 to come and hear about blended learning essentials. And I think we have a number of speakers today and I'm not going to introduce each individual speaker, so we're gonna ask each speaker as they take their turn to introduce themselves. But the first I can introduce, and that is Professor Neil Morris from the University of Leeds, one of the lead minds behind this new development. So please put your hands together and a warm welcome for the entire team from the blended learning essentials course. Thank you. Great, well, as Marilyn says, thank you very much for coming to this session. We are really, really excited about this project and we hope to kind of convey that excitement and enthusiasm to you this afternoon. Role for this session is to introduce you to this project and to the course and then to spend as much time as we need to on questions from you and either as a collective or down at the front after we finish formally. So please interact with us after we finish presenting. The main focus of today is to introduce you to this project and I will introduce my colleagues as they come up. This is a very large collective effort that we're working on together. So the project is called blended learning essentials, getting started. It's a series of courses that are designed as massive open online courses for the vocational education and training sector. This is a very ambitious project that's been funded by the UFI Charitable Trust to run over the next two years to help support the vet sector, to embed and to make use of digital technologies to support learners and learners success. And today we want to, I guess, launch this course to the OAK conference and to seek your support for the project. So I'm just going to introduce the project and then I'll hand over to Diana Lorela, Professor of Learning Technologies at Institute of Education at University College who's the co-director on the project to talk through the course syllabus in more detail. So the first run of the first course is going to go live in November. We're running each course three times and there are two courses, one which is designed to introduce the main concepts of blended learning to people who have either never used it before or who are beginners in blended learning. And the second course is intended to give people more opportunity to reflect and to embed their practice into their learners' activities and to form communities of practice with other practitioners across the sector and indeed beyond. So the two courses together are intended for the whole of the vocational education and training sector, which if you work in that sector will know is a very broad and far-reaching and all-encompassing sector. It has teachers, trainers, skills providers, adult and community learners, workplace learners and the teachers and trainers in that sector have very varying demands and needs and have very, very, as I'm starting to learn, scarce time and I thought things were hard in HE but we're starting to understand some of the pressures in the vet sector on working on this project. So this project is intended to help. That was Diana and I's main conception was to help teachers to help their learners to get better success with scarce resources making effective use of digital technology. And hopefully as you'll know, Diana Laurelard is one of the world's experts in digital technology so it is an absolute coup for me and for the whole team to be able to work with her and to have her expertise to support the vocational and educational training sector with this project. So you can sign up for this course. Now it is live for sign up and we have just under 4,000 people signed up already. It went live about two, three weeks ago. So we've already got a really good cohort of people who are telling us about their expectations on the sign up page and describing their kind of needs and their work environment. So we'd encourage you immediately to sign up for the course and to share it with your colleagues and friends by Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and help us to grow this community of learners who are gonna work on this course together. So the blended learning essentials courses will run on the FutureLearn platform. You may or may not be familiar with FutureLearn but I'll just introduce it to you for those that are not. FutureLearn is a massive open online course platform that's funded entirely by the Open University. It has around 40 university partners from all around the world who are putting out courses on the platform on a daily basis. The University of Leeds and UCL are both partners of FutureLearn and we're working with FutureLearn on this project to deliver these courses. The University of Leeds has a lot of experience of delivering courses on the FutureLearn platform. We've done around 10 over the last couple of years. We were one of the founding partners of FutureLearn. So we are very familiar with the way that the platform works and it's the digital learning team at the University of Leeds that are leading the course design aspect for this project. FutureLearn is a social learning platform. It's been designed with a constructivist pedagogy which means that it's all about social learning. It's all about community. It's all about putting the learners at the front of their learning. It's a balance between teacher input and learning input but what's very good about the FutureLearn platform is that comments and discussion are absolutely embedded with all of the content so it's not separate content and conversation and when you see the platform, I think you'll agree it's a very easy to use, easy to navigate and very friendly learning environment. FutureLearn has over 2 million people registered on its platform and they've run courses as large as 420,000 people on individual courses. So they are used to scale and they understand the challenges of large groups of learners working together. Their platform is entirely mobile. It was designed for mobile. It's the first and it works seamlessly on desktop PCs, tablet devices and indeed