Okay, so let's start with multi-level models and this will be mainly conceptual work today and then starting on Tuesday next week we can hit the ground running and actually do some work. So there are lots of ways to justify multi-level models, but the most general kind of epistemological justification that I like that I prefer is this one. Let me introduce you to it through the biography of a really impressive individual musicologist, Clive Wehring. He's still alive and British musicologist and conductor was at the height of his career and then got herpes encephalitis infection. So herpes is a strange virus in the sense that depending on which tissue it affects it manifests a completely different disease and he got one that went to the brain and when herpes goes in the brain it causes really severe brain damage to his camera. It's often deadly, but he survived.  It's funny, his motor memory is largely intact, his procedural memory. So he knows how to make coffee, but the first time he tastes it, he's like, wow, this is the first time I've ever had coffee. He doesn't remember ever having had coffee, but he knows how to make it. Likewise, he was a very accomplished musicologist and conductor and music historian and he still can play piano and conduct symphonies, but if you ask him if he can do these things, he'll insist that he's never done it before. And as soon as he stops playing the piano, one minute later, he will have forgotten that he just played it. He's like the proverbial goldfish in the bowl. Every time he turns around, the castle is there again. He's like, ooh, what a nice castle. He spins around and doesn't see it. Ooh, nice castle.  They're rare, but people are interested, of course. If you learn a lot about the brain when it's not working right, it's often the best way to study the system. It's when it's broken. And his wife wrote a fantastic and very touchy book about their life together because when he got this illness, physicians really didn't know how to treat people like this because it's incredibly rare. And his wife did a lot of work figuring out how to help him. And they've made great progress, as I understand, in helping him lead a much more normal life.  So I give you citations to that in the notes, by the way. It's pretty interesting. And I think there was a documentary made about it. So I wanted you to think about that. This is my mnemonic device to help you think about a statistical modeling. Clive wearing lives in this world where he can't remember what happened the minute it goes. So he learns things in the short term. He makes some coffee and he's making the coffee and he learns whether he likes coffee for a moment. Then he puts the coffee down and he forgets he ever had coffee. Next cup of coffee is the new cup of coffee. Of course, we're not like this because we don't have interrogated amnesia. We can learn going forward and our past experiences inform our expectations for current events. So let's think about beyond Clive wearing's cup of coffee. When you get cups of coffee at cafes in different parts of the world. So I'm trying to hear a cafe in Paris and a cafe in Berlin on the right. And let's say we take some simple measurement like how long it takes you to get your cup of coffee. But it could be anything that you want to record about your cup of coffee. You go to the Paris cafe, say it takes you seven minutes for your extremely rude waiter to bring you a cup of coffee. If you've ever spent time in Paris, you know this is accurate. Yes, no, true, exactly. This is a tourist photo, right? And I think the Berlin one is more accurate because it kind of looks like it's about to rain, which is exactly what is probably about to happen. So it takes you like seven minutes to get your cup of coffee. Then the next week you're in Berlin and you're at a cafe, you order a cup of coffee. Before you get your cup of coffee, what's your expectation for how long it's going to take? Now, seven informs it, but now here's the thing. You're not sure it's going to be exactly the same because it's a different cafe. And not only that, but even at the same cafe, it won't take you exactly the same amount of time on every day. So you know the variation. But nevertheless, your experience at the Paris cafe is informative. It's useful to remember that, even though you're in any context. It's not a completely different context. It's still a cafe. It's still just a cup of coffee, right? So enterogramnesia would have you completely forget the Paris cafe and act like in Berlin it's the first cup of coffee you've ever had, right? Now here's the trick though. It isn't just that Paris informs Berlin when you get the cup of coffee in Berlin. But once you receive your cup of coffee in Berlin, you should also update your estimate of how long on average it takes to get a cup of coffee in that cafe in Paris. Right? Because that was a finite sample too. Now you have equal amounts of data in both. The fact that you visited one first is irrelevant to the learning, right? Information moves forward and backwards in time inside a statistical model. That's the speed of life. It really doesn't matter because it's a joint probability distribution. And so you're compelled logically, if you are Bayesian or a Bayesian model, to update in both directions, regardless of which order you visit them. To do otherwise would be to commit yourself to enterogramnesia and live the life of the goldfish. Does this make some sense? So all the models we have looked at so far in the course are goldfish. They have enterogramnesia. As they move from one cluster, say it's an academic department or an individual or any of the other kinds of clusterings, nations that we've had data sets to another, they don't use any of the information from the other clusters to improve estimates of the one they're in. And all those clusters have finite samples, so there's a pooling of information that's available that can improve estimates for the whole collective of parameters. And this is what multi-level models do. They break the enterogramnesia of classical statistical models, and they use all the information optimally, conditional on the assumptions of the model, of course. This is not magic, right, to learn across. But you don't have to get all the assumptions exactly right. You just have to do better than being an amnesia, right? Use some information. How much pooling you want to do? That is how much you let your experience in Berlin influence your estimate for Paris, and vice versa, will of course depend upon also your estimate of the population of cafes. What is that like? If cafes are all pretty much the same, and in Europe they are, in the U.S. they're a completely different experience because you're expected to take your cup of coffee in your hand and walk out, right? So it's like an assembly line. But in Europe you're expected to sit down with your coffee like a civilized human being and drink it. And so you guys know what I mean. So they're all pretty much the same, and so you don't expect it to be wildly different in the amount of time you're going to wait for your cup of coffee. There are other, so that would mean you pool a lot of information, because you're approaching. You don't meet. You still expect them to be somewhat variable, but you're approaching the case where they're all the same cafe, epistemologically speaking, right? In which case you just pool all the data. Yeah. Is that a hand between us? No. Okay. I'm just like seeing hands everywhere. There are cases where you don't want to pool very much at all. So here's another example to think about. There are things that are much more variable than cafes. These are goat chili peppers. They're called goat peppers. I ate a bunch of these when I was doing field work in Tanzania. And I always had them in my pockets because these protect you against intestinal infections. That's the main thing. You know, spicy food kills gut parasites of all sorts. And so I spiked all my food with these things and I stayed very healthy after a while. And the thing about goat peppers is they're only barely domesticated, I would say. And even peppers from the same plant are wildly different in how spicy they are. So you have to like gingerly taste the first bit of an individual goat pepper to figure out how much pain you might be in if you put the whole thing in your rice. And some of them are really mild, even from the same plant. It's very frustrating.  I need this much of it in my rice. And oh, this one's really mild. The whole thing goes in. Right? Or maybe two of them. But in this case, the pepper you just ate gives you very little information. Right? So you get a plant, right? An individual pepper is off of it. The first pepper you try gives you very little information about the next pepper. Very little information about the average on the plant. The plants do vary in their average concentration because they have been artificially selected to be spicier than they would be naturally. But there's still so much variation that the benefits of pooling information across tastes of peppers is much lower. And the amnesiac models do pretty well in these cases. Right? Because generalization isn't very valuable. It can be like the case of all cafes or radically different. You can do a cup of coffee. Does this make sense? So multi-level models also, as a consequence, attempt to estimate these features of the population of objects. They have new parameters in them that are the mean and the standard deviation at the minimum of these populations of things, whether they be cafes or individuals or goat peppers. And learning about the population as you estimate the features of each cluster in the population helps a ton in accuracy of estimation. And that's what I want to... This is the way I want to justify to you the basic justification for multi-level models. And that will do good things for you, but the primary thing is they use the data better. They get more information out of the data than if you were an amnesiac. Right? Okay, so... Here's an example from earlier when we looked at the academic departments from the UC Berkeley data. Remember, we have these different departments. When you estimate an intercept for each, we do much better in posterior prediction and we don't get tricked by the fact that female applications are mainly for departments that are superior to ENF with really low admissions rates. Nevertheless, we left information on the table because the numbers of applications submitted to different departments do vary quite a lot. And, look, they're all academic departments and they're sampling variation in each. So it's like cafes, right? There's variation among them. If we can learn about that variation, then