Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Our little session that we will be running here in McEwen Hall. First up we have Sandra Huskinson and Rich Goodman from University of Loughborough who will be talking about transforming the transition BTEC students to higher education. So, over to you. Thank you. Okay. Good afternoon everybody. It's such a pleasure to be in such a wonderful venue this afternoon. I'm going to talk to you with Rich about a project that we've run at Loughborough to help BTEC students actually transform themselves into higher education students at the beginning of the year. So, this project was actually developed with a few other universities, so with Queen Mary, Exeter and the University of Birmingham. We wanted to look at the way that BTEC students actually did induction when they came to university. So, we did interviews, look at the theory of change, the difference between BTEC students and A-levels for which we did focus groups, interventions and we've got a findings report from this data. The drivers were diversity and actually encouraging more BTEC students to actually attend university after they've completed their BTEC. We've identified a gap potentially in study skills for these students and like I said, the project was aimed at pre-arrival to university and we looked at the idea of delivering this package online. So the research behind this, I don't know whether you all know, but 26% of university applicants are in fact BTEC students and these BTEC students are often academically less successful students who enter than traditional A-level students. They are more likely to drop out in their first year and they actually come from a more social, economically disadvantaged background or from an ethnic minority background and live in areas which have low HE participation. So we looked at the student experience in itself, so we did one-to-one interviews to collect data and also focus groups. We spoke to first year HE students and second year FE students to see what their attitudes were to actually attend in HE and what problems they'd encountered in doing this and what the differences were with their A-level colleagues. The majority were BTEC students but we also spoke to some A-level students and we wanted to actually provide that comparison. So in terms of lecturers and FE tutors also provided some more data on this sort of issue. So we had quite a lot of interesting comments also from our BTEC students. They'd actually come into the university and we looked at them at the end of the first year to see what issues that they'd actually had. So some had never done exams for a long period of time so maybe when they were at school they did exams but in their BTEC they'd not done exams so they had a whole new learning experience from that. They had problems with maths, they had issues with English and writing in a more academic style. They also had a feeling of disenfranchisism from the actual community itself because the majority of the students are actually A-level students. So in terms of doing this we looked at the idea of improving retention, making the induction process more inclusive for these particular students and also addressing some of the gaps in study skills. We wanted to improve diversity. We wanted to provide something that was more interactive for these students when they arrived to form a community. We wanted them to feel that they were equal to the A-level students and we wanted to use an online platform to deliver this. And I'm actually going to let Keith Pond actually talk to you about our thoughts on this process. Well our initial research with BTEC students in FE colleges and with our own undergraduate students on their first year of entry were that there were certain skills that they felt they needed a lot more practice on a lot more development of. These skills were in writing, academic writing, they were in maths particularly and the skills, the transition skills, working in a different way, working differently, working in groups, working to a high level with different people from different backgrounds. Well our initial research with... So basically what we've ended up with is a different sort of island for, see for people to navigate if you're a BTEC students. So you recognise you've got a skills gap and also you've got transitional issues to do with how you feel and the community that you're involved with. So I'm actually going to stop there and get you to think about the project overall. Now at this point you can see that we've done the research, you can see that we're ready to do some sort of intervention and the other universities involved in this project were all in that position. But we decided actually that we didn't want to do something that was just recycling of induction materials we already had. We wanted to actually do something different with the actual interface itself that we were going to use which is our VLE. And also within this actual project there wasn't actually much funding to support a big team producing an interface. It was actually only me at the end of the day and I was only given 30 hours. So if you think of it as end to stage right, the learning technologist two months before the actual project was going to be produced and I was actually only given 30 hours to actually produce this project. So in terms of that we were up against it from the start but we were sure that we wanted to produce something slightly differently and we also wanted to change the way that we'd normally deliver these materials. So one of the first things I looked at was actually looking at collaborating with the BTEC students we had that were in the first year or finishing the first year. So we asked them to get involved in what we were going to produce because we're sporty at Loughborough, we decided to call this module warm up. So we got some students involved. We went out and did some video. We looked at the idea of them peer support in this actual module rather than us and making the community for these students to enter and improve their study skills. We also looked at having a diagnostic quiz. So that's our current interface as it is there and I'm going to get Rich to come up and actually talk about the way that we change the interface to improve the way that we deliver things. So on this we were going to put a different spin on what we normally do in our VLE just for these students. Thanks, Sandra. So this is a screenshot from our VLE which is called Learn. It's been called Learn for 20 years now. It's gone through many different iterations and we've been using Moodle for about 12 years now. So this is our interpretation of Moodle. We've got three different themes that we can use plus a different theme that's on the mobile device and we've kind of put a lot of work into iterating this over the years to kind of get it to how we have it looking which is reasonably nice and it gets reasonably good feedback. But more and more over the last few years we've seen lots of people wanting to just change something slightly, try and make it a bit less like a VLE, these VLEs that are supposed to be dead again this year as they were 10 years ago. They're still not dead but it's there. Works, people love it. So we get lots of requests and we've been working with lots of colleagues across campus including Sandra and some other people around in different areas. Just to try and make the VLE look a little bit less like a VLE because you've got all these little things like the navigation block you can see there on the top left, bit of stuff in the model administration area for students to see activity results, things like reading list and the module card. Now these are all applicable to this particular module. This is a standard undergraduate module but when we start to fit in things like warm-up we need to try and adapt the approach and see how things are gonna work. For those students that have got no idea what all of this stuff would mean to them so leaving it there would be far too confusing. So we took this approach of making some adaptations just to make it look a little bit less like a VLE even though underneath it's still exactly the same. So now in the top right here you can see the screenshot of this particular module course in other people's parlance but we call the modules for the warm-up project. And you'll see the little blocks that we've got dotted here around the screen of the things that we used. So there's nice colorful icons to move students around to the different areas, go to the quiz, look at all the different skills that they need to use, watching the video. So this is all again based on the standard Moodle and the standard Moodle experience but by taking away some of those little blocks in there that make no sense to the students who are gonna be on this warm-up course because they've not been at the university and don't know what these things mean, it just makes their experience just that little bit nicer to be able to come in and just fiddle around with the page bit. For our standard undergraduate students and post-grads they want a reasonably consistent experience where everything is in the same place. They go onto the module then the electro capture block is on the top right hand side and there's a reading list block down there and there's a few other things and things move around and you get different module formats like grid and buttons and all these other kind of things but for this module it was much better to have this much more tailored approach which had a much better experience for those students who are working on this module and then if they come along and transition to be Loughborough students then they'll still see a lot of these elements when they come and take their undergraduate modules but they'll just get a bit more familiarity and experience. Okay. Back to Sandra. Back to technology. Right, basically we had then a piloting phase for this module. We ran it with students definitely before they came they had to confirm they were coming first and then Rich organised some module access in order for them to go in. Like I said before we had a diagnostic quiz which we produced and that gave them an idea of which area of study they wanted to do whether they wanted to look at transitional skills whether they wanted to look at their math skills it gave them a rating to see where they were wearing those things and give them a test to be able to do that. So in terms of this it ran successfully with peer support from the students that we recruited. There was a forum