Moodle LMS is an intuitive, and supportive environment for the independent nature of learning in higher education. There is no population more technologically skillful than post-secondary students - the virtual landscape of Moodle is one they are familiar with, and can navigate through easily. Without a major learning curve, online learning platforms like Moodle LMS are ideal for students in higher education. Here are 5 ways that Moodle improves and enhances higher education.

Did you know you can use the Moodle learning management system to make money? Universities, private colleges, technical institutes and all kinds of private online learning providers can offer courses commit a lot of time, effort, and money into developing their online learning programs, increasing the amount of pressure on learning departments to turn a profit. Moodle helps this process by allowing education instituties to offer their online courses - even entire online learning programs - at a profit. 

Creating online courses is one thing, creating courses that are both effective and engaging is another. With all the effort that goes into course development, why wouldn’t you ensure that the learning material is being well-received, and is effective? Effective and engaging eLearning programs are ones that deliver meaningful material, that enhance learner interest and increase learner retention. Here are 4 ways to create effective and engaging eLearning programs.

According to enrollment information gathered from the Institute of Education Sciences, over 80% of classes were delivered entirely online in 2014. This number increased since then, and will continue to increase as online learning takes off. Online learning has taken the world by storm, completely transforming the learning and training landscape. It has been one of the most disruptive learning innovations in the market, not only increasing access to education, but also improving learner performance. For anyone who is new to online learning, or who is thinking about implementing online learning, here is a list of the top 5 benefits from delivering online learning.

To ensure the efficiency of their manufacturing processes, Toyota developed a "just-in-time"  concept, ensuring that they only make what is needed, avoiding wasted resources, investments, and materials. While the world of auto-mechanics may greatly differ from the healthcare sector, this concept of allocating only the necessary resources - nothing more, nothing less - can apply to healthcare training landscape as well. Healthcare professionals work in a fast-paced, time-sensitive environment, meaning that they have no time to waste on anything that is not of immediate importance, or directly impacting their ability to carry out their patient-related work. This is where the "just-in-time" concept comes into play - just replace manufacturing materials with training information.

The first step to creating a better learning experience is to understand where it stands at present. You need to determine what worked to get you where you are, so that you can create a plan to realistically reach your goals. How do you accumulate this data? To begin, you can collect a bit of information through employee feedback surveys. Does the employee feel they can do their job better after training? Was the employee happy with the learning environment? Does the employee have an improved attitude about his or her job after taking training?

How can we prove that the training provided by to healthcare clinicians is improving patient outcomes? The answer comes with competency based training - learning from the perspective of the clinician. LIke any popular methodology, there are a broad number of pieces to the definition. Some are as dry and devoid of creativity as you would imagine. Other more recent definitions, however, take advantage of the adult learning trends that have been evolving in the training world and incorporate them into CBT. The one we are going to go over, is Andragogy.

If you're in the healthcare industry, and use AWS cloud hosting services, you'll be happy to know that AWS is HIPAA compliant. Healthcare providers use the AWS cloud to process, store, and transmit PHI (Protected Health Information). AWS allows covered entities and their business associates who are subject to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to take advantage of a secure AWS environment to process, maintain, and store protected health information.

If you've adopted an eLearning solution or methodology, you will likely be required to prove the return on investment. This is to show that the money you've invested in training has a tangible outcome, and isn't going to waste.  

With the LMS landscape changing as quickly as it has been, there are a ton of new features and functions that are being introduced in the market. The question then becomes, which features are essential? There are certain things every modern LMS should be able to do. Here, we go over this list, broken down into features that benefit organization/admin, and features that benefit learners.  For Organizations and Admin: 1. Develop and administer reports (A Reporting & Analytics Tool)  If you’ve implemented an LMS, chances are you’re going to need to prove the return on investment of your online learning platform. If your system has a reporting and analytics solution, you will have access to this type of data - you can access, analyze, and present data for administrators, management, and users through a variety of reports, interactive charts, and graphs. You can also determine how long learners spend working in a course, who has completed assignments and who hasn’t, how effective learning material is, and how you can improve your learning programs. A reporting and analytics solution will allow you to get the best insight on your learners, learning programs, and learning outcomes. Register for our webinar on May 26th, on the Top 8 Must Have LMS Features, for an in-depth look at what a modern LMS should be able to do for you. 

If you've ever confused blended learning with flipped classroom learning (or vice versa), you're not alone. While the two methods have some overlapping components, and a common objective, they are each unique in their execution. In this blog, we will provide you with an overview of blended learning and flipped classrooms, as well as a few best practices for implementing each one! 