we can decide how much information we should transfer across to improve estimates. It's a little bit magical right now, I'm sure, because we haven't looked at the machinery of it, so we'll do that in a little bit. We're trying to give you the idea of recognizing a situation in which it might be profitable. So there's a standard language here. The models we've been using up to this point in the course are often called fixed-effects models. Any of the parameters aren't from... Well, it's the opposite of varying effects. So I'm going to punt on what that is to show you an example. Let's just say everything we've done so far is simple. And these models have enterogram amnesia, but like live-wearing or the goldfish in the boat, seeing that castle being excited every time. So every new cluster or an individual, a pond, we're going to do tadpoles today, so that's where the pond's going to come from. A road, a classroom is some new world to the model. It uses only the data from that particular cluster to estimate the parameters that are unique to that cluster. And that sounds reasonable, and so you realize that that forces you to be an amnesiac because if you just came from a different pond or a different road or a different classroom, you learned something that's generalizable, but the question is how much. And to answer how much you can generalize, you need to know something about the population of these clusters. And that's what multilevel models do. They remember information across clusters and they pool that information in savvy ways determined by their estimates of the shape of the population. So there are properties of clusters and they come from some statistical population but we can't see it. But the cafes or the goat peppers or the classrooms or individuals are all samples from some statistical population. If we knew the average and variation at the minimum of that population, we could figure out optimally in a Bayesian way how to pool information across data in the sample. So I appreciate that this could be a little mystical. So if you go to the, typically in these kind of abstract audit experiments, you can get some insight by thinking about extreme cases.  And I ask you, what's your prediction for that classroom? Well, you'll use the posterior distribution of the population of classrooms you've already studied. That gives you your prior for this new classroom. Okay, now when you examine that new classroom, you get to update that prior. Prior is the population for each classroom, right? Because each classroom is sampled from that population. So if you've got a posterior distribution for the shape of that population, you can statistically sample a classroom from it. That gives you a prior for the features of each classroom. Once you observe the test scores for that classroom, you update that to the posterior distribution for the classroom. But now you have to feed that information back into your estimate about the population as well. And so now you get a posterior of the prior for the classroom, which is, yes, turtles all the way down. I told you it was going to get there. That's how the pooling works jointly. Now I'm going to show you the model, and maybe this will make a little bit more sense. This is a fundamentally psychologically difficult thing to think about. The cool thing is your brain does this. I don't think it does it analytically exactly the same way these models, but you're not an amnesiac. And you do pool information across similar things as you define them cognitively. Absolutely. Tables, cafes, Starbucks, right? But these things are categories. And people do generalize automatically across them. We just like models that are at least as savvy as undergraduates. There are no undergrads here. So I guess that's it. OK. So let's shift gears a little bit, although I'll tell you why this is relevant. So what you're looking at here is a chart of organ donation consent percentages in the population across different nations. And there are four here on the left where the legal policy is that people have to opt in. They have to, like, you know, sign the back of their driver's license or send in a form to say that, yes, when I die, please use my organs to save other people's lives or something like that. And so the United States is also an opt-in, right? I think maybe it varies by state to state. Probably doesn't look like everything else in this crazy content. But I think nationwide, we're almost entirely nationwide, we're opt-in. And those nations' proportions of organ donation are really low because you have to do something to join to do it. If you poll in these nations and ask people whether they think organ donation is a good idea, almost 100% say it is. Not quite 100%, but almost 100%, dude. The countries in blue are cases where the law is opt-out. You sign the back of your driver's license to say, no, do not harvest my kidneys. And I guess you could write that on the back of your driver's license. And in these countries, nearly everybody, except in Sweden where there's an amazing opt-out rate, it's interesting, are almost at 100%. And public opinion across these nations, at least on this slide, barely differs in terms of how much people think it's a good idea to be an organ donor. In almost all of these countries, people agree, almost 90% agree that it's a great idea to be an organ donor. The point of this is that defaults are very powerful things. Not just in legal systems and healthcare systems, which is what really this is an aspect of. But also in statistical and scientific methods, the default procedure that you must opt out of has an incredible force on the nature of our work. And so in this case, I want to argue something that may seem unreasonable, but I think over time it will not seem so unreasonable, is that multi-level regression deserves to be the default form of regression. There was a time when ordinary linear regression seemed fancy to people. And there's still a few people on campus who feel that way. And not very many.   And now we're in a case where multiple regression is pretty default. You can't say like that's fancy, right? That's a standard thing. So generation by generation, what's the default? Climes up, it rags itself. And I think it's time that we've ratcheted up multi-level because the software is available on your phones to fit these models. And it's not that much harder and you get better estimates in nearly every data context from a multi-level model. It's the power of defaults. That said, there are definitely situations in which you don't need multi-level models. So opting out is okay. There's nothing normally wrong with it. But again, it's just the power of defaults. Let's force people to justify opting out. No, don't take my kidding. No, these cafes are so different from one another. Or I have so much data that it won't matter. And I'll give you illustrations. So we work through the data examples of cases where opting out is fine. But the default is a powerful thing. And I want to encourage it that way. Okay. So practical goals for the slides to follow in all of next week. I'm going to introduce multi-level models to you in a mechanistic way. The main concepts to get are called shrinkage and pooling. There are aspects of the same process of not forgetting as you move from cluster to cluster, but also generalizing only the right amount. The right amount according to what you've learned about the population as you go. My goal is going to be to give you intuition about why these models produce better estimates as a consequence of remembering things moving from cluster to cluster. I'm going to show you how to fit these models with math to stand. Math is dead to us. It will not fit these models. Well, I'd say for the pure Gaussian-Gaussian model, actually it won't be such a bad job. But that's the special case. Outside of that, you're done. Show you methods for plotting and comparing as always. And then I think at the end of next week, I may get started on it, but certainly at the beginning of the week after, I want to generalize this to the case where we can have continuous categories. And this is a family of models often called Gaussian process regression where we have, we want to do shrinkage and pooling across continuous categorizations where individuals or units are taking different amounts of dimension that governs how similar they are. So like age groups, right? Or location is the one that ecologists are really going to be interested in, right? Spatial autocorrelation problems. Phylogenetic distance is another example, right? There are categories of a sort, but there are an infinite number of them. But some of them are closer to the others. And that's different than the categories we've worked with so far because all those categories are equally dissimilar from one another. There are unordered categories. And you want to learn across them. I'll show you how to do that with Gaussian processes. It's a really useful thing. That's my megalomaniacal objective. Okay. So functionally speaking, as end users of these models, you'll want to use them when you have clustering in the data. And this happens with vast majority of data sets, which is why I say this deserves to be the default form of regression. Classrooms within schools, students within classrooms, grades within students, questions within exams. I once did a multi-level analysis of the after-money exams like Dave. DA's hated it. But you learn a lot about your test from these things. The basic idea is here, we have repeat measures of units, right? Biologists learn this as pseudo-replication, which makes it sound like a disease. This is a good thing. You want data sets with pseudo-replication. You're using a model which ignores this fact when you have repeat measures of the same unit. So if you're really wrong with having a repeat measure of the same unit, you want to aim for that, because more data is good. When you use a model that doesn't match the structure of the data generation, then you get into trouble, and that's usually what pseudo-replication refers to in biology. Often we end up with imbalance in sampling as well, such that some of the clusters have been sampled a lot more than others. It's like some students don't come to class very often, so you have fewer test scores for them. That means you have a less estimate of how good a student they are. So if you just naively ignore the clustering structure, some students dominate the inference because you have more data from them. This happens in lots of data sets, especially things that aren't experimental, but even experiments, because you can design the best experiment in the world that it ain't how it's going to play out. Let me tell you, when you