Ep. 17. Harnessing Data for Educational Excellence with Scott Mulholland

Series: Artificial Intelligence, Leadership, and the Future of Further Education

Hosts:
Richard Foster-Fletcher, Executive Chair, MKAI.org
Kurt Hintz, Managing Director, Fortis Education Consulting

Guest:
Scott Mulholland, Chief Information, Data, and Estates Officer, NCG

Guest Bios:

Scott Mulholland has carved a niche in driving digital transformation across the education sector, particularly in further education. His journey began in student administration at Robert Gordon University, where he also earned his MSc in E-Business. Scott's career expanded through various senior roles, including a significant tenure as Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Central Lancashire, before moving to NCG. Here, he leads strategic initiatives across IT, estates, and data, enhancing educational delivery through innovative technology solutions.

Episode 18: Ep. 17. Harnessing Data for Educational Excellence with Scott Mulholland

Episode Overview:

In "Harnessing Data for Educational Excellence" we delve into the critical role of data management and technological innovation in shaping the future of further education. Join us as Scott Mulholland, a seasoned leader in information and estates management, shares his insights on leveraging data to transform educational practices and outcomes. This episode explores the integration of AI and data-driven strategies within the educational sector, highlighting the potential for significant enhancements in teaching, learning, and administrative efficiency.

Key Topics of Discussion:

1. Strategic Data Utilization: Examining Scott's approach to transforming data handling to drive educational and operational advancements.
2. Innovative Educational Technologies: Discussion on the development and impact of tools like "Teach Assist" and "Learn Assist," and their role in enhancing the educational experience.
3. Overcoming Technological Challenges: Insights into the challenges faced during the implementation of new technologies and the lessons learned.
4. Future of Education Technologies: Reflections on upcoming trends and potential innovations that could further reshape educational environments.
5. Smart Campus Initiatives: Exploring the integration of IT, estates, and data towards creating a more interconnected and responsive educational infrastructure.

Key 'Takeaway' Ideas:

1. Data as a Strategic Asset: Emphasizing the importance of treating data with the same seriousness as financial and human resources to enhance decision-making and operational efficiencies.
2. Ethical Tech Integration: Highlighting the need for careful consideration of ethical implications and policy development when incorporating technology in educational settings.
3. Empowering through Innovation: Showcasing how technological advancements can empower educators and learners, leading to improved educational outcomes and reduced administrative burdens.

Explore the Episode:

Witness a compelling discussion on the transformative power of data and technology in education with Scott Mulholland, and learn how these tools are not just reshaping educational strategies but also setting the stage for a more efficient and effective future. Tune into this enlightening conversation to see how data-centric approaches are pivotal in driving the next wave of educational innovation.


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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Artificial Intelligence, further Education leadership.It's everybody's favorite podcast show in the sector.
Kurt, it's great to see youagain. Credits the two Richard and
welcome Scott. Hi. Then Hi, that a nice to meet your book.
Scott. Thank you so much forguesting on our show today. We're
very excited to host you and getinto what you're working on and what you're

(00:21):
excited about, what you're worried about, and what the future might hold.
Perhaps you could start by telling usa bit about your work, your background
and the institution that you represent.Scott Mulholland is my name, Chief Information
Data and the States Officer is thetitle. I've been with NCG now for
five years. The rules is tobe director responsible for it for estates and

(00:43):
for learner data, but I'm alsoaccountable across the institution for other data sets
as well, so it's a verybroad role. NCG is a group of
seven colleges. We have about twoand a half thousand staff, thirty to
forty thousand students depending on how youcount them, and we have seven colleges
around the country, two in London, two in Newcastle, one in Carlisle,

(01:03):
one in Kiderminster, and one inSkelmersdale in West Lancashire. So before
that I worked in higher education.So I'm about twenty five years into my
education career now mostly spent in EG. Actually I'm told I came to NCG.
Some of that time was spent asa consultant a variety of clients that's
probably worked for seven or eight differentuniversities over the course of that time,

