Yes, welcome. Being recorded, we're on air and it's time for the Eden NAP webinar, which is about widening access to open education, looking at the way forward, and also focusing a little bit quite a lot on the recent Erasmus Plus project, Moonlight, which both of us have been involved in. So my name is Alistair Creelman. I come from Linnaeus University in Sweden, the southeast of Sweden in the corner. You can see on the map where I am. And yeah, Kim. Thank you, Alistair. My name is Timothy Reed. I'm at UNED, the National Distance Learning University here, smack bang in the middle of in Spain in Madrid. And as Alistair said, we worked together on the Moonlight project. And we're hoping that some of the conclusions we got from this project and also a large amounts of time we spent discussing these issues, both with project members and other academics, colleagues and friends we can share with you today. Yeah, as usual in these webinars, sadly, we can't actually see or hear you at the moment. You're registered as participants, but we want to hear by in the chat. We'll certainly give you plenty of opportunity to write your ideas. We have some polls for you, one in just a second. So we hope to get lots of interactions. So have your fingers on the keyboards ready to contribute. Okay, this we're looking at widening access to open education, but also a little bit of taking stock of where is open education today. I think really all of us who are assembled here, I have a suspicion we're all very familiar with open education. We probably all work with open education. But if you look around at the higher education sphere, not everybody is involved. In fact, enormous amounts of colleagues have very little idea that open education even exists or what the opportunities are. And we're sort of looking at sort of where do we how do we get forward on this? How do we widen access? There are many examples of widening access to open education and getting more people involved in higher education. But is it really getting through? Is the message being becoming mainstream? So, yeah, Tim. No, I was going to say that I think that's an interesting reflection because I've been going to the, for example, the Alt, the Association for Learning Technology in the UK. Open education, the OER conferences for some years now. And every once in a while, this topic comes up. We've been working with open education, but the impact seems to be a little limited. What can we do to increase that? And I think that now with some of the changes we've had, the political and sociological changes we've been seeing. For example, with the refugee crisis and the changing population across Europe. And I think this question is even more pertinent now than ever. And I think that hopefully we can make some reflections upon that point as the session goes on. Okay. So I would like to move on to a first bit of input from you. Hold on a second. Move over to the main. Here we are. Here's a poll for you. Get some ideas, brainstorm, chat as much as possible. What are the key challenges for widening access to open education as you see it? Just write in your comment and they will appear under the answers. So just get started basically. I mean, there's a potentially almost limitless list that can go in here depending really on context.  Lots that can actually go in the cooking pot here. Absolutely. BAM with limitations and also device limitations. A lot of people don't have access to good computing devices. And even if they are able to download a lot of open content, you can't really make the most of it. At the same time, there are, I mean, there's a lot of people working on this. I saw a wonderful application from around various countries around the world. I think it was in Uganda where they had a very nice, they had a solar powered server. You could load it with educational resources from a central location and then take it out to schools in outlying areas. It was run on solar power and could thereby transmit that information to tablets and mobiles in the classroom. And so they had access to online learning, even if they were not online or on the electricity grid. There was work going on like that. Student participation. Yes. That's a good one because quite often the most disadvantaged students all they want is face to face contact with their educators. Because that gives them a lot of the well needed support. So having to connect to online resources and activities is necessarily the desired output for them. Any, some more challenges? That's a good one as well. Aligning with institutional culture. I think that's the... Sometimes you see the importance of the bottom up initiatives being driven by teaching staff and the top down ones being supported by and funded by institutions and regional governments. Yes, we'll be touching on that for a long time. Institutional leadership, government initiatives, sort of part of a culture. Need for student self-directedness, that's another problem. People don't know how to take advantage of open education. In many cases they don't know, many of them, most people don't know it exists. Most people don't know how to use it, even if they do find it. And therefore it doesn't get used. Indeed, and what to do with it, I think that's a key thing because if they are already students, then quite often I've got a curriculum and associated materials with that curriculum. And it's difficult for people just to pick up additional materials and sometimes feel a bit concerned that they're going to get confused with extra material. OK. And another issue I think is the thing that even if you're not on a kind of formal course and you come across an education of a source which is useful and you can actually make a note of the fact you studied this on your curriculum. I mean who's there to vouch for the fact you've got it? I often think sometimes that when people enter into the world of open education it's recognition certification. Rather than if you like getting yourself a job with that, you can certainly get yourself an interview. And that's your opportunity to show that you actually know something about what you're talking about. OK, you're welcome to continue to comment in the chat, but I would like to... I'd like to... We move on with a little bit of input before we get you back to ask you more questions. A bit of background, Tim. What we experienced in the Moonlight Project, some conclusions, some thoughts. And keep the comments coming in the chat, please. Just your ideas, your questions, whatever you think. OK, Tim. Sure, absolutely. OK, let's talk about this then. I don't want to get into too much detail about the Moonlight Project because you have the link there. It's now finished at the end of August and all of our documentation outputs and results are available on the website. So you can find out more about what we were doing. But really the objective of this project was to apply open education specifically for disadvantaged people, typically refugees and migrants, and help them with social inclusion, entering into the higher education market and also into employment. And we were focusing on the sort of skills you'd need to get businesses going and also a key for us were linguistic issues. So this is quite a narrow focus, and I think we managed to do this quite well. But at the same time, as the project was finishing, we came to see the broader conclusions for what I call OERP, open education and resources and practices for the world in general. We think about the sustainable development goals for 2030, for example, and I think open education has a lot to offer to those particular goals. So as part of this process, we've been fortunate enough to account on the generosity of colleagues and experts for lots of conversations, round table sessions, workshop events, and just general interviews. And from that, we've drawn what we've set up as being the Hague Declaration, which essentially highlights these seven challenges, which we think could be game-changers for moving open education forward into the short-term future. And we're going to use this as a skeleton, if you like, for the input here and as a background. I mean, I don't think we necessarily mean to imply that it is the only challenges, but that other challenges that are easily identical, I think, can be subsumed by these. So let's just go through them now and give you, if you like, a bit of a taste of our thoughts on them. I mean, we can start off by talking about the question of access to MOOCs and open education. And the irony here, quite a lot of the time, is that a lot of the people who can most benefit from open education are the ones who don't actually come across the sort of courses they want and aren't necessarily always able to participate in them. I mean, one of the things we did as part of this group was to reach out, in our case, to the refugee support groups, to different associations, charities who were working with this particular kind of people and actually get them involved in their project, which enabled us to actually come into contact with the refugees and migrants, and certainly the ones that were either in Spain or coming to Spain and looking to try and settle down and have a future here. And it was really quite interesting in a way there. Just the lack of idea that these people had about open education and what you could do with online teaching. For example, there was a very well-established non-governmental organization in Madrid that teaches face-to-face classes with refugees and migrants, and they've been doing this for several years. It's an amazing service, and they had no idea what online education could actually offer to their students. So we ended up doing a couple of language MOOCs as part of the courses. We let them run them in a blended learning fashion, and it was actually quite positive. That's one of the problems, and you can say, okay, we can maybe get round this, if you like, by aggregating better the courses, informing the different associations and trying to get the information out. But the other side of the coin, of course, is that even if they know about the courses, MOOCs are run typically on a regular basis. They might be run twice, four times, eight times a year, but they're not open all the time. So if a particular group of people or even an individual wants to enter a course, it may not be around at that particular time. So what can we do about that? Well, we can actually try and make the access to the course as flexible as possible. Actually, I'll move on to that point here. So one thing we can do is try to have a particular course running as far as possible, as many times as possible. And the other thing is that when they're not being run, to actually leave them as open educational