 Okay, good morning all. Without further ado really, I'm just going to do Andrew. Andrew Lord he'll come up and start his stuff because we've got quite a tight schedule, we've got three speakers to get through. Okay, thanks for watching. You're even faster than that. I think there's only two of us so otherwise I'm going to have to go much faster. So no, not all of you from the UK, so I'm Andrew Lord, I'm from the Open University of the United Kingdom. For those that don't know, Open University is a large, distant, open educational organisation. There are no entry requirements to come to the Open University and it teaches around a quarter of a million students, mostly online, mostly in the UK, about 10% of those outside of the UK. I work for and run the Open Media Unit which is the unit that provides free public education. And Sam Aran a few months ago and she said, oh you should come and talk about this and try in 20 minutes to talk a little bit about what you're doing to make sure that people are aware of how much free educational materials are available publicly to you for reuse and to the public learners. But also a little bit about the lessons that we've learnt by providing free public education in part because the stories around MOOCs and MOOC engines and business models of freemium are usually stories of looking for free education. I can say here I'm paid a salary and I'm a permanent contract and my current Chief Exec also knows as a Vice Chancellor, although he is leaving at Christmas, is promising that this is a perfectly feasible and sound and working business model. It is not looking for a solution, it is the solution and it's working perfectly fine. So I'll talk a little bit as we go as well as what we're doing about what lessons we've learnt about making that business model work. Okay, so one very convenient thing is our business model is determined by the Queen of the United Kingdom. In our charter it says we have to provide free public education in the public domain. There are only three big statements at the top of our charter and one of them is we will engage the public in learning for free using technology as appropriate. And we've done that really for 40 years. The technology at the time was broadcasting the BBC and we've been putting out free public education with the BBC really for the last 40 years. But in the last six or seven years we've added a whole series of other channels in part to bring about a different form of learning and in part to find new learners and in part to represent the change that's taking place at the university, which is increasingly online. So I'm going to talk a bit about these. Okay, first big lesson for me when I joined, which was about six years ago, seven years ago, is there was a lot of talk, reference to the charter, a lot of good spirit about being free and public and open and Martin Weller was a, and I've noticed this here but he's gone now, was a key advocate for doing this. But actually there was very, very little written down or stated beyond our public mission that was argued for or clearly accounted for how and why we're doing it and what benefits bring come back to the open university. And although people could talk about these things very few of them could be measured and critically in the last two or three years I think I know because I've had to stand in front of committees and argue the case that we proceed with what we're doing. Getting really clear KPIs that are absolutely understandable to your governance team was absolutely critical. And I've seen other emerging business models for MOOCs and for some of our partners on future learning and they tend to repeat some of these. One of which is get your brand out there, make sure people are aware of you and what you do and there is value to brand presence. The other is inquiries and there's a lot of myths about how many inquiries and actual registrations are created by this activity. I'll bust a little bit of those myths in a minute and show you what we actually do and what we achieve with this. That is the killer measure for what we do. That's actually the thing which brings in the business benefits on top of the social good that we're doing with free and public education. There are assets that we get from doing this. I won't dwell on that too much but I'm happy afterwards to talk about that. And actually there is income and I can talk a bit about that outside if you want over coffee. We actually do get income from being free. That may sound a little weird but for instance we acquire rights in a lot of things that we produce that we provide publicly and we can resell those materials in other contexts. In the end, the headline here is, my unit spends 1.5%, I don't think I'm supposed to give all the numbers away. My unit spends 1.5% of the university's turnover. We're a £400 million turnover organisation. I know those tangible business benefits massively exceed my budget. So the positive things we get back outstrip the cost of these activities significantly. Those are the tangible ones. There are a whole series of other intangible ones. Disruption, innovation, doing social good which we find harder to measure. But these all more than balance and put my unit in the black. OK. So what is it we actually do? We commission TV programmes with the BBC. I'll just display it a little bit. Give you a sense of some of the programmes we're making in the United Kingdom. Maybe turn the volume down a little bit now. So we put about 25 series out each year. We pay for these programmes. The BBC don't give them to us a gift. We co-fund these programmes with the BBC. The academics work on them with us. We won't put them out unless there's a call to action at the end of the programme. Every programme that goes out, as I say, about 25 series a year. Reaching about 250 million views inside the United Kingdom. Mainstream viewing, BBC One bangos a theory through to pain, pus and poison on BBC 4. More niche viewing. 250 million views of our brand and calls to individuals in the UK to come and do something because they've been inspired and interested by learning on the BBC. That call to action is a pointer to open learn, which is an indexed open 10 to 15,000 hours of free public content. No registration is required. Lesson number one. Actually the value of getting people to register and acquiring a bit of data from them proves not as valuable as just getting people in there in the first place. We do offer a registration service, but effectively anybody can just come and start looking at these 10,000 hours of content without giving an email address without registering with us. They can, and we're building more services that people get if they want to give us their email address. This creates about five and a half million visits to this site every year. For those that are tracking the numbers on MOOCs, that's about the equivalent of edX and Coursera and Udacity combined just in the United Kingdom. So a lot of people coming in. We provide free, frothy cosmetic items, videos, games and interactives. We open up the site of our VLE and we release some of our course units. In fact every qualification from the Open University, in fact every module from the Open University has at least one unit from a course on the site sitting inside the Moodle system that sits behind it. You can look at these without registering and critically every single page of Open Learn and nobody has ever complained about this since we installed it two or three years ago has an invitation to make an inquiry to become a student with the Open University if you want to go beyond the free service. So the killer statistics is five and a half million people coming in mostly because we don't require registration, mostly because we're openly indexed. 