actually collect that data, some units are not going to work on some day, or along will come a bear and empty your trap, or whatever you think it's happening. It doesn't always work out quite right, so expect imbalance. We had some examples earlier where we could have used multi-level modeling. We had individuals and families in the Kalahari Saan data, species and clades in the primate milk data, nations and continents, pools and chimpanzees and blocks. We're going to reanalyze the chimp data in the multi-level context, and applicants and departments will also come back to that in a multi-level way. Let me give you the first... I think I got 20 minutes here, so I got time to give you a first worked example. There's a data set in the Rethinking Library called Read Frogs. This is Ben Bulkers Read Frog experimental data. These are field experiments where they captured Read Frog eggs and had them drop into experimental... They were buckets, but they're called tanks in the data. They're buckets, basically. So the eggs are laid on leaves, and when they actually fall down into these buckets, it's suspended under them, and then the tadpoles can move around these buckets and manipulate the densities of these buckets. So it's a great kind of field experiment on predator defense and aggregation and so on. I cite the paper in the book. Take a look if you're interested in things like this. We're going to be interested in it because there's clear clustering, and there's lots of heterogeneity across the tanks and the outcomes. The outcome of interest is survival. And survival, why? Well, tadpoles get eaten by things. There are vicious arthropod predators, like the one displayed here, that love delicious tadpoles. And also then tadpoles eat tadpoles, too, but the species I don't think cannibalism is very common. So there's a bunch of experimental treatments where they vary the density and the size, initial size of the tadpoles, and then with them without predators. So we're going to ignore those predictors for now. We might come back to it in a homework problem next week. And instead, I'm just going to say, those treatment effects generate a lot of variation in survival of tadpoles in the buckets. And so you can view each tadpole's outcome, one or zero, whether it lives, as one cup of coffee from a cafe. Each bucket is a cafe. So you learn something about each bucket, and that information helps you understand survival in the other buckets as we go. So we're going to build a multi-level model of tadpole survival in this context. Here's the conceptual structure about it. We've got tadpoles and tanks. They're different treatments. The outcome's the number surviving. We're going to look at two basic models. First, we're going to fit yeoldee dummy variable model, where we have a dummy variable for each tank. That's the amnesiac model that does no cooling. I'm going to remind you how that works. And you've seen models like that before. We did it with the UC Berkeley admissions data. I'm just going to replicate that structure. Then we're going to do the multi-level model, which is barely different, but does a much, much better job of coping with these data and you learn a lot more from it. It'll help me illustrate shrinkage and pooling and why that helps with accuracy. Okay. And no, I don't know what spunky tadpole is, but I Googled tadpole, and it was there. So you're welcome. When there's only words on a slide, it makes me uncomfortable. That's just how it is, so I need something on my slides. Here's the tadpole model that just has a dummy variable for each tank. So we're just estimating a unique intercept for each tank. And I'm going to do this in the form where we don't explicitly code dummy variables, but we use this trick of indexing. We have a vector of intercepts, and we have a tank index variable. I will show you the code to do this in a moment, in case you've forgotten. But we did this with the Berkeley data, didn't we? Or the CHIP data? It was the CHIP ACR data. We did it with the CHIP ACRs, right? Okay. So S of i is the number of individuals surviving in tank i. This is a binomial distribution and we know how many tadpoles were there at day one if they were placed in there, right? They were placed on a leaf and they hatched in. And N sub i is the initial density, the number of tadpoles that could have survived. And P sub i is what we're going to model. We're going to put a logent link on it, and it's equal to alpha for tank i, which is the log odds of survival in that tank. That's what we're going to estimate. And then we assign them all a common regularizing prior, a pretty weak one centered on zero, which remember log odds of zero is a half chance of survival. And five is a big standard deviation on log odds. It covers reasonably flat over the whole range of reasonable probabilities. So weekly regularizing, not too much. All get the same prior. We can fit this model. You've seen code like this before. Load the refrogs data. Next thing I do is construct the tank index, right? And then in this data set, every row is a tank, is an experimental tank. And this is an aggregated binomial model, and the outcome is a count. It can be greater than one. And so we can just use the row number. All I've done there is one. Two, the number of rows is our index variable, because every row is a tank. And then you fit the model. You just bracket tank. Map to stand knows what you want to do. It makes a vector of parameters for you, and you get the results from it. Just like the chimpanzee actor example. Makes sense? We're not going to inspect the output yet. Can we get the other model? Yeah? Okay. This is the multi-level model. And it's got two extra lines, and they're both priors. So let me walk you through step-by-step what's going on here. The thing that's new, in a sense, is that now instead of a standard regularizing prior, which has a zero and a five in it, or any numbers you like, but they're constants, there are parameters inside this prior. It gets an adaptively regularizing prior. This is a prior that gets learned from the data as you fit the model. This is what makes these multi-level models. So now you're like, but if it's a prior, then how are we learning what it is? It's like, well, welcome to Bayesian land. It's turtles all the way down. And from one's, whether this is a prior or a posterior, it depends upon which parameter you are. So imagine yourself as a parameter. And if you're an intercept for a tank, then this thing is a prior for you, because it's the initial thing that the data from that tank updates, just like before. In the previous model, that mean of zero is standard regularization of five. That was the prior for every tank's intercept. So if you're an intercept for a tank, this is your prior. However, if you're the alpha and sigma that make it up, it's a posterior distribution. The whole thing is actually being learned. It's like a likelihood. A prior is a likelihood for the intercepts, in a sense. And then they inform the linear model to give you a likelihood for the data. So these are often called two-level models, because you've got two things that can kind of be squinted at and look like likelihoods. At the top level, there's the data model. And then in the middle, we've got this secondary, second-level parameter model for the intercepts. But it might be easier to think of it as, this is the prior that gets learned. There are adjustable bits of it. And those are alpha and sigma, the parameters inside of it. I'll come back to those in a second and explain them a little bit better. This is called a varying intercepts model. And now the alpha tanks are varying intercepts. And I have to say something about terminology, because the terminology in this literature is really magic. And this is why you have to insist upon some mathematical definitions of the model, I think, to be sure about what people are doing. These things are all, I'm going to call them varying intercepts, because I think that's sort of the least bad term, but it's still not very good. And I'd rather call them, you know, adaptively regularizing priors or something, but that doesn't make sense to anybody, right? So I won't do that. But these are also often called random intercepts. You've probably heard that as well. These are random effects models. I like that way less, because what does random mean? People get so superstitious and weird about the word random that I avoid it. Random, what is random? The only thing random, at least at the scale of the world that we decide is information. Right? We believe in a deterministic universe at the scale of stuff science that we do. In fact, I believe in deterministic universe at the quantum level too, but there's a fight in physics about that. So, but in biology and social sciences, right, you don't believe that it takes actually random. Instead, random just refers to our lack of information about things. That's how, that's the Bayesian premise about using probability to encode information. So, random here is not clear exactly what it means. And it just gets confusing. So, but when you see someone talk about a random intercept model, they're talking about the same thing we're using, nearly always. So, it's weird because this random, there's a tradition in experimental design of talking about random effects models, which has to do with how you design the experiment, rather than the information content of what you want to learn. And that's, well, let's just say that's not what's going on here. And that's also never the right way to decide whether to use a random effect or a varying effect. You use a varying effect because you don't want to be an amnesia. It doesn't matter how the data that generates, in a sense, if you want better estimates and you dive into clusters, you can use a mixed effects model or a random effects model, or a varying intercepts model. They're all the same thing. Vary is not perfect either because even ordinary dummy variables vary across clusters, right? We saw that when we analyzed the chimpanzee actors. The whole point was, look, there's always variation across the chimpanzees. They have an intercept for each of them. Look how different they are. They've obviously varied. So the variation doesn't magically appear suddenly because we do this this weird prior. So you just have to live with this.  But, right, that word is dead to me now for that reason. You just can't use it for anything. It's a great word. Fantastic Latin root. It's almost magically good sounding. Be great in poetry, but it's dead to me. It's just dead to me. You can't do anything about it. You can't fight vocabulary. It's like spinning into the wind. Just don't do it. So I'm just going to tell you the different vocabulary. Okay. So, yeah, here's my bid.  