(01:26):
including a couple of lengthy permanent assignments. And before that, I had about
ten years in the private sector,working largely in the oil industry and in
the shipping industry here in the UKand in Singapore and in New Zealand,
until I stumbled into my EG career. As so many of us seem to,
you have this unique challenge I thinkin the sector of this enormous geographic
spread, enormous for the UK anyway, you talk about some of the unique

(01:49):
challenges and opportunities that come with sucha broad regional focus that you have in
your role. I think it's oneof the most interesting and fascinating things about
working in NCG. I said,we've got colleges as far Afield as London
and Carlisle. So if you considerthe cercioeconomic conditions in both of those cities,
you can very quickly appreciate how differenttheir contexts are. So culturally and

(02:13):
in terms of demographics, they're entirelydifferent, but when you get down to
the fundamentals, they are all essentiallyabout the learner experience, about creating wonderful
outcomes and changing people's lives. SoI think that's the thing that really binds
us all. Each college has itsown personality, its own culture, and
the fact that we're part of agroup doesn't change that really at all.

(02:34):
We just have access to a setof shared services, pooled knowledge, shared
expertise, in some cases a supportnetwork if we're going through difficulties, because
inevitably somebody else in the group willhave had that experience. And how do
you bring that together under a sortof leadership and strategic vision. We try
to establish the concept of one NCG, so we'll come together around our shared

(02:55):
commitment to our learners to staff development, for example, and that's the common
ground that we build from there,and we have a shared vision towards twenty
thirty to become an outstanding college group. And we operate in what I might
often describe as a hub and spokebasis across the three services I lead.
So the Learner Data Service was establishedis to bring together some common practice,

(03:19):
to create a team, a groupof data professionals, and a commitment to
data as a strategic asset, andto take it seriously in a way it
hadn't really been taken seriously in thepast. We're still on that path.
I think we've come a very longway, but we certainly have a recognizable
group of data professionals and our datais in a much stronger condition than it
was before. But strategically we're movingaway from I think what is traditionally the

(03:45):
business of mis which is around externalreturns, making sure the enrollment data is
complete, getting timetables done, thosesorts of things, to having a much
more data analytical frame of mind,maybe even aspiring to data science at some
stage. So that applies to theother service. So the IT service operated
does a hubban spoke before then,and the Estate service is also moving in

(04:05):
that direction. So three services underone roof, all operating on the hubbin
spoke basis, each with a localrepresentation and each with a central director who
reports to me. I just wonderedhow much your experience of the private sector
has influenced some of your thinking andwhat you've brought into the sector, which
is quite unique. Has there beenan aspect it has There are many organizations

(04:30):
where both of those services report througha single leader. But I really wanted
to forge closer working relationships between thosetwo areas underpinned by really strong data as
a foundation to drive forward our strategicintent, and that just wasn't going to
be possible if we continue to havethe states and it running along on separate
tracks. One of the things I'mthinking about is that quite as significant advance

(04:54):
was in technology and as you say, probably data rich now, whereas a
Hepsus state wouldn't have been so richin data in the past. And it
seems leaps and bounds in that sectorspecifically, we've progressed a great deal,
but we still have a long wayto go in a state. So we
have a KAFAM facilities management system.We have that in place, that's been
an implementation for the last year orso. Building management systems we've got those

(05:17):
up and running as well, butthe data we harvest and managed through those
collection points isn't particularly coherent as yet, so we've still got some months to
go, I think before we canturn that into the kind of asset that
I talked about in relation to learnerdata. So yeah, massive opportunity there,
and combined with the data we harvestfrom the use of our desktop estate

(05:40):
for example, that there's just somuch we can do with it. How
might you use AI and to helpyou with this? Whereas it would have
been probably extremely expensive to do manuallywith people and effectively, as you say,
larger and larger data sets, probablynot manageable within the financial structures that
we worked with an for their education. So I guess it's then how to