resources, take a snapshot of the forums, for example, and the interactive activities, because it can be a little dangerous for the people who are participating in these courses or want to participate if they come across forums and there isn't anybody on the other end to actually answer. It can be a bit difficult because then other people come in to answer their questions and it can be a little bit chaotic. So we need to freeze the forums and the chats and the activities, but leave the resources online. So it's very important in that sense to use open licenses for the content, creative comments, stuff like approaches like that, but make it available as possible. And this, I think, will fit in with something that Alistair might be saying later on when we look at the business models, because the problem with this approach is that it's very nice to have open courses and everything's free, but we all know, all of us grown-ups in the room know, that there's no such thing as free. Somebody somewhere is paying. So if it's free for our users, it's not necessarily free for us. We have to keep the service running, the electricity. We have to keep the networks open. The people who are preparing the content, who's going to be facilitating the courses. So it's tricky. So in a way, if we are very, very stringent about this, so everything has to be open and free, it can be a problem for our institutions and their business models. So we need to be careful. I mean, there are ways around it with services that can be value-added related, but the core part of the courses need to be open as far as possible to something. Then of course to leave the resources open and free, but with some kind of guidance for teachers and let other institutions use that material and form courses around it, applying it to the local situation. That's a model that is being used by several operators and seems quite successful. Give people the material and the chance to actually do something with it. Absolutely. I mean, that can't work. I've got a colleague in another open university in Europe and they have a huge amount of content of resources and activities put online and they actually track what happens. And it's done in such a way that the idea is that fellow colleagues download the courses, they use them, they adapt them, et cetera, and then they upload them again if you like to improve and extend the content and the data is actually quite damning in that sense. Lots of people download it, presumably they use it, but nobody actually uploads it again. That is something that still needs to be solved if it is in fact a reasonable possibility for progress in this particular area. Okay, another important issue here is that of support for the people who are actually taking the courses. I mean, I don't want to get into the whole issue of drop-out because sometimes MOOCs in a way are heavily criticized because of the drop-out rates, which can be as high as 90% on these courses. There are lots of counter-arguments about this, saying like for a lot of the people who enter in MOOCs, they're not entering to do the whole course. They're just entering because they want to get some of the resources, have a look and come out. And I must admit, I've done a few MOOCs that way. I don't have the time to do the course, but I'm very interested in the topics, so I'll just go up and cherry-pick some of the resources. But what we need to appreciate with this is that if we're offering open education for students that are outside of our typical catchment area. I mean, when MOOCs were first being offered in 2012 and then the majority of the people who were actually taking part in these courses were actually people who already had degrees. They were European or North American students and they were already educated and familiar with using online platforms. Culturally, quite used to doing what we're doing now. What are we doing? We're sharing. We're opening ourselves up to this event without being recorded, without any hesitation or preoccupations. But for people coming from a different area, for men, for example, from the Middle East or North of Africa, they may not be quite so open to doing this, especially if they're refugees, they've had to flee from a particular conflict situation at home. Then they can be a little concerned about the way they actually participate online. So they need to be supported. And this can be done. It can be done implicitly in the way the course is prepared and also in the role we give to the facilitators and tutors on the course to actually interact with the people so that they feel safe and they feel they are able to participate. I think this is fitting quite nicely with the comment that Alistair made just before the video was being recorded at this session for the participants. Of course, if there's anybody here who doesn't want to leave personal data in their recording, then they can just log back in with an imaginary name and that way it solves the problem. So I feel like the other side of the argument here is it's not just a question of supporting. It's a question of preparing the course as a priori to be inclusive, designing and developing the MOOCs for that. And there are lots of different important issues that need to be addressed for this to work. And it does work because, for example, the two language MOOCs we ran inside the Moonlight Project rather than having a 10% finishing rate, we had over 30% of the people finishing the courses, and they really were connecting and participating well online. So if you want to read this, and I don't have time to go into all the details now, then I strongly suggest you have a look at some of the reports we've written on the project website. But if I only identify one element which I thought was really key to this process is to involve your public in the design, development, and deployment of the courses, which we were lucky enough to do. Thanks to our stakeholders, our refugee support groups, and the refugees themselves, we were able to listen to them and say, okay, within the limit of the project, what kind of courses would you like? How would you like these courses to be structured and what kind of activities would you like to be undertaken there? And then by starting from there, we were able to develop the materials with them and actually test the learning scenarios with small groups. And I mean, it just worked very, very well. It was such a character-building and positive exercise for everybody involved. And it really enabled us to actually scaffold the whole process and enable them to actually connect with the tool. I mean, one thing I think I should mention as well is that there are a whole set of limitations of whatever technology you're going to be using. Every MOOC platform has its limitations. I mean, sometimes we're lucky in the sense that our institution has its own platform or has an agreement with a big MOOC platform, which are very powerful and have a lot of functionality. Other times we don't have that, but we don't necessarily have to have a MOOC platform to run these open educational courses. And it's really possible to do this using the open tools that are actually online if we're not necessarily concerned with the branding issues. If we're happy to have the platforms actually there. So I think that's really enough for me now. And as I say, all the information underlying these points are on the project website and you can, in fact, go and have a look at this in more detail if you want to. So let me just summarize. So what I've said to start with in the four points I was covering is that the important characteristics is to improve the access to the courses in a sense of visibility and also that they are available in more time. Try to keep them open and free as much as possible. And the idea of designing for inclusion, designing for your audience and then the need to actually provide the support in the MOOCs as they run. So I think what we can do now is if we can go back to the chat and I can just shut up for a minute here and that will give you the opportunity to agree, disagree, share some reflections or personal experiences and that will give Alistair and myself the opportunity to participate in this as well. We're looking for some comments in the chat, please. Have you got something to offer on these points? What do you think about these points? I have actually decided to open mics and if you have a good headset installed and you have the opportunity, you can raise your hand and there's a button up there for raising your hand and you are welcome to speak. Top left, yep. You can actually, I think it's quite alright for you to speak if that is easier. But please raise your hand first and we'll invite you to speak while you type. I can see people are typing here. Yes, I think in fact the number was closer to 32% and the satisfaction questionnaires were very, very positive. In fact we ran two language mooks, both A1 and A2 and the first one had somewhere in the region of 2,500 people connected, of which 30% finished and we ran the second part of the course slightly more advanced and we had about 1,300. And once again the finishing rates were pretty much the same. Yeah, I think they were quite successful. I mean what people actually really wanted was if you like the sub-language of Spanish in your typical situations that they'd find themselves if they came to Spain. So for example, going to the town hall, the first thing you need to actually register, get your permission documents for being here and you actually have to get. Then if you like going to the chemist shop, going to the doctor, of course can sometimes be a problem if you can imagine it. If you've got a lady with a child who's ill from a Middle Eastern background and has to go along and see a male doctor then it can be a little stressful shall we say. So predefined time slots, I mean both language mooks lasted six weeks but like any mooks we had a suggested timing. You have the first week which is feel like it's just getting to know the platform, getting to know the content and the sixth week which is the catch-up week and doing all the activities you haven't done. Then we had one topic a week and that way it enabled us to actually get some structure. Okay, and hello, the impact from a social inclusion point of view, one of the things we were very careful to do with this was to actually train our facilitators and also content developers so that the language was always inclusive by nature and that rather than if you like talking about us and you, we were talking about we the entire time and trying to move people into feeling safe and secure with them and actually trying to get them to feel part of the same if you like wider social group that we were on the