Efallai, i chi'n g todasiaeth i chi'n zeithio i ei wneud, a gweithio gyda'r rhai oedd sydd yn gweithio i chi'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio i chi pethau'i glasadau. Erth cyn i gael, rai'n siaradau i chi ddim opogledio i chi oedd Mark Ruskell, felly dnewch â'r cylyn. mae hi wedi gydag ymddangosahodd ei wneud gweld. Mae'r gwaith ym raddwysus gwneud yn bwysigio'r cyfnod aethau panell cŵis, a oes cymryd cyfrofiadau yn gyrgyrchu eu cyfrofiadadau cyfrofiadau cyfrofiadau cyfrofiadau cyfrofiadau cwis yn cymru, stalu gymrif i ni i gynnig ymdagedd grandfatheri sydd wedi gweld yr oedden nhw ym hyn o'r cyfrofiadau cyfrofiadau yn cyfrofiadau cyfrofiadau cyfrofiadau. Pl poreidwch 23 oes gan gyddiwyr i'r cyfrofiadau panel convened over two residential weekends and held two online sessions in February and March, where it gathered evidence from a variety of witnesses. On 11 April, the panel reported its findings and recommendations. On our meeting today, we will discuss the report with a selection of representatives from the panel. Thank you all for joining us. We are delighted to have you here. I think the last time I saw you all, you were about to engage on your work and I was shooting off so I could watch the rugby matches. So a lot's happened since then. I'd like to thank you on behalf of the committee for your dedication, which has proved it in hard work and proved it in the report which you presented and we've read with great interest. So what I thought I'd do is start off with the panellists and come to you, Karen, first of all, and ask you just to introduce yourself and say where you're from and then I'm going to ask the committee so you know all of the committee where they're from.  No, I'm Karen Shakespeare and I'm from Ayrshire. That's down in the west coast. Kevin Rorte, originally from Edinburgh, now living in Paisley. Hello. I'm Malil, I'm based in Edinburgh. David. Yeah, hello, I'm David Harald, I'm from Strumnus in the Orkney Islands. Hello, I'm Louise Franklin and I'm from Eastin Bartonshire. Hello, I'm Scott Critching and I'm from Edinburgh. Thank you. Right, we'll just get around the panel. I'll start it off. I'm Edward Mountain, I'm the convener of the panel and I come from and represent the region of the Highlands and Islands region. Ben. Good morning and good to see many of you again. I'm Ben Macpherson, I'm the member of the Scottish Parliament for Edinburgh Northern and Leith constituency and also deputy convener of the committee. Hi everyone, nice to see you again. Monica Lennon, MSP for Central Scotland region, a member of this committee and I live in Blantyre in South Lanarkshire. Good morning everyone, thank you for coming along today. My name is Bob Doris and I'm the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow Mary Hill and Springburn. Good morning panel, my name is Douglas Slumstone, MSP for North East region and I live in Aberdeen. Sorry, Jackie, I shouldn't have pushed the button, I forgot you were here. Jackie, my mistake. Good morning, I'm Jackie Dunbar, I live in Aberdeen and I'm the MSP for Aberdeen Donshire. Right, thank you and I've just proved the point that you don't need to touch any buttons because the gentleman over there will make sure the buttons on your microphones are activated. So I made the mistake, none of you will, that's all perfect. I just wanted, before we move into specific questions, probably in the same order to just go through, to ask you a brief reflection on your views on what you've been doing. So Karen, do you want to go? For me personally I find it quite exciting to be asked about it and being asked to join in, simply because I work several jobs in several different places. For people asking me to have an electric car that I can't afford to buy, let alone even rent or anything else, is utterly ridiculous for me personally. And then for people wanting me to change things about my house that I can't afford, I'm really not into that. I don't mind helping the climate change and doing my piece that I can afford to do and that I can do and I can feel that it's quite a lot of other people in the country that would be in my position. So I felt it was really important that I took part so I could raise those issues that maybe other people are unable to really see or reflect or even understand, so that was important for me to put my voice in. I'm a big fan of the concept of deliberative democracy. I hadn't heard of it until I came along to the panel for this sort of topic. I thought that it was an ideal way to engage. I really hope that the pilot panels have proved useful to both the public and the Parliament that it will be further rolled out on a further subject, but I enjoyed the experience and it's very worthwhile. Just to echo my fellow panellists, it's an exciting process to be engaged in and being asked to come and be part of the deliberative just democracy process. I felt included. Usually people feel a distance from the parliamentary process and parliamentary politics, so it's a good step to take. Again, we reiterate the fact that deliberative democracy is a gift to the people of Scotland and it's electorate. In Scotland we appear to be ahead of the game compared to many countries. We had evidence through a sessions of citizens assemblies and the like, but many of them seemed fairly cumbersome and unwieldy. In the people's panel, we felt representative, relevant and listened to by the PACT team. If I may go on to add to the task that we were set on this subject of top-down communication, I feel that we'll maybe move on to this, but I feel that if we were marking the Scottish Government, it would probably be a solid B minus. Probably with the comment that much good work has been done, but much more is needed. For context, to back that up, I would say when you have a sizable minority within my own group who by the very presence are already engaged in the subject matter yet who haven't even heard of heat pumps or know how about the effectiveness or the importance in the whole message, you can see why we think there's still much to be done. Finally, what I learned from the process, and probably having been self-employed most of my days, I often think that the best committee is a committee of one, but that was absolutely not the case here. I learned not to be cynical of this process. I must confess to being fearful that of us all eventually adopting a group, I think, not in dog type mentality, however my experience couldn't be further from this. It's been enlightening, fascinating at times, but most of all a fairly compelling journey through a democratic process, the results of which we hope that you will find informative, honest and helpful in your quest to assess the Scottish Government's progress in this most crucial off-topics. I would reiterate the things that David and the other panellists have said, but the reason I came along to this is because I had to retire through ill health, so I really felt that I needed to do something that would bring me back on board with working for and with other people. I found this an exciting and interesting area because I didn't know very much about it at all. I'm ashamed to say that I now know an awful lot more, and there's lots more to learn, but as David was saying, I'm one of the ones who didn't know what a heat pump was. I didn't know a lot of the things that are going on in the country, and I found the whole thing quite enlightening. I'm quite impressed with some of the initiatives that are happening in Scotland, and I think that we're particularly in Orkney, where David is from. They seem to be trailblazers and really pushing things, but there's still a lot of work to do, and I'm mindful of some of the things that Karen was saying about there are people, many people, and it's not just the people who are on low income, people on day-to-day income. Those initiatives, some of them, are very expensive and unaffordable, so we need to look at that. I've learnt about recycling, about heat pumps, about how climate targets are not being met at the moment. I've learnt that there is not enough information available in primary schools, libraries, community centres and other public areas. I think that community climate hubs are a necessity. The panel has helped me so much, but I want to give advice to MSPs about what I've learnt. For example, I think that there needs to be more climate hubs. The main reason for that is for future generations of the people of Scotland who are going to suffer because of climate change. Thank you all for your contributions. I now have the difficult thing, because, unfortunately, committees are not panels of one, David, otherwise I'd be able to ask all the questions. I wouldn't upset my fellow committee members when I didn't let them in to ask questions. What I'm going to say to you is that I'm going to try and get as many questions in as possible. I know that you'll all want to answer every question. Sadly, you can't do it, because I just haven't got the time to bring you all in, but I want to bring as many in as possible. I would ask you to keep it short. In the last committee, I used to have a thing where I waggled my pen when I thought you got to the stage where I was trying to attract your attention to shut up. The danger was that I was going to let go of it and it might come in your direction. I promise it won't, but if I'm looking at you and going like that, that means I want to bring somebody else in. It's all about management of time. I'm going to get the first question. You were asked to assess how effective the Scottish Government was in engaging with the public on climate change and our climate change target. What were the panel's overall conclusions and the effectiveness of the public engagement strategy? I'm going to say who would like to start off on that. If you want to start off on that, you've got two options. Raise your hand, and if you don't want to be in it, look the other way.  We heard from so many important people, for example, the case studies that were heard about from Isartas, the director of action for climate empowerment observatory in New York. We heard about some of the impacts of climate change that is happening now, and around the world. For example, how it affects animals, their food, their life and their health. All those impacts have touched my heart and have learned that they are impacting us now, so we need to do something about it right now. We need to save the next generations of Scottish people. We learned from the climate hubs that they needed three years' funding to help them do their job, and then that will help communities more. That's good, and it focuses on us. Kevin, are the Government doing enough? It could do better. The question that I understood was how well are we communicating? Now, for me, there was a lot of good work going on that I was unaware of, so, clearly, it's not being communicated as well as it could be, so I would encourage a more wider celebration of the good things that are going on, rather than only people immediately in that area are aware of it, so it could do better. David, I suggest that you'd said B-minus. Do you want to amplify on that? That came about from what I probably touched on there, from what is an engaged representative group across Scotland. I felt just because I lived there not anything to do with me personally, but I was much more aware of a lot of the things that my fellow panel members really hadn't been aware of. Kevin said that there is a lot of information out there, but it's a top-down approach. I don't think that it's not working at all, it's just not working well enough. When the things that Scott touched on with the climate hubs, that's a great resource for you guys—for goodness sake, fund them. It helps people to give them that trust to engage at a local level and give them a point of contact to help them with things like explanation heat pumps and things like that. It's useful, and I think that recommendation 4 that you made in your report was such that we've got to get the message out there. I'm going to move to other people with questions. I'm going to come to the deputy convener, Ben. Thanks, convener. That follows on well from what you've said and what the convener said. You made three recommendations on the theme of communication, and I was just wondering if you can tell us a bit more about the