transcript -...

International education delivery in ‘the new normal’

Online briefing 29th May 2020

Transcript Unknown Speaker 0:00

So let's get cracking on. I've got colleagues with me, who will answer some of your questions on some of the more specific technical detail or some of the other areas that you might be interested in. So I have value why I have these crimes down. And Greg is with me on today's briefing. I'll talk for about 35 to 40 minutes. And we have three questions that we will be posing to you throughout that time. If we can't answer all your questions online on top of those, just put things in the chat pane and we will come back to you for sure. And there is also some resources that we are sharing with you in terms of web links and documentation that went live yesterday. Exciting news is those web links that just international pages are have gone live literally within the Five minutes. So it's a new part of our website, specifically devoted for international. And I'll come on to the reasons why. I'm going to put my webcam back off again now. So I'll carry on through the presentation. So this is an overview of what I will be covering just international strategy, our international services and supports the new normal as we see it, I'll be looking at some of the things that we're doing specifically focused on China and I would anticipate a number of you who want to know a bit more about that, including a project that we have ongoing with me, Barbara, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in depth. Talk about where we go from here, working in partnership, which is really critical for our sector, and how you can then be involved. This is our standard G sight about us. We provide shared digital infrastructure sector well venture deals and publisher deals, and expert trusted advice. Our vision is to be the best place in the world to use digital and data to learn and teach, and research. We have about 900 staff, we're a large organisation. And I'll touch on this not only to just remind you of the cool things that we do, but also because this is my vision for for international, I want to be able to offer all of these services and support that we offer to you in the UK, I want to be able to do that internationally. So where we have shared digital infrastructure, we're talking about the channel network, and how that extends to the rest of the world. And those services on top of that, the connectivity services, the security services, trusted identity all of those things that we offer for you in in the UK, the SEC two World Wide deals for with vendors and publishers. We aim again to aggregate demand in different parts of the world to be able to get you the best deals. And we'll come on to those specifically. And again, we've we've built up quite an expertise and knowledge and expertise in our technology in we can give expert trusted advice for your international activities. We've been very much in the background with our international work over the last few years. We we've done that for a number of reasons, but we really want you to focus on what our members what you needed in the UK rather than internationally. Now the world has changed as we'll come on to. So our international strategy has become more overt over the last few months. These have always been out strategic priorities. And the ones I want to focus on today are really about strategic priority one supporting our members, internationally wherever you are, or want to work in the world. Just touching on the other two, we know that we've got good products and services that we offer our UK communities and we want to be able to offer those worldwide, which we're doing in some cases, interest in

International education delivery in ‘the new normal’Online briefing 29th May 2020 Transcript 1

identity services. And also our digital skills and capabilities work the first priority by being a leader and collaborator of choice. This is my thought leadership, advocacy, collaboration and partnership. We want to work with everyone else, globally, that we need to be able to achieve what we want the best for our members.

Unknown Speaker 4:52

So focusing on strategic partnership on what we can do for you with our members, we've developed over the last probably five or six years by you and I have developed services and support in the international area to in in the main focus on transnational education that was our original focus, the where we're delivering education overseas. We concentrated on branch campuses and partnerships, we didn't really touch online until probably a few months ago. So we've come up with a number of services we have the first which is global Connect, good connectivity to the rest of the world is essential. You can't do anything without good connectivity. And we have a world class general network. And that giant network is plugged into the rest of the world, through Europe. And many of the hearings that we have to other organisations and institutions across the rest of the world. So we have that service which will help facilitate connectivity to wherever you are wherever you are delivering education. We have customers in India, Malta and Malaysia, we service edges to see in Malaysia and we've worked with them for a number of years. And we've worked with Queen Mary within Malta, again over a number of years. Where possible, we aggregate demand. We're working at the moment on doing that specifically in the United Arab Emirates. And there are a number of UK institutions over there. And we're working with our preferences, as we say here is to use the National Research and Education Network. So we're working with them in UAE, vehicles and robots. And we hope to be able to negotiate a deal with them so that we can connect all of our institutions in UAE back to the UK efficiently. The services that we offer internationally do not come as a The disc core subscription, anything that we do internationally has to cover its costs because we're not funded to do that. However, our charges are minimal in this area. So we have a small annual fee. To be able to do this. We have setup fee instal fees and a small 5% on top of the supply charge for this. He takes the contracting the management of contracts, the management of the service, and the risks away from your institution. The second service we have is global partnership. This is essentially our advice and guidance service that we've built up, as I say a good infantry knowledge of various parts of the world, specifically in China and UAE. And we have a lot that we can offer in these areas. If you're having problems with connectivity, but also wider issues. We can look into that with our partners. across the world, we can offer different options and solutions development. Again, this is a small amount of money to 2500 pounds annual fee, or the daily rate that we can offer the consultancy, but I think it's about two and a half days, three days, and you may as well just sign up for the annual fee. So we happy again to offer that transnational education licencing. We've been doing this for a number of years we've been building on our success as just collections in working with publishers across the UK to get deals and access to content, the tanning licencing service has been a huge success and we have well over 40 institutions signed up to the service. We therefore hours of provision, publisher engagement and negotiation advice guidance, communications and development activity, fundamentally is about improving the student experience and supporting parity of content. being transparent with publishers, we have a top 10 publishers that we're working with on this. And we've developed a framework for charging, which means that regardless of the country, or the publisher you're working with, there is a framework that will will we have put in place to be able to manage that? Greg and Carolyn, I think maybe on the cool. So if there's any discussion about that, any questions about the TNT licencing they'll be able to help support that