course. And we actually did, we got an article coming out about the use of inclusive language in MOOCs and I think that was actually quite important. The activities were limited in a way by the platform because at our institution we use Open edX so you know the sorts of tools you've got there. I mean we combined closed test with Open report essay writing that's corrected if you like in a peer-to-peer way. So if you write your report, you submit it and then you correct three other reports and that way when you get the feedback you get the feedback from the three people. The other thing we tried to do as well was to correct people's language in the forum. I mean the course was a Spanish course but it was A1, A2 using the common European framework of reference for languages. So you really can't expect too much in the way of interaction in the target language. So we also allowed them to use their own languages. People were speaking in Arabic and in French and we were lucky enough to have facilitators who could use those languages and basically help them. So the open tools for the MOOC, I mean you've got two choices as far as I can see. You can use the tools which the platform actually provides which the advantage is there is you've got the analytics about how they're working, you can capture the results. When you grade them you can use them toward the final grade of the course or you can just take people out and get them to use other tools, other kinds of resources that are actually online. I mean we had a Facebook group associated with the MOOCs for example and once we got people in that kind of environment then as I say the interchange of information between us was a lot more open. But then once again it's a bit of a trust because you're crossing a line in a way because when they register for the course they can use any name they want. We're not controlling them. But of course when you connect back to a social network and they're already on that social network then you have to be a bit careful because typically these are people's real profiles and unless they've got the security carefully set up on Facebook it's very easy just a couple of clicks to jump across to their timeline, see their friends, see their family, etc. So I think that's things that have to be done. Another key issue at the time of choosing tools is thinking about where these people are going to be and what kind of devices they're going to be using. I mean the majority of our students were using their mobile phones and most of them were already somewhere in Europe and had access to reasonable bandwidth so when we were careful, when we built the videos that they were short they were low resolution so it wasn't difficult for them to download but we also had transcriptions. We had transcriptions in Spanish and then we had transcriptions in their own languages to actually enable them to download the content to their phone and then they could actually use it as much as they wanted to and then unfortunately for the activities they had to actually connect back. Alistair. Don's question about providing support and so on. I think one of the models Kairon has been very successful as I understand with this is getting local support centres, workers in refugee support centres, it can be libraries, it can be community centres but getting them on board and having communication with them, providing them with maybe a little bit of a basic handbook or something so that they can gather learners locally and talk to them and guide them through it because I don't think that these sort of groups are just going to use their mobile and get onto a MOOC just like that. They need to get that inspiration and support locally and so local support is extremely important but that's relying on voluntary workers doing it. It's relying on a sort of very informal network. That's an excellent question or comment, Don. I know what Alistair said. In our case, what we did, obviously if you've got 3,000 students there, they're not all active online at the same time in the forums and the participation is a lot smaller than that but what we did was to really, really try and make the MOOCs a blended learning activity so if you like a lot of the students, the people who actually came in contact with the MOOCs, they came in contact because of the refugee support groups who are actually pushing information out saying these people are doing this project, it's well worth trying it, have a go if you've got any problems, get back to us. And then, as I said, there was lots of documentation. There was textual and video documentation about the platform, about how this could, the interaction could be handled and for the facilitators, we actually provided them, we scaffolded their interactions with the students and tried to actually get them to participate in this particularly positive way.  So it's a question of if you like picking one little mistake and correcting it constantly and trying to get them to come back with you using that same particular expression and getting it to work. The whole thing, the whole key issue here was getting them in from the very beginning. This wasn't, I mean, look where the smart academics and our ivory towers, look, this is what you need. No, no, no, no, we had them in at the beginning. We told them about the project, you know, free tea and biscuits. Then we had the sessions about what open education is, what MOOCs are, et cetera. And then we all sat around the round table and we thought about how we could do that and they were participating as well as they did. And Frank, the question about the certificate, we gave a free one ECTS certificate to everybody who did that. We didn't do digital badges, but it was a standard UNED one ECTS, which they get as a PDF. On the front it gets their course title, details about it, the name, the fact that it's worth one ECTS at UNED if you like. And on the back of the certificate you had a full breakdown of everything they've done in their course. We can move on a bit. Tim, you're welcome to continue answering the questions in the chat while I'm talking. I mean, I think it's very important that the moving on to the next part here, that it's about sort of recognition and MOOC certification and so on. The point that Farage was making there about badges and so on. Badges can be very nice and so on, but what a lot of the, in terms of social inclusion, what they really want are real credentials and giving them one ECTS, although it is merely symbolic, it is a credential that is accepted. And in this sort of situation that is vital for the people taking these courses. They want to get a foothold in the new society and a credit here and there can make a big difference. It shows that they're on track. We need more recognition than prior learning. We need recognition of MOOCs, whatever we want to define them as, or open education in general. Basically, I mean, recognition to prior learning needs to be strengthened. We can see that around Europe. And there's a lot of initiatives at the moment looking at how to recognize non-formal learning, how to recognize open education, how to make MOOCs more credible in terms of getting ECTS, instead of getting real credits for them and how to make that, how to be able to do that in a safe way and a trustworthy way so that they are credible credentials at the end. There are many projects at the moment in Europe doing this. I mean, we have the EuroPASS, we have the EU Skills Profile, the European Qualifications Framework. There's been other projects like OEPASS and MicroHE. I could give a long list of projects and initiatives over the last few years that are doing extremely interesting work on how we can credentialize this sort of amoebic or very difficult to define learning that's going on in workplaces in our free time through open educational resources, through open courses, and through general work experience. The trouble is that MOOCs are recognized very sporadically. Some universities are working with providing credentials for MOOCs. Many universities won't accept them at all. Many will deny that they are valid for anything. Many countries in the world, there's no formal recognition of e-learning at all. Any sort of online learning is looked upon with suspicion. Refugees are unable to get scholarships or financial support often to get on into higher education. Really, we wondered, can we get an internationally accepted recognition framework for MOOCs? Would that be possible? Can we get some kind of overarching principle that everyone can sign up to? Many questions here, but no real answers, except that this is an urgent, this is something that is quite urgent, both in Europe and around the world. And there is work in progress and some very admirable work. Yeah, I could just add we've just started a new Erasmus Plus project running through 2022, exactly on that particular issue, ECOA, which is really trying to look at a system for making the process of mutual recognition of micro-credentials a lot more agile, because it really is a problem. Somebody from Lithuania decides they want to do one of our Spanish language MOOCs, we give them an ECTS, but then when they get back to their university, the credits are not actually recognized for anything. I mean, most Bologna degrees have this idea of your free credits, but then actually getting somebody else's credits actually recognized is difficult. You know, I always think it's a bit like the old saying, it's easier to use an academic's toothbrush than his technology or his certificates. Yep, exactly. Thanks so much. You're welcome to post the links to Micro-HE and OEPASS for those who are interested, because in the chat that's very good to have links, and the people watching this recording can also click on them and investigate these two projects. We need open educational policies at national and international levels. As many of you know, I mean, there are plenty of top-level initiatives, international initiatives from the European Commission, from UNESCO, from OECD, all of whom have raised the importance of open educational resources and practice recognition of open educational initiatives. There's a lot of excellent top-level documentation and recommendations, and international conferences regularly come out with position papers, recommendations, and declarations. So there are many, many very, very good and very practical suggestions out there. The trouble is that it's a bit of a patchwork approach at national level. Some countries are listening to this and doing something about it, and others are not. And it varies very much from one to the other. Open education is far from mainstream, as I said in the previous one, it's still questioned by many people. And it seems in a way that if you