ALT Scotland Update – May 2026 Two Stars and a Wish.

In early May, we convened an online 2 Stars and a Wish Session with members of the Association for Learning Technology across Scotland. We had an active and useful discussion around themes and burning issues - and mostly our hopes for the future.  

Scotland’s digital learning landscape is shifting in ways that matter deeply for ALT members. Across AI, open practice, digital capability, and national reform, the sector is innovating, but unevenly; collaboration is strengthening, but still fragile; and the gap between policy ambition and operational reality remains stubborn.

Our next gathering will be hybrid, with both face-to-face and online options. Hosted at Jisc Innovation Hub at the University of Stirling on 12th of June - book here. 

And our wishes -

Better Assessment Design: A hope that AI disruption finally forces institutions to rethink outdated, surface‑level assessment practices.

Broader ALT Scotland Engagement: A desire to bring more colleagues into the ALT Scotland community, too many are still missing out on the support, camaraderie, and shared expertise.

More Thoughtful Use of AI vs OER: A call for educators to recognise when AI is helpful — and when a well‑chosen OER or public‑domain resource is the better, safer, or more transparent choice.

 A More Open System: A strong plea to move beyond “It’s all on SharePoint, unfortunately.” Members want institutions to enable external sharing, embrace open platforms, and reduce unnecessary barriers to collaboration.

 And a quick personal summary reflection on initial provocations - any omissions are my own. See Padlet for all links. (Both Padlets are now frozen)

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1. Digital Capability: Progress, but still too slow

The Digital Skills Development Scoping Report (2025) continues to shape conversations about workforce readiness across colleges. It highlights what many ALT members already know: capability is improving, but the system lacks coherence, shared frameworks, and visible institutional and national leadership.

The ongoing Tertiary System workstream has real potential to address this, but only if outputs are openly published and actively used. Transparency here would make a tangible difference to practitioners.

Meanwhile, The Data Lab’s Education Community is emerging as a valuable cross‑sector space for data and AI practice. It’s early, but it could become a key partner for ALT Scotland.

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2. AI in Education: Between grassroots realism and global critique

AI remains the dominant theme, but the conversation is maturing.

• The Scottish AI in Tertiary Education Network (SCAITEN) making great progress in providing an informed position on AI for Colleges and Universities across Scotland.
• AICE.scot, led by Stuart Caddell, is one of the most grounded, practitioner‑led initiatives in Scotland. It’s pragmatic, classroom‑focused, and aligned with the realities of Scottish schools. FE/HE should be paying attention.
• Helen Beetham’s “AI Can Fail You” is resonating strongly with ALT members — a reminder that criticality must sit alongside innovation.
• Timnit Gebru’s work at DAIR continues to expose the structural risks in the global AI ecosystem. For a sector dependent on vendor tools, this critique is not optional reading.
• Jisc’s National Centre for AI remains a key source of guidance, though institutions are still wrestling with implementation.

The overall picture: There is some confident experimenting happening, but the ethical and infrastructural questions are getting louder. There are challenges to the best use of local AI solutions that need to be overcome in partnership with IT colleagues and with students.

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3. Academic Integrity & Assessment: Normalisation underway

• Across universities, AI‑supported academic work is becoming normalised rather than feared.
• Northampton’s GenAI assessment guidance
• Edinburgh’s subject‑level guidance
• A growing set of open resources on copyright, public‑domain images, and AI‑generated media

These are practical, aligned, open, and increasingly shareable, exactly the kind of cross‑institutional consistency ALT Scotland has long advocated for.

4. Open Education: A renewed moment for Scotland

Open practice is gaining momentum again, and ALT members are at the centre of it.

• Edinburgh’s TILT toolkit is a strong, interdisciplinary OER contribution.
• Jisc’s Open Policy Finder is becoming essential for policy alignment.
• UCL’s ABC Learning Design resources remain widely adopted across FE and HE.
• Edinburgh’s Open Education Week shows what a mature institutional open culture looks like.
• If you are doing work in the open follow #openscot example and get your work on the OERWorldMap.

