Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on digital for health education. My name is Sally Parsley behind these spectacles and I'm a e-learning developer and technologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I'm based with the International Centre for Eye Health and I'm working on a series of open access online courses with the group there. And we're running these webinars, a series of three webinars looking at how educators and health professionals can develop their digital skills and capabilities to make the most of the opportunities for learning and teaching that are offered online these days. So I'm going to turn myself off now. I just wanted to show you that I'm a real person, but you don't need to see my face anymore and we'll get started as quickly as possible. So I'm delighted today we're looking at digital technologies from the viewpoint of the health educator. So and we have two very experienced educators in their respective fields of ophthalmology and disability studies to talk to us today and I'm really excited to hear both their presentations. It's a wonderful opportunity over the next half an hour or so to learn from their expertise and experiences of using digital technologies for education and training. Before I go any further and introduce our first speaker, I just want to do a couple of quick bits of housekeeping. And that is please be aware that we're going to record this session and we'll be sharing the recording and a transcript with you and putting it on our website afterwards. So the plan is for each speaker to talk for about 10 minutes and then we'll have five minutes with five minutes with each speaker for to answer your comments and questions in a quick Q&A. So as you listen to our speakers, please post your questions and comments using the chat bar, which you should see in the go to webinar menu on your screen. So you can post your questions there to me or to the group and I'll collate the questions and put them to our speakers at the end. So that's the plan. I hope it sounds clear. I'm very excited and I'm going to start now by introducing our first speaker. Sorry, Dr. Eduardo Miorga. He's an ophthalmologist with specialisms in refractive and cataract surgery and he's honorary chief of the ophthalmology service at the hospital Italiano de Bueniserries in Argentina. He's an ophthalmic educator and trainer with many years standing and he has a particular interest in expertise in e-learning. Eduardo is the director of e-learning at the Pan American Association of Ophthalmology and the International Council of Ophthalmology, where he's a member of the editorial board for the center of ophthalmic educators, which I think we're going to learn a bit about today, which is great. And he regularly teaches on e-learning courses at the center. So he's going to talk today, and I'm very excited to hear about it, on the importance of good digital literacy for developing medical continuing professional education, CPD, and how the International Council of Ophthalmology can support educators to do this. So remember to post your questions to Eduardo using the chat bar and we'll answer these afterwards. Let me hand over to you now, Eduardo. I'm just making you a presenter. And I think you're still yourself muted. So when you're ready, there you go. Welcome. I'll mute myself. I'll mute myself now, Eduardo. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much, Sally. It's a pleasure to be in honor to be today with you here to share some of what we're doing at the International Council of Ophthalmology. I'm going to turn off my camera now and share my screen. Let me know when you have a full screen of my presentation. Can you see it okay? Yes, I can see it great. Thank you. Okay. So my goal today is to show you how the Center for Ophthalmic Educators belonging to the International Council of Ophthalmology tries to help teachers develop this digital literacy. For this, I'll divide my presentation into four areas, one telling you about our online courses, then a little bit more about the Center for Ophthalmic Educators. Then I will show you our technology blog. And finally, and talking about the Ophthalmic Educators Group. The ICO, for those of you that do not know them well, is an international organization that has 103 National Ophthalmology Societies and 44 International Sospatiality Societies as members. We work together with other NGOs and with supranational organizations from in ophthalmic and ophthalmology from Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and America. The commitments of the ICO are three, education, that's my area, enhancing care and advancing leadership. The first thing I want to introduce to you are our online courses. These online courses are asynchronous courses that, as you know, these are courses where everybody can get connected from any part of the world. And there is no need for the teacher to be there at that time, because the teaching interventions are stored in the web. Of course, the teacher will interact at the time, it's best for them, for students and for himself through forums. The first one I want to talk about is the webinar workshop. We used to give this course to individuals, but we now are trying to do it to organizations. The reason for this is because many times individuals really were not able to implement what they learned there, and organizations usually have more possibilities to do this. Basically, what we taught them was all about the technology behind the webinars. We usually used Adobe Connect for this, but there are now days there are many different softwares for developing webinars from where you can choose from. But they all have in common, like this one here, go to meeting where you can see the screen, where my presentation will be. And the possibility to do chat, do quizzes and polls and see at the same time the video of the speaker. This course prepared them on how to prepare the webinars before what you need to have ready before you do a successful webinar. And during the webinar, how to use the different windows inside the software. How to use presentations, videos, screen sharing, etc. The second one and the one I like most is this one called Transforming Lectures into Effective Teaching Interventions. This is also an asynchronous course where we cover different topics such as adult learning theory that helps engage, keep attention and facilitate learning. How to plan courses that starts with writing good goals and objectives, organizing content and developing assessments. Then how to build the course content, because as most of you are aware of, you can't teach and assess in the same way facts, concepts, procedures, processes and principles. They all need different strategies and this is what we cover here. We then went into the multimedia principles where we join cognitive, what we've learned from cognitive psychology and how to combine multimedia to enhance learning effectiveness. All this runs on a learning management system, one of the most used free software for handling these kind of courses. We also covered how to use screencast software that allows you to record and then publish your presentations. And so creative free answering systems that uses the phones of the learners to answer this in the face-to-face classes. The main goal of this course is to help those who are teaching face-to-face to move into the e-learning arena. In this course, usually in the first week, the learners uploaded what they believe was in their best presentation and as