evidence that you heard to suggest that the Scottish Government could do more to improve its communication on climate change. A consistent positive media campaign was recommended because there doesn't appear to be one just now. There are pockets of good work that's going on. It will be on the local news, maybe in the local paper, but not everybody is aware across Scotland that these important things are happening in Scotland. It's about widening the communication rather than keeping it limited to the locality where those works are going on. Do you think that there's a responsibility on the media to amplify some of the good work that's going on? If the Government is seeking to raise awareness of it, that's only one part of the story that the media has then got to take it forward and tell that story. That would certainly help. There's no doubt about it, but even if there was a central store of archival materials clips so that something happening in Orkney, for example, people in Bathgate could find out about it. If you happen to be watching the news when that comes on, you'll catch it, but what if you were working or you didn't see the news, you were at the football or whatever, then it's about how do you keep that message hanging around so that people can access it, and again, one of our other recommendations is about utilising libraries and existing spaces that people are going where, whether it's a newsletter or an update, or even a terminal in a library, where you could access this material. I think that it was mentioned earlier that a lot of good information is out there, but it can be quite tricky to find, and if there was a way to try and make that easier for people who have an interest in the topic, to come in and find the resources, this is what has been done, this is what we plan to do, etc. I'm very keen to get everyone in, and you made reference to learning more about what was going on. Do you think that this would be a positive way of doing it? There are reasons why people are not taking this all on board, and we need to look at that, and some of it is to do with the way that we are putting it across to people, so we need to look at different ways of approaching getting the message out there. I'm looking at, for instance, the youth where maybe we should be using more, and I know we do some, but we might need to use more TikTok and all these kind of modern things that I know nothing about, but you know, these kind of ways of getting them to come on board. Also, one of the things that we did notice was people were saying face to face, you know, communications with people to try, and it's not always let's go and look at something, let's go and go through the computer and things. I do think that it's useful. I mean, I think that there's lots of different opportunities that we could look at, but we don't need to reinvent the wheel. There is a lot out there, and we can, I think it would be good to harness those things and share them amongst us, and that's why Scott's ideas about the community hub is good, because there's lots there, and that wouldn't be, you know, the funding wouldn't be so much because we can utilise what's already been done and add to it rather than start again, you know. Thanks, Llewsyn. Karen, you were wanting to come in as well. Yeah, I think it's really important that we actually remember that positive messages are more important than negative doom and gloom stuff, so I know climate change is really important, and people are very focused on the doom and gloom of it, but I do think that we should be really positive about what we are achieving as a country, and yes, key areas that are doing really well, but even celebrating the small achievements that small towns or cities or villages make is really important to the whole country and the whole dynamics of everything, so positive messages would be more positive in the end result for you. Agreed. Thank you, my points have already been covered mainly by Louise. I think that covers all the communications areas that we had, the convener. Okay, I mean, I just wanted to push a little bit, if I may, back to me, I'm afraid. Just the evidence that you heard over your weekend's engagement with the Parliament, how much of that was new and how much of that do you think we could have heard of through other means rather than you coming here? How are we going to get that message out to everyone? How's government going to get that message out to everyone? Yes, I think that we need to do a lot more, so people learn about public transport, train stations, bus stations, just general transport, so we can see what's actually happening, because there's a lot of people that don't know about climate change. A lot of people would just say, oh, that's it, it's nothing that we can do, but I'll leave it to somebody else to deal with it. But I think that everybody of Scotland has got a responsibility to do that a bit and to save the climate and to help it and to slow it down for future generations of Scotland. I totally agree that that is critical. How are we going to get that message out there? Does anyone have any other things that weren't in the report?  Does anyone want to add to that? Louise, do you want to add to that or not? You talked about using the arts, music, arts, creating different things to demonstrate it, to capture people who wouldn't normally engage in, as I say, written things. There's lots of things out there, lots of media that we can use. One of the things that I did notice is that one of the groups in Africa had utilised the grandparents. They have a special role as a kind of matriarchal society, and they had the grandparents telling stories about how things were playing out for them and what changes they needed to do. Because it was more of a family in a community thing, people tended to take it more on board. There were some interesting case studies that we looked at that helped us with that. I was looking over the notes the other day, and I was thinking, gosh, there's so much. What will we say here? There is so much. I'm sorry, but I think that, Karen, you mentioned about doing good news stories, not bad news stories, but having to reinforce the message to get across. Has there got to be some sort of, if we don't do this, this is what's going to happen? Have we got to do something a little bit, give the negative side to say how we can develop the positive? David, do you want to come in on that, or Karen? Sorry, I've caused confusion.  Going with what Louise had said about the arts and culture section of the Government and where the funding comes from, as a group, we all liked that, but it wasn't voted on because it didn't meet the criteria or the questions that we were asked, but if funding was put towards doing some positive news or negative news, what would happen? Some plays, some poems, some artwork, some public space artwork to then bring in children, the education, and people who are not in education, so you've got all the young people who are not in education, who are school leavers or not school attenders, getting them on board with doing some public engagement artwork or some art forums or music, anything like that, because art does engage and it could be any types of art, dance, drama, theatre, anything, and Louise is right, you would bring people in because you would capture the older audience, you get to the newer audience and you get the people who'd maybe not want to do anything else, but maybe a bit of the black human black comedy, so you would capture a whole load of people that you would not really capture anywhere else via your signs, again what other people had said in the panel via the public transport at Central Station, they're now got a sign up for BLS, British Sign Language, so people who can't hear, can actually see via that what is actually coming up and what the trains are doing, what's the harm in us having that to do with climate awareness stuff or information up on some of those signs popping up now and again, using the spaces that we actually already have available and we're not utilising that. Perfect, David. Just quickly, if I may, I spoke with Neil Carmode, who's the chairman of, you'll know, the chairman of EMEC, a European Marine Energy centre up in my hometown in Strumlis, and his take on it was that we don't really have a software or hardware problem because, you know, everything's happening and working as regards the levels of communication, but we have a wet ware problem in that we have a problem with people's perception, getting the message through, if you like. We've talked a lot about trusted sources, and I think that that will mainly come not on a top-down approach from a bottom-up approach. So again, I would encourage the committee to consider the funding that you're putting in locally. Most of the local authorities have climate officers use them, fund them, and also back to the hubs again, fund them, give them more than one year at a time, because nobody wants a P45 every 12 months. You're not going to get the right people, you're not going to get the right people, but they're not going to stick around. You've got to give them longer-term funding. That's what horrible thought P45 every 12 months, but I'm going to come to the next question. Yeah, sorry, Ben. Just as a point of clarity, we'll of course take all the recommendations and press the government on your recommendations. It's for the government to make these decisions about funding and policy changes. Officially, Parliament votes for it, but just to hear your point about what to press on and that we will definitely consider it.  Sorry, Louise. We spoke to three different climate hubs, representatives from three different climate hubs, and all three of them said funding was their major issue, because they really couldn't plan ahead for things they couldn't put in place what they needed, because they needed a minimum of three years, and they were only getting a one-year fund. By the time they got through that money or got that past, they were catching themselves up trying to think, we really can't plan ahead, because we don't know if we're going to have the money for the next stage of this, and it made things very short-term, rather than longer-term planning. The other thing was those three hubs said that they tried to share their information amongst each other, but there's a huge amount of work that needs to be done there, and that really there needs to be somebody overseeing the whole thing and sort of saying right here what's happening, and that's where our school thing came from, that really is a wee bit piecemeal everywhere, and we really need to, this is an important issue, and we really need to be making sure that all children, all young people, all adults, all the most diverse group of people, everybody gets to know that this is a big, big issue. I can absolutely tell you, one of the committee members is going to be pushing on schools later on in the questioning session, so I'm going to part the school idea, if I can, politely, Louise at this stage, because I want to get some questions in from Bob, who's got some questions he'd like to ask. I was actually just googling on climate hubs there to see what was coming up, so you already got me just trying to learn a little bit more. There were five recommendations in relation to making it easier for everyone to contribute to tackling climate issues, and I really like the expression that there was an action gap in relation, not a willingness gap, but an action gap because I wonder if any of you want to say a little bit more about that. I was clearly taking a little bit about the climate hub ideas, but they're making it easier for people to engage and to act, so maybe some, not even some concrete examples of things that you think government consider or local authorities consider to make easier for people not just to be aware of climate change and those challenges, but to identify and fill that action gap that's referred to in the report. It's not about one little item that everything has to join together, so for example, someone being able to take part in helping a wee bit, which is maybe take the bus or public transport, but for that to happen, the public transport has to run where they are needing to go, for them to be able to ditch the car, for them to be able to do that. It needs to be cheap enough for them