our series this year that we have relaunched and very pleased to be welcoming you and we have set the recording just because lots of people have asked for recordings and if that's okay with everybody we will we have now our YouTube channel so we will make it available hope that's good with everybody. In terms of just a bit of housekeeping if you're more familiar with Zoom or Teams although I think most of your work that now the access panel is in the bottom right corner we encourage you to contribute in the chat if you've got any questions but indicate with a queue also at the end when we will launch into a Q&A session you can use your raise hand and also unmute your mic and and pose any questions for that if you notifications bother you you can use the settings on the bottom right corner but that's really it hopefully yeah that will be okay and I think this is really my queue to welcome Professor Armalini, Virginia Tahira Antunas and Rob Howe who will talk about the student voice on active blended learning so over to you Theo we look forward to hearing from you. That's great thank you very much Tundi thank you for introducing us so good afternoon everyone I'm Rob Howe head alone in technology and as Tundi actually said we've also got Virginia and Ali on the call as well we're going to be talking about some research that we've actually done at Northampton. In terms of the the chat it will keep people muted for now and then later on there's a chance to actually ask questions okay so first thing just a little bit of institutional context just around Northampton University of Northampton so back in 1261 original University of Northampton four years later that was dissolved then we became a technical college then became NEN college we got university college status full university status 2005 and we've got around about 12,000 students 1500 staff across three different faculties in 2014 we had a move to active blended learning as a new pedagogy and it's actually taken quite a few years for that to actually settle into into the institution itself but around active blended learning we actually developed a new campus so this is our water side campus and you're welcome to look at it online and then obviously a little bit later on you can visit us later in the in the year brand new campus so 330 million pounds spent actually in terms of developing it and we've now been a few years in and we've been rolling out active blended learning as part of one of the cores really of being actually at water side itself so in terms of changes that were actually going on at the time quite a few different dimensions actually going on there we were looking this is round about that sort of 2014-2015 time period we were looking at those three core elements particularly we're looking at graduate attributes we were looking at the assessment review and we were looking at active blended learning so the the graduate attributes we were looking at ethically driven graduates for the assessment review we were looking at our outcomes consistent we're early with being in a 21st century and actually blended learning which is really what the focus is today it's focused very much on this this scalable learning and teaching and we'll say a little bit more really about what active blended learning is we had an institutional definition and you can see the definition obviously on the screen at the moment and there's some key parts actually inside that so we've got sense making activities you've got focused student interactions with all of the sort of the key agents that are actually as part of that process and includes both in and outside the classroom as well in terms of what AEBL actually means we've got a few you know four bullet points really about what the key thing is so we've got particularly we've got activities so students learning through these activities we've got subject knowledge and applying that actually for their professional skills plenty of feedback digital fluency and really some flexibility as well in relation to to time and place more generally in terms of what it actually means for a course so a course sort of follows that if it follows those those three sort of core sort of principles and we've got those on our Institute learning and teaching website actually at Northampton in terms of just building that up then there's a number of key elements that actually go towards a session that is actually running with with ABL so you have the pre-session sense making activities you've got the embedded content and resources there you've also got real-time sessions particularly webinars at the moment but obviously we face-to-face sessions and through those you've got a whole mix of different question and answer sessions you've got discussion sessions and various analysis that actually goes into that generally and then after the session itself you have consolidation you you reflect on the event itself so if we put that in a sort of a broader context all of that is the the three sort of green circles really are the the scaffolding for what we're actually talking about the the two at the sort of the the 12 o'clock and the the 7 o'clock position those are tend to be tutor moderated and most of that is asynchronous actually in terms of the way it's actually delivered the one on the the right hand side sort of the five-clock position that is more about being tutor facilitated and it's more about synchronous and it's not about delivery at all it's about the interaction actually with the students at the time so for Northampton active blended learning obviously was a really core change actually in the way that we were doing some of our learning teaching and it builds on the the strengths I think that a lot of our academics were already doing at that time as you'd expect with such a a major pedagogical change evaluation was very much important as part of that process so what I'm going to do now is to pass on to to Virginia to go through some of the questions particularly that we wanted to focus on and what we want to focus on really as part of today. Thanks Rob so as part of this evaluation process that we've done for several exchanges that the university went through we've conducted a study on the students and we were kind of focusing on two main questions which was their perceptions of their own experiences within ABL and what kind of enables and barriers could they find to have quality and successful learning experiences so that guided our study and this study was a two-stage study at the start we focused on the tutors and we did a wide range survey and then we narrowed it down to some tutors that were willing to have in-depth interviews with us and from those we asked to have access to some of their students the idea was to have a bit of a background of what the tutors were actually doing in terms of their practice so we could understand students with responses a little bit better so we conducted focus groups with 60 students and we focused on things like effective practice what for them was effective practice how they felt their precession tasks were or not linked to their face-to-face activities and what they considered to be engaging learning experiences so then we did in vivo analysis so it was a qualitative study and in the in vivo analysis we had around 26 teams and we narrowed them down to the ones that we considered to be more saturated so the ones that appeared at least in four different focus groups in a number of times a significant number of times we then grouped this into three categories learning experiences social experiences and learning support which I'm going to go through more in depth so this one was quite a long one because obviously that's that was pretty much the focus was the learning experiences so we talked about we'd learn us about several things and we realized that they really value how their activities link theory and practice in the sense that it will give them better skills for employability they said pretty much the same in terms of assessment so that was a very key component of them was that they felt prepared for employability in terms of what they felt were engaging learning experiences while they talked a lot about being active and being engaged in activities within the face-to-face synchronous classes and all that and asynchronous they also related what they considered to be engaging a lot with what tutors were like in terms of their personal traits and personal characteristics so those tutors that were nicer to them and more engaging more social would make them feel more engaged in sessions this obviously means that there was a lot of variability in how their experiences were in terms of different tutors so from one session to another from one to another they would have different experiences and they were very aware of that they noted strongly that the use of technology was one of the areas that could be seen this variability because some tutors were using it in a creative way interactive trying to promote their engagement while others were using very limited namely true just the use of PowerPoints and this use of PowerPoint is interesting because for them those engaging learning experiences needed to be more than just being there and listening to someone read through a PowerPoint and they were very clear about that in terms of their pre-session tasks and how they linked with the face-to-face sessions they felt like they were great to promote for them to be able to engage better in face-to-face sessions but they really valued tutors that knew how to engage every learner every student even those that hadn't done the pre-session tasks so that was quite significant for them and the main reason for them to attend was to feel comfortable to feel that they would be engaged whether they had done the pre-session tasks or not and that they would be doing something in the in the synchronous session that would be more than just reading through PowerPoints so that was pretty much the core of this category and then the second category which is social experiences was quite quite important for them they started by discussing a lot of the communication within the sessions and how they valued tutors that that were open to questioning and that engaged them in discussions in the sessions and all that but they went further than that they said they they particularly valued valued those tutors that would talk to them about other stuff about their personal problems that were open to help them with even other subject areas or give them any range of support and communication and and respond to emails all of that so they talked a lot about tutors that were seen as going the extra mile for them that was an expression that they used a lot tutors that seemed to care and that made them feel more like partners in that learning and teaching experience so it was very important for them that they were engaged in the in the activities and that tutors made them feel not as believe them but at the same level and part of the whole process this is also seen a little bit on the third category learning support where it was very clear that learners students were expecting not only classroom-based support the the help with all of the like examples all of that but also they expected tutors to be available for them for further than that they the values to tutors that would meet them in the in the corridor and just say how are you why do you have that face and stuff like that so those were the tutors that they would engage more with and that was