 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 So we've got Don's talk on here. Yes Don's talk is all on there. I haven't started it yet. We're mirrored, aren't we? So we don't want to start it until we're ready to go. No, and it's just a folder on the desktop called MOOC event in which it is. You can minimise this to see. But I can do that while you introduce him if you like. Okay MOOC event, okay. And it's just his presentation on there. So is that alright? Great, in that case, shall we get started? Over to you. Good morning and a little bit later to me. Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention and ask you to take a seat. My name is Myron Defile. I'm the Chief Executive of the Association for Learning Technology. And I've got the privilege to have the first welcome this morning. I'm going to very shortly hand you over to Professor Hugh Davies. But before then, I'd just like to say a very warm welcome to you all. This is the first event of the MOOC special interest group which was only launched in early September at our annual conference. And we're very excited to see such a high profile of speakers. I think there's going to be a lot of activity on social media where there are digit champs, particularly in the corner of there. If you want to wave, hello, digit champs. And so lots of treating will be going on. I think also on Weibo in Chinese. So in case English isn't your first language when you prefer Chinese, you can still follow the event. I think this is the first. Also, I would like to thank the University of Southampton, and particularly Don Nuttbyn, for hosting us so kindly here today. And I'd also like to thank Fiona Sronbridge and her fellow officers at the MOOC for organizing this event, which has been pretty much like a dream. I hope the day itself is going to go as well as the run-up. But now, one more further announcement, which is housekeeping. We have had a fire drill already this morning. That was a test. In case there is another fire drill, that will not be a test. And I'd like to point out that the nearest fire exit is here. So please follow the evacuation signs. And we'll also be welcome to help you in case of emergency. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Professor Hugh Daly, Director of Site, the Centre for Innovation for Technology in Learning. Technology is an education, don't you? Sorry. Long time. But Hugh will introduce today our speakers. Thank you very much. Oh, our speaker as well. Right, OK. Hello everyone. I'm welcome. Actually, the person who's organized all this is Fiona, who's just tried to escape at the back there. And in an hideous example of a reverse delegation, she asked me to chair this morning. So here I am. And it's going to be my privilege to introduce Don Nuttbyn, who is Vice Chancellor at Southampton University of Southampton. And the bio is all in there. You may spot a touch of the Australian accent from this time in Australia. But I think the thing I'd like to say about Don is that when the movement started getting going, Don enthusiastically embraced this and said to us, come on, we can embrace this as a university. There was a certain amount of provincial cynicism, but then he held a meeting to talk to people about it. And we chose a reasonably large lecture theatre. It was packed with people who thought it would be fun to do a move. And that enthusiasm has really invaded the university since. And that's been a really good part about working on moves. It's been an opportunity for us to really embrace our online education in a way that we've been able to before. So without it, I will ask Don to come to the podium and present to us your... Oh, it's up, yes. Can I use the microphone? Can I just sit and stand? Oh, I probably prefer to stand, actually. That appears to be... Oh, right. Thank you. Doesn't need to be working. Right. Well, good morning. I should say welcome to the University of Manhattan. Seeking someone who spent 20 years in Australia, I can say this is one of our sunnier, brighter days. The weather's always lovely here. I'm sure the sun will be shining before we finish this morning's session. There's a real pleasure to be with you this morning. As Hugh said, I've been fascinated by what he referred to as the MOOC movement. It feels like that occasionally. In fact, my first conversations about MOOCs were probably about 18 months ago when I spent some concentrated time in the company of the Vice Chancellor of the Urban University, Martin Bean, who introduced me to the language of MOOCs and shared with me his enthusiastic understanding of their great potential, both as a force in education and as a disruptive force in education. From those conversations that say not so long ago, has emerged Martin's grand idea for future learn. We'll be hearing more about that later. And an enthusiastic group of British universities who have teamed up with future learn to launch in just the last few weeks the UK's first MOOCs. Now, I'm going to offer you a perspective. If you read my bio, I have absolutely no background in this at all. My perspective is that of the University Vice Chancellor interested in the education of our students and the future of the University and the place that MOOCs might have in that future. So I've posed a question that's been put to me, certainly as a statement at several times over the last year. Is this the end of the campus or as a statement, this is the end of the campus university? I'm also sure, as you'll hear from my presentation this morning, but it is a perfectly valid question to ask. So this is a photo taken just out front of the building we're currently in. There's certain symbolism attached to this, which I will refer to a bit later, but the two buildings you can see are always classic red brick library housing a fantastic collection of books. A few of the periodicals these days are fantastic special collections. It contains all the papers of the Duke of Wellington and Lorde Parsden. Most recently, we've inherited in our patent papers a fantastic learning resource at the heart of the university. All the left, as you see it, our newest building opened for use just two years ago. It's a fantastic life sciences building home to our biological sciences, medical sciences, and increasingly home to some pretty fantastic interdisciplinary research and learning. I chose the picture, as I said, for quite symbolic reasons, which I will come back to eventually. Martin Bean, in one of his wilder and more enthusiastic moments, said to me, the future is clicks, not bricks. There will be no campus in the future. Students can study what they like, where they like, when they like, through the meeting on the internet, basically. And again, I've got a big cross on our lovely red brick building, which you can all go and inspect later. So is it the end of the campus, as we know it? Well, certainly, if you believe some of the slightly more excited, in my opinion, rather over-height papers and reports that have been written in the last year, I'm sure some of you will be familiar with these. I've forgotten the name of it. I forget them easily, but it was a report by the Pearson Group, no vested interest there, of course, called the Avalanche is coming. Again, Martin, who does get very excited, Martin Bean referred to this as Education's Napster Moment, this highly disruptive moment in university education. And the logic is actually quite compelling. If university content is available for free or nearly for free of access to the internet, of course, who's going to pay 9,000 pounds plus a year for university education? If content can be delivered when and wherever people want it, who's going to turn up at lectures, like this, ever again. The conclusion is obvious. I'll use this slide, by the way, in a presentation a few months back. The Times reported it directly as a quote from me, that we should mook or die more than the spice chancellor. Actually, this is a quote from somebody else. But nonetheless, I certainly engage with the spirit of mooks. As you said, I've been a pretty enthusiastic supporter of this university's engagement with future learn. And I have to say, very responsive to what I've discovered to be overwhelming interest and enthusiasm among the university academic community for the creation of more accessible online learning resources. And if you believe the Pearson report, neither quality nor reputation can stop this avalanche change, this disruptive moment in higher education. Well, honestly, I don't know any of this truth, and I'd be surprised if anyone here really felt confident enough to predict quite how things will shape up, whether this will disrupt higher education, campus education in the same way that the music industry and the book industry has been completely disrupted as a consequence of technological change. I'm not sure. I don't know. But I certainly felt that this was important enough as a change in higher education. The universities like Southampton to want to embrace it and use it in ways that we felt were compatible with what we're trying to achieve as a university. And there are a lot of opportunities for those of open mind and a willingness to embrace the change. For example, one of the rather deliberate approaches that we've taken to creating our first few MOOCs is that we're concentrating on what we do best, what we're world-renowned for. We are entering a highly competitive market space for educational content. And we felt that the strategically what we needed to do was to make sure that we've positioned ourselves in spaces where we know we're world-leading. And we have something to say that students from around the world will be interested to hear. And our first two MOOCs may not be a surprise to you who know anything about the university. Our MOOC on Web Science, which is live, going live. On Monday. It starts on Monday. And just announced in the last couple of days while I was overseas in New York our second MOOC oceanography, the last exchange I saw you was that we were capped to 10,000 students for the Web Science MOOC but you were applying for an extension. That sort of thing, yes. But certainly, as far as I'm aware, we have the maximum number of students, 10,000 students, so we're about ready to commence our Web Science MOOC on Monday. So it does give you some idea of interest and enthusiasm for this style of learning around the world. We don't really get to know much about the profile of those who signed up, I don't think. We've got a bit, actually. OK, well, tell us. There's been this interactive. What do we know? As usual, we've got the ones who are coming in through the media in advance and they're very enthusiastic, experienced learners. Very good. Excellent. Part of them are University of Southampton staff. So why are we embracing MOOCs? Well, first and foremost, this is an opportunity for the University of Southampton to show the world what it can do and what we're good at, why you might be interested to become a student, become a member of staff at the University of Southampton. We're good at Web Science and Oceanography. We are world-leading in those discipline areas. And progressively, it's our intention over the year and coming years to bring online programs where we feel we've got something to say that is international competitive. It's very good. It will forgive me for being so commercial about this, but I did say to you, I'd speak as a Vice Chancellor, it's good marketing for the University. We can bring to tens of thousands of potential students the opportunities that exist. The attention of students around the world, the opportunities that exist at the University of Southampton. It's good for us in terms of raising our international profile. It may well, although this is completely unclear, but it may well create new markets for us for learning that eventually may translate into paying students. We just don't know, but we are experimenting as we go along, as are most of the universities and organizations that are engaged with MOOCs at the moment. Over time, it's very likely, it seems to me, that MOOCs will have a part-play in continuing professional development. We also, and I have to say, this is something that's strongly felt by the academic community of this university. We all see this as part of our public service role as a university. There's no doubt in my mind, Q described this extraordinary event that we held probably about ten months ago, where rather casually, I think, we had to say, we organized a very short notice a lecture theatre and said, if you're interested in MOOCs, come and hear what Q has to say. And frankly, we were breaking the fire regulations on the day, I think because people were sat in the aisles and were crowded at the back of the lecture theatre. We were interested, they liked the idea of making educational content accessible all around the world to people who might