and various questions were produced in terms of idea of what students issues were with that sort of thing. It ran very well over that pilot period. But in sort of tandem with this the university then decided to produce their own induction material so we've run it once and then the university's main induction actually has taken over. But we've still got the resources from that which fed into that actual process. So I'm gonna let Keith have the final word and actually tell you all what we actually learned from this course. We learned three key things. We learned that yes there is a gap in the development needs of not only BTEC students but also A level students or students coming to university development of the skills they will need to succeed in their courses. We also learned there was quite a gap between what the universities were preparing and had available for students to develop those skills and the skills needs that these students had. And one third thing that we learned was that when we do have a project that people believe in that is reasonably well funded, it brings in lots of voluntary help, lots of different skills and people feel really good about providing a project that has such positive results. But we learned three key things. We learned that yes there is a gap in the development needs of. There are the references for this project. We are looking at putting the diagnostic quiz out as we are free resource. So please look out for that because we're now no longer using it in there. And thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much indeed. That was a very well timed and a lot in there for us to think about. This time I'm going to go straight to Vvox for the questions we've received there. I think it might be coming up on the big screen. But first one, will any of your course design ideas be adopted by regular undergraduate courses? Yes, we've got a project to do with induction at Loughborough, which seems to run in parallel with our project, which is called Personal West. And some of the design ideas we're taking into that, the particular diagnostic quiz, to be used by all university students, not just these students. Fantastic. And do you want to tackle the top question as well? We're still looking at using and talking with formed relationships with ethic colleges in this actual process. Our local colleges were very much involved in actually designing our content. So yeah, we're still continuing to work with those students and also look at how we might be of more help. Thank you. We've got another four minutes for questions. So check if there are any in the audience that have been submitted online already. Yes, down the front here. We'll just bring the mic to you. And if you could see who you are as well, please. Can you ask your question? I am Laura Hollinshead from the University of Derby. I was just wondering if you're planning to track the attainment and achievement of those students who perhaps have taken the course. There are no plans as such at the moment. I think the university decided that it would be better to use our actual current personal best just off to cover a blanket cover of everybody rather than track the individual students. So not at this point. Thank you. Any other questions in the audience? Okay, we have another on the VVox. What's the connection with FutureLearn? In terms of FutureLearn, we looked at FutureLearn as an inspiration for looking at the way that we would construct the actual course. We've not got the course to show you today, but we looked at the way that you navigated through the course, and also the way that FutureLearn produce interactivity. So we use that as a basis to design what we've done in the end. Thank you. I'll just final check for any other questions in the audience. In which case, if we thank Sandra and Richard again, please. And we'll just be a minute or two until we get set up with our next speaker. Just bear with us for a moment. But are you pretty much set up? Well, colleagues, our next speakers are ready. We're just a minute ahead of time, but as I think everyone's staying anyway, we will just crack on. So we now have Daniel Johnston and Rachel Wall from Kings College London who will be talking about podcasts, the new mix. So over to you. Excellent. Thank you so much. Well, to just get us started, we're going to just do a quick activity. So if you're able, could you raise your hand? Cool. So do you want to put your hand down if you have an Alexa or a Google Home? Okay, lower your hand if you've taken an audio tour at a museum. Excellent. Do you lower your hand if you pay for Spotify or Apple Music? Lower your hand if you've done a Duolingo or Rosetta Stone activity. Oh, is that everyone? Oh, no, a couple more. Lower your hand if you've ever listened to Serial, the podcast. Lower your hand if you have headphones with you today. Oh, last one.  Ah, there we go. So what this exercise really shows is how immersive and versatile that audio actually is. It's used in a variety of different places, in loads of different contexts and for various purposes. As a medium, audio is really flexible. It's cheap and it's easy to consume. And perhaps one of the cheapest and most flexible forms of audio for consumers is podcasts. So what are podcasts? That they're most basic form? It's an audio clip that you can access through the internet, you can download or stream. You can be more specific in that. I would say it should be delivered through an RSS feed so you can subscribe to it. But for our purposes, we also think that there's a social and cultural definition that we need to come to terms with. And we have certain expectations about what a podcast is today that it's a media form as well as a technology. And that's really informed by the way that people are creating and consuming podcasts. Cool. So what do we know about podcasts today? Well, lots of people are listening to them and lots of people are making them. But where did this come from? How did they take off? Well, Richard Berry writes in 2015 about what he calls this golden age of podcasting which was launched by the popularity of the podcast serial. So how it all started, podcasts were really this rival to radio. Producers and listeners had this opportunity to really explore really niche topics and really take advantage of on-demand listening. And these advances in technology could really control what people were listening to and when they listened. So when we think about serial, it arrived at what Berry describes as this golden age of podcasting in 2014. And the podcast arrived at, it really mirrored what he describes as the classic narratives and the experiences of audiobooks. And it really prompted listener engagement. People really had a mental and emotional connection with the topics that they were listening to. The content was really topical, really culturally relevant and it really sparked loads of conversations. People had loads of questions, they had debates, they had agreements, they had disagreements. And this engagement and this word of mouth really created this overall shared experience. And really the popularity of serial kickstarted what Berry describes as this golden age of podcasting as we know podcasts and how they've risen today. So in a golden age of podcasts, it's not surprising that we started to look at the application of the technology to learning and how that can be done. And typically scholars have looked at bespoke podcasts created for very specific learning aims, learning environments and specific courses. But what about the podcast like serial? Podcasts that are created for the general public, for entertainment, but have arguably really serious and content that can help us to learn. Well, this is really what drew us to our main research question, that can listening to these mainstream podcasts be described or interpreted as a learning experience. So to explore this, we decided to look closely at the podcast themselves. We found a list of the 50 most popular podcasts on a particular day and selected full podcasts from this. And we selected them by choosing ones that seemed like they had educational content within them and also by choosing a range and genre. We then completed an auto ethnography where we kept listening journals while we listened to the podcast and performed close textual analysis on a few episodes to look at the detail. Cool. So the first podcast that we listened to, which we've already talked about was Serial. So for those who aren't aware, Serial is an investigative journalism podcast that narrates a non-fiction story over multiple episodes. So when I started my listening journey of listening to Serial, I had already listened to season one. So I jumped right into season two and just as a really brief description, season two investigates the story behind deployed private first class Beau Bergdahl, who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009, was captured and held captive by the Taliban for five years. Wow. So my listening experience of listening to Serial threw up a lot of really interesting points. And the first one that really struck me was the narrative structure of this series. The episodes fit within this overall structure. You need to listen to each of the episodes in order to really gain the full experience and the complete story. And this really maps on to what Walker describes in learning design in that how narrative really helps us to structure knowledge. It's a really good aid in remembering and imparting knowledge. The other thing that was really significant for me listening to Serial was how the story is told and how information is presented. You producer spoke to a lot of different people. They really took care to get a really balanced account of events as they unfolded. So how does that map onto the listener experience? Well, I decided to go online and have a look at what people were saying about the season. And unsurprisingly, people had a lot to say online. There were huge conversations, huge debates and discussions about the content. And this really maps onto what King describes as this cooperative or jigsaw learning model where views were taken outside of the listening experience and really debated and discussed outside of the context of learning. And knowledge was really acquired and shared collectively. The second podcast we looked at was Ted Talks Daily, which is basically recordings of Ted Talks that were given to live audiences by experts on particular topics. So this felt like a curated collection of lectures and mapped really directly onto