very clear in this research because those were the learner the students that kept that gave me more of their time that made sure they were talking as as much as they possibly could and instead of having 10 minutes of the focus group we had half an hour for example because they said well my tutor is amazing why wouldn't I do this for her which was quite interesting also the issue of employability comes back here because that support that goes beyond the classroom is also on a value for tutors that for example give them information about in terms that they can apply to conferences that so extra things that they don't necessarily need to do but that will help the students be more prepared in terms of employability so the key for this study was that we wanted to try to contribute in some way to this question of of the student engagement we know that in the sector this has been a long issue a long lasting issue so this study tried to really contribute to it and there are some ideas some data that we can withdraw from here that will kind of help in this mainly the idea of social interactions and the sense of belonging and how important it is and how important it is to foster that sense of engagement and belonging to the to the institution in general so in in summary basically what matters to learners is to students as learning experiences beyond the classroom they don't only want to be in that conscripted restricted space anymore they want to learn more than that and blended helps that to happen a lot tasks and assignments that link theory and practice so that they feel more employable that's the main concern as we know with students nowadays and the idea that because we now have blended the idea of going to a face-to-face session where you do just the reading of the PowerPoints is no longer enough and for them to go to that effort the those sessions need to have that added value of engaging them of giving them something that goes beyond just listening to to a tutor read so they very much highlighted the idea of how important the social interaction and communication were both in terms of synchronous and asynchronous interactions and that idea of tutors that go the extra mile particularly always connecting that with tutors personal traits like accessibility and sociability etc so what we have in this study is basically that tutors and students can and should be seen as partners that will engage students a lot more and digital technology and blended learning can work as a tool to blur those boundaries between the asynchronous and the synchronous the learning spaces the classroom and outside beyond the classroom and promote interaction both within and beyond the classroom so it's all about easing that's what digital technology works for in the students minds is to kind of help make all of these holistic experience of experience as a whole so we kind of conclude something that isn't our chattering but still is a significant that both the academic and the past pastoral support and and the relationships all of those are needed to provide these holistic learning and teaching experiences because just having quality learning experience is not enough anymore learn students expect more by doing that we can by giving them these holistic rich learning and teaching experience we will work on their engagement we'll increase and enhance interaction we enhance their feeling of belonging and then we work on those metrics that higher education is so concerned with like retention satisfaction etc so they are really important as an idea to take from there finally this is basically the summary of everything that we've been saying so far all of the little enablers of positive learning experiences this holistic learning experiences that go from the theory practice link to having those partnerships and having support that goes beyond the classroom all of that is really really important now one kind of unexpected value or impact of this study was that it informed the institution into how to deal with something that was also very unexpected which was the pandemic and the impact it had on provision so a lot of what we've done and and a lot of this ABL issue is going to help this institution and hopefully others into how to deal with the pandemic and Ali will now kind of discuss this topic a little bit and offer some reflections Ali up to you yes we'll do Hello everyone and thanks Virginia for that I think I'd like to use the last few minutes of this session to reflect on some of the things that Virginia and Rob elaborated on earlier and then move us on to the to this transition period where some some things might actually shape the future of the sector and the future of our institutions far beyond the the pandemic first however I think there is a need to stress the what Virginia said about activity development activity creation a lot of the time we see colleagues thinking that they are setting learning activities in preparation for next week sessions or as part of next week session or or in any context and they say well read this watch that come back with three key points and and I think while there is a place for that really we need to do better than that we need to think about our activity design in much more serious terms we have to be much more creative we have to push students in a way that the standard thing read this watch that come back with three points does not achieve we need to add value we know from data from this study and others that in order for a typical blended learning student to to attend sessions you've got to you've got to add value they will attend sessions that do that regardless of whether they are recorded or not if you add value in the classroom or in the lab or in the field or in the studio the students will be there because they see that they that those sessions move them on this notion of partnerships that Virginia and Rob spoke about they do not necessarily refer to formal things they refer to also to informal partnerships they they they they they refer to to links between groups of students and group of groups of staff that could be as simple as doing a mini formative task together over a period of a week or two weeks or whatever it is the students value these partnerships and I think many of my colleagues value these partnerships too and one final point before moving on to the transition is this what Virginia referred to as the big issue the the student engagement issue and I would put it to you that a lot of the problems around student engagement revolve around staff engagement and and it's it's not comfortable reading too many but but it is I would suggest that staff engagement visibility and the level of activity correlates with the engagement visibility and level of activity of the student in order to get them engaged we've got to be visible we've got to be seen to be engaging ourselves it's not a case of uploading the task uploading the material and hoping for the best we've got to be there all of the time and we've got to be there for them with them alongside them so as the 20th of March 2020 hit we had a situation across the sector we had issues to do with what are we going to do next week when we when we need to continue our courses but we can no longer use the campus and what this study would point to and others that that that were run alongside this one they point to an issue of pedagogy knowledge and understanding not so much about technology not in the case of Northampton but but but but certainly questions and answers of a pedagogic nature so the work done on active blended learning since 2014 at the University of Northampton put the university in a fairly favorable position to face the challenges of the last 12 months the level of the level of pedagogic understanding had increased as had the level of digital fluency across members of staff and across the student body over the previous couple of years we had started a laptop scheme students first year students were getting a laptop as part of the registration staff all got mobile devices all of that with a huge amount of training and development helped to improve all of those metrics to put us in a good position but I insist the primary element was pedagogic knowledge and understanding we need to think about a scenario from March 2020 of lower proximity and synchronicity and I'll go into that in a moment on the next slide the engagement and visibility of the tutor as I said before critical to generate engagement and visibility from the student and then of course key issues of autonomy with no campus to be used no people to that we were allowed to visit and the constant need to explore ways in which we can advance our digital fluency so if we look at that diagram we have a on the on the x-axis we've got high proximity low proximity so high proximity is very much a high face-to-face contact if you like low proximity is low geographical proximity on the y-axis you've got synchronicity so high synchronicity is real-time-ness low is asynchronous and bottom left quadrant would refer to our standard bread and butter activity for most for all campus-based universities so that's how a traditional campus offering top right is the traditional mostly asynchronous provision at a distance the interesting bits is are the other two perhaps and how we shifted from one section of this diagram to the other top left very important group of students those who are campus-based but because of covid have been working mostly asynchronously so trying to access the webinars the seminars the the lectures from the halls of residence or from home and bottom right is real-time provision for geographically dispersed students so so things like teams sessions zoom sessions or blackboard collapse sessions like today and then i'd like you to think about how our model shifted from march last year so i would put it to you that we moved our apologies for the quality of the slides not great when it converted to collab but the we moved from for campus-based institutions like mine we moved from the bottom left as our primary area with bits of the other areas with bits of the other quadrants but our main area bottom left we moved from there to there and and we have to understand what that shift means so we've got we've got to shift from traditional campus-based provision to something else and each institution had to figure out what that's something that something else looked like it wasn't always straightforward it wasn't easy and and we had lots of issues to address in relation to how our provision had to shift the the staff development that was required and we had to do that pretty much overnight so we we moved to a scenario where we had to cater for students who were based largely on campus but were accessing sessions asynchronously and students who went home completely and became de facto distance learners while they were part of a cohort that we did not want to lose the the key elements from so that is a central part of what happened as ABL developed into ADL or active distance learning if you like as I said years of experience with active blended learning turned out to be quite instrumental for this transition and what we did is we we put in place a range of staff development sessions from March 2020 the by far the best attended staff development session at that point March April May 2020 was one called lesson planning and in that session very short online session about 45 minutes and we went through the key the basic elements that constitute a good lesson plan a lesson