EdTech Europe London 2014

EdTech Europe 2014 London

This week I attended EdTech Europe at the Millbank Tower in Westminster. Not only did the 29th floor of this skyscraper provide brilliant views of London but a coming together of some of the biggest brains and most influential innovators and investors in the Education Technology community. Although most people in attendance were British other great companies were on display from France, Finland and Germany offering their different perspectives on how to tackle some of the biggest challenges in Education.

Charles McIntyre of IBIS Capital kicked off the day with a keynote speech demonstrating how technology has disrupted the media industry and how this was now happening in Education. He explained we are only at the start of this transformative era which is happening now right in front of our eyes. Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloque co-founder of EdTech Europe went on to show a graph showing how Coursera a 5 year old MOOC start up had caught up with the well established institutions of Oxford and Cambridge University in terms of Google search volumes. Of course MOOCs aren’t going to replace Cambridge and Oxford but the search engine traffic shows the demand for high quality education through affordable MOOC offerings is very real. Ben continued to show a similar graph showing the website traffic of the established BBC websites vs YouTube. It was clear to see how Coursera might grow exponentially over the coming years and even if the completion rates of such MOOC platforms are in question the cost of delivery to the learner brings a massive advantage to bear. Are the MOOCs potentially levelling the playing field for access to Education?

Westminster on a summers day from the Millbank Tower

Colin Hughes the CEO of Collins Learning gave a thought provoking talk on how textbooks are not dead. His argument was backed up by evidence that much of the high performing countries in the world have high penetrations of textbook usage and how in the UK policy makers have downplayed the role of the textbook over the years. He explained that building a textbook is as difficult if not as hard as building a Lamborghini car. Colin in essence said that textbooks are here to stay all be it in different forms and with different features. Textbooks in the form of podcasts provide a very cheap way for publishers to get their content out and they are enjoyable for learners especially within a revision context. Furthermore digital ebooks on iPads can provide pop up videos and quizzes to make the learning more interactive.

Dr. Ulrik Juul Christensen Senior Fellow of McGraw Hill gave his keynote speech on how content creation has to change in order to enable adaptive learning. His slides showed the publishing industry at an inflection point where the iceberg is about to crumble. A trend toward smaller content packages of perhaps 1 minute durations is needed to adapt the learning experience for differing learning pathways. Smaller content packages will make the industry open up to smaller more nimble players who will find niches within the industry. Will smaller more agile publishers kill the cash cows of the established publishing houses?

The EdTech Europe Awards led to Better Marks, The Student Room and Busuu being named as winners. Better Marks is a German based Maths software company. Meanwhile the Student Room is a peer to peer learning platform which allows students to learn from one another and Busuu is the largest social network for language learning online.

To conclude the iPad and big data will transform the learning outcomes of the next generation. However the biggest gatekeeper and most essential person in a child’s education is the teacher. It would be good to see more UK teachers becoming teacherpreneurs. One thing that all investors and innovators agree on is that a product must improve learning outcomes and must breakdown barriers to add value. UK investors need to become less risk averse and back high growth EdTech startups. Currently EdTech investments are 10 times higher in the USA than in Europe and the UK EdTech industry must respond if we are to compete on a truly global scale.

2Inspire Leadership Programme and Dale Carnegie

Sean at Bradford School of Management talking to MBA students

Rob Northfield runs a successful leadership programme called 2Inspire and each week for the last 6 weeks I have been attending the Cedar Court Hotel in Harrogate alongside 11 other people; Julie, Sarah, Chris, Dan, Lee, Sarah, Sharon, Brett, Adam, Natalie and Colin. You might ask the question why have I listed all the names above? Well it’s because I have learnt a person’s name is the most important word in the world, at least to them. This would explain why politicians such as Nick Clegg use people’s names all the time to make the other person feel important and hence become more likeable to the voting public. The trick to remembering people’s names is to think of their name as an object or symbol. If you forget a person’s name just say “I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch your name?” and then repeat this back to the person.