But not everybody studied Greek in college, so I'm not sure anybody cares about that naming, but nestic means memory. It means of memory. So you can remember something. I like that because it labels the other models as amnestic or they're amnesia. They forget things, right? It's one of these. It's this labeling that characterizes the opposition, right? It's like saying, some people don't love our country. Right?  Some models don't use all the data optimally. Yeah, those are the fixed effects models. And they should not be presented. Okay. All right. Yes. Okay. Let's finish explaining this model. So we've got two parameters inside this weird prior, the varying intercepts prior now. Remember, all we've changed, we've taken the zero out, we put alpha in its place, and we took the five out, and we put sigma there. And these are means and standard deviations of the normal distribution of the prior for each intercept for the tank. And we're going to estimate those from the data. They're ordinary parameters. They'll get estimated. And this is what we need the Markov chains to do. They do a better job of this, because you can't write down a unified likelihood function for a model like this. But since they're parameters, they need priors of their own, right? They're turtles all the way down. So we define weekly regularizing priors. These ones are fixed for alpha and sigma, the ordinary sort. Now there's going to be a posterior distribution for alpha, sigma, and all the alpha tanks. They're all going to get updated from the data. They could end up really different than these priors, and they will. But it's important to understand what the objective here is. The idea is there's a population of tanks. That population has a mean alpha and a standard deviation of sigma. We can estimate that from the data. We can learn how to pool information across the tanks. We can get better estimates for each tank. Because some of the tanks, as you'll see, there's not a lot of data for them, because there weren't a lot of tadpoles in them. So stochasticity gives us, you know, error, measurement error in those tanks. There are some tanks with lots of tadpoles in them. Those tanks have a lot of information, which we can pool to the smaller tanks to improve the estimates in the smaller ones. This is what I'm going to reveal to you happens. And that's possible because we estimate the population distribution of log-on mortality. That's what that prior is. But it's learned from the data. Yeah, question? So is that saying that each tank will have a distribution of log-on mortality? No. It is saying each tank has its own intercept. But the intercepts across all the tanks come from a common distribution, a population of tanks in which mortality varies. And we'd like to learn about that population at the same time we estimate the mortality in each tank, because it will improve the estimates in each tank if we do that, because it lets us pool. And there are more slides coming where I explain what's going to happen. It's called shrinkage. And I'll explain how it goes. So hang on, and we'll get there. I've only got six minutes, so I may not finish this, but that's okay. This is like a three lecture series for me. Okay, so here's the first kind of take-home thing. You could say survival across tanks has a distribution. This distribution is the prior for each tank, and that distribution also needs its own prior. And this is the model that defines all those things. And this is the minimal multi-level model. And you can use any likelihood at the top you like. It's still the structure beneath it will be nearly identical for the basic case. Okay, how do we fit this? Well, you just write this in map to state. It looks exactly the same.  Put the fixed priors on those two new parameters, and let it run. And this samples it to death, you don't necessarily need to do that. But I'm trying to teach you guys early on, sample things to death so you can get some understanding of what's going on.  Right? And it's little victories. And was that like a maybe? Oh, yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I am with you. Exactly. Well, let's say the first time I used state, it wasn't yet released. It was like .9. I had to compile it myself and download what's called the tar ball and get it going. And it was definitely worth it, but I was an early beta tester of a sense. And so it's gotten a lot better, is all I'm saying. But yeah, there's still little victories involved. It's also compiler now. It used to be more than that. So the first thing I want to say about this is if you compute WAIC for these models, the effective number of parameters is going to be typically a lot less than the literal number of parameters now, because it's these varying effect priors are regularizing. The estimated variation is, well, whatever it is, it's not infinite. And one way you can think about the fixed model is that it assumes infinite variation across the tanks or the departments or the schools or whatever it is. Because that means that you would pool nothing across them. There's no information in the population about how any of them are related to any others. That's like there's infinite variation in the population of tanks. So Sigma here, I haven't showed you the estimate, but it's a lot less than infinity. In fact, it's pretty small. So this corresponds to, I think it comes out to be like 1.3, it corresponds to a pretty aggressive regularizing prior in that case. That's stronger than the one we put in in the original. So a regularizing prior would have standard deviation of like 1.0. Now the caveat is that there's a posterior distribution of Sigma, and all of the estimates for all the parameters are averaging over that. Because it's this full Bayesian inference. It'll still help you think about it if you look at the math value for Sigma. Figure it out. So as a consequence of that regularization, WIC pegs the effective number of parameters at 38 instead of the 50 literal parameters that are in the model. If it turned out that tanks were really similar in their mortality, Sigma could be really close to zero actually. And the number of parameters could be like 12. We'll have examples like that where multi-level models aggressively pool because what they've learned from the data is these things don't vary much. I'm going to treat them basically as the same thing. And you get really strong regularization around the mean of Alpha, which has also been learned from the data. This makes some sense. Just to make a little bit of sense right now, you're going to be inundated with examples and you're going to fight with your software. Let me show you what this population looks like.  We sample Alpha and Sigma values, which are correlated. You better believe it. And then for each of them, we plot a Gaussian contour here. I think this is 100 of them. And you can see they do vary. There's a posterior distribution of tadpole populations or tank populations, rather, that are being sampled. These are distributions of the log-ups of survival. It has a mean a little over one and a standard deviation. I think it was like 1.3, but you can check. You'll fit this model yourself for fun, right? And see. The implication on the log odds scale, when we mean on the probability scale, you take these log odds and you run them through the logistics. So if you take these distributions and you push them through the logistics, what you see is that these tadpoles survive quite well. In most tanks, nearly all the tadpoles survive. And that is true in the data as well. But there's this long sloping tail of death in Missouri, down towards zero, especially as you add predators and have small tadpoles. But that's the connection. This gets translated into a population. So you can imagine sampling tanks from these Gaussian distributions and then plotting the distribution of the probability of survival of those tanks. And this would be the population. This is the distribution of probability of survival that's implied in the population of tanks. So this is a posterior predictive distribution. It makes some sense as we've learned about the population. I've got like 20 seconds here. So I'm going to put this slide up and promise that this is where we'll resume on Tuesday. And I will explain to you why we want to do this and what happens by trying to explain this magical effect that arises from knowing about the population is we get something called shrinkage, which is the monastic transfer of information across the tanks. That's my promise for next week. Your homework is up on the website. You'll have a lot of fun with it. Parks and Estimation.


My research looks at the experiences of queer and transgender people who access mental health support. So you might know queer and transgender people as those in rainbow communities or LGBTQ people. So there is a very large body of research that tells us that queer and trans people experience high levels of mental health difficulties, stigma and discrimination. So we know for example that 20% of secondary school students who identify as trans have attempted suicide in the last year compared to 5% of students in the general population. I think it's really important that we know what happens when this group goes into therapy and seeks support. So for my research I've been interviewing people about that and I've been finding that some people find it difficult to disclose aspects of their identity to the mental health professional for fear of that discrimination coming into the therapy room. I got in touch with people who are interested. I sent them some information about myself in the study. I asked them to choose a location that they would feel comfortable in. So lots of the interviews were done at university but also at central libraries or sometimes in the person's home if that was best for them. And we just kind of sat down for an hour, an hour and a half and had a conversation about their experience. I think that sometimes as mental health professionals we think of our therapy room as a safe space away from what's going on in the world. But what my participants are telling me is that they bring kind of the weight of the world into that situation. I'd come from that ground of doing a lot of statistics. So my participants had always been numbers on a screen to me rather than people with lives and stories. And so being able to form those connections with people was really amazing.


