Alright thanks for staying with us. Now in recent years there has been a growing interest in digitization of education in Nigeria. This is due to the fact that technology has the potential to improve the quality of education and make it more accessible to a larger number of students. Now one of the major initiatives in this regard is the introduction of e-learning platforms and online courses. Many universities and other educational institutions in Nigeria now offer online courses which allows students to study at their own pace and form from anywhere with an internet connection. This has made education more flexible and convenient for many people who may not have been able to attend traditional classroom-based courses. So tonight we're asking what is the present and the future of digitizing education in Nigeria. Now please let's hear what you have to say. Remember you can join the conversation, send us an SMS or WhatsApp to us at 1-803-484-663. You can also see that it's at Weissho, I've got one on the hashtag Weissho. Alright you are already doing something with online e-learning. How is that for you and do you see it you know getting really really what's it called popular or more acceptable in Nigeria? No I think online courses or e-learning platforms are already popular in Nigeria. A lot of people are pushing it. Even universities like ABU have e-learning for masters. I have a friend who is currently taking it. She doesn't have to travel all the way to Zaria to do her masters and before you know by next year she'll be done and I think that's quite amazing and one thing that online or e-learning platforms have actually done for us is you don't have to travel so far or go to a particular location for you to take some courses or to get the certificates that you need. In the comfort of your home you can get education. Absolutely. In the comfort of your home you can gather knowledge on a particular subject matter and in a few months, in a month, in three months, one year before you know you're a professional right? Absolutely. The only downside that I see to it is when it comes to some subjects or skills that require hands-on learning where you have to be very practical. Now in cases like that obviously you cannot use e-learning platforms. You can only use e-learning for probably the theory aspect of it but where you have to be hands-on you have to build something, you have to probably do something physical that you have to be present. So those are the only downsides that I see.  You've used a lot of technology to be able to transfer knowledge to your students. So how has that experience been for you? Would you say that it is a lot more easier for you as now the educator or you know classroom is still preferable for you? All right. Thank you. First I would say education is a position of skill. Now if you're acquiring a skill set in that context you have to understand that whoever you are teaching you are teaching that individual to acquire a particular skill. Now where the person has challenges is where you as a teacher have not been able to deliver it using different methodologies. Okay. I have the opportunity to teach online and on site. Everything has its pros and cons of course but for older learners I would say yes. Online platform is the best tool to use but for young learners I wouldn't advise you to use online all the time for them. There should be that having where they can have a one-to-one that is having to interact with the teacher physically on site instead of being in a Zoom meeting because they have different things that can actually keep them distracted in class. You keep talking to the child and you are asking what are you doing? The child will tell you I'm with you but in after that that child might be playing games on the phone or playing games on the laptop so you have this challenge of individuals or parents not supervising that child. So yes it has its pros and of course it has its cons. For older learners online platform is the goal too. I was going to say that I'm a very kinetic learner right. I like to feel I like to touch what it is that I'm learning and I have started I don't waste money for this education matter. So I started a I started an MBA and because of the style of learning it was just going to be so funny like you know I have to do everything by myself I dropped it I started another MBA I managed to do the pre-MBA part I completed that one I dropped it.  So what I now did with this one I did I tested something and you know because it was too technical I by the second day I already knew that I'm not going there. But what then happened was I then took up another course and that course now I've just it's just two days I registered I've already I'm already in my week four I'm almost done with the the first module and because what I observed was because I have very very keen interest.  But let me bring in our guest. So Sharon Ecott is a self-disciplined well-organized and driven professional with a solid understanding of marketing principles and product management. She is skilled in marketing strategy planning or strategic planning and business development and overseas product development at PAVE HQ. A higher education digital ecosystem platform powering global education and career guidance for Africans and she has joined me live or joined us live in studio. Hi Sharon. By the way you look amazing. You know we met on a quick background we met on Saturday and immediately she opened them out to explain what she was doing and say I know I need you in my life because I mean for us at on this platform we try as much as possible to bring in resource for people again that we know that would impact because I'm very passionate about education right that would impact people in different ways. I mean your organization does a lot so maybe we'll start with you know first of all do you believe that digitizing education right is the way to go and do you believe it has really come to stay in Nigeria. Yes thank you very much first of all for having me I feel really honored to be here today. Yes I do think that digitizing education is very important and if we're taking way back to the COVID-19 pandemic where a lot of things were shut down and inclusive of schools and a lot of schools had to adapt to digital learning especially for their students who went either in maybe the final classes so that they don't have to be you know delayed and for a school like the university I attended Covenant University we also had to start taking a lot of courses and certification courses on Coursera Hub Sports and the likes and you know it just we were able to move ahead of that so imagine people who live in rural and marginalized areas who for that nine ten one year of their lives where literally stagnant with no growth you know so I definitely think that digitizing education is something that is here to stay especially in Nigeria these days there's so many online schools Trefort and even a lot of young people these days teenagers are building digital classrooms like of the founder of class Nathan and Wachiku who is like a 20-year-old boy and he has he's built this amazing technology to host them did online classes which a lot of big organizations like talent QL and the rest are you know part of so I definitely think that digitalizing education is the way forward especially for I mean just to make education to make education accessible flexible and I mean relevant to the need of the 21st century you know world which is so let me quickly just quickly touch on something before I'll let Jennifer and easy comment it's interesting how you know the world is changing times are changing right but do you think that if we stick to or if we truly embrace digital education right do you think that the structure of Nigeria can accommodate it because again it's one thing for us to say that this is a fantastic learning tool it's another thing for the people like you mentioned the rural areas the rural communities and all of that those people don't have access do we not