not otherwise have any access to educational content of the standard and quality that we can offer at this university. And the last thing to say is, I felt, certainly strategically, as a university, that we really did need to embrace MOOCs as an idea, and that over time, I suspect, most of the leading universities in the world will be offering online content for free, organized courses for students for free. So you'll stand out if you're not engaged in the game. Mind you, though, I have to say, and one of the reasons why I've personally been so enthusiastic about this as a Vice Chancellor is that I think it offers us an unprecedented opportunity to draw through our academic community. It's not drawing through the students into the university as much in the short term as drawing the academic community of the university. In many parts notoriously conservative in its approach to teaching and learning draw through the academic community to get the community to embrace IT and education much more. So the point I make on this slide, the first point is that these MOOCs and the technologies that they foster I think will rapidly advance the innovations in teaching and learning and will, as I've indicated in the previous slide, expand our market education away from the typical three-year campus-based undergraduate education, but it will expand not necessarily the place and I think that's the key word. For me, MOOCs and again the technologies that will be developed through MOOC platforms will add to the range of options available for learning on campus and extend access to a wider range of content currently the case. In my view, our challenge as a campus-based university over the next few years is how we optimise the campus experience how we ensure that there is real added value to being on a university campus by in this case embracing the digital movement and in particular looking to free up contact time, free up the timetable to be able to concentrate on high added value contact time between university faculty and the student community. In my own view, I don't see this quite as I naps the moment as such a disruptive moment in higher education, but I do see it as a point of acceleration of an existing process of evolution in campus-based teaching and learning. One question that I think is more legitimate I don't know that this is the end of the campus but it could herald the end of a traditional lecture. When I talk to students I have to say there are genuinely mixed views about this I rather boldly said a conference a few months back that how many students really like to be sat in the back row of a three, four hundred person lecture when in fact they get the same content delivered to them at a time that's convenient a place that's convenient they can stop and start and go over things why what's the future of the lecture under those circumstances I've got a surprising reaction from some students some students agreed immediately and said I wish all my lectures were available online that's how I would like them others though said that the discipline the structure of coming into a lecture of being with colleagues of joining with other students before and after a lecture is as important as the content delivery itself and if they sit at home in their room and receive a lecture same content of course possibly a better and more tailored delivery but nonetheless miss the interaction in and around the lecture then they are losing something vital it was just a reminder again that it is the human interaction that students are very high value on as a part of campus education and although of course there are ways of reproducing that human interaction online most of the students that I've talked to about this will argue with me that being in a place is really important to them not to everyone and it's not possible for everyone but for them it's a real added value a really important part of their education so could be the end of the lecture could be the end of the lecture as we typically use a lecture so I think you'll be more familiar than I am even with flip classroom this is the last time I taught made all my material available online in advance told the students that I expected them to be familiar with it when we started and we had a great and much more interactive set of discussions going on in the lecture I really enjoyed it I must say and I can see how our faculties will begin to embrace this approach to learning but importantly I don't think I'm going to be wanting surgery from someone who trained online I'm not even that fussed to be honest about engineers that do their study entirely online the truth of the matter is there's a lot of added value that comes from being on campus through the quality interaction that occurs between faculty and students and between students during their time on campus our goal has to be to use online learning online communication optimally so that we can use place to face interactions optimally and I think for us that's the challenge as a campus based university and I think that's the opportunity that the MOOC revolution offers us working in conventional universities certainly offers us much more choice but I'm going to fit that back actually just because chosen for symbolic value every year we run a competition with our student community to design learning spaces and increasingly now around the campus we have learning spaces that have been designed by and for our students and this is a whole area of one of our buildings that was redesigned according to a student design using hot space highly digitally connected as you can see and all about enhancing the quality of the campus and optimizing the the wire facilities there so MOOCs on campus well it's all in the wrapping I'm afraid I struggle always to keep up with the ever changing language that surrounds MOOCs but I gather wrapping is a new part of that language even Hugh looks surprised I'm very hip-hop and happy here I've got the language so that the idea here is that universities are happening in my previous university which was the University of Sydney in Australia universities they are notoriously reluctant to accept teaching at another university as credit against its own degree programs so how's that going to play out I don't know but I do know universities have been terribly reluctant up until now to allow the free movement of students between universities and between degree programs and I pose a very simple question is it all about the student or is it all about the institution and I'm uncertain as to how this is going to play out but the one thing I am sure about is that this university will be in the game we will be actively looking and exploring ways in which we can make it as much about the student as it is about the institution without frankly bankrupting the institution so how do we make it all work well I think we still some way to go there are a lot of issues emerging that frankly we probably don't want too much government involvement in just at the moment and I have to say Martin Bean and I have had exactly this conversation with David Willis the Minister of Science and the universities David is enthusiastic about the potential of MOOCs he was very supportive of the establishment of Future Learn but equally adamant that he felt the best thing the government could do at this stage was not do anything but at some stage down the road we are going to have to find a way of regulating of quality assurance of working through who owns what is the kind of conundrum I have just described will emerge quite quickly I think it is fair to say that the campus of the future and I believe there is a future for a campus will be different to the past the way we design the campuses will be different from the past the types of buildings the types of space the type of learning space the type of social space and the campuses as the past I have mentioned the point that I think the added value from campus education comes from the wrapper it is what we do around the content because the content is going to increasingly be available in a number of attractive forms from a number of attractive places and it is all about the wrapper and as I mentioned earlier it is all about using the technology that it evolves and is being accelerated by the creation it moves for all forms of teaching particularly campus based teaching my favourite Australian expression of course is that universities like my own like Southampton have to ride the wave not get swamped by it and focus on the things that we are going to have so whether that leave us at the end of the campus I said that the two buildings have been chosen for their symbolism in fact on the right the Hartley Library I was a student here in the early 1980s and the Hartley Library was a library and it was probably less than half the size it is now in the 25 years or so that I was away the Hartley Library more than doubled in size and more than half the space used for book storage it is now a learning space that still has traditional library facilities but a great deal more it has been redesigned it has morphed as a building the façade, the lovely redwood façade still remains the same but the inside of the library is entirely different from a generation ago what is stored there, what goes on there the way in which students use the library and learn in the library is enormously changed over that time and I believe it will continue to change the life sciences building on the left doesn't have large lecture theatres it is designed with hugely flexible learning space for the students but it also of course houses a large range of laboratories for teaching and learning and research and lots of space for interdisciplinary learning where we are bringing students together from different parts of the campus in interdisciplinary learning and in research so it is for me an example of what the campus of the future is going to look more and more like interdisciplinary mixed use space no large large lecture theatres but lots of flexible learning space entirely wired up and entirely designed to add value to the learning experience of our students today and in the future so the future as far as I'm concerned of course is clicks but it's clicks and breaks I don't think this is going to herald the campus education but I do think it will accelerate an existing evolution in capital space learning thanks very much experienced speaker coming in bang on time thank you Don so it gives us plenty of time to ask questions and I think Don's happy to take questions don't know we haven't got a second microphone have we to run around with I'll share I'll introduce yourself I'm Alison this morning I'm the academic lead for flexible learning at the higher education category and thank you very much indeed my theme is very much what you've been talking about as I conduct my work as the lead for flexible learning I tend to put it within the wider global context of employability which is also looking for flexibility of mobility and that's the technology side of things which is allowing flexibility not only of students of learning but also in the workplace and also the global context of 2047 I think we're going to be doing things throughout the 24 hour day so I'm really with what you've been saying but putting those additional dimensions into the pot and really endorsing your vision just a comment thank you I might say that as a university in common with a number of universities we're of course expanding our global footprint so we opened up permanent offices in Singapore last month we now have a permanent research base in Singapore last year we opened our first international campus in Malaysia we have a building University of Southampton building in the middle of a campus in China so the 24-7 operation has some real meaning for a university like Southampton at the moment we have people engaged in studying for University of Southampton degrees in a campus environment in at least three other countries in now three time zones generally I was just interested to know given it's such a radical change what kind of pushback you might be getting from academics on these possible things are they saying to you what the meaning is here I don't know if I could I could easily say there's pushback in the sense that generally the pushback is people will just ignore it in my experience where I would anticipate pushback is that if we progressively support and encourage you might be better placed on to this than I am if we progressively support and encourage our staff to start to use IT in education sample embrace it and have embraced it enthusiastically others are very reluctant and will continue to do the thing that they've done for 10 possibly 20 years or more and increasingly that's not the kind of learning that our students are looking for and where I'm expecting and where some exist at the moment is where we for