we had before. The current pandemic has been looking at digital experiences and Digital capabilities of our students overseas. We have good services both in in finance and capabilities in finance is a survey, essentially a survey to look at the digital environment and access and use of digital in the university and college environment. This has been


really successful in the UK and we aim to develop this for TNA students and Ruth on colleague was brought down my colleague here is here to answer questions on this. We've been doing some work to look at the experience of TNT students. So looking at the comparison between the UK and overseas. And we've done some work with at the University of Nottingham named go Ningbo campus a couple of years ago, which is a case study, given the situation that we're in now when we Have ramped up this work. And there are a number of institutions that want to be able to assess the, what the students have on staff have access to overseas as well as developing their digital skills. So we have to say we ramp this up. We've been working with UK visa, the UK Council for International Student Affairs and their student ambassadors on this programme. We've recently in the last couple of weeks been working with them. They are looking at the digital experience insights programme and the survey, carrying out the survey themselves with a view to rolling out this fifth in a more broad fashion September, but we'll keep you informed of where we go with that. This particular area is one that we've been working with quite closely with Australia. There are a number of Australian institutions that have picked and picked up on this work and I you think Both the insights and the capabilities tools.


As you'd expect, Jeff has a response to COVID. And we're reviewing our priorities and how we're shifting our challenges for the next to help support our members over the next two years. So these are some of the areas that we've been looking at teaching and learning, reimagined. We're looking at the UK, predominantly for that. But also working on how that teaching and learning that new experience that new, those new models of T now will extend or won't extend to overseas education. So what are the differences that we will need to address and what the synergies will need to address in delivering education overseas? As I just mentioned, we we are working on international student experience It's an area I don't think we've done enough of at all over the last few years and it's certainly come to the forefront as we as we've been hit with a pandemic. We've been looking at data visualisations and we have a subject portfolio planning going live in the next few weeks about based on Heidi data, and as a result of just working with hersa and having his expertise within just now as we've taken part of their enterprise data. We're also looking at graduate graduate employment with an international perspective. We've recently again worked at merged with hex to the higher education through Support Unit, and we working on an international aspect


of graduate employment


and one area that the rest of the world has definitely been taught Working with us and looking to us for guidance on our health and well being for students in terms of digital. The first question and given that we have now putting our international strategy at the forefront, if you can just jot down for me as we go through any ideas and how you would like us, to help you with your international aspects of your digital teaching and learning strategies, that would be really helpful. We really do want to engage you in the development of that strategy going forward. So anything that you can help us with here would be really, really great. I'll leave you to do that by carrying on and I'm talking about the new normal.