Rob Northfield grew up in the East End of London with Jewish roots his family was very poor and his career as a professional footballer for Leyton Orient was cut short due to injury. Rob then went on to be the youngest Managing Director of Beecham’s before running Dale Carnegie training in the UK.

Attending the course has been great and our reading list included “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie talks about a set of principles to create stronger relationships with people. We must make the other person feel important by using their name and showing a real interest in what they have to say by listening intently. Dale goes on to explain how criticism of other gets you nowhere and it’s much better to ask quality questions rather than argue for sake of argument. We must talk about another person’s interests, it’s about them not you and as human beings we tend to talk and focus on ourselves far too often. Smiling and eye contact when listening also helps!

Rob talks about leadership being made up of skill, knowledge and attitude and that you need to have all of these to properly lead. The most important of these is your attitude. Of course your attitude is a state of mind and Rob and his co-presenter David Ross have taught us about the importance of giving to other people to energies others and indeed yourself. Sometimes giving to others is reciprocated and this in turn takes your daily energy to another level.

Plan to flip the trip on a slow coach always on time listening to songs of praise. The former sentence helps me remember my new personal values to help me improve how I interact with people and lead them at Webanywhere. I need to learn to listen more to people and their point of view. Sometimes when I get negative thoughts I need to flip these and take the other person’s perspective. Slowing down in my daily life instead of rushing from one meeting to the next and one task to the next will make me more reflective. Coaching other people to become leaders themselves is something I must work hard on. I need to be on time for internal meetings! For some reason I attend client meetings on time but this doesn’t happen in our business. And finally, song of praise reminds me to praise staff not just when they accomplish their goals but on the successful small steps they take towards their objectives.

In business technical skill and knowledge only gets you so far. What takes you to the next level and beyond is leadership and leadership needs you to have a great positive mental attitude. It’s about attitude not aptitude!

Moodle Moot Edinburgh 2014

One of the key reasons educators and corporations choose Moodle is the strength of the Moodle Community. This year’s Moodle Moot was held in Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange again demonstrating the power of the community where 350 people from across the globe descended on to the Scottish capital.

Martin Dougiamas’ key note was slightly different this year. Martin had flown his children over from Australia to join in with the festivities. Each time a version of Moodle is release traditionally his kids have taken a photo symbolising which version number we are on. The next version of Moodle is 2.7 and will be supported for the next 5 years. Moodle users are recommended to upgrade their installs to this latest version which includes amongst other great features security patches. It was nice to see his kids take a photo with the audience in preparation for the new release in the coming months.

Martin in his key note demonstrated some exciting plans around user notifications and how in particular Moodle can talk to Apple and Google to enable SMART phone notifications. Furthermore, a brand new text editor has been coded from scratch to replace TinyMCE and allows Moodle developers to display only the text editing icons they need enhancing the user experience.

On the Moodle Theme agenda boot strap themes are to be used as standard and the ‘More’ theme was demonstrated showing how teachers can customise their own themes quickly on the fly. Other impressive developments I witnesses included a sophisticated social media and notices module developed by Glasgow College which greatly enhances the student experience online. And finally, I was interested to learn more about conditional learning pathways and how depending on the grades of your students various notifications and additional resources can be unlocked. This enables a personalisation of learning whereby students who are struggling are given extra support materials and tutors are notified to intervene. Gifted and talented learners with higher grades can be challenged with more stretching resources individualising the experience.

Of course it’s not all about the technology it’s the people that make Moodle Moots special. Over lunch I spoke to people from the USA, Poland, Lebanon and Australia – well yes that was Martin Dougiamas the Moodle founder from Perth!

