 Helo ydych chi'n rydyn ni'n fyddai i weld ni'n gwrdd i chi, rydyn ni'n rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Dwi'n mynd i wneud i ddod, dyfodol i'r ffordd, y gallwch yn gweithio i gyd-d Lywol ac mae'n gyma hwn o ymddindig ac mae yw Llywodraeth Wyrddol, yw Llywodraeth Ffundi, yw Llywodraeth Ffundi a'u gweithio i gynhyrch dynion gweithio'r technolig. Fy enw i'n mynd i'n gweithio'r cyffredinol, wrth i'n ffwg i'n gwneud y gweithwyr oherwydd hefyd yn fwy o'r hynny'r hystry. Fy enw, rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n fwy o'r computer ffmwy. Fy enw i'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n ffwg i'r llwyddoedd, mae'n byw o'r cyffredinol, First, something about Hefge's history in relation to the development of learning policy. Secondly, that I want to say a little bit about the Open Educational Resources programme. And thirdly, a little about the online learning task force that is currently under way. And then to end up by posing what I see as some of the key, if you like, challenges, but also opportunities for learning technology in enhancing learning and teaching. I wanted to start off by a bit of a wider approach and saying that past and present governments often have quite kind words to say about learning technology and often make statements about what they see learning technology as being able to do. For example, David Willits has recently mentioned learning technology can contribute to addressing growing and varied demand from potential students. He's also referred to learning technology being a cost-effective way of spreading educational opportunity to learning technology potentially contributing to social mobility through the wide range of students that can be drawn into study and also the contribution of learning technology to the educational reputation of UK HE and to its competitive place in a global market for higher education. So, some messages from government which on the face of it appear quite helpful, although of course they are not always followed up by the funding that might be needed to drive some of these things forward. Hefgu, and some of you may have seen me using this slide before, published in association with a large number of other bodies, a sort of national e-learning strategy which was updated in 2009 and the main emphasis of that strategy was to suggest to institutions that they needed to seize and embrace the learning technology agenda and link it quite firmly to their own institutional mission objectives and students and that relying on a sort of more national vision of these things was probably not the way to go. It needs to be much more targeted, much more purposive than that and linked firmly into an institution's development and life and that they need to think how they use the funds that they have for teaching whether, as I mentioned in this slide, those coming from Hefgu via the block grant or from student fees as to how they will enhance learning and teaching through the use of technology. A little bit about some of the ways in which Hefgu invests in learning technology and I put at the front of that funding that we provide to GISC and we're the largest funder of GISC investing some £64-65 million each year in GISC. We're also a large funder of the Higher Education Academy and whilst of course not all of the work of the Higher Education Academy are directed towards learning technology, significant parts of it are. Another area of activity that we've funded over the years is to encourage institutions to develop learning teaching and assessment strategies which of course include strategies for the development of e-learning. We also provide capital funding for teaching unfortunately diminishing current circumstances. That capital funding when it's used to build teaching classrooms, laboratories, et cetera should also be used to incorporate into them learning technology. We funded the Open Educational Resources Programme which I'm going to say a little bit more about in a minute so I won't elaborate on that here. We've also been encouraging and indeed funding directly some pathfinding activities in flexible provision which I will say a little bit more about at this stage. We've funded seven or eight pathfinder programmes using all using learning technology but experimenting with a range of often a combination of work-based learning, intensive full-time provision and relatively intensive part-time provision all drawing heavily on the use of learning technology to support students on these programmes. So learning technology can support many modes of study and learning. It can and it doesn't necessarily do so but it can of course enhance the nature and quality of provision. It can promote innovative pedagogy and it of course supports distance learning. So to come on to the Open Educational Resources Programme this is a programme that Hethge funded starting about 18 months ago with a pilot range of projects costing nearly six million. We've just moved on to the second phase of the projects. JISC and the Higher Education Academy are managing the programme. Many of you in this room may have participated or have grants or been involved in some of these activities. I think some of the key assumptions behind the programmes are that for Open Educational Resources to work effectively there has to be a fair degree of culture change taking place within institutions and amongst staff using and creating OERs and also around the business models that institutions use when they're thinking about how they use learning technology because of course these are open source shared resources that anybody can be able to use. They are not things that are protected and kept within an institution or indeed a single academic range of materials they're using. There are 22 projects that have just started in the second phase of the programme and they focus essentially within three broad themes. One is to try and extend the range of material that's available in the open format, particularly focusing on some key areas that may be currently underrepresented. So