example getting poor feedback from students about the quality of the teaching and learning and a failure on the part of the individual academic curve to embrace the change necessary which almost always involves more interactive terms of learning better use of IT in education so I suppose it's passive resistance rather than active pushback that I said here do you want to comment on I mean you're closer to the front line of this university I think I could make I entirely agree with Don's analysis that but I would say the student experience goes two ways that yes there are students who are looking for more flexibility more different ways of approaching their learning there are also some who are very very conservative students as well who if you say right we're going to go for the flipped classroom we're going to get flipped MOOC or whatever go and do the MOOC and then we'll come in and have a discussion they get crossed that you haven't you haven't given them a base with come on you learn me so it works both ways but yes we are we get both angles and just as Don said I mean I just offer a slightly more controversial comment one of the observations I would make is that a portion of our first year students come into the university having been coached within an inch of their life in their sixth form at another very hand-fed education and then coming to a university in general is quite a radical experience being expected to take responsibility and discipline responsibility for their own learning is quite a shock to some students in their first few months at university they are used to a particular style of learning so I suppose I have a controversial comment but it will be good if we get schools to start to embrace a bit more the use of IT enhanced education Question for all of you Who's going to go first? I think Gail was first Gabby, sorry I can read Sorry, my eyesight's poor Right, good I just wanted to ask to what extent is it important for Southampton to be part of future learning does it make any difference as opposed to growing it alone? Does it make any difference? I think it makes a difference in terms of the fact that future learners sweat a lot to create a platform to deliver MOOCs that we otherwise might have had to have done for ourselves and speaking personally that seems to me to be the simplest argument for joining something like future learn and not being available I suspect there's enough enthusiasm and interest and technical know-how in the university that we've probably done our own we've done something and not felt the need to join our future there's a whole set of circumstances that lead you to make decisions I spent some quality time with Martin Bean he just assumed we would be joining and that was the end of the discussion I don't know if we gave that a lot of thought but I suspect the attraction was simply it's convenient for us to join something like future learning and there's certainly a power of the number of people we've got involved that I don't know that we've got if we just put our own hand up that says we're doing it If I could just follow on from there I'm from UVA I'm the proud owner of Future Learn's first group Secret Power Brands and I have to say it's about since the professor at my office said I've got a job for you I remember that one once I picked myself up we were going to do something so cutting edge actually I'm really glad that we did it because someone said you're going to have to do open and distance learning but you can do it with the open university and pretty much all of the rest of the top 20 I think we've said oh yes that's probably the best way for us to make progress with this and so you know that for me has actually been key in the success of being able to move so quickly towards our goal of actually having MOOCs at the moment but just to come back to what you were making earlier on about student expectations and so on and a perceived mismatch between what we'd like to call dominant university as kind of as kind of a warm thing but for me MOOCs are a way of delivering several things and what we're expecting from the Secret Power Brands and what we're expecting from preparing for uni are actually very, very different things and you might get something completely different from websites and oceanography so it seems to me that one of the things that we need to make sure we're doing here is making sure that we're thinking about the diversity of MOOCs as opposed to just thinking of it as one thing is exactly right that's a really important point I think I have focused in my presentation I didn't really mean to but I have if I can see now on MOOCs as higher education vehicles whereas I think you would be very quick to say our third MOOC based on an absolutely outstanding archaeological activity that we're engaged in in excavating the Roman port of Portos now that would be really honest with you I'm not expecting that to fit in the same pattern but what you would say is we we might track a grade we might track an entirely different type of student into that MOOC students who've got a personal interest or it's nothing to do with wanting self advancement for career purposes or anything like that but actually to do with their interests I'm coming back to your first point actually we're all going to learn a lot more about this if we do share and that's one of the challenges the future is that some people are very very willing to share and we've got more worried about the kind of commercial yes there's a little bit of resistance to sharing it's a pleasure that we feel I think but we will learn more if we do share I think so to everybody's benefit we'll share everything Mike's waving his arm around I've also got one question from Twitter Mike Wolves Mike Wolves has a university that's interesting some universities have a brand and it's a university brand and it doesn't have a full state brand it's a university you pointed out the idea of taking into the world you seem to be playing out into the future will it end up with the university and just focus on what about the area they don't work for it's a very good question of course my answer to most questions some about the future and moves is I don't know what I would say here is I think I said I meant to say if I didn't that we chose areas that would show off our brand the best so it's still all about the University of St. Hampton and my colleagues I've got into trouble for doing this but I can't think of a better example for the moment probably the University of St. Hampton is not going to compete well in accounting 101 we actually teach accounting really well at this university but I suspect other places around the world will be able to attract by their name students into that the reason we've gone into these areas is we can both get our brand out there the University of St. Hampton and there's something that people will probably want to sign up for certainly after those experiences so I think what we're trying to do is to project both the brand and the issue I've certainly discussed with you because I'm hopelessly ambitious but it's my view that one of the things we've been particularly exploring is the idea of mini MOOCs not a whole program but if you wanted to know what the University of St. Hampton was like and what it was like to study here in a particular discipline area why don't you just join our mini MOOC and it's like a taster event and my view is that we should try over a period of time to have any prospective student offer them the opportunity to see what it's like to learn at St. Hampton in any discipline area so this is about accelerating the use of IT in all sorts of ways in what we do at the University so I've seen no compatibility between choosing our world-leading areas to project ourselves into a highly competitive market through future learning whilst at the same time within the University creating a whole series of mini MOOCs across the disciplines I have one question from Twitter which is about regulation but we have a panel to follow next morning and maybe regulation and the involvement of the QAA is something that might possibly come up in the panel and Don is going to be on the panel as well so thank you very much Don we now have a coffee break yes well done looks like it's work well done thank you right to turn them off press and power is there a light function on it so can I have a go with that I'll just turn it off but let me let me take it for a little more it might should be on now I think that might go off if I can use the one I'll probably use that one it's totally turned off there's a foundry like this you don't actually need to have one isn't that hooked up to this laptop that's not going over here so if I'm standing up will that pick up do you think that's hooked up to the that's hooked up to the but that wouldn't work if not just turn that one off so it's not getting me into IAS okay refresh your mobile the next talk is going to be from Simon Nelson who is the CEO is that the right word of Futureland I have to confess that when we first started to go into this relationship with Futureland the MOOCs are going to start in October and there isn't a platform yet we're going to build a platform in six months really I was quite kind of worried but when we knew who was doing it the team that Simon has led we gained enormous confidence these are the people that managed to make the iPlayer work across the the whole of the UK and scale MP3 or the BDO2 I thought right from the beginning we would understand the business of scale and when we started talking to them about how they were going to do it they can do scale they appear to be delivering as promised so I'm going to hand over to Simon and he will tell you a bit about the business of how Futureland has worked thank you Hugh so yes Simon Nelson it's now almost a year since I was summoned over the road from where I was normally doing business which was in the MTV building in Hawley Crescent in Camden to meet Martin Bean in the Open University Vice Chancellor of the Open University in the Open University building on Hawley Crescent and the appalling acronym MOOC was first described to me and a few weeks later I'd agreed to set up this thing and a few weeks later we announced the launch of Futureland in mid December last year so it's been quite a journey since but it's a privilege to be here today at the home of one of my favourite partners for other partners in the room you are as well but I will say that Southampton and Don were among the, if not the earliest supporters of what became Futureland and have been incredibly supportive and guided as along the way especially Hugh working closely with him and I cannot wait for the start of their first course on Monday so I'm going to give a presentation about 20-25 minutes I hope in it I'm not going to teach a room of world class learning technologists to suck eggs but I probably will from time to time please forgive me if I do and remind you of some of the basics like that Futureland is a platform for online learning and we sort of put MOOCs within that I don't say we're exclusively a MOOC platform because I think MOOCs is such an early and emergent market that I think this thing could go in a number of different directions but it's definitely an exciting start point for us I suspect that this room knows what a MOOC is but our own interpretation large numbers of students open to 2-6 hours study a week 6-10 weeks duration and a high degree of social interaction involved we have I hope a pretty simple and clear vision of what we're trying to do inspiring learning for life through telling stories provoking conversation and celebrating progress of those 3 points the most controversial whenever I've spoken to academics or partners is always the first one telling stories but I therefore leave it in very deliberately because I think it provokes exactly the kind of conversation we should be having about how to use the platform of the web to deliver new forms of learning and it's also a bias to my previous 15 years at the BBC where I was certainly not I wouldn't take all the credit that Hughes has given me for the development of the iPlayer but I was certainly heavily involved in that and the interactive web services for radio and TV so we deliver through hopefully an expertise in distance and online learning drawn from our founder our owner the Open University but also that area of broadcast storytelling a lot of my team have got that BBC background but also I'm bringing in digital start up people very grounded in the new social tools and technologies that we believe can really bring this thing to life and a marriage of those three areas is always the easiest thing but that for me is what future learn is about and that's what the beauty of our ownership structure and our relationship with the Open University potentially gives us so I'm able to draw on