 So, good morning, Sarah. It's nice to have you with us this morning. Sarah Gurry-Rosemblette, who is one of our keynote speakers, is with us and she'll be speaking this afternoon at the conference at Eden. Maybe you could share with us a little bit what you'll be talking about at your presentation this afternoon. Yeah, I will talk about five pairs of contrasting trends that exist right now in confronting at the macro-level higher education systems at large and individual higher education institutions at the meso-level and each institutional, each higher education system has to find the balance, the equilibrium on the continuum of these contrasting trends. For example, they have to decide whether they want to be more global, international-oriented or still be more national, which is a big issue right now. And obviously, the needs of different higher education systems are totally different. If you take Burkina Faso, for example, where they have 2% of their population studying higher education, their needs are very different from the Italian higher education system or the British one or the French one, United States. So, this is one issue. For sure, the change of also for the distance teaching universities moving from the industrial model that was pioneered by the British Open University to the digital model actually created a lot of big challenges for the large-scale distance teaching universities because they have to move to a totally different infrastructure, technological infrastructure, teaching learning system and it's a huge problem. You have to decide who are your competitors, who you are competing with and who are the people that you want to collaborate with, organizations or universities or the marketplace that you would like to collaborate with and so on. So, I speak about contrasting trends and they need to find an equilibrium for each higher education system, for each institution, how to shape their mission and operational strategies. Okay. So, what role do you see leadership playing in all of this? A huge role. A huge role. Because, for example, if you take Australia, the government has decided that they want large numbers of transnational students, mainly because of higher fees that they pay compared to the Australian students. So, the government invested a lot in the whole issue of globalization, internationalization, which is not the case in many other countries. That more individual institutions decide whether they want to be more global international or they want to be geared mainly to national priorities. And the leadership is tremendously important. So, leadership not just in the sense of the institution, but leadership also with policy makers? Of course, Kansas for higher education, ministries of education were in countries in which the responsibility for higher education is situated within ministries of education, all the case in Israel, for example, we have a council for higher education. So, they very much shape the priorities and accordingly also divide the kind of budgets for the institutions. You mentioned the open universities and some of the challenges that they're dealing with right now, and I think about the open university in the UK and some of the issues that they're dealing with. What do you see as the primary challenges for the open universities and what do they need to do in order to reinvent themselves perhaps for the 21st century? You know, I'm going to, and I'm now in the process of writing a paper for the special issue that will deal with open universities celebrating 50 years of the, with Alan, yes. And the name of my article is Open Universities, Innovative Past, Challenging Presidents and Prospective Future. Part of their big success also created their identity crisis because when they were invented, the British Open University, when it was established in 1969, it was innovative in so many aspects, open admission, part-time students, the teamwork and so many other things. And many establishments in the higher education, since the more campus-based universities were very skeptical and critical about its very establishment. But because it succeeded so much, so many of its goals are right now commonly shared by all higher education institutions. And since they were adopted by so many higher education institutions, it's an identity crisis because there is no special role for the open university. At the beginning, there was a line that it was an open admission, but only 20,000 students per year were founded by the government to enter the university and many more wanted. So it was like first come, first serve, they stood in a line and if they were not accepted the year that they applied, they were promised to be accepted the following year. No line anymore, a decrease of third of their students in the last 10 years. So it's a huge problem that basically is creating an identity crisis and they really have to find with whom to collaborate. The future learns that they invented. They are leading more than 70 universities in preparing something, but still the investment has not returned back. So there is more investments and kind of economies of scale provided right now. A huge problem. One of the things that, you know, traditional institutions are now shifting toward engaging in more technology enhanced learning. So technology is becoming more commonplace within traditional education. How do you see that impacting traditionally distance education institutions in the open universities? And what can we do to retain our, so to speak, our position within the educational landscape? The problem is that the campus-based universities in some aspects have a better position in using the technology. Because if the whole idea of the iron triangle of John Daniel of the industrial mode was that you use a very small number of faculty preparing high quality materials that can be studied by dozens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of students. This is not the case with technology right now, because the teacher is still is becoming back to interact with the students. So Universitat Roberta de Catalonia that was established already is an online university. The system is really very, very different. Okay. So you see two main strengths then from the distance teaching universities and that would be their ability to teach the masses and also and to organize themselves for the masses as well as the collaborative aspects. What other strengths do they have that they can maximize? They are more efficient in providing support systems for, because right now the digital literacy is lacking both by teachers at university and also by students. Even those students that were born with a mouse in their hand, they know how to download the music files, they know how to do wonderful things with the computer, they do not know how to study. So basically the digital literacies have to be practiced and provided by universities and the distance teaching universities can have an advantage in doing it. What other changes do you see happening within education that are impacting distance teaching universities? First of all that many more students study. When the British Open University was established 50 years ago, they were responsible for 95% of part-time students. Now all universities kind of applied to part-time students. Many more of the age cohort if it was once 10 to 20% now it's over 50% studying. So it's not just a quantitative change, it's a qualitative change and definitely it is something that is affecting the distance teaching university. The distinction between distance and campus was very clear for nearly 170 years since the University of London opened its gates in 1858 to all inhabitants in the Commonwealth. But the distinction is not existent anymore because campus universities can reach out and the fact is that the MOOCs and OER are mainly pioneered by campus universities, not by the distance teaching universities. So it's a huge challenge. Did you see some of these issues being addressed at the conference? Yes of course. Mainly in the keynotes but also in some of the sessions. What did you enjoy most about the evening conference while you were here? That you hear a lot of a practice already a research and practice conducted in different parts of the world and it is quite interesting to see things that are done and also plans that are planned to be done and from all over the world. So it is really interesting. Okay well thank you for taking the time to speak with us this morning and we appreciate that for sharing your insights and good luck with your keynote this afternoon. Thank you very much.