the typical sage on the stage model we see throughout traditional education. In contrast to Serial, the listening experience did not evolve starting at episode one and working through to the end. Instead, I went through and I selected episodes that seemed interesting or relevant to me. And this way I was able to co-construct my listening and learning experience. The structure of the episodes themselves also resembled a lot of learning experiences that we see in, there was scaffolding. So the speaker would establish foundational learning and grow complexity out of that. There was segmenting, selection of data and information and indigestible chunks. In fact, while I was listening, I was often pull out statistical facts that were being shared in the episodes and text them to my husband. But I think what I found most striking about the Ted Talks Daily episodes was that these speakers, these educators were clearly not neutral. Scholars like Paola Freer would have had a field day with this with these speakers who, while they were sharing empirical research and factual information, were intertwining it with their philosophical beliefs. So the third podcast that we looked at was The Guilty Feminist. So The Guilty Feminist is a comedy podcast hosted by Deborah Frances White. And it really explores 21st century topics relevant to women and mostly from the perspective of women. So in a similar way to Ted Talks, the engagement in online learning that Walker describes is really evident in how I chose to listen to the episodes that I did for the purpose of our research. I really chose topics that I was either familiar with or topics that I wanted to know a bit more about or I chose comedians that I knew that I liked. So where and why I listened was also really important in my research. I mostly listened to episodes while I was on the bus during my commute, as a lot of people do. Often I found that I was really deeply engrossed in what I was listening to. We would get three or four stops ahead and I would not have remembered how we got there if I was really involved in what I was listening to. I even laughed out loud at points and I'm sure people thought that I was going a bit crazy but that's the level of engagement. I also listened to some of the episodes at the gym which I'd never considered doing before but surprisingly they made my workout go a bit faster which I was not expecting. But really the significance of this is the environment in which you listen to some of these episodes can really map on to what we already know about learning design and that it drew a lot of connections with cognitive load theory. This idea that being deeply engrossed in what you're listening to really has your brain and your imagination really heightened in those moments and in those senses I was really focused on just listening to what I was paying attention to. And finally listening to these episodes was a really reflective experience. As a woman myself I really enjoyed reflecting on like the lively debates and discussions that were being talked about and really thought drew up like thoughts and feelings that I was comparing to the experiences of the guests being spoken to. And the informal but consistent format of all of these episodes really does create this reflective space. Finally we looked at Brexitcast which is a news show following the events around Brexit. It's hosted by political journalists based in Brussels and Westminster and features guests from around the world. And yet in the episodes the hosts and the guests are able to create a really connected discussion despite their geographical distance. Something that we look for a lot in distance education and online learning. The hosts also modeled skills for political analysis. They modeled things like where to get information, how to debate, how to interrogate facts in ways that really map onto what we know about observational learning. And finally the Brexitcast website provided other ways for you to get involved and to learn by taking quizzes or reading blog posts by hosts. So the experience could be really multimodal. Cool, so when we go back to our original question which explored really whether podcasts can be described as a learning experience and for us we thought the overall conclusion was yes. They are learning experiences and they're in a learning experience that really maps onto MOOCs in the most similar way in that they're learning objects, they're educational experiences that just really reminded us of that MOOC experience. So how are they similar? Well they mapped onto what has already been established descriptions of learning in the literature that we reviewed. They have low entry requirements, they're inexpensive to consume, listeners need no prior qualification, knowledge or expertise to listen to them and they're really similar to MOOCs in that they are massive. We looked at serial productions and download numbers of season one and season two and their episodes have been downloaded more than 250 million times showing just how far and wide that reaches. At the same time mainstream podcasts have a lot of the drawbacks that MOOCs have so they're difficult to assess, they're difficult to evaluate but they also have some of the issues around demographics that we've seen criticized in MOOCs. So we have this huge expectation that MOOCs were going to widen participation in education and allow access to people who weren't familiar with traditional roots of education but in critiques of MOOCs we've seen that MOOC audiences tend to be degree educated, Western, middle class and that is the same for podcast listeners. So in the US alone podcast listeners are 40% more likely to have a university degree compared to the general population. Ultimately you can say that the most distinctive difference between MOOCs and mainstream podcasts is that podcasts are designed to be learning in the same way that MOOCs and courses are and yet they're arguably a more flexible and mobile and less bandwidth intensive way to engage people with educational content. So what does this mean for us? So podcasts definitely have this opportunity to widen participation, to democratize knowledge and to democratize learning. Here at Kings we have a couple of different teams and departments who already engage in podcasts for the purpose of disseminating information and for discussing their research. This is a page from our wall studies department who have really grown their podcast following discussing their current research and up to date developments on areas that they're speaking in and they're lecturing on a regular basis. It should also impact the way we think about MOOCs. So what if we start thinking about MOOCs as more similar to podcasts as a media form rather than formal courses? It's really important for people like us who work in online learning. Cool, so why is this important to us? So we both work in an online learning team where we work with audio on a daily basis and this really started from a desire from us to understand how we currently use audio in our daily working practices. So we started with a interrogation into our instructional design process. How do we work with audio at the moment? Well, we interviewed our instructional designers to find out what their thoughts were and came out with some really interesting insights. Instructional designers talked about the really inventive ways that we have with the potential use of audio in online learning ways that are really rich in evidence and their descriptions really mapped onto Middleton's premise of audio as being a really rich learning space. And in general, their personal consumption of non-learning focused audio really highlighted how much of an entertainment media it is in guiding and inspiring learning design. So overall, we thought we really need to start thinking more broadly about what is digitally enabled learning. So ultimately, this research is more of a beginning than a conclusion. Raised an enormous number of questions for us and it has a huge number of limitations. So we need to keep asking more questions about the design of audio media for learning but also about how to extend education to massive cohorts of learners about the ever blurring lines between formal and informal learning experiences. And the identity of universities as learning providers in a world of increasingly free and open content. Thank you very much. Thank you both very much, perfectly timed and we have just under five minutes for questions. So I'll ask if we can get the V-box window up. Quite a few things have come in. Can the talks in the tower be put into bigger rooms? You don't have to answer that. That's clearly a question that's come from elsewhere. But I wonder if we could just, I'll let you pick maybe the first one of those you want to engage with. Do you want to do the learning disabilities one? Do you want to do the second one? Yes, absolutely. So I think this is a fairly important question. So it's about to what extent podcasts and other audio can be relevant in the context of participants with learning, with hearing disabilities. So I think podcasts have advantages with accessibility so they can be a great advantage to, for instance, people with dyslexia who might struggle with reading, but they also have drawbacks in that if you're not able to hear, you're not able to consume them. So I would recommend for anyone who's considering creating audio or podcasts to provide an alternative. So in our practice, when we create audio for online learning, that's something we've invested in is that we get a human transcription of all our audio. Great, thank you. And you talked a lot about the kind of MOOCs as well and there's a question there. MOOCs are built around connectivism and peer-to-peer interaction. How can podcasts be interactive or, I guess, how could they be used interactively? Interesting. I mean, at the moment, we kind of use audio that goes alongside visuals and certainly something that we would like to do a bit more would be to think about how we talk a lot about scaffolding and learning and I think it would be great to make them interactive but I think we need to kind of go back a few stages and really think about how we can use them to supplement the content that we're already putting out there. I think it definitely is gonna be something we should explore in the future but at the moment, if anybody is doing that then I would love to hear more from you because I would be really interested in learning more about that as well. And I think, yeah, the other way that