Okay, good morning everybody, or good afternoon for those of you on the East Coast. Today's webinar is Free Windows 7 Curriculum, Basic Computer Training at Your Library or Non-Profit. My name is Kyla Hunt. I will be your facilitator today. I am the new webinar program manager here at TechSoup, and my experience is primarily in library and library technology training. So I'm really excited to hear what Todd has to say to us today. And with us today is Todd Watts from my PC. Todd, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to the folks here today. Hello everyone. Hi, I'm Todd Watts. I'm a program manager working on the My PC program, which is a program out of the Windows marketing group. And my background is I spent some time being a web developer, so I have a technical background. And also I spent a number of years in different training organizations in Microsoft to also come to this with a training background. And I've been on this program for, goodness, it's been almost two years both in developing and helping to promote the adoption of the My PC series program. Awesome. And then assisting with us for us with chat today was originally going to be Stephanie Girding, and she has had a prior commitment come up. And so William Coonan from TechSoup is actually going to be answering some of your ready talk or technical questions today. And then also from my PC, we have Casey Hawkins Brown. And if you put any of those questions into that chat pane, she will try to get those questions answered to you via chat. And again, I will be pushing any additional questions to Todd at the end of the presentation. And so a little bit about what we're going to be covering today. First I'm going to go over a little bit about who TechSoup is. And then Todd will talk a little bit about My PC Basics, some stuff about accessible technology training, workshop curriculum topics, how to use the curriculum, any support materials that will be provided, feedback from libraries and other organizations that have used My PC, and finally how to sign up. And then again, at the end, we will try to address as many questions as we possibly can So I, of course, am with TechSoup. TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. And as of June 2010, TechSoup served more than 127,000 organizations, distributed more than 6.3 million technology donations, and enabled nonprofit recipients to save more than $1.8 billion in IT expenses in 33 countries around the world. TechSoup is part of TechSoup Global, which is working towards the day when every nonprofit, library, and social organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. And I did want to remind you all because this curriculum that Todd will be talking about today is based on Windows 7. That's the Microsoft Software Donation Program for U.S. nonprofits and public libraries is one of TechSoup's most popular resources. And if you wanted to find out more information about the Software Donation Program, you can go to bit.ly.org slash Microsoft Software Donation. I will also include that link in the follow-up email that will go out after this webinar. All right, so with that, let's get started. So Todd, if you could just let us know a little bit about the My PC for Windows 7 curriculum, and just a little bit about the history of how it was developed. Yeah, certainly. So thanks, Kyla. So first, the My PC series is a set of basic PC classroom workshops that have been developed by Microsoft for less tech savvy adult learners. The curriculum is designed to be hand-on, jargon-free, and it's being offered to organizations like libraries that teach adult computer skills. The My PC series program is broken down into three different sets of workshops. For the personal enrichment consumer audience, we have our one-hour and three-hour workshops. The ten one-hour workshops are fun and easy classes that cover topics adult learners are interested in, like learning how to edit and share digital pictures, for example. The four three-hour workshops are classes that build confidence in using PCs and teach skills that are desired by many adult learners. And lastly, for the business and the home PC user, which includes workforce development programs, we offer our introduction to Windows 7, which is a 12-hour workshop where PC users become familiar and efficient with their computer's operating system. So a little on the history, the My PC program came out of the consumer audience team at Microsoft, which is a team that looks at the changing needs of the audience they're focusing on and what that audience wants to see in the world of technology. The team did a lot of research around the baby boomer segments in regard to how they interact with and how they learn technology. The research came from third-party resources as well as Microsoft talking to customers about what they want and how we as Microsoft could really fill those gaps. And this is what influenced the creation of the My PC program. It's good to note that our program has since evolved beyond the baby boomer demographic and now really is focused on all less tech-savvy adult learners. So the My PC program began as a pilot of one-hour instructor-led, hands-on workshop based on the research that was done. Microsoft partnered with Holland America Cruise Lines and developed what became known as the Digital Workshops. The workshops being offered on the Holland America cruise ships was a very big hit and soon it was expanded to all the ships in the Holland America fleet. The program is still going on today. And over the past two years Holland America and Microsoft have taught well over 500,000 adult students. And just point on the screen, I always love the picture on the right of the overflowing classroom that was during the Windows 7 launch. It was just tremendously well received. And really quick Todd, we have had a couple of comments that asked you to speak up just a little bit. I think you sound fine, but if you could just speak up just a tiny bit or maybe turn the volume up on your phone a little bit more, that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. I will do both. I will try to do both. Awesome. Fabulous. Okay. So Microsoft took our experience and momentum from the research and the Holland America partnership. And we branched out to the higher education channel as well as we developed a partnership with SeniorNet to deliver the My PC Series workshops. The higher education effort began with a pilot in the community college space with five community colleges in the Seattle area. From the Seattle area pilot we launched a nationwide campaign targeting community colleges and continuing education programs for adult learners. And now it leads us to now, which is Microsoft is now making the My PC Series curriculum available to public and private libraries, community and corporate learning centers, and workforce development programs as a channel to offer a less technical, more lifestyle approach to teaching PC topics geared towards the consumer market and specifically towards the dead learner. Okay. Awesome. I think that there is a great deal of talk in the library and of course the nonprofit community about making technology training accessible to people with all levels of knowledge. And I know at least a lot of libraries are really trying adamantly to provide this kind of training. So how does My PC work to reflect this need? Yeah. Well, let me share a little bit of what we learned from our research. We found that there's been, in the past, a real disconnect between what many adults want to learn about computers and what they were generally finding available. And talking with consumers, this list that you see on the screen is common for the types of topics that they were telling us that they wanted to learn about. The email, the photos, connecting with family, staying safe online, even just becoming more proficient with their PC. So however, when we sat in entry-level computer classes to see what the consumer experience was, here's what we found as common topics at the time it was colleges. The topics being like GUI, memory, WordPad, CPU, and RAM. And the one that always gets me is the taking apart PCs in the class. Not really topics that are very endearing to the adult audience. So we found that most students taking introductory computer classes are aged 45 to 75, they're home users, and they're probably not aspiring IT professionals. So many of these intro classes traditionally teach topics that are too dry for this audience or are taught with, teach with too much jargon. So the training industry as a whole is focused on IT pros and helping train an entire industry of support folks. And in some ways consumers have somewhat really gotten left behind as many computer classes were very technically focused. So this is something that we feel like Microsoft has really contributed to, and we have to take some responsibility for. Microsoft is focused on providing training for the IT pro, the developer, and the office workers of the world, but not as much the consumer. So we also recognize that in saying all that, we recognize that many libraries and other training organizations have started to meet the needs of this audience. So we don't want to paint everybody with the same broad brush here, but rather we're trying to provide content to this program that is designed to address both the audience and the technology for organizations wanting to better serve the adult audience. So what we learned from this research really went into helping to design the My PC Series workshops. We looked at the learning styles for adults and really used that as a guide to help build these workshops. Number one, about forgetting the jargon. You have to speak in the language that they speak in and provide them with materials that speak in the consumer's voice that's accessible to them. They're really not there to understand the inner workings of the computer. They really are turned off by the geek speak. So we think that key topics can be taught without ever using a lot of tech jargon. Two, it's about building confidence. Adults lacking computer skills are usually wary of making mistakes with technology. We find that they may actually be trained at work to use an application, but when they get home, they tend to be more afraid of doing much on their home computer. So in some cases, especially with the older audience, they didn't grow up with technology and we know that they learn differently from kids who've grown up with a mouse in their hands. So it takes patience. So one-on-one teaching and really what we call a tell-show-do teaching style. And lastly, it's a lifestyle approach. So lots of course catalogs we found that focused on the office application, base classes, your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera. And these are great, but really it's more of a technology approach, how to use specific applications. Through the My PC Series, we wanted to experiment with benefit-driven classes