at any time or is it kind of fixed and how open you are so who gets to access that content and from this we developed a lengthy questionnaire we asked people to kind of rate their own institution on these nine axes and we could then produce visualisations from those and from those visualisations we managed to pick out a number of different patterns so I won't go through all of them things like content delivery how flexible that means can learners access the content whenever they want how open is it and who gets to access that content is it everybody as in a MOOC or any certain people how flexible is the support delivery so are there 24 hour help des for instance can you access your tutor anytime how open is that who gets to deliver the support are there forums for students to support people is the content personalised and also elements around recognition so is recognition open where is it flexible so can they decide on what they want to be assessed when they want to be assessed and we got people to kind of rate their institution on that it's a very subjective score lots of people would have different things depending on what you say but I ran this as a session at the OU and using the same sort of voting function that we've had to use here this is how people scored us which I find it's slightly surprising because we're very highly on content delivery that's kind of our modus operandi students can access at any time people thought our delivery was quite open I think that's probably because lots of student forums but we didn't score much on the other axes and I'll come back to that later another project I worked on was called Mapping Open Education which like all good projects grew out of a conversation in a pub one night so I was talking to Richard Reesews from Thompson Rivers University and Viv Rolf here in the UK and we were sort of bemoaning the fact that a lot of new things come along in open education and they very rarely reference anything that's gone before so mooks for instance never really talk about a lot of the fundamental research that went on in e-learning and Viv had done some research that's shown that a lot of the early papers in the 70s written about places like the open university were hardly ever referenced and so then working with the next PhD student and one Katie Jordan who's a wizard of this stuff we came up with well she came up with a method to explore this which was citation analysis so we did a library search for open education plus we recommended some key articles and from that she stripped out all the references and then found the references that those papers referenced and then the papers that those papers referenced and from that you get a kind of spreading activation network as you can see so you get a spreading activation network so each blob is a paper and there's a line between them that shows it's being referenced and the more it gets referenced the bigger the blob gets so you begin to see these clusters emerging of different areas and plus it's pretty so you can see these clusters beginning to come together and then what we roughly ended up with was what we put these categories on but kind of eight areas then so up in the top there's what we were mainly open access publishing they often tended to be information sciences library science type publications and down the bottom here is what you might call traditional distant said so particularly stuff coming out in the 70s from places like the OU and this little cluster down here open education schools there was a significant report published in the US in the 70s and often that was about the layout of the classroom e-learning then forms a kind of bridge between traditional distance education and later developments we've got social media over here social media use of by academics those kind of things a lot of that coming from communication studies but our kind of grumpy old people's musings were born out I think by a lot of this so you'll see that the MOOC papers over here don't really reference much over here and over here in isolation I think you see that with what you might call a kind of year zero mentality like we've invented online learning this year and even a lot of the OER stuff I think sits alone and this in the middle here kind of actions of glue is what you might call open practices kind of how academics use these kind of things but I think there's a kind of opportunity for the open university to act as the ring that binds all these things together really we explore openness all these different ways and demonstrate how it's useful for academics and learners as a kind of powerful institution so what all this led me to realise was that actually open is a really good name for a university it's not dated if you're starting at the university now if we didn't exist and calling it the open university would be a really good term at the time we were often referred to as the university of the airwaves which I think would sound quite dated now so we lucked out we got a really good name so that made me think what might I know you invented today focus on and one way of thinking about this is to return to the UFAP model so I said this was kind of how we are now and this was based on about 30 or 40 people voting and you might say should the open university be the kind of the pink line perfect scores all the way around we should be openest core to everything we do always do an area we might want to focus on strategically and say that's what we should develop next that's our kind of core direction as an open university and you'll guess what's coming next it's a poll so you can tell me which aspect should the OU expand upon so I only picked up some of them so personalised content so as students learn they get recommended say open educational resources maybe based on analytics or recommendations from others open to further students a radical idea might be that all our course material is open use of open content in production so using more OERs with great courses bringing it in from elsewhere recognising stuff open recognition of assessment allowing students to bring in their learning from say sayler or other places or mooks and say we will recognise this stuff and flexible assessment allowing students to say perhaps we do challenge exams so you can just turn up and take an exam and we'll give you a credit or that students can choose different bits of assessment or they can drop out of a course halfway through and take some assessment with them and log it so where are you coming down oh okay I didn't try to swing you on this one it's a free