see a situation where we begin to cut off you know like marginalize those people that they're not able to access education or do you think the the technology will be modified in a way that it would work with or without maybe probably internet connectivity um so I mean aside digital learning is more than you know internet connectivity it has to do with electricity because you need to power these devices that you learn on and with the current economic situation with in Nigeria especially we're dealing with the false subsidy a lot of people either there's if never doesn't give them lights it's darkness for them so in situations like that with the current uh you know with the way Nigeria is currently I don't personally think that um digitalizing education can work a hundred percent especially when you put in low income in enters into the equation you know or schools that can barely even afford a computer system so I mean I'm referring to government schools as well you know a lot of government schools are underdeveloped so underdeveloped so it's um I don't think Nigeria is ready yet for yes but I definitely think that it is a conversation that we need to start having and day by day I mean the government needs to hear us and know that it is it is the future because I mean it it caters for just about anybody I can't be a sales girl in a store but still have access to education aside the four walls of the classroom through my smartphone through the internet so I definitely think that Nigeria is on its way there but we are not just there yet awesome Jennifer yeah so I like your response to that um and I agree with you 100 percent there was also something um EC had mentioned earlier which I also agree with and it has to do with the younger learners right um I've been a teacher before and I know that there were times where I taught in class and I had some students who had to stay back because they had more questions or probably didn't understand anything that was being taught in class right there are some that I had to take extra time to teach and to put them through on on that particular subject right now when we talk about digitizing education and we want kids to start learning on e-learning platforms and joining via zoom or just going on a platform like you said like the young guy who created or maybe platforms like Lightroom for example you go there you take lessons now what about kids who don't understand immediately right kids who want you to actually give them like special tutoring because there are people who don't understand at the go right even growing up I also know that I kind of relate to what yeah who I was saying earlier I like hands-on learning right I like one-on-one learning I learn faster that way than when I have to go online to learn something right it takes me a longer time to assimilate and then process the entire thing than the average than the average person so how do we cater to young learners like that so and I think when it comes to education education is more than the one-on-one engagements that you have in a classroom to learn something even in as much as you know I would learn from what my lecturer or my teacher I said I can as well go on the internet and I can learn and you know watch videos and more interactive and practical videos so I think um aside you know the general classroom learning situation you have the internet which is an entire school on its own that you can learn just about anything and you can also engage in you know very much interactive and engaging sessions with people from you know that you don't even know strangers on the internet to discuss on certain topics and you know get more insights of them but I personally think that for the younger generation they are very they are more of visual people so making use of things that would grasp their attention and keep their attention you know keep their attention retain their attention during the class is something that should be explored on and they are not they don't have a long attentive span so you need to keep your lessons short interactive and engaging for the younger generation and I think um that way you will be able to you know get more younger people to understand however some people are listeners some people are readers like I for one amirida no matter how much you speak if I'm not reading it I really would not understand what you're saying so yes we have different styles but the thing is um not everybody I mean we can't technology can't really suit 100% of people there are some people that is to work for excellently and therefore some people that you know would struggle or one thing or the other but um the majority of people aside the younger generations we're talking about the older generations of the people who have very busy professional lives they still can get as many certifications as they want to the internet so um you know looking at it on a wider range I personally think it's still good okay all right so let's quickly run off on a break when we come back from that break we'll continue the conversation stay with us we'll be right back thanks for staying with us never just tuned in we're discussing the topic digitizing education in Nigeria we've had with us Sharon Acott now please let's hear what you have to say remember you can join the conversation send us an sms or what's up to zero in one eight zero three eight four six six three so I quickly want to have one small view on young learners the truth is right like you rightly said they are very visual and also they are very auditory right because if you listen to i've seen some children they've never left the shores of this country just by watching all those they are lullabies and all of that they can they speak they act they dramatize like you know the so you see the children doing all of those things so I believe that you know if the contents of the digital learning right if it is interesting enough if it can hold their attention they would learn when you were talking about attention span even us as a dog the highest video that I watch is six minutes if you don't fast like that you will lose me because the truth is that too many things is taking our attention so you literally must so what I do these days now 5 30 a.m. or before five I wake up I study till like nine a.m. so that time I'm not distracted my phone is somewhere far from me but let me come to you easy now quick hi now for me I I got something from what you said earlier when you said that we have the internet that was part on I mean there is nothing like the University of England it teaches you practically everything or anything you want to know but let's come back to digitizing the education sector in Nigeria we know that the curriculum is almost a cake because it was coined years ago if you had to give an insight into some of the things that could be tweaked in the curriculum what would you do what would you say okay didn't get also she's talking about the curriculum right that if you say you want to adopt digitizing education in Nigeria is it is the current curriculum is it easy for us to adapt to the digital platforms or we really need to like we're going to tweak it change it or modify it or put some sort of innovation to it to marry it to what we have currently in Nigeria I think that we're definitely going to modify the curriculum in Nigeria a lot of things that have been taught in classrooms these days I really don't think that the students we need in you know in practically all of their lives or they're not literally important information so I think we'll definitely need to modify it and only stick to the ones that are the ones that are more important and I you know I tend to realize that in schools these days they just they don't teach these kids things that would prepare them for life outside school exactly so a lot of them going to school with really bright ideas but they are very much confused on the next steps to take because they do not have that you know foundation on what to expect so they are lost they are confused