encouraging HE that's taught through FE, encouraging potentially small subject areas, work-based learning etc to develop materials. To try to draw in new institutions to using OER through collaboration with institutions that already have a sustainable development programme for OER and also to develop resources around thematic areas often discipline-based. Those projects obviously will come to fruition in a year's time and I'm sure we'll hear much more about them as we're beginning to hear about the projects from the pilot phase. Another area of activity that's going on is that in September 09 Dame Lynn Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library agreed to chair a national online learning task force, the OLTF in the title here. This was something very much prompted by a desire on the part of government I think for the UK to be internationally competitive in terms of its offering. But of course equally important is the part that learning technology plays with all the students at home. And so some of the starting points for the work of the task force were that the UK was already a world leader in this area but there was an opportunity to access different and new markets internationally. That one route to development of this area both for home students and for overseas was through increasing collaboration in developing learning technology and its uses. And another area of emphasis was thinking about developing skills. Skills is a word I would probably shy away from using in a sense but it's shorthand. Shorthand for student digital literacies, shorthand for staff digital literatories and so on. So a range of areas that were of interest. The task force has been meeting now for getting on for a year. It will publish its final report very shortly towards the end of the autumn and it will make recommendations to HEFGI, to the government, to institutions, to individuals and to bodies working in this area about ways that it thinks could be developed to enhance the use of learning technology in the future. It's been conducting or commissioning some research to contribute to its findings, interviewing a lot of people, having an input from a lot of experts in the field. I think many of you will have heard this morning David White talking about the work that Oxford University has been doing that's contributed to this project, researching online distance learning. I'm not going to repeat here many of you will have already heard his talk this morning. I think one of the key findings of course was that in terms of distance learning and undergraduate provision outside of the OU, the current offerings are relatively limited and that their discoverability is even more limited. In other words, if a student wants to study purely at a distance and online, apart from the OU, it's quite hard for them to access information readily that tells them what are the sort of courses that they might have available to them. We know very little about what such students want. We know very little also about the international markets and competitors operating in this field, surprisingly little. These were some of the key findings from the research. Another piece of research, the Task Force Commission, has been conducted by the NUS and I know that Aaron Porter is going to be talking about this tomorrow. Again, I'm not going to go into details, but some of the key findings from that work are that there are very variable levels of staff competency in the use of ICT. That students welcome better use of ICT, especially in assessing work. There's a need to encourage staff and students to participate in the earliest stages of course development and contribute towards learning technology in course development. They also found that there's variability amongst students in their preparedness and understanding of the use of learning technology. Overall, the findings were that student expectations of ICT and HE are largely being met, but there are these problem areas that have been identified. The OLFTF, when it makes its recommendations, is likely to make them in a number of areas, including some recommendations about how the UK may take advantage of new and expanding markets, both at home and abroad, how it might encourage new and new types of students into higher education, about creating opportunities for collaboration between private and public and public public organisations because this is one way to achieve economies of scale and to share resources. To identify opportunities for targeted investment to support excellent and provision at significant scale. To think about better ways of levering support from other bodies and to think about the cultural and staff development challenges that the use of learning technology poses. I think everyone here today is already on the converted side of that border and the knowledgeable side of that border, but of course there are large numbers of institutional leaders and academic staff who haven't made that journey. I want just to conclude by pointing towards some of the challenges, key roles and opportunities as I see them for learning technology and I'm talking here very much I think from my background as a specialist in learning and teaching in higher education as well as in higher education policy. I think that one of the key things is that students coming into higher education in the main come with the absolute expectation that they will encounter and use learning technology in a fairly sophisticated form, that's certainly true for the younger 18 to 19 year olds anyway and with prior experience of using technology both in learning and for social activity and that's a challenge I think that we all have to face. I think another challenge is to think about the diversity of students, the diversity of modes of study and the diversity of types of pedagogy needed for different subject materials. Just as face to face teaching for sciences for example quite different from teaching in history so is online teaching quite different in how you can use the technology. I think another key