plan for online teaching synchronous and asynchronous and critically the blend of the two we were in a good position because Northampton provides what we would call a future focused risk friendly digitally rich environment for the reasons I outlined before we were we were in a good place to push the agenda forward and to fill in gaps where we knew staff or students needed additional support the case of the case of lesson planning was a very was it was a typical example of a session that people really needed and that well I please help me plan a session whether that is in real time whether that is over a week asynchronous or whether there's a combination of both and all of the above required a generous very generous dose of patience on all parts and finally a couple of references for you to consider if you if you'd like to do a bit of reading on that and the studies and some of the other key conclusions that we did not cover today those are on the screen now so I will pause here and I will hand back to Tunde to take us to the next stage yeah thanks all three of you that was excellent the chat has been buzzing all all along so I think at this point what I would like to do is just if people have questions to ask can you please raise your hand if you wanted to ask the question allowed that you put in the chat please do so and I can also pick some questions out from the chat but if you indicate with putting hands up that you have a question then you can have the mic and ask your question allowed and while we're waiting for someone to do that I could perhaps relay some of the so there was a really interesting discussion in the chat around the this idea that is what you later than you elaborated on is the link between staff and student engagement and you know staff engagement and visibility then promote student engagement and there were a lot of questions around you know how you might I think Jeffrey, Andrew, Vicky were asking around how have you enabled staff to uptake the approach the ABL how how do you obscure them to be able to implement it effectively was a specific question from Andrew but there's associated questions from Jeffrey and Vicky as well so I don't know which one of you wants to take that perhaps well I can start and then I'll move on to Rob because Rob knows the the details but one of the things that we've seen in the in the part of the study the stage one where we talked to the staff was about giving them opportunities to share their knowledge to kind of share experiences and training obviously and support all the time also trying to use the strengths of the staff that we already had and and the strengths that they already had and try to build up on it by giving them those opportunities and giving them time to to to use those but Rob probably can tell you a little bit more about all of the training and well not training sorry all of the the support that was provided by the university yeah there's wide range of support that was sort of in place so we have sort of staff sort of aligned to all of the faculty so there was always people engaged as necessary actually with that we also embedded a lot of these ideas and principles we've embedded that in some of the curriculum design and redesign processes so we internally called that the Cairo development cycle so this allowed us to actually embed it straight into the curriculum and we also had a range of events which allowed people to share really good experiences of where they were doing this already and they were able to then to share this with with other staff in a in a supported forum so they were doing good examples and we're also picking up there particularly case studies and tips that we were then using as part of further promotion with staff because it's it's one of the things I think people expect these sort of messages to come out centrally but actually it's more powerful when actually the staff that are doing this already and have learned from experiences are actually telling other staff about how they have done it and contextualize that for their own subject areas particularly as well Ali did you want to say any more yeah I want to add a couple of things on that one absolutely critical the the Cairo or Carpe Diem learning design process was central to this that enabled us to to embed these principles right from the conception of the course and and with the course as a team approach to course design that helped us put the seeds in and and get that development and that thinking right from the start of the course and there is a question relate that relates to that how do we get from the lesson planning to the big picture well if you think lesson week month term year program the Carpe Diem or Cairo process allows us enables us to to design for all of those for all of those things the storyboarding element of the of the process was central and and that was kind of the when the penny dropped that people oh I can actually do this in that rather different way from what I was doing before it is not content driven it is not getting the content I've got to cover and slice it into 12 weeks and then deliver it we kind of remove the word deliver from the narrative we remove the word cover and we looked at other things particularly learning outcomes alignment of those two assessment and what good teaching looks like in between them the those two and that that enabled us to to to bring colleagues on board because we were showing value we were showing value of this it was not this was not in addition to the job this was their job so this it very it very quickly over the years became clear if that can go quickly it became clear that that was a good way of doing things in the middle of that of course we've had the figure I don't you might remember that rob of the learning and teaching coordinators that played a key role in promoting and scaling up this in the faculties and and the argument at the time was actually learning and teaching is is everyone's role not the role of the learning and teaching coordinator so after after they had so created a critical mass of of of interest of engagement of belief they the the role of the learning and teaching coordinator kind of disappeared and and it was felt that this was everyone's role not the role of one person so I hope I've covered some of the key elements that that enabled us to bring stuff stuff with us in this process so can I sneak into questions on the back of that thank thank you all the I think Vicky asked a specific one because you're talking about critical mass and how you are expanding people who get on board with this new approach or you know the active the ABL approach and then Vicky was asking about interested in hearing how Northampton addresses for example when staff to just read PowerPoints or bend the ABL approach to continue to teach in other ways and that was then perhaps and slightly different but but because just because you mentioned workload and Andrew was also asking about any workload challenge for staff in developing the blend effectively so sorry to ask two questions at the same time and I'm just as well while you were responding I would say I left Northampton in September so probably Rob is is better place to tackle some of that as it is today so I first hand over to Rob and then and then pick up on the on one or two things I want to say okay yeah I think in terms of I think in terms of building up the the capacity particularly in terms of sharing that with with staff and also I think that timescale thing that you mentioned as well along with the the PowerPoint so you can you can push out methodologies till you're blue in the face but if some staff want to do things in a particular way they will probably carry on doing some of those things and actually if you look at the second paper that we actually put which is very much about the the staff experiences of moving to ABL you will see I think some of the fact that staff are they fall into a number of different categories in terms of their their attitude to change generally and I mean I think those of you that are institutions at the moment can also reflect on the different staff that you actually work with and the fact that some of them will play a tokenistic nod essentially to whatever you're trying to push out centrally and then just carry on doing whatever they they decide to do we have not done necessarily a hard audit essentially so we're not walking into everyone's classroom and saying you're doing a PowerPoint that's wrong or anything like that what we have to do to a certain extent is to trust that the academics are doing the right things for their situations at that particular time it might be that a short PowerPoint is actually appropriate for some part of the session and then they'll carry on and do something else at another time we're not going to get into the the view that we've got to see in every one session and to check that they're following some sort of ABL type methodology at the end of the day a lot of this is about good teaching so we have to trust I think our tutors to basically pick up the key things from this and actually to expand that into their own environment the time aspect is obviously incredibly difficult and I know I think you know again the time at the moment is very challenging we've got a number of change processes and I think it was mentioned in the chat about change management and certainly that is covered a lot more in the in the other article as well it is about exactly about change management and it's about very good communication it's about bringing people with you it's about trying to give people the the headspace and the time to actually do their jobs properly I'm not sure that we've managed to solve all of that at Northampton I think that would be a miracle if we've managed to actually do that and there are still things very much competing pressures I think at the same time so it is you know sometimes some subject areas have given people protected time to try and do things in other areas that's been a lot more difficult to do you know and you know we do certainly emphasize with the tutors that challenge to you find this a challenge to actually put these things into place I mean in the in the chat there was a discussion around the the showing staff or just to get them experience the joy of teaching online and and how you know on the other hand that that was to some extent some of the strategies you know and you talked about that if they see that oh I could do it this way and this is actually I enjoy it that that that can be a really positive way of getting people on board as well thank you I'd like to add one or two things to the one in relation to your final point and I had question about points or you mean oh no I wanted to I wanted to just stress or illustrate that point because over particularly at the earliest stages of the rollout of ABL I had very a number of very difficult conversations with colleagues and and I will ask the audience colleagues from around the world to tell me which discipline they think some of these colleagues came from so just just just for a bit of fun but on one occasion I remember at the old cafeteria the old campus I sit down with two colleagues from a particular discipline one one fairly experienced one very young and the experienced guy looks at me in the eye and says the thing is that you do not understand the only way I can teach my discipline you fill in the blanks is through and he slowed right down a lecture right now the bad news for him were