that focus more on the audience's lifestyle needs and not as much about the technology. Really embracing a fun approach to teaching PC skills, even when teaching job-related skills. So what topics do the workshops in the curriculum actually cover? Well, let's see. The My PC Series workshops, as I mentioned before, are really split into three different buckets of workshops. The one-hour, three-hour, and the introduction to Windows 7. For the one-hour and three-hour workshops, those are further broken down into two main categories. One, you have basic computer, or computer basics rather, from getting started with Windows 7 to staying safe online to even picking the right PC to start with. Secondly, is digital photography. Classes on digital photo editing, to sharing photos, to creating digital movies, and then how to share those digital movies. Another way that we like to think about these workshops is by, or another way to think about them is to look at our roadmap the roadmap shows where the My PC Series workshops fit in the traditional training space. Our one-hour and three-hour workshops fill a need in the personal enrichment area, and our fun, unantimidating introduction for students with limited PC skills. Our 12-hour, excuse me, I'll take a drink of water here. Our 12-hour introduction in Windows 7 workshop, the blue segment you see on this slide, is a hands-on full-length course that has some topical overlap with our My PC getting started course like Snap and Shake and Peak, but it also goes much deeper. Students become familiar with their computers before moving on to more specialized training such as Word, Excel, or other office type applications. Awesome. So what I'm really curious about is how libraries and other organizations are incorporating the My PC training into their education offerings. So are they using this curriculum as the basis for self-paced education, or are they primarily using the curriculum for really like a group-led training in a lab setting? The My PC Series workshops are all offered as instructor-led training or ILT, which means that they require an instructor and a classroom or lab-type space to be available to deliver the workshops. And while Microsoft is providing the curriculum and a series of toolkits to help deliver these workshops, the program is really designed to fit in your business model, so you get to determine how much to charge, how many classes to offer, which workshops to offer, and so forth. The content is also offered with a license that allows you to customize the content if needed. If you want to combine additional material with a workshop, you can do that. If you want to shorten a workshop, you can do that as well. We do ask that you do not post the customized content online, however. And while the content was designed for the consumer audience, we've had the content be used in the workforce development environment. We've also had feedback from libraries looking to use the content to train not just their patrons, but also their staff members. The My PC program offers free curriculum and a turnkey set of toolkits. And really we like to think we've kept it simple. Choose which workshops you want to use, and you can download everything from our website and it's convenient for you and your staff. The best part is that it's all free. No money ever changes hands with Microsoft to use the curriculum. And with a simple mouse click, you receive online access to the curriculum and the toolkits for administrators, instructors, and your IT managers. The My PC series is designed to fit into your business model. It's your instructors, your labs, your schedule. Okay, awesome. And I know that I've seen some questions come in that are kind of related to this. So I just wanted to throw out there, are there any software or are there any software libraries need to download onto their computers or public workstations before using My PC? And are there any support materials given to organizations when they decide to use the curriculum? Good questions. And let me take the last one first to the software download here as I go. So we designed the program with three different audiences in mind. Your instructors or faculty and administrators and also then your IT slash lab managers. We developed toolkits to help each of these audiences when they were either evaluating or preparing or actually even delivering the workshops. On this slide you'll see is the faculty toolkit or instructor toolkit. So the instructor toolkit includes, as you can see, class-ready PowerPoints. You get course outlines. It comes with print-ready student handouts and also an instructor guide, which even includes a script for your instructor if needed. And for your program administrators, we developed three different toolkits. First, an evaluation toolkit, which includes a program overview, the course outlines, the roadmap that you saw earlier, even a philosophy white paper behind the program, support details, sample content. It's really everything we think that you need to be able to review the My PC program to determine if you want to add it to your schedule. After registering with our program, administrators then also get full access to a promotional toolkit, which includes marketing templates, advertising samples, an email bat, blast template, and material that basically what we like to say is to help you put butts in seats. We also include an open house toolkit, and the open house toolkit is a set of slides, an instructor guide, and also some demonstration steps and even videos to help you to promote the workshop so you can hold an open house and promote the workshop to your patrons. Your IT slash lab managers, we developed a technical toolkit. Excuse me, I'm going to cough here. Okay, I'm back. So we developed a technical toolkit. Thank you. Nothing like a frog in your throat during a webinar. We developed a technical toolkit to walk them through setting up the classroom or lab environment to host the workshops. Also for the software for your IT lab managers, as we mentioned earlier, the workshops do require Windows 7 to be installed, and some of the workshops do require the Windows Live Essentials set of applications, which is your email, chat, photo gallery, movie maker applications, which are available online and are also free downloads. The Windows Live Essentials applications also are available in versions that work on XP, VISTA, and also Windows 7 for your patrons so they can go back and use them, no matter which OS they're running. And all of my PC series toolkits are available online as free downloads for yourself or your staff to be able to get access to. Lastly, we also have a student website. This is where students will find workshop handouts so they can go up and get a soft copy of the handouts for all of the different my PC series classes. We also provide them with a list of different Windows 7 resources that might be of use to them. And also they can see course descriptions to all the different my PC series workshops that might be available to them. As a good note here, we also have a future feature being worked on for the student website, which is a directory of organizations that are delivering the my PC series workshops that as an organization you can opt into. The directory will allow potential students that find the website organically through search or possibly through other efforts that we undertake to find an organization in their local area that might be offering the my PC series workshops. Great. One thing that I'm really curious about is what kind of feedback have you gotten from the program or from people who have actually participated or held this kind of curriculum in their organization. Are there any stories that you have heard about a successful my PC program? Well, from the Hall in America pilot of the program, the higher education space, and also senior, yeah, we've had very positive responses from both the organizations and also from students. On our website we have actually right now there's a list of quotes from students that have taken the workshops to give you a sense of that. For libraries, the program has been available to libraries for a fairly short period of time. We only opened it up to libraries in late May, early June. So far, the one-hour workshops have proven to be very popular with libraries and they continue to be our most popular download. Libraries are telling us, however, that in general they do have an interest in all three sets of workshops. And some of the initial feedback from libraries has been positive. However, many libraries are still evaluating the curriculum or are still in the planning phase before being able to roll out the workshops. We should start seeing some of our early library adopters begin offering workshops this fall. And one of the things that we're hearing to date, the biggest obstacle that we're seeing that they're having is getting Windows 7 on their desktops. Many have told us that they're in the process of moving to Windows 7 or they're planning to move to Windows 7 and then they will plan on offering the workshops once the move is complete. Got it. So we are just blasting through this content but if you could go over a little bit for us the process, so if a library organization really wants to sign up for my PC to use the free Windows 7 curriculum, how would they go about doing so? This is the really great part. So because everything that you need is really available online. We've been able to automate the process here so that you can go up and do really a self-serve process. So if you need more information or if you want access to our Evaluation Toolkit you can go to our website, the mypcprogram.com and from there if you click on the Learn More button and if you see on the slide the What Is My PC? series in the upper left you can click on that and that will take you to the Learn More section and you can read about a lot about what I've said already or get access to our Evaluation Toolkit as everything that you need to evaluate the program. If you're ready to participate you can click on the Download Center and from there you can sign in with your Windows Live ID, register with the My PC program site, tell us a little bit about you, about what program you're with and then you accept the online license agreement. Once you register and accept the license then you can access our Download Center and download all the content and tools that are available. I would like to mention one more thing and we also do have a checklist planning document that's available and if you go to the Contact Us section of the site as you'll see because there's a list of resources, support resources and at the bottom of the page you'll see there's a link to