to do it, so it's not cheaper for me to drive my car from Irvine to Glasgow and to park it than it is for me to get a train ticket. I return, which it is, it's cheaper for me to drive than it is to catch a train, which is a bit ridiculous, so it's all about looking at the costs and factors of what people can do to help themselves and to help with the climate change. Yes, it's about public transport and making that cheaper and more accessible for everyone, which would mean that someone has to oversee where everything links together. For example, the mums that like to, the mums and dads, not one to separate anyone there, to drop the kids off at schools in the morning, will you get free bus travel for kids? For any kids or young people in education up to the age of 22, so without being rude, why are we not overseeing that and making sure that the bus stops are there for the young ones as well so that the parents can just drop them off very safely where the bus is going to pick them up to drop them off at school without the parents having to drop them off and there's not a big huge traffic jam. So it's all about making sure that schools are interlinking with the parents and it's about the connections. Someone actually needs to start communicating with people down on the ground floor, so it's nice enough that the Government wants to do something about it, but then the Government has to filter that down to the councils. The councils need to filter that down to where people are needing it most, so some of it is going to be down in the schools communication, which is then parents and anyone who looks after it, anything like that, and then you're talking about the disability services. So it's not just one answer fits all, it has to fit different people in different situations, which I understand is about a challenge, but it's not just about one thing, it's how people can change their habits. So yes, we've looked at lights, heating and everything else, but it's the general day-to-day things, which is going to make a huge difference, because the day-to-day things is what everybody does, so it's how everybody can change that small little thing that they can do to make a difference to then help the bigger picture, and that's where we're looking at. That was a really helpful answer within that. All of it was very helpful, Karen, but you started off by something that is challenging for politicians to to fund and achieve, and that's how we significantly improve bus services and make it more affordable. There's work in that area, but I wouldn't go off on a tangent, but you then give a very specific example of the school run, where we can't fix everything at once, but can we work in specific areas to make a real and meaningful difference? That was a concrete example, which I found really, really helpful. I'm just wondering if there are any other concrete examples that other participants might want to share with us on how the Scottish Government or local authorities can support communities in relation to that action gap? Just like quick examples, I think that we heard different methods of transport share that happens more locally as well, such as car shares and community transport options. I think it's more about having different options available and having infrastructure for it to function as well, so it has to be more options, but also very coordinated options, I think. Sorry for that, I didn't mean to jump in there. Are you finished? The climate hubs are bringing people together to try and solve local issues relating to climate change, so it could be some low-level things like it could be litter, it could be pollution, but it could also be that they are trying to get businesses engaged with supporting some of the local issues. One of our recommendations is that if we are funding businesses, we really should be looking for some payback and they should really be taking on board some climate awareness issues within their business. We'll give you money, so here's what you're doing. The climate hubs are there to find what's needed locally, to discuss that amongst themselves and to come up with the issues that they think are the highest priorities and come up with their own solutions, which could be to do with transport and a range of other things. I'm really helpful. I'm conscious that the circular economy bill has revenue aspects to it as well, where money can be plowed back into community initiatives. Again, you're allowing us to join dots about how revenues can be used as effectively as possible. I'm sorry for cutting you off there, David. Do you want to come in? Just one quick one as regards a practical example. I'm sure my fellow panel members are fed up with hearing about Orkney, but when you come off into the airport in Kirkwall, one of the first leaflets that you'll see is car share schemes, obviously Orkney lends itself to that because the size of place lends itself to electric vehicles, so we have electric car share. Projects like that could be spread, as Karen referenced, that bus is difficult. There are other ways that we could be doing that, rather than people having a higher car. It's cheap, affordable, electric vehicles, and it's plentiful and accessible. There's got to be other areas of Scotland that that could be introduced into. I'm really helpful to have time to ask a further question. One more, yes. I want to squeeze out other members who wish to come in. I was struck by the keep it positive mantra that comes all the time. I suppose that there's a lesson there for politicians because I'm a back bench MSP of government. I want to make things look as positive as possible, even when they're just kind of okay. When they're just kind of okay, obviously, in politics, they want them to look as bad as possible, and we're all part of that not being positive. There's a lesson for politicians there, but in relation to keeping it positive, the climate hub was mentioned about how you can get involved, but climate hubs have to be bricks and mortar. I'm thinking about the local sports centre, the local supermarket and the local football stadium, where we could encourage those organisations if there's a climate hub co-ordinator, which is not specific to one building, to make sure that those positive stories are shared with the community and what the pathways for involvement would be. Did you look at some of that, and I'm afleshig at what the recommendations mean in practice or doesn't mean in practice? Scott, did you want to come in? I've been looking at hubs quite recently, and it's very difficult to find. It's only foreign Scotland at the moment. I just feel that it's needing more advice about setting up climate hubs, more funding, and raising how to set it up through the local government and through council bodies as well. That's very helpful. I don't have any more questions, but if anyone else has got a comment to make before I pass back to them—oh, sorry. I pass back to you, Kevin. On keeping it positive, a lot of the messaging is around the issues. You certainly hear people commenting that they're quite tired of hearing about the issue. I think that the issues are in themselves fairly widely communicated and spread. It's the positive things that are happening that's missing. As we said earlier, it's the sharing of the good news stories, so there is actually some good work going on, but not everyone is aware of it. If we could find a way to share the positive stuff more widely, the negative stuff is all over the news. You can hardly miss that, but the positive stuff Scotland has done this month, or this quarter, or this year. Be proud of it and celebrate the good things that are actually happening. To answer your question, no, it doesn't need to be a bricks and mortar building, but you've got lots of youth centres out there, and there's lots of new mums with babies who are not really getting much connection, so what you could potentially do is encourage the youth centres to open up to the new mums and dads and bring the wee ones in to them, maybe teach them about climate change, climate hubs, and do some wee projects of how to recycle, how to change things and what they can do with bringing up the wee ones, anything like that, because that way they do the meet and greet. You get to talk about the climate and you also get to share that, and then they'll be able to go away and talk about it to their other new mums and dads and then family members and bring it up that way. So you're then talking about, you're reaching a very new generation to the older generation and it feeds through everywhere. Monica. Thank you, convener, and thank you again everyone for your brilliant ideas and of course to the whole 23 members of the climate change people's panel. So I've scribbled down lots of notes, but I'm going to stick to some of the questions that I had planned. One was to come back to this issue of finance and financial support, because the panel you've called on the Scottish Government to increase financial support to enable people to take action that will help the Government and Scotland meet these really important climate targets, and that includes free bushtable, which I know has been talked about already. I'm interested to hear what evidence the people's panel heard about the need for more financial support to help individual people. Karen talked about a lot of the measures that are discussed and are not affordable for everyone, and I think that we all recognise that. I'm just interested to hear more about the evidence and what kind of financial support you think would be useful. I'm not sure. I think that Scott would like to go first. Yes, the evidence that's available at the moment is no funding available for people who own their houses for heat pumps. That's a big major issue at the moment and a lot of worry. I'm just wondering if for people who afford a heat pump in their own house, would that be funding for the Government or would it be extended as a mortgage for the local banks? I'm just wondering as well who's going to be responsible and who's going to overact or take their responsibility to make sure that it's all done professionally, and is there going to be a certain type of person that fits it and what certification have we got as well? It's got to be insulation as well for a heat pump. Is it a thing? It's got to cost a lot of money. Do you want to answer that? It's slightly within our remit but it's within the heat in buildings bill that's absolutely critical, Scott, and you're right. I hope they're listening to this. As you rightly say, heat pumps are expensive, insulation is expensive, double glazing is expensive, all of these things that need to be costed out. So it's right that you're flagging it up and it's good that it's flagged up, slightly out with the committee's rework. I'll pass you back to Monica. She may have a better answer than that. Rather than give a direct answer what I thought might be better if we build on the really important points that Scott has made because there's that issue about the financial investment if it's heat pumps or something else, but I think what Scott's touched on is for individual householders that there could be an element of risk not just about the money but also that really important point about how do we know the tradespeople coming into our home, that we can trust them, that the work can be properly certified. As well as that financial support maybe people can maybe add to that but hopefully government is listening today and maybe can help us as a committee and to Scott's question more directly. In terms of that financial support was it mostly around helping individuals or was it also about doing things at a neighbourhood level? I think you did some work in looking at district heating and schemes like that, Louise? We had some evidence about there being, if for instance you were in a big building that you could share a heat source pump for that whole building but the infrastructure is not there at the moment for things like that but they could be and that's where investment needs to happen to move things forward because that would be financially much cheaper than having each and everyone having their own heat pump. There's lots of new technology and things that are being developed that there needs to be investment for that. It's all money, isn't it? I mean and understand you're obviously in a