that was that the new campus that brought talked about at the start has no lecture theaters and it hasn't got staff offices either and that was going to be as it turned out subsequently turned out to be a big problem for him and some others a handful of others not many but what I would say is that you cannot stop someone lecturing at six people if you if you if six people is your audience in a small room they if they want to do that they can still do that we do not take peer observation as performance management we do a lot of peer observation for enhancement and that is a key tool that we use for mutual enhancement for mutual benefit and there is a protocol to follow which is confidential to the to the people involved it is mutual I would also say that that the all good blends contain elements of multiple multiple sources we're not saying teacher centeredness is completely off the table you it's banned absolutely not every good blend has elements of different kinds teacher centeredness in moderation is one of those and I will end by saying that we would never go out to say oh abl works or abl doesn't work I mean we could say all sorts of things about abl pbl tbl udl and whatever else you want what matters is not the the name or the method what matters is is how you apply that method in context content is not kin context is and that is what matters here yes and yeah I think at this point thank you there I don't know John Cooper 3 do you want to ask your question because it is little bit related to disciplinariness oh yeah I'm happy to thanks very much indeed I'm so it's really just from experience that there can be some courses where there's many many different people involved some clinical some kind of teaching from the university and it's just how we might sort of find that way of of linking people together through a module to get a more interactive kind of sense of how teachers are going to be developed it's it's just something I've come across many times and I am I'd love to know if you've kind of found some kind of ways forward of doing that at Northampton or Osworth I think that's that's a good cue to describe the chiro process in more detail we don't have a lot of time but I will give it a go and then Rob can can can top it up if you like putting your course module or program through a chiro process is a requirement for validation and for other academic quality processes at Northampton and and those processes have to be facilitated by trained people who bring a true interdisciplinary flavor to those to those design workshops that means bringing in learning technologists learning designers it means bringing in students and what appropriate it means bringing in employers to that and it is not it is not a one-hour thing it can take a lot longer like half day slots or even two days in a row that is the critical tool that enabled us to scale up that enabled us to bring to bring the team together as opposed to oh you you do module one I do module two she does module three which which which is a recipe for complete lack of consistency we are not advocating a strict standard or a strict template what we are we are advocating freedom and creativity and all the rest of it within a set of consistent principles that the students can identify so over to Rob if you want to add anything else I was just going to say I've just I know we're quite short of time so I've just popped something into the chat window about what is chiro it's a it's an oldish blog posting we're doing a review at the moment so if you're interested in any more in that please do get in touch and we'll give you some more details yes thank you both I mean just the last question perhaps to Virginia because I know as elastic we are very much interested in methodologies among running projects and evaluation and research of student experiences around technology is is there anything if people wanted to you know do a similar evaluation perhaps is there anything that you might suggest for for us well engage tutors first and foremost and get their time because learner students will not give you their time they will be okay if they if you can have the last 20 minutes of a session but it's going to be very difficult to get them to actually move and go to your office or something like that and I'm so sorry I know we are very short on time but there's something that is happening it has been going on on the chat that I think is really really important several people ask for recommendations and Jeffrey will mention something about learner students sorry students being conservative and I think that's a really important point too um we one of the things we realized in the tutor stage was that it was incredibly important to also teach students about what ABL is if you're going to make them learn in a slightly different innovative transformative way then they need to know what they what they're expecting uh to overcome those expectation gaps and all of that conservative so that would probably be one of my main recommendations in in any case is to teach tutors what they're going to be doing and the value of it and also learners students because it's incredibly important that to get them engaged okay thank you and thank you all the three of you thank you everyone in the chat as well because there's just some brilliant conversations around that and hope you know once we've finished this session we will make this available on our website and in our blog just to reiterate and for those of you who might be new to LSEG of who we are we are a community of researchers and practitioners and we come together to you know to disseminate share practice and it's it's we're all very much interested in researching and evaluating learners experiences with technology so if you do want to get involved then um there is a few ways that we've listed here so you can join us we've got a gisk mail and the old site as well and there's some really good instructions you know if you wanted to attend our next webinar or propose a webinar yourself for a topic then do get in touch with us you can look out for our LS6 Scholar Scheme pilot which is a mentoring scheme that we're doing around research and evaluation follow us on Twitter or if you want to write a blog post let's say about this webinar and some of those sorts that you've been contributing to the chat that would be brilliant and also we have got regional conveners so for instance I am the co-lead for North West Rob is in in the Midlands so you know you can find us and get in touch and get involved can I just add that there's I can I just been scrolling up and down the chat there's a lot of stuff in there that we did not touch on and I'm sorry colleagues that we haven't had the time to do that but I hope that through those other sessions other regional meetings or discussions we can address those things I have not forgotten them yeah I mean I don't know what we could do is that we could start a blog of this session because I also think there were some really really good questions and I wondered if you pasted them out in the blog and if you had time I don't know to perhaps just spend some responses to that would that be a good way to do but I know there were some really good comments and conversations around that but just to plug so thank you Ellie and and colleagues for for this excellent session it was a brilliant opening very apt and I know in Northampton you were already seven years ahead of time I guess we're from looking back from this year so our next session is on the 27th of March and the details are there and you can sign up on our webinars list but I think this is us four of us saying goodbye is there anything else Rob colleagues you want to add but thank you so much for your time and see you next time now thank you very much everyone for attending thank you thank you all see you next time


to find joy in my family spending by sharing it here online every day. It's the end of a week before I'm going to get that in my head if you can hear that but it sounds like the show before hours is just finishing. So because I don't think it would look that good for me to just film the whole thing and also I should be more present in the moment shouldn't I? What we'll do is we'll show you the best three seconds of every act. So that was the circus. Good wasn't it? It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. You get a chance to go any year. Gifford Circus absolutely rocks. If you've reached this point in the video why don't give me a thumbs up or hit the subscribe button and I'll see you for day 29 tomorrow. What a beautiful one. Right I need to get down. Can you please help my daddy get 1000 subscribers? Just click in the space. Thanks bye.


Swarm is a de novo Amplicon clustering method that addresses the flaws of popular methods by using local thresholding and refining results based on cluster structure and Amplicon abundances, resulting in fast, scalable, and input order independent operational taxonomic units. This article was authored by Frederic Mahé, Torbjorn Rohns, Christopher Quince, and others.


Hello everyone. Good morning. It's 10 on the dot that will just give everyone maybe a couple more minutes to join. I pasted a link to the meeting notes, so I noticed quite a few people on the call if you want to go go down there and Put your name down. That'll be great. And thank you Ash for volunteering to be described today All right, maybe we'll start in just a minute All right, I think we've got quite a few people on and why don't we get started? Welcome everyone I guess happy new year to kick off the first meeting for 2021 And we've got quite a quite a few people on so that's that's great So this is my first time Hosting the meeting, you know It's so much easier to be in the audience than to host it but bear with me as I walk as I walk us through today Firstly, is there anyone new to our group and who'd like to quickly introduce yourselves? Okay, I'll take that as a no and if not are there any Any items that anyone would like to bring up before I go through the You know the roll call and call out If anybody has any updates or items that you'd like to talk about Okay, and in that case, I'm going to call on Emily. I know You probably want to Ask people to take a look at prs. Emily. Would you like to say a few words on that? Yes, so just a quick reminder that The tech leads and the co-chairs are not the only people that can look at prs We would like everybody that's part of the sig and even folks that are looking to join to go ahead and review the prs That currently exist Sometimes it's good to just have a fresh set of eyes go over something that I've been working on or brand in or anybody else Has been working on kind of get that second opinion to make sure that we're not going down the wrong tunnel So if everybody could take a look at some of the prs that we have in there And if you've looked at it and it looks fine, just drop a comment on the pr letting them know that it looks good to you things to pay attention to if you're new to this are language grammars smelling making sure that it's in Alignment with how we would like to see some of the content laid out So text wrapping and 80 characters Spelling those kinds of things. So that's the first thing about prs The other piece is that we have a ton of issues. We have 94 current open active Will 94 open issues a lot of them are inactive So if you're new to the sig or if you're you've been around for a while And there's something that you want to take a look