vote okay so the winner seems to be flexible assessment okay I don't know what to do with that I'll pass that on to someone else that's probably your job please you can so as well as our core mission I think the role of the OU there are a couple of things I want to pull out there one is to act as a I think it's a useful body to have a national institution across all four nations that acts as a voice for part-time students even if they don't acknowledge it lots of policy makers and politicians have a kind of conceptual model of the 18 to 22 year old full-time student and you can see how that influences lots of policy so the fee structure for example I think is a good example of that Barbara and I both work on the TEF and a lot of the TEF is based around that kind of model and often we try to fight against it and it's interesting that a report came out in the US recently that 74% of students in US higher education are now non-traditional I don't know what traditional means in them 74% are not traditional but they defined it as either studying part-time had a child of their own older students so they didn't fit that traditional concept but in the UK the trend is the other way so part-time studies falling as we know and generally older students are declining that's probably a result of fees but it helps to have a voice in the room to speak up for part-time students and non-traditional students to kind of challenge that conceptual model and I think the OU and Wales is a good example of this so when the diamond review was going on the OU fought very strongly to make sure that part-time students also got maintenance grants so having them in the room was vital I think another role I think so I'm the president of the Association for Learning Technology and a shout-out to Maren Diep, well I think to watching online who's the CEO and at ALT we developed a policy around openness because it wasn't just that it's not just that it's an interesting kind of by-product or a peripheral interest it's actually kind of core to how we relate to higher education so my thanks to Brian Mathes for taking my quote and making it look intelligent but I think if I was to give any advice to the incoming Vice Chancellor it would be to innovate around openness if the OU innovates around what openness means in higher education it will always stay current and relevant and I think openness helps shape our identity and also the identity of a higher education so so I'd just like to get some input from you so for society complete this sentence for society open education is dot dot dot what's that one okay I'm going to track that person down it says it's anonymous but no it is anonymous okay thank you so here are some of the ways I thought of ending that sentence practical so it's actually a very practical way to address a lot of the needs of a digital change in evolving society it's evolving it's not the thing that it was it's changed over time as I've tried to demonstrate it's diverse it's not just one definition open education that's a range of things it's necessary you're only going to meet the demands of certain students and populations by having an open approach and we can't keep building new universities it's useful for learners as they kind of go through their lives a lot of them will need open education at some point perhaps they want to transition to a new job up skill it's innovative I think you know that history that I drew out there I think shows a lot of the innovation interest in things in higher education happened around the notion of openness and it's the future so I think nearly all universities will at some point be engaging in some form of open education so my colleague Rick Hollam and I who's in August coming up next month worked on a statement for the national co-ordinating centre for public engagement did they get that right Rick everyone's going to say what our commitment to public engagement was and we're centred around that I can't remember who said which bit but openness should not just be a strategy a market employee it's embodied in every aspect of the university and at the open university we're always redefining what open means which I think I'll try to demonstrate today and our challenge to the wider education sector is to embrace those different interpretations and think about how they benefit society so here just to kind of sum up this is my kind of very rough personal timeline not necessarily the time of the open university and other people would have different ones so up until the 90s we have the kind of traditional OU model very successful in 99 we take that large-scale learning approach and show that we can take the OU model and get it to work online develop an open VLE in 2004 2006 we start with open educational resources and also start exploring educational practice as educators I took over Jarran Bratt hyn but it had been going longer beginning to explore the idea of open access publications and their role exploring different MOOCs around from 2009 the idea of researching in the open not just researching into open in 2012 and more recently open textbooks and open pedagogy I think if you look at that that kind of tells quite a powerful narrative of innovation around the idea of openness and lots of interesting things happening there at the OU so my kind of final point is again coming back to some of the stuff that happened last year in particular the story we tell the world about ourselves isn't just a luxury and I got that sense a lot last year so Kurt Vonnegut says we've become what we pretend to be and I don't think we're pretending to be anything but I think we need to make a better story for the people what we are and what we are is as my American friend said the open university and a friend of mine said always leave people happy so here's a picture of my dog thank you all for coming out tonight okay thank you for that Martin I for one really really enjoyed it so thank you very much now it's time to hear from you on any questions and comments that the talk has raised so Martin we're going to go over to the seating area okay thank you so we've got a roving mic and we've also got people on the on laptops to pick up comments from the online audience so please if you have a question can you introduce yourself say who you are and where you're from and try to keep it short so that we can answer as many questions as possible and if you're watching online then please use the email provided on the slide showing to send in any questions so who's going first Nick Martin thank you very much for that talk I really like the