difficult position where it's you know what do we do and what do we hold back on but there definitely needs to be investment and people are very worried about you know their own personal situation. I would say a lot of the people that were there of the 23 of us, most of us, were concerned about the impact of we want to do things, we want to try and tackle this climate change issue but the things that are holding us back really is the money involved. It's very expensive, a lot of people were saying the heat pump thing you can get a grant for that is about £7,000 it sounds fantastic but the evidence that we heard was that people have to first of all get their house into a zero kind of emission type thing so they have to spend a lot of money upgrading lots of things in their house before they can get the heat pump fitted and that's problematic for people because they just don't have the money. There's an investment for things like solar panels and things like that which yes if you can pay that money up front in time it will pay back for you but it's a lot of money up front that people don't really have so yeah day to day people are finding it really difficult they want to do what they can so maybe sharing resources if that can be done I don't know and it's not just the people who are on low income it's actually a lot of the people who are in that kind of middle area where you know we're all struggling to pay the mortgage and food prices everything's going up so it's becoming very very difficult. Thanks for that Louise I do want to come in and ask about bus in particular but in terms of what Louise has described it sounds like in your discussions there might have been you know an argument that maybe a bit more coordination would help so that if it's individual households feeling this is quite a big leap of faith but if you're working alongside your neighbours or others in the community that might help to pull resources before we go and talk about buses any final comment on that from anyone Kevin? Just on the where does money come from the one thing that struck me is a bit odd was that cheap renewable energy produced in Scotland has to go on to the open market and get sold back to people at gas energy prices it seems crazy. There's a clear differential there if you can produce a kilowatt for x and you're having to sell it back to the public at 3x or 4x how does that make any sense is there a way that Scotland could consume its renewable energy local to where it's generated thereby not needing to buy it from the market thereby freeing up money that could then go into other initiatives I don't know if that's an option whether it's something that's devolved or not but as a concept it would seem like a way to raise funds there's a significant gap between what we pay and what it costs. Thanks Kevin again you're making some really important points there now bus has been mentioned and I know that one of your recommendations is around bus travel you know to make bus travel free for everyone that would require a lot of investment there would be a cost to the public purse so did you hear evidence on how a policy like that and how that would work you know might achieve savings elsewhere or in the longer term and did you hear any evidence about how that could be funded what would work and what wouldn't? Just to put that into context if I may moniker I think that the committee every year looks at concessionary travel for buses which comes out just the concessionary travel alone is about 230 million pounds so making it free for every single bus across Scotland maybe substantially more than that and David's going to say it's parry all from all the power from Orkney but does anyone want to come back just I mean it's I was looking at that it's your recommendation 17 I think does anyone want to comment on that? I think before you can lay down any any financial investment or say no you can't do that you need to have a proper overview of where where you need the buses so when I was younger there used to be lots of bus services and now I'm a little older but quite a lot of the bus services have been sliced and diced and cut which then obviously means that people are needing to use other ways to get to where they want to be we're doing a climate hub and climate panel that's what we're here for we're to give you recommendations how to sort things out and help the country which would include make more available services so yes you might be thinking dude we cannot make that free for everyone that's just going to cost a bomb is there a way that we can do it you can make it really reduced but it should not cost me £10 on a bus to go from Trun to where and that's for a single so this is where the reality check for people who run in the bus services and the operations and without being rude a Scottish Government gives a lot of money to public transport to do what they need to do so you're talking real buses everyone is getting the cut of the money and the cut of the money without being rude it's coming from us you guys and everyone else in the country from various things so without being rude I don't think it's going to be that hard to find the money you just need to move it about and I know that you're like but that's a lot harder than you say it is but also if you look at some of the other recommendations when we're saying about other business incorporations we're giving lots of money to them and we're not getting that back we're not even seeing that trickling back it's not coming back full stop so when you start putting all the recommendations that we have put and actually put in a proper overview of how you can actually start moving things about you will need to actually physically move things about it's not just about or we'll just do this you will actually need to physically sit down and move things about and get things working and then everything's going to fall into place and it's not going to happen overnight let's not lie about it this is going to take five 10 15 years to get everything functioning flowing the way that we want it to see it flowing but there's no reality of where it's going to happen overnight so it's a long-term investment so as a community which is the country as a community it's a big one we need to put an investment in and we do expect the people who are running the country to put that investment in as well and it's a long-term goal it's not a short-term thing it's long-term thank you this is sorry monica this is where i get myself into trouble with committee members because time is marching on and it always goes quicker when it's an interesting subject so i could take one more person on this and then move to Douglas if it's all right with you i'll come back to you on the final one at the end so does anyone else want to add anything to what Karen's just said David briefly sorry if i made just very briefly for context i think a recommendation 17 came under the could come under the category of a while a bit of a wild card and a headline grabber if you like but it's also as Karen said it's there to challenge you it's quantifiable in other words it will cost a lot but you will be able to work out how much it does cost it's it's has goals and that is its objective is to take people off you know off roads off cars and reduce the country's carbon output so you know it's there just a prompt thought it's certainly out in my eyes Douglas yeah thanks thanks community i'm moving on to the theme of business now where you'd made three recommendations one of these recommendations called for the Scottish government to require businesses that receive public funding to support local communities to take climate action can you tell us a little bit more of the evidence you heard there and what you'd like to see businesses providing if i may take that one yeah i think that comes from and we're aware for example that the the scottish enterprise have just quite recently i think it's quarter two and two and twenty two twenty three scottish enterprise have introduced an approach aligning business support to to to target in their own net zero targets but those so that's so that process has started i think the feeling was that it wasn't ambitious enough the it's only the so if another in other words of a business is supported by scottish enterprise then either have to have a credible a credible plan in place to reduce carbon emissions to net zero but it's only by 2045 but i think the feeling was that's too far in the future it's not accountable enough and it's not in it's really just um it could be more appointed more shot a term and with with achievable targets because it's easy for a business to say yeah we can do that and we'll put this in place but it needs to be more accountable we feel so i think that's where that one stemmed from okay and um there was other two recommendations that um there weren't unanimous um there was majority support the first one was around government regulation of business around climate targets and not subsidising companies with negative impact of car and you mentioned slightly about that before i don't know if there's anything else you would like to add on what you heard about maybe businesses receiving subsidies but not giving back yeah we as a panel we spoke to a whole bunch of different people via climate change and then businesses and bringing in and it was really a lot reflection for us as a panel of quite a lot of the money that some companies need to do x yn z they're getting that from the scotish government but they're not putting any money back into the community now that could be small businesses or big businesses so you could say for example the Covid loans right that was to help businesses to do whatever they want to do but none of that money is coming back you're talking about money for electricity and gas and shell companies and that's helped to support them to do whatever they need but again none of that money is coming back but all our bills are going up so how is a community they can actually start putting money back into the community that they're actually working with or they are even got bases in now we were also talking about how that is and maybe not central to scotland it's maybe central to england to do with the actual british government and we do understand that but we do think where any money is coming from the scotish people going to businesses there should be some sort of reward back to the scotish people not just to the businesses to become rich and not put anything back and as we have been made very aware is there other places that need funding so if you as a scotish government cannot fund that because there's no money there then there are companies that you're given money to because you think that's more important then that money should then trickle back maybe into for example the climate hubs and any education or any projects that would be useful that you don't have money for but those companies do have money to then plough it back and so the money then recycles round and it is going back into the community where it needs to be but not all the panellists agreed on that once what was the other reason why they didn't all agree is simply because one did we feel that did that meet the questions that were asked to were you able to actually do it that's with some of the recommendations and people not being able to physically say is would that be able to happen I personally think it should be able to happen and I think it's quite easy for you to put that in writing as one of the part of the agreements if they're taking money from you then they should be able to put x amount of money back or a small percentage back then that's my personal reflection everyone else will have their own different views on that as you've noted yourself but it's about could you make that happen and that was where we're looking at we were trying to get everything unanimous of where you could actually achieve everything that we've asked you to achieve and that was where it was okay and I'll move on to it so the last recommendation you had was around there needs to be a change the way national capital projects like installation of heat pumps and home insulation are administered can someone tell us a little bit more of you know what you the examples you'd heard there and once again why some panellists couldn't agree with with that