(06:01):
use the ALI tools. I I'dlike to use them for allowing yourselves to
be visionary a little bit here.If you take a timetabling for example,
or our understanding of space utilization that'sat a very low level at the moment.
In higher education, we'd have ateam of people with clipboards who go
out and do a manual survey ofwho's in the room at which particular point

(06:26):
of annual sheep exercise, which wasnever particularly accurate, but it's better than
what I currently have in NCG.So I think moving to a position where
we have we use sensors the Internetof Things to detect how many people are
in a particular location, can comparethat with the timetable. Then we can
start to see where there are mismatches, and AI can then be used,

(06:48):
I think, to analyze the patternsof behavior there and perhaps even automate the
scheduling of our timetables in an adaptiveway, going beyond what I've had in
previous organizations. Most of the universitieswhere we might ow to schedule our timetable,
but inevitably you would go in you'dbe changing that on the fly manually,
with all of the consequences that entails. So I'd love to see up

(07:12):
time when we can use AI todo that kind of thing in a genuinely
adaptive way. I think that wouldbe really exciting. One of the benefits
of being a group is that wecan pilot these ideas in very different colleges
and see how they play, andthen take the good things and scale that
up across the rest of the group. It was very interesting what you said
there, and it gives you theopportunity to really chick things through, taste
them properly before you scale up.I think that's a great little bit of

(07:35):
feedback. Yeah, that's paid dividendsfor us over the last five years as
well. We'll try very hard notto impose on the colleges, and the
approach we've taken in most cases sofar has been to let them adopt a
uniform approach across the group of theirown volition. I'd be an approach that

(07:57):
works quite well in the group.Let people will come to us and viral
change seems to work quite well forus as well. What sort of things
that are coming across your disk?What are you thinking about for the future,
what's already developed. One of thefirst things we did with the benefit
of teams was create a think calledthe Learning Technologies Innovation Group, which is
a bit of a mouthful, butELTAIC is what we call it for short,

(08:20):
and that was a community of digitaladvocates. So they were the people
we wanted to work with to getthe digital strategy out there, to get
people talking about digital literacy, toraise awareness and to be in the vanguard
our early adopters. Really, we'venow got forty or fifty people involved in
that group, all steadily working towardtheir mie qualifications through Microsoft as well.

(08:43):
So that's all good too, Butthey've been absolutely pivotal to all of the
ed tech innovations we've brought about overthe last five years, and in many
ways it's been a grassroots kind ofthing. So we bring them together once
a month, we asked them whatthey're doing. We share information that we
get from partners like Microsoft and clickView, metavirse people like that. So

(09:05):
we give them this, provide usa platform and let them see let our
teams see what's available, and letthem pick it up and see what they
can do with it. And they'vebeen very experimental and really driven forward the
adoption rate massively, so we owean awful lot to them. Look into
the future, we've spent the lastyear developing our own in house AI tool,
which we have been calling AI Administrator, but that was a working title

(09:30):
which kind of got out of controland it's a terrible name, so we
changed that to teach Assist, andwe're now developing a version of that called
learn Assist, and that's really justusing the Opening Eye Chat GPT three point
five tool with a number of predefined prompts in a template overlaid and it
enables our teaching colleagues to create multiplechoice questionnaires, they can work in class

(09:54):
activities, they can rubrics and smarttargets, and a whole range of other
things that would other have been veryheavily manual in nature. And I think
you've had previous speakers on these podcaststalking about similar examples. But the take
up, again just through people adoptingit through their own volition, that's been
huge. And just in the lastsix months, we've gone from zero to

(10:15):
over seven hundred across the group ofpeople who are regularly using this, and
the feedback we've had from them hasbeen universally positive, and we're looking at
something like eighty percent or above interms of efficiency compared with how long it
used to take them to produce thoseteaching materials, So you multiply that across
the group and that is a genuinelytransformative change. So that's already happening now,