at there are quite a few Inactive issues that we'd like to kind of drum up attention to to determine whether or not They're still valid if they're still interest I know we have a couple of great projects upcoming that are planned But some of these issues are relatively small and can be knocked out very easily and help clean up our Q So if everybody could jump in the repo and take a look at those issues in those prs, that would be fabulous Ported by all this first Preferably yes Yeah, that's that's a good point Thanks a lot Emily And and that's on me as well and I I have a couple I'd like to talk about maybe I've come down come back to it But maybe I know Brandon Has something that you'd like to talk about Brandon Yeah, um happy new year and I think kind of the the main thing that I wanted to just highlight that people know um last year um in december we we mentioned a little bit about The security landscape And we also discussed that in the new name. Maybe that gives the best the best way to describe it Um, so we are going to be kicking off that work. Um next week. So I've scheduled There is an issue that's open and I'll let me get it here So I scheduled a kickoff meeting Just before our regular weekly meeting So if you're interested in kind of helping to look at the landscape or contributing to it Definitely just Leave leave a comment in that issue And I'll send you an invite to that Other than that The security assessment issues are going well. We have a couple Folks there looking into each of them. So hopefully within the next few weeks we can kind of Present some of the the proposed changes. Yeah So great. Thanks Brandon. So just to reiterate that I think For the purpose of you know, if you're interested in any issue and if you'd like to partake and contribute Just please, you know, call yourselves out on those tickets and then, you know The respective people will, you know, loop you in into, you know I don't I don't know make me be a private slack chat or a slack room or something and then we can kick those off And I noticed today that there are no other Updates or topics that we want to talk about so I I had opened two PRs Towards the end of last year and Emily had warned me and I was being very ambitious and I completely dropped the ball on it I was exhausted towards the end of the year, but here we are brand new year Hopefully we can take it off and the two issues that I I had called out And I think I've gotten some feedback on those PRs. Thank you to everyone who responded are Kind of like a webinar like a round table to talk about the cloud security White paper. So what I'd like to do, I think this which is In line with what we've been doing is I'll create a new slack channel To call out all the people who have, you know, Expressed an interest so that we could, you know, have some chats around it and figure out how we can make that happen So that's one and then the goal of that just real quick is to amplify the message of the cloud native Security white paper. I think it's a fabulous artifact. There's so much of interesting stuff But we want to make sure that people are aware of it and then understand the objectives and the key takeaways And so the more that we can do to amplify that message, I think would be great. So I will do that and the second thing is We also talked about doing some Double click kind of blogs. I know there was one blog that summarized the entire Landscare that the paper the security white paper But then there is I think there's plenty of opportunity to break it up. So I created another pr And I know it's on me to actually Provide a little bit more context around that I'm going to do that and I have also seen some people express an interest I believe it's 495 and 496 At the end of the meeting today. Maybe I will reference it In our security chat, but those are two things that I will definitely be kicking off and hopefully we can all collaborate and Get that off the ground. So those are two things that I wanted to talk about And uh, I don't know. Uh, maybe I got first time lucky. This might end up being one of our shortest meetings But is there anything else that anybody would like to talk about? So when I add a quick question on the two issues that you brought up Yes, the second part where we want to do micro blogs Was there an issue about Updating the paper with more content as well as vision too Yes, is that a separate issue from this? Yeah, I believe so. I think that is a separate issue. All right now Got you. Okay. Yeah. So there's actually a few issues that are open about the white paper So there is the retrospective That push car had opened up on it There's the micro blogs. There's the webinar and then there's the Breakout topics one, which is 495 and that's the one that you had submitted And I had tagged and related it back to the retrospective So there's a few of them that are kind of all in that same realm That I think would be good to To solidify that group either through the current white paper channel Or anything related to that or just creating a separate planning channel and vene you could probably use the SIG security events channel for planning that webinar and having that conversation We currently use it for the security day, but it's not restricted just a security day. So There's also that I think brand and do we already have a label for the White paper, right? Yeah, we do Yeah, so we we can go through and add those labels to the corresponding issues that are all related Emily does it mix that's a great point. Does it make sense at the risk of creating yet another issue to actually How do we How do we correlate? All these are the related issues. How do we typically do that? Usually it's through the labeling schema and commenting them together So I think adding the label to them all will certainly help that way anybody that's looking for anything related to that topic Very similar to how we did the assessment process labels Got it. Yep. No, I will definitely do that. I think right now we have like four or five issues I will I will take a stab at that and get that done today Yeah, and also if you see like kind of organizationally that is becoming a little bit Dispersed and difficult to manage. We also have kind of like a project tag and we have a project bot that Kind of for bigger efforts involving more people is we use it to track so if that happens you could create a kind of A meta issue and then we can label that as a project and then it may be easier to keep track from that Awesome. Yeah, I like that too Brandon. Maybe I might need your help on that. Is it just create an issue? And maybe either you or Emily can make it into a project. Is that how that would work? Yeah, so so the the main idea is kind of we There has to be a definition of what the project is kind of it has to be like a defined piece of Scoped work and then with a timeline that we can track off Okay. Yep. That's a good good idea. Thank you I so yeah, now that's great. I will definitely go and clean that up Correlated so that everybody has visibility into all the related issues and we can go from there So may I have one more time? Sorry? Yes I'm gonna hold you so so one of the Topics I wanted to discuss was um, I don't know if you need to create an issue for this but I came across this mitre framework for Kubernetes And how that how we can expand on that in our white paper in the next version. Um, so Do you guys think that'll be helpful? I feel there is a huge gap in the detection side of Kubernetes platforms today And correlating information from different bits and pieces is really hard So having that view of what are the dark patterns and what data is required to correlate And script together to be able to see and tackle in an environment. I think that'll be very helpful from an enterprise perspective So the white paper we wanted to remain project or technology specific agnostic um, even though kubernetes is like the The thing that everybody is using but for the kubernetes Detection issues that might be something that's good to do with the falco project and the kubernetes security sig Just kind of like putting together a group just to focus on those There was an article from One of the community members of falco that talked about kubernetes detection runtime security I'll see if yeah, that was that was kaize. So kaize is one of the security researchers at cystic um Yeah, I mean in terms of the mitre tech framework those are the sweet So I was part of that and so to be with her we wrote that because of a requirement from from an investment bank That kind of wanted to have something mapped to it I don't know if that you know, that could be something that could be more widespread That's more of obviously the group here to kind of decide if that's the case But it is an amazing framework to kind of say here's you know the logic that could be put here um, I just I guess I'm trying to understand like what what the end goal of Is that be kind of our best practices in the white paper? That's again as emily said a diagnostic piece there or What are we trying to do with the mitre tech framework really? So I probably would be we were having this discussion a little bit that there There were quite a number of issues that came in and said kind of like uh, it said like a Best practices or he is like he has a playbook I'm looking for a playbook for security And I think the general discussion has always that too It always varies depending on what environment you're in and also I think that It is difficult for us to kind of maintain that list for a different set of technologies that are Very agile and keep keep changing uh, I think we can kind of provide A page to reference all this material, but I don't think that we Is in scope for us to maintain And magno has a good point in the chat here. I mean if it's not an official framework I think the the tact we should have and again in my humble opinion is like you said is basically have links to You know things that could be used but basically, you know, do we want to advocate a specific one? I don't I don't know if that's something we want to specifically do Or how about this? I think that's a great point. I think uh, uh, which is Do We want to consider like uh, like a git repo or sub-git repo or something like that with the whole bunch of collated Links that that would be helpful in general that there was a There's an issue going back. I think about yeah about the micro micro side and part of the micro side was This this thing about education and then it had resources and as well as Uh, some additional information on how to do certain aspects of aspects of security um, so we want to Um, maybe if we want to kind of start up the discussion again, uh, we should Continue the conversation in the issue. Let me find it and I'll put it in the chat. It's issue number 110 Oh boy. All right going back 300 issues So yeah, there there is an issue um issue number 110. It's for a micro site It's something that we had talked about before and I believe Vinnie I had mentioned it to you as being, uh, Maybe a good place to do micro bogs for this egg okay, but I'm gonna post the link for it in the chat So this is something that we've been wanting to do for a very long time And there's a potential for a plethora of content So I don't want to lose track of this particular discussion But if folks are interested in the micro site, there's an issue you can sign up for it um, but I think a collective resource for Not necessarily specifically kubernetes security, but anything associated with cloud native security documentation resources and blogs Um frameworks as well that kind of go just just just that extra step beyond for somebody that wants like a singular repository of where to go to look for things because I've seen Tons of cross posts and various slack channels and slack work spaces about hey This is how I collect and manage all of my kubernetes related security information or docker information and so on Right awesome. Just to weigh in Yeah, go ahead Robert Hey and answer. I don't know who I think it was dan who asked the question What is the goal of of putting mitre or any framework lowercase f into The white paper I I have used that not in the specific context of kubernetes, but in two different clouds Uh for mapping incident response both in the preparation for incident response Table top exercises for incident response and then actual incident responses And of course for risk assessment So proactively assessing risk and then retroactively postmortem assessing risk. So We happen to use the mitre framework for both azure and aws clouds But lowercase f framework any framework. I think is a useful concept or tool For doing that those types of activities Yeah, so I'm kind of aware. I'm just one other thought. I'm sorry.  