Okay, okay then welcome everybody. Thanks for coming See mr. Ballin the audience is a great way to make me feel not at all nervous before presenting It's great to be here. So my name is Adam spires. I'm a senior software engineer at Sousa and this is my colleague Yeah, and my name is Sampath. I'm from entity yeah, and so we're gonna be talking about high availability for instances and What we believe is is the future of this feature in Upstream open stack. We've been working on this with a smallish community for quite a while now So these are the findings. So firstly, this is kind of a sequel to a talk that I gave with another colleague in in Austin If you haven't if you didn't see that one You're very welcome to you know go back to the Watch the video recording of that I'm gonna go over some of this Same material of that to sort of set the scene for the problem just to make sure everyone's on the same page There's a lot more a bit more detail in in that Talk about the the the background to this problem So today I'm gonna quickly Talk about the difference between HA on the compute plane versus the control plane. I'm going to make a case for why we need HA on the compute plane And go through some design goals of what we think the ideal solution looks like talk about some existing technologies and Sampath is gonna Tell you some more about one of the solutions that he has been Leading and working on and we'll talk about what we're up to currently and where we think we're going in the future and we'll also Warmly encourage everyone to get involved So firstly, I'm also difference between control plane and compute plane HA. So most people are probably familiar with this kind of HA on the control control plane So pretty standard architecture where you have a cluster with all your services running in it may be multiple clusters you can divide up the Responsibility of work for example have API clusters API services in one cluster and message queue database in another for example, there's a lot of different possibilities But essentially it involves some kind of cluster manager and which will do automatic restart of controller services and it will increase the uptime of your control plane on average and If you look a bit more closely, then you've got you know, typically an HA proxy load balancer You might have crossing pacemaker. Maybe keep alive D Especially if you're doing neutral on L3 HA these days It's a pretty pretty standard practices which are documented in the official HA guide and I should mention that That HA guide is actually currently under a lot of flux And I'm one of the people involved in trying to revamp that and get it back up today Because it does have a number of issues which needs sorting out So this HA on the on the control plane is It's pretty much a solved problem mostly. I mean there's still ongoing work in some areas like Neutron and so on but it's you know, it's generally pretty well understood So if your control plane is the stuff on the left of this diagram, and then it talks to all the compute nodes on the right hand side Then if you have a failure in the control and in the compute plane then You're not covered by any of the technology that I just mentioned so in that situation is is there a problem that needs solving and I would contend that there is Not for every single cloud out there, but certainly for some and we all know the pets versus cattle Metaphor which actually I think I first heard off when when Tim I was presenting it a long a long time ago So yeah pets. I won't go into you know detail because I think everyone knows this but pets are unique and Stateful and they take a lot of work to to create and look after Cattle aren't unique. They're stateless when something goes wrong. You just get another one replace it and So cattle are Basically ideal for the cloud. They're kind of designed To be to run cloud native the naturally resilient and disposable so if you have a bunch of hypervisors in your cloud And you start populating them with cattle Instances then everything's happy if one of them blows up then you you don't panic you just deploy another one You keep going you might want to keep scaling your cloud you might have different types of cattle in different projects and You know and anything can fail anywhere, but you just keep going and it's all fine But you get to a point where okay, there's a bit of mess that needs cleaning up here and Ideally the application layer will take care of the cleanup. Maybe it toss the open stack API's and cleans things up But you might have a dumb castle situation where actually you want the cleanup to be done automatically by the by the control plate control plane by the infrastructure layer That's it's still not a big problem, but what if like for example a whole compute host fails then That really is something that needs to be handled by the infrastructure layer because it's not a problem that's specific to any one workload, so for example, you might want to reboot it at that point and Or reacting some other way notify an operator or whatever So it's so it's not a Big problem when when fairly to happen with cattle, but you know It just does require some thought when it gets to pets the situation is Quite a bit more complicated because now you have pets scattered around and you can't just if a pet fails for some reason You can't just redeploy that pet elsewhere without thinking because it has state and that state needs to be protected So you need to make sure that that pet really is dead before you resurrect it somewhere else Otherwise you'll get two copies of the same pet conflicting with the same state And that's where you get the need for things like fencing Come in to avoid data corruption So you might want to defend against your failures in different ways Well, I'll get onto that in a bit actually, but yeah in this case if a compute host fails Then we need to be very careful before just we can't just reboot it and then expect everything to magically heal itself We need to think about the fencing and a Controlled recovery that is context aware. So as a summary do does open stack really need it I would say in the in the general case. Yes, we do need compute plane ha and The the quick summary is pretty much the reasons I've just stated It's not just pets that we need it for sometimes we need it for cattle and Despite what some people I think believe that there are valid reasons for running pets in open stack There's manage but manageability benefits all the the nice ecosystem within open stack for managing your resources There's no reason that cattle should be the only thing to benefit from that Otherwise, you would have you know a cloud here for your cattle and then something else over there for your pets and it's not An economic way of of handling your estate and As as developers We know that it's expensive to migrate to just completely convert a pet based traditional Legacy workload into something that is is cloud aware. So we kind of agreed on this as a community I guess largely I mean a While ago and we wrote this user story and the product product working group discussed it and And decided that it was one of the higher priority user stories out there But it didn't really go very far in terms of like how do we actually you know What what how do we respond to this user story and do some implementation? So I'll talk about that Shortly, but firstly, what do we really want from a solution? So the design goals are at least this is this is how we we see it. I think Firstly obviously as to scale that's just that's just a given and look it's So to scale we We seem to come up to a consensus that actually one way of Scaling that works pretty nicely is if we already have pacemaker running on the control plane. There's this nice Feature called pacemaker remote where you can have a remote proxy demon that runs on your compute nodes and kind of Forms an annex to the the control plane it extends the control plane. You can you can use pacemaker on the control plane to Control stuff that's running on the compute nodes and Because this is not a full mesh hierarchy with all the can the pacemaker remotes on the Compute nodes talking to each other you only get communication between the control plane and individually each Pacemaker remote so it does scale. So it's kind of like a I guess a hub topology So that's a brief Response to the scalability thing We want to handle different failure modes obviously we want to be able to handle an individual compute host Failing that could be just the OS or the hardware or whatever It could be a pros an individual process like liver demon On on a control on a compute node. Sorry or Nova compute Or we definitely also of course want to handle failures on the control plane But like I said earlier, we've sort of addressed that if we have a recovery workflow Controller that is is responsible for handling failures on the compute plane then we need to make sure that that itself is resilient. Otherwise We can nanosalve in a situation where suddenly our complete compute plane is no longer protected We want to be able to deal with individual VMs failing from a kind of infrastructure as a service Aspect what the we consider out of scope is failures inside the instance So if there's something wrong with the workload inside the instance, that's not the business of the cloud operators to worry about That's the business of the consumers of the cloud So that's the only one of those explosions that we consider out of scope for the rest of this talk Another clear design goal is is operability So we need to be able to have as operators have visibility into what kind of failures are happening in the cloud and What the system is doing to automatically or send me automatically respond to them? And we also want to have a like a history and be able to see the history of what failures have happened before So for example, we can See, you know, how many failures are happening on a weekly basis and is that what we would expect or is it too high? So we need to be able to Configure the response to failures in a sort of policy-driven manner and not every cloud is the same shape or has the same SLAs or requirements so for example We might decide that we want to configure the response by availability zone or We might want to configure the response by by project by tenant or by Instance flavor or even by individual pet if we have a specific pet that needs special treatment in some specific way We probably want to be able to cope with that So every cloud is different There are other things that we might want to configure We might want to set aside a certain number of compute hosts to be reserved So that we always know if there are failures on other compute hosts that we always have some hosts spare to fail things on to We might want to configure the retry thresholds On on various operations recovery operations We might even want to go into the the exact workflow that has been used for recovery and and customize those There are some Clouds in production out there that are using some of the existing solutions that were about to show you and It was very important for those. I mean I for example, I work for SUSE So obviously we have customers who are using our current implementation of compute Plane HA and we obviously want to make sure that those customers can be upgraded to a an improved solution in the future that's a you know best of breed upstream solution and similarly at NCT they have you know production clouds that are using their solution and They need to be able to upgrade that to an improved version in a smooth manner and We want An recovery workflow controller that is intelligent