and that is really the present situation of a lot of you know teenagers in today's world so I definitely think that the curriculum needs to be modified to cater for you know more things aside more things aside the generic courses and classes that you know we take things that cover self the skills but you know you you mentioned when we had that conversation on Saturday that you are you um your organization rather does things like that like a bridge here a big bridge on gap gap year for children you know how do you think we can adapt that you know and what exactly is it that you guys do for young children um okay so we have the gap we have the pave academy which under the pave academy we have the african tantech festival and then we have the gap year so um the african tantech festival is it's like a one day event where we get as many as thousands of teenagers with very innovative tech and tech ideas come and pitch their startup ideas and then you know get the necessary funding and mentorship to you know build this product a lot of them have really great products but they do not have that business mindset you know to push this product to market so we you know take them through that process of internships and mentorships to and you know funding as well to bring this their you know product is their idea to a product you know a product stage and then skill in the market we also you know involve schools with our school innovation challenges and um teach with tech where teachers and school you know school innovators you know can also win cash prizes to push um basically they'll just let us know like hey this is how i think using technology in my classroom can you know enhance education and learning and you know you look at the most innovative ideas and the last one we had in partnership at the focal was very insightful because you realize that a lot of teachers have so many brilliant ideas on how to use technology in their classrooms that you know could enhance learning but they do not have that tools to push this um agenda and then we also had something where we showed you know school innovators where what the 21st century classroom using technology looks like and it's a surprise people a lot of schools even um government schools are willing to you know adapt this technology in their classrooms then we have the gap year program the gap year program is a transformative um self-discovery career discovery um leadership three months program where it's basically to either hand us something or best something in these teenagers so that by the time they are going into university they are pretty much prepared to face the 21st markets um you know marketplace and basically life beyond they're not going in as teenage teenagers they're going in prepared and we personally believe that pay that you don't need to finish school so you know to be a rock star pretty much right from when you're in school you can identify your talent and you can't build on it so when you're finishing school you're finishing strong and ready to face whatever you know the workforce you know has installed so this this this initiative that you do for children are they free you know or do they come at a cost you know because again what we try to do is pass on information so that whatever it is that somebody is doing they're probably planned so it doesn't come at a cost or it is free the african 10-tech festival is absolutely free both for schools and teachers and teenagers however the gap year program goes for 18 000 so it's very very subsidized rates for the three month session and i mean aside the three months we we don't just after the three months this teenagers don't just leave us and go some of them who want to do internships we place them into companies that fit exactly what they've identified as what they want to study their lives those of them that you know want to go ahead to school we place them in universities that we know is that this course they want to study it's one of the best and you know it's in line with whatever they want to do so you know after the gap year program you know we build on in other internships or student placements for this and you also provide i i heard you say then that you also provide financial aid yes you know what i'm saying this now because we're in tough times right parents are i mean we are seeing what the the price of the dollar is looking like and parents are actually at that point where it's probably some parents but the children some children just finished work they're about to go to university and all of that so how can you help those parents you know to say okay you know what we can help with school fees payment you know apply for loans or whatever government say they want to give us loan we don't know how their structure would look like you know but i would rather i'm safer with a private organization giving me a loan for study yeah so um with pay with a paid platform um aside we have schools of as low as $600 a year so we don't just you know we don't just um going to partnerships with just high-end universities because we try to cater for just about anybody and we also offer student loans at a very discounted rate as well as um tuition payment so you can easily pay for tuition off from our platform as a very you know low rate other than what's the black market rate or you know what you would get from anywhere else so that way we're able to aid people with student loans at a very affordable interest rates with the payment plan that is beneficial based on you know where you work how much you earn we can you know um you know be able to build a payment plan for you and we will also help you know with easy tuition payment so you don't really and it's not just about it's not just so when we take a student in pav is pav is concerned about your and your entire education and career life cycle so when you get when you go abroad we are looking at okay what's the next step you need to open a bank account you need to find a place to be so we have this strategic partnerships that whenever okay we have a student going abroad so it just is like almost like making them you know settle them very nicely into the system i get you i get you so i mean so um the educational structure in i yeah go ahead quickly okay one quick one yeah what about i'm glad that you talked about what you can do for teachers or what you've been doing with teachers okay can you throw more light on how teachers can use um um technology to scale up as teachers aside from doing online courses of course how you partner in with teachers to maybe we should throw more light because i think you mentioned something around teachers yeah so what's the what's the partnership for teachers like um so the partnership for teachers is basically to provide them so a lot of teachers have really great ideas but for instance they do not have laptops to you know draft out proper costs um outline so they have to keep writing it sometimes they want to send maybe like the students on holidays and they need to you know send in hand out of things to their students but they do not have that tool to you know do that so with um with pave our parents company imperial education technology where we in partnership with replica build um devices and we give out to this teachers you know to help build on this their skills and um they are teaching with technology pretty much okay nice so talking about the gap here program um what are the requirements requirements for that um we're looking at students between 15 to 22 years old students who um for those who are around 22 years old should they already be in uni or is there any particular culture so basically i'm looking at the i'm looking at the entire school year right and how many months some of them have for holidays right i mean for students who are yet to enter university obviously they have they have the time to be able to attend for those who are currently already in university right once they have holidays sometimes there are some schools where their holidays don't pan out