smartphones. So all content, all interactions, all activity will work just as well on your iPhone as they will on your desktop computer which makes mobile learning and learning on the go actually possible and entirely a suitable learning experience. So this course, the first course that we'll be running is five weeks long but it's been designed to fit around people's everyday lives. There's a maximum of four hours of learning time per week which is we consider from our experience to be appropriate for professionals to be able to fit in maybe half an hour over a lunch break, half an hour in evening and an hour on a Saturday morning with coffee perhaps and this has worked very well with courses that we've run in the past. The course has certification available and accreditation which Marin will talk about at the end of the course. So just to acknowledge the very large group of people and organizations that are involved with this project, the project is led by University of Leeds and University College London Institute of Education with support from ALT and FutureLearn. As I said, it's funded by the UFI Charitable Trust and we have, I'm not going to read all these project partners out but a large group of project partners working with us and their main role, apart from Evans Wolf Media who are doing the production for us, the role of the rest of the project partners is to help us make sure that the course meets the needs of that sector. So we have representative organizations from all aspects of the sector and we are working with them all very closely to source case studies and content and to check the content and the curriculum with them at every single stage to make sure that what we're doing and what we're saying and what we're preparing and proposing is in line with the requirements of teachers and trainers in this sector. So we are incredibly grateful to all of our project partners for the support that they're giving us during this project. So I'm just going to show you just a brief extract of the course trailer. You can watch the whole thing on the FutureLearn platform at your leisure. Why is there such interest now in using learning technologies? Well, this course will explain that whatever your role in vocational education and training. The course is about blended learning which means using the most appropriate learning technologies alongside our usual teaching methods. We'll be giving you practical support and advice on making the best use of technology for your learners. To help you answer questions such as which technology should I use in my context and does learning technology really help to improve learners' success? I believe it gives teachers the tools that they need to develop their digital technological skills. It gives them the opportunity to be ahead of their learners and engage them more in their lessons. Okay, as I say, you can watch the rest on the FutureLearn website. So now let me ask Diana to come up and continue the presentation and give more insight into the structure of the course. Thank you. You look a little tebbed. Thank you. Thank you very much for a very exciting adventure for us and I'm enormously grateful to having the University of Leeds team who've got a lot of experience with running MOOCs on the FutureLearn platform. And we were incredibly fortunate to persuade five further education colleges to join us in this who have a lot of experience in actually making blended learning happen in the FE sector. And on top of that, we have NAIS which covers the adult and community learning area as well as the Association of Employment and Learning Providers who have the experience of work-based learning. So as Neil said, it's an incredibly diverse sector and we're aware all the time of this rich mix of different kinds of subject areas and disciplines and ways of teaching and learning as well as the different kinds of organizations that we've got to contend with. And on top of that, a huge range of expertise because we do have people whom we hear from. We've got invited speakers from the sector who are telling us in this conference about what they've done in blended learning. So that expertise we need to harness but we've got to think also at the other end of the people who haven't got engaged with technology and who might be resistant to it, who find it difficult, who find it somewhat awesome to even think about whether they could use it in their own teaching. So it is a very wide range and as Neil said, having a kind of constructivist approach which involves social learning is very important in a professional development context because they know more than we do actually about what they need to be doing with technology in their teaching and learning. So we've got to be able to learn from them as well. So all of that feedback that we get and their contributions in the way that we set the course up are going to be very important. So the course objectives overall and this is not just the learning objectives within the course, but really what the course is trying to do as a whole is to enable everybody in this sector, all the teachers and trainers and mentors and support staff to become a digital practitioner as appropriate to whatever their role is. So not being afraid of the technology, embracing the technology, ultimately becoming the people who are indignant about the fact that technology doesn't do enough and demanding more. That's the kind of, what it really means to be a digital practitioner in education, I think. So we want to be able to engage teachers and trainers. So it's wonderful to have this opportunity at the conference to proselytize about this, promote it to you and ask for your help in promoting it to others. It's designed for the vet sector, for vocational education and training, but as everyone at this conference is always aware, every year, the issues that we address in trying to make the best of new technology are the same across all sectors. Sectors differ in the way in which we implement and we form policy in the way that we do professional