the course goes by, they start working on it to try to apply everything they've learned. Usually by the end of it, the end with much better and polished presentations that the one they started with. This one is probably the course I most enjoy running. This one has not to do with digital literacy, but has to do with probably the most important skill any worker in the 25, 21st century, I'm going to fast, needs to be successful. And this is critical thinking. The teachings here are based on what the foundation for critical thinking is teaching based on Richard Paul's teaching. We use books and booklets from here and recover in different models. The definitions for critical thinking, how Richard Paul classifies the elements of thought in eight areas and how these are analyzed applying intellectual standards. Then we look at the functions of the mind that always work together, such as thinking, feeling and wanting. We go into talking about sociocentric thinking and egocentric thinking that usually modify a lot of our thought. And finally, we end with how to apply all this to analyzing articles and to solve problems in the clinical settings. The center for understanding education is the place where we, you can find all these resources or reach them. We've built this area as a separate website from the ICO website. It just committed to teaching the taxonomy we decided to use is to divide this on how to teach where we publish articles and videos. Regarding, sorry, regarding how to teach, what to teach that goes into developing curriculums for teaching of terminology, what to teach with resources that are used for teaching, how to assess and what to assess with. It has a search engine that allows you to search all these areas on the road. We also have a technology blog that started I think in 2010, where we tried to keep a monthly post on how to use technology for teaching and learning. In this case, this blog, this post is about how to give feedback for the formative or summative using screencast software. And finally, I wanted to mention the Aftalmic Educators Group. This is a group we're trying to form in everybody related to ophthalmology is invited to become a member. You can find more information on this on our website. And the idea is to keep all those interested in teaching and learning and the area related to ophthalmology together. So they can learn from each other and exchange ideas from each other. Of course, in such a short time, I don't have time to cover a lot of other digital competencies that are needed to do all this work, especially for an international organization with ours where our members are spread all over the world. We need to be competent on a lot of collaboration tools. So other things you probably will need to learn. And we probably will be developing courses specifically for these are using collaboration tools such as Google Drive, where with all the reps are our main weapon to hold it some way to be able to do shared work online. We use software like follow up then that allows your and I have no interest. I don't have no economical interest in this, but we use this to follow up and keep our inbox free to follow up our emails. Screencast romantic and other free software that allows you to record and narrate your presentations to put up to the web. Software like to do is that is a to do list that also shared inside helps groups work together. I don't know to be a place to collect all what you find on the web because today probably it's more about creating good teaching interventions that are already on the web than producing them. We just try to produce what we don't find. And finally, another software we use a lot and that we believe learners and teachers in this digital age need to master are the software for mind maps. That allows for students to develop their deep learning and for teachers to develop documents that will help fight the forgetting curve you always have after a teaching intervention. So I'm 20 seconds past my 10 minutes and I think this is all I had to say. Thank you. Thank you so much Edward. 20 seconds is amazing. That was that was terrible. I really enjoyed that for, I mean, lots of things you packed so much into 10 minutes. I particularly enjoyed learning a bit more about the learning modules which are offered by the ICO. And also you gave me ideas for adding more interactivity to our webinars, you know, making the most of the active learning opportunities that this all this technology affords us. So thank you. We've had a question in from Mustafa. I hope I pronounced that right. I apologize. And that is how please how can we have access to the multimedia tools mentioned from ICO. Well, I've, I've sent you this presentation PDF on this PDF. It's my it's a it's a longer presentation I first prepared but of course 10 minutes one on enough there you have all the links to different to different parts of what I talked about. I suggest you first explore that. And if that's not enough, please. Sally share now my, my, my email and I'll be very glad to help anyone that has further questions of needs to find things I talked about. I will be very glad to, to, to help them through email. Oh, that's fantastic. I'll figure out your email and share it in the chat section for for all the audience I've put the link to our web page in the chat bar. And that I we've uploaded Eduardo's PDF and a link to his longer talk there so you can follow up there Mustafa. Okay, thank you. I had a couple of questions for you as well. Eduardo, I hope you don't mind. I promise. So I wanted to know I wanted to maybe it's cheeky not easy. So I wanted to know which, which aspects of teaching online that you personally enjoy the most what you get the most out of and which parts are the most frustrating as an educator. So the, the part I like most is that it allows us to do active learning. It allows us to teach at the time we are, we like to do it. I always get up at four o'clock in the morning. So that's, that's the moment I answer everything that's pending on the forums. And also students specifically when we're talking of CPE, when you talk of CPE, learners are usually working. They're not full time learners. They need to do this when their work and their family obligations do not are not pulling from them. So the thing I, I most like is the possibility to do this for learners and teachers whenever they want. And the other thing is that it adapts to the learners state when they go into it. Because learners that have little experience on the topic can go in the presentations to three times, ask more questions. And that are more competent in that you can just fast forward the videos or just skip them and go into the discussions or assessments or whatever. I think those are the things I value most as a fast forward. Yeah, that's a really great point about Perse being able to being enabled to personalize learning, you know, as a conversation between the educator and the learner. Okay. All right, I've got, I've got several more questions, but I have to let it go, Eduardo, because we're time is moving on. And I want to make sure there's lots of time for Judas talk as well. So thank you again. And I really appreciate your time today for joining us. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay, so we're now going to move on to our second talk. And this is from our second speakers from joining us from South Africa. It's associate professor Dr. Judith McKenzie, who's an extremely experienced educator and researcher at the University of Cape Town. She's head of the disability studies division within the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. And she convenes the postgraduate diploma and disability studies there. She's also responsible for supervision of masters and PhD students and has an active research program focusing largely on inclusive education, intellectual disability and family life. And she's the lead academic on the MOOC education for all disability diversity and inclusion, which was developed by the University of Cape Town on the future and platform. So Judith is here today to actually share mostly to share her I think to share her experiences of these MOOCs are massive open online courses. And just a quick word about those before you go on. MOOCs are free to access online courses, which are being developed in large numbers by universities around the world. And the aim is to extend the reach of higher education beyond the university walls. So they tend to have large numbers of students and a lot of the learning is self directed in the courses and UCT has a fantastic program of MOOCs available now. So Judith is going to talk about her experiences as an educator developing and delivering the MOOC she was involved with and also on the impact it's had on her research and teaching practice since. So again, please, as questions and comments come to you, please post them to Judith using either the chat bar or the question bar. And we'll answer these in a Q&A afterwards. Okay, so let me hand over. Control to do this. Yes. Thank you. Hi, Judith. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Getting to the screen. I do believe. Yes, I can see your screen now. You can see the screen. Yep. I can see your slide. Great. Okay, I am not as expert at webinars as Eduardo. So thank you, Eduardo, for the presentation and I've certainly learned a lot and love the professional way in which it was done. I think there's a skill to doing that. And really being familiar with the technology. So I'm talking about experiences with MOOCs and I would like to just look at this presentation in terms of firstly my own personal experiences that I've had with the MOOC and the motivation that I had to develop it and that we felt the need for the MOOC. And then something about what that development entailed. And finally just to look at some of the benefits and challenges that arise from working in that MOOC space. So starting off with my own personal experiences. I found myself I've been involved in the area of inclusive education for many years and inclusive education for those who may be not so familiar with it is the education of all children in the same classroom. Instead of special education for children with disabilities and regular education for those without inclusive education looks at the ways in which education can be integrated for both children with and without disabilities. So what I find is that often we ask for help or advice and especially the requests would come from less well resourced areas who really felt they wanted to do something this area. We're unable to find resources to assist them. So from our division there was a need to share and wanting to share but not having the time and many of the people making the requests were not people in a position to come and study with us but just needed some information to get them going. The other aspect that was important for me is that we in running the postgraduate diploma on disability studies. We moved from a block release course where students would come for two weeks, go back and then come back for another two weeks and then come back and do the exam and then come back for another two weeks and go back and come back and forth. And we moved that to a blended learning in which they would just come for two weeks and then the rest would be in online learning. And this was a full qualification which is counted as a distance education in South Africa and throughout Council of Higher Education. But what was revealing to me was the level of audience interaction, I mean not audience, peer interaction that would happen in the online space, the discussion and the way that peers would construct knowledge with the facilitator and with each other. And so that was a revelation for me to see that. And then the other personal experience is that there is such a willingness to learn out there and a dearth of knowledge and yet we've got this, the internet which is such a wonderful way to share. So as I say, I was impressed by the power of online engagement, especially as it allows students interaction and co-creation of knowledge. And then UCT sent out an offer for people to motivate to do courses. And stated that funding would be made available for course development. So that was motivating and we applied in that. And then the attraction of the openness that the open courses open technically, legally, culturally, pedagogically and financially. So it gave ultimate access. So in terms of legal, copyright in terms of culture, culturally, it was that we had the opportunity to bring in the full range of, a whole range of cultures. And then pedagogical that it was, we had a range of pedagogical techniques and financial being free, not being having any cost implications for the user. And then the other really thing that was important just was reaching low to middle income countries. And here we had a challenge because if you do, sorry, I've done something with my screen now. And we had a challenge because if you look at the literature finds is that MOOCs are often, they've often, while they've been held as an educational revolution and being able to reach people who might not have access to courses. And the research reveals that, in fact, the users are mostly located in high income countries. And thus educational disparity is particularly stock in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all of which seem to be prime candidates for MOOC education. But in those countries, almost 80% of the MOOCs come from the wealthiest and the most well educated 6% of the population. And so those were the motivations. And then we through that motivation, fortunately, we were accepted to go on to the program and to be funded for it. And then we moved into the course development. And this was a really very, very interesting experience and I learned a lot about teaching and about learning design, even having had a lot of experience in course development. The precision that's needed to develop a MOOC was very enlightening. So we had regular meetings to lay out and plan the MOOC and we engage with an NGO in the field of inclusive education and also share their resources. I think when you're developing a MOOC, it really is time to make use of your networks. We found that people were very willing to be drawn in and to be part of it. We had, as I said, clarity is the thing and the learning design team really pushes one for clarity. So we had to gain clarity on what is mean starting from the beginning. And we had to define our target group carefully and of course determine learning outcomes and assessment. I'll point out copyright is something of a mystery to academics. We just feel like we can use whatever we like and that was the challenge to learn about that as well. And there's a lot of an administrative load, there's setting up appointments, there's arranging shoots, there's preparing scripts. So there is a lot of preparation to get the MOOC prepared and would not have been able to do that without the support of an assistant. If you are in an academic position and