Welcome to everybody who's joining us this morning, and our workshop is Preparing Students for ETD Format Review, a discussion of workshop best practices. And I like to call it the workshop workshop. And as we go through, again, we don't have a moderator today, so just make sure to turn off your audio during our presentations. And then, you know, as we go through, go ahead and place questions in the chat, and we'll go forward from there. My name is Dan Nygaard. I'm the dissertation and thesis coordinator at North Dakota State University. And I'm joined today by Cynthia Tindangan, director of thesis and dissertation services at Ohio University, and Luciella Fazzino, assistant professor at St. John's University. And today, the agenda is basically these quick introductions, and then each of us are going to present our experiences with workshops at our respective universities. And then, basically after that, we'll be going to the questions and panel discussion. And again, we'll save all questions to the very end, and we'll just turn to that and make that our discussion section. And when we open that up, you know, please put the questions in the Q&A, and in addition to questions, another thing we want to hear about is your own workshop experiences and best practices, and so forth. And we really want to make sure we're just sharing information about how workshops are conducted. And this will be in the proceedings, but our contact information and our websites are right here. And so without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and stop screen sharing. I think I pressed the wrong button there. It'll just be a moment, and I'll turn it over to Cynthia. Good morning, everyone. Can you see my big green slide? Yes. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. My name is Cynthia Tindongan, and I'm the Director of Thesis and Dissertation Services at Ohio University and the Graduate College. And I'm delighted to be here with you today at the USETDA 2021 conference. And in particular, talking about workshops, best practices. A little bit about Ohio University. We are a public university in Southeast Ohio, in Athens, Ohio. We are a Research 2 institution, and we have five regional campuses. Although it seems like overnight mushrooms sites pop up, and I'm forever learning about a new center or a new something, a new location for some of our programming, some of our classes. Maybe that's happening to you too. I guess that's the good news. So we are housed in the Graduate College. And most of you are probably either on the library side or the graduate school side. And I'm in the Graduate College, actually. We are an academic unit. We are degree granting. And we have 1.5 FTE, myself as the director. And then I have a halftime reviewer who bumps up to full time during deadline weeks. Before I talk more specifically about workshops, I want to give you a little bit of an overview about what we do here on the Graduate College at Ohio University. And we're known as Thesis and Dissertation Services, otherwise known as TADD. And sometimes students confuse that with the name. They think our name, one of us is called TADD. But no, that's just an acronym. And our role is to facilitate students meeting the final requirements for graduation, publishing their documents, meeting all of their other requirements so that they can finish and graduate on time. So our main function is conducting format reviews. And I'm sure many of you do that as well. We have standards to which we expect students to adhere. And we help them to do that. We also provide semesterly workshops for semesterly workshops, which of course I'm going to talk about in a little bit more detail. And our sort of work-a-day quotidian work is advising students over email, phone. We used to see them in person before the pandemic. And we hope to do that again. But we also do a lot of work with students one-on-one and also our workshops and teams. And if you're not familiar with teams, the Microsoft products like Zoom or Hopin, we help them to finish their documents, publish their documents, embargo their documents, and so on. We also set the deadlines for every semester. We manage students' information. And we serve as a liaison between students and many other entities on campus and also beyond, including Ohio Lake and ProQuest. And we give presentations at the request of professors. We like to do that because we like to get students sort of engaged and thinking ahead about what they might need to be doing at the end of their graduate school tenure a little earlier on. Again, we publish documents in Ohio Lake. We run various reports for internal and external entities. And we liaise with Ohio Lake ProQuest and our own university libraries and anyone else who engages with us. So let me tell you a little bit about our workflow. And it may or may not be similar to yours. Students send their document, and we call these thesis and dissertation. We call those documents to us. We only work with thesis and dissertations at Ohio University. We don't work with capstone projects or any other kinds of written projects. And we are mainly working with written theses and dissertations, although, as you know, in the arts, for example, there are performance-based documents or documents in quotes. So a student sends us their document and we go through it and send them an email asking them to correct any formatting issues. And then they do that, hopefully they do that, and they send it back to us. And we have this sort of little back and forth until their formatting is complete. And when it is complete, we attach our approval page, our seal, to the last page of the PDF, sort of formalizing that it's been approved. And we send them a link with instructions to upload to Ohio Lake. If you're not familiar with Ohio Lake, it is the online repository for the most institutions in the state of Ohio. And then doctoral candidates complete the survey of earned doctorates. I know we will have a presentation later on from the SED folks, which will be interesting because many of us do have our students complete that survey. We have four semesterly workshops. One is completing the TAD process. One is preparing for graduation, working with Microsoft words specifically in our templates. And the last is formatting tables and figures. So the first workshop called completing the TAD process came about when a student approached me about trying to create a timeline, trying to map out this process for himself so that he could stay on track so that he could meet deadlines. And that seemed like a wonderful tool. And so we went ahead and created something like that, which I'm gonna show you here. This is on our website, and I'll show you where it is later. But this is a tool that is designed to be a working document for students. This one is for dissertations. We also have one for theses. And this is designed for students to plug their own planning, their own timeline into. But what we started with was preparing a guide for students who, for example, wanted to finish in six months. So if they're graduating in this fall semester, if they're doctoral students, they need to finish in November. So we have them beginning in May. And if they were to do that, then we have tasks recommended for different weeks in the semester to take care of different tasks. And we expect that they would modify this for their own best purposes. And embedded there are links for documents and resources they need. In addition to that, we created another timeline, another sort of template timeline for three months, beginning in August. And then for one month, beginning in October. And that is basically an overview of the completing the TAD process workshop. We share that resource and show students how to use it. Our next workshop is preparing for graduation. And what we do in this workshop is one of the main topics of discussion is deadlines. And I'm sure your students are the same. They wanna know what the deadlines are. Can they be moved? Can they be excused from deadlines? And of course the answer is no. Usually no, unless someone senior to me tells me to let a student through and then I do. That's rare. It has to be really extenuating circumstances. But for example, up here we have for fall dissertation, we have a graduate application deadline, an oral defense deadline, a post defense format review deadline and a final clearance deadline, which students need to, which means that a student has finished up the process. And Dan, will you give me like a one minute warning here just before 15? Or tell me when I've gone on too long and when I should stop? Sure thing, I would you have plenty of time. Right, okay, thank you. So we have the same, we have also a set of deadlines for theses. And then we have what we call early four. And we have early four in between any two semesters between fall and spring, between spring and summer and so on. And it's sort of a grace period or a liminal space, a liminal time of space that students can use if, for example, and you may have something like this where you are too, you may have come to this or not, where students who, for example, haven't quite met the fall deadlines but are really close, then they can finish up usually in between fall and spring semesters. And if they do this, if they meet the specific early four deadlines, then the advantage for them is that they don't have to register in spring semester. They will graduate in spring semester, their degrees will be conferred at the end of the semester, just like everyone else who files sort of regular spring. But again, the benefit for them is that they finish up early and they won't have to register. So let me leap here to our website and I will show you a couple of things that we show students about how to, how to get around our website, how to use the tools that we provide here. This is our webpage and we have a couple of things here that we hope are helpful. We have this TAD process checklist, which is sort of a narrative of the steps in the process and the relative order in which they should be taken. We have a deadline document here and this shows students based on who they are, what their deadlines are, they look across the columns. And there's a lot of confusion with our students, frankly, about what these mean and how to meet them. So I spend a lot of time sort of explaining what these are about and what they mean for students. We provide things like this sample front matter, which is formatted to our specifications to have sort of a visual for students. This is all in the templates too, which I'll show you in a minute. And the timeline that I showed you earlier is here. We have a checklist. These are all the things that we're going over in the graduation workshop. And then the last thing I'll look at, well, not the last thing, let's see. Feel free to borrow or steal anything that we've created that could be helpful. This is what we call a TAD submission form. It's a fillable PDF and students send this to us when they first engage with us and it gives us a sort of snapshot of who they