for like three months or probably two months or one month so how would that work for them the gap year program is it's a virtual it's a virtual program first off and it's just three times a week it's three times a week and not more than two hours so it's very flexible it's very flexible exactly and um so the way the gap year is structured in terms of our curriculum they are certain you get to pick the classes that you want to join because we don't believe in student just learning just about anything that day and we know it's not going to benefit you out of them for instance why am i learning social media management when i know it's not in line with anything i want to do so they just get to pick classes that are strictly in line with what they want to do and we are when we look at the gap when we know we talk about the gap year our idea is or you know what we do is basically for students who are about to finish for like this ss3 students who are just you know graduated and lots of them are not going to go into school immediately also some of them are not going to go to school till january so these are the people that you know that your targets exactly our target so what happens if a student has completed the gap year program and decides okay you know what i studied um project the last time and i don't think that's what i want to do is there like a provision for them to come back again to the gap year and take something else yes there's provision for free the gap here i'm not subsidized not for free since you're already in the system we ask it's a 12 weeks program right and the first the six we have six weeks for the self-discovery leadership trainings and then we have six weeks for practical career courses so obviously they would just be taking the six weeks for practical courses not necessary because i mean they've gone through that stage of the self-discovery and kaira development but then the beauty about the gap year is no matter how many cohorts you join you would definitely always be learning something new because we're not like we're going to you know we're not we're not bringing we don't bring the same um facilitators so there's always someone that is definitely going to say something different something that you felt or you know you might you might need you just might need to hear so there's always something different okay from baller blue now so what are the investment opportunities that you have any investment opportunities so for people somebody said whether they are investment opportunities is it for the for us not one invests in you people how do we invest no okay you mentioned something around if children have great um ideas for businesses you would support them you will fund them and you'll provide mentorship and business strategy um plan for the internships of them okay that works that works uh do we have comments quickly yes i have comments go ahead okay it says good evening my dear good evening my dear beautiful sisters and what are you saying hashtag wait digitizing education in Nigeria my dear beautiful sister ec made mention of two things she said that when the student is taught that student should be taught about what he or she will be in future not only for teaching side she also made mention of thorough supervision of every student so that the student will not be distracted and be focused your guest made mention of when digitizing like um education in Nigeria is introduced there should be maintenance and sustainability of it Nigerians should not start what they cannot finish let us learn how to maintain and sustain digitization for a good and quality education system my name is daniel illo ways regular thank you go ahead all right so i have a comment here that says digitizing education in Nigeria is like putting on a coat on the monkey we like to borrow or assume anything we see somewhere else without asking the right questions whether it can be proper to us in our own world in this regard i believe that what works in europe and in america cannot necessarily work in our own part of the world europe and america are more individualistic in nature and even on how they learn but we are more or less community-oriented human beings we learn more in community apart from these education should holistically education should holistic in the sense of being mental physical social and spiritual and you cannot achieve these in digital space but in the location if digitizing is the way of the world in learning europe and america would have closed all their schools it cannot work in nigeria with no lights this is from sanctus sanctus you just you don't have to dash our hope but you see anybody that knows me knows that i would have been like i'm the i'm the least person on earth that will ever say i want to go and take a course online let alone pay my money for it because i know that i will not learn it i told the people that i've spent money i've done i've dumped like four you know but i think the perfect fit would work right first of all you the person must have an interest in what it is that you're about to learn that is enough to sustain you you know learning digitally but thank you so much charon we're going to bring you more because she has a very fantastic initiative that she does for children with her NGO so we'll bring you for that one much later thank you so much thank you ec thank you jennifer now remember before we go and show you follow us across all our social media handles at waste your africa you can interact with us further drop a comment and more importantly follow all the engagements on social media like she invited family and friends to watch and follow the conversation i've you missed our quote for today here it is again um if we if you if you want to teach people a new way of thinking don't bother trying to teach them instead give them tools the the use of which will lead to a new way of thinking we'll see you guys tomorrow is our lady's night out i have so many just need to fix for tomorrow but hey we'll see you guys enjoy


From Las Vegas, extracting the signal from noise. It's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We do it every year. We go to all the events, go to SiliconANGLE.tv. Remember, Cube Madness starts March 15th. So check that out. It's always an annual tradition. The NCAA and March managed to do a Cube Madness where the guests go up against each other. But we're here at the IBM InterConnect 2016 event. All the most powerful people are here. Entrepreneurs, executives, customers, telling their story with digital transmissions about the cloud, about data. It's all about user experience. This segment is an update with Brian Gracely. Wikibon ads. Brian, great to see you again. Hey, great to see you guys. So you've been out scouring the floor. You've been in a lot of sessions. There's a lot of developer action going on. A lot of cloud, a lot of hybrid cloud. So what's your report? What are you seeing and what can you report from your digging in here at IBM InterConnect 2016? Yeah, so I mean, just a huge amount of announcements, huge amount of things going on. They call it cloud plus mobile. It's pretty much every technology in the industry these days. So it's hard to sort of segment it. But a couple of big takeaways. I mean, I heard you talk about it. The IBM messages digitize everything. It's for the technical people, it's everything as a service. Everything is a service, essentially take everything open source that's cool, everything that's popular, operationalize and make that a service. So this whole idea of how do I get started with it, they're sort of taking that barrier out of the play for it. Huge story around hybrid cloud. So basically they call it dedicated, which is, it's in their cloud, but it's sort of dedicated to you. So the old multi-tenancy story, the regular shared services stuff, and then they've got local, which some companies want to call that private cloud.  