Welcome everybody to another episode of the non-profit show. We're really excited because we have one of our favorites here, Mukhi Kawaja, a trainer from Fundraising Academy, and really the man of mystery because he travels throughout the world and he always joins us from wherever he might be and bringing us a different perspective. Also, I think one of the most interesting things about him, and he's quiet about this, but he's the co-founder of the American Muslim Community Foundation. We talk about the Community Foundation system and concept a lot on the non-profit show. It's such a uniquely American thing in so many ways and it's changed as our country's changed, and so this is such a cool thing that he can bring this to the table. So I always love any time I get with you, Mukhi, and asking the answer is definitely one of those days. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. We are delighted to have you with us today, along with our sponsors, and they include Blumerang, American Non-profit Academy, Non-profit Thought Leader, Staffing Boutique, your part-time controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Non-profit Nerd, and Non-profit Tech Talk. So these are the folks that really allow us to have great rock stars on the non-profit show like Mukhi. Okay, my friend, before we get into the questions, and we have some barn burners today, I want to ask you to educate us and reflect upon the start of Ramadan and how it has this really interesting link to philanthropy that a lot of, as we say in my part of the country, Blancos, don't understand. Well, thank you for the opportunity as always. It's great to be here. And I also wanted to congratulate you on over a thousand episodes. So I've been fortunate to be part of a small portion of those and just really glad to see you hit that thousand milestone. So kudos to you and the team. Well, you know, I had, now I have white hair when I saw that I didn't. So that's why. But thank you, Mukhi. That's very gracious. And you have definitely been a part of that journey. So let's jump back to this issue of, I mean, I'm so challenged and interested and intrigued by faith and philanthropy of all levels of all type. But you're living it right now in Ramadan, the sacred holy month. Talk to us about that. And if you could back up for those of us that might not know what it even means, so then then we can figure out how it fits into philanthropy. Yeah, of course. So Muslims follow Islamic calendar that's based on the lunar cycle. So there are specific months and Ramadan is one of them. It is a time of fasting, spiritual reflection, increasing worship and good deeds, and an opportunity for Muslims to think through how they want to spiritually become closer to God. And Ramadan means something different to each and every individual's experience through the cultural influence, through the family practice and everything in between. So many Muslims like to increase their charitable giving in Ramadan because of the additional blessings that are involved. And the principle of Zakat and Sadaka, which is charitable giving, Islam has five pillars. So fasting in Ramadan is one of those five pillars. The second another pillar is Zakat, which is almsgiving, which is two and a half percent of your cumulative wealth annually. They have Zakat calculators out there so you can try to figure out if you owe Zakat or if you're eligible to receive Zakat. People who don't have the capacity to give or certain threshold of income throughout the year can be one of the eight categories of people who actually receive it. And those eight categories are listed in the Quran. So just a little lesson for those that are listening. And Ramadan is going to be starting around March 10th or 11th. So some people go by astronomical calculations for when the moon is visible.  So there are two different camps on days to start. So let me drill down a little bit on and it's help me out here. It's Zakat. Z-A-K-A-T. So Zakat. Zakat. Is this, if I'm going to use the word administrated through the specific community religion or religious organization, or is this something that you can do? Like could you give to, for example, your local art museum and or does this funnel in a certain way when you're doing these charitable engagements? In Muslim majority countries, there may be a government participation, some sort of program that is initiated. But for individuals like myself living here in the United States, we calculate it individually and distribute it to individuals, to nonprofits, to anybody in need. So there's again those eight categories that we would adhere to give to. Is this, I know you worked with the Red Cross. Does this factor in with the Red Crescent and in some of these other global issues? You know, we're in a terrible time of war in the Middle East. Plus we have famine in Africa in some Muslim oriented countries that's not getting, in my mind, not getting enough attention. So you know, how would the faithful learn about these things and navigate? Is it like a push necessarily or is it really more individualized as you were kind of intimating? Yeah, so food programs are definitely a Zakat eligible program. So when it comes to scarcity, famine, providing for those in conflict, people who are poor orphans, so on so forth. So again, I choose to do mine individually. Some people do it collectively. Some people, maybe they immigrated from a country overseas and they still have cousins and extended family that can help distribute it to people who are in more need where your dollar goes a lot further than here in the US. So some principles are to distribute it locally. So I'm a firm believer in maybe helping out the local food bank and other institutions, whether they're Muslim led or not. To me, that isn't of significance, but other people will want it to be given to a Muslim led institution because they understand the values and the principles and the distribution and sacredness of that. So again, it's a very individualized practice, but I think communally there are guidelines that you adopt when you distribute your Zakat. Now, and again, I know we have questions, but I got to ask this question because this is timely and I'm so interested in this. Do, is this a daily, I mean Ramadan is a 30-day process or sacred time? So is this something that you do every day during the fasting or is it at the end of the week or how does that manage out? Yeah, like for Muslims our holy day is Friday. So I know many people like to give weekly on Friday. Okay. There are other significant religious holidays and dates throughout the year outside of Ramadan as well and some people like to give on those days, such as when Hajj is another pillar of the faith. And there are charitable giving platforms designed for Muslim giving where some will do a daily transaction in the month of Ramadan or specifically the last 10 nights of Ramadan, which are even deemed even holier and more spiritual. So there are giving platforms catered to Muslim giving that are very specific and you can set an automated amount each day or those last 10 and things like that. So you see the technology and the need meeting the demands of the community as well. You know it's such a fascinating thing and it just seems to me that you know in the US maybe not so much in Canada, but in the and maybe it's because of where I live in the Southwest. This is just something that is not discussed in such a missed opportunity in the philanthropic spectrum. It's just a fascinating thing because we talk so much about December and Thanksgiving and Christmas and all that, but there's such a lot going on that you have to compete for those dollars. It seems like Ramadan has this really overt call to give. Yeah and I've seen organizations even like World Central Kitchen and I'm sure UNHCR and other organizations that are doing Ramadan campaigns that I've seen the last few years being active and I'm sure this year they will be too. Yeah absolutely and I think that it's just such a it's a basic concept that we've got to be embracing and really understanding what it means to give and how it's a motivation for such a huge population on this planet and so very very interesting.  I really would have because I think these things are so interesting, but anyway aside from that what's really interesting are the questions that come into the nonprofit show. So are you ready my friend? Let's jump in. Okay Jose from City with Health wrote in, we're being solicited by our local Chamber of Commerce to join their organization. They're a nonprofit right? I'm not sure if it will benefit us and could use some feedback on this. So I look at this more or so from a networking lens. Are there people involved that could join an event committee or join the board eventually? How can you cultivate some of those relationships? Because the Chamber of Commerce are typically people who are well connected, who are go-getters, they have their own businesses so maybe they'd be interested in sponsoring an event and although to my knowledge they are classified as a nonprofit there's still not a 501c3 in the traditional sense, but maybe you can share a little bit more on that as well. Yeah there's c6s because technically they're an association member-driven you know structure. I really like your point of view about how you know they can be a networking opportunity and a further engagement of what's going on. You know Jose joining a chamber for the most part it can be pretty pricey. So first and foremost I would ask if they have a nonprofit rate. There is no shame in asking if you have a nonprofit rate.  