Generating insights from Moodle and Totara elearning solutions is now fast and easy with the new release of Lambda Solutions’ LMS reporting and analytics tool. Formerly named Analytika, version 4.1 of Zoola™ Analytics provides Lambda customers and partners using both Moodle and Totara LMS the ability to dig deeper into learner data, generate full insights into learning programs, and generate customizable, exportable reports quickly! 

Moodle isn’t just for the higher education sector, it’s used by countless organizations in healthcare, enterprise, and even non-profit arenas to ensure employees are provided with learning opportunities to meet their performance goals. If you are in the market for a learning management system that meets your unique learning needs, this blog will provide you with an overview of some of the many benefits you will gain from implementing Moodle into your organization.

The worldwide market for eLearning is has grown significantly over the past 10 years and it doesn't look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. In 2011, the worldwide market was valued at US $35.6 billion and by 2016 the market is expected to reach US $51.3 billion. As discussed in eLearning Trends in the Fast Growing Education Markets, the leading regional market is Asia Pacific where growth is expected to have the largest aggregate growth rate over a 5 year period at 17.3%. Close behind is Eastern Europe (16.9%), Africa (15.2%) and Latin America (14.6%).

How would you go about completely transforming the world of education as we know it, by (literally, and figuratively) tearing down classroom walls, encouraging educators to quit the in-class lecture-style teaching methods they're used to, and have them assist online-driven learning without causing an outrage? Show them the data that proves how well it works. 

Big news in the Moodle world, as the release of Moodle 3.1 is almost here! Set for Monday May 23rd, this long awaited release comes equipped with significant enhancements, additions, and improvements based on requests, and pains expressed by the Moodle community. Here are 10 (of the many!) improvements you have to look forward to with the release of Moodle 3.1.  

If administrators and teachers had insight into how much time learners are actively spending in their courses, and had the ability to both restrict access to activities based on this time, and generate reports with this data, they would be able to better ensure and monitor learner success and knowledge retention.  To provide this requirement, Lambda Solutions has built a set of plugins that allow administrators to track the time learners actively spend in courses and course activities! 

(image: Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons) Warning -this is a bit of a moan post. Last week I attended the Jisc Learning Analytics Network meeting. It was a really good day, lots of people there, lots of good sharing, moaning, asking where next-ing.  One of the reasons I find these events useful is that they help focus my mind and give me a sense of relief that some of the challenges that I face are similar, if not exactly the same, as many others in the sector. In terms of learning analytics, my experiences to date have been metaphor-tastic: (ever decreasing) circles, slopes, dead ends, stop-starts . . . I feel that it’s appropriate reflect on my journey via the well trodden Gartner hype cycle. I’m the first to admit I enjoyed being swept up to the peak of inflated expectations. Exploring the potential of data and learning analytics was probably the last piece of innovation work I was involved in when I work with Cetis. I really enjoyed trying to figure out the practical applications and meanings for mainstream learning and teaching of the swirly twirly graphs at early LAK conferences. It was great to support the emerging UK community via early SoLAR meeting.  I learnt a huge amount being involved in the Cetis Analytics Series.  I always think I brought a  healthy degree of scepticism to some of the hype of learning analytics, but I could  (and still can) see the benefits of extracting, exploring and understanding data around learning and teaching. From the giddy heights of the peak of inflated expectation, I knew when I moved to a "proper job" within a university I would have a bit of a slide down the slope to the trough of disillusionment. It’s getting out of the trough that I’m finding real difficulty with. Changes in senior management, have meant going through a bit of a treadmill in terms of gaining institutional support and understanding. That’s before even accessing any data. The Jisc Effective Analytics Programme has been a bit of ray of light and hope for me. Towards the end of last year we took part in the Discovery phase of the programme. This involved a consultancy exercise, onsite for 3 days with a cross section of institutional stakeholders to assess our "readiness" for analytics. At the end of the exercise we got a report with our readiness matrix and some recommendations.  You can view our report here. At the meeting last week a number of institutions who have gone through the Discovery phase took part in a panel discussion about the experience.  One common thread was the reassurance that the exercise gave to everyone in terms of being "on the right track" with things.  I was pleasantly surprised that we got such good score in terms of our cultural readiness. The validation of having an external report from a nationally recognised agency such as Jisc is also incredibly useful for those of us on the ground to remind/cajole (hit people of the head - oh wait that’s only in my dreams) with in terms of what we should be doing next. I think one of the main problems with analytics is finding a starting point. Going through the Discovery phase does give a number of starting points. My frustration just now is that my institution is now going through a major rethink of our overall data architecture. So on the one hand I think "hurrah" because that does need to be done. On the other I feel that I am almost back to square one as terms of "business needs" anything to do with learning and teaching seems to fall off the list of things that need to be done pretty quickly.  It’s difficult to juggle priorities, what is more important, getting our admissions process working more efficiently or developing ways to understand what happens when students are engaging (or not) with modules and the rest of the "stuff" that happens at University? Or updating our student record system, or updating our finance systems? Amidst all this it was good to get a day out to find out what others are up to in the sector. Thanks Jisc for providing these networking events. They really are so useful for the sector and long may they continue. UEL who hosted the event have been doing some great work over the past four years around learning analytics which has emerged from their original BI work with Jisc. The work they have been doing around module attendance (via their swipe card system and VLE data) and performance is something I hope we can do here at GCU sometime soon. In the morning we got updates from 3 mini projects just have funded starting with the University of Greenwich and their investigations into module survey results and learning outcomes. The team explain more in this blog post. I was also very interested in the Student workload model mini project being developed at the OU.  You can read more about it here. The other mini project from the University of Edinburgh, was interesting too, but in a different way. It is more what I would term, a pure LA research project with lots of text data mining, regression modelling of (MOOC) discussion forums. Part of me is fascinated by all of this "clever stuff", but equally part of me just thinks that I will never be able to use any of that in my day job.  We don’t have huge discussion forums, in fact we are seeing (and in many ways encouraging) less use of them (even with our limited data views I know that) and more use of wikis and blogs for reflection and discussion. Maybe these techniques will work on these areas too, I hope so but sometimes thinking about that really does make my head hurt. I hope that we can start moving on our pilot work around learning analytics soon. ’Til then, I will hang on in there and continue my slow climb up the slope, and maby one day arrive at the plateau. Tagged: #learninganalytics