you are thinking of doing a MOOC, then one needs to be aware of the real load that it does impose. And we were lucky at UCT to have the funding to be able to employ somebody. And the learning design team is critical. We had an expert team at the Centre for Innovation of Learning and Teaching, which we call SILT at UCT. Then what was the impact on other forms of teaching? And I think it helped me a lot with the blended learning course, just understanding how to facilitate more student engagement. I also learned more about the importance of multimedia, not just not only the PowerPoint, but using other sources as well. And engaging students to discuss with each other. I think what it also highlighted for me in an area that I still need to go more into is the importance of digital literacies. And I looked at Belshaw, which I won't go into now, but he identifies these different elements of digital literacy. So it's so much more than just being able to use the technology and it's so much more than just being able to post messages. There are a whole lot of digital literacies which need to be drawn upon. I also found that coming from disability studies, it was very important to us that the MOOC would be accessible to people with disabilities. So people with visual impairment, which might of course be of interest to Eduardo from the filmic side. And also people with hearing impairments and even people with low levels of language, either second language speakers or through disability. And we used then the notion of universal design for learning and we found that MOOCs are very well orientated for that. And universal design for learning looks at representing the information that you need to present in a range of ways. Visually, auditory, text in a whole range of ways so that people can exercise their own learning style and use their own strengths. And then multiple means of action and expression means that there are flexible methods of action and expression to support their learning. So that participants might respond through a written text, through a spoken text, through a posted video and so on. So that multiple means of action and expression and then multiple means of engagement. And that means it's the motivation getting the effective part of learning in why people actually learn. So I think that that framework helps us to look at making it accessible. There's just a screenshot of the MOOC, which is actually running at the moment. It's I think the eighth run that it's on now. And so the benefits, the benefits that we've experienced is that participants have really benefited in ways that they've shared with us. That emails and stories, people that have like come said, oh, they've really found it helpful. And the MOOC also raises the profile of the division and as a lead academic, it also has assisted me in my academic career. And we've made connections with other countries. That is a fascinating part of MOOCs that you've got a global connection and a global dialogue. We also find that students who do MOOCs have joined our program. So we have gathered PhD students and postgraduate students who started off by doing the MOOC and then became interested in disability studies. And those experiences has led us to seek and to receive funding for further forms, which would be on education of children with disabilities. So that we're doing a more advanced version of education for all. And then we're doing a MOOC on education of children who are deaf and hard of hearing, children who have blind and have low vision and children with intellectual impairment. It's been nice to be able to bring in students as mentors. They are doing work in inclusive education. They can spend some time on the MOOC and get to know some of the issues and engage with students on there. And of course, there are also research opportunities. The challenge is that it's very time consuming to set up. And as each run goes, as I say, we're in the eighth run now. But each time one wants to engage with it more, but it's a challenge to find the time to do that. And when one is when, one would actually update the course. And then, of course, keeping up the main term is an issue is students tend not to complete. There's a funnel of participation with a large number starting and a few coming out. For example, our first run, 9,104 participants registered, but 724 actually finished the course with various degrees of participation in between. So whereas it is a very small proportion that actually finished, I think that you will agree that having 724 people go through a course is reaching still a lot of people. And the others will still have gained from the incomplete participation. So in conclusion, I would just like to say that it's a very, I've had a very positive experience. And it's been very supported by the university. And we're grateful to Sultan to the VC strategic fund and just also to acknowledge my coeducator. And inclusive education South Africa, because as I say, it's very much a collaborative effort and can't be done on one's own. So I've raced through that, Sally. And I hope it hasn't been too quick. I'm not, and I hope that I'm in my time. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Judith. That was fascinating. And you were absolutely on time. And a lot of what she said, I'm a someone who is more of a learning designer who's also who works with academics to create MOOCs. And so much of what you said resonated with me about the need to the need for precision and so much work in the planning at the start. I think because the less teacher, less ongoing teacher facilitation, you need to really plan how it's going to work at the start, don't you? And I actually had a with your with your completion rate, 724 people going through the course is amazing. And I want to I have read recently that we shouldn't be looking at the people who register for MOOC as our learners. They're like the people who are thinking about buying our product. And it's the people who turn up that we should think of as our learners, which actually kind of will double your completion rate. And actually, I had one question I had for you was I recently went to a meeting. You use future learners, the platform, and that's a real feature of MOOCs, isn't it that academics, we kind of work with this external commercial platform provider, don't we? So we move out of our mood or our or or vula and work with these these and they're quite commercial and how they think about things. And they're very focused on how to make MOOCs sustainable. So this meeting was all about make the taking the MOOCs we're creating and integrating them with our formal courses. And I was very interested to see that you had come from a blended a blended course and into developing MOOCs. And my question when I get to it, finally, I apologize, is do you see are you looking at integrating the MOOC back into the blended formal course? Is that something that's feasible or are they two different and the audiences are two different, the learners and so on. Do you see a synergy between the two to help you with this, you know, managing the workload and making them more sustainable in future? Yes, I do. The thing is that the MOOC has been slightly different to the aim of the blended course. So it hasn't really been a fit exactly. But interestingly enough, we have the MOOC that's running now this run now the University of Johannesburg. They the education students have been they need to do they've been told that they need to do the MOOC. So they are integrating it. It's