EdTech Europe 2015 Review, Kings Place, London

EdTech Europe 2015

This year’s EdTech Europe was held at King’s Place in London near King’s Cross. The event sees investors, entrepreneurs and companies come together to share stories and to discuss the latest innovations, trends and solutions to the big problems facing EdTech.

IBIS Capital explained that education technology is the reset button for global economies. The jobs of the future need people to work with computers and some jobs are more at risk to the digital revolution than others.

The Head of Google Education, Liz Sprout, focussed her talk on what skills business leaders need in the modern workplace. Google conducted an extensive worldwide survey of business CEOs. Problem solving skills came top closely followed by teamwork, communication skills and critical thinking.

Google expeditions is driven by a new phenomenon called Google Cardboard. In essence Google Cardboard is a headset made out of cardboard and lenses with a smartphone attached to enable virtual reality experiences in the classroom. Kids in classrooms can be taken to places they have never been before. The cheap wearable devices can be purchased cost effectively for whole classrooms and change pupils entire outlook on learning through immersive virtual reality. Kids can go to up to 50 different world locations and teachers and can teach lessons in ways they have never done before.

Sean Gilligan at EdTech Europe 2015, Kings Place, London

Another talk involved Rob Grimshaw of TES Global, Karine Allouche Salanon CEO of Pearson English Business Solutions and John Martin CEO of Sanoma learning focused on the teacher being at the centre if the education system. According to the panel, it’s the teacher that is the killer app. Finland’s PISA scores are significantly higher than that of the UK and France and thus there living standards and earning potentials are higher. Apparently a 25 points difference in PISA score represents $100,000 of lost earnings over a workers life time.

Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet
Co-Founder
EdTech Europe

2U’s founder Rob Cohen talked about their services to take top universities in the USA online. They explained how student enrolment and attraction tended to have a local bias. Prospective students living further away from a campus were less likely to enrol, even if the course was online. 2U are offering online degrees for universities at the same cost and with same certificate. Whilst the university is in control of enrolment and certification, 2U provides the content, recruitment service and enables the traditional universities journey to widen their reach online.

SOLE Self Organised Learning Environment

A further panel involved Maurice de Hond, the founder of the Steve Jobs School based in The Netherlands, A French School Lycee International de Londres and Anne Preston, a Researcher from SOLE Central at Newcastle University. Maurice de Hond explained that simply adding new technology to old schools is an expensive exercise. What is actually needed is a new learning experience and classroom environment. Sugata Mitra is resident at Newcastle University and has been spending many years on his School in the Cloud project which is all about SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments). In SOLEs, the role of the teacher changes from the transmitter of information to more of a coach and a researcher of data analytics. This new model allows for self paced, personalisation of learning and adaptive learning which is tailor made to the needs of the learners. There is no lesson plan and the learning is unstructured i.e. self organised. This way if one pupil is struggling they are given more time to catch up with the rest of the class. This is what some people believe will be the smart classroom of the future.

Solar Powered iPads for Learning

OneBillion is a project help provided learning and teaching solution to children in Malawi. In Malawi there are usually 9,000 pupils in a school with classroom sizes of 250 pupils per class. OneBillion use solar powered iPads to increase the learning opportunities for these children, and the curriculum is delivered in the local language. A similar project running in Kenya by Avanti Communications Group beams broadband into schools using satellites. Often the developing world is moving quicker towards a mobile first, cloud first approach to teaching and learning, given the lack of fixed line internet and the availability of 3G and 4G. These stories are touching ways that education technology can make a real impact on the life chances of people in poorer nations. Certainly, the much shorter school days on the African continent can be extended by the use of digital technology. EdTech can be an education leveller, and can reach students less fortunate than ourselves.

Khan Academy Self Paced Learning

Indeed Sal Khan of Kahn Academy was then beamed into the lecture auditorium to talk about his massively successful not-for-profit education platform. Khan Academy first came under the spotlight when Bill Gates mentioned the project in a TED talk a few years back. The platform allows millions of students globally, in different languages, to study self paced Maths, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. The idea started when Sal was teaching his cousins Maths over the internet by posting Maths videos to YouTube. The most touching story was to see a Princeton STEM graduate come top of his class using Khan Academy. The student went on to state that he would not have made it to University if it was not for the Khan Academy and that the platform had changed his life. He had been failing time and time again in the traditional classroom and it was only the introduction of Khan Academy that saved him on his learning journey. Khan Academy is now in the process of broadening its reach, both in terms of subjects and in terms of languages.

Perhaps the biggest opportunity is life long learning; mapping the skills needed for graduates and the workforce at large to learn the skills needed for their ideal job and then to stay in that job. Understanding what the consumer (i.e. the learner) wants and then mapping out a learning path for these individuals would provide the personalisation of learning needed for career success.