and context aware So some examples of that if Nova compute fails, but the VMs are still running The VMs are still healthy, but you just can't control them because Nova AP Nova can't from the control plane can't talk to the compute plane and control them So in that situation, do you want to automatically kill them and recover them elsewhere? Well, if they're kind of disposable cattle, then maybe it's safe to do that as long as it's not Too big an impact on the overall service But if it's pets then actually you might do more harm than good by by automatically killing them and trying to restart Them elsewhere because you might cause a significant service disruption. So things like that Need to need to be considered There's the possibility of having multiple faults occurring at the same time And then you need something that's intelligent enough to look at all of them and think well Do I handle these are separate things or are they all related? So I just focus on one of them If something goes wrong, then maybe you want to set the compute host to maintenance mode and until it's Everything's back up and running. Otherwise you might try you might end up with new instances or certain activity happening on that host that shouldn't happen and This is a use case from the entity world that they have Storage boundaries. Do you want to talk about this or yeah? The basic concept is we use the shared storage for each clusters so the without shadows shared storage the Evacuation is not going to work as we expected. So We want to define the Shared storage boundaries. I think no one still not supporting it, but it will in the future So that's why we specifically asked for this requirement Obviously as to perform, you know, we need a quick response to failures So if you're polling then you that might incur an extra latency over pushing so we Thought that you know using the standard open stack model of notifications on the message bus makes sense and We might want to Decide to handle certain faults at a higher priority than than others. So one example of that is if You have a host failing then it could well generate faults at not just the host level, but the instance level and You don't necessarily want to spend effort trying to recover an instance when you're already trying to recover the whole host that that instance is on and and if if there is some reason for Delaying a response to a particular fault Because you've considered it lower priorities another another one then obviously the operators need to understand that otherwise They might wonder why is this instance not being recovered automatically if they didn't realize that there's there's some good reason for that And finally it should go without saying saying that you know any any good upstream Best of breed solution should conform to all the open stack standards So the four opens open source open design open development open community We very much subscribe to that So, you know typically Python using all the standard libraries like Oslo and so on The the code should be hosted in the normal open stack way with Garrett review and all that and CI and Yeah, so that's the a whirlwind tour through the design goals if the kind of the direction that we were trying to head when we've Guided all our Existing existing work so Quick Recap slash intro if you haven't seen it before to the Open-source solutions that we're aware of out there in the community that handle compute plane ha the first one is is one that I've been Involved with for quite a while and it's it's the solution that is used by the product I work on sees open stack cloud, but also the The red hat product as well and they take a very similar approach And we we share code between them and we we collaborated on patches and and so on and So this is if this is like the kind of typical template for an architecture for these solutions Where you have the recovery workflow controller with some kind of state tracking What's going on so that it can be an intelligent make intelligent decisions then that lives in the control plane and then like I said We have pacemaker and the control plane and pace make a pace make a remote in the compute plane For actually controlling what goes on in the compute plane. So in this particular solution It looks like this. So actually the recovery workflow controller lives Effectively inside pacemaker itself So the the state is tracked in pacemaker and we have these two components Nova evacuate is effectively the recovery workflow controller that that takes care of executing a nova evacuate command which resurrects Instances onto a new compute node once the old one has failed And then we have this dedicated fence compute fencing agent which is responsible for Flagging to the nova evacuate process that some some clean-up recovery work needs to be done I'll maybe go into a slightly more detail on this if we have time later on So this solution Handles the the following types of failures. So it handles the the big explosion on the left there Which is your First the other whole compute host blowing up and it handles failures of individual Processes in terms of trying to restart them if if they crash for some reason It does not hand handle failures of individual instances. So that is a weakness. Oh Yeah, I just mentioned I'm so this is a video demo Which we don't have time to play here but I included it in the slides and the you know these slides are online the qr code was shown at the beginning I'll show it again at the end. So Yeah, you couldn't if you're more interested interested in more details on this particular Solution, this is a YouTube video that you can watch to just get a quick overview of you know how it works and So a quick summary of that, you know, this is a working solution has been for I Guess over a year now Or more there's commercial support from Susan Red Hat maybe from others. I'm not sure and The the code is upstream but like I said it it doesn't handle failures of VMs and There's a few other corner cases that are problematic there, you know limitations of the design rather than rather than actual bugs and So, yeah hand over to explain the next solution, which is called masakari. Yep So the masakari project is what we use in production in the entity So it's pretty much same architecture But we have take out the recovery for recovery flow for external as external service so This is a kind of a rough diagram how the masakari looks like the masakari itself consists with the masakari API and the masakari engine and the We use the pacemaker for the control plane h.a. And the we also use the pacemaker remote in the compute nodes But it's it's not we support default Masakari default support pacemaker, but you may configure it with the console or any other h.a. Solution you have is very the flexible solution so Besides the masakari main project we have another sub project called masakari monitors and In default we support three type of monitors the first one is the the host monitor which monitors the host failures And the second one is the process monitor which is looking for the any process failures Such as no a compute fail or liberty failed or any other like ice-caji demon Multiplot so such kind of important process get failed it will try to send the notification to the masakari API the third one is the the instance monitor which use the liberty API to monitor the VMs individual VMs and Then the notifications will send to the masakari API then it will take some Intelligent decisions based on the rules and it passed to the masakari engine to do the actual recovery so currently we have Only we have the task flow recovery driver and it has three main recovery workflows for instance failures and VM failures and host failures and and Also, we have another project called a python masakari client, which is give you a nice CLI to configure and control everything in the masakari the workflows and the configurations and the the the boundaries for the fail overs and This is an example for The process failure the we have process monitor each of on each compute node Which is looking for the process failures if we detect any process failure it will try to restart the process in several times And even if get failed to restart the process and work it properly it will alert to the masakari API and Then it goes to the masakari engine and the end result is it will disable the nova service on that particular compute node and the second one is the The instance monitor we use the lipid API lipid API to monitor the instance activities of the instance such as like The freezing IO so any other the bad Things happen in the VM. So it's monitored the VM externally and it will try to Get some alert from the lipid API and if it finds something it will alert to the masakari API by Send the notification and then it's go to the masakari engine and it will execute the the instance failure workflow to recover the instance the eventually what it does it is stop and start the VM and That will hopefully recover the instance from the failure and the third one is the node failures scenario and If some nodes was down it will detect by the other nodes in the cluster so this is we use pacemaker remote to detect those failures and the we have the host monitor which is a Connected to the pacemaker remote and it will alert the masakari API and it will get reduced the deduct the the Same notifications coming from a each and every host and it will aggregate it's the one notification and it will hand over to the host failure workflow and what it does this is Evacuate all the VM to to the healthy host in the In the cluster so in here we in masakari we support four types of The evacuation patterns the first one is the we use the nova Scheduler to select the particular host for the evacuates destination and the second type is we use the Reserved host so first of all you have to configure the masakari with some reserved host like It's a sample you have a 10 computer nodes and you can put another Computer node as a reserved host then it will use to As a look at destination for the failure host and the third and fourth patterns are the hybrid of those like first use You know our ex scheduler if it's fails then go to the reserved host and the fourth one is the opposite of the the priority and About masakari, I think we started this project as a github project Project in the like two and a half years ago now is under the open stack namespace so you may find the most details everything details in the masakari wiki and The current stable release is stable okata and masakari team turn the pretty much good job job to enhance the the recovery engine to support the customer of several recovery patterns and We also have the retry failure recovery workflows and the The most huge part huge work has been done with the bring it up to the open stack standards So if you take a look at the code, it's pretty much clean and very much understandable at now Yeah, thank you. And by the way The there are quite a few links on this presentation So, you know when you go to visit it on it's just a website So you can just you know go through and follow any of the links to any of the information that interests you Including these two links here So that there is one more Sort of upstream open source solution which sort of started off as a proof of concept and Proved itself, but hasn't really been taken too much further recently And it's based on Mistro, which if you haven't come across the Mistro project It's a workflow as a service project. So in this particular case Even though, you know any user can make any workflows for any any use case in this particular case Obviously, we're interested