recommendation without being rude it's just way too expensive if you're looking at someone who I've got seven jobs all part time okay so I also look after my parents as well so I've got quite a lot of things that I'm juggling and I'm paying all my bills I'm not on benefits rents and like that so I'm doing quite alright and financing along quite nicely but then you as a government have not done a financial impact statement which is something that you should have done but you've not done before you put out this climate target stuff and then you're asking people everyday people including yourselves I understand to then spend lots of money thousand pounds of money up to 10 grand even more to change aspects of their living accommodation whatever building that they're living in or if they're not owning a place then obviously the rents going up or the community charges are going up and you're not really looking down at the people the little work abeas and that's the problem so yes you've got things out there that can maybe help people but it's not helping everyone and I understand that's a bit of a challenge but also every council is operating that differently and that was brought to the attention of where some people in the panel actually had heat pumps and electric cars and they and solar panels and they got their funding slightly differently and everything worked very differently and as a panel we didn't really understand why everything was working really differently if it's a national incentive that was going out then it should be a basic here here's everything that we can offer this is what is available to you and it shouldn't be chopped in change depending on where you live in so that's where some of that's coming in okay that's that's very Douglas I'm going to bring David in and then I'm going to have to move to the last question because I'm just my the clock is ticking away if I may walk back just to the the question you asked there it was specifically about we there was an issue regarding the administration of some of the national schemes now as you know I live in Otney and I this this was bred through conversations with and and also I can give you anecdotal direct evidence from from our experience on the ground of these things I spoke to the the char builder in Otney who's the chairman of the national builders federation and they are continually him and his colleagues are continually frustrated by what are effectively central belt companies who are who are coming to the more remote areas to install the insulation to install insulation we learn from the start insulation housing is one of the the key things that we have to do in especially old housing stock but these contracts appear to be awarded on a on a national level where we feel it would be much much more effective to administer that to local government to local sources and to it actually the benefits are numerous and that you would actually be benefit and not only again getting back to trusted sources trusted builders you'd also be keeping the money local and you'd get them I think you'd get a much higher engagement from people who want to introduce these things and like insulation etc the house if I can give you one specific piece of information my partner and I are involved in property let in Otney I know I'm going to give you a quick one you can't wiggle it I'm wiggling it I'm going to wiggle it I'm going to I'm going to wiggle it back to you you have given a contractor company called ever warm who administer your insulation now ever warm actually booked a house with us in Otney for two days they sent two people up in a van to come across on the water to stay in our house they actually went to one of the smaller islands of Otney so it's more expensive and all that they were doing was to install at one door one door that's all they had to finish a job that they had they took their own door size to expend it to me so they came they had two two days accommodation all that travel from the central belt it's it's senseless now I'm sure that's an exceptional case but but it is a case just the same so for these contracts again if we can put a lot of more of the money local it's not it shouldn't all be central belt based and I've got the pen wiggle so I'll stop you're almost going to get launched so we've got one more question we've got one more question and it's going to come from Monica and whoever puts their hand up first can answer the question so Monica Roffica thank you computer well speaking of positive news you got a lot of media coverage last week and just looking at some of the headlines lessons on climate jumps out so your first recommendation which was unanimous is about making climate change a compulsory part of the curriculum because in schools right now it's optional as you Kevin's got his hand up already so you've told us in the report why you think it's important we'd like to hear more about that and you know are there examples where young people in school are not getting any you know climate change information so Kevin perhaps you can enlighten us well it would appear that some some schools have already embedded climate change and and what again positive things that can be done about it into this current curriculum so without the need to spending too much money it would seem that some schools have taken the approach okay we'll add some worksheets in each subject area so at primary school for example writing then what you're writing about is something on the the topic maths if you're going to do a sum why not make it theme related and so it's about rather than again having to come up with a new subject area it's about how do you embed the topic into the existing curriculum in the first place there could be some really quick wins there and given that some schools are already doing that it's simply a case of sharing that to make sure everybody's included so growing on that best practice and then mainstreaming that work David had his hand up next yeah again briefly I think I think this maybe comes under the category of we were all really surprised that it wasn't already there and this Kevin says we don't have to reinvent the wheel with us and it's not for us to to try and understand the national curriculum but it wouldn't seem that difficult it at least seems a very natural thing to do to introduce that as early as possible so that it becomes second nature because that then gets transferred back into the home and it you know it as I said seems a very normal and natural thing approach to take um well I got ambushed then David by you I said one and you made it two but I was also warned before the this session by the partition participation and communities team that I wasn't going to get away without being asked a question myself so I'm not going to give you the chance to answer me the question politicians never let other people ask questions they they work out the question they want to answer themselves and then give you the answer so so the I guess the question that you would have wanted to ask me is what we're going to do with this report now that we've got it well we've got to decide as a committee after this what we're going to do but some of the things that we will be doing is for example we have got the climate change committee in next week into the committee and I'm sure your report will and some of the questions that you've raised in the report will help us inform our views and questions to them we've got the circular economy bill which we're about to do stage two from which I'm sure will prompt some of the discussions that go on in there we constantly have ministers in here from different portfolios and I guess we'll be asking them questions and there's a process going on in the parliament at the moment where there's a review being undertaken to see where government policies are reaching targets of net zero and and as conveners and as committees we're looking at ways to try and make sure that when a bill is published and when policies are published that we understand where we go and whether it's achieving not only the net zero goal but it's also getting the right messages out and there's the correct funding within the bills so I think that will help us with that and the deputy convener ambushed me when you were planning your ambush David and said of course we could write to the minister subject to the committee's approval because I can't do anything as a convener of a committee without committee's approval and I asked the minister to respond to your recommendations in writing to us which we could then share with you and say I'm not seeing any dissent from round the table from committee members so hopefully that's something that we can agree afterwards what I would say as as convener of the committee and I stress that this has been a committee thing that we have driven it is not being driven by the government I think Karen you were suggesting as a government we could well if if if I was a convener of the government this was a government we get a lot done I'm sure but we're going to have to go back to the government with the points that you've made because we are just a committee of it but I'd like to thank you uh congratulate you for all the work that you put in because there was a lot of work and it's uh you know it is your parliament and and we are here uh to make sure that uh what what the people want is delivered by the parliament so as a committee we're extremely grateful for all that you've done and uh fed into us so I can't reiterate my thanks enough we are now going to have to go into private session to see if we can agree some of the things that I've just talked about and to review the evidence that we've heard but thank you very much and I'm sure we will be in touch and keep you updated and point out things that have come over come about as a result of your participation in this deliberative democracy so thank you very much and we're going to move into private session


Yeah, we're ready. Brilliant. And I will welcome to the virtual Summit Parallel Session. I have to say I'm really excited that we have Julie Rose Donpates and a whole host of co-presenters today for a very special session. And I'll be in the chat the whole time to help with any technical problems or questions any of you might have. Please be aware that this is a one hour joined wildcard session. I think it's great, please to say, which will involve a lot of participation from all of you. And as soon as we start the breakout rooms about which Julie will tell you more later on, you will have my access as well. So without further ado, please put your virtual hands together to say a very warm welcome to everybody organizing the session. And a particular welcome to Julie Rose. Hi, Julie, over to you. Hi, thanks, Maureen. We'll just get things set up. It's an important announcement. The programs you're about to watch make use of the Section 30a copyright exception related to parody, which allows fair dealing use of existing works in a spirit of mockery, humour or social commentary. Good afternoon. Next up on AltTV, we have Have I Got Tell For You, where panellists will discuss the findings from the USISER Technology Enhanced Learning Survey. This is followed by After the Quake, a speculative and participative look into higher education's crystal ball. And good afternoon. I'm Julie Bose, and welcome to this special episode of Have I Got Tell For You, focusing on the findings from the USISER 2020 Technology Enhanced Learning Survey. Before we start, I just wanted to speculate on what Alt might have looked like this year in a socially distanced format. But we're online, so hopefully this will all go well. I want to introduce you to our teams today. On Team One, we've got Catherine Nnamani, who's Head of Learning through Technology from the University of South Wales and accompanying her is Dominic Pates, a Senior Educational Technologist from City University of London. On the other team, we have Rich Goodman, the Learning Technology Manager from Loughborough University and accompanying him is Deborah Garrison, Director of Accounts from Penocto. So welcome and thank you very much for taking part in our session today. We're going to be playing four different rounds, starting with our silent film round, where I'll play you a video representing one of the key themes from the survey. And the teams will