At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. Beginning October 18th, the Middle Creek Fire Department will be hosting their Creepy Creek Haunted House for all ages to attend. Chief James Billeter welcomes everyone to enjoy a night of scares and other Halloween activities while helping the fire crew raise funds for a good cause. Creepy Creek is going to be going every weekend, but the weekend of Halloween, we let that off for their families and so forth. But Creepy Creek, it's a haunted house we started several years ago. It started out raising money for the fire department for extra activities such as our special operations, that's swift water, rope rescue, technical rescue stuff. And then we also take that money now, half of it, and use it towards Christmas for children during our Santa Claus run and that sort of thing. The event will be $5 per person and will feature a sensory night on the 8th for those with sensory disabilities to participate and have fun. Billeter wants as many as possible to enjoy the event. Also, next Saturday, we will be doing a sensory night. So anybody that's got special needs kids as in autism or anything that a kid or even adult, if they want to go through and we got to scale it down or whatever, we'll do that. We'll take our time for every person that wants to go through because we want everybody to enjoy this. Just come, be ready, have fun, it's $5 and we try to keep the costs down because we know everybody is having hard times right now. And it's worth it, it's going for a good cause and just come out, open mind and have a good time. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.


Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Oshkahn. The first thing, thanks for letting me be here. When Oshkahn first mentioned it, speaking, I thought, wait, Saturday morning, there's a farmer's market, there's fresh fruits and vegetables. I wonder if I'm going to be a target. But, you know, getting aside, it's been an amazing experience for me, just being here last year and getting to know you all as business people and as entrepreneurs. I think it's really been a pleasure. You know, the health department, we were kind of stuck. What Peter was talking about just a few minutes ago was like spot on. We don't know what we don't know. Nobody likes to feel like they're less knowledgeable.  Nobody likes to feel that way. The health department, we've been asked many, many times. We need an exact list of everything you need. The thing is, we don't even know. We don't know. There's some things we, let's focus on these. We can figure these out and then we can, you know, that might open up, that might open up more opportunities somewhere else or it might solve a problem that we were working on somewhere else. It's just fascinating. But, basically, what my point in the presentation, it's not about me. We're all individuals. We've all had experiences. We've all had ups, downs. We've hurt. We've loved all that kind of thing. We all have that story. It's taken me 50 years to get here. Here, here and here in this room.  It's been forever. I'm originally from Minnesota. I grew up on the St. Croix River in Stilwater, actually in Marine on the St. Croix. You can see the sign over there. That's actually, I don't know if anybody is a public radio fan, but if you've ever heard of Prairie Home Companion, that's where it was based off. That's Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery right there that you're looking at. I grew up on public TV and public radio, so I apologize. I diverged. But I grew up in a river town. It was a logging town. And while I was growing up, that river really meant a lot to me. It was really something that it allowed me to question some things. It was really, it was a really moving thing. And, therefore, I went into biology. I'm a fishery's biologist. That's my training. I don't have a degree in environmental health. Actually, when I was going to school, it didn't exist. So I had no option. I didn't even know, I didn't even know these jobs worked. So this is another picture of the St. Croix River. Epistemology. I know if you're familiar with that term, but I read it in literature for this industry. It's the exploration or study of free thought. The river did that for me. It gave me an outlet and it gave me something to really question and apply some of the things that we've learned in school socially. It was just a very amazing place. Some of the best people I've ever known still live there, including my family, but I'm biased there. It's just a really interesting place to grow up. So, again, you're like, who cares, right? My point is, that's where I came from. Everybody's got a story. No matter what health inspector or whatever it is, everybody's got a story and it led them to where they are right now. They know what they know. Sometimes they really know what they know and are afraid to admit that they don't. I learned quite a long time ago, I don't know at all. If I know at all, I'll get bored. I don't want to know at all, but I'm not afraid to ask questions and I'm not afraid to admit I was wrong. It's just one of those things, but people are individuals. So I get into environmental health. Again, I'm a fishery's biologist. My vision is of being a fish hippie for the rest of my life, working for the Environmental Protection Agency, who actually, speaking of the EPA, I don't know if you'd noticed what they did to the Animas River in Colorado, but really detrimental. This is the scope of environmental health. So when you go in and talk to your health inspector or whatever term they use, these are some of the things that they're looking at. Food, water, land, building, air. They may, a health inspector that comes out to inspect your facility, maybe, they have a lot of things on their plate, right? So, geez, today I have to inspect a brand new septic system. Well, while I'm doing that, I'll be by this restaurant that I have to inspect. Oh, and the float center's right there, too.  They're not as focused as you all are. It takes, they have to switch gears for every one of those things. And there's a lot more to it than just the inspection. It's the process. And as an environmental health specialist, we should be educating. That should be the primary goal, not to always bring bad news and slap people around. That's typically not it. But so, this is it. It's like information overload. And I'm not looking for sympathy. I just want to explain the fact that when I got certified for this, there's a national test. It's big and it's hard. It's very hard. That's the topics it covers. To maintain my certification, I have to stay current on this stuff. Radiation. I mean, how much, how often do we deal with radiation on a regular basis? Emergency preparedness, complaints, pesticides, epidemiology. Epidemiology, anybody here of outbreak with pork recently? Folks in my office are dealing with that. So, they're really all over the map as far as responsibilities go. The diversity has kind of gone away for me because I've been able to specialize. So, I'm focused. I do pools. I know you don't like to be put in that category, but that's what I do. That's what they've allowed me to do. And through work with this group and the Float Tank Association, it's given me this opportunity to really, really get specific. And I embrace it. I can't wait to learn more. Just talking to folks out in the lobby this morning. There's some things that are new and pretty darn interesting. I want to learn more about it. But so, again, we're trained and we have to be able to keep up with changing environments. Might not feel that way. There's a couple of people in the audience that have dealt with me directly as a plan reviewer for a new facility. They may have completely different opinions than I do, but I tried to work with them. I can't say everybody's any every health inspector is going to do that. I wish I could. I wish I could say that we're all the same and we're all seeing things the same way, but we're not. But through the industry, including Ashkan and Graham, last year, they spoke at the World Aquatic Health Conference. That's one of the conferences Ashkan was talking about that's so big, they get a really small portion of the population. This is fabulous. This is amazing. But so when we go to those trainings, we have to do that. We have to have continuing education. Well, when it comes to pools, that's what we're used to. It looks pretty familiar, right? There's been pools built like that for literally thousands of years. The city of David, that goes back a few years. Basically the same thing. They didn't have pumps so they use gravity, but it's still the same process. And the Piscine Molitor, 1929, when I was working for Montana, I found the 1912 swimming pool rules. You know what? They were simpler, but basically they were the same thing that we're looking at now. It's the same process. So this is what the pool is. Okay, where's the main drain? Where's the skimmer? Where are your inlets? How's the water being mixed? All that kind of thing, right? And then it's like, okay, pools kind of comfortable with it. We're all right. And then there's an evolution. About 20 years ago, all of a sudden water parks started showing up.  It's like, wait, it's a pool, but no, it's not. Wait. And it took a while for us to absorb that. It is a pool. Every each one of those is a pool. You just can't see the water. The water is somewhere else being processed like in a normal pool. This is just where you get exposed to it. It took a while for our end, my industry, it took a while to be able to grasp that. You know, looking at some of these, the one up in the upper left there, believe it's in Germany, it's called the Schlitterbahn. Look at how tall that thing is. Schlitterbahn, that sounds like it's only a couple letters off of potential end result. I don't know. Because that's what it looks like from the top, you know, the bottom on there.  