in workflows revolving around recovery of Failures on the compute plane. So this example here of this workflow is is what you would do if a Host fails. So you look to see which VMs are on that host Decide which ones you want to recover through some filter optionally and then and then do the recovery And yeah, that's the github repository for that if anyone wants to look at it Okay, so those are the those are kind of three You know upstream open source solutions to this there are other proprietary ones as well But we're not focusing on those in this talk Here's a quick comparison of the the first two and then the third column is is what we're aiming Towards now. I'm definitely not going to go through all the details of this matrix right now But I just you know want to point out them the most obvious thing which is that Masakari has a lot of very nice features it ticks almost all the boxes that we want The one area where we The OCF base solution is is maybe slightly more elegant is in the host and process monitoring Which is done natively through pacemaker and that is what pacemaker was designed for Originally, so the the idea is to basically combine the two of those and get this best of breed solution Which really ticks pretty much all the boxes Or at least a lot of them in the short term So how are we going to do that? Well, we've been discussing it for quite a long time actually over several design summits and so on and we decided to the kind of divide and conquer approach is Is what is needed really? so We decided to split it up into key areas. So for example host monitoring host recovery VM monitoring VM recovery process monitoring process recovery and We thought okay, if we can tackle these independently and build them in a modular way Then anyone can implement any one of those components in whatever way they want And it will still interface with all the others So people can kind of do a mix and match approach to building whatever they want and that will also give us a nice smooth upgrade path So there's the gory details on that aether pad. I'm going back to Newton design summit It I can't promise how much sense that aether pad will make to you, but if you want to look it's there But so what we did after a lot of discussion as we started writing some specs And to be honest, you know that the specs are kind of still in process. We haven't Necessarily like there's still a bit more knowledge in our in our heads from all our discussions So we've had weekly IRC meetings and so on and you can you know read the logs of those as well So the specs is not not a completely up-to-date faithful representation of where we are Right now. In fact, this talk is probably the first time that we've exposed all of this thinking Publicly so we're trying to do a better job there, but the respects for You know those areas that that I just mentioned We we also we haven't written these yet, but we do want specs for writing some other resource agents as well Okay, so this is like that was all the preamble of the talk and this is kind of the interesting bit or at least I hope it's interesting so the The OCF resource agent solution, which is the first of the the three solutions that we just mentioned Looks like this. This is a pretty much the same diagram as before but just rearranged and not as colorful But don't worry the colors will come in a second So you have the The state in pacemaker. I apologize for the small text by the way But again, you can look at these slides afterwards so that the state here is is only of the recovery of like the failures and the recovery it only lives within pacemaker and The dividing line across the bottom there is in between monitoring and recovery So that corresponds to the modular approach that we're trying to take And and you can see so that this existing solution wasn't a kind of elegant separation of those two things because you have the nova evacuate Process that is kind of straddling the two and yeah, that's how it looks and then This is where it starts to get interesting So the way we want to change this is that we want to retire the nova evacuate resource agent and we want to replace it by this more capable thing that I've Somewhat arbitrarily called nova host a letter Which is another resource agent, but it's capable of alerting so its responsibility is is is for is Not relating to recovery at all. It's just the monitoring side of things It's only responsible for passing the failures on to a system that is able to to do some kind of recovery and We're aiming for a driver-based approach to that so it can talk to masakari it can send out arbitrarily HTTP, you know, like just a kind of sort of chance. Yeah, like a rest type, you know message to to to whatever HTTP endpoint is is out there that the wants to consume it and so with this and With maybe some small modification of the two existing other components there in yellow We can start to make the architecture a lot cleaner And this also offers really quite a nice upgrade path from existing solutions because for example in if if one of my customers who's running suzer open stack cloud has the components running on the left What we can do in the upgrade path is to add a resource agent into the cluster for the Nova host Alerter and it's still running Nova evacuate and then all we need to do for the cut-over is to literally just stop the Nova evacuate resource and start the Nova host alert at resource and then suddenly the responsibility for doing the recovery of failed compute host is handed over and there's no You know, there's no Impact to the control plane or the compute plane and downtime of any services So we were quite excited when we when we came up with that Approach and It is a bit more flexible again because if we bring back in a Solution to recovery based on mistrial for example like the the the proof of concept thing that I mentioned earlier We have you know, there's this similar mechanism where pacemaker Uses a custom fencing agent on the left called fence evacuate that delivers the signal to mistrial to initiate the recovery workflow and We could reuse that even like either directly from the Nova host alert or By using masakari with a new driver that implements recovery workflows through mistrial instead of What it's currently doing, which is the driver for using task flow So The stuff in red Hopefully goes away the stuff in green appears everything else and then the stuff in yellow You know gets modified and everything else stays the same So it's really in terms of code changes from where we are now from both sides from the like the Sousa red hat side and from the entity side and whoever else out there is using these upstream solutions isn't is really quite a minor shift, but it's it's It delivers pretty much what we what we need Incidentally, this diagram is focusing on mainly on host recovery, but a similar Kind of approach applies to everything process and the VM record. Yeah So I Think we're are we close to time? Yeah, so we'll just wrap up So I've been working on packaging Masakari in the upstream in the RPM packaging project. That's now almost completed Just got to finish off the masakari monitors thing, but the other two packages emerge. So any RPM based Distro should benefit from that Then the next thing is to integrate the this new Nova host alert approach Update the spec so that anyone reading those doesn't You know gets the latest details and Then yeah, the future work for masakari like we still need to write a lot of documentation and right now we are on it and we have some the documentation under review and we will keep continue working on documentation and We have another spec for recovery method customization That is for like you can actually customize the recovery method on your needs. So I'll skip the details But yeah, and the one other thing is we gone We will try to implement the back-end driver for mistrial and the another very cool feature is we are thinking about is the having the ironic support for the volume booted ironic instance making it highly available through yes it's kind of a similar workflow and we also looking for to get in the big tent because it's a It's very pretty much important thing for our users to get insures. This project still Maintained and it stayed in the good hands Yeah, and there's a another little there's a few improvements that can be made on the Nova side Which I was talking to one of the Nova guys yesterday about Which and I think some of this is already in the pipeline for exposing the More details of the recovery process as it happens So that's pretty much it if you want to get involved then please do we have the dedicated HH open stack HRC channel If you post anything HA related to open stack dev or any of the other open stack mailing lists Please do include the HA badge on it so that people like myself are filtering the huge firehose of traffic for HA can Can can spot that stuff we have the weekly IRC meetings that everyone's very welcome to There's yeah, the launchpad project there There's similar one launchpad net slash masakari, right? Yeah. Yeah That like I said the HA guide we're working on and please bear with us this stuff that needs fixing there and yeah Please get involved. Yeah, and There again is the QR code and the URL that everything you just saw is available from there including hyperlinks and That's it. I think where we were we out of time or do we have time for questions? We're Where I think we're out of time so Yeah, yeah, so thanks very much Please one more thing we have another forum session day after tomorrow. Oh, yeah, right? Of course. Yeah, it's not about the D just not about the company. It is whole thing about the open stack HA Any topic is welcome. Yeah, like the the new front HA sin the HA. Yeah Oh, the control plan. It's like those of a feather for HA and that's Thursday at what time? I don't remember anyone know offhand. It's like Thursday morning. Yes, it's like 11 to 11 It's part of the forum. Yeah, it's part of the yeah, so please come to that if you want to talk tomorrow And of course you can ask questions, you know just come up afterwards and happy to answer anything. Yeah, thanks very much Thank you very much