With Creative Commons celebrating 25 years, it’s a timely reminder that open licensing underpins everything from AI training to resource reuse.

We had a good discussion around 'sharepoint', it can enable external sharing, but this is normally disabled.

5. AI for OER Discovery: A promising pilot

The Jisc–Sylla pilot exploring AI‑driven OER discovery is one to watch. If it can deliver transparent, licence‑accurate search, it could transform how materials are found and reused. But the risks, hallucinated attributions, opaque sourcing, remain real.

6. ALT Developments: A more integrated ecosystem

• ALT itself is evolving in ways that matter for Scotland:
• OER26 is approaching
• ALT and DLI have announced a strategic partnership
• AmplifyFE is now an ALT Special Interest Group
• The arrival of a refreshed CMALT is imminent

These shifts strengthen ALT’s FE presence and create clearer pathways for professional recognition.

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7. Wider Sector Signals

A few additional developments shaping the landscape:

• Jisc Connect More (12–13 May) – free, online, and increasingly influential
• SFC’s College Sector of the Future – early but important
• Jisc’s Manifesto for Tertiary Education in Scotland – a bold attempt to shape national direction
• UCISA’s VLE Review Toolkit – outputs will be essential for procurement cycles
• DataFest – expensive, but consistently strong, some great global speakers. 
• We Are Open Co‑op – closing after years of thoughtful sector support. Worth having a look and their fantastic legacy. 

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What this means for ALT Scotland

Across all these threads, a few strategic implications stand out:

• ALT Scotland is uniquely placed to convene the cross‑sector conversations others aren’t hosting.
• Grassroots innovation (AICE.scot, open practice communities, practitioner networks) is outpacing national strategy.
• AI is both enabling and destabilising — and the sector needs a shared, critical, Scottish voice.
• Open practice is becoming the backbone of responsible digital education.
• The tertiary reform agenda needs more visibility and more practitioner input.

ALT Scotland’s role is clear: connect, challenge, and amplify — ensuring Scotland’s digital learning community shapes the future rather than reacts to it.

Recording of Session Here 

TECHday Glasgow 2026: What Colleges Can Learn from the Latest AV and AI Innovations

 

With colleges wrestling with hybrid delivery, estate pressures, and the rapid rise of AI, this year’s TECHday event felt less like a tech showcase and more like a snapshot of where FE learning spaces could be heading, if we have the investment to support the closure of the digital divide. 

Mediascape’s annual gathering may be compact, but it continues to offer one of the clearest windows into the technologies that will shape teaching and learning over the next few years.

It's great to meet and see all the suppliers who all use MediaScape to install and service their systems.  

It was great to catch up with lots of old friends and make some new ones. I still really like SmartBoard Mini.

What stood out this time was the shift from speculative AI conversations to practical, deployable solutions, tools that can make a difference in classrooms tomorrow, not in some distant future.

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AI‑Ready Classrooms Are Becoming the New Standard

Across the exhibitor stands, the strongest theme was the shift toward AI‑enhanced teaching environments. Not abstract AI, not hype, but practical tools that make hybrid delivery smoother and reduce staff workload.

I saw intelligent camera and microphone arrays that automatically track speakers, built‑in AI captioning and transcription that actually works in real time, and Teams/Zoom‑certified room kits designed for reliability rather than complexity. 

Wireless presentation systems rounded out the picture, supporting flexible, device‑agnostic teaching. For colleges still juggling inconsistent hybrid setups, these solutions felt mature, stable, and ready to deploy. I can be a sucker for gadgets, and I really liked the handy cam that was being used to capture the proceedings. 

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Immersive Learning Is Moving Into the Mainstream

Another standout trend was the rise of immersive and simulation‑based learning. Large LED walls, interactive displays, and projection systems are becoming more affordable and more adaptable to vocational contexts.

For construction, engineering, and health programmes, simulation environments now offer realistic, safe spaces for learners to practise skills before stepping into real‑world placements. These tools aren’t just visually impressive;  they support deeper engagement, repetition, and confidence‑building, especially in sectors where placement capacity is tight, or learners need more time to develop practical competence - you can wander around in spaces that you cannot access in real life. 

