Really what it says in the heading. I will play with this from time to time. A mixture of education and domestic observations.
A blog about living and working around the creative edge of education
All the very best to all who are back for a new session.
I had a busy end to my part-time consulting year! And then a useful chance to simply potter about and reflect. Had great fun watching World Cup too in Scotland and France.
I am a few blog posts behind.
Here is a quick look at what I’ve been up to:
Holyrood Communications: I had the privilege of speaking on the transformative role of AI in Education, exploring both the opportunities and challenges it brings for learners and teachers. Mainly how assessment needs to change. But have a close look at the presentation on skills you and learners need to develop to make the most of AI tools.
#OER26: Connected with the open education community to share ideas and insights on the future of open educational resources. I focused on the practical things that open education advocates and their organisations should be doing to be open. Extended blog to follow.
Very timely as the Scottish Government has finally got behind Open Practice. Caught up too over the summer with the team leading on this work. Worth a read - if I was still working at a public body or at an institutional level I'd be figuring out how we start the journey towards sharing more resources publicly with an appropriate open licence and discussing this with all stakeholders.
The #openscot community and Association for Learning Technology have lots of experts on hand who could help.
Quality Systems: Delivered a session for Northampton College on familiar territory of quality systems internal and external quality assurance for their engineering academic team.
Île de Ré: Balanced the busy schedule with a fantastic summer break on the French coast, enjoying the quiet beaches, cycling routes, food, wine, and plenty of sunshine (perhaps too hot this year).
Glasgow Commonwealth Games: Spent an unforgettable time volunteering on the ground, soaking in the vibrant energy of the events. Some memorable moments: the Ugandan team (on a rainy day) telling me how beautiful Scotland was in the autumn and being surprised it was summer. The Cook Islands team singing and playing their music on their hotel balcony each evening. Above all, working with a great set of volunteers and welcoming so many different people into the City of Glasgow.
RSA Scotland: Supported the Commonwealth Reception in Trades House of Glasgow, engaging in fantastic conversations with fellows and partners celebrating regional and international connections and handing the baton on to the Indian delegation.
Mentoring: Continued supporting senior leaders on driving change, leveraging digital tools while staying human, and leading authentically. If you role-play being a rotter, you risk getting stuck in that mode, and we have more than enough angry leaders in the world right now!
Looking forward to ALTC in Cardiff, meeting new ALT Scotland Exec members, and supporting Instructure Canvas (including Canvas Con in November) and moving on a few other projects that will keep me occupied into the new year.
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.
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)
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Otus - taking data and learning materials from multiple sources.
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.