(10:39):
and we would look to start,I think encouraging people more and more
directly, more forcefully perhaps to adoptthis, because one of the things that
has been consistently fed back through staffsurveys is that people feel overworked, overburdened
with administration, and what are wegoing to do about it? This is
a classic example of a really positiveinnovation, and we're looking to extend that

(11:01):
now to learners as well, butwe need to tread quite carefully with that
for a whole range of reasons.So that's really what we're focused on at
the moment. Yeah, I lovethat obviously that there's a ranger tools,
isn't there at to the moment?And the teacher says, sounds sounds great,
and what you've developed here, Idon't want to miss this point about
teacher system you've built, because obviouslythere's advantages commercially otherwise to roll in this

(11:24):
out. But the flip side ofthat is actually that there are some alternative
platforms that have been described behind closeddoors by KURTA and I as useful,
simple and expensive. What risk doyou think that some colleges are overpaying for
what effectively are just front ends intoAI platforms because there's a lot of money
in some cases, isn't it.I think it's a very substantial risk of

(11:46):
that, and I think I guessmy message would be, don't be overawed
or to afraid of the technology,play around with it, let people in
your team experiment, because you'll beastonished at what they can do. So
if you give them a samdpit,a safe place to experiment, they'll be
able to produce a lot of thesethings for you without having to engage third

(12:07):
parties. But I know there areother equivalents to what we've done with teacher
assists, which would cost in theorder of hundreds of thousands of pounds for
us to license annually across a groupof our side. So I guess that's
the message you don't be too inawe of the technology. Yes, I
do think that's the case, becauseit's certainly what we're hearing and seeing is

(12:28):
every college in many colleges doing theirown thing specifically, and perhaps some advancing
quite quickly in others, perhaps notinequally. Colleagues have said within their own
organizations there's a very diverse early adoptershave talked about and perhaps some where technology
is more challenging and actually huge variantsin their own organizations alone. Are you're
seeing that really significant variance yourself.We talked about seven hundred staff obviously getting

(12:52):
involved in the platform, but that'sout of a total of maybe two and
a half thousand, so quite anumber of those I think over a thousand
of them are professional services and supportstaff, so maybe fifteen hundred frontline curriculum
colleagues, I would think, SoI guess off the back of that it's
maybe half of them have adopted inthe last six months, which I had
actually worked that out. But that'spretty good. But the other half,

(13:16):
I guess is what I'm saying ishow do we brigger them to engage in
how do we give them the bestBecause we talked about the improvements and really
just their life actually and their lifework balance and removing some of those administered
barriers. I think selling the benefitsthat this one sells itself. Really it
should be easier, in fact thanteams was. Teams succeeded because people talk

(13:39):
to one another in colleges and acrosscollege groups. And I mentioned that idea
of viral change, and I thinkthat will work here too. So just
let the grapevine do its work.And if an initiative is beneficial enough and
strong enough, then I think peoplewill adopt it of their own free will,
because it's patently of obvious, obviouslysensible thing to do. So some

(14:03):
people simply won't adopt this, andI think that will be a generational thing.
So as new blood flows into ourorganizations and people flow out the other
end, then I think that willgradually happen, just as the process of
demographics. So I think we haveto accept that not everyone will accept these
tools, and that's okay because timewill saw at that. Yeah. One

(14:26):
of the things we talked about ina previous session actually was the teacher education
and perhaps there's an opportunity here tobring in this technology at the earlier stages
of teacher education because at the momentit doesn't seem like that's embedded yet,
and to do that at a veryearly stage. We talk about the first
twelve months being probably the most difficultof any teacher's career and the amount of

(14:50):
administrative and trying to learn the curriculum, try to get all the materials and
resources developed and do your day job. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's
a really good point and it's anarea that we will be doing more work
on in future. So positioning digitalat the heart of TLA, I think
it's going to be an important partof our development plans in future. I