You will be amazed at how many organizations have this and so I would look into that and I also think too that you know sometimes chambers will have like a nonprofit partner of the mom through the quarter or whatever and maybe your organization can be that vehicle right. So but look into it and find out what they can do for you and at the same time what they expect of you right. You know what is it what is their expectation. What makes a good member because if you just write a big check and then you're like waiting for the money to drop back into your lap that's not how it's going to work. You need to kind of be a little bit more strategic on this and really understand how it could work. I hope this helps Jose because I think associations are good on so many levels it's just finding the right one for you. Very interesting well let's go on to name withheld from St. Louis. I took this name off I'm in a man up because it's a really interesting question and speaking with a new donor they had some truly awful things to say about another CEO with a nonprofit in our community. I know this person and I don't think the comments were fair. Should I reach out and let the CEO know there's an issue this donor is powerful and is probably spreading the story. It's what I mean high school still probably I was going to say movie this is like mean girls nonprofit edition. You know just the way that I personally would handle it may not be the way others think so you know I appreciate the what your insights would be as well but for me I would say it's worth having a direct conversation with the donor in getting more clarity and asking them why they believe what they believe and then if you do know this other person they're bad mouthing the CEO and you feel it's unfair you can share back with the donor I don't know all the details however in my experience the CEO has done XYZ I don't think it's fair to affiliate that with the organization's mission they are a separate entity and sure you know I don't I wouldn't know every single detail but I would try to still defend the nonprofit separate it from the CEO and me personally I wouldn't go to the CEO but I would maybe drop a hint anonymously to the organization that there is this feedback and see what they do with it. Okay wow mind blown I would have never gone there I really like I think what you said is magical and that should always be of an approach and that is separate the individual from the organization that should always be an approach no matter what I mean while this was while this conversation was going on that would have been the way to extricate yourself from that to say well you know I don't know about that individual but I know about the organization and they do this and they do that and their mission is that would have been that would have been the right thing to do because to your point Mookie we have personalities and we have individuals and then we have organizational structures you know and what's more important because people come and go but that organizational structure is what in my view we need to protect right so I really yeah that's interesting so I'm fascinated that you would talk to the donor because I immediately had like a fear of oh I don't want to piss off a new donor right fair and you know it's coming at it with not challenging them but getting more clarity okay so it shouldn't be like well I think you're wrong it should be like well tell me a little bit more about why you think that's the case and then you should be able to have a conversation with them and share in my experience it's been x y and z and you know I'm probably thinking about it with a little more grace because as a co-founder I've probably been on the side of criticism from donors and other people and I know how I would want it to be handled and you know in communities of high net worth individual word does get around about experiences and things like that so I'm always a strong proponent of even if it's a difficult conversation having the conversation yeah well I think that's yeah I think that's the right thing to have done and it's really interesting and I'd love to use the word grace because that's absolutely the right approach too you know we the nonprofit sector is fraught with emotion a lot of different ideas a lot of different opinions and perceptions and it's a journey and and I know that sometimes we think we're doing certain work with a nonprofit and then as we learn more about a nonprofit or we learn more about the the issue or the programming then our own perceptions change and so I think you're you're spot on and I I know I know you're a wise person but that actually even proved it so I say thank you wise moody that's what I how I'm going to start calling you okay Cheryl from norlands writes in we want to promote an event coming up but there are a few folks on our board who are anti advertising they think it is a misuse of funds I can't imagine how to deal with this tough because you got to sell your product which is your you know your event sure and you know as the old adage goes you got to spend money to make money yeah however what method of advertisement are you using is it traditional print radio tv online there's so many different formats these days news publications or social media think about your target audience and where are they beyond your email list beyond your social media what paid things will provide the best return on investment and you know I've had this conversation eight years running with the American Muslim Community Foundation about sending direct mail and you know we have a list of about 10,000 addresses across the country and it does get costly to send a pamphlet or a direct letter but we like doing postcards and we feel like it's the most bang for our buck it directs them to an online forum where they can then find out more information and it's brand awareness at the end of the day so I think it's worth it if you're promoting a specific event build it into the budget you know I think there's ways in which you can create it as good use of funds instead of misuse of funds I think that's a well I love the postcard concept I think that's genius you know we just did yesterday or maybe the day before yesterday I can't remember sometime this week we did an episode on what corporate sponsors want and and specifically for events and one of the things that we talked about was they want to know who your media partners are so secure those first don't just you know get go out and say okay we're gonna have this event you know I was thinking the old you know Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney my dad's got a barn let's put on a show mentality you don't want to be doing that you want to be really thoughtful about this and it should start with media partners so that they will do that heavy lifting for you you know they're required by law to give so much depending on if they're broadcast or radio they're required to give so many minutes of you know charitable promotion now it might be two in the morning but still you gotta you gotta think this outside of the the line item and you know it's an interesting thing about marketing because people just get so freaked out about the the outlay and I think you're right movie you've got to build that into your budget and look that it's look at it as a responsible way to build your business not just that event I mean fascinating well Cheryl I hope this helps let's go on to I never know if it's seen or Sean from Chicago Illinois what do you think that is Sean Sean do you think it's Sean okay Sean seen wherever you are Mr Chicago you make me laugh movies now I have the giggles okay we have a program that's in that another nonprofit in our community is replicating it is a duplication of service in some ways it seems like they've copied our program do you have any advice on how to deal with this I don't want donors or the media to confuse us with their work yeah you know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I think there's always room for duplication or competition if it pushes you to be better at what you do that's how you need to framework it sure they may have more resources they may have other advantages but stick to what's true to you and I think that will shine through and I think that you know if there's duplication of service again the charity already existed beforehand if they are in the same line area it's not really competition because there's enough philanthropic dollars to go out and support you both causes so it's just a matter of like stewardship and relationship building and who is sponsoring their event get them to sponsor your event too you know like who can play that game so you know moji this question also kind of ignites another path for me and that is about licensing or you know documenting your programming in such a way that maybe you can sell it or sell the processes or whatever I mean if it was good enough for somebody else in your own community they must have seen something that was working and maybe that's an opportunity for revenue that is going to be a lot healthier for the organization at the end of the day and and there's that's I think such a missed opportunity in the nonprofit sector is we we we have the sense that we have to start everything over we have to create everything from the ground up we're in the for-profit world is much better if it's from franchising to just buying canned software right you know it just seems like they're much better at it saying we got to get get somebody else's product in here so we can ramp up might not be perfect but it's going to get us you know out the gate faster and so that might be something to think about in a way that kind of helps you navigate what you thought was a problem and turn it into an opportunity it seems like but yeah 1.8 million nonprofits in this country you're going to see some of this duplication so absolutely well moji kwaja one of the the master minds over at fundraising academy one of the trainers co-founder of american muslim community foundation thank you for coming on and sharing with us um you're really interesting perspectives and the things that are going on in your world for those folks that want to be able to meet you they're going to be able to see you at the fundraising academy event coming up at the first week of may right right cultivate conference may 2nd and 3rd come on out to san diego and learn more about best practices and trending technology you know we have great speakers lined up and it's almost half more than half sold out so limited number of tickets remain you know you sold out well in advance last year and that's powerful considering you know we're still kind of in that that waning stages of the pandemic and people were still very concerned about traveling and already you've moved through so many more tickets at this point so yeah if you're interested you probably need to jump on you can go see that get that information at www fundraising dash academy dot org and you'll learn more about who the speakers are what's going to be going on because it's really an exciting opportunity i know one of our co-hosts will be there and we'll be broadcasting i believe on friday from there we're just figuring that out you might be joined you might have meredith there from your team doing that so anyway moe it's always a delight to be with you and the other group that's with us that i want to make sure i honor and that is all of our presenting sponsors they include bloomering american nonprofit academy nonprofit thought leader staffing boutique your part-time controller 180 management group fundraising academy at national university jmt consulting nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk these are the folks that join us day in and day out so we can do better with our nonprofit sector and moe as we end today we end this every day with this message in this mantra to stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here again thank you my friend


The performance of perovskite solar cells recently exceeded 15% solar-to-electricity conversion efficiency for small-area devices. The fundamental properties of the active absorber layers, hybrid organic and organic perovskites formed from mixing metal and organic halides, NH4, PBI3 and CH3NH3, PBI3, are largely unknown. The materials are semiconductors with direct band gaps at the boundary of the first Brillouin zone. The calculated dielectric constants and band gaps show an orientation dependence with a low barrier for rotation of the organic cations. Due to the electric dipole of the methyl ammonium cation, a photophoroic effect may be accessible, which could enhance carrier collection. This article was authored by Federico Brivio, Allison B. Walker and Aaron Walsh.


