Motivational and a celebration of our professional community. That’s my initial reaction to Day 1 of the Association for Learning Technology Annual Conference 2025 in Glasgow. With all the uncertainty in our sector, I am thankful that we have come together to acknowledge the value of our profession and our collective desire to be responsive to the changing educational environment. The tone was very appropriately set by Charles Knight’s opening keynote.
“You will not outrun technology with policy.”
Charles Knight (2025)
Leading education
Much of Knight’s message in terms of how we adapt and positively respond to sector challenges comes from how we enable and empower the people we work with. I am an advocate of all roles having a leadership responsibility and have shares this view to my own team whether it is leading others, leading a project or leading your own professional practice. Leadership is not about formal authority and it’s not about management. Knight’s perspective echoes this and he conveyed our “role as leaders is about bringing empathy” and identifying what we can do in context, “doing what matters, not trying to control.” When leading others, particularly in tough times, transparency is key: sharing the reasons for decisions, why those decisions are difficult and being clear even when you cannot share all the information.
In terms of what we can do individually, with personal leadership, Knight encouraged us to commit to the moment: what you will remember are the times you didn’t commit and could have made an impact. When times require flexibility, resilience and adaptability, then the internal context has to match that external context. As Knight explained, if the culture of the team is about experimentation and innovation, this has to be backed up by the leader saying “I accept accountability for the work you do”. That allows considered risks to be taken, ‘mistakes’ can be made and there is, in Knight’s words, space for ‘magic’ to happen. Leadership has to break it’s obsession with perfection, which can slow progress, add barriers and avoid learning from taking risks. The reality, as Knight suggested, is that we already operate in an imperfect system, as the system involves people and people are not perfect. Put simply, he described the need to have the right context, leading to the right mindset, leading to ‘boundless potential.’
In response to one of the audience questions on how we reclaim a sense of magic, Knight didn’t hold back with criticism of the big ‘EdTech Bros’ being uncritically accepted by senior leadership. We are also seeing this at national level too, where the influence of big tech extends much higher and further. Our role, as a community of knowledgeable and experienced education practitioners, is to bring our collective voice. Bring in critical friends into institutional discussions, sometimes capable of more resonance with senior leadership than internal perspectives. Knight mentioned in passing the value of collective intelligence, a point that underpinned my own workshop that followed.
Finding our influence
In my workshop on institutional readiness for the future of education (Cornock, 2025), I perpetuated the ‘skills-first’ agenda for education from Prof. Martin Bean (2025) that provides a call to action to rethink our approach to institutional design, qualifications and educational experiences. Indeed, the idea of ‘enduring human capabilities’ (Hagel, et al. 2019), with a focus on the skills, creativity and resilience required of people to adapt to fast-paced change, pre-empted the Gen-AI boom. The drivers for a focus on skills are far more critical now, with large proportions of the workforce affected by decisions that will be made on the value of roles in a Gen-AI landscape. It’s very easy to take a pessimistic view of our future and that of our learners, but we can adapt and we can come together to create an educational ecosystem that is future ready.
One of my key messages was how important it is to make connections and learn from different perspectives within your own institution, as much as it is to learn from across institutions (such as at conferences). In my own work, I really value being able to bring together professional services supporting online learning to address the full, holistic student learning experience. Making connections also goes as far as what happens in the curriculum and learning design, bridging both the educational and professional spaces of our students. Hopefully the take-away though was the ability for each of us to inform, influence and lead the change of education for the future in our own institutions. Wherever we are part of the conversation, we can be part of the collective intelligence trying to adapt and respond to what our learners’ needs are. More on my session will follow, along with the outputs from the workshop.
Collaboration across identity spaces
As we moved onto the breakout sessions with research and practice papers, collaboration and finding ‘our place’ as non-academic professionals working in education was a theme shared by Kate Molloy and Clare Thomson (Molloy, et al., 2025). What underpinned their approach to collaboration was shared values of criticality, creativity, caring and openness. There were also some interesting learning points about how to work in large and complex institutions, with multiple professional identities. A lot of good work comes from professional services engagement in evaluation and formal research in education, yet most funding requires an academic lead, regardless of the qualifications, role or experience of the non-academic colleagues on a project team or professional service. Molloy and Thomson made a really interesting point around an often cited feeling of ‘imposter syndrome’ and whether this was something that was inherent in our own roles or a result of institutional structures that don’t recognise the value of the interplay between practice and research.
The following paper in that session was an excellent collaboration between educational technology provider, institution and student partnership (Gordon and Sawani, 2025). The learning that has come from the Echo360 ‘Go React’ video assessment approach has clearly had a positive impact at the University of Warwick on one programme. Here, video assessment and feedback enabled students to see their progress, not just within a module of study, but across their learning as they could assess their skills and competencies. As Sawani described, this was a shift from competing against other students, to competing against yourself in terms of the motivation to do better and improve. The standout quote for me though was on how assessment was reframed to be less about evidencing completion of a course, and more as a process for developing yourself as a learner and an individual:
“A shift from ‘proving’ to ‘improving’.”
Aalaiya Sawani (2025)
Enduring human skills in practice
To round off the day, I joined the session by Emily Patterson (2025) on teaching creativity (defined as leading to ideas that are both ‘novel’ and ‘appropriate’). In professional settings, creative thinking and problem solving go hand in hand with understanding different perspectives and differences in context. Patterson modelled metacognitive approaches to developing creative thinking, following four stages which are experienced by learners in their CPD course:
- Expose and evaluate your own thinking.
- Compare your thinking to others and evaluate how they are similar and different.
- Learn, try out new techniques and get feedback on other ways to think.
- Apply this to your own context.
I appreciated the concept of ‘confidence of creativity’, as ‘being creative’ at any one point in time I find requires to be in a particular mindset. However, what Patterson demonstrated is that you can be aware of your mindset and shift it into a place of creative thinking, utilising processes and ways of thinking in a systematic way too.
What have I missed?
I’d also like to call out the presentations by John Brindle, and Tamsyn Smith and James Allen. I’ve gathered a lot of very useful references, frameworks, and experiences shared and am grateful for the time taken to convey their work so clearly and thoughtfully. In addition, Julian Hopkins presented a robust analysis of both students’ and educators’ perception of video feedback, which I hope to see published.
Obviously, I have not attended every session available, so I would welcome comments on what you found interesting at Day 1 of the ALT Conference too – at the very least sign post me towards a talk that I shouldn’t have missed! There was an excellent student panel just after lunch and I have a plan to represent that in a different posting to come.
References
- Bean, M. (2025). Transforming Education: Seizing Opportunities in a Disrupted World. Online Learning Summit, University of Leeds, 10-11 July 2025.
- Cornock, M. (2025). Institutional readiness for the future of education. ALT Conference 23-24 October 2025.
- Gordon, J. and Sawani, A. (2025). Reframing assessment: what if we started with students. ALT Conference 23-24 October 2025.
- Hagel, J., Seely Brown, J. and Woolly, M. (2019). Skills change, but capabilities endure. Deloitte Centre for the Edge, Deloitte.
- Knight, C. (2025). Being a leader, not an algorithm: Human skills for an AI-shaped future. Keynote. ALT Conference 23-24 October 2025.
- Molloy, K., Costello, E., Brunton, J. and Thomson, C. (2025). Critical and creative methodologies: learning design practice to research. ALT Conference 23-24 October 2025.
- Patterson, E. (2025). Human skills for a digital world: creativity, problem solving and design thinking. ALT Conference 23-24 October 2025.
Acknowledgement
My attendance at ALTC25 was funded by the University of Leeds in my role as Head of Online Learning. I am a trustee of ALT.
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