13% of them make some form of inquiry within a six month period about studying with the Open University. That's big enough for marketing to see this as a very valuable and important and powerful. We can also tell the kind of people they are, where they've come from, what they're interested in what they go on to do without registration because we can do that with cookies. If they register we get even more information from them. Most people think this is all caused by the BBC. In fact the majority of the traffic comes from Google and natural search. Another asset that we get here is because we have free public education. If you have free public education and you're a charity in the United Kingdom Google would give you a Google AdWord grant. You get half a million dollars from Google every year in advertising pushing us up the discovery rankings and bringing in the majority of our traffic to natural search because we're openly indexed. So no registrations, openly indexed and make sure every page points to your inquiry service. The other big lesson we've got is we realise that although Open Learn was becoming a major portal, a hub, a place to visit and Google and the BBC would bring people there if we got the engineering behind this right there was no reason to require people to come to us. We can go to them. The critical thing we've done in the last two or three months is in a sense to syndicate the content from Open Learn onto a whole series of other channels. So we now take that content and spit it back out into other places. This adds to the five and a half million people that come to Open Learn about another two million people on iTunes and about another two and a half million people on YouTube. This isn't just greater volume, this is also different demographics and fundamentally we've understood much more in the last two or three years it isn't just the volume, obviously it's where you are fishing. Now it's where you're fishing from a social perspective as well as from a business perspective. There is to be perfectly frank not much point from a social mission point of view putting your educational content on iTunes U. Most of iTunes U visitors are actually American undergraduates from Ivy League colleges topping up their teaching. It is not about new access to provision. YouTube however provides us with a completely different audience and a surprisingly own audience that hasn't even thought about going to university before and actually just by duplicating our content onto YouTube from iTunes U we doubled the number of visitors to the Open University. So we syndicate. We're syndicating our units of being go through a minor transform engine and get spat out onto Google Play. They also get spat out as ebooks onto iTunes U and in the last couple of months we're spitting our audio onto Audio Boo which is an openly indexed audio channel. So again big broadcasters like Channel 4 and BBC put a lot of their materials there and we're expecting to find new visitors there. Future Learn is one of the big MOOC engines. It's one of the UK's obviously Prime Movers and the OE is being deeply involved in making that happen and we're obviously building our own MOOCs and putting it there along with our 30 or so other partners but critically from my perspective is that content isn't just going to go to Future Learn. It's also going to come back to Open Learn and it's also going to be redistributed as ebooks. So most of our MOOCs that we stick on Future Learn will also start appearing over the next few months as interactive ebooks. The social component of them is going to have to be removed at a relatively low cost but we're effectively doubling our audience and very much significantly extending our reach by doing very simple bits of underlying engineering that transform an initial piece of content into multiple places of output. YouTube, as I say, is very, very important to us. It's perfectly clear from looking at the comments on the YouTube videos that we've got that it's bringing in a different audience and also showing the world that we're no longer kipotide academics turning up at BBC 2 one o'clock in the morning in front of a drunken audience talking about quantum mechanics but a slightly different flavour to the OE. The History of English in 10 Minutes Chapter 5, The English of Science or How to Speak with Gravity Before the 17th century, scientists weren't really recognised possibly because lab coats had yet to catch on but suddenly Britain was full of physicists. It was Robert Hook, Robert Boyle and even some people not called Robert like Isaac Newton. The Royal Society was formed out of the Invisible College after they put it down somewhere and couldn't find it again. At first they worked in Latin. After sitting through Newton's story about the Pomom falling to the terror from the Arbor for the umpteenth time, the bright sparks realised they all spoke English and they could transform our understanding of the universe much quicker by talking in their own language. But science was discovering things faster than they could name them. Words like acid, gravity, electricity and pendulum had to be invented just to stop their meetings turning into an endless game of charades. Like teenage boys, the scientists suddenly became aware of the human body coining new words like cardiac and tonsil, ovary and sternum. And the invention of penis and vagina made sex education classes a bit easier to follow though clitoris was still a source of confusion. OK, so a bit different to what we were doing on BBC 2 ten years ago it brought us a different audience, it's brought a different attitude to what the OU is, it's brought a new generation into the OU that don't remember the black and white TV programmes and talk about us in a different way. A critical thing about YouTube is obviously the audience that we're reaching for our social purposes and business interests. Actually YouTube's a very very powerful channel but there's another feature to that channel which is its social dimension and the fact that you can embed these materials and get bloggers or encourage bloggers to talk about you. So a quarter of a million people saw that within about three weeks of its release not because of natural search but because a couple of bloggers talked about it and said it was brilliant. They didn't see it on our site, they saw it on a British library site because the British library had picked it up and embedded it there. So other people are now doing our social