This is what we


we just experiencing, as I mentioned earlier that we have only focused until February on supporting transnational education students because they were overseas they had unique needs other than Alexander responsibility. Any international student coming to the UK would be treated the same as any UK students. So we weren't essentially interested in international students. However, things have changed. As we all know, there are a huge number of students that have returned to their home country. And now we need to give them access to their education as they were expecting to be educated. In the UK. We need to make sure that they can complete their examination and assessments, run the professional courses where the students were expecting to come to the UK. And in in the autumn. There are a number of immediate challenges, as well as a huge code, new cohort of students that we need to be able to support. We need to do this now, if we don't do this now and do it properly, as we all know, that fax income as the international students bring to the UK, along with everything else and all the other abilities and skills that they bring with them. And that will just go away. We were on a decline already in student numbers. So we really need a short and a long term response to COVID. So this is what we are hearing or have been hearing over the last few months. Really, so so much uncertainty, so much uncertainty in where your students are, are they here? Are they at home or are they Caught somewhere in between? Will students return in the autumn? Will I be prepared to pay for their courses? Will I continue? Will we continue to attract international students? Will will courses now be online from October, if they are for how long? Thanks to his critical illness, and working as a famous, he's a colleague's is absolutely critical in this area. But as we working as we are working through the next three to five years, we really need to understand the impact of cobalt and it will be three to five years, we believe.


We also need to convince for the country that the quality of our online education


so we just really needed to look into what our priority areas were or we did this by looking at the number of students that have been domiciled in a particular country judged against the technical legal challenges that there are in that particular country, as well as the digital divide now, but that area is something that we cannot do anything about right now. But maybe it's something that we need to address in the future. But as I say, our priority is looking at the number of students in that particular country and the technical challenges. Some institutions have come to us early on and said, when we were educating in the UK, we now have to educate in 160 countries, each with our different challenges with a number of students that technological challenges, but even if there's one or two students in that area, they still deserve to be educated in that in that high quality standard that they are used to in the UK. So that brings me to China and I think China pop up in question one quite significantly. So it isn't No surprise that we have focused our efforts on China. We've been probably contacted by about 50 universities since March. And the only question people are asking about is how do we deliver education online in China. So these these are the challenges that we, we think, strategic challenges obviously about the percentage of the high percentage and possibly over reliance on on China for Chinese students.



Many are currently unhappy with the level of delivery


or many may not want to travel back to the UK. In the future, though, they do want to stay in China. But again, we need more data on that again, huge amount. In terms of technology, these won't be a surprise to you. We have to address Three three areas, Chinese government regulations regarding cross border virtual private networks VPN, that have restricted they use over the last few years. The China international gateways or the Great Firewall, which screens track traffic. So that has two implications. One is that certain occupations, websites and content are blocked, such as YouTube, Facebook and Google. And there's also intermittent screening, which shows which will slow down the general internet performance. So accessing ble would be difficult, for example, with file upload and timelines, particularly for large files or for synchronous learning. It's a not not a reliable service. And there are also geographical challenges. If you're in Beijing, or other big cities There will be good quality and connectivity but not necessarily in the more rural areas or provinces. So those are the real big challenges at the China that we have to address.


And we do this in a number of ways.


We've done a lot of troubleshooting over the past for campus to campus connectivity. And I, I won't go too much into detail over that. But and but we can offer that as a one to one bespoke meeting in having really good connectivity between your UK campus and your overseas campus, whether that's a campus owned by yourself, your own branch campus or whether it's a partnership approach.


It's very different for off campus connectivity.


We'll come to that after this slide. We've got good advice. guidance. We've been working on China issues for a number of years. And we have a number of partners in China and work with. I've set up in the last month an international team site, community team site for discussion area which has a specific focus on China. And we have been working across the sector with you Cypher with university she came to national and the British Council specifically on this, we all bring a different approach. You sighs that brings the the the technical perspective of our members. The British Council brings more students perspective. UK international brings a pretty well rounded perspective from those parts of your organisations that just isn't well versed in tapping into we are used to talking to CIOs to librarians, and those areas of your organisation but part of the problem is There is no join up between that and the maybe the international legal institutions. So by doing this cross sectoral approach, we hopefully will tap into


many parts of your organisation. And then we come to the pilot project that the next few slides are will talk about. So as I say there are different perspectives, campus to campus connectivity. We prefer to use the National Research and Education Network, as I said before, and that's what that looks like. We have hearings to Senate, which is the Chinese and when. And we have good connectivity through jobs across what's called orient plus direct to China. Every University in China has that link. So campus to campus crime tivity should not be a problem. Off Campus connectivity is a different matter. And that really has been brought to the fore with the huge number of students going back to China to learn. In the past, we've done this through China transit, we've actually purchased China transit from China Telecom and China Unicom. And we've done that in the background. We don't charge our members for that. And however, that has become very costly. Over the last few months, we've seen doubling and triple tripling of using that transit, which is a cost to us.