look at the situation today, there's a lot of top-down initiatives from the very top, from a sort of international level. There's a lot of initiatives from the bottom up, but somewhere in the middle, things seem to go missing. I'm not sure how you see it in your country, but I think that's a very common problem. And so we have lots of puzzle, we have lots, the jigsaw puzzle has lots of pieces that we're only just putting it together, and we still have quite a long way to go to get some kind of policy sort of consistent policies at both these levels, and that it actually also gets down to institutional level. I think you're completely right there. I mean, the most activity is at the top of the bottom of the sandwich, if you like. And I think until we get clear leadership at a political level, if you like a European level, which then has implications for national governments, and they, therefore, when actually defining their educational laws or actually making it part of the, in the same way they specify what has to be on a particular syllabus for a particular kind of degree, then they can also actually include these sorts of appreciations about open education and what we can actually do with them. Because you can tell sometimes by, if you look at how the wind blows, if you're looking at the European funding, I mean, what the Europe is funding is giving you an idea of what's important for them. And I think the idea, if you like the new migration into Europe, the initial skills that the refugees and migrants would need are linguistic skills, I think that was the case a few years ago, and it's not the case now. They realize that these sorts of questions are pretty much being solved. So now we're moving on to the next level, if you like, and I've got another project about citizenship at European level as well. And these are the sorts of skills you want to get new democracy, the decision-making processes, or part of social inclusion to make you feel part of a country where you actually are. And as part of this, if you like, we've got the real free movement between European countries, but we don't have that with our educational qualifications. I mean, I can remember in my case, I mean, 30 years ago when I moved from the UK to Spain, I already had a degree, I already had a doctorate, but I wanted to work in a Spanish university, and it was very difficult for me to get these qualifications, if you like, officially recognized by the Spanish educational authorities so I could actually teach in the university. I mean, it took me six months of painstaking paperwork and paying lawyers and all sorts of issues to do it, but I managed it, and that was between two European countries. I mean, if I'm coming here somewhere from the Middle East, and I have limited financial resources, that would just be mission impossible. So that's something we need to think about how to address, I think. Indeed. Finally, on this sort of new funding business models, in a way, we've been looking at MOOCs a lot, but what is a MOOC anyway? What actually is it anymore? It's morphed into many, many different branches. There are still very many courses that are genuinely open online. They can be massive, and they are open. They're free to copy. They're free to use. Genuinely open courses still exist. There's still quite a lot of them. On the other hand, many of the top commercial platforms are sort of monetizing everything. So we see more and more monetization of these courses, and in fact, the term MOOC is not being used so much by many of these actors. We're talking about... Let's talk about online courses that you pay money for. You may be able to look at the material for free, but you certainly can't participate for free anymore. You certainly can't get any credentials for free. You can't get any support for free, so that more and more layers are being built on this model. So we have to really... Let's look more at sort of open education or how we define that than actually talking about MOOC so much. Maybe the term has run its course and it's time to look at new terms for this, preferably not complicated acronyms. There are... I mean, there's a lot of collaboration going on. A lot of universities, especially in Europe, are now running their own MOOC platforms or regional MOOC platforms, which are done on a very sort of open and sharing culture. They're taking the risks together. They're not running it for commercial gain. There is a lot of collaboration and interesting projects, but they're not very visible very often unless you know where to look. We need incentives for universities to engage more in widening access to higher education and using open education to do that and sharing resources. There still isn't that top-down incentive for universities to get involved if they don't want to. Could we have a European MOOC portal? Is it necessary? You can write your views in the chat or in the minute. We're going to open up for some more ideas from you. There are lots of MOOC portals, but no one portal covers everything. We have Class Central, but it generally looks at the commercial MOOC platforms rather than those of the more innovative open courses that are a little bit under the radar. The commercial platforms are the most visible, basically, and that's what most people refer to when they're talking about this phenomenon. So, really, if we come to sort of find some conclusions on this... Tim? Well, I think one of the things I mentioned in the chat, if you like, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think it's quite true that not all ECTS are equal. I mean, when we started on the Bologna process, the idea of actually, you know, targeting our courses and our teaching at ECTS, which is very important, if you like, as a kind of currency for open education in the same way as it is. I mean, all it really has achieved, in my humble opinion, is that we're using the same language to talk to each other, not that we actually understand what each other is saying. It's actually difficult. I like to think that, if you like, the credits we give on these courses sometimes are like bank notes. If you're walking around with euros, dollars, and UK pounds sterling in your wallet, then you've got a good chance of being able to go just about everywhere and spend it. But if you come from some smaller countries with their currency, then that's not guaranteed. So, we do really need to solve this question of recognition and the added value of certification. And there are a lot of initiatives going on. You've talked about them, and this is something that needs to happen more so in the future. And the European Commission are funding these sorts of projects, and I think that we'll see more of this in the future. And then it's also the practical value of the course, because we're talking about this, if you like. It's not just about people doing a course on, basically Spanish so they can get up to a B1, B2 level to be able to study in a foreign university. I mean, what about practical and more applied skills, in which case what we need is enough to be able to start working in the job market, in which case once you're a potential employer, it's actually seen that you're able to do the job you said you could do, then you'll have more trust in you and things will advance from there. Okay, we're heading towards the end. We've got a question below. Let's see if we can get some answers. Of course, you can write in the chat. Keep chatting away, please. The more you contribute, the better it gets. But there's a question down here. And let's see if... Why is open education not more widely used or appreciated? Or maybe we... Do you feel we've already answered that? Or have you got some clues there? Any other... Why is it not really getting through? The idea is wonderful that we all... Education is there to be shared. Knowledge can be shared. By sharing with each other, our knowledge can grow. We can exchange experience. It seems like an o-brainer. Somehow there are things that stop us. Credibility and credentialing. Yep, that I think is right. But it depends on which institution is actually certifying the activities that are going along. And it's interesting because when MOOCs first were getting hot in the beginning, then there were some conferences on MOOC. And I remember going along with sort of talks about, but how can we actually really know it's the student who's doing the work on the course and it's not their smart cousin who's already qualified, et cetera. And there were some very deep and meaningful reflections and people started to work on some really sophisticated technology like keyboard recognition, cameras, et cetera, et cetera. Or in fact, what we did at UNEDB, which was quite a pragmatic solution, at least for the people in Spain, was to let the students, if they wanted to, go along to one of our regional study centres and do the final test there. They'd have to have their identity document on the table next to them and we could see who was doing it. That's one way. But I think as time has gone on, we've kind of moved away from these anxieties because it's not typically about one big killer test that somebody has to do. If you have a well-structured MOOC with 10, 20 activities at the end of the course, you might be able to get your smart cousin to come in and do the first couple.  But I think this credibility issue will continue but in the same way as it is for standard degrees and mattress qualifications at the moment. Dale has mentioned PLAR, would weed out the smart cousins. I'm not sure what PLAR means. Dale will elaborate, I think, because he's typing at the moment. The mind boggles. I think... Please leave a reward. I've got no idea. Oh, prior learning. Oh, okay. Fair enough. I mean, we also have these sort of remote proctoring solutions. Of course, they're commercial, but they could be run by universities in collaboration but being able to monitor, as you said, using remote cameras, with sensors to track keyboard patterns and so on and having a camera monitoring the person all the time and locking down the computer to only allow the test to be run. There are various technical ways to make sure that really the person who's doing it is the person they say they are and to be able to show your ID card or password right in front of the camera. But I think this is a bit of a dead end. I think we're not going to get very far with that kind of argument and I still think that the value, really, is that what an Open Educational Certificate gives you. It opens the door towards something else. So, for example, let's imagine I've done some kind of introductory physics MOOC and then I start doing a degree in physics. I mean, I'm not going to get very far on that course. I doubt very much I'd even finished the first semester of my exams if I've had somebody else doing the course for me. It's really about learning for your capacitation and being able to do things in a better way. I mean, something we haven't mentioned here, which is also important, if you like, sometimes there's hidden political agendas that are not actually obvious. And sometimes it seems to me, why aren't people using Open Education? Well, because there's a lot of people who make an awful lot of money by selling content, selling their books, giving talks, providing teaching, if you like. And it's something that, well, I don't know if it's necessarily a completely bad thing at the end of the day.  