Afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. I'm Maureen Lee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and I am very pleased to welcome Brigadier General Bill Mullen III, the director of the Capabilities Development Directorate down at Marine Corps Combat Development Command. He has a longer than he looks very distinguished career command at multiple levels. Most recently served as the president of Marine Corps University before taking his current assignment. He's been the marinade to the president. He's done numerous operational jobs to include a slew of counter-narcotics missions and all kinds of interesting things and is now trying to chart the path forward for Marine Corps capabilities on a number of fronts to include connectors. A key part of the Marine Corps capability as a whole. And so we asked him to come today to talk a little bit about where they're going with connectors. They've been getting a lot of attention on that subject for the last few years and have recently made a few decisions about the way ahead. So General Mullen, thanks very much for taking the time to come talk with us today. And I'll probably let you make a few minutes of remarks and then we can open it up for questions. And if people could check their phones and put them on silent, if you would. And then also to people who may be watching on the web, if you'd like to send questions by email, you can do so by sending them to me at mleed at CSIS.org. And I'll try to inject them into the conversation. And we'll try to get to a conversation with all of you shortly. Great. Well, it's good to be here today. Thanks for the time. And what do I know about capability development? That's the question I asked about a year ago when I was putting into it. And the answer was zip. But what I do know is operational requirements and the things that we need to be able to do out there. And that's why I was put into this job. And I tell you, it's been quite a learning experience. And especially learning the acquisition process and all the things that were required there. We're in a state of flux right now, as you probably can imagine. There's a lot of things going on, all in the face of a pretty significant physically constrained environment. So how are we going forward? How are we enabling ourselves to be able to do something like an amphibious operation, which can be anywhere from disaster relief all the way to the high end, which we believe we won't do, but we have to have the capability to do. One of the things we talked about at lunch there was there's a lot of people that point to something like what you saw in the Pacific series, the HBO series Pacific, as, well, the United States will never do that again. We have no intention. We don't want to do that again. That's not how we want to conduct operations. We want to go where somebody is not. The problem we have is we have to have the ability to do that if it's absolutely required. Because if you don't have a credible ability to do that, that starts limiting your options. And if your options start to get limited, then that gives people that don't like you very much room to maneuver and do things that they wouldn't normally do because they have in the back of their mind thinking, well, what's the United States going to do about this? And all I'm talking about here is capability. I'm not talking about will, I'm not talking about anything else, it's the capability to do these things. Again, I'm the capability development guy. I have to look at what the Marine Corps is able to do and not able to do, and figure out if we can't do something, what do we do to make sure that we get that ability? How do we fill that gap? And of course, it all starts with requirements. What is the requirement? And we had a pretty good discussion at lunch about concepts and requirements. The hard part is you nail down a concept, you lay something out and the rug can get pulled under you pretty quickly by some folks saying, no, you'll never do that. Don't use that as a concept. It's never going to happen. So those are some of the challenges we're facing right now. In this fissuring strain environment, as you well know, we've pursued for a long time the ability to have a high water speed vehicle. It's technically feasible to do that. It's pretty dog on expensive. That's not a good thing these days and not for years to come. But it's also very, very complex. And due to the weight restrictions, it can't be above a certain weight or else you're not getting a high water speed vehicle. It's a low water speed vehicle. You have to keep below a certain weight, which means less lethality and less armor on the thing. So the alternative we come up with is a program that we're already working on, the military Marine personnel carrier, which has some ability to swim. How much we don't know, it has to be proven, has to be tested. But the engineering specifications we're looking at indicated maybe as good as the AAV. Has to be proven though. So then what? So then what? Especially if you need, if the requirement is to come in from a much greater distance, which based on the A2 threat that we're seeing out there, we probably have to do something from a much greater distance. Not an entire amphibious operation. We have to have the ability to do something. Maybe it's nothing more than a company landing team that we put ashore. Either via V-22s or a combination of V-22s and connectors that can get us into the general vicinity. Because the connectors we have, the LCACs, the LCUs, the Joint High Speed Vessel, none of those things will go into an unprotected beach. Even if there's somebody just with, not the high end spectrum, but even if something as simple as an RPG or maybe a machine gun or something, they're not gonna put something in an unprotected beach. Which tells us we have to have the ability to have that thing bring us into just outside small arms range and then get off it and swim ashore. V-R on means. Now, whether the vehicle we're looking at right now can do that, we don't know. Has to be proven. The connectors, that's a challenge. The Navy's replacing the LCAC program. They're schlepping them and they're starting a program to replace them. They're just getting underway a program to replace the LCUs. Because we have some that are as old as 54 years old. LCUs carry a lot, but they're very slow. LCACs don't carry much, but they're very fast. So we're also looking at other options out there. We held a connector summit in March. What are some of the other potentials out there? Right now there's a half scale model of something called the ultra heavy amphibious connector, U-HAC. It's the screwiest looking thing I've ever seen. But one of the things it has the potential to do that half size model is proving out is it can carry about as much as an LCU and go about two thirds as fast as an LCAC. And it's the same size as an LCAC. That sounds fairly good. We're looking at other things out there. In the 1980s, the Marine Corps tested something called the HAVIC, the Havoc. It's an aluminum sled. Self-propelled aluminum sled. Vehicle drives on. There's a control console that the driver of that vehicle controls. The thing can get up to about 20 to 25 knots. Don't know what the range is on it. It gets ashore.  That's an idea. That's something out there that has been tested in the past. The prototype that was developed was scrapped in the 1990s. What's the potential there? We don't know. But we're gonna explore it. There's other options out there also that have been presented to us. We put out a white paper asking for people's ideas. What do you think? What are some other things we might be able to do? Because we understand we have a challenge. We're also looking to work it with alternative platforms that was part of the discussion at lunch. The Navy in particular because of limitations on what they're able to do with gray-held ships from the standpoint of how many they're gonna have and some of the maintenance issues they're having. They're asking us to look at more alternative methods of using some of these ships. People in this crowd probably know some of those limitations better than I do. But I tell you, we are looking at it, but very cautiously. Because one of the things we have to make sure of is we still need those gray-held ships. They can't replace. Anything we do alternatively can't replace any of those gray-held ships. And part of that discussion is we need 38. We understand in a fiscally constrained environment we'll accept 33. Due to maintenance issues and other issues going on right now, we have less than that. And we work very closely with the Navy trying to improve that situation. So I probably talked enough and I would like to know what you wanna know. So here to have tomatoes thrown at me. Mar and promise I'd get tomatoes. Let me start with something a little bit more benign maybe an apple. Oh, an apple, nice. Not a softball, but. So one of the Marine Corps' critical challenges is one shared by the Army of protection and weight. And the Army is putting a lot of emphasis on material development and really trying to break that relationship, that relationship of physics. It seems like the Marine Corps is less focused on that objective. And clearly you have an interest in the capability but the Marine Corps doesn't talk as much about material development as a potential solution to that. Is the Marine Corps participating in any way supportive of what the Army's trying to do in that space or they just sort of trying to let the Army lead and focus on other things? Well, we're watching very closely what the Army does because in many ways we try and piggyback off some of their efforts. Perfect example being a joint light tactical vehicle. But because we're involved in it, that vehicle's lighter, that vehicle is able to lower itself because our requirements are it has to be able to fit on a ship. And in certain areas of the ship, you can't go above 76 inches. If we weren't involved in that program, those restrictions wouldn't be there because the Army really isn't concerned about those kind of things. We're nowhere near as much as we are. So that's part of the issue of what we're looking at. But a lot of the vehicles tend to be bigger, heavier and they rely on them much more heavily than we do. Our emphasis has been not so much fighting with those vehicles but fighting from those vehicles to be able to use this armored protective transport. And we don't necessarily, like our AAV, we've never used that as an armored fighting vehicle unlike the Army which has used the Bradley as an armored fighting vehicle. So those are some of the differences in our approach to things. But where we can work with the Army to be able to, they have obviously much deeper pockets than we do and their ability to investigate things, do the RDT&E to develop things. Where we can, we use that. But again, our interests are not all that closely aligned. So we were talking earlier also about the mobile landing platform which is a concept that has changed or evolved over time and now envisioned as two versions, MLP one and two and then three and four which are pretty different. Yeah, three and four are considered in a float forward staging base. And they have, it's the same general hull of the ship but what they put on is a very large flight deck that goes pretty much across the entire middle part of that ship.  