world-class talent from the academic side of the Open University Mike Sharples my academic lead drawing on world-class experts like Simon Buckingham-Shum in the area of learning analytics and as I say my background media, Martin Bean my vice chairman vice chancellor of the OU education technology so if we can get those things working well together and I think we have done so far then I think we're onto something particularly if we can exploit these amazing relationships that we've been able to build up so far so 26 partners 23 UK three international and the latest to come on board University of Auckland Newcastle and Liverpool but an extremely powerful group of universities in my view and increasingly starting to we're starting to see some of the collaborative potential of this grouping I'm very clear that with future learn we're nothing without our partners and actually we have to be really really good at building a product and a platform for online learning but also at working with these partnerships because if we do that then I do think there's very exciting innovations that are going to come out from the collective partnership there are a whole range of different motivations I think that bring those partners within the future learn family but I think the potential for global reach is a key common driver but also that opportunity to experiment experiment in a new MOOC landscape and experiment in terms of online learning online delivery of their existing expertise I sort of class these five broad motivations as some combination of each I think powers most of our university partners it's not only academic partners we have three high class content partners who we're working with and our vision for these is to use them to augment the content the courses that are coming out of the universities but also potentially to co-create some of those courses and to place the actual online learning at the heart of a broader online knowledge offer drawing the digital archives that for example the museum, the library etc and behind these there's a whole range of other potential partners cultural content commercial who are interested in working with the university sector to bring these new forms of learning to life I don't have the BBC up there but it won't surprise you to know I've been working quite hard on them over the last year and last week, no two weeks ago they announced the first collaboration with FutureLearn and its universities as part of its centenary of World War I commemorations so we're working on the first potential courses to come out of there and so not only cultural corporate bodies but first commercial corporate partner British Telecom and I'd say that my approach to British Telecom as with those first three content partners is about piloting different ways of working with the universities and then using what we learned from them to open up to a wider range of potential partners so watch this space there so we're up and running our first courses are out there at the moment course four launched this week the mind is flat from the University of Warwick and we'll be running eight in total by the back end of this year and as I say web science starts on Monday and I'm very much enjoying the experience of working through some of these courses so we're not in here just to copy this emerging MOOC landscape we do think we can bring something new we think we can bring something fresh something different to this area if we really exploit those partnerships with our universities and bring that open university and social web development together so we're particularly excited about the idea of transforming the convenience and accessibility of learning I'm making it available at times of the day and on devices and in locations where traditionally people wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn to heavily prioritise mobile learning we've made sure that we've developed the whole future learning platform in a responsive way so that it renders appropriately on small mobile phone devices of tablet as well as on the desktop or laptop and surprisingly I think that already puts us a little ahead of the game of some of the existing providers out there although I'm sure they're catching up very quickly there's a lot further to go in here and I want to be providing offline access in some way not least for myself the metro system of London is the perfect to get through some of those 6 minute videos so watch this space on there and we're also intrigued by some of the other potential that native app environments could provide us I want to emphasise we've launched in beta we've done that very deliberately I would say that I'm incredibly proud of the beta product we've put out there but I'd say at the moment it's the foundations of what future learning is going to become it's not the end product and in some ways I sort of think we maybe should always stay in beta because I'm never getting rid of my development team there's always going to be the next innovation to come we're always going to be learning from what happened in the last month and hopefully iterating rapidly that product in order to get it better we'll talk a bit more about that in a bit but as I say you can now go to FutureLearn I'm hoping many of you are also the second experience so learners can just go on and join that course as I say I think we've got the thing I asked my team to prioritise was the foundations the core architecture I remember at the BBC I'm very proud of a huge amount of stuff that we built and developed and the audiences we reached, the innovations we reached and so on but there are a few things that I just could never do well one of them was mobile and another one was social and that's because I was building on a legacy system a sort of Frankenstein technology platform that had started in 1997 with the BBC news site and in fact the original architect of that site was my lead technologist at the start of this project because the thing has managed to grow to however many tens of millions of pages or whatever based on that same architecture that was designed at the beginning but to then actually turn that oil tanker to do social simply and well was almost impossible so the priority for the team has been fewer bells and whistles get that functionality get that architecture in place so that we can grow we can build on it etc I think they've done that superbly so the sort of core architecture is once to do list with hopefully a clear representation of the course structure how many weeks are where you are in that cycle at the moment you've got your steps underneath you can watch an individual a bit of video, read an article join in a discussion and once you've done that you are self complete by marking something as complete and that then tracks back to you to do this you can see what you've done what you've still got to do what's coming up next etc again a huge amount we're learning about this area from our first first experiments with it really how does it feel if you've only ticked off three quarters of week one and week two has already begun how do we communicate to the learner is it okay for the course structure and and then what counts as complete so these are very interesting questions for us we've heavily prioritized these aspects of social learning we think that learning together is one of the key opportunities that the web offers to develop on where we're coming from and so I've been absolutely blown away by the first real learner reaction to these features so I'll be honest with you we put them out going okay at the moment they're not that sophisticated you know there are basically long discussions it's very hard to filter at the moment we haven't got the opportunity for small group discussion I promise you all of this is coming we have all sorts of ways that we're going to be able to manage large amounts of social activity we decided we're in beta we want to get this out there the reaction's been amazing the volume of take up the quantity and quality of discussion in these environments again vindicating I think some of the early decisions we took to place the discussion at the heart to send people off into different environments to discuss the chat etc but if you go through one of our courses then I think you really do find and there's something about anyone who's been involved with the MOOC development and there's Amy from Edinburgh at the back there who's been one of the UK pioneers in this area I'm sure you'll agree there is a moment where you actually see real people in there talking and it brings it to life in a way that's quite inspiring really thrilling and particularly on something so global I mean you get people introducing themselves I'm from Peru, I'm from Korea, I'm from Nigeria, I'm from China I want to learn this, I'm here for this I work part time doing this and have time in the evening I'm trying to navigate around my 2 year old toddler helping me do this, it's brilliant to come to life and the communities that build around it and as I say, we're scratching the surface of what's possible here at the moment our first basic filtering techniques are in there we're drawing on the principles from social media that we believe the core audience is very familiar with so the ability to follow people who you're particularly interested in and be able to then filter your discussions by filter the social activity you view by the people you follow I'll show you a couple of things that are coming soon as well in that area and our first assessment tools are in place and the key here is to try and use these as formative experiences, so try and develop learning, not just test it and it's interesting working with bringing together those different cultures in my team there've been times when I'd say the web development side has come at an issue like assessment multiple choice quizzes and gone how hard can that be and then we've sort of brought in the pedagogic experts from the OU and got okay, we've got a bit to learn about this and again that fusion of those skills I mean it's challenging because we're trying to do this in a MOOC environment in a free environment so finding the right area to pitch this at is key but we're also there we know that we've got the brands of the Open University and all our partners behind us so we want to make damn sure that what we're putting out there is quality and I think in just something as basic as multiple choice quizzes at the moment we have put a lot of thinking into it into the ability how many tries people get for an individual question what happens when they get one right or wrong making sure that we provide hints from the educator send people back to the areas where they might be able to go over there learning again in order to get that right track their progress through and and score appropriately and again these are our first weeks of this, we're still learning what works, what's appropriate etc but again in all of these areas we're just looking to pick them off and do them well but appropriately for a MOOC space so coming soon and you can imagine my day job is tied up with a roadmap of things we could do and making sure we prioritise those appropriately but one of the things that's starting to come in now is little test assess in those kind of areas and we've got other demands for for example audio inquisits and audio testing and comparison and video etc and also there's sort of innovative HTML5 apps etc that we want to embed into some of our courses to enable us to really exploit the interactive potential of the medium so to do some you know funkier stuff around content coming soon peer review and assessment so peer review we're going to be starting with that's a heavy priority for us because again we think that that hits several sweet spots of where we believe the MOOC space has to be and not least our social aspects of utilising the crowd so these are early designs for what's coming and actually is going to be tested quite shortly we are hoping maybe with Southampton so then some of those aspects of actually utilising these crowds in slightly more sophisticated ways so group discussions again that's an early priority and then there are much more ambitious and sophisticated ways that we could do this forms of jigsaw learning argue graphs some of you will be familiar with those concepts and we definitely I have people like Mike Sharples ready to unleash themselves on the tools we give them in order to try and innovate in these kind of areas filtering those discussions so one of the things that we found in our alpha test was that there was a person going around all the comments and replying to lots of them going just saying like and he just dotted all around saying like, like, like okay maybe we need a like button and it's true because you go through and you see these incredibly warm sort of responses or incredibly clever responses