development, but what it takes to use technology well in the context of education is the same everywhere. So although it's targeted on further education, I feel sure that we'll also be attracting people from higher education and indeed from school education as well. And that's fine because we learn from each other and we very frequently borrow from each other. So I think that will only enrich the course. We want a good uptake and it's not gonna be good enough for us to say, well, there's always a drop-off in MOOCs and people join enthusiastically and then tail off. We can't afford that. They've gotta be sustained throughout the MOOC because everything we're talking about is not that much time, five weeks for the first course, four hours a week. That's not an enormous amount of time to be spending on such a rich area and difficult area to understand. So we've gotta keep them in and we've got to make sure that it's gonna work for them in whatever they're doing in their teaching and learning as well. So trying to link it through to their current practices is part of the way in which we do that. Focus on quality and what the quality frameworks are telling us we need to do, obviously, flexibility of delivery of the course itself because it's wholly online. You can study asynchronously. You can study all four hours of your week all at once or throughout the week and so on. And we want vocational teachers to be able to prepare their learners for work and all of the policy vision insofar as there is policy vision in this area is about enabling the workforce to be fully trained for the 21st century. So being able to teach through technology enables that workforce to make sure that their students are not just digitally literate with respect to the kind of technology they happen to want to use but digitally literate with respect to how you use it in order to inform your professional life in order to make yourself a better practitioner in whatever field you go into. And there isn't a single field which is untouched by technology after all. Sustaining the optimal use of learning technology throughout the sector, again, there's no part of the sector which is untouched by the technology. And we're looking for optimal use. We're not just doing technology for the sake of it. It's what do you really want to do and how can the technology help? And fostering that sustainable community of professional practice. Now this is one of the really exciting things about MOOCs, I think, because as Neil pointed out, this material is going to be there for the five weeks that people are studying but it's going to stay there. If you've registered on the course, you can get back to it. And that means that you can stay in those groups. You can stay arguing that point. You can stay talking with other colleagues and peers about, so what is the best way to do this? And I've just been trying this out and actually I've made a complete mess about what did you do and so on. That's how we learn. That's how any area builds knowledge and we have so much knowledge to build in how best to use the technologies. And it keeps having to be renewed because the technologies keep changing. So it's never going to go away. This issue of how we keep sustaining our building of knowledge for supporting our students as well as possible. So the five week course will then be, which begins at the beginning of November, will then be followed by the second part of the course which begins in February. And I'll come on to that. This is the first course, five weeks. Each week is organized in much the same sort of way. There's an introduction to it. Three activities generally speaking and then a summary and looking forward to where we go next. The first week is making the assumption that people coming to the course may not necessarily know everything there is to know about why we should be doing this at all. So looking at what's the point of blended learning? Why should we be thinking about it is a good way to begin. And then it takes people through examples and exemplars and the videos are based as much as we can on case studies of what's actually happening out there in the sector. So going out and filming blended learning as it happens, hearing the stories of the teachers, the learners, the managers, the leaders and their support people in their college or workplace, wherever they are. So that's the kind of videos we have in there. And then the second week gets into the principles of how we think about it and your own readiness and your environment's readiness for blended learning. Then getting down to the different kinds of systems and tools and gadgets and websites and apps and all kinds of things, just a brief illustration of the kinds of things which are out there already, which people are using and you too can use because they're free and your learners are probably using them already. Then getting down to designing not only the learning but also thinking about assessment and feedback because this could be transformational after all. Assessment is so difficult, so time consuming, so labor intensive, but there are ways in which the technology can support the teacher in gearing, obtaining a much better gearing ratio for the time that they put in to assessment. So looking at some of those things is going to be important too. And then teaching for your learners' futures, developing your learners' digital literacy, the things which are going to make a difference to them in the workplace. Just to give you a brief example of the kind of thing we'd be doing, this is a filmed case study from one of the colleges, from one of the workplace learning environments. I observe as a video and recording app available for Apple and Android devices which uses the video and recording elements within the tablet or device. What's quite unique about it is when you're making a recording, your actual qualification criteria are embedded within the app. It allows you to create a full observation of a student highlighting everything they've achieved throughout that period. I've also worked