we did see for instance with Serial is that people were connecting in these informal online communities so there is connection happening and actually, again, if we go back to the critique of MOOCs some of the criticisms that we have is that there actually isn't connection happening in MOOCs especially in the ones that focus more on sort of independent and asynchronous learning. Okay, thank you very much. I'm conscious that these questions will be coming from colleagues in the room but is there anyone who isn't using the VVox app as a question they'd like to ask? Yes, gentlemen, third row from the front and if you could say who you are as well, please. Hi, my name is Tom Buckley. I come from UE, I'm a digital learning manager there. I just, I just wanted to ask from your kind of looking at either the research or your own experiences, how did you find your reception of these podcasts? I've kind of got the feeling with I listen to about 20 hours a week, I'm an addict but I see amongst other people that the intimacy of them and the directness of them sometimes stops the criticality of the content that's being delivered and it's something that you picked upon at the TED Talks. Is that something that you see? Like, do you think there's sometimes people receive it as the truth rather than something to be discussed? I think that's a really good point and yes, we definitely did see that thing with TED Talks but when I went and looked at reviews of TED Talks that was also a criticism that listeners were sharing. So they were concerned about that as listeners. I think that we see sort of an equal level of non-neutrality if you like in the classroom all the time, in written content. I actually think that there's an extent to which the spoken word leaves a lot more opportunity for critique than the written word. I think there's an extent to which when we see something written down we take it as being more factual than when we see someone or hear someone speaking it and we realise that it's a point of view. Great, thank you very much. We're just about on time so I'm gonna have to give apologies to colleagues who've posted some of the other questions but presumably if you're around you'd be happy to have a chat with colleagues. Perfect, thank you. Okay, so a good thank, Danielle and Rachel and we'll move on to our final talk. Yes. Can you present the thing at all? Yes, I am, yeah. If you have a warning when you've got five minutes to talk left, so the five minute warning will be when you've got five minutes to talk. Five minutes left to talk. Okay colleagues, for our last talk before we have a break we have Laura Hollinshead who's presenting on behalf of herself and colleagues, humanising the lived experience of mental health patients through immersive video. So Laura, over to you, thank you. Thank you very much. So I'm here to talk today about an issue that arose when we were looking at teaching our mental health nursing students and they were finding it difficult to replicate some of the scenarios that the students might encounter in practice within on campus learning that was taking place. So with adult nursing for instance you would find that people can take blood pressure and use some of the equipment either on dummies or on real patients but it's actually really difficult to actually replicate the types of scenarios that those students are going to encounter out in practice around mental health patients. We also wanted to make sure that the students could tune into what it felt like to be a mental health patient in different situations that those people are going to actually experience within a healthcare setting. So I'm going to play a video here from the discipline lead for mental health at the university. Just get it up. Hello, my name is Alison Kildoff. I'm head of mental health nursing at the University of Derby. I've been working with a colleague in learning technology, Laura Hollingshead and Gemma and Victoria from the mental health nursing team. And we've been working on a project in the past few months to look at the immersive experience and immersive video experience to see whether that would be helpful in humanizing the lived experience of mental health service users as an element of education around mental health. We know that simulated practice is a really effective way about very beneficial way for student nurses to be able to develop and practice and rehearse some of the skills. And we also know that some simulated practice techniques are very, very widely used in a whole range of different fields. But in mental health nursing, some of our skills are slightly different, less technical. So we need to find different ways to be able to understand how we help people develop those skills and how we measure whether that learning is helpful or useful and meaningful, most importantly. We want to know whether it can have an impact on practice. We want to think about design and delivery of future sessions if it's a feasible project. So therefore we need to collect feedback because we want to know whether this is worth taking forward and whether we can refine and use it much more widely, both locally, nationally and perhaps internationally in the future. I'm just gonna go to my next slide to get to avoid the extra things that are on there. Okay, so one of the things that we wanted to do and ensure we're done with these videos is that we wanted to make sure that it was actually sustainable. So we wanted to look at these videos being created to be reusable and reusable as much as possible in different contexts. We wanted to make sure that it was also scalable as well because we've actually seen an increase in our nursing students at the university. Partly due to the bursaries changing and that has obviously created more challenging delivery in terms of the teaching. So we wanted to make sure that this could actually be scaled up. So we tried to keep it as low cost as possible. We based it on a bring your own device aspect as well. So we were utilizing the students use of technology. And all we did really was we actually supplied some headsets for the VR aspects of when we actually used 360 video. So our academic staff wrote the script and they based this around some of the practice that they'd seen out there when they had been working but also some of the experiences they may have heard from other people and practitioners out there in the NHS. We looked and focused on creating, recreating the patient's journey at five key points within that process. So we looked at a home visit where a mental health practitioner had gone out to the home and was talking about a mission. We looked at a situation where they're actually going onto the ward for the first time and focusing on the elements that might be a bit different for that person having never experienced that before. Again, we looked at some communal areas within the wards where they would get admitted and focused on how that experience might feel and the different types of people that they might encounter. We also created a situation where they were outside a meeting room which they were due to go into. So again, they were hearing and experiencing things there. And then finally, they would attend a multidisciplinary meeting which is where different healthcare practitioners will come together to discuss the health needs of that individual. So we wanted to make sure that it was really reusable so we actually made the individual gender neutral, ethnicity neutral, you do not see them, you actually don't hear from them really to try and help immerse that student within that patient's journey so they can really feel like they are the person that we called it Sam. We also had it so that all of the videos were talking to camera as well so when they're talking directly to Sam they're always facing the camera so it really does feel like you are that person. And when we actually utilised the 360 element because we didn't use that in all of the videos we were able to then give the student's agency over that situation so they were able to actually look around and view different aspects of that context and that they could actually feel like they were the patient and they had control over that situation to an extent. So in creating the videos it took about a day to film, it had about 25 different people involved in that, most of those were actually actors within the actual scenario itself. There was academics, we had experts by experience which were actually ex-patients involved in the filming and we also had NHS staff as well playing the different roles that we put in there. One of the aspects that took the majority of the time on the day in the filming was to try and ensure that the different people were in the right place at the right time. So in terms of how this was actually delivered to the students, there was pre-sessions instructions that were actually sent out to the students to try and get them skilled upon using their own devices to ensure that they were comfortable with doing that. It was delivered as an all day workshop within a simulated practice module. So as part of one of those sessions. In terms of how we got the videos to the students we used QR codes and short URLs. So we tried to make it as easy and quick to access as possible. And then we actually gave them a mixture of headsets but we found that there was a bit of a difference between some people for the headsets, some people didn't, some people just used their phone and squalled around. So it was kind of a bit of both but a lot of them did actually have a go with the headsets. And really the focus was on the fact that they were using their own technology. So hopefully it's something they're a little more familiar with than picking something up that they haven't used before. So in terms of the numbers of students this was delivered to 54 students. This was two groups at two different campuses at the university. They were first year students and it's important to consider that about three quarters of the students who actually took part were female but there was still a good proportion of male students who also took part. So the main part of this is to think about what did the students actually think. So we asked the students three statements to answer three statements and to look at their agreement for these statements before and after having watched the videos. We didn't actually see a big difference in the agreement levels because actually most of them agreed to these statements prior to seeing the videos but we did see a shift in whether they