and business PR for us and the content is doing it for itself. Okay, I'm going to just rush through the last few bits very quickly because I know we need to leave time for questions but the other critical thing gives enormous reassurance to your governance and management organisation if you can show them data. I have a team of 20 people, two of them, 10% of them only look at data. So I'm a content commissioning team but 10% of the team just look at data and they are too busy to be able to get their jobs done as effectively as they should. We look at data a lot and it helps tell us where people are coming from and which channels are working and how to tune our data. We've also got a much better understanding of the channels that we're working on and what those channels are delivering to us in terms of the features. So although open learning is still critically important as the place where people can register, where most people visit, some of these other channels bring other features and we're slowly learning to make better use of some of those features as more natural parts of that channel. I probably shouldn't have put out your zero up there because we haven't yet sorted the deal out but let's just say we're looking at other broadcasters in other regions to work with but I think although I was on holiday we did start broadcasting with Sky a couple of weeks ago on a new Shakespeare series. So a wide range of channels on which our content is now flowing. For those that do register with open learn and do give us their details we can use the open Moodle system we've got for these five and a half million visitors to deliver other services and you'll see those services. Up until now we've mostly just been a content portal delivering content. We're now going to start adding services including badging and certification and possibly April required prior learning opportunity over the next couple of years as an informal and free way of making an entry into the open university and maybe jumping some of those initial steps. So the badging system is going to be turned on next week I think and we'll have our first badged courses for employability being delivered over the next few months. I'll jump through the badging not just because Joe here is an annus here the other critical thing is we're cloning or we're reinventing a cloned version of open learn. Open learn at the moment is only available for open university content but we're aware that the engineering for badging for multiple format presentation for syndication is something that others who don't have our scale may benefit from and we're keen to share that where we can. So with the fantastic badging of the Scottish government we're effectively cloning open learn and some of its features but opening it so that other people can put their content in there as well. We're also building over the next two or three years with a lot of Scottish partners a whole series of capacity building tools and knowledge sets to help people understand about rights to help people understand about marketing and syndication and multiple format presentation as learning design in the open. I think over the next two or three months Anna will have the blog details and the Twitter feed I can't remember them off the top of my head it will be possible to follow that and if you want experiment by putting your own content here and seeing what you can do if you're not already doing it that's open learn works currently a bit of a mess but over the next few months will be massively improved. I think I should probably just leave that up as the place where if you're interested in the content ignoring the lessons that we've learnt and continue to learn that's where you'll find most of this content and I should stop there otherwise there won't be any time for questions. Can I be really specific and perhaps and ask what you're using for digital publishing and for asset management within the system? Asset management mostly internally still is with documentum internally which is not an open system, seat based license system Anna that's true isn't it? We're mostly documentum I think we have some other bits and pieces of homemade stuff to manage how we get stuff onto iTunes and onto YouTube making end boards, rendering the videos in the appropriate formats automatically at low cost we built one of those ourselves because there wasn't one at the time available but we're probably going to replace that with a proprietary system but documentum is our internal asset management system Hiya, it's Therese isn't it? Hi Therese from Lester, just wondering I think is the OU part of the open education consortium and if so how does that fit into the mix how do you see that and if not are you going to? Yeah we remember the consortium and we've been very bad not being as explicit about that as perhaps we should be and we're about to put the badge on to make that clear for those that are interested in open education as opposed to free education which is different, I mean open is a particular licence we absolutely have an issue with the licence and you will see that on open learn there is a mixture of creative commons non-commercial, share alike and non-creative commons and there is a very particular reason for that but there are two reasons, one of which is it's irrational we didn't think about it clearly enough as all these channels exploded and some got different rights regimes on them to others I choose hardly any creative commons open learn mostly creative commons same material, two different licences so we're fixing that over the autumn with a bolder public statement about what we're going to be doing with creative commons but we think there is a fundamental flaw should I say this publicly? I'm going to say this publicly I think there's a fundamental flaw in the business model as defined at the moment under what they mean by non-commercial I know the licence doesn't define non-commercial and that's part of the problem so we're about to make a statement about what we think we mean and we hope to share that agreement with other large players in the domain about what we all think non-commercial really means so that if they saw the OU and say MIT and a few other people all sign up to say we think non-commercial means this it might be a clear statement to everybody about how bold we're going to be if we think those rules are going to get broken we're not going to chase a little scout group that accidentally copies something but we are interested in the very large growth of aggregator engines who then monetise off the back of aggregated free content in a way that competes with the original the originators of that content and we're an originator and we have interest in long-term monetisation and we think that at the moment the licence doesn't protect us from that unless we tighten it up so we're about to supposedly when I return from this conference give people work in the wording for that licence because I think there's a problem there Cable Green doesn't agree with me and he is God in this world so I have to be very careful that we are tidying up what we mean by non-commercial