Hillary, tell us a little bit about Greater Portland Landmarks. Greater Portland Landmarks is Portland's historic preservation education and advocacy organization. We actually build awareness of the historic nature of Portland and also the wonderful architecture that tells the story of our history. Does every old building have to be preserved or restored? I think that the beauty of historic preservation is that there is a really rigorous process about analyzing what's preserved. So in Portland, for example, there are historic districts and these are made up of properties that have been surveyed carefully and also there's a concentration of historic material. So in historic districts there are a number of historic properties that tell the story of an era or in some cases they tell the story of a whole mix of activities that happened in the city. For example, Congress Street really tells the economic development story of Portland whereas a neighborhood like the Western Promenade is a period of time in which a lot of beautiful buildings and beautiful architecture was created. So within one of these districts is every building eligible to be restored or only some of them? Part of the analysis for an historic district is to determine which properties are what they call contributing and which are landmark buildings and then there are buildings that are non-contributing. So buildings that were let's say you are in the Western Promenade or the West End District and there is a gas station that was added in the 1950s so that would be a non-contributing building. Whereas a landmark building might be something like the Portland Observatory or City Hall, a building that has very special stature from its history and also its architecture and then the buildings that are contributing are part of the fabric or the historic fabric of that neighborhood. So they're part of a building that has historic features and architectural elements that fit into what they call the period of significance or the time in which that neighborhood gathered its history. And if you have one of these buildings, must it be restored if you're going to do something to it? Well in an historic district there's a review process so it doesn't require you to do any projects but when you do a project that affects the exterior appearance of the building then there's a review process. Often it's very much at the staff level for a small project but for a large project there is actually a review committee that reviews the plans for whatever exterior changes there are to the building and the idea there is to be sure that changes are made in a way that's compatible with the architecture of the building and the history of the neighborhood but it doesn't necessarily mean you can't do additions or make changes it just is a way of managing change so that the whole neighborhood retains its historic character. If an owner buys a building how do they know if it falls into one of these categories? Actually there's a very detailed study of every building in an historic district so once you are in a district you can actually look up your street address and find out if it is a contributing or non-contributing or landmark building and usually there's a very detailed study in survey form, photography so it's a really interesting way also to learn more about your own historic building. Jennifer one of the resources that the Greater Portland Landmarks has for homeowners and building owners is things like this trade show. Tell us about the show. The Old House Trade Show is a collection of juried exhibitors who specialize in preservation and construction and specialists in the field of preserving or working within the confines of an old house and we define an old house as a house that's already been built so they are the ones who know what might be happening behind your walls or know how to fix what might be behind your walls and your attics on your basements it's a really great collection of exhibitors. What are some of the challenges in doing something like that, restoring an old house? Where do you start? That's a really good question and we actually have a workshop on that we have multiple multitudes of workshops today and our very first one today is all about how to attack your project where do you start? If you have so many things that need to be done how do you manage those projects? And sometimes it's with an architect, sometimes it's with a contractor sometimes you just know what you want to do but it's always good to have some sort of resource maybe how to accomplish those tasks. In addition to the trade show, what other resources does Greater Portland Landmarks have and what resources does the city provide? Greater Portland Landmarks also publishes what's called the Northern New England Preservation Directory which is a listing, it's a directory listing of some of the same people that are here today and we do that every year so we even do that on the years of the trade show and that lives on our website at PortlandLandmarks.org and we have a preservation services program our preservation services advisor Christopher Kloss can come to your home and help you work on those projects and help you figure out what you might want to do there are tax credits available by the federal government and the state and for homes and homeowners and the city provides some resources as well especially if you live in a historic district there are some guidelines that need to be followed when restoring or doing work on the outside of your home And are there any other resources that are available that people can use if they just have questions, that sort of thing? Sure, we have some resources on our website the National Park Service has resources on their website the city has resources and we also have many books available for sale that we've published The Energy Efficient Old House is a workbook that we've done that steps homeowners through making your house more energy efficient which is great here in Northern New England in the wintertime even in the summer but mostly in the winter and we have another publication called Living with the Newer Old House so it's a publication that covers homes from the 1930s up through mid-20th century and that was done by the advisory service of Greater Portland Landmarks which is a volunteer group the advisory service is also a group of people that can come and help you understand your home historically and maybe some of the things that you might want to restore in your house what's original, what's not and you can ask for them to come to your home as well Heather, when somebody comes to you and they want to restore their house so they think they want to, where do you start? We typically start with a general walkthrough just to get to know the client and get to know the home myself and my right-hand man Dave Cleaves our general contractor will walk through and take note of what you're looking to do and then we'll go back and we will write up a review and give you some ideas on how we think is the best way to go about that How do you sort of judge the possible from the practical? It's very difficult restoration as you know can sometimes bring some surprises so you know we try to just judge what's the best and most practical way to go about restoring so whether that is cosmetic or down to insulation and other items such as that you know we try to be practical and give you the best solutions And some people they may have larger ideas than their building can take or can handle or they can afford, how do you sort of manage all that? We try to get the full scope of the project and separate individual pieces of the project so that you could possibly, if you'd like, do them in different phases at a time and of course you do have to be practical about an older home and how much it can handle so usually we'll just work together, build some floor plans, maybe a 3D model and be able to walk through the plans together and decide what's the best application What are some of the biggest challenges working with our very old home? Some of the biggest challenges certainly can be plaster Some people do prefer to restore the plaster which can be a little bit of a treacherous feat but it's not impossible, foundations you know sometimes can be an older field stone or a brick may need some repointing besides that there's always some unforeseen unknowns that you may run into a lack of insulation, you name it And how do you work with the guidelines if it's in a historic district? Do you work with the city and that sort of thing to be sure that you're following all the guidelines? Most certainly and Greater Portland Landmarks I have to say is a phenomenal company to be able to go to and get resources and find people around here that specialize in particular items such as brick, windows, siding and we certainly work with the city through every single project and to be sure that we're doing things properly Is there room in this process for new buildings and new design and new architecture? There's definitely room for new architecture and historic districts and I think you can just go to the old port in Portland and see some good examples One example for example is the building that's next door to the U.S. Custom House which is now occupied by CIEE which is an organization that has its headquarters in Portland so a very modern building with modern materials and modern forms right next to one of the Great Landmarks of Portland, the U.S. Custom House And is that a sort of building that 50 years from now that people will want to preserve? I would hope so. One of the goals of Landmarks is to encourage the production of new architecture that is of the quality of the historic buildings so that really looking at neighborhoods and districts as evolving over time and so the buildings that are built today with quality materials with good design those buildings are going to be the historic buildings of tomorrow so very much so we want to encourage really good new architecture and historic context And if people want more information about Greater Portland Landmarks where can they go? They can go to our website www.portlandlandmarks.org or our offices are on the corner of High and Spring Street at 93 High Street and we'd love to have people stop in and we're open Fridays 11 to 1 We have a wonderful installation that talks about how historic preservation has evolved over the last 50 years and of course it's all still evolving so we look forward to meeting new people and getting more people involved in historic preservation going forward


Appalachian Wireless now has new forward pay prices where you can pay up front and get the data and features you desire. Five gigabytes of data, just $39.99. Unlimited, just $79.99. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. I was sitting in my car at a red light thinking about what I was going to order at the restaurant. I had no idea that I would be going to jail. Tara Campbell Hatcher, her husband and two-year-old daughter were involved in a minor accident Saturday evening, which should have been no more than a minor inconvenience, but that changed when the officer ran her driver's license number.  My name, my birthday, my social. It was all there. What they saw was a warrant for her arrest, second-degree trafficking in a controlled substance stemming from a 2009 indictment out of Powell County. Tara was arrested. You know, I had to put my hands where they could see him. I was fingerprinted. I have a mugshot now. But that wasn't the worst part for Tara. As I was being arrested, my daughter was getting loaded into the ambulance. And as a mother, I know a lot of women could probably relate to that feeling. And I hope you never have to feel it, but I never want to feel it again. In those moments, I had no freedom. You know, I was Tara Campbell criminal. Tara Campbell drug trafficker. Not Tara Campbell mom, business owner, wife, taxpayer. I was none of those things. I was Tara Campbell criminal. Tara posted her bond later that night. And by Monday morning, the Commonwealth attorney in Powell County was dismissing those charges, admitting they had arrested the wrong Tara Campbell. If the officer has the date of birth and the social security number for the suspect, we always put that in the indictment. Now on this one, that information was not in the indictment. At this point, nine years after the indictment, authorities can only speculate that what happened was that Tara Campbell's information was obtained from a recent speeding ticket she had gotten driving through Powell County a couple months earlier. But the mistake has been corrected. I have a letter stating, you know, it was misidentification, which is somewhat relief for me. It's the first sense of control that I have over the situation, which is a big thing for me. Because I want to be able to say, hey, you know, my name's Tara Campbell, but not that Tara Campbell. Powell Commonwealth attorney Darryl Harold says that his office will make sure this case of mistaken identity is taken care of and permanently removed from her record. In Pikeville, I'm Shannon Deskins, EKB News.