Education spending continues to rise without a proportionate improvement in standards and learning outcomes. Education technology has the power to change this as long as the software, content and devices are easy for teachers to use. Shifts are happening in learning. Technology does not equal engagement. Information is all around us, Google can tell you the answer to anything. What is more important is how you understand the information and how you apply it.

Questions are more important than answers. We don’t know what the future will be so how can we teach for this? We know that graduates today will have 27 different jobs in their lifetime. The boundaries between working and learning are merging. Industry aligned curriculum is needed at the pace that the tech industry moves. Everyone is a tech company; Goldman Sachs now has more developers than Facebook. Industries are going digital. This means we can reach more people and we can engage them in different ways. Learning technology has to have great user experience; it must work on mobile phones and fit around people’s lives. Once this happens we will have passionate, excited audiences, who from their personal dashboards and feedback will be able to change the world.

Following EdTech Europe we will be hosting an EdTech Conference in Leeds more details are here:

http://www.educationtechnology2015.co.uk/

Growth mindsets and gaining feedback for self improvement

Growth Mindset Stretch Beyond

I was talking to the Vice Chancellor of The University of Bradford, Brain Cantor, about a business problem I had, and he surprised me with his remarks. He said “You can grow round that problem, can’t you?” At the time I didn’t really understand what he meant, but now I think I do. A growth mindset comes from the belief that intelligence is not fixed, and that it can be developed. Just as a tree needs water and minerals to grow, so too does the human brain. Some people give up when a challenge comes along, but others persist. Their are those who quickly become successful, but their fear of failure holds them back. People often take negative feedback in a defensive way, when actually they should learn from this criticism. Growth mindsets result in a higher overall achievement, instead of reaching a career plateau.

Show me any successful person and not far away you will see their coach or mentor. We all need real-time feedback on our performance. We need to “coach the coaches”, and using technology there are positive ways to iteratively improve the quality of what we do. Having just purchased an Apple Watch I want to know how many calories I have burnt today, I want to speed up my communication and always be on time for meetings. The feedback from my Apple Watch will allow this and hopefully (fingers crossed) will not be another distraction in my busy life.

Another example of this would be teacher-annotated videos on teaching best-practices, which could be shared with the teaching community. Teachers would then be able to learn from their peer group and perhaps teachers in rural areas could tap into the expertise found with teaching communities in big cities.

Learning platforms aren’t just for students they can be used for teachers. A teacher CPD portal can connect educators with each other and to educational experts. They can help teachers reflect on their own practice and provide educators support to master new strategies. Being online these resources are available on-demand. Furthermore, content can be curated online so teachers can find appropriate support and ideas quickly.

The classroom hasn’t changed that much since Victorian times, and embracing new technology to create more value for teacher satisfaction and student experience has to be a no-brainer. As Bill Gates says, the big issue in Education is the quality of teaching, so any mechanism that empower teachers to learn from the best will only help improve the life chances and prosperity of our future generations.

Productivity in the economy is the ultimate goal, and we need to catch up with the French and Germans by investing more in research and development, the quality of management and indeed lifelong education, if we are to compete in a global marketplace. By the time the French and Germans have hit Thursday afternoon it takes Britain until Friday afternoon to catch up. Let’s skill-up our teachers to the next level. For teachers to have a growth mindset we need to look at new ways of developing and leveraging advances in technology, be it learning platforms or Apple Watches. The reason I got an Apple Watch was to improve my time management skills and to gain more real-time feedback. Feedback can sometimes hurt, but without it we will keep on doing what we have always done!

Totara for Teacher Training

Moodle Moot Ireland & UK Dublin 2015

Danny Bonta and Jonathan Smith

Having just returned from the Moodle Moot in Dublin, the Moodle community is as strong as ever. At the Moot at DCU, Martin Dougiamas launched the Moodle Association to the community, to help accelerate the product roadmap of Moodle. This new membership organisation will allow individuals, universities and others to finance new product features for Moodle whilst helping to steer the product roadmap. There will also be a new board for the Moodle Association which will include an elected chair.

One of the big themes for the Moodle Moot was “Learning Analytics”, and Dr Bart Rienties (Reader in Learning Analytics at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University) gave his keynote speech on his research in this area. Learning Analytics are important to try and improve learning outcomes but also to ensure the retention and further engagement of students. What is needed is a dialogue between the teacher and student online. The real driver is feedback, and this is needed for a personalised approach. We need to map out what a successful student does in terms of their learning journey. What are the stronger guiding paths? What is the gateway which leads to success? What are the demographics of the students? What is the VLE activity and is this activity declining?