Now it's moving. So all these weird complications. So my point is, now comes along flotation systems. Our code in Washington calls it sensory deprivation. I wish I could change the terminology, I cannot change a single word in that code, not one word. Well, I can, but I'd have to go through public hearings and take about two years. So it's something I can't do. I wish I could believe me, I wish I could. But now, now comes along float systems. Let's see, salty water, really salty water. Hmm. Sanitizer, where's the chlorine, you know, automatic response. So it was kind of like, now it's really different. This is a completely different thing. Run away, run away. But through the industry and the motivation and determination of this group, it's like, we need to pay attention. We should have been paying attention years ago. We missed the boat. But it's really starting to get recognized that that's a boat we don't want to miss. So there is efforts out there. I understand and I'm sure I'm confident you've all run into roadblocks with health departments. But there is an effort. It might look like it's moving at a glacial pace. And it kind of is, but it's gaining momentum. In the last year, I have seen amazing from from my perspective in environmental health, I have seen an amazing growth in curiosity. And it's a genuine curiosity. It's, you know, I start talking to folks in the in environmental health. And I'm talking to them about they ask about sanitizers and filters and things like that. I'm like, you know, one thing that I think we're missing is that it's not even water anymore. This is a completely different compound. We don't we know what water does. You take a two liter bottle, put water in it, turn it upside down, stir it up a little bit. What happens is going to create a vortex and it's going to drain out, right? You take something like glycerin, which has the Scott is similar viscosity to what you're using in the tanks. That doesn't happen. It just it doesn't act the same. It's got a lot of variables. But like Peter said, we don't know what we don't know. So we need to start kind of attacking the things we can get to and build some successes there. And then some things might start to click and that might start to fall together a little bit better. But it's going to take work. I wish I could do it all for everybody, but I can't. Really, I think something I've learned again, I've had ups and downs in my life made some really bad decisions, made some really good decisions. But really, what it boils down to is communication. I honestly believe that in any, and I'll use the word relationship, any relationship. And that could be, you know, I talked to several people at the Rogue last night, we had a relationship, you know, it's you need to invest in that relationship. And then and it's a two way street. Everybody's got to participate. When when we get into a stressful situation, like going in front of a health department, it might be it might be intimidating. And again, the health department still kind of scratch in their head. So it's actually a little bit intimidating to them too. They'll never admit it. No, I didn't say that. But you know, clear terminology. There's a few things I talked to some folks last night that have a background in the medical field. There's, there's terminology that's used. That can be really confusing. You know, there's all kinds of acronyms, PPM and TDH and all all this different stuff. But you might not be talking the same language. For example, the difference between sanitation, which is what we're looking for in pool water or recreational water, I'll say, sanitation versus sterilization. That's a huge difference. If you've got if you're in the medical field, that is a very, very big difference. So if if you go in and say, I'm going to sterilize the water, that means the water could be used in a surgical procedure. It is that clean. We're not looking for that. We're looking for and I'm going to use the term a three log reduction. Does anybody I'm just curious, does anybody know what that is? You know, when you're talking about when you're talking to a group of folks, I teach like Jake does a certified pool operator class. And it's, you know, you talk about AFR is accidental fecal releases. And you're talking about sanitizer. And and all of a sudden, so you've got these images in your head and you're trying to get figured out. And all of a sudden, a three log reduction. Whoa, what kind of picture is that painting? You know, so so that's that's that onus is on us that you know, we have we have terminology that has been consistent. You might not like it or agree with it. I might not like it or agree with it. But it's an accepted standard. So you don't a three log reduction.  Um, sterilization that 0.99 goes out eight or nine more spots. So you're killing way more, way more. So again, it's just terminology. And if you're unclear on a term, ask. And you know, maybe when you're talking to a health inspector or a plan reviewer, if they don't get it, offer to explain what that means. It'll I honestly believe it'll help you to get a better understanding. What I was what I've been taught many times is all I would I I don't remember what it was.  And in my opinion, Albert Einstein Albert Einstein said it, if you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough. You really need to break stuff down. I'm not I'm not projecting this to you at all. I would I would give the same talk to folks in my industry. Exactly the same thing. Both parties have to be mindful. The graphic, it just cracks me up. But that isn't too far off. I showed the slide I showed you a little bit ago with the environmental health, and there's junk all over. I did that on purpose because that's what that's what it felt like. The mind is full. It's an you can't be mindful when your mind is too full. Floating gives you the opportunity to explore getting away from that. So I I float. Ashkan mentioned the guidelines were working on. I haven't had a whole time this summer, unfortunately, but when I sit when I sit down and do it, I work on it better after I've had a float at a facility that's represented here that actually went through plan review with me. And I was really afraid they were going to throw fruit at me. But no, they're great folks. I'm kidding. Sorry, Dan. But you've got to consider other positions. You know, you've done a lot of research. You've learned a lot of things about the attributes or the benefits of floating. You've learned a lot about business. I'll be honest with you. I don't know about business. There's another person, Valerie, somewhere in the audience. She had a business plan.  I don't know. So we're trying to fit the two things together. But I can't teach to the business plan. But the business plan can't necessarily dictate exactly the direction you're going to go when it comes to something like a float center where people are potentially going to be impacted. Nobody wants to get people sick. That's very, very clear. In fact, when Ashkahn also mentioned a task group that we set up. And when I was here last year, like Ashkahn said, I came on my own, partially because I was afraid. I didn't want to be too conspicuous. But I was absolutely floored, shocked. I never had a negative conversation at all. Everything was very positive. I could feel frustration. No question. I acknowledge that. But it was really a accommodating. So I went back and I talked to my supervisor, Dave. We really need to pay attention to this. And the thing is, we are so close. We are so close to be in there. When I first set out to work with the group, I was hoping that we would be able to talk to this community, your community, and acknowledge that there are some concerns. Slips, falls, trips, you know, that kind of thing. And by the time I left here last year, it was like, that's not a destination anymore. We're already there. It's not a goal. It's already been achieved. That's because of you all. You all had already considered that stuff without even really tying the health department to it. It's common sense. You don't want people hurt. It's bad for business. Again, with communication, both parties can learn. If there's a willingness on both people's part to be willing to learn, I can't control that. I can't control it with folks in my industry. I can't control it with anybody in the general public. But I will try to listen as much as I can. I've learned a lot from the group. It's been a really amazing process. I just want to touch briefly on these guidelines. It's specific. I work for the state of Washington. We have our code. And there is a little bit of, actually quite a bit of flexibility in that code for a unique event, or a unique application, I would call it, innovation. You know, a float tank. Anybody, that's an example. Another example, anybody here who has ever slide the city, a big event that's been kind of going around, that's another one. We have to deal with that one, too. It's like, oh, okay, that one's really weird. You know, you think about it. Siding down a city street in Portland, you could, I mean, in Seattle, you could launch somebody halfway into the Puget Sound there. But it didn't go very well, unfortunately, this year for that event. But we do have to be able to apply the rule on, in an appropriate manner. So what the task group is tasked with is to come up within that parameter, within that code, we can pick and choose which parts apply. In the state of Washington, a facility like yours that the general public is open to, and it's not like a hotel or something, would be considered a general use facility. So it would be similar to a city park, or a municipal pool, say, same category. Again, I don't necessarily agree with all this, I'm just telling you what the fact is. And a general use facility requires a lifeguard. Does that make, are you gonna have a lifeguard in the float room with you? Sounds a little weird. But of course not. You know, so that one's like, that's easy. We got that one figured out. Now we've only got 7,000 more issues to go through to, to find out which ones really apply. And if they apply, do they apply the same way that that it worked in normal water? We don't know. We don't know. That's why we're asking for more information. I talked to folks last night