#CanvasCon24 Barcelona #canvascon

It was kind of the great folks at Instructure Canvas to invite me over to a very sunny Barcelona for their annual European conference and to enjoy their impeccable hospitality. I write this up with a certain sense of longing, as I have now left the College and won't be rolling out some of the great new developments. However, I will keep doing my bit to champion many of the themes and ideas that were discussed in the sessions.

I will also feed this back to my former colleagues at City of Glasgow College.  As ever with a large event, I could not be in all of the sessions, so apologies if I missed some other key nuggets.  The space themed conference hotel and venue very fitting for some really useful future gazing, though many of the issues are old and apparently intractable.

Moon Walk 

 Here is my quick review.  Excellent keynotes, well organised and chaired by Dan Hill, MD EMEA.  Preconference, I enjoyed getting my brain being picked on what Colleges need next from their VLE platforms. 

Anne Marie Imafidon was a super opening speaker,  her work with Women into STEM is superb and it was great to hear her speak about the need to educate for the future and not for now. How important too that we inspire the next generation - gravitas is one of my pet hates - that as a young bright black girl she could only see images of serious looking dead white men with beards who had apparently invented the future - could have been a block to her own aspirations.  She is truly a great role model. 

This fitted well with later speaker Jóhanna Birna Bjartmarsdóttir (johannabirnabjartmars.com) a now confident, high achieving, young women who was initially rejected by the education system. A truly humbling story.  Interesting how much AI and other tools like Speechify and Grammarly enabled Johanna to re-engage with learning. 

 Ishan Kolhatkar from Inspera challenged us around the future of assessment. Exams will still be a thing, but in increasingly in smaller and more personalised bursts, and an old acquaintance and well known leader of digital learning Martin Bean - chaired some excellent panel sessions over the day. 

More on that later but hoping to see him in Scotland in December.  

Main messages here is that Generative AI means the end of lots of things and beginning of lots of new things particularly for learners and learning.  In twenty years time learners will scoff at old means of delivery of learning , just as they will be puzzled by computer keyboards and or even that in olden times people touched screens - voice and face recognition is future.

Here are my takeaways 

1. What seemed to be fairly standard "what is AI session"  from AWS services suddenly became quite exciting when presenter demoed PartyRock. Worth a look.
2. Mary McCooey of Queens University - has created a Canvas course for academics to make the most of data available to them to them at course level. Many teachers don't know how and don't access all the data they already have access to.  They have also pushed on with Canvas Data2. The analytics has enabled useful learning that has impacted on practice.  It seems counter intuitive but learners like doing as much as possible on the small screen on their phone. Has done a lot to link range of data and reports on usage of LTIs etc.  Also on when and what learners access and that they prefer interactive content. As COGC about to do some more work here would be useful follow up, there is also scope to work with Corry at Glasgow School of Art on Canvas data 2 in navigating this as she has very small team and would benefit from nearby critical friend. 
3. Cidilabs  this platform blew me away perhaps worth having a look at but do that alongside the new page creation designer from Canvas . The UDoIT tool might be more useful than blackboard ally as more Canvas native . They even have a tool that takes a PDF and converts it into a Canvas page. City of Glasgow College does have a few courses where there are squinty old PDF images of text that would benefit from this converter. 
4. Similarly worth having a look at Feedback Fruits some of their work around collaborative assessment particularly interesting and offers possibility of much more authentic assessment of group work and contributions of learners to team based assessments.
5. From AI sessions - we have all policy etc in place at COGC what is needed next is a more technical road map around adoption across College operations. I think most institutions need that. 
6. I met with Rosie Loyd of Tutello a platform that turns lecture notes and more into AI enabled agents - which looks just what many centres now need. 
7. Ryan Lufkin ran a great session I will certainly start following his podcast  I wonder if COGC would be interested him as speaker for future Learning and Teaching Conference ? His vision around impactful eight is good and aligned to global change The Impactful Eight - Instructure Community - 599792 (canvaslms.com)
8. Most Colleges in Northern Ireland and Sweden all use Canvas opening up more opportunities for national cooperation around Canvas Commons.
9. Swedish institutional lead interested in how UHI manages online and blended learning will make relevant introductions to colleagues at UHI.
10. Met EDF a development organisation who supported and continue to support Oxford Universities Canvas journey. I still think its amazing that we give Glasgow College students the platform used by most of the top global universities. EDF useful to know about if you need Canvas support.
11. Encountered, a new to me, similarity detection engine and I will have a poke around and promote if it is as good as it looks.  Shame they have just missed the APUC framework window.
12. Portflow by Driem - another portfolio solution not sure I need a deeper look .. but if you already have Canvas folio ? 
13. Manchester University are where we were five years ago but giving themselves a very generous two year window to move across to Canvas.
14. Had a useful conversation with Wiris  block in past to adoption is that they were always looking for an institutional licence which was just prohibitively expensive - suggests they may now be able to do smaller departmental deals.  If contact comes back will pass on to college. 
15. Finally great overview of Canvas Product Road Map My favourites are the new block editor and ability to have differentiated content release along with in course smart search, the new AI discussion summary tool and for the teckie in me the new LTI management tools.

I hope this summary is useful I am now back in very cold Scotland.  Thanks again Instructure for a really useful conference. Thanks too to all the great folks I met at conference for making it rewarding and fun.  

Goodbye and Hello

 

I let folks know on LinkedIn that I was finishing up my shift at City of Glasgow College at the end of August and moving back into world of educational consultancy. My association with vocational education and educational technology is continuing into its 38th year. I was overwhelmed by all the good wishes from friends past and present and job offers.I am really going to pick and choose I already have some irons in the fire, but looking forward to some me time too.