Live on Facebook and YouTube, make sure you leave a comment to let us know you can hear us. And here comes the... Just kidding, I was messing with people. All right, I'm rolling the intro. Okay. Oh, whenever I see that intro and I see us sitting next to each other, I think these started with us together in the same space. And now here we are. I know. I've far apart been doing this for this way for so long. Which, and it's nice. It's nice. Yeah. I don't know what I was gonna say. I'm gonna say something very profound and important, but yeah, anyway, I will say hello. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, it is true. I think once we get some more vaccinations around or maybe when it's not the holidays anymore, we could probably do something outside. We could do something short. We could do something cold. Yeah. Someday we'll plan, we'll do something together outside with some plexiglass. I mean, we're both healthy, we're both vaccinated, but we're still just trying to practice good. Plexiglass would be funny though. Little boxes, little... Yeah, speaking of, okay, so I'm trying to open the comments so that I can see people.  I'm just, yeah, trying to see comments. We've got Sun who says hello from Cambodia. Anything on Facebook yet? Du Tao, which we again apologize for your names being mispronounced, says hello and so hello. Oh, and Jude says good evening. Okay, so Adam, I have a surprise for you. Oh, please. Okay, so once I get, I'll be right back. Okay, Liz is leaving the room right now or leaving the screen. I'm not sure what she's doing, but it is a surprise to me. This is not faked. I have no idea what she's doing. I love this, Adam. I usually have no idea what she's doing. So this is par for the course. Oh, did you love this? Well, I will be honest. I knew that, so in a few days, we will be celebrating Halloween. So I suspected there might be some kind of costume, but I did not expect, I'm gonna, this is a leopard or a cheetah, some kind of spotted cat. Well, okay, so technically the fabric looks like a leopard, but we're calling it a cheetah. Okay. I mean, I know if there are like big cat experts that they'll say that is a leopard and not a cheetah, but we're just going cheetah. It is very cute. I have to, and you made it, did you make it yourself? I made this. Yes, and actually I made a whole costume to go, this is, I made a whole costume to go with it. This is actually a costume for my daughter. Okay. She is very young. Yeah. But it fits, it fits my head. I stalled these ears on by hand. That is nice. So you have an adult-sized one? Like you have this for yourself, like you're going in the same costume? No, no I don't. I am not gonna dress up, but I just figured I would put this little hood on. That? To show everyone that this is Halloween. Halloween. I did, like I said, I made a full costume for my youngest daughter, but I also made a costume, well I'm making a costume for my older daughter as well. Of this same costume. And this is the most complicated thing I have ever made. Well it looks, like the ears look even and balanced. Thank you. Yeah, that's very nice. I even had to put a zipper in it for the first time. I think maybe we could start Liz wearing costumes every time and this would be a very different YouTube channel. Yes, it really would. But it would have a different audience, let's be honest. Oh now I have to fix my hair, there we go. Oh, Marita says just now I need some pleasant and cheerful, encouraging words. Well you've come to the right place. Here we try to be a place of cheer and encouragement. So wherever you find yourself today, we hope that today is a good day for you. And hang out with us for a few minutes and you'll have some fun. Yeah, I hope so too. Yeah, so we were talking a little bit about Halloween, which is of course next week and then in the States at least we're heading into a season of holidays. So Halloween isn't really like part of the holidays. If you hear someone refer to, oh it's the holidays. But for me, I feel like once it hits Halloween, the rest of the year is just a roller coaster straight down to the end. I think it's gotta be a little, like I feel like Halloween is like the precursor, which is just a fancy word for it comes before. The warmup. Yeah. So when people, Liz, when people say the holidays, what do they mean? If someone was coming to the United States and said, hey, come for the holidays. Right, so in the United States, we have, excuse me, we celebrate Thanksgiving on the third Thursday of every November. So that means it's not on the same day every year. It could be early in November or late in November. This year, what is it, on the 25th? 24th, 25th, yeah, somewhere in there. Yeah, it's around there somewhere, whatever that Thursday is. And so we'll celebrate that, and usually people have that Thursday off, and then Fridays, sometimes they have that off from work as well, and that's known as Black Friday. And there is a program on our website that is super popular about that day, about Black Friday called Buy Nothing Day. And I think that is really a program worth checking out if you are interested in learning more about the holidays, or shopping, or business, or the environment, or really that program touches on a lot of topics, and I would encourage you to check that out. The thing I love about that is things about personal choice. Yes, exactly, like what you can do for a community. But the, okay, so then we're Thanksgiving, and then that Friday is Black Friday, and then there's usually only about three or four weeks until Christmas. And of course, Christmas is, I would say it's probably the main holiday in the United States. I think a lot of people take off work around this time, a lot of people travel, Thanksgiving as well, people travel, but Christmas is a big time where a lot of people get together for many different groups of family, yeah. Right, and so we celebrate that on December 25 every year, and then of course a week later is the new year, January 1st, so it is really, then it's the new year, and then you go back to school, and back to work, and then you slog through until the end. But yeah, so Halloween really is, once it's Halloween, the rest of the year is real fast. But we have to, we gotta get some shout outs to some people, but Liz, I have to tell people, and I tell them this, every year that you are not a huge fan of Halloween, are you? Even though you made a wonderful costume, there are certain aspects of Halloween you don't like. That is true, I make, well, I made this costume purely out of love, and not because I enjoy Halloween. Right. So, yeah, and so you don't like spiders? Somebody said the screen is frozen, so I hope that is not for everybody. She says it's not okay. Okay, good. So yeah, and then actually for members, there is a great video, well I say great, I made it, but there is a video about why I hate Halloween, and I will give a little hint as to why people decorate for Halloween, and they use a lot of spiders. Yes. A lot. Which I do not. And giant spiders, not just like actual sized spiders. Even thinking about it is real bad. Yeah, I love Halloween, and I don't mind spiders, or skeletons, or scary things. Yeah, I love Halloween, I like dressing up, I like seeing kids walk around, knock on their neighbor's door. I mean, most of the time, if you knock on your neighbor's door, people would be like, open the door, and they'd be like, what do you want? What are you trying to sell me? But now they open the door, and they give you candy. Well, you have to give other people candy. I did hear that in the United States, of all the candy that's sold, like half of it is sold in the three weeks leading up to Halloween. And a quarter of it is eaten by me, after all. Exactly, candy. So a lot of people who come to the United States say that our desserts and our candy is extremely sweet, extremely sugary, which is probably true. Yeah, it is true. Adam, before we go on, I did want to tell about a really cool thing that is new in YouTube for members. And that is if you are a member of our channel, and there's different levels of membership, you can get a special benefit if you have been a member for longer than a month, and then every month after that, in our live chats right now, you can get a chat that stays at the top for free. So we would love to see that. So it's a highlighted chat, that's what it's called. And if you are a member, please take advantage of that. We would love to see your comments and respond to them. And for anyone else, right at the little bottom of the chat window, not the video, but the chat window, you can see a little dollar sign if you want to send us a special message that we will respond to, and that we will say in this chat, you can click on that little money sign and pay for a little highlighted chat of your own. So, and that money really helps us stay as a channel, it helps us spread our message, it helps us make more programs and research things. So it really does help us out. Yeah, and another thing that we just, if you've never been to our website, spotlightenglish.com, check that out, because you can now, Liz, let me ask you a question. If you were a spotlight member and you said, you know what, I want to get emails of programs and scripts every week. You'd probably think, no, that's gonna be too expensive. That's gonna be like $50 a week. It's not, not even $25 a week. What do you think a good price would be about per week? I don't know. We put a lot of time. We do, we do, we do. However, there's people all around the world who want to get these scripts via email. So we made it about a dollar a week. Yeah. You can get, or $5 a month, however you want to do it. And we'll send you a PDF that's yours to keep and you'll be able to follow along with the program. And again, it's just a small way we're trying to create sustainability for ourselves and to be able to do more stuff for you. So check that out. It's for help people. We have people asking all the time, can I get this script? Like maybe if they see it on YouTube or whatever. And there are ways to get those PDF scripts and I hope that is helpful. I do want to address one comment on Facebook from Nyata says, you hate spiders, but do you like Spider-Man, Liz? Now I have to say, I do, people who have been watching this program and our conversations for a long time, Adam, will know that I am really into like nerd stuff. So like science fiction, the Avengers, that sort of stuff. And I don't really like the old Spider-Man movies, but I do love some Tom Holland. Who doesn't? Okay, yeah. That guy is great. Yeah. And I love that Spider-Man into the Spider-Man. Into the Spider-Verse. Into the Spider-Verse movie. You're just, you're starting to love spiders. No, I'm not. I do have to like cringe and look away in the part where they get bit by the spider. That is giving me shivers right now. But yeah, so I guess that is a fair, that is a fair question. That's a fair question. And Tan Nhi Pham says, do you know the Lunar New Year? Yes. We don't usually celebrate that in the United States. I mean, there are some people who do, but I don't think it's very common, but I am aware of it. Isn't, I think, okay, this is where I'm gonna be, all of our Vietnamese listeners are going to yell at me. Please do, please do. That is what Tet is a celebration of, right? So there's the celebration, and then Tet is the celebration of the Lunar New Year. And I wanna say it's late January, early February? Yeah, I think so. So Vietnamese listeners, or anyone who celebrates the Lunar New Year, please. Let me know. Correct me. I am happy to learn more. I love learning. I mean, everyone on this chat loves learning, right? Otherwise, why would you be here? Yeah, why are you watching this? If you're happy, the way you are, and you know everything you need to know about the world, you have my permission to leave this, leave it, leave it right now. Patricia De Los Sabeas says, how can I pay for the scripts? I'm really interested. So