Spoiler alert there may be a bit of shameless self promotion in this post. Earlier this week I received my copy of  Advancing Academic Practice in Academic Development, edited by David Baume and Ceila Popovic.   The collection addresses a number of key questions for anyone currently involved in academic development including: How have global academic developers and their units developed and changed over recent decades? How has the context in which academic development works is done altered? What have academic developers and their professional associations learnt? I was delighted to be able to co-author the "Technologies and Academic Development" chapter with Professors Peter Hartley and Keith Smyth.  Our chapter explores "what academic developers need to know and be able to do about learning technologies, considering both breadth and depth of knowledge . . . we concentrate on the functional and educational potential of current and emerging classes of technologies." Like a number of my peers, I see myself as a bit of a hybrid academic/educational developer. David Walker and I explored this notion last year in our Chapter on Learning Technologist as Digital Pedagogues in The Really Useful Ed Tech Book. Our roles in universities are evolving which is good, but we do still need to fight to be heard at strategic levels too. Our chapter explores a number of models that are being used successful to bring around bottom up change and at times more top down strategic change. I think many of  could be drawn to "the middle way" describe by Peter Bryant in his recent post. I continue to support the need for academic developers to be at the heart of developments and institutional  strategies relating to (digital) technology and learning and teaching.  I’m sure that this book will make a significant contribution to the discourse around the evolution and impact of academic development.