agreed or strongly agreed. So that's where we saw the biggest difference. So it's really that those things were actually kind of backed up by what they already knew but that they're feeling about those felt stronger. So when they were asked around understanding the lived experience we found that around 16% increase in terms of their agreements that. In terms of whether they empathized with the lived experience of service users we had an about 19% increase and in terms of critically reflecting on the nuances within their own practice we actually had a 23% increase in terms of their agreement to that statement. So we felt that was really, really positive to see. In terms of the making changes to their practice which is one of the key things that we want to see from any of the teaching that we do 74% of them are actually agreeing to that and we also had the fact that 94% of them actually got the fact that the videos had made them consider something they'd not thought about before in terms of their practice which is one of the key things we wanted to get at this especially in terms of a simulation that's one of the key areas that is the purpose of that type of session. So in terms of how they would actually change their practice so they wanted to or we found that again a lot of this is actually backing up what they already are going to be learning within their courses but increased empathy being mindful, being considerate thinking how the patient feels, reflecting you know, thinking about the lived experience you know, just it reinforces the key aspects that we were trying to get out of the session and trying to humanize that experience of the patients. In terms of the video usage it was half, hadn't used VR before in terms of the headsets we actually, that figure is actually quite high based on what we actually found. A lot of them did use the headsets but there was at least half of them who were tending to not use them again when they were actually being used for the 360 video they tended to just revert back to watching it on their devices. So there's quite a lot of them that weren't actually keen on using the headsets and actually the use of their own device we would expect that to actually be higher than the figure shown just because a lot of them are probably thinking about the headsets rather than their actual mobile device. In terms of the effectiveness of the videos we tended to find that students were really positive about it and when they were being asked whether they would look at it again often it was around things that they'd missed in the first time that they looked at it or areas that had been discussed within the session that they didn't see but they would like to then go back and view again. So again it was really positive in terms of the fact that they were interested in re-engaging with those particular resources. In terms of improvements one of the aspects was around the technical improvements so they were sound issues so a lot of them mentioned that there were sound issues on their own devices and also compatibility with their own devices. Some of this may be down to the fact that some of them didn't do the preparation for the session in terms of actually trying things out before the session and often came without having done that so that would obviously improve things but some of it was also to do with trying to get the VR headsets to work with their own devices because they wouldn't have had a chance to do that beforehand unless they've got ones at home so again some of it was around that. One of the interesting things that came out of this was around authenticity. So we actually had, because there were academic staff in there who they've already seen, that didn't feel authentic to them so it didn't feel quite as immersive as it could have done if they didn't actually know those individuals. And the other aspect that I found quite interesting was that they didn't like the idea that they couldn't respond to Sam or they didn't hear Sam's voice as part of it which partly showed that they didn't feel that they were Sam in that situation but also it was interesting because I don't really know how you could have actually added that in to actually have them responding as Sam as part of those videos. So in terms of next steps what we'd like to do is we'd like to see about how we can support other academic staff to do a similar thing and we'd also like to look at how we can involve interprofessional learning in this. So this was written and created by mental health nursing but those nursing students will come into contact with lots of different practitioners, social workers, occupational therapists so it'd be really good to try and combine that. So just to say there's a couple of QR codes here which do actually link to a couple of the videos if you wanted to have a look at them. And yeah, so any questions? Again, another perfectly timed presentation so thank you Laura. I think we'll go to the floor first of all before we look at V-Vox. Are there any questions from in the room? Gentleman at the very back row I think. Second back. Is it on? Yes it is. Hi Laura, that's brilliant. I apologize if I didn't notice but did you say you contextualized the videos in terms of activities the students performed before or after or do they simply just watch them and reflect on the experience? So it is contextualized. There's usually a bit of an overview of who Sam is however that can be adapted so you can present that individual with certain mental health conditions but you can also then change that for another context so you could then present it to a secondary group of students and then present with a different context. So that's why within the videos themselves we've tried to keep that out of it a little bit. It does confuse the students to an extent because I think they're expecting something that is heavily contextualized but it does make them a lot more reusable in terms of actually then going on to use them with other groups of students. Great stuff. And were there actually activities that the students were expected to perform sort of after watching them? I'm just interested in that sort of context. Yeah, so they would usually watch one of the videos and then they would then work as a group to discuss what had been seen and then to kind of, so the start of the activity was focused on how that patient's feeling. So how did you feel how did you feel in that situation as you're trying to get them to consider how that felt for them as a patient? And then moving on to what practice are you seeing? How could that be improved? What could you do differently in that context? Great, thank you. And I have another question at the front. Hi, Sandra Huskinson from Loughborough University. Can you see this particular method using it for another topic or another area of expertise that you might be able to help students with? We certainly see that this could work really well in a lot of other healthcare subjects. So I've talked to people about using it in social work, occupational therapy, and they've been really interested in doing something similar. Part of it's around the commitment of time to create the actual script, which is the thing that actually takes the longest to do. But also we can see its application in things like policing, law, and other areas where case studies are used quite heavily. I think getting students to immerse themselves in the experience they may not have had before, so we'll work with first year students who perhaps haven't gone out on placement or have not gone into a work context would work. So for instance, in a courtroom, getting to experience that as a witness or as a defendant might be a really good experience for them to have prior to doing that themselves because they're not going to necessarily see it from that perspective. Great, thank you. We had some good engagement in VVox, I think in at least a couple of instances, colleagues have answered each other's questions. So I'm just going to pick out one which is, obviously a straight-off question no one's responded to yet. So this one around, there's a couple around alternatives. So we take this one. Did you consider issuing students with their own Google Cardboard headsets rather than having a mixture of headsets and platforms? So we did consider doing that, but there was an issue around trying to get access to those and budgets and things like that. So in the end, we've got a central set of VR headsets hoping that those will work with more different types of technologies that the students have got. But again, actually, because we've not invested in a set for every single student, we got them to share them. And actually, that's turned out to be the right thing to do because a lot of them didn't actually like using them. Great, thank you. And we will take another question that is hopefully quite straightforward to answer in the last minute. And again, it's about alternatives. The one at the top, H5P is a branching scenario activity. Do you think you could use this app as well? The demo content is similar to what you've been showing us today. You could do. I think in terms of a branching activity, it does get more complicated. So if you're giving students choices to make, then you're gonna have to create more videos. That will take a lot more time. So in the different scenarios, we'll then have to be written. So I think the approach that we took was more kind of scalable and doable within the time scale that we had. Great, thank you very much indeed. Apologies to any questions we didn't get to. We're now on time. Could we thank Laura and our other speakers again for this session, please? And we are now going into a networking breakdown stairs before we're all back in this room in half an hour. So thank you. Adena's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with Noteable, our Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high-quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Adena's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with Noteable, our Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high-quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Adena's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with Noteable, our Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high-quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology. Adena's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with Noteable, our Jupyter Notebook service. Our DigiMap services deliver high-quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology.