And the simple set of wireless headsets that can turn a noisy atrium or busy exhibition space into a viable space for focused presentations could be used for a silent disco, too.

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Smart‑Campus Tech Is Quietly Transforming Estates Planning

I was lucky latterly to be on a smart campus. Though I was never sure where the data actually went.

An increasingly important strand of the event focused on smart‑building technologies. These systems can monitor occupancy, automate environmental controls, and feed real‑time data into estate dashboards. For colleges managing ageing estates, fluctuating timetables, and ambitious carbon‑reduction targets, this kind of intelligence is becoming essential. The shift toward data‑driven estates planning was clear: institutions will soon expect their buildings to tell them how they’re being used, where energy is being wasted, and how learning spaces can be optimised. Well, I would expect that data as a board member.

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A Chance to Reconnect — and a Reminder of Sector Realities

One of the unexpected highlights of the day was catching up with colleagues from my own FE past — including an early‑career IT technician I once knew who’s now the head of technology at a major Glasgow college. It was a reminder of how much the sector evolves, and yet how many of the challenges stubbornly stay the same.

We ended up swapping stories that felt painfully familiar: significant investment in hybrid classrooms, but far less investment in the staff development needed to make that technology work. The result is predictable: frustration, wasted money, and teaching staff who, through no fault of their own, end up dismantling or bypassing equipment simply because they don’t know what it does. Every college seems to have its own horror stories. The shared wisdom was simple: if in doubt, ask a tech, and always check the room is working before you start teaching. It’s not glamorous advice, but it’s the difference between a smooth session and a chaotic one, and pulling all the wires out will never make a system work. 

Had a good chat too about how easy it is to open up SharePoint to share learning materials beyond the organisation and around, no-cost solutions to allow staff to create local agents in Microsoft Co-Pilot. But I fear we are still some way off from that being normal practice.  

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Cybersecurity and AI Governance Are Rising Priorities

As AI becomes more embedded in teaching spaces and campus systems, cybersecurity is moving rapidly up the agenda. Several sessions highlighted the risks associated with AI‑enabled devices, from data capture to network vulnerabilities and the need for robust governance frameworks. For colleges, this reinforces a simple truth: adopting AI isn’t just about innovation. It’s about ensuring that the systems supporting learners and staff are secure, compliant, and aligned with institutional policies. You don't get any shadow IT when IT is innovative and aligned with learning and teaching. 

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So What Does TECHday Tell Us About the Future of FE?

For me, the event reinforced a few key points:

• The future of FE learning is hybrid, flexible, and AI‑supported
• Teaching spaces need to be AI‑ready, not just AV‑equipped
• Immersive and simulation technologies are becoming core to vocational delivery
• Estates teams will increasingly rely on data‑driven decision‑making
• AI governance and cybersecurity must evolve alongside innovation
• Staff do need time, support, and training to make the best use of what is available. 
• We need open platforms. Was interesting to hear how easy it would be to make SharePoint open - and how resistant techs are to opening the platform up and or allowing staff access to tools to build their own AI agents. 

TECHday Glasgow didn’t offer speculative visions of the future. It offered practical, deployable technologies that colleges can adopt right now to improve teaching, learning, and campus operations.

And in a sector where time, budgets, and staff capacity are always tight, that’s exactly what we need.

Teachermatic and Jisc : AI and Assessment project Webinar - worth digging into

I don’t usually devote a full post to a single webinar, but this one genuinely merited it. The session offered one of the clearest, most practice‑grounded explorations of how AI is reshaping assessment and feedback across FE and HE.

Teachermatic is an award-winning platform now with over 300 centres across the UK. Originally aimed at reducing the need for staff to learn prompt engineering. Developed by a team from across FE and HE. So staff did not need to learn how to set up all of this in Chat GPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, etc and it still offers these distinct benefits.

I've been a fan since the project was piloted and then gained UFI seed funding.

In the Glasgow Region, some great work from Clyde College and Kelvin College around deploying and using Teachermatic. I hope someone from City of Glasgow College is reading this. 