Jisc Digital Capability Framework Digital was certainly a key theme of last week.  Jisc held it’s annual digital jamboree digifest which I’m now trying to catch up on. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend this year due to internal commitments. One of which was our annual programme leaders learning and teaching event which did have a very strong digital element to it too.  The theme of the event was digital learning, and we used a number of the resources developed from the great work Jisc have been doing around developing digital capability as the basis for some activities. In particular we adapted the Jisc/NUS Student Experience Benchmarking Toolkit to get people to start discussing, reflecting, sharing and benchmarking their programme, module and personal digital capabilities. I really like this tool, the principles it has identified and particularly the criteria of first steps, developing, developed and outstanding.  They are easily to relate to, and I think, give a non-threatening progression overview for teaching staff. It is useful to illustrate that you don’t have to got from first steps to outstanding all in one go,  there is a progression. For any programme (or module) moving from first steps to developing, or developing to developed could represent a significant change in practice, capabilities and (hopefully) a more successful student experience. During the event we had a number of presentations from colleagues about their practice. Of course, we had to deal with the irony of the wifi at our external venue not working ( key part of digital capability always have a non internet accessed back up plan!). We heard about some really great examples of how colleagues are developing more blended and fully online delivery approaches. Podcasting, annotated slides, rethinking of contact time with more project/flipped approaches, developing use of more interactive approaches to using videos (with zaption) were all shared.  You can see more in this storify (a few of us did manage to tweet). Of course it is always great to (almost) see and hear this type of practice. However as the discussions unfolded, I was reminded of the importance of confidence and support in helping colleagues use more "digital" and blended approaches to their learning and teaching strategies. So whilst on the one hand the presentations were inspirational, they were also a bit intimidating to others. At the table where I was sitting, this digital intimidation was expressed by a number of colleagues.  I wasn’t altogether surprised by this, but it did make me remind me of the balance that we need to strike in terms of inspiration and giving people achievable exemplars. I did also have to remind one colleague of some of the innovate practice she has added to one of her modules. It’s so embedded now, and "so last year" that she had forgotten about it.  Sometimes we forget that many "things " and "stuff" which are now badged "digital" are actually "things" and "stuff" that people had been doing before someone decided to badge them "digital". We can’t (and I certainly don’t) expect everyone to change everything overnight. It’s easy to forget the incremental changes when just viewing a presentation.  All changes need to be contextualised within modules (programmes). What works for one may not work for everyone - there is no one size fits all or template. Part of being digitally capable is being confident enough to try, or indeed know when not to try, new approaches. Like everything it comes back to learning design and making time to reflect on practice and effective engagement.

I was delighted to once again represent ALT at a master class for copyright in teaching and learning in FE this week in Glasgow.  Organised by the CLA this workshop focused on providing guidance and information about copyright and various resources from the CLA and others including SCRAN and ERA specifically aimed at the FE sector. It was fitting that during Open Education Week that I got the opportunity to talk about open educational practice, OERs within the context of my personal open journey. I think the CLA should be commended for recognising and, for a number of delegates, introducing the concept of open educational resources and practice. Of course the main reason for this series of masterclasses is to give an overview of the services CLA and other agencies provide to (in this case FE) the sector. It also provides an opportunity for the community to feedback to CLA around their issues and pain points. I had forgotten about SCRAN, so it was good to get a reminder of the image bank and the services that I can access via my institution’s subscription. I did ask the question about opening up the services, at present there are no plans, despite support for that from staff. The original (and at the time probably quite ground breaking) license still stands. I do feel there is an opportunity there for at least a part of the collection to become "open SCRAN", and opportunity for some nationally funded cultural institutions and resources become and show support for the Open Scotland movement.  I suspect I am not alone. SCRAN a publicly funded land grab of Scottish culture from Museums & Libraries now behind a paywall https://t.co/cb2r9KYIYF #fecopyright — Theo Kuechel (@TheoKL) March 9, 2016 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Cost is always an issue (or pain point), and not just in FE. Although currently FE is being increasingly squeezed. And of course it did come up during the discussions.  There is of course a cost for open resources too. Open doesn’t = free. As was pointed out during the discussions, many freelance writers, artists, musicians rely on license fees to make their living. However in (publicly) funded educational institutions sharing back resources does make perfect sense to me and many others. Our open-ness isn’t free -there is a cost: staff, time etc but open-ness core to many of the common goals of institutions such as the common good, something my own institution GCU and the University of Edinburgh share. As an aside it was great to hear that Edinburgh has joined us with the publication of their institutional OER policy this week. Finding the balance of open-ness is something we all struggle with personally and institutionally. I was at the workshop in my capacity as an ALT Trustee. ALT,  is a great supporter of the open education movement. This week it has been involved in a number of events for Open Education Week. As a  membership organisation can’t afford to make everything free. For example conferences. As a membership organisation (with a very small staff) we can’t afford to run major conferences such as OER16, and our main ALT-C conference for no cost.   We try to make as much of these events as open as possible via live streaming, open publications etc. To this end we also rely heavily on open and free contributions from our membership as well as the many additional hours the ALT full-time staff contribute.  We also rely on conference fees to cover the expenses of providing a first class conference. In my day to day job I have to make decisions about what conferences I want to attend, where will it make the most impact to have my work shared, presented and published.  There is always a cost. I, like the majority of my peers, regularly give up my time to review conference submissions. That’s part and parcel of academic life. I now consciously support conferences that are committed to publishing conference proceedings openly. My positive open-ness if you like. Open educational practice is constantly evolving, and gaining more mainstream traction. Open Education week is a great opportunity to share an reflect on this evolution.  It’s also a good time to reflect and gain greater understanding of how, where and when open education in the form of resources, practices and most importantly people use open-ness most effectively in their context. Through the open window from Sheila MacNeill Tagged: #OpenEducationWk #femasterclass