Go ahead magnum Apologize. Yeah. No, I just want to add to to this As I've seen this kubernetes mitre framework for a while now It was released by microsoft like april in the last year, right? So it's not as I said in the chat It's not an official framework, right? But mitre has put out a blog post recently Asking for help for for the community and company. So Uh, we can either reach out to them either as the the seek security group or with your individual companies there That's one of the things that we're doing here and Yeah, they're trying to create a uh either like a mitre framework for containers in general Or or having both one for for containers and one specific for kubernetes So maybe like a cloud native mitre framework would be a good idea to start. I don't know So yeah, that's just my thoughts there So I just to kind of clarify my thought was not like, hey, what are we why are we doing it's more like Why are we deciding like, you know the the specifics here? And so this that's great. I think it's it's it's where The mitre attack framework is is a great framework if it's not adopted Like if it's not like has something specific as you said to cloud native I think that's something that we you know, maybe we should somewhat get involved with but we shouldn't advocate anything, you know, specifically unless it's a standard that like Everyone wants to adopt. I guess I guess it's a very wishy-washy answer there but like it's I don't know if we want to draw a line and they say and then on something that hasn't been kind of um, That hasn't been kind of uh advocated out there. So Yeah, what I like about the framework is that they focus on real world scenarios, right? So they only add stuff that they see in real life attacks or like honeypots and stuff So that's what they're looking for help with So, yeah, I think it's a great framework and and if we can provide any guidance or or help or any data for them It would be a very helpful for the community as a whole I mean My my sense over there is uh, like even I'm looking at that Microsoft blog post at least the one that I posted there was You know, uh, this whole space people are still learning people are still trying to understand it So it's it's it's really good for them to understand all the different threat vectors and then the way the threats progress and so on So and and I understand it's not officially official. Uh, but maybe we can Make it into some other type of a threat framework and not call it a mitre framework, but just to help Uh educate the the the community around Generic threats for I don't know our Kubernetes and containers. Maybe that's a thought One of the things I'm sorry to bogart the meeting but I have one thought here I was I'm also in the uh, cncf Financial services user group and they're looking for like a specific like set of guidelines from a security perspective And if security is the one that's the overarching saying this is the one that we think is is You know, whatever it is I think we have to basically put our line in the sand at some point say Yes, we're going to support the mitre attack framework and hear some great concepts that you all want want to use You know out of the box, right? It's in again It's vendor agnostic because every vendor is going to be able to have you know mitre attack framework You know the discussions it's up to the end user to choose what those things are so I think yeah At some point we should probably have a working group and figure out But if we haven't already What what it is what these things are and kind of standardize on it and help mitre if we need to is my two cents In a way the the framework of choice is going to depend where people are coming from And how much time do they have available and what the s Mario is someone may opt for like Oh, we're going to do ssri. We don't need to do like full on mitre. So it could be Hey, look, these are all the frameworks that are out there like They're great. They're proven to work here are the considerations of one over the other Apply whichever is applicable and and they give an instance We don't need to get behind a particular one But I think our goal is to to educate and in turn Hey, depending on what your objective is you may Evaluate among these and choose one over the other for your project or for the implementation of that project So in the past we've talked about creating Threat matrices or assisting in projects and doing a threat matrix For themselves as part of the security assessments and when we were doing cloud native security white paper We kind of talked a little bit about Threat assessments and How much of that content should go into the white paper? White paper and I think that it might be beneficial to have That as a one of the breakout topics That way we can move forward in that space because I've also seen requests for that same information and perhaps having it broken out I think aradna had mentioned at the cast and the fast level Would also be beneficial. So not just through orchestration and containers, but also going down to serverless to Yeah, go ahead Robert You have a your hand is raised. Oh, no, that was from before. I guess I oh, okay So I think No worries I think maybe this calls for another ticket So that we can collate all our ideas put together because I know these are fantastic ideas But it's just that's just the best option where we put down all our ideas collated Have a separate working group and then figure out how we can converge and land somewhere that's useful for the community So I'll create a ticket veneer since I started the conversation Yeah, that's great. Well collaborated. Thanks. Sure. Thanks aradna lingering thought vene is when when Justin Capos did the Attack matrices for spiffy inspired two three years ago like the team that every Wednesday Every week throughout a year and they they came up with this exercise that was informed by many methodologies But everything was like just thrown out of the window and every single person came from a different background and have different opinions So perhaps we can exemplify of hey actually get people who are performing different using different frameworks and are producing or extrapolating from all of it and coming up with something better ultimately that can be like basic security approach Yeah, I like it andress. Yeah, that should definitely please make sure to put that down there. I like it a lot Aradna, would you be able to link this spiffy spire assessment as kind of like an example? within the issue I will sure. Thank you. Awesome So it's a bit different Suggestion here, but maybe we shouldn't fight somebody from mitre to come talk to the group because Great idea My company has an NDA with them And they've got two divisions, you know one is to exploit industrialization commercialization things The more researchy folks are working on a unified ontology for cyber security, which I know is separate from this threat landscape stuff which tends to be more practical in our organization the ops people are very Focused on the attack surface and reconciling the telemetry from our tooling into the into the threat, but across information security more broadly and especially looking at dev sec ops The threat matrix is not well integrated the mitre framework for The attack surfaces are not isn't quite as well integrated So that's what I am trying to say is mitre Other folks that mitre are interested in broader issues as we are So it might be interested I could extend an invitation to see if we could get somebody to talk there. They're very cagey Maybe other people on the call have talked to them They're You know, they're an ff rdc, but they're reluctant to talk About things that they think are proprietary even though it's federal dollars often that are just promoting the work that they're doing So it can be frustrating to talk to them But there's a lot of interesting work there that they're that they're trying to do and if you try to do automation of brown security You're going to find yourself trying to do things with uco or one of the mitre Taxonomy so it might be, you know, if we're on our forward-looking aspects of the work we do here It might be, you know, at least good to invite them. So there we're of what we're doing too Yeah, mark. That's a great point. I do have some connections at mitre as well through nest So I'll reach out to them as well and see if they are interested in working with us on this Um, and then get back to the team and or include them a dish So, I know magno made a comment We can reach out to the mitre attack for continuous team lead Which was one that posted the blog. Uh, do you want to elaborate on that magno? Sure. Yeah, there's a Link to a blog post and mitre Engineerity posted on december 17 on on the chat there. I can post it again So gen burns is the one that's leading this mitre for containers mitre attack for containers I've reached out to her already like for For us to provide some some data and information related to what we've seen out there in the wild, but Yeah, we I have her email and we can definitely Contact her and ask her to join in a next meeting or or any other date Yeah, but I think that's a great idea I mean the more input that we can get from those folks and to figure out how exactly we can Collaborate and once again for me making it really really useful for the community to understand this is It's the better. I think yeah And I think once again, please feel free to make sure to put that down in the ticket that aradna is going to open on this as well Sounds like it's lining up as a series of great guest speakers Speaking of great guest speakers. We actually have a presentation scheduled for our next meeting on software factory from jonathan meadows So just wanted to let everybody know that Yep, perfect Yeah, I think we have also We have a string of good presentations this month. I think on 20 of also we have the record project which is on um On signing transparency similar to the certificate transparency So it sounds like february is another good month for lots of presentations Is that the rickshaw brandon the rickshaw rickshaw rickshaw, okay. Yeah Yep, so we got it lined up for the next couple of weeks Awesome guys. That was a great Discussion here. I'm looking