So taking a lot of that operational cost and letting the stuff live on premise. So that's a big piece of their story. And then I've been really impressed with the Bluemix, the Bluemix piece. It's obviously, it's built on Cloud Foundry. We're seeing the Cloud Foundry ecosystem glow. But integration with everything, everything from Watson to messaging services to queuing services to, we saw the stuff about Apple and Swift. We've got this whole Apple programming thing going on.  So really making it very robust. When we talk about digitizing, digital business, digitizing the enterprise, they've got a really interesting story at this point. We say barriers to entry, meaning with the cloud, removing that. You mean how they're onboarding people, the messaging, literature, all the above? Everybody says, the technology's not that hard to get to the cloud. It's always people in process. Well, and then the conversation stops. And you go, I can't hire people. We can't change our process. It's hard to deal with. What they're basically saying is like, here, it's like private cloud in your data center, but we're gonna help run it for you. So we don't have to retrain you.  But I said in a number of sessions, and customers are basically like, I worry for my operations people because they're probably gonna start getting consumed by some of these IBM technologies taking over for them. They're gonna have to become DevOps. Heard that a couple of times for people. So it's become a reality. A scary way, or more like freight train coming, or in a good way. You know, it's still early customers driving this, but yeah, I mean they, and the thing was, these were business people talking, leading these conversations. They didn't seem to have any qualms with saying, look, if my operations people don't get on the train and don't get going, you know, that's business. How do those skills translate in your experience? I mean, the operations guys, can they become sort of DevOps? I mean, some, yes, I'm sure, but. It's some yes and some no. I mean, is the technology really complicated? No, I mean, the good technologists that we know that we have on all the time, they're learning, right? We've seen them in the VMware crowd. They've gone from, you know, I'm hands on keyboards to I'm scripting to I'm automating. That's what it is. It's more a mindset of like, you know, do I wanna just have a silo or am I part of something that's driving a product? And I think it's that collaboration piece and you know, where do I fit in the org chart? That's the hard part. The skills, you know, technologists learn skills. They're pretty good at that. That's the organizational piece that's hard. What do you make of the VMware announcement? IBM announced today, Carl Aschenbach was up on stage, you know, with Robert LeBlanc. Yeah. What do you make of that deal? I think it's potentially very good for IBM. It feels a little bit like a white, like waving a white flag for VMware in terms of their owning their own cloud destiny. You know, I mean, we haven't heard, this is the first thing we've heard since the vCloud Virtustream joint venture kind of went away. I mean, it feels to a certain extent like VMware saying, you know what, I'm outsourcing vCloud Air to IBM. Customers, if you need a public cloud option, these guys are really good for the enterprise. But I don't see what VMware gets out of this thing. I mean, it seems like a one-way trip to the IBM cloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it reminded me, I tweeted, I think it reminded me of the NetApp AWS deal, you know, it's sort of on ramp to software. Yeah, it was interesting.  And there was sort of very... Jeb Bush moment. You got a golf course. Clap for me. You got less than a golf club. Ask people who are not excited. Yeah, I mean, that's what I take away. There was not a lot of clapping. No, no, there were a lot of people clapping about, you know, Swift and putting things on Linux and open source and stuff, but VMware and IBM. So I got to ask, I want to get your take on this because Jamie Thomas was on, I asked her a question. I said, you know, if you can go back and any conversations internally at IBM around, their experience with open source, IBM has been a great leader in open source.  They've had a great open source, but sometimes, you know, so I said, if you can go back learning what you've learned, translation, what would you do differently in this new era? And basically her answer was pretty solid. And she said, get in early and make a difference. So are they getting in early? Obviously, Bluemix is not early. They're catching up to Amazon and they are running as fast as they can to check the boxes. But outside of Bluemix, is IBM getting in early and these key initiatives with open, with collaboration with some of the communities? Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of probably the top five or six contributors, they're big in Linux, they're big in Docker, heavily involved in Cloud Foundry, although- Spark too. Spark, you know, there's a number of places they're in the top five or six, right? Do you have to be top one or two for all of them? You know, most of them are dominated by the company that started it, you know, whether that's Hadoop or Docker or whatever it is. I think the smart thing they're doing and the difference between now and 15 years ago is, you know, before it was, I was going to drive services, now I can drive cloud business with that. And I think that's the differentiator is, you know, if I'm just driving services, that's a hard business to scale. I'm driving this as cloud and you know, you've had lots of charts, we talked about this. You know, now you can start to drive marginal economics and really kind of scale that business. Well, I think this is what's happening in IBM's business. We didn't have time with Scott Habner to talk about this, but IBM was such a services led company under the Gersner transformation. It was fine, it was great. One throat to choke, threw off a lot of cash, but it's a hard business. And IBM wasn't a product company and now they're really becoming a product, come a services company that's within the cloud product. And that is a game changer. The big question I have though is their software portfolio is so fragmented. You know, can they bring that together in a way that a customer can actually consume those services easily and cost effectively? That to me is a potential headwind for IBM, but I wonder if you have a thought on that. Yeah, I agree with you. It feels somewhat fragmented. It feels sometimes like, you know, the names change sometimes, so you're keeping up. You know, as a user, you're having to keep up with their portfolio. I haven't been to a lot of IBM shows before. This was one of the first ones for me. I noticed there's a lot of IBM people here. So they do give off that vibe of even though the technology's evolving, we're always going to have a lot of people there. It's a customer event. They do a lot of sales motions here, so that's the Oracle that's the same thing as they show. But that's one of those things they're going to have to overcome. I mean, it's interesting. You hear them talk about, we've had X thousands of people sign up for Bluemix or X thousands of people sign up for, you know, the container service or the data service. And, you know, the follow up question probably needs to be, and how many of them stay? And how many of them are able to sort of get going on their own versus, you know, needing to call in and drive services? Because that's... So you're saying there's a lot of potential group thing going on around IBM talking to themselves? I don't know that's that. I, you know, you can only sign up for so many free accounts yourself. The people that I've heard that sign up for it tend to like it, but it just, it's, there's a weird disconnect it feels like between. IBM does a great job of talking about business and changing business. And then the technologists kind of, they don't dig into the weeds a lot. It's don't worry it'll work. And, you know, it's an interesting connection. Well, IBM's SaaS business is a relatively small part of its software portfolio