to come and hear about blended learning essentials. And I think we have a number of speakers today and I'm not going to introduce each individual speaker, so we're gonna ask each speaker as they take their turn to introduce themselves. But the first I can introduce, and that is Professor Neil Morris from the University of Leeds, one of the lead minds behind this new development. So please put your hands together and a warm welcome for the entire team from the blended learning essentials course. Thank you. Great, well, as Marilyn says, thank you very much for coming to this session. We are really, really excited about this project and we hope to kind of convey that excitement and enthusiasm to you this afternoon. Role for this session is to introduce you to this project and to the course and then to spend as much time as we need to on questions from you and either as a collective or down at the front after we finish formally. So please interact with us after we finish presenting. The main focus of today is to introduce you to this project and I will introduce my colleagues as they come up. This is a very large collective effort that we're working on together. So the project is called blended learning essentials, getting started. It's a series of courses that are designed as massive open online courses for the vocational education and training sector. This is a very ambitious project that's been funded by the UFI Charitable Trust to run over the next two years to help support the vet sector, to embed and to make use of digital technologies to support learners and learners success. And today we want to, I guess, launch this course to the OAK conference and to seek your support for the project. So I'm just going to introduce the project and then I'll hand over to Diana Lorela, Professor of Learning Technologies at Institute of Education at University College who's the co-director on the project to talk through the course syllabus in more detail. So the first run of the first course is going to go live in November. We're running each course three times and there are two courses, one which is designed to introduce the main concepts of blended learning to people who have either never used it before or who are beginners in blended learning. And the second course is intended to give people more opportunity to reflect and to embed their practice into their learners' activities and to form communities of practice with other practitioners across the sector and indeed beyond. So the two courses together are intended for the whole of the vocational education and training sector, which if you work in that sector will know is a very broad and far-reaching and all-encompassing sector. It has teachers, trainers, skills providers, adult and community learners, workplace learners and the teachers and trainers in that sector have very varying demands and needs and have very, very, as I'm starting to learn, scarce time and I thought things were hard in HE but we're starting to understand some of the pressures in the vet sector on working on this project. So this project is intended to help. That was Diana and I's main conception was to help teachers to help their learners to get better success with scarce resources making effective use of digital technology. And hopefully as you'll know, Diana Laurelard is one of the world's experts in digital technology so it is an absolute coup for me and for the whole team to be able to work with her and to have her expertise to support the vocational and educational training sector with this project. So you can sign up for this course. Now it is live for sign up and we have just under 4,000 people signed up already. It went live about two, three weeks ago. So we've already got a really good cohort of people who are telling us about their expectations on the sign up page and describing their kind of needs and their work environment. So we'd encourage you immediately to sign up for the course and to share it with your colleagues and friends by Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and help us to grow this community of learners who are gonna work on this course together. So the blended learning essentials courses will run on the FutureLearn platform. You may or may not be familiar with FutureLearn but I'll just introduce it to you for those that are not. FutureLearn is a massive open online course platform that's funded entirely by the Open University. It has around 40 university partners from all around the world who are putting out courses on the platform on a daily basis. The University of Leeds and UCL are both partners of FutureLearn and we're working with FutureLearn on this project to deliver these courses. The University of Leeds has a lot of experience of delivering courses on the FutureLearn platform. We've done around 10 over the last couple of years. We were one of the founding partners of FutureLearn. So we are very familiar with the way that the platform works and it's the digital learning team at the University of Leeds that are leading the course design aspect for this project. FutureLearn is a social learning platform. It's been designed with a constructivist pedagogy which means that it's all about social learning. It's all about community. It's all about putting the learners at the front of their learning. It's a balance between teacher input and learning input but what's very good about the FutureLearn platform is that comments and discussion are absolutely embedded with all of the content so it's not separate content and conversation and when you see the platform, I think you'll agree it's a very easy to use, easy to navigate and very friendly learning environment. FutureLearn has over 2 million people registered on its platform and they've run courses as large as 420,000 people on individual courses. So they are used to scale and they understand the challenges of large groups of learners working together. Their platform is entirely mobile. It was designed for mobile. It's the first and it works seamlessly on desktop PCs, tablet devices and indeed smartphones. So all content, all interactions, all activity will work just as well on your iPhone as they will on your desktop computer which makes mobile learning and learning on the go actually possible and entirely a suitable learning experience. So this course, the first course that we'll be running is five weeks long but it's been designed to fit around people's everyday lives. There's a maximum of four hours of learning time per week which is we consider from our experience to be appropriate for professionals to be able to fit in maybe half an hour over a lunch break, half an hour in evening and an hour on a Saturday morning with coffee perhaps and this has worked very well with courses that we've run in the past. The course has certification available and accreditation which Marin will talk about at the end of the course. So just to acknowledge the very large group of people and organizations that are involved with this project, the project is led by University of Leeds and University College London Institute of Education with support from ALT and FutureLearn. As I said, it's funded by the UFI Charitable Trust and we have, I'm not going to read all these project partners out but a large group of project partners working with us and their main role, apart from Evans Wolf Media who are doing the production for us, the role of the rest of the project partners is to help us make sure that the course meets the needs of that sector. So we have representative organizations from all aspects of the sector and we are working with them all very closely to source case studies and content and to check the content and the curriculum with them at every single stage to make sure that what we're doing and what we're saying and what we're preparing and proposing is in line with the requirements of teachers and trainers in this sector. So we are incredibly grateful to all of our project partners for the support that they're giving us during this project. So I'm just going to show you just a brief extract of the course trailer. You can watch the whole thing on the FutureLearn platform at your leisure. Why is there such interest now in using learning technologies? Well, this course will explain that whatever your role in vocational education and training. The course is about blended learning which means using the most appropriate learning technologies alongside our usual teaching methods. We'll be giving you practical support and advice on making the best use of technology for your learners. To help you answer questions such as which technology should I use in my context and does learning technology really help to improve learners' success? I believe it gives teachers the tools that they need to develop their digital technological skills. It gives them the opportunity to be ahead of their learners and engage them more in their lessons. Okay, as I say, you can watch the rest on the FutureLearn website. So now let me ask Diana to come up and continue the presentation and give more insight into the structure of the course. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you very much for a very exciting adventure for us and I'm enormously grateful to having the University of Leeds team who've got a lot of experience with running MOOCs on the FutureLearn platform. And we were incredibly fortunate to persuade five further education colleges to join us in this who have a lot of experience in actually making blended learning happen in the FE sector. And on top of that, we have NAIS which covers the adult and community learning area as well as the Association of Employment and Learning Providers who have the experience of work-based learning. So as Neil said, it's an incredibly diverse sector and we're aware all the time of this rich mix of different kinds of subject areas and disciplines and ways of teaching and learning as well as the different kinds of organizations that we've got to contend with. And on top of that, a huge range of expertise because we do have people whom we hear from. We've got invited speakers from the sector who are telling us in this conference about what they've done in blended learning. So that expertise we need to harness but we've got to think also at the other end of the people who haven't got engaged with technology and who might be resistant to it, who find it difficult, who find it somewhat awesome to even think about whether they could use it in their own teaching. So it is a very wide range and as Neil said, having a kind of constructivist approach which involves social learning is very important in a professional development context because they know more than we do actually about what they need to be doing with technology in their teaching and learning. So we've got to be able to learn from them as well. So all of that feedback that we get and their contributions in the way that we set the course up are going to be very important. So the course objectives overall and this is not just the learning objectives within the course, but really what the course is trying to do as a whole is to enable everybody in this sector, all the teachers and trainers and mentors and support staff to become a digital practitioner as appropriate to whatever their role is. So not being afraid of the technology, embracing the technology, ultimately becoming the people who are indignant about the fact that technology doesn't do enough and demanding more. That's the kind of, what it really means to be a digital practitioner in education, I think. So we want to be able to engage teachers and trainers. So it's wonderful to have this opportunity at the conference to proselytize about this, promote it to you and ask for your help in promoting it to others. It's designed for the vet sector, for vocational education and training, but as everyone at this conference is always aware, every year, the issues that we address in trying to make the best of new technology are the same across all sectors. Sectors differ in the way in which we implement and we form policy in the way that we do professional development, but what it takes to use technology well in the context of education is the same everywhere. So although it's targeted on further education, I feel sure that we'll also be attracting people from higher education and indeed from school education as well. And that's fine because we learn from each other and we very frequently borrow from each other. So I think that will only enrich the course. We want a good uptake and it's not gonna be good enough for us to say, well, there's always a drop-off in MOOCs and people join enthusiastically and then tail off. We can't afford that. They've gotta be sustained throughout the MOOC because everything we're talking about is not that much time, five weeks for the first course, four hours a week. That's not an enormous amount of