Day two of eLFA continued many of the themes from day one: social learning and the constant question of how do we know that what we are doing is benefiting student learning. Both powerful and important themes. Prof Lillian Vrijimoed’s work from City U of Hong Kong was fascinating: getting her students to go out there into their world and find examples of microbiology in their daily lives: mLearning at its best. Also later in the day an absolutely brilliant explanation of the development of an automated test of spoken Chinese delivered by Prof Li Xiao Qi from Peking Unviersity. This paper was delivered in Chinese and many of the slides were in Chinese but the incredible translators did a great job and I was able to follow what was being said and argued. It’s clear that there are some astonishing automatic tools out there for testing spoken language skills and moving into tonal languages is a particular challenge. But it was the plenaries and keynotes on this day that really brought the themes of the conference together. Matthew Smith offered some compelling, and to a certain extent, sobering statistics and data about the ubiquity of mobile learning devices and the strategy taken at Southern Cross University in Australia to meet the challenge this BYOD culture presents and to find ways to support students. He’s a great speaker and it was fascinating to listen to his ideas. I really enjoyed Prof. Ruay-Shiung Change from National Dong Hwa University talking about Learning 3.0: a very compelling argument for social, connected, collaborative learning. This was a theme picked up by Assoc Prof Daniel Tan in his contribution to the Panel Discussion which brought the conference to an end with an empassioned plea for a move from eLearning to ‘we’Learning. It was fantastic also to hear the reflections of Dr J.T Yu, the Chairman and Founder of the forum. He too had some powerful things to say about the direction in which we need to travel in terms of harnessing the potential that is becoming available.

I had the pleasure and honour of sharing lunch with a group of colleagues from Hong Kong Baptist, including Eva Wong. Dr Yu was at the table and it was enlightening to hear his enthusiasm for the ideas I explored during that lunch conversation to do with learning and assessment analytics. It was clear that this is a vision he has had for the future potential of eLearning for some time and he finds it rewarding to see it starting to come to fruition.

Overall – it was a fantastic experience to hear from the experiences and vision of the learned colleagues invited to deliver keynotes and plenaries.