and you don't necessarily always want to reply to them just want to hit like and so the ability to like stuff, to filter stuff in that way and you know experiment around how do you scale, how do you filter social activity and critically you know one of the things I'm really it's really coming home to me and we already was there you know celebrating progress is a key part of our vision but you know what trying to understand what a learner's targets are what success means for them moving beyond the sort of crude retention completion rates that are sort of the media's obsessed by potentially correctly but there's something more sophisticated going on in here and if we design these courses in the right way then you know some people are going to come in and get you know chunks of learning that actually we should celebrate we should maybe reward them for and we're trying to find interesting ways to sort of visualise and use a learner's data play it back to them so that they can to improve their own experience and set their own targets data let's say is a the lifeblood of the future learn offer go back to the BBC again you know 15 year old platform basically power in BBC getting sophisticated data and analytics never mind then reacting rapidly to it really really difficult for a legacy business future learn doesn't have that excuse and has all of that opportunity so we're putting heavy emphasis on what we can do here and we just see the benefits for learners for the educator themselves, partners as a whole and for future learn the product and the company as manifold and actually critical to our success so helping learners to track progress set targets understand how they're doing educators you know if we get the right kind of dashboards in front of them provide them with dynamic and powerful data then they will that will help to improve the courses we are making for partners no doubt that you know this is an opportunity to reach new students and to reach out into parts of the world where the traditional physical university has not been able to but also all of them are interested in the research potential of this big learning data and we're trying as a partnership to find the right ways to collaborate and to make those opportunities available and then of course for future learn you know we have to be a learning operation we have our first learners on the platform what are they telling us what questions they're asking so I'll give you a few that are sort of exercising me at the moment I will say I don't think there's any what one of the things about you know this area is I don't believe there's a one size fits all solution to what a MOOC is but I do think there's stuff we can learn from everything we're doing so in the first few weeks we have had a 10 week course start we've had a 2 week course start and finish we've had a 6 week and 8 week course I'm very interested to see what we can learn about the different rates of progress through there I spoke about that number of steps that people are doing per week what's appropriate how do you structure a course in case the majority of people are only getting 3 quarters of the way through but these are the kind of things that I want to put in front of our educators and get them playing around with and testing video characteristics and length I was going through a course the other day and watched an incredibly stimulating 7 minute piece of video that then was confronted with an 11 minute piece of video and just in my own head a trigger went I just can't justify that time now there's just something about understanding ideal durations ideal sort of scheduling of a course understanding the sort of rhythms and pattern of the learner again no one size fits all solution but you can imagine the depth and quality of data that's going to be coming back course by course and across the whole piece marketing and scheduling courses scheduling is a word I've used a lot bringing it in from TV I remember when I moved from BBC Radio to BBC TV I was blown away by this engine they had of planning and scheduling planning, commissioning and scheduling courses so they analysed the hell out of what they thought viewers would want then they commissioned and went over everything with a fine tooth comb through a very long production process etc and then in terms of knowing exactly who would be there at what time would be interested in what else they might be doing this was down to an art some would say they've actually replaced some of the art with science in doing that but if you can get the right balance it's amazingly effective we're nowhere near that yet and I think again as a partnership as an operation I want to get into much more of a dialogue with all of our partners about understanding what works here what learner appetite is what learners we're after and all of us learning how to market to them because there's a web science course starting on Monday does everyone who would be interested in that know that in the early stages here we're in beta but you know what that is a key discipline we all need to learn and actually it's not something that is traditionally I think in our maker Titling I will make no comment but if you go through our title list they do what they say on the tin and really suck you in you'll see others that may be done are a bit more confusing etc we cannot just translate the traditional university course titles etc into this environment to be fair I don't think anyone really is but we need to get good at this how open should we be so this is one of the things that's in my life blood and the rest of the team is actually making things open, discoverable, shareable but it's sort of like a paywall argument with a newspaper you know how much should you open up pre-registration so that you can really take the benefits of that discoverability that the web can offer but they encourage people or even force them to register in order to take part of the whole experience I'm running out of time use of email key marketing tool we need to get really good at it learner expectations and targets that's progression I've spoken about and sort of from all of that what are the right metrics to measure success or failure for this because I think it's a lot more sophisticated than some of the traditional ones out there in the market first demographics so pretty balanced, pretty typical I think Helen is going to give a bit more insight into some of the learners that she's had on the power of brands so I'll just leave that for a sec while you take your photo and then I'll move on and end by with the only stats I'm sort of putting out there publicly at the moment so we actually got 20,000 people in the first 24 hours but I've just adapted it to say 25,000 people in the first day or so after launch because it just opposes beautifully with something that my chairman said to me which is that in its first year after foundation the Open University had 25,000 students so I think in just over a day future learn registered 25,000 people from over 150 countries I find that dead exciting as I do the whole future learn proposition thank you for your time and I'm happy to take some questions so Simon will you forgive me but in order to keep on time what we said we do is we move into the panel session and you can direct questions to the panel yes I of course thank you so panelists please so I should say of course thank you very much to Simon the tweet stream was going mad there you were releasing information in a good way people letting the world know what you've said there so that will be interesting to follow up so there is a roving mic going around there is a roving mic going around so I can put this down can I yes there's a mic here as well and I think we won't go through any introductions because you know who we are and we'll just go straight into questions and I can see 1, 2, 3, 4 so can I start there and we'll go around that way it's Gabby isn't it thank you could you just say your name again and who you are just because Simon wasn't here earlier I'm going to ask the University of Bradford and University of Leicester I just want to ask about the Code of Conduct for Future Learn on the website there's some wonderful points in it one of them is I may engage in a robust debate where appropriate to the learning experience but I will not deliver it personally attack or offend others and I will not spam other future learners and so on but number 13 out of 13 is a little surprising to me it says as the Future Learn community first language is English and I will always post contributions in English to enable all to understand unless specifically requested to the other minds and I think this kind of goes against portraying we've seen in the exhaust where little language groups have been set up independently so I'm just wondering is this really going to be enforced and how serious is which to learn about this and why and all that okay so when you read it out like that it becomes a little more draconian than maybe the spirit of it is but you know it is an encouragement that at the moment Future Learn is an English language platform and we don't believe we can deliver a good experience if we have multiple languages appearing in threads that as I say at the moment are not able to be as filtered as we'd like now the ability to throw into small group discussions maybe and have individual language groups is a good one and I promise you as well we do not see our future as exclusively English language we definitely want to open to other languages other cultures both in terms of welcoming learners but also potentially in course development in the future but for the moment it's about providing a good experience to all of our learners and we believe if we have multiple languages in there we may struggle and we might just look at the language on that one Helena's just trying to get in there because we're actually doing this at the moment and so one of the great things about Secret Power of Brands is that learning behaviour has been very good I am not aware of anybody who has practiced it and part of that is it's a nice supported place to be on the Secret Power of Brands and if people are speaking in languages that not everybody understands that begins to that begins to inhibit that feeling at the moment so they kind of I completely take the point that actually while we're in beta that is helping with making Secret Power of Brands feel like they're like this and it's actually not especially because we have a lot, we have real global engagement I would recommend you look at the language of that because Futureland got some bad press on Twitter a few weeks ago because of that Right, I will do I think, do you want to say anything on this one Tom? So should we go to the next question? My name is Bernard Loverzi I'm a student at the University of Leicester and I come from Rwanda when you look at more at the current stage they are already a privilege of people who have access to the internet and when you look at the statistics you find that they are they are less than 50% of the world population and when you go to countries like Rwanda it's less than 10% however, and I'm really very glad because the BBC joined and the BBC have been providing open courses like English language courses and many people who do not have access to the internet have been learning those courses and really they have been making a difference to those people Now, my question is now partnering with the BBC is the BBC going to broadcast Futureland modes so that we move from people who have access to people who have access to the internet and reach people in those places without access to the internet without access to electricity Thank you Okay, so firstly in terms of the BBC I'd say we are collaborating on the development of some courses I wouldn't describe them as a partner yet in the same way as the library or museum is, certainly would like to get them there In terms of broadening access and opening access it won't surprise you to know I am a big believer in the power of mass media and broadcast media still to open the funnel to then encourage people to go online and to exploit the potential of online and actually I do believe the BBC could do more in that area and actually I often think that people don't quite have the opportunities of really using those mass media platforms but providing the online back channel to really take people on to the next steps I think there's a lot more that could be done with that across the media in general so it's certainly part of my philosophy, it's certainly something I'd hope we could do and I also hope that MOOCs and open online learning can be a powerful motivator for people to take their first steps online and really start to exploit the potential of it So you ask those who don't have access to the internet do we leave them behind I certainly hope not it isn't a