time to be spending on such a rich area and difficult area to understand. So we've gotta keep them in and we've got to make sure that it's gonna work for them in whatever they're doing in their teaching and learning as well. So trying to link it through to their current practices is part of the way in which we do that. Focus on quality and what the quality frameworks are telling us we need to do, obviously, flexibility of delivery of the course itself because it's wholly online. You can study asynchronously. You can study all four hours of your week all at once or throughout the week and so on. And we want vocational teachers to be able to prepare their learners for work and all of the policy vision insofar as there is policy vision in this area is about enabling the workforce to be fully trained for the 21st century. So being able to teach through technology enables that workforce to make sure that their students are not just digitally literate with respect to the kind of technology they happen to want to use but digitally literate with respect to how you use it in order to inform your professional life in order to make yourself a better practitioner in whatever field you go into. And there isn't a single field which is untouched by technology after all. Sustaining the optimal use of learning technology throughout the sector, again, there's no part of the sector which is untouched by the technology. And we're looking for optimal use. We're not just doing technology for the sake of it. It's what do you really want to do and how can the technology help? And fostering that sustainable community of professional practice. Now this is one of the really exciting things about MOOCs, I think, because as Neil pointed out, this material is going to be there for the five weeks that people are studying but it's going to stay there. If you've registered on the course, you can get back to it. And that means that you can stay in those groups. You can stay arguing that point. You can stay talking with other colleagues and peers about, so what is the best way to do this? And I've just been trying this out and actually I've made a complete mess about what did you do and so on. That's how we learn. That's how any area builds knowledge and we have so much knowledge to build in how best to use the technologies. And it keeps having to be renewed because the technologies keep changing. So it's never going to go away. This issue of how we keep sustaining our building of knowledge for supporting our students as well as possible. So the five week course will then be, which begins at the beginning of November, will then be followed by the second part of the course which begins in February. And I'll come on to that. This is the first course, five weeks. Each week is organized in much the same sort of way. There's an introduction to it. Three activities generally speaking and then a summary and looking forward to where we go next. The first week is making the assumption that people coming to the course may not necessarily know everything there is to know about why we should be doing this at all. So looking at what's the point of blended learning? Why should we be thinking about it is a good way to begin. And then it takes people through examples and exemplars and the videos are based as much as we can on case studies of what's actually happening out there in the sector. So going out and filming blended learning as it happens, hearing the stories of the teachers, the learners, the managers, the leaders and their support people in their college or workplace, wherever they are. So that's the kind of videos we have in there. And then the second week gets into the principles of how we think about it and your own readiness and your environment's readiness for blended learning. Then getting down to the different kinds of systems and tools and gadgets and websites and apps and all kinds of things, just a brief illustration of the kinds of things which are out there already, which people are using and you too can use because they're free and your learners are probably using them already. Then getting down to designing not only the learning but also thinking about assessment and feedback because this could be transformational after all. Assessment is so difficult, so time consuming, so labor intensive, but there are ways in which the technology can support the teacher in gearing, obtaining a much better gearing ratio for the time that they put in to assessment. So looking at some of those things is going to be important too. And then teaching for your learners' futures, developing your learners' digital literacy, the things which are going to make a difference to them in the workplace. Just to give you a brief example of the kind of thing we'd be doing, this is a filmed case study from one of the colleges, from one of the workplace learning environments. I observe as a video and recording app available for Apple and Android devices which uses the video and recording elements within the tablet or device. What's quite unique about it is when you're making a recording, your actual qualification criteria are embedded within the app. It allows you to create a full observation of a student highlighting everything they've achieved throughout that period. I've also worked perfectly for evidence when your external verifiers come out from your morning bodies to check to make sure everything's okay. The students we work with on our programmes are 16 to 18 year olds that are studying the sports qualification so that the mobile learning or the e-learning even enables them to actually access the course materials in a fun and interactive way. They like to come back and they can actually see themselves playing the sport on the tablet. So for them it's a very visual tool. It shows them actually demonstrating tasks, two criteria in their qualification instead of just writing about it afterwards. That's a very nice example of how the technology supports the assessment in a much more efficient way for those tutors than would have been possible without it. So the kinds of course materials and activities there are on the future learning platform there will be steps that you work through, participants work through, telling you how much time each one is likely to take. There'll be a task and a description of that task and what you're asked to do with that task whether you then engage in a forum discussion with your colleagues. For many of these activities there will be introducing new technologies and tools to use. And of course to go thoroughly into all of them would take an enormous amount of time but by providing a crib sheet on each one you don't have to do it right there and then you can always come back to it and see so what was that, how might I use that, how have other people used that. And the crib sheets include examples of how that particular tool has been used by people in the sector already. And then it tells you how far through you are so you can pace yourself as you go through the materials on the course. So now I'd like to introduce Rachel Chanan. We're lucky that she's been able to get to the conference today because Rachel represents all of our five colleges. So Rachel if you'd like to come up and tell us about the FE College point of view on this and your role in it. No pressure, all five colleges. Okay so I'm just here very quickly to say how we think this course is so important for the FE sector and the issues that the FE sector are having and how this can impact positively on those. So it would be no surprise to anybody who's in FE that our physical resources are depleting rapidly and we have to work smarter. We have to make the best of what we've got and blended learning is the answer. Actually it's the answer to any question. But that's the way we need to get our staff up skilled so that they can appreciate the opportunities that are there for them. It doesn't mean to say that there isn't some wonderful stuff already happening in FE but as a sector we're really quite bad at sharing. We tend just to get on with it and a little bit of that is because of our workload. If you're not in FE our teachers teach about 840 hours a year which is a slightly different to Haiti. So the time that they have to do extra study or learn about extra things is not there. So this course is really important because of the idea that Diana said about the fact that you've signed up for the five weeks but actually the course is there for after. So they can dip in and dip out as they feel that they need to and as they need some more support. So, but in FE, as I said in my previous presentation actually if anybody was there, FE is all about impact. Actually, my senior sec would say what is the impact of our staff going on here? Our staff would say what is the impact of me undertaking this course? So, I can answer that. It's so that they can start to understand the opportunities that blended learning will give them that they can learn by these excellent case studies that are going to be in here and it isn't case studies that are in a different sector. It isn't case studies that aren't applicable to them. It is real people in real colleges doing the things that they want to do. So they can start to build those networks, start sharing with each other, start having those professional dialogues with each other that can be maintained and those networks can carry on afterwards. It will help them to gain confidence in what they do to almost, and it's to be hoped that some of the case studies may be of things going wrong, actually, because that's the best way to learn. And there's a real comfort in the fact that not everybody gets it right first time. And obviously for staff, the impact is for learners because of the experience that they can give learners and the learners can carry forward into their roles. But for staff, it's about increasing their digital literacy as well. So for FE, this is a really important course. Our college has addressed it by putting it into our formal annual CPD offer. So all our staff will be signing on, we'll be logging in, and that'll be part of our in-house professional dialogue with all those tutors to see how they got on and what they found from that as well. Great, thank you very much, Rachel. So next, let me introduce Maron, who needs no introduction, who's going to talk about some of the accreditation options that come with this course. It's always nice to think that everybody knows your name, but I'm hoping to tell you about some of the things we're doing with this course that will really make a difference for practitioners across vocational education and training, because one of the key issues we've come up against in the last 20 years is that, you know, very time-pressured in FE, and you really need to try and align whatever it is you're doing to support the workforce with the deliverables that that workforce has. So whether it's, you know, being, getting QTLS, whether it's getting offset inspections through, whether it's learner success rates, we do need to try and make sure that what comes out of this course, what those participants gain, really translates directly into impact into their work place themselves and onto learner success. So one of the ways in which we're doing this, which Neil's already mentioned and Diana's referred to, is accreditation options. And given that we're really aiming this course at people who are starting from scratch to quite proficient practitioners, it's very difficult to find a one-size-fits-all accreditation model. So obviously one of the things that we're working with is all the partner organizations, which includes, as well as those already mentioned, also the Tinder Foundation, the Association of Colleges, the Education and Training Foundation, and wider partners across the sector, because those organizations are the owners or the guardians of the frameworks that really shape what's happening in FE in terms of regulations and funding. One of the things we're doing as well is trying to figure out how we can get meaningful accreditation beyond the course, so you might be able to get a participant certificate from FutureLearn, which will be maybe a new form of accreditation for many participants. You'll also be able to, if you volunteer as a digital champion, and this is a little recruitment advert for those of you in the audience who are feeling like you wanna do more for us, so you can become a champion and participate in this course, helping others along, in which case we'll give you very exciting, open badges. But also for those of the participants who are more interested in professional development in learning technology, we're going to map the course on a route to Seamold, our Association for Learning Technology Accreditation Scheme, and the hope is really that this will be one of the options, together with mappings against QTLS, for example, that