another university and they're integrating it into their postgraduate program. So it's quite interesting how how interesting. Yeah, it's early days, isn't it? There's a lot of change going on. I've got bits of paper, I've written millions of notes. So yes, I was very interested in Bellshore for digital literacy is something we've been thinking about, too. And we've been looking at what the UK universities information literacy service has been looking at. They've developed a set of competencies and capabilities that they feel UK students need to have for higher education. And something we've been talking about is how cultural these how culturally contextual these capabilities and digital literacies are. So for example, here in the UK, there's a big emphasis on managing your digital identity and making sure you've got a professional digital identity. Because everybody's on social media chatting away and maybe mixing up their personal and professional identities when they're students. Is that something that you see it in South Africa? Well, I think that, you know, this MOOC, for example, was aimed at low and middle income countries. So a lot of our participants are not very sophisticated in terms of a lot of them are. But there are many that are not that sophisticated in the digital technologies. And I think that we haven't taken sufficient note of the elements of digital literacy and kind of use the MOOC itself to develop those skills as we go as we go along as we go through it. I think it takes a lot more thought and certainly with online with full qualifications is even more of an issue. Because they are people who have paid the fees and who are ready for full qualification and with different levels of preparedness for the digital element. So in that we do spend a lot of time we spent like two weeks and we have ongoing support for the students. So I would say we're probably more the other way, Sally, is that people are quite unsophisticated. A lot of people are quite unsophisticated in the digital world. Okay. Certainly in the formal courses obviously in the MOOC you have the full range. Yeah. I think that's a really important point that I just made. I just made that mistake. I think in my question of not lumping our students together in great heaps that there's a lot of difference between a cohort in amongst a cohort of students and that will change over time as well. Yeah. Okay, I see I can see time running on so I'm although I could ask both you and Eduardo many more questions. We will lose our audience one by one. So I'm going to. So I'm going to thank you very much, Judith. That was extremely interesting and I'm going to wrap up now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. Bye. Bye. So I'm thank you to both our presenters and you should get an email in a few days with the links to this recording and the transcripts and please share them. And also, please, if I could just finish off by showing our last screen, join us next time when we're going to look at digital technologies from the learner's point of view from our for health professionals. So we have another faculty member from Cape Town, Miss Veronica Mitchell, we will be talking about the digital skills and tools that health professionals need to support their technology enhanced learning. And she's actually going to talk, I think, a bit more about the digital skills and literacies we've touched on here, which I also talked about in our first webinar in a very sort of broad sense. So if you're interested in seeing the first webinar or the transcript or in signing up for the next one, which I very much encourage you to do, please visit this webpage and I have stuck the link in the chat as well. Find out more and so I'm going to finish now and I'd like to finish finally by thanking Eduardo and Judith again for two really interesting webinars. Thank you very much.


That brings me to the topic of this video, Amway. Amway was one of the first widely successful MLMs, and much of the way that they conducted their business and also involved themselves in politics kind of paved the way for the rest of the MLM world to follow. I'm telling you, the story of Amway is absolutely crazy, and I feel like more people need to know about it. So that's why I'm gonna talk about it today. Just a quick disclaimer, because I feel like it's kind of necessary, obviously a lot of this stuff is going to be my opinion, Amway don't sue me.  So yeah, strap in, get some good snacks, and if you're as interested in MLMs as I am, I think this will be a really fun video. So first, let's go into the history of Amway, and hopefully this is as interesting to you as it is to me. Amway was founded in 1959 by J. Van Andel and Richard DeVos. The founders were inspired to create Amway when they were recruited into an MLM called Neutralite. What happened is under Neutralite, DeVos and Van Andel grew their distributor downline to over 5,000 people. So they're actually really successful at Neutralite, but they saw the limits of that business. They only sold nutrition products, not everyone was interested in it, and they thought, what if we took this model and had more products that everyone could buy and use? And so they basically created Amway and then used their 5,000 distributors that they already had through Neutralite to just distribute Amway products. So it's like starting a business and already having 5,000 customers, it's definitely going to work. Amway is still thriving today and they sell mainly health, beauty, and home care products. Their motto is selling things that everyone can use every day and that everyone basically does use in their home. Amway reported sales of 8.8 billion in 2018 and conducts business through a number of various countries and territories. Eventually, Amway grew so big that they bought out Neutralite, the MLM that the founders joined in the first place and they used Neutralite as a distribution leeway for their products. So what is the Amway business model? Amway combines direct selling with a multi-level marketing strategy. Amway distributors are referred to as independent business owners. Independent business owners can market products directly to potential customers and may also sponsor and mentor other people to become independent business owners. Pay attention to the word mentor because that's a very important phrase when it comes to Amway's recruitment process. Amway has extremely overpriced home products. That's how they're able to pay all of their upline and the top people in their pyramid is by overpricing and having these huge margins of profit. Amway distributors are taught to purchase all of their home care products from Amway themselves and they're told that this is like purchasing from their own business when in fact they're not really profiting off of it and it's still more expensive even with the distributor discount than the home care products would be anywhere else. To further profit off of distributors buying their home care products from Amway, Amway created a system called Ditto Delivery. Ditto Delivery is a monthly replenishment program that fills orders based on customers predetermined needs. Ditto Delivery accounts for 30% of Northern American sales. What I personally believe is happening through Ditto Delivery is distributors are taught to purchase from their own company, Amway, and so they purchase all their home goods through Ditto Delivery, it automatically replenishes and charges them every month for home care needs. But if you put that into perspective, as we said