there's two ways. If you become a YouTube member, you can get some benefits like exclusive member videos or your name in every program and things like that. But if you just want the scripts that come out every week with the program, go to our website. And Adam, is there a button or is it on the left hand, or the right hand? If you scroll down to about the middle of the homepage, you'll be able to find it. It will take you to another site and you'll just have to sign up. You can use PayPal or whatever. Let us know if you have any trouble signing up depending on what country you're in. Yeah, contact. Yeah, contact at spotlightenglish.com is an email directly to me. I answer those. And so if you have any troubles, please email me at contact at spotlightenglish.com and I will point you in the right direction. And Yatta says, I also love Spider-Man and all heroes in Marvel Liz. Yeah. That's great. I gotta say, I think my favorite is Captain Marvel for obvious reasons. That movie was amazing. And you love a strong female protagonist? I do, I do. And that movie did make me cry. You know, she just keeps getting up. Okay, now I'm gonna get like all into Marvel. I do, I can talk about this for a long time. Maybe we need to have a special Marvel-based chat. Yes, a Marvel-based chat. Lynn in YouTube says in Asia, we don't have Halloween. So that's interesting. Very sad about that. If you do want to learn about Halloween, we have some great programs about Halloween. We have one called All About Halloween. We have one, if you are a person who loves scary stories, we have a program called Telling Scary Stories, which I did help make, but really creeps me out. There is a story about an island, which is the island of the dolls. There's a story in there about a Japanese spirit. And there's one more story. Oh, it's about a very famous story, Frankenstein. Oh yeah. If you enjoy those things, check out those programs. And there's also this week's program, Adam. Do you remember what it is? Oh, this week's is, I don't remember right now. Why am I blanking? It's about urban legends. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Urban legends. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things about Halloween are those stories that are like, could be true, but there's enough about them. You're like, probably not, but they could be true. You can't really tell. Yeah, I do not enjoy those stories. We do have a member here, Alberto Santos. Liz and Adam, thank you for all the programs you made, God bless you. You too, thank you so much for your message and thank you for your support. We love it when members participate. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, there's tons of, and we're always looking for more. And, oh, I have to say one more. From Villian Santana says, hello, I always listen to you on the podcast, but I didn't know your faces, so welcome. Here are our faces. Though I do not usually have a beard, that is a temporary, but check out the program, Beard Makes a Man. Oh yeah, that's true. Does a beard make a man. Does a beard make a man. I'm being, I'm being, Adam, it's not a statement. I'm being deliberately provocative so that people go and- So why is the beard? Is it for November or something? Every time I grow a beard, it's because I don't shave and then I get lazy and then it just is like, well, it's there. And then when I shave it off, I'm like, eh, it's time. I feel old, so I have a lot of white. Yeah, it is true. Although, I feel like- I'm gonna dye it all black, I think. For men, the white in a beard is distinguished. Yes, that's what we've convinced the world. We've convinced everybody. For women, it's not the same. If women get gray hair, then people just think, oh, you're old and that is totally not cool. No, no, Liz, I don't know if you know this, but in several ways, you've found, you've actually found one of them.  Do you think so? Oh, I'm coming to think that. I'm thinking that I'm discovering that.  Oh, well, I guess that's a compliment. I'm gonna take it as a compliment. I think it is. Maybe it means you have an older, distinguished voice. You know, there are times I'm talking to my children and I'll talk in one voice, but we do, Liz and I are both very experienced at using our voice in ways to make it sound a certain way. Thank you. I'll take it as a compliment. Okay, so I did wanna encourage people. If you have any questions about us or a program or English or, I don't know, whatever else, Marvel movies, feel free to write in the comments and we would love to chat with you about that. I do have a question from Christian on Facebook. Talking about Halloween, what is your favorite horror movie? So I'll go first if you wanna add. Okay, you have a favorite. My favorite horror movie is no horror movie because I will not watch horror movies. That's too scary. Sometimes even like a thriller I can't even handle because I get too involved in the emotions and the stuff of it. I think that the most horror-filled thing that I have watched is like a Doctor Who episode. Oh, Weeping Angels. Yeah, Doctor Who is an English television program. Again, it's in the sci-fi range. Yeah, yeah. And there are some very horror-like episodes. But as a movie, I just probably wouldn't watch that. I think the last horror movie I watched was maybe like 12 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. Yeah. Well, I will say one that has stuck with me is a, from probably 25 years ago now. Ooh, can I guess it? Oh, how about I'll tell you who's in it and that will, if you can guess it from then. Okay. So it stars Denzel Washington. Oh, that's not who I expected. No, it's a movie called Fallen. So the premise of this movie is there's a bad angel who possesses people, some kind of demon, who a fallen angel. And when someone gets killed or died, they float up in the air and they go to, it came out of a serial killer or something who was killed. And it passes from person to person but they always sing this song. Time, it's on my side.  And then, so the detective character is trying to figure out who this person is. And it's- The detective's gotta be Denzel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can't go wrong with Denzel. No, no, no. We have gotten lots of questions. What? Yes. Okay, so should we start a, should we start a, yeah, I hope that is, I feel like that's a movie that I maybe could watch. No, don't watch it. But maybe not. You'd be so creeped out. Too scary, yeah. All right, so some, Silvio says, about your advanced conversation program, would it be possible to make any free class as kind of experience or test? That's a great idea. Well, we are thinking about that. We are working on some very low cost options. We could, we will probably run some specials that will be free to just, we want people to test it. And so we'll let you know about that, for sure. Okay, so, and I love this idea from Alberto. Says, could you talk about some movies, like a movie club? That sounds amazing. Yeah. Yeah, let's write that down as an idea. Yeah. Man, wouldn't that be so fun? We could do Comedy Week. We could do. We have like the Spotlight Movie Club. Yes. We could take some suggestions. Talk about clips. That'd be so fun. First, every Marvel movie in order. No. Lena says, Friends is my favorite show. You what? Lena says, Friends, the show Friends is my favorite show.  We actually have them on DVD. Now, I know everybody's streaming everything, but yeah, I'm old. So we don't watch them that way, but we still have them on DVD. That's true. Yeah, I have never, I have seen an episode or two of Friends, but I never watched it. It wasn't your thing. No. It was, yeah, I don't know. I will be honest, there are things about that show that here's a English phrase you can learn. It does not hold up, so or hold up well, which means. Yeah. As time goes by, some of the jokes or some of the stories seem a little inappropriate. Yeah, that is true. Trin says, What time is it in your country? Because it's almost midnight in Vietnam and I still keep on watching your live stream. Well, I don't know what time you need to wake up in the morning Trin, but hopefully, well, we usually keep this live stream to about half an hour. So we've got about five more minutes left. Yeah, and then you can go to bed. We should tuck you in. We'll make sure we say good night to all of you. Yeah, we're like a little lullaby. Yeah.  Yeah, maybe we could do that. And Asa has a great question. A movie club, what does that mean? So a movie club, a movie and a film, they're kind of like the same thing. I feel like film you use when something is like more important, like an independent film or like a documentary. It tells a story about a troubled man who wanders the earth and it's got some message about it. Yeah.  But I don't think those are definite classifications. No. That's just what I feel those words mean, the connotations or the meanings of those words. So a movie club would be like a small group of people who maybe all watch the same movie. Like maybe we would all watch Spider-Man Homecoming. Yeah, we could even do like, don't certain platforms, you could do a, like we could all watch it at the same time. Yeah, they do. So you watch the movie. Watch Party, that's what they're called. A spotlight watch party. Yeah, and then you get together and you just talk about the movie. So you might talk about, you know, the plot and what you liked about it or what the movie was missing or whatever. So it's just a conversation, a group that meets together to have a conversation about a film or movie. That would be fun. Yeah, and I do love watching movies. So. We could just like live chat our watch party. Talk to each other while we watch it. Yes. Oh my goodness, that would be very fun. That would be fun. Yeah, I love this one from Fatima who says, hello, I want to tell you that your channel was very useful for me to get six banned in IELTS exam. Well, congratulations on that. That's great. Great job. And I'm so glad that we could be a part of that with you. Yeah, and if you're new to this channel, if you just happened to stumble upon us, we would say, hey, welcome. Do all the things you know you're supposed to do. Like, subscribe, blah, blah, blah. But also just know that you belong here, that maybe you don't understand what every word we're saying, maybe you do. But there's definitely, as you get into these programs, you're gonna find a way to learn and to practice your English. So welcome when we're glad to have you. Yeah, it looks like our time is almost done. I did want to say that if you are watching and you like this video, please just give us a little like, subscribe. And if you think that Spotlight will help you or has helped you, click on the join button and just check it out. There's different levels that you can support us at. There's a level where you can get one PDF script a month or three or five. You can get your name in every program. That has been so cool. Every week when I make the video, I look through the whole list and I copy people's names onto there. So I see every single one and I am always, so thankful for every person who has decided to support us. And so, yeah, if you wanna be a part of that magic or if you just want the script delivered directly to your email every week with the audio link, then you can sign up on our website to get the PDFs delivered to you. Like Adam said, it is only $1 a week and you get that PDF to keep and a link to the audio. So that is really cool. And yeah, visit our website. You can find the link to the PDF scripts to sign up for that on our website at www.spotlightenglish.com. Of course, thank you to those of you watching on YouTube. Thank you to those of you watching on Facebook. And yeah, you can also check out our podcast. Wow, we have a lot of spaces. We just like to make life easy for you. So however you wanna interact with us, we will be there. Yeah, awesome. All right. Well, until next time. Yeah, goodbye everyone. Listen, watch, practice, learn, spotlight out.