But Dr. Weeks was kind of a pioneer for sure in the early days like back in the 1950s and 1960s She was a hundred percent a pioneer and applying principles of acceptance to the anxiety state 100% she was blazing a trail there But it is true that many therapists now in 2023 have no idea who dr. Claire Weeks was they do not know what the Claire Weeks method is in air quotes And we want to know is that a deal breaker?


Leaders from the Marine Corps and naval inventories of 15 different countries gathered in Lima, Peru to take part in MLAC 2011 Since 2001 MLAC has offered a venue to increase engagement between the Marine leaders of the Western Hemisphere We the combined leadership of nearly all the Marine forces of North Central and South America Have a significant opportunity to set the example for all other Marines to share and to learn from each other's experiences In dealing with and defeating common threats. Although the leaders spoke different languages and had different backgrounds Their similarities were more evident than their differences here in Lima. We'll be a great opportunity to share ideas Knowledge and experiences as brother Marines. We are all naval infantry with a maritime tradition warrior ethos And ethos that binds us together as brothers this year's conference was co-hosted by Peru and the United States Our nation welcomes you all with much affection with the hope that by the end of this conference The conclusions we've reached serve to consolidate the relationships that our countries have developed in the past In order to procure a better future for our nation Reporting from Lima, Peru Marine Corporal J. Nava


I don't think we've ever done that together in like a minute. I know, I don't think so either. As you guys read by today's title, yes, we bought another house. And we are standing in that house right now. So, to give a little background story, we're not moving out of the house that we own now, but, Bill is getting into, what are you getting into? Just in real estate, and we're gonna give you a little house tour of the house that we bought. And we are doing a lot of remodeling in here, and it's actually gonna be really cute, and I'm really excited to see what you do with the place, cause like, it's already like really cute. Oh my God, I can't wait. We literally bought a house. Like, this is it, we're in the kitchen right now. This is everything right here. Yeah. This is all ours. Like, I closed on it last week. I can like, stand on the counter. I can rip out this stove right now if I want it. So, Bill is actually nice. So, Bill for a while has been really wanting to get into like real estate. We should bring this into our house. Look at how nice this stove is. And this stove is really nice. We should steal it. Anyway, the tech talk. So, Bill for a while has been really wanting to invest our money into real estate, like do Airbnb. And we're gonna just like keep like, we're gonna see how this one goes, but we're gonna keep like buying houses and like, you know, Airbnb and renting it. And this one goes well. Yeah. That's my goal. So, that's like his little side hobby. But man, I've been wanting to buy a house for a while. And stay tuned for next year, because we're planning to- Wait, wait, we got a surprise for ourselves. For ourselves. Maybe it has to do with dream home or something. I don't know, we'll talk more about that, but y'all are here to see our brand new house that we bought. Exactly, baby. Literally, I just signed all the paperwork and sent them the money and it's officially ours. Like we own it, nobody could take it from us. And that's final. Yeah, it's final. So, baby, I know you only, this is the first time Rai has ever actually seen the house. I've been here- That's pretty cute. I've been here a couple times. Isn't it growing on you? No, it definitely needs remodeling. Tell me it's homey vibes. It is homey vibes. Like, you go to your parents' house, this is how you feel. Yeah, it's definitely homey vibes. Definitely, like I said, need some upgrading. Need some new lighting and everything. Yeah, and like, look at the little light right there. And the curtains. I know. Well, and there's a kitchen table. Well, let's start with the guest room. Let's just start way over here. Let's go and move through the house and comment down below what you think about it. And also, now that we have a fresh house to renovate, comment down below some ideas and I actually might put some of your ideas into the renovation of this house. Do you want us to paint the walls? Do you want us to redo the flooring? Do you want us to put a new fan in? Let us know in the comments. But without further ado, let's get you this house tour on our own. Here is the guest room. Okay, we've got that blue wall. We've got an extra carpet right here just in case you want to add some more carpet. Got a nice big closet for storage and anything of the goodies. I don't think it's a walk-in closet. It is. I don't think it is. Okay, just because you can walk in it, it's a walk-in closet. It is a walk-in closet. You can walk in it. All right, fine. It's probably a walk-in closet. It's gotta, you know, if you see a fan, probably it will change that too. Yeah, it definitely needs to go. I don't know about this blue wall. We're not a dark color five person when it comes to like our accents in our house. We like lighter colors, like silvers. Lights, blacks. Yeah, some blacks for accents and grays for accents. Okay, so you walk down here. You got what, just like a little linen closet? A linen. I've never heard of closet.  You can put your towels and blankets or whatnot. Ooh, okay. And then, okay, it's got a nice little bathroom. Ooh, this is nice.  Okay. Did it leave us anything in here in the mouth? Dang. Soft clothes. Ooh, that's how you know a house is good. It has soft clothes, toilet seats.  Not gonna lie, the lighting in here looks amazing. Like, look at it to yourself. You're glowing. Oh, wow, okay. Look at it, let's, but we should have done the intro in here. Yeah, we should have done the intro in here. What is good? Oh my God. All right, redo the whole video, okay. All right, so, is this another little linen closet? Yeah, I'm definitely gonna use one of these closets to like store all the cleaning supplies. There's a lot of dead spiders. You know, oh, is it really? Where? Ew, there's a bunch right there. Oh yeah, we're gonna need past people here. Stat. I love to hear one thing that I do like about this garage is that it has storage space, right? Maybe you need something like that. And low key, it does not have a laundry room, so this is a laundry, but I love how it has an extra little lip. So you can like, look at it, you can put shelves here babe. You can put storage all here.  I think, yeah, it's deeper. We don't have this. It stops here. Yeah, this is cute. But this is the whole garage. Oh, and the plus side of the line in this house is that they have shutters. So, the shutters can bring it to our house that we have right now. We don't have hurricane shutters, and if you did not know a hurricane, just hit, I don't know, October, so almost a year ago now. And we didn't have hurricane shutters. This house, they got hurricane windows installed, so they're old shutters. We're gonna be able to take, because they're mine now. And put them on our house. So, it works out. All of these windows here are hurricane, like if Bill was just telling me hurricane. Hurricane roof, so you don't have to worry about anything. Oh, they have an attic here. Oh, they do. We haven't even seen that. Like this video, get this video to 3000 likes, and I'll get Mariah to go up in the attic and explore. Right babe? And then this is, I guess, the kitchen and the living room area. Ooh, look at how big this is. It's supposed to couch right here out of here. Yeah, TV there. Couch, probably this way, this way. It's gonna block the window just a little bit, but it'll look cute, because couch here, here. Coffee table, entertainment center.  