Once you look at the analytics over time, you can go back to the future. This is why learning design is so important: The modules with more communication and which involve finding more information are the ones students tend to find more engaging. However, courses with lots of assimilated activities lead to a higher drop-out rate. There appears to be more positive evidence than negative, showing that Learning Analytics can really help students fulfil their potential.

DCU

Gavin Henrik organised this year’s Moot, and he conducted a workshop on Learning Analytics. He talked about the need to have actionable reports which are useful. During his session we were asked to come up with four questions and present this back to the group.

Our group included representatives from King’s College London and a Danish university. We came up with four main questions:

What is my learning style?
What is my teaching style?
What percentage of people are using the VLE?
What gaps are there?

On the issue of gap-analysis we thought it would be good to develop a Moodle plugin called the Pareto Plugin. Pareto’s law states that 20% of the students will deliver 80% of the results. It therefore follows that it is 20% of the teachers creating the most engaging courses, and 20% of the students using Moodle the most. We thought it could be a clever idea to notify the remaining 80%, as graphed using Learning Analytics, telling them how the top 20% are learning and to share this best practice. How often are the top 20% accessing the VLE? What do the top 20% of students, with the best results, do in terms of online learning habits.

Moodle Moot Dublin 2015

One of the disadvantages of Learning Analytics is that we do not get to see how the students are working in the offline world. If someone doesn’t log on for a while there could be other external factors outside of Moodle’s knowledge, contributing positively or negatively to a student’s education. Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics is a controversial topic, and the idea that a student’s grade in three years’ time could be predicted is one I find scary. However, used in the correct, ethical way, Learning Analytics should inform better course design, learning experience and allow teachers to focus on areas of greatest need. We need to follow the trends and patterns to optimise learning outcomes. Let’s remember: don’t create a report unless there is a recommended course of action contained within it!

Blackhawks Chicago Ice Hockey Stanley Cup

Scaling up in Chicago means finding talent. Our return to Chicago saw us watch the Chicago Blackhawks, and following 60 minutes of play the Hawks and Nashville were even stevens. What should have been a quiet work night out instead saw extended play, and we returned back to the hotel at 1am. Thankfully the Blackhawks had won, and for those of you who have never been to an ice hockey match I would thoroughly recommend watching a Stanley Cup game.

Back in England, Harry Kane of Tottenham Hotspurs is an up and coming talent. His namesake Kane of the Blackhawks is one of the stars of the Chicago ice hockey team. So where do you find talent? And specifically where do you find tech talent in Chicago.

Entrepreneurial hub 1871 was opened in the Merchant Mart in the city in 2012. We attended an Innovation event one evening with a panel discussion. The audience included tech entrepreneurs, investors and city heavy weights. Speakers included Chicago Ventures, a professor from The Kellogg School and others. Whilst the discussion was very interesting, one of panel started dishing the British as being risk averse. Upon hearing this my natural reaction was to rebuke this as I said ‘I beg your pardon’. Now this sort of rebuke would have been laughed off in Britain but not in America where they don’t understand irony in the same way we do. Of course the lady in question was right – the Brits are risk averse, as I was the only Brit in a hall of hundreds. I apologised after the panel had finished and explained how on reflection I agreed with her statement.

1871 Innovation Debate

Visiting marketing agencies later in the week, I learnt that in the UK you have hit to connect with people’s heads whereas in America it’s through the head.

I guess the Hawks had touched my heart with their comeback victory, and I must now go and buy a Blackhawks shirt. As for finding talent, connecting with 1871 and with the Department of Commerce should help that. We hired two more members of staff so our talent pool is growing across cultures. And we certainly need Americans who understand the local culture to serve local customers. We are after all two countries separated by a common language!

The fragility of business and the need for change

Phones4u stores close after losing key customers

Before I set up Webanywhere in 2003 I spent 5 years in the world of work following my graduation from the University of York. My first interview involved an elevator pitch. I arrived on Mark Lane just off the Headrow in Leeds for an interview with Ian Holding, the Sports Director of TEAMtalk.com, one of the top 10 websites in the UK at the time. Ian had just bought a sandwich and we got chatting in the lift. Thankfully my first impressions must have been favourable and my name dropping of Andrew Gilligan (my cousin – a famous journalist) must have added some credibility – I had landed a temporary job.

TEAMtalk football news site failed to monetise it’s readership

The role started out with me working just a few days a week, which soon led to full-time employment. For six months I had no contract and worked for £5 an hour until just after Christmas, when I landed a full time contract. Whilst TEAMtalk had millions of readers, it was unable to monetise its content and after three years of service I was made redundant. I was the second person to leave the business after the HR manager. Whilst TEAMtalk had grown its staff from 50 to 500 and moved to new flashy offices in Wellington Street, it had failed to generate sufficient revenues. It was acquired firstly by UK Betting plc and then lately Sky. Just this week the TEAMtalk office in Leeds has now been shut down making it the end of an era. I still have a lot of friends from the TEAMtalk days and lots of web based skills were learnt on TEAMtalk’s watch.