are when they expect to graduate. And with this, we create a file for them in our database so that we can track them through the process. So our idea is to help them get across the finish line, not dragging them. Sometimes we're holding their hands, but to provide as much encouragement and support as we can. We really aim to be student-centered here. And we have found that in these workshops, one of the benefits of them is kind of demystifying the process, allaying their fears, assuaging whatever is keeping them in the way, getting in the way of, we can't write for them, but we can help them, we can help guide them through the process. And here we have a list of templates, most of which are in APA 7. I'm sure you have templates too. And I'm not going to really dwell on this a whole lot, except to say that obviously it's formatted to our specifications. It has dropdown menus and boxes to fill in, things like titles and names. It has the Dean's name on it, depending on the college. And one thing we hope is really helpful in these templates, and I'm afraid students don't really utilize this as a resource the way they could, is that within this template are actually instructions for how to do what students need to do, for example, how to form out their headings, how to do their spacing, how to create an automated table of contents. All of these instructions are actually written here within the template. And so it's always there. We are happy to work with students whenever they need our help, but it's here, the resource is there for them. The next workshop is on Microsoft Word, and really it is about using the template that I just showed you. The formatting is there, but that doesn't mean that it always works for every student, especially, and I'm sure you've had this experience too, when students are cutting and pasting from course papers and proposals and different sources, the formatting can get all sort of wonky. And so we spend a lot of time working with students on how to format their reference pages, how to do block quotes, tables and figures, spacing, section breaks, all kinds of things like that. The margins are there, and for some reason I don't know why, maybe you have this experience too. Our students tend to change the margins that are in the template, exactly how the margins need to be. That's okay, we work with that, we work with that too. And those are some links that I really have already shown you. The tables and figures workshop is the last workshop, and it clearly is about formatting tables and figures, spacing them, aligning them, creating an automated list of tables, automated list of figures. One of the issues that we really spend a lot of time on right now is explaining to students how in APA 7, let me show you this actually. Let me go back here and show you this. I'm sure you have this experience too, but the title and the number for figures and tables, figures I'm saying, go at the top of the figure, and that has never been the case for APA, for any of APA styles, style guides before this. So this is, we spend a lot of time talking to students about how it's different in APA 7, and the figure number and title belong above the figure. Okay, let me move forward here again a little bit. And also, as I said, automated list of tables and figures helping students with that, that can be a little bit tricky. And our students give us, we have some qualitative data and some quantitative data, sharing some qualitative data here with you now. Our students seem to respond really well to our workshops. It sort of gives them a foundation, a starting point where, as I said earlier, this mystifying process that has a lot of moving parts when students are under a whole lot of stress to meet deadlines and get through and get out of here. And so we introduce ourselves to them, we try to build some rapport, we get to know them a little bit so they can reach out to us one-on-one and not try to solve problems that for us can be a snap, but for them it can be really frustrating. This is a frustrating process. And I tell students, you have done all the coursework, all the research and writing, all the analysis, and now we're telling you to fix the margins. And I feel for them because someone told me the same thing. And so again, we try to help them over the finish line. And when we engage with students, we try to take some of the stress out of it. We try to make it a more positive experience for them. And it seems to work that way. We seem to get good feedback from students and I would say they keep coming back. We don't really want them to keep coming back, but at least they feel free to get in touch with us when they need further help and beyond. Those are the things that we cover when we do our workshops with TAD services here at Ohio University. And I'll be glad to answer any questions when we get through our individual presentations. So I just stopped sharing and I don't see that I'm coming back with you. I can see you, Cynthia. Okay, great. So thanks. All right, thanks Cynthia. And so I'm going to be going next. And this is my discussion of ETD workshops at North Dakota State University. And again, I'm Dan Nygaard. I'm with the NDSU Graduate School. And I'm hoping you can click on this link. Let me try to get it open here. And this is basically our templates, our instructions on how to use the template and format guidelines, just if you want to take a look at them. This is the presentation we're doing right now. And then this is my workshop slides in case anybody wants to take a look at what the workshops that we conduct here look like. And what I'm going to try to do is paste this into the chat. So let me see if I can... My bad, I've got that in Q&A. I'm going to go ahead and... Oh, thank you, Scarlett. Scarlett just put it in there. So we are good to go. And so basically NDSU at a glance, our spring enrollment was 11,712. And we have 723 doctoral and 1,087 masters. Our overall enrollment has been going down over the last few years. I think I came to many schools that are out there. However, our graduate numbers have stayed relatively stable throughout that. And if you can see our average number is a low of 280, a high of 317. But around 300 or so documents come through. And NDSU uses the term dispositions. It's a term that's been around since long before my time. And it's a catch-all for dissertation, thesis, or master's papers. So if you see that term, that's what that means. And basically we do the format review process. Many of you are probably familiar with it. We have a submission through ProQuest or master's papers go in in a separate way because we don't publish our master's papers through ProQuest. And we do a review memo. We find the changes that need to be made in the document.  And student makes the changes and resubmits it for the next review and repeat until approved. So I'm sure many of you are familiar with that and many of you are probably familiar with the same challenges that students might have with it. We do have an initial submission deadline each semester. And it's about 30 days ahead of the final deadline where we need to have them approved for graduation. And some students have trouble understanding the initial submission deadline and what it means. You can't submit an incomplete or an incomplete or an unedited document ahead of the deadline and then expect to be able to make all those committee changes. You have to have your final exam, everything else done before you make that initial submission, all the content. And students have trouble with the prerequisites because we do have a number of them. We need a report of final, a research compliance form, the disposition payment or the graduate school payment. All those different prerequisites, sometimes students have trouble understanding all the different things to be submitted. And we have, of course, our students are focused on their research, on teaching, on writing. They are focused on all those things they're supposed to be focused on. And it can sometimes make it hard to be, to turn that focus to the format guidelines. And sometimes students will have written for a while without knowing the guidelines and maybe they haven't found that part of our website. And again, it's one of those things, we're trying to do our best to get out in front of that and make sure that they're aware of everything.  I think we have 48 double spaced pages. And that covers all the front matter, all the preparatory material, all the way through how appendices should be done. So again, it's just a lot. It's a book length project they're trying to publish. And it can be a little challenging. And then our final challenge is that last month of each semester, when we are doing nothing but format reviews, we can't provide a lot of that personalized assistance that we might be able to provide earlier. So students sometimes can be faced with a real nasty surprise. If they submit a document that needs a lot of changes and what are they gonna do at that point? There's fewer resources available and the ones that are available are being used by other students who might be in the same situation. So to try to prevent some of that, we've always had a Microsoft Word workshop. And that sort of goes in and out. We don't necessarily control that as much from the graduate school. And that's done through our technology center. And it covers things like how to add sectioning page breaks, how to use styles, how to update a table of contents, all those different things that if you're familiar with a word you might be familiar with and know that students sometimes need help with. What we did as a graduate school, we decided to implement a navigating the disposition review process workshop. And that's a single workshop where we try to give students that introduction and overview of everything. And alongside that, we also put in place a method of individual meetings where students can take, we schedule an hour with them and we meet up over the pandemic. Of course, we meet over Zoom and we work on their documents together. And so that's kind of the methods that we put in place to try to mitigate some of those challenges. Our workshop itself, we cover, again, we're trying to cover a lot of ground. And so we start out with our introduction, goals and agenda. And during that, I try to establish that I'm in collaboration with them. And I'm not, it can be easy to see our role as holding up that final obstacle for them to jump through or that final thing they have to do, but we're really trying to make it a collaborative process. There's a reason that we do what we do. And in my workshop, I also try to show them the website and just show them where to find all those different things. And the guidelines, the different edge cases that some of them might have. And maybe they have a co-authored document or something that's a chapter that might be co-authored with somebody else. And how do they determine how to put that if they want to include that? And we also talk about prerequisites, submission process, non-pre-requisites as well because