in 2018, $8.8 billion is what Amway made. So think of 30% of that which is what comes from Ditto Delivery and you can imagine just how much the distributors themselves are giving to Amway. Do these independent business owners see a profit even remotely close to $8.8 billion? Not at all. That's why I personally believe that this is a disgusting business practice to encourage distributors who are supposed to be making money from you as a company and selling your products to be purchasing your products themselves and that's how you make the majority of your money is a little bit gross and unethical. Funny enough, I've had a run-in with Amway Recruiters myself and I thought that I'd share with you guys this experience just so you can see how Amway Recruiters work, how independent business owners, you know, try and recruit others into their downline. So I ran into Amway Recruiters when I was in my hometown at a local animal nursery. It was like in a, you know, very family oriented part of town and it was this couple with their young baby. They came up to me and just randomly started talking to me. They were incredibly nice but also really strangely inquisitive into my life. I didn't think much of it at the time except for just kind of that it was a little weird how nosy this like random couple was but they would ask me things like where my clothes were from, where I worked, where I went to school, all that kind of stuff but since they were, you know, with their child at a really family oriented place I just thought of them as really friendly like neighborly like people. They started talking about how successful they were in their business. They told me that they see something in me where they think I could be successful too and at the time I was just freshly in college. I think I was 18. I really wanted to be successful. I had a lot of ambition and thought it was really cool that this, you know, seemingly successful young couple saw that in me and wanted to mentor me. So they invited me out for coffee and while usually strangers inviting you out for coffee would feel weird and awkward, they seemed so nice and normal that I didn't really think much of it. When I went out for coffee with them, they started talking about some really strange concepts to me. They mentioned the Rich Man Poor Man book by Guy Kosaki, which I thought was like a business book they were recommending to me. They talked about their friends who were 24 years old, who were multimillionaires and have already retired and were their own mentors. They talked about how what they do is basically own a ton of different businesses and then purchase their own goods from their own businesses instead of buying from outside businesses like Walmart or Target. Being young and fresh in college, not really understanding much about business, but having an interest in it, I thought that they were genuinely sharing with me some new way to make money. I noticed that they were really pushy and they kept wanting me to come to this one seminar and come to this thing with them. I ended up having this gut feeling that something wasn't right and that they weren't maybe as successful as they claimed they were or maybe wanted something from me. So I went home and I looked up the book Rich Man Poor Man by Guy Kosaki. I did some research into who these people are and what they're trying to tell me because they wouldn't even say that their company was AMLE. They wouldn't say what they worked for or what they were doing. They just kind of kept everything really vague. And when I did research, I ended up finding out that they were AMLE recruiters and that's what they were trying to get me to do. Go to this seminar that would sell me on becoming an AMLE independent business owner myself. Of course, any time you go up and look up AMLE or any other MLM, you come across thousands of horror stories. And so luckily I wasn't completely sold yet on the whole concept and I backed out and told them I'm sorry, but I'm not interested. The creepy thing is that the couple was so aggressive at that point that I remember just happening to run into the wife at my place of work, which was really creepy because I told her where I worked. That's just creepy and pushing the boundaries of super inappropriate to find out where someone works that you're trying to recruit into your MLM and then show up at their workplace. Like, no. Now this is where it gets even weirder. So AMLE and its founders, especially the DeBoss family, is very involved in politics, which I believe personally is a big reason why they were able to be so successful and have such little regulations on the company, which in turn allowed other MLMs to have little regulations as well. So these are going to be a lot of factoids that I'm about to say, but bear with me because it adds up to a really, really strange, bigger picture. In the 1990s, AMLE was a major contributor to the Republican Party and to the election campaign of various GOP candidates. In October of 1994, AMLE gave the biggest corporate contribution recorded to that day for a single election. They gave $2.5 million to the Republican National Committee and was the number one corporate political donor in the US during the 2004 election cycle. The organization contributed $4 million to the conservative group Progress for America as well. So that's a lot of money, even just in that statement. That's $6.5 million that AMLE has donated over the course of a few years to the Republican Party. You have to be wondering why they donated so much money to politics and how that maybe benefited them in the long run. Here are some other factors pertaining to money, politics, and the DeBoss family that kind of ties in with AMLE and how they were able to further their business politically. In 1996, in July, AMLE co-founder Richard DeBoss was honored at a $3 million fundraiser for the Republican Party. In April 1997, Richard and Helen DeBoss gave $1 million to the RNC, which was the second biggest soft-money donation ever, apart from AMLE's first donation. So they personally, as a family, gave $1 million to the Republican Party. I can't even imagine having $1 million, let alone donating it. I mean, people that usually have that much money, they don't donate to something just out of the kindness of their heart. Like, let's be real, usually it's because they have something to gain from that. If you're like me, you're probably wondering if these contributions had an effect on helping AMLE steer clear of the FTC and harsher regulations for its shady practices. In July of 1997, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Newt Gringrich slipped a last-minute provision into a tax bill that granted AMLE a tax break on Asian branches that totalled $19 million, way more than their contributions to the Republican Party. So AMLE and its founders have contributed maybe $8 million to the Republican Party, and you can see, in turn, in 1997, around the same year that that much money was donated, they were granted $19 million in a tax break. That's a huge win for AMLE and a huge amount of money to, you know, not have to pay in taxes. It's insane. Not only did AMLE get some major benefits from being in bed with the Republican Party, but much of the DeVos family became a part of politics as well.  