today, which I see in its problematic. That has to change. IBM's got to, and it's not easy for them to sort of sassify their entire business. But having said all that, I'm interested that you're impressed with Bluemix. John, you were here and I, when Bluemix was announced and it was like, okay. Yeah, they announced it. And they announced essentially a self, no, it was a self-service. They actually shipped code on that day. Right, no, that's true, but it was a shell. There wasn't a lot in there. And they were like looking for people to, hey, come on, get into Bluemix. Now it feels like they're on that flywheel effect with Bluemix. Oh no, since the day they announced Bluemix, they have a full team of guys who know what they want to do and they know they're behind and they're humble. And they had their notebooks out, snapping lines and just running like the wind. And I can say that, I've been watching them. And they've had gaps, Dave. We know, with the Elastic Beanstalk on Amazon, we use that Redis. They've got Redis now, they've got auto scaling, they've got the APIs, and they're bringing Watson in. They're enabling businesses. And I think that is unique to me about what Bluemix is doing is they're taking more of an enterprise approach that enables some entrepreneurial activity. Amazon kind of does that by their offering. Not really saying, hey, use our stuff and here's some IP. You pay for it all. So, but Brian, I want to get your take on something different. So, you know, we at the Wikibon, Brian's been focusing a lot on end user outcome driven problems, whether it's DevOps and that transformation. So I know that you've been deep in looking at the practitioners and looking at some of those things. So I want to ask you a question, get your take on this. If you were advising IBM and they're here, you say, and they say, Brian, you know, in a closed room, okay, we don't want to screw this up. What should we do and not do? What's your advice to them? What would you say? Look, you're in a good tech here, we tweak this, don't screw this up, do that better, double down on this. What's your advice to IBM? Yeah, I think to me that the thing that ruffled, I don't want to see ruffled people suffer, but had people kind of, you know, that murmuring you get when people are talking is, there's that, they do a great job of, how do I help you drive your digital business, right? That's, to me, that's their calling card, they do that incredibly well. And the transition piece feels like the, how do I get there? It's always these wonderful outcomes and you don't hear enough about how to get there. How, you know, how do I help those customers get there? The interesting thing is- See the playbook. What's the playbook? And don't give it to me just as a red book. It's got to get somehow simplified. It's got to get, but what was interesting, I sat in a session just a little while ago, company called Spigot. They basically do crowdsourced innovation for enterprises. So the idea being, you know, you have a large enterprise, there's probably a lot of great ideas out there. How do I tap into that? And it was really interesting to hear how these guys said, we ported from, we took an application that we had homegrown, used to run ourselves, and ran it on Heroku, and ported it over to Bluemix. And the way they talked about giving those guys feedback, you know, it was like very iterative feedback. It was essentially like DevOps kind of feedback. And what was interesting was hearing how they said, we weren't making custom changes anymore. We were making changes that we had to think about, is this going to impact 100 customers, 1,000 customers? And it was a very positive conversation. Customers are very positive about it. The IBM guys were very humble about saying, look, we've been learning as we go along, like you said. I think that piece has got to come across, because their end story is very positive. It's very, very strong. It's how do I convince customers that I can get you there without it being this massive, massive, long services engagement? You can do that, and you can do it on demand. It's a powerful story. Dave, I want to get your thoughts.   I think IBM always has smart people, and they always pick a good vector. I think execution is something that they kind of get out of their own way sometimes. But what's your take on the business? Because now you're talking about consolidating business that they've had good cash behind the data cloud and user experience. The software silos that exist within the company, you have a lot of different CTOs out there, you got a lot of different groups. Is IBM, can they pull it off? What's your analysis? Yeah, I definitely think IBM can pull it off. I mean, I've been waiting for this turnaround to actually take place for a long time. And I think that, you know, Ginny Rometti, when she took over, she was running strategy at IBM. This is like, I don't know, whenever it was six, seven years ago. And so she came in and said, all right, we have to make some big bets. And they've made some enormous bets, obviously on cloud, on the middleware piece. They've streamlined their organization. They take big components of their services organization and put them in the product groups. The thing that people don't talk about a lot is when Gerstner made the decision to go services, it basically de-emphasized products. Not that IBM didn't spend a lot of money on products, but you can't really name a product where IBM was number one, except for mainframes, you know, and thinkpads for a while. But that was kind of it, all right? So now IBM's got to get its product mojo back and it's slowly reorganizing. I think Ginny's still tweaking. We saw the middleware pieces kind of went into the systems group and now I guess they're back in the software group. So they're still tweaking things. But generally speaking, I think IBM's got the organization right. So that's, to me, that's number one, is you got to get the organization right. Second is you got to place your bets. And I think IBM's placing bets in the right places. I have said it a million times, Dell's by an EMC, IBM buys the weather company. What does that tell you? Look how IBM's building out this media platform, this content distribution network, file transfer, Ustream capabilities, really interesting horizontal play around media services. So what I see IBM doing is right on is they're basically building out horizontal capabilities on which people can build new businesses. And I think they're positioned very, very well. The other thing about IBM is they invest heavily in R&D and they throw off cash. IBM threw off $13 billion last year in free cash flow. That's serious dough. And they got some, the executives are smart. Pappaciano and the people that are getting promoted are really solid. Pappaciano, computer science degree, obviously making some good moves. The management team seems solid to me. I like their chances a lot. And I think to me, their only challenge will be them getting in their own way from some legacy or just organizational stuff being the 400,000 people company. I think that's not a question of do you need to be more heavily in SaaS? You know, do you have to? Yeah, they do. This is what I was gonna say. Their software business is a challenge because Steve Mills basically transformed IBM into a software and services company, at least he owned the software side, but it was a big giant sort of hairball of an organization that now is being pulled apart by different pieces and streamlined and reorganized. And that's still taking a long time. They're not there yet. And the minimal contribution from SaaS is somewhat concerning. They need, do they need, they do need a fusion-like integration capability. That is Blue Mix. That's what Blue Mix is all about. Well guys, thanks so much. Brian, good to see you. We'll see you at some of the events. They will have our ears down to the ground. We're reading the tea leaves, talking to people in the hallways. This is day one is over. Day two is gonna be pretty huge. We got Kevin Egan coming on. Bob Picciano coming on at 1230 SVP. Always looking to talk to Bob. That's Steve Robinson. We're gonna have the youngest cube guest ever, a 12-year-old on tomorrow. Genius in the cloud and development, of course. I'm excited to meet the CEO of GitHub, a company that's certainly changed software development. Big fan of Git and GitHub. Looking forward to talking with Chris. Again, big day to many other great, more powerful people on the cube. So stay tuned for tomorrow. Day two coverage. Take care, good night.