So it's just things we need to take into account. When he was talking about the sandwich, if you like, and we don't really want to be squeezing the bread. We want to be putting more in the filling, trying to get the institutions to actually participate more in these issues. There's a comment here below. If you were talking about developing world, a very different range of complexities. I mean, yeah, we've got to talk about basics. Access at all, as we said. Access to technology, access to quality education. It's very complex. As I said, there are some excellent schemes going on in many developing countries using, as I said, solar-powered servers and using low-tech solutions, providing sort of bite-sized learning on mobiles, for example, which are much easier for people to acquire than anything else. And they're quite widespread. And yes, getting access when you don't have electricity, when you don't have internet, that's no amount of open education is going to help you. But there are openings here. Things are beginning to happen. Yeah, I think that's right. And certainly the refugees I've spoken to who have either been living in camps or have come out of the camps, it's not like us. At the moment we're sat in reasonably warm, quiet rooms and we have the luxury of being able to think and participate. And that's quite often not the case if you've got maybe four families sharing a tent. I mean, the noise and the background in it, the difficulties apart from the bandwidth limitations, I mean, that's the least of their worries in a way. It's just very, very difficult, apart from the psychological issues, because you don't just typically hop on the bus and move from one country to another quite happily and relocate. They've been through some pretty traumatic experiences. People who've migrated and haven't had to go through those sorts of circumstances can typically feel very alienated and they're not necessarily psychologically in the best place to be worrying about education. And it's a cushion of trust and stuff. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying and a lot of progress has been made and a lot of people who are, if you like some of the people that are moving into Spain and stuff, they're studying on our courses and we know that they're better able to integrate when they actually get there. And I think just a final comment about this because it's not directly related to the project, but it's also interesting to think about the mindset of the people who feel like refugees that are moving over because they quite often don't see themselves as moving into Spain for the rest of their life. They just think they're going to be here there for a few years until the situation in their own country gets better and they want to go home. I mean, I've spoken to Syrian refugees. They're still believing this and you say, well, yeah, but have you actually seen what Syria actually looks like at the moment? You think in 10 years' time you're going to be able to go back? I mean, we all hang on to hope and I think sometimes as soon as people realize that they need to adapt, adopt and improve, the better it can be for them. All the people I know from around there, I mean, they're making a good show of it, but they really are homesick. The trouble is you're homesick for a country that doesn't exist anymore in the way you remember it. Anyway, we need to begin to wrap up things here. Please keep writing in the chat. You're welcome to do that. I would also like to tell you that if you see below on the little presentation there, you can click on these links. There's the link to the Moonlight Project where all the outputs are available. There are lots of reports available. There's a lot of stuff there. If you're interested in learning more, we even have the Facebook group is still going. Books for social inclusion and employability and will continue as long as there's activity there. However, I'd like to point you in the direction of other things because later this evening we have an Eden chat, and that's part of the process here. A chance to discuss these issues in more detail. It's fast and furious. Chatting via Twitter is a bit of a challenge for some people, but I find it very stimulating. You need a critical mass, so if any of you are on Twitter, get on there at 6 o'clock this evening, a little bit before, and search the hashtag Eden chat, and that will get a column up so you can see everything that has the hashtag. I'll be asking questions, and you answer them or contribute, and every tweet you use, you use the hashtag Eden chat because if you don't use the hashtag everything, every time, we won't see what you're saying. The hashtag is the key for everything there, so please come there and see what happens. Also, coming Eden events, I noticed that the Secretariat has beaten me to it. There is the next webinar, the next NAP webinar, is the inclusion of learners with digital technology hosted by Elspeth Sorenson from Alborg University, not far from here. 16th of October, same time, and you can register already by clicking the link in the chat. In the link in the slide here, you can go to other Eden online events, and I'd like to also point you in the direction of European Distance Learning Week. There will be a lot of interesting webinars and events, online events that Eden are arranging, and also a lot of other organisations, and you'll get the details on the Eden website. If you want the presentation file that we have used at the bottom of the page here, you can download the slideshow, and that really brings us to the end of this webinar. You are going to get badges for your participation, so as long as you have registered for this webinar, you are on our radar, and the Secretariat will be sending you a digital badge very soon. Any final words from Tim about this? Are we... any thoughts to close with? I'd just like to thank everybody who's been here, especially the people who have participated in the chat, and do keep on the wavelength, if you like. As I said, I've got two projects starting now, 2019. One about citizenship in the European space, another one about this issue of certification and making the recognition issues a whole lot more agile, and I think there will be a lot of overlap with the stuff we've done in Moonlack, and you've got our contact details on the website, and we'd love to hear from you and carry on talking about this, and meeting you maybe at other events in the future. My Twitter address is at the bottom. I'll be behind most of the Twitter stuff this evening.


you guys are coming, first of all. My name's Taylor Jones, I'm gonna talk about architecture and what's coming next maybe. But we need to kind of view a couple of frames before we figure out exactly what is next. So again, I said my name's Taylor Jones, you can find me on the internet under hi, I'm Taylor Jones. I grew up in this really weird state called Alabama and then I decided to move to an even stranger state called Florida. So I live smack dab in the middle of there in Orlando and love it.  This talk is not about Star Trek. So I apologize, I've got a few things in there but we're not gonna really talk about the whole history of the show or any of that kind of stuff so yeah, sorry. Anyways, I work for Isaiah down in Orlando and we do a lot of really, really interesting stuff. For one, we do content marketing. We also do a lot of social media, general data analytics and provide enterprise solutions to marketing systems. All that's to say that we just have a big pile of data and we're trying to organize it and draw conclusions from it. Honestly, we all have these kinds of data. For us, it's social media data. We depend on a lot of external APIs like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, any kind of popular social network out there. We're trying to mine metrics and data from it and provide that information to folks who wanna create content. So as far as the tools that we use, we use a lot of Rails and AmberJS. What that means is that our stack is very focused on this convention of our configuration stuff but we have a lot of Java and a good bit of Python in our stacks as well. That being said, the balance of our stack is always changing. We're always trying to look at something new. I think DHH had a wonderful analogy the other day when he was talking about how we kinda drive but we also swerve over every once in a while and try to figure out what's new and why it matters. This talk is mostly about Rails architecture, where it's been and where it's going. We're also talking about technical debt and how architecture can create or relieve it. IZEA has technical debt. Your company also has technical debt and we have to figure out how to address it. I believe architecture is the root of a lot of our technical debt and this seems like a loaded statement or acting like architecture is the problem but what I mostly mean is that it determines the means that our technical debt is piled up and grows. So how exactly does architecture create technical debt? We often come so focused on building features that we forget to clean up our mess and fixing technical debt is also viewed as just not profitable. I mean our stocks aren't gonna go up overnight because we said we're addressing technical debt. People wanna see features shift, they wanna see exciting things, they wanna see whatever's new and hot but how things always been this way. Does modern architecture create more debt? Have we just forgotten something from the old days and did we lose some sort of insight along the way and stop caring about it? So I think it's important to look back in the past and see if we can find something within there. What was early web development like? Well applications were really hard to deploy. Code organization was inconsistent and development was license driven. Environments were also really hard to duplicate and these problems still exist. None of these things are completely solved but if you look at five, 10 years ago they were probably twice as hard as they were today in a lot of instances. So then in this