problem I can solve at the moment or in any other way than providing making sure our services are as accessible as possible when people take their first steps making sure they're accessible on mobiles rather than purely desktops I am open to discussions about what we can do to broaden access certainly I think so first of all I absolutely appreciate the point that you're making I think there's always been a digital divide I mean it's existed really in the internet age but it's closing I was fortunate enough to visit India in the last year and it's very clear to me that certainly in India the mobile phone is revolutionizing the lives of many people and they have almost leapfrogged made a technological leapfrog through access and availability to cheap access genuine accessibility to mobile phones and through that progressively access to the internet technology still to develop and so on but all I'm really saying is once the technology will help us here it will help countries like your country like Wanda to make a leap forward of 10 or 20 years in one quick go once we get the technology sorted out so I'm a bit more optimistic about what might be accessible to all in the future but I think Simon's right to say solving one problem at a time is very effective we'd like you to keep solving the problems to get the platform right I think the technology will advance and then the platform will become more and more accessible to a much wider range of people it's certainly the case in India that there's a clear understanding that mobile phone access will provide the type of access to MOOCs that many are looking for in a meaningful way in the very near future so I'm a bit more optimistic that the digital divide that we all know exists will be closed faster than we imagine Mike Wald, University of Southampton I'd like to ask you a question about the video player and video hosting you've gone for give me your background with the iPad player you talked about making changes quickly in arguments because for a player not to have a captioned button in this day and age it seems quite amazing we're not tied up with it it is definitely one of our sort of priority road map issues so we're on it it's just a question of timing and we have timing and prioritisation but I'd point very much taken yeah I don't think we're going to comment on that one anyway Sue Sue White, University of Southampton you've explained how learning team, tech team have been very mobile and the academics have been very mobile as well very missing agile in terms of getting materials off the ground however the QAA what's all this about the quality that's happening to be assured I'm happy to start but then Don maybe simply to say from my point of view we've had a number of conversations with the QAA they've been incredibly supportive and positive and actually you know many problems at the time being with that I actually think that they as everyone else are very interested in what this MOOC area is doing for higher education in general but our relations so far have been extremely supportive and constructive I don't think organisations like QAA have any role in relation to the operation of MOOCs at this stage in their evolution and the further away they are the better as far as I'm concerned frankly I could be more frank but I won't it may come to matter as universities I mentioned I think the University of Central Lancaster Lancashire I don't know I don't know what it's called one of those universities that I don't really know the name of has already indicated that it will offer credit for MOOCs and I guess it's at that point that the QAA will need to consider in the context of that specific university whether or not the learning experience warrants the type of credit that they're giving you I would not want it anywhere near the MOOC platform or the future learning organisation to be absolutely honest particularly at this point in its evolution that's my opinion of course Can I add one word to that one I'd like to put in a one to that and say yes of course when we do credit bearing things the QAA are interested in our what we're giving credit for but I don't remember anyone ever going through my teaching notes to check what I am teaching and how I am teaching and they're looking at my assessment methods so I feel I absolutely support Don's statement I'm very glad to hear him say it that it seems that this is not where the QAA should be and I'm quite interested to see the extent to which they wish to be I'm not quite sure why I've got a question there and then Fiona I'd start to go back to some of the issues well arising out of language it's not a language issue what we found in researching because of the early MOOCs 2018-20 was that one of the key things that was happening and I think it's one of the key value added to MOOCs is that it provides different points of engagement you come in through different doors different points of engagement you come into the game and one of the things that happened in the early MOOCs I know getting a platform in running a short period of time in one language is enough to do so I'm not advocating a thousand languages immediately but one of the things that came out of the early research in a number of different platforms was that different people are comfortable in coming into the strange MOOC and one of the ways of doing that is to say we have a special form of language you want to Spanish, you want to Chinese whatever that's fine press a button start from and it made a huge difference so there were a lot of students who came in through different ways and one of the ways of doing that was to say either create your own platform so you can do a whole lot of different things to be able to start in whatever and that provides a pedagogical reach which is really important for maximising the value of the MOOC so just to say that sounds like a reinforcement of you know the idea that was suggested earlier I'm noting it down as we speak as a good extension potentially of our small group discussion thinking about okay up to Fiona I'm Fiona Harvey and I work here at the University of Wellington I'm also the old MOOC there's some questions from Twitter I just thought I should bring to your attention there's just one, lots of them have been asked already or answered already something has asked or Sam Ling has asked if MOOCs are still with us in 10 years what does uni classroom look like as a transition? Well as I mentioned I think universities are already managing a transition I mentioned in my presentation this morning how our Harvey library has undergone an extraordinary transition over a generation and how our most recently designed building was designed for a quite different learning experience we're currently planning another major student building in the centre of campus at the moment and it's very likely that the learning space that we create there will be highly flexible and adaptable so my sense is that that's already happening and I suspect that if you went round the room every major campus would have a similar story to tell about the evolution of campus design and the evolution of learning space as I say it's unlikely that we'll be building five and six hundred student lecture theatres in the future of any of them I think there's two aspects of this that I'm curious about in 10 years time one is who will be in the classroom from a teaching delivery point of view because I think one of the things all of the MOOC examples we've seen and what we're going to hear about more today it's all very much giving new perspectives to using technology and education and the extent to which some of the lecturers who are already on future learn on their videos are gaining a new sense of their professional identity across social media and not least of all is I think going to have a really big impact but I also think one of the opportunities that we have and what we looked at today having MOOCs that maybe aren't mirroring academic courses at university level but also lifelong learning so in terms of who is in the classroom that might be a completely different population also different age groups so I think from a perspective of learning technologists and professionals here today that is what I'm very curious about is who will actually be the content creators, the learning designers the delivery platform makers of the future and what can we do to contribute as Simon said the data will tell us a lot of where we're going to go next okay there was one in here formerly with Sight, now the University of Derby online learning and former BBC Learning Employee hold a second the microphone will arrive for you Michelle Michelle Bournemann, formerly with Sight now the University of Derby online learning Sight, now the University of Derby launched and done that being in this presentation referred to how MOOCs can impact campus-based pedagogical learning considering winding participation of higher education what opportunities in the panel think MOOCs offer to encourage people studying online to engage with educational campuses higher use museums or other physical locations actually you've been involved in this and it's about basic math skills and one of the things this campaign has done is also develop MOOCs in online learning and they use UK Centres online, sort of active in library spaces, other public spaces offering access to the internet for those who don't have it at home or might need technical skills and I think also DOM's anecdote about India and mobile devices make a big difference here because that's what we see a lot in rural areas in the UK as well I've heard a really interesting experiment of running courses online when the weather was bad so if you're living in an area that gets a lot of snow let's say in Northern Scotland you might have actually a lot more access to campus online during the winter months than you would do otherwise so I think there is a really key functionality of MOOCs here in terms of accessibility equality of opportunity but also I think for learners from different age groups in different regional groups to participate and that might change the university experience in some ways I think I'm going to pass the mic on to you now No, not at all I mean the truth is we don't know and I mentioned in my presentation that there are many who are engaging with MOOCs in this academic community who are doing so for social benefit reasons and we've certainly identified this as part of our social mission to reach out in many different ways I think of widening participation rather more globally than I do just about encouraging young people from non-traditional backgrounds to come to university in the UK and my sense is that we're going to have a bigger impact than that globally in terms of enabling people to engage with higher education from all around the world but I think my view is we should experiment with everything in these early stages and that will remain my view for some time yet I'm sure that's the view of future and we have to experiment with everything to see what works and what takes a hold Any more questions? Roger So I'd say with developing a future-led partnership this has been a highly agile process and one that we've had to do very rapidly so I had to decide very early how many partners we could comfortably accept and what was the right area to draw the line there was no right way of doing that I could see beyond using lead tables an objective measure that would excuse me for many subjective judgment in order to do that and so that's how I drew up the initial membership criteria from the university point of view so we've had some founder universities who have worked incredibly hard and one of the questions pointed out extremely agile way themselves to get these first courses up and running but for the moment we still have a lot to learn as a partnership about where we're going but I'd say not set in stone but no immediate review of what we're doing at the moment Dan did you want to add anything? No I'm not sure what I could add in the end I think learners will take excellence from wherever they can find it the issue will ultimately become are learners prevented from accessing material from your university let's say because you're not a future learner my sense is again in the future as the technology evolves it may become more or less relevant to be part of future learner or Coursera or any of the currently organized vehicles for delivering MOOCs but my sense is learners won't care that much whether it's part of X platform or Y platform learners will go looking for what they're interested in and what they want and that can come from any source as it can and does now I just want to make a small point on that question is that I think regardless of platform there's I think certainly a real sense of the potential of the MOOC as a sort of model for FE and skills delivery particularly