our checklist planning document. That's helpful to use to bring down and gives you basically an overview of what steps should I take to adopt this program. We have plenty of time to go over these questions. First of all, thank you so much Todd for providing us an overview of the free Windows 7 curriculum. If you do have questions after this event like I said, feel free to post those questions on the forums and I will include that question in the follow-up email that goes out. Todd has also given us an email address which is askmypc.com. There was a reminder email that was sent out this morning with a PowerPoint attached to it. In that PowerPoint that email address is slightly different. So just make sure that if you email Todd with a question you'll want to do it at askmypc at mypcprogram.com. All right, so let's go to the questions and there have been a lot of them. All right, so first of all from William we had a question, will My PC be expanded to include Microsoft Office? That's a really good question and there have been discussions internally of how do we work with Office because Office has their own set of training and so as of right now they are separate. A lot of the Office material is online training and the Windows material is Instructor Let. So is Windows going to do online and what is Office? So I don't have a coherent answer for that at the moment and Casey if you're listening maybe you might have something to say on that as well. Sure, I can say that as Todd said Office has a lot of curriculum that they've established already so it's something that's under consideration for the future. Okay, great. So is the series available in other languages other than English? Currently it's only been published in English. Do you know if there are any plans? Again there have been discussions about localizing the material but we don't have any definite plans right now. That is one of the things that we've looked at is also is how do we work with the community if people want to localize it. So if somebody localized it we would take it and make it available to other people so that's something that we've talked about and now Microsoft does not have definite plans on localizing the content. It is becoming, I will say that because initially it was a U.S. based program we were focused totally on the U.S. audience but it is becoming an international program and that we've opened it up and we're starting to get a lot of interest from overseas from the international audience. So it's something that I think in the future could become more prevalent for us as that audience grows. You can also alter the program to download the content and alter the content in a way that suits your needs too if you are interested in having it in a different language. That's something to consider also. That's sort of what I was saying with the community with somebody being able to take it and they can localize it themselves if they wanted to. I know from experience at libraries they are really, really great and other organizations too adapting things like this to fit the needs of their community so I think that's a really great idea. We did have a couple of questions asking just to reiterate are these programs free which my understanding is as long as you have Windows 7 that yes, they're free, correct? Yeah, the program, and this is great. No matter how many times I emphasize I always get that, really? Is it really free? Yes, it is really free. The curriculum itself is free. The toolkits are free. The Windows Live Essential applications that you would use within the workshops are free downloads. And then of course it requires the Windows 7 and that's always a variable question. We don't give Windows 7 with this program but it depends on, of course, libraries through TechSube you can get copies of Windows 7. Right, exactly. I was just going to mention that if you are a library or organization that does not have Windows 7 and you're interested to see if you are eligible for a Microsoft donation feel free to go to the TechSube site and fill out the eligibility quiz which for the most part I believe is it will help you figure that out or you can contact client services to talk to them about it and I will include that information in the follow-up email that will go out to the session. And this kind of goes along with that same question which is what infrastructure is required for these training modules. And I think that they are really wondering about if you need a classroom or a lab space or a projector or things like that to do these sessions. Yeah, so good question. So I think that depends. I think probably the best setup is if you have a classroom space with a projector and desktops or notebooks for your students to use that would be maybe the optimum space. But I don't think that has to be it doesn't have to be exactly that way. If you don't have a projector perhaps you can print out the slides and give your students copies of the slides or there's work arounds that you can do. But as long as the instructor has a computer to be able to demonstrate on as long as the students have a computer to be able to do the hands-on labs because the workshops are it's not a just sit and listen workshop. It really is focused on hands-on on being able to do the activities. Okay, yeah. And there were a couple other questions that were asking, you know, can the computers used for in conjunction with the program be standalone PCs or will they require an LCD projector or things like that. And as far as I can tell as long as you can get that curriculum up and running on the system that you have then it should be fine, correct? Yes. And within the technical setup toolkit we have documents that outline the requirements for the workshops. Okay, awesome. So Kathleen asks, is my PC program and a lot of these questions I think are pretty specific but they're definitely worth reiterating is my PC program available for older operating systems such as XP? And of course if it's not it's worth asking do you know of any other training tools like this for older operating systems? Well that's a good question and the program it was designed around Windows 7 and of course because there's a lot of getting started with Windows 7 workshops and so in helping people to make that transition from XP to Windows 7. So it is focused really on Windows 7. The Windows Live Essential apps that the training because there's a lot of screenshots it's focused on Windows 7 as well. The applications themselves are available on XP but the screen because they did a the newest version of Windows Live Essentials is not backwards compatible with XP so there is a difference so it's not you can't teach it on one and then teach it on the other. So again just reiterate I guess it's Windows 7 focused and right now we I'm not aware of any other workshops that are like this that are on XP myself. Okay great. And that's something worth looking into is other free just kind of technology training sites. I know there are some other just general technology training sites out there but I think the Goodwill Community Foundation offers some software instruction and most of those are really for people taking classes on their computers and their own time not necessarily in a lab setting but that's really great to know and I will try to include a couple links to some additional free programs that are out there as well. One question that came in was does this curriculum offer any learning assessment tools and specifically quizzes or assignments or projects that help really assess if the students are learning and if not are there any in the works? Good question. So because the workshops were developed to go into the personal enrichment space so we did not develop assessments for them. The one thing that we've had in this area is especially the 12-hour Introduction to Windows 7 class is one that we've seen that we had in the higher education channel we had actually some schools wanted to take it and use it in the credit space and what that meant is they had to develop their own assessment for it. So no, we don't have any assessment modules for it but it's something that you could do on your own. You would have to do on your own to include that. Okay, got it. And again, a lot of these, a lot of organizations, a lot of libraries I think are really creative in making assessment tools like this so as long as they have the infrastructure of the course itself I think that that will be really helpful in creating those kinds of assessment tools. We have a question from Bob asking, saying that he's almost completed his Microsoft Certified Trainer Certification, his MCT Certification. And so will that offer additional benefits to this program similar to the Microsoft IT Academy? Well the MCT program is great. This is actually what we're looking at and including this program as part of IT Academy. It's something that we've been talking to them about but there's not, being an MCT doesn't get, it's not like we have something in the closet we're waiting to pull out for MCTs. No, MCTs are certainly welcome to sign up and register for the program but what we have is what we make available is to everybody. Got it. And Syndra asks, many libraries training PCs so their workstations where they conduct training are locked down pretty tight to avoid saving to servers or hard drives and I know I've had that experience conducting trainings and labs as well. Do you think that this could be a problem in conducting these trainings? Yeah, that's always a challenge. And we've seen, especially in the community college space because they're having to run multiple classes and so we've talked to them about different ways of doing a set on the desktops for these classes and then afterwards and they have to reset it to another one. So I think the students do need access to the hard drives to be able to do these workshops because especially if they're doing the photo editing they're having to go in and utilize sample files and edit them and save them and do various things. So it's something that they will need access to and it's a hard question to answer specifically because there's so many variables that can go into that. But yes, they will need access to the hard drive to do some of the workshops. Some of them they won't, but some of the basic PC ones of getting started with Windows 7 but some of the digital photo editing ones they do need access. Got it. Susan asked and I was really curious about this. She says that she doesn't understand the Windows Live ID. She had it at one time but I guess never really used it. Could you just give us just a verbal kind of explanation of how to get a Windows Live ID and if there's any kind of fees attached to that