Bradford School of Management International Students

Sean at Bradford School of Management

Every year for several years I have worked with Shahid Rasul and Christos Kalantaridis lecturers at Bradford School of Management challenging students to come up with ideas to problems faced by Webanywhere. Not only does this strengthen our ties with Bradford University and help their mission to ‘Make Knowledge Work‘ but there are real business benefits to working with Webanywhere outsiders.

It is true that executives and managers in businesses can suffer from not seeing the wood for the trees and young dynamic students with fresh thinking can challenge some of your original thinking.

Our work with Christos is particularly interesting as we developed an online Ideas Market which now spans six international Universities two of which are in the Ukraine. Clearly, our online learning solution is much needed given the difficulties posed in the Ukraine and the disagreements between Russia and the West. Indeed, Christos is meant to be visiting another University in the Crimea but given the difficult situation this will no doubt have to be cancelled. The online Ideas Market place will continue to allow collaboration between University research groups irrespective of the political unrest and diplomatic strains.

My work with Shahid’s students has been equally enlightening. Two groups of students have been helping us with the challenge of global expansion. One group focused on our go to market strategy in the USA and another group focussed on issues around the business cultures between our three global offices in Poland, the USA and the UK. It was thoroughly enjoyable watching the students present back their findings at the School of Management.

Hopefully in a few years to come we can re-connect with the international students and who knows perhaps they will run Webanywhere in China!

Webanywhere and Whitehill Community Multi-Academy Trust

Whitehill Trust Board Meeting

I have been active over a number of years with the Whitehill Trust Executive Board. The Learning Trust includes Webanywhere and other organisations such as the University of Huddersfield, Denford, Carnegie Learning Leaders, Yorkshire County Cricket and Barnardos. This has been a great forum for like minded organisations who work with schools to collaborate for the greater good.

The Whitehill Trust is a great example of how business and other organisations can engage with the local community to improve learning outcomes and add real value. Whitehill partner organisations are now allowing Whitehill to offer school to school support to other schools in Calderdale and beyond. For example, the University of Huddersfield’s Jayne Price helps Whitehill with their Schools Direct placement of teachers whilst Carnegie Learning Leaders help develop the middle leadership within schools.

Webanywhere are currently investigating how learning management systems can be used to develop continuous professional development and talent management across the Trust. We have worked previously with other teaching schools and universities, to provide online learning portals for teachers. Whitehill are interested in how senior management will be able to track this learning and assess the quality of teaching whilst providing ongoing support. Having a number of schools in a dispersed geography means a blended learning approach to teacher training and talent management has many advantages both for the learners and the leadership.

Our New School Jotter with Education Apps is launched

Over the last year we have spent many hours of development and testing creating a new version of our market leading product School Jotter. School Jotter has a significant customer base in the UK used by thousands of schools. Countless schools on a daily basis rely on School Jotter to edit their school website but the latest version of School Jotter takes teaching and learning online to a new level.

New School Jotter with Education Apps

The old version of School Jotter has been successful in schools with bursars and head teachers logging on to update their website with the latest newsletters, holiday dates and more. So what has changed?

In our new version of School Jotter all stakeholders in school and outside of school are given logins to the system. This include parents, teachers, student and governors. Furthermore, School Jotter is turning from being a website content management system into an education app store.

Webanywhere has developed our own education apps and new apps such as School Merits and Jotter Learn can be used to extend teaching online. School Merits is an online reward system whilst Jotter Learn allows teachers to create compelling learning sites for setting homework or to drive classroom activity as part of a blended learning approach. School Jotter is now fully compatible with tablets and mobile devices and supports mobile learning.

We will continue to develop further education apps for School Jotter whilst incorporating third party education apps such as eBooks and other useful resources. We’d appreciate your feedback on our software. We want to co-create our software with you our customers, so please do let us know if you have ideas for other apps you’d like to see.

I remember my old paper based school jotter at school in the 1990s, how times have changed. Our new version of School Jotter takes teaching and learning online and into the 21st century! We hope this will engage students and improve learning outcomes. Out with the old and in with the new.

No pain no gain