My next role was with the Caudwell Group in Stoke-on-Trent. Entrepreneur John Caudwell had built up his telecoms empire to include Phones4u and Singlepoint. I was employed as a developer in a start up within Singlepoint called Wizcom which specialised in mobile commerce. John Caudwell wisely sold his business to a Private Equity group a few years ago for £1.5 billion. If you’ve read the news in the last couple of month you will have seen about the closure of Phones4u. The large telecoms players were no longer prepared to do business with them which ultimately led to Phones4u’s demise and the job losses which followed.

Egg Bank was split and sold to BarclayCard and The Yorkshire Building Society

Egg Bank was my last tenure as an employee. I was hired as a contractor for the Prudential-owned internet bank based in Derby. The lucrative contract allowed me to save the cash to start my business Webanywhere and to follow my dream. Again, not too many years ago, Egg was split and sold off. Once a darling of the internet age, Egg had failed to adapt and its credit card business was sold to BarclayCard while the Yorkshire Building Society acquired Egg’s savings arm.

So what does this mean? It means that all three of the businesses which I used to work for as a young professional have since folded. TEAMtalk had failed to monetise it’s readership. Phones4u had been too reliant on a small number of large mobile phone operators and Egg had failed to adapt and change to a heavily competitive credit card market.

Businesses are indeed fragile, and the job of the leader is to challenge your staff to change and adapt. If a business does not serve its customers and their needs then you have no business. Morrison’s (and their lack of reaction to online shopping until recently) is a good recent example of how losing touch with customers can negatively impact a business. Getting back to basics and listening to your customers is what’s important.

Webanywhere’s core value is flexibility and we co-create our software with our customers to ensure we don’t fall foul of these mistakes. Businesses which get complacent, greedy, arrogant or lack energy will fail. We must be flexible to navigate head winds and avoid some of the dangerous paths ahead.

Debt and leverage make a business fragile. Webanywhere does not have any debt and is not geared up. Optionality leads to anti-fragility and with Webanywhere operating in three locations this helps us take risk out of our business. Top-down management-planning leads to fragility, which is why we prefer bottom-up management. Finally, Webanywhere has a large customer base of 4,000 customers, so rather than relying on a few large ones we can spread our risk around.

If you find this subject interesting, have a read of the following book:
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.

Wealth Dynamics the Secrets to Success

Personality Types

Roger Hamilton a Cambridge graduate who now lives in Bali has devised a system call Wealth Dynamics. I have been learning about Wealth Dynamics and applying this to my business and my teams.

Roger starts with the fact that we are all geniuses but we must stop doing things which we find hard or make us unhappy. Whilst in principle this seems pretty obvious the reality of adult life is this does not happen. Often in careers people focus on weaknesses rather than playing to strengths. Roger says we should hire our weaknesses and play to our strengths. Of course what is our weakness is someone else’s genius.

In order to work effectively in teams we must first understand ourselves. There are four types of genius. Each type of genius has different passions and strengths. Not only do these types apply to success in business but they can also steer you to happiness in your personal lives. We must focus on the things we are great at so that we go from ordinary to extraordinary.

Dynamo genius likes to create, blaze genius loves to connect, tempo genius love to serve and steel genius loves the details. Your winning formula is someone else’s losing formula. In effect you can take yourself and your team and place them on a square. The top line of the square represents people with intuition and their head in the clouds. These people are good at creating products with new ideas. The bottom line of the square is for people with their ears to the ground and they like to serve. On the far right of the square are extrovert people interested in connecting, and on the left hand side there are people who like the devil in the detail.

One of the major problems in business is people playing out of position and not using their talents to the best of their abilities. By mapping out your team onto a square you can then form a picture of the imbalances in your team and where you need to hire next i.e. your team’s weakness. Do you need more blaze, dynamo, tempo or steel people.

Relating this back to your business role models is an interesting exercise. Are you a creator like Richard Branson or Bill Gates, with your head in the clouds? Are you a supporter, such as Jack Welch, the famous former CEO of GE, blazing and leading the business? Are you a Donald Trump who likes to do deals where it’s all about timing? Or are you a Warren Buffet who likes to accumulate?

Whatever you are are and whoever you are, there is nothing wrong in how you have been wired. What is important is to realise your habits, your communication style and your personality so you can leverage these for business success. When you and your colleagues understand and do this, you will be part of a winning team!

You can learn more about yourself on the GenuisU site.

No pain no gain