era of the web this thing called Rails appeared and it was really interesting because it employed this idea of convention over configuration. What that simply means is that it eliminates the tedious parts of development like setting up an environment and scaffolding stuff and it allows developers to really focus on the things that matter. This really is an important thing for especially for products that are trying to quickly iterate, trying to quickly develop, trying to develop new features and get stuff out the door. In short, it eliminates a lot of yak shaving in the world. Rails took the web development process and refactored it in my opinion. That doesn't mean that the refactor that it was was automatically good. We can do good refactors but we can also make really bad refactors in our minds. So what kind of refactor do we think Rails is? Well, this is a picture of my cat, so but we do wanna look at how Rails has evolved to kind of understand this because I think there's some really important patterns if you look at just an overarching picture of how the framework has evolved. So if you look at the origin of Rails, we see that it's based on an existing product, right? It's based off the extraction of Basecamp. It has a real world use case by default, right? So DHH could have extracted Rails and gone home and said, you know what? I did it, I put something out there and that's good enough for me because it works and it's a product and we're making money off of it. But what really helped it find its place is making that open source project and opening the commit rights to it and allowing it to grow and for other people to see if it resonated with them. Well, it did. Until probably it started growing a little bit and some folks decided to create a framework known as Merb. Merb was a reaction to a lot of the problems in Rails, right? It's from the Ruby community built this framework and it was like the idea of a cleaner implementation whereas the original Rails was an extraction of a product and an idea. Merb was saying, what if we took these ideas that really resonated with us and we wrote it from a clean, from scratch, from the start without any of the kind of mistakes that we saw maybe being made along the way. And so it focused on speed, scalability, modularity, and API tools. So eventually Merb and Rails decided to merge together. This resulted in Rails 3.0. It was a little bit messy to say the least but I think it was ultimately good for the Ruby community and the Rails community and the Merb community because it united them over a common framework or community because ultimately I think that's what's one of Rails' strongest attributes is a really good community that cares. But as a result, some ideas that were presented both frameworks didn't survive because there were very binary decisions, how to handle maybe certain parts of what was now active record. So post-merger Rails begins to take some of the lessons that maybe it learned from Merb how to be created in general. The fact that we felt like, okay, we're fresh here, the problems with Rails, we're gonna do our own thing and started to implement some of these ideas. So one of the things I think is really interesting in Rails 4, breaking apart the general active libraries and putting them into their own gems, right? So when you bump to new Rails versions, a lot of times you're just bumping those gems which is really cool. And then Rails 5 introduced API mode which is always possible with Rails but it just made it a little bit simpler, right? So after time, architecture begins to become slow and messy and a pain to maintain. What this means is that we have to recognize code smells, bad patterns and other harmful things. This isn't easy at all for us to do, right? Like it's not, you never develop something and think, man, I'm really shipping some awful code and destroying the structure of my application that they know it. It's not until we get down the road that you're looking like, ah, that wasn't a good idea, you know? So a couple years ago, I was doing research for this. This is my first Rails conference actually but I've been kind of long-time listener, first-time caller in a lot of ways and I saw that Robert Martin, who I really admire, keynoted a long time ago. And one of his keynote in 2010 was about the issues that small talk dealt with and what ultimately kind of crushed that community at large. So the thing that he found was that, like one of the many attributes that kind of led to the demise of the small talk community that was really easy to make a mess. This is really true for a lot of things but I think with a language like Ruby and a framework like Rails, we do have to be cognizant of making a mess because a lot of times it can result in some really big performance bottlenecks. So how can we make a mess in Rails? If you haven't made a mess in Rails, I highly recommend it. It's a great learning experience but some examples might be a lack of distribution between model views and controllers.  Maybe not understanding what you're doing with Ruby, right? Because Ruby is magic and a lot of times you don't realize that Ruby can be really slow if you don't use it, right? And misunderstanding just common code smells and those things are not unique to Ruby but they nonetheless plague the community. So as Rails grew, it begins to address a lot of the issues that plague the community the most. This involved making the framework more modular, efficient and scalable, right? That's also what I think has led to the success while we have this conference in general is because the community has been able to say, you know what, this is a problem that we're really frustrated with, let's address it. Let's move forward, work together, find the best solution to move into the future. But despite this, Rails is useful as it used to be, right?  Is Rails just done for and we're here? I think that's kind of the answer to that but like, you know, should we just all go home and move to something else? But I do wanna talk about an interesting story that happened with Twitter and their choice to move away from Rails. This is a little bit of a, it's kind of a hard lesson learned when I'm looking back at the history of Rails. So Twitter suddenly became a big deal every night. A lot of people started using it and it became also the poster child of Ruby on Rails in a lot of ways because people started using it really early on, right? But eventually they started to move away from Rails and there was kind of the rumors that the internet, you know, tech crunches right in articles like, oh my gosh, they're moving away from this, it's so crazy. But why did they actually do it, right? It's just a lot of speculation but what's the truth? And so from what I could gather, it came to the idea of when they looked at reinventing search. And when Twitter was rewriting their search engine, they found that they had a lot of frustration with Rails and this had to do a lot with how they handled data, how they queued it up and how they called it from the database. So they're able to make some slight changes on their SQL layer or database layer and maybe move some things around but they ultimately just found that writing in other languages was better for them. So they started to gradually just mantle their Rails stuff and move to something new. So in short, they were breaking down something bigger into unique services that worked together. Sounds really, really familiar if you've studied architecture at all and that comes down to microservices and it is totally the hype train in the Dev community right now and we're gonna have to talk about it because everybody wants to talk about it. And so how have microservices actually benefited companies that are right, they just say, oh man, we switched to microservices, our lives are so much better. How? What's the big deal with it? So I think a great example actually is Netflix. Now Netflix has not really used that much Rails but they were a really big success story and advocate for microservices. So they have a really great architecture in my opinion and if you subscribe to Netflix at all or you see what they do, you can find that they are really good at delivering high quality AC content to you wherever in the world you are. So they had the advantage of using whatever language they want to for these smaller services and they took early bet on it, right? But as their service grew, they were able to really scale it to fit the man in the world. So the question comes though, how do you actually test all the stuff you're building? Because you're building these isolated pieces. So this comes down to Netflix's Simeon army or the testing standards that they created to exercise some aspects of their microservices. The Simeon army created a high stakes for developers as well. So from what I've been researching and understanding about it, they basically have things that will take down production instances of their application if they're not the standard. This is pretty crazy because I don't know about you but I would hate to get a call that I totally am hosing part of Netflix's infrastructure because of something, a typo I made or something weird but they've created this standard that allows them to be able to deliver content despite those downages or despite those hindrances which I think is super cool. The whole takeaway from this is saying that when we change our architectures, our process and our understanding has to change. Meaning that we trade the comfort of what we understand, right? So for me, this doesn't make me a monolith or it might be something else. And we try to say, you know what, microservices or whatever it might be looks a lot happier. It looks like a better life. So I think we should go for it. But every architecture is a brave new world in many ways. It can be dangerous. It can be dicey. If we do it wrong, we could seriously hurt our businesses, lose a lot of developers and really just have a horrible time with it. So how does it success stories though, right? With Netflix or maybe Twitter funding success and moving is something different. How does that work for Rails? So I wanna talk about what it means to actually design certain patterns in Rails. So for one, we have monolithic design and monolithic design, if you don't know, if you haven't ever reasoned it out or looked into it, it's basically this. You have these connected pieces all within some encompassing environment and they can share data with each other. They have pretty good knowledge of what each other does, right? If you think about Rails, you could technically call stuff from the view layer and understand the controller and make database pings and all that kind of stuff. They all, the cool part about Rails, right, is that you're able to pass data incredibly easy. You don't have to write an interface or anything like that to the properly scaffold and get data going throughout your application. So the deal with monoliths for Rails is I think it's always skewed historically towards that tendency. And that's been a really good strength of it, especially when we talk about, remember the history of early on where everything was really hard to configure, everything was license-driven, environments were a pain to set up and import across. But it has been a subject of a lot of hate mail, right?  