The system has now moved from an initial focus on creating learning materials and assessments to looking at how AI can support the actual assessment and feedback process. The new assessment tools aim to save staff time and improve the overall learning experience for students - a lot of good evidence that this is the case. 

The platform is secure and works to make ethical and sustainable choices.  AI in Assessment - is being used a great deal in formative assessment and feedback. Interesting - needs assent by students - workload reduction is a priority only for staff.  Students are suspicious of AI being used for marking and feedback - they need reassured that AI improves the volume of feedback, consistency, and timelines and that the human element has not disappeared. 

The assessment and feedback tool was originally set up to mark one piece of work at a time, but can now mark whole cohorts' submissions. The teacher still has a lot of agency. Teachermatic has had useful feedback from awarding bodies and regulators. AI can be used to support feedback. AI tools are there to speed up and enrich the feedback process. Ultimately, decisions and feedback come from the teacher.  So support does not replace human marking. 

Evidence that school teachers mark up to 8 hours, FE up to 10 hours, HE up to 8 hours per week on marking and feedback. Reminded that more timely feedback supports better learning. The Forgetting curve is real, and speed matters - the old two-week rule is too long. When that works, reminded that lots of academic teams miss even that two-week turnaround target. 

The assessment feedback tool looks excellent and comes with national levels across the UK, including Scotland. Can cope with a rubric, even a simple unit description, and a range of student inputs, from graphical to handwritten and digital text. Comes with a whole range of different marking schemes - copes with up to 250 assessments at a time. Was particularly impressed by the ability of the system to cope with the grading of drawings and diagrams and handwritten submissions.  Creates an annotated PDF with comments on work for tutor review - they can accept, delete, change, and add comments.  Provides very rich feedback and consistency of grading. When complete, you download and share with the student.

Have developed a specialist platform for BTechs that gives feedback against the performance criteria in the unit standard. 

The balance of workload now  looks around 80% AI and 20% teacher 

Saves around 144 hours of work per year 

Cost is £30 per year, perhaps the actual input cost of one hour of marking.

Strong endorsement from staff on time saving, accuracy of grading, and richness of feedback, and positive feedback from students. Has gone a long way in improving work-life balance and improving learner satisfaction. 

UK-based Azure servers do not train any LLM, retain all IP rights, and all submitted work is deleted, not retained.  Jisc is a reseller and has done all due diligence. In the background on general AI, they work hard to remove risk and bias from the overall system, but on actual grading and feedback, the  AI is calling on the rubric, etc, that the centre provides. 

Reduces bias, improves the validity and reliability of grading 

Works best up to HNC/D year one and two of degree provision, but is getting better at grading very extended writing that features in the final years of University learning.   Introducing pre-marking - so students get feedback before final submission - and integrations with VLE platforms.

If you want to adopt, then lots of advance planning makes this a game-changer; staff and students need to be engaged from the start.

The SAFE Framework

One of the most valuable outputs of the wider project is the emerging SAFE framework, designed to help institutions that currently lack clear policy or guidance around AI in assessment.

SAFE emphasises:

• Safeguarding: data protection and privacy

• Augmenting: human judgement remains central

• Fairness: reducing conscious and unconscious bias

• Ethical practice: transparency and student understanding

It covers governance, consent, and procedures for both staff and students—practical scaffolding for institutions that want to move forward responsibly.. 

It is really worth reaching out to Peter and the team at Teachermatic and getting a free test account to try these tools out .

From Ideas to Apps: Rediscovering Creativity Through AI and Vibe Coding

For most of my working life, I’ve been fascinated by how ideas become real. In the last century, when I taught mass communications and videography, the creative process was equal part excitement and endurance. We storyboarded ambitious scenes, imagined sweeping camera moves, and dreamed complex scenes. But we then we spent hours in the editing suite wrestling with sync, sound, and timing. The gap between what we envisioned and what we produced was often wide, and closing it required patience, skill, and a fair bit of stubbornness. That has since changed has technology moved on.

I followed a similar path with early computing. Tools like WordStar, HyperCard, and QuarkXPress opened new creative possibilities, but they also demanded a working knowledge of code. I spent a lot of time getting to a working if not optimum solution.