that were, it was like, yes, taking tests, keeping records. It's like, man, that's the stuff we want to see. It might, you might not be sanctioned by a certain lab, but at least we see what's really going on. That's real world information. That is good stuff. Once you start getting it backed up with more science, that's, that's a really good thing. The, but basically I can only address things in Washington, state of Washington. There's, I've been contacted by folks all over the country. And I'm willing to talk to folks about it. But I'm, again, we're getting, I'm getting calls from all over. So I know there's interest in from the environmental health perspective. There's, there's a thing called the model aquatic health code, which the CDC and a bunch of partners came up with that addresses pools. And there's talk now that maybe float systems need to be part of that master plan. That's a big sign that the pool industry is like, whoa, wake up. Here we go. This is it. It's here. So it's a, it's a really big acknowledgement. I don't want to run over. But my contact information, again, I can't, I can't change. I basically can't change anything even in Washington. But I'm more than happy to talk to you about, about the regulations or, or where things are at. The group that we're working with with the task group has just been outstanding. And this image, has there anybody ever heard of Justin Beaver? That's sidewalk art. And again, I put that purposefully, because what is it? What are you looking at? At the street with a, with a painting on it, right? Do you think he's seeing the same thing? Or if you stand off to the side, you think you're going to see the same thing? It's a perspective. It's if you got one perspective, and it's very, very clear. You shift that a little bit, things start getting fuzzy. So just communication and clarification I think is really, really important. Other than that, I thanks again for allowing me to be here. And thanks for the warm welcome.


Okay, we're back live here at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host, Dave Vellante from wikibond.org. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, and certainly here at OpenStack, there's not a lot of noise, but a lot of signal, a lot of developers, a lot of use cases. Really, really, the alpha geeks, the practitioners, really putting new technology into place to power this modern era of computing, cloud, mobile, and social. David Floyd, we're here with Dimitri Stiliatis from Nudge Networks and Mountain View. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. David, I want to get your take on this before we set up this interview, because obviously we've heard from RightScale, they're on the management side just previous. We've had Rackspace on earlier. They're on the provider side. We had Big Switch on, software defined networking. And now, Dimitri's company. The software is eating the world. What's your take on the SDN market right now? Relative to OpenStack. Relative to OpenStack? Well, what you're clearly wanting to do in every part of it is separate out all of the different layers. And you ought to be able to separate out the physical and the logical and the software is the way that that's going to be done. So instead of having to have a switch, which is a piece of hardware and the software, you want to separate the two out so that you have the logical function and the physical function from the two pieces. So that's very important to be able to contribute to every layer, take new technologies along with you, and then define the software element of that as the piece that you keep constant as the technologies themselves adjust. So durable code, but yet manageable, you can build on and maintain. Which can take advantage of new technologies as they come along. And obviously, coming back to you, what are you contributing? What do you think needs to be contributing? What's the white space in that area that you're going after? So, see, when people started thinking about the cloud and OpenStack and all this kind of thing, they quickly realized that the network is a fundamental piece, right? You have to start with the network. You have to interconnect your components and so on. The angle that we are taking is, yes, it's good. Within your data center, within your cloud, you have to create these network services, interconnect applications and so on. But much more importantly, you need to be able to dynamically connect these applications with your existing network services, right? So you have a large amount of enterprise VPN services. You have hybrid clouds coming out. So you need to be able, the moment you activate a network service in the data center, to be able to seamlessly interconnect this now with your enterprise sites, with other network services and other data centers and other clouds and so on, right? So the network is always a network of networks and we have to bring everything together. We cannot just restrict ourselves within the confinements of a single administrative model. So that's a fundamental part of what we are trying to bring here together. Okay, and so how are you fitting in with the network layer? So our view is that, first of all, we need to talk both languages. If you don't think of it as a translation thing, right? So we need to understand the language of the cloud. We need to understand the language of the application developers and the cloud. They want to use some abstract mechanics to define their network services and install them if you want in the hypervisors and open stack quantum seems to be the prevalent way to do that. So that's language number one. But then we have all these thousands of networks out there where their language is BGP. So what we are doing is we are mirroring the two. We allow you to code and define services in open stack and we allow you to define the mechanism in the interconnect the services automatically with all the other networks that are out there. So I call it, sometimes we're just translating between languages. All right, a language translator. From an application point of view, they want to consume resources and previously networks and computers were the main things they consumed. But it seems now that, sorry, computing and storage were the main things they consumed. But it now seems that networks themselves have to pay a much bigger role in providing a quality of service to those places. And you've got a quality of service down in the nanoseconds when you get to the server level and used to have milliseconds for the storage side. It's now coming down to microseconds. What are you doing to make sure that that quality of service is not just the bandwidth but it's also the latency? How are you planning to manage that? See, the way data center networks evolve is people are quickly realizing that the same, if you want principles that we used in order to build the internet itself can be used inside the data center. So if you think about the internet, right? In the internet, there is voice services, there is video services, there is all these other services running. And they are actually running by assuming you have a well-engineered IP network and then you run the services at the edges if you push all the intelligence at the edges. It's the same thing where the network on the data center is going. The data center network becomes a very scalable IP fabric. It is very well managed if you want, very well trafficked and engineered. And you push the edges at the hypervisors. You push essentially the services at the hypervisors where traffic is differentiated. So if you see, for example, a tenant misbehaving, you're gonna block him at the hypervisor layer. If you're gonna provide QoS or map different tenants to different classes of traffic, it's happening at the hypervisor. So the center of the network behaves like a scalable IP fabric and all the intelligence it's pushed around the edges. And the reason you want to do that is because this allows you the ultimate scalability, right? The network core doesn't need to know about every flow that goes through the core of the network there, right? You don't need to know the IP addresses of virtual machines. You don't need to know what individual virtual machines need to know, want to do there. You just need to worry about aggregates so you can engineer and scale the core, make it very cheap. And because you make it very cheap, you can increase the capacity of the core and you can distribute all the intelligence at the edges of the network. Right. So you said that you can do to the hypervisor and that's obviously on the compute side, that side of it. But what about the data network? Isn't that a, don't you need to regulate the priorities and flow from the data through? And isn't that today, that's a very big part of it, isn't it? Yes, but it is still happening at the hypervisor, right? The first touch of an application with a network is not anymore the top of rock sheets, let's say on the data center, but it is actually the hypervisor virtual sheets, right? That's the first time that you see a packet. When a packet comes out of a virtual machine, the first time you see it is at the hypervisor itself. And at this layer, when the first time you see the packet at the hypervisor itself is where you apply all your policies, right? In other words, the edge of the network is not the hardware, it's not the sheets on the top of the rack. The edge of the network is inside the server now. Okay, yeah, okay, excellent. So I want to ask you, we have a couple minutes left here. We have two minutes left, I want to get your perspective on the state of the business around OpenStack. What is your view, okay, because you're chief architect, you're looking at the tech, but you have to intersect the business objectives. What are you seeing as the core business drivers that are causing you to make your technology a certain way? Right, so it's clear that what people want to do is they want to provide this ability to their end users to consume services rapidly, right? That is what is driving this whole OpenStack development and more important, the community