we still have the occasional student who may think even that they need to print bound copies and we haven't done that for a number of years, but things still sometimes persist. And after I discuss a lot of those things, we turn to the guidelines. And we just look at, if you looked at my slides or if you take a chance later, you can see what I try to do is show them as much as possible a picture of what Wright looks like. And we cover the title page, all the preparatory material, table of contents, list of tables and figures, headings, body paragraphs, tables and figures, anything you can think of. We try to fit it in there with a few exceptions. We're trying to fit it also into the time that we're allotted. And I do very little word how to, the focus is really on, again, what that correct looks like. And I don't delve into the nuts and bolts as much. The one place where I might do that is when I show them the templates. And one thing that I try to do when I show them the templates is just a couple of those little automated features. And it helps to kind of give, I try to show a little bit that I also can help them with word and if they have any problems with it. And then we sort of wrap up with a practical exercise where it's from a review. And I don't share those files because I'm not comfortable sharing my student files with everybody, but basically it's just a look at a document that a student actually did submit and then what the review memo is actually going to look like. And then we talk through some of the changes that we're looking for. And again, we do all of that in about an hour and a half and we schedule I'd say about three to five workshops each semester, more in the spring, fewer in the summer.  So we typically do that in the month leading up to that initial submission deadline. So our deadline this year for fall is November 19th. So our workshops are happening throughout the month of October. And what I found from the workshops is I'll list here just I call it qualitative benefits are just things that you can't really put into numbers necessarily. And it makes me more relatable and that's I really try to be a friendly face when I'm doing that workshop. And it, just try to be where I'm not somebody that's I don't want to be scary or a monster to them. So I'm trying to be a little more we're cooperating. And again, we try to frame that format review as not an obstacle, something that where we're trying to make their document look as good as it can possibly look before we send it out into the world. I use my workshops to advertise those individual meetings. When we do, we want students to not just attend one workshop but to try to continue thinking about that final format review and not let it be a nasty surprise at the end of their time here. And of course, we all know that students are searching for a job. So they're probably thinking about a thousand different things at graduation time. And we want to make it smooth. We want to make that review process go a little bit easier for them. Again, we do want to make sure that the students get those websites and resources. And again, we don't release, if we didn't do workshops, we didn't do meetings or any sort of outreach, some students would, I think they might not even know there are guidelines until that very end process. And so we want to try to get out in front and make sure that students are aware. The other thing it puts templates in student hands and templates, of course, I've found that they've been pretty helpful, even if a student doesn't necessarily use the template, the way that we intend for them, at least I have the word, the background, the styles and things so I can help them during maybe a meeting later to put things into place. And then the final thing is I just want to overall put the students encouraged communication. I think in some graduate school departments and colleges, students are taught to be very independent and figure things out on their own and to do everything themselves. And sometimes, especially when you're trying to put together a full length book, you might need a little help. And I wanted to encourage them and just to be able to know that they can talk to me, they can send me an email and they can reach out. Now, in terms of quantitative benefits, the way that I sort of try to evaluate the reviews here is I essentially assign a grade based on how an initial submission adheres to the format guidelines. And in our day-to-day reviews, we just basically give it A, B, C or D. We have a rubric, but it's generally, A is where it's nearly ready to be published, D is where it's, I'm sure you've all seen that document before. And within the middle on a general ballpark figure, in A or a B is typically a one, two or three, you may one or two page review memo where there's just not very many changes. And then a C or D is three, four, even five page review memo. We try not to do five pages, but again, if there's a lot going on, there's a lot that needs to be fixed, then we end up with that really low grade. The other thing that I look at, and we keep track of here, is the number of reviews before a student is accepted. And does it go three iterations with me, four or five? And again, we just want to make sure. And then the data that I have is from fall 2015, which is when we started doing this, up until the last semester, which is summer of 2021. And that's 1,758 students who have gone through the process. There is a moderate negative correlation between numeric grade and number of reviews. And in other words, that means if you have a high initial grade, you can expect that generally, you're not gonna have too many iterations with me and vice versa. And now again, you can't rely on that 100%, but the pattern and you can see it there, the general trend looks like that. So for the overall, for the entire time we've been doing this, the initial grades, you can see if there's no workshop or meeting, it's not that great. And you can see it climbs if you have only a workshop, and then if you have a meeting with me, our meetings are very effective. We're just generally really rolling up our sleeves and getting that formatting right. And then if you have both, we see a really a huge benefit from bottom to top. And I know my method's not perfect. If a student, for example, changes their name, after they've attended a workshop with me, it might slip through to cracks and they might, this does not attend to a workshop or a meeting, but again, as an overall large figure with the number of reviews that we have, you can see a general pattern emerging. And the same thing with the number of reviews, you can see it sort of goes the same, the opposite direction, where if you have nothing, if you've done no workshop or meeting, you're not gonna, you're gonna be with me a little bit longer than if you have a workshop. Again, I wish this number were a little better, but it's what it is. And then meetings and both, they seem to be the biggest one where we're, that magic number is three, where you have one big review, maybe one with a number of changes, and then one where you're kind of cleaning things up. And then that final review where you're telling them congratulations, that's where we're trying to hit. And it seems like the more that we make the effort the better that we do with that. And so this is just the same numbers over the last couple. I just wanted to look at spring 2019 to 21, and that covers the beginning of the, of the pandemic. And so this does cover the time when we did switch, for one, our workshops did switch to zoom over that time. And you can see that the pattern for the grade generally, it generally holds. And with the number of reviews, you can see that it does get a little wonky.  This is looking at only 775 students. But again, and this is where again, the workshops are, they're not having the results I'm looking for over the last couple of years. So again, that's one of the reasons why I'm here is just to see what other practices are out there and what can be done. And as far as takeaways, no workshop, no meeting is generally not good. And over the course of the time, about 50% of the students have done something, whether it's a workshop or a meeting. And so if you do either a workshop or a meeting, but not both, you're going to be, you know, it would be a little better. Meetings are generally better than workshops in that regard. And then a workshop that leads to a meeting, I found that I think that generally the numbers bear out that that seems to be really where we get amazing results. And what that means, I think, is that a student starts with the workshop and then, you know, they can use template, for instance. And then when they come to the meeting, we're doing a lot less initial prep, we're taking a lot more time making that document shine. And again, it's one of those things where the other thing that I want to consider is that time is always a consideration. I can reach a lot of people in a workshop in an hour and a half where a meeting is just one student for an hour. So, you know, it's one of those things. We spend a lot of time doing meetings. And I'd love to see ways that our workshop can do better where we can actually get a more positive impact for students who may not be able to attend a meeting with me. And, but they can come to a workshop. So, again, that's basically what we have. And a lot of things about just, I'm interested in hearing some ways to improve. You know, should I turn more to some of that technical stuff? How to use word. And should I break it into multiple focused workshops instead of one general one? And, you know, I see Cynthia is doing that. So that's, you know, that's one option. And then, you know, workshops targeted at different academic programs, maybe. And then even things like, you know, should I, all my outreach is to students, generally. And would it be better to do maybe some work with faculty? All those different things are questions that I have. And I'm interested in hearing what, you know, some of the, some of the thoughts you guys have are. And with that, I'll go ahead and I'll thank you guys. And I'm gonna try to figure out how to stop the screen sharing. And let's see here. Am I still screen sharing? There it is. Yeah. Okay, so again, and thanks everybody. And with that, I'll turn it over to Luciella. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Cynthia. It's really good to be here. My name's Luciella Fazzino, and I am the E-Repository Scholarship, or E-Scholarship Repository Librarian. I forget the name of it so many times. And I've requested actually a title change to just Scholarly Communication Librarian because that's a much, you know, a much more known title. And it is what I do. And under that, I also manage the electronic theses and dissertations and manage the workshops. I'm going to put the link to our LibGuide and our templates in the chat. And it's great to see so many Q and As. It'll be great to have different answers from the different types of institutions that we are.  