We have global transits. And we also have periods with Alibaba cloud,


which then brings me nicely on to our pilot project with Alibaba cloud. We released some information yesterday and there are links available to you in one of the boxes that we have somewhere that describe the solution that we're exploring with Alibaba cloud. We just rolling this is to understand the challenges that need to be addressed in accessing content to China developing different solutions not only in Alibaba cloud, but we have to look at other solutions that are on the market that may be able to achieve the same thing, but in a different way. But we'll do that on behalf of the sector. And we'll do that to make sure that any solution would be available at small and large scale, making sure that's appropriate, and possibly where we can aggregate demand to make sure that we can make that make any solution that we propose, affordable for our members. And that's one of the key issues that we've had to address. So this little All decisions we're looking at, are about improving the quality and performance of connectivity and reliable access to course material cleaning the early systems hosted on Janet or other cloud providers networks for global distance learning between for now the UK and China. The solution needs to be affordable, as I say whether it's a small or large cohort that needs to be affordable for our members. I'm not going to read through all of that. I'll leave that for you. But as I say, it's also in the brief thing that's come up in the web links. So this is this is what we have been working with Alibaba cloud on. This solution came to us from Universities UK, there are similar solutions that are working with in Australia with a I think over half of Australian universities, although the solution is slightly different, my colleague by EU has been able to work directly with Alibaba to make sure that the solution that they offer us is better for our members. So the productivity does not go by Hong Kong, it's direct to London, from that has its advantages. But also, more importantly, as important is the fact that the help desk or the support is not in Australia. So there, but there, there are some universities that I've taken this up in the UK, and one of the problems that so they experiments with the Australians mission is obviously the help desk is has a lag time of sort of 12 to 24 hours before you can do anything.


So this is the solution that we have.



And these are the main advantages of what we think


The key features and the main advantages. So it's stable, it's fast, we have a guaranteed service level agreement of 99.95%. We have good latency, we have a short contract term, so you can sign up for a month. So if it's not working for you, then we can stop the subscription. It's flexible, and the same in terms of the contract terms, but also the bandwidth required. So if you require significant bandwidth for an examination period, or online professional courses, for example, or in a particular part of the time, will increase and decrease that bandwidth within a very short time. The solution if you wanted the solution, we could get back to you within 48 hours work on Alibaba and it can support two 10s of thousands of end users.


What we're looking at in the pilot is what we're testing is the licencing.


And the access to applications that may not be possible to, to access normally through the great firewalls such as YouTube, and Facebook, etc. We're looking at authentication. We're looking at that flexibility and how we manage bandwidth and how that can bring down costs. We're looking at the costs for students, and that whole scalability points. Those are the things that we are hoping to test. I Baba has offered us a one month trial for free with four institutions that tries to start next week. We've had to go through a number of


excuse me, we've had to go through a number of


information security checks, obviously GDPR and data protection to make sure that we're all in line. And the universities are fully supported in that. Everyone's happy and we will be going ahead next week with the University of York University from Hampton, Queen Mary's in King's College. We're also the third working with UK international new Cypher and the British Council on this. We're trying to start this next week of I say, from the first of June, there's a one month trial and we will keep you informed as we go through. As I mentioned earlier, we have a just international community team site. And if you email me, I can get you onto that team site. We'll be putting the costs the summary and also an FAQ on that specifically about this project so you can monitor it as we go through Ask us questions. And we'll see if we can address those isn't the only solution on the market. And as you all know, there are many other institutions, suppliers that can do that can do similar things, achieving the same results in a different way. In parallel to running this pilot project, Alibaba, we are running a procurement process that will hopefully establish a multi supply framework by September to be able for you to be able to sign up to that for the start of next term. We know timescales aren't working really well here. And we'd love another month to be able to do this properly


for you. But there are ways in which you can sign up if Alibaba project is successful. And there are ways that you could sign up to that, for example directly with them in the short term, Find a one one month on an off switch, essentially. And we can negotiate discounts for you. directly with Alibaba, when an if a Baba come on to the multi supply framework, there will be far more significant discounts that we'll be able to offer, but we'll let you know of that, as in when. So how do you get information? There's a project briefing and the link is there is an expression of interest form. I would really encourage any university or college that is interested in this solution needs to fill in that age do I fall back on life today? Without your interest, we can't aggregate that demand and negotiate better deals for you. Every University and I would say college and country has Chinese students in the situation to a greater or lesser To degree, we anchor on a panel session in May, June with you cyber, and also project briefing we will do at the end of the pilot project for you to become more engaged. And again, let me know about that whether you want to be on that international community team site for a number of reasons, but it's been one of the most fundamental. Hi,