Our next presenter is Chris Smith. He's a fourth year medical student as well at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Thank you. My name is Christopher Smith. I am a medical student at the University of Texas Medical Branch. As you said, I live in Austin, Texas, and it's been a great opportunity to come to the Moran Eye Center and work with you. Today I want to present on a project I worked on looking at the confocal microscope, comparing two different lenses on there among DSEC patients. To start off, I'd like to review the anatomy since it is relevant to my project of the cornea. These are cross-sections, stained cross-sections of the cornea. On the top left, we'll mainly focus here. We have the layers, the epithelium, the stroma, and the endothelium. I was mainly focused on the corneal endothelium here that's the most posterior layer and is in contact with the aqueous humor. Since the cornea is in a vascular layer, it is important to get nutrients. This endothelium is important to get nutrients into the stroma. It does this by a pump leak mechanism, meaning it leaks the solutes in, but it needs to get the water out so that the cornea does not become over-hydrated and deflect light. An example of this is seen in fuchs dystrophy, where gutata are built up in the cornea and over time the corneal endothelium thins and the cell layer is lost and so it's lost function. When we lose the function, the cornea becomes more cloudy and less clear, so light is not able to go through it. There's different ways of correcting this by surgery and with different transplants. The corneal endothelium, one way to calculate the parameters or the healthiness of this graft is by doing an endothelial cell density. The way they do this is they take a picture with a microscope of the endothelium and you literally take the area of the, you count a number of cells in a contiguous area and divide that over a certain number of area. This gives you a density. This is, pertinent, at birth we have the most, the highest density, around 4,200 cells per millimeter squared and then over time you can see that the density drops and in adult, during our adult years it plateaus to around 2,700 and then we lose 0.6 percent per year and with, obviously with pathology or diseases, we lose even more. They have been looking at this ECD. One of the projects of this cornea donor study, one of their goals was to see how corneal endothelium, this ECD, pertains as far as follow-up in the clinic and how useful of a parameter it is. This study that performed in 2010 looked at about 500 graphs. 17 of these graphs had failed and 483 of them were healthy after transplant, corneal transplant and they went back and looked at the times of, at different times, oh sorry, at different times of the endothelial cell density and were able to measure is this a useful parameter. So to look at some of the figures of these studies we see on the top, this is our healthy graphs and below the solid lines are graphs that had failed and as you can see the endothelial cell count is much less. Looking further of significance of this is they broke it into three different groups. At six months they saw a group with 17, less than 1700 and then these other two groups with greater than 1700 and as we can see the percent incidence of failure is much more in this solid group. Thus they concluded that at about six months this is a good follow-up as far as looking at a parameter to follow up these either desicc or corneal transplant patients to see how healthy their graft is. This is the confocal microscope. It is on the fourth floor of the morocular brand eye center. If you haven't been able to see it you also take a field trip. It's a great machine and we spent lots of money fixing it and it's working great now. There has been over time a couple different techniques of visualizing the corneal endothelium that have been used in the past. One specular microscopy has been very popular as well as confocal microscopy. Specular, this is the first image taken in published in 1974 of the corneal endothelium. You'll see these hexagon cells and this is the one cell layer thick and about ten years later that's when the confocal microscope started being more wide used to visualize this parameter and calculate the ECD. The difference between these two techniques can be seen here. The confocal has two different pinholes that you look through. One is the illumination where the light is coming from and it focuses on a specific layer right here and bounces off and goes through the observer or the recorder through this pinhole. It's a good useful tool of the confocal microscope since the illumination and the observer are focused on one specific layer. Any light out of focus or deeper is not able to reach the observer. Thus any other light through different layers that can blur the image is not reached to the observer and we get a much clearer crisper image as opposed to the specular microscope which is a lot more simple of bouncing off a certain layer of the light and into the observer and with the different angles the light that is most direct as it bounces off is the brightest light and anything that gets deflected you get these dark. This would be an example this is a cartoon of a gutata that is not shown up on the picture. It's a little more dark. There have been papers that have compared these two techniques. This is a very important paper to the project I worked on since I sort of modeled off what they did and kind of took it a few steps further. This is the abstract and the main things I highlighted from this I wanted to look at. They looked at three different techniques. Two lenses on the confocal microscope as well as specular microscope and compared they took several images of desec eyes and 20 normal eyes and they had a masked observer after they took these images to just label these excellent, good, fair or poor. Poor would be considered uncountable so they weren't able to get an ECD at all. Their conclusions found that the image quality was best with the contact confocal microscope lens and then the non-contact and then the specular microscope in that order. We can look at their figures. Here is an example of what these images look like. Here excellent, good, fair, poor. This is an example of what these images would look like here. Poor as you can see can't pick out cell borders here very difficult to determine an endothelial cell density and it gets a little better as time and compared to the confocal nice, crisp and clear cell borders is easy for the technician or whoever is counting these things to put a dot in there and get an accurate endothelial cell density. They broke them down into percentages and comparing the confocal versus specular they found it was very significant of how many were failed or were not able to get a calculable endothelial cell density. This was 42% of the images that they looked at. They did not have any failures here in the non-contact and this is where I branched my project. I wanted to compare these two lenses because as I started examining these patients I noticed that it was a little more difficult to get the non-contact confocal microscope. Sometimes it took several minutes to get an image even clear enough to be countable. Thus I wanted to calculate what I was seeing as far as is there a failure rate here? Is this useful as far as clinical efficiency? Because if you talk to many of the techs, their goal is 12 minutes to check in the patient, examine, this is including getting a refraction, getting all the different parameters they need to get ready for it when the physician comes in. If they have to spend 6, 7, 8 minutes getting a clear image here at this lens type that could be significant and slow the clinic efficiency down. These are among DSEC patients. This would be just quick among normal patients.  