forward to what we do with the the mitre framework in the context of containers And uh, you know going one last time. Uh, any anything else that you guys would like to talk about? Uh, if it's the last option, I just uh mentioned that we did have our policy work group meeting We have those at 8 a.m. Pacific every other week On wednesdays, so uh, I I think that there's some magic process that occurs where that because we use the same zoom Uh, and i'm not sure how it gets archived, but I think there is some process that can occur to archive those videos So i'll i'll follow up, uh Jim usually handles. I don't think he's on right now But we'll try to post that on the and there's a google doc with the agenda notes Today's talk. We had a presentation About mapping our the policy work group has produced a kubernetes crd for policy report output And presentation today was about mapping that to oscal and specifically for those familiar with oscal the sar the assessment report or assessment results so anyone's interested in that you can review the Recording when it's posted or just reach out on slack and we'll We'll try to send it to everyone Actually, Robert would you is there a link that you could provide to the your meeting notes document? Yeah, if you could post that it's slack, that'd be fantastic Yeah, I'll post that in slack. Okay. I'm on a mobile device. So it's hard to Switch windows, but yeah, I'll get that on the slack for everyone. That would be great. Thank you All right. Well, uh Another question Sure. Yeah Um, there were a couple of issues that were opened um Just pulling them up about the automation of The security assessment process and creating tooling and uh, I missed the the meeting Where uh, when they were discussed, I just wanted to ask about the differences between them. There was a mini discussion in the github issues about that, but if someone can Clarify because that sounds very very interesting Unrelevant for me. I just want to understand anyone's there so Unless anybody else wants to go I can take a stab at refreshing everyone's On on that topic. I think what came about was You know in the context of the assessments and how can we evaluate projects and how can we automate a lot of those concepts? So I think that was just a lot of discussion around it And I don't think we landed anywhere in particular But once again, that's another one where we weren't quite sure Uh, there was some concerns on cost and operationalizing it and liveliness and how do you keep all the projects updated and so on So so that's where we were at. I mean, it was a it was a good topic to talk about But I think the once again the devil is in the details and we really need to understand the scope and converge on that all right, so um Maybe a more specific question. Oh, yeah No, I was going to say I I think just for the I don't know whether you're kind of thinking about the in terms of the security assessment work group issues that we're looking at but I think for now, um, you know, since that's kind of Something that is just started the discussion on we should not include that and Kind of the the specific points that we discussed during the work group Just so that we don't we don't grow the scope too much. Okay. Thanks Okay, thank you Well, I think, uh, I'm gonna finally call it folks. Thank you very much. Uh, Happy new year and look forward to a great year ahead. Cheers. Fene, you did a great job Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Cheers. Thank you everyone. Bye. Bye. Thank you


What's up guys? I'm not a plumber. I don't even play a plumber on YouTube, except for today. What we have here today is a water softener, and this is at my house.  I'm going to show you guys what I did to rebuild this water softener without having to spend the big money on buying a new one. If you guys want to learn how to do it, and want to see what I did, learn from my mistakes, make sure you check out the video, hit the thumbs up button. I do HVAC primarily, but I've done a lot of plumbing in the past. I just don't like doing it. Let's go ahead and get started. This is a 2003. It's not really McLean water softener. It was the value series. It just says value on the back. This was a McLean head. It's got a metering head here. We've got the stuff to rebuild that. We've got the piston and the little o-rings and stuff in there. We've got the resin and the bed that goes in here, and so we're going to do the whole thing. As you guys know, I hate plumbing, so we're going to just basically document this because I didn't see a whole lot on this particular model, but yet I know this is a very popular water softener. It's an American made one too, I believe. Yeah, made in the USA. That's what we're doing today. I've been running res care in it. I've got obviously a well here. We're going to first unplug it. We're going to go ahead and pop this head off. I've got some compression fittings here. This is what I had available when I started this thing up, which will actually come in handy. We'll be able to bypass and be able to turn it back on so that she least can have regular water. I don't know if I really want hard water in the system, but we're going to do that. We're also going to shock the well too. Water softener like this somewhere around 800 bucks, 900 bucks for a good one. We're rebuilding it grand total for about $260. What does all the work is the resin that's inside there, so you're going to see what that is. It just looks like BBs. We're going to go ahead and pop this thing loose and get her apart. We'll just do it piece by piece as we do it. For those people out there don't know what these are. These are Nipix pliers. They're not just regular old claw hammer type pliers. They literally are a down pressure crescent wrench. I've had people in the past say I was doing something that would make a technician cringe, and this one here I've already got broke loose. There's no o-ring or nothing in there. Getting that nut there undone, it's kind of in the way of this clip here. This is supposed to just pop right off.  Just pull it right out. It's got a little lever right there, and that just comes right off. So we've got that undone, and this should come undone now. Pretty easy. There we go. See all that is just a C-shape there. Before we get to that clip there, we're going to go ahead and just take out these two screws that are right here, and that's going to allow us to pull this clock mechanism off, and then we'll be able to get to it a little easier. We've got a piston here that's going to get replaced. I'm pretty sure we need to pull that pin out. There we go. Cut the pin out. We're going to put that right in our little cover here. We don't lose anything. Looks like that just kind of comes undone. As soon as we get that piece there undone and the power wire there undone, it should pop right off. We're going to head and unhook this plastic piece here. We're going to probably let all these things soak in CLR or something of the sorts. It really doesn't look that bad from what I'm seeing. You can see that there's some black. Now we can get to that nut there and then pop that piece off there. We've got that piston here, which I've got a new one of those. I'm going to go grab some of the parts so you can see what we've got to work with. We've got our funnel here, which funnels it down through the end of the tank. I don't know if we're going to need the rock resin stuff here. It's a sand bed basically. Here is the piston, which there we go. It's for the 1500, 2500, whatever. There's that. Here is the seals and the spacers. Then there's a few different miscellaneous pieces here. The guy that sold me all this is a water treatment place. This guy rebuilds them himself. Then when I get done, I'm going to shock my well, which is chlorinating the well. I've got that there. Then far as your grease, I guess you want to make sure you use silicone grease, not planters grease. Like I said, right there is that piece. That should pull right out of there. I have never rebuilt one of these. I've only redone the resin, so you're going to have to work with me a bit here. That pulled right out. I ended up taking my linesmins, ended up just kind of pinching here and then pry it against the brass, which obviously did not leave any marks. Then that pulled out. Not horrible shape. It's kind of nasty right there. Some of our other things. We're going to take that apart, but I want to focus on the resin first. This right here should pull right out. There we go. There is the top of it. You can see the water comes in through the oval shape and vice versa on the piece down through the center there. Then that valve thing that you've seen, there's all the guts. That's where all the spacers and things are at. That's going to move back and forth, I believe, to channel it whatever direction it needs to go through. It's going to allow it to come through the out, through the end, because you've got obviously a place where it's siphoning in here. You've got draining going back out through the white tube. So again, a little miss of everything going on here. Yeah, it looks kind of nasty. We got the water sub pump right there. Let's go ahead and just drain it into there. Telling how heavy it is. Once the water's out of it, we may just take it outside and drain the resin out of it. So we just drain that out. I don't want to see if we're starting to lose some resin there. Look at that stuff. Yeah, that looks a little ratty. Let's see where we're out here level-wise. So I'd put it back to the same place. Man, that thing's lucky if it's up to here. I went ahead and did it in this tub here.  It's like ball bearings. So we're going to be, I spilled a little bit down here. They really don't look horrible from what I can see. I'm just putting all new in there. This thing, like I said, was started to be used in 2003, January. And I think it's just plum gotten old. Yeah, look, see, I think it's just because it's dry versus wet. So I've taken this Venturi-type device here completely apart. You can see the black stuff. There is a old well, oil well, within a half mile of here. And so I would speculate we've got oil in the ground around here. And I obviously am drinking some of it, which probably ain't that good. But like I said, this has been an accumulation because I just don't wipe off very good at all. I mean, it wipes off as you can see. But yeah, I mean, this how long it took for this to accumulate. I mean, this house was finished in December 2002 and moved in January of 2003. So it's 18 years old as of today in November of 2021. This here is like a little rubber ducky. It's got like a little beak here. The water comes through and then keeps the crap from coming back in at the other direction.  There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing's broke. At this point, there ain't a whole lot I can do. There's another tube over here. This other tube here is kind of goes on there. Yeah, I understand that. We're using a little bit of this citrus blast cleaner here. It's gotten it pretty clean. It still doesn't make me feel much better about what's in my actual water. Definitely going to have to have it tested. I've been using bottled water for the last few years, but I drink quite a bit from the faucet. Unfortunately, you know, this is not very comforting when you see stuff like that. Not comforting at all. And city water is not really available where we're at. Cleaned up pretty good. I've gotten it completely scrubbed, took a scrub brush to it with that degreaser. I, looking back, would have known about this. I would have just bought a new one. Did not know that it was going to be like this.  