Unlike Cynthia and Dan, we do not have a centralized graduate office. I'm going to try and share my screen. Let's see. No. Okay. Can everybody see the presentation? I'm not seeing it, Luciella. Okay, let's try again. Luciella, if you click on the share screen, and if you're in there, there's a under entire screen, where you see the screen, you actually have to click in that. You have to click on your screen and then it will allow you to share it. The entire screen, yes. Are we there now? Not yet. Is that? Not yet. I'm clicking on that screen at the bottom with the red line crossed through it. Is that correct? Right, you do that. And then when it pops up and it says choose what to share, so it says entire screen in blue. The only thing that I'm getting is select window or screen and it says to block and allow. So under the screen, do you see under the word screen, do you see your screen? My apologies for the technical difficulty. It says allow app hop in com to see your screen. Select window or screen. I say entire screen. Right, and yet. And then click on the screen under entire screen. Okay. And then it says allow or block and I'm going to allow it. Are we there? Not yet. Should I log out and maybe log back in? Do you know what I might do? I will log out and log back in. I'm going to leave and then come back in. See if that helps. All right, so while we're waiting, I'm seeing a lot of questions about templates and we can address those more at the end. But one thing I should mention is that we do use a dot x and that is, I realize that's not necessarily what word would call a template, but I use the term template just so students, so I have a common term that I can share with those students. So yeah, I do realize, I see some of the chat. It is something that, it's something that we use even though it's not necessarily technically correct. And a couple other quick things. And again, we'll get to the rest of the questions in the Q and A once Housiella logs back in. Maybe I can tackle a couple, because I want the focus of when Luciella is finished to really be talking about workshops. And so let me go ahead and respond to Roxanne while we're waiting for Luciella. We ask students to use APA seven, but if their discipline requires latech or some other style guide, then yes, we will certainly entertain Chicago, MLA, any kind of style that their discipline uses. And I can only speak for Ohio University, but if we have a student who has a chapter, for example, that's formatted for a particular journal, we just ask them to indicate that under the chapter heading and we're not gonna ask them to change the formatting when they've already formatted for the journal. We recognize that professional step. So yeah, mostly we like APA seven, but we can work with other style guides. And Kayla asks about working with colleges and schools to create these templates. Our guiding body is what we call the Graduate Council and it is made up of associate deans for research from every college and they approve our process. So yes. Okay, and it looks like Luciella is back up and running. So. Great. Hold on one, it is trying to make its way. People are interested in what's happening with the Dow today, that's good. Here we go, present. As I was saying, we don't have a centralized office the way that Dan and Cynthia do. We are a private four year Catholic University at St. John's University, we're in Queens, New York. We were founded in 1870 by the Byzantium Fathers who follow Vincent de Paul as a patron saint. We have six colleges and schools. We have six campuses including Rome and Paris and the main campus is in Queens and it's an urban campus on 105 acres. For schools and colleges, we have the College of Pharmacy, we have a St. John's College, School of Education, Tobin College of Business, we have a Collins College of Professional Studies and we have the School of Law. We do not oversee the ETDs for the School of Law in the main campus. So our enrollment profile, we have about 4,600 graduate students, 4,500 for 2021. We lost about 100, but that's not bad considering the effects of COVID. Again, we do not oversee any of the materials for the law school. So what we do have is about 3,800 masters and PhD students. The library takes a look at about 160 votes per year. There's no centralized graduate offices outside. We do have seven doctoral degree programs and 27 masters degree programs and that does keep changing. And thank goodness, the lines of communication among the different departments of the library are much better. Therefore, when they do, there are a lot of new programs cropping up all the time and because of the new relationships that we have across the board, we are informed of what is happening with each department and the different schools. So the student challenges are that there have been so many messages, there have been so many messengers. We have the advisor saying one thing, we have the department saying another thing, the school is saying something else and the library also may be saying something else. There's also different publications. We have a graduate bulletin, we have the departmental handbooks and then we have the library guidelines. I have taught the administration when all else fails, please go to Harvard University's dissertation guide. There are times, for example, this year a student wanted to include an epigraph and we didn't have a guideline for that. So I went to the Harvard University site, saw what it was they were doing and then implemented that. And eventually that will go into our guidebook as well. We did get student buy-in because they really wanted to have the correct information. They were tired of all the mixed messages. They wanted the most current information and they wanted that opportunity for question and answer where they could just bring their own specific issue to the workshop. They also wanted a line of communication with someone who they could reach to through an email or refer back to. They were really starving for this because there had been nothing like this at the school before. We had departmental challenges in the sense that each school had its own template, its own rules. And so I met with each school and I asked for uniformity. At first they were not willing. And when I showed them the four or five different title pages and the change would just be a tiny little thing, let's put it this way instead of that way, let's take this line out. They were squeamish in the beginning and it took four months to get consensus. And then they also threatened that we would have to do, I would have to submit a proposal to the graduation education policy committee. So we're talking about months and months just to change a few letters, a few positions on a title page, on a copyright page. And eventually they conceded and I was able to do that. And one of the ways that I did do that is that I said, I'll reach out to the deans of each of the schools, if they okay this, then we can move forward. So I did get that and I was very grateful. The departmental administrators were very eager to get this responsibility off their plate. They were like, okay, Luzela's gonna take care of the uniformity, the standardization, getting the templates together and just making their life easier. They also were starving for someone to just take the reins because it was a lot of moving parts and they were different moving parts. One thing that did happen this last year was that one school did lose an administrator, their admin who was a reviewer for the ETTs and she was never replaced. So that department, that school asked the library if they would take over full review. Initially when a student submits their work, it goes to the department, the department reviews and there's a bit of back and forth between the student and the department. Once the department is satisfied, then it comes to the library. So this school was asking that our paraprofessional who does most of the reviewing and myself would absorb this responsibility. Our library was not keen on it but they didn't see an alternative. Luckily, there's only about 15 to 20 works that are coming through that school at this time and it's manageable. We're hoping that this doesn't continue, it's not a trend and that somehow we can get the responsibility back onto the school. The departmental buy-in was also very easy because they got to contribute. I was able to get input from all the schools, the school of education, Tobin College of Business. So everyone was together. We were able to come up with some new policies. We decided we didn't want a signature on the title page for privacy reasons. We decided that the departments could handle that part through their own internal processes and they could keep that documentation in their records. We changed the title page. We got to a consensus on what the handbooks and the graduate bulletin should look like. There was a lot of solidarity and a lot of camaraderie and it was the first time that the admins and some of the deans across the campuses were meeting on this issue. So there was a lot of goodwill formed. It made the faculty jobs much easier and it made the admin jobs a lot easier. So everyone I think was very satisfied. So these are some of the things that we changed. The templates for the title page, the copyright, the VTAY, it was really helpful. The students love the templates. We also changed the guidelines. This is a more dense document for the library to know what exactly the students need to do. And then we also created a checklist which was a much easier, quicker item that they could go through after their work was finished. Again, I put the URL in the chat box to our live guides if you need to have access to that. So these are the workshops. I think I cannot get rid of this little thing up here but that is okay. And what I do with the workshops is that I get the rosters from each school of the students for that semester. So it's a very collaborative endeavor. Once I get the names and the emails, what I do is I send out the doodle polls suggesting five to 10 different days. And the one that is most populated is the one I go for. And then I try to collect the other students on the best days where I get the most responses. Some professors that are going as far as embedding me in their class which is fantastic. What I do at the workshop is I have about 10 to 15 students usually attending. Before COVID, we were doing it face to face. Now we're doing it on Webex. I just to foster that environment of inclusivity and more I have the student introduce themselves, talk about, can you tell us the title of your work? And I think it really helps. I love getting to know the students. I think they like getting to know each other from the different schools. And I go over why is there standardization? It's not something that St. John's has created. And I explain that once your work is out there, the entire world is going to be able to see it. And there is a format that's followed and that's what we're endeavoring for. We want you to look like your best self when you're out there. And then when I