perfectly for evidence when your external verifiers come out from your morning bodies to check to make sure everything's okay. The students we work with on our programmes are 16 to 18 year olds that are studying the sports qualification so that the mobile learning or the e-learning even enables them to actually access the course materials in a fun and interactive way. They like to come back and they can actually see themselves playing the sport on the tablet. So for them it's a very visual tool. It shows them actually demonstrating tasks, two criteria in their qualification instead of just writing about it afterwards. That's a very nice example of how the technology supports the assessment in a much more efficient way for those tutors than would have been possible without it. So the kinds of course materials and activities there are on the future learning platform there will be steps that you work through, participants work through, telling you how much time each one is likely to take. There'll be a task and a description of that task and what you're asked to do with that task whether you then engage in a forum discussion with your colleagues. For many of these activities there will be introducing new technologies and tools to use. And of course to go thoroughly into all of them would take an enormous amount of time but by providing a crib sheet on each one you don't have to do it right there and then you can always come back to it and see so what was that, how might I use that, how have other people used that. And the crib sheets include examples of how that particular tool has been used by people in the sector already. And then it tells you how far through you are so you can pace yourself as you go through the materials on the course. So now I'd like to introduce Rachel Chanan. We're lucky that she's been able to get to the conference today because Rachel represents all of our five colleges. So Rachel if you'd like to come up and tell us about the FE College point of view on this and your role in it. No pressure, all five colleges. Okay so I'm just here very quickly to say how we think this course is so important for the FE sector and the issues that the FE sector are having and how this can impact positively on those. So it would be no surprise to anybody who's in FE that our physical resources are depleting rapidly and we have to work smarter. We have to make the best of what we've got and blended learning is the answer. Actually it's the answer to any question. But that's the way we need to get our staff up skilled so that they can appreciate the opportunities that are there for them. It doesn't mean to say that there isn't some wonderful stuff already happening in FE but as a sector we're really quite bad at sharing. We tend just to get on with it and a little bit of that is because of our workload. If you're not in FE our teachers teach about 840 hours a year which is a slightly different to Haiti. So the time that they have to do extra study or learn about extra things is not there. So this course is really important because of the idea that Diana said about the fact that you've signed up for the five weeks but actually the course is there for after. So they can dip in and dip out as they feel that they need to and as they need some more support. So, but in FE, as I said in my previous presentation actually if anybody was there, FE is all about impact. Actually, my senior sec would say what is the impact of our staff going on here? Our staff would say what is the impact of me undertaking this course? So, I can answer that. It's so that they can start to understand the opportunities that blended learning will give them that they can learn by these excellent case studies that are going to be in here and it isn't case studies that are in a different sector. It isn't case studies that aren't applicable to them. It is real people in real colleges doing the things that they want to do. So they can start to build those networks, start sharing with each other, start having those professional dialogues with each other that can be maintained and those networks can carry on afterwards. It will help them to gain confidence in what they do to almost, and it's to be hoped that some of the case studies may be of things going wrong, actually, because that's the best way to learn. And there's a real comfort in the fact that not everybody gets it right first time. And obviously for staff, the impact is for learners because of the experience that they can give learners and the learners can carry forward into their roles. But for staff, it's about increasing their digital literacy as well. So for FE, this is a really important course. Our college has addressed it by putting it into our formal annual CPD offer. So all our staff will be signing on, we'll be logging in, and that'll be part of our in-house professional dialogue with all those tutors to see how they got on and what they found from that as well. Great, thank you very much, Rachel. So next, let me introduce Maron, who needs no introduction, who's going to talk about some of the accreditation options that come with this course. It's always nice to think that everybody knows your name, but I'm hoping to tell you about some of the things we're doing with this course that will really make a difference for practitioners across vocational education and training, because one of the key issues we've come up against in the last 20 years is that, you know, very time-pressured in FE, and you really need to try and align whatever it is you're doing to support the workforce with the deliverables that that workforce has. So whether it's, you know, being, getting QTLS, whether it's getting offset inspections through, whether it's learner success rates, we do need to try and make sure that what comes out of this course, what those participants gain, really translates directly into impact into their work place themselves and onto learner success. So one of the ways in which we're doing this, which Neil's already mentioned and Diana's referred to, is accreditation