or anything like that? Yeah, Windows Live ID is a free offering by Microsoft and it's used to give you, so basically you have the same credentials across multiple websites and a lot of those are of course Microsoft websites so you can log in with the same password. And Windows Live ID doesn't require a Microsoft email account or anything. You can use any email account and associate it and make it a Windows Live ID. And so when you go in to do the sign up, if you don't have a Windows Live ID, when you go to hit sign in, you actually get a screen that gives you the ability to sign in with an active Live ID or if you don't have one on the left, it has steps of how you can create one, create a Live ID. If you have one but you don't remember it, you might be able to do a, like I don't remember, tell me my password or you can just create a new one. Got it. And Eric also wanted to know that he didn't see the download center from my PC, my PC series. Could you explain a little bit more about how to get to the download center? Sure. So in fact, let me bump the slide back. So let me use the tools here. So you can get to the download center by going here. If you look on the screen, I'm marking it. Or by clicking there, either one of those links will take you to the download center. Before you can get to the download center, before you can get access to it, you will, at first, you will get a sign in page which will ask you to sign in with a Windows Live ID. And then if it's your first time through, you have to then register, fill out the registration form, and then accept the license terms. And then from there, you will be passed into the download center. And from there, you can view all the different content. It's split up by audience. So there's a tab for instructors, a tab for administrators, and a tab for your IT lab managers. Great. So Penny wanted to know, what would you recommend to be a reasonable size class for this program? Do you think that it would be about 10 people, or 20 people, or 50 people? Yeah, that's, often we always had that question asked to us by the community colleges. And it's something we also ask them a lot of how many people are you offering. And so we had a lot of varied answers, but it generally went from as low as four people to I saw as even as high as like 25 people. But on average, I would say it's usually 8 to 10 people per workshop as a good size. And especially because part of it, if you remember some of the principles that we're using behind this, was being able to give them confidence. And part of that is the instructor is an important piece of the puzzle. And that means that the instructor is able to give one-on-one time to the students. And so you have to keep the class sizes down to really facilitate that. Got it, that makes sense. So going back to the actual classes, is the 12-hour class something that's done all at one time, or you can just split it up how you want to, like in four-hour segments or three-hour segments, things like that? Yeah, good question. So it actually is split up in four three-hour modules. And they are independent, so you can run two of the modules, or you can run all of them, and you can run them all at once. You can run them over a period of time. That's really, it's up to you however it fits within your business model. The one thing that, that was a good story we had was a community college in Hawaii that what they, because in Hawaii it was very focused on the social aspect. And so they wanted to run the three-hour class and they wanted to make it like an eight-hour class. And they were the only ones that we heard that from, but yeah, that's what you want to do by all means. So it's up to you. Okay, great. And William wanted to know, are all presenters permitted to have a copy of the class materials on their own computers? Oh yes, yes. The, yeah, definitely. In fact, what we recommend is that your, it always starts with the administrators whoever is going to evaluate the program, that they go up and they register on the site and download the materials that they need. And then when they're ready, to have an instructor begin preparing is not to download material and send that to the instructor, but send the instructor to the site, they can register, then they can go and download the materials that they need onto their laptops or their computer and do the preparation. And then the same when you're getting ready to deploy, again, send your IT person to the website, they can register, there's a space for them, they can go in, get the setup guides, get the technical tool kit, and download that and set up the computers. So it's everybody, they can go to the website and register and they can get what they need. Okay, great. Do you know what a good website would be to be, as a starting point, to find out what Microsoft is offering to nonprofits? That's a good question. Casey, do you have an answer for that? What was the question I was answering another person? Sure, that's fine. Do you know of a website that would be a good starting point to find out what Microsoft is offering to nonprofits? I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm sure that I can ask some people around the office here and get the question answered. Right, and I think I have a link to, I don't remember exactly what it's called, but it's about Microsoft offerings to nonprofits. So if I can find that link, I will include that in the follow-up and now that goes out. Alright, so Kathy wanted to know, what are some sample topics within the Starting with Windows 7 module? Sample topics within which one? The Starting with Windows 7 module. Let me drill in here and get the course outlined. So if you want, you can just look that up and I can send it along with the follow-up email. If you don't have that, off the top of your head. Yeah, I'll send because we have the course outlines are all available. I'll send you the link to the course outlines so they can download it. Awesome, fabulous. Okay, so Penny wanted to know, just to reiterate, how basic is the program? Do the patrons need to come with skills such as being familiar with the mouse and being able to double-click, things like that? Or is it really a little bit more advanced than that? Yeah, great question. And that's one of the reasons why I included the roadmap. I'm going to pull that up here real quick. The roadmap to kind of give you an idea. So because we think that there is a before these classes, there is really that real basic introduction to computers which is the keyboarding mouse skills. Now you can either offer that class or if you're just aware that, hey, we have students that are familiar with this and incorporate that into what you're doing. I actually sat in one of the classes I sat in. I had a gentleman that he was, didn't know how to use copy and paste and select, and he didn't need another class. He just needed the instructor to take the time to show him quickly, hey, yes, here's how you do that. And then he was able to move on. So they are basic classes, but there is some skill that they should either get while they're there or should come in with, and that's the keyboarding and mouse skills. Okay, great. And I have a question asking, does your organization have to be 501c3 to get access to the program? And my understanding is pretty much any organization can really get access to the program. Is that right? Correct. We've opened the flood gates and made it available to any organization. Before we did have it limited to higher education and a few other organizations, but that was with the release in the end of May. We modified our license agreement, and we allow anybody to come in and register and get the content. Okay, great. I think we have time for just a couple of more questions. There's a question. Oh, I'm sorry. No, go ahead. There's a question that I've answered a couple of times that I think would be helpful to answer. Sure. And it's sort of a question on how the content comes packaged if the content is online or if it's sort of standalone. And the answer to it is that you have to go on my PC program to download the content. However, the classes themselves are in PowerPoint. Microsoft Office is PowerPoint. And the instructor guides are in, I think, document form or PDF form. And some of the other things, they are also in document or PDF form. So the classes themselves are not online. However, you do need Internet connection for some of the things to teach. So if that clarifies, hopefully it does for everybody. No, that's incredibly helpful. Thank you, Casey. And one thing to add to that is when they download, some of the files they can download individually, but a lot of them we have zipped up. So you're actually downloading a zip file which you then have to expand out which would have all the files available within it. Okay, great. And one last question. William wanted to know if a student brings his own laptop, could they then load the My PC materials on it? Do you think that's a feasible model for people to bring in their own machines and then to download the My PC curriculum onto that and teach them on their own machines? It certainly is a possibility. It's a matter of, you know, it's how much time, if you're going to deliver the class, you're going to have to make sure that you have a time set up for installing on their computers. Because normally in the classroom you're doing that pre-work beforehand. You have an IT person installing workshops. So if you're going to make that part of the class, you just have to account for it in the time that you allot to cover the material. Okay, great. And I think that's all the questions that we really have time for during this hour. So first of all, I really want to thank you, Todd and Casey for both being on today. This has been really, really helpful. And I hope that the audience has found this really helpful as well. If you have any additional questions, again you can email My PC, askmypcatmypcprogram.com. And you can also find them on the web at www.mypcprogram.com. We will also have a forum thread available, and that will go out in the follow-up email that we'll be going out after this session. I also want to thank our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk does offer dedicated product demos for tech-soup organizations four times per week. So check out that URL if you want to find out more information about that. And again, thank you. Thank you, Todd. Thank you, Casey. Thank you, William, for handling chat questions. And thank you to everybody who attended today. Please take a little bit of time to complete the post-event survey. It does help us in developing further content. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Please stand by.