for adult learning and work based learning and I think even in staff development there is a lot of opportunity here and I think one of the ways in which the MOOC might well be active is to try and organize more non-traditional style MOOCs and experimenting with the business models and opportunities for running and I think there's certainly a lot of potential there and FE is an area but it has a lot of interest in that as well so I'm quite excited about what might happen there I think that's about the right perfect timing actually to stop this session and can I say thank you very much to the panellists there is no break now we're going to go straight into one more presentation great can I have it where everybody can see it do you mind if I stick it in the middle because I'm going to write on it yeah that looks good so while Helena is getting the set up Helena Gillespie from U.E.A sorry Helena Gillespie from U.E.A so Helena my kind of opposite number she was the person that she said earlier and I think I've heard about her when U.E.A joined I joined FutureLearn and it's possibly the slightly less stressed and rather more relaxed than I am looking at at the moment because they have just completed their first MOOC and we just start ours in a few days time so what makes good is something perhaps that she is more qualified than anyone else in the FutureLearn consortium to talk about it at the moment yes thank you actually is that audio working okay yeah so yes the difficulty of doing this at a conference is that you don't know what's going to come before and once it's through the first few sessions gradually crossing things on the list of what one was going to say because somebody has already said them but also it does give me an opportunity to sort of sharpen up what I'm going to do in terms of what I think you might actually want to know and I'm just getting a sense at the moment but actually what you'd quite like to know from me representing U.E.A is what how it's been for me and what data we've got so what I've kind of quite helpful to do initially is for you to just have a couple of minutes to think about what data you'd like me to talk about and then I will try and my best to answer your questions so if you could just think about that for a moment and will I introduce myself properly that would be really helpful if you could just sort of jot down some ideas like have you got any data on this or have you got any data on that and if I haven't got a say and I might have it so I should introduce myself properly I'm Helena Gillespie I'm the MOOC project lead for U.E.A I'm also Associate Dean for Learning, Teaching and Quality in the Faculty of Social Sciences and I'm a lecturer in education specializing in learning technology and actually the thing that qualifies me as a project lead is kind of those other two hats because I specialize in learning technology in teaching about them technology but I also have an organizational managerial role within the university because the fact that I wore all those two hats that meant as a Vice Chancellor came and knocked on my door just before I was off on my Christmas holidays last year and said ah just a woman I've got a job for you and and I sort of picked myself up off the floor in surprise that we were going to do something quite so incredibly cutting edge one of the things that I said was yes I'm going to do this and I'm going to find out as much as I can and when people say ok what's U.E.A's motivation ok we think this might be good marketing we think this is a good forward planning it could be interesting for us education but we are in this to find out as much as we can and for me that's kind of the major motivation and so you've had a couple of minutes now I just wondered if anybody would now like to tell me if there's anything that they would like to any questions they would like me to try to answer with the data that I have in my head and some of the data that I've brought with me is anything specific that people would like me to concentrate on so you really want to know about what we're marketing probably and so that's the same extent so you want some data about that sort of ok anything else what were the motivations of the people who signed up for your MOOCs ok you want me to get inside the Vice Chancellor's head no no no no no the participants the learners ok I know we're supposed to call them participants but yeah no motivation I've got quite a bit to say about that because I'm really interested in it ok so what are they getting out of it ok so motivation and then outcomes pitch fit so I should know what challenges the data have to be and so talk and don't worry about that I don't have survey data about that but I'm talking about that are there hotspots in learner activities there's a whole lot of teams that have made up wearing hotspots from a project management perspective what's the ideal MOOC team and then how does that translate into some couple costs ok yeah I'm having to talk about costs actually so I have this image of you leading the MOOC team and who are yours so just humans beside you yeah and do you know what I was just to say something about that the only thing that has made it happen is the willingness of everybody in this team including three significant people at FutureLearn to behave like sensible, rational, reasonable human beings under the most enormous pressure and I should say that while you're in the room really because I'm talking about Matthew and Matt in particular but also Darmesh and Rowley and the other people who have you know but the MOOC team is really important so I will talk about the MOOC team and talk a little bit about the costs and about some fluff around that as well I've filled my pager so I better start talking and answering your questions and then if I run out of time then you can button hold me later and I'm happy to share the things that I've got so I started off by planning this talk around some questions ok so let's address the first question with maybe what we know about MOOC learners and we might wrap up some of that so your question was are we converting this to sign ups my answer is it's too soon to say we're in week 4 we're running a 10 week MOOC and in any case I don't think that's what we were trying to do with the secret power of brands what we were trying to do with the secret power of brands was to see how global we could make this now the great thing about secret power of brands was that the kind of the medium is the message for the secret power of brands that brands are a global phenomenon and actually the richness of what's happened on the MOOC has been supported by the global nature of the learners and I was actually really very excited at 5.30 on the morning of the 14th of October when I woke up I actually woke up and this is one of those kind of moments it went live at 1 in the morning on the 14th and I actually woke up at that moment and I'm not going to look I'm not going to look divorce pending but I woke up at that moment and it was just like a magic moment because there were people already on there real live students on there but I'm all over the building you know in fine bones trying to get ahead of us and so on so what we were trying to do with brands was to see how global we could make this well here's your answer so all the bits coloured in blue have people have people registered on the secret power of brands looks like we're not touching Greenland at the moment and our African reach is restricted but pretty much everywhere else it's coloured in aren't there times your question better once we finish with our next move which is preparing for uni and apart from thinking that preparing students to university is very important and our Vice Chancellor was recently saying quite a bit about that in a times higher and how we should get better at it and one of the things that we're trying to do with preparing for uni is to use it as a marketing tool and so I think probably in six months time I will be able to tell you whether we think that preparing for uni has actually impacted on undergraduate bummer six so it's different kind of courses for courses I'm going to go on and actually answer the next question as well with the same slide because I've got another diagram here and I'm not sure that you can read this as clearly as I'd hope you would so forgive me if I just read this to you and you can have this obviously we'll publish these slides so this data comes from the pre-course survey I've got more data than I had time to deal with at the moment so what is the major motivation for what our learners thought they wanted to get out of the course and the first thing is that they wanted to learn new things which I guess you can take as a kind of given and that's kind of almost a hundred percent of them so they wanted to learn new things so that's good and then we've got a group of things which come in sort of around the 50 percent mark so about half of the people who responded to the pre-course survey about half of those said that these were significant factors so they wanted to try out future learn or MOOCs okay and I don't underestimate the power of nosiness okay we're hoping to draw in and make use of some of that but this comes back to my I'm turning into a rapidly turning into an amateur internet sociologist and I've got a very interesting in the way that people behave online and I read a really interesting article recently and say basically lurking is okay but we have this kind of thing that we say oh MOOC the completion rates they're not so good but actually I say forget about it, it's not face to face that's not the point actually lurking on a MOOC is a perfectly sensible and valid thing to do and so if you're out there lurking on our MOOC okay and I will be lurking on your MOOC so everybody in the future and community I am convinced is lurking on everybody else's MOOC but so I'm validating that so that's okay what students are there yeah of course I've got a high level of lurking engagement but I'm saying lurking is okay so but this was an interesting one this is where it got interesting for me that's the next one is to add a fresh perspective to their current work now that is really interesting for me so half the people are coming along bringing something they know about this topic already I'm wanting to kind of augment it using our MOOC so for me that's really important and then we've also got things like try learning online improve career prospects actually supplement existing studies, interaction and find out more about university actually comes in very less than 10% of our people who responded to this and there were thousands who responded to this and wanted to find out more about university I'm hoping that when we come to do preparing for uni and we have the same stats we have different responses and that's where things start to get interesting because that's when we can start to take this kind of thing and channel it down the channels that we wanted to channel down okay so what's the educator experience I don't know if I've got any data on that let me go back to my first slide and see if there's a question that kind of matches that I'll tell you what I'll do next slide I'm going to roll that up with answering the next question with a question at the bottom which is sort of relating to costs so we've just entered what I'm calling at UEA MOOC phase 2 MOOC phase 1 was actually just getting to the point where we launched a course and the qualification for joining in with MOOC phase 1 was no closed doors so I didn't we didn't try at any point during the first phase to deal with anybody who wasn't completely bought in and enthusiastic about it because frankly it was hard enough work as it was just trying to understand everything and do everything the whole project work without having to deal with people's resistance it's not that I want to exclude academic colleagues I just we couldn't deal with them in that first phase phase 2 at the moment is to do it and find out as much as you can about why it might be useful phase and then when we get to phase 3 which is begin to target what we do more closely then I might get to the point where I have to knock on some of those doors that maybe are not so subscribed to us and we talked already about where areas in which universities are world class are we going to MOOC in those areas so the UVA that would be created writing, American studies, environmental and so on and we're not making in those areas at the moment but I know you need to go knock on some of those doors and I don't know whether they're going to be into my clothes but that's really when I'm going to have to do when I'm going to have to do that but I guess the thing that the educator experience is that it has been a significant learning curve because you sort of have to forget almost everything that you know about how you teach and