Was that English? Dick DeVos, son of AMLE founder Richard DeVos, served as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his wife Betsy DeVos served as chair of Michigan Republican Party throughout 1996 to 2005. On February 7th of 2017, Betsy DeVos was confirmed by the Senate as the 11th Secretary of Education. This means that Betsy DeVos, part of the AMLE family, is largely in charge of the U.S.'s education, and she has very close ties to AMLE and MLM, with so much money poured from AMLE into politics. And the owners and their descendants working in politics, it makes a lot of sense why the government has not further regulated or cracked down on unethical MLM practices. So let's talk about AMLE's different run-ins with the law. AMLE co-founder Jay Van Andel in 1980 and later son Steve Van Andel in 2001 were elected by the board of directors of the United States Chamber of Commerce to be the chairman of the private American lobbying organization. And as we know, lobbying has a huge play in politics and rules past, and it's a big downfall of democracy, in my opinion, where corporations and people with lots of money are able to influence politicians. In 1979, the Federal Trade Commission found AMLE to not fit the definition of a pyramid scheme because A, distributors weren't paid to recruit people. B, it did not require distributors to buy a large stock of unmoving inventory. C, distributors were required to maintain sales. And D, the company and distributors were required to accept returns of inventory from down-level distributors. As you can see, these rules are what modern MLMs use today to avoid being labeled a pyramid scheme as well. The FTC did find AMLE guilty of price fixing and making exaggerated income claims, which in my opinion, they 100% still do today, considering that the people that tried to recruit me into AMLE were claiming that their friends retired at the age of 24 and were multi-millionaires. It's just statistically pretty impossible, that's a fact. On November 3rd of 2010, AMLE agreed to pay $56 million to settle a class action that had been filed in Federal District Court in LA in 2007. But that hasn't stopped the AMLE founders from doing a lot to lobby for deregulation of AMLE and similar MLM schemes. The divosses supported an amendment to the U.S. House of Representatives, Omnibus Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Bill in 2018, so that's only a year ago or almost two years ago, that would have limited the ability of the FTC to investigate whether MLMs are pyramid schemes. Imagine that. If the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, couldn't even regulate or look into whether an MLM was a pyramid scheme. Imagine how many people would get screwed over by that.  It also adopted provisions from the so-called Anti-Pyramid Scheme Promotion Act of 2016, which would blur lines from MLM activity and pyramid schemes. Thank God the amendment was opposed by a coalition of consumer interest groups. So you look at a family like the Divoss family, which is involved in AMLE as a company in politics, and you can understand why they're only interested in passing bills that benefits their company and not the interests of American citizens. I know that these are a lot of boring facts all at once, but the bigger picture is not pretty. And all of these laws and regulations have allowed AMLE to financially take advantage of real innocent people. Studies of independent consumer watchdog agencies have shown that between 990 and 999 of 1,000 participants that use AMLE-type pay plans lose money. That means that 99 to 99.9% of people lose money. How do people justify these business practices or not realize that they're being played a fool? AMLE distributors have been accused of using cult-like practices to attract new distributors and keep them committed. Seminars and rallies resemble religious revival meetings, with enormous involvement of distributors despite their minimal income. With mention of these rallies, I can't help but think of modern MLMs and the events and rallies that they hold as well. We've all seen the Arabon White Party or whatever that is, and the Lulu Roe event that have happened. AMLE is very tied in with Christian ideology and is spread mainly through churches. In fact, the people that I met that were AMLE distributors found out about AMLE in their church. AMLE preaches the gospel of prosperity, but even though most people lose money, they stay in AMLE because of the social connections that are deeply woven into the system, much like a cult would say. Think about it. Since most MLMs tell you to go after friends and family, you either lose touch with friends and family or they join you in the MLM. All of a sudden, if you walk away, you're walking away from your church friends, people you associate with, and your friends and family who joined you, and you don't have many others to turn to since you've turned them all away. This is a recruiting practice replicated by almost every MLM to follow AMLE. With no major legal or social repercussions, MLMs are an easy way for greedy and unethical people to get rich quick. And it really seems like AMLE was a major player who paved the way and helped legally allow others to do the same. So that's the history of AMLE. I am super interested in MLMs and how they work and the history behind them, what led them to be where they are today. And I would love to do more videos like this going into other MLM companies. So if you want to see more MLM history videos and in-depth analyses of different MLM companies, give this video a thumbs up, subscribe, and I'd love to make that for you guys. Have a good day. Bye.


The analysis of 30 years of global monthly normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI, data revealed that almost half of the land surface exhibit significant seasonal trends. The most common type of trend was an increase in NDVI in the green season, which was balanced out by a decrease in the brown season. This was mainly seen in grasslands and shrublands, as well as in tigers and tundras. No single attribution of cause could be determined for this trend, but it was clear that it was related to climate-related ameliorations of growing conditions. This article was authored by Asafanyamba, Florencia Sangamano, Elia A. Machado and others.


Spring Valley Elementary is a school that serves a population of children that have a lot of high needs. 93% of our students would qualify for free and reduced lunch and are considered economically disadvantaged. Through our work with Radiant Church this fall we've identified a number of different areas where we think the church could be extraordinarily beneficial in the lives of students here at Spring Valley. It's extremely exciting. There's sustainable materials that could be reused year after year to have a greater impact with a larger number of students in our classrooms and then the ability to have one-on-one or small group time for students and or teachers that are really looking just for a little extra help and partnership. They don't have the things they need as simple as the basic needs. It changes how they behave and all those supports we can give them to the big give will really have a big impact on the kids. I'm happy that the big give chose our school because it will make our classmates happy and excited to go to school. I'm excited for my teacher to have more resources. From the encouragement at the beginning of the school year to volunteering opportunities in the building to financial donations and academic supports over the course of the year the donations would have great impact with the children's lives. That has more of an impact than I could really share until you see it for yourself. It can make a difference. Thank you Radiant Church.