Hey, Kiriaki, we can't hear you yet, but if you can switch on your mic, then we can give it a go. We're just going to wait for a moment. Kiriaki, we still can't hear you. We're just going to wait for a moment to see if you can join us as well. We had a sound check just earlier today, so we know it's working. Can you hear me now? Oh, yes, we can. Hello. Oh, wonderful. Apologies for that. Thank you, Marin. Well, hello, everyone. I'm Kiriaki Anagnostopoulou, and I'm the head of eLearning at the University of Bath. I've been in the field of eLearning for approximately 17 years. And through this time, I've supported both individuals, but also entire institutions. I've taught about learning technologies. I've researched them. I've produced practitioner resources. I've worked in partnership with others to deliver large-scale, also ambitious online projects, including entire master's degrees and more recently some of our massive open online courses. I've also been researching into leadership in eLearning and UK higher education. And I'm establishing some professional networks abroad as well. I also lead a wonderful team of learning technologies and software developers. And we work with a hub and spokes model here in Bath. And we cover a full range of these activities. I'm really excited to be speaking to you today to share some of your experiences about some of my experiences about my strategies for choosing and using learning technologies. But before I continue, I'd like to know a little bit about yourselves. There's quite a few bubbles, and I'm not really sure who my audience is today. There's so many of you. Can I see some smiley faces from those who are learning technologists and staff developers? Okay, quite a few of you. Wonderful. Wonderful. Can I see some green ticks from those of you who are working in industry? Ah, very few. Okay, none. No problem. Can you tell me whether you are designing? Use a green tick to let me know whether you are designing online courses at the moment. And that is your main purpose for attending the webinar today. Okay. Right. Okay, well, predominantly learning technologists from what I can see. So that is wonderful. And some people actually thinking about it. Excellent. Right. In respect to what category you're in, I hope you'll find something useful in this presentation. Moving on. In my session, I'm going to be using the term eLearning to mean the use of any technology to enhance learning and teaching. I will be using it as shorthand for the phrases such as technology-enhanced learning, network learning, blended learning, distance learning, and so on. Now, eLearning has become a discipline in its own right, as you know. It is quite unique, especially within institutions, because you'll find that it actually straddles a number of domains. And those people who are implementing eLearning find themselves at the very heart of this Venn diagram. It's an umbrella, eLearning is an umbrella that brings together the academic parts of an institution that are delivering the curriculum, administrative parts which support staff and students, and also the technical part of an institution with its infrastructure and software. It truly cuts across the entire institution, and quite often we're seen as people working at the fracture lines of academia. As you can imagine, the skill set and knowledge which is required to work in this space at the heart of this Venn diagram is actually quite vast. If you're an academic developer or a learning technologist, you'll often find yourself translating and bridging the gap between these domains. Now, I work at an institutional level in my current role, which means that in addition to these three domains and understanding how the overlaps actually happen and what they mean, I'm also asked to understand the institutional context, the mission, the vision of the institution, where we're going, but also tap into what's going on in the higher education sector and keep tabs on what's happening in industry and with employers outside. So it's actually quite a vast knowledge set, and making decisions in such a complex field is actually really not easy. However, today in this presentation, I'm going to focus on the initial three diagrams, the three circles that I presented earlier. And I'm going to be talking about how we make decisions in relation to learning technologies very much in a teacher-student sort of setting to enhance the learning experience. Indeed, one of the participants has highlighted, all of us have highlighted that this is often referred to as third space working practices. Now, reflecting on my experiences in higher education, I can see that over the years we have become more evidence-based and more sophisticated in how we choose our technologies for learning, but also how institutions tend to invest in technologies. Many years ago, when I started in the field, we were quite happy to assume that the use of technology was a good thing because of the potential it offered. It was also quite novel. We based our implementation on rules of thumb. If it had worked before, it will probably work again. If it was a good experience previously, it will probably offer a good experience again. And when we measured success, we started looking at it in relation to face-to-face activities and whether it was good enough or offered an equally rich experience. The sector then started looking at satisfaction and the use of technology was based on need and the importance of technology to provide a modern education. We were asking whether students were happy with what we were providing. We were asking them whether they would recommend it to their friends and whether they wanted it again. Later on, we looked at expectations, but I can definitely see, even from personal experience, that we've now moved away from that and we're starting to look at different things. We're starting to look at educational impacts. We've gone from proof of concept to actually taking a more evidence problem-based approach to efficiency, effectiveness, but also educational enhancement moving on. Establishing whether we're making the right choices is actually really difficult. As you know, e-learning is all about embedding, whether it's in the curriculum, whether it's in student support, existing practice and so on. And when something is embedded, it's actually quite difficult to distinguish it from something else and say whether a particular technology has actually made a difference. There are so many variables within the context in which we operate. So how do we know that our choices and strategies are successful? I quite like this graphic. It might be a little bit dated now in that some technologies no longer exist and some new ones have also appeared on the scene. It is the digital version of a blue taxonomy that depicts the various stages of learning along with the tools which might facilitate these levels. However, I do like it because it highlights the importance of using the right tool for the task and by implication using the right tool for the right context but also for the right learner. Ultimately, it highlights that our choices and our decisions are about learning and not about the technology. For those of you working in higher education, you'll probably be familiar with this, this tri-partite structure. There's an intended learning outcome at the very top of this pyramid. We want students to learn something, we want them to achieve something quite often just discipline based. Sometimes it refers to transferable skills. We want to know whether they've learned it so we assess them but also in order to help them achieve this, we design teaching activities that will help them get there, help them achieve that intended learning outcome. Now, when all three of these work together and they're in sync, all these three components, it's commonly known as constructive alignment. So how do we use technologies as part of this? In this webinar, I'm going to be highlighting the importance of learning design to support our decisions. How many of you are familiar with the concept of learning design? Can I see some green ticks? I'm not seeing any green ticks at the moment. No worries at all. The concept of learning design provides us with a systematic way of developing and describing experiences. Some green ticks are appearing wonderful. If you consider, a nice analogy would be to consider learning as a dance. So if they're learning, they're dancing. So if we were talking about learning design, we'd actually be talking about the choreography to this dance. We're talking about the outlines of the steps. We're talking about the sequence. We're talking about the props that are needed. And therefore, learning design includes the description of the learners, the space and the environment in which they learn, but also the tools that they use to interact with each other. I'm going to briefly mention a couple of these frameworks, learning design frameworks, and I'm going to provide some examples of how they've been used to effectively provide guidance for choosing technologies. One example of this framework you may or may not be familiar with is the one developed at the AUTC, a tripartite model of tasks, resources and supports. And this was developed by Ron Oliver and his colleagues at Edith Cowan University in Australia. He sees learning as a series of tasks that we ask students to do to help achieve the learning outcomes. We may ask them to solve problems. We may ask them to investigate. We may ask them to do role plays and carry out projects. But in order to do those learning tasks objectively, we actually need to give them some resources. And these resources could be in the form of traditional books and papers and articles. They could be online resources, but they also might be quizzes and simulations and more e-learning type infrastructure might be involved in that. Furthermore, in order to help them effectively interact with these resources and carry out the tasks, he says that we actually need to put some support structures in place. And sometimes the support structures might be administrative information such as deadlines, schedules, calendars, announcements and so on. Other times it might be more academic support like tutorials and collaboration and group work. So I quite like this model because it's a nice way of conceptualizing the task at hand and the roles that technology can play. In this example, technology is very much seen as a resource. And I will now give you an example that I came across of this type of conceptualization. So, right. This case study, this example I came across, comes from John Beasley Murray, who's an academic in Canada. He teaches Latin American studies. He wanted to teach his students about Spanish literature. So to do this, he devised, he looked at tasks, resources and supports, very much the previous model. So he devised a task, he offered them resources and he put supports in place to help them achieve that task. He wanted them to choose a Spanish author to understand his or her work. He wanted them to work in groups. He wanted them to create or improve a Wikipedia article relating to their author of choice. Now in order to do this, students obviously started reading about Spanish literature. They researched authors. They used technology to collaborate and produce their final assessment. Why I particularly like this example is because it does some things that the traditional experience doesn't offer. There are elements of choice. So they could choose their own author. It enables students to master a number of learning outcomes simultaneously, both that are discipline specific in relation to Latin American studies, but also transferable skills. And it also enables them to enhance their digital literacies. I particularly like this choice of technology. He used Wikipedia. Now this is quite often frowned upon within the higher education setting. It is not a system that is supported by our institutions. It's an externally hosted system that we have no control over. And it is there and quite often we do not see it as academically credible. However, it did provide him with the collaboration tools that he needed. It also provided him with the initial resources for his tasks and the materials, which could be improved by the students. Furthermore, it provided him with peer assessment tools. A simple Wiki could have done this. However, what Wikipedia enables him to do is actually make the experience authentic. So students were not only producing these resources for assessment purposes, using possibly a fictional scenario, a problem that we've asked them to solve, or even writing an essay that only one tutor would ever see. What they were producing was actually contributing to knowledge in the widest sense. Their work was being assessed by the tutor, was being assessed by their peers. Wikipedia itself has quality checks, but also it was being assessed by peers around the world that also have opinions and can customize what they've put out there. Ultimately, it offered a really highly unique experience. Now, you might say, oh, yes, of course, that works fine because it's a text-based subject. The same sort of concept was actually used by a completely different subject that's highly visual. This was a landscape architecture course that did something similar. He wanted Bruce Sharkey, wanted his students to understand natural phenomenon and how it impacted on buildings. So he asked them to enhance Wikipedia with particular images that they were asked to draw. He found that the output was much higher in quality and the coursework was much higher quality than students would have usually produced within his module, partly because it was out there and it was public. That's one example of how one framework can help us structure a choice of learning technologies. There are a number of learning design frameworks out there. Another very common one you may have come across is the hybrid learning model developed by Dominic Verporten and her colleagues at the University of Leage. Now, she says that students will only ever do these eight things within learning.  