Esther. Sorry, it's Scott here. Sorry to intervene. Can I just make a suggestion? People didn't really get a lot of time to fill in the first chat question. So can I suggest that we just have a pause for a minute during the presentation while people fill in the chat box? Because it's really difficult to do the chat box and follow the slides at the same time. Is that okay? No problem. Thanks,


Tom for filling in this, what are your main challenges in China that you would like our help with given Given what we've said,


How can we help you more?


Okay, I'll let you carry on filling in those interesting ones coming up, some of which have not seen before. So we will get back to you with all of with all of these Questions and address everything that you raised. Okay. As I said earlier, the costing or an indicative costing will be put up as a Monday on the international team site. So


it could well be



a costly solution. But then I think people have to ask themselves, how much you're willing to invest in your international students to get this quality of performance. Okay, moving swiftly on. How do we maintain the momentum we've all seen harm. We've managed to get everybody online to do those exams and assessments to do the pre course. work really quickly over the last few months. And we've achieved an awful lot but now where do we go from here? Before, before the pandemic, we've done quite a lot of information on teaching and learning and research in the new industrial revolution. So


Industrial Revolution for so we what we call education and research 4.0


where we come together to work on in the pre painted world, but we need to, again adjust what we do.


We run training 19 2023 International workshops on international education 4.0 come up with some really interesting pathways and challenges and opportunities and how we can use not new technologies but technologies that already exist, which is AI Mixed virtual augmented reality, 5g Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, all of those things, how we can really deliver education internationally better and have a not just a better student experience but a new student experience. And that has really come to the fore for how do we take this forward given where how quickly we've got to this point? How do we take this forward? So these are some of the questions that you might want to think about when when it starts to come down a little bit more and I'll let you just reflect on those for a second.


And all these the wrong questions that we're asking what else What else should we be looking at?


So final question, what would International Education 4.0 mean for you? And are you ready for it? Again? How can we help support that?


Hi, Esther, I just wanted to mention briefly as well, just in case anybody was concerned that we appreciate that this. We're a bit pressed for time during this online briefing. So what we will do because we very much want to capture all your views and your questions. We'll have a bit of time at the end, where we'll reopen these three chat questions that we've had for you, to give you another opportunity to type in your responses if you didn't do it earlier. Okay. We're just


conscious that we don't keep them open too long during the session because it does block the slides. Thanks, Esther.


And given that we will probably have that time, I've got probably one or two more slides, and then we're going to come back time to ask some more questions and for reflection. So as I said before, key to success, I push success in this COVID world and post COVID world. He's working in partnership, we've been working. A lot of the work that I did, when I started our international strategy a few years ago was to make sure that our sector bodies in the UK with an international outlook, and understood what just could do, what our capabilities were, and the part of the jigsaw really, that we can play for the the UK sector as a whole in both research and education. So we've been working really closely with UK international Department for International Trade QA UK Merrick, British Council, you sign up for an advance he and that work that we did over the last few years has really come to the fore now. And I think the sector has been very strong in pulling together and creating a response to cobit and support for our members. In all of in all of those organisations, we've been working closely very closely with Australia, who are in a very similar situation to us. You difference really being there 10 times the difference. So we've been learning from each other. And we've been working with on it within the Research and Education Network in that country and caught it Who are the use either equivalent. We've been working in China, again with the National Research and Education Network, and also with the British Council office in China. We've been really helpful. We have a a network of global chief executives of research and education networks across the world, what we call the willing and able, chief executives of those organisations who meet every six months, and education is really at the forefront of them gender Research and Education networks were set up predominantly to move large swathes of research data across the world. That's pretty much pretty much works, okay. But I'm focused really on delivering education through those networks. We've worked with James who have a European sort of conglomerate of research and education networks, and we have transnational education groups and task forces for education that we work with closely on with James. These are the resources that I've mentioned all the way through for anything really just contact us on international adjust dorothy.uk. That's it for me. We've got 15 minutes to answer any questions. And so we will put my webcam back up.