start from basics and because you're dealing not just with a different media but different sorts of learner and different sorts of learning resources and different tools and so on and so people have to be kind of comfortable with that and they also have to be comfortable with not knowing and being a bit unsure and feeling a bit dangerous and it did feel in early October it felt really dangerous but it's okay now because it's revving and it's fine we're getting great degrees of feedback and so that's okay but I did feel like I took a risk at the time I'm going to jump around down to the ideal Luke team okay so our Luke team is me and Simon Lancaster who's a national team I'm very tech savvy so you might really know Simon and he describes himself as my right-handed man and I think it's more more of a kind of friendship and so we're sort of leading the project we report directly to the provides chancellor and within our team we have I guess we have a group of about 8 academics who are mooky or preparing to mook oh yes it is a verb I think we've definitely verbed that one so we've got our and then also in that team we have a learning technologist and we also have somebody from the library because I don't know if you know the future we have a group of future non librarians who have set themselves up as a group and they're talking about the implications of this which is really interesting and so that's our group and and then also we have a person I've described as UVA's man who can which is our we call him our course content creator okay and he's the person who does the day-to-day stuff and he's called Ross and he's marvelous but for many reasons because he's really low maintenance you say Ross can you just go and do something and for that reason and we respect him and we love him so we have the kind of management and then we have the academics and then I guess we have some administrative people as well but what we do is we sit around the table once and I think the sitting around the table once is actually really cool we have an online area where we share things and all that kind of stuff as well but actually we sit around the table once and we just say how's it going for you and that's how we managed to stay safe and it is a very very steep learning curve I'm going to move on to costs now and I've deliberately got this picture here because this is not a this is not a snip from our website this is a snip from the website on Wolf Olives who are a large brand management company okay they've done some big stuff they've been to Macmillan they've been to the Olympics they've got a really big reputation and this is Professor Robert Jensen he's our lead educator and the great thing about Robert Jensen is he works for Wolf Olives and he works for UVA and what that enabled us to do was to put those two things together to harness the power and the resource of Wolf Olives and what we can do at UVA in terms of education bring those two things together and there is no conflict of interest there there is power in higher education in making these collaborations MOOCs give us the power to do that collaboration I'm not really a fan of saying oh well it's real world higher education because I don't like the idea that that universities are not the real world I'm very kind of allergic to that idea but what it does is it gives us that opportunity to really kind of link up in very demonstrable ways with other places the other plans we've got we're linking up with other companies we're linking up with subject associations we're going to say oh I can't believe we've done this everybody starts crying it was kind of pathetic anyway we got very excited about that point and then I understand that the amount of traffic that's kind of level down okay but what we do see here is a spike and that's where Robert sent his first email so we do know we do know that emails generate traffic to the site so we've started doing two the other thing Robert's doing is he's doing a little video message so that doesn't mean everybody has to do that but because Robert spends his life going in interesting places so he's done one for me now here I am in New York County it's just quite interesting to do that actually if you find the video messages are really good at creating educated presence where educated presence doesn't really exist but what we do know is that we have this kind of pattern which is quite a lot of engagement in terms of learners and it drops off a bit in the night because we don't have so many people from those time zones okay and then it picks up and if we send an email we get a spike okay going forward with this data we are still maintaining it into week four okay so we're not seeing although we've seen significant drop off from day one as you would expect there's a significant drop off going forward okay and we've changed the pace on the move now and they're doing this week they've got recently created they've got to make something okay and so that's quite that's kind of quite interesting and the last thing I just want to I just want to add in because it's something that I'm interested in about the learners I don't know how many of you know Clay Scherke's book I think it's I love it I just love it one of those things I just said he just sort of shared a little bit of Clay Scherke's ideas and this is really in terms of learner motivations and unwindings he's got this idea that there is a spectrum of collaboration cognitive surplus is the word that Clay Scherke applies to the one trillion hours per year he estimates that the global internet population have that they're disposable they're disposable so it's not time that they're working or whatever so there are one trillion hours a year that are out there for us to do something with and he's terribly keen that we should do something collaborative and positive with those and he thinks that there are basically four points on the sharing spectrum now the first thing the first aspect of it is personal sharing and this is sharing that doesn't really matter whether it has an audience it's just something that I've done and his favourite example of that is the kind that has a cheeseburger website if you're familiar with lolcats so cute pictures of cats with badly spelled captions people post them and then they get onto Facebook and some people love them and some people hate them and they look really bad if anybody else doesn't see your lolcats you just feel satisfied in doing it yourself and there's no necessarily transit burger in that but that's personal sharing and then there's what he calls communal sharing and he just puts that as a sharing to meet the needs of the people in the group so websites like meetup.com where the benefit is definitely for the group but it's meant for the people in the group the third source is public sharing which is where things are created by a group but they have benefits to lots of people and his example of that is that he created a membership so the group do it but it has wider public benefit whereas for here the benefit is just in the group and here the benefit and then the kind of the most valuable sort of sharing as far as he's concerned is civic sharing and that's what brings together all of these things and that's why a group of people do something which then has a wider benefit for every so a really good example of that is Yusha Hibi which is the website that was created by people trying to globally geographically map events it started off in disputed elections in Kenya but it's used for all sorts of things and that's where the benefit of something that a group of people have done the Centenance enabled actually benefits every part of people and my question to you just as I finish really is where do we put new participants on this scale is this just something that people are doing themselves or for the group is there a wider benefit I would really like to think that actually but if we get really really good at this what we can do is we can actually mean we can actually mostly become a school of civic sharing where actually what happens on this is that global understanding and knowledge and interest and engagement is actually fostered through this kind of through this kind of media and then I think maybe in terms of my own perspective we will have achieved our Miki aims I think that's going to get a stream of questions I can think of quite a few there's even been some backchats of questions going on and bearing in mind that it is lunch soon let's not go for too many questions but let's take a few, yeah would you probably because then in the journey anyway who cleaners are at various levels who cleaners are at various levels of let's say mastery of the materials and the less confident trainers might tend to be and they move progressively towards this so would you agree that movement as would be scattered in your response? I think at the moment they are but I think it would be useful for us to keep our eyes on the prize which is which is here but what I don't want to do is to say that Muklen has ought to behave in a particular way because I think we can endorse all sorts of learning behaviors that we wouldn't necessarily endorse in a face-to-face classroom in the Muk environment and that's one of the things that we're learning so if people are working at in this space it's kind of introspective then as a Muk educator I endorse that whole heartedly and I hope that eventually any other questions? about Jennifer from University College London the chart behind you we sent out an email and you got a spike of activity you did it right in the middle of two low spots was that intentional because obviously it drops and then it comes back up again? No planned so we email Friday and we email Sunday, Monday it kind of depends because what we're trying to pick up in the emails also is we try to bring in kind of topics and things that happen during the week and if there's something significant that's happened we might try to bring the email a bit further forward to still catch the news story so we're still developing our practice around emails I mean I've always said that when I get a moment I'm going to write a book about why email is like terrible and the worst thing to do but actually it seems to me that in this case email actually is doing something particular for us so no not bad I wanted to ask a question as well I'm wondering if you've been the first person to speak today who's really had a sort of integrity head and sturdy perspective on this so if you, I mean many here in the room will have been on a move but maybe not be in your position of actually having one of those great documents I think that's what I most want to see really how do we of course how it takes to have a document but what is your kind of the best bit and the worst bit thinking of all personal reflection of what's the best what's the worst so what's the worst and undoubtedly the stuff that I don't find very interesting which is about contracts and budgets and I mean, you know, I've often said you know, whatever job you give me you've got to give me a budget but I will just spend it so that has been difficult it's not just been difficult because I don't enjoy it it's actually been difficult because this is not like anything else we've done before and the university kept scratching it and saying what we don't do things like this this is not how we do things it doesn't fit within our but there was a magic moment that happened it's just after Brandt launched and I don't know what happened in the Vice Chancellor's office that morning but somebody somebody showed something and somebody said somebody and suddenly everybody couldn't be more helpful you know, it was like I've been in a magic moment and suddenly somebody went oh my god what have we done that's fantastic and suddenly everybody wants to be helpful and so that is getting easier but I'm never ever going to enjoy the project and I'm never ever going to enjoy the contractual life because it just doesn't engage what I'm actually really interested in is the people and so that's my best thing but the real magic moment was that first day when you could actually really really see it and I thought I actually thought do you know what if UVA hadn't pushed this and done that and put those things in and if Robert and his team really pushed the envelope to try to get all of this we wouldn't have all of these people doing this and they were really happy to be there and a lot of them were actually posting hi you know I'm really happy to be here and I wanted to message every single one of them and I'd go oh I'm really happy you're here but you know I haven't seen the institutions so yeah that's the kind of that's kind of my heart thank you so I think we should give her a big round of applause to be here and she's exiled a lot thanks to today's communication okay it's lunch and we're back to just under an hour