They will reflect on things. And if we break these tasks down into a sequence of learning events, we can actually then see which tool is more appropriate for using within our educational context. So really interesting. And again, it provides a very structured approach to choosing the tools that we want. Nothing else, what these learning frameworks do is they actually provide us with a vocabulary and a structure for our thinking but also for our interaction when we are working within a team-based approach for developing courses. However, pedagogy and technology have both moved on over recent years. And the learner is obviously important including now where there are higher fees within higher education. Designers, learners at the heart of the system and also personalized experiences are much preferred. Some of the technology that we now know, for example, I don't know if you've heard of a platform called Newton which is used in the States. It started off as a K to 12 technology but is now used in higher education. Academics and teachers would put a number of different resources and they would use metadata to mark them up to say whether they were basic level resources, intermediate resources, advanced resources, what subject they were referring to, whether they were visual, whether they were text based and so on. And then we just put a number of resources within an environment. The system knows who each learner is through a series of questions. It has established whether the learner is a visual learner or they prefer text. And it automatically synthesizes a learning experience that is tailored to that specific student. Now that's really interesting because what it does, it removes the learning design. It doesn't make it invisible. It makes it invisible to the tutors. Tutors only mark up a number of resources. However, that learning design is inherent within the technology. And in choosing technologies, I think we also really need to consider about what the conceptions of the actual developers were at the time of designing the technology. So a little word of caution there. But again, some really interesting mastery based recommendation systems that are emerging that are becoming quite adaptive. Following on from that, again, in terms of adaptation, as I mentioned earlier, I worked at an institutional level. So some of the things that I do involve rolling out technologies on a large scale for everyone to use. Here at the University of Bath, we have about 15,000 students. However, when I introduce and roll out technology, I'm not rolling out a system that will offer a high quality learning experience to all. But what I aim to roll out is a learning system that will provide 15,000 different high quality experiences. Each of our students will use it differently. They have different preferences and they will customize it appropriately. Not all our technologies are flexible enough, but that is the spirit in which we try and roll things out here. One example of an initiative that we had here relates to our digital literacies project. We were given a large grant to explore institutional approaches to developing digital literacies. As part of that, we defined what we meant by digital literacies. Indeed, each of our faculties defined these. So we had a multitude of definitions, as well as a list of skills and attributes that we wanted our students to develop. Now we could have put on a series of workshops to address these needs in each of the faculties. But we felt that the learner was the most important person in the process and they should be able to customize their experience. So we designed an online activity that enabled them to self assess themselves to declare the level of confidence against the various categories of digital literacies. We mapped their individual perceptions against what their faculty, their particular faculty wanted them to achieve. We raised their awareness of what these were. We prompted reflection and furthermore, we got the system to direct them and recommend activities from around the university that were tailored to their needs. Thus, the fragmenting the experience of trying to find the right course for them. So again, this was bespoke software development. However, this is an example of where we're going and where technology is actually no longer a bolt on, an additional knife to have, but is actually integrated in the learning experience. From an institutional perspective and also from an individual perspective, we want to use learning technology to offer something highly unique, a pedagogical experience which cannot really be replicated without the use of technology. So I will close my talk with a recent example of how technology enabled us to offer a unique experience as part of one of our very first massive open online courses which the University of Bath offered on cancer genetics. This was a course that was offered via the FutureLearn platform and was designed in collaboration with my staff here, learning technologists with instructional design, learning design expertise, but also with large academic teams. The technological platform, the openness of it and the massive nature of it, we could offer an experience like no other. Let me explain. This course attracted almost 8,000 participants. And interestingly, it was rated one of the highest, it was one of the best rated courses on the FutureLearn platform. This course had 44 participants, sorry, apologies, had participants from 44 different countries. And what it did, it actually brought together students from A level through to PhD. It brought together researchers at the cutting edge of cancer research. It brought together medical practitioners. It brought together sufferers and carers with a worldwide perspective and a single online space to gain access to current up-to-date expertise and learn about this subject. It did indeed offer an experience that money could not buy. And it's not an experience that we can easily offer our current students that are studying this topic either. So we had asked our students to register onto this course and experience it with all these perspectives, this worldwide perspective available to them. So this was about using the importance of technology to offer something that really wasn't available within a traditional setting. And I think that is my closing comment, that when we choose technology, it really needs to add to the learning experience. It really needs to enhance it. It needs to be unique and not seen as a bolt-on and something that would be nice to have. So I will leave you with that thought. And I believe I'm passing on the mic to my colleague James Little before we take any questions. Thank you. Thanks, Kiriaki. Before James gets involved, I think it would be great to just pause a moment and thank you for what's been a really interesting first presentation. If anybody has any quick questions for Kiriaki, please post them in the chat window and we'll do our best to respond. But now we're going to have our second presentation and then we'll have discussion at the end with James Little and James. I hope you are ready to take over the mic and guide us through the next couple of slides. The one just checking there, you can hear me okay. If so, just put it to my place. Excellent. So just a quick introduction of myself. I'm James Little. I'm a learning technologist at the University of Leeds. I've been in higher education, being a learning technologist and a staff developer since 2007. Prior to that, I've had quite a lot of experience working in web design and educational consultancies, basically also kind of producing and learning. So it's quite an interesting kind of combination coming from the commercial world and going into higher education. So let's give you a brief summary of the second half of the webinar. I've kind of got five areas to consider with you. One is the wider context, when we're thinking about strategies and learning technology and kind of the current context that we're finding ourselves in. And then looking at specific areas that we might want to consider within that in terms of students and staff attitudes. And then really the last section is about trying to make sense of an overwhelming choice of information that we have in terms of what we could use, how we could produce things and try and make some, in fact, using some theoretical approaches but then also looking at practical approaches of how we can actually implement some of these aspects of learning technology. Some people are saying that there's poor audio. Let me just turn my microphone up because that helped to turn people here a bit better now. Excellent. Okay. So moving on to the first slide. So, as Kyrie actually mentioned, when I'm thinking about learning technology, I'm also thinking about all the other kinds of types of technology. So that was kind of technology in hot learning, blended learning, distance learning, e-learning, the whole kind of range of phrases that people have come to associate education and technology together. And thinking about, before we're thinking about strategies and approaches to this type of technology, just thinking about the current context. So why are we kind of dabbling with different types of technology and being done as advocate? Can we not continue to teach and research that we have done in the past? So what is the wider context? So this is a model that kind of came up with a couple of years ago. Trying to identify all of these different aspects that are kind of creeping in. So we've got education in the center. We've got massive changes in society in the way people are using technology across society. We've got lots of different policies coming out from the government, bodies like Alts, JISC, the Higher Educational Academy, influencing and kind of directing the way education is happening in the U.S. and across the world. And thinking about kind of commercial and external interests. So we've got a lot of companies that are actually producing content for other companies as well as directly for the educational market. And then we've kind of got the whole questioning around the purpose of the educational system. Is it for work? Is it for people understanding? So all these things are kind of going on. And really it leads to kind of this big push towards change. Change is happening. So people are looking at different ways of doing things and achieving things slightly differently to how they have done in the past. So looking more specifically at drivers, now this report was the Sizer report from actually 2012. And I don't find there were 22 specific drivers that came across for why we should be thinking about using learning technology in education. And really distilled that the number one is about enhancing the quality of learning and teaching, widening, participating and attracting slash impressing students. Now the other ones are a lot more technical but really I think the key one is the first one which is the whole purpose of using any approach to education to enhance from where we are currently. So from an academic or a teacher perspective, a section of views that I kind of often seem to come up is that change isn't coming. It's already here and it's going to