need to guess what the story is and feel free to play along in the chat as well. So Rich and Deborah, have a look at this one. Please feel free to comment on what you see. Well, this is our good friend accessibility that we've all been spending a huge amount of time getting to grips with and making lots of changes and trying to get senior management involved with and getting people to take it seriously, looking at different tools, looking at different ways of doing things, looking at captioning for video, looking at really ancient things and word documents. It's taking a lot of everybody's time, I think. Deborah, any thoughts from you? Oh, definitely, definitely. Number one priority right now, especially with the EU regulation changes. So happy to see captioning. We saw screen readers. Lots of good things that are now being incorporated across all campuses. So yeah, correct. Two points to you guys. This is the story about accessibility and the increasing importance of accessibility, inclusion and widening participation in relation to tell. It's one of the key themes of the survey. So the top six drivers now include three items relating to widening participation, meeting the equality and meeting the accessibility regulations. We also found that 37% of institutions who've carried out reviews of technologies in the past two years have reviewed digital accessibility tools with the majority of those implementing Blackboard Ally. In addition, accessibility of learning and teaching resources has been in the top three evaluation for the impact of tell on both the student experience and staff pedagogic practices. So it's definitely a key theme for the survey this year. Okay, Catherine and Dom, this is your film. Let me know what you see. Any thoughts on that one? Show my video a minute. I think, well, the first slide is looking at the different structures relating to how tele-supported across different institutions where learning technologies sit and the relationship within the institution. And the last one is the photograph taken from last year's old scene where everybody was in the room. So yeah, that's what I can see. Any thoughts, Dom? Are you on mute, Dom? The classic phrase. I did warn, Dom, about the subtitle. I don't think we can hear you, Dom. Okay, we'll come back to Dom then. So partially right, Catherine. This is the story about the growing numbers of staff supporting tele within UK higher education. So it's a trend that we expect to continue, especially following COVID-19 and the number of job adverts that we've seen for roles within the learning technology industry coming out since then. Distance learning units have seen the largest mean number of staff, but this has mainly been skewed by two institutions who have very large distance learning teams. We're also seeing an increasing number of institutions with more than 36 FTE of staff supporting tele with three institutions now reporting over 100 FTE of staff. But those are the ones primarily with the large distance learning teams as well. Alright, so next up is the picture spin round. Well, you'll see a spinning picture emerging with another finding from the survey. You didn't already see the sneak preview. Teams, you've all got buzzers, I believe. So could you just show me, let's hear your buzzers. Catherine, do you want to start? Deborah, what's your buzzer? Little Gudetama. Rich, have you got a buzzer? Classic Bell. Classic Bell and Dom. Dom, have you joined us yet? Classic Bell and Dung Dung. I think we've still got silence from Dom, unfortunately. Stick disadvantage, okay.  Oh, Rich. It's got to be our favourite story of which of the most popular VLEs amongst UK universities? Moodle and Blackboard, slugging it out for the top spot as usual. Yeah, that's right, Rich. So this is the story about the dominance of Moodle and Blackboard as the main virtual learning environment in use within UK higher education. All the institutions who responded to the survey reported having at least one institutional VLE with two institutions reporting as many as five VLEs. I wouldn't want to be the one supporting those. Moodle wins the VLE battle again, so 59% of institutions are using Moodle and it's the main VLE in use in 49% of institutions. Blackboard Learn comes in second with 30% of institutions reporting its use and when you combine it with the other flavours of Blackboard, this increases to 33%. So I think Moodle is definitely winning the race again. We've seen an increase in the number of institutions using Canvas up from 16% in 2018 to 22% in 2020. So there's now 21 institutions who are using the platform. When it comes to VLE hosting, we continue to see a decline in the number of institutions who host their VLE in-house and an increase in the percentage of institutions opting for cloud-based software as a service. Moodle users are the ones most likely to host in, manage their VLE in-house with 54% doing so and only 9% are using a cloud-based solution. Okay, time now for the odd one out round. I'm going to give you four items and you have to guess which one is the odd one out. So Catherine and Dom, got Dom correctly excellent. Here are your four. So let us know what you think is the odd one out. Your four are webinar software, toilet roll, flower and conspiracy theories. Do you want to go for that one, Catherine? Oh my goodness. Well the toilet roll and the flower were things that were in terribly short supply early on in the pandemic. 5G, yes, we all thought that that was the cause of the pandemic and then the webinar software, the great battle between Zoom and Collaborate and Teams. Which one is the odd one out? Well, if City is anything to go by, we didn't have a lot of webinar software to go around at the beginning anyway. So I think we should plot for conspiracy theories. Yeah, I think I probably agree with you on that. So yeah, we'll go with the 5G theory for that one. Yeah, that's the point to you. So the odd one out is conspiracy theories. As all of the others were in high demand at the beginning of lockdown. The survey findings reported that 72% of institutions have a centrally supported webinar or virtual classroom solution. This was an increase from 53% in 2018. In addition, only 15% of institutions have reported plans to pilot or implement a webinar solution in the next two years. But things may have changed since COVID. I suspect those numbers will be a lot higher next time we run the survey. So Catherine and Don, what was the situation in your institutions? Did you have a platform in place to support the rapid move to online learning? Yeah, we were very fortunate actually. We had Collaborate and have been using it for a number of years and had already done quite a lot of staff development using it. So that was really helpful. But our usage just shot through the ceiling in March. I think we went from something like an average of 10 sessions a week to over a thousand sessions a week. At one point, it was all for the integrators. So that was really helpful. And we'd also just started using Teams. So we were in a pretty strong position actually. A few people said, please, can we use Zoom? So we pushed back on that. But yeah, it's worked really well. I have to say, I'm very lucky I think. It sounds like you went into lockdown in a slightly more comfortable position than we did, Catherine. We had Adobe Connect licenses pretty much like toilet roll. They were very hard to come by. We didn't have an institutional license at the time. It was host licensees only. So really when the lockdown happened, suddenly everyone was scrabbling for Adobe Connect license. So it's been years trying to get people to do them and nobody's interested. Then as things unfolded, Teams got turned on and the pushback against Zoom was unsuccessful. So we went in with one limited platform and we ended up with three. A bit of rapid upskilling from the hotel TV there too. Thanks, Darwin, Catherine. OK, over to you, Richard Debra. Here's your odd one out. Your choices are accessibility. Office 365, which I think is now Microsoft 365 and Teams. Electronic management of assessment and COVID-19. Surely it's because everything else is in the top things in the tail survey. Surely top 10 things would be my guess. Would you say Debra? Yeah, this was a good one, Julie. Yeah, spot on. So the majority of survey responses were submitted by the end of February 2020. So COVID-19 was not one of the top five developments that were starting to make demands on tail support at the beginning of the year. Accessibility in Office 365 were new entries to the top five with 43% of institutions reporting accessibility as a new development up from 5% in 2018. And also in the top five were electronic management of assessment, learning analytics and lecture capture. Surprisingly degree apprenticeships has not had the impact that we anticipated in the 2018 survey with only 5% of institutions reporting this as a development that was making new demands. So over to the panel, how has COVID-19 impacted on your organisations? Richard Debra, do you want to start? Oh, my God. Where to begin? So the last six months have been unbelievable. Well, as like Dom said, for a city, we had, I don't know if you can act as our accomplishing platform with a small number of licenses. Everybody was desperate to use it. So we had to get more licenses, but that wasn't really enough because the platform itself was struggling quite a lot through April. So during one week, we emergency prepped Cisco Webex to be a replacement product for that just in case the Adobe system kept falling out of all, but thankfully it didn't. Teams has come up on the rails. We were already thinking about getting teams at some point, but essentially teams will now be one of our major delivery platforms for the next semester coming up. And so we've essentially rolled it out in a very, very short amount of time with all of our modules being attached to the teams and ready for teaching in various groups, and we're automatically done. And yeah, that's been an amazingly fast project going really quickly with loads of support resources coming on at the same time. Lepticaptor has been very important as well. As Deb will know, we're a big user of Penovo. And we have lots of lots of usage of our system for emergency response essentially we copied over existing content from the previous year. Our Lepticaptor quality is up to 97 ish percent of all seconds are captured anyway. So we had a lot of previously captured sessions, but we're going forward. We're going to be doing a lot more live streaming of existing sessions and also working with recording sort of 20 minute kind of small sessions in advance and things. So yeah, we're planning for lots of different scenarios for going forward, but we know no idea which one we'll be in from week to week. We're kind of ready for most scenarios, just not quite sure which one's going to be with us. Thanks, Rich. I think we're all waiting to see which scenarios might play out. Deborah, what was it like for the supplier side of things? Oh, it was just as crazy. I would like to say the UK was ahead of the curve. So most of our UK customers, there was no issue. Most of them were like, oh, we're glad we already had this rolled out because they were able to make that transition. And so that was great. But what we saw a huge increase was in like central Europe. A lot of the universities haven't been deploying these types of solutions like lecture capture, distance learning, things like that. And so they were starting from scratch. So that was just a race to get everyone up and running. Like for Italy, we had a few customers already there. And from the end of February, they were able to live stream all of their lectures, which I think was like over a million hours of for one institution, University of Verona. In that small amount of time, but they were able to get up and running. But I will say, I thought the UK was in a really good position. And all of you guys should feel really proud of being so forward thinking and not having to scramble last minute to make sure that no student was disadvantaged during this time. So I was really proud in that sense, but it was quite the hustle for the rest of Europe for us. Great. Thanks, Deborah, and a big pat on the back for everyone in UK HE.  