I've had a busier than anticipated September, my first month on the loose. 

Happy to say I arrived and left smiling from COGC. I am grateful for the opportunity to ride off into the sunset. I don't intend to be competing in the full- time job market again and a mix of paid and pro bono work will see me into retirement comfortably. Special thanks to Joanna Campbell who hired me initially with a clear vision and to all the learning technologists, IT team members past and present and the team of the Learning and Teaching Academy who helped roll out Canvas and much more at City of Glasgow College over the last seven years. Thanks too to all of the staff and students who in this period had to engage with learning technology more than at any other time.

Reminder -
It's not the end of learning design and blended learning - it is just the beginning.

I think we've transformed a lot and I'm sure there is more change to come across the College and the tertiary sector. Thanks too to the commercial sponsors and funders that trusted us over the years with lots of money and kit to push on our digital projects and capabilities and to all our educational technology suppliers who smoothed the way.

I leave behind a great team and robust learning technology platform for someone to write the next chapter.

I'm now looking forward to pushing on some things that were simply not possible in an institutional setting. 

Turkish Vocational Qualifications Authority Exchange Ankara

It was an amazing privilege to be invited to make two presentations, chair and  participate in a series of workshops in Ankara following catching up with the Turkish delegation in Scotland some seven months ago.

I was on familiar ground around talking occupational standards, national awarding , accreditation, credit and levelling and quality control at national and centre level, but my talk was about how centres can use technology to support innovative delivery  and personalised assessments which is my current day job, reflecting the work of our team. 

I know we as a centre can support centres and training staff in Turkey to innovate their practice. I hope a partnership can grow around that. 

Interesting opportunities too with a large centre in France for learner and staff exchange and with a centre in Italy keen to figure out portfolios, microcredentials and digital badging with us. I'll take these back to our international team. 

It was great to hear the progress that has been made in Turkey where they have broadly adopted the Scottish Vocational system. Like many other countries. Unit based awards with clear approval criteria for centres and a sensible sampling quality assurance process is a sensible option. Well done SQA who were along to support event and great to catch up with Roderic Gillespie and Donald Paterson two former SQA colleagues supporting the developments in Turkey. Well done too to the SCQF partnership who were truly european trail blazers around setting up a national qualifications framework. 

We visited a really well equipped training centre and sampled their processes. These would be familiar to any training centre or College in Scotland. One thing stood out, when assessing candidates on solar panel installation or working at height on powerlines, all of the practical assessments are videoed as evidence and kept for later sampling. At moment evidence is required to be kept for 100 years. In Scotland we just need to hold evidence for around 12 months, though we do keep records of resulting for 3 - 5 years.

It was good to hear too the progress that has been made in France, Italy and Germany who made presentations on their own systems. 

All have clear employer levies that support employers and trainees. France and Italy have perhaps the most flexible system to support employers and employees upgrade their skills.  Germany is looking to modernise their established system - the delegates knew that many countries look at their system as leading.  It was interesting to hear them describe their own system as like Sputnik - a world first but now in need of upgrading. Their system is creaking a bit in terms of it ability to innovate and on the ground they are having challenges around recruiting and retaining assessors. 

My own reflections - 

• I think we need clearer line of sight in Scotland between the employer levy and where money is then committed to the vocational system. It is clear that is an essential element of a successful vocational system. 
• Ankara is a modern metropolis of 6 million people, it's very cold in winter - but with warm friendly people and amazing food. Turkey has a population of 84 million. 
• I've encountered the massive success of Scottish vocational system all around the world. It is easy to forget for a tiny country, we have always hit well above our weight on educational exporting, developing global thinking not at institutional but at national level, this around our vocational system - not school assessments nor the Scottish University system. I am still concerned this will be seriously disrupted or even lost when reforms come to SQA. 
• Other countries are making strong progress around digital certification. In Turkey you can request your certificate in any major language. 
• It was great to meet again colleagues from the European Training Foundation and from GOPA  and great to hear that expat Glaswegians in their ranks  follow my wee brother's Lost Glasgow Facebook and Twitter pages. 

Here in full flow speaking and chairing and  presentation linked to this blog post.  The work here is a reflection of work across the Learning and Teaching Academy at City of Glasgow College. I'm taking some Turkish delight back to my team. 

 

Year in Review 2023

A quick year in review - next post will be looking forward.

I managed to fit in a lot of personal and business travel in this year.  Thanks in the main to external organisations who are interested in what we are getting up to at City of Glasgow College. From Cupboard to Keynote - our work around AI has been picked up on a number of fronts. 

That combined with some of my friends' big birthdays and some major sporting events. It's  been quite a year.  Tinged with sadness as I lost one of my big cousins and just before Christmas my 88 year old uncle. 

Had lots' of nice nights out with old pals down the pub , combined with St Mirren and Scotland having great football seasons and caught a number of great gigs including Pulp. 

Venice was great fun for the Carnivali in February, Barcelona was great en famille as was short return to Ile De Re at the start of the summer. 

Our big escape was a tour of France for the Rugby World Cup. Which was just superb - Rheims, Lyons. Bandol , Marseille , Villefranche , Nice and repeat on homeward leg, just great. 

Made even better that our family came out for different legs of the tour and we had a lot of old rugby chums to meet up with along the way. 

That combined with speaking in London (BETT) , Amsterdam (Edutech) , Liverpool (Instructure/Canvas) and Inverness  (#OER23) among other places made for a busy year.