(15:11):
was very interesting and we just touchedon which was the learner cist. I'm
not sure how much you want tocan talk about there, but it'd be
love to hear a little bit moreabout what you're thinking. The challenges,
the opportunities seem to be enormous.Absolutely absolutely. Learning Syst as we've seen
it is like a virtual parent ora virtual mentor. So the kinds of

(15:33):
questions that our kids are are alot of the ones come home from college
and ask us over the dinner tableabout how would you tackle this situation,
what would the questions be that youwould be looking to research? And response
to this assignment challenge, I've gotI think there is a place for AI
there. So one of the featuresof learning Cyst is around starter activities.

(15:56):
So how do you get over thatblank page freak out thing that people often
now where they just can't get started? So my assignment is this or that?
And the prompt might say have youconsidered looking at these areas of interest?
And then they would be required togo off and do their own research.
There's a real difficulty there, whichI'm sure you're more than aware of

(16:17):
that we can't allow it to writethings for them, so all it can
really do is suggest you might wantto look in this direction or that direction.
But it certainly can't do any ofthe writing, so we have to
be quite careful with that, Butthere are lots of other things that can
do so helping them to generate CVSstudy plans, a rewording tool, a
kind of thesorous, industry trends,what's going on out there summary generated those

(16:41):
kinds of things. There's a wholerange of ideas we're batting around at the
moment, but it's still at thatvery experimental sandpit stage where we're working with
our students and with our curriculum colleaguesto see what we think is safe,
what we thinks useful, and whatdo we think will comply with with the
policy constraints we have to work with. In you've got your own personal tutor,

(17:03):
effectively, hopefully that's what it bringsto all of our students, where
mentors a tutor who you can askthose questions. I didn't really understand this
concept today that we learned in class, or could you re explain or all
of those things. Is that howyou see tools working to very much that.
I think that the conversation that seemsto be the elephant in the room

(17:26):
often or not, maybe not somuch an elephant in the room. But
the thing that's the real stumbling bookis this few that teachers will be replaced
in some way. I don't thinkthat's the case at all. I think
the work of a teacher will beaugmented by these tools, certainly not replaced,
not in our lifetime anyway. AndI can't imagine a time when it
would be, because you will alwaysneed somebody to go to, whether particularly

(17:48):
thorny problem for example, or togive a real world perspective on an example
that you're wrestling with. So Ithink that it's kind of small tutorials,
one to one kind of activities willbecome much much more powerful, and the
learning experience, I think will beimproved as a consequence of that. It's
so Scott. I was thinking backto your resume. So you had got
an MSc in Business and Internet backin about two thousand and one, so

(18:11):
it might be fair to assume thatyou're quite level headed about AI. So
if that's true, well, howdid you manage a potential sudden surge of
expectation or hype in the group.What were your experiences after jan AI landed.
I was surprised at how long ittook to surface and then once it

(18:33):
did surface, it quickly became amassive flood of interest. But by that
point, fortunately we had done quitea lot of work. We had established
an EI advisory group, brought abunch of people together who were interested in
the subject, in including learners,and we started to develop a policy.
So we had that in draft formalready, and we'd work through some basic

(18:56):
comms and training. Don't be afraidAI is not a monster, but these
are some basic things you should doand not do when you're using things like
chat GPT, for example. Justbe aware that's open source and it's going
out into the worldwide out into thewide world, which a lot of people
were completely unaware of. So thatwas an important step to take, just

(19:18):
getting that sort of basic primer ofinformation out there. And people, I
think have been reassured by the factthat we had given it some thought and
we were up and running and wehad teachers ready to roll out already.
People are calm about it here,they're excited. A lot of people are
off doing their own experiments and theirmobiles and such. We've put some safeguards
in place so that people can't putthings on our network and eavesdrop in meetings