came together in order to unify if you want the core engine and the core APIs in order to make this consumption of services very easy. And in order to allow the application developers to move from one cloud to the other and so on, right? What we do is, what we try to do is, in addition, is expand if you want this model and making the network as consumable as the storage and compute facilities, right? And I'm not talking just about the network in the data center. I'm talking about also the network in the way that the service in the data center of a cloud provider will interconnect with enterprise, right? If you see the next, if you want Holy Grail that everybody's talking about is the hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud is only possible if you can connect the network and the services in the service provider cloud with the network and services in the enterprise itself, right? So what links the two together is the network. So we have to make this network to be consumable. Final question for you is obviously DevOps is a mindset. We heard from RightScale that that adoption is in mainstream enterprises and service providers, but the word infrastructure as code is becoming more popular outside of the geeks and the architects and the coders. What, in your mind, how would you describe infrastructure as code to the folks out there? Ah! Give it a try, it's okay. No right answers. It's a moving target, that's what it is. Reality is that applications and code is a living organization. It's constantly changing and you cannot assume at any point it's static, right? It's not the good old days if you want and that's what it really means, right? It's a living organism. It will constantly adapt to the new requirements out there. Like switches in the old days, you knew exactly ports and you knew what was going on now. It's all kinds of weird stuff happening, right? It's all stuff you have to be, you have to accept change if you want, right? So it's the, actually there is an old Isaac Asimov code, right, the author of the science fiction stuff that said the only constant is change. We should do a genome project just on the network genome. Here, software defined networking, Dimitri Stilianos, thanks for jumping inside the cube. Again, you're here with a lot of the chief architects making things happen, congratulations. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. We'll be right back with more analysis from David Fleurier after the short break and a breakdown day one and day two here and more depth from the analysts here at OpenStack. This is SiliconANGLE, Kibon's exclusive coverage of OpenStack Summit, we'll be right back.


I believe that Jesus quite literally teaches us how to manifest. We see it over and over again in the Bible. Both of the examples I'm going to give you right now are from the book of Mark. In Mark 923, Jesus says, anything is possible if a person just believed. Now the second one is a little more intricate and I think this explains manifestation just a little deeper and again it's something that Jesus says. And this is in Mark 23 and it says, I assure you and most solemnly say to you, whoever says this to the mountain, be lifted up and thrown into the sea and does not doubt in his heart, but believes what he says is going to take place. It will be done for him. Like, come on. Jesus is literally saying that if you believe with your full freaking heart that you can pick up this mountain and throw it into the sea and you zero doubt, it can be done.


Good morning, everyone, or good afternoon if you're on the East Coast. This is Una Daly from the Community College Consortium for OER. And welcome to our second webinar of the fall series. This one is on OER and accessibility, a very important topic. And I'm just so happy to have Amanda Coolidge from Open BC Campus with us this morning and Emily Moore from the FET simulations team at University of Colorado. So welcome, everybody. For those of you who might be brand new this morning to our Blackboard Collaborate System, I want to let you know that we use the California Community College Blackboard Collaborate System and we thank them for that. The main thing to keep in mind is that throughout the webinar we welcome your comments and questions and we ask that you use the chat window for those until the very end when we'll have an open Q&A period. The chat window should be at the bottom left of your screen and you can just type in there and we'll answer questions as we get a chance to. So today, after we do some, we're going to meet our presenters here in just a moment, we're going to have a quick overview of CCCOER as usual, our little commercial break there and then we're going to talk about why OER and accessibility are such, how they intersect and why they're so important. They have similar missions. And then we'll jump right into hearing about the Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit that Amanda has led at BC Campus and then we will talk, we will hear from Emily on the FET interactive simulations and all the great work they're doing there to make those accessible to all students. At this time, I'm going to give my presenters a chance to say hello and tell you a little bit about their day jobs. And I think we'll go ahead and start with Amanda. Sure. Thanks, Luna. Hi, everyone. My name is Amanda Coolidge and I'm the Senior Manager of Open Education at BC Campus. So my role is to work with the team in our Open Education area and work on creating, adapting and working on mainstream adoption of Open Textbooks. And we're so glad to have Amanda back with us again to present. And now I'd like to give Emily more a chance to say hello. And this is Emily's first time joining us and she's the Director of Accessibility and Research at the FET interactive simulations. Emily? Hi, hi, everyone. I'm very delighted to be joining all of you today. I am the Director of Research and Accessibility at the FET simulations project. I've been with the FET project for about five years now and I've been in charge of our research efforts for almost three years now. So we research how to best design the simulations and use them in classrooms. I'm starting last year. I've led our efforts to secure funding to increase our working accessibility. And a little bit later on I'll be sharing with you our progress in making accessible interactive simulations. Great. Thank you, Emily. And we're very excited to hear more about the FET interactive simulations. They're really exciting science simulations that I think many of our faculty, particularly our science faculty, could incorporate into their courses. All right. For those of you who are new to the Community College Consortium for OER, our mission since 2007 is expanding access to high quality open materials. We support faculty choice and development and these webinars are part of that, fulfilling that mission. And ultimately our goal is to improve student success and we know that by expanding access to materials, student success and low cost materials that we can really support that. We have members in over 21 states representing actually more than 250 colleges at this point. We're probably closer to 300. If you're not a member, we'd love to invite you to join us and find out more about what membership brings. So now I want to get to the heart of why we're here this morning. And those of you who've worked with me for over the years know that accessibility has been a strong interest of mine for a long time. And part of that, of course, is just an interest in being able to serve everyone, but OER and accessibility work really well together. We had a blog post this week from open Oregon about this very topic called the Intersection of Accessibility in OER and if Amy is online, maybe she'll post a link to that blog post in which I'll talk directly to that topic. But I want to bring forward some of the statistics about students with disabilities. So in the U.S., 11% of post-secondary students report a disability upon entering college. And I've looked at the Canadian numbers and Amanda may correct me here, but often the statistics are very similar. In fact, I've seen slightly higher statistics, but I think they're very much in line. Some of it depends on how it's reported, where the numbers come from. One thing that is interesting is that if you look at students with disabilities and where they attend, quite a bit higher percentage attend the two-year colleges than the universities. And so I think for those of us who work at the community colleges, we know that we do have a lot of students who need extra help in this area. So this is really part of our mission. In general, statistics show that people with disabilities do suffer from a higher poverty rate. They have generally lower educational and career attainment. So this makes it even more of a strong mission for us to support accessibility in our open resources. Legally, of course, in the United States, the ADA and the American Rehabilitation Act all require our educational materials to be accessible. Once again, that tends to be an ongoing process as we add new digital technologies to the educational system, and in general as they come out of our commercial sector, our accessibility, I should say, is not always something that new entrepreneurs think about. And so it's an ongoing job. And so in Canada, there's the Canadian Human Rights Act, which dates from 1985 and also covers many of these same things and guidelines. And with the digital age that we've been in now for, geez, I don't know, I guess it depends on how you count that, but certainly for the last 25 years, all of our materials are born digital, and so there is the potential for them to be made accessible. But there are guidelines that need to be followed. My speakers will tell you a little bit more about those guidelines. There have been several webinars on those set of guidelines, particularly the international ones, the WC3 guidelines. So what is the intersection? So the intersection between OER and accessibility is around that affordability and access piece. As I mentioned earlier, students and