provocations that are in it and I'm all for the openness but what's the business model because it seems to rest very happily on people giving things away depends which bit you're looking at so I think there are different models so take open textbooks we can pick other ones so your open textbooks are based on giving stuff away and where's the business model on that but I think if you look at it you can kind of flip the economics of a lot of things so at the moment cable green of creative commonsies we have a lot of money in education we're just really bad at spending it so at the moment we pay a lot to publishers to buy material that we want with you could flip some of that money to then pay for the production of open content open textbooks for instance which are then free to use and they've started to explore that model in the US so I think there are different economic models based around openness that we can explore Do you subscribe to Wikipedia? Do I subscribe? Do you support the financial? No I don't Interesting I'm live streamed from Professor Alan Tate who is Professor Emeritus of Distance Education and Development and he says Hello Martin, is the institutional model of an open university under threat from the wide availability of online programs from other universities and colleges or is there something special and distinctive about the open university that mitigates that risk? First of all hello Alan It's a good question and Alan and I have had this conversation at different places I think there is but I don't think it's guaranteed so I tried to set out a number of the roles for an open university such as that being a voice of part-time students but certainly the arrival of the internet from 95 onwards timeline meant that other universities could become more like the open university and in some ways it also allowed the open university to become more like other universities so I think there are a number of areas where having a large national institution is viable for instance there are courses that are fairly small scale if you distribute them around but if there's enough students nationally for them to make sense so I think exploring different models such as we have done with the OU allowing people to take a hybrid study to operate in collaboration with universities where they may take one or two open universities courses but also study with them so I think there are different ways we can explore that but it's not guaranteed and certainly the kind of monopoly we once had has gone Cath Brown, president of the OU Students Association in all these aspects of open all of which I think we can agree are admirable do you think that open partnership working with students is integral to their success and if not why not Hi Cath Absolutely I think and a lot of that research we tried to do with the OER hub was trying to get that student voice in there to find out how people are actually using these resources and sometimes it's surprising they're not using them how you think they're using them and sometimes they're using them in much more ingenious ways than you imagined but you really need to understand that model and I think often it's not just about asking would you like this but actually kind of seeing how it's actually used in practice I think that there's a lot that work to be done but I think you see that with MOOCs also I think a lot of the initial beliefs around MOOCs where everyone's going to study them they're going to democratise higher education and of course when we went to look at them it was mainly privileged learners who already had higher education so if you want to work with learn if you want to achieve those goals of MOOCs then the support is the viable function in that of how it's worth my students Hi Martin, thanks for the wonderful presentation I really enjoyed it and my name is Satish Krishnamurti I'm professor in energy technology from school of A&I so I liked your timeline which you showed from 1990s to this so what is your take on artificial intelligence and distance education that's going to play a very key role because the employment is based on AI probably the whole jobs will be transformed the jobs which is available now may not be available in the next few years because AI is going to kick off already so I just wanted to have your comment Okay thanks for the AI question I was hoping to get on here I have mixed feelings about AI I'll confess I did my PhD in AI and sometimes I kind of feel like it's the thing that's always just about to be there but never actually is quite there so kind of a lot of the stories and promises we're seeing of AI were there back in the 90s when I was doing my PhD but I think you're quite right I guess my feeling in all this stuff is I'm never very interested in technology that's trying to replace human educators because I believe education is kind of fundamentally a human enterprise but if AI can help people in that process so I think you know and it it will also mean what do we mean by AI can just be a statistical model but I think some of the things we're talking about maybe with personalised content I don't think you want for example fully personalised courses because there's something about that joint experience but you might want some AI operating in the backgrounds based on your analytics you seem to be struggling with this concept over here here's a really useful bit of OER that people who are struggling like you kind of found useful so I'm cautiously for it but not as kind of wrapped up as some of the kind of headlines of that on to the same trail that do you fit in the road map just an assumption like 2030, 2045 because it's such a crazy thing America is now currently working on what do you call road to immortality using AI startup companies there I'm not kidding I think I could have put AI at any time prior to now in that timeline as well it's always just about to be in there and I think we'll see cautious use of it when we did that survey we surveyed institutions around the world and hardly any of them are using AI which I guess makes sense at the moment but I think it will be for support for students identifying issues that is the kind of black box algorithm that begins to disenfranchise certain students we decide underneath this lid it says actually these students we don't want them or they're more troubled than they're worth and before you know it you can't get into universities because the algorithm is deciding against you so I'm always very cautious about their kind of blanket acceptance and the need for an ethical and moral dimension to them I