They can't be transported by that MLP but they can operate from them. Load on, have the vehicles load on to those LCACs and they depart. And that's actually the first ones, they're proving that concept out in California right now because the first one's actually doing that. The float forward staging base, number three, the MLP three is actually being finished up right now. It's the puller. We were just out about two months ago and they were just getting ready to put the flight deck on. And that should be pretty versatile. And now our big question is, is it going to be able to work with V-22s? And I know that's one of the issues that are focused on to try and make sure that it can. I don't know if it can or not. I haven't heard yet. Let me open it up to audience questions. Anybody, I'll keep going, go ahead. Let's wait for the microphone if you would so we can capture it for everyone. Hi, good afternoon. I'm Megan Eckstein with Defense Daily. As you look at the future of connectors, I mean, right now with the ACV, you have sort of uncertain swim capabilities. The commandant has sort of said, the concept of operations are unknown and possibly MLP will play a role. So it's hard. I mean, I guess I'm wondering how you guys are able to determine what the LCU replacement or any other connectors might look like when there are so many variables right now and how these things will be operating. The LCU replacement and the LCAC replacement, the LCAC replacement, which is called the Surface SSC, acronym is escaping me, there's too many acronyms. The SSC, they're essentially gonna be a little bit more capable than what we have right now. But it's gonna be a very, very similar vehicle because the driving factor on those things is first of all speed, so you can't put too much weight on them, but the second part is being able to fit in the well decks of the ships we currently have and we're anticipated to have in the future. So that's what's driving those capabilities. One of the things we're asking if they can do is to be able to do an in-stream launch with these vehicles. And the old LCAC demonstrated that 1988, 87 or 88 demonstrated the ability with AAVs, very slow laborious process, but we want those ships to be able to, those vessels to have the same capability. My understanding is with the SSC, we probably won't be able to get that capability until about the 10th one because they've already started manufacturing the first, I believe, eight. So we don't wanna change any design. We don't wanna, you know, we're not trying to impact that program, but we ask them where possible can we make modifications, in-stream modifications that will enable us to be able to launch off of those things. Because as I said, we have to have the ability to do that because those things aren't gonna go into an undefended beach. And if we're coming from much further out, there is no vehicle that'll swim from that range. Even the high water speed EFV that we were anticipating, 25 nautical miles is about the extent of it.  Other questions? I've just got Maas Yonim with Inside the Pentagon. I was just curious as to, you know, you talked about this a little bit before what you're doing in kind of in the short term, but what are you doing right now to improve connectors and getting to shore, you know, upgrade-wise, or are any modifications on the vehicles? Right now we're not, I mean, we're working with what we have because anytime you come up with a new idea, it takes years to actually implement. And so right now what we're doing is our AAVs are not very capable. Rather problem, you know, some of them were first entered service in 1972. So what we're trying to emphasize with those is a program where we're doing a limited force protection upgrade and assistance improvement to it, but it takes time. We're not actually gonna be able to start modifying, turning wrenches on those vehicles, until FY19. Just because of the way these programs work is they have to test things out. There's the engineering piece of it. There's just so many different things involved that you can't actually, you know, that's the kind of lead time we're talking about, just to modify vehicles that we have right now. So, you know, we're doing what we can. Those vehicles, we have issues with them launching, you know, outside of three miles. They're just old and we're facing parts obsolescence, but it's what we have and, you know, they get the job done one way or another for what we're doing right now. And our emphasis right now, in particular, especially with the currently fiscal and serene environment, our common odds priorities are crisis response at the expense of major combat operations. If we absolutely had to do it, we certainly would, but it'd be a stretch, but right now we're focusing on crisis response and that's, you know, the capabilities we need to do crisis response aren't as robust as what we need to do major combat operations. Okay. Just one back there and then we'll come up here. Good afternoon, sir. Yolanda Peterson Jones from CNA. And I wanted to know if you had any concerns or issues with the new system that could pose delays with the ACV meeting operational requirements, meaning delays such as weather related, sea wave height, that kind of thing. And are there any concerns with the distance that the assets would be launched from Shep to Shore? Well, right now what our intentions are is we're going to do a limited buy first. And we're calling that 1.1. And the idea behind that is to get it out, get it operating, we'll obviously test it, make sure it's safe to operate, but we're going to get it out to the operating forces, let the Marines use them while the still majority of our fleet are the AVs. And tell us what needs to change. What works, what doesn't work, what are the limitations on this thing? And then we make changes to 1.2 and then we buy to about half of our requirement with 1.2. And so what the considerations you just mentioned, first of all, we have to prove that it even swims in the first place. I mean, we don't know that for sure. Engineering specifications have indicated to us that it does, but we don't know that for sure. We can't actually say it does, definitely does until it's been tested and proven. So once we have tested and proven that, then we start looking at the limit, okay, what are the exact limitations as to how far it can go, what it can do. And then the idea behind it though is 1.1, we don't tend to change very much because we need to get it as quickly as possible and start operating with it because as I explained, our AVs are getting very, very old. So that's some of the, if it's not able to do much, then the engineering change proposals for the second group of vehicles that we're going to buy need to improve our ability to do some of those things. Hope that answers your question. Thank you. Hi, sir, Sidney Friedberg from rakingdefense.com. We mentioned the emphasis on the crisis response on the lower end of the spectrum or even the non-shooting operations where you also need amphibious capability rather than the World War III scenarios. But if you, one of the things that everyone's very concerned about is if you look at low end or hybrid or non-state threats, that things like RPGs, like roadside bombs, often with homemade explosives, even drones to some degree. Absolutely. Cyber, for everyone's sake. All sorts of things are proliferating down from the state actors to some very low level groups that may well pop up as spoilers in humanitarian relief operations, for example. So, without going into the full airsea battle dimension of things, how do you and these more modest operations create an amphibious force that is survivable and effective without breaking the bank, as of course, or bringing it back? Well, that's the thing, that's something we've been watching very, very closely. Because we are operating on an assumption that no matter where we go, no matter what we do, we have to always be looking over our shoulder, watching for people that don't like us very much, using that as an opportunity to cause casualties, to embarrass the United States. That could happen anywhere in the most mundane of operations. We call it force protection. We're always emphasizing force protection. One of the reasons the Commandant chose to go the path we're on right now is because this armoured, or this amphibious combat vehicle has much higher ground clearance. It has a V-shaped hull. It has the ability to have wheels blown off and keep going. It's designed to operate more like an M-Rap than a tracked vehicle is. Frankly, we had such problems with our AAVs in Iraq that we stopped using them outside the gate and we never even took them to Afghanistan. So that's some of the adjustments we made because of exactly the points you just brought up. I mean, the current operating environment and the anticipated operating environment, we think we're gonna have to face all of those things and technology's getting cheaper and more widely available and we're very concerned about it. And that's some of the reasons why we're going in the direction we're going. Yeah, we're being driven for good reason by the Department of Defense to go to things like network on the move, N-O-T-M, not them. That's a requirement in our vehicles. Something else that's becoming a requirement in our vehicles is energy efficiency. So all of these things combine and contribute towards the approach that we're taking. Let's go here and then here. I'm Terry Murphy with CSIS and once upon a time an amphibious officer. And got the Marines ashore. My question is a broader one. This is way above my technical pay grade. How is the Marine Corps dealing with the cultural shift if you like, if there is a cultural shift from many, many years of war? I'm no junior officers in Fallujah and I think I knew you're a former commanding officer of the sixth Marines. But in any event, 10 years of desert, et cetera, et cetera. How is the culture of the Marine Corps shifting to being in effect expeditionary? It's hard. We've never gotten away from the expeditionary aspect. We've not had anywhere near as much emphasis on it as we have in the past. Essentially, we did what was required of us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Really, I was actually on the joint staff and I heard a conversation going on with regards to Iraq. We had the march up, Marines went home and Secretary Rumsfeld asked, well, what do you mean you went home? This is the war of the zone. Why aren't you there? The reply was, well, we don't do the longer term stuff. That's what the Army's good at. That's what their focus is. And the response was, thanks for your international offense, get over there. So we did. And I think we did fairly well. We did what was required of us. Now there's a large generation of our younger Marines that that's the only experience they have is operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so the command has focused very heavily on that and from the standpoint of okay, what we need to do is go back to our amphibious routes, go back to our expeditionary routes, guess what, you're not gonna have a green beans coffee over where you go from now on. And you have to have the ability to respond to crisis, the full scale, all the way from passing out MREs to dealing with people that don't like us very much and are willing to try and hurt us or try and embarrass us or anything. So, and that's one of the things we're doing right now is in the 1940s, we had something called the Small Wars Manual. And we're putting out a supplement to that. We're calling the Small Wars Manual for the 21st century. Because what we don't wanna do is forget the lessons we've learned over the last 10 to 12 years. We need to make sure those are inculcated throughout our operating forces because as we've talked about, some of the things we face there, we're gonna face in a lot of other places. It's gonna be a lot of aspects are gonna be different. Some things aren't gonna be that different. We have to be ready to face those things. Frankly, people that don't like us very much, they found out that things like IEDs and now drones and some other things, they work pretty well. So we're gonna have to deal with those kind of things. And our Marines understand that. So that cultural shift from, okay, we're not doing that anymore. Now, we're going back out on ships. We're putting out special purpose mag tests for crisis response reasons. And we're gonna respond to whatever we're faced with. We need to be able to come up with an array of options for the decision makers. And that's what we're trying to do. Morning, sir. George Nicholson, a consultant for special operations and counterterrorism. I was at a session this morning with General Amos. And he started talking about his decision to cancel the EFV. And he said, like you alluded to, it was a matter of cost and survivability. And he said, the flat bottom, he said, I'm not about to explain to the mothers or fathers or sons or daughters why somebody was killed using that vehicle. And he indicated it, even if I had the fully field at EFV today, I would not have put it into Afghanistan or I wouldn't because like you alluded to, 90% of the use is not gonna be on the ground. He also talked about