explain metrics and download statistics and I show them in the repository previous students works and how they're being downloaded, then they get really excited. And then they realize, okay, yes, I do want my work to look as best as it can. I go through the preliminary pages. I go through templates, the guidebook, the checklist. And then I've also created a workflow that explains to them what happens once they submit their work to ProQuest. And it goes through who is reviewing it, the department, then the library, then what happens once we publish it or send it to ProQuest, how long that process takes. And if they've ordered hard copies for themselves, how long that will be almost frozen there. So these are the 2020 and 2021 E.T.D. workshops. And as you can see, I started in 2020 with 21 that were online and two that were embedded. In 2021, I did 13 online and three that were embedded. So we had 23 in 2020 and we had 16 in 2021. And I feel like one of those people that book, don't work harder, work smarter, because what happened was even though there were less workshops, attendance increased by 44%. And going through the process of the process and going through the process of preparing this conference, I was really excited to see this. And I think most of the increase we can see here is the CCPS, right? That's the cons continuing professional studies. And what happened with that is that they increased the embedding of my workshop. They have a week-long residency program in the summer and they decided that they would invite me as part of that. Also the School of Education really came out and was pushing for more workshops. You know, telling their students about it, having that be a first point of contact. So we had 75 in 2020 and then in 2021 we had 119 students. And it's important to know that students are always at different stages of writing their feces and dissertations. So although we had 75 students attend in 2020, the submissions were different. And what I did was that I went into the ETD administrator and looked to see the amount of errors that students were making. I also compared the notes who was attending my workshop and how they did on their process of submitting and revising. So in 2020, 61 students came to my workshops and they made an average of 3.21 errors or revisions. The students who did not come to my workshops, they made 4.12 errors or revisions. So we have 0.91 more errors or revisions happening among those who do not attend a workshop for the year of 2020. The interesting thing about going into the ETD administrator and looking at everything, it was an opportunity also to do a lot of cleanup. I saw duplicate submissions from students. It was a time to like withdraw certain things. I had never taken such a granular look inside the ETD administrator. So that in itself was quite eye-opening and it was good. It was a good process. In 2021, 31 students that came to my workshop they had made 2.9 errors and revisions. Students who had not come to my workshop and this is only through the month of August because we still have the fall semester. The students who did not come to my workshop, there were 41 of them, they made 3.39 errors or revisions. So you have about almost half a point there, 0.49 more errors and revisions if you did not attend a workshop. And it was interesting. You know, when I had first begun crunching the numbers, I started seeing, I thought that there wasn't much of a difference between the students who did attend and who did not.  What is, what will be? But as I got through more and more numbers and students, there was definitely a benefit to attending. So the takeaways are that the number of errors does not decrease significantly, but it does decrease. You know, at the same time, there is quite a bit of team building across the schools and the departments. And that is precious. I mean, to be honest, the idea that we all can sit in a meeting and come to a consensus on different really granular details about feces and dissertations is quite incredible. And I know that the administrators are doing the best that they can. There's been a lot of goodwill formed. In our university, it's the departments that determine all the deadlines. And we're even at the point now, with some schools, they kind of ask us for feedback. When do you think would be the best deadline? Just to make space for, they back and forth with the revision process for the students. So there's a lot of teamwork and also a much better student experience. They really enjoy the workshops. And these are some of the beginning responses that I got from one of the surveys. I think this was probably right after COVID. And one student says, this webinar was so far the most helpful communication I've received from St. John's or the School of Education regarding the formatting and submission of the dissertation. Thank you. In general, I found the level of communication from St. John's in general to be quite confusing, not just during the pandemic. I'm a student at the Ally Graduate Center. So this is the kind of feedback that's not only useful to me, but also to the department. So I can bring this back to them just so that we can make a more seamless process for the student. Again, the next student, there seems to be a giant disconnect between the revisions of the department and the submission to the library. I fear that I am submitting work that has been approved by the department, but it's going to be delayed by the library. So knowing this, as Cynthia pointed out in her presentation, we want to calm their fears. So I know the job, the task at hand that I have. Someone else says, very informative presentation. Thank you. Very helpful webinar. Very helpful and encouraging. This person was sick from COVID-19 and they were just relieved to have this communication. So quantitatively and qualitatively, these workshops are a benefit. And I can't underscore enough the goodwill and the teamwork that's happened across the campus around this and that the students have a place to go. And it's easy for them step by step to find out what it is that they need to do. So I will stop sharing my screen and I think we will turn it over for questions. As you know, it'll be in the Q&A box. And I think, I don't know how or Cynthia and John want to do it. I'm going to start this discussion just by commenting on something Luciella just said and that is the goodwill. And we can't fail to recognize how important goodwill is working across units. So thank you for saying that. So as Dan mentioned in the beginning, we really have alternative motives, ulterior motives in doing this. And we want to learn from you. And I do see a lot of questions about templates which we will also certainly be glad to answer. But I would like to ask you if you have something to share about workshops, how it's worked for you, any obstacles you've encountered. If you'd like to start providing workshops and you haven't, turn your camera on, turn your mic on and let's just talk about workshops. Also with that Cynthia, can I respond to one of the messages in the chat? Of course. This is Deborah, I totally agree. I simply and I were just talking about what you posted yesterday. And we do wonder sometimes if the students who attend the workshops are the ones who maybe at least need to attend the workshops and the students who most need to attend it are the ones who are probably not going to trouble themselves to come to one. So definitely that's out there. And I just wanted to make sure, that is something we were just talking about as we were preparing for this. So definitely, it's definitely something to wonder about. But again, I think we all see in our different schools that the results sometimes speak for themselves. So, and I do see we have somebody who, hi. Hi Lily, please share. Hi, well, thank you. I was really interested in listening to what other people are doing. And I can say, at Iowa State, we're more similar to what Dan and Cynthia were talking about. And then bits and pieces of what Luciella was talking about. So I will respond to what you were talking about workshops. We also have something similar. We call them boot camps. And at boot camps, the students actually bring their documents to a computer lab. We collaborate with the library. So they give us the computer lab space. And then what we have fortunately in Iowa State is that we have a center for communication excellence. And I actually hire grad students who are trained with the formatting. And so then they lead the boot camps. So one of them will be presenting all the graduate college requirements and students bring their files, right? And they're at the computer stations. And then as they're working through, there's another consultant who's moving back and forth trying to address some of the questions. So that's how we do it. But in terms of like, where you were talking about educating them ahead of time, we do that separately in a seminar event, which I lead. And at that stage, I talk about all the requirements, what you need to do way ahead of schedule, a little bit about the process and the submission and what we talk about who, once you defend, once you do the edits, then you go through progress or even then it kicks back and you have to do all that. Don't wait until the end because then they freak out and say, what, I still have all these revisions to do. I'm not prepared for this. We don't do all of them through ProQuest. Fortunately, again, like I said, I have graduate assistants who are trained as consultants. So they do the before-proquest part. So what you were talking about months before, that timeline kind of thing, we do that, we say anytime you have a draft ready for format check, come in and make an appointment. The grad student goes through most of all the requirements so that by the time they upload it to ProQuest, which we have the grad college staff review at that point, the kickback is usually minor. And if they've utilized our template, it's an easy fix. And we have all the resources that tells them how to do it. The issue with probably the same as what you found is the issue is not them using the template. The issue is when students don't know that templates exist, they have utilized their own and then all of a sudden everything's just messed up or they don't even know their requirements. Those are the issues that we face with and in some ways our departments all do their own thing. They don't always send their students to us, which is the issue. So a lot of students don't even know that they have all these things to utilize way ahead of time. Those are the students that run in trouble. I had a question, Lily, about your process. Because we thought about having grad students, is there a conflict of interest from like grad students advising their peers? Do you know what I mean because? Yeah, we call them our peer mentor programs. And so our consultants are trained consultants. So they have already been certified through rigorous training by me or by my assistant director in different aspects. And so we say they are your first line of