think we've got another question online this one's come in from Twitter, Martin from Dr Jenny Heyman what aspect of openness do you believe contributes most to the life success so personal life satisfaction economic other types of success of learners inside and outside of the OU okay so Jenny's one of our fabulous go-gen researchers that I mentioned so hi Jenny I think that that's I probably can't give a single answer to that so for instance I mentioned the course T171 that we did that passed its 20th anniversary recently and someone I know from those days is on Facebook and she posted it, not 20 years since T171 started and loads of people follow us like that course completely changed my life you know from there I went on to do so many different things and that was although it was kind of online it wasn't open in the sense of anyone could study it wasn't open like a movie's open but for those people that form of openness was the most dramatic and most significant for them and I think for lots of people it's just it's coming to believe that you can become a learner I think particularly the sorts of students we often get with the open university often have a doubt about whether education's for them and however they come to it whether that's through a formal OU course whether it's through one of our openings courses or MOOCs or OER it's coming out that shift in identity I'm not sure this is for me I can do this, I am a learner I can engage in it however they come to that realisation I think it's the significant part this one is from Mariella Beringan who's from the Netherlands she's an MA ODE student so what can MA ODE students do to promote OEP an educational pedagogy at their own college university especially the more traditional ones OK I think it is always difficult because students and I don't mean this as a criticism I think I was the same students are often quite conservative when they come in to study they kind of have an idea about what higher education should be like and so if you start trying to tweak that too much it doesn't match the model they have so you always need to justify why you're doing this but I think for certain subjects particularly as you get further up the higher educational ladder it's a good way to explore particularly complex topics so things like use of an open textbook and getting people to construct that textbook themselves or take it apart or add new pieces to it begins to change the way that they perceive of knowledge and their role within it and work collaboratively with others to do that I think we've got time for just one more I've got two people in the room waiting so could you pass that back Helen, just behind you and then we'll take the last one from Sandra after that thank you Martin Levoix, the Tired Lecture of Open University there's a second word in Open University that you've only touched on so my question is around in the 21st century is the bachelor degree past its sell-by-date and is it really sensible for 50% or more of our population being aiming for this rather perhaps outdated concept in terms of qualifications and the future of society I thought the other word you wouldn't go for was the I could have gone with that we'll go with the universe it's an interesting question and it's much like the lecture despite all the proclamations of its death that keeps going on and I've just been writing a book which I hope will be the third Open Access one about 25 years of ed tech and one of the things I was looking at there was e-portfolios and this whole idea of accrediting small chunks of learning and it makes perfect sense but they still don't always take off partly because it's not so much to do with the technology it's about society's recognition and acceptance of those things so if you ask employers do you want an e-portfolio with all this listing of everyone's credentials and all the things they've achieved they say yeah but then when they get 50 applicants it's a massive e-portfolio who's got a degree so it does provide a cultural shorthand in many ways you could say of course it's all going to be informal accreditation, digital badges, e-portfolios small chunks of learning put together on the blockchain that's what it's going to look like but I wouldn't mind betting in ten years time it looks pretty similar to what it does now so I think these things have a momentum and an inertia which is of their own which is regardless of whether they're always the best solution so I think we'll have to ask Martin to come back to deliver another lecture on that topic but Sandra last question from you Hi Sandra Summers, I'm a student currently in FBL you've touched on it there's lots of good stuff going on but have you done any research in what I'll call student resistance to the technologies and cast laughing but you know print, I'll just leave it there have you actually researched the resistance to changing to the technologies? Yeah, and I think I'll be honest, when I was early to this stuff, when I was back in the e-learning as the way forward days why can't these students just accept that what I'm doing is right that kind of attitude but I've come to understand a lot of those nuances and I think you mentioned print people have a real kind of people have a real kind of emotional attachment to physical books to books themselves and I think that actually plays a really important part in education and I don't want to move that so I think for instance things like when we were doing the open textbook project the most influential factor trying to convince academics that they're a good idea was that we worked with in the US called OpenStacks and they produced really nice open textbooks you only got to put one of those in someone's hand they go, oh I get it, this is good stuff there is that kind of emotional attachment and response to a book so I think what's often what we often think of as resistance coming from a different place that we need to understand I mean I think sometimes with all creatures of habit I know I like this I'm not sure I'll like this and sometimes you have to just keep pushing those things forward because if we want to project and be a modern universe we wouldn't still be doing what we were doing in the 70s but I think there's often something very real to be got out with what we just think of as resistance I'm afraid that's all the questions we've got time for I just would like to thank Martin for a really interesting, excellent lecture and for provoking such a lot of thoughts and ideas and questions and I think there's a lot that we could follow up on in discussion