Well, exhausting to begin with. The day we went into lockdown, March the 16th, it was announced that we were going to sort of close the institution. And rather rashly, I'd said to a colleague that they didn't need to come in on the Monday because they'd had an economic council. And we just got Austria skiing. And she and I were due to be the only people on the Monday. And I said, oh, don't worry, I'll be fine on my own. Thing is, last words, I came home. I've never been so exhausted in my life. And it's continued since then. It's been relentless. But it's also been really exciting, I think, to see how people who have been so reluctant in the past to engage with technology have really gone out of their comfort zones to put their students first. I think, Deborah, you mentioned about not just advantaging students, and that's really been at the heart of what we've been trying to achieve at University of South Wales. And some of the work that's happened, I think one of the real, one of the examples I'd really like to share with you is our team in chiropractic who previously had not done anything at all in terms of using technology. They've had some sort of technology in situ, but never really engaged with technology that's been at all. And they were in a situation where the students risked not being able to graduate because of the nature of their assessment. And yet, working with one of my colleagues, they transformed their assessment to be completely online, using Collaborate, in a relatively short period of time. It was very intense, but it did mean that the students were actually able to graduate in July and go on to jobs. And that really sums up, I think, the effort and the focus and I know we've got a session about Quake after this, but it really exemplifies it, I think, in terms of people's approach, attitude and just getting on with the job rate. So exciting and exhausting and not sustainable, I have to say, but yeah, all good. Thanks, Catherine. It's been a big challenge for all the disciplines with practical things that we're trying to get students through some of that practical work. Don, finally, how's it been for Citi? Well, we had the rather strange situation in educational technology for suddenly becoming an emergency service. Obviously, an emergency service that we're working from home, which is not the same as you can say for paramedics or nurses, but it certainly helps. I can certainly empathise Catherine with your feelings of exhaustion as well. Taking a slightly wider view as well, we kind of flipped from, as Matt's just referring to in chat, we flipped from years of trying to get the university to listen to us to suddenly influencing the decisions and directions and strategic choices that the institution actually took, which was kind of shocking in a way after so many years. Can anybody hear us? To some extent, although we've rebuilt ourselves, we've restructured ourselves internally a couple of years ago, Covid basically kind of flattened our structure a bit as well within this emergency context. I think the past few months have probably given all of us a collective ear as well. An entire lifetime's worth of stories. The other sort of thing to note as well, I suppose, is that everything has spiked, whether it's the sudden increase in use of the VLE, the web conferencing platforms, the video hosting services, all of the amount of supply ratio of ed text to academics that want or need to have something digital to do with their teaching practice. Great, thank you, Darwin. I can see Catherine said they've been nominated and shortlisted for a team award, so well done. Now it's time for some audience participation. In the chat, Don will post a link to a poll where you can share three words to describe your last few months. The responses will be collated for discussion in the next session after the quake. While you do that, we would like to thank our session sponsors, RapidMook, for their support. RapidMook provides self-service video studios for the production of high quality videos in minutes. Hopefully everyone's had enough time. We have Chris from RapidMook just posted in the chat, so if you do have any questions, then do contact Chris. Okay, welcome back. You join us for our final round, which is the Missing Words Round. This features as its guest publication, the journal Research in Learning Technology. Teams, you'll need to get your buzzers ready. Don, can you say your buzzer with us? I'll have to find which phone it's in, but we'll have to. That's it. Teams, if you want to buzz in with your suggested answer, okay. And we started with what is the leading barrier to the development of processes to promote and support self-taughts? Don? Is it stockpiles of toilet roll? Rich? Senior management. I'll agree with that one, yep. Feel free to join in in the chat as well. Any other thoughts? I think just lack of time. Great, Catherine, yep. This is the finding that lack of time remains the leading promotion and support of TEL, maintaining this position since the 2005 survey. Lack of academic staff knowledge moves up into second place from third in 2018, and this actually reflects the continual changing TEL landscape and introduction to new tools and technologies. So a record high of 70% of institutions who responded to the survey reported undertaking a review of a TEL system in the past two years. And for the majority, this resulted in the introduction of a new system or an upgrade to an existing system. So lots of change for academics. Next up, students what during a fit to classroom course in engineering mathematics? Is that done? That started a TikTok dance. No, we're not looking for that answer. Students confused from the chat? Students hide, yes, that's a really good one. Went to sleep. Went to sleep, yep. Played Fortnite. Okay, so the answer is students video viewing habits. And this article is from Research and Learning Technology. It reports on student viewing habits based on 104 videos over a period of 12 weeks. The video statistics indicate that many students waited until the last day before assignments to watch the required videos. And they also found that students would try to reduce their heavy workload induced by watching them all on the single day by skipping the videos they perceived as less valuable. So definitely an interesting article to have a look at. Your next one, the proportion of institutions who have evaluated the impact of TEL on staff pedagogic practices, what? Deborah? I think it's increased. Increased? No, sadly, that's not the right answer. Any other thoughts? It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Catherine? Choconmore staff? Choconmore staff, that would be a nice one. I think the answer is in the chat yet remains relatively low. So this is the finding that only 28% of institutions reported carrying out an institution-wide evaluation of the impact of TEL on pedagogic practices. It's very comparable to the 2018 data. Digital literacy and adoption of lecture capture were the top two areas that have been evaluated. The seven principles of online learning. What? Go on. Never try to upskill in a pandemic. I think we need to come to that. Any other thoughts? So we need seven words. Is that what we're saying? There's quite a few words in here, but you can make up anything you want. I like Matt's answer. Is it clickbait tweets? Education, education, education. Keep it simple. Keep it simple. That's a list of parents. Accessibility's got to be in there somewhere, surely. So it's feedback from faculty and alumni on its importance for teaching and learning. This is another article from our guest publication research in learning technology, and the results demonstrated that holding students to high standards of performance, academic honesty and professional conduct was the most important factor to both faculty in their online teaching and alumni. Additionally, alumni valued engagement with their faculty more than engagement with other students or course content. And finally, availability of what is the number one encouraging factor for tell development? Beer. Beer and correct. Coffee and biscuits. Technology. Correct, it is technology enhanced learning support staff. So this is defining that the availability of tell support staff continues to be the leading encouraging factor in the development of tell, which is good news for us learning technologists. Other encouraging factors include feedback from students and availability and access to tools across the institution. So we finish with our caption competition. Do we have any suggestions from the panel? I've got one or two. Go for it, Rich. Take a virtual trip to Barnard Castle. Driving testing. Second one. Nice like myself from the world. Third one. I can't find any toilet rolls here. The man who takes off in nine months put it straight back on again when he hears what the new normal is. Any for anyone else? How much does the teacher miss? Deborah Catherine, any thoughts? They do look like electric handcuffs. So you're right. We did put this out on Twitter. And this was my favourite one from one of my colleagues, Catherine Drum. Yes, your mask looks very cool, but I think it's meant to cover your mouth and mouth. Hello. So welcome. So I leave you with news from a government briefing where Gavin Williamson closes with, and that's our plan for A-level grading and HE admissions. Any questions? And news from Alt HQ, where in light of Monday's Zoom outage, the Alt Chief Executive has been found preying to the Learning Technology Gold for a smooth start to online teaching in Term 1. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to the online teaching in Term 1. Thank you. Thank you. And goodbye. Are you ready for the future? Joined on pace, Thor, after the quake. In 2020, higher education was hit by an earthquake that moved fast and broke things. We have combined forces today with, have I got tell for you perspectives from a life in educational technology in 2020. We heard in the last program about the scenes from before the quake. This was issues like the rise of accessibility considerations, the ongoing dominance of big VLEs, learning analytics, and questions around degree apprenticeships. We're going to go now to some of the impressions that you've given us about life as a learning technology itself and within the sector. Let's see if we can get the right screen share. What have your experiences been like in the last three months, which we could talk about as the quake itself? We can see that it's been exhilarating, tiring, exhausting, challenging. In many ways, it's been frustrating and demanding. It's been a roller coaster, but it's also been collaborative. It's been productive. It's been character building. It's had things to do with leggings and dogs as well. There are all manner of different ways that you might have experienced the quake itself during the dramatic moments that hit higher education beginning in March of 2020. We're going to go next to education, though has been disrupted before. This is not the first time that higher education has been disrupted. If we look at a period of the bubonic plague during the Middle Ages, we can see that although there were obviously wider population declines at the time, higher education did see longer term enrollment increases. Oxford, for example, set up new college. Cambridge established four new colleges during this period. We also found a shift from the more theological worldview of universities at the time to a more science-based one, which led somewhat towards the enlightenment at the time. During World War I, of course, we also had a further period of disruption to higher education. Before the war, we found that universities were largely private institutions that were somewhat dependent on fee income and philanthropy. University contributions to war efforts, such as staff and students signing up to fight and war-related research, did lead to financial crises, and ultimately these led to universities and governments being drawn into closer relationships with each other. World War I also saw an increase in female teachers and things like changes in courses offered, such as modern languages like French or Russian. So we can see that while higher education has been profoundly disrupted in the past, it has also tended to evolve and change. So we talked a little bit about before the quake, and these were the known knowns of what the landscape was like before the quake