people in general with disabilities do suffer a higher poverty rate. So affordability becomes an even bigger issue for those students. And so when we say we're going to expand access with OER, we need to be keeping in mind those students as well. The wonderful thing about an open license is that it allows modification. So for instance, if you have videos, open videos that don't have captions, those captions can be added so that they can support students who have hearing impairment. The same thing for images that don't have alt text. The alt text can be added to open documents, open web pages so that those images do have text for students who have vision impairment. And finally, we all know that the right way to do this is really to create accessible OER up front rather than fixing it. And so Amanda's going to talk about some of the work she's doing with faculty authors to help them create accessible OER the first time. And also that makes it possible for faculty who are coming along later and reusing materials to make sure that they're actually reusing materials that are also accessible. Alrighty. At this point, I want to turn it over to Amanda to tell us about the Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit. Great. Thanks, Una. So hi, everyone. As mentioned, my name is Amanda. And this presentation, can I actually use it testing open textbooks for accessibility? It's based on a collaborative project that we did at BC campus with another organization called Kaper BC and an instructional designer out of one of our colleges in the area called Kamosan College. So just to give you a bit of background, Kaper BC is an organization here in British Columbia that provides alternate formats to 20 post-secondary institutions across our province. And basically their team makes custom audio books and e-books for textbooks for students with print disabilities. So last year they served about 1200 students and they already have existing relationships with disability service offices. So that's why we decided to work with them specifically. And then Sue is an instructional designer who worked with us. And she's been really working in the capacity of universal design for many years. So we wanted to tap into her expertise as well. So I want to give you a little bit of background in terms of what BC campus is, because some people often wonder which institution we're affiliated with. And we're not, actually. We're an organization that supports the work of the BC, so our British Columbia post-secondary system, in the areas of teaching, learning, and educational technology. And we're funded through our Ministry of Advanced Education. So there's three primary areas that we focus on, which is open education and professional learning, collaborative programs and shared services, and student services and data exchange. So the area that I work in and the one that houses the BC Open Textbook Project is open education and professional learning. And these are some of the other things we do as well if you've heard of any of these other pieces. So the BC Open Textbook Project, just to give you another little bit of background, it was the Ministry's response to issues of student debt and restricted access. So the Open Textbook Project first started in 2012. It was announced by John Niat, who was our Minister of Advanced Education, and the government was going to fund and did fund $1 million in the creation of 40 open textbooks for the highest enrolled post-secondary subject areas. And then in 2013, the government announced that another million dollars would be provided to develop 20 open textbooks in trades. So why are we doing this project as a whole? And this also really relates to the reason why we did the Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit. One is to increase access to higher education by reducing student costs to give faculty more control over their instructional resources and to improve learning outcomes for students. And so like many Open Textbook Projects, we decided that we'd look at the inventory of the subject areas. We didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so we went ahead and started adopting a number of open textbooks that already existed in the system. And you can see that we got some of these books from a variety of well-known areas, specifically open stacks and then the Open Textbook Library, et cetera. So we then solicited faculty reviews so that the faculty would review the textbook information, and then they would go ahead and identify for us what's missing and what needed to be adapted based on those reviews. And so those adaptions came out of those reviews, and we just wanted to make sure that whatever was missing or lacking from a textbook in our collections, that it was adapted to meet the needs of our faculty. So in some cases, for example, some of the books were too U.S. centric, which wasn't relevant for the BC context, and faculty were able to change the book to meet specific learning outcomes. We also work in a platform called Press Books, and this is really important because it allows for us to write one and then format out in a variety of different publishing formats. So we've got EPUB, PDF, Moby, HTML, et cetera. And the beauty of this is that it means it gives students the number of choices on the various platforms they can use, and it means that when faculty want to create or adapt or adopt the materials, they can go ahead and use those different formats. And I'm running through these fairly quickly, but you'll see why. I just want to get to more of the accessibility information that wanted to give you a background in terms of where the project is. So what was really important to us, and as with many of the OER projects, is that students have day one access to resources. And so often we hear those complaints that the textbook is back bordered, it's out of addition, it's not available until the student loan arrives. And what's even more interesting is, as we'll talk about, when we started doing user testing with students who have disabilities, they almost have never started a term with the resources that they need. Because once the instructor identifies which textbook addition they'll be using, that textbook then has to be put into an electronic format if it doesn't already exist. And sometimes they're three weeks or four weeks behind. So just to recap our project, actually today that number changed. I was saying to Una, our numbers change daily, but we're at 118 open textbooks in our collection. We have 284 adoptions across, so we, I should say we calculate only in British Columbia. So, and 18 institutions across British Columbia are using textbooks. Over 9,000 students are using the open textbooks and we've saved about $1 million in student savings. So we're really proud of that. And you can find these resources at open.bccampus.ca and you'll be able to go through them. So what I want to go through now is really, how did we get to the evolution of creating an accessibility toolkit? So what we decided was we really wanted to ensure that we were, where we're living up to the power of open, which for us, as Luna pointed out, is really about access and affordability. And we really wanted to make sure that students could have day one access to resources, but we also wanted them to give us an idea as to what formats they were using, what was important when they would be using those formats, and what were some things that we were missing that we didn't know about that we needed to include to educate faculty a bit better. So our goal was to get about 15 students to test the open textbooks. And in the end, we had seven students who completed written feedback and five students attended the in-person focus group. So we actually gave an honorarium of $150, but it was still difficult to recruit people. So our goal was to find student volunteers who were engaged in and give us good concrete feedback. And we went ahead and spoke with the Disability Services Offices to identify which students might be best suited to do some user testing. So what we decided to do was we picked a good cross-section of content and areas that we knew had some accessibility issues. So for example, English literature, we had poetry and footnotes, introduction to psychology, we had issues with tables and images, intro to sociology, we had quizzes, a long chapter, BC in a global context. And this was really fascinating because we had tons of charts, maps, and an embedded Google map, and introductory chemistry images and formula or equations. So what we did is we took these books and to let you know is that all of these books were either ones that we created or we had adapted. So we weren't user testing any books that we had just adopted. So to take a look at the books we sort of had touched on already. So what we did is it was interesting because the five different subject areas that we chose, they didn't necessarily line up with what our student testers were studying. So we gave them the following instructors. We said we're asking you to read one chapter from five different textbooks in the way that you normally would using the software and hardware that you would normally use. And we realized that these topic areas might be outside of the area that you're studying. So what we did is we said, you know, for each of the chapters, there's a few questions on the content. We're not testing your intelligence. Don't feel bad if you have a tough time answering the questions, but fill out the areas where the content is hard to understand or it's likely that the content is not accessible or very accessible. So for example, we asked content related questions for users to find information like what is the definition of Weber's law or what is the population of Sweden so that the testing became a bit more realistic. And it gave some focus to reading various textbook chapters. And then when we were putting together there the feedback forum, we took a look at a number of user design surveys. And what we noticed is that we had difficulty describing the concept of layout. So we forgot to include keyboard accessibility as a