we're going to give participants to translate what they're learning online into day-to-day success in their workplaces and for providers. We're also hoping to get senior management and governors involved so they can have a think about what their in-house provision for CPD for their staff can be contributing to overall in providers sort of day-to-day business models and how they can support success and progress scaling up. I think Liam from OCR earlier gave a really exciting example of why they're using blended assessment methods, and he said, well, we have a workforce who work night shifts, you're not gonna get them into the classroom during daylight hours, we do this blended approach to do CPD at night. It was very difficult to get people into colleges, and I think this is one of the examples of what Diana and Neil said earlier about digital no longer being an option, but a must-have, and hopefully our accreditation options will develop to really help people gain that must-have skill and the recognition for it. For those of you, particularly who are coming from a cross-sector, maybe delivering HE in FE, or maybe also HE, I mean, this course is developed for the vet sector, but if you want to join in anyhow, I'm sure you're very welcome. CMOS also mapped against the UK PSF, and that's one of the other frameworks we are exploring to deliver, so that we can really do some joining up and sharing between the different sectors, because as Diana pointed out, what works really well in one sector might also work very well in another context. And with that, I'd like to say thank you and hand back to Diana. Okay, thanks, Maron. I mentioned that course one lasts for five weeks at around four hours a week, and when we were planning the course, we felt that, you know, how do you do blended learning, everything that people are going to need to know, and thought we wanted 10 weeks or something, but that wasn't realistic. We decided in the end to split it all into two parts, so the first part is five weeks, and then the following part for course two is thinking about, you've been focusing on what you're going to, how blended learning could work for you, now what does it really mean to be better than practice, and that's where you so frequently run up against the difficulties of the context within which you work, the particular institutional factors which make it difficult. So there is something in the second course about which relates to what leaders and governors and managers in the sector might also be interested in, but not forgetting that there will be people who are teaching practitioners who've got to work within that context. So if we can engage every single teacher in thinking about what your managers need as well, how you can support them, what you should be asking them for, how you talk to your IT people because they're overworked and underfunded as well, well what kind of a conversation can you have with them to help you in what you're trying to do with your own learners, so that everybody is engaged in trying to make the best of whatever situation they're in. So the three weeks of the second course are about, first of all, learning from experience, how we actually make sure that we get the impact that Rachel was talking about because these systems, the students are all working digitally, those systems are recording what they're doing, there is data there, we can make use of that, we can learn what the students are doing, what works and what doesn't work. So getting people to think about that a bit is important in that first week, so that's one kind of activity there. And then what can technology do for the most difficult challenges is what we have to think about if we're trying to persuade managers, leaders, institutional directors and so on, this is something we've really got to get into now. But there's no point in just saying we're doing it because everybody else is or we don't want to be left behind, there's only any point if it's going to solve the problems we know we've got. So is our problem recruitment, is our problem dropout, is our problem linking to what the local employers actually want and we've got to realign our curriculum, whatever the problem is, technology can help. So thinking about some of the most difficult challenges that we've got in this sector and what technology can do to help might be a more productive way of going about planning what we do than if we just pitch in for the sake of it. So reaching more learners more flexibly is one kind of thing we're looking at, supporting independent learning because obviously it's a wonderful technology for doing that. Reducing the costs of innovation. So reducing the cost of innovation means this is expensive, we've got to think again, we've got to take time up front to plan and design what we're doing. How do we ameliorate the costs of doing that? The more we share and collaborate, the more we can work together and build on what other people do, then the lower that upfront cost of getting started. So the course is trying to provide that basis of getting started so you don't have to reinvent it all for yourself. And then creating the community that can build on that and work together more. And that's what the final week then comes around to, is thinking about those challenges, matching the innovation to the needs of your organization, supporting your colleagues, and you may be quite low down the hierarchy, but there's still an enormous amount you can do to persuade and help. And finally, just the course itself has to operate in a reasonably blended way. It is entirely online, but we have to remember that we're trying to persuade people to come into this wholly online course who are not necessarily technology oriented. We've got to think about the hard to reach. So that's why the digital champions are so important. Because if we can get digital champions running something in a local college to say, here's a lunchtime session about this new course, it's free, it's open to everybody, go and have a look, they might persuade those hardest to reach people to come into it. So one of the things we do here is to provide the kind of toolkit that you might need if you wanted to run such a lunchtime session. So a few chunks of videos and photos, a couple of bits of case study, just give people a flavor of what it's about, how it would work, what it's like to be engaged in it. Maybe that's another way that we can get the hardest to reach engaged. So I think that's everything. We would like to really hear from you, your comments, questions, challenges. And Marin is gonna be handing out some actual printed materials which tell you something about what the course is. Gives you the URL, the Twitter hashtag and so on, so that, and there will be more of these available on the alt-stand outside. If all of the team could come up, Rachel, we prize you from your seat. I will be up here so that we can all attempt to answer questions, take your comments. I have a mic, can I ask a question? Yeah, I'm here. Okay, Alistair Clarke, I work in mainly in adult education. I think this is fabulous. I think everybody's to be congratulated for both the vision and putting this together. I've got a very practical question, having fumbled my ways for a future-learn course before, and I think it's really important to be able to understand what the course is and my ways for a future-learn course before, and being completely bogged down in the forum. It was a course on ecology, and I got linked in with some creationists, and the discussion was completely unmanaged. It's a big challenge, but you've actually specifically said that there'll be a constructivist approach within the course. So I'd be very interested to know what your thoughts are on managing forum discussions and possibly creating groups or offering people the chance to create groups. Yeah, thank you. That's a very valuable question, and I can't answer it fully because I think we're still learning, so future-learn took a very specific position on the way that they were going to do their discussion forums, which they don't even call them discussion forums. They are linked to all of the content, and they work on this kind of idea of the water cooler, and they're not expected that you would read all of the posts in any discussion, but that you would step into a discussion as it's happening and interact with a number of people as they are there, and then perhaps walk away and come back later. So that does require some difference in thought for people who are familiar with discussion forums. But the way that leads as approach future-learn discussions in the past is to try to make them very focused around a particular question, so that people are answering a single question, and that discussion is around a single topic. So discussion forums, in my experience, have failed before because they're just too wide-ranging, too broad, and it's too hard to follow the thread of the conversation. So all of the steps are now in this course will have a very focused call to action for the discussion that will say, now that you've seen this case study, think about how this case study will work in your practice, what might be the barriers, how might it work, what are the technical challenges, and we would hope the discussion would be focused around that kind of conversation. I hope that helps Diana might want to add to that. Yeah, no, let's move on to the next. Hi, John Kerr from the University of Glasgow. Diana, at the beginning you said, and very importantly, about trying to bring the cohort through all the weeks because of the massive drop-out rates. The MOOCs that we have produced, some people said they only turned up for a week, too, because that was the topic that they were most interested in, which is fair enough. It's more opt-in rather than dropped out to try and flip the statistics in your favour. For this course, would you still see as a success if a lot of people still dropped out at various MOOC drop-out points that are sort of consistent with all other courses? Would it still be a success? Sorry, I didn't quite understand the question. So the question was, if you can't bring everyone through, I think everyone is searching for that to bring that massive cohort through as a group, but would it still be a success if we still saw the drop-out patterns that all MOOCs are still receiving? These are grown-ups. They know what they need from the course, and many people joining it will be experts, actually. We know that already from the people who said they're joining. There's no question that coming in and out of the course is absolutely fine. I'd be very keen. If you do manage to pull everyone through together, then your secret should be shared. Yeah, but I think one of the secrets... I mean, we found this on a MOOC that we did previously on ICT for primary education, and there were much better retention rates, but I think it's because it's such a homogeneous cohort who really do get a lot from each other. It's very different from these massive courses where anybody can come in, and you do get things going all over the place. I don't know what the creationist equivalent is for our field, probably Luddites or something. We could get bogged down somewhere, but you have much better focus discussions, and they do hang in there. So we might... Hi, I've done a future-learn MOOC before, and it was a fantastic experience. I was just wondering, when you designed the course, did you take into account the likely interest from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? I've been working with ACL and work-based learning in Wales for many years, and I think they're going to be very excited about this. So I was wondering how England-centric it was. Well, it's a MOOC. It's open. It's not going to be just Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland. But given that it's a MOOC, we've got a big worry about how relevant it's going to be to the thousands of people who are in it, because they will come from diversity of countries, countries where they don't even have a debt sector, or they have a sort of an approximation to it. So we've got that kind of problem, and the best that we can do is rest on the fact that we're all in the same kind of problem area. It doesn't matter where I go in the world, everybody's got the same problem, whether it's schools, universities, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, whatever kind of culture we're in, we've all got the same kinds of issues with respect to how we use this. It's not going on too, really. But we've got a Scottish College involved. So we've got Scotland covered. We've got lots of Welsh people engaged who are very interested. We've got people in Ireland who are coming into the course that we know about. There's going to be networks there, too. So I hope we've got it covered. It's a challenge, certainly. That's one