Here are an example of the two lens types that are available with this confocal upstairs. There's a 40x and a 20x lens. This is a contact and a non-contact lens that they named as such because this one moves forward. You put a little bit of gel, a drop of gel on the tip of this lens and as you move in it goes and touches, actually contacts the center of the cornea. This is theorized that it will give a better medium for which light can go through. However the non-contact one does not have to touch the eye so the advantages of this would be that the patient would be more comfortable since they don't have to have their eye touched. The purpose of my study briefly stated here is to compare the efficacy of these two contact and non-contact modes in evaluating the endothelium after these DSEC patients. Here are my methods that I used. I took 23 eyes after DSEC and 22 normal eyes. I sat them down in front of the confocal, got them all ready for the exam and before I moved the joystick, that's the first movement towards studying. That's where there's variability in the time of getting this measurement. I put a stopwatch and I estimated about five minutes would be a reasonable time to get a clear image for one of these people. So a clear image and so I started the stopwatch and that's when I started measuring and as you bring the joystick in further and back you want to hit the brightest corneal image as you focus right on the center of that pupil and once you get that bright image the machine will give you audio feedback and you push scan and then it will automatically align and you'll get an image that you can upload to the computer.  You give them a drop of anesthesia before that of course. Anesthetic. Then after that was done we uploaded, I'll show in the next slide how this is done. We calculated by a variable frame technique. You upload the images and can count them. Then after this the failure rate was determined by the inability of the two lenses to obtain readable image within five minutes. Since there has been an idea that contact versus non-contact, somebody might not like having their eye touch during the contact mode, I evaluated with just a simple scale of discomfort. I asked the patients on a scale from one to five, one being no discomfort at all and five being the maximum discomfort they can experience. What was their experience as far as these measurements after both were performed? So after we get a picture, an image, we bring it up to the software and this is a software program. This is an example of an automatic software. You can push these images. You push this button right here and it comes up and the software can find, by contrast, it can find these cell borders and quickly get a rough endothelial cell density. However, they have found that this is not very accurate since, as you can see here, it's picking out cells that maybe aren't there or missing cells that not splitting two cells that are separate from each other. This is the variable frame technique that I used in my project, a more manual count. What you do is after you upload, you count these number of cells, you put a dot about in the center and then you take this blue tool and you outline all the way around and after you get all the way around, it will automatically tell you the number of cells you had and the area and divide it and give you an endothelial cell density as seen here below. This is an example here. I kind of wanted to show the image quality that I was seeing between these patients. This is a desec patient. As you upload, this is the kind of image you're going to be counting which is significant because it might be a little difficult to count these images if they are blurry. This is an idea of a contact. I want to compare this one to the non-contact of the exact same patient. As you can see, a little more difficult in these non-contact images, this would be considered a countable image in my study. This was typically what I saw. However, the borders are a little more, is this a cell here? Is this one cell a little more difficult to determine and can maybe influence our decision as far as the follow-up of these patients? This is my eye. It looks pretty good, right? I hope. I just wanted to show an example of a normal patient to compare between the desec eyes. This would be a contact in my eye and, once again, my wonderful eye here. The results I found, I concluded where neither method failed among the normal eyes, the contact or the non-contact lens. I was able to get a countable image in each one of these. Significantly though, in the desec eyes, the failure rate was 26.1% in the non-contact mode and none of them failed in the contact mode. So it was much easier to obtain an image within five minutes using this contact mode. The endothelial cell density while comparing these in between patients what they counted, it counted about on average 61.9 cells more dense in the contact method which really isn't clinically significant and there have been several papers that you can read on this in the past that they have compared these two modes as far as calculating the density and they come up with very similar results once you get an image. However, if there is a failure, this could be significant. This could slow you down. And then looking further, the failure of non-contact mode was not correlated with best corrected visual acuity, central cornea thickness, age or length of time from surgery. The patients reported comparing the discomfort, there was no significant difference between these two methods. And this is just a figure I made for this showing that there is no difference between contact and non-contact mode. They are around 1.7 as far as what they come to remember. One being no discomfort at all, five being maximum discomfort. My conclusion that I found the contact lens on the CONFLOSCAN 4 was a little quicker and it got the clearest image. When the non-contact mode works lens, it can be quicker. However, if you have to redo the lens because you didn't get a clear image the first time, it was a little more difficult to use. And then as I say before, the mean ECD was a little higher but not significant. And then the subjects did not prefer one method over the other. I'd like to give acknowledgments to Dr. Mark Mifflin and Dr. Maylon Xu who helped me out with this project. And are there any questions I could try to answer, please? Exactly. The calculating it manually, that was not put into the five minutes. That took me approximately not too long, maybe another five to ten minutes, something like that. Maybe even shorter. I'm not exactly sure. I never timed myself, but I got quicker as I had to do several of these, obviously. Exactly. Which either way you're going to have, which is interesting because in the non-contact mode, if you have to measure this with the variable frame technique, as I said, if you can't see those cell borders, it was a little difficult. It did take more time. And if the tech is in a hurry, it'd be easy for them to just flub through the borders and, you know, this might be border. I don't really care. I got to get going. So that could be another thing to look at. Yeah. And further, I forgot to mention with the six months, they noticed that at six months that was significant. However, looking, they found that there were some endothelial cell densities in the corneal transplant paper that got lower than 500, yet they still had clear graphs, which is something that Dr. Mifflin has seen even with his patients. So it is more of an over time following as opposed to a specific number that you reach because even low numbers can keep the corneal clean. That's true. All right. Thank you.