Image: Jim Woodward- Nutt CC-BY-SA 2.0  I hadn’t really thought of a connection between Don Quixote and our ever increasing digitally connected world until earlier this week when I attended a guest #teplsig research seminar from Dr Caroline Roth Ebner, entitled ‘Office Work in the Digital Age’. You can find out more and access the slides here. The title was actually a bit misleading.  What Caroline has been researching are the new competencies required for effective work with what she has termed "dig-com" workers, people working in the digital communications industry.  As Caroline’s talk unfolded there were many parallels with education, and I’m sure many other industries. The increasing virtualisation of work, flexible and mobile work, the blurring of boundaries between professional and private life is all to common. So not surprisingly the new competencies coming through from Caroline’s work include digital literacy. What has also emerged from her research is that CPD and training opportunities are still predominately focused on technical capabilities and not the actually more important digital literacy skills the how to as opposed to why/where to - as I tweeted during the seminar so most training provided on how to use something not why and when you should use it #teplsig16 — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) March 15, 2016 One of the methods Caroline has been using is to get her research subjects to visualise their ways technology impacts on their working lives.  Many of her subjects talked about strategies for managing communications; for example using email rules and folders.  Get ready for the Don Quixote bit. The photo in the tweet below shows how one of her subjects (a senior manager) visualised their methods (futile battle?)  for managing effective communications.  Email rules could be seen as part of their lance! Caroline Roth-Ebner shows examples of research subjects visualising their digital work challenges. #teplsig16 pic.twitter.com/nsd6GDdF09 — Colin Milligan (@cdmilligan) March 15, 2016 As the seminar unfolded I was obviously drawn to the similarities and linkages of Caroline’s work to the other visualisations of digital work/life interactions such as Dave White’s Visitors and Residents mapping - could there be ways of combining both?  I’ll hopefully get a chance to speak more with her about that during her short sabbatical in Glasgow. The other image that kept flashing through my head was that of the Jisc Digital Capability framework - I suspect many of Caroline’s competencies would map to that - and in particular digital well being element of the framework. We all need to raise awareness of digital wellbeing and the need to for organisations (commercial/public sector) and the educational sector to support staff/students/ everyone in terms of managing digital engagement. Just because you have 24/7 access doesn’t mean that you have to be online all the time. But it is difficult to switch off. I know.  I am getting better at not checking emails over the weekends and a night - but ooh the temptation when you hear that beep on your phone as you post something to instagram.  If someone sends an email at 11pm and you see it why not just answer it there and then? Well if you’re anything like me if you answer work emails late at night, or on Saturday afternoon when you are trying to to half a dozen things that relate to "real’ not "work" life, or on the train home when you have had to get up at silly o-clock to get to a work meeting at the other end of the country,  you will probably answer too quickly, not read the email properly and on Monday morning realise that you’ll have to send another 3 emails trying to sort everything out. Having access to another half a dozen digital communication channels isn’t going to help with that. It all stems back to to why and when you want to use something - purpose not platform. I often go to meetings about restructuring things or creating new working partnerships with the organisation. More often than not better communication methods is raised as a key issue. More often than not there is an assumption that some new "digital" communication channel will automagically solve the problem. More often than not, we never actually spend time really investigation the route of the issues and where the communication blockages are. If we did, we’d probably find we didn’t actually need a new communication channel, just more effective and appropriate use of the ones we already have. It’s easier to try something new ("digital" of course) and put in a training plan for hardware, get everyone to download the app . . . Unless we all start to manage our digital well being and start to focus more on "the why", learn to switch on and off at appropriate times, we may all lose our  battles with digital windmills. Cervantes words still hold true today. "Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind." Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote Tagged: #teplsig16