options. And given that we're really aiming this course at people who are starting from scratch to quite proficient practitioners, it's very difficult to find a one-size-fits-all accreditation model. So obviously one of the things that we're working with is all the partner organizations, which includes, as well as those already mentioned, also the Tinder Foundation, the Association of Colleges, the Education and Training Foundation, and wider partners across the sector, because those organizations are the owners or the guardians of the frameworks that really shape what's happening in FE in terms of regulations and funding. One of the things we're doing as well is trying to figure out how we can get meaningful accreditation beyond the course, so you might be able to get a participant certificate from FutureLearn, which will be maybe a new form of accreditation for many participants. You'll also be able to, if you volunteer as a digital champion, and this is a little recruitment advert for those of you in the audience who are feeling like you wanna do more for us, so you can become a champion and participate in this course, helping others along, in which case we'll give you very exciting, open badges. But also for those of the participants who are more interested in professional development in learning technology, we're going to map the course on a route to Seamold, our Association for Learning Technology Accreditation Scheme, and the hope is really that this will be one of the options, together with mappings against QTLS, for example, that we're going to give participants to translate what they're learning online into day-to-day success in their workplaces and for providers. We're also hoping to get senior management and governors involved so they can have a think about what their in-house provision for CPD for their staff can be contributing to overall in providers sort of day-to-day business models and how they can support success and progress scaling up. I think Liam from OCR earlier gave a really exciting example of why they're using blended assessment methods, and he said, well, we have a workforce who work night shifts, you're not gonna get them into the classroom during daylight hours, we do this blended approach to do CPD at night. It was very difficult to get people into colleges, and I think this is one of the examples of what Diana and Neil said earlier about digital no longer being an option, but a must-have, and hopefully our accreditation options will develop to really help people gain that must-have skill and the recognition for it. For those of you, particularly who are coming from a cross-sector, maybe delivering HE in FE, or maybe also HE, I mean, this course is developed for the vet sector, but if you want to join in anyhow, I'm sure you're very welcome. CMOS also mapped against the UK PSF, and that's one of the other frameworks we are exploring to deliver, so that we can really do some joining up and sharing between the different sectors, because as Diana pointed out, what works really well in one sector might also work very well in another context. And with that, I'd like to say thank you and hand back to Diana. Okay, thanks, Maron. I mentioned that course one lasts for five weeks at around four hours a week, and when we were planning the course, we felt that, you know, how do you do blended learning, everything that people are going to need to know, and thought we wanted 10 weeks or something, but that wasn't realistic. We decided in the end to split it all into two parts, so the first part is five weeks, and then the following part for course two is thinking about, you've been focusing on what you're going to, how blended learning could work for you, now what does it really mean to be better than practice, and that's where you so frequently run up against the difficulties of the context within which you work, the particular institutional factors which make it difficult. So there is something in the second course about which relates to what leaders and governors and managers in the sector might also be interested in, but not forgetting that there will be people who are teaching practitioners who've got to work within that context. So if we can engage every single teacher in thinking about what your managers need as well, how you can support them, what you should be asking them for, how you talk to your IT people because they're overworked and underfunded as well, well what kind of a conversation can you have with them to help you in what you're trying to do with your own learners, so that everybody is engaged in trying to make the best of whatever situation they're in. So the three weeks of the second course are about, first of all, learning from experience, how we actually make sure that we get the impact that Rachel was talking about because these systems, the students are all working digitally, those systems are recording what they're doing, there is data there, we can make use of that, we can learn what the students are doing, what works and what doesn't work. So getting people to think about that a bit is important in that first week, so that's one kind of activity there. And then what can technology do for the most difficult challenges is what we have to think about if we're trying to persuade managers, leaders, institutional directors and so on, this is something we've really got to get into now. But there's no point in just saying we're doing it because everybody else is or we don't want to be left behind, there's only any point if it's going to solve the problems we know we've got. So is our problem recruitment, is our problem dropout, is our problem linking to what the local employers actually want and we've got to realign our curriculum, whatever the problem is, technology can help. So thinking about some of the most difficult challenges that we've got in this sector and what technology can do to help might be a more productive way of going about planning what we do than if we just pitch in for the sake of it. So reaching more learners more flexibly is one kind