though, that they're off the shelf solutions that the Marine Corps are looking at right now. Certain vehicles that are off the shelf right now that have got almost 63% more protected capability than the NRAP. Can you talk to that? Yes, sir. That's essentially the amphibious combat vehicle capability that we're going after. I've been counseled that using the words off the shelf isn't necessarily accurate by our systems command folks. They're calling it non-developmental, which means in my mind is we have to keep control of the requirements for those vehicles, not let them go anywhere in order to get that first group of vehicle out there. That our emphasis on that that's gotta be good enough to operate vehicle, not 100% of our requirement. We're looking for good enough, 1.2 will be a much better vehicle. What happens beyond that, it may be a high water speed ACV. It may be a 1.3 version as we'd be able to, we don't know. What we do know is something has to change in the technology for a high water speed vehicle to enable us to do that at unacceptable cost. When you start trading things away like armor, lethality, that's a problem. And one of the things we found kind of inadvertently in our act was our seven ton trucks were much more survival against IEDs. Why, that's not what they were designed for. It was something as simple as ground clearance. You had higher ground clearance so you had a little bit of offset. M-Raps, offset, V-shaped hull to try and deflect the blast a little bit. Now there's some folks going back and second guessing whether the hull form actually does deflect the blast. I personally think it does, but I'm not an engineer. What do I know? So that's why we're emphasizing this ACV because it has, out in the Nevada Automotive Test Center they tested our technology demonstrator for the NPC and industry followed that, all the developments on that. And some of the things they developed in that thing is something like called inline drive. So that all four tires on each side pull about the same way it tracks pull to be able to climb over things, some maneuver and soft soil, mud sand, that kind of thing. But more importantly, you have higher level ground clearance. It can raise and lower itself.   So all those things combine and there are a lot of different things. There's the operational availability of those vehicles, the complexity, frankly the high water speed vehicle was very, very complex. There was a lot of hydraulics in it. So and the reliability was getting better by the time the program was canceled but it still wasn't very good. That's a challenge, fuel efficiency.  That's not good. So I mean, all of those things combined are what contributed to the decision that kind of made and to take this different path and in some ways it's something we always intended to do because the MPC we started developing in 2008 is a complimentary capability. And our original intentions for that vehicle had nothing to do with us any more than swimming from shore to shore and calm water. So we didn't really discuss anything other than that because that's all we wanted the vehicle to be able to do. We'd get it ashore and then we'd use it ashore. Well, in talking with some of the industry representatives at modern day Marine and a couple other events, you ask them, well, why didn't you bring up the fact that your vehicle swims? That wasn't one of the requirements. So we didn't talk about it. Well, does it swim? And they show you a video. Okay, well that doesn't prove anything.  Obviously it has to be tested. So you start looking at the engineering specification, reserve buoyancy, ability to ride itself, all those kinds of things, thrust through the water to be able to get through the surf zone, the ability to keep itself from sinking once it comes off the ship. Indications we have is it's pretty good, but it has to be proved. Sir Byron Callan, Capital Alpha Partners. I wonder if you can talk a little about the international aspects of some of these connector programs. There are a number of other countries that operate AAVs. They're probably as long as a tooth of some of ours. They're buying some of ours, so I guarantee they're as long as a tooth. Okay, but I'm curious. I mean, are they engaging in the requirements or what's kind of the state of dialogue with the requirements that you're setting and how maybe partners might fit in those in the future? One of the things about it is we haven't really started discussing outside international. We've looked around at who's doing what. And right now the only people that have built a high water speed amphibious vehicle are the Chinese. And guess what? It looks a lot like the EV. Now the specifications for it, we don't know all of them, but what it looked like they did was to get around the weight problem was put armor on the front, for the frontal facing, and then sides and back, much, much later armor. I think you can take that with a BB gun. I'm just kidding. We also don't know what they have in the back of it from the standpoint of how you fit the people in the back, because the other thing about the ACVs that we're looking at, they have mine resistant blast seats so they're suspended from the ceiling and so the troops sitting in there don't absorb the seat, the blasts coming up through their legs and through their spines. I don't know if they did anything like that in those vehicles. It goes very fast through the water. We don't know how far, and we don't know what happened when it gets to shore. We don't know what the reliability is. All of the challenges that we face. But like I said, it looks all like the EV. Had different paint scheme. What a lot of other countries are doing with their amphibious vehicles is using the international versions of the ones we're looking at right now as potential vendors. That's what they're using for amphibious vehicles. They swim off the ship, they come ashore. They use different options. There's also the option that the French just did in Mali. They wanted to operate in Mali so they pulled a ship into Port in Senegal, drove off onto the pier, drove across Senegal, went into Mali to operate. Can we do that? I don't know. Obviously there's a lot of permissions involved in that. But that's a potential also. Try to do a drive hundreds of miles with tracked vehicles, doesn't work too well. Especially with our old, you leave a bunch of them by the side of the road and that's not considered a good thing. One of the broader trade spaces that has been being navigated of late in the Marine Corps is between the air element and the ground element. And clearly the V-22 is, I, at least from where I sit, proving out to be a lot of what the Marine Corps promised and no one believed initially is now sort of coming to bear. I think it's going beyond our expectations. And the Marine Corps always said, just wait till we get it out there and it'll be even better. And again, it actually looks like perhaps the Marine Corps was right. But that promise, I think, has to some degree reinvigorated the debate about, okay, how much of the ground element do we really need? How much could you do relying more heavily on air? How relevant is the ground element coming ashore? So, how do you think about that balance? Well, that's just it. There has to be a balance. Because- But it can it be a 75-25 balance? No. One way or the other? Because the thing about it is whatever you bring in via air, right now we have an internally transportable vehicle, but you have to make some modification before you put it on a V-22 and then to get it off modified again before you can operate with it. And we have a limited number of those. Other than that, those people are restricted to walking. And if you have a fairly robust anti-air threat, you have to do a lot to be able to tamp that down before you bring the V-22 in. And or before you bring helicopters in with suspended vehicles underneath them, like our 53 can carry quite a bit. The JLTV that we're bringing online, the 53 can actually carry two of them. And so that's another way to sling load them in, bring those in. But you have to have a relatively benign environment to do that because you have to have the ability to move more than just at foot speed. And that's a challenge. And that's why I believe the ground element has to have the ability to get ashore with vehicles that are protected by armor and can fight. And so that's, and then our bigger things, there's the only way to get them ashore or the only way to get them somewhere is via ship. Because even the C-17, like we can only fly, you can only put one tank at a time on a C-17. So those are very limited options. Well, there are also the arguments about just exactly what the right balance is of the self deployment. You've talked a lot about that, but do you see the potential for some technological evolution that might shift that need and or could you see a financial scenario coming to pass that would essentially force the Marine Corps to conceive of that differently? I would not, I'd never say never because as soon as you do that, you get proven wrong. But I can't, I don't see it because we're a ground-centric organization. We have our air assets to support ground. Well, I don't mean in the ground, but I mean in terms of having a connector that just delivers as opposed to having a self-deployed capability, surface capability, can you see, it's a lot easier in some ways to put a vehicle onto a surface connector and drive it off than having the self-deployed and getting that balance of protection ashore versus speed in the water, obviously is where, it's a petard you've been hoisted on before, so. To us, we see the ability to have an independent deployer that swims ashore without any connector is a service to finding capability and that's why I've put so much emphasis on it. I mean, for the pursuit of high water speed, we've spent 26 years, $3 billion and as I think I said at lunch, it's not because we're stupid, it's because that's how important it is to us to be able to have that capability and that remains a requirement to have that capability as in why we're continuing to pursue other options and at the same time, continuing the pursuit of high water speed in technology, RDT&E, because the equation has to change somewhat so there's less trade-offs to be able to get that vehicle because that's ultimately what we would like because what we've envisioned is for the longest time and I think General Cruelac and maybe General Kirkman if I'm wrong and maybe since before him, three-legged stool, V-22, L-CAC, high water speed, it was called a AAAV then became EFE and then we referred to it as a high water speed ACV when the high water speed study office was stood up but that's what we're trying to get to because we believe that gives us the most capability. More questions out there? Somebody's gotta have some tomatoes, we haven't gotten the tomatoes yet. Here we go, Dakota, how about some tomatoes? He won't do it, he won't do it, he won't do it, he won't do it. Dakota Wood, Heritage Foundation, the conversation has really been about the ACV, whatever variant, the topic was connectors and oftentimes when I read about the topic or hear people talk about it, they conflate connectors, SIP to short connectors with the ACV program but really it's LCAC, LCAC replacement, LCU, LCU replacement, you gotta get JLTV ashore, you gotta get Humvee's ashore, you gotta get MTVR's ashore, so what can you tell us about the CORE's program or desires for actual surface connectors and Ryan's on Navy programs and the timeline for all that? Yeah, I think I've talked about it earlier or maybe I'm confusing what I talked about at lunch. We had a summit in March to talk about all the different ideas that are out there because one of the things we clearly understand is with the route we're taking, LCUs and LCACs probably aren't gonna be enough. What else is there out there? What else can be done? The joint high-speed vessel that's just coming online, we're gonna build eventually 10 of them and the first two, first three have already been commissioned and two of them are out there operating right now to find out, well, what all can we do with these vehicles? Excuse me, these vessels. High-speed catamaran kept to 35 knots, carry over 600 tons, pretty capable vehicle except that that's not a landing