So with dispositional notation, we can write down any numerical amount that we want to in any base we want to work with. So by bundling, we found that the number of cubes shown can be expressed in base 4 as one big thing, two medium, three small, or because this is in dispositional notation, because we're explicitly showing what those units are, then it doesn't really matter what order we list them. We could say there's two medium, one large, three small, or three small, two medium, one large. And this has a number of advantages. One, we don't have to worry about the order that we write things down. All three of these say we have one large, two medium, three small, and it's very clear what this means. The disadvantage is that we have to retain these unit symbols. We have to write them down every single time. And so we might ask, is there a more compact way we could write this? And so this leads us to positional notation. So the number of boxes we had in base 4 was, well, let's pick one of these. We'll say it's three small, two medium, one large. And the thing to remember arithmetic is bookkeeping. And we want to keep track of how many of which type of units. So how can we do this in positional form? Well, this is going to take a little bit of organization. And so, first of all, we want to put down the units in order of decreasing size, largest down to smallest. Now, if we were writing our number in dispositional notation, we would then just use our abstract symbols to indicate how many of each type of unit. So of this large thing, we have one. Of this medium, we have two. Of this small thing, we have three. And so at this point, our positional form is really nothing more than our dispositional form just set down in an organized fashion. What takes us to the positional form is two steps. First of all, we're going to drop these unit designations and leave only the abstract symbols. So those unit designations, large, medium, small, they're gone. And now I just have the symbols one, two, three. Now, the problem is that, again, arithmetic is bookkeeping. We want to keep track of how many of which type of unit. When those units were present, we had an idea of how big each of the units were. When they're gone, we need to remind ourselves of how big those units were. And the key here is that we were working in base four. And so that four of each unit made one of the next larger unit. Since arithmetic is bookkeeping, we want to make note of the fact that we were working in base four. And to do that, we'll add in at the very end and subscripted a spelled out number four. And so this tells us that we have one, two, three, base four. And we can read this one large, two medium, three small at a base of four. Now, one final note, it is very, very, very important to remember how you speak influences how you think. You should read this as one, two, three, base four. Because this reminds you we have one of something, two of something, three of something. And we can fill it in later. We have three small, two medium, one large. If you read this as one, two, three, base four, you'll be reminded of that fact and you'll think about this number correctly. Avoid the temptation to read this as something like 123 base four because that means something completely different that has nothing to do with what we have here. You should read this as one, two, three, base four, one of something, two of something, three of something. All right, so let's take a look. So here we have a number of objects and let's see if we can express the number of objects in base three. And so since we're working in base three, we can begin by bundling sets of three. So here's a set, we'll bundle it. Here's another set. And we don't have any more things that we can bundle together as a set of three so we can write down our positional form. Now as a transition we might want to start with our dispositional form so we'll write down our units in decreasing size order. So we have the medium size unit. We have the small unit. We want to record the number of each type. I have two of these mediums and one of these smalls. Now to get to the positional form we'll drop those unit designations and then we'll remind ourselves that we're working in base three. So we'll write down three there. And there's our number in base three. Now let's see if we can do something with a larger set. So here's a larger set and let's go ahead and express the amount in base three again. So as before, since we're working in base three, we'll begin by bundling sets of three objects. So here's a set of three. Another set of three. Another set of three. Another set of three. Another set of three. Another set of three. And I now have these three things. I can bundle them into a single object. Again, still working base three so I can take these three things and bundle them into a single object. And now I've done I can't bundle anything else. So I'll write down our units in decreasing size, I have this big thing, I have this small thing. I'll write down the number of each type, I have two big, one small. I'll drop the unit symbols, and then I'll put a reminder that we're working in base three. And remember arithmetic is bookkeeping, but there's a problem. It is very bad bookkeeping to write two different numbers in the same way. We wrote this set also as two, one, base three. And yet these two sets have very different amounts of them. So there's something going on that we have to fix. And this comes down to the importance of nothing. To avoid the problem of expressing different amounts using the same written form, we have to write down all the units, even if none of that unit is actually present. So for this amount, which we wrote as two large, one small, there is an intermediate unit that we didn't have any of. But we should, if we're going to write our number in positional form, include that intermediate unit. So we'll include the intermediate unit. We'll write down the amounts. We have two large, zero medium, and one small. We'll drop the unit designations and write the number spelled out. And so there's our number here. There's two, zero, one, base three things there. Well, let's try to work in base four. So we have a number of objects. We want to express the number as a number in base four because we're working in base four. We want to look for sets of four objects to bundle. So let's see. Here's a set. Here's another set. Here's another set of four. And another set of four. Oh, and look, I have one, two, three. I have four objects here. I can bundle these into a single set. So I'll write down the units, one big thing. Now there are two smaller units that we actually used, medium and small, so we do have to indicate those. And arithmetic is bookkeeping. We're going to write down how many of each type of unit. So I have one big, zero medium, and zero small. And I'll write in positional form by dropping the unit designations and reminding ourselves that we're working as a number in base four. And again, it is very, very, very, very, very, very, very important to read this not as 100 base four, but this is 100 base four. There's one of something, zero of something, and zero of something else.