UK Merrick, British Council, you sign up for an advance he and that work that we did over the last few years has really come to the fore now. And I think the sector has been very strong in pulling together and creating a response to cobit and support for our members. In all of in all of those organisations. We've been working closely, very closely with Australia, who are in a very similar situation to us. You difference really being there 10 times the difference. So we've been learning from each other. And we've been working with on it within the Research and Education Network in that country and caught it Who are the use either equivalent. We've been working in China, again with the National Research and Education Network, and also with the British Council office in China. We've been really helpful. We have an a network of global chief executives of research and education networks across the world what we call the willing and able, chief executives of those organisations who meet every six months, and education is really at the forefront of them gender Research and Education networks were set up predominantly to move large swathes of research data across the world. That's


pretty much



pretty much works okay. But I'm focused really on delivering education through those networks. We've worked with James who are the European sort of conglomerate of research and education networks. We have transnational education groups and task forces for education that we work with closely on with James.


These are the resources that I've mentioned all the way through for anything really just contact us on international adjust dorothy.uk.


That's it for me. We've got 15 minutes to answer any questions. And so we will put my webcam back up.


Okay, everybody, if you do have a question for Esther or the rest of the team, if you could use the raised hand icon that you can see at the top of your screen, and then what we'll do is we'll take each question in turn any questions that we don't get chance to answer today in this session, we'll get back to you after the session. So please do pop your questions into the chat if you don't get chance to ask them and we'll make sure we'll respond then. So just a quick reminder, if you click on the raised hand icon at the top of your screen, it's the fourth icon along and then what we'll do is we'll get you to open up your mics and we'll take a quick questions in turn.


Thank you.


I'm not seeing any questions at the moment. So I think you've covered everything quite comprehensively or people are still struggling to find where the raised hand icon is perhaps.


I just wondered whether biographical Reese wanted to add anything while they have the opportunity.



Yeah, yeah. I'm certainly very curious to hear from delegates. How are they gathering students and potentially staff that are not in the UK? How do they get it getting the feedback on the experience to date and how do they think they'll get feedback in the future going forward? are you treating your international students any differently from your home students in terms of provision? So especially if colleagues are thinking about synchronous or asynchronous delivery for the next academic year? How will that play out with international in different time zones? So, I believe during the sort of initial acute phase, international, we're expected to access recordings asynchronously after the synchronous event had happened in the UK. But thinking about parity of experience, how are things going to be done going forward? So I don't know if anybody sort of willing to either pick up the mic and speak or put in the chat. How they addressing these sorts of challenges, and about delivering parity of experience over different time zones and gaining feedback on what the challenges and issues are with those students in different countries.


Okay, I can see a lot of people typing in chat. So it looks like that will generate quite a bit of discussion. We do have


David with his hand up. So, David, if you want to open your mic and ask your question as well, that fantastic.


Hi, everyone.


I just wanted to say I think you got the questions exactly right. And those are that those three things are exactly what we're struggling with. I don't have the immediate answers. Maybe Be prepared to jump in here with their fantastic answers these things, but we we I think are really struggling around that question about, you know, the synchronous versus asynchronous. Their question about how we gather feedback on on on the experiences students in China's in China, because we're really struggling with this sort of drip feed of kind of negative feedback problem reports. And what we're really unable to do is ascertain just what portion of our students are really struggling and trying to separate the noise of tinnitus individual cases from the from the wider experience. So if people have solutions that that's great at the moment, we try to sort of go out proactively programme by programme basis


to get feedback


about how things how the experiences



so yeah, no answers. I think lost all the right questions. There.


And I think that's where our cross sectoral approach really does come in with UK, particularly, and universities, UK and British councils as well. British passports and a lot of work with students, particularly in China, asking some quite pertinent questions. And I'll try and


put that on the LinkedIn, international community team site, actually, because there's some quite interesting stuff direct from from students, but like you say, and you do tend to get the more negative, unfortunately, so a more consistent and wholesome approach to getting international students feedback on their experience is absolutely critical. Something I think we've neglected for a while.