vessel. So one of the things we talked about is having a ramp. We're working with O&R right now, Office of Neighbor Research, to see if we can do a ramp that we can launch vehicles off. They drive off into the water instead of driving off onto an MLP or driving off onto a pier. So you load those up from much greater distance. They can carry about 20 to 21 of the ACVs, bring them into just outside small and range and let them drive off and swim ashore. Those are some potential options. Again, all of it has to be proven. We have to work these things out but one of the things that we clearly realize is as the fiscal environment gets more and more constrained we have to think harder. What are the alternatives? What else can we do to be able to make sure that we continue to have the capability to do amphibious operations? Because that's what makes us different, we believe. I saw another hand out there sitting. No way to move them like this. Expeditionary Force 21 recently came out and obviously the connectors and the ACV and the whole ground component are one of the prongs of that trident as it were. Talk to me if you would about how whatever replaces LCAC and LCU and some of these innovative brand new platforms fit into a context small world where people are firing off anti-ship cruise missiles possibly the non-state actors as we've seen Lebanon firing off anti-ship cruise missiles. You can buy pretty long range radars off the internet now. So how do those connectors, yes I understand the Navy doesn't want to bring it within small arms range but how about getting them through that cruise missile envelope which more and more adversaries are gonna be able to generate to some degree. Absolutely. That's the thing is what I don't want to give people ideas that we'd be doing this by ourselves. Obviously we'd be doing this with the Navy and the Navy and the Air Force. The Navy and the Air Force put a great deal of time and effort into the anti-access fight to be able to suppress that. One of the things that we believe though is we can't just stand by and wait until we get the green light, okay now it's safe to go ashore or safe to get within range to be able to go ashore. We believe that we have to be able to contribute to those shaping operations even if it's nothing more than launching from quite a ways out beyond 65 nautical miles out via a form of connector that can get ashore fairly quickly be able to come like with a joint high speed vessel. Be able to come just outside small arms range to be able to get these vehicles to swim off and then swim ashore be able to open up a bubble ashore because one of the concerns I have is much like the scud hunting in Iraq in the first Gulf War was aircraft can't see everything, radar can't sense everything. They can shut themselves down, they can camouflage themselves and they can pop up at the least convenient time. If you have people on the ground looking for those things to be able to open up a window opportunity then you can help with that effort of bringing things closer in but it's very much going to be a joint fight. We would not be, that's how we would see operating from much longer range. And that's, we think is something we have to be able to do. So that's my question. It's hard for you to see a JHSV type vessel for example, you know, riding bravely through a cruise, anti-ship cruise missile defense zone. Well, you wouldn't, we wouldn't just blithely go into that. But when the alternative is if there's something we absolutely have to do and if you think about that environment, you know, there'd have to be a great deal, you know, the stakes would have to be very, very high. The objective would have to be tremendously important. Vital national interest kind of thing. But I'd rather, I think, stick a smaller vessel in there than a bigger gray vessel have that come in closer. So if you can get the standoff range with a gray vessel and use something to get you most of the way in, that's much smaller, much more maneuverable. Is it still under threat? Absolutely. That's kind of what we get paid to do. But you try and limit your exposure so that you can get something ashore, open things up and it probably in conjunction with something like what we described earlier, V-22 landed force on foot to help clear an area and be able to tamp something down to at least maybe secure what we call a lateral penetration point to be able to get other things ashore and be able to start expanding that bridge head ashore. Okay. Are there other questions out there or have we connected everyone? Okay, we've got one here. Exhausted, the connection. Connecting. Hi, sir. Greg Kicinski from Raytheon. What type of avionics suite? Given that other question that was up front, do you envision on these connectors and also any self-defense weapons? No self-defense weapons. Avionics suite? I'm not sure. Absolutely, as a matter of fact, your company's actually providing some of those options. Hence the question. Or at least offering the opportunity. That's very much on our mind. In particular with the J-35, the capabilities that aircraft are just astronomical and but how do you get that information down to the operating forces? That is a very difficult problem. Something we're very heavily focused on right now. Be able to get that information out. All of the things that we do, we try and take the holistic picture of, well, how do you operate with your aircraft? How do you communicate with them? How do you maintain situational awareness? One of the things we're working on right now, for long-range raids in V-22s, if it's six, eight, 10 hours in the air, the change to the situation, the situation doesn't remain stable. It's gonna be very different from when you originally took off in the last update you got when you're short. So we're looking at ways to collaborate, looking at what 18th Airborne Corps is doing, looking at a lot of different options to see, okay, how do we do airborne command and control amongst the people in that force that are going on that long-range raid, for lack of a way of putting it, to be able to communicate, maintain situational awareness, understand the changes on the ground and be able to adjust and pass orders, okay, here's what we're gonna do now in those aircraft. So all of those things we're working on, do I have an action for them right now? Absolutely not. But technology is moving pretty quick, as you well know, and it's something we're focused on, we're looking at, and we have to make sure we stay at the forward edge of that technology. Okay, I think we want one more back here. Sir, on the subject of connectors, you were talking briefly about catamaran, you mentioned catamaran, and it brought to mind the Navy's INLS system, and I wondered if some of the capabilities that you were considering in terms of getting the assets from ship to shore, were they going to be organic, meaning were they going to be Marine Corps assets only, or were you considering partnering with the Navy, for example, and if so, had the INLS system been considered at all, possibly, I know how slow it moves, I actually attended, supported a training exercise, a Freedom Banner, a few years ago, in which the INLS was implemented, but with modifications, might that be an opportunity for consideration? Well, you'd have to ask the Navy that. If it's a vessel, they own it, and we're partnering with them very much, though. I mean, that's how they get us to shore. If it's a vehicle, we own it. Very simplistic way of looking at it, but no, none of these connector options we're looking at are things that we would actually own ourselves. We don't have the craft masters, we don't have the people that would be able to operate those kind of things. As far as the INLS, you'd have to ask the Navy on that one, because you just want it right past me, so. So that, I forget what the I stands for, but the Navy Lighterage System is what? Improved, okay. Yes, right, so it's a system of barges and other craft from which you take equipment off of a larger ship and get it ashore. That's, the Navy owns all of that. Right, exactly. I've seen it demonstrated, but that's very, I'm not sure if you're right. The INLS, I've seen it demonstrated, but it's very slow, obviously sea states have to be very, very calm, and that's in a permissive environment when they actually push those things ashore, so. Thank you. My question focuses on using it as a model and possibly making improvements to it. We certainly are having those kind of discussions that we'd like to have that done, but one of the things we talked about is the Navy has pretty significant issues facing right now, fiscally, and so I think their options are getting fairly limited to what they can do because ship construction, as a matter of fact, they can't build all the ships that they want to build, let alone the ships that we want them to build, and so that's, we're very constrained times right now, but anyways, we can find to improve things to find out better ways to do things, we're all about it, and so far in our discussions with the Navy, they are too, but within limits, within fiscal limits, because like I said, they have much bigger fiscal problems than we do, can't even imagine the ones they have. Sir, hi, George Nicholson again. You referred to the Joint High Speed Vessel, and also looking at using other platforms, I know that the original requirements for the Joint High Speed Vessel and the LCS had as a threshold, and that it would be able to support the 53 helicopter or the V-22, those were knocked over to objectives, I brought this up at the Surface Navy Association a couple of years ago and the PEO ship said, that's not a requirement, we don't structure. Are you all looking at now with the new innovative concepts, looking what it would take to modify, particularly the deck of a larger LCS, like the independence, particularly to be able to resupply it with a V-22, or to use it as an FOB or a lily pad? Yes, and I believe the Navy's looking very hard at those also, and of course it's more important that they look at it than we do, but one of the things that I have, my understanding is that Navy's looking to get V-22s as a potential replacement for the cod, whether they do that or not, I don't know. I've seen some reference to that in articles a couple of other places. So you brought up the idea that the V-22's shown itself to be a lot more capable than a lot of people thought it was. It's going beyond our expectations, well I just saw an article earlier that there's a lot of different countries looking to get the V-22 now, and the cap of the article, at the end of the article said now it's cool to have a V-22, so I don't know. What I do know that as this thing proves itself more and more capable, more and more people are going to want to use it, and that means it has to have platforms that can actually land on and operate off of it, and it's both weight and heat signature, as you probably well know, and so both of those are issues for the GHSV, and I believe the LCS haven't looked as much at the LCS. But I think there's also a fair amount of experimentation going on to see if there are military Seawolf command platforms that also might be able to be V-22 certified, and again expand the utility of some of those for additional operations. Absolutely. Okay, are there any other burning questions about amphibious connectors? Okay, well, thank you all very much for coming. Really appreciate you taking the time, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care. Thank you.