But one of those kind of big pieces at Ruffleshoe Feathers, DHH, wrote something called the majestic monolith. And it's basically saying, basecamp does this, we really like it a lot. We don't think that Microsoft's people are chumps, but don't come at us when we say we use a monolith.  But the point of monoliths though is that they're rooted in uniformity and they're also rooted in very tight coupling. So Isaiah had monolith architecture to start off with like maybe a lot of apps. What this means for us is that we learned the hard way of how to process a lot of our data. So as I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of data incoming and a growing amount of it, right? With every user that connects to our service or every business thing that we do, we were tracking these metrics and analyzing them, seeing how well a lot of our content does. And we realized a greater need for processing all this data, right? And you can use great tools like Sidekick and we certainly do and love it and they're great solutions for dealing with that kind of stuff. But we said, what would happen if we started dabbling in some AWS, right? What if we started maybe riding a few Lambdas and trying that? And so soon enough, we found ourselves kind of going this weird journey where we're heading towards microservice all of a sudden. And this is kind of where the whole idea came into my head and what I've experienced and kind of been able to watch that the past couple of, past year or so. So if we remember our monolith, microservices are kind of like this in a simplified way. They're very independent pieces that are a little bit cleaner looking. They're naturally more aesthetic to the eye.  And I think a lot of folks kind of wonder how Rails fits in that microservice ecosystem. So I think the most popular usage for Rails is with the API. I think that there are a lot of ways that you can use other aspects of Rails, but if you're talking about, if you tell me, hey, you know what, I wanna do microservices with Rails right now, I'd say build API on Rails. It's a great tool to do so. So how we handle that is we use our, still our big monolith-like Rails app and we make calls to AWS in little services that we build or any other kind of service we might build. We could go roll something up completely in Java. We don't have to ride a Lambda to do everything or anything like that. So the advantage is we can have developers that are focused on looking at maybe some more intense data problems. We've hired a couple of data science folks, a couple of analytics developers and they've been really instrumental in helping us process and queue up all this data that we have. So I think some tips though, if you're gonna do it, use a stable language when you're taking a big bet on something, right? For example, I love Rust. I think it's a great language, but I would not rat my entire metric service in Rust right now. I think what Yehuda and Godfrey and all folks at Skylight are doing with Helix mean that they can run Rust at a lower level on their Ruby stuff is a really great example because they're able to take a risk on a newer language that's really proven to be awesome, but they're able to take a small risk and capitalize upon that if they see success in return. So if they found that Helix didn't work, they would just go back to what they were doing before as opposed to putting their business on a limb because they didn't wanna try something new. And so luckily there's not any disaster stories to tell from those kind of stuff, but I feel like it's important to put that out there. So microservices are rooted in modularity and they're also rooted in loose coupling. So when we have, we compare the ideas of microservices and monoliths and they seem pretty night and day, right? But the more I've kind of researched and looked at our stuff and looked at other people's stuff, I've kind of figured out a lot of people live in between these two ideas, right? Like us, we have a big Rails app, but we also utilize microservices and we're heading towards that journey and we feel like we're gonna make it to eventually just having equal pieces, but even all your microservices probably aren't gonna be the same size, right? So there's this idea of microservice ecosystems that looks like this. So we got our monolith. We have our microservices. And this is what I think a microservice ecosystem looks like. And it might be, Taylor, you just add a square behind it. This is stupid, like, you know, but the point I see with it is that we're able, we have very neat pieces, but they're all controlled by some kind of higher being in a way. And these ecosystems root in modularity, right? They have replaceable pieces, but they are also a little bit tighter coupled, meaning that they have a bit more knowledge of each other than maybe the standard microservices might have, right? So when you write a microservice, you have to write an interface to understand that kind of stuff. The point I'm getting at is that most of our stuff exists in the space where we have smaller services, but they have a lot more knowledge almost and they need to know about other services. And the more I thought about it, I think Docker was a great example. So with Docker, you can create these small containers, right? You can put your database in Docker. You can put your Rails app in Docker. You can put your other front-end services in Docker. But then you're gonna end up using a tool like Compose, for example, to control and to really organize all these pieces. And so Compose is the thing that has the knowledge of all that, these smaller units. Amazon Web Services is also a great example where you can choose a variety of Amazon services and pay them an infinite amount of money to use them all. But the beauty of AWS, to me, and what I found that we love at IZEA is that we're able to properly just use whatever we want and it really works for what we have and it kind of automatically configures and scales itself depending on what we use. But more so, the point that I saw, even from the vanilla use case, is that Rails is very much this kind of thing. In many ways, I believe Rails is a microservice ecosystem. And that might be controversial. Sorry. You know, this might be controversial, but I think that we have these small modular pieces, right? We've been working towards making parts of the Rails ecosystem independent so that we can easily replace that with. So we can choose what kind of server we want in Rails. So you can oftentimes, you can insert React or Ember or Angular, all these things into our services. And so we have this a bit tighter coupling as a consequence of that, but we're able to use Rails and customize it to our means and we can really pair it up and pair it down. And I think that's a result of a lot of the development that we've seen in the Rails history of things. So you might say, okay, I see what you mean, like this is great, like I get that we're a microservice ecosystem and we used to be monoliths and we're not seeing microservice. Well, I wanna do it, man. I don't care what you have to say, like just tell me how to do it. And after all, one architecture is not fit all Rails apps. And I think that was the point of a lot of the discourse that goes on in the internet where we yell at each other about whether who's better. So let's say you won out, how do you get out? This is the part I wanna talk about how we switch architecture without crushing our hopes and dreams. And I think the first step that you have to do when you look at switching to something new is you have to kill the hype. Forget about your love for Rails, forget about your love or hate for Java or anything else out there. If you're gonna evaluate what you're pairing down or what you're switching to, you have to understand that your history sometimes doesn't matter in that sense or your love or hate. So the important notes, there's a difference between implementing something in a project that's smaller and putting in a production code. Please realize that was kind of a note I said on Rust, no languages earlier that we don't want to take really big risk because that's a bad idea. But I think it's important to be excited by new things but also be skeptical.  Things have changed in the development world. But also what you're doing is working just fine. Every method has a balance or kind of zen for each group of people. And you have to think about what type of architecture also supports your team's size and skill sets. If you're a small startup with like three developers, don't necessarily go after building 20 microservices in different languages because that's gonna be really hard to maintain. I think secondly, it's important to find your pacing. And what I've seen is that we talk a lot about DevOps. We say that, oh man, we're gonna go to the DevOps conference. We've hired a DevOps developer.   And that's what we've realized at IZEA is that we have a lot of developers doing different things but we have to realize that the balance that our developers and what languages they specialize in has to coordinate with the ability and their knowledge of deploying. We have to go from having just like, okay, here DevOps guide, deploy the code, we're gonna keep developing to training developers to have responsibility of the code they write. So finally, I believe that knowledge is power. And this is where I'm gonna veer into this whole idea that we're not all on the same page in programming. That's always been that way, even when programmers were some high-class people that were all went to college and had master's degrees and that could out-science and out-math everybody in the world. We often only let people that we consider professionals discuss design in a pre-architecture. It's almost like this kind of very holy ritual that we have. But what happens when these people retire and move on? We don't wanna focus in front load all our knowledge or all our architecture thoughts or anything like that in the hands of a few people. We wanna train the next generation of developers to really learn how to design well. So I think it's important to realize that we all come from different places and backgrounds. I've loved this conference because I've met more coding bootcamp people than I ever have. I work with a lot of them at IZEA and it's a great blessing. But it's really cool to see one that folks that are either teaching themselves or taking an initiative to do these bootcamps are coming and saying like, I'm not only learning this stuff, I'm wanting to get involved. I think it's important to embrace your history and implement in your work. Never feel ashamed because of what you do or where you're from.  