continue. It's no longer as suitable or available to kind of essentially ignore any of the changes that are happening in my society and how they could be applied to education. But it's genuinely creating a skills gap for all types of staff in trying to make sense of how to use these tools within their current teaching. A common complaint is that there's not enough time to catch up. So there are often things to be addressed. As a student perspective, there's a feeling that technology is being surrounded by their everyday experience. And why isn't it being used in some areas of education? But then it's quite clear that as students, as individuals, as we all are, everyone has a different relationship with technology. So we need to be quite careful in making assumptions about certain generations or types of people that they're particularly or are not with technology. And then the kind of consumption that if technology is implemented, it should just work. It shouldn't kind of frustrate or add an additional barrier. So to kind of summarise that in the context of education, learning seems to take place in quite the same way. But the changes in the context and expectations and practices have changed to kind of focus around the increasing availability of technology, whether that's internet, mobile devices, there's always a new focus that is being coming across along. And this is really raising expectations and also opening up a range of places and locations where students can learn. So what does that really mean for educators and students? I'm just thinking about students that are currently, this is quite UK centric or westernised, but in terms of progressing through an education system, it's quite acknowledged that primary and secondary schools are ahead of higher education in terms of implementing technology. So is there an expectations gap that's being created between one educational section and the next? And then kind of those questions about the expectations of youth. So there's an expectation that things are used, but what's the best way of doing it? And bound up in all of this is where does the learning take place? Does it really take place in our education, for example, in the classroom? Well, there's a lot of it actually take place within seminars, within formal discussions, outside in more formal contexts. So how can we use that on need to access that as well? So looking specifically at some more focus examples, quite like a key action event diagram in thinking there's a combination of three areas here. The first would be kind of the pedagogical view. So what are we trying to do here with technology? Who, why, what, all the learning outcomes, enhancing existing teaching methods and creating or enabling new methods of education. And then kind of the self-awareness, this would be equally applied to students or our staff. But what skills do I have? What skills do I need to make use of these? And how can this transition or upskilling be achieved? So this focus then thirdly on digital skills is thinking how can we actually ensure that if we design things using technology that we're not excluding people and that we really are giving people fair access. So one of the other things is there's an overwhelming choice I think of technologies that we can think about. And just to give you an example, this is just a visual representation, I think of how the app phenomenon has kind of taken off on devices. There's just many available. How do we make, you know, how do we decide what's appropriate, what actually works? And how do we match what we want to do in terms of education with the technology choice that we're having to make? So here are some strategies and at different levels. So for example, institutionally supported ones, you've kind of got the VLE, which could be Blackboard or Moodle, you've got things like let capture, you've got kind of big, big kind of almost existing sweets that, you know, once comes to the technology, but in this office and all these things that are kind of century supported. Then there's things that people might use specifically to themselves, you know, so screen casting, audio feedback, YouTube, things that you can use on your own terms and integrate if you wish to, but they're not necessarily century supported. And then you've got things I could really experience like this Hangout, this webinar MOOCs that are kind of above and beyond one institution, the institution across the sector. So trying to put these kind of where technology can actually fit within education, I think this is trying to deal with things about where you can access technology as much and where can it be within the educational experience. So kind of the four surfboards really are kind of the overlapping areas that you can, that have already been created in terms of the physical learning spaces and the institutional VLEs. There's personalized learning environments and then there's all the environments that we might be creating as a mobile experience for people to use on the go and they're kind of the underpinning architecture. But then along the side we've got those three areas and really technology can be considered at the unit or module level or kind of discrete session by session basis. It can also be considered at program level and it could be considered across a school or institution so you know right across a curriculum. So again this is the whole context it can be quite granular but it can also be incredibly broad depending on how you choose to view it. So how do we try and make sense of choice and where we perhaps could apply the different types of choices. So here's three theories I'm going to go through and please review them or the encounter these and hopefully one of them what we need to do but the whole idea of looking at how students and academics and teachers actually make use of technology it's the idea that you could be a resident in technology which essentially you can leave a certain amount of your experience through that technology so Facebook is a good example you're actually leaving memories and work there the VLE could potentially if you've got an online course could be used in that way so as opposed to using a technology as a visitor so for example you might just pop in and check your email using to their banking you're not particularly leaving any footprint or information there you're just making use of that purely as a tool and I think that approach can be applied so that's how you can integrate a particular tool within within your teaching and that applies to both yourselves and also how students would perhaps relate to technology within that context now the the SAMAR model I think is a great way of trying to think I've got all these options how do I actually want to integrate it how could I integrate it into my teaching into my education and it starts off with kind of this division between enhancement and transformation the idea that you could enhance things by either substituting augmenting existing activity so for example I would say that this webinar is kind of an augmentation or face-to-face meeting it's a direct substitute of the fact that we could all be in a room meeting but the augmentation is that we're enabling us to connect without being in the same room I guess the idea of the transformation is that it's enabling things that wouldn't necessarily be possible before so for example if we were to use this facility to share files or create a diagram together at a distance that would be a modification because we could not physically get 100 people easily in a webinar and talk so really it's also not to say that the transformation is better than the enhancement it's just that if you're looking at a particular tool it's thinking how does this fit in am I replacing something or I'm actually enabling something new that couldn't be done before and then finally just a highlight from the poach from Edinburgh Napier the three ease approach and the idea of enhancing extending and empowering this is kind of an approach that they've taken in a way of looking at how students can really use technology or have it enable for them to use to support their learning at different types of level so it basically there's lots of different ways it can be implemented there's a really great way of looking at a student-centric way of the effect of using technology rather than going about the particular choice and going about the specifying of a tool that's actually looking at the outcome you want and kind of working backwards so I think it's also fair to say that there's often if you just talk technology and education to a lot of people there's quite rightly some critical voices so I think it's worth thinking about around context is that there is sometimes a lot of positive talk about it but then they're actually issued on the ground when it comes to trying to achieve some of these changes so for example in our education the slower pace that has happened there's a preparedness and a readiness to actually realize the potentials so I think a lot of everyday activity is about addressing some of the concerns that come from not only change but also the correct implementations of things so just thinking about how you can actually implement and share approaches to learning technology and really I'm taking from that a journey from kind of embedded up to kind of national or international level so looking at a local level with institutions it's interesting at the beginning there's a lot of learning technologies to primarily over other types of staff and I think a learning technology to have a role can be a bridge it's kind of a bridge from development of a familiar kind of scenario to one where there's all these different options new options that are causing you to completely actually evaluate the way you're doing things so I think there's a kind of a departmental and a faculty level or in the classroom directly it's quite important I think that a role exists where the connections can be made and also supported to provide not only the technical support but also kind of a pedagogical understanding of how things could be implemented on a local level thinking about across an institution approaches so for example here at Leeds there's not a network I had just called the Learning Technologist Network at Leeds and it's a meet up once every month where people come together and share ideas problem solutions so it's kind of creating a community of practice trying to share different ideas of how things can be implemented and then more formally there is the blended learning committee and the team of academic champions and faculty teams that kind of help implement lots of changes and decisions kind of from a policy level so to give an example there's some centrally supported technology such as Articulate Studio although we connect and yet they're kind of supported both centrally and locally at the same time so people without in faculties and departments at the University of Leeds have a key link person that will help them with these particular tools and then centrally there's also kind of a whole community of practice of different ideas and different activities that have gone about how to use these particular tools effectively. I'm just thinking across regions it's really a great way of sharing ideas is to join loads of different kind of groups that exist just to literally pick a few out of the air there's the M25 learning technology group based around London and there's the media and arts learning specialist group that's based kind of around New York and there's loads of different kind of pan institution and the educational sector groups which leads me on to kind of the whole point of sharing approaches through activity like OCTEL Association for Learning Technology GISC is a great way to kind of have a continuing conversation about the best way to do things and in summary I kind of again to echo some of what Kiyaki was mentioning as well but there's so much out there you really have to focus on kind of the pedagogy and the technology so that you know continuing to have the focus on the purpose of education rather than the tool and again that could be considered to write from the kind of small granular level write up to kind of program or correct curriculum or pan institution level and really it should be considered at the start rather than being bolted on which is actually what Kiyaki said as well so that ideally things work best when they're considered right at the beginning and also that it's fine to apply theories to try and aid selection it's kind of grounding the theory in practice and I think that having a balance of theoretical understanding as well as a practical