Okay, but it's quarter two, so we should close the gap then, show all of the load. I expect to think we've finally met some of the people online here. My answer to that, how do you know that we've changed? Is my better and previous to the best seven or the only people that we've got in the workshop are so confident in the fact that all that I've talked about is going to need to do anyway. So he can welcome Sarah Knight and Hannah Heathen, we're all going to need this workshop here, it's on the report that you've got in front of you. Thank you, it's not got one, but if you sit here and have it for now, I'll bring one over to you. And I joined the workshop, welcome Sarah and Hannah. Thank you very much. And as you'll see, we have also got two colleagues who are also named on the slide, that aren't in the workshop today, but we do need to recognise their work as well, which we will do, that's Sheila McNeill and Elizabeth Neill. So thank you so much for making it on a really warm afternoon, on a really packed day, and we're really excited you're able to join us today. We are going to make your work, I'm afraid, but hopefully in an enjoyable way, we have got some activities planned, but we want to give you a bit of an overview around the work that we've been doing at JISC over the past year. And some of you in the room have been very much part of that work through our advisory groups, through events that have been running, and it's a way of also recognising the contributions that we've had from the sector. So we're going to give a little bit of context in relation to where we are post-pandemic, and I think that's a theme that's been picked up in quite a few of the sessions that we've been hearing over the past two days, and where we are with learning and curriculum design. We're going to be introducing, and I think this is a really exciting bit because it's hot off the press, the beyond blended report and materials that you've got on your tables, and we have also got a QR code on the back of the postcard, if you want to download an electronic version of that as well. We're going to be looking at some of the materials from this work, which relate to some of the key concepts in that guide, in really looking at ways in which we can move our practice forward, with thinking about the ways in which we are designing post-pandemic learning. And you have got an opportunity as well in the group activities to discuss and share, so please do make a note of the URL that's on the screen at the moment, because that's the one that we are going to be using today in the workshop. So take a photograph of that, we will have it on as well when we go through into the activity section as well. So, where does this work come from? For us, and I'm showing my age here, but I've been at this nearly 20 years and worked with Helen for a large proportion of that time, as well as Sheila McNeill. And during that time, we have always had an interest and a focus on curriculum and learning design, and I can see people in the room have been involved in some of that early work and those projects. We have led quite a large change programme back in 2008, where we funded projects to look at organisational change in relation to curriculum design. And it's been interesting, I think, for us both to reflect back on some of the lessons from that programme, some of which are still absolutely relevant today, but also to look at where we are now and some of the differences that are coming to the fore. We produced a wide variety of guides, and I think again, you know, recognising the work that the alt community played and has played over that time as well in moving forward this agenda and this discussion. And that really led us post-pandemic to thinking, actually, we need to review where we are now with learning and curriculum design, particularly thinking more about ways we can more effectively ensure that we are designing learning that does better meet the requirements and expectations of our students coming in. So, in phase one, which we conducted last year, we ran a survey, we did a desk review, we had some in-depth interviews, and that guide is available, and that report is available on the JISC website. You can tweet some links to that. But that was really important for us to say, well, where are we now? What is the current state of play? And also to pick up on all the excellent practice that is going on in the sector, but also to look at some of those challenges and where some of the differences lie where we are now, as opposed to pre-pandemic. That then allowed us to think about ways in which we could take that work forward, to think about what support and what materials could make a difference, both at a curriculum level, but also thinking back to that larger transformation change agenda, where we do need to be having a more strategic look at the spaces, the places that we're working in, the ways in which we are planning our assessment and curriculum design. And that's the work that Helen is going to talk through with us today. But I think also just to recognise the consultation, the involvement that we've had with the community around these areas of work, as you'll see there. So, at that point, I'm going to hand over to Helen, who's going to talk us through the next set of materials, and you should be plugged in. Yeah, I'm in. Thank you, Sarah. There's such a wealth of experience in the room, actually, it's quite daunting. So, although we've set this up very much as a workshop, we're the chance to go and look at the resources. At the end of this sort of introductory bit, I think it would be good to stop for some questions maybe, just to see some challenges. We're always welcome to that before we go and look at the resources, because there's not going to be long in an hour to cover everything that we've developed. But there is a chance to go and get a taste for them, hopefully come back with an appetite for more or with some thoughts about it. So, out of the first phase of this project, and Sheila McNeill, my colleague, very much led on this phase, we use these two definitions, and it's very much not to impose them on the sector, it's really just to describe the ways we found these terms being used by the sector. That curriculum design seems to be used very much for those kind of formal organisational processes that might have some kind of committee-based structure, they produce a lot of documentation, they define the graduate outcomes, they might be mapped to other kinds of organisational agenda. And learning design is often used to think about how students will learn within that curriculum structure in terms of activities, materials, assignments, environments that might be used, but in all, in practice, those two processes are iterative and they are interrelated to one another. So, we use this term curriculum and learning design to reflect both that iterative nature of it and the lack of, I guess, certainty about which is being used. So, we talk about the whole process of curriculum and learning design, designing a course of study, thinking about how students will learn within it. And part of the reason for working in this space, I think, going back to the theme that I feel was set with the keynotes and various other sessions today, is to have a common vocabulary and the gap that Sheila and I felt we were working in was very much the gap between curriculum teams and practicing academics and the strategic thinking around things like place design, platform design, timetabling, workload modelling. But, of course, if we find the right vocabulary to bridge that gap, we also hope we might find a vocabulary to bridge the gap with students and how students talk about their learning. So, as we go through, I think it would be interesting just to think about how some of the terms that we're suggesting and we're not alone in suggesting because there's been parallel work that the QAA have been doing, that Advanced HE have been doing, if there are some terms we might use that might also help students to get involved more deeply in the conversation. And also, in a while, I'll show you some visual resources that we really think have got a lot of potential to be used with students for them to describe in visual ways the times and spaces that they feel they occupy in the curriculum. So, in the report, we don't so much talk about the pandemic shift as the pandemic push because so many things on the left side of this slide were happening already unevenly, differently in different institutions, in different parts of the institution, but definitely there was already a shift to thinking about, for example, not just activities and resources being digital in the curriculum, but what if the whole curriculum or whole parts of the curriculum were delivered online, were delivered in a hybrid space? There was definitely a shift from thinking about digital media and resources as something that we produced, discreetly, maybe with some support, to thinking about everything we do just as now being recorded. So, every single thing that happens potentially in a learning space, whether it's officially as I'm being recorded now or unofficially as a student might be making their own notes and records, could emerge from that space, could might have been distributed, could have a new life in another space, a distributed space, or in another time as a student was reviewing it. So, that was already happening, but the pandemic gave a big push to some of these moves. The move from thinking just about our own productivity tools being digital, to thinking about our collaboration tools, our collaborative environments being digital, and in terms of learning teaching and assessment, that move from how do we embed technology, which was certainly the terminology we were using five, ten years ago, to how do we change pedagogy to be more blended, more hybrid, more flexible, more digitally inclusive, more post-digital even. And this bit of thinking about new sessions, I think that came through very much from some of those student voices that we heard at the beginning and also from Peter Bryant's session, if some of you were in there, that students are kind of asking questions like, well, what is a lecture? What is a seminar? Why don't I get more time in an immersive space? Why don't I get more tutorials that could be online? You know, what is this hour that I have to spend here when I could be there? And thinking about those sessions perhaps in a more diverse way. We can't stand up with Jisk on our badges without mentioning the transformation framework, and this is where we mention it, that you've heard from Sarah earlier about that if you came to that session. But in terms of the organisational transformation, we're thinking about a push from integrating platforms to whole space, place, and even timetable redesign. How many of you feel that at your institution there is new thinking about what the purpose of a space is if we have online access to it, some nodding going on? So there's rethinking about space. I think rethinking about the phrase we keep coming in with, what does it mean to be at university or college? Right, could mean something very different from what it seemed to mean pre-pandemic. And of course, they've always been students who had a very transitory experience of being at university or college. But so many of our students and so many of us and our staff went through that experience that suddenly being in a place, being at a place, on the one hand it has a new value, a new set of values for us. On the other hand, we can always choose not to be there. And so we need to rethink as campuses, as institutions, what do our spaces mean to our students? What could they mean? How could they be different? And that's very different from thinking about how do we bring these learning platforms into an existing university college which we know what it looks like. It's on the front of our prospectus. There it is. And I think also we're thinking about then support moving from embedding particular technologies to thinking about the whole pedagogy of online. Of course, we all went through an amazing process of rethinking and upskilling there. But how much of that do we want to consolidate and hang on to? How much of that is in risk perhaps of being lost or forgotten about in a rushback to a more embodied and on-campus experience? So I think the first kind of message that came out for us of the phase one and phase two work was that all learning we could imagine is at least potentially blended. That there are diverse spaces and places of learning taking place that when learners are in one place, they might be having a conversation that extends into another space. That there are collaborative environments which in an interesting way can be used live. A bit like some of the environments we've been using today, you can use them live and that's very responsive and immediate and engaging. But then the trace can be carried forward to another time, time of review. Or maybe you did the preparation in that space and then when you come together, it's to think about what that preparation means