When the web arrived in the 1990s, I used those skills to build simple pages for students. But as blogging platforms and user‑friendly tools emerged, the need to hand‑craft everything faded. Even when I later managed large coding projects, I left the actual code to the coders.

Today, that landscape around coding has shifted again and dramatically.

The Rise of Vibe Coding

We are now in an era where AI allows us to be more ambitious than ever. “Vibe coding”, using natural language to shape an application into existence, it represents a genuine paradigm shift. Instead of wrestling with boilerplate or scaffolding, we can focus on the logic, the user experience, and the problem we’re trying to solve. The AI does a lot of the magic and handles the heavy lifting.

If you are automating a manual workflow, prototyping a weekend idea, or simply tidying up a webpage, vibe coding lets you move from concept to working prototype with unbelievable speed. It’s powerful even if you never intend to write a line of code yourself. You can test ideas, explore possibilities, and hand a validated proof‑of‑concept to professional developers when you’re ready. Anyone really can have a go at this.

I’ve been experimenting with this through the Glasgow No Code Initiative, which has taken me “back to college” in the best possible way. While the classes use Replit, I’ve tried a range of tools, and the experience has been both a refresher and a revelation. It's been good too to catch up with some fellow like minds from Glasgow's digital community who have signed up for the course.

Interesting that course has been bought in by Glasgow region - I hope lots of academic and support staff have signed up and are able to deliver future iterations.

I’ve built a simple app that checks a community hall’s availability via Google Calendar and allows users to make a booking, something that would once have required a small team, a long timeline and/or would have cost money if we'd bought an off the shelf tool.

The Golden Rules of Prompting

Regardless of the tool, your results depend on the clarity of your instructions. There are four principles that consistently produce better outputs from tools like Replit , Claude or ChatGPT:

1. Be Clear and Concise

Avoid unnecessary detail. Tell the model exactly what it needs to know.

2. Prioritise Requirements

Put the most important constraints at the top of your prompt. Structure matters.

3. Frame Requests Positively

Tell the AI what to do, not just what to avoid. Positive instructions reduce ambiguity.

4. Use Precise Language

Specificity narrows the “hallucination gap” and leads to more reliable results.

And if the model gets it wrong? Refine your prompt. Iteration is part of the process, just as it always was in the editing suite.

A New Creative Cycle

What excites me most is how familiar this all feels. The tools have changed, but the creative impulse hasn’t. We’re once again at a moment where the imagination leads, and technology follows. The difference now is the speed: the distance between idea and prototype has collapsed.

If I was back in the classroom I'd be showing all learners how to use these tools to develop apps for themselves.

At a very simple level it quickly unpacks how a full stack app is built and how the different files and folders interact. I'd use it as a way to get learners to start understanding coding.

For educators, community builders, and anyone with a spark of curiosity, this is an extraordinary opportunity. If you have an idea, even a small one, give it a go. You might be surprised by how quickly it becomes something real.

And if the Glasgow No Code Initiative runs again, it’s well worth signing up.

A Week in London #bettuk2026 #bett26 Part Three BETT

 #Bettuk2026 Wed -Friday 21st-23rd January 2026

Here is my usual summary and observations

2nd year at BETT when there were no feet on the ground from Education Scotland.  A travel ban apparently. Shame when the biggest educational technology event in the UK is on and senior folks from all major IT companies are in London and not least the UK and international educational community. 

It is a bit of a scandal really. Scotland should be on the map at this event. I spotted Wales and Northern Ireland on the UK stands. Great to see EdTech's from schools, colleges, universities and local authorities found the ways and means to get down from Scotland. Education Scotland's sponsoring department please note.

Queen Elizabeth line to Excel continues to be a revelation for travelling to and from venue and opens up possibility of accommodation across London. I stayed initially with my daughter in her student flat over in Deptford and then moved for two nights to an amazing hotel hostel in Rotherhithe. Really brilliant value and proof that you can do BETT on a budget. Made for an interesting free short ferry commute in morning. 