hit. Let's go over to you now to talk about the current situation as well. We also heard from the panel about their experiences of lockdown itself in the summer of the last few months. So we're going to go over to you now, and this is a time for a little bit of audience input here. I have a question for each of you, and we'll give you a little bit of time to think about that and add your questions. You'll see them coming through live as well. A question for you all is what one thing we're thinking of the coming academic year that was due to start shortly, what one thing are you or your institution putting in place to effectively support teaching, learning, or assessment for the coming year? Take a minute to get some responses in there as they come in, and this is something that you're also able to, as you can see, add full sentences as well. Welcome to add more than one comment, if you feel the urge, and do note the effectively support part of the question. Panic is natural for each and everyone. Riding the winds of chaos, that's a beautiful embracing the pending academic year. Somebody is enabling hybrid seminars, that's a bold move. We have a new framework for teaching and learning that is focusing on synchronous over synchronous, asynchronous over synchronous. We'll keep that open for the time being anyway, so somebody's going for a Seamalt as well. I'd like to introduce an idea that I brought to the ALT 2019 conference at Edinburgh. The idea of speculative design may be familiar to some of you. We introduced this at Edinburgh last year as we call speculative learning design. Speculative design takes the notion of possible futures, uses ideas generated to better understand the present, and to discuss the kinds of ideas that people actually want or not in the future. Usually this takes the form of scenarios, and often it starts with a what if question. You'll see some of these in a moment. Essentially, this is using design as a critical tool. It's not about predicting the future, but it's about imagining what possible futures there might be. Now, speculative design comes from a London-based artist called Dunn and Rabi. They wrote a great book called Speculative Everything, published in 2013. They've found in their research this potential futures because of the frame or motif of thinking about speculative design, and developed themselves to suit their own purposes. If you look at the different components of this, you can see that it starts out with the present. On the left-hand side, it stretches out to the probable, which is what is likely to happen. The plausible, which is what could happen. The possible, which is what might happen. And somewhere in there as well, we have the preferable, which is what we want to happen. So, bear these different options and possibilities in mind. Obviously, speculative learning design simply would apply these principles and these design objectives ideas to possible educational futures. Now, one of the ways that helps us to think about these speculative design ideas is taking a look at the state of the art, or some current social trends. So, I've re-showing a slide that we used again at Edinburgh last year that shows some technical, some social, some positive, some negative social trends, or technical trends in some cases. Interestingly, after revisiting this slide, I noticed that global pandemics is all in there as well. So, I'm not sure that any of us in Edinburgh in September last year, when we were talking about holographic academics, would have quite expected this degree of change that's been visited upon us. So, that's it from me. I'm going to hand over to you, and Judy's going to be helping me with the breakout room ideas as well. So, we talked about before the quake, which was the tell landscape before the lockdowns and coronavirus hit global higher education. We talked about during the quake, and you've contributed to that yourselves, which are your ideas and perspectives for the challenges that you have had. Kenai, amongst you, will notice a third Rumsfeldism coming here as well. We're also going to think about the unknown unknowns here as well. The unknown unknowns, this is thinking somewhat into the future. This is thinking about a post-COVID world. What does higher education look like in a post-COVID world? Now, I'm not going to specify a timeframe there. It could be five years. It could be 10. It could be 20. But we're going to put you into small groups, and you will have a single prompt in that group, which is at the top of the page. I'd like you to use that prompt, open up a discussion between yourselves in the group, and use that prompt to generate ideas for higher education institutions in the post-COVID era. So, it's a sort of ideation board or thought-showering, I think, is the current appropriate expression. Aim for positive ideas, if you can. But obviously, we're talking big themes, big topics here. You might have all sorts of difficult questions to throw in there as well. Now, to keep it narrow, you could think about teaching, learning and assessment in a post-COVID environment. But welcome to also include any other ideas around higher education as well. And just to give everybody a, give you some time on deciding who does what, the person in your breakout group whose name comes first in the alphabet according to the Blackboard Listing will be typing up the ideas from the discussion in the Padlet board. And Julie has shared the Padlet link into the chat. You can see it there, padlet.com slash dompate slash after the quake. So, I hope that the instructions are clear. Julie, would you like to send our participants into their breakout rooms, please? Julie, we'll find ourselves joining in. Okay, you should be going to the rooms now. Okay, Dom, it's just you, me and Maureen in the main room now. How are you doing so far? That's too bad. I think some of the groups are now a lot lower than they were when I set them up. I thought, did they go in automatically as well? Yeah, they've all gone in. Call, let me know. I'm here. Let me know if you need anything. Is my mic coming out all right? Yeah. I'll go and join group four because quite a few of them are down to two participants now. So, I'll go and join group four. Feel free to join a group if you wish, Maureen. Thank you, will do. I'll also keep an eye on the chat in case anybody has any technical questions. I should wander into some of these rooms as well. The biggest thing, oh, we returned to the main room. Okay, I think we are back into the main room again here. I'm hoping that that's all. Are we all back? So, let's go for a final share of some of what we've seen. We've got a few panelists, a few responses coming in. So, plenty of stuff from group one. The problem of universally good internet access would need to be solved for people working from home. That it certainly wouldn't be as much fun. What if the pandemic kills off in-person exams? The idea of trusting our adult learners is an idea. What if hybrid teaching becomes a preferred operating model for most universities and colleges? No, we certainly need to overcome some of the challenges. Let's take one more as well. What if global heating continues to rise? This is group six. We certainly need more flexible systems regardless of the pandemic. So, I think this is working. I think this is sharing on. So, there we go. I'm going to stop sharing that one. I'd like to thank you all very, very much for your participation in this today. I know it took a very different turn from have I got tell for you, but we've given you very different perspectives on the year today. Now, the Padlet link itself will remain open. And the intention is that we'll follow up on this with a blog post to aggregate your respective responses on our Learning at City blog at City University. And if Alts would like the version of the blog post as well, then we could get the conversation started there.


Is water wet? I remember this old debate. I think water has to be wet, right? I think so. Yes, water's wet. I would say no. It's already, it's water. Like, it's water. Like, that's, that's, that's what it is, you know? If water isn't wet, then it's the ability to mix things wet that makes it wet. No. I learned this a year. I was, yeah, no, it's not a parody. Yeah, water's wet. Water's wet. Yeah, water's for sure wet, for no doubt. Um, yeah, water's, water's very wet. It's as wet as it gets, for real. Honestly. Water is wet. Yes, absolutely.


Yeah, well Europe's competing on a global stage. Telecommunications is global. So we need global standards and that's the challenge we have. Hello, welcome to the Etno FT summit here in Brussels. Joining me to talk about some of the issues coming up is Malcolm Johnson, the director of the International Telecommunication Union. Thank you for being here. Pleasure. You're speaking today. Give us an idea what the main talking points in your speech are going to be. Yeah, so I'm going to talk about a conference we've got coming in Dubai at the end of this year. It's to revise the International Treaty on Telecommunications. And there are a lot of concerns about this conference. First time the treaty has been opened up for 24 years, a lot of new issues. And it's the subject of a lot of discussion. There's been quite a bit of misinformation about it. So I just want to clarify some of the issues. There are many issues around now that weren't of a concern in 1988 when the treaty was adopted. I mean, mobile communications has exploded since then.  But there are a number of issues that related to that that need to be addressed and our concerns in many countries throughout the world that are not covered by this treaty. And will they be coming along to Dubai? Will they be involved at least at the talking level? Yeah, we've got ITU has got 193 governments that are members of ITU. But we also have a big industry membership. We have several hundred companies, operators, vendors, including other organisations, standards organisations, all members of ITU. So they're all coming together and preparing for this conference. But of course, because it's a treaty conference, it's the member states that will be doing the negotiating. But of course, before they get to Dubai, they're going to be lobbied by their industries and their respective constituents. So they'll be bringing their national positions to this conference. There's only 10 days. But at the end of it, we hope to have a new treaty on international telecommunications, which will establish a new international regulatory framework to take forward the telecommunications, information communication technologies into the future, especially to encourage market forces to address some of the concerns, such as investment in networks, that a number of people have concerns about. Well, I mean, this is one of the big areas where the EU, the European Commission and so forth, there are various instruments, financial instruments to encourage, well, to make up the shortfall in this investment. I mean, what do you see are the main problems, particularly from an EU standpoint? Well, the EU has got a very good regulatory framework, but it puts telecommunications as global. I mean, the European companies are competing at a global level. So really, what we would like to see is this conference being able to extend some of these good practices, regulatory practices onto the global stage, so that we have this framework throughout the world. And then places everybody on an equal footing to compete. So that's one of the main things, especially from the industry side, they would like to see, you know, to have a global framework to compete on a level playing field. And do you think the model of some of the standards and legislation we have in Europe might be a model for other countries to follow? Yes, I mean, we, you know, Europe is a main player in ITU, but we have six regions in ITU. And our standards are international standards, so they're adopted throughout the world. Of course, we get European input to the development of these standards. So some of them are based on European standards, but they could be based on Asian standards, Chinese standards. The challenge we have is to get global agreement to things such as technical standards, but also this regulatory framework. OK, thank you very much. Do stay with us on views.eu for more interviews from the FT-ETNO Summit.