I know, because nobody's lived here. Nobody's lived here in like months. Hey guys, nobody's cleaned this place in month 5. Really? Yes. That's how our house would look if we didn't have pest control. I'll have to clean this. Yes you are. It's your house now. The other thing that sold me Mariah's squad on this house is look at how big this layout is. Like, looking from this point of view, I love that that open layout here.  This is gonna be a perfect area. Oh my gosh. If you wanna stay in South West Florida, let me know, because this will be on the market hopefully soon. Yes. And if you're also wondering why there's shutters on the window, they never took them down from last year. That just shows nobody's lived here. Like, they literally just been like chilling. I think this house was their vacation home. Probably. And then they never came back, so they just sold it. Then here's the master. Pretty cute. Pretty cute. Once again, lighting probably needs to be a little bit stronger. Kind of dull in here. And obviously the windows are blocked, but this is the walk-in closet. This is showing this, baby. Come on. Get in there. Show them. It's not, it's, it's, no, no. You said there's buggies in there. You're so cute. Are they actually? It's Explorer. See, I actually like, there's not one bug in here. This is probably the cleanest, oh, wait. Is that a bug? Oh, it's a froggy. Oh, what? No, wait, see? This house is poppin'. This place has a bidet. Look at that. Spray your butt cheeks down, look at that. Oh my God, why would they put that? It just shot the light switch. Oh my God, that's such a bad design because it goes right there. Hold on.  I think you show them how big the shower is because it looks pretty nice. There's spiders in there. I was gonna turn it on. Are there actually? Yeah, there's spiders. You said we gotta clean. Oh, you're in it now. Oh, you're in it now. You already said you would.  Like, it's super nice, vanity, good lighting. Like, look at how nice this is. Yeah, this house is very cute. I told you. Yeah, it's decent, like it. Right? And then once we get the panels off of the windows, it'll look so much nicer because the actual natural light will come in. But I don't know what they were doing. Like, I for one don't like dark blue in a house. Yeah, they have blue here. This is like a weird blue. It's like a denim. Who puts like jeans? Are you making an outside of house? In the future, the outside of the house is yellow-ish. But in the future, I want it to be all white. I feel like white for this house would make it look fancy. I know, all the house over here in this neighborhood look real, real nice. And our house is just like yellow. But hopefully in the future, we'll be able to do that. You're tired.  There's a bedroom over there, babe. I'll come back for you later. I'm gonna go clean it. I'm gonna go hang out with the cat.  I get such good vibes in this house. When I walked in, I'm like, I feel like it's homey. Like, I feel like I could definitely eat here and sleep here, especially Airbnb. And then last thing, we didn't show you the kitchen. I know we started in here, but... So this is obviously where the kitchen table is gonna go. We got this nice little breakfast bar they call it. And then they put in new cabinets.  But this is still super nice for being like, it's new. So I'm gonna keep it like this because it is super nice. I know, right? You can look right out here. We're gonna put a fence out in the backyard. I know it's hard to like see, but we're gonna put a fence out here, a white fence like our house. But dang, with these appliances, look at that. Look at this. We should steal this, too. Look it, there's a top rack for silverware. Oh my gosh, this is super nice. I actually want that. It looks like they ran it too.  Smells good. I think they just ran it. This is so much nice. We should honestly steal this. This one is so much nicer than our house. I know it would be stealing, to be tactically on this, but. Baby, this is a really good purchase. It's cute. And I think once you shape it up, like how we did for our house, it's gonna look really freaking good. Like I'm excited. That's what I'm saying. I literally can't wait. I'm super excited. And do you want to know what's funny? This is all Mariah's off. So I handed her this paper of like the house and literally I was like, I handed her three different houses when I was looking at them and I'm like, which one do you like the best? I like this one. She's like, oh, this one's super nice. I was like, okay, I'll put a offer on it. And after some negotiating, they took our offer and here we are. Yeah, it's pretty cute. Before we leave, can I ask you to do one thing? What did you do when we bought our first house? What did we do? I stood on top of the counter. Maybe. Yeah, we do it again. And what'd you do though? What did I do? I don't remember what we did. You threw it back on the counter. Remember? Oh, I twerked? Yeah, come on, steal the deal. That's like hitting champagne off of a new ship. She looks like she's looking at the bugs. Look at her stand.  Get over here. Go, go, go. Here, come here. Gosh, our feelings are way taller than this. Come here, oh my God. Don't hurt yourself now. I know, Jesus. You did a good job though. I couldn't have done it as good as you. I know, I got scared. What the, don't, okay. Don't hide yourself up that much. I am. I was thinking, what about we just go on the counter and like break it, cracks it. I mean. This has to be a disaster. Are we getting new car drops? No, probably leaving for now. They're nice. Once you dress them up with plants and stuff, bottoming, bottom boom. Did you buy some bottoming? We are definitely gonna keep giving you guys updates throughout this whole like remodeling and making everything look super good and show you guys like after we finally get everything furnished and stuff. Cause he's been getting a lot of stuff for the house and it's been filling up our garage. Oh my God, I know. We have like a couch in the garage, outdoor furniture, two TVs, a bed, a bed frame. Like we're getting a lot in. There's a lot. And I couldn't buy anything else cause our garage is packed full right now. So now you can see like the before like we did before like our house door. But then an after will be soon. I'm hoping to get this place done within like a month, maybe two. Oh, so you're trying to get it up on the listing on two months? Yeah, I say two months because like you got to start paying on the house. We're gonna start getting mortgage payments. Like I want to start, you know. Getting people in here, yeah, you're right. Getting people in here and hopefully being like the best host and have the best place. Now that I've stayed at tons and tons of Airbnb's, I know what it takes to be a good host because like some Airbnb places are like, ugh. Yeah. And I hate that. Or the people that run it are mean and they don't care about their guests. Well, we're gonna make sure we care and clean it up and make it look nice and excited. And now if we ever want to have like a party, throw it here. We don't have to worry about ruining our house. Yeah, you're right. But you guys, I hope you enjoyed today's video. And I want to say one more thing. Thank you so much for letting us do this. Like we could not have bought this house without you guys like the support that you've given us throughout our whole lives and continue to give us into our next chapters and hopefully into our future family. Yeah, so we're very blessed. We're about to get married. Our wedding is nine months away. We were 13 months away. I'm not supposed. I know. Nine months until we get married and everything is just like changing but like for the better. Like it's getting like so much better. And like the fact that we could bring all of you along for the ride is insane. But like I said, 3,000 likes Mariah's going in the attic, you know. I didn't agree to this so. Well, you don't have to. I just, I put it up there. So now it's up to the longest part. All right. You shake on it? I'm not shaking on it. Come on. No, I don't want to find it. Oh! All right, that's fine. Do that. All right. We love you guys so much and we will see you in the next video. But until then. Peace. Love you guys.