of thing we're looking at, supporting independent learning because obviously it's a wonderful technology for doing that. Reducing the costs of innovation. So reducing the cost of innovation means this is expensive, we've got to think again, we've got to take time up front to plan and design what we're doing. How do we ameliorate the costs of doing that? The more we share and collaborate, the more we can work together and build on what other people do, then the lower that upfront cost of getting started. So the course is trying to provide that basis of getting started so you don't have to reinvent it all for yourself. And then creating the community that can build on that and work together more. And that's what the final week then comes around to, is thinking about those challenges, matching the innovation to the needs of your organization, supporting your colleagues, and you may be quite low down the hierarchy, but there's still an enormous amount you can do to persuade and help. And finally, just the course itself has to operate in a reasonably blended way. It is entirely online, but we have to remember that we're trying to persuade people to come into this wholly online course who are not necessarily technology oriented. We've got to think about the hard to reach. So that's why the digital champions are so important. Because if we can get digital champions running something in a local college to say, here's a lunchtime session about this new course, it's free, it's open to everybody, go and have a look, they might persuade those hardest to reach people to come into it. So one of the things we do here is to provide the kind of toolkit that you might need if you wanted to run such a lunchtime session. So a few chunks of videos and photos, a couple of bits of case study, just give people a flavor of what it's about, how it would work, what it's like to be engaged in it. Maybe that's another way that we can get the hardest to reach engaged. So I think that's everything. We would like to really hear from you, your comments, questions, challenges. And Marin is gonna be handing out some actual printed materials which tell you something about what the course is. Gives you the URL, the Twitter hashtag and so on, so that, and there will be more of these available on the alt-stand outside. If all of the team could come up, Rachel, we prize you from your seat. I will be up here so that we can all attempt to answer questions, take your comments. I have a mic, can I ask a question? Yeah, I'm here. Okay, Alistair Clarke, I work in mainly in adult education. I think this is fabulous. I think everybody's to be congratulated for both the vision and putting this together. I've got a very practical question, having fumbled my ways for a future-learn course before, and I think it's really important to be able to understand what the course is and my ways for a future-learn course before, and being completely bogged down in the forum. It was a course on ecology, and I got linked in with some creationists, and the discussion was completely unmanaged. It's a big challenge, but you've actually specifically said that there'll be a constructivist approach within the course. So I'd be very interested to know what your thoughts are on managing forum discussions and possibly creating groups or offering people the chance to create groups. Yeah, thank you. That's a very valuable question, and I can't answer it fully because I think we're still learning, so future-learn took a very specific position on the way that they were going to do their discussion forums, which they don't even call them discussion forums. They are linked to all of the content, and they work on this kind of idea of the water cooler, and they're not expected that you would read all of the posts in any discussion, but that you would step into a discussion as it's happening and interact with a number of people as they are there, and then perhaps walk away and come back later. So that does require some difference in thought for people who are familiar with discussion forums. But the way that leads as approach future-learn discussions in the past is to try to make them very focused around a particular question, so that people are answering a single question, and that discussion is around a single topic. So discussion forums, in my experience, have failed before because they're just too wide-ranging, too broad, and it's too hard to follow the thread of the conversation. So all of the steps are now in this course will have a very focused call to action for the discussion that will say, now that you've seen this case study, think about how this case study will work in your practice, what might be the barriers, how might it work, what are the technical challenges, and we would hope the discussion would be focused around that kind of conversation. I hope that helps Diana might want to add to that. Yeah, no, let's move on to the next. Hi, John Kerr from the University of Glasgow. Diana, at the beginning you said, and very importantly, about trying to bring the cohort through all the weeks because of the massive drop-out rates. The MOOCs that we have produced, some people said they only turned up for a week, too, because that was the topic that they were most interested in, which is fair enough. It's more opt-in rather than dropped out to try and flip the statistics in your favour. For this course, would you still see as a success if a lot of people still dropped out at various MOOC drop-out points that are sort of consistent with all other courses? Would it still be a success? Sorry, I didn't quite understand the question. So the question was, if you can't bring everyone through, I think everyone is searching for that to bring that massive cohort through as a group, but would it still be a success if we still saw the drop-out patterns that all MOOCs are still receiving? These are grown-ups. They know what they need from the course, and many people joining it will be experts, actually. We know that already from the people who said they're joining. There's no question