challenge is how to translate and join up technical advances with educational appropriateness. It's no good having great technological developments if they are not used in a pedagogically appropriate way that will excite curiosity, engage interest, develop learning etc. I know I'm preaching to the converted here but I still think that these are points that the learning technology community has to make. I think scale and investment are important. We are living in increasingly restrained economic times. Costs of development are not little. The old fallacy I think has been well and truly hit on the head that e-learning is the way to a cheap future for HE. It's not cheap. It costs and it costs a lot in time. Therefore one way of approaching that is to think about the scale when you're thinking about how you develop and use learning technology and that's why the online learning task force is focusing so much on thinking about collaboration and that's why things like the OER with shared access to open resources are such an important part of the picture. I think the overall thing that we have to bear in mind is the goal because the goal must be enhance pedagogy and enhance student outcomes. Without that everything that we do is more or less pointless. Thank you. Thank you very much Heather. Questions, comments from the audience. Thank you for that. Davie Callaghan, Learning Technologist from Edgehall University. You said quite a few times about international and international aspect and UK higher education is a brand. What is your organisation doing to fund support that or did I miss bits? I'm sorry maybe go over them again. I think I would start off as I started off in my talk by saying that HEFG is the High Education Funding Council for England so we can only fund English institutions. So the approach that one would take and that the government would take is how can English institutions increase their share, their participation in that international market. You ask what we're doing to fund that. I think all developments in learning technology contribute to that. They contribute to our knowledge and our understanding. They start to produce materials whether or not they're used with students at home or students who may be studying at a distance. It is very much one of the foci of the online learning task force and one of the areas in which they will be making recommendations. I think I would say that as far as possible I wouldn't like to make a dichotomy between developments that are entirely aimed at home students and home developments and ones that are aimed overseas. Everything has to contribute to everything else and that's the way that it should be and that it normally is. So it's not a precise answer to your question. It's a more general answer to your question. Thanks. Colin Addy from the University of Wolverhampton. Heather, in your slide that's up at the moment, challenges, roles and opportunities, I suspect we need a sort of a major step change in what we're doing and how things have got a change going forward as opposed to sort of organic evolution, the kind of thing that we're probably used to over those of us that go back 20 plus years. Do you think that what's being discussed, what's being proposed, what's sort of on the table at the moment is sufficient to push that step change? Or do you think what we're talking about at the moment is just the beginnings of it or what's your sort of thinking how this goes forward for the next two or three years in which I think something's got to happen? I think we're at the beginning of a process and I think, for example, the OER programme demonstrates that the first phase pilots were very successful and some of the participants were in a sense surprised at some of the problems that they were able to overcome, but these are still relatively isolated and small pockets of development. So the question of scale and collaboration, I think, are the words that I would come back to and the whole idea of culture change, I think still the vast mass of teachers in higher education don't necessarily readily embrace the use of technology in the fullest way possible. I count myself guilty in my past history of that as well. So I think we're at the start of a process of change. You may argue we've been at the start for far too long, but I think we are at the start. Fred Garnett, London Knowledge Lab. Will there be any change in the key performance indicators to reflect technology use across the institution or will it remain focused on online distance learning which you talked about? Could you just clarify what your meaning by key performance indicators? Well, the targets that are set for vice-chancellers which will drive overall institutional behaviour, because at the moment the way I read it, KPIs only really relate to online distance learning which you went into, and going back to the point you said about using it to enhance teaching and learning, there's no overall measure of university use which might drive vice-chancellers to increase or reflect a great degree of use of technology within their institution. I'm not sure that there's an overall measure in relation to the distance learning that you're referring to, but I think that much more effective than necessarily setting anything like national targets or whatever, is the feedback that every teacher and every institution gets from its own students about their expectations and their use of learning technology. And I think many, many people here could tell stories about how it's often students within institutions who are clamouring for more and more effective use of learning technology and that they have become one of the big drivers of change through the feedback that they provide on courses and so on to develop things. And I think that that is why it's institutions who need to think about how they will most effectively use learning technology for their students, the range of subjects they teach, the type of approach that they take to higher education, not some sort of key performance indicator at a national level.