Next up is Trevor Grant, who will be talking about one of the oldest but still going strong projects in Apache Software Foundation that have to do with big data, Apache Machout. Who's everyone doing today? The magnificent modular Mahoops. My name's Trevor Grant. I will be giving this quick lightning talk. I'm not going to dwell on myself very much because we don't have a lot of time. Suffice to say, I formally trained in mathematics. I had computers to varying degrees of success here and there. I work at IBM. They brought me out here today. I also get paid to work on open source. It's wonderful. If anybody has the means to do so, I highly recommend getting paid to work on open source. It's very rewarding. Apache Mahout is a big math library. I'm going to kind of get into what exactly that means. Big data, I know it's high performance computing, but that can mean different things. Big data, users, some. It's linear algebra, unlike machine learning. That is part of the reason that it is not necessarily the most popular projects because it is a project that is that thing that you hated to do, but you kind of muscled your way through to get through college. Advanced linear applied linear algebra. And there's GPUs, I guess. I don't know. I made these slides recently and it was kind of a hip, it was quick. Clusters versus supercomputers. The idea of a big data, this big math, is that we could do a supercomputer.  But those are really expensive and there's a lot of other costs, things that go along with that. So we maybe want to just buy a bunch of cheap commodity computers and we'll have one part of the matrix over here on this computer and another part here, another part. So you've got this matrix that's now spread across, let's say, 10 or 20 or 100 different computers. That is the problem that we seek out to solve. When you have a matrix that's split up like that, simple things like finding the inverse, doing the compositions becomes tricky. The other problem is that if you're writing in Scala or a lot of these other big data languages, you don't have a mathematically expressive, even TensorFlow, which is Python and Python is supposed to be very expressive, it's still not very expressive in the case it's like dirty Java. Enter, we also have a Scala, an R-like Scala DSL. So this is Scala code, so your matrix A transpose times A is expressed like this. Very easy to read and this is important because if you're trying to express these very difficult math formulas, you want them to be as easy to read as possible so that you can keep up the code, so you can maintain these things over time, et cetera. Distributed row matrix in general is like in RDD and Spark, it could be a data set and flint batch, it could be a SQL table. It's whatever big data engine you have, you, to say, this is going to be my matrix. And I'm saying this because one of the big features of Moot is that it's very modular. You can plug in your own engine. These are flint, Spark, and H2O are the three out of the box engines. However, you can write bindings for just about anything. And what that means is you're going to, I'm out of order, you implement like matrix A transpose times A, matrix A times B. You implement some of these things, just general BLAST operations for these big data sets. It's a library that runs on your distributed engine. Now locally, you've got these small little chunks of your matrix. You've got one chunk here, one chunk there, one chunk there. So when we get down to the, in, like, on each node, the level that we're running, we also have optimizers that will run BLAST operations locally that you can optimize out of. So you have, like, a JVM. This is usually JVM type of stuff. Instead of using the Colt BLAST packs, you can use OpenCL and run CPU BLAST packs. You can run Vienna CL, that also is the GPU BLAST packs. You can have CUDA BLAST packs, whatever you need to do. This is also very exciting because if you are doing IoT things, you're doing some sort of IoT operation and you've got some weird architecture and you want to run really fast on that architecture, you can let whoever knows that architecture really well take some fairly well-defined, you know, I guess not fairly well-defined, it's matrix, awesome. It's matrix operations, matrix A times B. They can implement it for that architecture and then at compile time you just change the dependency and now all of the code, all of the advanced math code runs now on your edge device is the kind of exciting part. And so, what this all, to kind of like tie this all together, why this is all exciting? I bet you, it supports doing this data science or big math or whatever you want to call the buzzword AI, but it makes it a team sport. You have the really smart math people who can use, maybe program a little bit, but they're mainly doing like a scholar, this art, this very mathematically expressive scholar DSL. You have database engineers who really understand how to high-performance tune their database. All they need to do is take these well-understood matrix A times matrix B. They implement those on the database. If you want to do specific hardware acceleration, you can find someone who knows that hardware very well. And it allows this divisional labor where people who, everyone who knows their specific piece of the pie can really just go all in on that little piece and it all comes together into this beautiful system. The other really cool thing there is you start working in a regular like business or foundations or wherever you're at, you can have, you know, someone writes this very difficult algorithm and it's documented, but there's only maybe a few people in the world who really understand this algorithm and maybe one of the person who wrote it is left. Well, that kind of sticks your organization on that architecture because nobody understands how this works to even begin to port it over. Well, the upshot is if it's written in Mahoud, all you need to do is rewrite the back end and everything just picks up and lifts. You can just, you change your back end, there's a level of abstraction there and you go to your next engine as time goes on. Math nerds write the algorithms once. Oh, but wait, there's more. Best in class recommenders. Mahoud has always had a reputation for having best in class open source and even close source recommenders. The universal recommender of Apache prediction, IO incubating, cars.com uses it. There's other places that use it, but I'm not sure exactly who I can talk about. So suffice to say though, this recommender engine is in production at a lot of places because it's a very, very good recommender. It is also not MapReduce. I very much hope that everyone goes out and checks out Apache Mahoud and all this and you're going to run into a lot of stuff talking about Mahoud on MapReduce and how Mahoud's dead because MapReduce is no but no more. We're not, however, everybody who's come up with an ML package and they want you to buy it since 2014 always holds up Mahoud because Mahoud was the machine learning of MapReduce. They're like, we are 100 times faster than this same job on MapReduce and they're talking about Mahoud. And it's all Mahoud, so it's whatever. It's a very important project. A lot of projects depend on it. If not explicitly, code gets copied and pasted out. So please, if you're into math or this kind of stuff, join our mailing list, commit some code, et cetera, et cetera. We have a really nice new website and I nailed it. Again, one question from the audience. Anybody? All right. Well, let's thank Trevor.