in a more responsive way. There's a lot of talk about how space is reconfigured by digital, isn't there? But I think there's less talk about how time is changed by digital, by those ubiquitous recordings that students can access pre-lecture, post-lecture, speed it up to twice times if my teenagers are anything to go by, stopped and started, how time is changed by having those collaborative environments and documents that can move with us from a preparatory phase of learning to a live phase when there's that excitement of getting in there together, seeing other people's cursors moving around and their anonymous rabbit over here. And then the more reflective space where we go and look back in the same environment at what happened. And I think all of that means that learners have this new power to make choices, to connect learning to participate, to not participate, but to also connect, to make new conversations for themselves, to make new groups for themselves. And again, that's something that the students were saying, wasn't it? Well, why can't we have different WhatsApp groups that do a lot of this thing that you want us to come on campus to do? Learners are very often in transit in this cost of living crisis. Maybe not every learner can come on campus as much as they might want to. Perhaps they're accessing learning as they cross borders for some of our students, or as they get into town for others of our students, or as they don't get into town because they can't afford to get into town. So there's a lot of learning in transit and in transition, which means that technology can allow for some of those transitions to happen that wouldn't have been possible, but also creates new vulnerabilities, doesn't it? Because some of our learners may be in transit while others might be securely located. So what we're thinking about in this idea that all learning is blended is that when we design a programme or a session even, we need to be paying attention to space and place, to time and pace, as well as some of the more traditional learning design issues like media, resources, tools, environments, groupings, as resources we can deploy. The resources we have as the university were massively resourced in all of those things, but also resources that students might be choosing to deploy or not to deploy. And if we can meet them, then we can persuade them that spending the right sort of time and place with us might be worth doing and engagement really runs throughout this idea of time and place as resources. Now Sheila being a wonderful visual communicator. Sheila's done some great posters and then when we get to the online workshop, you can have a look at some more of them that's expressed and it's much better than I've just done it with words really. So there's a number of posters that think about where am I, where am I in, for example, in a live lecture on campus, something a bit like this space and I don't know exactly where all of you are right now. Some of you I can see are here with me, which is lovely, hello. Some of you may be doing other things, which may be entirely relevant, maybe for you relevant, they may be the sorts of distraction you need to keep focused. We could have bought in Sheila, sadly we can't because she's doing a workshop somewhere else from another space to talk to you. We could have bought in other stakeholder voices here to this space. You might be going in a minute you will to a padlet to go and do something relevant to what we're doing here. So being in this space is a much broader, more diverse experience. You're not all having the same experience that perhaps five, ten years ago you'd all have been having the same experience. I could rely on you having the same experience of being in this room together. It's not exactly the same and I think this poster and we're finding ways of developing versions of these posters that we can then work with students to get them to express what it's like for them to be in place or not in place, in platform and the different ways that they coordinate things into place. What about time? I mentioned that we could reconfigure time. This is a learning journey in time and it's the journey in time of a lecture recording. So maybe you know you come from an institution where there's a lot of preparatory work. You may have put your slides upon line first so students are already doing some work to prepare them for this lecture to think ahead about what's going to come up in the lecture and then there's a time when the lecture actually happens and hopefully it's really dynamic and interactive and they're doing some of those different things we've talked about and then there's the time after the lecture when they can take that lecture and they can create learning time for themselves that they wouldn't otherwise have had because they have access to that recording because they can bend and shape it to their own needs, to their own revision, to their own lack of understanding. We've come across students having watch parties together. Let's get together and look at that lecture again because there was bits of it we really need to revise together and have a chat about or what about the collaborative design board, something like a padlet? What's the journey of that in time? The board you're going to go and look at has a prehistory. We did eight workshops. We had about 700 participants in total. Some of the traces of those workshops remain in that padlet although we always take them out and respectfully write them up afterwards. You will go and hopefully interact in that padlet with each other, with the resources that are there and then that padlet will continue to have since in time for you. You can go and find all these links that Sarah's told you about. We can go and see what you said and create new learning resource from it. I'm going to get into a couple of things that have numbers attached to them because they always make for good outcomes. You always have to have numbers of things and then you can create a nice visual and then people hopefully remember it. We had a long look at what we are talking about when we're talking about this blend with the view that blended, flexible, hybrid. These are all really nice aspirational words, but they don't really tell anybody what is going to happen in this session. What's going to happen in my curriculum? Okay, it's a blended curriculum. Which bits of it are actually going to be helpful for me for learning from? Actually, I went all the way back to Brona Sharpe and Greg Benfield did a review of blended learning way back in 2006, which blended meant media, blended meant all. There's this thing called online resources that you might be using as well as your traditional resources and that was what blended meant. Now, we're thinking more about these blends of place. Are we in place or in a platform or in a place that has a platform embedded in some kind of immersive space? We're thinking about time, which has always been there. We've always had live study time and independent study time. That is the nature of post-16 education that we want students to become more capable of studying in their own time, but we've got these new ways of bending, blending and shaping time. And I think one of the things we all learned in lockdown was that students like different paces or learning that for some students, the live experience, which is very responsive, very sociable, they miss that terribly. They couldn't get motivated online. Whereas there were some students for whom actually some of that live learning had been quite overwhelming, which maybe we hadn't seen those students very clearly. And when they had more reflective time, they were more engaged because they were able to think, they were able to slow things down, they were able to look at what was expected of them in a slower time frame. Then we still think about media and about how groups and interactions can be coordinated around all of that. So, we took the first two of those, the time, pace and place issues, and they kind of arranged themselves nicely into a quadrant. And what was really nice was that a team at Advanced HE brought a team together to think about exactly the same issue. What is it we're talking about when we talk about different modes of participating? And they've come up with very, very similar ways of talking about it. So obviously we've got the live online, which we're familiar with from the pandemic and post pandemic, being in a video webinar type environment with audio, video, chat maybe, other kinds of resources, polling. We've got live in place, which might have all kinds of material resources, might be a lab session, it might be in place because we want live exchanges to happen. We've got asynchronous online and asynchronous in place. And interestingly, the Advanced HE report puts asynchronous online and in place sort of together because you can see why, because if it's your time, you can decide where you are. But one of the things the cost of living crisis has really highlighted is that a lot of students don't have a good place to be, to be doing their online, their independent learning. And there's a new sense that the campus has to be a place where students can find themselves in place, services they need, a sense of belonging, a sense that they're supported, while doing quote, independent study. So it's not enough just to say, well it's independent study, you know where you want to be, that's fine. We actually really need to think about the campus as a place where students have to find a place even when they're not required to be in a place at the same time as other people. And that's why we had this separation in these four modes. I'm nearly there to the bit that you get to do some stuff. So that's also a quite high level. And when we went out to talk to people, you know, we really had conversations about, well, what's it like to design? What's it like to actually design either a programme or a session or an activity when there are these options available? And especially how do we engage learners? Because we know that learner engagement, given that there's all this choice, you know, you'd think that this choice would create a kind of massive amount of engagement, but actually it's had the opposite effect, having a lot of choices created a crisis of engagement along with other things. It's not only that. And what we were hearing is that we need to focus on what are the high value spacetime, place-pace combinations that students will commit to, that they will be engaged with. It may not be the same answer for every student. It certainly won't be for the same discipline, for every discipline the same. We need ways of describing that. And when you begin to drill down into our workshop materials, you'll find that we've started to attempt to describe some of the value of different session types and spaces that we were hearing that hopefully focused very much on engagement. They were saying we need to see time and place as resources in a new way. So instead of like, well, we have the campus that's kind of obvious and we have timetabling and we have room bookings and that's all just given to us. So when we start design, we've got 12 sessions and they're going to be in this room and we've got an hour a week actually thinking about those as resources that we need to deploy in new ways. And we need to have that conversation in a pedagogic way, like we need to be able to explain why it doesn't suit this group of students or this course or this particular discipline or topic to have those 12 sessions in the same place, but some of them might want to be flexibly online. Some of them might need to be on site. Some of them might need to be in a different place with different materials. Of course, those conversations have always happened, but it's finding of a vocabulary to explain why student engagement really critically means why do I need to be in this place with these people at this time when I might not be, I might be engaging differently. We know that as educators we have to actively manage pacing presence and a lot of educators I talked to have taken that insight from their online teaching experience back into the classroom, have realised how they use their body and their voice and their position and their movement around the class and their relationship