that coming in and out of the course is absolutely fine. I'd be very keen. If you do manage to pull everyone through together, then your secret should be shared. Yeah, but I think one of the secrets... I mean, we found this on a MOOC that we did previously on ICT for primary education, and there were much better retention rates, but I think it's because it's such a homogeneous cohort who really do get a lot from each other. It's very different from these massive courses where anybody can come in, and you do get things going all over the place. I don't know what the creationist equivalent is for our field, probably Luddites or something. We could get bogged down somewhere, but you have much better focus discussions, and they do hang in there. So we might... Hi, I've done a future-learn MOOC before, and it was a fantastic experience. I was just wondering, when you designed the course, did you take into account the likely interest from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? I've been working with ACL and work-based learning in Wales for many years, and I think they're going to be very excited about this. So I was wondering how England-centric it was. Well, it's a MOOC. It's open. It's not going to be just Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland. But given that it's a MOOC, we've got a big worry about how relevant it's going to be to the thousands of people who are in it, because they will come from diversity of countries, countries where they don't even have a debt sector, or they have a sort of an approximation to it. So we've got that kind of problem, and the best that we can do is rest on the fact that we're all in the same kind of problem area. It doesn't matter where I go in the world, everybody's got the same problem, whether it's schools, universities, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, whatever kind of culture we're in, we've all got the same kinds of issues with respect to how we use this. It's not going on too, really. But we've got a Scottish College involved. So we've got Scotland covered. We've got lots of Welsh people engaged who are very interested. We've got people in Ireland who are coming into the course that we know about. There's going to be networks there, too. So I hope we've got it covered. It's a challenge, certainly. That's one up there. Hilary Griffiths from the University of Bristol. One of your course objectives is to foster a sustainable community. Can you say a little bit more about how you might do that? Maybe Maren would normally answer that. So a lot of it is about... Well, we've got the digital champions. So the slide up there now is about starting that community of people who are in the sector and please join us from Wales to start to gather that intelligence. The digital champions will work both before the course and during the course and hopefully after the course to embed it into practice. And also, the fact that there are two courses running sequentially will hopefully initiate a sustainable community. So we would expect cohorts to move from one course to the other. And of course, because the courses are running multiple times, people may say, well, I've done course one now. I'm going to wait for a couple of times to do course two. That will hopefully start to build up a community of people who are interested in this. And beyond that, I don't know if we thought maybe Maren might want to add more, yeah. I think one of the key issues with sustaining communities beyond the course is that there's usually kind of limited activity going on and people are kind of dropping in, dropping out. But one of the strategies that we have in place as a consortium is obviously involving a lot of the existing communities from the partner organizations. Whether it be NIAS, the Association of Colleges, the Tinder Foundation, or other organizations. We have a lot of existing communities that are going to take part. So what we're really hoping is that we'll be able to incorporate the course and the community that will be creating with it into some of the existing networks to strengthen them. Because I think what we're very realistic about is that this course has to reach far beyond the sort of easy-to-convert ad-tech enthusiasts who are going to sign up to the course anyway. This course is not really primarily for them. They're very welcome. Everybody's welcome to join in. But it's for those people who are hard to reach. And that's one of the ways in which we're hoping to engage face-to-face as well. Why are the local champions? Why are the membership organizations? Because I don't think anybody's ever tried to do what we're trying to do here. And I don't think we're daunted by the challenge, but I don't think we're underestimating it either. So I'm building a sustainable community that will transform the FE system all together is our aim. Yes, tomorrow at the world. That's right. Well, domination next. Could it race heavily? I don't know if this question would put anyone on the spot, but I'm just wondering if any of the materials are planning to be CC-licensed. Yes, because I'd like to possibly use some of those crib sheets. That's part of the value. I mean, that's one of the ways in which it's sustainable is that you can reuse those. And so people can recreate their own courses using some of those assets which are in the course. And that's how you get that sort of viral extension of what you're doing within any one of these courses. I mean, we've seen that happen. No, absolutely. The crib sheets, and I think there are around 20 of them, will form a really nice kind of package that anyone can take, and they are licensed creative commons. They'll be freely available beyond the course. They'll be on a video repository that people can dip into outside of the course. So yeah, we want this to be as open as possible. And UFI, which is the Charitable Trust funding this, that's their mission, is to transform the way the sector uses technology and to achieve learner success as a result. So they'll be absolutely delighted if you steal