section. So this is the group of students that we got together and as facilitators, I have to say we were a bit nervous about doing the focus groups because for all of us, this is our first time conducting user testing or focus groups. And we were working with a group of students who were low vision or blind. So we went ahead and ran our plans through a colleague at Kapor BC who runs the adaptive technology organization and he's actually blind. So we wanted to make sure we didn't miss any key accessibility points. So you can see five students attended the focus group and they all had visual or have visual impairments and they were all using different assistive technology. So voiceover on an iPad, voiceover on a Mac, JAWS on Windows laptop, Zoom text on a Windows laptop, and Kurzweil on a Windows laptop. We were from three different universities and had different majors. So arts, English, computer science, business, and an occupational therapist. And we ended up learning a lot. It was a really great group of students who were super engaged and we went through the written feedback and we pulled out things that people identified as problems or where one student would say it was fine, but another student would say it wasn't accessible to them. So we were really able to flesh out a lot of things that weren't working and really ask the questions of well, how did you do that? And so some of the students were able to highlight some accessibility issues we hadn't anticipated. So for example, the English book has some embedded YouTube videos that JAWS didn't read and we didn't anticipate that when poetry was enlarged using Zoom text, it would be really hard to scroll horizontally to the end of the line. So the formatting issue clearly got in the way of them being able to feel the flow of the poem. So sometimes the reading students feedback didn't really make sense to us because we weren't sure what they were referring to, but when they actually showed us what the problem was, it helped us better understand it. Let's see here. So things that the students said as feedback, they just said that they loved being a part of it and they wanted to be consulted on so many things. And they just thought that the understanding and awareness of what we were doing was very appreciated. So as a result of all of the testing that we did with the students, we went ahead and created a toolkit. And so what we wanted to do was to really identify who is the audience. So the purpose of the toolkit was that it would be designed with the faculty, content creators, instructional designers and ed tech in mind. And so the idea was you may not know what you don't know about making materials accessible. So in our mind, the audience wasn't always familiar with proactive strategies of universal design as they applied to accessibility. And they may rather than doing the work, would just refer the student to the accessibility or accessibility resource center. So there's a few things that we wanted to do in terms of why we were doing this. We wanted to ensure that we were looking at accommodation for students with disabilities. We'd be looking at principles of universal design and we wanted to make sure that the materials were really accessible. And so then we started looking at what should be included in that we didn't want to overwhelm anyone with information. And so one of the things that was really important as we worked through this was although the W3C guidelines are excellent and was a great starting point for us, we found them a little bit difficult to actually understand and to work through. It seemed like a bit too much information if you're a faculty member just trying to make your resources open or if you're an instructional designer trying to guide a faculty in doing that. And so we decided we wanted to use language that was a bit more commonplace, I guess you could say, a bit more usable. So we decided also that we would make the toolkit available in press books. We wanted this available because we wanted to say, you know, model it on the behavior where our faculty were developing their materials, but also it allowed us to export the toolkit in a variety of different formats. So you can access the toolkit at opentextbc.ca slash accessibility toolkit. And I'm going to walk you through some screenshots because I don't want to have to try to get through there. I'll put the link up later too for you. So the accessibility toolkit starts off with key concepts. So we talk about what does it mean to work in the concept of universal design for learning. And then we decided we were going to create user personas. So we took each type of disability that's often seen in disability services and we created a user persona. So we named that person, we described what type of background they would have, what are some of their issues that they may encounter. And so you'll see these as they go in, as they work through the chapters. And then the best practices is really the content of the material. And so we looked at organizing content, images, tables, web links, multimedia formulas, font size, and color contrast. And so as you can see here is an example for, we always start off with each chapter. Who are you doing this for? So who is the, what type of person are you actually accommodating? So this example that we say is, does the student have, is he blind or have low vision? And so it gives you an image of what that student would be doing. And then it says, for example, here are ways to look at functional images and alt text descriptions. And then we provide an example. So we go ahead and talk about best practices, but then we also put in the example of how this is working. So as, sorry, as I said, we do introduction and context. Who are you doing this for? And what do you need to do? And then our next step is basically, we've been incorporating the toolkit into the development process for all new textbook creators. So the toolkit is available to anyone. We're currently in the process of making corrections to any existing textbook. And we've been implementing that through user feedback and contributions. We've been adding some more content within the chapters and we actually have a French version that will be available by the end of the month. So we're really excited about that. We're also conducting some user testing for the trade books. And this testing will take place in the new year. We're testing based on learning disabilities. And we also have started a community of practice for people who are interested in universal design and accessibility issues. So you can contact to donor if you're interested because it doesn't just have to be within BC. So thank you very much. And I will pass it on over back to Una. Hopefully that was right on time for you. Nice job, Amanda. There were a couple of questions in the chat window which we'll let you type in answers to. And we can review those at the end if you'd like to as well. All right. Thank you very much, Amanda. Really, really excellent to hear about your toolkit and all the great work that continues to go on in BC, British Columbia. Now, next up is Emily Moore. And she's going to talk to us about those amazing FET interactive simulations and the work that they are doing to make sure that they're accessible to all students. Emily? Hi. Yes. Yeah. Here we go. So I'm going to start by introducing the FET simulations project for those of you that may not be familiar with it. I'm going to talk then about our approach to accessibility, our progress so far, and some of the challenges we run into. And then I'm going to end with some tips and resources that you can use this week in your classroom if you wanted to. So the FET interactive simulations project includes a suite of over 130 interactive math and science simulations. They're used over 75 million times a year. And each one is a free, flexible, exploratory learning tool. They've also been translated into over 70 languages. The FET project engages in both design of these simulations and also research into their use and how to best design them. Some of the things that make our simulations unique is that they're highly interactive. So they encourage students to learn by doing, by actually interacting with all the teachers in the simulation. They provide real-time feedback. So students use to interact with each slider, each object, each toolbox. They're given real-time feedback that helps them explore and connect the ideas that the simulation is designed to cover. They allow difficult or impossible actions. So they allow you to do things in the classroom that would be very difficult or impossible to do in a hands-on activity or lab. They all show multiple representations, which allows students to use representations that they're familiar with to help them understand representations that they're not familiar with. Each simulation is designed to be intuitive, and we do that through iterative interviews with students, so we see what's working and what's not working with real students. Any simulation is implicitly scaffolded to support students' inquiry, so it starts with a foundational core idea and then builds up from there as students interact with the teachers. The mission of the FET project is to advance STEM education worldwide through great interactive simulations, and their simulations engage students in exploration and discovery, help students develop robust conceptual understanding, help make STEM accessible, understandable, and enjoyable, and help empower students to direct their own learning by learning through doing with the tools. We also want our simulations to be available for all students. We want them to be intuitive and easy to use so they're not overwhelmed by the content. We want them to be freely available online and offline for those that may have difficulty with internet access. We want them to be flexible for teachers, so they don't come with a particular curriculum that you must use them with. They can be grabbed and dropped into any particular curriculum that you're using, and they can also be embedded in other resources, like open textbooks. So now