with eye contact with students that they were missing and have really committed to developing their pacing presence live as well as online and I think that's a really exciting opportunity for us as educators to think about and to understand the trade-offs. So when we get on to our six pillars, we've got pillars around flexibility, but that doesn't mean that every element of every curriculum should be as flexible as possible. It means that there are trade-offs for flexibility, trade-offs like coherence, trade-offs like the cohort effect being on the same page with your peers as you move through the curriculum. Finally, we need to obviously make this very local. What works for you, what works for your students will be different to what works for other student groups and those issues about responsive versus reflective time that I mentioned, first structured versus open-ended, what the different rules are of these different spaces need to be taken into account. So where we've arrived at, and if I'm clever, I can, oh there you go, falls open in the middle. Just because it's a good graphic, but actually I quite like this graphic for this set of principles. We distilled from those conversations, that feedback, those many, many participants who spoke to us, we distilled what we've called the six pillars, and they're pillars rather than principles because I'm sure every single one of you already has principles for curriculum design at your institution. You know to have learning design frameworks you use, you know to have graduate attributes. So this is not to replace any of that, it's just to give another perhaps way of thinking about those decisions you're already making. And the top three are called place, platform and pace. So it's thinking about the blend of obviously in-place learning with online learning and how that interacts with the pace you want students to be learning at, you know, and need them to be learning at, and what choices they could have about pace. And then when you're combining those, the bottom ones are about blend, flex and support. So blend is that going back to that slide and that discussion about all learning is blended potentially, but what parts of the blend are going to work for this student cohort? What flexibility is useful for students to have? Again, not all parts of the curriculum need to be maximally flexible. There's often a case for parts of the curriculum being very structured perhaps in place because we need to see everybody having this experience together, maybe it's a very high value discursive experience, maybe it's a site visit, maybe it's a really important concept that we're all going to address together through an experimental method or through going and collecting some data. And finally, all of this needs support, you know, doing all of this is different, it's difficult, it's not what we used to do for our staff but for our students. Workload modelling needs to be aligned with the reality that, you know, some of this takes a lot of preparation before and after, needs to be aligned with the fact that not all of teaching may be in contact, it may not all be in place and live and that requires workload modelling. Managing pace and presence is something staff really want to learn how to do better after the pandemic, that takes resources. Students want to know how to connect all this up and they've got the technology to do it but do they know how to use the technology to make their own pathways through these resources of time and space and place that are being offered? So we're going to go to activities to go and have a look at those but I'm really happy to take five minutes first to Sarah if you want to come up and just if people have any thoughts or any questions, it's been a high level gallop through. If you have any thoughts, any questions, any contributions, we're doing it like this, how does that fit in? Please let's take five to do that before we go and actually look at the resources. You will stand after lunch in the AGM or needing your pick up of tea and coffee. Sorry, I think we need a mic for the, thanks Sarah for that. Thank you very much Helen, really interesting. I was having a discussion with Dave Weiss earlier on and came up with a reflection after the student panel that quite often students have a certain perception of learning that teaching is learning rather than learning is learning as we might broadly understand it. Not quite sure if this is a question but do you think students get designed learning or could? Well I think student expectation is part of what we need to work with isn't it? So students comes to university college with a series of expectations about what that culturally will look like and some of that is quite helpful actually because it means it feels you know there are things we can work with in that and some of it is really unhelpful like if I'm not sitting in a lecture being lectured at I'm not properly being taught and I think this kind of vocabulary around where am I going to be and why am I going to be there and is that going to be in my own time? Is it going to be you know students are used to having a lot of flexibility around how they devote their own time and a lot of students need that because they have part-time jobs they have caring responsibilities they're in transit so how do we persuade students that when we have them together in a space in a life space on campus that is worth their time now some of that happens because they value the lecture whatever we say about lectures being rubbish students continue to think lectures are the real deal but we can use that as a positive thing like because students tend to think getting lots of people together in a room is going to be good and we can use that as a motivating thing but I think we have to have that conversation right from the beginning and some of that might look like I mean I've seen a brilliant graphical curriculum don't know some of the rest you saw it on the thing that used to be called Twitter going around just before this conference you know the way we talk to students about what's going to happen in the curriculum doesn't have to be a 14 page document about you know learning outcomes it could be some of the sorts of things that were on those you know visual bursts of like well when you're in a live lecture on this course here are some of the things that are going to go on boom boom boom boom boom you know when you're in a lab here are some of the resources you're going to build yourself that you can build into your own timeline of learning you can take away and build them into however you choose to learn with them you know whatever note capture you use whatever ai you're using behind the scenes so I think just having the the conversation with students about what the curriculum looks like literally looks like is going to be quite important part of what could come out of this does that exactly yeah exactly it's the aesthetics yeah the aesthetics of course design exactly and I think that's something that we've picked up over the years with all our student research isn't it Helen that students always say we actually want stuff to be a bit more explicit about the role that technology is going to play or or why we are doing the things that we're doing so you know going back to that student panel this morning a lot of those experiences from students if they had had that support or things were a bit more explicit rather than us as staff thinking they're explicit to students may then help students to understand what is expected of them and how that learning is going to take place and also the choices that are open to them you know I think you know when we design a curriculum we want some flexibility we want to build in a certain amount of flexibility and you know how flexible do we want it to be possible for staff to be like you know I've programmed in for there to be a lecture at this hour every week nobody's turning up have I got the flexibility to turn that on its head and do something different with that hour that I've got for that I've got in the timetable just as we want that some flexibility for students like I've got an hour two hours to devote to this course this morning what's the most productive thing I could do with those two hours right now you know we want to be able to answer that question because time and space are resources for students as well as for the curriculum should we do should we go to some activities because I think time we need we can eat it on so hopefully you've gone most of you've gone to this this space here and there's lots to explore there but what we'd like you to use as resources since we are in this high value with incredible colleagues around you really high value space genuinely um we'd really love you to go and have a look at the six pillars in the light of things I've said about them and possibly the four modes as well and just have that conversation about terminology you know hybrid high flex flexible blended you know do some of the terms that we are using here will they land okay or is it too late to change the terminology where you are is this a helpful way of thinking about curriculum design if you can add anything to the palette that's great but we'll also since we are live do a bit of life feedback in kind of eight minutes or so five or eight minutes so hopefully you will enjoy I thought I was going to have to take any of that because one of the things I have to be learning is that it's so easy to get all of your energy on that and it's happy to be in the class with you because it makes you get into the class and you've got to be able to take that out of there because you've got to be able to do that because that's how you do it and then why not involve in the additional learning by me quite a large number of things because they need to be shown to us because that has to be done on the way to the way you can do it because they need to be able to do it because you can do it on the way you can do it but they don't really get it so it's happy to have a couple of my friends who are doing the work and they have to be paid to them and they need to be on that and we always bear that in mind because we all really want to make you a content editor and you can do it Mae Yng Nghymru yn ffordd hwn. Rwy'n gweld yn ymddai Ediolwyr yn ddegglu. Felly, mae'r pob آ samplingo yn ymddangos i'r ddeglu. Wel, mae'n ffordd hynny, ond mae'n ynchangos yn ffordd maen nhw. Mwysyllt ymddangos, Ediolwyr yn ddeglu ffordd yn y ffordd. Rydyn ni'n ddeglu ymddangos yw'r rwy'n ddeglu. Ond mae'r rydyn ni'n ffordd... Mae'n byw yng ngwybod nifer. Rydw i'n mynd i'n rhaid o'r hwn o'i bwysig. Mae'n mynd i'n mynd i'n bwysig. Yn ystod yw'r ffordd, dwi'n fawr, dwi'n fawr. I think we'll have one more minute, one more minute and then a little bit of feedback, one minute. Thank you very much also. One more minute. I'm going to just have one more minute to discuss. I'm going to work on this. It's kind of like in the English, and we are, if I said it, and it was a different world than I had with it. I have experience with a few sessions and they are not all going to be in the middle of the meeting, and I'm moving with a lot of them, and then we will have to do a lot and the AC comes to them, and I know this is fine. Your session types does that, which is online, which we'll look at next session. No, no, no, you're absolutely right. We've tried using the term responsive time and reflective time.  