support, right? Because they are the ones who are trained. They don't say that they know everything, but they can at least try to capture most of the issues before they go to the actual review. Likewise, our consultants are also trained to give writing feedback. So our center deals not only with the thesis and dissertation, it's only a small part, but we do academic writing as well. And so we have different consultants trained in different specialized areas. Most of our, I would say, almost all of our thesis and dissertation consultants are already pre-trained in writing areas as well. So they can actually give feedback across disciplines in what does your discipline do in terms of writing a manuscript or a dissertation piece? Here are some areas that you might want to explore in terms of making it more clear to your audience and what does that mean in your discipline? So they deal with all that. We call that the Graduate Mentor Program. That's great, thank you. So if I could ask the follow-up question, how far in advance are you letting your graduate students know that this is what the process is gonna be? These are, you have formatting requirements, et cetera. How far in advance of, say, their graduation, their planned graduation date, are they being notified of these requirements? I'll answer and then Dan and Luciella, feel free to answer too. We have our requirements, our templates, our deadlines, all of our resources on the website up to a year in advance. And we really hope faculty steer their students to our website or ask us to come to speak to their classes. We have communications coming out from the Graduate College about workshops and deadlines, but we don't necessarily know which students are coming up on writing or finishing their dissertation. So we hope they're directed to us and once they come to us, we engage with them, but we can't know who they are in some larger fashion. What about? Yeah, we send out a semester, each semester, we send out an info, listserv, email with all the stuff that they should need, all the resources they should need, and just knowing that this format review process is a thing. But we all know how well listserv messages end the land with some of our students. Aside from that, we do outreach through just the Center for Writers, for instance, and aside from that, we do rely on departments to steer their students in our direction in a lot of ways. And I will say that the workshops that we do, and it's a big part of our outreach, actually. And it's one way that we actually, students will come to us and say, wow, okay, I hadn't really realized that this was gonna be what was involved. And if I remember from at a different university than NDSU, but my own graduate school experience, we didn't really get any sort of indication of all the thesis stuff until we were in our very final semester. And then we were given a set of guidelines to follow. So I do think it is something, again, that's a good question, Valerie. How do we get that outreach as soon as possible? I mean, it's one of the theories that we've thought about here at GW is, well, what if we were to introduce the idea that you're gonna have formatting guidelines that you're gonna have to follow when they start the writing process so that they're writing within the formatting guidelines and they don't have to go back and reformat everything. Well, again, we want that to happen. And when we know that students are in the beginning of the writing process, those are the kinds of resources we provide, but we don't necessarily know who the students are that are embarking on writing their proposal, defending their proposal, beginning to do their research. At St. John's, it really depends on the department, the class, for example, when I get embedded it's at the beginning of their program and it's great because I can alert them. I don't think you wanna use Google Docs because everything that we're doing is in one drive and when you go to convert your Google Doc into a PDF, my experience has been it's a little more wonky than the Word document into. So being able to alert them about that is great. And I think being faculty at St. John's is very helpful because I can get the information early on. I have a good rapport with the deans and the assistant deans and the admins also. Like there's always a emails going back. I get the rosters of who the students are gonna be at the beginning of the semester and it's usually they are aware of it and then usually about a month, six weeks before they're graduating is when I get the work done for those students. And some students earlier, some students come later. Some students hear from their peers, hear from other people and they join. And I've had students come multiple times early on and then come back later for a refresher. Thanks. Are there other? Sorry, I just wanted to ask you for other students or other participants who are doing workshops here with us or who want to do workshops. Valerie, were you going to say something else? Please do. Oh no, it's just that my experience is at the, and again, I don't have any control over when they interact with the students and I don't know who they are either. But my experience is they're doing it in say October for students who are graduating in the fall which to me is not nearly enough time for them to pick up on the formatting requirements. And as a result, I'm doing multiple reviews. So I was just trying to get a sense of what other people are introducing the idea of formatting requirements to their students. So I can go back and maybe propose something differently to the graduate schools. Roxanne Treese has a very interesting question in the chat and I was wondering if she wanted to unmute and share her video and pose it. Roxanne, are you out there? I'm gonna go ahead and ask it because it says, she says the benefit of workshops in terms of reducing errors is good but it seems to be a modest benefit. Are there other outcomes that makes the effort of workshops with it? And I'm gonna have Dan and Cynthia speak on that. I can answer and again, this is something that I'm still trying to puzzle out, but again, we have the general workshop, we give them the background and the overview and we can get typically in a semester, it's about four and a half to six hours commitment over that semester to do that outreach for those students. And I think what I've noticed is for me, it's been a feeder to our further resources, whether it's even the writing center or coming to me for another meeting, that's been the big benefit that I've seen in terms of just getting students going in the right direction. And then when they do come to me, we're at least speaking a little bit of the same language and we instead of having to build a document from scratch for them or turn to a template and start trying to convert what they have into a template, they've already got it into a template and then maybe they just need a little help getting it kind of styled up and going from there. So that's what I felt. I agree with Dan that the workshops for me, the workshops in and of themselves are not as valuable as I would hope them to be. They're not as well attended as I would hope them to be, but they're a doorway and they're leading to engagement with us and it's not really very cumbersome time consuming to put them on. It doesn't cost anything except my time. So I still think it's worth it, but your question is really a fair one. Wendy, what would you like to share? Hi, I'm at UCF, I'm the thesis dissertation coordinator and we do have workshops that we offer for the formatting for students, but about maybe five years ago now, we actually moved everything online into Canvas into a web course and all of the formatting instruction videos as well as general information about the whole process are all in the web course that students can access at any time. And then we still email communications to them about what's going on as well as putting announcements in the course and then instead of offering those same workshops particularly over the last year with COVID, I started doing an online session and having just like a Q and A and kind of a, I call it don't fear the format review because everybody gets so freaked out about it just to kind of calm them down and get them to feel confident about submitting and what the responses that we give them actually mean because that's where we do see a lot of confusion between what it means to have met the deadline and when they have to have full approval of their document. So just wanted to share that. That makes a lot of sense. Again, what Lucy Ellis said about goodwill and what we're saying about building rapport with students, those are some of the main takeaways. Dan, you wanted to say something? I think Wendy, that's a great idea and that's why I do this stuff because that's something that we could probably do here at NDSU. I do think that I would continue. I enjoy the outreach. I enjoy going and meeting these graduate students, whether it's over Zoom or face to face and there's something to be said for that but I think having the option where if a student is not able to come to the workshops when they're scheduled to be able to go on to a campus course, that sounds great. Yeah, thanks and we've actually had a lot more engagement since I started offering the sessions through Zoom because students could get there more easily. They didn't have to deal with parking on campus and we also have a lot of satellite campuses. So students from other areas that aren't necessarily at the main campus where I'm located were able to attend. Plus I record the session and I share it afterwards. So even if they can't come at that time they still get some benefit. Wendy, I think I'm gonna try and move towards that. I think that might be one of my goals. Oh, if you wanna reach out, if you have any questions or anything that I can help with please feel free to email me. I also wanted to respond to Roxanne's question. Is it worth it? To have the library be the go-to place for ETD formatting is so valuable. Like our presence, if you talk about ETD formatting you're talking about me and my assistant and there's so much goodwill around the campus and to be embedded in classes, to be consulted by the deans, the assistant deans, the admins, one of the students yesterday that was at the plenary session, Shadi Marabon, she came, I invited her to speak because we had a rapport and we had to work out an issue with her thesis and whether we could put it into the repository because it was actually, it had become a journal publication. So it just, to me, it's a no brainer, definitely. I was gonna say, there's a question in the Q and A that I like to read, it's from GW and it's just, if I have a way of tracking the faculty members who might be producing a large number of C and D students and that is a good question as far as the method that I use just to kind of evaluate them and I don't have it down to faculty members but I do have it down to departments and programs and so I have been able to do, to take a look and see, oh boy, this department is producing a lot of lower quality documents and my efforts to fix that by department have been generally overall fairly good in terms of those really bad ones. There are some departments who are still, I ask them if they wanna do this or that and maybe I don't get a very good response or I don't get much feedback at all from them. So it's one of those things where I can't really mandate things but I can continue to seek out those people who need more help than maybe another department. So I hope that answered that question. Thanks Dan, we are at time and I'm sorry we didn't get to all the formatting or the template questions but feel free to reach out to us individually and please check on that session schedule the program to go to your next session. We wanna thank you very much for attending and we'd like to continue this conversation in any capacity with our colleagues. Dan and Luciella and I are gonna be continuing to do research and would welcome engagement from you. So thank you very much for being here and it was delightful to speak with you and Dan and Luciella could you stick around for just a minute? Certainly. Thank you everyone, have a great rest of the conference. Thanks everybody for attending, that was great. I just wanted to make sure we had a chance to give each other a high five.  