awareness or the functions of particular types of technologies that is key in helping understand how but that's it for the tool can enhance the educational purpose I don't think it's it's a problem but actually there isn't a one size fits all and it's a complicated area and that for each situation you know you might not only draw multiple approaches but there are multiple ways of doing it which is why I think that the last point of gaining ideas through multiple networks is really keen to trying to continue to understand all the different ways that educational technologies being implemented and across the UK and across the world and let's just say thank you very much and any questions Thanks very much that was an absolutely brilliant overview lots of ideas in the chat as well we've got a few more moments for discussion about 10 minutes and it would be fantastic if you could let us know your questions in the chat window if you want to use your mic to ask a question we'll ask you that you can maybe stick to the chat just because we might have lots of questions but Kiriaki and James and me will do our best to answer your questions and I wonder Kiriaki, James do you want to pick us off with any comments after your presentations anything you've picked up in the chat window and for those of you who are keen on getting the bad for this week the code word is white like the colour Kiriaki do you maybe want to go first any comments or after thoughts or anything from the chat you want to pick up thanks Marin I have been reading through the chat window as James was presenting just trying to catch up on a number of things so I've posted a link to the platform that I talked about that promotes adaptive learning but it was interesting to hear James' views I took a quite a traditional approach and sort of gone into learning design and looking at strategies for choosing technologies very specific and James took a greater overview which was wonderful to hear and it was quite comforting to hear that we're both recommending the same sort of things that it is the pedagogy it is the uniqueness and the embeddedness but also the fact that there are so many things out there that we could be looking at and it's often difficult to make those decisions because it's such a broad field and all we can do really is expose ourselves and be open to ideas and keep our principles of sound pedagogy really at the forefront great thank you I think there is a question that has been coming up through the chat window which I think James and you could maybe comment on which is about convincing and involving senior leaders in effective strategies for learning technology working with senior management whether it's in a school, college or university from your experience are there any key ingredients to getting it right? It's quite interesting I've got two experiences why is working locally within a school within a university and I think the key thing there is trying to raise the importance or raise the awareness in technology within the school and the key thing was basically trying to present the background context for why things couldn't continue as they were I was specifically thinking of some distance learning masters that had been running for five years and it reached the point where they were great when they were started but because I've been at the march of technology and the kind of richer experience that could be provided they were kind of looking dated shall we say and I think the kind of techniques were just were comparative so looking across the sector but then also looking and using that as kind of a a motivator to kind of say well this is going on we also need to be doing this but not just to follow suit but actually to kind of say because these are the educational reasons why it would be delivering an enhanced experience for the students that are taking part so I think that balance between addressing things that become updated and using awareness of them along with the actual impact as if you can call them that that you kind of have to promise but use kind of your experience to know that they're not just made up they're actually genuine evidence based in that. Great thanks very much James Kiriaki do you have any comments on that question too on how to work with senior leaders for effective strategies? My experience of of developing strategies and policies within the academic setting I've always sort of focused around three things and James alluded to one of them and it is very much that evidence base one of my slides I talked about satisfaction expectations and finally impact we're now being able we're now being asked to demonstrate impact of learning technologies before decisions are made before investments are made and policies are written so that evidence base in terms of tangible benefits for the student community I think is an absolute must. The other thing that has helped me along the way has been in ownership and fostering ownership at those very high levels giving senior leaders a stake in some of the work that we're doing and actually making the links back to other missions, visions, strategy, other things that are going on in the institution that we consider to be very important. My previous institution was a post-92 institution in London it was a post-92 big widening participation agenda very large. I've now come to a research intensive institution that is at the top of the league tables but it's interesting because in both cases I'm being asked to promote the use of e-learning and enhancing the student learning experience however the drivers are very very different so again looking at that ownership and looking at those drivers and where they're coming from is very important and my final word with regard to getting senior managers on board is also establishing the readiness and again James mentioned something around that in his presentation as well it is about the readiness of the institutions to move forward and sometimes institutions are happy to just incrementally change things in some cases and depending on those external government drivers possibly whether it's fees or whether it's research income or whatever it is sometimes they're ready to make much bigger steps and it is about taking the opportunity at the right time to make those changes so those three things an evidence base, ownership and readiness would probably be my top three tips around getting senior managers on board. Great thanks very much I think there was a few more questions that we're going to try and pick up in a moment if Kiriaki and James have another moment we have a few more questions in the chat but unfortunately our time for the formal part of the webinar is now up and I'd like to thank you all for participating but also thank Kiriaki and James for really inspiring examples and very thought provoking ideas that I'm hoping together with Phil Tubman the other lead tutor for this week we'll see lots of discussions about in the Octel forums and on your blogs across Twitter and I'm hoping that you'll be able to find the Octel badge for this webinar today as well. If you've got any questions about Octel or how to participate in the rest of the week you can email us as well get in touch with as far as the Octel site and I'm very much hoping that you'll join us again for next week's webinar which will be for week 2 of Octel starting on Monday. So for now thank you very much for joining us and again thanks to Kiriaki, James, Phil Caroline and Martin. Kiriaki and James if you still have a second there is a couple of questions in the moderator chat about assessing digital literacy tools and something I'll start if you wanted to have a quick look before you head off that would be great. There is a question by Martin Hoxie in relation to the digital literacy assessment tool and whether it is available for others to use. Now, it isn't at the moment it's in the process of currently being updated. Some early work on the tool and part of that code comes from the Exeter project as well and I believe they may have made part of that available. However, we are planning on developing it further. What we need to do is update our definitions of digital literacy and incorporate them into the new tool before we make it available to all our students and hopefully make it available to others. Thanks very much. I think the other question is for you as well Kiriaki, which is about the three differences or the key differences of your system and a learning management system any initial thoughts on that? I'm unclear about what is referred to as my system. Does this relate to the Newton platform that I talked about? I'm unsure. I would need a bit of a clarification there. I'm afraid. Great. I think the participant Moira who has asked a question is still in the session. Moira, if you wanted to ask a follow-up we can hopefully answer your question. Fortunately we can't hear your mic Moira. You might need to use the chat window but in the meantime if anybody has any final questions for James or Kiriaki please post them in the chat window and we'll do our best to answer otherwise we'll wish you a very nice afternoon. I think Moira is just typing Kiriaki so that's great. Thank you. I have a question from Paul who is talking curious whether maybe James that is something you could answer whether you struggle with staff engagement? I think that's true to say that staff engagement can vary. I think it can vary depending on what's trying to be achieved so thinking back to my previous institution when I was working in a particular department we eventually lost around which seemed to centre around time not willingness to engage or think around things, it was purely time by making sure there was agreement that a certain amount of time was actually the least for staff to go on additional training or different kind of sessions that were run in order to kind of think about the different educational things that were being designed. I think on a general level I think at the institutional level it's quite hard to reach all staff and I think that can vary sometimes it can be because the institution itself is incredibly large so it's hard to actually get a message from the centre out to kind of trickle down or just because people have to want to engage or be convinced that it's important I think that's kind of often half of the issue that it needs to be a conversation about the educational side of things rather than we've got this tool and we're going to force you to use it which I think is kind of something that often gets a new york reaction or well I'm not using that or I'm not engaging so I think generally staff engagement is always a battle to be kind of encouraged to be kind of thoughtful and try to unpick why is it where individuals or particularly groups are not engaging what is it and what's the real kind of under the undertones there. Thank you very much. I think we're running nearly out of time now so I'm going to give James and Kiriaki both the opportunity to make any final comments, pick up any final questions before we close Kiriaki anything final comments or answers from you? I know there's been quite a few questions around the slides. I believe Marin that these will be made available to the participants if there's any further information that you would like me to include any particular links or so on then please do let me know I'm very happy to do so. I would just like to really thank all the participants for their questions and for patiently listening to us for the last hour I'm very happy to interact with all of you again soon. Great thanks Kiriaki and yes we'll be able to make the slides available via the Octel website. James last comments from you? Yes just much again the same really to get a closing comment would be that the harder you look the further you look into things the more complicated it seems to get so it's quite it's okay to be confused and to think things are quite located in terms of that intersection between learning technology and education and I really just keep on being curious and asking questions because that's how you form opinions and try to find the best, do the best that you can. So again just to account Kiriaki, it's been great to have people attend and listen to us and yeah we're happy to continue the conversations on the Octel site or via the Octel website. Fantastic thank you very much and as most of you will know there is a forum specifically about strategies for learning technology on the Octel site, we hope to be able to carry on the conversation there but for now I'd like to thank again James and Kiriaki and everybody else for participating, wish you a good afternoon. Goodbye.