That's just, that's troublesome, to say the least. What I'm doing is just using one of my drill bits to shove it down through the center. I've sprayed the degreaser inside the tube and basically just shoving it on through and getting it clean. There you go. Got some of that nasty stuff off the end there. Okay. Well, everything's clear now. Obviously, I've got a problem with the well. I'm not sure what exactly is available to take care of this. I'm sure there's got to be something. At this point, there ain't nothing more we can do. We just got to get it back together and get it up and running.  The ball free floats around in there like it's supposed to. It, you blow through the end here. Got it all deburred too. It had a little edge there. It was a little sharp. So, you bird that. If you blow through it, it's got, you know, check valve action. If you breathe in on it, it comes right through. Put our stick back down in there. You're going to make sure we get it centered, which you can kind of feel the center down there. I kind of went off of the gray mark here where you can see where the stuff was setting at, which I kind of marked it on the outside right here. So, it should fill up about that area there with what he gave me. The guy that set me up with everything I need does this, you know, pretty much every day multiple times and has been doing it for years and years. So, let's go ahead and get this part here covered up. So, we can put a balloon condom, whatever you want over top of that, piece of tape, whatever, and then start pouring stuff down in there. So, what it is, I used my little hook tool here to dig out the spacers that are in between there. They've got rubber seals and then a spacer, a rubber seal, and what happens is that piston I showed you earlier goes back and forth and channels the water, whether it be through that one there, that one there, whether it's going through here or wherever. I'm no softener expert, but I just know that they wanted those changed, so I had to dig them out, which we've got it all down here. And then I got the seal or the o-ring that goes in the circular spot there with that, I call it a turbulent, I forget exactly what it's called, but the thing that we just worked on a minute ago, it goes right in there and I got a new o-ring over there. So, I'm going to count these up, make sure I've got the same amount of parts for going back in there. Just looked up online the 2500 head and now I know the correct order for the spacers. I was a little confused, so it's going to be the nylon, then a rubber, then the plastic, then a rubber, and so on and so on until your very end. We had a total of six rubber rings and then we had five of the spacers, which I destroyed a couple of them, getting them out. I guess there's a tool that will remove them and there's also a tool that can put it in there. They say it's nice to have, but don't necessarily have it. We're going to go ahead and get those lubed up and slid in there. I went ahead and ran a wire brush, which this is a inch and three-eighths, inch and a quarter, so OD would be inch and three-eighths. I ran that three there, was very careful to go only one direction with it. That cleaned it up, then I rinsed it out. Everything seems to be looking pretty good in there, so we should both slide that in and then get this thing back together. To make this kind of easy to see, so you get the spacer, the nylon, you got rubber, then you got the plastic rubber, plastic rubber, blah, blah, blah, blah, and rubber at the top. I'm going to lube that up, slide it on into the brass body, and hopefully everything seats in there correctly. So we ended up doing, was using four of the spacers here to continue shoving it further into the valve body. So now it's fully inserted all the way to the very back. You can tell, by the way, the spacers line up with the cuts in the bottom of the valve body. We've just taken out the four screws on the metering head here. We've got it popped out of there a little bit. Here's the propeller. That there, they said clean it up with some CLR and stuff, but I really don't have any type of lime or rust in there. Probably have plenty of lubrication from the freaking oil, but yeah, we're pretty good there on that. So I'm going to go ahead and get that o-ring replaced on the head here. I don't know if that was really worth taking apart. All it is, is it just spins as water goes through and it turns the dial. It's nothing extravaganza here. So I was going to clean that up a little bit and put her back together with a new o-ring. Going ahead and clean it up a little bit with the brush wheel. Got some of this corrosion tarnish, whatever, off of it. Looks a little bit better. It could be polished off with some polish cleaning type of stuff, I think, for brass. It probably would get it. Clean that all up there. It looks a lot better than what it did. Got the new o-ring on there. So we just got to lubricate that up and slide it on. The impeller got that cleaned up. It just goes in there like that right there. And it spins like that. There's a gear in there. The other piece there fits on that little spindle. See how it spins? And then I took and put a scratch on this before I took it out, but it just so happens that that dot right there and that nipple looking thing there, all go to the top. Blow in there and you can see it spin. So we're definitely free spinning. We just loosened up these screws, taken that off. We got o-rings for here. One that goes down in there, I believe. So that's going to get replaced. All right, we just pulled the top off there. There's the other o-ring there. There's a screen. So the most part, we really don't have a lot of gunk in there.  I mean, it's kind of disturbing. But there's the pieces there that go in there. So we'll get those put in there. You can pretty well just follow along and take out one, put one back in. This is, I've never done this before and it's pretty brain dead. What we've done so far is we put a piece of tape over this thing. Like I said, I've seen people use condoms and all kinds of different things. It's not that crazy that, you know, it's going to like penetrate through there. So we've got that all the way down. There's like a, at the bottom of this tank, there's a spot that's kind of more pointed. And so it went right down into that point. And I went ahead and poured a little bit in there to begin with, just to kind of get a start as everything's kind of centered now. That was just a quarter of a bag. So now we've got the rest of this bag. You can see it's kind of a gold color, similar to that right there. It's really interesting is, is when you tilt it, it, the way it starts to dry, you see it change color there. But I'm hoping that basically it's fouled. That looks like oil residue to me on top there. The laggy down here is really bad. So it looks worse than what it really is to a point. And we're going to fill up to about that mark right there, which is a lot less than what I originally figured it would take. Went ahead and lubricated that on the inside and around the outside of that. We've got our head piece here, ready to go. That's got new O-ring there at the bottom, new O-ring there. Everything's lubed on that. We got the new flat seal on top underneath that stainless in between the brass and the plastic. And then there's a screen in there and then a white orifice looking thing that had to be screwed into place. So we just gotta slide that down the rest of the way. We got it right down in there nice and tight. Gonna go ahead and put our ring back on. That piece here goes right around like that. This one here locks onto that one. It doesn't compress anything. It just keeps it from popping up because when that's pressurized it's going to lift up. That's just squeezing it from top to bottom. That went on there, which locked into between the two of them. One of the last things that's going to have to go in there is this right here. What that does is it actually moves back and forth. There's a motor right there and it pushes this forward and backwards. And what it does is that green thing moves forward and back and it directs the flow of water one way or the other. The meter here spins the little timer mechanism here. The clock that's plugged in the wall. Only thing it does is it tells it what time it is in the morning that it goes into regeneration, which generally I think is two o'clock. So we just gotta finish putting the few pieces onto it. I've got the brass all cleaned up. We should be able to hopefully reuse everything. Everything's kind of brass to brass and copper to copper.  Slides are in. This here freely moves in and out. I got that silicone on there. That should be spreading across. When I put that head on it should push this the rest of the way back in. I put a little bit of that silicone grease on those fittings.  That piece right there pulled in perfect to the head. We've got everything back together. I popped that back off to kind of show you again. I don't know if I got it on video or not, but there's that little orifice, the white mylar plastic thing there and then that screen. That little cover there goes over top of it.  Got everything back together here and there. Got the time set. I've got the pin there. They gave you a new pin for it. There it is. Right there you can see it. So that's on there ready to go. That's the part, like I said, it goes in and out based off of when it calls for it. There's the actuator and things like that, which that changed the valve back here in the back. That's how it siphons the salt water in to clean the resin. The salt doesn't actually soften the water. It just cleans the resin, but I'm sure you already knew that. I went ahead and closed my bypass, opened my outgoing side and went upstairs and got the closest fixture, which is the bathtub. So it's going to just shoot right over to that and up. That will help keep anything that might be in the pipes that might have broke loose from going through some of the faucets that have strainers. So I'm just opening this up slowly before we open it up all the way. So I'm just going to let it fill up. Now I'm going to run through regeneration that way. I know that it's actually siphoning. I've got res care on this thing, which is a resin treatment system. This stuff here actually helps take care of any iron build up on it, automatically filled right there on that little container right there. That container has a little wick in it. And what it does is it slowly adds some of that resin stuff at a predetermined drip level. You can kind of see there. Get a better shot for you. We're a little bit low on it, but yeah, it has a little wick and it just comes and just dumps it down into there. We've got our resin good to go. I can hear the water going through and it sounds like it's starting to feed through. I just put it into the first stage of regeneration. I'm not seeing any leaks. It purged out some air looking pretty good. Water comes down through the tube. It comes over and goes into the sub pump. So as long as we don't have any leaks, we're all done. So if you guys enjoyed the video and you want to see more like it, don't forget to hit the thumbs up button. Don't forget to check us out on Facebook and Instagram. And just remember, I'm not a plumber. I just play one on YouTube. So until next time guys, we'll catch you on the next one.