And again, I think I've learned a lot from everybody who, everybody who's here and there's, again, there's a lot of questions about templates too, so that's something to think about because I'm wondering if that means that maybe there's something that comes down the road next year, maybe there's a looking into how templates are put into place. We could think about that, we could be the ones if we want to. I wanted to make mention that I noticed and the number might have been higher. I'm not sure, but at one point I noticed 43. Yeah, that's great. In a conference of, you know, around a hundred people, that's great. To stick around for an hour and a half, yeah. Definitely. And I was just glad to have people here and against the Q and A fills up and then people come into the main questions. I wish I could answer every single question individually and maybe if people do email or send in responses and I see there's some people still in the room so please follow up if you do have further questions for me or any, even things that you guys might wanna, anybody might wanna suggest. Also, I wasn't able to attend the formatting users group meeting, but you can join that through USETDA if you want to and talking about things like templates and formatting or what we do in that users group. So you are welcome to join us. I don't think I have a URL to put in the chat, but you could reach out to I think any one of us and we would be able to hook you up. I had to log off one computer and get onto another computer is what happened. But once I got on this computer, it went through. I don't know what the problem is. Well, I'm really pleased with how it went. I think it just as well as I could have expected. I have something and I just looked at people. Is Natalia Bauer still in the room? I just wanna see if you are still available because I know you had a question in the Q and A and we didn't get to it. Yes, I wanted to actually answer that question too. There was a question about the PDF, the final PDF. Are you there, Natalia? I'm gonna start the answer anyways. And if Natalia wants to come in as well, that's fine. But everything that's done in ours is where once we give that approval memo, that document that was the last one that was looked at, it's the one that's gonna get sent forward. And so like there's nothing that happens after that final approval, unless there's maybe a typo that gets caught or something like that, then we might be able to intervene. But for the most part, the expectation is that when we approve, when we say you've completed that format review process, we take that last document that was submitted to ProQuest and that's the one that goes forward. I'm not sure if you do it any differently. Well, at our higher university, we don't apply our approval seal and instruct the student to upload to Ohio Link until the formatting is complete. And we actually don't want them to make any other changes because you have to stop making changes at some point. And that is the document that we approve. The document we approve is the one under which they graduate and have their degree conferred. So that has to be, and that's the one that's published, that has to be the official document. And students do sometimes upload the wrong document. Another version, an earlier version, they don't understand our instructions and we ask them to re-upload, to re-submit so that it's the version that we are saying is the one. Is that to Ohio Link then? Is that what we're uploading? Yeah, and I check them. I check them every single one and I approve it, I approve them for being published and then probably six to eight weeks after degrees are conferred, I publish them. And if they've set an embargo, we honor that embargo, but we publish them anyway. And so if there's an embargo set, then the metadata is available, is searchable, but not the document itself. We do all the uploading here. So that's, once the document's approved, we take that document and the student doesn't go any further with whatever they may want to upload. That's the final approved copy. So, it prevents a lot of that. We don't have, we do it, so we send it forward or we put it in the IR ourselves and there's no confusion at that point. I'm gonna head off and have lunch. Yeah, I was gonna say if, unless there's anybody else who, I can stay for a few more minutes, but otherwise it looks like the few people are leaving, but if there's any other questions, great. Otherwise, I'd say we call it a day. Thank you everyone. Bye. Thanks, Dan and Luciella. Thank you both.


Controversial subject now. Popularity of veganism and veganury. Well, one vegan activist wants to take things a lot further. He says that milk is murder. I want to show you something that is a product of the dairy industry. Milk is murder. Take the vegans out of the picture. It's too busy to say. It's about the animals. If people want to do this, get on with it quietly. Do whatever you want to do. It's the tyranny that comes with it. Alright, this is where you put rubbish and garbage. I don't want to show you who's in here. I'm going to go and eat a steak from a cow I know later and see if that makes me feel better. Dairy is notorious for being one of the cruelest industries on the planet. It involves the rape of female cows to impregnate them. The kidnap of calves at birth. If their calf is born a male, they are killed at as young as five days old for veal. And while the mother mourns the loss of her child, she is forced into a life of slavery. And because of genetic manipulation, we'll produce up to 12 times more milk than natural.  The cycle then repeats, with yearly forced insemination to keep the cow lactating, yearly child kidnap and murder. And when milk production declines, the cows go to a peaceful, beautiful retirement home where they can live happily ever after. Oh. Sylvia is the little dairy calf. She was just six hours old when we got her. Sylvia the dairy calf. Yeah. She's even got her buds because she was so young when we got her down behind her. Debutted her, yeah. I was just saying you're playful. Because she's a girl and they only replace a third of the herd every year. She had her still gone to veal.  They're supporting the same industry, aren't they? Yeah, they've built the industry, haven't they? They've built the industry. I think that's the point about, you know, even when we're all vegetarians and we think we're kind, we're actually... They're supporting one of the most abusive, exploitative industries on earth. So 150,000 dairy cows a year in Britain alone are slaughtered with the baby still in their stomach. And I've seen images of them cutting the, literally cutting the baby out of their stomach after they've slaughtered the mother. Dairy industries, it's a horror story. And this is why we speak out so ferociously against the dairy industry. And we have people like Pierce Morgan defending dairy consumption. He's defending the murder of these baby dairy calves that are being hacked up and fed to others. People who eat cheese and drink dairy milk. It's cruel, unnecessary, abusive, and it's just pure slavery. But now you know what happens to animals in slaughterhouses so you can have milk in your coffee and what are you going to do about it? A lot of cows that get milk don't go to slaughterhouses. Yes they do. No they don't. You don't know nothing about the industry, my friend. I do. They all get slaughtered. So what a lot of people don't know about the dairy industry is that all those cows get killed. The facility over there is a facility that chops up these animals and feeds them to people. Usually for second grade cuts, minced up into hamburgers, you know, pies, just processed food. That's the skins torn off the bodies of these poor cows. And that'll get turned into like furniture, jackets, shoes. They're showing no mercy. No mercy to these animals for cheese, for milk. Milk in Pierce Morgan's coffee. Have you tried drinking tea with soya milk? Delicious. Have you ever tried almond milk, rice milk, coconut milk? None of it was tea. Why are we... None of it was for the national drink of tea. For the national drink of tea? We choose soya milk. Alright. So here we are on a farm in the UK here. And I want to show you something that is a product of the dairy industry. Absolutely disgraceful coming up. Have a look at this. The argument about milk is murder is a facture as well. So this is a bin. This is where you put rubbish and garbage. And I want to show you who's in here. I want them to see the faces of these babies. Oh my God. Look at this. Look at this little angel here.  It's a beautiful angel. Throwing it back here, that's probably, you know, sibling.  I'm in the UK right now. I'm in the UK right now. So, like, people say it doesn't happen here. This is exactly what happens in the dairy industry. In the UK, in Australia, all around the world.  Baby killers. So, you know, try the plant milk. Don't have this type of blood on your hands. You don't want this on your conscience. It's horrible. Milk is murder. Take the vegans out of the picture.  It's about the animals. These babies' blood is on your hands. Those who fund one of the cruelest industries on Earth are dairy industry. Poor babies didn't have a chance. But you know what? They don't suffer anymore. But this is how we treat them like waste. Put them in a bin. Disgraceful. So why would you defend dairy consumption? Why would you defend it? Especially, like, you know, with so many alternatives, it makes it even... Even if we didn't have alternatives, it wouldn't be justified. But the fact is you do. You do have alternatives to dairy. There's no reason animals like this even should need to be rescued from some evil oppressive system. But you're defending piss.