I did the kind of higher level education. I learned a lot and I loved it. It was great. But I do think that I love hearing the perspective of people who are self-taught or with bootcamps because oftentimes they're seeing stuff that I don't see. And I think that's awesome. So how do you kind of help share that knowledge in a team environment? And I think that I came up with kind of six steps that I saw that would be a really good start for trying to figure out how to design with the team and to share that knowledge. One being that you don't want to have too many cooks in the kitchen, right? You don't want to have a design by committee necessarily but you want to say, hey, let's get like kind of three of our top developers together and let's kind of butt head to see if we can come up with this design. Then you're going to bring this preferred design to a small but diverse team, meaning diversity experience and backgrounds. So you want to kind of hear from all levels, try to workshop it as diversely as possible. Take that feedback, go back with your core team design and then bring that whole design to your engineering team. Let them see that and learn from it. Whether they want to or care about it or not, it's not your problem. Just put it in front of them. Charati gets some feedback, workshop it maybe once more and then bring it back and say, hey guys, this is what we're doing. We've all agreed on this but we made some executive decisions because we are at our place where we're supposed to be because of a reason and this is what we're doing. So this is a little chart of how that might work, right?  Few kind of thought-leadery devices or like absolute things here, right? Effective software teams teach each other in my opinion. Effective software developers have a desire to learn. You don't always have these two syncing up with each other, right? I've been part of companies that have a lot of guys or girls that can teach well but they can't, nobody wants to learn or maybe have a lot of people that want to learn but nobody wants to teach. Everybody wants to kind of just really shut them out and I think there's been some great talks this weekend on that sort of subjects and I refer to other people. I think Marcus Keena this morning was awesome a variety of other folks have spoken about some really great stuff as far as how do we sync on the same page or what can we do? This disconnect is creating developers a lot of times who are comfortable with being in their own environment. So what I mean by that is that we have a lot of folks that are really good at being working at company X but aren't necessarily concerned about growing and I think it's really important that we look at ways that we can help teach people and help them grow and not be worried about what that means for us or that they leave us or they go to some bigger place. Like we should be focused on making good software and teaching people and loving people well. So here we're gonna go into the kind of wrap up and maybe try to stream together a lot of things that we've done here. Architecture in many ways is a house. Debt piles up in different places. A good example I think of this is Spaceship Earth. I love going to Disney. I think it's awesome. Spaceship Earth if you've never been on it it's just a big old globe. It has a ride. It goes all the way up through it. It's super cool. The problem is that it's a unique thing. It's this own piece of architecture. There's another building at Disney and we compare the two, right? We look at this and we say, okay, maybe like dust and clutter and all the yucky stuff that we wanna clean is gonna collect definitely in this place and it's gonna collect in this place right here. And that's okay. Architecture can sometimes be a scape hatch for us to escape debt. In Twitter's example, that's why I brought it up. We saw that they said, you know what? We've kinda painted ourselves into a corner because we have this big user growth and we have all these problems that we're trying to rewrite search and make it better. But ultimately it's just easier for us to ditch rails and switch to something else. Ultimately we need to learn how to clean our house and maintain our house. Maybe it's expensive. It doesn't mean that you should ever not move. It doesn't mean that you should always fight the battle and go down swinging. Like you need to learn how to clean up after yourselves, guys, singles. Like it's important to learn how to confront technical debt. Find a place in your process that allows for addressing debt while pushing forward features. You're never gonna have a time to stop development completely and work on technical debt. I'm sorry to break it to you. I'm slowly coming to realities with that, it's a grip to that reality, but we have to find a way to do this in the way that we deliver features. It might take longer, but also it's gonna mean that you're delivering cleaner and better features to your customers. I really loved it when I have written stuff and I've been cognizant of the mess I'm making in the very few times it happens.  So it's a really great incentive for me to write good clean code. Architecture should feel comfortable. Ultimately, it's after developer happiness. People should not switch to microservices because they wanna be cool or they shouldn't feel like they can't switch because they don't wanna follow a trend. They should be after what makes them happy and what makes you feel effective as a developer. This is really prevalent in the Ruby community, right? The idea of Ruby is bent on developer happiness. Rails is bent on developer happiness. It's there and we're using these tools because we feel like they help us not only become better software developers or writers or anything like that, but because they make us happy and they make work feel less like work. That makes sense. So what's coming for us next, right? We're talking about the next generation. So okay, we've rolled through the past and rolled through the present. We've kind of talked about the current debate that's raging on, but what's gonna be next? I don't have the slightest idea. So I'm sorry if you can just talk to me on the answer. I don't know what's coming next. I can't predict the future. But what I can say is that we look at these small pieces of history, right? Within the history of Rails, with the history of architecture, we've kind of seen this back and forth between monolith and microservices and we're seeing the pendulum swing over to more modular microservice like code. That's not to say that things won't become more monolithic or anything like that. Maybe there's this idea of web assembly coming along that is gonna completely ruin our jobs and make us all code C++ in the browser again. I don't know and that's okay because I really like being the developer right now. I think it's a lot of fun. I'm really excited to learn about the past and how we got there and being thankful that I'm not having to do a lot of stuff that people used to do or solve problems that people have already solved. But I want to be excited about the future and maybe we're gonna be writing blog posts to each other about how we don't use servers anymore and we're amazing and you suck. I don't know. But that's okay. I think we're ready for whatever's next. So that's my talk. Thank you guys for coming along. We've got about five minutes for questions if they want us to talk. If not, we can talk later. But yeah. Like how do I clean up technical debt while working on features? Well, I think that's kind of hard, right? And it comes down to changing the environment at where you work. So whether you work in a company or where you work for yourself as a consultant. A good example I think of that whether you might roll your eyes and not about it is TDD. So we look at TDD and we say we write tests, we write code and then we refactor. That's an important pillar TDD I think it's ever looked. And so I think that the cleaning up the technical debt should come up in the refactor part honestly with TDD. Not everybody uses TDD and everybody's got a hot opinion about it but whatever your TDD is, I think it's important. I think it requires having a structured process mainly that you're looking and you're saying, all right, we're designing code, we're writing code and then we're cleaning up code and whether that means that like if you're doing pretty well in technical debt and you say, okay, well, you know, we'll only take maybe, you know, two hours out of every cycle to clean up stuff.  Like you might say, okay, we're gonna try to just fight this as much as it can expand our time. So yeah, realizing from a leadership level that like, hey, we need to do this and that kind of sucks, right? Because we can't, some of us aren't leaders or some of us don't have the ability to change culture and it's kind of like, but I think there's even time within your own specific cycles that you can say, you know what, like I'm gonna try to develop this feature as fast as possible, but also clean it up, make it better. So cool. Well, come talk to me afterwards if you have any more questions, but thank you guys.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with another number block randomizer for pick your team 10, NT pick your team 10. This is for the Dodgers group right here. That's how it works. Big thanks to these folks right here. And there are the numbers right there and let's roll it, let's randomize it. Three out of three. Hard six. One, two, three, four, five, and six in the final time. After six we've got Matt down to Matt. Hard six. Three out of three. One, two, three, four, five, and six in the final time. Good luck. After six we've got four down to five. All right, Matt with four, Aaron with six, Adam with seven and zero, Matt Arnold with one. Oh, and Matt Harper, you'll get any and all redemptions for those teams in that tab down there where my cursor is circling. The bottom tab, including one of one redemptions. But Matt Arnold, as you saw in the description, you'll get any live one of ones. Travis with three. Adam Harper with two. Aaron with nine. Adam with eight. Matt Medlin with five. Let's sort by number. Coming up in a separate video will be the NT break itself. Jasperyscasebreaks.com. Bye.