up there. Hilary Griffiths from the University of Bristol. One of your course objectives is to foster a sustainable community. Can you say a little bit more about how you might do that? Maybe Maren would normally answer that. So a lot of it is about... Well, we've got the digital champions. So the slide up there now is about starting that community of people who are in the sector and please join us from Wales to start to gather that intelligence. The digital champions will work both before the course and during the course and hopefully after the course to embed it into practice. And also, the fact that there are two courses running sequentially will hopefully initiate a sustainable community. So we would expect cohorts to move from one course to the other. And of course, because the courses are running multiple times, people may say, well, I've done course one now. I'm going to wait for a couple of times to do course two. That will hopefully start to build up a community of people who are interested in this. And beyond that, I don't know if we thought maybe Maren might want to add more, yeah. I think one of the key issues with sustaining communities beyond the course is that there's usually kind of limited activity going on and people are kind of dropping in, dropping out. But one of the strategies that we have in place as a consortium is obviously involving a lot of the existing communities from the partner organizations. Whether it be NIAS, the Association of Colleges, the Tinder Foundation, or other organizations. We have a lot of existing communities that are going to take part. So what we're really hoping is that we'll be able to incorporate the course and the community that will be creating with it into some of the existing networks to strengthen them. Because I think what we're very realistic about is that this course has to reach far beyond the sort of easy-to-convert ad-tech enthusiasts who are going to sign up to the course anyway. This course is not really primarily for them. They're very welcome. Everybody's welcome to join in. But it's for those people who are hard to reach. And that's one of the ways in which we're hoping to engage face-to-face as well. Why are the local champions? Why are the membership organizations? Because I don't think anybody's ever tried to do what we're trying to do here. And I don't think we're daunted by the challenge, but I don't think we're underestimating it either. So I'm building a sustainable community that will transform the FE system all together is our aim. Yes, tomorrow at the world. That's right. Well, domination next. Could it race heavily? I don't know if this question would put anyone on the spot, but I'm just wondering if any of the materials are planning to be CC-licensed. Yes, because I'd like to possibly use some of those crib sheets. That's part of the value. I mean, that's one of the ways in which it's sustainable is that you can reuse those. And so people can recreate their own courses using some of those assets which are in the course. And that's how you get that sort of viral extension of what you're doing within any one of these courses. I mean, we've seen that happen. No, absolutely. The crib sheets, and I think there are around 20 of them, will form a really nice kind of package that anyone can take, and they are licensed creative commons. They'll be freely available beyond the course. They'll be on a video repository that people can dip into outside of the course. So yeah, we want this to be as open as possible. And UFI, which is the Charitable Trust funding this, that's their mission, is to transform the way the sector uses technology and to achieve learner success as a result. So they'll be absolutely delighted if you steal everything that they do. Do you want to say something about the tools that we're hoping to use examples of tools that anybody can use as well? Yeah, so just alongside the case studies, there will be kind of walkthroughs and demonstrations of how tools have been used in particular sectors. So there is quite a rich array of materials beyond the course that will help. And again, that will be openly available. Okay, so how... So I already said that we're putting it onto our formal CPD offer. But there are different ways that we can use it. We can encourage people. We can use it as a flip learning approach, actually. Can't we? Because isn't that just an excellent way going in, having a look at the videos, talking to other people in different colleges and bringing all that back and that professional dialogue happening in our classroom? Maybe with the digital champion there as well. And that is... When the discussion about the digital champ, that is the way that FE is going to sustain this because having that person within the college to support the staff is really important. They won't feel alone online, but sometimes when they go back into practice, it's there that they might feel a little bit lonely and to have that voice next to them is going to make a real impact. So... Okay. Oh! Pressure. So really, so that's how we're going to use it. We're going to encourage people to go in. We're going to not dictate how many hours they have to do or how many weeks they have to do. It might well be that they go in and they do what is necessary for them, but then it's the drawing out of that. So it's not just a one-stop. They just go in and then the learning finishes. It's about how we draw that out afterwards. Okay. Thank you. There was a question. Hi. Reksir Sun from Florium. In terms of the accreditation, it seems to be entirely focused on people that are teaching. What about staff like myself who are never in the classroom with the students, but we work on the back end of the courses and the technology. The course itself would be quite interesting, but there doesn't seem to be a path for any accreditation for non-teaching staff. What's wrong for you, Mara? Yeah, to answer your question. So all of our accreditation options are actually suitable for teaching and non-teaching staff. But you're absolutely right that it's more challenging to find sort of very valuable accreditation options. So one of the things we're doing is looking at how the course can count towards formal CPD. So a lot of senior staff or managerial staff or technical staff obviously still need to do CPD. So that's one of the ways we're looking at. But also I don't think the kind of options that I talked about are kind of the beyond and end all of our accreditation and we're very much looking for feedback via a number of surveys before, during and after the course, from our participants and we're very much looking to listen and see if we get a lot of people who are saying, oh, I'd really like an accreditation that leads to X or Y body framework and that that's something we're really keen to hear about. But I think a lot of the course materials are really looking to try and engage people whether you're in the classroom or not and hoping to give enough to go on depending on which role you're coming into it, which side you're coming from. So some of the example we talked about today were very much sort of classroom facing, Lorna facing roles and we're hoping very much to involve governors, managers, but also staff at all levels of different provision. And I think the first course is going to guide us a little bit in how that's going to develop. So a bit of work in progress there I think. But if you have any feedback, any ideas for us we're here to listen all day today. Do we have any more questions? Yeah, one over there. So I'm Mahabali from the American University in Cairo and Diana I've been in love with your work for like 12 years so I'm really honoured to be here. So I missed a small part of the presentation at the beginning so I'm sorry if you've already explained that but if your goal is to have a continuous community of people beyond, I don't understand really why you're using FutureLearn and if your material is creative commons licenses and so on, why are you doing it inside FutureLearn rather than openly, completely openly, like without login or anything? Well FutureLearn is completely open. But you have to login to get in. So I was just wondering if the material is also available in some other way that's easy to access without having to go through the actual... Some things may well be available, for example, on YouTube some of it would be, although that's of course not completely open in some countries so you can always have a kind of problem. FutureLearn is that we can make our steps open and then people go in. Without even telling us anything. Yeah, so I'm just saying that FutureLearn allows open steps so we're going to maybe make our steps open and that will stop that problem and in fact it will potentially make it more open than putting stuff on YouTube. I think the answer to the question is slightly more fundamental. For me the reason we're doing in FutureLearn is because it's a course and we want people to work together synchronously and go through it as a collective and build up a community. If we were just to put the resources out onto the web as many people do and valuably do, they don't have that kind of course and that community feel about them so I don't think the FutureLearn login is much of a barrier to many people. We both. We are releasing some resources outside of the course. Some will be out there, yes. But I mean it's a course that's really important and that's a to govern, that's a curated orchestrated process of activity. Okay. So the marines finger has gone up again as it does. So let me thank you all very much for coming and for your questions and for community. We're here at the front so if you want to come down and chat then that's great but again thank you all very much for coming. Please get in touch. Thank you.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with 2022 Panini National Treasures FIFA Road to World Cup Soccer. Pick your team number 35. This is the last box of this particular case that we opened up. The next one, which should already be in stores now if you're watching live, the next one is a one box break from a fresh case. And then we'll work on that. Very big thanks to this group for getting your team straight up. I appreciate it. Nicholas, LastBotMojo, Portugal. And we pulled a few big teams out and turned it into a random number block randomizer. We did that randomizer in a separate video. There are the results right there. Good luck. Set that aside next to me here. And let's see what we got in this case or in this particular box. I wrote 35 there, but for some reason I wrote random number block. No, this is a pick your team. It's number 35. Oh, it looks like we got a plate on the bottom. You can see the shadowed corner right there, the rounded corner. So that could that's something for something that could be a plate for someone here. We're going to find out. I wonder if that's in the autographs or if it's a non-auto. We'll see. 39 out of 99. Federico Chiesa, Chiesa for Italy. David B. We got Javi Alonzo. 67 out of 99 for Spain. Robert, Spain's playing in a few days, right? Tomorrow's matches. Today's Monday, the 21st. And tomorrow's match 22nd. We're looking at Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Denmark, Tunisia, Mexico, Poland, France, Australia. Good set of matches there. Got a triple relic. Mauricio Ponella. 65 out of 90 at Panilla. 65 out of 99 for Chile. That's for David. We got Alvaro Morata. 7 out of 25.  Also for Spain, Robert Runkle. 46 out of 49. Raul Jimenez. 4 Mexico. Big match for Mexico. It's 8 AM my time, LA time. Mexico, Poland. A W for either team could secure a spot in the next round. 92 out of 99. Roberto Firmino. Nice. Big fan of Roberto Firmino. He's on my club, Liverpool. In fact, that actually might be the Liverpool jersey piece in there. That's going to go to Brazil. Brazil is a number block spot. We go by that digit right there. Brazil 2. Daniel Smith. We got Adrian Rabiot. 42 out of 99. Penmanship autograph for Le Bleu, for France. That's another number 2 for Daniel. We got a David Espina. 26 out of 49. Penmanship autograph for Colombia. Kevin with Colombia. A couple more here. 64 out of 99. That's Giuseppe Bergome. 64 out of 99. Legendary signatures for the Italians. For Zazzuri. That is for David. One more on the plate. We got legendary signatures. That's Denise Borkamp. 32 out of 49. Dennis Bergkamp for the Orange. He was pretty good for the Orange. Daniel with Dennis. And the last one here, the plate, it is not autographed, but it's Francesco Toti. Nice. One of one. Good looking card for Zazzuri. That's for David B. There you go, David. And all aboard the Big Hit Express. And there you go, gang. Another nice NT road to the World Cup break in the books. Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us. The next one box break will be from a fresh case, so check it out. JaspysCaseRakes.com. Bye-bye.