everything that they do. Do you want to say something about the tools that we're hoping to use examples of tools that anybody can use as well? Yeah, so just alongside the case studies, there will be kind of walkthroughs and demonstrations of how tools have been used in particular sectors. So there is quite a rich array of materials beyond the course that will help. And again, that will be openly available. Okay, so how... So I already said that we're putting it onto our formal CPD offer. But there are different ways that we can use it. We can encourage people. We can use it as a flip learning approach, actually. Can't we? Because isn't that just an excellent way going in, having a look at the videos, talking to other people in different colleges and bringing all that back and that professional dialogue happening in our classroom? Maybe with the digital champion there as well. And that is... When the discussion about the digital champ, that is the way that FE is going to sustain this because having that person within the college to support the staff is really important. They won't feel alone online, but sometimes when they go back into practice, it's there that they might feel a little bit lonely and to have that voice next to them is going to make a real impact. So... Okay. Oh! Pressure. So really, so that's how we're going to use it. We're going to encourage people to go in. We're going to not dictate how many hours they have to do or how many weeks they have to do. It might well be that they go in and they do what is necessary for them, but then it's the drawing out of that. So it's not just a one-stop. They just go in and then the learning finishes. It's about how we draw that out afterwards. Okay. Thank you. There was a question. Hi. Reksir Sun from Florium. In terms of the accreditation, it seems to be entirely focused on people that are teaching. What about staff like myself who are never in the classroom with the students, but we work on the back end of the courses and the technology. The course itself would be quite interesting, but there doesn't seem to be a path for any accreditation for non-teaching staff. What's wrong for you, Mara? Yeah, to answer your question. So all of our accreditation options are actually suitable for teaching and non-teaching staff. But you're absolutely right that it's more challenging to find sort of very valuable accreditation options. So one of the things we're doing is looking at how the course can count towards formal CPD. So a lot of senior staff or managerial staff or technical staff obviously still need to do CPD. So that's one of the ways we're looking at. But also I don't think the kind of options that I talked about are kind of the beyond and end all of our accreditation and we're very much looking for feedback via a number of surveys before, during and after the course, from our participants and we're very much looking to listen and see if we get a lot of people who are saying, oh, I'd really like an accreditation that leads to X or Y body framework and that that's something we're really keen to hear about. But I think a lot of the course materials are really looking to try and engage people whether you're in the classroom or not and hoping to give enough to go on depending on which role you're coming into it, which side you're coming from. So some of the example we talked about today were very much sort of classroom facing, Lorna facing roles and we're hoping very much to involve governors, managers, but also staff at all levels of different provision. And I think the first course is going to guide us a little bit in how that's going to develop. So a bit of work in progress there I think. But if you have any feedback, any ideas for us we're here to listen all day today. Do we have any more questions? Yeah, one over there. So I'm Mahabali from the American University in Cairo and Diana I've been in love with your work for like 12 years so I'm really honoured to be here. So I missed a small part of the presentation at the beginning so I'm sorry if you've already explained that but if your goal is to have a continuous community of people beyond, I don't understand really why you're using FutureLearn and if your material is creative commons licenses and so on, why are you doing it inside FutureLearn rather than openly, completely openly, like without login or anything? Well FutureLearn is completely open. But you have to login to get in. So I was just wondering if the material is also available in some other way that's easy to access without having to go through the actual... Some things may well be available, for example, on YouTube some of it would be, although that's of course not completely open in some countries so you can always have a kind of problem. FutureLearn is that we can make our steps open and then people go in. Without even telling us anything. Yeah, so I'm just saying that FutureLearn allows open steps so we're going to maybe make our steps open and that will stop that problem and in fact it will potentially make it more open than putting stuff on YouTube. I think the answer to the question is slightly more fundamental. For me the reason we're doing in FutureLearn is because it's a course and we want people to work together synchronously and go through it as a collective and build up a community. If we were just to put the resources out onto the web as many people do and valuably do, they don't have that kind of course and that community feel about them so I don't think the FutureLearn login is much of a barrier to many people. We both. We are releasing some resources outside of the course. Some will be out there, yes. But I mean it's a course that's really important and that's a to govern, that's a curated orchestrated process of activity. Okay. So the marines finger has gone up again as it does. So let me thank you all very much for coming and for your questions and for community. We're here at the front so if you want to come down and chat then that's great but again thank you all very much for coming. Please get in touch. Thank you.