The thing about asynchronous is that it's very technical and people agree, or live and independent, that's the other possibility. If you guys would look in the next activity, if you were going to look at session types matched in the form modes and see if that makes it any clearer, that would be really useful feedback. Not saying we shouldn't do glossaries, because I totally agree, but I think it would be really helpful to know whether when you get examples, it looks a bit clearer. So, we'll move on first, and then we'll do feedback again. I can hear what is known as wide ranging conversations happening, which is usually time to train bring people back together a little bit. Some of the questions that a few people at some tables have had might be answered if we went straight into the next bit and then did some feedback at the end, because some of the other resources we've got do go more deeply into real kind of real examples, particularly around what the different sessions look like, if you think about them this way. So if it's okay with you, we'll go, I mean, if you're ready to move on, and if you're not, that's fine. If you're ready to move on to something else, you'll see there's two further columns to the right. One of them has got a series of what we've called lenses, curriculum lenses and strategic lenses. And hopefully this is where the so what about the six pillars comes in. So the six pillars are looked at through a series of curriculum design lenses like what does this look like when we're thinking about student capability when we're thinking about student engagement when we're thinking about assessment. There's also some strategic pillars lenses of which there could have been about 20 after our workshops, you know we had, but there are some kind of core strategic pillars as well. So you could go and have a look at that way of accessing the six pillars and give us some feedback, or you could go further on to the workshop resources which include kind of what is the value of live online of the four modes like what is the actual educational value. And there's also a series of session types, which looks at the session types in the different modes, like why you might run a live lecture as opposed to an online one, why you might give students a task to do together live as opposed to in their own time. Either I would suggest because of the time we've got either look at one of the two lenses strategic or curriculum, or go and look at those other workshop resources right at the second last column. And then when we get back hopefully they'll the feedback will be having had the benefit of seeing that slightly more detailed view, as well as the high level view does that sound sensible. Great, so we'll have in a few more minutes to look at the more detailed stuff and then it'd be great to have your feedback and questions at the end. Thank you. We're going to come up and do questions and I'll run around with this. I'll run around with this. You can do feedback. Yes, my dear. No. I think it said you because I can see it fine by that's because I'm all my it's preloaded on my. So it's all related. Some other people seems online fine. Oh, there we go. I just opened it in. Yn y�bryd yn y rIfort, mae'r rifordd yn y rifordd mai'n gwneud. Mae'r rifordd yn y rifordd, yn y rifordd. Greekfarn? So dwi'n rwy'n gyfer ehongod. Be fydd ydw i ddweud gan ddechrau fwy gynnig o bobl pwler a'r wychydig yn ddangos. Yn nhw, mae'r ffydd eisiau ddweud o bobl pwler. Ond rwy'n dechrau mae'n gweithio hyn mor hwnnw wedi cael ddweud e'ch gwir ffyrdd. Mae'n gweithio i'w gwir fydd i ddweud. Rydyn nhw i'r tŷl yn tyfu, eogwch hynny'n gweithio i lefnodu'n meddwl i ddweud. Cymru? gyda'r newid ei ysaflite, y gweithi i llunio eu sleidio'u newid efo'r eitem. Felly, mae'n gweithio, efo'ch cyfrnewun efo'i bleidio. On o'r llei'r sallig yw hyflwysgol yn y cwyd i'r llei'r sallig i ddileu, mae'n cael y ddileu'r llunio. Diolch yn rhoi. Britech chi'n defnyddio. One of the things we say in here is high flex is really problematic because those are their own interactive potential structures and if you're trying to combine them in an education you're trying to meet in two different ways aren't you, trying to meet the need of people in the room. So what's not right, actually, though, is that it's very good idea. We've got an experience of looking at it in like a slightly new control of the island. We're valuating what technology we're using. I don't know if I'm going to say I'm going to say I'm going to sort of work with it long time ago. So I think I've got to work with sort of, you know, this is why I call it really, you're not meeting anyone's needs. And I think this is why we haven't used the term affordance, but so easily have done. Martin was on my shoulder. We did this thing about, you know, what are the, why would we do in place or online though?  It's not going to work or you're going to need to double up your teaching resource so that you can. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think that's why we need to do all the things that we can do. Well, that's good to know. ond gennym yn chytnod o bach yn un ond pþwyn gaf i'r cyflogaeth, chi paiech chi'n roi roi, i'w ddweud yn bach yn fverlwysbud. not a dyma'r mewn fydd, a'r debyg hefyd, swyddhaeth, unrhyw mewn bobl. Fwy ni dda, rhaid i weithio'r gwaith i'r gweithiwaith i ddefnyddio diolch i ni'n maes gwasanaeth ydych chi'n dod yn gweithio'r gweithiwg? Y onion were comingDIA is again. Right, shall we just gather some feedback? Yes, let's have some thoughts. It's great that the small group conversations are so active. But it'd be lovely to use this large space with so many expertise in it just to share a few high-level thoughts. So we're not going to stretch this to anyone who feels moved to say whatever and feel free. Ew, and Stem. Thanks. Felly, mae'n gweld, yn ymlaen, yn ymddangos, ychydig yn y ddechrau, oherwydd ymlaen, ychydig yn y ffordd yn ffilosofiogol, yn ymlaen, yn y ffordd yn oed yn y ffordd yn y ffordd yn y ffordd. Mae'n ddweud ymlaen ymlaen, ond mae'n ddechrau, yn y ddweud ymlaen o'r wneud yn ei wneud, be Why is in is widely used in normal learning? example, it just means, in my view, that students need to go to probably University provided location in order to study that could be the library that could be artists studios that could be laboratories where where they book independently computer pool rooms and so on all resources is that they don't have access unless it's university provided. So in terms of these places, if you look at the online domain, we are very happy to distinguish between synchronous and asynchronous. But I think the thinking needs to be the same for the physical spaces in the university because they can be used synchronously and they can be used asynchronously. So I think the asynchronous aspect probably needs the firma definition. But exactly why we like, and actually elsewhere we say that a large amount of equity of the equity inequity issue can be talked about in that space because it's the students who need, you know, the lot of those spaces, the university is providing for all students what otherwise you might assume like a private study space or, you know, access to books and resources or computer time, you know, some of it is specialist. But I think the university needs to think about the general spaces it provides as well for. So, yeah, great. And it could, you know, please, right, do some resources around that. That would be wonderful. Yeah, great. Well, but students could be deciding to be together in place, couldn't they, which would be synchronous if they'd be taking the advantage of the capacity to be together, which those those in place things can also provide. It doesn't have to be timetable, but I agree it's usually timetable. I just wanted to add just following on from that, is it when I read that those to the the async online and in place, are we thinking that that's a student on their own or is that students in groups doing things? So when I see read that word independent, there'll be lots of students that may have to do a group task for, say, a problem based learning situation that they've got to prepare it before they come to the live in place. But they may do that as an async and one group decides we're going to meet on Friday afternoon and have pizza while another group might decide let's meet on campus. So that seems to me more around like one learner on their own. But that just might be my interpretation. And the other thing is, why not sync online and sync in place?  Had the conversation about. So sync and async are difficult terms and we tried lots of varieties. So live independent would have been a pair, sync async would have been a pair. I quite like reactive, responsive, reflective as a pair, but it's a bit too edgyspeak. There isn't really a great pair, but live async was the one that most people said they recognised, sorry to the person who said async. But I do think that so if you go back to the blend, you know, clearly you can have a whole range of interactions going on. You know, solo learning, informal group learning, formal group learning, highly structured role based learning in all four modes. It's just that some of those modes we tend to use in different ways. And I guess that's why we, you know, we tried to suggest that classic learning design does quite a lot of this, whereas we were trying to think about the bit that classic learning design perhaps has not paid so much attention to, which is time and spaces resources. Because, yeah, you could you could you could map formal and informal, you know, onto those and it would almost match, but not quite because some of this is shifting partly because of technology. Well, thank you for this. I think this is enormously useful. And what I like about the that quadrant diagram is is the simplicity of it and the clarity so I can see that the discussions that have just been had about the asynchronous online and in place. But I think for me, the real strength is about the live online and the live in place and helping colleagues to understand the appropriateness of those different modes and where they add value and where they don't. And in your documents on page 26 and 27, there's a really good table about what you know, comparing in place and online learning sessions. And and you can see that it's almost the cororally of each other. And we were just discussing on our table how this really probably lays to rest any argument for the value of what I think we call high flex, where you've got some students in the room and some students online. Because if we accept that those things, that those do two different things, which I believe they do, I mean, not everybody will agree with me. But I think that is good. It's a good tool to help colleagues see that the high general high flex. You know, there may be specialist uses of it that are value added. You know, that sort of idea of having a big lecture theatre with some people in it and some people online. I just I think this this helps us explain why that's not a great idea. So thank you. Well, it'd be great if it did that task. I mean, I guess another way of putting that is that the resources, teaching time resources, the resources of a teacher are differently allocated when you're teaching live in class and when you're teaching online. We all know they're very different experiences and you're allocating your resources of attention and care differently. So trying to do both at once, you need to double up on teaching resource, basically if you want that to work for people. So that might be another way of putting the same thing. I think we have to come to a close. So do you have any close your view much better at closing statements than I am? Have you got anything to say at the end? And that's fine. Well, just say thank you so much for the engagement that you've you've given us today, especially on such a hot afternoon. This is just the start, although this work has been going on for a year and we've got the report out now. We are working on a new GISC guide, which will take the resources on the Padlet and move them over to our GISC website or feedback that we are gathering through all these workshops on the Padlet, all help, shape and inform and enhance the work that Helen and Sheila have been doing. So go away, bookmark that Padlet link. Please do if you are interested in hearing more about the guide. Please do sign up and you'll get advance notice of when that guide is going to be published in the autumn. And please just continue to engage with us. This work is only is always informed and shaped by yourselves and the community that we work with, and we hugely value the input that we've had today in our advisory group and others. So please continue to discuss, engage, share, get in touch with Helen, Sheila or myself. And we'd love to hear your feedback and work with you on developing these further. So thank you so much for participating. Thank you to Helen as well and to Sheila virtually for all the work that's gone into this. Thank you. Remains my final thing to do is just to say thank you very much to Helen and to Sarah and if you can all show your appreciation before you rush off for a cup of coffee.