I can see I


got another question from Shuang


gal.


I don't know if you want to open up your mic Shuang


The question is also available in Chester, it's where can we find more information about campus to campus connection?



In China specifically, I'm assuming, or anywhere in the world, just contact us directly. We can talk you through what, what the optimal arrangement should be. And then we can work with you on how that actually in practice does work. I can also see a few people asking a question of the Baba project about the last mile. I'm afraid it doesn't address the last mile connection. Are you? Is there anything you wanted to say about about that?


Are you I think you're on mute if he wanted to say any more about the last mile on the Alibaba project. You're not


Mara, sorry, I forgot to unmute it.


Thanks for


the last mile and Alibaba as


the solution where you forced students from their home using their own home like Wi Fi to get connected to VPN connection to Alibaba smart access gateway. So the last mile from a student's home really depends out in the region where they are our local students Wi Fi, supply, the quality of the service and a part in F without Alibaba service. So all those traffic will be routed through the international gateway. So congestion Yeah, it was in China. And we don't know where where it would be. But there was Alibaba we know there are eight, Alibaba and the visa region. And now that was smart access point gateway. So the, the local in China parts probably would be better than without it. So that's what we wanted through the pilots. And to try it because one Queen Mary University of London have already selected a number of students in different parts of China to do the trial. So we were gather information from their student a disappearance, to say Which part of China probably it's not up to speed. And so we can let the people know that the result of this pilot trial we currently were No idea. pika city like Beijing, Shanghai. And Guangzhou, Shenzhen it's good. And but in the other Luton area, we don't know.



Is it okay? Yeah.


I'm one of the things I just like to point out, as well as coming to us directly in the US national team. I'm just gonna put a link up


here.


People can put it up.


We have obviously account managers who are all universities and colleges in the UK. And it would be good to make contact with them as well as at the same time, because there may be other things that they can offer. There are a number of account managers on the coolest thing in as well. So, yeah, have a look at the link. If you don't know who your account manager is, please do get in touch with


Have a few minutes if there are any more questions. The other questions have popped up again. If you want to add any more, it's more opportunity to


call. I've noticed that I noted your issues and we'll pick that up with the account manager team. Thank you.


I saw a question about whether this solution will apply to students in Hong Kong or Macau or somewhere In five years, and Alibaba solution actually is currently it's a four man and China because the four student in Hong Kong, this is not great the firewall is not an issue. So students can use their home broadband connectivity to, to the VRP outside of China very just as efficient as it can be. And with Taiwan Well, I think that there are basically this Alibaba solution is really getting away with the Chinese regulation. And so this is using Alibaba as a private enterprise


network. So the traffic and when Mark goes to the China international gateway, this The main focus and so in the other part of in forest, no, this is not an issue that we are not addressing it in the pilot.


I just had another question about does G Suite work through Alibaba? University of York use G Suite started by apart the trial. That was the reason for including


University of York as well.


Okay, Richard, thank you.


I can see earlier in to answer to question one, there are lots of about China and the difficult challenges in China. As Esther mentioned, we were produced Q and A's q&a documents. So we were we really appreciate all those questions. So we were respond in that q&a document.


Okay.


As we set up questions that we haven't responded to, already online, we will do in each of those question boxes, as well as the chat and so on. We'll be getting back to in the next week or so with But please do do sign up to our community website. Just email me directly on if you want to be invited.


equity.



Thank you Esther. Thank you very much for this briefing. I hope everybody found it beneficial. We've got Now to finish time of 11. So we will bring the session to a close and as Esther was saying will collate any questions that haven't been followed upon. and get back to you with those you guys's email address there if you'd like to go direct. And this session is recorded as I was saying at the start, it been made available on the web page probably by the end of day Tuesday next week of latest. And if you haven't downloaded the slides, you can do so in the pod at the top and also the the platform's links just to the right of that as well. We really appreciate your feedback from the session today. So thank you very much first Wilkinson for for delivering and also, of course, to bio to Greg and to Ruth picking up questions at the end, and to my colleague Scott for helping with the facilitation to. So to leave the session, all you need to do is just close your tab or window that you've got the session running in, that locks you out, you can go meeting top left and go down to exit Adobe Connect, and that will lock you out. So apart from that, have a lovely rest of Friday and have a nice weekend. Thanks, everyone.


Thank you Bye

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