(19:40):
for example, and you know thekind of security concerns that you get from
some of these recording tools that suddenlypop up in meetings. On the whole,
people have been pretty calm about itacross ENSETG. But I think we
were fortunate then having some people inour digital advocates community who were ahead of
the game, and then we couldpiggyback on that just to assure everyone else

(20:02):
that we weren't buying the curve.People have used the words leveling up of
education, giving everybody the same levelof input, if you like, with
having the access to suddenly to muchbetter educational resources perhaps and individualized support perhaps
where they haven't had it before.Now, I guess we all think it's

(20:23):
going to have an impact, butwill it genuinely? And I guess that's
the question mark, is that whatwill be the use cases? Will there
have been sufficient research to show theimpact. I'd certainly like to think so.
I mean, I know we're alllooking at English and maths for example,
and how we can improve delivery there. And I think when when you

(20:45):
take rule based content heavy subjects likethat, the perfectly suited to an EI
solution of some kind. Again toaugment the work of the teacher, and
one example of that might be todeliver content in a way which is adaptive
to the needs of the individual learner, in a way that would be physically

(21:06):
impossible for a single teacher to do, even under the best circumstances. So
I think to be blind to thatis pretty obtuse. Really. I know
there was some ESFA issued some guidanceI think it was a few months ago
anyway, which I think was drawnaround how we deliver teaching in those subjects,

(21:26):
which actually said you mustn't use technologybeyond a certain point. I forget
that the exact language they used todescribe that. It was clearly meant to
reinforce the need for face to facedelivery and achieving that by eliminating the possibility
of using technology to its fullest extent. I think that kind of intervention is
deeply unhelpful and counterproductive to the needsof the SFA as well. So hopefully

(21:52):
that was an unintended kind of consequence, just a quick error. But we
could do without those sorts of falseconstraints being put in our encouragement. Is
what we really need for these things? Yes, the sandbox approach where we
hopefully we can then genuinely come upwith use cases and the impact and that
it is in a superficial technology,because it always makes me wonder there are

(22:14):
any as good as the question thatyou ask it? So yes, more
questions aren't good enough. Will youget really the detailed support that you need
out of a tool like that?And so that will be I guess it's
in the technology and for those toprove these cases and to show how genuinely
good they are or are they reallydo you need the support of a teacher
in order to enable them to maximizetheir impact? And that will be really

(22:37):
interesting to watch this space actually overthis period and augment versus individualization and self
direct and I think that's a greatexample of where the rule of the teacher
could evolve. So they'll use theirknowledge, their expertise, their experience to
write prompts that they know will comefrom the class that they're working with,
and then creating the way we havedone with teacher system by creating a kind

(23:02):
of template of pre defined prompts,which makes it easier then for the learner
to get to what they need withouthaving to be an accomplished prompt engineer.
Themselves, So I think that wouldbe a really interesting direction of travel.
Actually, any final words of adviceor recommendations for the wider sector that draw
on your experiences maybe leave us witha positive message today, I think the

(23:25):
positive message. Gosh, I hadn'tanticipated that question, but there are so
many I think faith in the peoplewe work with is something that I think
we would do well to remind ourselvesof from time to time. That the
temptation to command and control to leadby Dick Tat, I think if there
ever was a time when that wasthe right approach, I think it's far

(23:48):
behind us now. I think ona number of occasion that I've caught myself
just in the course of this discussiontalking about grassroots and viral change and advocates
and people doing things of their ownvolition. I think if you make a
case strongly enough, and you sellthe benefits convincingly enough, then people will
galvanize around those ideas and adopt themof their own free will. So I

(24:10):
think have faith in the people wework with, it's probably a pretty good
message. And don't be afraid ofthe technology. Scot We may need to
ask you to come back again andupdates later on in this series at some
point, but for now. Thankyou so much for the time and all
the incredible information that you've shared.I know it's so useful for Kurt,
and I will be for everybody tuningin today to hear this too. Huge

(24:30):
thanks, You're welcome. It wasgreat fun nice talking to you both.