we're going to talk more specifically about FETs and accessibility. We're taking an inclusive design approach and a couple of core ideas to include the design is that accessibility is incorporated into the design and development process from the start. So we're not 100% there yet, but we're getting there. We're getting there as quickly as we can because this is very important to us. Another core idea is accessibility features are added as layers. So there's not a separate version that's an accessible version of the simulation. As they're published, it'll be one simulation for everyone, a one-size-fits-one approach, so the features are added as layers that can be turned on or off or adjusted as needed. And everything that I'm going to show you today is the peak behind the scenes. So starting in spring 2016, we'll start rolling out simulations that have these inclusive features, but we're not quite ready yet, but I'm going to show you some demo here in just a moment of one of them. So more specifically about the accessibility features we're working on, we're working on keyboard navigation, auditory descriptions for screen readers, notification, which is the use of non-speech sounds to convey information, text to speech, pinch to zoom, and color contrast control. We're also creating professional development guides and videos, as well as inclusive classroom activities that make use of these features, and we'll have those all available for free on the FET website as resources for teachers. I'm also engaged with a number of collaborators around research with these inclusive features, including research on how to design these features effectively to work well with diverse populations of students, and also how to use these inclusive simulations effectively in classrooms, particularly with student groups. So there's two main features that we're really focusing on trying to get implemented into as many simulations as quickly as possible. And those two features are keyboard navigation, which allows full access to all of the same elements just by using the keyboard. And this is really beneficial for students who are blind, have low vision, or have some mobility issues. We're also focused on auditory descriptions, which is descriptions provided of all of the same elements, all of the interactions, all of the changes that happen in the simulation. And this is particularly beneficial for students who are blind, have low vision, or also those who have certain learning disabilities. And again, so these are the features that you'll be able to see and play with with more of our simulations starting in spring of 2016. So now I'm going to show you a live demo of one of these simulations with keyboard navigation. So this is a Forces in Motion basic simulation. It's a physics simulation that's used across middle school, high school, and college level classes. It has four different screens that covers different ideas related to Forces in Motion. But today we're just going to look at this net force screen. So here you can see a cart that has ropes attached that can pull the cart to the left or to the right. You can add pullers to the cart. And as you add pullers, you can see a vector representation that shows the magnitude and direction of the force that these pullers can apply to the rope. You can also play a tug of war game and see that the side that can apply the most force is the one that wins the tug of war. So I was able to show you that really quickly using my mouse.  So when I press the tab key, a blue focus box appears around the pullers and shows me all the things I can interact with. I can also use shift tab to go backwards through the keyboard navigation order. I can select pullers, place them on the rope just as I did with my mouse. And we can play the same tug of war game. At this time, I only use the tab key, the shift key, enter and arrow keys to do this. I'm going to go back to my slide. So hopefully that demonstration looks relatively straightforward. But there are a number of really large challenges in making interactive tools accessible. I'm going to talk about technical challenges and some design challenges. There's also some research challenges that I won't have time to speak about today. But if you want to know more, you're welcome to contact me about that or to ask me some questions at the end of the talk about that. So to understand some of the technical challenges that we're overcoming, it's helpful to know a little bit about HTML and HTML5. So HTML5 is a modern market language that allows the simulations to be run in the browser and allows them to be used across platforms. So they can be used on PCs, Macs, tablets and phones. And in fact, this is the only way to make one simulation that can be used across all of these different platforms. When that started about 15 years ago, we've made all of our simulations in Java and Flash. But in 2013, we transitioned to making simulations only in HTML5 and also transitioned to porting our Java and Flash simulations into HTML5. And our website right now has about 29 stands available in this cross-platform HTML5. When you think about HTML and HTML webpages, HTML webpages have as part of their underlying markup various tags like headers and sections and articles and flutters that assistive technologies can see. So it has this underlying structure that assistive technology can recognize. And this allows navigation through webpages and also allows skinning. So someone using a screen reader, for example, can navigate from header to header or from link to link. So you can add some extra bells and whistles, some extra nice features into your HTML to make it easier and more user-friendly for assistive devices. But even basic HTML has these tags that assistive technology can recognize. Unfortunately, the way that you make HTML5 as simulations and other interactive learning resources, they're not structured like webpages. Assistive devices cannot recognize any of the internal structure and cannot provide out of the box any access to this content. So essentially, if you take one of our simulations that are on the set website right now and try to, for example, listen to it with a screen reader, you're not really going to hear anything. The screen reader can't see inside the simulation at all. So what we've had to do over the past year is to figure out how to address this challenge. And so we've tried a number of different ways, working with different collaborators to figure out different strategies for addressing them. And the one that we found to be best is to essentially do kind of a trick, which is to create a web page-like underlying structure that's generated by the simulation that can communicate with assistive devices, and it's generated on the fly and changes every time you interact with the simulation. So we kind of make a fake web page-like thing that can speak with the screen reader or screen magnifier. And this was a really huge hurdle that required a lot of collaborative efforts across multiple countries to figure out how to get this to work well. And we figured it out. We're still refining, but we're really proud of this. And this will serve as a model for other interactive resources and other development groups going forward. The benefits of this approach are many, but some of them are, it allows us to wear standards exist to apply those standards in this web page-like parallel structure. And also allows us to keep the accessibility structure consolidated in one place. So as standards evolve, new standards are developed for things specific to interactive simulations. We'll be able to update and maintain them more easily. So while we've been addressing some of those technical issues, we've also been addressing some design challenges. And a couple of those are, it's actually really difficult to design consistent, intuitive accessibility features across so many different simulations, where each simulation is unique and so dynamic. They don't have a similar layout necessarily. They don't have a similar interaction style. For example, some of our simulations, you know, being able to rob a balloon on a sweater is important. And some of our simulations, being able to build something is important. So making sure that when students come to our simulations, they don't have to learn new navigation. Each time is important to us and something we're working very hard on. It's also difficult to design layers to play well together. So for example, we want to have keyboard navigation where someone who's visually exploring the simulation, but using the keyboard to do that has just as intuitive and useful learning experience for someone who's using keyboard navigation and also using a screen reader. And this has turned into a really interesting intellectual challenge. So we have a number of undergraduate students, for example, right now that are doing thesis projects, looking at this layering together of different accessibility features and how they can work well together. And we really see these challenges as opportunities. We're really proud to be breaking new grounds and accessible interactive learning resources. And we are actively really sharing our code, our process and all of our designs with the broader educational technology community. So I just described an introduction to the FET simulations project and our mission to provide free accessible, increasingly accessible interactive simulations to students. I talked about FET's approach to accessibility and our goal was inclusive design and accessible design from the start. And I talked about some of the challenges in making these things accessible. And so I want to wrap up with a few tips and resources that while you wait for some of these accessibility features to roll out on this screen and for other interactive resources to be able to implement these sorts of inclusive design strategies. While you wait for that, there's some things that you can do in your classroom right now to help make use of interactive resources more inclusive for your students. And so one of those is, and this is useful for any resource, is to ask your students