It was very much AI every where - some pretty random and some very focused on the challenges discussed over the previous two days. AI can write your essay and mark it. Message really is that assessment has to change and that centres really need to learn about CASE and MCP servers to make most of their data and content. 

Bridget Phillipson Secretary of State for Education's address picked up on much I had heard on the two preceding days with OECD and 1Edtech. Good to see her back ( see last year's BETT post) . Highlighting the transformative potential of AI and EdTech to make learning more inclusive, support teachers, and improve outcomes for all learners. Announces new safety standards, new digital skills pathways for teacher training, and a £23 million expansion of the EdTech Testbeds programme to build a strong evidence base for effective tools. 

I achieved everything in my original plan and then some. 

Squeezed into a smaller area of Excel this year but having spoken to the organisers, more exhibitors and certainly high footfall. Great to have themed stages with keynotes distributed around exhibitors. I spent most of my time in and around FE/HE zone. Still think could do with a bit more from ALT, Jisc , QAA and perhaps some more focus on Colleges and vocational learning.  

Great to see many of the Scots who made it down at the Scottish gathering kindly supported by SmartBoards. Good too to get great update on their products. The training and support they give users is first class- liked new mike through smartboard- and still like smartboard mini. 

Nice to see more thought on design and layout of the start up zone. Though apologies nothing really fired me up this year.  

TeachmeetBett26 on Teachmeet's 20th Anniversary. Many thanks to BETT organisers for super on site support. 

I did a two minute plug for learning design , Open Education  and for membership of ALT. Thanks too Everway/Texthelp for sponsoring cracking social at 02 Battle Bar and for old pal Dawn Holly-Bone from 2Simple for chairing so well. Was great to see new faces embracing Teachmeet methodology. Presentations here and tribute to Teachmeet history.  Every College should hold one at least once a year. Challenge is out to all attendees to organise one.

Here is very quick run down of what caught my eye and attention and some of my chats .

• Microsoft - sat through a few sessions to be up to speed with their new roll outs. I didn't go to all of their sessions mainly the What is new session. But you can get all of their sessions here.
• Google - Similarly spent some time getting on inside track . Some great sessions on using Notebook LM for research.

I am still really amazed that every College does not have tenancies on both Microsoft and Google platforms. It can be done at no cost, if you know how. Both are promoting a range of new tools within existing licensing costs and the best way to prevent any shadow IT developing. 

In main auditorium, teaching and learning theatre and Higher Education theatre - some practical workshops particularly around how AI is changing up operational areas of Colleges and Universities - from data to track skills and employment opportunities , answering phones and even students using vibe coding to create their own booking systems. Had quick coffee and catch up with Paul Mckean and Sue Attewell on Jisc AI work.  

Lots of AI with everything sat through presentations  and visited some of these stands. Last year Teachermatic was out in the lead for teacher content creation, now everyone is at that game , including Microsoft and Google.  More significantly emergence of tools using CASE and MCP.

Many amazing stands - big budget items. The Egyptian Education Authority had built a pyramid. 

Lots too on esports - which I still don't quite get.  I do get it as a gateway to games development and programming.

VR and AR it is still ClassVR leader of pack and interesting new tools for simulating interviews.  Metaverse learning and Body Swaps territory . Think every College should have a class set of VR head sets for appropriate activities. 

Liked this juice bar vending machine as an alternative to fizzy drinks. 

A few stands that I thought were selling Vapes - were really selling Vape detector systems. A sign of the times. 

Great conversations with ClickView , Cisco Training Academies and BodySwaps - it is great to hear they are going from strength to strength. Met some old Spanish friends who do lot around improving data and learning material flows for Colleges and Universities. I spent some time too revisiting C-Learning and their Merlyn Mind product. 

Useful conversation with Newcastle College group who are doing the right thing and rolling out CMALT to all of their educational technologists. Follow up conversation with their Rob Wraith on how they manage access and costs around tokenisation in Microsoft Co-Pilot. Basically how they set up permissions and controls so that the institution does not get additional bills. ( this is issue for many institutions moving ahead into this space) So critical that learning technologists and IT work together around this. 