What's up everybody definitive pick your team number three sold out in jazzy's case breaks calm. Thanks everybody All teams sold straight up. No random number blocks. I'll have pick your teams four five and six posted in a couple hours If you're watching live if you're not watching live and watching this on Saturday the brakes are probably already up in the store. So go check it out First one up. We got a nice patch in there for the Yankees James Paxton four of 20 New York Yankees that one's going out to Robert Z who has the Bronx Bombers four of 20 James Paxton Pinstri patch trying to cover the music with me talking. It is code 7 3 8 0 0 1 JC for that hate that commercial New York Yankees you can look up that code See what game he wore it in if you pitched in that game, maybe 49 of 50 Jock Peterson For the Dodgers Christopher Day has the Dodgers that one is two zero three eight two nine JB Next oh look at this Four of five the big hurt Frank Thomas Joe and recent last team Mojo Chicago White Sox Four of five Frank Thomas Pretty nice one Especially last Bob Mojo team Guess nobody wanted the White Sox But Joe nice hit the big hurt We got number to 35 Steve Carlton 12 to 35 for the Phillies that was going out to Jared K Phillies Steve Doolado Kessen Yorah and Christian Yelich 35 of 35 Milwaukee Brewers Josh Bruce nice one Josh a few more to go Will the thrill one of the best autographs right now 38 of 50 Will Clark for the Giants Mike Smith that one Couple more. This is a nice one. It is a rookie autograph 25 25 Dustin May Dodgers Looks like AJ Brown signature Dustin May Dodgers Christopher Day gets the Dustin May funny a May for day on May 1st and the final hit of the box is for the Nationals Carter Keeboom 28 of 30 Chris Walker with the Nats There you go. That was definitive baseball pick your team three. Thanks. Everybody congrats to the winners Sorry for those who went hitless, but we will have another case up in the store. Check it out Jasper's case breaks at calm


Hi again, folks. So let's talk a little bit about a folk theorem now for discounted repeated games. So we're in a case where there is a discount factor and people care more about today than the future or than tomorrow and so forth. And we want to think about the expansion of the logic that we just went through in some examples, but see whether that holds in a general setting of repeated games. So what's the folk theorem? What's the extension to repeated games? So take a normal form game and so there's actually very many versions of folk theorems and we'll do a very particular one which has I think the basic intuition behind it and fairly simple proof. So the idea is we're looking at some Nash equilibrium of the stage game. So take a stage game, find a profile which is a Nash equilibrium of the stage game and then also look for some alternative strategy and here we have a couple of typos that should be an A prime. So look for some alternative strategy A prime such that everybody gets a strictly higher payoff from A prime than A. Okay, where A is a Nash equilibrium. Then there exists some discount factor below one such that if everybody has a discount factor above that level then there exists a sub game perfect equilibrium of the infinite repetition of the game that has A prime played in every period on the equilibrium path. So what this is telling us is the logic that we went through in those two examples of prisoner's dilemmas where we found the discount factor either a half or at least seven nines, etc. Take any game, find a Nash equilibrium of that and find something which is better than that which you'd like to sustain in an infinitely repeated game and you can do the same logic that we did in those examples in the general case where there'll be a high enough discount factor that'll make that sustainable. And basically the proof of this theorem is very similar to what we went through in those examples. So the idea is we'll play A prime as long as everybody plays it. If anybody deviates from that then we're going to go to Grim Trigger. We're just going to threaten to play the Nash equilibrium A forever after which is giving us a lower payoff than A prime. And we just need to make sure that people care enough about the loss of the future to offset the game from today. So in terms of the proof, checking that this is a sub-game equilibrium for high enough discount factors, what do we have to do? Well, playing A forever if anyone has ever deviated is part of a sub-game perfect continuation if we ever have a deviation because it's Nash in every sub-game. So we need to check will anybody want to deviate from A prime if nobody has in the past? And we can bound the gain. So an upper bound on the gain is the maximum over all players and all possible deviations they could have of the best of the gain and payoff that they would get from that. So that gives us a maximum possible gain. The minimum per period loss, so this is the maximum they can gain from today well compared to the minimum they could lose from tomorrow. So the minimum they could lose is instead of getting A prime they're going to go to A. So that's that and take the minimum across different players for this. And one question is sort of why this? The question here is really the minimum relative to the Nash equilibrium or could they gain, so think about this a little bit, why wouldn't they want to change from the Nash equilibrium in the future? So the idea there is they're not going to be able to help themselves by trying to change away from the punishment because that is a Nash equilibrium so they're already getting the best possible payoff if the other people follow through with the punishment. So we've got the maximum possible gain, the minimum possible loss. So if I deviate then given what other players are doing the maximum possible net gain overall is I'll gain the M today but I could lose up to M tomorrow in the future I'll lose at least M in the future and this should be an I. Then we've got beta I over 1 minus beta I and so if you go ahead and set this has to be non-negative sorry, has to be negative in order for players not to want to deviate so what do we need? We need that M is less than or equal to this so M over M is less than or equal to beta I over 1 minus beta I and that gives us a lower bound on beta I it has to be at least M over M plus M so that's not a tight lower bound in the sense that we went with fairly loose bounds here but if everybody has a high enough discount factor then you can sustain cooperation so this is just a straightforward generalization of the examples we looked through before and it's showing us that we can sustain cooperation in an infinitely repeated setting provided people have enough patience for the future now there's many bells and whistles on this one thing to think about you can sustain fairly complicated play if you'd like let's take a look at the game we looked at before so the prisoner's dilemma but now we've got this very high payoff from deviating one thing you can notice is the total of the payoffs here the players together get 10 if they cooperate they're only getting 6 in total so here actually playing this makes one of the players really well off so if they play this in perpetuity they get 3-3 suppose they try and do the following they say in odd periods we'll play CD so in periods 1, 3, 5 and so forth we'll play cooperate by the first player, defect for the other so the second player is going to get 10s in those periods but then we'll reverse it in the even periods so now roughly on average players are getting 5 each instead of 3 each so what we'll do is we'll alternate and as long as we're continuing to abide by these rules where we nicely do this then in the future as long as everybody does this we'll continue to do it if anybody deviates from this then we'll just go to defect-defect and you can check and see what kind of discount factors you need are there different discount factors you need for the first player the player is getting a CD in the first period versus the second player and so forth so you can go through that and actually this kind of thing is something that people worry about in regulatory settings so for instance imagine that you have a situation where you've got companies bidding for government contracts and they're doing this repeatedly over time and one way they could do it is to say look we can compete against each other and bid very high every day or have to bid to give them the government a low cost every day if there's a procurement contract but what they could do alternatively is say okay look I'll let you win the contract today you let me win it tomorrow and we'll just alternate and as long as we keep cooperating we won't compete with each other we'll enjoy high payoffs but if that ever breaks down then we're going to go back to competition so there's situations where regulators worry and in fact there's some various cases that have some evidence that companies will tend to do this to try and game the system and increase payoffs so you can see the kind of logic and what has to be true in order for that to happen okay so repeated games we've had a fairly detailed look at these things players can condition their future play on past actions that allows them to react to things in ways that they can't in a static game it produces new equilibria in the game folk theorems partly referring to the fact that these were known for a long time in kind of folklore and game theory before they were actually written down there's many equilibria in these things and they're based on key ingredients having observation of what other players do and being able to react to that and having sufficient value on the future either by limit of the means which is an extreme value or high enough discount factors so that players really care about the future now repeated games have actually been a fairly active area of research recently there's a lot of other interesting questions on these what happens if you don't always see what other players do you only see sometimes there's some noisiness in things what happens if there's uncertain payoffs over time our payoffs are varying there's a whole series of issues there there's also issues about things like renegotiation so the logic here has been if anybody ever deviates then we go to a bad equilibrium forever after so suppose that happens somebody deviates and then after about a few periods we say well this is kind of silly why are we hurting ourselves let's go back to the original agreement let's forget about things by bonds be bygones so we can do better by just starting all over that's wonderful the difficulty is that if we now believe that if we deviate eventually we're going to be forgiven then that changes the whole nature of the game and changes the incentives at the beginning and so incorporating that kind of logic is quite complicated and another area of research in these so repeated games are very interesting they have lots of applications there's some interesting logic which comes out of them sometimes you can sustain cooperation or better payoffs than you can in a static setting sometimes you can't and we've seen some of the features that affect that