So twitter is 10 years old this week. The twittersphere  has been full of reflections on what has happened in the last decade, a raft of top tweets including 12 of the best ever. I particularly liked this article on Mashable  - I think this really captured the essence and usefulness of twitter for me. I also liked this post from Donald Clark about some of the often forgotten potential benefits for learning from using twitter. I was a little late to the twitter party, I started tweeting in April 2007 so I do like to think of myself as an early-ish adopter of the service. 32.2k tweets and 2,803 followers later it’s pretty much embedded into my working practices.  From my first pretty banal first tweet to today, I  still enjoy connecting and sharing via twitter. I am frustrated that it is trying to be "clever" and show me the tweets that it thinks should be relevant to me. I still love the serendipity of twitter and just scrolling through my stream on my iPad. Organising twitter has always seemed a bit of an anathema to me.  As Lance said so well in the article above "My relationship with Twitter is best summarized as the kind you have with a sibling. I love it, deeply, but also question its choices.  . . . at the end of the day, we’re tied together."  Happy birthday Twitter, stay as you are and we’ll all stay with you. Tagged: #twitter

In preparation for our #OER16 presentation, this is the first of two blog posts where Keith Smyth and will build on our abstract and give a bit more detail and context around our current thinking. There’s quite a bit to pack into a 15 minute conference presentation so we hope that these posts will allow us to elaborate a bit more, ask some questions and hopefully get some feedback which we can take into the session itself. We’ll also follow up after the session itself. For the past 3 years now, Keith, Bill Johnston and myself have been investigating and trying to unpack the notion of a digital university, and develop a way to move from what can be a very tech-centric, view of "the digital" to one which is more balanced and includes people, pedagogy, and wider societal factors. If, as we are starting to do, we take open as the lens to examine our conceptual matrix, then a number of questions arise. As our abstract states "despite the early promise of open online education, including developments such as MOOCs, the Higher Education sector as a whole has fallen short in using digital spaces to provide equitable distribution of access to education." From the early openly shared evaluation from the University of Edinburgh, to more recent statistics from FutureLearn, the evidence shows that the majority of "learners" in MOOCs have a first degree and a significant proportion of those have a post graduate qualification. Instead of widening access to education, are we now in a situation where MOOCs, with their "massive" investment, unclear ROI, only served to preserve the status quo and create another elite measure of engagement? MOOCs may not have lived up to their disruptive hype (Siemens et al 2015), however the reverberations of the hype, the urban myths that have grown up around it continue to have an impact in the HE sector, and in the development of open education practice.As MOOCs become more established the already contentious "open" element of the acronym becomes even less significant, the platforms and licences become more closed. For institutions like my own who didn’t ride the first, or second wave of MOOCs, is development of open educational practice going to suffer from the still widely held assumption that open education = MOOCs? Is our development of digital learning going to be predicated on the more "popular" templates of many MOOCs for example "high quality" video talking heads and MCQ quizzes? Open falls of the agenda as we can’t justify the case for that level of investment without a clear ROI, and we look for more "legitimate" income streams from postgraduate/Masters level online programmes."Digital learning" in turn becomes equated only with fully online experiences, the "digital" is something new, disruptive, that doesn’t need to be cognisant of past and current research and practice (Siemens et al 2015). The obsession with global market share blinds us to the potential of the local. Discussions around digital environment forget the place of the physical and where institutional psychically sit within a community. The power of open, connected, student driven learning exemplified by the numerous examples of spontaneous face to face meet-ups is not being seen as something that Universities could capitalise on. Could this be the place, as we state in our abstract, where open education could "act as a bridge between formal institutional cultures and learning within physical and digital third spaces." Should we not be looking for ways for our physical campuses to become digitally enabled community hubs. Places that don’t empty after 6pm until 8am this next day, but are being used to create more informal, open learning opportunities which utilise the capabilities of our digital and physical infrastructures? We need only look to our conference hosts, the University of Edinburgh, and their definition and use of "the common good" as a rational for their commitment to the support, development and sharing of OERs as a first stage in this type of engagement. My own institution’s 2020 strategy is predicated on our position as "the university for the common good", yet we are still not able to articulate and use open education as cornerstone of this. Open is a "nice to have", but still seen with suspicion (if at all) by many. Instead of open being a means to meaningfully deconstruct the ivory tower and reintegrate it with wider society, the conflation with digital and online merely helps to reinforce the status quo. Those who can afford to be open do so in ways of their choosing, the rest of us still scrabble around for ways to be innovative which actually equates to making money. Open seems like common sense however, as one of my colleagues wisely said in a meeting this week common sense is not common practice. This frustrating for many of us Yet again open educational practice can offer us a bridge at individual, organisational and sectoral level. Developing open, distributed curriculum is key part of this and something that Keith is going to explore more in part two. Tagged: #oer16