Only spotted one awarding body - which may also be sign of times - assessment and certification really need to change.

But back to my theme of week it was really AI with everything - have a look at BrainFreeze stand useful to see they are explaining how their tool uses CASE and MCP.

Sorry to miss a sit down and proper catch up with Vic Boyd and Scott Renton from City of Glasgow College who were around too and many more colleagues from across vocational learning. We will catch up soon. 

On way down I spotted a very negative post about BETT from a 'leading' Scottish educational academic who I think has attended one BETT in the past- it was very down on the technological hegemony - but on all technology really. 

Yes, lots of selling of fantasies but some really useful learning for all. People make BETT not the technology. Everyone working in learning really needs an understanding of technologies - it is the only way to actually move classroom, institutional and global learning forward.  We all need a bit more #openscot. 

And a final big thanks for all the hospitality and good company I enjoyed. 

My week in London Reports

• Part One with OECD
• Part Two with IEdtech.
• Reports on Previous BETT conferences here.

I miss Wakelet as my tool of choice for summarising events like this. 

A Week in London #bettuk2026 #bett26 Part Two 1Edtech Why AI in Learning Needs Standards: Shared Context, Shared Trust , Westminster Hall.

Tuesday 20th January

1Edtech Why AI in Learning Needs Standards: Shared Context, Shared Trust , Westminster Hall. 

It was really useful to get high level OECD view on Monday and technical deep dive from 1Edtech on following day. Open technical standards still drive most of the global developments in technology and learning. 

I was a guest of 1Edtech last year too. The event last year had a specific focus on the open badge and other relevant standards. This year the focus was on AI and the place of open standards in the technical stack. I've a book chapter just published on this area. ( more in a later post) 

Great presentations and discussion showing how AI can bridge different educational lexicons when it has been trained. The challenge is being confident enough to start this process. 

• Japan, Korea  and France identified as world leaders in adoption of open standards - in terms of national data. 
• Korea - using AI already to map national competency standards to national qualifications. ( accelerates development process)
• Japan - Using the one roster standard to streamline the exchange of educational data between School Information Systems (SIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) across the country.
• France - Whole sale adoption of open standards to improve learning and data flows across their educational system. 

The discussion and debate was unavoidably technical. A lot focussing on what needs to be done to pre-existing content and data to give it context to work well with AI systems. 

Useful metaphor - example - the same ingredients can make a Pancake or a Yorkshire pudding. Currently a large language model with no context would not know which one you want.

When you have context. You can do more 

You can use an MCP Server - MCP servers are essential for building AI agents that can actually "do" things, rather than just talk about them.  It allows multi agentic workflows. MCP is a protocol and a standard , it acts as a "USB-C" connector for AI, allowing models to securely access local files, databases, and third-party services without requiring custom, one-off integrations. 

These systems use CASE 

• A data standard that allows educational institutions, employers, and edtech platforms to exchange competency data in machine-readable formats (JSON).
• Purpose: It replaces static, inefficient documents like PDFs or spreadsheets with standardized, digital frameworks that can be easily mapped, searched, and updated.

Key Components:

• Frameworks: Digital versions of academic standards or professional competencies.
• Items: Machine-readable statements of what a learner should know or be able to do.
• GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers):Every standard, skill, or competency is given a unique identifier, ensuring it can be recognized globally across different systems.
• Associations: Links that define how competencies relate to each other, such as aligning a local school curriculum with national or international standard.

Why is this useful 

• In the context of global learning (interconnected education,, sustainability, and international skills), CASE serves several critical functions:
• Interoperability for Global Education: As educational institutions operate internationally, CASE allows them to map their curricula, learning outcomes, and assessment rubrics to common global frameworks, facilitating easier student transfer and recognition of skills.
• Workforce Competency Mapping: CASE helps define and exchange skills needed for the global economy. It is used in higher education and corporate training to ensure that digital credentials and competency-based learning modules are recognized across different borders and platforms.
• Digital Credentialing: It enables the alignment of learning outcomes with micro-credentials and digital badges, allowing a skill earned in one country to be verified and understood by an employer in another.
• Reducing Inefficiency: By providing a common, machine-readable language, CASE eliminates the need for manual, error-prone, or time-consuming mapping of learning standards across different systems.