and be explicit about this. Ask them to tell you if they're having any trouble with any resource. Are they having trouble downloading it? Are they having trouble hearing it? Are they having trouble understanding what it's doing? That indicates this to students in multiple ways that they can contact you in your office hours by email to provide a couple different ways for students can find a way that's comfortable to let you know about their needs. And you're using an interactive resource and lecture. Describe pedagogically relevant actions and outcomes and be specific. Avoid using language like notice what happens here or see what just happens there. That can be helpful to think about your descriptions linearly or as nested lists. There's been a lot of work in image description. So using nested lists to describe difficult complex images. And so you can use a similar strategy to think about descriptions for interactive simulations. So thinking about, for example, describing your resource from left to right or from top to bottom, or from a more simple foundational idea and the building up in complexity from there. If you're providing your resources online. For example, someone tells you they're having difficulty with it. One thing that can be helpful is to make a short screencast where you describe to students what's happening and making that available to them. There are many ways to make a screencast for free using software that you can download. And there's also particularly if you're just making a few short screencasts. And there are some some pretty straightforward ways of providing captioning for those also. And I would definitely consider having students work with Sims or any other interactive content in group. You can prompt students to get listed about their needs in their group to support each other. And make it clear that, you know, it's important that they complete the task as a group. But also it's important to be working together as a group and to be helping each other and recognizing when there's an issue. And being able to say very clearly if you need something done more slowly or you need something described verbally from that sort of thing. So here is a list of some resources. If you want to learn more, you can find all of our simulations for free at that colorado.edu. And if you want to learn more about some of our accessibility work and to play around with some of our prototypes. And you can find that in the second link here. You can also find a video of me doing a similar demo as to what I showed you before and also introducing some ideas about auditory descriptions for screen readers. And if you want to know more about using simulations in the classroom in general, we have a teacher resources section that has videos guides. And we have hundreds and hundreds of free activities that teachers have provided and that we've created that to be used with our simulations. You're also free to get involved. If you or anyone you know uses an assistive device when you're using a computer, please contact me. We'd love to have more people in our pool of user testers. You can also follow our progress and learn about new simulations that are being published on Twitter, Facebook. We have a blog and we also have a newsletter. So our efforts and accessibility have been supported by National Science Foundation and Hewlett Foundation and the University of Colorado Boulder. And we're very grateful for that. I'm also very grateful for you for listening. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Emily. That was really exciting to hear about. It's just a couple of questions that are in the chat window. But since we've finished up, we can just, I see applause. Big applause for both of our presenters today. And one of the questions was, is there a code repository on GitHub for the HTML framework? And that was targeted at you, Emily. Yes. Yes. Yes, for sure. All of our HTML5 work is available on GitHub. Wonderful. Thank you. Before we go to our general Q&A here, I just wanted to mention that the Open Education Consortium, which is our parent organization, is sponsoring a webinar on Monday at 10 a.m. on adaptive learning. And this is featuring Norman Beer from Carnegie Mellon, who's the director of the Open Learning Initiative and also the Simon Initiative, which is about open learning analytics. And we will also have Dustin Silva, who's a math faculty at College of the Canyons and has been teaching with the Open Learning Initiative courseware for several years. And he's going to tell us about how that experience has been going. And I know there is another open webinar on Friday with Open Oregon. And I'll let Amy post that in the chat window if she hasn't done that so far, because that looks like a really exciting webinar, too. So we are. And I think that we'll just go to general Q&A now. Amanda, I may have missed. Did you have any questions that you wanted to repeat and give the answer to again? I don't think so. I think that the answer is really geared towards more of the reviews. So I think it's fine. OK. All right, great. So we are open for questions. You can either you can grab your mic by clicking on the talk button. This is for all of our audience members. You can click on the talk button and you can ask questions directly to Emily or Amanda or myself, or you can simply type in the chat window. So this is Emily. I had a question for Amanda if that's OK. Yeah, Amanda. So I would love actually to learn any lessons you learned about effective user testing with students with visual impairment. So we've begun doing this and we've never done this in focus groups that we've done it individually. And I'm curious if you would do things different the second time around if something went unexpectedly. That's a great question. I noticed that my audio is a little bit messed up here. So apologies. I hope you can hear me OK. Basically, we came to the focus group really. I don't want to say naively. I mean, we really had never never done anything like this before. And so in a way that worked out in our favor because we were able to ask the questions that I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily always ask. And so I think there's two things that made it a success. One is providing students enough time ahead of time to really understand what it was we would be testing and to do that in a written format. That was super important for the students to feel like they weren't rushed or anything and to know that they could use any format or any device that they normally use. So having them be comfortable in that arena. And then in terms of the questions and conversations in the focus group, it really, honestly, the question of, well, why did you do that? Why, why, why? That was the key. I don't know if we would do anything differently per se. I think it's just knowing that creating the environment to make the students feel comfortable and accepted and really understanding why it was we wanted their feedback. That seems to be the most essential. Thank you, Amanda. Thanks, Amanda. And Emily, we had a question for you from Kayleen. She was curious to hear about how instructors have integrated that simulations into their course. Have they given you any feedback on that? Yeah. So instructors use the simulations in lots of different ways. They sometimes use them as part of their lecture as a lecture demonstration. So they'll project the simulation up for the class to see and then do experiments with the simulation in front of them. They can also create clicker questions around that. So set up scenarios and then ask a clicker question about what students think are going to happen next. And then they can actually see in real time what happens next and discuss answers for the quicker questions. Some teachers provide them as online resources. I've worked really closely with a number of teachers who use room as part of guided inquiry class group activities. So where they create guided inquiry paper-based handouts that have students work in groups with the simulation. We have a number of those sort of activities on our website. Yeah. And we do hear a lot of feedback. So the project's been around for about 15 years. We get lots and lots of emails. So people find an issue or just want to tell us about a clue whether they're using the simulation. They can email that helps at Colorado.edu. So we get lots of feedback about what's working well and what's not working well. And we do go back. If people find something that's confusing or difficult for their students, we will go back to their simulations and make adjustments. Thank you, Emily. I have a quick question for you. This is Uda. What percentage would you say are K through 12 versus say college or university of faculty who use your materials? Do you have a sense for that? Yeah, that's a good question. So we've been trying to learn more about that. So the project started in college at college level making college level simulations. And over the years we learned that teachers in K-12 classrooms were using them with their students. And so about five years ago we started developing simulations specifically targeted at middle school, noble population. So our K-12 youth has been growing, but it's a bit hard to track. So yeah, I couldn't tell you a number, but I definitely would say that K-12 youth is growing. Very interesting. And I hope that the community college population is growing too based on our webinar today. This is very exciting. All right. Well, I don't see any other questions in the chat window. We will hang around here for a few more minutes. But I will probably turn the recorder off at this time. And before I do that, once again I want to thank my amazing presenters today. Thank you very much, Amanda and Emily. I learned a lot and I think our audience probably did as well. These are just amazing projects. So thanks so much. And thank you to all of you who came today. We really enjoyed putting on these webinars. And I know many of you write and let us know how much you appreciate them. And we plan to continue to do this. So thank you very much and have a great afternoon.