Example used Campus Mind - system can identify where student potentially needs some additional support and can build a personalised course from materials that institution already has across range of repositories including the virtual learning environment. 

Microsoft and Google are both building integrations. Jisc standards group moving ahead in UK.

Some examples 

1. Otus - taking data and learning materials from multiple sources.
2. French Teacher training Moodle platform - AI was used to - re-engineered with standards and context to allow individual training pathways - personalised for teachers.  The MCP server can now be used with  any learner management system. 

Overall and ties in well with OECD work.  

• Call to move away from general models of AI to local models of AI that capture context etc ( what OECD said)  
• To move forward all players need increased awareness of the open standards that are already available and ones in development. 

To move forward here data needs context added ( AI could help with that). It was great to catch up with Dominik Lukes and a number of like minded old friends.

So what does all this mean at national level.

• We really need SQA - Qualifications Scotland to get a move on here. This is much more than end of paper based certification. 
• More Scottish organisations should have appropriate membership of 1Edtech and I am going to see if I can help with that. 
• And a final plug anyone interested in these open standards should get along and or get a paper into their upcoming European Conference in Salonika.

At institutional level

• AI and MCP services can start bringing your data together securely. You will be  using local engine rather than opening up anything. Get a move on.
• Make sure you and or any suppliers you use are making most of open standards. Some of this should be hard wired into procurement guidance.   

All of the above set up BETT Conference very well, Part 3 to follow. 

A Week in London #bettuk2026 #bett26 Part One Pre Bett OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026

As ever, a very busy week, as the world's clans of educational technologists gather in London in and around BETT.

What was one post has become three posts as each event I attended really worth digging into.

Monday

OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026: Exploring Effective Uses of Generative AI in Education , The Law Society Hall Chancery Lane

The event was to launch the OECD recent research paper. It was good to meet some old chums from the European policy landscape.

It was great too to have an update from the Education Department's Susan Acland-Hood, who was confident and on the ball , reporting on the AI test beds happening in English schools that are all exploring the possible. 

This including a content store, a repository of documents, such as curriculum guidance and anonymized pupil assessments, to train AI models for better educational outputs. 

The key bit of all of this is criticality of developing local models 

"Launched in May 2025 with £3 million in funding, pools and encodes curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work, to train AI tools that generate accurate, high quality educational content. Training on the content store increases accuracy of feedback on students’ work to 92%, up from 67%, meaning safer and more reliable use of AI in the classroom"

She also pointed out the refreshed English standards launched to coincide with BETT week. She also keyed up well the Education ministers speech on day one of BETT. 

Key messages are much more than cautious optimism and much more than a narrow focus on teaching and learning.

There is always a danger that the AI industry like IT industry before sells education fantasies and that is why it is so critical that education takes technology and uses it to build it's own closed models.

Education needs to develop specialist tools to amplify learning. We do need to redesign practice in ways that continues to support teacher agency.

Other work highlighted over day

• The work of Harvard's Bok Centre
• Open AI work around AI Schema to improve reliability of services for education and other areas. Would allow education to customise their own models.
• The emergence of Gemini for Education and Co-Pilot tools that can match and create content against available competency frameworks.

This was a useful paper to take to my second meeting of the week which was more technical about the standards needed to support ethical application of AI.



Pre conference I caught up with Joseph Jones CEO Saige Qualifications an Ofqual approved awarding body in England rolling out AI awards and training for pupils and teachers.

Main takeaways - 

• Education needs to start making more use of AI in a customised way to support learning and operations. 
• At a national level this means system change as well as policy and guidance.  I think we have latter but not former in Scotland.
• At institutional level requires operations , IT , learning technology and whole community to work more effectively together. Start building local agents now.
• As an institution you need that local data store and you need to start making effective use of your data
• For schools in Scotland - local authorities need switched on to this and there is probably a role for Education Scotland but certainly Scottish Education Department in creating something similar to English content store. 

Part Two to follow -